Authors: A.J. Aalto
A flicker in the dark underbrush to our right drew my gaze. There was a thick growth of short, stumpy white mushrooms beneath a fallen log and a long whip of bluebells woven into the greenery. Where the shadows became heavy, the mushrooms seemed to glow. Through the trees I could see one of the other paths that had been offered after crossing the river. A path not taken. Sun shone through the canopy there, and I had an urge to go there that I quickly recognized as unwise.
Harry murmured, “Do reign in your temptation to stray, ducky,” and cast a long glance over his shoulder at me, eyes flashing chrome. “I really do not have the time to rescue you from your own missteps at present.”
“No,” said a high male voice from the trees. “Nor do I. Nor do we. Nor do we or I or me or us. Hullo, Guy.”
Harry paused in his step and then turned with a great smile that I sensed was an act of theatre and not in the least bit sincere. “Lord High Treasurer. You will be expecting your toll.”
I tried to spot the being with whom Harry was speaking, but he was very small; when I found him, I saw a whip-thin little fellow perched in the upward curve of a branch. He had a high collar of what looked like tiny green leaves, and his shoulders were covered in a mantle of brown lichen and ebony-stained branches crooked up like claws. He was no bigger than my hand, but he stood very straight and proud, and managed to look noble in his tiny felt boots.
“Who would cross the
jiekngasaldi
?” The wee man cast an unhappy eye at Kill Notch. “A brawny lad, made for murder, made for murder. Yes, I see. Slashes and ashes. Many lives has he taken. Many lives will he destroy. All is dust, all is dust.” His expression grew darker. “Unless I have something to say about it.”
I suspected this was a bluff, and though his assessment of Batten wasn’t far off, and that there was indeed a killing machine in the Bitter Pass, I didn’t think there was too much the fairy could do about it.
Batten squared his shoulders with the small creature and lifted his chin. He kept his face blank and matched Harry’s casually friendly tone. “And what will you say about it?”
The Treasurer’s eyes darted at Harry, as if checking to see if Harry would rein Batten in. When Harry took a casual step back and pretended to admire the blooming vine swaying overhead, the fairy got a bit more agitated.
“
Don't make any sudden movements, sudden movements, oh no, don’t do that,” the little man warned. “Mighty Mithridates hasn't tasted human flesh in three centuries. He will obey me. One nod from me, one, and I make his dreams come true, come true.”
Harry said, “One wonders how such a contest would end, my dreadnaught against your lovely pet. Certainly, one of them would die. What a shame it would be if the only living manticore sire were to meet with a sad fate… and at the hands of a mere human, well, I ask you.”
The Treasurer looked disgusted at the thought, but he also looked like he suspected a particularly dangerous human could manage the task. “He couldn’t—“
I cleared my throat. “He wouldn’t be alone.”
The Treasurer noticed me standing there, slightly behind Batten, literally if not figuratively having his back. I braced for an insult, or a taunt, but instead, the small man looked excited. He disappeared into a tangle of vines and reappeared at the base of the tree to scramble closer, wiggling his fingers at me enthusiastically in a
come-down-here
signal. I crouched as Batten stepped aside and out of his way.
The fairy pointed up at me with one eye shut. “You,” he said, wagging that finger. “You, I like.”
“I—huh?” Well, there was a first. I squinted at him. “Like, for real, or is this a trick?”
He grinned up at me. “You’re unpredictable. All things are possible, all things are possible, anything can happen. Not slashes and ashes, no. Not with you.”
“Do you see… running and funning?” I asked, scrunching my nose. “Gotta be honest, that’s what I’m good at. Throw in a little sunning on my days off.”
The fairy showed tiny white teeth in a smile. “With you, the path is neither right nor left, the motives are varied, the lines are blurred. There is no black and white! There are chances! Opportunities! Oh.” He calmed down a bit, but still he vibrated with anticipation. “That one, the big one, he will do one thing and one thing only. It’s all he knows. Remember that, my ever-shifting one. Some in this world are more predictable than you, and it will be hard for your hurricane-wild mind to understand and see that.”
“My mind
is
a hurricane,” I heartily agreed, shooting my companions a smug glance. “Hurricane. Hear that? Don’t forget it.”
Harry pursed his lips in silence, but the grand roll of his eyes spoke volumes. Batten smiled down at his boots.
“Predict it!” the fairy advised, waggling a finger at Batten. “Ask yourself what he is. He is the river as it moves through rock, pushing his way,
pushingpushingpushing
, never does he stop, eating away at the obstacles, dragging you under. Doesn’t he drag you under?”
I didn’t answer that, but I really didn’t need to.
“The river swallows. It does not stop, ever moving to the end goal, the release into the ocean. But
you
expect things to fluctuate in others as they do in you.”
“Because of my hurricane brain,” I repeated, not entirely sure I was getting it, but enjoying the metaphor. Hurricanes were badass.
“Aye, your murderous river man… it’s all he is.” The Lord High Treasurer gazed at Harry. “There isn’t another level. There is one function, one motive, one reason, one action. The other…the cold one. Even shrouded in their mysteries, slipping through time and shadow, the
Falskaar Vouras
are at all times predictable, too; they have a base, single need that must be met. Theirs is a stealthy advance, feeding in the darkness. And so, when there is doubt, you may always return to this need in order to judge their hearts. The cold one is the glacier, creeping slowly, encroaching and retreating, the smothering blanket of ice. Claiming. Concealing. Overpowering. Guy will always do what is best for himself, and by extension, what is best for his DaySitter. His need for you, and the continuation of his precious Bond, goes deeper, deeper than human want and need. Where the murderer
will not
fluctuate, the undead
cannot
. Do you see?”
Harry cleared his throat uncomfortably and jingled some coins in his palm. “Lord High Treasurer, your toll.”
“You are ill at ease with my assessment, Guy, very ill at ease, yes.” The fairy raised his voice. “But she is the wind, untamed, following only the shifting sands of her own judgment. And how, my lord,
how
can she follow that judgment if she is not properly educated? For shame, Guy, for shame.”
“Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m fine right here for a while,” I said, moving from my uncomfortable squat to sit cross-legged. “Me and my hurricane brain are fascinated by this brand new information. Tell me more, Lord High Treasurer.”
“I will, I will,” he assured me, digging in a pocket that was sewn onto the back of his green cloak, making his silver mantle caps tinkle. A little skin flask appeared. “But first, we drink, and you will guess my name.”
Now, even
I
know not to drink fairy wine or go about guessing their true names. I may never have met any fae of the
jiekngasaldi
, but I didn’t have to, to know this was the worst idea I’d heard today, including “Sure, let’s bring Kill-Notch the vampire hunter to the revenant seat of power.” But how does one politely decline fairy wine? Harry jumped to my rescue.
“She would enjoy the opportunity, and on our return trip, we shall gladly stay a bit longer and indulge with you, Lord High Treasurer, if the invitation stands. However, we regret to inform you that we are in rush.”
“Yes, as are the others of your kind. Beware, Guy…” The little man frowned. “Mithridates can keep out the unwanted, but those who belong here are of equal danger to you. I fear for your sentry, here.”
Sentry?
My mind flashed back to the orc mystic.
All other sun sentries…
must what? I couldn’t quite dredge it up. I’d have to look it up later.
The fairy continued. “There is an uncertainty in the air, yes, a question, a shifting. Even the oldest ones are jumping at shadows and second guessing their allies. Houses are not on firm foundations these days. Even the mightiest rock will crumble over time, Guy. It would be wise to play one’s cards close to one’s vest, and take nothing for granted.”
I smiled at the strange little warning, and got to my feet while slipping off one glove. “It’s been an enormous pleasure to meet you, Lord High Treasurer,” I said, extending a bare hand to shake his tiny one, summoning a subtle whisper of psi. He slapped his palm in mine hard enough for our skin to make a loud pat, more like a fairy high five. The Blue Sense tingled and swirled between us, offering a fun image of a couple of Red Angus cows sporting old man beards, and William Butler Yeats wandering somewhere.
“We will meet again, Marnie Baranuik,” he promised.
“Yes, Aengus Yeats,” I replied, “we absolutely will.”
His little mouth fell open, and he shot Harry an angry glance before tossing his cloak back over one shoulder and strutting off into the underbrush in a huff.
Before I lost sight of him, I heard him mutter, “Feckin’ psychics.”
WHEN YOU GO FAR ENOUGH
north, there are certain things you expect to see, and certain things that should eventually fall away as the Arctic tundra begins to devour the landscape; if you’ve never seen the tundra before, it might seem an abrupt change. Pine and Siberian spruce shelter brown bears and reindeer, and then polar bears and walrus skirt the ice floes along the coast. Long-tailed skua and black-legged kittiwake dominate the skies. We left the odd, bright sanctuary of the jiekngasaldi as suddenly as we’d entered it, plunging back into the perfect night of the high north. When Captain Rask met us post-fairy inspection, there was a lot less fight in his eyes; we’d passed some sort of test. Maybe the Lord High Treasurer’s manticore cut Rask’s passenger list on a regular basis.
The Meita
was a time warp, for sure, and I didn’t know enough about ships to say what sort it was, but it felt more solid and real than anything in the
jiekngasaldi
had; ropes creaked, sails drummed on a single mast, the crew barked at one another from one end of the ship to the other. The ocean was a noisy bastard, never silent, unlike the giant captain who navigated her frosty waves. I felt like I had returned to the real world, and I welcomed it. It was cold as a witch’s left tit, but I could trust my eyes, here.
Belowdecks, all non-revenants feasted on red king crab and filled our cups with
karsk
, which I discovered much too late was coffee mixed with moonshine. After draining a couple of heavy mugs, I was fairly certain I hadn’t been anywhere near this drunk since the time I’d shared whiskey with Declan Edgar and ended up river-dancing on the bed in my underpants. A sobering sit in the cold air proved to be effective medicine, so I split my time for the next few hours between eating crab in the dining area, and freezing my butt off on the deck where Rask indicated it was okay for me to sit. He did so with a silent
stay-outta-my-way
chin motion toward a bench. I wobbled from the bench, down several stairs to the dining table, practicing my sea legs and my drunk legs. Probably, it wasn’t the best idea to combine those lessons, but I didn’t fall once alternating between lots of company and laughter and food, and the cold night air and Rask’s surprisingly pleasant non-verbal company. His directives to his crew were mostly hand gestures, and though he seemed irritated, I came to suspect he just had resting mad face, shaped by the harsh winds and how seriously he took his job.
The Meita
passed the Svalbard archipelago as the long, unbroken night progressed. I could no longer feel the difference between night and day, and this form of jet lag was going to be a real thrill, I predicted. I braved the frigid air and staggered out to the deck while the stars became brighter and more brittle above me. The night deepened and the ocean spread out before us like a swath of black velvet, its constant liquid motion a mercury-slick ripple below. I tried not to think of how deep the water was, and how many unknown horrors could lurk in the lightless fathoms, slithering beneath the ship, noting our passage, aware of us without our being aware of them.
As the bow of the ship sliced into slush and icebergs loomed as white fingers in the distance, I searched behind us to see if I could mark the last bit of Svalbard. My last hope to view the edge of mankind’s mapped world had been swallowed in a hungry swirl of fog, and I felt a moment of disorientation and concern.
I do not belong here
, I thought, but the Bond reported like clarion bell:
oh yes you do, DaySitter.
This was not cruise ship territory. This was not a friendly place for humankind. Men were not built for this weather and the risks below the waves. Very few mortals came this way for pleasure. The old mapmakers had a phrase for the world beyond where cartography ceased:
Here there be serpents
.
I wondered what kept Konrad Rask and his crew on his journey to and fro; though his body temperature must be the same as other revenants, Rask thrived here. Frost had formed in his pale, knotted beard. He did not notice; in fact, it seemed a part of him. While I took a seat on the bench to huddle for a moment of warmth under a pile of blankets, swaddled in wool everywhere but my eyeballs, Rask strode by wearing a neon yellow rubber coat that was fixed with hooks and fasteners and doo-dads, and thick, black, knee-high rubber boots, not pausing to look at me. The air crackled subtly in his wake like he created an electric current, his aura a blue shock. Etiquette demanded that I be subtle and respectful with my own Talents, so I didn't purposefully summon psi and probe him. Rask’s scruffy, bare-bones politeness had been reserved to quietly bitching about us coming aboard with Batten instead of Golden, and seeing that the steward served our dinner correctly. Since then, he hadn’t said a word, directing his crew primarily through curt gestures and stern looks.