“I assure you, Mr. Burgett, that when your king sends scouts to investigate these documents, and he will, he will find such an encampment in those mountains.”
“He will?”
“Yes, he will. Bad sanitation, bones strewn at cave entrances, the entire nightmarish scenario—however ludicrous you and I know it to be. It’s cost me quite a bit to set up, but it’s impressively realistic.”
The red-haired man smiled even as his brow furrowed. He interlaced his fingers and brought his hands to rest on his belly.
“All right, I’m intrigued. What possible gain is there for you—and me—in persuading Beliac that the Bolg are massing in the hills outside Longsworth?”
“It’s a diversion,” said Dranth. “Beliac will panic at the prospect of Golgarn being a feeding ground for the Firbolg. And since he does not have the land military power to do anything to stop it, he will turn to an ally who does—and commit his naval forces, as well as whatever pathetic army he has—to the service of that ally in return for being saved from the big, bad Firbolg—who could care less that he, or any of you, exist. For you, it means that the omnipresence of the military will be over; once the men of Golgarn have been conscripted into the war that is to come, you can emerge from the shadows into the light, where you will discover many unguarded citizens and visitors to your fair land who are without the protection they once enjoyed. Not to mention ships. You can raise the practice of your profession from shadow thuggery to, well, whatever you wish it to be. And my aforementioned friend, who coincidentally happens to be the ally to whom Beliac will turn, will get the support he craves for his war.”
Burgett exhaled. “And for you?”
A tight smile finally cracked Dranth’s features.
“The Raven’s Guild will obtain what it most dearly desires—vengeance on the one whose actions put me in charge.”
The owlish eyes glistened with interest. “Very well,” the red-haired man said after a moment, his deep voice smooth and resonant. “I will accept your proposition, Dranth from the Raven’s Guild. Go back to the wharf— follow the man you came here with—and proceed on alone by night to an inn just to the lee of the north gate of the city. You’ll know the place by its firebrands outside, and the white straw of its roof. Go in the side door and ask the woman at the bar to send out her husband to speak to you. Tell him you are looking to buy a dray mare, and give him your papers. You can be assured they will be found as you hoped.”
“And what is the name of the man I am seeking?” Dranth asked, rising from the table and steadying himself on his feet. “Just in case there is more than one woman in the bar in the inn with a husband.”
The pearly teeth gleamed white in the darkness of the boat’s hold. “Why, his name’s John Burgett, of course.”
When the raid on the inn was accomplished, the papers took almost no time in making their way to Beliac’s table.
The king was in the middle of his breakfast at the time, sweetening the whey in his porringer with molasses, when the messenger arrived from the very efficient commander of the city’s police brigade.
Upon opening the commander’s packet and reading the contents, the king spat his breakfast the entire length of the table. The Queen of Golgarn, seated across from him, rose from her chair in disgust, even as his adult children choked back laughter. Scouts were dispatched forthwith, as Dranth had predicted. Upon entering the mountain passes to the northwest of the prefecture of Longsworth, they came upon a sight that had been relegated to the stuff of nightmares a thousand or more years old. From the bases of the first mountain pass to the summit of the hills that led up into the mountainous reaches, a pathway of human bones had been carefully bordered with a series of fencelike posts.
Each crowned with a human head in varying stages of decay.
The stench of the encampment, issuing forth from a variety of repulsive sources, was so overwhelming that two of the four scouts immediately turned from the scene and retched. The more intrepid two, possessing somewhat stronger stomachs, ventured up alongside the path in tree cover until they were in position to observe through a spyglass the encampment itself. A series of caves, hidden from view from below, were being loosely guarded by tall, broad manlike creatures, hirsute and covered in filth, who sat sharpening cruel-looking weapons and setting up catapults with arms that could easily lift burdens of two hundred stone or more. They appeared to be training their weapons defensively on the mountain passes, but had shown evidence of positioning similar encampments farther up the hillside, from which the town would be not only visibie, but within range.
Dranth and Yabrith remained in Golgarn, taking rooms at the beautiful Sea Duchess inn in the heart of the Jeweled Streets and enjoying the fine cuisine of the port city, including the new experience of seafood, which Dranth found to be quite to his liking. Yabrith, still suffering queasiness from the smell of the sea, was unable to stomach anything more gastronomically challenging than fish stew.
It was only a matter of days before the word came back to the palace. While neither of the men were privy to the conversations of the king and his scouts, there was no mistaking the outcome.
They were sitting out on the terrace of the Sea Duchess one fine morning when a royal mail coach came clattering through the finely cobbled streets, the driver urging the horses mercilessly in order to meet the outgoing tide.
“What do you suppose the message he’s carrying says?” asked Yabrith idly, picking the sausage out of his teeth with an ivory shard as they watched the carriage driver delivering a package under seal to the yeoman at the docks.
“Can’t imagine,” said Dranth, folding his napkin. “But something tells me it may be time for us to head home—I have had as much as I can tolerate of the hospitality of John Burgett.”
37
Deep within the old Cymrian lands, past the wide heath beyond the canyon and sheltered by a high inner ring of rock formations was Kraldurge, the Realm of Ghosts. It was the only place the Bolg, without exception, did not go, a desolate, forbidding place from the look of its exterior structures.
What heinous tragedy had occurred here was unclear in the legends, but it had been devastating enough to permanently scar the psyche of the Firbolg who lived in the mountains. They spoke in reluctant whispers of fields of bones and wandering demons that consumed any creature unfortunate enough to cross their paths, of blood that seeped up from the ground and winds that ignited anyone caught on the plain.
It also was the place that marked the beginning of the lands of their king’s First Woman, as the Firbolg called Rhapsody. For them this was an even better reason not to go anywhere near the place. Within a range of guardian rocks that reached high into the peaks around them stood an uncovered meadow, overgrown in meadow flowers that Rhapsody planted upon coming to this place, now untended in her absence. A hill-like mound rose in the center of the meadow, a place she had paid special attention at the time, due to the unsettling nature of the vibration she found there. There was something innately sad and overwhelmingly unsettling all throughout the hidden canyon-dell, but most especially at this place on top of the mound. For that reason she covered it in heartsease, flowers that in the old world the Lirin planted in cemeteries and on battlefields as a sign of mourning and reconciliation, and most particularly of condolence. She did not know at the time, nor did she know now, what she was trying to apologize for, what had happened deep within the history of the sad, windswept place that caused the very ground to cry out in pain, but she knew that whatever it had been was so traumatic, so ultimately wrong, that nothing could be done save for the gentle offering of flowers and a song of comfort in the hope of reclaiming the earth at least a little there. Some of the reputation Kraldurge had as a playground for demons and other harbingers of evil came from its geology. Anyone walking through the circle of guardian rocks found themselves in a hollow canyon, surrounded by a circle of towering cliff sides. It was impossible to walk there without one’s footfalls sounding up the canyon walls, echoing at an enormous amplification, so that anything that might have been waiting would have had ample warning, something always dangerous in the Bolglands, which for years had been roved by hungry demi-humans in search of any prey they could find. The canyon that hid the grassy field was so tall that the wind rarely reached down into it; it howled around the top of the surrounding crags, creating a mournful wail. Even the bravest Bolg or most educated human could mistake the noise for demonic shrieking. Despite the natural explanation for the sound, there was still the sense of an innate sadness to the place, a feeling of overwhelming grief and anger. In her time as putative duchess of these lands, Rhapsody had begun to wonder if Kraldurge was a forgotten burial ground from the earliest conflicts of the Cymrian War. There was no mention of it in the manuscripts of Gwylliam’s vast and spectacular library, a collection of manuscripts and scrolls containing much of the wisdom of the world that they had located upon discovering this place four years before. The offering of peace flowers had seemed to work; now, though the wind continued to shriek and howl around the top of the rocks, filling the canyon with the same eerie, unsettling noise, the ground seemed to sleep, peacefully if not really in peace.