by Mok, DK
Elhan del Gavir—the woman from the sign-up table. She had a cut lip, a grazed cheek, and plenty of bruises—mostly on her fists.
Seris glanced at Qara, who was returning to the podium. The crowd, which had dissipated slightly over the morning, had returned for the finale.
“Combatants,” said Qara, “you may work in allied pairs or groups, but only the last contestant standing is the victor. If you wish to capitulate, simply sit down, and you will be considered a non-combatant in the ring. Good luck, and may the best challenger win. Commence!”
The crowd roared in a swell of bloodlust, their voices filling the forecourt in a deafening tsunami. Then they fell abruptly silent, fading into uncertain horror.
Seris couldn’t be sure what he’d seen—it had been a blur of movement and cracking noises. And then an awful silence.
A lone figure stood on the platform, blood dripping from its hands. Along one side of the ring lay a neat line of nine motionless, prostrate bodies.
The figure slowly lifted one bloodied hand to point at the row of bodies.
“I ordered them according to severity of injury,” said Elhan, turning shiny black eyes towards Qara and Seris. “Hey, cleric, you gonna come do your thing?”
Seris swallowed a ball of hysterical panic and glanced at Qara, who stood very rigidly with an unreadable expression.
“We have a victor,” said Qara, her voice carrying over the silent crowd.
Seris didn’t sleep well that night. He woke in feverish starts, mumbling in fitful half-dreams. At one point, he woke to find Morle standing beside his bed, proffering a mug of warm milk with an understanding expression.
The following morning, Seris wore his hood drawn to hide the dark circles beneath his eyes. Qara glanced at Seris but said nothing as she handed him the schedule for the day. Seris blinked tiredly at the complicated diagram, thinking that it resembled the family tree of an extremely fertile cult. He didn’t know what it meant, aside from a very busy day.
A large section of the forecourt had been roped off, and a row of archery targets lined the breadth of the square. City guards stood at intervals along the cordon, keeping the chattering crowd a safe distance from the competitors.
Qara leapt easily onto a raised walkway, and Seris clambered up after her. They looked out onto a sea of longbows, shortbows, crossbows, and the occasional confused javelineer.
“The second challenge is a test of long-range combat,” said Qara to the crowd. “Challengers will compete in groups of four, with the winner of each round progressing to the next stage. The last remaining challenger will be the victor. Take your marks and commence!”
The day was filled with the rush and thud of flying arrows, punctuated by horn blasts while pages cleared the targets. Seris’s gaze sifted through the bustle of competitors, looking for the figure in the hessian sacking.
The Kali-Adelsa.
He’d heard the phrase only a handful of times before, and always as a passing joke. Be a good girl or the Kali-Adelsa will get you. Stop wailing or the Kali-Adelsa will rip out your tongue. Seris assumed it referred to some monster from folklore, but then again, he rarely socialised with the locals.
Seris had lived at the temple since he was five, and he’d never felt a need to leave the solace of its walls except to visit those too sick to come to him. Eliantora’s acceptance gave him peace, his books gave him knowledge, and Petr and Morle were all the family he needed. However, it would seem that his atrophied circle of acquaintances had left him with a sizeable gap in his knowledge.
Seris cleared his throat.
“Lord Qara, what’s the Kali-Adelsa?”
Qara stiffened slightly, but her expression remained neutral.
“It depends who you ask.”
“I’m asking you.”
Rather conveniently for Qara, it was at this point that a guard in the crowd signalled to her with two triangular green flags. Qara gave Seris an apologetic look before turning to the crowd.
“Final four, step forward!”
The number of challengers had progressively thinned, and now the competitors’ space was clear except for four archers. The last figure in the line was unmistakeable, and a mutter rippled through the crowd. Seris felt his own heart beating faster as Elhan blinked slowly at her competitors.
“First challenger,” called Qara, “step forward.”
The first to step forward was a ruggedly windswept ranger with an oversized bow. He sighted down a tanned arm, lining up the solitary target at the far end of the forecourt. The ranger smiled, and a faint breeze stirred through the square. There was a buzz, a sharp thud, and the crowd craned forward as a page scampered to check the target.
Bullseye.
He couldn’t have centred it more accurately with a geometry set.
“Second challenger, step forward.”
The second archer was a slender woman with a long, brown braid and a cherrywood bow. She nocked her arrow and loosed it in one rapid, fluid movement. There was a whizz and a crack, and the crowd was already cheering as the page ran to the target.
The ranger’s arrow had been split down the middle, as though bisected by a fine blade. The woman smirked at the ranger, who gave her a “bring it on” expression. There were going to be some interesting barroom brawls that night.
“Third challenger, step forward,” said Qara.
The third challenger was a young man with rather unfortunate blond ringlets and a bow of silver ash. He stepped forward and drew his arrow with effortless grace, closing his eyes as though listening for a distant voice. His arrow barely made a noise as it slid through the air, and the crowd didn’t need an announcement to know it had split the woman’s arrow. It was starting to look like this could take a while.
Qara’s voice tightened.
“Fourth challenger, step forward.”
The crowd held its collective breath as Elhan smiled, slowly drawing an arrow from her badly scuffed quiver. A thousand pairs of eyes watched as she nocked the arrow, and then Seris realised, she hadn’t stepped forward.
There was a sudden…something, that Seris couldn’t quite describe. It was like a pulse, a suffocating wave that swept through the forecourt with incredible speed. For a moment, it was as though someone had snatched the breath from his lungs, but looking at the silent crowd, he couldn’t be sure that anyone else had felt it.
There was a twang, and very soon after it—too soon after it—came a thud. A breathless audience stared at Elhan, who stood squarely facing her three fellow challengers, her bowstring still vibrating. The blond man looked down, very slowly, at his neatly severed bowstring, then turned to look at the slender woman beside him. The slender woman stared at a needle-thin graze on her forearm, just starting to bead with blood. The slender woman finally turned to look at the ranger beside her, whose gaze was fixed on Elhan’s arrow, buried deep in the quiver on his back.
Qara’s fists were clenched, her knuckles shining white, although her face remained composed.
“Challenger number four, you are disqualif—”
Qara stopped as a guard signalled urgently with two yellow flags. The blond man was scurrying into the crowd, clutching his damaged bow and throwing nervous glances over his shoulder. The slender woman followed suit, one hand clasped over her bleeding arm. Elhan threw a casual glance at the ranger, giving him a wide, sharp smile. Qara watched helplessly as the ranger disappeared down a side street, still trying to pull Elhan’s arrow from his quiver.
Seris glanced at Qara, seeing the speechless frustration tremble through her as she struggled with several conflicting and possibly inadvisable impulses. Seris moved quickly to stand beside Qara, pulling back his hood and turning to the crowd.
“We have a victor!” said Seris, somewhat uncertainly.
The crowd seemed equally uncertain as they gave a ragged and slightly questioning cheer, which petered out into shrugs and looks of confusion.
“Um, the third and final challenge is tomorrow,” said
Seris loudly. “Please come back then. Especially the challengers.”
Seris felt Qara’s hand on his shoulder, and she gave it a slight squeeze before firmly guiding him off the walkway.
“Lord Qara, don’t you think I should know?”
Qara sighed, watching the crowd disperse.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. You should get as much sleep as possible tonight.”
“You still haven’t told me what the third challenge is.”
A strange look flashed across Qara’s eyes, and for some reason it made Seris very, very worried. Qara glanced towards the dimming sky.
“It’ll be an early start tomorrow, cleric of Eliantora. Get some sleep.”
The only noise in the room was the soft crackle of candle flames, and a quill scratching over parchment.
“He’s asking questions,” said Qara.
“Of course he’s asking questions,” said Falon. “He’s not an idiot. If he was an idiot, he’d be my brother.”
Qara looked around the study uncomfortably. She knew better than to rebuke Falon during one of his moods, but he seemed to be having these moods more often. It was fair enough for him to vent about his brother in private, but it wasn’t appropriate for such comments to spill into public.
It was true that she and Falon used to pelt Valamon with pebbles, just to see how long he would stand there before running away, but they hadn’t done that in years now. And while Qara was firmly against the idea of Valamon becoming king, she didn’t want him to suffer terribly, either. She’d supported the idea of sending him to the Temple of Fiviel—they did a lot of weaving there and crushing things in pestles, which she thought Valamon might like.
There had always been whispers around the court that Valamon wasn’t normal. As a child, Qara had heard her own parents talking with the other nobles, low voices drifting from the drawing rooms. He’d be the kind of king who gave royalty a bad name.
The royal minders were always having to pat him down, and they’d find his pockets full of nails, pieces of string, and shards of broken glass. Once, the chamberlain’s staff found a crocodile egg hatching in Valamon’s coat pocket, and when they demanded to know where he’d gotten it, he just stared at them with his melancholy eyes. When the staff had taken it away from him, he didn’t speak for two days afterwards. Even Qara and Falon had left him alone for a while after that.
Qara tried not to think about where Valamon was now, and she forced herself to focus on the papers spread over Falon’s desk.
“Everyone knows that she’s going to win,” said Qara.
“Then she wins.”
“She’s the Kali-Adelsa! The Accursed One. If the king were here—”
Falon put down his quill.
“The king isn’t here. It’s a public tournament, and if she wins, then she goes on the quest to bring Valamon back. The king’s obsessions are not necessarily mine. There are far greater threats facing the Talgaran Empire than the Kali-Adelsa.”
Qara remained silent as Falon plucked a stained sheet of parchment from his desk. His gaze trailed down to the last name on the list, the blood faded to a ferrous brown.
“Frankly, I’d like to see what my father’s so afraid of.”
As the morning light tipped over into the castle forecourt, several dozen challengers awaited their final task with the dogged optimism of chronic Find-The-Pea patrons. Admittedly, ten thousand gold pieces could buy a lot of optimism.
Only a loose crowd of spectators had turned up, not overly excited by the plain wooden desk on the flagstones. Qara soon emerged from the supervisor’s tent, her breath fogging in the brisk air. She glanced over the knot of competitors before stepping onto the sturdy desk. Seris was not with her.
“The third and final challenge is wit,” said Qara. “We have hidden a scroll—marked with the royal seal—in Elwood Forest, east of the capital. The first challenger to find the scroll, carry out its instructions, and return it to me wins the challenge. You may form alliances, you may hinder competitors, but the sole victor must have personally completed each part of the challenge.”
Qara swept her gaze carefully over the crowd and stopped on a pale face, looking back at her with a malevolent smile. Qara forced her gaze to move on.
“The victor must return before nightfall. Good hunting, and commence!”
As the challengers dispersed in a chatter of assorted alliances and excited plotting, Qara hoped that she wouldn’t come to regret this.
Interestingly, Seris was thinking the same thing as he stumbled through the murky forest, clutching a scroll in one hand.
Hide the scroll, she said. Do your best to prevent it from being found, without actually destroying it. No, don’t throw it in the river; you have to be able to bring it back. No, it’s not too complicated; just hide.
Everywhere he turned, unfamiliar animal noises filtered through the undergrowth. Seris had heard rumours that bears roamed Elwood Forest, as well as giant owls that would try to carry away your head. After several exhausting hours of walking in circles, Seris started to think that perhaps he should just sit down and wait to be found. That was when the other noises started.
Voices flitted softly through the trees. The sound of footsteps, the crack of twigs. And in the distance, the occasional scream. Seris started moving more urgently, but the sounds grew closer, more desperate. At some point, Seris started running.
Seris had the distinct feeling that this third challenge was intended for him as much as for the competitors. He could imagine Falon casually deciding that he wanted to see how well the cleric performed under pressure—how long could he hide, how far could he run, how well could he keep a secret.
Seris’s lungs were starting to burn, and still the noises drew closer. A snap here, a rustle there, a broken scream too close for comfort. He glanced up at the distant canopy, catching glimpses of deepening afternoon light. Still hours to go—he wouldn’t make it.
Just stay hidden until nightfall, Qara had said. Come back at nightfall and I’ll give you all the answers you want.
Seris gasped for air, clambering over fallen trees and staggering through several prickly bushes. He could hear someone growing closer, seeming to come from all directions. He took a few steps one way, then a few steps another, whirling at the thundering footsteps charging towards him.
There was a sudden scream, and the footsteps stopped abruptly. Seris spun around, his throat so tight he could barely breathe. Like a shadow with a face, she stood perfectly still against the dark trees. Elhan took a step towards him, and something about her seemed to jitter in the shadows.
“Hello, cleric,” said Elhan. “You have something of mine.”
Seris felt as though his chest were in a vise, his feet frozen to the ground.
She found you, fair and square, thought Seris. Just give her the damn scroll.
Seris stared at Elhan, Qara’s instructions circling his mind. Protect the scroll. Stay hidden. Return to her at nightfall. A strange, queasy delirium seemed to rise through Seris, and his hand clenched the scroll.
Ah, the hell with it.
Seris turned and sprinted away into the forest, racing through the towering pines, tearing through the undergrowth. His feet pounded across the damp earth, his throat searing as he struggled for air. He ran until he couldn’t breathe, until his steps became a stagger.
The shafts of amber light were fading from the forest when his legs gave way. Hurting in all kinds of unfamiliar places but still gripping the scroll, Seris twisted to look over his shoulder. She stood mere feet away, like a ghost in the growing darkness, leaning calmly against a tree as though she hadn’t even moved.
“Go on,” said Elhan. “I like watching you run.”
Dizzy with exhaustion, Seris wondered whether he was supposed to eat the scroll at this stage. Elhan strode smoothly towards Seris, and he struggled to his feet.
He wasn’t entirely sure what happened next, but when his head stopped spinning he was lying on his back in the mud
. Elhan stood beside him, cracking open the seal. Seris watched helplessly as fragments of glossy red wax fell onto the earth.
Elhan’s eyes scanned the words on the scroll, an expression of dark delight illuminating her face. Her gaze locked lazily onto Seris.
“Well, you seem to have made some enemies,” she said.
Qara wasn’t fretting. She was strategically concerned. Not a single challenger had returned—not even to withdraw, or complain, or submit a fake scroll. She hoped this meant Seris was tougher than she gave him credit for, but she was more inclined to think that perhaps he’d fallen down a well. She glanced at the tent behind her, watching the shadow of movement as Falon went through her reports.
A ripple of voices stirred through the loose crowd, and Qara turned to see a lone figure slinking across the forecourt. On some level, she’d known who it would be, but this hadn’t stopped her from vigorously hoping it’d be someone, anyone else. Elhan tracked a film of mud across the flagstones and stopped in front of Qara’s desk. Her pale, grubby hand held out the roll of parchment, smeared with disconcerting lines of blood. Qara took the scroll stiffly.
“The prince will verify the scroll, and any further announcements will be made tomorrow afternoon,” said Qara.
Elhan paused, her eyes suddenly sharp.
“The prince? You mean you don’t know what’s on the scroll?”
Qara looked coldly at Elhan.
“Any further announcements will be made tomorrow.”
A crooked smile formed on Elhan’s cracked lips.
“You might want to read it before you give it to the prince.” Elhan strolled languidly into the evening crowd.
Qara waited until the onlookers had moved on before unfurling the stiff parchment. Her heart stopped.
Kill the cleric and bury his body by the river.
Qara stormed through the tent flap, the bloodied scroll scrunched in her fist. Falon swept his riding cloak over his shoulders, glancing mildly at Qara.
“Lord Qara. Care to join me for a ride?”
They found him by the river in the fading moments of twilight. He was tied to a tree, and Qara had never felt so relieved to see someone so angry. She leapt from her horse, slicing through the rope with a few drags of her dagger. She caught him as he collapsed, and Seris shot her a dark look.