He’d known about the monster for two days now, ever since the new maid had put it there, but he was a Fahallis, and Fahallis did not cry for their mamas, not even at age four. The monster was clever. When Edo lit the lamp and looked under the bed it was gone, but he knew that as soon as it was dark again, the monster would be back. For the past two nights as soon as his mama tucked him into bed and left the room he’d leaped right back out of bed and slept on the bit of carpet in front of his wardrobe. He’d heard the monster searching for him with its quiet and tiny fingers creeping among his blankets, so he’d stayed where he was, quiet and afraid.
Tonight he’d decided he must tell mama. He sat at his chair and looked out the window at the palace lights, hoping that he might catch a glimpse of the flying sparkers the Entreddi had promised would be a part of their celebration. From the chair he couldn’t see very far, and once his mama had gotten rid of the monster he would be able to see more.
“What are you doing?” Mama asked, startling Edo. He turned to look at her as she entered the room, carrying a lit candle even though it was still light enough to see for a bit. Her round and solid shape was a comfort to the boy. “You are supposed to be in bed, Edo.”
“There’s a monster under the bed, mama.” Edo explained. “The new maid put it there.”
“She’s not a new maid.” Eshora Fahallis explained, and not for the first time. “She was only here the one day, and only because Methenia took sick. Methenia will be back tomorrow. Now what is this about a monster?” Eshora smiled slightly. It had been a long time since Edo had needed her to check for monsters in the wardrobe or under the bed, and honestly it felt nice to be needed for mama’s jobs.
“It’s under the bed, mama.” Edo explained. “It goes away and hides when you put a light on it.”
“It does?” Eshora smiled kindly. “Let’s see if we can find it.” She then proceeded to look, first under the bed, then in the wardrobe, then beneath the carpet and in the bureau drawers.
“I think it has run away for good, Edo.” She said patiently. She gave the bed a whack for good measure. “Still, do you want to sleep with mama and papa tonight?” At Edo’s little nod she took his hand and led him to the master bedroom. Unlike most families in Mortentia City, the Fahallis had a separate bedroom for each member of the family, as well as rooms for maids, butlers, hostlers and the cook. Berrin Fahallis was at his desk in the bedroom in his nightshirt, absenting fingering his moustache while reading the latest letter from the new king. He looked up when Eshora entered, then gave Edo a puzzled frown.
“Edorien, why are you not in bed?” He demanded. Edo’s father always used his full name, so it didn’t mean Edo was in trouble when he said it. When mama said the whole name, it meant he’d done something he shouldn’t have, like wet the bed.
“Edo thinks there is a monster under his bed.” Eshora explained. “I told him he could sleep with us tonight. Tonight only, Berrin.” Edo’s father was shaking his head before she finished.
“Out of the question, Eshora. He’s too old to be treated like a baby. Additionally, I’ve half a hundred things to deal with yet tonight with the new king. I will be up half the night reading and writing. He won’t be able to sleep with the candle burning, and I don’t want him to be cranky tomorrow.”
“Please, Berrin.” Eshora insisted. “I did promise him.”
Berrin sighed. “I will do this much for you, Edorien.” He said, looking at his son fondly. “I will inspect your room for monsters, and I’ll let you borrow my practice poniard. If the monster has run away and come back, you will have to kill it yourself.” He took a wooden dagger from a cupboard and handed it to Edo. Edo nodded very seriously.
Back in Edo’s room his father did the same inspection that his mother had, and found nothing. Edo crawled into the bed warily, holding the wooden dagger close to his chest. “Thank you father.” He said to Berrin, and seeing the fear in his son’s eyes, Berrin Fahallis almost relented and let him come back to the master bedroom. But he’d given his word and said how it would be, and he was not one to change his mind over the irrational fears of a four-year-old. He gave his son a kiss on the head and pulled the blankets up around him. It had been an unseasonably cold Kastanus, and Leath didn’t look to be any warmer.
“Good night, son.” Berrin blew out the candle and closed the door.
For a long time Edo knelt by the window, looking at the sky around the palace. Candles, torches and lamps were being lit in the King’s great house, and the party at the docks was still roaring, for once in a while Edo could hear the boom of a big drum. Then, to his delight, he saw white flaming lights shoot into the sky beyond the palace, and they exploded in a shower of red sparks, causing his window to vibrate noisily. For perhaps half an hour he watched them, then he lay down, with his feet toward where his head should go, keeping his eyes on the window for more fireworks. Then his eyes grew heavy and at last he slept.
The monster was not truly under the bed, but it was in the bed. Greedy tendrils like the elongated roots of sickly flowers stretched out from the mattress and entered the sleeping boy’s skin. Invisible fibers paralyzed Edo almost instantly, and he tried to scream, but the changeling was true to its instinct. The first muscles it paralyzed were those that made noise. Edo tried to stab at the monster, but wooden daggers were not made to harm such things as these, and Edo’s tiny muscles were quickly paralyzed. The wooden dagger fell to the floor.
Gradually it flowed upward through the fabric and into the boy, forming a shape just like him, but starved and gangrel, and for a little while it was as if two Edos lay in the bed, one holding tightly to the other. Then, when all was quiet in the huge house the monster opened up its mouth to a fantastic width and swallowed Edo whole.
In the morning, the thing that had been Edo would greet Berrin and Eshora Fahallis with a happy smile, and they would not know what it was until it was far too late to do them any good.
Kahdin had to admit that the Entreddi made better guardsmen than he did, at least when it came to policing drunks. Every time two drunken Mortentians looked like brawling, a gypsy would appear beside them, laughingly separating them with smiles, songs and the promise of more free beer or a gypsy girl’s kiss. Half a dozen fights had been broken up this way, and Kahdin, who had never had a very high opinion of the ‘thieving gypsies,’ as his grandmother had called them, was forced to change his mind. They were clever and wise to the ways of rowdy crowds, and the dockside remained merry and free of violence.
He was witnessing one such performance when a brightly lit object in the harbor, moving way too fast, caught his attention. It was the party galley, and it was coursing at full speed, with drunks pulling madly at the oars and pounding out a rowing beat with their feet on the deck, and it was right among the mooring posts.
“Look out!” He shouted at the drunks, but none could hear him over the racket of music, yelling and cavorting. “You’re going too fast! Back water!” But his shouting was to no avail. The party galley slammed head on into a dark and empty seeming ship, a small and low-slung grand sloop or dhow with lateen rigging. Several people screamed at the impact, but fortunately, no one stood at the front of the party galley, or they might have fallen overboard.
Many of the revelers on the party galley seemed to think it was all part of the show, and it took several minutes before they could get things arranged to back water. By that time, the ship they had hit was clearly listing to the starboard aft. “You fools!” Kahdin shouted. “You’ve sunk her!”
“It’s all right, guardsman.” Came a voice near his ear. It was a young gypsy, with a face so handsome as to be almost pretty. “We’ll find the owner and we’ll pay damages. Probably we can pull the ship up in the morning and repair it, if not, we can pay.”
“Seriously?” Kahdin replied. “You’d pay for a ship?”
“Absolutely.” Yeg said calmly. “We are always careful of our debts, we Entreddi, especially to our friends the Mortentians. We will make su
re the owner is properly compensated.”
Dejon Blaise was drowning again. He struggled for breath, even though he was standing in the open air, cloaked and hooded, he clawed at his throat for air. Water filled him up, and he felt it filling his lungs. He fell to the ground in a dark alley on a nondescript street called Whitewood Way, in the deserted merchant’s quarter of the King’s Town. His feet and arms pounded against the worn cobbles in a seizure that might have lasted half of an hour, but the alley was deserted and he did not scream, so no help came. When at last the fit passed, he found himself lying in a puddle of his own urine, arms bruised and aching, and there was a matted patch of blood where the back of his head had hit the edge of a cobblestone unevenly laid. His boots had protected his feet, but the middle finger of his right hand was bloodied and the nail missing.
The nail was not the only thing missing. Twice now, Dejon Blaise had been drowned, and now he was free. The drowning sensation was not his own, but that of the horrible black tree that had enslaved him. He reached out with the tendrils of his mind, but in half an hour of questing there was no echoing thought or command, although he still felt the tiny consciences of the changelings where he and the witch had placed them.
Where the tree had stood in the center of his being was a void, as if some strange power had slain the god that lived in the temple that was his mind. The black tree was dead, drowned in Mortentia Harbor with the Kalgareth, but the thing that had once been Dejon Blaise and then had been the seeker that killed eagles and eagle riders by proxy, was alive.
Very slowly his mind cleared, and what remained of Dejon Blaise returned to his strange new body, aware of everything within five hundred paces through some strange power of sensing that was not sight. Command over his eyes returned to him first, then his body and limbs. The horrible drive to murder and obey was gone, but the seeker’s powers remained. When he realized this he laughed, a dry and croaking sound like a stomped on toad.
He was going to find that bitch and make her pay.
Far away from Mortentia City, in the besieged city of Northcraven, a skulking man nobody much liked stepped from the decrepit and half-burned house in which he had squatted since the siege began. The skulking man only ever came out at night, and when he did the starving people around him wondered if he was mad, for the siege could make anyone mad, and all he did was stare at the south wall, as if looking through it at someone or something far away. It was early for the skulker to be about, but the black pox was in Northcraven, and things had gotten so desperate that nobody noticed him until he stripped naked and turned into a tree.
His arms became tree limbs, but black and shiny and slick. He stank, but everything in the city stank. Where his head had been was just another tree limb, and his legs grew together into a trunk. The two people who saw him change, a starveling child in rags and a starving, middle-aged woman wearing ruined but once fine linen, felt a strange desire to fall to their knees and somehow serve the man who was now a tree, but the third person to see it was Ermil Koathe. He was bitter cold and far less sensitive, and surprised to see a tree still standing in Northcraven City. He found some friends and they cut it down for firewood right away. When it burned it made them all sick, but they were already mostly sick, and at least it kept them warm.
Derry stood on the waterfront and watched the Kalgareth sink. The ugly little ship took water quickly, which made sense, since he himself had overseen the attachment of the large metal ram to the party ferry. The Kalgareth’s complement of sailors, a disreputable and ill-favored bunch of waterfront jagtooths that she must have picked up from the worst leavings of the worst ports in Mortentia, were all in town, and were all being disposed of. Others of the Summer Brotherhood had seen to that, with the more skilled Entreddi girls luring them ashore with promises of fun that ended in secret rooms and in pools of blood.
He watched because the black-haired and hard-faced witch was still unaccounted for, as was her tall swordsman. The party ferry stood by the sinking ship for a long time, which was by design of course. The many bright lights on the gaily colored boat shone brightly on the wreck to make sure no one who had been hiding below decks escaped the Summer Brotherhood. The witch and her man had been last seen heading into the Suzerainty, a place where the brothers who had been tasked with following them would have stuck out like ravens in a dovecote, but they were watching the gates carefully.
Jecha, wearing no disguise but somehow managing to go unnoticed in the crowd despite her milky eye and stooped back, walked up beside Derry. “The crew are got rid of, Madam Jecha.” Derry informed her. “We’re watching for the witch and her swordsman. They cannot leave Northcraven now except on the roads we watch, and we will find them.”
“If you can catch the witch without killing her, I would like to have a discussion with her.” Jecha answered, her voice like a killing frost. “The kind of talk you twins specialize in.”
“If it can be done it will be done.” Derry answered. “I don’t think anyone will be coming forward to claim damages for their ship.”
“If they do we will pay it.” Jecha answered curtly. “Although it hardly touches the debt they owe to us.” Derry nodded agreement while they watched the Kalgareth sink.
Chapter 71: Mid-Leath in the Kingdom of the Green Hills
Jahaksi looked at the gigantic boar’s head hanging on the wall above the oversized fireplace in the main hall of the great keep. If it had still been alive, it would doubtless be rolling its eyes at the lunatics screaming at each other from the various tables below.
These descendants of the Black Duke could hold a grudge like nobody he had ever known. They handed out insults recklessly and reached for their belt knives, the only weapons that King Otten would permit them to carry, about every other sentence. The threats were empty, for the king had imposed a peace on this gathering, but the verbal exchanges were nearly as bloody.
Jhumar had nearly killed one of them already, a thoughtless fellow named Bulgris O’root or D’root or O’routh, who had insulted him seriously. Jhumar’s Mortentian, learned through patient study over the past month and a half in king Otten’s service, was barely sufficient to understand half of what these mad ‘roots’ said, but ‘cat-eyed bastard’ was easy enough to interpret. Swords were drawn, and only Jahaksi’s intervention had prevented bloodshed. It turned out that ‘cat-eyed bastard’ was meant to be descriptive, not insulting, and the Mortentian had not meant offense.
Apparently all of the human-Sesseri half-breeds in this part of the world were bastards by definition, the result of unsanctioned one-time trysts in deep forests between human girls and Thushavran foresters. Jahaksi understood, he supposed. Young human women could be quite fetching before they reached the age of about thirty-five summers, when time began to mark them as mortal. A few lines of Sesseri poetry or a few notes on a pipe played just for them wooed them easily, especially when the wooer was one of the immortal Sesseri, with godlike good looks, exotic eyes and many decades of experience in the arts of poetry and seduction.
Jhumar and Tathaga had both been the objects of human girls’ crushes, for in the Kingdom of the Green Hills there was no official church to label them as witchy or forbidden, and King Otten Ottenson liked to keep pretty serving girls around. He was fairly relaxed about such things as sex, letting his people do as they would. Jahaksi understood this to be the typical Thimenian attitude, although he had been initially surprised to see the normally prudish Mortentians take it up. He had told his men not to dally with any of the women here, however, and as far as he was aware, they had not.
Jahaksi had secured his men positions as scouts when Otten learned that they could not only see in the dark but also knew the secrets of the Sesseri roads in the Whitewood. It had been an interesting conversation, and had not the Thimenian king’s man been able to verify that the insignia had been stripped from their armor before he first saw them, it might have gone badly. Fortunately, Otten Ottenson was willing to believe them Brizaki deserters, and tha
t cast them in a good light.
After a month and a half in Otten’s service Jahaksi had come to understand that the people here were nothing like those in the rest of Mortentia. About half of the folk of the Green Hills were Mortentian castoffs, people that neither fit in the rigid structures of Mortentian society nor wanted to fit. If they were lucky enough to find this place, they stayed here, happy to escape from places like Dunwater Duchy or Orr. The balance were people of the hundred kingdoms, and they had never had the overzealous church of Lio here dictating their behavior, for the Green Hills had never been conquered. They had always been here, although if you looked at any map in any other part of Mortentia, you would not see that the Kingdom of the Green Hills existed, just an empty space tucked into the southwest corner of Arker Barony. It sat isolated behind its maze of oak and twisting roads, far from the main towns and travel routes. It truly was a forgotten kingdom.
Perhaps the Tolrissan invaders had found it convenient to forget them when they discovered that they could not conquer them.
“Well, maybe if you lot would once in a while take a wife outside of your own little family tree you wouldn’t be such a lot of pop-eyed lunatics!” Bulgris O’routh said loudly, and Jahaksi looked up to see a look of slightly astonished amusement on Jhumar’s face across the room. The two of them had not been tasked to keep the peace here, for that was King Otten’s role in this summit of the Black Duke’s get, but Otten didn’t seem to think the insults mattered much. Among Thimenians this was just table conversation, but Hagne O’root glared fiercely at Bulgris, and indeed Jahaksi saw why the insult scored. Every one of her close kin had the same unnaturally wide eyes, and coupled with her bristled cock’s comb of snow-white hair and the road map of lines on her face, she looked like a children’s tale of a witch come to life.
War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy Page 94
