A Circle of Iron (Eldernost: Book 1)

by Greg Benage

  Chapter 5

  When the sun dropped behind the trees, the crew packed up and followed the scavs out of the ruins. Other than the narrowly averted row between Quinix and Blind Tom, they hadn’t done much except spin the iron on the scrying tablet to see if any wights came close enough to kill. They hadn’t, in Thorn’s judgment, so there’d been plenty of time to enjoy the sunshine and get used to being in the ruins. When they got back to the town, they made straightaway for the Duck and Quinix came with them.

  Thorn sat at one end of their table with the wizard across from him. The scavs who’d retained their services were in the same place as well. The expressions on their faces didn’t seem too happy.

  “Our patrons are giving us the stink eye,” said Thorn.

  Quinix leaned over, his belly spilling over the surface of the old table. “Perhaps we showed insufficient industry to meet their expectations.”

  “If you mean they think we’re lazy, I expect you’re right. Still, I guess they all came back with their blood where it’s supposed to be, and it didn’t even cost them anything.”

  Quinix fidgeted with his cup. “Do you think there will be fighting tomorrow?”

  “With any luck,” said Thorn. “I guess we need to start killing wights if we expect to get paid.”

  “Have you been in a lot of fights?”

  “More than I’d like.” He looked up and squinted at the wizard. “I guess you haven’t done a lot of it yourself.”

  Quinix shook his head. “Never…not since I was a young lad, anyway, and I wasn’t any good at it even then.”

  “Well, you’ve never been in a real fight, then. The scuffles you were in as a boy, they don’t count for anything seeing how you always had a choice about it. Anyone right in the head, he has a choice he’ll choose not to fight. Easier to walk away or even take a beating than it is to fight.”

  “I’ll bet you weren’t right in the head, when you were a boy.”

  Thorn snorted. “No, I never was right in the head. But you’ll find a fight to the death is another matter. Choice ain’t got nothing to do with it. When someone’s trying to kill you, even if it’s a wight, you do what you got to do without even thinking about it.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  Thorn nodded. “Your fear don’t go away. Everything else does, until your fear’s all that’s left. You’re so damned scared you might piss yourself. You’re so damned scared you can’t think, and that’s usually a good thing. Your fear is the part of you that wants to survive and you’ll be real surprised what it’ll do when you let it.”

  “How long have you been hunting wights?”

  “Long enough, and then a while longer. More than five years, with this crew. Not all of it in Eldernost—we worked the timber camps before.”

  “Were you a soldier?”

  “A long time ago. But I don’t believe they’ve changed the rules since then.”

  Quinix was quiet for a while. Finally, he whispered, “Are you and Mara…”

  Thorn looked up at the wizard, then over to where Mara was sawing a chicken leg with her knife. “No, we ain’t. We hunt together, so there ain’t much room for anything else.” Not to mention, she’d probably rather kiss a wight than a scarred, used-up old killer like me.

  “She’s beautiful,” Quinix said. His voice was low, but Thorn saw his eyes light up. “I don’t understand why she does this—hunts wights, I mean.”

  “Well, she ain’t no princess,” Thorn said. “If she wasn’t doing this, I guess she’d be tilling a field somewhere, or having babies for some dirt-poor farmer or one of them scavs going into the ruins to die.”

  “How did you meet her?” Quinix said. “I mean, how did she come to hunt wights with you?”

  The first time Thorn had seen Mara, there’d been a wight lying on top of her, holding her down while it worked at her throat. He’d been tracking the wight for days. It had stopped long enough in Mara’s village for him to catch up. By the time he got there, her husband was already dead. So was her daughter, though the wight hadn’t done it. The child was stabbed through the heart and there was a bloody knife lying a few feet from Mara’s outstretched hand.

  He’d killed the wight and Mara had joined his crew. He hadn’t asked her to, and she hadn’t asked his permission to come with him. Since that night, she spoke a number every time they took a wight: one kill for every year of life her daughter never had. There was no way of knowing how long her daughter would have lived, and sometimes Thorn was sure she’d lost the count of the wights they’d killed. It didn’t seem to matter.

  He shook his head. “Ain’t my place to say. Everyone who does what we do has a story, but you’ll have to ask her if it’s a tale you want to hear.”

  “You might stop asking questions that ain’t none of your business.” Mara pointed her knife at the wizard and eyed him along the blade. “You keep flapping your lips, maybe I’ll shave ‘em for you.”

  Quinix looked like he’d been accused of high treason. “I didn’t mean to…I just wanted to…” Mara ignored him and attacked her dinner with the knife.

  Thorn grinned. “You might want to let her tell the story without asking about it.”

  “So why do you hunt wights, Master Thorn?”

  Thorn smoked his pipe and didn’t answer for a while. Finally, he said, “I guess if you get started in the killing business early enough in life, you never really learn how to do anything else.”

  “But why did you start? Is it like Mara? Did the wights kill your wife or something?”

  “No, I kill wights because I get a gold mark for a set of teeth. At least I used to. I’d never seen a wight when my wife died.”

  “You were married, then?”

  “I was, and I had a son, too. My story ain’t as good as Mara’s. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before.”

  “I’d like to, though,” Quinix said, smiling uncertainly. “If you want to tell it, that is.”

  The first memory that always came to him was the blood. It sat there at the top of his mind like a fly floating in a bowl of milk and refused to be pushed back into the darkness. There was so much blood the air was thick with the smell, but his wife wasn’t lying on a battlefield. It was the straw mattress in the house he’d built with his own hands out of mud brick and thatch. Her skin was pale as ghost-flesh and there were dark circles under her eyes, like bruises inflicted by some violence he couldn’t see. “She’s passing,” the wise woman told him. “The spirits have her now. Use well the time they give you.” The babe cradled in his wife’s arms was a joy so intense it flared white-hot in Thorn’s chest. And he was losing his love, and his joy warred with anguish, despair and rage, and threatened to tear him in two. His wife smiled at the babe, and smiled at him, and they said their words. And then she was gone.

  For three years after that, the boy had been his life. He fed his son, and cleaned him, and kept him safe. He told him stories about the mother he’d never known. The boy had his mother’s hair and eyes, and every day it broke Thorn’s heart to look at him. And then one night he got a fever. Thorn held him in his arms and rocked him. He pressed a rag soaked in cool water against the boy’s forehead, and rubbed the poultice the wise woman had given him on his son’s chest. At some point during the night, he’d fallen asleep. When he awoke, the boy was dead. Thorn was alone in the house he had built without even ghosts to haunt him.

  “I had a wife and a boy,” said Thorn. “They died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Master Thorn. I really am.”

  Thorn shrugged. “I guess you can call me Caleb or Thorn, as it suits you. Anyway, like I said, it’s nothing you can’t hear in any corner of the known world. The wights didn’t do it. My wife and my boy—they just died. Truth is, life is cheap, unless you’re a Gray and you can afford to make it dear. The world don’t miss my wife or my boy, nor even notice they’re gone.”

  “Is that when you became a soldier?”

  Thorn nodded once. “At least when
you kill a man—or a wight, for that matter—you can say why he’s dead. It’s no mystery when you put your steel in a man’s gut and watch the light go out in his eyes. You can give it a reason.” Thorn tapped out the bowl on the floor and tucked his pipe away in shirt. He closed his eyes and drained his cup, slamming it on the table in hopes the noise might attract a serving girl. “What about you? How’d you get into the wizarding business?”

  “I had four older brothers and no other prospects, so my father gave me to the Schoolmen. A man who means to be a Gray doesn’t need five sons to begin with—he doesn’t expect to require an heir, you see? A son with no prospects is a terrible expense.” Quinix smoothed his robes nervously and shifted his bulk on the bench. “A Magister in the family still brings some status, though. I suppose it worked out for everyone.”

  “Were you in Cicosia, then?”

  Quinix laughed. “By the winds, no! It would have cost my father a great deal of money to place me at the University, and that was the exact opposite of his intentions. I studied at the College in Pavaria. That didn’t cost my father anything, and the Schoolmen there were happy enough to have me. They’re sponsored by the Duke, but their funding might be diminished if they found themselves without students.”

  Mara slid down the bench next to Quinix. “So then you went to work for Viorno?”

  The wizard looked surprised and somewhat uncomfortable about the attention. “Sadly, you, uh, do me too great an honor, my la—Mara,” Quinix said, stammering. “No, once out of College with my Magister’s signet,” he flashed the large, gold ring at them, “I was approached by the Leone family in Trevi. They are deeply involved in the alchemical trade, as you may know, and I assumed it was in that field they wished to retain some expertise. Instead, I discovered they wanted me to concoct poisons to do away with their commercial rivals.”

  “Bloody Grays,” Mara spat.

  “Indeed. So, then, when Lord Viorno was given title to Eldernost, I showed up at his door and offered my services. I knew he did not have a wizard currently in his employ and that he would shortly have need of one.” Quinix chuckled. “I confess, if I’d actually known what to expect I might still be brewing poisons.”

  Thorn and Mara laughed. There was even a sound that might have indicated merriment from Blind Tom, though he showed no other sign of having been distracted from his cup.

  “Anyway,” said Quinix quietly, “I didn’t learn anything of fighting in the College. But I will try not to let you down.”

  “Being honest,” said Mara, “except for Caleb and Odd, and maybe the dog, there ain’t a lot of what you’d call fighting. You can be sure no one ever taught me how to fight, unless you count twisting a rooster’s neck. What we do is just killing. It’s a job for a butcher, not a soldier. We get a wight in the net and then we bleed it. A fair fight’s nothing to do with it.”

  At the other end of the table, Big Odd lifted his cup in a toast. “May our lives be free of sorrow,” he said, and winked, “and may the wight never escape the net.”