The Black Road

by Mel Odom

  “Skipper,” Maldrin said in a quiet voice, “Cap’n Tollifer appreciates everythin’ ye done. An’ he ain’t about to forget it. But he’s a prideful man, too, an’ him havin’ to deal with one of his own always fightin’ while in port during these edgy times, why, it ain’t settin’ well with him at all. An’ ye damn sure don’t need me tellin’ ye this.”

  Darrick agreed.

  The healer started in with the needle again.

  “Ye need help, skipper,” Maldrin said. “Cap’n knows it. I know it. Crew knows it. Ye’re the only one what seems convinced ye don’t.”

  Taking a towel from his knee, the healer blotted blood from Darrick’s eye, poured fresh salt water over the wound, and started putting in the final stitch.

  “Ye ain’t the only man what’s lost a friend,” Maldrin croaked.

  “I didn’t say I was.”

  “An’ me,” Maldrin went on as if he hadn’t heard Darrick, “I’m near to losin’ two. I don’t want to see you leave Lonesome Star, skipper. Not if’n there’s a way I can help.”

  “I’m not worth losing any sleep over, Maldrin,” Darrick said in a flat voice. The thing that scared him most was that he felt that way, but he knew it was only his father’s words. They were never far from his mind. He’d found he could escape his father’s fists, but he’d never been able to escape the man’s harsh words. Only Mat had made him feel differently. None of the other friendships he’d made helped, nor did remembering any of the women he’d been with over the years. Not even Maldrin could reach him.

  But he knew why. Everything Darrick touched would eventually turn to dung. His father had told him that, and it was turning out true. He’d lost Mat, and now he was losing Lonesome Star and his career in the Westmarch Navy.

  “Mayhap ye ain’t,” Maldrin said. “Mayhap ye ain’t.”

  Darrick ran, heart pounding so hard that the infection in his week-old eye wound thundered painfully. His breath came in short gasps as he held his cutlass at his side and dashed through the alleys around the Mercantile Quarter. Reaching Dock Street, he turned his stride toward Fleet Street, the thoroughfare that went through the Military District where the Westmarch Navy harbor was.

  He saw the navy frigates in the distance, tall masts thrust up into the low-lying fog that hugged the gulf coastline. A few ships sailed out over the curve of the world, following a favorable breeze away from Westmarch.

  So far, Raithen’s pirates had presented no real threat to the city and may even have disbanded, but other pirates had gathered, preying on the busy shipping lanes as Westmarch brought in more and more goods to support the navy, army, and mercenaries. With almost two and a half months gone and no sighting of Kabraxis, the king was beginning to doubt the reports Lonesome Star had brought back. Even now, the main problems in Westmarch had become the restlessness of the mercenaries at not having a goal or any real action to occupy them and the dwindling food stores that the city had not yet been able to replace since the action against Tristram.

  Darrick cursed the fog that covered the city in steel gray.

  He’d woken in an alley, not knowing if he’d gone to sleep there or if he’d been thrown there from one of the nearby taverns. He hadn’t awakened until after cock’s crow, and Lonesome Star was due to sail that morning.

  He damned himself for a fool, knowing he should have stayed aboard ship. But he hadn’t been able to. No one aboard, including the captain and Maldrin, talked with him anymore. He had become an embarrassment, something his father had always told him he was.

  Out of breath, he made the final turn toward Spinnaker Bridge, one of the last checkpoints where nonnaval personnel were turned back from entering the Military District. He fumbled inside his stained blouse for his papers.

  Four guards stepped up to block his way. They were hard-faced men with weapons that showed obvious care. One of them held up a hand.

  Darrick stopped, breathing hard, his injured eye throbbing painfully. “Ship’s Officer Second Grade Lang,” he gasped.

  The leader of the guards looked at Darrick doubtfully but took the papers Darrick offered. He scanned them, noting the captain’s seal embossed upon the pages.

  “Says here you sail with Lonesome Star,” the guard said, offering the papers back.

  “Aye,” Darrick said, raking the sea with his good eye. He didn’t recognize any of the ships sailing out into the gulf as his. Maybe he was in luck.

  “Lonesome Star sailed hours ago,” the guardsman said.

  Darrick’s heart plummeted through his knees. “No,” he whispered.

  “By rights with you missing your ship like you have,” the guardsman said, “I ought to run you in and let the commodore deal with you. But from the looks of you, I’d say getting beaten up and robbed will stand as a good excuse. I’ll make an entry of it in my log. Should stand you in good stead if you’re called before a naval inquest.”

  You’d be doing me no favors, Darrick thought. Any man caught missing from his ship for no good reason was hung for dereliction of duty. He turned and gazed out to sea, watching the gulls hunting through the water for scraps carried out by the tide. The cries of the birds sounded mournful and hollow, filtering over the crash of the surf against the shore.

  If Captain Tollifer had sailed without him, Darrick knew there no longer remained a berth for him aboard Lonesome Star. His career in the Westmarch Navy was over, and he had no idea what lay ahead of him.

  He wanted nothing more than to die, but he couldn’t do that—he wouldn’t do that—because it would mean that his father would win even after all these years. He walled himself off from his pain and loss, and he turned away from the sea, following the street back into Westmarch. He had no money. The possibility of missing meals didn’t bother him, but he knew he’d want to drink again that night. By the Light, he wanted to drink right now.

  THIRTEEN

  “Master.” Buyard Cholik looked up from the comfortable sofa that took up one long wall of the coach he traveled in. Drawn by six horses on three axles, the coach had all the amenities of home. Built-in shelves held his priestly supplies, clothing, and personal belongings. Lamps screwed into the walls and fluted for smoke discharge through the sides of the coach provided light to read by. Since leaving the ruins of Tauruk’s Port and Ransim almost three months ago, almost all of his time had been spent reading the arcane texts Kabraxis had provided him and practicing the sorcery the demon had been teaching him.

  “What is it?” Cholik asked.

  The man speaking stood outside on the platform attached to the bottom of the coach. Cholik made no move to open one of the shuttered windows so that he might see the man. Since Kabraxis had changed him, altering his mind and his body—in addition to removing decades from his age—Cholik felt close to none of the men who had survived the demon’s arrival and the attack of Raithen’s pirates. Several of them were new, gathered from the small towns the caravan had passed through on its way to its eventual destination.

  “We are approaching Bramwell, master,” the man said. “I thought you might want to know.”

  “Yes,” Cholik replied. He could tell by the level ride of the coach that the long, winding, uphill trek they’d been making for hours had passed.

  Cholik marked his place in the book he’d been reading with a thin braid of human tongues that had turned leathery over the years. Sometimes, with the proper spell in place, the tongues read aloud from profane passages. The book was writ in blood upon paper made from human skin and bound in children’s teeth. Most of the other books Kabraxis had provided over the past months were crafted in things that Cholik in his past life as a priest of the Zakarum Church would have believed to be even more horrendous.

  The bookmarker made of tongues whispered a sibilant protest at being put away, inciting a small amount of guilt in Cholik as he felt certain Kabraxis had spelled them to do. Nearly all of his days were spent reading, yet it never seemed enough.

  Moving with the grace of a man barely enterin
g his middle years, Cholik opened the coach’s door, stepped out onto the platform, then climbed the small hand-carved ladder that led up to the coach’s peaked, thatched roof. A small ledge was rather like a widow’s walk on some of the more affluent houses in Westmarch where merchanter captains’ wives walked to see if their husbands arrived safely back from sea.

  The coach had been one of the first things Cholik had purchased with the gold and jewels he and his converted priests had carted out of the caverns with Kabraxis’s blessing. In its past life, the coach had belonged to a merchant prince who specialized in overland trading. Only two days before Cholik had bought the coach, the merchant prince had suffered debilitating losses and a mysterious illness that had killed him in a matter of hours. Faced with certain bankruptcy, the executor of the prince’s goods had sold the coach to Cholik’s emissaries.

  Standing on the small widow’s walk, aware of the immense forest around him, Cholik looked over the half-dozen wagons that preceded the coach. Another half-dozen wagons, all loaded down with the things that Kabraxis had ordered salvaged from Tauruk’s Port, trailed behind Cholik’s coach.

  A winding road cut through the heart of the forest. Cholik couldn’t remember the forest’s name at the moment, but he had never seen it before. His travels from Westmarch had always been by ship, and he’d never been to Bramwell as young as he now was.

  At the end of the winding road lay the city of Bramwell, a suburb north-northwest of Westmarch. Centuries ago, situated among the highlands as it was, the city had occupied a position of prominence that competed with Westmarch. Bramwell had been far enough away from Westmarch that its economy was its own. Farmers and fishermen lived in the tiny city, descendants of families that had lived there for generations, sailing the same ships and plowing the same lands as their ancestors had. In the old days, Bramwell’s sailors had hunted whales and sold the oil. Now, the whaling fleets had become a handful of diehard families who stubbornly got by in a hardscrabble existence more with pride and a deep reluctance to change than out of necessity.

  Almost ancient, Bramwell was constructed of buildings two and three stories tall from stones cut and carried down from the mountains. Peaked roofs crafted with thatching dyed a dozen different shades of green mimicked the forest surrounding the city on three sides. The fourth side fronted the Gulf of Westmarch, where a breakwater had been built of rock dug from the mountains to protect the harbor from the harsh seasons of the sea.

  From atop the coach and atop the mountains, Cholik surveyed the city that would be his home during the first of Kabraxis’s conquests. An empire, Cholik told himself as he gazed out onto the unsuspecting city, would begin there. He rode on the platform, rocking back and forth as the heavy-duty springs of the coach compensated for the road’s failings, watching as the city drew closer.

  Hours later, Cholik stood beside the Sweetwater River that fed Bramwell. The river ran deep and true between broad, stone-covered banks. The waterway also provided more harbor space for smaller craft that plied the city’s trade farther inland and graced the lands with a plenitude of wells and irrigation for the farms that made checkerboards outside the city proper.

  At the eastern end of the city where the loggers and craftsmen gathered and where shops and markets had sprung up years ago, Cholik halted the caravan in the campgrounds that were open to all who hoped to trade with the Bramwell population.

  Children had gathered around the coach and the wagons immediately, hoping for a traveling minstrel show. Cholik didn’t disappoint them, offering the troupe of entertainers he’d hired as the caravan had journeyed north from Tauruk’s Port. They’d taken the overland route, a long and arduous event compared with travel by sea, but they had avoided the Westmarch Navy as well. Cholik doubted that anyone who had once known him would recognize him since his youth had been returned, but he hadn’t wanted to take the chance, and Kabraxis had been patient.

  The entertainers gamboled and clowned, performing physical feats that seemed astounding and combining witty poems and snippets of exchanges that had the gathering audience roaring with laughter. The juggling and acrobatics, while pipes and drums played in the background, drew amazed comments from the families.

  Cholik stood inside the coach and watched through a covered window. The festive atmosphere didn’t fit with how he’d been trained to think of religious practices. New converts to the Zakarum Church weren’t entertained and wooed in such a manner, although some of the smaller churches did.

  “Still disapproving, are you?” a deep voice asked.

  Recognizing Kabraxis’s voice, Cholik stood and turned. He knew the demon hadn’t entered the coach in the conventional means, but he didn’t know from where Kabraxis had traveled before stepping into the coach.

  “Old habits are hard to break,” Cholik said.

  “Like changing your religious beliefs?” Kabraxis asked.

  “No.”

  Kabraxis stood before Cholik wearing a dead man’s body. Upon his decision to go among the humans and look for a city to establish as a beachhead to begin their campaign, Kabraxis had killed a merchant, sacrificing the man’s soul to unforgiving darkness. Once the mortal remains of the man were nothing more than an empty shell, Kabraxis had labored for three days and nights with the blackest arcane spells available, finally managing to fit himself into the corpse.

  Although Cholik had never witnessed something like that, Kabraxis had assured him that it was sometimes done, though not without danger. When the host body was taken over a month ago, it had been that of a young man who had not yet seen thirty. Now the man looked much older than Cholik, like a man in his twilight years. The flesh was baggy and loose, wrinkled and crisscrossed by hair-fine scars that marred his features. His black hair had gone colorless gray, his eyes from brown to pale ash.

  “Are you all right?” Cholik asked.

  The old man smiled, but it was with an expression Cholik recognized as Kabraxis’s. “I’ve put many harsh demands on this body. But its use is almost at an end.” He stepped past Cholik and peered out the window.

  “What are you doing here?” Cholik asked.

  “I came to watch you observe the festivities of the people coming to see you,” Kabraxis said. “I knew that this many people around you, and so many of them happy and needing diversion, would prove unnerving for you. Life goes much easier for you if you can maintain a somber vigilance over it.”

  “These people will know us as entertainers,” Cholik said, “not as conduits to a new religion that will help them with their lives.”

  “Oh,” Kabraxis said, “I’ll help them with their lives. In fact, I wanted to have a word with you about how this evening’s meeting will go.”

  Excitement flared within Cholik. After two months of being on the road, of planning to found a church and build a power base that would eventually seek to draw its constituency from the Zakarum Church, it felt good to know that they were about to start.

  “Bramwell is the place, then?”

  “Yes,” Kabraxis said. “There is old power located within this town. Power that I can tap into that will shape your destiny and my conquest. Tonight, you will lay the first stone in the church we have discussed for the past month. But it won’t be of stone and mortar as you think. Rather, it will be of believers.”

  The comment left Cholik cold. He wanted an edifice, a building that would dwarf the Zakarum Church in Westmarch. “We will need a church.”

  “We will have a church,” Kabraxis said. “But having a church anchors you in one spot. Although I’ve tried to teach you this, you’ve still not learned. But a belief—Buyard Cholik, First Chosen of the Black Road—a belief transcends all physical boundaries and leaves its mark on the ages. That’s what we want.”

  Cholik said nothing, but visions of a grand church continued to dance in his head.

  “I’ve given you an extended life,” Kabraxis said. “Few humans will ever achieve the years that you’ve lived so far without the effects of my gift. Wou
ld you want to spend all the coming years in one place, looking only over the triumphs you’ve already wrought?”

  “You are the one who has spoken of the need for patience.”

  “I still speak of patience,” Kabraxis insisted, “but you will not be the tree of my religion, Buyard Cholik. I don’t need a tree. I need a bee. A bee that flits from one place to another to collect our believers.” He smiled and patted Cholik on the shoulder. “But come. We start here in Bramwell with these people.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Cholik asked.

  “Tonight,” Kabraxis said, “we will show these people the power of the Black Road. We will show them that anything they may dream possible can happen.”

  * * *

  Cholik walked out of the coach and toward the gathering area. He wore his best robe, but it was of a modest style that wouldn’t turn away those who were poor.

  At least three hundred people ringed the clearing where the caravan had stopped. Other wagons, some of them loaded with straw, apples, and livestock, formed another ring outside Cholik’s. Still more wagons, empty of any goods, made seating areas beneath the spreading trees.

  “Ah,” one man whispered, “here comes the speechmaker. The fun and games are over now, I’ll warrant.”

  “If he starts lecturing me on how to live my life and how much I should tithe to whatever religion he’s shilling for,” another man whispered, “I’m leaving. I’ve spent two hours watching performers that I didn’t have time to lose and will never get back.”

  “I’ve got a field that needs tending.”

  “And the cows are going to be expecting an early morning milking.”

  Aware that he was losing part of the audience the performers had brought in for him, knowing not to make any attempt to speak to them of anything smacking of responsibility or donations, Cholik walked to the center of the clearing and brought out the metal bucket containing black ash that Kabraxis had made and presented to him. Speaking a single word of power that the audience couldn’t hear, he threw out the ashes.