Her third thought was of the duty The Daisain expected of her. She did not know what it was yet, but already her heart beat fast in anticipation of it. Mirel had not followed his instructions in a very long time, and after her last and unfortunate encounter with him, she had much to make amends for.
The sound of someone approaching caused her to open her eyes once more, and she saw Fardine disrobe at the edge of the lake. From his lack of embarrassment or shyness, he probably had not observed Mirel floating amidst the reeds. She watched him bathe for some time, and when he appeared to have acclimatised to the cool temperatures of the water, she swam toward him. His eyes widened pleasingly as she approached.
“Hello,” she said sweetly.
He nodded in polite acknowledgement, but made sure to keep his eyes directed no lower than hers.
“What I cannot fathom,” she said, “is why you were brought along to my rescue. You did not fight, and you did not open my prison nor distract any who would see us. So, Fardine, what is your purpose?”
He shrugged. “I carried the spoon.”
No. The Daisain must have had something else in mind. He never did anything without good reason. What was it? Mirel brushed aside some of Fardine’s thickly curled hair. He was evidently built for fighting, and had enough meat upon him to survive for some years in un-life. He would make a very nice pet indeed. “But you are a warrior?”
“Knight of Forda – until recently. Sell-sword these days, if you want to call it that.”
Mirel tilted her head to examine him, and then she hit upon the answer. Fardine had been, and still was, a test. Well, that was a disappointment after so many dry years. She sighed resignedly and withdrew a small distance from him. “Knights are supposed to remain… virtuous in Forda, correct?”
He nodded.
Of course, he was just about as tempting as a man could be to her. Lannda would know that, and Lannda would use Mirel’s behaviour with him to prove or disprove her utility in whatever plans The Daisain had described. She almost laughed aloud. The Daisain would also have known that she would pass such a test, and that this was for her sister’s benefit alone. “I must go to find my clothes.” Mirel swam to the water’s edge, and soon she was dressed and clean like the most respectable of mortal women.
Lannda was writing some correspondence and seated upon an improbably large toadstool when Mirel returned to their campsite. The orange and white mushroom had not been there when she had left. What a curious talent it was that Lannda had! “Sister,” Mirel said, “I think you will find I have proven myself worthy for whatever mission you have in mind for me.”
Lannda looked up only after a moment. “And how have you achieved this?”
“Fardine still has his skin.” …and she was still intensely frustrated.
A wide grin spread across Lannda’s features, and she put her writing aside to stand. “Then you truly are ready. And it will be worth it, Mirel… I promise you. What the Daisain has planned – it will please you.” Her sister embraced her, and Mirel might even have described it as a pleasant experience.
It had taken her five full days to engage her prison guards in any sort of conversation. For the most part, they seemed keen to communicate with her using only sour expressions and the quietest of grunts. But then, one day, whilst handing her a bowl of water, one of them had murmured, “Jintow.” And that was the first word of their peculiar language that she had picked up. From there, she was able to establish the names of the things around her – the walls, the stones, chains and bars. She found the clicks and whistles difficult to properly master, but could imitate them well enough to be understood. It had not taken her long to realise that she would be in this world of endless night for many months before she found a way free of it, and so she set about learning as much as she could, as quickly as she could.
Two weeks into her imprisonment, she had tried to get a fellow inmate to teach her more basic words, but when her guards had giggled uncontrollably at everything she tried to say to them, she soon realised that the other woman was teaching her nothing but profanities. Not that such things weren’t useful, of course. Artemi catalogued those words and phrases away in her mind for later application.
After two months, she could express most of the things she wanted to express to them, even if her mastery of their grammar was poor. “I am no threat to you; I am not bad,” she would say. And each time the guards would shake their heads and walk away. She probably had not helped herself by snapping the bars in her cell during the previous week. Artemi had not intended to do so, but she had become annoyed when no one was listening to her, and had kicked once at the metal without thinking. Solid iron had snapped like old, hollow wood.
When she had not tried to use her clear route to escape, they had reacted with fear once more. Again they had tried to kill her with their strange tube device, and again they had failed. Artemi was placed in a stone cell after that, though she knew that she needed to do little more than sneeze and it would be enough to set her free. By the third month, she had established that they called her something that meant “splinter-touch”, which she rather liked. It was a change from Fireblade, anyway.
All of this was beginning to feel much like her almost-voluntary imprisonment during Morghiad’s confusion, and Artemi found herself wondering if she enjoyed being in dark, damp cells a little more than she ought to. She just had to remember her goals here. First, she had to befriend these people enough to find out more about how to get off this damned world, and second, she had to get home to Morghiad. And Tallyn – there had to be a way to force the Law-keepers into bringing him back. There had to be…
A small, quiet voice inside her head whispered that she ought to accept his death just as she had accepted thousands of others before, but she told it that she knew differently. Tallyn had been different. What sort of mother would she have been if she did not try to do all she could for him?
Can he be returned to life?
We do not have the power to do that.
The Law-keepers were clod-headed and blind, but were they ever liars?
Selfish, another memory whispered to her, but she could not recall if the voice behind it had belonged to them, The Daisain or Mirel. Attributing certain words to certain people from her past became increasingly troublesome the longer she lived, it seemed. For the moment, she tried to think of Morghiad, and of the embrace he could give her that was capable of dispelling millennia of unhappinesses. There was no better place in any world, or moment in time, than that which could be found in his arms.
From what she was able to tell, there was a concept of love in this world, but it only ever seemed to exist between three people rather than two. At first she had assumed it was something similar to the Casfinian marital arrangements, where a wife could take two brothers for husbands, or perhaps the old Ortan tradition, where a man could marry a second wife. But then she had met what was known as an injra. These were a third sex – something that was neither male nor female.
Artemi had only met one by chance – an inmate, of course - and that an injra was a criminal at all was something of a novelty even here. Injras, as Artemi had learned, tended not to labour or leave the home like the other genders. Males and females would run the gaols and walk about the town, but the injras would remain in their houses with the babies as far as Artemi could tell. She still could not quite comprehend how a sexual union would take place in this world between three partners, and all of the things she had imagined made her mind boggle.
As she looked down at herself for the thousandth time since she had arrived here, she remarked that she was certainly less obviously feminine than she had been. She had almost become used to her heavy thighs and long arms, but she was definitely a female whatever-it-was that these people called themselves. There was something else that was different though – something these people saw that she did not.
Just then, the distant sound of explosives breaking rock interrupted her thoughts. It was followed by
a long, low rumble and a peculiar whistling sound. Well, now would be as good a time as any to make a break from her cell. It had to be something to do with those red defensive walls – an attack! Perhaps the aggressors would turn out to be friendlier than her gaolers, or perhaps she could help her prison keepers enough for them to like her. If there was one thing Artemi Fireblade knew how to do, it was choosing a side.
She hopped to her feet and took a running leap at the door. It was made of some kind of hardwood and braced with iron, but it shattered as soon as her shoulder impacted with it. She sprinted through as fast as she could, taking care not to trip over the broken bolts or the furniture that she had destroyed beyond. The tunnels were in complete disarray as she pelted through them, and they were filled with panicked, scurrying staff and horrified inmates. Whatever had struck such fear in them, it was not Artemi.
Curious black and white portraits glared at her from the walls of every hallway and through the doors of each room. The picture was always of the same individual: empty-eyed, pickaxe-nosed and thin-lipped. Candles circled many of the portraits, but what Artemi had been unable to fathom during her stay here was just how the painter had managed to make their strokes so fine as to be invisible. And how had they so perfectly replicated the same image a thousand-odd times?
That would be a puzzle for a calmer moment, she told herself.
She pressed onward through the melee and into the open air beyond. Though the outside was fresh and clean-smelling against the odours of the prison, there was no sun to light it. The skies were pitch rather than grey, which was somewhat unexpected. In her windowless cell, and without the Blazes to aid her, Artemi had enjoyed access to few indicators to the passage of time. But to have been so far wrong – that was unusual.
As she drew nearer to the town’s limits, strange sounds of howling and screeching reached her ears. All around her, carts were overturned, rubbish scattered across the roads and doors slammed as the town’s residents fled to the safety of their homes. Their terror was strange however, as not one of them screamed aloud or made any cry for help. The howling and screeching was coming from somewhere else. Another strange feature of this night-time town was that the street lamps all burned with their peculiar, hissing light, but there still lingered the smell of unburned spirit, as it was known here. Artemi had been here long enough to have learned that the smell meant the lamps had only just been lit.
She slowed her pace a fraction, but came to a stop when she saw something reach over the peak of the town’s defences. Whatever it was, it looked to be clawed. Above her, several braced awnings appeared to have been drawn to the upper limits of the wall as if to seal the city beneath a solid canopy, but there were gaps. Whoever had been trying to close the defences had been interrupted.
There was a screech to Artemi’s left, and when she turned to its source, she found herself taking whole steps backward. There crept a creature, and it walked upon two legs as a man should, but its arms were too long and webbed with stained and ragged, bat-like wings. Those wings were not capable of flight like that, surely? At least, no farther than a clipped crow could fly. Artemi took another step back, waiting for the deformed creature to make its move first, and then the street lamps flickered, and died.
Everything was thrust into pitch darkness; the howls stuttered to silence. There were no more screeches, no reflections, glimmers or even hints of light. Artemi was blind, and she might as well have been deaf. But almost as suddenly, the old Kusuru training she had received made itself known. She took seven silent sidesteps and crouched, stock-still, to listen.
Blinding had been one of The Daisain’s favourite exercises in training his perfect killers. Before she and Mirel were old enough to wield, he would carve out their eyes and have them fight one of the sighted boys. Other times, the roles would be reversed, but that did not make the task any easier. Artemi still recalled how she had crept behind an eyeless Tallyn Hunter with a dagger in her hand, and had stuck it into his back without a second thought. She had cried with guilt afterward, but The Daisain had soon corrected her on that display of sentimentality. This, however, was not the noisy, scent-filled mayhem of the Sokirin forest; in this place of half life, everything had become utterly silent. There were no sounds to echo against obstructions, and no screeches from the monsters to reveal their location. And so, Artemi waited.
Just then, there was something… a sort of rustling or whispering. Artemi listened keenly to it while she held her breath, her hands pressed hard against the cold stone of the ground and her bare feet slick with mud. The whispering grew closer, until it was near enough to be the recognisable sound of large nostrils with a lungful of air moving through them, and then she felt the movement of the breeze from it. It brushed over her ear, and it was close. Artemi leapt at the creature with all her might.
Her hands made contact with warm flesh as she flew forward, and liquid began to spatter upon her bare skin with tiny stabs of ice. It was the beginning of a rainstorm. As the creature fought back, the spatters turned to a tumult, and the noise of the downpour was so powerful it masked anything that could be revealing about the environment more than a yard away from her. Artemi was thrust to the ground with surprising force, her shoulder blades shattering the stones beneath. This animal was just as strong as she was!
She hit back at it with a knee to its trunk and a punch to the area she presumed was its neck. But the creature did not retreat. Artemi reached for the claws it had dug into her left arm, and tried to twist them free, but the rain had made them too slippery to grip. Artemi wriggled and wrestled with it a while longer, but all too soon she found herself face-down in the mud and broken flagstones, bound up like a hog for roasting.
The creature hauled her from the ground and carried her, still writhing as violently as she could, to what she presumed was the city wall. There, she felt her body being jolted upward as her captor clambered to the top, and after that, and for reasons she could not explain, she passed out.
The skies above Sokiri were just as blue as they were above any other country, and that was something Morghiad had to admit he was surprised at. From all he had read of the place, he had quite expected those skies to be green. The trees, however, were almost exactly as he had anticipated. They were so tall that their canopies were barely visible to the naked eye when one stood below them, and so vast that an athletic man could become out of breath from completing a circuit at the base of a single trunk. Given that they grew right to the very edges of the coastline, it was clear that those trees had grown too large even for their host continent. Felling one of these beasts would be a project to last whole weeks, and Morghiad was in awe.
Beneath the great trees lay the cities, roads and villages of the Sokirin people. These wove up and between the trunks, with many homes carved into the dense bark or set upon the vast branches. Necklaces of lights were strung between these homes, and their ruby flames burned day and night. In the town where Morghiad had arrived from his arduous sea voyage – a port known as Freeman’s Hold – most of the ground had been cleared to make way for ship-building sheds or other industry, but as soon as one looked beyond those buildings, one could see just how impenetrable the untamed undergrowth of Sokiri was.
Profuse, heavy vines knotted over roads that were not regularly maintained, and overgrown saplings fought with all manner of exotic fly traps for space between those. Morghiad had read that it rained here most days, and that the clouds would hover below the peaks of the trees, but no such cover was visible on this day. He looked back at the ship as it made ready to depart for Sunidara again. Back to Artemi, the monsters whispered to him, but he decided to ignore them for the moment. They had moaned at him all the way through his crossing of the Virulent Ocean, and had frequently urged him to throw the captain overboard so that he could take the helm himself. Their complaints troubled him, as he sometimes found that he agreed with their sentiments.
He sighed noisily. This place was beautiful, and he fully intended to enjoy i
t while he had the opportunity. Tyshar was beginning to cheer up, which was good to see, or at least he was no longer bucking and stamping at his master for being made to travel by boat again. Morghiad had been diligent in his care of his horse through the bad weather, and had walked the animal twice-daily about the decks in order to see him properly exercised. But Tyshar had lost some of his muscle through those weeks, and he had also started to look somewhat morose. It was possible for a horse to look morose, wasn’t it?
Morghiad gave the warhorse an affectionate rub on his velvet neck, which only prompted a snort from the beast, and looked to the inns of the town. All of them were located some way above the ground, and the fingers of apprehension poked at him as he thought of encouraging Tyshar up the ramps. No. Tonight was not the night for fighting with his mount. He would sleep on the forest floor like a transient, and take in the new sights and sounds of the Sokirin open air.
He wobbled forward on his sea legs, and Tyshar wobbled behind him after a fashion. By the time the sun was setting, they had found a quiet clearing, just outside of Freeman’s Hold, in which to camp for the night. The air was too warm and humid for Morghiad to require a fire, though he did keep his coat on. He settled amidst the roots of a spirewood and pulled out one of his maps to examine. Curkovi was two-hundred miles to the north-west, and no doubt hidden away amongst more trees. Morghiad had already practised the speech he would deliver to his son when he found him, and deeply hoped that it would have the desired effect.
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