The Hammer and the Blade

CHAPTER EIGHT

Within an hour, Dur Follin had vanished from sight behind them. Broken, rust-red earth extended as far as Nix could see in all directions. The ground became more broken as they advanced. It looked shattered, as if the world had bucked, the lower strata trying to shed the disease of the upper. Deep valleys and cuts scarred the terrain, steep rock walls, sheer chasms, hills of jagged rocks, fields of large boulders.

Bits of tenacious scrub, the fronds thin and sickly, grew here and there. Lichen the color of mellowed piss clung on the shade-side of many of the boulders. Low mountains rose in the east. The air carried an acrid stink that made Nix's throat raw and eyes water. When the wind gusted, it threw up clouds of red dust and wailed over the shattered terrain, as if grieving.

"Wounded earth," Egil said to Nix.

"Aye."

By late morning, they reached Deadman's Way, a wide, incongruously smooth stretch of ancient road that stretched across the otherwise blasted terrain. Nix had heard of the road, but had never expected to lay eyes on it.

Inexplicably, the road had been spared the ruin of the surrounding terrain. It was not paved with stones, but rather looked as if the gods had driven a chisel across the terrain, leaving the unmarred ribbon of the road in their wake.

Deadman's Way showed no cracks, and no scrub or weeds grew on its surface. To Nix it called to mind the same precise, flawless, uncanny construction that marked the Archbridge.

"This pristine after so long?" Nix asked.

"Now we know why he brought the carriage and wagon," Egil observed.

"Aye."

Rakon emerged from the carriage long enough to study the terrain ahead, and then the caravan headed out, following the road and making good speed.

Two guards paced the carriage to either side, which was driven by another guard and pulled by a pair of shaggy draft horses. The supply wagon followed, likewise driven by a guard and pulled by two horses. The rest of the group walked or jogged on foot behind and around the wagons, though from time to time one or another guard would ride on the wagon to rest his feet.

As they put more and more distance behind them, Nix felt as though he were swimming in ever-deeper water. Dur Follin was lost to the distance behind them. They were deep in the Wastes, the broken, red earth roofed with a cloudy, slate-gray sky. At least the rain had relented.

The others seemed to share his growing sense of ominousness. Now and again the horses tossed their heads and stomped at nothing in particular. The drivers kept cocked crossbows on the benches beside them, and the guards afoot held bare blades in hand. Egil shook his dice as they walked. The sky pressed down on them, a gray, miasmic blanket.

Nix worked at the compulsion as he walked, seeking a place within himself that the spellworm had not reached.

I am Nix Fall of Dur Follin.

But the effort itself — contrary as it was to Rakon's wishes — nauseated him, and he found it hard to keep pace with a roiling stomach. He resolved to work at slipping the spellworm during the night, when they camped. They had three, maybe four days' travel through the Wastes before they reached the Afirion Desert.

Assuming they lived that long.

He took a headcount. Including the eunuch and Rakon, they totaled eleven men and the sisters.

Eleven men.

He would have laughed if his jaw and head didn't hurt so much. Phrases moved through his mind, foreboding words he'd heard used to describe the Demon Wastes.

Cursed earth.

Ruined ground.

At the Conclave, Nix had read a few treatises containing theories about the Demon Wastes' origin. All agreed that the Wastes had once been fertile ground, part of a now-lost and forgotten civilization, probably the same one responsible for building the Archbridge.

Some held that a sorcerer had accidentally created a doorway to Hell and an army of devils had destroyed the realm and left the land barren. Others said a curse infected the ground, spreading incrementally closer to Dur Follin each year. Others said wrathful gods had reached down from the vault of night and smashed an arrogant people.

Nix had thought all the theories nonsense, but now, walking the Wastes, treading an ancient road that shouldn't exist, he wasn't as sure. The land was forsaken, a wasteland. Theories Nix had thought outlandish now seemed quaint seen in the light of the actual desolation.

"This road's better than even the Promenade in Dur Follin," Egil said.

"Makes no sense," Nix said, and then an idea struck him.

He fell to his knees and held the palms of his hands a finger's width over the surface of the road. He closed his eyes, concentrated on the skin of his palms, his fingertips.

"What are you doing?" Baras called from his right. "Keep moving."

"Hsst," Egil said to the guardsman.

The drivers halted the wagons. Rakon shouted from the carriage.

"What is going on? We are not to stop moving."

Nix's palms and fingertips tingled. The hairs on his knuckles rose and stood on end. He smiled, nodded, stood.

"It's enspelled," he said to everyone "The road. That's why it's remained intact. Powerful magic. Wearing thin now, but in its day it must have been powerful."

Egil eyed the blasted terrain all around them. "They might have used it to preserve more than just the roads."

Nix chuckled. "Aye."

"Why would anyone enspell a road?" Baras asked.

Nix shook his head. It made little sense.

"Get us moving again, Baras," Rakon said from the carriage.

"Yes, my lord. You heard him," Baras said. "Leg it."

Reins cracked and the caravan started again.

"I'm half-tempted to move at a dilatory pace," Egil said. "Slow these bastards down."

The moment he said the words, the priest burped loudly, put a hand on his stomach. His face greened behind his beard.

"You can't," Nix said. "And your body's telling you why. The spellworm's rooted deep and it responds to your intent. Just thinking something at odds with Rakon will make you sick at the least. Actually acting at crosspurposes will bring pain, just as it did before. Even death, if we push too hard."

They walked on for a short while before Nix said, "Did you say 'dilatory' a moment ago?"

"I did."

"Aren't I supposed to be the educated one in this pairing?"

"Maybe. But that'd make me the good-looking one then."

"Ha!"

Egil hung onto his own smile for only a moment. "Gonna be hard to get over on this sorcerer with this worm in our guts." He winced, probably as the worm did its work in response to his thoughts of getting over on Rakon. "I've no desire to be in his thrall or puking for the rest of my days."

"You won't. Retrieving the horn he seeks is one way to end the compulsion."

"What's the other way?"

"We slip it sooner," Nix said.

Egil looked intrigued. He glanced around to make certain none of the guards were listening. "Slip it how? Argh. Even asking the question upsets my stomach."

Nix spoke in a low tone. "When the worm first infected you, I told you to focus on your faith, yeah?"

Egil nodded. His hand went to the tattoo on his head.

Nausea rose in Nix — the spellworm exerting itself in response to his thoughts — but he endured it. He tried to explain things in a way that would make sense to Egil. "The purpose of that was to wall off a bit of your will from the worm before it expanded in you. Think of the compulsion as a net around your will. You think or do something at odds with the compulsion and it draws tight, making your own mind and body an enemy of itself."

"Thrice-damned sorcery," Egil said.

"Quite. But if you did as I said, you may have kept the worm's net loose or absent around your core. In your case, that's your faith."

"You think faith is my core?"

"You know better than to have to ask that. I mock your beliefs only because we've been blooded together. Anyway, you focus inwardly and find that place. You focus on it to the exclusion of everything else. You worry at it as you might an itchy scab or pained tooth. Gradually that'll open it up, expand it. Open it enough and you'll have enough space to slip the compulsion's net entirely."

"So you've done this before?" Egil asked.

"Of course not."

Egil stopped and glared at him.

"Keep moving!" Baras called.

They gave Baras an obscene gesture but started walking again.

"You're guessing then?" Egil said. "How do you know it'll work?"

"Guessing yes, but it's an informed guess."

"Informed by what? Your year at the Conclave?"

"Well, yes."

The priest shook his head. "Gods, man, that's a thin thread on which to hang hope. How will I know if I've slipped it? I don't feel that different except when I think about dropping a hammer on Rakon's head."

He groaned, the thought, no doubt, twisting up the worm.

"And that's how you'll know," Nix said. "If you can think about killing Rakon or running back to Dur Follin without puking, without your bones and teeth aching, then you've slipped it. Or think of it this way: working at slipping it will make you sick. That's why you don't do it except after camp. When you finally find yourself worrying at it and it doesn't make you sick, then you're free of it."

"You mean whenever I think about slipping it, I'll be nauseous?"

"Of course."

More cursing. "And if we don't slip it?"

"Then Rakon owns us until we get him that horn."

A final, inspired round of cursing that drew Baras's skeptical eyes, then, "So where'd you keep it loose?"

The question cut a little too deep for Nix to answer honestly, even to Egil. For a moment he considered confessing the mask he wore around his true self, exposing for his friend the boy of the Warrens who lived in his core, but he had no easy words to express it. He wasn't sure Egil would believe him anyway.

"I focused on my arrogance, of course. I don't want for that."

Egil looked skeptical, but let it pass. "As you say. Anyway, you're the better of us with knots and nets, so get to it."

"You work at it, too."

"Aye." Egil took out his dice, shook them as he walked.

For a time they said nothing, then Nix said, "Egil, I think… the sisters did something to me."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean, my eye pained me and I ran for the carriage and I still don't know why. And then my head felt like it was going to burst and I heard a voice, a woman's voice telling me to help her."

Egil considered Nix's confession for several beats. "You think the sisters are sorcerers, too?"

"I think maybe."

Egil eyed the carriage. "That makes us caught between witches and a warlock. All the more reason to slip this spellworm and get clear, I suppose."

"Aye."

Hours passed. The cloud cover blocked the sun so they trekked under a gray roof. The ground grew still more blasted as they advanced deeper into the Wastes, all but the magically protected road. Cracks and wide chasms bisected the parched ground here and there. Jagged rock formations jutted from the earth, carved by wind, dirt, and rain into thin, unsettling alien towers. Sharp stones poked up from the soil, as if the flesh had been stripped from the earth, exposing the bones of the world.

The road cut through it all, through gulleys and deep, barren valleys, leading them on, guiding them toward whatever doom awaited them. A tumble of rocky hills to their left cast them in late afternoon shadows. Caves opened here and there in the hills, open mouths hissing profane conspiracies into the wind.

Nix felt his eyes drawn to the carriage throughout the day. He replayed in his mind the events from earlier, the vacant expressions on the faces of the sisters, the nosebleed, the fact that he somehow knew their names.

How? None of it made sense.

Help us, he thought he'd heard, but that too made no sense.

Sorcery, he concluded. Had to be.

Rakon's sisters might be cursed, but they were also sorceresses.

They'd enspelled Nix somehow, forced him to open the door to the carriage, put thoughts in his mind. But why? He winced when he recalled the painful itch behind his eye, the agonizing feeling that his head would burst.

He worked at the spellworm with ever more urgency.

"I am Nix Fall of Dur Follin," he whispered as he walked, and thought of his childhood, the Heap, Mamabird, the old man he'd murdered over bread. "I'm Nix Fall of Dur Follin."

The exercise unsettled his stomach and weakened his legs, but he told himself that he felt some slack in the worm's grip. Bile crept up his throat, stinging and foul, but he kept at it as long as he could, hoping his efforts would wear down the compulsion. Taken with his task, he didn't notice Baras approach until the guardsmen stood at his side.

"You talking to yourself now?"

Nix swallowed the bile, cleared his throat. "No one else in this motley crew is half as interesting. Have to avoid boredom somehow."

Baras nodded, glanced around at the ruined land. Worry reached his eyes. "I suspect we'll have excitement enough at some point."

Seeing the worry, Nix dared a hard question. "What in the Pits are you doing here, Baras? You don't seem the kind to work for Rakon Norristru."

The guardsmen stiffened, looked straight ahead. "The lord Adjunct is my superior. It's my duty to serve. And I take my duty very seriously."

"See if that doesn't land you in a pile of shite one day," Nix said.

"Your jaw seems all right, given how well it's flapping at the moment."

"I've been hit by worse."

"I don't doubt it."

"You carry a decent punch, though."

"As I said, if I can help it, I don't take one without giving one back. That elbow caught me flat."

"Yeah," Nix said, grinning. "It did. Uh, sorry."

Baras cleared his throat. "Listen, you see that you're in this now, right? You and the priest? Whether you like it or not. I don't want to have to hawk over you. Got enough to worry my mind."

Nix looked over at him. For the first time, he noticed the dark circles under Baras's eyes, the worry wrinkles in his brow and around his eyes. He looked worn. "Whether I like it or not? Seems to me that goes for both of us, yeah? What with your duty and all."

Baras said nothing for a long moment. "We've a few more hours of travel left in the day. Keep legging it, Nix."

Nix stared at Baras's back as he walked away. He couldn't even work up the will to curse him. The man was just doing his duty as he saw it. He might be a fool, but he was a noble fool.

At Rakon's order, the drivers of the carriage and wagon drove the horses at a faster pace as twilight came on. The men afoot jogged to keep up. Rakon leaned out the carriage door from time to time and studied the sky for long stretches, his gaze intense, irritable. At first Nix assumed he was worried about a storm slowing them, but it seemed something more than that. Rakon seemed to see through the roof of clouds, to something beyond them, something that had him worried.

Before sunset, they reached an intersection. The new road was as pristine and well preserved as the old, and they took it, heading more or less due east. As dusk deepened, the wind picked up, howling over the jagged stonescape. The guards lapsed into silence, somber, huddled into their cloaks, alone with their thoughts. Baras did what he could for their morale but it helped little. Darkness threatened, darkness in the Wastes, far from Dur Follin, far from anything.

"What is that?" one of the guards called. He pointed off to the south.

There, black against the darkening sky, a cloud whirled and jerked wildly above the ruined earth.

"What in the Pits is that?" Nix asked, peering through the failing light. "Some kind of fog?"

Egil, with his better vision, said, "It's a flock of something. Doesn't move like birds, though."

"Then what?"

Egil shrugged.

"There's nothing for it," Baras said. "It's nothing to fear. Keep moving."

And they did keep moving, but all of them kept their eyes on the flock. For a time it flew in their direction and Nix got a sense of its huge size. There must have been thousands of… creatures in it.

The horses whinnied nervously. Out came Egil's dice. Nix, too, felt exposed under the bleak sky, but in time the flock turned away from them and they lost sight of it behind low hills.

Presently the setting sun slipped out from beneath the clouds just long enough to stain the western sky orange and red. The rocky terrain looked like a sea of blood in the dying light. The drivers of the wagon and carriage pulled the horses to a stop.

Ahead, the terrain fell away and the road descended through a deep cut. The fading sunlight did not reach very far into the declivity, leaving the bottom a lightless gash in the earth. A few crooked trees clung to the top of the cut, rattling in the gusts. While Baras conferred with Rakon, the rest of the group had a quick drink or sank to the ground with fatigue.

Presently a shout sounded from the right, Jyme's voice. "Here! Over here!"

Heads turned. Egil and Nix, seated on the road to rest, rose. The other guards did the same.

"Found his balls, maybe?" Nix said to Egil.

"Those are as lost as Abn Thuset's tomb," Egil said.

"What is it?" Baras called.

"Come over and see for yourself," Jyme said.

He stood twenty paces off the road, on a low rise, amid a tumble of oddly shaped rocks, wind-stripped scrub, and a few large boulders. He was looking at something on the ground, the wind whipping his cloak and hair. He didn't have his blade drawn, so Nix figured whatever he saw couldn't be too dangerous.

Baras and the other guards hurried over. Egil and Nix shared a glance, shrugged, and headed over, too.

"What is it?" Rakon called, leaning out of the carriage.

"I'm… unsure, my lord," Baras called back over his shoulder.

When they reached the top of the rise, they found Jyme standing at the edge of a deep hole. The coarse ground around it, littered with queerly shaped stones and sticks, crunched underfoot. The wind blew dust everywhere.

The hole was circular, about two paces in diameter, and it fell away into the earth at a steep angle. The dying light of the setting sun did not reach down it very far.

"You called out for this?" Baras said, frowning. "It's just a hole."

"No it's not. Smell that." Jyme leaned over the hole and sniffed. "It smells like a bunghole down there."

"Familiar with that smell, are you?" Nix said, eliciting chuckles from two of the other guards.

Jyme ignored him and pointed. "There are more holes just like this one over there and there. I came over to piss and noticed them. One might be natural, like a cave, right? But lots of them? That ain't natural. Something dug them."

Baras rubbed the back of his neck, eyeing the hole. Two of the younger guards coughed in the blowing dust. The setting sun stretched their shadows over the ground.

Egil reached into his beltpouch, removed his dice, and rattled them in his right hand. Nix pulled his cloak over his mouth and nose and walked the area around the first hole, found the others that Jyme had mentioned. He counted five, all of them perfectly circular, all of them descending away into darkness under the Wastes, all of them stinking like a latrine.

"I count five more," he said, upon returning. "And as much as it irks me, I agree with Jyme. Something dug them somehow. I don't see any tracks so I don't think they've been used in a long while."

"Used?" Baras asked. "Used by what?"

Nix shrugged, though his mind turned to the flock of creatures they'd seen earlier.

The wind gusted and whistled over the holes, which keened eerily. One of the guards looped finger and thumb in the protective gesture of Orella.

Egil edged closer, crouched at the edge of the hole, and looked down. "It's like a bug hole or a worm's boring. Looks to go deep."

"No such thing as bugs or worms that big," Baras said.

"Shouldn't be any such thing as the Demon Wastes, either," Egil said. "Yet here we stand."

The other guards shifted uncomfortable on their feet, passed worried glances.

Nix imagined a honeycombed earth under his boots, crawling with horrors. There were many stories about the Wastes.

"What could be down there?" one of the young guards said.

"Go see," another of the guards said, and gave him a fake shove, creating a shortlived panic in the first, and laughter or a smile from everyone else except Baras.

"Bunghole!" the first said. "I piss in your soup for that."

"Enough," Baras said. "They're just holes in the ground. Dug or natural doesn't matter. There's nothing down there." He looked at the darkening sky, the setting sun. "Lord Norristru wants to press on into the declivity before nightfall. We've got another half-hour or more of light. Let's get into that cut and find a likely spot. Leg it, men."

Sighs and groans answered Baras's command, but everyone turned to go. As they did, Nix spotted a thin cylindrical stone sticking out of the scree at an odd angle. He stepped over to it, nudged it with his boot to free it, and saw it for what it was: not a stone, but a bone. He glanced around at the ground under his feet and realization dawned.

"Wait," he said, and the guards and Egil turned back.

Nix fell to all fours and scraped the soil all around the hole with his punch dagger. His work made the dust worse, and loose dirt, caught by the gusting wind, stung eyes and drew curses.

"What are you doing, man?" Baras asked, shielding his mouth with his cloak.

Nix stopped in his work long enough to toss the bone at him. "That's a bone." His digging revealed another, another. As he found them, he tossed them toward Egil and Baras, one after another.

"It's all bones," Nix said, looked up at them. "This whole hill. Bones and dirt."

The young guards cursed nervously. They all looked under their feet, wide-eyed, as if fearful the hill of remains would soon vomit up an army of animated dead.

Egil picked up the bone and examined it. Jyme and Baras looked over his shoulder.

"Are they… human?" Jyme asked.

Egil shrugged. "Could be, but I can't say for certain. Any skulls, Nix?"

"Gods," Baras said. "You talk of this as if they were melons at market."

Egil shrugged again, handed the bone to Baras. "We're tomb robbers. The dead hold no fear for either of us."

Nix worried at the heap a bit longer, looking for a skull, darkening the sky with powdered death. He found shards of bone with every dug furrow, but no skulls.

"Maybe it's a burial mound of some kind," Baras said.

"Not likely," Egil said to Baras. He took the bone from Baras and pointed at various features. "See that? Cracked open for marrow. And those grooves there, those are from teeth."

"Gods," one of the guards said.

All of them made the protective gesture of Orella, even Jyme.

"Maybe we should just leave them be," said Jyme, his voice quaking. "Show some respect for the dead."

Nix left off his digging and stood, his clothes and face coated in the dust of the dead. "The dead need respect no more than they need air or food. Didn't have you as the superstitious sort, Jyme."

"I should be back in Dur Follin in my damned bed," Jyme said.

"Shouldn't we all," Nix said, and wiped his face with his gloved hand. He glanced around. "Bodies, carcasses, whatever these are, they must have been stacked here waist deep. This was the scene of a slaughter."

All eyes went to the hole. The wind gusted, whistled over the opening, the sound like a prolonged scream.

"I ain't camping near this hole," one of the young guards said.

Nods around.

"We could still go back to Dur Follin," said another.

Baras cleared his throat. "No, we can't. And what happened here happened long ago. There's nothing to fear. Let's move, men. Nix, we go. Egil. Now."

When they returned to the caravan, they found Rakon standing near the carriage, looking up at the sky, muttering as if he could speak to wind. When he saw them approach, he made a sharp, dismissive gesture with one hand and turned to face them, hands on his hips.

"What was it?" he asked.

"Holes, my lord," Baras answered.

"Holes?"

The guards around Egil and Nix muttered.

"Unusual holes," Egil said. "Dug by something. With the bones of many old kills near them."

Rakon stared at them, his thin face unreadable. He checked the sky a final time, looked to the west, at the fading light. "We press on a bit more today. Into the cut so we're out of the wind."

With that, he vanished into the carriage.

As the wagon and carriage started to move, Egil sidled up to Nix.

"I'm disquieted by those bones."

"First 'dilatory' and now 'disquieted'? My priest has been replaced by a scholar."

"The bones weren't that old."

"I know," Nix said.

"I think if we don't get clear of this soon, we're going to die here. All of us."

Nix nodded. "We can't go anywhere unless we slip the spellworm. We're in it, Egil. Us and them."

Egil looked at the darkness creeping into the sky, infecting the air. "No one has ever gotten through the Wastes that I've heard."

"Fatalism ill suits you. Recall that you and I have done many things most said couldn't be done. We'll add traversing the Wastes to that list."

"Well enough," Egil finally conceded. "Nix, you see the way Rakon's been watching the sky? He's watching more than the Mages' Moon. There's more afoot here."

"Agreed," Nix said.

Before descending into the cut, the guards took a moment to take torches from the supply wagon and fire them. Nix declined to take one. Instead, he rifled through his satchel until he found what he sought: a fist-sized black globe of polished volcanic glass scribed with the symbol of a closed eye.

"Another gewgaw," Egil said.

"Indeed." Nix held the globe in his palm, spoke a word in the Language of Creation to awaken the magic, and poked the scribed eye with his forefinger. It opened as if alive, squinted at him in anger.

"Come on," Nix said, and poked it again, harder. "Come on."

That did it. The eye closed tightly for a moment, as if charging itself, then opened, emitting a glow as bright as a lantern. The guards looked on with wonder. Baras came over, looked at the globe, looked at Nix, and walked away.

"We could have used that a number of times previous," Egil said. "Where'd you get it?"

"Where else?" Nix said, shining the light around at the red, cracked walls. "The Low Bazaar."

Egil's eyeroll was audible in his tone. "Not a servant of Kerfallen the Grey Mage again?"

"No," Nix said. "I learned my lesson there. This came from a Narascene fortune teller. A pretty one, too."

Egil eyed the bauble skeptically. "Well, if it explodes, at least we'll know who to blame."

" Whom," Nix corrected, and couldn't resist a jibe. "Now leave me alone and go be disquieted or dilatory or something."