With Ripheneal in the hands of Elimori, Arken would march on Fragment Eight with the might of Amortis. But it takes time to mobilize an army, and he wouldn’t chance defeat — not with victory so very close.
The conjurers would get there in time. Whether they’d be enough to push his armies back was another question entirely. And still a larger question loomed: what exactly was the goddess of war doing here?
I was close to completing the puzzle, but a few pieces were still missing.
We’d made it to the highroads without trouble. In the silent twilight of an early morning, a swath of brush caught my eye. Stalks of grass and woody foliage had been laid low, smoothed out. Probably courtesy of resting deer and hopefully not resting Red Sentinels. The animals — a name which applied to both deer and Red Sentinels — had since vacated the spot, offering my team of nearly two hundred conjurers a place to rest their weary bones. Or heads. Or… come to think of it, do dead people tire in the same manner as the living?
They looked beaten down. Had to drag themselves up the last hump, pausing frequently to hunch over and catch their breath. Ellie’s bandits that had captured us and taken us to the city never seemed to tire, and I was fairly certain Ellie herself rarely slept. Perhaps sleep for the dead was like eating: good for morale but ultimately nonessential.
After settling down in the peaceful grove, it took Lysa all of five minutes to begin needling me. In her defense, she’d trudged along thus far without having a morsel more of information than the conjurers we’d freed.
“What happened back there?” she asked, plopping on her butt next to me, against a huge specimen of bark and branches. Couldn’t really call it a tree. More like a mountain that had obviously felt it was born to be less a home to avalanches and falling rock and more to nesting birds.
“Back where?” I asked, innocently. Maybe it was the sweet fall air or the giddiness that always seems to claim me when I can hear the subtle tossing of ocean waves in the distance, but goddammit did I feel like a happy-go-lucky assassin this morning.
Lysa picked up a walnut and rolled it between her fingers. “You know where! You can’t expect me to just nod my head and never ask another question when you suddenly tell me you’re staying back to wait and see if Arken’ll come investigate and, oh yeah, be a dear and lead all these conjurers to safety once you reach Mizridahl, will you?”
“You sound disturbingly similar to someone I know.” I snapped my fingers. “Wait a second! You sound like me.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “I’ve been around you too long, haven’t I?”
“Is this a breakup? I’m not good with those.”
Lysa chucked the walnut at me. “Shut up. I’m serious. What happened? And what’s going to happen? I understand if you don’t want to tell them” — she gestured at the sleeping conjurers arranged as one massive floor of bodies amongst a bed of smashed vines and creepers and grass — “but you have to tell me.”
“I have to?”
She scowled. Not with her mouth, but entirely with her eyes. Much more frightening that way. “Yes. You have to.”
“You’re not very scary, Lysa Rabthorn. But before you say it, I know. You can be. Arken came to the fortress, and we exchanged hellos. Then I skedaddled right on through the tear.”
“He let you leave?”
I shrugged. “Sure. All I had to do was give him the book.”
“The fake book, right?”
I leaned back against the tree, fingering a loose panel of bark. “I want you to remember this when you accuse me of withholding information from you in the future. Because I don’t have to tell you this little secret. In fact, I shouldn’t. It won’t do you any good, and it’ll probably incense you with worry and concern. But… the copy of the book is identical to the real thing, with one minor revision. Most every thought, every insight gleaned from the living realm throughout the course of its history… is all there.”
Lysa licked her lips. “That seems like a dangerous gift to give the god of Amortis, Astul.”
My, my. What a calculated, diplomatic response. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought she’d learned a thing or two from Sybil Tath. Maybe my little Lysa was maturing.
“I don’t think he gives two sacks of rat hooves, as Rav might say, about anything in that book except how to make all of Ripheneal’s creations go away.”
“What makes you say that?”
“An educated guess. Along with some damning commentary from Ripheneal himself.”
Lysa played with a winglike seed that fell from the tree onto her hand. “Hmm. You’re a liar, you know that? You said you didn’t read much at all from that book. You probably snuck a look at it every time I went to sleep, reading Ripheneal’s thoughts. Didn’t you?”
“I never read it. He told me while we were in Amortis.”
That confession sucked all the lightheartedness from the conversation. Lysa spent the next minute or two blinking, shaking her head, and moving her mouth to form silent words.
Finally, as she crushed the winglike seed between her fingers, she said, “He’s in Amortis? Right now?”
That familiar look of betrayal crossed her eyes — the same one she’d hit me with when watching me leave Scholl, unable to chase me down as the Warden pushed her back.
“I never told you,” I said, “because it wasn’t important for you to know.”
A sarcastic chuckle.
“Well?” I said. “Tell me I’m wrong. What did you stand to gain from it?”
“Is that all you consider? Whether someone will gain or lose from your gossip? When I tell you something, that doesn’t even cross my mind. I confide in you because you’re my friend, my best friend. That’s all the reason I need.”
After much plucking, I’d managed to free a palm-sized piece of bark from the tree. “Careful of the line you toe, Lysa. You’re quickly finding yourself in dishonest territory. Or have you already forgotten of the whole business in Vereumene with the reaped?”
She struck the forest floor with her firsts. “I couldn’t—” She paused. Then she huffed. “Fine. But that would have put everything we worked for in danger. How is telling me about Ripheneal the same?”
To back her off my ass and calm her down, I made the most logical decision available to me. I lied.
“Ripheneal made me promise to not tell anyone.”
She relaxed against the tree again, her hunched-over frame of rabid womanly hatred and annoyance no more.
“Look,” I said. “It’s not even what you think. He didn’t tap me on the shoulder in the middle of the night and say, ‘Howdy, Shepherd, fancy seeing you here in the land of the dead.’ He… was in my mind.”
“Your mind? Like a—”
“Conjurer,” I said, finishing her thought. “Yes. I finally met him in the flesh shortly after arriving in Scholl.” I then proceeded to relay as much of that night as I could remember.
“And,” I said to Lysa, putting the finishing touches on my story, “I told Arken exactly that: end the god of life and you end his creations. He’ll see it for himself in the book, and nothing else will matter to him.”
Lysa dissected another winglike seed. “Where is Ripheneal now?”
Dammit. So much for hoping she didn’t ask that question. “With Ellie.”
Lysa stuck her face forward, eyes growing big as she put two and two together. “Astul! Arken will—”
I put a hand to her chest. “I know. Which is exactly why it’s quite prudent we get the conjurers on a boat and to Fragment Eight as soon as possible.”
As it turned out, procuring a boat wouldn’t be as simple a matter as I’d hoped. When we arrived at the Brierwall dock on the River Menth, the shipmaster there refused my handsome offer of five thousand gold coins to be paid in full in one month’s time. He also refused ten thousand, twenty thousand, and even thirty thousand. Apparently, word had gotten around that the Black Rot had failed to return our borrowed horses to Brierwall messenger camp a few mo
nths ago.
Time to steal a boat, I thought.
Chapter 22
My moral compass has never excluded thievery. Still, I prefer to obtain my needs and wants through an exchange of coins, persuasion, threats and, if it comes down to it, swindling. Outright thievery gets you a reputation that’s not easily shrugged off — a reputation that brands you as a rat, snake or other shameful creature.
But such a reputation is more desirable than death, which was what waited for me if I couldn’t get the conjurers to Fragment Eight. Plus, I needed to rid myself of my hundred-and-ninety-person cargo sooner rather than later. Pinpointing Vayle and meeting with her was rather important at the moment. We did, after all, still have a goddess-of-war issue to deal with, and knowing what, if any, progress she’d made on that front in uniting the Taths, Verdans and the hodgepodge leftovers of Dercy’s kingdom was something I greatly desired.
So yeah, I had to steal a boat.
I thankfully had the good judgment not to go marching into the Brierwall messenger docks with one hundred and ninety conjurers in tow. That in itself wouldn’t have caused a commotion, besides a few raised eyebrows and whispers among the messengers, but it would have made my strategy of infiltration more difficult if their faces had been seen.
Four conjurers, including Sybil Tath, had stumbled into the messenger dock camp an hour or so after the shipmaster there’d rejected my monetary offer. The remaining lot, including me and Lysa, hid amongst dense thickets and crooked trees growing sideways out of a sloping hillside, high over the River Menth.
“There are an awful lot of dockworkers down there,” Lysa noted, peering through split branches as lanterns and torch fire mingled in the night. “I bet if we created a distraction on the other side of the camp, we could pull them away from the boats.”
“Boat,” I corrected her. “Singular. There’s only one boat big enough to ship two hundred conjurers down the river.”
That boat was, as the messengers called her, Plump Pertha. The Order had several Plump Perthas, situated on rivers throughout Mizridahl. The boats had more in common with ships than the small messenger vessels that otherwise filled in the ranks of the Order’s armada.
Picture a framework of dark wood — think walnut, mahogany… the sort that borrow their color from a mixture of dried blood and old night skies — splotched with what can only be described as white mold and complete with wood knots, deep gashes, and a smattering of liver spots. And if not liver spots, because ships do not have livers, then I could not even begin to guess an alternative.
The ship looked less like it’d been built and more as if it’d been dredged up from the deep, perhaps a relic that the river had claimed five hundred years ago. Still, it was floating, and it had a couple masts, a bowsprit, and plenty of oars, so it was serviceable.
Lysa’s proposition to pull the workers away from the dock was smart, and possibly something we’d put into action — a decision that would depend on the information Sybil and the others brought back.
Here’s the thing about messenger camps: they exist. Also, they employ cooks who can whip up a mean stew. Because of these two facts, wanderers often gather near the camps and plan their nomadic adventures with them in mind.
Rather than turn away hungry wanderers, the Order typically welcomes them in, gives them a small bowl of stew and sends them on their way. Not because the Order is the epitome of goodwill, mind you, but because it’s advantageous not to have starving-will-do-anything-for-food wanderers near your camp.
What happens if the wanderers don’t move on, and instead stick around for free handouts? Generally they receive messenger swords across their throats, put down like a pack of rabid hounds.
Anyhow, Sybil and the other three conjurers were gaunt enough looking that they’d pass for famished wanderers. And while they were hopefully being fed and taken care of, they’d have a look around the camp — counting messengers, weapons, workers. Listening to conversations. Spy business, essentially.
“I dunno,” Lysa said. “She doesn’t seem with it, you know?”
“She’s frightened, probably.”
The gal in question was, of course, one Sybil Tath. She hadn’t spoken to me since I’d whisked her away from Amortis. The prattling woman who had a nose for gossip had turned suddenly shy and reserved. Given her past, it was little wonder.
Lysa wasn’t convinced she trusted us. And neither was I. Which was exactly why I’d sent her into the camp. Better to know now if she intended to sell us out than later, when the stakes were higher.
Maybe it wasn’t worth the risk, bringing her along. But Ellie seemed desperate to recruit Lysa into her war effort, so it seemed a single conjurer was worth her weight in gold. And Sybil Tath probably more so. She had experience. Better yet, she’d delivered results. She had, after all, managed to pull the wool over my eyes and almost — almost — help conquer an entire world. Seemed just the kind of experience Ellie and the rebellion needed.
A while later, into the early morning, after the lanterns had gone out and the workers to bed, Sybil and her troop returned.
They crashed through hip-high ferns and shrubs and weeds, ducking under creepers that coiled from tree to tree. Smack into one of those things and they’ll boing you right back down the hill you walked up.
I walked down from my perch deep in the forest to meet them, sidestepping a rather unsightly spiderweb whose host had either abandoned it or wanted you to think he’d abandoned it. Tricky bastards, those with eight legs.
“Talk to me,” I said, looking Sybil in the eyes.
Hesitant, she quickly came to the conclusion that I wanted only her to impart the group’s findings.
“Over twenty workers,” she said, staring at her feet.
“But less than thirty,” a man by the name of Yoll put in.
Sybil brushed her raven hair behind her ear. “Fifteen messengers when we entered. One left while we ate. Th-the boats are locked, we think.”
“Locked? Explain.”
“The messenger who left did so by boat. The shipmaster took him inside his cottage. When the messenger came out, he had a key.”
“Key could be for anything. I’ve never seen a boat locked down before.”
Sybil lifted her head. The green of her eyes burned into mine… took me back to a time I wanted to forget. “I…”
“She followed him,” Yoll said. “Could’ve sniffed the shit right from his arse.”
“I didn’t follow that closely,” she said. “I kept myself well hidden. No one expected a thing. I saw him put the key into a lock around the wheel of the boat.”
I clapped, slowly. “Well, well. That’s something I expect from the best of my Rots, not a weary, beaten-down conjurer. Good job. A damn fine job, in fact. Go rest. You’ve a boat to catch in a few hours.”
Yoll and the other two hiked it past me. Sybil tried, but I shot my hand out and latched onto her arm as she passed.
“Stay,” I whispered.
She shivered.
I uncoiled my fingers from around her wrist. Like a dog who’d been grabbed around the neck in his owner’s fit of rage, Sybil remained beside me, nostrils flared. Head down.
“This,” I told her, “is not about me. Or you. Or what happened in the past. I don’t intend to sunder you. Or torture you, or hand you over to Arken again. All I want is to trust you. Can I do that?”
She nodded.
“Good. Go.”
Sybil went, shivering still, up the sloped ramp of dirt and brush. I gazed down at the River Menth. Here the river was a narrow channel of black water, barely a ripple on its surface. Father west, it widened into a proper river, its depths rumored to hold the anchors from an ancient battle between two kingdoms who had settled its banks.
What stories would they tell in six hundred years? Or perhaps the better question… would there be stories to tell in six hundred years?
“Master Astul,” croaked a voice.
I turned to see Yoll navigating th
e hillside, shifting dirt beneath his unwieldy feet.
“Master Astul, may I have a word?”
“So long as you never call me master again, sure.”
“Apologies, m — Astul. The Lady Sybil, I beg of you not to give her much trouble. Uncooperative though she may seem, she harbors no ill will. We befriended one another during our time in Fragment Zero. She has a good heart.”
“We have a past,” I told him.
“Oh. Then forgive me. I did not—”
“She seems disturbed. She been this way since you’ve known her, or is it my face getting that reaction out of her?”
Yoll tugged at the single rope of hair coming from the back of his mostly bald head. Had it been me, I would’ve taken a knife to the grungy tail and hacked it off, but different, er, heads of hair for different folks.
“She… suffered, Master Astul. Sorry. In my time, the preface was a great honor. It is difficult to—”
“Suffered?” I asked, interrupting him. “I imagine like most of you, yes? Being thrown into a fortress and forced to pervert minds for hours on end would make sufferers out of us all.”
Yoll looked to stuff his hands into his pockets, but found — or remembered — he had none, so he awkwardly played with his fingers. “Lady Sybil had it worse than others, you see. She orchestrated, um” — he turned around, as if concerned Sybil might appear behind him — “she won’t like me telling you this. It brings back bad memories.”
“Too late,” I said. “Spit it out.”
“Right. Um, you see, she orchestrated The Great Escape, as a few of us termed it. We overpowered several Custodians and guards and… in the end, we were caught. We’d made it halfway across Fragment Zero when the Wardens came. And then Arken arrived and Sybil spat in his face. She told him it was all her idea. I’m not sure exactly what happened, Master Astul, but she did not return to us for two months’ time. When she did, she was never quite the same. Shattered, you might say. Very broken.”
I didn’t want to imagine the terrors that Sybil had experienced in those two months, but the mind is wont to go places you rarely want it to go. And here I thought it was my ugly mug that had given her pause. I supposed her trust was something I didn’t need to question any longer.
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