Schemes

The next day, the Noble wore a dress that covered her shoulders. It was every bit as beautiful as the last one. Gold strands and lace decorated rivers of red velvet. I yearned to touch it, just the bottom hem, just for a second.

I was surprised to find her striking up a conversation with me as we rode. I was so surprised, in fact, that I missed most of what she actually said. I don’t think it’s my fault: the way her lips moved was surprisingly distracting. Please remember, I hadn’t really interacted with women on the Ariel Angel.

I came back to reality when I realized that she was giving me something. In her long fingers was something that looked like a fat pencil, equal to my thumb in diameter. When I took it, I realized that it was paper rolled around dried leaves. She put an identical item in her mouth and struck a match. Soon, she was pulling smoke from the burning tube into her mouth and blowing it out.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I just told you,” she said. “It’s tobacco. It’s what the farms produce. It’s a cigar.”

“You’re a farmer?”

She looked at me as if my level of intelligence disgusted her. “No, I’m not a farmer. I own the farm. I own a whole complex of farms.” She blew a smoke ring in my direction. “Give it back. I’ve changed my mind.”

“But—”

“Give it back!” she said, snapping her fingers.

After working on a ship for two years, I was so used to taking orders that I handed the cigar back immediately. “I didn’t mean to offend…” I began. But she was already gone, kicking her horse forward. A moment later she was engaged in a one-sided conversation with the Fool about the merits of cigars over pipes.

“Don’t worry,” said a voice beside me. To my surprise, it was the Hunter. “She’ll fall for you.”

“I’m not sure I want her to,” I lied.

“Don’t assume you have a choice. You’ve obviously never been in love,” she said.

“Hmmm. Well. Not that I want her to, uh, fall for me—but what makes you think she will?”

“You are a fan of statistics, right?” said the Hunter. “Ten pilgrims. Correct?” I nodded. “The two of you are seventeen and unmarried. At least from what I can tell. Are you married, Nial?”

I just rolled my eyes, knowing she was joking. I suddenly felt better about my chances, though. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

“I haven’t done you any favors.” She lapsed into her own thoughts and fell behind, leaving me alone once again. I wondered if she was married. How many of these pilgrims had someone waiting for them back home? None wore rings, save the Nobel and the Singer, who both wore several.

The pilgrims reached a dusty city at the edge of the basin by nightfall. We spent the night at an inn, each in our own separate rooms. “Enjoy the bed,” the Knight said. “It’ll be your last for quite a long time.”

This evening, my ability to write down the events of the day was hindered by my inability to stop thinking about the Noble. Again and again I tried to figure out what I had done wrong during the conversation. How I had pissed her off? How was I supposed to pay attention to every word she was saying when her lips looked that way? I wondered if statistics were really powerful enough to bring us together in spite of the fact that she apparently hated me. These thoughts evaporated when a muffled cry made me shoot to my feet. Blankets tumbled to the ground. The cold inn floor creaked under my weight. I listened, but the night was quiet. Tiptoeing barefoot to the door, I opened it and peered down the hallway. All was quiet.

Perhaps I had imagined it? Perhaps I had begun to fall asleep? Perhaps I had begun to dream?

Then it came again, from the room across the hall. The door was ajar, revealing a sliver of darkness. Putting my eye to the opening, I tried to pierce the gloom. Nothing. I opened the door. “Hello?” I hissed. “Who’s there?” Someone gasped. A rustle of clothing exploded from within. The shadows inside shifted and morphed. For an embarrassing moment, I thought I might have interrupted two of my fellow pilgrims having sex. But then footsteps pounded toward me. A shadow burst out of the darkness, knocking me aside. I never saw the person’s face—only a black mask that made me think of the Knight’s story. The shadow descended a staircase and was gone before I could move.

When I recovered, I stepped inside the bedroom and looked around. I whispered, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

Whose room was this? The Morl’s? I thought so. And yet, it was empty. The blankets were twisted and dark, like a waiting monster. A necklace with a holy symbol lay on a bedside table, glittering in what little moonlight managed to seep through the dirty window.

Keeping a hand on the adobe wall for support, I penetrated deeper into the room. I looked into every shadow. Nothing was amiss. Then, just as I was about to leave, I heard a low moan.

“Nial,” someone whispered.

I opened the window to let in the moonlight. After a long moment, I finally saw the bloodstains spreading across the bed sheets; or rather, I started to realize how hard it was to look at the bedsheets. My eyes wanted to slide off and look elsewhere. If I didn’t know I was looking for a morl, I would never have noticed anything amiss. What looked like an empty bed was, probably, not empty at all. “Father Ori?” I said to the empty bed.

Fetching a candle from my own room, I returned to the bedside to find that if I held the candle very close, I could now make out the shimmers of Father Ori lying there, clutching his side. Blood seeped between his fingers in rhythmic spurts. I finally shouted for help.

“Did you see who it was?” the Morl rasped.

“Don’t try to talk,” I said.

A light flared up behind me. The Knight entered with a lantern. The Singer and the Old Lady piled in after him, with their own lights. Soon the entire company was trying to cram into the room.

“Out!” commanded the Old Lady. “Except you two.” She indicated the Wizard and the Knight. “Leave your lights.” To the Wizard, she said, “Do you know any healing magic?”

He cleared his throat. “I am of course well-versed in the theory of restoration magic—”

“Theory?” said the Old Lady.

“Yes, I—”

“Get out,” she said. To the Knight: “I used to be a physician for a time. Tear the sheets into strips.” She yelled into the hallway, “One of you go find whiskey or rum, or any kind of alcohol! Wait! Make that two of you. No one should be alone.”

I refused to leave and forced my weight onto the Morl’s gash. The ooze of blood whose color was impossible to determine slowed beneath my palms. It wasn’t warm, nor cold. As the blood covered my hands, they became easy to miss, creating an optical illusion that my arms ended in stumps where hands should be. When the bandages were cut, the Old Lady told the Knight to soak them in whiskey.

By this time, the innkeeper had arrived, elbowing his way through the crowd of pilgrims. He was a rotund but short man with sleep in his eyes. At first he looked with horror at my missing hands. Then peering closer, his lip curled. “A morl…” To the Knight: “Extra charge for the sheets and the whiskey.”

The Old Lady ignored him as she oversaw the bandaging of the wound. She wasn’t strong enough to do it herself, but the Knight obeyed her without question. At first, the whiskey-soaked bandages disappeared, soaked in morl blood. But after several more layers, the bleeding stopped, and I was able to take my hands away. The Morl’s raspy breathing seemed calm and stable at least.

The Old Lady wheeled toward the innkeeper. “We certainly will not pay for the sheets and the whiskey,” she said, as if he had just mentioned it. “In fact, you will be providing us a sizable refund.”

The innkeeper’s eyes bugged out. “You can’t be serio—”

“We paid for safety and a good night’s sleep,” she said. “As it is, we won’t be getting either.”

The innkeeper looked at the ten sets of angry eyes and began to stammer. “I-I got to make a living here.”

“You won’t be living for long,” she said. “Not when we report back that your inn was the site of an assault on a church pilgrimage.”

The man’s resolve was beginning to crumble. “But… how do you know it wasn’t one of you who did it? I’ve had no trouble before—not even with morls. Not til you all come along.”

Dear Human, the time has come to tell you some things that Nial’s texts cannot, for he did not know at the time.

Let me start, however, with what he did know. It is common knowledge that the shrine that lies across the Northern Desert is one of the most mysterious, powerful places in the known world. It was built long before there were morls and humans, in an age long since past, by a civilization long since vanished. Those who go there are permitted to ask a question of the universe itself. Those who ask a question and survive often find themselves changed forever.

Suffice it to say that it takes a special kind of person to make the trek, someone with 1) financial means and 2) willingness to risk mind and body. In other words: Someone with a question that burns so hotly and eternally at the very core of their soul, leaving them no choice.

Someone like Nial tagging along at the last minute is not something I anticipated. People don’t usually walk in the day before such a pilgrimage.

The rest of the human pilgrims had been in communication with the church for a year or more, carefully weighing their life-and-death decision. I know this because, being a priest, I have access to certain bureaucratic records upon request. And I also know it because, well, I had myself arranged for many of them to be there. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that years of work by morlish operatives had ensured that six very powerful people were there together, on that fateful pilgrimage with me.

Those of us there by morlish design were:

The Morl - your faithful narrator, Father Ori

The Wizard - Professor Octavius

The Old Lady - Madam Bela

The Singer - Gwen Florence

The Nobel - Lilly Overlai

The Fool - Jonny of Davenport

Those there for reasons outside our control were:

The Knight - Sir Mau

The Hunter - Asuana of the Lighthouse

The Mourner - Madam Du Vreil

The “Hero” - Nial of Grennport

Oh! And I suppose you are wondering who on these lists was responsible for stabbing me in the night. That, I’m afraid, I did not know at the time, but it was (as you might expect, Dear Human) at the forefront of my mind. At first, I assumed it was a random member of the town, perhaps someone else staying at the inn. Random acts of violence were not new to morls who venture about in the South Sea Nations.

Silence filled the room like toxic gas. The rotund innkeeper gulped, realizing that he’d gone too far. He edged out of the room. “Never mind,” he said. He mumbled something about “free rooms.” Then, he left us alone.

“Well,” said the Morl, “don’t lose sleep on my account.”

Exhausted, I wrote down the events of the day as quickly as I could, with hands that were barely visible even after I’d washed them. I tried to collapse into my bed, but my attempts to sleep were thwarted by my overactive imagination. What face had looked at me from behind that mask?