He smirked, twirled around and went down the line, yelling, “This is home for now,” and, “Don’t let the sand get in your cracks. That’s the first step to not letting it get in your holes.”
Craftsmen and carpenters and the less-skilled farmhands unloaded wood and hammers and nails and straw from the wagons. Oriana, Rol, Brynn, and Gamen—the de facto council-that-wasn’t-really-a-council-but-needed-to-be-one-because-leadership-is-important—had drawn up a systematic, organized plan to transform empty shore into a workable manor within one day. Everyone who was anyone and who had at least one hand, or in the case of Vlatch “I Ain’t Got No Arms” Horn, had feet that could lift things, had a job to do.
Oriana’s was simple: mask this place in an illusion, and then sleep. She had a big day tomorrow; flying across the sea on a youthful, exuberant and semitrained dragon would not be easy. Touching down on Baelous and finding a rogue sorceress would ideally be the simple part. That was, assuming she still lived.
Casting an illusion is not unlike putting on a mask and gussying up in a colorful, extravagant outfit that hides every identifying detail of who you are, right down to the scar on your finger. Except a rather treacherous consequence tags along with it. The opposite and equal reaction to illusionary sorcery is the destruction of existence, or rather a piece of it.
Tap into the plane of illusion and cast your sorcery across a one-mile span of beach here, and a one-mile stretch of something over there vanishes. Forever. It just dies. The where and what are unknown, but rest assured you will have taken a permanent chunk of land or ocean out of this world.
This explains why Davod the Sixteenth of Wollis—present-day Haeglin—plunged from two hundred feet up as the earth fell out from under his feet. It also explains why the Enclave strictly forbade illusionary sorcery without their approval.
Oriana was never big on rules, though. She sat cross-legged on the sand, closed her eyes and slowly slipped away, into a realm where only sorcerers can go. The planes of existence floated by, worlds encased in ice and those conflagrated by liquid flames. If she had attempted to probe any other than her own—the plane of illusion—she would have been greeted with swift rejection and a horselike kick straight to her brain. That’s Rule Number One of sorcery: never venture outside your own plane.
The plane of illusion is one of blinking, ever-changing pictures: a window that, if you look closely enough, isn’t truly a window but a placid sheet of water, or a tree that is actually a pillar supporting a church.
Oriana waded into her plane. She pulled and yanked, twisted and cut, as if she was shaping paper to fit over the kingdom of Haeglin.
When she finished, her eyes opened. Then they closed again as she laid her head in the sand and slept. Sorcery is exhausting work—and it can also be deadly. Sorcerers who tap into their realm for too long begin experiencing complete shutdown of bodily functions, including breathing.
Heinous, abominable nightmares tortured Oriana that night. Each would begin with the walls of her illusion crumbling like silt in a downpour, and each would end with melting flesh, frozen tongues, and globules of poison rupturing into eyes wide and wet with tears. She was the only survivor. Every nightmare she survived. Not because they permitted her to, but because she was too late. She was always returning from Baelous, flying high over the sea on the spine of Sarpella. She’d smell smoke and scorched hair, then she’d see the devastation.
She was always too late.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lavery had refused to leave without an explanation from Baern.
“Why do they call you the Keeper?”
“You need to go.”
“Why are we going back to Valios?”
“Just trust me.”
“Why should I trust you?”
Exasperated and desperate to see the boy on his way, Baern relented. Or rather, he bent. He didn’t break, but he did bend.
He sat at the lip of the cave, before Oriana Gravendeer’s newly dilapidated and hobbled estate littered with wood framing, wood shavings, busted carts, overturned chicken cages curiously absent of chickens, and generally a whole mess of destruction. Also, there was a dead dragon present.
Baern sighed. “Dragons were not dispelled from Avestas by only the hand of man,” he said.
“I read books about—”
“Books,” Baern said, chuckling. “There’s truth in books, if you read the right ones and know where to look. But those that accurately portrayed the war between man and dragon six hundred years ago no longer exist on Avestas. They’ve been burned. Tossed in the oceans. Some have been used as chamber pots, others as dummies for sword training.”
Lavery bit his lip. “I don’t understand. Why would you burn a book?”
“Because,” Baern said, picking up a sharp pebble, “the truth is sometimes inconvenient and quite scary. Kings and queens and those who rule the world prefer not to court fear, because fear breeds panic and chaos. It’s not easy to contain chaos.
“The fact of the matter is that books had warned future generations that dragons had not been hunted to extinction. They’d fled in enough numbers that they would one day return, if not to settle Avestas, then to destroy it. But more importantly, the books had shown that, as mighty as a brave man is and as strong as a hundred of them are, they alone could not contain the threat of dragons.”
“Gods,” Lavery blurted, as if he had the answer to a riddle that Baern thought would stymie him. “It was gods, wasn’t it?”
Baern wound up, pointed at him emphatically, and said, “You are… wrong. In the far north, there is a lonesome, forsaken world where nothing grows and nothing lives. Things exist, but they don’t live.”
“Like a fence,” Lavery suggested. “It’s not alive, but exists.”
Baern blinked. “No. Not like a fence. Listen, Lavery—the dead scuttle there, aimless and hopeless without the direction of the necromancer who ripped their souls from a peaceful rest and plunged them into fleshless bodies. He’d bound their souls to a crown, and they answered to that crown.”
Lavery interrupted with a raise of his hand. “What you said isn’t true, then.”
“What?”
“You said they’re aimless and hopeless without the direction of a necromancer. But couldn’t anyone who has the crown control them?”
Baern looked at Laythe and nodded at Lavery. “Get an earful of that—the boy’s put on his thinking cap. Right you are, king of Valios.”
“I’m not king—”
“Right, right. I know. Go with it, will you? The necromancer and his risen offered their aid to ward off the dragons. And like a well-behaved necromancer ought to do, he retreated into his bitterly cold domain once the war ended.
“But he slithered out in the years to come, intent on cursing the living and marching them northward, where he would slaughter and raise them.”
Laythe pushed himself away from the cavern wall. “Actually, I believe the Keeper is wrong on that account. Granted, I did not experience those years, but the texts that I perused suggest the necromancer had ventured south to explore a massive graveyard. I believe his intentions were the same: augment his forces of risen, but the means by which he’d do it did not include slaughtering the living.”
Baern didn’t have the patience for this. Firstly, he was too damned old. Secondly, he didn’t appreciate being played for a fool. But among the many lessons he’d learned in over six hundred years was that if you can calm yourself while you’re angry, you were never really angry to begin with and any action taken in anger would have been unjustified. If you can’t calm yourself, then that’s real anger and you ought to do whatever your infuriated mind suggests.
Not a very good lesson, truth be told, but it had served him well over the centuries. Mostly, anyhow. There was that one time…
“Baern,” Lavery said. “Are you okay?”
“Er… thinking. That’s all. Back to the matter of things—why the necromancer left his realm does not matter. H
e did, and he died because of it. The Twin Sisters settled Silderine near the only way in and out of his domain. With the help of sorcerers, they bore the seal.
“Soon after, they found the necromancer, and that was the end of his story.”
Mouth twisting in an attempt to decipher all of this new and intense information, Lavery said, “And the crown? Did the Sisters take it?”
Baern nodded. “They did, to the Valios tombs. They placed it in a phylactery, behind a wall, and the key to the phylactery inside the wall. Only a Wraith Walker who Walks into the very time the phylactery was brought to the tombs can retrieve it.”
“Or anyone who has a big hammer,” Lavery noted.
Baern chuckled. “You’d have to have the knowledge that it was there. And also the entire tomb would crumble; the wall was part of its structural integrity.”
“I would have destroyed the crown.”
“Then you would have no defense against a future invasion of dragons. The Sisters were cruel, but they were smart. You must get that phylactery; it’s the only way to bring down the seal and command the risen. I do not like it any more than you do, but I’m afraid we have limited options.”
Lavery chewed his cheek. “Will I see you again?”
“Of course you will. I’ve told Laythe the plan. You’ll meet me at Tactin’s Fist after you recover the phylactery, and from there the real work begins.”
Lavery seemed satisfied with these answers. He continued talking, of course, and asking questions, but he eventually agreed that it was best for him to leave for Valios. Baern breathed a sigh of relief when he did, not because he had finally departed, but because he had forgotten about the one question Baern did not want to answer: why Laythe called him the Keeper.
Lavery wouldn’t have enjoyed hearing the truth of that one.
Baern was too old for this nonsense. It’s one thing to be trudging through a sewer when you’re twenty and in good health and good spirits. It’s another to be splashing through rancid waste when you’re six hundred twenty-two. He deserved more respect than this.
Haeglin had been sealed off. He’d discovered this upon walking up to the gate and being told to go sod off unless he wanted a dagger between his eyes and an arrow in his throat. Desiring neither of those things, he had given up on the easy way of entering the kingdom and resigned himself to the old sewer trick.
Sewers used to be a lot easier to enter in the old days. Back then, pipes were new inventions—at least in the way of transporting waste—and the horrifically smelly sludge flowed out of an open end, usually into a lake or marsh. Nowadays, those ends weren’t open. Reinforced steel grates refused entry to not only wildlife but also sleuthing men like Baern.
But if you hang around for six hundred odd years, you hold on to forgotten knowledge. Haeglin’s original sewer system had failed spectacularly a few decades ago, culminating in what was known as the Brown Days. New, modern pipes were placed, and the old system was abandoned. But the outflow pipe remained, along with its enormous opening at the foot of Talon Lake.
Baern swiped away cobwebs and webs that eight-legged, fat-bellied and unfathomably large spiders clung on to. He didn’t mind spiders, so long as they weren’t larger than his hand. These guys and gals felt larger than his foot as they climbed across his shoulders and nested in his hair.
Despite being unused for over thirty years, the pipes still stunk. Baern wasn’t sure if this was the result of smell stains—a phrase he’d made up many years ago after removing the carcass of a squirrel who’d been left in the Valiosian mausoleum for six weeks—or because of the many dead rats and mice. And were those snakes, and more importantly, were they alive? He hated snakes.
After a long, winding and very dark journey, Baern finally found himself under broken rays of light that filtered through a grate a couple feet above. He’d been forced to crouch this entire time, so standing upright felt positively splendid… after the brief spasming.
He pushed on the grate. It didn’t move. He pulled at his beard, thinking. The chances of the grate being bolted or riveted in place were low. Sewer entrance points weren’t meant to keep sewer life and possible intruders out, only to keep the populace from falling in.
He figured it was probably crusted over with gunk and rust. So he tried again, this time giving more oomph. Nothing. Not even a budge. He palm-punched it, took off his shoe and slapped it, firmly told it bugger off and, as a last resort, sweet-talked it.
Nothing worked. He needed better leverage.
“This is unfortunate,” he said aloud.
“Hallo.”
Baern looked up to see a small pudgy face pressing against the grate. “Er. Hello.” The boy couldn’t have been older than seven.
“What are you doing?”
“Er.” He’s a child, you imbecile, Baern told himself, he’ll believe anything. “I came down here to catch snakes.” He swore to himself silently. That was the best you could come up with?
“Why?”
“For stew.”
The boy turned up his face. “Eww. You shouldn’t eat snakes.”
“I’ll remember that. Say, can you pull on that grate? It, er, fell back into place when I came down here and now I can’t get back up.”
The boy considered this with a scrunched nose. “Mmm… okay.” He wrapped his fingers around the steel bars and pulled. The old grate screeched as it gave its final resistance before relenting and allowing the boy to pry it out.
Baern reached, grabbed on to the cobbled ledge, and hefted himself up. His arms burned as he did. He cursed himself for letting his body go weak. Back in the day, he could lift boulders the size of—
“I want it,” the boy said, holding out his hand expectedly.
“Want what?”
“My reward.”
“We never agreed on that.”
The boy went red in the face, and his eyes swelled with tears. “I want it! I want it! I want it!” he screamed, stomping his feet.
Baern chuckled uneasily as he glanced around. He’d emerged in an area of Haeglin known as the Pits, tucked safely away from the prim and proper of nobility on the bottommost disc. Here were the grim-faced and baggy-eyed, the ones whose only wish was to survive another day. Longhouses—not unlike longboats, except shoddily made and anchored on land instead of water—housed some of them, but most sat on muddy banks and slept on eroded roads of shattered and sunken cobble.
They watched Baern with indifference. He wondered if they would bother to so much as raise a fist if he grabbed the boy by his hair and stuffed him into the sewers. Not that he would… it was only a thought.
“I’ll tell a guard,” the boy said, arms crossed. He pouted his lips. “I’ll tell him you touched me!”
“I did not touch you.”
“Yes, you did. Right here, you did.”
Baern’s eyes widened. “Oh, no,” he said, wagging a finger. “I most certainly did not touch you there.”
“This old man grabbed me!” the boy squealed.
“I’m leaving now,” Baern said. He wheeled around and shambled along, down a bare dirt lane. The boy followed, accusing him of grabbing and touching and prodding in the most inappropriate of places.
Baern felt hot in his cheeks. He didn’t need this right now. He knew the chance of encountering a Jackal in the Pits was somewhere between a negative percentage and zero, but he hadn’t had the best of luck the past few days—being captured, imprisoned, discovering dragons were returning, and now having a deviant child trying to swindle him out of money.
“Raffi,” called a woman. “Get yer bum ovah ’ere and stop this nonsense. That poor man didn’t do nothin’ to you. I was watchin’ the whole time.”
Baern didn’t bother thanking the woman. Partly because he didn’t know where she was—putting face to voice in the Pits is like searching for the yellowest daffodil in a field of the bloody things—and partly because he had places to go, people to see. Well, one place to go, but still lots of people to see.
Knowing who had succeeded Raegon Gravendeer, given the gray billowing smoke last night signaled a dead king, was important. He hadn’t kept up with the day-to-day happenings in Haeglin, but he knew Oriana had her father wrapped around her pinky and was almost certainly his successor. Problem was, Oriana Gravendeer had apparently been fiddling with dragons. Also, she had apparently fled. So, who had taken the crown?
Not Olyssi, he thought. Or rather, prayed. Madness on the Grateful Throne would doom Avestas.
He also wanted additional information, such as how Raegon had keeled over and if foul play was suspected. Asking passersby might have gotten him that information, but it would have also raised suspicions; sober busybodies don’t enjoy holding those kinds of conversations with strangers. But drunks? Now, there’s where you can get the juicy scoop on all things important.
The second ring of Haeglin’s spire served as the kingdom’s social playground. There you’d find hammer-throwing competitions, a daily chess tournament, horseshoes, wrestling, and lots of places to take a few mugs of ale to your face.
Baern passed through the Pits and made the steep ascent to the second ring. A burly, bald gentleman offered him a shiny hammer. “One throw, I’ll spot ya. You knock the pegleg off that wooden effigy over there and I’ll give you this here pouch o’ mystery. What’s in it? It’s a mystery!”
Baern smiled, said thanks but no thanks, and aimed his nose to the building with a carving of a fat, sleazy slob sitting on its roof. The slob was pouring two mugs of ale on his flabby chest and had his tongue wiggling out of his mouth. A sign below him read, “Chub’s Pissery.”
He went inside and coughed immediately. Smoke filled the place, lingering in the air like fog. The smell of mint and honey and cherry and stale ale all coalesced into one unpleasant smell. He knew people in the East loved to smoke their herbs and soak them with various flavors, but this was a bit much.
Baern nimbly navigated a long, narrow entryway packed in with droopy-eyed drunks and smokers who made no effort to avoid blowing in his face.
The Dragon Thief (Sorcery and Sin Book 1) Page 26
