The Vengekeep Prophecies

by Brian Farrey

  “Wait, how do you know Talian?” The apprentice mage had left Vengekeep before Callie had moved here.

  She smiled. “He’s my cousin, naff-nut.”

  Of course. The only son of the Keeper of the Catacombs. I should have remembered. Talian had become a bit of a local celebrity. At only eighteen, he was the youngest person ever to be appointed a town-state mage. If he passed the Trials.

  “When he returns, the house will belong to him,” Callie said. “But until then, it’s just sitting there … like it’s waiting for an apprentice thief to try her luck. What do you say?”

  I glanced past her to the wagon parked in front of our house. Nanni and Aubrin were moving some of Ma’s more sensitive equipment into a secret compartment under the driver’s perch at the front of the wagon. It wouldn’t be long now until we were off.

  “Listen, Callie,” I said, trying my best to sound disappointed. Which wasn’t hard because I actually was. “Tonight’s not the best time....”

  She noticed the wagon and asked, “You going somewhere?”

  I nodded, summoning the lie that we’d created as our cover story. “Just popping out of town for a couple days. Visiting family in Whitepiper Dell.” Then I smiled and added, “Don’t worry. We’ll try to be back before any more bad prophecies come true.”

  In the dim light, her eyes fixed on mine. She frowned. “Jaxter Grimjinx, you might be able to take one look at me and deduce my family history, but one thing you don’t know about me is I can always tell when someone is lying.”

  I looked down. Nanni had taught me years ago how to suppress all the body language that indicated a lie. Somehow, around Callie, I’d forgotten to do that. “Callie, I—”

  “Are you leaving?” Her green eyes narrowed as she added it all up. “Are you and your family abandoning Vengekeep so you don’t have to deal with the prophecies?”

  I bit my lower lip. “Abandoning is such an ugly term—”

  “Ugly?” she asked, anger tinting her voice as her hands went to her hips. “Well, what do you think of this word? Cowards!”

  Like when Maloch said cutpurse, I flinched. But in this case, my reaction came from knowing that what she said was true.

  My palms started to sweat. I wanted to say something—an apology maybe—but the words stuck in my throat.

  “You and your family are all that stand between this town-state and destruction,” Callie continued, her voice wavering with anger. “No matter what the people of Vengekeep used to think about the Grimjinxes, they believe in you now.”

  “Not everyone,” I said meekly. “Maloch thinks we staged the whole thing just so we could look like heroes.”

  Her arms crossed her chest. “Did you?”

  “No!” I tried another approach. “Callie, I’m no hero. I’m a thief. And not a very good one. If I thought I could help, I’d give it a try. But if I’m not good at the one thing my family excels at, how could I ever save anyone from anything?”

  “No one just is a hero,” she said. “You have to at least try.”

  She stared angrily at me for several moments. Behind her, Ma and Da were hitching the stolen mangs up to the wagon. Ma turned to me and wiggled her thumb. Time to go.

  “Callie, look—”

  “Leave, then,” Callie spat. “I’m told the prophecies have been wrong before. The Twins usually knew what they were talking about, but they must have been having a bad day when they wove that tapestry. Because there’s no way they could be right about Vengekeep needing the Grimjinxes.”

  Before I could say good-bye, she darted off into the dark. I heard the wagon come clip-clopping toward me. I waved into the black streets at Callie’s back, then hopped on the wagon and joined Nanni and Aubrin in the back.

  The guards at the gate never questioned our need to visit family in the dead of night. They simply raised the portcullis and we proceded through.

  The front of the wagon tilted upward as we climbed the rocky hill that led away from Vengekeep. Outside, in the driver’s seat, I could hear Ma and Da singing a par-Goblin nursery rhyme about raiding the High Laird’s vaults. I stared out the back window, watching the flickering lights along the town-state’s perimeter walls growing smaller. Callie’s final words stabbed at me. The more I thought about them, the angrier I got. What made her think thieves knew anything about responsibility? Let alone heroism.

  “I’m no hero,” I repeated quietly to no one.

  I felt the wagon level out as we reached the top of the hill. It wouldn’t be long before the uneven pavement gave way to soft dirt roads and we’d be rid of Vengekeep. I turned to join Nanni and Aubrin, already asleep in their hammocks, when the wagon came to a sudden halt. I froze, worried that we’d been pursued by Vengekeep’s stateguard, who’d changed their minds about letting the town-state’s “saviors” leave. But I listened and heard nothing until: “Zoc!”

  Da’s curse rang out. A hatch in the front wagon wall slid open and Ma peeked inside.

  “Jaxter, look out the back and tell us what you see.”

  Confused, I opened the rear door and peered into the dark. Thick clouds hid both moons, robbing the blackened landscape of any features. I could see the hill descend into the valley and the lights along Vengekeep’s borders twinkling below. Stepping outside, I walked around to the front of the wagon where Da and Ma sat, their faces racked with concern.

  “Nothing unusual,” I reported. “Just Vengekeep. Were you expecting an angry mob?”

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Da and Ma shared a look, then Ma nodded forward. I turned and took a few cautious steps ahead of the mangs. The rocky road away from Vengekeep normally disappeared into the woods at this point. Instead, I could see from the light of the lantern Da hung on the front of the wagon that the road was now sloping downward. I stepped right up to the edge where the path slanted down into a valley that had not been there before, the forest nowhere in sight. My breath stopped as my eyes followed the path to a large, wooden gate.

  “It’s Vengekeep!” I told my parents, whirling around. “But how can it—?”

  I ran to the back of the wagon again, where the hill disappeared into the darkness. There, still at our rear, was Vengekeep, sentry fires burning. I moved back to the driver’s seat and stared up at my parents in disbelief.

  “Is it a trick?” Ma wondered. “Some kind of illusion?”

  Da shook his head. “There’s no mage in town. You’d need a full-fledged mage to cast an illusion that strong.”

  They looked around, trying to spot another escape route. But as I stood there, looking back and forth at the two Vengekeeps, I came to understand what was happening.

  “It’s the fateskein,” I whispered to them. “It won’t let us leave. If we try, we’ll always arrive back at Vengekeep.” By weaving our family into the tapestry, Ma had secured our fate here.

  Ma pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders. “We have no choice. We can’t leave until the end of the year.”

  And, of course, I had to state the obvious. “If we live that long.”

  7

  The Second Prophecy

  “Truth is a poison of last resort.”

  —Ancient par-Goblin proverb

  Say what you want about the Grimjinx clan—and believe me, people often did just that—you can’t say that we don’t know how to act in a crisis. True, our action of choice usually involves running far, far from danger. But on those extremely rare occasions when that can’t happen—like, say, when an enchanted tapestry is magically preventing us from escaping—we hunker down and come up with a plan.

  We don’t have as much practice at that because the running away usually works.

  I awoke the next morning in my bed back in Vengekeep. I didn’t get much sleep, having spent most of the night considering our problem. I kept thinking that if we knew more about the nature of fateskein, we might find a solution. Not much was known about fateskein, just that it was very dangerous and very illegal. Only mages posse
ssed any real knowledge of the matter and we couldn’t ask the Palatinate without incriminating ourselves. That left us with finding ways to prevent, or lessen the effect of, any prophecies that were set to appear.

  Running away was always so much simpler.

  By the time I got dressed and went downstairs, I found Nanni and Aubrin in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. Ma and Da had just returned from an early morning trip to the town-state hall for another look at the “fake prophecies.” Ma had taken a large piece of parchment and sketched an exact replica of the tapestry for us to study. After downing a plateful of gekbeak eggs and singetoast, we huddled around the dining room table and stared long and hard at Ma’s drawing.

  I’d forgotten just how many prophecies there were. And how horrible they all looked. Da pointed at the stick figures surrounding the four-point star and beamed.

  “Well,” he said with a laugh, “we’ve got one thing going for us.”

  “What’s that?” Ma asked.

  “The tapestry says we’ll save Vengekeep, right?” Da said. “If the fateskein is forcing whatever the tapestry says to come true, I guess we’re bound to do that, one way or another. We’ll be heroes!”

  “Da,” I said uneasily, “wasn’t it Vaster Grimjinx who said, ‘A dead hero is indeed a hero but let’s not forget he’s also dead’?”

  “Sorry, Son, what was that? I was too busy ignoring you.”

  Ma waved her hand dismissively at the drawing. “This probably looks much worse than it actually is. What are we really dealing with here?”

  Together, we started counting. In all, we identified twenty-nine different prophecies. Nanni drew three columns onto a new piece of parchment and we separated the predictions into categories. The first was labeled Easy to Beat. This included minor disasters like food shortages and droughts, stuff we could easily prepare for. The second category—also the longest list—was Difficult to Beat. Here we listed things like a major flood and a vessapede infestation. It would take some work, and we’d need help from all of Vengekeep, but these were still things that could be overcome. The final category was How Will We Ever Beat This? Under that, we listed the flying skeletons that appeared to be tearing the town apart.

  “There we are!” Ma said brightly. “It’s better than I thought. Only one impossible-to-beat prophecy.”

  “But one is all it takes to destroy everything,” I replied.

  “Sorry, Son, I missed that,” Ma said. “Ignoring you can be a full-time job.”

  The one good thing about the flying-skeleton prophecy was that it was the only one where we had a good idea when it would happen. While all the other prophecies could happen at any time, Ma had woven a single word under the picture of the skeletons: MOONCRUX.

  Mooncrux happened every three months. Most nights, Velos, our larger moon, would rise from the west at sunset. Zelos, the smaller moon, would rise from the east. They’d cross the sky, passing side by side in the middle of the night, before setting on opposite horizons at sunrise. But during mooncrux, Velos passed directly above Zelos. Instead of appearing side by side, they would overlap and look like concentric circles. Superstition said that bad luck came at mooncrux.

  Superstition had no idea.

  “Mooncrux will occur four times this year,” Nanni said, casting an eye at a nearby calendar. “Question is: Which mooncrux will bring the beasts?”

  The way our luck was running, the question didn’t need to be asked. The first mooncrux of the year was just over five weeks away. We all bet that Vengekeep had only that long before the impossible-to-beat prophecy came true.

  “So,” Da said, “we’ve got some time to think about the flying creatures. Let’s figure out what to do about the rest of this.”

  We spent all day crafting ideas on how to beat the prophecies. We danced around the harder ones, tackling the Easy to Beat column first. Ma, Da, and I tossed ideas around as Nanni wrote down the good ones and stuck her tongue out at the bad ones. Aubrin drew sketches to suggest how we might store water ahead of the drought. By dusk, we’d come up with solutions for about half the predictions. We’d reached a point where we had no choice but to talk about some of the worst prophecies.

  Da ran his finger down the Difficult to Beat list until it rested on a single word: firestorm. “This one seems pretty nasty. So, think! What do we do in the event of a firestorm?”

  And that’s when we heard the screams from outside.

  Ma and I were the first out the door and into the street. Just as we emerged, the air above us sizzled. Bright orange light lit the dusk and we felt a wave of scalding heat. Looking up, we saw a great fiery ball shoot across the rooftops and plunge into a building across the way, sending a shower of brick and timber in all directions.

  Nanni and Da, with Aubrin in his arms, came out next. We watched as more flaming rocks rained down all across the town-state, igniting buildings and punching craters into the roads. People ran everywhere, some falling as flying debris struck. The demonic hiss that announced the arrival of every fireball soon drowned out the screams as more and more flaming rocks fell.

  Ma grabbed my shoulder and ushered everyone into the narrow alley that separated our house from our neighbors. The neighbors, an elderly couple, had already taken shelter there. We crouched and watched the destruction, unable to do anything.

  It took several moments of silence to realize the fireballs had stopped. We crawled from the alley. I gagged on the smoke that snaked through the streets, my eyes watering at the stench. The screams continued, mixed with the roar of fires. Somewhere, a few blocks over, we heard the alarm bells of the fire brigade. Then we saw a group of men and women in leather aprons running down the cobblestones, each carrying two buckets filled with water.

  Ma pointed at Nanni. “Stay with the children,” she ordered. She and Da ran off to follow the brigade, disappearing into the chaos of the streets.

  Nanni tried to usher Aubrin and me inside, when a woman I recognized—a baker from down the block—stumbled through the haze, holding her daughter in her arms. The little girl was crying, clutching at her red and blistered hand. I called out to the baker.

  “Bring her over here!”

  I darted into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of the glass containers where I kept my herbs. Stepping outside, I met the baker and smiled at the teary-eyed girl.

  “Oya,” I said, “my name’s Jaxter. Can I have a look at your hand?”

  She winced but gave me her hand. I paged through the Formulary and began mixing bits of different plants, rubbing them in my hands until the oil from my fingers combined to make a gel that I applied to her burn. At first, she cried out, but then she smiled as the soothing effects of the salve set in.

  “Thank you,” the baker said.

  Before I could say anything, the baker started directing more wounded people to our door. “We’re gonna need more supplies, Jinxface,” I said to Aubrin, who ran into the house and raided the herb cupboard. Suddenly, Aubrin, Nanni, and I were running a triage center, helping the injured and comforting those who’d watched their homes burn.

  We did that until the moons rose. By then, I’d run out of the plants I needed to make burn salve. Ma and Da returned, blackened with soot from assisting the fire brigade. Ma couldn’t stop crying. She looked around at the destruction and kept muttering, “I did this.... I did this....”

  Two days later, Vengekeep was still smoldering. A thin pall of smoke hung just over the city walls and nearly everything was covered in a veneer of ash. Some roads were impassable. About a hundred homes had been completely wiped out. Brassbell Promenade was nearly destroyed. Quite a few buildings on the Promenade had burned to the ground. The fire brigade had no water tower to draw water from.

  While most praised us for helping burn victims during and after the firestorm, some people had gone back to resenting us. To them, the tapestry’s promise of Grimjinx salvation was looking sketchy at best. Now when our family walked down the street, it was back to business as normal: gla
res and the occasional hiss.

  We spent our days devising methods to beat the other prophecies. Each night, we went to bed exhausted and no closer to finding a way to defeat the flying skeletons. One night, after a particularly long planning session, I went for a walk to clear my head.

  My tunic clung to my body in the humid evening air. I dragged my feet, but my mind raced. I’d never questioned the life my family lived. But if my parents had been bakers or millers, we’d live normal, quiet lives. I never knew what that was like. Truth be told, normal and quiet sounded boring. But boring, right now, seemed far better than what was coming to Vengekeep this year.

  I got to the park, went to the tall mokka tree, and sank down against the trunk. As I tried to think of what to do next, I heard a rustling in the silhouetted leaves above.

  A figure dropped from the lowest branch and Callie stepped into the moonlight. Her face shone as brightly as her eyes.

  “It’s true. You came back.”

  I sat there quietly, letting her believe that a sense of honor had won out over our cowardice and that we’d returned to take our rightful place as defenders of Vengekeep. She wanted a hero and, for those few moments, I got to play that part. But I knew that wouldn’t last. Someone in this town finally liked me. I didn’t want her liking me for the wrong reasons.

  So I asked her to sit and I told her the whole story. The tapestry, the fateskein, how we weren’t able to leave Vengekeep. I even told her about how my clumsiness started the fire that burned the Castellan’s house down. I felt a mite sick to my stomach. My aunt Risella was right: “Honesty is a tonic for fools.”

  Callie was fascinated by the tapestry switch, frightened by the fateskein, and disappointed that our return wasn’t honor driven. But she made no judgments and just listened. It felt good to tell someone all this. Once I’d finished, she stood. “I owe you a tree-climbing lesson. Come on.” She scaled the trunk to the lowest branch and reached down for me.