Ameria tugged at a jar on her belt with her last strength, twisting it off like the slavers had. Her shaking fingers spilled the white blood sap everywhere. She brought the remaining contents to her peeling lips and drank deep of her own sap, draining its contents. She pulled off the other jar and emptied it as well. Her thirst still itched her mind and her body ached. She felt like retching, but she refused the fate before her. She wouldn’t die here.
Crawling across the filthy floor she had drunk from so many times, she reached out for the belt of the closest elf. Pulling herself up on her crèche sister's still stomach, she fought the tears that would forestall her efforts.
‘Damn these humans!’ she thought to herself, ‘May darkness swallow them!’
She must have drank four more bottles before her thirst finally abated.
The humans had come soon after she had slaked her thirst on the blood sap of her sisters. She heard their boots and the jangle of keys. Ameria laid down and pulled the desiccated forms of her sisters over her. The men came to the door of the pens, accompanied by a rattling clamor.
"Alright, this lot is done up."
She recognized the voice of the lead slaver, the foreman that wound their belts every day. She could see his hairy human face in her mind and her gut clenched remembering the stench of meat on his breath. She longed to squeeze the life out of his body, her hands crushing his throat like creeper vines around their trapped prey. But she had to be quiet and play dead.
"Get the belts off them and pile them on the cart!" the foreman barked, "Then get them to the pyre!"
The sounds of locks opening and jars clanking as belts were undone and collected were followed by sickening thumps.
"Lo, they ain't heavy are they?” one slaver asked.
"Right! They feel like old driftwood!" yelled another.
There was another hollow thud followed by a wicked laugh, "They even sound like wood!"
She felt a rough and grubby hand on her ankle, "Hey, Gordin, this one don't have bottles!"
Cold fear rolled in her stomach. She willed herself to remain as still and lifeless as the trees her people came from. She heard the foreman grunt, "Those don't either, must have broke while they were dying. Don't matter, they're still fuel."
They unlocked her belt and pulled it off. She could feel metal things slide out from her stomach. Did she shudder or was it her imagination? The cold air and men’s hands on her body made her skin crawl. She hoped the vile humans didn’t notice and were as dim as they seemed.
Fortunately, to the humans, one elf body was much like any other. Even while they were alive, elves had no pulse and didn’t breathe like other creatures. The only way to make sure they were dead was to bleed them drier than dust and set them on fire. She kept her limbs as stiff as branches, at least until they threw her into the cart.
For what seemed an eternity she lay under her sisters’ dry corpses. She was thankful their bodies were so light and that she still had enough strength to shift beneath them.
With the cart full, the humans rolled it away to another chamber. She could tell this one was much larger as the rattling wheels echoed off the walls far away and the crackling of flames filled the air. She could smell something burning, bitter and stinging. Not wood, but dry elf flesh. She had to get out before the cart stopped!
Worming her way out from under the bodies, she fell to the ground as the cart continued on. She didn’t remember much about the tunnels she found herself in, except that they were black as a moonless winter night and far fouler than the pen she escaped from. She felt her way for hours along slick stone tunnels and across rivers that stank worse than the water they had been forced to drink.
Alone she wandered, or so she thought until she caught wind of a familiar odor. She had smelled something like it long ago, back when she was a child in the trees of Pahale Van, an acrid smell that burned the inside of her nose. The fine grassy hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Memories of wandering the woods alone. Memories of being stalked. Memories of old enemies. Impossible! What would those foul beasts be doing here?
She hastened her sloshing pace. Her legs grew chill. The cold was getting up into her chest. Where was the way out? Was that light ahead? She could make out the faint glow of moonlight ahead in the darkness, two circles of light shimmering on black water.
Her feet were numb and she wanted to stop and think. Think! What would she find when she left the tunnels? Where would she go? How long could she stay here until it wasn’t safe? She covered her face with her hands until the creeping panic ebbed.
That was when she heard the sound. A chattering, clattering staccato. Like teeth rattling against a shiver. But under the clatter was another sound, wet and slapping. Her panic gripped her again. It was them! The Eizyr! She needed to get out of there! Oh, to be back home in her forest! She was trapped under this foul human city and struggling to not scream, desperate to remain unnoticed.
Something moved in the darkness, blacker than the shrouding shadows. There were hints of a shape, glimpses of moonlight reflecting off wet lengths of inky flesh, writhing, advancing.
A voice in her mind began chanting a litany, 'Run. Run. Run. Run! Run! Run!' but her frozen legs remained locked in place. Dark, wet coils were slapping up and down the walls behind her. Then, radiating out from the center of the thing, eyes began flickering open. Eyes that glowed like a pack of rats that had found easy meal. A tentacle reached out and her fear broke like a wave, pushing her towards the dim light that lay ahead.
The tunnel grew brighter around her as she stumbled through the wet, unable to keep her balance. She was so cold, so scared. The water grew even colder. It thickened, turning to frozen slush with every step forward until at last stood at the opening of a large pipe.
Gouts of icy sludge sloshed out and into a frozen canal below her. Everything she saw seemed washed of color and a gray cloud crept around her sight. The only color she could see was the purple light of the city reflecting down from the low hanging snow clouds.
She spun and looked behind her, straining to hear, to see into the shadows of the pipe. Nothing. Had that been one of the Eizyr? Or had it been her panicked, delirious imagination? It made no sense that they would be outside Pahale Van, under a human city. They hadn’t been seen for hundreds of years!
She was so desperately cold! Everything was going numb standing still in the slush. Her thoughts were slow, dim as her vision. Night shouldn’t be this cold. Was it her depleted body? Then she realized, it wasn't only night, months had passed beneath the ground, it was Winterdark. The time of the year where the sun disappeared and the world was buried for a frozen fortnight.
Ameria needed to keep moving, while she still could. Cautiously, she had climbed out of the pipe and along the canal’s edge. Huge snowflakes fell all around her naked body. It was true that elves could withstand the freezing temperatures of Winterdark longer than humans, but still, not without the warmth of a fire or the shelter of a tree, and not in the wasted condition the humans had left her in. She had to find shelter or freeze to death.
She shook her head as she staggered into another snow drift, trying to clear the memories that froze her in shock as surely as the icy world around her.
“At last!” she whispered to herself, stepping forward once more. She was free and she was lost. Lost, cold, and still thirsty. She shoved handfuls of snow into her mouth, unthinking. Her insides were literally freezing, but she couldn't help herself. She wanted to purge her body of her sisters' blood.
Up a rough set of steps, she’d entered an empty street above. Now even up here, the snow was waist deep in drifts. How long had it been snowing? How far into Winterdark was the world? Were all the humans hiding inside by now, to wait out the end of it? It made sense, for that’s what her sisters would be doing right now back in their forest. Every year, when the sun disappeared, they’d hide up in their trees. Safe and warm inside once the doors grew shut.
Her teeth chattering in her head
reminded her of the thing that had pursued her in the tunnels. She wasted no time in putting more distance between herself and all that was behind her.
She pushed herself through the empty streets, hoping to no avail to find an open door or even an empty stable. But the locked buildings were as impassable as city walls. All she found were confusing, crisscrossing streets bending back on themselves. Slipping in the deep powder, Ameria half fell down one of the snowy slopes and staggered into an dark alley, exhausted. The passage was narrow enough to be cut off from the freezing wind, a semblance of comfort. She couldn't pause for long. She needed to get home, get warm. But first she would rest, just for a few minutes.
3
The noonday sun melted away layers of the gray snow in the open streets. Snowy pathways were widening enough for winter’s survivors to pass through. Though the dead end alleys were still buried deep enough to conceal all manner of things. Gansel stepped ankle deep through frozen slush as she entered one of those shadowed backstreets in the heart of the Merchant’s Quarter.
Her legs kept disappearing up to her knees as the post holed into the slick crust. Keeping steady with a sounding pole and stopping every few feet to break through the ice, she poked around in the snow hoping that she wouldn’t find anything. Winterdark had been especially hard and the freezing days and nights drug out through the rest of a winter reluctant to surrender the world.
Her feet were wet and numb from post-holing into dirty snow drifts all morning. Her crew had been searching for two days and fortunately hadn’t found a thing. There were rumors though that a crew in Hochgarden found over thirty dead nobles and their servants frozen in their homes. No one was willing to say why they were all dead, but Gansel figured they were members of the more extreme Assembly sects that believed those who were truly filled with the Pure Human Spirit could withstand all manner of hardship. She had seen them in the markets, only buying the minimum of provisions, secure in their faith that their supreme nature would sustain them. She couldn’t understand why mama idolized the Assembly so.
Frustrated with her mother’s unquestioning obedience to the Assembly, Gansel brought her pole down hard into the gritty ice. The crust broke away with a satisfying crunch, but she winced as her shoulder jolted, her pole hitting something dense beneath, too high to be the frozen mud of the ground. Gansel swallowed, dread coating her throat. Trying to extract the pole, she found it stuck. Gripping with both hands, she kicked away the ice that surrounded where she had plunged it in the snow. Still, it refused to move.
Reaching down to clear away the snow, she wondered if she had planted the end into some debris was all, uncleared alley waste left from before the snows. Scooping away handfuls of the wet, crystallized mound in front of her, she uncovered a dark shape in the frozen muck.
The light shifted then as the sun reached its zenith and shone down into the narrow alley, into the depression she had dug. A single solid black eye peered up at her, its twin pierced by the end of her pole. A scream escaped her throat and she stumbled back away from the impaled face, falling hard. The strangeness of it hitched in her mind though and kept her from scrambling out of the alley, away from the dead thing.
She crawled on her hands and knees, heedless of the cold and wet, to where her pole stuck straight up in the air and looked at what little of the face she had exposed. Something was wrong with its skin! Mottled green and blackish around the edges it looked like the cabbage she’d left in the garden after the first frost last year, getting her in so much trouble with mama. She reached into the hole to pull more snow away and shuddered, yanking her hand back for a moment when the wrinkled cheek crackled and gave, mushy under her touch.
Above the face's brow, she saw an even stranger sight, blades of pale green grass sticking out of the snow. She brushed away more of it. That wasn't grass. It was hair!
She cleared away the rest of the snow around the face and neck, gasping when she saw pointed tips on the ears. Was this an elf?
Gansel finally got to her feet and clambered out to the street, slipping more than once on the slick cobblestones. She had to find mama! She saw her, down and across the street next to another alleyway opening, talking to Warden Wulfgust. Gansel slowed down, unsure of how to act in front of the old man.
"Mama!” she panted and grabbed her by the sleeve, "Mama! Come quickly!"
"Ganny, oh dear, did you find someone?” Her mother looked to the warden and pointed to the alley Gansel had run from, "Warden Wulfgust, we'll need the rest of your crew over there."
The warden shook his head, "May the Spirit bless us. Another human has departed to join the Eternal Fold."
Gansel shook her head and gasped, trying to get her breathing under control, "No! That's just it!"
Her mother and the warden looked puzzled.
"It's not human!” She swallowed. "Come look!"
After the digger cleared away the last of the snow around the elf, the warden looked down in disgust at its frozen green flesh. Revolted by the sight of its naked form, he clutched the symbol of the Pure Human Spirit he had pinned to his cloak, a human right hand, bearing an open eye in its palm that presented a benediction on its beholder.
Gansel and her mama stood behind them, she could hear the Warden mutter something under his breath. She wasn't sure if it was a curse or a prayer.
The digger looked at Warden Wulfgust and scratched the stubble of his chin with dirty fingernails, spitting a wet wad of blackweed on the ground. "Whatcha want us to do with it, Warden? We can't rightly store it with our dead until the ground thaws. Ain't that blasphemy or somethin'?"
Looking over his shoulder, Wulfgust saw a small crowd forming at the mouth of the alley. What was he to do? The last thing he wanted was for something like this to get out! The scandal of it! An elf! Dead in his ward!
He shot an icy stare at the digger so cold it could've added the laborer's body to the pile in the wagon.
"Of course it's blasphemy you mooncalfed dolt! Don't you think I know that?!” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a kerchief to dab at his waxy brow. "We've got to do something with it before Sharpe hears about this!"
"Hears about what, good Warden?” asked a voice from behind them. Warden Wulfgust froze and Gansel saw all of the remaining blood drain from his porridge like cheeks. Mama put her hand out and pushed Gansel to stand against the wall with her, lowering her eyes as a tall man walked past.
Gansel didn't share her mother's fear and looked up at the man.
Primus Morrow Sharpe was a veteran of the Assembly's Panickorps and a decorated Assemblyman, famous for cleansing the Gebrochen Wastes north of Dunklesalzgrube. These campaigns kept the troops out in harsh wasteland elements for months on end as they exterminated cobolds concealed within the fens of northern Eldervost.
His gaze raked across Gansel as he passed, his black eyes wreathed in tan skin bore into her with contempt. Gansel felt a shiver pass through her and she looked away. Her mother’s arm went around her shoulder and drew her in as she put her back against the stone and stucco alley wall.
"Primus Sharpe," the warden whispered, "you're here."
"Obviously, Wulfgust," the senior Assemblyman jeered, "I was inspecting the neighboring wards and word reached me that something exotic and queer had been found on your streets."
The old warden swallowed hard and nodded. Fear shone from his hollow eyes and Gansel thought he seemed close to tears. "Er. Yes, Primus?"
"I don't like things exotic and queer Warden," he admonished.
Panic flashed on the warden’s face as if it were a rat skittering across a street into a sewer grate. "Certainly, Primus!"
Sharpe raised an eyebrow at the old man.
"I mean! No! Primus?” Gansel felt a little sorry for the old fool, but not much. Warden Wulfgust was a pompous, self-serving windbag and she enjoyed seeing him brought down.
Primus Sharpe sighed, bored with the unchallenging exchange. "You found something warden?"
With a jittery han
d, Wulfgust gestured at the hollowed out snow where the elf's body lay.
"There, Primus! This thing! An elf!" At that, the digger pushed his shovel under the corpse and lifted it, wilted and dripping, out of the hole, dropping it onto the ice at the warden’s feet.
Warden Wulfgust cast a disgusted glare at the man and stepped away from the body. He looked around nervously, desperate to shift the Assemblyman’s piercing attention away from himself and his eyes fell on Gansel. He pointed at her, his hand still quivering. "She found it! That girl!"
Gansel froze. The Primus turned his broad shoulders aside, sweeping the gaze of all present with them to look in the direction of the warden's gesticulation. Sharpe cocked his head, "What's your name girl?"
She heard Mama squeak in fear as she took her arm away from her daughter. Gansel looked around, everyone was staring at her now. "Gansel."
"Primus!” her mother hissed under her breath.
Gansel gave a short huff, "...Primus."
Sharpe smirked at her. "Quaint. Come over here, girl."
Gansel hated how the Assembly did this to people. She glanced at her mother who kept her eyes downcast. She wouldn't even look at her! Gansel remembered her promise to herself and now extended it to every other human in Port Myskatol, she wouldn't grow up to be like any of them. She wasn't going to live in fear. She stood straight and walked over to the man that had everyone else cowed. But with every step towards him, her courage evaporated.
Menace radiated off the man. He glared at her and she grew anxious. It was difficult to breathe. Their eyes met and her stomach quivered. She felt like a mouse held fast by a serpent's gaze.
Wrenching her eyes away from his, she regarded the dead elf once more. She had never seen one of them before today. Goblins and dwarves like her friends Tymuld and Tar'dur, their families were allowed to settle by Port Myskatol because of trade agreements. But elves were among what the Assembly called the ‘chattel races’ along with bugbears and cobolds. They considered them as dregs of the dregs.
The Necrosopher’s Apprentice Page 3
