Wintertide (14 page)

Older than the Sorcerer. That thought ran through Khamsin’s mind as she left Queenie’s tavern, after blessing a few of the woman’s favorite amulets. Her refusal of money for her services shocked both the tavern-keep and the Captain, and Khamsin heard echoes of Rylan’s opinion of local Healers. But the blessing of minor charms or local Healers’ financial demands were not her main concerns. She was barely aware of Queenie’s gushing thanks as she pulled her cloak about her and stepped out into the night.

Older than the Sorcerer. Then he would be the one who would know.

The room seemed empty without Rylan. Khamsin sat in the window, watching the moons rise and found herself alternately filled with anticipation, and sadness.

Anticipation over finding her teacher, Ciro. Or rather, finding a place where he’d often been seen.

But sadness over the losses that had filled the past year of her life. Tanta Bron, Tavis, Rina, Aric and the children. And all the others she had known at Cirrus Cove. Familiar faces. Familiar times.

Everything here in Noviiya was distant and strange.

Some hours later, she heard the noises of the inn become muted, with only an occasional thump of a door, or clink of glass. The street below her window was deserted. The lamplighter had long come and gone.

She slipped down the back stairs again into the small garden and took out her amulets and warding stones. She wrote Ciro’s name in the dust, then her own sign as a Healer. It was more of an announcement than a spell. She wasn’t even sure it would work. She’d never tried to contact another Healer—or a Wizard!—before. Tanta Bron said it was something Khamsin didn’t need to know.

The runes for the open calling in the Book were vague. Even as she inscribed them, they felt weak.

But perhaps that’s because they were spell runes.

She waited. Something shifted over her mage circle; a pulsation of the palest blue. And then it was gone.

She bit back a sigh of disappointment. She’d have to look through the Book again. Perhaps realign her warding stones. There was interference, she felt, from Tarkir’s stone. It was too powerful, but Tanta Bron never permitted any other placement for Khamsin’s circles. Tarkir’s stone had to be the primary.

She waved her hand over the circle and the dust settled back smoothly onto the ground. Amulets went back into her pockets and stones were carefully placed in their soft, velvet bags. She was just rising from her knees when a gust of hot wind buffeted her face. She looked up quickly. The moons were gone. A large, dark shape plummeting towards her was all she could see.

She was on her feet, knife in her hand. Her throat was suddenly dry.

Then the moons appeared again and the dark shape arced away and settled on the top of the low wall. There was the ruffle of feathers and the sharp scrabble of claws against stone.

A crow. A large black crow, larger than the one that had frightened her and Nixa at the market.

“Do you bring me a message?” she whispered. But the crow didn’t answer and she sensed no spell-binding as she sought his animal essence.

Yet there was something... almost a foul smell about the bird. No doubt it feasted on dead fish and carrion. The odor of rotting fish brought to mind the old man in a cape as dark as the crow’s feathers, his claw-like hand reaching for her that day in Cirrus Cove. A lecherous drunk, filthy from sleeping in debris.

Or was he, like the crow, a well-disguised specter, a minion of a greater power?

She slipped her left hand into her pocket and rolled one of her amulets between her fingers. If there were magic here, perhaps the amulet would sense it, bring it to her by touch.

But the amulet resonated nothing. Not even crow essence. Nothing.

As if the crow really wasn’t there.

“What do you want?” she asked it quietly.

It turned its large head from her and pecked at the round stones of the wall, as if seeking an insect or small hidden rodent.

Then it shook its feathers again, took two short hops and sprang into the air. Its large wings beat furiously and in seconds it was out of sight, lost in the shadows of the rooftops.

Khamsin brought her sword out of the cupboard when she returned to the room, and slept with it, and Nixa, by her side.

*

She rose late after a night of fitful sleep. She brought a pot of tea back to the room and, making sure the door was secured, brought out the Book and lay it on the floor.

She had a lot of studying to do.

She took supper in her room as well. It was just after sunset that she and Nixa left the inn and headed towards the Old Quarter.

Nixa bounded ahead and would have been lost in the thick shadows of the night but for the mental contact Khamsin kept with the gray cat. After a day of being confined, the feline needed the feel of the wind through her fur and she scampered, halted and scampered again, stopping only to sniff at an unfamiliar doorstep or a pile of dog dung.

Khamsin, too, kept up a brisk pace, no longer as interested in her surroundings as she was in her destination: the Bell Tower. At the end of the Street of Dreams.

The Captain told her that the dilapidated structure was the tallest in the Old Quarter. Probably in Noviiya itself, save for the Governor’s Mansion—which Rylan told her was six stories. The Bell Tower matched the height of the temple of Meraka at the end of Pier Street, which had five. But the tower had no stories, save for a ground floor and a top floor with a winding staircase connecting the two.

The view from the top floor was breathtaking even late at night. It was worth the treacherous climb up the crumbling stone steps that spiraled up the interior walls of the tower. To the North and Northeast, the tower looked out over the Great North Sea and all the heavens. To the South and Southwest, the city. A panorama of lights sparkled through patches of darkness. Khamsin stood for a moment, arms wrapped around her waist and wished it was Rylan who held her, instead. Probably he’d seen this view a hundred times, or one just like it in his travels. Still she felt a need to share it with him. She promised herself she would, when he came back.

She walked slowly around the circular top floor that was punctured by a hole through which the bell ropes descended to the ground. The bells were gone. Khamsin stopped at the edge of the shaft, tilting her head back and gazed straight up at the great cross beams above her. Their only occupants now were the city’s pigeons.

A fine feast for Nixa, had she not been relegated to the duty of guard on the ground floor. The door to the tower was locked and bolted; though with its reputation as being ‘haunted’ intruders were not a serious problem. Khamsin ‘unlocked’ the door with the proper spell, securing it again after they entered. But felt safer with the night-eyed feline crouched at the foot of the stairs.

She stayed almost ’til dawn, watching, waiting; occasionally levitating a cluster of pigeon feathers for practice, swirling them in a circle or marching them in a line across the floor. It kept her mind occupied; kept thoughts of a dark-haired man from seeping through. She missed his company more than she thought she would and consoled herself with the stories they’d share when he returned.

If he returned, a small voice said. She pushed the thought away.

No one appeared to interrupt her reverie. Not even the pigeons overhead seemed the least bit interested that the Healer from Cirrus Cove was in the Bell Tower at the end of the Street of Dreams.

She and Nixa left at dawn accompanied by the clatter of chickens and the calling of voices through open windows in the early morn.

The next day was Reverence, the end of the week. It was the day when shops and stores traditionally shut down in observance with religious requirements, allowing Noviiyads to don their best and spend some time in prayer in the temple of their choosing. There were three temples in the city: the Temple of Meraka, the God of the Sea, appropriately enough on Pier Street. The Temple of Ixari, the Goddess of the Heavens, across from the Governor’s Mansion. And the largest, Tarkir’s Shrine, a few streets west of the Old Quarter where those who recognized the great powers of the Land and the Underworld could pay homage. The God Tarkir was the husband/brother of Ixari and, just as the sky and the earth met, but never intertwined, the two religious factions coexisted. But just barely.

Khamsin chose to pay her respects to Meraka early in the morning, her heritage being that of the Cove and the sea. Then at mid-morning she lit candles in Ixari’s Temple. One for Tanta Bron and one for Rylan. She prayed for the Sky Goddess to watch over them both.

She avoided Tarkir’s Shrine, even though the powerful Dark God was often favored by Healers and others who worked with mystical realms. The deaths at Cirrus Cove still weighed too heavily upon her to ask for favors from the God the Hill Raiders also worshipped.

Then wrapping her tan cloak around her, for it was a chillier day than Noviiya had seen in a time, she and Nixa made their way towards the Street of Dreams.

But Reverence produced nothing more than the previous night nor did the next three nights following into Midweek, save for an aching back and a feeling of disorientation due the disruption of her sleeping schedule. She took to catnapping, literally, with Nixa in the afternoons before stopping in to see Queenie and the Captain. She either ate supper there or purchased it and took it back to the tower to share with Nixa and a pitifully thin brown dog they had recently befriended.

And so it went even past Midweek, until Reverence was again only one sunrise away. The mad wizard Ciro was still nothing more than an illusive legend.

Rylan the Tinker, too, failed to reappear. She checked with Master Verney personally on several occasions. A week, the dark-haired man had said. Perhaps two. Well, she had now one week behind her. The loneliness hadn’t diminished as the days went by. Nor had the memory of the warmth of his touch.

She stopped at the Temple of Meraka on her way back to the inn. She almost collided with the Captain on the steps after the sunrise services.

“There are other Healers,” he advised, after commenting on the shadows under her eyes. “Why don’t you seek them out instead?”

But Khamsin shook her head, knowing that what the runes instructed couldn’t be altered. Ciro was the one.

Her dreams that afternoon were strangely troubling, the strain on her body taking it’s toll. She tossed and turned in the soft bed in the room she had occupied with the Tinker, disrupting Nixa. The cat sought the safety of the windowsill on which to snooze. Twice, she called out for Rylan as if her body remembered the magic his touch could work. Then she settled into a deep slumber.

Just as the shopkeepers filtered out into the streets, heading home for their evening meals, Khamsin awoke with a start, trembling and in a cold sweat. Danger. It was all she could remember of her dream, if a dream indeed it was. Danger. Terror. Darkness.

That night her sword hung from her belt as she and Nixa climbed the worn steps of the Bell Tower. Had she unsheathed it in the darkness, it would glow with a faint blue light of enchantment. But she kept it hidden for more reasons that just her lack of knowledge on how to use it. True, she’d given the instructions for its forging and true, she placed the proper spells within its heart. But the power it now possessed was one that was far beyond her experience. She could call upon it. But wasn’t quite sure what would happen when she did.

A light tap-tap-tap-tap interrupted her thoughts. She reached out to stroke the scruffy head of Nixa’s new friend, the stray brown dog. His tail kept a private rhythm on the stone floor, his belly now pleasantly full from his share of cheese and bread. Unlike the odd crow, which never reappeared, the dog’s animal essence was easy to read. Grateful emotions emanated from his mind into hers and she smiled. He knew a soft heart when he saw one.

She had hoped, on the first day she had befriended the animal, that he had had better bloodlines or training. A Hunter or a Retriever, perhaps, which could have been useful to her. Nixa’s size did limit her capabilities and Khamsin was reluctant to experiment with more advanced spells on the feline. But the dog’s mind was simple, very simple, perhaps due to poor nutrition as a pup. She accepted his existence because he needed her. And because Nixa seemed to like him.

The dog stood and shook himself, his ears flapping rapidly. Nixa batted at him playfully and he gave a small snort, then trotted down the stairs. The cat followed him part way then returned. The dog wasn’t interested in playing and Nixa preferred to stay with her mistress.

Khamsin broke the last of the bread into small pieces to feed to the feline. Nixa chewed delicately and then sat and began her usual ritual of an after-meal bath.

Suddenly, the cat bolted. Too late, Khamsin became aware of a foul stench filling the air, surrounding her, choking her. She rose up on one knee, her hand on the hilt of her sword. There was a flash; a bright fiery light in the center of the room where the bell-cords once were. She fell backwards, as if the light alone pushed her against the wall.

She was blinded, could see nothing but a diffuse orange glow. She groped for her sword, pulling it from its covering. The pale color of blue was added before her, pulsing almost as hard as her heart pounding in her chest.

Then, all was dark save for her sword and two red orbs that smoldered like embers above her, moving closer.

She struggled to her feet. “Name thyself!”

A hot wind whipped around her and closed upon her face like a hand, smothering. She coughed, the stench almost unbearable. She brought the sword up higher between herself and the approaching red eyes.

“Name thyself!” Her hands trembled and not from the weight of the sword.

Then she saw it. It stepped into a shaft of moonlight. It took all her training to stifle the scream of terror rising in her throat. A Demon. A Hell-spawned creature bred for deformities, weaned on the sludge that oozed from the graveyards in the Black Swamp. It stood twice her size. Its face was a grotesque carving of a lidless and lipless creature: eye sockets vacant but burning; mouth, a cavern of sharp, yellowed fangs. Its tongue, slit and pointed like a snake’s, dangled from between its teeth. A slimy mucus slid down it, sizzling as it impacted against the cold stone floor.