by Jon Kiln
The other, a crowned woman, also had the same high cheekbones and clear, unblemished brow that spoke of youth or good health, and she appeared unmarked by the passage of time nor animal.
“Incredible,” Vekal murmured, reaching out to touch the large lips of the female head that looked so lifelike as to be almost soft.
“Don’t touch her!” Ikrit suddenly spat, and Vekal jerked backward as a pulse of almost pure ice jabbed down his arm.
“Ow! Hey! Did you—did you do that?” the Sin Eater stammered, massaging his stinging hand. “Why?”
“I had to stop you, you oaf! You meat-sacks are all the same,” Ikrit snarled. “All the legends talk about his place being cursed. What if you just blundered into some terrible curse and got us killed? Is that what you want—you and me dragged down to the lowest of the hells, and another eternity before we crawl back up again?”
“No, of course not,” Vekal grumbled, feeling stupid and stubborn as he turned back to the gates. It seemed that all the ruins were doing were making the devil tetchy.
The forest had cheerfully ignored the guardian gates, and so too, did Vekal. Whatever wood or gate had been between the heads was long since mouldered away to nothing, and through the empty space, Vekal could see a wide avenue stretching into the distance, with shapes that had once been stone houses on either side, now green with ivy and moss. Long fingers of brambles struck out from the choked-up alleys, and thick cables of tree roots and vines snaked across the floor, creating their own roads through the ruins.
Vekal took a cautious step inside, but nothing happened. No curse suddenly sprung up to strike him down, and no monster emerged from the gloom to eat him. He shrugged, and chuckled to himself. Maybe I was just being a little over-sensitive, he thought, as he widened his stride, and walked faster down the main thoroughfare into the dead city.
23
It was late afternoon, and Vekal’s legs were tired. He was so deep inside the city of Telset that the day itself seemed to have taken on a greenish, gloomy glow, as the sun filtered through the sporadic trees, and through the vine and plant-chocked alleyways. It seemed to the priest that the old city was almost entirely being replaced by the forest itself, as if the plants had always wanted a place to call their own, and now, finally, they had it.
If they invaded this place, Vekal thought, poetically, then it looks like they are still fighting over it. The narrowest of lanes and streets were nothing but a tangle of grasses, straggly trees reaching nervously for the light, high brambles and shrubs. Any street by the main routes appeared almost impenetrable, as no machete or axe had ever been used to clean a path through this place.
But still, the Sin Eater’s interest was piqued. Telset was the sort of place that shouldn’t be, in worldly terms. It was too grand, and too well-made, and too fine for any to leave it abandoned. He had stopped just a little while ago at a high, circular well in the center of a plaza that was now a pleasant meadow. Wild flowers in every color of the rainbow sprouted at knee height, as Vekal released a coil of vines and drew up from the depths a heavy stone bucket that was filled with crystal clear, delicious fresh water.
He had made sure that Ikrit ‘sensed’ the water first for any toxins or residue of evil magic, but either the curse was so subtle as to be beyond the devils’ powers, or the water was just normal well-water, as it hadn’t seemed to do him any harm.
The day was getting late, but the priest found his steps slowing as they passed another empty hole of a door. He had paused to put his head into any number of stone-built houses on the way through, only to find a completely bare stone room, smelling faintly of the wood outside, and dust. Nothing else. No furniture, no other doors, nothing to indicate what each house could have been used for.
“I told you, they never finished building it,” Ikrit said, impatiently.
Vekal ignored him. This house he had chosen was a little larger, and indeed had a set of stone stairs in the corner leading to an upper floor.
“We really should be going… The Lockless Gates,” the devil protested.
“Will remain unlocked, and quite possibly hidden for eternity after us,” Vekal said, forcing his legs that had suddenly turned stubborn up the stone steps. Even the manufacture of these were remarkable. Every block had been fit perfectly into place, almost without cracks or seams. The priest thought that it was no wonder that the forest was so slow in colonizing this space, as the city was so well built as to withstand the crudest of roots, weeds, and mosses.
Vekal’s legs stopped working, and he almost overbalanced as he clung to the walls of the stairs. “Really?” he demanded of the devil. “You are so afraid of this place that you are going to try and turn me into your puppet?”
“I could, you know,” the fiend sniped back. “I could remove my power from that ugly little wound in your spine, and have you crawl the rest of the way.” As if to show his sincerity, the priest felt a distant spasm of pain somewhere near the center of his back.
“Yes, you could do it,” Vekal said through hissing teeth. “But what good would that do you? Maybe you’d never even get to where you want to go, and I would just die of shock.”
“You might still die, yet, if it wasn’t for me.”
“Not this again. If you are scared of these ruins, then tell me why. That is all I ask,” the Sin Eater said into the empty space around him, glad, for once, that he really was devoid of any human company. “I know that you are hiding something, Ikrit.”
“Every creature has their secrets,” Ikrit pouted inside of the man. “Mine are my own. Not yours. Not your bird-brained gods, not anyone’s. At least give me that much respect.”
“You’re nothing but a bad dream without my body to sustain you. If it wasn’t for me, and my skills, then you would have been blown out of this world by the first healer or cleric or shaman we came across,” Vekal pointed out angrily, before instantly feeling stupid, and mean. The creature that rode him might be a truly terrible, horrible being, but it also had no choice than to survive by occupying another’s body. He felt small-hearted for stooping so low as to bicker and trade insults with the creature.
“Fine,” Ikrit said. “Have it your way. I thought we were doing something together, Vekal Morson of the Accursed. I thought that perhaps you understood what I was offering. But if you wish this to be a simple business transaction between us then you can have that, too. We work together to get to the Isle of Gaunt, and then we see what I owe you. Agreed?”
“Ikrit, no, I didn’t mean that. I was angry…” Vekal tried to say, but when he reached his mind towards the dark, buzzing knot of devilry that lay inside of him, all he felt now was a frosty silence. He couldn’t sense the intentions of the devil as clearly as he could have before. Ikrit had pulled back from his mind, and walled himself off inside Vekal’s own head.
The young man sighed, and continued to walk up the stairs, a little gingerly in case the devil really did decide to take away all of its gifts and powers.
At the top of the stairs was another empty and bare stone room, just like the downstairs room, only this one had a window on three of the walls. One of the windows looked north, towards the Great Inner Sea. It was to this opening that the Vekal was drawn, as it was the direction that he had to travel in. From this high elevation he could make out a little bit more of the city up ahead, with the forest slowly giving way to blank stone, and all of the streets coming into a round plaza in the very center of the city where a squat building stood.
“What is that place?” Vekal asked, but received no answer. He gritted his teeth, and tried not to swear at the willful, stubborn pride of devils, and tried to remember what Ikrit had told him about Telset.
“Built for a god-emperor to be the perfect city, but was cursed…” He looked again at the vastness of the central building. “I guess that was to be the palace then,” he said in awe. If only I had time to really understand what it was I was looking at here. The priest sighed regretfully. It was the kind of mystery that he
loved, history and ancient things, and the actions and intentions of people long since turned to dust. At least half of his work back at the Tower of Records had been, after all, the recording of the confessions that he had collected, and transcribing and maintaining all of the confessions obtained through the centuries by other Sin Eaters of Tir’an’fal. Together they formed a sort of history, with amazing insight not only into the ways of people, but the whole shaping of the modern world.
Or so I had always believed, he thought, turning to go, when he saw, on the opposite wall—the one behind the stairs he had walked up out of which had no window—a small alcove, with a carving like the two faces that made the city gates, and the rounded, indistinct shape over their heads.
“It seems to be some kind of shrine, of sorts,” Vekal murmured, approaching carefully to see that yes, one face was of the bearded ‘king’ whilst the other was of the beautiful and pale woman. Underneath each there was a scratching of runes, that Vekal could almost read.
They are like some of the earliest languages of Tir’an’fal, he wondered, as he forced his mouth to navigate the almost-familiar syllables.
“Tur… Tun? No. Geh…” he read the name under the king’s head. “Gehdin? Gehin?”
The name under the woman’s head was simpler however. “Eiver.” Vekal felt a little better at finding out at least a fraction more about the mysterious necropolis than he had known this morning.
It was the shape that hung over the heads, however, that seemed to be the most suggestive, as Vekal realized that it wasn’t a face with hair, or a flower with petals, or a sun with stylized rays flying out.
It was some sort of face the same as those below, but instead of a beard or long hair framing it, the priest could see that it was tentacles that knotted and twirled and splayed out from cheeks and jaw. Its mouth was a small, vicious beak with tiny serrated teeth.
The Sin Eater took an involuntary step backwards, feeling somehow repulsed by the image now. He didn’t know what it meant. He had thought that Gehin and Eiver were the King and Queen of this place, the God-Emperor and Divine Empress of old who had been so superstitious as to believe the entire city cursed. But the appearance of the foul thing, in the same style and likeness as the others, made his skin crawl. Was it their god? The priest grimaced. Some horrible amalgam of bird and sea monster? If it wasn’t a god or a spirit, what else could it be?
Suddenly, the devil inside broke its fast of words to barge into his mind like a storm wind, and said in a voice that sounded like angry hornets. “You worship gods with the heads of birds. Why not these poor people worship something far more… fantastical?”
A small part of the priest knew what the devil meant. That there was no difference, really, but his heart rebelled at the mere sight of the strange unnamed creature. “Our gods wear masks of birds, and so there is a big difference. No one knows what their real faces are like. They take the forms of birds, they fly as birds, but it does not mean that their real form is like that. Lord Annwn and Lady Iliya are beyond forms,” Vekal argued, but he was arguing at nothing. The devil inside of him had once again retreated to its reinforced cave of inaccessibility, somewhere lost in the fold of the priest’s brain.
“Ikrit!” Vekal demanded of it, but there was no answer.
Looking outside, he saw that he had already spent too long here in this house, as the late afternoon had given way to early evening.
I could spend the rest of the night here and start again in the morning, or keep on going, he thought, looking dubiously at the darkening ruins outside. When he looked back at the three faces staring unblinking into the room beside him, he shivered and decided that he would rather take his chances with the ghosts and echoes of the city, and hurried down the steps, and out towards the distant palace.
24
“There now.” Aldameda straightened up from her work. “Two drops twice a day, for twenty days,” she said to her last patient of the day—a hoary old pirate by the name of Sour, who had a badly infected abscess in his jaw. The man was bald on top but a snowy-white beard occupied the lower half of his entire head. He was still sweating with the pain, but he accepted the tincture bottle that the old woman handed him gratefully.
“Mmph?” he mumbled through an aching mouth.
“By the gods, you can count can’t you?” She raised her eyebrows at him.
Sour shook his head very, very carefully.
“Okay, well, just keep taking the bloody stuff until the next full moon,” Aldameda huffed, turning to wash her hands and pack away her things as the old pirate got up and made his wobbling way out of the makeshift tent.
“You could at least teach these men how to count,” she snapped at one of the only two occupants left in the room. Talon resisted the urge to snicker, but the object of the woman’s scorn only sat, disinterested, on a stool at the back, poking through Aldameda’s supplies as if he owned them.
Technically, I think he might own everything, including us, Talon thought, as the ‘Pirate Lord’ Oberra raised his voice.
“And what would be the point of that? They would only start counting how light their wage-purses were, old mother,” he joked, throwing a conspiratorial wink at Talon.
“And don’t you ‘old mother’ me, young man,” Aldameda snapped, although Talon thought that she was secretly pleased at getting even that hint of respect. “I may be old enough to be your grandmother, but don’t treat me like one. My wits are still sharper than yours, my lad.”
“Clearly,” Oberra said, picking up one of the phials and shaking its contents curiously.
“And put that down. Half a pinch of that will blind you, you dolt. If you taught your crew a few things, like how to sign their own name at least, count on their fingers, read a little, then you would have a pirate crew who could assess treasure for you. Could count how many guards a ship has to have. Could actually pose as merchants or guild ships, or bodyguards or whatever it is you have to do to steal for a living.”
“With my crew? Half of them would end up counting the value just so they could fill their own socks with it,” Oberra pointed out, hastily putting the eye-injuring phial back.
“Not if they respect you. If you got them a first-class ship, and if you found for them so much treasure that they wouldn’t know whether to swim in it or eat it, and you were generous enough to teach them their letters and numbers… Then they would go to their deaths for you.”
“I see.” Oberra fixed the old woman with a hard glare. “And I suppose that you know where I can get all of these things? That you just happen to know where a ship, and a whole pile of unclaimed gold might be?”
Aldameda groaned in relief. “At last. I was hoping that you would ask.”
***
Any other person might be tempted to ask what qualified a herbalist to perform such tricky operations as advising a pirate crew, let alone a pirate lord, as Oberra styled himself. On the face of it, Aldameda was another grey haired woman, with dark skin and eyes whose skin was heavily lined with the passage of years. She looked like her professed occupation: as nothing more than a healer.
However, Talon was not simply any other person, and had already seen Mother Aldameda efficiently disarm a wall guard of Fuldoon. And if Suriyen trusted her with her life, then I will trust her with mine, Talon reassured himself.
The secret camp they were in was little more than a small, abandoned cove with high rocky outcrops on either side. A straggle of trees for some shade, a small stream, and half a dozen tents or huts. In his earlier life, Talon might have looked upon the camp as a dream come true, a place where tales of tall adventure were sung and recited across the campfires at night, whilst the brave sailors practiced their weapons and feats of strength during the day.
The reality of the pirate camp was one of interminable boredom and scullery work, as far as Talon could ascertain. The crew stayed here because while they did, no one else was asking them to fight in a war. As long as they hid out here by the coast they could h
unt and fish and rob the few refugees and travelers that crossed behind them.
The boy had only been there a couple days when he realized that there was nothing glamorous about a pirates’ life, and that most of these pirates were happy enough to become bandits. So far, Aldameda and Talon had been busy from dawn to dusk with the aches and pains of the crew. True to her bargain, the old woman tended to their ailments with an expert eye, not sparing what needed to be done for the good of the injured, nor sugar-coating the truth. One person had a foot amputated, and looked set to survive, although they would be staying at the camp for the next six months, whilst another had three mangled fingers removed.
Over the day and a half, Aldameda had insisted that she talked to their captain, Oberra, at the same time. The man was older than Suriyen, Talon guessed, but only by a handful of years. He took great care over his sandy-colored hair and his complexion, insisting that “a Captain should at least look the part”.
Talon thought that Oberra was too kind by far to be a pirate, and who preferred a quiet life of banditry to that of captaincy.
However, despite all of this, it was still a shock to the boy when Aldameda revealed her plan to the captain, and Talon found himself being the one to stagger behind one of the pirates with an armful of dried kindling.
It was night on the cove, and there were no campfires warmly burning away the cold. Instead, there was only the darkness, and the glint of water reflected against the stars.
“She’s canny enough to choose a moonlit night, that one,” said Olma, the pirate that Talon was following. Olma was a seasoned pirate, with black hair swept high on her head, and shaved from the ears down. “And cloudy too.”
“It was the captain’s idea,” Talon replied dutifully, repeating what Aldameda had told him to say if any of the pirates stopped to ask.
