The wailing baby ripped her attention upward, and soon Jancy was scaling the wall of Vilka’s tower.
THIS IS IT. This is the window.
Jancy had followed her ears to the right spot, or so she thought. Wouldn’t know for sure until she pulled herself over the jutting, angled ledge to see what awaited her. And would that be Vilka? Yes, certainly. The shadow stick, lost. The scryer, dead. The fight in the yard. The sorceress could not have felt Jancy’s presence.
So be it.
Jancy took one glance over her shoulder—the breathtaking view from this dizzying height as she clung to the sill’s underside like a spider, fingers and thin leather climbing boots locked into the tiniest of crevices, arms and legs bent at rigid angles to keep her from plunging down, down—and took a deep breath of night air.
And then she pulled herself up and over the ledge to land lightly on a plush, animal skin rug. Light oozed from brass wall sconces holding clear domes of glass. A smell like old garments and machine oil tickled Jancy’s nose. The room was wide, spanning the tower’s full diameter. A set of stairs spiraled up along the wall, another set spiraled down.
Jancy was hardly an expert in valuable antiquities, but even her untrained eye could fathom the pricelessness of the artifacts displayed on the walls, bureaus, and tables all around the room. In a far niche stood a cluster of exotic, pale dolls, clockwork beauties with skin made of porcelain and brass plates, nearly seamless rivet work and clear, vibrant eyes that looked down or away; some right at her.
“Waaaaaa!”
Heart racing, senses piqued to screaming, Jancy darted to an ornate bed in the center of the room, slid across the golden quilt, and landed softly beside a gently rocking cradle. The child’s prison swayed of its own volition, the click, click, click of mechanisms inside as the machine wheel turned and the rocker arm gently labored.
Jancy stood over it, looking down. She pursed her lips in disappointment. The baby wailed again and Jancy nodded to herself—dumb, dumb, dumb, Jancy. You are so dumb. A fool, even, for coming here.
She shook her head and reached inside to touch it, see if it was real. Its skin was cold and unyielding, tarnished, marred with faint, circular scratches from what must have been centuries of polishing. Eyes made of azure-tinted crystal shifted around, looking at nothing. Brass eyelids blinked with soft claps. Its hinged mouth flopped open, and that discordant cry came again. “Waaaa!”
“Damn it.” You should have known not to trust a bard’s tale. Only half right, it was. He said he’d heard a child, but you never thought to ask him if he’d actually seen it. And you’re a fool for not noticing it sooner, so blind…
“I’m trying to discern what you are.” The voice reached her from another part of the room; a child’s voice bathed in callousness.
Jancy froze.
“A human? An elf? No, I think neither of those.”
Unhuman. Jancy pulled her hands out of the cradle and turned.
The owner of the voice separated herself from the other dolls with slow, easy steps for one so small. She came to just above Jancy’s waist but seemed taller. Must be her elegant posture; back straight, shoulders up and stiff, weight balanced perfectly on her hips.
“You’re Vilka.”
“I am.” No hesitation. “But that still doesn’t answer my question. What are you?” The sorceress lingered in the shadows at the edge of the light, playing.
“Don’t you want to know my name?”
Vilka made a dismissive noise. “It hardly matters.” She crossed to Jancy’s right, passing behind a sitting chair, her pallid hands tracing gently across its back. The sorceress moved in and out of the shadows, exposing her features a little at a time. She wore a simple black gown, slippers on her feet, and bracelets that jangled as she moved. Hair the color of ink fell in tiny ringlets around her brow and down over her shoulders. A sharp jaw was set in something like anger, softened by glowing skin. A startlingly blue eye flashed in the light and then dimmed as the sorcerous found another pocket of darkness.
It was unnerving the way she moved, especially since Jancy had thought herself something of an enigma in that category. “What happened to the baby?”
“The baby? Oh, you mean my son, Nurthrik? He’s been gone a very long time, both from this tower and from the face of Sullenor, too. Dead, I’m afraid. But he lived a very long life.”
Jancy shook her head in confusion. “I don’t understand. Hopper…” Damn! She hadn’t meant to expose the bard. Well, no use in protecting him now. That squirrel was on the spit. “Hopper told me you took the child from the throne room in Thrasperville. That you stole him.”
Vilka’s chuckle was a wicked stab. The sorceress turned and crossed back the other way, toward the window, showing Jancy, quite plainly, the other side of her face. Jancy gasped, stepped back, stomach turning with revulsion. Vilka’s face was… it was… skinless… no, plated. No, an assembly. Delicate rivets ran across her forehead, encircled her ear, and plunged beneath her chin. Her jaw was hinged with a finely-grooved bolt. A blue stone blazed from her lidless eye socket. Brass teeth clicked when she spoke, and her voice no longer feigned at kindness or even curiosity. It was cruel. “Is that what he said?”
“Yes, and he said you killed so many good gnomes. That you slaughtered them for no other reason than ambition.”
“Well, yes. I did the stealing of the child, and the slaughtering. Well, some of it, anyway. But, as usual, the scribes and bards only have one side of the tale. The side that is the most compelling and cruel and pointedly not in my favor, no doubt.” Vilka was standing not fifteen feet from Jancy, staring out the window. She sighed, cocked her head. “You do know there’s always two… sides.”
“Yes, of course.” Jancy sought her itch, longed for it. But it was gone. She was frozen to the spot, unable to move. Barely able to breath. She gulped. “What’s your side, then?”
“The truth!” Vilka’s chin jutted in defiance. “Hopper painted the Thrasperville colony as the perfect picture of victory over great odds, yes? Pure of purpose?”
Jancy nodded.
“The last of our kind?”
Again, Jancy nodded.
“Hah! No, Thrasperville was founded by criminals and miscreants, necromongers and polymagicians, who fled across the sea to this insipid rock you call Sullenor. We were prisoners of the cogweavers in the old world. Entire generations of us, slaves. Entrapped so long no one remembered why we’d been imprisoned in the first place. So we broke free, killed hundreds of them, stole what we could, and trudged across the sea.
“Who knew that when we came here, we’d turn against one another?” Vilka shrugged. “Looking back, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, I suppose. We all had our egos, and our pride. We all wanted to rule in the new world with the others at our feet. What happened in the throne room at Thrasperville was nothing short of chaos. Bloodshed. Brother against sister. Father against son.
“My stealing that child got their attention. It bound them together. It gave them a common cause. You see, I saved that city. They came after me rather than destroy themselves.”
“They couldn’t defeat you.”
“No, they couldn’t. And my dear son, Nurthrik, grew up to be quite normal. A great cogweaver in his own right. A decent wizard, even. In fact, he got very bored of this tower and sought his fortune elsewhere, out there in the world.” She waved her hand absently at the window. “Met some of our Thrasperville kin who were not happy with the current Mayor, or whatever they called it at the time, and struck out eastward to begin a new city. They called it Hightower, I believe.”
Jancy’s nerves began to calm as she sensed the truth in Vilka’s story. Jancy knew the hearts of men, had witnessed their cruelty and malice firsthand, and she figured they weren’t too far removed from the hearts of gnomes. She could picture the slaughter in the throne room; a combination of her and Hopper’s tales, the truth lying somewhere in between the tellings. It didn’t matter, though, because there was
no child in danger. There was no child. Jancy had no reason to be here, no reason to trouble this gnomestress, strange as she may be, any longer.
“Why do you keep this?” Jancy nodded to the hulk of metal in the cradle.
A flash of sadness passed over the Vilka’s face, a quick sprinkle of sorrow, and “because it reminds me of him. My son.”
Someone else’s son. But Jancy didn’t press the point. “I’m sorry for coming here. I shouldn’t have. I didn’t know—”
“Yes, assumptions. They always get us into trouble, don’t they? I find it ironic that a baby stealer came here to accuse me of the selfsame thing.”
“I don’t steal them.”
“Oh? What would you call it, then? Did you come all this way because you thought it was hungry?”
“No!” Jancy bit her tongue. That itch wiggled inside her belly, that tease of premonition she always got when something was about to go horribly wrong. “I’ll just be going, if you don’t mind.” Jancy started to slide across the bed, since Vilka was directly in her path if she wanted to go around it, but the sorceress stepped quickly and quietly toward the window, blocking the way out. Her gaze remained outside, though, leaving that awful side of her face for Jancy to consider.
“You won’t take the stairs? Don’t you trust me?”
Jancy stopped, put her feet back on the ground. “I don’t even know you.”
“That’s right,” Vilka’s voice dripped venom. “And you broke into my home.”
Jancy shifted nervously from one foot to the other. She’d already taken stock of every possible escape route, but the only sure exit was out the window, through the sorceress. “I… I apologize for that. My intentions were—.”
Vilka faced Jancy, smiled, half honey, half horror. “Apology not accepted. You see, if I let everyone simply stroll in here, have a cup of tea, and then leave, I fear my reputation would suffer. I might even seem somehow vulnerable to those wobbleheads up in Thrasperville who, for the most part, have forgotten all about me.”
Jancy’s body became taut for a nervous moment and then relaxed into state of calm resignation. It would be a fight. She could feel it.
“Plus I have a collection to keep up.” The sorceress gestured to a large tank behind Jancy, a massive block of glass so opaque that not even Jancy’s superior eyes could pierce it. Now, though, it was crystalizing, clearing, so that she could see what was stored there…
Jancy gasped, unbelieving.
Heads.
In ornate glass jars.
Bloated things in some murky brine. Humans and elves, dwarves with their beards spun around at the bottoms, trolls in the bigger ones. But mostly gnomes. Old ones, to be sure; flesh sloughed and floating in that putrid slosh. Jancy felt their eyes on her. Accusing! They all knew what she’d been doing these past few years. Fixing those poor fathers and wretched mothers, killing, no, murdering anyone that didn’t fit her sense of right and good. Whispers in Half Town’s taverns spoke of a misguided vigilante. She knew then that hers would be the next head in a jar. And probably Hopper’s soon after.
She returned Vilka’s wicked stare, blue eyes against green, her fingers brushing the hilts of her knives.
And then Jancy got the itch to move…
ANGEL OF TEARS
• A TALE OF THE WORLD OF RUIN •
Erik Scott de Bie
The Outpost of Gardh
Winter 978, Sorcerus Annis
MIDNIGHT’S CHILL WIND swept up the gray snow into skirling ghosts that danced wildly in the deserted street, radiant in the moonlight and beautiful in the silence. At a distance, these specters seemed harmless, but only a fool or a corpse would believe it. Winter had come in earnest to the northland, and with it dense flurries of the burning rain from the gray skies. The snow sizzled against the tar-sealed oak buildings and seared exposed flesh, leaving red streaks that could take years to fade.
Pain in beauty—such is the World of Ruin.
The Victorious Hunter, Gardh’s stout common hall, squatted beneath a corroded sign that depicted a leaping hart, an arrow thrust through its breast. Someone had drunkenly shot an actual arrow through the coat of arms, but the shaft had found the animal’s rump rather than its heart. The sign twisted lazily in the cold breeze.
Within, a dozen wind-burned men and women in worn garments perched around stained tables cluttered with half-empty tankards and tureens of congealed stew. They had returned from a hard day’s labor spent hacking at trees and tearing the frozen ground, all the while avoiding the blistering snowfall. A harried dark-haired woman of about twenty winters moved among them with practiced grace pouring ale, mead, and fresh bowls of wine. A crackling alchemical fire kept the chilling darkness at bay, its purple flames pungent enough to fill the room with the smell of metallic lavender.
A single man sat at a table in the center of the room, as he did every night when the sun fell and cold swept through Gardh. He had seen perhaps forty or so winters, but his posture made him seem much older. The weight of the season, of the town spiraling into ruin, of the decaying world itself—all of it seemed to rest on his shoulders. A forward-curved sword sheathed in a worn scabbard lay on the table within his reach, but he hardly seemed aware of its presence. He bore a single mark upon his face: a black inked teardrop below his left eye, which glittered faintly in the firelight.
The old man stared at his stew in its stale-hardened trencher, and the small loaf of the same bread sitting alongside it. He hesitated before eating, as he did every night, as if considering starvation as a preferred fate. Ultimately, he took up the bread and began mopping the stew into his mouth, and all assembled breathed a faint sigh of relief.
Little changed in Gardh, not since the mage-city Tar Vangr had abandoned the place to its fate years before. Life proceeded in the same dreary circle year after year.
Until the traveler came.
The thick oak door rattled open, admitting a gust of cold wind and setting the worn metal fittings to vibrating against the wood. It produced a grating sound that filled the common room, drawing a chorus of glares that ranged from the irritated to the suspicious. A single figure crossed the threshold—slight and soft of step, with snowflakes sizzling on her gray cloak. Her features hid beneath a thick leather mask and tinted goggles to keep the snow from her face. She breathed hollowly through the sweaty cloth over her nose and mouth.
Despite the scrutiny of every gaze upon her, the woman stepped boldly a few paces inside and scanned the common hall for something in particular. When her eyes settled on the old man sitting in the middle of the room—the only one not watching her—she drew in a breath in both relief and unexpected anger. She strode to his side and stood across the table from him, arms crossed.
“Regel,” she said, her voice muted through her leather mask.
“Serris.” He kept his eyes fixed on his stew, eating slowly.
The traveler undid the cowl she had pulled tight against the scalding snow, releasing a fall of golden hair, and unbuckled the mask she’d worn against the cold. The heat of the common hall put a touch of color in Serris’s sharp-featured face and made the livid red scar that cut from cheek to jawline glow brightly. Like unto that of the old man, she bore a teardrop mark of her own, inked in the same place. Serris had fierce gray eyes like the heart of a snowstorm, which seemed to absorb the firelight in the room. Only a fool or a madman would not recognize her wrath from a distance.
Regel gestured to the opposite seat without looking up. “Sit. Your road was long, I expect.”
“Long enough.” Liberated from her mask, Serris looked around at the patrons of the common hall, as if she had noticed for the first time that they existed, and dismissed them all. She sat, staring across at her master with cold focus. “Time to come back,” she said. “The Circle of Tears needs you.”
Regel gave a slight shrug, barely moving his shoulders.
Seeing his indifference made Serris bite her lip to restrain her anger. “I stood by you for years w
hile you let this pain rot you from the inside, and for what?” She leaned forward and put her elbows on the table. “Are you any better? Is this any better?”
Regel shrugged once more. “I have a new master now,” he said. “A purpose.”
Serris narrowed her eyes. “And who must I kill to relieve you of it?”
She became aware of another presence and tensed for an attack that never came.
“Coin?” The dark-haired ale-bearer stood beside their table, her deep brown eyes focused on Serris. She held aloft a tray with a rough-bread trencher of stew, which quivered on the surface and smelled quite wonderful, as well as a steaming bowl warm with mulled wine.
“Of course.” Serris fished out her purse and set two silver coins freshly minted with the mark of Tar Vangr on the table. “This enough?”
The woman looked down at the proffered silver with widening eyes, then swept them up with a flick of her wrist. “More than,” she said as she set out the stew. “Rooms are all full.”
“Food and a place by the fire. And these.” Serris fumbled a weathered bit of paper out of her belt pouch and plunked down two more coins atop it. “Supplies for the road for my master and me.”
The ale-bearer unfolded the paper and scrutinized it, then shook her head. She looked embarrassed. “I cannot read.”
That made Serris smile despite herself. “I couldn’t either,” she said.
The woman returned the smile, and the expression made her face lovely. She smelled strongly of lilac rather than the dull, false lavender scent that filled the room. Serris found it refreshing.
“I’ll give this to the quartermaster.” Hastily, she tucked the note and the coins into her bodice. She glanced about the hall, visibly uneasy.
Serris caught the woman by the wrist. “What?”
“Naught. Only…” The woman looked down at Serris’s hand on her wrist, cool fingers pressed against her veins, and Serris could feel the woman’s heartbeat quicken at the unexpected intimacy. Years of hard work had roughened the woman’s skin, and she felt strong. “Pass wary.” She hurried away.
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