Hinterland

by James Clemens

  But it was his daughter that took his hand.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Not again…”

  His chin shifted, and he moaned. “Never.”

  Then he lay still.

  “I wish I had more practice,” Rogger said.

  “You’ll do fine,” Tylar assured him. He glanced back at the others.

  The flitterskiff floated a quarter league from the island in the clear channel again, out of the clogged choke. The others crouched, hands firmly on the rail. Dart shared his bench, clutching a hand to his swordbelt. He felt the tremble in her arm.

  Each had a duty this night. And though fear shone bright in all their eyes, so did determination. Satisfied, he twisted forward and squeezed Rogger’s arm, sharing friendship and certainty.

  “Go.”

  With a nod, Rogger twisted the flow of trickling alchemy to full. “Hold tight!”

  The paddles to either side churned the waters into a boil. The flitterskiff leaped forward like a startled pony. It blew across the waters, rising, lifting its keel, winds whipping the hood from Tylar’s cloak.

  He tugged it back up, ducking lower.

  The skiff skimmed on its paddle tips, racing along the channel. Rogger hit the first bend around a hillock, but he was too gentle with the wheel. They swung wide, almost burying their bow in a tangle of knotted roots. He pulled harder, tilting the skiff up almost on one row of paddles, and then they were away.

  The channel twisted and turned from there.

  Rogger did his best, flying the skiff around fast turns, slowing, jogging, banking, and tilting. He took the last turn with a bit of a panic. The rearmost starboard paddle struck a stone and clipped off with a jolt of the boat. The bronze oar flew like an arrow back into the flooded woods.

  Then they were in the boiling lake.

  Steam rose in a fierce, bubbling roil. The waters glowed a fiery crimson. As they shot across the water toward the island, the heat swamped over them, dampened them with a stinging wash. The kiss of Takaminara. Behind them, steam swirled and churned in their wake.

  A screech of fury erupted from the island. Green flames flickered off the rocky spars, fanned by the beat of rising wings.

  Rogger shot toward the island, a flittering spear of wood and bronze. He aimed straight for one of the pinnacles, as if he intended to ram it. “Get ready!”

  Tylar shifted up, drawing Dart under his cloak, one arm snaked under her shoulders. “Both hands,” he told her.

  Two hands locked onto his swordbelt.

  “Now!” Rogger yelled.

  The thief yanked on the wheel, and twisted the nose to the left, banking high. Their thrust still carried them toward the island, broadside first now. They slowed.

  But not Tylar.

  With shadows heavy in his cloak and Dart under his arm, he leaped over the starboard rail and flew like a dark raven toward the sandy beach.

  Behind him, Rogger burnt more alchemies and the flitterskiff flew off like a frightened sparrow, skimming out and away from the island.

  Tylar landed in a rolling tumble, protecting Dart with his limbs until they fell into the shadows of the rocky spar. He buried them both in the darkness and some scrabbled bushes.

  He watched the flitterskiff skim out into the cooler waters of the lake and vanish to the right, intending to circle the island and retreat back the way they’d come in.

  But not alone.

  A wailing cry of a hunter pierced the night. Tylar did not dare look. They had leaped from the boat into the shadows, and they needed to remain out of sight. Before flying here, Tylar had smeared his blood all over the boat’s railing. His scent would be ripe on the skiff, a bait trolled through these dark waters and away.

  But had they hooked their big fish?

  Another shriek and the green firelight flickered with fury. Tylar heard the beat of heavy wings, rising from the island. Distantly, he heard Rogger shout.

  “If you want to bite this arse, you’re gonna have to catch it first!”

  The flap of leather and bone followed Rogger’s call.

  Tylar waited another two breaths. The goal had been for Rogger to lure the winged guard away. The daemon’s power came from the island. If Tylar could stamp out the flame here, then the wraithed ghawl would be easier to manage, stripped of much of its Dark Grace.

  Still, what would they find here? There was only one way to find out.

  “Let’s go, and remember if I say—”

  “—run, I’m supposed to run and hide,” Dart mumbled. “I know.”

  He hadn’t wanted to bring Dart, but he had no way of knowing if her blood might be needed for the sword. Too much was unknown still about the blade, and he had gods to set free. It would not do to find himself standing with a bladeless hilt in his hand.

  A screech echoed over the waters.

  And who was to say being on the boat was any safer?

  Tylar stood up and slid Rivenscryr from its sheath. “Keep to my shadows. I’ll keep us cloaked as much as possible.”

  Already at his hip, she shuffled closer still.

  He set out around the rock. The island had fallen into a hushed silence. All he heard was a flicker of hungry flame, a few scrapes, and what sounded like rattled chains.

  He crept another step when he realized something was missing here.

  Seersong.

  When they’d first spied upon the island from across the lake, he had heard a few faint chords. A lone woman singing softly, full of sorrow. But now nothing. What had happened?

  Tylar feared what this might portend.

  Leading the way, he stepped past the granite spar and into the green firelight. The pyre rose at the island’s center. It cast no warmth, only a sick feverish tint to the skin, oily and foul. It splattered its light against stone and rock.

  Tylar lifted his cloak against it, sensing the immense well of power here. He kept back from it, edging around the central square. Low stone buildings, all stacked brick and slabbed roofs, ringed the edges. The doorways were open, no windows. He made sure they kept clear from those dark openings, too.

  He heard stone scrape inside—and again a rattle of iron.

  Once they were among the crown of pinnacles, the firelight revealed carvings on the inner surfaces of the spars: of men and women at work, tilling fields, leading beasts of burden by yoke. One spar held what appeared to be a great tangled battle with spear and ax, decorated with limbless bodies, and staked heads that were too painful a reminder of Saysh Mal. Another seemed to depict great acts of carnal passion: feasts, debauchery, rutting bodies in every pose.

  He stepped between Dart and that view.

  Crossing deeper, he searched around him. Here was an ancient human settlement, long before even the human kings rose, stretching to a more distant time. Here is where the human Cabalists had chosen to set up their wicked forge, believing the lies of the naethryn Cabal, to end the tyranny of the gods, to return to the majesty of human rule.

  Tylar turned his eyes away, back to the ring of stone buildings. By now, he had circled to the far side of the fire. Here rose the largest of the buildings. Firelight glowed out its door. Not the green poison of this pyre, but a regular hearth.

  He approached, but motioned Dart to one side of the door. He led with Rivenscryr in hand. The door was low, requiring him to duck in order to peer inside. A small pit in the room’s center glowed with a few wan flames. It illuminated six stone slabs, radiating out from the fire. A single small figure lay atop each bed, draped in a gray robe, stained and ragged.

  Tylar smelled the blood.

  It flowed over the slabs and pooled at their feet. A few trickles dribbled toward the fire in the room. A fresh large drop rolled along one of the rivulets and extended its reach by a tiny measure.

  He entered but pointed back. “Stay near the door. Watch the square.”

  Dart stepped within the shelter of the threshold, but she faced outward.

  Tylar crossed to one of the beds. The fig
ure was a girl, surely no more than fifteen, straight blond hair, long to the shoulder. She appeared no different than any young girl, except for two things about her neck. Under her chin, her throat bulged out, like a frog in mid-croak.

  One of the songstresses.

  He looked into her open eyes, such a sweet face for such a font of misery. But was she to blame? Such children were born of Dark Grace, against their will, tainted by black alchemies to become these sirens of Grace. Were they any freer than those they bound?

  And then there was one last horror found at her throat.

  A ragged slice drawn clean and deep. Its edges had peeled back as her lifeblood poured out. Tylar’s toe nudged one of the blades, a shard of obsidian in a bronze handle. It lay near the girl’s slack fingers.

  She had cut her own throat.

  He stepped to the next, and the next—all the same.

  All the songstresses.

  Dead.

  He touched one cheek. Still warm. The deaths had occurred only moments before. He remembered the forlorn notes of song he had heard drifting over the lake. Maybe it hadn’t truly been seersong, only one last whisper into the night, a lone child knowing what she must do.

  Tylar stared across the ruin here.

  “Why?” he whispered to them.

  The one word encompassed two questions.

  Why had they killed themselves? Were they no longer needed? Had Lord Ulf ordered them to take their lives? And if so, what did that portend for Tashijan?

  But there was a larger question locked in that single whispered word. He stared across the slabs. Every face that stared up toward the roof, wide-eyed and blind in death, was the same. As with Meylan’s group. All identical. But Meylan and her sisters were all Wyr-born.

  Tylar’s blood went cold. He knew the truth. So were these children. They’d been birthed in the same Wyr’s forges, identical songstresses.

  Why?

  Dart stepped deeper into the room, a warning tone in her voice.

  “Tylar—”

  He turned his back on the horror here and hurried back to her side. She pointed, drawing him down so he might see better.

  All around the ring, they crept out of doorways, many on hands and knees, others sliding on bellies, others hunkered into beaten postures. Had they sensed the winged guard was gone? Or was it just Tylar’s trespass?

  They came out of their stone dens, naked, covered in mud and their own filth. Hair caked in bile, limbs starved to bone, and many of those broken and healed crooked. But all their eyes, staring up, staring over, staring at nothing, glowed with Grace.

  Here were the rogues.

  What was left of gods treated brutally.

  Twelve in all.

  They clawed from their warrens, chained at the ankles. One began to wail at the sky, then another. One woman sat outside the doorway, tugging her hair out by the fistful. Another man rocked on his knees, digging at the stone underfoot, tearing nails and flesh in his urgency.

  Though freed from the seersong, they were bound even tighter now by madness, beyond even the ability to use their Grace to break their chains.

  Tylar remembered Rogger’s description of tanglebriar, how if you yanked the weed, its roots only dug deeper and spread wider. How long had these been rooted with seersong? With the loss of the songstresses, something worse than raving was left behind—mindless agony and an imprisonment far worse than chain and stone, locked forever in your own horror. He had seen what such madness had wrought in Saysh Mal—not just to those around them but to the gods themselves.

  He pictured Miyana stepping into fire. The same as her brother.

  I want to go home.

  Tylar stepped out. No one noted him. He had come to free these rogues. And so he would.

  Lifting his sword, he stalked out.

  “Faster!” Brant yelled.

  Rogger cursed and raced the flitterskiff around another bend. The daemon had closed upon them again. They were burdened by tangle and choke. The ghawl had open air.

  Their only advantage lay in dense cover and darting turns.

  But they were rapidly losing even that slim lead.

  Rogger had taken the last turn too sharply and sheered three paddles off on a shoulder of rock. The skiff jostled, and Rogger had to fight the wheel to hold them steady. And now they were heading into a familiar section of the wood, less dense with areas of open canopy.

  Malthumalbaen knelt in the boat’s stern, balancing one hand on the rail, holding aloft a thick branch, more a log, with the other. And Brant appreciated the giant’s skill with it. They had already come close to death a few moments back. The daemon had dropped like a diving hawk at them, crashing through a sparse section of canopy.

  A quick swing of that log, and he’d batted it aside. It had crashed into the muck and weed. They had cheered—but in a storm of wing and claw, it had burst up, showering filth, climbing and leaping back into the air to continue its hunt.

  And it was upon them again already. It flapped above the canopy, closing the distance with a savage screech of triumph.

  Rogger did his best. The flitterskiff raced but in a rattling limp compared to its effortless flight. It was over for them. Had they bought Tylar and Dart enough time? Once the beast ravaged them, it would discover the ruse and return to the island in a furious rage.

  They had run out of ways to confound the daemon.

  They were too few, too limited.

  Too few?

  An idea dawned. Maybe not.

  Brant twisted back to Rogger and told him where to go.

  The thief nodded. “You have a deliciously evil streak, boy. That’s why I love you.”

  Brant faced around. He grabbed his longbow, supplied by the Wyr, and readied his arrows. The giant came next to him.

  “You want me to just throw my log?”

  “When I tell you.” Brant worked fast, fighting the jostle as Rogger swung the boat toward the new target. It was time the daemon learned how all life in the wood was connected by a dance of predator and prey. Heartless and hard—but nonetheless perfect.

  This was what Brant had been taught as a boy.

  The Way.

  “Here we are!” Rogger said.

  And not a moment too soon.

  The daemon appeared in a break in the canopy overhead, turned on a wing, ready to dive.

  “Now!” Brant bellowed and arched back. He pulled hard on his bowstring. Oil dripped from his arrow’s shaft to his fingers.

  Malthumalbaen threw his log at the neighboring tree, then leaned down and touched Brant’s arrow with a burning piece of straw.

  The shaft ignited as Brant let loose the string. The arrow shot high, arcing a fiery trail up through the hole in the canopy. The daemon wraith had begun its final dive.

  Brant’s arrow struck true.

  From the neighboring tree, woken by the giant’s log crashing through the limbs of their roost, a thousand white bats took to wing, searching for the attacker. Malthumalbaen wisely threw his piece of flaming straw into the water.

  The bats noted the only other flame, honed from centuries of hunting.

  In their skies.

  In their territory.

  Impaled upon a winged trespasser.

  Brant’s arrow did nothing to discourage the daemon, but the thousand bats did, churning up like smoke through the hole in the canopy.

  The daemon’s dive tumbled as wings struck bats, and thousands upon thousands of fangs tore at skin and eyes. It twisted in midair, plagued at every turn, unable to escape the swirling white cloud. It fled higher, shedding the cloud for a moment. The rush of air fanned the impaled arrow’s flame.

  In that moment, the daemon hesitated, turned once on a wingtip. Then with a wail of fury, it swung away.

  Back toward the island.

  Rogger watched it leave. “It knows about Tylar’s trespass.”

  Brant stood next to Rogger, shouldering his bow. “We did all that we could.”

  Rogger looked
above. Overhead, the swirl of bats chased after the slower-flapping daemon, following its flame. A cry of rage flowed back, tinged by pain.

  “And those little buggers will slow it down a bit more for us.”

  Malthumalbaen sank to the bench. “I could almost like those bats now. Especially fried in pepperseed oil.”

  Tylar stood amid the carnage.

  The fire at his back had dimmed to flickers of green flame. With each rogue he slew, more fuel for the pyre died. Somehow each god’s lifeforce was forged to the flames, some dread blood alchemy, forced upon them by the song. And like the chains that bound their ankles, they were unable to escape—not while they lived.

  It was up to Tylar to break that curse, too.

  In the only way he knew how.

  Their bodies lay where they fell. He made each of their deaths swift.

  He felt the tenth no less than the first—especially as he finally learned the truth of Rivenscryr.

  He stepped to the eleventh rogue and lifted his sword. It was a woman of fine bone, revealed by her sunken skin. A god might not die, but they could eternally starve. She stared up at him. She did not wail. She had bitten off her tongue some time ago, and in the horror of godhood, it had yet to grow back. How many tongues had she bitten off? Had she done it to silence her cries or out of hunger?

  He met her gaze and found nothing there, a burned shell, waiting to be released. Like all the others…or at least those who still had eyes.

  Tylar heaved back his sword and swung it sharply.

  Graced steel cleaved flesh and bone with hardly a shudder of the hilt.

  Still, as Rivenscryr touched flesh, the last flicker of life entered the blade, drawn up the steel by Keorn’s black diamond, drawing together in that exact moment all that had been sundered—flesh, naethryn, and aethryn.

  And slaying all three.

  That was the final truth.

  No god had truly died on Myrillia in all its four thousand years since the great Sundering. Parts certainly had died. Meeryn. Chrism. But these were only a sliver of the whole. What had died before had left spirit in the naether and the aether. Like the undergod inside Tylar. Or Chrism’s naethryn banished from Myrillia back to its dark underworld. They abided.

  Even Miyana and Keorn.