by Matt Gilbert
Ahmed studied the map before him. It depicted, in faded outline, an unfamiliar landmass. Brutus’s source of confusion was clear. The map bore a stylized arrow to indicate North. Below this, another arrow, smaller and more rudimentary, pointed in the opposite direction, with the word “North” scribbled alongside in spiky handwritten letters.
Tahir reached across the table and turned a knob on the oil lamp, raising the wick higher and brightening the room. “It’s taken some time, but we have done enough mapping to come up with what I think is a match,” he said. Ahmed gritted his teeth at the annoying, nasal sound of Tahir's voice. The navigator produced his own roll of paper, a partial outline of the coast, and flattened it beside the ancient map, orienting it to match. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but close enough to leave no doubt as to the correct orientation. “We’re about a third of the way around the continent so far, and it’s clear the handwritten change is the correct orientation.”
Yazid scowled, his lips pressed flat like coins as he studied the two maps. Tahir noticed his displeasure. “You disagree, Prelate?”
Yazid shook his head slowly. “I do not. Which is why I am disturbed.”
Brutus looked at the others, then back at Yazid and laughed. “You are disturbed that we can find our asses without a compass?”
“You’ve had much experience with that!” Ahmed said with a grin, and the rest laughed heartily.
Brutus grabbed at his crotch and jerked at it. “Aye, but we need only one pointer,” he said, sparking more laughter form everyone but Yazid. Brutus quickly grew somber once more. “What is it, Prelate?”
The older man sighed, his face still troubled. “It would be fine if the handwritten version were the incorrect one. But the mapmaker was wrong? It’s bizarre.”
Sandilianus absently polished a brightwork handhold with his sleeve. “Perhaps he was a fool.”
“A fool whose work survived an eon, then,” Yazid said. “It seems unlikely.”
Tahir rolled his eyes once more, a gesture that Ahmed had begun to loathe. “What matter? Perhaps it was custom to indicate South in that time, rather than North. The point is, we are oriented and can make our plans.”
“Aye, ‘tis so,” Brutus declared. “Let us move on to that. Where would our enemy make his home?”
Yazid’s humor seemed all used up. His face was stern and hard. “We do not know that these people are our enemies. It has been a thousand years. Surely, enmity died with those who bore it?”
Brutus sat up in his seat, serious now. “We should be just as careful that we not think of them as friends,” he noted. “In my experience, strangers are more like to be enemies. But as you wish, Prelate. We shall call them whatever you like.”
“They called themselves Meites at one time,” Yazid said. “It is a good enough name, I think, until we find a better one.”
Brutus nodded in assent. “So, where would these Meites have likely settled, that is our mystery.”
“Coastal, of course,” Tahir noted. “At the mouth of a river. They would have had the land to themselves, so I’d suppose we should look for the most prime spot.”
Everyone nodded in agreement, but Yazid shook his head. “I think not.”
Sandilianus heaved a sigh and turned from his polishing with a wry smile. “Do you truly think so, or is it habit now to tell us what fools we are?”
“Truly, I think so,” Yazid said, returning the smile. “The Meites would have been very fearful at the time. They had no way of knowing when they would be attacked once again, and they were surely as war-weary as the Laureans.” Yazid walked to a porthole and looked out over the waves, taking in a great breath of fresh, salty air. “More importantly, they were powerful sorcerers. The legends say the Council of Twelve were like unto demigods, capable of facing entire armies. They would not need to settle on a river. They could have diverted one to their chosen spot.” He took his seat again, considering the map. “I say defensibility would be their primary concern.”
“If that is so, then we are lost,” Brutus said with a sigh. “If it is not coastal, we could circumnavigate the entire continent and never find them.”
“Aye, but Ilaweh is with us. Now you will see why I have brought the boy.” Yazid turned to Ahmed. “You must use your gift, child.”
Ahmed’s belligerent mood fell away in an instant. Not in front of these men! They will think me a freak!“ Must I, Master?”
“You must. On the old map.”
Brutus’s face went from confused to amazed as he came to a sudden realization. “He has the sight?”
Yazid nodded. “He is modest about it.”
“Modest?” Brutus chuckled. “This same boy who was waving his dick about like a flag?” He turned to Ahmed. “Are you mad, boy? You are touched by Ilaweh more than any of my kind to have such a gift!”
Ahmed swallowed hard. “I fear it. You don’t understand.”
“I understand that it is the hand of Ilaweh,” Brutus answered. “That is all any of us need to know. Show us.”
Tahir ran a hand over his face, obviously unimpressed. “A hundred swords says he finds nothing.”
Brutus cast a baleful glare at Tahir. “Why not a thousand, heathen?”
“You don’t have a thousand swords to lose.”
Brutus continued his stare down a moment, then nodded. “A hundred swords, then.”
“Do not risk your money on me!” Ahmed gasped.
Brutus laughed out loud. “On you? Bah! On Ilaweh! And to shame this dog. His few rare words are blasphemies.”
“Why not simply beat him, then?” Ahmed suggested.
Sandilianus flashed a cruel grin at this. “Tahir has no soul. He cannot feel pain like a man would. But part him from his gold and he’ll squeal like a little girl.”
Tahir’s eyes narrowed in annoyance, but his lips curled up in a smile, refusing to cooperate with the rest of his face. “The way I see it, I can’t lose. Either I take Brutus’s gold, or I get to go home sooner.”
Brutus punched the red-haired navigator in the arm hard enough to stagger him. “I will buy myself a hard, young boy with your gold, Tahir, and fuck him in front of you just to make you ill! Eh? Will you wager that, too?”
“Only if, when you lose, you fuck my woman for me while I go out whoring,” Tahir chuckled.
Brutus gave an exaggerated shudder of revulsion. “You are a monster!”
“Where is your faith, Brutus? Surely Ilaweh will save your masculinity, eh?”
“Sandi had the right of you. You have no soul.”
Tahir gave Brutus a wicked leer but said nothing.
Brutus struggled with his pride a moment, then slammed a fist on the table and shouted, “Aye! Done!” He turned to Ahmed. “Do not fuck this up, boy!”
Ahmed felt bile rising in his throat as he lay his hands on the old map, reaching out for…something. It was a feeling for which there were no words, his gift. At times, it seemed purely guessing, at others, sure knowledge. This time? Who could know the will of Ilaweh until it was done?
He ran his hands over the old parchment, searching, feeling the grain of the material. It is just paper. There is nothing here...no...wait...there. He felt his hands drawn toward a point. He moved slowly, the pull growing stronger, now strong hands grasping his wrists and yanking them. The paper beneath his hands grew warm, then hot, then searing like molten lava. Visions of horror tore into his mind like daggers, brutal, unspeakable acts. Cries of agony rang in his ears.
Ahmed screamed as his hands burned and his vision flew elsewhere, showing him unspeakable things: monsters with tentacles and gibbering mouths ripping the flesh from screaming victims, blood pouring in rivers, cold, lifeless eyes glazed in unending horror. It was too much! He tore his hands from the map. “There!” he cried. He pounded a finger on the spot, feeling the heat and corruption each time his fingertip touched the parchment. “There! There!”
Yazid frowned and shook his head. “No. Not there.”
“It is!”
Ahmed cried. “A great evil, Yazid! Terrible evil!” I can’t breathe!
Yazid nodded and placed a soothing arm upon Ahmed’s shoulders. “I believe you, child. I know that place. It is called Torium, and there is no doubt much evil there. But this is not our destination. Look for a smaller evil.”
Ahmed stared at Yazid in frustration as the rest watched the scene in grim silence. “How can I hear a whisper over that shriek?”
Yazid scowled in displeasure and slapped Ahmed hard enough to rattle the teeth in his head. “Do you trust Ilaweh or not, boy?”
Thank you! The pain brought him back from the edge. Ahmed lowered his gaze and stared at the deck as he slowly regained his breath. “Aye, Master, I do.”
“Then listen for his voice.” Yazid pointed at the map. “Again. Try further away from Torium. Perhaps it will help.”
As Ahmed bent to his task once again, Brutus said, “I will not take my men there, Prelate. Even I know of Torium.”
“Indeed. ‘Tis a place we would do well to steer clear of,” Yazid answered. “For now,” he added, then gestured for silence.
Ahmed lay his fingers gently against the map, letting the tips just brush against the outline of the western coast. He immediately felt the pull toward Torium, a poisonous, yellow, nauseating current, a river of filth flowing to a sea of decay. It was overwhelming and disorienting, a sense of being torn in two by opposing forces of revulsion and compulsion.
Ilaweh, give me strength.
Slowly, his mind cleared, and the throbbing wound of Torium seemed to fade to a dull ache. He reached out, searching, listening.
There. A pinprick, a slight moan of pain, and yet a sense of kindred. My brother is ill, Ahmed thought to himself as he traced his finger along a river, up into a series of mountains. “Here.”
Yazid looked at the point Ahmed indicated. It was blank, an unmarked area surrounded by mountains. Yazid smiled in satisfaction. “Aye,” he said, nodding. “It seems just the sort of place they might have chosen. Isolated. Unexplored, even. Unapproachable without their grace. And it is very near us. It is surely the grace of Ilaweh that it should be so.”
Brutus and Sandilianus nodded in appreciation as Tahir scowled and stepped forward with his own map. He stroked his chin as he considered the two maps side by side. “Look here. We mapped the mouth of a river two days back. This old map shows it going inland fairly close to the mountains. Of course, how we’ll get past the mountains is anyone’s guess.”
“If the boy’s vision is right, there will be a pass,” Brutus noted. “And there ought to be a river.”
Yazid agreed. “If there wasn’t, the Meites would have made one.”
Brutus rose to his feet. “I’ll need to prepare my men. What should we expect? What do you need?”
“This will be very dangerous,” Yazid said. “We have no idea if they are hostile or not, and we can’t afford to provoke them if they are inclined to be friendly.” He scratched at his chin as he thought. “We go armed, but we must not look like an invading army. And we must be ready to weather an initial assault.”
Brutus nodded, grim-faced. “As you say, dangerous, but I agree with your assessment.” He turned to Sandilianus. “We take twenty men. You and I, and your choice of our best to fill out the other eighteen slots.”
“Twenty one then, with me,” Yazid said. “A fortunate number, three times seven.”
Ahmed’s leapt to his feet, indignant. “You would leave me behind?”
“Aye,” Yazid told him, the look in his eyes suggesting that any defiance an Ahmed’s part would earn him a beating. “If I fall, you must carry on this work. I will not risk the both of us.”
Ahmed ground his teeth, trying to contain his anger and disappointment. There was no arguing with Yazid. Not only was he not a man to change his mind, he was right about this. But that didn’t make it any easier to be left behind.
Ahmed nodded his assent, not trusting himself to speak. His tongue might not obey his head, and he would prefer to avoid humiliating himself in front of these strong warriors.
Brutus waited a moment, then nodded his admiration of Ahmed’s silence. “Tahir, turn us around and let us have a look at this river. And you owe me a hundred swords.”
Tahir waved a hand and sneered. “I’ve heard much talk, but I see no Meites.”
Brutus grinned at him. “Aye. But you will.”
They reconvened on the forecastle two days later. The air at the mouth of the river was thick with biting insects, the banks covered with more green than Ahmed had ever imagined. A man could be swallowed up in such a place and never find his way out.
“Can we sail the ship upriver?” Yazid asked Tahir.
The navigator scratched at his scraggly beard, considering. “Can we? Aye, but how far, I can’t say. It will be slow. We’ll need to stay on the sounding lines. But we could do it, at least part of the way.”
Brutus shook his head. “We will anchor the ship here and proceed on foot. It’s no more than twenty miles inland. I see no reason to announce our arrival any sooner than we must.”
Yazid nodded. “I stand corrected.”
Tahir pointed to the mountains in the distance. Dark clouds boiled over the peaks, thick and angry. “Could be trouble.”
“Bad weather?” Brutus asked.
“Soon, I’d say.”
Brutus eyed the distant cloud cover, scowling. “Then we’d best get started.”
Ahmed watched them until they vanished into the green jungle. It made no sense, but he felt in his bones he would not see Yazid again. Other men could dismiss such notions as unfounded, but what was a man who had visions to think? How could he tell the difference? Father, I should be at your side.
But sons must obey fathers and men must be brave, and so Ahmed waited with his fear. There was nothing else he could do.
“I think we are ready to approach them,” Yazid said.
Brutus considered, weighing things in his mind. A week ago, they had left the ship and proceeded inland on foot. Sooner than they had dared hope for, they had come upon signs of civilization, small villages with tall, thin, pale men working fields, tending animals, and otherwise going about farm business. They had given these settlements wide birth, not wanting to risk detection. Initially Brutus had learned very little beyond what he could see through his spyglass.
Things had gone quickly after that, however. They had found a cave and set up a small camp from which they dispatched observers on reconnaissance missions. It was simple enough to follow the villagers when they left their homes, which led to the discovery of the pass, the road, and then the city.
It was obvious that these people were harmless. The road was patrolled, but at regular intervals, easily predictable, never more than a dozen armed men. It was a trivial matter to avoid them and slip into the city proper, a bit more challenging to blend in. The natives were tall, thin, and had a deathly pallor, but hooded robes and hands kept in pockets worked well enough as long as they were careful. No one questioned a single man who minded his own business. They were clearly more concerned about thieves than spies.
If the people were unusual, the city itself was nothing short of astounding! Brutus had never seen such great towers, so many people in one place, nor such a stark separation between the rich and the poor. When he had first entered, Brutus had thought that despite its appearance from afar, the place was little different from any other city: dirty, crowded, and on occasion requiring the use of his sword arm. Then he had looked up, and seen a true wonder.
In the air above him hung another city, another people sharing the same land with the common folks below them. Everywhere, real glass and polished steel glinted, turning the night sky into a sight to rival the very moon and stars. Indeed, it seemed the people who had built this metropolis had been arrogant enough to block out the mundane lights of the heavens so that they could not possibly compete. The clouds over the city never parted, never thinned, never rained. They simply hovered, dark and brooding
in the day, orange and luminous at night.
By now, Brutus knew the name of the city: Nihlos. He knew the locals spoke a variant of Priman, though a thousand years of divergence had created accents and phrases that were at times different enough to pass as another language entirely. He knew that they were relatively civilized, that there were divisions of class in a hierarchy of noble, commoner, and slave, though ‘slave’ meant something different here than it would in Aviar.
He knew the paths food and other vital supplies took from the outlying villages to the city proper, and how to cut them off. He knew the location of the gates about the city, and how paltry the forces manning them were.
Most importantly, he knew that, of the estimated half million residents, less than one percent of them were under arms. They were, for all practical purposes, completely defenseless. They had no army to speak of, only police whose chief concerns were thieves and drunks.
“Approach?” He fixed Yazid with a smoldering stare and sneered. “Prelate, I begin to wonder why I listen to you and your tales. These people are weaklings. We have nothing to fear from them. This is a fool’s errand.”
Yazid’s face grew even darker, and his right hand clenched into a fist. “Even if you do not fear them, you should fear to insult me.”
Brutus held his gaze for a moment, then nodded his surrender with a laugh. “Fair enough, Yazid. I will be more respectful. But truly, these people cannot possibly be a threat to us. Bagdreme alone could field twenty legions if her need was great enough, to say nothing of all Xanthia. I think we can simply walk away from this. We know what we need to know.”
Yazid shook his head. “We do not. We know nothing, truly.”
“I try to be respectful, Prelate, but I try to be honest, as well. I think this prophesy business is bunk, Ilaweh be praised. It is time to admit you were wrong about this.”
Yazid’s fingers clenched and unclenched, and his nostrils flared wide. “If I am wrong, then how came we here? How did Ahmed and I guide you to this city that should not exist? How am I right about everything else?” He spat on the ground. “Idiot. You think with your sword hand and your dick.”
