by Jordan Reece
Frantically, Elario dumped out his satchel and threw open his herbal case. Mortar and pestle . . . sealeaf and sandstone and more . . . Jamming the ingredients together, he ground them together fast and made a sloppy paste with water from his flask.
He tore open Westen’s shirt and scooped the paste into his palm. Bringing it down with a slap over Westen’s heart, Elario let his knack flow through him. Heal. Heal and come back to me.
His knack was just too weak! Through his hand, he felt the shutting down within Westen, the stilling of his organs, the blurring of his sight and hearing. The beat of his heart was becoming irregular; the flow of blood in his veins grew sluggish; his lips blued and his flesh tone mottled. A strong herbal knacker would have yanked him away from the precipice over which lay death; Elario was only tugging feebly at Westen’s sleeve as he stepped out into space.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be! It wasn’t fair! Westen should walk away from this mine and make a life, one life of it. One good life, which was all he had ever wanted. A tear splashed down upon his chest, having fallen from Elario’s watering eyes. There was one more to die, one last death claimed by dervesh, and it was Westen at’Inamon, who had conquered them all.
The knack flowed through Elario’s hand to the herbal paste, and from the paste to Westen’s heart, but still . . . still it was making no difference, those dimming blue eyes fixing upon another horizon. Elario stretched for more power and met that line, that damned burning line that always stopped him! He reached until he was right at its border, needing more, needing more to keep Westen in this world . . .
He had to stop here, and let it not be enough. Sometimes, no matter how much he wanted it, he had to stop. He had to let the one beneath his hand go.
No. No!
He would take all that Westen needed.
Sobbing, Elario crossed the line.
No longer throttled, power raged through him like a storm over sea. It burned him from the inside out, gushing and spitting and bucking. He heard a scream echoing through the passages and hardly knew it as his own. It was agony; it was ecstasy; it shoved Elario aside in its thrill to have its leash removed, to spill in torrents through that open door, to buckle the frame around it and wipe away the wall about the frame.
It stepped out into space and slammed Westen back onto the precipice.
Onto the precipice and far away from it, his heart jumping in his chest. What the energetic corruptions had wrecked, the healing knack unbound sewed together with swift, nimble fingers. The mottling flushed to a rosy hue and his eyes jerked away from whatever they were seeing in death. A surprised draw of air was pulled into his lungs with a gasp; his hand flew out and grasped Elario’s wrist.
No more of his knack was needed and he reeled back over the line, unable to bear the pain of this possession. But there was no line. The knack had eaten it away. There was no door to retreat through. He had done what could never be undone, and already, the storm of power within him was ebbing.
The surge reduced to a trickle, the trickle to drops, and the drops evaporated. Blackness took his mind for a moment, his knees going weak and his hand dropping from Westen’s heart.
Westen sat up with a horrified cry, the clot of paste oozing down his chest. “Elario, why did you do that? Your knack!”
He no longer had a knack. In its place was a void.
Westen pulled him into a tight embrace. This was the home that Elario longed for, this man’s arms, wherever they were in the world. Love was worth the price of his knack. “I am glad,” Elario said, and meant it.
When they broke apart, Westen startled upon his face. “You’re losing the dragon’s eye!”
Elario looked down. A river of gold streamed out from his true eye. It twisted in the air, breaking into a helix and rejoining to pool upon the floor of the chamber. The shifting, swirling golden puddle was outlined in scarlet flecks. No bigger than a fingertip, the pool sank into the ground and disappeared.
“It was my knack that held it to me,” Elario realized. “It needed to be contained, and I contained aithra in my herbal knack.” He had been the obselium. And now that his knack was gone, the dragon’s eye had no way to hold onto him.
Westen grimaced and pressed a hand to his stomach.
“How do you feel?” Elario asked.
“Like I haven’t eaten much in five hundred years.” Westen smiled. “I remember this feeling! Needing to eat! And think! Tonight, I will have the need to sleep. A true sleep. This is really quite exciting!”
Elario laughed at his child-like enthusiasm.
“Perhaps we should start all of this anew, eh?” Westen put a hand to his heart and inclined his head in a courtly bow. “My name is Westen at’Inamon, and I am from too many places to name. Although I am currently unemployed, I once traded in wine and ran a haberdashery. And you are?”
“You know me,” Elario said. “I have lost my knack and dragon’s eye, but everything else remains the same. I am from Alming, though I do not believe I can ever return there.”
Westen kissed his forehead. “No. They have lost the way things are. Even without the dragon’s eye, you will be held accountable. But the world, Elario! We can go anywhere in the world and make it our home. We have gold. Just pick a direction.”
“How about we get out of this mine first? I know several ways.” He repacked his satchel. A map of the mine was there in his head, a parting gift from the dragon’s eye. Other hidden doors in other hills, and they would slip away to the river while the soldiers dealt with their damaged aerials.
Westen got up, and offered his hand. Elario took it. Then they set out together.
Epilogue
“How did you know?” Elario asked.
“Because I know, farm boy.” Westen folded the paper and set it down beside his plate of eggs and ham. The news was weeks out-of-date. Newspapers from the golden ring came bumping along to Derridge in the back of irregular post wagons. Living in the little towns of northwest Phaleros meant that one learned about things long after they happened. “Because you are hard people below the Hopcross, as your ancestors had to be hard to live. They forged south to survive, and now your people forge north to thrive.”
He motioned to Hobbe to refill his tea. The blond-haired mechanical man with a crescent moon on his cheek tipped the pot to the cup. From the veranda of their newly built home, Elario looked over the field to the river.
It had begun without warning all those years ago, war aerials soaring overhead and shooting down dragonwood staffs from their cannons. It was ending without warning as well, and just as Westen expected it would go. When a man lived as long as he, Elario supposed, how things played out was often quite predictable.
The end was not truly the end, but another beginning. When rumors got around below the Hopcross of the fall of the dervesh, most people rejected them out of hand as fancies. Dervesh were a natural and inevitable part of life, as natural and inevitable as wolves and wind and floods. Just as those things would never be eliminated, so was this true of dervesh.
It did not escape their notice, however, the sudden silence from the Wickewoods, and that those who traveled so foolishly by night somehow arrived at their destination intact. A few brave souls, or perhaps foolish ones, went in to hunt game. Like the night travelers, they returned.
A spark was lit.
The Crown itself, ironically, fanned that spark to flames. An edict was put forth in the dead of winter, confirming that the military had quelled the dervesh at last, and claimed all of the bounty of the Great Cities and the land itself as belonging to the state. No one was to enter the Wickewoods.
The response was outrage. The people of the south knew where they had come from, and what they had lost. Before the snows completely melted, small parties were already venturing over the Hopcross and into the trees. To find their old homes. To carve out a plot of farmland. To treasure seek without fear of death. First there were dozens. Hundreds. Then thousands.
Now it was sum
mer, and the exodus could not be restrained. The Crown was lashing out to check the flow, but the dam was broken.
Though there was a fortune in Repse properties within the Great Cities, Elario held his peace since to claim them was to expose himself. The battle over the wealth of the Wickewoods concerned few people in faraway Derridge, who had never encountered dervesh, nor held known ancestry to the Great Cities. Some of the young went haring off after riches; the rest shook their heads and got on with sowing the fields and minding the shops.
As did Elario, tending to his petty spice gathering in the foothills of the Gates and along the river. Not from need, as they had money. They had more than they needed. But Repses had always done this work, and he saw no reason to discontinue it. It was just that now he did it with Westen, his love and his heart.
And Hobbe, of course. His new mechanical body was nearly as old as his previous one, a tinkerer rustling it up from a warehouse and installing the memory chip. Hobbe was not exactly the same as he had been before. Nor could he be, in a new body with a slightly different set-up.
Then again, that was not the way of life. None of them were the same. None of them could stay the same when the world kept changing under their feet. But Elario was still at peace, in this new place where he had found himself, as much as one could be.
“Perhaps we should go downtown today to look at buying a carriage,” Elario suggested. “Inamon Spices and Incense, we can paint that upon the sides.” Westen had dropped the prefix, as nobody had an at’ in Derridge, and shared the rest of his surname with Elario. Holding to Repse seemed risky even at a considerable distance.
“The carriage will have to wait until tomorrow. I forgot to tell you that we are having visitors today,” Westen said. “They should be here within the hour.”
“Visitors?” Elario repeated in befuddlement. “Who are we expecting?”
“I hired a houseman. I think he has a child or two, and they’ll be bringing along a few horses.”
“You did what?”
“We cannot keep up with this house and its acreage all on our own, Elario! Not if we wish to cultivate these fields. Hobbe is not programmed for agriculture. And when I put in downtown that I was seeking a man for such employ, nobody even knew what a proper houseman was!” Westen shook his head in appall at Derridge’s failings. “This is a barbarian land. I had to send post all the way to Penborough and beyond months ago to locate a suitable fellow.”
Startled that all of this had been done without his knowledge, Elario spluttered, “Did you put no more thought during those months into what happens when they arrive? Have you set up the servants’ quarters for this man and his child or children? There is no furniture in there! They are just empty rooms with curtains. Have you even readied the stalls in the barn for their horses?”
“I did it, sir,” Hobbe said. “The stalls and the servants’ quarters both. While you two were out gathering yesterday, the deliverymen carried in the new beds, dressers, and the other necessities that Master Westen purchased.”
Then that was that, but still! “Why didn’t you just tell me what you were planning, Westen?” Elario demanded.
Airily, Westen said, “It was a surprise.”
Elario would have preferred to have some say in it. “I am grateful, for we do have need, but you really are a most aggravating man.”
“Yes, I am, and you enjoy it. I keep you on your toes.”
“But Master Elario is sitting, sir,” Hobbe said.
“A keen observation, Hobbe,” Westen replied. “I stand corrected. So he is.”
“Look at his eyebrows,” Elario reminded Hobbe. “This is yet another example of his queer humor.”
“Yes, sir. He is truly queer, is he not? I had to develop and refine a separate conversational program specific to him, whereas my basic social programs encompass the rest of humanity with ease.”
“I require a special program,” Westen said proudly.
“Don’t be a braggart,” Elario chided. “Confounding an antiquated mechanical man isn’t something to be proud of, but you would take a perverse pride in that. Who is this houseman and who has he worked for before?”
“He knows the maintenance of a house and the care of a farm. An older man, greatly experienced, though I can’t recall his name. It’s in the letters we exchanged.”
“Well, roust them up, you jackal-mannered man, for the love of Elequa!” Elario exclaimed. “We must greet him by name, not refer to him as houseman. That is inconceivably rude!”
Westen’s eyes danced at the sound of hooves over the bridge. “Oh, too late for that. Here he is.”
In exasperation, Elario rose from the chair to look down the long drive. Two horses were turning in.
His heart leaped into his throat.
The short gray mare was Jersey, his beloved old friend, and next to her was Orman. The two figures on horseback waved, crying out Elario’s name.
Yens. Nyca.
Westen stepped to his side. “I wanted you to have your family. But I did not know if they would come or could come, nor could I stand your heartbreak if they did not. That was why I held my tongue. Forgive me.”
There was nothing to forgive. Laughing and crying, Elario pulled Westen to him in an embrace. “This is your family now, too, and always will be.”
They kissed, and went down the stairs to greet them.
THE END
THE SEER
by Jordan Reece
Chapter One
Jesco was out on the grounds with the children when the police carriage turned down the flowered lane of the asylum. Errant branches scraped along the bright black sides as the autohorse drew it on, shoes making merry clips on the cobbles.
They had been watching the aviators, the handful of othelin children who were recovered enough from spot-flu to be outside in the garden. The pale blue sky was full of bulbous shapes in every color, and they were sketching what hung suspended high above while Jesco minded them. The arrival of the carriage took their attention away from paper and pencil. No face could be seen within the carriage, as the glass was darkened. One could look out, but not in, which Jesco had explained to them many times from personal experience.
“Is it a body, Mr. Currane, sir?” asked a girl.
“It may be,” Jesco replied as the carriage rolled past them to the main building. The scratching of the branches gave off as the autohorse pulled into the driveway circle. The grounds always had a riotous look despite the dedicated ministrations of wizened Phipps and his assistant. Vine roses crept up the windows by night to shine their blushing faces into the rooms at morning, and cheery purple holidays took frequent rambles over the stepping-stones. The lane was ever in danger of being crowded out by the lines of shaggy trees stooping over it, the petals of their white flowers drifting down all summer to swathe the cobbles in snow. The happy disorder of it all had been Jesco’s first impression of Cantercaster Asylum when he was delivered to it at the age of eight, and though he had been beaten in body, tormented in spirit, and terrified from skin to marrow in the back of the wagon, his heart was kindled at the mutiny of form and explosion of color. He had never seen such a thing in all his life, and surely it could not be such a bad place when it was so lovely. It was a child’s logic, but it proved true.
Soon a nurse was stepping quickly down the path and calling for Jesco, who excused himself from his small company of artists. They whispered in his wake as the nurse took over his duty. His excursions from the asylum fascinated them one and all, and often the evening-time stories they requested were not The Bolging Hare or Tales of a Girl Pirate but of his participation in the mysteries of murder. The cases in which it was not a mystery had no need of his involvement.
Ideally, he would have had more time to recuperate since the last case. He was up and walking, but he was well aware that if he pushed too hard, he would land himself back in his wheelchair in short order. Yet he would not dream of sending the police carriage away without him. Jesco was very
limited in the work he could do, and to be part of investigations out in the world excited him. In one way, and one way only, was his seer skill valuable. In every other way, it was a detriment that constricted his life to these grounds where his environment could be controlled.
The carriage had stopped at the entryway to the asylum. It was Sinclair who had come for him, a junior detective to whom the ignominious tasks of an investigation fell. A nervous fellow with flapping cheeks, he was holding open the door of the carriage so that Jesco’s chair could be pushed inside. The new attendant had brought it out. Pawing at the ground, the bay autohorse settled and stilled. They were in almost every fashion a real horse, from appearance to mannerisms, and only by looking directly into the eyes was the truth revealed in the faint glimmer of tiny springs and gears and circuitry, which extended into a whirring, revolving infinity.
“Greetings,” Jesco said as he came to the carriage. He liked Sinclair, who had always treated him politely though some others at the station did not. The chair was now inside, and the attendant as well to engage the brakes. After a click-clack, he ducked out, inclined his head to Sinclair and Jesco, and retreated to the entryway.
At first glance, Sinclair did not seem suited to investigating homicides. He was too much of a gentleman. In all the cases that Jesco had worked with him, the man was as wide-eyed and aghast as an innocent to have happened upon the scene of a crime. Better suited to robbery, perhaps, or simply filing papers at the Fourth Street Station, yet despite his shock he worked hard and no one had transferred him. He looked down to Jesco’s hands and said, “Good, good, you’ve got the gloves on already. Then we shall go.”
Jesco entered the carriage and took a seat. Sitting down across from him, Sinclair called, “Second destination, ho!” From the bowels of the autohorse came a symphony of metallic sounds, which muted when Sinclair shut the door. The carriage lurched and curled gracefully around the driveway, returning to the lane and the scratching of branches as they passed down it to the road.