by Paul S. Kemp
"My sisters' lives are far more important to me than yours," Rakon said. "Help me and you help yourselves. Get me the horn and the compulsion will be satisfied. Get them up, Baras."
"Yes, my lord," Baras said, and walked toward Nix. "Jyme, a hand."
"We don't need help to stand, bungholes," Nix said. "Get up, Egil."
Nix rose to his knees, then slowly to his feet, grunting with the effort, his body screaming with pain. He endured and stood, swaying. Egil did the same, pulling his arms off the soil one at a time and climbing to his feet.
Rakon looked on with annoyance. "We don't have much time before Minnear is full," he said tightly, "so no more of this. Defy me, and the worm does its work."
An intense itch behind his left eye caused Nix to blink and set his eye to watering. He wondered for a moment if Rakon was using some kind of eyebite on him; he'd heard of such things from sorcerers.
"They can stand, so they can walk," Rakon said to Baras. "The pain from the worm is temporary, lasting only as long as their defiance. Let's get moving again."
"Yes, my lord," Baras said.
Rakon walked back to the carriage.
The pain from the spellworm abated almost immediately, but the itch behind Nix's eye remained. A thought seized him, blossomed fully into an idea. His mouth formed words, though he didn't remember thinking them.
"Rakon," he called, and started walking toward the carriage.
"Lord Norristru," Baras corrected. He stepped in front of Nix and put a hand on his chest.
"Show me your sisters," Nix called. "Let me see them. You said you're doing this for them. You stole our wills for them. Show them to me."
"Shut your mouth," Baras said, giving him a shove, but Nix didn't stop. He wanted to see Rakon's sisters, needed to see them. He thought much depended on it, though he had no idea why.
Rakon stopped on the footstep to the carriage, looked over at Nix and Baras.
"They walk, Baras."
With that, Rakon disappeared into the black, lacquered box of the carriage. The eunuch followed, vacant-eyed and smiling, but Nix did not relent.
"I call you a liar until my eyes see these so-called sisters! Rakon!"
"That's enough!" Baras said to Nix. "What's into you, man?"
Nix ignored Baras. He stared after Rakon, breathing hard, convinced the inside of the carriage held an answer to a question he could not articulate but needed to hear. The itch behind his eye would not relent.
Baras took him by the bicep and steered him away from the carriage. Jyme tried to do the same for Egil but a glare from the priest put an end to that.
"Suit yourself," Jyme said.
"I'm sorry it went this way," said Baras. "It's not personal. My lord is honorable. Help him and I have no doubt he'll reward you."
"Not personal," echoed Nix, turning his head to stare at the carriage, still blinking at the irritation behind his eye.
"You don't seem stupid," Baras said. "And yet…"
"Never underestimate my ability for stupidity."
Egil snickered. Baras almost smiled.
"This isn't personal either, Baras," Nix said.
"What's that?"
"This," Nix said, and snapped a reverse elbow into Baras's jaw, sending him careening backward, cursing and bleeding.
Jyme reached for his blade, but before he could draw it, Egil tackled him. Priest and hiresword fell to the ground in a tumble, the priest's fists thudding against Jyme's midsection, chiming the links of his mail shirt.
The other guards shouted and drew blades while Nix sprinted for the carriage. He wanted to see the sisters, had to see them. He grabbed the handle, threw open the door, parted the shade curtain and…
"You dare!" Rakon said, wide-eyed with shock and anger. He held a small metal vial in one hand, perhaps an elixir to give to one of his sisters, who slouched in the coach seats across from him.
Blankets wrapped the women's slim forms and their skin, pale and nearly translucent, looked as del icate and colorless as ice. Glassy eyes looked in Nix's direction, bright in the ovals of their faces, but their blank expressions told him that they didn't see him. Long auburn hair fell in waves from the head of the older. Short, almost boyishly cut dark hair crowned the smaller and younger. They looked like beautiful corpses.
"What's wrong with them?" he said, and the itch behind his eyes grew painful. His vision swam, blurred. He dug a knuckle into his eye, groaning.
Rakon half-rose from his seat, careful of his vial, but not before the huge eunuch grunted and lurched toward the door, toward Nix, still wearing the same vacant smile. He pulled his knife free as he advanced.
"Help us!" a woman cried, and a stabbing pain exploded in Nix's temples. He screamed, recoiled as the eunuch reached for him. He stumbled backward, spitting a shout of pain between gritted teeth, his head feeling as if would split asunder. He tripped on a rock, fell backward into the scree, and hit the ground hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.
The eunuch leaped awkwardly from the carriage, knife raised, still smiling stupidly. Nix heard the tread of feet on the rocks as the other guards closed on him, too.
"Nix!" Egil shouted.
Nix raised his hands defensively as the hulking form of the eunuch loomed over him, all dumb smile and sharp edge.
Rakon appeared in the carriage doorway. "No!" he shouted, and at his utterance the eunuch froze, the huge chest rising and falling like a bellows, the light rain glistening on his face and bald head, and those eyes, those vacant, unblinking eyes. He lowered the knife to his side.
The pain in Nix's head subsided, leaving only the ghost of agony to haunt him. He lay flat on his back, the rain falling softly on his face, the hard earth of the Demon Wastes digging into his skin.
Some of the other guards came around him, blades bare. One of them pulled him to his feet.
Rakon stood on the rail of the carriage door, his face floating above the head of the eunuch and the guards.
"I just wanted to see them," Nix said, his words inexplicably slurred. His head felt thick, sluggish, stuffed with cloth. "Your sisters. I needed to see them."
Rakon stepped down and picked his way past the eunuch and guards. He stared at Nix as if he were a pile of dung. "I told you they were dangerous."
"Needed… to see them," Nix muttered.
Rakon looked back into the carriage, then took Nix's face in his hand. "You needed to see them why?"
Nix's tongue seemed made of sand, which was just as well. He could not have answered. He had no idea why. A compulsion had driven him, as strong as Rakon's spellworm. It had come from nowhere. He uttered the first lie that popped into his head.
"Thought you were lying."
Rakon sniffed and pushed him back into the arms of the guards. "Now you know better. Let's get moving."
While Rakon and the eunuch boarded the carriage, the hands gripping Nix turned him around.
Baras glared at him, eyes hard, bleeding from the mouth.
"Sorry," Nix said. "I don't know what happened."
"Apology accepted," Baras said, and punched him in the jaw.
Nix went down in a heap, sparks exploding before his eyes. He heard Egil shout in anger but couldn't make out the words. Baras's face appeared over him, a grizzled moon against the gray of the sky.
Nix blinked in the rain, winced in anticipation of another blow. Instead, Baras took him under the armpits and lifted him to his feet.
"I give as good as I get," Baras said. "Fair is fair."
"Well enough," Nix muttered, swinging his jaw from side to side on loose hinges, tasting blood. Without warning, he vomited again, directly onto Baras's boots.
"Sorry," Nix said, wiping his mouth. "Came on of a sudden. You're not going to pay that one back, are you?"
Baras shook the vomit from his boots and handed Nix off to Egil. The priest had a red mark on his left cheek.
"Jyme catch you?" Nix asked.
"Pfft. One of the others joined in mid-scrum."
>
"Ah."
Egil kept Nix upright until he'd recovered enough to handle his own locomotion. Soon, the caravan was moving once more, cutting through the Wastes.
"Seems silly to have brought the wagon and carriage," Egil said.
Both vehicles struggled over the terrain.
Nix grunted agreement.
"What was that all about?" Egil asked. "With the sisters?"
Nix shook his head. He rubbed his jaw, his head, his backside, and stared at the carriage, wondering the same thing. "I'm… not sure. It was odd, Egil."
"Odd, aye," Egil said. "And stupid. You saw them, though, eh?"
Nix nodded slowly, seeing the older sister's green eyes so clearly in his mind's eye they might as well have been graven into his brain. "They're sick. Rakon spoke truth about that. Beautiful, too, as much as I could see."
"Well, there's that, then."
"But…"
"But?" Egil prompted.
"Did you… hear something when I cracked the carriage?"
"Something like what?"
"Like a shout for help. A woman's shout."
Egil shook his head. "Not that I heard. You heard it?"
"I thought. But maybe not."
Egil eyed the carriage. "One of the sisters crying out in a fever dream?"
Nix shook his head. "I don't think they can speak. They look very near death."
Egil grunted.
"Rusilla and Merelda," Nix said. "That's their names."
"Had time for introductions, did you?"
Nix shook his head. His thoughts were muddled. "Wait… no."
How did he know their names? Were those their names?
"What?" Egil asked.
"Nothing. I'm… still a bit muzzyheaded, is all."
Egil eyed him. "You're bleeding."
"I know," Nix said, massaging his jaw. Baras had caught him clean. He'd be feeling it for days.
"No. Your nose."
"Huh?" Nix put a knuckle to his nose and it came away bloody. "Shite."
Egil chuckled. "You're slowing down, Nix."
"Must be," Nix agreed, though he didn't remember taking a blow to his nose.
How odd. He stared at the carriage.
"I think Rakon said something else truthful, too."
"And what's that?" Egil asked.
"His sisters are dangerous."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Within an hour, Dur Follin had vanished from sight behind them. Broken, rust-red earth extended as far as Nix could see in all directions. The ground became more broken as they advanced. It looked shattered, as if the world had bucked, the lower strata trying to shed the disease of the upper. Deep valleys and cuts scarred the terrain, steep rock walls, sheer chasms, hills of jagged rocks, fields of large boulders.
Bits of tenacious scrub, the fronds thin and sickly, grew here and there. Lichen the color of mellowed piss clung on the shade-side of many of the boulders. Low mountains rose in the east. The air carried an acrid stink that made Nix's throat raw and eyes water. When the wind gusted, it threw up clouds of red dust and wailed over the shattered terrain, as if grieving.
"Wounded earth," Egil said to Nix.
"Aye."
By late morning, they reached Deadman's Way, a wide, incongruously smooth stretch of ancient road that stretched across the otherwise blasted terrain. Nix had heard of the road, but had never expected to lay eyes on it.
Inexplicably, the road had been spared the ruin of the surrounding terrain. It was not paved with stones, but rather looked as if the gods had driven a chisel across the terrain, leaving the unmarred ribbon of the road in their wake.
Deadman's Way showed no cracks, and no scrub or weeds grew on its surface. To Nix it called to mind the same precise, flawless, uncanny construction that marked the Archbridge.
"This pristine after so long?" Nix asked.
"Now we know why he brought the carriage and wagon," Egil observed.
"Aye."
Rakon emerged from the carriage long enough to study the terrain ahead, and then the caravan headed out, following the road and making good speed.
Two guards paced the carriage to either side, which was driven by another guard and pulled by a pair of shaggy draft horses. The supply wagon followed, likewise driven by a guard and pulled by two horses. The rest of the group walked or jogged on foot behind and around the wagons, though from time to time one or another guard would ride on the wagon to rest his feet.
As they put more and more distance behind them, Nix felt as though he were swimming in ever-deeper water. Dur Follin was lost to the distance behind them. They were deep in the Wastes, the broken, red earth roofed with a cloudy, slate-gray sky. At least the rain had relented.
The others seemed to share his growing sense of ominousness. Now and again the horses tossed their heads and stomped at nothing in particular. The drivers kept cocked crossbows on the benches beside them, and the guards afoot held bare blades in hand. Egil shook his dice as they walked. The sky pressed down on them, a gray, miasmic blanket.
Nix worked at the compulsion as he walked, seeking a place within himself that the spellworm had not reached.
I am Nix Fall of Dur Follin.
But the effort itself – contrary as it was to Rakon's wishes – nauseated him, and he found it hard to keep pace with a roiling stomach. He resolved to work at slipping the spellworm during the night, when they camped. They had three, maybe four days' travel through the Wastes before they reached the Afirion Desert.
Assuming they lived that long.
He took a headcount. Including the eunuch and Rakon, they totaled eleven men and the sisters.
Eleven men.
He would have laughed if his jaw and head didn't hurt so much. Phrases moved through his mind, foreboding words he'd heard used to describe the Demon Wastes.
Cursed earth.
Ruined ground.
At the Conclave, Nix had read a few treatises containing theories about the Demon Wastes' origin. All agreed that the Wastes had once been fertile ground, part of a now-lost and forgotten civilization, probably the same one responsible for building the Archbridge.
Some held that a sorcerer had accidentally created a doorway to Hell and an army of devils had destroyed the realm and left the land barren. Others said a curse infected the ground, spreading incrementally closer to Dur Follin each year. Others said wrathful gods had reached down from the vault of night and smashed an arrogant people.
Nix had thought all the theories nonsense, but now, walking the Wastes, treading an ancient road that shouldn't exist, he wasn't as sure. The land was forsaken, a wasteland. Theories Nix had thought outlandish now seemed quaint seen in the light of the actual desolation.
"This road's better than even the Promenade in Dur Follin," Egil said.
"Makes no sense," Nix said, and then an idea struck him.
He fell to his knees and held the palms of his hands a finger's width over the surface of the road. He closed his eyes, concentrated on the skin of his palms, his fingertips.
"What are you doing?" Baras called from his right. "Keep moving."
"Hsst," Egil said to the guardsman.
The drivers halted the wagons. Rakon shouted from the carriage.
"What is going on? We are not to stop moving."
Nix's palms and fingertips tingled. The hairs on his knuckles rose and stood on end. He smiled, nodded, stood.
"It's enspelled," he said to everyone "The road. That's why it's remained intact. Powerful magic. Wearing thin now, but in its day it must have been powerful."
Egil eyed the blasted terrain all around them. "They might have used it to preserve more than just the roads."
Nix chuckled. "Aye."
"Why would anyone enspell a road?" Baras asked.
Nix shook his head. It made little sense.
"Get us moving again, Baras," Rakon said from the carriage.
"Yes, my lord. You heard him," Baras said. "Leg it."
Reins cracked an
d the caravan started again.
"I'm half-tempted to move at a dilatory pace," Egil said. "Slow these bastards down."
The moment he said the words, the priest burped loudly, put a hand on his stomach. His face greened behind his beard.
