by Sam Hawke
“Where are we?” I asked, scanning the countryside. Our boat sailed along among dozens of others, a thicket of dark, quiet creatures making swift pace down the river. Unmarred green stretched away in both directions, giving no hint of our position.
Garan shook his head. “Not sure. I’ve been with you below, remember? But we look to be making good time; the wind and the current are helping us.”
“Honor-down, I hope we’re not too late.” I stared north. We’d see the city long before we arrived; would it be a smoking ruin?
A burly wetlander striding past the other side of the boat gave us a sidelong look, and Garan took my hand. “Please, let’s go below,” he said, and I agreed, with another sigh. I didn’t want to get my guard in trouble, but couldn’t help dreading returning to the damp little box of a room.
Soon. Soon we’ll be back, and Aven will save the city.
Garan shut my door behind me and I took a seat on the bunk. As long as I don’t go mad down here in the meantime. I shut my eyes and lay there, listening to Garan’s whistling and trying not to think too much.
False goaberry
DESCRIPTION: Fruit from the gravalana bush, often called “false goaberry” for its resemblance to the popular fruit, but distinguishable by the spiral pattern on the leaves.
SYMPTOMS: Contact with juice causes a burning rash on the skin, distinctive with large, hivelike growths, worsening with touch. Symptoms of consumption include burning sensation in mouth and throat, ulcers and bleeding from gums, internal bleeding, death.
PROOFING CUES: Intensely sour flavor, leaving the mouth dry; prickling, tingling sensation on tongue, cheeks, gums.
27
Jovan
It took me precious time to convince Tain to stay in bed. He staggered as far as his bedroom door, struggling to make his way in the blackness. “I need to be out there!” he yelled, some semblance of his old volume returning. But he was weak as a day-old kitsa, and it wasn’t hard to wrestle him to safety.
“And how are you going to defend yourself in this state?” I demanded. “And how easy would it be for Marco to finish you off in a crowd?”
“If you gave me something—I know you’ve got things that perk you up, what is it, that mineral the javelin thrower was using a few years back? I could—”
“Darpar? No.” I frowned. “It’s a poison. Even if you were at full health it wouldn’t be worth the risk. You need to rest. You’re staying here with Salvea and Davi and I’ll be back to let you know what’s happening as soon as I can.”
Salvea interrupted with a polite little cough before I could leave. “Credo Jovan, have you seen my daughter?”
“I’m sorry, Salvea, no.”
“Oh.” She twisted her hands together. At her feet, unusually silent, Davi leaned into her skirts and stared up at me, wide-eyed and accusing. “She wasn’t in bed when the bell rang.”
It wasn’t even dawn yet; still dark and a fraction chilly. What nighttime explorations had she gone on this time? My heart grew heavy as I imagined her spying on Marco or something equally dangerous. “I’ll look out for her down near the bridge,” I promised.
The city was buzzing as people streamed in one direction or another in the moonlight, some running toward the lake and others away. It was a starry, bright night and as soon as I had a clear line of sight to the water it was obvious what had happened. The far shore crawled with activity; the rebels had built what looked like portable platforms which extended out into the lake, and onto them were being wheeled great catapults, now with an angle to the Finger. On the west half of Trickster’s, a dark mass of troops advanced slowly. Out of reach of our torches and lit only by moonlight, I could barely make out their troops, shielded and in formation, presumably protecting further machines.
Their catapults were outside the range of the tower’s archers, and they wouldn’t risk advancing any of their soldiers across the bridge until they had done sufficient damage to the tower. They’d be open targets marching on the bridge, vulnerable to our archers from the shore and from the tower. By the time I reached the Finger, all the new archers’ slots on the wall extensions were filled, and flaming, oil-filled basins stood at the ready. Across the water, drums and a droning chant echoed eerily. It was meant to intimidate us, and it was working.
I raced up the back stairs and to the top level. Marco showed me to the arrow slits so I could see the catapults being loaded. “They have reassembled their machines,” he told me, grim. “That is what they have been waiting for. They will shoot at us from safety over there until they breach the gate.”
“What do we do?” I asked. “We can’t lead a charge over there; they’ve ten times the men we have, and it’d be us being picked off on the bridge.”
He ran a hand over his head. “The Builders’ Guild is bringing our other catapults down. We must destroy theirs before they destroy the tower. If their troops on the bridge advance, we will also need to be ready to meet them.”
It was only then I remembered Marco was our enemy; in the distraction of the attack I’d dropped back into old patterns. As he left the room, already shouting orders, I shook my head. Some part of me still found it difficult to picture the humble and competent man as a villain. Which is how he fooled us all for so long. But why?
As I descended, the atmosphere among the men and women manning it was cold as the round stone walls. Everyone looked frightened.
“They’re in place!” someone yelled, and I found a spot behind the new wall to hoist myself up to see. The different-colored stones had been cobbled together from an assortment of other buildings and remade into this fat, triangular extension to the tower; it couldn’t compare to the strength of the city walls, but Eliska’s Guild had done the best they could in limited time.
“Loooad!” someone cried. Our own catapult, the one built directly on the tower roof, was hidden by the lip of the tower; it now burst into action, sending a great chunk of rock hurtling over the water toward the opposing machines. Even their drums seemed to hold their breath a moment as the rock spun soundlessly in the air …
… and crashed short of the line of weapons, plopping harmlessly into the lake in a shower of white spray blossoming in the dark.
The rebel army cheered, a great roar of sound that drained my spirit. They retaliated immediately; fear drove me down from my perch on the wall as the stones sailed over the lake. The smash of stone on stone shook the structure with each deafening impact. From the sound of it, perhaps half of their shots had reached some part of the Finger.
“Five in the lake, Credo,” Chen called down to me, her face oddly cheerful underneath her helmet. “Three on the bridge, no harm done there. Four hit us. No damage yet.”
But they had our entire lower city to dismantle, and therefore an endless supply of projectiles. We wouldn’t hold out forever.
A cheer from our side spun me around. Eliska led a procession of siege weapons across the grass, all on wheels. Some were catapults, but others I didn’t recognize; low things like flat carts, loaded with massive metal javelins.
“Not much testing done on these yet,” Eliska told me as I met her. “But they’re more mobile than the catapults and we should be able to get them through the gate on the bridge and shoot at anyone approaching over it.”
Behind me, another series of impacts and splashes signaled another round of fire. I suppressed a shiver. “Good luck,” I said, moving out of her way.
I moved back out of range behind the trenches nearby with a crowd of others as the new machines rolled out onto the east side of Trickster’s. Budua the Scribe-Guilder joined me there, gray like a ghost in the moonlight. We watched together, helpless, as the catapults exchanged fire. The rebels, cautious of our new javelin machines, were not yet advancing over the bridge. The first stone smashed into our makeshift wall and I winced as a spiderweb of cracks sprang out from the impact zone. Beside me, Budua didn’t flinch.
“Credo Jovan!” A small voice came through the noise. Little E
rel, Tain’s messenger, had spotted me and scurried toward us. “I’ve been looking for you, Credo.”
I glanced around me. Budua pressed her lips together, frowning; she now knew the truth about Tain. “What is it, Erel?” I dropped my voice, trying not to worry. Behind us another mighty crash shook the wall. Had Tain relapsed?
“Um, it’s the lady. Hadrea.”
My heart pounded a distracting rhythm in my head. “What’s happened?”
“I’ve been trying to find you, Credo, but every time I go somewhere you’ve moved somewhere else.” His tone rang with the exasperation of a twelve-year-old discovering the world wouldn’t move in convenient predictability.
The crowd cheered suddenly and we all spun around to see that one of our catapult strikes from the Finger had successfully hit one of the extended pier platforms the rebels had built over the lake. The platform jerked and tilted and their catapult began to slide toward the water. I tapped Erel’s shoulder and he snapped his gaping mouth shut.
“She left a message for you earlier. Before the bells rang. She said … um, that she was going to the Oll Woorin.”
“To the what?”
More cheers as the frantic rebels lost control of the sliding machine and the floating platform tipped more dramatically, sending the catapult toppling almost gracefully into the silky waters of the lake. This time I had to gently take Erel’s chin and redirect his gaze to me.
“Sorry, Credo. I think she said the Oll Woorin. But I don’t know what that means. She didn’t explain! She said you would know.”
Another enormous crack split the air as our wall took a hit. Across the water, the rebels started up another chant, and unease spread around me, a palpable thing.
Frustrated, I shook my head. “I don’t know what that means, Erel. She must have told you something else.” Oll Woorin, I thought. The name tickled with familiarity. Where have I heard that before? My tired brain felt woolly as I scanned the lakeside blankly, trying to think. I couldn’t remember where I’d heard the word.
“Os-Woorin, do you mean?” Budua said suddenly, and Erel nodded in relief. “Oh, yes, Scribe-Guilder. It could have been that, now you say it.”
That I had definitely heard, but through the increasing pounding of my heartbeat in my head and the rising chant from across the water, I couldn’t catch the thought. I looked helplessly at Budua, and the Scribe-Guilder cocked her head. “From the song, Credo. The children’s rhyme. Toil in secret/day and night/build it up/get it right/work so hard so we don’t fall/the great Os-Woorin saved us all.…”
“Old wooden, you mean. The great old wooden saved us all.” Everyone knew that rhyme; the stacking game that accompanied it was played on every street corner and in every garden in the city. Falling from the top of the stack was the cause of many a childhood injury, but it never dropped in popularity.
Budua shook her head. “No. Oh, I know that’s how the children sing it these days. Even in your day, I suppose. But they’re not the words. Os-Woorin, not old wooden. What is an ‘old wooden’?”
“What’s an Os-Woorin?” I countered, but already my brain was tickling again. Os-Woorin. It sounded even more familiar, and it wasn’t because of the rhyme.
“I don’t know,” Budua said. “But that’s the right word, I’m certain of that.”
Another crash and then a hush on our side. “Darfri magic,” I heard someone whisper, and as if indeed the Darfri had summoned their spirits across the lake around their catapults a heavy mist was forming, obscuring our view of their machines. I shivered. The lake was often misty at dawn, but this was something different. Had they dropped some chemical in the lake that was reacting with the water? It was growing harder to disregard or explain away the strangeness.
And then my memory triggered. Of course; Hadrea had told me. The great spirit of the lake, that was its name: Os-Woorin. Our history books might have skimmed over the old religion but sometimes truth was buried in children’s rhymes and stories. So Hadrea had gone to the Os-Woorin? What did that mean? Back to the shrine Eliska and her lover had built in the cave? Did she intend to try to ask a boon of the lake spirit herself? It hadn’t worked for Eliska and Dara, and presumably the rebel Darfri would have tried the same thing. But I wondered; maybe Eliska had given her some other idea about how to contact Os-Woorin. I had sometimes suspected Hadrea knew more about Darfri magic than she was perhaps meant to. Did she know something Eliska did not?
I left Budua and went back to the Finger. The Stone-Guilder was on the roof with the catapult, wind whipping her hair, helping with adjustments to the machine. I dared a peek over the edge; the mist had hidden the rebel platforms entirely, but even as I watched a stone hurtled from the cloud and struck the base of the tower near the bridge, and we were all jolted by the impact. Someone beside me cried out as flying debris hit her in the face. I ducked back to safety.
“What is it, Jovan?” Eliska didn’t even look up at me.
“You saw Hadrea yesterday didn’t you? Did she ask you about the catacombs?”
She glanced up at that. “She took the maps. I brought them to you at the Manor yesterday afternoon and she said she’d pass them on.” She pulled me backward and out of the way as the operators began loading another immense stone.
“I still haven’t seen her. She was up before the bells this morning and I thought she might have gone down there.”
Eliska dropped her voice, checking around her quickly for listening ears. “She was interested. There was a room on the map marked with the Darfri symbol for Os-Woorin, the lake spirit. I thought it must be an old shrine. That was what gave me the original idea to … well, you know. But it was well into the caves, probably right under the lake itself, so given what Chancellor Caslav told me, I never went there, and told Hadrea not to as well.”
I almost laughed. As if Hadrea could ever be told not to do something she wanted to.
“Ready to fire!” someone called, and Eliska shook her head apologetically. “Jovan, I can’t talk right now.”
It was tempting to go the caves then and there, but I was Tain’s only source of news of the attack on the bridge. I set back at a run, thinking hard.
* * *
“I told you, stop worrying. I’m fine. I’d be better if you gave me something—”
I looked up at Tain sharply. “I told you. These aren’t substances to take lightly at the best of times. In your condition I don’t know what they’d do to your body.”
“All right, all right. I’m feeling much stronger anyway.” Tain watched me, bemused, as I sorted through stacks of journals I’d brought from our apartments. The history of our family. These records predated Silasta and even Sjona, giving insight into our ancestors in the formative days of their reign.
“Is this just about Hadrea?” he asked as I flicked through the older hand-bound journals. “We don’t even know she’s down there. She could have gone anywhere.”
“It’s not just that. There’s something about those tunnels, something about this lake spirit reference. We don’t know much about it, but religion was important back then. Os-Woorin found its way into a children’s rhyme that’s lasted all this time. What do you think that means?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” he said. “It’s just a rhyme.”
“Etan once told me there can be fascinating history in rhymes children sing,” I murmured, turning the old pages carefully. The words ran back and forth in my head, mocking me. Was there some link between the rhyme and what Hadrea had told me about how the first Chancellor had summoned the lake spirit and blessed Silasta? Why weren’t there any references in history books?
When children played the old wooden game, they formed piles, stacking on one another on the ground. The bolder ones sat on each other’s shoulders during the “build it up” stage, and giggled as they wobbled, trying to stay up as they sang “so we don’t fall.” It was a song about building something, obviously, but not something wooden. “Are they talking about building the city?”
Here, this was the right era. My ancestor Tresa, the first proofer—though she had just been a close ally of the Chancellor with an interest in chemistry, then, not truly a proofer. I scanned. There wasn’t much—innocuous notes about experiments, indecipherable comments about people I had never heard of. Some blank sections that looked like she’d started to take notes on something and never finished. The strange thing, the thing that bothered me, was why my own family’s notes were so absent mention of spirits or ritual. If everyone was religious back then, even if it had fallen out of fashion and thus records over time, why had I no memory of Darfri beliefs in our own family journals?
“I guess it’s just a song about the Os-Woorin blessing, then.”
“Maybe.” This next section had several blank pages. I stopped. Once or twice might have been an error, an unfinished task. But my family wasn’t known for that. I smoothed the paper with my fingers. This journal was older than my family code. Sensitive information might have been conveyed another way.
It was still dark, and there were better lamps in the outer room. I left Tain on the bed and unpacked my pouches on the table by the door; both needed checking and refilling anyway. I took the jar of naftate, which I’d had out as a detector for manita fungus, and spread it thinly across the blank page, pulse thumping. Had Tresa known the trick with geraslin ink?
“Jov, what is it?”
The light still wasn’t good; was that a glimmer of color? I laid the journal directly under the lamp and stared at the page, willing something to happen.
“Nothing,” I said at last, returning to Tain, disappointment heavy in me. “I thought there might have been something important there.”
“Mmm.” His interest had faded. “I think I need to be down there.”
I looked up from the journal. “At the front? Are you mad?”
“Tell me honestly, how’s morale? Do the people still have hope?”
I dropped my gaze back to the book, avoiding his. The mood of the trenches had been apparent even from my short visit, and I wouldn’t lie to my Chancellor or my friend. “People are saying we won’t last the night. Some of our people have fled and are hiding in the city rather than wait to defend the bridge or the trenches. They’re frightened. They think the rebels will use magic to defeat us.” Maybe they will, I thought, my brain twitching with unease at the clash between what I had observed and what I could rationally explain.
