Witch King 1

by Nick Harrow

  My shopping list grew longer with every step, and I hoped we’d be able to fill at least some of it. The traveling merchants who’d visited Floating Village had told me the Deepways were used to ship all sorts of cargo. The wealthiest merchants with the most precious goods would seal their wares inside scripted containers to preserve them so they’d be fresh when they reached market. With any luck, our search would net us a few of those that we could crack open and loot.

  After navigating a zigzagging route around the corruption hotspots that dotted the open plain around Cragtooth Station, we finally reached the entrance. The sun had sunk near the hilly horizon by that point, and its bloody rays hardly put a dent in the blackness beyond the building’s yawning doorways.

  The structure was bigger than it had looked from the hill. Thirteen evenly spaced doors pierced the wall ahead of us. Seven of them were triple the width of the others, large enough to allow wagons and large cargo crates to pass through with room to spare. The ground in front of the doors was overgrown with weeds and blades of black grass, though large numbers of cracked cobblestones jutted up from the earth like broken teeth.

  It was hard to believe that hundreds of men and women had passed through those doorways every day. Wagon trains had picked up cargo to haul to distant villages, horse hooves had clattered across the stones as they carried riders too far-flung destinations. This Deepways station had once been a center of life in the Sevenfold Empire. That it had fallen into utter ruin filled me with a deep, unwholesome dread. If the rest of the world was as bad off as the station, my job would be a hell of a lot harder than I’d imagined.

  The spirits sensed my discomfort and leaned against me to provide the simple comfort of contact. Their cool shoulders against mine reminded me that while I’d lost my past, I’d found the first pieces of a puzzle to build a different kind of future. It wasn’t what I’d ever imagined, or wanted, but the crimson bear had always told me that mortals were spectacularly shitty at predicting the future.

  “Let’s stick together until we figure out what we’re dealing with in here.” I hooked my arms over the spirits’ shoulders and pulled them closer. “We’re looking for metal boxes or chests. They’ll be covered in scripts, and some of those might be dangerous. If you see one, don’t touch it until I can examine it for traps.”

  “I’ve been reading scripts since before you were born, mortal,” Aja said with a huff. “You don’t have to tell me how to handle them.”

  “Oh, you’re a century old, are you?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean,” Aja grumped. Then her voice softened and she leaned her head against my shoulder. “Sorry. I get snippy when I’m nervous.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” Ayo chirped excitedly. “This will be exciting. There’s bound to be all kinds of treasure in here!”

  “Let’s hope.” We’d reached a door, and I pulled it open to let the dim light of the fading sun inside.

  The interior of the station was far larger than I’d expected. It was crowded with stalls and desks, chandeliers dangled from its ceiling, and strange plants had grown up through cracks in the tiled floor. On the opposite side of the building from the doors, an enormous staircase plunged into the earth, and I glimpsed a much larger, deeper chamber down there.

  Or at least part of a bigger chamber. The fading light could only reach so far past the end of the stairs, and everything after that was cloaked in pitch darkness.

  “Anybody bring a torch?” I asked.

  The spirits shook their heads, and I cursed at myself. As a shaman of the crimson bear, I saw just fine in low-light conditions. True darkness, though, blinded me just as much as any other person. I wouldn’t be able to see much once I got down there.

  Let there be light. I fed a trickle of rin into my weapon and prayed that the crimson bear’s offer of a light through the darkness wasn’t just a figure of speech.

  The instant my power reached the channels, sinuous lines sprang to glowing life along the length of my war club. The remnants of Mielyssi’s kiss grew brighter by the moment, until they shed a thirty-foot globe of near daylight around us.

  “Neat trick,” Ayo said.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said.

  You’re welcome.

  The crimson bear’s voice rang in my head, followed by a faint chuckle that left me wanting her more than ever when its echoes died. I wondered what other tricks she might have imparted to my club and wished there was a way for me to ask her.

  I had no idea how long the light would last and decided to make the most of it. I descended the stairs into the lower level of the Deepways with the club held high.

  Rats and squirrels scurried away from the light, disappearing into holes in the floor and nests under the desks and inside the stalls. I didn’t see anything of value on our way to the stairs, and my spirit sight didn’t find any glowing spots of sacred energy, either. Someone had cleared this place out. I only hoped the deeper parts of the station hadn’t been so thoroughly looted.

  “There’s something down here,” Ayo whispered. “I can feel it. It’s so dark. So alone.”

  “Well, hopefully it can’t feel us.” I still had enough energy in my core to activate the crimson bear’s techniques, if it came to a fight, but I’d rather not tangle with some unknown foe in a deep fucking hole in the ground. “Let’s look over here.”

  Unlike the upper floor of the Deepways station, the area at the bottom of the stairs hadn’t been overrun by wildlife or rampant weeds. The light from my war club spread thirty feet in every direction without hitting a wall. The silver glow showed us ranks of evenly spaced columns that supported the roof, orderly lines of colored tiles on the floor to guide passengers to their destinations, and scattered standing desks with heavy iron boxes chained to their bases.

  The real prizes, though, were the gilded capsules of the Deepways carriages that rested in eight sunken berths ahead of us. My gut told me that if anything valuable had been left behind when this place was abandoned, it would be in those golden transports.

  I’d just reached the closest of the carriages when whatever Ayo had detected smashed into the back of my head. Black wings buffeted my ears while its claws tangled in my hair and its beak stabbed at the top of my skull.

  “Intruders! Intruders!” the flying monster screeched raucously in a rough-edged voice that was almost as painful as the bloody holes it had punched in my scalp. “Guards! Alert!”

  “Get the fuck off me!” I shouted.

  For all the noise the infuriated creature made, it wasn’t very big or strong. I reached behind me, grabbed it around the neck, and yanked it off my head with a yelp. Its clenched claws had ripped out bloody hanks of my hair, and its beak pecked at the back of my hand with a ferocity out of all proportion to its actual size.

  “Release me, intruder!” The creature in my hand appeared to be a talking raven. I’d seen weirder things during my stay with the crimson bear, to be sure, but I hadn’t expected to run into such a vocal critter after I’d left Mount Shiki.

  “Stop, goddammit.” It would’ve been easy enough to snap the thing’s neck, but that would have been a dick move. The angry creature was only doing its job, and it must’ve been down here alone, in the dark, for a very long time. Besides, I was a shaman. It was my job to protect nature’s children, not slaughter them because they annoyed me. “I said stop!”

  “That looks like it hurts.” Ayo fussed over me while I wrestled with the bird. She gingerly probed at the bloody spots on my scalp with one finger. “The cuts aren’t deep, but they’re going to sting for a while, and we should watch them for signs of infection.”

  “Release me!” the black bird croaked. “Begone! I am the guardian of the station, and I will not allow you to ransack its carriages!”

  “Oh, come on.” Aja rolled her eyes at the raven’s raucous protests and spread her arms out to encompass the empty station. “Anyone who owns any of this has long since abandoned it. Finders, keepers. Now get out of our way before I
wring your neck myself.”

  The bird glared at Aja but shut its beak.

  “I’m going to let you go. And you’re not going to stab me in the head with your beak anymore. Nod if you understand me.” The bird and I stared at one another, its black eye as cold and expressionless as a marble. It gave me one small nod of its head. “Good.”

  The raven fluttered to the top of the nearest carriage, and watched us anxiously. For the first time, I noticed it had three legs and was suddenly very glad I hadn’t killed it. Three-legged ravens were sacred beasts that some claimed were messengers of the gods. Offing one of those for doing its job would’ve racked up some very bad karma indeed.

  “Look, we don’t want any trouble,” I said to the raven. Maybe if it understood what we were doing here, it wouldn’t try to snatch me bald-headed again. “We’d hoped to take the Deepways carriage to the stop closest to the Lake of Moonsilver Mist.”

  “And I’d hoped not to have to do this job for a hundred years without relief.” The raven’s claws ticked against the roof of the carriage as it shifted from one leg to another to another. “I guess none of us are getting what we want today.”

  “We need supplies.” I eyeballed the raven, and it eyeballed me right back. Despite the creature’s small size, it looked ready to fight me if I tried to get past it.

  Rather than try to bull my way past the bird to reach the carriage, I decided to use my awesome shamanic powers to do some scouting. There wasn’t any point in dealing with this creature if there wasn’t anything on the carriage.

  Unfortunately for the bird, my spirt sight immediately spied a deep, azure glow coming from inside three of the carriages. That glow was a sure sign of concentrated shio sacred energy. The kind that would be used to power preservation scripts. I was sure what we needed was inside those vessels.

  “My spirit companions are sick. I need to return them to their mistress before the illness takes them.” The raven didn’t seem impressed by my sob story. “Unfortunately, their mistress is far to the south, and we don’t have enough supplies to carry us that far. I’d normally hunt and forage for food, but the land is so corrupted that’s no longer an option. There’s no harm in letting us take a few items from these carriages. No one’s coming back to claim them.”

  “The harm is to me,” the raven croaked. “If I let you steal from what I’m sworn to protect, my duty bond will punish me.”

  “Maybe there’s something I can do to help you.” As a shaman, dealing with the mystical connections between creatures, spirits, and mortals was my stock in trade. If I could figure out how to free this creature from a bond that had long since outlived its usefulness, then I’d earn some good karma and get the provisions we needed.

  “I doubt there’s anything you can do.” The raven flapped its wings in agitation. “My bond is to the station manager. The last one, Yala Kinrey, told me she’d send another raven to relieve me when she reached Madrus Lota, but that was obviously a lie. I’ve been stuck guarding this place and it’s been thirty years, eight months, and fourteen days since I’ve seen another soul.”

  Well, shit.

  I pulled Aja and Ayo back toward the steps to the upper level. I needed their advice, and I didn’t want the raven to overhear our conversation.

  “We should kill it,” Aja said the second we reached the staircase. “If there’s anything that can help us in those carriages, we need it, and there’s no sense in letting some stupid bird get in our way.”

  “That’s a three-legged raven,” I said, my voice serious. “I don’t know what your mistress taught you, but that’s a sacred beast. Some people say they’re the messengers and agents of the gods. Killing the raven would let us get into the carriage, sure, but it’s going to piss off whoever created it. Are you willing to have one of the Celestial Bureacracy gods pissed off at you?”

  Before I’d climbed Mount Shiki and spent decades knocking boots with the crimson bear, I’d only ever paid lip service to the immortal deities that made up the Celestial Bureacracy. It wasn’t like they showed up in Floating Village to chastise those who broke their laws or offended their priests. But experiencing the higher spirits’ realms for myself had changed my view of the world. There were forces at work that mortal eyes couldn’t see, and I took them very seriously now that they’d flipped my whole life upside down.

  “We may as well start walking,” Ayo said. Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears. Her core was nearly empty, and she knew she’d never survive the walk back to her mistress without more help than I could give her. “Even if we don’t make it back, you can still reach our mistress and help her.”

  “I’m not giving up that easy.” I mulled over our problem and tried to come up with a solution. “There’s a bound sacred beast between us and supplies we need. We can’t kill it. We also can’t sneak around it because the raven will get hurt if we steal anything. That’s just as likely to piss off the Celestial Bureaucracy as bashing the bird’s brains out with my war club.”

  “We have to set it free,” Ayo urged me. “It wants to be away from here, I can feel that. If you remove its bond, the raven will leave us in peace.”

  “That’s the plan.” I looked at each of the spirits in turn. “Did your mistress ever tell you anything about that?”

  “No.” Aja furrowed her brow. “She’s very private. We were never around for her workings.”

  “Of course she didn’t let you see any of her secrets,” the raven called to us. “You’re her familiars; she wouldn’t want you to know how to break her bonds with you any more than my masters wanted me to break mine.”

  “You can hear us?” I asked.

  “I can hear anything in the station.” The raven cawed and hopped to the end of the carriage. “You might as well come over here to talk. I’m going to eavesdrop on you, regardless.”

  “You could’ve said something,” I grumbled and headed over to the golden vessel.

  “Then I wouldn’t have been able to eavesdrop on your secrets.” The raven clucked its tongue.

  I leaned on my war club and considered the raven. To my spirit sight it glowed rich blue, swirled through with streaks of pure silver senjin. It was a powerful creature, and if it hadn’t been for the corrupted energy that radiated from the dream meridians all around us, it probably would’ve been even stronger.

  My connection to the crimson bear wasn’t the same as a bound spirit. We were partners more than master and servant. She gave me techniques I wouldn’t otherwise have, and she could influence the world of mortals through me. There was a give and take there that didn’t exist with bound spirits, who were basically slaves to their master’s whims.

  There were other kinds of connections, too. Sorcerers could bind demons using the sevenfold rituals handed down by the lost gods. Wizards could summon elementals and bind them to their cores to power their spells thanks to ancient thaumaturgic rites. Shamans could have familiars, though we tended to treat our bound spirits with more respect than the other practitioners.

  That gave me an idea, though I wasn’t at all sure that it would work.

  “I’m going to try something that you’re not going to like.” This was risky, but I needed what was in those carriages to get Ayo and Aja safely to their mistress. If it came down to fucking up a sacred beast or watching the spirits die, I’d risk the bad karma and wrath of the Celestial Bureacracy.

  “Take your best shot, kid.” The three-legged raven didn’t seem concerned about me in the slightest. “But you better make it a good one. Otherwise, my bond will make me peck out your eyes and shit on your brain.”

  Before the raven could make good on its threat, I focused my spirit sight until its core glowed in my mind’s eye, so close to my core I could touch it.

  “What kind of pervert are you?” the crow squawked. “Stop digging around in my core. I’m not your average crow for you to jack around with.”

  “I’m trying to fucking help you. Sorry if you don’t like it.” I didn’t much like it,
either, to be totally honest. Messing around with a sacred beast bordered on the blasphemous, and if I fucked it up there’d be no end of trouble in it for me.

  But if I got it right, I’d get all the loot I wanted from the carriages and hopefully earn the raven’s gratitude. Before I could come to my senses, I made my move.

  Chapter Nine

  FOR MY NEXT PARTY TRICK, I stretched a thin strand of rin from my core’s first node toward the raven. The bird tried to hop away, but I was faster. The loop of sacred energy closed around its core with a faint sizzle.

  “Don’t you dare,” the raven squawked. “I don’t want to be your pet!”

  “Do you want to stay down here for another thirty years before someone else finds you?” The bird’s protests were more frantic than fierce, and I suspected it was more afraid of what the bond would do to it if it didn’t fight me than it was of becoming my familiar.

  The three-legged raven’s core nearly slipped away from me several times before I found what I was looking for. The shell that surrounded the bird’s spirit was bright blue, with a single dark spot on one side. That spot was surrounded by a ring of silver script that I assumed was the binding itself. I turned the core this way and that looking for other connection points and didn’t find another one.

  Perfect.

  “Don’t fuck with that,” the bird squawked. “It has warding seals on it that will go off if you tamper with it.”

  “Settle down.” I had no intention of tampering with the bird’s bond. What I had in mind was more effective than that. And more dangerous. If I messed this up, the bird might end up free, but I would almost certainly end up very, very dead. “Try not to struggle.”