The Warden, page 2
… depending on whether the particular specimen is animated by its own will or by that of a Necromancer determines how the necrobane proceeds …
“With a Lower Order Banishment of the animating will or a selection of Suppressing and Severing,” Aelis murmured as she gently pulled the silk ribbon into place, closed the book, and placed it back into its empty spot on the shelf. “If the former, a Lower Order should be all that is required, given that a spirit still clinging to its corporeal remains is not likely to be sentient enough to be aware of the power available to it,” she went on, as she stood and stretched, cracking her back and shoulders.
“These chapters of Aldayim were always a surefire soporific,” she added as she massaged her lower back. “No more sleeping in chairs,” she chided. “Can’t have the people see me hobbling about and deciding I’m some kind of horrid crone.”
She thought back to her passage through the village green. As soon as the people had seen her black robes, they’d scattered, children grasped and pulled away by their parents. The way the crowd melted made the remarks she’d so carefully labored over on the ride up turn to ashes in her mouth. The only people who’d stuck around were the two innkeepers, Rus and Martin, and then only to quietly help her load up their packhorse.
“Oh fuck,” she suddenly spat. “Their horse. I ought to have brought it back…”
She paused only to grab her swordbelt and buckle it on as she headed for the door. She dispelled the much-weakened ward holding it closed with a flick of her hand, threw it open, and looked to where she’d left the horse.
Her ward was good enough to hold the horse’s lead to the ring, but not, apparently, the ring to the wall of the tower, for the horse had ripped it free and then dragged lead and ring down along the path, where it was happily grazing.
In a rush, she swept forward and patted its neck. The horse ignored her and kept grazing. It seemed none the worse for wear, so she gathered up the reins, twisting them in her fist, and, with some urging, led the animal away from its grazing and on to the walk back to Lone Pine proper.
The village seemed deserted. She glanced up at a mostly cloudless sky, with the sun bright and one half of Anaerion’s red moon hanging low in the sky. Not too late in the day, then.
The inn, with its central location by the village’s crossroads, didn’t appear to be busy, possibly not yet open for the day. But as she led the horse on, she heard a throat clear and then a voice call out to her.
“Finally remembered to bring our Pansy back, eh?” She turned to find Rus—a compact man of middle years, bald and sharp-eyed—carrying a large basket over one shoulder. “She would’ve come in handy this morning.”
“I am abjectly sorry,” Aelis said, drawing herself up to her full height, which was still an inch or two shy of Rus. “In the rush of everything last night, I simply forgot.”
“It’s alright,” he said as he walked up to the horse, set the basket on her back, and began securing it to the pack frame. Aelis caught a glimpse of its contents; rabbits, gutted and ready to be skinned. “She’s none the worse for wear, and a smart enough beast. She’d’ve come home in her own time. Probably got at the verge around your tower, I expect.”
“She did,” Aelis agreed. “Pulled the hitching ring right out of the mortar.”
Rus ran his hand along the horse’s brown neck. Pansy lowered her head to nuzzle at his hand, and then at his pockets, before turning back to the grass. “It’d help you to learn, and to remember—folk here treasure their beasts only just below their kin. You’ll do nothing to improve on the impression you made on these people if you let them think you’re careless around animals.”
Aelis stifled the first thoughts that came to her about the opinions of the people who’d written to the Lyceum for a Warden and then run away as soon as she’d arrived, and forced a smile to her face. “I’ll do well to remember that, goodman Rus.”
“Just Rus, please,” he said. “How did you settle in? Is the tower in decent repair?”
“In point of fact,” Aelis said, “it’s a crumbling heap. The door is out of frame, I haven’t tried to go to the upper floor, the roof lets in daylight, the weather, and likely enough any number of birds, and I’ve not bothered to examine most of the furniture.”
“Well,” Rus said with a shrug, “you’ll want to fix most of that before winter. Snows come early out here.”
Aelis stood and stared at him for a moment. “How do I … fix it?”
“Folk here’ll give you the loan of tools, I’m sure.”
I have passed the Tests of three Colleges of the Magisters’ Lyceum. I am an Abjurer, a Necromancer, and an Enchanter and have few equals of my own age within those disciplines, but I am not a gods-damned carpenter, mason, thatcher, or hod carrier, Aelis wanted to scream.
“I believe,” she said instead, carefully, “that the finer details of the agreement to post a Warden here indicate that the residence is to be well maintained.”
“With all due respect, Warden, you’ll find perhaps three people here, not counting Martin and me, who know how to read the contract made on their behalf. Further, their lives are about to become far too busy to go providing a good deal of free labor on the tower of a wizard they’re all terrified of.”
“What do you mean, their lives are about to become too busy?”
“With the turn of the season coming on, some of the folk who raise the real long-haired sheep you may’ve seen around are going to have to do their second shearing. Some folks’ll be culling their herds, everyone’ll be harvesting, there’ll be markets to drive animals to. And before all that’s done, pioneers and explorers and salvagers will be coming down out of the frontier and the lost territories, looking for lodging and splashing gold about as they pass through. It’s a busy time.”
And that all sounds just fucking delightful. Not for the last time, Aelis bit her tongue to drive away thoughts of bright plazas and glittering parties. “I see.” By now, Rus had finished securing his basket and took up the horse’s lead, but manners seemed to dictate he wait till she finished and let him go.
She didn’t. “This is a more delicate question,” Aelis said. “But, ah, the tower is not equipped with a kitchen, or food storage. There are things I can do to deal with the weather or a stuck door,” she added, “but I can’t conjure food out of the air.”
“I know you can’t,” Rus said with a grin. “No brown stripes on your sleeves.”
Aelis laughed, but rather humorlessly, as even the word food had seemed like an aggressive lure to her stomach, which began reminding her, rather powerfully, that it had been more than half a day since she last ate. “True. And even if I had passed a Conjurer’s test—”
“I’ve eaten conjured food a time or two,” Rus said, a smile creasing his blunt features. “And I’m sure we’ve got something you could break your fast with. Though it’ll be nothing like what a lady of your stature is used to.”
“I give you my word upon my family and my power,” Aelis said, “that I will offer no complaint to any food I can eat within the next hour.”
“Well, if you’d be so kind,” Rus said, “back up at the top of the hill behind the inn there—” he pointed to where he’d come from—“there are some more baskets like this one. I sure could use some help bringing them down, and I’d like to get Pansy here rubbed down and into her stall as quick as I can.”
“Of course. Won’t take but a moment,” Aelis said. Squaring her shoulders, she set aside the pangs in her stomach and trotted up the hill. Urizen did say I’d probably have to get my hands dirty, she thought to herself.
2
THE ORRERY
What must be done at first included hauling heavy baskets full of small game animals and birds down the hill from where Rus had pointed out. Then, steeling herself for whatever gustatory horror lay before her, she walked into the crossroads inn to find Martin setting a laden tray down at the table nearest the door, where a window’s shutters had been pulled back to let in a shaft of midmorning sunlight.
Martin was a taller, lankier man than Rus. He moved with a slight stoop in his right shoulder, but the tray was steady and the contents far more tantalizing than she’d imagined. Instead of the platter of fish heads, rock-hard black bread, and cup of thickened buttermilk she’d been half expecting, there was brown bread, fresh and crusted with salt and seeds, small bowls of butter and soft cheese, two soft-boiled eggs, a pitcher of water and one, she was guessing, of small beer.
“Rus didn’t give me much warning,” Martin said in a soft, slightly fussy voice that was at odds with his sharp features, quick eyes, and the white dot of a scar on his cheek. “This was all I could muster.”
“Believe me, goodman,” Aelis said as she sat, trying to maintain manners and not tear into all of it at once, “it will more than suffice.”
“With a half-hour warning I could’ve had fresh griddle cakes, with apples and nuts…” Martin sighed and dusted off his hands on the flour-covered apron he wore, which seemed to only stir up the flour and further dirty his hands. “I’ve work to do to be ready for midday bite and then supper,” he said, his tone slightly mournful. “If you’d be so kind as to join us for another meal today, I promise you won’t be as disappointed.”
Aelis was trying to find the space to tell him that she wasn’t disappointed at all before politely tucking in when the door opened and Rus strode in, went directly to Martin’s side, and slipped an arm about his waist.
“The girl is starving, Mart. Let her eat. Offer unnecessary apologies and doom and gloom later,” Rus said.
With a sniff, Martin slipped away from Rus’s embrace and stomped back into the kitchen, where Aelis heard a few quiet but pointed smacks as a tool or a pot hit a wooden counter harder than they needed to. Rus offered her a brief smile, and being finally able to eat something made her forget all about being called “the girl” instead of “the Warden.”
The bread was perhaps a bit tougher on the jaw than the bread she was accustomed to, and at the Lyceum all the finest things in the world could be had for ready coin. But she found no fault in its flavor, and once she took up a knife and spread butter on it, she had to set it down or she’d devour the entire half loaf in one go.
Rus, meanwhile, had taken a seat across the table from her. “I’m sure it doesn’t compare to the food you’ve had in the grand halls and palaces in Tirraval and Antraval, but Mart does his best.”
“They say hunger is the best sauce,” Aelis said, “but only because they likely haven’t had Tirravalan cognac and cream over green pepper−crusted beef. However,” she added quickly, “I have had no better at more famous tables.”
Rus smiled, a cautious glint in his knowing gray eyes. “I’ll try to give Mart your compliment,” he said, “but he won’t listen. He’ll only drive himself to spectacle for the next meal he makes you.”
After swallowing a mouthful of egg that she sprinkled with salt, Aelis cleared her throat and looked up at Rus, his words finally landing at the forefront of her mind. “Why would you imagine I’ve eaten in palaces in Antraval?”
“Your name is de Lenti un Tirraval, isn’t it?” the innkeeper countered.
“It is,” Aelis admitted. “Though while I serve as Warden it is … somewhat reduced to simply ‘de Lenti.’”
“Well, we’re not accustomed to being visited by the daughter of a count.”
“I’m not visiting,” Aelis pointed out. “I’m here to stay.”
“Don’t misunderstand me, now,” Rus said. “The folk are glad to have a Warden near. Some of them remember Montross with fondness, though I never knew him. They like what it represents, that the world is reaching out to them, they just…” He paused, and gestured pointlessly with his hands.
“Expected a man, with a staff, and possibly a beard. I know,” Aelis said as she spread some of the soft white goat cheese onto the heel of the bread. And I expected a comfortable hotel in Antraval with Humphrey or Miralla nearby. “Montross was your last Warden?”
Rus nodded. “We didn’t settle here till a couple years after the war. He’d been assigned just after it ended.”
“What became of him?”
“They say he just wandered off into the wilderness. Told no one what he was about, took no guide. Just said he’d an errand and … vanished.”
“And I’ll bet he had a beard and a staff.”
“Possibly even a pointed hat,” Rus said, just before she took a bite of bread and cheese, and Aelis had to laugh.
Reluctantly, Aelis set the last of her bread on the wooden plate before her. “You and Martin seem like the only locals who aren’t terrified to step in my shadow.”
“We’ve both seen the work of Lyceum training in our days,” Rus said, “including that of your primary school. Most of the village folk haven’t.”
“Necromancy, Rus. You can say it.”
“Listen, Warden, I have work to do. Always work to do here. And if I may, let me make this the last advice I’ll give you; find some of it yourself. If you can show practical skills to the people right away they’ll come around, fast.” He stood up, quickly, pulling a length of rag from the pocket of his apron and quickly wiping at a spot on the table.
“I’m here to help,” Aelis said, noting how quickly and deftly Rus had avoided further conversation. “I am. But I’m no farmer, nor a laborer. I would only get in the way of people who were. Although,” she added, as the innkeeper stood up and pushed his chair back to the table, “I will have a look around later, and see what there is I might do without impeding the effort of someone better qualified.”
“Good,” Rus said. “And if no one delivers any food, come back here for supper. We’ll make sure you stay fed. Just leave the tray; we’ll get it.”
Aelis waited till Rus had walked past her to swipe a finger through the remnants of the butter, and another through the soft goat cheese, then sucked them both clean at the same time. She began the walk back to her tower wondering if she really should hope for a sudden outbreak of animated skeletons.
A small one, she thought as she walked. Nothing that’d require more than a First Order Severing or Banishment. Perhaps a Second Order if I wanted to show off a bit.
Of course, that was nonsense. Even a manageable outbreak would present more danger to the people here than she’d like.
“I doubt any of them will need any serious wards laid,” she murmured. She was struck with the sudden inspiration of making and handing out wardstones with simple abjurations on them to keep doors held fast against the wind and roofs secure against the weather.
“Except I haven’t got enough silver to engrave them with, and I’d need to put one in every home, every hole in a roof, every window,” she said aloud. “So that’s out.”
She’d come up with no great plans by the time she reached her tower, so she bent to the work of unpacking and cleaning. She pulled the dustcloths off the furniture and hauled them outside, tossing them over the wall of the rising walk and getting dirt all over her clothes and hair in the process.
What she found beneath them was largely serviceable: two battered but sturdy tables, assorted stools and chairs, and a creaky-doored wardrobe. She dutifully stored her clothes in it, after carefully inspecting it for moths, webs, eggs, and other signs of unwanted intruders. She set her case of instruments, of soft calf hide with brass fittings and her crest tooled into the side, on one of the tables, along with a few other implements she took care unpacking: a mortar and pestle of hard, pebbled stone, an alembic, a number of racks and glass flasks.
Whatever steps she took, Aelis understood that she was merely delaying what was perhaps her most important—and most mind-numbingly difficult—task.
Setting up her orrery.
It traveled in its own case, and on the long series of carriage rides up through the middle of the continent into Ystain and then to its borders, she had fussed with it like a mother might with a child.
She flipped open her case of instruments and pulled out the heavy chisel she’d use to pry open the top of the orrery’s packing crate, which had been carefully nailed shut under her own supervision.
It seemed to take an age to dislodge each nail just enough to pry the wooden slats loose, to be set delicately aside in order to work on the next one. Removing the top layer of the wooden crate was only the first step. Inside, packed tightly with straw till it just barely fit in the crate, was a hard leather case. Dropping quite a bit of straw on the floor in the process, Aelis drew it out and set it on the table.
The leather itself was soft, wrapped deftly around a hard wooden frame, with solid bronze clasps. She undid them, slid back the top, and carefully reached in to pull her metal-and-crystal contraption free and set it next to its case, its silver arms jangling slightly.
The base was of solid dark mahogany, with six silver arms attached in concentric rings to a central silver post, atop which sat a faceted blue crystal—the earth. Aelis leaned in close to eye the painstaking detail worked upon it, representing the larger continents and island chains in paint and in the minutest facets. She thought of the hundreds of miles between where she stood now, in northern, barely civilized Ystain, and her home in Tirraval and the grand cities of the south. She’d never before been farther north than the Lyceum, and even that was no more than a day’s ride on good roads from Lascenise, the last outpost of what she considered true civilization.
“I’d need one of the tightest lenses in the Lyceum to find Lone Pine here,” she muttered, peering at the crystal earth, then set about inspecting the six moons for dust. All six—represented by smooth spheres of polished blown glass in black, blue, red, green, yellow, and white—were clean. Black was the farthest out, the Unseen Moon—or the moon most folk didn’t want to see, didn’t want to acknowledge, Aelis thought.
Aelis was rather more familiar with Onoma’s moon than most.
With a sigh, she looked up through the broken wooden slats of the second story’s floor above her, trying to get a glimpse of the sun. “Can’t be noon yet,” she muttered. Of course, a village like Lone Pine was unlikely to have any clocks.
