Chapter Thirty

I didn’t dislike that elf, Fenirig Arte. He scared me a little, but I was sure he had no intention of harming Krissy or the others — well, as long as he considered us useful. He seemed to be the constantly angry, no-nonsense military type, and those usually got the job done, whatever the job was. And he had just delegated a job to our fake Bureau. I was having second thoughts about posing as members of something that didn’t exist, but it was too late. Well, it was what it was, and we just had to deal with it.

Tovaron Ento and the two other elves sighed with relief as Fenirig Arte left for real this time.

‘So …’ Tovaron Ento began, but then stopped.

It seemed he wasn’t sure what to say, but Krissy looked at the sailors, then at the two other elves, and came to the rescue.

‘Introductions?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ the man said immediately, then gestured to the other elf man. ‘This is Kerabal Aven, or Kerav,’ he introduced him, then gestured at the elf woman. ‘And this is Ardeela Erini. You can call her Arde. They don’t speak Treini, so if you have something to say to them, I’ll translate.’

Kerav just nodded his head to us.

‘I … am … learning Treini,’ Ardeela Erini said, looking like it was causing her pain to say the words.

I felt for the elf woman. The language the humans spoke, Treini, wasn’t easy — it had taken me the last two and a half, almost three months to learn enough to be … well … conversational, and there was always more to learn. I silently wished her the best of luck.

Krissy introduced Kenta and Tommy, and with that out of the way they all sat down at the table. Tovaron Ento pulled out a map from his bag, unfolded it on the table, then began to bring us up to speed. The map was of the Island of Solace. It was hand drawn map and it didn’t have a scale bar to help work out distances. Still, I could tell Solace was a country sized island. I saw markings for several cities and towns, mostly in the north and north-west, even a couple of port towns with drawings of ships.

‘This is where we are,’ Tovaron Ento pointed at spot in the south where there was nothing much, save for a few dots that probably indicated smaller towns of villages. Then he put a finger on another spot further to the south-west. ‘This is where we think the evil spirit appeared roughly a month ago. It’s hard to tell for sure. It has been killing wild animals, livestock, people, and it’s constantly moving. That sword you found belonged to Ruennen Itora. His team has been missing for days. Now we’re almost certain they’re dead,’ he said, Kerav and Arde nodding grimly. Toven then circled a large area with his fingers. ‘We think it’s roaming these parts, so we’ll head there tomorrow morning and start looking for it again. Every farm and village in the area have been evacuated, just like this one, so we’ll only see Master Fenar’s rangers.’

‘Didn’t he tell you not to call him that?’ Krissy asked.

‘He’s not here, is he?’ Toven countered, grinning.

‘Looks like a large area,’ Kenta said, eying the map. ‘It’s gonna be takin’ us a while.’

‘Dozens of teams are searching as we speak.’ Toven said. ‘Sivera’s spiritualists are out there, too, but who knows what they’re up to.’

‘Ask him how they usually get rid of evil spirits without spiritualists,’ I said to Krissy. ‘I imagine it’s not easy.’

Krissy asked him.

‘Well, the last time one appeared, it was Sivera’s people who killed it,’ Toven explained, then added, ‘We had a hard time kicking them out of Solace after that. They’re an arrogant bunch, and for some reason they think they can build a shrine and start recruiting here just because they helped a little.’

‘How do you deal with an evil spirit without spiritualists?’ Krissy asked.

‘We can’t kill it, obviously, so we isolate it.’ Toven said.

‘How?’

‘We kill its corrupted host so it can’t move. That’s the easier part. Then we basically guess how far the spirit can reach, double that number, then build a stone wall around it and fill it with pitch. It can’t take another host if no animals can get near it.’

‘That’s pretty damn clever,’ I said to Krissy. ‘If they know the spirit’s reach, then a big enough pitch-filled room will trap it for all eternity.’

‘That’s clever,’ Krissy said.

‘It is,’ Tovaron Ento said. ‘So how would you kill it? I heard it takes three or four spiritualist, and that’s if the host is dead.’

Kevin? Krissy’s thought came to me.

‘I think … I’d probably eat it,’ I said to her.

‘My familiar can handle it,’ Krissy said to the elf.

‘Alright, Misery, if you say so,’ the elf said, sighing, apparently not convinced. Then he turned to Kerav and Arde, saying something in their own language. The two left through a smaller door, going to another room. Toven turned to Krissy and said, ‘We’ll have something to eat, then we rest, and tomorrow we go hunting. There is a room upstairs you can use, but please don’t leave the house and don’t do anything stupid, or we’ll all pay the price.’

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***

Elven food looked … normal. I suspected the bread and dry jerky were military rations or thereabouts, rather than true representatives of elven cuisine. My humans didn’t complain though, in fact they enjoyed it quite a bit. I wasn’t surprised: for them this was the first meal in three month that wasn’t brined meat and bitter roots. I wasn’t interested in the jerky — Akela seemed to like it a lot though, and Tovaron Ento had given him a generous portion — but I really wished I could have tasted the bread. It was a brown bread, perhaps rye or its local equivalent, but it looked good.

Once they all finished dinner, the elves showed us to our room, and left us there.

I stuck my tenties out of my spirit-costume, stretching them out to their full five meters, going through the door and walls. I divided my sight between them, concentrating it on the tip of each tentacle, and I had a look.

As nice and agreeable as the elves turned out to be, they didn’t seem to trust us any more than I trusted them. Five guards stood outside the house, carrying spears and bows, chatting quietly in their language, probably gossiping about us. Two guards — one of them Ardeela Erini, the other someone I’d not seen before — sat on chairs at the end of the corridor from which our room opened, both fully armed.

Our room was small and had four beds. All three of my humans murmured silent prayers of thanks to whichever god they deemed responsible for this good fortune, and they all jumped on the soft mattresses, grinning as if they had found themselves in heaven. Akela climbed up onto the fourth bed, then he decided he didn’t like it and settled down in one of the corners of the room.

Kenta and Tommy fell asleep quickly. Akela kept fidgeting for a few minutes, then he fell asleep, too. The single window of the room was above Krissy’s bed. The girl lay on the bed, her eyes open, staring up at the light of the rising moon glinting off dust particles in the air. She was deep in thought, it seemed.

‘What’s up, Krissy? What are you thinking about?’ I asked her.

She turned her head to glance over to the sailors — both asleep and snoring.

‘I don’t know. Nothing. Everything,’ Krissy whispered.

She had been through a lot, and imagined she had a lot to think about. I wasn’t sure if prying further was a good idea, but I thought she could at least use some encouragement.

‘You’ve done very well, Krissy,’ I said to her. ‘I think you’ll be just fine when we start hunting tomorrow.’

‘Maybe,’ she whispered. ‘But what about after tomorrow? And after that? I have no idea what we’re doing or why. I … want to go home, to Thyssa.’

‘To look for your brother?’ I asked, recalling the things she had said during our short lived voyage.

‘You understood what I told Quenta?’ she asked, and didn’t wait for my answer. ‘Yes. I want to find my brother. If he’s alive. Instead, we’re here, doing who knows what.’

‘For now we’re just doing what Wensah wants,’ I said. ‘But once we’re done …

‘You know, we only have your word on this,’ she said, interrupting me. ‘None of us saw this goddess of yours.’

‘Trust me, she’s real, and a real pain in the ass,’ I said.

‘Alright. Then there’s … you, Kevin,’ she said. ‘You talk a lot for a spirit, but I still don’t know anything about you. You keep saying you’re not an evil spirit, but … I think you are. And I don’t know what you want, or what you’re after. I’m thankful to you for helping us, but … should I be worried that you’ll drag me to hell or eat my soul sometime soon? Or Quenta’s? Or Tommi’s?’

I had been expecting her to ask these questions sooner or later. I hadn’t been doing a good job putting myself in her shoes, but based on what I’d learned about spirits, I wasn’t surprised that she was worried. I would have preferred not to talk about it, but guessed I had no choice if I wanted to put her at ease.

‘Alright Krissy, I admit: I am what you call an evil spirit.’ I said. ‘But I haven’t always been.’

Krissy stayed silent for a few moments, then asked,

‘What were you?’

‘Human. Like you.’ I said.

Krissy’s eyes widened, and she sat up on the bed.

‘What? How?’

‘Well, it was Wensah’s doing. I was killed, she plucked my soul out of my dead body, then she worked it into the spiritual body of an evil spirit. That’s how. Then she dumped me on Misery Island, and left me there alone. It was almost three years ago.’

‘Is … something like this even possible?’ she asked, gasping.

‘For someone like Wensah, I suppose it is. I am here, aren’t I?’ I said. ‘So when I say I’m an evil spirit, it’s both true and not true. Uhm … picture it like this: the soul of a dead human puppeteering the body of an evil spirit. I think that’s close enough.’

Krissy thought about this for a moment, sitting on her bed, her eyes flicking left and right. Then her eyes widened, and her face took on a panicked look.

‘Oh no!’ she whisper-yelped.

‘Oh no what?’

‘You … you’re human. You’re a man,’ she gasped.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘You’re a man … and … you’ve been sitting on my shoulder, watching … every time I … cleaned myself or … relieved myself,’ she stuttered, absolutely horrified out of a sudden.

‘Hold on, Krissy, hold on, let’s stay on topic, shall we?’ I said, finding myself in a panic now.

‘We are on topic,’ she squealed quietly. ‘This is … this is … bad. Very bad.’

‘Oh, so evil spirit is bad, but human is also bad? What do you want me to be, then?’ I groaned.

‘I don’t know. Not … this,’ she said.

Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. I had been killed, I had been re-born as a weird spirit with tentacles in another world, and I still had to experience a phenomenon my married friends back on Earth had warned me about: it was called “There’s no pleasing a woman”.

Regardless, I tried to explain to her that I had died and wasn’t really a human any more, therefore the bodily functions of members of my former race were no longer of any interest to me. Krissy — after long minutes of complaining about the indignation I had apparently been subjecting her to — finally fell asleep.

***

The next morning I kept quiet, not saying a single word, pretending I wasn’t even there. Krissy however was unusually shy when she went to wash herself — she even called out to me to warn me not to peek. I hoped that my silence would both put her at ease and annoy her.

After breakfast we got ready.

I brought out the spear from Jack’s Room, the one I had looted from the cuirass wearing pirate, and gave it to Kenta. I offered Jevan’s sword to Tommy, but he said he wasn’t good with a sword, and he took Jevan’s small daggers instead. Krissy didn’t want to carry the sword either; I didn’t have its sheath, and Krissy said I could just make it appear in front of her if needed.

Tovaron Ento, Ardeela Erini and Kerabal Aven were ready and waiting for us, armed with swords, daggers and bows, their small shoulder-bags packed with provisions. They looked at us with suspicion and disapproval, asking Krissy where Kenta’s spear and Tommy’s daggers had come from, and why we hadn’t packed any provisions from the kitchen. Krissy assured the elves that we had everything we needed, and we shouldn’t waste time discussing unimportant things. Tovaron Ento just sighed, muttering something in their elven tongue that I suspected to be curses, and we were ready embark on our little journey to hunt down the evil spirit plaguing the elves of Solace.