by Shel, Mike
“Sir, the man and his daughter are back to speak with you.”
The man and his daughter. Auric was uncertain why the boy’s formulation seemed odd to him. He spoke as though they were characters in a fairy tale.
When he peered in the barred window, he saw the old man sitting on the rough stone floor at the center of his miserable little cell. He looked up after a moment, the Aerican’s ancient eyes meeting Auric’s with an unspoken power. “The big, bearded man,” said the Aerican in his penetrating baritone, “will be well enough to join you, when you begin your journey.”
“You foresaw this, then?” Auric asked.
“In a way.”
The man wore a peacefulness about his person, like a fine robe. It differed from that of the moon-faced priest at the shrine, whose calm seemed the product of willful ignorance. Auric sensed that the man’s knowledge was vast.
“You know all? Perhaps you should have warned us of the attack. Or inform us now of what lies ahead, if your aim is to truly aid us.”
“Ah, I do not possess omniscience, Auric Manteo, though it may seem so to you. It’s true I have visions of the future, and other divinatory sight, but those glimpses I receive are murky, uncertain. If I were to reveal all I see to you, it may hinder you in your duty. I will tell you what I can to assist, but no more than is helpful. And besides, do you require encouragement to be on your guard in these times?”
“No numinous riddles for us, then?”
The Aerican’s smile was broad and toothy. “I do not mean to confound you with riddles, sir, though I can appreciate your frustration. Think of it as trusting another’s wisdom, one who has more information, sources, and experience. Much experience.”
Szaa’da’shaela purred at Auric’s hip. He put a hand to it, waiting for it to speak. When it did not, he glanced at Agnes, to see if she had noticed his gesture. Instead, she stood on her tiptoes and held on to the bars of the window.
“Where would you send us?” she asked, urgency in her voice. “To find Timilis. Where?”
“He has done much to injure you and those you love, Agnes Manteo,” replied the old man, his deep voice soothing. “But what you do cannot be for vengeance. Instead, you must do it to protect and preserve what remains.”
Agnes muttered something to herself that Auric couldn’t understand. “What?”
“Something I said to Kennah, when we strung up the bandit on the road. ‘This is to be a hanging by law,’ I said. Or something like that. Is that what you mean, sir?”
“That is an interesting thought, Agnes,” he said. “The crimes of Timilis are many, and death is an appropriate sentence. But it is better to think of him as a besieging army that threatens to raze your city, salt your fields, and slay your people. This enemy must be defeated if you are to survive.”
“Then I’ll ask it again: where would you send us?”
“Gnexes.”
Agnes’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know it. Father?”
The name sounded familiar to Auric, but he could recall little about it, including its location.
“It is a vast complex of caves, both natural and man-made, that pre-date the Buskers,” Ush’oul answered, using his hand to guide a crawling cockroach from his soiled robe back to the stone with gentle regard. “It is situated in the Ironspur Mountains, just outside the northeastern boundaries of the Earldom of Ironwound. The Buskers used the ruins for rituals of divination when they were discovered, and it’s now a site sacred to the cult of Pember, venerating his aspect as the supposed deity of prophecy and divination. That is where you will find Timilis.”
“Is he leasing a summer manor there?” Auric said. He felt a petulant fool for the comment, but his irritation was rising within him again. The old man continued as though Auric had not spoken.
“He resides in its deepest place, beyond the Throne of the Oracle. He communes with Pember.”
“Pember’s there as well?” asked Agnes, incredulous.
“Perhaps. I’m not certain. Whatever the case, Pember will not interfere with your task. There is no love lost between Pember and Timilis.”
Agnes turned to Auric. “Do you know it, Father? Have you been to this place?”
“He has not,” the Aerican said, answering for him. “The Cult of Pember has long guarded its depths and forbidden the Syraeic League from exploring the labyrinth. They hide secrets there, allowing only those with sufficient coin to have a peek at a hem of the Garment.”
Szaa’da’shaela trembled again at his side. Auric laid a hand on its emerald-studded pommel, as if to comfort the weapon. He didn’t know why the old man’s phrase disturbed him as well. “The garment? You speak in fanciful metaphors?”
The old man smiled, lips pressed together tightly. “In this case, no. The priests of Pember weave an enormous tapestry in the darkness, in an unending ritual. They have done so for hundreds of years. One day, perhaps sooner than they know, it will serve as the Vestment of God, when the Divine Spirit of Creation takes form and strides the earth.”
Auric sighed and hung his head. He was tired in his bones, in his spirit. When Agnes spoke, her voice was edged with a kind of wildness that alarmed him. “You’ll help us, then? To dispatch a god?”
He looked intently at Agnes, tilting his chin up. “Oh yes, young Agnes Manteo. Most certainly, yes.”
“Why?”
“Let me tell you a story,” the Aerican answered.
“We’ve no time for a bloody story!” shouted Auric, unable to check his annoyance. It was then that Auric noticed the young jailer, sitting on his knees behind them in the hall. The boy frowned and spoke.
“You should listen to his story, sir,” he said, his boyish voice cracking. “It’ll teach you somethin’ you need to know. Maybe it won’t sound like it now, but later, it’ll make some sense to you.”
Auric looked at the lad, seeming more the Aerican’s servant than his jailer in that moment. He turned back to the barred window. “All right, sir. Tell us your tale.”
The old man looked back at him, seeming to take his measure. A butterfly fluttered in Auric’s stomach with the scrutiny. At last the man spoke. “You have heard the tale of the people,” he began, “who had forever lived deep inside the bowels of the earth, in a cave so deep the light did not penetrate it?”
“Yes,” Auric answered, tentative. “An old Busker fable, if memory serves. One of them wandered into the light and when he told his friends, they did not believe him.”
“Oh, she did not tell her friends,” responded the Aerican, his expression serious. “At least for a time. No. At first, she kept it secret, reveling in her discovery. She grew strong from the fruit and wisdom of that vibrant place she had found, alive with light and color. When she finally chose to share the bounty of the living world with the others, she told them that she alone could walk in the light and not perish. And if they made her their queen, she would continue to provide them with what she brought back. Having subsisted all their lives on the insects that crawled in the darkness, the people gladly crowned her supreme.”
Auric clenched and unclenched his jaw, the sense of being spoken to as a child chewing at his nerves. “You think I can only digest what you mean for me to know via a fairy tale, sir?”
“Papa,” whispered Agnes, putting a gentle hand on his arm. But it was the awkward tug at his sleeve that halted the words ready to tumble forth from his mouth. It was the jailer boy, Ghallo.
“Sir,” he said, big, pensive eyes dark and pleading, “you really oughta listen to him. Later it’ll all make sense. At least, I think it will.”
Auric looked back at the lad. He was likely pressed into service in these dungeons, to spend his life in these dark corridors, playing turnkey to the constantly changing collection of wretched prisoners; selfish and cruel ne’er-do-wells, and those unfortunates with terrible luck. Auric, too, could have be
en scooped up when he first came to Boudun, a piss-stinking boy from a Pescham tannery, dragged to work in the darkness here. Or perhaps kidnapped by a press gang into the Royal Navy. Or he might have fallen in with some cluster of thieves who preyed on young, motherless immigrants to replenish their ranks. But the League took him in, clothed him, fed him, trained him in swordplay, ancient history and languages, dusky wisdom known to but a few. What wisdom did jailer boys and girls who prowled the hopeless halls of the queen’s dungeons gain through their labors?
“Perhaps you would prefer I hurry to the moral of this story, Auric Manteo? There is none. She became their unquestioned sovereign. Though she was the most intrepid of her kind, the first to venture into the light of the sun, her crown was built upon deception…and cruel violence. The yoke she laid upon the people in exchange for what she gave them was very heavy.”
“And how did they finally overthrow her?” asked Agnes, pulling herself up to the barred window again. In that moment, Auric saw the little girl who had consumed his Syraeic stories like a parched man drank cool water at a fountain. He squeezed back a tear.
“They never did,” the old man replied to Agnes with his smile. “After a time, others dared to brave the outside world in defiance of her warnings. But when they learned the truth they simply joined her in lording their knowledge over the ignorant folk who still huddled and scraped in the dark.” Then the Aerican’s smile vanished. “And when her subjects finally grew weary of their tyranny and rebelled, their god-queen and her willing accomplices murdered those oppressed people, down to the last cooing infant.”
The abrupt conclusion to the old man’s tale made Auric’s blood run cold, and Szaa’da’shaela purred at his side. After a silence that lasted an age, and with a hand on the weapon’s hilt, he spoke again. “And what do you mean to tell us with this grim story?”
“All respect,” squeaked the jailer boy, “but best figure it out yourself. I always asked him what his stories meant, but I found it’s better to work it out myself, even if it’s after a long while.”
Auric looked at the black-haired boy, who did his best not to shrink at the scrutiny, then turned to Agnes, still on her tiptoes, her lips forming an “O” of wonder. She matched the gaze of the Aerican in his cell. Auric was at a loss, angry because of it, and a petulant, fatigued part of him wanted to leave. He stayed the impulse to march out of this dismal place and head for Daurhim that very night, falling into bed with Hannah, kissing her and confessing she was right—the League was a nest of intrigues and he would never leave her side again. But as Szaa’da’shaela shivered at his hip, he instead decided to unburden his mind to this strange old man, without reservation.
“This Djao blade spoke to me first in my last foray into the Barrowlands,” he began, aware of his recklessness before the words left his tongue. “At first, I thought it the strain of the endeavor, my troubled mind playing tricks. I worried that perhaps I was going mad again…as I had when I was last there. A few years before, they found me stumbling from the wilderness after an expeditionary disaster, talking to the severed head of my closest friend as though she still drew breath.”
Agnes coughed, backing away from the cell door. She was uneasy with his words, it seemed, perhaps sensing somehow that he was being indiscreet. She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and made to speak, but Auric put two fingers to her lips.
“No, dear, I think I need to speak this aloud, to this man,” he said, turning back to the cell window. “This man, who calls himself…Ush’oul. What does that name mean, sir? Our linguists are baffled.”
“Betrayer,” answered the Aerican, his lined brown face serious.
This, Auric did not expect. “Betrayer of whom?”
“Of my own kind. Who else can one betray?”
So many questions, things that the old man’s words hinted at. Auric imagined himself asking those questions but feared the answers. Finally, he decided to continue with what he wanted to say. “This sword, also called Ush’oul by the thing I slew beneath Saint Besh, it speaks to me again, after a year of silence. Had I not listened to its directives down in that unholy place, we would have perished. More recently, it enabled me to escape a burning building and drive off a fire elemental. And soon after I left wounded Kennah at the shrine to Blessed Belu, we had a conversation.”
“Father,” began Agnes, but Auric shook his head.
“The blade told me I should ask this lad here to unlock your cell, and that we would walk from these dungeons unmolested. That seems a mad thing, too. But I think I may be close to surrendering to this lunacy. ‘Walking with the wind.’ Isn’t that what you young ones say these days, Agnes?”
Agnes didn’t speak. The look on her face was an odd mix of confusion, anger, and fear. The old man smiled and nodded almost imperceptibly. Auric turned to the jailer boy, who he found stood near him now. He put a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “Would you please open the door, son?”
“I don’t have no key,” he responded, voice cracking again. “We don’t carry the keys. Only senior jailers like Oxula have keys.”
“Check your left pocket, Ghallo,” said the Aerican with certain calm.
The boy didn’t hesitate. He reached inside the pocket of his dusty trousers, patched a dozen times, and with a look of wonder, pulled out a large iron key.
17
Arrivals
With a shaking hand, the jailer boy Ghallo inserted the iron key in the lock and turned it to the left. A loud click reverberated down the shadow-lined dungeon corridor, fading witch light flaring for an instant with ominous portent. The Aerican stood. The fluidity of his single, effortless movement made Agnes’s breath catch: the old man showed none of the infirmity of his obvious age, rising with an ease and grace Agnes herself would be hard-pressed to duplicate. Her father hesitated for a moment, then opened the cell door into the hall for the strange man. The Aerican strode forward, brushing scraps of hay from the cloth of his dirtied robe. He stopped at the threshold of his prison, all serene patience.
“Where would you have us take you?” asked her father, his tone even.
The old man closed his eyes and smiled, drawing in a deep breath through broad nostrils, as though the air in the corridor was fresher than that of his shadowed cell. “To the rooms of the countess, if you please. I will lodge there during these events.”
Her father was suddenly defensive. “Why there?”
“Ilanda Padivale has her role to play in all of this as well, Auric Manteo. Another agent in the cause of righteousness.”
“Righteousness?” Agnes said, screwing up her face. “You say what the queen would have us do is a holy task?”
That brought an ivory grin from the Aerican, a twinkle at the corner of an eye. “Yes, young Agnes, it is.” He began walking down the ill-lit hall, apparently assuming they would follow. Agnes exchanged a look with her father. He shrugged and turned after the old man. Agnes looked down at the boy Ghallo, his expression mournful, tears welling up in his eyes. But then the Aerican called over his shoulder, “Come, Ghallo. You will attend me in the palace. Your time in these miserable environs is at an end.”
Agnes looked back at the boy, his face now lit up with wonder and joy. Her heart swelled in that moment—it was the elation of reprieve, of a condemned soul spared from the executioner’s block. The lad looked at the iron key in his hand, dropped it on the floor, and scurried to catch up with the others.
Not a single guard or court official questioned them on their progress from the dungeons beneath the royal palace, nor in the halls of the palace itself. They moved through the world effortlessly, as though invisible. Within half an hour they were at the door of the countess’s lavish suite of rooms, but a stone’s throw from the queen’s own chambers. No guard had questioned them or shown any recognition that they passed by. Ilanda Padivale admitted them immediately, adjusting to the presence of the old man with remarkable ease.
Agnes imagined her ability to adapt quickly was a priceless skill when navigating the intrigues of the queen’s court. Without fanfare she agreed to act as the Aerican’s host in the palace.
“We agree that the queen and her officers needn’t know of Ush’oul’s presence?” asked Auric.
“Ulwen must know,” the countess responded.
“The Grand Chamberlain? He can be trusted?” There was worry in her father’s voice.
Ilanda bit her lower lip, exhaled. “In this, yes. The artifact with which Ush’oul gifted Her Majesty, the orb that allowed Ulwen to reach the queen’s true self, that has purchased his cooperation for the time being. But let me worry about him, Sir Auric. You have more pressing matters to concern you.”
“I will advise the countess from now on, Sir Auric,” said the old man in his lustrous baritone. “My presence will go unnoticed, I assure you.”
“Might I ask why you didn’t just waltz out of those dungeons on your own days ago, sir?” asked her father, a petulant frown on his lips.
“The time was not right.”
Agnes watched her father stare at the man for a long, awkward moment, as though he could somehow decipher secrets in the lines of the Aerican’s ancient face. It was during this odd reverie that she noticed Auric’s left hand on the pommel of the Djao blade. Her father held it there, fingers alternately touching the emeralds and the metal they were set in. Was he seeking reassurance? Was it speaking to him now? An image of her godmother’s severed head appeared unbidden before her mind’s eye, smiling its bloody smile. She was grateful when her father broke both his stare and his silence.
“Very well, sir. You have no further information for us before we leave on our journey to Gnexes?”
“Only that you will find Timilis in the deepest place in those catacombs, past the public grottoes, and beyond the throne of the Videna. My duty now is to the countess.”
Ilanda frowned and Auric grimaced. “I think you know more, sir,” he growled, hand now tight on Szaa’da’shaela’s hilt. “And I know not why you hide it from us.”