With a sigh, Torrahs halted his study of the texts before him. Fortenu would not leave without an answer; giving him one would only distract from the task at hand and waste yet more time. “Methodical practice and repetitive form,” he said matter-of-factly. “Something which seems to have fallen completely out of practice within these walls.” He waved a hand at the shelves within the library, indicating the general disarray of the once impressive collection of volumes therein.
“What are you suggesting?” Fortenu asked.
Torrahs sat back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. “I’m not suggesting anything, merely stating the truth of things. The Brotherhood has fallen into an existence of negligence, sloth, and somehow a remarkable amount of contemptible self-importance—”
“How dare you bring such accusations upon us?” Fortenu sputtered, his double chins quivering in the sudden onset of his rage.
Shoving away from the table amidst the echoing grate of his chair upon the stone, Torrahs stood to his full height and towered over the man beside him. “Do not speak to me of daring,” he roared, his voice filling the library’s expanse. “For decades, we have sought the secret knowledge of this world. The study of tomes and dead men’s words became the Brotherhood’s sole focus when it should only have been a tool. I left because that knowledge provides us nothing if it is not put to greater use.” The fat Brother seemed to shrink into himself, staring at his returned comrade with wide, glassy eyes. Torrahs sighed and placed a hand on Fortenu’s shoulder, though the way the man’s flesh gave beneath his touch made him want to pull away. “I have seen things you cannot possibly imagine, Brother. I have gone where no mortal man was meant to be. I have communed with creatures not intended for this world. I have saved lives, and I have taken them. Yes, there is blood on my hands, but my conscience is clear because I learned, through experience, what must be done. The rest of you holed yourselves up within this salt-encrusted tomb and still believe the specter of your cause to be a noble one.”
Fortenu’s glistening lower lip wobbled, and he surprised Torrahs when he did not quail further. “We have learned so much,” he whispered.
“No doubt,” Torrahs said, raising an eyebrow. “Tell me, what good has such knowledge done you?”
The other man glanced around the vast library, his eyes flicking from one shelf to the next as if the sight of the dusty volumes might speak to him. “We have the amarach.”
“Ah, yes. Immortal pets you’ve made of them, and how incredibly helpful they have been.” Fortenu frowned under the sting of Torrahs’ sarcasm. “The one covenant the Brotherhood implemented has stroked your egos and blinded you all. Touch an amarach and they’re physically bound to you, but their will remains their own. They’re nothing but prisoners, Fortenu, and it grieves me to think you never considered why you have only two.”
The man folded his arms over the grotesque drop of his belly, buckling under Torrahs’ gaze like a reprimanded yet ever-obstinate child. “They may still be of some use,” he said, and when he finally met Torrahs gaze again, his statement seemed a request for permission.
“They may,” Torrahs agreed, “but we should not rely on such an improbability.” Then he bent toward his Brother and lowered his voice. “And in the name of Henrick and Cecil, man—may their souls never wander—you cannot tell me you still believe it will be so easy.” Fortenu paused, and when the man lowered his gaze and gave a small nod of admission, Torrahs knew he had him. Before Henrick and Cecil’s deaths, the Brotherhood had been of one mind and had undertaken their pursuits within a balance of knowledge and action. Those two, however, had admittedly gone too far in their youth, operating before they had armed themselves with the necessary information. That had scared the Brotherhood toward the other extreme, and Deeprock Spire had become a cloistered confinement for aged men, no longer the seat of power and unyielding wisdom for which it had been conceived. And surely, more than thirty years of avoiding two dead men’s mistakes was quite enough.
Despite Fortenu’s deep-rooted caution and his cultivated aversion to change, he agreed with his returned Brother. Torrahs saw it in the renewed determination within the man’s heavy brows, in the quivering of his fleshy cheeks—not from fear or rage but in an attempt to summon what little remained of his impotent courage and fortitude. “Your return was much needed, Brother,” Fortenu said, his head bobbing as he accepted how well he’d been convinced. “We are closer now than ever before.”
“Indeed.” Torrahs nodded. “And we will be one step closer when you tell the others it is time to implement the knowledge they have acquired and fiercely protected.”
Fortenu froze, then he glanced up from the floor and tilted his head toward Torrahs, a sly smirk spreading across his swollen lips as if he’d formed the idea himself. “Methodical practice and repetitive form.”
Torrahs fought not to roll his eyes and slap the self-important expression from the man’s face. The cost was not worth the incredible satisfaction it would have brought, however fleeting. Instead, he inclined his head and closed his eyes, giving a brief nod of acknowledgement.
“I will tell them.” The fat man nodded vigorously, then clasped Torrahs’ forearm with both hands and forced him into shaking them. “We will follow you, and we will strive to learn from all the sacrifices you have made. When do we return to the tower?”
The man’s nauseating groveling had been an unintended consequence of employing this tactic. While Torrahs maintained his composure, he could not help the brief flaring of his nostrils. “I need two more days to go through these,” he said, gesturing to the wild array of documents. “Perhaps I find some hidden spell to aid us, but even if I do not, we will try again in two days.” Finally, he sat again at the table and bent to work once more. But Fortenu did not leave, standing there as if he wished to ask for more but feared his own brazen curiosity. “You would do best to rouse the others into improving their practical application. Start with the fire.”
This seemed to please Fortenu immensely, for he quivered to attention, gave a remarkably shallow bow, and headed toward the library door. His brown robes flapped behind him, and with another echoing boom of the door being shut once more, Torrahs was left alone.
In truth, he had no idea what to look for that might propel him beyond this hurdle without having to wait. He knew the unwritten, unexplained laws prevented the amarach from whisking Dehlyn away to safety indefinitely; for some reason, they dictated it could only be done during the darkest hours of night, when the blue-eyed woman-child disappeared. And still, she was returned every morning, either hidden again behind her pitiful mask or just on the verge of it. Torrahs expected this was done to prevent anyone from questioning—let alone witnessing—the vessel in such a state, protecting her secrets behind a nightly retreat unless she desired otherwise. Many nights, he had attempted to speak with her before these departures, and each time, he had failed.
He had not, however, expected Dehlyn, the green-eyed vessel borne away by the dark amarach every night, to withstand the physical assault of the Brotherhood’s combined efforts. Nor had he expected the iron chains and manacles to be rendered so useless at such a time. It was quite possible that entering the well of the vessel’s secrets extended beyond the physical realm—that they still lacked some other immortal tool required for the juncture of their success. Perhaps he and his Brothers had simply failed to use the correct combination of magic. There were still so many things he did not know, but two truths he knew for certain. Dehlyn was the celestial channel leading to all the wisdom of existence itself. And Kherron would be coming for her. If they could not break her on their own before Kherron arrived, Torrahs knew full well that nothing could stop them once his former ward stepped within Deeprock Spire. Should Torrahs find it necessary to wait until then, he could certainly use the time that waiting afforded to discover just exactly how he would ensure he got what he wanted.
Chapter 10
The first twenty-four hours alone with Uishen passed
with far less conflict and quarreling than Kherron had anticipated. The ferryman had eyed him almost through the entirety of their first meal after setting off from Vereling Town, smirking as if he possessed some secret he knew Kherron wished him to reveal. They didn’t say much of anything to each other through that meal, or to eat when the sun heralded midday, or for supper. Mostly, Uishen talked to himself, which Kherron quickly came to recognize when he’d responded in anger to a particularly volatile string of insults. Uishen had glanced at him from where he leaned over the Honalei’s portside railing, frowned as if Kherron had just spit on his ship, and moved aft to put the cabin between them.
Kherron had found their morning on the river refreshing, choosing to push aside the threatening anxiety arising from their solitude in such waters. He couldn’t imagine what it must feel like for sailors upon the waves of the ocean, with far more between the shores they’d left and their next berth than a mere few days of travel. And while the Sylthurst was no ocean, its changing tides certainly set the Honalei to rocking as much as she might have in truly open waters.
By the end of that first day, Kherron found himself well and truly seasick. “Riversick,” Uishen had said, laughing at Kherron’s groans. “The Sylthurst will never be the sea, and I think she’d never want to. She would not find Honalei in her waters if she were made of salt.”
Kherron had wanted to remark on the sheer stupidity of everything the ferryman had just said, but another wave of nausea overcame him, and his words fell over the side of the railings with the contents of his stomach. Only after Kherron had well and truly emptied himself of their supper did Uishen hand him a viscous yellow substance within a vial, telling him to drink it. He chuckled when his passenger asked what it was, replying it eased the sickness and made a river journey more bearable.
“You’re just giving this to me now,” Kherron had grumbled.
“Only works on an empty stomach.”
Uishen’s grin made Kherron want to push the man overboard—or he’d jump downriver himself and swim the rest of the way to Eran’s Crossing. But he could not entertain such fantasies; he’d downed the vial and leaned back over the portside railing, staring upriver.
Whether for fear of more nausea within the Honalei’s walls or of Uishen’s additional pranks at his expense, Kherron refused the extra pallet the ferryman had said he’d provided within the cabin. Kherron hadn’t wished to set foot inside the cabin at that; somehow, he suspected it remained as well-kept and routinely maintained as the ferryman himself. Instead, he opted to sleep upon the deck and under the stars. Uishen had given him an odd look—which might have been an acknowledgement of respect—when he heard this, but he pulled the extra pallet out on the deck as Kherron had requested and left his passenger alone beneath the open sky.
At first, Kherron had found the added breeze across the water too cold, the tapping of some dangling item against the swaying cabin wall too rhythmic and jolting. It seemed he’d fallen quite swiftly into preferring the quiet and the solitude of sleeping where he’d made camp—namely outdoors and on land. Trying to drift out of consciousness upon the deck of a moving river barge had seemed a remarkably unsavory expectation. But soon, he found himself soothed by the wind brushing the hair across his forehead. The rumble of the turning waterwheel at the bow and all its rotating parts soon drowned out even the slap and burble of the oars moving up and down, up and down along the Sylthurst. Stars winked at him overhead, but his eyes were closed before he had a chance to call any of them by name.
THE NEXT MORNING, THE rising sun flickered rhythmically between the waterwheel’s turning spokes. Kherron thought it a gentle way to wake, though he would have liked to feel the sun’s warmth on him in full. A flock of small grey birds cast their shadows upon the Honalei’s deck, heading south downriver. Despite the barge’s groans and hums of travel, the morning was remarkably quiet—until the cabin door burst open.
Uishen came stumbling out of the cabin to the Honalei’s fore, hitching up his trousers as he fumbled to unbuckle his belt. Kherron expected the man to trip over his own bare feet, but the ferryman made it safely to the starboard railing, where he leaned against the wooden slats and relieved himself into the Sylthurst. Kherron couldn’t help but wonder if the man had intended such a brazen disruption of his own morning; it would have saved the man time and a lot of floundering if he’d performed such actions just outside the cabin door.
After coughing and spitting downriver, Uishen fitted his pants and belt back into place, grunted, and turned to look at Kherron. “Morning,” he grumbled, blinking wide. “I’m guessing you’ve never fished before, either.” Of course, the man was right, but Kherron only shrugged. “Then I’ll teach you.”
“I don’t need you to teach me how to fish,” Kherron protested, stooping to roll up the extra pallet on the deck.
“You do if you want to eat,” Uishen replied. “You ate everything else on board.”
Kherron stopped to glare at the man, opening his mouth to object to the hypocritical nature of Uishen’s accusations. The ferryman had neither mentioned a need to ration their stores nor refrained from eating twice what Kherron had the day before. But the sight of the man’s shirtless back as Uishen headed for the tangled web of ropes and trinkets silenced Kherron completely.
A matrix of shining scars crossed the man’s flesh, rising over his shoulders and the back of his neck. Kherron imagined they extended below Uishen’s beltline as well, as they did not stop before the top of his trousers. True, he hadn’t seen the man without a shirt until that moment, but he hadn’t expected to find such a morose history written upon the man’s torn and healed skin. Silently, he finished rolling the pallet and took it to the Honalei’s cabin, where he stowed it just inside the door.
Uishen was busy tugging at the tangled mess on the cabin’s portside outer wall, grumbling to himself. Something that looked like a ball of stitched leather fell from the chaos above, glancing off the ferryman’s head before landing on the deck with a thud. Cursing wildly, Uishen bent over, punched the heavy round object, then lifted it and tossed it with one arm back into the jumbled mass. Kherron didn’t see how the man could possibly expect to pull anything of use from an assemblage so unkept and disorganized, but Uishen managed it. A large fishing net thumped to the ground, and when Uishen caught Kherron watching him, he nodded gruffly for his passenger to seize the other end.
“We’ll tie this off at the taffrail,” Uishen said, gathering the net’s loose middle as he led them to the Honalei’s stern. “Lots of little critters are fond of Honalei. It might be curiosity leads them to follow in her wake, though I like to think they’re overcome by her beauty.”
Kherron glanced up at the man with a frown, hoping this was just another of the ferryman’s jests. But Uishen just gave a wistful smile, unaware of the skeptical gaze upon him. It was impossible to tell when the man spoke with genuine interest or in an earnest attempt to patronize his listeners; when he did not look up to smirk, as he often did, Kherron thought the man quite believed what he’d just said. He shook his head in disbelief and helped Uishen tie the corners of the net to the taffrail posts Uishen indicated, just on either side of the latched gangway. Then they hoisted the ropes overboard and watched the net fan out behind the Honalei, drifting slightly downriver with the tide.
After a moment, Uishen nodded and headed back to the cabin. With the requisite clamor of his rummaging through the cabin’s contents, he emerged again, two wooden poles in hand and a small wooden box under one arm. “Your lesson begins now,” he said with a comically formal nod. When Uishen sat by the starboard railing, laying the poles aside to focus on opening the box in his lap, Kherron couldn’t help but notice the man had chosen nearly the exact same place from which he’d earlier emptied his bladder. Sighing, Kherron steeled himself and sat as well, taking care to avoid any particularly damp area of the deck—from river spray or otherwise.
Uishen removed a large spool of light-colored twine, which seemed almost
translucent in the morning light. “Nettle hemp,” he said, noting Kherron’s curiosity. “I don’t make it myself, of course. Don’t have the time. But the girls at The Back Door sell it for a good price. Sometimes, they’ll even throw it in for free with their other... services.” The man chuckled, unwrapping a length of the twine and cutting it with his teeth. Kherron assumed The Back Door was the tavern in which they’d finally managed to complete their business for this journey; if any of the girls there took to Uishen as Polly had, he imagined they charged the ferryman far more than necessary for their company, calling the nettle hemp a gift as they laughed behind his back.
The man then produced two iron hooks from the box, stringing the twine through each open-eye end and tying them off. Kherron wondered what the extra length of twine at the end of each hook was for until he watched Uishen tie what he called bait to one of them. Kherron nearly punched the man; apparently, the ferryman had found a far more valuable use for gold coins than what they inherently carried. The man had bored a hole at the top of each coin, through which he strung that extra length of nettle hemp and tied it off with a handful of knots. The two gold coins themselves could have bought two men extravagant meals for the entire course of their passage and then some.
Uishen looked up from his work and caught Kherron staring at him once again. The man shrugged, lifting both wooden poles so the hooks and coins dangled from their lines. “It wasn’t my first choice,” he said, handing one of the poles to Kherron. “But there just doesn’t seem to be anything more worth chasing.” With a grin, he flicked the dangling gold coin at the end of his own line and stood.
Wondering whether the ferryman had diligently saved his coin to experiment with as a fishing lure or if Uishen had simply robbed someone to fulfill such an impulse, Kherron followed the man to the starboard railing and waited to be shown what to do. Part of him couldn’t believe he’d paid Uishen to put him to this much work on their journey, and part of him was admittedly grateful for that fact. There was nothing else to do aboard the Honalei, and he did not remotely consider engaging conversation with his companion an option.
Secret of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 2) Page 9
