Vayle removed her chalice from the brazier and set it on the ground. “That would have likely served as the bait to bring her back.” She squeezed two lemon halves into the chalice, then removed a tiny steel infuser from the tea bag.
“It was only an offer I extended her,” I said. “Not a plea to return.”
Vayle dumped a heaping of tea leaves into the infuser, then set it inside the chalice. “We could have used her, and her talent for recruitment.”
I ran a hand gently down Pormillia’s long snout. “We’re growing, Vayle. It won’t be long. It snowballs, you know.”
“It’s been four months, and we have only nine recruits. Half of them never make it. You know this.”
“We have time,” I insisted.
She looked up at me. “Do we?”
Pormillia threw her face into mine, nestling against my cheek. “I don’t know,” I said, low enough so only my lovely girl could hear.
We could’ve had two weeks, two months, two years. Hell, an entire lifetime. A time line hadn’t exactly been offered to me. When I’d departed Amortis four months ago, some fucked-up things had happened. Kale, now third in command of the Black Rot, had been tipped off that I had bounty hunters after me. The information was accurate. They came in the middle of the night, conked me right over the bloody head and tried dragging me out of the Hole with my hands bound. Luckily Vayle was nearby. She’d put some ebon in the vagabonds’ throats.
A few weeks later, I’d been ambushed while out trapping. There were six of them, and not one had any interest in killing me. They jumped me, winding rope around my ankles and wrists. Pormillia, as they learned, does not take kindly to strangers attempting to capture her master. She rode in like a furious gale, barreling into them with her muscular chest. As I rose to my feet, I noticed something strange about the ones who hadn’t been trampled to death. Their eyes were blank. Faces pale, featureless. It was as if everything that’d made them human had been sucked right out of them.
If Braddock Glannondil had still been alive, I would’ve pinned the incidents on him. He had a sweet bounty on my head, after all, and probably so very much sweeter if it came intact. But he was dead, and so too was his offer. Sure, his family — uncles, brothers, sister — could’ve honored the bounty, but they had bigger worries, like Kane Calbid laying siege to Erior.
Whoever was after me wanted me alive, which disturbed me. After all, when you hunt something, you aim to kill it. Only three reasons exist for capture: ransom, torture, and the procurement of information from the captive. My life wasn’t worth piss all from a ransom standpoint, and while plenty of people out there would probably delight in cutting off my toes and smashing my balls into bits, few had the resources to make it a reality.
But information? Yeah, I had information. Very covetable information. Such as, for example, oh… the location of a certain book.
Ripheneal had told me I’d made a mistake in burying that damn thing and hiding it away from him. But given he wasn’t permitted to stay in Amortis for long, what he could do about it? Soon as I came back here, though, to the realm of the living, he had the means to make me realize my mistake.
The Black Rot needed to swell in numbers, because Vayle and I both had a grave feeling that a storm was approaching. And a few of us wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
Eight out of the nine recruits who’d gone into Burm returned after a short while. The ninth never showed. Only one had in his possession the same poison Slenna had given me, but he’d paid for it with his entire purse. The other seven had failed to acquire the stuff. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t make it as Rots, but they weren’t the promising type.
A fight broke out on the steps of Burm. We quickly untied our horses, mounted up and set off on a path back to the Hole, before a degenerate fuck attempted to shank one of us.
A few hours later, we were trotting through a forest. The rosy fingers of dawn swam through the sky, showering us briefly in their cozy light before the thick-leafed canopy sealed shut again.
“I think,” I said to Vayle, “that I’ll take one or two up to Edenvaile with me. Get them used to the routes, blending in, and all that good stuff.”
My commander replied in the muddled tones of someone submerged in water. I swung my head around, alarmed that she was seizing, or suffocating, or suffering in some manner. But my neck, it turned so slowly. And my eyes felt like they were lingering in thick syrup, unable to move. My lids gradually closed, lashes falling across my vision in the form of fine hairs.
The musk of a wet, leaf-littered floor retreated, replaced by the cold swirl of winter. As my eyes opened again from their lethargic blink, I found the forest surrounding me was stretching, as if it was a mere canvas and hands were pulling at the edges.
As…sss…tulll. The hiss of my name languished in the air. Ast…ulll. Faster now. Astul! Astul! My world spun around me, and my eyes flicked up and across and down — the directions I’d tried to reach moments ago.
“Astul!” cried Vayle. She had hold of my shoulder.
Some sense of normalcy returned, but the forest… where had it gone? A snowy fog, or perhaps a hot, concentrated steam, bled in from all around. I couldn’t sense the cold anymore, nor any warmth.
“I apologize,” said a woman, “for the abruptness.”
The voice seemed to come from a snowy owl which sat upon the ground. It tucked in its feathers, relaxed its talons, then shed its whiteness, obscuring itself in a cloud of white dandelion puffs.
When the cloud dispersed, a tall, elegant woman stood in the owl’s place. She had skin the color of a translucent opal. A necklace of bark hung around her neck. Strips of cloth, as if sliced haphazardly from bedsheets, adorned her.
For some reason, the thought of withdrawing my sword never crossed my mind. Nor had it crossed Vayle’s.
“My name is Polinia,” the woman said. “Charmed, I’m sure.”
The who didn’t interest me — or rather, terrify me — nearly as much as the what.
“Not many people I know,” I said, “can twist a landscape like you’ve done. Or fly around as an owl.”
“I would hope not,” she said. “There is, after all, only one goddess of nature.”
“Let me guess — I’m looking at her.”
Her face was round and small and it seemed to glow the color of ripe strawberries when she smiled. It didn’t disarm me, though, sweet as she appeared.
“So,” I said, “another god? How many of you people are there?”
“The book,” she said, ignoring my question entirely. “It’s urgent you bring it to me.”
Vayle and I exchanged glances.
“That’s a hell of a thing to ask,” I said, “when we’ve never even met. Hell, even Ripheneal got to know me a little before jumping right into the thick of things. Speaking of that bastard, he sent you, didn’t he? I thought he was cleverer than that.”
“Pardon my manners,” she said. “I sometimes forget the nuances of conversation. Ripheneal did not send me. He is not aware that I am here, with you. And I would prefer it remain that way. So I cannot linger but for a few moments.”
“Why,” Vayle asked, “do you want this book?”
Polinia straightened herself, interlocked her fingers. “In the wrong hands, it will prove disastrous.”
“It won’t fall into any hands at all,” I said. “I made sure of that.”
“I see. Understand that its absence does not alleviate the risk. If it falls into no hands at all, that is still very much a problem. I am aware of your hesitancy. You worry that I will lose the book to a man like Occrum, or that I will offer it to Ripheneal, who failed to keep it secure. I will do neither of those things, nor will I use it for a power beyond that which I already possess. You often claim your word is gold, but mine is godly.”
Polinia aimed her ear toward the left, as if listening intently. She unwound her hands from one another as she clenched her jaw.
“Reacquire the book,
and I will find you. Please, Astul, I beg.”
A snowdrift converged on this supposed goddess of nature, and through the drift flapped a pair of snowy wings. The owl soared into the air, and the landscape that I’d known to be here since I first made the journey to Burm several years ago was drawn back in, like a band snapping back into place.
The brown of tree trunks crowded us, corralling us in a forest once again. The rain fell like it had before this world had become twisted and stretched. And for a moment, I wondered if it had all been a dream; things like that happened when you courted the nightmares I had. The psyche breaks, and horrors start infiltrating your waking hours.
But something told me it had all been real. And that something was a white owl feather fluttering through the air, landing softly on my saddle.
Chapter 2
Vayle was driving me goddamned insane. We made it back to the Hole on barely any sleep, and she was insisting — insisting — I go get the bloody book.
“The answer, for the fourth fucking time,” I said, “is no. Do you understand the word, Vayle? No. No. It starts with a fucking en and ends with a goddamned oh. No.”
She rubbed her temples and paced the vault room of the Hole, where I’d gone to fill a purse in preparation for skipping into the bitter North and delivering Patrick Verdan his precious poison.
“Avoidance,” she said, “is obviously not going to work. Maybe Kale is setting up the greatest network of spies as we speak, but it will not matter if something like that can happen.”
The that she referred to was the troublesome corralling by a goddess. It had everyone on edge, enough so that one recruit had jumped ship and taken his sorry self southward as we’d rounded the bend of the Midland Mountain shelf.
“I’m not digging that bloody book back up. Not for the goddess of nature, not for the god of… whatever Ripheneal is. Not for you, Vayle. I lost a very dear girl over that book. We almost lost our world over that book.” I shook my head, angry — so very, very angry — at Vayle’s mere request. “No, it stays where it is. Forever.”
My commander closed her eyes and pushed a sigh through tightened lips. “Tell me you at least have a plan. Reassure me that the Astul I’ve known all my life is still here, somewhere.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It appears you are content with running away, Astul.”
I knelt before the open vault, leather purse in hand. I reached inside and felt my fingertips swim in the coolness of smooth gold coins.
“Astul,” Vayle said.
“I’m thinking.” I closed my hand around as many coins as I could, hovered over the purse and dropped them inside. Again and again, till the glint of yellow peeked through the small opening. “That wispy motherfucker I told you about, the demonic-looking bastard there with Ripheneal and Lysa at the Prim.”
“What about him?”
I kicked the vault closed and stood. “I’m going to venture a guess here that he’s another god, one that doesn’t get along with those in this realm.”
Vayle shrugged. “A safe enough guess.”
“All right, stay with me here. Polinia tells us she’s not working with Ripheneal. Maybe it’s a lie, maybe it’s the truth. But she’s most probably affiliated with him, yeah? His reasons for wanting the book are probably the same as her reasons for wanting it. So I can’t trust her, or for that matter, any other god or goddess in this realm that might decide to appear from the ether.
“But that wispy bastard, he’s not on good terms with Ripheneal. He’d probably, if I could find him somehow, tell me… I don’t know, something that’d be of help.”
Vayle crossed her arms. “Tell me you are not intending on starting a war with gods. Given the options, I believe running may actually be the preferable option of the two.”
I waved away her concerns. “Not a war. Just a way to… you know. Make this all go away. Maybe their existence is tied to the book. Or maybe their weakness is in there.” I sighed and kicked a lump of mud across the floor. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. I should just give the damn thing back to them.”
Vayle put a hand on my chest. “I wish to live for a long time yet, and I want the same for you. I want the Black Rot to become formidable again, perhaps out of selfishness, so my dream of dismantling the slave trade in the North may be realized. But also out of pride. We have done enough for this world, twice over. Return the book. Let them play their game, just as kings play theirs.”
“What if it falls into the wrong hands again?” I said.
“Maybe it will. But it took two thousand years for Occrum to attempt a massacre of this world. If it happens again, we’ll be long gone, and the world can find a new hero. You’ve paid the price already, Astul — a far costlier one than any man should.”
I drew the string on the purse and swung it around my finger thoughtfully. Of all the mouths that’d opened and babbled on and on about what I ought to do with my life, Vayle had often been the most reasonable. Not that I always agreed with her or never disregarded her suggestions. Sometimes you’ve got to make your own way.
But this… well, this wasn’t one of those times. I’d never expected the honorable Vayle to propose something so selfish, but I guess sometimes you have to look after yourself. I’d done a solid job of that most of my life, until recently — until the burning desire to change into a selfless humanitarian had gripped me. But the pendulum can swing too far to the other side, as it had in my case.
I’d never been a hero, or wanted to be one. Why start now?
“Patrick Verdan will probably want his poison soon,” I said. “After I freeze my balls off in the North, I’ll hike back into Amortis. Dig the damn thing up, give it back, and forget all about this mess.” I grinned and added, “Happy?”
Vayle patted my chest. “In the end, you turn out well. You always do.”
“Round up some good recruits while I’m gone,” I said. “Let’s get the Black Rot rolling again, yeah?” I winked at her, then ducked out of the vault room.
Through the narrow hallway of wood-braced walls and muddy floors I walked. I stopped for a moment and looked back, toward the end of the Hole, at the enormous black door made out of pure ebon. I’d reached out to a few people in an attempt to locate my good friend Borgart, master blacksmith. Ended up finding him along the eastern coast, far north of Watchmen’s Bay, and paid him a handsome sum to construct an impregnable door with an equally impregnable lock. He’d asked why the piss we wanted to build a door ten feet from the conclusion of a tunnel, and I’d told him it was a fashion statement. Couldn’t very well tell him it was a gateway into another realm, could I?
I patted my pocket, ensuring the thick key was still there. I would need it soon enough.
Outside the Hole, I took a recruit by the name of Galmon to the side. Told him he was coming with me, into the North. His eyes got big, and he nodded excitedly.
“Go pack your shit,” I told him. “We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
“Right away, Shepherd!”
He bounded off into the Hole, lanky frame bouncing around like it was constructed of toothpicks. Good kid, although a bit too excitable.
After stuffing some essentials — food, wine, sundry tools — into my riding satchels, I mounted Pormillia and aimed her toward the windy stairway at the edge of the plateau, Galmon behind me.
A couple days later, the warm memories that come with the tail end of summer faded as snow crunched beneath us.
“You cold yet?” I asked Galmon.
“Good to go, Shepherd! Warm as I’ve ever been.” His teeth were chattering.
I waved him forward, and he came trotting beside me. “Pack more wools next time,” I said, tossing him a folded sweater. “End of summer at the Hole is the start of winter in the North. And it ain’t pretty, is it?”
“Snow’s pretty,” he said, breathing warmth into his gloved hands. “The crystals on the snow, and the silence, and the smell — it’s all very pretty.”
<
br /> “First time seeing snow?”
He nodded. “Not much falls in the South. None at all, really.”
Three days later and Galmon’s idea of winter being a charming sight had likely been squashed. The sky looked old and bruised, brimming with menacing gray clouds. The snow fell so fast and thick, it looked less like individual flakes and more like a sheer curtain of white strips spilling out of the sky.
Several messenger caravans passed us, each wagon drawn by two hulking draft horses, a steel plow attached to the back. Galmon and I rode the raked path. After about eleven days, we reached the pale stone walls of Edenvaile.
Galmon swallowed hard as he took in the sights. “It’s vast,” he said.
“You should’ve seen it flush with conjurers.”
“What was it like, fighting them?”
“Be glad you’ll never have to,” I said, pulling back Pormillia’s reins.
A squealing wind ripped from left to right. The guards atop the parapet tucked their heads into their shoulders until it relented. I, on the other hand, felt like I had acid eating into my flesh, even with the wool mask covering my face.
Once inside the city, Galmon and I handed our horses off to the stable boy. I peeled the wool mask up over my head and dusted the ice crystals and snow off my body.
“Right,” I said, “have yourself a merry time, Galmon. Watering hole is that way, and the brothels over there. Be careful, though. Last time I was in there, I got framed for murder.”
Galmon rubbed his hands together nervously. “Well, um. If you’ll need me, I shouldn’t indulge. I don’t hold a sword well with even a few sips. Bit weak in that area.”
I chuckled. “I brought you up here to learn the land, but more importantly, as a reward for obtaining the poison I requested in Burm. Enjoy yourself.”
The shaggy-haired kid — might’ve been twenty, but he damn well didn’t look like it — smiled appreciatively, told me he could probably use a mugful of warm mead, then went off in the direction of Bear Tavern.
I could’ve damn well used some warm mead too, but duty called.
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