JET 8.5: FAREWELL, MUND
“I did not write these words. I only spoke them. I do not know your tongue. It is your Mother-tongue. The speech of demons. Do not decry the translator. How might I speak to you, but in your own voice? There is no untranslated speech.”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 13:270-277
The landscape below was a tapestry of shadowed farmlands, winter-blasted fields scarred with naked hedgerows, shivering animals longing for the dawn. The frost-eaten meadows were pale, sparkling sometimes under the moonlight as we passed overhead. I already had all three of us enwraithed, invisible, and on the road – so to speak. The moon was only just waning, barely less than full, and it felt at times like we were swimming through silver water. Rath had said to leave a clear twenty miles between us and the Plain Road as we headed north-west, so I’d fixed our height at around about three hundred feet as he’d recommended, the road running almost along the horizon.
My skin tingled. It was like that first night, flying in Hightown – flying with the platinum-haired wizard who never loved me… But it’d felt like love, hadn’t it? It’d felt real, flying there before the Maginox?
I felt it again now. It wasn’t love, exactly, but it was a surprisingly-similar sensation: freedom. Unbounded freedom. The night was alive in ways no vampire could perceive, but I could. I flew across a plain, a plane of potential. I had only to fix my mind upon some purpose, some calling…
But what? It was impossible to think clearly. As much as my nethernal flesh enjoyed the predawn flight, my mind was preoccupied.
Everything was not okay in the House of Mortenn.
The light-globes fastened to the posts along the Plain Road’s route stood out, even from here, the white beacons designed to shine across the dark expanse doing their job superbly. We had a map, but none of us were experienced at map-reading, obviously, beyond tracing routes on those clearly-absurd things in the first pages of story-books. Our collective lack of skill with maps being the case, my arch-arch-diviner advisor said that keeping the road in sight was the only way we’d avoid getting lost. Apparently getting lost would run us into even worse issues before we reached the mountain-pass – the delightful-sounding ‘Irontooth Gates’, as the map would have it.
Even worse issues. Yeah, that was what he’d said. His choice of phrasing had been ominous. Truth be told, I’d had no idea what I was letting myself in for – just getting out of Mund, getting here with the twins and all my stuff, had been a trial.
But flying in silence like this? For all the blissfulness, I felt little or nothing of the relief I’d expected. No, now it was all apprehension at what trials might be lie before us. What more I’d have to do to keep us alive, keep us in happiness and health.
“Keep up, guys,” I called softly – not to my brother and sister, whose hands I had to keep hold of, but to the invisible entourage following along behind us.
“But it is heavy, Master!”
“If that’s you, Bigbum, you know where you can put your complaints, don’t you?”
“Please, Master must not be so literal, or the Bigbum will suffer much…”
That got Jaid to laugh, but it was a brief snatch of sound, quickly stifled by her mood.
“You’d better stop writing them down, then, hadn’t you?”
“Y-e-e-e-ssssss, Master.”
I looked across at Jaroan. He was staring over his left shoulder, out towards the sea, little more than a faint wall of smudgy greyness against the horizon.
Goodbye, Salnifast-by-the-Sea. Goodbye, the Bay of Mund.
Of all the things I’d thought I’d have to say goodbye to, my brother wasn’t one of them. But he was different now. We were leaving the old Jaroan behind, perhaps forever.
Gilaela, or that thorny king who used her as a mouthpiece, hadn’t been wrong. ‘Return to the nightmare… from whence you came.’ The words lay heavy on my mind, anchoring me to my worries.
For a kick off, my robe was covered in mud, wet and slimy from months in the ground – thankfully it’d been well-made by Madame Sailor, having suffered only minor damage, a little fraying in a few patches and on one of the sleeve-cuffs. It was my robe, damn it, and it was a million percent better than an inmate’s rags, even covered in stains. However, the mask Xas had buried was obviously my spare one: it had a slightly more-daunting twist to its grinning expression, and a certain quality of the curving horns made them not decorative but blade-like, their points far more pronounced than my usual mask.
I had stowed it in my newly-stolen satchel. I had no idea whether it might prove useful at some future juncture, but for now it only made me more recognisable. The robe, once I was all ghostly, could’ve been any sorcerer’s really – the mask far less-so. Even if I’d only used it rarely, there was no need to take the risk; it did look an awful lot like my favourite one. Perhaps it was only to me that it looked much different.
Once I’d bade Morsus farewell, I floated over my parents’ graves, and just stayed there for a minute, collecting myself mentally, coming up with a plan. The first thing I did was go and have a shave. Losing the whiskers was almost as good as regaining my powers. Then I went ahead and stocked up on the essentials for our journey – probably far more important than the champion’s costume, thinking about it. Books – I didn’t dare go near the Maginox library, but there were plenty of contemporary books I still hadn’t read, on both sorcery and magic in general, books which had caught my eye over the past months but which my chosen profession had afforded me little time to read. Bedding, warm clothing – I couldn’t stay in wraith-form twenty-four-seven or I’d start to fade away into the shadowland. I’d have to have something comfy to wear when I was sleeping at least, and the same went for the twins, obviously. We weren’t heading for sunny climes.
And then there was food – I had ways to get meat in the wild, ways beyond the ken (or tastes) of most men, but there was no harm taking some nuts and salted beef, pickled vegetables, anything that would keep. After my diet in Zyger, the moment I saw a jar of gherkins I tore the lid off it in such a rush my satyr-strength shattered the thing. It mattered little to me – there was a whole shelf of the bad boys. By the time I got to the third jar, I’d calmed down enough to actually open it without peppering its contents with glass-shards.
There was too much stuff to carry, but that was what imps were for – I sat Zab on top of the chest full of goodies, my winged demonoids hefted it between them, and, with a dash of gremlin illusion, the chest sauntered along after me, equally invisible.
Yes, I stole it all, from the very-poshest shops I could safely enter with my considerable skill-set. Yes, I filled my pockets with cash wherever I could. Yes, I got terrible wind from the gherkins. I didn’t care about any of it. I owed it to myself. The city owed it to me. I gave Mund my life, and it repaid me by starving me, entrapping me, maiming me.
No more.
Once I had ninety percent of my preparations finished and my guts had stopped jabbering on in their dismal chorus, I finally plucked up the courage to go and do it.
Go home.
Mud Lane was a place out of my dreams, its wooden spans and rope-bridges tearing at my heart more than the lofty golden arches of Hightown – even the newest ones I didn’t recognise. I was descending past its windows and balconies for the last time. I was coming home to leave it forever, Rathal’s opinions notwithstanding.
It was strange, coming back – getting to see Jaid and Jaroan had been the driving force in my life for so long that I could hardly remember their faces; the specifics of their appearance had been wholly subsumed by the idea of their existence, the symbol of my freedom – yet after hearing Duskdown’s portentous words regarding my brother, I was bound-over in apprehension.
Knife-men? I asked myself for what had to have been the fiftieth time. How? How dare he?
And then – before my mind’s eye – looming large and blinding, a burning tongue of hell-flame – Shadowcrafter falling, his blood arcing up –
I had no room to judge Jaroan.
Then I was there – floating through my apartment – Orstrum, the dear old man snoring on his mattress – Xan and Xastur, the boy seeming almost to blink as he slumbered deep in dreams – and, finally, my brother and sister.
I tried to do it as gently as possible, knowing how fragile they might be.
“Jaid? Jar?”
They were sleeping in separate beds, now, obviously; it was Jaid that’d taken mine. She was hugging her pillow, and I almost cracked and started weeping, right then and there, looking down at her – but I drew a ragged breath and forced myself to swallow down my emotions. By the Five, I didn’t even want to wake her – but I had to.
“Guys? Please.”
I lit a candle and ensured I was in a position where my face was visible, that I was talking slowly and surely as they started to awaken.
“I’m here. Jaid? Will you wake up? Jaroan? I didn’t bring you any bread this time, but I think I could rustle up a blackberry pastry… if Pinktongue’s not scoffed them all.”
“Kas? What?” Jaid sounded annoyed more than anything, her sleep-voice loud and brusque. “I’m tryin’ – tryin’ to go back to – Kas…”
She came awake and stared at me for a full five seconds before whirling out of bed faster than an arch-diviner, sucking in her breath to squeal –
“Shh!” I made my eyes wide, telling her without words how dangerous the next few seconds could be for me.
I crouched to receive her and there was only a moment of hesitation before she ran to me, squeezed me harder than an arch-druid. I only had to crouch a bit. They were growing. You didn’t notice it, until you weren’t there every day, and suddenly in a couple of months she’d shot up like a reed.
Tears fell down my cheeks, but I was smiling in joy.
Over Jaid’s shoulder, I saw that Jaroan was just starting to push himself into an upright position. The battle within him flared in his eyes.
This time it was Jaroan who wouldn’t speak. This time it was Jaroan who cried, not out of happiness but out of grief, grief for these lost months, the course he’d chosen. I could see the contest of emotions playing itself out across his features.
Jaid was trying not to squeal, burying her face in my shoulder. I took them both into my arms, and, whatever else was wrong with the world, I knew this little piece of it would be okay. It might take time, it might be hard, but we would get through it together.
I told them the plan, showed them the note for Xantaire. Jaid went for it instantly, and, while Jaroan raised no word of complaint, he laughed scornfully a few times; at himself, at me, the plan… I had no idea, but he packed a bag all the same. That was all that mattered.
Sure, they probably knew it was all a lie. They knew it wasn’t going to be some big adventure. We were running from Mund, running from excitement into safety, from the end of the world as we knew it into obscurity. The untravelled lands beyond the Realm’s borders were probably untravelled for a very good reason, but we’d get chance to find out.
If the death of the world caught us there, at least we’d be some of the last to enjoy our time on the plane before we were made dragon-fodder. And who knew for certain? We could go so far that even Ulu Kalar reborn couldn’t find us. Keep going to the very ends of Materium.
The sun rose behind us, but we cast no shadows. We flew higher, until we were wisps of cloud drifting across the sky towards the distant mountains.
I’d had plenty-enough trouble getting free the first time. I wasn’t about to be caught again.
* * *
Now that it was light and it was child’s play to fix our direction, I ascended up to perhaps a thousand feet, and we could see the lay of the land more clearly. Little matchstick villages were scattered beneath us, flocks of sheep being brought in for shearing, teams of oxen pulling ploughs across spell-enhanced soil. It was only rarely that the druidic committees forced the lands to lie fallow, and even from up here I couldn’t spot a single field left untouched; the signs of activity were everywhere – the tents of marketplaces were like tiny patches of gems in the grass, pavilions blue and white and yellow; plenty of carts were twisting about the paths winding to and fro between trading outposts, and parties of travellers on horseback. The Plain Road was dotted every fifteen or twenty miles with towns, if they could be called that – I doubted any one of them was half as big as even Helbert’s Bend, but these road-stops were all named on my map: Griffon’s Lodge with its white-blossomed groves, Arlbrowtain with its seven streams, Hidden Hedge with its wheat-coated roofs… The bigger towns were down by the Greywater, which had snaked out of sight to the west.
The road itself seemed to be full of traffic going in both directions, riders and carriages, carts and pedestrians – and we weren’t the only aerial travellers either. Though most were keeping close to the road, and flying far lower than us, there was one exciting moment when a flock of griffons zoomed past, heading towards the east, crossing within just a quarter of a mile of us. But we emitted no significant scents on the breeze when we were like this, and even the monstrous hunters of the skies were oblivious to our presence.
I raised my head once the tremendous creatures had winged by, looking over at Jaid to catch her reaction – only to note how ashen her face had become. Beneath the ghostly transparency she ought to look pale, sure, but her skin was almost luminous.
“Are you okay?” I asked her, squeezing her hand.
She pulled her eyes up from the ground to meet mine, and juddered through gritted teeth, “Fine.”
“You want to go lower?”
“No!” she cried. “Yes! I don’t kn-know! Oh… I just – I don’t f-feel right!”
Whatever it was, I didn’t want to find out. I knew I felt fine, but my brother and sister were younger, less physically-mature by a significant margin… Was it possible that they could succumb to the nethernal effects of the wraith’s essence much more quickly than me? Or maybe it wasn’t even a matter of that… Maybe it was just that I was an arch-sorcerer, and they weren’t… Could I continue to run the risk?
“To the ground,” I said. “We need a break. Stretch your legs. Get something to eat.”
“Sure,” Jaroan said in a mocking voice – but when I looked over at him, his skin had almost the same hue as our sister’s.
Just glad to have caught it in time, I slowly descended.
“I don’t like it,” Jaid whimpered, the details of the landscape below coming into sharper and sharper focus. There was a hillock beneath us, choked with small hawthorn trees, its long grasses matted like wet grey hairs. Redwings and thrushes could be seen here and there, darting from shrub to shrub in search of food.
“Just another few seconds,” I murmured, then craned my head back and spoke to the unseen chest and its retinue following along: “Zab, can you make this look like an empty hillside for a bit, please? We’re going to drop the wraith for a while.”
The moment I set the twins down on the flattest bit of the slope, I released their hands, and the opacity of their skin and clothes immediately started to return. I got the imps settled, which brought about a chorus of relieved sighs, and I graciously permitted my hellspawn to hunt the local birds and rodents, so long as they did nothing to impinge on my gremlin’s illusion. Then I limped around between my brother and sister and the chest, handing out food and drink, skipping the preserves and going straight for the perishables.
“What’s wrong with your foot, Kas?” Jaid asked, before taking a small nibble at her pastry.
Ah.
This was the first time they’d seen me moving around on my legs since I came back for them.
Jaroan was saying nothing, chewing his food in silence.
“Unhealable,” I said with a sardonic half-smile. “A small price to pay, for escaping Zyger, believe me…”
“But – an arch-druid –“
I was shaking my head. “Saw one. One of the best. Even –“
“Imrye?”
I shook my head again.
“Fangmoon?”
I smiled. “Uh huh. She couldn’t do anything – she even took the foot clean off, regrew it. The damage was too set-in for it to revert to its previous condition. I don’t think all the planar hopping helped, from what Fang said. Twenty-seven days, we were in those other worlds – but to my wounds it was more like twenty-seven years. It’s a miracle she was able to fix the rest of my injuries. My elbow was… never mind.”
Jaid kept her gaze on me for another ten seconds, then dropped it back to her tart, taking another tiny nibble.
Was it the wraith, or is it something else?
When I studied my sister’s expression, I saw the same troubled eyes she’d had in the skies, the same drawn, thin lips.
“Alright, I guess we’d better just talk about it.” I sat down on the ground between them, and looked pointedly at Jaroan.
“About wha’?” he muttered darkly.
“I’ve never seen someone with so much jam in their mouth look so moody,” I commented.
It didn’t help, and I should’ve known it wouldn’t. He half-turned away from both of us, staring at a patch of heather fifty yards off down the hillside.
“About your night-time activities.” I looked at Jaid, who was almost as morose, chewing despondently on her pastry. “What do you make of it all?”
She just offered a sad little shrug, and went on slowly moving the contents of her mouth around.
“I’ll tell you what I think.” I let myself slouch, enjoying the softness of the grass at my back. Even cold and wet, it sure beat the rocks of Magicrux Zyger. “I think our brother made some mistakes. Bad ones. Ones he regrets.”
Jaroan didn’t look back at me, but I could tell from the movement of his head that he was now looking down at the ground between his feet.
“But nothing that can’t be forgiven. The same mistakes many young people make, especially young men. Mistakes I made. Don’t think you’re the only one to struggle. We all do.”
Now he looked around. His eyes were still bleak pools of misery.
“And I think our sister’s blamed herself.” I smiled at her. “She thinks she didn’t do enough –”
“I don’t think so.”
I’d expected Jaid to interrupt me, not Jaroan, and I looked up in surprise.
His tone – so cold.
“You don’t? If you –”
“Shut up!” he screamed, rising to his feet, whirling at me. “You’re always talking, it’s always me, me, me! You’re the archmage, you’re the oldest one – well you’re not him! Not Dad! And I’m glad! Because you’re not the boss of me, not either of us! It’s a good job – what was it, to you?” His eyes came alight as they suddenly narrowed, the battle within him won by the forces of fury and wroth. “What was it, just one more adventure? ‘Oh, I know, I’ll go to Zadhal and face down evil gods!’ ‘Oh yeah, dragon, arch-demon, heretic, gimme gimme, what could go wrong!’ ‘Oh cool, I get to break myself out of mage-jail, so awesome!’ Is that how it goes? Is that how life seems to you? Cos it looks dropping different from down here!”
Sicker than flying wraithless, feeling more adrift in space than ever before, I cast about for support, only to find the facelessness of the landscape and her, Jaid’s eyes exuding their emptiness.
“You think she blames herself? She blames you! We both do. I blame you.” Tears were coursing down his face again but the voice of glacial anger rolled on, relentless. “You told me – told us – told us you’d run – promised us, you’d be back and then – then –”
I only beheld the tiniest fraction of the horror that had to be in him and yet it was too much for me – it broke me, to hear him drop to a whisper, the voice bubbling up from a hell-pit.
“Then you were gone, dead, like them, and we were the ones left behind. The ones you left behind. And I – I still don’t know, whether it’s even better that you came back than if you’d just –”
I’d closed my eyes, and was so lost in my thoughts, in his voice, that I hadn’t noticed Jaid get up until she slapped him.
He caught her wrist on her second swing, and when he twisted her arm it all descended into chaos. I got involved, applying the wraith-form to my lower body so that I could get between them, grapple them apart; Jaid was yelling incoherently through her sobs; Jaroan was spitting increasingly-vile words and he wouldn’t let her go –
In the act of separating them I took a blow from Jaroan across the chin but I managed to shove them apart with as much gentleness as I could muster. Even still, they both stumbled in the thick weeds tangled about their feet. I rounded on Jaroan, putting myself between the two of them.
“You think I deserve that, don’t you? You think it’s all just an adventure? Yeah, because the souls of thousands in Zadhal – who cares, right? Who cares what the dragons and demons do? It’s not like they’ve ever invaded our dropping street, is it! Who cares when they’re sentenced to death, thrown in a hole just for trying to save lives, a hole no one’s escaped for seven hundred years… who moves heaven and earth to get back to his brother and sister… to look after the most ungrateful –”
“That’s just what you want us to believe, what you want yourself to believe!” He was getting louder again and I looked aside at the ground to quell my own slowly-boiling anger. “You want to think you’re doing it for us, for the innocents and their souls – but it’s glory you’re after, it’s all you’ve ever been after – ever since you told us what you were you’ve been different –”
“I’ve been different? Knives, Jar? Knives! What in the Twelve Hells went through your head –”
“You were gone! I – I had to protect us. Someone had to protect us. You use daggers, don’t you?” He said it with a sneer on his face. “I heard Garet talking to Xan. I know about Zandrina. I know she’s – she was coming –”
Zandrina? It didn’t matter – I got the context.
“Gang wars? Gang wars, is your excuse for spitting on their graves like that? I thought, what with dragons and that whole Everseer –”
“What’s your excuse?” he shrieked. “You promised us you’d be safe and you left! You left and we were alone and for what? So you could line your pockets with platinum? So you could woo your g-girlfriend? We were fine, before! We never needed any of that stuff but you had to chase it! And look at what happened to us!”
I was finding it hard to breathe, the truth of it all, my egotistical actions, my self-aggrandising and my selfishness, waves coming thick and fast.
“I’m sorry!” I choked. “If I’d known – at the start – what it was, to wear the mask – I thought I knew – I thought I could control it all! What would you have done, before? If you were me, if you got this –“
Power? Was that what it was? The ability to channel magic by instinct was precious, something I’d missed in Zyger, and when it returned to me I’d been bowled over by the ecstasy of reconnecting with my gift –
Gift?
I looked at my life – the remnants of my life – and rejected that word. No gift brought so much woe on the recipient. It was a… trade-off. A reciprocal transaction, cost-on-delivery. It took away as much as it gave.
With me, it’d given a lot. I was one of the stronger sorcerers, I knew. Why was that? Was it just that I was the most broken? Was that why my future had been thrown into the shadows of Henthae’s sunken cell? Was I doomed from the beginning, or had I doomed myself? What if I’d been content to just sit in a booth day by day, ensorcelling things for other people to use, clock on, clock off…?
It’s the hell I made for myself.
I’d fallen silent, and it wasn’t until I met his eyes, knowing how vulnerable, how weak and pathetic I looked, that my brother responded.
“I don’t know what I would’ve done, in your place,” he snarled. “But I wouldn’t have forgotten my brother and sister!”
Forgotten… you? But I didn’t – I always thought of you. Always!
I had no voice.
I let myself go down to my knees, but the lightness of the wraith-form about my lower half meant I just pitched myself forward instead; I threw up my hands just in time to avoid full on face-planting the thick wet grass.
I raised my chin, lying on my front on the ground, weeds poking in my throat.
A few feet away, Oldbeard was feasting on Jaroan’s discarded tart, ponderously chomping away at the pastry and watching our altercation with wide eyes, his tail twitching from side to side at a measured pace.
I managed to sigh.
At least things can’t get much worse.
I slowly drifted back into an upright position.
“You’re right. I forgot you.”
He was pacing to and fro, and I spoke to his back – he froze.
“I didn’t put you first.” I looked back at Jaid. “I put myself first.”
“No, Kas,” she whispered.
“Yes, I did! Unnnhhhh!” A moan of frustration burst from my lips. “I was never there! I tried, to make it look like I was there, but I wasn’t, not most of the time, and when I was there I was reading, I was thinking, I was plotting and planning or even just sleeping… But it’s over now. Don’t you get it? It’s over. We can – listen!”
Something in my tone caught both their attentions.
“We can start over. The world – it’s huge. Way beyond Mund. We can go wherever we want, once we’re past the point Duskdown gave me. We’re safe. No more champions. No more darkmages. You see a monster you don’t want me to fight, point us in the other direction. It’s simple. No Incursions. No demons. Well – no more demons…”
We looked down at Oldbeard – the imp’s creased, bat-like face was covered in jam, and his long tongue flickered through the spiky bristles of his white beard, snatching up the last dregs.
“I think you’ll be needing a new tart,” I observed.
Jaroan laughed. I shivered at the chilling sound – but that was that. After the morning stop-over on the hillside and my final jokey comment, things seemed to settle down, at least a bit. The awkwardness between us wasn’t brought up again, and for the first time Jaid asked me to tell her about Magicrux Zyger. I went into as much detail as I thought I could, leaving out the extent of my injuries and carefully avoiding any mention of Gilaela; the topic of conversation passed on, and we talked about what we could do once we found somewhere to settle. Jaid wanted a field full of horses – all Jaroan said before lapsing back into silence was that wherever we ended up, it had to have a good library.
Words could only go so far in mending what was wrong in our family. Recent events had done something to Jaroan that hadn’t only changed his personality – it’d changed his face, the bent of his features, sculpting a haughty scowl out of his jawline that never departed, even when he laughed. His laughter – that’d changed too. It was snide, sarcastic – I had no idea where he’d gotten it from, and didn’t want to know. Laughter like that – it said that he saw through you. Even if your joke was amusing, you were even more amusing, being so desperate for approval that you felt you had to make it. It ripped the amusement from almost every conversation, until it almost felt better not to speak at all.
If Jaid was different in anything, it was in her interactions with her twin. It appeared that they were no longer as close as they’d always been, a schism opened up in their mutual respect. He’d changed – she’d stayed the same, or almost. The differences between the twins were no longer trivial. We resumed our journey, this time flying with a lot less wraith and a lot more clinging on for dear life, with Zab coming behind on his imp-palanquin to provide concealment, and I spent a lot of time just going over it in my head, sorting and cataloguing the emotions sloshing like oil and water inside my mind.
Jaid and Jaroan – I had to stop thinking of them in the same breath like that. They were two people. Two actual, separate people. Sure, they’d come out of Mum at the same time, but that didn’t mean they shared the same identity. Of course, they’d always diverged in their interests, their opinions, but only by a matter of degree – they’d always been so similar in their underlying personalities that this divide between them, between us all, felt magnified by its newness. I was like a child experiencing my first paper-cut, wondering whether it would stop, or whether it would keep hurting forever.
It’ll pass – it has to. Time will heal the rift, and one day I’ll look back and wonder when exactly it was that everything went back to normal.
I focussed my eyes on the mountains ahead instead of dwelling on things. I’d taken another peek at the map before we packed up and headed off again, and I had a good idea of the kind of territory we were looking at. The Five Peaks north-east of Mund were the south-eastern tip of a mountain range, the Brittlespurs that curled around above the city like a horseshoe or upside-down ‘u’. By heading north-west across Upper Agormand we’d run into the northernmost curve of the same mountains, and the location of the most popular pass through them: Irontooth Gates. The town inked onto the paper beneath the word ‘Gates’ looked about one percent the size of Mund, even as far as the map itself depicted it – I wondered what the people there would be like, living almost in Mund’s shadow, just a few days’ ride from the two-hundred-foot white walls.
I wouldn’t have long to wait to find out. We were travelling faster than a horse could gallop, outpacing half the birds we passed. Irontooth Gates might’ve been a few days’ ride for a lord, a week’s travel for a wagon – but we’d probably get there not much past lunchtime, blessed as we were with the ability to cut straight across the landscape. The bigger towns like Disholt we would avoid entirely. We saw as the Plain Road broke up at Ariath’s Cross, the junction-town where the broad, well-lit street, fit for several lanes going either direction, split into three far narrower pathways.
We continued north-west, and an undulating carpet of fields and small woods slowly rose up, up, steeper and steeper before us. Before long the Agormand meadows ahead were replaced with slopes wild with thorns – Jaroan pointed out the sleek shapes of a wolf-pack on the move, moving through the long grasses like eels beneath the surface of a pond. The emaciated woods became shrouded forests as they rose up onto the hillsides, dark of leaf and close-growing. These trees were smothered in their own oily shadows despite the sun beaming down – the canopy seemed to swallow away the light hungrily, churning it into mist.
Then at last all that was green gave way to murky grey basalt, the caps of the Brittlespurs looming above the countryside. It was breathtaking to see them from such an elevation – already feeling high up, yet knowing you were at but a fraction of their height… I’d noticed them not long after leaving Mund, obviously, but it was one thing to see their shadows against the night sky – another thing entirely to see them in the full radiance of the sun. The mountain-peaks, snow-crowned, ice-mantled, seemed to leer down upon the world, clad in their sheer cloaks, their armour of ravine and silence.
The great sentinels we would cross in order to leave it all behind, following the instructions of a mad seer to the very letter.
* * *
“’Sleep at the Lucky Fox’, that’s what he said, and we’d have to be crazy not to,” I said, trudging across the boggy ground towards the road with minimal wraith-assistance. “Look, it’s the middle of the day, and I’ll put shields up – there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t like it,” Jaid said for the twenty-somethingth time. She was yards behind me and our brother, kicking every bit of scrub she came across.
“And I’m the moody one,” Jaroan sneered over his shoulder. “Hurry up.”
I cast him a glance, then quickly looked away again.
It’ll take time, I reminded myself.
I sighed, then stopped, letting Jaid catch up.
“Look, I’m only saying it to convince myself.” I took her hand, helping her cross a big patch of smelly, black-looking water, then once she reached my side I turned and slowly continued on. “I’ve got absolutely no interest in sleeping in the middle of a random building filled with strangers – any of them could be eyes for Zakimel and his cronies – even unwittingly. We’ve got to exercise absolute caution, until Blackice Bay, and I know if we had our way we’d be camping out in the woods.”
I kind of liked the thought of it, especially with my power trivialising the dangers posed by such exposure.
“But I’ve got to admit, there’s sense to Rath’s words. I doubt Fang’s repeated attempts to regenerate my foot’s done any wonders for my energy-levels, and I’ve got no idea how long it’s been since I last slept – weeks and weeks, as far as you measured time on the outside – but even on the inside it’s got to have been over twenty-four hours. How long was I awake, before…?”
My voice dropped away.
Before the ghost came floating down into Zyger to claim a darkmage’s soul?
Before I mentioned Neverwish by name and brought our destiny crashing down on us?
Before I sealed Temcar’s fate, the way I sealed Withertongue’s?
Before I slew Shadowcrafter?
Maybe it was all because I’d become a killer today, but it’d been a very long day indeed.
“Well, you can sleep in the woods, if you’re so tired,” Jaid protested.
I shrugged. “Who’s to know? If we camped in the wilderness, maybe something bad would happen… We’re virtually guaranteed safe passage, riding the wave of Duskdown’s foresight. Plus, I’ve got my illusions to disguise our faces. No one’s going to be looking for us specifically. Very few people have got any idea I’m not where I’m supposed to be – Xantaire and Orstrum, Duskdown and Neverwish… Fangmoon… and maybe Timesnatcher.”
It’ll take time for Zakimel’s people to pull it from Xantaire’s head – he’d have no reason to submit her to an interrogation, unless someone slipped up. The others… he can’t get in their heads, can he?
I was doing a fine job of convincing myself, but when I checked for Jaid’s reaction, she remained unpersuaded.
Chewing my lower lip, I focussed my energies, sculpting her a new face out of my imagination. I’d had the imps bury the chest then hide in the bushes so that I could safely bring Zab back into the fold, utilise his power. Now more than ever before I was in need of his abilities.
Once I’d sorted Jaid’s new face – full of freckles, fuller lips, broader nose, brown eyes and dark hair – I started on Jaroan. I didn’t need contact for this kind of work, not anymore, but I’d have to keep focussed on the illusions to maintain them. It was the same level of concentration that was required to walk up some stairs without spilling a full cup of water – I could do it while talking, thinking, even daydreaming – but it took some margin of my consciousness. Yes, it was a risk, but it wasn’t an unnecessary one. I couldn’t afford for anyone to see our real faces, not really.
I gave Jaroan red hair, made him taller, added some extra weight to his visible frame. There was no point us looking like a mage and a pair of twins. We might as well look like three different people. I made myself look older, more grizzled, without going too far – I considered adding scars to hide mine, but people would probably remember someone with a big ugly mess across his cheek. In the end I removed them all. The point was to fit in, just one more mage and his wards making our way through the town. I adjusted the colours of my robe, removed the purple and blue and silver-laced grins, making it a featureless green-grey all over. I couldn’t afford to abandon the robe entirely, though – it acted as a warning, making potential thieves, tricksters and attackers aware of what they would be facing if they decided to mess with me. If I started performing spells without a robe on, that would draw far more attention.
We passed between the tanneries and dyers in the bogland to the side of the road. The noxious fumes did little to disturb us three – if anything, the putrid scents only reminded me of home, Sticktown, Mud Lane… More disturbing were the looks on the faces of the leather-workers and clothiers themselves. Only about half of them were native Mundic people, it seemed, with a fair few obvious outland faces amongst them. We saw them emptying buckets of pungent liquids in the swamp, eating dour lunches upwind of their huts – and they saw us. They tried to mask the suspicious glances they cast our way, but I caught them all the same. A tall, hooded mage and two children – coming not along the road, but seemingly heading out of the woods to the east? Perhaps that had been a mistake, too…
Cresting a small, treeless rise, we got our first close-up look at our destination. Irontooth Gates wasn’t exactly as intimidating as I’d expected. The slopes on either side of it were sheer, and the town was nestled in the ‘v’ between them, straddling the gap between the two upthrusting pieces of rock. Walls little higher than a fence surrounded the town, constructed from neatly-laid sandstone, the big bricks mottled yellow and mauve, red and brown, grey and orange. The guards wore watch-style uniforms, with only a single mage or magister in sight atop the battlements. Two great doors stood open to the traffic, but they were just made from thick planks of ebonwood, not iron, and the swordsmen at the sides were just waving everyone through.
We crossed the final stretch, picking our way through a field where a herd of cattle had clearly been stationed for the night. We did our best to ignore the several travellers we saw relieving themselves onto the grass, and joined the people flowing into Irontooth Gates. We ended up walking sandwiched between a group of traders and their bodyguards, leading ponies laden with saffron and truffles, and a family from Hilltown, fleeing Mund with their servants. They weren’t talking about it much, but I easily picked up on the fact it was Everseer the guildsman and his wife feared, Everseer whose wrath they were trying to outrun. By the sounds of things the Hilltowners were more scared of ‘her’ than they were of the dragons themselves.
We were waved through with the rest of the crowd, and it didn’t seem that the watchman nearest us even glanced in our direction, despite the mage’s robe I wore. Who knew what they were actually looking out for; perhaps they were just stationed there to keep everyone orderly.
Brilliant.
It was easy for the three of us to slip around the slower-moving groups once we were inside, and the amount of animal waste in the thoroughfare made me feel at home almost at once. There was even a quintet of magisters coming up the street towards us; Jaid looked at me uncertainly, but I gritted my teeth and steered us right past the five officers. I let the wraith fade out, and limped along, reminded suddenly of the uselessness of my foot. A mage with a limp was one thing, and perhaps memorable, but a mage with an insubstantiality-effect on their legs was something else – something only archmagery or unusually-specific spells might achieve.
They cared more about me than the guards, but only to the extent that one of them cast his eyes over me derisively.
Within thirty minutes of idle wandering we had the lay of the place. There was a whole range of inns, taverns and hostels, accommodating travellers from the rich merchant to the poor ranger. A street of smithies that brought back Anvil Row. A street of jewellers with the heaviest presence of non-Magisterium mages we’d seen yet – three! There were shrines to the twelve major gods, and a few other important ones like Kultemeren – most of them were no bigger than the houses surrounding them, and some of them were simple, open-air altars with little more than a hut and a statue. The temple to Brondor, King of Commerce, Money-Bags, the Shrewd Swashbuckler – his was the biggest, a miniature palace of tiny spires and arches that might’ve been impressive to outlanders whose journeys hadn’t yet brought them to Mund.
Indeed, Brondor’s temple rivalled the town hall, which overlooked ‘the Crack of the Tooth’. Running through the centre of the town there was a chasm thirty feet across and inestimably deep, slashing the full width of Irontooth Gates, with two dozen bridges of various sizes spanning the gap. The Lucky Fox, the establishment of Rathal’s choosing, was on a side road, a narrow structure with a base of basalt and upper floors of white-painted wood. The inn actually leaned over the crevasse, with struts driven into the rock underneath to support its weight; fully half of the inn’s guests staying in the upper rooms would be afforded a view of the bottomless gouge through their windows.
The proprietor was a fussy old chap who seemed to be obsessed with cleanliness – not a trait unlooked-for in a person of his profession, although one would’ve thought a man so-inclined would’ve trimmed his moustache; the thing was long enough that he’d have to lift it with a sidelong finger to sip his soup. We were shown up to our room the moment I displayed some of my stolen cash – again, no questioning of the mage and his wards – and within two minutes I had the key in my hand, sitting on the smaller of the room’s two small beds, looking down at the bridges of Irontooth Gates.
“It’s a bit like home, isn’t it?” I said, mostly to myself.
“A bit,” Jaid said.
Jaroan said nothing.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep, as much as I wanted to, needed to. Jaid slept – even Jaroan slept, after grumbling to himself for ten minutes straight, trying to read a book on his side. I lay there, listening to their snoring, wishing it was everything I’d hoped it would be. Escape. Reunion. Exodus. None of it had the charm I’d thought it would’ve. Sure, it felt good to get out of Zyger. Just being able to look at the twins, watch them sleep, was a wonder. And the vast openness of the world was at our feet. But what was it all, really? In escaping Zyger, I proved I deserved it. It didn’t matter that I returned to the twins, because even being away, being dead for all this time, had already broken my brother. Maybe my sister too. What was a beautiful, bountiful world, if I was running away from the birthplace of the dragons that would consume it all in fire and ice and acid?
After another twenty minutes the sounds coming up from the bar-area drew my attention.
A drink will calm my nerves.
I locked the door behind me and headed down the stairs, then turned left past Arch-Moustache at the desk, entering the drinking area, a long, thin room that wrapped around the bar in an ‘L’-shape. Almost everything in the place was black or painted black – shelves, tables, chairs, cushions. I smiled at the serving-boy behind the bar then glanced over his shoulder at the ale casks, trying to ignore his stare. By the looks of things, they served nothing but beer here – I didn’t recognise any of the brand-names, but when I realised half of them had some reference to ‘iron’, ‘tooth’ or ‘gates’ in their names I understood; they were all from local breweries in this particular tavern.
Interesting choice, Rath, I admitted.
Arch-Moustache entered behind me.
“Is there a problem?” he asked in his querulous voice. He seemed to be directing the question at me.
If he were bald, he would’ve reminded me of Zakimel.
“No, no problem.” I gestured at the barrels. “Just trying to decide what to have. Ah… a pint of your… Rustyrube, please.”
Seven copper seemed really steep, for a place as dingy as this, but I dutifully paid the price. While I cast about for somewhere to sit, Arch-Moustache went behind the bar, shooed the girl back into the kitchens, and stood with his hands on the smooth wooden surface, his eyes on me.
Half the chairs were occupied, and my presence disturbed the current patrons. A dozen heads bobbed about on their necks, craning to allow a better look at me.
“No airs and graces,” I said, sitting down. There was nowhere to sit that didn’t put me in their midst. “I’m just a bloke. Mund born and raised.” I took a swig of the beer, glancing around at the neutral gazes of the resident lunchtime drinkers. “Not a bad tipple,” I lied. It tasted like some of the black paint had got into it.
But that seemed to mollify them. A few grunted, then they went back to their conversations.
It might not have tasted great, but my head really seemed to enjoy the sensation, or lack thereof, brought about by the booze. I was back at the bar within fifteen minutes, getting a refill.
That clinched it. I wasn’t more than three long sips into the second when they started including me in their chatter.
“Yeah, from Mund,” I replied to their questions with a wistful sigh. “I didn’t realise till I started travelling just how much of the world is green.”
“Must be weird,” a big, long-bearded man said. “How many times you left the city, then?”
“First time.” I took another swig of the beer.
“And you been where, exactly?”
I looked around pointedly then returned my gaze to his face, smiling.
“Two days’ hard ride, and you think you’ve seen how green the world is? Boy, you’re still in Mund! This is the ‘ancient domain’ of House Sentelemeth. You haven’t even got to the lands of its vassals.”
“Vassals,” someone snorted; I turned to regard the speaker, an older man with cracked white skin all over his face, eyes raw-looking, so red they almost glowed. “I wouldn’t call ’em vassals. That’s just what they’re called in the ‘istory books. It’s been a long time since any of that meant anything round ‘ere. Noble ‘ouses ain’t changed ‘ands much in ‘undreds of years. When was the last Mage Wars? When was the last battle, like in the stories?”
He was asking the room, but it might’ve been that he was expecting the magic-user to pipe up. “I’ve read a few books on the topic,” I said. “The Eleventh Mage War was in seven-seventy-one. That was before the Maginox was built, before the Arrealbord fell in with the Magisterium to such a degree. The Magisterium used to just be the magic guild of the city… then it became the magic guild of the Realm.”
“Centralisin’ power,” he said in a musing tone. I admired the depth of his intellect. “Well, seems like it worked, don’t it? No more war. No more backstabbin’s and betrayals. Not ‘ere. No more vassal nonsense.”
I smiled. “Well, I wouldn’t say that. War’s just on a smaller scale now. I don’t know where I’m going to end up, but I’ve had my fill of intrigue in Mund. I’m looking for someplace quiet to settle down.”
“Seriously? How old are you, fella? You don’t look a day past twenny-five.”
I laughed, trying to keep my voice in a low register. I’d been aiming for mid-twenties when I crafted the illusion. “When you’re a magician, time goes slow. A lot happens in a short time. Things don’t stay still for long. I just… I need a bit of peace.”
Somewhere I can kick back and relax. Somewhere I might actually be able to enjoy my powers…
Even as I thought it, I knew – I could never enjoy them. Not even if the champions or the heretics saved the world from the dragons and barely a peep escaped the Realm about the battle. Not even if everyone I knew back there lived through the ordeal, the ‘Crucible’ of which Everseer spoke.
I was leaving them with no experienced sorcerers. I was running. Fleeing.
Craven.
One of the outlanders spoke up. She was a tall, peachy-skinned Northman, red-maned and big-shouldered with a bulbous nose almost the same shade as her hair. “Where I come from, there ain’ herdly neh mages. Vassal goes wi’ thane, an’ means yer figh’ fer th’ man. Neh wi’ yer fancy magic, oh no, wi’ yer sword an’ shield – an’ if yer ain’ got one, yer axe, yer bow, yer bare hands if it come t’ it! An’ th’ thane, he’s a vassal t’ his own liege… When we go t’ war, we send an army o’ men, neh some gang o’ snotty teenagers wi’ wands up their sleeves.”
“Sounds exciting,” I said. To think, what a single archmage could do to such a conflict…
End it. Immediately. You could create peace with a few words and gestures.
The temptation, to commodify peace –
“Not that yeh’d neh be welcome.” She flicked her eyes over my robe. “We ain’ stupid. Be money in it, fer a man like yerself. Head north to the marshes, then foller th’ branch up into th’ hells, north-east through Daggerwood. When yer getten too deep in th’ bog jus’ head east till yer clear, then strike straigh’ north agen on th’ flat. When yer see the Din Dalor, the Mountains of the North – yer’ll know yer there. Make th’ Brittlespurs look like mole-hells.”
“I’ll… take it under advisement.” I took another few mouthfuls of beer, trying not to think of Emrelet.
“It’s not so green up there, mind,” the cracked-skin man said, “and they might as like whiz in their beer for all it’d affect the taste.”
That started something of an argument. I hid my smile behind the rim of my tankard (and behind a twenty-five-year-old’s visage, I supposed), glad to not be the focus of attention despite my unusual status.
Conversation moved on, and I took my time finishing the second beer, knowing that if I started a third I’d be running too much of a risk.
Can’t let my hair down. Not till after Blackice.
Someone asked me for my assistance clearing a family of trolls out of a cave on the edge of their territory. I suggested blocking up the cave and flooding it – the bogginess of the land around here made it sound reasonable in my head – but their denial didn’t come for logistical reasons: they were a hundred percent certain trolls couldn’t be drowned, only put into a form of stasis. That in particular made it hard to put Em out of my mind. Someone else was about to sign on for a dragon-bone excavation operation and invited me along – apparently there was a lot of money in digging up the cursed things as collector’s items since Vardae’s little announcement. Yet someone else knew of a bandit camp they’d be happy to ‘guide’ me to – apparently legally-speaking, bandits were fair game for someone like me to do over.
Swaying a little and doing my best to keep the illusion from slipping, I shook my head politely to their various offers and requests – probably thinking I was on a quest of grave importance, they let me be after a while. When I drained my tankard, I retired back up the stairs to my room, receiving a few nods of farewell from the patrons.
It didn’t seem to take long to fall asleep this time; if anything it felt like no time at all.
When I awoke, the sun had set and it was raining. The twins were still sleeping, looking strangely tranquil, so I left them asleep and went for a wash, and smoothing out the folds in my robe as I headed downstairs. There seemed to be lots of creases in the fabric. I almost felt myself falling in, seeing it like Tanra used to – expanses of cloth, like Irimar’s oceans, where my hands were blood-stained mountains of iron pawing at the temporal fabric, only making things worse. Even worse.
In a dark pocket of the stairwell, surrounded by the creaking echoes, I froze, hearing her voice threading its way up from the desk in the bar-area.
“Have you seen them? He told me they would be here but I can’t find them.”
Rathal betrayed me. Vardae is here.
Why couldn’t she find us? The illusion?
Was I still focussing on the illusion?
“Twins?” The fussy old innkeep sounded perplexed. “Apologies, m’lady, I’ve seen none of their sort. We do have a mage with two children, though –”
I ran back upstairs, climbing a mountain of nausea. I was back there, in Etherium, ascending an impossible height, the arch-diviner not carrying me but hunting me – the room was on the third floor, which to me was farther than Mund from Zyger, farther than Iroontooth Gates from Zyger – it was only a few flights of stairs but that was impossible, impossible, she was so fast, even if I went a single step more, it was a miracle –
I burst back into the room, and she was there ahead of me, standing over them. The twins were still sleeping, still looking strangely tranquil. I was filled with the notion that she’d already killed them but the shield, the shield –
“The shield only protects against ill-will,” Vardae murmured.
There was something appealing about her ruggedness, her lithe confidence. The curly blonde hair she didn’t care about, twisted in a savage knot – the crudely-carved chin, the slightly-overhanging brow – none of it mattered.
Her violence; it attracted me.
“Ill-will means no killing,” I said.
“Only if you wanted them alive,” the heretic replied, smiling coldly. “It’s what you dreamt, isn’t it?”
“No. That was the dragon.”
“The dragon’s gone. You long to be freed of your burdens. You could live however you wanted, be whoever you wanted –“
“No.”
“That’s why you killed Shadowcrafter.”
How does she know?
He told her! Rathal – Rathal, why have you betrayed me?
“That’s why you’ll never be free. Isn’t it freedom you seek? Wasn’t it Nentheleme who answered your cries? What will she think of you now?”
Gilaela, threaded with thorns.
“What will you do, when you’re tested? When you’ve grown weak from flying them across the country instead of standing and fighting, moulding your power, increasing your control? You will die! You will be nothing!”
Aidel and Graima. Ancient arch-liches, mere shadows of their former potential.
“Don’t kill them. But give them to me. They are twins. Their brother is an archmage. I will watch over them. You can go, be free. Or return, hide, safe in the knowledge no one will ever find them.”
I stared at her in horror. She stretched out her hand, stroked Jaid’s hair.
“You know I won’t harm them, but this makes your skin crawl, doesn’t it? You won’t let me have them?”
I just shook my head, trying to move my tongue. When I raised my hands to my throat, I choked myself as if to strangle the words, keep myself from speaking.
The window burst in, and she rode the lightning into the room, a white flash depositing her there at the foot of the bed in a shower of glass-shards.
Emrelet Reyd. A goddess in unblemished marble, molten platinum.
But the cobalt eyes turn on me, as does the crackling sword-tip.
“I never loved you anyvay.” She plunges forwards, the lightning-blade doubling in length, in heat, to strike me in the centre of the chest, vaporise the heart that never knew hers in the first place –
I dive to evade the blow, screwing my eyes shut – but my foot is an unresponsive paste of agony and somehow I’m falling – somehow I fell through the window. The chasm opens up, swallows me in an instant, and I am descending again, falling without a spell or a prayer this time, ready for the annihilation –
Ready for Zyger.
You never… left, the thorns sigh through his bloody lips.
I scream – I scream and I claw and I can’t escape – the darkness, I’m falling through it and it’s a part of me – the wraith shares my soul, my killer’s soul –
“You are a good man,” the old man lies. “A strong man.”
“Em! Em, catch me! Catch me, please! Em! Em…”
Em.
But it isn’t Em who catches me. It’s Dad.
I look into his face, and I know him again. Every wisdom-line, every patch of stubble. Every fleck in the green irises.
“You’re alive!” I cry. “You’re alive again!”
I weep, and his face is like mine in the way it creases.
He smiles sadly.
“You avenged me, son. You avenged me. And now everything’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.”
* * *
When I awoke, the sun had set and it was raining. The twins were sleeping, looking strangely tranquil, but I checked their chests were rising and falling before collapsing back on my bed, wiping the sweat from my forehead, trying to still my quivering hands. A few minutes later I left them asleep and went for a wash, but I didn’t go downstairs afterwards, instead returning to the room and sitting on my bed, smoothing out the folds in my robe by gremlin-light.
There were indeed lots of creases in the fabric. But I’d get them out.
In time.
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