The skills they used were not magic, but rather forgotten talents, practices that had been mostly discarded long ago. The Monks knew the boundaries between where the laws of nature crossed and diverted, and where they were purposely bent out of shape. It was ironic that the greatest weapons they employed against the reemergence of magic could look so much like its use to any who bore witness.
Still, the Monks had their ways, and that night in the dead village of Trengborne they used them. It was a place rich in wraiths, the disturbed and confused souls of those so violently and recently killed, and the Monks had ways to question these. They sought them out where they hid, folded between moments and slipping madly from one moonbeam to the next, and while one Monk held them down with a mirific chant, another would seek out the mind-mad and confused, sad and raging-and question it with a Delving root. The Delving was a common plant near rivers and lakes, and its root, if picked at the exact moment between when it was sterile and when that sterility suddenly ended, became receptive to many hidden influences and energies. It planted itself not only under the surface of the land, but beneath the plane of the world, burrowing down from true reality to where the richest, purest sustenance was to be found. Only the Monks knew this, because over the decades they had wiped out anyone else with that knowledge.
Where is Rafe Baburn? they asked.
Dead, dead, we’re all dead-
I don’t know, help me, help me!-
Not you again, not you, not you!
Where is Rafe Baburn? they asked again. There was much madness in these new wraiths; anger and ire and bewilderment. But the Monks kept asking because they had all night.
Where is Rafe Baburn?
And eventually:
Rafe? My Rafe, my son? Is that you? Run Rafe, run! Flee! Go to Vance, find Uncle Vance in Pavisse!
Pavisse, the Monks said, and the root transmitted their smiles and made their emotions its own, a chemical message to spring into the ether where this wraith floated on uncertainty.
No! the stricken wraith said, but the Monks had withdrawn, and they left it to its raving.
They set out from Trengborne straightaway, traveling through the night, following their ancient maps and finding shortcuts through the mountains that even the most experienced shepherds did not know. As they walked, they planned. Their talk was spare, and in the space of a hundred words they had agreed that their incursion into Pavisse had to be carried out with more care. Trengborne had been only hundreds of people; Pavisse had a population of tens of thousands. The Monks would not be averse to killing them all if it meant that one of them was Baburn, but practicalities forced them to think logically. Not only would it be impossible to keep everyone in the town while the slaughter progressed, but that very act would take days. And as Carfallo had demonstrated, even a Red Monk could be worn down in the end. Madness had power, but only so much. Eventually a punctured heart needed more to run on than rage, and once its blood had drained and the routes for the fury had been slashed and cut, death was all that was left.
They needed stealth and speed. Their red robes would be seen, and some who saw might know what that meant. The word would spread. But the Monks still had surprise on their side. They were sure that the boy still did not know who he was.
They sought Vance Baburn. If they found him, they would find the boy.
Lucien headed down the hillside, aiming for the northern outskirts of the town, where a wide sprawl of shacks and tents indicated a growing influx of refugees. From his travels over the years he had come to realize that Noreelans, though fracturing into tribal elements once more, were still finding safety in numbers. The towns grew as the regions shrank, and the Duke found himself ruling over new kingdoms and independent states instead of simply Noreela. Perhaps that was why he barely ruled at all. Lucien viewed people as another part of nature, nothing special, distinct from it only because they had such a proclivity to destroy instead of nurture. They flocked, they feared, they were terrified at what they had sown, and yet they attempted little to right their wrongs.
He crossed a small wooden bridge spanning a stream. The water was barely a trickle, and as he passed over, it seemed to cloud. Bloodied from upstream, perhaps, or maybe he was seeing an echo of what was to come. He looked up but the stream disappeared between buildings, like an artery drawing life through the dying town. Because this place was dying. Lucien had been around enough death to recognize its stench, its sights. The refugees clung on to the town’s outskirts like premature mourners, here to take what they could and then flee when the time came. The town stank of apathy: shit and rot left in the open; a miasma of stale fledge and spilled ale in the air, drifting from the many drink and drug establishments; food gone off, bodies unwashed, and above it all the smell of burning. Lucien saw a pall of smoke hanging above the center of Pavisse, evidence that even here the Breakers were at work, paring down the old dead machines in the hope of finding dregs of magic in their sumps, hidden away in petrified timber arteries, clasped in stone wombs never before seen, ossified by time but still potent. He would usually kill a Breaker as a matter of course, simply because of what they sought, though none that he knew of had ever found a scrap of magic. Right now his aims were higher.
The look of Pavisse also marked it as a place waiting to die. These encampments on the outskirts bled it out across the valley floor, but as he approached the town proper it was difficult to tell where the shantytown ended and Pavisse proper began. The buildings changed gradually, progressing from tents to wooden shacks, and then on to dwellings with stone walls and reed roofs. But the degradation was wholescale. Gardens lay dead and sterile, pools of dust where he saw skull ravens bathing and plotting. Windows were mostly glassless, covered with swathes of sheebok fur to keep out the light and the stares of prying eyes. Graffiti adorned many walls facing out onto the main streets, sigils and codes marking the turf of one street gang or another. But even that was old and worn down by the sun. The gangs were still there, perhaps, but less zealous now, members more concerned with their own personal survival than that of their mob.
Lucien passed a small street market where traders sold fruit and vegetables on the verge of wrinkling into rot. There were craft stalls and a furbat drainer milking his restrained creatures of rhellim, stroking the fluid into individual vials that would sell for more than most of the fruit in any neighboring stall. This trader looked well fed, well traveled and relatively affluent. Lucien spotted a platinum ring on his finger, a metal only mined and worked on the Cantrass Plains three hundred miles to the northeast. A few of the sellers called to Lucien as he passed by, inviting him to sample their wares, but others fell silent at the sight of his weapons. He walked on without glancing their way, but he felt their eyes on his back. Maybe they had heard stories. Perhaps one or two had even seen a Red Monk before, knew what he sought, why he was here. If so, they would do well to pack their stalls and leave.