Without skilled opponents to face, Maarkov was forced to pick fights with imaginary wraiths. Even running through the blade-forms became second nature, a series of movements he had perfected to a sharp edge. Maarkov worried that his skill was ebbing, his edge dulling like a sword used for chopping trees. He yearned for a good fight.
The Hunter watched him as he slid through the blade-forms. It swayed and cocked its head like some bizarre combination between a bird and a dog, its burning red eye narrowing to a pinpoint. Maarkov tried to ignore the thing’s presence, but its gaze crawled over his skin like an oily film. It was like being watched by a snake, or a wolf. The fiend crouched in the dirt like a cat readying itself to pounce. Maarkov had thought that nothing was worse than the company of strega, but he had been wrong. The Hunter’s very presence made his skin crawl.
What was worse, it smelled just as nasty as the strega.
Maarkov whipped through the rest of the blade-form, and ended his dance with his sword pointed right at the Hunter’s burning eye. He held it there, frozen in place, his dead arm not moving a hair’s breadth. The Hunter just cocked its head, and made a hissing noise from the ruined throat of its host body. Maarkov was surprised the brute was moving at all. It was missing an eye, its body was ravaged, and one of its arms hung half-limp at its side.
Maarkov didn’t know much about his brother’s craft, but he had deduced a few things in the years of his indenture. He knew, for instance, that there were various levels of being dead. The strega were one level—mindless bags of meat that did little but follow simple commands until told to stop. Maarkov and his brother were another level—human in everything but body, which was preserved by eating the dead in one of his brother’s fell rites. The Hunter, it seemed, was another level entirely.
Maarkov had seen the queer ritual that had created the Hunter, he knew what its original form had been. This thing and its counterpart had appeared as shadows, and had crawled into the mouths of bodies prepared for them. Whatever they were, they had never been human in the first place. These creatures had come from somewhere else, some world beside their own, or beneath it. Maarkov didn’t understand the lore behind it.
He knew, though, that he hated the creatures. He hated the strega, he hated the Hunters, he hated all of it. He hated his brother, and he hated himself.
“Are you quite finished with your little dance?” Maaz asked.
Maarkov turned and regarded his brother. He was swathed, as always, in a dark robe. His cowl was pulled over his head to hide the features beneath, and he had a book clutched in one of his claw-like hands. Maarkov had seen the book on only a few occasions. Maaz had kept it hidden from prying eyes since the day he’d found it. The only thing Maarkov had noticed about the tome was the abnormal smoothness of the leather binding the cover. It had taken him a full year to realize the skin that covered the book had come from a human being.
When Maaz realized that Maarkov was looking at it, he stuffed the tome into a satchel at his side.
“We’re moving,” Maaz said, ignoring the insolent smile that Maarkov gave him.
“Where to, brother mine?” Maarkov asked.
“North,” Maaz said, turning his gaze toward the valley. It was quiet at nighttime, though scattered lights from scattered windows echoed the twinkling stars above. “We’ll travel along the river until we can steal a suitable boat.”
“And from there?”
“Still north,” Maaz said. “I want to reach Orm ahead of our quarry.”
“You’re sure they’re headed for this temple?” Maarkov asked. “There are lots of places to the north, you know. Maybe they’re headed to Tept, or Jerrantis. Hells, maybe they’re sticking one up your arse, and they’re heading east right now.”
“And maybe you’re a fool who should stick to pointy lengths of steel,” Maaz hissed. “Thinking isn’t one of your strengths, Maarkov. It’s probably best to leave it to those more qualified.”
The Hunter prowled up beside Maarkov, and he resisted the urge to cringe away from the thing. It moved like an otherworldly predator, crawling along the ground like some spectral mountain-cat. Its smell, though, would give it away. The damn thing stank like rotten meat covered in shit.
It’s made of rotting meat, Maarkov thought, and it did spend some time in a sewer recently.
“I would prefer that you just kill me now,” Maarkov sighed. “That fucking thing smells like an open grave, Maaz—an open grave re-purposed for a camp latrine. You can’t even tell it to wash the shit from that burial shroud it’s wearing, either, because wet corpse is the only thing that smells worse than dry corpse. If I have to inhale that thing’s stench all the way to the plains of Farra-Jerra, I’ll carve its legs off and leave it to wiggle in a field somewhere.”
The Hunter hissed at him, and fell into a ready crouch.
So you can understand me, after all, Maarkov thought, peering into the Hunter’s single pinpoint of an eye.
“If all you’re going to do is waste my time and complain, I’ll let you rot,” Maaz said. “It will take an entire season for your body to turn—did you know that? You will feel every moment, every tendon creaking, every muscle slowly dehydrating. In the end, you will become strega.” Maaz took a single stride forward, and locked eyes with Maarkov. “You test my patience with your pettiness, brother. If you’re going to whine like a pitiful dog the whole way to Orm, then I will leash you, and treat you as a dog.”
“You’ll have to kill me first,” Maarkov snarled.
Maaz smiled. “No, brother, I will not. Now—you can get on your horse and ride north with me, or you can run behind me with the strega. What will it be?”
Maaz turned and strode away without waiting for an answer. Maarkov watched him go, hand tightening on the hilt of his sword. The Hunter cocked its head at him again, then slid along the ground in Maaz’s wake. Maarkov watched them walk toward the camp, contemplating various ways of ending them both.
In the end, though, he went for his horse, which stunk as badly as the rest of the strega.
***
“Around a hundred years ago,” Lacelle said, her face outlined by the fire, “there was a group of children that went missing from a village near the ruins of the ancient temple of Orm. Three of the fathers of these children set out to find them, and discovered from some of the other kids in the village that they had been dared to brave the ruins, and bring back something as proof. The sort of thing that happens with lots of children.”
Dormael remembered Lacelle’s story of being dared into the sewers beneath Ishamael, and becoming lost. He thought he noticed a cynical twinge to her lips at the similarity to her own story, but he could have imagined it. He took a pull from his pipe, and examined the faces around the fire. Everyone listened in silence—even Lilliane was quiet.
“The fathers set out immediately to the ruins, hoping to find the children,” Lacelle continued. “The families waited three days, but the fathers never returned. The town went mad, as you could imagine. A few of the men in the village organized everyone into a mob, and they marched to the ruins of Orm.
“The story gets a bit confusing at this point. Apparently, the townspeople saw one of the children in the ruins. Some of them rushed into the place, all searching for their missing people. They never found them, but something inside the place frightened the mob enough that it fled and never went back. Two of the townspeople never came out of the temple.”
“Where did you hear this story?” Allen asked.
“The incident was recorded when one of the surviving mothers petitioned the Conclave for help,” Lacelle said. “The whole thing is documented in the archive. The children were never found, nor was anyone else who disappeared. It’s an infamous story in the countryside of Farra-Jerra.”
“Those poor children,” Shawna said. “The families must have been devastated.”
“Surely,” Lacelle said. “The village was abandoned soon after. The incident destroyed the entire community.”
“What did the Conclave discover?” Dormael asked. “They must have sent someone.”
“By the time the request had made it to the proper ears, the woman was gone,” Lacelle said. “With the village abandoned, and the woman gone, there was no one to care. The incident was written up to local superstition.”
“Evmir’s bloody hammer,” Allen said. “That’s a chilling tale.”
“There’s more,” Lacelle said. “A mythology has grown up around the place with the people who live on the plains surrounding it.”
“A mythology?” Bethany asked.
“A legend—stories,” Dormael clarified. Bethany nodded.
“Sifting through them, as I said, one finds a lot of superstition,” Lacelle went on, “but there are some striking similarities in some of the tales. People who have ventured close enough to see the temple have claimed sightings of an elderly man through windows, or tottering around the yard. All the stories describe him as a small fellow in an old smock. They call him the Caretaker, or the Old Man of the Temple. Still others claim to see a beast made of shadow, or darkness. Him, they call the Lurker.”
“Wait,” Allen said. “Isn’t there an old tune called The Old Man and the Lurker?”
“There is,” Lacelle said, a wide smile breaking over her face. “It was inspired by the tales surrounding Orm.”
“I’ve never heard that one,” Dormael said.
Allen started singing, and tapping a rhythm on his knee.
“The Old Man, he walks the halls,
and him the Lurker follows
He asks for Lady Neesa to
forgive the Lurker’s sorrows
But when the Lurker catches him,
the Old Man he will swallow
Forever they will lie beneath,
inside the Lurker’s hollow.”
“There’s even a fable told to children about the Lurker,” Lacelle said. “It’s local to the Farra-Jerran frontier, though. No one goes near the place anymore. The stories keep people away.”
“I heard the song from a Jerran tracker,” Allen nodded. “He used to go around humming it, and it got stuck in my head.”
“Spirits, strange disappearances—this Orm sounds like a wonderful place,” Shawna said. “Why is it cursed? What happened there?”
“The Dannon destroyed it during the Second Great War,” Lacelle said. “They’re famous for their religious regard for brutality. Everyone there was put to the sword, or used in Dannon blood rites.”
“Lots of places have been destroyed that way,” Shawna said. “Why is this one so special?”
“There could be any number of reasons, you understand,” Lacelle said, grimacing as she tried to explain. “The best explanation I’ve read, though, comes from a subset of magical philosophy called Material Resonance Theory.”
“You wizards and your fancy names,” Shawna sighed. Lacelle gave her an apologetic look, but Shawna gestured for her to continue. “I’m sorry, dear. It’s a reflex now, after having traveled with—,” Dormael heard her hesitate, “—with wizards for so long.”
Dormael knew what she had been about to say—with Dormael and D’Jenn for so long.
“I’ll try and explain it,” Lacelle said. “Material Resonance Theory suggests that magic responds to stimuli that occur naturally in the environment. Experiments have shown that magic responds differently to all sorts of things—sound, shapes, mathematical equations, running water, stone, even people. There is some evidence to suggest that places can have similar effects on magical energy. One place may attract magic through a chance arrangement of its landscape, or another might repel magic because it sits above a deposit of a certain type of stone.”
“So Orm just happens to be one of those places?” Shawna asked.
“Not exactly,” Lacelle said. “At least, I don’t think that’s the case with Orm.”
“Then what?” Allen asked.
“It probably built magical energy over time,” Dormael said. “It was one of the holiest sites in the Sevenlands before the Dannons desecrated it. Think about it—all those festivals, the prayers, sacrifices, and the gathered focus of so much will, so much intent. That sort of thing can make a place powerful, if built up over time. I read a treatise on the theory behind it a few years ago.”
“You read that?” Lacelle asked, surprise blooming on her face.
“I did,” Dormael said. “Do I have it wrong?”
“Oh, no,” she smiled. “I’m just surprised. I wrote that treatise.”
Shawna smiled and ruffled Dormael’s hair, not unlike he did with Bethany.
“He only pretends to be an oaf,” she said.
“So what you’re saying is that the place is haunted,” Allen said.
“I cannot say for sure,” Lacelle explained. “But something is happening there. Sometimes, when a place is charged with power, an event like the massacre can leave a sort of stain over it, like mold. It’s similar to when a wizard dies, and leaves behind a resonance.”
“And I’m guessing that you’ve got no idea what we’ll encounter there,” Allen said.
Lacelle gave him an apologetic look. “Again, I cannot say for sure.”
“What about this Cabal of the Epitaph?” Dormael asked. He was tired of speaking about tragedy. There had been plenty of that to deal with over the past few days. “Let’s talk about that.”
“That,” Lacelle said with a smile, “is Lilliane’s area of expertise.”
“It is?” Dormael asked.
“That’s right,” Lilliane said, shooting him a frosty glance. “Surprised?”
“There was a reason she was amongst the scholars researching the Nar’doroc,” Lacelle said. “Lilliane is a member of the Cabal.”
“You’re making it sound more significant than it actually is, Deacon,” Lilliane said. “The Cabal is just a group of people who believe a certain theory about history, that’s all. It’s not a secret society. It’s more like a scholar’s club.”
“It sounds like a secret society,” Allen muttered. Lilliane shot him a dangerous look, which Allen ignored.
“Whatever it is,” Dormael sighed, “I’d like to hear about it before the moon reaches the horizon.”
“Have you ever made the pilgrimage to the Steele of the Founder?” Lilliane asked.
“I haven’t,” Dormael said. “I’m not sure where it is.”
“It’s north and east, way up past the Gathan Boundary,” Lilliane said, “standing in a valley that’s as beautiful as you can fucking believe, if you don’t count the Garthorin. It’s so far north, it’s almost to the Sea of Moving Ice.”
“You made a pilgrimage there?” Dormael asked.
“I did,” Lilliane said, raising her chin. “It’s part of getting membership to the fucking Cabal, isn’t it? I can see the look on your face, Warlock, but you bet your squeaky arse that I made that journey. I wasn’t always this big, you know.”
“I didn’t mean anything—”
“Shut your damned mouth,” she said, waving off his apology. “I’m a grown woman. Do you want my expertise, or not?”
“Definitely,” Dormael smiled, glad to be past the awkward moment.
“Wait—what’s the Steele of the Founder?” Shawna asked.
“It’s the grave-marker for Indalvian, the Founder of the Conclave,” Lilliane said. “He erected it sometime before his death, and left it deep inside Garthorin territory. It’s made of a series of silver monoliths sticking from the earth in what seems at first glance to be a random placement. They are roughly arranged in a circular pattern, though at irregular intervals, and they all face a central point.
“Now—each pillar has an inscription cut into its face, but at first glance, it all reads as gibberish. The language is a recognizable form of Old Vendon, though the words themselves don’t say anything at all. They’re arranged in such a way as to be meaningless. One of what we call the ‘surface inscriptions’ says noble green vapor bring water hurt weather drum. There were debat
es raging in philosophical circles about those inscriptions for years—whether or not they’re a code, what the original language was, whether or not it’s a magical spell. I’m sure you can fucking imagine.”
“I can,” Dormael nodded.
“Three hundred years ago a Philosopher named Shosanna Jorim discovered something that changed everything,” Lilliane continued. “If one stands at the focal point of the Steele, keeping the sun at one’s back, at the top of every second hour the inscriptions are cast into shadow—which changes what they say. It’s not magic, just clever trickery with the inscriptions themselves and the carving around it. Where before there was gibberish, coded language began to appear.”
“That’s the inscription the Mekai mentioned,” Shawna said. “In the place of the dead under the house of the gods, behind a door only their hammer can open—he was speaking of the Steele.”
“Sharp as a fucking knife, aren’t we, Lady Baroness?” Lilliane smiled. She seemed to realize what she’d said, and gave Shawna an apologetic look. “Sorry, Lady—I’m not used to dealing with nobility.”
“Don’t worry, dear,” Shawna said, giving Dormael and Allen a meaningful look, “neither am I.”
Allen gave Shawna a rude gesture.
“In any case,” Lilliane continued, “the going theory is that these inscriptions speak of secret caches of knowledge hidden around the Sevenlands, or perhaps around the world. The pillars point the way to each one.”
“How many of these pillars are there?” Dormael asked.
“Twelve,” Lilliane replied.
“I guess it was a slim hope that they were constructed to house the different pieces of the Nar’doroc,” Dormael sighed. “Is there more to the inscription?”
“Oh, aye,” Lilliane said. “It says—In the place of the dead under the house of the gods, behind a door only their hammer can open, hides a story of loss and a ghost of regret. Beware a terrible truth.”
“Beware a terrible truth,” Allen repeated. “It doesn’t sound like he wanted anything he left there to be found.”
The Seven Signs: Three Book Collection Page 90