The Blighted City (The Fractured Tapestry)

by Scott Kaelen

  “Still,” Oriken said, “there’s a part of me that’s jealous of you being able to live forever. With the corpses gone, what you’ve got here isn’t too bad, all things considered.”

  “Ah, but immortality comes at a hefty price. Would you rather remain in one place forever, or would you prefer the freedom of travelling the world, meeting new people, seeing fresh and wondrous sights, but knowing beyond doubt that you will one day die? Then again, can you imagine the experience of one who could combine immortality with freedom, to walk Verragos forever?” Sabrian sighed plaintively. “Me, I think I could enjoy that, but it is not the card I was dealt in life. I left a lot behind when I came here, but some of those who dwell in this city have pasts they cannot emotionally resolve, even after three centuries. The king, for instance.”

  “He wasn’t a particularly jovial fellow, that’s for sure.”

  “Nor would I be, in his situation. You know that he killed his champion? The act was warranted, from what I’ve learned. Mallak’s wife gave birth mere months before the living of the city began to turn. When the boy was born, Mallak was convinced it was not of his blood. When he confronted his wife, after some… persuasion, I imagine, she confessed to a series of indiscretions with the king’s own champion, no less. And so Mallak slew the man, but in a fair fight. After the turning, the baby was not half a year old – no physical state for any immortal to be locked in; poor Lewin suffers enough, but a baby?” Sabrian shook his head. “Before the first year was over, the queen took her dead lover’s son in her arms and descended the trail to the beach. She walked into the water, and the king – along with all the cityfolk – felt her slow, fading passing along with the false but innocent heir as she waded deeper into the Echilan Ocean. So you see – for some like Mallak, three hundred years as a shackled ghost is not equal to even one year of living in freedom.”

  Oriken grunted. “It’s a tragic story, but the world’s full of them, and the rest of us have to live with ours. Define freedom, though. The freedom you talk of may be beyond your prison cell, but not beyond the whole dungeon. Perhaps it is not immortality, but mortality that comes at a price.”

  “That’s a fair perspective for someone who hasn’t spent the last century and more in the same city, staring out onto the same ocean and at the same stretch of heathland. Oriken, if I could trade my existence for yours, I might be sorely tempted to do so, despite the constant knowledge of unavoidable death. And, with my few remaining decades, I would head out into Verragos and fill my life with meaning. But”—again he sighed—“I am resigned to this life now. I might have traded places with you, were it possible, but I would not walk out into the heath in search of death.”

  “Who would?”

  Sabrian turned to him, but said nothing. He looked down at the leafy cylinder in his hand. “Thank you for this, my friend. And for the talk. It was very nostalgic.” He stubbed the embers against the wall. “I think I will keep a hold of this.” He pocketed the half-finished roll of tobah. “See how many decades I can resist the urge to light it.” Sabrian chuckled, and Oriken laughed with him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  SUNSET TO SUNRISE

  Dagra shifted upon the rectangular-cut boulder and looked out past the cliff’s edge onto the grey ocean. No birds cried beneath the sigh of the tide or the crash of waves upon unseen rocks below, and none swooped before the orange orb of Banael as it melted into the frothing water. It was a beautiful sight, but barren of life.

  This time yesterday I saw this place as the edge of the world, but what does a simple freeblade know? Maybe, somewhere far beyond the horizon, someone else is looking out onto the same churning expanse and thinking the same thought as I was.

  Beside him, Gorven loosed a plaintive sigh. “I like to come here sometimes. Alone. To speculate.”

  Dagra huffed. “Is there anything left to wonder about after the years you’ve lived?”

  “You might be surprised. Some questions, after all, are unanswerable; the more you consider them, the more they give rise to new, equally unanswerable questions.”

  “Such as?”

  Gorven laughed softly. “Well, now…” As he pointed to the horizon far opposite from the sinking sun, Dagra followed his finger to a dim three-quarters sphere that hung low in the sky. “Do you see that?”

  “Of course,” Dagra said. “It’s Haleth rising. The whole world knows that.”

  Gorven nodded. “Indeed it is. What more can you tell me about Haleth?”

  “What is this? A history lesson?”

  “History?” Gorven said with a grin. “Oh, but my dear Dagra, what makes you think my question has anything to do with history?”

  Dagra shrugged. “Haleth is one of the old gods.”

  “True.” Gorven leaned back and planted his hands on the stone behind him. “And this moon of Haleth, does she have a role in the stories of the old gods?”

  Dagra sat up and frowned at the man. “Did you drag me out here so you could bore me into throwing myself off the cliff? Because, if so, it’s working.”

  “Humour me. Please.”

  He let out an exasperated sigh. “Very well. Haleth is the Ethereal Goddess of the Air and the Void, cast there at the end of the Arkhaeon by the Arbiter for breathing life into the toys of the gods.”

  “And why did the Arbiter judge her so?”

  “Because of the violence of the gods’ creations. I guess she’s supposed to not be able to come back to Verragos, condemned to forever watch the toys she helped create, but never again to interfere with the world.”

  “Hm.” Gorven quirked an eyebrow. “But is any of this true?”

  “Of course it is. I mean, look, there she is. What more proof do you need?”

  “I see.” Gorven lifted his gaze past Haleth, shielding his eyes from the rays of the dipping sun. “Ah, there.” He pointed almost directly overhead at a small, indistinct smudge in the darkening sky. “Atros, the Grey Watcher. Emissary of the Dyad.”

  “Oh, you never gave me a chance,” Dagra said drily.

  Gorven smiled as he stared upwards at the smudge. “I don’t seek to test your knowledge, my friend, but rather your understanding.”

  “What difference is there?”

  “To some”—Gorven shrugged—“there is none. Now, tell me what you understand about that dirty little smear above us.”

  Dagra blanched. “You shouldn’t talk like that. The Emissary watches us constantly.”

  “Ah.” Gorven turned an amused eye on Dagra. “What will the Emissary do now, I wonder, that he has deigned not to do in all my years of blasphemous utterances? Shall we put it to the test?”

  “No!” Dagra rose from the stone.

  “Very well.” Gorven waved a placating hand. “Please, sit. I’ll behave, I promise.”

  Reluctantly, Dagra sat back down. “Why would you tempt the anger of the gods? You saw what happened earlier.”

  Gorven smiled ruefully, his gaze trailing across the watery expanse. “Truthfully? At first it was my own personal test, but I suppose it developed over the years into something of an indulgence, a game I’ve liked to play ever since the goddess died.”

  “Morta’Valsana? She didn’t die. She deserted you.”

  “Perhaps that is true. But, after you have lived here as long as I have, a dead goddess or an otherwise absent goddess, it really makes no difference.”

  Dagra said nothing, and they lapsed into silence, each looking out at the tranquil ocean and the fading day. After some minutes, he felt Gorven studying him. “What is it?”

  “I was just wondering what you were thinking.”

  He shrugged. “I was recalling something that happened a long time ago, back when me and Oriken were lads.”

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  Dagra barked a laugh. “I doubt it.” He cast Gorven a sideways glance. “Fine, but I warned you.” He drew a deep breath and released it slowly. “Me and Oriken, we were in our early teens. I’m a little older than he
is, but I was as much a short-arse then as I am now, and Oriken was already turning into a beanpole, but there wasn’t much strength to him. We’d been friends ten years or so, ever since he and his parents arrived in Eyndal. His pa, a good man named Kyne, was a mineworker. Both my parents were long dead. Oriken and I did menial jobs to help the miners – carrying supplies, relaying information, manning the doors.

  “One day I entered the miners’ rest area to see Oriken sizing up to one of the workers. The miner shoved him and he went down. I ran to help him up and the miner yelled at me to keep my friend from poking his nose where it didn’t belong.” Dagra looked at Gorven. “You know the sort.”

  Gorven nodded.

  “Anyway, Oriken’s shouting back at the man and telling me that the feller’s got his pa’s hat.”

  “Ah.”

  “Aye. Sure enough, I looked to the feller’s head and there’s the hat that Kyne supposedly lost some days earlier. So I voiced as much.” Dagra shrugged. “You do, don’t you, when it’s your friend?”

  Gorven brushed a thumb pensively over his chin. “Indeed you do.”

  “The mine worker shoved me away. I stumbled, but got a hold of him and we both went down. His hand clasped onto my throat, and he squeezed. He wanted to kill me. I could see it in his eyes. Somehow, I wrapped my hand around a rock. You don’t stop to think when your life’s in the balance. I smashed it into his head and he was out like a lamp. Oriken helped me up, and as he took his pa’s hat I stared down at the miner. I wanted to pummel the rock into his face again and again, but I didn’t. I let him live.

  “Oriken returned the hat to his pa, and all was well with the world till the following week when Kyne died. Some accident down in the mines, it was said, but I called that out as cowshit. Couldn’t prove it, but I knew it were the feller we’d altercated with, ‘cause again the hat had gone missing.” Dagra shook his head. “Damned business.”

  “There’s a moral to the story,” Gorven said.

  “Aye, there’s a bloody moral. That night I went to the feller’s house and stuck the murdering bastard in the heart while he slept. Cowardly, maybe, but I didn’t give a shit. Took the hat and gave it to Oriken. He’s worn it ever since. Until today, that is. I reckon it’s done him good to finally let it go. As for the moral, take your pick.” Dagra shrugged. “For me, it’s that cold-blooded murderous bastards may get what they want in the short-run, but in the long-run they damn well get what they deserve.”

  “And how do you feel about it now?”

  Dagra pursed his lips and considered the question. “Maybe if I’d cowered, maybe if I’d just taken Oriken out of the mines instead of knocking the feller senseless, maybe Oriken’s pa might still be alive. Maybe his ma, too. But probably not. Could be that someone else would’ve died instead, and that may have been Oriken. Would I change it if I could?” He shook his head. “I’m at peace with what I did. Just a bloody shame, is all. Still, maybe Kyne met his killer in the next life and befriended him. They say that the Underland makes the strangest bedfellows – mortal enemies on Verragos can be fast friends on Kambesh.”

  “Hm.” Gorven looked thoughtful. “May I ask another question?”

  Dagra gestured for him to do so.

  “Do you worship the goddess Valsana?”

  “I worship the Dyad,” Dagra replied vehemently. “Svey’Drommelach and Aveia, and their prophets, Avato and Ederron.”

  “So, not Valsana, then. And is this”—Gorven indicated behind them at the towering battlements—“not what happens when a deity dies? Or if, as you say, she deserted us, then where now is she? Reduced to ruling over a single village innocuously named Minnow’s Beck, when once she owned the whole of Himaera? Forgive me for saying so, but that doesn’t sound like a goddess that can afford to pick and choose, especially these recent centuries with the Dyad invading her territory. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know about any of that,” Dagra said gruffly. “I only know I can’t stay here.”

  “You cannot leave, Dagra.” Gorven’s tone was firm. “To leave is to truly die. When you walk away from the only place that can sustain you”—he held his hands palm-upwards—“then, like Valsana, you fade away.”

  Dagra said nothing. Gorven – and Sabrian – were newcomers to his life, and yet somewhere within him he knew them as intimately as he did Oriken, Jalis and Maros. To a lesser extent, the same was true with the entire population of Lachyla. He didn’t know what he knew of them, only that the knowledge was either in his head somewhere or otherwise reachable. Perhaps not knowledge, he mused, but more like an understanding. “I refuse to stay in this blighted city,” he said, “this limbo between life and rebirth where nobody’s thoughts are fully their own.”

  “You will not endure beyond the reaches of Scapa Fell. That I promise you. You will never return to Alder’s Folly, nor see your family in Eyndal again. The Mother’s reach is only to Lachyla’s perimeters. Beyond that, it is like being without food and water. Go for too long, or too distant, and you will not survive.”

  Dagra turned away from Gorven to the sun sinking into the rippling water. “Then I will die free,” he said, rubbing a knuckle at the edge of his eye. “And in good company. With my friends.”

  The mansion doors clicked open and Oriken looked up from the unsheathed gladius in his lap, now polished to a gleaming shine. Gorven stepped through onto the porch and greeted them with a hospitable smile.

  “Whenever the three of you are ready,” he said, “I’ll escort you to the guest quarters where you will each have a separate room with a comfortable bed. Krea has prepared fresh linen.”

  “We appreciate it,” Jalis said. “Could we trouble you for a few blankets to take with for the journey? We left our bedding at camp when we came to find Dagra.”

  “Of course. I’ll leave some in the entranceway with your packs.”

  Jalis nodded her gratitude. “Thank you for retrieving them.”

  “Not at all. Ah, I also brought your light device from the tunnel. A lamp, do you call it? You see, I do pay attention. I had a little fiddle around with it. Quite practical, I must say. Cleve would be fascinated with it.”

  “I doubt we’ll need that lamp again,” Oriken said as he leaned back against the porch wall. “The guild has enough in stock. Keep it. Or give it to your friend.”

  “Truly? Well then.” Gorven inclined his head. “My thanks. I’ll leave you in peace. Come and find me when you’re ready to retire for the night.”

  As Gorven withdrew back into the mansion’s shadowed interior, Dagra reached for the jewelled sword in Oriken’s lap. “Can I have a look at that?”

  Oriken passed him the gladius. While Dagra scrutinised the weapon beneath the light of the torches attached to the wall, Oriken studied his face. It seemed to him that Dagra was only going through the motions, feigning an interest that, at any other time, would have been genuine. Faint shadows etched his eyes, the beginnings of what Oriken guessed would turn out like the thin black outlines on the eyes of every undead resident of Lachyla.

  Undead. A tightness cramped his chest and he turned from Dagra to Jalis; she, too, had her eye on their friend, her expression solemn in the flickering shadows of the night.

  “Fascinating,” Dagra muttered, running a finger down the gutter at the centre of the blade. “This isn’t iron, but it’s not quite steel either.”

  “Steel wasn’t made until after the Uprising,” Jalis said.

  “True,” Oriken said. “Whatever it’s made of, I can attest to it being stronger than my sabre.”

  “They must have created their own form of steel after the blight,” Jalis suggested.

  Dagra grunted. “Aye, so it would seem.”

  “What do the words say?” Jalis leaned closer. “I can’t quite make them out in this light.”

  Oriken took the sword and rose to his feet. With the blade held close to one of the torches, he read the inscriptions out loud, struggling over the unfamiliar words.

&nb
sp; Ammenfar Blaydos

  Mallak Yldireth

  Oerenos Lachyla Oanvaeld

  Ay Ben Aevyknesa

  “Whatever that means,” Oriken concluded as he sat down and rested the weapon on his lap.

  “The blade of Ammenfar,” Jalis said as she stared across the dark garden. Her tone was almost bored, and Oriken knew that she, like himself, was playing at Dagra’s act of interest. “Then it says King Mallak, I would presume. Oanvaeld might be Kingdom. The rest I don’t know, but I would guess that Ay Ben could mean I Am.”

  “Eternity.” Krea’s voice drifted from within the entranceway, and a moment later she stepped out onto the porch. Rather than the black attire she’d worn while dealing with the corpses, she now wore sandals with laces wrapped around her lower legs, and a pleated dress, clasped at each shoulder with brooches of silver and garnet. “Very well done,” she said, flicking a glance at Jalis. “You have a modest grasp of Old Himaeran.”

  “Language is one of my passions,” Jalis replied tersely.

  Krea crossed the porch to descend the steps.

  “Going somewhere interesting?” Oriken called after her.

  She scoffed and half-turned to look back at him. “Interesting? I’m going to play some games with an entirely deadlier weapon than the one between your thighs.” She raised an eyebrow at the gladius on his lap, though her meaning was far from lost on him.

  “Uh. Well. Have a good one, then.” He raised a hand to tip his absent hat, muttered a curse, and ran his fingers through his hair.

  Krea laughed heartily. “Oh,” she purred, “I shall.” Hurrying down the steps, she melted into the night.

  Oriken caught Jalis’s questioning look and pounced to his feet, slinging the sword into its sheath. “I don’t know about you, but I think I’m ready for bed.”