A Fray of Furies, page 24
part #2 of The Waking Worlds Series
The nerve of the swine! Walking in here with the Serpent’s Tongue around his neck!
It was an ingenious charm of her own devising, paid for in sweat and bone and snakebites. Nomparal believed it imbued him with a serpent’s subtlety and slyness. That it ensorcelled his tongue, gifting him unreasonable eloquence and allowing him to loosen the hearts (and purse strings) of others.
Certainly, that is how it appeared.
Snuggling her shawl closer, she pushed to her feet. It took a moment for the cabin to stop spinning. With a slow-footed shuffle, perfected over years, she parted the ever-present carpet of snakes. She could get them to clear her a path, of course. But that would cost more control than she felt comfortable spending. Snakes were shit at following direction. Unless it concerned their next meal, they were complete scatterbrains. Not at all the shrewd creatures they were credited to be.
She turned back to her dinner, dropping some wild tubers into the boil. She’d wanted to see whether Nomparal had some salt. But asking would have undermined all her illusory efforts.
She selected a striped specimen from the sill. He curled obediently about her wrist, wrapping himself close to her warmth. Her knife sheared his spine behind his skull, scoring the cutting board. His fanged maw stretched wide in death. She worked down the length of him, cutting him into carrot-sized wedges.
With a scrape, she tumbled him into the cauldron. She was long past skinning, cleaning and quartering her meals. What these snakes had inside them was, inevitably, more snake.
His kin slithered on, unconcerned. They’d stripped the forest of every mole, mouse and magpie for a league in all directions. Now they noticed one another only when they hungered, which was an infrequent affair.
It was truly something to see: when snakes closed with one another. The Empire did not host any especially venomous vipers. The most potent would give a grown man a light bruise and a bad headache. Unlike Purlian asps, who felled horses within a few paces. Or the Jade Isles’ tree snakes, whose victims fell silently, save for the splat. Their Heli cousins, in contrast, had to wrestle.
Snakes take an inordinately long time to suffocate. It was not uncommon for one to worm free. It could be downright hilarious, seeing the one speed after the other, through the tangle of slow unconcern. Irreverent children, playing tag at a funeral.
Despite human expectation, they were amazingly forthright. When one decided to hunt another, it announced itself: rearing and darting, hissing and spitting. That was what the Serpent’s Tongue actually did. It did not grant any supernatural powers of speech-craft. Instead, it stripped away all artifice, forcing its object to air their true desires. That Nomparal was still a piddling peddler instead of a mercer magnate spoke to the man’s innate ineptitude.
He was most certainly cursed. But not by her.
The Serpent’s Tongue was a witches’ tool, meant for a witch’s talent. In the simpleton’s hands, it was a siren’s song, summoning every snake within earshot. Though they were not very venomous individually, their poisons tended to linger. Her illusions had found easy grip in Nomparal’s rotten gourd. In another season or two, he’d need no sorcerous help to see serpents everywhere.
A smarter man would have burned or buried the Tongue straight away. But he was obsessed. See how he’d come, begging for forgiveness, not even thinking to return what he’d taken.
Still, his self-imposed curse had borne fruit, bringing him right back into her reach. And with such a terrible totem!
She lovingly caressed the splayed fur.
The burrower’s power was potent indeed. But it paled in comparison to that of its killer. Tantalizing traces bled into the ether, staining it with sullen effervescence. If a Neril girl, then one born to the blood of the old shamans. Unknowing. Untaught.
Scrumptious.
Power enough, perhaps, to challenge the threat rising in the east.
Gradually, she became aware of another intruder to her domain. Snakes were brilliant at spotting vibrations through their sensitive bellies. One to the east was reporting a single pair of footfalls. With a thought, she sent him to dissuade the interloper. Then she put the matter out of her mind.
She needed quiet. To think. And plan.
A shepherd’s whistle echoed among the trees.
“Axe!? Here, Axe! Where’s a good boy?!”
He smacked his thighs in an age-old summoning ritual. His knees, feeling unfairly taxed, revolted. He keeled over.
“Whoop–!”
Loyal to the hegemony but sympathetic to the revolt, his belt split its support between him and his knees with a loud snap.
“Dang it! Aaaxe!” he vented, at the top of his lungs. “You come back here, right now! I mean it! I’m gonna count to three!”
Where had the blasted beastie gotten to? It’d been here just a moment ago. They’d been playing fetch...
“One!”
Fetch? Well, certainly sticks had been involved. Wood for sure. And there’d been a lot of running. And shouting.
“Two!”
Wait… he seemed to recall he’d been doing most of the running. That couldn’t be right, could it?
“Two and a half!”
And most of the shouting. Screaming, in fact. Had he been yelling ‘fetch!’? No, that didn’t sound right…
“Four!”
No, that wasn’t it either. Who shouted ‘four!’? Dullards and madmen, that’s who! He was missing something. Something vital. Something to do with the wood…
“Timber!”
Yes, that was it! He’d shouted that a lot. So much so that Axe had lost his head. Had, in fact, gone winging off into the woods.
He’d been searching for the beastie ever since.
A faint rustle sounded from the underbrush.
“Axe?” he brightened.
The high grasses disgorged a violet-striped serpent.
“You’re not Axe,” he accused. He realized he must look a sight, sprawled in the dirt, in the middle of a clothing coup.
The newcomer drew itself up, arching in hilarity.
“Don’t you dare stick your tongue out at Phelamy Mop, you–”
His pants, apparently siding with his knees, put paid to his bid for affronted dignity. His intention to jump up pitched him into political disarray. And into the ground.
Above him, the snake grinned, shaking with merriment.
A wonderful idea occurred. Fortuitous meeting!
“Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a head for politics, would you? It just so happens we have an opening for a new belt!”
* * *
She stood with her back to a tree, listening to the krin splash in the stream. Its beast-self had an unfortunate habit of rolling in things it found pleasing to its nose.
“This stinks,” it had complained of the soap she’d pressed on it.
“You stinks,” she’d returned, pinching her nostrils shut.
“I smell like the forest,” it had defended.
“Like something what died in forest,” she’d agreed.
In the end, it had succumbed to her ultimatum: either wash itself or have her scrub it by force. It was not a threat she was willing to carry out. But she’d known the krin would give in. Despite the indecent proximity of the wolf-den, it remained terribly shy of her.
It had been all she could do, to stop it leaping into the clothes she’d gotten from the peddler. She was grateful of her foresight now. Though the jacket was patched, the shirt sweat-ingrained and the breeches discolored, they were serviceable. But they’d not have survived a day on the back of the beast Bearbait occasionally became.
And she was happy to put off wearing the country dress she’d traded for. How did lowland women walk two paces without tripping over their wayward hems? How did they ride at all?
“Hey, Kassika?”
They’d come away with clothes, provisions and a small amount of lowland coin. But no bow. The greasy peddler had proceeded as though nothing untoward had happened between them. And, she supposed, nothing had: he’d spoken no threats and loosed no arrows. There was only her certainty that he’d intended her harm.
“Kassika?”
She fervently hoped peddler Ehwan would find himself in People territory one day. His bony carcass would be a boon to any of the border markers. She’d desperately wanted to kill him herself but, so far from the hearth fires (and with the threat cooling), she’d been hesitant. And he’d had valuable information.
“Kassika?”
They were in Undan province, she thought, repeating the unfamiliar names she’d committed to memory. If they followed the road west to a village called Howford and took the river Ervice to Tongal, they could follow the Imperial highway to Tellar.
Tellar, the peddler had claimed, was the oldest, largest city in the lowlands. And it lay on the coast to the west. That had to be where she’d find the Old Masters’ Halls. And where she would–
“Kassika?”
“What?!” The sounds of washing had dwindled.
“About what that mercer said…?”
“He say many things,” she equivocated. But she knew what the krin was after. She’d heard it too: “My hand to Helia,” the swindler had vouched for his goods. And she’d seen the krin stiffen.
She’d been frozen through and only half-conscious the first time she’d heard it. In the wolf-den. She’d since forgotten: Helia’s mercy, the krin had exclaimed, upon finding their fire dead.
How was it a krin called upon a lowlander deity by rote?
And, for that matter, what in the world was a ‘bestiary’ and what business did a krin have quoting it by heart?
She shivered. She’d given the question a lot of serious thought and she was very much afraid she had an answer:
The People made their home in the high passes, because that’s where krin spawned. The Deepmeadow tribe claimed the creatures crawled up from the deep caves; Coldhearth held that they thawed from the glacial ice during warm summers; Windwinder swore they arrived from the shore beyond the Ancestral Bridge.
Wherever they came from, the Hunt saw to it that none ever escaped to the lowlands. This, by force, turned the People’s home into the krin’s habitual hunting ground. No krin had tasted lowlander flesh in more than a dozen generations.
But this one had.
She’d watched it flense through at least three citymen. And then, lo and behold, it spoke the traders’ tongue like it had been born to it. It knew things it had no business knowing. Things only citymen would know. And if its memory seemed incomplete, well, its meal had been interrupted, hadn’t it?
The implications were… too horrific to contemplate. And if they appalled her, she didn’t want the krin considering them at all. Realization might be just the thing to strip the human skin from it.
“I meant,” it continued, “specifically as regards–”
“If you finished,” she spoke over it, “I coming out...”
“Wait–! No–!” It fell over itself, splashing as it attempted to hide its nakedness from her. For a bare moment, she found it funny. Then she remembered it was wearing a tribesman’s face. And how it had likely come by it.
“Here,” she grated, tossing it its kilt.
“Can’t I have my britches, instead?” it pleaded, wading ashore.
“No ‘britches’ for you,” she denied.
“But–”
“No ‘but’ for you, also.”
“Either,” it corrected by rote.
“No ‘but’ for you either,” she conceded.
It stilled at her tone, “Have I done something wrong?”
She stared at it, with its hair dripping and its skin raised in goosebumps. Despite everything she knew, everything she’d said, she found herself doubting whether this boy was the beast she’d seen, slaughtering those citymen. She felt no threat from it. None.
“No,” she answered, confused. “Yes!”
“What did I do?” it worried, tramping after her as she gathered up their things and shouldered their new pack.
“You take too long,” she growled. “We losing daylight.”
“I thought we were camping here? Don’t you need to wash?”
“I wash later,” she decided. “Now come.”
She considered setting a pace that would preclude speaking. But the krin’s inhuman endurance made that a fool’s errand. She would have to find some other means to distract it.
“You can not to speak the mountain tongue?” she considered. She’d been wondering about that. Why retain a tribesman’s visage but not his vernacular? Perhaps it was bound to the order in which the krin consumed its prey: the freshest kill displacing the old?
“I don’t think so.”
She switched to the People’s language, “So you don’t know I’m calling you a colossal pain in my ass right now?”
It shrugged helplessly. She switched back.
“Then you must to learn,” she nodded, decisive.
“Alright?” it agreed.
She spent the rest of the day instructing it in proper speech, keeping it as complicated as she could. By nightfall, she was hoarse.
They wolfed their food, savoring the taste of hard cheese, dried fruit and salted nuts. Even the renewed hardtack was welcome. The krin seized its chance to forge ahead while her mouth was full.
“So, I was thinking,” it drawled, “about Tellar…”
She halted mid-chew.
“I have some impressions…” it struggled. “Bits and pieces, no more. But I think… I think, maybe, I’m from there?”
She swallowed hard. This was not at all what she had expected.
“You remember this place?”
“Not in so many words. It’s all disconnected. Hard to explain. But, for instance, I recall the sound of the bells ringing. The smell of the surf, see? Nothing specific just… sensations. No context.”
“Oh?” she shifted, so she could more easily draw her knife.
“And I remember,” it went on, eyes unfocusing, “the feel of a saddle. The crackle of a fire– No, many fires. Smoke...”
Something else came over its face. She tried to make sense of what she was seeing but it was too much, too jumbled.
The krin raised a trembling hand, “Something wet…”
“You am crying,” she gasped, horrified.
“Am I?” It glanced down at its damp fingertips. “How strange. Crying over something I can’t even remember…”
It smiled at her. A sad, broken smile that speared to her core.
“Thank you,” it said at last, using a phrase she’d taught it that afternoon.
“For what?” she whispered.
“For taking me home…”
* * *
Time had lost all meaning. Within the belly of the windblown beast, it was hard to remember there existed a world beyond. The sand carried a kind of infection, seeping through every orifice and into your skull. The ropes, stretching ahead and behind, became a near-intangible promise that you were, indeed, not alone.
The transition from the pocket of madness to the real world was jarring. Level ground when you expected another stair.
He blinked crusted eyes, trying to focus on the cave walls. Neever and the rest already stood to one side, all coated in the same ochre hue. He joined them, drawing off his wraps and spitting mud as the tinker’s wagon rolled in behind him.
“Everyone alright?”
Dust cascaded as they nodded their relief. He looked about.
The cave entrance was a broad, ribbed throat, the storm a swirling sea of stomach acids beyond. The space was thick with the travelers’ shocked sense of survival.
“No bandits yet,” Neever whispered.
“Let’s go make sure…”
If Hulain Vaste’s pothelm perched comically atop his head, there was nothing funny about the spear in his pudgy grip.
“Anything?” he asked in an undertone as they approaching.
“My men are searching now. But bandits have been here recently,” the helm titled toward a dead fire pit. “They may simply have dug deeper into the caves when the storm threatened.”
“Doubtful,” Obyd put in, shaking sand from her shawl.
“How so, wife?”
“If they’d drawn further in, they’d have brought their mounts inside. And this is the only cavern large enough to house horses.”
He was dying to ask how a career caravaneer knew so much about this old bandit base. But some experiences were hard won and ofttimes not as hilarious in the retelling as one might like.
One of Vaste’s guards appeared from a passage ahead, armed with bright scimitar and brighter torch. The man hurried over to whisper in his employer’s ear. The caravan master stiffened, drawing back in surprise. The guard nodded a mute affirmative.
“Show me,” the karwan commanded.
Though they’d not been invited, they trailed after, imitating the guard’s severe silence. The cave ceiling gradually drew down on their heads, the sides squeezing inward. Vaste’s spear stuck at an odd angle in a tricky switchback and refused to budge.
“Blasted thing!” the karwan spat, abandoning it.
The narrow passage opened into an uneven chamber. The still air was suddenly redolent with the stink of spilled blood and bowels. What looked to have been the main living area lived no longer. The caravan guards roved around, their torches lighting dead and bloated bandits and sundry bits of bandits.
“What happened here?” the karwan wondered aloud.
“I doubt it was something they ate,” he observed, kneeling.
“More like something ate them,” the caravan captain affirmed.
Ah, yes. He’d seen wounds caused by everything from half-bricks to halberds. He’d rarely seen someone chewed about, though. But the hollowed ribcages and ravaged thighs and buttocks said, clearly, these men had been something’s dinner.
“Not jackals, certainly,” the caravan master opined. “Sandcats?”
His conversation quota apparently exhausted, Daim looked a question at one of his men. The young guard cleared his throat.
“If the pride were here first, maybe,” the man speculated, eyes roving over the carnage. “They’re territorial. But the bedrolls show the bandits bedding down here awhile. Sandcats are mostly solitary, too. A pride big enough to pick off,” he did a quick count, “eleven men is unheard of. And I see not a single sandcat carcass.”
