by D. P. Prior
Those would have been dangerous words back in Malogoi. Speaking about a god in such a way would have gotten Grun stoned or burned or fed to the fire ants. But Tey was starting to see how things worked, even more than she had from observing Theurig. There was one law for the clansfolk, quite another for sorcerers.
She emerged from the shaft into a skirling gale that carried the tang of brine. Chalk showed through the grass beneath her feet, and off to her left came a continuous rush and sweep, rush and sweep.
Slyndon Grun squeezed out of the opening and pulled up the hood of his robe against the rain. Wind tugged at Tey’s dress, caused the sorcerer’s robe to flap and snap behind him. Taking her arm roughly, he led her in the direction of the noise, until she could see they were high atop a cliff. Beneath them, frothing waves rolled in toward a sandy shore before they broke against a natural barrier of chalk boulders that must have broken loose from the cliff face.
“You’ll have plenty of time to stand and gawp once you’ve settled in,” Slyndon Grun said.
The weather seemed to have soured his mood. Still with a hold on her arm, he angled them along a clifftop path parallel to the sea, and Tey could make out the hazy smudge of a building in the distance.
By the time they reached the drystone wall at the building’s perimeter, the sorcerer had grown sullen. Maybe it was the cold and rain. Maybe he was just tired from having walked to Malogoi and back. But either way, Tey decided to withdraw inside herself in case any word of hers provoked him.
The house beyond was massive: a broad, stone-built base with rows of windows, a turreted tower, and a second, smaller tower topped by a metal dome green with patina. It looked impossibly ancient. Certainly, nothing of its like existed in Malogoi. On the sea-side, the perimeter wall came within a dozen yards of the cliff’s edge. The way chalk crumbled, it would be only a matter of years before the sorcerer’s house plunged into the sea. It seemed a precarious place to live.
A rake-thin woman opened the iron gate to them. She was dressed only in sodden undergarments. Perhaps she didn’t want her clothes to get wet. Dark hair clung to her bony face like strands of seaweed. Her ear seemed pressed permanently to her shoulder, and her neck was grotesquely swollen. For all Tey knew, the woman could have been waiting there for Slyndon Grun’s return ever since he set off for Malogoi. Maybe he’d even commanded it.
Within the compound, more women stood around drenched. Like the one at the gate, most wore only undergarments, but a few of them were naked. Some were missing limbs, others eyes. Some were hunchbacked or covered with tuberous growths. The deformed, the injured, the rejects of the clans. They all held rakes or shovels or sickles, and from the looks of it, they had been tending the immaculate gardens, despite the weather.
Ignoring them, Slyndon Grun followed the flagstone path to a covered porch. The ironbound door swung inwards before they reached it.
In spite of herself, Tey couldn’t suppress a shudder, then she felt herself foolish when another woman appeared in the entrance hall, having clearly opened the door.
The woman wore only metal cups covering her breasts, and a narrow strip of cloth at her loins. Her auburn hair was braided into two long pigtails, her eyes dull and unfocused. She smiled coldly at Slyndon Grun, more sweetly for Tey’s benefit, then stood aside to let them enter.
As Tey passed, she glanced behind; took in the long scars on the woman’s back as she closed and locked the door. They weren’t neatly ordered like her own. They were angry, violent, the marks of another’s hand.
Instinctively, she pulled away from Slyndon Grun, but he tightened his grip till it pinched her arm. She slipped on the wet floor tiles. When she looked, they were smeared with her own bloody footprints.
“Calm yourself,” he growled. It was an order. “This is all new to you. It takes time to settle in.”
He led her through a large hall divided by dozens of ceiling-to-floor bookcases stacked with clothbound and leather tomes. Theurig’s collection was nothing compared with this.
Slyndon Grun brought her through a door at the far side and into a dismal chamber with bare stone walls. Hanging from them were all manner of rusty tools: saws, pincers, chisels, and planes. A rare few similar items were owned by the Malogoi, artifacts left behind by the Hélum invaders. In among them, she saw a bullwhip and a birch cane, daggers and hatchets. There was even a bear trap. Just seeing it set her bad leg throbbing with remembered pain. There was a trestle table, folded up, leaning against the wall, and in one corner stood a throne-like chair of wood, leather restraining straps fitted to its arms and front legs.
“Here,” Slyndon Grun said, kicking aside a rug to reveal a ring pull set into the floor. “This is where you’ll sleep.” He bent over with a grunt and pulled open a trapdoor.
A rush of foul air rushed up from below—piss and shit and stale sweat. Tey heard gasps and moans, the clank of chains. She glanced down into the gloom, looked up at Slyndon Grun.
Bronze flashed as his stick swept down, and then her head exploded.
THEURIG’S APPRENTICE
When Snaith and Theurig got back from the Copse, the village was just starting to stir. It already felt different to Snaith. Everything did, after what the sorcerer had revealed about magic, superstition, the way of deception. After the slaughter of the other candidates—by their own parents, Tey had guessed. After what they’d seen beneath the tumulus.
It had come for him: the Hand of Vilchus. Pointed straight at him. His guts told him it was a predator selecting its next victim, which was why he’d grabbed Tey and fled. But his mind wondered if that was just an animal response. What if the Hand had pointed because it had chosen him? But for what, and why?
“Keep up,” Theurig said. “It’s best you are not seen. A sorcerer is never accepted by his own clan. He must first disappear from village life, then re-present himself when distance has been established.”
Snaith bit down his anger, resentment, grief—whatever it was that seethed beneath his skin. The Hand, if it had indeed chosen him, wasn’t the only one. Theurig had gotten what he wanted. The Weyd had not been denied. But at what cost?
The answer hit him with crushing force as they passed the wattle-and-daub cottage he’d shared with his parents. Empty now. Gathering dust. It wouldn’t be long before the roaches moved in. He felt a sudden need for the order of his wooden warriors; veered toward the garden path.
“That life is gone,” Theurig said, sweeping in front of him to block his way. “Dead.”
Snaith glared defiance at the sorcerer, clenched his good hand into a trembling fist. His maimed arm was stiff and useless, a reminder of what else he’d lost, of the person he could no longer be.
Grisel Vret’s mother, Yelsa, emerged from the mud-brick hut across the way, fishing pole over one shoulder, a basket of bait in her hand. Her eyes widened with recognition when she saw Snaith. She was about to wave, then her features set like sun-dried clay and she sharply looked away.
“Ignore her,” Theurig said, visibly relieved by the distraction, though doing his best to look nonchalant. “They don’t know how to act around you yet. But they will.”
Maybe. But that’s not what Snaith had seen on her face. It wasn’t awkwardness around the new sorcerer’s apprentice, and neither was it fear. It had been welcome familiarity, a cruel trick of the mind in which things were back to how they used to be: Snaith Harrow, up early for fight practice; a nod and a wave as she went off to fish, while her husband was out hunting and Grisel was cleaning up inside, getting the house ready for a feast when her parents returned. Then Yelsa Vret had remembered. Then her guilt had once more hit home. Guilt at what she and her husband had been forced to do, and resentment that Snaith had lived and her daughter had not.
“The clansfolk are not your friends now,” Theurig said, watching the new stoop to Yelsa Vret’s back as she trudged away toward the creek. “They are your charges. Old acquaintances end today. Show them only what you want them to see. What it is necessar
y for them to see.”
Snaith heard the sorcerer, but the words seemed distant, meaningless, the incoherent buzzing of annoying insects. All he could think about was his parents. Would they have dressed in black and come for him at the Copse, like the other parents had? He couldn’t imagine it. Not his mother, not his father. They had defied the Weyd for him, hadn’t they? They would have refused.
Not that there would have been the need. Theurig had admitted he’d wanted Snaith and Tey from the outset. In whatever way, they’d stood out from the pack. Always had, since the schoolhouse days. What it was about Tey, it was hard to say, but in some vague, indefinable way Snaith had always sensed it. She was different to everyone he knew, and since the Proving, that difference had grown beyond anything he could have imagined. Somehow, the Weyd must have let Theurig know, indicated that it had chosen her. Or Theurig had his own reasons, and just attributed them to the Weyd. It was difficult not thinking that way, despite the warnings about such doubt and suspicion that had been drummed into them over the years, if not by Theurig, then by the elders.
But why Snaith? Why had Theurig, or the Weyd, chosen him? Maybe Bas Harrow’s lust for knowledge and Jennika’s scrupulosity had rubbed off on him, and in a way spared them the horror of burying their child in the Copse. But they’d not been spared the rot for tending him after the bear attack, for not giving up on him despite what had happened to his arm. He wanted to ask Theurig how the Weyd could have cursed his parents if it was supposed to be no-thing, but then he remembered what Tey had told him. Before his mind made all the connections, he blurted out, “Tey told me it was you that gave Vrom Mowry the rot.”
Theurig turned away from Yelsa Vret’s retreating back, studied Snaith with a long and calculating gaze. Eventually, he sighed.
“Tey is quite mad, Snaith. And more than that, she is trouble. It’s why I had to send her away. Talented, I do not deny, but she needs expert handling. Slyndon Grun’s just the man for that. Let me tell you, Tey Moonshine is forever seeing conspiracies left, right, and center. I don’t agree with his methods, but Khunt needed to use a firm hand. That girl is tormented, Snaith. Has been since her mother died. You are too soft, too ready to sympathize, and to try to rescue that which does not want to be rescued.”
Tey had said something similar on the Copse, about how he was trying to save her.
He tried to think of some way to contradict Theurig, some way of sticking up for the woman he’d wanted to marry, but he’d seen and heard too much. His thoughts were in disarray, and it was undeniable that a good deal of what the sorcerer said rang true. It would take time to sift through his feelings about Tey.
“So, you didn’t kill Vrom?”
Theurig shook his head, gave a wry smile. “Vrom is not dead.”
“But he had the rot.”
“Did he?” A cold glitter entered Theurig’s eyes. “How do you know? Are you a sorcerer yet? Have you studied the signs and symptoms?”
“His face,” Snaith said. “His skin.”
“Lesions. What do you infer from that, Snaith? It could be any one of a thousand things. The rot, I’ll grant you, is a terrible disease, an affliction sent from on high, but that is not what Vrom had. You know how the villagers are, though. First sign of a rash, and you are cast out, unclean. Even if he recovered, poor Vrom would have never been accepted back.”
“So, where is he?”
“In safe hands.” Theurig narrowed his eyes. “Safe hands.”
“Is that what happened to my parents? They got chased away for nothing?”
Now Theurig chose to look genuinely sad. “I wish it were so. As I’ve already said, I have no control over the Weyd. I merely convey its wishes, as far as I know them. There was nothing I could do. I’m sorry, Snaith. I really am.”
Tears burned at the corners of Snaith’s eyes as he asked, “Are they dead, then?”
Theurig shrugged. “Not from the rot, I’d say. It is a slow punishment. Takes weeks, even months sometimes. It may be they ran into another clan, or perhaps some wild beast took them. It’s equally possible they found shelter and still live, but it’s all much of a muchness, I’m afraid to say. There is no coming back from this. The Weyd has spoken. Come now, we have lingered too long.”
More and more clansfolk were leaving their homes, shooting nervous looks Snaith and Theurig’s way.
As they cut across the village toward Theurig’s house on the edge of the woods, Snaith came back to the question burning inside him. “But if the Weyd is no-thing, how can it curse us?”
“The Weyd is not a thing because it is above and beyond the world. It transcends the entire interlocking system of the cosmos. All we perceive, all we truly know, is what we sorcerers term nature. But logic dictates, as you shall soon learn, that nature cannot be infinite, and it cannot be eternal. Everything that is, rots and decays.” He looked pointedly at Snaith, still maintaining his long, loping pace. “The curse of the Weyd is merely an acceleration of natural processes.”
“But—”
“More later,” Theurig said with a raise of his hand. “You mustn’t run before you can walk. Basics first, and believe me, there are a lot of basics. We’ll start with them on our trip.”
“Trip?”
“To the Wakeful Isle.”
“The what?”
Theurig chuckled. “You’ll see. There are checks and balances in place, to make sure we sorcerers don’t make bad choices. It does happen, you know. The Archmage likes to meet all new apprentices in person.”
“Arch—”
“Not another word on the subject,” Theurig said. “Villages have ears, though Malogoi’s have been somewhat deafened since Tey’s departure.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Archmage is not a term these people are familiar with. Nor is it right that they should be.”
The rest of the way to the sorcerer’s house, Snaith’s mind was abuzz with implications, hopes, fears, and resentment. There was no simple way to untangle it all, and the effort brought him frustration and a near-tangible pain. Worst of all was that he couldn’t rid himself of the memory of Tey’s touch atop the tumulus. Even now it inflamed him, but it also fired his cheeks with shame. Part of him saw it as a pleasure to one day be re-lived, but another part—the part of him that liked his neat rows and order, that insisted on his clothes being washed daily and folded—recoiled from the memory and yelled “contagion.”
“When we reach your house,” he asked, “will I be able to bathe?”
“We’re here already,” Theurig said, holding the front door open and waving him inside.
Snaith had been so caught up in his memories of Tey, in the warring sensations she evoked, he hadn’t even realized they’d arrived yet.
“And for the record,” Theurig said, “you don’t need to ask my permission to bathe. But you will have to draw your own water.”
Theurig preceded him inside, and Snaith lingered to rap three times on the doorjamb. Then three times more. And three more to make nine.
They went straight through to the kitchen, where Snaith rapped discreetly on the threshold this time, so Theurig wouldn’t see. Two of the crones were tidying away the remains of a meal from the night before: half-eaten fruits and cheeses, great slabs of meat, potatoes, some kind of sauce that stained the dishes orange, and a couple of earthenware bottles with ruby streaks down their sides from the pouring of wine.
Theurig wrinkled his nose. “Too much of a good thing, if you ask me, but that’s Slyndon Grun for you. Oh, I asked him to bring this.” He stooped to lift a hefty clothbound book from a chair and passed it to Snaith. “It’s for you. The start of your long training to be a sorcerer.”
“The Four Invasions of Branikdür,” Snaith said, reading from the richly embossed cover. “By Josias Cawdor.”
“What are we without our history?” Theurig said. “And there are few better, or more entertaining, than Cawdor. Start on it tonight, and bring it with you when we leave.”
“For the Wakeful Is
le? When are we going?”
“First thing in the morning.”
THE CELLAR
Tey was sinking through poisonous waters that filled the cavern of coal. Not water—air. A roiling cloud of stinking vapor. She glimpsed the blurry outline of the Shedim swimming through the brume with languid strokes, trying to reach her. A shadow formed in the darkness beneath it, and the Shedim’s eyes blazed violet with panic. The shadow bolted through the smog at an alarming rate, propelled by the snap and rush of tattered wings. She’d seen this creature somewhere before. Somewhere—
Cavernous jaws opened. The Shedim’s scream shredded her insides, filled her skull to bursting, till she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t her own.
And then they were lost in the murk, the Shedim and the dragon-thing. Snaith’s totem mark, that’s where she’d seen it. The design Theurig had inked on his chest.
Tey was left drifting, alone. Oblivion contracted and dilated all around her. She grew mesmerized by its fateful pulse, half desperate to flee, half daring to open her arms to the dark.
But the stench. The stench overpowered her, sent her into a reeling dive till she hit something harder than the mattress at Theurig’s house, and in that instant she knew there were no crones there to wash her. It was a vague recollection only, but she knew she was someplace else. Something had happened. Something bad.
She tried opening her eyes. They were stiff and refused her. All she could see was the blur of her lashes crusted over with sleep dust. Or was it blood? Her headed pounded, a crushing pain radiating out from her forehead to encompass her skull. She lifted her hands to her eyes, heard the clank of chains, felt their weight.
And then she remembered: the room of iron tools, the rug, the cellar beneath. She remembered turning to Slyndon Grun, the bronze skull atop his cane crashing down.