Vergence

by John March

  Any hint of friendliness had slipped from Addae's face. “As you say.”

  “See now,” Phar Salsa said, walking slowly towards the front garden. “Khet'Tuk borrowed a great sum — thirty thousand golden guilders, seeking to buy a great forest near the home of his family. Unfortunately, another managed to acquire the land before him.”

  “Why didn't he return the guilders you lent him?” Ebryn asked.

  “Oh, he did,” Phar Salsa said.

  “If he's returned what you lent him, then why is he here?”

  “He returned the initial sum, oh yes. But he had no way of returning the interest. Most unfortunate. Now he is mine, until he's worked off the debt and interest accumulated on the unpaid interest.”

  Ebryn glanced at Addae to see if he'd understood Phar Salsa's explanation.

  Addae's face gave no clue about what he might be thinking “For how long will Khet'Tuk be a bondsman to you?”

  “Oh, most likely years,” Phar Salsa said. “The debt is large, and he has few useful skills to earn back.”

  They rounded the corner to the front of the building and found a carriage waiting, a small contraption with four large wheels, barely large enough to accommodate Phar Salsa. The whole thing had been painted in guild colours, a gaudy mess of yellow, blue, and gold leaf. Ebryn's eyes were drawn to the two horses hitched to the front, the only ones he'd seen in a pair for pulling anything since he'd arrived in the city.

  In common with everything else they'd seen since passing through the gates of this building, the use of horses seemed intended as a casual reminder of the guilds wealth, and power.

  “Now if you've not brought funds to pay his debt, I'm afraid our conversation is at an end. However much I enjoy helping my friends in the orders, I'm afraid I am heavily burdened with duties.”

  Addae turned away without saying anything, and Ebryn followed. He thought he felt Phar Salsa's eyes on him until they'd passed through the gate. Addae had a face as rigid as stone. He glared from under furrowed brows, with the muscles in his jaws working, and teeth clenched firmly together.

  Addae stopped a short way down the road beyond the outer wall. “Were he in my lands, I would cut out his lying tongue, and geld him for his usury.”

  “What do you mean?” Ebryn asked.

  “Khet'Tuk is not in bonded servitude to Phar Salsa by chance. Is it not clear, the lender is the cause of his misfortune?”

  “How would he be able to do that?”

  “Khet'Tuk's borrowed thirty thousand guilders from Phar, a very great sum. Did you know there is a fee to be paid to the lender on such a sum, each season or each year?”

  Ebryn shook his head. “No, I didn't. Is that what he meant by interest?”

  “A part of the amount is added to what must be repaid. In time, if no payments are made, the debt grows larger,” Addae said.

  “Phar said when Khet'Tuk couldn't buy the land he wanted, he returned the loan.”

  “Yes, my friend, Khet'Tuk repaid the sum lent by Phar Salsa. Yet I fear he could not repay the fee without the land he needed. Is it not strange that another bid such a great sum for this same land? If possession of this land allowed Khet'Tuk to repay the full value of the debt, and the fee, it may be Phar Salsa wanted it for his own—”

  “So he pays a little more for the land than he would have lent to Khet'Tuk,” Ebryn said. “And he has a debt slave, and no doubt Brack feels he owes a favour for disposing of a rival—”

  Addae nodded. “Yes, my friend. This is what I see in this Phar Salsa's eyes.”

  Ebryn stopped, half turning to go back, his face flushed. As Addae had calmed down, it seemed anger had grown inside him.

  “I can free him. I'll free all of them. I was told Vittore didn't allow slavery here, but what difference is there between that and what Salsa is doing?”

  Addae put a restraining hand on Ebryn's arm. A white robed man a few yards behind had stopped when they turned, looking directly at them with a startled expression. He wore the clothing of a Genestuer order administrator, and seemed oddly familiar to Ebryn. He made a half-hearted effort at looking around, as if he'd paused to wait for someone, before hitching up his clothes and hurrying away.

  “Who was that?” Ebryn asked.

  “That one has followed us from near the guild of the lenders.”

  “You knew he was following us?”

  “Yes, my friend, he has not the skill for concealing himself. It may be he wore such clothing to better pass amongst us at the claws, yet it is a poor choice for streets on this side of the great road.”

  The Hunchback

  ON EACH OF HIS TURNS, Fla moved his piece with feverish speed, barely paying attention to the state of the board, his good eye focused unblinkingly on Hoi Helha. The old man fidgeted, fumbling with his pieces when it came to his turn, staring at Fla as if transfixed.

  As they played, Fla questioned him, dragging a piece of history out as he planned each move, interrogating Hoi about Ben-gan. What happened in the early days of Vergence? Where had the sky-wood they'd found for the world-ships come from? Fla sat facing Hoi across one of the tables in the entrance to the inner library, his hood pulled forward to cover the left hand side of his face, leaving only his good eye visible.

  Hoi's eyes traced the visible side of Fla's face compulsively. There'd been a moment when Hoi seemed to see something there, a kind of recognition, his gaze darting between Fla's eyes and dark greasy hair with a burgeoning horror visible on his features. Strange, Fla thought, as the worst side of his face was covered.

  Hoi's fear was palpable. A thin line of sweat gathered on his forehead as they started the second game, and he gripped his defeated pieces spasmodically. Initially, Hoi had been delighted when Fla joined him to play gulls. By the start of the second game Hoi barely whispered his answers.

  “Tell me,” Fla said, jumping his solitary wyvern over two of Hoi's gulls. “was he ageing before he found the sky-wood in Syvylar?”

  “I did not see. I was just born at that time.”

  “But you asked, didn't you? You found out,” Fla said.

  Hoi lowered his head. “Yes—”

  “Tell me.”

  “They say he no longer aged after Syvylar. He's barely changed my entire life.”

  Fla leant forward. “But he grew older before that?”

  “It is said he did. But you must understand, his people … like the Senesellans—”

  Fla thought furiously, trying to recall what he knew of Syvylar. What little he remembered concerned the nature of the valuable wood found there; extracted from sky forests, it would not fall — as buoyant in air as in water, and essential for building craft to navigate the between.

  What else had Ben-gan discovered, when he'd been there? Some secret to immortality, perhaps, but in his mind Fla could see light from Tranquillity celebrations reflected off undamaged sevyric manacles, lying on a table where moments before Ben-gan had worn them.

  And with the thought, he felt a sudden tickle of fear. An indwelling binding able to shape a host must be substantially ephemeral, from an ephemeral realm, and by their nature such places were short-lived. The ephemeral Ben-gan used might already be lost to time.

  Fla reached out and gripped Hoi's arm. “Are there books? You have records for Syvylar?”

  “Nothing—” Hoi said, but his eyes flicked towards a break in the shelves.

  Hoi tried to pull away, but Fla's urgency lent him strength, dragging the old man upright and hauling him towards the gap he'd glanced at. Fla's own body shook with the effort. His joints felt dislocated, ruptured, torn. But he kept Hoi upright, shoving him through the narrow avenues. When Hoi grabbed at a shelf, Fla struck his hand with the edge of his staff, and when Hoi stumbled to the floor, Fla heaved him back to his feet and forced him forward.

  “Here,” Hoi said eventually.

  The old man collapsed, whimpering. Fla ignored him, already feverishly searching the rows of books, fingers fumbling at the bindings, strug
gling to pull the tightly packed works free from their places on the shelves. His body was drenched in sweat from the effort, skin prickling, stomach revolting, as he pushed against waves of pain.

  Volumes tumbled to the floor, falling in loose uneven piles, and Fla scrabbled amongst them with sweat-slick hands. His cheeks were suddenly wet with tears of frustration, the snuffling noises from Hoi an infuriating distraction.

  “Go … go away, before I hurt you,” Fla screamed at him.

  Fla turned back to the shelves, with bile in his throat. How could he find what he was looking for here, with noise and the risk of interruption?

  Fla folded the tome in his hands using words and technique learnt from Orim, first one at a time — then full rows, until the entire book case was nearly empty. He would go somewhere quiet to find what he needed.

  Fla left Hoi, lying forgotten in the alcove, with a look of base terror on his face.

  Fla lurched into his underground home, almost welcoming the familiar cold, mouldering walls. He worked his way through the outer chambers, cluttered with now empty cages, the crypts and floor fouled with the putrefied droppings from a dozen kinds of creature.

  Dark guardians he'd summoned, following Orim's last visit, retreated to hidden spaces as he approached, and glutinous wards reformed behind him. He sat on the inscribed stone throne at the far end of the main chamber with a groan, the muscles in his legs and back cramping with fatigue. Exhaustion from two full days without sleep, and sparse food, threatened to overwhelm him.

  The first book yielded nothing. And the next. And the one which followed that. He ripped out pages in frustration and threw them across the room, abandoning the mangled shells of outer covers and crumpled scraps in a growing pile near his feet. When the dim purple-blue were-light stuttered, he replaced it.

  Daylight had drifted into darkness outside, and half the books lay scattered across the floor before Fla found his first clue. A bound servitor crouched in front of him, like some bloated sculpture of smooth polished dark bronze, supporting the open volume in multiple arms.

  Fla reread the section carefully. It concerned the properties of a specific kind of heartwood ephemeral, with instructions for binding to imbue a vessel with resilience and longevity. The secret lay not in the main text, but in a faded note scribbled in the margin.

  Fla leant forward, ignoring sharp twinges from his legs, breathing fast with excitement. He saw two comments, the first mentioning the effects of indwelling binding of a heartwood ephemeral in a living host.

  The second had been written in old Volanian, right to left in faded ink above the first comment, and completed in a formal hand. Most of the message meant nothing to him, but he did recognise two of the ideograms. One symbolised joining and the other denoted the concepts of adaptation, morphing, blending.

  Fla sat back as the ideas cascaded through his mind, sifting possibilities, seeing relationships in the forms described in the writing. The annotations suggested binding heartwood ephemerals within living hosts, gifting longevity and resilience. The second annotation suggested a double binding, the second serving as an accent to the first — subtly changing the outcome. He ran through the implications, trying to imagine the results.

  Would a pure heartwood binding lead to longevity, but at the expense of endless torpor and rigidity of mind and body? A second binding to compensate, something to add vitality, flexibility, the capacity for change? He'd never heard of a double binding to anything, let alone a living creature. The relationship could not be inimical, the two ephemeral would need to blend naturally, the two related — somehow complementary and compensatory, opposites drawn from the same root.

  Could this be Ben-gan's secret? The accenting of the second ephemeral, allowing him to change his form just enough to remove the sevyric bindings? And if the shape-shifting ephemeral were dominant, and the heartwood an accent for stability — what then could he achieve? A body no longer bent, a face like Muro's?

  Fla knew with a certainty he had the answer. Sashael lay like a precious jewel visible on the other side of a cage grill, just out of reach. All he needed was the identity of the second ephemeral. He returned to the book with a renewed sense of urgency, fatigue held at bay by hope, and a single desperate desire.

  As morning approached, he found it: another neat annotation in old Volanian at the foot of a page drew his attention and forced him to reread the preceding paragraph. And there it was, an elliptical reference to a bundlewisp — an incorporeal protean ephemeral.

  Fla laughed out loud. As common as weeds in a farmer's garden, nearly as welcome, and entirely disregarded. As valuable as gold to a few, but you probably couldn't give them away. Resilient through adaptation — the shared characteristic which would allow it to co-exist with heartwood.

  How to test this?

  Fla's good eye swept over the empty cages, and he cursed himself. A summoning would not hold an ephemeral, and in a fit of sentiment he'd released his own small menagerie.

  He worked urgently, flinging empty cages into a corner, sweeping loose pieces of paper, and other materials into piles. He rifled through old manuscripts, seeking out guides for the containment, and control, of the ephemerals he needed. The arboreal heartwood would be tricky to lure away from its abode, but its nature was easier to contain. Bundlewisps were a half mercurial substance, half blade-sharp instinct — difficult to fetch, and fiendishly hard to hold.

  Darkness came and went, as he laboured, ignoring the tormented protests of his body, drinking little and neither eating nor sleeping. His servitors, driven into alternating paroxysms of indecision and frenetic activity by his insistence, slowly assembled what he needed: dark earth, with wood and living plants for the heartwood. A small basin of clear water followed, and a shallow bowl of quicksilver.

  Fla had long known he possessed an extraordinary, even unique, affinity with certain taxa of ephemeral. He'd safely summoned and commanded them, keeping them in servitude for great periods of time, but with the ones he sought now, he would have no such advantage. And so the work must be completed painstakingly, with the closest attention to details.

  By the third attempt, Fla suspected something was amiss. By the fourth, he felt certain.

  He'd successfully summoned dozens of powerful ephemeral, many fiendishly clever and deadly, and all obeyed him. Minor ephemeral in his taxa had become habitual, requiring little effort, and he'd experimented with binding many into living creatures.

  The results were often unpleasant, frequently messy, as the ephemerals he could command reacted in strange ways with their hosts. But after a few early failures, every binding he'd attempted had finished with some degree of success.

  Blending the heartwood ephemeral with the bundlewisp created a strange mix, like flowing bright green oil. When he stepped into it, he felt nothing, and they flowed off him like water running over a stone. Nothing he did would force the indwelling binding to take hold, and in a rage he dismissed them.

  Fla's servitors scattered as he went from room to room, striking everything in sight with his staff. Fatigue threatened to overwhelm him, but reserves of molten frustration and desire pushed him onwards.

  After a while he calmed a little and made his way back to his stash of reference books, borrowed from the great library over the years, and never returned.

  Surely, as knowledge flowed up to great men, such as Vittore, the same must hold true in the ephemeral planes. Fla scoured old parchments, gathered together in binders, small flakes falling to the floor as his rough fingers plucked at each leaf in turn. Years before, he'd come across a reference to one of the principalities of his taxa. Not a ruler — one of the ultimate archons of darkness — but a prince.

  Fla couldn't recall the name he sought, looking instead for the image, drawn almost as an afterthought into the corner of the page. The drawing had shown nothing but a swirl, like a cloud of sparks, yet he had stopped and stared at it for a long time, and years later he remembered.

  When he found it
, he no longer cared that he might have neither the skill, nor the power, to protect himself from such a powerful ephemeral.

  Working quickly, he created a containing circle on the stone floor — an unbroken shape, using the last of his silvered salt. Enough, he hoped, to hold his summoning long enough.

  It appeared first as a disjointed hedge of razor-thin black needles, sliding soundlessly into the prepared circle, a handful at first, and then thousands all at once.

  It coalesced into a solid form, its lower half like the body of a coiled serpent, its upper part like a man. The limited light in the room reflected from rippling skin made of countless impossibly sharp points, twisting this way and that as the summoning turned hollow eyes to examine the binding on the floor surrounding it.

  Its presence pressed on Fla, a prickling sensation on his skin, the feeling of frozen grit against his eyes, and an unpleasantly high-pitched keening sound inside his ears.

  Fla had a sense of being watched by a vast and ancient intelligence, something which viewed men with the same indifference they, in turn, might the common louse. Yet he instinctively felt he had a measure of control over this thing, which could have towered nearly twice his height, but for the low ceiling.

  “What do you desire of me son of darkness?” the creature asked.

  The breath almost caught in Fla's throat. “Do you know about the blending together — the merging of your kind and mine?”

  “I do.”

  “The binding of heartwood and bundlewisp — do you know how it is done, how I can bind with them?”

  “I know how it is done,” the creature said. “For you it cannot ever be.”

  Fla felt as if his chest had constricted.

  “Why not?

  Hunting Yale

  ORIM PLACED THE HEAD carefully on the table and waited. Plyntoure had shown him into the dining room, and gone to find Aara Sur. The building felt unused — filled with echoing silence, and shuttered windows. Most of the other quarters given over to the Orders would be bustling with activity, fortunate if not overcrowded with young apprentices.