Plague of Spells (12 page)

Still, she felt sorry for the dog. She began feeding the guard dog bits of meat she stole from the constantly simmering stewpot in the galley. After only a day, she’d managed to calm the creature so much that her immaterial presence elicited a happy whine and wagging tail instead of vicious growls. Not knowing if it already had a name, Anusha called it Lucky.

Besides Lucky, she also suspected Japheth might be able to see her, as the Green Siren put out from port. The man’s gaze seemed to meet hers. She’d stopped, appalled. But he took no action other than stare at her, his expression somewhat bemused. She immediately forced herself awake back in her travel chest, her breathing suddenly coming too swift for the enclosed space.

After a few days thinking about those dark, mysterious eyes, she worked up enough courage to seek out the warlock.

She’d entertained a little fantasy that she would reveal her stowaway status on the ship to the man. Despite knowing nothing of Japheth, she felt a slight twinge of… interest. But his lethal habit! How terrible. She wondered how he was able to control its symptoms. Perhaps she had mistaken what she’d seen in the curio shop in New Sarshel.

One thing was certain—loneliness weighed upon her like an anvil. After four days of speaking only to Lucky, she yearned for conversation and companionship more than food. Well, the fact that the rations she’d packed with her sleeping body in the travel chest were beginning to taste like chalk wasn’t helping her mood.

She’d been dream-stepping across the upper decks by starlight, looking for Japheth, when dread tingled on her neck. Not knowing from whence it came, she descended to check on her body, only to find the inquisitive sailor had returned. He was hunched over her travel chest once more, this time inserting a pry bar under the travel chest’s lid. With him was another sailor, a dark-haired woman with a terrible scar.

Anusha dashed forward and instinctively reached to grab the man’s arm. Unlike all her recent practice with inert objects, her attempt to interact with a living creature failed. Her hand slipped right off the interloper.

Desperate, she reached for the man with both hands, thinking to grab the too curious investigator by his collar and haul him backward. Instead, her hands “slid” into his back, and she’d touched something slick and warm that had pulsed thub-dub, thub-dub, thub-dub…

The man screamed with a throaty, awful tone, fell backward onto the floor, and began convulsing.

The scarred woman looked at Anusha’s image in the polished shield and screamed, “Ghost! A ghost is killing Dorian!”

*****

Anusha took another moment to gaze at her own terrifying image in the polished shield. A ghostlike image stared back, a burning silhouette in a girlish dress. If she didn’t know better, she’d scream seeing herself too. Especially if one of Anusha’s companions lay insensate upon the floor.

But Anusha was not a ghost, nor did she mean anyone harm. Normally, Anusha couldn’t even bring herself to hurt spiders scuttling around the corners of her suite. Her grazing contact with the sailor’s… insides… was an accident. He didn’t deserve what she’d done to him, whatever that was.

Or did he?

The truth was, both the screaming woman and the convulsing man were pirates, not sailors. She’d overheard both Japheth and Behroun say it, and other evidence she’d found on the ship the last few days confirmed it.

The man and woman had probably done a lot of terrible things. Perhaps they deserved a little pain, if not something more drastic, in return. Perhaps she should reach up and quiet the woman too, before she drew a response. It wouldn’t do to draw more people down here, wondering why one travel chest didn’t show up on the hold manifest.

But she couldn’t bring herself to follow through.

Besides, already voices echoed from the decks above, yelling questions. The ship was alerted that something strange was in the hold. Nothing she could do now would change that; she would only make things worse by attacking the woman.

A chill of foreboding touched the back of her neck. If her sleeping body was discovered, they’d forcefully wake her. Then what? Would they tie her behind the ship to drag through the cold, shark-filled water until she drowned or died of cold? Did pirates really do that? Yes, of course they did.

Anusha moved until she stood just a few feet from the polished shields. With the new angle, she could no longer see the screaming woman’s distorted image in any of the shields; hopefully, neither could the woman see her. Just to be safe, Anusha reached out and struck all three shields to the floor. They clattered loudly, and the pirate screamed the louder.

Bobbing shapes, visible around the edges of the hold opening, resolved as the heads of watchful, muttering pirates. They gazed down at their crewmates with varying degrees of surprise, humor, and real fear. None of them had seen Anusha’s reflection.

A new voice blared down, “What’s all this then, Brida? What’s wrong with Dorian? I wager you stuck him, but are trying to claim it’s spirits that done it. Am I right?”

Anusha saw the speaker peering down from the top deck, the toes of his boots overhanging the square opening. The elaborate hat revealed the man as Captain Thoster.

The woman on the ladder, apparently named Brida, kept her eyes fixed on the fallen shield in which she’d glimpsed Anusha’s dream image. Brida exclaimed in a fear-coarsened voice, “No, sir! It was a ghost! I saw it myself, right after it got Dorlan right there!” She pointed. Her arm shook as she tried to indicate where she’d seen the “ghost.”

Anusha took a few more steps away from the fallen shields, then paused. What would Captain Thoster make of the claim?

The captain turned his head and spoke to someone standing just back from the opening, his voice not loud enough for Anusha to hear his words. It sounded like a question.

Then a cloaked shape appeared at the edge of the hold access. Her breath caught slightly. It was Japheth!

Even from two decks below, Anusha could see Japheth’s eyes gleamed red. His gaze locked with her own. Fear thrilled down her spine and her stomach tightened.

A third shape appeared next to Thoster, a woman dressed in a bone white sari wielding a scarlet-glyphed wand.

It was Seren, the Green Siren’s mercenary wizard.

Thoster complained to Japheth and Seren, “I don’t see anything.”

Japheth looked up at the captain and the wizard, then back down into her eyes, still silent. Could he see her, or was she imagining it?

Seren traced symbols in the air with her free hand. Where her fingers passed, lines of magical energy persisted moments before fading. Syllables of pure arcane magic tumbled from Seren’s lips. Her eyes flashed with a glint of citrine light.

“There!” said Seren, gesturing with her wand down at Anusha. “I see it now—an apparition! The spirit of a drowned woman, perhaps, lingers in your hold, Captain.”

Anusha cursed. She nearly woke herself… but then thought, I’ve got to lead them away from my travel chest!

Instead of retreating, Anusha ran to the steps of the ladder and climbed. She slipped past the still petrified Brida on the broad rope rungs without touching her.

Seren cried, “It ascends; it attacks!”

Seren backed out of Anusha’s view, as did Thoster, his features betraying bafflement and a hint of concern. Japheth merely cocked his head and observed. There was no doubt he saw her; his eyes didn’t leave her as she climbed, and she ascended quickly. Without any real weight, rising required hardly any effort. She wondered, even as she clambered onto the top deck, apparently in full sight of Japheth, if she needed a ladder to ascend at all. She’d had dreams of flying when she was younger. Maybe if—

Seren hadn’t run away; she’d merely retreated a few steps to cast another spell. The war wizard threw out her free hand, and from her fingertips sprang a tremendous stroke of blinding purple-white lightning.

Anusha screamed as obliterating, mind-shattering pain coursed through her naked, unprotected soul.

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) City of Nathlekh

A remarkable bridge provided access to Nathlekh. Not long ago, no such bridge had been required.

A decade earlier, a slow but inexorable earth movement thrust a majority of the city’s Shou ward several hundred feet higher than the rest of the city. Hundreds of structures along the edges of the fault were destroyed. By chance, the destroyed structures were mostly the homes of non-Shou, though the Shou faced their own share of loss. When the earth stopped moving, the survivors slowly forgot their fear, especially those whose homes, mansions, and businesses remained. As many pointed out too, the new city heights provided an unexpected but welcome defensive stance against a landscape suddenly more dangerous than ever before.

Thus, once the sky fires, earth movements, and attacks by plaguechanged monsters subsided, a collection of the city’s Shou nobles poured a large portion of their considerable wealth into the creation of the bridge.

The Dragon Bridge supported a wide and thick stone span that sprang from the earth near the piers on Long Arm Lake to rise in a diagonal line all the way up to the Sky District. The Dragon Bridge was named for its supporting arches, each of which took the form of a sculpted, sinuous stone dragon. Each successively larger stone dragon bore the weight of its span section in a unique fashion—some on arched backs, others in wide maws, and even one, who stood closest to Nathlekh’s stone column, in clawed hands raised high above its head as it reared on its hind legs.

A series of three massive, gated checkpoints along the bridge’s span guarded against attacking ground forces, or, as happened on occasion even more than a decade after the Spellplague, groups of homeless refugees. Each gated wall contained barracks for a company of bridge guardians commanded by a gate captain.

Raidon Kane ascended the Dragon Bridge in the back of a cart drawn by two donkeys, driven by an old Shou farmer. Raidon silently wondered if he were, in truth, being brought to Nathlekh as the farmer claimed. Last time he’d been here, there’d been no Dragon Bridge.

It seemed impossible that such a dramatic change could overtake the city in little over a decade. Then again, the changes that occurred while the blue fire raged defied reason. In comparison to what he’d seen in Starmantle, Nathlekh’s uplift hardly seemed worth mentioning.

His foot cramped suddenly, as if to rebuke him for recalling the awful image of Starmantle and the ghoul-like aberrations that inhabited it. He wondered if the wound would ever completely heal. Even now, wrapped in linens provided by the kindly farmer’s wife, his foot seeped fluids.

Each new day, he concentrated all his healing ability on the limb, attempting to re-knit more of the lost skin and sensitivity to touch. Each day, he convinced himself he made a little more progress.

In truth, the wound was much improved. Raidon might have walked this final distance into Nathlekh today, probably with just a minor limp. But the solicitous farmers, who’d found him crawling amid their turnip beds a tenday earlier, who’d nursed him back to health in their modest dwelling, wouldn’t hear of him walking so soon. They offered to take him up to Nathlekh by donkey cart. In the end, he’d gratefully accepted.

The biggest mystery of all was his location. He was far closer to the city when the farmers found him than he should have been.

The last thing he recalled was falling asleep in the rain on top of a hard-won bluff near Starmantle. Even upon reaching the safety of the bluffs top, he half suspected he would never see another day.

But he survived. When he opened his eyes next, it was to a cool sunrise. There was no bluff, no burning forest, and no rain. He lay in a turnip field. He couldn’t recall anything between falling asleep and waking along the edge of a farm. A turnip farm that turned out to be nearly two hundred miles west of his last location just outside Nathlekh!

Raidon wondered again if he were going insane. It could be he was losing his memory before his mind.

Or perhaps the Spellplague described to him by the ghouls had so altered the landscape that cities and other previously fixed points had become unstuck from their old foundations. He didn’t have enough information to rightly judge.

A new thought struck him. Perhaps the Cerulean Sign had something to do with it. Had the symbol, now spellscarred into his flesh, somehow contrived to move him toward his unconscious goal while he lay at death’s door?

Sometimes it seemed he could almost discern a voice speaking his name___

Raidon pushed these speculations from his head. Right now, all that mattered was finding Ailyn. He tried to imagine in what circumstance he’d find her. His anxiety over what had become of the girl was more painful than his throbbing foot.

They ascended the great dragon-supported bridge. As the cart approached the third and final gate, a gate guard signaled the farmer to stop his cart.

Words penetrated Raidon’s apprehension. The gate guard was saying… only. Turn around and take your cargo with you, I said. Be glad I do not fine you.”

“What is this nuisance?” Raidon spoke up. “Why are you holding us up? This man has no cargo today but me. He is due no merchant fees.”

The guard sneered and returned, “In these dangerous times, non-Shou who wish to enter Nathlekh can only do so with an invitation.”

“But this man…” The guard’s implication struck home. The guard referred to Raidon, not the farmer.

Raidon began again, “My father is a son of the east, and he raised me in Telflamm, some thirty… nay, forty years ago. But disregard that; I am a resident of Nathlekh. I kept my residence here before the Spellplague. My daughter lives here even now. You cannot deny me entry to my home.”

The guard tried to meet Raidon’s gaze. And failed. Apparently he was unused to opposition from people in donkey carts. He scowled. “Stay here. I’ll get the captain.” The man stalked off.

Raidon usually passed as Shou, but sometimes strangers noticed his fey ancestry. His long-absent mother’s blood manifest in him only faintly, but was visible to those sensitive to such differences. Raidon’s ears were ever so slightly pointed, the shape of his skull was perhaps narrower than other Shou, and his bearing was straight, though no straighter than any other practitioner of Xiang Do. He thought of himself as Shou. Usually, his mother’s blood didn’t cause any problems… except sometimes among other Shou.