by T. O. Munro
“He feels no pain,” Elise said. “That is a good sign?” The question died on her lips at the prior’s sharp look.
“Are you in pain, my son?” Abroath must have been little more than half the man’s age, but still the formalities of address were followed.
“No, father, not at all,” Colm Galdor replied.
Abroath nodded, kissed his symbol and pressed it to the man’s forehead. “Rest easy my son,” he said, murmuring some words of benediction.
“Thank you father,” Colm Galdor blinked his gratitude as the prior rose.
“Wait,” Elise called. “He is still hurt, you have not healed him.”
Abroath looked sadly back at her. “I have done all I can for him, Mistress Elise. He is in the Goddess’s hands, hers and yours now. Stay with him.”
“No.” Elise shook her head in denial rather than disobedience. She gripped the man’s bloody hand between her palms, pressing tight as though to hold his spirit there by physical force alone. But the prior was gone and she was alone with the wounded farmer, counting the slow rasping breaths he drew.
There were many of them. An hour had passed in which Elise raged inwardly at the awfulness of war and the emptiness of victory. They had won. The latest force, the largest the enemy had sent against the freed territories, had been despatched fleeing and in disorder. Kaylan and his band of cavalry, dwarves and a growing militia of Undersalve farmers, had chased them away down the narrow valley, harrying the somewhat curdled cream of the enemy’s army. But here, besides the corpses of the foe, lay their own dead and injured. The fallen who would never see the freedom they had fought so hard for because they could not or would not be saved.
The pauses between Colm Galdor’s breaths grew irregular but ever longer. His fingers against her hand fluttered as light as a butterfly’s wings, and then one pause grew longer and longer still, stretching unbroken into the evening light. Elise looked at his face, eyes bright open, lips smiling as if he had just recognised an old friend.
She wiped her sleeve across her face and closed his eyes so that his peaceful expression now became that of a man in the grip of a pleasant dream. The sorceress sat a while longer, rubbing at her pockmarked cheeks with one hand then the other, afraid to ask herself why this one death should move her more than all the others. Then she stood and sought out the prior.
Abroath was rising from another casualty, sweating from the exertion of delivering the Goddess’s grace to a soldier who smiled back weakly, gazing in wonder at his healed flesh. “Thank you father,” the man called.
The prior waved away the gratitude. “The Goddess needs you to be well, I am simply her agent.”
Elise spun Abroath around by the shoulder. “Why him?” she hissed. “Why him and not the poor farmer with the wife and daughters? Does the Goddess love soldiers more than scythe wielding famers?”
“I could do nothing for Colm Galdor, Elise.”
“You didn’t even try.”
He took her hands in his, squeezing her fingers, rusty with Galdor’s dried blood. “There are wounds that take our weak mortal frames beyond the reach of my powers. When the Goddess has blessed a man with relief from all pain, she has taken him in her arms, claimed him for her eternal protection not my healing.”
“You didn’t try,” she sobbed. “You didn’t even try.”
The prior pulled her towards him, burying her head against his shoulder and running a soothing palm over the sorceress’s whitened hair. “There are some we can save and some we cannot, Elise. That we can save any is a cause for celebration, as is the fact that Colm Galdor died a free man in defence of his family, not a slave under Maelgrum’s yoke.”
She pushed herself away from his embrace, challenging him with a look. “Will that celebration dry his wife’s tears? Will that feed his daughters when winter comes again?”
He reached out cupping his hands around her face. “No Elise, it will not. Those are our tasks, yours and mine.” He shook his head. “It does you credit and him honour that you mourn the man so.”
She shook her head free of his cloying consoling grasp. “What? the flint hearted bitch sheds a tear at last and that alone makes this a good thing.” She shrugged. “He had a name, a life, a future. It isn’t right, it’s just not right.”
Abroath stood silently sympathetic. Elise glared at him. “Don’t patronise me, Prior.”
His eyebrows rose a fraction at the accusation. Then he dipped his chin and spread his hands in a courteous but wordless parting. She opened her mouth to call some further rebuke at his back but left the thought unspoken. The prior, for all his youth, had broad shoulders and would absorb her railing against the world’s injustices without complaint. While a childish tantrum might yield a certain satisfaction, the pleasure was dimmed and the guilt accentuated by Abroath’s patient, passive endurance. The effect would only emphasise how far she was searching for a simple single culprit on which to blame a far more complex angst.
A cry went up from further down the hill taken up by other voices. “The general! The general’s back.”
She shaded her eyes to look down the narrow valley where a troop of cavalry were trotting exhausted horses towards them. The lean figure at their head certainly rode with the assurance of an army commander, though Kaylan would still squirm at the epithet which farmers, soldiers and even dwarves were increasingly invoking.
The thief turned general halted at points in his journey, leaning low from the saddle to exchange words with a soldier here, a farmer there, one of the dwarves too received his words. Elise waited, arms folded across her, so it was Abroath that Kaylan came to first. A conversation too far away for the sorceress to overhear, but two stolen glances in her direction suggested she was its subject.
Kaylan slid from his horse, still favouring slightly his uninjured leg, and walked the thirty yards or so to stand before her silent but expectant. She bit her lip, her tongue too. He’d come to her, let him speak first, but it was a silence that discomforted her more than the thief. With a shrug of indifference she surrendered to the impulse to speak. “You’ve won a great victory here, Kaylan.” Her tone was casual, underimpressed.
”You think the price too great?” He glanced towards the row of the fallen laid out respectfully on the hill side.
“They are farmers not fighters, they should not be here.”
“I’m a thief not a general. You’re a herbalist not a warrior. What business have any of us in warfare? Yet here we are and, by the Goddess’s grace here we still stand in possession of the battlefield. Should and should not are no part of this, there is only are and are not.”
“Do you think she will be impressed?”
Kaylan’s expression grew stony, his eyes lit by a splinter of that same fury which drove him in battle. He did not ask who Elise meant.
“Do you think to curry the queen’s favour by winning back her father’s province single handed and at any cost?” She went on probing at what she knew was an open wound.
He let the question hang between them for a long moment, pregnant in the air until Elise longed to withdraw it, to unsay the accusation. At last he just shook his head. “It’s my province too, my people’s land, my mother’s land. The people deserve freedom, but that is not free, it is not even cheap.” He looked around at the scars of battle wrought in the smoke on the hillside and the sad line of corpses awaiting internment. “On days like this it may look like an expensive commodity to pursue, but there’s many times we’ve paid a higher price and bought less.”
“So what has this victory won you, Kaylan? What have you bought with these farmers’ lives?”
He chewed his lip staring away south towards the plains of Undersalve ripe and fertile beyond the foothills of the Hadrans. “It’s kindled new hope in our friends and sowed despair in our enemies. Colm Galdor may have fallen but there will be many more now willing to take up his scythe and his cause. We are close, Mistress Elise, close.”
“Close to what, Kaylan.”
“Close to that point where our allies expect to win and our enemies expect to lose. It takes little more for such expectations to become self-fulfilling.”
***
They sat in companionable silence side by side, watching the karib fisherman scull their fishing skiffs across the lake at the heart of the volcanic cavern. Sitting down on a rock by the shoreline they were, for the moment of a height with each other. Odestus’s ill proportioned physique, a long body atop short legs not made for running, meant that there were still situations like this where he need not look up to Dema’s daughter.
Persapha perched beside him, stretching out her long limbs toes dipping in the crystal clear water. Odestus had wrestled with a quick mental calculation of the temporal exchange rate between Grithsank and his own plane. By his estimation, Persapha was just shy of fourteen years old and, making an allowance for the vagaries of her part reptilian physiognomy, perhaps just a couple of inches short of being full grown. Yet, at five foot eight in her bare feet she already over-topped him by several inches. The latest growth spurt had drained her of what little puppy fat she had accumulated turning her into a gawky angular thing not yet comfortable in the adult form she was assuming. Gone was the exuberant child. In its place there sat an uncertain young woman trying to respond appropriately to the expectations of emotional maturity which her physical height engendered.
She flexed her toes in the clear water sending tiny ripples towards Odestus’s sandaled feet. The hood of her cloak shifted as something flexed beneath it and she scratched distractedly at the patch. A low susurration sounded through the cloth, a hiss through barely parted lips.
“I am making good progress,” Odestus hurried to speak over the faint sound. “It will be done very soon.”
“Is that your ‘very soon’ or my ‘very soon’?”
He gulped at the question. “A few days at most in my laboratory.”
She sighed and stared out across the water. One of the karib fisherman waved at them and she waved back but without enthusiasm. “A few months for me then.”
“You have been patient for years, my dear. It is not so long now.”
“Vlyndor and the karib have been patient too. But…” she shook her head and the material of her cloak seethed with more motion than the simple gesture could have created. “They cannot be patient for ever, I might not give them the choice. There might come a time when they drive me out.”
He seized her slim long fingered hand between his two podgy ones and gripped it firmly. “That will never happen, Persapha. The karib would never do that, not to you. You are one of their own.”
She picked up a stone, a flat piece of rock that she turned unthinking in her hands, finding the best angle by feel alone as she positioned it for the cast. Then, with a lightning flick of her wrist, she sent it skimming across the surface of the lake. It splashed a dozen times before bumping the hull of a skiff. The fishing karib turned and gave a shout of good natured indignation. Persapha waved and ducked her head in an apology.
Odestus suppressed a shiver at the effortless grace of her movement, so reminiscent of her mother in battle. “You should not disturb the fish, he will be annoyed.”
She stuck out her tongue towards the fisher, flicking its sharp tip to taste the air between them. “He isn’t annoyed, not really,” she announced. “He’s amused if anything.”
The wizard grinned. “That is something your mother never did, to taste a person’s emotions like a true karib.”
She looked at him, eyes sparkling beneath the gauze. “It’s not a karib gift,” she said. “It is something anyone can learn with a little effort.”
“Indeed, and what emotion, pray tell, do I taste of.”
She gave a flat smile. “Worry, you always taste of worry.”
He sighed. “I worry less for knowing you are safely here. There is no better place for you.” He pushed himself upright and, for a moment, fancied he caught the scent of her alarm.
“Are you going you’ve barely been here an hour.”
“An hour here, a few minutes there, that is all I can spare at a time, Persapha. I have a new mistress and I must never be far from her call.”
“I don’t like her,” Persapha said. “Whoever she is.”
He smiled. “I don’t like her that much either. Still, this is what it is.”
“Come back soon,” she reached up for his hand, unwilling to stand, the tall child embarrassed by her height.
He bent to kiss her wrist. “I will my dear, and I will bring someone you should meet.”
“You will bring someone?” Her face beneath the mask lit up with joyful anticipation. “Who?”
“His name is Bob,” Odestus said with great solemnity suppressing an inward chuckle. She was a child still, a child he’d never had, and there was still a pleasure to be gained in a little dissembling amusement.
“What is he? Is he a man? Is he like you?”
He shook his head. “No, you will not prize the secret from me. A surprise is a surprise until it is sprung.”
She was all a quiver with the prospect of another visitor. She leapt to her feet and accompanied him all along the rocky passage out of the mountain’s hollow, even though she had to bow lower than him beneath a craggy roof suited for none taller than a karib. Yet despite her desperate inveigling she got no further answer or clue from him and was left as mystified as ever waving him off on the short walk to his concealed gate.
Odestus chuckled his way along the familiar sandy paths, the ones that he knew to be safe from the denizens of Grithsank by air or ground. The shimmering gate hung where he had left it, concealed in the shadow within the crevasse. The vision on the other side was the dark inner lining of a cloak which he had draped over the other side of the gate. He pushed through the membrane of the magical portal and then the folds of the cloak to emerge into the dark chamber that was his laboratory within the foundations of Listcairn’s northernmost tower.
He let the cloak fall back behind him. The room was still lit by the guttering torches which had barely burned a fraction away in the few minutes it had taken him to spend some hours in Grithsank. He moved around the work bench laden with its vials and glassware. An earthenware pot tucked beside a bookcase drew his attention for a moment. He lifted the lid and looked at the amber liquid within in which a faint hint of fluorescence was just beginning to show.
Nodding with satisfaction he turned to a next to a rough wooden crate as large as a coffin but punctured with holes. He pushed back the lid and looked down at the sand covered base of the enclosure. At one end a large reptile rested on a flat piece of rock, its skin toning into the greys and browns of the veined stone. It rolled one eye towards Odestus and a thin tongue snaked out, in a hopeful search for food.
“Hello, Bob,” Odestus said.
***
“Well,” Quintala said. “What is this wonder you have to show me?” The half-elf glared around Haselrig’s shadow filled chamber, wrinkling her nose at the odours that assaulted her nostrils. It was a cacophony of scents, the musk of sweating orc mingled with the stench of the zombie’s walking decay. A slightly built necromancer slid his hands endlessly over each other, restless with nerves in the presence of the new commander in Listcairn.
An old cloak was draped across the table in the middle of the room, the fabric distorted by the objects beneath it.
“Come on,” Quintala urged. “I haven’t got all day.”
Haselrig tutted in irritation. “You are a strange mixture these days Lady Quintala, slow to answer a call and yet impatient when you do arrive.”
The half-elf’s mouth bent in a faint smile but her eyes were as hard as flint. She glanced at the necromancer and the orc. The mage had the good sense to be examining his fingernails but the orc’s mouth was open his eyes bright with a dim awareness of discord between his superiors. “You should simply be grateful that I am here, and even more grateful that you are still here, Haselrig.” The smile stayed, in stark cont
rast to the iciness of her tone.
“Quite so, Lady Quintala, quite so.” He bustled apologetically over to the table, his own eagerness tempered by the half-elf’s irritation. He pulled the strange discoloured cloth aside to reveal the two swords of the Vanquisher. The Father and The Son lay gleaming and untarnished on the rough wooden surface.
The half-elf pursed her lips. “Still playing with your toys, Haselrig.”
The ex-antiquary splayed his fingers in an aborted gesture of command and then nodded at the necromancer. At the wizard’s behest the zombie stepped forward hand stretched towards the hilt of the nearest sword. Quintala instinctively took a step back resisting the urge to raise an arm to ward her face. She had seen the sword’s power. Prior Abroath hurled into insensibility when he had seized the sword in a bid to disprove Niarmit’s story and heritage. A grim smile played across her lips as she recalled how the experience had addled his senses transforming him into one of the queen’s most loyal acolytes; the shuffling undead thing would have few enough wits to afford any re-arrangement of them.
She felt her body tense as the rotting fingers closed on the ancient artefact. But there was no flash, no bang. The zombie seized the blade and lifted it clear of the table, experiencing no greater discomfort than a disturbance to its uncertain balance from the weapon’s weight.
Quintala’s eyes widened as Haselrig gave another signal to the necromancer. The wizard bent his will to command the zombie and with some difficulty the creature swung the weapon two handed bringing its blade crashing down on the table. It was not as graceful a stroke as the one with which Niarmit had cleaved the legs from Rugan’s great council table, slicing through wood as though it were paper. However, it was a heavy blow that bit into the hard wood surface, a slice a quarter inch deep injuring the furniture no more than any normal weapon might have done.
“A switch! A subterfuge!” she cried. “You have been duped, where are the real weapons, Haselrig? They had better not be anywhere near the bitch queen’s hands, else not even I could save you from Maelgrum’s wrath.”