The river which emptied into the Norothian Channel at Souterm was called the Red at its delta, but where it arose in the Girding Mountains far to the north it was known as the Blue. The name changed where the river cut through a ridge of chalky hills that stained its waters. The hills were also called the Red and they stabbed knife-like deep into the Vod Wilds on an east-west line, rising above the tangled masses of life that thrived there. The section of the Red Hills west of the river on the Codian side was much smaller, hardly amounting to a knob on the end of the blade’s hilt. It was on this knob that the Codian town of Galdeez had been, or rather was still in the process of being, built.
There had been a town on those hills for centuries but it had long been a sleepy place far upriver from the thriving city now known as Souterm, a place to where the products of rural farms were gathered to ship downstream. With the Codification of Doon forty years ago and the extension of the Imperial Post Road the town was now a booming place, with new shops and homes springing up on the hills so swiftly that several proposed sites for city walls had been consecutively overrun. The wall was not a priority for despite the proximity of the Vod Wilds, Magdetchoi raids here were few as the river cut through the hills in a sharp, deep channel that was almost a canyon.
The spot where the Imperial authorities had allowed the Shugak to erect a ferry dock and a cluster of hide tents in which they did the business of selling passes and licenses was below the hills and to the south. Nesha-tari’s band did not have to enter Red Galdeez at all, much to their leader’s relief. At her direction Zebulon Baj Nif handled the transaction for passes with the hulking hobgoblins, while Phoarty and Amatesu went ahead into town only to buy provisions for what would be around two additional weeks on the rough Shugak road.
There were no swamps nor bayous in this region of the Vod Wilds, only the hills across which hobgoblins had hacked out a trace road through the wilderness. The trace was so bad that even the baggage cart was problematic, for the obstinate straight-line route dropped and climbed hills without an awful lot of forethought. The group was obliged to spread the baggage in heavy packs among them. Zeb got the worst of it as the Minauan now carried his crossbow, a massive weapon with a heavy hand crank for reloading. The bolts it shot were the size of long tent stakes, making even the ammunition a burden.
Despite the ruggedness of their way the group made decent time as Nesha-tari set a brisk place, continuing to march out in front. When they camped at night she went well out into the thick forests at the base of the hills to sleep on her own, typically high in a tree. Shugak hobgoblins selling water for wine prices along the way warned against straying from the path, but not even Uriako Shikashe made much of a fuss when she went out by herself. The samurai seemed to recognize that in her present state Nesha-tari Hrilamae was likely the most dangerous thing in the darkness of the Wilds.
Zeb and Phin made the journey mostly in silence for even with Nesha-tari keeping her distance, and knowing what they now did about her, both could still feel the tug of her presence. They tried to look at their feet while walking, but several times one or the other took a spill as their gaze drifted up and settled dreamily on the flitting beige figure far ahead on the rough trace. The other would help the fallen one up, and the two would exchange a long look and shake their heads.
Phin had worries about Camp Town. Once there he was set to separate from the rest of the group, and to leave Nesha-tari. Thinking about it made his palms clammy, and his breathing quickened until he felt lightheaded. Abverwar had given the wizard a disciplined mind, but the woman (if that was the right word) had invaded it. Phin’s morning meditations were becoming ever longer by the day, for it was an effort for him to muster the concentration necessary to memorize his spells. Only the hard, physical effort of the march on the Shugak trace gave Phin any relief, for he collapsed so exhausted at the end of each day that his sleep was as deep as the dead. So deep that not even the dreams roused him from it, though there were a lot of dreams. They were all about the same thing.
Phin was starting to think he might have to ask Amatesu to club him unconscious again before he would be able to let Nesha-tari walk out of his life.
*
After nine days the trace road left the Red Hills, or rather the hills sank into marshy ground while the trace continued straight across it. This was only possible because suddenly, for miles, a wide causeway ran above the fens to either side, lying on a true line due east. The causeway was surely not the work of the hobgoblins for in places the grass growing over it had been so trampled by adventurers over the last months that the dirt had given way, revealing a stone road made up of many different types of rocks all fitted together as smoothly as the finest city street. None who noticed it in passing thought it could have been the work of anyone other than the ancient Ettaceans, the Builders of Vod’Adia toward which the road led.
A day later the causeway ended at a new line of hills, and only the rude trace road marked the route again. This range in the midst of the Wilds was if anything worse than the Red Hills, with steeper sides and sharper peaks giving little purchase for plants and thus a greater air of desolation. For more long days the path rose and fell though in at least three places there were signs that a higher road had once existed here, for a rubble of ingeniously cut stones that had once been the supports of bridges cluttered the bottoms of deep gulches through which the trace ran.
After thirteen days all told, bringing the date to the 25th of Ninth Month, the trace mounted the side of a ridge at a ludicrous angle, not quite necessitating the use of hands to get up it but not shy of that by many degrees. Zeb’s lungs were heaving by the time he reached the top, the last to do so, and he splayed on the ground next to Phin who was already flat on his back before a dense line of tall pines.
“Gods, this sucks,” Zeb gasped.
“I hate the Ettaceans,” Phin said at the cloudy sky above. It looked like rain was not far off.
Amatesu emerged from the tree line and frowned at the two prone men. Zeb looked up at her accusingly.
“You’re not even breathing hard, are you?”
“Gentlemen,” Amatesu said, actually without sarcasm. “We are here.”
Despite their exhaustion, and everything else, Zeb and Phin got back to their feet. They followed Amatesu through the trees packed together so tightly it almost seemed like evening down among them, until finally stepping back out into daylight shining on a different world.
They stood on the western edge of a deep valley ringed by walls of black stone steep as cliffs. They were closer to the northern end and down on the valley floor far below them was a town of ramshackle wood and stone, mud streets shining wetly and black smoke from innumerable fires drifting up to mingle with skirls of fog drifting about below them like clouds beneath their feet.
“ That is fabled Vod’Adia?” Phin sputtered.
“I think that is Camp Town,” Zeb said, and he pointed to the south.
Phin swung his gaze over the grassy floor of the middle valley and noticed that the southern half was not just obscured by thicker fog, as he had thought at a glance. The fog was not just a bank, but rather a solid, stationary mass filling the valley to its walls and stretching from the floor to a level with the top. The mass was a dark gray on the bottom that became lighter as it rose, and while whitish skirls were pulled off the top by a breeze the whole never lost in size, almost as though more fog was constantly being generated from the ground.
As Phin stared he saw that the thick mass was still slightly permeable quite a ways down, and his eyes tried to make peace with the fact that the whole was slowly turning, whirling, revolving, in various directions contrary to the wind. He began to perceive shapes beyond the veil. There were tall, spindly towers and heaping masses of black fortifications and citadels. Phin could only make out their highest points as the ground level was wholly lost in the gray darkness.
“Oh,” Phin said. “That is a bit more impressive.”
There was a shrill whistle from the left. Uriako Shikashe had made it for Nesha-tari was striding away along the lip of the valley, heading for what Phin now saw was a massive construction at the north end beyond Camp Town, a series of seven switch-back roads descending to the valley floor with towers built above the turnabouts. Phin had not noticed the structure at first only because it was made of the same black stone as the cliffs, and blended in perfectly. Shikashe and the others followed the woman’s lead and despite having her beige figure in sight up ahead, Phin managed to frequently glance back down into the valley as they passed along high above Camp Town. That place looked no more pleasant as it came into better view, with wet streets boiling with tiny figures looking like ants from the distance, and buildings that were all a jumbled warren of raw lumber and sagging roofs. The only structure that was distinct was a square pyramid fenced off on a block of its own, which despite being made of wood had the same symmetrical look of the stone temples of Jobe present in the great cities of the Codian Empire.
The group rounded the head of the valley in an hour and reached the gatehouse entrance to the descending switchback roads just as rain began to fall. Hobgoblins sat station on the battlements above, but none barked a challenge as Nesha-tari led the way beneath them with the others now in a bunch several paces behind her.
The stone roads descended consecutively at an easy grade and they were wide enough for wagon traffic in both directions, though of course there was none. Nesha-tari’s party was the only one descending at the moment. At each turnabout they passed through towers cut with arrow slits and murder holes that would have commanded the passage fully if they were manned, but the Shugak did not appear to have bothered posting guards in most of them. As the group was alone Uriako Shikashe suddenly began to speak at a length that was rare for him as he looked around. He said more words in his native Ashinese than Phin had heard from him in a month, and Amatesu translated into Codian.
“His lordship Uriako-sama says that while this is a truly formidable work, the valley is a foolish place to build a city. An invading army could simply seize the rim and seal the whole as a cork does a bottle.”
Zeb for once had nothing to say as he was looking warily into Camp Town from the roads. Phin answered.
“You can tell his lordship that when the ancient Ettaceans made this place they had the only army on Noroth. They were the first nation of Men to arise here.”
Amatesu looked back at him. “Some fifteen hundred years ago?”
“In round numbers.”
The woman from the Farthest West shook her rain-matted head.
“Such a young land.”
Halfway down the roads the sounds of Camp Town became raucous, sounding like a city at festival time. Voices babbled in innumerable languages, some with mirth and some with anger, while song and music poured out of rough taverns and inns. Street hawkers shouted their wares, and drunks brayed to the heavens. Somewhere, steel rang on steel.
The party reached the valley floor and found the square beyond the gatehouse was a pit of churned mud, with no walkways along the rutted streets running off in irregular directions. While the people milling about were of a thousand different kinds all were alike covered in mud to the knees and armed to the teeth with blades, bows, and even guns. Nesha-tari marched to the middle of the square, where she stopped. She rummaged within her robes while Phin stared at her back, then turned and tossed a pouch to Zeb. Phin saw just a bit of her face, the pale skin and a flip of blonde hair, before she bent her graceful neck to lower her hood. The pouch hit Zeb in the chest before the Minaun noticed it and picked it up. Nesha-tari spoke to him and while Phin had never thought Zantish to be a particularly pleasant-sounding language, it was melodic honey from Nesha-tari’s mouth.
“This is for you,” Zeb said absently, holding the pouch out to Phin while not taking his eyes off of Nesha-tari, who had turned back around. “Some silver for an inn room. Goodbye and good luck.”
Nesha-tari walked away toward the widest street leaving the intersection, heading more or less south. Zeb dropped the pouch at Phin’s feet and hurried after her without another word, now walking beside Shikashe. Phin took a step after them, but Amatesu grabbed his arm.
“Phinneas,” she said, and repeated it until he looked at her.
“What?”
“We are here,” Amatesu said. “This is where we part.”
“But…I mean I can, I can still be of use to her…”
Amatesu reached up and grabbed Phin’s chin, turning his head to look down at her and locking his eyes on her own.
“Phinneas, listen to me. You do not want to go with her. What you feel now is not yourself.”
“I know what I want,” Phin said and tried to pull away from the shukenja, but she held onto him like a bear trap.
“No, you do not.”
Phin glared at Amatesu and felt blood pounding through his temples. He slipped the fingers of his left hand into a trouser pocket in which he had a small pouch of his own, loosely bound with string and filled along the way with chalky dust from the surface of the Post Road. He slipped two fingers through the string into the dust.
“Woman, release me,” he hissed.
“Phinneas, you must concentrate. Think.”
Phin did not think. He slipped his fingers out from the pouch in his pocket and raised his hand toward his mouth, muttering an incantation in old Tullish. It was a poor move on a number of counts, the main one being that Sleep, as taught at Abverwar, was an ambush spell. It rarely worked when the target saw it coming.
Amatesu saw it coming, of course. As she already had a hand on Phin’s chin she shoved it up so that his jaw clacked hard into his skull and his head jerked back, then she kicked his feet out from under him. Phin hit the mud on his back with a splat. Amatesu stomped on his left wrist and the hand with the dusty fingers sank into the slop.
“I forgive you for that,” Amatesu said. “But do not do it again.”
Phin wheezed in the mud for Amatesu’s blow, while not very forceful, would not have needed to be from that angle to snap his neck. He glared up at her as she backed away a step, kicking the coin pouch so that it landed on his chest while sending a spatter of mud up his face.
“Fight it, Phinneas,” she said. “It should fade soon enough. Do not follow.”
She backed away further before turning and disappearing among the people on the southern street, none of whom had watched their exchange with more than a passing interest.
Phin scrambled to his feet when Amatesu was gone and had just enough presence of mind to hold onto the coins. He could not go straight after her for there was no telling if the shukenja woman would lurk in ambush for him so he stumbled to the right, thinking to cut over a block and race ahead to intercept Nesha-tari. There was not a handy street that way so he veered back to the left. A few people stopped to look at him, at his wild eyes and grimacing snarl.
Something about their expressions struck Phin, and it occurred to the Circle Wizard that he must look like a crazy person. He was acting like a crazy person. This was crazy.
Phin stopped, and blinked. His breathing was rapid but it started to slow, and the pounding in his ears lessened. He looked in the direction Nesha-tari had gone and took another step after her, but only one. He stopped himself. The desire ran out of his body, and was replaced by something far more sensible. Fear.
Phin shivered where he stood, and let out a long breath. When he thought of Nesha-tari now, with a growing distance between them, it was with a tremble of revulsion. Inherent or intentional, power like hers must be meant for a purpose, and a man driven to her would surely come to no good end. Neither did moths to flames, nor a fly to a pitcher plant.
“Good luck, Zeb,” Phin said, and he shivered again, though this time it was only because of the mud running down his back.
*
As Nesha-tari walked down the middle of the muddy street men stopped talking all around her and stared until she had passed. She had three separate spells active and together they were enough that the effort required to maintain them blunted the weight of the men’s attention. But she knew they were there. She could smell the blood moving in their veins, the big ones through their necks, just under the thin skin that a scratch could open to a welter.
Just days, she thought. Only hours. She would Feed, and soon. She had to.
Nesha-tari crossed the full length of Camp Town from north to south. At the southern end the town ended sharply at a tall palisade wall that stretched the breadth of the valley, great logs sharpened on the top with plank walkways behind them, scaffold towers rising above. Wugs and hobgoblins warded the wall heavily for beyond it was nothing but an open field of thick, short grass stretching almost a mile to the mass of gray fog at the valley’s far end, hanging over everything.
A road of ancient black stones bisected the field and connected the fog to the single gate in the Camp Town palisade. The yard around the gate was further strengthened with earthworks, for two centuries ago it had been a fortress thrown up by Shugak and humans together, by the forces gathered here to do battle should the Third Opening of Vod’Adia have unleashed a new wave of undead horrors into the world. That had not of course happened, and now the Shugak operated the earthen fort as a gate complex through which parties of adventurers would be allowed to pass down the road to Vod’Adia, in accordance with the terms of the licenses they had bought. It was also where the Shugak would halt all adventurers who managed to return, and levy a final tax on everything brought out of the Sable City.
For now, three days before the Opening, the yard within the dirt-and-timber fort was still a marketplace with adventurers queued up on plank flooring before tables at which late licenses were being sold. Nesha-tari strode in and wound among them, close enough that men shivered as she brushed by. Nesha-tari clenched her hands into white-knuckled fists in her gloves. She passed through the lines and then by a slate board marked in chalk with indecipherable bullywug signs, where great numbers of the frogmen chirped excitedly and placed bets on groups of adventures. They wagered mostly on how many of them would die in Vod’Adia.
Beyond the bookmakers a quarter of the yard was enclosed by a second palisade, setting aside ground where a series of low stone buildings built more stoutly than anything else in Camp Town emerged halfway from the ground, stairs descending into each. These would be both Shugak barracks, and warehouses for goods. While none of the Magdetchoi Nesha-tari had seen thus far had made any move to interfere with her, a rank of massive hobgoblins in ornate bronze breast plates barred the entrance to the secondary compound. Two crossed their halberds as she approached, and she stopped before them.
“Kerek,” she hissed, and the animals narrowed their watery pink eyes at her under the low brows of heavy iron helms. Magdetchoi were not effected by Nesha-tari’s peculiarities, no more than she wanted to eat one of them. The hobgoblins saw her as she was, and they were not too impressed.
“Kerek!” she shouted as a demand. She knew the right name, at any rate.
The hobgoblins growled among themselves and one slouched off into the compound while the others continued to glare at her, and those who now joined her. Nesha-tari was aware of Shikashe and Zebulon behind her, and more dimly of Amatesu.
“The three of you will wait here,” she said in Zantish over her shoulder without looking back. “I will not be long.”
There was no response, and Nesha-tari clenched her teeth.
“Baj Nif, you slack-jawed moron. Tell the others.”
Baj Nif started speaking thickly in Codian, his voice just sounding stupid. Nesha-tari fought the urge to turn around and punch him in the face.
The hobgoblin returned and beckoned Nesha-tari forward with a heavy gauntlet, pointing her toward a sloping hut built in the nearest corner of the palisades. Nesha-tari strode for the hut where an emaciated jet-black bullywug with purple spots stood in the crooked doorway under twisting animal horns mounted to the beam. Acrid smoke wafted out of the hut around it, and beads, feathers, and trinkets hung from bands around its chest and arms.
Kerek was the sort of Magdetchoi mage most humans called a Witch Doctor. His importance to Nesha-tari was displayed in his cupola eyes, which were as solidly lightless as two massive black pearls.
The bullywug croaked, but Nesha-tari understood the words as if they had been spoken in Low Drak. Her raised spell of magic detection gave her a tickling twinge.
“I greet my sister of the Blue,” Kerek said.
“I greet my brother of the Black.”
Nesha-tari’s relationship to Kerek was far different than hers had been to Edgewise. The goblin had been the chosen servant of the Bronze Lady, a Great Dragon of the Land, who thus was due a grudging respect. Akroya and Danavod were both Great Dragons of the Sky, and the Azure One had been the greatest among those since the death of Ged-azi the Red. Black Danavod was least among the three Great Sky Dragons yet living, for the Winter Wyrm had perished in the years before men even numbered them.
“How may I serve you?” Kerek asked with a humble bow.
“There is a high priest of the Ayzantine faith of Ayon bound for this place, if he is not here already. You will search him out and inform me when he is discovered.”
Kerek swayed among the stinking smoke, the puffs breaking up in the air as the rain began to fall more strongly.
“And then?”
“Then I will kill him.”
Clear membranes passed over the bullywugs black eyes, and a webbed hand fingered some beads.
“A high priest of the Burning Man’s faith would be a very formidable being.”
“As am I.”
The little creature looked at her longer, rain pattering its hide. Drops fell from Nesha-tari’s hood as well, and while she loathed being wet she gave no sign. Finally, the wug shrugged.
“As you wish, sister.”