The Hammer and the Blade

  Nix shook his head. "Gods, I was quite happy disliking all of you, you in particular, Jyme, and now you've gone and fouled that up. One day in the Wastes and I don't know who to despise. I almost wish I'd never taken your coinpurse."

  Jyme's mouth fell open. "Back at the tavern? That was you what took my coinpurse? I wondered where that went."

  Nix nodded absently, eyed his hands, which so often worked of their own accord. "When you bumped me outside of the Tunnel. I put it into the hands of an old man I saw on the street."

  "Alms," Egil said.

  "Pshaw," Nix answered. To Jyme he said, "I'll repay you when we return to Dur Follin."

  "Well enough," Jyme said. "There were, uh, fifteen terns and two royals in there."

  "Ha!" Nix said. "There were exactly nine terns and three commons and you haven't seen a gold royal since the Year of the Jackal."

  More laughter around.

  Despite the situation, Nix found himself warming to the men. The Wastes had birthed quick camaraderie from shared menace. Before long, he'd find himself liking Rakon and his sisters.

  Or perhaps not.

  "Well," Jyme said, looking up at sky. "You won't have to repay if we don't get back to Dur Follin. And right now, I don't see how that happens."

  "There is that," Egil said. The priest stretched his long legs out before him and crossed his hands behind his head.

  "There is that," Nix agreed.

  "None of that now," Baras said, though the words sang a false note. "We'll be fine."

  Egil tipped back the rest of his coffee, shook out the cup, and nodded at the supply wagon. "Here's what I say. Women and fine ale seem much more than only a day gone, the night is cold, the fire feeble, and we're all going to die out here in the Wastes. Before we do, I say we make the best of it. Since this coffee tastes like piss, I offer we look to the beer in that wagon."

  "The priest speaks with wisdom," Jyme said. "How about some beer, Baras?"

  Baras considered, nodded, and two of the younger guards quickly rose, smiling, and made for the supply wagon.

  "Meanwhile," Egil said, "why not tell them of that time in the Well of Farrago, Nix, when that door defied your talents?"

  "It was a hatch, whoreson, which you well know."

  The guards returned with two small beer barrels, cracked them, and started to pour.

  "But well enough," Nix said, his cup sloshing with beer. "I'll tell them about that hatch, and about how you nearly pissed yourself when…"

  Hours later, their bellies full of beer, Egil and Nix sat around the glowing embers of the small fire. Nix's storytelling had put everyone at ease for a time, but the moment he stopped, the sense of foreboding crept back into camp and took a seat at the fire.

  The guards without watch duty had either gone to their tents to sleep or snored on their bedrolls near the embers. Above them the wind howled, and Nix swore he heard voices in the gusts, a mad muttering that made his skin crawl.

  "This is an unholy place," Egil said. The priest stared into the fire, dice in hand but idle.

  "No argument from me. Shake those dice, will you?"

  "Eh? Oh." Egil shook the dice, his habit when tense, but he kept at it only a short time. As he put them away, he said, "I've been thinking about what you said. The woman's voice you heard?"

  "And?"

  "We've both heard of Oremal and the mindmages, Nix."

  "We're far from Oremal."

  "Yes, but what's to say such magic is limited only to Oremal?"

  "They're not even conscious."

  "And yet they seem to be affecting you somehow. To what purpose we don't know, but it seems reasonable to assume a sinister intention."

  Nix could only shrug. He could not disagree.

  "We have to do something," Egil said.

  "Like what?" Nix said. "Even if I could harm a woman – which I can't – the spellworm would prevent it. His sisters are the very point of Rakon's charge to us."

  "Maybe we tell him what they're doing. Maybe he can stop it."

  "I don't trust him any farther than I can spit," Nix said. "He'd turn it further to his advantage somehow."

  Egil toed the embers with his boot. "So, what then?"

  "We get the horn for Rakon or we slip the compulsion."

  "I've had no luck on that last," Egil said. "I've just made myself sick."

  "Likewise. But either way, we get clear of this and far from the Norristru family as soon as we can. Then maybe we try our luck out west, stay away from Dur Follin for a time."

  Egil sighed and stood. "If that's what we must do, that's what we'll do. And now I've prayers to say and then sleep to find. I'll note only that if you start acting odd due to the sisters' witchery, I'll kill you quickly. Well enough?"

  "Fak you," Nix said with a smile.

  Egil chuckled. "In the morn, then."

  "In the morn."

  Nix sat before the fire, trying to solve the puzzle of his situation, and succeeding only in irritating himself over his inability to do so. At length the eunuch emerged from the carriage, bearing Rusilla as easily as Nix might have carried a child. Her face was turned toward Nix, the vacant eyes on him, her hair a red curtain falling from her head. Seeing her caused Nix's heart to thump. His eye itched, watered, and he wanted to scream at her to leave him alone.

  The eunuch placed Rusilla in one of the tents, saw that she was blanketed, then did the same with Merelda. Once he had them ensconced, he tied their tent closed and took station just outside, arms crossed over his huge chest, eyes unblinking and staring at nothing.

  Nix wanted very much to face Rusilla again, to look into her eyes, get to the bottom of her game, but the eunuch afforded him no opportunity. The man didn't move and showed no signs of fatigue. He might as well have been carved from stone. Once, Nix rose and made as though to walk in the general direction of the sisters' tent.

  Instantly the eunuch had his knife in hand and his vacant gaze fixed directly on Nix. Nix diverted to the supply wagon and took another loaf of flatbread from the sack. He returned to the fire and stared at the flames, his left eye pained.

  "Leave me be, woman," he said.

  He listened to the wind and his eyelids soon grew heavy. He fell asleep to the crackle of wood and the pounding of his pulse in his skull.

  Nix dreamed of an ancient, dilapidated mansion. He stood in a long hallway, where dim light flickered. Paint peeled from cracked plaster walls. The lines of the cracks, the whorls and spirals, called to mind the indecipherable script of a madman. Dread settled on him, a heavy, dire foreboding.

  "Hello," he called, his voice small and high-pitched, girlish.

  At his utterance the plaster and cracks in the wall wrinkled, shifted, finally coalesced into the outline of a pair of huge eyes. Paint and plaster chips rained to the floor as they opened, bloodshot and terrible. Pupils dilated as they fixed on him, their regard judgmental, terrifying.

  He staggered back, reached for a weapon but had none. In fact, he realized to his shock that he was not in his own clothing. He wore a dress, a blue dress like Tesha's, but with a ragged, dirty hem and a torn bodice. For a reason he could not articulate, the attire made him feel vulnerable, and the vulnerability deepened the terror gnawing at his self-control.

  He hurried down the hall and the eyes swiveled in their plaster orbits to watch him go. New pairs of eyes formed in the walls as he went, cracking open in the plaster and paint. They were the eyes of men, he knew, judging, planning, plotting. He could not escape them.

  Thick wooden doors lined the hall between faded, moth-eaten tapestries. Sounds carried through the doors: a bestial, rhythmic grunting, the pained screams of women. He felt something sticky and warm under his slippers. He looked down and saw bright red blood seeping under the bottom of the doors, soaking the floor, drenching his feet in crimson.

  The grunting behind the doors grew more urgent, the screams more pained. He put his hands to his ears, unable to bear more, but he could not escape the terribl
e sounds. He fled, speeding down the hallway, past an endless processional of doors behind which horrors and bloody violations occurred unchecked.

  "Stop it!" he screamed, and banged a fist on one of the doors. "Stop!"

  But it didn't stop. The grunts grew faster, harder, the entire floor shook. A woman screamed desperately. He reached for the handle on the door but there was no handle. He put his shoulder into it, once, twice, but it would not budge.

  He whirled to glare accusingly back at the eyes in the wall – it was their fault, he somehow knew – but they were gone. Instead, the cracks in the plaster formed words, a sentence.

  This already happened. It will happen again.

  The grunts and screams stopped. He blinked, breathing hard.

  Down the hall he heard wet respiration, deep and steady. He licked his lips and turned slowly on his heel to face the sound. The hallway ended at another door, larger than the others, and this one with a handle.

  The door was breathing, stretching and expanding as it respired, a great wooden lung that exhaled the smell of sweat, sex, and terror. He stared at it a long while, stuck to the ground by his bloody slippers and his fright.

  The handle on the door started to turn, a slow rotation that caused him nearly to faint.

  Panicked, terrified of the hulking form he knew must lurk on the other side of the wooden slab, he ran down the hall and grabbed the handle with both hands, preventing it from turning. Small, fearful sounds escaped his lips as he tried to hold it still.

  "Go away!" he shouted. "Leave me alone."

  He heard cracking and feared the wood of the door giving way. A titter of laughter sounded in his ears, wispy and otherworldly.

  He opened his eyes, his heart a hammer against the cage of his ribs.

  The wood of the fire crackled, not the door of his dream. He'd fallen asleep around the fire. Two of the guards lay on the ground near the fire, too, wrapped in their bedrolls. One of the pack horses stirred, whinnied, the sound like laughter.

  "Shit," he whispered, and sat up. His head was pounding, his eyes aching. He dabbed at his nose and it came away bloody. Inexplicably, his mouth tasted vaguely of pepper. He spit out the taste and glanced over at the tent that sheltered Rusilla and Merelda. The eunuch remained in his station, as immovable and expressionless as a mountain. A breeze carried down the cut, stirred the flames, Nix's hair.

  He absently poked the still-glowing embers with a stick. Sparks and smoke carried off into the air, and the breeze carried them toward the tents, the carriage. He watched them go, but they didn't go, not directly. Floating embers and swirling smoke gathered in a cloud around the window of Rakon's carriage, as if caught there in a tiny cyclone. For a fleeting moment, Nix thought he saw the outline of an enormous winged form just outside the carriage. Too, he thought he heard the faint titter of laughter in the wind, but the sound and the suggested form lasted only a moment before vanishing into nebulous shapelessness. Fatigue and the stress of traveling the Wastes were making him imagine things.

  He lay back before the fire, closed his eyes, and soon fell into dreamless sleep.

  The sylph hovered invisibly outside Rakon's carriage, its voice a breeze in his ear, smoke from the fire outlining its winged form for a moment. Open tomes and several ancient, yellowed maps of the Wastes lay on the upholstered bench beside Rakon. He'd pored over them constantly in recent days, confirming and reconfirming his thinking, testing his conclusion.

  Each of the maps showed different parts of the Wastes, yet each part showed a road not unlike the road they traveled, which was actually not a road at all.

  "Lines, angles, shapes," said the sylph, its voice rustling the pages.

  Layering the maps one on top of each other, though clumsy, had brought revelation, had allowed Rakon to discern the truth of the Wastes, and, he thought, the location of Abrak-Thyss.

  "The lines of the roads are as I've described to you?" he said.

  The sylph could see the lines from high above, discern the angles, and note the shape.

  "They are as you've surmised," the sylph whispered, the breeze of its voice tickling his ear, stirring his hair.

  He replayed the spirit's words in his mind, tested them for ambiguities, saw none that troubled him.

  "And the prison of Abrak-Thyss?"

  "The winds here say nothing of Abrak-Thyss. His prison is in the earth, and the air knows him not. The winds speak only of a great mirror that covers the earth where a city once stood, not far from the end of the valley you travel even now. The winds whisper of the Vwynn devils whose delves hollow the earth below us. They say the Vwynn do not go to the place of the mirror."

  "A mirror," Rakon echoed thoughtfully. "Glass."

  Glass made sense. The mirror had to be it.

  The sylph stirred and its winds caused the maps to flutter, flipped pages in the open tome. "The Vwynn suspect you are here," the sylph said, and giggled. "They don't hear the wind, but they smell it, smell the sorcery on it. They're all around you, under you, prowling, stalking. The gusts sing of their hunger."

  "Silence," Rakon said, but the sylph continued.

  "But there is more, master. The breezes from Dur Follin hint that the Norristru pact with Hell is broken. Perhaps your enemies move against you even now. There are sorcerers and witches in Dur Follin gleeful at your fall, even now plotting your demise."

  "I said silence," Rakon hissed. "Begone from me, spirit."

  The sylph whirled around the carriage, incensed. "Perhaps next time you call for me, Rakon Norristru, the King of the Air will not heed and will not order me to come. Perhaps after that the wind will carry word of your death."

  Rakon growled, snatched at the air where he knew the spirit to be but his hand passed through its incorporeal form. He jabbed a finger at empty space.

  "And perhaps after I awaken Abrak-Thyss and renew the Pact, when House Thyss of Hell is bound once more to lend its strength to my house, then maybe I shall demand of the King of the Air that he give me you, to imprison in an airless jar with naught for company but your own voice. Forever. Do you think the King of the Air would gainsay me, then, sylph?"

  The sylph keened in terror, swirled gently around Rakon. "A zephyr offered in placation, master. I meant no offense, and of course wish you only good fortune on your quest to find and free Abrak-Thyss."

  "Leave me now, fickle creature."

  "But master, the thought of an airless jar–"

  "Think on it elsewhere. Leave me, I said, until I call again!"

  Keening, the sylph merged with the wind of the Wastes and was gone.

  For a long while, Rakon eyed his maps, the tomes that had led him to the Wastes, to the sole hope for his family. He looked out the window of the carriage, up through the cut and into the sky. Minnear floated against the black vault, nearly full. The thin, waning crescent of Kulven floated above it, a silver scythe. The Thin Veil was almost upon the world.

  Hell, too, blinked in the velvet of the night sky, a crimson dot of fire and stone. He glanced at it for only a moment. Hell was no longer his salvation. His salvation lay somewhere in the Wastes.

  He studied his maps a final time, folded and rolled them up, and tried not to think of the Vwynn.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Nix awoke before the dawn, as was his wont when he wasn't otherwise knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. The eunuch still stood his station, and Nix assumed he had not moved through the night.

  "Does the man piss in place?" Nix muttered through a dry mouth that tasted peppery. He sat up, prodded the embers to life, and put two logs on the fire to get it going.

  The camp stirred as dawn turned the sky gray. Men coughed, spit, pissed, pulled on mail and weapons, yoked horses.

  At Rakon's call, the eunuch carried Rusilla and Merelda back to the carriage in turn. Nix did not dare interfere, despite his impulse to do so.

  Egil soon emerged from his tent, yawning, the ruff of his hair sticking out in all directions. He offered a brief prayer t
o his dead god and came to Nix's side.

  "You feel all right?" the priest asked. "You look like shite."

  Nix made a helpless gesture. "Bad dreams."

  Egil turned and looked at the carriage. "The sisters, you think? Or this place?"

  "Maybe both," Nix said.

  Egil rubbed his palm over his head briskly, as if shaking the eye of Ebenor to wakefulness. "I slept poorly as well. But hopefully we'll not have too much of this. I make us only three days from Afirion."