‘Do not be so careless.’
Instantly, the water collapsed and fell back into the river, making no more sound than if Kherron had jumped in himself.
A wet, crunching smack filled the air, and Uishen cackled. “Biggest pike I’ve ever seen,” the man exclaimed, and Kherron turned slowly to look at him. The ferryman lay sprawled across the deck beside his enormous catch, which had fallen motionless within a puddle of water tinged pink with blood. The thing’s head no longer resembled what it had been—flattened and crunched now upon the deck—and Uishen let his wooden box of supplies fall from his hand. “This fellow made a worthy opponent,” he added, panting, and wiped his brows with a forearm. “Got me too, before the end.”
Kherron imagined the bloody water came from both fish and man. Uishen’s right forearm did, in fact, sport multiple slashes from where the nettle twine had cut into his flesh. The fish might have also gotten in a bite or two during the struggle; Uishen brought a bleeding finger to his mouth and sucked on it briefly. Then he turned to Kherron with an unsettling grin.
“Manage to bring in anything yourself?”
For a moment, Kherron wondered if he should try feigning surprise at the fact that his fishing rod no longer leaned against the railing where he’d left it. The thought of Uishen’s angry retribution at the loss of such tools unnerved him greatly; madmen were said to be most insane when spurned. He opened his mouth to say something, then Uishen barked another laugh.
“Well, look at that,” the ferryman shouted, nodding behind Kherron.
Whirling around, Kherron expected to see the fist in the river rising up again, preparing to correct its mistake of helping him in the first place. Instead, he found Uishen’s second wooden rod on the deck, beside which flapped two medium-sized silver fish. Their mouths gaped open and shut, their tails flashing in the sun as they thumped helplessly against the deck.
“I’ve never seen that happen,” Uishen added, then pushed himself to standing with a grunt. He stalked across the deck, passed Kherron, and stooped to grab the Sky Metal blade by the hilt. A flutter of panic moved through Kherron as the thought of Uishen striking him with his own weapon entered his mind. Had the man seen the living water, heard its words, and now decided he was better off without his passenger’s dangerous habit of attracting such things? But the man merely knelt beside the two smaller fish, bringing the point of the blade through each one of their skulls in turn. When he finished, he rose again, turned toward Kherron, and offered the dagger hilt-first.
Kherron took it with a nod, then glanced at the blade and wiped it off on his pants before returning it to the sheath at his belt. When he looked back up, Uishen was eyeing him with an odd mixture of curiosity and amusement.
The man narrowed his eyes at his passenger and raised a brow. “Interesting weapon.”
Relief flooded Kherron; he recognized Uishen could not possibly have seen or heard the fist of water that had so intervened on his behalf. He did not think the ferryman could have refrained from remarking upon such a thing, and he was incredibly grateful that Uishen had been so preoccupied in those pivotal few moments. “It is,” he replied.
“And the scabbard.” Uishen nodded toward Kherron’s belt. “Loro’s work.”
It was not a question in the least. “He had it ready for me before he... called on you.” He didn’t think it wise to mention Uishen having required help in rousing him from sleep before they’d embarked.
Uishen gave a slow, shallow nod followed by a hum of acknowledgement. Kherron couldn’t tell if he’d meant it in conceit or curiosity, but the ferryman brushed past him again and toward his monstrous catch. “I prefer to use my own,” he said. He looked back at Kherron with a grin. “We’ll be feasting today. Might not even have to do this again before we make port.” Then he set to work on removing the iron hook from the pike’s throat.
Kherron turned to attempt the same with the two fish he hadn’t truly caught, only to find that neither of them had bitten the hook or the gold coin. He remained, as he’d been before, an inexperienced fisherman.
Chapter 11
In general, cold weather made movement difficult, stiffening the joints and diminishing sensation. The salty spray hurtling over the cliffs and misting the air only intensified the cold, but Lorraii had lived and fought and survived in every climate imaginable. This excluded, of course, the places Torrahs had described to her—places through which he’d traveled alone and considered himself fortunate to have left. She thought his tales unbelievable and more than a little embellished, but the Wanderer’s journeys—real or imagined—did not concern her. She’d been promised the opportunity for retribution and reward, when the time came. Nothing else drove her.
With a slashing, meticulous swing, she brought the wooden staff to a ready position once more, ending her forms. For the last four hours, she’d made the practice weapon sing in her hands, though it had been created without precision and cut to balance awkwardly on one end. The Brotherhood had argued vehemently against arming her with anything else; either they had not noticed the daggers on her person or, more foolishly, believed small weapons posed a lesser danger in her hands. It had not mattered. Lorraii had trained with a staff under her father’s guidance, and she abhorred the cumbersome weight of long swords; any other armament of knights and soldiers and metal-clad men worked against speed, agility, and lightness of foot. She’d been known for her accuracy with a longbow at one time, but she had not carried one for many years. Her daggers were enough, and she had decided to keep these hidden within the lining of her boots, opting instead to maintain the readiness of both body and mind with this farce of a staff.
It had given her great pleasure to see the color drain from the two Brothers’ faces when they’d offered her the training weapon. One glance had been enough to know the staff lacked in all efficient qualities, but she’d taken her time anyways in making a show of examining the thing. The old men in robes of grey and deep purple had blanched at her response, which she’d delivered in the form of growling her disapproval, punctuated by a string of curses they no doubt had never heard from a woman’s mouth. But she’d accepted the staff in the end, amused by their terrified condemnation of her presence. Anything was better than another day sequestered within the stifling stone walls of Deeprock Spire, wiling away the hours in wasteful silence. She’d honed her blades to the sharpest points of their potential, and there had been nothing else within the place to capture her attention or satisfy her restlessness.
Torrahs most certainly took his time, no matter with whom he dealt, but he’d never forsaken his word to her. As she’d requested, she’d been delivered an area outside the towers to maintain her awareness and stretch herself physically. This consisted only of a small patch of flat ground beside the stone structure itself, abutting the jagged cliffs dropping into the sea. Short, coarse brown grass grew sparsely here, and the ocean spray had made the ground annoyingly soft, more mud than anything else. But there was open sky above her, however gray and cold, and she now had a temporary purpose on which to focus herself for the immediate future.
For the last two days, she’d awoken before sunrise to storm through the towers and move across the wet ground. In such a place as this with so little to do, she took her entertainment where she could. Each morning, two Brothers had been assigned to escort her to her promised outdoor arena, groaning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes as they fought to match her pace with their frail shambling. The entire Brotherhood had grown old, weak, and lazy, whether or not they’d maintained any semblance of physical conditioning during the prime of their years. Lorraii assumed they had not had cause to disrupt their languid habits in some time, and she’d taken it upon herself to compel them into an anxious, wary sense of urgency as soon as she burst through the doors of her chambers and down the hallway. She gleefully savored both their distrust of her and the fact that their cowardice prevented them from voicing it.
What satisfied her the most, by far, was that each
man with the misfortune of being appointed her escort for the morning was also required to stand guard through the duration of her forms. That was a sham, of course, a mockery of their self-proclaimed and nonexistent authority; it would take her less time to cut them down than it did to tighten and tie the laces of her own vest. But she enjoyed immensely the sight of their haggard features, weary and cold, as they blinked away the saltwater mist and tried not to shiver. Four hours was a long time to stand in such weather doing nothing, especially when one was not accustomed to the practice. She expected one of them to collapse from the strain after multiple such mornings, though she supposed the fear instilled in them by the sight of her hacking and slashing on end with a poorly formed instrument was enough to keep them on their feet.
Now, as she finished her routine, she thrust the butt of the staff into the mud, brought her feet firmly together, and took a deep breath. The conclusion of her diligent practice had been ceremonious before now; the Ouroke Warlord Ruxii, her father, had instilled in all his warriors a reverence for the act and its purpose. Here, on the merciless shores of the Amneas and in the presence of these aging charlatans, Lorraii could not allow herself to perform those last few details. The thought alone of the Brotherhood bearing witness to the sacred rites of the Ouroke sullied the memory of her people. Even so, Ruxii’s words echoed in her mind. ‘The entire world is both your enemy and your ally. You are its fiercest instrument.’ This precept dictated most facets of Ouroke customs—varying widely in meaning and application from one capacity to the next—though Lorraii had always felt its significance most severely in the call to battle. She acknowledged the purpose of those words and of her role in this intolerable place, then released herself from her closing stance and hoisted the staff from the soft earth.
The midmorning sun gave little warmth through the thick cover of cloud blanketing the sky, and she looked forward to a hot meal in her belly after the chill. Though her exercises had moved her blood quickly and brought both feeling to her limbs and a light sheen of sweat, her raised temperature would not last long in this weather.
With a grunt, she stormed past the nearest Brother, shoving the staff against his folded arms and releasing it. The man was, of course, too slow to react to her brusque discarding of the weapon, and she heard the staff fall to the ground with a thud. She’d been given clear instructions, when they’d finally agreed to let her outside to train, to return the practice weapons immediately upon finishing her work. The precaution was juvenile and unnecessary, but she complied for the sake of biding her time. That did not mean she had to be civil about it; civility itself had never been part of her existence.
The entrance hall within Deeprock Spire echoed with a resounding boom when she burst through the thick iron door, which groaned on its hinges in protest. A small gathering of Brothers sat at the long table beside the largest hearth, finishing their meal with goblets and wine and seemingly no care for structure or time. A cooking pot of thick, steaming stew hung from a hook beside the fire, and Lorraii helped herself to an empty wooden bowl from the stack of them on the table. She ladled out a meal for herself in silence, feeling the wary glances of the old men behind her. When she turned, four pairs of eyes jerked uneasily away to avoid her gaze.
She approached the table slowly once more, amused when the thin, delicate-looking man on whom she focused her attention quivered at her approach. This was, she remembered, the very same Brother who had fainted on their first failed attempt in the tower. When she leaned toward him, a whimper escaped his lips. The color drained from his normally quite pale face as he fought not to cringe away from her. With a shallow snort, Lorraii seized two large slices of bread from the tray upon the table behind him, then swept her gaze over the other Brothers before taking her leave. Though only the sound of the fire crackling in the hearth followed her down the hallway, she liked to imagine she heard a collective sigh of relief from the pitiful old fools at her departure.
Her leather boots made little sound over the stone floors—padding softly in a thin, neglected layer of dust—and she ripped a huge bite of bread from the first slice. Though she’d spent very little time within archaic structures like Deeprock Spire, having lived mostly in Ouroke transient encampments, she recognized how much there was to be desired in the upkeep of this place. The wood stores were poorly managed, what little firewood remaining having been allowed to grow damp and nearly rotten. Every hearth she’d seen had not been efficiently cleared of ash for quite some time. The floors were un-swept, the upholstery frayed and eaten by moths, the straw pallets thin and infrequently changed. What little the Brotherhood had in the way of employed help on site consisted of scrawny, highly eager, irritatingly incompetent adolescents, and they called them initiates.
But it could not be said that the Brotherhood, holed up on the unforgiving coast of the Amneas Sea, did not care for some of the finer things worthy of their station. They’d had a single visitor in this barren place since she and Torrahs had arrived, though the man and his four mules had drawn an irregularly large cart of provisions through the squelching mud and freezing spray. A collection of irregularly large purses bulging with coin had also changed hands, meaning the old men had since pooled together their funds to pay for luxury in place of their original omniscient intentions, now defunct. It was impossible to imagine otherwise.
Lorraii had also noticed that no Brother dressed himself in less than robes of the finest quality, meticulously mended and washed with care. Those who adorned themselves with rings and pendants also boasted rare, glistening jewels of impeccable cut, some of which glinted from ceremonial knives. Above all, they seemed to spare no expense on the food.
Though the first and second meals of the day were simple—most of the culinary flair reserved for the feast-like suppers directly disproportionate to the everyday occasion—everything the Brotherhood consumed was well-flavored, fresh, and remarkably rich. The steam wafting beneath her nose from the bowl in her hand piqued her appetite as she walked—venison, today, it seemed, and a few brightly colored vegetables amidst the softened chunks of potato. There was cream, too, and combined with the spices so particularly favored by the Brotherhood, it might even manage to override the perpetual saltiness of her mouth since she’d arrived.
Lorraii reached the door to her chambers, which connected with those provided for Torrahs, though the Brotherhood no longer stationed any of their own in the hall outside the living quarters. But she did not stop there, choosing instead to wander the halls. Eating the stew as she walked succeeded greatly both in filling her belly and in returning some feeling to her extremities. If her skin had not been so completely covered by the rust-colored runes of her people and her legacy, it most likely would have burned red from the cold.
She had not thought heavy skins and warmer dress would be necessary so early in the autumn season, but she’d also never been this far east. The Amneas coast left much to be desired, mainly in the fact that there was nothing here but rocks and cliffs, muddy banks, cold salt air, and endlessly grey skies. The Brotherhood had chosen this place for some unfathomable reason, and when she’d asked Torrahs why they had so willingly isolated themselves in such a bleary, unforgiving place, he’d merely mentioned something about metal meeting sky. But he’d refused to elaborate, and Lorraii did not care enough to press further.
She wished now, with some reluctance, that he’d informed her of the awful weather that was to be their daily companion. She would have hunted for a new bear or wolf skin, as she did during the winter months in climates requiring extra warmth. Her first bearskin cloak remained hidden in a cave just north of Shatterback Pass in the Bladeshale Mountains. While the Ouroke had been a nomadic race and lived with few possessions—both for ease of travel and in congruence with their doctrine—she’d been loath in her younger years to simply leave that cloak with the rest of her few belongings when Ruxii had led them through the mountains. This was, of course, against their customs to harbor pride in and longing for such mat
erial things, but her flesh back then had only accepted a fraction of her current runes, and that bear had been her first kill. She had not once gone back for it in all the years since, but she thought of it now.
Retrieving it would have brought dishonor both on her and her people, but that hardly mattered now. Lorraii was the only Ouroke in this world—the single remaining vessel of Ruxii’s legacy and the sole bearer of his vengeance. No one remained to stop her or punish her for such an act. She could easily hunt again for another, but this coast was barren, and she would be required to journey west for days before finding any suitable game. And she could not leave Deeprock Spire. She had given her word, and she would ride this out until the moment she seized retribution and avenged the decimation of her people. No doubt the Brotherhood harbored skins and furs for the weather, most likely piled away somewhere in a dusty room; the aged fools seemed never to set foot beyond the stone walls of their order. The idea of requesting the use of their unused cloaks, however, filled her with more disdain than the prospect of training alone amidst the icy chill in only her leather breeches and vest.
These still dripped with the ocean mist that had clung to her for four hours outside, the leather cold and hard, but she knew they would loosen quickly now as she moved.
The weariness of inaction remained her greatest enemy in this place. Torrahs spent his days mostly in the library, poring over whatever knowledge lay hidden in the dusty array of volumes. Lorraii never understood the value of such things; everything she’d ever needed to know had been shown to her through experience, the pulse of battle, the whispers of her tattoos, and the secret wisdom of her people passed down through time. But it seemed important to the Wanderer, and she’d learned quickly not to attempt dissuading him from his interests.
Secret of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 2) Page 11
