“There is a sphere,” Malin said, “in the sky. Coming this way. No, not exactly a sphere. Very close in shape, however. Do you have any idea what it is?”
“An Orb Dragon?” Inga said doubtfully.
Joy’s eyes widened. “I know exactly what that is. Friends Peersdatter and Jorgensdatter, I am about to give you a new adventure story.”
CHAPTER 15
A JOURNEY TO KANTENJORD, CONTINUED
(as penned by Katta, called the Mad)
While I hesitate to append anything to the fine calligraphy of my companion Haytham ibn Zakwan, his current preoccupation compels me to act in his stead. Indeed, I feel a duty to write for him, as he made it possible for me to write with any clarity at all.
Among Haytham’s inventions is a thing he calls, I think, a lail-qalam or, more in the manner of northwesterly scholars, a noctograph. It is a box with a constrained writing window, within which are held two sheets of paper, one of the ordinary sort, the other suffused with a special ink concoction. By writing in the window with a stylus, the special paper transfers its ink neatly to the ordinary one. Haytham claims he invented the thing to enable journal entries on night journeys. I mostly believe him; it would be unlike him to invent anything solely for a friend. However, it is quite useful to me, as it allows me to make more legible notes than ever before. With its help I commence the longest account I’ve ever written.
In the literature of the Plateau of Geam, where I long studied, such a work would have three aspects: the “outer version,” concerned with external action; the “inner version,” describing the author’s meditative state and other spiritual pursuits; and the “secret version,” wherein the author confides one’s deepest visions and miraculous experiences. Given that this account will likely never reach Geam, and may not even escape this balloon, I shall forgo the inner and secret versions, though I will comment on my mental state, and certain events may strike the reader as miraculous.
The shaman Northwing and I were loath to abandon Haytham with his head wound, but the soldiers of Soderland gave us little choice. Northwing is a powerful individual but was spent from the exertion of bringing us across the sea and surviving the troll-sent storm. I was in better shape, but my gifts are mainly in the monster-slaying line, and while the forces of Soderland were certainly intimidating, they were hardly monstrous. Thus we consented to be guests at the Fortress in Svanstad.
I cannot say the stay was unpleasant. The Fortress’s exterior of orange stone may seem imposing at first, but closer up the traveler will encounter many more windows than would be prudent for a castle of war, far too many wide entrances to be truly secure. The Fortress is more a statement of power than an expression of it.
The knowledgeable reader will now wonder how I, who am blind, can have perceived all these matters. I absorb more than one might assume. I am of course alert to descriptions given by my companions, but also, even in the absence of my gift for perceiving evil (of which, much more later) I make great use of my ears, nose, and skin in considering my surroundings. It is not so much that these senses have become stronger, as that all our senses, yours, mine, and those of the dog barking down your street, are far more powerful than we can ever master. Each of your glances absorbs more information than you can truly make sense of, and thus your mind prunes the forest of perception like a brutal gardener. So, too, your ears take in an avalanche of noise, out of which your mind plucks a few rocks. It is for this reason that the Undetermined, founder of my faith, bade us to still our minds and let the perceptions wash over us, so we might better understand how thought and perception lead us into confusion.
When disease took my sight in my long-ago youth, I mourned. I might have taken up, like Northwing, the path of a taiga shaman, for I was already apprenticed as such. But in the absence of sight I could not make sense of the teachings. I know now that I might have found other means of interpreting the spirit world, but I would have had to invent all my own tricks, and at the time both I and my teacher thought this impossible. I withdrew into solitude for many days.
But though I abandoned the world, the world did not abandon me. The chirping of birds, the cool pressure of falling snow, the musk of reindeer, the taste of woodsmoke in my people’s tents—these things teased me back to life. I emerged from the cave of my mind a new person. The old me was gone; blind Deadfall, the new name I chose, stood in his place. Yet I was not dead, not fallen. My mind was learning to take more from my other senses, to help build a notion of my surroundings. I paid close attention to tone of voice, stride, scent of sweat in understanding others. I discerned the locations of objects from echoes, the direction of the sun from fine gradations of warmth upon my body. The process of mastering my surroundings can be slower than yours, who have sight. But I sometimes think I am less often fooled.
“It’s impressive,” Northwing said as we passed through the gates of the Fortress, “if you like that kind of thing. We are riding through a gate from the town proper into a courtyard.”
“Yes, a stone courtyard, fenced by flat-faced buildings at least three stories high. There are many windows and doors, and a large number of soldiers awaiting us.”
“Now you’re just showing off,” Northwing said. “Though you’re right.” The shaman hesitated. “Unless the place is saturated with evil . . .”
“No, I’ve seen no evil here. I am just acquainted with stone and sound.”
“All right, well, the uniforms are blue and the walls are orange. So there.”
“Thank you, Northwing.”
“Don’t mention it. Ah, here I think are our hosts. A man and a woman, or so I assume, both approaching middle age, bearing a family resemblance. They are not uniformed and wear garish outfits studded with pieces of meaningless metal.”
“You and I wear pieces of metal,” I reminded the shaman.
“Mine are not meaningless but bear the images of spirit animals. Yours do too, but of course they are meaningless in your case, since you abandoned the call of the shaman.”
I am always grateful to Northwing for providing me many opportunities to enlarge my tolerance and patience. “They are meaningful to me as tokens of my past.”
“How many years has it been since you left our people?”
“You were not even born.”
“Are you older even than Imago Bone?”
“When I was a boy, there were still three moons in the sky. But that is another story. Let’s attend to this one.”
“You do the talking. You’re nicer. And I’m reaching out to the local animals. I love big buildings. Always full of rats . . .”
I cannot deny that I am more sociable than Northwing. It is a trait I learned early, for a man who would explore the world blind must make friends swiftly. As the horses came to a stop I bowed in the saddle, waiting for our hosts to speak.
“Welcome,” came a woman’s voice, strong and somewhat amused, “to the Fortress of Svanstad. I am Princess Corinna, and this is Prince Ragnar. Please pardon the involuntary nature of your arrival. These are troubled times, and it is not every day that a flying craft crashes upon our soil. Is it suitable that we speak in Kantentongue?”
I have rendered her words as well as I can reconstruct them, though in truth I was still struggling with the language at the time. I am quick to learn languages, a skill of long practice, but I had never traveled this far. I answered, “I can speak it. I think I am better able to speak it than my companion.” This was not meant as a slight of Northwing, though it was the simple truth. Rather, it might provide cover in the future. “I am Katta, a wandering monk, and this is Northwing, a shaman of the taiga.”
“Come inside and be refreshed. We have much to discuss.”
“May I first inquire what will happen to our friend?”
Prince Ragnar, beside her, spoke. His voice conveyed deep irritation, as though we had interrupted something he considered much more important. “He is going to rest at a farm near your craft. You will see him soon enough. Come.
”
So, we were prisoners, but comfortable, politely treated prisoners. I have experienced worse things. As Northwing, communing with her rats, declined to tell me anything, I tapped with my staff as we entered the Fortress, gaining a sense of stone floors and oak walls. There was a slight tinkle of crystal chandeliers overhead and a hum of metal armor on either side.
“You,” Ragnar said in surprise. “You are a blind man.”
“That is one of many things that I am.”
“Extraordinary. I couldn’t be sure before. Even now I confess I half-suspect you of acting.”
“It can be difficult to prove a lack, Prince Ragnar, though I suppose I could arrange it. I hope you will not demand it, however.”
“My brother is a better host than that,” Princess Corinna declared. “I suspect your story is a most wonderful one, Katta, and well suited to the library.”
Libraries are always tantalizing things, for gifted though I am, I cannot read the inked page. But I have had many pleasant hours in such places, listening to others recite. To have a meal there, however, was a new experience. The chamber was an upper-story room with a wooden floor and book-lined walls on three sides, with windows interrupting the stacks. The windows were open this afternoon, and breezes fluttered the tapestries upon the fourth wall. Tables wide enough to spread many volumes filled the floor, and servants shifted heavy oak chairs to accommodate four people to the accompaniment of grunts and scrapes.
Seated, we enjoyed salmon, bread, cheese, and tea. The cheese was not altogether agreeable, but the bread and tea were pleasant, and the salmon took me back to my youth.
“You may be wondering why the king is not seeing you,” Princess Corinna was saying.
“I am too unacquainted with your land to wonder at such things,” I said honestly.
“You are either ignorant or diplomatic,” Prince Ragnar said. “As I am neither I will say it openly. The old king, our grandfather, having outlived the old queen and his mind shaken by battle, abdicated for his son after the wars of unification. The new king, Corinna’s and my father, was ravaged by plague, the same plague that killed Corinna’s mother the queen. As such Soderland is a kingdom in limbo, with its true king a barely conscious shell of a man, and its old king too unsteady to retake the reins.”
Corinna interrupted, her tone gentle but insisting on commanding the conversation. “We were but children at the time, Katta, is it? Ragnar took command of the army, and I of the court, and we stretched our advisors to the limit. We defied all expectation by avoiding a civil war. Ragnar is my elder, you see, but he was fathered out of wedlock and cannot inherit the crown. I am a woman and thus considered by many fools to be ill suited to rulership. One day I will be queen, but that day is a long way off.”
“Yet,” Ragnar said, his voice harsh, “my half-sister is queen in all but title, and I am her right hand. No matter how many scheming nobles try to divide us. So there is no disrespect intended in meeting you ourselves. An audience with our father or grandfather might be . . . counterproductive.”
Northwing blinked, returning to us. A rustling in one corner confirmed my guess we were now observed by rats. “No need to apologize for how you handle things,” Northwing said. “You wouldn’t believe how many ways people are governed. Most of them bad.”
“Ah,” said Corinna, “thank you, sir, Northwing . . . yes?”
“Yes,” said Northwing, not trying to deny the assumption of masculinity.
“Well,” Corinna said, studying us two foreign “men,” “that is our strange country, and welcome to it. You are quite a mystery to us. How did you come to be here?”
“Katta can tell it better,” Northwing said at once, laying a great burden on me but also the freedom to arrange it as I would.
And so I told how we befriended an inventor of Mirabad, who had flown a balloon to the steppes and landed among the Karvaks, our people’s neighbors, and how later we set off to explore more of the world at Haytham’s side. I pretended primitiveness and emphasized our sense of wonder at the mighty places of the West.
I had the impression Corinna and Ragnar were not quite believing in the primitiveness, and that they sensed the numerous gaping crevasses in the path of my tale. “And so you flew alone?” Ragnar asked. “No other balloons?”
“Just us,” I said. “Though the Karvaks of the steppes were interested in adopting Haytham’s methods.”
“We may be interested ourselves,” Corinna said. “Well, you must be tired. Servants will show you to your rooms. I will warn you openly that we are cautious, and until we are sure you are harmless and truthful, you will be guarded. Otherwise, you are guests of the Crown.”
It was not such a bad thing, to be a guest of the Crown. We were afforded fine meals, which, although sometimes strange, were an agreeable change from tough, dry traveler’s food. I normally avoid meat, but there was a paucity of vegetables in Kantenjord in the winter. To compromise I developed a taste for goat cheese.
Escorted, we were able to explore the Fortress and the city of Svanstad, which was quite a pleasant place aside from the ubiquitous odor of fish—fresh fish, dry fish, rotting fish, rotting pickled fish prepared as some mad substitute for food, and so on. We toured the Swan cathedral with its ethereal-sounding choir and the street of the traders with wares as unexpected as Mirabad coffee and Amberhorn incense. We walked along the waterfront, and Northwing described a delirious variety of ships—knarrs, longships, clinkers, caravels, galleys, plus two dhows and a sleek galleon from jungled Kpalamaa. I enjoyed the descriptions much as you might appreciate tales of imaginary creatures, for my home has long been the heart of what some Westerners call the Continent of the Young Sun, and I have rarely heard the ocean.
Back at the Fortress, Northwing and I discovered that a couple of the servants were sufficiently adventurous to share our beds, though we did our best to keep such activities quiet so as not to trip over any local taboos. We saw nothing of Corinna after the first day, but Ragnar was a compassionate if irritable keeper, pressing us for information on every land we’d seen and, I believe, poking at the gaps in our stories.
Late on the third day, much recovered, I discovered in my meditations a recurring feeling of guilt. With the session ended, I knocked on Northwing’s door.
“Wait,” Northwing said, and after a minute let me into her room. It, like mine, was as richly appointed as the interior of a khan’s tent. I sat upon the floor, as did Northwing.
“Northwing,” I said, “do you feel we should be moving on?”
“Is that what the lamb said to the slaughterer?”
I smiled. “You mistrust our hosts?”
“I’ve seen what’s become of Haytham and the balloon, Katta. I’ve just now followed birds to where they’ve got both. He’s recuperating—a guest, like us—and Princess Corinna is pressing him for information. Soon Ragnar will know our story is too thin. Haytham’s much too proud of himself not to talk, and talk, and talk, especially with a striking woman hanging on his arm.”
“What have they done with the balloon?”
“They are studying it, attempting to sniff out how to use it. They haven’t figured out the brazier yet, but they have some sort of magic-workers on the job. We’re cooked.”
“Hm. I have heard from my nocturnal companion Thom that these local magic-workers, called Runewalkers, have been prophesying a great war with an army coming out of Spydbanen, the northern island. I suspect Corinna is in a hurry to turn Haytham’s arts to military use. Is the vessel otherwise repaired?”
“I think so. They’ve patched the canvas.”
“Very well,” I said, “I suggest we make our exit and rescue Haytham from the wiles of good Princess Corinna.”
“He may not thank you.”
I shrugged. “Let’s find him a less dangerous princess, somewhere in the wide world. Now, Thom told me much about secret passages hereabouts, and earlier I believe I tapped my way to finding an access point.”
“My own b
edmate, Hedda the head of the household staff, has promised to lend us horses whenever we want. As everyone is busy with preparations for the feast of Saint Kringa, it should be easy to sneak off.”
“A pleasure working with you, Northwing.”
“You’re not so bad for a monk, Katta. Let’s go.”
As we traversed the secret corridors to a spot prearranged with Hedda, I reflected on the ethics of our actions. One the one hand, we were abusing the hospitality of royalty and playing with the hearts of others. On the other hand, we were prisoners, and we had chosen confederates who were quite willing to help us. I decided that circumstances demanded such actions but that I had acquired a karmic burden thereby. I must look for a way to repay Soderland in the future.
To repay Soderland seemed no sad thing as we rode through the back gate of the Fortress, an access that led directly out into the countryside. Leafless trees swayed and creaked, snow sliding off them in tiny avalanches. Hares padded swiftly away from our horses. Pines made a shimmering sort of sound in the breeze. The afternoon cooled, but its chill air pleased me more than the smoky closeness of the Fortress. Northwing took us swiftly across fields toward Haytham’s location, as the crow flies.
We attracted stares from farmers and wayfarers, or so Northwing informed me. She’d previously told me that the occasional person of brown, black, or red hue could be found in Svanstad, but none who looked quite like ourselves.
Once away from habitation Northwing began chanting and slapping a small drum. There was something frightening about the sound. I can’t claim to truly know what the shamans do, but I know Northwing was communing with mighty powers of nature, and that it was no peaceful discussion but a fierce cajoling.
Snow fell. As the sun set, it came down in waves of tiny frozen kisses on my skin. The wind swirled these so they would converge in all directions at my face.
“Sight is quite obscured,” Northwing said at last, voice normal.
“I will take your word for it!” I said. We were already passing through thick drifts.
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