Now, she had to warn him. He still had a soft spot for Liobe. If she showed up at the guild, he would welcome her in, and she would certainly murder him and possibly most of the high-ranking Spiders.
She walked several miles with Bandit trailing behind, often stopping to dig an acorn out of the ground or catch a lizard. It was nearing dusk again when she had found the banks of the Black River and eventually started seeing the obvious signs of swampland. Dragonflies zipped by and hovered in droves. She hurried by several snapping turtles every so often clambering along the mud banks along with colonies of hippos soaking in the grassy bayous. Hippos were among the most terrifying things for a milg, as many had been eaten in one bite, though often, they would just bite a milg in half and leave them to bleed out floating in the swamp. She sniffed the air, hoping for a whiff of Uncle Lomah's cooking. Maybe she would get lucky and walk up on one of the Spiders' crawfish boils. She only smelled the rotten egg stink of the swamp. Giant cypress trees rose from Riverwell ahead like withered arms with long fingers in black water. Clusters of cypress knees jutted up from the water in hives.
She grinned when she sighted the tiny squares of orange light scattered throughout the cypress treetops. This was Vylket, her old home. Over a hundred milg huts hung high in the cypress trees, safe from flooding and away from predators of the swamp. It seemed a fitting home for those who operated in the shadows of big folk towns, stealing their gold and slitting the throats of wicked lords.
Dusk cloaked the sky in a drab cobalt blue. An orchestra of crickets and frogs built slowly to a steady lullaby of mingled songs.
Bandit kept chasing frogs and losing them in the tall cattail grass.
Emmanora stopped when she reached the embankment where milg found their way to the grandmother cypress, the heart of the Vylket. A trail of cypress knees led from the embankment to the massive trunk of the grandmother. She hadn't been for a visit in months. It always unnerved her a touch making the first run across the knees to the trunk. She often fell the first time after so long but got the hang of it soon enough.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit!" she whispered before she took a deep breath and leaped to the first knee and bolted across the swamp from one horn of wood to the next. If you didn't keep running, you gave your foot too much time to slip and fall into the water. The key was to make your footfalls precise and keep running as fast as you could. She made it all the way across to the grandmother's trunk without the slightest misstep, but she paused a second too long in mental gratification to get a tight grip on the cypress root. She lost her footing and fell waist deep into the swamp. "Fuck mouth! Cunt Stained Whore!" she shouted, pulling herself up.
Now all her moon moth would be ruined for sure. She didn't bother to check. Maybe it would dry out before she opened the pouch, but she doubted it. She raced up the grandmother cypress with clawed fingers and finding purchase in all the right crannies of burl going up the trunk until she made it to the ledge of the First Home. It was the hut of the very first milg settler from hundreds of years past, so the stories went. No one lived in it now and it served as a guest house for visitors. She never wanted to stay in the First Home. It had grown moldy and gray over the years and had too many tiny swamp residents. It also stank of piss. She preferred to stay with Uncle Lomah as she had planned on tonight. His hut stood only three bridges away in a smaller cypress.
This late in the evening most milg in Vylket had retired to their huts or gone out to the big folk towns on a run. She strolled down the first rope bridge with ease. Uncle Lomah's light was on and his front door was open. She raced across the ropes, leaping over, through and around hearthstones, chairs, barrels and cook pots on the decks of the huts on the way.
She saw him sitting in his chair puffing on a bamboo pipe of moon moth and shouted, "Uncle Lomah! It's me!"
The old milg tilted his head and squinted up at her. "So it is," he said simply, his stubbly face expressionless.
"Well," she said.
"Well," he said. "Bout--" he started coughing and cleared his throat before trying again. "Bout time you came back. Had enough, yet?"
"I'm not coming back, Uncle Lomah. You know this." She reached for his pipe, and he passed it over to her.
"Well, what then? You outta money?" He smiled then.
She took a long puff on the pipe before answering. "No. Well, actually, fuck yes! And that's another thing I'm so pissed about! I'm gonna kill that bitch Liobe!"
"Your sister?" Uncle Lomah huffed out from his nostrils. His shaggy hair, thinned and long since grayed from its glorious milg scarlet, danced in the wind on top of his head. Milg hair remained mostly too stiff for wind until they were past fifty or so.
"Yes, Uncle Lomah! She tried to kill me! She stabbed me right here." She pulled the collar of her leather cuirass over.
He leaned in to get a look. "Looks like quite a long time ago. Why so angry now?"
"It was just yesterday! I got healed."
He frowned skeptically at this.
"Well, it's a long story, but I'm not asking for anything except but to warm you. She's coming here to kill you soon. Edvard the pirate king has ordered her to murder all assassin guild lords and renegades."
Uncle Lomah rubbed the back of his neck and leaned back in his chair. "She wouldn't do that. You and your sister are always at ends. It's that big folk blood in her. Thinks she's always got to conquest. She'll tire of the nonsense soon enough, and I don't think she'll ever do that, Uncle Lomah. Shit, I used to fight with my siblings just the same. Ain't nothing to kill over. Oh, we'd threaten to, but we never . . . Well, I take that back I did cut off my little brother's pinky finger, but he dared me to, and--" he leaned close to her to where she could smell sour milk on his breath,"--you know as well as I, you don't never dare a milg!"
Emmanora shrugged. It was true. "We are on the wild side. I mean, we live in a swamp! Somebody must've dared the milg that made the First Home into that."
Uncle Lomah raised a brow and nodded, taking another drag from his pipe. "Anyways, if you're so worried about it. Why don't you just stay for a few days and wait for her? You can sleep in my hut. Whaddayah say?" He poked her with the end of his pipe.
She responded first by taking it from him for another puff. After a moment's contemplation, she nodded and said, "That's actually a pretty good idea."
"So, it's settled then. Emmanora Cerahal is a Spider on the Wind again." He gave her a wink and a grin.
"Now, now. I might just stay for a few days. Not promising anything full time."
"Oh, sure! Of course! Keep up the whole independence thing. But just know that there's a lot of coin hauling happening these days from Kilawon, Gladstone, Lake Town. If Liobe robbed you blind, you could get back to where you were in a month or two-way things been going lately."
Emmanora shooed a big red dragonfly hovering by her face. "Maybe someday. I'll think about it."
That night she somehow fell asleep too easily. She had wanted to stay up a bit later to watch out for Liobe, but the long hike down to Vylket had her sore and exhausted. She dreamed about the King of Scion. His voice echoed in her head, laughing and screaming. She saw Liobe's face as she plunged Heartnail between her eyes and used it to move her head facing up and pushing the blade down through her heart. The dream ended with Liobe turning to blood red sand and blowing away into the wind.
She lay awake in a cot in Uncle Lomah's hut. The moonlight shone through the open window in a bright column down to the floor.
Something scratched outside on the deck and bolted upright with Heartnail in hand. Uncle Lomah lay asleep on his egret feathered bed in the deepest corner of the hut.
Emmanora crept across the wooden floor and stood in the shadows by the window close enough for her to see what was outside. A familiar chatter made her jump up and smile. "Bandit!" she whisper-shouted. "How the fuck? Well, you finally managed to make it up grandmother tree."
A tiny black paw appeared on the corner of the window, and he pulled himself insid
e, carrying some sort of treasure he had brought all the way from the bayou. It was the top of a very large cattail. He offered it to her.
"Thank you," she whispered as she took it and placed it down on the cot. "I'm going back to bed. Keep watch."
Bandit stood on his hind legs and scratched at the air.
"Yeah, just like that," she said and laid back down.
12
IVANOS
Ivanos rode toward Red Wolf Keep just after nightfall.
Velvet seemed jittery as they neared the wide-open gates which, with all the bouncing shadows cast from inside, looked much like a giant fiery hearth. Embers from bonfires within the walls swirled into the night sky above. Ominous music played on lower ranged stringed instruments beneath a haunting choir of voices wailing in unsettling harmonies. Lastly, before he came up to pass through the entrance, a troupe of twenty-one glowing skeletons formed a human pyramid six figures high. When he passed into the keep, close passing revealed the skeletons were naked men and women who had painted their entire bodies black and then painted the image of a skeleton in glowing white paint over the black.
No one as much as looked up at him as he rode by. No one questioned him. Ahead, the castle yard seethed with the Red Wolf populace of all sorts, all costumed in morbid characters with painted skull faces, deathly looking pale makeup with blackened eye-sockets, and miscellaneous monstrous masks of demons and gory disfigured corpses.
Ivanos's mouth watered as Velvet rode through the smells of roasted pork and turkey, sweet baked pies and cinnamon bread. He craned his neck in search of the source. All he had eaten for the last several weeks had been campfire rabbit, bamboo shoots, and the occasional sweet discovery of wild berries. When the crowded street parted briefly, he saw a row of tables piled with the feasts of all varieties offered for the celebration. Surrounding a table of meat and bread stood several of vegetables and fruit, and another of black and white cakes and fruit pies.
"Over here, milord! Milord! Horses this way!" a young stableman called up to him. He looked no older than fifteen. He wore a drab leather tunic and brushes and hoof hammers hung from his belt. He kept waving up at Ivanos for him to dismount.
Ivanos eyed him skeptically before relenting. He dropped down, unfastened his traveling bag from the saddle and threw it over his shoulder. He patted Velvet on the shoulder then. "She's a good war-horse, lad. A bit frightened by all this . . . unusual festivity."
"Right, well, she'll be kept safe enough with the other horses. The stables are just this way, and they're closed off from all the revelry. And they got a mountain of oats to fill her belly. She'll have a good brushing before you head out as well."
"I've no coin," said Ivanos.
The young stableman frowned and cocked his head. "It's alright. Don't worry about it. It's House of the Dead!"
"I'm not exactly acquainted with the Red Wolf customs. House of the Dead? Is it like the Vothian Devil's Fortnight?"
"I suppose, a bit, yeah." The young stableman took Velvet by the reins and led her toward the stables.
Ivanos strolled alongside them. "Oh?"
Just then a mummer from the shuffling crowd wearing an oversized red wolf head with blood-painted teeth careened at Ivanos, growling and raking the air with fake claws and a shaggy suit of red wolf hair.
The stableman smiled and continued to tell the story as they walked, "It's a celebration of those lost who belonged to Red Wolf Keep in some way. Maybe a knight's daughter or a cook or a serving maid. Anyone who's part of the kingdom really. The more merriment, the greater we honor the dead, so they say."
"I see."
When they had reached the stables, Ivanos stopped and waved to the stableman as he led Velvet into a large hallway with a dirt floor. He waved back disappearing into the darkness within.
Ivanos turned around and decided he should start searching for one of the Knights if he could recognize any of them as such. The food still pulled at him though, and he found that he had made his way back to the table of roasted meats and baked bread. He shrugged and reached for a turkey leg and started devouring it right there. It tasted better than any he had ever had in memory. As he cleaned it to the bone and tossed it to a couple spotted dogs lingering nearby, he realized he needed something to drink. Ale or wine would be good right now.
He strolled along through the festival eyeing all the spectacular events as he passed. Nude dancers, fire breathers, jugglers, face painters, flag twirlers, and an odd sort of clearing where a circle of women in witch costumes seemingly pretending to have some kind of seance. Right next to that he sighted a stone slab where people gathered filling their cups with wine from several casks. He headed right over.
"Excuse me, my lord?" He tapped on the shoulder of a man cloaked in black with a face painted white who was filling his chalice.
The man turned around, immediately drinking gulps of wine as he glared at Ivanos over his chalice.
"I was wondering where one might find a simple cup?"
The man pointed to a serving maid nearby picking up debris and trying her best to usher people about.
She was middle-aged and dusky-skinned with jet black curly hair wrapped in a teal scarf with a five-pointed star embroidered on top. She looked to be middle aged but still beautiful. As Ivanos approached her, he noticed her top garment was sheer and her breasts visible except for the nipples which were covered by brass five-pointed stars. She jingled loudly when she moved, due to her forearms being covered in various charms and steel bracelets and bells hanging from two braids in her hair.
"Miss," Ivanos said.
She smiled up at him and grabbed his beard and pulled on it playfully with her fingers. "You! Come!" Her accent was thick Bezzago, a northeastern woman. She grabbed his hand with delicate warm fingers and led him to a small red tent beside the drinking area.
"No, milady. I'm afraid I don't need that sort of thing at the moment. I'm just looking for a cup to get a taste of wine."
"I have plenty for you to drink in my tent," she said. She smelled of spice and exotic perfumes. She pressed her eyelids together for a moment to show him the tattoos she had on each of them. The left a black blazing sun, the right a crescent moon and stars falling from the corner of each eye like tears down to her cheeks. "I just want to read your fortune."
Ivanos shrugged. He didn't want to waste much more time, but he was so thirsty. He let her take him inside the tent.
She sat him in a chair at a small table covered with white fur and sat across from him.
To his left stood a tall birdcage holding a white owl perched perfectly still and staring at him.
"I'm Violet Kartollozi of the north deserts. King Ingus has invited me here to read fortunes for the House of the Dead. Here, have a drink." She handed him a wooden cup filled with something the color of dark mud.
He studied the liquid and sniffed it. "Cider, masking the scent of something else," he affirmed.
Violet laughed. "Drink it silly, it's just punch! It will relax you."
Ivanos raised a brow and drank. It tasted like a mixture of sweet berries and melons with a hint of rum. "It's very good. Thank you, milady."
She pulled a black silk bag from beneath the table and stretched open the corded cinch and presented the dark opening to him. "Put inside your hand."
Ivanos stood. "I need to be on my way, milady. I appreciate the drink."
"No, no, please! You must trust Violet! It is part of fortune! I cannot see without your trust. I will see your future. Maybe riches, maybe glory! Besides, you have big sword on your belt. What has Violet? I am small woman. Be not afraid. Come! Trust Violet. Put in hand." She shoved the silk bag closer to his hand.
For a second, a vision of the previous incident with his sword and the bear flashed before him. He wondered what might happen now if he did need to use it. He rolled his eyes and stuck in his hand. It felt like oddly shaped pebbles.
She smiled and dumped the bag's contents out onto the table. Finger and hand bon
es tumbled and rattled out into a pile. She swirled them about and started speaking in what sounded Belazonian but with scratchy throat enunciations. After a moment, her eyes widened, and she stepped back with her mouth open, her lips quivering.
"Everything all right, milady?" he asked.
"I cannot read fortune! You must go now!"
"What? But why? I've done you no harm."
"Bones say you are devil knight. You will slay King Ingul."
"I assure you, milady Violet. I am not that sort of knight. A knight only kills to protect his kingdom and honor his king, and I am not tied to any king or kingdom."
"No." She backed farther away. "You must leave. You should also leave the keep. The spirits tell it."
The white owl flapped its wings frantically. The movement seemed surreal and almost liquid at times.
The stars on Violet's face moved down her face like tears. Her eyes shifted from blue to glowing yellow.
Ivanos sighed and left the tent, but he took the cup with him and finally got to fill it with wine. When he began to drink, he noticed the people attending the festival dispersing and gathering near the main entrance to the castle. Horns trumpeted. The crowd chanted, "The king! The king! The king! The king!"
KILL HIM!
The crowd cheered and clapped as six porters carried a litter into the castle yard and placed it down on the ground. Eight Red Wolf Knights stood guard as King Ingul stepped out and removed his red wolf fur hood and revealed his face which had been painted to resemble the flowing skull of a wolf with his very real crown made from red wolf fangs on his head. He stood easily six and a half feet, but he looked very old. He shook when he held up his longsword and addressed the gathered crowd.
The Vanguards of Scion Page 7