by RW Krpoun
Provine Sael did not resume walking after Pieter had collected the baby, and Burk came up from his habitual place at the rear of the group.
“What was that you were doing with your thumb?” I asked Pieter as he joined Burk and me.
Rose was gurgling and slapping at his face, and he had to adjust how she lay before he could answer. “If you hold your hand steady, you mhm can measure movement on featureless terrain.”
I immediately tried it on a clump of shaggy cattle to our left. “It works.”
“You can also measure distance to an mhm object.” Pieter looked at my arms, then shrugged. “But it might mhm not work for you the same way.”
“Why”
“The proportional distance from arm mhm to eye may not be the same for you as it is for me.”
“Huh.”
“Who is that?” Provine asked Torl as he joined us.
“One man, half-dead,” the scout shrugged. “I’ve trailed him long enough to be sure he’s alone.”
“He looked like he’s coming straight for us.” Hunter noted.
“He is.” Torl checked the horizon. “And he has been for hours.”
“Great,” Hatcher sighed. “What are we, a magnet? Everybody wants to meet us.”
Hunter gestured at the countryside. “You don’t think the Dusmen just stripped the plains of their followers and trusted to luck, do you? Who knows how many telltales they have in place.”
“What is a ‘telltale’?”
“Something that will alert the Dusman that they have company, and where. I expect that the Dusmen make them so nothing less than a cohort will set them off, but you never know.”
“What does a telltale look like?” Hatcher removed and re-tied her scarf.
“Like something else; it is just a few dozen symbols etched onto a solid surface. It could be on a rock or a cow skull.”
“Why didn’t you share this before?”
“Because it was pointless information,” Provine Sael said in a tone that brooked no argument. “The Dusmen are watching for an invasion or sizeable raiding force, not a group our size.”
“So how come this guy is coming straight for us?”
“We’ll determine that when he reaches us.”
“How come the Empire doesn’t use telltales?” Hatcher directed this to Hunter.
“Expense. And they can be foxed.”
We rested while we waited for the figure to close; Provine Sael mixed up some of the white goop and fed it to Rose, who gurgled and kicked, while the rest of us ate freshly smoked beef, slices of dried apple, and hardtack.
“She’s starting to get to her proper weight,” Hatcher jerked her chin towards Rose while I broke up the Nisker’s hardtack for her.
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t want a baby who is too fat or too thin. Pleasingly plump is the target.”
“Like a goose,” Pieter observed from where he sat in the shade of the cart.
Hatcher grinned. “Humor? You’re in a rare mood, Pieter.”
“I have my days.”
“What is Provine Sael going to work on next?”
“She will work downward from my mhm eyes.”
“What will it take to completely get rid of that catch in your throat?”
“I had that before my scars. Too much mhm coal dust, I believe.”
“Coal dust?”
“I was, or still am, an engineer by trade. I mhm spent years working in coal and iron mines.”
“Don’t engineers make a lot of money?”
“Not enough to buy what I need mhm done. But fortunately, I know men like Hunter, who could steer me to this mhm sort of work.”
“Work where you could barter skills for healing arts.”
“Rare healing arts, yes.”
“Why would an engineer dig coal?” I asked
“I did not dig, I designed load-bearing mhm structures; mine supports and water diversion are crucial aspects of the business, and each mine has unique mhm problems.”
“Huh.” I thought about that, but I really had no idea what a mine consisted of, other than a hole in the ground.
“Remember the stone arches in the tunnels where we found the ballad?” Hatcher accepted the kerchief containing her smashed hardtack. “They kept the roof and floor from meeting. He designed that sort of thing, and figured out where they were needed. A mine continually grows, and so do the amount of supports needed. Or so I’m told; I’ve never been in a mine, but I’ve had more than a few jobs underground.”
“Close enough,” Pieter nodded. “In a mine there are also issues of mhm air movement and accumulation or influx of water mhm. Especially sudden influxes of water.”
“Grog knows all about water in underground areas,” Hatcher grinned at me.
Chapter Seven
The figure plodded towards us at a deliberate, and slow, pace.
“Why don’t we just go meet him?” Hatcher asked, absently rocking Rose’s cradle with her foot; the baby was asleep within.
“When someone comes straight at you in the middle of nowhere, you’re well-advised to be careful,” Hunter observed from where he was stretched out on the grass, a kerchief across his eyes. “Did you get a look at him, Torl?”
“Just his tracks, and then him at a far distance. He walks oddly, and he was heading on a beeline to us.” The scout was lounging atop the cart’s canvas-covered load.
I was only half-listening, having captured one of the big grasshoppers that lived here and was studying it through a gap in my fingers. Burk was reading his novel, Pieter was lying on his back under the cart doing something to the axle, and Provine Sael was sitting cross-legged with her staff across her lap and her chin on her chest, possibly dozing.
Hunter suddenly sat up. “That’s not right.”
“What?” Hatcher asked.
“That man.” He stood as Provine Sael looked up; the man was about three hundred yards off.
“What is it?” Provine Sael asked.
“If I was to guess, I would say necromancy,” Hunter fingered the tiny pouches that lined his harness as he checked to the sides and rear. “But that man is alive.”
“A necromancer?” Hatcher stood and picked up Rose’s cradle.
“No, not unless he’s some sort of practitioner I’ve never met before.” Hunter frowned. “Which is far from impossible.”
I released the grasshopper unharmed as Pieter took the cradle from Hatcher and carefully stowed it on the cart; Burk marked his place and put away the book.
Provine Sael joined Hunter by the mule and closed her eyes for a moment. “I don’t get anything,” she said after opening her eyes.
“It’s there.”
“I believe you,” she fingered her staff. “What do you wish to do?”
Hunter studied the approaching figure. “He’s coming to us with a purpose, and my ward didn’t pick up nearly enough power to be a real danger. I’m guessing he’s going to deliver a threat or warning.”
“From whom? The Dusmen don’t make use of the Arts, and renegade Tulg or Ukar wouldn’t bother with messages.” Provine Sael reached up to a horn nub and then caught herself. “Neither would the Dusman, for that matter.”
“A good question.” As the figure drew closer Hunter traced a symbol in the air. “No, still no more power than bistre at best.”
I wondered what ‘bistre’ meant, but I didn’t ask.
Torl, his bow in hand, was flanking the figure to the right; I tapped Burk and gestured to the left as I moved up to stand a couple yards in front of Provine Sael, balancing a javelin in my hand.
“Hold,” Provine Sael said from behind me. “No violence until I order it.”
Hatcher moved up on my left, a dozen feet away, a throwing axe in hand, and we watched the figure close the distance one awkward step at a time. She swore under her breath as the figure neared: it was a man, more dead than alive, and he was not walking at all. He was tightly strapped to a framework made of age-browned bones,
and it was the framework that was walking.
I had to blink several times and study the thing to work out the details: the man’s limbs were bound to long bones that were jointed with leather and which methodically ‘walked’ forward, carrying him; his torso was bound to a latticework of what I guessed were ribs, and a short section of spine rose from the back, and provided an anchor for the strap around his forehead.
The man’s skin was burnt dark from years of sun, and old lash scars stood out from the tanned flesh; he was lean bordering on starved, clad in filthy rags that were once a field hands’ smock and trousers. His eye sockets were pits of scabbed flesh, and the sides of his head were charred black and crispy; he hung limp against his restraints, unconscious or on the cusp of death.
A glass cylinder the size of a drinking mug was strapped across his chest, and two eyeballs floated in the clear liquid within, the eyes looking far too clear and front-facing to be ordinary; a Human ear was bound to each end of the cylinder, and a tongue, pink and glistening, hung from the cylinder’s bottom center.
I stuck the point of the javelin into the soil so it stood upright and drew my sword as the thing closed to within ten feet.
“Steady,” Provine Sael said from behind me.
“It will not pass,” I set my feet.
The figure lurched to a halt about a foot outside my standing reach, and the man’s face contorted and twisted for a moment. “Welcome, Provine Sael,” a voice hissed from his mouth.
“Well, this is a new level of disgusting,” Hatcher observed.
“Speak,” Provine Sael moved up between me and Hatcher.
“You must depart.”
“Because you know my name? Hardly. Parlor tricks do not impress me.”
“This is my domain.”
“It wasn’t before, it isn’t now, and it won’t be when I have finished and gone.”
The man’s faced contorted and a hissing noise came from its mouth.
“Stav,” Hunter said from behind and to my right. “Stav..,.Stavo…Stavodrag.”
“You see? We can play games as well,” Provine Sael snapped her fingers and a puff of small white feathers fell from her fingertips.
“You must leave,” the voice hissed. “Turn around.”
“Venatin,” Hunter drummed his fingers on his forehead. “Stavodrag Venatin, sometimes called Stavodrag the Binder. I thought you were dead.”
“I am above the foibles of mortal flesh,” the voice snapped, and I realized that Hunter had been sussing out the thing’s name.
“You’re just a necromancer,” Provine Sael rested her staff across her shoulders, a hand at each end. “An apprentice of decay.”
“I am a master of the gates of death!”
“If you were, we would be fighting, not talking,” Hunter said dismissively. “How about this: you bugger off until we’re done, and we won’t mention we saw you.”
“I am master of this domain!”
“Nonsense, you’re here for the same reason we are: because the Dusmen are busy invading south. Now, say something interesting, or this conversation is over,” Provine Sael warned.
The captive man’s face twisted and struggled for a long moment. “You will all die here.”
“Everyone does,” Hunter drawled. “But I’ve heard more convincing predictions as to when.”
“Grog.” Provine Sael said, and I put the point of my sword through the captive man’s empty left eye socket, feeling the point strike the bone on the far side of the brain pan. The corpse and bone structure collapsed into a heap.
Provine Sael traced a symbol over the fallen figure. “Bury the poor wretch, and burn the bones.”
“Had you really heard of him?” Provine Sael asked Hunter as Burk and I dug the grave.
“No. I was hoping he might say something that would help me place him.”
“He is either a fool or woefully uneducated to think that such a construct would upset a Provine of the Blue.”
“Well, it killed my appetite,” Hatcher observed from where she sat cradling Rose in her arms.
“I’m curious why he showed his hand in such a fashion,” Hunter took a swig from his flask and then offered it to Provine Sael, who declined with a single economic shake of her head.
“A slave of renegade Ukar,” Pieter stood after having finished stitching the body into a blanket-shroud.
“How can you tell?” Hatcher asked.
“Brands on his back.”
“Here we are,” Provine Sael pointed to a low hill a half mile to our right the day after we met the man on the bones. “The Place of Mounds. Or rather, the south edge of it.”
“That is not a natural rise,” Pieter noted, and cleared his throat.
“It isn’t,” the Dellian agreed. “That’s a barrow, a number of burial chambers connected by passages to a central ceremonial place, the whole covered by a great mound of earth. Ahead of us are scores of such mounds. That particular one is likely relatively recent, several hundred years younger than those at the center of our destination.”
“Who built them?” Hatcher asked from my shoulders.
“The Elder Ones,” Hunter answered.
“And what do we want with them?”
“I want to examine the Place of Mounds; I am investigating the possibility that the Dusmen’s great aura is created, possibly in part, from something taken from the Mounds.” Provine Sael answered, her boots swishing through the tall grass.
“This has been Dusman territory for,” Hatcher paused to think. “Well, always. The Mounds should have been looted bare generations ago.”
“Should have,” Hunter grinned. “But weren’t. Back when they were still free the Ukar and Tulg avoided the barrows and prevented others from tampering with them. The Dusmen are not inclined to the Arts, and kept their vassals’ traditions for the place.”
“So if we get there and find open barrows, that’ll tell us something?”
“It could tell us a great deal.”
“Why would something useful to the Dusmen be in an Elder Ones grave?” I asked.
“Barrows are burial places for the great and powerful,” Hunter advised. “They would be interred with servants, wealth, weapons, and trophies. Remember that staff old Umbargen’s guard left with him?”
“Yeah.”
“I expect it came from a barrow, although probably not the from the Place of Mounds. Also, if the deceased had been a powerful worker of the Arts, they might leave his most powerful piece with him in order to get rid of it. Arcane items are not like swords or axes: they can’t just be picked up and used by anyone, and they’re not safe to leave just anywhere, especially the works of the First Folk, which tended to be long on power and short on control.”
“The Elder Ones had a different view of Death,” Provine Sael noted. “They didn’t see it as permanent as we do. There was a concern that their great ones could return without warning, and would be displeased to not have their belongings to hand. They brought necromancy into the world, and perfected it to a high degree, possibly higher than the best practitioners of today. That staff in Umbargen’s tomb had been crafted by the First Folk, after all.”
“Which was another good reason for interring it with the Emperor,” Hunter nodded.
“Why didn’t they just destroy the staff?” I asked.
“Easier said than done. Well, done safely, anyhow,” Hunter explained. “Unmaking artifacts, especially leftovers from the First Folk, is a risky business. Far better to hide them.”
“Except that they often get discovered,” Provine Sael noted grimly. “Legends say they call out to those of dark intent, and I am inclined to believe that there is a kernel of truth in that.”
“Evil always finds a way,” Hatcher sighed.
“Things of the First Folk more than most,” Hunter nodded.
“Which is why, if I am correct, our mission is so important. I will be quite content to be proven wrong, however.” Provine Sael noted.
“What�
�re some of the other leading theories?” Hatcher asked.
Hunter snorted. “Fat chance of knowing those in any detail. Practitioners of the Arts are notoriously closed-mothed.”
“Hunter is right, but at their core there are three basic theories: that the aura is created by an artifact or artifacts, or a ritual coupled with time and place, or a previously unknown application of the Arts,” Provine Sael noted. “Any one of which leads to countless potential specifics.”
“So what pointed you to the Place of Mounds?” Hatcher drummed on my head.
“The attack on Merrywine. When they built the first defenses for Merrywine, well over two hundred years ago, they uncovered a barrow.”
“But the attack failed to carry the walls,” Hatcher objected. “And in any case the barrow and its contents would have been destroyed.”
“True. But barrows are seldom placed entirely by themselves.” Provine Sael pointed out another mound with her staff. “I believe that there are other barrows in or around the town, and that the attack’s real purpose was to create confusion so that one or more of these barrows could be plundered covertly.”
“So you think they’re gathering pieces to make something.”
“I do,” the Dellian nodded. “The Dusmen have the best information on the First Folk. I think they were looking in a variety of spots on the sly, but Merrywine required more effort. I don’t know if the barrows at Merrywine yielded anything useful to the Dusman plan, but I think their late start was based upon the gathering of various pieces.”
“Why not just wait once they had all the pieces? They could kick off next spring.” Hatcher drummed her heels against my breastplate.
“You don’t just warehouse certain artifacts,” Hunter noted. “Disturbing one can start a chain of events that can create serious and unexpected problems. Better to lose part of your invasion season than to have one or more nasty items going rogue in your territory. Especially only half-understood artifacts.” She shrugged. “Of course, I am no general.”
“It fits,” Hatcher admitted. “But the facts to support the theory are pretty thin on the ground.”
