The Barbed Coil

by J. V. Jones

  It had taken Garizon troops nearly two days to roll rocks and other impediments from the slope. Another day had been spent building a dam five leagues downstream of a local waterway. The resulting overflow had been diverted northward, turning a tiny, summer-dry creek into a water supply big enough for a camp. Fresh water, a cleared hillside, and a prospect that allowed a view of the land directly adjacent to Garizon’s camp had been more than enough fuel to sway Sandor’s choice. Izgard hadn’t even raised an eyebrow when the Rhaize forces began pounding stakes into the hillside yesterday at noon. It was what he had planned on all along. That and southwesterly winds to drive flames through the camp and thick tunnels of black smoke onto the battlefield beyond.

  Ederius saw, smelled, and tasted the smoke now. He watched the havoc it created, and even as he noted its effect on the Rhaize vanguard, he weaved the harras through it like pieces on a board. Black moving through black: they knew what all knew, saw what all saw, took orders as a single corps. Their terrible half-human braying keened away in Ederius’ ears. Any other time it would have chilled him. Here and now, though, he found his lips opening and closing involuntarily, mimicking their calls. He was one of them. All of them. Their leader, their creator, the thread that bound them to the Coil.

  Ederius felt needs so deep and so base, they could only be expressed in images, not words. And although there was still some part of him that was afraid and appalled at the horrors his mind’s eye showed him, his hands never shook against the parchment and he never lost sight of the design.

  Black moving through black. The harras swept down the burning slope, longknives clawing downward, driving the confused and terrified Rhaize forces before them. Smoke stung eyes and choked lungs. Flames licked heels. The noise was deafening, maddening. It inhibited rational thought.

  Herded as surely as cattle, the enemy fled down into the valley. Most wore full armor. All had blades. If they had stopped and thought and held council, they would have turned on the harras and fought—they outnumbered them ten to one. Yet there was no council. Or if there was, it went unheeded amid the roar of the fire and the howling of the harras. Panic overtook the camp, just as Izgard had said it would. Just as he had planned.

  Seeing the Rhaize forces running at full charge into the valley, Ederius risked switching his attention back to his tent. His vision blurred for a moment and then came sharply into focus. The Barbed Coil lay before him on the desk, more vivid and more golden than he remembered. No longer gleaming like polished metal, it shone. Just one look was enough. Izgard had given him orders. The Barbed Coil offered him the means to carry them out. Quickly, eagerly, Ederius returned to his design.

  Ink scorched the vellum as the harras moved to form a half circle behind the enemy: chasing, goading, and ultimately propelling them to a valley partitioned for death. Dark figures they were, darting through showers of soft, burned flecks and a barreling storm of smoke. Black moving through black.

  “It was Hierac who found the Barbed Coil,” Avaccus said. “Legend goes that the young king was battling the Venns in the Upper Vjorhad at the time. Seventeen he was. Not a clever fighter, so they say, but a tenacious one. He was leading a raid on a Vennish village in retaliation for some incident involving the slaughter of Garizon merchants the previous summer. It was a mountain town, situated within the folds of the great northern glaciers. The Venns knew their territory and had long since perfected the strategy of driving invaders onto the glacier. They knew the glacier, you see, knew where it was weak and likely to collapse. Knew just by looking at the texture of the packed snow which areas were unsafe to tread.”

  Avaccus paused in his telling to take a sip from his cup. It was almost dark in the cave now, and Tessa could no longer see the old monk’s face clearly. She could not guess what time of day it was. Perhaps the sun had simply stopped shining through the cave entrance. Perhaps the sky was overcast. Perhaps it was night.

  Avaccus had prepared them a light meal of butter-soft cheese, pale bread, and water. Tessa had no appetite, but she forced herself to eat a little of the bread. It was as dry and tasteless as rice paper, and it caught in the back of her throat. From the shadows behind a rock, Avaccus had brought forth a fat white candle and then spent many minutes trying to light it with a flint. Watching him struggling to strike the flint at the correct angle to produce a spark, Tessa guessed that Avaccus lit the candle only for her benefit. That either from frugality or choice, he usually spent the long hours of darkness in the dark.

  The candle burned now, on the floor of the cave, sending a low tissue of light across the chamber. With candlelight grazing their curves, the wheels of cheese took on the look of craters on some remote alien landscape. Looking down at them from her position against the wall, Tessa felt as if she were floating in the darkness above another world. A loose pile of dried seaweed smoked away in the far corner behind Avaccus’ back, giving off the sweetly decaying aroma of the seashore at low tide. Avaccus said the smell drove away bats. Tessa couldn’t decide which she thought was worse: the smoking seaweed or the cheese.

  Strangely, she was no longer tired. Sore and hurting all over, shivering now and then as drafts took her, but wholly alert. She didn’t want to miss anything Avaccus said.

  Putting down his cup, Avaccus took a sharp breath, shifted his body from side to side as if it were some troublesome weight he had to bear, and then continued with his story.

  “The Venns sent the entire Garizon raiding party over the edge of the glacier, driving them back until they had nowhere else to go. The shelf of packed snow they were forced onto collapsed beneath their feet, calving away from the dam the moment it bore their weight. All but Hierac died, their falling bodies crushed by walls of ice, their spines snapped by rocks impacted in the frozen snow.

  “Hierac fell with all the rest. How far, I do not know. His body was flung outward as well as down, and by some miracle he landed on the rain-softened remains of the previous calving. His right leg was broken in two places, his rib cage crushed. He was unconscious for one night and a day. When he finally opened his eyes he saw it, shining gold in a stream of white glacial milk, embedded in the meal of gravel, clay, and sand. The Barbed Coil. It had been uncovered by the very calving that had sent Hierac’s men to their deaths.”

  Hearing Avaccus speak, Tessa shivered so deeply she felt a trembling motion in her heart.

  “It is always the way with ephemeras. They never enter a world quietly with a kiss; they claw their way through with a vengeance: diverting lives and history and nature itself. They like to make an entrance.”

  Tessa nodded. She knew. A long, tortured ride in the car, a head full of noises, and three hundred lives laid bare, courtesy of two robbers who likely thought it bad luck when the main safe wouldn’t open, forcing them to raid the vault instead. How long could the thread be traced back? How long had the ring been waiting for her? Perhaps it had not waited one instant. Perhaps it had held off until the last possible moment before slipping between the envelope’s folds.

  Avaccus made a soft noise, drawing Tessa’s attention back. “Hierac took the Coil back with him to Garizon. How he managed the journey is a story in itself, but I do not see how you would benefit from the telling. Things were never the same for him again. Up until that day on the glacier, he had been a hard-fighting, hardheaded soldier duke, with modest ambitions and a limited vision incorporating nothing more sophisticated than border raids and blood feuds. Garizon was a small dukedom with small ideas and even smaller plans. Hierac changed all that.

  “Within a month of crowning himself with the Barbed Coil, he won his first war. Fighting against Balgedis in the north, he managed to claim the pasturelands of the Berrans. From there he never looked back. Victory fired and inspired the Garizon army; appetites grew, ambitions expanded, possibilities opened up before them like fields of summer wheat.

  “Most of the western continent was under Istanian control at the time. The Istanian infidels had conquered Rhaize, Medran, Drokho, west
Balgedis, and south Maribane. They controlled the Bay of Plenty, the Gulf, the Mettle Sea, and were masters of the middle east. Terhas, the desert state where they had originally risen from, was theirs, along with Harassi, Ranypt, and Arpur. The world had never seen an empire like it. The infidels placed no value on life. They entered a country and slaughtered its men and women until they had robbed it of its heart. Goods were what counted: grain, silks, gold, wool, precious stones, and human flesh. They herded hundreds of thousands of Drokho and Medrani children onto slave boats and sent them to the east. Adults were too old, they said, too set in their western ways to be trained for service at infidel courts.

  “All men of fighting age who were not slaughtered were maimed—the infidels wanted no army massing in the shadow of their turned backs. They favored pouring scalding oil into ear canals, ruining a man’s hearing and sense of balance, and rendering him unfit to fight. The operation is painful in the extreme, and if not carefully done, it can result in brain damage, madness, and death. The Istanian infidels cared little either way. They had a saying: The blood of a westerner washes quickly from the blade.

  “The same spring that Hierac found the Coil, the Istanians decided to invade Garizon. Some say the Istanians had become lax, that they had grown accustomed to meeting little or no resistance, and that they set out for Garizon ill prepared.”

  Avaccus pushed a hard noise from his throat. “They are wrong. The Istanian forces moved across the Veize in late spring. They had taken note of Hierac’s victory over Balgedis in the north. They came expecting resistance.

  “And they got it. The likes of which they hadn’t seen in over a century. Hierac had been reborn in the brilliance of the Barbed Coil. It showed him visions of war, brought forth skills he never knew he possessed, endowed him with the confidence necessary for command. It made a war king of him.

  “Not only did Hierac succeed in halting the Istanian invasion, he drove them back. Back into Rhaize and Balgedis, back across the Veize. Within three months Hierac claimed Balgedis for himself. One year later to the day he took Rhaize. There was no stopping him. His armies went from strength to strength. His strategies were bold, ingenious. The Istanians matched his brute force, but they could not compete with his sheer relentlessness. No one could stand in his way. Always he pushed forward, claiming one field, one village, at a time. Hierac changed the way the world fought. He didn’t plan single battles or campaigns, thinking two, perhaps three moves ahead. He planned an entire war.”

  “He broke up the empire?” Tessa spoke more to hear the sound of her own voice than to ask a question for which she already knew the answer. The further Avaccus went with his tale, the less substantial she felt. Things grew larger with every word he said. Five hundred years. Empires. Thousands of deaths and countless generations. It didn’t bear thinking about. The fact that she was here and caught up in it seemed some terrible mistake.

  “It took Hierac only a decade to achieve what no other army had managed in over a century.” Avaccus was as composed as a historian reciting dates. “The infidels were driven from the west; from Rhaize, Medran, Maribane, Drokho, and even the greater part of the Istanian peninsula. Garizon forces hounded them south and then east, and ultimately annihilated them. At the last great battle, on the red sandbanks of the river Medi, Hierac’s army massacred one hundred thousand men. The Barbed Coil had a hand in every death.”

  Tessa closed her eyes. The silence following Avaccus’ words seemed to press against her eyelids. She didn’t want to open them again. Opening them would mean facing things she didn’t want to face. Seconds passed and then, with eyes still closed, she let out a small, defeated sigh and said, “That was the reason the ephemera entered the world, wasn’t it? To dismantle the Istanian empire.”

  Even though her eyes were closed, Tessa knew when Avaccus nodded. “I believe you are right.”

  “And somehow the ephemera outstayed its welcome? It failed to slip away?”

  “Yes. Yes.” A subtle change could be detected in Avaccus’ voice. “Though failed is hardly the right word.” He met Tessa’s gaze, and in that instant she immediately knew the great weight of responsibility that came with the knowledge he had gained. Even as he spoke again, she felt a portion of that weight transferring to herself. It was shared now.

  “The Barbed Coil was prevented from leaving this world,” Avaccus said. “Hierac commissioned its binding.”

  Tessa pulled her knees to her chest and rested her head against them. Her body felt as heavy and brittle as slate. All around her the walls of the cave soaked up the light from the candle, converting its tiny golden flame into a dozen shades of red. It was like sitting in the middle of a glowing hearth. Only there was no warmth.

  “It’s why I’m here today, isn’t it?” she said, looking Avaccus straight in the eye. “Not to rid the world of the harras or their leader, but to send the Barbed Coil away?”

  Avaccus’ hand flitted upward and then stopped abruptly, as if he meant to touch her yet quickly realized she was beyond his reach. “Yes,” he said, dropping his hand to his side. “I believe that is why you were brought here. The ring and the crown are paired ephemeras. The ring is a sister piece to the Barbed Coil, and is working through you to free it.”

  “Tell me what I must do.”

  Avaccus’ eyes widened, and Tessa realized she had spoken the words as a command. He looked at her a long moment and then nodded as if she had spoken something unpleasant but ultimately true. “To understand what you have to do, you must first know how and why the Coil was bound.”

  Something in Avaccus’ voice made Tessa’s heart race. She put a hand on her chest, to calm herself. As she pressed her palm against her ribs, she noticed Avaccus was looking past her toward the entrance to the cave. Somewhere up there lay the abbey.

  Avaccus began speaking, his voice low enough to whisper secrets, his gaze flickering from time to time back toward the entrance. “After Hierac crushed the infidels at the river Medi, he traveled back to the west to consolidate his territories. He went on a massive three-year tour of all the lands, towns, and dukedoms he had conquered. He wanted people to know him as a king. He wanted them to see him on his mighty warhorse with his broadsword in his hand and the Barbed Coil upon his head and realize it would be futile to oppose him. Specially trained troops went into towns after Hierac had departed, slaughtering rebels, torching their homes and meeting places, seizing property, gold—anything of value—in the name of the king. Those who did not give willingly were forced to watch as their homes were drenched with naphtha and then burned.

  “It is how the harras got their name: Hierac’s arsonists, his bringers of horror. His harras.”

  Tessa felt a hand of ice slide down her spine. Bundling herself up into the smallest ball she could manage, she pressed her knees fast against her chest.

  “During this time, Hierac made it his business to seek out scholars in every town he visited, as he was anxious to discover more about his crown. He was fiercely possessive of it, never allowing it to be handled by another or let out of his sight. He knew, you see. He knew it was the reason he won the wars he did. And he wanted to find out why.”

  “He came here, didn’t he?” Tessa surprised herself by interrupting. Fragments of old conversations weaved through her mind, revealing connections as she spoke. There was a pattern here. She could sense it. “Hierac came to the Anointed Isle and visited with the monks. They knew what the Barbed Coil was, didn’t they? They helped him bind it to the earth in return for . . .” As Tessa let the thought dangle unsaid, Avaccus supplied the word for it:

  “Immunity.” His entire body shifted downward as he spoke, as if someone were high above him, piling weights on his shoulders. He regarded Tessa a moment, his light eyes full of pain, and then said, “Yes, it is so. Hierac came here, lured by talk of holy relics, priceless manuscripts, and the reputation of the Anointed Isle for learning. He came to plunder, either gold or knowledge—whatever treasure he found first. The holy fat
hers came out onto the rocks to meet him. They were full of fear. They had heard all the stories of Hierac and his harras. They believed he would burn the abbey to the ground, rob their ancient treasures, and take lives.

  “Instead he brought them the Coil. Look at it, he commanded. Tell me of its nature and its history. Give me reason to spare your lives.

  “And they did. A full Quire of scribes was called to the abbey scriptorium and immediately began work on a pattern to reveal knowledge of the Coil. Twelve men there were. Twelve men working for twelve hours through the night, each contributing a pattern to the whole. It wasn’t like today, where gathering knowledge through the painting of illuminations is considered a trespass against God and his domains. The holy fathers considered it a blessing, bestowed upon their scribes for their use alone.”

  Avaccus shook his head. “I do not know the right and wrong of it. I, of all people, am not fit to judge.” His head sank against his chest and his breaths were labored for a while. After a few moments of working to control something inside of himself, he continued, his voice firm. “At dawn the Quire had their answers. They called the holy fathers to them and spoke what their patterns had revealed. They knew it all. They knew the Barbed Coil was an ephemera, one of many that slipped from world to world, each with its own intent. Winning wars was the Barbed Coil’s purpose, and now that it had won one of such import it would surely slip away.

  “The holy fathers made a decision. I believe they thought that even without the Coil, Hierac would still be a demon king, that they and the rest of the world would continue to suffer from whatever poison had been administered through its barbs.” Avaccus shrugged heavily. “Whatever their reasons, the holy fathers went to Hierac within the hour and passed along the findings of the Quire. Hierac was immediately overcome with a deep fear that the Coil would be lost to him. He turned to the holy fathers and demanded they find a way to harness it to the earth, to prevent it from leaving his side. He threatened to burn the abbey to the ground and kill the monks one by one.