Manx

by Greg Curtis

  “Told you!” Whitey managed a smile. “Now where's my liver?!”

  “Coming,” he told her idly. But mostly he was thinking about the riddle. There was a revolution happening. But who was the servant and who was the master? Who was taking whose place? And were the Silver Order a part of the revolution? Were they the crown? Or were they just caught up in it? And whose side were they on? That was the problem with riddles. They often raised more questions than they answered.

  But in time he watched his friend come down the stairs to join them for breakfast, a cloth over his mouth as he coughed, and Manx put his questions away. For the moment he had a friend to worry about. And now maybe there was hope for Adern. He wanted to believe so. But for the moment the only thing that mattered was making him comfortable.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Winstone again. Sorsha wasn't happy about being back in the stone city, but she had reason to be there. Larissa had told her what the cat had said, and she would have forgotten about it completely save that several other cats had been bribed with food and come out with exactly the same riddle. Which meant that Lady Marshendale had some more questions to answer. This time truthfully.

  But in any case she was in no condition to lead an army against the spiders. She was in poor shape. Most of her hair had now turned white and only a few black tresses now hung down among the avalanche of snow. But that was the least of her worries. Her joints ached like never before, and she started wheezing whenever she walked a few steps. Worse still her eyes were so blurry that she could hardly tell who was standing right in front of her.

  She wasn't alone of course. All of her fellow walkers from the southern battlefield were in poor shape, and now they were desperately trying to get new members of their family to take their place. But it wasn't easy. Walkers had never been the most numerous of the spell-casters to begin with. And so many had either been ageing when they went into the prison and so were now fighting just to keep breathing, or else very young and so had no training. More of course, had gone travelling, searching for their loved ones. And so a small number had become much smaller again. And how many of those they could find, would even want to serve on the battle field when they saw what had become of the others?

  Meanwhile the spiders in all the other cities were still standing guard but growing in numbers. Now in each of the cities they guessed a ring of ten thousand spiders surrounded them. And more of the great green nightmares joined them every day. Maybe it was defensive. But in her heart she knew they were getting ready to march. Assembling their armies. And when they did march, it would be the spiders from at least three cities that would do so. They'd barely survived the onslaught from single cities. How could they possibly cope with three at once?!

  They were in a lot of trouble. And while she thought they could survive the next battle if it was no worse than what they'd already endured, she wasn't at all sure about the one after that.

  “Atan be!” A woman cried out in surprise. “You look like a dog's breakfast – after he's left it on the ground!”

  Sorsha turned around to see Jayla Marshendale being brought out before her in chains by a couple of sorceres and several taurans. They couldn't do the interview in the prison itself because it was filled with lodestone and cold steel. So they had to bring her outside so that the soothsayers could use their magic on her. Here she couldn't lie – not successfully anyway.

  “You should look in a mirror,” she replied. “I'm ageing rapidly. But you already have one foot in the grave.” And that was true. She hadn't seen the woman in maybe a couple of weeks, but in that time she'd aged surely forty years. She looked eighty. Her skin was filled with wrinkles, both fine and deep, and there were liver spots everywhere. Her posture had gone too and she was bent double like a washer woman who'd carried laundry for her entire life. Did the woman even have another week to live she wondered?

  “I'll die happy!”

  “You'll die next week!” Sorsha replied. “Probably blind and toothless, dribbling into your bib and pissing yourself.”

  “And you soon after.” the woman spat at her.

  “Not that soon. I'm ageing, but mostly because I took the fight to your lies and destroyed two spider cities. But they're not cities are they? They're nests. And there is no spider queen. Even if we had to learn that from the cats!” And she was angry about that. Angry that she had believed something so stupid for so long. Angrier still that they'd fought two battles they probably didn't have to.

  Once you realised that there was no spider queen, and that the spiders, for all their numbers and size were just normal spiders in their nest, you understood that they didn't invade realms and destroy them. Spiders didn't do that. But they did defend their nests. She was even more angry that people had died when they didn't have to, and that now maybe, more might have to if the spiders thought they were about to attack again. They'd started a war against an enemy they hadn't had to fight, and one they couldn't reason with. But most of all she was angry that the cats had been the ones to tell them how stupid they were.

  “The cats told you?” The former knight stared at her in surprise.

  “And they told us a lot more too. Like the fact that the spiders don't control you. You control them.”

  “We don't control them!” the prisoner protested. But the soothsayers standing behind her weren't so sure judging from their expressions. It was a half truth at best. And a half truth was always half a lie.

  “They took us. Made us this way!”

  Sorsha didn't believe that for a heartbeat. Especially not when the soothsayers shook their heads. The woman was lying.

  “Still trying to lie your way out of trouble?” She took a deep breath as she thought. And what came to her was that the woman was skating around the truth. Revising things a little. “The spiders didn't abduct you, did they? You may not command them completely, but you called them.” It was the logical explanation.

  Lady Marshendale stood there in her chains, simply refusing to answer her. But that was alright. Sorsha hadn't expected her to tell her what she wanted to know. Not willingly. So she nodded to the two soothsayers and watched them nod back in agreement. It was time, and the silver eared shamans knew it.

  They stepped up behind the woman and placed their hands on her shoulders.

  “What?!” Lady Marshendale cried out and nearly fell to her knees as the magic flowed between them. She tried to resist it. Sorsha could see the effort in her face and in the way her fists clenched. But there was no resisting. Soothsayers were shamans, which was why they had the pointed ears of their kind even if they had short silver fur on them. But their lord was Veritan, and he was one of the more powerful of the gods. When his will flowed through the flesh and blood of his servants, no mere mortal could resist them. And that included her.

  “You called them?” Sorsha repeated. “Didn't you?”

  “Yes!” Jayla Marshendale yelled out in seeming pain.

  But it wasn't pain she was feeling Sorsha knew. It was pressure. Her will against the divine. And though she hated it with every fibre in her being, she could not fight it. It was as though she was being crushed by a mountain and she just could not get out from under it.

  “So tell me what happened?” It probably wasn't the most important question she had, but it was where everything began.

  “We were weak!” she began, barely able to squeeze the words out. And then she finally gave up and fell to her knees. “Growing in numbers, but no stronger for it. We couldn't hide our nature for much longer.”

  “That you suck life from spell-casters,” Sorsha finished for her. It wasn't the damned spiders or their imaginary queen!

  “Yes.” The woman almost seemed to crumble as she admitted it. “We can't help it. It's simply what we are.”

  That much Sorsha did believe. She didn't need to see the soothsayers nod to tell her it. The Silver Order after all the lies were spoken and dismissed, were vampyres. But she knew there had to be more.

 
“And the spiders?”

  “Their venom. It makes an elixir. It makes our gift stronger.” Lady Marshendale's head dropped as she knelt there, so that she stared at the ground and didn't have to see the others. “We thought that with it we would be strong enough to drain the life from across the dimensions.”

  “Ahh.” And there was the genesis of their plan, Sorsha realised. They had to get rid of the spell-casters. Because sooner or later they would have discovered their secret. But if they did – what would they eat? The spider venom made it possible for them to get rid of the spell-casters and still feed.

  “It didn't work.” That wasn't a question.

  “No.” The woman kept staring hard at the ground in front of her. “The vitality that came back – it burned.”

  “Ice burn.” It was exactly what she'd told the woman had happened so long ago.

  “Yes. And more. Some of the vitality we took, went to the spiders. The venom was a channel. And they grew larger and more numerous. The nests became cities.”

  “Of course it did!” Sorsha shook her head sadly as the understanding found her. It was a magical potion, whether it was a venom or a healing elixir. And all magical potions came with unexpected consequences. That was why healers trained for so long before they were considered competent. She could guess the rest.

  “So the spiders grew larger and more dangerous. More difficult for you to capture to harvest the venom from. And you grew sicker as the life you drained crippled you. It was a vicious circle. You needed the venom to feed. And without it you aged and withered away. But getting it cost you lives. And even when you did the life it let you feed on still burned you.”

  “Eventually you could no longer maintain the spells keeping the prisons secure, and we escaped. And then you told us about the spiders, in the hope that we would destroy their nests and knock them back so far that you could once more take the venom. And you hoped that the spiders would harm us so greatly that we wouldn't be able to fight you.”

  “It should have worked!” The prisoner raised her head to stare at Sorsha with pure hatred in her eyes. “You should have fed us for ten thousand years!”

  “Sorry to disappoint!” Sorsha wondered if the woman even understood how awful what she was telling her was. How truly evil. But her sense was that the woman simply didn't care. Which led her to the next piece of the riddle. What did she care about?

  “So you staged a revolution?” She knew that, though she hadn't been the one to work that part of the riddle out. Peth had. He loved history. And he had started reading up on the four hundred years of history they'd slept through before they'd been told the cats' riddle. And so he knew who the crown was. It was the King. And the servants were the Silver Order.

  Years before they had been abducted, the King had decided to create the Silver Order. He'd wanted some sort of magical policing system to deal with the spell-casters after various incidents had happened. And the casters with the ice blue eyes, the vampyres as it turned out, had signed up in numbers. They had been the servants who had wanted a master. But then as the verse said, the wheel had turned, and it seemed they had never really wanted to have a master at all. The Silver Order had just been a step on their journey to the throne.

  Four hundred years ago, it wasn't just the spell-casters who had been overthrown. King Julian had been as well – though not in the expected manner. Instead the Court had slowly usurped his power in a strange but bloodless revolution. None of them knew how that had happened. They'd been asleep. But as Peth had told them, it was likely that magic had been involved. And the only magic in the realm at that time had been that of the Silver Order. So the Silver Order, the King's personal magical force, had engineered a revolution where the King had been left powerless and the Court had taken control of the realm.

  “Why?”

  “It was always the plan,” Lady Marshendale told her simply. “We were going to live forever. Who better than an immortal to rule?”

  “Who indeed?” Sorsha commented sarcastically. “But that went wrong too?” Obviously it had since the Silver Order weren't ruling anyone.

  “The Smythe's, they betrayed us!” She spat on the ground. “Filthy whore-mongering bastards!”

  “It is their nature,” Sorsha pointed out. Someone had to. Although the librarian who was helping them appeared determined to disprove everything they knew about Smythes. Then again she wasn't completely sure he was one, save for an accident of blood. “How did they betray you? And what part did they play in your plan to start with?”

  “They obtained things for us.” The prisoner let out a heavy breath as she realised she was saying something else she didn't want to. But she also wasn't struggling as hard against her restraints as she had been. She was becoming used to her situation. “What we needed to create the enchantments. Documents to bring down our enemies. Servants to help us in our work. But then when we were done and you were gone and the King was having his change of heart, they started making deals with the other members of the Court.”

  “But we showed them!” She smiled for the first time, even in her binds.

  “Go on.” Sorsha wasn't sure she wanted to know what they'd done. There was something about the woman's smile that troubled her even more than everything else. But still she had to be talking about the binding, and that had been removed. There was nothing left to worry about. Was there?

  “We cursed them to know always the magic they had, to ache for it as they ached to breathe, and yet never be able to touch it.” The woman's smile broadened even as she struggled. “It must be anguish!”

  It must be torture, Sorsha guessed. A fate so terrible that a man would feed his own children to lions just to try and free them of the curse! And it had worked, partly. The librarian had been partly freed of the curse. But only regained a part of his magic. And the price he had paid for that little bit of freedom had been horrible.

  But there was more to it than that. Obviously they'd left a way to free a few of the Smythes from their blood curse. How else could they have Smythe assassins working for them? And what did she mean that they could never touch their magic? She asked while the woman was in a cooperative mood.

  “We sent their magic to the same hell we sent you of course. We already had the enchantment. All we had to do was modify it a little. And then cast it on their blood.”

  Lady Marshendale didn't mean blood though. Not literally. She meant the first Smythe they could find. The oldest of the family. Probably a corpse that had been buried a thousand or more years ago. Entombed would be better though. Someone who was connected down through the ages to all the others. And from him or her the curse had been carried through blood to the rest of the family. Father to son, mother to daughter.

  All of that made sense. But there was one thing that didn't. How had they made it so that the Smythes could always feel their magic but never touch it? Especially when it was kept from them in another dimension?

  “We used Freda's pane of course,” Jayla Marshendale answered her when she finally asked the question. “It seemed only fair when the Smythes stole it for us to begin with.”

  Sorsha nearly sat down when she heard that. Actually she nearly fell down. They'd stolen the window of the Goddess of Knowledge! The most famous crime of the century – four centuries ago. A crime that had never been solved, but one that had been talked about across the entire realm for at least fifty years, before the spell-casters had been abducted. And it explained so much. How a people with minor enchanting gifts, even if they were vampyres, could create such powerful enchantments.

  But it was more than that. The ditty spoke about a window and a flame. Now she knew it was really referring to an actual window. Not a portal as the librarian had thought. The one the Goddess had stood in front of day after day for all her life before she had finally ascended. And a window that was said to have great magical powers. Meanwhile the flame burning brightly on the other side of it had to be the magical gifts of the Smythes. It wasn't their magic a
fter all. It wasn't their life. It was the Smythes'.

  It was like a punch in the gut. There was no hope. She'd known that from the very start. And yet still when the cats had started repeating the silly little ditty she'd felt it. It had been the only thing on her mind in truth. But it wasn't their magic and their life that the cats had been talking about. And now she felt let down when she should never have hoped in the first place.

  “Well, we may as well return the window to her followers. Where is it?”

  “You think –?” The prisoner cried out as the soothsayers applied their magic to her once more, and then started cursing. “Killmorn Estate!” she finally squeaked out. “The basement of the folly!”

  “Bitch!” She threw that at Sorsha when she could finally speak properly again. She threw a few other choice insults her way as well.