The Wrack

by John Bierce

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Author's Note

  CHAPTER ONE The Castle Below the Mist

  CHAPTER TWO Spirit Messages

  CHAPTER THREE Mourning in Lothain

  CHAPTER FOUR The Rest Between

  CHAPTER FIVE Monsters in Seibarrow

  CHAPTER SIX Precipice

  CHAPTER SEVEN A Visitor in the Clouds

  CHAPTER EIGHT More Tales Of This Night Than Any Other

  CHAPTER NINE Every Name That Ever Was

  CHAPTER TEN Time Marked Only By Wind

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Adrift on Land, Home at Sea

  CHAPTER TWELVE Defeat Without Ever Fighting A Battle

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN A Galicantan Propensity for Polite Lies

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN A Duel at Sea

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Her Dedication Lacking

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Fragmentary Message

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Like Water Through A Sieve

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Rumors at the Choke

  CHAPTER NINETEEN In the Land of the Blind

  CHAPTER TWENTY A Chorus of Screams

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE He Who Would Grasp At Mist

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO All Maps Lie

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Flies Like Rain

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Questions Like Arrows

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE A Change in the Sky

  Author's Note on Epidemiology in the Wrack

  Galvachren's Guide to Iopis

  [Redacted] Assessment of the Wrack Incident

  Galvachren's Guide to Iopan Gem Scrying

  Afterword

  Further Reading

  The Wrack

  John Bierce

  For all our own missing names.

  And for all the amazing epidemiologists, public health workers, and healthcare professionals out there. We owe you all big-time.

  Copyright © 2020 John Bierce

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9798636465911

  Author’s Note

  Several months into the writing of The Wrack, reports starting coming out of China of some sort of new strain of coronavirus. Four days after I sent the manuscript of the Wrack off to my editor, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

  To say the writing of The Wrack was a weird experience is seriously understating things.

  Fair warning- The Wrack is a weird, depressing little book. If you came looking for something along the lines of my Mage Errant series, this definitely isn’t that. But if you’re in the mood for a weird, depressing little book, then I hope you enjoy The Wrack!

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Castle Below the Mist

  The first victim of the Wrack was Prince Arnulf of Lothain.

  In general, when one’s prince collapses at a luncheon and begins convulsing and screaming, one can safely assume the involvement of poison. When said prince is a warrior in his prime, who lived with wild abandon and had never been known to be sick a day in his life, it tends to strongly reinforce the possibility that poison has been involved.

  The residents of Castle Morinth, unsurprisingly, assumed exactly that.

  Castle Morinth was swiftly locked down, and none were permitted to leave, save for three guards judged to share the twin virtues of being particularly trustworthy and of having lacked the opportunity to have poisoned Arnulf.

  The latter virtue was, to be honest, the more important of the two. If you’d asked anyone in the castle an hour before, none would have imagined that anyone would poison Arnulf. He was much beloved by his soldiers, the servants, and even the villagers farther down the pass.

  Prince Arnulf, the fifth son of King Sigis IV, had been sent to Castle Morinth to take up the mantle of the Mist Warden by his father, and had had done a far better job than any other Warden in generations.

  It would seem odd for any other kingdom to maintain a sizable armed force far from its borders, but other kingdoms lacked the Maze of Mist.

  Castle Morinth sat at the base of a high pass leading up into the Krannenbergs— the jagged mountain range that marked Lothain’s north-eastern frontier. The pass Castle Morinth guarded, however, didn’t cross the Krannenbergs. In fact, no one ever entered it if they could possibly help it.

  A massive wall of mist hung just a few miles up the pass from Castle Morinth. Even in the heat of a late summer afternoon, the mist never burned away. It just hung between the walls of the pass, always shifting and twisting. If you watched it long enough, you could begin to almost make sense of the twisting patterns of the mist.

  Almost.

  Those few who had entered and returned spoke of a twisting maze inside the mist, narrow paths where the miasma could be seen through. Those who strayed off these paths into the thicker mist were never heard from again.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, the paths were always moving, shifting, merging and splitting.

  If that were the extent of the Mist Maze’s dangers, it would hardly be more than a lethal curiosity. Far from it, however.

  Because things also came out of it. Beasts of twisted forms, of vile temperament, of uncouth demeanor.

  Sometimes it would be weeks or months between incursions, and sometimes the denizens of the maze would flood out like the tide.

  The maze beasts varied wildly in form. In the last year alone there had been a snake the size of a tree, a flock of predatory flightless birds, some sort of hideous tentacled boar-horror, and a voracious land-eel with the eyes and legs of a centipede.

  Past kings had tried merely ignoring the maze and hoping the beasts would stay near it, but eventually, the threat grew severe enough that the kings of Lothain had constructed the fortress to keep the rest of the kingdom safe. The commanders of the fortress became known as the Mist Wardens.

  Though others would deny it, all those who fought the beasts from the mists knew their work had the blessing of the ancestors.

  Many past Mist Wardens had stayed safe in the castle while their men defended the pass, but Prince Arnulf had personally led the charge against each and every one of the beasts that emerged under his watch. His men adored him for it. The villages below the castle grew to love him as well, for allowing their children and herds to roam more safely.

  His generous nature, handsome face, and booming laugh did their share in making him so beloved, of course. As far as those around him were concerned, Arnulf was a living legend. He could ride twice as hard, fight twice as long, and eat twice as much as a normal man. Given that, and the fact that Castle Morinth was far enough from the capital that it rested almost untouched by court politics, no one should have had any reason to poison Prince Arnulf.

  The three desperate guards that left the castle that summer day all rode down the pass towards the villages below in search of the castle healer, in the vain hope of saving their prince.

  Captain Oson, the highest ranked of the three soldiers, was the one to find Healer Benen, who was riding his horse back from one of the herder’s villages.

  “Hail, Oson!” the grizzled, burly healer called, then adjusted his leather eyepatch.

  Captain Oson drew his horse alongside Benen’s as he caught his breath from the swift ride down.

  “Something come out of the Maze?” Benen inquired, offering Oson his waterskin.

  Oson drank gratefully from the waterskin. He hadn’t thought to bring his own in the rush, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

  “I must admit, to my shame,” Benen said, “that I’ve been looking forward to some action. It will make a welcome change from farmers insisting that their cattle are acting strange.”

  Captain Oson shook his head. “It’s Prince Arnulf. He’s been poisoned.”

  The affable healer had kicked his horse into a gallop be
fore Oson could even offer the waterskin back.

  “Tell me everything,” Benen demanded, as he stormed through the castle halls.

  “The prince was halfway through his luncheon, then he just… fell over,” the head maid said, wringing her hands. She looked on the verge of tears. “He started making this awful noise in the back of his throat, and kept shaking like he’d lost control of his body.”

  “What was he eating?” Benen asked.

  “Stew with barley bread and cheese, nothing unusual,” the maid said.

  Benen frowned. Nothing unusual for Arnulf, perhaps, but the prince was the only noble Benen knew that preferred coarse barley bread over wheat bread.

  “I’ll need you to fetch the prince’s food to his chambers,” Benen said.

  “My lord?” the maid asked.

  Benen, for once, ignored being referred to as a lord. His parents were honest craftsfolk, not nobles, but the servants and village folk up here were convinced that seers were somehow a step above them, and wouldn’t dream to treat them any different than they’d treat lords and ladies.

  Benen hated it, but he’d been unable to convince them to stop.

  “I need to check the food for poison, and I daren’t leave the prince’s side once I get there,” Benen said.

  The head maid nodded. As they crossed the great hall, she snagged a guardsman, and the two of them began gathering the remains of Arnulf’s luncheon.

  The healer ignored them for the moment, going through the door at the back of the great hall.

  There was a short hall leading to a spiral staircase through the door. The guards at its base let him through wordlessly, and he quickly ascended to the prince’s chambers above the great hall.

  He could hear shouting and screaming coming from Arnulf’s chamber as he climbed the stairs.

  Benen was hardly expecting the sight of Arnulf thrashing about in his bed, a half dozen of his soldiers trying to hold him down. He varied back and forth between incomprehensible muttering and horrid, rasping screams.

  “Seer Benen!” a soldier called. “The prince is”

  Benen pushed past the woman and marched straight for Arnulf. He slipped in between two of the soldiers holding the prince down, and rested his hand on the prince’s forehead.

  The prince was feverish, but nowhere near as much as his symptoms would seem to warrant.

  “His fever is low,” Benen muttered.

  “That’s good, right?” one of the soldiers asked. “It means he’s more likely to survive?”

  “Fever is the body’s first weapon against contagion,” Benen said, quoting the Moonsworn holy book. Many of his fellow healers would frown at him quoting the Moonsworn, but they could all have their names forgotten, for all Benen cared. Whether they were southern spies or not, the Moonsworn could save three patients for every one that his fellows could. If the Moonsworn said humours and vapours were nonsense, they were nonsense, and if they claimed fevers were the body’s weapon, Benen believed them.

  Frowning, he pried open Arnulf’s eyelid. His pupil was constricted almost to nothing. “Any illness bad enough to do this should have triggered a much stronger fever. Some poisons are known to cause low fevers along with their other symptoms, however.”

  “You can cure him?” another soldier asked, desperately. “You can use your magic on him?”

  Benen had opened his mouth to explain for the thousandth time that magic didn’t work like that, when Arnulf tore his arm free from the soldier’s grasp. The prince convulsed, screaming as he clawed himself across the face hard enough to draw blood.

  After Benen had helped the others pin and tie the prince down, the healer carefully cut off Arnulf’s tunic, taking care not to cut the thrashing prince as well.

  He did his best to ignore the blood dripping down into Arnulf’s beard.

  Once he had the tunic free, he realized that it wasn’t just Arnulf’s arms and legs clenching. The muscles across his entire body appeared to be twitching and spasming violently.

  This… this wasn’t anything Benen had seen before. A thought occurred to him.

  “Did the mist-beast the other day bite or sting him?” Benen demanded of the soldiers around him.

  “The big armored beetle thing?” one soldier said. “Didn’t even come close to touching him before he planted his lance in its eye.”

  Perhaps some of the beast’s ichor had splashed onto Arnulf and poisoned him?

  Benen sighed, then reached for his eyepatch. The soldiers around him edged away, as though afraid he’d curse them or some such nonsense. Superstition reigned supreme this far from the capital.

  The healer pulled away the eyepatch, revealing the polished, light green peridot sphere in his eye socket. Delicate lines were engraved into its surface in precise patterns, and it seemed to glow slightly from within.

  Benen took a deep breath, shut his living eye, and dove into the spirit realm.

  Despite what the peasant folktales claimed, Benen had never seen any actual spirits in the spirit world. No ghosts of the dead, no demons, and no horrible creatures that preyed upon the living.

  No, the spirit realm was far more peaceful than the real world.

  Benen knew that if he opened his good eye, he’d still be able to see Arnulf writhing in his bed and the soldiers clustering worriedly. He knew everyone else in the room would just see him standing there stock-still, his peridot eye faintly aglow.

  Benen felt like his hair and beard should be drifting in the gentle currents of the spirit realm, but they had no power over the material world.

  Around and above Benen stretched an endless, restful sea of transparent, pale green energy. Gentle streams of spiritstuff drifted past him, like currents passing through a gentle river. It looked serene at first, but his vision quickly adapted, and he began spotting the turbulence where the physical world impinged upon the spirit realm.

  As an apprentice, it had been months before he could dive into the spirit realm on command. It had been months more before he could stay there— he kept getting vertigo, feeling as though he were about to plunge into the infinite abyss of the spirit realm.

  Now, though, he could dive on command and hold there as long as needed.

  As his vision continued to adjust, he carefully measured the distortions against the lines that crossed his vision— the very lines carved into the crystal sphere of his eye. Despite what the peasants and soldiers thought, the markings weren’t any sort of magic rune. They were merely reference marks, to help him better get his bearings in the spirit realm.

  After about a minute, he started parsing the turbulence in the spirit currents. As spiritstuff flowed, its currents were churned by the material world. A seer could learn to interpret that turbulence, to use it to see within solid matter.

  Learning that art was by far the most challenging part of the endeavor. Scrying presented the human mind with far, far more information than it could ever use, so the most important ability of the seer was learning to filter out unnecessary turbulence in the spirit realm.

  Having one’s eye put out as a youth to gain the ability to see the spirit flows was also rather a challenging aspect of learning magic, of course.

  Gradually, slowly, the world came into focus. The stone walls sheared the spirit currents according to their mineral crystals. The wooden bedposts twisted the flows around their own grains. The threads of the blanket fuzzed and disrupted the flows.

  And there was Arnulf.

  To a seer untrained in healing, the currents flowing through the human body— or that of any animal— appeared to be pure chaos. This was largely because bodies didn’t have the simple composition of baser matter, but were instead filled with a hundred different materials. Bone, blood, bile, fat… the list went on and on.

  Compared to a human, a block of stone or board of wood was hardly so complex.

  The diversity of their constituent parts was far from the only difference, however. The internal movement of the blood, the flow of lightn
ing across the nerves, and the strange chemical processes of the gut all further changed the shape of the body in the spirit realm.

  It had taken Benen most of a decade to learn to properly read the spirit flows as they passed through the human body.

  He frowned as he passed his gaze over Arnulf. The prince’s wild muscle spasms were making this far more difficult than it should have been, distorting and hiding the turbulence from his organs.

  Benen contemplated giving Arnulf tincture of the poppy for a moment, but he decided against it. It would settle the prince’s muscles so he could see past them, but he had no idea what poison ran through Arnulf’s veins. The mixture could hasten Arnulf’s death, for all he knew.

  He briefly wished for an eye of emerald. Peridot was a poor replacement for true green beryl— an emerald eye could discern the turbulence of poisons with ease.

  There were, however, only three emerald eyes on the whole continent, and none had set foot in Lothain for centuries.

  Benen reached up and rotated the peridot eye in his socket, adjusting the reference marks.

  He relaxed his focus a little. It was counterintuitive, but it made the spirit current ripples from deeper in Arnulf’s body stand out more. It was, some seers theorized, to do with the fact that the essential core of scrying wasn’t one of trying to see more, but trying to see less. The most useful gems limited a seer’s vision to specific types of spirit turbulence. Peridot did much of that work for the human body, but there was so much of it that a seer had to learn to ignore. There were countless little creatures living within the human body to ignore, countless normal functions of the body that looked bizarre and terrifying to a new seer. Training oneself to only see the harmful creatures and the abnormal functions took years.

  He frowned, then opened his good eye. He felt briefly nauseous for a moment as he tried to overlap the spirit world and the material world, before his vision stabilized. The angle of the spirit current was off a bit, so he shifted his body to take better advantage of it, then ran his eyes down Arnulf’s body again.