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Stillbright
Book Two of the Paladin Trilogy
By Daniel M. Ford SFWP
Copyright © 2017 Daniel M. Ford
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-939650-60-3
CHAPTER 1
Cost and Memory
Allystaire, formerly Lord Coldbourne, War Leader of Barony Oyrwyn, favored knight of the Old Baron Gerard Oyrwyn, Castellan of Wind's Jaw Keep, currently the Arm of the Mother, Paladin and Prophet of Her Church, was intimately acquainted with pain. Pain was the price of the life he had lived before his Ordination. It seemed to him that pain was the cost of the life he lived now.
And at the moment, he was readying himself to pay a great deal of that cost. Bound to a rack in a lightless room in the bowels of the Dunes, at the mercy of Baron Lionel Delondeur's pet sorcerer, he was anticipating pain. On what scale, he wasn't entirely sure yet.
There'd been a beating on the way down to the lightless room in which he languished, after he'd been stripped of arms and armor. With his body held immobile by the sorcerer's power, and even the release of yelling or screaming denied to him, the Delondeur soldiers escorting them had taken a bit of their own back. His name had usually been foremost among the army that had killed their friends, or brothers, or, when he realized how young some of them looked, probably their fathers. He didn't begrudge them the odd thud of fist or boot. It was really just professional courtesy. Had better from your sisters, he might have said. Only I had to pay them in copper, he might have added, had he the use of his mouth. Though it didn't seem the knightly thing to say, it was customary to say something.
The guards had lost interest quickly when they saw they could earn no response, and none were eager to linger around Bhimanzir. That much was plain. So once he was secured, the chains pulled tight, off they'd gone, taking their torches with them. The features of the room barely impressed themselves upon Allystaire's vision as the door sealed the last of the light away. He knew he was bound to a rack of iron and wood by loops of chain and that his sorcerous bonds had dropped away once the chains had been looped taut. He'd seen an oddly shaped table for a moment. There'd been a rack of tools upon it. Sharp tools.
Submitting to fear earns me nothing, Allystaire told himself. Think on how I got here. Down a lot of freezing stairs, yes. Some new construction? Near the keep's own dock, out over the water? He felt entirely uncertain of any of these guesses. Making guesses and developing a possible response is better than waiting for the cutting to start, he told himself, but he'd just run out of guesses to make.
The sorcerer suddenly appeared, revealed in the darkness only by the light emanating from his hands. Allystaire strained to make out his captor's features, but could see only that he was bald, and that his skin appeared entirely smooth and unlined.
"No doubt you are steeling yourself to resist my blades and hooks, my whips and hot irons," the sorcerer said. "I have no need of such crude tools for such a simple task. No doubt you will end your life upon one of them." There was no more feeling, no more expression in the man's words, than in those of a bored child reciting a lesson for a tutor who wasn't listening.
"What I am interested in is inside you, yes. Yet I think the hook would not show it to me," the sorcerer went on. One of those fingers, warm with the promise of agony, reached out and pressed against Allystaire's bare chest.
The sorcerer uttered a single syllable that vanished before Allystaire's ears could reach out for it.
Then the fingertip ignited against Allystaire's chest and burned unbearably. He screamed, surprising himself, as the world collapsed around the brand of fire that pressed against him.
Unloosed, unfocused, his mind sought some way to comprehend what was happening. Memories flashed, battles and wounds he'd taken. Then suddenly an image flashed into clarity.
Michar, the Old Baron's chirurgeon. A stump of a dwarf, his hair gone grey, beard in three thick, short braids bound with caps of silver, gold, and a metal Allystaire couldn't name. The plain workingman's clothes and thin gloves, the apron with its pockets of gleaming instruments.
One of them, a thick rod with its handle wrapped in leather, that would heat over a good fire in the time it took to simply lay it in the coals. The dwarf had closed many a wound with it, sealed them with his potions soaking the tissues, keeping away the things a man feared more than a wound itself.
Allystaire remembered almost a score of years ago, the dwarf standing over him as three men held him down. Having cut away an arrow from the meat of young Allystaire's thigh, sniffing the barbed point and harumphing as he consigned it to the flames with a flick of his hand.
"Sorry, son," he'd said. "They've dipped the arrowheads in their own jakes. It's for the best. On three." Then, without counting at all, the dwarf plunged the heated rod into the young knight's wound. There was the smell of his own flesh burning before the world collapsed into the pain of it.
There, Allystaire told himself, snapping back into the now, into the sorcerer standing in front of him. He screamed still, but the scream turned into an improbable laugh.
"I have had that from a dwarf who meant to save my life," he spat, when the sorcerer lowered his hand, having taken half a step back in confusion.
"I suppose I must use all the Delvings," the sorcerer said, ignoring the Paladin's exclamation. "One at a time, of course."
That energy was directed at Allystaire again. He half expected his skin to start smoking. The light extending the half span from the sorcerer's finger seemed, by turns, smoky, greasy, and incandescent. That may have been his mind simply searching aimlessly to understand what was happening.
What Allystaire did understand, what he knew, was that this was a pain he'd felt before. It hurt certainly. Hurt enough so that he screamed till his throat was raw. But he'd felt it before, or something enough like it to call himself its master instead of being mastered by it.
Abruptly, it ceased. And the quality of the light bathing his skin changed, becoming thicker, less translucent, as did its form. Instead of a single ray boring — or seeming to — a hole into his chest, the sorcerer raised his hand above Allystaire's head and let it fall down upon him like slow drops of rain.
It was a different kind of agony, and it engulfed his whole body. But he didn't have to search long or think hard.
"The battle in front of some shit-hole keep in Harlach," he groaned. Inwardly he remembered trying to carry a wall defended by starving, exhausted men. Without anything else left, they'd boiled water and poured it over the walls. Some had splashed along his neck and inside his armor, scalded him. Other men took it worse, he reminded himself. Not other men. Poorer men. They always did, he added, a moment of clarity amidst the pain.
Still the sorcerer said nothing, did nothing, except guide droplets of power through Allystaire's body.
The paladin clamped his teeth shut, cutting off his cries of pain. He swallowed them, buried them behind a sudden loathing of his memories.
This drew a humorless laugh from the sorcerer. "Try as you might, you cannot resist the pain of the Delvings. None can. Give into it. Perhaps, if you are lucky, your mind will untether itself before I am done, and you will feel only the dimmest pain before I feed my divinations with your life. This is, however, unlikely. You will end begging to serve me. You will scream it before long."
"Scream? Aye, I will. Beg to serve you? Never that," Allystaire grated through clenched teeth. Goddess help me, never that, he silently prayed.
* * *
It may have been turns. It may have been moments. It may have been days. Allystaire wasn't sure. In the midst of the pains the sorcerer inflicted with new manifestations of his power, it was all Allystaire could do to search his memories and find something to tell him that he had survived the thing once and would do so again.
All too often the memories he sought reminded him that others hadn't survived.
When the sorcerer tried a kind of cutting energy that sliced at him, Allystaire laughed. The lance at Aldacren keep. A dirk trying to find my ribs while I throttled the knight wielding it, both of our weapons lost. The captain's sword in the warehouse in Bend.
When a faint web of lines, pulsing darkly red in the air flew at him and sank into his skin, surely he screamed. But he remembered being unhorsed by a lance for the first time, the feeling of helplessness, the way the shock and the pain hit his whole body all at once as he crashed to the ground.
I could barely crawl out of bed the next day. I was a mass of bruise. I was perhaps twelve summers old. And still they made me sit a horse and tilt against the quintain the next day.
Finally, lowering his hands, the sorcerer — his measured voice betraying his seething anger better than any yelling might have done — said, "Why do you keep recounting these pathetic anecdotes?"
It was only then that Allystaire realized he'd been speaking them all aloud, shouting them while he screamed.
He didn't answer. Instead he lifted his head and found the sorcerer 's eyes. It was easy enough to do now, as they had started to slowly pulse with thin lines of red like that which drifted from his fingertips.
"I realize that you will pride yourself on not answering even my most petty questions. This will prove foolish. In the main I do not need your answers."
Allystaire thought about summoning the strength to spit, discarded the idea, and simply met the gaze.
With an exasperated sigh, the sorcerer turned and vanished in a rush of red light, leaving Allystaire in complete darkness.
CHAPTER 2
Sounds like Cursing
A turn or two before she went walking on the quays, Idgen Marte found Torvul outside a metal-monger's shop along a street full of smiths of every description. The air was thick with smoke and the faint burnt scent of hot metal and it rang with hammers, though they slowly petered out as the afternoon wore on.
Inside, the alchemist conversed with a fellow dwarf in the harsh but flowing consonance of their shared language. The other dwarf was a bit taller than Torvul, and had a thick but carefully trimmed soot-black beard covering his face. When she came a few more steps into the shop, the conversation abruptly ceased as both turned to look at her, but Torvul smiled and said to the other dwarf, "She's a friend, Murnock."
As Idgen Marte walked to his side, the dwarf said to her, "You won't mind if we continue in our native tongue — it is a more satisfying language to barter in than what you people use, after all, and besides, I can't thoroughly defraud the good ironmonger here if I don't use Dwarfish."
"I speak the barony tongue too, wanderer," the other dwarf said, and his tone, Idgen Marte thought, was a bit cold for a man hoping to make a sale. "You'll defraud me in no tongue at all."
"The problem for you, Murnock, is that when I outwit a man in a bargain, which is to say when I make a bargain, he doesn't realize it till his deathbed."
"Cease your nattering and let's finish up. Past time for beer and bread."
"I couldn't agree more," Torvul said, his voice suddenly honeyed. "But I couldn't possibly pay more than three or four silver links per rod of your bar stock."
"Price is a gold link per, 'less it's a lot-price, in which case I can go as low as six silver."
"I only need two rods and I'd sooner walk out of here less my balls than two gold links for iron like this. Five silver links, not a bent copper-half more."
"I'll take no less than eight."
Torvul snorted and pushed away from the counter, holding his hands up in mock disgust. "Then I'll find another iron-monger." He turned and started to walk out of the shop. He was at the door when the other dwarf smashed a fist against his counter and cursed in their native tongue, then barked out, "Six!"
I think he cursed, Idgen Marte thought. It all sounds like cursing.
Torvul pivoted on his heel and smoothly walked back to the counter, already digging in the purse he'd produced from up a sleeve. "I want to pick my own bars," he said, before pulling free three linked chains of four bright circles of silver and laying them on the counter. Almost instantly, they were swept up by the other dwarf's hand.
The dwarf grumbled, but he took the money, then lifted up a hinged section of his counter. Idgen Marte quickly followed him through the door behind the counter and out into the larger part of the building where metal was stored in stacks; it was mostly iron, but she saw stacks of white lead, green copper, others she couldn't identify. Torvul gravitated instantly to a pyramidal stack of thick iron rods, and knelt down, tilting his head towards them and inhaling deeply through his nose. His eyes widened, briefly, but from where Murnock stood, he couldn't have seen.
Torvul made a show of sorting through them, sniffing around the entire pile, tapping one or two with his fingertip — but Idgen Marte noticed that he went right back to the bottom and carefully separated out the first two he'd sniffed. He picked them up, handed one to Idgen Marte, and the two made for the door. They were almost out when the shopkeeper burst out with another rockslide of Dwarfish. Idgen Marte turned to listen, watching their faces carefully.
Torvul looked pained, his jaw tightening and his eyes narrowing just a moment before he answered. Idgen Marte couldn't pick out where one word ended and another began, but she could've sworn she heard the word Thornhurst tucked into Torvul's response. Then the dwarf turned and left so quickly she was stuck standing in the doorway with an iron bar in one hand.
When they were ten paces from the storefront, Torvul shook off whatever had bothered him and let out a cackle. "Still got it. Could've taken him to three if I wanted to — but the poor benighted bastard has no nose for the metal at all, and half a wagonfull of hungry mouths 'round him."
"And you didn't because?"
Torvul shrugged, and pointed his free hand vaguely skyward. "Don't want to anger Her Ladyship. I figure I can bargain shrewd, I just can't rob a man blind anymore." He sniffed disdainfully, and said, "It's like deliberately leaving half a vein of ore in the tunnel. Goes against everything I was brought up to believe — there was actually a cult a few hundred years ago, preached that we ought to leave some of everything — ores, gems, where we found it, to appease the rock and the spirits inhabiting it."
"What happened to it?"
"Nothing good," Torvul said, darkly. "Now. Where is our man?"
Idgen Marte sighed, shifted the burden of the rod she was carrying, and pointed with a free hand towards the distant towers of the keep. "There."
Torvul whirled on her. "What? Why did you say nothing?"
"He was summoned. Not arrested. Invited."
"And he agreed to go?"
"Well, he was asked by a squad of soldiers — looked solid types, too." She glanced around, and said, "We shouldn't be talking about this on the street."
Torvul nodded and quickened his pace, and soon enough they arrived at the inn he'd taken rooms at and unburdened themselves of their cargo. Torvul stroked the edge of one of the rods, and said, "Got traces of other things in it. With some coal and the right fire, I'll make steel out of this that could string a harp."
"What're you planning to make?"
Torvul shrugged. "This n'that. You'll see. Now — Allystaire went to the Dunes?"
Idgen Marte sat down in one of the chairs the room provided, surprised that it came cushioned. "Aye — he told me to wait till morning. That if we hadn't heard, we ought to, well ... go find him, I s'spose."
Torvul spat into the unlit fireplace. "He's a fool."
"If he had resisted, maybe that squad couldn't have taken us, but the city's full of hundreds more soldiers — campaign season is over."
"Haven't they farms to go back to? Mills? Fishing boats?"
"Some, surely. Not all."
"Well — what do we do?"
Idgen Marte shifted uncomfortably on the chair. "Wait till morning?"
Torvul shook his head. "I don't like it. We don't know what's going on there. Could be he's already dead, or in chains, tortured."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stillbright by Daniel M. Ford. Copyright © 2017 Daniel M. Ford. Excerpted by permission of SFWP.
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