Surfacing Ch. 14

"Just defending his territory?" I asked, shrugging. That was indeed simple.

"Simple, yes, but the devil is in the details. Lord Nikros managed to identify and arrest a top-ranking Guild operator, a woman named Halete Ebtryne." Gavin lifted his nighttime gaze to me. "He made her public execution particularly gruesome as a warning to any and all who would further the Guild's goals, whether they were a member or simply coerced. His mistake, it seems, was attempting to be more intimidating by creatively torturing a Guild member. A female one."

"Why would the gender matter, if she was performing a crime that either male or female could do?" I asked. "Would the message not have been as strong if it had been male?"

Gavin and Mourn both nodded in agreement, and it left me baffled for a moment, but it was the necromancer who continued.

"There are males competing and vying for status, and there are challenges to the status quo, and this is acceptable," Gavin explained. "If I am not mistaken, the clergy are all male at this point in time, and so are all the landowners. The only females mentioned are this one Guild leader and the occasional wife or sister or daughter who bear no consequence except for gossip, marriage, and breeding."

"I will also add," Mourn spoke, "at that time, while the priests did not revile women as openly as they do now, they carried little respect for them and were reluctant to train the rare female with magical potential. Better to keep them uneducated, safe and docile, by convincing them they were weak and dependent by happenstance of birth."

I covered my mouth with my gloved hand in thought, remembering any recent, public deaths of male Drow back home. Intent to scare other males into obeying? Absolutely. Intent to reassure us that we still held the power? Oh, yes. Because they were automatically weaker and dependent just being born male...?

Well. They were smaller. And I knew plenty of Matrons and Priestesses who would have looked at me like I'd been dropped on my head as a child for musing that they might be equal in strength. Certainly Callitro and Auslan were as they should be; submissive, seductive, obedient, graceful, easily intimidated...

Shyntre, on the other hand, was not; and yet he was no less enjoyable to me. In some ways, more so. Just in a different way. Was it just entertaining to me when he demanded something else than his meeker brothers were content with? Entertaining, because I knew he would never get it and it was like watching a very angry fly trapped in a web—?

Maybe that was what it looked like for those Men watching Halete?

I was jerked from my wandering reflection when Gavin spoke directly to me.

"So a female Guild leader within the city, whether to the Lord or the clergy, was..."

"Someone blatantly questioning her worth," I considered, realizing I was halfway through my second pie. They were definitely filling. "And someone had trained Halete to challenge that worth."

"Indeed. And it seemed she had magical potential as well," Gavin spoke while skimming, "tricks I know for certain are spells. This means someone had trained her in magic as well, and it makes her a witch in the eyes of the priests."

Mourn nodded, and I looked at him.

"Did you know her? Halete?"

"I did," he answered frankly.

"Did you train her?"

"We did. The Guild was smaller, starting out, we were learning. Halete had a troubled past with her family, but what she learned drove her to accept risk and turn against her Lord, both of state and of Sun. She was exactly what we needed to make inroads into one of the strictest, most devout cities. For several years, Lord Nikro thought he was looking for a man."

"Because no woman could be so competent," Gavin smirked, again studying his page. "She caused quite a bit of organized fear, didn't she? Terrorizing those who resisted."

"Her 'men folk' taught her well, from what I learned." Mourn pushed a few bites of meat into better position before clasping them with his eating sticks. "Though these methods likely made her death that much more vicious once she was caught at last. We did not have the time to recapture her ourselves, as she did not spend much time in prison. The message to the Guild was received in the tales and gossip, and in view of her rotting corpse in their courtyard."

I was finishing up my meal, listening well to the story. "So Lord Nikro drew the Guild's wrath."

"Not immediately," Gavin said. "According to this, the Guild gained back all the fear it had been building with interest over the next ten years."

I blinked. "A decade? What did they do?"

"It began with unexplained deaths in Lord Nikro's extended family, cousins and the like," the necromancer recounted without any apparent emotion. "Unfortunate poisonings and accidents, sometimes a violent death but easily explained by brigands or burglaries gone wrong. Soon the sheer amount of dead created a noticeable pattern. That each death was getting closer and closer to Nikro's family, and mutterings of the witch's curse spread quickly amongst the populace."

My eyes fell on Mourn as Gavin talked; he wasn't giving me any visual cues, but in this part of the tale, I saw the work of a Drow as plainly as the Sun in the Sky, whether or not they blamed it on the dead witch's "curse."

"Despite these deaths, or more likely because of them," Gavin said, "Lord Nikros clasped only more tightly to his power, becoming less lenient and creating more laws to enforce. However this did not dissuade or halt the Guild's actions. He was in his forties when his last heir died and his wife poisoned herself. By then he was nearly broken and the clergy had stepped forward taking on more responsibility to keep the city running. Nikros finally put out a message to meet the Guild master, and was granted an audience."

Mourn had finished eating and pushed his tray to the side, leaning back to watch and listen. I did not know whether Mourn had been the active Guild leader at that time or not, but I knew that he was a founding member with Krithannia and Talov, and the planning would have been his. He glanced at me but his face was like stone, and he looked back at Gavin.

I did as well, and Gavin chose to read a passage aloud when he had my attention again. He had a good reading voice, enough inflection to avoid sounding like he was droning on, though absolutely none of his personal emotion—if he had any—was apparent.

"'Lord Nikros submitted to our requirements in meeting a Guild member face to face; he was searched and stripped of all, given back that which kept him decent and able to concentrate on our words. His hands were bound and he did not fight. He kneeled when pushed down, and his head hung.

"'Pray you, stop,' he pleaded. 'I know it is the Guild behind the destruction of my lineage, my entire family. I know it is vengeance for the execution of the traitor witch, I know this. I may regret the manner in which I punished her, but not the spirit of it. I could not stand by and watch you corrupt the peace of my city. Surely even you can see this.'

"He spoke thus as he still believed, even now, that stasis was worth preserving at all costs. He had been important in this balance. Now he was not important; his people despised him for failing them, his loved ones died for his choices.

"'I acknowledge your ruthlessness and see why other Lords have made pacts with you. You do not play by public law but you must play by some law to have grown so strong, to be an invisible, invading army in so short a time.

'Let us make a treaty now,' he begged. 'I know I must be next. Spare me, let me rebuild Manalar and regain the faith of my people as the last of my legacy. Help me bring them wealth and safety before I die, and perhaps... I may have another young son who will continue our mutual prosperity after me.'"

Gavin turned a page. "'The Guild need not make 'treaties' with powerless opponents, and Manalar was exposed and ripe for the taking. We dreamed of an unprecedented shift in the land, a city where Guild business was in the open and the old ways to which the Lords clung in their city-states must break and reform into something else, something in which the worth of individuals within the next generation brought true change. Birthright and religion did not determine whether or not any daughter or son could develop their talents, and leadership was forged in the fires of need, not thrust upon the next one birthed, regardless of their ability.

"The Guild planners believed it to be the right time, and we killed the last Lord of Manalar then. We did not need to bargain, and thus the city became the first to have no one left at all to make a god-blood claim to the throne.

"Lord Nikro never returned to his city. His words and his offer would haunt us, however, as the next leadership did indeed forge itself in the fires of need. It already had, in secret, and Bishop Tefornin was a mage well-prepared and powerful, ruthless as the Guild and flawless in his timing to reveal the blessings of Musanlo to a people hungry for stability and prosperity beneath the sun. We saw the face of our next opponent then, and it was much worse than Nikro."

Gavin paused and lifted his eyes to look at Mourn. "The Guild is responsible for Manalar becoming a theocracy, by gutting the nobility."

"We are speaking about three centuries ago, am I right?" I said. "When a certain half-Drow and his partners had a plan?"

One corner of Mourn's mouth lifted, this time in chagrin, as he watched me with calm, reptilian eyes. "Not as much of a plan as we believed it to be, as it turned out. A plan for gaining power and influence, not much plan for what to do with it. But regardless, watching the rise of the Witch Hunters persuaded me that I need not act on my Drow blood at its most aggressive any time I am challenged. There are other ways."

The necromancer caught up to us quickly. "The Guild master mentioned in this chronicle, who met with the doomed Lord, is you."

"Are you surprised, Deathwalker?"

"Not really. I only did not want to assume so on very little fact. But it seems Sirana has figured that out."

"She has. And it seems Graul wanted to give you a hint. He likely recognized your accent."

"Curious to I consider that I am speaking to someone that affected the course of my youth so greatly."

Mourn shook his head. "One of many, I will grant you, but your Ma'ab side has had as much effect as the theocracy."

"Not to mention the Grey Maiden," I added.

Gavin shrugged. "None but the gods can truly see the scope of how one's life came to be, I suppose."

Mourn smiled. "A pity Krithannia is not in on this conversation."

"Mm. But a very few of these texts are what I believe must be scribed in Elfish."

"They are. I am keeping them secured for her."

"She is hiding them? Naughty Pale Elf," I commented with a chuckle.

"You might enjoy a conversation with her as well, Baenar."

"Mm-hm. Did she steal them from her own people?"

"Perhaps."

"And was she involved in events with Lord Nikro and Halete Ebtryne?"

"She was."

"Interesting."

Gavin was listening but also quietly drumming his fingers, contemplating another scroll at which he had been looking when we had popped back in. During a lull, I refocused on him, able to read his face.

"What else is on your mind, Gavin?"

"A few of these manuscripts...the ones chosen by the drake." He paused. "They will take time to translate completely, but I found references to some of the same old passages I had once read at the monastery. Encouraging to find them in a second and third source, it means they are much older than I thought."

"Which passages?"

"I have recited one of them to you before," he told me. "When my skin I first darkened in sunlight, after we left the inn."

"Would you recite that again?" Mourn asked.

Nodding once, Gavin quoted, "'Ye shall know the shepherd, for he shall be as a light in the dark, but also the darkness in the light.' It is not exact here...I cannot tell yet if there is a significance to the changes or if it is simply due differences in translation, but it is similar to what I read before."

"And what is the reference in these passages here? What do they speak of?"

I got the barest feeling that Gavin's hesitation and slightly shift in gaze toward me was because this could lead somewhere personal. My instincts were on high alert as I recalled the mention of some records which had somehow escaped being burned by the monks when Gavin was young. Something related to his mother.

"The guides who walk between two worlds," he said, keeping his eyes on the letters. "As your Elfish handler spoke to me, of the Deathwalkers. She has read these as well?"

Mourn nodded. "Some, as she can understand, or have the time."

"She has studied Manalar's history for decades, at least."

"Yes. Best to study well the history of one's enemy."

"Wait, that's a Manalar text about Deathwalkers?" I asked as something finally clashed to me. "Is it not written in the Ma'ab language?"

Gavin looked at me. "No. Very old Paxian, I think."

I shook my head, trying to chase my thought to its lair. "Is there anything in there that mentions the Ma'ab? Any encroaching influence from the North or some other place far away?"

"Not that I've found as of yet."

"But you have told me that the Grey Maiden can only speak to you through your Ma'ab heritage. Don't these 'Deathwalkers' have to come from the Ma'ab?"

The monk Gavin had been became a little more apparent as he showed me a few more of those same nervous tells from before, when we had stood together down in Brom's cellar amongst the Witch Hunter corpses. He was feeling stress at finding it difficult to both share knowledge and block me from personal memories in any predictable way.

"There is no mention of the Ma'ab," he said flatly, as if he didn't really want to say it. "Only a 'grave mother' and the sun god, both worshipped by whoever wrote this down, implying a people behind it."

I jerked my head. "Musanlo and Nyx?!"

My voice went high enough that Graul started and growled in sleepy irritation before puffing a breath, adjusting his position to curl up on his other side, and going back to sleep. The little beast certainly didn't seem invested in the conversation he had planted with this little "treat hunter" game.

"You follow my thoughts," Gavin commented blandly. "And my surprise. Manalar's ancestry was not always monotheistic."

"Meaning your heritage as a priest to the Greylands exists on both sides," Mourn said with obvious deep thought. "Your sire, as well as your dam."

Gavin shook his head just a bit, enough to hint that this idea did not please him much. I thought I could guess why; he had come to some kind of peace in his understanding that his gifts came solely from his mother, a Ma'ab witch, whose people Nyx herself had told him came from the Greylands. He had never known his mother to grow to hate her, as he still loathed his "magic-less" father, even after poisoning him.

"Did Nyx ever hint that the Ma'ab ancestors used to be her slaves?" I asked curiously. "Before they escaped."

Mourn straightened up noticeably, keeping his mouth closed as his ears perked up, while Gavin blinked at me.

"Uhm. No. But then, it hasn't been a subject I thought to broach with her, either."

"So they could easily have been from a different Greylord."

"Easily, yes."

"And yet Nyx once held sway in the ley-line worship of Manalar," Mourn rumbled, seeming to catch up even though he was not privy to our conversation in that early morning by that mountain river. "The Deathwalkers by this perspective were native to this world through a god-bond with its people. But you know the Ma'ab have come by a different way?"

Gavin confirmed that for Mourn.

Similar but unrelated death magic? Converged into our time now, and perhaps a long time in coming. So what did this mean? Hadn't Gavin thought that the Ma'ab had brought necromancy to this plane? I guessed he was wrong.

I was beginning to understand Gavin's expression earlier as I realized we could not know anything but what was here with us and in front of us. I knew the necromancer had been just as tempted as I was now, when he had first realized that the Guild master in the journal—Mourn—had been instrumental to the rise of Manalar in its current form, and thus... the circumstances of Gavin's own birth and his treatment as a child.

The temptation to think or believe one had all the pieces to put a history together, at least the important ones, was great indeed. One had only to simply ignore whatever didn't fit.

"I am only speaking of power connections, Gavin," I said to him now. "Having knowledge of these bonds only makes the web more apparent, when otherwise you only see a strand at a time as it loops around you, eventually binding you blind, to be consumed."

Gavin grunted. "Poetic. I trust that must be an early lesson for Drow children?"

"It is," Mourn confirmed. "And she is right, as far as that goes. Your mistress may only care for the Ma'ab as far as it allowed her to reach you. But you are a monk of Musanlo and, if this text is genuine, you always have been. A resurgence of a previous god-bond lost for some unknown time."

"Does Krithannia know more, then?" Gavin asked. "Of the Deathwalkers? Do you remember them existing?"

Mourn shook his head. "It was before my arrival on the Surface, likely long before. I have never heard talk of a Grave Mother or her Walkers outside of whatever stories Krithannia has collected."

"Have you not read all you possess in your library, then?"

The half-dragon now looked a bit chagrinned. "I have not. I have been busy collecting more than I can read in my travels. In time, perhaps, I will get to them all."

"What language was the passage you read before, at the monastery?" I asked abruptly. "Also old Paxian?"

I'd struck something personal again; I could tell just from the expression of brief anger Gavin flipped at me. I was right about something again. So what was I right about?

It seemed just a bit easier for Gavin to answer this time. "It was in Ma'ab...but translated from something else. By my mother."

I couldn't help but watch every tick on his face. "She discovered stories of the Deathwalkers in her time living with your father?"

"So it would seem." Gavin shifted uncomfortably and wouldn't look at me; he returned to the refuge of his books. "She never named them as Deathwalkers, however. But... she had written it down so as not to lose it, though I do not know what she intended to do with the knowledge. Her own words were joyous but... mad. Incoherent ramblings and delusions."

"Perhaps not all of it," Mourn commented. "You still have her writings?"

"Of course," Gavin said with obvious insult. "Rewritten in my own grimoire. Unfortunately she never specified her exact sources for anything she copied. Your library is actually some of the first physical evidence for me that shows they weren't simply scribbling spawned by an unsettled mind."

Huh. No wonder he sought tomes.

I considered, then, the dagger at my belt and the fact that Innathi had known of Nyx by name, knew it was she whom Gavin served so faithfully. I wondered...would she tell me more of that time, if I asked? What would be her price?

The other two were following their own private thoughts as I glanced between them. Mourn flicked his eyes at me but Gavin wasn't making eye contact with anyone, staring hard at some of the script before him.

Eventually Gavin did raise his gaze to look at me, though; his irises seemed cold as always, and for a moment, I thought he might wish to ask about Innathi as well, remembering as well the connection between his mistress and the ancient Drow...but he also seemed to remember his agreement not to share that with Mourn.