by Jordan Reece
Acting of its own will, Elario’s hand went to a crown. A real crown! Rubies dazzled upon the arches, which propped up a dragon made of gold. He stroked its head and marveled at the tiny, twinkling green gems to line the wings. Each had a many-pointed silver star burning radiantly within. “What are these beautiful stones?”
“Peritoz.” Westen set his satchel on the floor and paced the wine cellar. With the havok beasts so close by, they could not ascend yet. “You are looking at the loot of some madcap, or team of madcaps. I have seen drawings of that exact crown gracing the heads of royals at their coronations some seven hundred years ago.”
How could any madcap have left the crown behind? What better find was there than this? A very long time it had been down in this wine cellar, gauging from the thickness of the dust. There were no bones lying about, or evidence of a battle. Elario slid his fingers along a jewel-capped scepter placed next to the crown. The madcap to collect these things here had died in his hunger to go above and search for more. It was not the thrill of discovery but the hunt, Elario presumed. Insanity.
Westen concluded his inventory of the wine cellar and pulled back a chair at the table to sit. Nudging aside rings and bracelets, he made room for the lantern. “Do you sense any dragons nearby?”
“No.” Elario drew out another chair, which was untouched by time. The wood was dark, but had lovely flares of crimson in the grain. The flares in Westen’s chair were blue. Dragonwood. Skimming the green stripe of grain in the table, which was warm despite the very cold room, Elario said, “You told me dragonwood was too hard for woodworkers.”
“Which is why so few pieces were ever made from it. The price of these is equivalent to an army of mechanical men. But they’re heavy, and hard to carry out, so here they sit.” Westen flicked a coin into the air and caught it in his palm. “We’re an hour’s walk from the pass, but we must wait here for a time to let the havok give up.”
His face settled into sourness. “They have no doubt taken bites from Hobbe to find him disappointingly shy of meat.”
“He’ll live again, and you can tell him about it.”
-hold still! Hold still, Westen, I know it hurts-
-many of them die, my lord, but your man is in good health and-
“I thought,” Elario said uncomfortably when the unfamiliar voices ceased, “the other night in the cove . . . I thought that you were a dervesh. You live like they live. But . . . but you can’t be. It was a fancy in the dark.”
“A dervesh,” Westen repeated, his expression inscrutable.
“But you were born mortal, and lived as a mortal. And now I wonder about the dervesh knackers, and the energies they used. You said they could steal a couple’s fertility, and give it to another couple using dervesh energy. What of the child born of this? Were they mortal? Dervesh? Or both?”
“Mortal. Mortal, but cursed, or that was what people believed,” Westen said, Elario wishing that he could decipher Westen’s feelings from that blank face. “These things were kept secret. One did not declare to the world that their newborn child had its genesis in a dervesh spell. Their lives were shorter, it was rumored, and in poorer health. To stand beside them was to feel the disturbance of the dervesh energy, so subtle that only the most sensitive were fully aware of it, and the rest just experienced a nameless niggling at the senses.”
“Did you ever meet one?”
“Not that I knew.”
“Better to have no child than a cursed child,” Elario said staunchly, “one whose existence was a curse upon others.”
“Your view is that of a commoner,” Westen said, though not rudely. “To a noble couple requiring an heir to carry on their titles, this cursed child was better than no child at all. A little warped, a little strange, and the grandchildren in turn were said to be a little more warped and strange, and the great-grandchildren further so. By that generation, they returned to infertility, which could not be remedied by the knack. All the dervesh spell did was forestall an inevitable conclusion to the family line.”
“What other experiments did dervesh knackers do?”
Westen looked with aggravation and amusement to the dragon’s eye. “A curious word you chose, but you, Elario, hardly chose it. Experiments. They did many experiments in the centuries that Nevenin and Olehalem stood. A jewel holds a singular dervesh energy fixed within it; water holds none. Some wood will bind, dragonwood most of all, yet others resist. It is this way with your herbs, I trust. You cannot funnel your power into bread dough or cow manure.”
Elario stitched the pieces of this puzzle together, but disliked the picture they made. “They experimented upon humans.”
“To the detriment of those unfortunate souls. Flesh and blood are unwilling hosts to dervesh energy, as it was discovered. They died. The greatest of the great dervesh knackers, a man named Ilahu, had better luck and more perseverance at this frustrating branch of knack science, which the others abandoned for lack of talent, lack of subjects, and lack of success. Ilahu spent Denelan’s reign on the run, never sleeping more than a couple of nights at the same house. The king would have loved to collect him.”
Elario saw them, the carriage rolling to a stop at the side door, Westen exiting after the Lord Inamon, the lord as he was from Westen’s original lifetime. Into a dark hallway they were ushered. A man moaned in pain from a cot in a bedroom, Westen looking to him with chilled eyes.
He was born an at’Inamon. To question the lord’s decisions was beyond his kenning. The lord ordered; it was Westen’s honor and duty to obey. The fortunes of their families rose and fell together; one did not exist without the other to hold it up. Willingly, he surrendered himself.
“I cannot believe your lord gave you up for this purpose!” Elario spat.
“It was an extreme time,” Westen said. “I have no anger for him. He did what he thought he had to do, Elario, what many frightened nobles were doing, to increase our chances of survival. After the Lord and Lady Ardya and their entire family were slaughtered in their beds, their home in Olehalem ransacked . . . The gang was admitted to the premises by the houseman, an at’Ardya bribed with gold.”
Elario looked down to the table.
“What would you do to protect your family? Would you not even consider binding a servant to your blood line so that betrayal was never possible? Would you not long for him to be strong and ageless and tireless, every breath of his body dedicated to the protection of the shared family name? Spare your ire for my lord just as I ask you to spare your pity for those who would wrong you. You did not live in those times or know that fear.”
That night’s fancy had been right, and it took Elario’s breath away. “So you are a dervesh.”
“I dislike to have it worded that way.” Westen’s voice was sharp. “My body hosts traces of dervesh spells, but I am no dervesh. I have more in common with you than them.”
Unsettled by his anger, Elario said, “I should have selected my words with greater care.”
Westen picked up a curved dagger so encrusted with jewels that its sole purpose was ceremonial. Turning it over in the light, he said, “I care little for humans after so long, but I do not revel in their pain or destruction, or seek to bring it about. You have seen this for yourself. Ilahu changed me, yes. But he did not, and could not, make me a dervesh.”
“How did you survive the experiments?”
“I survived because Ilahu learned from his errors. He knew when he had pressed too hard or too little; he had identified which dervesh energies were wholly incompatible with flesh, and which of those should never be combined into one body. He was at the end of his life when I was brought to him, and the wealth of his knowledge was poured into me. Many died still, for all of his efforts. Many lived, but the dervesh spells within them did not always play out as intended. Some energies evanesced over time, and others strengthened until they killed the host. Subjects went mad and were confined in asylums; some mentally regressed to children, gabbling and drooling. And some, li
ke myself, were successes. I host many dervesh energies, and I was the only one to survive the dervesh energy for agelessness. Ilahu died within a month of my creation; no dervesh knacker picked up his torch before the Great Cities fell, and then there were no dervesh knackers.”
“I will not call you that again,” Elario said. Westen’s temper was still crackling in his eyes. “My intention was never to insult.”
Westen untied his hair and smoothed it out to plait it. The intensity in his gaze softened as he worked at the braid. “Would that the eye had arrived in the post.”
“Without me, you mean?”
“Without you. You unearth things in me that I thought dead and buried. I wish not to feel them.”
“You need to feel them,” Elario argued, “and you need to hang on to people even if they are going to leave. Better to hurt than to live as you have lived, without taste or color or emotion. Someone needs to care for you, or else you retreat into the man you were when I found you below the jail grate.”
They spun around to the stairs at a rustle. What came down the steps was just the fade of a frightened maidservant. Setting down a basket packed with straw, she inspected the racks and withdrew ghostly bottles. Westen scoffed. “Yes, well, it’s very important when evacuating to remember the lord’s wine.”
“What will happen to you when the dragon bones are burned?” Elario asked. Are you so eager to die? This was the context of Hydon’s question. “If it destroys the dervesh knack everywhere . . . then what will it do within you?”
“I cannot say for certain.” Westen watched the fade as she packed the bottles in the straw. “So much of what I know, I’ve cobbled together out of wisps. Perhaps the dervesh spells in me will be eliminated. This is the best end, to be suddenly returned to the man I was before. Perhaps all of my stolen years will catch up to me at last, and I will fall in ashes to the earth. But it is irrelevant what it does to me. What matters is that this curse upon our country is brought to an end.”
“You matter, too,” Elario protested.
The fade scuttled away with the basket. Westen got up. “I’ll check on the havok and see if they’ve gone.” Leaving the lantern with Elario, he followed the fade.
Chapter Twenty-One
Twice Westen climbed to the house above to spy, and twice he returned below with bad tidings. Havok beasts were in the road and on the drive, climbing over the walls between the properties and searching the gardens. They did not relinquish a trail lightly once picked up. Those who had been shot regenerated and returned, so in time a hundred of them were hunting out there for Westen and Elario.
It was sometime in the afternoon when Elario went upstairs with Westen. This great house was relatively unmarred, unlike its neighbor, though it stank from the rodents who now called it home. The windows on the first story were high off the ground and barred, and the doors locked and blocked by furniture. The havok could not get in, nor did they try. Creeping up after Westen to the sunroom on the highest story, Elario headed immediately to the windows to see the havok for himself. The glass was filthy and matted with layers of dead vines. He spied out between the vines, moving along all four walls of the room as Westen blocked the door by propping one of the dragonwood chairs under the knob.
The beasts ringed the house. Several were methodically thrusting swords and lances into shrubbery below; others combed through a family cemetery and flowed in and out of separate servants’ quarters behind the great house. Many of them remained over at the fire-charred house and on the grounds, picking through the rubble.
Elario calculated the distance between the homes and realized in dismay that it was much too dangerous to journey on for now. Their three pistols and Westen’s short sword against so many havok . . . Acting in haste was going to get Elario killed. Since their location was unknown, it was safer to stay put.
The appearance of fades in the sunroom startled him repeatedly over the next hours, popping around him to peek outside and whisper to one another about what was going on. An arrogant lordling with a piecemeal sprouting of facial hair argued with his father to let him out to slay these monsters; two young ladies worried about friends who lived along the canals; servants fretted and prayed to Elequa that the fire they saw spread no further. The appearances happened less and less as the day grew long.
The war aerial glided southward by late afternoon, riding high to stay above a flock of sanga. The concentration of havok elicited no interest from the crew, if the beasts were even noticed. In the evening, the aerial turned on its searchlight and flew towards the river. At last giving up, a sizeable faction of the beasts went after it.
Elario ate a meal while sitting at one of his viewing spots over the backyard. Crashes resounded from the servants’ quarters, havok breaking the windows and calling snappishly to one another. There would be no meat today, those animal calls said. Then another faction departed, their whistles and barks tinged with anger at the fruitlessness of their search.
The numbers of havok whittled down even further with the rising of the moon. Quitting the property in small groups, they stalked away into the city until only a handful remained. Perhaps they left, too, but it grew too dark to see.
The war aerial was now flying back and forth over the pass, so there was no point in leaving the house. Resting upon his cloak, Elario whiled the night away in short bouts of poor sleep. Westen rubbed his back to soothe him when he woke to the cries and calls of dervesh.
It was a hum to wake him before dawn, and Westen was not beside him. Elario yawned and joined him at the glass wall of the sunroom. The aerial was close by, not half a mile from this house. Its bright light was shining down to where they were chased away from Hobbe.
A bucket lowered from the belly of the air vessel, peopled by armed soldiers in tan-and-greens. Losing sight of the bucket as it lowered below the tree line, it was gone for a brief time. Then it swiftly returned upwards to the aerial.
“They took Hobbe,” Westen said, that bald head gleaming in the spotlight among the soldiers.
What had Hobbe had upon his person, and within his belongings? A great weight of ammunition and gold, a shovel and cookpot, the bedrolls . . . None of it indicated where they were going. The soldiers were left to deduce what they could only from the location of the body itself.
“It is good you took his memory chip,” Elario said.
“It is.” Westen clutched it in his fist as Hobbe vanished into the aerial. “There is some duplication in his memory banks, which he would not have had the time to erase.”
“Should this concern us?”
“No. A tinkerer versed in the functions of antique mechanical men can restore it, but that is the work of days to weeks. Even months. The age of his machinery protects us, as does the fact of his maker going defunct so long ago. Though it can be done, it will be damned hard for them to gain access to those banks.”
“Maybe they will wonder in the meantime if he was ordered to search the Great Cities for treasure, and has nothing to do with us,” Elario said hopefully. “That is hardly far-fetched, a madcap sending in an old mechanical man to do the work.”
Westen shook his head. “They will recognize who he is very soon, if they don’t know already. This is my fault. I lived in Drouthe for better than twenty years. It was foolish to stay there so long. People knew Hobbe well in Drouthe, and many of them surely supplied a description of him to the Dragons of the Blood. I am dead, in their eyes, but you are in league with my mechanical man, who can only be working under my direction, so I may as well live.”
The aerial turned east and flew out of Nevenin. Prinzio’s Pass was unguarded. Without need for discussion, Elario and Westen scrambled to their feet. They had to get to the pass and cross it, and there was no time to dally.
Once outside in the garden, they saw that there was even less time. The aerial was almost gone, but another was flying to Nevenin to replace it. Westen closed the lantern shades save one to light the ground, and they set off for the pass at
a brisk walk.
Every shape in the darkness was a dervesh to Elario’s nerves until they showed themselves to be trees and bushes and posts. Bone towers, too, to his revulsion, skulls grinning in the yellow glow of the lantern. Whether soldiers or madcaps was a mystery; the victims had not been killed here, only their bones toted in by the yorsa for these sickening displays.
The garden terminated in a crumbling wall, which they clambered over. Then they trod through a field to a road covered in a blanket of dead leaves. Drives sprouted off the right side of it to fine homes built along and upon the slopes of the southern cliffs. A stream ran along the other side of the road for some time, running silently and sluggishly with the cold. After it curled away into the trees, they rounded a curve to a building with its windows aglow.
Elario stumbled over his own feet from surprise at the sudden sounds of music and merriment. “Fades?” he whispered.
“A circlet.” Westen had caught his arm to keep him from falling. “Just a dervesh. It can’t harm us as long as we stay outside the tavern.”
Like the abide and thrace, the circlet was a lure, and a powerful one. Elario looked through the windows of the tavern wistfully as Westen ferried him past it. Merrymakers pranced and sang upon a stage, wearing tall hats and acting out a comical scene. The audience was in fits of laughter at the tables, which were decorated with green and red and gold candles for Hallowmas. The scene concluded and the merrymakers bowed. Attractive servers exited the kitchen, bearing pitchers of ale and frosted molasses cakes upon platters.
As Elario passed the door, which opened of its own accord, a woman with golden hair was climbing up to the stage. Applause burst out. “Sing! Sing!” She smiled, but there was something wrong with that smile, as if she was forcing her lips to form it when she was truthfully in terrible pain. A bloody gash sliced her from throat to breast, so deep as to be a mortal wound, yet she stood. The audience cheered like the gash wasn’t there, and she smoothed her dirty trousers as if they were an elegant skirt. Slung around her waist was a belt with holstered pistols.