“What do you take this to mean?”
Uriako Shikashe and Amatesu had known each other for decades and journeyed together for years. While their backgrounds were very different they had come to find that in many things what each of them knew or did not know was complementary. Shikashe knew how men behaved while they were together at war. Amatesu knew other things.
“It means that as soon as we make landfall and the opportunity arises, Zebulon Baj Nif intends to run.”
Shikashe smiled very slightly at one side of his mouth.
“That will not be a problem, by then.”
“No,” Amatesu agreed. “By then, Madame Nesha-tari shall have made herself known. After that, the man will not go anywhere.”
Amatesu glanced at the deck beneath her feet and made a small gesture with one hand, two fingers bent under her thumb and two extended. It was not a gesture typical of any shukenja school, but from a far more ancient peasant tradition. It was meant to ward away evil.
Chapter Thirteen
The bugbears did no more cavorting. Those that had climbed down into the palisade gathered around the dead one Tilda had shot in the mouth, roared at the sky and beat their great fists against their broad chests. When they climbed back up the same way they had come down two carried the dead one between them. Tilda watched from the pine woods across the chasm and would not have thought such an ascent possible until noticing that the bugbears used their large, hairy feet just like a second pair of hands.
The sun went down a few hours later and the night was illuminated by the panoply of stars and a waxing moon. The sky had looked too crowded to Tilda ever since she had left the great capital city of Miilark. She left the trees and stared down into the dark chasm. Dugan watched her from nearby. She turned and moved toward him, leaned her gun against a tree and removed her pack. She left her cloak, several daggers, and her club, though she shifted her sword to her back. She put a candle in her boot.
“There is no point, Tilda,” Dugan said. She didn’t look at him but moved back to the chasm’s edge and lowered her legs over the side, boot-tips probing for purchase.
The climb in the dark was bad, but not the worst Tilda had made. She had ascended the Ghost Mountain as part of her Guild training and the coral edges of that familiar peak were like knives in places. She had finished that climb with bleeding hands and feet for her gloves and boots had been shredded. Here, there were loose stones and soft-packed dirt she had to avoid, but the fact that doing so required her full attention and left her no room to think was actually a relief.
Centuries of rain and snowmelt had made the bottom of the crevasse concave rather than sharp, and Block’s body was easy to find once the candle was lit, lying beside the shattered wreckage of the drawbridge. It was bad.
The captain’s kitbag was nearby, the thing Tilda had to have. She opened it and found both pistols were broken, but she left them and the loose parts inside as they might be repairable. The map cases, the coin purses, and most importantly the money belt of Miilarkian banknotes were fine. There was an empty silver wine-flask, dented now, with an embossed gold seal of a Miilarkian ship on either side. Tilda looked at the flask, and toward the body, but ultimately dropped it back into the bag, closed the clasp and slung the strap across her back.
Miilarkians did not bury their dead in the ground, their final rest was at sea. There was a particular two-day long route out from the capital city taken by white funerary barges twice every tenday, past a holy islet where white albatrosses roosted and ashes were scattered on the waters. Tilda had no idea what dwarves did with their dead, but to her Captain Block was as much an Islander as was she. Yet she could not reduce the body to ash, and merely setting a fire that would burn out was unbelievably morbid.
She did the only thing she could think to do, drawing her sword and jamming it into the ground at the Captain’s feet. She went into a coin purse in the kitbag, holding the candle close. She found one of the few gold coins, a bright Codian Sovereign with the Book-from-the-Water design of the Code from the Lake on one side and the young Emperor Albert in profile on the reverse. She closed her hand around the coin, shut her eyes, and spoke in Miilarkian.
“Gracious Miisina, Our Lady of Coin. This I ask. When the snows of the mountains melt and this passage runs in stream, let its waters to river fly, thence to Channel, thence to the great Ocean you have made Ours. Let the soul of this good Islander be borne by the Wind, to its home. This I ask. For this I pay.”
Tilda knelt and placed the coin on the ground. She set a water-smoothed stone atop it. She stood, wondering why she could not cry. She wanted to, but knew the Captain would have shaken his head and growled. Probably told her she was an idiot. There was work to be done, still.
She sniffled. Once. Tilda rubbed her nose on a sleeve and blew out the candle. She turned to make the climb back up.
Dugan was waiting when she neared the top, though the night was surely past its mid-watch by then. He extended an arm when she drew near and after a moment of hesitation she clasped hands and let him pull her up the last few feet. Tilda stood with her aching back bent and her scraped hands on her knees, breathing heavily but not panting.
“Thought you’d be gone,” she said between breaths. Just as on the night they had met, Dugan was mostly a silhouette in the darkness.
“And what would you have done then?”
“Chased you down.”
Tilda straightened, and faced Dugan in the starlight. “Where is he?”
Dugan’s head tilted. “John Deskata, you mean?”
“Good guess.”
He did not answer right away, and then suddenly he did.
*
Once upon a time, before years were even numbered, the first human civilization on the continent of Noroth built a great city they called Vod’Adia. They were known as the Ettaceans, and in their language Vod’Adia meant “Black Stone.” Though none could say in truth what had happened there, for a thousand years the name was a byword in many human tongues for pride, hubris, and calamity. For that same thousand years the site of the city itself was unknown, though it was believed by scholarly types to have been somewhere in the hobgoblin and bullywug infested wasteland still called the Vod Wilds. In the year 999 of the Norothian Calendar, Kanderamath, the Second Witch King of Tull, disappeared in that wilderness searching for the fabled place.
Ninety-nine years later in 1098, the Wilds were overrun by creatures that drove the hobgoblins and bullywugs before them, and themselves spilled out both west into Agintan Doon and east into Chengdea, Nanshea, and other realms that would soon unite for their own defense as the Kingdom of Daul. That union was necessary for survival, for the creatures pouring out of the Wilds knew neither pain nor fatigue, but only hunger. They were the Undead, and the thirty years it took for humans, hobgoblins and bullywugs to exterminate them, sometimes even by fighting side-by-side, were remembered as the Dead War.
Priests, magi, and shamans divined and discovered what had happened. Kanderamath had discovered Vod’Adia in 999, and worked powerful spells that had allowed him for a brief time to enter the city that had been magically sealed for a millennium. The Witch King had never emerged from Blackstone, but somehow his spells had kept working. When ninety-nine years had passed the Closed city had once again Opened, for a time. Just long enough for the occupants of the place, the unholy animate remains of what had once been a thriving population, to pour out into the world they had left long ago and afflict it until bodily destroyed.
Given this understanding, the approach of the year 1197 was viewed with great trepidation in the Vod Wilds and the lands bordering them. The seven decades since the end of the Dead War had seen a budding rivalry develop between Agintan Doon and the young Kingdom of Daul, and hobgoblin and bullywug tribes again skulked in the Wilds, preying on settlements pushed too close to the ragged border of civilization and wasteland.