by Mike Shel
“The duchess has always been fascinated with men of the Royal Navy, Captain,” Emberto said, smiling a feral smile. “She would like to say farewell, if you would be so kind.”
The duke turned to Auric, his face a mask of aristocratic dignity, despite its grizzled appearance.
“I wasn’t expecting you at my table, Sir Auric, so I have no gift prepared. I must improvise…”
The duke walked back around the table to the blade wedged in the wood and yanked it out with an indecorous grunt. Hraea, still in his chair next to the weapon, flinched.
“You are a swordsman, Sir Auric? Of the Syraeic League?”
“I am, Duke Emberto.” His heart still pounded in his chest.
The duke strolled around the table once more, past Sira, and pointed the blade at Auric’s chest. With a moment’s more hesitation Emberto turned it around and presented him with the jeweled pommel. “This blade is called Bane God’s Whim—Szaa’da’shaela in the Djao tongue. It has been in my family for many generations, wielded by the Dukes of Kelse in battle. It was salvaged from some burial mound in the Barrowlands five centuries ago. None of my children still live. Perhaps you could put it to good use?”
“The gift overwhelms me, Your Grace,” said Auric, letting his hand take hold of the weapon’s grip as he stood. “I do not deserve it.”
“Nonetheless, it is yours. I recommend you investigate its history when you get to Serekirk. I haven’t the time to enlighten you now.”
Auric affected a slight bow.
“Say your farewells to the duchess, Captain,” said the duke, impatient.
“Of course, Your G-grace,” stuttered Hraea, who stood from the table and walked to the nearest chair before the hearth. He looked at the seated figure hidden to Auric and Sira, hesitating for a moment before bowing with stiff formality and reaching down to kiss a gloved hand.
As the captain walked to join his fellow guests, who stood now together beside the dining table, the duke spoke something in his ear that made Hraea blanch. The mousy servant called Alyce reappeared.
“Farewell, then,” said the duke, waving a long-nailed hand as though he rode in a holiday parade. “Safe journey. Success. Gods speed. Good morrow. Yes. Yes. Alyce, see them to the door. Good night. Good night. Good night.”
The trio rode to the sounds of the carriage for much of the journey back to the Duke Yaryx, Hraea staring at the box he had been given, Auric alternately rubbing his temples and examining the fine Djao sword he now owned. Sira watched the hanging bodies along Monument Road. At last she opened the box in her lap and pulled out a laurel crown like the one Archbishop Hanadis had given Belech back in Boudun. She turned up her nose as though confronted by a strong odor.
“Who did that belong to?” asked Auric.
“The Bishop of Belu here in Kalimander, I imagine,” she said in a flat tone, turning the brittle crown over in her hands.
“And how did the duke come into possession of that?” asked Hraea, leery.
“He gave me a clue when he handed me the box.”
“Yes?” the two men asked in unison.
“He said…he said that he would never hang a man wearing clerical vestments. I assume the bishop is one of these naked corpses we’ve passed, hanging from a lamppost. I fear the duke has hung every priest in Kalimander.”
They rode in silence a while longer, Hraea still staring at his unopened gift. At last, Sira asked if he intended to open it.
“Eventually, when I have summoned the will,” he said with a hesitancy unlike the man.
“Tell us about the duchess, if you would,” the priest said, asking the question foremost in Auric’s mind. Hraea opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again for a moment before responding.
“A pretty woman at one time,” he said at last, scratching at a muttonchop. “Though the past week has been unkind. Her throat was slit from ear to ear, about seven days ago, I’d guess. She wore a lovely lace gown that was white at one time.”
Sira started to weep, bowing her head in her hands. Somehow, Auric didn’t feel any surprise. “And what is it he whispered to you when you walked by him?” he asked.
Hraea paused, looking outside their carriage at the hanging men and women they passed, pensive. “The duke said…he said, ‘My cure for the common cold.’”
18
Serekirk
King Coryth the Revelator was born Coryth Angana, the fourth son of minor nobility in a seaside town called Sethwick, on the easternmost island of what would later be known as Hanifax. With little to inherit, he became a mercenary and adventurer, first ransacking tombs of avaricious Busker kings who had ruled the southeastern lands of the Cradle Sea for over a thousand years. Making a name for himself as a fearless and dependable explorer who always brought back profit for the wealthy who bankrolled his expeditions, it was natural that Lord Syraea of high-walled Boudun would seek him out for a bold venture to the unexplored north. At that time, the islands of Hanifax were comprised of numerous petty city-states and walled towns, vying for dominance in the years of anarchy that followed the collapse of the Busker Kingdoms. Lord Syraea was one member of the triumvirate that ruled Boudun, one of the major settlements on the archipelago’s largest isle. His Northward Expedition was made up of three stout carracks, each crewed by two hundred stalwart adventurers, set on sailing into the turbulent waters of the Cradle Sea to find what treasure and wonder might exist in those mysterious lands.
Angana sailed on the Lady Syraea, named for their financier’s wife, and soon managed to obtain a position of influence on the ship, convincing its captain to leave their two sister ships, the Bright Promise and the Sure Wind, and head directly north into the foreboding Cradle. Angana claimed he had a dream in which a beautiful woman, clad in robes shimmering like the stars of the night sky, her flawless skin pale blue, told him that great wealth and a glorious future lay waiting there for them. While the Promise and the Wind hugged the coastline, timid and cautious, Lady Syraea sailed right into the maelstrom, buffeted by awful storms for a full month before at last arriving in Barrow Sound. Angana had assumed the captain’s role on the Lady when the original chief was lost overboard the night before the storms finally abated. He insisted they continue sailing deeper into the sound, despite the towering ruins they passed on the shore.
“The Blue Lady guides me,” he had said.
At last they came to the end of the sound, landing at a place where later was built the gateway city of Serekirk. Angana and a hundred mercenary companions set up a basecamp, then marched directly north. They were the first to touch the intimidating ruins of an ancient civilization of tremendous affluence and power. They had discovered the wasted lands of the Djao.
Angana and his expedition discovered the hills north of their camp littered with hidden tombs and buried temples, temples dedicated to terrible, bloodthirsty gods. They plundered one fabulously rich site after another, though many mercenaries died in those hulking ruins, victims of monstrous beasts drawn from the Netherworld, undead guardians, and deadly traps. But it was when Angana reached the place called Aem’al’ai’esh that he finally found his Blue Lady. She revealed herself to him in the depths of that elephantine structure as the goddess Belu, and she charged him with bringing her gospel and that of her fellow gods to the benighted lands of his origin.
Worship us, she promised, and we shall lay the world at thy feet.
The Duke Yaryx, rigged with fresh sails and resupplied, followed the coastline of Kelse upon sailing out of Kalimander. Auric and his companions stood at the port railing as the ship passed the mouth of the Kelsea, the broad river that separated the duchy from the wastelands to its north. Crossing that boundary, color gradually faded from the countryside: the greens of the foliage grew less vibrant, the hues of the rocky earth became dull and desultory. Even the blue of the sky seemed diminished.
“Welcome,” said Auric in a sa
d tone, “to the legendary Barrowlands.”
“It’s as though someone threw a burial shroud over the earth,” observed Del.
“Look!” Belech cried, staring into the sky and sails above.
As they sailed past the forbidding landscape, the noisy flock of seabirds that had been following the Yaryx on its journey along Kelse’s coast suddenly circled the ship in a great swarm. Those perched in the rigging left their respite to join their siblings and flew off to the south, as though fleeing ahead of some calamity.
“Belu’s breath,” gasped Gnaeus, drawing his rapier and pointing it at the shoreline. Perched on the fat branch of a huge, dead tree was a large, crook-necked bird with a curved and ragged beak. Its feathers were a dingy black and gray, and its blood-red eyes, all four of them lined up like those of an arachnid, glared at the ship as it passed by.
“A fortha,” said Auric without emotion. “Carrion bird. He’s a big one alright, but he won’t trouble us. Unless we come upon a flock of them feasting on a sizable carcass, they generally let you be. We’ll see plenty of them in the hills north of Serekirk. If forthas are the worst we encounter, we’ll count ourselves blessed.”
It wasn’t long before they came to the first seaside Djao ruin: a collection of towering obelisks made of pale orange stone, sticking out of the earth at strange angles, like the crooked underbite of a beastly colossus. Even at this distance, Del could read some of the curling script etched in their faces. “Shim’a’taal. It means, ‘pass us by.’”
“A minor site,” commented Auric. “I know an agent who had his tongue torn out by a hollow man in those ruins. Belu gave it back to him, though, to no one’s ultimate benefit.”
Sira gave him a sideways glance. “A harsh comment, friend Auric.”
“You had to know the man.”
Auric felt the burial shroud Del had mentioned draped over his own mood as well. He watched the blasted heath with the others for a while longer, but just as he readied to abandon the deck he caught sight of a wreck in the near distance. It was a small caravel, the kind favored by shady merchants more concerned with speed and stealth. It had apparently run aground on one of the many rocky shoals for which this stretch of the coast was notorious. The ship’s sails were in tatters and there was no sign of life aboard, save for a few dirty black crows that perched on the tilting yard of the ruined vessel’s mainmast. Yet it seemed strangely haunted, as though the restless spirits of what crew it had carried lingered there with the derelict. Within an hour they had passed five more wrecks, all victim of the treacherous teeth hidden beneath the waters. Captain Hraea sidled up to him when they passed the sixth, whistling some sailor’s tune, desperately off-key.
“We’ll leave the coastline soon enough, Sir Auric,” he said, hands folded behind his back, chin jutting up like the prow of a ship coming in to ram an enemy. “I know you wish us to make haste. But I wanted to see if the reports were accurate.”
“What reports were those?”
“Pirates and mercenaries, they’ve begun attempts at entering the Barrowlands without royal sanction. With the navy spread as thin as it is, we’ve had to rely for the most part on the treachery of the reefs hereabouts to dissuade such brazen opportunists. Looks like our natural allies beneath these waves have performed the task admirably, no? Well, we’ll cut to the east and pass north of the barrier island that gives way to Barrow Sound. If I can convince Miss Mercele to oblige us, she can speed our way to Serekirk and we can make up the few hours this little diversion has cost us. However, I make no promises; she has been exasperatingly changeable lately.”
After excusing himself with a few vapid pleasantries, Auric returned to their cabin. Changeable? Was Hraea feigning ignorance of the angry red scars permanently fixed in the aeromancer’s flesh by his order, or was he really that obtuse? Moody, Auric sat on his bunk, taking the time to again examine Duke Emberto’s Djao sword.
My Djao sword, he corrected.
Auric had always believed that naming a sword was the petty province of puffed-up aristocrats, though he knew several League swordsmen who gave their blades monikers. He himself had never grown overly attached to a weapon, viewing it simply as a tool. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate a well-made sword; on the contrary, he was always willing to pay top coin for the finest quality. But he eschewed the unnecessary ostentation that would warrant christening a weapon with an identity: jeweled pommels, quotations from scripture or fancifully engraved curlicues artfully etched on blades. But now he was the owner of just such a sword: Szaa’da’shaela—Bane God’s Whim, though Del had quibbled with the translation.
“Bane God’s Whim is a literal, word-for-word translation, Sir Auric,” she had said. “But that doesn’t take the subtleties of the language into account.”
“Well, what would be a more faithful translation?” he had asked.
Del had squinted, rubbed the opal embedded in her skull, and let out a long sigh. “The first thing you have to understand about the Djao tongue—and I mean all its original varieties: Middle, Lesser, even presumably Higher Djao, if we could ever make sense of it—a word is affected by the words that are near it, before and after. Context is everything. Well, nearly so. Pronunciation and emphasis, stressing one syllable over another, the way the words are spoken can change meaning as well. This is why interpreting inscriptions on Djao artifacts and rubbings from ruin walls is so fraught with controversy. The meaning of words can be radically altered by those that precede or follow them, and how the engraver might have meant them to be spoken. So, you see the difficulty with those clues absent.”
Auric nodded, remembering his lessons in convoluted Djao linguistics when he was a young initiate at the Citadel. All Syraeic recruits received such education, but it was the sorcerers who spent countless hours of intense study.
“Take this word shaela, for instance,” Del continued. “While ‘whim’ is an acceptable translation, it could also mean ‘trick’ or ‘error’ or ‘jest.’ And really, ‘God’s Bane’ is every bit as legitimate a reading of szaa’da as ‘Bane God’s.’ Just to be quarrelsome, one could even make a case for ‘the Bane of Gods.’”
Auric shook his head. Bloody Djao. “So, what do you think it means?” he asked.
“Honestly, I really don’t know. And szaa…you could make a case to translate it as ‘doom,’ or ‘curse,’ at least in isolation.”
The blade was certainly of Djao manufacture. Auric had examined enough artifacts over the years to recognize that pedigree from careful inspection. This meant the blade was at least ten thousand years old. But it was still perfectly balanced—he’d never seen a sword of its quality. And it still held its edge. A wicked cutting edge.
“Say what you will about the Montcalmes,” he said aloud to no one, “they certainly maintained this heirloom quite admirably.”
Sira had also contributed earlier to examination of the weapon. She surmised that the artistic etchings around the faceted emeralds set in the weapon’s elaborate hilt were in fact religious markings.
“I admit, they’re strangely configured,” she said, inspecting the markings surrounding one gem through a jeweler’s loop borrowed from Lumari. “I see symbols related to all the gods of our pantheon, great and small, but with delicate alterations. Others I don’t recognize. And the progression of the sigils is different around each of the emeralds. It strikes me as a kind of prayer, perhaps invoking the strength of all the gods. Of course, I could be mistaken…” She grew quiet, her brow furrowed. It reminded him of Lenda when something worried her.
A weird hush hung over the harbor of Serekirk. Rather than omnipresent seagulls and other sea-going birds, the shoreline was crowded with black-feathered crows and ravens, perched on the support poles of the long wooden docks. The seafront buildings were squat, made of dun-colored brick. The glass of the windows was of poor quality, producing warped vision for those who peered through them, like the d
istorted mirrors at a traveling carnival. Two banners flew from the only flagpole: one the gold on green griffin rampant of Hanifax, and beneath it the nine-pointed star of the Syraeic League. At the city’s western and northern extremes was a three-story crenelated stone wall that stretched from one end of the harbor to the other, hemming in everything from the rough hills beyond.
The Duke Yaryx tied up at a dock like all the other vessels in port; there was no preferential treatment for the Royal Navy here at the gateway to the Barrowlands. Captain Hraea and his new first mate, Lieutenant Polor, saw the party off in the late afternoon, both holding their bicorn hats under an arm in a gesture of respect.
“May all good gods speed you, Sir Auric,” Hraea said, a stern frown on his face. “We wait patiently for you here in port, ready to ferry you back to Boudun as soon as you return, triumphant in your task.”
“Thank you, Captain,” responded Auric with a curt nod of his head.
Sira gave the man an appreciative smile and a gentle touch on his gold-braided shoulder. “May Belu grant it,” she said.
The others gave the captain and Polor polite nods as they descended the ramp. The six of them walked across the worn, rough-hewn timbers of the dock toward the sun, already sinking behind the inhospitable rolling hills they could see past Serekirk’s wall.
“So, what’s next?” asked Gnaeus, a noticeable spring in his step since leaving the ship.
“The Counting House first,” answered Auric. “We have to present ourselves there, submit to inspection, and present the queen’s Letter of Imprimatur.”
“Counting House?” grunted Gnaeus. “We have to show ourselves to a bunch of damned accountants?”