by Danie Ware
“Would you care to face a test, trader?” he asked.
Conscious of a sudden tension, the scribe held his breath.
“You may forget,” Saravin went on, “how sharp a man’s ears become when he spends thirty returns listening to the plains wind.” The trader’s eyes flicked to the peace-bonded weapon and back to Saravin’s face. “You may also forget that ‘that poor girl’ learned much of her rural lore at my side, and that I grew very fond of her. You may forget, but it’s probably wiser if you don’t.”
“On the contrary,” the trader said, smiling with all innocence. “I have a very good memory. And I remember you, Saravin.”
“Delighted to hear it,” Saravin said, beaming. “Then you’ll remember that I’ve told you to leave the girl be. Let her do her job.”
“Let Phylos do her job.”
The dyer’s mutter was barely more than a breath, but Saravin’s hearing was as sharp as he’d claimed. Still affable, he grasped the man’s shoulder in one huge, hairy paw. His voice was bare-edged. “Tread careful, trader.”
The trader folded his arms deliberately, looking up into the fighter’s face.
“Everyone treads careful round you, Saravin.”
Tension locked them together for a brief, silent moment. Then Mael laid a sun-wizened hand on his friend’s arm. “Go easy,” he murmured, “you’re seeing things.”
For a second, Saravin didn’t move, but the trader sat in bland-eyed innocence, and the warrior let him go, glowering.
“You’re too long in the plains, old friend, too long alone,” Mael said softly. Under his hand was the scar that had nearly reft Saravin of his life some thirty returns before - the bite of the gangrene from which Mael had saved him. “I’ve seen what that open space does to a man’s mind. It changes you, ’Vin, remember?”
Saravin grunted, patted Mael’s hand as if it were a child’s, smiled. “Remind me how to think city?”
Mael laughed quietly. “At least you’ve got the city’s respect. But if you win this afternoon, win anything, you’ll have responsibilities.”
Shaking his mass of hair, Saravin turned away. “Maybe I’m seeing shadows,” he said. “Arta ekanta; figments that aren’t there when I turn to look close. But these rumours of disease -we’ve got no -”
“This is a city, Saravin, you can’t treat its people like pirates.”
With his flash of his childlike grin, Saravin quoted a Fhaveon axiom. “‘Guilty until proven guilty.’”
Mael moved him away, catching the trader’s eye as he did so. Almost imperceptibly, the trader nodded in acknowledgement, then turned to a couple of brightly clad ladies who were examining his colours. He did not look up again.
“It’s all games.” Saravin smiled and shook his head as a younger woman pressed herself against him, her eyes vivid with kohl and sincerity. “If the harvest really is threatened, then we must stand together, city and farmlands both, or we’ll all die.”
Mael wasn’t so optimistic, but he let the matter rest.
* * *
At the edge of the plaza mosaic, a simple bar had been erected - no more than a waxed cloth roof and a makeshift wooden table. Behind it, warm in the unlikely sun, a small, walled garden gave a place for drinkers to loiter and chat. Even though it was early, the space was packed and people had scattered outwards into the sunshine, needing to make the most of both weather and break.
Scribe and warrior began to shoulder their way through to the bar.
Conversations paused as Saravin passed; gatherings of traders and workers and celebrants were silenced by his presence, then fell to muttering at his back. Mael’s hearing was sharp enough to catch fragments of words, tantalising hints of public opinion, concern about the harvest, several comments about the city’s new Lord. He could only imagine how much Saravin could overhear, but the warrior’s face was stone hard under his heavy beard. They reached the bar without comment.
“A tankard of the tempest,” Mael said, “and -”
Before he’d finished his order, the girl thumped two leather tankards down in front of him, spilling ale on the bar top. Her eyes did not meet his.
“Won’t you...”
But she had gone to serve another, further away.
Saravin stared after her, checked a sigh. By the tension in his movements, he would far rather be in the garden than clustered in with all these people - Mael saw him watching the light dapple the green space with a certain well-disciplined wistfulness.
Mael picked up his drink, and turned to lean his elbows on the bar. Unlike his friend, he avoided the outdoors whenever possible - the inadequacy of the harvest was an almost academic problem to the scribe, one of numbers and weights and allocation rates. He understood that any shortage meant the farmlands would struggle with the winter. It meant their manors wouldn’t hit their required autumn quotas, that the city would decline full recompense, refusing to exchange with them the goods and materials they needed. He understood how this could become both complex and disastrous. But he had not seen the failure, had not felt it in the soil as Saravin could.
Tensions stole through the crowd like figments, stole through the city entire.
The creeping blight was not the only problem.
Lord Foundersdaughter Selana Valiembor, only child of her dead father Demisarr, was painfully inadequate for the role to which she had so abruptly ascended. Her father murdered, her mother raped, her family’s timeless guardian accused and condemned. Selana’s grooming had been good - but she was too young, too traumatised, and she was an open opportunity for exploitation.
Her increasing reliance on the Merchant Master Phylos was both apparent and worrying - and it didn’t take a scribe’s wisdom to know where this story of a new and naïve ruler could end.
Mael listened to the fragments ebb and flow, took a thoughtful sip of his foaming ale.
Something about Rhan’s absence was deeply, fundamentally unsettling. He had always been here; his presence like the stone the city was built upon, the wall that defended her cliffside face from the water. Yes, he had been irreverent, his behaviour was both legendary and humorous, but his loyalty was unquestioned and his defence absolute. Without his experience - his authority to balance Phylos’s manipulation and ambition - the city was rocked to her foundations, trembling headless and vulnerable. Out there, right now, a heady mix of fear and drink was working upon the people’s anxieties - one strong voice could lead them almost anywhere.
Had Rhan really been a champion? Or had he been as Phylos painted him, the stagnant deadweight that prevented the city - and the Varchinde - from developing? Had he murdered Demisarr? Forced his wife? Caused the harvest to fail? Who would take his critical seat upon the Council of Nine? With Phylos in ascendance, would this promise of a new age really come to save the city, the grasslands?
Saravin had drifted away, gone to find the open air. His head full of questions, Mael continued to idly observe the crowd.
And what of Fletcher Wyll’s meeting? Priorities warred within the old scribe. Though young, Selana was the only child of her father, and Fhaveonic traditions were as deep as her wells. Enough people would support that principle to make insurrection scattered and unlikely.
People like Saravin. His heart was true, but his loyalty...
Mael found himself looking through a gap in the drinkers -following the direction that Saravin had taken. The big warrior stood in the garden with his bearded face turned up to the sunlight, feeling the cool wind of the autumn, brisk this high above the sea. The seethe of plant life around him was almost overgrown - an oddity for the upper reaches of the city where the soil was thin.
At the very rear of the garden, on a stone bench with a gargoyle grimacing at one end of it, sat a young woman, cloaked, hooded, and alone. She sat silent, her hands and most of her face concealed. Mael gazed at her blankly for a while, not really seeing what he was looking at, until something crossed his line of sight and he suddenly blinked, aware.
There
was something wrong with the woman’s skin.
It was hard to see - the sun was behind her, behind the low wall of the garden, and her face was in the shadow of her cowl. The stonework over her was hung with vine and creeper. There was something wrong with her hands -
Good Gods.
Mael’s grip tightened on his leather tankard and he found himself staring, breathless and wordless, the blood draining from his face.
The girl’s hands were in her lap, in a dapple of sunlight. They were soft and uncallused, yet her skin was blotched and suppurating. There were patches of rot, like lichens, growing through and in her flesh. As she raised her face and her hood fell back, he saw her hair was matted with it, that her mouth was full of... he swallowed in spite of himself, felt sick... her mouth was full of moss.
Saravin, closest, must have seen Mael’s expression. He seemed to turn with almost comedic slowness, his hands going to the peace-bond that held his belt-blade. The woman parted her lips, tried to speak to him, but no voice came. She lifted those hands, tried to reach for him but the creeper held her back and she struggled like a trapped thing, and the people were looking up now and wondering who she was, why she was trapped with her hands reaching outwards...
Mael stared, stunned.
Then someone pointed and screamed, and suddenly all around him was disbelief and scrambling, scrabbling bodies. Someone tried to scramble over the bar, and was forcibly repelled.
Saravin was moving, but something in Mael could not. He was...
Fascinated.
He didn’t think about why.
As the people backed and fled, some of them panicked, hissing like water over stones. Mael moved forwards, out of the bar and into the garden, towards his friend.
“’Vin?” he called softly. “What’s that?”
“Damned if I know...” Saravin’s voice was hoarse. Mael had never heard him sound scared before. “You?”
A thrill of terror went through Mael’s blood.
The woman tried to speak again, but whatever was growing in her mouth had coated her tongue and her teeth, the insides of her cheeks, and no air would come.
“I’ve never seen anything like it...” Saravin tailed off, his hand still on his belt. “What in the name of the Gods is the matter with her?”
The bar was empty now, people had fled shrieking across the plaza outside and the soldiery would arrive any moment.
The woman opened her mouth again. The overgrown plant life of the garden seemed to reach for and through her.
The scribe edged closer, ignoring Saravin’s combatant bark of warning. Mael had no weapons, couldn’t use one anyway, but he needed to see her close-up - needed to see what was happening. In long returns at the hospice, he had seen many illnesses and injuries, many types of grief and pain, but he’d never seen anything like this. And if Saravin, also, had no idea...
Something in him moved - like pity.
And then she came for them.
* * *
She was thin, savage and slavering; her eyes glowed like windows into the Rhez itself; and her gnarled hands slashed, desperate and claw-like. She came at them as though she’d been waiting. She thrashed and tore herself from her cloak, arms reaching and fingers outstretched as though frantic to tear the skin from their faces.
She was trying to speak.
Unreal in the gentle dapple of sunlight, patches of her skin shone cold round areas of roughened darkness. She wore garments overgrown with moss, fibres rotting and torn by the garden’s plant life.
“Gods!” Mael breathed.
Both men had fallen back - the change was so sudden, so wrong.
For a moment, she paused in her struggles. She opened her mouth again and exhaled, a long stinking breath. She snarled.
A tremble went through Saravin’s body, a pulse of absolute, focused fury.
Softly, Mael said, “Wait!”
Shivering with tension, he crept closer, until the overgrown garden had swallowed his boots to the ankle. He paused, transfixed, studying. Something about the fecund reek of this thing’s breath, something...
...familiar...
The woman met his gaze. She half-heartedly swiped at him with one arm - as if she knew he was out of reach. Her eyes were pure madness now, burning cold.
“So,” he said softly, watching her, “this your garden?”
Saravin muttered, “What are you doing?”
The woman cocked her head to one side, gave a second, open-mouthed hiss. In the still air, it stank like a farmer’s compost pile.
“There are herbs for that,” Mael said.
In response, she gave a plaintive whine and stretched one hand slowly towards his mouth. Yearning.
Now that was creepy.
“Mael,” Saravin said. “Come away. Come away now.”
The hiss became an inhalation, a sucking of air, a seeking. The woman coiled back, watched them through crazed, unblinking eyes. Then she hurled herself forwards, tugging frantically, struggling, shredding her own skin. Ripping the bramble clean from the dark, city soil.
Wearing it like a blood-garland.
Mael backed up sharply, tripped over his heels and went down on his arse. The woman threw herself at his face, clawing to reach his jaw and mouth, inhaling, her lips parted as though to drain his very breath. And Saravin was there to meet her, punching his blade’s quillons straight into her eyes and grappling for Mael’s collar with the other hand.
“I said, come away!” he gasped.
One eye popped in a splash of darkness but her hands caught Mael’s shoulders. They clung, clawed - she was trying to pull him into her embrace. Her other eye was fixed, glaring-chill.
Viciously, Saravin slammed the blade into her ribs, undercutting. She keened, a horribly human noise.
But she opened her mouth anyway.
The sweet, lush stench was overpowering, a grass-harvest pile left too long on a hot day, a farmer’s vegetables rotting by the roadside. The stench smothered Mael’s breathing, breakfast and fear roiled in his belly - he was going to throw up.
And Saravin was there, blade discarded, hands closing on the woman’s shoulders, bodily dragging her from Mael. With a vicious shudder, he threw her down to the overgrown path and slammed his boot into the side of her head.
A wet, cracking sound.
Again.
For a second, she seemed confused. The tension left her body, the crazed blue light faded from her eye. She blinked, tried to focus, her mouth worked as if to say something, but only a flood of dark fluid came from her ears and lips.
Kneeling, Saravin punched his oversized and hairy fist clean through the front of her skull. Almost unwittingly, Mael rolled to the side to throw up.
And he saw.
The young woman, now faceless and broken, was still in the regulation garments of a Fhaveon city servitor.
3: FAMILY AMOS
Amos, largest and oldest city of the Varchinde, a dark sprawl about the mouth of the Great Cemothen River.
Over the jumble of her tiled and tessellated roofs, the yellow moon had shrunk to half-full, liquid and gleaming; her smaller, higher brother now faced away from her as if sulking, glittering white in the starless sky. Melding with the moonlight, torchlight pooled across the cobbles, flickering, and bright rocklights glinted from shadowed doorways. Grass-garlands danced from window to window, fluttering, beckoning the milling crowd down toward the river and the heart of the city - then onwards to the broad, bustling spread of the Estuary Wharf.
Over the river’s myriad mouths, music skirled like night wind. Carried by its promise, the people laughed and danced.
Somewhere among them, hemmed in by tight and gleeful bodies, the slim, bright figure of a woman caught a toe in the hem of her skirt and half-tripped, splashing wine down her embroidered bodice. The movement was almost clumsy, as though she was unused to fine dress.
About her, ale and humour ran freely - the accident was greeted with cheers.
She did not ack
nowledge them.
Triqueta blinked as the streets seemed to waver in her vision, then downed the last of her wine. Staggering, she found herself caught in the centre of a great crowd, laughter all round her, buoyed tidal through widening roadways. Pressed close, the people of Amos drank carefree, their hair woven with coloured grass.
From somewhere, a hand produced a pottery carafe, and refilled her goblet.
Rumour raced round her; boasts and dares. The Lord Nivrotar, CityWarden of Amos, had herself been seen dancing in the streets. She was unarmoured, they said, jesting with those who came close. Her prowling bodyguards were few and seemed unworried by the masses. As Triq was carried forward to the huge swath of the Estuary Wharf, the mood around her was expansive, and lavish.
Yet some part of her was withheld, and unable to let go.
She should be revelling in it, she knew that, she had every reason. She had success and fortune. She had notoriety. She had wealth to squander and no reason to withhold. She was a cursed hero, for the Gods’ sakes, reunited with family she’d missed and now carried high on their shoulders...
Family.
The word was bitter.
Triqueta found she’d stopped. The crowd tutted and pushed to get round her, heady smells of scented flesh and spiced food, but she didn’t move. She had a shadow in her heart, something that hurt like a bruise. She had seen things she could never unsee.
She had family hurt, and no idea how to help them.
With a gesture like need, she threw back the wine. It was sharp, almost made her splutter. She shook herself, shrugged the shock away, started to move - and tripped again on the hem of her ridiculous, whimsical finery.
What in the rhez had she been thinking, wearing this?
That she was some great lady, some cursed champion? Going to some carefree revel?
She was Banned, body and bone, born to the saddle and the free grass of the Varchinde.
But the tide still carried her forwards.
Below her, scattered through the awnings and lights of the Estuary Wharf, the taverns had overspilled, and drinkers crowded shouting. Songs grew in volume and then scattered into laughing fragments. Yet from up here, crushed in flesh and festivity, the party seemed oddly hollow, the laughter forced, the colours fake - like shadow-puppets.
