Beguiler

by Maxx Whittaker

  BEGUILER

  Part 1

  Beguiler is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual places, events, or persons living or deceased, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Maxx Whittaker

  Copyright © 2019 Saving Throw Ink

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Publishing Partner,” at the email address below.

  midnightbookworks@mail.com

  First Printing June 2019

  –Prologue–

  Orilus, Fourth World of the Wastes

  c. 1382 of the Grand Alliance

  Jestyn knelt in hot grit beneath the Tower’s watchful eye and dug his grave.

  He’d been sent to the Wastes realm for just this reason: To dig and dig, until his body broke. Then, The Watchers would shove him in one of the holes he’d made, and another prisoner would take his place.

  He’d been here since his twenty-first birthday and by slight changes in the sun – from inferno to searing to inferno again – he thought a year had passed. He felt so much older. His hands were gloved in calluses, the scabs on his knees like armor. When he licked his lips with a dry tongue, he felt the thick flakes of skin like scales.

  Jestyn shook another sifter of sand, keeping his eyes on the ground. He tried never to look up. Looking up was punished. And the land was so flat and glaring in every direction that in his dehydrated madness, sometimes he had the idea he could fly off the face of the world. Slide away into space with nothing to stop him. Not even the fucking Tower of the Eye.

  He dumped the tailings and scooped again. Who knew what they were searching for, him and twelve other men scattered prostrate over the sand. The men who’d been here the longest had forgotten how to talk, or had any desire to beaten from them. If they knew what the point of all this was, they weren’t telling now. His only knowledge was the instruction to call a guard if he found something.

  He’d been beaten in the early days for screaming over a shard of pottery, an ancient brick from city walls eaten by the sands. It’d been amusing and almost worth the infected welts to watch the tower scramble. Almost.

  It didn’t take long for him to grasp the emptiness ahead, how long he had to suffer, and stop manufacturing misery.

  Guards wandered between them in white knee length tunics, breastplates and brass scabbards blinding in the light. They watched for laziness, for deceit, for the best target to endure their abuse.

  Splinters and worn metal in his next pan went unremarked. Jestyn scooped again, sifted, and stopped.

  It didn’t wink exactly. It wasn’t that shiny; more a dull glow. The object was no bigger than his pinky nail, when he’d had one. Shaped like a drop of water, or a tear, its vibrant blue looked so cool and inviting that Jestyn raised it to his lips.

  It was cool, and smooth like glass or pearl, but not wet. He quickly sifted again. Two more. He squinted and tried to see the position of the guards. One circled the outer edge of the work site. One at his back moved away, toward the tower. A third hovered a few yards away, kicking dirt into a hole another prisoner numbly emptied again each time.

  Jestyn sifted furiously, scoop after scoop, setting each small gem in the sling of his threadbare tunic. Two pans, then three, then five came away with nothing more.

  Eight. Eight gleaming drops sat against the dirty fabric in his lap.

  Tap, tap, tap. The pommel struck his shoulder. “What ya got?”

  Jestyn clasped his knees together, folding his tunic between them, “Sick. Sick is all.” He panted, pretending to rest.

  “You’re picking at them tailings like a hen picks corn. Ain’t a nothing about it. Hand it up.”

  They were his. Jestyn felt in his gut that what he’d found, tiny and benign as they were, they were powerful. He could bargain for release, for freedom. “I want the High Inquisitor.’

  “And I want what you got there.” The scabbard rung his head like a bell. Jestyn slumped but didn’t give in.

  “Inquisitor,” he panted, fighting the urge to retch. “Tower.”

  “I’ll take ya to the tower....”

  He’d played this out as far as it would go. They were about to take his find. Jestyn scooped the gems into his palm. Thick hands came down around his deflated biceps, and before they could drag him away, with the last of his strength, Jestyn tossed back the gems like a handful of medicinal tablets.

  The guard laughed, dragging him along sand-glass that cut like razors. “Cuttin’ you open won’t be no problem. After five aught years it’ll be a real pleasure.”

  Five years.

  Fuck all the gods.

  And he’d never considered they’d just gut him. Might as well make the most of his last minutes. Jestyn swung his free arm, zipped the guard's blade free and stuck him with a gritty, wet sound. Not deep – Jestyn was too weak for that – but skillfully. With a precision he hadn’t forgotten, murder his inherent craft.

  The guard let go and collapsed, writhing, screaming, fingers scrambling for the sword jutting from his kidney. Blood poured scarlet through his tunic. Jestyn felt the spike of bloodlust, through his hunger and desiccation. He had the animal urge to lick the stain. The guard’s movements coated the wound and blood in sand, masking it. His hunger faded again.

  Screams drew the guards’ attention and more streamed out from the tower. Fifty, a hundred.

  He couldn’t run. Even if he found the edge of Orilus, if he lasted that long, the Wastes were lands blasted apart by magic. He could never cross back to the Known World.

  A woman strode from the tower, flesh pale and gleaming in defiance of the relentless sun. Her black hair glinted like a raven’s wing, face beautiful but severe.

  Jestyn had the absent thought that her light armor and blade must be for more than show. At least fifty men in this deprived wasteland would shred anything female. What degree of fear kept that baseness in check?

  He didn’t have to wonder long. What radiated from her was terrifying. She didn’t hurry or call orders, but her eyes were on him, her steps relentless.

  He struggled to his feet and stood as much as his long-hunched body would let him. He’d lived on his knees for a year. He wouldn’t die this way.

  As the men closed in at a dead run, Jestyn filled tired lungs and unleashed a feral cry, a battle roar. He braced for pikes and blades. His guts tightened. Heat rested heavy like coals. It set fire to his blood. Jestyn shook. The sand around him pulsed, rippling like water.

  The first sword swung high, more blades arcing, men circling Jestyn as at their bullseye.

  The woman flowed between them.

  He felt heavy as stone. It grew as she approached. When he was sure he’d crush to the ground under his own weight, reality shifted.

  Jestyn became insubstantial, his mind floating away into the hot white sky.

  Get back! Run!

  Who was she telling him to run from? He looked down on the scene, now a sand table of terrain and figures below. They ran. They all ran from a shape hunched on the sand.

  Me.

  The flash exploded from him so quickly that it had come and gone before it echoed across the desert.

  Sunlight blinked out and the world, for a moment, was a vacuum. When light came roaring back in, it filtered through dust that hung like smoke. The tower was a low dune of thick, tan sand - nothing more. Skeletons lay bleached in a ring pointing out and out. On the first hot gust of wind, thei
r exposed parts blew into the nether.

  In the center, where Jestyn and the woman had stood, was a flat, black disk of obsidian glass, the result of arcane heat unimaginable.

  Jestyn and the woman, however, were gone.

  Not a single other thing remained alive on Orilus.

  -One-

  “There is no more certain and ignorant creature in all the world than an Albian villager of the Northern Marches. He is capable at once of absolute stupidity and total dedication to his rightness. The only beings more pitiable are the men obliged to rule such a lot…”

  -A Brief History of Three Millennia on the Albian Continent

  Village of Varnay, The Northern Marches

  1484 of the Grand Alliance

  Bannock was the only common man in Varnay who could read, and for this he was to be hanged.

  This became apparent when Jarl Ferth said, “Brother Bannock, you are to be hanged.”

  More specifically, Bannock’s teaching the burgher’s daughter to read had brought witchcraft to Varnay. He must have whispered to her spells or incantations - no one else in the village had a clue what the words in Bannock’s books said - but his knowledge must have summoned the incubus who got the burgher’s daughter with child.

  “I don’t think it was an incubus,” said Bannock to Jarl Ferth and a priest standing behind the lords. He wasn’t much concerned by the panel of men assembled against him, not enough to hold his tongue now. “I think it was one of the lads who come after dark. The ones who’ve climbed a bald stripe up the burgher’s trellis.”

  “You bastard!” The burgher jumped from his seat and a murmur spread through the tallow-smoked chamber like angry bees. “I paid handsomely for you to teach Mallja to read, be a proper merchant’s wife. You’ve cost me a dowry, an alliance with Tainn’s guild, and now you call my daughter a whore?”

  Bannock shrugged. He didn’t particularly care either way. His only feeling was one of sharp-edged irritation at being caught in the middle. “I’m not saying she is…”

  Torches stopped flickering, and for the first time he could hear sounds from the street. Jarl Ferth exhaled in a slow, benevolent pass. Outrage subsided among the onlookers.

  Bannock despised them all. He took a deep breath.

  “...And I’m not saying she isn’t.”

  The burgher’s chair clattered over stones and the crowd exploded. Men and women surged forward, slapped back by soldier’s pikes. Two constables restrained the burgher while he lunged at Bannock and frothed out profanity. Knocked to the floor, he shouted, “I regret the day! I regret the day I sent to the abbey for a brother.”

  Bannock cast his eyes to the ceiling wearing a half smile. The abbey probably regretted it right about now, too.

  What were the odds? The courier he’d robbed on the road outside town had a letter for the bishop of Tainn. Bannock had expected something juicier, something about his escape from the Order, but a request from Varnay for a tutor was even better, in its own way.

  The letter bore a scribe stamp; that meant the sender had paid someone else to write it, and this sparked curiosity.

  It had taken a single tavern stop for Bannock to piece together that not one idiot in Varnay could read or write beyond settling the figures in their accounts. Sizable accounts. Five gold crowns a day for tutoring was a fortune, and the burgher hadn’t batted an eye at Bannock’s offer.

  But he wouldn’t pay out until Mallja could read. Bannock thought he’d been so close. She did know a few words, when she applied herself. Coin practically in-hand...

  “Do you confess, or no?” demanded Ferth.

  I confess this is stupidest place I’ve ever had the misfortune to be stuck. Bannock wanted to say this, but no one present knew he’d once spent three midsummer days hiding in a latrine pit, so he couldn’t expect these people to appreciate the full weight of his condemnation. “I deny the accusations.”

  “Devil!” shouted a woman with hair like a scarecrow.

  “Bastard spawn of sin!” cried another. “You’ll have the rope for it!”

  Bannock didn’t care what these people thought, or what they intended. He could go at any time, and look at them...he wouldn’t have to kill a single one. They were no match.

  But he needed the gold for tutoring the burgher’s girl. There had to be some way of convincing the burgher to pay him.

  “What if I could banish the incubus? Fifty crowns and you let me go.”

  Ferth’s page shuffled into the hall before anyone could answer or throw more rotten onions, drawn into his tabard like a frightened turtle. He handed a crisply folded parchment to the jarl and murmured something.

  When the jarl broke a familiar red wax seal, Bannock felt his first moment of pause, a premonition that had saved his arse in a winding alley or on darkened road countless times before.

  It was trouble, Fate, a hint of calamity.

  “Bastards.” The jarl flung his letter, casting hot eyed glances at his ministers. “They overreach! They have no business telling us how to observe our laws.”

  What Inquisition was Ferth speaking of? Bannock thought that was exactly the Silver Hand’s business, so far as he could tell.

  One of Ferth’s men skimmed the letter, his ruddy jowls blanching. “Inquisitor?”

  Everyone in the gallery gasped. Everyone except Bannock, who felt the words like a gut-blow.

  “Who told them?” demanded Ferth, looking over his cabinet. “How do they know we’ve held the monk for judgment?”

  “We’re not prepared for an inquisition.” This from Galvin, a bony lord with white hair like an afterthought at the crown of his head. “The chapel needs repairs. And the church yard. The grotto is weathered. Symbols of piety along the high road are missing.” Galvin cast equally accusing looks at his fellow nobles.

  The priest paled, and for the first time Bannock felt in sympathy with the bastard.

  Bannock turned at looked behind me over the assembled townsfolk.

  One glance and he knew exactly what all five men before him were thinking, especially the priest. No one in Varnay knew the devotions or hours by heart. On Merchant Tuesdays the chapel was used as overflow for the tavern. The town was bad, and the village was worse. By the Hand’s standards, Varnay had strayed so far from the Father’s light the Inquisitor wouldn’t be able to see the town on his arrival, spiritually speaking.

  The lords were panicked, and they should be. These people were no match for the Silver Hand’s inquisition. Bannock hadn’t forgotten his last encounter with them.

  Bannock didn’t have his sword, his armor, and he didn’t have much time. He had to leave now. “Twenty crowns, no more incubus, and I swear not to be here when the Inquisitor arrives.”

  “Done! Bring my purse,” Ferth instructed his page.

  The burgher bellowed again, and the whole gallery joined in. Someone said ‘pitchfork’.

  This would be tight.

  Bannock approached the table, hand outstretched. The second gold kissed his palm, he’d run.

  On that promise, everything sank into cold honey.

  Ferth’s page strolled from the back room. He took the long way around a group of women who milled like angry bees outside the gallery partition.

  Ferth gripped drawstrings in trembling fingers and pulled.

  Galvin snapped a hand over Ferth’s and squeezed his knuckles white. “We can’t stop them coming. The Inquisition will be here no matter what we say. And if they arrive to find he’s gone…what then?”

  Ferth’s eyes fell on Bannock and widened.

  Dammit all to hell. Bannock ground his back teeth. “Tell them I escaped.”

  “If we let you, a monk, escape, the king would confiscate these lands in a day!” said Galvin.

  Ferth’s eyes transformed from sockets to astronomical features. He banged the table with his magistrate’s stone. “Gather the town masters and the abbot. Tell them they’re to work through the night to be ready. I expect the Inquisitor will arrive
by midday tomorrow.” He pounded again. “And as for the brother, hang him. Bury the body. Properly.”

  Bannock didn’t fight as the soldiers dragged him to the courtyard. He was preoccupied with how close the Inquisitor was, and how far away his three hundred crowns. The pouch beneath his brown cassock whispered its emptiness.

  He sized up distance across the courtyard and to the town gates. Run, run.

  The Hand would have outriders. Crusaders on horseback would be well ahead of the Inquisitor’s entourage and posh wagon. Bannock felt a familiar tingle up his right arm, a reminder he couldn’t afford to kill one more person. And he wasn’t equipped at the moment to face one Crusader, let alone six or eight.

  Dragged up the scaffold, Bannock admitted he was barely equipped to face fifty illiterate townsfolk.

  As the noose slipped around his neck, Bannock had to admit that things couldn’t get much worse.

  -Two-

  Townsfolk jeered the corpse all day, charging villagers two-pence a throw to hurl something from the bucket; rotten produce, clumps of horse shite. No one heeded the jarl’s warning that agents of the Inquisition could already be lodged within Varnay’s walls, watching citizens desecrate the dead. They laughed and pinched the jarl until Ferth ran from the square, bruised on his arms and buttocks, Varnay’s shortest and most successful rebellion to date.

  At sunset, when the Jarl had Bannock cut down in accordance with Order law, three drunk merchants made a solid effort to put Jarl Ferth next upon the scaffold.

  Grave keeper Seldom and his brother Early loaded the body into their haycart. The cart’s indelible stench cleared the square in a way no other odor had managed all day, flushing out a mob that demanded Bannock’s body.

  But, in usual fashion, Seldom and Early were running behind. They reached the potter’s field atop Witchknoll at twilight.

  It was called Witchknoll because it was the knoll upon which Varnay’s witches were interred. Quite a clever lot, those Varnar.