Written in Blood

by Span, Ryan A.

  “That... was not part of our agreement.”

  “It is now. By the letter of our contract, you have a guide of your choice and my obligations are fulfilled. You've no power to object, unless you wish to renegotiate.”

  Her expression hardened, and she shook her head.

  “Very good. I'm glad we understand each other.” His death-stare never wavered, not even to blink. “Let me further stipulate that if you were to turn back without my Racha, I will hunt you down. Men, women, and children. There will be a reckoning in blood. Get out of my sight before I decide there are things more important to me than honour.”

  We beat a hasty retreat from the hall and waited in the square outside while a few Brunoke men brought our animals out to us. The woman fumed at Rogald's deliberate show of disrespect. Sir Erroll went a little red, like he might storm back in and demand a duel, but even he wasn't that stupid. If he really was Duke Selcourt's heir in disguise, he'd had a good taste of humility by now.

  Racha came out looking glum and distant. She didn't take a horse. In proud infantry tradition, I followed her example, leading my mare on foot. Faro and the Rangers walked too, although for them it wasn't really a choice.

  “Hard to believe we're putting our backs to this place already,” said Faro. He took a long wistful look around the valley, with its terrace farms and tenacious oak trees. Probably the most inviting country we'd see for weeks.

  “Go tell Rogald you'd like to stay a while longer,” I suggested. “See how he takes it.”

  “I'd rather wrestle a mother bear.”

  Chortling, Descard decided to weigh in. “You may get to try, lad. No telling what we'll find over the Edge.”

  “Bears,” interjected Racha, suddenly and with no humour at all, “will be the least of your worries.”

  She shouldered her pack and began the long climb up the steep walls of the valley. We followed, and we didn't tell any more jokes.

  5. The Edge of the World

  “If, through no fault of your own, you outlast the client and their associates, your contract is null and void.”

  - Contractor's Fifth Rule

  In the high Catsclaws, we were aware of time passing mostly by the change from rain to snow and back again. The sun we saw on our way out of Brunoke Valley was our last. The dreary late-autumn weather settled in for the long haul, and the colour of the sky only shifted a few shades of grey by day or night. Everything up here smelled like moss and wet dog, until I caught another cold and stopped smelling anything.

  Even the mountains which had been bare were snow-capped now. We threaded a long, winding path between slopes of stone and ice, slopes that only seemed to get sharper and higher the further north we came. Any sign of trees or greenery vanished. Soon even the birds, the goats and the hares stopped showing themselves. We were the only colour in this frozen world. Us, and perhaps a few patches of lichen on the sheer, jagged cliffs. I couldn't believe people ever conquered this land. An empire, here, seemed as far-fetched as walking across the ocean.

  My one comfort was that our new furs kept us warm. They didn't do much for the damp or the general misery, but I enjoyed not freezing my toes off.

  Others felt the hardships worse than I did. Yazizi kept herself wrapped up from head to toe, and even produced some coverings for her palfrey, who did not enjoy the cold one bit. Aemedd breathed through a thick cloth, frosted around the edges, and rarely talked to conserve his breath. Faro couldn't stop his teeth from chattering.

  All our horses started to look a little thin and ragged around the edges. I wondered if any of them would survive the trip. When they started to drop, how much longer until we joined them?

  “I used to think the steppe was the worst place in the world,” panted Faro, his breath pouring out in great clouds of steam. “Lord, for my foolishness, I beg Your clemency.”

  “Shut up and ride, boy.”

  This was Mudden, one of Descard's boys. The one who most opposed his commander's decision to throw in with us. He'd held his tongue through the riverlands and Brunoke, but now he was on the verge of open rebellion, growing more discontent by the day.

  The other Ranger, Bertran, quieted Mudden with a hand on his arm and a small shake of the head. Mute, never spoke a word, but a gentle soul. Eloquent in gestures and soldier's sign.

  That was the full extent of our conversation that day. No one spoke more than a few sentences at a time, so even the arguments were brief. It took too much energy to be angry in the thin, freezing air.

  The next morning we got caught in a rockslide, and lost Bertran. Dawning horror on his face as the ground began to tumble down on him. Nowhere to flee as stones careened into him, broke him and swept him away. Faro, who was the next man in line, managed to dance backwards, but not before a falling boulder battered his arm. It must've hurt like a devil, but he paid it no mind, screaming Bertran's name as the Ranger vanished under a tide of stone and snow.

  It took hours before Aemedd got the squire back into any condition to travel. One fur-lined sleeve dangled loose from his shoulder. His wounded arm stayed in a sling inside his cloak.

  We never found Bertran's body. We erected a tiny cross, but no one could bring themselves to speak. It was an unfair, senseless death.

  We rode on.

  Long years in the Army had inured me to the conspicuous absence left by a fallen comrade. The empty space at breakfast. The face, already beginning to fade. Even so, I missed Bertran bitterly, though I barely knew him. We didn't have people to spare.

  The experience changed Faro. At first he pretended it didn't bother him. He pretended with fierce determination, and if anyone had asked, he would've claimed he didn't think about Adar anymore either. He tried even harder to act like a man, and stopped talking more than necessary. He no longer allowed Yazizi into his tent at nights. Too much guilt to hold at once.

  I saw her standing outside mine once, a shadow on the white canvas, but she never entered. Angry, or hurt, or afraid. Maybe all three at once. I thought about going out to talk, but what would I say to her? After everything that happened between us, all that we'd done, all that I'd done, drunk or sober...

  Every day we found it difficult to look each other in the eye. I started wishing she weren't around to remind me of my own weakness.

  Despite the general wall of silence, our mood turned uglier day by day. Mudden and Descard argued in whispers all the time. Sir Erroll did his best to make the two Rangers feel as unwelcome as possible. He became more and more possessive of the woman, and every time she rebuffed his advances, he took it out on his squire. Once we had to stop him from beating the boy unconscious. By the maddened look in the knight's eyes, he might have started on me if Descard and the others hadn't been there to restrain him.

  “A fine group of people you have here, Sergeant,” Descard said under his breath as Sir Erroll walked away. “You're all insane.”

  I felt a flush of anger at that, but by the time I could think of a good rejoinder, he'd gone. I bit my tongue and went back to my tent. How dare he? No one forced him to come along. He was here because he was too much of a coward to cut his own throat.

  I dwelled on it until our evening meal of goat's cheese and cured meat, when Aemedd leaned over to me and whispered, “Do you think it'll come to blows?”

  “I... don't know.” I threw him a sideways glance. “Saints know I'd like to take swings at a few people.”

  “Don't. Under no circumstances‒”

  He ran out of breath, took another couple of shallow gulps through the cloth over his mouth, and punctuated it with a harsh cough. I knew how he felt. Even I was struggling to fill my lungs. “If we‒ Together‒”

  Those were the last intelligible words out of him for the night. He lay doubled over either coughing or fighting for air, and neither ate nor drank. When he took one of his hands out of his gloves, it was a grey claw, skin over bone. It didn't look like it ought to move.

  His words stayed with me, though. What would happen
if we fell apart now? So much country and nothing in it but rock and frozen water. Anyone could go stir-crazy over the Edge of the World.

  The next day was another wretched slog through the freezing rain and snow. Every once in a while, the weather would clear for a few minutes and a little glow of colourful sunlight would rise behind the towering ridges, lending them halos of staggering beauty. It was as if each silhouetted mountain threw up its own little rainbow. It made me appreciate how hard it was to raise your head out of the general misery for long enough to see the natural spectacles unfolding all around you.

  Around noon, Racha called a halt near the lowest point of a relatively sheltered valley, where the snow mainly just piled up against the cliffs. Racha gathered us round and pulled the cloth from her face so we could see her. The harsh weather and travel barely showed on her strong features. Apart from the sleepless blue bags under her eyes, which we all shared, she looked the same as when we left.

  “My father's directions tell of a bent-backed mountain, a forest and a great lake.” Without any ceremony, she pointed to the high bluff ahead of us, nearly a crescent, with a precarious cap of snow on top. Then her finger moved to the mirror-smooth pit at the bottom of the valley, and the black, ice-draped hulks of dead trees around it. “This is the ancestral Grove of Black Oaks. The men and women of Blockoke Valley, far to our west, are descended from those who made their homes here before the ice came. This is the Edge of the World.”

  “Fantastic,” grunted Sir Erroll, stamping his feet and rubbing his gloved hands together to keep his blood flowing, “but I didn't come for a history lesson.”

  Racha glared at him like a wrathful schoolteacher at the class dimwit. “Then shut your mouth long enough for me to finish, unless you'd like to climb up the Mother of Ice herself and skate to Kassareth!” The knight went resentfully mute. “Carrying on through the mountains from here is suicide. If you think this is cold, you have much to learn. However, there is another way.”

  She went to a sheer part of the cliff, where vertical snowdrifts rose only a few metres up the rock face. She chose one drift carefully and climbed to the top, brushing away snow by the armful until she exposed a horizontal beam of ancient wood, stained deep red by preservatives, almost completely free of rot. She followed it to its right edge and dug down to reveal a vertical support. A tunnel. My mind flashed back to our evening in Brunoke, and I suddenly understood.

  “It's a mine,” I blurted out. “One of the Brass Men's mines, like you said!”

  She turned back, panting from the effort, and gave me a grin. “At least one of you was paying attention. This shaft goes into the largest underground complex ever dug by the hands of man. Somewhere inside should be a passage connecting to the outskirts of Kassareth.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” asked the woman. Her lips seemed even redder in the cold, wearing a heart-shaped smile. “Gentlemen, to your spades.”

  We gritted our teeth and began to work in the bitter cold, prying a small hole in the wall of compacted snow and ice. Then we enlarged the hole until we could fit a horse through. The animals became restless, as if they sensed what was coming up, and the last place they wanted to be was in the cold, dank underground. My mare stood shivering despite her blanket. She lay down in the snow just as we were finishing up our tunnel, and never got up again. Yazizi muttered a foreign prayer over the gentle beast's body and redistributed the supplies. The cold gnawed at us too hard to spend time butchering it for meat.

  It was warmer inside, though not by much. The wind howled in through our newly-opened passage. We managed to build a small fire in the lee of the snow wall, and made the most of it. Trying to enjoy our last few hours of sunlight and fresh air. By the time we were ready to go, the pack horse we'd given to Descard was also gone from this world, already frozen stiff.

  Two horses in a day was a heavy blow. From that point on, nobody rode except Aemedd, who was too weak to put one foot in front of the other. We had to tie him into the saddle to stop him from falling, and lay him flat against the horse's back to avoid the low ceiling. Only Yazizi's talent kept the animals from bolting. Without her, they wouldn't have followed us down the tunnel, not even if we dragged them.

  The girl took a critical sniff of the dank, stale air. “It smells worse than Newmond.”

  “Give it time,” said Racha, hefting her lantern. “Things will get much more awful before we are out.”

  “You've been down here before?”

  “Of course not. No one has, not in living memory.”

  “How reassuring.”

  Racha gave Yazizi an unkind look and ignored her for the rest of the trip.

  We marched into the dark, going down.

  It took a while before I stopped feeling the cold draft on the back of my neck. An hour, maybe. My sense of time was the first thing to go in the dark.

  The shaft curved left and right, and the dust kicked up by our footsteps made it hard to see more than a few feet, even with our lanterns. Side tunnels branched off at random, following long-gone veins of ore, sometimes several in the span of a few yards. Many of them had collapsed, and debris spilled out of more than a few openings. Every now and again little flecks of copper ore gleamed back at us from the walls or the rubble. It was pretty, and yet, it made me all too conscious of the immense weight of rock over my head.

  Once, we came across a great white lump sitting in an alcove off the main path. It took me a minute to realise it wasn't rock but fur. As I watched, it breathed once, but gave no other sign of life.

  “Ice bear,” whispered Racha. “Very aggressive if woken.”

  We crept around the hibernating creature and left it in peace. After a few minutes I heard a single, echoing snore from far behind us. No worries.

  People began to exchange the occasional word of small talk now that we weren't conserving every freezing breath. Descard tried to strike up a conversation with me but I shot him down with gruff, one-word responses. Sir Erroll made himself into a wall between the woman and the rest of us. Rather than deal with that, I went to to the front of our little column where Faro and Racha marched together, trying to pretend Yazizi didn't exist. I grabbed the boy by a shoulder and sent him to the rear. Sullen, red-rimmed eyes glared at me, but he went all the same.

  “Hello,” I said. She gave a small nod, which was more than anyone else in our group got out of her. “I had a question for you.”

  “I am listening.”

  “Does this place have a name?”

  She hesitated. When she said anything, she pitched her voice high, airy, nonchalant. “You mean this tunnel, or the mine, or the mountains above us? In Brunoke we have a saying‒”

  “Racha,” I interrupted, “we have a saying in the South too. You're stalling.”

  “What do you want me to say, Byren? What can I say in front of these people?” Glancing nervously over her shoulder, she went on, “We call it Loscolhom. Place of the Lost Souls. The only names anyone remembers for these mines involve how nobody ever comes back. Alright? They're haunted. Of all the hundreds who have tried in our history, if one man ever made it through to Kassareth, he certainly didn't make it back.”

  I nodded, and swallowed. That word, 'haunted.' There was something about the way she said it that didn't sit well. I decided to change the subject. “Your Southern is getting much better.”

  Her nervousness fled in the face of a blush, colouring her already-rosy cheeks a fresh cherry red. “I... Thank you.”

  “You're welcome. Keep practicing.” The moment of levity passed all too soon. I coughed into my fist. A question hung in the space between us, one I didn't want to ask and she didn't want to answer. So we walked and didn't say another word.

  It was Sir Erroll who broke the silence this time. He tromped up to the front and pointed down the descending slope, deep worry lines cut into his frowning face. “What about miner's breath? We should be carrying a bird, or something.”

  “Did you see many birds in the area,
Sir Knight?” asked Descard, all soft-spoken and reasonable. “Do you know of any which we could've carried through these mountains alive?”

  “Are you saying we should hinge our lives on blind faith, my Lord?”

  “I say we can't use what we do not have, Sir. If we're doing God's work, then God will see us through.”

  The argument bled out into silent, glowering bitterness. Descard shrugged it off, but I knew Sir Erroll wouldn't let it go. He'd hold it inside and let it fester together with all the other imagined slights and hatreds. Maybe he thought the newly-minted Baron was another rival for the woman's affections, or maybe he resented being outranked, or... Or he thought that Descard knew something. If anybody was in on the secret of Erick Selcourt, it'd be a commander of the Household Rangers, someone who worked closely with Lord Halser and who'd been dispatched by the King himself to hunt us down.

  More hours drifted away in the flickering twilight. The first touch of tiredness began to tug at my eyes. I was brooding, thinking, so at first I didn't notice when the walls around us suddenly dropped away. The carved bedrock underfoot turned into stone blocks. We were on a bridge, ancient and crumbling, over a chasm so deep we could see nothing but black below us. The faint, echoing drip of water suggested there might be an underground lake or stream down there, but I wouldn't count on it to break any falls.

  “The Sea of Stones,” whispered Racha, a mixture of dread and awe in her voice. She dug out one of her father's papers and traced her finger down the page. “Legend says it's more than a league across, and ten times as long. This is the birthplace of the northern farns. The bridge under our feet is the only crossing.”

  “We'll need more light,” the woman said. She strode to the edge of the group, bypassing Sir Erroll, and swept a critical eye over the age-old stones. “Torches. I don't want anyone setting a foot wrong in this place.”

  In minutes we had a guttering torch lit for everyone without a lantern. They struggled to burn in the close, musty air, but every little helped. I could actually see the blocks in front of my feet and the rows of gargoyles that lined the railings, somehow more horrific with their features worn away by time. We travelled single file, so I stuck close behind Racha, in what I figured was the safest place to be. It was still nerve-wracking. Every footfall seemed to shake pebbles and mortar-dust from the sides of the bridge, tumbling noisily into the darkness below.