by Paul S. Kemp
He remembered screaming, remembered the knight who’d cut off the digit apologizing for the mutilation.
Zeeahd’s coughing intensified, turned into a prolonged heave, and the sound pulled Sayeed back into the present. The cats meowed with excitement, circling, tails raised, eyes gleaming as Zeeahd gagged. And finally the felines received what they wished.
Zeeahd’s abdomen visibly roiled under his robes and he vomited forth a long, thick rope of stinking black sputum. The grass it struck smoked, curled, and browned. The cats pounced on the mucous, hissing and clawing at one another, a fierce caterwaul, each lapping at the mucous.
Zeeahd cursed and wiped his mouth.
“Thrice-damned cats,” Sayeed said, stomping a boot on the ground near the felines, splashing them with mud. The cats arched, hissed, and bared their fangs but did not back away from their meal. Sayeed had never seen them eat anything other than the black result of his brother’s expulsions.
“They’re not cats, but damned, indeed,” Zeeahd said. He cleared his throat again and the cats, having devoured the first string of mucous, turned to him, hoping for another meal. When none was forthcoming, they sat on their haunches and licked their paws and chops.
Zeeahd lowered his hood, threw his head back to put his face to the rain. He ran a hand over his thin, black hair. With skin pulled taut to reveal sunken eyes and cavernous cheeks, he looked skeletal, the living dead.
“The purgings only slow the advance of the curse,” Zeeahd said. “I need someone soon, Sayeed. A vessel. Otherwise the curse will run its course.”
Sayeed nodded. Their use of vessels had left a trail of aberrations in their wake.
“Come,” Zeeahd said, and threw up his hood. “We must get to the next village. The urge is strong.” He inhaled as well as his ruined lungs would allow and stared down at the cats. They looked up at him, far too much intelligence in their eyes.
“I can’t let it happen to me,” Zeeahd said softly.
“Let what happen?”
His brother seemed not to hear him and Sayeed was, as always, left to wonder.
The Spellplague had transformed both of them, but differently. Sayeed had been made unable to sleep and increasingly dull to life’s pleasures and pains, his emotions and appreciation of physical sensations had been ground down to nubs.
Zeeahd, on the other hand, had been killed. But the blue fire had not left him dead. Instead, it had somehow filled him with pollution and returned him to life. Sayeed well remembered how Zeeahd looked upon his return: the panicked eyes, the animal scream of terror and pain. He had shivered with cold but, inexplicably, smelled of brimstone, of rot. Zeeahd had pawed frantically at his own body, his breath coming in strained gasps.
“What is it?” Sayeed had asked.
“I’m . . . unchanged?” Zeeahd had said, his tone amazed and relieved. “I was torn, Sayeed, burned, flayed. For centuries. I saw the master of that place and he spoke to me, made me promise to seek. . .”
Sayeed had thought him mad. “Master? Centuries? You were gone only moments.”
Zeeahd had not heard him. “I’m unchanged! Unchanged!”
But he was not unchanged. His laughter had turned to wheezing, then coughing, then his first purging, and both of them had stared in horror at the squirming black mass expelled from his guts.
“Oh, gods,” Zeeahd had said. He’d wept as if he understood some truth that Sayeed did not. “It’s in me still, Sayeed. That place. It’s a curse, and it wants to come out.”
Only later had Sayeed learned that Zeeahd’s soul had gone to Cania, where his brother had forged a pact with Mephistopheles to seek out someone the archdevil could not find alone. And only later had Sayeed learned what the purging actually meant, what it would require, again and again until Mephistopheles set them free of their afflictions.
“Come on,” he said, hating himself for saying it. “We’ll find you someone.”
They walked on, two men who weren’t men and thirteen cats who weren’t cats, bent under the weight of the rain. In time they came upon a packedearth wagon road.
“Must be a village near,” Sayeed said, scanning the shapeless black expanse of the plains. Wisps of shadow clung to the trees and scrubs, a black mist.
Zeeahd nodded, his head bobbing strangely on his neck. His voice, too, sounded odd when he spoke.
“Let’s hope so.”
Gerak awoke before sunrise, or so he judged. Dawn’s light rarely penetrated Sembia’s shadow-shrouded air, so he relied for timekeeping on the instincts he’d sharpened as a soldier.
He stared up at the ceiling beams of the cottage, listening to the soft roll of distant thunder through the shuttered windows, the patter of rain on the woodshingled roof. He hoped it was ordinary precipitation. Ten days earlier a stinking black rain had fallen, and whatever it had borne in its drops had fouled the soil. Soon after, the barley crop had begun to wither and the autumn vegetables— especially the pumpkins—had browned on the vine. They’d done what they could to minimize the loss, but the whole village keenly felt the absence of a greenpriest of Chauntea. The villagers’ own prayers to the Earth Mother, whispered in small, secret gatherings, as if in fear the Shadovar in their distant cities and floating citadel would somehow overhear, went unanswered. Winter would bring hardship for them all. Another black rain would ruin the harvest altogether.
He and Elle would have to put up as much food as they could before first snow.
And that meant he would have to risk a hunt.
The thought of it sped his heart, although he wasn’t sure if that was out of fear of what he might encounter on the plains or out of fear of Elle’s reaction.
She lay beside him, her form covered in the tattered quilts, her breathing the deep, regular intake of sleep.
Moving slowly, so as not to awaken her, he swung his legs off of the strawstuffed mattress and sat on the side of the bed. He tried to squelch a cough but only half managed. Elle did not stir.
He sat there for a time, his bare feet flat on the cold wood floor, and waited for wakefulness. The damp air summoned the aches that lurked in his joints and muscles, and he massaged first one shoulder, then another. Age was turning him brittle.
He tried to swallow away the foul taste of morning but could not summon the spit. He grabbed the tin cup on the bedside table, swished the leftover tea, and drank it down. Cold and bitter, like the morning.
He rubbed the back of his neck and considered the one-room cottage, lit faintly in the glow of the hearth’s embers: furniture he’d made from the straight, dark limbs of broadleaf trees, bowls and cups and pans that had served three generations. He tried to imagine their baby crawling on the floor, but could not quite do it. He tried to imagine how they would provide for the baby and could not quite do that, either.
Elle’s pregnancy had been a surprise to them both.
Gerak had resigned himself to childlessness long before. Ten seasons of marriage had produced not a single pregnancy, so they had assumed one or both of them was sterile. At the time, Gerak had thought it just as well. The world seemed too dark for children.
And then Elle had told him, her voice quaking.
“I think I’m with child, Gerak.”
The joy he’d felt had surprised him, as if the child were a key to a locked room inside him that held happiness, that held possibility. In a moment, the stakes of his life had been raised—a child would rely on him.
The realization terrified him.
He wondered if they should leave Fairelm. Many of their friends and neighbors had already abandoned the village—the Milsons and Rabbs the most recent. They had braved the darkness, the Shadovar, and the Shadovar’s creatures, and made for the sun. He didn’t know if they’d gone west for Daerlun or north for the Dales. He wasn’t sure it mattered. War or the threat of war seemed everywhere in Sembia. The big cities were the sites of musters, the borders were the sites of battles, and the villages and towns in between were left to fend for themselves. He
didn’t know what to do.
Elle was still able to travel, and they owned a wagon, a pack horse. They could sell their remaining chickens, gather up their goods, and head northeast. Gerak knew how to handle a blade and was matchless with his bow. Maybe they could avoid the soldiers, and Gerak could protect them from the creatures that prowled the plains.
He tried to coax another drop of tea from the cup. Nothing. He tried to coax from himself the will to leave. Nothing.
Leaving seemed too dangerous, and felt too much like surrender, like a betrayal, and neither was in him. He had been raised in the cottage, as had his father and grandfather before him. And despite the perpetual shadow that covered Sembia, despite the dire creatures that prowled the countryside, despite the sometimes harsh rule of the Shadovar, his father and grandfather had managed to eke out a living from the land. They had taken pride in it.
And so did he.
He hadn’t always. He’d thought a farmer’s life contemptible in his youth, and had run off to serve in one of the Shadovar’s many wars. He’d killed more than a dozen men with his bow, but only one, the last, with his blade. Killing felt different up close. Gerak had seen his reflection in the dying man’s eyes and that had been all he wanted of war ever again.
He ran a hand through his hair—it was getting long—and scratched at the three-day beard that covered his cheeks. He exhaled, ready at last to start another sunless day. As he started to rise, Elle’s voice broke the quiet and stopped him.
“I’m awake,” she said.
He sat back down. He knew her tone well enough to understand that her thoughts had probably veered close to his own. She, too, was worried about the future. He put his hand on the rise of her hip.
“You’ve been awake this whole time?”
She rolled over and looked up at him. Her skin looked less pale in the light of the embers. Her long, dark hair formed a cloud on the bolster. Under the quilt, she had one hand on her belly, which was just beginning to swell with their child.
“The rain awakened me hours ago. I started worrying for the crop and then my mind whirled and I couldn’t fall back asleep.”
“Try not to worry. We’ll manage. Are you cold?”
Without waiting for an answer, he rose, walked across the cool floor, and threw two logs onto the embers. The logs caught flame almost immediately and he returned to the bed and sat. She had not moved.
“Are you worried?” she asked.
He knew better than to offer her a falsehood. “Of course I am. I worry about how we’ll feed ourselves and the baby, mostly. But then I remind myself that my parents endured difficult years, too, especially after I left to fight, and yet here this cottage stands. The crops will recover and we’ll endure.”
“Yes, but . . . do you worry about . . . the world?”
He took her meaning and offered her a falsehood after all. “The world is too big for my worry. I’m trying to focus on our bellies.”
“And if the Shadovar come for a quota of the crop to supply the troops? They say there’s war in the Dales.”
The fire caused shadows to dance on the walls, and Gerak flashed on memories of his military service, when he’d served the Shadovar in battle against Cormyreans.
“They say lots of things, and the Shadovar haven’t come for a quota in years. The farms near the cities must produce enough. Or perhaps they eat magic in the cities these days.”
She did not smile at his poor joke but at least it smoothed the worried furrows from her brow. She inhaled deeply, as if to purge the concerns that plagued her, and when she exhaled a playful look came into her eye, the same look he’d first seen on her ten years ago, the look that had caused him to want her as a wife.
“You snore loudly.”
“I know. You should nudge me.”
“No,” she said, and snuggled more deeply into the quilts. “I like the sound sometimes.”
“You like strange things, Sweets.”
“Taking you for a husband seals that ward, I’d say.”
“I’d say,” he agreed with a smile. He bent and kissed her on the crooked nose she’d broken years before when she’d stepped on a rake. He placed his hand over hers, on her belly, so that both of them had their unborn child in their palms.
“We’ll be all right,” he said and wanted her to believe it.
“I know,” she said, and he knew she wanted to believe it.
He stood and stretched, groaned when his muscles protested. “Why’re you up so early?” she asked.
He hesitated for a moment, braced himself, then dived in. “I’m going on a hunt, Elle.”
“What?” Instantly she sounded fully awake. The grooves had returned to her brow, deeper than before.
“We need to put up some meat,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, it’s not safe. We saw Sakkors in the night sky only last month. The Shadovar keep their creatures away from the villages but let them wander the plains. Only soldiers and those with official charters walk the roads safely.”
“Neither the Shadovar nor their flying city will take an interest in a lone hunter. They just want no one in or out of Sembia without their permission, especially during a time of war.”
“No one has come to the village in months, Gerak. Why do you think that is? It’s not safe.”
He could not deny it. Peddlers and priests and caravans had once roamed the Sembian countryside, tending to the villages. But Fairelm had seen nothing in a long while, nothing but old Minser the peddler, who seemed to enjoy spinning tales more than selling wares. But Minser had not returned in more than a month. The village seemed to have been forgotten out in the dark of the plains, all alone and surrounded by monsters.
“There are worse things than Shadovar,” she said. “Don’t go. We can manage—”
“I have to. I’ll be gone not more than two days—”
“Two days!” she said, half sitting up.
“Two days,” he said, nodding, his resolve firming up as he spoke. “And when I return, we’ll have a stag or three to dress and smoke. And that’ll keep us in meat through the winter and then some. You and the baby need more than roots and tubers and we need the chickens for eggs.”
“I need my husband and the baby its father.”
He bent and put his hand on her brow. She covered it tightly and lay back, as if she had no intention of letting go.
“Nothing will happen to me.”
“How can you know?”
“I’m a soldier, Elle.”
“You were a soldier. Now you’re a farmer.”
“Nothing will happen to me.”
She squeezed his hand. “Swear it.”
“I swear.”
“If you see something bigger than a deer, you run away. Promise.” “I promise.”
She gave his hand another squeeze and let it go.
He cleared his throat and went to the chest near the hearth, feeling Elle’s eyes on him. He opened the lid and removed the weapon belt and the broadsword, still oiled and sharp, that he’d earned as partial payment for his military service. He had not worn more than an eating knife and dagger in what felt like a lifetime, and when he strapped on the heavier blade, the weight felt awkward on his waist.
“I used to feel awkward without this on,” he said, and Elle said nothing.
His bow sat in its deerskin case near the chest, his two quivers, both stuffed with arrows, beside it. He undid the tie on the case and removed the yew shaft. He strung it with practiced ease and placed his hand in the grip. It felt as smooth and familiar as Elle’s skin. He imagined himself sighting along an arrow, a stag in his sight.
His talent with the longbow had been a matter of comment among his fellow soldiers, and he had not let his skills atrophy over the years, even after taking up the plow for the sword.
“Wait for the rain to end, at least,” she said.
He strapped the quivers on, did a quick count on his various arrows. “The sooner I leave, the sooner I’ll r
eturn.”
“You’ll get sick from the wet.”
“I won’t.”
“Then at least eat something before you go.”
“I can eat when I—”
“Eat, Gerak. The rain and cold is bad enough. I won’t have you out there with an empty stomach.”
He smiled, nodded, went to the small table he’d made, and broke off a large chunk of two day old bread from a loaf. With it, he swabbed yesterday’s stew slop from the bottom of the cauldron hanging near the fire. Elle watched as he ate. There was no meat in the turnip and kale stew and the absence only strengthened his resolve to hunt. He would fill his waterskin in the pond and could forage for additional food in the field, should he need it.
“You eat, too, Elle.”
“I will. The baby’s always hungry. Takes after its father, I suppose.” He went to the bed once more and gave her a lingering kiss.
“There’s ample stew and bread. A few eggs in the coop. I’ll be back before you know it.”
She stayed strong, as he knew she would. “You’re leaving me here with none but the fools and cowards.”
“You manage fools and cowards quite well, Sweets.”
“Again, I think our marriage seals that ward.” She smiled as she spoke and he thanked the gods for it.
“I think I like you better asleep.”
She turned serious. “Be careful, Gerak.”
“I will,” he said, and pulled on his boots and cloak. “Go see Ana while I am gone.”
“A good idea,” she said. “I’ll take her a couple eggs. They’re suffering.”
“I know. See you soon.”
He opened the door and the wind rushed in.
“Wait,” she called. “Take my locket. For good fortune.” She leaned over and took the locket, a bronze sun on a leather lanyard, from the side table.
“Elle, that’s—”
“Take it,” she insisted. “Minser sold it to my mother. Told her it’d been blessed by one of Tymora’s priests.”
He came back to the bed, took the locket, secreted it in a pocket of his cloak, and gave her another kiss.
