“Mayddox!” Gildwyn yelled. He waved his arms, trying to find a wall or some point of reference. “Mayddox! Where are you?”
A blunt wet object brushed against Gildwyn’s face, and he reached up to feel his friend’s snout in the darkness. He hugged Mayddox’s head, and then Gildwyn heard the strike of a match. He looked up from where he sat with squinting eyes, and immediately recognized the strange man from Marg’s restaurant, the lenses of his goggles reflecting the flame of the match.
The strange man tipped the flame into a glass lantern, bringing greater light to the group. Gildwyn looked around to see Mayddox standing over him, and past Mayddox was a dark-brown wooden door, built into a wall of dirt. There was no longer a hole above their heads. There was nothing except for dirt and darkness. The lion roared again, but the sound was muffled. It seemed they had been ushered away from the beast and into an underground tunnel.
“Well, you’ve gone and spoiled my lion trap,” the strange man said. “That’s a month of meat, at least, right into the piss pot.”
Gildwyn looked at the man incredulously. “You dug a trap under the surface of the North Road?”
The man smiled. “We’re a half mile west of the North Road, friend. Looks like you should have waited out the blizzard like the old man suggested.”
The strange man held the lantern to the side of his head, and the light cast him in a mellow glow. Unbelievably, he was still dressed exactly as he had been in the restaurant.
He might as well be nude, Gildwyn thought.
“How do you dress that way and not freeze to death out here?” Gildwyn asked, using Mayddox’s reins to pull himself up.
“Well,” the man began, “firstly, we’re not out here, we’re down here, and that makes a difference. And second, none of your fuckin’ business.”
Gildwyn frowned. “What’s your name?”
“You can call me Endemall,” the man said, twisting a length of his moustache between two fingers. “I already know your name.”
“So you remember me from the restaurant,” Gildwyn said, “and you know I need to get to the palace.”
“Yes. I remember,” Endemall answered.
“Can you help me?” Gildwyn asked, looking away from the light and into the stretching darkness. “These are tunnels, I assume. Can you lead me through them to the palace? Do they go that far?”
“They go everywhere,” Endemall said. “But I ain’t taking you to the palace. I got other plans.”
Gildwyn quickly reached down into his boot and withdrew his knife. He held it out toward Endemall and backed closer to Mayddox. “You followed us?”
“I followed you,” Endemall confirmed.
“I’m a Whiteclaw envoy. People will come looking for me.” Gildwyn was scared.
“Put the knife away, or you’ll get hurt,” Endemall said to Gildwyn as if speaking to a child. “I can tell you don’t know what you’re doing by the way you hold the damned thing.”
“Please,” Gildwyn sighed, attempting the diplomatic route. “I have urgent business. People’s lives are at stake. If you want money, I can arrange for that, but I have to go to the palace.”
“Tell me, envoy”—Endemall seemed to be ignoring Gildwyn’s pleas—“what terrible thing has happened in one of your villages? Why do you need to speak to Nygaard?”
“It’s not a good idea for me to talk about it,” Gildwyn said. “I don’t see why it should matter, anyhow.”
Endemall popped a snap on one of the knife sheaths along his chest and slid a long white blade out and into the light of the lantern. “It matters, envoy.”
Gildwyn swallowed hard and resigned himself to his fate. He wasn’t sure why the man in front of him cared, but he didn’t see how it could hurt his cause to tell the truth at this point.
“I need to reach all the tribe chiefs as quickly as possible so a zul master can be elected to address an issue afflicting a village in my tribe,” Gildwyn said. “A supernatural force has attacked a young girl, and we have no idea how to fight it. It haunts the village still, and who knows who else might be hurt if we cannot act quickly. We need a zul master’s help.”
“A supernatural force?” Endemall asked dubiously. “Something no one in Whiteclaw tribe knows how to fight? Did you see it yourself?”
“Yes,” Gildwyn said hesitantly.
“It just let you live?” Endemall asked, waving the white blade in the air dramatically.
Gildwyn sighed. “Look, I don’t know why they killed only the girl. I don’t know why they were just hovering over the lake when I saw them, but that’s the whole point. We don’t understand them, why they are here, or how to get rid of them. As I’ve already said, we need a zul master, and this is wasting time.”
Endemall stepped forward quickly and held his blade to Gildwyn’s throat, still holding the lantern in his other hand. Gildwyn noticed how well shaved the man’s head was with the exception of the stripe down the middle, and thought it prudent not to upset a man who seemed so intimate with his knives. It was hard to see Endemall’s eyes past the lenses of his goggles. They glowed like bright yellow circles in the lantern’s light.
“I’m gonna ask you something,” Endemall began, “and if you laugh at me, I’m gonna cut your throat. Do you understand?” Endemall’s jaw clenched as his eyebrows arched high. Gildwyn nodded ever so slightly, and the man with the knife continued. “You said they. Were the things that killed that girl in your village butterflies?”
Gildwyn’s eyes grew wide with shock. “How could you guess that?”
“The butterflies are also in Zehnder tribe, Mr. Nye.” Endemall dropped the blade from Gildwyn’s throat. “Katrien Nygaard already knows about them. She used the cursed things to kill my brother.”
• • •
Gildwyn held on to Mayddox’s reins with sweaty hands as he and the stag walked behind Endemall into the seemingly infinite darkness, led by nothing more than the light of Endemall’s lantern and his experience. The revelation that both men knew of the mysterious black butterflies had caused Endemall to immediately demand that Gildwyn follow him into the tunnels. Trapped underground in an unfamiliar and unlit place, what choice did Gildwyn have?
The air in the tunnel was cool but nowhere near as frigid and biting as it had been in the open air. Gildwyn was happy for that, but only for that. The tunnel didn’t have the sort of architectural integrity that gave Gildwyn confidence he and Mayddox would not end up buried alive. The rough brown walls made the tunnels seem crude and clandestine. It seemed the type of place criminals congregated to hide from the authorities. Gildwyn had traced his fingers along the walls only once before regretting it, as a chunk of the wall had fallen out, hitting the floor and bursting into loose dirt. Endemall had looked back at him with scorn.
There hadn’t been a lot of conversation in the brief time that had passed since they started moving. Gildwyn patted Mayddox on the snout intermittently, uttering assurances that were more for himself than for the stag. The silence made Gildwyn uncomfortable. After another ten minutes passed, he decided to attempt to make conversation with Endemall. After all, Gildwyn had many questions that were begging for answers.
“Where exactly are we going?” was the first and most immediately important question Gildwyn decided to ask.
“We’re headed south,” Endemall replied. “I don’t want to surface until we’re almost out of Zehnder tribe.”
“So we’re not headed to the palace?” Gildwyn asked as if missing a very important piece of the puzzle.
“Didn’t you hear a word I said?” Endemall griped. “Katrien Nygaard let those damned butterflies kill my brother. She can’t help us. You said we need a zul master’s help. So we’re headed to Ferrenglyn. I thought that was all fairly obvious.”
“Okay,” Gildwyn said slowly, “but we can’t just walk up to a zul master and ask for his or her help. We have to contact the tribe chiefs and ask them to elect a master. We can’t just ignore hundreds of years of political eti
quette.”
“Maybe you can’t,” Endemall said, “but I can.”
“You can’t just do something because you say you can,” Gildwyn argued. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Endemall stopped walking and spun around toward Gildwyn, pressing the lantern toward him. “How does it work then? Hmmm? We head up to the palace and ask Nygaard nicely to cast her vote. Then you head on down to Tiber tribe and gather yourself another vote, then it’s on to Andor tribe to do the same thing, and then in a month from now, we have a zul master on our side. Except, oh wait, we’ve wasted so much damned time obeying etiquette that the black butterflies have spread over Ferren like a plague. Not to mention, as I’ve already said, that bitch killed my brother!”
Gildwyn backed into Mayddox and put his palms up in surrender. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry about your brother. This is just a lot to deal with, and I’m trying to do what I know how to do. I’m just an envoy…just an envoy.”
The presence of the butterflies in Zehnder tribe did change things. Gildwyn couldn’t argue against that. He had been worried about time from the outset, but now it might be the most important factor. There was no way to know what the butterflies would do next, and more importantly, there was no way to know where else in Ferren they had appeared. They could be swarming over the entirety of Ferren right now. Suddenly, something occurred to Gildwyn.
“You didn’t know about the butterflies in Whiteclaw tribe when you followed me from the restaurant, did you?” Gildwyn furrowed his brow. “Why were you following me?”
“I needed your help, and now you need mine, so let’s keep moving,” Endemall said gruffly and turned back toward the dark tunnel stretching before them.
“No,” Gildwyn said with false bravado.
“What?” Endemall asked behind gritted teeth.
“I’m not moving a muscle,” Gildwyn said. “I don’t know anything about you other than the fact that you operate in secret tunnels under the ground and apparently have a hatred for Katrien Nygaard. You could be leading me to my death, and I wouldn’t even know it. You say you need my help? Well, I’m not going another step farther until you tell me who you are and why you were following me.”
Gildwyn folded his arms and nodded his head resolutely. He seemed foolish in his yak-hair outfit, especially considering Endemall was a much larger man than Gildwyn and could likely force him to do whatever he wanted. The envoy looked like a stubborn child protesting schoolwork. But Endemall relented.
“Fine,” he said. “You want to waste more time? Let’s waste time, envoy. Before I saw you in that restaurant, I was on my way out. That lunch was my last stop before I said good-bye to Zehnder tribe forever. You see, Mr. Nye, I ain’t a good guy. I make my living in this world by helping unfortunate souls get their wings on.”
“You smuggle pink leaf?” Gildwyn asked.
“Smuggle it, sell it, hell, I even put it on my own tongue when I get to feeling down on myself,” Endemall admitted. “Why the hell not?”
“It’s illegal,” Gildwyn said, stating the obvious. “That’s why.”
“As I said, Mr. Nye, I ain’t a good guy.” Endemall shook his head. “But I’m not a bad man, and my brother wasn’t a bad man, and he didn’t deserve to be given to those butterflies. Pink leaf might be illegal, but it isn’t killing anybody. We got locked up for smuggling. We broke the laws. We understood all that. But since when does a man get put to death for pink leaf? Do they put a man to death for pink leaf in your tribe?”
“No,” Gildwyn replied.
“No,” Endemall echoed. “Well, apparently Nygaard does. She had her guards lead my brother and me down into the grottos under the palace, and those things were everywhere. Butterflies hanging like bats from the cave ceilings. The guards threw my brother into the swarm, and what I saw then will make me scream in the night for the rest of my life. The guards saw it too. It was pretty obvious they didn’t know what to expect, and they panicked. In the confusion, I knocked one of them over and escaped down a side tunnel. I know these wormholes better than they do, and it wasn’t hard to lose them. After seeing what Zehnder’s chief was willing to do to my brother and me, well, you’ll say my allegiance faltered. I was on the way out when I came across you in that restaurant.”
“I’m sorry,” Gildwyn said, and he was. It was shocking to hear Katrien Nygaard had given a man to the butterflies. The woman had always been hard, her slick blond hair looking more like a helmet, but this was something different.
“I know I’m not a good guy,” Endemall repeated. “But no one deserves that.”
“You’re right, Endemall. No one deserves that. I don’t blame you for leaving.” Gildwyn didn’t want to upset the man further. He was standing with his head bowed, obviously haunted by his memories and the loss of his brother. “But I still don’t understand where I come into play.”
“I was hoping for asylum,” Endemall said simply. “I hoped you might hear me and take me to Whiteclaw tribe. I knew I couldn’t match your speed when I saw your stag, but I thought I might be able to catch you if I took a shortcut. Coming upon you in that lion trap was dumb luck.” Endemall shrugged. “I’m not asking for forgiveness, Nye. I know I’m a criminal. I’ll serve however I can to prove myself to your tribe, but I can’t go back to that palace, and I can’t live under her rule any longer.” Endemall looked into Gildwyn’s eyes. “If I can help you with this, if we can get rid of the butterflies together, maybe I can redeem myself.”
“So that’s what this is then?” Gildwyn asked. “Redemption?”
“I don’t know,” Endemall said, shaking his head. “Maybe I want vengeance on those damned butterflies…on Nygaard…I don’t know.”
Silence stood between the men for a minute. Gildwyn considered what he had heard, and Endemall grimaced and hung his head, pessimistically waiting to hear the envoy tell him to forget it all. Then Gildwyn stepped forward in the mellow light of the lantern and placed a hand on Endemall’s shoulder.
“It was too much pink leaf that made you do that to your hair, wasn’t it?” Gildwyn asked. “I mean, you missed a whole stripe up the middle.”
A large toothy grin spread across Endemall’s face, and he laughed, his eyes brightening. “To Ferrenglyn then?”
Gildwyn nodded. “To Ferrenglyn.”
• • •
The long, dark walk through the tunnels was arduous. Hours passed, and what little Gildwyn could see looked the same as every other part of the tunnel. If Endemall had told him they had accidentally circled around and were walking back over their tracks, Gildwyn wouldn’t have known any different. He had placed his faith in Endemall. He wasn’t sure whether he had a choice in the matter. The man was a self-proclaimed criminal and a fugitive, and now Gildwyn was guilty by aiding him.
Does it matter? Gildwyn wondered. The butterflies had consumed every bit of his focus. Nothing but that one problem existed. Is this righteous clarity, or have these tunnels caused me to lose all perspective?
They had come to a fork in the tunnel so many times Gildwyn had lost count. Endemall always seemed to know which direction to choose without hesitation, which helped curb Gildwyn’s doubt. However, it did nothing to buoy his hope of leaving the tunnels and returning to open air. Gildwyn had been roughly two days north of Whiteclaw tribe when he fell into the hole, and that was riding Mayddox. Now, having been underground for less than half a day and traveling more slowly, Gildwyn wasn’t optimistic about seeing the sunshine anytime soon.
“Any idea how long we might be down here?” Gildwyn asked.
“My target is four days, barring any setbacks,” Endemall answered.
Setbacks? Gildwyn wondered. He feared to find out what setbacks they might face walking through tunnels under the ground.
“Others use these tunnels, I imagine,” Gildwyn said, expecting the statement to spur elaboration from Endemall.
“These tunnels have been around longer than any of us have,” Endemall said. “They span the e
ntirety of Zehnder tribe, and some of them go much farther south into other territories. I’ve been using them my whole life, but mostly for smuggling. It’s the family business, you know. My granddad was a smuggler, my father was a smuggler, and my brother was a smuggler. Mother didn’t approve, but she didn’t stop spending the gold my father brought home neither. So I guess she just figured if she didn’t ask too many questions, she could make herself believe my father was earning everything legally. Funny relationship my parents had. They each pretended they were married to someone better than the truth. My mother pretended my father wasn’t a lying smuggler, and my father pretended my mother actually loved him. She didn’t, mind you. She left us in my thirteenth year, my brother’s tenth. Said she wanted a better life. Never saw her again. My father was pretty broke up about it, and so was my brother. Kellen was his name, my brother. I wasn’t really broke up about it none.”
“Why?” Gildwyn asked simply.
“That woman never gave me nothing but life and a name,” Endemall said, “and that might be enough for some, but it wasn’t for me, especially when neither gift was very good. You can tell me life is a precious gift all you want. I ain’t been convinced of that yet. As for the name, I gave that back to her the day she left.”
Gildwyn was confused. “You gave your name back?”
“You would have too if you’d been named George,” Endemall said with disgust. “Gaw. George. What a shit name.”
Gildwyn shrugged. He’d known a fair amount of Georges throughout his life, and they had all been decent fellows. He figured he’d keep that to himself though. “So how did you come about the name Endemall?”
“Well, it pretty much summed up how I felt at the time,” Endemall said. “Remember I was in my thirteenth when she left. I started telling people Endemall was my name, and it just sort of stuck. It’s a fair mark better than George.”
The Hands of Ruin: Book One Page 12