William King - Shadowblood

Still, there was something about this place that set her trained senses on edge. Her fingers danced through the patterns of an augury as she muttered an invocation. At first, she noticed nothing, but then she found something just on the edge of her perception, so faint that if she had not been so keyed up she would probably have missed it. There was a very, very faint trace of magic in the air.

She shook her head, puzzled, wondering what it could be. Perhaps this village had been home to a sorcerer, or perhaps some wandering mage had passed through. Maybe someone owned a basic charm, or perhaps someone had purchased a ward against the plague. Finding the source of the magic was her best chance of finding someone alive in this Light-forsaken place.

She drew her blade, unsure as to why, but trusting her instincts. She wanted to get back on the steed and leave. Something made her uneasy and she doubted it was the sight of all the dead bodies. The old weapon felt reassuringly heavy in her grasp. She extended her senses as she had been taught, looking for signs of life, of ambush, of danger.

The breeze whispered through the streets. Somewhere a shutter banged, and an unlatched door creaked in the wind. She caught the sound of movement, faint and furtive. Perhaps it was rats but it never paid to make assumptions in a situation like this.

She concentrated again on her divination and sensed the faint magic once more. She moved around an old stone building and saw a doorway before her. A crudely painted sign depicting a rampant bull hung over the door. The picture was old and flaking away from exposure to the elements. The doorway beneath it yawned like an open mouth. From it came a smell of corruption and decay. From within she sensed movement. A man moved behind the bar, perhaps seeking liquor on the shelves. Under the circumstances she could hardly blame him.

She entered the building and saw a group of men slumped over a table. A huge bald-pated bruiser was behind the bar. He moved slowly as if his limbs were twisted or broken and she wondered if he were just beginning to come down with the plague.

Even as that thought occurred to her, she realised that something was wrong, that he was the source of the magic she had detected. He turned to face her, his eyes flaring greenly, the skin peeling from his face to reveal yellowing teeth. His skin was blotched with mould and something else, and he looked as if he had been dead for quite some time.

“Hungry,” he said. Her sword swept out and took his head off. She turned to leave. This was not a place for the living.

The great wyrm waddled along the Eastern road, a huge reptilian ship carried along by the current of troops. Halim was a week’s march behind them, lost behind ranges of hills. In the howdah, Asea sat under a parasol reading. Rik envied her the ability to do that. His mind raced even as he tried to keep still. He was reminded of their barge trip to Harven. That had not ended well either.

Without looking up Asea said: “You are restless.”

“I am.”

“You could try reviewing the meditation exercises I taught you.”

“I have. This bloody potion makes it difficult to concentrate.”

“All the more reason to practise. It is not always possible to work sorcery under ideal circumstances.”

“I take your point.” He said the words slowly and with emphasis. She sighed and closed the book.

“But you are not willing to act upon it.”

“There are times when it’s difficult to concentrate and this is one of them.”

“You are normally a very focussed young man, Rik. It’s what makes you such an apt pupil. Tell me, what is disturbing you?”

“Everything. Nothing. Nothing I can put my finger on anyway. It’s just that my life — all our lives — seem to be spinning out of control. We are marching to war in the East just as if I were still in the army.”

“You still are, Rik. We are both part of it. There is no escape from duty. Not in times like these. Not ever, really.”

“Look at all these men marching. In a few weeks they may all be dead. In a few weeks they may be walking corpses.”

“That’s the risk a soldier takes, Rik. If war does not get them, plague might. If plague does not get them, hunger might. If hunger does not get them, accident might. If accident does not, old age most certainly will. Everything dies, Rik.”

“Terrarchs don’t.”

“Terrarchs do. We simply live longer than humans, Rik.” He looked at her long and hard, trying to measure her youthful beauty against what he knew of her age.

“Are you really two thousand years old?”

“I am two thousand, one hundred and fifty nine years old, give or take a few years.”

“Why do that?”

“The lengths of months and years on Al’Terra were somewhat different from those of Gaeia. I am converting my age into your years for the purposes of satisfying your somewhat impertinent curiosity.”

He considered this. She had told him that the climate was different on the Terrarch homeworld. He had not imagined such basic things as the length of a year might be different. It opened up whole new vistas of strangeness.

“I talked to a sorcerer in Harven who claimed he would give up years of his life for the opportunity to talk to you.”

“You are doing so. I hope it’s worth it.”

“What is it like?”

“What?”

“Being so old?”

Asea laughed. She seemed genuinely amused but there was a hint of anger in her voice. “You have a lot to learn about tact, Rik.”

“This I know. Are you annoyed?”

“Never apologise for being curious, Rik. At least not to me. The only way to get answers is to ask questions.”

“Are you going to answer mine?”

“Let me think about it. I am not sure there is any easy answer I can give you.”

“Any answer will do. It does not have to be easy.”

“Why this sudden interest in matters of life and death?”

“Kathea is dead. I killed Malkior. There are times, looking at the things in my mind when I know what it’s like to die. The Quan killed many people.”

Asea flashed him warning look. Karim was the wyrm’s mahout. He was her servant, and loyal, but there were some things better not discussed in the presence of anyone save themselves. She raised her hand, and he felt the flow of power as she invoked a ward. He could almost picture the lines of energy weaving around them. His sensitivity to such things had increased recently. External sounds vanished, as the bubble of privacy swirled into being around them.

“This is probably not the best place to discuss this, Rik,” she said. He knew this but the words had forced themselves out anyway. Some compulsion lay on him, some force within his mind.

“I have killed a lot of people,” he said. “I have a lot of strange dreams.”

She cocked her head to one side, concerned. “Go on.”

He tried to approach what was troubling him obliquely, like a hunter moving downwind of a deer. He was not really sure what it was, but he felt its presence as he could sense the presence of an animal in a bush, by the rustling of that which it displaced.

“When I was a soldier it was either me or them. The people I killed I mean. Most of the fights since then have been the same way. I thought about these things, but I never really thought about them, if you know what I mean?”

“No,” she said. He sighed and looked for another approach.

“When I was a kid, the Temple priests told me about heaven and hell. I sort of believed them. As I got older I stopped believing. One priest tells you that you go to hell if you murder someone, but another says it’s all right if you do it in the service of Queen and country. Some men can hold both those thoughts in their mind and believe both. I couldn’t — so one of them had to go.”