Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga

by Regina Watts

  “Faeries come and go out of mounds,” Branwen informed me.

  “If he has been marked somehow by this creature”—Valeria leaned forward, her expression tense—“do you think she will come back for him again?”

  “It’s possible. Yes,” decided Branwen more confidently after another second of reflection. “It’s certainly possible. I would even go so far as to say that moving on to Skythorn would be in our best interests, if only to keep Rorke safe.”

  This discussion of Skythorn brought a frightening notion to mind. “Have we missed the airship to Rhineland?”

  “Erdwud said it goes out in five days,” said Branwen. “If we push the horses, we can make it to Skythorn and still have a few days to find Hildolfr and Grimalkin…but if we arrive too close to departure—as in, the day of—we’ll have to assume they’ve already boarded and hope there are still unbooked tickets.”

  “Last minute is better than late,” I told her, looking between the women, “but I’ve always preferred arriving early. Are you all ready to set out right away?”

  Looking somewhat dubious, Valeria asked, “Are you?”

  “I’m tired, but after a meal and perhaps an hour to close my eyes, I’ll be right as rain. Ah…and I do have one more thing to do before we leave town.”

  That errand, I attended after I’d rested a bit. While Branwen talked to Lively and Erdwurd about whether or not they knew anyplace in Skythorn willing to board durrow, I made my way across town to Rigan’s smithy. As he had last time, the old man hammered away. This time, he looked up at my approach. Rigan raised his face mask to reveal his white-stubbled face and grumbled a bit before producing audible words.

  “Paladin,” he said, placing down his hammer, “Burningsoul. About time you showed up.”

  Unable to help my chuckle at the crotchety smith’s ways, I confessed to him, “That’s me…early or late, never just right.”

  “Sure seems to be that way with you. Come on in.”

  Rigan pushed open his property’s short gate for me, waving me thereafter into a front door that was open to permit the cool spring breeze through his cabin. The main room was cluttered, and so was the second room where he brought me—but the weapons displayed around the old man’s private armory were immaculate.

  Unlike the rest of his house, these items must have been carefully dusted every day and polished regularly. The man had good reason to take pride in his work. A few mannequins held different styles of armor, all of them artful and in some cases even elaborately decorated, and I wondered if I had seen anything half so quality as his swords displayed around the burning forge of Roserpine’s palace. The newest pieces—of rather more utilitarian design compared to those that had been embossed with a snarling gold plains-king or marked with shapes upon the back like raptor wings, but certainly no less beautiful—shone from their place on the stand nearest the door.

  “There you are.” Rigan gestured as he made his slow way over to unbuckle the breastplate and help me into it. While I tried the helmet on, he asked, “How’d I do? Your friend was vague with the details of your size, but I think I got a sense of you once you came to visit me.”

  “This is perfect, Rigan. I can’t begin to thank you!”

  “What for? I was paid for it, wasn’t I? Don’t thank me, thank your friend…”

  “He didn’t ask you to pass anything along when he commissioned these pieces for me, did he? Indicate anything, say anything?”

  “Only thing he said was that I could expect you sometime soon. Other than that, he just paid, explained what he wanted, and left. Gave me extra to get it done in a rush…I hate rushing.”

  Tell me about it! I could certainly appreciate that, being now in a rush as I was. We were going to be in for quite a trip. Assuming our travel went smoothly and we could make it there before the airship departed, we might not need to worry at all about buying a ticket. It would instead be a matter of finding Grimalkin and Hildolfr…which, in the city of Skythorn, seemed a tall order.

  That, however, was what divination was made for, among other things…and if Weltyr’s blessings were with us, we might not even need that.

  Erdwud and his wife were sorry to see us go, and not just because of the money we brought in. Lively had developed a fondness for the ladies and regarded them as friends of a sort. She seemed particularly moved to know we were on our way and did quite a bit of blinking while hugging us good-bye. For his part, Erdwud was also disappointed, but wasted no time in handing me a sealed note of which he declared, “This’ll get you a nice, cozy little room in an inn called The Poisoned Mongoose, assumin’ you don’t mind a bit of hollarin’ in the night. Things can get a little rowdy there…but it’s me friend’s establishment. Like a brother to me, Sharp is! He’ll see to it that you lot are well looked-after.”

  I thanked him for his generosity again and shook his hand warmly, keeping it held in mine while asking for directions. As I occupied him, the women filed out through the tavern’s back door before the lewd old innkeeper could take too much advantage of the opportunity to hug them good-bye. Then, delaying only to explain to the Dardries where and when they could come collect their horses, we paid a fee for the extension of their rental leases and headed south to Skythorn.

  Having spent much of my life in the Temple’s properties, I had not been prepared for how beautiful the trip out of the city would be. Heading back down to it, the journey seemed doubly so. Farms and orchards marked most of the route, and Valeria in particular was breathless to look upon sights that were mundane to most. She and I saw them in similar lights—for Valeria, these rural plots were novelties. For me, they were examples of the intricate beauty by means of which Weltyr’s world functioned. Joy filled me to see every rice paddy, every artichoke field, all the trees full of nuts and fruit swaying softly in the wind. I had appreciated the landscape when on my way to the Nightlands, but had no idea how much I would appreciate them after my return.

  All the time, Valeria—and, to a lesser extent, Indra—demanded to know the names of all number of things. Fruits they had not seen, crops they did not recognize; birds and beasts of burden that were unrecorded in durrow encyclopedias due to lack of interest, context, or relevance; the dog of Weltyr that seemed to follow us on our journey, each night lurking some distance outside our lantern but evident to the sensitive eyes of the subterranean elves. Twice Valeria stopped us to pick and learn the names of flowers, and the absolute ecstasy in her tearful eyes to see so many fields of verdant plants made me think nothing of the delay; and even Odile gasped with girlish delight, shielding her goggled eyes with one hand and pointing up with another, as an airship from the far Eastern nation of Pulnoma meandered across the cool blue sky ahead of us to the Skythorn airport.

  There was nothing that escaped their amazed eyes. Branwen and I felt like teachers; the guides of aliens who had literally come from a different world. That was certainly how it felt when, at night, the durrow taught us deeper pleasures than we had previously enjoyed upon the surface. It would seem that, in her week with the durrow, Branwen had become slightly less protesting. Beneath Valeria’s radiant stars, the women would take turns with me, each watching the others enjoy her pleasure while in turn pleasuring one another. Branwen and I rarely had a moment alone to talk, but in our nights of witnessed passion I felt a certain powerful intimacy. Arguing with me, losing me, and being forced to grow accustomed to the durrow without me seemed to have changed her. Perhaps she learned, as I had been learning, to think of the consequences of her actions, and to remember how easily existence was taken for granted.

  This journey was a relief compared to the one out of the Nightlands. Protected by the magic lantern while tucked in a grove of trees that would further dissuade the attention of bandits—or any other brand of marauder who would be undeterred by the light, unlike the great wild dog to whom I tossed a few scraps each night by way of peace offering—we rested well, and beneath the light of the sun traveled safely south.

 
My only concern was related to the durrow. With but two pairs of goggles, Indra and Odile continued to trade off as they had mentioned to me. Valeria offered hers up multiple times, but, loyal to their culture’s royalty, they refused to deny her the protection and instead wore cloaks with thick hoods. They pulled these hoods down low before their faces whenever required, and though I remained concerned that the protection was insufficient, the women nonetheless insisted they were fine. How much of this was show for Valeria’s sake, I’m not sure; but I’m sure they also felt, like I did, that once we were safely at The Poisoned Mongoose we wouldn’t have quite so much to worry about.

  Those hoods were important in other ways, too. Skythorn was a place of mingling, as I described it to Valeria. Men and women, upper class and lower, mankinds of all varieties met and worked in the city as casually as you pleased. Humans of every creed and color passed through the city walls.

  But never, not once, had I or anyone else that I knew of seen a durrow come through.

  To Skythorn citizens, dark elves were as good as faeries. Most only knew them as far-away creatures living below the surface of Urde, a kind of anti-elf renown for sadistic inclinations and their penchant for slavery. They were sometimes used as the villains of fairy tales, or as a way to get children to behave at bedtime. “If you don’t go to sleep right this instant, your mother and I will sell you to the dark elves…” (Did I miss that much by not having parents? When speaking to those allegedly more fortunate than I, I always wondered.)

  In other words, durrow were as uncommon as it got. I was therefore far more concerned about traveling through the streets of Skythorn than I had been about moving through Soot. There was nothing necessarily illegal about their presence in the city, but between Odile’s recollection of her colony’s destruction and the general bigotry that mankinds could show one another, I could not shake my worry.

  However…much to my relief, no one we encountered on the highway seemed to give the women a second glance outside of the sort men tended to give women as painfully beautiful as my companions. I admit, I felt rather prideful to have them all by my side. What I had done to deserve such companionship, I was not sure—but I was also very thankful for their beauty, because it provided a natural glamor in the magical sense of the word. Those who looked upon them were so taken by their radiant looks that it was hard to notice details, like the slight disfigurement of the fabric of their hoods or the slightly exaggerated facial features that marked them as elves rather than human. Accordingly, when we reached the busy gates of Skythorn, there was no problem other than the wait to get in.

  The city’s namesake, not unlike the tower at the heart of El’ryh, was a citadel swirling toward the clouds and punctuating in a sharp black spire. The heart-warming structure had been visible for some leagues by then, but when we rose up the final hill overlooking the city, my heart throbbed with fierce pride at the durrows’ gasps.

  For the first time they took full stock of the sprawling scale, a single city comparable in size to some smaller countries. From our new vantage the city seemed to go on forever in all directions, an extraordinary sea of buildings whose greatest towers could not amount to one half the central landmark’s height. Millions of people navigated its streets and, that day, at least a hundred were trying to get in ahead of us. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to call Skythorn its own city-state, save for that it fell under the legal jurisdiction of Cascadia and owed its taxes to the king of the land just as much as any other town.

  But that was where the similarities between Skythorn and any other town had a way of stopping. The line of merchants, travelers, entertainers and others seeking entry to the city was astonishing, and dwarfed by far even that entry line to El’ryh. Unlike the guards of El’ryh, who appeared to primarily act in the name of preventing slave escapes, the purpose of the guards here was to filter out known terrorists and occasionally sort through a merchant’s goods to prevent the smuggling of contraband, foreign seeds, dwarvish pistols, or anything else verboten in the city—a very small list of items, truth be told, when compared to how freely the citizens came and went. Most who were not merchants never had to worry about such scrutiny, and in the end, though the line was vast, we took only an hour to reach the front.

  All my anxiety was for nothing. The guard took one look at the tattoo of Weltyr’s sigil upon my neck, asked if the women were with me, and let us through without much more than a brisk glance at my face.

  Then, as though I were coming to the end of a dream—or deeper in the midst of one than ever—our horses set hoof upon the paving stones of Skythorn.

  “And I thought El’ryh was crowded!” Laughing, Valeria stared around the noisy city and pushed her hood back enough that her view was obstructed by nothing more than the rims of the welding goggles. “Why, I’ve never seen so many people…certainly not so many men.”

  “This is all a little surreal,” agreed Odile, peering from the low beak of her hood. “Boy, look at that one—he’d be excellent in agriculture! It’s probably what he does here. Why don’t we lure men down to the Nightlands anymore?”

  “Because there isn’t any need,” Valeria said, spreading her hands. “So many of our slaves our bred now.”

  “I guess that’s true…boy, and that one!”

  Odile’s fascination for the existence of free men was funny in some ways, disturbing in others. It was very strange to know someone for whom basic liberties were foreign notions. What would it take, I wondered, to change the culture of the Nightlands?

  As much as it would take to change the culture of Skythorn, I’m sure.

  One develops blind spots for the shortcomings of one’s only home. Much as the durrow were not used to living in a culture where all those who worked were (ostensibly, at least) paid fair wages, I was not prepared for what our time in Skythorn would reveal to me about the city—and, sadly enough, the Temple—where I was raised.

  “Let’s find this tavern Erdwud recommended to us,” I said, glancing at the letter peering from the edge of the saddlebag. “While you ladies rest, I’ll consult the Temple as to the location of Grimalkin and Hildolfr…Skythorn is a vast city, an easy place to become lost.”

  Lips parted in amazement as she peered through the protective glass of her occluded goggles, Valeria indicated the citadel in the center of it all. “And this is the Temple?”

  “It is…it is, indeed. Which city inspired which, of course, I cannot say for certain.”

  Valeria, not given to so quickly scoffing at me, spoke in a dubious tone. “El’ryh has been the hub of durrow existence for well over 150,000 years.”

  “No one knows how old the Skythorn is,” I told her, “nor the city around it. The priests have documents with information on the subject, but they are extremely rare and cannot be shared with great ease. One of their most important duties is to maintain this information by rewriting it in new manuscripts.”

  “Have you no printing presses in Skythorn?”

  “These histories, I have been told, contain things that ought not to be printed for the common man.” I explained this as our horses made their ways down the busy street, pedestrians going to and fro on either side of us and thankfully thinning as we plodded through this heavily-trafficked corner of the city. “It is for the priests to interpret the holy books of Weltyr, and to communicate their contents to laymen. The information is too mentally devastating to the individual.”

  “Roserpine’s relationship with her worshipers is a personal one,” she responded.

  “As is Weltyr’s, if the individual should will it…but, in a personal relationship, one person does not tell the other everything all of the time. Not when the relationship is between a master and his slave, for instance.”

  With a faint sniff, Valeria moved her horse along a little faster and cut ahead of me on the street. I peered up beyond the sullen priestess, at the tip of the Temple vanishing into the clouds.

  The Mongoose was not difficult to find, although I should
not have been particularly surprised, going by its name, to find it where we did. When I confirmed Erdwud’s (as usual, poor) directions to it, the guard who answered me glanced at my companions with a wiggle of his mustache.

  “You sure that’s the spot you’re looking for?”

  Never a good sign to hear that when one is after lodgings, but we were only going to be staying a night or two if I had my druthers. In fact, Weltyr willing, we might not even have to deal with that much. If I could speak to Father Fortisto—in my mind, foremost among Weltyr’s Temple priests—I might get the information I sought without receiving much remonstration for failing at my first attempt to retrieve the Scepter. There were those among the brotherhood who would have had more than a few harsh words for me, and a few who would have even taken the task from my hands altogether. That would have been a disaster. I was not interested in having to choose between my duty to the Church and my affection for the women whom I had agreed to help, and to whom I now had a responsibility as their escort outside of the Nightlands.

  I could not help but notice how protective I had become of them. They did not need protection, of course—had any man attempted to interfere with them, he would have walked away, at best, with a broken hand or nose. But I nonetheless marveled at my own internal protective urge: as if I walked with Elishta-bet, a certain childhood friend of mine. Wild animals in the countryside were of no concern to me, nor were nighttime monsters. The ladies could all handle themselves. Yet, I suppose because I wanted them to think well of humans and of Skythorn, I was on such high alert and so poised for something to happen that the last problem I expected to have was with the innkeeper, Sharp.

  The Poisoned Mongoose was aptly-named. The working class quarter where it was located was full of ash and smoke and other artifacts of manufacture that were no doubt responsible for rotting the lungs and temperaments of all the people about it. We found the inn and its dingy tavern squeezed between a cobbler and a fish market, and the scent was so foul that Odile looked up at the sign with a curled lip.