by Jordan Reece
Infuriated to lose his prey, the dervesh man shrieked wordlessly at Westen. He was not so beautiful now, his face twisted in rage and loathing over the meal denied him. Taking aim with his pistol, Westen pulled the trigger.
The dervesh blew apart to sparks, which twinkled in the grass and upon the rocks before darkening. Seizing Elario’s hand, Westen forced him to a run around the hillocks. He did not let go until they were back at the wagons. Unaware, Hobbe was still reorganizing his programs.
Westen’s face contorted with fury in the moonlight. “What in the hell were you doing?”
“I . . .” Aghast at himself, Elario sat dizzily in the doorway of the wagon.
“They can’t get past the rocks, but they can lure you over them! Why were you over there? There was no reason for you to be over there!”
“I was . . .”
“You went to the dragon bones,” Westen finished in betrayal and appall. “You chased after some damn bones to reminisce and almost got yourself eaten to death by a thrace, you fool! And now I’ve fired the pistol and revealed our position to any nearby dervesh or soldiers!”
“I’m sorry,” Elario breathed.
“Sorrier you would have been when he sank his teeth into your flesh. Sorrier you might be if soldiers are now heading this way! Would that I could leave you alone for an hour without you giving your hand and manhood in a dance to death, Elario Repse! I should tie you up and lock you in the wagon until sunbreak. And if I did not know the nature of the thrace, I would be offended that you had any energetics left after last night.”
Somewhere along the way, his diatribe had become a little less angry and a little more lighthearted. “You can stop railing at me,” Elario said. “I feel stupid enough without you piling on for more.” Westen extended an imperious finger to the berth. Sheepishly, Elario climbed in to take his rest.
It was a hard bed, but exhaustion was dragging at his eyelids. The thick wood of the wagon blocked much of the night’s chill, his cloak and blanket provided the rest, and the next he knew was Hobbe opening the door to wake him. “Good morning, sir! Master Westen says it is time to be off.”
The sky behind the bald mechanical man was deep gray. “Good morning, Hobbe. Are you organized?”
“Yes, sir, I completed my organization over seven hours ago. I am told you nobly tried to feed a dervesh last night.” Earnestly, Hobbe explained, “They may look very hungry, sir, but you must not let yourself be fooled. They have no care for apples or beans in gravy; it is your flesh in a blood gravy they truly desire. Such generosity of spirit, though commendable, will serve you most poorly in the Wickewoods.”
“Thank you, Hobbe. I will take your advice.” Elario rolled out of bed, already dreading to leave the sanctuary of the cove. He envied placid Hobbe. To be programmed for rudimentary emotions was not a bad thing in these circumstances.
A light dusting of snow lay upon the hillocks. It was melting already. Westen was outside, fixing his clothing as it was askew. A fresh tear in his trousers bared his calf. “What happened to you?” Elario asked.
“Nothing,” Westen said gruffly.
“Master Westen went looking for soldiers from the aerial while I stood watch here,” Hobbe volunteered. “There were dervesh. He fought by blade and hand rather than shoot.”
“Did you find survivors?” Westen rolled his eyes upwards in answer. Exasperated, Elario exclaimed, “You need not punish me for my actions anymore. I have-”
“Get back in the wagon. Both of you! Get in the wagon now!” Westen ordered in panic.
There was nothing about them that was queer or threatening, but they did as they were told without question or dallying. Elario was halfway inside the wagon when he saw it was the sun that Westen had rolled his eyes upwards to view . . . a sun rising in the west rather than the east.
Hobbe entered after Elario, and then Westen climbed into the wagon and shut the three of them in. He pushed by them to the window as a distant hum vibrated through the air. Through the dirty glass, the sun was growing brighter. No, not the sun. Elario skirted Westen and knelt on the bed to peer out with him. Gliding over the trees and into the hillocks was a war aerial. In place of the cannon was a revolving beam.
Light washed out the glass as the aerial passed overhead. The hum trembled the wagon. “Will they see the trail of footprints you left in the snow?” Elario whispered.
“I left none,” Westen said. “It snowed just as I returned.”
The light blazed through the window on the other side of the wagon. Elario clambered over the bed to look out. The dark blob of the aerial continued on, going slowly as the light swooped over the hillocks.
A terrible thought occurred to him. “Does the military know about coves?”
“They do.” Westen watched the aerial with him as Hobbe stooped by the door. “I spied a dozen petrified and injured ensigno last night north of Davenah, huddled into a tiny cove and awaiting rescue. This was the key to the Rothshales’ success. They survived so many expeditions because they discovered coves. But they-” He indicated the aerial above. “They will not think that you know this.”
The aerial turned. Elario worried that it was about to double back over the hillocks, but it steered south. “Praise Elequa!”
“Praise Elequa after we’ve found the bones,” Westen grumbled.
Are you so eager to die?
Hydon’s words. Last night’s thoughts of Westen pushed forth in Elario’s mind. Why had Hydon asked that of an immortal man? Unless there was some means in this world with the ability to kill him . . .
“Shall we?” Westen asked, tying his long hair back in a tail.
Those blue eyes struck Elario afresh for their intensity. Part of this mission he was not privy to. Westen told him only some things, and at certain times. But there were reasons for that. Elario trusted Westen, so he trusted those reasons as well.
“I think once we’ve found them,” Elario said rashly, “we should walk away together. Even though we know what will happen. You have eternity to dig up the bones. They aren’t going anywhere. You should have some happiness first.”
Westen put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he commanded, but with affection, and Hobbe opened the door.
Chapter Twenty
For several terrifying days, they traveled through the Wickewoods.
Hours passed without a single dervesh, followed by hours in which dervesh were everywhere. Often there was little to no warning of their advance: like the thrace, some moved soundlessly, and others flickered in and out so that one moment Elario was looking at a field of wind-flattened grass, and the next moment there was a monstrous being where none had been before. Rising out of the ground, disengaging its body from a boulder, dropping out of nowhere, hunger burned in their eyes as they rushed forward.
Westen knew their games, and walked with his pistols at the ready. After each kill, they ran from the site of the attack. Dervesh were not as intelligent as humans, but they were very aware of the world around them. They understood that a noise might indicate the presence of a flesh-meal, and would quit their aimless roving to hunt down the source. It was imperative to quit the scene in haste, and quietly.
No Great Cities lay between Davenah and Nevenin, but often they encountered villages tucked beneath the trees, and small towns in the shadow of bluffs. When they could avoid going too closely, they did. It was common for dervesh such as the sisters to haunt them in perpetuity, like the people who once lived there were eventually going to regenerate as the dervesh did. Though the dragonwood staffs supplied a wider range in which to hunt, some creatures refused to stray from those moldering homes and shops, and the roads to link them.
Skirting those places spared the ammunition; they were using enough as it was in the woods. Each time they dropped an empty box behind them, Elario worried about running out. He regretted every wasted bullet, and shamed himself one day by shooting blindly into a trembling bush only for a jackrabbit to burst out and run away
. At least the next firing of his pistol acquitted him in part when his bullet blasted apart an ovane. The color of its fur blended so perfectly with the trunk of a tree that its seven-foot form was shielded until it stepped away.
The night hours were spent in trees, chosen for how many leaves were left upon the branches to screen them from both ground and air. A tree was hardly a comfortable bed, but this inconvenienced Elario alone. He tied himself to the trunk and waited for exhaustion to take him. Sleep, though, was light and elusive; he jerked awake whenever dervesh called out in the darkness and occasionally they wandered below the very tree he was concealed within. The worst risk was from the havok beasts, traveling in a pack of forty to fifty with axes and swords and bows. Had the beasts taken notice of Elario ten feet over their heads, he would have been dead before Westen and Hobbe could do anything to prevent it.
Aerials were a constant, drifting presence in the sky. They vanished periodically to the north when they had to refuel, and within hours, they were back. None landed, but they did lower alarmingly close to the treetops in the night to shine their lights over the earth. Elario heard snatches of soldiers’ chatter through the dragon’s eye.
-they are dead, sir! We would have seen them by now if they were going east-
-unless they approach from the south to skirt us! Assign the P-12s to this region-
On the fourth or fifth morning since Davenah, for Elario had lost track, an aerial swung so far in their direction as they neared Nevenin that they took shelter beneath a rocky precipice in the woods. In distaste, he said, “All this they do on behalf of preserving the dervesh who would just as soon kill them.”
“All this they do to preserve the way things are,” Westen corrected.
“What will they do when you succeed?” When, not if. Dust in a grave Elario would be when Westen finally destroyed the bones, but it would happen. Elario believed in him.
Westen’s smile was hard, his eyes never leaving the aerial. “They will have lost what has guaranteed them power in their spelled objects. What gives them the upper hand in love, wealth, canniness, strength, power, vengeance, what chokes out their competition, silences agitators, does their dirty work for them . . . gone. They will panic, and feel unjustly singled out and abused by the world, when all this is what they have done to others.”
They shrank deeper beneath the rocky overhang as the aerial glided closer. Elario’s teeth chattered at the hum. “They will have to fight to maintain their position after that.”
“The social order will be shaken, and shaken hard. But that is nothing compared to the panic the Cabal of the Crown will feel at the south rising anew. They think you crushed. They want you crushed. They plunder you, ignore you, and consign you to irrelevancy. Were all the people south of the Hopcross to flood into the Wickewoods and take back what was stolen from their forebears, were you to regain your pride and voice and demand your place . . . You are the rightful heirs to these lands.” The war aerial veered away, but they stayed where they were in case it swung back.
“They will hold the land from us,” Elario said.
“They will try, but how?” Westen asked, leaning out to track the aerial’s progress. Hobbe watched quietly for dervesh. “The numbers they need to enforce it; well, these are numbers they don’t have. All of the Dragons of the Blood and all of the Red Guard can hold a few of these cities, but not all. Unless their numbers have swelled greatly in the future, the children of the rebellion shall reclaim their homes without dervesh to waylay them or soldiers to stop them.”
Elario remembered the inn at Jumario, where he sat at the end of the long table for dinner. It seemed decades in the past. The older of the two men beside him was hungry for the wasted farmland between the Argonauth and the Hopcross. We used to be rich. Yes, they would dare to tread into the Wickewoods with the dervesh gone. They would search for where their ancestors came from, take back the land and all upon it.
Westen stared after the aerial in irritation. “It’s flying to Nevenin. That will stir up the dervesh when we’re on the city’s doorstep.”
“We could wait until tomorrow, sir,” Hobbe suggested.
“No, we’ll just have to deal with the dervesh. Better soldiers in the air than soldiers on the ground. They could block us from entering Nevenin at all, should they take the notion to risk touching down. Let’s go. The bridge into Nevenin is scarcely five miles from here.”
Villages appeared more frequently from there on, until there were so many that little separated them from one another. Westen shepherded them down a road when there was no longer anyway to skirt around. Posts outlined former gardens, where laborers’ modest homes had given way to time. The roofs were open to the sky; grass was growing up through what was left of the floorboards; windows were broken and doors gone from the hinges. Scattered over the winding road were rusted cookpots and plain cutlery.
A face suddenly appeared around a post, Elario crying out in warning and grabbing for his pistol, but Westen’s curt voice stopped him from pulling the trigger. “It’s naught but a fade.”
Heart pounding, Elario lowered the weapon. The fade was an old man, his hair white and sparse. The sun shined vaguely through simple garb of woolen shirt and battered trousers. Rounding the post with a grimace of fear, he ran into Elario, who experienced no sensation at the impact. Elario whirled around. The man had exited his back to run on.
“A fade?” Elario asked. The old man stopped short and turned around in abject terror. Nowhere to go, his terrified eyes said. There was nowhere to go. His knees buckled and he fell.
“A ghost, if you will, though not truly,” Westen said after the man vanished. “He repeats his last moments of life unknowingly. You will see many of them in Nevenin. Did you never wonder about the verse in Jewels and Blood? And so they marched to Nevenin, where man and cart and horse all thronged, upon the bejeweled road down to the city. It is a reference to the fades. Some of the Rothshales’ bodyguards lost their wits upon the sight at each expedition, and ran away in terror to be slaughtered by dervesh.”
“This road is certainly not bejeweled,” Elario said, the three of them resuming their walk. It was paved in gray stone, which was cracked and split by tree roots bulging up from underneath. A fine road once, but never glorious.
Westen was scanning the homes, where nothing stirred. “I am speaking of Achen’s Bridge into Nevenin, which we will soon be upon. There is no tree cover there: it’s exposed to the sky from summit to base. Our cover will be the fades, who are strongest upon it at midday. Nevenin died from queen to noble, merchant to laborer.”
“A scholar upon the aerial I took told me there were no known survivors of Nevenin.”
“He was right in that. Where were they to go? Run east and they met the river, where the ships were on fire. Run south and they met the dervesh of Olehalem. Run north and they met the dervesh of Valelu. Run west and they met the dervesh of the farmlands, villages, and hills that we just walked through. The king’s wrath was terrible indeed for the runaway queen. We’ll pass her carriage at the foot of the bridge.”
The sun was near its full height when they left the road for grass. The last home fell away behind them, the property’s posts marking what was once a field for farming or grazing. Past the last marker, the ground sloped downwards through snarls of bramble and trees draped in browning shag. The foliage impeded their view of what was ahead until Westen parted a curtain of vines to a stunning sight.
Elario stepped out to the very edge of a cliff. The city of Nevenin occupied the valley below. On three sides was it surrounded by blood red cliffs just like the one that their party stood upon, though to the south, the cliffs were only half as high. Water glittered in canals, which snaked through the city and reflected the colorful houses built alongside. From little bridges over the water hung metal baskets of flowers, overgrown but blooming. Parks and pavilions were plentiful. At the very center of the city, the canals flowed together and twisted about a tiny island with a dock and
gazebo.
He saw what had to be Achen’s Bridge. Once again, this was the stunning work of a stone knacker. Extending out of the cliffs was a sharply slanted bridge going down into the city. Sunlight shined brilliantly on the mineral streaks in the polished, eggshell-white columns holding it aloft. Silver and blue, gold and green, the colors traded off in intensity though the sunlight stayed steady.
“The aerial, sirs,” Hobbe said, pointing to the blue ribbon of the river outlining the far side of the city. The war aerial was now hovering over there.
“Once we go in, how do we get out?” Elario asked.
Westen pointed to the southern cliffs. Near the river was a visible break in the rock. “That is Prinzio’s Pass. All but one of the dervesh knackers were born on the other side of that pass, so that is where we are taking your dragon’s eye to do its work.”
“Is going through the city the best way? Can’t we go around?”
“I wish we could, but there is little refuge to take by that route. Those in the aerials will see us coming for miles.”
Boats appeared on the canals. Elario rubbed at his dragon’s eye, wishing to stay in the correct time, but Westen said, “No. We see it, too. The city’s fades are coming alive. Quickly now. They are our shield.”
An air of alarm descended upon Nevenin as they hastened along the cliff’s edge after Westen. The past was suddenly here in the present for all to witness. Ghostly inhabitants by the thousands flooded into the streets below, which rapidly became a gridlock of carriages and foot traffic. Parcels and children were handed down from verandas of the homes at the waterside to boats. Once full, the rowers pulled hard along the canals, all of them steering for the river. Desperate people jumped from the little bridges down to the boats, a man striking one so hard that it flipped and spilled everyone inside. Utter chaos besieged every road and waterway as far out as Elario could see.
The aerial swiveled to pace over the city. They had noticed the frenetic activity.
