The Harbour Master shook his head. ‘Haven’t had an Ostian ship stop here since the war started. Not for six weeks. All the warships are fightin’, and the merchants have gone north with supplies and to bring home the plunder. If she came south it was on an Auracian ship. If it was an Auracian ship, it was the Wind Sprite.’
‘There’s no way she was on one of the others?’
The Harbour Master shook his head again. His demeanour had changed from curiosity to sympathetic condolence, and Soren felt as though the room was spinning around him.
‘They have to declare passengers in their custom duty check. I make note of it in the ledger.’ He tapped his finger on the page. ‘No female passengers that week at all. There’ve been a number of them the last two weeks, but they all came here on ships that were still here when your wife would’ve left Ostenheim. I’m sorry, lad, but ships are lost. It’s the way of the sea.’
His words faded into the distance. All Soren could hear was her voice.
Soren went back to the inn, ordered a mug of ale and retreated to the darkest corner of the taproom. His mind raced with conflicting thoughts, and despair threatened to swallow him up whole.
Alessandra had fled their home city of Ostenheim shortly before he had at his suggestion, as guiltless as he in the assassination of the old Duke, but just as heavily implicated. She had been headed for Auracia. He had not expected to get away or be able to keep his promise that he would find her. She knew that it was unlikely he would survive when they parted, but thinking she would be safe was enough for him.
Despair was mixed with anger when he allowed himself to dwell on the reality that she was dead; lost to the sea. The fear she must have felt, the loneliness. He had to fight back sobs of anguish. The same person who sent men to kill him the previous evening was responsible for her having to flee, for tearing them apart and manipulating their lives as though they were little more than tools or playthings. Grief turned to fury as he thought of everything that had gone wrong in his life, of the terrible things that had happened to Alessandra and how they could all be traced back to Amero and his lies, intrigues and manipulation.
Now the bastard was sitting on the throne of Ostia, comfortable in the palace while he sent thousands of men to war and had hundreds more that opposed him murdered, or as it was being called, ‘executed for treason’. That Amero sat there at all was in part down to Soren. Even when he had thought he was making his own choices, Soren had only been playing along with Amero’s master plan, contributing to its forward momentum in his own small — and sometimes not so small — way. Amero was sitting there, smug in the belief that he had destroyed his enemies and could relax as he reached out to tie up any loose ends with no thought to the consequences for the people involved.
Alessandra was the cause of the only true happiness Soren had ever known. Amero had taken that from him, had taken so much from so many. In that moment, Soren decided he was going to kill him for it.
Soren’s thoughts may have been directed by anger, but that anger was not blind. Walking into the Ducal Palace in Ostenheim fuelled with rage would achieve nothing. He had rushed into things in the past and paid the consequences. If killing Amero meant dying himself so be it, but he would not squander his life without achieving his purpose.
His Gift had given him an advantage many times, but he didn’t understand how it worked, or why he had it. He had developed a rudimentary method to bring it on, but as the episode in the alley had shown, his method was not good enough. It was overly involved and unreliable. Even when he did manage to bring on the Gift, he had no way to control it. Each time he reached out for it felt like he was leaping into the unknown. As powerful as it promised to be, right now it was all but useless as a tool to help him kill Amero.
If he was to be successful, he needed to know more about it. As sleep finally came to him, he made his second decision of the evening. He would seek out more knowledge on the Gift. He would seek to understand it and he would seek to control it. Then he would use it to kill Amero.
Chapter 3
A Futile Search
Soren certainly wasn’t cheerful the next morning, but he had a sense of purpose. Focus and clarity directed his movements, but he felt nothing else. He would visit the library at Auracia’s Academy. He was due some luck and he hoped he would find it there in the form of information on the Gift, or at the very least a clue of where to look next.
The academies had once been the home away from home to the Society of Mages, one in each of the former provincial capitals of the Empire. It was not as simple as walking in and picking the relevant book off a shelf, however. After the mages were defeated in the wars that fragmented the Empire, the victorious swordsmen, the bannerets, took over their former homes and converted them into schools of swordsmanship: the academies. They also destroyed every trace of magery they could find.
All objects, documents and traces of their existence had been hunted down in an effort to prevent the influence of magic from ever rising again. This included the contents of the libraries in Ostenheim and Auracia, along with every other academy around the Middle Sea.
Going there was a slim hope, but Soren did not need much; enough to keep his search moving forward was all he wanted. Perhaps an innocuous volume on a different subject, overlooked by the bannerets, would give him what he sought.
There was a hypocritical qualification to the purge that always irritated Soren when he tried to learn about the Gift, as not everything had been eradicated. If it made life a little more convenient in many cases it remained untouched, so long as it could not serve a role in the creating of magics. The mage lamps found in most cities were a prime example of this, but there were other, less visible things.
In his darker moments, Soren thought that it was unlikely he would find much that would be of help to him. He had to try though.
He had briefly tried to search out information in the Academy at Ostenheim when he was a student there, but it had turned up nothing. The irony was that in destroying the mages’ libraries, the bannerets had wiped out all information concerning themselves, the one-time servants and bodyguards of the mages. The result was that now the stories about them were little more than legends, with perhaps the faintest seed of truth at their centre.
White stone was the building material of choice amongst the mages. Like his own Academy in Ostenheim, the Academy in Auracia stood out in the city as one of the few buildings not constructed from bricks of brown or dark red and capped with rust coloured tiles. The Academy was built with finely cut stone, off-white in colour, and its buildings stood taller than those around it.
The streets of Auracia tended to be tight and twisting, lined with tall buildings on either side. This changed as he drew near the Academy, where the streets widened into spacious boulevards culminating in a small square outside the front of the Academy itself.
Soren was admitted to the complex with little scrutiny; bannerets tended to carry themselves in a certain way that was easily recognised to an experienced eye — not to mention he was carrying a rapier, something that was illegal for anyone other than a banneret inside the city walls. Once inside he was given directions by a student, and quickly found the library.
It looked very much like the library in Ostenheim; all of the buildings he had seen in the Academy so far were similar to their Ostian counterparts. It was a long hall with an apex roof high above the wooden floor. There was a dusty scent in the air that was strangely calming. Shelves jutted out from the wall at regular intervals, creating little alcoves that were home to desks and chairs. A mezzanine ran around the room above the shelves, which gave access to another row of shelving that lined the wall above, their continuity interrupted only by the large windows that allowed daylight into the room.
Without any clear idea of where to begin, he started by wandering slowly along the shelves, scanning the titles on the spines of the books as he went. The vast majority related directly to the day-to-day curriculum of the Academy;
illustrated guides of fencing positions, treatises on physical training, tactics and suchlike. He would have headed straight for the history section, were it not for the fact that it would surely have been one of the first stops for the men who had purged the library. If he was to find anything of use, it was going to be tucked away in a less obvious tome. He’d need to make a thorough and careful examination of far more books than he would have liked.
After several hours of searching, the skin on his face and hands was grimy with the dust that gathered around large numbers of books. His back ached from stooping down to reach lower shelves, and his hands bore the stinging marks of half a dozen paper cuts. All he had to show for his efforts were two books that were so old all the writing on the spine had worn away. He thought that age and anonymity might have allowed them to escape the purges.
With almost one quarter of the library surveyed and dismissed, it was time to take a look at what he had. He retired to one of the desks to leaf through his two selections. He opened the first, causing a small plume of dust to twist up into the air, and flipped over the first few pages, which were blank. He turned a dozen or so before he went straight to the middle of the book. All blank. It seemed the years had been as unkind to the ink on the inside as they had been to the writing on the spine. Perhaps there was some magic concealing the text, but that seemed a little too fantastical for even his imagination.
Nonetheless, he was tempted to concentrate on the blue glow to see if it had an effect, but after the previous night, he had no desire to put himself through the post-Gift recovery again so soon. It mattered little. If there was anything concealed there, it would most likely have taken something more complex than his tenuous connection to a magical world to reveal its secrets. It was just as likely an old book faded by the passage of time as a magically protected text. His imagination did seem to get ahead of him from time to time, and he was confident that this was one of those occasions.
He pushed the blank volume to the side and opened the second. Happily it had retained its contents in a legible state. Sadly they were entirely on the subject of victualing a force of men in various climates. He sighed and pushed the volume aside. Was he wasting his time? His high spirits had ebbed and his hands were so covered in greasy dust that he could think of nothing more than a frustrated desire to wash them.
There was so little to go on it was hard to know where to begin. The large gaps on the shelves betrayed just how many books had been destroyed in the purges; even centuries later the library had not accumulated enough new works to fill them. The library might have been so ruthlessly censored that there was no mention of those times when magic had still been practised, and when all bannerets had allegedly enjoyed the Gift of which Soren now seemed to be the sole beneficiary. The worrying thought was that he knew every library around the Middle Sea would be the same; it stood to reason.
Searching the universities would most likely be a waste of time as they all post-dated the break up of the Empire. The libraries of the academies were the oldest repositories of information available. A search of the other libraries would take a great deal of travelling and time, and he knew it would be equally futile.
He wondered where to turn next. The options available filled him with feelings of such futility that he couldn’t view them as reasonable. He got up and went to the geography section. He had no real idea of the distances involved between all of the cities that were once provincial capitals of the Empire, and wanted to satisfy his curiosity on that before giving up for the day.
He pulled a large atlas from the shelf and opened it. The spine creaked in protest; the book had clearly not been read in a long time. Each page revealed a beautiful map of a region or a city of the Empire. In the middle of the book, covering both of the facing pages, there was a map of its entire territory.
Spread across the centre was the Middle Sea, vast but surrounded by the coastline of the mainland that hemmed it in on all sides. The only break was in the far south, where, amongst a littering of small islands that stretched between the coastlines, the Middle Sea met the Southern Ocean.
Soren traced his finger along the eastern coastline from north to south, looking for places he could identify to gain a sense of scale. Ruripathia, which he had visited what seemed like a lifetime before, sat in the north east. Ostia was to its south — where he had lived before fleeing — and then farther down the coast, Auracia, where he was now. It all seemed so vast to Soren, who had spent most of his life unaware of everything beyond the walls of the city in which he was born.
Auracia was once the largest province of the Empire, but now it was a loosely affiliated collection of petty principalities often at war with one another. Its southern edge marked the limit of the Empire with the deserts and rivers of Shandahar beyond. On the left hand page on the other side of the Middle Sea there were the other former imperial states running down the western coast: Venter, Humberland, Mirabaya and Estranza, but those places were little more than names to Soren.
There was so much of the world out there of which he was almost completely ignorant. It was daunting. His eye was drawn to the two large islands in the centre of the Middle Sea. He had ignored them up until now. While all of the other states were illuminated with brightly coloured inks, and marked with tiny, immaculately neat labels indicating the names of towns, rivers and mountains, the islands had been given no attention; merely shaded with grey lines and devoid of any labels bar one: ‘The Shrouded Isles’.
It told Soren that the atlas had been made after the fall of the Empire, since prior to that the Isles had been home to its capital. Soren knew of the Isles; everyone did. They formed part of the various legends that were told of the Empire and the days that followed its fall, and were often used as the home for all sorts of monsters in stories told to frighten children.
The city of Vellin-Ilora had sat on either side of the Straits of Saludor, the channel of water that divided the two islands and had been used as a shortcut for ships crossing the Middle Sea. The city became enormously wealthy as a result and eventually gave birth to the Empire. Terrible things were said to have happened there during the Mage Wars, and anyone who had been able to flee the city did so. It had been avoided ever since, with ships’ captains preferring to take the longer route around the islands rather than venture into the straits and anywhere near the cursed city.
Nobody ever went back after the wars, so the stories said. If nobody had ever gone back, perhaps nobody had destroyed what was in the city or, more importantly, its library. He stared at the greyed out blobs, lurking ominously at the centre of the map. After so much time it seemed a slim hope, but could it be that the answers he sought were still there?
Chapter 4
The Honest Christophe
Soren adopted a chattier demeanour that evening back at the inn. A handful of sailors drank there most evenings and they came from all over. He couldn’t think of any group of people better qualified to update his old wives’ tales and legends about the Shrouded Isles.
He walked up to a group of three sailors standing at the bar.
‘Just arrived?’ he said.
‘Aye,’ said one of the sailors, turning from his friends to look at Soren.
‘Where are you out of?’
‘Brisham.’
Soren nodded. It was the capital of Humberland, on the other side of the Middle Sea. ‘Long way.’
The sailor shrugged.
‘Fair voyage?’ Soren said.
‘Aye, we’ve had plenty worse,’ one of the other sailors said.
‘Must be annoying having to go all the way around the Isles to get home again,’ Soren said.
‘No option,’ the first sailor said, shrugging again.
‘Ever think about trying to go through the straits?’
The sailor turned back to his friends and they all burst into laughter.
‘Not a chance,’ the first sailor said, turning back to Soren. ‘Even a landsman like you must have heard the stories?’
‘Heard ‘em. Always wondered if there was any truth to ‘em,’ Soren said, hoping to wring some more information from them.
‘Plenty of truth. Too many stories for them not to be true; ships wrecked, sailors drowned. They’re the lucky ones. The ones that end up on the island have it worse. No one’s ever made it off them alive. Things that happen there? Horrible things.’ The sailor shook his head in knowing dismay, a gesture mirrored by his two friends.
‘If no one’s ever made it off them alive, how do you know what happened?’ Soren said, jumping on the obvious hole in their story.
The sailor opened his mouth to reply but closed it again. He hesitated before responding. ‘If you think they’re just stories, why don’t you go there yourself to find out.’
The other sailors started to laugh as though the idea was the most ridiculous thing in the world, and Soren was the most naive fool.
‘Well, enjoy your time ashore, lads,’ Soren said, before turning to head for his room.
‘Yeah, you too. Good luck finding a ship to take you to the Isles,’ the sailor said.
The others chuckled with renewed enthusiasm.
First thing the next morning, Soren went to the harbour. Someone had tried to kill him in the city once already, and he had no desire to dally there for whomever it was to try again. The port area of Auracia was smaller than the massive harbour at Ostenheim, but it was still busy. Soren intended to find a ship that would take him close enough to the coast of the Shrouded Isles to row ashore.
He cast a glance at the Harbour Master’s office as he went and felt his stomach tighten into a knot. He tried to push the memory from his mind, but it was enough to leave him feeling unsettled.
The Huntsman's Amulet (Society of the Sword Volume 2) Page 2
