Tiaraku was silent, brooding in front of his blinded portal as he thought. “I will be watching you, Bartolo,” he said eventually. “I will give you a chance to make amends before I take matters into my own hands. Be assured that if I must intervene myself, you will suffer greatly before you give up your last miserable breath.”
Bartolo bowed low enough to touch his nose to his knees before backing out of the chamber, followed by Habur.
“I’m not in need of a nurse,” he said to the neneckt, whose close proximity was making him uncomfortable.
“I’m not your nurse. A nurse wouldn’t slice your throat down to the bone at the first hint of disobedience to your king. Get used to my shadow, land slug. You will be seeing it every waking moment and into your dreams.”
“My nightmares, you mean,” Bartolo said under his breath, and Habur laughed. “Take me to the surface,” he demanded. “I have work to do.”
Bartolo’s ears popped painfully as he left behind the oddly crushing sensation of being deep under the sea. The open air was clean and sweet, with the faintest taste of salt stirring under a heavy green blanket of warm, moist vegetation, and he greedily took in the sight of the bright purple wood sorrel tucked away among the soothing rows of lavender and riotous spears of foxglove that lined the crunching gravel walkways of Tiaraku’s pleasure grounds.
He would have to ask the head gardener where he had found that golden pale specimen, he thought absently as Habur trailed him through the rows of red ginger and fire lilies bobbing sagely in the breeze. The way the trumpet of blossoms faded to coral was really quite remarkable.
He would like to boast such plants on his own estates, but he would need to work very hard to find his way back into Tiaraku’s favor if he wanted to enjoy the sight and scent of flowers in neatly tended exhibition beds instead of growing over his grave.
“You can’t follow me where I’m going,” he said to Habur when they had reached the limits of the palace complex. “They will not speak with me if you’re flapping about like a wet dishcloth.”
“I have no intention of boring myself with your black magic drivel,” the warrior sneered, showing no sign of turning aside just yet. “I’m just making sure you’re going to the right place. If you decide to play any tricks, you can be certain I will find out about it.”
“I would expect no less,” Bartolo said, hurrying through the streets as if he had half a hope of losing the neneckt before Habur decided to leave him.
The city of Niheba was a sharply segregated one. Each type of resident held strictly to his or her own quarter, all of which were more or less self-sufficient. The shabbier human laborers shopped in stores owned by their fellows, attended church schools run by their priests, drank in taverns that served the watery beer and razor sharp liquors popular among their kind in Paderborn, and laid glass jars of their ashes upon row after row of tiny shelves in tall, stone crypts, refusing to commit their bodies to the corruption of the sea.
While the neneckt had the luxury of owning most of the property and business in the metropolis, they too had their separate ways and exclusive neighborhoods. Traditionally, the major clans did not mix, and each had its own slightly different variation on how they presented their architecture, reared their young, and organized their lives.
Tiaraku’s Kitefins held court in the center of the city, while their allies clustered around in a roughly-shaped spiral: the Redfin-Pike closest to their cousins, while the Wreckfish pushed in on their borders and the lesser Cuskeels flashily tried to emulate the richer, more powerful families. Merchant clans like the Bluegills and the Saltskins were relegated to the harbor side, shunned for their dealings with the distasteful humans even while they quietly built up enough wealth to rival the king.
Bartolo was not headed for the domains of the well-known tribes, nor even the hovels of the last war’s losers: the Black Salts and the Box Claws, whose few unfortunate survivors – those that had not been sold into slavery or executed for treason – were forced to mix together in scrambling despair, crammed up against the land’s edge or even spilling over into the areas of human habitation.
Those who had been pushed out of their homes in Emyer-Ekvori, yet could not bear the thought of mixing with the land-dwellers, had even taken refuge under the thin veneer of wood and brick that crusted the crowded island’s face. Niheba’s cliffs were peppered with caves underneath the waterline that served as homes for many of the disenfranchised neneckt too proud to abandon the ocean entirely, and there were caverns that peeped above surface, too.
On the western side of the island, where the green topsoil dropped away into sheer, dark basalt, there were grottos and tunnels that had been carved by the unceasing pounding of the waves. Generally, they did little more than provide excellent purchase for smugglers looking to bypass the Treaty of Libourg’s harsh penalties, but some of the hollows held permanent residents with even darker secrets.
They called themselves the Divided, and claimed to live in two worlds, straddling the twilight between the mortal plane of men and the infinite darkness of the Siheldi. The caverns under Niheba were the closest they had ever gotten to Sind Heofonne, since its secrets were so carefully guarded by the neneckt, but proximity wasn’t their primary goal.
The caves held many other benefits for them. The seeping warmth from the sleeping mountain upon which Niheba was built made the colder rainy seasons more tolerable, and brought with it venomous fumes from the core of the world for the priests to inhale as fuel for their nightmarish rituals. Their friendly relations with their smuggler neighbors gave them first choice of expensive goods too risky to sell in the city, not to mention that news to and from Paderborn traveled fastest and most quietly with those who had the most to lose from being exposed.
Niheba was the primary residence of the insular little society, but there were Divided strewn right across the continent, from Port Ravenaught to the Ivory Isles, working away like burrowing bees to uncover the haunted truths of the Siheldi.
To Bartolo, most of them seemed more than a little bit mad, even though he had been raised on their tales and taught his letters at the knees of the order’s greatest men. He had only been a boy when his father had set the trap that mistakenly snared Giles Swinn and his pregnant wife wailing in her labor pains, but he remembered well how his father had done everything he could, from that point on, to rectify his errors. The effort had led to his early death, and Bartolo had made it his mission to succeed where his father had failed, even if it brought him into conflict with his own tutors.
The Divided were not a popular breed, due to the nature of their studies, and it was not uncommon for the humans on the island to invoke their name to curse their minor enemies in the same manner as they would call down the wrath of Kashni the Destroyer on an unscrupulous tradesman or wanton gossip. They were tolerated on Niheba, insofar as the neneckt authorities did not actively try to eliminate them, but it had always infuriated Bartolo that they let the prevailing public opinion dictate their actions rather than the other way around.
They slunk about in the night like beggars who skimmed the gutters for forgotten farthings and discarded meals, refusing to use any of the tools that Paderborn or Niheba could provide for them: the ancient libraries, the scholars of the old, withered religions, or the neneckt oughon who had mastered the mysteries of flesh and bone while the men of the land were still learning to pile brick upon brick. In Bartolo’s mind, the obstinate secrecy of the Divided would be their downfall, and it remained his great pride that he had been the first to get the neneckt to cooperate with the cult rather than shun them.
The difference of opinion had made him somewhat unwelcome to the leaders of the unhappy brotherhood, but Bartolo was not truly a member of the Divided to begin with. He was more like a guest – a guest who had plans to make the castle his own – and he had no compunction or conflict of interest that would prevent him from pursuing a strategy that had, so far, reaped him great rewards.
He was look
ing forward to telling the High Warden that he had been among the first mortal men to gaze upon the forbidden gate to the Siheldi underworld, even if it had been from a distance. But he would need to do so without boasting, because in the next breath, he would have to ask the Warden for help to fix the disaster that had immediately followed.
“That’s far enough,” he told Habur when they had threaded their way through the respectable areas of the harbor side and come to the elderly, unwashed district where many of the illiterate human workers made their homes. It stank of the sewage that floated thick and oily on the surface of the stagnant canals, and Bartolo lifted a scented lace handkerchief to his nose to keep the pestilence away from him. “You’ll shy away my boatman.”
“Very well. But if you aren’t back at this spot in two hours…” he said over his shoulder as he turned, knowing perfectly well that even a half-formed threat would give Bartolo the shivers.
Bartolo didn’t move until the neneckt was completely out of sight, then he spun on his heel and hurried down towards the water with a spurt of anxiety as he tried to puzzle out the complicated formula for determining the day’s passcode. The moon was just over quarter full, so the next neap tide was more than a fortnight away. That meant the boatman would be expecting three specific words instead of four. He hoped he remembered his festivals properly – and then there was the handshake, too, of course. That was easy enough, but he grimaced as he realized he hadn’t brought any gloves. He would have to touch the man’s bare skin during the ritual, and the gods only knew what kind of hideous scrofula the stranger might be carrying.
“Good day, sir,” he called down to the ferryman when he found him, sitting in a rowboat and eating a pasty, looking bored.
“I ain’t for hire,” he replied, not bothering to look up as he spat a glob of greasy grizzle into the water.
“I’m not looking for hire,” Bartolo said. “I just wanted to know if you had seen the white smoke in the sand.”
The man did raise his head then. “Aye, but only at sunset on a feast day.”
“The Feast of Green Waters is nearly upon us,” said Bartolo, and the boatman nodded. “May I give you my best blessings on this day of peace?”
The man nodded again, and Bartolo carefully climbed down the narrow, steep steps cut into the rock that lined the canal. He was not accustomed to clambering around in boats, and it was with a complete lack of grace that he eventually managed to crawl into the vessel, having chosen the wrong step to use in order to properly launch himself forward.
“Steady on, sir,” the man said, grabbing Bartolo’s elbow to help him, leaving a streak of oil from his meal on the expensive cloth. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere if you tip us ought-side up first.”
Bartolo did his best to refrain from looking too upset at the stained sleeve or too embarrassed at his lack of seagoing ease, and instead turned his attention to clasping the boatman’s hands in just the right way in accordance with the day’s appointed sequence.
Bartolo’s gestures seemed to satisfy the waterman, and he picked up his oars as his passenger surreptitiously wiped his hand on his kerchief, holding on to the bench as the boat tipped slightly with the building momentum. Thankfully, the stranger didn’t see a need to make conversation as he propelled them out of the turgid waterway, and Bartolo sank into his own thoughts, gazing sightlessly at the merchant traffic drifting across the bay as he ordered his words in his mind.
Before he even knew it, they had glided clear across the main harbor and out the other side, with nothing but blue ocean on the left hand and the leaden rock face of Niheba to the right. The island had been thrust upwards from the sea floor at an uneven angle during the fiery pangs of its birth, and millennia of soft, fertile ash had been blown to one side by the prevailing winds as the crater spewed and sputtered, eventually wearing itself down into a flattened hump. The layer of soil had helped to form the gently sloping harbor to the southeast, but had left the jagged cliffs of the northwest exposed to the corrosive bluster of salt and storms.
At their feet were heaps of stony spoil, knocked clear of the towering mass by the winter tempests or the occasional deep rumble of the earth. The wind-whipped waves crashed fiercely along the shore, cloaking rocky teeth ready to gnaw ships to pieces. Bartolo found himself gripping the sides of the rowboat as the man carefully maneuvered them through the spray.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked, just a little breathless, as the edge of a hidden stone scraped loudly along the hull, sending a sharp spurt of panic up through the soles of his boots. He was nothing of a sailor, and being at the mercy of the pounding surf was all the worse for the echo of Tiaraku’s irate voice that seemed to accompany it.
The ferryman just gave him a weary, condescending look and glanced over his shoulder as he pulled hard on the oars. Sitting backwards, for the sake of all the gods, Bartolo thought sourly as he wiped a droplet of foam from his face. How anyone ever got anywhere in such a state was beyond him. He clenched his teeth as the boat started to gain speed, aiming itself directly towards an arch of stone that seemed too low and tight to thread through.
The pilot snorted as Bartolo squeezed his eyes shut involuntarily, bracing himself to feel the crack of his skull on the rock overhead, ducking down as a brief shadow passed in front of his shuttered eyelids.
Almost immediately beyond the arch, everything was silent and smooth as a millpond. They had entered a rounded, sheltered cove that wandered invitingly into a grotto of dappled sun and crystalline sea: a natural dock where the boat’s rail kissed gently against a lip of stone. Bartolo let out his breath and smoothed his hand through his hair, shaking off the droplets of water that had gathered like morning dew.
He didn’t think the boatman deserved anything more than a quick nod in thanks, which he waited to dole out until he had navigated the tricky step up to the high ledge that led into the heart of the cave. One of the novices was waiting for him, leaning against the wall with his hands stuck deep into his pockets, the sleeves of his robe chronically creased from long repetition of the motion. He stood up straight and bowed appropriately when he saw Bartolo, however, his arms decently at his sides, before he turned and led his guest into the yellowing glow of the tunnel’s torchlight length.
The acolyte was not allowed to speak to Bartolo during the long walk, but he didn’t mind. Reverent silence was always an acceptable default when treading the sandy halls that led towards the Sanctum, especially when pacing through the tall, narrow door that separated the realm of the Divided from the common world. It was a fine example of stone craft, perfectly fitted into its frame so that it opened without the slightest sound, decorated only with an enormous eye carved into its ashen face, balefully staring down at any interlopers.
Bartolo kept his gaze away from the image. It had fueled his most secret nightmares for many years, with its stark, unceasing judgment. The Divided had made it their purpose to watch what no other men dared to witness; to see what no other men were capable of comprehending, and they did their job well.
Their sight bored even into the very souls of men who hoped to join their ranks, and the punishment for being found wanting was severe. Initiation was not a pleasant experience, and while Bartolo had never completed the process that led to the final, lifelong, binding vows, he had done enough to know that he was perfectly happy with having dropped off along the way.
The man who opened the ponderously heavy portal had not been such a shirker. He had finished his training years before Bartolo had ever come screaming into the world, and his long, gray hair hung over a face that had no use for the scarred and burned sockets where his eyes had been. The Divided looked deeply, but they used only their minds in order to see.
“Good day, Guthrin,” Bartolo said, inclining his head in a gesture of respect anyway. The man had been blind for fifty years, and that was certainly long enough for his other senses to sharpen sufficiently to detect a lack of due deference. “I am here to see the Warden
.”
“I know why you’re here,” Guthrin replied. “And it is not just to see the Warden. You are a fool, Bartolo. There is no help we could give you for that, even if we wished to.”
“I didn’t know you spoke for him,” he said. “Last I heard, you weren’t even allowed to set foot in the council room anymore. Have things changed so much since I’ve been away?”
Guthrin’s face darkened. He would be glaring daggers if he had eyes to throw them with, and Bartolo allowed himself a fraction of a smile. It helped to keep current with politics. They could always hurt.
“You will have to wait,” Guthrin said tersely. “He is in the middle of his studies.”
“Then get him out of his studies. I will give him something better to chew over.”
“You’re an arrogant prick, Bartolo,” Guthrin muttered.
“Just bring me to him.”
Accompanied by a string of displeased throat-clearing, Bartolo was led deeper into the earth, where the tangy scent of sea spray faded under the weight of ash, sulfur, and damp, moldering dust.
Bartolo was not quite as eager to see the Warden as he had indicated, and his breath was coming a little shorter than usual by the time they reached his study.
“You can go in, if you like,” Guthrin said, his colorless lips working themselves into a mocking smile. It was impossible to hide the evidence of his discomfort from someone with hearing more acute than that of a white owl. “Or you could wait here while you work up the nerve.”
Just to spite him, Bartolo didn’t even hesitate before knocking, the rapping thump mimicking the uncertain rhythm of his blood.
“Come,” called a strong voice from inside.
Bartolo did as he was told, leaving Guthrin in the hallway as he firmly closed the door, making sure it clicked shut to avoid as much eavesdropping as possible.
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