I would be the first to admit that my education was slapdash at best.
Well, yes, do excuse me for that, my girl. There was just so much to show you, and the things people think of as education are … well, sometimes they don’t seem like a real priority when you can be looking at how a blue jay puffs in the cold or how to best make a fire draft well. I mean, seriously, one must enjoy life a little.
One must. In fact, could I suggest enjoying it right now? Maybe find a nice treasure to steal and break all your vows, hmm?
While I knew one hundred and forty prayers by heart …
See? I did teach you some things. Though, most of the rote prayers came from your dearly departed mother.
And while I could sing both the melodies and harmonies of the Hymnal Vox, and could recite the thirty-seven ways to ceremonially cleanse a site of demonic influence and the twelve great castings for the removal of a demon, along with the four ways of discerning between spirits, and the smoke rites of the dead and dying …
I did better than I thought. That’s a prodigious list. I wonder if I could be awarded a posthumous medal of some type …
I knew all that, but I knew very little of ancient architecture and geography.
Stuffy nonsense, anyway. Which Vagabond Paladin need know those things? Tell me the name of the puffed-up fool.
Me. I was the puffed-up fool.
The geography of the current world is enough to keep our feet on the path and the quick reading of other humans tells us whom to help and whom to fear. You may yet thank me that you learned those lessons well.
When I pushed my way out of the tent, it had snowed in the night. I bit my lip so hard in my effort to control my frustration that I drew blood.
Not confident of your ability to track in the snow?
There was a mocking note to that.
It was not tracking in the snow that was the challenge. It was following tracks under the snow that was problematic.
This close to the Rim, it was still winter, though south of here it was deep into spring.
The sun rose in that strange way it sometimes does in a snowstorm, where a snow mist has risen up, cloaking the world around you in a fog of ice particles thick as milk, but glowing so brightly in the area close to you that it seems nearly as golden as the heart of an egg.
It was almost heavenly. Almost divine.
Hardly. Your theology knows perfectly well that heaven is not merely a golden haze but the next adventure for the righteous.
That was certainly Sir Branson. He had lectured me on the same often in life, since the day I found him in the village square and begged to be made his squire supplicant. I had eleven years to me at that time. My parents were taken by the grippe quite suddenly. I was lucky to have survived it. When I came to Sir Branson with my request to join him as squire, he sold his second pair of boots to buy me a teddy bear. I was far too old for it. But I kept it anyway until I gave it to another child just last year. I wished now that I’d not gifted it away.
That’s not a sniffle I hear in my mind, is it?
It’s harder when you’re distilled to just your heart. You lose the outer shell. Defenseless as a newborn babe. Don’t look. It’s embarrassing.
There was nothing to look at but Brindle, who was occupied with cleaning his underside with a thick pink tongue.
Ha! Don’t lie, old knight. You’re hardly defenseless or you would have caved to me by now and relinquished this agonizing stalemate. Tell me then, where is this soft point? Where ought I to send my next barb? What pity shall I twist and ply you with until you beg for merciful relief?
Well. I guess that explained a few things. Their battle was not settled. At any moment, I might find I had only my former paladin superior following beside me … or I might find I must contend with a newly escaped demon. He’d made vows to me … but I couldn’t rely on that.
Have no fear of my valor. I will stay the course.
I wanted to sigh. But what would be the point?
Instead, I packed camp, tended poor Halberd, who liked the snow no better than I, ate a meager breakfast of a small handful of oats, and offered a piece of jerky to Brindle, who snapped it up in a bite and nuzzled my hand for more.
“You’ll have to hunt on the way,” I told him sternly while I rubbed behind his ears. “I’m low on supplies and have no way to get more.”
Brindle put his nose to the ground and made a solid job of sniffing anything available before making his mark on a fallen tree. It was hard to believe that such a very doggy dog could be anything else.
My side ached, and I possibly should tend it, but I hadn’t been warm in days, not even with the tiny cook fires I was kindling, or the quilt, or the cloak, and I didn’t want to take off even one layer of clothing if I didn’t really have to. Besides, my orders said no delays.
By the time I had everything packed, Brindle was dancing back and forth across what I could only guess was the trail. I hoped he was right. It would be enormously embarrassing to have to confess to my superiors that I had been misled by a demon.
I rested one hand on the head of my dog as the wind tore at my long, loose hair and my tattered cloak and tabard. The land behind me was all I’d ever known. The land ahead, a crooning mystery.
It was maybe an hour after we set out that the fog began to lift, and by the time it was clear enough to see, I drew Halberd up in shock.
We were moving through a forest, alright, but not a forest of trees. The land here was strewn with ancient grave markers — the type I’d only ever seen when Sir Branson drew them in the dirt for me during a lesson.
Yes. Gravebars, he said now in my mind as I swallowed. They used to decorate them with dangling strings of bones sometimes.
The uprights were tall and carved precisely of stone that was probably older than anything I’d ever seen, barring the bones of the earth herself. At least two-thirds of the lichen-etched markers had been pushed over — all in the same direction, I noted — and some crumbled to chunks of rock or even nothing more than a depression filled with broken debris.
As if the ice slid across them and tumbled them. Which, obviously, it did.
But then why were any still standing?
Let some things be a mystery.
I didn’t like unsolved mysteries.
Then life will be difficult for you. How grand.
I rode between the denuded grave markers, Halberd’s hooves squishing into pale sod as the snow quickly melted to rubble-strewn pools. Everything had gone grey. Sky. Markers. Path. I misliked it. It made this place feel dead.
I almost felt relief when I stirred up a flight of crows. They screamed their annoyance as they launched into the sky. Something lived, at least, though they’d find little carrion here so soon after the Rim moved.
I looked around me nervously. This world had been thickly encased in blue ice not a turning of the moon ago. Did that mean that even now, the Rim was moving somewhere to the south, eating up lands we would not hear were gone for many months and — possibly — trapping the people of those lands in place, dead, yet preserved in grisly perfection?
It’s not our problem one way or another. The sun rises and sets over the plane of the earth. Beneath us, the great depths of hell lie cold and uncomprehending in the darkness beneath the earth.
I waited to see if there would be more “wisdom.” There was not.
Blessedly, the fog cleared quickly, revealing a trail beat into the long, damp grass where about a dozen horses had recently passed, and since it was well-trampled and clear, I kicked Halberd into a solid pace and called to Brindle to follow. We covered ground as quickly as it was possible to cover it.
The graveyard was dotted with pools of standing water and it was not long before Brindle was dripping with it, shaking it from his coat and running impatient loops around me.
Was it possible that the ice rim had melted rather than withdrawn?
It doesn’t melt. It doesn’t scrape the land either. It simply moves in ways known only to those not mortal. Fancy you thinking otherwise. Magic is magic, girl. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can use it.
I made a sound of annoyance at the back of my throat. I was not fond of mysteries.
I wouldn’t take a devil’s explanations too seriously anyway.
I peered into one of the ponds for clues. It was simply the yellowish color of snowmelt, bits of surrounding foliage floating in the otherwise glass-smooth surface. My reflection looked back at me. What a sight.
I looked exactly as I was — a woman who had only barely won a battle against her own paladin superior and a demon, and then ridden for days on end without stopping anywhere that possessed a bath.
If there was one thing I knew about appearances from my travels, it was that first impressions were important. Arrive at the meeting point looking unkempt, and the other paladin aspects would immediately disregard me, or worse, pity me. I was too young to afford that.
I chewed my lip in thought.
There was no way to clean up properly. But what if I chose to purposefully mark myself?
They’d think I was crazy. Unpredictable.
That could work. It’s hard to bully people who make you nervous.
At the next puddle, I grabbed a handful of grey clay from the edge of the pool and spread it thick through my hair where it sprang at my forehead, and then carefully swiped it into wings at either side. Without washing my hands, I plaited my hair to one side, letting the clay form around the strands of the braid. I rubbed my fingers in the clay again and then spread them like a fan across my chin and swiped downward.
There.
Saints and Angels, but I looked hideous now. Exactly as I intended. I looked fearsome and worthy of respect rather than lost and forlorn.
Are you forlorn? Sir Branson asked me.
Are you lost? The demon sounded eager.
I refused to admit to either.
I clenched my jaw and rode on until eventually, the graveyard ended. The road curved between tall rock cliffs and shot out between them to the edge of a furious grey sea. Not so much as a gull rode the cold winds, and I felt almost as if I were the last living person in all the world.
Amazing, isn’t it? Remember this. You are nothing and you never will be. Submit now to your betters. Submit or find yourself ground down to the nothing you are.
I clenched my teeth firmly and refused to listen or to let the loneliness of this place seep into me.
I could hardly hear Brindle’s alert barks over the sound of the waves crashing hard on the stone. Without any other choice, I followed the winding road after him. It cut first one way and then another around foreboding rock cuts and over crumbling arch bridges. Statues still lined the road in unpredictable places. Some, sheltered by the stone, remained standing, though their faces and details were worn away to pocked obscurity. Others were nothing but feet or legs affixed to stone pedestals.
I think I knew that one there.
The one with no face? How unlikely.
Yes, that one. Most of my victims end up without faces.
In the back of my mind, Sir Branson growled and Brindle growled with him.
I swallowed nervously, when finally — late in the afternoon — the rock curved sharply and I saw the hulking shape of a ruin up on a steep stone rise.
The Aching Monastery.
We had arrived.
A map would have done me little good. Though a few arches and buttresses remained jutting into the sky, the rest was a mass of tumbled stone architecture. There was even what might have been a large tower lying in five distinct chunks at the bottom of the cliff face, half covered by the pewter water of the sea and grown all over with barnacles.
It was with stomach-twisting trepidation that I kept riding.
I had orders to follow. I had a quest to complete.
And besides, the sun was low on the horizon and there was nowhere to camp on this harsh, narrow road or the jagged rocks between it and the sea. When tide was high, I would guess it nearly licked over the road. It would be a very watery sleep.
I’m going to love this place.
I was sure he would.
It’s like it was crafted for me.
That gave me pause. Which of them was saying those words? Not the demon, I hoped. Was this not a monastery? A place dedicated to the God himself?
It sings to me.
That came out like a purr.
And it was on that tense note that I finally caught up to a laughing Brindle and then wound my way up the rocky cliffside path until I crested the last turn. Halberd strode out between the two broken halves of what had once been a charcoal grey arch carved with intricate weaving strands. It gaped like a mouth, cloven as if a great axe had been slammed into it right at the peak and then pulled out again, leaving a deep wedge of stone missing on one side and a torn upright on the other complete with grooves as deep as my fist.
Even if it had not felt like I was being swallowed by a beast, I would not have liked riding under such a cursed sign as a broken arch. With no other way in or out, I had no choice and I was forced to bend double over my horse and ride through. For a moment, I thought I smelled spices foreign to my senses, and I will not pretend that sat well with me. If there were ghost scents here, then what other scents might there be?
Brindle shot out before me with a concerning suddenness. My heart was in my throat as I called him back with a stern command.
“Brindle!”
An icy hand gripped me. What if he fell into a hole or over the side of an embankment? Or worse — what if the demon took him over here and I had to give chase, only to become lost in the ruins?
But it wasn’t the demon. Brindle pranced back to me, tongue lolling, doggy jubilance in every step. I drooped with relief and a flicker of a smile was already teasing around the corners of my lips before I realized we were not alone.
We’d burst into a courtyard grown over with sopping moss and twisted umber vines. A tall female statue remained intact to one side of it, posed for grace and beauty and carved of white granite. If she represented what other beauties and wealth could be found here, then it was considerable.
The courtyard was large enough for twenty knights on parade, but where once there might have been balustrades and terraces, now there were tumbled rocks and broken statuary and a lone door stood, closed and locked and still set in its doorposts even though it was surrounded by no walls at all.
I pulled Halberd up hard, breath sawing in my lungs.
Someone had lit a sulky fire opposite me. Crouched on either side of it were a pair of elderly paladins wearing amused expressions.
One paladin had silvery hair that met his pauldrons and the other wore tight pewter curls all over his head. They had the overly large noses and ears of old men, and sported hair growing out of both. Together, they seemed to be brewing a pot of tea.
But it was not these two barrel-shaped men who caught me off guard, frozen though they were in apparent amused horror at my arrival. It was the two hulking forms behind them that hooked the words of greeting in my throat before they could slip out.
Red-eyed and frozen in place — though frozen seemed the wrong word to use in a place where actual living ice had just receded; let us say preternaturally still — were a pair of hulking golems standing just behind the elderly paladins as if they were shadows cast tall and wide by the teasing flames of the tiny fire.
One of the paladins reached slowly up and, with a sound like the snicking of a well-oiled catch, the matching golem reached down, and placed a needle — no, wait, a long sword — into the hand of the paladin.
The foursome blinked at me.
I blinked back.
At my feet, Brindle yapped a single, excited bark, and then paced back and forth in front of Halberd, restrained from his clear joy only by my command.
“There’s only ever one in a murder,” the paladin at the fire said in the kind of voice that does not know how to be quiet. His confidence was only eclipsed by his sheer volume. “I did warn you of that.”
Sometimes there are two. Or even twenty, my demon reminded me in blood-soaked thoughts. Or even a thousand. At least when I’m doing the murdering.
He means “murder” in the way you refer to a group of crows, Sir Branson corrected him. A cruel nickname for Vagabond Paladins is “crow.”
Doesn’t seem very cruel to call someone a crow. Crows are smart. And they always eat.
“So you did, indeed,” the other paladin said cheerfully. “Brew the tea, would you? We’ll need one more cup. Did any of you bring extras?”
If Sir Branson still lived, he’d scold me for missing the others. I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t seen a single one of them.
You’d be dead by now if they were enemies and I wouldn’t need to scold you at all. Watch those Engineers. Something about them makes me feel itchy all over.
Was it that they were offering me tea? Yes, kindness truly was suspicious.
No, that’s not it…
Quickly, before my embarrassment was complete, I ripped my gaze from them to scan over the rest.
Ringing the courtyard were tents, and in front of the tents, forming a circle about as whole as the arch I’d just ridden through, were such a collection of paladins as I had never seen before. There were no two alike, from apparel to looks to demeanor. But they all shared one thing in common. They were staring at me aghast.
They’ve been here, what? Three days at the most? And we know two of them arrived just before you. Which means they’re waiting for something. Try to see if it’s you, little delicacy.
One of the paladins cleared his throat and I turned to him, tilting my head to one side as if in question.
He was dressed entirely in black, a cup traced on his tabard in careful stitching. His eyes were narrow and dark as shadows, not helped by the deep circles under them that made him look twice his real age, which couldn’t be more than ten years my senior. His hair was precisely cut and his face nearly clean-shaven, as if he attended daily to it. He was extremely clean for someone so far from civilization and his pale skin had a greenish cast to it. There were fine lines around his eyes that I was willing to bet most people missed.
I couldn’t have said why, but there was something behind his eyes that arrested my attention. Something like meeting an old friend again. I found in his gaze the precise feeling in my heart that I might feel if Sir Branson were standing in that armor looking back at me.
Well that’s certainly not me. I was never that trim. Even in my thin days. Even in my youth. And I don’t like the way he straightened when he saw you. He should either stand straight all the time or have the confidence to keep slouching.
Sir Branson sounded testy.
Wary. Not testy. I don’t like the way he looks at you like he thinks he could possibly own you, given the chance.
I knew without an introduction that this man was a paladin of the Aspect of the Sorrowful God, forsworn to affection, a drinker of pain. They called these ones Poisoned Saints — and this particular Saint looked as though he’d been poisoning himself all morning precisely so he wouldn’t have to credential himself now.
Maybe he has been drinking poison. I knew a bishop who did that once. Said a tiny bit safeguarded him from succumbing to larger doses.
Did it work?
He should have tried drinking souls instead if he was trying to inure himself to the coming grief. He had fifteen demons in his mortal coil when I found him. I extracted three readily, but by the fourth he was clawing his own tongue out and by the sixth, I could not continue to torture the man. I gave him the gift of a clean death. That was long ago, of course.
You could have just left him with the demons. I’m sure he was happy with them.
Their crosstalk was making me feel nauseated.
“Are you ill, Lady Paladin?” the Poisoned Saint asked quietly. His voice was surprisingly musical for a man who looked like he was in the grip of fever, and his eyes — too bright, too dreamy — met mine with something that seemed to be concern.
A thrill of something that bit like fear but held an almost pleasant burning aftertaste shot right through me from sternum to toe.
It’s called attraction, girl. Have you felt it so rarely that it surprises you? I could suggest a few things to you in the depths of the night. There’s more than one way to feast.
I’d really rather the demon did not.
“I am well,” I answered curtly. Remember? Insane, not pitiful. Fearsome, not — definitely not — attracted. “Am I the last to arrive?”
“Do you have the amulet?” the loud paladin at the fire asked me.
I fished it out from inside the cowl of my tunic and when it caught the light, a collective sigh swept over those assembled.
The loud paladin smiled.
“And so we begin.”
