Drowning at Dusk Ch. 04

When we set out from the temple through the Wildwood, we were joined by Terakh and ten of the hired cutthroats. By the time we reached the edges of the great untamed forest, we'd lost half of that number. Two had disappeared during the first night, vanishing to parts unknown, their courage likely broken by the prospect of other future encounters with undead. We lost three more to an attack by wolf-crows: vicious, feathered canines that had fallen upon us when we'd stopped for water at a stream.

And when we emerged from the thick, verdant expanse of the forest and caught sight of the rolling plains and countryside, we lost the remaining five.

Terakh announced that he was going to wander off to take a piss while the rest of us rested, and he disappeared over a rocky hill. Klevek-the tattooed bandit who had fought at my side against the undead-let out a sudden hiss. He scratched fiercely at the alchemical bandage he'd placed over the wound he'd received from the barrow-walkers.

"Don't pick at it," I said. "You'll tear the scab open, and that bandage will be for naught."

"It's not the wound itself. It hurts underneath. Like...like ice."

One of the other bandits cursed and reached for his axe, but I cut him off with a glare.

"Barrow-walkers only turn their victims if they actually die to their steel. Scratches like that don't make barrow-walkers."

"Whatever the case," Klevek grumbled. "Xelari, can you give it another go with that fancy runestone of yours?"

The bandit with the axe frowned and wandered over, giving Klevek's bandage a dubious look.

Sighing, the dusk elf withdrew her runestone and moved to Klevek's side.

The tattooed bandit moved with speed and ferocity he hadn't even displayed during the fight against the barrow-walkers: he lunged upward, freeing a knife from his belt and shoving it underneath Xelari's chin, stopping just short of piercing the flesh.

The bandit with the axe, whose concern about the wound had clearly been a clever ruse, drew his axe and flashed me a glare of warning as I went for my own blade.

"Easy, easy," Klevek said, grinning as he snatched Xelari's runestone from her grasp.

"What in the Voids is wrong with you?" Xelari said, her voice distant and calm despite the knife to her throat. "You received your share for helping us find the relic, and another small fortune awaits you if you help Terakh find another."

"Our little band won't survive another delve like that. We lost what, ten of us to Esharyn here? Dozens more down in the temple, and five more just walking out of the Wildwood. No. I'm not risking my hide for your mysterious crusade for one more damned day. So we're going to relax here until Terakh gets back, and then he's going to give us that circlet, then we'll be on our way."

Klevek nodded at one of the other bandits.

"Josric, go get Esharyn's weapons."

The scarred, squat little bandit stalked towards me, his notched axe at the ready.

As he approached, I assessed the situation. Five against two would have been laughably good odds in our favor if Xelari had her runestone and if they hadn't gotten the drop on us. I assessed the distances between us, judging how quickly I could close the gap. If I gave Josric a chop to the throat when he went for my weapons, I could likely get off a quick knife-throw at Klevek. Even if I didn't kill him outright, it could give Xelari a chance to make her move.

A dangerous woman like that only needed the slimmest of opportunities. I had just had to give her the opening.

"You're making a mistake," I said, glaring at Josric as he approached.

"Esharyn was wrong, Klevek," Xelari said, staring into her captor's eyes.

I and the other bandits frowned at her.

"What?" Klevek laughed.

"About the barrow-walkers. She is right that normal barrow-walkers can only turn their victims if they fall to their steel. But those wereelven barrow-walkers. The curse is conveyed through any wound they inflict."

"I was lying about the itch," he growled.

"Were you? I've seen you picking and scratching at that bandage since we left the temple. I've seen the redness on the edges of the bandage during times of exertion. The blood vessels straining in your eye. It's even more clear now that we're this close."

"What in the Void is she talking about, Klevek?" asked one of the other conspirators.

"She's spinning tales," Klevek snapped.

"Take off your bandage, then," Xelari said. "Show them."

"I'm the one with the knife to your throat. You don't get to give commands anymore."

"Shit," I murmured under my breath, loud enough that only Josric could likely hear. "I think she's right. The White Talons mentioned something about elven barrow-walkers being stronger."

I looked over Josric's shoulder, giving Klevek a long, fearful stare.

Josric glanced backwards.

I struck.

By the time Josric's head had lurched back towards me, it was too late. I slammed my fist into his throat, and as he toppled, choking and gurgling, I tore my knife from its sheath. Before I could even pull it back for a throw, Xelari's hand clawed into Klevek's wound. He screamed and twisted away, tearing open a shallow gash beneath her chin in the process.

She kicked him in the groin, sending him sprawling onto his back.

I stabbed down with my knife, tearing into the side of Josric's neck. Leaving the blade there, I ripped the axe from his shaking hands and rushed to Xelari's side.

The other three bandits charged her, swords and axes at the ready. A bellow of rage rose from the hill behind us; Terakh had apparently returned.

The bandit closest to Xelari hesitated at that furious cry, and died for it.

That slower step gave Xelari time to grab her runestone from Klevek. An eruption-rune ignited, sending a lance of molten rock directly into the face of the bandit who'd hesitated. As he wailed and burned, the other two bandits rushed past the growing cloud of smoke.

I ran straight into one, my stolen axe hacking and hewing. I tore open her forearm, then hissed with pain as her blade skimmed over my thigh. Twisting back, I recovered and followed up with a mighty swing that split open her skull.

A flick of Xelari's wrist sent the eruption-rune at the last bandit. His ashen, smoldering form crumpled to the grass mere feet from Klevek, the only one still alive.

Ignoring the pain in my thigh, I tore the axe free from my victim's face and raised it above Klevek's neck.

"What in the bloody Voids?" Terakh shouted, sprinting to join us, his greatsword drawn and hungry for blood. "I wander over the hill for one long piss and everyone's fuckingdead."

"Klevek made a move for the circlet," I said, panting. "Wanted to trade Xelari's life for it."

"Wait," Klevek sputtered. "We just wanted to make a deal. We-"

Terakh shoved me out of the way, raised his greatsword, and impaled Klevek through the chest. The mighty thrust shoved the blade all the way through, nearly pinning the bandit to the ground. After spitting in the dying man's face, Terakh growled out an orcish curse and ripped the blade free.

"I'm sorry, Xelari," he said. "I should have paid more attention to their grumbling. Should have known they'd try something like this."

"Do you think the others will mount a similar mutiny at camp?" I asked, pulling the alchemical bandages from Klevek's satchel to bind my wounded leg. "Valrafein could be in danger."

"Valrafein doesn't have anything of worth." She wrinkled her nose. "Surprising, though, to hear you so concerned about him."

"I'm not worried abouthim. More worried about the other bandits coming after us if they don't get a payout from Valrafein."

"We'll be long gone by then. It will be a week or more before they can catch up to us."

"Shit, shit, shit," Terakh said, glaring back and forth between the dead bandits.

Xelari dabbed her fingers against the wound just beneath her chin: it was long but shallow, and a thin stream of dark blue blood ran down her elegant neck.

"I'll take care of that," I said. "No need to waste the runes."

Tearing off another strip of bandages, I cleaned the blood away and gently wrapped a bandage around her neck. I lingered there for a moment, torn about what to say. An apology? An expression of relief that she was all right? Praise for her quick thinking?

She turned away before I could speak.

"Going to be a lot harder for me to loot that other temple now," said Terakh. "I'll need another crew."

"I recommend finding hirelings other than greedy bandits this time," I said.

"We didn't have much choice earlier. We needed a lot of people to cover all that ground."

"Litarra is a two days' journey south," I said. "When I passed through on my way north, I ran into plenty of mercenaries and adventurers in the taverns. Won't be able to get a crew as big or as cheap as your last one, though."

"Good place for a bath and a resupply, too," Terakh said. He kicked Klevek's corpse. "Dumb fucking bastard. I was starting to like you, too."

Sighing, Terakh set to looting the corpses, and Xelari reached into her satchel and pulled out a small cloth bundle.

"I was going to give you these when we stopped for the night. Now I'm wishing I'd done so earlier. Your runestones. Enhanced and refined. Reusable now."

I thanked her and took them, examining the fury-rune, charm-rune, shadow-rune, and sight-rune. Xelari had added a little triangular rune on the backside of each stone.

Gods, those would make the hunt for Heroth and any potential future targets all the easier. No more spending a small fortune to stock up before each job, and long-term hunts would be made far simpler on account of being able to restore my magic with each rising of the moons.

We left the dead to rot, mounted our horses and resumed the southward journey.

Our journey took us along an ill-maintained cobblestone road, passing by mills, small villages, vineyards, farms, and the occasional military watchtower. Of the three towers we passed, only one was manned, and we could barely call the meager, ill-equipped squad a proper garrison.

An orc and a dusk elf certainly caught the attention of the soldiers, but they did not halt our journey. A passing wine merchant openly ogled at Xelari, and three children ran out from a nearby farm to shout at Terakh, demanding that he show them their sword. The warrior obliged, raising the sword high to the delight of the children, who then ran off to a nearby thicket to gather sticks big enough to make their own greatswords.

"Little devils," Xelari said, her laughter chasing after the children as they ran. "I used to do the same thing, in fact, but with the bows of the glade-rangers of my home."

I realized that I knew scarcely little of Xelari's past, and knew more of her mad ambitions than I did of her origins.

"And where is home, exactly?" I asked.

"Qal-Hashaa. A dusk elf enclave far, far to the south."

I'd heard of other dusk elf glades: Qal-Tesh, Qal-Enhara, Qal-Tuum. But never Qal-Hashaa. Given the insular nature of her people, though, and so the enclaves I'd heard of were as mysterious and shrouded as Xelari's home.

She cocked her head at me.

"Allow me to guess. Mrenhold?"

I blinked.

"How'd you guess that?"

My training with the White Talons had included methods of vocal training, to erase any trace of an accent, and to adopt the accents of other places to better aid our missions. I lacked the trademark braids of my homeland, and didn't wear the frilly silken scarves that most Mrenhold women wore. Thus there was nothing about me or my belongings that gave any hint of my origins, and she'd nailed it one attempt.

"The way you pronounce the very first syllable of my name. It's subtle, but distinct. Most humans have trouble with it, but something about a Mrenhold accent just flows better. Perhaps it's linguistic heritage, leftover from when Mrenhold was once an ally to the dusk elves."

Another shock, for I'd never once heard that.

"That's news to me."

"Centuries and centuries ago. Back before Mrenhold was Mrenhold. The Mrennic barbarians who settled in that land served as mercenaries in dusk elf armies in wars against the orcs and the southern human clans. I wonder if the accent thus preserved some aspect of those ties."

My ignorance of her past was so deep that I didn't even know how old she was. Gods...had she been around for that alliance?

"You...witnessed this yourself?"

Terakh threw his head back and laughed, while Xelari replied with a ghost of a smile.

"How old do you think I am, Esharyn?"

"I don't bloody know. Dusk elves can live for centuries and centuries, and once an elf gets past a certain age I can never tell the damned difference. Met an elf who was thirty, who looked just like her grandmother, who was almost three hundred."

"Guess, then," Terakh said, laughing once again. "I got it to within a decade the first time. Orcish eyes are better at seeing the subtle differences."

I frowned, staring at Xelari for a moment. I'd fucked elves, killed elves, fought alongside them, but had never really been able to assess how old one was. Xelari in particular was so...uncanny that such a prediction seemed impossible. Given the depth of her knowledge, the unearthly poise, and skill with magic, I wagered she was quite old, at least relative to me.

"This isn't a dangerous guess, is it? Not going to get punished for guessing too old, am I?"

"We both know you'd enjoy the punishment," she said. "So answer away."

"One hundred and...thirty."

"Eighty-nine. Or...three hundred and two cycles of the moons, which is by the dusk elf reckoning."

"How in the bloody Voids did you get to within a decade?" I asked Terakh.

"It's the ears. The points get a bit sharper after a century or so. Hers aren't quite so sharp, which put her under a century or thereabouts. I just made a lucky guess of ninety-nine." He grinned at Xelari. "Now it's Xel's turn to guess. Should be good for a laugh; she's terrible at it."

I chuckled.

"How? We humans age in the most obvious ways: paunch, wrinkles, graying hair."

"Not consistently. And sometimes people get paunch or wrinkles from their lifestyle, not their age. Not to mention that we dusk elves see colors differently: blonde, silver, gray all look the same to us. So that blonde little boy back there who wanted to see Terakh's sword had the same hair color as a wrinkled old crone." She looked me up and down. "Fifty."

I gasped in mock shock, while Terakh's guffaws rolled off the wheat fields around us.

"Fifty? You're decades off. I'm twenty-nine. What wrinkles or gray hairs do I possess that I would have made you think I was fifty?"

"Nothing physical. I made the guess based on your skills and experience. You said you trained with the White Talons for years, served them for two, and spent some time afterwards an assassin. Given your exploits and endurance, I assumed you were more...seasoned."

"Bloody Voids," I said, chuckling again. I wasn't really offended in the slightest, and was just amused by how wrong she'd been. "Was she this wrong in guessing your age, too, Terakh?"

"She did better. She also guessed fifty, but I'm just past forty. I'm starting to think she just guesses 'fifty' for every human or orc she meets, and hopes for the best."

"Given the average lifespan of humans and orcs, it's not the worst strategy." I smiled at her. "Now I'm wondering what else it is you're hopelessly ignorant about."

"We all have our shortcomings. I may be dreadful at telling human ages or knowing the differences between types of birds, for example, but I am sure there are vagaries of dusk elf culture you know nothing about. The differences in greetings on nights when there are eclipses, for example, or which songs to sing when the moons are low, or how runes interact when there is a new moon."

"Destroy some of my own ignorance, then. Tell me about your time in Qal-Hashaa."

"If this is your roundabout way of trying to learn why I joined the Deathless, it will not work."

"That's not my aim. Just trying to pass the time on the road."

"I was born to a noble house. The Orakviir clan, to be precise."

"So what title should I use, hmm? Baroness, countess, duchess?" I gave a theatrical gasp. "Have I been sleeping with aprincess? Would that make me a royal consort of some sort?"

Xelari let out one of her melodious laughs and shook her head.

"Noble clans among the dusk elves aren't exactly the same as human noble families. It's not a blood family, you see. Placement for a child is made not by blood or kin, but through very complicated rituals that assess the phase of the moons at birth. And technically the head of our house was an Archon, not a duke or a duchess, and my title roughly translates to 'Moondancer.'"

"Moondancer. I like the sound of that. A metaphorical title?"

"No. I was a dancer. Not like one you might encounter in a tavern or a brothel, though; it was a holy position. I was a devotee of the gods, not unlike you were. Though my soul was worn to Huinala, goddess of the red moon."

I could certainly picture Xelari as a skilled and renowned dancer; her figure, her lithe grace, her alluring eyes...

"The 'dancing' was only a small fraction of my duties. Yes, I would dance to honor Huinala and the other gods in grand ceremonies, but I conducted other rituals, passed judgment on legal disputes, oversaw weddings and funerals, blessed the birth of children, and so on."

"The dancing is easy to picture. The rest of that, though?" I laughed at the thought of Xelari holding court between two feuding parties.

"It seems amusing to me at times, as well. It was a lifetime ago. An echo of another person's life, almost."

"Your turn," Terakh said to me. "You pestered me about why I joined the Deathless, pestered her about Qal-Hashaa. Now you spill."

"I already told Xelari mostly everything. Took the vows to Venkaya, joined the White Talons, found things too strict and confining, left the order-"

"I can't imagine an order of holy assassins would smile on that."

"They didn't. They have rules to allow for departures, though. I was branded," I said, tapping my forehead. "With a glowing mark that identified me as an apostate. Which meant that anyone who recognized that symbol could kill me on sight, without any judgment from the temples. So I ran. And ran. And ran. The mark only lasted for a month, though, as per their scriptures. After that, I was free. But I had incurred a large debt to some smugglers who helped me get away.

"When I couldn't pay up, the smugglers sent killers after me. I killed my would-be assassins, so they hired a more prominent assassin's guild. When I killed the next band of assassins, a rival of that guild got wind of my stubborn refusal to die, and reached out to hire me. He cleared my debts, arranged for other contracts, and I worked for him for a few years.

"He wasn't as strict or demanding a master as the White Talons, so I was free of that arrangement after a time, then made my way to Arkostead, and went independent. I usually tried to pick the contracts that would have me knifing bastards and villains, though. No murdering of unfaithful spouses or the offing of business partners for me."

"Blood in your wake," Terakh said with a somber nod. "I know the feeling."

"Kill a lot of people as a tavern bouncer?" I asked.

"Only a few. My life before that, though, was soaked with blood. I was the son of my clan's blood mage, which was an...unusual position to be in."

"How so?"

"Blood mages are not supposed to have children. As such, I was consideredhek-raath. I am not sure of the word for it in your tongue."

"'One without birth,'" said Xelari. "'A soul who should not be'. One who was, in the eyes of the clan, not officially 'born.'"