Waterlogged (The Valkwitch Saga)

by Michael Watson

  The long, hot days of Jadelight were in full force. While the landscape remained in its verdant summer bloom, it carried a distinct undercurrent of weariness that spoke to the coming autumn. In those initial days, Tyrissa and the Cadre stayed out of the way of the Drifter’s crew, taking on simpler tasks when asked. By night, however, the Cadre stuck to their old mercenary-knight ways. Atop the Drifter, behind the navigation crown, was an open deck ringed with railings and dotted with restraints for extra cargo space. For this run it stood empty and made a suitable sparring ring.

  Tyrissa leaned against the deck’s outer railing and watched the next sparring bout commence as the sun dipped low in the west and released its hot grip on the river. Her staff was held in the crook of one arm, her other hand waving away a persistent swarm of flies. Seven Cadre members and herself had gathered for tonight’s training, with a handful of off-duty crewmen watching as well.

  Tyrissa had already finished her first round against Jesca. The dueling ring wasn’t the largest, given the setting, forcing her to check her swings and holding Jesca’s twin blade style to a draw. As twilight settled across the river, a crewman circled the top deck and hooked elchemical lanterns to the railing. Each lantern surged to life with a touch and burned with a strong but consistent ruddy light, their bloodless dueling arena stained red by other means. The lanterns were of older design, their elchemical processes rawer and imprecise. Tyrissa could close her eyes and below the clack of training weapons and spectators’ jeers or cheers she felt the presence of each lantern, a ring of faint fiery pulses in her mind.

  “Yhon always tries his luck against Alun,” Jesca said to Tyrissa’s left. “And he’s always outmatched.”

  Tyrissa returned her gaze to the duel. She didn’t know either of Cadre men personally. But they were definitely a mismatched pair, skill-wise, the dark-haired Alun handing his opponent with a carefree ease and flawless execution. They fought bare-chested and Yhon already bore a few welts.

  “His form is likely the best in the company,” Jesca said.

  “Mmm, yes. Excellent…form,” Tyrissa agreed.

  Jesca rolled her eyes and said, “Try to remain professional there, Ty.”

  Tyrissa gave her an over-the-shoulder grin. “Being a freelancer, I can be somewhat less professional.”

  Yhon conceded the bout after a few more moments of futility. To her right, in the lull between matches, Tyrissa heard some story reaching its punchline. Laughter, arms swung, and a playful shove all flashed in the corner of her eye. A crewman tumbled to the deck and in his flailing knocked loose one of the elchemical lanterns. The lantern bounced from its mount and crashed to the deck, its housing breaking apart and the contained flames bursting out in a pool of unleashed red anger, brightening the scene.

  Tyrissa pushed off her place along the railing and slid toward the fallen lantern’s flames, staff rattling to the deck behind her. The fiery sense of the processed magick surged in strength as she drew near, beckoning her on. Without hesitation, Tyrissa cupped her hands around the spreading fire, the momentary burning turning to a shock of icy energy running through her bones. The fire sputtered out and faded, scattered isles of flame drawn into her hands.

  It was a simple act for her. Part of what she was. Tyrissa thought nothing of it until she looked up and saw the varying looks of worry and wonder scattered around the makeshift sparring ring. A crewman near the navigation nest carried a no-longer-needed sack of sand.

  “Kal and Owen. You’re next,” Jesca ordered from behind her, saving the moment and diverting attention away.

  “I thought you let them know,” Tyrissa said to Jesca after retrieving her staff and resuming her positioning along the railing. The chill of water magick lingered in her bones and stilled her mind with cool clarity.

  “There’s a difference between knowing and seeing it for yourself,” Jesca said. “Better now than later. Can’t expect folk to accept something like that sight unseen.”

  Tyrissa held back any further comment. She knew, even with their previous history, that Jesca only trusted her so far. Saving someone’s life tends to buy you enough credit for that, at least. The rest of the Cadre and the Drifter’s crew would need something more.

  It will be on me to get them acclimated to my presence.

  She would find such an opportunity later that night. After the sparring circle died down, Tyrissa found herself wandering over to the interior crew area on the lower deck, where a mix of crewmen and Cadre were playing daajik, a ubiquitous card game among all levels of Khalan life.

  One of the Drifter crew, fellow named Gott, monopolized the chatter, weaving here and there, eventually settling on the rumors and hearsay of the Sons’ of Amatha’s abilities.

  “And if we’re after them for having a Pactbound, if that’s so, what the difference between us and them, since we got one of our own.” He turned to Tyrissa and added, “Begging your pardon, miss.” Gott was your typical river man, rough looks and a wiry frame, but any brutishness in his face checked by a broad, infectious grin.

  “Perhaps I should clear it up for you, then,” Tyrissa said.

  The rest of the daajik game turned to her, now expecting a rundown of…whatever Tyrissa was. She took a moment to gather her thoughts and make it a concise explanation. After her own troubles learning just what legacy she’d inherited with her Pact, Tyrissa decided she wouldn’t make herself a secret, a ghost of history like her predecessors. But neither would she advertise.

  I refuse to be a complete enigma. If they know enough, perhaps they won’t distrust me as much.

  “Eight Elemental Powers, eight planes of existence beyond our own.” It was actually ten, but the representation of the Outer Powers and sources of magick were more commonly known as eight. The group gave her vague nods, understandable since she was already getting outside the realm of common thought.

  “Sometimes the Elemental Powers push their agents, Pactbound, too far. They become more destructive in their actions, even if those actions aren’t particularly clear in motive to you and I.” This was more understood. Everyone had heard stories of elemental magick gone wild, to say nothing of landscape-warping elemental domains. Khalanheim itself sat astride the Rift, a massive tear in the world created by runaway wind magicks.

  The Cadre man in the group, Yosh, riffled the deck of cards but held back on dealing a new hand as she spoke, watching her expectantly. Yosh had a bald, plain look that hid a practical intelligence, from what Tyrissa could recall of him during her service in the Cadre, though they had spoken only a handful of times. Even the Cadre members had a limited grasp on their hired freelancer’s abilities and history beyond her brief stint among their number last year.

  “I’m a Valkwitch. I’m an enforcer against those rogue expressions of elemental energy. My Pact gives me a sense of where I’m needed and I go there to prevent or heal whatever damage might be caused. My own magick is largely based on countering and nullifying elemental powers. If I’m near fire magick, I absorb it and convert it to water magick, for example.” Word of her bare-handed dousing of the fallen lantern had no doubt spread throughout the boat. There were few secrets in such a confined space, after all.

  “I don’t hunt down every Pactbound, but only a fraction. I’m drawn to those who have gone completely out of control, or threaten too much. Only the ones in violation of some unseen, unknowable balance,” Tyrissa said. Even to her own ears it sounded hard to believe and she’d been living it for months now. She thought it best to skip over the idea of some grand, ill-defined war between the Elements and their own, fragile world. Didn’t want to scare them. Or herself.

  “Right now, I’m pulled towards the Upper Rildermeek and believe it’s related to the Sons’ banditry and the ‘odd’ waters of their attacks. I have a history with Jes— Commander van Rild and our two goals are complementary, so I was allowed to come along.”

  The lecture seemed to satisfy them, though the next hand being dealt precluded any follow-up questions.
Talk slowly turned toward the stranger places of the Rildermeek swamps. Spirits and monsters and so on. The typical stuff of local legend but Tyrissa knew full well how true old tales could be. She had little wonder of just why she was called in to help on this mission.

  “So there are places of water magick in the flooded woods?” Tyrissa asked at a lull in the talk, as the players examined their hands for plays.

  “That’s what folk say,” Gott said without glancing up from his cards. “Here and there, but never near.”

  “Every town and every boat has its own set of stories,” his wife Jinin said while rearranging her own cards. Jinin was a barrel-shaped woman, the counterpoint to Gott’s wiry frame. Both worked below in the engine room by day. “Things they’ve seen in the deeper places away from the main rivers. Out in the swamps.”

  “Many a young one have gone looking for their version of the Oracle of the Woods,” agreed Gott.

  “Young ones like Gott here,” added Jinin. She slapped three cards onto the crate and shouted, “Triple sequence! Start us off hot!” Groans followed and Yosh dealt her an additional five cards, increasing her already fair hand to absurd size. The rest of the table grudgingly received two cards each.

  “Yeah, I went looking for her. Me, a few mates, and a borrowed boat. Must have been fourteen years old at the time,” Gott said with the misty tone of nostalgia while the players sorted their hands and groused about the cards in play.

  “Never found her, ‘course,” he added after a pause to glare at his own hand. This version of the game seemed to involve being as obviously negative as possible to your own game state, a far cry from the styles Tyrissa had witnessed so far: the steely, emotionless style played in Khalanheim tea houses and the boisterous fashion of caravan merchants.

  “We found enough out there. Some close calls. Some good scraps with some kids from the town upriver. You go in looking for magickal guidance but manage to figure it out on your own. Decide what you need to do, how you might change.”

  Memories of Tyrissa’s own journey into the woods flooded back to mind. A carefree trip out, a discovery, the realization of a horrible mistake. A fight for her life. The agony of defeat. And then, salvation through the Pact.

  Gods. It was almost exactly a year ago.

  A year ago she had been aimless, chasing after a dream that wasn’t a viable life anymore. Then she poked around a too-dark part of the forest. There, a year ago, Tyrissa died, only to return as something…changed, marked with a Pact she didn’t understand. A shiver ran up her spine from the raw memory of one terrible moment and the wild, confusing, ascendant year that followed.

  “Or,” Tyrissa said, “you come back changed and the figuring out bit comes later.” That had only taken months of travel across the continent, a manhunt into one of the most dangerous places in the known world, the loss of an ally, and a quick, deadly visit to another plane of existence.

  Gott looked over at her with his goofy grin but it melted away into a knowing nod of respect.

  “Trades open,” Yosh announced, setting off another flurry of layered offers and counteroffers.

  Tyrissa left them to their game and went back out onto the exterior of the Drifter. The air had slightly cooled, though it continued to be heavy with moisture. She wandered to the fore of the boat, where a line of white lanterns outlined the Drifter against the night. A larger spotlight fixed below the navigation crown illuminated a stretch of the broad night-darkened river ahead and they pushed along at a cautious nighttime speed.

  I thought I was over this. Over and done with what had happened to her, how she had changed to become something not quite human. Pactbound, if in a different way.

  Tyrissa’s solution was the same as it always was: Focus on tomorrow and let any build-up of self-doubt trail away behind her like the rippling wake of the Drifter, the ill memories dispersing away as a fading trace of passage.

  Chapter Three

  Tyrissa watched from the fore of the Drifter as the town of Kesh lazed into view around a final bend in the river. At first Kesh looked much like Orten: a wonderfully appointed and designed port, its associated facilities ready to take on a wealth of traffic and the traffic of wealth. The image did not last. As the Drifter made its approach, Tyrissa’s initial view of the port decayed from Khalan grandeur to a dejected façade. While it possessed the same stately frontage of businesses, only half appeared occupied, the remainder shuttered and empty. The array of piers on the waterfront outnumbered the attendant traffic, with only one in five occupied. As they pulled toward an open slot, Tyrissa spied an oncoming river barge badged with the silver and blue of Khalan Southwest hew to the opposite side of the river and show no indication it would stop here, this so-called mid-point of the great Khalan river system.

  The Drifter came to a halt at its chosen pier and the bustle of docking and unloading cargo rose to its natural crescendo as the crew and the port’s longshoremen set to their tasks with a typical mix of haste and care. All quite normal, but their boat was an island of activity in a sea of stillness, every motion done at a professional clip for the sake of maintaining appearances.

  Most of the Cadre’s complement filtered through the workers and dispersed into the town in pursuit of solid land and recreation. However, a subset were pulled aside by Jesca for an actual task.

  “Yosh, Kal. With me,” Jesca ordered. “You too, Ty. I think we could use your…talents.”

  “What’s the deal, Commander?” Tyrissa asked as they stepped out of the activity of the docks and onto Kesh’s fine, too-wide avenues. She noticed Jesca had picked out the largest of the Cadre men for this side job.

  “We’re off to see someone,” Jesca said, casting her gaze around and following a fork in the road leading deeper into the city. Jesca had arranged herself into a far more professional image, with fresh clothes, sorted hair, and a formal jacket of Kadrich’s Cadre in hand, though not worn in this heat.

  “A contact?”

  “I wouldn’t extend that much credit to him. He’s an elchemist by the name of Zaes. Works as a middle man and supplier for the area. Technically certified by the Concord…at some point in his life.” She dropped her voice a degree. “I assume you can snuff out elchem tech on demand, right? What with the fallen lantern the other night and how you’ve been staying well away from the engine room...”

  “It depends on the type of material and the construction of the device.” While based on magick-infused materials, her interactions with elchemical technology was a mixed, still confusing aspect of her powers. Some devices and materials were inert toward her Pact, or gave off a little signal in her awareness and nothing more. Others, like the lantern she doused were much more active elchemically and could be damaged by Tyrissa getting too close. In that way such devices acted much like the actual elemental magicks from which they were derived.

  “We’ll play the cards as they’re dealt, then,” Jesca said.

  Jesca led their group through Kesh with a mix of confidence and masked hesitation at every juncture, seemingly working off a mental set of directions. Away from the oversized port, Kesh was less a lifeless city than a sleepy one. The arcades fronting the main drags were sparsely populated with vendors and the advertisement boards were only half covered with recent postings. Tyrissa had seen a number of Khalan cities in her recent travels and while it would be unfair to compare any place to the endless, frantic activity of Khalanheim, Kesh seemed languid and meager against even the secondary cities of the nation.

  They crossed one market square in their route through Kesh and it possessed the requisite variety of stalls and sufficient, vibrant bustle as any proper Khalan square would, but everything moved at a slower pace. The vendors were volumes quieter, less desperate for the attention of every passerby, and the wares on offer were more often practical than exotic. This speed of life was reflected in the cant of the locals’ Khalan dialect, their words delivered slower but more precise than the accent of Khalanheim. Tyrissa found it refreshing a
nd similar enough to the dialect of her homeland for a brief pang of nostalgia.

  Soon they arrived at a quiet side-street, little more than an alleyway, lined by the rear entrances of the shops and homes facing the wider avenues of Kesh. Piles of debris and wind-blown gatherings of dirt and muck spoke to how little traffic passed through here. Jesca stopped in front of a narrow building wedged between two larger establishments, its white brickwork stained by the passing years. A weathered emblem set onto the bricks to the right of the door depicted a ring of eight elemental symbols. The badge of an elchemist but not one who desired much attention.

  “Not looking to haul this guy away, right?” asked Yosh.

  “Right. Just a little presence while we ask questions,” Jesca said. She turned to Tyrissa and added, “Feel free to poke around at his toys, Ty. Let me know if you find anything too interesting.”

  “Will do.”

  Jesca shrugged into her Cadre jacket and then hammered her fist on the door five times. After a lazy moment it opened onto a cool, darkened space, a tempting relief from the day’s sweltering heat. Zaes was a well-featured man of about forty and nothing about his outward appearance would corroborate his supposed gray-area profession beyond a general cautiousness in the set of his eyes.

  “Can I help you ma’am…and sirs…and ma’am,” he said, gradually realizing the nature of this visit. “Who are you with?”

  “Commander van Rild of Kadrich’s Cadre, Mr. Zaes,” Jesca announced. She turned slightly aside to display the guild patch on her left shoulder.

  Zaes darkened by degrees. “Suppose I should invite you in before you force the issue. Come on, then.” He waved them inside and disappeared into the murk.