by D. P. Prior
Frantically, she scraped at whatever was gluing her eyes shut, pulled and pried at the lids till they came open.
As her sight adjusted to the gloom, she could make out the forms of bodies chained to the walls, just as she was. Women, kneeling, heads bowed with exhaustion, or curled up on the packed-dirt floor. Not all women, she realized as she took in the whole cellar. Some of them were young men. Most of them were disfigured in some way. All of them were naked, covered in their own filth.
How long had she been there? Hours? Days?
She still had her dress on, though in places the wool was damp, in others stiff with dried blood. He’d hit her hard, Slyndon Grun. Her fingers probed the tender edges of a fist-sized knot on her forehead. It was split down the middle, hot and fleshy and weeping. She needed to see it, this wound she’d not given herself, see how badly she was hurt.
None of the others were talking. No one even moaned. Either they were drugged, or they were too far beyond hope to make a sound.
[Be alert,] the Shedim said in her bones. [You must not end here. Too much is at stake.]
“You don’t need me,” Tey whispered. Her chains clinked as she rolled to her side. She wanted to curl into a ball, but her bad leg wouldn’t permit it. “Take one of these others.”
The Shedim was quiet for a moment. She had the impression it was considering. She’d half-drifted into oblivion when it answered.
[They do not yet rival you, Tey Moonshine. Their sufferings are new to them, and altogether passive. You were born to pain, and you know best how to use it. Survive this. You must survive.]
“Why? So you can use me? Use me to do what you cannot? Why is that? Can’t you drain your own victims and kill them?”
The Shedim squirmed in her marrow, but before it could respond, a boy spoke out of the gloom.
“Tey? Is that you? Tey Moonshine?”
At least he still sounded like a boy, though he should have been a man. He was the same age as her, after all.
“Vrom?”
Tey pulled herself upright by her chains. Manacles bit into her wrists. The pain brought her focus.
Vrom sat on his haunches. She couldn’t see his face clearly in the dark. She remembered how it had looked after Theurig’s concoction: blistered, weeping sores, rank with decay. And that was the last she’d seen of him before he… before he died.
“Vrom, how can you… I mean, you are… you were supposed to be…”
“Sick,” Vrom said. His breath shuddered as he spoke, and his voice was that of the child she used to play with. “I got sick. They took me to the Copse to die, and he was waiting there. Slyndon Grun. There’s a cure, Tey. For the rot.” He began to sob. “He had a cure.”
A cure? Then Snaith needed to know. She yanked on her chains. Maybe the bricks they were secured to were crumbling. Maybe the links were weak.
All around the cellar, other chains rattled. Eyes wide with fear stared Tey’s way through the darkness.
“Be silent,” a woman hissed. “He will hear. He will come.”
“I’m sorry, Tey.” Vrom’s whisper carried across the space between them. “Sorry you came to be here.”
It was quiet then, no one even shifting position, as if they feared the merest breath would bring Slyndon Grun down to the cellar. Tey wrapped herself in the gloom, sank into it till she was alone with herself, though since the coming of the Shedim she was never really alone.
[My people are immortal, Tey.] There was a barely perceptible tremor in its voice. It was scared. Frightened of losing her. Or was it more than that? Did it feel what she felt: dread as well as physical pain? [Age does not cause us to decay, but we are not immune to other forms of death. We were betrayed then banished, and now only a few of us remain.]
“So?” Tey muttered, soft enough that no one but the Shedim would hear. “Why should I care?”
But she was interested. Interested to see how much she could glean now the Shedim felt it had something to lose, even if that something was her.
[Before the rise of Hélum, there was order in this world. Order and goodness. The fruits of our cleansing. Branikdür, you see, was once the heart of a dark empire, from which tendrils of evil went out into the world. When we came, that is where we went, as liberators, as restorers of order and peace.]
“Came,” Tey breathed. “Came from where?”
The Shedim ignored her. [But there were too few of us for the task. And during the wars of liberation from the Gardeners’ tyranny we were further diminished, with no way to replenish our numbers. Our enemies knew this. Knew we did not reproduce like the beasts.] Again, that revulsion in its tone. [So we searched and experimented, seeking to emulate the Crafters who seeded all life, and we found a way.] It concluded in a solemn tone tinged with hatred and regret, [Vilchus found a way.]
“None of this has anything to do with me,” Tey said.
Deep within her, she felt the Shedim sigh. It seemed about to say more, when footfalls sounded from above. Chains clanked all around the cellar. There were whimpers, a succession of shuddering breaths.
“You’re new,” a woman hissed at Tey. “It’s you he wants, not me.”
Other voices, hushed and breathy, concurred. “You, not me. You, not me.”
Beneath it all, she heard Vrom Mowry repeating over and over, “I’m sorry, Tey. I’m so sorry…”
Her instinct was to hang limply from her chains, tell herself she wasn’t really there. If she believed hard enough…
The trapdoor creaked open, and stark light streamed through the opening.
SLEEPLESS
Snaith lay awake, flicking through the book Theurig had lent him: Cawdor’s The Four Invasions of Branikdür. He must have read the same sentence six or seven times before he finally accepted he was too tired to concentrate.
He shut the book and stared blearily at the embossed image in a filigreed circle on the cover: a rugged island of coal or obsidian jutting above the surface of a poisonous sea.
The manner of its making fascinated him, the subtle blending of red, green, and purple-dyed leather for the water; the way the isle stood out in sharp relief, as if it were a solid object. Forgotten lore. The art of illusion.
He traced its contours with his fingertip, his focus alternating between the multicolored sea and the Dark Isle; for that’s what Cawdor called it in his introduction, claiming the name had changed only following the last of the four invasions, that of the Hélum Empire. Branikdür was a native word from the most ancient times, which apparently meant “Fortress of the Raven.” It was a concession the Hélumites made to their human subjects, Cawdor said, after driving the Shedim from their midst. It honored the memory of their long-dead language, their histories, and their right to govern themselves. It seemed an odd name for an island, and Cawdor offered nothing but theories as to its meaning. The one that stood out to Snaith, though, was that “raven” was a cryptic reference to the dark god of Hélum, the very Wyvern of Necras that now adorned his chest.
Hélum had originally planned for the isle to become sacred to the cult of the Wyvern, Cawdor claimed, and had even started a vast program of temple building for the offering of bloody sacrifices. According to Cawdor, the Wyvern truly existed, a monster from the frozen wastes of Necras, beyond the furthest reaches of the Empire. In the aftermath of their invasion, the Hélumites began preparations to make Branikdür the Wyvern’s new home. They even planned to move their capital there.
And that’s where Snaith’s enthusiasm for Cawdor’s book left off. As Theurig had warned him, it was a blend of fact and fiction, of history and legend. He had little interest in the former, and none at all in the latter. Give him a book of actual instruction, like his father’s pig-skin book on fighting, and he’d read it cover to cover and put its teachings into practice. But this… if this was the start of his training in sorcery, it didn’t bode well. If anything, it just added to the idea that sorcery was make-believe, which for him made it a waste of time.
Yawning, he
rolled off the bed and placed the book on the rocking chair the crones had taken turns using while they watched over him and Tey. But it was his room now, and his alone. Theurig had granted him that privilege. A sorcerer needed privacy, a place to study and think, he’d said, but right now Snaith was too tired for both.
He threw himself back down on the bed, turned to one side, and shut his eyes. If he willed it enough, perhaps sleep would come. But the harder he tried, the more his head was filled with the massacre at the Copse, the Hand of Vilchus, and worst of all, Tey’s hand and the shame it had brought him.
He couldn’t get her naked image out of his mind, the spray of hair over her breasts, the network of mutilation that covered her flesh. He was repulsed and attracted at the same time. She frightened him, disgusted him, and yet more than either, she fascinated him. Even now he could smell her musky scent, and in response he felt the first stirrings of arousal. He pressed his face into the pillow, tried to smother this new image he had of her. But no matter how he tried, his old, perfect simulacrum refused to come into focus.
But the scent: it wasn’t just in his mind. He sniffed at the pillow. It was there, despite the crones changing the bed linen: the smell of Tey, imbued deep into the fabric.
He flung the pillow aside and sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. He didn’t want to be in Theurig’s house, didn’t want to be a sorcerer, especially if it meant wading through rubbish like Cawdor. He just wanted things back the way they were, the way they’d always been. He wanted his home, his parents. He wanted Tey, shy, wrapped in her black dress and shawl, with no indication of what lay beneath. If he could turn back the days… If the Weyd could. If it would. If it ever listened to the petitions of its poor, pathetic creatures. Because that’s the image Theurig had left him with: a remote and indifferent source of all life, uncaring, inaccessible, yet capable of acts of great cruelty.
He knew he was missing the point. Knew Theurig had said there was more to come. Much more. But Snaith didn’t want to waste years and years studying mystery and riddle. If the Weyd was anything, anything at all, he wanted to know what it was now, not discover it was worthless when he’d already invested so much.
What kind of god accepted only the maimed and crippled into its service? What kind of god punished transgressors with the rot and banishment? No god worth pledging your life to. How was worship of the Weyd, this source or being outside the universe of created things, any better than the depraved cult of the Wyvern of Necras and its demand for human blood?
The more thoughts that swarmed about his mind, the bleaker he felt. The room seemed to him a cell. A tomb. He gasped down snatches of stale air, and still his lungs burned for more. His breaths came faster and faster, till he was panting, heart skittering about his chest. He stood. Stumbled toward the door. He needed to breathe, needed to…
He needed to be quiet, he realized, as he opened the door and crept out into the hallway. Last thing he wanted was to wake up the house. Theurig had retired early, given the long trek they had ahead of them, and the crones had gone to their beds in the basement. He needed to be quiet because he needed to get out, feel the night air on his face. And more than that, even if it were only for a moment, he needed to go home.
He crept to the front door on tiptoe, lifted the latch, and let himself out.
The moon was low in the sky, casting silvery ripples across the ground and limning the stooped branches of the weeping willows. There was a light drizzle, and the air was crisp, cooling his lungs as he sucked it in.
When he reached the garden fence, a chicken squawked, and the pigs began to grunt. Latching the gate behind him, he checked to reassure himself the house was still in darkness, and then set off at a brisk pace into the night.
In the distance, the orange specks of a brazier fire atop the earthworks that surrounded Malogoi winked just beneath the level of the lowest stars. Snaith turned a slow circle as he walked, taking in the entire basin the village was nestled in. There would be a warrior, hooded and cloaked against the rain, warming hands over the coals, cursing Gosynag the Grey for pissing during their watch against a surprise attack that would probably never come. It only ever had once in living memory, and the advantage the high ground gave the Malogoi meant their rivals weren’t likely to try again. It had taken a week to clear the slopes of bodies.
The flickering glow from a hooded lantern warned him of the approach of a nightwatchman as he came to the mud-brick dwellings on the edge of the village. Snaith pressed himself against a wall as the man passed—a grizzled veteran still proving he was good for something, despite the stiffness of his gait, the face etched and grooved with wrinkles.
The odor of weedstick smoke reached Snaith’s nostrils as the man passed by, oblivious. Ky Glivkin, if he wasn’t mistaken. The hero of the Boarwood Skirmish, when Malogoi and Valk and Wolver had fought over a disputed patch of forest, one that Theurig claimed was essential to the clan’s good standing with the Weyd. The sorcerer’s crones spent many a morning there nowadays, gathering herbs and mushrooms.
At one time, Snaith had aspired to be like Ky Glivkin. Greater than him, even. But in the space of a few short days, those dreams had turned bitter. Glivkin seemed a pathetic figure now as he continued on his patrol, taking what scant comfort he could from his weedstick. Hero or no hero, the Copse still waited. The minute he could no longer hold a blade or set one foot in front of the other, he’d be no good to anyone.
The rest of the village was as quiet as the burial mounds of the ancestors. Nothing but the dark bulk of houses against the black of the sky. It was the first time Snaith had walked the streets at night. Besides the watch, no one did. There were things that stalked the darkness, Theurig said. And besides, it was forbidden by the Weyd. It was hard to know how to take such a prohibition after what he’d learned at the Copse, but the clansfolk never questioned it. They imbibed obedience to the Weyd with their mothers’ milk.
Whatever horrors were supposed to come out at night—bodachs, ditch-hags, the Shedim—he saw no sign of them.
Maybe Ky Glivkin put them to sleep with the smoke from his weedstick.
Snaith still walked faster than was necessary, still felt his heart quicken at the pooling of shadows in the alleys between houses.
The world with all its certainties had become overnight a much more frightening place. The ground no longer felt solid beneath his feet. He could no longer say with surety that the sun would rise in the east come morning, or that the stars would not fall from the sky.
His footsteps grew more assured as he headed down the garden path toward the wattle-and-daub home that should have fallen to him now his parents were gone. But it was common knowledge a sorcerer’s apprentice had no possessions of his own. Even the clothes on his back belonged to Theurig now, and were only on loan. A sorcerer was expected to pass on every last bit of knowledge and wisdom they’d acquired during a lifetime of study. All they were, all they had ever been was poured out into the apprentice, so that when the master’s body finally succumbed to the decay that eventually touched all things, the flame of the Weyd’s mystery incarnate would not perish, but would simply be passed on. And the apprentice, for their part, was to become a vessel, a nobody, a mold for the sorcerer’s life and wisdom. It stood to reason, then, that if anyone owned the Harrow house now, it was Theurig.
Snaith entered through the front door. His maimed arm tingled as if it wanted to rap three times on the jamb. He hadn’t even thought about doing so. He paused on the threshold, momentarily saddened, mind awash with ghosting memories. Blinking back the tears, he lifted his good hand and tapped just the once.
No one had shuttered the windows against the night. Probably, no one had thought to when his parents had been told to leave. Moonlight and starlight painted the hallway the grey of gloaming. It was enough to see by.
He moved from room to room, aware that his heart thudded with a ridiculous hope, and knowing full well what he would find no one home.
O
n the bench in the hearth room, he spotted Bas Harrow’s pig-skin book, laid open from the usual evening reading. Snaith picked it up, let his eyes rove over the page, the last his father had read—or rather re-read, because Bas knew the book inside out. He said he continued to read it because of what he gleaned from between the lines.
It was the section on use of the shield as a weapon and not just for defense. It wasn’t what Snaith needed to see. What good was a shield when you had one working arm? He was about to set the book back down, when he was hit by a wave of grief, followed swiftly by a surge of anger. The house and all its contents might now belong to Theurig, but not this. Not his father’s book. It was too much a part of Bas Harrow, too painful a connection to relinquish. He shoved it in the pocket of his tunic. What Theurig didn’t know…
But the Weyd will know, an errant thought whispered. Snaith stamped down on it, dismissed it as a lingering superstition. But he still couldn’t be sure. How could he ever be?
In his parents’ room, he found a satchel his mother had stitched from boiled leather and took it with him to his own room. His urge to rap on entering had left him. Died as he lay his family’s ghosts to rest. Because even if they weren’t dead yet, they would be soon enough. There was no coming back from this.
He set the satchel on his bed, planning to fill it with his figures. Perhaps Theurig would let him keep them, if he explained. But when he turned to the model army lined up along his shelf, took in their rough and lumpy musculature, their swords, their spears, their shields, he lunged at them and roared. Swept them from the shelf with his maimed hand. Stomped them under foot.
As he danced his dance of destruction, Snaith’s animal cries of rage turned to curses, and the curses turned to sobs. And then he dropped to his haunches amid the broken figures he’d taken so long to carve—he and his Uncle Tubal together—and remained there, staring blankly at the wall, listening to the fading thunder of his breath, the retreating gallop of his heart.
Perhaps an hour later, maybe even more, Snaith crept back into Theurig’s yard, Jennika’s satchel over his shoulder, Bas’s book now within it. As he reached the front door, it swung open, and a crone stood there, something she’d been knitting in one hand. She looked him over with rheumy eyes, snorted, and stood aside so he could go in. Snaith nodded his thanks, unable to hold her gaze. But he felt her eyes on him as he passed down the hall to his room; heard the thud of the door being shut behind him.
