18 - 2

[Magus]

Prudent

The Lone Sparrow - 2nd of Evening Star, 1125 A.E.

Sparrow and Blue Priestess walked down two flights of stairs. Unsurprisingly, both sets were numbered in seven increments, an inch or two under a full span for each step; just enough for a woman’s foot but a bit uncomfortable for Barry.

Mostly it were his heels up until the base of his toes that struck the stone, leather soles and cloth providing bulwark against the cold. He’d slept with them on, what with his well-founded fear of needing to run should things turn sour.

He had been half right; he would have to make his escape from Berrowden at the latest of First of Rain’s Hand.

From Evening Star that’s somewhere between three and three-and-a-half months, Barry surmised as his foot almost missed its mark on the dainty step.

From what the mercenary knew of the Sevenfold, the make of the stairs made a great deal of sense—if a bit curmudgeonly. Why use more material for a few steps that would scarce see the touch of a single man after construction?

A person could not pledge themselves to a god not of their gender; Mahna took only maidens and Oriath khristened but men. The only kinds of people in the Kingsland that could bind themselves to a Sevenfold godling, without worry of what was between their legs, were the lumen-blessed; called hermaphrodites in Free Kedwen, those touched by the Everchanging God were of both and neither sex, seen as good omens for the time and tide.

Didn’t matter what dress they took to, be it the shawl and three-colored patterns as was worn by godsfearing wifes along the countrysides or the tunic and two-colored leggings of bucks on either cut of the Ydden, either and any mixture thereof were just as valid for these particular gods-touched in the eyes of the Keds.

Mooncalves surviving of lumenhood alone were allowed such freedom in the Corners, unbound in their pick of the Seven and even companionship.

Barry, though? Born entirely mannish and liking as he was of Oriath’s lot just as much as Elaria’s? He’d be lucky if he was only driven out of town should the faithful find out.

He’d been lucky that his pa had not done worse than ten welts of the belt, two broken fingers and a bruised eye swollen shut.

Eric had gotten an apprenticeship in wagonmaking.

The other boy had been beaten too, far worse than Barry even, but the wagonmaking had been the truly awful part.

It had not even been his fortyear, the apprenticeship stealing him away in the night of the very same day that Malas stumbled upon their tryst. A stone mound of middling stature had arisen behind Reggy’s house in the dawn of two Turns of the moon’s time. A peasant tradition common under the boughs of the Higgenhollow, it had been a thing of remembrance for a son gone far away.

There were no wagonwrights ten leagues around the hamlet, afterall.

Eric had traveled light, what with Reggy’s larder not a shill lesser than it had been before. Eric had traveled light, what with all of his only two tunics being passed onto his younger kin, Big Jon and Little Tregvortham. Eric had traveled light, what with him going nowhere but beneath that mound of stone.

There were no wagonwrights ten leagues around the hamlet, afterall.

Eric had been beaten to an inch of his life by Barry’s pa. Once Reggy found out, he had pushed the thirteen-year-old boy past the last inch, onwards into the embrace of the Pale.

Or so it seemed to the Lone Sparrow’s fleeting remembrance of that time five-and-a-half Solarian cycles ago.

Barry had never quite gotten the courage to dig up what was under that mound of stone, to see them bones with his own eyes, but the sellsword knew that nothing else made much sense. Beyond the more apparent things of suspicion, the devils were in the details; the way that none talked ‘bout Eric, as if the boy had not even ever been born. The way that Reggy seemed so quick to avoid Barry like he were the pox.

It added up to two-score-and-a-dead-boy.

What wouldn’t Barry give to change the haunt inside his skull from matricide to patri—

The Lone Sparrow let the thoughts go, abandoned to the phantom river in his mind. Had Stregor not taught him the Breath, them’s knowings would’ve festered and turned him rotten inside-out real quick.

Were it not for the arms master’s teachings, Barry would’ve long since returned to the hamlet, buried a dagger in Reggy’s gut and put an axe in his pa’s skull. The very same axe that had once belonged to Malas and then had been lost in the battle at Tregthekkar.

The White Wolf had not called for temperance and restraint to save those two black-hearts’ lives. He had done so for the fact that others depended upon two unworthy men. As it oft were, killing only helped when it was done to those branded outside the eyes of the Iron and High Laws; bandits and ilk of their like.

Were Barry to kill Malas, his father, then Frita would probably keel over from the grief alone. To see her son kill his pa, her husband, would be a nightmare given physical form; a machination from the devil Morrigain Herself.

Were Barry to cleave Reggy’s face in twain, Little Jon and Big Tregvortham and aunt Elariane would struggle to put food in their bellies come the next winter. They’d begrudge him for all his life, a heavy blood price of no less than twenty talents put upon his family line. Barry had been lucky to make a single, whole talent this year alone and that were because his trade was one in great demand in the Corners.

Had the consequences of two mens deaths not weighed heavy like lead atop the scale, well…

Barry could not deny that he would’ve enjoyed the crunch of bone before the blunt side o’ the axe. Throw him down Hell’s well, he’d do them both worse than they had done him and Eric, twice-over. Neither Malas nor Reggy knew even a grain of a gram of the Forms.

Theirs would be nice and slow; broken fingers, bleeding gashes, begging on their knees for their miserable little—

The Lone Sparrow breathed out once again in accordance to Stregor’s teachings. How fast did the festering dark thoughts come upon one, without notice nor even sound. How fast did he turn to fantasies and images of violence. To fancies of torture that he could not deny having found perverse joy in.

The shame, it burned hot and red.

Didnae matter that they were black-hearts, to indulge fully in lusting after blood was a path never to be unwalked. It wasn’t even a road proper, more of a sheer and deep ditch like the Pits of Perdition.

Ye couldn’t put the fairy back in the bottle and all that.

It was harder than before, letting go to the ether, mind all but a stonefisted clutch. Every little thing that Barry had thought to be mastered was now unruly and making a mess of his witts.

The evenness he had so carefully cultivated unraveled as did old, roughspun cloth; a single thread and so it was unmade. Not entirely and not fast but still, one noticed a ratty shirt when they saw the holes in its seams.

“The tower was erected to house an astrallis… it’s like a spyglass… but for the stars.” Emilia said in between breaths and between steps.

“What in the Nine’s a spyglass?”

Mother Forentes took the question as the last straw upon which made break the back of the horse that was her perseverance, as excuse to rest herself against the wall. Even fourteen steps were far too much on her, the Crone of Berrowden having stopped midway in an alcove that fit her diminutive stature like a scabbard for a sword.

The fresco within the alcove was a dainty thing, little painted aerendghasts dancing along the clouds above the Priestess’ mitre; the holy hat wrought of whiten sendal and studded with more gems and silver wire than sense, heavy as lead given that it’d made her head droop here and there.

“Language.” She chided, voice laced with steel wire. It would cut if pressed. “A spyglass is an artifice of base and mundane make; not an ounce of magick does it possess, yet still it allows a person’s see things from afar as if from very close.

“A mahneanic invention using lumenarian principles; you know those little glass beads that make light into dancing fairies? Usually hung up in the Lumen festival? Well, a few Grey priests and a flock of Blue crones got together in cabal and wrought this tool for the King’s line a good two hundred cycles back.

“It is, as the name suggests, used to spy on things from afar and is employed in war and statecraft. Looks a bit like a copper pipe used in distillation, straight and anywhere from one to two span long with glass discs on either end. About as thick as a tyke’s wrist.

“Other realms and kingdoms have made their own refractors—spyglasses, in more scholarly haggle—long before us. The Kedweni artifice differs in that it is made of materials found here and its make is known to our mortal ken; it can be fabricated and repaired by our Guildam tinkerers.”

The woman had the uncanny ability to interrupt Barry’s attempts at drowning himself in the strong drink of rumination. He would’ve thought it a magick of some sort had the senses of his spirit not been so keenly tracking the frail thing hanging on his arm.

He had sensed no splashes in the shroud of mana around her, no fluctuations of her soul calling upon a god’s power. He’d know if that were the case otherwise, the beast in his bones being quick to sniff out any holy magicks.

Strange, now that Barry thought of it, why had the sworn oath not prodded at the beast? Could it have been because of the magicking’s composition? He had known, courtesy of Emilia, that not all magicks were spells proper and that there were many a Path that a mage might walk. Mayhaps, rather blunt and simple, the beast within were just well-fed.

He’d have to ask Mother Forentes later on.

After recovering a foothold into her lungs, she gave Barry a poke to the ribs with her cane and then off they went.

They traversed at the speed of an old and rickety mule twice-older than Death Himself. But Barry was in no hurry—band, and thus obligation, on the other side of the Pale—so he endured; the Priestess was sure to be in worse straits than him anyhows.

The least he could do and all that.

Maybe it would make scarce the empty ache of his chest. The Lone Sparrow doubted it, but the beggar’s faith held strong still. Hope was insidious in the way it wormed into the bread of the mind. Just as quick to him as the want for blood and battle.

A single blink and you find yourself thinking it would all be alright only for the rug to be pulled right under your rump.

By the height of the shadows spilling out any bit of glass not stained the Crone’s blue, it was no more than midmorning. The time that any cloister usually did their rounds at the leiggan’s shop; the infirmary or infirmaria, as Emilia had called it.

The sellsword had some experience with the times that healers checked on their wards; he’d been at Roddy’s side the winter before this one at Havgertham’s monastery when that hotheaded fool got a bowel nicked by a badly parried falchion. The other man, a bandit in the black-hearted band of Ytthel the Bruise, had not had the same opportunity; the bad parry had been done to make the brigand overcommit on a thrust and show his jugular.

Oh boy, was that a day with rain but no cloud in sight.

At the thought of having to interact with other people—people that most likely feared him for those black hands that peeked through from the longsleeved tunic—Barry started to sweat.

He’d take being outnumbered two to one and having the lowground than face that. He first fight an aerendghast from On High than endure the biting words of women whose tongues were sharper than War’s battle arms.

He had a ma, last he saw her. He knew there was no winning with them’s odds.

After another seven steps—where the star-tower ended and the temple proper began—the Sparrow and the Priestess reached the stoneworked halls, both slow and with hitches in their steps but for different reasons.

Without ken on exactly how, Barry knew that two holy women and a sickly man would round the corner on them in a blink. No window, holy or merchant glass twain, to make light and shadows, and thus tell tale of a coming person. Only a marrow-of-the-bones-deep instinct, somewhere between scent and taste, that told him that three people were nearing on them.

Dressed in cloth similiar-to-but-lesser-than-Emilia’s, two Mahneanic nuns entered their stretch of hall, a man in peasant garb at their back and beck. He limped on wooden struts placed under his pits, a single leg cast in plaster to set bone right and proper.

Instead of flinching at him as Barry had expected, the two shawled ladies had their eyes light up upon seeing both Emi and the Sparrow.

They called out in a very unchurch-like manner, voices loud in the almost painfully quiet temple. Their spirits were high, it seemed.

“Mother Emilia! We had heard you got a new one under your wing. Though Essebeth was rather stringy on the details. Ornery, too.”

The sister to the right gave a knowing nod and whispered something in a loud hush when they got close enough.

“Angrier than a maiden’s father finding a vagrant in her bed, that one.”

The man behind them let out the long-suffering sigh of a person having been in this exact situation far too many times. I knew this was gonna happen, all but etched on his face… and the skin of his spirit.

Huh. Haven’t had time to poke around the aura. Emilia’s is like an owl, all secretive and furtive, but theirs are much easier to parse.

The man, compared to the muddy waters of the two holywomen, is a crystal-clear spring.

Barry shook himself from his thoughts and gave a little reserved wave.

“Hi there, Crone blessing’s to ye. The name’s Barry.”

The two looked at his hands, one giving support to the Priestess, and the other receding awkwardly back to his side. The shadow from which they were wrought moved like a serpent warding its clutch of eggs.

“Don’t be ruddy and rude Mergiotz,” The left one said to the right in chide, “We’re in pleasant company; the man isn’t going to eat you up like the Wolf Below.”

Wish I could say that you were wrong, the Sorcerer kept that thought to himself.

“I am Sister Hellary d’Abar, and this is Sister…” Sister Hellary gave the nun to her right a poke with her elbow.

“Mergiotz, pleasure to meet you—uh—Barrius.”

“Barry.”

“Ah, yes, Barry.”

Emilia tapped her cane to the brickwork floor arranged in the manner and make of spirals. Heavy flagstones were intersped through the smaller rectangles like islands in midst of sea.

“Sorry, lasses, you’ll have to get this one’s ear another time. I need a cup of teh before I keel over. Don’t care if its from Kiervo or the Ninth Hell Itself, I need me some kaffeine.”

The diminutive and dying crone dragged Barry along with speed and strength belying her stature. That lady was fast when she wanted to be, even with White Gull singing at her door.

Sister Hellary d’Abar gave a little wave with a chuckle, her cheeks dimpling with well-carved mirth. Even Mergiotz, startled as she had been upon seeing his mitts, did a little wave, too.

The man at the back, which they sortly passed, gave Barry a nod equal parts ‘how do you do’ and ‘what did I do to deserve this.’

“You’re lot is a funny and down-to-earth bunch, Emi,” the sellsword said in almost-whisper after they passed further down the hall and out of earshot of the trio, “I expected more harsh task-masters and silent ardents.

“And some screaming. You know, ‘kill the warlock with the devil-hands’ and all that.”

With a smile, Emilia batted the lad with her cane as one did an unruly dog. In her crooked hands it did not hurt, he reckoned. Though, there was no way to truly damage those sorcerous mitts of his; one could not touch shadows after all.

All except that heavy light she cast, Barry thought, unnerved. Unraveled my arms in the same way that hot sun banishes a rolling fog bank.

That presence on my spirit like great weights were tied around me and I was thrown down the Dark Ocean.

Besides the lead upon the shoulders of his spirit, that light had lit a fire in his guts. He felt queer kith and kin with that light, like it had once been a part so intrinsic to him and that it belonged to him. That he should take it back and…

Well, that was where the sorcerous ken ended.

Bind Them in the Web, came to mind, a nagging discomfort like a fly thrashing bemidst the spider’s thread accompanied the thought.

“We’re people, Bare.” The Priestess said, ignorant of his unease. “Not all monasteries are bleak places of zealotry and unbending, dead faith. Though the stereotype will stick for as long as there are such examples.

“There be a reason why men fear the Sevenfold; we either crucify or burn at the stake a Toma, Rikk, and Harry every two Turns o’ the Twins. No wonder ye’ve such a grim and dire notion of the Faith. We don’t do much if anything to correct it.

“But I hope that, with this bright little spark in the midst of so much ash, I might just change your mind.”

Barry let out a chuckle.

“For shame, Mother Forentes. Were you not a maiden pledged, I woulda thought this were a courting and not a conversion to the Blue Cult.”

The chimes sang their little song again as Emi gave Barry’s mitts another smack.