The Wrack

by John Bierce

  Other nations were stirring as well. Galicanta and the Sunsworn Empire were both eyeing events in Lothain with interest, though the two powers were too focused on one another to take advantage. Sei raids from the mountains had picked up over the last few weeks, as the ill-tempered, humorless barbarians insisted the Wrack was sent by their dour god to punish Lothain. There might not be many Sei left, but they were an irritant, nonetheless. The two dozen or so small northern kingdoms beyond the Krannenbergs were shifting restlessly, clearly trying to decide whether to attempt an invasion with autumn and its fierce snows so close. Most concerningly, there were rumblings behind the Geredain border. Both nations always kept troops ready on their borders. Battles over contested territory were common, and the Geredain royal line had never abandoned their claim to the throne of Lothain— one which, Carlan admitted only in the privacy of his own mind, was a claim not entirely without merit. Their neighbors were still looking at the Wrack as more opportunity than threat, as it hadn’t yet entered their lands.

  No matter how much one hoped that trying times would bring the mighty to look past their own interests, disappointment would always be one’s reward.

  Their smaller neighbors to the west, at least, were paying them little attention other than cautious interest.

  Trying to help govern a panicked kingdom with restless enemies, with limited communications and manpower, would have been headache-inducing enough for Carlan. Adding entitled nobles who kept demanding Carlan’s time made it even worse. The fact that the palace had been sealed with only two thirds of its normal complement of servants, with a greater than usual number of nobles, was a miserable lump of uncooked flour in his bread.

  Worse yet than all that, though, were the troubling reports of the names of the dead going unrecorded, that in some of the worst-struck cities, the priests were abandoning their duties, were simply unable to keep up with the dead due to sheer numbers, or had died off themselves. Carlan desperately hoped this was false, or at least exaggerated. Hopefully, families and neighbors were preserving the names of the dead, so that they might be transcribed into obelisks as soon as possible, lest the Wrack dead be prevented from joining their ancestors beyond the spirit realm.

  None of that was the worst part, though. No, the worst part?

  The worst part was that the idiot nobles were planning a masquerade. The other councilors and the king were fully behind it, in the interest of “preventing panic in the city”. Carlan hardly saw how the nobility splurging on a wasteful feast and ball while their subjects suffered would do anything but enrage the populace, but he’d been overruled, and now party business was taking up valuable semaphore time, servant labor the palace could ill afford, palace clerks Carlan absolutely couldn’t afford to spare, and simply getting in the way of everything. Nobles were constantly trying to send for food, wine, and costumes from the city, despite the castle being closed off, and somehow Carlan had been roped into denying them outside expeditions, despite not supporting the quarantine in the first place.

  Carlan would never publicly voice an ill-word about the king, but the way his majesty had hurled himself into party planning was an obvious attempt to bury his grief at Arnulf’s death.

  This most recent bit of nonsense, however, was the absolute worst. He had Moonsworn summaries of the Wrack’s spread to read, troop orders to send to the border, requisition forms to file, and a solid dozen petitioners to deal with, and the king had seen fit to send the royal seamstresses to measure Carlan for a costume for the masquerade.

  He was, apparently, to be outfitted as a worried mother hen.

  Yusef had gotten quite a laugh out of Carlan’s semaphore messages describing the masquerade preparations— and his friend’s most unwanted costume. He hadn’t had many laughs, lately, so that one had been much appreciated.

  The whole city was on edge, and there’d already been several attacks on Moonsworn in some of the wealthier neighborhoods they visited. Hardly any topic but the Wrack were on any lips, and everyone sought out those wiser or more knowledgeable with questions. Or, at least, they sought out those who best postured as wise.

  The herbalists, chirurgeons, seers, and scholars, bombarded with questions from those below, in turn sought out others to ask— almost always members of the Moonsworn. Who, of course, turned to their elders, who turned to, of course, Yusef himself.

  Yusef desperately wished he had someone to turn to with his own questions.

  King Sigis IV— Sigis the Fat, Sigis the Useless Birdwatcher, Sigis the Easily Distracted, Sigis the Faint of Heart— had, in his infinite foolishness, ordered the semaphores closed to the Moonsworn, for fear that they’d inform the Sunsworn of Lothain’s weakness. Yusef had had no communication with the nameless Moonsworn holy city, which lay widdershins about the holy mountain, for almost a week. He’d had no word from Nalda at Castle Morinth for nearly four days— it had taken messengers longer to reach the pass and close the semaphore to her.

  Yusef was the only Moonsworn in the whole kingdom allowed access to the semaphores, and this only for the purposes of communicating with Carlan in the palace.

  He still received reports on the spread of the Wrack, but they were all panicky, unrigorous, superstitious messes of rumors from Vowless healers. He had few reputable reports about the apparent changes to the Wrack as it spread— its special focus on the wealthy and the appearance of the so-called babblers and moaners.

  He found the former far more interesting than the latter— based on what reports he did have, the babblers and moaners simply seemed to be victims who were suffering a less-extreme version of the first, most dangerous stage of the disease. They also suffered less blackening of the extremities than the screamers.

  On top of that, in over half the cities struck by the Wrack, the plague didn’t start small and grow over time— instead, dozens or hundreds of victims would start screaming in a terrifyingly short amount of time— often as little as hours. It was as if something were triggering it. In other cities, like Seibarrow, it spread a bit more normally, but that was hardly a consolation.

  The bottle of brandy in the cabinet almost seemed to be calling to him, but Yusef resisted the urge to pour himself a drink. He dropped the latest useless report from a Vowless healer in Seibarrow, scooted back his chair, and strode out of his office, trying to ignore Nalda’s empty desk.

  Had he done the right thing in sending her into the heart of the Wrack? Would the standard Moonsworn precautions keep her safe, or would the Wrack claim her like it had claimed so many already? Even if she survived it, most of the surviving victims were shells of who they’d been, few able to move around much, broken physically and mentally, and living as though in a daze in a world drained of much of its color.

  Who knew what the awful first stage actually felt like— few of the survivors had been able to offer any sort of cogent explanation.

  Worries chased each other around Yusef’s head as he trudged down the stairs, ignoring the worried whispering of his sons-in-law, trying not to wake the sleeping children. He reached the bottom floor, where Emala was tending to the shrine of the Goddesses, as she did so often these days.

  He moved to kneel beside her when a knock came at the door.

  Frowning, Yusef answered the door. On the other side stood Gilded Bensamen, the richest member of the Moonsworn community in Lothain. No one called him Gilded Ben to his face, but the fat, venal merchant’s propensity for cloth of gold and expensive jewelry doomed him to the name.

  “What?” Yusef demanded. It was late, and he had little interest in visitors.

  “I, ah, that is,” Bensamen said, “was merely in the, ah, neighborhood, and…”

  Yusef gestured for the man to speed it up. Bensamen would quite happily take an hour to say something worth only a few heartbeats.

  “I merely thought to stop by and show a…. a show of, ah, my support,” Bensamen said, looking slightly affronted. “In these trying times, the, ah, pious must do all we can for the community and,
ah, in service of the Goddesses, yes?”

  The fat merchant pulled a jingling sack of coin from his robes, and offered it to Yusef. “To help, ah, support the healers’ work.”

  Yusef raised a brow at that, but reached out and took the donation. Bensamen must be panicked about the Wrack indeed— he seldom showed more than the barest trace of piety, and he begrudged every penny tithed to the healers. Yusef knew for a fact that meat of furred animals crossed Bensamen’s table more nights than not, that he kept no cats or dogs to hunt vermin, and that he had a household shrine to the Goddesses that was as gaudy as it was unused.

  “I, ah, hope that we have enough tincture of the poppy for when it is needed,” Bensamen said.

  So that was why the merchant was making this donation. He’d failed to secure a supply for himself when it was still available, and he wanted to ensure he felt as little pain as possible if he caught the Wrack.

  “We have ample supplies,” Yusef said, “and they will be distributed in their rightful order, as the Verses of Impossible Choice lay out. You need not fear corruption or misuse by the healers.”

  He shut the door on Bensamen’s greasy expression, ignoring anything else the man had to say, and turned to the shrine. He kissed the crown of Emala’s head, and she smiled at him as he carefully lowered himself to his knees beside her, grunting.

  Thankfully, though the Goddesses were quite strict on how one was supposed to pray, they didn’t forbid the use of knee pillows, else Yusef might have been tempted to pray far less as he aged.

  Yusef took a moment to simply stare at the candles in the shrine before he began his prayers. He felt like he was standing on a precipice, as though he were waiting for the tide to come in, a storm to strike, a tree to fall. A current was coming to seize them all, and he didn’t know what else to do but pray.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Visitor in the Clouds

  Priestess Verna was picking her nose when someone burst into the village’s Eidolon temple. It was one of the village children— a uniformly grubby, high-pitched, overstimulated bunch.

  “Priestess!” the child yelled, blinking as their eyes adjusted from the bright daylight to the dim insides of the temple.

  Before the child’s eyes could finish adjusting, Verna removed her finger from her nose and quickly wiped her finger beneath the stool.

  It was one of life’s peculiar truths that no matter how many people picked their noses, they all treated it as something shameful and embarrassing, even in front of others whom they knew picked their noses as well. If every man and woman on Iopis picked their nose, they’d still all pretend not to. And, if Verna had to guess, they probably all did.

  Verna’s hair was more white than brown now, and she was, at the risk of praising herself too much, reasonably respectable and dignified in appearance and demeanor.

  She still got the occasional recalcitrant booger, though. The human body didn’t care in the slightest about one’s dignity.

  “Priestess Verna!” the child yelled again, running between the rows of obelisks, engraved with thousands of names.

  Cloudholt was a village of fewer than two hundred souls, where everyone knew everyone. Half the villagers were Sei converts of questionable faith and morose demeanor, while the other half were Eidol born, but equally morose and lackluster in their faith. It would take millennia to fill all of the temple’s obelisks with the names of the dead from Cloudholt alone, but the obelisks weren’t just for their dead— the Cloudholt Temple was a sacred Repository, filled with the copies of the names of the dead from a dozen towns and cities. If something happened to the obelisks on the plains, the ancestors’ names would still be anchored here in Cloudholt, so they could watch their children through the medium of the spirit realm.

  A priestess of Verna’s education would hardly have been sent to such a small village otherwise.

  “What is it, child?” Verna asked, picking up her chisel and mallet again.

  “There’s a visitor in the village!” the child said, in its high-pitched voice. “He’s talking about sick people, and Granny told me to fetch you!”

  Verna sighed, set down her tools, and stood up, her back creaking.

  “Lead on, child,” she said.

  Her feet hurt the first few steps down the aisle— the soles of her feet always hurt after sitting or lying for any length of time these days. By the time she reached the temple doors, she was walking at a normal pace again, which was still far too slow for the impatient child.

  Verna blinked as she stepped into the sun and looked around the village.

  The temple was the highest structure in the village proper, and the view from its entrance looked down across the village, down the mountain, and far across the plains of Lothain. Cloudholt was a poor village, built just below the treeline on the shoulders of the Krannenbergs. It spent a good chunk of the year enveloped in clouds blowing against the mountain, but on a clear day like today, you could see forever.

  Most of the villagers were simple herders, leading flocks of goats or a few stringy, badtempered sheep. There were a few woodcutters and craftsmen, a blacksmith, several carpenters, and a small number of miners— garnets could be found in the mountain’s granite this high up, on rare occasion even ones large enough to sell to the seers, but it was backbreaking, unrewarding work.

  It often seemed to Verna as though immediately upon hitting puberty, the villagers began aging three days for every one they lived. Their lives were hardscrabble and harsh, and there was little joy in them. Despite that— or perhaps because of it— they indulged their children more than the peasants down in the plains did, buying them toys and treats whenever peddlers came to town, or whittling crude wooden toys themselves, and hardly ever assigning any chores to them.

  Verna rolled her stiff back a bit, then followed the child down into the village.

  She really should try and learn some of the children’s names.

  The village didn’t have any proper roads— the houses and goat paddocks were scattered almost at random in the bare dirt. Most of the sparse trees had been cleared from inside the village, but it was hard to tell the difference between it and the rest of the forest. There was hardly even a road up to the village— it was more like a game trail with a few stone markers alongside it.

  Despite the poverty of the village, the houses were far from hovels. The villagers had as much good timber as they needed, from farther down the mountain, and more granite than they could ever hope to quarry. Most of the homes were built of stone and thatched with the long needles of the walking pines— called that because their trunks often didn’t start until several feet off the ground, giving them the appearance of walking on their thick, protruding roots. There were plenty of wooden sheds, chicken coops, and the like. Not much in the way of livestock could survive up here— mostly just goats, sheep, and chickens. Pigs had been tried a few times, but the lowland breeds seldom thrived up here, and there weren’t any highland breeds close enough for the villagers to purchase.

  They had no lord to prevent them from logging the forests below them for firewood, yet they never pushed the forest too far— the villagers had a strict logging schedule, fine-tuned over generations, and they never took too much from any one spot. It tended to be enforced with social shaming and penalties paid in home-brewed beer— though if a family was having a particularly rough year, everyone would just look the other way.

  Down at the bottom of the village, where the rough trail arrived, Verna could see a crowd gathered around someone. She frowned. Unexpected peddlers were rare, but hardly unknown, yet Verna saw no mules carrying goods. The sheep were sheared in summer this high up, but that was long done with now, and autumn fast approached. Miners took their garnets down into the foothills, and gem traders didn’t come up this high themselves.

  The child, seeing she was on her way towards the stranger, took off, clambering up a rain cistern for a better view. The village’s well didn’t provide enough water on its own, so the
village made up the gap however they could— there were always water barrels lying around in the summer, hauled hours up the mountains from the nearest stream, if need be. In the winter, there was plenty of snow to melt.

  She began hearing an unfamiliar male voice as she walked through the crowd, the villagers making way respectfully enough for her. Not as quickly as they might in the lowlands, but…

  When she got to the center of the crowd, she found herself looking at a tall, slender, middle-aged man. He wore well-worn but well-kept finery, carried a stout walking stick, and a leather knapsack rested at his feet. Over one eye, he had an eyepatch that marked him as a seer.

  Something about him screamed trouble to Verna.

  She had absolutely no idea why her instincts were screaming trouble about the man. If Verna was honest with herself, she’d been sent to tend to the Repository not just for her faith in the ancestors, but due to her… difficulties with people.

  She lived inside her own heart more than in the world around her, communing with the ancestors and tending to the obelisks that kept the names of the dead. Verna was a poor hand at politics, and she understood matters spiritual far better than matters worldly. It had come to a shock to her when she realized that, rather than being a position to be competed over, many priests in the Eidol ranks considered being sent to tend one of the remote Repositories by a Hierarch a punishment.

  She supposed most of the priests she knew thought her naive to actually believe the teachings and consider it a great spiritual honor.

  To put it simply, Verna hardly had a scheming or suspicious bone in her body, and if she weren’t a priestess, she was quite sure she would have been taken for everything she had years ago by some grifter or other.