The Black Book, page 30
part #2 of The Cycle of the Scour Series
The nether within him. It wasn't moving.
I stared. And stared. Then I stood, and I ran to Myla's side instead.
She was more battered than Rowe had looked, four deep slashes running down her chest. Yet the shadows circulated within her. I covered her with nether and found that three of her ribs were cracked. But her ribs weren't going anywhere, unlike the blood steadily vacating her body, and I sealed the slashes first. Next I made a quick sweep of her form for anything I might have missed at first glance. Finding nothing but scrapes and bumps, I fused the cracks in her ribs back together. Her eyelids fluttered before I was done with the last one.
"Cally?" She eased upright, eyes darting around the room. "Cally, are we safe?"
"You killed the demon," I said. "And I killed Wate."
"Praise Taim and the order of his world!" Her gaze focused on a spot across the room. "Tend to Rowe. We can talk later."
I shook my head. Before she could say more, I pulled her to her feet.
I very much doubted the enemy could repair the red rod if I left it behind, but I gathered up the shards of it anyway. This done, we made our way back through the tunnel. I held a small hope that Inquisitor Vara and the others had found a way to defeat the nethermancers and return to storm the underground chamber, but when we got outside, the plaza was empty except for the dead.
We backtracked through the tunnel to the fork that led outside. I knew it would be empty—if there'd been any sentries there, they'd have come to Wate's aid in the chamber—but I drew what little ether I could to me anyway.
It was as empty as I thought. It delivered us outside, to the night and the silent fields of snow.
~
It was possible that all of the Black Book had been slain in the streets of Barr. We'd arranged a spot to rally with the horses and their minders if disaster struck, a low hill a quarter mile from where we'd scaled the cliffs to gain entry to the town. A mass of footprints led to it. As we circled around the back side, an agent and two men-at-arms ran forth to accost us.
I told them we had news for Inquisitor Vara. They were hesitant to let us see her, explaining she was quite busy at the moment.
"She will want to hear this," Myla said. "And if you don't let us see her, she'll want to drag you behind the horses all the way back to Bressel."
This changed their minds. They led us through the makeshift camp, which bustled with people prepping horses and treating wounds. There were fewer of us than we'd started out with. Maybe by as much as a fifth.
Vara looked bedraggled but intact. "We were just about to leave." She glanced over us. "We thought you were dead!"
"We were cut off from you when the enemy forced you from the square," I said. "But they didn't leave anyone to guard the entrance to the tunnels."
Her head tilted like a hawk's. "And?"
"Wate was there. The man who was leading them. He was in the middle of his summoning."
I told her, as tersely as I could, what we'd seen and done. How we had, to the best of my knowledge, put an end to the threat. I gave her the pieces of the red rod, but didn't mention the book I'd taken.
Vara turned the shards over in her hand, then looked up with raw wonder in her eyes. "I feared all had been lost—but you two have plucked victory from the jaws of defeat. The crown owes you a great debt for your service. Come now, let us find you each a horse!"
"We can't leave yet," I said. "Not without Rowe's body."
"That's not possible. By now, the enemy could have regrouped in the underground. The winter air will preserve the remains until we are able to send someone to retrieve them."
"Retrieve them? And how long will that take? I won't let these people turn him into one of their abominations!"
Vara blinked three times, leaning back from me. "Cally, I know that he was dear to—"
"Give me a sledge. I'll go and get him."
"There is not time. We have to leave."
"Give him the sledge," Myla said. "We'll bear him back by ourselves. We've made the trek before."
The Inquisitor tipped back her head and lifted her palms, beseeching the heavens. "I won't leave you. Nor will I let you go alone. He gave his life that our cause wouldn't be lost. We will honor him for that."
She yelled orders to her people. For what we all prayed would be the last time, we made way to the underground.
~
Day after day, the clouds hung above us, gray and unbroken. It seemed the sun would never rise again.
We rode for Mallon. Inquisitor Vara had dispatched a pair of spies to the city of Collen to pass word to our allies there and keep watch for further activity in our absence, but our work in the Basin was, for the time being, done with. It was likely the king would send a second expedition into the territory to root out the remaining infidels in Barr and hunt elsewhere for others, but Vara didn't think he would include the Black Book in such a mission, with the possible exception of two or three advisors.
It would be another occupation, then. A small one, yes, and quite justified from the Mallish perspective, but small occupations had a tendency to bloat into big ones. And if any one thing on earth was true, it was that the Mallish perspective was not the way the Colleners saw things.
In some ways, it was hard to believe that we'd accomplished much of anything at all. I supposed it was true that full war was less likely than before we'd arrived. Maybe by a lot. But it was also true that if the Mallish were marching on Collen once more, then we'd failed everything that Lod had lived and died for.
Maybe that was just the way of things.
Plateaus came and went, but one part of the snow and the desert looked the same as all the rest. I began to feel like we'd never get out of Collen. Sometimes I found myself thinking about this against my will: what if I hadn't made it out of Collen? What if I'd died there and this was a cruel afterlife? After all, for all the times I could have died and didn't, it felt more likely that I actually had.
And if it was possible that I'd died at some point in Collen, wasn't it also possible that I'd died before coming to the Basin at all? For what were the odds that I would be directly involved in the stomping-out of not just one demon infestation, but two? Compared to that, it didn't seem at all mad to suggest I'd died to the mob in the Sandpit—or that I'd been tortured to death by the Black Book when they'd caught me and Rowe back in Allingham.
"What's on your mind?" Myla said.
I tried not to flinch; I'd forgotten she was riding beside me. I waved my hand. "Nothing. Nothing, and that I'm getting incredibly sick of snow."
She was silent for a moment. "Was he like a father to you?"
"A father? No. Not really." She let the silence stretch on until I found myself saying more. "More like an uncle who takes you in after your father dies. Although that's not really it, either. He didn't treat me like a child, you see. Or rather, he did, all the time, but he always expected me to pull my weight wherever I could, and to learn how to when I couldn't."
"How long did you know each other?"
"A year and a half, about."
"Oh."
"But it was a long year and a half. Before it, I led a completely different life. I was just a boy." I frowned. "I suppose it's like when you lose anyone that you thought would always be there. There were so many places I'd imagined we'd go. So many things I'd imagined us doing. I had so many plans. But in none of them did I imagine he'd just…go away."
"No one would want to dwell on such a future." She glanced away, perhaps realizing the implication of her words. "Are you going to go away now, too?"
"Go away? Why?"
"Before, you said you were staying with the Black Book to help put down the demons. That's all done now."
"Are we sure of that?"
"Our work is done here. Even Inquisitor Vara thinks so."
I fiddled with the reins of my horse. "I've thought about it, yes."
"Well?"
"I don't know where else I'd go."
"You must have gotten your training from somewhere, didn't you? Won't they have you back?"
I laughed. I wasn't sure I'd done that since Barr. "I would say that bridge is thoroughly burned. Even if they would take me back, I no longer believe in the things they stand for. Their faith could only work in a world that's much better than the one we live in."
"Then why not stay here?" she said. "You've proven yourself to them beyond any doubt. They'll teach you things they wouldn't have before. Besides, you're good at what they do."
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe this was the path that fate intended for me all along."
In my heart, though, I didn't think this was true. My fate—I still believed this—was to restore Narashtovik to the city it had once been. Without Rowe, though, that flame seemed fainter than ever.
And what else could I do? Return to my old Order, and hope that if I groveled low enough, they'd resume my very slow and highly incomplete training? Should I return to the norren clan and beseech Yobb to show me more of what she knew? Even if she would—and given how inconstant the norren were, and that she considered her debt to Rowe's family paid, that was no sure thing at all—the season was all wrong for it, I'd have to wait until at least mid-spring to cross over the mountains.
What else? One of the Gaskan orders of sorcerers? Well there were more than a few of those to choose from; which one? And if they found out who I was, what were the chances they would force me to help them craft new demons of their own? Or that some rival group would fear such a thing, and kidnap me to take that power for themselves—or just kill me to eliminate the threat of it?
Should I make for a far-off land, then? Which one? How to choose? Or were all of these the wrong questions, I wasn't thinking boldly enough: should I give it all up, forsake both nether and ether, retire from this world of struggle and power, of dogma and heresy, to go lead a quiet, normal life—clear myself a farm, become a traveling merchant, find myself a wife? Or go the opposite, become an outlaw, use my powers to rob caravans blind, and once I was rich, do whatever I pleased?
The very thought of it all made me want to curl up into a ball and close my eyes.
I leaned forward in the saddle, frowning. I was just apprehending a truth I would later dub "the tyranny of choice." Its basic shape was this. If you asked a man where he had more freedom, when enclosed within a labyrinth, or set loose in a wide open field, he would laugh at you and insist it was the field.
Yet I would tell him this: the walls of a labyrinth aren't there to confine you, they're there to guide you. For it is far easier to make a choice when you are "hemmed in" with just a few ways to go forward than when you find yourself in the middle of a yawning plain with no guideposts or markers for which direction you ought to strike out in.
Or, another way: if a raindrop could fall in any direction, which direction should it choose?
For now, I fell toward Bressel.
~
At last we came to a road, and the road brought us into the hills. We reached the fort that stood on the border between the two regions. We'd last seen it just a few weeks ago, but it felt like years.
This time, when I crossed from Collen into Mallon, I thought I could feel the difference. The Basin was a place of anger and unease. Maybe that was the nature of deserts. Or maybe it was the nature of Collen.
The snows were even deeper in Mallon than they'd been in the desert. Later, I heard they were the worst the land had suffered in twenty years. Scraggly little pines appeared in the folds of the hills. It was good to see trees again, and even better yet when they grew many and tall enough for us to pass beneath them. It was comforting in the same way it is for a young child to walk alongside the great heights of her mother and father.
We buried Rowe in the churchyard of a temple of Gashen forty miles inside the border. The ground was frozen and the temple servants groused about how they wouldn't be able to dig a proper grave until it thawed, but Garold and Shives used the ether to break up the brick-like dirt. Once they had it deep enough, they lowered Rowe into it, and the local priest held a ceremony, which was different in almost every detail from how we did it in Narashtovik, yet almost identical to it in structure and mood.
"Cally," Inquisitor Vara said once the priest had finished. "You knew him best. Would you like to speak for him?"
"Ah," I said. "Yes."
In fact I didn't want to, not at all; I hadn't thought about it, assuming I was too young to be involved in such things, and that it would all be handled by proper adults. Everyone was staring at me, too, something that the last couple of years had forced me to grow out of being too bothered by, but at that moment I felt years younger.
"Rowe was…" I hunched my shoulders and stared at the ground. How absurd to think you could reduce a full life to a few words.
Then again, wasn't that freeing? The task was impossible to do perfectly: and that meant there was no pressure to be perfect.
"Rowe was a man who didn't give his loyalty easily. But once you'd earned it, he gave it fully. I am fortunate to have earned it, despite myself. And to have learned from it how powerful such a thing can be.
"Do you know what was most remarkable about him? That he was both a born servant and a born leader. Because of his loyalty, any ruler would kill to have him at their command. And anyone assigned to serve him would kill for him.
"He's gone from us now, lost to us. But I know that, in the hereafter, the gods are fighting over which one of them will win him to them."
A few more prayers, and it was done. I waited for everyone but the gravediggers to walk away, then whispered to him that I would get him back to Narashtovik some day.
I took his sword with me. I like to think he would have wanted me to. But I wasn't used to wearing it, and whenever it banged against my side or caught on the leg of a table, I was reminded that I was alone.
~
I am not sure that there is any worse thing than being cut off from everything that you've ever known, and being too young to know how to build any replacements for them.
~
And so we returned to Bressel.
The city looked big enough to house every soul in Collen. No wonder the Basin was always getting its rear kicked in.
After days of eventless travel, things got very busy again. Inquisitor Vara delivered a host of reports to the palace. Ministers and messengers came and went. Inquisitor Vara elevated me to a full agent of the Black Book. There was a ceremony. I got a badge of office. It was an obsidian pendant carved into a tome. Myla was made a proper agent, too. We were each granted our own quarters.
I supposed I should have felt happy. Or at least felt busy, which can serve as a reasonable substitute. Instead I felt like the child at the center of a game of ring-dance, where all the world was awhirl around me while I was stuck in its middle.
I decided to steal the copy of the Cycle of Arawn from the archives and then leave. I'd figure out where to go later. If it came down to it, I'd draw names of places out of a hat.
While I made my preparations, I read through the book I'd taken from Wate's body, along with the loose pages stuffed inside it. I hadn't had enough privacy to do much more than skim through it while we'd been on the road. Nothing had jumped out at me, at least not in terms of Wate's last words, and the same was true now. The book was about the crafting of demons, and the loose sheets read like philosophy, albeit a deranged one I couldn't make sense of. It seemed as though Wate had been bullshitting me, spouting nonsense to try to buy himself more time.
I finished my preparations. I put together a pack and hid it under my bed. Then, that same night, I made my way to the archives.
It was just as dark as the last time I'd snuck in. This time, though, I sent a pair of dead beetles buzzing through the stacks. Once I'd convinced myself Artha wasn't there watching her books in the dark, I entered.
The copy of the Cycle—the one I suspected was the true copy—was right where I'd left it. It probably hadn't been touched. Picking it up sent a tingle up my elbow. I slipped it under my doublet.
I might have left right then; all my life might have been different. But while they'd been scouting, my sixers had bumbled over Artha's reading desk. A copy of the same book I'd taken from Wate lay atop it, next to several of the others the Black Book had confiscated since all this business had started in Allingham.
Artha had been studying them. It was a longshot, but it was possible she'd teased some meaning out of the book that would make sense of the things that Wate had said to me. It turned out she'd taken notes on the work. I glanced through them, then stopped, blinking.
I posted one of my beetles at the door, then sat down and read through the notes. It turned out that sections of the book had been written in code. A code that she'd deciphered.
A code I recognized as being used in the loose sheets from Wate's book.
I stuffed the notes under my shirt and all but ran back to my new quarters. Working by candlelight, I used the code sheets to translate the pages I'd looted from Wate. After the first page, my stomach had twisted itself into a rope, but I kept going, until it was complete, and I was sweating and clenching the lip of the table so hard that either it or my fingers were about to snap.
After, I sat paralyzed. Overwhelmed once again by the tyranny of choice. Outside, the moon sunk toward the horizon. It was all so still except within my mind. Part of me wanted to stick with my old plan and to hell with it. But my old plan had been based on a world that no longer existed.
I tried to imagine what Rowe would have done. Well, not sit around in the dark in his room worrying over every possible fault or contingency, that was for sure.
I sat up straight and laughed. Rowe hadn't exactly been the most talkative man to walk the face of the earth. Often, when he did something, I had to ask why. In nearly every case, he wouldn't tell me, expecting me to reason it out for myself—and believing that if I couldn't do that, then the information would be useless to me anyway. Oh, but that had been annoying.
