David Dalglish - Blood of the Underworld

Victor offered his hand, and Antonil clasped it.

“I would have us friends rather than enemies,” Victor said. “But tonight has done me well. I know how strong we must be to succeed. Trust me. Last night will not happen again.”

Antonil nodded, wished the man well. Still, when he left to join Sergan, he did so with a heavy heart. Something about the way Victor had said that made the hair on the back of his neck itch. Victor’s response to near death and failure was not to doubt, but to harden his resolve. What could he do to the thief guilds that would be any worse than what he did now?

“What do we do with the dead Spiders?” Sergan asked at his arrival. “Hold them for a day at the castle, let family members come and see if they recognize them?”

Antonil chewed on his lower lip.

“Bury them all in a common grave, not a name given for any,” he said. “They’re enemies of the peace, enemies of our king. They deserve no better.”

“Might piss ‘em off.”

Antonil laughed, and he waved his arms at the wreckage about them.

“Any worse than they are now? Bury them, and forget them. We have a lot of work to do, and not anywhere near enough time to do it.”

Nathaniel hovered around his mother the early part of the morning, but her mind was clearly elsewhere. His attempts at talking to her always ended abruptly, her answers terse and distracted. Henris, the scribe sitting beside her, seemed more important, his questions given more thought. Terrance was also there, looking nervous and incredibly young next to the wrinkled old scribe. He didn’t speak much, only when the scribe directly asked him something. Nathaniel tried being more persistent, until Alyssa looked up from the table in her study and snapped at him.

“Must I make up tasks so I might have a moment of peace?”

Nathaniel flinched, but he’d listened to Lord Gandrem’s words closely, and knew such childish fits were not becoming of him. He grabbed his stump of a right arm, just a small chunk of bone and skin coming down from his shoulder. Nervous, he drummed his fingers atop the bone like he did when he needed to distract himself. Alyssa saw this and immediately softened.

“Come here, Nathan,” she said.

He walked closer and leaned his head against his mother’s stomach as she wrapped her arms about him.

“You’ve endured troubled times before,” she said. “This is one of them. I haven’t forgotten you, though. Tonight, I’ll fetch us a bard, and pay him to dazzle us with a dozen songs. We’ll listen together, and you can tell me which is your favorite. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

He nodded, and she kissed his forehead.

“Go play,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll have John find you something to do.”

“He’ll just make me practice with my sword,” he said. “He knows it gets heavy.”

“That just means you need to practice more, until it feels like a part of your arm.”

“Milady, may I ask the source of these imports?” Henris asked, pointing to one of what seemed like a thousand pieces of parchment. Alyssa turned back to the man, and Nathaniel knew that was his sign to leave. He wanted to stay, to stomp his foot and demand attention, but he imagined the way John would react should he hear about such a display.

“Yes, mother,” Nathaniel said, even though he doubted she heard him. At least her promise about the bard was exciting. He loved listening to their stories, most of them anyway. Some dwelt on lords and ladies, and who was in love with whom. They bored him to tears. The ones about dragons, paladins, orcs, wolf-men, and other creatures of the Vile Wedge…those were the ones that kept him up far past his bedtime, wide-eyed in the lap of his mother. He especially loved hearing of the war between the gods, back during the creation of the world.

Nathaniel left the study, left the adults to argue and bicker about money and paper, as John had once put it. Part of him felt sad knowing that that was the fate awaiting him when he got older, not charging into battle on a horse like he dreamed. His missing arm alone ruined any chance of that. No, he’d bicker with old men and women, count coins until the moon was high, and trade things he did not have for things he would never see.

So much better the life the bards sang about.

While on his way to see Lord Gandrem, Nathaniel passed by the door to his grandmother’s room. She must have seen him, for he heard her call his name. Rolling his eyes, Nathaniel turned around. He always felt awkward in his grandmother’s presence. He didn’t know her, had barely even heard of her until her sudden arrival, yet he was expected to act as if she were close family. It left him confused, unsure of how to act. That, and the way she looked at him, her eyes always watery even if she wasn’t crying, made his stomach twist.

“Yes, grandmother?” he asked, stepping into her room, which had been a guest bedroom mere weeks before. His grandmother lay in the center of the bed, as she often did. Alyssa had said she had gone through many trials, and was left weak because of it. But she didn’t seem weak to Nathaniel. Instead, she seemed like a coiled spring, wound up and unable to move.

“Please, just Melody,” she said, shifting to the side so she might put her feet off the bed. “Though it warms my heart to hear you say the word grandmother.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She laughed as if this amused her, though he’d purposefully chosen not to call her Melody.

“You look upset, dear,” she said. “Is your mother still busy with that worm of Victor’s?”

Despite himself, he cracked a smile, thinking of Henris’s scrunched in face.

“He doesn’t look like a worm. He looks like one of the gophers groundskeeper Willis hates.”

To his relief, Melody laughed instead of getting upset for him saying such a thing.

“Watch your tongue in their presence,” Melody said, gently easing herself off the bed. “But don’t worry about me. I spent too much time in silence to care for tempered words and padded half-truths. I say if a man looks like a gopher, call him a gopher, don’t you?”

Nathaniel nodded. He still felt awkward, but at least it seemed like he could trust Melody to pay attention to him, and not care if he said something John would claim was ‘improper’. His grandmother walked over to her expansive closet and opened the doors.

“Can you can keep a secret, Nathaniel?” she asked as she peered into its darkness.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Lord Gandrem says my word should be my bond, and to never break it.”

“John’s a smart man,” Melody said. “And you should trust much of what he says. But I’ve spent a few afternoons with him, and he is lacking in knowledge of the gods. Tell me, Nathan, what do you know of Karak and Ashhur?”

As she asked this, she pulled out a small wooden box from the far recesses of the closet. Nathaniel stepped closer, his curiosity too strong to resist. Her question itself, though, nearly deflated him. His teacher of numbers had been devoted to Ashhur, always telling Nathaniel lists of rules, expectations, and everything Ashhur would be sad about for him doing.

“My teacher made me memorize some things,” he reluctantly admitted.

“I don’t mean prayers and sermons, Nathan. The gods are not figments, not boring lessons with names. They were real. They wielded blades, raised armies, and conquered the wildlands Dezrel used to be before their arrival.”

Nathaniel’s eyes widened. Now this was more like the bards’ songs than the dry lecturing of his teacher. When Melody opened the box, his eyes widened further, so much that he thought they’d bug out of his head. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. The base was a circle made of dark stone, with two soft indents on either side. The center almost like a bowl, but much too shallow. Laying in it were nine precious stones, each with a thin silver chain encircling it attached it to the base. The stones were all different, ruby, sapphire, emerald, topaz, even a couple he didn’t recognize. Each one was the size of his thumb.