Frayja didn’t know what to do, holding The Thorn’s lifeless body under her hands. She watched as the Medusi that had thralled him detached. Medusi do not stay long when their host actually expires. She remembered her gift through her grief and plunged her mind into The Thorn’s body. Her magic surged through him, knitting together his wounds, generating new blood to replace that which was lost, pumping his heart until it began to pump on its own.
The Thorn rose from the dead that day, killed the Medusi that had thralled him, and saved the Healer Frayja.
*
[How did they get back across the sea of Medusi?] Totelun wrote once he’d finished. He gave his question to Cassandra.
Cassandra didn’t answer immediately, instead passing him another leaf as she came to stand beside him. The mass of Medusi before them was just like the one in her story. [We can try it,] she’d written.
[What, dying?]
[No, weren't you reading carefully?] When he still looked blank, Cassandra rolled her eyes behind her yellowed goggles. [The immunity. I am immune to the bloom; they won’t be interested in me.]
[I understand that,] Totelun wrote, [but I am not thralled.]
Cassandra smiled and deemed finally to answer his question. [Frayja took The Thorn back across the moat made of Medusi, without being attacked.]
[How?]
Cassandra stepped right up to Totelun, so near they were touching chest to chest. She put her arms around him, communicating in the way her notes never could. She looked up at him, her blue eyes bright behind her goggles, and passed him the note. [We must get this close, Totelun, so close that we look like one person.]
He was embarrassed. Part of him wanted to break away from her and laugh. He could feel the blood rushing to his cheeks, making him blush red. But part of him wanted to stay right where he was, and never move again.
Cassandra was the one that broke away. She mimed, pointing at herself and then his shoulders. He got the idea faster than usual. Totelun gave her the packs to carry, stooped down and let Cassandra climb onto his back. Her hands and arms held on around his shoulders, and he held her legs with his arms in turn. He could tell he wouldn’t last forever, but he felt strong.
He strode out into the sea of Medusi, pushing them aside, left and right. They moved aside like seaweed breaking before a fishing boat. Both of them were covered with thick cloth, or fur from neck to feet, only their faces and hands bared. Tentacles brushed Totelun’s hands, and fired their stinging barbs, but the Medusi did not move to attack.
It was the strangest sensation; touching them, barging into them as he progressed further and further into the seething mass, yet they did not attack him.
The Medusi saw them as one creature, already claimed by the Medusi attached to Cassandra, floating above like a tiny lighthouse in a ragging storm. He would still make it to the mountain. He wouldn’t fall behind the punishing schedule set by the Islands’ progression.
Somehow Totelun wished Naus could see them now, re-enacting the trick he’d used to traverse a similar bloom, over a thousand years before. He missed the old man terribly, missed his wit, and his friendship and his certain company. He found his eyes welling with tears as he walked through the ocean of Medusi.
Cassandra held tight but manoeuvred herself to hold the last note she’d written in front of his face.
[Still think I’m a liability?]
Chapter Sixteen
Nausithorn
Ambrinor was the famous mining city that had been carved into the rock on the western side of Mount Cartracia. Though it was likely levelled rubble with all the recent armies that had travelled through, it had once been an engineering and mining marvel, with great labyrinthine tunnels, towered housing and entire mansion complexes bored into the earth. Naus had heard the survivors of the city’s incineration during the war dug another very productive tunnel for the Empress during the siege. She is a capable one, that Aurelia, he thought, just unlucky. He hoped she would survive to make good on her talents. He wondered sometimes about joining her as she had offered, but his place was in the shadows, not the stark light of politics.
If Ambrinor was the burly engineer making science work to better his city, Kabranth was its surly younger brother, an incompetent teenager aping its elder brother’s achievements. Situated on the eastern side of the great mountain, Kabranth faced the Terracon Steppe and ostensibly protected the Theris basin from the horse tribes. It had been entirely gutted by the horse lord King Stauros Isingr when his armies had finally routed Emperor Tiber’s last surviving forces there.
Kabranth had boasted a great wall fifty feet high that blocked the entrance to the city on the Terracon side; what its citizens were lacking in mining expertise, they made up for in construction.
But it hadn’t held; from where Naus stood he could see the wall far ahead and below him, a great crumbled fissure in the centre had allowed the army to overrun the fortress.
The city was abandoned. As Naus wandered through, slowly making his way lower and lower down the different levels of the fort-like city, he found no trace of another human being. The ruins sometimes shifted and fell as he moved through, but there was no one else affecting them but him. Even the normal squatters and hermits one might find in abandoned ruins were missing, or a good deal better at remaining undetected than they usually were. It was eerily silent, just one solitary man wandering through a grey landscape of ruin and debris. Wouldn’t want to change the habit of a lifetime, he thought.
He had made good time striking East from the Theris river. Far less forest in the direction he chose; he had reached the mountain range long before Totelun and Cassandra and had climbed into Kabranth from the undefended rear, leaving the Theris basin behind him.
Naus remembered making his way through this city when it thrived, but also before it had even been founded, more than a thousand years before. Then it had just been the craggy outcrop of the mountain range that circled the valley beyond. He was close to the point where Eleutheria had led her ragtag group of rebels and supporters away from the fighting and destruction on the plains. She had stood resplendent with her silver hair whipping in the wind and gazed down at the green valley that would be the site of her great city. Naus had been the second to join her on that ridge, had seen her brilliant smile. She had been so happy then in that short decade or so where they had founded Theris, before the great War of the Overlords had sapped her of everything that made her his friend, before the rigors of rule and empire and power had taken their toll. Before she’d sent him on all those missions, the ones that had broken him and destroyed everything he had been. She had taken his son from him and his son’s husband, and their adopted children, cold-bloodedly killed them because of him. When he had eventually betrayed her it had been too little too late.
Naus shook himself. He found the old memories easier and easier to slip into, and harder to release himself from. Some minutes may have passed and he wouldn’t know. He’d forgotten entire decades, even centuries of the time since. But you weren’t doing anything of note then, he reminded himself, just wandering the world, a nomad with no purpose and nowhere to call home.
He was enjoying having purpose again. Striking out for the Temple of the Order. He would find the secret to destroying the power of the Overlords once and for all. He was saddened that he had been forced to abandon Totelun, but he tried to think of the boy as little as possible.
It was just the same as it had been for the preceding centuries. Me against the world. He hadn’t had a companion then, and he didn’t need one now.
He looked at the lines and liver spots on his hands and wondered if he would make it on his own. He had to hunt for himself again, without Totelun’s incredible aim and steady hands. He had neither any longer.
High in the city, he spotted a fat creature that looked somewhere between a warthog and a fox. He crouched low and quiet, took careful aim…and shot it in the tail. He knew because as it sped away into the ruins never to be seen again, he cou
ld see the arrow flapping left and right. Not even winded. He couldn’t even follow it and hope it might collapse from blood loss.
It was infuriating because he had been a good shot at least in his prime; put an enemy soldier in front of him a few centuries ago and he could put one through their eye from fifty paces. But age was taking its toll. Incredibly slowly for him, granted, but it was happening. He wasn’t awful, he hit some things he aimed at, but the ratio was terrible. Where Totelun would take his prey in one shot, on his first attempt, Naus would need five shots, maybe more. He had collected more lopsided arrows from bushes than carcasses. He wondered yet again, as he had for many decades, about designing a weapon that shot ten arrows at once. You would aim it in the vague direction of the rabbit and simple probability would feed you – one of them had to hit. Cheating, maybe, but at least he’d eat.
The one and only rabbit he had hit was securely fastened to his belt; he was saving it until he really needed it.
Thinking of his empty stomach brought him back to Totelun. The boy had supplied them with food with no trouble. He wished he could speak to him again now; in this abandoned city he felt his absence more keenly. Dammit, the boy has to learn to deal with that stubborn streak. He was making his way up the mountain on a fool’s errand, but Naus was glad he was making decisions of his own. Naus had been the one making them for him, right up until the boy had chosen to stay in the palace to buy Naus the time to escape with the Empress and her sister. Naus had navigated them from town to town, taken them to Velella’s ruined home, to Corolan Harbour and all the way to Theris. He’d even planted the idea of the airship in the young boy’s mind.
Totelun was always so keen on being thought of as an adult, as a man. Well, making your own decisions and living with the consequences, isn’t that the very definition?
Not for the first time, he wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have left him with Cassandra, but he had to trust the boy to make the right decisions, and not to get them killed.
Naus had his own purpose now. The Temple of the Order of the Medousa would be ill-defended considering how many Clerics and acolytes had arrived in Theris. It was their new seat of power, and the old one had been abandoned. He'd tried many times over the centuries to gain entrance, even going so far as to setup armies and organisations to fight them. But he’d never actually managed to get in. The place had been a fortress, full of security measures and vigilant brain-washed cultists.
As the evening wore on, he clambered up the broken façade of a building that still sported a second storey. He could stay here overnight, out of the chill wind. The closer he got to Terracon, and the further north, the warmer the climes became, but nights were still best spent under shelter. This one had a window and Naus watched the city slowly darken as the sun fell from a pink and amber radiance to a dying glow. He was looking for lights. Not from fires - the city was empty - but from Medusi; the city’s emptiness was due to the bloom of Medusi that had passed through on their way to thrall Theris. Daylight made spotting Medusi difficult even for the trained eye, but at night they were visible for miles.
But as the city fell to darkness, instead of the Medusi he expected to find and still hadn’t, he spotted a thin column of smoke rising against the disappearing sunset. Once the sun was gone, the fire was visible from almost anywhere in Kabranth.
Naus left his shelter to investigate. He wasn’t alone in the city, and though he trusted his skills with his blade, he didn’t want to be ambushed. The fire could be trap, but he also couldn’t just forget about it. He crept silently through the ruins for a few minutes, round some broken buildings, down a few roads thick with dust and debris. It was hard to be as silent as he wished, but if the owner of the fire was still next to it, the crackle of the flame would be obscuring all small sounds anyway.
Naus shielded his eyes when he rounded a corner and the fire was only twenty yards away, out in a small square. It was away from buildings and wood, so it wouldn’t set fire to anything by accident, but it was visible from all around. It looked more and more like a trap, or possibly, the work of an incompetent; the fire was tiny, and badly constructed. As his eyes became accustomed to the flames and the afterimages died away, he could see the culprit; a young man in a dark black suit with his hood down and a blue visor, trying to work damp wood into the flames, hence the smoke.
So close to the fire the young man wouldn’t be able to see anything in the darkness. Naus watched him, and as he shifted he saw that the stranger was a thrall; he hadn’t seen it at first because his Medusi was encased in an armoured shell, giving off only minimal light through a series of small orb-like ports.
Coupled with the black suit, he was clearly a Cephean; one of the elite spies of the Order, usually recruited as young children and brain-washed into betraying their families for the Goddess. A tool of his enemy.
Naus considered killing him; one less Cephean to supply the Order with secrets. It would be the work of a moment; he could step up behind him, or even in front, and simply snap his neck. He'd have to be silent, the Cephean were sensitive aurally. The boy had no real strength to speak of, no tell-tale musculature that spoke of months on the practice field; he was a scholarly boy, more at home in a library or the Citadel of the Premiers than out here in the bones of a ruined city.
He crept down into the shadows thrown by the fire. The young man stopped trying to wedge the piece of damp wood into the flames; he gave up, leaving it sticking half in and half out. He went to his pack and pulled out food; cold dried meats and cheese, and something that looked a little like a pie. Naus could feel himself salivating at the sight of it. Could he kill someone for a pie? The boy was no hunter, it wouldn’t be dangerous, but was it the right thing to do?
With his eyes blighted by the firelight, Naus figured the young thrall would never see him. He remembered Cassandra was one of these stolen children, taken from their families and thralled against their will. Her eyes had been exceptionally sensitive to light, to the point where without her visor she had been rendered blind in all but the darkest room. Totelun had given her his light-cancelling goggles.
The young thrall saw him.
He scrambled to his feet, knocking his foot against the damp branch and flicking fire about. ‘Who goes there?’ he said, peering through the haze.
Naus decided in that moment not to kill him, he was too intrigued why a Cephean would be out here alone. Curiosity will get me killed one day, he thought. He stood, lifting his hands to show he was not armed. ‘Just a fellow traveller.’ Naus reached to his belt.
‘What are you doing?’ said the thrall. His voice was scared. He had not expected company. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’
Naus chuckled. ‘That line would work better if you had a weapon, but I see none.’ He took the rabbit from his belt and held it up as he stepped slowly round the fire. ‘It’s a cold night. Will you share food, share a fire?’
The thrall looked ready to run.
‘I mean no harm,’ Naus said, truthfully. ‘There is no one for miles around and I saw your fire.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. Company. I saw your fire and figured I could use the company. Always a risky venture in the wilds, but you were also alone.’
‘What makes you think I’m alone?’ The thrall’s voice was masculine and noble. Naus found the Cephean uniform tended to give its wearer’s an androgynous quality. Certainly this was the case with his body, but not the voice. Educated, son of a noble? Most Cephean were.
Naus smiled, trying to seem friendly. He had so little practice. ‘I’ve been watching you for twenty minutes. If there’s anyone else around they’re a long way off. Come on, calm down. What’s your name?’
The thrall gave the distinct impression of being distracted by something. The Cephean were a network of interconnected symbiotic spies; he was probably hearing something through the hive-mind that Naus couldn’t. Instructions? Or just background chatter?
‘Crescen.’
Naus recognised that one somehow. ‘Of House Argentor?’
The thrall tensed again. ‘How do you know that?’
‘You are almost royalty. You have to expect people might recognise your name.’ Naus sat himself down near the warmth of the fire. He chuckled again. ‘I’ll be honest, I did not expect to find the son of the Duke of Argentor out here.’
He calmed as Naus sat down, possibly figuring he had the upper hand if he needed it. ‘And you?’
Naus extended a hand. Crescen stooped to shake it, which made him sit. ‘Arcturus. I’m a travelling bard.’ When Crescen didn’t seem to know the word, he added. ‘A storyteller.’
Naus would need to be careful; whatever he said was not heard only by young Crescen. He was also talking to all the other Cepheans on the wide symbiotic network, even Cassandra he supposed, if she could still hear them. It was also relayed back to the High Cleric and the Goddess of the Order, Noctiluca. He could not use his real identity, if they had heard his name from Totelun’s torture or the other inhabitants of the palace he was as good as inviting attack. He didn’t suspect anyone knew his true identity as Nausithorn, the assassin of legend; it was only his recent history that would give him away.
The Arcturus persona would serve, a travelling storyteller he had played multiple times. But who remembered the storyteller’s name, no one. Just the story. It was a safe identity to use and Naus had a lot of stories.
‘Where are you from?’ Crescen asked. ‘Your accent is not local.’
Naus couldn’t even remember his original hometown these days. He’d lost that memory along with all the others of his childhood. ‘I’m from everywhere,’ he said, dismissing it. ‘But lately of Theris. I left before the great battle.’
He hoped Crescen wouldn’t examine his claims too deeply. With the siege and the war, it was unlikely for anyone to have escaped Theris, or be wandering in the valley. That left travelling from Argentor, but Naus’ recent knowledge of the place was poor, as he had spent most of the last fifty years in the east; he didn’t want to get caught in a lie about the thrall’s homeland.
Embrace of the Medusi (The Overlords Trilogy Book 2) Page 24
