Stillbright

by Daniel M Ford

  One of them, a thick rod with its handle wrapped in leather, that would heat over a good fire in the time it took to simply lay it in the coals. The dwarf had closed many a wound with it, sealed them with his potions soaking the tissues, keeping away the things a man feared more than a wound itself.

  Allystaire remembered almost a score of years ago, the dwarf standing over him as three men held him down. Having cut away an arrow from the meat of young Allystaire’s thigh, sniffing the barbed point and harumphing as he consigned it to the flames with a flick of his hand.

  “Sorry, son,” he’d said. “They’ve dipped the arrowheads in their own jakes. It’s for the best. On three.” Then, without counting at all, the dwarf plunged the heated rod into the young knight’s wound. There was the smell of his own flesh burning before the world collapsed into the pain of it.

  There, Allystaire told himself, snapping back into the now, into the sorcerer standing in front of him. He screamed still, but the scream turned into an improbable laugh.

  “I have had that from a dwarf who meant to save my life,” he spat, when the sorcerer lowered his hand, having taken half a step back in confusion.

  “I suppose I must use all the Delvings,” the sorcerer said, ignoring the Paladin’s exclamation. “One at a time, of course.”

  That energy was directed at Allystaire again. He half expected his skin to start smoking. The light extending the half span from the sorcerer’s finger seemed, by turns, smoky, greasy, and incandescent. That may have been his mind simply searching aimlessly to understand what was happening.

  What Allystaire did understand, what he knew, was that this was a pain he’d felt before. It hurt certainly. Hurt enough so that he screamed till his throat was raw. But he’d felt it before, or something enough like it to call himself its master instead of being mastered by it.

  Abruptly, it ceased. And the quality of the light bathing his skin changed, becoming thicker, less translucent, as did its form. Instead of a single ray boring—or seeming to—a hole into his chest, the sorcerer raised his hand above Allystaire’s head and let it fall down upon him like slow drops of rain.

  It was a different kind of agony, and it engulfed his whole body. But he didn’t have to search long or think hard.

  “The battle in front of some shit-hole keep in Harlach,” he groaned. Inwardly he remembered trying to carry a wall defended by starving, exhausted men. Without anything else left, they’d boiled water and poured it over the walls. Some had splashed along his neck and inside his armor, scalded him. Other men took it worse, he reminded himself. Not other men. Poorer men. They always did, he added, a moment of clarity amidst the pain.

  Still the sorcerer said nothing, did nothing, except guide droplets of power through Allystaire’s body.

  The paladin clamped his teeth shut, cutting off his cries of pain. He swallowed them, buried them behind a sudden loathing of his memories.

  This drew a humorless laugh from the sorcerer. “Try as you might, you cannot resist the pain of the Delvings. None can. Give into it. Perhaps, if you are lucky, your mind will untether itself before I am done, and you will feel only the dimmest pain before I feed my divinations with your life. This is, however, unlikely. You will end begging to serve me. You will scream it before long.”

  “Scream? Aye, I will. Beg to serve you? Never that,” Allystaire grated through clenched teeth. Goddess help me, never that, he silently prayed.

  * * *

  It may have been turns. It may have been moments. It may have been days. Allystaire wasn’t sure. In the midst of the pains the sorcerer inflicted with new manifestations of his power, it was all Allystaire could do to search his memories and find something to tell him that he had survived the thing once and would do so again.

  All too often the memories he sought reminded him that others hadn’t survived.

  When the sorcerer tried a kind of cutting energy that sliced at him, Allystaire laughed. The lance at Aldacren keep. A dirk trying to find my ribs while I throttled the knight wielding it, both of our weapons lost. The captain’s sword in the warehouse in Bend.

  When a faint web of lines, pulsing darkly red in the air flew at him and sank into his skin, surely he screamed. But he remembered being unhorsed by a lance for the first time, the feeling of helplessness, the way the shock and the pain hit his whole body all at once as he crashed to the ground.

  I could barely crawl out of bed the next day. I was a mass of bruise. I was perhaps twelve summers old. And still they made me sit a horse and tilt against the quintain the next day.

  Finally, lowering his hands, the sorcerer—his measured voice betraying his seething anger better than any yelling might have done—said, “Why do you keep recounting these pathetic anecdotes?”

  It was only then that Allystaire realized he’d been speaking them all aloud, shouting them while he screamed.

  He didn’t answer. Instead he lifted his head and found the sorcerer ‘s eyes. It was easy enough to do now, as they had started to slowly pulse with thin lines of red like that which drifted from his fingertips.

  “I realize that you will pride yourself on not answering even my most petty questions. This will prove foolish. In the main I do not need your answers.”

  Allystaire thought about summoning the strength to spit, discarded the idea, and simply met the gaze.

  With an exasperated sigh, the sorcerer turned and vanished in a rush of red light, leaving Allystaire in complete darkness.

  Chapter 2

  Sounds like Cursing

  Aturn or two before she went walking on the quays, Idgen Marte found Torvul outside a metal-monger’s shop along a street full of smiths of every description. The air was thick with smoke and the faint burnt scent of hot metal and it rang with hammers, though they slowly petered out as the afternoon wore on.

  Inside, the alchemist conversed with a fellow dwarf in the harsh but flowing consonance of their shared language. The other dwarf was a bit taller than Torvul, and had a thick but carefully trimmed soot-black beard covering his face. When she came a few more steps into the shop, the conversation abruptly ceased as both turned to look at her, but Torvul smiled and said to the other dwarf, “She’s a friend, Murnock.”

  As Idgen Marte walked to his side, the dwarf said to her, “You won’t mind if we continue in our native tongue—it is a more satisfying language to barter in than what you people use, after all, and besides, I can’t thoroughly defraud the good ironmonger here if I don’t use Dwarfish.”

  “I speak the barony tongue too, wanderer,” the other dwarf said, and his tone, Idgen Marte thought, was a bit cold for a man hoping to make a sale. “You’ll defraud me in no tongue at all.”

  “The problem for you, Murnock, is that when I outwit a man in a bargain, which is to say when I make a bargain, he doesn’t realize it till his deathbed.”

  “Cease your nattering and let’s finish up. Past time for beer and bread.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Torvul said, his voice suddenly honeyed. “But I couldn’t possibly pay more than three or four silver links per rod of your bar stock.”

  “Price is a gold link per, ‘less it’s a lot-price, in which case I can go as low as six silver.”

  “I only need two rods and I’d sooner walk out of here less my balls than two gold links for iron like this. Five silver links, not a bent copper-half more.”

  “I’ll take no less than eight.”

  Torvul snorted and pushed away from the counter, holding his hands up in mock disgust. “Then I’ll find another iron-monger.” He turned and started to walk out of the shop. He was at the door when the other dwarf smashed a fist against his counter and cursed in their native tongue, then barked out, “Six!”

  I think he cursed, Idgen Marte thought. It all sounds like cursing.

  Torvul pivoted on his heel and smoothly walked back to the counter, alread
y digging in the purse he’d produced from up a sleeve. “I want to pick my own bars,” he said, before pulling free three linked chains of four bright circles of silver and laying them on the counter. Almost instantly, they were swept up by the other dwarf’s hand.

  The dwarf grumbled, but he took the money, then lifted up a hinged section of his counter. Idgen Marte quickly followed him through the door behind the counter and out into the larger part of the building where metal was stored in stacks; it was mostly iron, but she saw stacks of white lead, green copper, others she couldn’t identify. Torvul gravitated instantly to a pyramidal stack of thick iron rods, and knelt down, tilting his head towards them and inhaling deeply through his nose. His eyes widened, briefly, but from where Murnock stood, he couldn’t have seen.

  Torvul made a show of sorting through them, sniffing around the entire pile, tapping one or two with his fingertip—but Idgen Marte noticed that he went right back to the bottom and carefully separated out the first two he’d sniffed. He picked them up, handed one to Idgen Marte, and the two made for the door. They were almost out when the shopkeeper burst out with another rockslide of Dwarfish. Idgen Marte turned to listen, watching their faces carefully.

  Torvul looked pained, his jaw tightening and his eyes narrowing just a moment before he answered. Idgen Marte couldn’t pick out where one word ended and another began, but she could’ve sworn she heard the word Thornhurst tucked into Torvul’s response. Then the dwarf turned and left so quickly she was stuck standing in the doorway with an iron bar in one hand.

  When they were ten paces from the storefront, Torvul shook off whatever had bothered him and let out a cackle. “Still got it. Could’ve taken him to three if I wanted to—but the poor benighted bastard has no nose for the metal at all, and half a wagonfull of hungry mouths ‘round him.”

  “And you didn’t because?”

  Torvul shrugged, and pointed his free hand vaguely skyward. “Don’t want to anger Her Ladyship. I figure I can bargain shrewd, I just can’t rob a man blind anymore.” He sniffed disdainfully, and said, “It’s like deliberately leaving half a vein of ore in the tunnel. Goes against everything I was brought up to believe—there was actually a cult a few hundred years ago, preached that we ought to leave some of everything—ores, gems, where we found it, to appease the rock and the spirits inhabiting it.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Nothing good,” Torvul said, darkly. “Now. Where is our man?”

  Idgen Marte sighed, shifted the burden of the rod she was carrying, and pointed with a free hand towards the distant towers of the keep. “There.”

  Torvul whirled on her. “What? Why did you say nothing?”

  “He was summoned. Not arrested. Invited.”

  “And he agreed to go?”

  “Well, he was asked by a squad of soldiers—looked solid types, too.” She glanced around, and said, “We shouldn’t be talking about this on the street.”

  Torvul nodded and quickened his pace, and soon enough they arrived at the inn he’d taken rooms at and unburdened themselves of their cargo. Torvul stroked the edge of one of the rods, and said, “Got traces of other things in it. With some coal and the right fire, I’ll make steel out of this that could string a harp.”

  “What’re you planning to make?”

  Torvul shrugged. “This n’that. You’ll see. Now—Allystaire went to the Dunes?”

  Idgen Marte sat down in one of the chairs the room provided, surprised that it came cushioned. “Aye—he told me to wait till morning. That if we hadn’t heard, we ought to, well…go find him, I s’spose.”

  Torvul spat into the unlit fireplace. “He’s a fool.”

  “If he had resisted, maybe that squad couldn’t have taken us, but the city’s full of hundreds more soldiers—campaign season is over.”

  “Haven’t they farms to go back to? Mills? Fishing boats?”

  “Some, surely. Not all.”

  “Well—what do we do?”

  Idgen Marte shifted uncomfortably on the chair. “Wait till morning?”

  Torvul shook his head. “I don’t like it. We don’t know what’s going on there. Could be he’s already dead, or in chains, tortured.”

  “And it could be he’s having a bottle of brandy with the Baron and all is well.”

  “How much are you willing to bet on that?”

  Idgen Marte let out a breath and looked down at the floor, lacing her fingers. She tapped her boot on the floorboard once, twice, then said, “I think if he was dead, we would know it. Yet I hate sitting and waiting.”

  “I could try and bluff us in.”

  She raised her head and glared at him briefly. “Are Baronial Seats accustomed to allowing dwarfish peddlers in?”

  “Point taken,” Torvul agreed, with an upraised index finger. “Nightfall?”

  Idgen Marte stood up suddenly and wrapped a hand around the hilt of her sword. “I don’t know. I don’t know and I hate this…sitting, waiting, planning, wondering. I’ve never liked commanding, and this is why. I’d rather react than plan—”

  “Idgen Marte,” Torvul said, his voice smoothed and calming. “Her Ladyship didn’t choose you for no reason. You’ve been followin’ Allystaire’s lead for months now, and I don’t blame you. He’s an easy man t’follow, and that’s precisely why this Baron is probably scared of him. And you know if you want to get into the keep, there’s no walls that can keep you out. Aye?”

  Idgen Marte took a deep breath, her eyes still on her boots, and nodded. “Aye.”

  “Good. I don’t think we wait till morning. Nightfall—you get inside, at least.”

  “What’ll you do?”

  “Doubtlessly something brilliant.”

  “Haven’t the faintest idea, have you?”

  “Ideas are but a very small part of brilliance,” Torvul said, with a wave of his hand. “And no rescue should go on empty stomachs.” He glared at the fireplace. “Or cold feet. That’s a bit of a Dwarfish saying, really, though it’s not rescue so much as ‘moving gold from one vault to another under threat of robbery,’ but it’s got a similar sense.”

  Idgen Marte snorted. “Take your sayings and go get us food and fire.”

  Torvul nodded and headed for the door, then paused and turned. “Whatever’s going on, Idgen Marte, we’ll find him. We’ve got too much work left to do. She wouldn’t let it end like this.”

  Idgen Marte smiled faintly, but said, “She’s not the only god in the fight, I think.”

  Torvul smiled in return. “She’s the only one who’s got us on her side.”

  Chapter 3

  The Boy

  Allystaire wasn’t sure how long he’d lain on the edge of unconsciousness in the total darkness of the room when he was suddenly startled to wakefulness by a quiet but steady voice.

  “What were you speaking of while Bhimanzir tested you?”

  The voice was soft, a young boy’s voice, or a woman’s, he really couldn’t tell. The sudden intrusion of noise into his aching, pain-wracked senses brought him to full alertness, his tingling wrists training against their chains. “What? Who is there?”

  “It annoyed him very much,” the voice went on. Allystaire couldn’t place the accent; it certainly wasn’t Baronial, or Islandman. Keersvast, or Concordat, he thought, but he hadn’t heard much of their tongues. “He was less angry than confused.”

  “Well I am glad I can at least do that, whoever you are.”

  There was a pause, long enough that Allystaire wondered if the owner of the voice had left, before it went on. “I am Bhimanzir’s student.”

  A young sorcerer. Wonderful. “And does he know you are here?”

  “I was to observe you while he was gone. Not to speak. I have only just learned the Seeing Dark and it is a test of my mastery, I think.”

  “Well, Bhimanzir’s student,” Ally
staire said, “what did you think of your master being confused and annoyed?”

  “It is better than how he usually is.”

  “Oh? How is that?”

  “Angry. Demanding. You’re a puzzle he means to unlock, and he prides himself on his cleverness.”

  “Do you find him clever?”

  Another pause. “No. Powerful and clever are not the same.”

  Well. This is something. “No, no they are not. Do you want to know the answer to what I was saying?”

  “If I do, and Bhimanzir asks me, he may force me to tell him.”

  “Then you will at least have known something he did not. That will make you the clever one.”

  There was another pause. “Very well.”

  “Whatever your master was doing,” Allystaire said, “it hurt. Yet I have been hurt many times before. More than I can count.”

  “Yes,” the boy’s voice replied. “I can see your scars from here. They are quite ugly,” he added, matter-of-factly.

  “Well, ugly or not, I know pain. We are old friends, pain and me. Well, acquaintances—I do not mean to say I like them, the aches and bruises, the burning throb, the feeling of a blade on the wrong side of my skin. Yet I do know just about every kind of pain a man can know. Your master was not showing me anything new. I found it helped if I recalled when I had felt whatever he was doing before.”

  “The Delvings—at least in the way Bhimanzir was performing them—surely hurt more than any weapon of steel.”

  “Mayhap,” Allystaire admitted hoarsely. “There is more to it, I suppose. That counsel I would keep for myself, for now.”

  “I see,” the voice said, and Allystaire believed that the boy probably did. “He will not like to hear that.” Another pause, then, “Yet I think I will enjoy telling him, if he asks.”

  “What is your name, student?”

  “I cannot tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “My master has not given me one yet.”

  “I see.” I really don’t, Allystaire thought. “In my experience, the name another man gives you is likely to stick whether you like it or not. Better, perhaps, to claim your own.”