The Dame

TWENTY-EIGHT

Mcwigik leaned his elbows on the top of the small barrel boat tower, staring at the distant fires and candles twinkling in windows. So many lights. More than Mcwigik had ever seen, more than he had ever imagined possible. For a hundred years he had looked across the waters of Mithranidoon, where even a single firelight was an oddity. For many years of life before that, the largest collection of people together he had ever seen was the town of Hard Rocks on the Weathered Isles.

But even that place, once thought impressive, couldn’t have been one-twentieth the size of this!

“Got to be Palmaristown,” Bikelbrin said, coming up beside him. “We’re at the mouth o’ the river, and that’s where Shiknickel said it’d be.”

“We get ten of us boys together, and we call it a town,” Mcwigik replied, shaking his hairy head. “Thirty and we call it a city, a hundred and it’s a kingdom.”

“Lot o’ people in there,” Bikelbrin agreed.

“Lot o’ blood,” his friend reminded.

“We get killed to death in there, and there’s none to be burying our hearts.”

“Bah, but we won’t be knowin’ that anyway!” Mcwigik said with a laugh, and he and Bikelbrin clapped each other on the shoulders.

The powrie shiver stayed offshore as the lights went down in the city, and only then did the eager dwarves resume their pedaling, moving very slowly and quietly. With a hundred thirty warriors among all the boats, they figured they’d find themselves outnumbered a hundred to one or more.

Dreams of berets shining brightly enough to light up the night carried them on their way.

Bransen sat on the roof of the inn in Ethelbert dos Entel, his legs tightly crossed before him, his hands on his bent knees and his eyes skyward, basking in the contemplative light of a million stars. His thoughts were out there and within himself all at once, a meditative state of serenity in the face of the great questions of purpose and being. To face the many questions of his future meant that he needed the cleansing experience of being fully in the present, of recognizing his mind-body connection and putting that in context with his greater connection to the universe around him. He needed to find that moment of perfect, unfettered clarity, that complete sensation of peace.

But the stunning revelations and twists of the last day stayed with him, nagging him with doubts, particularly on where Cadayle might fit into his new allegiance to Affwin Wi. She had dismissed Jameston out of hand; what might that portend for Cadayle?

Bransen took a deep breath and threw away that unsettling thought. He forced himself back inside his ki-chi-kree, his line of life energy, and then sent that line spiritually up into the dark and starry sky.

A different sensation tugged at him, though, and suddenly and unexpectedly, a feeling that something, somehow, was amiss.

Bransen interrupted his meditative journey to refocus on this disturbance, this ill feeling. It had direction, like a cry of pain, out in the dark night.

Bransen let his soul slide through the soul stone of the brooch and escape his corporeal form. He started away spiritually, but hesitantly, until he felt again that strange sensation that something was terribly wrong.

Then he moved with purpose, willing his noncorporeal form over the city’s wall and out across the empty fields to the edge of a forest he had traversed that very morning.

The docks were quiet, those few guards on duty either asleep or gambling, throwing bones against a warehouse wall. One or another would occasionally glance at the harbor to check the masts of the few ships in port.

Barrel boats didn’t have masts.

The powrie craft came in slowly, their underwater rams prodding the sand below the wharves so that even as the dwarves climbed from their craft and slowly walked across the top arc of those rams, they remained out of sight to the distracted guards up on the boardwalk.

“Beat that point!” one gambling sentry shouted triumphantly as the bones rolled a strong number.

The words had barely left his mouth when a mallet cracked down atop his head, breaking his skull and shattering every bone in his neck.

“As ye asked!” a dwarf explained.

How the other four guards started to scramble! Started, but never even made their feet, as a score of powries, weapons flashing and swung with bloodlust, fell over them. They cried out for their companions on the docks but those sleeping or inattentive men and women were already dead, powries already wetting their berets in freshly spilled blood.

The dwarves methodically formed into six units, each crew as a battle group. They used the very bones the men had been rolling to determine which of the six would stay behind and watch the boats for the first forays.

“Not to worry,” many told the losers. “Plenty to kill.”

Five battle groups moved up into sleeping, unwitting Palmaristown, a hundred weapons, a hundred serrated knives to open veins.

Like a plague of hungry rats they roved through the town, sweeping through houses and tenements, at one point overwhelming a group still drinking and shouting in one of the nearby taverns.

They came in, and they killed. They dipped their bloody caps, and they moved on.

After a very brief while, the crew still on the docks realized that their companions were into powrie bloodlust now and would not be coming back, so they, too, went up into the city. As their friends had assured them, there were plenty still to kill.

It took nearly an hour, with hundreds and hundreds murdered, before Palmaristown even began to organize any semblance of defense against the intruders. Many, many more people died to powrie blades before the dwarves faced any real resistance. Even then, with armies of both Prince Milwellis and Laird Panlamaris out of the city fighting in the war, the fierce powries pressed on.

With Laird Ethelbert on the run in the south and his own mighty warships securing the gulf, Laird Panlamaris had never imagined such an attack.

The bloodbath went on throughout the night, a night that would be known in the region for decades hence as “the dark of long murder,” and, when the powries finally did retreat, they set fire to every structure they passed so that, by the time their barrel boats pushed back out into the river, a quarter of the great city was ablaze.

By the time those fires finally died away days later, two of every three structures in the great city-the second largest in Honce-lay in ruins. One in every three residents within the city was dead.

Warships sailed fast for home as the word of the tragedy spread, but the powries, with their shining berets, slipped past them unnoticed into the open waters of the gulf.

Using the cat’s-eye gemstone set in his brooch, Bransen had no trouble navigating the darkness beyond the wall of Ethelbert dos Entel. He ran on light feet, falling into the malachite as well as the soul stone to provide added lift and distance to each desperate step.

Soldiers walking perimeter outside the wall called to him, but he ignored them and sprinted on. They couldn’t hope to catch him with his magically enhanced speed, and even the few spears they threw out at him fell far short of the mark.

Bransen didn’t look back, his focus squarely ahead as he tried to recall the exact route his spirit had taken as he tried to hear again the disturbance that had sounded so clear in his state of meditation.

His heart beat even faster when he entered the small forest. He nearly fell over with fear as he skidded to a stop before the small cluster of ruined houses. Behind him in the east the sky was still dark, still hours before the dawn.

Bransen tried to hear again the psychic cry, but all was silent. He summoned his courage and ran into the house, to find Jameston crumpled on the floor, blood pooled about him.

“No!” Bransen fell over him, reaching into the soul stone, bringing forth mighty waves of healing magic.

But Jameston was already cold.

Bransen dug deeper, seeking any flicker of life energy, any notion that the man’s soul had not yet fled, seeking resurrection itself, something even the greatest of gemstone users had always believed impossible, something Abelle himself had never managed.

Because it was not possible. Jameston, this man he had come to know as a friend, as a teacher and mentor, as a father, even, was lost to him.