The Rose upon the Rood of Time (Dark Spiral Book 1)

by Segoy Sands

  Cole betrayed no interest and blessedly Merb shut up. As they climbed, the high, flat ribbon of clouds seemed to cook away in the heat, and Cole wished he’d filled several gourds, not one. Nothing grew except sparse silverweed and thornwood. They rode gingerly up slopes of loose xanthous shale, stirring up small rockslides that hissed like serpents to every side or slipped right under them. Actual rattlers camouflaged in the shale made the horses extra skittish. It was slow going, and little more enjoyable than marching with the troop, though once they scared up two gray hares that zigzagged so wildly Cole couldn’t get a shot. Burnt and Merb made the usual jokes about shooting too fast. It was an hour past noon before they got up into the high scree, with sweeping views to the east of the only somewhat less arid valleys and thin blue rivers of Siorsior, the redlands, where men as a rule, didn’t go. Nice as the view seemed, the sun at its zenith was a fierce god.

  “We want to die,” Burnt said, trying to wrap his head with a dirty scrap of cloth.

  “Aw, this ain’t nothin’,” Merb spat.

  “I’m Burnt, he’s Cole,” the big man laughed. “What’s a cnuching Merb?”

  Merb winked. “Merry-Be-Well. A goodly name, though folks tend to slur it.”

  “Well, Merry-Be-Well, it was a shit idea to ride up here today. But I suppose it’s one of those days. Every hundred or so days, it’s one of those days.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” Merb said. “Mebbe you got you a curse.”

  Something caught Cole’s eye. He’d been watching for the slightest sign of the scrappy and elusive scree goat, if only those two would shut up. Not that scree goat was likely to taste any good, but he’d missed the damn hare. What he saw was neither goat nor hare, a long turquoise streak, which for a moment he hoped, incongruously, was water. Merb let out a whoop that echoed in a dozen directions.

  “Oh, the goats,” mourned Burnt. “It was all about the goats.”

  “This is better than goats,” Merb rubbed his hands. “Thar’s a monstrous big scorcher. Oh, it’s a beauty.”

  7 THE LORD OF NUMBERS

  He was drooling on his inner arm. Someone was nudging him. Not the kick in the ribs he was used to, but a cool, smooth hand on his shoulder. A distinctly feminine hand. A hand that made him feel manly and substantial.

  “Your friends are in The Hand across the street.”

  “The Hand?”

  “Across the street.”

  Standing up, he rubbed his eyes, ran his fingers through his hair, and stretched. If he spread his arms out wide enough he could almost touch both walls. He still had his pants on, and he noticed his tunic folded on a low stool. Bloody small room, no window, no furnishings. Where did she keep all her girl things? She was properly dressed, if what she was wearing could be called proper anywhere outside this particular house on this particular street in this particular town. She’d obviously been waiting for him to wake up. Next to his tunic was a tiny cup of spice tea that looked as if it had gone a little bit greasy. If she knew where Bu and Hog were, then she’d had time to chat with her friends. Had they poked their heads in to look at him? Had Zodo? How late was it?

  For some reason, seeing her in the day made him feel embarrassed. When he turned his head, it turned too fast. When he reached for his shirt, his hands moved too hurriedly. She was watching. He was going to have to tell some tales in the Hand. How much had they paid for him to sleep on her mattress, if it was even her mattress? She was supposed to be businesslike, too. Was she? He’d never actually been alone in a room with a girl before, let alone a night girl. Maybe that pipe weed hadn’t worn off. Why else was he feeling every fleck of color in her eyes, every detail of her skin, like they were all of a cloth too real to be real? Why were those shiny little black moles so beautiful on her? Shouldn’t they be really ugly? Maybe not cnuching her was an insult in a way. Hadn’t she been the first to fall asleep? The small of her back had been so delicate.

  “Don’t sit down again,” she said. “You have to go.” He waved his hand to say just a second. She dropped onto her knees, face to face with him, smiling again. With a deft yank, she pulled the source of his trouble out of his breeches, and then did something that lit his brain on fire. He would have tried to stop her only that would have seemed criminally stupid. Whose modesty did he want to protect anyway? He closed his eyes and let her push him onto his back. The wildfire in the dry branches of his brain spread too fast for him to actually remember, later, exactly how and when he stopped being a virgin, but he had the nagging impression that it was the greatest moment of his life.

  That thing about controlling appetite hadn’t worked, either, because he found his body doing to her what it had planned, which, to his surprise, seemed to be what she wanted. Somehow they weren’t on the bed anymore, but pushed into the corner, her back against the wall, her legs curled around him, her hands crowding his back, showing him what to do. It went on so long, even after a semblance of normal consciousness had returned to him, that he had to accept that it was really happening, and that he was indisputably involved in willing it not to stop anytime soon, which gave him a glimpse of himself he’d not had before. Truth be told, he was much more interested in her for the moment, everything about her, most of all her eyes, which were absorbing him, as if his boundaries had always been figments of his mind. One of them was laughing.

  *

  Boinn woke. By the smell of it, she was in a den. The cords were gone, but she felt angry welts all across her body. She reached about in the darkness, tentatively, but felt only cold hard dirt around her. A pit. The air was close. Her chest was tight. She listened but heard nothing, only a deep living silence. She let the silence come to her, humming, crystalline.

  Maybe her brain, deprived of sensory experience, was producing after-impressions of sights and sounds. Maybe she was hurt worse than she knew. Lights came round, flickering, winking in and out of existence, soft and otherworldly, like a fluttering of fireflies. At first they were all of a vivid yellow, then yellowish-orange, green and yellowish-green, attracted to the white light’s edges. There was a pattern, the smaller lights wheeling in interlocking rings. As she watched, the yellows and greens and reds grew more intense, as if she had lived all her life in faded world. Closer and closer they visited, the interlocking rings filling the darkness, a spiral, pulsing deepest blue at its source.

  She watched as they began to touch her skin, a slight cool pressure, a tingling where they lighted along her arm, saffron, gold, sapphire, emerald, ruby. Calmly she watched it crawl along her knees and shoulders, enfolding her. With eyes half-closed, legs folded under her, she sat within the burning rainbow and stared into its indigo core. She saw them, not with her eyes alone, but with her permeable body: myriads of tiny silver sparks, a river of momentary intelligences. They were pouring through her, filling her every atom. She did not think of the stories of how the lugh devoured a person’s human form.

  *

  “Now we best be careful,” Merbwill said, as they rode up a steep, fractious slope of white powder shale. Cole did not see how they could be careful. Their horses were skidding about and whinnying, kicking up clouds of white powder and sending small shale avalanches, like hissing white snakes, back downhill. “A blue-scorch like that, even way out here, it’ll attract unwanted attention. Best be mighty careful.”

  Burnt’s hand cradled the twenty pound head of a hammer, an old weapon with a silver-worked ebonwood handle, holstered to his horse. Fat lot of good that hammer would do if someone from above fancied a bit of target practice. A child could hit them. The reassuring fact, though, was that no one had any business thinking about sky iron in this heat. Water, that’s what one had business thinking about. Damn, it wasn’t kind for Burnt to have ridden an Equiss into this. Its proud dark nostrils were flaring, its neck dripping, its hind legs quivering ever so slightly on the unsure shale. The big ugly nail-studded hammer only added to Burnt’s weight. Gazing up the slope, Cole couldn’t see properly through the heat shimmer. His hair was
slicked back and rolling sweat stung his eyes. He sincerely hoped there was no one up there. It would be a nasty thing, to look down and see the pretty fletching sunk between his ribs.

  “We should dismount,” he said.

  “Better idea,” Merb winked, with a gap-toothed grin, already swinging down off his horse. “You scout ahead. We take it careful with the horses.”

  A nice plan, sending him into danger and using the horses as a moving shield. Cole didn’t care. Considering the distance between him and the nearest drop of water, he’d do anything to expedite this business. Hopping off Maidenhead, he zigzagged up the slope, keeping low and stepping sidewise so the shale shifted under his foot without hissing slides. Near the top, he went down on his belly. As he wriggled up, the whole shimmering plateau ahead seemed likely to melt steel.

  He wondered if at some point the body stopped telling you it was getting hotter. The flat terrain on the plateau offered no concealment, so he went upright through the blur like a man through a storm, a strangeness in his veins, as if he was feeling each of the thousands of ripples, the dragon currents, in the air. Even through the warp and weft, he could see with pristine clarity and a curious self-absence. Not far ahead lay the blue scorch, twenty feet deep, twice as long and wide, carved into the scree by the fall of the sky metal.

  He wondered how long before the brain started hallucinating, because a slim wavering figure was moving toward him, a child he thought or a small woman. It carried such an elegance and gentleness, he accepted it as a dream, a vision, a blur that stepped through folds and ripples in space. Its slanted, patient eyes were nearly as silver as the short hair covering it from pointed ears to clever feet. Sionach, silverfox.

  “Sleaghadair,” its voice was a soft rasp in a tongue that might have been Old Orroch.

  His body felt strange. Looking down at his torso, limbs, and hands, he saw thousands of subtle, moving lines. I’m not a spearman. He wanted to warn Burnt and Merb not to enter the warp. In the stories there was danger, here, in the folds where the worlds overlapped, and where the silverfox, most sagacious of the Sí, appeared to seekers pure. There was always a sort of etiquette in the stories, too, a way of stating one’s request.

  “My people are pressed beneath a hard cruel heel,” he said.

  The sionach bared its sharp, fine teeth. “Yna, chanwr, chanu.”

  He felt something queer in his throat, a coolness, a blueness, a soothing. What good was singing? Before he could speak, the creature regressed, moving retrograde, forward yet backward, leaving something tarnished and metallic pointing up out of the ground, the four-sided head of an old skylla dagger. He knelt, testing it, but it resisted slightly as though caught not in loose soil but some sticky fabric. When it suddenly pulled free, he seemed to see, in all that heat, countless threads or lines oscillate from the spot where it had been stuck. It was as if all things everywhere subtly quivered at an imperceptible level. He hadn’t remembered walking all the way to the scorch, but he must have, for he was down in the bowl, fifteen feet below its lip, the cut blue sky above. He didn’t feel thirsty anymore, but he was anxious for water. Some sort of sunstroke, he thought randomly, was putting holes in his consciousness.

  At least he’d found it. A true skylla dagger. You only heard of such things. You never saw one. It was ten inches long, tarnished almost blue. Its head was four-faced, its shaft a scepter with a solid ball at its center, from both poles of which five curved radials formed hollow spheres that terminated in macabre skulls. Its blade, as long as the head and shaft combined, was three-edged like a spike or stake. Each triune blade face was carved with twining serpents. The four-fold head was precision carved with the faces of man, eagle, ox, and lion. He hoped Burnt and Merb were coming. It had all been too much of a strain. He felt lightheaded. Sinking to his knees, he thought he saw and heard thousands on thousands of radiances softly exploding around him, like the music of a ten thousand stringed instrument.

  *

  The nighthouse was larger than he’d thought. She led him through narrow, dim passages, into a dark round chamber of several doors, down a stairs (though he was sure they were already on the ground floor) to an exit that let into a side alley.

  “If you come back,” she said, “I’ll show you the rest.”

  “Of the house?”

  She gave him a pitying look.

  “I’d like to see the rest,” he smiled, then grinned, “but I think I saw just about everything.”

  “Does a groom, after his wedding night, think he has seen everything. I would feel sorry for him. Does a lover ever believe he has seen his beloved?”

  He almost blushed at her romantic choice of words, though he was sure she was toying with him.

  “I’ll come back,” he promised.

  She withdrew partway into the shaded house. “Your mother is around your head,” she told him, “and your father around your feet.”

  Before he could ask what she meant, she was gone, and he was left facing a nearly seamless door. It hurt, parting from her. He knew he should be a man about it. Evidently, she was being a woman, or a night girl, about it. But his heart fell anyway. The door had closed and here was the rather ordinary alley ahead of him. The street waiting for him at the end of the alley confirmed the mundane world of toil and trade. Each step brought him closer to the steady tapping of metal-smiths, the angry swirl of flies around the flesh-wasted sea sick, who begged in listless, plaintive tones, the clipped accents of merchants and buyers and soldiers. Squinting in the sunlight, he scoped the opposite street, and spotted the placard with the gilded, bleeding hand.

  Hog and Bu were inside, smoking, legs kicked up, greasy bits of bacon and eggs scattered on their plates, and two empty carafes of ale.

  “Missed breakfast,” Hog commented, the slightest glint of mischief in his eyes.

  “Never fear,” Bu raised an eyebrow. “Street food. On the way out.”

  They must have already settled the bill, because they shuffled to their feet and headed onto the sun-washed street. In daylight, the town seemed rougher around the edges. Its three-tiered buildings of dark polished wood, so quiet by night, were noisy places of business by day. Skilled in craft, formal in custom, deadly in combat, the Nesso were also a sea folk. Smugglers from Neverre, often enough women, shot between Skår and Mora to reach Aina Livia, thumbing their noses at the Skårsans, who were so quick to raid the shores of others but so jealous of their own. It was hard to guess whether the Nesso had come to Aina Livia for trade, or for the purposes of their Blakes, who had been a class of scholar-priests alongside the Bedes, long ago, when the Moretti drove them from Ellene. The Blakes had fled to the shores of Neverre, just as the Bedes had fled to the shores of Grael, to be given refuge and eventually given honor. And in some ways the Blakes had become Nesso just as the Bedes had become Graelish. No one had ever explained these things clearly to him, but now, having met La’mo, he vowed to find out all that he could.

  They were most of the way back to the gate when Dillan stopped to buy street food from a cart lady. Dressed in a sarrba as grey and coarse as her hair, she neatly wrapped fried potatoes in golden fry bread, offering him a blue-glazed pot of red sauce. He poured a little bit on, but the old woman made gestures encouraging him not to be shy, and both his friends advised liberal application. She certainly seemed to grow warmer and merrier, the more he poured. Chewing into the dripping grease bread, his taste buds informed him that the sauce was imported expressly from the Ignis, blended to the taste of Arru demons, and that what he’d taken for mild bits of potato were demon peppers incarnate.

  Fumes rushed up his nose, tears down his face. The cup of water someone handed him made it worse. He couldn’t see or think through the multiple crescendos of heat, with more peaks and ridges than the Jökullinn, but it seemed more people were enjoying the show at his expense than just the dear old vendor and his deeply sympathetic friends. He was making a scene. Tonight, Nesso parents would tell their children about the stupid Orroch wh
o nearly died because he had a small bite of what every Nesso baby eats with its mother’s milk.

  The old lady was shoving a spoon into his mouth. Something warm, sticky, sweet. Wild honey. It didn’t help, but he tried to smile gratefully through watering eyes. Only, it dawned on him painfully that it was fire honey, a remedy for peppers they said worked going in but had its own rather unfortunate consequences going out. For now, anyway, the numbness in his mouth was a relief. The old woman was looking at him with sparkling humor in her eyes, and people on the street were laughing.

  A middle-aged man approached the cart. His arm went around Hog’s neck like they were old friends, as he poured a volcanic pool over his food and chewed placidly. “Come to my shop. Right over here,” he pointed vaguely left and continued to eat, arm over Hog’s shoulder. “You can do me a small favor.”

  Bu shot Hog a look. They both looked uneasy.

  “Kunnok t’cho,” the little old woman gave a little bow of deference, adding the honorific. She sat back down on her stool, and gazed determinedly off down the street. The man, Kunnok, licked his fingers clean and began to walk, arm still around Hog. They had little choice but to follow him through the dark doors of his rug and pipe shop. He sat them down on cushions, and, within moments, two younger men brought in the pipe bowl and a tall brass steaming tea kettle.

  “Lyme-heads,” the man nodded toward Hog and Bu. “Be welcome in my shop.” Silence filled the room as they smoked and drank bitter tea. “I have many fine things.”

  “Too fine for us, I fear,” Hog said, apologetically.

  Kunnok raised a thick black eyebrow. “You came to town with gold in your pockets. A man with gold in his pockets is rich, if he is wise. He can make many good trades and grow richer. More importantly, he can make many good friendships. He is a tree who spreads shade and gives fruit.” He made a wide gesture evoking a tree in the space between them, and indicating the vast green shade it might provide them.