Lore of the Underlings: Episode 3 ~ Fyryx Page 4

and limberwood trunks, or stone of all sorts for our roads, huts, and such.

  “It seemed to some the Semperor himself had surely made this place — and made it just so to quench all thirst, to fill every want or need… even down to the cold, clear spring that we found just over the high hill’s crest, in a notch just right for settlement. And that’s where we set to making our Keep, by a babbling brook running east.

  “Yet another thirst there was, an older hunger our master knew that could not be so happily measured or met. A dark want. A red need. The lust for blood. The wont to bleed… It would be a lie to deny it… And so the maker crafted here one more wonder, an instrument made to feed and satiate that beast. Too bad the children found it first.

  “Small screams drew us from far and wide through a sun-dappled valley of rosewood and pyne to the edge of a huge field of green — but a green of vein-blue hue it was, like an ocean stained with jealousy. There in the deep of that sweetgrass sea stood a twisted old ironwood tree. It snaked skyward, spawn of a gray strain unknown, ominous, lost, at anchor alone, a strange scurvy pirate, no skull but all bones, bleeding black sap like bile. With gnarled, fingery branches it cast a wide net, nails longing to scratch at our treasure and get it…

  “Two tots, the Mayn twins, had wandered too near in their innocence not knowing what was to fear. It taught them a lesson they’d never forget — a course in assailing with cutty sharps from its twitching limbs and hard arms. Men found them under the waves of blades, still with this world but maimed, everharmed.

  “For the boy, Droydyn, his right hand was gone. His sister Nystra had lost her left.

  “At least our medicine, all that we’d learned by trial of the Wild, spared their lives. From that day on we boys, the three, were often at their side — then when better, they at ours, always in tow. We didn’t mind. Sweet Hannyn especially befriended them both, Droy and Nys, the siblings she never knew. And up they grew, the plucky pair, not as a single-handed two but together too handy to compare. In fact by the age of seventeen, yet apprenticed and their father’s own, they would be unmatched already, the finest craftsmen of pikes ever known. The twain of Mayn. Magic stick makers. Treasured by the Guard.”

  “Grrrrrr-OWWW…”

  Fyryx sat up with a start.

  “Grrrrrrrrr-OWWW…”

  He snatched up the strangers’ sword from the floor and scrambled to his feet.

  “It tracks us even here, the beast… to the very edge of our Keep.”

  With a few steps he reached the tent’s front doorflap and pressed his ear to listen.

  “This thing prowls with a purpose. Thirst it must for more of the blood, your blood, that it tasted yesterday.”

  Fyryx noticed the lamp that he hung and how it now burned low. Its oil was almost empty. Its light but an afterglow.

  “Morning is soon to come, my friend, and daylight will send this devil home. No oddcat strays far from its lair for long. Not once the sun comes up.”

  He heard the growl again but this time at a distance.

  “It chills the spine, that sound does, even from afar.”

  Fyryx lowered the borrowed sword and began to pace the fore chamber floor. He was silent for a while. His shot eyes were all but shut, somewhere else.

  At last he looked.

  The petrified vell now seemed strangely serene. Was this the unworldly before him?

  At last he spoke.

  “You have a peace about you, old boy. Perhaps my childish tales have helped. We were never more alive than then, your pureblood never more clear… In those memories maybe you’ve found some relief from the poison that now pollutes your veins. A moment’s peace at least — in a place of the past where your soul can rest a while from the venom’s reach. Away from its fire and ice.

  “And I pray this peace is not that other, the calm of approaching death…”

  Fyryx leaned on the bone-white blade like an old man with his cane.

  “Please forgive me, Arrowborne. Riding you into the Wild again, I was careless, reliving a youth long gone. The Keep years had left you less quick and alert, and robbed me of my boyhood luck. I never valued that dumb luck enough or the practice we had evading death. Keeps you sharp, on edge, that constant threat. But we’d all gone hapless and dull in time, even the honored Guard. Waning behind our settlement walls. Flagging atop these seven hills. Wilting in their flowered fields…

  “I won’t lie to you any longer, dear friend. There is no cure known for the oddcat’s fang. The moment it lunged and locked on your leg, its teeth too deep in your hind left hock, you were done, all was lost. Still, its toxin takes time to do its work. A day more, maybe two. Is that time enough to work wonders? For a miracle to save your skin? I pray that it’s so but my hopes are all false.”

  The lamplight finally flickered out.

  “I had no heart to tell the boys, not out in the Liar’s field last night with all the world fogbound in half-truths and tricks. Not even here in this makeshift stable once they had been spellbound by sleepiness. No… they deserved better, so better to wait. They must learn your fate by the light of day, this day, with heads clear and eyes open wide. Though those eyes won’t long stay dry. I know that they’ll cry for you boy, Ayr the most. For he’s the most like me.

  “You mean that much to them, Arrowborne. That much to us all. To me. And to Ayrie… if only I could tell him… but maybe he’ll know somehow anyway. Can you hear me, Ayryx Hurx?”

  A thin stream of sun from the tent’s flap door split the floor between Fyryx and vell. Yet the fresh broken dawn went unnoticed by both, for the man here turned inward as well.

  “From this day and onward, take heart, remember, whatever befalls you now… your life shall not have been lived in vain. I make that promise. This I vow…

  “Though my means may have at times been flawed, my purpose has ever been pure and right. The ends always back to where we began.

  “The impure clot in our wild hearts, the true flaw spoiling our gemstone souls — that evil came from father’s own tongue by the child’s tales of hope he told, the fool’s gold of his welcome speech, in the glow of that treasured address. Oh, rosy words, yes — so soothing, easing. All well-meaning but misleading…

  “So there at the end of that Crossing Day when we made this Keep our home at last, that was the moment we lost our way. To be shielded by armor but rusting away, deep in the irony wood…

  “We were never intended to rest in peace, complacent, with comfort our only goal. The Semperor knew, he foresaw it all. That’s why his edict ordered we move at the turn of every third season. But we chose to ignore his wisdom and rule, thinking somehow that we knew better than him.

  “Now we know how wrong we were. No Sylander can still deny that. Instead I reject my own father’s act and dare at last to overrule it. Back to the natural law of the land. To return to the struggle that made us strong.”

  In slipped the sound of a songbird, sweet, adrift on a draft of the morning air. Fyryx nodded his head when he heard it.

  “Brother vell, I’ve another confession to make. One more small mistruth I have told you tonight, spun from a secret that I’ve been keeping. A feint about a voice you knew… a Voyce of the Court I’ve come to know…

  “A fortnight ago I had a dream. The Semperor’s siren appeared to me — Semperess Amyly, in song — and told me it was time to go. Seduced by her beauty, under her spell, I eagerly agreed. But little enchantment did I need to do what I’ve yearned for myself for years. Long before leadership fell to me, I felt in my heart that our destiny would be written without this safe Keep. Only now, I knew it to be true — filled with music, the courage to act.

  “That very morn I gathered the Guard.

  “‘Warriors! Ready your mounts to ride. Pack them with two weeks’ provisions. Into the Wilderness we go. Armed to the teeth. Tomorrow!’

  “The next day we set out on expedition, to find a way back to ourselves once more…”

  Men made noises, manly ones, jus
t beyond the tent’s thin walls. They were the sounds that morning brings.

  “Father would have thought me mad, rash to leave his Treasury, the Keep of the people he loved. No doubt my brother Ayryx too, who carried on that legacy. But they no longer stand this ground or walk its ways or smell the soil. With both lost or fallen to evil disease, the bloodline of Treasurors runs to me. Now I must claim it as my own. For once and for all. Finally.

  “Not that I pity myself as weak or that I’ve led meekly at every turn. I’ve ruled with force when pushed — quelling the tide of leavers, making judgment swift and punishment public, meting out justice sure and sharp. And yet, not rightly honored. Never more than Huryx’ younger son or the stricken Treasuror’s little brother.

  “Ten years I’ve served in my brother’s stead. It’s been twenty since our father left to meet with death alone. I’ve already paid them due respect. I cannot fear to truly lead and be the Treasuror in full.

  “What beset us yesterday — setbacks sobering and strange — none of that will sway me. No, the opposite is so…

  “I’ve been thinking. These alien three that served themselves up last night like some stinking imported cheese — their arrival cannot be by chance. There’s a deeper secret behind this rot. For in all our Treasured history, from the moment this internal exile began, no one has ever found us before. No Sylander. Surely no outsider. And now these foreigners stumble upon us just when the Guard