by Mike Shel
Auric had taken in the weapons the four men held: knife, knife, brass candlestick, knife. In a motion almost too swift and fluid for them to register, he drew his sword from its scabbard and swung it upward, cleaving the side of Torn Tunic’s head. The man’s ear, separated from his head, flew through the air. He dropped his knife, the now-empty hand clutching at his bloody earhole instead as he howled. Auric brought the blade back down at an angle and knocked the candlestick from another’s hand.
“The door!” he shouted.
Belech heaved his plank at the heads of the locals, who ducked the unlikely projectile. The old soldier scooped up a cursing Gnaeus like an unwieldy sack of flour and slung him over his shoulder, turning for the exit. Auric managed to parry a knife point aimed at his throat by a tow-headed man, but the other one with a knife, a bushy moustache hiding the man’s mouth and one eye swollen shut, broke through his guard. The blade plunged right into his chest. Auric hadn’t time to brace for the lethal stab, but when he stepped back the knife was stuck there in his chest.
He felt no pain. There was no blood. He looked at it in awe.
The mustachioed fellow’s good eye went wide at Auric, standing there skewered but unharmed by the knife protruding from his chest. Moustache Man crouched low and scuttled for the tavern’s single exit, knocking Belech with his burden off balance. The tow-headed assailant, uttering a stream of profanities, turned his attention from Auric to strike at Belech. The old soldier righted himself and was headed for the door to the street, still holding Gnaeus by the legs with the blond swordsman’s top half dangling behind him. Auric watched as Tow-Head’s knife pierced the lower back of Belech’s wriggling passenger, who emitted a dull grunt. Suddenly, the belligerent, his knife slick with Gnaeus’s blood, was hurled through the air as though backhanded by a giant. He struck the far wall near the ceiling and landed with a loud crash on the tankard-littered floor. Thin plumes of dark green smoke rose from his motionless form.
“Black magic!” cried someone at the back of the bar.
“Necromancy!” screamed another.
Auric, Del, Belech, and a now-unconscious Gnaeus made it out to the street as Commandant Mastro and four uniformed marines wielding cudgels came upon the tavern. Several more blustering locals piled out of the Five Flagons, violence on their faces.
“Head for the ship!” called Mastro. “The boys and I will educate this lot!”
Auric didn’t argue, running with his companions in the direction of the docks.
“Necromancy,” scoffed Del, rubbing the tattoos on her throat as they ran. “It was a straightforward evocation. ‘Contemplation’s Soothing Trajectory,’ it’s called. Not remotely related to necromantic sorcery.” Her face filled with horror when she noticed the knife stuck in Auric’s chest, bobbing as they ran.
“I doubt they’re versed in the subtleties of your art, Del,” quipped Auric. “And don’t worry about me.” He pulled the knife from his chest and tossed it aside, slapping his breast pocket where Quintus Valec’s book of proverbs had acted as his shield. He looked over at Belech, who had a curtain of blood on his forehead, flowing from a fresh gash. “How the hell did that happen?”
“Banged my bloody head on my way out the door!” he cursed through a broad grimace.
“Can you make it all the way to the Yaryx?”
“Lady Hannah has me carrying loads of potatoes twice as heavy as him, and a touch brighter,” Belech answered, though his face showed strain.
When they reached the Duke Yaryx, Lumari and Sira greeted them at the top of the ramp. The alchemist’s wound was completely healed thanks to the priest, whose fatigue from the effort was apparent.
“Gnaeus was stabbed!” Del panted. “Don’t know how deep.”
Mastro and his men were close behind. “Use the medicus’s theater!” he called out, waving a bloodied cudgel. “Third deck, below the aftcastle!”
Lumari had a cloth with a paste she had mixed already on Belech’s head wound by the time Gnaeus was face down on the ship medicus’s table. Sira tore away his bloody shirt and hiked down his trousers to find the wound in his back. The slit was broader than Auric expected, but he was still shocked when Sira managed to plunge one of her small hands into the wound, feeling around as though fishing for a lost coin.
“It’s bad. Very deep” she said. “Kidney nearly cut in half. Something was on that blade…poison.”
The priest closed her eyes and with one hand still sunk inside Gnaeus’s body she began a chant, so soft the others couldn’t make out the words. With a languorous motion her free hand rose above her head, then descended like a feather on the wind until it covered the wound and her other hand, buried to the wrist. Belech pressed two fingers to his bandaged forehead and lips in prayerful support. Sira’s words grew louder, a strange, atonal quality to her voice.
“Blessed Belu, make me thine instrument. Let thy healing love course through me into this, thy injured child. Grant thy bounty this night.”
At last, Sira drew her gore-gloved hand from Gnaeus’s back. Already, Auric could see the punctured flesh very slowly knitting itself together. Sira placed both palms on the wound and continued her sacred entreaty silently, lips still moving. Minutes later she lifted her hands away. In place of the injury lay an angry red scar.
Sira stood with her eyes closed for a few moments before turning to Belech. “He’ll have a fever. Now bend down here and let me look at that forehead, friend Belech,” she said, breathless. The priest reached up to the big man, but swooned. Auric caught her as she collapsed. Black circles lay under her eyes and her flesh was pale, her breathing shallow.
“Too much,” said Auric, responding to the concerned looks of his companions. “She healed Lumari’s injury fully, then dealt with a poisoned wound. She wasn’t prepared for this sort of exertion so soon. She’ll need to recover. Lumari, you know enough medicine to tend too-tall Belech’s head there?”
She nodded, turning her attention to Belech. Del agreed to remain with Gnaeus. Auric carried the unconscious priest to their cabin, struck anew by her resemblance to Lenda. By the time he had her tucked into a lower bunk and a cool cloth on her forehead, her heavy-lidded eyes opened.
“Friend Auric,” she whispered.
“Sleep, Sira. You take too much upon yourself.”
“Earlier…I found a note, written for you…in the cabin. Didn’t mean to read it…put it in your pack.” She was out again.
Auric looked over at his pack, which lay on his own bunk. A folded piece of paper lay there. He reached into his tunic, withdrawing Quintus Valec’s pale blue tome. It now bore a knife wound at its center. He smiled without humor.
“Good for something, it appears,” he said to the book.
He tossed the volume on his bunk and reached for the folded paper. It was a letter, drafted on papyrus in a hand that was almost childlike in its carelessness. “Well,” he said aloud, “we’ve found something at which you do not excel, my lady. You have dreadful penmanship.”
Sir Auric:
When I said that my father had made a study of your life and career, I neglected to mention that I had as well. The privileges of rank penetrate even into the archives of the Syraeic League, which contain far more information about you than you might expect. Forgive us for violating your privacy so.
I write this to you now, knowing your history as I do, to provide encouragement. You have seen much, suffered much, and if the gods were fair, this bitter cup would have passed you by. The gods are not, and you must drink.
Nevertheless, be of good heart.
While the world is cruel and fickle gods often fail to deserve our faith, trust in yourself and your companions. Each bears his or her own wounds and weaknesses, I’m sure, but do not let their youth prejudice you. Nor should you allow your own weariness and past injuries to foster doubt. The world has need of men and women of character, friend Auric.
Do your best to stay in it. And when experience and skill fail, perhaps you may depend on some measure of luck.
If the Padivales or Sallymonts can ever be of assistance, you have only to ask. You hold our debt.
Your friend,
Ilanda Padivale nèe Sallymont
Countess of Beyenfort
Auric laughed, thinking it a strangely opportune moment for her note to present itself. She had been in this cabin awfully long to just retrieve some books and a parasol. Tonight was the product of foolishness, it was true, and its safe resolution achieved by experience, skill…and luck. He felt the place on his tunic where the mustachioed man’s knife had pierced it. His heart had escaped injury due to the intervention of Valec’s collection of platitudes. Perhaps he shouldn’t give up on it so quickly.
Yes, I was served by luck this time, he thought. Pray to all good gods that luck and skill are enough to take the day.
12
Kenes
The corpse-things stayed at the far lip of the pit, their malevolent attention fixed on its living occupants. Some were on all fours, jaws snapping, mottled gray tongues wiggling out with a lecherous hunger. Others stood, swaying as though to some dreadful melody, arms grasping, coveting the living flesh out of their ravenous reach.
He had picked up Lenda’s savaged head, closed its eyes, its mouth, smoothed down the hair tacky with gore, and wrapped it lovingly in a shirt from his pack. Tears coursed down his face. He tried to wipe them away, but his fingers were sticky with her blood, and he only managed to smear red streaks across his cheeks.
“W-what will we d-d-do?” stuttered Brenten, still loath to come near him while he held their dead companion’s severed head.
“Do you have rope? Those stone heads set in the walls, the ones we passed on the way in…if we could get a rope around one, we could climb out.”
“No. Meric and Lenda carried our rope.”
From the lip of the pit came a clamor that sounded like barking gasps. When he looked up at the animated cadavers, he saw that they were laughing.
“Ahhh, boy,” hissed his father’s voice, rising from behind the gleeful corpses. “That’s the sound the dead make when we’re joyful. We have much to teach you, lad. Much you can learn from we who have dwelt in the dirt. You’ll see much more clearly once the worms have eaten your eyes away.”
The nightmare. The goddamned nightmare.
He recalled the mummified body with which they shared the pit, the failed explorer with its unopened pack. Auric removed the priceless gold ornaments from his own pack, gathered from the niche-lined temple, and tossed them to the floor so that he could accommodate poor Lenda’s head, which he placed in the satchel with tender care. He turned back to the prone body, undid the clasps of its pack with shaking hands and pulled out the contents: A hammer, alchemical substances in sealed tubes that had long ago lost their potency…a coil of silken rope. He tested its strength, then tied a loop at one end, and backed away to the far side of the pit. He tossed his glow-rod up to the floor above so that the corridor above the pit was illuminated more brightly and he could make out the closest of the leering, demonic heads of stone protruding from the brick. There was one on either wall. As he judged the distance, scraps of dried flesh and bits of bone rained down on him from the impatient corpses standing at the pit’s edge above and behind him.
It took seven attempts before he managed to ring a stone head on the right wall, each failure punctuated by the staccato mirth of the corpses. Again, he tested its strength, made certain the loop had tightened well around the neck of the protuberant head. That was when Brenten shoved him, grabbed the rope, and began making the climb before him. His heart flushed with rage and panic, bringing with it an overwhelming urge to draw his sword and drive it into the exposed back of his friend and colleague of years, shove it in hard enough so that the point burst through his chest. But halfway up, Brenten lost his grip and tumbled back down into the pit.
Would Auric have skewered Brenten had he not fallen?
Brenten massaged his battered shoulder while Auric climbed the rope, feeling his muscles burn as he did. When he reached the top, he had to exert enormous will to resist a shameful impulse to run; to leave Brenten below; to save himself. With great effort, he stood his ground, yelled down to Brenten to tie the rope around his waist.
“I’ll lift you out of the pit!”
Brenten dropped his glow-stick to comply with Auric’s direction, and it went out as it hit the floor, so that for a few moments the alchemist’s form was lost in darkness.
“I’ve got it,” Brenten said at last, a quiver in his voice. “Let me light up another rod before you pull me out.”
A shriek of terror exploded from the pit as the glow-stick illuminated the space. The once-lifeless body of their failed predecessor stood before Brenten, eye sockets now alight with a sickly yellow glow, a savage grin on its desiccated lips. The panicked alchemist flailed at the thing impotently, trying to push it away, but the corpse leapt on him with unholy vitality and began gnawing at the meat where neck met shoulder. In seconds, Brenten’s screams no longer sounded human, and a torrent of blood soaked his clothing.
Auric stared with numb horror for a few moments, until the gloating corpses at the other side of the pit began descending, crawling head-first down the vertical surface with gravity-defying ease. They had only waited, toying with them. The hungry dead were coming for him after all.
The sound of his father’s drunken laughter finally broke Auric’s paralysis, and he ran down the corridor howling, leaving his friend Brenten as a meal for his ghastly pursuers.
The skies to the north were dark and ominous when the Duke Yaryx sailed out of Tessy’s harbor. The coastal waters of the empire were the most easily navigable, while the central Cradle Sea was beset with violent, unpredictable storms. For this reason, only ships crewed with elementalist sorcerers—aeromancers and aquamancers—braved those turbulent waters. Merchantmen were often forced into the volatile seas to flee aggressive buccaneers that plagued the coasts, especially in the west. But in the case of the Yaryx, the remote Isle of Kenes lay deep within those tempest-torn waters.
With only one sorcerer to manage winds, and another to handle the waves and rains, the Duke Yaryx relied heavily on the seamanship of its crew. It took six full days to cover the 400 miles between Tessy and Kenes, battling storms most of the way. By the time the island was in sight, with morning waning on that sixth day, the resolute crew was exhausted, and the sorcerers were carried below deck on stretchers to recover. Auric, never one for rough seas, had nevertheless stayed on deck during part of one tempest, watching with fascination as the two weary sorcerers cajoled and corralled wind elementals and otherworldly creatures made of water to keep the Duke Yaryx afloat and on course.
The Isle of Kenes was about fifty miles long and twenty wide. Most of the island was rolling green hills that rose in swelling slopes from the west before reaching a flat-topped mountain at its eastern end. A sprawling monastery crowned the mountain—St. Qoterine of the Vine—the slopes hugging it blanketed by lush vineyards. Kenes had no suitable harbor, forcing the Yaryx to anchor well offshore. Captain Hraea saw the Syraeic party off in a longboat crewed by a contingent of sailors.
“Take your time, Sir Auric,” said the captain, red-cheeked and affable. “While you’re about your business with the monks, I’ll be about mine. How long do you think you’ll be?”
“I can’t say for certain,” Auric answered. “We don’t even know if Gower Morz lives, and if he does, whether he’ll speak with us. This may be a very quick stop, Captain.”
“Well!” exclaimed Hraea, undeterred. “I take that as a challenge! Let’s see how many crates of their lovely wine we can negotiate aboard with however much time we have. Gods speed your mission, sir!”
Auric sat at the center of the longboat with Belech, Del, and Lumari while eight Yaryx seamen lab
ored at the oars. Sira and Gnaeus remained aboard the ship, still convalescing from their Tessy ordeal. Both had protested staying behind, but Auric was adamant.
“You must recuperate and prepare,” he had said to the priest. “There’s no telling what lies ahead for us in the Barrowlands. If a stab wound and an arm gash exhausts you so, you’ll need the time to bolster your spiritual resources. There’s a chance you’ll need to repair damage like that on the hour when we’re in the wastes north of Serekirk.”
The conversation with Gnaeus had been less cordial. “Gnaeus, that wound would have been mortal if Sira hadn’t nearly killed herself drawing out the poison and knitting the hole the man poked in you, to say nothing of your goddamned kidney. Regardless, I want you completely healed by the time we reach Serekirk, and that means no unnecessary exertion in the meantime. Half a mile in a longboat in rough waters like these might tear you open again.”
“The wound is healed,” Gnaeus had retorted. “This is punishment for what happened in Tessy, yes?”
“Gnaeus, lad, stop acting the petulant child. Gods, man! You manage to instigate a drunken bout with so vital an expedition looming? The bloody earl’s son? Govern yourself, Gnaeus, and bury your father in the ground where he belongs. I did the same with mine long before he found his own way to the grave. We are who we make ourselves, not who our fathers were.”
Gnaeus nodded, his expression sour, his arms crossed over his chest.
The sky was an elegant blue, a pleasure after days of angry clouds, but the longboat ride was still rough, the boat bobbing up and down, waves working against their progress. At last, they tied up to a single wooden dock with the aid of a monk who emerged from a tiny hut by the shore that looked more outhouse than outpost. He was a pug-nosed old man, wearing a coarse brown robe of homespun. Bent over and walking with difficulty, he had a toothless smile on his homely face, which was covered with rough white stubble.
“I am Sir Auric Manteo of the Syraeic League, and these are my companions. We are here to meet with a man named Gower Morz, who we understand resides in the monastery.”