Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1)

by Michael Watson

  “Let this be a personal warning,” he said to her, voice loud enough in the chaos for Tyrissa to catch his words. “Your husband knows what I want.”

  A shadow emerged from the fog of the attack, Kexal rushing toward the two with sword raised. The Pactbound leapt aside and rolled through the air as the fatal swing fell, drifting away as if he were a puff of cottonseed caught on an updraft. Kexal’s sword hit only the table, the crash of steel on wood echoed by the Pactbound landing directly atop the table Tyrissa crouched behind. She felt her stomach tighten, but the sensation was reassuring, almost empowering. The Pactbound turned to her, glaring, the face beneath the cowl clear.

  Tyrissa recognized the voice, the cloak, the face. He was a specter from the past, one of Tsellien companions that visited Edgewatch and died with her in that cursed temple. The one with the map, though his name eluded her.

  Stand. Fight.

  She didn’t get the chance. The Pactbound glanced back at Kexal, where the Jalarni stood his ground in front of Mrs. Guldres and stared down his opponent with a knowing glare. The cloaked man sheathed his knife and a fierce, source-less wind blasted around the table, pushing the smoke to the outer edges of the room and scattering silverware and plates. Tyrissa could only watch as he leapt upward, cloak billowing in the impossible winds. He cleared the twenty feet to the raised walkways above, landing gracefully before running to a shadowed doorway in the heights of the hall. A lingering, weighty feeling in her gut remained after he was gone, a trace of magick.

  “Ty,” Jesca snapped from below the table.

  “Come out, it’s already over.”

  The smoke was fading now, the attack ending as quick as it begun. The attackers had melted away through the atrium’s numerous exits, lost among the fleeing crowds. Only their handiwork and a few ‘servant’ casualties remained behind. A number of hired guards lay dead or wounded and splashes of blood decorated the walls and planters of the atrium. The once finely dressed crowd of attendees stood disheveled and distraught in scattered small groups, many already leaving with their guards and retainers. The woman in the garish orange and yellow dress still sat in her assigned chair, like the eye of the storm. Kexal and Garth stood over her, trying to rouse the woman from her stunned state.

  Jesca ducked out from under the table and Olivianna followed. Nina emerged last and hurried away without a word, looking mortified and still half-way panicked. Their client brushed herself down, smoothing the wrinkles in her dress and readjusting her hair. With the exception of a dark wine stain across her chest, she was downright presentable. Tyrissa considered that a job well done.

  Their hosts tried to create a semblance of order, sending for medics and tending to the wounded while asking anyone well enough to leave to do so. Tyrissa kept looking up to the suspended vine-covered walkways, hoping in vain to catch another glimpse of the Pactbound. More than anything she felt like she should have done more.

  “I wonder,” Olivianna said once she was suitably in order, “Though the party was ruined, it was notable. Does that make it the right one to be seen at?” She managed to keep a calm face, though pointedly looked away from any of the carnage.

  “I find your priorities baffling,” Tyrissa said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “That’s a real strange way of saying thanks for keeping me safe.”

  Olivianna’s return glare could have melted glass. “How dare you—”

  “Only Talons were attacked,” Jesca said, thankfully changing the subject.

  She was right. Every corpse wore the gold and black insignia of The Striking Talons guild. Many still had their weapons sheathed. They never had a chance. The surviving members of the guild hustled their employers out, but left lingering gazes on their fallen comrades, faces worried. This wasn’t an assassination or kidnapping attempt. This was revenge.

  “Come on,” Jesca said, “Let’s get Miss Alvedo home.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The university’s library had rapidly become Tyrissa’s second home. Whenever she found herself with a few spare hours she would inevitably end up browsing the stacks and shelves. The scholars and students that frequented the library had started to recognize her and returned her cheerful greetings. Today, however, she had an objective. She had procrastinated long enough and it was time to follow up on her actual reason for being in the city. Liran’s tip of the Stone Shaper that the elusive Pact Witch had ‘cured’ was more than a rumor, it had become a brief news sensation in the days after the North Wind left for Morgale. Khalanheim’s dueling daily newspapers had run with the story for a few days, and the library kept archival copies of both papers for posterity. The library staff had been surprised that she wanted to see the news archives, but gave her directions all the same and, worryingly, a lantern.

  Tyrissa stood before a door in a back corner of the library where the books populating the shelves looked exceptionally lonely and underutilized. The door must have been a hold-over from the building’s fortress past. The thick panel of worn oak barely fit in the stone framework and the base of the doorway wasn’t flush with the library floor. ‘Basement Archives’ was stenciled in white paint at eye level. The rust-pitted handle seemed to be decorative since it would not turn when Tyrissa tried it. The door resisted Tyrissa’s first attempt to push it open, but surrendered to a well-placed hip check, its hinges squealing in protest.

  Beyond lay a stairway of steep steps that curved down into darkness like the throat of a great wurm of stone. An exhalation of cool air flowed up from below. Tyrissa sparked the lantern alight and made her way down. The stairwell’s utilitarian masonry spoke to the building’s martial past, with walls of plain gray bricks that met in an arch above her head. Tyrissa let her free hand run along the walls for balance as she descended the spiral for what felt like many floors. The bottom of the stairs spilled out into a long hallway that ran off to the left and right, the passageway broad enough for a pair of armored men to walk abreast. The lantern’s glow highlighted a number of doorways in either direction before fading into the darkness. Directly ahead was another old oaken door labeled ‘News Archives’ in the same white paint as above though the lettering was not as neat and somehow disdainful.

  The door opened with all the resistance of its twin above. Within was a long, narrow storeroom, the walls lined with shelves that reached to the ceiling. Each shelf was ten levels tall, six feet long, and was prominently labeled with a ten year range. Many of the shelves in the rear of the storeroom stood empty for future use. A layer of dust clung to every surface and cobwebs decorated the ceiling, the dangling threads stained a spectral and pallid yellow by her lantern.

  Tyrissa paced the length of the occupied shelves to gain her bearings. The years were in the New Khalan Calendar, a reckoning that began in the year after the Rift’s formation and denoted as ‘AR’. The earliest date on the shelves was 192 AR, though many gaps were present in the shelves until the 210s. Tyrissa found the least dusty shelf that corresponded to the current decade of 251-260 AR, where the bottom three levels were empty. She set the lantern down and opened all of the vents to create four wedges of golden light on the floor.

  She thumbed through the 257 shelf until she found the prints for Emeraldbloom, the sixth month. That was when the North Wind caravan left Khalanheim. The archival versions of the newspapers were printed on oversized pieces of thick card stock, twice as large the cheap paper editions sold on the streets and with none of the cheap ink that rubbed off onto your fingers. Tyrissa pulled out a double fistful, around ten days’ worth of the two papers. Their content seemed barren when stripped of advertisements that adorned the pages of the commercial versions she’d seen hawked from the little, competing news carts or drifting through the streets, discarded.

  She looked about for a place to sit, but such comforts were absent. Aside from shelves the only other resident of the storeroom was a wooden stepladder of questionable sturdiness. Tyrissa settled down cross-legged on
the floor and rotated the lantern to angle a wedge of light across the stack of newspapers. As she flipped through the record of Emeraldbloom 257, it became clear that Khalan news largely consisted glorified gossip over the ins and outs of the city’s elite, the soul crushing minutia of financial stories and guild politics, and a trickle of news from further afield, mostly from Felarin or Rhonia. Tyrissa had her fill of the first in the past two weeks of standing watch over Olivianna Alvedo’s social life. Of the two daily papers, The Times of Khalanheim seemed more concerned with the financials and The Daily Coin with gossip.

  The story Tyrissa sought started to emerge on the twenty-fifth of Emeraldbloom. ‘Shaper Guild Schism?’ asked one Times headline, the accompanying article talking in vague terms of a dispute within the Pactbound group and linking it to the unexpected halting of work on a new Khalan Southwest guildhall in the city of Kelnburg on the Upper Rilder River. By the twenty-seventh the Shapers had closed ranks, retreating to their assumed headquarters in the caverns beneath the city and leaving numerous unfinished jobs across the Khalan Federation. The Coin picked up the story at that point, applying a speculative interpretation of reality and its wealth of unnamed ‘contacts’ to expand the drama. From there, the timeline of events was a jumbled mess and no better that getting the story from the rumor mill taverns of Dockside or Crossing. The Shapers were collapsing. No, they were simply on strike. No, they were at war deep underground against an army of crystalline golems. Each newspaper ran with their own narrative, rarely agreeing on anything but the basics. The story faded from the headlines by the thirty-first of Emeraldbloom, rapidly falling in status from first page news to last.

  Tyrissa went back to the shelf to fetch another grip of newspapers from the following month of Opalstorm. On the second of the month the Shapers began to return to their contracted jobs without any explanation of their absence, and by the fourth all attention was centered on the arrival of a large trade delegation from Rhonian Empire. The Times dropped the Shaper Schism story altogether, but there was a final article on the subject wedged in the bottom corner of the last page of the Coin from the tenth of Opalstorm. A self-described intrepid reporter sought out and found the source of the Shaper story among the mines and smelters of Under Forge. A Stone Shaper named Settan had chosen to set aside his Earth Pact and managed to get it removed by the oft-rumored Pact mystic or ‘Ghost Witch’ as the writer called her. The Times preferred ‘The Pact Witch’, which was the more common term from what little Tyrissa could find on the topic. The interview was brief as Settan was silent on any further details, especially on what the Stone Shapers had done in their few days of seclusion.

  The smell of burnt oil hung heavy in the air when Tyrissa stood and stretched away the hour of being hunched over newspaper articles. She replaced the archival prints, taking care to keep them in chronological order even though she suspected that she was the first to ever reference them. She hummed a cheerful tune to herself all the while. Settan. Under Forge. A name and a place to start her search for this ‘Pact Witch’ in earnest. It would just be a matter of finding the time. After the incident at Khalan Southwest’s autumn gala, requests for additional protection had soared even higher than before, stretching the ranks of security guilds like the Cadre thin. Aside from recurring jobs with Alvedo, Tyrissa spent half her days watching a variety of merchant wives and daughters go about their (often frivolous) business, and half her nights on long, quiet vigils at some vault or storehouse, counting stars and checking shadows. Neither type of job had a scrap of action.

  Pure havoc on any kind of sleep schedule. The very thought triggered a yawn.

  Tyrissa lingered in the hall before ascending the stairs back up to the library, her sense of exploration urging her to wander. She turned left and followed the passageway, the swaying lantern light revealing nothing but more rough gray stone. Many of the doorways where the hall once split into other passages or rooms were blocked by walls of smaller red bricks of more recent construction. She paused in front of one and saw that the masonry was uneven and hasty. Most had gaps along top, the rectangular bricks failing to cover the older arched heights. Eventually the tunnel itself ended in an abrupt wall built of the grayish-white stones that composed the university’s new walls and buildings. She would have to ask one of the archivists how extensive the remaining tunnels were. Or explore it herself, permission or no.

  Her lantern flickered, running low on oil. Outside, daylight would be burning away just as quickly and she had another appointment to keep today. Tyrissa hurried back down the tunnel to the winding stairs, making plans to follow her new lead as soon as possible.

  The owner of the leatherworking shop was just about to lock up for the evening, in the midst of pulling down a metal grating across the window of his shop, when Tyrissa rushed up blurting out apologies and clutching the slip of paper with her order details. She had spent longer than expected in the library and lost time weaving through the press of humanity that clogged the major streets at the end of the workday. The man had a face as toughened as his products that could have deflected a sword, to say nothing of her pleas, but he simply nodded and pushed the grating back up.

  “Wait here,” he said before disappearing into his shop. He emerged a few minutes later with Tyrissa’s order, a leather harness built of deep brown straps. One length of leather ran down the back and had the strip of magnetized blocks securely pinned to it. The base had a metal buckle like a belt for adjusting the fit. The buckle came too close to the magnets and jumped up, sticking to the dull gray strip.

  After accepting the harness with set of three rapid ‘thank you’, Tyrissa threw it on over her shirt, shrugging and tugging it into place. The magnets were neatly centered on her back, the strap housing them following her spine before splitting in two to loop over her shoulders and descend down her sides. The fit was a little off due to it being on top of her clothes, but otherwise was exactly what she imagined. She paid the balance left on the bill, added a gilder for being a bother at closing time, and ran home like a child racing towards a new toy. It wasn’t far from the truth.

  Tyrissa was a blur at home, snagging a piece of day old bread and stripping down to a white linen shirt and loose trousers. Then she was back out in the narrow street, the evening dim in the growing twilight, her staff in hand. The harness fit much better over a thin undershirt. Slowly, Tyrissa maneuvered the steeloak staff behind her back, finding the magnetized plate with the staff’s central metal band. The two came together with a satisfying metallic snap. She could see one end of the staff above her head, clearing by a good foot. Below, the other end hovered over the ground between her feet. She took a few experimental steps, and found it was quite manageable, if awkward at first, like wearing a long thin backpack.

  In a smooth motion she reached up, grasped the staff, and pulled it forward. Anchored by her body, the harness held fast and the staff snapped free, rolling around her shoulder to be caught by her other hand.

  Oh yes.

  Tyrissa spent the next hour practicing many different ways of drawing and replacing her staff: over either shoulder, her back near a wall, horizontally around her stomach. Much of the time was spent fumbling and tripping over her limbs like she never held the weapon before. Most draws required considerable space, but soon she was whipping the steeloak around with all the force of a hammer blow. As full dark descended, her body was sweat-soaked while her mind buzzed with possibilities and situations. She slept well that night, her worries and objectives temporarily forgotten.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Tyrissa set out for Under Forge an hour after dawn when the morning air still possessed a hint of chill that promised to burn away into a warm day. Tyrissa couldn’t help but compare the weather to home where they might have seen their first, fleeting snows by now. A full week had passed since she resolved to find Settan the former Stone Shaper, but the growing paranoia in the city showed no signs of abating anytime soon and the Cadre had plenty of contracts to fill. She w
ore her guild coat, hoping that the status would be of some minor use, and the new harness fit comfortably underneath. Her staff stuck firm to the strip of magnets through the fabric the coat and swayed above her shoulder as she walked into the northwestern district of Khalanheim known as Forge.

  Forge bustled with activity despite it being a day of rest in the Khalanheim work-week. As she walked up the main boulevard known as Smith’s Row, Tyrissa passed countless smithies and factories that showed no sign of slowed work. Many buildings had the peaked gables of other neighborhoods, but all wore soot-stained facades with none of the ornamentation of the rest of Khalanheim. The ubiquitous shops and markets of the city were limited to a few scattered food vendors. This was a neighborhood of pure production that left the style and selling to the professionals in other districts. A forest of chimneys and smokestacks lined the rooftops and belched out steady plumes of smoke that the riftwinds carried up and away from the city. Color was in short supply, with everything shaded gray, black or brown except the clean and bright guild crests that hung over every building’s main entry. Workers dressed in simple, stout brown clothes and leather aprons weaved their way through traffic dominated by oxen-drawn cargo carts that plodded along the timeworn streets.

  Tyrissa followed the dominant flow of traffic and came to her first waypoint: the intersection of Smith’s Row and an equally broad avenue known simply as North Street. This was the heart of Forge, an orderly square lined by the most prestigious production companies. Here Smith’s Row split around a tall half-circle tunnel entrance at the center of the square. Cargo carts bearing piles of ore and metals streamed in and out of the tunnel, passing through a check point before carrying the fruits of the underground to their respective buyers. The Central guardsmen manning the checkpoint paid fleeting attention to passing foot traffic, giving Tyrissa only a cursory glance as she entered the under district.