On the ride back from the arch, Farisa could not focus her gaze. The world seemed to whip around the vehicle, and it was good that Andor was driving, because she would have been unable. Ground fog had thickened and they could not see more than a quarter mile in any direction.
She reached into her jacket pocket. Last night, she had awakened for a few minutes, gone outside, and picked through dirt for dried cedar needles, which she used to make a Lith of Sophya. This proved that she could do it, but she still had no sense of how one might use it against fast-moving undead in the future. The pebbles were too small for a firearm and too irregular for a blowgun.
As the day wore on, the motorcycle seemed to run louder. As another belt of rain clouds came overhead, Andor’s driving slowed. The vehicle seemed to stall when going uphill, and she dreaded the possibility of it giving out, leaving them to walk the rest of the way in this bog, but it never failed them. Just as the gray sky began to darken for evening, Runar saw the white of Claes’s leather tent.
Farisa, as she got off the motorcycle, checked the wheels to see what they were made of—cork and steel, no rubber. She helped Andor and Runar steer the device, too heavy to be lifted except by group effort, up a ramp and into the back of their husker wagon.
Claes asked, “Does it have much fuel left?”
“No,” Andor said. “Fifty miles, if that.”
Farisa massaged her lower back. Two days of riding through bumpy terrain had left her sore.
Claes said, “It’ll make a good scouting vehicle, if we need one.”
“Glad you’re back,” Saito said as he joined them. “You’re just in time for dinner.”
They ate well, because Eric had discovered a trout stream where he’d been able to catch all day. Mazie and Saito had found a grove flush with golden chanterelles. When Farisa asked Saito how he knew the local fungi were safe, he confessed to having sampled them in small amounts, to no ill effect.
“Skin test, then wait a day. Nibble, then wait a day. A small portion... you get the idea. It’d still be far better to have a field guide.”
“I’m craving rice, of all things,” Runar admitted. “Seasoned rice to go with the fish.”
“That...” Claes said before trailing off.
Farisa chuckled, not because anything had been funny, but because the morning’s spell and the exhaustion of such a bruising ride had taken half her mind’s solidity. That rice, an ordinary staple, would be an object such desire amused her. They had none, though they had spices—the fish held the flavor bland, and was not bland at all.
She was sitting in front of the campfire, unaware of who had gone to sleep and who was still up—fatigue had this way of making the world private, cozy, sheltered from basic information—when Mazie sat next to her and their hands enclosed.
Farisa said, “Destruction can’t be who we are, Mazie.”
“If you turn the G-Comps away from this new world, you’ve done the place a great favor.”
“The Globbos also think what they're doing is right for the world.”
“Aye, but there’s a difference between us and them.”
“What’s that, Mazie?”
“We are good and they are bad. This argument would fail in a philosophy paper, but we have lived long enough to see it is true.”
Farisa chuckled. Sometimes, things were simpler than her overzealous conscience wanted to make them. Her eyelids were getting heavy, so she walked over to the tent, where sleeping bags had already been laid out.
“Good night, Mazie.”
She had expected to sleep late, due to her exhaustion, but she woke up alert in the middle of the night with an aching body and a mind in need of distraction, so she decided to read. There was always something new to learn in A History of Wytchcraft. Mazie, who was finishing up the midnight watch, was near the end of her fifth reading of Jakhob’s Gun.
Farisa tapped Mazie on the arm. “You’re not bored of that story yet?”
“I’ve come to agree with you,” said Mazie. “There’s a regularity to the errors. It’s some kind of cipher.”
“Right?”
“You’re from a family of code breakers, right?”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Farisa leafed through the novel, which Mazie had marked up. “My mother was one.”
Eric emerged from the tent. “Let me see.”
Mazie held the book to her chest. “This book is for adults, sweetheart.”
“It isn’t that bad,” Farisa said. “Consider what he’s already seen.”
Eric said, “After having my face eaten by a skrum, I think I can handle the word ‘fuck.’”
Farisa, laughing, covered her mouth. Mazie gave her a side-eyed glare.
She found a pen and ink vial in her bag and handed them to Eric. “What do you know about codes?”
“We think there’s a pattern to the errors,” Mazie said.
Eric asked, “Wouldn’t that mean they’re not errors?”
Mazie laughed. “You hear this kid?” She ruffled his hair.
Eric opened the book and set it carefully on a stone, holding an oil lantern at some distance. “I see one thing. The right edge isn’t normal. It’s uneven.”
“Monospace font,” Farisa said. She had assumed the text’s appearance, styled like a typewritten manuscript, had been a stylistic choice supporting the epistolary format of the novel’s first chapters, that had simply been carried on into the whole story to make printing cheaper, but it was possible that—
“Could that be a clue?”
“It could be,” Farisa admitted, embarrassed that a child had spotted she had given an inferior explanation. The author, it was obvious in retrospect, had wanted astute readers to notice row and column numbers—a monospace format would ensure the columns lined up.
“It very well could be. Do us a favor: number the lines and the columns. If you get bored of this, hand the book over to me and I’ll do the same. Then we’ll start to tally errors. That will help us.”
#
Farisa had promised herself she would not cry this time. She had to be stronger than that. A rabbit had fallen into one of their traps overnight. She went into the blue and put the animal into a sleep in which it would feel nothing. “May your merit in this life be reflected in the next.”
Their stores of dried food were nearly out, as were their bullets, but their ingenuity kept them out of danger, at least for now, on the nutrition front. Saito had taught Runar how to use the crossbow, their only ranged weapon with reusable ammunition, and Eric had taught Andor how to fish. The others had taken to trapping. The skinning and gutting no longer disgusted Farisa, but it still struck her as odd that this act of butchery existed not only here, but in all the civilized cities she had seen before. She imagined herself, if she were to return to the world in which there was a choice, turning vegetarian.
Mazie said, “You used magic? Doesn’t that put you at risk of...?”
“I’m not using it to kill. The killing is separate. I do it to give the animal peace. At least, that’s what I tell myself. I can’t bear the thought of an animal suffering. But I really don’t know, do I? Yes, I worry about entanglement, but...”
“It’s not wrong to kill to survive,” Mazie said.
“In God’s world, life need not consume other life, but we are born far from Her.”
“You believe in all that?” Mazie said.
“Most of the time. You?”
“I think so. I’m one-eighth Vehu, but I prefer to believe that’s the real me. Do you think my ancestors...?”
Farisa cradled the dead rabbit and packed up the trap. “What?”
“Nothing. We should get back to camp.”
They ate, and they continued on. During the second half of October, they encountered orcs at least once per day, but rarely opened fire. Saito would send a warning shot with his crossbow; the orcs would drop their crude swords and short-range bows, if they had weapons, and flee. The orcs in these highlands were different from those up north—no taller than an average man, often hairless, and skittish. Half of them seemed malnourished, but this forest had plenty of food.
As they came over an oak-lined ridge on the morning of October 27, Farisa was the first to spot the curtain of smoke hanging over the western plains, and though she had never seen such an event by day she knew it to be...
“Forest fire. Let’s be sure to go around it.”
Saito said, “I don’t think so.”
They all looked at him.
“The clouds aren’t high and suggest a controlled burn, and I don’t smell wood smoke. I suspect...”
Farisa broke the silence. “You suspect?”
“A city.”
“This is orcish territory, Saito.”
“It’s possible,” Mazie said.
“Orcs, Mazie?”
“They don’t speak, because their mouths are so malformed. Can you imagine what torture it would be, to have all that intelligence and no language? They must have invented a different way to communicate.”
Farisa shuddered. She remembered Erysi and the sickening effect on the young woman's lover of orc’s blood, and was disgusted by the idea of an entire city of those who naturally had it in them.
“Anyway,” she said, changing the topic to what she had inferred of her location from A History of Wytchcraft, “I know where we are, and nothing this to be an important place.”
“Whether it’s a forest fire or an orcish city,” said Andor, “I suppose it does us little good to investigate.”
“We’re half a flag off course,” Claes said. “If we pin back the other way, and the smoke doesn’t move, we’ll miss it by a mile.”
“Pin back,” said Farisa. She paused. “That sounds good.”
“Are you unsure?”
She had seen a heraldic crest in the literature with a red serpent on a silver background, and was beginning to believe the snake’s peculiar, calibrated posture was, in fact, a map of the Mountain Road. She didn’t answer. Due south, when it could be done, felt correct, but with no better signs one could hardly be sure.
They never did get close enough to the haze to determine what it was, but it proved harmless and they moved on.
Three days later, after lunch on a warm afternoon, Farisa climbed a bald hilltop for a view and caught the sight she’d been waiting for. The skies were half cloudy and, if the light had been slightly stronger or weaker, the ribbon might not have been visible, but from this vantage point at the end of October, the artifact—almost too subtle to spot, barely off-color—stretched as far as she could see.
“That’s it,” Farisa said..
Mazie looked up at her. “That’s what?”
“Come up here.” When Mazie did, she continued. “That’s the original Mountain Road. Do you see it? You can tell by the sand maples. In Tevalon, they would turn orange or pink, right around my birthday. Where you’re from, they’d do that about now. They don’t change much down here, of course, but you can see that a few of the leaves are pale.”
“I... I do see it.” Mazie pointed. “How do you know that’s the Road, though?”
“Sand maples don’t do well here, not in the rich dark soil of these woods. There’s too much competition. But if the topsoil is gravelly and poor, they do well because nothing else can. Why would there be a ribbon of subpar topsoil? Because we’re near—we’re on—the remains of the thing.”
Mazie smiled.
"God only knows if Malisse still stands, but we're headed the right way."
She taught the others how to recognize sand maples by their leaves—broad like those of sugar maples, but with reddish veins on the underside. They used the trees to set their path, and it did often make the going easier, because they dodged fields of boulders or thick vegetation that would have cost them hours.
To their surprise, they did on occasion find a tree that was properly fall-colored—on November 3, they passed a bright yellow-leafed specimen in whose shade they could eat lunch. Despite the four-flag warmth, the contrast of color between the bright foliage and the deep sky—if they looked at only that tree—made it feel like autumn really existed here and that they were in the peak of it.
Eric, after taking a swig of water from his canteen, looked at Mazie. “You said there’s no winter here?”
“There won’t be much of one. No snow, unless we go much higher.”
“That’ll be sad, though I suppose we wouldn’t want snow, given what we’re doing.”
Saito laughed. “Winter camping, without the gear for it, is hell. With the right gear, it’s fun, but exhausting.”
Eric said, “As for altitude, we are pretty high, aren’t we?”
Farisa, who had calculated their altitude last night, said, “Sixteen thousand feet, plus or minus a couple hundred.”
“Splendid,” said Eric.
Farisa and Mazie looked at each other. Three months ago, Eric would have been daunted by much lesser heights than this. Neither woman wanted to say this, but Farisa suspected Mazie had the same thought she did—that Talyn had been contributing to Eric’s trepidation, of which he was now cured.
#
The Day of the Lantern, observed back home on November 8, was either a somber or a profoundly trivial holiday. The observant—mostly elderly, with curious children mixed in—would gather around familial gravesties to stand guard against scavengers like ghouls. Having seen one herself, Farisa could not take seriously the notion that unarmed people could make a real defense against such a beast, for the skill she had used to destroy one had not been seen for centuries and, even then, she had required help. Moreover, those who had seen the undead knew it absurd to confine their depredations to a single day in autumn.
Most, of course, knew the holiday had no sacred significance and used it as an opportunity to drink, which they wouldn’t be doing today, not with miles to cover.
Farisa had not thought at all about the holiday when, that morning before the others woke, she wandered off to make a few Liths of Sophya. White sand was not hard to find—the interior of the husker wagon still had several pounds of it from the Ashes—but finding the right cedar foliage tended to come down to trial and error, as the needles needed to be dry, but not too dry. Of course, the most important ingredient was the mage’s tears—the reason her efforts to make these Liths were done at night.
When at this work, she brought to mind the saddest memories she could. When she ran out of past with which to abuse her mind, she drew from the future. Ouragan would die some day. Farisa would, if she lived to old age, lose her looks. She might lose Mazie’s love; Mazie might decide she preferred men after all. There was a real possibility of them traversing the whole Mountain Road and finding absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing....
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Her eyes watered and she collected the tears in her open palm. She mixed in sand and leaf matter; she squeezed. She rubbed her hands together and the paste hardened into pearlescent stones, five of them this time.
She noticed, around midday as they snaked through dense forest, that Claes seemed different fron his usual self. He sensed that something was wrong, clearly, but would not discuss it until he could name it. He made a few mistakes that day in choosing their path—he had tried a shortcut that led them through a limestone labyrinth whose corridors were too tight for the huskers, forcing them to turn back after three hours. He had, that afternoon, suggested they ford a stream, missing a natural bridge half a mile away. This had done no harm, but it had left them tired, wet, and cold by sunset.
They were still walking by lamplight when full darkness had fallen. Claes had rejected two campsites that no one else could find fault with.
Eric asked Farisa, "What's bothering him?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been trying to figure that out all day.”
“I think he's homesick,” Mazie said.
Farisa looked up at the star-lined sky. “I suppose I can’t blame him, but why now?”
“The world’s pulling toward winter.” Mazie looked over her shoulder. “It’s not something you’d notice this far south, but it has to be on his mind.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell me?"
Mazie patted the side of a panting unta. “I don’t think he’s told anyone. It’s not like him. He doesn’t want to cause worry.”
“So he’s homesick.” Farisa kicked a stone off their path. “I’m an adult. He needn’t hide it from me. He can talk to me about things like this.”
“Farisa.” Mazie prodded her. “You care so much for other people.”
“Everyone should. The Company can only exist in a world of lone swords.”
Runar had also been silently anxious all day. When he thought no one else would notice, he’d look back and stare north. Sometimes, he’d place a hand over his working eye, hold it for a few seconds, and shake his head.
It was after nine o’clock—by trail life standards, the middle of the night—when Claes finally stopped. “We can camp here. It has been a rough day of travel.”
Saito and Runar set up their tent. Claes and Mazie started a fire, though they kept it low, because they had not seen the environs by daylight and could only guess at lines of sight. They ate quickly, then sat in silence.
“In spite of our switchings-back,” Claes said, “we’ve done well. Twelve miles would be my guess. At our current pace, we’ll reach the equator by December.”
Andor said, “Is there anything special about the equator?"
Claes looked at Farisa.
She said, “The equator itself, no. About forty miles north, there was—and may still be—a great city called Malisse. The City of Honey. I couldn’t tell you what we’ll find there. It could be a mere ruin, of archeological interest only, but it could be a bustling metropolis with a million people, as it’s believed it once was.”
“Huh,” said Runar.
“You’ve been quiet today,” Mazie said to him.
“I have,” he admitted.
Farisa asked, “Is anything on your mind?”
He finally acknowledged an innocent and ordinary fact that had nevertheless gone unspoken all day. “It’s November 8.”
Farisa, whose gaze had been set on the ground between her feet due to fatigue, looked up. “The day of the Lantern. It’s still daytime—just about sunset—where we came from.”
“It isn’t my favorite day,” Runar admitted. He told a story about a costume party he’d attended years ago. It wasn’t clear who the heroes and villains were, and in the life they had left no one would have allowed Eric to listen to the tale. The ending was ambiguous but depressing under any interpretation.
“I don’t miss being young,” Claes said.
Mazie, to change the subject, brought up the “Lantern Riots” of November ‘92, which had in truth started in Exmore on the sixth, but had spread to Moyenne on the third day and thus acquired the name. She admitted vaguely that she might have been a factor in the original altercation.
All their conversations, though, trended back in a certain dark direction—the drunk at the costume party had fatally poisoned himself; a Globbo had been stomped into oblivion in Exmore ‘92—and it began to seem as if they were all questioning, by virtue of the negative space of the unsaid, what opinions the deceased might hold of the whirling living world. Did the trampled Globbo understand the hope his demise had given to thousands of people, or did he still view it (not unrightfully, for in spite of his allegiance he was still human) as a tragedy? Did grandmothers and grandfathers and ancestors ever stick around, instead of taking rebirth, to watch all this? In what matters would they take interest? If a soul knew it survived death, what in life would retain its stakes?
“Saito,” Eric said. “You promised...”
“I did.”
Mazie said, “Promised what?”
“Earlier today, I told him that I’d tell you everything I know about the undead. I wish I had done this earlier, but I do everything I can to forget the Camp Prosperity years.”
“I know,” said Farisa in a voice she hoped was sympathetic
Some of his accounts, they had heard before—the thralls, the zombies, the mistaken creation of the ghoul—but some of the information was new to them all.
“What about vampires?” Mazie said. “Are they real?”
“We did try to make one,” Saito admitted. “We failed. We tried to work with ghosts—it seems circumstances do exist that can prevent a soul's admission into the world beyond—but they proved impossible to control. A zombie is blind hunger in a rotting body—easily led, immune to pain, and hungry; thus, an excellent soldat. A ghost, on the other hand, knows fully that it is dead and will not be threatened by withdrawal of food or shelter, neither of which it needs. Ghosts are willful and intelligent; thus, the Company has little use for them. I suspect that, if we discovered a way to create vampires, we would find the same problems.”
The wind picked up from the east, and their campfire, after leaping as if eager to escape, dwindled.
Saito added, “Ghouls are disgusting and terrifying, but we believe their hunger dies out. Fifty tons of flesh, give or take, and it loses its will to feed and slowly dies. I would be much more terrified if we ever encountered...”
Farisa had read the Sixteen Winds. “Ifnyri?”
“Indeed.”
“You think they're real?”
Eric asked, “What’s an ifnyri?”
“Ifnyr is the singular,” Farisa said. “Don’t worry, they’re probably not real.”
“We believed at Geshna that they are,” said Saito. He looked aside, half is face in shadow. “Not even the undead can live, if you would call it that, forever. There is always decay. The ifnyr falls fast into madness. It has no sense of time or place, and its living memories mix with its dead ones. Through this, it seems to gain new abilities like those of—”
“A mage,” Farisa said. “It can enter minds. It can twist them.”
Saito looked around. “In fact, it can enter a mage, as seems to be their preference.”
“How—” do you...?
“We made one. We destroyed it. Unlike a ghoul, it’s neither strong nor fast, so if you can find it, it isn’t that hard to do. A child could break its neck with one hand. We were lucky no mages were in the lab that day; others, who did similar experiments, were not. If we came upon such an abomination, we wouldn’t just be fighting it.” His eyes dropped; his gaze took the level of the fading fire's base. “We’d be fighting Farisa.”
#
The forest stretched like a green hallway; everywhere one looked, a trick of light created a tunnel effect, making it unclear if a privileged direction existed. The sun, though high, rarely broke through the canopy—when it did, though, it stung.
The middle of November—the fourteenth—was when it became clear that they were moving through inhabited territory. Trees had been cut and logs laid down, making a corduroy road over wetlands. Claes and Saito wanted to take a parallel path, due to the high likelihood of orcish traffic, but Runar suggested they move fast, because he’d developed a nagging sense of an evil presence, one that was drawing closer from the north and therefore seemed to be chasing them.
He added, “I’d rather have to scare off or even fight orcs than have that thing—whatever it is—catch up with us.”
The others asked him to get more specific, but he explained to the group that, while the strange colors and symbols now visible to him always tended to mean something, they were not precise, especially at such a distance.
“We might wake up one day and I find out it’s above us,” Runar said.
Eric looked up. “Above?”
“I think it’s flying. I think it’s in the air. I hope I’m wrong.”
Thus far, Runar’s intuition that it was right to use orcish infrastructure had been correct. These were not the tough, predatory orcs north of Switch Cave, and a single shout sufficed to scare off an entire band. On November 16, they reached a tollhouse guarding a river’s sole stone bridge, but the place had been abandoned, requiring no payment. They hid their fires at night and checked every obvious ambush spot before passing through, but felt little daily anxiety.
Farisa estimated, once she could use Alfad Sophya to determine their coordinates, that they were within five hundred miles of Malisse, the City of Honey. If terrain and weather cooperated, they could be there in a month.
The next few days, rain and sun alternated as they followed a ridge that flirted with the tree line. Occasionally, they’d reach a high plateau where a notch opened up to their west, reminding them of just how high they were—the desert’s color stung the eye. To their east, though, bare granite peaks rose three miles higher, into places supporting no life at all.
On the morning of the twenty-first, they reached a savannah of rolling hills where Farisa noticed a rising peppery odor that she hoped she had only imagined, but it grew stronger as they moved along, and when they crested a hill, Farisa felt quite ill. Yellow flowers stretched for miles.
“Fuck,” she said.
Mazie asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Blackrue.” She looked out to see if the landscape offered a path clear of the hazard, but could see none. A pair of phantom thumbs pressed into her eyes, turning the others’ faces into ghastly blurs. Saliva pooled in her mouth faster than she could swallow, so she spat.
Saito had come to her. “Is there anything I can do?”
“You’re not a mage, so you’re immune. I’d like it if you could dig up about five hundred roots. I have a use for them.”
“Roots?” Saito said.
Farisa nodded.
“They won’t poison you?”
“The roots? No.”
Mazie took Farisa’s hand. “There doesn’t seem to be a way around this stuff. I’ll lead you through.”
“Thank you.”
As they walked, Farisa opened her eyes as rarely as possible. The blackrue odor intensified; pruritic agony filled the inside of her face, as if the inside of her skull had been stung. The air in her lungs felt sharp, like glass. The tingling on her feet when her soles were bare out of doors had spread everywhere.
“Watch out for the sinkhole,” Mazie said, the sound of her voice swirling into a din as if the hot sun also melted sound.
Indeed, Farisa’s step had failed. The twisting of her ankle rang her leg; she had become her own private earthquake.
“Stop.”
Mazie squeezed her arm. “What’s wrong?”
She bit her hand so she would not scream. “I’ve survived eight hundred of these things, but every fucking time...” The Marquessa. She’s still here. She never left.
The mage opened her eyes, to distract herself, but the colors ahead—up and blue, down and yellow—stung of salt water, had been spun around to take the orange glow of Cait Forest’s blaze. Screams were coming from everywhere. The whole world had burned already. Claes, Mazie, Runar, Eric, Saito, Andor, and even Ouragan had died, all of them—Farisa had done this; she had made them thralls in her army, like an orcish necromancer, and she too was a thrall of that nine-foot weird woman, the one who kept laughing, laughing for no reason. I’ve led these people into certain death, beyond the edge of the world, and the blaze is still chasing us because I am the fire that must be put out. I’m a fugitive, an arsonist, a barefoot fire starter, and I swear, I swear I tried, I tried, but...
Her skin, like a breaking bladder, poured sweat. The sky was orange, then black, and then even blackness. I am blinded, I am blind, I have been blind, I am worse than blind, because I am sight’s death.
“Mazie, I’m scared. I’m so scared.”
“We’re almost through it. Just keep walking.”
Farisa’s mouth hurt; she had been breathing so fast, she had nearly paralyzed her face.
“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to...”
“You’re doing it.” Mazie squeezed her arm. “You’re walking. It’s what we’ve done every day. Whatever faces us, we go through. We’re almost good at it; we must be. The last bush is just beyond—”
“Erysi.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t want you to die, Erysi. I didn’t mean to kill you.”
“Who’s Erysi?”
“Do you forgive me?”
She heard Claes say, “Take her another quarter mile and let her sit down.”
“Half,” Farisa said. “Half a mile.”
She continued to stumble forward. She had a sense of walking up on the march; when her eyelids opened again, and when daylight did not force them shut, she reasoned that they had, in fact, passed through the blackrue field.
When they all did finally stop to gather, Saito said, “I gathered the roots you asked for.”
Farisa heard herself thank him in a distant, baritone voice.
They were, Claes said, nearly a mile beyond the last yellow flower. Runar offered her water, which she drank so fast it scared her, because her throat had almost forgotten the motions of drinking. The pain that had wracked her body was slowly lessening.
Mazie asked, “Can you see?”
“Trees from bushes,” Farisa said. “Sky from ground.”
Claes said, “We can wait here as long as you need.”
“No,” Farisa said. “We should get going. The wind could change.”
Mazie continued to lead her, using a tree branch they’d taken for use as a guide stick. She could tell by the level of light that they had come under a canopy, and she was starting to see in more detail again, but the ground’s dips and roots and rocks still required care, since she could make out little more than basic shapes below her feet. She estimated they traveled three more blurry miles before camping.
By dinnertime, her headache and nausea were gone, but her eyesight had not fully centered itself.
“I’ll feel better after a night of sleep,” Farisa said. “I promise.”
She had no appetite and was the first one in her sleeping bag, although her dreams were unsettling. An hour or two of oblivious blackness opened into a bright, vivid, and strange world full of red-faced lions and horned cherubim like the gods depicted on Dyuri bookplates. She tossed and turned; when she woke up around midnight, she tried to lull herself back to sleep by counting through the prime numbers, the ones up to three hundred being rote by now.... two, three, five... two hundred ninety-three, two hundred ninety-nine... because, given enough insomnia over a long enough life, one could memorize anything. Often, sleep came in the four hundreds, but she was well beyond that mark... six hundred sixty-seven looks prime, but is it? It’s not divisible by two or three or five clearly, so let’s try seven; no? now let’s try eleven...
She heard Eric whisper. “Aunt Mazie?”
Mazie laughed. “We’re related now?”
Eric chuckled. “Sure.”
“I’ll be your aunt. Neither of us has a real family, huh?”
“I found something in the book.”
Farisa sat up. “Jakhob’s Gun?”
“I played this game as a child. If I saw a number on a sign, I’d add its digits—and then I’d do it again, until I got down to a single digit. Take sixty-seven. Six plus seven is thirteen; one, three. One plus three is four.”
Farisa said, “You’re computing its value, mod nine.”
“Sure, I guess. I’ve been doing that for the row and column position of each error I’ve found in the text. If you take these numbers and place them on a nine-by-nine grid, all the points fall into two lines. Do you think that’s something?”
“It could be,” Mazie said.
Farisa groaned. Her vision was still blurry, and she was now resentful of the sighted. She told herself, though she knew it wasn’t true, that she would have surely found this pattern had she not been debilitated by blackrue. “It is.”
She heard Eric hand Mazie a piece of paper.
“Shit,” Mazie said. “You’re absolutely right. They all fit the pattern. Well, all of them but this one on page 113. ‘She tock the derringer from her pocket.’ That one—”
Farisa said, “Line and column?”
Eric said, “Line thirty-one, column twenty-five.”
“Thirty-one, twenty-five,” Farisa said. “Now, 3125 is the fifth power of five, and there’s reference to a derringer. Huh. A gun and fives. Five fives. A five-shot? No, derringers are single-shot, so it can’t be that, but… read the whole paragraph, please.”
The three of them went out to the dwindling campfire, so as not to disturb the others, and argued about this particular error. Old Lyrian had used five, rather than ten, as its base of counting—fifteen was terbez or “three-of-fives” and twenty-five was zhanak and 125 was tsubohn and 625 was g’vah. To the ancients, 3125 (fedira) was a very special number, and if this was the only error out of line with Eric’s grid pattern, there had to be a message in it, but what did a gun have to do with Old Lyrian, and why would the letter C be chosen for the error, which made no sense given that...
“I think I’ve got it,” Mazie said.
Farisa, whose eyes had cleared enough to see Mazie’s face, wrapped her arms around her knees. “Oh, do you?”
“A real mistake.” Mazie wet her finger and rubbed the page. “It could be a printing error.”
Farisa laughed, giving the event far more significance and hilarity than it really deserved, until the muscles in her abdomen started to hurt from the bodily abuse of the blackrue.
She said, “I suppose that’s always a possibility, now isn’t it? An actual mistake.”
Eric said, “Are we accepting that as our explanation?”
Mazie said, “For now, it’s the best we can do.”
#
Farisa woke the next morning to find that her left eye had fully recovered; the right one was still blurry in the bottom third of its visual field. She had little appetite; she nibbled at a biscuit Runar had made from the last of their flour.
Saito opened a canvas sack. The dust caused her to sneeze. “Are these what you were looking for?”
“Blackrue roots. Perfect.” The others had gathered around her.
“You’re sure they won’t make you sick?”
“The flowers and the leaves would. The roots won’t.”
Claes said, “What did you need them for?”
“These.” Farisa reached into her pocket and produced a few Liths of Sophya; the lingering effects of the blackrue had caused her eyes to tear up on waking, so she’d made a couple more.
Eric asked, “What are those?”
“This is what I used to kill Talyn—Talyn’s ghoul, I mean—but she only fell on it because she decided to. She remembered us and, with the little lucidity she had left, decided she didn’t want to kill us. We can’t rely on the next ghoul we meet having such compassion and, given their strength and speed, it’s not a good idea to rely on a throwing arm with a stone so tiny. It would be like stopping a bull with a wad of paper. You need more firepower, more accuracy. You need—” She grabbed one of the roots and broke it in two, exposing a milky-white substance.
She had hoped to explain more, but Saito spotted a band of orcs half a mile away. Like all the others in this region, they were short and ill-armed, not intimidating at all, but this group of them numbered at least twenty, so Claes deemed it prudent to pack up camp and take a path that would avoid confrontation at all.
“If you see a yellow rock, let me know,” Farisa said before helping Andor load the tent in the husker’s wagon.
They set off, working south on a rising road through rugged mountains, of no apparent interest to the orcs. The next day, they continued to rise; it was sunny and hot in the morning, but an afternoon thundershower in a mountain pass turned streams into torrents, so they had to be careful of flash floods, and one their untas required encouragement to proceed.
There was still light in the overcast sky when they stopped for dinner. Runar seemed almost fearful—an emotion men like him did not often wear—every time he looked north.
He asked Farisa, “How close are we to this—”
“Malisse?” She had decided not to mention all the sites mentioned in A History of Wytchcraft that they had already passed, in which there were no signs of recent habitation. “Three hundred and forty miles.”
“I hope there’s something there. We need to get somewhere safe.” Runar’s teeth flashed in anger, not at her but at the dread he was feeling. “The presence to our north, I am more sure of its speed than before. I don’t think Switch Cave has slowed it at all, nor the Ashes, and I hope it is not coming for us, because it’s fucking evil.”