by Ben Galley
Chapter 16
“Curiosity killed the cat, but luckily for the cat, she has nine lives…”
Old saying, source unknown
The Wodehallow marshes were a strange place. Just as the Dunwold moors in the northeast were devoid of life, the marshes thrived on it. Everything there moved, whether it was the whirring, humming bugs that infested the puzzle of bogs and rotting walkways, or the half-frozen ground that squelched and slipped from underfoot, thick with worms and slugs and leeches. Even the water moved of its own accord, bubbling in the places where the ice couldn’t reach and rippling under the tentative feet of the swarming insects and other furtive creatures. A cold and heavy fog hung over the landscape like a thick blanket. It muffled sound and yet carried it at the same time; things would wail, or howl, or creak in the distance, or zip and buzz past their ears, and every now and again they would hear snatches of city noise coming from the shadowy walls ahead, and the whoosh of wings from Brightshow and Ilios above. The fog also played tricks on the eyes. It made the city in the distance look like a shapeless mountain of shadow, it smothered the weak winter sun, plucked it from the sky, and turned the marshes gloomy and monochrome. Colour was a rare commodity there. Occasionally a flash of a scarlet dragonfly or the iridescent emerald glitter of a wandering beetle lost in the fog would interrupt the gloom. Depressing was a theme that the Wodehallow marshes knew inside and out. It wore it like a cloak.
For the third time that morning Farden’s boot sank ankle-deep into the mud. The thick peaty stuff pulled and sucked at his leg like a hungry leech. The mage clenched his fist and swore to himself. ‘Remind me again why it is we’re walking instead of flying, Lakkin?’ he grumbled to the Siren.
‘Well, as Durnus said, if you’d like to scare the entire populace of this Wodehallow city half to death then be my guest; I can call Brightshow down and we’ll land in the centre of the Bartering thing,’ smirked the rider. He had an annoying knack of finding solid and dry ground with every step, and hopped from spot to spot as confidently as a sprightly frog. His boots were barely muddy. Farden scowled. The mage’s feet squelched inside his socks.
‘Superstitious peasants,’ he mumbled, and made an effort to follow the Siren’s steps. Durnus was somewhere behind them in the fog; over his shoulder Farden could see a hunched and silent figure picking its way slowly across the marshland. Even in the hazy, pallid sunlight, the vampyre still had to keep his skin hidden. He looked ominous under his black hood, his black scarf, and his long gloves. The swirling mists made him look like some sort of marshland wraith.
After another half an hour or so of slow, squelchy progress, Brightshow spotted a rickety wooden pathway through the marshland and directed the men towards it. The makeshift wooden road was half-rotten and covered in muddy slime, but it made the going easier, and soon afterwards they came across solid ground and a solid dirt road. The city wall of Wodehallow leant out of the fog at them, awkward and hunchbacked with its stubby wooden turrets and machicolated battlements, flying a myriad of coloured flags and patrolled by beady-eyed men with spears. They watched the travellers like curious owls, completely oblivious to the dragon and the gryphon hidden somewhere either above or in the fog. ‘To the left,’ one of them yelled, as though they needed directions, and Farden thanked him with a wave. They followed the road around the wall until they spotted the main gate. Stretching out of its mouth, like a half-swallowed snake, was an enormous wriggling queue of people waiting to get into the city. Amidst much sighing from Durnus and Farden, the three men sauntered to the end and joined its ranks. They listened to the intermittent eruptions of loud music and laughter, muffled as they were by the heavy air, and through the narrow gap in the gates up ahead, they caught glimpses and flashes of colour. Behind them a wide dirt road wound its way into the gloomy marshland. ‘Oh look,’ remarked Farden, scowling sideways at Lakkin. ‘A road. Brightshow never mentioned there was a road.’
The dragon-rider grunted and shrugged. ‘I would have thought you’d known, spending so long in Albion and all?’ he replied with more than a hint of a grin. Farden smiled and shook his head in mock annoyance. He hadn’t known, and even if he had it would have risked Brightshow and Ilios being spotted. A peasant faced with a dragon was hazardous enough, but seeing a gryphon was a step too far. The last thing they wanted to do was to start a riot. Farden stared back at the road, pondering escape routes, and he suddenly realised how Wodehallow’s swampy foundations were actually the perfect defence. What better to slow your enemy down with than twenty miles of surrounding bog and a single narrow road? Whether it had been by accident or by design, it was as close to a tactical genius as an Albion Duke got.
The long queue gradually shuffled forward like a weary centipede, full of braying donkeys and lowing cows led by colourful traders and chattering women. They and their beasts toted enormous bags and boxes of things for sale, so stuffed and overloaded that their wares threatened to spill over the road with every step they took. Thankfully, it didn’t take too long for the three men to reach the gates. Once there, they found a wide lump of a guard barring their way.
‘Old up,’ ordered the big man, thrusting out a calloused palm. Farden sized him up instantly. Everything about this man was thick; from the set of limbs to his rotund waistline, from his giant neck to his mental faculties. His accent was so thick they could barely understand him. He snorted officiously. ‘What’s yor business ‘ere then?’ he gurgled, as though he were in the middle of chewing on his limited vocabulary.
‘The Bartering,’ replied Farden, with a disarming smile. The guard looked to his nearby colleagues and made an unsure face, baring ivory teeth that looked as though they were trying their best to escape. They shook their heads and tapped their spears on the dirt, motioning for their hefty comrade to ask again. The big guard turned back to the men. ‘But what’s yor business? What y’sellin’?’ he repeated.
Farden shrugged and looked from side to side, from the tall rider to the stoic and blank-looking vampyre flanking him. ‘Us,’ said the mage, and as if to qualify his statement he patted the sword handle at his hip.
The big man looked confused. ‘You?’
‘Yes, us. We’re bodyguards, for the Dukes,’ said Durnus, quietly. His face was hidden by his scarf and, even though it was uncomfortable for him to do so, he had folded his fangs back and out of sight just to be safe. Vampyres were as welcome in Albion as the plague. The other guards were staring at him suspiciously. Durnus hoped they were as stupid as their friend and wouldn’t think too hard about his covered face. ‘We’ve come to offer our services.’
‘That we have,’ nodded Farden. ‘We’re the very best at what we do.’
‘An’ what’s that?’ challenged the guard.
‘Making sure people don’t get in our way,’ replied Farden.
The thick guard looked as though he had been given a very long mathematic problem to solve. He chewed the inside of his lip for a moment, trying to work out if that had been a threat or not, before giving up. He looked to his mates. They shrugged. ‘Blades for coin,’ one mumbled. The big man waved his calloused hand. ‘Very well, in you go. But no funny business, ‘ear me? We don’t want no trouble in Wode’allow today.’
Farden and the others bowed and moved past the gaggle of suspicious guards and under the archway of the gate, eying the wooden portcullis suspended above their heads by heavy chains. When they emerged it was into a world of barely-contained chaos.
The main square had been converted into a muddy trough of riotous colours. Cacophonous noise bombarded them like a warzone of discordant music and yelling. Stalls had been pressed against each other back to back and side by side like coins in a miser’s purse. Dirty children ran about in droves, heckling and pickpocketing, while men and women of all social classes tried to make their way from one end of the marketplace to the other without being injured or dying on the way. Everywhere they turned merchants were haggling in a way that bordered on harassment, and even assault in som
e places. The fervent traders literally threw their wares at passers-by, bellowing insane offers at the top of their lungs. Nearby a fight had broken out between two fruit dealers. A crowd had gathered to watch. Coin started to flow. A gaggle of sackcloth children sprinted past, mud flying from their heels, chased by a red-faced fishmonger. Like any society given an excuse to act as it pleases, Wodehallow had descended into chaos. It was a maelstrom of disorder. A flaunted farce.
Farden looked to Lakkin and Durnus and shook his head with a groan. He knew now why he had avoided the Bartering in the past. As one the men hoisted up their hoods and retreated into anonymity. Sadly, they needn’t have bothered.
Despite their unsociable appearance they barely made it through the marketplace alive. Even skirting the edges of the stalls did no help them. The zealous merchants, noticing three men wearing expensive-looking armour and foreign clothes, saw an instant opportunity, and pressed on them from all sides as though they were walking bags of gold. Farden almost broke the arm of one man as he pressed a vase into the mage’s hands for the tenth time, suggesting he take it home to his wife. The rest were more cautious after that, circling the men like hungry foxes. Mercifully, they soon got bored and went to harass some less-dangerous clients. The men collectively breathed a sigh of relief.
After escaping the market, Farden and the others made their way up the main thoroughfare towards a large square keep that sat on a hillock at the centre of the muddy city. Wodehallow was the largest of Albion’s cities, hence its claim for being the capital, and like all the other cities its architects had no concept of space nor order; every clay-smeared building seemed to have been built on top of another, and the dirt streets had been strangled by pipes and gurgling waterways. The smell of burning peat leaked from stubby chimneys. Insects hovered over the gutters. Brothels and brick-factories nudged shoulders. Carts sat here and there, full of half-forgotten clay bricks.
However, apart from the riotous noise of the Bartering, the churning of industry, the sulphurous smell of the encroaching marshland and the occasional waft of sewage and urine, Wodehallow could have actually been a peaceful place. The fog and lingering wood-smoke managed to give the city a slightly ethereal look. Pale misshapen patches of sunlight moved lazily across the ground wherever there was a gap in the clouds or the fog. Somewhere inside one of the houses, a woman was singing. Waterwheels clanked and splashed softly between the buildings, and deep streams and rivers criss-crossed the streets like brown capillaries, murmuring as they flowed, full of silent dirty children harvesting precious mud and clay for the smoking brick-houses near the north wall.
The men paused on a wooden bridge and watched a gang of children working below. They were knee-deep in the mud and hard at work. They looked like little mud-devils, strange creatures covered head to toe in thick clay and brackish water, and where it had dried on their skin, it cracked and splintered like burnt bark. There was a tall man in a tall hat standing at the end of the bridge, leaning leisurely against the handrail and smoking a pipe. Every now and again he would reach inside his pocket and withdraw a small pebble and then fling it at one of the children, telling them to work faster or harder. ‘Come on Karli,’ he called, ‘that mud doesn’t collect itself, does it?’ Seeing he was being watched by Farden and the others he took another puff on his pipe and winked. ‘Orphans eh? Slackers, the lot of them,’ he smiled. Farden wanted to break his jaw. Perhaps slavery had reached Emaneska’s shores after all. If that was the case, then a deep hatred of the practice was starting to grow inside him.
The three men left the clay-slaves to their labour and carried on towards the square keep that commanded the rest of the city. As they walked up the hillock, the buildings became bigger, and grander, and finer, until finally they felt as though they were surrounded by a different city altogether. Rough cobbles appeared underfoot, and for the most part they were clean and dry.
As they rightly assumed, this was the wealthier side of Wodehallow. Farden noticed the same things as he had once seen on the streets of his own Krauslung; women in overly-decorative dresses, wearing their wealth around their necks and on their arms and walking plump geese on velvet leads; men in tailed coats, and people with too much time on their hands and dreams of dukedom. They had no idea of the world outside Wodehallow’s walls; they had no clue of what was befalling the rest of Emaneska. This Albion society had no contribution to make to the world. They had no great seats of learning, no might or power, no magick, no worth to speak of besides land. The Arka, despite their similar crimes of wealth and pomp, had at least strived for betterment, and they had succeeded for a time. Here were cheap imitators, wrapped in finery, pretenders and gutless to the bone, wallowing in ignorance and casual indifference. Farden and the others hated them for it. The mage met their snooty passing gazes and stared back at them until they looked away. Behind him, Durnus glowered at everything from under his black scarf. As far as the two men were concerned, Albion had a debt to pay, and it was collection time.
Walking briskly, it didn’t take long for them to reach the door of the keep, and when they did they found it tightly locked. There wasn’t a guard to be seen. Lakkin kicked the wood with the toe of his boot. ‘So, what now? How do we get an audience with these Dukes?’ asked the Siren.
Farden made a face. ‘We knock,’ he answered.
‘Surely it can't be that easy,’ began Lakkin, looking to Durnus for a bit of wisdom. The vampyre squinted at the battlements hanging above them. Far far above the crenellations, soaring high in the pale sky, were two faint specks, which, if one looked hard enough, might have resembled a dragon and a gryphon. ‘Who knows,’ he said. ‘The rest of the guards seem to be busy with the Bartering.’
‘It’s worth a try. We need the Dukes’ armies, or we’ll be handing Vice our head on a plate,’ muttered Farden. He rapped loudly on the pine door, hearing the locks jangle. It took almost a minute of sighing and foot-tapping before there was a rattling noise and the wooden cover of a peephole slid back. A wary eye with a pierced and wonky nose below it appeared. ‘Oo are ye?’ challenged the eye. Farden inwardly groaned. Why did all the thick ones become guards? the mage wondered. ‘We’re here to see the Dukes,’ he said, with an authoritative voice.
The eye laughed and a finger poked over the edge of the peephole, as dirty and as wriggly as an earthworm. ‘By Jötun’s balls. You an’ every other merchant in the city! The Dukes aren't seein’ anyone but themselves today. And besides, ye don't ‘ave the appropriate goods for sale,’ winked the eye, gesturing towards the men's chests. Farden looked to Lakkin and made a confused face.
‘Tits,’ explained the eye. ‘You ain't got none. Females is what the Dukes want. And you ain’t very female-lookin’ to me. So get lost.’ Their conversation was apparently over, and the peephole slid shut with a bang.
Farden rubbed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, praying for patience.
‘Now what?’ asked the Siren, crossing his arms.
‘Well unless you're planning some extensive changes down below, Lakkin, I suggest we teach somebody some manners,’ Durnus muttered darkly.
‘Good idea,’ agreed Farden, and after clicking his knuckles he knocked once more upon the wood. There was a faint smile hovering around his mouth. They heard an impatient scratching and the peephole cover opened once again. A familiar eye glared at them. ‘I thought I told you lot to fu…’ But unfortunately for the man behind the door, he never got to finish his sentence, because a mage jabbed him hard in the eye with a finger. The man wailed with pain as Farden pressed his other hand against the door and felt for the locks and bolts he knew were there. In a blink of a sore eye, the wood convulsed and shivered and burst apart at its hinges. The door flew inwards, squashing the unfortunate guard beneath it. Calm as could be, the mage, the vampyre, and the dragon-rider picked their way over the shattered door and wandered into the gloom of the keep, ignoring the groaning man lying on the floor.
Nobody challenged them. Nobody was even t
here to perform the challenging. The corridor was empty. The three men stood in the corridor and listened hard, expecting the thunder of feet or the ringing of alarm bells, but none came. Instead, hoots of laughter and shrill giggling echoed along the corridors, twinned with the smells of roasting food and expensive tobacco mixed with cheap perfume. Music wafted drunkenly through the stuffy air. Smoke and dust hovered in the shafts of light that fell from the high windows. Durnus ducked under one as he removed his sun-proof scarf and rubbed his sweaty face. ‘It sounds as though somebody is home,’ he said. The others murmured in agreement, and kept walking.
The three men soon found the source of the drunken music, and found a crowd of drunken people to go with it. The corridor opened out into a wide room with a low ceiling supported by pine beams. Spread around the room were luxurious chairs, the arrangement of which suggested they might have once been in an orderly square, but had since wandered off in a drunken stupor, much like everything else in the room. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t the Bartering.
Barrels of wine squatted on tables, men and women lying underneath their taps, giggling and guffawing every time the wine spilt over their fine and dandy clothes. A roast pig rotated over coals in one corner. A bard sat on a nearby stool and plucked tunelessly at his ljot, wailing and humming unrecognisable songs. Servants ran to and fro and tried to clean up while avoiding their inebriated masters. Courtesans, prostitutes, ladies of the court, whatever they were, shamelessly entertained the Dukes and their rich friends. Most were missing items of clothing, some danced completely naked in front of the fireplace, while the rest just flirted and flounced about the hall. Standing behind one old Duke were three young boys. They stood sheepishly and shirtless, staring blankly into space while their master sat chatting to a woman and stroked her hand seductively. Another man circled the young shirtless trio, flicking wine at them and prodding their pale skin, giggling to himself. If this was Dukedom, thought Farden, Albion could keep it. He had never seen such a debauched room in all his life.
