Salt, Sand, and Blood

by MarQuese Liddle

  “But what?” she might have snapped. The impotence of her sons never failed her displeasure. Savages in loincloths with bone-tipped spears, defeated first by the craven Black Beast, and now they struggled with a few mortal men—a few ignorant foreigners. Foreigners. The thought made her pause. The dawn rising in the west. Could this be His answer, so soon?

  Tempering herself, she silenced the messenger with a flick of her wrist and questioned, “Where on the Vereringeks?”

  The man stammered.

  “Where?” Lilum lashed him with her tongue.

  “To the south, on the bank beyond the crucified.”

  “Show me.”

  “But Mother, It’s not safe! These heathens fight like animals, like they don’t know death. They’ve killed two brothers already. If you come and we can’t hold them back—”

  She started down the stairs. “Then you and who ever remains of your brothers will feed yourselves to the riverwyrms, and your bones will never know the grace of the Father’s reign—the rest of you,” she said, descending the final step, “the blooding is done. Scour the altar and begone before I return.” For I will not have your faith tried by heathen snakes. Not again, she promised, the image of that false prophet imprinted in her mind—a man pierced, crucified, and cast into the river alongside his apostates two years prior, condemned to their fate, to consumption at the great Father’s black table. No, I will not risk that these snakes spit venom. I will hear them alone. I will see them for myself.

  Indeed, she would find those heathens a breed of beasts unlike anything she imagined while pursuing the winding river passed ruined homes and pock-scarred streets to where her sons held the transgressors captive. A wretched march despite the wind at her back, for, even two years after the attack, the breeze weighed tainted with the Beast of Tsaazaar. It hounded her nostrils, the odor, the memories of desecration—the sole instance she’d questioned the Father’s gift—questioned herself, her judgement. Did I execute the wrong man? Lilum had fretted years ago hiding helplessly behind the temple walls as the Beast pillaged her city. Only after morning came and the threat retreated was she able to reaffirm her faith: she was alive, and the temple unscathed. Surely, she had thought, watching dawn color Iisah’s shattered clay hovels, that the man and his apostates truly were false prophets.

  Now, as she and her escort arrived at a row of empty crucifixes looming tall over the river’s edge, the Mother of Iisah swore aloud, “Father, save us.” They stood at the feet of one of seven dead sons, this one skewered through the heart and left to bleed on the bank. The other corpses laid farther along where the skirmish had become a massacre. They were headless, most of them, like they’d been brained by the blow of a nephilim’s boulder; yet there were no stones among the patchy grasses of the floodplain, just blood, sand, one last living son, and three foreign devils.

  They were not animals. They were monsters: a wild mongrel, half naked, his gaunt frame striated with sinew as he danced like the Gautamans do, his sabre glinting; and beside him, a young Messah whose crown shone gold and whose face was stone even as he ran a man through to the cross of his blood-smeared sword. Then there was the last of them, clad in black and crimson, a heathen priest gleefully working some devilish engine of fire and steel held level at his shoulder, aimed for the north. The roar was deafening, belching sulfur and smoke like from the throat of a dragon. Lilum never saw her escort’s head explode, only felt the hot mist, bits of tissue and skull. The body crumpled—beats of life-blood vanished in the sand.

  Like lambs to the slaughter, she thought, disappointed, reposed, a part of her eager. Perhaps these were the foreigners forewarned. She would learn soon enough, watching their approach, spying them observing her—the half-blood fixated, the Messah possessed, and the priest with his arrogant mask of mirth as he fed a cartridge into the smoky muzzle, a stick of incense clenched betwixt his teeth.

  Lilum reached into the folds of her robe and gripped a hilt of yellowed bone. “Transgressors,” she started, “infidels, blasphemers. Who are you to dare trample on the Father’s covenant?”

  “Bishop Ba’al, envoy of the King—or Father, or whatever you savages call him. We’re here to see the priestess.” He leveled his weapon. “And you’re going to show us the way, unless you want to look like your friends.” A bluff, etched bright as day on the bishop’s blackened heart.

  “Was that meant to frighten me? Insolent insect, your posturing has no power here. I have seen the end, and you are not there, even among the risen dead.”

  Ba’al’s nostrils flared. Taking incense in hand, he poised ready to jam the burning stick into the breach. Then five bony fingers snared the loaded barrel—the half-blood’s—redirecting the engine toward empty air to the east. What followed was a vociferant ejaculate of curses and damnations as the bishop pleaded with Adam for help. Yet the young Messah hesitated, looked instead to the Mother of old Iisah.

  “What was that you said about the dead?”

  That they shall rise again, those bones aslumber on the bed of the Vereringeks. That was the promise made to her, but the resolution in this Messah’s eye craved something different—a wish—and it was this which Lilum gave him, “You want to know what the Father has shown me? It is the consummation of our covenant: the rebirth of the faithful, alive and in their graves, to wage war on the false prophets and bring an end to the Traitor’s reign. To bring the coming of His kingdom.”

  “The revelation,” finished the pastor’s son—mistaken, taken in, beguiled, her puppet.

  Then the mongrel interjected, “Is that how you have Jezebel’s face?”

  The question took them all aback, but when they laid eyes on her again, it was with a sudden recognition. The Messah gasped. The bishop cursed. They knew her, and Lilum could see on their very souls that it was true. She answered, “This body, you mean? It was a gift from the Father, and I can see now that He did not choose it by chance. Who was she to you? A lover? Your kin?”

  “She was the most beautiful woman in all of Eemah.”

  “Eemah? You’re blood of our sister tribe?” A dead snake in the sand, succumbed to its own venom. “What is your name, child? And the man who sired you?”

  “Adnihilo,” he replied. “But I never knew my father. Not even his name.”

  “He’s the legate’s son,” Ba’al answered for the half-blood, jerking his weapon free, yet his disposition had calmed. “And it seems to me that you must be the priestess. The Mother of old Iisah, Lilum. We’ve come a long way to find you.”

  “Yes,” she said, fitting together in her head the pieces of prophecy—that the legate must be the Traitor and that this mongrel must be his seed—he the lion, and this Messah the lamb. A sacrifice. A blooding. Yet the bishop remained a mystery, so she asked, “Why is it you have come?”

  “For the fall of the Walls of Barzakh. An old friend told me you might have the key to bring them down.”

  I do now. You’ve just handed it to me.

  Twentieth Verse

  Sylvertre’s quill scratched quickly as a spider’s skittering the Saint’s Cross’s sigil into the rapidly hardening wax. The task was growing easier, done thrice as fast as his last attempt, and for once Ogdon was impressed with the results of his handiwork: forging an ornate seal in the shadowy hull of a rocking boat. He held the letter to a candle removed from its lantern. Dawn should not have yet risen, but the squire would not risk a stray eye spying light beneath the hatch. Looks good, he thought. Not even he could tell the true seal from the fake.

  With a wetted thumb and forefinger, Ogdon snuffed out his candle and returned it to its glass cage, listened as sounds emerged from the darkness. The crashing of waves on rock and sand, the dong of a rusted bell, the shouts of seamen and the pounding of their boots on the docks. They’d finally arrived at Quiet Harbor. Done just in time. Sylvertre recalled the task given to him by the captain.

  It was back at the Watcher’s Eye, the morning after the attack, he would later learn. The squire
awoke in a bed he didn’t know, in a place he’d never been, to a Gildmane unlike anything he’d ever seen of the man. His cheeks were pale, his eyes sunken, his armour dented and caked with mud. In his hands was a shallow box stacked with parchment, a quill and ink pot, a stick of wax, and the Cross’s signet. Promptly, Trey dropped it onto the squire’s lap. That was weeks ago, yet even sitting alone, passenger with cargo and stow away rats, Ogdon tensed his jaw in memory of the jolt bursting forth from his broken ankle.

  “Wake up,” the captain said, “It’s passed time you were made useful. I need half a hundred copies of the unsigned letter, one for each of the names on that list. And you’ll find a few notes already sealed; you’ll be holding onto those as well, at least until we arrive at Quiet Harbor. Find a ship set for Aestas as soon as we dock. I want these letter gone by the time we arrive.”

  Mad from fever and his throbbing foreleg, Sylvertre propped himself up in the sickbed and grumbled, “I’m not a damned scribe. Do it yourself.”

  For a moment, Trey stared, taken aback—as was his squire. Neither man, it seemed, believed Ogdon had the backbone. The captain sighed, “Now’s not the time for your balls to drop. The Cross needs this done, and it needs it done now, and I can’t be seen doing it myself.” He stopped to scan the barracks, and only then did Sylvertre notice the two of them were alone. “Don’t you realize what kind of firestorm we’ll be walking into when we return to Pareo?”

  He hadn’t realized, not then, but he hid his surprise and agreed to the task and swore never to speak to anyone of the letters, even Gildmane.

  Then days went by, and they changed their route. Neither Jael nor Ogdon could ride through the northern moors with their injuries, and there was the captain’s bounty to contend with. So they took the Watchers’ offer to escort them south disguised as spice farmers shipping cinnamon around the western cape. By carriage and riverboat, they arrived at the mouth of the Serpent’s Southern Fork, boarded a trade vessel at the way port, and thence were bound north for Quiet Harbor.

  Those were arduous, hushed, lethargic days wading water and woods. Hardly a word was spoken. No matter how Ogdon provoked the members of the Cross, they glared, sullen or loathsome, till he spoke a word too far and suffered a verbal reprimand—usually from the captain—and after he’d recall bitterly the secret burden placed upon him. Is this treason? he’d pondered, his mind stretched thin between disparate desires: wielding Trey’s letters like a dagger in the back and learning the mystery behind Jael’s condition. The last time he and Leonhardt conversed was before the brackdragon attack—which, to his knowledge, she’d survived unscathed. Then he woke up to discover her battered and broken with deep gouges on either side of her face. Gildmane was to blame, such was obvious to him, yet no one dared utter a thing, not about the clerics’ raid nor Jael’s wounds. Not until they boarded the Cape Ibis at a south-western way port did he uncover the truth.

  It was the captain’s loose tongue whom proved the traitor in a missive addressed to Bishop Ba’al. Gildmane couldn’t help himself, it seemed that he was overwhelmed, over his head in politics and intrigue—and witchery. Sylvertre had not believed it at first, thought it must be a trick of the light or his imagining, like those illusory demons on the Serpent’s Head: shadows and cobwebs and the scratching of rat feet turning the Ibis’s cargo hold into a cavern replete with malignant beasts. It’s just my imagination, he reasoned, reading and rereading. But what Trey had written remained the same.

  His Grace Bishop Ba’al of the Faithful’s Cathedral,

  When you told me I would see it with my own eyes, I thought you meant that I would be an old man before it all began. You had not warned me that it would be my own hands to build the new temple. Perhaps you did not know, for I only learned by the rumored words of a dead man written on burial cloth. I saw them myself, heretical things, like an exile’s daughter being admitted into an order of holy knights. Yet this too has come to pass, and since then the seeds of discord and strife have been sewn, false prophets have bled, and demons roam the earth. It seems as though God’s plan shall progress without you. I’ll do everything I can in service of this, what little that is, until your return. I pray that is soon.

  May soon his kingdom come,

  Knight Paladin and Captain of the Saint’s Cross, Trey Gildmane

  Ogdon wasted more days than he’d like to admit fretting what in the end he concluded was nothing more than coded language. A revolt. It was the only rational answer, and he plans to use Jael to do it. Such was confirmed in the other notes: an order of blunt arms and measurements for plate harness, and a letter addressed to Johan and Ariel Stoltz—the duke and duchess of castle Aestas, lord and lady of more than a quarter of the country—Trey’s uncle by marriage and aunt by blood. And all the letters to be copied over the voyage, invitations to a grand ball at the castle to celebrate a revolutionary event.

  It was time. Sylvertre gathered together the letters in a bundle, counted again the coins in his purse, and hobbled on a crutch to the rungs and emerged to the comforting bustle of civilization. He tugged at the collar of his cloak, cold. Though the busy ports of Quiet Harbor reminded him of home, these lands were of the northern bite. Like Hibernis to the far east, the waters there were ice and the winds white when winter came. They left the squire longing for his wool and armour, but he could not risk being recognized.

  Without waiting for the others to depart, Ogdon limped the length of the plank and onto the docks. Up close, the city’s resemblance to Pareo all but dissolved. These were not a breed of culture and wealth, but of salt and fish and bitterness. Sailors made the most of them, of the kind he’d only heard tales about, and the rest were western spice peddlers, or else locals bundled in sheep-skins. Their movement was constant; in and out of ships and houses—half-buried cottages save for the frequent taverns rising stories above the steep gable peaks. Only the chimney stacks seemed to reach higher. Beyond them, the eye was consumed by gray smoke and sky, though the squire knew better. Not far to the east along the rocky shore stood the clerics’ retired fortress, Quiet Tower, its crystalline panes a dim beacon amidst the gray.

  This won’t take long, thought Sylvertre, that he’d find an eastward vessel and be back with the others before they saw the dawn. He was wrong. On the docks, the crowd ran thick as his broken ankle, and his good leg turned stiff in the cold. Blood burned in his cheeks, none in his nose as he limped, sniffling, a makeshift crutch constructed from the lames of a barrel stuffed hard under his sword arm. He took pride in knowing that: that he was a sworn squire, that he could call it his sword arm, and that these plebeians he passed glared not at him, but at a disguise. They might believe him to be a beggar, as the first few shipmasters did, and turn him away to continue his search. But it’s their loss, he thought, squeezing a heavy purse beneath the folds of his cloak. They’re wrong about me. All of them. Even Gildmane can’t say that he’s faced a brackdragon—and lived! He hastened his pace, suddenly proud of his injury. Then his grin turned grimace as he placed his weight on his swollen foot. All of them but Jael.

  An hour later, his task at last done, he wondered despite himself what sort of demon she’d braved. Ogdon charged the captain with giving him those superstitious thoughts. He’d delivered the letters to the first carrier who’d take them, Belaykrov, a Hibernis lumber vessel promised to supply at the ports north of Aestas. There, a contract was drafted and signed at the captain’s insistence. Copies were scribed, and coin was exchanged. It was more than he could have hoped for: records and witnesses to corroborate his evidence—secret copies of Trey’s written confessionals—yet, a strange angst impressed upon him. He’d felt it as soon as he’d boarded the Hibernis ship and would have withdrawn had it not been the last left in the harbor. The crew were entirely foreigners, dark skinned where it showed, unintelligible when they spoke through thick head scarves; and their captain, the only Messaii man aboard, refused to come out into the open air. So they met in the cabin. He was a pale man, this capta
in, his complexion, hair and eyes white as ivory, underdressed in thin silks, yet unperturbed by the chill.

  Hobbling opposite across the dock from the way he came, Sylvertre shivered pondering if it were truly possible for a man to sell his soul—by action if not by agreement. By then, he’d figured the crew to be slaves. The practice had long since been deemed blasphemous, but he’d heard that God’s law was not followed the same in the Enclave as it was in the rest of the country. Nor in the west, nor the north it seemed as Ogdon struggled up the steepening bluff. Beaten road became rocky soil became an ancient bed of pocked, faded mortar. On this rested the Quiet Tower.

  The first hundred feet shone bright with new plaster, only the ocean side baring the granite underneath. And to the west buttressed a parish of queer construction, of wooden columns and triangular spires and sheer tiled peaks. Nowhere did Sylvertre see a Messaii cross—not a pane of stained glass, nor an icon of a saint—just stained wood, whitewash, and an eye set inside a trinity. Ogdon stopped a dozen paces before the parish portal to examine the image and rest his swollen leg. At first, he mistook the symbol for the Watcher’s Eye. The Tower was home to clerics, once upon a time; it would be expected he’d find their markings there. But this façade was new, and the clerics had been gone from Quiet Harbor for decades. It seemed odd to him for them to keep it. Maybe it’s just tradition, he reasoned. What else is religion, anyway? Then he limped a leg closer and noticed three names, each carved along one face of the trinity: Patrem, Sol, and Ventus.

  The Tower doors creaked, and a pair of tonsured elders greeted him.

  “What might you be doing here? The hour of alms is over,” spoke the stout man to the right.