Harrien nodded. “Yap.”
“Weird little mage who looks like he has ogre blood?”
Cleavon glared at the scout, then almost hissed a yap.
“Then come. We will wait for the chief to finish making his heirs, and then you will see him.”
As we followed the scout, Nino tapped me on the shoulder and leaned close. "Do not stare too long at Chief Fergus's face, nor mention his age."
As soon as we were summoned into the chief’s tent and four of us filed in, I knew what Nino meant about not staring at his face.
Firstly, the chief of the Tallsteep clan was a surprising guy, to say the least. Sure, he was muscular like his clanmates, and he had obviously toned his body through fighting, training, and hunting, but he looked even younger than Harrien.
This didn’t make sense to me. The chief of these people was a teenager?
I guess it meant they had a different system to the Lonehills. Where the Lonehills seemed to choose new chiefs based on mage-rank, competency, and experience, maybe the Tallsteep clan had a hereditary monarchy system.
Forgetting that for now, there was something about the chief that struck me immediately.
See, Chief Fergus had a beard. Nothing unusual there, even on a teenager. Some people develop early.
The hair that composed the beard, however, was not his own.
Fergus had little wisps of blonde hair on his head, while his beard was a deep black. It looked like he had stuck it on using glue or poultice or whatever they used to make things stick to other things around here. Seriously, this was a straight-up beard toupee.
Realizing that Nino’s warning meant the chief was sensitive about this, I stopped staring at the glued monstrosity and looked around.
His tent was bigger than any other in the camp, and the inside of it was the most luxurious place I had seen since getting to this world. He had an actual bed on a real wooden frame, with a mattress that looked like it was stuffed with feathers.
Nearby, there was a weapons rack with half a dozen gleaming blades of different kinds resting in it. Next to the rack was a wooden block with a metal leaning against it. It seemed that when Chief Fergus got tooled up for war, he did it in style.
“Come closer, do not be shy,” said Fergus, and his voice sounded too deep, as though he was doing it on purpose.
He waved us over and walked over to his bed and exaggeratedly shook his head.
“Apologies for the mess, Lonehills,” he said. “My bed is so unkempt because I have not long since finished mating on it.”
Cleavon rolled his eyes so hard I thought they might permanently face the inside of his skull.
“Yes,” continued Fergus. “Mating. Poking the soil with the stick. A heavy morning of it. That is the problem when you are man like me, and you can go for hours.”
What the hell was with this dude?
It was a question I’d love to ask, but one that I knew enough to keep in my head. I was in a strange camp where my even stranger friends weren’t exactly the most favored of guests. I had to be respectful.
Even so, Fergus was a weird, weird person. He looked so young in his face, yet he was built so strongly there was no question who would win in a fight between us.
He noticed me looking at him now, and he touched his beard. I looked away.
“Kostig explain it all to me,” said the chief. “The little you told him, anyway. You are here to join maps?”
Nino nodded. “Yap. With conditions.”
“Joining maps hasn’t been done in generations.”
“And neither clan has faced danger like this in generations. It is not something we have taken with light minds.”
“Bison shit. I don’t like liars who trick their way into camp. If it wasn’t against clan way, I would disarm you.”
“You think too much like a Tallsteep, Fergus. You would disarm a mage? How?” said Nino.
“Your medallions. I take them.”
“Our medallions are not source of power.”
Interesting. Nino was lying about this, and I knew it from my experiments. The curious part was that Fergus didn’t seem prepared to contradict him. That meant the Tallsteeps were ignorant about magic, and that Nino knew how to manipulate the chief.
Had we made a mistake recommendation Mardak as chief?
Nothing we could do about that right now, but Nino’s performance made me think about something else.
Nino had lied to Chief Fergus about the medallion, and the chief had eaten the lies as if they were dessert. This meant the Lonehills had thus far made sure that knowledge about their magic never left their clan.
Was this why the Lonehills were so reluctant to explain anything to me? Maybe the ‘a mage must walk his own path’ thing was bullshit. Perhaps the clan only shared secrets with those they trusted, through fear of the Tallsteeps learning more about them.
“Even so, Nino of Lonehills, you come here crowing about things I do not believe. Why would you join maps? You expect me to trust? Think I am stupid?” said Fergus.
“Did your scout not explain why we must do this?”
“There was little time for Kostig to tell me everything, and I prefer to hear a man’s words from own lips.”
“Then hear mine,” said Nino. “We would join maps with you, and that is not lie. But with conditions.”
Fergus walked over to his weapon rack and ran his finger along a sword blade. “Conditions? I will just have two dozen of my best men hold swords to your throats while we find the map in your silly endless bags.”
“Do you think we walk into camp with map on our person?” said Nino.
“My blades would tease the map’s location from you amidst songs of pain.”
“Chief Fergus, all these years our clans have not been friends. Sometimes, we have fought. Yet we have never descended into full war, have we? And that is because neither of our clans can risk it. We both balance on shifting earth, where one footstep mean the death of clan. This is why no Lonehill or Tallsteep chief has risked more than small raid on camp. When cost of failure is death of whole clan, most chiefs do not wish to pay.”
Fergus stroked his beard. “I could make my clan great again with map. One of you would talk, when the pain got too much. You have almost invited me to do this to you, walking in here like this.”
I had expected the Tallsteep chief to think along these lines. Not that I knew him as a person, but it was what I would do in his position.
“Pendras had a vision before he visited the land beyond,” I said.
Fergus stared at me as if I was an alien. Which I suppose I was, in his eyes. “Poor Pendras,” he said, his voice betraying an emotion I hadn’t expected. Despite their peoples’ dislike of each other, maybe Fergus and Pendras had bonded over having the job as chief of their respective clans. It was probably a lonely role.
I took his further silence as a sign to continue. “In his death vision, he dreamed that we came here offering cooperation, but you refused it and acted on greed. In his vision, a sickness befell your people. A sickness they knew too well, a sickness that had learned from its past failures and grown stronger. This time, you people never left its grasp.”
“Pendras said this?”
“He did.”
Of the people in the room, only Harrien could contradict me about this, but he said nothing. I thought about pushing this further. Maybe Pendras, in his dying vision, had seen Fergus give us their half of the map, no questions asked…
No. I was already straining his belief, I could see that in his eyes. If I asked too much of Fergus, I’d shatter the little belief he had in my lies.
Fergus sighed. “Speak, before I cut your tongue, dry it, and use it as bookmark.”
“You mean you can read?” asked Harrien.
Fergus shot him a look of burning lava. “What?”
“I said, what books do you read?”
Fergus waved his hand. “Never mind that.”
“So. Conditions,” said Nin
o. “We would like-”
The chief shook his head. “Na. First, explain the reason why you would join maps and do what my father, his father, his father, all the way to our beginning, would never do.”
And so, Nino told Fergus about everything that had happened in the last month or so. Of course, the chief was already aware of most of it, having given the Lonehill refugees a week or so of sanctuary.
What he didn’t know about were our lengthy discussions in the Valley, and the plans we had made.
“You want me to send our best men and women to a war with the ogres,” said Fergus.
Nino shook his head. “Not war. A slaughter. War implies they have chance, and we do not intend to give them that.”
Fergus grinned, and a few of his beard hairs fell from his face. Harrien bit his lip suppressing a grin, and that made amusement rise in my belly. I had to look at the ground to stop it from spreading. I needed to look anywhere but at that ridiculous beard.
“Slaughter,” said Fergus. “Much better word. And to bargain for our warriors’ help, you would join maps, and we will send a party into Mines of Light to recover more precious items.”
“We need things for the fight, as do you. And there are yet previous things that wait in the depths of the Mine of Light, there for us to get.”
“But our fathers…I mean, those who were as one clan before the split…they mined the upper levels of everything, did they not?”
Nino nodded. “We would have to go deeper.”
“That is what a clanswoman said to me this morning,” said Fergus. “Hmm. I have oft thought about our feud, inventoryman of Lonehills. I have dwelled on it after satisfying a woman or two. I find that is when my thoughts run deepest.”
“And what are your thoughts?”
“That as the world changes, so must attitudes. But unfortunately my people will not accept that Lonehills and Tallsteep ever be friends.”
“You are their chief.”
“But not their tyrant. I am the youngest to ever be chief, and my position is like that of beaver crossing river over a rotten log. One misstep, and I am a wet beaver.”
Wow, I thought, listening to this.
Was the whole animal-metaphor-thing something all Tallsteeps did? Was it so entrenched in their DNA that even Tosvig, who hadn’t grown up here, spoke that way?
And what was with this guy’s beard?
Questions, questions, questions.
“Yap,” continued Fergus. “You will know, Nino Inventoryman, that a Tallsteep chief claims his seat when he challenges present chief to duel. I grew up as best young warrior in my clan. I also grew up under a rain of insults. Insults of my face; of my spots, of always looking like child, of being last to sprout hairs, and of voice refusing to grow deep. So, I train when others eat. I train when others sleep. I even read old texts that some clansmen too stubborn to read, as they despise words. From these I learn ways of fighting that others do not.”
“Your story is most impressive, Chief Fergus.”
“I do not say to brag; bragging is not my nature. I say because you should know this; I won my seat in battle, but some older warriors would love to see my status weaken. Every time I make a decision they hate, I get another challenge to my power. I have won them all duels so far, but these warriors are strong, and I will not always win.”
“I understand. You worry that if word spreads that you are considering friendship, you will lose power.”
“I must show them results first,” said Fergus. “So. We will send four Tallsteeps into Mines of Light with you. Men I trust more than my own shadow.”
“How can we trust your men?” asked Nino. “Suspicion is a double-edged blade.”
“Oath of the blood. You know the oath I speak of. We still possess an oath stone here, Nino Inventoryman. All those entering mines will swear on it. Swear that they will not harm one another, except in defense of self.”
Nino turned to me now. “Oathstone will kill those who break its words, Isaac. It is an assurance we can trust.”
So, an oathstone was something you made a promise over, something that would kill those who broke the promise. Was this real? Was it a magic stone, and did it smite down those who broke it?
Maybe the oathstone itself was a placebo, or more accurately, a symbol. Like swearing on the bible in court; the act of placing your hand on a book didn’t mean you were suddenly unable to deceive people. People just assumed the symbolic act was enough to keep you honest.
I really should start keeping a question journal for this stuff.
“Okai,” said Fergus. Then he shouted in the direction of the tent entrance. “Kostig? Fetch the oathstone.”
Kostig nodded, but he gave Fergus a stern glance. It wasn’t lost on me that Kostig resented his chief a little. Maybe he felt Fergus was too young, or maybe Kostig felt like he should be chief.
As Kostig headed off, Fergus spoke again.
“And Kostig? Fetch the outsider.”
“I am already here,” I said.
“Not you, no-color human. The outsider. The wretched one outside of camp, who possess only one hand.”
“Tosvig will not enter camp,” said Nino.
“Then he will not enter the mines. He can make choice.”
“I tell you, he will not…”
“I will fetch him,” said Cleavon. “He will listen to me.”
Soon, Kostig returned with an oathstone, and Tosvig entered the tent, his expression that of barely contained anger. Yet, there seemed to be a vulnerability about him, too.
“What?” Tosvig said. “Get on with it! I am here only because I will serve my clan. My real clan, not this den of troll-faced bastards. No oathstone will stop Tosvig helping his clan. And your beard is falling off, man-boy chief. I have never met man whose own beard hates him.”
Fergus, showing an incredibly mature degree of self-restraint, said nothing to Tosvig, and instead summoned three more Tallsteep warriors – two men and a woman. I guessed that Fergus knew that punishing Tosvig’s insolence would ruin his chances of being the first chief to join the map of the Mine of Light.
When the other Tallsteeps were present, and the tent was feeling quite full, we all swore on the oathstone.
If I’m honest, the oathstone looked like the stones we used to put on the fire and use to keep warm. Except, it had weird lines drawn on it. There seemed nothing special about it at all.
As Fergus spoke the words of the oath and we repeated them back to him, I didn’t feel any different. That being said, I wasn’t going to take a chance in breaking the oath. I knew enough not to mess around with stuff like that.
The oath was a simple one, really. And to give Fergus credit, it was a fair one. In his own words, Fergus constructed an oath that would strike him down were he to try and take the map by force once we had left the camp. As well as this, neither the Lonehills nor Tallsteeps could act in aggression toward members of the other clan.
Added to my threat of spreading an old sickness, it seemed to work. Besides, I already knew that the Tallsteeps weren’t strong enough to provoke a war. Fergus at least seemed aware of that.
Mostly importantly, the oath prevented any of us traveling to the mines from killing each other. That’s always reassuring. I still didn’t believe in the oathstone, but I guess that didn’t matter; all that mattered was that Fergus and his people did, because believing in its powers meant it would control their actions.
There’s a reason symbols pervade through the ages; they are powerful things, and our brains respond to them. So too, do the brains of green-skinned warriors and mages.
“The pact is sealed,” said Fergus. “None here will discuss this outside this tent. My warriors, you will pretend you are escorting the Lonehills off our lands. But you will go to Mines of Light. Now, we join maps.”
Nino nodded. “Tosvig has ours. Tosvig?”
Fergus held out his hand for the map.
Tosvig, his face screwed up in contempt, took the map piece
and gave it to Cleavon, who was standing behind us all.
Something jarred in my head just then. A weird kind of feeling, but I just couldn’t place it. The more I tried, the less understand came to me.
What was my brain trying to tell me?
No, it wouldn’t come.
“Let us join maps,” said Fergus. “And then you go.”
“Yap,” said Nino.
Fergus spread his arms out. “Tallsteep warriors, Lonehill mages, introduce yourselves to each other. You will be as one when you enter mines, and you need to try and trust.”
Harrien stuck his thumb out to the Tallsteep lady near him, and she pressed her thumb against his. Kostig, the scout with a hoop through one nostril, approached Tosvig.
“Greetings, older brother,” he said, sarcasm in his voice. “We finally meet.”
Tosvig just glared at him. “Brother? What?”
Fergus grinned at Tosvig. He looked like a man finally getting to say an insult he’d held in for a while. “Do you think your parents gave up after they spawn a broken boy with one hand? Na. They try again until they get it right.”
I had never seen a volcano about to erupt before, but I guessed it resembled the look on Tosvig’s face now. Knowing that were just one Tosvig fit of rage away from all of this being for nothing, I put my hand on his back and pushed him toward the entrance.
Suffering a mixture of shock and anger, Tosvig let me guide him away. It hadn’t been the sweetest of family reunions, but we’d accomplished some of what we came here for.
CHAPTER 29 – A Rock and a Hard Place
I managed to get Tosvig far, far away from camp and to a clearing, where he took a jar of ale from his inventory and drank it, then took out another and drank that too. And that is how alcohol stopped Tosvig from trying to slaughter the whole Tallsteep camp by himself.
He had calmed down by the time the rest of the group left camp, and then we set out into the wilds, all nine of us walking under a storm cloud of tension. To say there was a lack of trust between the Lonehills and Tallsteeps within the group, would be like saying that hippos aren’t really fond of the crocodiles who lurk in the waters they are drinking from.
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 27
