The Dark Ferryman

by Jenna Rhodes

  Daravan reached for Rivergrace but Sevryn knocked his arm aside and the three of them stood linked, Ferryman, Sevryn, and Daravan. The very air quivered about them in shock as they contacted. Daravan looked at Sevryn in a mixture of disbelief and discovery.

  “The bridge is rebuilt. Water, air, earth, and fire.”

  Daravan raised his right arm as if in benediction, and the air shimmered under it. The seeming of another place came to sight. A world of such beauty that Rivergrace’s heart keened to see it. She could see fairness and beauty and flowers that had never bloomed on Kerith and her being longed for it. Lara cried out, “Trevilara!” and would have leaped for it, but Diort’s hammer blocked her way as he parried a blow meant to take her head from her shoulders as she stared into wonder. Warriors rose against them, herded by fire and flood.

  The Ferryman swept up the Raymy as if they were nothing but a scattering of toys, swept them and flooded them into the window of the world they beheld. “We can hold them,” Daravan said. “For a time. A season. Maybe ten years of seasons but then the Way, this bridge, will weaken and they’ll be back.” With that warning, he, the Ferryman, and his charges disappeared.

  Driven by fire, Quendius crawled to the outcropping where he had left Narskap’s body. He would loot his hound of all the weaponry he could find, crafted by a man who could coax and cage both God and Demon into his steel. They would serve him well even as their maker had. His army lost, he would take the Pathways in retreat but not defeat. Yet he crouched over a rock stained with blood and nothing remained. Not flesh or bone or ash. Quendius ran his palm over the killing ground. He felt an essence he did not know, neither dead or alive, but undead.

  And no sign of Narskap.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  RIVERGRACE LIFTED HER EYES to the sky, dappled gray and lowering over her, the sky that remained sterile despite all their hopes, and then looked down to the trampled ground, to the ashes of the fire pits and the pools of blood that the earth might never be able to soak up, there was so much of it. They had been burning the bodies for days now and finally finished. Sevryn walked beside her quietly, his presence bolstering her, his love warming her. She lifted her hands, palms up, and a shudder ran through her at the inescapable gravity of so much death. No matter what she had done, it hadn’t been enough. The incredible loss weighed on her so that she could hardly breathe, hardly even feel. He put his arm about her waist in comfort, but there was not comfort enough for what she saw and felt.

  She’d left Nutmeg behind, in mourning, with Lariel, and she’d taken Sevryn because only he could understand and feel as she did about death. And because she loved and needed him.

  A veil lay over her sight, a translucent curtain of men and women still locked in combat upon the river plain, still fighting, still falling, still dying, a vision of which she might never be rid. So many dead. So many maimed for the rest of their lives. So many. She would name the ones she could, but it seemed a gross injustice for the many lost that she could not name. Sorrow shivered through her body, dancing upon her skin when it emerged like tears. It sighed through her. It fell from her as a tree sheds its leaves in the fall, without thought or hesitation because that was the way of things, naturally, to let go. It took the veil from her eyes as it fell.

  Drops began to fall from above. Large, cold, hugely wet drops. They fell in hesitation, and then steadied into a pattering rhythm upon the parched and trampled earth. Blood washed away in rivulets, and puddles began to form in beaten hoofprints. Ash dissolved. The world seemed to let out a sigh born of relief and need. They stood unmoving for the longest time before she looked at Sevryn as it soaked them. She could feel the dampness upon her face, at the corner of her eyes, and skittering down her cheeks; she saw it upon his lined face and glistening in his hair and spotting the shoulders of his cloak. Wonder lightened her face.

  “I can make it rain,” she said.

  Epilogue

  Tales from the Toback Shop

  Told with a hope to illuminate the mortal condition

  THE MILLER, HIS FINE VEST strained to its buttons over his chest which was ample even for a Dweller, took a deep breath and began to regale them.

  “This,” the tale-spinner said, after filling and tamping his pipe to perfection, lighting it, and sitting back, “I heard from a Bolger chieftain himself, and since we’ve had hardly any stories from these folk, I remembered it well. Knowing that they are a people but not as we reckon people, I cannot say whether it is the truth or not, but only as they view it. This is how they say they came to be.

  “The world began as a steaming ball of mud, floating through the sky and clouds. The Gods looked down it, a-thinking to themselves what they might do with it. They called up the one known as Digger, who appeared with his rounded talons and rounded ears and his sharp-pointed stick. He was not a God, but a great, strong creature, and listened to them. ‘Go down,’ they told him. ‘Dig about and make us lakes and rivers and great seas as you wander, and grub about and tell us what you see.’

  “So Digger went to the newborn world and did as he’d been told. With his clawed and padded feet, he dug out the massive oceans. He paddled in the waters that flowed over the mire, and he tickled the fish with his claws and tail. When he tired of that, he trudged over the steaming lands and searched for other life that made him curious. With his point-sharp stick, he etched out the thin and swift rivers. The mud he flung aside stacked into towering mountains and vast, wide plains. He did many things heedlessly, interested only in what he might dig up from under the steaming mud. Almost, the Bolger chieftain told me,” reminisced the miller, who may or may not have actually had the tale from a chieftain but was far more likely to have heard it in another toback shop, “the Digger did not notice the people he brought up. Colored as the muds, brown and gray and greenish, the people were, and grubbers like the Digger and with sharp sticks of their own, they set off across the new lands fashioned from the Digger’s cast-aside sludge.

  “Finished with the new world, the Digger returned to the Gods and let them see what he had found, and done. Now it drew their interest and closer attention, so they fashioned new people with their own hands, and reshaped the lands themselves with fire, ice, and flood, until the world was nearly what we know today.

  “The mud people, the Bolgers, stayed to themselves for many a century until one day, they found a bridge between their land and another, and traveled it, astonished to find they were not the only people in the world. How they dealt with that discovery is another tale.” And here, the miller closed his story, and the ponderings of his words began—including whether he had ever met a Bolger chieftain, for he was well known to have rarely strayed from the fine millworks his family built and owned—and many other things were discussed in the shop, until the talkers were too weary of it and begged for another tale rather than decide upon returning home.

  Someone, whose cheeks sounded stuffed with toback leaf being chewed, shouted out for a telling of “Why the Kernan Grew Tall” and so that tale was launched by a quiet, straw-colored man in the corner who recited: “Why the Kernan Grew Taller—

  “In the early days, it is told the Gods came down to the top man of the Dwellers as he sat taking his leisure with his pipe, and said to him, ‘Bad times are coming for our peoples, for your kind and the Kernans.’

  “The Dweller, who was a little surprised but not disconcerted to see a God emerging from a cloud of toback smoke, put his pipe down to answer, ‘I am sorry to hear that, my Lord. Is there something I need to do?’

  “To which the God replied, ‘It is We who will do the doing. I have come to make you taller, so that you will be closer for hearing and talking with Us, so that We may help.’

  “ ‘Me? Taller?’

  “ ‘All Dwellers,’ the God told him, not unkindly.

  “ ‘If there are bad times coming, You will need all of Your strengths, then! No need to make us taller—there isn’t a tree we can’t climb to get closer to you and to get a
leg up on trouble.’

  “The God frowned a bit. ‘This is a great honor We offer you.’

  “Our Dweller responded in his sturdy way, ‘Of that I have no doubt! But we like ourselves quite as we are, and I thank You, knowing that You wish to be close by when trouble comes.’ And the Dweller bowed in great respect and when he looked up, not only the fragrant cloud of good toback smoke had faded away, but so had the God.

  “He might have wondered if he had seen what he thought, but other events occurred to prove the truth of it. Determined in the way of Gods to do something with Its omnipotent powers, the apparition then made Its way to the leader of the Kernans. To the God’s declaration, the Kernan smiled shrewdly and only asked, ‘May we listen to You from our cities?’

  “ ‘Of course.’

  “ ‘Done, then,’ the Kernan told the God. ‘There will be paperwork and new buildings to build, and new jobs to assign to those who will be speaking with You, and You will find no more capable hands than ours for this work.’

  “So the deal was struck, and the Kernans, one by one, were made taller to the dismay of those who found it quite painful to be stretched by bone and sinew and flesh to a height the Gods deemed necessary. Their children after were born taller but the remaking of those already living was not a thing to be borne lightly. Some to this day are still quite disagreeable over their lot in life. They did as they said they would, and built tall buildings in their cities for listening and talking to the Gods and created the priests and the Mageborn, and talked and talked until they began to fight over the Gods and their newly gained magics and things turned out quite disastrous, in the way lofty plans can go wrong. It is said, after the Mageborn Wars when the Gods stopped talking to anyone, that it was as much out of embarrassment as anger and punishment, but who can say for sure? Only a God would know Their minds.

  “As for the trouble said to be coming, there have been many difficult days but no one knows if the times the Gods feared have passed or are yet to be. So it is a good thing the Dwellers have remained nimble and strong and the trees are still growing tall enough that one might shinny skyward up them, just in case the Gods might decide to speak and listen once again.” The straw man grew quiet, as did the entire room, for that warning of dire times seemed to echo the words Tolby Farbranch had spoken earlier in the evening though every Dweller and Kernan in the room had held some hope of forgetting them.

  Kerith Timeline

  A Recollection of Some Curious Events

  300—Magi create Galdarkan guards.

  223—The Raymy are defeated and retreat across the ocean, leaving Ravers stranded behind.

  90—Magi wars. Most magic users die and magic fades from Kerith.

  0—Collapse of the Empire.

  90 AE (After Empire)—Creation of City States through trader guilds.

  112—Galdarkan Rebellion, the collapse of which sends the survivors into the barrens as nomads.

  312—Vaelinars invade Kerith, starting a hundred years of slavery, strife, impressments.

  423—Accords signed, principally between the Houses and Strongholds of the Vaelinars for their own civil wars, but are extended to the City States.

  501—Bolger clans unite, begin warfare.

  511—Vaelinars step in to help defeat Bolger clans, but then retire to a deep seclusion, as their numbers are hard hit. Kanako defeats the Bolger tribes, but his lineage dies with him.

  700—Vahlinora is born.

  703—Gilgarran dies.

  721—Bolgers emboldened, and Raver raids begin anew.

  723—Nutmeg Farbranch pulls a waif from the Silverwing River waters.

  723—A major assassination attempt in Calcort signals new animoisites toward the Vaelinars.

  733—Ravers and Bolgers join together in raiding groups with new aggressions.

  737—Accords Conference in Calcort brings riots, and the Accords are contested.

  737—Abayan Diort begins forcible unification of the Galdarkans.

  Glossary

  aderro: (Vaelinar corruption of the Dweller greeting Derro) an endearment meaning little one

  alna: (Dweller) a fishing bird

  astiri: (Vaelinar) true path

  avandara: (Vaelinar) verifier, truth-finder

  Aymar: (Vaelinar) elemental God of the wind and air

  Banh: (Vaelinar) elemental God of earth

  Calcort: a major trading city

  Cerat: (Vaelinar) souldrinker

  Daran: (Vaelinar) the God of Dark, God of the Three

  defer: (Kernan) a hot drink with spices and milk

  Dhuriel: (Vaelinar) elemental God of fire

  emeraldbark: (Dweller) a long-lived, tall, insect- and fire-resistant evergreen

  forkhorn: (Kernan) a beast of burden with wide, heavy horns

  Hawthorne: capital of the free provinces

  kedant: (Kernan) a potent poison from the kedant viper

  Lina: (Vaelinar) elemental Goddess of water

  Nar: (Vaelinar) God of the Three, the God of War

  Nevinaya aliora: (Vaelinar) You must remember the soul

  Nylara: (Kernan) a treacherous, vital river

  quinberry: a tart yet sweet berry fruit

  Rakka: (Kernan) elemental Demon, he who follows in the wake of the earth mover doing damage

  skraw: (Kernan) a carrion eating bird

  staghorns: elklike creatures

  stinkdog: a beslimed unpleasant porcine critter

  Stonesend: a Dweller trading village

  tashya: (Vaelinar) a warm-blooded breed of horse

  teah: (Kernan) a hot drink brewed from leaves

  ukalla: (Bolgish) a large hunting dog

  Vae: (Vaelinar) Goddess of Light, God of the Three

  vantane: (Vaelinar) war falcon

  velvethorns: a lithe deerlike creature

  winterberry: a cherrylike fruit