Among the Fallen

by NS Dolkart

  But the two of them were about to find out.

  The first thing Narky noticed as they approached the city was the wall. The city wall had never come down, it seemed. Criton had thought once that Bestillos might be chasing him, trying to slay the last of the Dragon Touched, rather than taking the time to fully subjugate Anardis. Did the wall’s presence mean he was right? Had the red priest really tried to chase them so soon after taking the city?

  He and Ptera approached with caution. The gate was wide open, and Narky could already see the devastation that had been wrought by the fire the Ardismen had set. Many of the old houses were still there, burnt-out husks that would serve as a reminder of that day’s events for years to come. Others were new, or had blackened sides where the fire had passed by without destroying them.

  He took a deep breath and walked up to the guards who stood by the open gate. “I am Narky of Tarphae, High Priest of Ravennis. I’m here to speak to Mother Dinendra, or whoever is high priest of Elkinar in these times.”

  The men’s hostility was unconcealed, but they didn’t turn him and Ptera away. “Mother Dinendra still lives,” one said, “not that you wanderers of Tarphae would have cared should the Ardismen have slaughtered her as they did so many others. Ravennis is respected here, but you are not. Enter, but know that you are not welcome.”

  He supposed that was as pleasant an interaction as he could have hoped for. They entered the city and went straight to Elkinar’s temple, trying to ignore the many stares they received along the way.

  The temple’s sides had been blackened by the fire, and none of the hanging greenery that he remembered was visible on its roof. Had the priests’ rooftop garden perished in the fire?

  One of the younger priests, Father Taemon, met them at the door. “I am here to speak with Mother Dinendra,” Narky told him.

  The priest said nothing and was about to turn away when Narky added, “You’re the one whose wife was having a baby when Ardis came. How is your family?”

  Taemon looked surprised. “They’re well. I thank you for asking.” He bowed slightly. “I’ll tell Mother Dinendra you’re here.”

  They stood outside the triangular building, waiting. What could Narky say to the High Priestess of Elkinar to make up for the misfortune they had brought to Anardis? He had to keep reminding himself that Dinendra hadn’t believed any of that stuff about the islanders being cursed. She had thought her nephew, the king of Anardis, was to blame, because of the way his actions had goaded their northern neighbor into attacking them. Did she still feel that way? He hoped so.

  Mother Dinendra arrived a moment later, opening the door and looking beyond and all around Narky before accepting that he and Ptera were the only ones there. The elderly high priestess was a welcome sight in this place. “You’ve lost your friends,” she said. “And gained a new one. What’s this about your being High Priest of Ravennis now?”

  “The Graceful Servant named him high priest,” Ptera answered. “And Narky has gained more than a friend: I’m his wife.”

  Dinendra smiled indulgently. “Welcome, Narky’s wife, and welcome to you too, Narky. But what did you do with the other islanders?”

  “They’re among the Dragon Touched in the north,” he answered. “At least, I assume they are. I left them before they got there.”

  “And now you have returned to Anardis. Well, come in.”

  They entered the dimly lit hall of worship, where pillar-chimneys stood waiting for worshippers’ prayer notes, each pillar containing an oil lamp. There were three women inside praying, one of them noticeably pregnant. They stared at Narky, their gazes unfriendly at best.

  “We can speak in the library,” Mother Dinendra offered, “and you can tell me what brings you back here.”

  She led the way, slowly and carefully, to the chamber beyond, which was perhaps even dustier and more disorganized than Narky had remembered. Scrolls and codices were stuffed onto their shelves in a jumble, joined by earthenware jars, empty bowls, half-spent candles, and various other kinds of debris. In a corner sat a familiar sack of plaster and a pile of rags. It was here that Mother Dinendra had bound Phaedra’s ankle, allowing her to walk again, though with a limp. At the time, they hadn’t realized how permanent that limp would be: Phaedra had hoped that Psander might heal her ankle with magic someday. Those hopes had been dashed upon their return to Silent Hall.

  “What happened to your garden?” Narky asked the priestess.

  “The temple walls are made of stone,” Mother Dinendra said, “but the garden was flammable. We were able to bring some of the clay pots down to the library, but we had to cast the heavier ones off the roof to keep the fire from spreading to us. So the garden remains, but the hanging plants that you’d have seen from the street outside are no longer. We will replace them eventually, I’m sure. There would be no better symbol of Elkinar’s resilience than the display of new plants to replace the old. Elkinar’s cycle continues, as it always has.”

  Narky nodded. “I’ve noticed that my God has taken up residence in Anardis as well. Have the worshippers of Magor all converted on their own?”

  “Almost. If Bestillos’ humbling of our city made Magor less popular here, his death dealt a mortal blow to the cult of Magor in Anardis. The temple was defaced within days, and its priests fled. Ardis might have punished us for that, but we sent our tribute early to placate them. Without Bestillos, and with our city walls still standing, the Council of Generals chose to accept our payment with grace.”

  Ptera made a subtle noise that caught Narky’s attention and made him put off what he was about to say. “Does Magor’s defaced temple still stand?” she asked.

  “It does.”

  He saw the meaning in her eyes. “We can claim it for Ravennis,” Narky said. “Good thinking.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  “You’ll be staying in Anardis, then?” Mother Dinendra asked.

  “Yes, at least until Ardis is ready to welcome us back.”

  The old woman eyed him skeptically. “And when will that happen?”

  “When Criton slaughters their army.”

  23

  Hunter

  The first couple of days were the hardest. Phaedra disappeared into the house and didn’t come out again, while the field slaves and their overseers worked and ate and slept outside. He worried about her constantly – what were they doing to her in there? But there was nothing he could do besides pray for God Most High to protect her, and hope that his prayers would be enough.

  The overseers were cruel, violent men, and quick to use the whip. It stung more, knowing that this land may well have belonged to his father: House Tavener owned much farmland on the outskirts of Karsanye. His father had taken him and Kataras out to the fields when they were children, but Hunter hadn’t shown enough of an interest to be brought back. Neither had Kataras, really, but as the eldest son, Lord Tavener had forced him to learn about managing their lands anyway.

  Hunter wondered whether the slaves his father owned had been treated like this. He hoped not, and he honestly doubted it. Under the Tarphaean system of slavery, slaves could bring suit against their masters for unreasonable treatment and win back their freedom. Hunter hadn’t always retained what his father had taught him of Tarphaean law, but this much he remembered: the contracts by which men sold their families into slavery were taken seriously. Any breach of contract could be prosecuted.

  He didn’t remember what qualified as mistreatment under the old Tarphaean law, but he was pretty sure his captors would have been in breach of contract. They allowed no rest during daylight, and beat their workers on a whim. When one of the continental sailors collapsed, they threw him in the river and watched as he nearly drowned trying to get out again. By the end of the day, every prisoner was aching and weary, and the continental men had sunburns.

  On that first day, they built a barn for the captives to sleep in alongside the six sheep and one cow that the pirates had somehow found and brought b
ack here to supply them with labor and, hopefully, milk. Hunter was surprised, frankly, that any domesticated animals had survived the last year without turning wild or being eaten by predators. Farming had always seemed like such hard, tedious work to him that he had imagined a whole year’s neglect would surely ruin everything. And yet, even if only a hundredth of Tarphae’s crops and animals could be recovered, that would be more than enough to feed such a small group of people.

  He was glad of the barn, in any case. The rainy season might have held off for him and Phaedra while they were on the ocean, but the unnaturally fair weather didn’t last for long. No sooner had they erected the barn than the downpours began. But if he had thought that would spare him from laboring outside, he was wrong: the overseers gladly sent their slaves out in the deluge to catch river fish.

  By the second and third day, though, Hunter began to notice a mysterious change in the pirates’ attitude toward him. In short, they stopped paying attention to him. He still did as they directed, not wanting to test the limits of their leniency, but the difference was noticeable. The whip never touched his body again, and he was able to be occasionally inefficient without fear of violence. The other captives looked on him with envy and loathing, but they also began praying to God Most High. They might not know how Hunter was being protected, but they had some very concrete suspicions about why.

  Mura returned a few days later, collecting men to help repair the new ship. The hull had apparently sprung a mysterious leak – he suspected foul play, but could find no motive for sabotaging what was, as far as anyone knew, the only way off the island. Almost as soon as he had arrived, Mura sniffed the air and announced that something was wrong.

  “Somebody’s been casting spells here,” he told Bennan. “There’s magic so strong I can smell it.”

  “Really?” Bennan said. “I haven’t noticed anything unusual.”

  Mura gave him a long stare, frowning. “Gather everyone,” he said at last. “The slaves too. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

  While Bennan was gathering the others, Mura commanded Hunter to build a fire. The ground was muddy, but he seemed to want a bonfire outside, so Hunter chose the driest spot he could find and made a few trips to the woodpile in the barn. Mura did not light the fire with magic this time – perhaps that required Karassa’s intervention – so Hunter had to do it by hand. By the time he had set the tinder alight, everyone had gathered around.

  Everyone but Phaedra.

  Hunter felt that familiar fear gnawing at him, the same fear he had felt when Phaedra had fallen into the ants’ nest in Hession’s cavern. What had happened to her? He prayed that she had somehow escaped, but he didn’t really believe that was possible – not with her limp, and not without a word to Hunter first. Had they hurt her? Had they killed her and forgotten even to taunt him about it?

  No. No, he couldn’t believe that. Why would God Most High protect him from these men, while allowing her to die? That just could not be. It was all wrong.

  Mura noticed Phaedra’s absence as well. “Where is she?” he demanded.

  “Where is who?” asked Bennan, playing dumb. There was only one ‘she’ on the island, besides Karassa.

  “The girl. This one’s half-sister.”

  Bennan looked sheepish. “Oh, her. I’m sorry, Mura. I forgot all about her. She must still be up in that attic.”

  “Get her.”

  Hunter allowed himself to breathe a little. They had simply forgotten her. It was hard to believe, but it was true. Somehow, Bennan and the others had managed to forget that there was a woman living among them. Hunter was no wizard, but he was starting to understand what Mura meant by “magic so strong I can smell it.”

  Had Phaedra had some sort of breakthrough, and laid an enchantment on their captors? He couldn’t imagine who else would have done such a thing, and it would explain the overseers’ lenient treatment of him. So what had changed? What had Phaedra discovered?

  Mura paced in front of the fire while everyone waited for Bennan and Phaedra to return. They arrived a short time later, Bennan mumbling an apology. Mura gave the two of them a contemptuous glare and commanded the whole crowd to look into the fire.

  “Karassa,” he intoned, “let the nature of this enchantment reveal itself to me.” He added three foreign words, pulling the pouch from under his tunic and sprinkling some of its ashes in the fire.

  The flames leapt skyward for a moment, drawing Hunter’s eyes upward. A vulture was circling overhead. An omen? If so, then for whom?

  His heart was pounding. What if Phaedra really was behind this enchantment and Mura found out? God Most High may have protected the two of them from Karassa and Mayar, but hadn’t Phaedra always said that humans had free will? That was the whole point of the mesh, wasn’t it – to protect people from too much interference by the Gods? Could anything really stop Mura from killing them if he set his mind to it?

  “Look into the fire!” Mura spat.

  Hunter glanced about, startled and frightened, but luckily Mura was not just talking to him: several other people were as distracted as he was. One or two of them were overseers, which was also lucky. If none had been, Mura would likely have punished all the captives without even waiting for his fire ritual to bear fruit.

  Hunter turned his eyes back to the fire, wondering what he was supposed to be seeing. He hoped that whatever Mura had planned, it wouldn’t work. But now that he was really looking, he saw that the embers were glowing green as if they’d been burning copper. Mura threw in another handful of ashes, and the flames turned a startling purple. At the third handful the fire flashed such an intense white that Hunter shut his eyes involuntarily, an after-image of the fire still glowing beneath his eyelids.

  “An enchantment of the mind,” Mura said, probably to himself and yet loud enough to be heard. “No surprises there – far too inattentive to be natural. Well, I can fix that.”

  He turned away from the fire and began circling behind the crowd, sprinkling holy ashes on each of their heads. He was mumbling the whole time, and when he got close enough for Hunter to hear him, it became clear that these words were in no language Hunter had even heard before. Were they real words in any language?

  Hunter began to feel something, a tugging at his mind. He thought the ashes must be acting as a wick, trying to tease the enchantment out through their heads. The sensation went away fairly quickly, but then Hunter was pretty sure he hadn’t been a target of the original enchantment. Perhaps this was having more of an effect on the others.

  It sure didn’t seem like it, though. Mura was growing increasingly frustrated. “Karassa,” he pleaded, “aid Your servant. Break the shackles that have imprisoned these men’s minds and give them the freedom to think as before. I cannot do this alone!”

  He threw another handful of ashes in the fire, but this time, nothing happened at all. He tore the pouch from his neck and flung the whole thing in, but the flames only burned on, unchanging. Mura stood there with a look of disbelief, watching his pouch of sacrificial ashes, his sacrifice of sacrifices, blacken and disintegrate to no effect.

  “Listen, the lot of you,” he shouted. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this, and when I do, whoever cast this spell on my men will suffer like no one has ever suffered before. I will offer him to Karassa piece by bloody piece, all while he lives and watches. If magic will not break the enchantment, death will.”

  With that he stalked away indoors, leaving his men and their captives looking wonderingly at each other. “Mage Mura is angry at us,” the cook said dumbly.

  “As well he should be,” Bennan answered. “We let ourselves get enchanted, and now he has to fix it. You just pray he figures it out before he starts cutting us into pieces. I’ve never seen his magic fail before.”

  “Best to keep away from the house,” said an overseer called Tarphon. “I don’t want to get in his way.”

  The others agreed, so they all spent the next few hours outside, fishing an
d tending to the livestock. “We need to leave tonight,” Phaedra whispered when she and Hunter were briefly next to each other. “It’s not safe to stay, and I think an escape might be possible.”

  “On what ship?”

  Phaedra shook her head almost imperceptibly. Nobody had noticed them talking yet, and there was no reason to change that. “Even if we have to live in the forest, it’s better than staying here with Mura.”

  “You think we can make it far enough away with your limp?”

  They separated for a minute, seeing Bennan glance in their direction. When the danger of their conversation being witnessed had passed, Phaedra said, “I think we’d better find out.”

  They had to wait until late that night to make their attempt. Shortly after their conversation, Mura returned from the house and took a lock of hair from every person on the estate, presumably so that he could use them to identify whoever had cast the spell on his men. However he meant to use the hair, he was apparently waiting for morning to do it, because they heard nothing more about it that night. That was a great relief: the two of them had no intention of waiting to find out whether his second ritual would identify Phaedra as the culprit.

  They made their attempt shortly after midnight. Hunter slipped out of the barn while its watchman was relieving himself against a tree, and set off to get Phaedra from the farmhouse. It was midmonth, and the moon was bright overhead. He slunk over to the house, keeping low so that he would be harder to spot. Nobody stopped him. The cook, Terrin, was on watch at the house tonight, but he seemed to be half asleep in his chair by the door. What had Phaedra done to these men?

  Whatever it was, Hunter had no complaints. He had been on the cusp of thinking this might be too easy, but that was nonsense. Being caught would mean their deaths, whereas escaping would save their lives – there was no such thing as “too easy.”