Salvation (Scars of the Sundering Book 3)

by Hans Cummings

  She felt a tug, and a force pressed against her, pushing in all around and lifting her from the rushing water. Katka, still clinging to her arm, was also pulled, sputtering and shrieking, from the flood. As the two passed backward over the torrent and through the tunnel, Delilah observed the deluge diminish to a trickle and cease.

  Alysha deposited the two at the edge of the runed circle. She lowered her staff and leaned on it, shaking her head. “I think you should find a better place to stand when we open the next one.”

  Delilah cursed and removed her cloak, throwing the soggy cloth to the floor. Her feathers and fetishes dripped water wherever she stepped. She helped her apprentice to her feet, and turned her attention to Alysha, as Katka stripped out of her waterlogged robes.

  “How did you close it?”

  “I know an incantation to block magic. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.”

  The archmage retrieved her staff. “It won’t hurt the moon gate?”

  “It shouldn’t.” Alysha picked up the ruined remains of the tome Katka had been holding. “So much for this old thing.”

  “Damn.” Delilah regarded the soggy remains of the ancient text. “Maybe Ori can fix it.”

  Katka stood shivering in her smallclothes and held up her dripping robes. “I don’t suppose you know an incantation to dry these?”

  “We can dry them by the hearth upstairs.” Delilah gathered all the wet garments, including Katka’s robes. “Bring that parchment with the combinations and the book, if you can.”

  Kale waited at the top of the stairs. “Hey, I thought I heard running water and screaming.”

  Delilah held up an armful of wet clothing and squeezed, trickling water down the stairs. “Apparently, someplace called Faenwar is underwater now. Is Ori still here?”

  “Yeah, he’s packing up for the night.” Kale jerked his thumb toward the front of the shop.

  “Have him come see me in the kitchen when he’s done, please. We need to borrow your hearth to dry our clothes.”

  Kali stood in the kitchen, roasting a bird of some sort. Delilah arranged the clothes near the edge of the hearth, hoping no grease splattered on them. Katka placed the ruined book on the table. The two sorceresses warmed themselves by the fire and explained to Kali what happened. Alysha excused herself and headed to the upper city to find a tavern.

  “Oh, Archmage! Kale said you wanted to see me?” Ori appeared in the doorway, holding an armful of rolled parchments.

  “One of our books got a little wet.” Delilah pointed to the tome. “Can anything be done to save it?”

  “Oh, my. Oh, no!” Ori dropped the supplies he held in his arms, scattering rolls of parchment throughout the hallway and kitchen threshold. Candle flames flickered as Kali sighed, although Delilah suspected that was just a trick of the light, rather than her mighty wind.

  The blue drak slid a claw under one of the pages and lifted it with care. He peered under it, muttered to himself, and sighed. “Oh, oh, oh! Perhaps with divine intervention.”

  “Well, damn.” Delilah looked at her apprentice. “You memorized that whole thing, right?”

  Katka eyes widened, and she shook her head. The fire sputtered as water flew from her hair into the hearth.

  “Oh! I might be able to recopy some of it.” Ori flipped the page and turned his head as he tried to decipher the text. “What language is this?”

  “Elvish,” Delilah and Katka answered in unison before then eyeing each other and giggling.

  “Oh. I can’t read that. I’ll probably get a lot of the words wrong. They’re smudging.”

  “I can.” Katka rubbed her arms. “Maybe my mistress will let me work on that with you as a special project for a while?”

  “I’m all for that.” Delilah removed her harness and laid it on top of her cloak. The feathers were probably ruined, but she hoped to salvage the fetishes. “It’s important, right?”

  “Oh, Archmage Delilah”—Ori bowed his head and crossed an arm over his chest—“you should know that I’ll do anything for you, but this project is too big. I have to… um… I have bills to pay…”

  Delilah patted Ori on the cheek. “The Arcane University will compensate you for your work, of course. Thank you. I’d appreciate it if you could start right away, though.” She nuzzled the nape of his neck.

  The blue drak sputtered and nodded, gathering up the remains of the soggy tome. As he exited the kitchen, he tripped over a chair before slamming into a wall and spinning around the corner into the hallway. Delilah winced as she heard Kale shout when the two collided.

  “You know he’s smitten with you, right?” Kali pursed her lips as she kicked a stray roll of parchment away from the hearth.

  ***

  “You should pick up some extra classes.” Orion put his arm around Pancras and guided the wizard’s head onto his shoulder.

  With everything going on regarding the Lich Queen, Pancras actually wanted fewer classes. He glanced up at the Justicar. “Why? Trying to get rid of me?”

  “Ha! No. The nobles are calling for blood. Lord Tyron was unpopular, but still he was influential. His cronies have the ear of most of the noble houses.”

  Pancras squeezed his eyes shut. Politics. Why do politics have to come into it?

  “Of course, since a Justicar was involved in the incident, their ability to investigate is limited, and the King has decreed that he has full faith in us. That won’t stop the nobles from hiring mercenaries. You and the fiendling should lie low for a few days. They have short attention spans, and we can stir the pot a bit to remind them that they have better things to do.”

  The afternoon sun crept across the room. Qaliah informed Pancras the day prior of Gisella’s spur-of-the-moment adventure with Scout Stonehammer and swore to let him know when she returned. The fiendling promised to seek him out daily.

  As if on cue, they heard a knocking at the door. Pancras ducked out from beneath Orion’s arm.

  “Back in Muncifer, they wouldn’t let non-students onto university grounds without the permission of the headmaster.” Pancras pulled on his robes and approached the door. He waited for Orion don his loincloth and tunic, leaning with one hand on the door in case Qaliah decided to pick the lock.

  “Maybe she sweet-talked the old man?” Orion moved to the armchair near the hearth as he dressed.

  “I wouldn’t put it past her.” Pancras opened the door, and the fiendling bounded in.

  “Past who, past what? Do you think I’m a sneaky slut?” She flicked Pancras’s ear as she skipped past.

  The minotaur reached up to stop the involuntary twitching of his ear and closed the door behind her. The fiendling sat in the chair opposite Orion, Pancras’s seat.

  “Do you have a reason for slipping into those terrible rhymes? I take it Gisella has not yet returned?” Pancras pulled over one of the chairs from his table and seated himself between her and Orion.

  “Nah, not back yet.” Qaliah sat up straight, hands on her knees and stared directly at Orion. “So, I didn’t interrupt any lovin’ time, did I? I can leave if I did.”

  The Justicar shifted in his chair and focused on the smoldering embers in the hearth. Pancras glared at her and snorted.

  “Oh, I interrupted something, that’s obvious.” The fiendling leaned back in the oversized chair and yanked at her skirt to keep it from bunching up beneath her. “I won’t stay long.”

  Orion, still staring into the fire, waved his hand in dismissal. “I need to be leaving anyway. Duty calls.”

  Over the last several days, Pancras learned much about the Justicars, although Orion would not reveal details about the responsibilities that took him away just before dusk. After the first night, Orion departed before dusk and returned after dark, explaining it away as “his duties.”

  “You’re very conscientious.” Pancras stroked Orion’s arm.

  “What sort of duties? Do you Justicars all get together at suppertime to beat down illegal gambling dens?” Qaliah leaned toward P
ancras. “I heard they come down hard on dens that don’t pay Dolios his due.”

  “Nothing like that. They’re just mundane obligations, traditions, mostly.”

  A smirk appeared on Qaliah’s face. “He’s got another lover.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  Orion gripped the arms of his chair and growled. Pancras scowled at Qaliah. “You’re pushing too far.”

  “Am I? Just a bit of jest… unless it’s true.”

  “It. Is. Not.” Orion spoke through clenched teeth. “Fiendling, it would be very easy to tell the nobles that you’re the one who killed Lord Tyron. They’d have their scapegoat and leave everyone else alone after they stretched your neck.”

  “Easy, yes, but that wouldn’t be the truth, would it?” Qaliah smirk grew wider.

  Relationships were not his forte, but Pancras noticed Qaliah’s words aggravated Orion. He put his hand on his lover’s leg. “Tell me of these duties. It will change nothing. Perhaps I can help.”

  “You’re wrong. It will change everything.”

  ***

  While Ori and Katka began the arduous task of separating the soggy pages of the tome, Delilah studied the parchment of possible rune combinations her apprentice and Alysha compiled. Most of the locations were unfamiliar to her, but pre-Sundering geography was not a subject taught in Drak-Anor. One of the notations, scribbled in her apprentice’s hand, caught her eye: Parsembdan = Maritropa.

  She had often heard traders visiting Drak-Anor speak of Maritropa floating high in the sky above the crystal blue waters of a lake, sitting roughly halfway between Almeria and Vlorey along the trade road.

  “Hm. I bet a floating city didn’t feel much of The Sundering at all.”

  “What?”

  Delilah glanced up. She had forgotten Kali stood behind her in the kitchen while she prepared the evening meal.

  “Sorry, I was talking to myself.” She rolled up the parchment. “I’ll get out of your scales.”

  After checking on Ori and her apprentice, Delilah returned to the bookshelves that lined the cellar stairs. Something about the Maritropa and Parsembdan notation seemed familiar, but she couldn’t summon the memory. She heard her brother in the cavern, breathing fire. Delilah proceeded into the cellar to check on him.

  He stood at the far side of the runed circle, exhaling gouts of flame across the puddles on the floor. Kale must have heard her approach, because he turned to face her.

  “Hi, Deli. I was just trying to dry things out down here.”

  “With fire?”

  “The rocks won’t burn, and I’ve been careful to keep away from the wood supports by the ceiling.”

  The archmage admitted his tactic was effective. “Well, thanks. I hope we don’t do something like that again.”

  “You could have been killed, Deli.”

  Delilah picked through the tomes on the shelf, searching for one which might contain maps or information about Calliome’s geography. “That’s why there’s more than one of us here when we perform these experiments. Hey, you went through a lot of these books, right?”

  Kale approached his sister. “I don’t know about a lot, maybe half of them.”

  “Did you notice if any of them were about geography? Did any of them have maps or anything like that in them?”

  “I remember one with pictures that looked like the stars Terrakaptis showed me a few years ago.” Kale clicked his fingers. “Yeah, there was one with really old maps in it, too. Pre-Sundering.”

  Delilah’s heart pounded. “Show me, please.”

  Kale climbed the stairs halfway up to the shop. He pulled a thick, leather-bound tome off the shelf, moved to the next shelf up, and removed another similarly bound volume. He handed them to his sister.

  The archmage’s eyes bulged under the weight of both works. After staggering upstairs, she lugged them to the kitchen table. She skipped the star charts for the moment and flipped through the other tome. A flowing script, similar to Elvish, adorned the pages, but Delilah recognized the words as a form of the common trade language.

  “What are you thinking, Deli?”

  “Dinner’s ready, Kale.” Kali pulled the roasted bird off the spit and shoved aside one of the books.

  “I’ll be out of your scales in a minute.” Delilah held up a finger. “I just need to find one thing…” She found a map from before The Sundering that depicted the eastern edge of the Celtan Forest. The drawing depicted a lake just south and east, and at its center, with bridges clearly illustrated, sat Parsembdan. She scanned the accompanying text. Slight differences in the dialect and syntax of this antiquated version of the language did not obscure its meaning. Parsembdan had once been a city on an island in the middle of the lake.

  She jabbed the map with her finger. “Ha! I was right.”

  “What? What?” Kale peered over her shoulder.

  “Parsembdan, you know it as Maritropa, was an island before The Sundering. Now, it floats in the sky, right?”

  Kale’s blank expression told Delilah all she needed to know about his knowledge of geography. Kali cocked her head. “It didn’t always float? Huh. I wonder how they got it in the air.”

  “It doesn’t matter. This confirms that not only did the names change, but also that some places aren’t in the same location anymore! Some of the coordinates we’ve been using are all wrong.”

  ***

  As Gisella and Valora approached the farmhouse standing at the far end of the field, they detected no evidence of habitation and took note of two other buildings on the property—a barn topped with a slanted roof and what appeared to be a woodshed. The dwelling seemed lifeless; oddly, although most families kept cooking fires lit during the muggy summers of the north, no smoke drifted up from the chimney. They observed tools scattered on the ground, as if abandoned or dropped.

  Moonsilver tossed her head and whinnied, resisting Gisella’s desire to move closer. After a few minutes, The Golden Slayer relented, dismounting, and tied the horse’s reins to a nearby stump. She picked up her spear, and after Valora secured Quincy, they advanced on the homestead. Clouds gathered near the horizon, dark, ominous, and laden with moisture.

  Careful to avoid the churned-up dirt, they meandered through the field to gain entry to the building. The air around the house was still, bereft of birdsong. Only the buzzing of insects cut through the heavy aura of dread.

  As they moved closer to the house, they noticed the front door askew, hanging on its hinges as if some great force battered it ajar. Gisella took the lead, pushing the door open with her spear. Creaking in protest, it gave way, falling off its hinges, crashing to the floor, and creating a billowing cloud of dirt. A two-room dwelling, once occupied by a hardworking farming family, lay in ruin.

  The sickly sweet stench of rot assaulted the two women. A half-eaten roast sat on the table, covered with flies and mold. A jug of wine lay on its side, having disgorged its contents and having left in its wake a wine stain that bled over the edge of the table, soaking the floor below it dark crimson. Around the table, the chairs were upended. Whoever last sat in them leapt up in a hurry, heedless of the mess they caused.

  Valora pointed to a splatter of dried blood on the wall and ceiling. A curtain-covered doorway separated the bedchamber from the living area. Gisella moved the curtain aside to find the bed, unkempt, but unoccupied. The crib positioned alongside the bed and the volume of flies crawling on it hinted at what lay within. Whatever happened here had occurred while the family ate.

  “Should we check it?” Valora cast half a glance at the crib.

  Gisella shook her head. “I haven’t the stomach for that. You?”

  “I don’t like babies.” Valora turned again to the living area. “I don’t think I’d much like to see a fly-eaten one.”

  “They came upon this family at night and slaughtered them.” Gisella inspected the room one final time and exited the house.

  “Why? If they left you and the fiendling alone, why attack these folk?”


  Gisella knelt by a discarded hayfork, pointing to its ichor-stained tines. “Good question. These folk fought back, though. Perhaps if they had remained huddled in their home, the dead would have burrowed into their fields and let them be. Or maybe, they killed them so they could use their fields in the first place.”

  “Shambling dead can’t think that way. Can they?” Valora picked up a hoe almost twice as long as she stood tall, examining its shattered shaft and notched, bloodied blade. She threw it to the ground.

  “They also can’t know to hide during the day.”

  The distant rumbling of thunder rolled across the fields. Gisella eyed the sky as the clouds moved in their direction.

  “We best get moving, don’t you think? I don’t fancy being around this place when night comes. Is there an inn or another farm where we might find shelter from that?” Gisella pointed at the oncoming storm.

  “This is the closest shelter. Maybe the barn is clear, or the woodshed?”

  Gisella regarded the two nearby structures. They seemed in better shape than the farmhouse. “Too close to the fields for my taste. I suppose we should make sure the farmer’s family isn’t holed up in one of them.”

  Once again, taking care to avoid the field, they first checked the woodshed. The lock on the outside of the door appeared undisturbed, albeit a bit rusty. Gisella banged on the door and called for the farmer. Hearing neither a reply nor movement from within, she glanced at the dwarf.

  “I can whack off the lock with my axe.” Valora held up her weapon.

  “They couldn’t have gone inside and locked themselves in.”

  “Maybe the parents locked their kids in and drew the undead away.” Valora raised her axe and brought it down on the lock. The honed dwarven blade sheared clear through the hasp, and lock clattered to the ground. She pulled open the door to reveal a supply shed packed with cords of wood.

  “That answers that.” Valora closed the door, but without the hasp and lock, it remained slightly ajar. Next, they approached the barn. The stink of decay as they neared the door almost overpowered them.