Well of Sorrows

by Joshua Palmatier

  On the plains, the dwarren battle shifted, edging farther from the forest, from the wagons and the Faelehgre.

  “It’s senseless. Useless.”

  It’s the way of man. And dwarren and, to a lesser extent, Alvritshai. It was the way of the Faelehgre once. It still is.

  As Colin turned away, troubled, he caught sight of the swirling black spot on his forearm and shuddered.

  Are you finished here? Osserin asked.

  Colin considered, then nodded. “Yes. I’m done.”

  And with that, he let the pressure of time still pushing against him carry him forward, felt Osserin traveling with him. The plain blurred, time slipping away so fast he couldn’t distinguish anything in its passage, and then it slowed, settling him back into the present. The wagons had vanished, long gone, the bodies with them, including the bodies of the dwarren and their gaezels. They were replaced with the columns of smoke he’d seen when he first emerged from the forest and the clouds of birds rising and settling like a black fog. The battle itself had played out beyond the nearest ridgeline.

  Colin watched the smoke a long moment, frowning, thinking of the dwarren battle in the past, of what Osserin had said.

  Always, there is battle on these plains. Always, there is blood. “I’ll be back shortly,” he said. Without waiting for a response, he trudged forward, through wet grass, the stalks brushing past his knees. By the time he’d reached the top of the hill, his robes were soaked and cumbersome, tangling with his legs.

  But the battlefield beyond pushed all of those petty concerns aside.

  “Holy Diermani, save us all,” he whispered, and unconsciously crossed himself again.

  The field of dead encompassed the breadth of the plains in sight, bodies fallen near and far, horses and gaezels, men and dwarren. Hundreds of them, thousands, impaled on pikes, pierced by spears, riddled with arrows. Armor glinted in the sunlight, much more extensive armor than he remembered any of the Armory guardsmen using in Portstown, heavier, and more protective. The columns of smoke rose from burning supply wagons. Everywhere he looked the carrion birds flocked, their black feathers glistening in the sunlight, their harsh cries echoing across the distance. They hovered close, dozens trying to settle, disturbing those already gorging themselves, others rising as they were shoved out of the way.

  And then the wind shifted, blew toward Colin, and the stench of death—of blood and smoke and scorched earth—doubled him over. He gagged, fell to his knees, and retched into the grass, heaving even when there was nothing left to purge.

  When it ended, he rose slowly, wiped his mouth as clean as possible with his sleeve and spat to one side. His stomach continued to roil as he climbed back to his feet. Leaning heavily on his staff, he pushed forward, down the edge of the hill. Carrion crows took reluctant flight as he approached, their protests raucous, only to settle back again as he passed, watching him warily. He ignored them all, focused on the bodies, on the death.

  He saw men and dwarren both, covered in blood, the earth soaked in it, churned to mud by the passage of the horses and the army. A man with blond hair—his eyes wide and empty, staring up at the sun—lay alone, his chest gaping where a spear had punched into his heart. A few paces beyond, bodies were stacked one on top of the other, thrown there haphazardly, arms and legs askew. An arrow had taken an older man in the throat, one hand still clutching the shaft loosely; another had been slashed as if with a dagger. A few had been trampled into the earth, their faces squashed into the mud, already half buried. Row after row, body after body, arms severed, legs crushed, heads caved in on one side.

  And scattered among the men were the bodies of the dwarren. Like the dwarren Colin remembered, they wore long tangled beards, braided with beads in complex patterns. Most had pierced noses and ears with fine chains running from nostril to lobe, a sign of their status in the tribe and their standing in the army. They wore armor, heavier than Colin remembered, like the men, but some of them carried swords and axes; they’d used only spears and arrows when they’d attacked the wagons. He recognized a few of the tribes by the bands of iron around their wrists or farther up on their forearms: Thousand Springs Clan . . . and Silver Grass.

  Colin continued deeper into the field, trying to breathe through his mouth, the stench increasing, the bodies growing denser. Horses and gaezels, men and dwarren. They grew thicker, until he was forced to halt because moving forward meant he’d have to step on the dead.

  He scanned the near distance, the carrion crows still flocking, their shadow passing over him now, blotting out the sun. “Bold bastards,” he murmured to himself.

  Not ten paces away, one dropped from the sky next to another. The one already on the ground flapped its wings and gave a harsh cry of protest, but the other advanced, hopping over the bodies. With a last squawk, the first retreated, taking sudden wing, and the victor settled in to feast. It turned its black gaze on Colin a moment. Then its head darted downward, and after two quick stabs of its beak, it rose, something clutched in its mouth.

  An eye.

  Colin cried out in outrage, stumbled forward, slipped on the dead and fell as the crow lurched into the sky, wings flapping, its prize held tight. Struggling where he’d fallen, Colin spat a useless curse, his stomach churning again, the taste of vomit still fresh.

  And then he looked down.

  He’d landed on the bodies of men, their clothes still damp with blood, their flesh soft beneath his hands, the armor chill. But the man he’d fallen on wasn’t really a man. He was just a boy, twelve, with dark hair, a few lighter strands catching the occasional sunlight. His mouth was set in a determined look, gone slack with death, his eyes empty, face rounded. His nose had been broken sometime in the past, but other than that . . .

  Other than that, it could have been Colin himself. The Colin he had just seen clutching Karen’s body to his chest.

  A shudder passed through Colin’s body, and something gripped his throat. He didn’t lurch upward, didn’t scramble back. The boy’s face, so like his own, held him transfixed, breath caught.

  And in that still moment, he realized he’d been asleep, that he’d forced himself into an unnatural slumber in the forest. He’d hidden there from the world, from his parents’ deaths, from Karen’s. He’d willed himself into nonexistence, living off the Well, off the Lifeblood, smothering himself in his grief, just as Osserin and the other Faelehgre had said.

  He needed to wake up. If he didn’t, the Lifeblood would claim him. The spot on his wrist would only be the beginning. He’d die, as surely as this boy had died here on the battlefield, a sword lodged in his side. And he realized he didn’t want to die, he didn’t want to sleep anymore.

  He turned at the sound of a banner flapping in the breeze, the motion startling him out of his paralysis. He glanced once more at the boy’s face, reached to close his eyes and murmur a prayer over him, then climbed carefully to his feet, making certain to place the end of his staff on ground and not flesh. The banner flapped again, a stylized shield on a background divided in half diagonally, one side red, the other yellow, a banner he didn’t recognize. He hadn’t traveled outside dwarren territory on his excursions, had only made it to the Escarpment—what they had once called the Bluff—and the edge of human lands. Frowning, he searched for more banners, looking for the colors on the overshirts and surplices, the sigils stitched into shirts or etched into shields. He found numerous tilted crosses and references to Diermani—clasped hands, fire, white candles—but he didn’t recognize anything else. No Family crests, no stylized symbols from the Court.

  When the stench became too great, the feeding of the crows too much, he retreated back to the hill, passing back out through the ranks of dead. He paused, scanned the scope of the death, then returned to where Osserin waited at the edge of the forest, the lantern he’d lit in memory of Karen, his parents, and all the rest still burning in the shepherd’s hook. Dusk had fallen, the few clouds in the sky orange and gold over the sighing of the trees.
/>   What did you find? Osserin asked.

  “A battlefield,” Colin reported, his voice muted. “Hundreds of dead. Thousands. I didn’t recognize any of the humans’ banners except those of the church.”

  It has been over sixty years. The world changes.

  Colin grunted.

  Who fought in the battle?

  Colin shrugged, troubled. “Men and dwarren. I didn’t see any of the Alvritshai.”

  The Alvritshai are less willing to fight. They live longer, and they do not like to risk their children’s lives. They respect life more because it is so difficult for them to bear children. That is why they halted their expansion southward from their northern mountain reaches and the foothills and forests beneath. The dwarren made the expansion onto the plains too costly for them. But the Alvritshai have fought here before. And they will again.

  Colin thought about what he’d just seen, all the faces, all the blood, particularly the face of the boy, and grimaced, sick to his stomach. He could still taste the vomit in his mouth.

  He glanced back toward the plains, to where the smoke had thinned to wisps and the black cloud of birds had increased.

  After a long moment, Osserin asked, What will you do? Where will you go?

  “I don’t know. Portstown, I guess.”

  Then safe travels.

  And Osserin began drifting away.

  Colin watched the Faelehgre’s retreating light with mild shock. “Farewell to you too,” he murmured.

  You’ll return, Osserin said before passing out of sight beneath the trees.

  Colin snorted, then shifted uncomfortably. He almost glanced down at the black mark on his arm, then realized he didn’t need to. He could feel it, a shadow beneath his skin, a taint.

  Then he adjusted the satchel and headed away from the forest.

  Toward the plains. Toward the Escarpment and the human lands beyond.

  12

  IX WEEKS LATER, HE STOOD AT THE EDGE of the main road leading down to Portstown, shocked into immobility.

  “How could I have missed all this?” He drew in a deep breath, tears burning at the corners of his eyes, and let it out in a heavy sigh. What lay before him had no resemblance whatsoever to the town that he’d left behind so many years before.

  Where the port used to be—the docks where the riot broke out, the gallows where Sartori had threatened to hang him in order to gain his father’s cooperation for the expedition to the east—he could see building after building, smoke rising from the chimneys of most, black and sooty, the stone used in their construction old and gray, leeched of life. Warehouses and stockyards, he guessed, where most of the dirty, hard work got done. The buildings blocked the shoreline, but he could see the masts and rigging of ships lined up and down the waterfront, ships larger than any he’d seen before, judging by the number of masts and the complexity of the rigging.

  The buildings farther south, near where the river drained into the bay, were newer. The road led down through estates and residential buildings to this section, and even from this distance Colin could tell that he’d find the marketplace there. He could see gaps between the buildings for fountains and plazas, and piercing through the rooftops here and there were the spires of churches, some topped by Diermani’s tilted cross, others by winged statues or simple poles, banners flapping in the breeze from the ocean. Across the inlet, he could see the swath of sand that protected the town from storm surges, what they’d called the Strand.

  But the thick wall of stone and the buildings to the north of the town drew Colin’s attention most. Behind the defensive wall, he could see the square towers of a large building, a manse of some sort, although twice the size of anything he’d seen before, and the angled rooftops of a few smaller buildings, including another church. The manse stood where Lean-to would have been, on the hill overlooking the town.

  As Colin watched, the gates of the outer wall opened, and a large force of men on horseback emerged, standards flying. Guardsmen, what Colin would have called the Armory in the Portstown of his time, but what he’d heard others refer to as the Legion since he’d reached the first human outpost of Farpoint at the top of the Escarpment, where he’d traded for coin and information. His eyes narrowed as the group descended from the walled manse down into the city proper, heading toward the ships. The banners catching the wind were half red, half yellow, the field cut diagonally. He couldn’t make out the symbol in the center, but he’d be willing to wager it was a shield.

  The same banner he’d seen on the battlefield outside the forest.

  The guardsmen vanished among the buildings, and Colin turned back to his study of the city. His hand massaged the grip on his staff with nervous tension, and he could feel a tightness at the base of his back, in the center of his shoulders.

  “What am I doing here?” he whispered to himself.

  He didn’t know. He’d expected Portstown to be similar to what he remembered, not . . . this.

  He glanced around at the people passing on the road, a cart loaded down with late autumn squash, a man on horseback with an escort of uniformed guardsmen. No one had noticed him. No one had even looked in his direction, not even the few men and boys traveling on foot.

  Loneliness settled on his shoulders, the weight of over sixty years of isolation suddenly too great a burden. His shoulders slumped. He didn’t belong here. Portstown had changed too much. But if not here, and not within the forest, then where?

  As if in answer, his stomach seized. Fear lanced through him as he clamped his hand to his side, the heat already building. Before he’d left, he’d thought the pain of withdrawal from the Well and the influence of the Lifeblood had been bad but tolerable. He’d discovered otherwise on the plains when the first seizure hit. It had begun like this, a cramp, followed by the searing heat. He’d stumbled to the grass, lips pressed tight, as the pain increased, the heat seeping outward through his side into his chest, into his left arm and his legs, until it had become too much to bear, and he’d collapsed to the ground, seizures wracking his body.

  When the seizure had finally faded, he’d lain in the grass, staring up at the sky, muscles trembling, too weak to move. Not even when a brown plains snake slid over his body, split tongue tasting his sweat in the air a moment before moving on. He’d lain there for nearly a day, unable to move, wondering if the dwarren would find him and what they would do to him if they did. But finally the weakness had passed, and he’d struggled to his feet.

  He’d almost drunk from his stash of Lifeblood then. The vial had been in his shaking hands, open and halfway to his mouth, before the unclaimed vow slipped from beneath the neck of his robe and glinted in the sunlight. As tremors coursed through his body, he’d forced himself to put the vial away, the smell of the Lifeblood—earth and leaves and snow—so sharp and tempting that he actually moaned.

  He’d had two more seizures before reaching Farpoint and human lands, then another on the trek from the Escarpment here. He’d been able to stumble off the road and out of sight for the last one.

  But now, as the heat intensified enough to drive him to one knee, leaning on his staff for support, he could hear the people around him. The creak of the farmer’s cart and the clop of the horses’ hooves sharpened as he fought back the pain. He gasped as it threatened to escalate and break into another seizure, but before it crested, he felt the heat beginning to ebb. He brought his hand away from his side and held onto the staff, resting his forehead against it. Sweat made his grip slick, but as the pain receded, he used the staff to pull himself back onto his feet.

  One of the uniformed guardsmen watched him with concern, but Colin motioned that he was fine. He massaged his side, wondering if the lack of a seizure meant he was getting better, if the pull of the Well was lessening.

  Then his stomach growled.

  A thin smile quirked his lips, but it didn’t linger.

  “Food,” he said to himself, then sighed again. “Food first and then . . .”

  He stilled,
then shrugged and headed down the gravel road into the city proper.

  He found himself drawn to the older part of the city. He wanted to see if there was anything left of the Portstown he knew. The imperative had even overridden his stomach.

  He went to the shipyards first, but there was no sign of the wide plank docks where the riot had broken out between the Armory and Shay and his men. Instead, he stood on a long cobbled street before a massive stone wall, the street and wall itself built out into the water. He placed his hands against the damp stone, felt its chill in his fingers, then let his hand drop. Glancing up, he could see the spits of ships jutting out over the top of the wall. Based on their height, he guessed that the ocean itself lay directly on the far side of the wall, that if the stone were to break, seawater would pour into the street and flood the lower wharf.

  He shuddered, then stepped into shadow as a door in the wall twenty paces away opened suddenly; men and women dressed in vests and coats in a style Colin didn’t recognize stepped out onto the cobbles. Their undershirts were a vibrant white, stark against the dirt that coated the buildings, but no one seemed to notice the grime. Carriages were waiting for some of them, the horses stamping the stone impatiently, heads rattling their traces. Others branched away in various directions. Those with the finer clothes were followed by men and women dressed more conservatively, in clothes Colin found more familiar: shirts and breeches, patched and stained in places. Once the carriages pulled away, their drivers tch-ing the horses into motion, the yard workers in even rougher clothing, most without shirts, began unloading the cargo, wagons arriving to take the carriages’ places, hauling the crates and barrels away into the city.

  Colin turned to look down the stretch of the street and saw numerous doorways all along its length; he shook his head. “Far larger than the wharf from my day,” he murmured, then turned his attention inland. He didn’t know how the streets were set up, didn’t even know if he was close to where the wharf he remembered had been, so he chose a street at random.