by Peter David
“I can see how comfort would be derived from that, yes. So . . . shall I—?”
“Continue?” I wave toward him with my now-fully-functioning hand, the momentary weakness having passed so completely that I am left wondering if I had imagined it. “Yes, by all means, do. Our young bravos headed toward points east, did they?”
“Indeed they did.”
“A long way to walk.”
“True enough, but Thomas had sufficient funds that several days later, they arrived at a central hub, where they were able to buy passage onto a coach. It helped that they were not particularly fussy about which direction they were heading, as long as it was toward the place where the sun rose each morning. After all, what better place to find enlightenment than where the sun first kisses the sky?”
Chapter 3
THOMAS WAS NOT ACCUSTOMED TO having people laughing in his face. Giving him dubious looks, or chastising him, or perhaps just shaking their heads and turning away while muttering disdainful comments, yes, all of that and more had he experienced.
This man, though, was laughing outright. He was round and heavyset, sitting opposite Thomas and James and swaying side to side as the rocking coach barreled down the highway. The horses’ hooves stamped out a steady tattoo on the dirt path, and if they slowed, the coachman would shout “Yah!” every so often, which meant nothing to the horses, but then crack his whip, which did indeed mean something to them. The fellow passenger had already introduced himself as a merchant on business to Rookridge, the town for which the coach was bound, and just to pass the time, he had tried to prompt the lads to tell him what their own business was. Thomas had been evasive in that regard for much of the trip, but the merchant, whose name was Sutter, had managed to wear him down so that as their destination was merely a few hours on, he judiciously told him as much detail about the matter as he felt comfortable. No need to dredge up the entire tragic story of his brother, certainly, but he let down his guard sufficiently to describe precisely what it was that they were hoping to encounter.
This prompted the laughter, which so overwhelmed Sutter that he had to start coughing mightily, as if his lungs might be expelled from his chest, before he could compose himself.
“Balverines! Seriously?” he finally managed to ask.
James gave Thomas a cautioning glance, and Thomas was able to discern the unspoken message: No. Not seriously. Tell him you were not serious. Tell him you were joking. We do not need this grief.
He considered the silent advice and rejected it. Instead, he tilted his chin defiantly, almost as if challenging Sutter to take a swing at it, and said, “Yes. Seriously.”
“But they’re the stuff of myth and legend, boy!”
“So are Heroes, but we have one sitting on the throne of Albion.”
“The last of a dying breed, I’ll grant you that . . .”
“And,” Thomas pressed, “the tales speak of the creatures that they fought against. If Heroes exist . . . even one Hero . . . then why not the monsters that challenged them?”
“Because,” said Sutter, his face still red from laughing so hard, “people need to spin tall tales in order to make the accomplishments of the Heroes seem the stuff of legend. That’s how people are, boy. There’s just a need to make things bigger than they are. To build them up so—”
“So they can tear them down?” James piped up.
That prompted a moment of silence from Sutter, and then the merchant shrugged. “That’s a valid enough point, I suppose. Heroes have fallen into disfavor, that’s certainly true. But they’ve only themselves to blame, strutting around and acting as if they’re so much better than everyone else.”
“Maybe,” Thomas shot back, “they really were better than everyone else. And maybe people didn’t realize it because the Heroes were so good at disposing of the creatures and races that lurk in the shadows that people stopped being afraid and eventually forgot what it was they were afraid of in the first place.”
“It’s a worthwhile theory, boy,” said Sutter. “But an even simpler theory is that all the balverines and their ilk were simply exaggerations that got out of control and took on lives of their own. Myth and legend were fine back in the days before we became more civilized, more technological. But the science of technology tends to drive out the backwards thinking of superstition and nonsense. Balverines are just overgrown wolves, and hollow men are simply poor bastards who were incorrectly pronounced dead, as happens from time to time if an incompetent physician cannot detect a heartbeat. And the terrified devils come out of their comas to discover they’ve been prematurely buried and claw their way back to the surface. Nothing supernatural about it. About any of it. Certainly not enough to go gallivanting around Albion looking for evidence of it.”
Thomas was steaming at Sutter’s words, but James rested a calming hand on Thomas’s forearm even as he said, “You make a reasonable case.”
“I am a reasonable man. I’m sure you’ll find quite a few of us in your travels. Then again, you may also find one or two fools who will lend credence to nonsensical tales of balverines and the like. Pay them no heed, young masters.” And he settled back into his seat, closing his eyes. “Pay them no heed.”
Astoundingly, he was actually able to fall asleep despite the bumpiness of the ride. Under his breath, Thomas muttered in a nasal imitation of the merchant, “Pay them no heed,” and James laughed softly. “What is it with some people of the older generation, that they talk like they’re giving a formal dissertation?”
“It’s called being pedantic,” said Thomas, and then added, “Pay it no heed.” Both of them laughed at that.
Several hours later, as the sun crawled toward its apex in the noon sky, the coach came rolling into Rookridge. The merchant woke up minutes before they arrived and, as the coachman opened the door for them from the outside, bade Thomas and James a good afternoon and much luck on their adventures. Then he walked away, shaking his head, and an annoyed Thomas was sure he heard the man chuckling and muttering, “Balverines,” under his breath.
“The man’s an idiot.”
It was the coachman who had spoken. He was a much older man, possibly—Thomas felt—the oldest man he had ever seen, with thick white hair that hung in front of his face and beard stubble that protruded at random points from his cheeks in an odd patchwork fashion. His eyes were deep and looked hollowed . . . or perhaps haunted, and only one seemed to fix on them properly, the other crusted over. He was quite skinny except for his arms, which were disproportionately larger and rather well muscled, which explained how one of such slight appearance would be able to control a team of horses. He nodded in the direction that Sutter had walked, and continued, “A bleeding idiot, y’ask me,” in a deep, cantankerous growl. “Doesn’t know what the hell he’s talkin’ about.”
“You could hear our discussion?” Thomas was astounded. “How? You were on top of the coach, and the horses’ hooves were thunderous . . .”
“Long years of practice.” He tilted his head slightly, his gaze shifting from Thomas to James, and back. “Balverines, eh?”
“Yes.”
The old man coughed deeply and brought up a wad of spit that he expelled on the ground nearby. Thomas noted that it was tinted red. “The parents of the Hero of Southcliff were attacked and killed by a white balverine, or at least so it’s said. They’re among the most dangerous of the breed although some say the frost balverines are worse.”
“Have you ever seen one?” Thomas said eagerly.
“No, and I’ll be perfectly happy to reach the end of my days—which are probably coming far sooner than either of us would like—without ever having done so. But’cha don’t have to see something to know something. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, ya ken what I’m sayin’?”
“You’re saying that with all the talk of balverines, they have to have existed in order to spawn it. And other creatures, too?”
“Most like.” He spat again. This wad looked even darker red than the
first, and he coughed a few times in order to clear his lungs. “Say what’cha will about the creatures of the night—and I could say plenty—but at least they’re natural.”
James exchanged a confused look with Thomas. “I thought they were unnatural, actually,” said James.
“Pfaw!” The coachman snorted contemptuously at James and turned away from him, apparently having decided that he wasn’t worth his time. Instead, he said to Thomas, “Machines are unnatural. Technology is unnatural. Great belching clouds of black smoke are unnatural. Balverines and dragons, scorpions and screamers . . . some of those things were old when the world was young. They have every right to be crouching in the shadows, waiting for unwary travelers such as you”—and he poked Thomas in the chest with a gnarled finger—“to let down your guard. They are beings of purest nature, and if they’re recoiling from the damnable technology and the rotting of magic that passes for the world today, then who can rightly blame them. I certainly can’t. Can you?”
Thomas shook his head. “No, sir. I sure can’t.”
The coachman seemed to be trying to determine whether Thomas was being sarcastic. When he evidently decided that Thomas was not, he crooked that same finger that he’d been poking Thomas with a moment earlier, motioning the young man to draw closer. Thomas did so.
“Windside,” growled the old man.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You want to be going to Windside.”
“I do?” He looked to James, who shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
“And Windside likes it that way.” He pointed toward a distant mountain range that looked to Thomas to be about a day’s walk. “Those mountains yonder are called Mistpeak. Just stay on this path and follow it up into them. Ain’t navigable for horses; if you’re on four legs, you’d have to be a mountain goat. But on two legs, you should be okay, especially if you pick yourselves up walking sticks in town to help steady you. Can’t miss Windside; the buildings cling to the sides of the mountain more like bats than human structures.
“And what’s in Windside that’s worth all that effort?”
“The Library.”
“Which one?”
“Just the Library,” he said to Thomas with a sour look, apparently annoyed that Thomas had felt the need to ask. “It’s got books on the exact sorts of things you want to find out about.”
“Not sure that’s a worthwhile use of our time,” James said.
The coachman gave him yet another disdainful glare. “Wasn’t talking to you.”
James bridled at that, but Thomas put out a hand, cautioning him to silence, as he said, “What James means is that, well . . . I’ve been reading about these creatures my entire life.” Then he saw the old man shaking his head. “I . . . haven’t been?”
“Whatever you’ve been reading is tales retold, diluted, watered down, and gotten wrong, and with major pieces of them left out. That I can promise ya. Written by poseurs who heard stories from people what heard other stories. Ya want the real facts? Go to the source.”
“And the Library is the source?”
“One of ’em, aye.”
“Well . . . uhm . . . thank you,” said Thomas, and he stuck out his hand to shake that of the coachman. The coachman, rather than taking it, looked at it suspiciously and turned, shaking his head. He hitched the horses to a post at the depot, and then walked away.
“We’re not doing it, are we?” said James the moment that the coachman was out of earshot.
“I don’t see why not,” said Thomas readily.
“Well, how about that there’s snow up there, which probably means that it’s damned cold. And that the person who suggested we do it is some guy who drives horses for a living.”
“And he’s also the first adult not to treat me like I’m an idiot.”
“Yes, but he treated me like I’m an idiot.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t bother me as much.” Thomas grinned. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“To get some walking staffs. Also some gloves and wraps for our boots. Wouldn’t want to freeze our feet or hands off.”
“You realize we could die up there.”
“At least we’d wind up well preserved.”
With that, he headed off toward the local market. James reluctantly followed, muttering to himself about cold weather and coachmen who obviously didn’t know when to keep their big mouths shut.
Chapter 4
JAMES HAD NEVER SEEN ANYTHING like it.
That, in and of itself, wasn’t all that surprising. Anything that he was witnessing that didn’t look like either a run-down slum of a neighborhood or a moderately fancy manor—the two environs in which he had spent his fairly sheltered life—was by definition outside the realm of James’s experience and thus was unlike anything he had ever seen. The more correct way to think of it was that it was unlike anything he had ever considered imaginable. In point of fact, the town of Windside seemed insane in its conception, to say nothing of its very existence. It was a town that by all rights should not have been there at all because James couldn’t fathom why it was there.
“Who the hell would want to live here?” he gasped as he watched his own breath drift from his mouth. He drew his cape more tightly around himself and was grateful for the gloves and boots that were keeping their extremities warm, or at least moderately so.
It had indeed taken them a full day and part of a night to reach Mistpeak, and they had found a convenient cave at the base of the mountain to camp in overnight. This was luxurious by contrast considering some of the places they had wound up camping during their sojourn thus far, because although Thomas did indeed have money with him, they had had to be judicious in its spending and thus had spent many a night sleeping under the stars. Still, even though the cave was relatively luxurious in comparison to their unsheltered stays, James kept waking up every so often, convinced that some large creature that had already claimed the cave for its domicile was going to wander in and press its territorial rights. Fortunately enough, that did not occur, and the only menace James had to face that night was Thomas’s occasional, but nonetheless fearsome, snoring.
When the night had rolled over into the morning, they had emerged from the cave, stretched, eaten the remains of some heavily salted beef they had picked up at the market the day before, and then set out upon the path that supposedly would wend its way up to Windside. What had amazed James was the steady drop in temperature as their relative altitude climbed. It became progressively colder. At first it was barely noticeable, but the farther up they went, the more steadily and dramatically the temperature fell around them. The rocky trail became steeper, and soon every step that James was taking required effort and force of will. He was vaguely annoyed to see that, on the other hand, Thomas wasn’t allowing himself to be the least bit deterred by his surroundings. They could have been strolling along a pleasant path in the forest for all that Thomas was willing to acknowledge the difficulty of their surroundings.
“You could at least try to make it look like you’re straining,” James had chided him. Thomas had simply grinned back, his smile the only thing visible within the darkness of the hood pulled up over his head.
Hours crawled one into the next, and the trail was getting narrower. It was becoming readily evident why horses would have been useless in this endeavor. There were points where the boys had to walk sideways in order to squeeze through, and James got himself hung up on his cloak several times, uttering profanities all along the way. “How much farther?” he had said at one point.
“How should I know?”
“Because coming up here was your idea!”
“Technically, it was the coachman’s idea.”
“Great!” James had shouted, his voice rising. “So we followed some nameless . . .” Suddenly something overhead caught his eye, something falling directly toward Thomas. “Watch it!” he cried out, and, grabbing the confused Thomas, he yanked him back toward himself. A column of ice, as l
ong as a man and sharp as a javelin, crashed to the ground right where Thomas had been and shattered into fragments.
Gasping, Thomas and James stared at it, and then slowly and softly, Thomas said, “You might want to keep your voice down. Unless you feel like bringing down a ton of snow or ice on our heads. That’s what loud noises do around here.”
“So ...” He looked around nervously. “You’re saying that if I lose my temper, it could kill us.”
“Pretty much.”
“Wonderful.”
That had been all the inspiration James had required to keep his mouth shut as they continued on their way. The path widened out a bit so that they were able to walk more normally after a time, but James was becoming increasingly concerned as the sun made its way across the sky, and no village presented itself. He was not enamored of the prospect of trying to find somewhere to make camp should night fall. For all he knew, Thomas’s snoring would be sufficient to bring a drift down upon them. and they would freeze to death, buried alive beneath tons of snow. But he elected not to say anything of his concerns to Thomas because he had no desire to come across as someone who was constantly complaining. This was a quest, after all, and one did not whine about a quest even though the exact parameters of it were still a bit unclear to him.
They approached a blind corner of the type that always made James a bit apprehensive since he had no idea what to expect from around the other side. When they turned it, however, Thomas stopped in his tracks, and, as a result, James bumped into him with such force that the two of them almost went to the ground in a tumble of arms and legs.
“I’ll be damned,” said Thomas, and James was beginning to suspect they both would be when, as he dusted snow off his leggings, he saw what it was that Thomas was reacting to.
“Windside?” he said, and Thomas nodded, and replied, “Has to be.”
