by Tim Pratt
Rodrick turned his head and squinted at her. “If you’re dressed in an illusion, it’s a good one. I’ve seen you move, too—you don’t move like someone the age of my dead great-grandmother.”
“It’s not an illusion. Have you ever heard of the sun orchid elixir?”
“Of course,” Hrym said. “Magical potion that restores youth, made by alchemists in some awful desert land to the south.”
Eldra nodded. “Only a few vials are produced each year, sold for extraordinary sums. They tend to be purchased by the most wealthy families in the world.”
“Am I to assume you’re a dowager duchess or something, then?” Rodrick said. “Spent your fortune on the elixir of youth, and turned to crime in your impoverished desperation?”
Eldra laughed. “Not exactly. I am a Conservatory-trained courtesan. I moved to one of the great capitals—I won’t say which one, a girl needs some secrets—and began my career. I was the adored mistress of several high-ranking nobles, and even the occasional artist—I have a weakness for musicians, they often have such gifted hands—and I did quite well for myself. My lovers tended to be generous, and I’m exceptionally good at investing. But, of course, youth and beauty fade, so before I could lose those assets, I moved to a neighboring country, reinvented myself with a rather less colorful past as a fresh émigré from Jalmeray, chose a young noble, and manipulated him into pursuing me until I agreed to marry him.” She sighed, wistfully, and Rodrick wondered if the wistfulness were genuine. “Eobard was good to me, a devoted husband, and a doting father to our children. He never had the sort of ambition I did, though, and was content to putter around the ancestral family estates. Marrying me—the ‘exotic’ Vudrani woman, as his family called me—was a wildly rebellious and scandalous thing for him to do … but it seemed to fulfill his allotted lifetime desire for scandal. He was never unkind to me, but eventually his ardor faded, and we essentially led separate lives. I kept myself busy, running the house, exerting an iron grip on the society of our village, raising up and dashing down hopeful social climbers as the whim took me, but it was all so petty. Eventually my husband died as he’d lived, wandering aimlessly around the countryside, hitting the long grass with a stick, his health sapped by a lifetime of eating heavy puddings and fatty hams. I never could get the cooks at the house to learn how to make good Vudrani cuisine.”
Remembering the oddly spiced dishes he’d alternately enjoyed and been terrified by in Jalmerary, Rodrick murmured, “I expect not.”
“It was then that I took stock of my life. The estates passed to me when my husband died, but I didn’t want them. My children were grown, with children of their own, settled in their own lives. They visited for the funeral, of course, and wrote slightly more letters than usual in the months following Eobard’s death, but we’d never been close, not since they were young. I was, in short, bored. I still maintained a secret correspondence with some of my old friends, from my previous life as a courtesan, and a letter reached me with a bit of interesting news: a man I’d once known, and with whom I’d parted on bad terms because he was something of a brute in his personal affairs, had successfully bid on the sun orchid elixir. The thought of that pig having his youth and vigor restored was appalling to me. I resolved to prevent it.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Oh, I was trained in all sorts of arts at the Conservatory. They follow what you might call an interdisciplinary approach to education. I had, in my former life, occasionally needed to steal things from the guilty, or plant incriminating things on the innocent, and I’d developed certain contacts among unsavory portions of society. Of course, all my contacts were quite old and retired themselves by then, but they were able to put me in touch with conditionally trustworthy members of the new generation.”
“Ha. Conditional trustworthiness. ‘If you pay me more than anyone else does, you can trust me.’”
“Exactly so.” She squeezed his arm. Was she really almost ninety? It seemed outlandish, but he’d been visited by a dark goddess and stared a demon lord in the face in the not-so-distant past, and his best friend was a talking magical sword, so he was hardly one to dismiss outlandish claims just on the basis of their outlandishness.
Eldra went on. “I left a note saying I couldn’t go on living without my Eobard, and left certain signs to make it appear I’d drowned myself in a lake not far from our estate. I left a scarf in the mud on the shore, things like that. There was no body to recover, of course, but it’s a very deep lake, known to be home to a family of aquatic ogres, so no one was likely to look very hard, and even if they did, they would assume the lake-ogres ate my corpse. I took my secret store of jewelry and gold and returned to the capital where I’d once made such an illustrious career, and put together a team. It cost me almost everything I had, but my plan worked: we intercepted the heavily armed caravan delivering the sun orchid elixir, and swapped the potion for a vial of colored water that appeared identical. I think one of my crew intended to betray me and take the elixir for himself, but he never had the chance: as soon as the vial was in my hand, I uncapped it and drank it, right there in the forest by the road. I was instantly transformed.” She shuddered. “The process of aging in reverse is not entirely pleasant—your skin and every muscle tightening, your body purging itself of toxins—but the end result was most acceptable. I still like to imagine the look on my old acquaintance’s face when he realized the potion he’d sold off most of his estates to purchase didn’t have any effect.”
“So you mean to tell me you’ve got the mind of a ninety-year-old in the body of a twenty-year-old?”
She slapped him lightly on the arm. “Oh, stop. You don’t think I look twenty.”
“Perhaps twenty-three,” he conceded. “Sorry. The flattery is habitual.”
“You’re still wrong. It’s hard to be sure, but I think the elixir restored me to about eighteen years of age, physically. That was ten years ago, so this body is probably about twenty-eight. I’ve always aged well.”
“What have you been doing for the past ten years?”
“Trying to make a fortune sufficient to bid on another batch of the elixir in, oh, another twenty or thirty years? Or else enough money and information to stage another heist … though it’s a trick I’d hesitate to repeat often. The man I stole the elixir from has since died, and good riddance, but the alchemists of Thuvia are rich and influential and probably don’t like people stealing their elixir. It’s bad for business if the bidders think they’ll be robbed, after all. It’s possible they’re still looking for me.”
“What makes you think I won’t write them a letter offering them information about your whereabouts in exchange for a hefty purse?” Rodrick said.
She stroked his arm. “The fact that we’re both slaves to the Bastion of Justice, mainly. We’ve got other things to keep us occupied, and if you can get a message to a foreign power while you’re under Temple’s thumb, I’ll be the first to applaud your ingenuity. After our year of service is over, I’ll disappear like a bit of dandelion fluff on the wind … or a corpse sinking into a lake full of ogres.” She leaned over and breathed in his ear. “Besides, after a few more months together, you’ll be so devoted to me you’d never even consider turning me in to my enemies.”
“You sound awfully sure of yourself.”
“I’ve been doing this since before your father was born, Rodrick.”
“It’ll take more than stroking my arm and murmuring in my ear to win my devotion, Eldra.”
“Ah, but making you wait for it means you’ll appreciate it that much more.”
“Yes, but now that I know you’re a grandmother…”
“Rodrick, Rodrick. You said it yourself: a lifetime of knowledge in a young, strong body. The perfect combination of experience and…” She pressed her body up against his. “Capability.”
“When you put it that way.” Rodrick’s voice was a bit hoarse.
“Humans are disgusting,” Hrym said.
; Eldra clucked her tongue. “I thought you’d appreciate the presence of an old woman, Hrym. I must make a nice change from all these impetuous youngsters.”
“Ha. You’re all children as far as I’m concerned. What’s ninety years? I’m thousands of years old.”
“Hrym, you weren’t even conscious for most of that time,” Rodrick objected. “And much of it you can’t even remember.”
“What do you expect?” Hrym said. “They say the memory is the first thing to go.”
Bannerman strode toward them across the deck. “No fraternization among the Volunteers.”
Eldra gave him a lazy salute. “Sir, yes sir.”
The crusader pointed across the water. “You see that?”
Rodrick squinted. “I see the shore, and maybe some shacks and piers.”
“Yes, indeed.” Bannerman clapped him on the shoulder almost hard enough to make him stumble. “That is the mighty city of Tamran, capital of the great nation of Nirmathas, and most likely your last chance to sleep on anything resembling a bed for a while.”
13
A BORDER CROSSING
Tamran looked like an overgrown fishing village. If this is the capital, Rodrick thought, what must the hinterlands look like? Of course, he’d seen a map of Nirmathas, so he knew the answer: it looked like a huge forest full of valuable natural resources, and probably lots of monsters.
Eldra stood on the dock, wrinkling her nose as she looked around. “Bannerman, are you sure this is the right city? Half these buildings are made of new wood. The place looks like it’s only been here a few months.”
Bannerman nodded. “Tamran has been occupied half a dozen times by Molthune’s armies in the past century. The Molthuni can never hold it for long, though. The citizens don’t resist, they let the occupiers settle in without a fight … but then, at night, guerrillas sneak in and slit throats, and poison food, and make people disappear. The army always retreats eventually. One time they burned the whole city to the ground first.” Bannerman chuckled. “If there’s one thing the people of Nirmathas have, besides a sheer bloody-minded refusal to be conquered, it’s wood. When your whole nation is built around a huge forest, rebuilding isn’t a particular hardship, so they just put up new houses on the ashes of the old.”
“They should build a wall,” Eldra said. “It would be cheaper than rebuilding a whole city.”
No they shouldn’t, Rodrick thought.
Merihim wandered over, shaking her head inside the recesses of her cloak. She was entirely covered with cloth, and wearing gloves as well, because her devil-touched nature was too obvious to easily disguise. Devilkin were hardly unknown in the region—long ago Molthune and Nirmathas had both been part of devil-worshiping Cheliax—but she preferred to avoid the attention her red skin inevitably drew. “No they shouldn’t,” she said. Rodrick glared at her for voicing his own thought, but she didn’t notice. “A wall is a terrible idea. Build a wall and you’re in a siege situation. Sieges are all about time and resources. You can win a siege behind city walls if you’ve got the time and resources to outlast your opponents, but in that case, you want the besieging army to come from far away. The way you win is, you make it too expensive for them to keep besieging you. Molthune has more resources than Tamran, though, and their supply lines are short because we’re so close to their border. The Molthuni could blockade the docks, and keep supplies from getting into the city by land, and starve the city out. No, a wall’s a losing proposition here. The way they do it’s better: let the enemy come in, don’t give them a force to fight, and then pick them off with small raids. It’s your basic asymmetrical warfare, and it’s the only way an outmatched ragtag bunch of rangers and hunters can hope to fight an actual military force.”
Bannerman looked at Merihim with something like respect. “All true. Tamran used to have a wall, but they tore it down ages ago, for just those reasons.”
Rodrick tried not to grind his teeth. Bad enough Merihim was in charge. Did she have to go around proving how qualified she was to be in charge all the time, too? He could have spoken up and said the same thing, but he hadn’t wanted to contradict Eldra when she was being so warm toward him.
“That’s how we’re going to get Zumani out, too.” She caught Rodrick’s eye and smirked at him. “A small, flexible force can do disproportionate damage to a larger and better-provisioned enemy.”
“Flies can irritate an elephant,” the Specialist said. “But it’s surprisingly hard for an elephant to kill flies.”
“It’s easy for soldiers to kill people, though,” Hrym said. “But maybe I’m being too literal. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of metaphors.”
Bannerman led them inland, past houses on stilts and over rickety, haphazard piers and bridges across the marshy land. Eventually they reached streets of packed dirt, and he took them to a small cottage with an incongruously solid door and stout lock. Bannerman unlocked the door and ushered them into a dim, fish-smelling, single-room dwelling. “Our safe house.”
“I’ve never felt safer.” Eldra nudged a filthy pallet with the toe of her shoe.
Bannerman lit a lantern—burning some kind of fish oil, apparently, based on the increased stench. He rolled back the pallet, brushing aside a scattering of straw, and revealed a trapdoor set into the floor. He hauled the hatch open and descended the stairs he revealed, lantern in hand, and the others followed.
The basement was three times the size of the cottage above, with walls of mortared stone. Bannerman went around the room, lighting other lanterns. “No one looks for a basement this close to the lake, because any hole you dig tends to fill with water. We used some magic to keep that from happening here, I’m told. We called ahead with all your special requests. You should find everything you need for your excursion into Molthune.”
The Specialist rushed to a long table against one wall, set with a wide array of beakers, tubes, retorts, alembics, and vials, near an apothecary cabinet. Merihim lifted the lid on a crate, said, “Ooooh,” and lifted out a pair of daggers. Eldra opened up a wardrobe and made a noise of amusement or pleasure or both and ran her fingers along a row of dangling gowns. Prinn started knocking spiderwebs out of high corners and then shoving the sticky filaments into a pouch, but that was sorcerers for you, assuming that’s what he even was.
Rodrick went over to the Specialist and looked glumly at all the glassware. “I don’t suppose you can use any of this stuff to make something good to drink?”
“Mmm? Alcohol, you mean? Alcohol is easy. It’s just sugar and time, really. But we don’t have much of the latter.”
Bannerman clapped Rodrick on the shoulder, which was a bit like having a tree fall on you. “I’ve got a flask in my boot, Rodrick, full of the finest corn liquor in Lastwall. Which, given that our patron nation is full of abstemious crusaders, isn’t high praise, but it’s better than the nothing you’ve been drinking otherwise. Temple doesn’t want you to have so much as a nip, on the principle that if you want some you probably shouldn’t be allowed any, but I’ve got a certain amount of discretion as field commander. I’ll tell you what: If we get Zumani safely away, and you help the mission more than you hinder it, we’ll celebrate in the safety of the Fangwood and I’ll let you get so drunk we’ll have to tie you to your horse the next morning.”
“Are you trying to motivate me?” Rodrick said. “Do you think I can be manipulated that easily?”
“For you, Hrym, I’ve commissioned a scabbard of solid gold as a reward for successfully completing this mission.”
“So I’d be … surrounded by gold?” the sword said.
“It’s impractical for carrying every day,” Bannerman said, “because it’s rather heavy, but I thought you might enjoy resting in it when you’re not on duty.”
“Surrounded. By gold.”
“Assuming we succeed in our mission and make it back to the Bastion safely, yes, I’ll present it to you personally. And as Temple told you: we don’t lie.”
Rodrick scowled. �
��Hrym gets gold, and I get whatever liquor is left in your flask? Doesn’t that seem a bit unequal to you?”
“Perhaps you should have negotiated better,” Hrym said. “Besides, I do all the work. You just carry me around.”
“And make tactical and strategic decisions about how best to deploy your powers!”
“No, that’s what you used to do,” Hrym said. “When we were carefree travelers. Now Merihim does all the deciding—and for a scabbard of gold I would follow her to the gates of the Abyss.”
Bannerman gave Rodrick another staggering shoulder-slap. “I like to see my people happy in their work.” He went to consult with Merihim, who was hiding an alarmingly growing number of knives about her person.
“Traitor,” Rodrick said conversationally.
“At least it takes more than a flagon of wine to buy my loyalty.”
“I don’t even think the Abyss has gates. I mean, why would it?”
“Just as well,” Hrym said. “I don’t have legs, so I can’t actually follow anyone anywhere anyway.”
* * *
Crossing the border into Molthune was a disappointingly simple affair. Rodrick had hoped for secret tunnels, or maybe hiding in a concealed compartment in the back of a cart—he’d had good luck with that approach before. But instead they loaded horses with their supplies, dressed in cloaks of dirt brown and leaf green and stone gray, and set off for the Southern Fangwood, which filled the entire interior of Nirmathas.
As they entered the forest, Rodrick eyed the trees nervously, looking for telltale blooms of mold. “Are there blighted fey here, too?”
“Oh, yes.” Bannerman nodded. “They say there’s a demon-tainted dryad queen deep in the heart of the forest, spreading her corruption. Quite far from here, though, fear not.”
“We’re not expected to kill her, too, are we?” Merihim said. “Just in a casual way, as we pass by?”
