by Paul Freeman
He swallowed hard before pulling himself into a sitting position. “The beast?”
“Fled, my lord. Do you wish to pursue it?”
“No, Malachi, I do not.”
Tomas: Alka-Roha
Tomas dragged a whetstone down the length of his blade. Stone rasping on steel was the only sound in the small room. He watched Aliss, her face hidden by strands of long white hair hanging over a wide wooden bowl filled with water. She held her hands either side of the bowl, gently moving them through the air in slow, short movements, as if she were parting the water held in the wooden vessel she was so intent on.
“It has been three days now, and nothing,” Tomas complained.
Aliss looked up, regarding him with storm-grey eyes. He looked away from the shifting clouds. “Patience, my love. I can feel the power growing within me, getting stronger every day. Haera not only saved me, but she has awoken a deeper well of magic. I don’t understand it, but I feel it.”
Tomas sighed and shook his head. “What are you doing there anyway? You haven’t stopped staring into that bowl of water all morning.”
“Searching.” Aliss smiled, her eyes shining.
“In a bowl?” Tomas arched an eyebrow.
“I have heard of mages and powerful witches with the power to scry the past and future using various devices. I never realised before that I too had the power.” Her smile widened.
“And what do you see?” Tomas asked somewhat sceptically.
“I see a temple, in the desert. Its walls are crumbling and its gates have long since turned to dust. To any who would pass it by, or even stop to rest in the shade of the ruin, it looks as if it has not been inhabited for a hundred years or more.”
“What is this place?”
“It is a temple to a god long forgotten by the folk here, worshipped by their ancestors in a different time. A charm has been placed upon it to make it look so.” She grinned and Tomas would swear a bolt of light flashed across her eyes.
“So it is not in ruins? How is that even possible?”
“Magic, as I am realising more and more, can be a very powerful force.”
“You think the dream-witch is there?”
“Oh yes,” Aliss answered.
“Where is it?” Tomas asked.
Aliss dropped her head. “I do not know.”
Tomas sighed and dragged the whetstone down the length of his sword once again, while Aliss returned to scrying.
Suddenly she cried out and jumped back away from the bowl. Horror twisted her face into a mask of fear. Tomas leapt up and ran to her side.
“What is it?” he asked urgently, as he looked mystified at the bowl. Aliss lashed out and knocked it from the table. Water splashed onto the floor as the bowl landed upside down on the floorboards. “What did you see?” he asked again as Aliss slowly composed herself.
“Blood. I saw blood,” she panted.
“Blood?”
“She knows we are searching for her. We must be careful and we must find her quickly.”
“How can we do that if we do not know where she is?”
“She is in the temple,” Aliss answered.
“But you already said you do not know where that is.” Tomas’s face creased in consternation.
“No, but we know what we are looking for, and it is likely known well enough. We just have to ask.”
“Horace is the tracker. I’ll tell him to ask around. He may even have heard of such a place himself. If he can tear himself from the whores and wine that is.” Tomas strapped on his sword belt.
“I’ll come too. I need to leave this room and fill my lungs with fresh air.”
“You’ll do well to find a clear breath of air anywhere in this stinking town. By the All Father, I’ve never been anywhere so hot.” Tomas wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand before opening the door and standing back to allow Aliss to leave the room first.
Below, in the common room of the inn they quickly spied their three travelling companions. Horace the tracker sat with a dark-skinned girl on his knee while he quaffed a jug of wine.
“Must you bring your… entertainments here?” Tomas asked, his lip curled in disgust.
“Listen to the lord high and mighty, king of the fucking swamp,” Horace shot back before draining the jug. “More wine!”
Tomas tensed, balling his fists. He felt a hand on his arm and glanced at Aliss.
“He’s drunk, let it pass,” she said. He looked to the other two men, all warriors of Duke Normand. They shrugged before returning their attention to their own wine.
“We need to find a temple,” Aliss said to Horace. “It is likely in ruin, with crumbling walls, long abandoned. Can you ask around, Horace?”
“I know of such a place,” the whore spoke up, her interest suddenly piqued.
“You do?”
“Yes,” she answered, quickly looking away from the swirling clouds examining her intently. She slapped away Horace’s wandering hand as it slid inside the brightly coloured dress she wore. “I can take you there… for gold,” she added.
“Is it far from here?” Aliss asked, stepping aside to allow the landlord through to deliver a clay jug. Red liquid sloshed over the sides making small puddles on the table when Horace snatched it from his hand.
“Two days’ ride,” she answered, fighting off another assault from the drunken tracker.
“Very good,” Aliss’ full lips curled into a smile. “You will be paid well if you speak true.”
She nodded and beamed a smile in return. Horace grabbed her as she attempted to stand up, pulling at her skirts. She swung on him and punched him hard in the face. “I am no longer your whore. Now I am your guide,” she spat, her exotic accent, rolling the words as she spoke, lacing them with venom.
Horace drew back his fist as his face clouded with anger, only for Tomas to catch his wrist, using his great blacksmith’s strength to immobilise the arm of the much smaller man. “Enough,” he said, his voice calm and soft, yet his meaning was clear enough.
Horace shot each of them dark, dangerous looks, but pushed the issue no further.
“We will leave before first light,” Aliss said, before turning to the woman. “What is your name?”
“Ivannia,” she answered.
“Meet us here before the sun has risen, Ivannia.” The girl nodded and left, shooting a look of daggers at the tracker as she passed.
Tomas followed Aliss back up the narrow wooden stairs to the upper floor of the inn. Floorboards creaked in protest as the two walked through the cramped corridor to their room at the end. “I do not trust her,” he said as he closed the door behind them.
“You trust no one, my love,” Aliss answered.
“It is a wise policy.”
“We are so far from home, in this strange place where people look different and sound odd to our ears. Those who can even speak the common trading tongue do so with a queer accent. The heat is oppressive and relentless—what I would not give for a gentle shower of rain—it is hard not to mistrust everything and everyone. And yes, wise too, but we are desperate, love. We need her.”
“I am tired of this place. I am sick of the heat stifling every breath. My heart aches to return home,” Tomas said, closing his eyes, his mouth set in a grim line.
“I also,” Aliss moved into Tomas’s reach, moulding into his shoulder when he encircled her with his arm, “but we can never go back.”
“I know,” he whispered into her hair.
“We will find a new home. We have been promised much gold for this task and our debt to Haera will be paid. We will start a new life, even better than the old.”
“Yes, you are right. There is nothing left for us back there now. Our home is in ashes and if the magistrate’s soldiers spy either of us they will kill us instantly. This is a dangerous task though – hunting a witch – I do not know why I ever agreed to such folly.”
“All will be well, love. Perhaps the duke will allow us to set
tle somewhere on his lands,” Aliss answered.
“No. It would be unwise to stay anywhere in the Duchies.”
“You’re right of course. The duke would likely give us up easily enough. Perhaps we…” Tomas felt her flinch then as her words trailed off. She cried out and staggered back, bending over as she wrapped her hands protectively about herself.
“Aliss, what is the matter?” Worry lines wrinkled his forehead.
“Wine, get me some wine,” she gasped.
Tomas quickly filled a cup with the ruby liquid and held it out for her. She took small, urgent sips.
“What is happening?”
“I do not know,” she answered, “but it is passing.”
“Sit,” he instructed as he led her to the bed.
“I think I may have been using too much magic, too quickly. My body suddenly ached all over and I felt a burning hunger like I’ve never felt before, but I do not know what will sate the hunger. I just need to rest.” She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.
Tomas sat back in a wooden chair and watched her as her even breaths told him she had fallen asleep. He made an oath to himself then that when their task was completed, they would find a place to settle, and there they would remain for the rest of their days. He had experienced too many upheavals in his life already. Too many changes, from blacksmith’s son, to orphan, to Royal Guard, to outlaw. He thought he had completed the circle when he met and wed Aliss and became a village blacksmith. He was sure that was to be the final leg of an overlong and complicated journey. Not so it would seem.
He would have to get word to Joshan. The old priest was the one constant in his life. The presence of the old man gave him a sense of assurance, a comfort knowing that if he fell, someone at least would pick up the broken pieces and put them back together. With these thoughts on his mind he drifted off to sleep.
A short while later he opened his eyes and Aliss was gone. His neck and back ached from falling asleep in the chair. He stretched and massaged his muscles as he shook off his sleep. He looked at the empty bed, bathed in the ghostly light of the moon. Surely he had not overslept, and if he had Aliss would have woken him. His glance fell on his sword hanging from the back of the chair, as he tried to dampen his feelings of anxiety. He heard a high-pitched wail then. Snatching his sheathed sword he ran to the window. By the time he got there, the cry had been stifled. Fear formed a knot in his stomach rising through him in a wave of frosty panic. Aliss, her name formed on his lips.
Beyond the second-storey window moonlight liquefied silver in the street below, but he could see naught. He had fallen asleep fully dressed, even wearing his boots. He contemplated climbing out of the window and dropping onto the street below. It would be quicker than using the more traditional exit. It was a good size drop though, and he was unsure whether Aliss was even outside. Perhaps she had simply gone down to the common room of the inn in search of food. He would look a fine fool if he broke his leg in the fall only to discover Aliss standing there brandishing a loaf of bread. He scanned the street below as best he could from his vantage point, listening for the sounds of crying again. Perhaps it was just a cat hunting, or fighting over territory.
In the three days they had been in the strange city Alka-Roha, with its bleeding walls, they had encountered no hostility—some curious glances perhaps—but that was not to say there were none about who would visit harm upon them. Aliss herself had said that the dream-witch knew they were hunting her. He knew very little about the High Priestess of Eor—or indeed about her god—she would undoubtedly have the resources to have a witch snatched from beneath the nose of a fool of a brigand and even worse blacksmith.
He strapped his sword-belt around his waist, resolving to go in search of his woman. He had thought her lost once already, when he snatched her from the magistrate’s pyre. He would not lose her a second time. As he walked towards the door, his boots echoing on the wooden floorboards, seeming far louder in the still of night, he heard scratching coming from outside the window. Before he could move to go and investigate, Aliss suddenly sprung through the frame, landing with feline grace before him. Her storm-cloud eyes were a swirling maelstrom with bolts of energy lightening them into a fervour before him. She glared at him with such intensity and hunger he took an involuntary step back.
“Aliss…” he began but was silenced by her passion as she clamped her mouth to his, snatching the wind from him. She tasted strongly of iron…. overwhelmingly so. He staggered back as she pushed him against the wall, her tongue probing his mouth, her hands pulling at his clothes.
Through the roaring in his ears he heard a pitiful cry coming from outside, the words stirring memories as they echoed from the past. “My baby!”
He pushed her away, having to use all of his strength to do so, despite the difference in their size. He saw then, in the pale light of the moon, the crimson streaks on her face, her hands bathed in red… her clothes. “Aliss, what have you done?” His voice cracked as the words came out in a whisper. Above all was the sound of the woman keening from the street.
“You gave me new life.” She smiled and he flinched at the sight of her bloody teeth. “I was reborn through blood magic, and I will ever hunger for it.”
“Nooo!” he gasped, covering his eyes from what he had done.
When he opened them again Aliss was still asleep in the bed, moonlight pooling around her. Just a dream. His eyes watered for the memory of what he bade the old witch Haera do back in the Great Wood, and how someday he would have to tell his woman, what price her life had cost. He tried to shrug off the image of Aliss covered in blood, her eyes gleaming in the moonlight. The image blackened his soul. It was a dream, he told himself. A really vivid dream brought on by guilt and shame. He glanced at his woman again, lying peacefully on the bed.
Jarl Crawulf: Northern Duchies
His eyes opened slowly, allowing in a crack of light. He was looking up at a dark stormy sky. He could feel the rain on his face, he could smell the churned up, soaking earth, hear the sound of fighting men milling about; the rattle of weapons and armour, the raucous boasts of men glad to be still alive, the cries for help of those too injured to help themselves. Pain washed over him then, from his head all the way down to his feet. At least I can still feel them, he thought. Someone had taken his helmet off and rolled up a cloak for him to rest his head on. He raised a hand to where it hurt the most, and felt a bandage of sorts wrapped around his skull. He could taste blood—his own he assumed—as the incessant rain fell on him, almost soothing… almost. He could not summon the will to move anymore, or to tear away his gaze from the overhead clouds as they raced across the sky. It had taken him thus long to remember where he was. Am I to die rolling in muck, in a field so far from home? he wondered. He was not ready to die. The face of his wife with her olive skin and nut-brown eyes flashed before him. Curious, he was not usually one for sentimentality, but he found her image a comfort. She was a piece in a game, a game of kings played by powerful men she did not understand. As am I, he thought. Her father would not be best pleased to learn of his son-in-law bleeding to death on a sodden hillside. Crawulf knew that he too was merely a piece moved around the board by the real players, men like the emperor who gave their daughters to men far from home to ensure a favourable union, and to seek advantage in the game. The emperor was gambling that Crawulf would one day become a king… a king of a rocky collection of windswept isles far from the empire. What must it be like to possess such long arms that they reach around the world?
“Jarl Crawulf, you yet live then?” The handsome face of Honbar Dolfson appeared in his vision, if a little blurred.
The jarl of Wind Isle suddenly sat bolt upright, remembering… remembering what? There was something urgent he needed to attend to, it was just on the edge of his memory.
“Easy now,” Ulf the Red said. Crawulf stared past the shaggy beard and into the concerned eyes.
“The left!” he suddenly blurted. “Defend the left.”
/>
“All is well,” Dolfson spoke in soothing tones. “Old One-eye saw the danger. His one good one twice the worth of most men’s two.” The clean-shaven Nortman grinned. “The battle is won.”
Crawulf tried to push himself up, but a wave of dizziness and nausea swept over him. “Help me,” he growled, and his two chosen men grabbed an arm each and hauled him to his feet. His vision swam. His head felt as if Boda’s dark dwarves were using their hammers to mine into his skull. He stood on top of the hillside he had been so determined to hold; everywhere was carnage. Bodies of men and horses littered the ground, huge divots of churned-up earth scarred the hill. It gave him a sense of satisfaction to see that the dead of the Duchies far outweighed the deaths of his own men. He glanced over to the left, to where Duke Elsward had regrouped his mounted warriors and threatened the flank. He could make out the distant figure of One-eye as he strode about the aftermath of battle, clapping men on the back, or sharing a joke Crawulf could not hear. The scene was replicated everywhere on the battlefield.
“And what of Elsward?” he asked.
“Fled with a handful of mounted hoursecarls. The rest of his army is broken. Even now we hunt them down.”
Crawulf nodded in grim satisfaction. Annoyed with himself for missing the end of the battle. Not that he had much choice. “Separate those men who are uninjured from the rest.” Crawulf glanced over at a small group of Duchies warriors corralled together and surrounded by guards. They all wore the same look of fear and hopelessness on their faces. He searched for any sign of defiance and found none.
“We will hardly have enough room on the boats for ourselves if we take all those we have taken captive today,” Dolfson said.
“They will not be boarding our ships. I am going to sell them. Jari-Vin will be here soon.”
“Jari-Vin the slaver from the Deadlands?” Dolfson asked.
“Aye, skin as dark as coal and a black heart to match. I don’t envy these men their future lives,” Crawulf answered.