by Deck Davis
When he was finished, he wiped his mouth. “What’re you asking for, anyway?”
Jake opened his mouth to answer, when Cason put his hand on his shoulder.
“He’s just interested in them. He’s my new apprentice. Found him up in Tolken. He’s a fourth son. Lad was such an ugly bum-jawed weasel that his parents didn’t bother trying to sell him, just upped and left in the night. Ain’t that right, boy?”
Cason must have had another reason to stop Jake telling Thotl why he was asking about portals. Weren’t the two of them old friends? If that was the case, why did Jake get the feeling that Cason didn’t trust Thotl? He’d play along for now.
“That’s right,” said Jake.
Cason grabbed a vial from the counter. He walked over to the open hearth at the wall to his left and uncorked it. He poured the liquid on the open hearth as if he were a vicar sprinkling holy water in a demon-infested house. When that was done, he grabbed a small lump of alchemical flint from a bowl on the counter, and then threw it at the hearth.
A spark lit, and soon the fire was roaring. It was such a warm and cozy flame that it would have rivalled even the best swiss ski cabin. There was no fuel on the fire save the few drops of liquid Cason had sprinkled, yet the flames crackled as if they were chewing through logs.
Cason settled back into his seat. “So, Thotl my friend, it’s good to see you, but what brings you my way?”
“I need a favor.”
Cason lifted his hands in mock dismay. “Here we go.”
“Hey – you owe me, remember?”
Thotl said this with such conviction that Jake instantly knew there was a debt between the two men. Cason, for once, said nothing, and instead just nodded.
“Remember Milty Blackjack?” asked Thotl.
“Milty! Worst card player I ever met. Whenever I was short of a bit of gonil, I’d ask Milty for a game. Always liked him. Well, before all the nasty business with a girl. After that, I thought he was an arse. How is he?”
“Not good,” said Thotl. “He was working in a forest with a lumberjack troop. Felling trees and stuff like that. Only, they got too close to the centre of the forest, and a bunch of timberkin got him.”
On hearing this, Faei leaned close to Jake. She spoke in almost a whisper. “Every forest has a centre. A heart. Never go into it.”
“Timberkin?” said Cason. He shivered. “And did he-”
Thotl gave a grim nod. “Yep. Bugger caught blackbark. I took him to a town nearby and had a practitioner look him over. He gave him some green stuff. Smelled horrible. Didn’t work, though.”
“Green stuff? No bloody wonder! This practitioner must not have known his crapper from his face. How far gone is he?”
“His skin stinks, and he’s got bark on his shoulders. It’s spreading onto his neck and down to his chest.”
“It’ll suffocate him before long,” said Cason. The, he shrugged his shoulders. “Oh well. Tell him to have a nice death. Hope he enjoys becoming a log.”
Faei gave him a glare sharp enough to cut steel. “What’s with you? Isn’t this Milty guy your friend?”
“Well…” began Thotl.
“It’s okay. Tell em,” said Cason.
“Cason and Milty fell out a few years after they left Isaac’s service.”
“Over a whore,” added Cason.
“Not an actual whore, however many times Cason calls her one,” said Thotl. “Milty fell for a girl, and he left Isaac’s service and went to live with her. Old Cass here was upset about his friend leaving. It’s just the way the world works sometimes. I thought you said you were gonna get over it?”
Cason shrugged. “Yeah, well, bugger me if I’m human.”
“Cason…” said Faei, in her best reprimanding voice.
“Come on, Cassy,” said Thotl, “He’s going to turn into a lump of timber. I never took sides in the whole fallout, even though you behaved like a rotten shit.”
“So, you’re appealing to my better nature, eh? Surprised if you can find it. Thought I’d locked that deep away in my subconscious, along with memories of shitting myself after drinking a stamina potion I didn’t brew right.”
“I’m not asking you to kiss and make up, or anything. Just don’t let him die.”
“Fine,” growled Cason.
He finished the rest of his drink, burped, and then looked at Jake.
“Looks like you need a run a little errand for me.”
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning, Faei woke Jake up as soon as the sun rose. She was dressed in mahogany-brown leathers, which he guessed was to offer her some protection on their journey. He supposed that after seeing cockimps and banshees, he shouldn’t be surprised that wherever they were going, it would be dangerous.
“Have you got the list of herbs?” asked Faei.
“Not written down, obviously, since Cason doesn’t believe in writing things down. Got them memorized though.”
“He asked me to give you this before he passed out.”
She handed a purple-tinted stone to him. It was roughly oval shaped, though it had little dents around the edges. Two golden shapes were carved into the surface.
“He said it’s a rune,” said Faei. “Apparently it’ll come in handy.”
“You know where we’re going?”
“It’s a few hours north. I’ll lead the way.”
They left the shack and walked down the hill and beyond the field of dead grass. After ten minutes they came to a roughly cut path that wound into the distance. It wasn’t a road, exactly, but it seemed that this was what travelers used. He couldn’t see where it led, because in the distance there was a grouping of hills that blocked the horizon.
They had a lot of walking ahead of them, so Jake decided it was a good time to learn a little more about Faei.
“Where are you from?” asked Jake. “I mean, where’s your village? I’m still trying to get my head around where everything is.”
“Mother and father live in Grey Peake. It’s about an hour’s walk from the shack. I might as well tell you, since you’re part of the group now. They aren’t my real parents.”
“No?”
“I’m from Steel Pike. It’s a warrior clan across the sinking sea. Not a lovely place, Jake, let me tell you that. They…uh...believe in something called the strong seed. They love fighting and hunting, and they want only the strongest people in the clan. Any children who aren’t deemed tough enough live with the clan until they’re eight, and then they’re put on a boat and taken across the sinking sea to the mainland, where they’re left alone to survive or die.”
“Sounds lovely. So how come you aren’t there? I mean…you seem strong enough to me.”
“You’re quite the gentleman. I’m weak as hell compared to the rest of the clan. Sure, I can shoot a bow and stuff, but some of the warriors there…let’s just say you don’t want to get into a fight with them.”
“So, you were one of the kids who was kicked out of the clan?”
“Yep. My father, not my birth father, but my father from the village, is a fisherman. He and mother have a son, but he went to mage college when he was twelve and they haven’t heard from him in years. Guess they were pretty lonely, because when father saw me on my own, he took me home, and I’ve lived with them ever since. Well, until you know, until I had to leave.”
He guessed he and Faei had something in common, then. They’d both lost their parents. Maybe the circumstances were different since Faei’s were still alive, but in a way, it was worse. Jake’s parents were taken from him; they didn’t just give him up. Faei’s mother and father subscribed to some strange belief system, and because of that they’d left her to die. It must have been worse knowing that your parents just didn’t want you.
Woah. The conversation was getting a lot heavier than he’d expected. Whenever that happened, Jake tended to either leave the conversation or divert it. He was never good facing emotions head-on.
“Why doesn’t Cason ju
st whip up another potion for your whole family to stop them turning?” he said, asking the first question that sprang to mind.
“The herbs that go in the potion are harder to find than a goblin’s treasure chest. He barely has enough to cover me. He thinks I don’t know, but he’s been using some of the gonils he makes from orders to import the herbs at ridiculous prices.”
“He’s got a real problem with admitting that he helps people, hasn’t he?” said Jake.
“Ruins his image.”
“Do you like living with him?”
“I guess. I think he sees me as a daughter sometimes. He used to have a family, you know.”
“He didn’t mention that,” said Jake.
Faei gave him a look that went way beyond stern and broached into ‘take me seriously or I’ll kill you’ territory. “You don’t breathe a word of this to him, got that?”
“Got it.”
“Seriously, Jake. I’ll tear out your heart and eat it in front of your face.”
“Delightful. I won’t say a word.”
“He was married, at some point,” said Faei. “I don’t know when, exactly, but he had a wife and a girl. He mentioned it once when he was really drunk. And then he got angry and drank an invisibility potion and then stormed out of the hut. I didn’t see him for three days.”
It seemed they were all alike. How about that? Jake would never bring the subject up with Cason, but it made him think about the old man a little differently. Maybe he’d give him a bit of leeway from time to time.
As they carried on walking down the dirt path, Jake began to hear a buzzing sound. At first it was like the hum of a refrigerator, but the further they walked, the louder it got. Faei nocked a bolt on her bow and looked around with keen eyes.
“Any idea what it is?” said Jake.
“Nothing I’ve ever hunted, I’m certain of that.”
Jake drew his dagger. He didn’t know what good it’d do him in a fight, but it felt better to hold it. He looked around him, trying to develop the keen senses that Faei had. He watched for small movements in the trees to their left, and he listened to faint noises carried by the wind.
Nothing. He was an alchemist, not a hunter, and it seemed that he’d just have to rely on Fae’s well-developed hearing and eyesight from now on.
Or maybe not.
The buzzing was much louder now, like the hum of an electricity pylon. Jake looked up and saw the source of it. There, in the sky, was a blue portal.
A portal! A god-damned portal!
He jabbed Faei with his elbow. “Look,” he said, unable to keep the urgency from his voice.
This portal was oval and roughly the size of a tennis ball. Certainly not as big as the one Jake had passed through to get here, but it was a portal all the same. He could tell from the blue light that seemed to pulse over it. Water dripped out of it, as if falling from a leaky pipe.
His pulse began to thud like a car driving over a cattle grid. He got an anxious feeling, like he be doing something. Was this a ticket home? Not in its current state, sure. It was barely big enough for him to put his head through. But maybe there was something he could do?
Even if he did manage to get his skull through it, for all he knew the portal could open up anywhere back on earth. It could open straight into the lair of a trapdoor spider, and Jake would come face to face with the insect’s hairy legs and body. Or it could open in the middle of the volcano, and as soon as Jake poked his head through, he’d be fried.
As if that weren’t enough, there was the question of how to actually get to the portal. It was in the sky, and Jake hadn’t quite worked out how to fly. Maybe there was a potion that Cason could brew?
The idea quickly became moot when the portal began to widen. The blue light stretched and became the size of a football. It stretched wider and wider, until soon it was the size of a car, and then a house.
Water gushed out now, spurting down onto the ground like rain from an extremely localized storm cloud. The portal stretched on and on, becoming impossibly wide.
And then a dark shape emerged from it. At first, Jake thought it was a boat or something, but as the shape crossed through the portal, he saw that it was a giant blue whale.
Oh my god. He couldn’t think anything else, just those three useless words.
“What the hell is that?” said Faei. She nocked a bolt on her bow.
He grabbed Faei and pulled her back, putting distance between them and the portal. The blue whale slid through the portal, and Jake saw its humongous body that dripped with water and was covered in barnacles. It had a giant slit of a mouth, which it opened and closed as if trying to gulp sea water.
As the rear end of it crossed the portal the whale tipped and then crashed down onto the ground, landing with a deafening thud. The ground seemed to shake, such was the size of the thing. It must have weighed ten tones.
With the blue whale on the ground, the portal fizzled. It began to close, getting smaller and smaller until soon, it disappeared completely.
The whale lay uselessly on the grass. For a few seconds, Jake couldn’t believe it. His brain couldn’t seem to process what he was seeing.
“What in the name of Rolag’s nether-regions is that?” said Faei. The look of confusion on her face dwarfed Jake’s. At least he knew what it was; it didn’t seem that Faei had ever seen a whale before.
“It’s a whale,” he said.
“Is it dangerous?”
“It’s a fish, and it’s on dry land. It’s dying. Where’s the nearest sea?”
“Not for a hundred miles. Can’t it breathe?”
“Not in open air…I don’t think. Or not for long, at any rate. When whales get beached on dry land they die. We need to get it to the sea.”
“Poor thing. We’ll never get it to sea, Jake. Even if we could move it somehow, which there’s no bloody way we can, it’d take days to get there.”
He rubbed his face. Putting all portal questions to one side, the sight of the whale on the ground was a pathetic one. For some damn reason, a portal must have opened up in the ocean, and the whale had swum through it. Left alone, it was just going to die a long and painful death.
He wanted to put it out of its misery, but how? His dagger certainly wasn’t going to be enough.
“How many bolts do you have?” he asked.
“Eight. Why?”
“If we can’t get it to sea, we need to stop it suffering.”
“My bolts won’t even come close to piercing that thing, Jake. Maybe if we had, I dunno, a bomb, or something. But Cason doesn’t keep any in the shack. I mean, I know he knows how to make them, but he doesn’t bother.”
Jake sighed. He felt wretched. “We’re just gonna have to leave it to die,” he said. “Damn it. Of all the places for a portal to open.”
He looked at the sky. There was no sign of the portal now, but there were conclusions he could draw from this. One, there were definitely more portals back on earth. That might have been a little comforting, if it weren’t for his second conclusion; the placement of them seemed to be completely random.
But hang on. He knew of three portals, didn’t he? One was his. Another for the whale. And a third that Thotl had said opened near his old house. Did that mean there could be other people here who’d come through portals?
Faei tapped him on the shoulder. “Can we move on?” she said. “I don’t wanna watch that thing die, and we don’t wanna be out around here after dark.”
Jake nodded. “Let’s go,” he said.
They both carried on walking, neither of them looking at the dying whale.
Chapter Fourteen
After walking most of the day, Faei called them to a stop. Jake pretended the end of their march meant nothing to him, but secretly he was glad to give his feet chance to stop throbbing. He’d been dying for a rest and a drink for a couple of hours now, but there was no way he’d admit that to Faei.
Just ahead of them, the land sunk into a rounded crater, as i
f it had been hit by a meteorite. This area covered almost half a mile long and wide and was marked by its edges that dipped a foot below the rest of the land. It was like the surface of the moon without the blackness of space surrounding it. There was a thick layer of fog covering everything, as though a smoke grenade had gone off. If there was anything to see, the mist hid it.
“There used to be a village here,” said Faei. “But a rock from the Black World hit it head on.”