by John March
“Really, have you got it with you?”
“It's in my room,” Ebryn said. “And another called Ullvenards Travels. He visited Senesella too.”
“Good, I can have a look at it later,” she said. She reached out a hand and the miniature dragon rubbed its chin against her fingers. “Are you hungry, Leth? He had to be locked up inside my cabin on the way here. I couldn't let him out to hunt, so he hasn't eaten much for days. They only eat from fresh kills unless they're starving.”
Leth made a rasping sound, and rattled his wings.
“How did you get him?”
“He's from my mother,” Sash said. “She gave him to me when I decided to come here — to Vergence. Actually, she gave me the egg to hatch out. You need to have them from the egg so they know you. You can't tame them otherwise. Hold out your arm, see if he'll come to you.”
Ebryn held out his hand. Leth looked at the offered perch for a few moments as if deciding then hopped onto Ebryn's outstretched arm, shifting his wings for balance. He was much lighter than Ebryn expected, gripping gently with small sharp claws.
Ebryn ran his fingertips along the miniature dragon's back, across the wing joint. The skin had a liquid appearance but it felt dry, and smooth.
Where he touched the small dragon its skin turned a brilliant gold. And like ink dropped onto soft paper the colour spread, as if drawn from his fingers, until the small creature glowed like a gilded statuette.
Sketik's Workshop
FOETID VAPORS CURLED up from the slime-filled water channel, mingled with the thin sooty fog, and rolled into surrounding alleyways like an acrid waist-high stew. Fla stood in the shadows, waiting.
The harsh low air invaded his lungs, making him cough, and spit. Turgid currents silently accepted his offerings, dragging them away in reluctant little eddies and swirls towards the Drops, the community of unfortunates which clung to its banks like congealed offal between the Claws and the sinistral spike.
He had waited the early part of the night in the dank back streets of the outer Claw for the runt-faced Sketik to finish and leave. Initial sharp twinges from his joints had settled into a persistent grinding pain. His throat felt abraded and raw in the night air.
The first time he saw Sketik collecting specimens he'd known with certainty the man was up to something unsavoury. There'd been something irresistibly furtive about Sketik's manner, the look of a man not simply breaking a law, but transgressing something more fundamental.
The day after each new batch of animals arrived at his workshop Sketik visited his old master, Sevoi Phlecur. There they sat, in the inner library, where they spent hours with their heads together, bowed over bits of paper, talking in little more than whispers.
And so Fla set a watch on Sketik, waiting impatiently for his next visit to the Vergence menagerie, to arrange for the next set of specimens. Had he not known where they were to be delivered, Fla would have been unable to keep up with the small cart as it wended its way through the convoluted back streets.
As it was, he'd arrived in time to witness the delivery of a family of orguta, six arms clinging anxiously to the wire frames of their cages as they were dumped roughly on the kerb by the driver. Bright rust-coloured fur and large intelligent eyes made these creatures, native to the humid forests of Pytroune, very popular at the Vergence menagerie. Fla doubted Sketik wanted them for pets.
So he'd waited, huddled on the bridleway against the side of the building opposite, while the cages were manhandled into Sketik's dimly lit workshop, and through long painful hours of dripping silence punctuated at intervals by muffled screams from the orguta — at first singly, then all at once in a kind of macabre chorus.
Finally, after a long lull in the tormented sounds, the faint light from the windows in the building opposite faded out, and moments later a door opened. Sketik's long pale face looked out, peering carefully up and down the narrow street. Fla felt the sudden sweep of a far-sensing, a sensation like hundreds of spiders crawling all at once over his skin, but he was already prepared with the counter.
With a small gesture the fog between them swirled and thickened. Shadows angled across him and deepened, and an impossibly diaphanous veil subtly turned the searching tendrils, allowing them to ripple over, and flow unhindered beyond him.
Sketik took a few moments to probe the alleyways and rooftops around the street then, apparently satisfied, he stepped out, and pulled the door shut behind him.
When Sketik had gone, walking swiftly away down the street in the direction of the outer Claw, Fla dislodged himself from his hiding place, and heaved himself across to the doorway. After so long standing, each movement was a jarring agony, a ragged serrated throbbing through his joints. He wanted to scream, to cry out, give up. He wanted to hurt Sketik for making him stand through unendurable hours, to shatter the door, and walls of the dark building facing him. But his will beat the pain back, pressed the rage down, turning it into something cold and hard, and familiar.
For as long as he could remember his body had rebelled against itself. His limbs and back bowed, and twisting with each year as he grew. He had been an adult for some time, but remained so short and bent that he could barely look a three-quarters grown boy in the eye.
He produced a far-sense, but just at the point he should have allowed it to spread, he held it, feeling it straining, boiling. He twisted and massaged the strands he felt coalescing around him, blurring the form with the substance of shade until only an outline of the original pattern remained.
When he released the casting, the purpose remained, but in every other way its nature had changed. In place of fine strands of discrete illumination to be cast as a rippling web, it now drew together a glutinous pooling mass of inky darkness, like a bitter mist.
It poured out across the narrow space between Fla and the building, and edged under the facing doorway like a blindly flowing stain, sliding easily across the threshold. Inside, it spread upwards and outwards, gliding smoothly like an oily slick across the surfaces, raising no more disturbance than the fall of a shadow. Where it encountered an obstruction, it gathered and oozed around, accumulating and dividing, but all the time seeking with an exquisite delicacy.
As expected, he found the interior laced with an assortment of alarm wards and traps, nothing lethal, but enough to do real harm to the unprepared. He spat irritably, a glistening streak of contaminated filth on the half cobbled street. The wards on the doors and windows were poor affairs, clumsily applied, and ragged. Contemptuously easy to find and easier to evade. And the ones inside were not much better.
Fla paused half-way across the street, leaning heavily on his staff. Too easy. All the castings inside the building were obvious. Simple enough for a modestly skilled caster to find, and disable.
He focused his attention, exploring the room in painstaking detail, careful not to step across the threshold until he'd scrutinised it thoroughly. The walls were dominated by haphazard shelves, thrown up crookedly and across windows, cluttered with books and jars, wooden containers and a hundred other implements too obscure to identify by feel. At the far end, his far-sensing enveloped huddled living forms in cages.
Even as his casting revealed the physical space of the interior, it also sampled at a deeper level, sifting for subtle disturbances. At the centre of the room he felt a vivid weal, like a livid bruise, throbbing backwards through layers of the world skin. Around that, a chaotic melange of elementary bindings, accumulated potentials, and the sad discordant echoing remains of long expired castings.
And he found the real trap. Woven together with subtlety, like a spider's web, cleverly hidden in an accumulation of rubbish, the finest filaments threading from point to point, attaching wherever he detected a residue of some previous casting. Lurking behind it he felt a presence — something concealed inside a fold in the world skin, a true summoning, poised as a baleful guardian over this one room.
Fla stifled his impatience as he carefully explored the remaining space, bef
ore returning to the creature. Few would go to such extremes to protect nothing. It would take the skill of a master to bind such a thing, and discovery would certainly prove fatal. He doubted Sketik was capable of summoning and controlling something this impressive. It felt more like the work of Sevoi Phlecur.
He suspected the threads would stick, like strands of cobweb, to anyone rash enough to perform a casting inside. Once attached, it would follow the caster everywhere, an invisible trail linking back to this place — easy for the lurker to follow — stalking, waiting for a vulnerable moment to strike. If it killed its victims, the bodies would be discovered far away, with no obvious connection to either Sketik or his workshop.
Cheating, Fla thought, his lip curling. You're not the only ones who can play that game. He ran through a list of alternatives in his mind, quickly discarding direct casting in favour of summoning.
He briefly considered a swarm of Vyspan pests: tiny ravenous ephemerals to leech away the vitality of a casting, and in numbers easily able to tear apart the wards, and other protections, from the building. They would be entertaining to watch at work, but destructive, and very difficult to conceal afterwards.
Finally, he settled on Thilan shades, cunning and subtle ephemerals, able to adapt themselves to nearly any purpose.
Thirty slow heartbeats later, Fla's summoning dragged six of the creatures onto the shadowy street. They appeared as columns of spiralling dark blue smoke, flowing into solid looking shapes, as if bound by invisible moulds, their forms reflecting like coloured glass in the minimal light.
Gliding with him as he approached the door, one Thilan shade peeled off to stand by the side of the entrance, positioned by Fla to act as a rear-guard, a reserve in case he needed help getting out.
The others he set to creating a safe path to the back of the workshop, but without disturbing the protective castings scattered around the inside.
He didn't care how many of the lurkers' filaments attached themselves to his shades. Once he finished with them he would dismiss them back to where he'd fetched them from, either breaking the strands, or dragging them halfway across the between. Either way, he'd be able to walk away afterwards, completely clear of the traces himself.
His shades collapsed as they reached the door, drifting underneath like billowing clouds of steam. Fla followed them with his far-sensing, feeling their progress through the inside of the building, watching them as they quickly reformed.
Inside, they divided. Two travelled the short distance along the passageway on the other side of the door, finding the workshop entrance. The other three busied themselves with the wards, traps and sense castings, and the door swung open in front of Fla as he reached it.
Still concentrating hard, he hobbled into the workshop, careful not to disturb anything inside the room. If Sketik was anything like him, he'd notice even the smallest thing out of place, no matter how untidy the room might appear.
Already he could feel the lurkers' webs drifting to coalesce around the shades as they dealt with more traps. A fair number of real cobwebs hung from the ceiling, and most of the surfaces were covered in a layer of dust.
Fla made his way along the outside of the room, flanked by watchful shades, avoiding the odd jumble of books and large vase-like pots cluttering the floor.
The orguta watched him as he eased his way through the room, leaning heavily on his staff for support. They clambered to the far sides of their cages when he or one of his shades came too close.
As he passed, something about the orguta caught his attention. Each had a patch of hair missing and a scar across its chest, and when he bent closer he saw all the lines were in identical positions, with the same shape and length. A weapon to harm many in the same way, or something else? Fla scanned the tops of the nearby tables for clues.
Crammed onto every available space, and piled up in unstable dusty stacks, were bundles of papers, books, flasks, beakers, and jars holding indecipherable parts of once living things floating in thick oily fluid.
His eyes were drawn to the few emptier spaces. However untidy, Sketik would have needed a clear area to work in.
He found it at once. A single piece of parchment, very old with faded writing, and next to it, a basin holding a tarry substance. The script looked like some archaic version of old Volanian — difficult to decipher, but such texts sometimes held valuable clues to long forgotten and novel applications of the craft.
Fla turned his attention to the black liquid. It rippled as he brought his face close, sending hair thin tendrils questing towards his eyes and mouth.
“Now, what are you?” He asked.
He withdrew his face, and the tendrils pulled back, except one which had reached too far. As it withdrew, it collapsed into a dozen small droplets, which scattered like tiny jet beads, and lay quivering on the surface of the table.
Fla watched them for a while, then straightened up. He couldn't leave them there for Sketik to see, but no point in wasting any.
“Collect these,” he said, passing a hand over the fragments. “Hold them safely, and follow me.”
Thilan shades couldn't understand him, and might not be able to hear at all, but he'd found he could shape commands far better, when he wanted his instructions followed exactly, if he spoke them aloud.
Outside, with the workshop door shut fast and Sketik's wards no longer suppressed, he dismissed all but one of his shades. That one he kept for carrying the pooled droplets of dark material. Instinctively he felt anything which reached so determinedly for his face wouldn't be safe to touch.
A fine drizzle filtered down from the starless night, coating the cobbles and washing away the mist. He pulled his cloak forward to protect his eyes and made his way slowly down the street, conserving his strength against the pain.
The Westerwall
EBRYN WOKE TO THE sound of muffled laughter. At first, as he drifted up through layers of sleep, still only half aware, he thought the sound was part of a waking dream. Something flapped softly nearby, and he felt a soft breeze across his cheek. Parchment rustled briefly, followed by a loud snort.
He sat up abruptly, fully awake, with the words of a warding already part formed on his lips. Something launched itself from his bedpost with an indignant hiss and a blur of shifting colours.
“What?” Ebryn said.
Sash sat cross-legged in a chair near the window, early light filtering in behind her. On her lap was a large open book which she read head down, shaking with near silent laughter.
Leth swooped down and landed on the back of her chair with a soft thump, sparkling yellow and gold in the light.
“Sash?”
“Sorry,” she said, looking up. “I didn't mean to wake you up. This is just so funny.”
“What are you doing?” Ebryn asked.
“Reading your Ullvenards book. I can see why you like it so much — it's so funny.”
“I mean what are you doing here — in my room?”
“I came to see if you were up yet. I found your book and decided to read it while I waited for you to wake.”
Ebryn looked at her, uncertain how to respond. He felt sure he'd bolted his door the previous evening, but now it stood slightly ajar, and anybody walking past in the passage outside would be able to see in.
“Was my door open?”
“No,” Sash said. “I opened it.”
“You opened it?”
“Yes. We don't have many doors in Senesella, but I thought it might come in useful here — so I learnt how. Want me to show you?”
Sash gestured and whispered something that sounded like a half rhyme, and his room door swung gently, silently into place, and the bolt slid shut.
“See now were locked in.”
“How did you learn that if you didn't have any doors?” Ebryn asked.
“There was a man, a caster from here, who wanted some kind of favour from my mother, and I told him I'd introduce him to her if he taught me.”
“What did he want fro
m your mother?”
“I don't know,” Sash said. “Whatever it was he probably wouldn't have got it after teaching me anyway. My mother didn't want me learning casting, or coming here to Vergence, I doubt she'd have been very happy with him when she found out.”
“Wasn't that a bit unfair of you?” Ebryn asked.
He regretted the question the moment the words were past his lips, and was relieved to see she didn't seem to be offended.
“No. There is a way to win the help of my family and he thought he could ignore it by using me. Are you getting up, or staying in bed?”
“I'll need my clothes,” Ebryn said.
“Where are they?”
“I think you are sitting on them.”
Sash laughed and threw his clothes to him, one item at a time, then watched with interest as he struggled to put his trousers on under the bedsheets.
“Is it a custom in Fyrenar to get dressed in bed?”
“Err, sometimes,” Ebryn said, “if you have company.”
As he fought to get his shirt on, Ebryn wondered what Fidela and Sarl might think to see him with a young woman in his sleeping quarters. He had a fairly good idea what Fidela would say.
“Come on,” she said. “There's so much to see, unless you want to stay inside all day reading mouldy old books.”
“Where do you want to go?” Ebryn asked.
“I thought we might try the tavern Teblin suggested. I have the directions here.”
Sash unfolded the small piece of parchment, and showed it to him.
“What part of the city is it in?” Ebryn asked.
“Near the Claws. Can you read his writing?”
Teblin's directions took them to an older, unhurried part of the city, where none of the buildings rose above two levels. The Westerwall tavern lay along one entire side of a large open square, set well back from the road. It had a wide garden in front, filled with tables and benches, and partially covered by an awning extending from the edge of the roof.