The Silver Portal (Weapons of Power Book 1)

by David J Normoyle

  Twig shrugged. Krawl had deserved to die. Feldman most likely. She wasn’t sure about some of the others, which was why she had come. “Most of them. It’s not for me to decide. I just kill the Takers to help those who can’t help themselves.” When Twig had been a mouse, no one had protected her from those who would do her harm. “It’s in helping others that you save yourself.”

  Bareth groaned and released Twig to touch the sides of his face with his hands. “It’s twisted. I teach you about Zeeism, and you go and use our mantra to justify what you’re doing. Killing people isn’t helping others.”

  “Yes, it is.” Twig needed to understand so she could make better choices in the future. “I’m helping those who would otherwise have been robbed or killed by these men.”

  Bareth retook Twig’s hand. “I desperately wanted to help you when you arrived on my doorstep last year—not just heal you but save you. It seemed to me so tragic for a young girl such as yourself to be on the streets. Even though you never smiled or laughed, I didn’t know how different you were from other girls.”

  “I’ve never had much to smile about.”

  “I thought that was the reason, too. I thought circumstance to be the only difference between you and the girls who giggle their way to school each morning. Then you found that sword. It’s obviously special. That was a gift, a way for you to escape the streets, to build a new life for yourself. And you chose to use it as an instrument of destruction.”

  “It is a weapon. It can only be used for destruction,” Twig said. “And I only use it on the Takers.”

  “They are people. Those you are killing are people who love and are loved by others.”

  “No one loved Krawl.” Twig didn’t understand love, a thing beyond friendship, but she knew that much.

  “I don’t want to know any details. I’m already too much a part of what you’ve done. Killing should be a last resort. You take away not only a person’s present but the memories of their past and all hope for their future. You are depriving a wife of her husband, parents of their child. A person’s death is irrevocable and can’t help but weigh heavily on those it affects.”

  That didn’t sound like the death that Twig knew. Death was a sodden lump of flesh with fish bites, dragged from the sea in the clammy early morning fog. Death was a rain person who forgot to wake up one morning and remained in a sleeping hole until the carrion eaters cleaned the person up or the smell drove someone to remove the corpse. Death was the slice of a blade followed by a gasp of red bubbles, then blank eyes.

  Bareth was watching her. “You don’t understand. I guess I take a normal upbringing too much for granted. Ideas which are second nature to me, to most everyone, are alien to you. That’s the difference I didn’t realize before—something that can’t be papered over by new clothes or even by a roof over your head. You’ve never known what it’s like to be part of a family or part of a community, have you? What happened to your parents?”

  “I never had any.” Her first memories were of looking for food and shelter. She’d always been a rain person.

  Bareth sighed. “You haven’t known any of it. Communities grow stronger when everyone works together. Parents rear their children when they are young, and children take care of their parents when they get old. It’s the connections between us that make us human. We become whole when we love each other, whether that love be parent–child, husband–wife, or just friends.”

  “Those I killed weren’t my friends.”

  “They were someone else’s friends. Even if they were bad people, by killing them, you took away their chance of redemption. If a shopkeeper is robbed, he can rebuild. If a rain person is beaten, he can heal. I know that killing is sometimes necessary, but a person’s life should never be taken lightly. All people everywhere are connected. When one person suffers, we are all a little worse off. When one person prospers, we are all better off. Do you see that?”

  The earnestness in Bareth’s voice made Twig desperately want to be persuaded. But what he was saying just didn’t make sense. If sheltered people made more topaz or built fancier houses, that didn’t help the rain people. Krawl prospered when others suffered.

  She tried to explain. “If two rats live on the same street and one sickens and dies, it means more food for the other.”

  “You know there’s a difference between a rat’s death and a person’s death, right?”

  “A person’s death leaves a bigger corpse.” A messier one, too.

  Bareth breathed a big sigh. “Rats don’t laugh or cry. They don’t feel love or know the anguish when a loved one is hurt. If a rat broke his leg, would other rats feed him and nurse him back to health?”

  “I want to repay that debt.”

  “I don’t bring it up to make you feel an obligation. I do it because words can’t express what I’m trying to get across. Only by weighing actions, by seeing love and friendship in action, can you understand. Someone must have told you about me, that I would help you, didn’t they, when you had a broken arm? One of the rain people.”

  Twig nodded. “A woman.” She had died since.

  “She helped you, and I helped you because you were in need. That’s how the world works. Or how it works best, at least. The person you killed mightn’t be your friend or your parent, but it was someone else’s. And if you spare one person, then another day someone else will spare the life of one close to you. In the same way, you can help a stranger, expecting nothing in return, and a totally different stranger will help you just when you most need it.”

  “Things don’t work the way you want them to,” Twig said.

  Bareth’s words sounded nice, but they didn’t correspond to what Twig knew about the world. It wasn’t just that she had never had a family that made everything he said hard for her to accept. If all people were like Bareth, then it might be true. But what about rain people or those like Krawl or Feldman or crime bosses like Rawls?

  “To repay your debt to me, though I don’t see it as a debt, you help someone else.” Bareth wearily pushed himself off his bed. “Even if, for you, that means not killing them.”

  Even after everything Bareth had said, Twig still couldn’t believe all she had done was wrong. “Am I a bad person?” she asked.

  Bareth had no answer for her.

  Chapter 21

  Instead of daily prayers, Suma had daily curses, and Lucii was always at the top of the list. She couldn’t believe she had almost thanked him the night he’d left her. That had been before she’d known she would end up on a ship. The priests told of a paradise and an other, a fiery hell, but Suma was beginning to think the opposite of paradise would surely be a place floating upon roiling water.

  Her cabin was the size of a privy chamber and about as pretty. Given that the privy chambers in the castle didn’t hurl her back and forth every time the wind picked up, she would have preferred to spend her days in one of those rather than in the cabin, despite the marginally better smell.

  After over a dozen days at sea, she didn’t puke every day anymore. Still, the ship, the sea, and seafaring in general usually filled out the rest of her cursing list. The creaking timbers, the damp wood, and the harsh, briny air had become constant and hated companions.

  Suma picked her book off the bed, leafed through it, then threw it back down again. She had read it too many times recently. It was all lies. The sea voyages were full of adventure, Lara always met her Gwavin, and no one’s father tried to kill her.

  The Duke wasn’t on her list of curses—the immensity of what he was, of what he had wanted to do, seemed too big to fit there. Even in the bowels of the ship, she sensed clouds darkening the sky when she thought of him, and her mind skittered away.

  She cursed Arron and Balti for whatever mischief they were undoubtedly involved in, and she cursed them for being so far away. She remembered her mother and young siblings and the other girls her age and—No! She forced back the tears threatening to spill. She wouldn’t spend another day moping.
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  Do I dare to venture up on deck? The sailors, men with stony expressions and leathery skin, always threw dark looks at her, and she feared what they would do.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The ship boy walked in with a food tray, on top of which sat the same cold, watery stew as always. The ship boy put the tray down without raising his gaze above floor level.

  “Wait.” Suma had to talk to someone before she went crazy. He was around her age, with dark, close-cropped hair and a face not yet coarsened by the salt air.

  The boy bobbed his head and waited, his gaze still glued to his own toes.

  “Where are you from?”

  He mumbled to his feet.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

  He looked up, caught her gaze, then glanced away. “I have to work, my lady.”

  “I’m a paying passenger on board this ship.” Lucii’s friend in the carriage had barely looked at her, dumping her on the ship and telling her that passage had been paid to wherever she wanted. Though if he had paid the captain more than two shards for that privy chamber, it was too much. “I’m sure the captain wants me to be satisfied with my journey.” Threatening the ship boy just to get him to talk to me—how low I have sunk! She knew the captain couldn’t give two farts about her satisfaction, so her threat was an empty one.

  “Blackstone, my lady.”

  “What’s it like?” She could do with knowing more about Blackstone since she could be living there before long.

  “Rainy and black, my lady.”

  That didn’t help much. She hadn’t disembarked at Yalsomme, though she had been tempted to, simply to get off the ship. However, Lucii had been right to make her hear her father plot against her—it meant her fear of him outweighed the numerous discomforts. Though Uniteia and Ziallia were mortal enemies, they had split not that long before. Before the civil war thirty years earlier, they had been the same country and still had strong ties. Suma had blood in Yalsomme, cousins and other relatives she had never met. Anywhere inside Uniteia or Ziallia would still be within the Duke’s long reach.

  Blackstone was their next port, and she wasn’t sure if she should disembark there. Where else, though? A coastal town farther on? Should I go all the way around to the south and to the barbarian lands of Pizarr?

  The ship boy shifted his weight from one foot to the other, clearly wondering if the pause in conversation allowed him to flee.

  “Do you like working on a ship?” Suma asked him. She didn’t understand how anyone could put up with it if they didn’t fear for their lives.

  The ship boy shrugged.

  “Better than living in Blackstone?”

  He nodded.

  “Really?” Perhaps I’ll have to risk the barbarians.

  “We get fed every day.” He said it as though that was all one could ask for out of life.

  “There isn’t much food in Blackstone?”

  “Some have food.” He shrugged. “We didn’t.”

  “Your parents didn’t give you any?” Suma had never considered a world where food didn’t appear each day.

  “They died when I was young. My sister takes care of us. It’s now better than it was. She has a job in a tavern, and I’m old enough to work.”

  “I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure for which part. She nodded at him, indicating that he could leave.

  However, he then had something to say. He opened his mouth then closed it again.

  “You want to ask something?” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” he blurted out.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You always look so sad.”

  “And you don’t understand how I could be?”

  “Not really, my lady. I mean, you have topaz for your own cabin and the captain’s food.”

  She looked over at the swill he had brought her. The crew eats worse?

  “You wear pretty dresses and have lovely yellow hair.” He flushed, mumbled something under his breath, then rushed out the door.

  Suma waited until the door closed behind him then pulled some of her ragged, limp hair to the front and scowled at it. He had to have been joking about it being pretty in its current state. The way the salt air and lack of washing had ruined it sometimes made her list of curses.

  She sat to spoon the stew into her mouth. If the boy waited for an answer, what would I have told him? She had a long list of reasons for being upset with her lot, of course. But after talking to the boy, most of them seemed stupid.

  After finishing her stew—for once, it didn’t leave her wanting to puke—she went to her holdall and searched through until she found the hand mirror. She held it up, grimaced at the day-old tear streaks, then used a damp cloth to wipe them. Her hair would need several washes with shampoo and fresh water before it would take a brush, so she tucked it behind her ears, retrieved a long shawl from the holdall, and pulled it over her head. She smoothed out her dress—it badly needed a cleaning, but she didn’t feel like changing—and wrapped the shawl around her shoulders, folding her hands in front to hold it closed.

  She exited the cabin and took hesitant steps up the narrow staircase. Just as she reached the deck, the ship shuddered. She stumbled but didn’t lose her footing. She looked up to see a man, a rope coiled around his forearm, staring at her. Fear froze her. He had swarthy skin, and his vest didn’t hide the mat of coarse hair clinging to his chest. Tattoos swirled along the left side of his face and covered his upper forearm. Suma forced a smile onto her face.

  To her surprise, he smiled back then gave her a wink, the twinkle in his eye reminding her of Lucii.

  Her own smile changed from forced to genuine. She nodded to him and moved past him to lean against the ship railing. A wind tugged at her shawl, and she tightened her grip on it. Undoubtedly, bad men were on board, but that was true of any group of people. Including, she thought ruefully, my own family. Perhaps especially my own family. Plotting to kill your own daughter—who does that?

  She looked out across the gray expanse of the sea. The world was impossibly big, making her feel small. Directly overhead, glimmers of light danced along the edge of dirty white clouds while in the distant sky, thick bands of dark cloud swirled. Choppy waves broke against the dark hull of the ship. Leaning over the railing, she could just about read its name: The Tireless Traveler. She had been cast out into the vastness of the wider world, and she couldn’t hide from it.

  The ship’s boy, half stumbling upon seeing her, managed not to spill anything from the tray he carried.

  “The tavern in Blackstone where your sister works,” Suma called out to him, “does it have a name?”

  “Ma’s Kitchen.” He hurried on.

  Ma’s Kitchen, she mouthed. I like that. Taverns often rented out rooms. She didn’t have a clue what she would do when she got there, but at least she had a destination. It was a start.

  Chapter 22

  Simeon was wrenched from a dream by a rope. One moment, he was sitting in front of the fire on a stool with Tarla opposite in the dreamworld, the next, his legs were dragged up into the air with a rope tied around his ankles. Unfortunately, the rope was very much in the real world.

  He twisted his body around until he could see his captor. To his shock, it was Sierre. “What do you think you are doing?” he asked angrily. It was early morning; the red light of dawn glowed on the horizon, and dew glistened on the patterned chaos of myriad spider webs—much too beautiful a morning for betrayal.

  Sierre didn’t answer. She’d thrown the rope over a high branch, and as she pulled downward, Simeon’s feet rose higher and higher. Simeon twisted back and forth, but he was powerless to escape. All he got for his troubles was a faceful of cold dew as his head was dragged along the ground. He spat out blades of grass. “I should never have trusted you.”

  The higher he got, the heavier the weight on the rope and the harder it was for Sierre to continue pulling. His shoulders were still o
n the ground when she decided to tie off the rope.

  “You are right. You shouldn’t have trusted me.” Sierre’s expression was cold and dark as she looked down at him. She seemed a whole different person.

  What had happened? As they’d traveled, he’d come to like her more and more. It had only been one full day since he’d left Medalon, but they had talked most of the time, and Simeon had quickly become comfortable in her presence, feeling as though he’d known her much longer. In just a short time, his knowledge of the world outside Pizarr and about how magic worked had expanded considerably.

  He’d learned how magic was divided into six powers: thought, speed, strength, energy, portal, and shield. Most mages in Mageles could only control a single power. Each of the five weapons gave their bearer one of the powers. Because Mezziall had only five powers, no one in Mageles—with the exception of Zubrios—had access to shield magic. That was why the wizards hadn’t been able to create a shield weapon. Mages had a limited amount of power available, which was why they stored the magic in crystals. The weapons of power, on the other hand, were able to generate magic from the energy of their bearers.

  Simeon’s mind had been abuzz with all the new information, and when they went to sleep the night before, he’d had no hint that anything was amiss.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I came to Medalon to find aid in the battle against Zubrios. Yesterday, I learned you are useless to me.”

  “That’s not my fault.” Out of the five weapons of power, only the staff required that the bearer be a magic user. Sierre had tested Simeon with her color-changing crystals and found that Simeon possessed no magical power.

  “Doesn’t matter if it’s your fault or not.” Sierre placed a thin book on the ground close to Simeon’s head. On it she placed a yellow crystal and a small black pouch. Inside the pouch, Simeon could just about see a purple crystal. “It only matters if you are going to be useful or not.”

  Sierre had used the crystals and the pouch to test Simeon the day before. The yellow crystal turned blue when it was out of the light. The purple crystal turned red when out in the open. Color-changing crystals were used to store magic, Simeon had learned. When out in the open, they were ready to release magic, and when exposed to little or no light, they were capable of storing magic.