by John Bierce
There.
The spirit current passing through Arnulf’s liver looked wrong. It was a subtle thing— ripples a little shorter and more chaotic than usual, curves a little too sharp— but it was definitely there.
Arnulf popped out his peridot eye, and the vision of the spirit world collapsed into faint flickers visible in his empty socket, like the flashes you might see when you clenched your eyelids too tight.
“What did you find?” one of the guards asked.
Benen ignored him as he wiped down the crystal sphere, then tucked it away in a protected pocket of his satchel. Peridot might be cheaper and more common than emerald, but peridot crystals of sufficient size for artificial eyes were still worth more than most prosperous craftsfolk would make in several years. He withdrew another sphere— also peridot, but with a cunning glass lens fastened to its front. Ironically, though it required a smaller peridot crystal, this eye was far more expensive— it required an exceptionally skilled jeweler and an even more skilled lenscrafter to craft. The lens couldn’t be glued to the crystal, for glue would interfere with spirit sight. Rather, it had to be attached with cunning slots and pins.
He carefully wiped down the sphere with a clean cloth, then slipped it into his empty socket. He blinked a few times and dropped back into the spirit world. This eye magnified his view, letting him see much smaller, finer details of the spirit currents, at the expense of the bigger picture.
It was no surprise, given he didn’t recognize the poison’s symptoms, but the spirit currents gave him no clues as to what poison had been used either. The poison was most densely concentrated in Arnulf’s liver, but the healer found traces of it in all of the prince’s twitching, convulsing muscles, and, to Benen’s distress, the quantities seemed to be actively increasing, as though it were leaking out into the rest of the body from his liver.
To his surprise, however, none of the poison could be seen in Arnulf’s stomach.
Scowling, Benen turned to the side-table where Arnulf’s food had been set. He was no culinary seer— indeed, he found their entire practice to be ostentatious and wasteful in the extreme— but he was no stranger to examining food for poison via spirit sight.
And there was no poison in Arnulf’s food.
“His luncheon wasn’t poisoned,” Benen said. “It might be a slow-acting poison. There are a few, like starweb leaf, whose symptoms come on all at once. It could also have been a faster poison delivered to the prince by some other means, as well. If we could…”
Arnulf screamed and convulsed. Benen had never heard sound kin to it from a human voice before— it sounded as though it were tearing the prince’s very throat apart. Most of the soldiers and servants in the room stepped back in fear, but two brave souls— a soldier and a chambermaid— dove atop the Prince, in an effort to still his thrashing.
To no avail, however. The massive warrior, even tied to his own bed, threw both off like they were mere children. His eyes were open but unseeing, and spittle flecked his beard and mustache. He strained forward, as though trying to escape some terror.
There was a crack, and Benen’s eyes, both living and crystal, shot to the bedposts, thinking Arnulf had broken one.
It wasn’t the wood that had broken.
Arnulf had shattered his own bones in his convulsions. His left forearm seemed to have grown a new elbow— one lumpy and deformed. Even with the wrong eye in his socket, Benen could clearly make out the rapids in the spirit currents where they passed through the break.
“Hold him down!” Benen shouted over the prince’s inhuman screams, and dove for his medicines.
By the time the soldiers had pinned Arnulf down, and Benen had retrieved his tincture of the poppy, Arnulf’s screams had become awful, rasping whispers, as though the man’s throat really had torn apart. Benen roughly splashed a little of the powerful sedative in Arnulf’s mouth, hoping it would quiet the screams, so he could get the man to drink more.
It took nearly half an hour to get enough of the concentrated poppy down Arnulf’s throat to force him to slumber. It took more of the tincture than he’d ever given to any man or woman before, save for in easing the death of the mortally wounded.
Part of Benen feared that if the poison didn’t kill the prince, the sheer amount of poppy might do the job.
The exhausted soldiers and servants were pale and terrified, and Benen feared he didn’t look much better. His false eye had rolled a little in his socket somehow, and the reference lines were strangely askew. He took a deep breath and adjusted it, as much to gather his wits as anything.
Even as he slumbered, Arnulf twitched and writhed, like a man tortured with hot coals.
Prince Arnulf’s death wasn’t a gentle one.
The massive doses of poppy tincture Benen provided barely alleviated the prince’s suffering. Twice during the endless night that followed his collapse, he managed to shatter the splint they’d put on his broken arm. Past midnight, Arnulf bit off the tip of his own tongue in his convulsions. The tips of his fingers and toes began to blacken horribly, and every time he awoke, the same dreadful, pained rattling echoed out of his broken vocal cords.
The healer did what he could for the prince, but only the poppy helped. None of the purgatives and poultices he attempted seemed to do anything. Benen even considered bleeding the prince, knowing full well what the Moonsworn would do if they found out he’d violated their strictures against it.
In the end, Benen was reduced to simply taking notes on the poison’s symptoms, on Arnulf’s rising fever, and on the steadily increasing levels of the poison in his blood and, somehow, in his liver.
Just before dawn, the warrior’s heart simply gave out from the strain.
CHAPTER TWO
Spirit Messages
Benen trudged up the stairs of the main semaphore tower, each step feeling like seven leagues.
The tower had long ago been built as a dovecote, but the doves had been moved to another part of Castle Morinth when the spirit semaphore had been built.
There were, in the spirit realm, certain stable currents that could last for years, decades, or even centuries, traversing tens or hundreds of leagues. There had been much debate about them over the years— the Moonsworn and Sunsworn merely thought them a curiosity of the spirit realm, a by-product of their twin goddesses’ eternal revolutions. The Sei had thought them the exhalations of their stern god and judged attempts to interfere with them heresy. The Radhan’s interest in them had only extended so far as distant hopes of using turbulence in the currents to predict storms. The Conclave Eidola, of course, had known them to be, like the rest of the spirit realm, the means by which the ancestors kept watch over their descendants.
The currents, however, proved slippery things, hard to affect and prone to slipping back into their previous states.
Then, nearly a century past, a Sunsworn noble, Vai en-Addem, had built the first semaphore in the tallest minaret of his manor house. The mad artist had intended it as a performance work, telling no one of his plans. When the current began filling with the turbulence of his semaphore, seers and scholars in the nearby city of On-Hagrad had panicked, starting a small riot among On-Hagrad’s ziggurats that had baffled the local merchants and laborers. To this day, Hagradi townsfolk still joked about the learned being a superstitious, easily frightened lot.
The potential of Vai en-Addem’s invention had quickly been seen, and within a decade, the first semaphore line was running between On-Hagrad and the nameless Sunsworn holy city. From there, they’d spread all across the great southern continent of Oyansur. Despite Sunsworn efforts to keep the technology from spreading north across the isthmus, it made it to Teringia a few decades later, and soon the entirety of the small northern continent had been covered by semaphore lines.
Spirit semaphores were difficult and expensive to run. They had to be placed inside the spirit currents, in those rare places where they dipped near to the ground. Repeater stations had to be placed along the currents to p
ass along messages before they degraded too much. Every message had to be encoded into clusters of letters. Otherwise, they would take far too long to send. If you wished to keep the contents of a message secret, you had to encode them even further, since any seer could watch the messages being sent merely by watching the current. To make it even more frustrating, messages could only be sent in one direction— along the path of the current— which meant that many messages were sent on looping, circuitous routes from one current to another, often with many interruptions to be hand-carried between two semaphore towers.
That didn’t even get into the sheer, absurd expense of building a spirit semaphore. The sophisticated clockwork mechanisms required rare gems, precisely blown pieces of glassware, and they had to be exactingly constructed by skilled workers on-site. The metals had to be carefully chosen and matched so that when they shifted size in different temperatures, it wouldn’t force the machine out of alignment.
Still, for all their countless disadvantages, spirit semaphores had revolutionized society. Messages could cross Teringia in days, instead of weeks or months. They could travel all the way to the foreign, strange lands at the southern tip of Oyansur, if you had a mind to, and could guarantee that there was a recipient you shared a language with. Kings and emperors immediately saw the utility of the semaphores for war and governance. Merchants had been close behind— information was always essential to commerce.
The semaphore network had grown so important that entirely new towns and cities had arisen near convergences of multiple spirit currents.
It was still expensive to send information via the semaphore network, of course— the average craftsman or merchant couldn’t afford it, let alone the average laborer.
Castle Morinth, by any standard, should have been Lothain’s biggest hub in the semaphore network. There were literally dozens of nearby spirit currents capable of carrying messages, stretching across most of the nation.
There were only two problems with that. First, the fact that all the currents traveled away, not towards, Castle Morinth. Or, rather, they traveled away from the Mist Maze. Along with the strange monsters it spat out, it was a source of some of the longest spirit currents on the continent. Any messages to the castle had to be carried several dozen leagues by horseback.
The second problem, of course, was that there just weren’t enough messages that needed to be sent by the castle, the prince, or the cattle herders of the villages below them.
So, the castle had just two semaphore towers— one atop the curtain wall’s southwest tower that could send messages to the nearest military garrison, and one in the old dovecote that could send messages to Lothain’s capital city of the same name.
Benen popped out his healer’s eye, and instead he pushed in an amethyst sphere— after carefully and thoroughly cleaning both. Amethyst eyes were ideally suited to using the semaphore network. Despite how common amethyst crystals of sufficient size were, they’d skyrocketed in price over the last few decades, as the size of the network grew.
Most healers would have considered it below them to maintain a semaphore alongside their usual duties— semaphore seers were seen as mere drudges, the lowest rank of those who could see into the spirit realm. They only took a few months to train, once they’d developed the basic skills of seeing. Benen had often heard other seers claim that absolutely anyone could become a semaphore seer, unlike the more rarefied ranks of other seers.
Absolute nonsense, in Benen’s opinion. Anyone could learn to be a seer, so long as they were hardworking, intelligent, and willing to sacrifice an eye.
Benen sighed as he reached the top of the semaphore tower, and took a moment to catch his breath before getting to work.
He started by removing the protective dust covers, setting the thin brass plates on the table to the side. Next, he undid a series of latches fastening down the semaphore arm, unfolding and extending them for readiness. Some of them were as long as six feet.
He fetched the crank out of its resting place in one of the empty boulins— the cubbies where the doves had once nested— and inserted it into the appropriate socket. He grunted and strained at the mechanism until he’d raised the semaphore up into the center of the current that traveled in through one tower window and out the other— the latter of which had been broken into the wall to stop it distorting messages. The thin wire meshes in the windows were enough to keep birds out of the tower without distorting the messages.
They did leave the tower viciously cold in the winter, though.
When he’d raised the semaphore to its appropriate height, he locked it into place, returning the crank to its cubby-hole. He then fetched several new gems from their boulins, replacing those on several of the semaphore’s brass arms.
If this had been a full-size semaphore, that wouldn’t be necessary, but Castle Morinth had only warranted smaller, cheaper semaphores— the kind an army might carry with them on the march.
Eventually, he’d finished making adjustments to the semaphore arms and strode over to the chain bench.
The chain bench was a long shelf set into the wall at chest height under a large group of boulins. Dozens of sizes and cuts of chain links could be found inside— some huge and smooth, others small and toothed, and others long and twisted.
It took nearly an hour for Benen to assemble the message chain. Not that it was particularly difficult— he was an old hand at the process; and he should have been able to assemble even the most heavily encoded long message in a third of the time at most.
No, the reason it took so long was writing the message itself. How did you tell a king that his son had been poisoned, and not only was the poison unknown, but the poisoner and their motives were as well?
As he worked, the healer kept glancing out the nearest window with his living eye at the courtyard below. Castle Morinth’s Eidola priest worked below, carving the prince’s name into the castle’s monolith, so that Arnulf might join the ancestors, not the hateful ranks of the forgotten dead.
Finally, he finished clipping the message chain together, carried it gently to the semaphore, and fed the end of the chain in. The first few links were neutral-sized, and weren’t strictly part of the message— they just marked the beginning of the message. The next few links detailed the recipient via a short identifier code. The links at the end were neutral-sized as well.
He hesitated for a moment, then clipped the ends of the chain together, forming a loop. He wanted to make sure this message made it through.
Benen fetched another crank from its boulin, inserting it into its aperture, and began to gently turn it. It turned easily, and the chain began to ratchet smoothly through the semaphore. As it did so, the arms of the spirit semaphore began to twist and spin, the cunning clockwork mechanisms responding to the different sizes and cuts of links in the chain. The spirit current began to twist and churn in recognizable patterns downstream of the semaphore, flowing gently away through the tower window.
He kept turning the cranks for as long as he could hear the sounds of the priest’s hammer and chisel, repeating the looped message again and again.
Captain Oson fell ill that night, quickly followed by two other guards, three cooks, and a chambermaid.
Benen wept as he administered the last of the castle’s poppy tincture, and was forced to move to skullcap, willow bark, catnip, and valerian to alleviate the pain. They might be suitable for relieving tooth-aches, sprains, and headaches, but they did little for the screaming victims.
Benen kept his hope that this was poison rather than contagion alive for days, as more and more of the castle fell ill, and he ran out of herbs to alleviate the pain. He filled his ears with wax to keep out the screaming echoing through the castle. He cursed the ban on the Moonsworn from all Lothain’s fortresses. He tried not to think about the servants and soldiers deserting the castle, fleeing down the pass seeking safety.
Captain Oson was the first to come out of his delirium. He’d broken three fingers on his rig
ht hand, torn out half his hair, and pulled muscles across his body. His fingers and toes were blackened, with little feeling left to them.
The captain spoke in a broken whisper, his voice stolen by the screams of his illness. His bedsheets were stained with watery stool, and he ran a low fever still, but the screaming, writhing, delirium, and pain had passed.
In his broken, rasping whispers before he fell asleep, Oson spoke of a world robbed of color, of feeling as though his mind swam through mud. He spoke of lingering pains throughout his body, and of relief that his fingers and toes were spared that pain.
To Benen’s peridot eye, the spirit turbulence of the poison had shifted. It still persisted throughout the body, but it seemed as though some key component had vanished from it, leaving it a shadow of its former virulence.
His hopes for poison over plague vanished as the screaming started in the village.
CHAPTER THREE
Mourning in Lothain
“One in seven?” the chirurgeon asked.
“At least,” Carlan said, setting his copy of Healer Benen’s most recent semaphore message on the table. “We don’t know how many who fled the castle took sick afterwards, nor how many of those who fled the villages took sick. It could be as high as one in four. And of those who sickened, over half perished. None of the survivors have regained the use of their fingers or toes.”
There was dismayed silence around the table, as the assorted seers, chirurgeons, herbalists, and alchemists all exchanged uncomfortable glances.
All avoided looking at the empty seats at either end of the table.
The great seat at the head of the table was distressing, to be sure— Sigis IV should have been there, but he had locked himself away in his chambers, mourning his beloved son. He had demanded a week of mourning from the capital— as much as a king or heir would receive, let alone a fifth son like Arnulf. At the moment, the king was likely getting his son’s name tattooed onto him by a priest— an old practice that not many kept to these days, but the royal line of Lothain was nothing if not conservative and resistant to change.
