by Jordan Reece
Elario backed away from the glass. “I should not stand right here where anyone can see.”
“Stand and look out to your heart’s content. This is tinted glass. Unless you are holding a light or a light is shining at your back, nobody can see in.”
Cold despite his cloak, Elario said, “Why did Elequa send these nightmares to torment all of us when the quarrel was with the king?”
“It was not the act of Elequa but the Cabal of the Crown.”
There was nothing in Elario to argue about this as another scream echoed in the evening. “What does that mean?”
“The answer is long, and you would not believe me.”
“Speak it anyway.”
“Very well; I will waste the air on you. The Corpse King feared the use of spelled objects upon himself, but revered how he could use them against others. He wished to make the mightiest of weapons to wield against his enemies . . .”
Elario touched his covered eye.
“No, that is not the weapon of which I speak. He wished a mighty weapon to wield against his enemies, and the longer he reigned, the more enemies he made. For years, he had captive dervesh knackers craft for him. But the talent is small in number and strength, creating little of advantage, until one knacker thought to embed his skill into the wood of a dragontree. They never die, those trees.”
Of course they died. All trees died. Though, Elario admitted to himself, he had never seen one fallen or withering. “What if it has been sawed through? It must die then.”
“Even fully sawed through and knocked onto its side, a dragontree will swiftly take root if left alone, and in a matter of months, pull itself upright. And to saw through that trunk is a challenging task; its wood dulls the sharpest teeth. It is so resistant that furniture makers usually refuse to work with it, not to mention that it is considered bad luck to use dragontree wood at all. It is living wood, still and always. Just as scientific knackers imbue their creations with aithra, and an herbal knacker does the same with herbs to increase their power-”
Elario was silent. This felt like the one personal thing that Westen did not know.
“-the dervesh knackers put their energy into dragonwood staffs, creating a never-ending replenishment of those disgusting creatures wherever those staffs were planted. This was a most fearsome weapon for the king to hurl at his foes. Sable was the first volley of a staff, so the Crown could test its effectiveness. It was the order of the king, in consultation with his council who were noblemen just as cruel and twisted as he. A cabal of evil, which broke the back of the country they professed to love and continues to this day. A war aerial was flown over Sable, and from the mouth of its cannon shot a dragonwood staff. Somewhere in this city it landed, burying itself in the soil, and hell itself spawned forth. All of Sable was ringed with Dragons of the Blood to kill anyone who escaped, so that stories did not carry of what happened here.”
“This cannot be true!” Elario spat.
“And this is why I will inspect the third story rather than pop the sweet bubble of innocence in which you prefer to dwell.” Westen retreated to the staircase. Most of the entryway to the third story was blocked off by stacked slabs of stone. Scrambling atop them, he squeezed through the slight opening and disappeared.
Since no one could see in, Elario took a seat at the window and slipped off his satchel. His mind split in two, so that he overlooked the abandoned street of the present by evening and the busy one of the past by late afternoon simultaneously. The game house to the right was of the same nature as the Greenspry, for Dagen’s boys and Kaliope’s girls. The younger Westen watched that game house, looking wistful and envious as two handsome young noblemen entered with their fingers locked together. Squinting at the sign, Elario made out the name Strattami.
The lavish fashions from the golden ring were not here, but why would they be? This was a scene from long ago. The noblemen were in sleek black trousers paired with colorful vests, and held walking sticks with precious stones caught in wooden claws at the top. Even the young and hale had them. Dead. Strange to remember they were dead as they strolled down the street and emerged from various doors, smiling and laughing and chatting, two men sharing a secretive smile and vanishing down an alley. Elario wanted to go into that game house, order a drink and find a card table with an empty chair. He had enough gold to play all night and buy every man as many ales as he could hold . . .
“Are you all right, Master Elario?”
“Yes, Hobbe,” Elario said distantly, looking down to the empty road. “The dragon soars through time, and carries me upon its back.”
“Yes, sir. The dragon’s eye should be in the obselium, rather than in your head.”
He looked to the mechanical man. “What is an obselium?”
“A small container specially reinforced with a little aithra to hold a dragon’s eye. It affixes to spectacles so that one can see as the dragon, but then remove the spectacles when one wishes not to do so. Master Westen has an obselium many thousands of years old in his safe.”
Westen was returning to the second level of the gallery. “No, I brought it along.”
“Will it remove the eye from mine?” Elario asked.
Westen withdrew a glass orb, flattish upon one side and ringed in metal. A cork jutted up from just off-center at the top. Lifting the patch away, Westen uncorked the obselium and pressed the glass high on Elario’s cheek.
Nothing happened, and Westen removed it. “Why it has fastened itself to you in such fashion, I can but speculate.”
A whistle pierced through the city. As it trailed away, a howl replaced it.
“Ah,” Westen said softly. “They come.”
“Shall I guard from the stairs tonight?” Hobbe asked.
“Yes, and without a sound. Turn your light off. If they knew we were in here, they would be besieging the tower already. Tonight, they will have easier games to play than searching buildings bereft of prey for centuries.” Westen nodded out the window. “Here is meat.”
A search team of five men were passing through the markers to the road. Four huddled back to back as they stepped and stopped, stepped and stopped again. Two of the four clutched long sticks and lanterns; one had a bow with an arrow nocked and a quiver at his belt; and the other held an axe. The fifth man had his fist wrapped around the handle of a rusted sword. Less frightened than his companions, though, as Elario observed, he was standing behind them, he spoke sharply and they increased their speed.
The sword waved as he gave directions. The men armed with sticks broke away from the group reluctantly. Creeping to one of the old game houses, they held up their lanterns to the broken glass of the window and shook their heads to the swordsman. He grimaced at them and barked an order. The two men hesitated and then went to the doorway. Neither wanted to go in first, but one finally mustered the courage.
Their lantern light gleamed from within as they searched the place. Within a minute, they reappeared in the doorway. Practically scampering back to the others, their shoulders sagged when the swordsman directed them to the next game house down. They obeyed, going in and splitting apart. The lights trembled as they passed behind the windows; that was how hard their bearers were shaking.
This would reduce their numbers, if not eliminate them altogether. Yet Elario felt no joy at the stark terror in those faces. These men had doubtlessly been offered money to join this search. With the unwillingness in which they crept farther down the street, they were deeply regretting their choice.
One of the lanterns went out.
Chapter Twelve
The bow jerked to the sudden darkness, and the axe was hefted. The swordsman shouted, his words penetrating into the gallery as a wordless but fearful burble. The second lantern was still shining within the building, its glow holding steady near a window on the opposite side of the game room.
Something moved at the Strattami farther down the road, a blackness that spilled over the roof like water. It struck the ground without a sound a
nd gathered every drop inwards. A puddle, yet not a puddle, because it began to ooze with deliberation toward the searchers. None took notice of it but those in the gallery window.
“What is that, Westen?” Elario drew down the eye patch so the small glow of the dragon’s eye would not give their position away.
Westen leaned against the wall as he watched over Elario’s head. “Dervesh knackers called it a whelos.”
“And how does it kill?”
“It doesn’t. It takes root beneath the victim it traps, and holds him fast until something else kills him.”
The reflection of the lit lantern across the street remained utterly still. What was going on in there? Had the man frozen in fear? Or had he set the lantern down upon a table or chair, which seemed more likely, to aid his companion whose light had gone out? The three upon the carved road were not running in to defend their companions, so Elario assumed they heard no sounds of battle taking place. Just silence.
As the swordsman and archer called anxiously into the game house, the axeman thought to check around them for dervesh. But he only looked out and above, not down, before returning his attention to the building where their two companions had gone in.
“The sisters,” Westen murmured, inclining his head to an upstairs window of a tavern past the Strattami. A ghoulish face was framed there, that of a woman so old that her features were as wrinkled as a walnut. She was a white, wispy thing, a second apparition flickering in and out at her side.
“But you killed those things in the arcade less than an hour ago!” Elario protested. “I saw you do it!”
“They replenish. There is no killing of a dervesh. The dragonwood staff simply stitches their energy back together and the dervesh steps upon the earth anew.”
If he spoke truth, then this was why the royal campaigns in the past to take back the Wickewoods had been doomed to fail! You could not win against an enemy able to rise inexhaustibly from the dead. “So the Red Guard dies for nothing with each foray.”
“Oh, they die for something.” The sisters vanished from the window; the whelos inched ever closer to the three searchers, who were now pushing and shoving one another to go into the game house. “Once taken into custody, they don’t often run. This is because of the lies they are told: the dervesh are not as bad as you believe, no, and you will receive arms training. You will go to the Great Cities to retrieve wealth for the Crown, and after three forays, you are guaranteed your freedom, all crimes forgiven. Continue on as Red Guard after that and earn a fifth-part of any treasure recovered from those streets and homes. The officers make sure that does not happen, even if the hand to fell a soldier must be their own. They die for the Crown, who sends them there in full knowledge of the inevitable result.”
“That is deplorable.”
“It is an elegant if merciless way to rid the country of its undesirables. They retain what number of Red Guard they need for certain tasks, the trustworthy ones whose crimes are relatively small. Tasks like manning the Gates, and those with skills such as metalwork are absorbed into auxiliary factions of the Dragons of the Blood. They serve their sentence and are promoted to Red Guard officers, and are compensated. As for the rest, they are expunged as dervesh feed. First to go are political agitators and scholars who study the forbidden. Their families and friends are questioned and often conscripted as well, with the exception of the youngest children, who are placed in orphanages.”
Just then, the lantern moved.
The jostling on the road ceased as the lantern passed behind the wall. Elario blinked and discovered himself outside among them as an invisible participant of the search party. He breathed in the smell of sweat from unwashed skin, took in the tear in the archer’s sleeve and the shabbiness of his bow, heard the footfalls and a queer rolling sound being made by the searcher coming to the entryway, and turned his head to the whelos slipping over the flowers.
No. Elario flailed and found Westen’s arm. “Keep me here!” he cried.
Fingers tightened painfully around his wrist. The greater the pain, the easier it was to stay in his right mind. Watching again through the gallery window, he cringed as the lantern appeared in the doorway. Blood was running down the glass, staining the light pink.
It was being held by a dervesh.
Of a man’s height and form, it had an inflated face that bulged the cheeks and chin and nose to a gruesome size. Its body was equally oversized and lumpy, straining the stitching of its sack-like apparel. Having beady eyes and a leering grin, the dervesh was saturated in fresh blood.
Worst of all was the object at its feet. The grin widened, a tongue snaking out to taste the blood dripping down its cheek, and the dervesh kicked the severed head into the clutch of men.
They screamed, their group parting frantically to avoid being struck by the head. It belonged to one of the men with sticks who had gone into the game house, the mouth open and the eyes clenched shut. The archer released his arrow, which soared harmlessly past the dervesh’s shoulder; the axeman had moved backwards into the whelos and was jerking about to free himself. The third swung the sword in terror to ward away the monster in the doorway.
“Help me! Help me! I cannot get free!”
A second arrow punched through the chest of the bulbous creature, who came apart in a waterfall of blood. To be born again, Elario thought in revulsion, so the quiver was spent of an arrow and the effort wasted.
The archer darted forward to retrieve the bloody lantern, which had dropped to the ground with the vanishing of the dervesh. The light it gave off was red now through the heavily stained glass. Taking a gulp of air, the fellow thrust the lantern through the doorway. Whatever he saw in there caused him to recoil into the street.
Two white forms took shape upon the top steps of the gallery. Elario shrank away, but they were not looking up to the windows on the second floor. Their target was the search party, reduced to three, and one of them unable to wrest himself from the whelos. Flickering, the sisters descended the steps. The captive man was first to see them, his cry alerting the others.
The archer set down the lantern hastily. He fired at them, but his skill was not great, and his aim was thrown off when the sisters disappeared and reappeared elsewhere. The hapless man in the whelos stopped trying to free himself and instead shook his axe menacingly, shouting, “Begone! Elequa, strike them down!”
Without a party to hide behind, bravery fled the swordsman. He grabbed the lantern by its handle and bolted down the road to the markers. In outrage, the archer fired again at the sisters and shouted after him, “Coward! Coward!”
“You do not have to watch, Elario.” Westen’s voice was gentle. Gentle and weary. It was the weariness of one who had seen these things many times, too many to count or recount, and they had lost the ability to be shocking or upsetting.
But Elario could not turn his head. The archer was now backing away. One arrow had hit home, vanquishing a sister, but the second was proving harder to strike. She jumped and jumped upon the stairs and down into the road, the bow swinging all around as he attempted to track her. Here and gone, there and gone, here . . .
She jumped once more, and did not return. The archer and axeman looked around wildly.
A white shape formed behind the trapped axeman. He shrieked and flailed as bony fingers seized him about the skull, arms pinwheeling uselessly as his head was tipped back. A mocking croon sprung from the throat of the sister. Her incisors lengthened as she held him, and her jaw dropped open to bite.
The archer fumbled at the quiver for another arrow as the axeman screamed in pain and swung his axe futilely over his shoulder. An arrow left the bow, sent to the sister’s head, but it struck the axeman instead. The point sliced into his throat, severing his scream. Still feasting upon his blood, the sister held him in his death throes.
The next arrow passed through her translucent head, and she turned into scraps of white. The axeman dropped dead to the whelos, which released him and sought new prey in t
he archer. He snatched another arrow from the diminishing supply in his quiver and fired into it. The black pool evaporated.
The archer stood there alone with his chest heaving. Then a brilliant orb of blue fire floated out of the alley.
Meat.
“That is an-” Westen began.
“Abide,” Elario said. The fire lengthened into that short cloak and there she was, that beautiful young woman with the reddish-blue eyes and coy smile from the Hopcross. Sparks flew off her cloak and nestled into the locks of her pale hair as she extended a hand to the archer.
He gazed to her, hypnotized. He saw the promises of sex in that smile, in the knowing look of those eyes. This was no Dagen’s touched beneath the gallery. Dreamily, he smiled back to her with his bow falling to clatter upon the road. Elario wanted to scream at him to run, but Elario was the reason this man was here.
And nothing was going to override the seductive power of that dervesh woman. The archer drifted obliviously past the body of the axeman, glassy-eyed in his adoration. Sex. She became even more radiant at his advance, her cloak parting to show her cleavage, and then more than that. The man swallowed in carnal hunger at the fullness of her breasts, her nipples hardening to tantalizing nubs.
Taking her hand, he let himself be drawn into an embrace. Her lips pressed to his in a kiss, and his lips parted to admit a snake-like tongue. Trailing sparks down his scuffs, her fingers slipped to his groin. His head dipped back in ecstasy as she fondled him.
Then she laughed and pulled away, keeping his hand in hers. The archer went along eagerly as she backtracked for the alley. They disappeared into the darkness, Elario bracing for an immediate scream.
None came. She intended to feast upon him sexually before she filled her belly with his flesh.
Elario turned away from the window with his stomach roiling, and withdrew his wrist from Westen’s grip. “This can’t be true what you tell me,” he said hopelessly. “But I saw Abide in the Wickewoods. How can a dervesh cross the golden ring to Sable? There must be at least two Abide dervesh . . . and so how can they both be the goddess? Why was I taught that they were divine?”