by Russ Linton
"It would be appreciated. Palace of the Attarah, if you please."
Stained teeth peered from under the driver's mustache. "For the two …" Sidge stepped out of the shadows and the driver eyed him, "… the three of you?"
Izhar nodded curtly.
"Five silver horns."
Izhar choked. "Could you not spare a ride today for the work of the Temple, my friend?"
"Ah, Vasheru, blessed be His bounty, may He forever hold Kurath at bay." The driver dipped his head. "But even for a dignitary such as yourself and your most interesting colleagues, my standard fees are necessary."
"Standard? Your fee could secure each of us a skiff for an afternoon."
"You could wait and see, I suppose," replied the boatman.
Sidge couldn't see Izhar's face, but his master's beard quivered.
He remembered Kaaliya had said people would treat him differently here. She'd specifically said he wasn't supposed to take any of their droppings, of which he had no intention. However, Kaaliya could've charmed the greedy boatman with her beauty or even threatened with her knife. Possibly dazzled the man with a priceless trinket from her bag. What could he do?
"Master, I could always meet you at the palace," he said.
"In which case," added the driver, "the fee would be one silver horn." He looked Chuman up and down. "Maybe two."
Izhar's jaw flexed making his sideburns flare outward like a lion's mane. Beads of sweat formed on his pate. None of this was a good sign.
"I'd rather walk, you—"
Sidge bowed toward the boatman, placed his middle palms together, and used a third hand to draw Izhar away from the boat. "Master, it's no trouble. Plus, it saves what's left of our funds."
"Nonsense. Why should I satisfy this heathen swindler?" Izhar said, much too loudly. The boatman gave an unapologetic shrug, the pleasantness never leaving his face. "Besides, how would you find the palace?"
The sensation of the crowded streets and the crush of people still hadn't left him. The nausea started to return and he shivered. "I suppose I could fly. A clear view from above should lead me to the grandest building in all Stronghold."
"You could probably spot Master Gohala's swollen head," Izhar muttered. "No. I'll walk, we'll get there together."
"There is no need for that, Master. The canal is surely the shortest route, and the day only grows later."
Izhar's expression softened. Genuine concern creased his brow. "It could be dangerous."
The people of Stronghold were unwelcoming and rude. Dangerous? Maybe, but the thought of Gohala's hand around Izhar's corestone and the guard's mistaken claim regarding the Wisdom only added to Sidge's conviction. "Please, Master, I do not want to delay your meeting with Cloud Born Gohala any longer. I know you wish to have words with him."
"Indeed." Fire burned in his Master's cheeks as though he'd had the same mental image. Izhar dug his nearly flattened money pouch from his robes, held it limply and sighed. "If you have trouble, you can find your way back to the inn?"
"Of course," Sidge said. He hesitated before asking, "What was the name?"
Izhar eyed him suspiciously. "Janipur's. Look, there are gardens outside the Palace. If we don't cross paths for the meeting, I'll wait for you at the garden gate when I'm done. My purse will be too light to suffer another insult such as this. We can walk back to the inn tonight. Together."
"As you wish, Master." Sidge bowed, palms upturned.
Izhar strode to the boat and fished a coin from his pouch. "Your fee."
The boatman stepped off his perch and accepted the coin. "Take no offense, Cloud Born, but your colleague's presence may dissuade my regular fares." He stooped to help Izhar board but the master only grunted and slapped his hands away.
Chuman set his eyes on Sidge, then stared down the boatman with an unnerving glare. "He follows the song as well."
The once unflappable driver fumbled for a response, and Sidge grabbed Chuman's sleeve to direct him toward the boat. He worried at first that the horse-wrestling giant would resist. But fortunately he guided and Chuman followed to the edge of the dock. Once at the edge, the man planted his feet.
Sidge sliced at the air with his mandibles. Why they couldn't leave the infuriating giant here, he didn't understand. He'd gladly invite the wrath of Izhar's lost, wandering god to be rid of their burden.
"How will you get there?" rumbled Chuman.
"I've got my own transportation." Sidge fluttered his wings.
The dull man seemed to understand and stepped over the gap between boat and dock. When his foot struck the deck, the skiff dipped low, water sloshing over the side, and the driver stabbed his pole against the dock. Izhar, seated on the lone bench, threw his hands out for balance. "To the center, please. Hurry!" shouted the boatman. Another precarious surge, and Chuman flopped onto the seat beside Izhar leaving the boat to bob restlessly.
Izhar stared straight ahead as the driver joined the traffic. His master had become more distant on their journey, and Sidge worried what might happen in the confrontation with Gohala. He worried too about the man at Izhar's side, where an acolyte should be. Chuman's vacant eyes regarded him until the skiff was lost among the hulls of the larger ships.
Sidge examined the skies. Clear, the late autumn sun was rapidly approaching its peak. While he'd come to dislike the constant glare, recalling the chaotic press of bodies in the streets drove him upward.
He rose from the canal, and the once-malignant sun burned away the humid film clinging to him. For one brief moment he thought he might follow the boat, but the higher he rose, the freer he felt.
The sounds far below formed a single buzz of activity. Under the buzz, Sidge detected the persistent call of mystical energy from the city's song. Chuman's obsession. His antennae easily latched onto the source.
Sidge followed for a time, eyeing the twisting walks and canals below. Squat, wooden buildings with shingled or thatched roofs peppered the spaces between taller structures, their open-air patios crowning the tops like the Temple sanctum. The place where only the Stormblade entered. Where one was closest to the Mighty Vasheru.
Buildings changed as he flew onward, the façades carved from the same type of trees which supported the city. They rose higher into the sky, capped with polished white, jade, ocher, and crimson stone. Larger slabs of this stone replaced shuttered windows. On these, carved murals depicted the Attarah's flight from the Children of Kurath. The Savior's trek across plains of razor-sharp thorns. The harrowing ascent up the Winding Stair where the Attarah and company tread on sky and stone. The founding of Stronghold. Deeper Sidge flew into the reaches of time, the buildings magnified in age and grandeur.
Growing up, he had immersed himself in the tales, the sayings, the history, through rigorous days of chanting and reflection. Every word, every syllable, of every mantra had passed from master to pupil in an unbroken chain leading back to the Attarah himself. Theirs had always been a spoken legacy. Seeing the mantras depicted in the murals, those unsettling questions brought about by the ancient archway of Cerudell started to simmer.
Sidge found himself hovering before the scene of a woman's lithe form stretched in a pose of both rest and surrender. Behind her sat a man, his two hands cupping her breasts. Three other women lay at his feet. He was a noble, perhaps even the Attarah himself, for as the Rule stated, only the nobility were allowed many wives.
Shortest of the collections, the Rule's fifteen hundred mantras codified how society should function for commoners and nobles alike. Roles were defined for men and women, a distinction he'd only recently seen firsthand despite countless recitations. There were even mantras about the treatment of pilgrims from the Temple. A Rule for humanity to live by so that, in the glory of Vasheru, they would triumph when Kurath returned. Humanity would triumph.
Even in the polished stone, the carved faces shone with joy. Lips curved back, teeth glistening. Their small eyes were closed and eyebrows arched upward in expressions of bliss. Sidge touc
hed his own mouth, caged behind hooked mandibles.
He flew on, and felt the weight of the small eyes upon him.
CHAPTER XVII
Sidge soon discovered he'd been correct; the palace of the Attarah was easy to spot from the skies, for everything the Stormblade Temple was, the palace was not. Each face and pillar of his home had been carved with utility in mind first, veneration second, and aesthetics somewhere beneath. This building had been made to impress, perhaps, even the gods themselves.
The main structure vaulted high above the rest of the cityscape, each tier slightly smaller than the one beneath. Above a central regal gate, the surrounding pillars and entablatures repeated in a slowly diminishing scale. From the ground, Sidge imagined this architectural trick would give the building a sense it climbed even higher than it actually did.
Colorful dyes added garish realism to the army of carved figures assembled along each tier. Interspersed between the figures were window panes formed from rectangular slabs of the milky white, jade, and ocher stone, but cut so thin, Sidge swore he could see shadowy figures moving within.
The roof tapered into a peak. On a ridgeline made of one of the stone timbers danced the graceful curves of a silver-plated Moonstrider. Sidge hovered in awe at the sheer size of it.
Despite the grandeur, what had led him here was the song. He could sense the source, a single clarion note, coming from the gardens immediately outside the palace courtyard. Drawn by the music, he drifted down through the bladed leaves.
Palms grew in the garden like the pilings below the city; wild, and not the ordered lines he would have employed as a groundskeeper. They formed a striped canopy over walkways paved with chips of polished stone. Smaller ferns and clusters of flowers flanked the path.
The plants grew inside knee-high, concentric rings encased in stony bark like the walls and pilings. From what he could see, these rings were supports from below the city platform, extending through the street and hollowed out for use as planters. The heart of these trees was the source of the ubiquitous earthy-colored stone.
One mystery solved, he took up the pursuit of the song. The pathways wound in many directions, branching into spirals and secluded groves. Sidge ignored these and followed only the continued refrain. Doing so led him along a wide boulevard lined with lanterns, dormant in the scattered daylight.
Trees fanned out, surrounding another hollowed ring, larger than the rest. No plants grew in the ring, but instead, beyond the pearly white lip, a skin of water ran from edge to edge. He walked around the well, testing the vibrations in the air with his antennae. This was definitely the source.
Yet another mystery not mentioned in the mantras. He was certain Izhar would have an answer: Jadugar, Urujaav, yet his master had never mentioned the well either. Kaaliya had seemed unable to feel the pull, so maybe others didn't know the source, was here. For them the song was the sound of an entire city.
He bent over the pool and looked in. The placid surface appeared frozen and he extended a finger.
"Crooked tree." A rasping voice called out, like a reed in the wind.
Spinning toward the call, Sidge searched the ferns. His lenses detected a slight flicker of movement.
"Hello?" he called.
A narrow, mouthless face pushed out of the brush, its green skin banded with dark stripes melding perfectly with the surrounding leaves. Yellowed eyes inspected him and the thin slits of its nose twitched. Mossy hair trailed down its cheeks, the rest collected into a top-knot bound by a vine.
A troll. What could it possibly be doing here? Sidge prayed to Vasheru to protect his shins.
"I'm afraid I have an appointment at the palace," he said and circled to the far side of the well.
"You have come for more spores?" the troll asked.
Sidge stopped. "What makes you believe I want spores?"
"We have given them to you before," the whistling voice stated.
He considered arguing, but getting lost in the troll's riddles would be a waste of time. How could this one possibly know they'd collected puffcap? But he remembered the strange way they had been transported, vardo and all, across a great distance and wondered aloud.
"Oakworm?"
The troll bounded forward with startling speed. Sidge leapt for the open air but the creature grabbed his arm. Panicked, he pulled, but the troll's iron grip held fast like ancient roots bound deep into the soil.
"Call me with the howling wind and drops of life from pregnant clouds." The hand engulfing Sidge's forearm relaxed but did not release him.
"Seems a bit long for a name," said Sidge nervously while he continued to free his arm.
"Hedgedweller, if you must."
It released him and let its hands, the size of cooking pots, drop. Broad as it was tall, Sidge could tell the troll easily outweighed him even though it only came up to his chest. It wore no clothes, but the mixture of leaves and moss that grew from it gave an appearance of modesty. And he was certain the vine binding its topknot grew straight out of its back.
"I am Sidge. And I must be going."
"No, you do not yet know what to call yourself." Amber eyes, flecked with green and gold, narrowed at him. "You cannot hear it. You have not listened." Hedgedweller raised a blunted finger in the air and his head turned at an awkward angle. Awkward for most. Physically, Sidge was capable of the same motion, but he'd not made it since scaring his fellow acolytes as a child. "You hear the call of this place, I know. Now hear mine. I am the monsoon wind serrated by leaf of palm, bent low but not broken."
Hedgedweller tossed its head back and under his chin, Sidge saw three sinewy bands vibrating inside a knotted hollow. From inside the space issued a sound like a vortex of air pulled through a vast, empty hall.
Sidge backed away. "Wait. You know I can hear the well? So you hear it, too?"
Hedgedweller shook its head. "The call is for the Timeless, not me. I am rooted here. I will die here and feed the tree where countless others will grow."
More nonsense. "So what brought you to the Attarah's garden?"
It happened too fast. He'd misjudged the length of the ropy arms. One shot forward and grabbed him again.
"To bring life to a dead place." More round than oval, the troll blinked its eyes, its lids sliding upward from the bottom. "Truth has fled here. What does she say to you?"
"I must go." He strained against the troll's grip but the creature dragged him to the side of the well.
"What must you do? Return to your masters?" The troll raised its free hand and a white boil pushed outward from its palm, bursting through the moss and stretching into a glistening mass. "Hmm?"
"No, thank you," he said, pulling as far away as he could and bringing two hands to his face. "I've had my share of hallucinations."
Hedgedweller leaned into him, chortling, and shoved him against the well.
"For your master, then." Hedgedweller's scattered pupils flexed. "To bring him closer to truth. It won't work for you."
"What do you mean?" The need to escape, forgotten, Sidge stared at his own reflection in the amber eyes.
"Puffcap." Hedgedweller brought the swollen lump to its face and the fungus disappeared beneath its protruding chin in a hazy cloud the color of a mottled pear. "Only for those who can't know truth themselves."
"You are speaking gibberish. I saw things and I can't even channel." Sidge felt numb. Images of a cup of gore filled his mind.
"You can never channel, no; only truth for you, Old Blood." Hedgedweller's massive hand engulfed Sidge's back above his forewings and gently turned him to face the well.
"It is a long journey," Sidge mumbled, without knowing what he was saying or why. "We travel to the deserts and then back to the Temple. Surely I will have mastered channeling in that time. I must—"
An odd noise issued from the troll, a bird's trill deep within the earth. "Is yours the face of a thief?"
There Sidge was, staring back from a skin of mercury. His eyes were entirely too large fo
r his face: bulging, watery blisters on the verge of bursting. Much too large. That he could see the surrounding garden, the cloudless sky, the troll at his side, the gate behind him, all while being confronted by the image of himself, only confirmed this fact.
Never channel. Yes, that sounded right. How would he ever focus enough to wield the power of Vasheru, when the whole world spun and twitched relentlessly around him?
And despite his impressive field of vision, he'd often ignored how badly his vestments had fared on the journey. They were impossible to ignore in the crystalline reflection. Frayed. Speckled with dark spots from the tree sap; he'd washed them vigorously fifteen times, and could always see those same spots.
He'd had no respect for his robes anyway; this was why they would not come clean. He pulled his wings as far as he could below his shoulders. Clamped his mouth behind his mandibles.
This troll, this Hedgedweller, it wasn't dealing in riddles. Truth. Mirrored on the pool, the gangly arm behind him crept up toward his head.
"What does she say?" the troll whispered.
Sidge felt himself being plunged into the well. Wings tore at the air but the troll's strength in its willowy arms was inescapable. He thrashed, his robes quickly drinking in the water and weighing him down.
Kicking and squirming, his vision ran in blurry streams, merging each lens. He held his breath and planted all six limbs on the lip of the well to fight the ferocious grip.
The song carried in the water, more like chimes on a crisp autumn day than the pervasive hum in the city. On the air of the world above, it had sounded natural, ambivalent. Delicate and urgent in the confines of the well, Sidge could tell these were mournful sounds.
Shapes formed. Phantoms in the currents. Faces devoid of features.
They parted and one came forward, distinct or the same, neither was clear. Humanoid in shape, the body was a swirl of water suggesting a female's curves. Transparent tendrils of hair swam around her face.
She grew closer, her nose nearly touching his mandibles. She reached behind him where the mossy fingers of the troll spanned his eyes and immediately, Hedgedweller withdrew. Sidge felt his air should be dwindling yet he perched on the lip of the well and kept his head beneath the water.