by Ember Lane
“Are you okay, Merl?” Desmelda asked.
“I just feel…” Merl yawned. “So tired.”
“We should have waited on the boat and come at dawn,” Frank growled. “I was thinking it, but never said anything.”
Merl staggered on. At first the land had risen gently, but now it fell gradually. After a while, the dense vegetation thinned, and spots of blue dappled its green. The burble of a river broke the forest’s silence and they stumbled into a previously unseen clearing.
“Here,” Merl said, laying down by the river’s bank. “This is where we’re supposed to wait.”
“For what?” Frank asked. He peeled back Merl’s eyelid, slapped his cheek, but Merl was barely awake.
“Put up your hut, fire the cauldron. We must wait here.” Merl pointed over the river, and Frank’s jaw dropped.
Two huge stones thrust out of the ground, topped with a horizontal slab. Upon it sat a man, upright and cross legged. He had darker skin and hair than Merl. He wore a gray robe that was edged with emerald runes, which gave off a faint light, and that gave him the look and air of a holy man, perhaps even a monk. A staff lay across his lap.
“Is he kippin’?” Billy asked.
“More guarding, I think,” Desmelda said.
“He’s thinking,” Merl told them and yawned.
“What in dig-a-dog’s name has he got to think about?” Billy asked. “How t’get down?” He started laughing.
“He’s debating whether to kill us or not. We won’t have our answer until dawn, so you might as well get our camp ready.”
“How are you sure of all this?” Frank asked.
Merl shrugged. “I don’t know the answer to that.”
Frank conjured his mud hut, taking Merl’s word at face value. Desmelda’s cauldron appeared over its fire pit, and her bed took up the majority of the rest of the hut. Merl rested on the riverbank for a while, sipping water and stroking Gloomy Joe. He stared at the man on the rock and wondered exactly who he was and how long he’d been waiting. The man turned his head and returned Merl’s gaze.
It was then Merl noticed that the man had no letters above his head, nor did he have a stripe with a dot underneath it, nor a shepherd’s crook. He had nothing and was the first person that Merl had ever seen like it. Even the giants had writing over their heads, a completely pointless thing as most were too tall for them to be seen. Most of the time, Merl disregarded the writing, because most of the time it meant nothing to him. It was like seeing a tree trunk and trusting it had a leafy canopy above without having to look up and check. Merl was so used to the letters being there that the absence of them stunned him.
He blinked and doublechecked, but nothing changed.
“My name is Baldrock.”
The words entered his head without knocking. One minute it wasn’t inside his mind, the next it was. It had announced itself as a metallic tone and was spoken as if the speaker was gargling water, which then echoed slightly as though his head was a cavern.
Perhaps I have no brains, Merl thought.
He heard chuckling, and again, it was between his ears.
“I am a guardian. I will escort you to Quaiyl. Quaiyl is The Origin.”
Merl understood it was the man talking, but not just him. The voice had a sort of harmony to its gargled quality.
“There are more of them, Frank.”
“Of who, Merl?” Frank asked. He’d set a fire outside of the hut and knelt by it, packing it with kindling and then using his strike to spark it to life. At first, Merl’s tired brain wondered why they needed a fire, given that it was warm outside. “Predators,” Frank told him as if reading his mind.
“More of him. His name is Baldrock and he’s a guardian. He’s not the only one. There are more, but they’re here to protect us. I’m not sure what from.”
Frank glanced at him. “We’re in your hands, Merl. If you trust them, then I trust them. Though, it’s a bit unnerving.”
“What are they, Merl?” Billy asked.
Merl rested his nose on the end of his thumb. He squeezed his eyes tight, trying to fathom the unfathomable. “They have no letters above them, so they aren’t the N, ermmm.” He tried to remember the next letter. He had a feeling it had something to do with Walinda Alepuller but couldn’t quite remember what.
“P, Merl, it’s a P, you remember,” Frank encouraged.
Frank had taught Merl all the letters while they’d been at sea. Most of them he could remember, but there were a few he got confused about, and the one legged, big-bellied-Walinda Alepuller with no top half was one he constantly had trouble with.
“NPC, he isn’t one of them, Billy. Whatever they are.”
Most folk had NPC hovering above their heads. Neither Merl nor Frank, nor Desmelda, and certainly not Billy, had a clue what it meant. The farthest they’d got was ‘Normal People’, but couldn’t work out what the C meant, nor why goblins and elves had the same letters over them. That had sparked a debate as to whether goblins and the like were people, or a race, in which case the P couldn’t stand for people. In the end, like the letters, it had gone right over Merl’s head. Besides, zombays still had NPC above their heads, and no way were they people—they were definitely monsters.
Baldrock had nothing over his head, and that had to mean something apart from the fact he wasn’t an NPC. Quite what, Merl didn’t know.
“Desmelda?” Frank called into the hut. “Do you sense anything? Have you ever heard of guardians?”
Desmelda took her time answering. She stirred the broth as it heated in the cauldron. Its smell spread across their little camp. “Only loosely. I know the term is used by the Priests of Raymonsha to denote acolytes that guard the legacies of The Five Sisters of Gar’Agnoth. Why the acolytes are called Guardians was always thought to be because they guard the legacies, thus Guardians.”
“And that’s related?” Frank asked, sounding a little underwhelmed.
“They are deadly fighters—masters of illusion and camouflage. They wear gray cloaks with trims of glowing emerald runes. Does that pique your attention, Frank?” Desmelda replied before returning her attention to the heating broth.
Frank grunted. He stood and faced the seated man, standing as if braced for a row. For a moment, Merl thought Frank was going to try and fight him, but then Frank bowed to the guardian, turned away and disappeared into his level-one mud hut. He soon reappeared with a full bowl of broth in hand and waded across the river, approaching the stones and offering it up to the man. Baldrock leaned forward. He reached down and carefully plucked the bowl from Frank’s outstretched hands before setting it down in front of him and resuming his endless observation of Merl
By this time, Merl was taking no note of Baldrock. He’d been told to rest and wait for the morning and was now sure that nothing would happen until then. After he wolfed his broth down and fed Gloomy Joe, he arranged his blankets by the fire pit and lay back looking up at the stars. For the first time in a long while, Merl felt like he was close to home, and that was a feeling he couldn’t quite comprehend.
Morgan Mount could hardly be farther away.
The stars though, they were the same, and he took solace in that as he tried to work through what was going in in his mind.
Baldrock stood at first light. He was shorter than Merl thought he would be, though it was difficult be sure from Merl’s lowly vantage point. Merl stretched and yawned, noting that he was the only one awake other than Baldrock. Merl cocked his head as he regarded the strange man. He had yet to see any hint of an expression grace the guardian’s face. Merl picked Gloomy Joe up. He carried him across the river and stood in front of stones. Now closer, the stones gave him the impression of being a doorway, a portal of sorts. Baldrock jumped down and landed softly. He knelt by Gloomy Joe and patted the dune dog’s head before standing upright.
“Quaiyl waits.”
Merl’s heart skipped a beat at Baldrock’s spoken words. It was the first he’d said out loud and was les
s garbled than his implanted words but still had an echoey quality.
“Who is Quaiyl?”
“What,” Baldrock replied. “What is Quaiyl? That is the question.”
Merl nodded but didn’t ask the question. He was too engrossed in the hole between the stones. It didn’t look like anything other than what it was, and the forest behind it was plain to see. Once again, however, Merl sensed it had been something else at one point or the other, but quite what, he had no clue. He brushed his hand down its inside. The stone was gray, speckled black and white and rough, like autumn leaves. He’d seen its like before, but only in tumbled rocks that littered the slopes of One Face Mountain, and he knew it was granite. Tiny pin pricks of sparkling energy bit at his fingers. It reminded him of spring fleas biting. He jerked his hand away.
Across the river, Frank emerged from his hut. He froze mid-stretch, spotting Merl and Baldrock and then darted back inside. Before long, Billy stumbled out, already falling before he’d left the hut’s shadows, and he collapsed by the river’s edge, dousing his head in its fresh, cold water.
“Merl!” he shouted. “Morning Merl, and morning weird bloke! It’s a fine day to get up to some mischief, like.” He cupped his hands and drank. “Are we breakfasting, or just getting straight to adventuring?”
Merl was sure Billy fancied himself a swashbuckling adventurer now. His friend had strutted around the adventurers’ bar, fencing ghosts with his stupid elfen sword. Billy more often than not tripped over his laces, or Gloomy Joe, or something. Merl doubted Billy would make a great adventurer. Merl glanced at Baldrock, who dropped and sat cross-legged.
“Breakfasting,” Merl said, sitting too.
Frank, Desmelda, and Billy crossed the river, bowls of steaming broth in hand, and passed one each to Merl, Gloomy Joe, and Baldrock. Behind them, Frank’s fire had already faded to ash-cloaked embers and the hut had vanished. They ate in silence, each clearly preoccupied with their thoughts—until Desmelda broke the still.
“Do we know where we are going yet?”
“To find something called Quaiyl,” Merl replied. “But I think Baldrock already knows where it is.”
“I do,” Baldrock said, startling Frank, Billy, and Desmelda. “Quaiyl is ready.” The guardian glanced at the sun. “We should hurry.” He lifted his bowl to his mouth and gulped the rest of his broth down. “You are not the only ones that seek The Origin.”
Baldrock stood. He walked between the stones and vanished.
Merl swapped confused glances with the others, then drained his own bowl. He handed his and Gloomy Joe’s bowl to Frank, jumped up, and strolled after Baldrock. The moment he passed between the stones, Merl’s whole body began to tingle as if a million spring fleas had now hatched in his clothes and were biting ravenously at his flesh. Merl blinked when he reappeared at the base of a hill and he let out a gasp.
A gentle escarpment sloped downward to a stream, then it rose back up, forming a curiously steep, terraced hill. It was the hill from Merl’s dreams, and for the first time he could see where the waterfall fell from. A cloud sat above the hill’s summit like a coronet of aged hair. A great golden bowl nestled within its wispy strands, and the fall spilled from its turned-down spout. A series of what Merl guessed had once been letters were scratched out one side of the bowl, but three were still clearly engraved on the other. The first was a circle. Merl knew the next was a nuh, and that was followed by a wrong-way-round three. Either side of the tumbling stream, piles of rubble sat where Merl always saw square, brown patches. All were cloaked in brambles and spouts of grass.
Frank appeared by his side. “Is this…?”
“Yes,” Merl whispered. “It is, though I have never seen the origin before. Perhaps that’s what this Quaiyl is—perhaps it’s the golden bowl, The Origin.”
“What the bugger is that bastard thing?” Billy asked as he hurtled by them, stumbling then falling down the grassy escarpment.
Desmelda stepped through the stones and shook her head when she saw Billy in a heap halfway down the slope and rilling toward the stream. She sighed. “I told him not to jump through. Bloody imbecile. I told him, I did, but there’s no telling him, is there?”
But Merl didn’t take any notice of the witch from Falling Glen. He was too busy laughing at Billy Muckspreader as his friend rolled to a halt and picked the grass and mud from his hair and ears. Merl darted after him.
“What the heck is it?” Billy asked looking across the stream and at the strange hill.
The more Merl stared at it, the more the hill looked out of place. It wasn’t its cloak of grass and brambles, more its topography. Not that Merl had a clue what topography meant. The hill simply didn’t fit. “It looks like it’s just fallen from the sky and dumped itself there,” he told his friend.
“Aye,” said Billy, “but what is it? Ain’t no normal hill, like. Normal hills match.”
“Match?”
“Look, Merl, look closer. The grass is a different color, and the rocks are all gray an’ dotty where the rest are as black as a shorn sheep’s ass.”
Now that Billy had said it, Merl could see it easily. It added to his impression that the thing had fallen from the sky. He briefly wondered if it might have risen from the bowels of the earth but discounted that because the golden bowl atop the cloud would have been full of mud and stuff. “It’s the place from me dreams, Billy, except in me dreams the place is nothin’ but thorns an’ brambles an’ empty mud patches.”
Billy turned around. He was beaming like a shining star. “Then we’re finally getting there, Merl. We’re gettin’ closer to unravellin’ the mush in yer bonce.”
Merl dumped himself down by Billy. “I think we might be.” The two friends stared up at the majestic, golden bowl.
Baldrock walked toward a set of rising steps aside the mount’s falling stream, where he waited patiently.
“There they are,” Frank said, then pointed.
As if by magic, a dozen other guardians appeared, all stationed along the steps, a pair standing on each plateau.
“I think Baldrock’s waiting for us,” Frank said.
“Well, he did tell us to hurry,” Merl told him, pushing himself up. “Though I can’t help but feel quite relaxed. It’s quite nice here.”
The hill was definitely out of place. It sort of interrupted whole scene. They had emerged from the stone portal behind, and into what would have been quite a gentle valley that led to broad and quite flat grass land, had a hill not been dumped in the middle of it. Now, the whole scene looked muddled, with slopes where they shouldn’t be and rises where they couldn’t be. It was a confusing place to be, and so Merl focused on what he could latch on to. He could see arcs of blue dotted about the strange vale’s lower edges, and he knew that was the sea. He anchored his reality there, needing a point he could rely on. As for the tapering slopes farther down that butted against rock bluffs, he decided it leaned even more credence to his theory the hill had crashed down from the sky. It had dented the big hill, and that was that.
They ambled down toward the stream and the strange-looking hill, all hypnotized by the vale’s peace. Merl paused as came closer to it and regarded the steps that led up the peculiar hill. He’d already known what they would be like, but he just wanted to make sure they matched his dreams. Of all the giant leaps forward he’d made with his life of recent, he knew this was the biggest, and he wanted to get it right.
“Are they, Merl?” Desmelda asked.
“Exactly the same as my dream, except it’s just me there, and there are no ruins on the terraces,” Merl said. He strode forward, following in Baldrock’s wake as he crossed the stream. They climbed over a curved pile of tumbled stone that was mostly grassed over, but still distinct. It was like the ground had rippled all around the hillock, but Merl knew it had once been a grand stone wall and wondered how time had reduced it so.
They climbed the steps to the first terrace. The ruins curved away on both sides. Brickwork corners, rotted
wood frames, and fallen trusses were all that were left of numerous dwellings that had lined the edges of this once proud place. The second level mimicked the first, as did the third. Merl turned and scanned around. The crescents of blue now dominated the horizon. Vast swathes of ocean greeted the sky. He was glad of the extra solid reality he could rely on. To his left, a huge ship sat moored in a bay. It was Wave Walker, and the mere sight of the great giant ship brought even more warmth to Merl’s heart.
Then he turned to his right. At first, he thought he’d mis-watched, or whatever the word was. He’d seen something but wasn’t sure if he’d seen it right. It looked very much like a ship, except it was far too black, like it was made out of shadows, and that was why he thought he’d mis-watched it. Quite what it was, he didn’t know.
“Dastaries,” Frank spat. “Is that what Baldrock meant when he said we weren’t alone?”
“Just what are dastaries?” Billy asked.
“They’re nothing good,” Frank said, ominously. “In laymen’s terms, dreadnails are the wizards, dreadnoughts, are the heavy cavalry, and dastaries are infantry. They are soldiers, warriors, big brutes. They dress like the night and fight like demons. Their weapon of choice is a heavy club spiked with foot-long nails. Their armor is made from the carapace of giant sand beetles from the tomb lands of Saragossa. They are trouble, Billy, trouble for us.”
“You must hurry,” Baldrock said, “they have already made the shore.” There was no urgency in his voice and certainly no fear. It was like he could only relay the facts, nothing more. He clicked his fingers, and the guardians at the top of the hill rushed down, fanning around in front of the piled rubble remnants of the derelict city’s walls. “My troops will only hold them back for so long,” Baldrock told them.