The Great Darkening (Epic of Haven Trilogy) (45 page)

“My dear Margarid, how may we be of help to you?” Engelmann graciously asked.

The three of them stood there in the great square of Westriver talking long into the day, for Margarid had many questions and was eager to hear what the old Arborist had to say. After some time had passed, and the depth of the conversation had intensified, the timber carts of the woodcutters made their anxious entrance to the borough’s square. Since the timber riots had started at the felling of the second to last branch, the riders of the Capital guard escorted and accompanied the vulnerable carts of the woodcutters in hopes of quelling any further uprisings.

The Priests of Westriver sat at their desks, scrolls and parchments at the ready. Their task was to make sure that what little timber arrived in the city was rationed out in relative fairness.

“I see that the Arborist has found himself quite the audience,” one Priest snidely commented to the other.

“If he spent less time postulating about the demise of our kingdom and what measures we should theoretically be taking to prepare for such a demise, and spent more time tending to the dying tree … perhaps he would have less to postulate about!” The other Priest grumbled with indignant fervor as he made markings to account for the small cords of timber that his partner had just given to a citizen family.

“That is what is wrong with our world. The undisciplined wanderings of too many undisciplined minds have led to the displeasure of the mighty THREE who is SEVEN, of that you can be certain,” said the first Priest.

“Maybe we could regain the favor and the provision of our most displeased deity if we but cleanse our great city of this infectious blasphemy. Send them wandering into the shadow lands like the Poets of old,” said the second Priest.

Armas, who had just arrived in the square in time to meet the now approaching timber carts, had overheard the disgruntled conversation of the Westriverian Priests. Coupled with the warning of the Chancellor earlier that morning, he began to grow uneasy at the condemnation that seemed to be gaining popularity with the people.

Oh Engelmann, what kind of trouble have you got yourself into now, my friend?

Armas made his way across the square to the merchant cart where the Arborist and his pupils sat and listened, still in excited conversation. The captain had been given orders, and though he half-believed the warnings of the mossy-haired old man, he still had to reluctantly deliver the message from the Citadel.

“Oh, good day, Captain,” Engelmann said in between puffs on his long-stemmed pipe.

“Engelmann. Michael,” Armas said, nodding to each of them in greeting.

“Oh—this is Margarid. She um … she is ...” Michael stumbled a bit over his words.

“Listening to the controversial ravings of this old Arborist, she is.” Engelmann smiled with a defiant grin on his face.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, my lady, though I do wish it was for brighter reasons,” Armas said as he embraced her slender arm with his own.

“Oh?” said Engelmann. “And just what are these dimly lit reasons of yours, Captain?”

Armas took a deep breath, making it obvious that he delivered these words with protest and great care. “Since your return from Bright Harbor, the Citadel has become both aware of and altogether angered by your unbecoming and dark heraldry, Arborist.”

Armas looked about to see if any Priest or guardsman was within earshot of his next words. “Though I do not doubt that there is magic in this world of ours that is largely ignored, and though it is obvious to me that somehow you have managed to stumble upon some of it … I warn you, friend, be careful as to whom and by which methods you choose to speak of this magic of yours,” he said in a stern and serious whisper.

“Magic of
mine
?” Engelmann said amusedly. “This magic is not something to be possessed, like a coin or a horse or that braided cord of office you wear. No, Captain Armas … this magic is far too wild for that kind of nonsense.”

“Whatever kind of magic it is, I implore you to think wisely about how and when you speak of it, before you find yourself locked in irons with no audience but the rats of the prison holds,” Armas said, plainly enough.

“Prison holds?” Michael said, quite confused. “I don’t understand, Armas. Engelmann only speaks of what the Oweles told him, and it is only for the safety and survival of our city. There is not a word of rebellion or malice in any of his conversations!”

“
Oweles
you say?” Armas said, both eyebrows now at full attention. “Now I must really beg of you both—perhaps all three of you,” he said, giving the young lady Margarid a sorrowful look, “to watch your tongues before the Chancellor does something to quiet them for you!”

Michael looked to his teacher and then back again to Margarid in search of some kind of reassurance, but all he found were blank stares. “Then what would you have us do? This is not just nonsense, not just the paranoid ravings of an overly imaginative old Arborist. Why would you quiet the truth at the very moment that our people so desperately need to hear it?”

Armas just shook his head, unable to come up with a satisfactory answer.

Michael turned and faced north, looking through the crowded streets and shadowy skies. “I know what Cal told me before he left, and I believe him, Armas, I believe what he so desperately tried to warn me of.”

“Cal? This is your groomsman friend, is it? The one who went in your stead to the Wreath? What exactly did he warn you of, Michael? Maybe you could help me understand why the lot of you would risk your freedom for such a message?” Armas asked sincerely.

“That a great and terrible foe is lurking in the edges of the shadows, a green-eyed evil that has long waited and brooded in its dark halls for the demise of our great tree. It is coming for us,” Michael said, still staring off to the north. “Cal said he had seen it, or at least parts of it, which is why he left.”

“So he just ran from it?” Armas asked.

“No!” said Michael vehemently, jumping to the defense of his friend. “Captain, he went in search of the one thing that could truly defeat it.”

“And just what is that?” asked Armas.

“The new light of the THREE who is SEVEN,” Engelmann said matter-of-factly, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “He has gone to fulfill the prophecies of old. He has set out to finish what King Illium could not.”

Armas stood there stunned for a moment. He could almost not believe his ears, incredulous at the notion of what his two friends were saying. “So … if Cal is seeking this new light as you say …” Armas paused to collect his thoughts, “then why in the damnable dark are you risking the wrath of the Citadel to preach from the back of a merchant cart?”

Engelmann took a long draw on his smoking pipe, his eyes panning the view of the men and women who waited dejectedly in line for their meager rations of the nearly vanished timber, and then he looked to his young apprentice before answering Armas’ question.

“For
hope,
Captain. Hope for hearts that will choose to endure the approaching darkness with belief in the promise that a new light will come. I fear that hope, out of all the virtues of our city’s people, is the least valued, and the least exercised here inside these well-disciplined walls,” Engelmann told him, something indefinable lighting his eyes as he spoke with an earnest passion.

“Hope?” Armas pondered for a moment. “That seems, well … like a bit of an ordinary thing to risk your neck for, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps now it does, when the only thing we truly fear is darkness itself.” Engelmann puffed again nonchalantly in between his words. “But just you wait, Captain, for when darkness is the least of our worries, hope might be the only thing that will keep us from being consumed by the ruinous tyranny of whatever evils wait for us.”

Armas crossed his arms in a clear indication that he did not fully comprehend Engelmann’s perspective. “You speak in riddles, old friend, but I need practicalities,” he said with a challenging tone in his voice. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, but neither seemed willing to say more on the matter.

Margarid stood quietly by, watching and listening to the conversation between the captain and the Arborist, and as she did she felt something new beginning to blossom there inside her innocent heart. “Is this what you believe, Michael? That there is something more worth hoping for?”

Michael thought long about her question, for he sensed there was more tied to his response than just a regurgitation of his teacher’s words. The eyes of Engelmann and Armas rested upon the young groomsman, there in the square of Westriver, as they waited for his response.

“I hope …
for hope
, lady Margarid,” Michael said honestly. “I hope that, when whatever green-eyed monsters that wait for us in the shadows assault the resolve of this city, I will have clear sight enough to find a deeper hope.”

Engelmann smiled a wide, knowing grin as he took yet another long tug on his pipe.
Good answer, young groomsman. Good answer indeed.

Margarid smiled a satisfied smile as she leaned over and kissed him quickly on his right cheek. Michael’s face turned a deep shade of red as he looked shyly into her upturned and admiring face.

“That was honest and hopeful enough for me,” Margarid said to him. “Thank you, Michael, and thank you, Arborist. I
hope
,” she said with a girlish giggle, “to see and to speak with you both again, soon.”

With a smile and a faint, new light in her hazel eyes, the auburn-haired young woman walked across the square to take her place at the end of the timber line.

“Well, groomsman, it would seem that you might even have more to be hopeful for now than you ever expected to,” Armas said with a teasing tone of voice.

Engelmann puffed his pipe, but his eyes twinkled and revealed his amusement with the whole exchange.

Armas grew serious again as he implored them one last time. “Please though, my friends, whereas I am not wholly convinced your words are the irreverent blasphemies that the Citadel believes them to be, you would do well to speak with prudence and caution. I, for one, will hold out
hope
that two of my friends will not end up bound and chained in the prison holds of the Capital.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

A
rmas
and two of his riders left from the Capital at the rising of the faintest amber the very next morning. They chose the fastest coursers from the stable yard and rode with great haste northward to the borough of Piney Creek. Armas went with the objective of truly investigating the frightened claims that were recorded in the marshal’s reports. Though the Chancellor would rather he just pacify their requests and bid them to keep any unfounded fears to themselves, Armas had a soft spot for the northerners and had determined to give their situation a fair assessment.

By the time they arrived in the northern borough, only the faintest silver light could be seen, casting its sad glow over the small community of Piney Creek. The streets were eerily quiet at this time of night, and most of the windows of the modest homes were completely dark in their cold slumber.

“Go and inform the marshal that we are here, and have him meet me over a loaf of hot bread and a flagon of the Gnarly Knob’s amber ale,” Armas said to his guardsmen. In truth, though the darkness continued to brood and his mission was slightly distasteful, all he had thought of for the last twenty leagues or so was the delight he was about to take in the warm hospitality of Keily’s cooking and Shameus’ amber ale.

“Aye, Captain,” his men said with a salute before they walked off into the darkened night of the North towards the guard bastion at the Northern Gate.

Though Armas could see an amber glow from inside the foggy glass windows of the familiar tavern, he heard no songs or jovial bouts of drunken laughter. He saw no shadows of men dancing or even stumbling to find the privy through the back door. The Gnarly Knob, once a vibrant center of life for those who called this colder borough home, seemed altogether … dead.

He heard the sound of his own boots clumping and knocking on the slats of the tavern’s front porch as he made his way to the door of the place that he had frequented whenever the Citadel sent him northward. Pushing at the wrought-iron handle, he swung the door inward, revealing a rather unexpected sight. There inside, seated at the tables and at the tavern’s bar itself, dozens of men and women ate their stew and drank their drink in frightened silence.

Armas scanned the crowd of people, but could not spy Shameus or Keily anywhere in the tavern. “Pardon, good people of Piney Creek,” Armas said, his voice sounding awkward in the strange quiet. “I’m looking for my friend Shameus or his daughter Keily. Would anyone be able to point me to where they might be?”

The patrons looked up from their suppers, and without saying a single word, they all began to turn and look to one another to determine who should be the one to address this captain of the Citadel. Finally, with what seemed like the full consensus of the silent group, an old man stood to his feet. His heavy, woolen clothes were dirty, and his face looked like he had not slept in days. His long mustache, once a deep black, was now peppered with the grey of long, hard-lived years. He removed his woolen hat from his head, and in cowering humility he spoke to the captain.

“My lord, the lady Keily is on the wall, as she has been for two days’ time,” said the old man named Bartle. “She has been there almost every moment, ever since her father was lost to the dark fog.”

“Shameus? Lost?” Armas was a bit stunned at the thought, despite the many warnings and reports he had heard of the dark mysteries in the North. “What fog, and why is he lost to it?”

“The day the branch fell, my lord, this thick, black hell of a haze came to rest heavy upon the outlands there, just on the other side of the wall.” Bartle seemed a bit sheepish as he retold the story. “The whole borough was spooked beyond belief, the horses and all the livestock too; they all began acting strangely, my lord. Not a one of the chickens would lay an egg, nor would any of the heifers give up their milk; it was as if the whole lot of us were scared puckered tight,” Bartle continued on.

“Some of us, well, we just drank more ale to dull the fear, and before long a few of the old ones had more than enough courage for the whole borough. The four of them wanted to prove something to themselves I think … maybe that they still had strength left in those old bones of theirs, or maybe that they wouldn’t be bullied here on their homeland. I couldn’t say for sure.” Bartle wrung his woolen hat in his hands as he spoke to the captain.

“And Shameus went with them then?” Armas asked.

“Aye,” replied Bartle with a somber look in his eyes.

“Well where are the four old fools now?” Armas asked him in a kind voice, trying to learn all that he could from this frightened old shepherd.

“That’s just it, my lord,” the man said as he raised his eyes to the captain’s. “No one knows, no one has seen them for two days now … they never did come back through the gates.”

The door of the Gnarly Knob burst open in a flurry of excitement as the two guardsmen that Armas had traveled with rushed inside. “Captain,” the older of the two said as his hurried breath fogged around him in the cold chill of the night’s air. “Captain, I need you to come with us right away. There is something you must see!”

Armas could feel the dread pulsating off of this frightened soldier’s body. “Alright corporal … where are we going?”

“To the Northern Gate,” the rider told him. “I need you to see what lies just beyond it.”

The rumblings and murmurings of the frightened people hiding in the warmth of the tavern began to swell to panicked outcries as they observed the faces of the worried guardsmen.

“What did he see?” shouted an old woman. “Tell us what he saw!’

“The THREE who is SEVEN has abandoned us, I knew it … I knew it! He has left us to die at the hands of the damnable dark and its evil fog!” shouted a drunk and ornery old cuss of a man.

“Don’t you go talking like that, you old fool, or the THREE who is SEVEN might get half a mind to follow through with it!” said another man as he kissed the flint that hung around his neck.

“Will you help us, Captain?” implored Bartle.

Armas chewed on his lower lip as he stood there, his mind racing to come up with some comforting words to offer the scared people of Piney Creek. As he thought, without much effort and to his great surprise, the words of Engelmann were the first words that came to his mind.

“Do not give up hope, people of Haven. You must hold onto it with both hands; for it may be hope alone that proves to be the very weapon to defeat whatever evils await us.” As Armas heard the words come out of his mouth, a deep empathy overcame him for these complete strangers of the cold North. His empathy however, was quickly followed by the sudden realization that he was not just saying the words of Engelmann in order to pacify and create calm; it seemed that he indeed meant them. He meant them, perhaps more than he had meant any words he had ever spoken before.

“Excuse me, my lord … but are you … well …” Bartle’s voice snapped Armas’ attention out of his reverie.

Armas began to step away from the old man, glancing around the room once more before he took his leave.

The old shepherd leaned in close once more and grabbed his arm. “Are you … are you a Poet, my lord?” Bartle asked him in a nervous whisper.

Without answering the question, but not without letting its implied meaning sink in a bit, Armas left the Gnarly Knob. He followed his guardsmen through the silent streets of the frightened borough by the faint light of the dying tree. When they arrived at the main entrance to the northern highway, there at the mouth of the Northern Gate, the gravity of the situation fell upon the captain’s chest with heavy and ill-fitting pressure.

“Corporal, tell me, what do you know about what’s happening here?” Armas asked his rider. “Is it just the fog that draws them to stand and take watch there atop the battlements of the wall?”

The young rider looked nervously at his commanding officer before he spoke. “No, Captain. Come, follow me and see for yourself.” The corporal led his captain through the checkpoint of guardsmen, then up the stone stairs that looked as if they had been cut right into the inner masonry of the large, stone wall.

When Armas reached the barbican atop the Northern Gate, it became instantaneously obvious that the very reports he had read, and that had subsequently led him to make the long ride North, did not for a moment accurately portray the state of affairs that presented itself just beyond the relative safety of this wall.

In fact, the situation was perhaps a great deal worse than the reports had led him to believe.

“Where is the gatekeeper? Corporal, get me the marshal of this borough and get him now!” Armas ordered with commanding haste. “Rider! I need a rider at once!” he shouted to the column of stunned and scared guardsmen that lined the battlements around him. “Move!”

A slow-burning commotion lit at the shouting of Armas’ orders, waking the guardsmen and the citizens alike from their fear-induced paralysis. Those atop the wall could see plain enough that whatever it was that waited on the other side would not be counted friendly.

The marshal of the borough swiftly made his way across the wall from the other side of the battlements and reported as Armas had ordered. “Captain, do you have any idea who or what that is out there?”

“No. Not in the slightest,” Armas replied.

The marshal peered worriedly down the small line of defense, as not more than a few dozen guardsmen and gatekeepers were at his command here in this northern assignment. Most of the Citadel’s trained fighters were stationed in Westriver, where the majority of the timber riots and outlier insurrections were taking place.

“Tell me, Marshal,” Armas asked him, “have you heard word from Hollis? I sent a rider a day before we arrived, and I had hoped that by some stroke of great fortune he might have been close by.”

“No, Captain, none yet,” answered the marshal. “And I fear that whatever is out there,” he pointed off into the dark distance, “might have just cut off any further chance we have of hearing from him now.”

“I fear the same thing,” Armas agreed. “About the tavern keeper, Shameus … has anyone seen any sign of him yet?”

“No sir, not one sign,” the marshal said, his expression going dim and a bit saddened as he answered. “His daughter is over there,” he said as he pointed to the dark-haired young woman. “She is a strong one though … hasn’t left her position there but for just long enough to make supper for her patrons, before taking her place back on the wall.”

The marshal looked at her with a mix of pride and sadness in his eyes. “She is not frightened, that one there, and she is not stupid either. She knows full well that her daddy is probably dead, but she is waiting and watching so that she might know who it is that will have to pay for taking him from her.”

“Well, it might just be her vengeance that raises courage up in the rest of these men of ours,” Armas said with a sad smile.

“You might be right about that, Captain,” the marshal said. “I have known her since she was a wee lass, and she was never one to hide from intimidation, not from the boys, and certainly not from her half-drunk patrons!”

Armas watched Keily, though she did not notice him. An urge to protect the beautiful young woman from the evil that had taken her father rose up inside him. Responsibility and a hint of desire for her nearly persuaded him to make her take her leave from the wall, and perhaps even Piney Creek altogether, but wisdom and prudence prevailed and he forced himself to temper his instincts. There was no doubt that they needed every able body if they were going to stand a fighting chance.

“And she is not a bad shot either, with that hunting bow of her daddy’s there.” The marshal pointed to the leather-wrapped bow that hung from her back. “If she pretends whoever it is out there is a jack or a chicken, well—I would put her up against some of your best archers.”

“Let us pray that we need not find out just how keen of an eye she has, huh?” Armas said as he firmly squeezed the shoulder of the old marshal.

The third member of Armas’ riding party ran up the stone stairs, the mist from his heavy breath dancing in the torchlight. “Captain, you sent for me?”

“I need you to ride, ride hard and with as great a haste as you can urge your horse to make!” Armas wrote hurriedly on two pieces of parchment, sealing them with green wax and the sigil of the Capital guard. “This one,” he handed the tiny piece of rolled parchment to the young rider, “deliver first to Lieutenant Marcum; he is stationed in Westriver at the Western Gate. His immediate response could be the very thing that saves the lives of many of Haven’s people.”

The rider took hold of the document and tried to pull it from Armas’ grasp, but the captain held firm, not ready to release it just yet.

“Do you understand me?” Armas asked with an urgent hardness to his voice, afraid that the young rider would miss the importance of this order or find himself distracted somewhere along the way if he was not properly instructed.

“Yes, Captain, I understand,” the rider responded.

“Then, and only then, once Marcum has received this order and you have watched him set into motion the words of my command, deliver this to the Citadel,” Armas said. The intensity of his gaze was so moving that the young rider could not help but feel overwhelmed at the gravity of this heavy assignment.