The Daemon Prism, page 18
Cantering hoofbeats brought the little weasel back, babbling: “Pardon the delay, Master, especially as it was all for naught. ’Twasn’t dock I saw, but blisterweed. I’m attempting only to give some variety to our fare….”
Fortunately for him, Andero took out right away, and I had to mind Devil and my seat. Would that I could break the damned tether that linked Devil to Andero’s mount. “Lag behind us again, John Deune,” I shouted after them, “and we’ll send you back to Merona afoot.”
I forced my hands to unclench, lest I bruise poor Devil. I wanted to hit something. To hammer something. To twist something until it broke. Anything but lay my mind to what Andero had said. I’d spent these days on the road reviewing every word, every circumstance, every action that I could recall since the day Masson de Cuvier had arrived at Pradoverde, trying to figure out why the sky over Jarasco might have been bulging and what connection that might have with white-gowned enchantresses and legendary emeralds and tales of the war for Heaven and the madness that had risen in me in that ruined cellar. Going over it again would feel like shaving my skin with a rasp.
By afternoon, the intermittent snow had yielded to a dry chill, and we joined a stream of travelers heading eastward. Patching sounds, smells, and snips of conversations into a moving landscape was a welcome distraction.
A heavily guarded caravan hauled tin and silver to trade for silk and porcelain.
A large family drove a rattling wagon eastward, hoping to reclaim their family holdings in Aroth. Their axles ground, spalled most likely, and would surely break down before too many more days on the road.
A large group of Cult penitents ventured the pilgrim way in winter as punishment for their faults. They nattered at each other about proper badges on their clothing and whether one could drink wine when fasting. An argument about the requirement to stop at every one of the fifty shrines along the way put them to blows.
A few days’ sharing encampments and wells with these myriad strangers and I began to distinguish individual travelers. One of the penitents peppered her conversations with wholly irrelevant quotations from Cult holy books. A soldier, who forever stank of spirits, had a wicked case of the shakes. A woman with five bodyguards and an older female attendant was riding to her wedding. Would her bridegroom smell the seductive smoke of synoise lingering on her garments? Did she deaden her senses in anticipation of his attentions or to erase the time they were apart?
It was about this same time I began to suspect we were being followed.
“Odd,” I said to Andero. “Weren’t those two ahead of us yesterday?”
“Who?”
“The two riders we passed not three breaths ago.”
“Naught but a clump of scrubby locusts at the edge of a field three breaths ago.”
“Then they must be hiding behind the trees. They stink of pipeweed and have likely not bathed since their birth washing. Their horses are lively and light, but they never make ground on us, and never talk but in mumbles when they’re close by. How odd is that? One of them wheezes like a leaky bellows. The other has a nose that runs like a river. Surely you can pick them out.”
“There’s a deal of riders about, Dante. None odder than the next.”
A day out from Mattefriese, the traffic grew heavier. The roads were dry. We shed our wool mufflers after sunrise and welcomed the sun’s blaze at midday. Three times that day I noted the two, once ahead, twice behind.
“I’ve peeled my eyes,” said Andero as we made camp at a caravan stop outside the city walls, “but I’ve seen naught out of the common way. There’s thirty campfires hereabouts, and travelers always ride together in the lean seasons.” Andero’s great bulk leaned closer. “Not my place to say, but you’re blind, if you recall. And now your collar is exposed, and your scraggle of a beard makes you look like a dying scarecrow, none dare lag anywhere near you.”
“Tell me how a man who smells like a wet dog looks better,” I said, a grin threatening. My brother could find my better humor, even when I thought it entirely lost. Still, those two riders were up to no good.
Andero sharpened his pen, unstoppered his ink bottle, and went back to scratching at his map as he did every night when the weather was dry. John Deune fussed with the fire and his pot. The manservant had maintained an exceptional quiet since we’d joined the other travelers.
“What of you, John Deune? You must have been accustomed to watching for thieves when you traveled with Lord Ilario. Have you noticed anyone suspicious?”
The thwup and splash of a dropped water flask marked him. I’d never heard him clumsy or so fluent in his cursing. “No! Certainly not! If I did notice such villains—and indeed I was always most careful watching out for the chevalier—you can be sure I would mention it right away. Many a time I saved his lordship’s purse from a snatch. He refused to go about without his jewels and gold chains and silken kerchiefs, as if every man and woman might own such things and not desire them. It was certain his privilege to display his riches so.”
I didn’t like having John Deune around. He didn’t know when to be quiet. And I’d never taken enough notice of him in the days when I might have learned to distinguish his truth or lies. But to abandon such a silly, preening cockroach on this road would be like offering him up to bandits. He was Ilario’s man, and Ilario had given his life for me. I owed him something. But I couldn’t make myself trust him.
Not wishing his knife so close to my throat, I didn’t allow him to shave my chin, but indeed, he wielded a pot and spoon with worthy skills. Using his leather packet of herbs and spices, he could have made a decent meal from dead grass and sticks. Yet I would have welcomed his dead master the more. Guilt and regret were hollow company.
“Perhaps you could work some magical thing to detect those two,” said Andero. I clamped my teeth against the curse I wanted to bellow at him, emptied my mind of the reasons, and rolled myself in my blanket.
MATTEFRIESE
Andero reported a large number of Temple bailiffs hanging about the gates of Mattefriese, so we took to the road as soon as Andero and John returned from the city. Andero brought information about our route, and John Deune brought supplies along with complaints about rancid bacon, stale bread, and the high cost of water.
After only a short distance on the high road, Andero slowed, allowing a wagon to rattle past us and out of hearing. “Five metres and we turn south,” he said.
“What are you doing, fool of a smith?” said John Deune. “Abidaijar is straight east on the high road. The librarian …”
“Plans have changed,” my brother said. “We’re not going to Abidaijar.”
The winds cut deep as we headed south. I drew up my hood, wrapped my scarf about my face, and retreated into a drowsy half sleep….
“Halt!” bellowed Andero, dragging me back to full alert. “Where is the blasted prig? How are we to make any speed at all if he keeps drifting so far out of sight?”
I held tight as Devil followed the other beast’s lead and came to a stop.
“I’ll go back. You wait here,” said Andero, detaching my tether rope.
“We should leave him,” I said. “He’s likely decided it’s time to collect the Temple’s price on my head.”
“If he didn’t have most of our food and all the extra water, I’d agree. From what I hear, we can’t afford to go ahead without. But I see the least thing suspicious, I’ll break his neck.”
My ever-genial brother made me believe he’d do it.
Surely it was half an eternity till the two of them returned.
“My profound apologies, Master. It was only after we were on our way that I realized I’d left all our extra water at the caravanserai.”
“Then why didn’t you say something instead of vanishing?” I snapped.
“Indeed, Master”—he was near choking—“Goodman Andero had emphasized how we dared not risk this road on a meager supply. Shamed, I thought it best to slip back quickly before we’d gone too far.”
I could not judge if he spoke truth. Yet no one had brought the Temple down on me in Mattefriese, and Andero wouldn’t have brought him back if he’d seen a risk. We shared out supplies equally and warned him that next time he fell behind we’d not stop for him.
“Certainly, Master. Certainly.”
“I think I know the two stragglers you spoke of, Master,” said Andero as we rode onward. “Glimpsed them in the marketplace buying sausage and water flasks. Two scrawny, pasty-faced fellows in ill-fitting clothes. One wheezing; one about to drown in his own snot. But they strike me as shop clerks more than highwaymen. I don’t—”
“Why would anyone be interested in us?” burst in John. “Well, of course, I know there’s a price on the mage’s head. But how would they know of it? Not that I noticed them. But none would ever guess that a ruffian on a leash”—he sniffed like a lord himself—“could ever be a court mage, certainly not one so clever and dangerous.”
Clearly John Deune believed blind men were necessarily deaf as well.
“Exactly so,” said Andero. “Indeed, they ducked away when a Temple bailiff came poking his nose about the market, elsewise I’d have had a serious word with them. Sure, if I should see them along this road, I’ll gut them both.”
I believed that, too.
DEMESNE OF ARABASCA
For days, we encountered neither man nor beast on the road south. As the steep ground leveled out to high plains, sere winds sapped moisture from our bodies and life from our spirits. Even Andero grumbled.
We traveled what Andero’s comrades in the Coverge legion called a ghost road. Our narrow dirt track centered a wide, shallow, grassy trough, the evidence of repeated invasion. For centuries, armies had marched across this land. My imagination conjured pockets of colder air in the wind, naming them hollow-eyed dead men who whispered, Lead usss. To be locked in one’s own head oft made for poor amusement.
No one followed, not even our sausage-eating tagalongs. Either Andero or I stayed alert during John Deune’s night watch. But I set no wards. To imagine reaching for power set my hands trembling like an old woman’s.
On our fourth day out from Mattefriese, the road brought us within sight of a village. Andero described it as a cluster of ramshackle huts huddled together like scrawny cattle with their backs to the wind. Though the daylight waned, he urged us to keep moving. “They’ll want to feed us,” he said, “but I’ve never seen folk could make a life from so much nothing as out here. Taking aught from ’em would be thieving.”
But it was already too late. “Welcome, travelers, be ye men or spirits!”
“It’s four of ’em come out,” murmured Andero. “Elders. A scrawny lot, but grinning wider than a pawner when a lord walks into his shop.”
“Rest ye this night ’neath our roofs,” said a breathless man who sounded older than the road. “We’ll spit a lamb in celebration of thy company, then share a cup and a tale of the wide world.”
“We’ve no wish to put you out,” said Andero. “And we need to be on our way.”
“There’s naught before thee but the haunted heights and the sea of sand. The dead will wait. We get few living travelers along this road. What news and stories thou might share will sustain us longer than the bits of sustenance we provide.”
“Have you seen travelers ride through since the change of season?” I blurted, as another cold pocket of air gave me a shudder. Easy to understand how people living here could imagine ghosts on the road. “Perhaps a party with a prisoner?”
“Only the one group, some two cycles of the moon since,” said a raspvoiced woman. “Maybe a dozen riders. They didn’t slow. Didn’t even look our way. We thought they might be dead.”
Perhaps Portier and his captors. Two months … The timing could be right. Not dead, though. Surely not dead.
“We’d be grateful for whatever you can spare,” said Andero. “My name is Manet de Shreu. This is my master, Mage Talon, and our servant, John Deune. My master travels south to ply his work in desert climes.”
“A sorcerer!” The old man’s voice grew wary. “This land aches from magework….”
“But he is welcome, anyway,” pronounced a woman, chiding. “He Who Wanders the Stars bids us welcome wanderers of all kinds.”
“I’ve no business here, elder,” I said. “Just a need to sleep.”
The villagers paraded us to each house in turn. Most were occupied by women and children, their men out with their animals. They sustained a small herd of sheep and goats by spreading them far out on the plains to graze, companioned and comforted in their lonely nights by their god or angel or whatever He Who Wanders the Stars was thought to be. The women produced woolen cloth that they colored with dyes distilled from the highland plants. Every other year, they took their cloth to Mattefriese to trade. They spoke of the journey with wonder, as if it were one of King Philippe’s voyages of exploration, a dangerous and exciting adventure from which one might or might not return with riches untold.
The colors and weaving were quite fine for starveling villagers, so John Deune declared aloud, as if poor folk might be as deaf as blind men.
Yet, indeed the villagers did the same. Whispers trailed us like dust in our wake: … he wears bruises from the Hungry One’s rod. Hide the children. Is he dead? Daemon. From Castelle Escalon to this village at the end of the world, I could not seem to escape the name, the same in every myth. It had never bothered me until Castelivre.
Claiming recent illness, I excused myself from the lamb spitting, tale spinning, and further mumbling. They provided me tea and the porridge they kept on the fire for infants and elders, and did not ask me to reconsider. Andero insisted we not crowd their cramped homes, so they offered us a lambing shed to bed down in. Stomach satisfied, grateful for a windbreak and the deep straw, I rolled up in my blanket and forced urgency aside. Andero would watch.
As sense played chase-and-hide with oblivion, a solid mass manifested itself a few centimetres from my head. Perhaps with a touch of a wheeze. My hand crept to my staff.
“Soft.” The old man’s words weighed in the night like gold amid feathers. “Thou’rt safe with me. I recognized thee from afar—a wanderer who cannot choose what realm he walks. Who crosses boundaries no man is meant to venture.”
“You’re more right than you could know,” I said, exhaustion slurring my words. “Sometimes it’s hard to find the way.”
“Arise, Daemon. Walk the road of the dead. But be wary of thy companion, required to speak truth, though his meaning is ever lies. And though wary, stay with him, for he leads thee to thy unhappy destiny. Thou’rt other, born in darkness, gifted with strength that can quench the light of Heaven.”
My body near stood up of its own self, ready to bellow a denial. But my limbs would not answer and I decided I must be asleep. Born in darkness. How else could he know that?
“Dante, are you still awake?”
“No,” I muttered into my arm. “There’s no wind. No rocks. No more wheezy old men with doom on their tongues. King Philippe sleeps no better.”
“I need to speak with you.” My brother’s voice was troubled, and when I didn’t answer right off, he didn’t go away.
“So speak.”
“It’s middle-night.”
Gods, my turn to watch. I groaned. “All right, all right, I’ll get up. Are you drunk?”
“Nay. The shepherds said they’d keep watch. I told them bandits tried to steal your collar at Mattefriese and might be after us. It’s—I’ve been drinking tea with the headman and his wife.”
“Then, what?”
“I don’t like to trouble you.”
I sat up, trying not to grind my teeth. “I’m awake. You’re not troubling me, and I don’t eat large men more than once a year. What is it?”
“There’s a man and a child been herding sheep in the hills out east. A boy went out this morning to take them supplies and found the little one half dead and the man bashing his head on the walls of his hut and tearing his skin away. They’ve no healer in the village.”
My spirit froze. “I’m not a healer, Andero.”
“I know that. It’s just that—well, it really sounds more up your line. The headman’s wife had them brought to a hut where they keep the sick, but she saw no signs of illness. No fever. No flux. Nothing. They’re thinking it’s a curse and are afraid to go near them. Maybe you could tell them what’s what.”
“They don’t want me near them. You heard them mumbling about sorcerers and daemons. It’s naught but bad water or sheep fever.”
“But the two will starve if their own people won’t care for them. The boy’s naught but a nub.”
“I won’t. I know what you’re trying to do, but I can’t. You heard them. They don’t want magic. And so wary of it, they’re like to blame me even if this fellow’s broken his head or eaten poison.”
“Just asking that you tell them whether it’s magic or no. I’ll vow you don’t have to use magic to do that much. After … if you can’t do for them, then that’s the way it must be.”
The stubborn oaf was setting up to argue until dawn. If I wanted to sleep again, I’d have to look. “All right. All right. If they agree to accept my word, I’ll take a look. Make sure they understand.”
After a few hours under a roof, the cold was fierce and hungry. The wind slammed my chest like a battering ram. As we made the long trek to the hovel where the shepherd and his son had been abandoned, I didn’t dare ask Andero to look at the sky. Dread rode the winds that night, outside me as well as inside.
“If you see that dotard who barged in before you did, tell him he’s the Daemon,” I grumbled. The old man’s words trailed after me just enough to roil my gut, but not enough to mean anything.
“Didn’t see him.”
Maybe he was another dream. Gods, I was ready to be done with dreams forever.
Someone had built up a fire in the healing hut before running away. The room was unbearably hot and smelled of burnt sheep dung. I sent Andero to discover if there was one person in the village who might assist me. I didn’t want my brother in the room if there was sickness after all.
