‘You mean, something like red water fell–’
‘No. It’s quite clear that it was actually blood. There hasn’t been anything else for two weeks, but something was causing weird things to happen up there.’
Kana sighed. ‘So, you want me to go to Skonar now? It’s just starting to get nice and warm here and you’re sending me to the icy north?’
‘No, the Master wants you to go to Skovir. Whatever was in Skonar has likely been taken aboard a ship bound for Skovir. He wants you to go there and see if you can detect any signs of it. Or of Cadorian. The two may be linked since we believe Cadorian went north. To make this a more… palatable trip, and to give you a
story to cover why you’re going there, you can pick up a pouch of fifteen gold pieces from the Adventurers’ Guild when you get there. It will, ostensibly, be payment for carrying a message securely to the city.’
‘Huh. Okay. Well, that’ll make Constance happy about a sudden trip to Skovir. After our side trip to the Dragon Blight, I’m not sure she likes doing favours for the White Castle.’
‘This time it’s a paid favour.’
‘And none of us are going to turn down a paid vacation to the sea.’
~~~
‘I wouldn’t describe Skovir as “at the seaside,”’ Rain said. ‘I mean, it has a port, but the place is not a vacation spot.’
‘We still get paid to go there,’ Kana said. It was time for dinner in the Sword and Staff, and Kana had told the others about the request from the White Castle. Well, she had called it a request, but they all knew that Kana and Aneshti were basically being ordered to go.
‘I won’t turn down money,’ Constance said. ‘It’s going to be quite a trek, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else on at the moment.’
‘So, it’s decided then?’ Kana asked. Lifting a hand, she beckoned to the jug of ale they had bought to accompany the meal. It lifted into the air and floated across the couple of feet to her waiting hand.
‘We’ll go. And you’re going to get bored with that spell pretty soon.’
Kana grinned. ‘Obviously. For right now, it’s fun. This would be absolutely great for retrieving the TV remote.’
‘Of course it would.’ Kana gave Constance a surprised look.
‘What? At this point I just assume whatever you say makes sense and is probably funny.’
Skovir, 26 th Menkarte.
‘It’s like Sintar, but shorter,’ Kana said.
Constance considered that assertion for a moment. ‘Yeah, I guess it is. They’re both grey. And you’re right, Sintar has more taller buildings. I used to think they were majestic, but I’ve come to think “ominous” might be a better term.’
‘Skovir has fewer slaves,’ Rain said.
‘Like none,’ Mimi added.
‘Well, if you want to be entirely pedantic about it, I’m a slave.
So there’s at least one.’
‘Don’t remind me,’ Kana said.
‘Yes, Mistress.’
‘Don’t think I won’t hit you.’ The moment the words were out of Kana’s mouth, she knew it was the wrong thing to say.
‘Oh yes, please, Mistress. Beat me soundly. Take me over your knee and–’
‘Let’s give it up while we’re ahead, shall we?’
~~~
‘The harbour’s in chaos,’ Rain said as they sat down for their evening meal.
‘What kind?’ Kana asked.
‘A ship that came in from Skonar a few days ago sank last night.’
‘It just sank?’
‘Pretty much. According to the crew, the hull under the main cargo hold just fell apart. They’d been trying to patch it since they got into port, but the planking gave in and… dissolved or something.’
‘Wood doesn’t dissolve. Okay, maybe here wood dissolves.’
‘Wood does not usually dissolve,’ Aneshti said. ‘Unless you make it into paper. That dissolves, but then that’s not really wood.’
‘So, wood doesn’t dissolve.’
‘And blood doesn’t rain from the sky and cobbles don’t fly.’
Kana nodded. ‘We need to talk to the captain of that ship.’
27 th Menkarte.
The captain of the Endless Wave was a very busy man and he was not going to talk to anyone who happened to walk up to him asking questions. This was partially because he had lost his ship and, with it, most of his life, so he was spending his days drinking until he fell unconscious.
His crew were another matter, thankfully. A lot of them were drinking to forget their last voyage, but they would find work elsewhere and they had less immediately disposable cash. Buy them a few rounds and they were happy to tell their tale of horror on
the high sea. Maybe the fact that five attractive women were doing the asking helped too.
‘The wind was with us as soon as we left harbour,’ the bosun said. It was an odd start to a tale of woe.
‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ Rain asked.
‘Aye. Normally. The clouds were moving east to west above us, but the wind was right behind us all the way south. It’s not natural.
Nothing was natural aboard that ship.’
‘Tell them about the barrel,’ another man, who had a beard you could have hidden a turkey in, said. Then he proceeded to tell them himself. ‘We was carrying salted fish in barrels as part of the cargo.’
‘Skonar is famed for its salted fish,’ Rain put in.
‘And well it should be. Best in the world, so long as it stays dead.’
‘It came back to life?!’
‘Ten days in, a few of the crew were down in the hold, checking the cargo hadn’t moved.’ The seaman sniffed. ‘Not that any of us wanted to be down there.’
‘Not with that crate they brought aboard,’ another said. His beard was better trimmed, but his skin would have kept a dermatologist busy for months. Maybe the Endless Wave had specialised in employing ‘salty sea dogs.’
‘Aye, the crate.’ Slight pause. ‘But the men who went down heard thumping noises and they tracked it down to one of the barrels of fish. Dragged the barrel up on deck, they did, because they thought there might be someone inside. Stowaway, like.’
‘A stowaway who nailed themselves into a barrel?’ Kana asked.
‘Wasn’t no stowaway. When the captain prised the top off, that barrel was full of live fish all thrashing around. Some of them flopped out onto the deck and still they was thrashing about. We threw the whole lot over the rail and said nothing more about it.’
‘It’s not natural,’ the bosun said. ‘We found the barrel of fish, and from then until we got into port, you could see light playing around the mast at night. Like the wood was glowing.’
‘Was demons,’ the man with the neater beard said. ‘Demons was guiding that ship. There’s no good going to come of that crate.
You could hear it at night. Like a slow drumbeat. Drums of war.
Demon drums of war.’
‘I never heard anything,’ the bosun said. He was lying. ‘But there was something wrong about that crate. Nothing was right from the moment it was brought aboard. Not that crate, and not the men who came with it.’
‘Men?’ Kana asked.
‘Passengers. They brought the crate with them. Big thing. Heavy.
Seven men and an elf, and that crate.’
‘Sintari,’ the big-bearded one said. ‘Seven Sintari and an elf.
Not an ice elf either. One of the southern ones. Don’t know what he was doing this far north.’
‘Finding whatever was in that crate,’ said the third. ‘Demon war drum.’
‘Didn’t sound like a drum to me. Sounded like a heartbeat. Like a slow, steady heartbeat.’
‘And what has a heart that beats that slow?’ the bosun countered.
‘Something they could fit in a crate no more than five feet on a side mind.’
‘Don’t know.’ The seaman strained the remainder of his current mug of ale through his moustache and
slammed the vessel down on the table. ‘What manner of thing brings a barrel of dried, gutted, and salted fish back from the dead?’
~~~
‘The talking beard did have a good question there,’ Rain said.
‘What manner of thing sits in a crate for weeks, sounds like a heart, and resurrects fish?’
‘Let’s not forget boiling the tar out from between the planks of the hull,’ Mimi said, ‘and then making the wood disintegrate, but only after it’s gone.’
‘No, the boiling tar shouldn’t be forgotten.’
They were in the Adventurers’ Guild which, like the one in Dvartim, was also a pub of sorts. Food was available and being eaten, and the matter of what had happened to the Endless Wave was being discussed. They had also learned that the warehouse the mysterious crate had been taken to was now being investigated by some of the local priests; the workers were refusing to go near the place because they said it was haunted. This was particularly odd since it was a new build, no more than two years old, and even the building which had been there before had had no history of ghostly visitations. Suddenly, there were ghosts.
‘Well,’ Aneshti said, ‘there’s one thing I can think of which could explain all this, but it’s… It just doesn’t happen.’
‘What is it?’ Kana asked. ‘I’m going to need to report to Sharassa later anyway. I can ask if they think your thought is possible.’
‘Yeah… I need her thinking I’ve gone funny. Wild magic.’
‘Are you crazy?’ Constance asked.
‘I thought that was a myth,’ Kana added. ‘Someone mentioned it in thaumatology class once and the teacher said it was just a hypothetical state of magic.’
‘For those of us without an education in magic?’ Rain asked.
‘Okay,’ Aneshti said, getting her lecturer on, ‘you know that the magic of the world can vary in strength? It’s a little easier to work magic in some places and harder in others. Like the Dragon Blight, for example. It’s really hard to work any kind of magic there.’
‘Even clerical magic is hard there,’ Mimi said. ‘That place is just barely a sliver above dead.’
‘Right. Well, there are very few places where the magic goes the other way and makes it practically no trouble for anyone to cast a spell, but they exist. And there are theoretically places where you can’t work magic at all. Even worse than the Blight. It’s not just hard, it’s impossible. Sometimes a magical accident will temporarily cause an effect like that. It’s also possible, in theory, to go beyond the “trivial casting” level, and that’s wild magic.’
Rain smiled slightly. ‘I think I get it. If you go beyond a place where anyone can easily work magic, then you’d presumably end up somewhere where you don’t even need someone casting a spell for magic to happen. Spontaneous magic, right?’
‘Exactly what a wild magic area would be like is an open question. No one has ever reliably recorded one, though there are stories. Usually, wild magic areas aren’t stable. The theory even predicts that they won’t be stable. They don’t hang around to be studied. However, the theory also predicts that casting spells in an area with wild magic would be dangerous, unpredictable, and it says that spontaneous magical events could happen.’
‘Like fish resurrection,’ Mimi said.
‘I don’t think they were resurrected. I think they were taken back in time.’
‘Which should be impossible,’ Kana reminded her.
Aneshti shrugged. ‘Wild magic. All bets are off.’
‘Okay, but wild magic zones aren’t supposed to move around. You can’t carry one in a crate.’
‘I say again, it’s wild magic. But no, I’ve never heard of one migrating. All the stories suggest they’re fixed regions which generally collapse into a normal state after anything from seconds to days.’
‘This one,’ Constance said, ‘seems to have been around for longer than a few days. Presumably, this is what caused the weird stuff in Skonar. It’s six weeks by boat from there to here. If this is wild magic, it’s wilder than usual.’
‘And it looks like Cadorian and his Sintari friends are escorting it,’ Kana said. ‘We missed them. They have three days on us and they were seen heading east when they left.’
‘We go after them?’
‘I’ll talk to Sharassa, but yes, I figure we go after them.’
Bridgehead, 12 th Hankarte.
Travel across the Alabethi Plains was not as simple as it could have been. This was caused by one major river which meandered down from the Dvartim Crest, across the plains in a wide curve, and eventually let out into the western sea. It was not fordable anywhere along its length and building bridges was something of a major project, undertaken only when one of the cities got involved. Hence, there were all of three bridges across it and the branch of it which went south to the Heartland Sea, all of them providing a crossing for major roads.
The town of Bridgehead got its name precisely because it was on the western side of the river, right beside the bridge which allowed travellers between Skovir and Dvartim to cross the river.
If you were going from Skovir to Alabeth, you also had to cross there, or go way to the south, through part of the Great Forest, and past Trefall. No one did that unless they also had business with the elves.
Despite its position on a major road beside the only nearby river crossing, Bridgehead was no bigger than Hillock. It had one inn, and that was out of action at the moment. The party would be sleeping with Ranulf in the stables, but they were eating in the local pub and listening to stories about why the inn was not currently accepting guests.
‘See, Wodon, the innkeeper, knew a bit of magic.’ Their storyteller was a man with a nose reddened by years of ale and watery eyes, but he was quite the gossip and he had actually seen what happened. ‘Used to be an adventurer. Always telling tales of how he fought two ogres at once and came out on top because he knew a couple of spells. Only thing I ever saw him do was light
fires, but he was good at it. Just a snap of the fingers, like, and he could light the fire in the hearth or a candle. Used to show off to the ladies with his little trick.’
The man drank from the ale Constance had bought for him, gazed lovingly at the necromancer’s barely restrained cleavage, and went on. ‘Well, not much call for fires this time of year, but he could still light candles on the tables and that was what he was doing a few nights back. Trio of women were in, travelling to Dvartim, or so I heard. Wodon puts a candle down on their table, right by the back wall, next to the yard where they stable guests’ horses. He snaps his fingers just like normal…’ There was another pull on his ale, which was certainly meant to span out the story. ‘The fireball killed Wodon and one of the women. The other two only survived because there was a priest of Soansha in town who knew healing magic. It took us an hour to get the flames under control too. It burned something fierce.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Mimi said.
‘Aye, it was. Now, I never heard Wodon once say he could throw fire around like that. Some are saying that the gods finally got fed up with Wodon’s boasting, but me, I think it was something to do with that crate you were asking about.’
‘Oh?’ Kana asked.
‘See, I said the yard was right out back of where it happened, didn’t I? Well, that crate was put up on a wagon right beside that wall. Seems like its owners upped and left in the night too.
An elf and seven Sintari, just like you were asking about.’
‘And wild magic could make spells go awry,’ Aneshti said.
‘Wild magic? Never heard of that.’
Aneshti gave their informant a smile. ‘And, hopefully, you’ll never hear of it again.’
Sintari Plains, 1 st Sokarte.
They had begun to worry that Cadorian was heading for Sintar.
That was not a place any of them wanted to return to in the near future, or possibly ever. The trail of strange happenings was leading them south, however, paralleling the line of Soansha’s C
rown and heading in the general direction of the Dragon Blight.
The party had stopped in Hillock on the way through and had been happy to discover that Cadorian had, apparently, bypassed the place. Considering the weird events they were following as they tracked the crate, the fact that there were none to be found in Hillock could only be described as a good thing.
They had come across villages where buildings, often the stables, had burned down in the night. In one of those, there was a
witness to say that the crate had been right in the middle of one of the fires, but it and its wagon had remained miraculously undamaged. The well in another village had suddenly filled with water, right to the top and out in a flood which had only subsided the following morning, not long after the crate had been taken away. There were stories of talking cats, talking dogs, and one singing goat. Mysterious spirts had appeared in a number of places after the passage of Cadorian and his party. Kana and her friends had followed the trail for over a month now, always a day or two behind.
Now, however, they were actually seeing something themselves, except that Rain was not buying it. Not entirely anyway. ‘Okay, so we saw a pillar of blue flame on this hilltop,’ Rain said, summarising.
‘I saw it first,’ Mimi said, ‘but it was still there when we got to the foot of the hill.’
‘Right,’ Kana said. ‘It looked like one of the wild magic effects we’ve been following. It was visible from the road and that’s five miles away.’
‘But it vanished when we got to the foot of the hill,’ Rain went on, ‘and there’s absolutely no sign that anyone camped here recently. Why would you? There are better places down on the far side. This is exposed. You could see just about any fire up here from the road and this is not a place to be noticed by those wandering the area.’
‘And we’ve never heard a story about the crate just passing and affecting something,’ Kana said, realisation dawning. ‘It seems to have to sit still for at least a few hours before anything happens.’
‘If they didn’t camp here,’ Constance said, ‘either the thing’s getting worse, or this was something else. Do we follow it anyway?’
The Girl Who Dreamed of a Different World Page 28