The Runes of Norien

by Auguste Corteau

Veig Treth paced at the entrance of the cave, his heart gripped alternately by anger and terror, self-loathing and despair. Every now and then, some sudden sound – the hoot of an owl, a fox rustling through the undergrowth – made him jump, yelp and take cover behind a bush that grew next to the cave’s mouth, a bush which (as if things weren’t rotten enough) was filled with big sharp thorns that got caught in his vestments and pricked him all over like a pin cushion. Yet despite the pain he couldn’t risk it, for what if one of those swishes and crackles wasn’t a nocturnal beast but a Scavenger scout?

  That was why he hadn’t yet lit the lamp, even though he dreaded the dark. Of course he could enter the cave, as his mission decreed, which would be a far better hiding place than the accursed bush – but Veig also feared what might lurk in its yawning depths.

  What incensed him most, however, was that he had only himself to blame. For if it weren’t for his insatiable, stupid ambition, he wouldn’t be here now, his life hanging in the balance between an army of savages and mind-reading freaks from another world.

  Things had already begun to unravel when that effeminate fool had come home minus a foolish head. Veig had observed the entire scene and its gory conclusion from the window of his chambers atop the Spirit Home, cringing behind the thick red drapes and praying that someone would seize that idiot of a King before he butchered all of his pathetic, dimwitted subjects. And when at last the corpses had been dragged away from the pools of blood that had gathered among the cobbles, and a pair of burly guards was stealthily advancing towards Fazen, just as Veig thought the whole beastly fit was over – not that it hadn’t an upside; less useless mouths in these lean times – the King had taken him and the guards by surprise, whirling around and delivering a fatal blow to both men, who fell to their knees, choking and clutching their blood-gushing throats, and then, with a fresh roar of rage (would he never tire?) he charged at the Spirit Home. Luckily for the High Servant, at the time the Home was empty of worshipers, and its sturdy doors were shut and barred from the inside, but that didn’t halt the King’s insane attack; still yelling, he hacked at the doors with his sword, kicked them and pummelled them with his fists, and even butted his blood-soaked head against them, till Veig was so terrified that the mad King would succeed, and then rush to his chambers to slay him for the Spirits’ failure to watch over Fantyr, he felt his anus painfully constrict around a haemorrhoid that had been pestering him for weeks.

  In the end the use of his head as a battering ram seemed to disorient the King, for after staggering a bit, he took one final swipe with the sword and collapsed face-down. But even though Veig’s life had been spared for the moment, that had been merely the beginning of his troubles, and of the ill fortune that had ultimately brought him, in the black of night, to this remote, unnerving corner of Feerien.

  Early the next day he’d been brutally awakened – kicked out of bed by the hard boot of a guard – and hauled to the Palace to officiate at the Prince’s funeral rites, his groggy mind striving to recall the exact sequence of inanities while through the corner of his eye he kept a fearful watch on the defeated King who slumped on his throne, lest he suddenly recover his murderous vigour and dice him into pieces like a turnip. And after the ordeal was over with no dicing, and Veig Treth dragged his weary steps back home, dreaming of locking himself in his room, drinking as much wine as was humanly possible without dying and then falling into the sweet oblivion of sleep, he found the Spirit Home invaded by a host of people who implored him to intervene on behalf of the loved ones they had lost to the King’s massacre, men and women pulling their hair and gnashing their teeth and wailing and clawing at him like famished beggars.

  The High Servant, by then already thoroughly repulsed by his vocation, had spent an intermiable day muttering prayers and blessings, and reassuring the unwashed bereaved that their relatives were basking in the warm light of the afterlife bestowed upon the virtuous by the Spirits. And when at long last he was allowed to stumble up to his bedchamber and let the horrors of the past two days be snuffed out like a candle’s flame, Veig dreamt that all was well again, going so far as to imagine (for his ambition knew no sleep) that with Fantyr dead, he would manage to regain the King’s trust and slyly ascend to the status of successor to the throne. And in his slumber he grinned.

  Little did he knew that the grin of self-aggrandizement would be once and for all wiped off his face. For in the course of the following days, while Velius and his army ransacked the Farmlands and the Minelands, unbeknownst to the Castle whose means of sustenance they cut off one by one, people began to sense that things were seriously amiss – an apprehension that was soon confirmed, when no cart or dray would pass the expectantly open gates, an absence brutally felt once the sixth moon set and households all over the Castle had no food to replenish them and no coals to warm them.

  It was only natural then that, having no one else to blame for the cold and the hunger and the toll it took on themselves and their whimpering children – not even the King, for despite the luxuries of the Palace, its residents too relied on the wagons that no longer arrived – the Castle folk turned on the Spirits, their aloof and inscrutable punishers, and on Their earthly middlemen, who had failed to warn them.

  And though most Spirit Servants of lesser rank were all too glad and quick to slink away from the people’s growing fury, Veig Treth could hardly deny responsibility when he was the one supposed to have the Spirits’ ear. Overnight, the believers’ abject beseeching turned to outright hostility. People began to abuse him in the market, some even spitting at him; children threw rocks at the Spirit Home’s windows and snuck into his quarters to steal his valuables and leave piles of excrement on his pillow. The High Servant was terrified, even fearing for his life, but no matter how many appeals he sent to the King, entreating his protection, they were all met with the same stony silence.

  In the throes of utter desperation, Veig decided to plead his case to the Queen, who rumours said was ecstatically happy if stark raving mad. And Queen Firalda, having grown generous and merciful ever since her son had been brought back from the dead, consented to grant him an audience – for after all he was a representative of the Spirits who had been so charitable towards her.

  “They have spoken to me, you know,” she had said, looking up at him with her moist, luminous eyes. “Well, not exactly spoken, but showed Themselves – They made a rock produce milk! Sweet, warm milk, as from a mother’s breast!”

  “I’m certain They did, Your Majesty,” Veig mumbled noncommittally, keeping his head down to avoid the ghastly sight of the Prince’s primped-up corpse, upon whose stuck-together lips crawled a big, revolting blowfly. He felt like being sick.

  “And they also gave me this,” the Queen went on, and showed him a stone she’d been clenching in her feast. “Look how it glows! It’s Spirit magic, plain as day!”

  Veig merely nodded without looking; this was getting him nowhere. And then, just as he was brooding that things couldn’t get any worse, they suddenly did.

  “I know what you must do!” Queen Firalda exclaimed, bringing down her rock-clenching fist on the table and making him start. “You must go seek Their advice and assistance yourself! I’m sure They’d listen to someone of your eminence and faith!”

  Now Veig Treth, who never had a grain of faith in his heart and who had lately come to hate his eminence, would rather poke his eyes out with a smoldering iron than travel all the way to the Cave of the Seers while Feerien was under attack by hordes of man-eating heathens. Moreover, although his faithlessness extended to all supposedly ‘otherworldy’ entities (as if the world wasn’t cruel enough without their retribution), he reserved some doubt as to the exact nature of the Cave, and what transpired within it. In all likeliness the Seers were figments of minds as greatly disturbed as the Queen’s, sheer inventions of the desperate, but over the years Veig had heard many Scribes – whom he regarded as his intellectual equals despite the uselessness of their scribblings �
�� talk of those strange creatures, who never lasted long enough to be brought out of the Cave, but nonetheless wielded great power over your mind, so great, some claimed, that to be in their presence could rob you of your senses forever. And though the death of her son had been most likely what had driven Queen Firalda mad, listening to her as she harped on about milk-welling rocks and magic stones, Veig couldn’t help wondering whether it had been her visit to the Cave of the Seers that had left her in this pitiable state, having dinner with Fantyr’s carrion while flies were laying eggs inside his mouth.

  However, his fate had been decided, for the Queen suddenly got it in her head that the High Servant, by far the most appropriate and gifted in communing with the Spirits, might bring back from the Cave something even more miraculous than an enchanted stone – perhaps a Seer in the flesh, whose powers, up close, could further heal her poor boy who sometimes looked so lost in thought and melancholy. And so,

  “I’ll have his Majesty order preparations for your journey at once!” she said, and before Veig could utter a word of disagreement, she bolted from the table and left him in the dining room, in the sickening company of the Prince’s cadaver; although, thinking of the dreadful venture that had been forced upon him, and which quite possibly might end in his own corpse being dismembered, disemboweled and devoured, Veig couldn’t help envying for a moment the eternity of calm into which Fantyr had vanished.

  He’d had barely enough time to pack for the journey when he was summoned to the Castle’s gates. The fourth moon had set, but it was still light enough to appease his fears, and as he made his way across the emptying marketplace, Veig, by force of habit, had once again indulged in a flight of fancy: he could bribe the men of his escort with some of the gold he had saved for a bind just like this, and instead of going all the way to the Cave – which would be asking to be ambushed and slain – they’d seek out the Scavengers themselves, offering, along with the rest of the gold, to defect to their side and help them seize the throne of Feerien, if they would vouchsafe their security. Sure, it would be a heinous act of treason which, provided the barbarians didn’t butcher them on sight, would probably result in the obliteration of the Castle and its dwellers, but Veig Treth was a man who put his life above the lives of all mankind; he was also quite intelligent, enough to sense that the balance of power had been upended. Any day now the Castle folk would begin to succumb to the famine, and the same would apply to the King’s small, depleted army; and having no allies, how could they possibly defend themselves against a well-fed, bloodlusting legion? No, Veig would make sure that, before the war that was imminent broke out, his lot would be cast with the victors.

  And then he reached the gates and his traitorous fantasy crumbled in a single stroke – for instead of the four-horse carriage and the armed and mounted escort he’d been expecting, there stood before him an old, black, mangy mare, with a filthy pile of sackloth in the place of a proper saddle, and, hanging from a sheath across her flank, a sword so tarnished and blunt that even if he’d been a master swordsman (which he was most definitely not; carving knives were the closest thing to a weapon he had ever held) he could inflict with it as much injury as with a willow switch or a sprig of rosemary.

  So this was King Fazen’s revenge, his final act of resentment and scorn: sending him to his death unarmed and on the back of a dying horse. Then a gruff voice spoke out of thin air, startling the edgy High Servant.

  “She’ll have to graze, poor old girl,” said the voice, which belonged to a wizened, toothless old man who stank of horse dung. “King’s orders. Can’t spare the hay; there’s hardly enough to go around in the stables. Oh, and one more thing,” he added, stepping over and handling the worn, frayed reins to Veig. “King’s orders too.”

  That I must copulate with the horse and breed? Veig wondered bitterly.

  “You must return with at least one living Seer,” the old man said, mashing his shrunken jaws around the words. “Or don’t dare return at all.”

  And yet the Spirits he’d never believed in had showed him a scrap of mercy in his time of ineffable misery. For one thing, the mare had clearly made the trip to the Cave of the Seers before, and seemed to know the way – which Veig could never have found on his own; and for another, the beast’s dull black coat, the same as his hooded cape, made them practically invisible so long as they kept close to dark, wooded areas.

  But after an uneventful day and a half, which had brought them to the foot of a slope of bare black rock, the horse came to a halt and refused to budge despite Veig’s pulling sharply at the reins and kicing at her flanks. It was clear that he would have to go the rest of the way on his own, and in the end, shaking with tiredness and fear (for the last two moons had set together, ushering a premature night) he’d done just that.

  And here he was now, caught between surges of dread as strong as ropes pulling him this way and that. Because what if he did overcome his fear of the Seers and went looking after them and found the Cave empty? What would become of him then, banished from the Castle with two days’ worth of rations, a sickly horse that could neither gallop nor be traded, in an unfamiliar land overrun by ferocious warriors?

  Oh, if only he could sacrifice his years of hectic rising for the life of the most wretched beggar living in the Castle’s vilest corner!

  It was while he wallowed in this state of self-lament that the screams erupted from the Cave, so sudden and piercing they were indistinguishable from his own.