The Ale Boy's Feast

by Jeffrey Overstreet

  “I didn’t ask to come back,” she said. “Help me. I can’t see.”

  Jordam was at her side to catch her, to ease her back to the stone. “rrMust get stronger.” He turned to the ale boy, fear in his quivering features. “Where did they go? Was Mordafey there?”

  The chamber shuddered. Dust and crumbling stone rained down all around them.

  “Feelers will find us,” said the ale boy. “We need another way out.”

  He looked out across the rising, at these bodies learning to move, these legs struggling to stand, this breath finding a rhythm again. And there was laughter, a regretful sort of laughter, as if they had all awakened from the same glorious dream and wished they could get it back. He closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids he saw faint, swirling lines of light like fraying threads of color. He felt again as if he were floating. He heard the sound of distant, crashing water.

  “I think I know the way out.”

  Jordam shook his head. “Nowhere is safe now.”

  “You’re forgetting the deep river. Jordam, we were alone down there. The air was better. The water was cleaner. This river won’t help us, but if we follow the deeper river upstream, who knows where it will lead us?”

  Jordam looked too exhausted to lift such heavy hope. “How? Can’t carry them down. Too many. Too far.”

  The ale boy stared at the far end of the cavern where the pool narrowed and became a flowing stream again, pouring into a lightless corridor. Slender wisps of mist wavered all about that passage. “Jordam, when we were down on the deeper river, we heard waterfalls. Do you see the fog there, in that tunnel? If this current eventually falls into the river far below us … you can keep your promise. We’ll get them all out of here.”

  “But … when the river falls … how far will it fall?”

  The boy smiled feebly. “One way to know.”

  5

  WARNEY FIGHTS A WOMAN

  arney remembered how the stories had whispered through House Abascar’s streets, implausible as they were. Krawg the Midnight Swindler of House Abascar could break into the king’s unbreakable vaults. He could make off with treasure even if all who knew its secret location had died. He could be in two places at once. Nothing could stop him.

  Lonely, desperate, and wanting so much that was out of reach, Warney had come to see Krawg as a figure of hope.

  When the two had become partners in robbery, most of those claims had proven untrue. Krawg was an awkward, anxious, aging thief; he looked like a fool and sounded even worse. But the myths had worked in his favor. People did not see the legend when he walked into the room, and they all but handed him their belongings. Still, the legends lived on in Warney’s mind, increasing his courage.

  His days of thievery were ancient history now. But on the morning of the day that Tabor Jan and the Abascar company set out from House Bel Amica, Warney found himself the victim of a theft. Consumed with rage and desire, he set out to regain what was taken. He forgot all about Krawg until it was too late. Captain Tabor Jan’s company had gone, leaving Warney lost for days in a world of trouble.

  This is how the story unfolded: Jes-hawk the archer—who would depart later that day with Tabor Jan’s company—woke Warney in the dark before dawn and asked for help. They crossed the long floating bridge, leaving the rock of House Bel Amica behind in the Rushtide Inlet like a mighty ship tethered to a dock. The sea-wary Warney felt a deep relief as they passed through the elaborate Arch of Welcome and set foot on the mainland. But then he saw the guards, tense and quiet, standing ready.

  “Why’d you drag me out here before the sun’s done snorin’?” Warney sulked.

  “You’ve got sharp eyes.”

  “Eye.” Warney tapped the new glass sphere that filled his long-empty socket.

  “Also, I need someone who’ll recognize her.” Jes-hawk stood on his tiptoes, anxious.

  Warney looked past him into the fog-thick gloom where the raised torches that approached them bloomed like red flowers. These were miners coming from Mawrnash, the mine run by the Seer called Panner Xa. Queen Thesera had closed it down, furious over the way the Seers had betrayed her. Now the disgruntled fortune seekers were coming home, so Warney concluded that this armed host was assigned to comb the crowd in hopes of arresting Panner Xa herself.

  “Panner Xa,” he shuddered. “A frightful beard she had. And that … that head. I’ll recognize her.”

  “Leave Panner Xa to the soldiers,” said Jes-hawk. “We’re looking for someone else.”

  Warney tapped the spot between his eyebrows. “Your sister. The barmaid.”

  “Lynna’s got nowhere to go now that Mawrnash is closed. And she’s not my sister anymore. She betrayed us. She’ll pay.”

  In the flame-scorched dark, dusty passengers emerged from arriving wagons. The archer wore an expression that Warney recognized—the look of a hunter determined to shoot down prey. His thoughts were almost visible. Lynna’s betrayal had brought Bel Amica’s Captain Ryllion upon the Abascar travelers, and he had beaten and humiliated Jes-hawk in front of the crowd.

  “Take that joke off your head.” Jes-hawk pointed to Warney’s knitted cap. “We don’t want attention.”

  “Auralia made this for me.” Warney removed it, checking to make sure that its green feathers were undamaged, and then folded it into a cloak pocket.

  As the dark became dim, and the dim became blue, Bel Amican guards searched the travelers’ bags, pockets, and shoes, filling crates with the chalky mawrn stones. Meanwhile the miners’ eyes widened as they looked across the water at House Bel Amica. The view was strange to them after their long absence, for the Rushtide Inlet had been emptied of boats, and the festive, crowded waters that had declared Bel Amica’s prosperity were now a chilling, lifeless scene.

  The city’s walls still coiled about the island of stone, and gleaming structures still crusted it like barnacles. Great shells still domed its auditoriums, and promontories bustled with the daily markets. The towers of the royalty still pierced the blankets of fog. But the waters were troubled by something more than wind. The same Deathweed tentacles that preyed on forest travelers had smashed ships in the harbor and battered Bel Amica’s foundation.

  Jes-hawk gestured to guards seizing and emptying packs from aggravated miners. “Take a look at those arrivals.”

  “You know the new rules,” one guard shouted. “No more potions.”

  “But my elixirs!” a woman shrieked. “The queen’s gone mad. She’s cast out Bel Amica’s saviors.”

  “If you can’t live without elixirs, you’re a slave,” growled the soldier.

  “I’d rather feel young and beautiful than achy and old,” the woman shot back.

  “I need this potion to keep me awake,” a burly miner complained. “If I have to go back to sleeping at night, I’ll lose half my pay.”

  Warney stayed at the crowd’s edge, counting more than fifty aggravated miners. But one held back, cowering—a woman of shifty eyes and long, matted red hair.

  He shouted the name: “Lynna!”

  The crowd paused, looking at him in surprise. He turned around as if he too was seeking the shout’s source. But when he glanced back, he glimpsed the woman’s matted red hair again. Small enough to make Warney feel tall, she seemed to fit his memory of Lynna. But he remembered her as young and flirtatious; this woman was burdened and tired, her skin hanging loosely on her skull as if only a mask.

  An officer approached her and grabbed her bag, but she did not let go. It tore. A heavy chunk of mawrn tumbled out. “If I have to pry those stinking rocks out of another miner’s hands,” the soldier snarled, “I’m going to chop his hands off.” The woman shrank within her cloak. And when he carried the stone away, she seemed to wither.

  While soldiers gathered the confiscated mawrn into a barrel, which they would later cast into the sea, the miners sulked down to the bridge where antlered sandbucks waited to pull them home in wagons. The woman limped along with them, silent and cowering.

/>   Warney seized Jes-hawk’s sleeve. “Might be your sister.”

  Jes-hawk snorted. “She moves like an old woman.”

  She wedged herself between two muscular miners on a cart. They cringed and slid away from her as if from a foul smell. The sandbucks whinnied, shaking their antlers, and pulled at their harnesses. Then the carts rumbled onto the floating bridge.

  Jes-hawk stood in torment, watching the diminishing crowd. “Follow her. Make sure. I’m staying.”

  As gold brush strokes streaked the sky, mirrored on both sides of the floating bridge, Warney took no comfort. He hated this bridge, knowing that Deathweed might lunge for him at any time. “Today we’ll leave this place for good,” he said, pulling his cap back over his head and hurrying after the wagon. “We’re going to New Abascar. Where everything’ll be fine.”

  The main gate was made from the wide jawbone of an enormous ocean-dwelling fish, and the prongs of its raised portcullis jutted down like teeth. Beyond it, passengers disembarked and scattered. Families embraced. Merchants besieged them. Cart drivers unloaded the miners’ bags, casting them into a pile on the edge of the welcome yard, where squawking netterbeaks swarmed over the spread, pulling at straps and pecking at the canvas covers.

  Warney slumped on a bound-up bedroll, catching his breath. His gaze strayed to the vagrants who picked at crumbs on the cobblestone plaza, their bodies permanently hunched as if the weight of the rock’s collected wealth had bent them. But what could be done? They were human wreckage, blasted apart by their indulgence in the Seers’ potions.

  “In New Abascar,” he murmured, “we’ll all have supper. We’ll all have shelter. We’ll all have everything. Nobody’s gonna sleep in the cold. Nobody’ll get thrown outside the walls for the monsters. And colors … Auralia’s colors will fly over it all like a flag.” He craned his neck, tower-seeking. “Now that the Seers are surrounded, maybe the queen’ll help these poor crumb-pickers.”

  One of the beggars skulked toward the luggage pile. “I know that sneaky step,” he muttered. “You mean to steal somethin’, don’t you?”

  She lifted her head, and he looked right into that familiar face framed by greasy red hair, the eyes wide and furious.

  “Lynna!”

  She was off, straightening and running, transformed from a burdened beggar to a crook caught in the act. She fled as swiftly as Krawg and Warney had ever run from the scenes of their own crimes.

  Warney, warming with anger, came to his feet as if answering some unspoken call.

  He followed, weaving through a parade of fish-packers, nearly knocking down a white-aproned cake-carrier, and then dancing his way through a crowd of kneeling children as they snipped marbles into brackets to win piles of colored chips.

  The woman leapt onto a passing rail train that carried her away down a long curve and slid into a tunnel at the base of Bel Amica’s rock. Warney reached the edge of the rails just before the train’s end—an open flatcar—rattled past. He dove onto it, landing hard on his fragile knees.

  The train coasted to a stop, and he waited, lying low and watching those who disembarked. She didn’t appear. If she were smart, she’d stay on board until the train was lifted up the long shaft to the very top of Bel Amica’s rock, where it would start its spiral descent again. There she’d have so many routes open to her that she’d be almost impossible to catch.

  “That’s what Krawg would do.”

  The lift mechanisms carried the cars two by two up the shaft. Warney’s ears crackled and swelled as his own car was raised far from the ground. When they reached the top of the city, mechanical arms lifted the cars, carried them into the morning’s bright white fog, and set them down on a rail line.

  A bundle of dark robes flew from the train and made a frantic dash into an alley.

  Warney was off, down the alley between the glittering turtle shell of Myrton’s greenhouse and the tall Seers’ Keep. Misshapen as a pile of ice blocks half-melted in the sun, the Keep was circled by archers—some on the ground, some poised in the windows of the five surrounding towers—all day and all night. Jaw-dogs slunk around the base of it, sniffing.

  Rumors had spread that the Seers were already gone, escaping with an invisibility potion. Warney had feared the Seers ever since he’d learned that they’d sent beastmen to kill Abascar’s people in the Blackstone Caves. He had feared them even more after seeing Panner Xa threaten to crush Krawg’s throat for telling a story that offended her. Now they had sought to slaughter Bel Amica’s royal family. He did not like the idea of such villains lurking unseen in the fog.

  The escapee jerked to a stop, startled to see the archers and the dogs. She slipped between two rubbish bins against Myrton’s greenhouse. Warney seized his moment. He stepped in front of her, trapping her there.

  “You’re a tad anxious,” he said. “Don’t know why you’d run from me ’less you got somethin’ to hide.”

  The woman tucked in her chin like a chastened child.

  “I was part of a company that camped in the woods with a woman who looked just like—”

  “Stowey,” she murmured. “My name. A stranger.”

  He was surprised that she did not fight or run. She seemed to have forgotten the chase. And one eye was staring at his feathered cap. His words went sideways in his throat, for the woman’s eyes were wrong; they were open too wide, and they did not align. She grinned fiercely, her teeth too big for her mouth. If this was Lynna, she was diseased beyond repair.

  “That’s … strange,” she whispered, raising a pale hand with a long, curling fingernail. “Your hat. Tell me.”

  “A friend made it,” he said, suddenly feeling as if he were the one cornered.

  “From where?”

  “Abascar,” he snapped, wondering why he even answered at all. “Well, not really. She came from somewhere else. Why?”

  “Those colors. Those feathers.” She spoke to herself, and something like fear flickered in her eyes. “Impossible.”

  As Warney’s next question sought its shape, the woman snatched the cap from his head. Reflexively, he grabbed hold of it. She tugged. He bared his teeth. She seized it with both hands. “Not … allowed,” she growled, her grip tightening.

  As they grappled, he noticed her hands—rather, her left hand in particular. It was far too large for the small woman. It was ash grey. And it, too, was familiar.

  “Those runes on your knuckles,” he grunted, straining.

  Her eyeballs, rolling as if they might tumble out, swiveled to see the marks as if they had only just appeared.

  Even as Warney realized what he was seeing, he found his conclusion to be madness. He had seen that hand severed from the wrist of a drunkard in the Mawrnash revelhouse and cast out the window. Later, finding a hand on the ground below the window, he’d bent down for a better look and seen that it was a different hand altogether.

  He dropped his cap and took hold of her wrist. “Did you … trade your hand for this one?”

  She flung herself away from him. But his grip was still fixed on her wrist, and the rune-marked hand tore right off.

  She tumbled onto the road, then propped herself up on the bloodless stump of her arm. She clutched Warney’s cap in her remaining hand.

  Warney looked at the severed hand, then threw it down. “What … How could …”

  She dropped the cap and launched herself at his face, shrieking. A long curling nail on her right hand’s forefinger sliced like a spoon into his eye socket, gouging out his glass eye and dropping it into her closing fist. Warney cried out at a flare of pain deep in his head. He doubled over, covering his empty eye socket. She grabbed the cap and dashed away.

  Warney’s anger blazed hotter than his injury. He went after her.

  She ran into the open, straight at the wall of the Keep. She did not stop. A break formed in the wall like a fracture in a window. It widened just enough for her to slip through.

  Warney threw himself at the wall. It slammed shut, and he staggered ba
ckward, clasping a new bruise on his forehead.

  Looking up, he saw a hundred arrows from nearby walls and windows aimed in his direction. He crawled on all fours away from the wall, back between the trash bins, and curled into a trembling huddle, covering his empty socket and sobbing curses at the Keep. A guard appeared with furious questions, but Warney’s story was so bewildering that he retreated.

  Exhausted, Warney quieted to a sulk, glowering at the impenetrable wall.

  “You’d better hide,” he muttered. “I’m comin’ in there.”

  The train rumbled past ten times while Warney muttered insufficient plots for entering a building without windows or doors. He considered the strategies he and Krawg had devised in the past.

  They’d stowed away in wagons loaded with bait. “But these tricksters don’t want anything, save Auralia’s colors.” They’d cut doors in walls by night and sealed them up by sunrise. “But nothin’s cuttin’ through that wall.” They’d blocked locks when doors were open so they’d fail to latch when closed. “These cowards won’t open a door unless one of their own comes knockin’.”

  They had tried disguises, but how could Warney make himself look like a Seer? They’d gone down chimneys, but no smoke rose from the Keep’s heights. They’d burrowed under homes, but this was rock that needed blasting.

  “It’s imbreakable,” he said. “No, that’s not right. It’s unsolvable. It’s …”

  “Impregnable?” said a voice behind his shoulder.

  Warney leapt as if he’d been stung.

  “Unassailable? Inviolable? Puzzle, puzzle. Ah, but you’re wrong. If you had another season, you just might solve it.”

  A soot-smeared, grass-stained man stood fidgeting in a doorway that had opened quietly in back of the greenhouse. He clutched a smelly crate against his apron-draped belly while he noisily gnawed the end of a sweetstalk. What hair he had left stood out from his head like quills.