by Jordan Reece
“‘Ele in his glory, Qua in her glory,’” Westen recited. Still his voice had that gentle weariness. “‘Their many children were born high within the clouds and deep within the earth, and all of them were good and beautiful.’ As it was once told in the temples, evil was born of humans, and evil was what humans had to eradicate within themselves to find divine favor. This was how I knew the gods long ago, but the teachings of the temples changed after the Troubled Times. Suddenly, the vespers taught of divine prisons above and below full of Elequa’s twisted progeny, and named them gods and goddesses whereas I knew those names until then only as the names that dervesh knackers called their foul creations.”
“You swear to me of this?”
“I swear it upon all the long years of my life. I stood in the presence of a dervesh knacker, Elario, back when there were dervesh knackers alive in this land. I bore witness to his powers. I stood in the temples lighting candles before and after the fall of the Great Cities, and heard the difference in the vespers’ teachings for myself. Many people refused to believe the new teachings, those who lived in the Troubled Times as I did, and they taught their children not to believe. But that was many generations ago, and disbelief turned to belief among almost all. And those who persist in not believing-”
There was a scream from the alley.
“They are arrested,” Elario said. “Aren’t they? If they do not keep their heresy to themselves, if they speak or write or preach of it, they are arrested and placed within the Red Guard to die.”
“Yes. A number of the Red Guard are avowed heretics.”
The screaming went on and on, pained and terrified. The pleas for mercy became wordless gabbling and high-pitched mewls. To know what was happening made bile rise to Elario’s throat. He quit the window and was sick along the wall.
The abide did not kill quickly. She relished his pain as much as she relished his rapture. Please die, please die, Elario prayed, but it was a long and terrible time before the screaming turned to choking, and a dreadful silence.
He looked out the window. The orb of brilliant blue fire exited the alley and bobbed with the air currents down the street until it was lost to the night. After that, nothing stirred.
Westen unfurled the two bedrolls upon the floor. Stretching out upon one, Elario rested his head on his cloak, but he hardly expected to sleep. Hobbe was as still as a statue on the landing, keeping watch upon the opening above the rock slabs. It was not fear of something slipping in unnoticed to make Elario restive, but fear of what might slip into his dreams.
Westen sat down cross-legged upon the second bedroll. “Do you want something to eat?” he asked.
Elario couldn’t eat after what he had seen. And heard. “Tomorrow, when we are away from this place. If we get away.”
“We will get away,” Westen said with assurance.
“You cannot be certain of that.”
“There are ways to up your odds of survival in a haunted city. Dervesh do not move altogether in a mob, unless they have caught trail of a victim. Left to their own devices, they spread out from end to end within their confines, and it is only so far they can travel from the staff to charge them. A few do work together all the time, the sisters and to a lesser extent the havok beasts, but generally speaking, dervesh have no impulse to seek out one another’s companionship.”
“Is any of this meant to comfort me?”
“It should. The way to survive is to stay on the move. Always, always, stay on the move. Madcaps die because they don’t. They fritter away hours upon an estate or searching a particular block for treasure. This gives dervesh time to find them, to ensnare them, just as it had happened to your uncle when I came across him.”
There was sense to what Westen was saying. They had encountered few dervesh from the noble garden to the tower, since those foul creatures were wandering about through all of Sable. “How fast are they?” Elario asked.
Westen balled up his cloak for a pillow. “Most of them move no faster than we do, and few can match the speed of a racing horse. That is how we will escape tomorrow, by kicking the horses to a run and directing them straight out of the city. We will be gone before the dervesh know we are here, except for those who happen to be in our path, and those we will shoot. Once we make the Alannesh Road, we can take that almost to Cat-”
“Shh,” Hobbe warned.
They stilled upon the bedrolls. A beating of great wings grew loud above. Pebbles scattered up on the third level as a creature landed with a thump. There was a throaty cry of a bird, and pecking that scattered more pebbles. In a minute, it lifted, and the beating diminished into the distance.
Elario’s questions choked in his throat; his gut warned him to be quiet. All of this could be discussed in another place, a safer place. He closed his eyes and a light sleep found him, though he jerked awake often. Hobbe remained upstairs, standing guard; Westen was always in a different location: sitting at various windows, his head turned to the glass, heading downstairs to the horses, laying back upon the bedroll. It appeared that he was sleeping, though Elario woke again soon after that, and Westen was upstairs and whispering to Hobbe.
Gray light was filtering through the windows when his eyes opened again. Breathing in the bitter scent of his vomit, Elario crept over to the window where Westen was sitting. “Is it time to leave?”
“Not yet,” Westen said, pointing downwards. A thing was upon the road, feeding on the body of the axeman. Her snarled hair trailed through the blood, and every time she jerked her head to wrest free a piece of meat, her hair splattered where it hit stone. Then she crept away on her elbows, legs dragging brokenly behind her.
“Nechto,” Elario breathed.
In surprise, Westen said, “How do you know this? The dragon’s eye?”
“No. There was a page of drawings I found up in the attic of my home as a boy. Ripped out of a book, and hidden within an old spice ledger. The drawings were of dervesh. They were labeled Gerger, Nechto, and Ovane.”
“A page from a forbidden book. That would have landed your entire family in very hot water if discovered.”
“Well, it would not have been,” Elario said, though now he was nervous that the Red Guard in Alming might take it upon themselves to search his home. “Until my uncle sent this eye to me, I never saw Red Guard that far south. They do not bother us.”
“There has never been a reason. You are the children of the resistance, but you do not resist. You know little of the world, little of the throne, and have little chance to disturb the peace when most haven’t the money to leave their little farms. The coin you earn in a year is what a nobleman in the golden ring spends in a day. You were crushed in the fall of the Great Cities, never to rise again. But, if ever there was a burble of unrest, you can be sure the military would be upon the next cutters down the Avys to quell it.”
Nechto entered the game house. No, Elario corrected himself. The nechto. She was no goddess squirming over the ground into the game house where the men with sticks had perished.
The sway of her broken legs was nauseating. Whatever she found inside was near the doorway; her scabbed, filthy feet remained in view when she stopped to feed.
“Where were you when the Great Cities fell?” Elario asked.
“Upon a road.” Westen’s eyes grew distant. “We were coming back to Atara from a short holiday in the Crescent Islands. Lord and Lady Inamon, their sons and their sons’ wives and grandchildren, and several servants including myself.”
“I thought your last name was at’Inamon?”
“It is. In those times, after three generations of loyal service to the same noble home, a servant family was granted the surname of their masters, with at’ before it to denote their position. I was the fifth generation of my line to serve the Inamons, and so I was named Westen at’Inamon. It was a mark of great pride and honor to shuck your lowly, laborer name and replace it with the name of your masters.”
How had Elario not known this? “That mea
ns my houseman’s ancestors served another family in the Troubled Times, and before those times. They are Yens and Nyca at’Matte, not Yens and Nyca at’Repse. There are many people in Alming with at’ before their surname, and in all the towns along the Hopcross.”
“The tradition was lost with the fall of the Great Cities, where it was most prevalent. Those with at’ in the golden ring ditched the prefix long ago. At’Matte? They are the descendants of the Lady Matte’s servant lineage then. It can be no other; the Matte family was small, and she had no siblings or children. She was a formidable opponent to King Denelan with her wealth and connections. That woman did not suffer a fool gladly.”
“You knew her?”
“I saw her at galas and horse races. She was old, and had a walking stick near as tall as she, with which she thumped those in her way.”
The feet slid into darkness. It was time to go.
They circled the second level to look out all the windows, and Hobbe went downstairs to the horses. There were other bodies out there, Elario reasoned. That was why the dervesh had not all descended upon this road to scavenge meat. Seeing nothing out any of the windows, he shook his head when he and Westen came together on the opposite side of the circular room.
They went downstairs. The bolt was slid back as Elario mounted his horse. Then Hobbe wrenched the heavy door open. He dashed back for his black gelding as Westen on the white exploded out to the steps with his pistols at the ready. Elario was right behind him, his uncovered eye going to the doorway where those feet had gone in. His fingers tightened on his pistol as the bay clattered down the stairs.
Her head appeared a heartbeat later. Hair and chin wet with blood, she began to scrabble outside on her belly. Westen shot the creature with deadly accuracy from across the street. She sank to the ground and kept sinking until she was gone.
Only to lift her head elsewhere. Elario turned his horse onto the road, refusing to look down to the ravaged body of the axeman, or the decapitated head. And not the alley. Though he should look, if only to verify the lack of dervesh within.
Westen turned to check it as he passed by, relieving Elario since now he did not have to do it. Perhaps that was cowardly of him, but he could still hear the archer’s agonized screams. Their party fled down the block to the cross street, which ran parallel to a muddy lake encircled with a flagstone walkway. Pairs of iron struts lined the walkway at regular intervals, all that was left of benches for passerby.
They wheeled onto the cross street and ran past the lake. This path was taking them deeper into Sable, which Elario disliked. Yet there was wisdom in Westen’s choice, he trusted. There was a fair amount of rubble strewing the road, and one side street they passed was completely blocked by it. But what total insanity brought Westen at’Inamon into these haunted places so often as to know them this intimately?
Stupid to think of these things now. Elario watched for dervesh as they turned at the corner. Another wide, carved road ran between the lake and a row of bashed houses enclosed by wrought iron fences. A sudden rushing movement made all three of them swing out their pistols, but it was a palomino horse galloping down a drive. Spittle flying from her lips, the white of her eyes showing in her terror, she was saddled but without a rider, and blood was tracked down her flank from claw marks. She swerved at the road to run with them.
The dragon’s eye awoke, putting the horse’s mind into Elario’s, or else letting Elario touch into her mind. He caught her reins, experiencing her fright as she experienced his determination to get out of Sable, and brought her along at the bay’s side. Looking back, Westen called, “Let her go, Elario. She’ll live, or won’t.”
Elario refused to release her. Sable was not a large city like Ballevue; the hills where the buildings stopped were in sight after another mile. Westen swung from road to road, all uninhabited and unimpeded, the hills coming ever closer. Even the humblest homes had been grand in Sable, though they were more tightly packed than those in Vallere.
Gunfire boomed, hailing from neither Westen nor Hobbe. Following the crack was a cry, “Help us! Help!”
A curve in the road brought them to outermost Sable, and that was where they found the dervesh. Surrounded by gardens was an inn at the far end of a drive. It was under siege, dozens of the creatures surging beneath the first story windows.
The Melaca. Elario slipped out of time, which erased the dervesh and replaced them with a carriage trundling down the drive . . . young Westen was seated beside the driver and looking out over the rose gardens . . . Through the inn’s bay windows were sitting rooms with lilac and lemon wallpaper, and a groomsman was stationed upon the steps to the porch to welcome them . . .
He slipped back. Bushes and trees overwhelmed those painstakingly tended gardens now, and grew out of the drive. The bay windows were smashed; the lovely wallpaper was muddied from filth, bleached from sunlight, and slashed to ribbons. Dervesh were seething over the steps and scrabbling through the broken windows to the sitting rooms. Many of them were of a like kind, tall and thickset and armored at the chest and groin, with human frames but monstrous heads. Instead of noses they had elongated snouts with overhanging teeth, and the bulging eyes of a fly. Together they worked to take down the door, hefting a tree as a battering ram. Havok beasts, Westen said from the dragon’s eye.
A hand waved frantically from the second floor. Appallingly, Westen chuckled. Half a dozen of their pursuers had attempted to take refuge at the inn. Huge gaps in the walls of the second story and the roof let Elario look in at them. Two men were firing down on the dervesh with bow and pistol; the others were holding the door closed as something beat on it from the other side. The last man was waving and screaming for help.
There was nothing to be done for them. Shadows passed overhead. It was two gigantic, dust brown birds with deadly sharp beaks, flying for the second floor. The man stopped waving to shout in warning at his companions. Elario rode on, hoping to be far away when the inevitable massacre began.
They did not stop until they were high upon the incline of a hill. A vineyard had decorated it in the Troubled Times, the trellises now down and the rows almost indiscernible. Grapes still grew here and there, the bunches shriveled and drooping on the vines. A stream trickled down a rocky bed from higher upon the hill, the flow of water little thicker than a finger.
Westen dismounted and gestured to a trail past the old vineyard. “This we can take to the Alannesh.”
Elario’s boots hit the pebbled dirt with a thud. Furiously, he exclaimed, “They were after us for no good purpose, be that as it may, but did you have to laugh at them in the hour of their death? If living for centuries robs you of humanity, then I am glad to be spared the callousness of an overlong life.”
He was speaking as if Westen were real, and he was. Hobbe was the only mechanical man in their company. Taking the reins of the palomino, Elario walked her to the stream. There he rid her of saddle and bridle, dumping them in the grass as she drank. Opening his satchel, he withdrew his herbal case.
A boulder with a flat surface was embedded in the dirt beside the stream. He placed the mortar and pestle upon it and dropped a sand-stone, a pinch of sealeaf, and petals of spring tides inside. Grinding it to powder and mumbling to himself from temper, he cupped a handful of water to stir it into paste. The sealeaf and spring tides were for the treatment of the horse’s lacerations and nerves; the sand-stone was to amplify his regrettably small healing ability to slightly more than it was capable of on its own.
He sank his fingers into the concoction, gathering up the whole of it, and stepped to the horse. With a calming hand to her side, he pressed the paste to her gouges and opened himself to his knack.
Jazan Repse had never dreamed of having a son with a knack. A mechanically-minded man who fixed most of their farm equipment himself, it intrigued him that Elario was unable to explain exactly what it was that he did. It was simply the act of opening a door within himself and permitting the bright light of his knack to flow throu
gh. But the door only opened so far. Force the door wider, stretch for more power, and Elario lost everything. The line was always there.
Is it a door in your mind, son? Or is it a line upon a road within you?
It is both. It is neither.
The herbal paste grew hot and caked under his hand. The horse did not move away; Elario was the only one to feel the change in temperature as the medicine charged with his energy. As the pain reduced, the palomino leaned into him. “Good girl,” he said soothingly.
Then he brushed the cake of paste away. Raw pink skin ran down her flank from the two deepest gouges; the third one had been shallower, and the only trace of it was a line of hairlessness.
Footsteps approached the stream. “You did not say that you have an herbal knack, Elario, only that you are a healer and midwife. Ah, that makes much more sense.”
“It is no one’s business but mine, nor am I much of one as a man born with a woman’s skill,” Elario said shortly as he brushed away crumbs of the paste.
Taking the mortar and pestle, Westen sat upon the boulder. “In your region, it appears more often as a woman’s skill, but there have been and are still towns and cities within Phaleros where a healing knack falls more often to men, and places split half and half between the sexes.”
Elario was sick of knowing so little. “You make me a fool with every word to roll off your tongue! I am not a babe-in-arms but a man, and a stupid one to your reckoning, and you could have at least corrected me that you are not of a mechanical nature.”
“It amused me to be mistaken so.”
Taking the mortar and pestle away, Elario got to his knees to wash it out in the stream. The palomino stepped carefully over the water and headed into the grass. The spark within the sea gave him a glimpse of her wandering into a field, snow alighting on her back, and a farm boy crying out for his mother. The two of them held out carrots to lure her into the barn.