A Secret Atlas (37 page)

same ban. Similarly, cases of food poisoning linked to one type of fish might have resulted

in its banning, and the fear of ships being lost in a storm when too far from the village

might have caused the laws about that to be born.

Instead of expanding and growing as a society should, this one contracted.
The whole

idea of a society shrinking sent a chill down his spine. His entire life, his family’s vocation was dedicated to
expanding
society and its horizons. Removing the people from Ethgi

would not only be logistically impossible, it would destroy them. Nysant would be seen as

a pit of vice and depravity—and he wasn’t sure he disagreed wholly with that—and the

Ethgisti would flee back to their island as fast as they could.

Darkness had fallen and silence stolen in save for the crackling of torch flames and the

flutter of bats’ wings in the night. All the soldiers remained still, their eyes and ears

straining. The breeze easily carried their scent into the jungle, but it also carried another

scent. And that scent drew the Fennych as fire draws insects.

The soldiers and sailors had not been happy when cask after cask of rice beer had been

loaded into boats and rowed to shore. The villagers carried it through Archurko and to the

forest edge, where the casks were buried to within a foot of their tops, then broken open.

Jorim had no idea how many Fenn there might be, so he’d had twenty casks shipped out,

and the expedition’s personnel mourned each one as if it were a sweetheart.

He had hoped rice beer would work, for in Ummummorar a variety of fruits and roots were

mashed up and allowed to ferment in preparation for what was known to be prime

Fennych season. When it passed without danger, the villagers consumed the mixture in

an orgy of drunken joy. If danger did present itself, the potent liquor was poured into

troughs made from split and hollowed logs.

True to the Ummummoraran tales, the island Fennych approached the alcohol cautiously.

Jorim could barely make out the single individual crawling forward to reach the first cask.

About the size of a small bear, but with a long tail and tufted ears, it dipped a paw into the

rice beer, then licked. It growled, then tried a bit more, before grabbing the edge of the

cask with both paws and plunging its head fully into it.

In less time than it took for bubbles to rise from the first Fennych’s splash, others poured

from the forest and went for the beer. Some dived in and splashed, others crowded

around, muzzles sunk deep, while yet others jostled and pushed like puppies searching

for a teat. A few fought for possession of a cask, then broke apart, little harm done, to

chase other interlopers away from their prize.

Snaps and snarls filled the air, followed by long howls that sounded mournful. As the din

died down and the owl-moon’s face shone over the scene, furry, barrel-chested creatures

lay all around the casks, twitching and snoring, staggering a few steps and falling. Several

poked their unconscious comrades, prodding them to get up, but gradually succumbed to

drink and gravity.

When Captain Gryst deemed all to be safe, the people of the
Stormwolf
left the

breastworks and approached the horde of drunken monsters. Jorim made certain he was

out in front and reached them first. They’d not begun to revert to their more docile form,

but they hardly seemed threatening. He checked first one, then another, looking at their

teeth and paws, and after looking over a half dozen, settled on the third one he’d

inspected.

He rolled the young male onto his stomach, then lifted him by the scruff of his neck. “This

one will do, Captain.”

Anaeda nodded. “Slaughter the rest of them, then report back to the ship.”

A sergeant with the Sea Dragons looked at her. “Begging your pardon, Captain—”

“Yes, Sergeant Solok?”

“This killing is likely to be thirsty work, Captain.” The man smiled as his men fell to

butchering the sleeping Fenns. “Be a shame to waste what’s left of the beer.”

4th day, Month of the Rat, Year of the Dog

9th Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court

162nd Year of the Komyr Dynasty

736th year since the Cataclysm

Telarunde, Solaeth

Had the situation they’d discovered in the small town of Telarunde not been so potentially

explosive, Moraven Tolo might have laughed. As it was, he shot a hand out to restrain

Ciras. Tyressa had the good grace to look at him before she chose to do anything. Keles

Anturasi just reined his horse to a stop, then squinted and studied the town square as if

trying to clear his mind of the fog that sometimes consumed him.

The journey from Asath to the coast of the Dark Sea had gone quickly. They decided to

avoid Gria, so Moraven led them northeast to a cove where smugglers plied their trade.

The smugglers were not choosy about cargo, and accepted their horses as partial

payment of passage. They’d often transported
xidantzu
and did not mind having one in

their debt. Moraven had employed this family before and found one of their virtues was

that they had a very short memory span, save for good friends.

The passage to Eoloth went quickly and uncharacteristically smoothly. They saw no

pirates and had no foul weather. The food, which was served very salty and cold, made

them long for the rancid rations on the
Catfish,
but within three days they’d quit the ship and entered Solaeth’s largest city.

Eoloth’s buildings rose to three and four stories, despite being made of mud bricks that

were then stuccoed over and whitewashed. The people actually took pride in their homes

and regularly decorated them with verses scripted in bright paint surrounding doors and

windows, or with painted-on ivy that could never have survived in the cool, dry climate.

The brightest colors and most exotic images adorned the wealthier homes, though neither

Keles nor Ciras thought much of what the Eolothans counted as wealth.

The two of them shared many characteristics born of an early life of privilege. Ciras

remained very precise in action and ritual. He even continued to be well-mannered despite

being hot, tired, and hungry—a state that was nearly constant in the ship’s cramped,

damp quarters. Moraven admired his stubbornness and unwillingness to compromise

unless there was a tactical advantage.

Keles likewise found the hardships trying, but remained game and made the best of

things. Moraven had been led to believe Keles was smart, but the young man did make a

number of errors. They were not consistent, but similar in nature. Part of the time he

seemed to be in a fog, and several days complained of waking with a headache as if he’d

spent the previous night drinking.

Tyressa intrigued Moraven because she possessed a discipline that belied her age and

clearly had been well trained, but was more than willing to listen to his ideas about how

they might accomplish their missions. Usually warriors associated with a nation or

particular noble house looked down on
xidantzu
—thinking them too independent to be

worthy of hire. Tyressa seemed to put that all aside, save where Keles’ safety might be

jeopardized.

Once they’d bypassed Gria, Tyressa had opened the sealed orders she’d been carrying.

She passed a message to Moraven, then read through the remaining documents. After a

second read, she turned them over to Keles. He read them, frowned, and slumped back

against the boat’s hull. “This is going to be difficult.”

Moraven had smiled. “That would be true of any mission out here. This just makes it more

curious.”

The Prince’s message had expanded Keles’ mission by adding two additional tasks. First,

he was to help Moraven in locating possible caches of weapons from the time before the

Cataclysm. He was to make exact maps of their locations and not communicate any of

that information to anyone, even his grandfather. That latter instruction had confused

Keles, but he agreed to it, noting, “It just means I’ll have to have lots more things to give

him, so he won’t go looking for stuff.”

The second thing the Prince asked him to do was to help find Borosan Gryst. Keles knew

who that was and brightened at the prospect of meeting him. Keles started to explain

about something Gryst might be carrying, but then grew quiet. Everyone in the group

noticed his reluctance to explain further, but no one cared, since they’d undoubtedly learn

what it was if they ever found Gryst.

The message to Moraven, penned by the Prince himself, had been separately sealed.

“Gryst is paramount. All else matters not.” Moraven had read it, then burned it saying,

“The Prince wishes us luck. I’ll let the gods read the message of luck in the smoke, and

we shall have help on our journey.”

The others accepted his not having let them read the message themselves. He didn’t like

Prince Cyron’s subordinating their efforts to the locating of one man, but leaders always

put their concerns first. The implication in the message had not been subtle at all: the

others could die or be murdered as long as Borosan Gryst was returned to Moriande.

Moraven felt a chill ripple down his back. There had once been a time when he’d thought

of lives in such a casual manner and he was glad he had changed. Killing the men at

Asath had been necessitated by the fact that survivors would have summoned more help.

Their pursuit might have continued even into Solaeth or, more likely, would have drawn

unwanted attention to the four of them.

The deaths in Asath will barely merit a mention to the Prince.
Moraven wished Cyron

would have the chance to see the true value of an individual life, but he doubted it. The

scale of the problems the Prince had to deal with, and the fact that his ministers insulated

him from the gory realities of life, meant he never would have that chance. It was a pity,

but was also likely the only way the Prince could acquit his responsibilities to the nation.

Moraven considered this and other things as they rode.
Thank the gods I’ve not been

placed in those same straits.
Even as that idea occurred to him, a carrion crow’s piercing cry mocked him.

Solaeth had only ever been a frontier province and never truly a full part of the Empire.

Very little in the way of Imperial influence could be seen in the architecture or the tangle of alleys and roads that threaded through the city. Warlords had long since divided the

nation, though they sent representatives to a ruling council in Eoloth, keeping up the

pretense that it was a nation and that the High Governor actually ruled it.

What struck Moraven as the greatest departure from Imperial influence was the

preponderance of devices created through
gyanri
. He had seen the blue lights that glowed at night in the larger cities and knew them to be very expensive, but here the same blue

light glowed from brooches or the pommels of decorative swords. He had no doubt that

the light would not last very long, for the
thaumston
to power it came dear, but these

people used as trinkets what the finest people of Moriande could only dream of owning.

The sheer volume of
gyanri
product did make entering a discussion about it easy.

Moraven and the others had no trouble appearing wide-eyed with amazement at the

things they saw. Carefully they were able to turn the resulting discussions toward Gryst,

and after a day had been pointed in the right direction. They traveled almost due north out

of Eoloth, bound for the small town of Telarunde.

Telarunde had sent people to the capital to seek help. The village lay at the foot of a

mountain containing the ruins of an old citadel. A creature, said to be of the Ixae Yllae,

had taken up residence in the ruins and regularly preyed on cows, goats, sheep, and the

occasional shepherd. It had become more emboldened in the dry summer, and carried off

far more than it had before. The villagers were afraid that it might be feeding a brood.

Borosan Gryst, with a wagonful of his
gyanri
inventions, had headed off to destroy the

beast. He’d said it was on his way to Dolosan anyway, and he would be happy to help.

He’d gone with the town’s representatives, and everyone who had related the story to

them in Eoloth was pretty certain it would not have a bard’s-tale ending where everyone

lived happily ever after.

How true their predictions were.
Moraven smiled in spite of himself as he watched the

villagers working hard in the town square. They were piling bundles of sticks, bales of

straw, and even the occasional broken piece of furniture onto a heap. They muttered as

they worked, with an occasional sharp outburst shocking everyone to silence—a silence

that was then filled with murmurs of agreement.

At the center of this pile, bound to a thick stake with thick ropes, was Borosan Gryst. At

least Moraven took him to be Gryst, for he had the man’s reddish-brown hair, and his eyes

did appear to be mismatched blue and hazel. He’d not been described as being too tall,

and the ropes, despite being snug, did allow his paunch to show. The match to the

description was enough for Moraven to feel confident in his identification, but when the

man spoke, that cinched it.