Hinterland g-2

by James Clemens

  Kathryn approached the sickbed. The stench of burnt flesh, hair, wool, and leather stained the room. To combat this, one of the healers already had a brazier glowing and dribbled oil of gentled mint across the sizzling red iron. A mound of soaked llamphur sprigs warmed atop its grate.

  “To help him breathe,” Healer Fennis said quietly, noting her attention. “Will open the lungs.”

  The other healer, a slim woman and wife to Fennis, knelt beside Lorr’s sprawled form. She had bathed away the charred clothes, exposing the rawness beneath.

  “There will be scars,” she said. “But the alchemy in the balms was newly concocted, devised by a physic in the deserts of Dry Wash. Using a Grace of loam and air. Who would have thought such a combination could be steadied?”

  “Then he will live?” Delia asked. Her voice rang with relief.

  “If you let us work in peace,” the woman answered.

  Kathryn waved Tylar’s Hand back from the bed. It was an irritated gesture, more brusque than she had intended. She blunted the effect with softer words. “He’s a strong man, even for one late in his years.”

  Stepping away, Delia stood with her arms crossed over her chest-not a stern pose, but more like she was hugging herself in a measure of reassurance. Kathryn studied her askance. There was a puffiness to her eyelids. She had been crying. Small lines marred a smooth brow. Still in this moment, Kathryn suddenly recognized the youth behind the worry. She had to remind herself that Delia was a full decade younger. Eternally serious, seldom smiling, she had always struck Kathryn as older in years.

  But not now.

  The girl shone behind the woman, worn through by grief and worry.

  Delia caught Kathryn staring, with a flick of her eyes toward Kathryn, then down to the floor. A fleeting glimpse of Delia’s guilt.

  For some reason, this only piqued Kathryn’s irritation again, setting her lips into hard lines. She fought against it, remembering the stolen kiss atop Stormwatch. There was no true blame here. She knew better than to fault the other woman. The man was equally to blame for any broken vows. And besides, what vows remained between Tylar and Kathryn? Whatever had once been sworn and promised had been broken into so many pieces as to be all but unrecognizable.

  A groan from the bed returned Kathryn’s attention to the greater threat, reminding her of her responsibility, to Lorr, to everyone in Tashijan. Her face heated slightly, shamed at the momentary lapse into childish resentments. She was not a young girl to moon over lost love. Especially when all of Myrillia was threatened.

  Lorr stirred on the sheets. His eyelids fluttered weakly open despite the squint of pain in his face.

  “He wakes,” Healer Fennis said.

  The woman glanced back at her husband. “We should draught him while we can. Willow bark and nettle wine.” She waved toward a side table.

  The other nodded and deftly began working on an elixir.

  “Two drops of poppy oil,” she reminded.

  “Yes, my dearest.”

  Kathryn stepped closer, shadowed by Delia. “Can you revive him enough to speak? We must-”

  “I kin hear you,” Lorr croaked out. He lifted his good arm, but it fell back to the bed. “How can a man sleep with all this babbling?”

  “Don’t stir,” Delia warned.

  Lorr’s eyes finally focused on the two women. “Such a sight would wake any man…” His attempt at levity fell on worried ears.

  Kathryn knelt to bring her face even with his. “Lorr, if you’re able, can you tell us what you saw below Tashijan?”

  The false cheer drained from the muscles of his face, tightening his features with a pain beyond his burns. He attempted to rise up on an elbow but was scolded back down to the pillows. He lifted a hand, surprised to find an empty palm.

  “Tylar found the diadem,” Kathryn said, reading his worry. “Castellan Mirra’s diadem.”

  He nodded and sighed. “I went down that dark stair to lure whatever lurked away from the young ones. A stumbling, broken-stone maze it were down there. Almost got myself nabbed up.”

  He coughed hard. Healer Fennis approached with his draught, but Lorr waved him away.

  “Then I caught a scent. A familiar enough one. I’d been dredging the sewers looking for it long ’nough, so when it caught up in the back of my blessed nose, tasted on the tongue, I knew it right. I went back to look closer. And there she was among that black clot of shadow, whispering to them.”

  Kathryn closed her eyes for a breath. So Lorr hadn’t found Castellan Mirra imprisoned or discovered her dead body. He hadn’t returned with the diadem as proof of either. It was much worse.

  “These shadowknights-” she began.

  “Not knights. Mayhap once. No longer. Ghawls, she called them. Black ghawls. Black-cursed to the bone.”

  Kathryn remembered the stern woman who had been counsel to Ser Henri for many decades. Though hard, she had always been evenhanded and of wise sensibility. Kathryn had wished often of late that she could be half the castellan that the old woman was.

  “So Mirra was tainted, too,” she said tiredly. “Cursed like the knights.”

  Lorr sighed. “That’s just it.” The tracker’s amber eyes found Kathryn’s. “I smelled no corruption from her. She scented as she did when wrapped up here in her hermitage. But those ghawls…they listened to her, lapping about her like beaten dogs. They were hers. Flesh and bone. I drew closer-too close. They fell out of the shadows around me like scraps of darkness. Only escape was fire and light.”

  He fell silent a moment, eyes lost in some unimaginable horror. Kathryn only had to look at his blistered flesh to know the cost of that escape.

  He closed his eyes, and Kathryn was glad for it. “I fought through them…” he mumbled. “Grabbed for her throat, but they reached through flames and tore me off. All I could do…I fled…”

  Healer Fennis again stepped forward with his draught.

  Kathryn rose and backed, but her motion was sensed. Lorr opened his eyes and fixed her with a firm stare.

  “She was not tainted…of that I am certain.”

  Kathryn nodded and stepped back to allow the healer to minister to Lorr. Lorr sank more deeply into his pillows, as if unburdening himself had finally granted him some measure of peace.

  Delia crossed to the other side of the bed. “I’ll stay with him.”

  She nodded again, too shaken for words, not trusting her voice. Lorr’s words stayed with her as she headed away. She was not tainted. If the tracker’s senses read true, then what did that portend? Had Castellan Mirra been a willing participant, a member of the Cabal? Had she always been the enemy, hiding behind her ermine cloaks and lined face, at the very pinnacle of Tashijan?

  Ice numbed her limbs and coursed through her heart. How many nights had she sat with Mirra, entrusted her with secrets? What about Ser Henri? Had he been duped as well?

  Suddenly Kathryn had to reach to a wall to hold herself upright. All she had supposed, all she had believed shifted inside her. It was as if she had slipped through a dark mirror. But which side was she on?

  The missing knights…the loss of Perryl…so many certainties and suspicions no longer made sense. She pictured again the slain young knight she had discovered last year, sacrificed in some dark rite. She had believed the Fiery Cross to be to blame, painted Warden Fields with the blackest of brushes. And though the warden lusted for power, Kathryn now knew whose hand truly pulled the dark strings of Tashijan.

  Not Argent.

  It had been Castellan Mirra all along. She must have purposely laid that false trail, instilling rancor and distrust throughout Tashijan, splitting them from within while crafting her own dark plots beneath their very towers.

  Kathryn leaned against the wall, sensing a well of tears rising, a mix of frustration and something that bordered on grief.

  Had Henri finally discovered Mirra’s secret? Was that why he had been murdered? It hadn’t been a plot by Argent, as Kathryn had always supposed; now she knew
the black truth.

  He had died because of trust.

  And now all of Tashijan…all of Myrillia…faced the same fate.

  “I must have the skull,” Krevan said.

  Dart had retreated to her bed in the small garret. The hearth was cold, but Rogger had lit the small lamp on her table. The thief now leaned against the closed door. She stared between Krevan and Tylar, both cloaked, both their faces triple-striped, though neither was a true knight any longer.

  What was this about a skull? she wondered.

  Tylar frowned at the pirate. “I don’t think this is a time to worry about such a cursed talisman.”

  “But it is more than mere bone…more than you could imagine.”

  “We know about the trace of seersong. Gerrod has been studying it.”

  The pirate’s gaze swept to Dart, then back to Tylar. Dart remembered his earlier words. It concerns your father. Your real father.

  “You know nothing,” he grumbled.

  “Then enlighten us.”

  Krevan glowered. “The skull belonged to a rogue god that stumbled out of the hinterland into a realm of the Eighth Land. Such a trespass burnt the flesh. Even the bones should have been consumed, but someone preserved the skull, granted it to the god of Saysh Mal.”

  Tylar nodded to the thief. “I gathered as much from Rogger. He stole it during his pilgrimage stop in that god-realm. But I hadn’t heard more of his tale, what with our rough landing and the cursed storm.”

  Krevan’s brow darkened as he stared toward Rogger.

  “Perhaps we should hear both your stories,” Tylar said.

  Rogger shrugged. “My tale is not that rich. I continued with my pilgrimage last year as a way of skirting through the god-realms, looking for any evidence of the Cabal.” He pulled back a sleeve to reveal the scarred brandings. “Such punishment of the flesh was fair trade to hear the rumblings and rumors among the underfolk of the various lands. Tongues wag more easily when the only ears nearby are those of a ragged beggar on a stoop.”

  Tylar waved for Rogger to continue. Even Dart knew that the thief’s pilgrimage was more than it had seemed.

  “So there I was, running out of blank skin when I stumbled into the jungle realm of the Huntress. And up to then, not a peep nor peck from the Cabal. As soon as I set foot in that realm, it weren’t hard to tell something was amiss. The people of that land went about with their heads tucked low. I saw more brawls in the tavernhouses in one night than in a fortnight elsewhere. Bodies were left in alleys to rot. That is not what I had expected to find. Saysh Mal was not a high place, but it was fairly wrought from all I’d heard. Lived by some code of honorable conduct. No longer. What I saw there more reminded me of ol’ Balger’s Foulsham Dell, corrupted and low of spirit.”

  “So what happened there?” Dart asked. She knew Brant hailed from that realm.

  “I went to present myself to the Huntress in her treetop castillion. I did my proper obeisance, took her sigil to my thigh, and thought to move on. But word among the underfolk at the castillion suggested their mistress might be the source of the decrepitude. She had grown sullen, pulled away from her people, seldom showed herself. The flow of her humours slowed, then stopped. It was said she even had one of her own Hands imprisoned. Such strangeness warranted further inquiries. A few pinches spent on ale, a few silver yokes rolled onto palms, and I heard more. How the Huntress retreated often to a private chamber, spent days in there alone. The underfolk reported hearing her whispering in there…laughing sometimes, cursing at other times.”

  “Who else was in there?” Tylar asked.

  “That’s just it. No one. She was alone. She kept some treasure in there, a talisman, hidden behind lock and curse.” Rogger shrugged.

  “So you had to take a look,” Tylar said.

  “How could I not? It surely sounded like another incursion by the Cabal, another tainted realm. So I snuck in there and saw the talisman, a skull resting on a golden cushion. From its ilked shape, there was little doubt that it had something to do with the Cabal, a slow poison meant to corrupt yet another god. There was only one clear course.”

  “You stole it.”

  Rogger nodded. “Best to get it out of there, away from the Huntress and her realm, away from all the god-realms. And I guess I was right. Look what happened when I set foot in Chrismferry.”

  “What happened?” Krevan asked, his eyes narrowing.

  Dart listened in horror as Tylar described the attack by ilk-beasts. He explained, “Master Gerrod believes the seersong drew upon the taint left behind by Chrism and cast forth a curse.”

  “So to keep it out of the god-realms, I finally brought it here,” Rogger concluded. “Tashijan lies nestled among the god-realms, but is not a god-realm itself. And with all the knowledgeable masters buried beneath these towers, here seemed a good place to have the skull’s secret plied from its bones.”

  Krevan’s dark expression had not changed. “You meddle in matters beyond your understanding.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Rogger mumbled. “And probably not the last.”

  Tylar lifted a hand. “Plainly the skull is some talisman of the Cabal. I don’t-”

  Krevan cut him off, voice booming with authority. “The skull is not some Cabalistic talisman. Have you not been listening? The skull came from a rogue god who trespassed into that realm.” His voice lowered. “And it wasn’t just any rogue god.”

  Tylar’s brow crinkled, but Dart understood. She’d known the truth from the moment Krevan first described the rogue’s trespass. From the glance he had given her. From his earlier words to her.

  “He was my father,” she said, gripping her bed’s ticking with both hands.

  Tylar gaped between her and the pirate.

  Krevan paced a bit but did not deny it. “Eylan…the Wyr-mistress…it was she who brought word out of the hinterland, of this godling’s birth.” An arm waved to Dart. “Word carried from this one’s mother, begging for her child to be taken to safe harbors.”

  Tylar nodded. “Ser Henri took her in, kept her hidden.”

  Krevan continued as if he hadn’t heard, one hand on his brow. “For centuries, the Wyr-lords have had tenuous dealings with the rogues, trading in alchemies and humours. They know the true nature of the ravening creatures better than any. And after Dart was secured, their interest focused upon the parents.”

  “Why?” Tylar asked. “Such births are rare. Only two in four centuries. And rogues slip in and out of ravings, spending more of their lives like beasts than gods. What did they hope to learn?”

  “The Wyr-lords believed there was something special about this pair of gods. They were perplexed. What made this seed take root when so many other ruttings among the wild gods failed? So they watched and waited, spied and plotted. As you know, the Wyr are drawn to Grace of an unusual nature.”

  Dart glanced to Tylar. The regent had personal experience with such interest.

  “The dam fell into full rave after the child was taken, waging a swath of madness. She vanished into caverns beneath Middleback a decade ago and has yet to resurface. Perhaps dead, perhaps in some raving dream, perhaps even escaped out some other tunnel long ago. But the sire…he remained strangely grounded, whisking from hinterland to hinterland. The Wyr had a difficult time tracking him from place to place. It was like-”

  “-he knew he was being hunted,” Rogger said.

  Krevan nodded. “They lost him when he reached the Eighth Land. It is a maze of hinterlands.”

  “How long ago was that?” Tylar asked.

  “Going on seven years.”

  “And the Wyr have still been hunting for him all this time?”

  “They have strategies that cross centuries. A handful of years is nothing to them. They scoured the hinterlands across all of Myrillia, searching for some trace or sign of him.”

  Of my father, Dart thought, still struggling with the revelation.

  Rogger coughed with a trace of amusement. “And
all this time he’s been locked under key in the Huntress’s castillion. Now that’s what I call a good hiding place. ’Course, there is a downside-you’re dead.”

  “But what made him trespass into one of the god-realms in the first place?” Tylar asked. “Did he fear the Wyr’s hunters so much that he killed himself?”

  “No. Unlike our thief here, I did some study of the skull’s history in Saysh Mal. The rogue entered the realm a full two years after the Wyr lost his trail among the twisted maze of hinterlands down there. Some other purpose drove the rogue into that realm.”

  “And what purpose might that be?” Rogger asked, setting his shoulders a bit stiffly.

  Krevan shook his head. “That I still don’t know. The Wyr refused to tell me more.”

  Tylar frowned at Krevan. “Considering your hatred of Wyrd Bennifren, I’m surprised you are so well informed about all this.”

  “They hired the Flaggers,” Krevan grumbled sourly.

  “What? I thought there was great enmity between you and Wyrd Bennifren?”

  “Yet, in this matter, there was also great urgency.”

  “How so? What did they want?”

  “To help find the missing rogue. Three seasons ago, they found the first crumb of a trail long gone cold. A wandering Wyr-lord was collecting alchemies and Grace-tainted herbs and stumbled into a hinter-village down in the Eighth Land. He discovered an old piece of hide, tacked in an elder’s home, a revered talisman. Upon the hide, inked in a blood that was rich in wild Graces, were words written in ancient Littick. None could read it, not even the elder, though he recognized it as God’s Tongue. The Wyr-lord deciphered it easily enough, but more importantly he read the sigil at the bottom, the mark of their long-lost rogue.”

  “This sigil?” Dart asked. “It was his name?”

  Krevan glanced to her, studied her a moment, then nodded.

  Dart swallowed. When younger, she had wondered about her mother and father, fabricated elaborate stories for why she had been abandoned at the doorstep of a school in Chrismferry. Only after learning her true heritage did she allow those dreams to die away, strangled by the horror of the truth. Since then, she had tried not to dwell upon it. Easier to be lost in her training and duties than face her blasted birthright.