OBLATION
a Tale of the Vast Land
Copyright 2015 Zachary Seibert
The sky over the Nephraath Barrens blazed with the skyfires of dawn, all caustic reds and oranges. It rippled like waves of heat off a forge, belying the tepid air. The Barrens lived up to their name, spread flat as still water into the far-flung Southern Fringe beyond Uhl’iir. And beyond them, somewhere deep in the shiftlands, was Neph’s Chasm.
The previous evening a small, fast-racing shiftstorm had forced the cohort of nine venturers, survivors from a starting number of seventeen, to encamp on a patch of hardpan strewn with desert-glass. Their Vagrant guide, by the name of Nith, had drawn them together into the protection of a ritual of his people; old and potent in its simplicity. The eight had done as their guide directed with the unquestioning obedience of those who know their lives are in the grasp of something far beyond their ken. So, they had passed the better part of that night seated in a close circle, their backs to the raging forces reshaping the landscape around them, watching one another. Vigilant. Desperate to survive the night unchanged.
The Vagrant, Nith, in whose obscure knowledge rested the fate of the cohort, maintained a low-breathed chant throughout the ordeal, its shuddering music seeming to meander in and out of the thoughts of all present. When one man’s gaze began to flicker from the eyes of the others, there Nith’s voice and breath and rhythm would find its way into his attention, calling him back to the vigil, back into the fixed regard of his fellows.
That night had been long for all among the cohort; long and fraught with the terrible temptation to look over one’s shoulder into the chaos rolling over the Barrens. It taxed the mind beyond reason to maintain constant awareness of only the kith around you, to spare no other thought for the madness of the lands you had crossed into, but Nith’s ritual had fulfilled its purpose.
When the nine venturers finally trusted that the shiftstorm had passed out of range, they broke their circle and cast knuckles for their watches without a word spoken. They went to their posts and blankets in the retreating gloom of predawn, knowing far too much about one another.
Vhaasa would have been at a loss to learn that he was not the only man in that night’s grim circle to have struggled against a cold weakness fluttering about in his chest and gut. He had felt a transparency when faced with the glassy eyes of hardened men that made him think they would reach into him and tear loose whatever was fragile in him. That they would hold it up to the others and laugh. The other men in this cohort were all experienced venturers, casual with their kit and weaponry. Every scar and hitched step among them spoke of violence and histories choked with mud and grit and cold winds.
The Captain, Mallock by name, had been a Field Commander in one of the big mercenary companies of Rivergate during the Feudal Campaigns in Shayle. A war both immense and strange, by all accounts, far to the north in the Vast Land’s interior. It was a place, like all places other than the City-State Uhl’iir, that Vhaasa had never been. Mallock had probably killed hundreds of men, a thought Vhaasa could repeat in his head over and over without gathering the slightest understanding of what that meant about a person. There was nothing in the Captain’s soldierly build and ruddy complexion that Vhaasa hadn’t seen on the more upright street thugs of Uhl’iir, no aura of death to alert strangers to all of the things he had done. What revealed the most of his brutal history, as far as Vhaasa could see, was his short-clipped speech, barbed with insult, full of the assumption of command.
Most of Captain Mallock’s barbs were directed at a man named Bandrell, who had become the impromptu “second” of their cohort. The man had been a sapper, which apparently was a soldier who killed by digging holes and crawling through tunnels or some such thing. According to one of the other venturers, a thug named Oodo, Bandrell had gotten himself leghurt in some battle or other, but before the officers let him go, they called him out for “Dishonor”. He’d had the smallfinger on his sword-hand clipped. Oodo went on to explain that when you’re dishonored you don’t get your pay. Apparently, Bandrell had followed Mallock all the way to the Southern Fringe and Uhl’iir to demand that his old Captain give him the chance to earn some silver for his retirement.
Bandrell was different sort of soldier than Captain Mallock. You could see the murder on him. He wore it on the outside of his clothes, full of swagger, with malice in his eyes. Vhaasa had had to spend far too much time looking into those eyes during the shiftstorm and he was confident, now, that he didn’t like Bandrell. The ex-sapper walked with a hopping limp on squat legs and wore piece-mail leather armor that looked bad next to Mallock’s well-oiled breastplate and greaves. He spit when he talked, which was mostly to snap orders at Ghetti, their teamster, or at one of the thugs.
Trapped in Nith’s Vagrant ritual, Vhaasa had picked up a passing affection for the old bowlegged teamster, Ghetti. The man was from some rocky hill-country far to the northeast, and claimed that that explained his pebbled skin and knobby joints. Made him perfectly suited to tend the shabby, hump-backed drays he called iryx that carried all the cohort’s supplies and bedrolls and the like. He cooked meals for everyone that nobody could identify but everyone ate. Passable enough fare. The caravaneers in Uhl’iir had said Ghetti was nigh-unkillable and that he could crack a Thar’s skull twice with his crook before it hit the ground. Mallock had laughed to hear those boasts, a broken sound, and then hired the old man on the spot.
This morning, with the land settled down again after the shiftstorm, Vhaasa knew a few things about his cohorts. He knew that Captain Mallock was a man you could believe in, if not like. He knew that Bandrell was cruel and Ghetti was kind. He knew that the thugs Oodo, Russt, and Borden weren’t bright enough to be truly wicked, only passingly mean, which had come in handy before and likely would again. He knew that Nith was as good as the Vagrant Clan they’d hired him out from had said he was, and that the Wayfinder would get them through this mad land if anyone would.
What he didn’t know was anything at all about Mogrus Un’Akuhl. The maven had been hired on to their venture as an appraiser, of all things. Vhaasa had seen mavens in Uhl’iir, men of strange and unnatural talents, fell sorcerors with lambent eyes. As a shiften child, born of kith who had wandered too close to the shiftlands and carried something of the currents of those places with them, Vhaasa shared those eyes, but none of the Arts. There had been a maven in the rookery that he had been raised in, foundling that he was. Every maven he had ever beheld was a man or woman of flamboyant taste, with a cultivated air of exotic sophistication. They were persons-of-import, as his old tutor Mhiist had called them; caught up in cultic intrigues and the politics of city-states.
This Mogrus, who bore the distinctive dusky features and down-tilted eyes of the Uhl’iiri nobility, carried none of that pomp and self-importance. His black cassock was trail-worn and threadbare. His only jewelry was of the sort wrapped in waxed twine; bits of bone and mineral oddments, an old rusted key bent around his middle finger. He wore his matted black hair haphazardly tied up with leather in two wild tails, one behind the other, the excess hanging in a tangled curtain about his neck. Mogrus had the eerie rectangular pupil of a goat in his left eye. It shone viridian in the firelight, but the other eye was simply dull grey, slightly rheumy. Those eyes had revealed nothing at all during Nith’s interminable shiftstorm vigil.
Vhaasa thought the man seemed haunted, but there was no care in his bearing for all that. Mogrus seemed… resigned. He’d heard Bandrell refer to the maven as a burnout, but that was a term Vhaasa had only ever heard applied to the people who lived in the streets, begging silver for more khajia seed or rotgut liquor. Mogrus Un’Akuhl had been hired directly by the two potentates, N
eliphus and Iiatro, who had financed this venture. That had to imply some sort of standing, some influence or unique talent. Captain Mallock, who had the charter for the venture, had mustered up all of the others.
It troubled Vhaasa that a maven would be hired for such a simple task as appraisal. Such hirelings were supposed to be very expensive, if a patron could secure a contract with them at all. Perhaps that’s what Bandrell had meant calling him a burnout, that he wasn’t as good as other mavens, that he was somehow used up and had to take on work like this when other mavens lived like Potentates. Whatever the case, Vhaasa had found himself more insecure under the gaze of Mogrus than that of any of the others.
The last men on watch had been Bandrell and Russk, and having woken the others they set to breaking their fast on the last of Ghetti’s odd stew from the day before. The cohort went about bundling their blankets and checking their kit while Ghetti unhobbled the iryx and packed their panniers with gear. Vhaasa’s kit was light as befitted a hired rook. He had his lock tools and a listening horn, two long-knives and a gently curved short-sword he’d barely trained with, some climbing gear and a fine long rope. The hellish lights of the dawnfires were muted now, and all color had left the world. There was just the wide open, bleached-bone wasteland in all directions. The horizon to the south where they were headed bore the same rippling mirage as every other direction, and the Wayfinder Nith led them onward.
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