The Path of Poison: Chapter 19
Previously…
On the road to Farhaven, the caravan was flagged down by a girl who’s family had been attacked by beastmen. Returning from a landwight shrine, Sepp and the Voerlund merchant Baruch found themselves caught in another beastmen attack, where after a battle the caravan was victorious…
Check out the Chapter Index for all previous installments
The caravan had moved into the wild hills of Voerlund—often called mountains, but as Seva remarked, the only eminence worthy of the name mountain was the beetling summit of Baletor in the east, tallest thing in the known world. Had the merchants of that city been present in their wagon, no doubt there would have been much hearty agreement. There was a sparseness to this higher land that seemed somehow exaggerated, more so than the rest of the winter landscape below. The grass grew to an absolute minimum, and was more like a thin fuzz across the earth than actual greenery. Its colour was dull, almost greyish. Clumps of leafless, wind-bowed trees shivered in the uneasy breeze which leaked into the wagons every so often. It came from no particular direction, but raced across the hillside in weak but prolonged bursts. Sepp could imagine this rugged land bursting with wild vitality in the summer: tall grass, dark earth, full-bodied trees, and hilltops crowned with pearlescent cloud in the day, and vermilion shrouds by night, instead of the tendrils of chilly haze that now obscured them.
Sepp had been rearranging things in his pack. A lot had been shaken around in the encounter, and he’d been left alone to make sure nothing was leaking, or worse, missing. He was setting things to rights when, after a period of idle chatter amongst everyone else, Seva spoke up.
“I did want to say, Sepp...thank you for trusting us with the—the hex.” Even in such genuine speech, Sepp could hear the little stutter. “We know this stuff is so important to you, and especially during such a dire time…” However, he couldn’t exactly hold it against her.
“I think I can trust you lot by now,” he replied with a smirk. “And really, it was very weak stuff,” he said with a lighter tone, “it just stinks to the heavens.”
“What was it anyway?” asked Barosh.
“I believe that one was some mulched up and dissolved spineleaves—the ones that leave a smell on you when you get stung by them. Well that sting is a poison, a minor poison, but they are packed with it. I saw my dad strain a single leaf once and you wouldn’t believe the amount that seeped out of it. Makes a very good irritant—for keeping you awake, you see.”
He had gone back to re-organizing his pack before he spoke again.
“And also...you all did very good back there, with the family. Supporting them, helping out. I suppose I can say that as a healer,” he finished with an awkward chuckle.
“None better to say it!” said Barosh with a friendly jab of the elbow.
“Indeed,” said Dorach, assigned to keep an eye on Sepp by his commander, “considering he’s holding that woad mark.” Sepp shot the northman a surprised look.
“How did you know about that?”
“I saw it as you were working there. You got it from the Macha dyrador—ah, the sorcerer?”
“I did, Aismere bade me copy it down as...well, I guess some sort of recompense for coming to help her.”
The Dunmarrow eyed Sepp intently for a second.
“I will not deny I think you deserve it. But I must ask you, you are aware of how serious it is for a Macha, let alone a dryador sorcerer, to give such a thing to any foreigner?”
“I’m...getting that impression, yeah. You saw what it did to the drake.”
Dorach gave a short sigh and thoughtful grunt.
“She must have seen or felt aught in you. Dryador see many things. And at least you are using it correctly, hmm?” the northman said with a quick grin then. “Keep that mark safe. It is very old, and very secret.”
Night began falling swiftly. The sun wasn’t long for the sky, and it seemed to everyone’s individual assessments that this winter was going to fall hard and fast. Some years they came slow, creeping in over a period of many days, even weeks, before the long dark settled in. Some years it fell like a smothering shroud cast over the known world. The Dunmarrow had large paper lanterns, easy to repair and make, they attached to the sides of the wagons, unwilling to stop travel just because it had grown dark early. It would be a long, long night ahead. The lanterns’ light was not a harsh, leaping fire, but a soft, flowing radiance that was thrown across the bare road, leaving all beyond its light in a hazy shadow. Rocks, lone trees, and bushes would seem to peer into its pool of illumination before swimming back into the dark as the caravan passed. Above them, though, was cast the sprawling tableaux of the stars. Long streaks dense with twinkling lights ended in or wound around great clusters of several large stars. In some places the sky was a naked black in which a single star, greater than any other, sat. It ran from horizon to horizon, a dome of gentle lights that lent a vague definition to the nigh formless landscape. The stars were many things to many people: a map scoured by astrologers since time immemorial, a guide for ancient peoples to the lands they now dwelt in, gods worshipped by folk in the eastern steppe lands, and even aspects of the World Serpent. In Silverden, their unmoving, unchanging nature was seen as an expression of perfect order, an expression of the beauty inherent in the Serpent’s order amidst the vulgar uncertainty of darkness, in which there was no order, only unknowing.
Under a bluff high in the hills, some ways still from the summit, did the caravan make its camp. The air had biting chill to it up here, more than any had ever experienced back home, save for the Dunmarrow who walked about it quite freely. They all sat around a decent sized campfire, joined by a few northmen. The rest of the warriors were about the wagons settling the beasts down, and two stood watch on the bluff above. A hearty meal was the best cure for a winter’s night, and extra provisions were dug out so that they all might warm themselves for a few hours before rest.
“Always it is winter in the clanhold,” said the Dunmarrow captain, Karel, taking a bite from his meal, “and the snow never leaves the lands.”
“Our cities are slick with little streams,” said another, refilling a wineskin, “from the torches and bonfires. That meltwater runs into the sea, and carries us across the known world.” None of them doubted it.
“Hmm! In Baletor,” one of the merchants of that land spoke up, pulling away a strip of meat from the fire, “it becomes, ah, quite cold, especially in the new city that is higher on the mountain. Sometimes even all the mountain is visited by snows from across the sea! Very beautiful, I think.”
“Much of northern Voerlund gets the snow, too,” said Baruch, the only Voerlunder among them. “Winters in Lundermark often get snow, as does the land for leagues around. We should still be far enough south get away with it.” The Dunmarrow were inclined to agree—they knew well the tendencies of the seasons.
“Gets chilly in Silverden,” said Barosh, “I remember we got frost on the trees not too long ago. But never snow.”
“The cold comes at night back there,” said Skivor. He wasn’t looking at anyone, just into the fire. “Comes and sticks to the air in other lands, but in Silverden, it mostly retreats in the day, and returns double at night. I’ve been in the woods when night falls fast and I have to make camp. The cold floods across the land with the darkness. Makes all kinds of things come out, too, and few of them good.”
“What kind of things is it you mean?” asked one of the Baletorians with mild disquiet.
“Nothing you need worry about,” said Karel, clapping the merchant on the shoulder as he got up and left. “It is why we leave our lanterns burning low.”
After watch schedules amongst the northmen were set up, the rest retired to their beds, which their guardians advised should be close to the wagons. Seva helped Sepp check on the bandages covering his wound the capalhead had given him. Redressed and with a new salve, Sepp collapsed onto his meagre bedding. From under a thick blanket, Sepp saw, as he had before, the nightly rites of his fellow travellers. The Baletorians facing towards the mountain and hailing it, the Manatarian lady burning something in the campfire, presumably for the stars, and he saw, too, Skivor giving a few moments over to meditation. Sepp thought he might try the same, though truth be told, he hadn’t exactly had the most informative Silverden upbringing. He was only a child when Búcher had taken him in, and children are only instructed on the Serpent’s order before they’re old enough to understand and practice meditation. But his father had been a Voerlunder, and not a very good Voerlunder at that. Little of his homeland’s religious rites were carried over, though when he was older Sepp learned of some things. Saints, landwights, Serpent-as-guardian, but mostly Búcher tried to maintain Silverden customs as best he could. Religiously, this manifested as visits to graveyard shrines, but rather than for the custom of offerings and communion, it was to visit his parents’ graves. In Silverden, the dead continued on as custodians of order. Búcher had said to Sepp, when he was still just a boy, that his parents were still with him, just in a different way. The man was a healer, and knew well how suddenly alone the lad in his care must have felt. There was naught for it, but he did all he could. After that, travelling monks working as educators filled in some of the blanks, as did life in the village, but that was about it. Traditions were sporadic, and they lived far from a monastery where these things would have been more pronounced. Graveyard visits happened less and less over the years, too. Sepp was never sure why. But then again, so did the thought of his parents as being near him.
As the camp quietened and darkened, he studied the night time sky. Order. Guardian. Custodians. Mediators. How to filter everything that had happened in his life in the past few days. In all fairness, despite everything that had happened since the war came his village, they were all fine, weren’t they? Beastmen, brigands, a damned drake attack—had they not come out shaken up but relatively unscathed? Maybe the Serpent really was looking out for them, or the landwights, or the dead. Or maybe this was in the order, if that’s how it worked. If there was a plan things fit into. Maybe war and ignoble archvenerates were in the order, too, but he wasn't sure he liked the idea of that. Was it ordained by a deity’s will that his father had to die to marauding Minosmirii? That Sepp had to be alone? Well, he thought nearly aloud, he wasn’t alone, and he was keenly aware of that. In Silverden, the Serpent wasn’t a great god somewhere beyond, it was more like a presence or a power, something that was in everything—the way travelling monks described it was that the Serpent’s coils, that is, metaphorical coils, held everything together. Helped things along in some places, and in others, made them go entirely. Perhaps people, like greedy archvenerates, could act outside of order. Could be one day those coils would tighten around them and fix them. But he wasn't sure he liked the idea of that either.
Truth was he liked the idea of it as a guardian, but not distant, waiting to step or be mediated by the dead or by earth spirits. Maybe its coils were in everything, and it was guarding little things all the time. Just enough so nothing went really wrong, in ways you don’t want, or can’t even think about. A god who worked by subtle degrees. Perhaps even right now it was helping fix things at home. But they’d need to find civilization first to even hear about that. There’d been no news back at the last village, not that they’d expected it. But there was bound to be a town or something beyond these hills.
As his mind began wandering into other topics, Sepp thought that was good enough meditation, and supposed such things were mysteries for monks and seers to figure out. So he took one last look at the serene lights of the heavens, rolled over, and went to sleep.