The Scrolls of the Ancients

by Robert Newcomb

  The same word had been branded into the left shoulder of almost every oarsman just before they were forced to board the vessel at the coastal city of Farpoint. The rest were marked with a slightly different word: R’talis. He had no idea what either word meant.

  Pulling on his oar, he glanced down at the aisle dividing the rows of slaves. Latticed gates lay flush in the floor, held fast with huge iron padlocks. They led to the lower decks, where still more slaves—men as well as women—were held.

  At the docks, the women and the men had been herded together. Twenty-Nine had been puzzled to see that they were all about the same age: somewhere between thirty and thirty-five Seasons of New Life. Then, after a small quantity of their blood had been taken, they had been branded. Those given the designation R’talis had been carefully boarded first and were treated marginally better. For example, he had never seen an R’talis forced to toil at the oars.

  Lost in thought, he let his mind drift just a bit too long. Before he realized that his pull on the oar had slackened slightly, the knotted nine-tails came whistling out of nowhere.

  Snapping loudly, its leather straps seared their way into the naked skin of Twenty-Nine’s back, making him scream. Trying to regain his focus, he screamed again, perhaps more loudly than was truly warranted.

  It was good enough for the bleeder with the whip. Apparently satisfied, the creature turned his white, opaque eyes to someone else, weapon arm raised.

  Suddenly a latticed doorway in the deck above opened and a stairway descended with a crash. Sunlight and sea air streamed in as a figure slowly climbed down. Twenty-Nine narrowed his eyes. He had seen this being only one other time since boarding the slave ship, and knew him only by the private name he had silently bestowed on him: the Harlequin.

  Even though the slaves continued rowing to the mind-numbing beat, every pair of eyes was now focused squarely on the Harlequin.

  As had been the case the other time Twenty-Nine had seen him, he was absurdly dressed. His long-sleeved, black-and-white-checked doublet was fastened down the center with shining gold buttons. Highly padded epaulets broadened the shoulders, and short, white ruffles on the raised, circular collar and cuffs of the doublet lengthened neck and arms. The almost obscenely tight, bright red breeches ended in black, square-toed shoes with raised heels and highly polished silver buckles. Rings adorned almost every finger, and a matching gold necklace hung to his breastbone. The long fingernails were also red.

  Strangest of all, his face was painted.

  The effect was chilling. His face was stark white; his lips were deep scarlet. A bright red painted mask surrounded dark, piercing eyes. Angular and foreboding, its edges swept back sharply from the eyebrows and lower lids into the stark white field surrounding it. The haughty, prominent nose was severely aquiline, the jaw surprisingly strong. An inverted red triangle was painted beneath the lower lip.

  His hair was dyed a bright red, and was pulled back tightly from the widow-peaked hairline to the rear of his skull.

  Fastened to his belt was a device that looked like two small iron spheres, one black and the other white, attached to either end of an alternating black-and-white knotted line. The line was coiled up and hung neatly from a hook on his belt at the right hip. Sometimes, usually when he was deep in thought or watching something he found to be particularly stimulating, the Harlequin would reach down and grasp the twin spheres, then gently rub them together, producing a soft clinking sound. There was something unnerving and perverse about the action, and Twenty-Nine cringed whenever he saw it.

  Taken as a whole, the Harlequin looked like a freak on view at a province fair rather than the leader of the fearsome taskmasters controlling the oarsmen. But whomever he turned his eyes on quickly learned the truth. This was no fair, and his intentions were sincerely deadly.

  The Harlequin whispered something to the bleeder keeping time, and the monster stopped pounding on the block of wood. As they had been trained, the oarsmen immediately ceased their labors. The silence was deafening.

  “Raise oars!” the bleeder shouted. Immediately all of the slaves pushed down on the handles of their oars, raising them up out of the restless Sea of Whispers.

  “Ship oars!”

  The slaves dutifully began to pull their oars into the ship and lay them down in the aisle separating the rows. Gasping, exhausted, they tried their best to remain quiet.

  “We have arrived at the first of our destinations,” Harlequin said to the bleeder. “I shall need forty of them.” He placed his hands upon his hips. “You may have the honor of selecting them for me.” His eyes hardened. “Make sure you take Talis only,” he added.

  “As you wish,” the master bleeder answered. Rising from his seat, he began walking down the length of the bloody aisle, pointing to slaves seemingly at random.

  A cold sense of dread shot through Twenty-Nine as the blanched creature stopped directly before his row. His broken, bloody hands were trembling. He held his breath and kept his head down and eyes lowered.

  “You,” came the simple command.

  Twenty-Nine looked up. The bleeder was pointing to Twenty-Eight. Feeling guilty, Twenty-Nine let out a long breath.

  Other bleeders began unchaining the chosen forty. They were forced to stand; many at first went crashing back down to the bloody deck, their legs too weak and cramped to hold their weight. Eventually all of them, including number Twenty-Eight, began shuffling stiffly toward the stairway where the bizarre Harlequin stood waiting. Twenty-Nine tried to give his seatmate a look of encouragement as he walked away, but Twenty-Eight wasn’t looking at him. As the slaves began climbing the stairs, the Harlequin examined each of them closely.

  Another of the chosen men was weeping openly. He was pulled out of the line. The Harlequin drew him closer.

  “Do not fear,” he said, almost compassionately. “You go to a far better place.” With that he released the man to the bleeders, and they forced him up the stairway. “Choose two more.” The bleeder did so, and the Harlequin followed the last of them up the stairs.

  It was at that moment Twenty-Nine realized things had changed.

  He could sense no movement: The ship was no longer rocking back and forth in the sea, as one would normally expect. There was no creaking of the ship’s sides. There was, in fact, no sound whatsoever.

  And then the temperature began to change.

  It started to become cold—impossibly so. The slaves in their meager loincloths began to shiver; their breath turned to clouds of vapor.

  Twenty-Nine bent over, trying to conserve body heat. Then he had an idea. Sliding as far into Twenty-Eight’s vacant seat as his chains would allow, he peered across the shivering bodies of the other four slaves in his row, trying to get a better look out the small oar slit.

  What he saw did not encourage him. The ship seemed to be in the grip of an impenetrable gray fog, the likes of which he had never seen. Growing up in the coastal city of Farpoint, he had seen fog banks roll in, to be sure. But this was decidedly different. As if it had a life of its own, the fog began to slither into the boat, tendrils reaching in through the oar slits and falling down the stairway from which the Harlequin had descended. It quickly filled the deck. As it increased in density the fog replaced the smell of the salt sea with a cleaner odor, such as one might inhale on land after a brisk, cold rain.

  Then came the voices: many voices whispering as one.

  “Pay us our bounty or we shall first take your ships, and then your bodies.”

  Almost immediately Twenty-Nine could hear desperate, tormented cries from above. Then everything became eerily silent again. The ship continued to sit motionless, but at last the fog still surrounding them began to thin, and he could see the terrified faces of his fellow oarsmen.

  Craning his neck, Twenty-Nine saw that the sun shone brightly once more. Then the splashing noises began.

  Instinctively, he started counting them. As he watched through the narrow slit, he could see the occasional bloodi
ed body plunging into the sea. There were forty splashes in all.

  Then he heard snuffling, snarling, grunting sounds. They reminded him of one time he and his father had been ocean fishing. Twenty-Nine had been young, and had made the mistake of accidentally tipping an entire bucket of bloody fish offal overboard. Sharks had swarmed.

  As had happened then, eventually all went quiet. Straining to get the best possible view, Twenty-Nine could see the red, spreading stain of blood as it stretched across the surface of the impossibly placid sea.

  Then the topside deck hatch opened noisily again, and the Harlequin reappeared. Blood dripped from the hem of his doublet. Gently wiping it off with an embroidered handkerchief, he descended the stairs and walked to the master bleeder.

  “Fill the vacant seats with replacements from below,” he said casually. “Talis only. And be quick about it.”

  Several bleeders moved aside the oars and unlocked the grates in the aisle floor, then descended into the darkness. Soon the replacements came up and out, furiously blinking their eyes in the brighter light of the oar deck. They were assigned to their stations and roughly chained into place.

  Twenty-Nine tried to smile hopefully into the face of the frightened, confused slave now seated next to him.

  Then he felt the great ship rock and heard the accompanying creaking of her sides. He heard the scurrying noises of the topside bleeders as they went about their labors above. Slowly, the Defiant began to make way.

  The Harlequin looked to the pacemaster. “Battle speed,” he ordered. “We have time to make up for.”

  “Very good,” the pacemaster replied. But an unusually worried look had crowded in upon the corners of his face. “But before we commence—are we safe?” he asked. “Are we through it?”

  “Oh, indeed,” the Harlequin answered casually.

  “And the human offerings?” the pacemaster inquired, taking up his twin sledges. “Their numbers sufficed?”

  “Oh, yes,” the Harlequin answered, walking to a comfortable-looking chair placed before the slaves. He smiled. “I think it safe to say they all disagreed with something that ate them!”

  The bleeders broke into raucous laughter. Reclining into the softness of his upholstered chair, the Harlequin threw a leg up over one of its arms.

  As the slaves slid their oars into the restless sea, the pacemaster resumed the beat, and the Defiant truly began to make way. Reaching down, the Harlequin took the twin iron spheres into his hand and began clinking them together, exactly matching the pacemaster’s beat.

  On the same ship, another slave lay shackled to the floor, one of hundreds packed cheek by jowl in the lower deck. His eyes were hazel. His straight, sandy hair was pulled back from his face into a tail that was secured with a bit of worn leather string and ran down almost to the center of his back. Before being chained down he had been branded with the word R’talis, as had many of the others imprisoned with him. He was strong and in the prime of his life, but in the darkness of this hold it didn’t matter. Nothing did.

  With no way to raise himself up, there was precious little escape from the constantly nauseating stench of human waste, not to mention the ever-present vomit from those who continually succumbed to seasickness. All the slaves marked R’talis were fed and hydrated enough to keep them alive. Still, his lips parched and his clothing soaked, his hollow stomach felt long past the point of hunger. He had no idea that his ship was part of a large flotilla of slavers. Nor did it matter. All he wanted was his freedom.

  A few hours earlier, the ship had inexplicably stopped, then suddenly resumed course. He did not know why.

  He could do nothing but listen to the moaning and sobbing of his fellow captives as the ship pitched sickeningly through the violent Sea of Whispers. Trying to keep from vomiting, he closed his eyes. His parched tongue reached out to touch the dark mole at the left-hand corner of his mouth.

  CHAPTER

  Two

  Dried tulip of Rokhana,” the old woman said in her raspy voice, pointing to the smoke-colored bottle. Never in her life had she seen so many rare, wonderful herbs collected in a single place. The sheer quantity and selection astounded her. She watched anxiously, as a greedy child might, while the man in the two-colored robe took the fragile bottle down from the shelf. He carefully placed it into the saddlebag alongside the others. The woman smiled, revealing the absence of several teeth.

  “And sneezeweed!” she added gleefully, clapping her hands together. She pointed to another container. “We must have sneezeweed!” Again the man complied.

  The small, thatched cottage they were plundering was in the Hartwick Woods, just east of the town of Florian’s Glade, in the south of Eutracia. An ancient herbmistress lived there. At the moment she cowered within the glowing wizard’s warp the man in the robe had conjured after breaking into her home.

  “What about this one?” he asked casually. He held a small, fluted bottle of shredded blue leaves before the light of the fireplace.

  “Bah!” the old woman grunted with a disparaging wave of her ancient hand. “What you now hold is a bottle of the ground flowers from a shammatrass tree. They bloom only once every twenty-three years, and must be picked within hours of their appearance, or they are no good. It is used for medicinal purposes only—not at all something that we need.”

  She smiled wickedly. “It is, however, exceedingly difficult to come by,” she continued. “It probably took the herbmistress there her entire life to collect the meager amount you now hold in the palm of your hand.” Turning, she cast a jealous eye to the woman trapped behind the azure bars of the cage.

  “Really?” the man asked nastily. “How interesting.” With that he removed the cork and cast the bottle’s contents into the fire. The flames roared colorfully for a moment before finally settling down again. The herbmistress cried aloud and slumped to the floor.

  Smiling, the man in the two-colored robe looked over at her. “After I have finished here, I will visit the lead wizard,” he said softly. “I will gladly give him your regards.” He began to laugh, but his laugh quickly decayed into an all-consuming cough.

  Hacking relentlessly, he placed a cloth before his mouth. When he took it away, it was covered with blood that was moving across the cloth, tracing his endowed blood signature. His lips twisting angrily, he stuffed the rag back into his robes. He stood there quietly for a moment, trying to reclaim his breathing.

  “Are you sure there is nothing in this place that would help me?” he whispered to the crone as she went about selecting more of the precious bottles.

  At last she stopped her search and turned her green eyes to him. “As I have told you before, Krassus, there is nothing of this world that can help you now. As you yourself have said, your illness is of the craft. What you have swirling inside was given to you by your previous master, the dead son of the Chosen One. What shall be shall be.” She turned her attention back to the shelves. “The items we take today should, however, help me locate the scroll you seek. And hopefully before it is too late,” she added softly.

  Hours after they had gone, the wizard’s warp finally dissolved, leaving the crying herbmistress free to face the task of cleaning up her smashed, looted home.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  Dreng!” the wizard Faegan shouted happily from his chair on wheels. “That’s another two hundred points!” Using a feathered quill, he made an exaggerated show of noting the tally down on a small pad. Smiling coyly, he sat back and stroked Nicodemus, his blue cat, as he waited for the inevitable outburst from the lead wizard. It didn’t take long.

  “Once again I say you’re cheating! You must be!” Wigg shouted back. His jaw stuck out like the prow of a ship. “You’re using the craft! I don’t know how you’re managing it, but I’ll find out! No one gets a full dreng on only two hands! Not even you!”

  Wigg, onetime lead wizard of the Directorate, was becoming more furious by the minute. His craggy face was red, and he glared at Faegan with the m
ighty, all-consuming surety of his convictions.

  Grabbing up the cards to shuffle them and deal out another hand, Faegan only smiled.

  Tristan of the House of Galland, prince of Eutracia, sat at the rectangular, upholstered gaming table listening to the two ancient wizards bicker. It had been this way for the better part of an hour. He normally found it comic when they were at each other’s throats, usually over something trivial. Today it was starting to annoy him.

  Six of them were playing the card game dreng, and the score was tied. Wigg captained the team consisting of himself, his daughter Celeste, and Tristan. The team sitting across from them was made up of Faegan, Geldon the hunchbacked dwarf, and Princess Shailiha, Tristan’s twin sister. Morganna, Shailiha’s baby, sat on the carpet, batting at some scattered toys.

  At first Wigg had not wanted to play, arguing, as usual, that there were far more important matters to attend to. In truth he had probably been right. But after some stiff cajoling by Shailiha and what Tristan thought to be comic but shameless outright begging by Celeste, the lead wizard had finally given in.

  These two strong-willed women had become Wigg’s and Faegan’s soft spots, and everyone in the palace knew it. There was in fact very little in this world that the two women could not get either of the wizards to do, especially if they both asked at once—a strategy the women had been quick to learn, and to capitalize upon.

  Tristan cast an eye across the table toward his sister, and gave her a slight smile. Shailiha smiled back, her long blond hair and hazel eyes as lovely as ever. She then looked at Wigg. The lead wizard’s face was red, and a vein had begun throbbing in his right temple. Suddenly unsure about the relative wisdom of purposely engaging the two irascible wizards in a competition, she looked back over at her twin brother.