by Jon Kiln
“Well. Perhaps you shouldn’t do that anymore then, if it only makes you fall over.” Meghan laughed, shaking her head at his supposed strange ways. Vekal grinned to himself. Soon enough, when he was long gone and away from them, Meghan would realize that her girl had been healed, and no more would any look upon them with suspicion of witchcraft or oddness.
“Perhaps,” he said, wiping his clothes down and picking up the stout walking stick that he had selected earlier over lunch. To his apparel he had added a sword and a belt from one of last night’s attackers, and a scrap of not very badly singed woolen cloth that Meghan had salvaged from the ruins. He waved at them both, thinking it best to leave now and not draw out the goodbyes.
“Kariss!” There were sudden footsteps and small arms once again were thrown around him in a childish hug, and he looked down at the girl he had healed, to find her looking up at him with surprisingly clear eyes. To his astonishment, he saw her open her mouth and whisper the words, just for him to hear.
“Your journey will be shorter than you think. You will be returned. The one that walks with borrowed feet follows behind. The black-haired lady will never return.”
“What?” Vekal staggered, but before he could ask her she had run back to her mother, to hide herself in her skirts and watch him with those large, silent eyes.
“What! What did she mean?” Ikrit inside was almost burning up, forcing Vekal to take an unsteady step forward, before the Sin Eater forced his will again. “The black-haired lady? Ask her about the black-haired lady!”
“Changed your mind, priest?” Meghan said lightly, smoothing the oracular girl’s head, blissfully unaware of what had passed between them.
“Yes! Ask her what she meant. What black-haired lady? I was right, you know—the girl was the witch. Not the mother, the girl!” Ikrit the devil was adamant and angry, but Vekal forced himself to shake his head. There were too many questions here, and he knew that he would get no further answer from Kariss’s strange outburst, and, he hated to admit but he didn’t trust how interested Ikrit was inside of him.
“No, just a moment’s sadness. I will think of you, Meghan and Kariss, your kindness and your words.” His gaze hovered over the girl, who appeared just like a shy child, perhaps herself unaware of what gifts she might have.
“Then be on your way, and may your journey be peaceful,” Meghan said solemnly. “Until we meet again.”
Vekal didn’t know whether they ever would, but he returned the sentiment all the same as they both turned and walked in separate directions. The girl and her mother taking the westward road, and the accursed Sin Eater taking the eastward.
“I tell you, that girl was a witch. She prophesied to us. What did she mean, returned? I mean to get to heaven. I will never return to this horrible little realm of flesh and blood,’ Ikrit ranted and raved inside of him, making Vekal’s face twitch and flinch as he strode. “And the black-haired lady—which one? This must be nonsense! Absolute nonsense.”
Apart from the extreme strangeness, and the recent hangover from his own past, Vekal could almost have liked sensing Ikrit squirm in annoyance inside of him. It made a change from their usual relationship, which he knew was Ikrit being nonchalant and Vekal’s soul being confused and feeling helpless. Vekal rather liked the fact that Ikrit didn’t know all of what might be going on in the world, and just what that message from the gods could have meant…
17
On the second day out from Fuldoon, Talon awoke before dawn to see the western sky ruddy and burnt with fire.
“Aldameda!” the youth gasped, rolling out of the rough blankets that had barely kept him comfortable on the hard ground. He meant to warn the older woman, but found that she was already perched on one of the boulders by the side of the eastward road, nursing a skin of water and watching the sky grimly.
“I know, child. I know. The flames will overtake us all if we do not hurry,” she said a little mysteriously, which Talon didn’t quite understand. Did she mean that the flames of Fuldoon would spread throughout the city, even out here? Exactly how fast could a fire spread?
The pair had stopped for the night out of sight of the road—again at the insistence of Mother Aldameda—in a region of land becoming ever stranger to Talon’s eyes. Out here there were rocky spires almost like pillars, outcrops and buttresses of grey, black, and yellow stone that formed a maze through which the eastward road wound. Simply called ‘the Rocks’ according to the older woman, this region acted as a natural barrier to any eastward progression of the city, both physically and socially, as Aldameda had warned Talon that the place was a haven for pirates and bandits who used the labyrinth of rock for their secret hide outs and enclaves.
At the moment however, the route through the Rocks appeared infinitely safer than did the road behind them, with Fuldoon now a ruddy glow on the horizon as they saddled their two ponies and started to ride.
“But, Mother Aldameda, what about Suriyen?” Talon asked before they had got far. “She’s back there.”
“I know, child. All we can do is hope that she had the same sense that we’ve had, and will be following us.” Aldameda didn’t meet the youth’s eyes, and Talon could sense that the old woman was just as upset as he was about Suriyen’s decision to stay.
“You think that she will? Follow us, I mean,” Talon said hopefully, watching as the land around them started to lighten slightly with the first glow of dawn. The Rocks cast strange shadows everywhere, long and thin, fat and short silhouettes across their path.
Aldameda looked at the path and frowned for a moment, as if thinking, before saying, “Yes. Suriyen might be strong willed, and obstinate, and angry, but she is also loyal, and clever. She’ll see sense eventually, and come to seek us out.”
“Unless…” Talon murmured, not wanting to complete the dark thought that had crept into his mind. Unless she is already dead, it finished.
“Don’t you dare think that!” Aldameda snapped, this time stopping her pony and staring over at Talon fiercely. She clasped his chestnut’s reigns to force him to stop and listen to her. “Don’t you dare! Suriyen is one of the best students that I have ever trained, and probably the best fighter I have ever seen.”
“Yes,” Talon nodded.
“Suriyen could fight a line through the entire Menaali army if she had to. But first she has to decide what it is she wants. To forgive herself, or not.”
“Forgive herself? I thought that you said that she was captured by Dal Grehb as a child?”
Aldameda nodded. “Let me tell you a story, boy. There was once a young woman little more than a girl who turned up at my door, with a dirty face and already a reputation as one of the best streetfighters in Fuldoon.”
Talon nodded.
“She was brought to me by one of our mutual friends, because this young woman had about her a charm of our faith. The very same one that you wear about your neck right now.”
Talon’s hands went to the bull and wheel pendant that sat around his throat as the cult mother’s voice continued.
“She had grown up in the faith, and she had sworn by it to protect her people, to avenge her people. I could see that she was fierce, and determined, and that she had a strong desire to defend the little people against the predators. So I took her in, and I started telling her of the rest of the world, the spirits, the cycle of life and death, the gods…” Aldameda’s voice softened a little as she remembered those distant times. “But this young woman, Suriyen, as you can no doubt guess she was, had already learned more lessons than any her age should. As we lived and worked and trained together in my lodge house, her story came out.
“Suriyen had been just a young girl when Dal Grehb took the Iron Pass. You’ve probably heard of it: a gap between two cliffs of rock higher than the walls of Fuldoon, and upon which live the great towers and people of the Pass, guarding the northlands. No one ever thought that Pass could be taken. But he did. He fired his siege engines at it until the tower and the terraces and cl
iffs themselves crumbled, killing thousands. And then, through the gap, his Menaali horde swarmed, heading into the deep north like that fire that rages behind us. Suriyen was one of the youngest taken into slavery, which is the Menaali custom.
“She worked and toiled for her overlords for five years, becoming almost a woman, before she managed to escape and was taken on by the pirates of the Inner Sea. There she, too, started at the bottom as a galley slave and sail-runner, working her way up through feat of conquest and arms and skill until she had killed the very pirate lord that had taken her on. He was, by all accounts a foul old man who had taken a liking to the seemingly ‘helpless’ young woman. That was when she fled to Fuldoon, the only free port where an orphan child like her could do well. And she did, fighting off any of the vicious little street gangs that decided they wanted anything that she had, before being spotted and brought to me.”
Wow, Talon thought, amazed at what Suriyen had been through. “I see why now, why she decided to stay.”
“Indeed. She has lived a whole life of violence, more than many a soldier or knight in any of the world’s armies, and somehow, by some miracle, she still believes in trying to do the right thing. In protecting the defenseless. In being honest. In being loyal.” Aldameda raised a finger to point at Talon as if Suriyen’s life could be an object lesson for him. “And this is the important part, Talon. Suriyen went through all of that, put up with trials worse than you or I could imagine, and defeated men who were much bigger and more skilled than she was all because she thought that she had let her parents down that day at the Iron Pass. She couldn’t forgive herself, and spent the next ten years trying to find a way back, to right that supposed wrong.”
Talon shook his head, wondering if what he was hearing was madness or nobility. “But why was she working as a guard when I met her?”
Aldameda sighed. “Despite all of my training, she was determined to get back across the Sand Seas to where the Menaali had established their vicious little empire around the Iron Pass. I had advised her to help me in my quest to find greater, much darker predators such as this devil Ikrit, but she could not give herself to the task. She needed to learn how to travel the desert, how to cross it safely, and how to find a way to get to Dal Grehb. That is why she is still there in Fuldoon, and that, too, is also why I believe that she will fight her way clear and return to us.
“Suriyen is strong. Stronger than any that I know, and what she is prepared to do is almost heroic. If Suriyen is able either to kill Dal Grehb, or to see that she really had no choice that day at the Iron Pass but to run, and that she forgives herself, then nothing will stop her from returning.” Aldameda gave him a rare warm smile. “You have to have hope, after all, young Talon. You always have to have hope. That is what our religion is based on after all: the hope that the herd, the pack, and that life can continue.”
The older woman appeared much cheerier as she turned and indicated the direction that they had to take. It seemed to Talon that Aldameda had told him that story as much to reassure herself as it was to reassure Talon that Suriyen would be safe.
As the dawn’s ruddy light started to lift, bringing with it the distant whiff of soot and ash, Talon could only hope that she was right.
18
By midday, the sun had started to rise higher and higher over the southlands, burning not as fiercely as it did over the desert, but still with an uncomfortable intensity. Behind Talon and Aldameda, the smokes of Fuldoon were now little more than a smudge of dirty clouds against the sky, and Talon wondered if they would ever go out.
The pair hadn’t stopped during their long ride. Instead, Aldameda had just made sure that the boy sipped at his canteen of water and ate some of the hard nuts and biscuits that she had made sure to bring with them.
“It will be a hard journey,” Aldameda said. “We have many days to travel before we get to Fisheye, and from there we need to charter some kind of boat to take us to the Isle of Gaunt, which in itself won’t be an easy task.”
“Fisheye?” Talon asked, wiping the sweat away from his brow.
“Here, take a scarf and tie it like this.” Aldameda showed him how to knot one of her many diaphanous and sheer scarfs over his forehead. It hung around his face to offer him a little shade. Instantly the boy started to feel brighter. “Did those people you were traveling with never teach you anything about traveling the hot lands?”
Talon shrugged. The people that he had been working for—or enslaved, as Suriyen had insisted—had been more intent on moving their herds of goat-like creatures from one end of the deserts to another, and making as much time and money as they could along the way.
“Anyway. Yes, Fuldoon is the biggest and only city along the Shattering Coasts, you see. There are a couple others much further east, but they are so far out that they have little to do with this part of the Inner Sea,” Aldameda explained. “Fisheye is the last village before the Shattering Coasts become impassable.”
“So, how far is this Fisheye?” Talon asked.
In reply, he was answered by a thud as an arrow thumped into the dirt of the path a few feet in front of Aldameda. As their horses snorted, Talon looked up to see that it had been fired by a figure suddenly appearing from the labyrinthine rock stacks all around them.
“Further than you’re going to get to, my young friend,” called the figure, as he notched another arrow to his bow.
“Wait!” Aldameda said, urging her horse in front of Talon’s.
“Why?” the man asked, for it was a man, Talon saw. He wore light leathers stained dark brown and dusted with rock dust to help his camouflage. He had short, sandy-colored hair and a face mask that covered the top half of his face, leaving a pointed chin underneath. “What good are an old woman and her grandson to me? You’re crossing my territory now, after all.”
“Yours? And who might you be? At least tell an old maid who is having the honor of robbing her,” Aldameda said lightly, keeping her hands up in the air as Talon saw her use her knees to nudge her horse forward a little further towards the man. But he was too canny for her, as he bobbed his bow at her horse instead.
“Easy there, grandmother. No closer, huh?” he said with a grin. “But I guess that you are right, and that I should say our territory.” At his words there was a rustle of leather and metal, as other figures stood up from the rocks all around Talon and Aldameda. Most carried cutlasses or short javelins, swords, hooks, and a few bows. Talon saw that they were of all sizes and ages, from his age to a man almost as old as Aldameda herself, women and men.
“We are the Red Hand, and I am the Pirate Lord Oberra. Now, what was it you were going to offer me to pass through my land?”
“Don’t pirate lords usually have ships? And their territories are usually the open waves,” Aldameda said heavily.
The man calling himself Oberra scowled and relaxed his bow. After all, he had his two newest victims surrounded. “Me and the good men and women of the Red Hand are between ships at the moment, thank you very much. So hand over any valuables you got to fund the ship’s effort.”
“Oh, dearie me!” Aldameda was laughing. “Pirates without a ship, and a pirate lord without even a half decent crew.”
“Hey!” the old gaffer with his fish hook said. “We’re plenty decent,” he said, then coughed.
“Not with lungs full of the humors like you have, sir.” Aldameda spun around to point a bony finger at several other members of the Red Hand around them. “And that one’s clearly broken an ankle or a foot last year but the bones were never set right, and that one is either drunk or has a fever as she stands before us, and that one, well, I don’t even know where to start with the list of ailments that one has got.”
“I say we kill the old hag and chit-chat later,” said one of the other pirates.
“Well, I would have to say that I agree with you.” Oberra shrugged, raising his bow once more.
“And this old hag as you so eloquently put it can heal the lot of you,” Aldameda
berated Oberra. “I’m a healer. My packs are full of herbs and tinctures, see for yourself. And this here lad is my apprentice, aren’t you, boy?”
Talon nodded energetically.
“I can have all of you in fighting condition and actually ready to get that ship you all want,” Aldameda offered. “And I know a thing or two about dentistry!”
That seemed to seal the deal for at least a few of the pirates, who were apparently sick of asking each other to knock their rotten, cracked, or infected teeth out of their heads by fists and brandy alone.
“I think she talks a good talk,” mumbled one.
“Aye! Give her a chance, at least,” winced another.
“Good grief,” the Pirate Lord Oberra shook his head sadly. “How on earth are the Red Hand going to become the most feared pirate gang in all of history and you can’t even rob an old grandmother.”
“I guess about as easily as they will if half of them die of fever and the other half are too mangled to even climb a rigging,” Aldameda said.
There was a moment of silence before Oberra’s shoulders slumped. “Go on then lads and lassies. Take their weapons and bring them back to our secret camp, why don’t you.” He turned and walked with great apparent futility back into the warren of the rocks from which they had appeared.
19
By dawn, the fires had spread to the docks, and a terrible pall hung low over the city of Fuldoon. No one knew where the fire had started, only that it had come in the dark before morning, and that it had come suddenly, and out of nowhere. Houses had seemingly erupted into flames or caved into their own burning and charcoal cellars as if they had been eaten away from underneath. The wails and screams had started hesitantly, as if people were too worried of the invading army to raise the alarm. But in the end they had no choice.
“We can’t hold the walls. Not like this,” Ruyiman was saying, sweeping a hand on either side of the battlements at the molten black and greasy ash that lay everywhere. The chemical fires that the defenders themselves had set still raged, only they had eaten most of what there was to eat in front of the gates. The mighty boat-bridge, one of the wonders of modern civilization, was now little more than a tattered and blackened causeway of rocks and timbers. Not fit for any army to pass, but they could swarm. The river below was black with soot, ash, and bodies, and the smell made Suriyen’s stomach churn and clench.
