47
Revelation
Harric’s plan was to take the horse north up the yoab trails and then down to the trail beside the Toothed Canyon. Once through the canyon, he’d look for the settlements on the other side. If he got through before dawn, he might be able to spot the morning cook fires. And a settlement would have information—and a road. Traveling alone, he’d be less conspicuous than the group with a Phyros-rider, auroch, wandering priest, and female knight.
Peering through his oculus into the Unseen, he led Snapper north along the main yoab run. A half-mile on, the run forked toward the river and the Toothed Canyon, just as Mudruffle’s map predicted. There he walked Snapper off the run and into the labyrinth of logs and hummocks. When he found a mossy basin concealed by thimble berry and ferns, he hobbled Snapper and let the gelding go back to sleep.
“Fink, you here?” Harric whispered. Climbing to the top of a log so ancient it was now more hill than tree trunk, he peered about the spirit-lit forest.
“Nebecci, Tasta, Tryst.”
After a few heartbeats of waiting, he wondered if he had pronounced the words to the summoning incorrectly. Nebecci, Jasta, Tryst? But then a shadow of black smoke formed against the essence light of the moss, and Fink materialized.
His grin flashed as he looked around the grove, but when he saw Snapper saddled and packed, his wings drooped along with his expression. “Kid. What are you doing? What happened?”
“Hey, Fink.” Harric shook his head apologetically. “I’m leaving. The Compulsion has her thinking of weddings and throwing up when she tries to resist it. It’s hurting her, but if I get out of her sight, it should be better, like you said. I still want to help them for a while, though; I’ll stay a day ahead and scout out danger on the roads.”
While Harric spoke, Fink’s talons twisted together like a tangle of fishhooks. His triple-chinned head shifted nervously from side to side. “Scouting ahead. That could work. Sort of with them but not with them. And we could take Missy back tomorrow night to take a look at the weaves.”
Harric’s gut knotted. “Maybe you should tell her to hold off a while—”
“Kid.” Fink’s voice hardened. “We don’t tell Missy to wait.” Behind the hardness, an edge of panic lurked in the imp’s tone, and it set a burr of dread in Harric’s heart.
“Then tell her it’s off,” Harric said. “That was our deal.”
Fink cringed and twisted his talons. “That was our deal, kid, sure. But you don’t offer Missy a deal like that.”
“You mean you didn’t tell her we’d call it off if something changed?”
Fink shook his head, jowls jiggling. “This is a mistake, kid.”
“It’s not. I know what I have to do.” Harric sucked a deep breath and sighed. “I have other news, too. I just watched Brolli talking into a witch-silver teacup. And I think it talked back.”
Fink’s brow wrinkled. “Talking to it? What’d it say?”
“I couldn’t hear it, but I think he could.” Harric frowned. Some of Brolli’s words—locusts, and do what we must to survive—came back to gall him. He made a decision. “Come on. I have a feeling about him tonight.”
“So you’re not leaving?”
“Not just yet.”
A sound made them both freeze. A soft crack, like a boot on a rotten branch.
They both vanished into the Unseen.
The burden of maintaining himself in the spirit world fell on Harric so hard that he nearly fell to one knee.
“Your clothes, kid,” Fink whispered. “Take off your clothes.”
Harric glimpsed Brolli moving between trees not fifty paces away. “No time. Look.” Brolli’s huge Kwendi eyes turned in their direction as he hiked past, but he did not pause or change his direction.
As Fink lifted the burden of the Unseen from him, Harric rubbed the lucky jack card in his sleeve and willed Snapper to remain silent. It would be a very bad time for the horse to fart or snort or step on a twig. Thankfully, the gelding preferred to sleep, head down, and Brolli passed without noticing.
When they could no longer hear him, Harric nodded to Fink, and they followed.
Brolli avoided the yoab run and zigzagged through the log maze, sometimes over but usually around the seedling logs, and generally northward. Scouting their path to the Toothed Canyon, probably, or looking for a better vantage of the fire on the opposite side of the valley. Harric was glad he hadn’t taken Snapper down the fork of the yoab run, or the Kwendi surely would have seen the hoof prints.
In the Unseen, the Kwendi’s spirit looked different than those of Harric or the others. Instead of pale blue, it had a greenish tint, and instead of rising upward, his strands bent north. North? It looked almost like Brolli was following his strands northward.
Harric’s brow wrinkled. Why wouldn’t Brolli’s strands go to the Unseen Moon, like everyone else’s? He glanced to Fink, but didn’t want to risk speaking out loud. He’d ask about that later. To keep up with Brolli, Harric had to concentrate intently on the forest floor in front of him, for it was not easy to move across it silently. Beneath the moss were twigs and branches that could snap as loud as a breaking bone, and he worried Brolli would lose them. But shortly after they’d crossed the fork of the yoab run, Brolli halted.
He had stopped in a sunken hollow between trees and logs, much like the one in which Harric had seen him with magic closet. Brolli set something in the moss beside him, and Harric recognized it as the cup he’d been talking into, only now it had a little lid on the top, and in the Unseen, Harric saw that many of Brolli’s strands were caught up in it. Harric glanced at Fink and mimed talking into a cup, and Fink nodded. The imp’s grin glittered, and his white eyes shone like little moons. Bright Mother Moons, Harric mused. Fink would hate the comparison.
From his satchel, Brolli produced a long rod of witch-silver, which looked like a rod of blackness in the Unseen. But the moment he drew it from its sheath, it seemed to suck Brolli’s strands—almost all of his strands—into it, like a greedy mouth sucking in a plateful of noodles. As he set it the moss before him, the strands enwrapped the rod so tightly it began to blaze like a rod of solid lightning, hot and dangerous.
Fink’s eyes widened.
Brolli removed the lid on his cup, releasing a puff of steam, and wrapped his hands around it. “I am ready.” He spoke in Arkendian, and Harric instantly imagined an Arkendian listening at a cup like it somewhere else. This idea vanished when Brolli chuckled and said, “You do not practice your Stilty.” After a pause, he chuckled again. “I am ready. Now.”
Brolli stooped and grabbed the rod in its center, and then lifted it straight up from the ground, keeping it horizontal, until it was above his head; in the air below the rod now stood the dark rectangle of the magic closet. Brolli released the rod, but it remained where he left it—hovering above—like the lintel of a dark doorway. The black surface of the door glistened like liquid tar.
“Mother Doom…” Fink said. “That’s a gate. Mortals can’t do that.”
“It’s a closet,” Harric whispered. “I saw it a couple nights ago. Meant to tell you. He keeps things in it.”
The door rippled sleepily, as a Kwendi head poked through the tarry surface of the door, followed by the rest of him as he crawled to his feet on the moss.
Harric nearly fell over backward in surprise.
The new Kwendi reached back through the door and helped another climb through.
Both newcomers wore light clothing and bandolier satchels equipped with painted cudgels and hurling globes like Brolli’s. They took up stations on either side of the doorway as a third came through. This last grinned roguishly at Brolli, like a brother, and swatted him on the arm. The two conversed briefly in Arkendian, but Harric was too far away to catch more than a few words, like yoab, knights, and maybe big deer. Brolli made some gestures to the east and the west and to the south when the other asked questions.
A new sense of danger and disbelief dawned in Harric. The magic c
loset was in fact a gate that led to Brolli’s people. And apparently each night, while Willard and the others slept, the other Kwendi joined Brolli to help him with his scouting.
He blinked several times, mouth working mutely. Gods leave it, he’s been bluffing this whole time.
And I fell for it.
Once the shock subsided and he was able to close his gaping mouth, some things became clear to Harric. First of all, the gate explained how Brolli had justified the unreasonable risk of striking out from the Queen’s court on his own in the first place. Harric had always thought that strange, but it made more sense once he knew Brolli could gate home to safety once night fell. But this also meant the danger he and his friends endured had been unnecessary—and worse than that, Abellia had died for no reason. And what stopped Brolli from taking Caris through the gate to his people so they could remove the ring? Even if she refused to use the gate, Brolli could have brought a Kwendi magus to her!
A blaze of anger filled Harric’s chest.
This gate also meant they could have agreed upon and signed the Queen’s treaty by now. Brolli could have brought Willard through the magical doorway, or he could have brought the Kwendi officials here.
So why hadn’t he?
The burn in Harric’s chest cooled quickly, replaced by a hard lump of dread. Maybe they had no intention of signing a peace treaty with the Arkendians. Was this whole quest with Willard a ruse, a diversion, a farce? But if so, for what? To set them up for a surprise attack?
Harric’s face burned with shame. Brolli had been playing him, and he hadn’t sensed it. Whatever Brolli’s game, in that instant he went from a practical politician and sometime friend to a treacherous foreign agent without scruple against harming Arkendians.
Harric crept toward the gate before another heartbeat passed.
It wouldn’t be enough to simply expose Brolli’s secret to the others. The ambassador could lie his way out of that, and the advantage of surprise would be lost. Surprise and the Unseen were the best cards in Harric’s hand, and they were powerful cards. If he went all in, he could beat the Kwendi at his own game.
Brolli was not the trickster here. Harric was. A fact Brolli would learn the hard way.
Harric halted three paces from the door, with Fink tugging frantically at his shirttail.
The leader of the Kwendi scouts made a strange gesture to Brolli. Crouching forward on the knuckles of both hands, he bared his teeth in a forced, feral-looking grin. Was it some kind of salute? Brolli mirrored the grimace, then stepped through the gate and vanished as if he’d plunged into a vertical pool of tar.
Knocking Fink’s hand from his shirttail, Harric took a step toward following, careful to approach it straight on so he could split the distance between the Kwendi standing to either side of it. The one on the right unslung his satchel and took from it a fast-running sandglass, which was already mostly drained. Judging by the amount of sand already passed, it measured the time the gate would remain open. If that were true, Harric had less than half a minute.
Fink gave up tugging Harric’s shirt and clambered up his back to put his lipless mouth to Harric’s ear. “Are you crazy? Don’t go in there!” It was a plea. But Harric sensed something else, too—a hesitation, or reluctance, desire blunted by fear.
Heart hammering in his chest, Harric crouched to spring into the liquid darkness of the door. I can do this. It’s not a lightless pit. It’s a door. I’ll step from moss onto a tiled floor in a palace.
He held up three fingers and caught Fink’s eye. Then two fingers. Then one.
Fink clutched Harric’s shoulders like the claws of a startled cat, and Harric leapt.
Into a void of silent, starless darkness where another gate hovered almost in reach.
Then he plummeted.
I am not fit for your queen’s court, for I don’t know how to lie.
—From First Ambassador Brolli’s farewell note to his pageboy, Rilf
48
Fear And Trembling
Harric flailed an arm back to make a grab at the foot of the gate as he fell past it, but his leap had carried him too far away. Then, to his astonishment, he saw he hadn’t fallen at all—or else the gates fell with him, for there they were, on either side of him, and no air whipped by—yet his stomach rose exactly as if he were falling. Weightless, he hung between the gates in a void of silent darkness, unable to reach either. If there had been a bridge between the gates, it seemed Brolli had taken it with him through the other gate, leaving Harric stranded.
Beyond the gate lay the quiet vision of an interior room with carpets and furniture. But Harric could not reach it. No matter how he moved his feet, there was nothing to push against, so he could not close the distance or move in any direction.
When he craned around to see the gate behind him, with its vision of green forest, that gate collapsed on itself and disappeared.
His heart began to flutter like a panicked dove. “Fink! I can’t reach the gate!” he said, but the void ate the sound like he’d spoken into a pillow.
Move! Fink squeaked, not a voice, but a thought. To the gate! Before it closes!
Harric flailed. “It’s not getting closer!” The thought of being left behind in that weird, weightless void without any anchoring reference set his mind roaring between his ears.
Reach out to it!
Harric reached with one hand, straining, and the doorway moved a little bit closer to him—or he toward it; there was no way to distinguish—but remained out of reach. He threw both hands out, reaching and grasping, and his hands passed through the liquid plane onto soft fur carpet. In that moment, spanning two spaces, he felt utterly out of place in the void—a foreign entity, a hated intrusion of space, time, light, and sound into nothingness.
As he pulled himself forward and passed through the pane, weight and light stunned him like a blow. Fink clapped both hands over Harric’s mouth as he fell to hands and knees on a carpet of perfumed furs.
As Harric steadied himself on the fur rug, Fink released him and hopped aside, white eyes wide with fear. Spirit light illuminated the room, banishing the dark of the void. Strong smells of tar and unfamiliar spices assailed Harric’s throat and nostrils, forcing him to swallow, lest he choke.
Above and behind him, the sound of silvery bells tinkled, and he looked up to see another witch-silver rod, suspended in air at the top of the weird black doorway from which he’d just emerged. The rod tinkled again, and then it dropped like a stone to the carpet, closing the gate as it fell.
Harric clambered to his feet and pressed his back against a wall to scan the room.
They’d landed in a huge cylindrical room, floored and paneled with wood, so in the Unseen it was bright with spirit essence. It reminded Harric of a drum tower, like Abellia’s, but without floors above or stairways climbing up to them. Instead, the airy space was crisscrossed with countless branches, each as thick as his wrist and radiating from a pillar in the center to anchor in the surrounding walls. It was as if they’d built the drum around a spoke-limb tree made of polished wood. At various levels in the spokes above him hung enclosed wooden platforms, like tents or pavilions high in the branches. Harric counted at least a half-dozen, each at different levels and different sides of the central “tree.” The nearest were three or four fathoms above, with the uppermost at ten or twelve fathoms before branches and platforms obscured further view.
Something thumped in one of the nearest pavilions, and Fink flung himself back against the wall beside Harric.
Straining to find the source of the noise in the glow of the essence, Harric saw greenish spirit strands so bright they could only be those of a Kwendi. The strands streamed from a large pavilion some six fathoms above, and dove down and into the ground.
“It feels good to be in armor again.” It was Brolli’s voice, from the pavilion.
He appeared on a branch beside the pavilion, wearing a strange, puffy quilted vest. Stepping from the limb, he descended amongst the mul
titude of branches in a kind of controlled fall, his hands and feet slapping and thumping on the branches as he passed them. Harric held his breath as Brolli stopped and hung from both hands right beside Harric and directly in front of Fink.
If either of them reached out with one hand, they could tweak Brolli’s nose.
Brolli studied something on the wall beside Harric, his huge gold eyes intent. Harric turned his head slowly and craned his neck forward to see what it was. It appeared to be a tapestry or painting in a wooden frame, but he didn’t dare lean out far enough to get a good look at it.
Brolli’s puffy armor appeared to be the source of the tar smell. This close, Harric could actually taste it in his mouth. It appeared to be a heavy vest in which soft bricks of what he assumed must be tar had been stitched between layers of canvas. Each tar brick had deformed and sagged over the brick below, like bloated scales, and oils from the tar had saturated and discolored the fabric. The largest brick was the main chest “plate” of the armor, which was a thick pad of tar, while a ring of the bricks made a collar that nearly swallowed Brolli’s head.
The whole thing gave him the look of a pinecone with arms and legs.
Brolli released his grip with one hand and reached out to the tapestry to walk his fingers across it. His brow furrowed as he counted each step.
A map, Harric realized.
“They move closer.” Brolli scowled.
Harric wanted to sidestep away far enough that he could risk stepping out for a peek at the map, but he feared accidentally making a sound while so close to the Kwendi.
A voice answered in Kwendi from somewhere above. Then a Kwendi wearing the same sort of armor stepped out of the pavilion onto a branch. Speaking again in Kwendi, he descended the branches in the same kind of controlled plummet to hang beside Brolli, even closer to Harric.
Harric risked a careful step to the right, but something metal scraped the panel behind him and he froze. The Kwendi’s eyes darted right through Harric, and Harric cursed himself inwardly. He’d forgotten that he wore his mother’s traveling pack, and its buckle had scraped the wood.
The Jack of Ruin Page 41