Weremage: A Book of Underrealm (The Nightblade Epic 5)

by Garrett Robinson

  Then she saw that he stood on a mound of stones. She remembered them well. They had piled them over Jordel’s body. She fell to her knees, weeping as she had when first they buried the Mystic—and then she fell back, shrieking in terror, as a hand covered with desiccated flesh burst from the mound of stones.

  She landed hard on her rear end, wincing from the impact on the stone bridge—but she was no longer on the stone bridge. Instead she lay upon a soft and silken bed, and fine cloth of many colors was draped upon the walls of the small room. Two torches were mounted in sconces, but to Loren they seemed far too large, and their flames licked at the drapes. Her sharp intake of breath brought the scents of fine perfume and wine, and she realized that she must be in a house of lovers. Blushing furiously, she pushed herself up, intent on leaving—but then she went stock still as the room’s door opened.

  The lover entered. It was a woman Loren had never seen before. She looked like an Idrisian, and her long black hair was worked into a single fine braid. Her clothes covered all her body, but they were so sheer that Loren’s blush grew twice as deep. Her gaze locked on Loren, and she swayed as she made her way towards the bed. When she reached the foot of it, she did not stop, but crawled forward on hands and knees.

  “I … I did not mean to come here,” said Loren. How had she come to be here, anyway? She could not remember. “I must go. Chet awaits me.”

  “Not for long,” said the girl. “Stay with me. You have paid, after all.”

  “I assure you I have not,” said Loren. She tried to leave, but her body would not respond—and she did not want to leave, in any case. Her eyes went to the torches on the walls. Their flames rose ever higher. How had they not already caught the silks in a blaze?

  The lover was close now, too close for Loren to escape without pushing her away. Her lips pressed against Loren’s ear. “Would you like to meet my parents?” she whispered.

  The question was so unexpected that Loren was shocked out of the moment. “I … what?” she said. “Who are your parents?”

  “He wonders,” said the lover. She drew back and curled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “He wonders, and I cannot tell him.”

  Loren nearly asked who the lover was talking about—but then she cried out, for the torches had caught the walls on fire at last. She leapt from the bed, trying to pull the lover with her. But the lover merely lay on the bed, curling in on herself, and began to weep. And now the door was wreathed in flames, and she could not get out. The smoke burned her eyes, forcing her to shut them as she coughed and coughed and fell back to the bed—

  —only she did not land upon the bed, but in a foul-smelling river of filth and refuse. She fought to get clear of it, and her hand struck stone. It was the edge of the channel, and she knew that she was in the sewers of Cabrus. Coughing and spluttering, she emerged from the channel, falling breathless upon her back.

  Snik

  Cold steel pressed against her throat. Loren froze.

  “Sweet, simpering little tart,” hissed a familiar voice. It was Auntie. Crouching, she held Loren’s own dagger to her throat. “Why did you come back here? You should never have returned.”

  “I did not mean to come here,” said Loren, unable to stop the tears that poured from her eyes. “Please, forgive me. I will leave, I will never come back, I will—”

  “It is the way you hold yourself,” said Auntie, lifting the dagger. Loren thought she was freed, but Auntie’s other hand seized her throat. “This hip juts out slightly.” With a shriek, she plunged the dagger in to Loren’s heart. Loren screamed. “That might be a stance of rest, but this hand you hold a bit farther from your body than the other.” She pulled the dagger out, but only to sink it into her heart again, and then pull it out, and then again, and again, and now Loren could not even scream, for only blood came bubbling up from her lungs. “It is ready to leap to the hip and draw forth the knife, the knife, the knife, the knife, the knife!”

  The world slowly went black, and Auntie’s furious screams faded to nothing. Then, in the blackness, Loren heard the sound of rushing water. She opened her eyes—when had she closed them?—and saw that she stood in a city of gold. It was build around a waterfall, and that had been the sound she heard. The city was in two levels—one at the bottom of the falls, and one at the top. The buildings all glistened and gleamed with gold trim, which shone all the more in the light mist that pervaded the air.

  She was on a balcony not unlike the one she had had in the High King’s palace, that afforded her an excellent view of the city and the lands all around—a landscape similar to the one surrounding Ammon, with strange trees that hid dark pathways.

  “Welcome to Dahab.”

  The voice made her jump. She turned to see Hewal standing beside her on the balcony. The Mystic did not look at her, but only leaned on the railing, looking out. Again he wore the blue and grey of the Shades. Without warning he leapt up on the railing, and then his mouth became a beak, his feet claws, and his hands wings. He had become a crow. With a raucous cry he took to the air, soaring higher and higher as he spiraled up into the mists coming off of the waterfall.

  Loren watched the bird soar for a minute—and then she found that she was no longer upon the balcony. Now she stood on a huge rocky pillar in the midst of the river, near to the bottom of the waterfall. Its roar deafened her, and she could barely keep her footing upon the slippery rock. Then she saw that Damaris stood there, just out of arm’s reach. And behind Damaris was Gregor, and now the bodyguard was truly giant-size, with hands as large as Loren herself. He reached out for her, and though she wanted to flee, there was nowhere to go. His fingers wrapped around her, and she barely managed to squeeze out between them. But they wrapped around her again, and again, each time dragging her closer.

  “I will take everything,” said Damaris.

  Gregor seized her at last, and he lifted her to hold her suspended before the waterfall. Between his fingers she could only just glimpse his face, and his cheeks that were sliced open, and the bloody ruined mess of his mouth, the gaping socket where his eye had been that now dripped blood.

  His hands fell away from her, and she thought she would plunge into the river far below—but she was on the pillar again. She looked up, wondering why he had released her, only to find that he now held Gem, Annis, and Chet, and that they now hung over the water in her stead. Loren fell to her knees before the giant.

  “I told her to kill you.” Gregor’s voice was like thunder. It struck her like a fist to the chest.

  “Please, let them go,” she cried. “Let them go. You want to kill me—since the beginning, you only wanted to kill me.”

  “Everything,” whispered Damaris in her ear.

  Gregor released her friends, and they fell into the water. But at the last moment, Chet reached out and grabbed an outcrop of the pillar Loren stood on, and the children clung to his arms. He tried to pull them all up, but the weight was too much. Screaming, Loren fell to her stomach and reached for him, trying to pull him up. The children climbed over him and took her hands, and she got them to safety. At last she reached Chet, but she could not lift him—he was too heavy.

  Chet looked into her eyes for a long moment. Then his arms slipped, and he fell into the abyss—for it was not the waterfall, but the stone bridge again, and his broken body would lie next to Jordel’s forever. Even as Loren’s screams redoubled, she felt hands seize her cloak. She looked up, expecting to see Gregor again. Instead, she found Gem and Annis. They had ruined mouths just like Gregor’s, and they laughed as they pitched her over the edge of the bridge.

  She came awake screaming again.

  Chet was fighting to hold her down, and this time she had just enough presence of mind not to strike him. But she could not still her panicked screams, and guards in red cloaks came bursting into the room, swords drawn.

  “It is all right!” cried Chet. “She is all right. Only help me hold her!”

  One of them balked, bu
t the other came, taking Loren’s arm and holding her in place as she slowly got her bearings. Her gaze roved all over the room, and she could not force it to stay any one place for long.

  “Loren. Loren!” said Chet. He took her face in his hands and forced her to look at him. “Loren. It is me. You are here, with me, in Ammon. It is all right. There is no one there. Come back to me.”

  At last her hands stopped trying to find purchase on a bridge that was not there. A long, shuddering breath escaped her. “I … I am all right. I am all right.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said, and pulled her close. She clutched him to her, staring over his shoulder into nothingness.

  “Is she ill?” said the guard who had remained by the door. “Should I fetch an apothecary?”

  “No,” said Loren at once.

  “Are you certain?” said Chet. “Mayhap some dream-wine …”

  “No, Chet,” she said, pushing back to look at him. “I am all right. It was only another dream.”

  A look of recognition crossed his face—she had seen things in her last dream, and he knew it. He turned to the Mystics and shrugged. “As she says. Thank you.”

  The guards did not look eager to leave. But Loren seemed to have grown calm again, and so they slipped out into the hallway.

  “Did you—”

  “Shush,” said Loren, putting a finger to his lips. She listened hard. Finally, after the space of several heartbeats, she heard the quiet footsteps of the Mystics as they slipped away. A sigh slipped from her. “They are gone.”

  She fell back upon her pillow. It was the eve of Yearsend, some days after Niya had given her instructions in the training yard, and they had learned nothing more in the meanwhile. Hewal still had not been sent from the fortress, and they had seen him do nothing nefarious within it. Why, then, had she had this dream now? Was it a sign of something soon to come?

  “What was it?” said Chet. “Did you … did you see anything? Was Hewal there?”

  “He was,” said Loren. “And he was dressed as a Shade again. But this time there was more—he turned into a bird, and flew off into the sky.”

  “A … a bird?” said Chet. “Do you mean that he is a weremage?”

  “I do not know that, any more than I know for certain that he is a Shade,” said Loren. “But that is what I saw. And … and I saw a golden city built on a waterfall. It is not a place I have ever seen before, and yet … and yet it was so real. I think it must be a real place—just as I first saw Hewal in a dream, and then found him in the waking world.”

  Chet frowned. “But why were you screaming? None of this sounds very terrifying.”

  Almost she answered him. Almost she told him of Trisken, and Jordel’s grave, and Auntie, and what had happened to him and Gem and Annis. But at the last moment, words failed her, and she shrugged. “I saw nothing else. Or at least, I remember nothing else. Whatever frightened me, it slipped away as I awoke.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. She could see in his eyes that he did not believe her. “Loren,” he said at last. “I have told you that I trust you. Do you not trust me in turn?”

  A pang of guilt struck her, and she pushed herself up on her elbows. “I … I do, of course, Chet. And yet there are things I do not wish to say. Not because I fear for you to know them—but because I fear to say them aloud, and give strength to the thought behind them.”

  “You cannot truly believe that.”

  Loren shrugged. “How can I know what to believe? I see things in my dreams only to find them in the waking world. And there … there are things I see, that I cannot bear to see come to pass. Do not force me to say them out loud. Please?”

  He did not answer her. After a long moment’s silence, he lay back down and turned his back to her, drawing the blanket tight around himself against the cold.

  She waited until his breath had deepened with sleep. Then she went to her cloak and reached within one of the pockets for her brown cloth packet. From it she drew a magestone. For a long while she looked at it.

  A wizard who consumes the stone does not dream, Xain had said. She was not a wizard. Yet maybe it would help regardless.

  Loren broke the stone in half and slid one piece onto her tongue. It dissolved into nothing, and she swallowed. The room did not grow brighter, for she did not have her dagger close to hand. But she felt a calm slip through her. She lay back down beside Chet, and was soon asleep—a dreamless sleep at last.

  fifteen

  FOUR DAYS PASSED IN CHEERLESS rain. The last day of Yearsend arrived, and it was time for the feast that would bring in the new year. More than two weeks had passed since Loren had come to Ammon, and her frustration had dwindled to a pervasive apathy. She rarely went into the training yard any more, and spent most of her time in the stables visiting Midnight, or else in her own chamber, from which she emerged only for meals. But the Yearsend feast drew her out of hiding at last, if only because Annis was very excited about it. Somehow, the girl had convinced Kal to let her arrange the whole thing, and it promised to be a merrier affair than Ammon had seen in years, if not decades.

  So Loren rode with Chet to a nearby river to bathe, and laundered her clothes so that they were clean for the feast. And when at last she came to the dining hall, she was not disappointed. The smell of the food struck her as soon as she walked in the door. Most of the tables were cleared to the edges of the room, except for a line of them down the center. Upon these were placed all manner of fine foods, from meats to vegetables to sweet treats baked with honey, and still other dishes made with spices that smelled wholly unfamiliar to Loren. They found not only the usual wine and ale waiting for them, but brandywines and meads and other, clear drinks that Loren had never seen before, but which smelled stronger than anything she had ever had.

  There were minstrels as well, a small party of them clustered off to one side of the room. They did not wear the red and silver of the Mystics, and so Loren guessed they must have come from one of the towns that lay not far away from Ammon. They plucked and pounded and blew upon their instruments enthusiastically, if not particularly well, and Loren saw many of the Mystics around the room stamping their feet and pounding their fists or mugs upon the table in time with the music. But from his elevated table at the head of the hall, Loren saw that Kal often glared at the minstrels, and tore more savagely at his food the longer they played.

  After Loren had taken her plate down the row of tables and loaded it high with her meal, she found a place at the table with Chet and Annis and Gem. Gem looked to be nearly done with his first plate by the time she reached them, and he soon rose to go fill another. Annis ate more delicately, but she savored her bites, moaning gently with each bite and dabbing at the corners of her mouth with the edge of her sleeve.

  “Having planned the feast myself, I was able to instruct the kitchens in preparing all of the dishes just the way I like them,” she said. “I have not enjoyed so many of my favorite treats since I left my family’s home upon the Seat.”

  “However did you convince Kal to let you do this?” said Loren. “This is a fine celebration. One might almost call it joyous, and that is a word I would never have used to describe the Grand Chancellor. I am surprised he did not flay you when you presented your plans to him.”

  Annis giggled. “I offered my expertise in planning the feast, and Kal accepted easily enough. Then, when he saw the list of things I intended to procure, he almost boxed my ears. But then I showed him my figures, and how this feast would cost him just over half of what he normally spent. Then he fell silent quickly enough, and left me to it.” She leaned over the table and dropped her voice to a murmur. “Though I waited until after that to hire the minstrels.”

  Chet laughed aloud, and Loren joined in. They began to eat, and she swiftly discovered that she and Annis must share similar tastes, as it was the best food she had had in some time, and compared most favorably to the meals she had been served in the palace.

  After some time, and more food, and
more wine as well, some soldiers got to their feet and pushed a number of tables to the side to clear a section of empty floor. Then the minstrels redoubled their playing, and the drummers took the lead, and the dancing began. Loren had never dreamed she would see these warriors, who were always so grim in their red cloaks, laughing and prancing upon the stone floor like they were villagers from her home in the Birchwood. The comparison seemed especially apt when Chet got to his feet and drew her up after him, pulling her into a dance that she laughed all the way through.

  “We have never danced together. Do you realize that?” he said, as one song finished and they waited for the chords of the next to begin.

  She smiled at him—but then the smile dampened, for his words brought her parents to mind. They, after all, were the reason Chet had been forbidden to approach her at the village dances.

  “I am sorry,” he said quickly. “I only meant that I am happy to do so now.”

  “And so am I,” she said. “I wish we had had years of this. We should not let that fate befall others.”

  She pointed back to their table, where Gem and Annis still sat. Annis had begun to fiddle with her own fingers, and ever so often she looked nervously over at Gem. The boy did not seem to notice her, for his gaze wandered the room, lingering on the table across the room where their Mystic friends sat. Chet’s gaze met Loren’s, and he nodded as he took her meaning. As the next song began, they ran up to the table. Loren seized Gem’s hands and drew him up, while Chet did the same to Annis.

  “Come, master urchin,” said Loren. “I know you are a scholar and an expert thief. Let us see if you are a dancer as well!”

  It soon became apparent that he was. The minstrels struck up a tune as old as the mountains, and half a hundred voices in the hall broke out into nearly as many different songs to accompany it, for bards in all the nine kingdoms had written different words for the same notes. That only made the dancers laugh all the more, and Gem’s feet danced lightly upon the stone floor in time with Loren’s as they whirled around each other. Loren was almost as surprised at his practice ease as she was at Annis’ awkwardness, for the girl’s feet fumbled as she did her turns with Chet. But then the middle of the song came, and Loren and Chet gave each other a look. They took the children’s hands, and spun them off to each other, an effortless trade that reunited them at the same time it pitched Gem and Annis together.