View Full Version : Things Better Left Buried
The barge drifted lazily forward, guided in by a team of dockworkers hauling ropes as thick as their arms. Behind them the docks were a teeming hive of activity, with goods being unloaded from every nation in the known world. Fallien was a land of contradictions, and it was obvious from the start. Foreigners were contained to a congested, slum-like quarter of the city-island, hated and feared by the native population, and yet Fallien was utterly dependent on trade for its survival.
Marcus Book had been awed by the broad and seemingly-endless Attireyi River, its length flanked by narrow strips of green where crops were grown. Still, as he watched from the barge as Irrakam drew ever-nearer, Book knew that even those extensive farms could not support the population of the Outlander’s Quarter, never mind the vast city beyond or the pockets of humanity he understood to exist even off the island. Without the eternal stream of goods from the world over, the young paladin felt certain that Irrakam would shrivel up into dust as surely as the endless desert that surrounded it.
That didn’t stop a swarthy dock master from casually spitting on Marcus’ boots the moment he stepped from the barge onto the docks proper. He paused, glanced at his newly-wetted boot, and then turned his gaze back to the aggressor. He knew his face remained impassive, but he also knew he was about to be in a great deal of trouble. How many times had he been warned not to fight with the locals? He didn’t know, but his ever-rising blood-pressure indicated that he would be spending the evening in a Fallien prison before finding himself at sea again.
A stream of angry words in the melodic language of the Fallien people gave him pause – a third party. Marcus felt his rage melt away and a grin cross his face as the dock master was assailed by the quick brown hands of Raji Adubi. When the dock master retreated, Raji smiled wide in his way and clasped one of Marcus’ hands in both of his, and shook.
And shook, and shook. Marcus was nearly a foot taller than Raji, and certainly twice as broad, and he had little doubt he could rip the little man in half – and yet, he also felt as though his brains were liable to rattle free of his skull.
“Marcus!” Raji said. “Marcus, Marcus! Welcome! A thousand welcomes! Smile, friend! You are always so serious.”
“Hello, Raj,” Book said, but Raji Adubi did not stop talking.
“Jya’s tears, friend, you were wearing that very thing the last time I saw you. It’s been two years! Where are your things?”
Marcus held his arms out demonstratively. “You’re looking at them. All I own in the world.”
Raji shook his head at his friend. “Sad. A rusty old sword, patchy old trousers. At least that jacket is nice. It may not seem like it right now, but give it an hour and you’ll be glad you brought that. We may not have all your Salvic snow, but Fallien is a land of extremes. In the day you will burn and at night you will freeze. Your poor naked head will be glowing like a hearth. Ever white inch of you will, poor boy.”
“I’ve been hot, I’ve been cold, and I’ve had sunburns. I’ll live,” Marcus said.
“Of course you will! Well, let me see if I can make you comfortable. Come along. It doesn’t seem like it now, I’m sure, but night will be on us in an hour. Night comes fast in the desert.”
The Outlander’s Quarter reminded Marcus of a burrow, and its inhabitants of rodents and insects. Everyone seemed to be moving – to be going somewhere – and yet no one seemed to be doing anything or reaching a destination. The “roads” were in fact the narrow spaces between carts, stalls, pack animals, and the buildings, and happened at random. Indeed, the paths through the city often passed through general buildings that seemed to be inns or taverns, and every so often even through communal houses for laborers.
The structures were made of hard red clay and muddy bricks, and Marcus made a wry mental comment that the houses were insulated with camel and horse dung (the smell of which was overpowering). As they continued on, this began to seem like a viable hypothesis rather than a bitter joke.
Raji had not been exaggerating when he said the sun set quickly on Irrakam. The shadows in the alleyways began to grow deeper, the sun’s blinding attention rising ever-higher along the tall stucco-coated walls of the tall, thin apartment buildings. And the temperature, once stifling, was plummeting.
As they walked, they caught up.
“Are you still apprenticed to Anya?” Raji was saying now.
“Technically,” Marcus said. “We were separated for awhile after a campaign on the border of Berevar. When I came back, the Brotherhood felt I needed a long debriefing, but they continued to send Anya on missions. We haven’t had an opportunity to travel together for awhile.”
“That is unfortunate,” Raji said. After a moment of silence, he spoke again, “Is she still single?”
Marcus laughed, genuinely amused. “Now and forever. Sorry. Even if she could marry, who could tame her?”
Raji smiled and stroked his moustache, “I am not too jaded to try, my friend.”
Book chuckled and said, “Yes, I recall a diminished sense of self-preservation in you.”
“Bah! We had fun, you and me. And Anya, though not as much as I would have liked. In any case, I am glad she is well. Tell me, does your Brotherhood know that you’re here?”
Marcus grinned and shook his head. “You’re too smart for your own good, Raj. They know, yes.”
“But they didn’t send you.”
“No,” Marcus said.
Raji eyed his friend critically as they walked. The Fallien-man had only spent a few weeks in the company of Marcus Book and Anya Shea, but it had been an eventful time for all of them. He owed Marcus his life, and knew Marcus would say the reverse. Their shared trials had forged a bond between them, and though they knew few facts about one another, they had seen into one another’s hearts. And that created an understanding.
“Were you given permission to come, Marcus?”
The larger man grunted, glancing briefly at Adubi. He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably before he ventured to speak. “They didn’t expressly forbid it,” he said at last.
Raji clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “You should have told me that, Marcus. I would have discouraged your coming. This is dangerous enough as it is, but as I understand it the Brotherhood is the closest thing you have to a family. I do not wish to help you if this risks your position among them, or worse, if you won’t have their support if something unexpected happens…”
Book shook his head. “Whether I have their support or not, they know I need to do this. I need answers, and they’re in Fallien.”
Raji sighed and waved one hand dismissively. “I’ve heard that already. It is lucky you have me for a friend. Look, we are here.”
The Fallien-man stopped, and pointed. The road or path they were on swept suddenly downhill, and opened up into a very cramped courtyard with a dried up fountain in the center. Looming over this courtyard was a building taller than most of the others, and very narrow. Indeed, if it had been only slightly narrower, Marcus would have considered it a tower, and not fit for living in.
“Your room is at the very top, but…”
Marcus turned his chin up. The top of the apartment-tower was square, with large windows that overlooked the quarter, billowing with dingy sheet-like curtains.
“But what?”
“Well, I should warn you, and give you a bit of history. The top floors of these apartments are now very cheap, but were once very expensive, and reserved for rich foreign merchants and ship captains, and diplomats.”
“What changed?” Marcus said.
“Well, the local thieves began to get very acrobatic,” Raji said. “They learned to climb the outside walls, and the windows were not well-built for keeping intruders out, so robberies became very common. So the rich foreigners stopped asking for the high rooms, and the value of the rooms dropped. For whatever reason, the rooms are still prone to burglaries, however.”
Marcus shrugged. “What have I got to steal?” he said. “You said it yourself. All I have to my name is a rusty sword and patchy pants. Don’t worry yourself, Raji, the room is perfect. Especially if it was cheap. What’s the plan?”
“Tonight, you rest! I will meet you tomorrow morning for breakfast, and after we eat I will share with you everything I have learned,” Raji said.
“I’m not tired,” Marcus said. “Come up with me, we can go over it all tonight.”
“Bah!” Raji made a face. “Be patient, my friend! I still have things to get together, and contacts to speak to. Rest assured, everything I know will be yours in the morning.”
Book sighed dramatically. “Alright, Raj.”
“Here is your key. I left some bread and wine for you. Sleep well, my friend. I will speak to you come morning.”
“I look forward to it.”
Two Years Ago
Raji Adubi stood frozen in abject horror amidst the abandoned buildings of a town on the island of Scara Brae. The cobblestone streets were absolutely ruined: it seemed that every third stone had come defiantly dislodged. It was impossible to run safely through those streets, so of course he could not dream of escaping quickly and take his pony-drawn cart and its precious cargo with him. That was assuming he could goad the pony into any sort of motion at all: it had gone from tossing its head and snorting in terror to simply standing, limb-locked, with its eyes closed. It was waiting for death.
The town had only been fully abandoned a year ago, and yet its disrepair was almost total. The tall, once-handsome buildings were now grey wooden husks with windows lacking panes. A precious few of those gaping portals had been hastily boarded up, but Raj hadn’t known if he preferred the boards or the empty voids. When he had first entered the town, it seemed to him that white faces were peering at him from every window at the corners of his vision, and hastening away every time he attempted to look at them full-on. He’d attributed it to nerves at first, but now he knew the horrible truth.
There was only one face, and it was not imaginary.
Why didn’t I listen to them!
The empty town was silent, devoid even of the howling wind or the beating of a crow’s wings, so he heard it when she moved. It wasn’t her specifically, but her clothing rippling around her as she darted from house to house or building to building. It sounded like a tattered flag whipping in a storm’s winds. But like the sight of her, the sound only came in brief flits of motion just within his awareness. She was toying with him. She enjoyed the way he spun this way and that, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of her, his heart beating louder with every shivery breath. He could feel her malignant amusement.
Suravani be with me. Suravani be good. By the Jya, save me.
His scimitar wavered in his trembling hand, the brown fingers rendered white by the force of his grip. And what good could it do him against one such as she? He felt doom on him, and it felt like cold fingers slowly closing around his throat.
She screamed. He moaned even as he whipped around to face her, and saw her flying into the dull, steel-colored sky with unnatural speed and grace. He could hardly make her out amidst the torn, billowing tatters of her dingy white dress. A ruined wedding gown or a shroud? He couldn’t tell, perhaps it was both. Gravity had no hold on her, and her hair hung in pale tawny clumps over her face. He was terrified, but thankful that he could not see her eyes or her mouth, or whatever she had in place of a human countenance now.
He summoned breath to gird himself, to present the illusion of bravery and confidence, but his voice died in his chest when he tried to call out, Come, witch, and die a second time!
She laughed, high and sweet and cruel, and then came out of the sky like an arrow aimed at his heart. Despair was on Raji Adubi and he knew he was going to die here alone, and no one would know. He felt a tear roll over his cheek as the witch extended her long, thin fingers, and he turned his face away so the last thing he saw would not be whatever was behind her hair.
Then there was a very different sound roaring out from somewhere, like a sunrise given voice, and the tremendous cracking of rotten wood. Raj opened his eyes in time to watch. The witch had been similarly startled; she was stopped and hovering in midair level with the second floor of the building to Raj’s left. A boarded window from that building exploded outward in a shower of splinters, and relinquished a man.
The man collided with the witch, and the pair dropped from the air and fell brutally to the street. The witch regained her senses and struggled away, extending her grotesquely thin arms to drag herself along the cobblestones. The man leapt upon her, took great handfuls of her billowing dress, and dragged her shrieking away from the stones. With cyclopean force, he threw her bodily against the upraised stones of a ruined well, and kicked the tawny mop of her head so that it was pinned between boot and stone. The witch clawed violently at his boot and leg as he drew his sword from its place on his back, which he then thrust into her.
The stab, however forceful, did not kill her. Indeed, the witch did not seem to feel pain. She clawed at the blade, howling in fury as the man slid his boot down to her shoulder, and he reached down with both hands to grasp at her concealed head. Despite her feverish struggle, he took a good hold of her skull through the thin oily wisps of hair and began to pull.
The witch screamed curses that would forevermore haunt Adubi’s nightmares, and her voice lingered even after her head had been forcibly ripped from her neck and thrown down the well, and for a long moment her headless body continued to claw blindly at blade and boot until, at last, it fell still.
The witch was dead.
Marcus Book threw his head back, raised his arms, and shouted his victory until his throat ached, defiant in the face of the haunted town’s graven silence.
That was the first time he saved Raj’s life.
***
In the end, he had obeyed Anya Shea because ignoring her the first time almost got him killed at the hands of a white witch. He would not abandon the cart, though, nor the holy relic stored in it, nor the pony he needed to drag it. With Anya and Marcus’ help, the pony and the cart were hidden in a ruined stable, while the three of them hid in a large, ruined manse to weather the coming of night. The witch’s spectral children would be granted a single night to avenge their unholy mother, the paladins told him, before dispersing forever into the affirmament.
And this witch had been prolific in her murder of babies and younglings. Their vengeance would be a storm of dread no army of mortals could withstand, much less a group of three strangers. As the sun set, they reinforced the flimsily-shuttered windows and braced the rotted doors.
Then they heard the screams of dead children in the distance, and collectively held their breath.
***
Raji would not be proud to remember that he cried that night. A living infant can rend a mind with its screams; the ghost of one can pierce the soul. He never saw them, but it sounded like a hundred tiny voices raised in a cacophony of unholy outrage. He could hear them battering their tiny bodies on the roof and against the doors and windows, their small, thick-fingered, clumsy hands clawing at cracks in the structure’s defenses.
It was the longest night of his life, and he had known it would be even before the sun set.
He estimated it to be four or five in the morning when the voices began to fade. It wasn’t that they were leaving, but that they were growing audibly weaker. At that time, Adubi ventured down from the room where he had sheltered alone. He returned to the crumbling entrance of the manse, and there discerned a figure crouched in the shadows. With a thrill of horror, he realized that two small, burning sparks in the shadows were, in fact, eyes peering at him.
He only breathed again when his eyes adjusted to the dark, and he realized he was looking upon Marcus Book.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Marcus had said.
Raji was disturbed to realize that the man was smiling and only more so troubled when he realized that the man was bracing the front door. He was seated before it with his back to it, anchored in place and struggling against the witch’s progeny, who were trying to push their way in. With a gasp, Raji hurried across the room and threw himself against the door, sitting down beside Marcus to ensure that the monsters would not get in.
“Relax,” Marcus said. “They couldn’t move me last night, and they’re weakening now. Perhaps if they worked together they would be strong enough, but even dead babies have no language.”
“If it’s all the same to you, friend,” Raji said, “I would rather feel like I’m doing my part to keep them out, weak or no. I won’t be sleeping anyway.”
Book chuckled. “If you wish.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
Marcus shrugged, “I’ve done this before.”
“Were you afraid then?”
Raji could see the whites of the man’s teeth in the dark. He was smiling again.
“I suppose not,” he said. “I would rather have at the little fuckers. I prefer to fight.”
“You’re mad,” Raji accused him confidently. “Only a madman has no fear.”
“Oh, I didn’t say I had no fear,” Marcus said. “I’m just not afraid of monsters.”
“What, if not monsters, scares you?”
Marcus was quiet for a long moment, thinking, and then said, “People.”
“People? Between snarling monsters and a smiling father of four, you quail from the father? People."
“People,” Marcus affirmed. “Monsters only want to kill and maim you. Pain and fear are temporary."
Raji considered this.
“You shame me,” he said at last.
“Oh?”
“Yes. What you’ve said about pain and fear are true. I should have had faith.”
“Faith?” Marcus had wrinkled his nose in the dark, but Raji hadn’t seen it. “You couldn’t have known I was going to come when I did.”
“No, I could have not have known. But I should have had faith that Suravani would keep me, whether in life or death. By her grace, I live and am unharmed, but even in death I would have been blessed by her.”
“Odd, I don’t remember the Jya diving through a window with incredibly good timing to heroically tackle a white witch.”
Raji laughed, but choked the sound down quickly when the sound was answered by a horrific shriek from outside.
“I do not mean to diminish your accomplishment,” he said after a time. “It was not the Jya or Suravani that saved me, it was you, and for that I am eternally grateful. But it was by her grace and will that you came when you did, of this I am certain. And for what you’ve said and done, I am all the more grateful, for you have given me a greater gift than my life.”
“What do you mean?” Marcus asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Never again will I allow my faith in Suravani to falter,” Raji said with conviction. “She is with me, and so I am forever with her. My devotion will be, from this moment on, perfect.”
“Well,” Marcus said with only a hint of discomfort. “I’m glad I could help.”
The slightest light of dawn was beginning to filter through the ruined windows, and the cries of the damned children were now reduced to anguished mews.
“There’s something else you could help me with, actually,” Raji said softly after a long silence.
“What’s that?”
“Tell me true,” the Fallien merchant said earnestly, “does Anya have a husband?”
There were no undead infants left to be outraged at the sound of Marcus' laughter.
Marcus woke with a start in the early morning hours, and looked around his Fallien rooms in a half-panic before he remembered where he was. The remembered cries of unliving infants lingered a moment in his ears, and he sat up in bed and ran his hands over the stubble on his scalp to relish that unique resistance. It grounded him in reality.
He drew his legs up toward his torso beneath the thin sheet Raji had left him, and rested his forearms on his knees to wait for his heart to slow. Time passed and the memory faded, and he looked around his room in the soft early-hours glow. Still, even now, some vague unease remained.
Book recognized this feeling. It was a unique sensation, vague and troubling, like having a perverse thought that will not stop reoccurring. It was the spiritual equivalent of tonguing a cut on the inside of one’s cheek, only one would have no control over the tongue. Marcus could not shake the thought that there was a monster out there in the chill desert night, sniffing after him like a bloodhound.
The Brotherhood had always told him that they had no presence in Fallien because, historically, it did not suffer the presence of the infernal. Demons, as the Brotherhood understood them, just seemed to have no interest in the arid nation. But no matter how Marcus reminded himself of what should have been a straightforward fact, he could not shake his disquiet.
Quietly, deliberately, he brushed aside the sheet and began moving around his small room. Outside, the horizon brightened beyond the Outlander’s Quarter. Marcus dipped his index finger in a small can of black ink and meticulously drew the alien and austere symbols of the celestials on the four walls of his place.
In time, either because of the wards or the coming sun, the distant demon faded. Marcus fell to sleep on the floor with his back to the door, cradling the still-open can of ink to his chest.
“My friend!” Adubi laughed. “What have you done to your room! I did not take you for an artist!”
Marcus splashed cold water on his face and rubbed it over his head. It evaporated quickly in the heat rising from the crowded city streets below, but blessedly washed away the night’s sweat. He smiled at his friend, glancing briefly around the room. The black ink of the wards stood out starkly on the wood and plaster walls.
“Was just making myself at home,” he said.
***
Marcus would have paid for clouds, but apparently Fallien’s sky was as arid as its land. Raj seemed to be of similar mind, choosing shady paths where he could find them. The so-called “streets” of the Outlander’s Quarter were busier in the early morning, and a malodorous cloud of human body odor mingled with the ubiquitous aroma of sun-baked horse manure.
“It’s no wonder we can’t seem to accept foreigners,” Raj said. “To us, foreigners and the smell of the Outlander’s Quarter are intertwined in the mind. No offense, of course, it is not the outlanders’ fault they have been confined here. Truly, I think the fear is that if they’re allowed out, the rest of Fallien will begin to smell like this.”
Book chuckled. “I smell horses, but I don’t think I’ve seen one yet.”
“You smell horse shit,” Raj corrected him. “Fallien loves her horses. They can be found all over Irrakam, but all the shit seems to find its way here. Come, we’re nearly there. Let’s get above the smell.”
They did, indeed, rise above the smell now. The slums of the Quarter rose abruptly into a broad, spacious square, which was populated along the outside edges by a teeming bazaar. Marcus could not hope to take it all in while amidst the crowd, and he was having trouble hearing his friend’s words over the general bustle of the assembled throng and the frequent calls of the stall vendors.
Adubi tapped the paladin on the arm to get his attention, and then ducked through a narrow doorway. A silken sheet occupied the door, which Raj brushed aside and held politely while Marcus followed. The roar of the crowd was muffled, and the pair took a narrow staircase into the heights of the building.
It was, Marcus discovered, a restaurant or café of sorts. He also discovered that they had ventured to the edge of the Outlander’s Quarter, and the clientele and patrons of the establishment were not pleased to see him even in the company of a native. Adubi waved off the fast, anguished whisperings of what Marcus assumed was the proprietor, and the pair was quickly seated on a balcony overlooking the square. They would not be seen by the rest of the patrons.
“Sorry,” Raj muttered. He ordered coffee for both of them in his native tongue. Despite her large, pretty eyes, the look the serving girl shot Marcus was anything but friendly.
“I feel so loved,” he said.
Raji chuckled politely, and pointed out at the square. “Look over there.”
Marcus did. Raj was pointing, of course, at a massive wall, which was broken at the far end of the square by a tremendous and fiercely guarded gate. Despite the incredible amount of traffic seeking to pass through the gate, it seemed that every man, cart, and camel was being stopped and thoroughly inspected by a gang of zealous guardsmen.
“There is but one road to the Jya’s Keep, and that’s it,” Raj said.
“They seem to take it very seriously,” Marcus said.
“Yes,” Raj chuckled. “But you can hardly blame them. It seems every month there is some new rumored attempt on Her Grace’s life, and the Cult has a strong presence even here. Perhaps especially here.”
“Foreigners have made assassination attempts?”
“Oh, no,” Raj said. “Very rarely, but the Cult has found the Quarter a good place to hide. They are cowards.”
The coffee arrived. This time the serving girl pointedly did not deign to look at Marcus. He was glad he didn’t like coffee; it probably wasn’t safe to drink.
“Why are we here, Raj?”
“Mm,” the Fallienman said while sipping his beverage. “Trust me my friend, I have my reasons. Let us start at the beginning.”
“Okay,” Marcus said, “did you find the Dordeka?”
“Yes,” Raj said, becoming very serious as they transitioned into business. This was not the first time Marcus had seen that transformation, but it remained unsettling. It made him question how well he really knew the man. “I had never heard of the tribe, nor had most of my contacts. There is a man in the Keep who trades with them every six months, however. Apparently they are a small tribe of horse-keepers, and have no claim to an oasis of their own, and they do not trade in glass or spices. By all accounts they are poor, but maintain a place at the Greenmeet.”
“What is that?”
“A biannual gathering of the desert tribes at one of the large oases. The chiefs send representatives, who negotiate trade and passage agreements and discuss the matters of the desert. It’s the closest thing to government they have in the wastes. Small tribes rarely have speaking seats at the Greenmeet, so these Dordeka you seek must have been large once, or perhaps have clout for some other reason. It’s hard to say.”
Marcus nodded his understanding. “Do you know where they are now? Or how I might get in touch with them?”
“Well,” Raj said, “their traders have already come and gone, a week past, and the tradesman I mentioned has no contact with them until they visit him. Thankfully the tribe announced its presence to the Jya’s guard. They are camped to the southeast, across the river.”
“Excellent,” Marcus said. “Can we send a messenger to them, perhaps? Set up a meeting, some way that I could ask questions?”
“That is where things grow difficult,” Raj sighed into his coffee. “I have requested an audience with them, but they won’t even speak to my messengers. They turn them away, and burn any messages handed directly to them. I understand they speak a nearly unintelligible dialect of our language and claim not to understand Trade, which has only complicated matters further. To make matters worse, their announcement only persists through tomorrow. They could move on at any time.”
Book’s shoulders slumped. “I have to talk to them, Raj. Especially given that they’re so close. And I’ve come so far.”
“Be at peace, friend, I have not given up yet.”
“What are my options?”
Adubi took a moment to sip at his coffee thoughtfully. “I doubt I would have any more success speaking to them than one of my messengers. You, however, might have more luck. You are a formidable man, and the shock of seeing you might be enough. If it’s not, your determination in this matter is…notable.”
“But they won’t come here,” Marcus said, “and, well…”
He waved his hand at the distant gate, where the unending search for foreigners and cultists continued.
“Yes, it is a challenge,” Raj said with a sly smile. “But the Jya does give special dispensations to foreigners from time to time. We could apply for one.”
“What are we waiting for?” Marcus said.
“Well, I should warn you that the process takes time. Some say the Jya reviews the applications herself, and denies a majority. I’ve heard of foreign traders waiting up to two weeks for an exit pass.”
Book cursed in Salvic, sitting back in his chair with a heavy sigh. He stared out over the square, considering the stalls, and then his eyes lingered on the far wall.
“I guess I’m out of options, then,” he said.
Raj smiled beneath his moustache, holding his coffee cup daintily and swirling the liquid in deft circles. “I thought you might say that,” he said.
The Fallienman finished his coffee with a flourish, and then sighed in contentment before he spoke again.
“I guess we should discuss my plan for sneaking you over the wall, a crime for which we could both be put to the most painful and public death.”
“And that makes you so happy,” Marcus said with a grin.
“Oh, my friend,” Raji said, “I cannot remember the last time I was so excited.”
The sun was already resting low over the square-topped buildings of the Outlander’s Quarter when Marcus arrived at his apartment again. He had intended to nap for a few hours, as Raji’s plan called for an eventful night, but he found himself lost twice on the way back and that had cost him precious hours. Now he figured he had time for a quick dinner before he would need to set out again.
A distant yet familiar sense of unease had begun settling over the paladin as the sun began disappearing behind the tightly and chaotically clustered structures to the west. And why not? They had only spent a few hours going over a precise and potentially deadly plan, and now Raji Adubi only had a few hours more to set all the imperative pieces of that plan into motion.
Marcus entered his apartment and closed the door behind him, then let out a short sigh as he looked over the space. He was overwhelmed and exhausted, and the effort of concealing that from his friend was fatiguing in and of itself. He checked the wards on the door and the inside of the window slats then tore a chunk of bread from a loaf and ate it plain as he straightened up.
Curious about the progress of the sun in its descent, the young warrior went to one of the windows and held his unfinished chunk of bread between his jaws so that his hands were free. Now, the windows in the apartment were an interesting affair. They were essentially thin wooden boards affixed to the top of the window, with a hinge that allowed them to swing up and outward. There was a long wooden post attached to the bottom of the windowsill, which could be fitted into notches cut all along the inside of the window covering in order to hold it up in various states of openness. Marcus did this now, and peered out to see that the sun was very nearly set. He tensed as he looked out over the Outlander’s Quarter by night, and then turned around.
A demon stood in the center of the room. It was as alien to Book as the land it called home, a tall, disturbingly thin being. It wore a hooded, ragged, all-concealing robe that was not cut from any cloth known to man. Instead it resembled a congealed, shiny black liquid, like frozen tar. Now its arms extended from the voluminous sleeves, and Marcus could see that in place of a man’s five-fingered hand it sported two thick, wicked, talon-like claws and a skeletal thumb.
“Heretic,” the hunter whispered in Fallien, and its voice reminded Marcus of fingernails digging at rock. “Your blood-scent, I have it. A place for you to hide from me, it does not exist. The wind, it whispers to me. My talons, it tells me where to put them. You will die.”
Marcus reached up and retrieved the bread from his mouth, then slowly lowered it again before dropping it to the floor. The hunter stood unmoving, staring out from the darkness within its cavernous hood. It was difficult to say who made the first move: when the attack came, the pair seemed to move in concert. The demon lunged forward, extending its disturbingly long, clawed arms. Book leaned under the grapple and in, wrapped his considerable arms around the monster’s frame, and lifted.
To its credit, the hunter made no sound as Marcus manhandled it. The paladin took it off the ground, twisted at the torso, and then forcibly dumped the robed body out the window so that it struck the post holding the window open on the way down.
The window fell closed with a sharp slap, and Marcus heard the hunter digging its claws into the outer walls to stop its descent. Then he heard the horrifyingly quick skittering of those same claws going around the outside of the apartment toward the window on the opposite side – the place where it must have originally entered so silently. Book hissed through his teeth, crossed the room, and swiftly shut the window before the hunter could enter again.
The hunter stopped, but Marcus knew it was still out there, waiting.
The paladin retrieved his sword and waited, turning slowly to watch every potential entrance to the apartment. In time he judged that the wards were effective and the monster could not enter as long as they were in place.
The flipside was, of course, that Marcus could not exit without disturbing the wards and putting himself at risk.
Marcus Book was stuck and, he realized with a cold thrill, already late to his meeting with Adubi and his escape from Irrakam.
It was long past now or never, but Marcus was not yet willing to give up. He estimated it to be near midnight, and the hunter had successfully foiled every attempt he made to either escape or draw the demon into a fair conflict. Now the paladin was growing desperate, and it was time to switch tactics.
He cinched the bed sheet to the post, and then wedged his sword under a floorboard to upraise it. The loaf of bread served to hold the board in place, and the board served to keep the bed post from sliding. Now Marcus strapped his sheathed sword to his back, went over his plan one more time in search of unforeseen issues, and then took a deep breath.
Go time.
Marcus’ experience with the hunter over the last few hours had given him some insight into the beast’s mind, and that proved useful. He figured the demon was lurking just outside the warded door, and that proved true. He figured the demon would lie in wait until Marcus stuck his head out experimentally, and that proved true. And finally he figured that if Marcus retreated back into the room before the hunter could strike out and kill him in the hallway, the beast would give chase before Marcus could close the door again.
So far so good.
Book did not turn around to make sure the demon followed him – he didn’t need to, he could hear the monstrous claws rending the floorboards. He also didn’t need to check to make sure the door closed behind them. His brief experience with the room had taught him that the door was heavy and the room had been built at a slight angle so that the door slammed closed unless propped open, as a rule. He listened for the all-important slam – it seemed to take forever – but didn’t allow himself even a sigh of relief when it came.
There was still too much to do, too many chances to die.
Marcus held his end of the sheet tightly, and charged the apparently-closed window. The demon hissed behind him, perhaps realizing too late what was about to happen. Book shoved the window open as he reached it and, without hesitation, dropped into the cool night air. The window board slapped down on the sheet behind him, which in turn extended as he fell, and then it abruptly stopped. The paladin grunted harshly, clinging to the sheet with both hands. Even so, he slid and it tore, but his descent blessedly ceased.
The young warrior released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and looked up along the sheet. The now-closed window did not seem very far above him, and he supposed it wasn’t. The sheet wasn’t especially long, and it was extended across half the room and pinched in the window.
He growled as the sheet suddenly jerked and dropped him a full foot before going taut again, and widened his eyes when he realized what was happening. The hunter was smarter than he gave it credit for: it was sawing through the sheet.
There was no choice. Marcus released his makeshift rope as quickly as he could, seeking out handholds on the chipped brick face. He only fully secured one hand before the sheet gave way in the other, which caused him to lose his grip and fall a short distance. Thankfully, a wooden frame had been built around the middle of the apartment-tower, perhaps to shore up the failing brickwork, and Marcus managed to catch himself on the splintery shelf.
Still alive? Nothing broken? Good. Book huffed and clenched his teeth. This night was not off to a great start.
First he peered up at the window – which now seemed much farther away – and waited despite the strain on his arms to ensure it stayed closed. Next he turned his eyes downward and tried to gauge how much of a fall it was to the ground. He didn’t like what he saw, but he figured he would survive it with minimal injury, if he landed right.
It still took a long time to work up the nerve to let go.
The landing hurt, and Marcus fell to his backside and then his back upon hitting the ground, which between the street and the sword strapped to his back caused an undue amount of bruising, but he didn’t sprain or break anything. Next time, he would request a ground floor room, spare no expense.
Marcus might have been content to lay there smarting a bit longer, but there wasn’t time for it. He took to his feet with a groan, and turned around to find himself facing four armed men dressed in adorned yellow scale-mail. They had the air of authority about them, and did not seem to like the sight of the paladin in the least. When they began glancing up at the apartment, Book realized he was in trouble.
They knew about the demon, yet their aggression remained centered on him.
The newcomers reached for their weapons, but it was Marcus that drew first. He beheaded the first of them smoothly, before the man could fully recover his sword from its sheath. The second was prepared, and their blades met with a spark and metallic song. Marcus locked his blade to his opponent’s and threw his shoulder in, sending the armored man stumbling into his fellows. The act temporarily took two of the men out of the equation, and Marcus deftly stabbed the third in the foot through his boot, and followed up by breaking the afflicted man’s nose with his elbow.
With that, Book decided the prudent action was to run away, and he did, sheathing his sword as he went. The remaining men called after him in the language of Fallien, but they opted to help their injured-but-surviving comrade rather than give chase. For the moment, Marcus’ fate was chosen for him: the demon was trapped in the apartment by the wards, but it had human allies. They would soon free it, and Marcus wasn’t sure he could defeat the thing on his own.
He was certain he could not defeat it if it had help.
The return to the gated square was painfully slow going. Though the so-called streets were disturbingly empty now, Marcus could not run full-bore through them. Where the perilous dark didn’t prevent it, the natives did: here were suspicious guards, there were sleeping laborers. He assumed he had pursuers, to boot, and he did not want to leave an easily-followed trail. People would remember a fleeing foreigner.
By the time he reached the square, it was certainly three hours past the agreed upon time. There were facets of Raji’s plan that required a strict schedule, and in that regard the plot had been a failure. Marcus was officially playing it by ear now, and that made an already-questionable plan increasingly insane.
Book ducked into the shadowy doorway of the café he and his friend had visited earlier that afternoon. It was quiet now, closed, and ominous. The entire square had a forbidding quality at night, vast and empty and devoid of stalls or vendors or the common man. The vast gate was firmly closed, and armored guards wandered along the walls in expertly choreographed patrols. Their spears were held high, attached banners billowing in the chilly night air. Not one of them showed sign of exhaustion or dereliction.
Adubi had been right. This was going to be hard. Maybe too hard.
Marcus sighed and pressed his back to the cool stone of the arched doorway. He lowered his chin, closed his eyes, and wondered what he was doing. This was a foreign nation, as strange and unfriendly as they come, and on his second day here he had committed murder within its borders, and here he was plotting to break one of its strictest laws in a suicidal bid to…what?
Find a mother that might not exist, and ask her questions for which she would probably have no answers.
The young paladin scoffed and shook his head, and wondered at his sanity. He couldn’t go through with this. This was suicide. He looked out over the square and wondered at his next move. There would be questions about the dead man at his apartment, he was sure of that. And he couldn’t go back there regardless. The hunter would return.
He knew he could not return to Raji. The hunter would follow him, and his friend could be hurt or killed in the struggle. No, Marcus would have to find his own place to wait out the night. In the morning he would find a courier or a messenger to bring a short explanation to Raji – the less the man knew the better – and then he would buy his way back onto the ferry before a murder investigation could get underway. Raji would be questioned, of course, the apartment was rented in his name, but Marcus knew his friend could talk his way out of trouble.
And then…and then…
Marcus set his jaw, and answered the question. And then he’d end up back in Salvar or Corone, back to killing without remorse or pity or reason or question, and never know why such a life came so easily to him. He’d end up dead in a bar, alley, or cave, stuck at the end of a sword or a grotesque claw, another soulless brute that never questioned his own monstrousness.
Book looked out over the square and watched the patrols. They were nearly flawless, Raji had told him, designed so that no man or beast could make for the gate without being seen by any three patrolmen. Every three and a half hours, though, during one of the staggered and nearly-imperceptible shift changes, there was a gap where a lucky man could reach the wall perpendicular to the gate.
Marcus saw the signs, and darted out into the square without hesitation. In that brief moment of clarity, he knew who he was and embraced it fully. He ran half-crouched with the heavy grace of a big cat, secure in the knowledge that he was not turning back. If he was spotted, he would not stop. If he was intercepted, he would kill.
He reached the hidden alcove Adubi had pointed out that afternoon and prayed that his friend’s bribed guard had followed through until, with a sigh of relief, his fingers closed around the rung of a concealed ladder. He ascended onto the wall as quickly as he was able, knowing that a guard’s shift would take him up that same ladder in scant seconds. Once he was mounted on the wall, the paladin sprinted away from the heavily guarded gate, painfully aware that he was at his most visible now. In theory the guards posted on the gate would not think to glance in his direction, but a casual or curious twist of the neck would spell doom for Marcus Book.
Wherever the walls of the square met a brick tower rose, and Marcus made the nearest of these his destination. He crouched beside the tower entrance and waited out of sight, just as Adubi taught him, for the guard inside to exit and go on his way to the next checkpoint on his patrol, and then Marcus slipped inside before the next guard rounded the corner. As he ascended the staircase within, risking a glance down to watch as the replacement guard entered, Marcus marveled at the situation. Their clockwork precision was remarkable, yes, but it also made them predictable.
And then he froze on the stairwell and his blood iced in his veins. He stopped and crouched on the stairs, and watched as the guard took his place at the tower entrance. He glanced upward, agonizing over the decision for a long moment before he began to descend the staircase again, bringing himself dangerously within sight of the guard.
He set his jaw. He had not been able to tell at a distance, but the guardsman’s uniform was familiar to Marcus. He wore ornate yellow scale-mail, and carried a fine curved sword. The hunter’s human allies had been dressed as guardsmen. A second thrill passed through the young paladin as he thought back on his encounter with the beast: it had called him, of all things, a heretic.
The guard yawned, and in the process turned his head just enough to catch Marcus from the corner of his eye. He jumped, startled, and that moment of fear was all Book needed to make his swift escape.
He took the stairs two and three and four at a time as the guard screamed alarum below, until he reached the first window positioned halfway up the tower’s length. He climbed onto the sill and gripped the smooth stone, breathing heavily. He looked down and saw only infinite darkness below – an impossible void, empty and ravenous.
He risked a glance behind and heard the fall of heavy boots and clattering spears, and the sound of singing swords newly freed from their sheaths. He reached for the hilt of his sword and considered the narrow stairwell – it would be a brutal fight, a desperate one, but he had a superior position, if he was lucky he could kill the first wave and escape back the way he’d come.
And then he remembered the sight of the gate to Jya’s Keep, and the words of Raji Adubi. Just to attempt escape from the Outlander’s Quarter was punishable by torture and public execution. And surely they would claim he had intended to reach the Keep and do their leader some harm – he was foreign, after all, newly arrived and unknown.
The guards never saw him. Marcus leapt from the tower window without a sound. For the briefest moment he looked out over Irrakam and saw the domed wonder of Jya’s Keep in the distance, lit from below by the light of a hundred thousand torches and from above by the full moon.
And then he fell to a place into which no light reached.
“Why would I attempt to escape from the most heavily guarded wall in Fallien?”
“Simple, they won’t expect it. Besides, you’re not going over the most heavily guarded wall, my friend. You’re going off the wall next to the most heavily guarded wall.”
The fall seemed to stretch into an agonizing forever, and Marcus had no way to tell when he’d reach the bottom. The darkness here was absolute. He had only the wind roaring in his ears and his own inner voice denying him the urge to shout. The guards above might hear him.
And then he struck water. Hard. The roar of the wind gave way to the rush of water, and the empty darkness became a full, consuming one. And it was bitingly frigid. It seemed impossible that the heat of the day could leave the water as utterly as it did with the coming of night.
“Why don’t I just slip off the ferry?”
“The ferries are closely watched, and only run during the day. You are unlikely to survive the swim during the day, certainly not from the middle of the river.”
“Why?”
“The crocodiles, of course.”
Marcus broke the surface with an intense intake of air. His limbs ached, his lungs ached, and he had half a river to swim without aid. He risked a glance upward and saw the tower he’d leapt from silhouetted against the star-speckled sky. It seemed an impossible distance.
“What’s the point of the gate if Jya’s Keep is surrounded by the river?”
“The Keep is actually built on a hill. The rock face from the river is sheer and treacherous; no man has ever successfully climbed it even from a boat. No, the only way to reach the Keep is through the gate, and that is why it is guarded so obsessively. That is why this plan will work. Only a madman would seek to leave Irrakam illegally so close to the Keep. The tower you will leap from will not be well-guarded.”
It took a moment for Marcus to figure which direction was east in the all-encompassing dark. Once he felt sure he was facing the right way, he swam hard for the invisible shore and silently prayed to no one in particular that Raj had been right and these waters were now too cold for all manner of aquatic predator.
It seemed he swam for hours. When he saw the shadows of the distant shore against the brightening horizon, he realized he had been swimming for hours. He growled away despair and pushed himself on, all the more eager to end this leg of the journey before morning broke and the waters began to warm and become truly deadly.
“Alright, I jump from an incredible height and then swim half the width of one of the greatest rivers in the known world. Then what?”
“Then I assume you will be rightly exhausted, my friend! I have friends at a farming enclave along the shore to the northeast, who have agreed to house you for the rest of the night and equip you with the necessary traveling gear the following morning.”
The shore was visible as Book reached it, purple-blue in the early morning twilight and sloshing gently beneath a blanket of thin mist. The young warrior stumbled amidst the muddy reeds. He grunted as his right boot sank in mire, bringing him down to one knee. Something large hissed and shifted to his left, and he threw himself away from it with all the force he could muster, and struggled backward through the mud. A crocodile leered at him, still too sluggish to give chase.
Adrenaline took him the rest of the way to dry land, and he went with his sword unsheathed in his right hand.
“All of these things must be done with the utmost precision and speed, my friend. I was forced to assemble this plan hastily, and so there are no contingencies. If there is a single failure, the rest will tumble away after it. You must not be seen, and you must not at any point dawdle. If your mysterious tribe has not already left, it will surely set out tomorrow. My friends will not risk the support of an illegal outlander during the day. And if you are seen by anyone, the word will go out that an outlander was seen, and you will be hunted. Precision. Is. Essential. And if at any point you fail, abandon the plan, or it will be the end of us both.”
Marcus sat himself down to breathe, and looked around. The sun was steadily rising now, casting its light over distant Irrakam in majestic shafts. The greenery that lined the Attireyi surrounded him, wheat-like stalks topped with yellow flowers swaying in the breeze. Day was breaking. The farming enclave was out of his way, to the north, but it was already too late for that. To the west, Irrakam loomed beyond the sparkling river, as threatening as it was inviting. He could go back and die at the hands of the Jya’s guard, or enter one of the harshest environments on Althanas unprepared.
“Well, shit,” Marcus Book muttered.
So this is what it felt like to be stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
“I’m doing a very stupid thing, aren’t I?”
“I won’t lie, Marcus. You’re probably going to die tonight.”
The sun was growing remarkably intense, and it was less than an hour after first light. Marcus took stock of the equipment he had available to him: the shirt on his back, a pair of patchy trousers, and thick, heavy-soled boots crafted with Salvar in mind. He checked his sword, notched and mottled with rust marks, and its scabbard was frayed and ancient.
That was it. That was all.
“I’m fucked,” Marcus mumbled to himself, squinting to the northeast. There was a farming enclave there with supplies, or so Raji told him, but Raji also told him they would not risk his presence during the day.
Marcus turned his gaze southeast and away from the river. That way was where the Dordeka were camped, certainly within a short riding distance from Irrakam, and they would certainly leave today if they hadn’t already. And they would be horsemen, deft riders. Once they set out, there would be no reaching them on foot.
Book sighed to himself.
He removed his shirt and risked returning to the marshy shore, keeping a wary eye out for crocodiles. He dunked his shirt in the water and tied the sleeves around his forehead, so that as much of the sodden cloth as possible spilled over his upper back. Then he drank, and then he drank more, until he felt on the verge of growing sick. As he did he recalled someone telling him that drinking your fill in a desert was a bad idea, from a survival standpoint, but he couldn’t remember for sure.
And he knew he would be begging for water soon.
So he drank more still.
When he was veritably sloshing with every step, Marcus got to his feet and sighed. The first step was easy; it was every progressive step that was hard, and each harder than the one before it.
***
Book’s skin hurt. Under the sun’s cruel eye he couldn’t see it reddening, but he figured it was, or would be soon. His mouth was already dry, and his arms and shoulders were slick with a sheen of sweat. He could not remember ever being so hot, or ever expending so much effort to simply lift his feet.
He had stopped calculating the time of day when ten minute increments seemed to be days. It was too discouraging. He did not look up now: no matter where the sun was, it would make him want to weep. He managed it in the only way that worked: every ridge was a goal. Let me make it to that dune, he would tell himself, and soon it’ll be over.
And when that didn’t work, he growled and forced himself to harden his resolve, and called himself names.
The land had been dry and cracked at first, a parched gray waste stretching into the infinite. He had been surprised at first, thinking the image of towering loose-sand dunes must have been a myth. In time, however, the loose sand and the dunes came, and he cursed himself vehemently for even thinking of it. The sand was more difficult to traverse than the cracked clay.
In his thoughts, Marcus Book damned Fallien, and damned Raji Adubi, and the Dordeka, and the Jya, and himself for ever coming here.
***
If there was a drop of water left in him, Marcus would have wept.
How his spirit soared when he saw wisps of smoke in the distance, and how low it fell now that he beheld an abandoned camp. He searched for forgotten supplies, but found nothing but smoldering campfires and buried refuse. He muttered curses in Salvic as he hunted, wincing as his cracked, sundried lips brushed together.
He unwrapped his shirt from around his head and wiped the sweat from his shoulders and upper arms while he considered the sun. It was beginning its blessed descent, but dusk was a few hours off yet. The heat of the campfires was still considerable, so perhaps the Dordeka had not set out so long ago. It made sense, Book told himself. A smart man would travel in the desert when it was at its mildest, from a few hours before sunset to a few hours after midnight.
Yes, he told himself with some determination, that’s what they would do.
And the going would be easier once the sun set, wouldn’t it? Of course it would. Even though they had horses, why should they start out hard? No, they would travel at a leisurely pace. And wouldn’t they have scouts? Anyone with enemies would scout his trail to make sure they weren’t being followed.
He would be found.
He had to be.
Marcus looked over his shoulder, back the way he came, and saw his own tracks stretched into the sandy infinite. If he turned back, he would die.
So he found the horse tracks of the Dordeka, and he went forward.
***
“I’m a fool,” Marcus Book muttered to himself, shivering. “I’m a fool and I’ll die for it.”
He’d prayed for the sand to cease, and perhaps the wicked Suravani heard him, because the sand did end. In its place was a vast sea of glinting, cracked glass, arranged in cliffs and clefts and jagged, shimmering canyons. Arrayed before him in the light of the moon, it was almost beautiful, and yet Marcus found he could not appreciate it.
He could not track horse spoor on a desert made of glass, certainly not by moonlight. If the Dordeka were smart, they would have waited until they reached the glass wastes and then change direction. Marcus set his jaw and plowed on, hugging himself for warmth. He’d tried wearing his shirt for its slight defense against the frigid night air, but his skin was so savagely sunburnt that the pain was unbearable.
A malicious wind began to pick up, tossing small shards of glass at the paladin’s face and pushing him back the way he came. The pain and the cold and the exhaustion were too much. He found a tall, relatively smooth mound and curled up in its shadow for shelter.
In time he fell to sleep, but it was fitful and uncomfortable to the point of torture, and he gained no rest from it. Finally, when the cold and the ache and the overwhelming need for water was too much to bear, there was a sharp pain on Marcus’ upper back, and the sleep afterward was absolute and dreamless.
Book woke with a sharp intake of breath. The pain set on him immediately, a long line of torture running from his right wrist down across his shoulder blade where it flared across every muscle of his upper back. He moaned it out against his will, his voice falling from a high pained whimper to a low, breathy growl, and tears blurred his vision so that for a long moment nothing made sense.
It was dark, crushing dark, and the air was hot and still and ancient. Marcus was hanging by his right arm, secured to something by sticky wet ropes that wound tight around his forearm a hundred times. The pain there was diminishing slowly, very slowly, and he brought his confusion gradually under control. Even ignoring the pain, he felt muddy, slow, drunk.
He let the supernatural fire loose, just a bit at a time. The dark began to retreat from his eyes, relinquishing the sight of his arm, and the hazy confusion diminished. He saw now that he was hanging from a smooth stone ceiling. He saw that he was secured to it by bundles of a black, ropey substance that clung wetly to the rock in elastic strands.
“What…?” he mouthed dumbly, staring at the stuff with mounting disgust.
As his confusion and intoxication burned away, it was steadily replaced by fear.
A great deal of fear.
He tried to see how far up he was, but as far as he could tell his feet were swaying above an inestimable void. Marcus was beginning to panic now. He tried to follow the ceiling with his eyes, but it too faded into inky obscurity, and if there were walls nearby he could not tell. The sounds of his shifting weight seemed to echo from every direction, but the pressure in the air and the sense of confinement were overwhelming. He could be hanging alone in an infinite abyss, or the walls could be closing in on him.
He remembered the desert of Fallien with an intense chill, and realized he was dead.
The time to act had come and gone two or three times over now, and Marcus made up his mind. The numb agony in his arm and shoulder was becoming unbearable, and a suicidal fall from an infinite height might be preferable.
He had discovered that by some strange twist his sword was still strapped to his back. Now he reached up with his left hand and, with a considerable struggle, he freed the blade from its sheath. He stared up at his captive hand for a long time, and his frown gradually deepened.
How the hell am I going to do this without cutting my own arm off?
The solution was not a pleasant one. He tightened his right arm and, with titanic effort, he lifted himself toward the stony ceiling. He kicked his legs and started to swing, stifling his voice as a fresh wave of agony washed out from his arm and shoulder, and finally brought his legs up and kicked at the ceiling. His boots slipped on the dry stone the first two times, but with the third swing they gained purchase.
Marcus was still hanging from the black, hardening goop, but now he was anchored upside down. He pushed against the stone with his legs, his panting breaths echoing loud from the emptiness surrounding him, and the substance began to stretch and extend away from its moorings. Still, Book knew if he relaxed his legs the strange, elastic ropes would snap back.
So he raised his sword left handed, took a few steadying breaths, and swung clumsily. The blade bit where the sticky black strands extended between his forearm and the stone, and one thin strand was severed. The remaining substance held the blade fast, but Marcus wrenched it loose and nearly lost his footing. He steadied himself, pushed himself away from the ceiling with all his might, and then swung a second time with more confidence.
His panicked gasp seemed deafening as it echoed in the dark, but otherwise he fell in silence.
He couldn’t say how far he fell, or for how long. He seemed suspended in midair for so long, and yet the end came so abruptly. He felt his back strike something dry and wispy and cried out as it lashed his sunburnt hide, but the surface sagged and gave away in an instant, and Marcus fell farther still.
The next surface he struck was as solid as it was uneven, and he landed sprawled out. The surface clattered raucously, and the sound was distantly familiar. He could not place it at first, but he felt the eventual realization would be an unhappy one. Marcus groaned and turned over, and winced hard. He felt blood from multiple cuts running freely over his naked back. He tried to steady himself with his right hand and this time shouted his pain out.
He brought his hand up, only remembering now the stringy goop still wrapped around his forearm. He saw with rising horror that something sharp had pierced the adhesive, and his upper wrist within it. He couldn’t tell what it was, save that it was pointed and soaked in shimmering black blood. His left hand shook violently, but he did not hesitate to try and remove the shard. It was a great deal larger than he realized, and gave a great deal more resistance than he expected. He found something hard on the ground and put it between his teeth so he wouldn’t bite his own tongue off in the throes of agony, and removed the shard with a final, brutal tug.
He felt his blood burst from the wound and pool beneath his arm.
Struggling through the pain, he managed to use the goopy adhesive still clinging to his flesh to tightly bind the gash – it drank up the blood eagerly and grew more malleable when wet, but also stickier.
“I can heal it,” he muttered over and over, his lips moving tremulous and fast.
Something was digging into his left knee, and he moved his leg. It was a human skull.
Marcus looked around, and realized he had landed amongst the bones of countless unknown animals. A chill ran over his face when he realized he’d bit into a dusty human ulna, and the bloody shard had been the rib of something rabbit-sized. He felt his breathing growing shallower, and the rational part of his brain knew he was beginning to panic but didn’t do anything to stop it.
He dug through the bones desperately with his left hand, pushing them violently aside in the search for his lost sword. The dark was tight here, hanging on him like something tangible. He was sure, sure something was there, and he swung the recovered blade ineffectually at it, spinning with urgent fear left and right, cutting the air, it was always behind him.
He didn’t regain control of himself until he was slick with sweat, panting and shivering and repeatedly sniffing all at the same time.
It’s not here, he told himself. It’s not here. It’s not here.
All he could hear was his own breath, wavering and laden with terror. He held his breath and listened, strained as if he could force himself to hear harder, and then all there was to hear was his own heart. The air didn’t move here except when he did, still and leaden and inexorably bred to the empty darkness.
It’s not here.
Marcus resisted the urge to swallow. It would be too loud, he told himself. He focused on the struggle not to swallow, but eventually he couldn’t bear it anymore and he did it. He was right, it seemed so loud. He forced himself to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth, and then he did the reverse. His heartbeat slowed.
What is it?
Cautiously, slowly, he bent down and began to examine the bones. Some were broken, but none had marks from talon or tooth. The ones he had not disturbed were not scattered, it seemed their owners rotted undisturbed in one spot. And, as he calmed further, he began to realize that it was usually the bottommost bones in the pile that were broken.
He looked up into nothing, and then down again at the bones.
He’d been lucky.
He needed more light. He let the fire come, flowing through his limbs. The Source was angry, it was always angry, but even its irrepressible rage was not enough to overshadow Marcus’ native fear. He raised his left arm, and the tattoos on it began to glow, brighter and brighter, and they pushed away the dark more than the light in his eyes could. He reluctantly sheathed his sword. His right arm was too mangled to use it effectively, and even if he didn’t need his left lifted to light the way, he wasn’t ambidextrous.
Using his own forearm as a makeshift torch, Marcus first examined the floor, and then followed it to a wall. He realized he was in a cave, but the stone was dry and coated in dust. Whatever carved out this deep place had long since dried up. There were no fresh bodies here; the newest was a dusty rug of hair over a small skeleton. Marcus fought down the panic when he thought that the Thing would not be happy to lose its first meal in some time.
The pit was narrow, with steep edges. As far as Marcus could tell, the entire area from top to bottom was a long empty shaft. He felt the cold emptiness of despair growing just behind his lungs when he found a small opening in the rock. He panted, pushing his hands against the edges of it. It seemed so impossibly narrow, he was sure he couldn’t fit, but he had to try.
He experimentally reached his arms into the hole, and once hesitantly pushed his head in and looked around. A crushing disappointment was settling over him now, and a long, dry, miserable death seemed assured. Then he froze, and his eyes widened.
His breath caught and held. The seconds passed empty, but he stood rigid.
No, you imagined it, he told himself when his lungs began to burn. There’s nothing.
Then something hard began to rhythmically tap against the stone somewhere above.
Marcus shoved his shoulders into the opening and struggled against the unyielding stone. His sword stuck, so he struggled to undo the strap at his chest with fingers trembling so badly that there seemed to be more than ten of them. He pushed the scabbard and harness into the hole first, and then he pushed himself in, scraping the skin from his back and shoulders as he went.
The clicking paused. Something scraped on the rock and the sound echoed, and then the clicking increased to a furious, staccato clatter.
Nononono!
Marcus kicked his legs and dragged himself forward. The earth pinched his broad chest between its unforgiving thumb and forefinger. He dragged himself with his arms, oblivious to the pain as the rock rubbed the skin off his ribs. The hole curved without direction, twisting until it wasn’t a tunnel but just a series of jagged, empty gaps in the rock. It would end in a dead end, he realized, just stop, and he wouldn’t be able to turn around.
Thisisn’thappeninggoingtodiegoingtodiestuckstuckst uck.
The tunnel opened up. Marcus gripped his sword and came up on his hands and knees. His back bumped the rock, so he crawled. It wasn’t any sort of crawling he’d done before. He kicked and dragged himself forward in a continuous burst. Something hissed in the dark, loud and continuous. He couldn’t hear the clicking anymore, just the sound of his limbs beating and scraping and dragging along the stone and the thunderous clack of his sword when he kept dropping it.
Was it getting brighter? It was getting brighter. It was. It was.
For an instant, he glimpsed moonlight.
Then something crushed his foot and Marcus screamed. He went down hard, struggling to grip the smooth stone floor of the tunnel with his fingernails, and then he was dragged backward.
Marcus struggled to twist himself around without snapping his captive ankle, all the while sliding along the uneven terrain of the tunnel. He caught glimpses of the Thing from the corners of his eyes as he resisted it, but he could neither turn himself over nor pull himself free. Its grip was incredible; nearly strong enough to grind the bones of his ankle into powder through his boot, all the while pulling him effortlessly back toward its den.
In his panic, he dropped his sword and was dragged too far to recover it. His hand caught an upraised lip of stone on the left wall, and with a savage grunt he shoved his free leg straight down into what he hoped was the monster’s face. His boot met something soft, and the grip on his ankle loosened. Marcus tore himself free and scrambled forward the scant few yards to his sword, which he then struggled to unsheathe in the tight quarters of the tunnel.
As he did, he turned himself over and lay flat on his back, half upraised to look at his attacker. In the dark he could only just discern its grotesque shape, nearly indistinguishable from the black around it save that it was glossier. It lunged forward, and reached a tremendous pincher out to catch its prey’s leg. Marcus twisted away and kicked at it again as it surged forward, and glimpsed its face of many gleaming red eyes, with dribbling fangs perched on deftly writhing, finger-like mounds of flesh.
The beast did not accept a second kick to the face. It ducked away, fading again into the dark save for the glimmer of its countless eyes, and then surged forward once again with its fangs spread wide. It hissed deafeningly, and clacked its pinchers together as they were extended. This time the sword was free, and Marcus jammed the blade down on the upraised pincher. The flesh was unyielding and the blade scraped as if against stone, but the horror drew back its limb and seemed, for a second, to be unsure.
Marcus did not waste the opportunity to begin scrambling backward toward the fading moonlight. Below him, the monster leered, and though he could not see or hear its movement, it did not grow distant. The tunnel was widening now, and he could feel the breeze playing over the bare, blood-caked skin of his back. The murderous Thing hissed a low, furious warning, and Book struggled away all the more urgently.
For a brief instant, the light was enough that he could see the horse-sized creature contorted to fit in the narrow confines of the tunnel, and then he fell.
He tumbled down a hill of glass fragments nearly as fine as sand, but not so fine that they didn’t cling and cut him a hundred thousand times. And then at last, he rolled free on solid ground. He took in his surroundings with quick glances, all the while greedily sucking in fresh air. He was out, he was free, and he was alive.
His eyes followed the hill from which he’d come, and near the top he saw the black opening of the cave. He swore he could see its thousand eyes gleaming red in that shadowed mouth-of-the-earth and he roared defiantly up at it, and then searched for his sword. He found it, and closed his hand around the hilt just as he heard the snort and whinny of an annoyed horse.
Marcus lifted his head, dumbstruck at the sight of a horse and rider staring down at him.
And then the rider kicked him in the face, and he went down again bleeding.
Raji Adubi stood alone on the street, looking up at Marcus Book’s apartments. The windows were all closed, but a tattered length of bed sheet flapped languidly in the breeze, pinned between the window slat and the sill. He raised an eyebrow and entered the tower, ascending with a growing sense of foreboding. He was prepared to find his friend’s corpse – what else could explain his absence at their all-important meeting the night before?
His fears seemed all but assured when he arrived at the top floor to find the door beaten off its hinges and lying flat in the hallway. The Fallienman took a steadying breath and stepped inside. The room was in complete disarray. There were deep gouges in the floor and on the walls, and even a few raked marks across the ceiling. A can of ink was overturned, and from it stretched a long black splatter, now fully dried. There was a tattered bit of cloth tied around the bed post, and the bed was turned askew. Strangest of all: someone wedged a stale loaf of bread beneath the floorboards.
But the room was otherwise empty.
Raj was relieved, and privately pleased he obtained the property under an alias, but no wiser. He returned to the street, and sought out a woman who seemed to live nearby. They exchanged pleasantries and Raji weaved his charm upon her, and then pointed casually at the apartment and asked what she knew about it.
The woman leaned forward conspiratorially, and told him that she hadn’t seen or heard anything, but her neighbor had seen strange things in the early morning hours. There had been a murder, she insisted, a man dressed in the style of the Jya’s own guard, but the whole affair had been swiftly dealt with before the sun rose. Of the foreigner that lived there, she knew nothing, except that he did not look like a good man to begin with.
Adubi thanked her and went on his way smiling. When he rounded the corner he sighed, and his moustache drooped.
What have you gotten yourself into, my friend?
Marcus was vaguely aware of voices, and rough treatment. He was slung over the back of a horse with his hands bound behind him and his ankles tied together. He drifted in and out, first it was night and then day, cold and then searing hot. His ribs ached, his wrists. His stomach was a ball of agony.
He muttered against the horse’s lathered hide, begging dazedly for water, and then he drifted out again.
***
Water. Holy, blessed, wonderful water. It felt like it was healing him, filling him perceptibly with life as it flowed down his throat, restoring dead flesh wherever it went. He drank it too greedily and coughed, and it was taken away again. His head hung and he swallowed, pressing his dried lips together so the air wouldn’t steal the water from them before they were healed.
Never before had it seemed so precious.
Marcus blinked his eyes open. His arms were bound behind his back, which fixed him to what felt like a wooden pole. He was leaned forward as far as his arms and the unyielding pole would allow, resting on his knees. He didn’t remember being taken here, and it took a moment for the night’s events to float to the hazy surface of his mind.
He looked around. He was inside a tent made of some sort of animal hide, and the pole was buried in the center. The leather was meant to shield the interior from the sun, but the heat inside was sweltering. Aside from Marcus, his sword and harness discarded in one far corner, the pole, and the cracked earth beneath him, there was nothing inside.
His shoulders ached dully, but his arms were much improved from the night before. It felt as though his savior-captors had removed the creature’s inky web from his forearm and bound his wound properly. He focused, stamped down the Source’s rage, and then gradually opened himself up to it. It roiled through him, demanding the right to consume him, but he restrained it, contained it, and then directed it into his wounded arm. The heat was not so different from that of the sun above, except that it originated from within, and restored rather than ruined.
Using the Light to heal was painful, difficult, psychologically unpleasant, and time consuming. Marcus was unsure of how long he’d been in his trance, but he desperately stamped the Sourcelight down when he realized there were other people in the tent now. His wounds felt much improved, but he was nowhere near healthy or battle-ready.
He took a deep breath to brace himself, and raised himself up straight on his knees. He was going to need to talk his way out of this, and already he felt doomed.
***
They were Fallienmen, and nomadic tribesmen by the look of them. This was encouraging.
This pair was young, stupid, and cruel. That was less encouraging.
Marcus could not understand their dialect, but he was sure it branched from the core language of Irrakam. There were snippets of intelligible words here and there, familiar sounds and a common lilt, but they spoke too fast. The one on the right was laughing now, said something to Marcus in his rapid-fire gibberish, and then slapped him open-palmed on the naked shoulder.
Book growled hard. The sun had rendered his torso an alarming red, which was now broken solely by a white handprint.
The offender tittered, and Marcus dubbed him Chuckles.
He wanted nothing more, excepting water, than to relieve Chuckles of his teeth.
The second boy was younger, shorter, and scrawnier. He made to repeat his friend’s bold move, but Marcus shot him a hard look and the youth thought better of it. The tone Chuckles gave his sidekick was unmistakably derisive, and he gave Book another firm slap on the back. Expecting it this time, he did not deign to acknowledge the pain.
Chuckles didn’t like that, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. New figures were entering the tent now, and the pair of youths shot ramrod straight and deferent. On the farthest left was a grizzled, middle-aged man with a full, untrimmed black beard and wild hair to match. His face had scars, and he wore a full suit of leather armor despite the heat and did not sweat, Marcus assumed purely out of discipline and grit. The man on the far right was the eldest, a kind of holy man by his manner and dress, grey-haired and beardless.
The one in the center was a man of great importance, though he wore nothing to signify it. There was something in his bearing, a steely confidence in his dark eyes, and it spoke of command and regality. He was muscular in a lean way, shorter and narrower than Marcus but somehow just as impressive, and his hair and beard were luxurious and flawlessly trimmed.
All three men wore large, strange swords at their hips. Marcus decided the weapons must be falchions of a sort, yet they better resembled giant machetes. He glanced, and realized that Chuckles wore one of those swords at his own hip. Being closer to that sword, Book was stunned by the realization that the blades weren’t metallic – they were crystalline, glasslike.
The prince-like one in the center spoke first in that same unknown dialect. Marcus stared at him silently, and then the old man began to speak in the common dialect of Irrakam.
“You are before Temuj,” the holy man said. “Great Leader of the tribe. You are an outlander. Where is your exit pass?”
“Lost it,” Marcus croaked in the same tongue. “In the cave.”
Temuj did not look impressed. The words tumbled out of him tersely.
“The Great Leader says that you are a liar.”
“The Great Leader is smarter than he looks,” Marcus grumbled.
“You would do well to remember it,” the elder said, with only the slightest grin.
Temuj narrowed his eyes.
“I’m looking for the Dordeka,” Marcus said. “I just want to talk to someone among them. A woman named Safia.”
Temuj and his bodyguard looked perplexed at the word, and then Book saw realization dawn in their eyes. The elder grinned almost mockingly.
“You are bold to throw around words you do not know,” he said. “Suffice it to say you are in the right place, but for no reason. There is no woman by that name here. There never has been. Your foolish errand ends foolishly.”
“Fine,” Marcus said. “Untie me and point me back to Irrakam. I will leave.”
A stream of words fell from Temuj evenly. The elder and the bodyguard bowed, and then turned and left together. Then Temuj said a few short words to Chuckles, before himself turning and leaving. Chuckles waited until his leader was gone before cracking a wide, cruel smile at Marcus, and then he and his friend exited.
A cold sensation rolled over Book’s back. As with the rest of their speech, there was something familiar in what Temuj had said, and Marcus struggled to remember the exact pronunciations. It seemed vitally important to him that he know what the princely bastard had said, and his mind mulled the gibberish feverishly. That word he did not know, but this one seemed so similar to the Fallien word for “top.” Top of what?
Marcus mouthed the words, his eyes tracing over unseen letters in the sand. Top of what? Top of what?
Not top, he realized. The word was head.
And it was a stretch, but the more he thought about it, the more he was sure that last word resembled a familiar verb.
To cut.
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.5 Copyright © 2024 vBulletin Solutions Inc. All rights reserved.