The Echoes of Sin (The Kinless Trilogy Book 3)

by Philbrook, Chris

  “Aye. A few hours. Dawn I would guess. If the winds at our back were to be a bit more kind to us, we might shave an hour off. Though with the tiny light rising ahead I am not certain we want to rush into what lies before us.”

  Samrale’s back had been turned from the prow of the boat so he turned and looked towards the eastern horizon. Distant, as far as his eyes could reach, he could make out a thin blue line that marked where Elmoryn ended, and the sky began. The sun had begun to rouse, casting its first light on the far east of Elmoryn, where the Commonwealth of Yokia and the Coastal Freelands sat, but only a sliver of a smudge of blue could be seen. Stark against the light far ahead in the vast blue-green expanse of the Varrland plains, a trickle of black smoke rose from a blot in the grass.

  “Is that Ockham’s Fringe?” Samrale asked his voice full of concern.

  “Aye. If the stars are telling the truth we’re dead set on course. Two, maybe three hours if all remains as-is. Though if we can see that much smoke at this distance, there must be an awful amount of fire.”

  Samrale made a sour face. “If the smoke rises as it is right now then they are sure under heavy siege. We must move faster or we may be too late. I will not arrive as Ockham’s Fringe is sacked by the Queen’s army.”

  The Captain chuckled. “You’re the Waymancer, old man. If I were able to stir the winds I’d be retired from behind the wheel, sitting behind a pile of pieces somewhere warm and sunny. If you want us to move faster that’ll be a task you’d need to take upon yourself.”

  The wizard grunted. “Perhaps there’s something I can do then,” Samrale said, cracking his knuckles, and forming a plan.

  It would work.

  It might work.

  It had to.

  —Chapter Seventeen—

  THE EYE OF THE STORM

  In the darkness and the rain, James had wreaked havoc on the vampires who had entered the ground consecrated with his spell. The sacred power of the ancestor spirits he’s brought to bear, coupled with the holy site and the presence of Desmond Silver’s ashes actively burned and scoured the flesh from the bones of the vampires. As each burst into flame they writhed in agony, swinging their arms wildly, ineffectually. The undead were made weak, and James set his friends to task.

  Umaryn had taken up her hammer again and smashed skulls and bodies apart, sending burning pieces of the undead to and fro, sizzling flesh quenched by the puddles of rainwater.

  Malwynn had drawn the short sword he’d carried on his hip since their darkest days in Graben and hacked and slashed until nothing remained moving. Chelsea did the same. Thickened black blood ran with the water on the ground until the difference between the two couldn’t be seen. The smell of carnage would remain for decades, soaked into the earth and air of New Falun like an infection.

  All the while, Aleksi Oathman, leader of the tribe of vampires sworn to keep the secrets of New Falun, watched his vampiric family die from a safe distance in the rain. He had a plan, and even after this setback it could work. It would work. It had to work. His oath would accept nothing less.

  The twins and their two friends had won their lives for the night, but two horses were dead, and Bramwell was gone. Malwynn’s animal was dead, most likely. For now, the glade and the ruined village were still and silent.

  If they managed to survive the day, they would face a very long walk to wherever they decided to call home.

  As the sky cleared, allowing the flat rays of the dawn to peer through, their exhaustion crushed. Worst of the four were the men. Umaryn’s spells were long in duration, and required few castings to maintain for long periods of time, but the men were more brutal and demanding in their use of The Way. Manipulating the energies of magic so actively all the night consumed body and spirit at a rate they couldn’t sustain any longer.

  Umaryn held her brother upright, and Chelsea did the same for James. “We need to rest,” Umaryn said to the group. “You three first. I’ll take the first two hours of watch. Chelsea, are you able to do the next two?”

  She looked bloody, ragged and defeated, but she nodded. “Of course. Wake me?”

  Umaryn nodded. The tall Everwalk sister maneuvered her brother down to a wet spot on the ground that seemed least wet, and his eyes closed. The serene expression on his face looked full of gratitude. Umaryn turned to make sure the other woman fared well with her charge, and she saw the two of them already slumped against the cold stone of the old church’s foundation. They too were fast asleep.

  She laughed quietly and sat down hard on the stone wall near her brother. Instinctively she fixed his dark hair and looked at him. Asleep and in the quiet it was easy for her to forget the terrible things he had done the past year. The horrors she herself had done. Umaryn looked up to the bodies that were stacked two and three deep in places around them. Many had been burnt to ash by the spells Malwynn and James had cast, but far too many were rotting now, giving off a putrid odor that rankled the nose and turned her stomach.

  “I’ll take care of those bodies in a second,” she said to herself quietly as she leaned over, putting her elbows on her knees and cradling her head in her hands. It was a comfortable position. Very comfortable.

  And it really was serene, if you could ignore the stench. She’d dealt with stench before. Certainly enough to ignore it. Certainly enough to forget that she needed to stay awake.

  Umaryn’s eyes cracked open and she saw that something hadn’t gone the way it should’ve. The sun had reached its zenith far above the bowl of mountains they sat in, and the day’s warmth had crept to a near uncomfortable level. In the haze that lingered after deep sleep she struggled to figure out what had happened.

  Did Chelsea forget to wake me? Umaryn looked to her sleeping body beside James and somehow that didn’t make sense. No. I fell asleep. Shit. Umaryn stood up from her sitting perch on the stone foundation with creaking bones and leaned down to her softly snoring brother. “Mal, wake up.”

  He stirred. “No Chel. I’m sleeping,” he mumbled. His arm reached out to wrap around a woman that wasn’t there. His arm flailed in slow motion when his hand failed to come to a rest on Chelsea’s hip. Half asleep, he made a sad face without realizing it.

  Umaryn clocked him gently up side the head with the back of her hand and laughed. “I’m not Chelsea idiot, wake up, we overslept.”

  Mal’s eyes widened and she watched the same haze she had fade out of his eyes. The fog was replaced by a bit of fear, and a touch of anger. “What? What time is it?” He half sat up and looked around for threats, alarmed.

  “Judging by the sun’s position above and the temperature, it’s near noon or just after. If we want to make the mine and be back before dark we need to move,” Umaryn said as she walked towards the rousing James and Chelsea.

  “Shit Umaryn, this is not good. We lost four hours of daylight,” Mal scolded.

  “I’m aware,” she said back, angry at herself, and now frustrated at her brother for pointing out her failure.

  “What happens if we get marooned out there as the sun sets?”Mal pressed, getting to his feet.

  “We’ll pray. We’ll figure it out,” Umaryn said angrily back, feeling persecuted for a mistake.

  “We’ll pray? Are you shitting me? Are you an apostle now?” Mal was hot now, angry at his sister for her error.

  “I’m an artificer brother. Do you forget that I pray too? What the fuck do you want me to do Mal? I can’t change what happened. I fell asleep, exhausted. I’m sorry. Now get off my ass about it,” Umaryn said, her patience exhausted.

  Mal threw up his hands and stormed off outside the safety of the church’s perimeter. He headed towards the river where Bramwell had disappeared. In spite of her anger at him, Umaryn wished he wouldn’t find the body of Bramwell. That might be too much for him to bear and that might be too much for her to bear.

  “Did you fall asleep?” Chelsea asked as she stood and rubbed the morning gunk out of her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Umaryn said her voice f
ull of more than a little shame.

  “It’s just as well,” James said as he stood and stretched out. “We will be better rested, and far more able to withstand another assault tonight.” He laughed. “Let alone whatever we might encounter during the day. We are in a very wild region.”

  “What’s funny about that?” Chelsea asked, hunting for the joke.

  James thought for a moment. “Nothing really. I just—I felt like laughing.”

  Chelsea patted him on the back of his dirty, blood spattered robe. “That’s the insanity setting in. It happens when you hang out with the Everwalk family too much.”

  James laughed, and Umaryn joined in. Laughing helped. “Aren’t you considering marrying into that family?”

  “Only in the most preliminary way, James. First we escape this disaster. If you two get our things gathered up and maybe prepare a meal too, I’ll go fetch our crabapple. Probably best I fall on that spear for the good of us all.”

  Umaryn and James couldn’t help but agree.

  Chelsea found her man sitting on the side of the stream that fed New Falun its fresh water. The moist ground—mud really—had soaked in gallons and gallons of the night’s rain, and perhaps even more than that of blood. The earth had taken on a ruddy rust color from the spilled blood, and Malwynn sat in it, unaware or uncaring. She approached him cautiously, but made sure her footfalls made noise. It didn’t take much effort with the mud clinging to her.

  “I want to be left alone,” Mal said without looking back at who approached him.

  “Even if it’s me?” she asked, feigning a bit of hurt.

  Mal turned and she saw her words had actually hurt him. In that moment she recognized fully that how she felt and what happened to her affected him just as much as it did her. A surge of emotion welled up inside her, and put a smile on her face that quelled the hurt on his. “No,” he said. “Not you.”

  She made her way through the muck and sat down beside him in it. Her bottom made a squishing noise that caused both lovers to giggle. They leaned into each other and listened to the gurgling, babbling stream. “It’s really nice here.”

  “If you ignore the smell of burning vampire, the wet ground, and overbearing sense of doom yeah, the place does have its charm,” Mal said.

  She pinched him and he yelped. “Quit being an ass. I’m trying to be funny to cheer you up.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “You bit your sister’s head off back there. She’s hurt.”

  “I know. I was just angry,” Mal said as he kicked a rock into the water. It made a splashing sound.

  “That explains why you were an asshole, Mal. It doesn’t make it okay. You need to apologize. You and I both know she’s pissed at herself far more than you’re angry at her. You know she thinks she let us down.”

  “Yeah. I overreacted. I know. I’ll say I’m sorry when we get back,” Mal looked at her and she could see he felt terrible. She dropped it.

  “Why’d you come here? To this spot?”

  Mal’s voice hitched with restrained grief. He seemed more fragile than ever. “I wanted to see if—if Bramwell’s body was here.”

  “It’s not. That’s good,” Chelsea said, brushing a blonde lock of hair out of her eyes and rubbing Mal’s lower back where the armor was thinnest. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  Mal shrugged his armored shoulder. Chelsea felt a hint of tremble. “It’s not the worst. I keep thinking and imagining the damn vampires dragging his body into the woods, feeding off of him. I can almost hear his whines. I can’t shake the image.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. But look around. He killed at least five or six of them right here before whatever happened, happened. He was a beast of war.”

  “He is a beast of war, Mal. Keep your hope.”

  “I’ll try. What are James and Umaryn doing?” Mal looked over his shoulder in their direction.

  “Preparing some food and getting our things packed to head to the mine. We still have time enough to make it there and back before sundown. It’s an hour walk right?”

  “I think. I forget exactly what Uncle Weston said, but that sounds right. Short enough to walk, but long enough to need a new train line to move the copper ore.”

  “Well, that hour journey starts with us getting up out of this mud, eating something, you telling your sister you love her, and that you’re sorry for being a judgmental ass.”

  “I’m going to need a hand up. I think my butt is stuck in the mud.”

  Chelsea snorted. “Might want to check and see if there’s a stick stuck up there too.”

  “I um. I’m sorry,” Mal said to Umaryn. She was sitting on a large stone near the fire she’d just lit to boil some water for tea and Mal stood beside her. He shuffled his feet. “I know you wouldn’t have fallen asleep unless you were dead tired. I snapped. With Bram gone, the hours lost of the day, I just overreacted. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Umaryn seemed wary of the apology, but after debating it, she stood up and hugged her brother abruptly, but warmly. “I’m sorry I fell asleep. Really. You know I wouldn’t have. I put us at risk in more ways than one.”

  “It’s okay. Without you we wouldn’t have survived the night. A nap is the least reward you could’ve claimed for all you did,” Mal kissed his sister on the forehead and the two smiled at one another. James and Chelsea watched, and exchanged their own smiles.

  “I don’t want to sound corny, but last night was more than a bit of a miracle,” Umaryn said, addressing Chelsea and James now. “I couldn’t tell you how we survived. Chelsea, your sword and shield were unstoppable, and James, were it not for your prayers and spells we surely would be drained of blood and long dead right now. Maybe that’s how we survived.”

  “Faith,” James said simply.

  “Faith,” Umaryn said, looking at her brother.

  “Food,” Mal said back to her with a wink.

  All well again for the moment, the four went to war on the meal Umaryn and James had prepared.

  The exact history of New Falun had escaped the twins during their research. Perhaps no one had taken the time to record it, or the Church records had been lost or destroyed by Alisanne in Daris, but the timeline on the construction of the village to mine rails was nowhere to be found. The slight winding path that the horse drawn carts had followed in the early years of the mining town eventually were graded, reinforced, and made the home of a new line of iron rails. A luxurious investment on the part of the Artificer’s Guild for certain. It helped that the twin iron lines doubled as a direct map to where Mal and Umaryn’s parents had been trapped in a landslide caused by their aunt. To find that site, they merely needed to walk the iron rails into the gorge.

  So they did.

  On Mal’s back rode a heavy pack that had been attached to Bram’s saddle. The twins hadn’t said anything about the wide and deep satchel the entire journey to New Falun and continued to act as if it didn’t exist.

  Chelsea’s curiosity could not have been more piqued. “What’s in the bag?” She asked Malwynn.

  “Some old gear my sister and I saved. Stuff that might become useful where we’re going.” He said it like the bag held no importance, and that made it worse for her.

  “Old gear? Must be heavy,” she prodded.

  “It’s not bad. It does make me wish Bram was still with us,” Mal said sadly, and that shut Chelsea down.

  With too few mounts to ride due to the previous night’s assault, they went on foot, walking in between the iron beams atop the recessed concrete sleepers. Their boots clacked on the foreign bars of mixed stone that most assuredly originated in the ground of the Northern Protectorate. All of Elmoryn’s concrete came from there.

  “Why not use wooden ties?” Mal asked his sister, the artificer, as they walked.

  “Concrete lasts longer, that’s about it,” she said as she kicked a large fallen branch off the tracks. It offended her that the somewhat recently
newborn rail was covered in debris.

  Chelsea shook her head. “Isn’t it a little strange that the Guild shipped all this concrete out here, to the center of nowhere to build a small rail line? The next closest town is hours away. Look around, there are a hundred thousand trees in this forest that could’ve been cut down and made ready easily, but instead they send concrete?”

  Umaryn considered the idea as they all put one foot in front of the other. “It’s not that unusual, but it does seem a bit strange. Maybe they thought the weight of the copper ore called for the stronger sleepers? I don’t know enough about the trains or the rails to say for sure. The Guild has adopted more advanced sciences as the years have gone by to the best of their ability. So long as it can be made by hand, if they can make something more efficient, they will.”

  “What’s the opposite of being made by hand?” James asked her. “Isn’t everything made by hand?”

  Umaryn perked up. This was her area of expertise. The making of things. “Nowadays yes, pretty much all things on Elmoryn are made by hand. Thank the Guild for that. Long before The Fall, before The Great Plague, some people manufactured things in large quantities to turn larger profits and produce items faster. They would stamp or mold things many at a time without thought or passion in factories not workshops, and then poorly paid unskilled workers would assemble the finished items. They called it an ‘assembly line.’ Now, as you know, anything made without passion or direct human contact and care has no soul. No spirit. It is as if it were a stillborn child. It’s like that black thing in Mal’s pocket that is supposedly a key. Dead.”

  “Hm,” James said.

  “What?” Umaryn asked the cleric.

  James responded, “It doesn’t add up, all of this. I keep thinking about how the Guild rushed in here on short notice, and built an advanced—albeit short—rail line to a small copper mine in the middle of nowhere, ostensibly at the request of the Church of Souls. There are populated places that need rail lines built that have waited for a decade only to be told resources are too scarce, and yet here, a rail is built and a locomotive sent immediately? It smacks of something we don’t know.”