It was a knock at the front door of the observatory that woke Nergei from his self-pity, and also alarmed him. In the years he had been living in the observatory, no one had ever lifted the heavy bronze knocker and let it fall against the thick oak of the door, yet there it was, steady and rhythmic, not impolite but insistent.
Long before, when Nergei was just a boy—just a smaller boy—then the Old Stargazer had forbid him to open the door, to let anyone in.
“Your doom might be at the door,” said the Old Stargazer. “And how will you know to recognize it?”
As a child, Nergei had not known how to answer it, and while he still did not, he was at least no longer scared of such simple rhetorical tricks. And anyway, there was enough trouble outside that opening or not opening a door could hardly be the worst of it.
When Nergei swung open the heavy wood of the door, he found Mikal standing outside, his finery concealed beneath a cruder winter coat borrowed from one of the villagers. It hadn’t been cold when they’d left the city, and it wasn’t supposed to still be winter upon the mountain, and so the company had failed to prepare for it. It had done them no favors with the villagers, either. What good were a bunch of mercenaries who couldn’t even come ready for the weather?
Mikal stepped past Nergei, into the darkened entryway. “Nergei, is your master available? I’d hoped to see him when we first arrived here, to discuss how I might combine my skills with his in the battle, but since he hasn’t appeared I thought it best to just trek up here myself.”
Nergei shook his head. “He’s here, but locked away, up in the tower. He hasn’t been down since we returned.”
“His magics upon the mountain were most impressive. I’ve some skill at illusions myself, and even so fell for quite a few of his. What do you think he has planned for the kenku? An old man such as himself should be quite the advantage, and better than whatever cheap arcana the kenku practice. He is an old man, yes? You recognize the distinction?”
“I believe so. He is in communion with another as the source of his power. Beholden to older creatures.”
“Precisely. So, he has spoken to you of his plans? He has told you how he intends to enter the fray against the kenku?”
Nergei denied knowing anything, which was true, but left out his most persistent worry: He did not believe the Old Stargazer would join in the fight.
His master had been withdrawn always, keeping himself apart from Haven and even from Nergei—especially from Nergei, maybe, wondered the boy, in his innermost voice—but his reclusiveness had worsened over the years, and seemed absolute. When Nergei snuck up to the door outside the looking room at the top of the tower, he pressed his ear against that door—stone there, not wood—and what he heard inside was unintelligible speech, magic perhaps but also maybe madness, and in a voice that was his master’s and also not his master’s, also something or someone more.
Whatever his master was wrestling with, he would not emerge until he had finished. If ever.
That was the real reason the mercenaries were there, but he did not know if he should tell them, did not know what he could tell if he felt like he should.
And so Mikal had walked around the first floor of the observatory, walking faster than Nergei so that the boy could not tell the wizard that he was not welcome without an invitation, that no one just entered the observatory as he had. Finally Nergei’s nervousness receded—the wizard’s constant smile and cheerful banter were infectious, especially to someone as worried as he—and he began to try to answer the half-elf’s questions regarding this leather-bound book or that one, this star map, those sextants and their origins. The half-elf’s curiosity seemed inexhaustible, and while Nergei did not know the answers to all the questions he was asked he still knew more than he thought he might.
“The old man has taught you about these things?”
“A few,” said Nergei. “He tells me what I need to know. If he demands a book, I have to know which one he wants, so he taught me to read. If he demands an implement of some sort, I have to know which one. Sometimes he will lose the name for something, though, and when that happens, he will tell me what he wants by telling me what he wants to do. So, he sat me down and told me what many of the things in here are for.”
Nergei was quiet for a moment, but Mikal said nothing, knowing that it would prompt more from the boy. He knew the young man had more to say.
“If he needs herbs for his potions, he needs me to go get them. So he has given me books of the local plants and made me memorize them.”
“So he has taught you some of his skills?” asked Mikal. “He has trained you with your own abilities?”
“Oh, no,” said Nergei. “He has only taught me how to act as his servant. Nothing more.”
Nergei seemed certain of it, but Mikal thought differently. He was convinced that the old man was, in fact, training the boy in arcana, but he masked it, convinced the boy he was merely a servant. There was more going on. Mikal was also aware that the source of the impediments to Nergei fully controlling, fully grasping his power was in the observatory. The old man was keeping them sealed within him.
Nergei absently picked up a magnifying glass that his master used with his many maps and held it over one nearby. “It is here,” he said. “The thing is here, in this cluster. That’s what he says.”
To Mikal, it looked like just another grouping of stars. But there was the seat of the Old Stargazer’s formidable magic. He took note of it and wondered: What lives there?
When the tour of the first floor was finished—and after Nergei protested at great length against the possibility of continuing on to the second—then Mikal told Nergei that he would show him something instead, and bid him follow him out of the tower.
Nergei did not know what Mikal wanted with him, but anything was better than rotting with patience in the observatory. Still, he did not expect to be taken to the offal pit behind the abattoir, where the butchers threw the unusable parts of the goats that had been brought to slaughter.
At first, he did not know what he was supposed to be looking at, but it did not take long.
There, on the edge of the pit, he saw what Mikhal had brought him to see—the body of the kenku he had killed, that he had set ablaze with the magical fire he had summoned just once and had never been able to summon again, despite attempts he would have admitted to no one, not even his master.
The kenku’s body was badly decomposed, matted with flies and worse, its flesh already past the bloating and into the collapse that follows. Its beak looked even bigger, with its face receded, and both of its eyes were long missing. Stripped of its clothes and its weapons, and with its limbs defleshed toward bone, it was harder to identify for what it was, but it was also even more obvious how it had died. Whereas the marks of an arrow or two might be gone by then—unless the arrowheads had nicked or shattered bones on the way through the body—there was no misreading the burned bones of the kenku’s chest, its hips and legs.
That didn’t mean Nergei had to admit anything. “Why did you bring me here, Mikal? I’ve already seen this, and when there was more of it to see.”
“Kohel told me that he killed the kenku, with his bow. That he killed this one, and that Padlur killed at least one, and that you and Luzhon did nothing.”
“That’s what happened. That’s what we all said happened.”
“Not you. You were unconscious when you returned. ‘Overcome,’ I believe is what Kohel said. Making sport of you around the campfire on the way here.”
“Yes.” Nergei’s face burned as he tried to lie. “With fear, maybe. Or excitement. I am not like the other boys.”
“No,” said Mikal, turning Nergei’s body to face his. “You’re not, and in more ways than those you already know. I was right with what I said in the city. You do have some magic in you, and you let it out to save your friends. To save Luzhon. So why haven’t you told any of the others what you can do?”
“Because I can’t do it again, okay
? I’m not a wizard. It was a freak accident, a mistake, and I’m sorry it ever happened.”
Nergei put his back to the half-elf, slumped his shoulders. Mikal waited before speaking again. He remembered being young. He remembered that he, too, had fought against his acumen with magic when it had first manifest. He had lived far away from the fey side of his family, among humans in a village much like Haven. And they were a superstitious lot. But he had his half-sister. He had Magla and her family to help guide him. He was bright and studious, and when they would visit, they would bring him books on magic. They would show him simple tricks, simple ways to access supernatural power. And each trick opened up a path to more powerful ones. Each book explained to him where the magic was within the world and within himself. That allowed what he was to grow naturally. Grow and learn and thrive. Magic needed freedom to prosper. The boy’s, though, was bound.
Mikal saw it. Nergei was one of those very special practitioners of the magic arts who had access without the burden of study. He could control it with his will. He could bring things into being by coaxing power from the earth, coaxing fire from his belly. He could convince the power to act as he desired because they spoke the same language naturally. Mikal had worked to learn it from books. The boy was born with it. But the old man—and Mikal saw the familiar weave of the old man’s magic in the boy as he saw it in the spells around Haven—had chained it within him. And he had set up snares to keep others from freeing it easily. Mikal would need time to help the boy release his power. He did not have time. Not yet.
“This was not an accident,” he said, pointing to the body of the kenku. “There are only a few who can call on the arcane even a little, and you are one of them. But I’ll say nothing of this to anyone else. There is no time to train you, even if your master would give me leave to try. I merely wanted you to know that I knew, and also to ask you for your help.”
“My help? What could I possibly help you with? I’m just a boy.”
“I know you’re not, but I won’t tell anyone else if that’s the story you’re trying to stick with. That doesn’t mean I don’t need help. I’ve got my own preparations to make before the battle, between the gathering of materials and the readying of rituals, and I’m sure your time with the Old Stargazer has prepared you well for the task. Would your master mind if I borrowed you for a few days?”
Nergei knew he should at least try to go ask, but he also knew there was no found. The master would not answer the door, and as long as he stayed in the looking room there was no need for Nergei.
“No,” said Nergei. “He will not mind my absence at all.”
“Good,” said Mikal. “Let’s get to work.”
Pain in the old man’s hands, an ache from knuckle to knuckle. Fire in his bones, fired in the dark of the observatory’s orrery, its topmost room. As the mechanics of the sky moved around him, rendered in copper and bronze, he stepped again to the edge of the viewing platform, looked out at the night sky.
His whole life he had studied the stars, and when the stars began to speak to him, he had listened and listened well. Then, when his star had chosen him, he’d make his pact with that power, taken its magic into his body in exchange for a promise, one that he did not expect he would live long enough to fulfill. And yet he had. He had lived longer than any man should have, longer than any of his fellows who’d climbed the mountain in the last days of the empire to garrison the village, the Haven whose true purpose no one else living remembered. And of course that was what the Old Stargazer intended, was the reason he had encircled the village in illusion and wardings, curses and traps. It was why he had done that and worse, once he was the last of them still alive.
All that, and his pact invoked, his debt come due: A power coming to earth, and himself the vessel it would claim.
It was not impossible that he could still escape, but it was unlikely, and there was pain in his hands, in his arms and legs and back and bones. There were the kenku, strange harbingers at the gates, and he did not know who they served. Not the stars, he was sure—whatever magic had granted them wings was hardly the same as that which had carved his bones into the painful shapes—and there was no other reason for Haven to be threatened other than his own presence, than what his presence had protected all these years.
Not the villagers, and not the village, but what lay beneath both.
His garrison. His Haven. Here, the last warriors of the empire of men would live on beyond the destruction of their power. Here, even though time and magic would let the memories slip away, the children of the empire would be safe. They would thrive. And with them, the idea of an empire of men could continue to exist as an ideal. And one day, from the seed of this little Haven, this former garrison, the empire might rise again. One day. Perhaps.
But the pact, invoked. Haven, threatened.
And in the sky: The star, the one whose presence he could feel in the sky, even when he was inside, even when he could not see it for ceiling or clouds. And how it called to him. And how it told him it was coming. And how it would be here too soon, too soon for him to save himself or anyone else.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ekho and Orick were right. The kenku were coming.
It was no longer simply a guess, an opinion of both the villagers—who, with few exceptions, had begun to exhibit the first signs of panic, which worried Sten—and also of the mercenaries, who had begun to quiet themselves, to prepare. For two days, Magla and Mikal had walked the top of the village walls together, discussing the best places to position archers, and for Mikal to work what magic he could. It seemed likely that the kenku would come from both the front and the back of the village, and so the already stretched group of archers would have to take both positions. Magla would organize and lead the archers near the front gates and upon the walls, and Mikal would lead those in the back, alongside the hunter Orick and his son, supplementing their smaller number of archers with spellcraft.
Following behind the siblings were Nergei and Luzhon, each of whom had taken on the roles of assistant and messenger for one or the other. Luzhon—who had never before fired a bow before the past weeks, at least as far as Nergei knew—had taken up with the archers, and carried her own weapon, and Nergei had spent nearly every waking moment since the charnel pit with Mikal, who would teach him no magic but other things instead, bits of herbcraft and history, bits of lore about great wizards of the past. His mouth moved constantly, spilling so much that it was hard for Nergei to tell what was of consequence and what was not, and so Nergei tried to remember all of it.
During the battle, the two teenagers would serve at Magla and Mikal’s sides, and then as messengers, if necessary. It would be dangerous work, and neither had been asked to take it on. Instead, each had volunteered independently, and then been surprised to see they had taken on similar roles, in similar company. It warmed Nergei to think of that, to wonder if it would create a bond between them, but he tried to keep these thoughts out of his mind, especially during the final moments of preparation.
Once the walls were breached—and the walls would be breached, as Sten had answered every single query on the subject—then there would be hard fighting in the streets, and in the town square. That would be the work of the archers too, but also Sten and Spundwand and Imony and Ekho, and all the villagers who claimed to be better with a blade than with a bow, which was not many and certainly not enough.
Or at least Sten did not think it would be enough.
There were too many variables still unanswered, too much he did not understand: How many would there be? Would it be kenku alone, or something else besides? Would they really come from both the road and the mountainside?
Would the new, higher nets and stakes even slow down the kenku, who Ekho did not believe could fly that high, or would they receive no grace from all that effort at all?
Sten did not know, could not know, but it was not the time for doubts, at least not public ones. He had asked the village chief and the other village
council members to gather the villagers in a central place, and because the council chambers were too small they met instead in what Londih had called “the ruin,” a long barren bit of broken stone and fallen walls at the end of the village, near the path up the last spire of the mountain, where the observatory stood.
In front of the only wall still standing, Sten paced the rubble-strewn earth and waited for the rest of the villagers to assemble. Amidst them were the mercenaries, each dressed in traveling clothes rather than their armor or other battle-dress, all except for Ekho, who he had never seen dressed any other way. Even he wore only the simplest of breeches, a shirt stained with the work of the last few days. The next day would be a day for armor, but that night was for simpler things: He would speak, and then they would eat, and then they would go to their rest.
He would lie to them, and then he would tell them that they would not die, that if they did as he and the others commanded they would be safe. It was not true—not for all of them—but there was nothing else to say, no alternative that had ever presented itself to him on the night before a battle.
When the crowd was assembled—some hundred villagers, maybe slightly more, maybe slightly less—and after the Crook of Haven had said a few words, Sten stood and spoke to the crowd. He told them that he and the others would stand for them against the kenku, against whatever enemy came after them. He said that they would not run, and also that they would lead the villagers so that they might not run. He detailed again the plans, made sure that everyone knew their places, from the archers to the footmen, to the few men and women who would guard the old and the weak and the young and the lame—what few there were of all of them, in the harshness of the Haven winter—and as the snow fell he told them what he would do.
He said, “Whatever comes inside your village, I will be there to raise a sword against it. Whatever the odds, I will stand at the front of the fight and I will put my shield in front of you so that I might take the blows that come after. You have hired me to protect you, and I will do my best.”
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