Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (32 page)

Comparing the
Miner’s Pick
to the tavern
attached to the
Grand Inn
was a study in the class differences the
Khalans like to pretend they eliminated. The common trait was the smoke, though
here it coiled among hanging glass lamps of a dozen jeweled colors instead of a
bare ceiling of stained beams. The tavern was a lushly decorated place enclosed
by warm, paneled wood walls, the oval floor filled with cushioned chairs around
finely crafted tables. The furniture had the look of a seasoned craftsman’s
hand, like her father’s work but without the humility. Deep, private booths
lined opposing, curved walls and a stage occupied the space to the immediate
left of the entry. A long bar built of molasses-dark wood occupied the far
side, backed by a mirror that filled the wall and doubled the rainbow array of
liquor bottles stacked upon the shelves. The clientele were as finely arranged
as the establishment, dominated by rich merchants in their silks and satins and
guild coats, continuing the dance of negotiations and power games away from the
guildhalls and merchant houses.

Tyrissa came here seeking Giroon and while a bard
was on the stage, he was far from the dusky bald man many called ‘The Great’.
Instead it was a Khalan man with a short lawn of precisely manicured brown hair
and a pointed beard. He was delivering an acceptable rendition of
A King
Brought Low
. Ferdhan’s advice to read that story on the caravan held true.
The tale was a crowd pleaser in Khalanheim, a romanticized retelling of the merchant
guilds turning the last king of Khalanheim into a pauper, though with far more
heroics and far less blackmail contained within the historical record. The
crowd was polite, if far from entranced, most granting only scant attention to
the performance and away from their business of the evening. Tyrissa winced as
the bard launched into an off-key sung portion of the story. His eyes kept glancing
over to a booth along the wall to his left where a dark skinned man paid him no
mind, preferring to flip though a large book with gold-edged pages. Tyrissa
skirted the edge of the central floor to Giroon’s booth.

Giroon clearly favored the color red. It was the
color of his satin shirt, the covers of the book, and the glass of wine
standing at the ready near his right hand. At her approach, the bard looked up
from the tome, the pages coated by a foreign text that evoked forks of
lightning and flares of flame in a hundred permutations.

“Giroon,” she said.

“Miss Jorensen. What brings you to this hardly
humble place?”

Tyrissa slid into the empty opposite bench. The
cushioned seat, meant for the long meetings of the tavern’s refined clientele,
were as soft and luxuriant as they looked. Giroon motioned to his drink then to
her but Tyrissa declined, shaking her head.

“As you will. One of my many astonishing
abilities is that drinks are rarely full price, if priced at all.”

The Khalan bard on stage reached an intermission
in the story, bowed to the succinct applause, and stepped down to the floor. He
promised to return shortly and made a bee-line to the bar across the room in
pursuit of a dose of liquid courage.

“Keeping tabs on the competition?” Tyrissa asked.

Giroon chuckled. “That fellow, while respectable,
poses no competition to me. Have you an update for me, my good witch?”

“Witch?” The typical image of an ugly
bog-dwelling crone came to mind, dispensing her poisoned wisdom and twisted
demands to wayward adventurers. Their powers were a curse, the result of drops
of daemonic blood from unfortunate or desperate ancestors. So the stories went,
at least. It wasn’t too far from being Pactbound.
Black icy fingers of
corruption worming through argent clouds.
Discomfort crept up Tyrissa’s
spine in spite of the cushions at her back.

“I’m fairly certain of my parentage, Giroon.”

“Ability, not lineage. Most commonly, witches
take one thing to make another: men into newts, maidens into frogs, life from
death, and the reverse. From what you’ve told me, that’s the best I can dredge
up from your scatterbrained Northern lore. The woman you so vainly sought below
the city was called the Pact Witch, and she was kin to you, should the emblem
be a connection. It fits with the one you saw in the dream as well. She created
heat from cold, and you did the reverse when you came in touch with a minion of
Fire.”

Even the memory brought a shiver.
Bones of ice.
So unbelievably cold.

“Since you mention it, I do have something new. I
saw another one, a few days past.”

“Another dream?”

“Visions. They’re too vivid to be dreams. It was
in a rocky desert canyon between red mountains ridged like the scales on the
back of a lizard.”

Giroon’s eyes ignited with flared interest. He
pushed his book aside and folded his hands. “Please go on,” he said.

“She was like you, in skin and lack of hairstyle,
and had those bright red tattoos, too. But hers were much more elaborate and
had the emblem inked between her shoulders.” Tyrissa filled in the rest of the
details of the vision, the girl with the winged shield emblem, the three Fire
Pactbound, and the interplay of frost and fire. Giroon listened, rapt and
asking no questions.

“It looked like they were training,” she
finished. The vision had been the inspiration to create a similar set-up with
Settan.

Giroon looked pleased. “Well, I’m glad my
countrymen have a new young warrior like you in our ranks.”

“
Your
countrymen? And what country would
that be?”

“Zegun’da, a hot little nation holding off the
greedy fist of Shadow by virtue of geography and well placed fires.” Giroon
pulled down the collar of his fiery red shirt to reveal the brilliant red
tattoo of red chain links. Tyrissa saw that the text was the same as the book,
harsh corners and sinuous flares. “What you saw were the
jwundla
, traditional
tattooed markings with a three-fold purpose. Firstly, all Zegun youth receive
them as a mark of passage. Second, they are an appellation to the Flames.”

“Flames? You mean elemental flames?”

“Indeed. The Zegun, we are called the Burnt
People, blessed by Fire. Or so the mythological logic goes. Why else did the
gods char our skin black?” Giroon rolled his eyes at that. “Those three men you
saw are warrior acolytes of the Flame, bound by the Burning Oath. Pactbound, as
you call them here. They are marked as such with more elaborate
jwundla,
a
symbol of their greater devotion to the grand deal we made with Elemental Fire
itself.”

“Your entire people made a deal with an Elemental
Power?” Visions of the burning of Vordeum and the Fall of Hithia came to mind,
the result of so many aligning with the Outer Powers. She felt slightly sick at
the idea that there were more nations willing to make that mistake.

“Don’t act so shocked, Tyrissa. It was a decision
made long ago and it was our only option. The last reason for the
jwundla
is the most pertinent. Security. Our neighbors look like us, talk like us, can
meld into shadows thanks to an elemental deal of their own, and would love
nothing more than to add Zegun’da to their imperial collection. The
jwundla
is impossible to fake; the inks can only be made in Zegun’da from a very
specific plant that thrives amidst the heat of the Zegun deserts. It is our
means of identifying outsiders. We had to make a grand deal with the Flames in
order to survive, to place us on equal footing with our neighbors to the north.”

“Your neighbors. The Vitu’ka?” Tyrissa said. She
figured Giroon and Wolef were from the same land, and was glad she never
broached the topic until now, though Giroon was a few degrees lighter than the
Shade.

“Indeed,
Vitu’ka
,” said the bard with all
the venom of a curse. “But back to the topic at hand. This revelation of a link
to my people is fascinating. I’ve been focusing my search on Northern lore to
little benefit, but if one of the four sisters is in my homeland, we’ve at
least that much more to comb through. Better than the witch connection at this
point, as you’re hardly stirring a brew.”

“Four? You think there are four of us?” Tyrissa
wasn’t surprised at his implying all four were women. She expected that, though
couldn’t explain why. It just felt right.

“We have confirmation of at least three, correct?
Your previous vision was of a woman trudging through snow. That implies winter,
though you saw it late in the summer. On the south side of the world, the
seasons are flipped. Our summer is their winter. That places her in the South.
This Zegun girl is most certainly in my homeland. The mountains you described
are known as the
Kasa Milun
and lie at the very heart of our lands.
Furthermore, the world is made up of four landmasses so it only follows there
would be one of you for each continent. Why else would the shield be of four
sections?” Giroon smiled to himself, “Clean and simple. Just like your crest.”

The Khalan bard returned to the stage and
launched into the second half of
A King Brought Low
. He was much more on
key this time around, though continued to shoot occasional nervous glances at
Giroon.

“That means I should see one more. A vision of the
East.”

“That is a reasonable assumption, yes.”

“And what of the feathers, the wings?”
Wrapped
in feathered warmth, silver all around.

Giroon gave a carefree shrug. “I don’t know.
We’ll see.” He rapped his knuckles against the book on the table. “This is one
of the few items I brought with me from Zegun’da, a collection of creation
myths and ancient legends, the beginning of all. I had an inkling that my
search wasn’t broad enough, but if one of your kind is in the homeland, well, perhaps
I was looking in the wrong place. My next steps will be to make some careful comparisons
to what is already familiar to me. Is there anything else?”

Tyrissa had nothing more, but remained in the
booth for a time, once again trading bits of stories and variations of lore
with Giroon. On stage, the bard finished his tale strong to light applause.
Giroon raised his glass in respect and the relief in the younger performer’s
face was clear.

Tyrissa walked home while mentally toying with
the idea of intentionally overloading herself with elemental energies in
pursuit of another vision, of a glimpse of her theorized Eastern counterpart.
If she did it in a controlled situation, what was the harm? She knew Settan
would never approve and Hali was like a ghost these last few days, to say
nothing of the danger of toying with the opposite of Life. That left the Vitu
Shade and she had barely spoken to him. She would have to remedy that in the
coming days.

Tyrissa’s chance to hear the other side of the
Evelands story arrived by mail. A folded note pinned to her front door laid out
the details in clean, practiced script. Tonight, at an address in northeast
Crossing, and a request: prepare for a night for shadows. Signed, Wolef.

She dressed for the part in a recently purchased
and precisely fitted shirt and trousers, both dyed a deep blue like the tail
end of twilight. She had finally found a tailor that was just right, a hidden
gem in the back alleys of the textile district. The harness fit comfortably
underneath, though she carried her staff in hand as she wove through the
winding side streets.

The address wasn’t far, located in an emptier section
of Crossing. A line of four row houses showed varying levels of fire damage,
but older and not part of the recent troubles that Tyrissa seen firsthand. Many
of the other residences nearby looked equally abandoned, vandalized, or simply boarded
up and forgotten. The address belonged to the last in the row of fire-damaged
buildings, one that looked the least likely to collapse without any
encouragement. The front door was boarded up like the others, but an open side
door in the alley led to a short flight of stairs and into the central living
area of the charred home.

The interior was thick with the long-lingering
scent of ashes, but looked structurally sound in the faint, indirect light of
the street lamps. The room was clear of any furniture, the floorboards slightly
warped from the heat and stained by water. Tyrissa squinted against the gloom
and tried to sense out Wolef’s presence. She felt a slight draw towards the
stairway, the only real feature in the room. The sensation was alluring,
somewhere between desire and fascination, and very different from the purely
physical sensations associated with Fire and Water, Air and Earth.

A patch of shadow on the stairs stirred and spoke.
“Tyrissa. You’re right on time.”

“Wolef. In your element, I see.”

The Shade resolved into sight, sitting on the
lowest step, his clothes, hair, skin and eyes decreasing degrees of black. The
mental allure from the slight pull of shadow magick faded away. Mostly.

“Always,” he said with the contrasting flash of a
white smile. He stood just about eye level with her while standing on the
lowest step. “Shall we take up our watch on the third floor?”

Tyrissa followed him up the stairs, running her
fingers through the dust and grit that coated the handrail. “What are we
watching?”

“With so much activity in one night, some pieces
of the Thieves’ operations came loose. One such piece led to the house across
the street.”

Wolef led her to a room that overlooked the empty
street through a wide window, complete with a padded bench. The glass was
missing but the view was sound, a commanding overlook on their target across
the street. The house in question was much like the rest in the neighborhood: seemingly
abandoned with boarded up windows, though the front door was intact and
unbarred.

“That place is a short term storehouse. Small, discrete
deliveries arrive every day and once a week they’re moved out.”

“What are they moving?”

“Elchemical materials. Specifically, the kind
that are highly illegal to possess in even modest quantities outside the
oversight of the Concordium and of interest to our ultimate quarry.”

“So they’re supplying Vralin’s elchemy
production.”

“Correct. And he in turn supplies the Thieves
with their bag of tricks. The goal tonight is to wait for and then follow the
shipment to see where it goes next. It has to get to Vralin eventually. Unless
there’s a
second
rogue elchemist in the Khalanheim underground.” Wolef’s
focus shifted between her and the house across the street and she saw that his eyes
had a faint luminance to them, a spectral glow.

“This all sounds like something you’re just the
man for,” Tyrissa said. “Why do you need me?”

“Indeed, I could do this all myself. I wanted try
out our newest partner and see if someone else on the team can operate on the
more delicate side of things.”

“You might be disappointed. Subtlety isn’t my
strongest virtue.”

“Perhaps not. Regardless, I needed a break from
long, lonely Slides through the city’s underbelly and dodging Vralin’s
Fireweaver pet.”

“Her name is Ash,” Tyrissa corrected him sharply.
Wolef raised an eyebrow at that. “We’ve met a couple times before the night at
the mills,” she added.

Wolef barked out a short laugh. “
Ash
. They
always take names like that. Strange that she would stay loyal to Vralin for
even this long. Fireweavers are fickle. It takes a lot to keep their
attention.”

“You’ve had some experience with them, then?”

“I’ve had ample practice against Firepacts back
home, yes. It was part of my Shade training. But also more recently with Kexal
and Garth, during their last Pactbound hunt.”

“Back home being the Evelands,” Tyrissa said,
trying to prod him to say more.

“If you wish to use the Northern name. It’s
certainly easier to say than
Vitu’ka zo vuli ya Hakisilu
.”

“What does that mean?”

“The land of Vitu’ka, Empire of Shadows.
Roughly.” The name was possessive and ignored Giroon’s homeland of Zegun’da,
but Tyrissa had already decided to avoid mentioning the nation of one Evelander
to the other.

“Empire of Shadows sounds a little…”

“Evil?” Wolef asked with a smile.

“In a word.”

“It’s a matter of perspective. In many ways
Vitu’ka is inverted from the North. Skin degrees of black instead of white,
unified under a single banner instead of your many small nations, and for some,
a preference of night over day.”

“And where do Shadow Pactbound fit?”

“The Shades are the heart of Vitu’ka’s power, her
soldiers, spies, and scouts.”

“With all that shadow in your homeland, shouldn’t
there be light? A balance?”

Wolef stiffened slightly, as if she had somehow
insulted him. “Nothing thus far,” he said. “There may not be such a thing as a
Light Pactbound.”

“I’ve never heard of one,” Tyrissa said, hoping
to smooth away whatever slight she may have committed. “Though most of what I
know about pact magick comes from stories, even with what I’ve seen
first-hand.”

“Given what you’ve told us about your own abilities,”
Wolef said, choosing his words carefully, as if breaking delicate news, “perhaps
you could simulate one.”

“Maybe you and I could try that out sometime.”

“I… indeed,” he whispered while turning back to
the street, “Perhaps we should.”

Just as Tyrissa was about to ask after that small
bit of hesitation, Wolef pointed to the street and said, “Ah, we have action
below.”

Tyrissa felt a minor flush of embarrassment, both
for missing the rather obvious change and distracting away Wolef’s attention
from the street. A wagon had pulled up in front of the opposite house and soon
a trio of men emerged through the front door. Each carried a small crate and they
moved with the caution and care of knowing that what they carried was volatile
and expensive. Every other crate produced a faint rattle of glass stacked
against glass when they were set into the padded wagon bed. The driver gingerly
organized the crates and made quick tally marks on a slip of paper before
covering each round with a thick, dampening cloth.

On the third round, one of the three crew members
slipped while descending the stairs, causing his crate to fly from his hands.
The other Thieves froze in place as it crashed to the ground, expecting the
worst. The top of the crate split off, spilling out bundles wrapped in brown paper.

“Idiot,” the driver hissed. “Lucky that was the
leaf or we’d all be dead!”

“Or at least on fire,” Wolef whispered. “Speaking
of…”

Muttering apologizes, the clumsy crew member replaced
the spilled packets back into the crate. One of the bundles had split open and now
brilliant red leaves skittered down the street on the riftwinds.

“What is that?” Tyrissa asked.

“I think it’s
kuti kas
. Inferno leaf. It’s
an elchemical plant, aligned to Fire. It burns hotter and longer than most wood
but at many times the price. Fireweavers chew it like tobacco to filter out the
poisonous buildup from using their abilities.” He tapped one forearm. “Like my
rods. It can also be processed to make fire bombs and lock melters. Just the
sort of thing Thieves would want.”

“So it could be used to pay off a Fireweaver?”

“Absolutely. In addition to being an elemental
filter, it’s very addictive. In the borderlands back home, the easiest way to
stop a Zegun advance is to hit their
kuti
supplies and weaken their
Pactbound.”

The Thieves wrapped up loading the wagon, the bed
now full of crates. Wolef stood and wrapped a hand around the window frame. “It’s
time to move. I’ll follow from the rooftops, you take the streets.” The
buildings weren’t packed as close together here as the areas around the
university hill and the mill district, so Tyrissa wouldn’t be able to repeat
their first encounter, flying across the city’s rooftops.

“Will do,” she said.

There was another burst of that alluring pull as
Wolef’s body blurred into a darkened outline and melded into the shadows.
Tyrissa could follow his position as he Slid away, curling around the exterior
of the building to wait among the sculpted and burnt gables fronting the roof.
She rose and hurried downstairs back to the alleyway, keeping note of the
constant sense of Wolef location, a pull of magick attraction.

Peering around the corner, Tyrissa watched as the
storehouse crew dispersed. Two went back in the house, while the third joined
the driver atop the wagon’s bench. The driver snapped the reins and the single
draft horse plodded into motion. She tried to shrink into the shadows as the
wagon passed, but the two Thieves were too focused on the streets ahead and
didn’t even give her hiding place a glance. She felt Wolef flash by above and
looked up just in time to see a man-shaped shadow blink across the gap between
the row houses.

Best keep up.

Tyrissa cut away from the wagon’s route,
following the alley to a parallel street. The pull towards Wolef waned, almost
becoming lost among the rush of air as she hurried through the streets to meet
the wagon again as it moved toward less chaotic side streets. They were headed
southeast, toward the Rift. Wolef became a faint beacon in her mind, an
enticing point to follow. Tyrissa certainly hadn’t memorized the streets of
Khalanheim, but the routes blurred into a varied challenge, her sense of
direction keeping her from ever taking a completely wrong path. It was times
like this that the city faded away to become just like the Morgwood, with
obstacles and detours that were all part of the plan. She never lost track of
the wagon, always able to catch up to it as it made its way toward the warehouses
and docking platforms and towers of Khalanheim’s inland zeppelin port.

This was more familiar territory. Many of her
earlier jobs with the Cadre involved escorting unspecified shipments to and
from the warehouses and storage vaults of Dockside. The wagon arrived at its
destination soon after entering the grid of storage buildings: a mid-sized
warehouse with mild security, the kind reserved for low risk shipments like
foodstuffs or construction materials. Certainly not elchemical supplies. There
was no sneaking in required for the shipment, the driver simply passed a small
pouch to the gate guard. The guard checked the weight and started to pull open
the gate. An existing deal, then. The wagon soon disappeared into the warehouse
and their brief chase was concluded.

A pleasurable shiver ran up her spine as the pull
of Wolef’s shadow magicks spiked in intensity and he stepped out of the shadows
next to her. Despite the proximity of Wolef’s shifts into and out of the shadows,
she never felt an analogue to absorbing the wind energies in the Rift. There
was only the dwindling alluring sensation, like a lingering pleasant scent, and
no usable counter magicks.

“You kept up even better than I thought you
would, Tyrissa,” he said.

“I have my tricks.” She guessed that he had no
idea how easy it was for her to follow him while melded into the shadows,
another difference between Shadow and the other Elements. Ash and Settan seemed
to be able to feel her just as easily as she could feel them.

“That you do. I think we’ve seen enough for
tonight. Kexal has a way with dock workers. I’ll let him know that he has
someone new to befriend. He and Garth should be back in town today.”

“The pieces are starting to come together,”
Tyrissa whispered back, though she meant more than Vralin’s supply chain. If
Ash was dependent on him for her filtering supplies, his leverage might be too
strong and Tyrissa wouldn’t be able to split her away. She would have to find
another way to break the hold on Ash, especially before Wolef decided to
execute on his ‘ample practice’ against Fireweavers.

“Wolef, if you see Ash in the depths again tell
her that I’m looking for her.”

The Shade gave her a quizzical look, but nodded
and said, “I will.”