Winterfinding

by Daniel Casey

  Winterfinding

  Ascendant Realms, Book Two

  Daniel Casey

  Copyright © 2015 Daniel Casey

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1511442549

  ISBN-13: 978-1511442541

  The Syr Nebra calendar is divided up by eight different celebration days serving as the name and first day of the month. The year is slightly longer than an Earth year:

  Winterfinding (December 20-23)

  Imbolc (February 2)

  Ostara (March 19-22)

  Beltane (May 1)

  Midsummer (June 19-23)

  Lammas (August 1)

  Mabon (September 21-24)

  Samhain (November 1)

  The Common Epoch (CE) began after the completion of the Grand Cathedral in the Cassubian city of Sulecin. The current year is 1167 CE.

  The Nations of Syr Nebra and their major cities

  Essia: Paraonen, Rikonen, & Heveonen

  Cassubia, also called The Lakes District or The Cathedral: Sulecin & Havan

  Novosy: Hythe, Medves, & Calla

  Silvincia, also called The Seven Spires: Rautia, Anhra, Bandra, Ardavass, & Elixem

  Adrenia: Dystos, Pyrgos, & Elvos

  The Aral: Lappala

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  1

  Chapter Two

  36

  Chapter Three

  87

  Chapter Four

  134

  Chapter Five

  179

  Chapter Six

  216

  Chapter 1

  First Day of Samhain

  The Cruor, Siracene Highlands

  The last body rolled over the edge of the pit falling onto the naked pile of corpses with a firm thud. Dirty, disheveled, and sore, Jena stood holding the pushcart up that she had dumped the corpse from gazing down with a clinical stare. She pulled the grey bandana, a rag really, she had been wearing over her mouth and nose down. It had barely mitigated the stench of the bodies, but at least, it had been something.

  She wiped her face with the cleanest part of her sleeve she could find and tossed aside the pushcart. Picking up one of the five small kegs from just behind her, she popped a cork out of its top spout and began splashing its contents out over the bodies below while slowly circling the pit. She made it nearly all the way around before the keg emptied, she tossed it towards the pushcart, and picked up a second keg repeating the process until all the kegs were used. The potash lye made the queerly blue and grey dead flesh of the naked bodies glisten in the sun. Jena paused in her work taking in the ugly faces of the soldiers.

  These had been children really. Only one or two of them looked more than twenty, most had been beardless. She wondered how the Spires were getting away with sending out such green recruits. Walking over the discarded pushcart, she kicked a few kegs out of her way, reached down to pick up a shovel, and proceeded to the other side of the pit to the dirt mound. She let the head of the shovel dive into the black dirt and then she just held it there.

  Fatigue washed over her. Her eyes fluttered, and she dumped the dirt back onto the pile. Stabbing the shovel into the dirt, she let her body lean on it allowing it to prop her up. A day buying the kegs, each separately from different vendors throughout Havan and then a two-day slog back to the Cruor with the supplies. A day to dig the pit, beginning at dawn and ending in torchlight a few hours after the sun descended. A day to find and strip all the bodies—loading armor and weapons onto the lift and laboring over the rusty winch to get all the gear up the hundred-foot sheer cliff to the Cruor’s salvage armory. Then today, disappearing the bodies.

  She still wasn’t done. Jena would have to track through the forests and road to cover the tracks of the squad if not create a decoy route. She needed sleep; she wanted it. She shot her head up and shook it violently, dispelling the tiredness. Bending her knees, she lifted a shovel full of dirty throwing it into the pit. She would get this done today, before evening. Fill the pit, re-lay the sod she had cut away, then crawl up into the Cruor and find the room with the softest bed. She’d sleep and not dream. It would be her reward.

  Novostos Sea

  The tallow light made everything feel dimmer than the near perfect dark of the brig. Sweat rolled down Riv’s forehead and found a channel into his eyes adding a warm blur to what he saw. His wrists were shackled above his head as he flexed trying to pull himself upright but failed. He hung there in the quiet as the yellow candle light hemmed him. Blinking several times, his vision cleared for a moment, and he saw the angry red lashes that crossed his chest and stomach.

  The burn of the cuts melded with those he felt all over his back. Breathing hurt. Riv tried again to reach the floor with is toes, to take off some of the weight off dangling but he was just high enough his feet only glanced the floor’s surface. He was losing his resolve, and he knew that they weren’t close to being done with him.

  The Kopis had just rounded the Avlea Peninsula, the western end the great Ragan Mountains that split the world into two parts, when it encountered the massive Lappalan fleet. The peninsula belong entirely to Adrenia, the nation of shipbuilders. Traders would round the peninsula and enter the Avostos Sea, a narrower but deeper body of water. At the eastern end of the Avostos was the city of Wick, the entry port to The Aral and the bithumin that came from its capital Lappala. The people of the Aral, a vast arid plain, had never shown themselves to be interested in sea trade or travel. For years, the Merchant Fleet was contracted to bring bithumin to the nations of Essia, Cassubia, and Silvincia.

  There had been stories of bizarre junks sailed by the Lappalans when the Aral had been a verdant savanna, but that had been so many centuries ago it only existed as a fable. Riv remembered once as a boy seeing a design scroll when he first worked for the harbormasters of Dystos. It had a sketch of a Lappalan junk in its margin. The junk looked impossibly tall more like a floating building than a ship and its sails looked more like fans. When he had asked about it, it was brushed aside as the doodling of a very board master shipbuilder.

  It had come back to him the morning his lookout had called him up, saying there were ships on the horizon. Peering through his monocular, strange sails appeared and he was thrown. However, it was nothing compared to the horror the he and the crew experienced coming closer to the fleet. There must have been more than thousand ships; Riv couldn’t count them all nor see them all as they were packed so deep. Gigantic junks loomed before them casting the Kopis in shade from a good distance. The junks had a beam of at least fifty yards and lengths of nearly four hundred yards. Riv shook his head in disbelief. He could imagine the draft of these ships; he had never seen anything like this. The junks were hemmed by other ships similar to the Kopis but even these were still larger. They were long, narrow ships akin to the Adrenine trireme, an empty flat deck with hundreds of oars churning the water like some kind of centipede dancing across the surface.

  There was no avoiding this fleet. The Kopis was soon met by four of the triremes and surrounded. When Riv had called down to what he took as the lead ship, his voice only brought forth a small man dressed in a rather bright and very fine looking robe. This man walked to the center of his ship’s deck and stood silent. Then Riv heard his crew begin to call out from all over the Kopis as huge metal hooks shot out from the foreign ships. They grabbed hold of the rails of the Kopis crashing through its hull to lodge deep in its body. The oars of the triremes began to row dragging the Kopis into the dark fleet. There was panic aboard the ship, some of the crew attempted to cut through the massive lines of the hooks only to discover that the fibers were too tightly wound, too numerous to be affected by any blade or even fire. The Kopis heaved and moaned like a whale as it lurched forward.

&
nbsp; Since the hijackers were too close to fire upon with cannons, Riv commanded the crew to arm themselves. But barely half obeyed or, at least, had time to before the lines from the triremes were released and the ships peeled away. Riv saw before them one of the massive junks looming as it opened two immense panels. The strange sea-gates seemed to suck in the ocean waters and with it the Kopis as though it were a toy. As they moved from the bright sun over the sea to the pitch black in the belly of the junk, Riv heard the grinding of the gates close behind them and the waters become still.

  The crew were terrified. There had never been anything like this not even in the stories they had read or, more likely, heard. There was no enemy, just faceless ships and now the dark. The minutes had been intolerable. Suddenly braziers lit up giving off a fiercely bright white light. Nearly all the crew were blinded. Riv regained his vision quicker than the rest and saw that hundreds of marines on what looked like innumerable terraces surrounded them. The marines looked like shadows, but they were real. Riv felt terror for the first time his life.

  Hanging here now, flayed for what felt like hours, unfed for days and only given the most brackish tasting water, Riv felt a strange resignation. He was going to die here. However, he had no idea where ‘here’ was or who these people were. The robed man on the trireme hadn’t said a word, the shadows dressed in all black and hooded had boarded his ship and ushered his entire crew off and into black cells in silence, and the man who had shackled him and whipped him had done so wordlessly. He had no idea what was going on, yet the soft light of the candles hypnotized him. He could feel himself surrendering.

  It was then that he heard footsteps—three men, maybe four—moving with pace but unrushed. They came towards him from what seemed like an interminable distance. Riv tried to lift his head to spy his captors. There were two shadow guards on either side of him and he could feel the presence of another behind him.

  “Look at me.” A hard voice commanded. Riv looked up and could just make out a man in gold. He felt a hand grab his chin and pull his face up.

  “Hem may have been too excessive.” It wasn’t a man; it was a woman. “I can’t abide this kind of shoddy work.” She wore polished golden armor. Riv felt her soft had grip his hot, sweaty face.

  “Can you speak, captain?” The woman demanded.

  Riv tried to nod but it probably came across more like a floundering head roll. Instantly exasperated, the woman gestured at the shadowed guards, “Let him down, put in him a seat.”

  What was this accent? Riv thought. He couldn’t place it. Not formal like the Spires nobility, not plain or as crisp as the Cathedral clergy, not Rikonese or Adrenine, and certainly not northern or Novosar. She spoke evenly, too evenly, but she didn’t sound comfortable with the words.

  The chains holding him slackened, and Riv collapsed on the wood floor. Rough hands grabbed him by the arms lifting him up into a flimsy wooden chair. There were still shackles around his wrists but the chains now locked beneath him, beneath the seat. He could move his arms beyond his lap, he felt his ankles shackled now too. He sat hunched as his muscles discovered how sore and torn they were.

  “I’ll ask again, captain. Can you speak?” The woman said.

  Riv inhaled deeply and exhaled in fits. He croaked, “Ya, ya I can talk.”

  “Are you hurt?” She asked suddenly sounding quite concerned.

  Riv began to laugh but felt a surge of pain all through his chest. He coughed and shook his head, “Not so much.”

  “Superb,” the woman dragged a chair to face in front of him and sat. Her armor made only the slightest jangle as she began to remove her gauntlets. “It’ll go so much faster and smoother with you in your right mind.”

  “Where am I? Who…” Riv raised his head slowly, his eyes closed, trying to right his posture.

  “You are in one of the grand barges of the Arali cartel on our way to the Essian port of Rikonen. I am Umma Myr-Sen. You can consider me…” She tapped her chin pondering her title, “Admiral of this envoy.”

  Riv shook his head, “This is no envoy.” He coughed, opened his eyes and gazed at Umma with a tired expression, “This is a war fleet.”

  Umma shrugged, “After a fashion. We certainly have the appropriate strength accompanying us. But we have such a precious cargo that it warrants such measures.”

  “Cargo?”

  “Why yes, captain, you didn’t think our barges were empty did you?”

  Riv leaned down and brought his hands up as high as they could go, he tried to wipe his face. Umma leaned forward and tossed a rag into his lap. “Barges? I’ve never seen ships like those before. Ever. Anywhere. And if I haven’t seen them, then no one else has ever seen them before.”

  “Quite true.” Umma nodded. “It took us two years to build this fleet. Exactly like the ancient Arali ships. Those used when the Aral was so very lush, a paradise really.”

  “That’s a myth.”

  “To you northern folk, decidedly, yes.” Umma’s tone was lamenting, “You see you call never really knew the Aral. You northerners are all lost people; you have forgotten where you came from. So you’ll forgive me if, when I hear your opinion, I discount it.”

  “What?”

  “Forgotten. Where. You. Came. From.” Umma glared at Riv. “All people came from out the Aral, it was where life sprouted.”

  Riv let out a long sigh, “I don’t want to hear about your myths or faith.”

  “Neither do I, captain.” She said matter-of-factly. “Lappala alone has a recorded history that goes back 72,000 years. I think the oldest city in your part of the world is…what? Two thousand?”

  “I’m not a learned man.” Riv shrugged.

  “I think you know well more than you would care to admit.” Umma leaned back, “But you are correct in your sentiment. Now is not the time for a lesson. I need to know some secrets you hold.”

  Riv cough-laughed again, “I have precious few of those.”

  “Captain…”

  “Riv. My name is Riv.”

  Umma blinked, “Riv. How…quaint.” She smiled, “Riv, I know where your ship was on course for.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, you were coming to collect two mercenaries.”

  Riv’s eyes narrowed and he tensed, “What of it, if I were?”

  “Well, you see, an associate of mine tracked down the survivor.” Umma paused, “What you probably didn’t know about these men you were to ferry was that they had weaseled their way into the Grand Registry of the Cartel and stolen some ledgers.”

  “I don’t really care about accounting.” He tried to brush his involvement off.

  “No, of course not, you being merely a ferryman.” She said contemptuously.

  “I take on contracts; it’s the nature of my living. I don’t ask questions if the pay is enough.”

  “And in this case?”

  “The pay was more than enough.”

  “That cuts to my point, capt…Riv...” Umma gave a wicked smile, “Tell me what you know about who gave you your contract.”

  Riv shook his head, “I don’t know anything more than what was presented to me, in Anhra by the harbormaster. They often dole out work and in a lot of cases give facility contracts. The harbormaster is who you’d want.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ll talk to him.” She nodded, “Anhra is a good way off and I have you here now in front of me.”

  “I told you…”

  “Nothing.” Umma’s voice cut into Riv. “You told me what you were instructed to tell anyone who happened to ask you. You know a good deal more. I need to know it.”

  “What makes you think I will tell you?”

  “What makes you think you needn’t?”

  There was silence between the two for a long time. Riv was trying to work out exactly the cost of revealing what he knew, of what giving up that information would cost him, of how it would leave him even more vulnerable than he was now.

  Riv stared hard at Umma, “I need water.�
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  She flicked her wrist and one of the guards withdrew but in an instant was back tossing a soaked sponge into Riv’s lap. He held the sponge and felt its weight; lifting it to his mouth, he sucked the water from it. The water was cold and clean, not what he had been given up to this point. He felt it move down his throat and into his body; he instantly felt more himself. However, it was no blessing; it simply made him more aware of the pain he was in and the hopelessness of the situation.

  “You, of course, have concerns for your safety.” Umma said flatly.

  “If I tell you what I know, how can I be assured I’ll live?”

  “I don’t know if you shall.” Umma shrugged, “But I know you won’t be ended by me or mine.”

  “Why should I believe that?”

  “Because either you tell me what you know with my assurance or you tell me as I peel your skin off until I know all I want.” Umma stood never breaking eye contact with him. Before he could say anything, guards were handling him, lifting him up out of the chair and dragging him down the long hall. Umma walked at a deliberate pace behind them, speaking evenly and without anger.

  “Think about what I have asked. I shall come to hear what you have to say in the morning.”

  They arrived before a door of iron bars. One of the guards opened it and went inside; Riv could hear him struggling with something before re-emerging. They threw him into the cell as though he were a hay bale. Umma stood before the closed door, the bars framing her cold face, “Eat. Sleep. Drink. Think. Decide.”

  As she walked away and the guards followed. Riv sat in the dark unthinking. Then, he heard a scratching from a corner of the cell—boots. Someone was sitting themselves upright.