Shoreseeker

by Brandon M. Lindsay

  His reaction must have been obvious. “Oh, Yarid,” said Gorun with a hard grin, “what is this? Dare you judge someone? How quaintly moralistic.”

  “Sarcasm hardly suits you, old man.” Odd. Gorun seemed to be the indifferent one. They had switched roles. The bastard.

  Shad Belgrith scanned those assembled. When her eyes met Yarid’s, he almost felt violated. Unsmiling, she stared him down, apparently reveling in his discomfort. The bitch.

  “Councilors.” Her clear, firm voice rang throughout the Hall, quelling the quiet muttering. “You disappoint me.”

  No one responded.

  She began to pace around the small bit of clear space in the Pit. “I thought we had an agreement. One that benefited us all.” She paused, as if to remind them how much she had invested in the project they had halted. “I gave you resources. I gave you techniques that eluded your most gifted builders. And I gave you my most skilled Patterners … all so you could betray me.”

  “Governor Belgrith,” said Frandera, “I am sorry to say that the law regarding this—”

  “You betrayed me!” Tears welled in Belgrith’s eyes; her fists were clenched. In that moment, she looked so much like a poor, maligned child that Yarid’s heart briefly went out to her—until he remembered this child with a temper had a pike for every Councilor’s neck in this room.

  “You betrayed me,” she said again in a quieter voice. “That was a mistake. One that you can still rectify.”

  Pembo Sint, apparently unaware of the danger all around him, leaned forward with a wicked grin. “We could have another duel—”

  “Shut up, you twit.” Frandera turned back to Shad. “I must admit that we were outmaneuvered, and now our hands are tied. Whatever authority granted to us by the Accord would become null and void were we to betray the law each of us swore to uphold.” She opened her hands. “We have worked for years, just as you have, to see the Runeway become a reality. We have just as much incentive as you do to see it finished. Unfortunately, as a political institution, we just don’t have the means to do so anymore. We have bridged the Rift and met our long-long brothers and sisters of Naruvieth, and though our relationship is currently not ideal, we are glad to have them back among us.” She left out that they had declared their sovereignty and were no longer ‘among us’. “We consider what we have been able to accomplish up until this point a victory, and we hope that you will join us in celebration of the advances we have made.”

  Sherin Firnaleos, recovered from whatever troubles her husband had caused her with his earlier antics, spoke up. “I believe you have some explaining of your own to do, Governor.” She gestured at the pair of heavily-armed men standing behind her. “Such as why you deemed it necessary to bring soldiers here with you. The Council of the Wall has always stood for peace. Such displays of brute force have never accomplished anything but hardship and suffering.” She, too, was just as oblivious as Sint to the danger these soldiers represented, it seemed.

  “You stand for peace,” Shad said, “until you don’t.” She gestured to Erianna behind her. “My proxy has told me all about your husband and how you approved his request to shed blood in this very Hall to solve your problems.”

  Sherin froze. She didn’t rise to the bait.

  Shad Belgrith smiled coldly. “But you misunderstand my intentions. These soldiers are not here to threaten. They are here to make you feel safe and comfortable.”

  “How do you reckon that?” Pembo Sint asked.

  “I want to ensure that you are not disturbed by what you are about to see. The Council, I’ve learned today, is governed by fear. I would hate for such fears to lead to rash action.” She gestured to one of her men in the Pit and stepped to the side with her hands folded behind her with Erianna, who suddenly looked shaken, at her heel. The man took off out the door.

  Steel-shod boots clicked loudly out in the tile-floored hallway beyond the doors. Each footfall crunched; the weight behind them must have been immense. Were it not for the fact that the slow, measured pace were made by two feet, Yarid would have guessed it made by a draft horse.

  A massive form, cloaked from head to toe, filled the doorway nearly to its full eight-foot height. The improbable man that stood there did not look fat at all, but what few details his dark, roughly woven cloak betrayed indicated a dense bulk of muscle. His back was arched slightly, a shadow-obscured face jutting forward like a horse’s—though for some reason, Yarid's mind seemed unable to make out any other details of that face. Huge gloved hands hung at his side, lower than a normal man’s would hang. Yarid had seen pictures of apes in a children’s illustrated reader when he was very young; those pictures came to mind now. There was more animal than human in the cloaked figure before them.

  “Governor Belgrith,” Gorun said, his voice quivering more than usual. “Who is your guest?”

  “A friend, Councilor. I give you Orthkalu.” Her smile widened. “From north of Andrin’s Wall.”

  Before the full meaning of those words could sink in, the cloaked form lifted its hood.

  Its skin was the color of a drowned corpse. Crimson eyes, with only flecks of yellow for pupils, stared at the Councilors intently. Lips twitched, briefly revealing rows of narrow fangs lining its long muzzle. The hood fell away to reveal a thick, greasy mane of black hair, hanging limply around its massive shoulders.

  A single word reverberated through Yarid’s mind, crowding out all other thought: sheggam.

  He must have stood because he felt himself slammed back into his seat by a firm, gauntleted hand on his shoulder. “Easy there, friend,” said the soldier standing next to him. Where had he come from? The man’s grip tightened.

  Yarid got the hint. That’s no way to treat a friend. But he took a deep breath, leaned back in his seat, and pretended at nonchalance. He didn’t know if he succeeded by any measure, but the soldier seemed mollified enough to release his grip. Yarid rolled his shoulder to loosen it up and froze when he again caught sight of the beast standing in the center of the Pit.

  A sheggam.

  Here.

  How? The Wall is impossible to breach.

  He noticed more than a few of the soldiers were providing “safety and comfort” to various other Councilors who had reacted in much the same way as Yarid. One woman—Yarid couldn’t think of her name at the moment—screamed and thrashed as two of Shad’s men carried her out the back door of her alcove. Sherin Firnaleos was aghast. Councilor Mundt was slumped in his chair, passed out. Maybe even dead. Neither of the soldiers standing behind him seemed all that worried. Or interested.

  “Abyss take me,” muttered Gorun. He buried his face in his hands. “Abyss take me right now.”

  In a daze, Yarid turned back to the Pit. Shad stood next to the monster, casual as can be, and spoke. “Orthkalu has come to speak to us in his official capacity as the ambassador of Sheggamur. I can personally vouch for his intentions. He wishes us no harm. He merely wants to repair the relationship between our peoples, which was so damaged by the misunderstandings of the past.”

  “Misunderstandings?” Sherin Firnaleos nearly launched out of her seat. “You call the intended destruction of the entire human race a misunderstanding?”

  There were similar outbursts, but Shad waved them down. “Those are precisely the sort of misconceptions this meeting is meant to correct. After all, what can we really know about the past? The written histories of that time were lost, and stories were told and retold for many years before anyone thought to write them down. And can we really trust them? All we have is one side of the story. We have never even heard the voices of the victims of our centuries-long prejudice and superstitious ignorance, much less their side of the story.” She nodded at the sheggam. “I think you should hear what he has to say before dismissing him outright.”

  Protestations arose from all corners. “Are you mad?”

  “I can’t believe this! This is preposterous! This is—”

  “Get this woman out of here! And that �
� thing! Get them—”

  “Traitor!”

  In all the hubbub, the door to Yarid’s alcove crashed open and Tirfaun was crouching at Yarid’s side before the two soldiers could molest him.

  “I’m going to kill him,” he said without preamble. His face was fierce.

  “Him?” Yarid stared at Tirfaun, then at the sheggam, then turned back to Tirfaun. “You can kill one of them?” he asked quietly and glanced over his shoulder at the soldiers, who were now watching them keenly.

  “One of who? What are you talking about?” Tirfaun rose slightly to peer over the railing. He paled visibly. “Apoth’s blood! Is that a …” He trailed off and shook his head. “That … changes things. Maybe it …” He frowned in concentration.

  “Who do you want to kill?” Yarid asked.

  Tirfaun noticed him again. “The Naruvian, of course. He’s the one I told you about.”

  Yarid searched his memory and remembered a cryptic warning the day they had gone to visit Councilor Nangrove. Tirfaun was often full of cryptic warnings, though, and Yarid didn’t think he’d need to remember every single one. “I don’t think that killing the Naruvian will change the outcome of today. Rannald Firnaleos saw to that.”

  “Drown me, but talking to you is like speaking to a child. The Naruvian changes everything. Even a blind man could at least feel the ripples that man’s footsteps sends throughout the world. You can’t tell me you believe everything that happened today was an accident, can you?”

  “Of course not. Rannald Firnaleos engineered it for some reason.”

  “Yes. And what reason is that?”

  Tirfaun had a point. “So, what are you suggesting he is?” Yarid asked.

  Tirfaun ran his fingers through his thin gray hair. “I honestly don’t know. He’s set off alarms with all the other Patterners in the city, though, and even a few outside.”

  “They told you this?” Yarid was skeptical anyone besides himself talked to Tirfaun of their own volition.

  “They don’t need to. I can feel their anxiety like it’s my own.”

  “Have you ever considered that’s all it is? Your own anxiety?”

  Tirfaun met his gaze. “Have I ever given you reason to doubt me?”

  Yarid raised his hands. “No, you’re right. If there’s anything I trust, it’s your Patterning. But merely knowing he’s a problem doesn’t tell us how to fix it. Especially if we don’t even know what kind of problem he is.”

  While Tirfaun squatted and leaned back against the wall to ponder this, Shad Belgrith raised her hands. “Please,” she said. “I beg of you, listen. That is all I ask.”

  All it took for the rest of the Councilors to quiet down was a little more forcible restraint by Shad’s soldiers.

  “Thank you,” she said. She took a deep breath to compose herself. “It’s easy, when you are sitting in such comfort, to look upon others with disdain and judgment. We of the Accord have become fat with wealth and peace, so much so that we have forgotten what it means to suffer. We need for very little. Especially those of us in positions of power, who can merely take what we need when we need it from those who have it. Yet where does that leave the ones deprived by our greed and excesses?

  “To think that we are so much better than everyone else, just because we took what they themselves made, is an injustice so great it sickens me. How many are starving in the streets of this city? A thousand? Two thousand? And what have any of you done but make them worse off?” She was accusing them of the same crimes that Tharadis did. Interesting, though, that they used the same justification to achieve contradictory goals. With the Council of the Wall caught in the middle.

  Belgrith shook her head and looked up at Sherin Firnaleos. “Hypocrites, all of you. You say you are for peace. But what gesture of peace have you ever made to our neighbors to the north? Have you ever spoken to one, tried to understand his thoughts, his dreams, and desires? You act as if you know them so well, when most of you probably didn’t believe the sheggam even existed before today.”

  She shrugged, ignoring the grumbling coming from the alcoves. “How long has it been since two cities of the Accord have fought each other? Five, six years? How long before that? Not long at all. Our history of ‘peace,’ as you called it, is a lie. We are a warfaring species. We kill each other as best as our weapons allow, and then abandon all real progress to develop better weapons. That’s all we’ve ever been good at. Killing each other, and killing ourselves. We are the true monsters here.” She stabbed a finger at the beast. “Not them.”

  “You seem to forget one important detail, Governor,” said Councilor Frandera, voice heating. “We are all that’s left of humanity because they killed all the rest.”

  “Really? Can you be so sure? You sit here behind your gleaming white wall that protects you from the rest of the world. How can you claim to know anything about it when you don’t even have the ability to look? Andrin didn’t want to face the truth, so he walled it off for the rest of us and called the truth threatening. All we have are the stories he told our great, great-grandparents, doubtless enforced with an iron fist.” Shad gestured at Erianna, who mysteriously produced a sheet of paper from somewhere on her person.

  Shad held the paper high. “This is a letter from an emissary from a region of Sheggamur called Eleankuron.” Mutters rose up at this. “Yes, you’ve heard of it. It’s an old place, and grand I’m told. Grander than even Andrin’s Wall. The emissary who wrote this is human.”

  “You expect us to believe that?” Frandera asked. “You just told us how ignorant we were for simply believing in our histories because we weren’t there, and you expect us to trust you now? To place our faith in you, rather than the man that saved our civilization?”

  “The man who claimed to save our civilization.” Belgrith shrugged. “What really can we claim to know? All we have heard are the stories of one side. I personally don’t know anything about Eleankuron. I’ve never been there—and I never will know anything about it unless we learn to broaden our horizons.”

  “You come,” Sherin said, eyes burning, “bearing the standard of knowledge. Yet it is our knowledge that you ask us to betray.”

  Belgrith looked genuinely puzzled at this. “How can you ever claim to gain knowledge without an open mind? That is all I really ask of you. To keep an open mind.”

  “A reasonable request,” said Pembo Sint with a smug expression on his weaselly face. Then he seemed to remember that a sheggam was in the room with him. His expression faltered and he looked to regret his outburst but realize he was committed. “We are the Council of the Wall, and if nothing else we are committed to fairness. We can’t really be fair until we hear both sides, can we? Merely listening can’t hurt us. It is the fact that we listen to both sides that makes us what we are.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “And listening doesn’t mean that we have committed to any course of action.”

  “True,” said Frandera. “It can’t hurt anything just to listen to what … he … wants to say. If nothing else, we can become a little wiser about the world.” Yarid recognized the tone of her voice. She wanted to know what she could about the beasts on the other side of the Wall. She could be shrewd, but her shrewdness was no secret to Yarid. She might as well have announced her suspicion for all the good her attempt at circumspection was.

  And her words made sense. What harm could listening possibly do? If the beast asked something of them, they could always say no. And one could never have too much information.

  Still, something about the situation left him uneasy, and it wasn’t merely the guards. He could see a similar sentiment mirrored on the faces throughout the Hall.

  “All right,” said Gorun. “Unless anyone has any further objections to listening to a supplicant, which would be unprecedented, I say we allow the emissary to speak.”

  Yarid blinked at Gorun. He leaned forward and whispered, “You’re throwing in with them?”

  “No, of course not. Just because he looks diff
erent doesn’t mean we can simply judge him.”

  Yarid eyed him warily then sat back in his chair. Such a sentiment wasn’t exactly in keeping with Gorun’s stodgy conservatism. He doubtless wanted to hear what such a creature could possibly say, just like Yarid and Frandera. It was odd, though, that he should speak such a desire openly. Gorun was usually subtler than that.

  But then subtlety was apparently on its way out the door, to sit in a midden with all of yesterday’s fashions. Yarid wondered where that left him. Unfashionable, or better than the rest of them? He wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Being unfashionable certainly didn’t appeal to him, as fashion was a sort of power in its own right.

  “Thank you,” said Shad. “For your generosity. I was honestly worried that you wouldn’t be open to discussions. I’m glad you’ve proved me wrong.” She turned to the sheggam, who had since pulled his hood back up over his head to obscure it. Still, the creature’s ghastly face was burned into Yarid’s vision as surely as if he had stared at the sun.

  Shad and the sheggam spoke to each other quietly. Yarid leaned in to see if he could hear what was said, but he was even more interested just to hear what the voice of such a creature would even sound like.

  The sheggam turned to address them. “Our world is wounded.” The words were thick, wet, and harsh, but intelligible. Yarid found himself wondering just how intelligent these creatures were. He didn’t remember any accounts that indicated they were even capable of speech. Only brutality.

  It spread its arms. “Our world is wounded,” it said again. “Torn apart by strife and division. Our peoples were once one, with great things in our future. It is a cruel thing to see such potential wasted.

  “The Wall built by Andrin, the betrayer of your people and ours, is the great symbol of this failure. It has kept our people apart for time beyond measure. And it still stands, as a mark of our collective shame for the crimes of the past and the legacy of hate that we share.” It shook its hooded head. “With its ancient spell of confusion, created by the blood of Andrin’s own Crafters, it has created an impassable barrier between us, and has even destroyed the seas around you. It is a prison.”