In the Shadow of the Rook (The Sons Incarnate Book 1)

  In the Shadow of the Rook

  The Sons Incarnate: Book I

  J.D.L. Rosell

  © 2017 J.D.L. Rosell

  All Rights Reserved

  Contents

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  The silence of the years bears down

  The silence of the years wears down

  Still I cast my doubts into the Void:

  Can a god know so little of being a man?

  The Sons Incarnate looked over the lands

  All they saw, they claimed as their birthright

  But no god can share a throne for long

  Pride ever triumphs over brotherly love

  Circling each other, they shone like comets

  Their eyes were burning suns

  Their hands were crushing mountains

  Their hearts were full of shallow silence

  One seized the Moon as his hammer blow

  The other claimed the hard anvil of the World

  One fell, one rose, and came on the crushing blows

  While all that laid between fell broken

  You, Friend, have called them saviors

  You, Friend, have called them gods

  But tell me, what good fruit grows

  From roots drowning in reddened waters?

  - The Sons Incarnate, “Plea of the Witness,” first cantus

  Witnessed by Sanct Eckard, the Living Testament

  192 IY (Illuvian Year), Second Year of Our Broken World

  “Locked lips,” Oslef had said to Erik. His voice was loud in Erik's ears, louder than the howling wind as he ran through the forest. “Locked lips, and if I unlock them, that’s two dead men, see?” Oslef had a gleam to his eyes—beer tears, like always. “Though you know how I’d love to gossip with an old friend.”

  Erik ran, the trees and brush smearing into an oily blur. He barely noticed the creatures scattering beneath the decaying leaves, the birds fluttering away as he passed. He didn’t look for lurchers hiding in shadows, who might be waiting for the next hapless passerby. A different scene played out in his mind's eye.

  “A bird asked after you. Wondered about our relationship. And asked about my prospects. My prospects—we both know those are complete and utter fek, don’t we? And as for us, well, that’s a bit more… complicated.”

  Erik’s breathing came fast. As he stumbled over roots and underbrush, a hand went to his chest, to the ribbed flesh where it had been stitched after the hot knife had welded his skin back together. It seemed to burn under his fingers, and he rubbed at the dull echoes of pain.

  “I explained the whole history to the bird, line by line. Fast friends we were, despite you having fek for family and lineage and being ‘fidel to boot. But I saw something in you, and I stuck around, didn’t I? Then we chased the same girls—girl, really, it was always just the one. We had our fights, but what boys don’t? But when that bird asked how far I was willing to go to get what I wanted, how far I would push our friendship, do you know what I said?”

  “What did you say, Oslef?” Erik whispered to the woods.

  “I said, ‘Anything for an old friend.’”

  At first, it had been no more than a strange feeling, that something in his chest, no more painful than seeing an arrow in a stump. Even as his heart pounded hard near the metal tip, Erik felt numb, helpless to do anything but stare at the dagger in his ribs. His shirt darkened in a widening circle, like watching a drop of ink spread in a pool of water.

  Then numbness gave way to the red wave, and it washed over him and carried him down.

  His foot caught, and Erik tumbled to the ground, memories ripped away. His knees and hands scraped against the twigs and dirt, and almost as soon as he fell, he was pulling up the legs of his trousers and peering at his hands, desperately looking for red lines breaking through the skin. But they were whole. He wasn’t bleeding.

  He sat back against a tree trunk, breathing heavily, and closed his eyes, and a different scene pressed in on him. Stale air in his throat, stiff and cloying as a tomb. Pale light flickered from thin tongues of piston lamp fire on stone walls. Before him, an old man’s eyes bulged, milky white tingeing pink, then the deep red of the setting sun on storm clouds. Strands of thin, pale hair fell over the unnaturally smooth, onyx face. The throat, thin as a starved doe, trembled with gasps, the only sound in the room as a pair of hands tightened about it. Then the noises stopped. There was a stillness, a silence, a sigh of relief—his own sigh—as he loosened his hands from the limp body.

  Erik opened his eyes and resisted the sudden urge to slam his head back against the trunk, if only to alleviate the pressure building behind his temples. He rose and pressed on.

  He couldn’t stay here, so close to Zauhn. Not with what he was. He had to leave as fast as he could, and not even because the town watch might come after him, or that he felt guilty from the blood on his hands. He didn’t know where he needed to go, not yet. And his father, who surely knew, who might have saved his son from what he’d become, wouldn’t tell him.

  As his breath whistled through his clenching jaw, Erik tried to put thoughts of his father from his mind.

  A bush rustled next to him, and he jerked away and scanned the woods, but the sparse moonlight showed nothing between the leaning trees. Still, his hand traveled to his belt knife and stayed there as he peered into the darkness and slowly found the source of the sound.

  A shadow emerged from around a tree, and Erik flinched back, hand clenching hard. As the figure moved forward, the moon reluctantly revealed it. First a shoulder, barely more than tendon and bone. A foot followed, seemingly disconnected in the darkness, its long, purplish nails curling back and stabbing into the toes. Then the face; it hovered above the black body, the skin loose over the skull, with the jaw hanging slack around its few remaining teeth. And the eyes, lolling to the sides, irises bleached of color so even the thin light of the broken moon seemed to fill them.

  Erik swallowed hard and shuffled back even as his grip relaxed. It was an old lurcher, probably two or more moon’s cycles past fresh. What flesh hadn’t rotted off its body had likely been picked by carrion creatures, the thing too feeble to prevent it. It would have been dangerous when it was first made, fast as a live man and twice as furious, but now it was less than harmless. Erik even pitied it.

  Pity?

  The lurcher shuffled forward, coming clear of the tree line. He could see it was once a woman from its skeletal hips. It favored its back foot as it approached, the end of the leg little more than a pulpy club.

  It was far from the first lurcher Erik had seen. He and the count’s son, Oslef—that betraying bastard—had followed many tracks throughout the woods, hunting for the dragging feet that had made them. The pair would follow them through rain and mud, deep into the forest, unt
il they saw the creature before them, walking slowly towards the shore of the island, always towards the shore. They had quietly drawn their blades and crept through the low ferns until the dead beings were close enough to rush. Erik had laughed as the steel cut through the flimsy skin and brittle bones.

  He didn’t want to laugh now.

  It kept coming, quiet but for the dragging of its foot and the creak of its bones. It didn’t wheeze like he expected, didn’t breathe at all. One day you’ll stop breathing, that devilish part of him taunted.

  Did the lurcher know him? Could it tell they were the same, that he was one of them now? Its arm reached out, fingers splayed—to welcome? To harm? Or just to touch? Had it felt the loss of another’s touch longer than the decay of its own body? Perhaps it was the worst of the two pains.

  But why did he think of it as an it? It had been a woman once, just as he’d once been a man. Why not she?

  Her fingers grasped at the air before him.

  Erik grabbed them, crushed them, and the bones became dust, too brittle even to cut. The lurcher made a guttural sound and fell forward, and Erik helped it, propelling its skull to the ground, and it smashed into wet grass and mud with enough force that even the soft earth could not stop the bone fracturing beneath his hand. Something oozed between his fingers.

  One of its arms reached back, and he pulled it, breaking it at the shoulder. Its scream, already thin and weak, was muffled in the mud. But still its body pushed up, still its legs fought. A stomp to each femur put an end to that.

  Erik rose and stepped away from the corpse, breathing hard. The forest was quiet, not even lunegazers clacking their wings, silent as before a storm.

  His stomach roiled, then he was heaving onto the grass. There was clumpy blood and bile on his hands, and the mangled body still moved in the mud before him.

  Isn’t it a bright future? The devilish voice gloated.

  He stumbled back into the dark woods, leaving the lurcher broken and tearlessly crying. He wished he could curl up and sleep and never have to wake again. He wished he didn’t have to move.

  But he did. For lack of anything else, Erik set his course on the hundred glowing pinpricks of lunegazers ahead, following them like a ship might follow the stars during a dark sea voyage. He soaked in their light hungrily, like they might nourish him of something he had lost.

  The lights blinked out as one, extinguished like gust-smothered candles.

  Erik dropped his gaze. He kept moving forward.

  Two

  How long had he been running? Since Erik could remember, his father and he had wandered Vestoria, living among their fellow copper-skinned Sudenians to hide away from the scornful looks of their light-haired countrymen and their accusations of ‘infidel’ and ‘savage.’ But they never stayed long. There always came a day when his father would wake him, their bags packed, and lead him out of the door to never return.

  They had run all the way to Erden Isle in the far corner of Vestoria, where they were forced together with people for nothing more than the color of their skin, into the slum of Tar Court in his hometown of Zauhn. Even they of Tar Court only accepted him grudgingly, for having a father as an alchemical formulaist came with its own set of biases and fears, and for good reason.

  But his father caused plenty of good and little harm, and slowly Erik settled in. For the first time since he was seven, they stopped running, and little by little, friendships and infatuations tied him down to Zauhn. He did not strive to learn so much formulaism as before, content to do only as much as his father asked him. He grew closer to a local girl. The old wanderlust did rouse when he thought of growing old and dying in that backwater place, but only enough that he made distant plans to one day depart.

  But as Sanct Eckard had written, plans were ashes awaiting the first spark.

  It should have been the end, that day in the tower. But when Erik had escaped, he knew it was finally time to run, if only because he had to. He had to run as long as his legs would carry him. As long as his lungs kept breathing. Heart kept beating. Mind kept spinning.

  As long as he could fool himself into thinking he was still human.

  Erik was in control. He was steady. He was back to looking at the world, and playing whatever fek-hand it had dealt him.

  Starting with this town.

  It was the next evening, the sky turning pig pink, when Erik arrived in front of Lienze’s gate, or what barely qualified as one when it hung on by one rusted hinge. Its fence was nearly as decrepit, a few feet of tied trees limbs, apparently sufficient for the protection of the western side of town.

  They either had very fierce farmers, or something else kept the nautded away. But then, he already knew that. It’s why he was here.

  Could be worse, he thought with a sardonic twist of a smile. Could be I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

  In Lienze—named after their main crop, the lentil—it wasn’t hard to find his destination. Brunnen’s Brews & Beds the sign read, painted in a sickly brown substance he hoped wasn’t what it looked like. As he looked at the wooden shack with the thatched roof, he wished to lose himself in a pint. A spinning, beer-logged head would match the mad spin he was in.

  Before he thought better of it, he walked up to the double-braced doors and stepped in.

  The half-lit room was nearly empty of customers. Five men were scattered across it, all at separate tables but for one pair. There was also a woman behind a counter, rag in hand, who watched Erik as he approached.

  “Evenin’,” she said, pulling a mug from the counter and resting it on a belly swollen as if she were with child, though she looked too old for it. She wiped the mug for a long moment, then asked, “Get you somethin’?”

  Before Erik could answer, a voice said from behind him, “Now there’s a sight you don’t see often `round these parts.” He spoke too loudly for the quiet murmur of the alehouse.

  “What’s that?” Erik said, keeping his voice even.

  “A man’s face that don’t look like an ass’s ass.” The man burst out laughing, his drink sloshing across the table.

  Erik relaxed and turned to the man. He had brown hair like leather, wavy and barely contained in a loose ponytail that extended well past his shoulders, while a strong jaw emerged from under a thick, rust-red beard. His frame, solid as it was, implied a profession of hard work, a blacksmith perhaps, while his eyes betrayed a sharp intelligence, or at least a wit that refused to dull despite his obvious intoxication. That was good. Much as Erik despised—or envied—the man’s drunkenness, he needed a sharp, talkative man.

  From the far corner, one of the pair said, irritated, “Damn you, Wil Tanner, always goin’ on like that—” His companion gripped his arm, and the man shook his head and said no more.

  Or he’s a tanner. That just meant he had the right blood for it; Dagathode, the lineage of most peasantry, and some northern Seafolk with that red beard.

  Erik, ignoring the alemistress, sat down at the joker’s table. “So, you’re the chatty one around here.”

  “Better than being chitty like warty Ilnuk back there.” The man named Wil looked back at the men in the corner, and as his victim flashed him the vulgar circle, he laughed again.

  Erik didn’t know what to say, but his companion had plenty of words.

  “I tell you, it’s from all the inbreeding `round here,” Wil said, keeping hold of his stool while it tipped back dangerously. “The warts and ugliness, you know, not to mention the sheer idiocy.”

  “Alrigh’, alrigh’,” the weary alemistress said. But, instead of actually managing her unruly patron, she slipped away through a curtained doorway. A wise woman, Erik thought. He wished he could slip away himself.

  “So,” Erik started, then stopped. How to approach what he wanted indirectly? “You don’t seem to have much in the way of defense,” he finished lamely.

  “What, you don’t like our wall?” Wil ran a hand through hair matted with sweat despite the relatively cool
weather outside. “Ah hell, you’re right. Didn’t keep Ilnuk’s goat from escaping last week. What could it do against a determined deadwalker?” He looked back again at the man in the corner, but his victim seemed to find better entertainment inside his flagon.

  “Speaking of attacks,” he continued, turning back to Erik, “you heard anything about that standing mooneyes? Eerie thing, that.”

  “Haven’t heard anything at all,” Erik said. Despite himself, a small chill crept down his back. He was sure it was nothing, like most of the talk spread about Voidic creatures, but to have something new spotted just as he escaped that tower… He didn’t like to think that the rumors might be about him.

  “As to that, I don’t know. And just the one, so far—Talstalker’s what they call it. But they say he’s as nasty as any of those damned cats he runs with. Maybe that’s where Ilnuk’s goat went to, eh?”

  He looked back hopefully at the corner, but soon gave up.

  “Ah well,” he continued, “always new things popping up on this island, every damn one of them trying to kill goodmen like ourselves.”

  When Wil took another long drink, then said bluntly, “So, you’re a darkie. Haven’t seen many of you.”

  There it is. There it always is. Still, could be worse, he could have started with it. “Yes. Happen to be born that way.”

  “They didn’t spread tar on you as a babe? `Cause that’s what happened to my cousin Nyla’s child. That, or she found herself a darkie to ride.” Wil chortled to himself.