The Resting Places, page 11
It stood at the edge of the treeline. Halfway home, then. Gryn was eager for a rest and a roof over his head – even another tankard full of dreadful wine would do quite nicely, as he’d already drunk the flagons of beer he bought for the journey in Ar-Ennascath. The only shame in that, he told himself, was not buying more.
But a rest would do nicely. Perhaps for even more than a single night. Especially after one of the wheels on his cart had splintered, which meant a whole lot more dragging than pulling. Even with a lightened load and Gryn’s optimism, the pain in his back was enough to allow some measure of doubt in making it back to the Somewhere Sister by nightfall. Still, quicker than him carrying it all on his back.
The front door was open. He tied the leather pouch of earnings on his belt next to the hammer as he climbed the steps to the door, pushing it open with a booted foot, snow falling from it to the floor inside.
It was dark and cold. No fire in the hearth.
‘Er… hullo?’ he asked the shadows of the room.
There. Something on the floor, just around the corner. He drew the hammer from his belt. The old anvil hammer, as much for working his craft as for punching through armour and equally good at both.
The thing on the floor disappeared behind the wall. Gryn followed. The door to the cellar was open. Gryn quieted his breath, staying close to the wall and raising the hammer higher as he peered through the doorway.
The innkeeper was standing in the darkness at the foot of the stairs, looking up at him. Her silhouette was all he could see, eyes reflecting what light there was at the top of the stairs.
‘V-Vendriel?’ he said, his gruff voice needing an extra push. ‘Are yeh–’
Stay.
She had brought her hands up and they were holding something. Something rough-edged, glistening. Like crystals in the mines. Aetherquartz, like the shards in his leather pouch. Absurdly, he thought she was demanding more payment. When she smiled at him, he saw the blood, too. Like she was eating them, no matter the damage done to what used to be an even row of teeth, now resembling the jagged, broken crystals she held out to him.
There’s plenty to go around.
Another figure was behind Vendriel. They were identical, though this one seemed to be taller. Someone like me, he remembered. She found her family, then. They climbed the steps towards him. He cursed himself, knowing he couldn’t run, not now. He’d barely make it to the door.
Gryn gripped his hammer, readying a blow, when her mouth began to open. It didn’t stop when it should have, impossibly continuing, the sharp cracks of bone breaking, skin stretching itself too thin.
He brought the hammer down, muttering an apology that never reached his lips, dying on the way there, when something halted his hammer hand in an explosion of pain, holding it back from its skull-shattering blow.
‘Argh!’ he shouted, his grip on the hammer loosening, dropping it down the stairwell. Something else fell along with it. Hardtack, from one of his pockets. Not that it had far to fall, but it sure didn’t break.
The thing that was wrapped around his wrist, the thing that stopped his swing was, impossibly, a tongue, or the grotesque exaggeration of one. There was a third aelf, if aelves they still were, there in the cellar, and this one had its impossible violet tongue writhing around his arm like a serpent, sinking its sharp barbs into him, shredding the skin beneath as it moved. His arm felt like it was on fire, nearly torn from him when the tongue pulled him down the unforgiving stairs, and Gryn landed in a heap at the feet of the things in the cellar. He could feel blood running down his arm, pooling on the stone floor.
The one who used to be Vendriel loomed over him, and Gryn struggled to keep his eyes open, to meet her gaze… but the blood falling from her ruin of a mouth soaked his face. He peered up at her through the blackened blood. Vendriel had taken the pouch of aetherquartz from his belt. There was something of recognition in her eyes. Eyes that looked like their old selves, staring down at the glimmering shards tumbling from the pouch and into her hands. Her eyes found his.
There is no pain here.
‘Yeh bloody liar,’ Gryn managed through the blood. He tried to lift his arm, but the pain was immense, the barbed things digging deeper into his skin–
Useless without pain.
Vendriel let the shards fall from her hand. They scattered, landing in the growing pool of Gryn’s blood, which crept along the cellar floor and towards the shadowed corner.
He could see something reflected in the blood, now, a light from the corner.
It was a furnace – a roaring, otherworldly fire of violet inside it. The metal grate which covered the furnace was stained with soot. It curled upwards at the ends, bent from use and time.
It was smiling.
THE GNARLED BOUGH
Jamie Mistry-Evans
There is love here, in the dark.
It is love tinged with sadness and loss, embodied by two towering figures – one a woman, the other a man, both grey with sickness. Where once there were faces, now there is only a sucking void that spreads ever outward, consuming their memory until only death and the darkness remain.
The season turns. A cycle begins anew. Impossibly small points of light that at first seem like stars erupt into iridescent shoots of new life, growing, climbing, illuminating. Each stem is a tree, each tree a tower, a city of song wrought from living bark and breathing stone. Sadness fades. Hope blossoms, for a time.
Now hear the carriage rattling across the cobbles. It stops. The door opens and a hand reaches out, bedecked in emeralds and jade, palm open in invitation. Does this hand offer life or death? There is no time to think, no choice permitted. The palm closes. Hope is crushed and dragged back into the darkness. The city is gone. The season turns. Death it is.
Arnvoe awoke, his ragged clothes drenched in cold sweat. The blackness before his eyes was as absolute as it had been in his dream. Chest heaving with anxiety, the boy rolled his aching body onto its side and felt damp straw beneath him, giving way to cold stone. His trembling fingers searched the ground and at last found the small copper box they sought. He opened it, took out the firesteel, attempted to strike the flint and missed. He sat up and tried again. This time he made contact. The flint sparked and a dim glow bloomed into life as the charcloth caught. His eyes adjusting to the meagre light, Arnvoe spotted a rushlight beside him. He retrieved it and used the charcloth to ignite the wick. He almost wished he hadn’t.
The boy’s eyes darted from one corner to another, probing his surroundings. The windowless room was little bigger than a coffin, its stone walls wet with condensation, crumbling mortar consumed by black moss. At his feet was a rotting wooden door bearing a small aperture set with iron bars in the manner of a jail cell. Arnvoe breathed a sigh of relief. The last whispers of the dream loosened their grip upon his heart. All was as it should be.
The absence of natural light should have made it impossible to tell day from night, but years of punishment for sleeping in late had conditioned Arnvoe to wake before dawn by reflex alone. He put away the contents of the tinderbox, stood up and brushed straw from his threadbare trousers and tunic. Holding the slender rushlight aloft between finger and thumb, Arnvoe opened the door as swiftly as he dared, peering into the darkness to be sure that he was alone before leaving his quarters. He padded quickly down the narrow passage in his tattered goatskin slippers, flickering shadows following in his wake, before ascending a set of stone steps and emerging into the east wing of Schreikwood Manor. The passageways here were wider and adorned with carved panels depicting tree-like creatures engaged in various bizarre and disturbing sacraments that the master, Lord Schreikwood, insisted were merely benign supplications to the forest spirits of old. The figures danced in the guttering glow of the rushlight as Arnvoe scurried silently towards a grand wooden archway that led into the great hall at the heart of the sprawling manse.
The current interior of the hall had been conceived by Lord Schreikwood himself in mimicry of the Living City’s celebrated Everspring Temple, for the master had a passion for the Realm of Life that, to Arnvoe’s mind, bordered on obsession. The temple was famed, among other things, for its two mighty ironoaks that reached to the vaulted ceiling, and which supported an ornate bell tower in the cradle of their branches. These would have been natural growth, the houseboy guessed, sung into being by the city’s ineffable sylvaneth patrons, or perhaps even the Everqueen herself. The copies at Schreikwood Manor were carved from corpsewood by local craftsmen, and the artifices of Shyish had contrived to lend them a rather less wholesome aspect. They recalled to Arnvoe the hushed tales told by the Freeguild mercenaries that guarded the manor’s environs – of dead things reaching up from the soil with mangled fingers in the forest beyond the wall.
Arnvoe stared up at the bell tower. It was relatively small, he supposed, open to the hall below, with no ledge to stand upon and largely inaccessible except when a scaffold was erected for occasional repairs. This suited the boy well – no one ever expected him to be up there. Provided no one stood immediately beneath it and looked directly upwards, it was his own private world. He set his foot against a carved knot of the westward trunk, reached up and began to climb, arriving at the top and clambering through the branches in mere moments. He eased himself into the small tower – taking care not to knock the iron bell – and leant back, bracing his legs against the opposite wall. From here he could look out and see the whole valley.
It was dawn now, or what passed for dawn in Morrthawn Vale. Here the arrival of Hysh was marked not by a disc of brilliant light rising gloriously over the horizon but with a sickly glow that bled between the distant peaks and surrendered itself at once to the all-consuming fog. This was what Shyish did to beautiful things, Arnvoe thought – it twisted and diminished them until their original spirit had been entirely drained.
The grey light crept insidiously down the mountains and over the vast primeval forest, finally dragging itself up the walls of the manor, into the bell tower, and spreading across Arnvoe’s gaunt face. The valley was not greatly improved by its presence. A bereft artist teetering on the edge of sanity could not have daubed a bleaker or more oppressive vista, but it was the closest thing to beauty in the houseboy’s meagre existence, and in a sombre way he held it dear.
The courtyard below was largely obscured from Arnvoe’s view, but he could hear the distant thud of boots as the Freeguild made their patrols, along with the first stirrings of the household staff making preparations to depart. Tomorrow would be Nocta Heldenfast – the night of the god-king – and by established custom most servants were permitted two days of absence to observe the festivities with their families in the surrounding villages, leaving only a skeleton staff back at the manor. This comprised the Freeguilders, the cook, the steward and, of course, Arnvoe. He had no family in the Vale, or anywhere else for that matter, and the traditions of the Heldenfast were not his.
Arnvoe’s thoughts were interrupted by a loud and sudden creak as the great main entrance doors were swung open and heavy footsteps echoed purposefully through the hall below. He looked down and saw an unfamiliar figure flanked by two guards – an aelf by the look of her, pale face covered in scars and a cloak of reptilian hide wrapped about her ornate ebon armour. One of the guards continued on in the direction of the senior servants’ quarters, while the others stopped beneath the bell tower.
It struck the houseboy that he had remained atop his perch for too long. He was late in reporting for duty. But he couldn’t be seen leaving the tower – there would be repercussions for that. Panic beginning to stir, Arnvoe had no choice but to wait, sitting perfectly still and praying that the strange visitor – even now craning her neck to examine the faded decorations of the hall – did not look up.
The guard returned, and Arnvoe’s heart filled with dread at the sight of the man who accompanied him – now he was truly trapped. The gaunt frame of the steward, Peuvan Kratchloc, stalked into the space beneath the tower, lank grey hair trailing down angular shoulders clad in worn black velvet. He spoke to the visitor. Arnvoe couldn’t make out what was said, but the cacophony of spitting and hissing that issued from the steward’s thin lips indicated that he was in a typically foul temper. The man reached to his thick leather belt and Arnvoe winced involuntarily. Kratchloc unclasped a vial of grave-sand from the belt and reluctantly proffered it to the visitor, who was forced to suffer the indignity of wrenching it from the steward’s sinewy fingers. The aelf then produced a small package from beneath her cloak and handed it over in exchange.
The package was wrapped in material of lustrous green that contrasted vividly with the drabness of the hall. Arnvoe squinted and leant down to get a better look. It put a strain on his muscles; his legs and back were really beginning to ache now. The package was far too small for Arnvoe to glean any notion of its contents, but something about it called to him. It was curious, an almost physical phenomenon, tugging him down. As the steward and the stranger turned to leave, the boy could bear the strain no more. His legs gave way and he slipped, clipping the bell with an almighty clang before landing with a thud and a grunt of pain in the upper branches of the corpsewood oak.
Four pairs of eyes turned sharply upwards.
Arnvoe spent the rest of the morning and afternoon attending to his duties – a burden that was greatly increased by the absence of the majority of the staff. After the incident in the great hall, the steward had departed abruptly on other business, but the look on his face had haunted Arnvoe all day. It was a face seething with contempt and thinly concealed malice. A reckoning would be coming, of that there could be no doubt, but with the manor standing largely empty and eerily silent, Arnvoe had given preference to those duties that took him as far away from the sound of approaching footsteps as possible.
The events of the morning now seemed like something of a portent, for Arnvoe’s work had been plagued by mishaps and unnerving incidents at every turn. When he had been called upon to tend the master’s hearth, some centipedal creature, slick and menacing, had skittered from the woodpile and disappeared into a crack in the walls. Barely audible sounds, like the mournful sighing of wind before a storm, seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere. The black moss normally confined to the subterranean chambers had inexplicably spread above ground and seemed to grow back as quickly as Arnvoe could scrape it away. This task in particular seemed without end, and its futility – coupled with the gnawing hunger in the boy’s empty stomach – at last prompted him to risk downing tools to make for the kitchen.
There was no particular provision for Arnvoe when it came to meals. He took what he could get, which was very little since the master had decreed, against all reason, that the boy should be encouraged to draw nutrition directly from the soil. Now Arnvoe skulked in the kitchen doorway, half-heartedly scraping clumps of moss from the timber frame, hoping against hope to be noticed and invited in to feast upon the scraps of Lord Schreikwood’s afternoon meal. His eyes darted furtively to a shapeless mound of stained woollen garments hunched over a pot-bellied stove, wreathed in clouds of steam.
‘I sees you back there, young Arnvoe!’ spat the cook, without turning around.
Arnvoe jumped.
‘B-but,’ he stammered, ‘how?’
‘Got eyes in the back of me ’ead, I ’ave,’ muttered the cook.
‘I wasn’t–’
‘Don’t give me none of that. I knows why you’re here.’
A bundle of rags that might once have been a reasonably pretty headscarf nodded towards a nearby table, upon which sat a plate strewn with small bones. Some looked as though they might have a little sinew left on them. Arnvoe scurried into the kitchen, snatched the plate and set about the bones like a rabid hound. The old cook wasn’t so bad, he thought. She was a formidable woman, as hard and bitter as anyone or anything else in the Vale, but she looked out for him in her way. She was the only one that did.
Arnvoe now saw that the old cook was stirring a great iron pot bubbling with a glutinous grey liquid. Ragged lumps of disintegrating vegetable matter rose and fell like decomposing flotsam on the tide.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘The master’s supper is what it is,’ the cook hissed, ‘so you stop eatin’ it up with those sad green eyes of yours.’
The shapeless mound of garments shifted a little and turned towards the boy, revealing a face so deeply wrinkled that most would have been hard-pressed to identify the precise location of its features. One of the wrinkles turned upward a little in what Arnvoe recognised as a half-hearted smile.
‘Jaderoot stew. Somethin’ the master ate in Thyria once, I’m told – or near as I could make it with the provisions they sent up from the valley, anyhow.’
Suddenly the cook let out a piercing howl. The wooden spoon fell from her hand, clanged noisily off the edge of the pot and clattered across the flagstones, leaving an oily smear in its wake. The cook glowered in shock at her leathery finger, where a large red bead was rapidly growing. It hung down, pregnant and bulbous, then dripped into the stew with a nauseating plop. The cook drew her finger away quickly and suckled upon it with flaccid, whiskery lips.
‘Ooh!’ she squealed. ‘What in the…?’
Arnvoe reached to pick up the spoon. He was about to wrap his fingers around the handle but hesitated. He knelt down closer and tilted his head curiously. There, on the handle, was a vicious black thorn. Not a splinter but a real thorn, as though the handle were the stem of a rose. He lifted the spoon up carefully and, turning it in his hand, noticed three smaller thorns along its length.
‘Look at that!’ said the cook, waving her stricken digit. ‘I’m bleedin’!’
