by Jordan Reece
“By his middle years, paranoia consumed him. This man could see the seeds of rebellion in a suckling child. He cut a bloody swath through nobles and merchants and laborers alike, their schemes real and imagined, even a succession of the Marchos that he himself installed. He demanded that he be made a totem at the temples of Elequa, and for it to be required by law that the king’s totem stand at the center of every family altar in Phaleros. A totem! As if he stood a god in the pantheon, and not just any god but the greatest of gods! It was sacrilege even to those who still supported him. His own soldiers resisted obeying this order of busting down doors to check on the family altars. Religion is a private business! You worship the divine relevant to your life, your trade, your family-”
A man’s voice rose from the jumble of passengers at the door. “The Corpse King killed his own son, yes? My great-grand-da had that from his own grand-da, but I can’t vouch for the truth in it.”
“He did as much, and far from all!” Undisturbed by the interruption, Brother Shanus said, “He eventually turned upon his own family. Both of his younger brothers and their entire families he had slain, fearing they plotted to seize the throne from him. Then he laid low his own fifteen-year-old son and half of the council for reasons the same. The queen great with child fled for her life with her retinue, south to Nevenin where she took shelter at her father’s estate. Do you know this name, Master Tappan? Yes? Nevenin?”
“One of the Great Cities.” They walked together across the grass. The aerial awaited the train of passengers, who throttled once more at the staircase going up to the belly of the craft. The worker who had opened the door was now standing there at the foot to collect the tickets, which he dropped into a bucket.
Brother Shanus searched the inner folds of his robe and withdrew his wooden ticket. “Nevenin was one of the most glorious jewels in Phaleros. The blue of its canals, the red of its cliffs, the grand stonework of its dancehalls, game quarters, and bathhouses, it was incomparably beautiful. It was where the wealthiest nobles had their homes, where the rare gemstone called the peritoz was mined, and where the Rothshales in their greed hunted treasure to their downfall. The queen went to Nevenin, and the king lost all remaining ties to rationality. The Great Cities rallied to the queen’s defense, and this was insurrection. He had his war now! He summoned the full five legions of the Dragons of the Blood to him, despite it being Hallowmas and the majority of them on leave. Death was threatened to any who refused to report, and to their families. They rallied, the newest Marchos, the High Commander and Captain Commanders, all of the regimenta and ensigno, they left their Hallowmas feasts to don their uniforms and pips, and rally in one-part duty and three-parts fear. Together they marched out of Ruzan with Denelan in a golden chariot at the fore. Passing a temple on the way to the rebel cities, the king fell into a rage that Elequa still held the position of highest honor at the center. In retribution, he boarded the doors of the temple and burned it down, killing the vespers of Elequa in the most holy time of year.”
Gasps resounded from the few still listening.
“No more,” Brother Shanus said in a forbidding voice. “The gods had borne insult after insult in his reign, and they would bear no more. Ele in his glory, Qua in her glory, Elequa in their glory turned a wrathful eye to the king. The king had no fear of Elequa, so Elequa taught him fear. Elequa had thousands of divine kin, the very worst imprisoned so that they would not ravage all of creation, and Elequa consigned them to eternity upon Phaleros. The seat of the king’s wealth was in the Great Cities, and he lost them to dervesh. He barely survived the escape, at the expense of three legions, and returned to his throne in Ruzan to find it stolen out from under him by his own daughter, who was scarcely out of girlhood. Yes, scarcely out of girlhood, but of a sound mind and disposition. The new Queen Kesma had him killed, and she spent her long reign building from the ashes that her father left behind. The royal army was decimated. The treasury was gutted; the twelve Great Cities were gone. The nine cities of the golden ring gradually rose to replace them. The temples once again received their yearly gift of funds and she ordered all totems of her father destroyed. Elequa was appeased. Elequa rejoiced, yes, and blessed her with a life of one hundred years in good health, a peaceful reign, and a quiet death in sleep. The city of Kesmara is named for her. One of her last acts was to found the university where I work today.”
It was their turn to board the aerial, Elario shuffling the satchel and case about to get to his ticket. A loud, unnerving hum was emanating from the massive air vessel, and it strengthened as they stepped upon the narrow staircase. The scholar ascended slowly but confidently, the cane tapping upon each stair. Elario wished to siphon a measure of that confidence into himself. To trust a humming bubble to keep him aloft . . .
No, they have no interest in things such as precious gems! Spirits, Hydon, is the main commerce done between Rathgate and the Hethai. Spirits and food, for which they trade the fur of the mink they raise hidden in those mountains. This is what you will deal in, always fair, and it will mark you above the other traders. Always, always, will your spirits be good, and your produce fresh, so the men know you are to be trusted. Always, always, will you show great deference to their women, so they learn to overlook you; always, always will you have sweets and kind words for the children. And, in time, they may lead you to the dragons.
The words were spoken directly into Elario’s ear. It was the voice of the man in his dream, and though Elario recalled stepping beneath the overhang into the aerial and through several small compartments, the voice had distracted him so thoroughly as to wipe out all else that he was feeling. He waited for the man to speak again, hearing the rustle of parchment, but all fell quiet.
Then he was fully back to himself, standing amongst the excited company of the tour, and just in time to see through a window that they were lifting into the air.
Chapter Seven
The lowest level of the aerial was an elongated room with curved windows running the length of it. There one could sit at a counter and look out to the field dropping away. Down the center of the large room was a narrow, oval-shaped bar hosted by a mechanical man, who glided around within the space to serve drinks. A small eagle insignia was stamped on his cheek for the company to make him, and he had on the paneled hat to mark him as an aerial worker. Brother Shanus greeted him as Nollo.
Trepidation filled Elario as they were lifted high off the ground. This did not seem safe, yet he was the only one perturbed. Everyone else was speaking companionably in cheery, upraised voices to be heard over the hum of the engine. Some of the passengers were taking chairs at the windows and stowing their belongings on or below the counter; others were pulling out stools at the bar and calling to Nollo for ale; many were climbing the curved staircase up to the second level.
“Come, come, Master Tappan, fear is the enemy of experience,” Brother Shanus said, beckoning Elario to two unoccupied chairs.
Elario made his unwilling feet move to the chair. Sitting down, he returned the case to the scholar and set down his satchel. The aerial rose higher still and Elario gripped the armrests so tightly that he made grooves in them. There was the Grand Market below, a patchwork sea of colorful fabric roofs. It flowed on and on until the aerial ascended to a height that let him see beyond the market to the river. In a mixture of terror and elation, he exclaimed, “This is beautiful!”
“It is indeed.” Brother Shanus opened his case. Within were slim books of parchment, banded down to hold them steady. Each spine was labeled with a name of a great city. Fasteners restrained dozens of sharpened pencils along the underside of the lid. There were a great many other curious objects in the case whose purpose was a mystery to all but an artist. Untying the band, the scholar sorted through the books until he arrived at the one for Vallere.
People scurried like ants all through the Grand Market. Furniture was being carried one way; horses were guided another; plumes of smoke bellowed from the kitchens and hundreds of he
ads were clustered at tables in the dining areas. The sun shined down straight into the open roof of the carnival, where in the rings a tiny man was balanced upon an almost invisible tightrope as the audience cheered. Then a flapping banner overlaid the tightrope and Elario looked out to the boats on the water. They were coming into dock or leaving it, the cutters motoring along swiftly and the cogs more slowly with full-bellied sails.
Beyond the far shore was the heavy canopy of the Wickewoods, rolling away in a rumpled blanket of autumn colors that gave no hint of the dangers within. To the south, the Daine mountains stood sentinel, black of rock and capped in snow at the peaks. The aerial shifted to fly northeast, the market falling away to the river, and the river to the swath of trees.
Without pausing to consider his words, Elario said, “What else do you know of the Hethai, Brother?”
The scholar settled comfortably into his chair, having packed all of the books but Vallere back into his case. A pencil was caught between his fingers. “Oh, too little, but not for lack of interest. They are a tribe of several thousand savages, who rely on crude stone tools and bows and arrows to survive. They live in a state of mourning for the dragons who once dwelled in this land. Yes, even now, tens of thousands of years after the passing of the last dragon, they grieve.”
“That is odd, to grieve what one has never known.”
“They are an odd folk. Resistant to change, they detest all that is unfamiliar to them. They wish not to be troubled by our world; they refuse to set foot in the mountain towns and loath to have our people set foot in their land.”
“We trade with them, don’t we?”
“Yes, we do. But one must travel upon the agreed-upon trade roads into their territory. Stray and they show no mercy. Universities once sent teams of scholars to the Gates to learn their people, and those teams were either shot full of arrows or sent back mystified, as the tribe hid from them. We know more about the Ponto with all of them dead than we do with the Hethai alive! So many cave drawings in the Wyn mountains of dragons with humans on their backs . . .”
The rumbling increased, and then diminished after the aerial picked up speed. “What is upstairs?” Elario inquired nervously.
“There are four levels to passenger aerials. The two highest you will not be permitted to enter: the topmost is the largest and for the aithra-based compound and machinery that lifts us, that is engineering, and the one beneath it is for the captain at the wheel and the crew. It is called the bridge. Just over our heads is another level for passengers. It has dining tables, as well as private viewing rooms, bunk rooms, and storage.”
Brother Shanus tapped the blunt end of the pencil upon the window glass. “Now keep a sharp eye out and you’ll soon catch bits of an old road. There were many villages under these trees, and that road traveled all the way to Vallere. Ah, yes, and use these, if you don’t wish to pay. It’s my old pair, but still good.”
Elario accepted a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and slipped them up his nose. “Merciful Elequa!” he exclaimed, for the counter and window had gone, and he saw down to every individual leaf of the trees they were soaring over.
The canopy broke for a clearing, and broke again beyond it for a patch of broken road. It was twice as wide as the Hopcross, once paved in white stone framed in red, though now that pavement was shattered like some gargantuan beast had bucked and kicked beneath it. Pieces of white jutted up at sharp angles, grass and flowers growing in the gaps, even whole trees puncturing through from the soil below.
The aerial flew onwards at a high speed, the road flitting in and out of view. Then the trees thinned and fell back from it. Still so broken as to be impassable, many brittle, yellowish towers were standing alongside the shattered road. Elario recoiled at what the spectacles permitted him to see in great detail. The towers were constructed of bones. Femurs formed the four-sided base of each tower, climbing several feet off the ground, and arm bones carried the middle. Smaller and smaller bones brought the tower to its peak, where a human skull rested with a leering grin.
“You will see many of those towers when you travel over the Great Cities,” said a soothing voice. It was Nollo, who had lost his patrons to the rush to the windows. Other passengers with spectacles were crying out in shock and disgust. “They are the work of the Yorsa dervesh.”
A familiar voice sounded in Elario’s ear. Yorsa, they were called. Wretched things, lipless and lidless, sinewy and hunched and gray and queer-eyed, choking their victims to death in grips that could not be broken by the strongest man, and then sniveling and giggling over their human carrion as they made art of entrail and bone.
Elario turned in reflex to the speaker, pushing the spectacles into his hair, but no one was there. This was madness, to hear things only in his head! And that voice . . . why was it the voice of that man in the scarf to haunt him? Yet he wasn’t truly speaking to Elario. They were words from a conversation happening in some other time and place, and to some other person, with Elario as a secret audience.
“Yorsa, the god of desecration,” Brother Shanus mumbled absent-mindedly as he studied his previous drawings of Vallere.
“Do you have a drawing of Yorsa?” Elario asked. A book was promptly slid over the counter to him. Within were pictures of dervesh, the paper cold beneath his fingers as he paged through it. Perhaps it was his fingers that were cold. The dervesh on the fifth page had him swallow down on a cry of recognition: it was the beautiful woman with the flaming cloak from the Hopcross. Abide was written over her head, the goddess of perverted lusts. He turned the page rapidly, reliving her coy smile and extended hand.
Elario’s fingers went even colder, for there on the next page was a picture of Yorsa. He was indeed a lipless and lidless creature, his eyes large but his iris and pupil halved as if severed top from bottom, and white running through the middle. A nub of a nose hovered over unshielded gums and sharp teeth washed in blood. He was thin, too thin, so that the sinews of his arms and legs were visible through his gray skin. A hunch drew up his left shoulder and lowered his right, so he stood at a tilt. His hair was in clots plaited together and ribbed with finger bones.
A stained shirt was ripped down his chest, and his trousers were a strip around his groin, ragged pieces of fabric dangling over his thighs. He was half as tall as Abide, but far more fearsome in appearance. A smaller picture was to the side on the same page, this ghastly being squatted at the body of a man, his hands plunged into the open chest cavity. His face was alive with a sickening ecstasy.
They do not leave their victims easily, no. Not the yorsa. They catch, and kill, and desecrate over a period of hours. They cannot be used in a swift attack to overwhelm, not with their detestable habits. Back and back again, they return to their kills, even as they decay, for these are their playthings. For a swift attack, and brutality in numbers, one needs things like havok b-
Elario slammed the book of drawings shut and the voice disappeared. Lowering the spectacles to the bridge of his nose, he refocused on the sights below the aerial. The towers of bone were gone now, and the road was so thoroughly destroyed that it was less a road than strewn rubble carpeted in greenery. Narrower roads jutted off it, in no better condition, to villages shrouded by trees. Now and then Elario saw traces of those villages, but the aerial passed over them too quickly for a better look.
A short time later, there were murmurs of excitement from those seated at the nose of the lowest level. A giant wall was taking shape in the distance. They were approaching the city of Vallere, the aerial slowing and lowering.
The wall itself was miles long and entirely whole, creepers winding up the side to dress it from top to bottom. The gate was gone, rusted hinges of great size the only evidence that anything had once been there. The road passed through the gap and into the city.
Then they were over the wall. Enormous properties were laid out below, demarcated by iron and stone fences layered in greenery. These were formerly country estates of nobles, larger than the largest pro
perties belonging to the rich in Penborough. Still at the bar, Nollo was saying, “One estate housed a manor and formal gardens, a farm and all the necessary farming structures and worker cottages, a temple and a wooded area or park, and two cemeteries: one reserved for the noble family, and one for the common laborers who worked the land. These were vast plots. Some had iron works; others produced textiles; a few had greenhouses cultivating rare flowers that were sent to the palace in Ruzan.”
The aerial shifted and they flew directly towards a manor with steeply pitched roofs and turrets. On all four sides of it were gardens gone wild, but five hundred years had done little to dim the opulence of the house. Two three-story wings extended from a tower topped in finials, and many of the windows still held glass. Storms had water spotted and spattered them with dirt, obscuring Elario’s view of the rooms within, and rot blackened the wooden frames, though in one place, a carving of a rosette still could be made out.
“I wonder who lived here,” Elario said.
His question had issued simultaneously from additional throats. Nollo answered. “We are flying over the Vallere country estate of Baron Calvus and Baroness Denae Brizadore, who were the tenth generation of the Brizadore family to manage this land. Neither they, nor any of their children or grandchildren, are known to have survived Elequa’s revenge. The last to sight the noble family was their jockey, Gilwan, no last name recorded, who was instructed by the baron to flee at once with the baroness’s prize racehorse. As Gilwan ran to the stables for the stallion, he witnessed the baron ushering his wife, daughters, three young grandsons, and a pair of maids into the house to pack for their home in Ruzan. Pursued by dervesh, Gilwan fled west on the unsaddled horse all the way to the River Avys, where he purchased passage on the ferry to cross into Pentris, which is now known as Penborough. There he waited faithfully for news of the Baron and Baroness Brizadore, and sent many letters of inquiry to Ruzan, but silence was the reply. He raced the stallion in their name and bred it, which is where we get the Brizadore line of horses that still exists today. Many madcaps over the centuries have ventured to the Brizadore home in the hopes of obtaining precious gems, as the family owned highly productive mines throughout the Great Cities as well as a notable jewelers’ guild in Ruzan favored by the Crown for its artisans’ elaborate pieces . . .”