The Black Book, page 19
part #2 of The Cycle of the Scour Series
Then he pulled back and grabbed her by the collar. "What d'you think you're doing?!"
"Oh!" Ora fanned herself, head swaying. "Forgive me. I must have…had too much to drink!"
Lod picked up her mug. He hardly had to tilt it before beer spilled past the lip. "If that's too much, you ought to start ordering it in thimbles!"
"Too much work this morning, then. It's made me light-headed. Whatever did it, there's no need to humiliate me."
Lod drew back his head, clearly confused as to how he'd been put on the defensive after she had been the one to cause offense.
"Never mind it," he muttered. "Just a momentarily spell, I'm sure."
Myla and I exchanged a look. The talk got a bit awkward. The server returned with beers, bread, and sheep bone broth, and the promise of something more substantial on its way. This at least gave us the chance to shift the conversation to the matter of how good everything was and how we couldn't wait to see what came next. Lod made a pass at drawing our talk back around to business, but when Ora brushed him off, he got a thoughtful look on his face.
The group beside me was growing increasingly loud and prone to laughter in a way that suggested to me that people were about to get punched. One of them had gotten out a dagger and was carving up the table with it, smiling crazily at his work. I considered several means of escape, be it straight to the door, or flinging myself under the table.
Then the serving girl brought out the evening's dinner, and my concern for my physical safety fell firmly into second place. The meal was somewhere between a thick stew or a looser sauce, stuffed with red beans, white beans, and hunks of lamb, filled out with pea-sized pellets of wheat dough cooked until soft and chewy.
And lots of old bread to sop it up with, of course.
Was it the finest dinner I'd ever eaten? No, any of the year's feasts would beat it. But between our travels, the cold, and the darkness outside, it was perhaps the most pleasant meal I'd ever had.
The men next to us grew louder and more rowdy yet. If Rowe had been with us, he'd have challenged several of them to duels already. Chairs scraped; they were standing, smirking down at the room around them. But rather than beating everyone up, they made way for the door, bumping into tables and chairs as they went, drawing plenty of glares. No one had the stomach for more than dirty looks, though. The pub seemed to give a collective sigh of relief as they left.
Lod and Ora had been laughing over some joke I didn't get. As soon as the pub door closed behind the last of the departing group, the levity dropped from Ora's face like a glass vase to a stone floor.
"The men you seek?" she said. "You just saw them."
Lod choked on his beer. "How would you know? You kept stopping me from saying who we're lookin' for."
"You said you're after the men who robbed the graveyard earlier this year, aren't you? That was them."
"They just told you this, did they? That they stole up a mess of their own town's dead?"
"Wasn't the town's own dead. Was Mallishers that died from the yellow pox. Soldiers, mostly. Plenty of 'em had beaten our people in the streets for looking at them crossed. Nobody was upset when they got yanked from their graves."
"Is that why they said they did it?" Myla said. "To dishonor the occupiers?"
"It's what they said, sure. But no one with half a head of sense bought it."
"Why not?"
Ora kept her blue eyes fixed on Myla. "Because we know just what those people are."
"Nethermancers."
The old woman nodded slowly. "Used to be a secret, and a close one. But over the year's course, they've stopped trying to hide it. Sometimes like they're flaunting it. Nobody likes it, of course, because once you start waving the shadows around, it's only a matter of time before the king's men come marching down the long road."
"Has there been anything, ah…strange since they dug up the cemetery?" I said.
"Strange as in how?"
I exchanged a look with Myla, then we both looked at Lod. Lod gave a small nod. "If it's safe with anyone, it's with her."
"Sightings or rumors of undead," I said. "Especially skeletons. Or things that look like skeletons."
"None that I've heard." Ora tapped the side of her mug; she was wearing a copper ring, and it clinked each time. "They've been doing some bragging, though. Saying that if Mallon tries to come and get them, they'll hit the Mallish with something they've never seen before—and won't have any idea how to stop."
"Did they happen to say what this weapon might be?"
"If'n they did, it wasn't where I could hear it."
"Do you know where they do their foul work?"
"They hold services in the Temple of Silidus. But that's right here in town. I'm guessing that's not the same place they're raising an army of the dead."
I clapped my hands to the table. "We'll have time for more questions later. Right now we have to go follow them before they get away!"
"We're not going anywhere," Myla said.
"But we have them right here. And they will be drunk and stupid, hence easy to follow."
"Our mission was to find out if there are other members of the conspiracy in Barr. We've just done that. Inquisitor Vara ordered us not to get involved beyond that."
"But if we find out where they're doing their deeds—"
She shook her head flatly. "Anything that might expose us before the full strength of the Black Book is here is out of the question. How can you be so strict about following some orders and so determined to defy others?"
"I suppose it's because some of them are lots better than others."
"Defying orders won't earn us anything but a lashing. We're going to have a nice quiet night, a well-deserved rest, and we'll start back for Collen in the morning."
This still felt like a wasted opportunity, but I couldn't argue with putting a swift end to our wandering around in the middle of nowhere. I reached for my mug and found it empty. For related reasons, my bladder wasn't, and I got up to use the privy, which was wisely located outside. As I stepped out the door, something hit my face, and I flinched. It was snowing.
I completed my business and returned inside. As I maneuvered to my place, I passed by the section of table where the boisterous nethermancers had been sitting, which was still empty. And stopped dead in my tracks.
The man with the dagger had carved an evil symbol into the table's surface. But alien as it was, I'd seen it before. Cut in simple lines, it was squarish. Sharp claws appeared to grip the right and left edges of the frame. From the center stared a pair of eyes, long and slanted. There was just enough of a suggestion of a face to know that it was horrible.
More than horrible: demonic.
"What's the matter?" Lod called to me. "Our ale too strong for your thin northern blood?"
"The people we came to find here," I said. "We were right all along. They may have worked out how to make bone golems—but their end goal is to make demons."
Myla blinked at me. "This was something you learned by relieving yourself?"
"I watched one of them carve this into the table just before they left."
The three of them got up to have a look at what had spooked me so bad, being subtle to avoid the attention of the other patrons. Once they were done, we all sat back down.
"I saw this same drawing in a book we confiscated in Allingham," I explained in a low voice. "The work was a theory on how to summon demons from out of the netherworld."
"And?" Myla said. "Didn't we already know the Scorpions had ties to the people we were investigating in the Western Kingdoms?"
"And those people were seeking demons. Is it so hard to believe the Scorpions are doing the same thing?"
"What if you're seeing demons everywhere because they're the only thing you know?"
"That would be a very good question if not for the fact it's totally wrong!"
She tilted her head, eyes tick-tocking between mine. "You're this sure? From a piece of graffiti?"
"Outside of my own name and that I'd much rather be wrong about this, I am sure of very little. But if we send the Black Book marching in here, they'll be expecting to have to deal with undead. Bone golems and the like. What if they run into something else? Something they're completely unprepared for?"
"Son of a bitch," Myla said. "We'll go after them. But we're not getting involved with them. Understand me?"
"Yes ma'am."
We said a hasty goodbye to Ora, who understandably didn't want to be seen running around with us in the streets, and all but ran outside. It was snowing steadily but nothing had stuck to the paving stones yet. It had been ten minutes or more since the men had left and there was no sight of them, but I'd heard them going left out of the pub, to the north, and so that's the direction we ran.
I was full of stew and beer and didn't much care to be running at all. But I was pushed onward by the conviction that we'd been sent to Barr not only as a matter of due diligence—but through an act of divine guidance.
As for which god had guided us here—Taim? Arawn? Even Carvahal, lord of chaos?—I couldn't begin to guess.
The setts were damp and slick. The second time Lod slipped, we slowed to a jog. It wasn't particularly late in the evening, and a few people were out on their business or hurrying home or to the pub, but the falling snow muffled any noise they were making. Then, somewhere ahead of us and to the west, a swirl of wind brought us the sound of drunken laughter.
We bent course and jogged onward. Two minutes later, as we followed the bend of a street, another burst of laughter sounded from right in front of us. We skidded to a stop, then crept after them.
A dozen men ambled down the street, some shuffling along, others reeling in zigzags. It was them, no question about it. They looked to be done with their drinking, and it was possible they were right about to say their goodbyes, go their separate ways, and head home to sleep it off.
But to me, they had the air of men who had convinced themselves—with the help of ale and camaraderie—to go do something they shouldn't.
We dawdled, letting them put some space between us, then followed them by the sound of their shouts and laughter. I wished, for about the thousandth time since getting involved with the Black Book, that I could have used a sixer.
Without warning, the men went silent. They were a couple of blocks ahead of us, far enough that we couldn't see them, and we quickened our pace to try to bring them back in line of sight before we lost them. Had they noticed us? Were they using sixers to watch out for themselves? I cleared my head, readying myself to draw the ether.
Ah: there they were again. But they'd stopped all talk between them, and while their movements were still visibly drunk, they were much more orderly than they'd been a minute before, proceeding down the street in something close to a formation. We'd only just started to follow them when one of the men glanced over his shoulder and looked right at us.
My instincts told me to stop and look away, but apparently my instincts wanted us to get assaulted in the street, because that reaction would have been supremely obvious. Myla had slowed down, though, so I did too. The street curved to the right, taking the men out of view. Were we about to lose them? But just as my heart started to beat faster, I blinked and pointed to the ground. Just enough snow had accreted to preserve their tracks.
So we followed these instead. The mesa that housed Barr wasn't large, and we would have already hit its northern rim if the men hadn't been moving so slowly. We only had to follow the snowy tracks for another two hundred yards before we caught sight of our quarry again. A few of them, anyway: most had disappeared. The remainder were standing in a deep alcove designed to provide shelter in weather like ours, or to let passersby take in a little shade during the summer.
As we watched, the remainder of the men disappeared as well. A doorway? If so, it was too dark to see.
"Wait here," Myla said. Before either of us could argue otherwise, she slipped across the stones toward the alcove.
Passing within it, she was little more than a shadow. I could barely make her out as she moved back and forth. After a full minute, she returned to us.
"It's just a wall of solid stone," she said. "Could they have vanished into thin air?"
I shook my head. "Hidden door."
"I didn't see a thing."
"Hence the name. Trust me, as someone with experience with hidden doors, I've got a feeling about this."
She pursed her lips, then turned back toward the alcove. "Well, if they've gone into some secret tunnel, it would be suicide to try to follow them. We'll wait for them to come back out, then see what's inside."
"If they come back out. It could be a passage to some other part of the city. Or down onto the plains."
"No, I don't think so. They'll be back."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Trust me, as someone with experience making good decisions, I've got a feeling about this."
I didn't think much of this plan. Then again, if I was right, I'd get to gloat. In the meantime, if the men caught us by surprise, or anyone wandered by and asked, we'd have no plausible explanation for an old man and two young people to be standing around in the middle of a snowfall. So we decided that two of us would head to a pub around the corner while the third bedded down here and pretended to be a vagabond.
By some process I didn't quite understand, it was determined that I should be the first one on vagabond duty. I was still complaining about this as the two of them walked away.
After a bit of fidgeting around, I discovered there's really no way to sit on frozen stone without getting cold. I decided that I would not ever become a homeless vagabond unless I had no other choice.
No more than fifteen minutes later, something scraped from the alcove. I was half hidden behind a mound of junk lumped beside a building, but I went perfectly still. Some more scraping and shuffling went on. Shadows stirred from the darkness, then a group of men emerged into the street. I recognized two by their cloaks, one by his boots, and another by the bareness of his scalp.
What was the energy I saw among them? Smugness? Yes, there was certainly some of that. But it was a deep smugness. Like they'd committed a crime. Or conspired to commit a very big crime. Like robbing a ship full of silver—or deposing a king.
They made way from the triangular plaza. Did I dare try to follow them, in case their work wasn't yet done? Believing I was making a big mistake, I started on their heels. One of them broke away from the others, then a second. Were they done for the night? When a third man went his own way, I was sure of it.
I found Myla and Lod nursing beers in the pub. On hearing my news, Lod swilled down his drink and Myla left hers. The plaza was silent and empty. We entered the alcove.
It was so dark I had to crouch toward the ground to confirm there wasn't any snow there, hence no prints to trace back to the part of the wall where the door must be hidden. I tried scattering some ether about, but it was solid stone, unchanged by the men's passage, and the ethereal prints had already faded.
I went to the wall and trailed my fingers over it. What I discovered was that it was very cold.
"I told you there wasn't anything to see," Myla said.
"I believe you," I said. "But what if there's something to feel? Or to hear?"
I actually had no idea what I was talking about. But you know once? It sounded pretty good. So I advanced along the wall, feeling it more thoroughly, cocking my ear to it, even stopping to sniff it now and then. I could just about hear Myla rolling her eyes at me. Well, let her roll them. When we risk looking the fool, sometimes we find glory.
I still wasn't feeling anything. Yet as I moved forward and took two more sharp breaths through my nose, I smelled something other than stone and cold. Burnt oil? Frowning, I felt for the nether in the wall—entirely passively, in a way Myla wouldn't be able to feel me doing. The nether was relatively dense about a foot deep into the wall, but very thin behind that. Hmm.
Trying to read the nether in the stone was a very clumsy way of sensing its details, and I often wished someone would come up with a way to do such things better. Still, I thought I sensed a seam. And just to the left of that seam, about nine inches above the ground, a…lump?
I kneeled in front of it, poking at the wall, and found a crevice. A crevice shaped suspiciously like a slot. I got out the little hunting knife I carried and inserted it into the slot. Nothing. I gave it a wiggle, followed by a jiggle. It slid a half inch deeper. I gave it another push.
With a soft grinding noise, and a whoosh of air, the wall began to slide open. It was soon wide enough for two people to walk through at once.
I stood and dusted off my hands. "What did I tell you? Hidden—"
The door was already starting to close. I quit gloating and darted through it. A narrow hallway ran ahead of me. There was just enough light to see an unlit lantern hanging from a side wall. The others joined me within. As the counterweight finished moving the wall back into place, I lit the lantern with a spark of either.
Myla gazed at the now-seamless wall behind us. "Let's just hope we can figure out how to open it back up from this side."
Before getting started, I felt my way forward in both ether and nether. "Be careful. They may have left undead spies behind."
"You think they had the sense of mind to do that? They were too drunk to count their own fingers."
"Yes, but there were a dozen of them. You shouldn't ever count on all the members of a group to make the same mistake."
Sensing nothing out of the ordinary, I headed down the hall. The walls were hewn from dark basalt and looked very old.
"This ain't the only town with tunnels like this," Lod remarked. "Built 'em to provide a secret means down from the mesa if the main path gets besieged. I hear tell Collen's got a set of 'em too, but can't say I've ever seen them myself."
The ground sloped downward and the stones were boot-smoothed, but at least they were dry. The air already felt a bit warmer, though maybe that was just having gotten out of the breeze. The walls were carved here and there with names and phrases, most of them gibberish, at least to me, along with icons and sigils. I recognized some of these from the Cycle of Arawn and other Arawnite works. Others were a mystery.
