“We simply replace Bashan with someone else. Someone better.”
“Simply? Like who?”
Owen lifted one shoulder. “Diaz, maybe? He’s an honorable man.”
“He is. But Suranna is not.” Nora stared at the dazzling, dancing light until her eyes hurt. Her jaw ached with the words held back.
“Diaz believes the Blade will free him from her influence. So I wonder why he doesn’t just take the Blade for himself when he can see what kind of a man Bashan is.”
“Because he’s not Bashan!” Nora blurted. “He doesn’t want someone to die for his gain. He’d carry that weight around with him for the rest of his life. And besides, who in their right mind would want to have the Blade? Only fucked-up crazy people like Bashan and Suranna. Power-hungry malcontents with issues.”
“Shhh, Nora.” Owen looked around, alarmed, as she raised her voice.
“Don’t you shhh me! Every wielder has been corrupted by it. Everyone it touches dies with blood on their hands and sins on their heart. Look around you, Owen. This is what the Blade does to its wielders. It makes them give what they never should give, makes them lose what they never wanted to lose. It breaks you. Because a blade is a blade. Its purpose is to destroy rather than mend. So we need to find a way to destroy it instead.”
Owen pressed his lips together, eyes closed again.
“All right,” he said finally. “I’ll think of something. Trust me. But I need you to talk to Diaz.”
Nora groaned. “Why me?”
“I need to know what he knows, and we need him on our side instead of Bashan’s. Think you could do that?”
“Again I ask, why me?”
Owen sat up then to give her a sharp look.
“Because the guilt is eating him up inside, and he would rather die than turn you down on anything you say to him. You have more leverage than me. Don’t you dare deny it. So you talk to him.”
Nora scowled. With connection came power. Suranna’s honey-filled voice dripped its venom into her mind through Owen’s words.
“Promise me, Nora?”
“Fine, yeah. I promise.” She threw another handful of sand into the water. Owen had failed to specify when.
* * *
The next day, they were waiting for departure and Master Caleddin in the communal square. The little man took his time, laying out the provisions, cheese and black bread, skins of sweet wine and mead, a little sealed jar of honey, dried pieces of beef and ham, sausages, apples, and dried apple rings. He talked and talked as the goods were being piled before Master Diaz’s eyes and praised every item, deploring the loss of the foodstuffs for the small bunch of pilgrims at the shrine during the hard winter months to come. Diaz said nothing until Caleddin had brought in a few moth-eaten, shaggy furs that reeked.
“What are those?”
“Alas!” Caleddin threw his arms up in despair. He had a whim for theater. “My master asked for furs to take with him. And we have searched for furs, Master Diaz, high and low, and this is what little our shrine possesses. We shall shiver in the colder months to come, but I have told my fellow pilgrims we shall think of our master and be warm in our hearts.”
Ugh, the oratory was definitely better when the little man was officiating in the sanctuary. Diaz raised his eyebrows.
“Where are the furs, Caleddin?”
“These are the only ones we have. I swear it by the prophetess. Oh, if only she were here to aid you.”
Caleddin dropped to his knees and spread his palms to the skies.
“Mighty Prophetess Hin, sweet Lady, bestow your blessing, we beg you. Bestow your rich blessing!”
“Get up!” Diaz hauled Caleddin up by the scruff of his neck. “And go, get me the good furs.”
“I beg you, Master Diaz! We possess nothing more!”
Mud stained Caleddin’s costly red robe. Bashan swooped in when Diaz let him go. He held the little man by the collar and pulled him close.
“Go ahead, beg him.”
Caleddin whimpered at the menace, frantic eyes searching for the all-black of Diaz’s eyes. The guts and fury he had showed when they first arrived had gone. Maybe because Bashan held a knife at his crotch.
“Garreth, go to the storehouse, knock anyone who dares stand in your way over the head with greetings from me, and get us something warm to take along.” Diaz sighed. “And Lord Prince, please put the knife away. It is not necessary.”
Garreth hitched up his shield and shambled off in the direction of the storehouse, grinning as broadly as Bashan was, sheathing his knife.
“The storehouses are empty, Master Diaz. Empty!”
“You are trying my patience, Caleddin.” Diaz shoved the little man away. “This shrine is known as the wealthiest in the whole north. In a few weeks’ time we shall return here with the Living Blade, the most powerful relic mankind knows, and you dare insult us with your lies and treachery and simony. This is behavior unworthy of any respectable pilgrim, and you shame our entire order with your deceit and greed. I will deal with it when I return.”
“He speaks the truth, though. The storehouse is empty, Master Diaz,” Nora spoke up. Several heads swiveled in her direction. Nora focused on one, the dark eyes of the half-wight, forcing herself not to look away, and took a deep breath. “There’s a stone crag not far from the sanctuary. A cave is sealed off and marked by a pile of rocks. I overheard his orders to the pilgrim scribes who tally the goods the women bring to trade for silver.”
“Is this true?” Diaz turned his stare on the little man again.
Caleddin was flustered. He waved his arms around helplessly. His mouth with the fat lips moved intensely, perhaps working curses to hiss at Nora. Yes, he had been up well before dawn, preaching in the sanctuary. But Nora hadn’t slept too well and had walked the premises unseen in the predawn light, searching for distraction.
“You!” Caleddin pointed a finger at her. “She lies, Master Diaz. An abomination unto the code, a girl who walks arrayed as a boy. A witch marked by Lara. The temptress has entered this holy place of innocence.”
Yeah, of course he’d choose that stale, old rag. Get in line, Master Caleddin. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will always hurt me. Nora looked away.
When Diaz ignored him and quietly sent Shade after Garreth with new directions, Caleddin tried a different tactic. He knelt on the ground and implored his prophetess to cast down fire from heaven to wipe out the abomination in her shrine. A fine drizzle started. Hin was ignoring him, too, it seemed. Spit dripped from his pursed lips as he prayed loudly and dramatically until Shade and Garreth returned with a stack of furs they laid down at Diaz’s feet.
“There’s other stuff down there, Master Diaz. Lots of it,” Shade said. “Valuable, too.”
“It belongs to the shrine,” Diaz said with a shrug. “Get a receipt for the furs and tell the scribes to get all the other valuables from Caleddin’s personal hoard and put them into the storehouse to distribute to the orphans and widows in need.”
He looked down.
“Please. I only ever served the shrine.” Caleddin had tears in his eyes and was tugging at Master Diaz’s tunic, pawing his thighs. “All I did was obey Darren’s word, stay true to his teaching. Receive me, Lord Diaz. Receive me in your mercy and I will do your bidding.”
Diaz slapped his hands away.
“You should only ever serve the code, Caleddin. Never a man. For they can fail.”
He turned and walked away, leaving the prince to distribute the goods to his men. Caleddin was wretched. Bashan turned to him and gave him his wolf smile.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t be here when he returns,” he said. “In fact, I wouldn’t go around calling myself ‘pilgrim’ anymore if I were you, either. Master Diaz takes these things very seriously, and he has a long memory. As do I.”
They left Caleddin standing in the drizzle.
“You need me,” he shouted at their backs as they walked under the Threshold. He was using hi
s powerful voice, the one that carried into the farthest corner of the sanctuary, in order to be heard. “You need me here. Or when you return there will be no shrine to come back to. Do you hear me, Diaz? You need me.”
Diaz didn’t answer.
Chapter 8
The lands beyond the shrine were empty and cold. Yet even here they passed homesteads and farms, isolated and far off from the next town, the straw-thatched wattle huts and barns mostly huddled together for warmth and shelter, sometimes around the occasional stone house. The fields around the homesteads were harvested already, morning frost on the stubble, the earth churned muddy by the hooves of the beasts penned there waiting for the winter slaughter. The cattle and the swine greeted them on their way past, though never did any human come forward. This was understandable, Nora felt. They were a small band of warriors, walking northeast into the wight lands with a half-wight as a guide. It didn’t pay to greet strangers who weren’t likely to ever return that way. Their ghosts might come back to haunt you.
They followed the ancient Wight Way, a broad ruin of a street left behind by a younger world, curving a winding path across the flat land, the only man-made thing to be seen far and wide in an ocean of dark green. Some farmers had lifted a few of the flat stones to build their hearths. And their houses and their barns, too. Still, stone bridges crossed the ever-growing number of streams, bridges that were in good condition and hadn’t been scavenged for masonry. The woodlands around them changed gradually, as though they were walking a slow descent. This descending became the prevailing feeling the farther north they marched. There were ever fewer oaks, birches, ash trees, and beeches, turning golden and red in the autumn, and more and more fir trees casting off their old needles to deaden any sound but the dry scratching of broken branches. It weighed heavy on the mood, the perpetual twilight beneath the trees, and talk withered and died on their lips, unless they cursed the landscape and their path through it. Bashan’s small company complained their way through the tiring trek by day, only to fall silent at the campfire by night.
Three days passed by in which they saw not a soul. Then a week. Then one and a half weeks. And when the canopy broke, they glimpsed the tall sky above a barren country ahead, where the forests and gurgling streams untouched for centuries came to a halt in the marshlands. Stepping out from under the last line of straggling trees, they faced two imposing menhirs, marking the beginning of the Wightingerode. Beyond the stones, the eye met no more obstruction to the horizon. Fens and marshes stretched far, far into the hazy blue distance, pools of reflected sky sprinkled across the brackish wastelands, undecided whether they were earth or water. The company’s route led through the wetland, but first it led them to the stones.
Garreth whistled, impressed, as so many men, with the sheer size. The menhirs were formidable. Diaz chose the way, not around the stones into the marsh, but through a narrow passageway that led between them, a tunnel, heaven-roofed, that seemed to suck them in as the wind breathed through it. The weathered stone was etched with pictographs telling a story that was now unreadable. And maybe it wasn’t just one story. It seemed to Nora that all sides of the stones were covered with a spiraling pattern of engravings, some overlapping, as though later generations had added to and rewritten the tale. She filed in after Shade and Owen, one hand trailing the polished stone inside the passage. Little light filtered down from above, so they walked in the dark of night despite the midday hour, two torches burning to light their way, one with Diaz at the front, one with Garreth behind Nora.
“Can you decipher what it says?” Nora asked her brother.
Owen’s head was tilted far back. His shoulders brushed against both sides of the stone wall, so narrow was their passage.
“No,” he said, eyes gleaming. “This is far older than anything I’ve ever seen before.”
“There are standing stones like these at the edge of the Sand Ocean, far in the south.” Shade spoke over his shoulder. “Talking stones, we call them.”
“Talking stones?” Owen raised his eyebrows. “Because of the pictures?”
“No.” Shade shook his head. Then he hummed a deep tone for several paces. “Huh.”
“Why did you hum?” Nora asked, intrigued.
“When you walk through the talking stones and hum, they…hum back. You can feel the sound dance on your skin, echoing deep within you.”
“Like a vibration?” Owen wanted to know.
“I guess.”
“Interesting. There are scholars who say that our universe is built on music, that the reverberations can be felt, just like when a musician plays upon a stringed instrument. Maybe the ancients knew this and crafted the stones as amplifiers?”
Shade rapped a knuckle against the stone wall.
“But these don’t talk back.” He hummed again, a slightly higher tone.
They heard nothing but their quieted footfalls on the sandy gravel between the black menhirs.
Owen hummed. Then Nora tried. The stone remained silent. It dulled the echo of their voices, as though it were absorbing the sound. They walked on for a few paces, and a sense of brooding filled the passageway, settling on the back of Nora’s neck like a warm, heavy hand directing her. She felt spooked, as if the stones didn’t want them there, and quickened her pace. The end of the tunnel was still just a single shaft of gray light ahead.
Owen cleared his throat.
“Well, maybe they were meant to be opposites, the stones in the south and the stones in the north. One set amplifying sounds, the other swallowing them. Markers for something.”
“A set. Like twins,” Nora said softly. “Tuil and Lara. Life and death.”
Owen looked over his shoulder, the flicker of the torchlight reflecting in his eyes.
“Maybe,” he said.
* * *
Beyond the menhirs, the road disintegrated into a soft squelch of marshland. Bashan stopped at the edge of the final truly solid ground.
“Gods, it stinks.” He wrinkled his nose as though offended.
In reality, though, except for the sulfurous undercurrent, they all didn’t smell much better than their surroundings after so long a time on the road.
Walking through a swamp was never pleasant, notwithstanding the danger it posed if you walked too far into it. However, as the next days proved, walking through a winter swamp was far worse. The ground, when it was solid, was frozen and slippery, and when it wasn’t, it cracked under their boots and then smeared its icy, muddy hands over their calves. At night, Diaz would find a place to camp, firm ground to sleep on—at least firm enough, and at least until morning. The first few nights they’d had a campfire in the middle of the grassy hummocks where they huddled close together. But in this godsforsaken stretch of land, there were no trees, no branches or twigs to keep a fire burning, let alone dry kindling to get one started. Occasionally a blackened tree stood ragged and broken out of the swamp, reaching claws to the heavens in mockery of the prayers of those damned here. But the trees stood in dark pools, far from the path Diaz had chosen. Although, path was not the right word. At all.
They followed Diaz in single file, making sure to walk in exactly the same spot the person in front had. But still, sometimes what had held up under Diaz’s, Bashan’s, and Shade’s feet, suddenly sagged and oozed. The treacherous bog sucked at Nora’s legs, tripping her wickedly, and Nora splashed into the muck. Again and again. And again. Until her hands were coated with the stinking, fucking peat in the making, and her face was speckled with it. It saturated her through and through, and with every breath she took, she could taste the fetid air on her tongue. There were no visible landmarks to guide them, so Nora wasn’t sure how Diaz knew which path to take, or from which sunken hole to refill their water. Maybe from memory. Or maybe he was navigating by the stars.
And then it started to rain.
“I have traveled the whole of the empire through my banishment. Through deserts and grasslands, and coastal plains, over mountaintops and under them,” Ba
shan said one night, shivering under his double-layered furs, nose dripping. “But this? This is the worst. This nearly makes me want to give up, find me a homely peasant wife, and just forget about stupid prophecies and cursed blades.”
In the following silence, Nora and Owen traded a look. If only it would be so easy. However, the operative word was “nearly,” although Nora also considered venting a little frustration and picking a fight about the “homely peasant wife.”
Diaz turned toward the prince. He had been standing at the far end of their small island, the drowning world around them, looking out into the blackness of the nightly downpour.
“Then I am glad. For you witness the effect of the Blade you seek to find.”
His voice was rough. Maybe because he hadn’t spoken much the last few days—none of them had. Or maybe he was simply as weary and tired and annoyed as they all were and his voice betrayed it. Bashan raised his eyebrows at Diaz.
“In ancient times, these lands were the border between two vast wight tribal territories,” Diaz carried on. “The wights say that it was Master Scyld who laid waste to both tribes who united against her under the leadership of the goddess Indis herself. In the ensuing battle, while Indis died of her wounds, she thrashed about in her pain and broke the earth into fragments. With her last breath she called out to Shinar, the god of fire, and he sent a fireball hurling from the heavens to destroy all that had congregated here. But Scyld deflected the fireball and rammed it deep into the earth with the power of the Blade. The result you see here: the breaking of the lands, the blurring of the edges between water and earth. And in a few days, you will notice the fires that still burn below the ground.”
“Great. Fire under our feet. That sounds great.” Bashan nodded, wiping his nose with his soaking-wet sleeve. But despite his deadpan voice, Nora imagined she saw a spark in his eyes as he appraised their dismal surroundings and found them…inspiring, perhaps.
Another day’s travel followed, much like the others: damp, muddy, gray. Another camp with too little shelter and too much rain. Nora woke, finding herself in the same squelching mess and wet cloak she had been in the night before. Nothing to look forward to but another day of travel, much like the others: damp, muddy, gray. Another camp with too little shelter and—
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