The Hammer and the Blade

CHAPTER NINE

The caravan descended into the cut, leaving even the fading light of sunset behind. The torchlight flickered on the cracked walls of reddish stone that rose to either side and hemmed them in. The meager light provided by the torches and Nix's magic crystal put tall shadows on the wall, but did only a little to dispel the black. The darkness in the cut seemed to have weight, growing heavier as they descended, a blanket of ink that threatened to blot them out.

"Like walking into Hell," Egil said, his voice bouncing loudly off the walls.

"At least we're out of the wind," said one of the guards.

The steep slope carried them down a hundred paces or so to the bottom, where the cut flattened and widened. Boulders and piles of scree flanked the road, but the way ahead looked clear.

A sliver of sky was visible above, through the gash of cut, and the dying light of the day colored it the purple of an old bruise. Looking up, Nix glimpsed a flock of creatures they'd seen earlier, the roiling, spinning cloud of them black against the purple sky. They looked about as big as ducks and flew with the jerky changes of direction typical of bats.

"There," he said, pointing, but they were already gone.

Tense hands went to blade hilts.

"What?" Baras asked, looking around in alarm. "What?"

"That flock of creatures," Nix said. "I just saw them above."

Baras opened his mouth to speak but before he did a high-pitched, uncanny shriek sounded from above. The sound spooked the mounts and those pulling the wagon reared, jolting the cart and spilling two bags of grain. The guards jerked blades from scabbards.

"Crossbows, you dolts," Baras hissed, unslinging his crossbow and readying a quarrel.

While the other guards sheathed blades and readied quarrels, Egil filled his fists with the hafts of his hammers. Nix drew his falchion and shined the light from his magic eye up the irregular face of the cliff. Cracks lined it, veins in the earth.

Another shriek sounded from above, inhuman and savage, but this time from the other side of the cut. The pitch of it put Nix's hairs on end. He thought of the holes they'd found, the heap of bones. He spun around, aiming the crystal eye's beam at the top of the cut. For a moment he thought he caught a flash of movement, but couldn't be sure.

It occurred to him of a sudden that the crystal would make him an easy target from a foe above, so he covered it with his palm and hid under his cloak. The etching of the scribed eye squirmed irritably against his grip. He poked it in the eye with his thumb.

"What in the Pits was that?" Jyme said softly. He scanned the top of the cut behind the aim of his crossbow.

"I thought I saw something move up there," one of the young guards said, pointing up to the right. "Over there."

"Calm heads, men," Baras said, backing toward Rakon's carriage. "No one saw anything moving. You're imagining things."

Rakon's head emerged from the carriage window. "Baras?"

The moment Nix saw Rakon, a sharp pain rooted behind his eye and for a fleeting moment he had an overpowering impulse to charge the carriage, slay the eunuch and the driver, and flee with Rusilla and Merelda. The impulse was so strong that he actually took a step toward the carriage.

Of course, the thought and the step agitated the spellworm, sent vomit up his throat and caused his chest to ache. He groaned, staggered a step. Egil's hand closed on his bicep, steadied him.

"You all right?" Egil whispered.

Nix shook his head. "No. They're trying to do something to me."

"Who? The sisters?"

Nix nodded.

"Rakon," Egil called, apparently intent on confronting the sorcerer about his sister.

"No!" Nix hissed. "No, leave it. Leave it."

Rakon looked at Egil, eyebrows raised, but Baras stepped between them.

"Did you hear that sound just now, my lord?" Baras asked.

Rakon looked up at the slit of dark sky visible between the cliff walls.

"The wind, maybe," he said. "Or an animal."

For a moment, Baras said nothing, then, "Probably we should camp soon, my lord. The light is soon to fail entirely. We should set up before that."

"Find a spot of your choosing, Baras."

"Very good, my lord."

Once more Rakon disappeared into the carriage and they started moving. The caravan traveled only a short distance more, everyone wary and with weapons to hand, before Baras called a halt for the night. The shriek did not recur, though the tension lingered.

Even with only torchlight by which to see, the guards set up the campsite with impressive efficiency. In under a half-hour, they'd pitched six tents, kindled a fire, distributed dried meat and cheese from the supply wagon, put feedbags on the horses, and started a large pot of water for coffee. Egil and Nix had little to do but watch. Even Jyme was of more use than them.

They ate with the guards, Egil with his usual volume of gustatory noise, Nix nibbling and still trying to figure out what to do about the sisters. He began to doubt his thinking. He'd seen them, and they did not look capable of working witchery. Perhaps it was the Wastes that was making him feel so off?

But that thinking fled before the fact that he knew their names.

"What's in your mind?" Egil asked.

"The Hells if I know," Nix said.

Rakon emerged from the carriage only once, to tell them to keep the fire low.

"My lord?" Baras asked.

"We don't want to be seen," Rakon explained.

"By what?" Egil asked.

Rakon considered his answer a long time. "By anything," he said, and returned to the carriage.

Later, the eunuch emerged from the carriage to retrieve food for his master. Nix stood, hurried over, and tried to engage the plodding giant in conversation.

"How fare your master's sisters?" he asked. He wanted to see them again, to look them in the eyes, to see if they were the cause of his discomfiture. "I can help you bear this food-"

The eunuch, arms laden with a wheel of cheese and two loaves of flatbread, responded with only a vacant stare so otherworldly that Nix, for once, found himself at a loss for words. He stepped aside so the giant wouldn't walk over him.

"He's a mute," Baras called from around the crackling fire. "And he'll welcome no help."

Nix nodded, eyeing the eunuch as the man walked back toward the carriage. A scar made a pink line above the fold of skin on the back of the eunuch's neck, a scar too clean to have been caused by a weapon. Nix had heard of such scars before, though he could not quite remember where — something about magical chirurgy.

"There's something off in that eunuch," Nix said, when he returned to Egil's side.

"Everything about this is off," the priest answered, shoveling a chunk of cheese into his mouth. "The people and the place. Still need to eat, though."

"Aye," Nix said, and did just that, though he found his eyes returning frequently to the carriage.

After the meal, Baras posted guards and set the watch schedule for the night. The men not on duty lingered around the low flames of the fire, saying little, watching smoke rise into the air. Egil shook his dice and Nix endured nausea to work at the spellworm. He needed to get himself free, now more than ever.

Everyone sat with weapons near to hand but the night got on peacefully.

Above them, the cloud cover broke, revealing a wedge of sky between the cliff walls of the cut. They could not see the skeletal trees standing watch on the cliff tops above, but the branches rattled in the wind like dry bones. As the hours passed, the darkness grew predatory. The wind howled above them, whistling dark promises.

"Heard lots of stories about you two," one of the young guards said to Nix. "Are they true?"

"Lies, all," Nix said, stretching out his legs.

"Can't all be lies," pressed the guard. "Tell us about one of these adventures you been on."

"Very well," Nix said. "Once, Egil and I were forced to travel the Demon Wastes with some guards of a doltish cast. One of these, a young whoreson who couldn't grow a respectable beard, insisted on hearing stories from me. I strangled him while he slept."

Uncertain laughter from one guard, silence from the rest, a frown from Baras.

"Did I give away the ending?" Nix asked Egil.

"I believe you did, yes."

"He was just asking, is all," said another guard, perturbed. "To pass the time. No need to be a prick."

"No need?" Nix said. "Really?"

"Nix," Egil said, but Nix ignored him.

"We're not here for your entertainment, boy, and we're not friends. Egil and I are prisoners. You're our keepers. Do I not speak the plain truth?"

"It ain't like that," one of the young guards protested.

Nix scoffed. "Can we just get up and walk home, then? We're a long day out of Dur Follin. Can we return if we wish?"

Baras frowned in his beard, sipped his coffee. "It isn't personal."

"So you say," Egil said.

"The lumps on my head feel personal," Nix added.

Baras shrugged, scratched his beard. "Have it as you will." He topped his tin cup with more coffee from the pot. "I offer no apologies. Duty is duty, and done is done."

"Duty," Nix said, shaking his head, and Baras said nothing.

"I think you've ruined the mood," Egil said to Nix.

Nix waved a hand derisively. "Bah. What mood?"

For a time, silence, then Jyme spoke, his tone incongruously light.

"It was for me," he said.

"Was what?" Nix asked, leaning back, his hands behind his head, staring up at the clearing sky, the stars. Minnear would rise soon. He did not relish sitting in the dark of the Demon Wastes under the Mages' Moon.

"Personal," Jyme said. "It was personal for me."

Nix smiled darkly. "Of course it was. Egil personally knocked the sense from you. Wait…" He sat up and looked across the fire at Jyme. "Did you mean that as a jest?"

Jyme was smiling, and Nix's frustration went out of him in a rush.

"Egil, is it possible that Jyme, Jyme, has a sense of humor?"

"Come now, no need for insults…" Jyme began.

"I've seen demons and devils," Egil said. "More than a man should. Even bloodied a few, so I know much is possible in this world. But this notion of Jyme having a sense of humor strikes me as preposterous."

Chuckles around the fire, certain this time, and including Jyme.

"I was just pissed, see?" Jyme said, setting down his tin cup. "You beat me down in front of my men. I didn't know you was all right, then. I just wanted to get even."

Nix toasted him with his coffee. "And instead of getting even you got a trip into the Wastes. Well played, Jyme."

More chuckles, except from Jyme, who looked sheepish. He nudged a log with his boot. "Who's got the luck, right? I suppose I'm as much a prisoner here as you two. They made me come, too."

"True enough," Egil said philosophically, then, "Listen, you caught me in a foul mood right then, back in the Tunnel. I had other things on my mind. We'd just bought a shithole, after all. Apologies for the punch."

"None needed," Jyme said, waving it away. "I was owed it. I was rude to that girl and for no reason."

The current of the priest's more forgiving nature caught Nix up in its wake. To the young guard he'd embarrassed, he said, "And a foul mood infected me as well, just now. With that story, I mean. Apologies. I vow not to strangle you."

The young guard inclined his head and Jyme raised his cup. "Well, done is done, as Baras said."

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 terrible 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.