Elation and murderous excitement seized the Warden’s muscles, fueling an ungodly strength as the tips of his fingers threatened to crush my windpipe.
The thing about strength, however, is it’s contained within such a fragile capsule. All you need is a little hole in just the right spot, and out leaks the blood and the juices that make the muscles flex and the hands squeeze and the legs drive.
Just the right spot, I thought. And I lifted my hand. Angled it slightly so the sheer blackness of an ebon tip rested about a foot above a big, thick vein in the Warden’s neck.
The disruptive noises of four-letter words and crashing swords in the distance faded, and so too did the hot and heavy breaths from the Warden’s gaped mouth flowing over my cheeks. Couldn’t hear Lysa’s feet stamping across the dirt roads, or the heart in my chest beating madly about.
It was only me and the dagger now. I clutched it tight, knuckles turning white. I held my breath, and I drove the sharp tip into that motherfucker’s neck, right into the blue of his throbbing vein.
Time slowed and it kept slowing, right up until the point of impact. Then the strange phenomenon collapsed and, like festering puss gushing out of a pricked abscess, blood splattered me in the face, and all my senses returned.
“Argh!” the Warden roared, releasing his hand from my throat. He writhed in agony as I grabbed the dagger with both hands now and ripped it across his throat, riving the second vein.
With each beat of his heart, blood fountained from his eviscerated throat. He woozily backed away, and within seconds teetered one way and the other, falling like a chopped tree onto his back, head implanting into the dirt.
“Oh my goodness,” Lysa cried, throwing herself into me. “Are you all right?” She attempted to clean the Warden’s blood from my face, but only slathered it along my cheeks and nose and into my mouth.
I jerked away from her, focusing my attention toward the grunts and grating of steel and ebon. Sheathing my dagger, I jogged toward the cavorting figures, their faces now hidden as the moon pulled itself back inside the blankets of its clouds. I didn’t need to see faces, though — I’d witnessed my commander dance with a sword often enough that I could’ve picked her out from a crowd of thousands. And the same with Rovid, although for entirely different reasons. He’d perfected the art of swing, then run the other way.
Four of the Warden’s cronies were still standing, the fifth curled up on the ground, making noises.
With a quick pluck of my sword from its scabbard, then a stab and a chop, there were three.
I flanked the two who’d backed Vayle up to the other side of the stables. They communicated poorly, or not at all, as both turned to face me, leaving my commander an easy one-two kill. Which she, of course, followed through with perfection.
“Ow!” wailed Rovid. “Fuck!”
Vayle and I rushed to the reaper’s aid. Our heavy footsteps attracted the attention of his attacker who, upon realizing he was alone, hightailed it into the forest.
Vayle went after him, but I called her back. “Leave him be.”
“Fucking bastard,” Rovid snapped, holding up the back of his hand for close inspection. “Got me right here, across the knuckles.”
“Straighten your fingers,” I said, trying to get a better look. The sword had nicked him across all five knuckles, a shallow gash that stopped short of the webbing of his thumb. “You’ll be fine. I brought along some bandages, so you’re in luck.”
“I have wolf’s leaf too,” Lysa said, joining us. “It’s in a bag inside Wollen Hall.”
“Are there more of these Wardens after you?” I asked.
She frowned. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“A guy who moves faster than lightning and hits you about twice as hard. Dead fucker over there. Said he was a Warden.”
Lysa instinctively looked at his bloody corpse. “I’m not sure. But probably?”
“After we get this village back to working order, you’ve got some explaining to do.”
“They say they’re servants of the fragments.”
I spun around, trying to locate who had said that. “Silma?”
“Are they gone?” she asked. She seemed near.
“Yeah, they’re gone. Where are you?”
The shudders of a window were pulled shut, and the door of a nearby cottage opened. Silma and a handful of villagers shuffled out sheepishly. She dropped a key hanging from a rope into the hand of an older man. “Bring two Preen out, quickly.” The man jogged toward Wollen Hall.
“Please,” Silma said, hands steepled in the direction of Lysa, “tell me what you saw.”
“Nothing!” Lysa shouted. “I swear I didn’t see anything at all! It didn’t work like I’d thought it would. Why won’t you believe me?”
“If you saw nothing, dear, then why would they come for you?”
I cleared my throat. “Ladies. Take a few steps back, will you?”
They both backed up.
“Not physically. What’s going on here? You’ve lost me.”
Lysa attempted to explain the situation, but Silma broke in with the voice of an authoritative mother, shutting her down hard.
“I have existed in Amortis for two hundred and fifty years,” Silma said. “Few were here when I came. It was pristine then, a heaven untainted by the pollution of man. More arrived in the years to follow. Always more each day, till the cities were built and the capitals were constructed.
“In the early days, when this village was a mere tent, runners came through sporadically. From the forest they ran, some alone, others in group of threes or fours. They told me they were running from their fragments, that this fragment wouldn’t last. But it was good now, and theirs had turned rotten. I asked them if they would stay with me. They said no, I was at the edge. I was too close. They would continue running until they reached the very edge of existence, lest the Wardens catch them. And when this fragment would turn sour and rotten, they would escape to a fresh one.”
Silma folded her hands, brought them to her stomach, and held Lysa’s eyes till she looked away from the older woman. “The Wardens,” Silma said, “did not come for them, though I heard their name and the violence they wrought from the lips of other migrants. So why would they come for you, my dear? What did you do?”
Lysa put a fist to her mouth, teeth gnawing at her knuckles. Her eyes were closed, but beneath her lashes puddled tears. She shook her head slowly, like an inconsolable little girl who’d made an unthinkable mistake.
Jaw locked, she lifted her head. Swollen blood vessels streaked the whites of her eyes.
“I didn’t know he owned the world,” she said. “How could I have?”
Chapter 6
Before the pinks and reds of a new dawn had split open the night sky, we’d put Crokdaw Village about two miles behind us. No one talked. No one wanted to talk. About eight hours prior, we’d exhausted all conversational routes and run the gamut of emotions. A couple hours of sleep is hardly enough to rejuvenate you.
Apparently Lysa’s insatiable thirst for mind fuckery hadn’t lessened when she’d departed the realm of the living. She’d found a book — of course she had — which described advanced conjuration techniques through which one could slip into the mind of another and glimpse their thoughts. The kicker is the afflicted didn’t need to be in a weakened physical or emotional state, since there was no manipulation of their motivations involved.
That wasn’t her big fuckup. This was her big fuckup.
According to Lysa, the demonic figure shrouded in black wisps had a name: Arken. And over the past couple weeks, he had been a traveling man or, as I’d find out, a traveling god. He’d come through the Prim on several occasions, each one marked by a visit with Lysa. And a bounty of supplies to “help the Prim achieve greatness once again. Oh, and by the way, while I’m here, be a good girl and tell me if you see Ripheneal around, will you?”
Lysa’s naive, but she’s not stupid. She knew she was being used. Ar
ken didn’t give two shits about the Prim’s existence.
“So,” she told me, “I slipped into his mind. I wanted to find out what he was up to.”
It was at this point in the conversation that the color drained from Lysa’s face as she recounted her brief foray into madness.
“He told me the jaunt had made him tired,” Lysa said. “That he wanted to sleep. So I offered him my bed, and when he slept, I…”
“Went fishing in his mind?” I wagered.
“I felt a terrible cold sweat overcome me. Sensations are different when you pass into the mind, you know? They’re more intense. Usually that helps a conjurer see and feel the broken pieces, so they can mend shattered emotions and thoughts. But this feeling I had, Astul” — she flattened a hand against her chest, as if to still her heart — “it was the rawest sensation of fear I’d ever had.”
We were sitting before a small fire when she told me this, offering our horses some much-needed rest. The flames licked across her face, flashing orange before her big, wet eyes. She had quite clearly taken the fear with her. Big mistake there. You always leave fear where you find it; otherwise it’ll follow you everywhere.
“I wanted to stop,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”
“You were already in that deep,” I said. “Makes sense. Why stop now, right?”
“It wasn’t like that. I mean I couldn’t stop. I didn’t have the ability. I was being pulled farther into his mind, as if I was tumbling down a hillside, nothing to slow my momentum. There was a laugh as I tried breaking the charm. It was an awful… a painfully sharp laugh. Knives,” she said, her eyes sinking into the embers of the fire, voice fleeting. “Every word was the point of a knife stabbing me. He told me his name was Arken, and he was Lord of Amortis, God of the Dead, the Minister of the Beyond. And he said… he said when he returned, he’d have me serve him.”
“Returned?” I asked. “From what, his slumber?”
“Rovid freed me,” Lysa said. “He heard me screaming and kicking, slamming myself against the walls. He picked me up. He shook me. And that’s when I heard a snap, and I wasn’t in Arken’s mind anymore. He was still lying there, in my bed, sleeping. Even as I ran away.”
I shoved the fat end of a stick into the fire, stirring the fading flames into a low whirl. “Think he’s still taking a nap at the Prim?”
Lysa threw her fists into the dirt and propelled herself to her feet. “We are not going back there, Astul. No! Rovid and I were ambushed minutes — maybe even less — after I fled Arken’s mind. These guards who’d escorted him to the Prim, they kicked in the door to where Rovid and I had hidden ourselves. We barely made it out of there alive.”
Hmm. Now there’s an interesting riddle, I thought. A reaper barely proficient in the art of swinging a sword, and a girl even less so, are attacked by guards in a room with only one exit. How do they survive?
I asked that question to Lysa — sans the demeaning bits, of course — and she set her jaw, crossed her arms and told me simply, “We managed.”
That did nothing to sate my curiosity — a curiosity that’d begun when I’d learned just how advanced her conjurer powers were — but I didn’t prod. Not yet.
We sat in the comfort of the fire awhile, the cracks and pops accentuating the silence between us. Finally, as the warmth faded and the coolness of a fall-like temperature swept in around us, Lysa confided in me.
“I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this one,” she said. “One Warden almost had me. Imagine if he sends two. Or five. Or ten. Or things even worse than Wardens.”
“There is something worse than Wardens,” I told her. Then, after a dramatic pause, “You’re looking at him.”
She smiled — the first smile since… well, it’d been a while. “While I was in Lith, training to become a conjurer, I was sitting in the library one day when a group of older girls came in. And they talked about men and I remember them all agreeing that a confident man was always the most attractive. I’ve learned a lot about confidence since then. It is attractive, but it’s reassuring too — to those around you. And I’m thankful for the reassurance, Astul, but I know that’s all it is. I really messed up this time.”
I got up from the mound of dirt I had made a seat out of, cracked some bones in my knees and neck and arms, then walked over and extended a hand to Lysa, helping her up.
“I’ll do you one better,” I said. “I started a war between gods.”
She cocked her head, then her mouth formed a little O as she began arranging the pieces of the puzzle.
“The book,” she said. “It’s why Ripheneal’s here, isn’t it? And it’s why Arken wants to know his whereabouts.”
“It goes a lot deeper than that. Although, this god of the dead, er… no one told me he was involved. And Wardens and fragments, that’s all new to me. But I think everything will go back to the way it was as soon as I return this book. Which, conveniently enough, is where I’m going. To dig it up. Which means that’s where you’re going, too.”
Lysa was, as expected, full of questions. I told her what I could remember as I woke Vayle and Rovid and got the horses ready for a thirteen-day excursion.
As we traveled, Lysa learned all about gods, and she asked more questions than I could possibly have answers for. How was I supposed to know the manner in which a god comes into being? Or how a god goes about acquiring dominion over the sun and moon? I imagined a long line of applicant gods, each one explaining they’d like to become the official god of cadence for this world, and by the way, here’s a synopsis of my work with various suns and moons — I think you’ll particularly enjoy the perfection of rhythm I orchestrated with not one or two or three, but four suns and three moons.
Or maybe it was rather anticlimactic, and the prestige of your godly daddy determined your domain. There’s a sobering thought — that the game played in Mizridahl by the Verdans and Taths and Glannondils and so on and so forth is simply a microcosm of the universe at large.
And a more sobering thought, because it was nearer to me and more immediately impactful: had I lied to Lysa for the first time? Not about the gods and goddesses and their fancy titles. I hadn’t told any tales there. But the bit about me fishing up the book and returning some normalcy to her life was rather… wishful.
All this information about Wardens and fragments and now Arken’s interest in Ripheneal’s doings in his realm — I was more convinced than ever that the quartet of gods in Mizridahl were keeping secrets from me.
Lysa caught me looking at her as we trudged through barren grasslands, and she smiled. That’s the trouble with honesty, right there. You tell the truth every time all the time and people start believing you. But eventually, for their own good or yours, you’ve got to stretch the truth, slip in a little lie. And all the work you put in to gain their trust collapses, and you’re back to where you started, suspicions and misgivings running rampant.
Hopefully Lysa would understand and trust that I’d figure this out. I always figured it out.
A Nightmare
It was a twinge, just as sleep sucked me away. The fingers reached in there, probing the mush. I felt him; I saw him. But I could not hear him.
He watched silently, spinning a spool of my memories, viewing the day’s experiences through my eyes.
When he finished, he tucked them away, as neatly as he found them.
He answered not one of my questions, but nor did he kill me.
A parasite? Or a vigilant guardian?
Chapter 7
Change was in the air. Or, more appropriately, underfoot. And over there. And there, and way in the distance, too, where the horizon of muddy evening clouds hung low over patches of dead trees and wiry brush.
I wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about the cartography of Amortis. This region we were in now — after having traveled for eleven days — probably had a proper name, but to me, it was simply known as Day Eleven. And the landscape behind it, with its fat creek and high banks cutt
ing through, was known as Day Ten. I’d remembered most of the landmarks from my stroll this way four months ago, but things looked slightly different now.
At first, there were minor discrepancies. Vague little idiosyncrasies that catch your eye, but don’t make you question anything. Soil that had been soft and crumbly was now cracked, hard and brittle, like bread left in a hearth for twenty minutes too long. The roots of turnips and radishes and parsnips that’d been dug up by varmints were knotted and twisted, warped and swollen.
Those changes could’ve been the result of anything, though. Bad weather, an uptick in opportunistic critters, a blight. But I didn’t have an answer for what we encountered in the days to come. There should have been snow on the ground, and a cold, bitter wind burning our faces. A layer of white fluff should’ve drooped the branches of pine trees, and we should’ve been blowing warm air into our hands and cursing about how this place wasn’t far removed from Rime.
None of that transpired. Thought I’d seen a fleck of snow at one point, but upon sticking out a finger and letting the fleck perch there, I realized it wasn’t very cold. Nor did it melt. It did, however, crumble into black soot when I rubbed it against my palm.
Ash, I thought. Strange thing for the sky to spit out.
On the morning of the twelfth day, we set up a creekside camp. Washed the horses and ourselves down, and indulged in a little rejuvenation by a small fire Vayle had struck.
“Couldn’t help but notice,” Rovid said, popping a blackberry into his mouth, “that, er, well, this isn’t exactly what you said it’d look like around here.”
“He’s right,” Lysa said. “Wouldn’t we start to feel the cold by now and see the snow?”
I placed a walnut on a slab of dislocated bark, took a heavy rock in my hand and proceeded to separate husk from nut with a couple powerful blows. “Weather changes,” I said, picking apart the shattered fragments of husk. And also the shattered fragments of nut. “Damn. Vayle, how in the hell do you get these bloody things out so cleanly?”
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