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i_read_whatSo last time, Alec had a miserable time, while Nysander finally reunited with Seregil and Micum.
This time we're back with Alec. And yeah, same content warnings still apply.
We start the chapter with Alec being brought on deck again. Apparently Mardus has changed up the routine - there was no morning walk, for example, and the guards actually gave him some clothing for the first time since his capture: a long tunic.
Alec guesses from the change of motion in the ship that they're probably nearing the coast. When he's brought up to the deck, he can see that he's correct.
He sees something else too: a "plague star" in the horizon. To the Plenimarians, however, it's the "Arm of Seriami." When Alec hears the name, he mutters an Aurenfaie prayer and gets scolded for it.
Thero's on deck too. He also has been given clothes, but he still looks kind of wretched:
Thero moved like a sleepwalker, obeying simple commands, moving when ordered. Otherwise he remained motionless, his expression betraying nothing of what thoughts, if any, were going on within. The seamless iron bands on his wrists glinted softly in the torchlight as he moved, the unreadable characters incised into their burnished surfaces lined black with shadow.
Alec realizes that the bands are likely how Thero's being controlled and tries to think of how to get them off, even as the necromancers are having their own consultation ahead. Their traveling trunks are being brought up and stacked by the rail.
Their journey will continue on land now. Mardus is pretty confident that Thero is restrained and under control, but tells Alec that he's another matter. He promises Alec that escape will be futile.
Alec does consider trying to dive off the ship, but his hands are tied and there are two hundred soldiers on shore. And he'd be leaving Thero alone. Alec isn't sure how much culpability Thero has in everything, and he knows better than to take Thero's mind controlled confession seriously, but he still can't just leave him there.
Things might look up though:
As he neared the rail, he caught sight of something lying half hidden in the shadow of a bulkhead in his path, something he’d long since given up all hope of finding. A nail. Two inches long, square forged and slightly bent with use, it lay in plain view less than five feet from where he stood.
At first, he wonders if it's a test, but when he pretends to stumble and grabs it, no one stops him.
We shift scenes to Beka, who's observing the Plenimarian camp. They see a warship dock, and someone's coming ashore. Is that Alec's ship?
It's running without colors and they don't observe any cargo leaving. Just people. One of Beka's men suggests a quick scouting mission, but Beka vetoes. They're still only fourteen people against a hundred. If the Plenimarians move out the next day, they'll follow.
They note that the Plenimarians won't be leaving by ship though, since they apparently have just set their ship on fire. Yeesh!
--
We switch scenes back to Alec. He's led to his new accommodations:
The following morning Alec’s guards woke him at dawn and led him to an iron cage mounted in the back of a small cart, the sort strolling players used to transport their trained animals. A thick mattress covered the floor of it, and there was a canvas awning over the top, but it still stank faintly of its former occupants.
Thero's there too. He's not tied up, and has been allowed to keep his clothing. To add insult to injury, Ashnazai is just outside of the cave and calls them a "mangy pair of bear cubs." He tells them that he'll be looking after them now.
He wrapped his hands around two of the bars, and Alec saw blue sparks dance over the iron, as if the cage had been struck by lightning. He jumped in alarm, and Ashnazai smiled his thin, unpleasant smile. In the clear light of the morning sun, his skin had a damp, unhealthy look, like the flesh of a toadstool.
“Don’t you fear, dear Alec. My magic won’t hurt you. Not unless you try to get out. And of course, you are far too intelligent to do anything so foolish.”
Still smiling, he walked away. He looked like a winter scarecrow as the wind off the sea tugged at his dusty brown robe. Hatred boiled in Alec’s veins. Never in his life had he wanted so badly to kill a man.
Fun!
Alec sees the smoking remains of the ship in the harbor, which seems to confirm that he and Beka are in the same place! He wonders what happened to the crew. I'm guessing bad things.
The trip is decidedly unpleasant, but Alec does have one thing: that nail. It's a symbol of hope. He can't keep it in his mouth because it's too large (that's what she said...sorry), so he's got it in the folds of his clothing. He's even keeping it a secret from Thero in case the bad guys try to spy via him again.
Night's still pretty hellish. There're not forced to watch the ritual this time, but Alec can still hear the screams. Alec thinks about the past:
Less than a year before, a younger, more innocent Alec had lain awake all night in Asengai’s dungeon, trembling and weeping at every fresh cry that echoed from the torturer’s room.
Weeks of death and torture in Mardus’ company had almost emptied him of such emotion. Pressing his hands over his ears, he drifted into a restless doze with the survivor’s uneasy prayer of relief: This time, at least, it wasn’t me.
It is rather startling to realize how short a time period this has all taken place in. Are there any therapists in Skala? Because I feel like Alec could probably use one.
He has another nightmare - he's in ruins, gripping an arrow shaft. There's the sound of the sea. Eventually there's a thing where he's naked, terrified and unarmed while crouched among corpses. He's doing really well, emotionally speaking!
And the climax:
Soon he caught sight of weird, humped forms moving among the dead. The grunting and snuffling grew louder, closer.
Suddenly something grabbed him from behind in an icy grip, pulling him to his feet. Alec couldn’t turn his head far enough to see what it was, but the putrid stench that rolled off it made him gag.
“Join the feast, boy, ” a gloating, clotted voice whispered close to his ear. Struggling out of that loathsome grasp, Alec whirled to see what the creature was, but there was nothing there.
“Join the feast!” the same voice said again, still behind him no matter how fast he turned.
Stumbling backward, he fell into a heap of bloated corpses. No matter how he struggled he couldn’t get up; every move enmeshed him more in a tangle of flaccid limbs.
Fun!
Actually, it gets even better, because when Alec wakes up...
Hugging his knees miserably, Alec took a deep breath, but the air smelled fouler every moment. “Oh, Alec, I’m so frightened!”
Looking up in amazement, Alec saw Cilia crouched a few feet away. Illuminated by some ghostly inner light, she looked imploringly at him. Ghost or not, he was too relieved to see her whole again to be frightened.
So, yeah...
“Why did you come?” he asked again.
“I had to,” she whispered sadly. “I had to tell you—“
“Tell me what?”
“How much I hate you.”
Her voice was so soft, so gentle, that it took a moment for the import of her words to sink in.
As his heart turned to lead in his chest, she said, “I hate you, Alec. It was your fault, even more than Seregil’s. They saw you, followed you. You led them to us. I’m glad you’re going to die.”
“No! Oh, no, no, no, no.” Scrambling away, Alec flung himself into the farthest corner. “That’s not true!” he cried. “It can’t be true.”
Cilia raised her head slowly, her eyes black hollows in the dim light of the moon. She smiled, and the fetid stench rolled through the cage again. Her smile widened to a grimace, a snarl, a silent scream, then a black arm shot from her mouth, lengthening impossibly as it reached for Alec.
This poor guy.
The figure from his dreams appear to taunt him further. Alec's got the wherewithal to realize this is probably Ashnazai's doing. But the chapter just ends with harsh, mocking laughter.
--
The next chapter takes us back to Seregil, Micum and Nysander. They're journeying forth. Nysander's still pretty weak and fragile, but he's keeping up well.
Seregil's plagued by doubt though. He wonders if Nysander's wrong. If maybe when he'd lost in Oreska, Nysander had already failed. What if they're going in the wrong direction and Alec is being taken somewhere else?
But there's a comet in the sky, and Seregil's scar is acting up, so deep down, he does believe Nysander is right. He is restless though. When the others take a moment to rest, he keeps scouting ahead.
And when he does, he finds something interesting:
lambering over rocks and fallen trees, he braced for another disappointment; an equally promising flash earlier that morning had turned out to be the shoulder blade of an elk. Another had been nothing more than sunlight striking a spring-fed pool. As he came closer, however, he saw that it was a boulder of milky white stone nearly four feet high.
Dropping his pack, he pushed his way through the thicket of leafless bushes and dead fern that partially obscured it.
It was real—a great chunk of white quartz that had no business being in this type of country. He circled it, looking for carvings or marks, then reached down through the dry bracken until his fingers found a small, smooth stone. Pulling it out, he saw that it was a piece of polished black basalt the size and shape of a goose egg. Digging in farther, he found more of the black stones, as well as a tiny clay figure of a woman and an ornament of carved shell.
It's the white rock from Nysander's prophecy. (To be honest, I don't remember this part, but I might have been distracted by the torture porn happening elsewhere.) It definitely brightens everyone's spirit: Nysander's right. They have time and they have hope.
Nysander has them help him to it. It seems to revitalize him. He explains that the stone is old - placed long before the first Hierophant arrived in Plenimar. It's something like a shrine, or a marker. They think the temple must be near.
Unfortunately though, they can't seem to find it. Nysander notes that if they're not finding what they seek, then maybe they're not looking for the right thing. Seregil takes that and runs with it, figuring that it's not a building.
Eventually he finds something:
Seregil lay sprawled on his belly, his arms plunged nearly to the shoulder into one of the long, narrow fissures that ran down the lower ledges to the sea.
“Come see for yourself.” Climbing down, Micum and Nysander knelt and peered into the cleft in the stone.
“Look here,” said Seregil, pushing aside a clump of rock weed. Beneath it, they saw rows of crudely carved symbols cut into the rock six inches below the top of the crack. Moving along on hands and knees, they found that the symbols formed a continuous band spanning both sides of the fissure all the way down to the sea. A second crevice near the other side of the cove was filled with the same sort of carvings.
It's another sacred spot. It has some kind of altar stone, similar to what Micum has seen in the Fens and the feeling is similar to what Seregil felt when he found the crown. It's clearl an ancient site.
Seregil then decides to go to the water. He has Micum hold one end of the rope as he dives in.
He doesn't actually find anything, but he realizes that he's looking at it wrong. The eclipse would occur at mid-day, during an unusually high tide. They do some digging:
“Look, a hole,” he said, showing them a round hole a hand’s span wide bored deep into the stone. Scrabbling along on his knees he soon found another, and then a third.
With the help of the others, he uncovered a total of fourteen of the holes, spaced evenly to form a half circle around a broad, shallow depression in the stone just above the high tide mark.
It was an unremarkable looking spot, littered with driftwood, shells, dried seaweed, and other debris, but both of the mysterious crevices in the rock ran through it.
They realize that at high tide, it will form a basin, which will fill at the same time as the eclipse. Mardus will have a very short time to complete his ritual, which, in conjunction with the comet, will have incredible power.
The chapter ends with this exchange:
“By the Flame!” Micum muttered. “And the three of us are supposed to take on that, with however many Plenimarans thrown in?”
“Four,” Seregil amended darkly, shooting Nysander a pointed look. “When the time comes, there are supposed to be four of us.”
I'm very gratified that Seregil hasn't forgotten about Alec. But, um, Nysander, are you not remotely worried about your apprentice?
Alas.
Anyway, see you next time!
This time we're back with Alec. And yeah, same content warnings still apply.
We start the chapter with Alec being brought on deck again. Apparently Mardus has changed up the routine - there was no morning walk, for example, and the guards actually gave him some clothing for the first time since his capture: a long tunic.
Alec guesses from the change of motion in the ship that they're probably nearing the coast. When he's brought up to the deck, he can see that he's correct.
He sees something else too: a "plague star" in the horizon. To the Plenimarians, however, it's the "Arm of Seriami." When Alec hears the name, he mutters an Aurenfaie prayer and gets scolded for it.
Thero's on deck too. He also has been given clothes, but he still looks kind of wretched:
Thero moved like a sleepwalker, obeying simple commands, moving when ordered. Otherwise he remained motionless, his expression betraying nothing of what thoughts, if any, were going on within. The seamless iron bands on his wrists glinted softly in the torchlight as he moved, the unreadable characters incised into their burnished surfaces lined black with shadow.
Alec realizes that the bands are likely how Thero's being controlled and tries to think of how to get them off, even as the necromancers are having their own consultation ahead. Their traveling trunks are being brought up and stacked by the rail.
Their journey will continue on land now. Mardus is pretty confident that Thero is restrained and under control, but tells Alec that he's another matter. He promises Alec that escape will be futile.
Alec does consider trying to dive off the ship, but his hands are tied and there are two hundred soldiers on shore. And he'd be leaving Thero alone. Alec isn't sure how much culpability Thero has in everything, and he knows better than to take Thero's mind controlled confession seriously, but he still can't just leave him there.
Things might look up though:
As he neared the rail, he caught sight of something lying half hidden in the shadow of a bulkhead in his path, something he’d long since given up all hope of finding. A nail. Two inches long, square forged and slightly bent with use, it lay in plain view less than five feet from where he stood.
At first, he wonders if it's a test, but when he pretends to stumble and grabs it, no one stops him.
We shift scenes to Beka, who's observing the Plenimarian camp. They see a warship dock, and someone's coming ashore. Is that Alec's ship?
It's running without colors and they don't observe any cargo leaving. Just people. One of Beka's men suggests a quick scouting mission, but Beka vetoes. They're still only fourteen people against a hundred. If the Plenimarians move out the next day, they'll follow.
They note that the Plenimarians won't be leaving by ship though, since they apparently have just set their ship on fire. Yeesh!
--
We switch scenes back to Alec. He's led to his new accommodations:
The following morning Alec’s guards woke him at dawn and led him to an iron cage mounted in the back of a small cart, the sort strolling players used to transport their trained animals. A thick mattress covered the floor of it, and there was a canvas awning over the top, but it still stank faintly of its former occupants.
Thero's there too. He's not tied up, and has been allowed to keep his clothing. To add insult to injury, Ashnazai is just outside of the cave and calls them a "mangy pair of bear cubs." He tells them that he'll be looking after them now.
He wrapped his hands around two of the bars, and Alec saw blue sparks dance over the iron, as if the cage had been struck by lightning. He jumped in alarm, and Ashnazai smiled his thin, unpleasant smile. In the clear light of the morning sun, his skin had a damp, unhealthy look, like the flesh of a toadstool.
“Don’t you fear, dear Alec. My magic won’t hurt you. Not unless you try to get out. And of course, you are far too intelligent to do anything so foolish.”
Still smiling, he walked away. He looked like a winter scarecrow as the wind off the sea tugged at his dusty brown robe. Hatred boiled in Alec’s veins. Never in his life had he wanted so badly to kill a man.
Fun!
Alec sees the smoking remains of the ship in the harbor, which seems to confirm that he and Beka are in the same place! He wonders what happened to the crew. I'm guessing bad things.
The trip is decidedly unpleasant, but Alec does have one thing: that nail. It's a symbol of hope. He can't keep it in his mouth because it's too large (that's what she said...sorry), so he's got it in the folds of his clothing. He's even keeping it a secret from Thero in case the bad guys try to spy via him again.
Night's still pretty hellish. There're not forced to watch the ritual this time, but Alec can still hear the screams. Alec thinks about the past:
Less than a year before, a younger, more innocent Alec had lain awake all night in Asengai’s dungeon, trembling and weeping at every fresh cry that echoed from the torturer’s room.
Weeks of death and torture in Mardus’ company had almost emptied him of such emotion. Pressing his hands over his ears, he drifted into a restless doze with the survivor’s uneasy prayer of relief: This time, at least, it wasn’t me.
It is rather startling to realize how short a time period this has all taken place in. Are there any therapists in Skala? Because I feel like Alec could probably use one.
He has another nightmare - he's in ruins, gripping an arrow shaft. There's the sound of the sea. Eventually there's a thing where he's naked, terrified and unarmed while crouched among corpses. He's doing really well, emotionally speaking!
And the climax:
Soon he caught sight of weird, humped forms moving among the dead. The grunting and snuffling grew louder, closer.
Suddenly something grabbed him from behind in an icy grip, pulling him to his feet. Alec couldn’t turn his head far enough to see what it was, but the putrid stench that rolled off it made him gag.
“Join the feast, boy, ” a gloating, clotted voice whispered close to his ear. Struggling out of that loathsome grasp, Alec whirled to see what the creature was, but there was nothing there.
“Join the feast!” the same voice said again, still behind him no matter how fast he turned.
Stumbling backward, he fell into a heap of bloated corpses. No matter how he struggled he couldn’t get up; every move enmeshed him more in a tangle of flaccid limbs.
Fun!
Actually, it gets even better, because when Alec wakes up...
Hugging his knees miserably, Alec took a deep breath, but the air smelled fouler every moment. “Oh, Alec, I’m so frightened!”
Looking up in amazement, Alec saw Cilia crouched a few feet away. Illuminated by some ghostly inner light, she looked imploringly at him. Ghost or not, he was too relieved to see her whole again to be frightened.
So, yeah...
“Why did you come?” he asked again.
“I had to,” she whispered sadly. “I had to tell you—“
“Tell me what?”
“How much I hate you.”
Her voice was so soft, so gentle, that it took a moment for the import of her words to sink in.
As his heart turned to lead in his chest, she said, “I hate you, Alec. It was your fault, even more than Seregil’s. They saw you, followed you. You led them to us. I’m glad you’re going to die.”
“No! Oh, no, no, no, no.” Scrambling away, Alec flung himself into the farthest corner. “That’s not true!” he cried. “It can’t be true.”
Cilia raised her head slowly, her eyes black hollows in the dim light of the moon. She smiled, and the fetid stench rolled through the cage again. Her smile widened to a grimace, a snarl, a silent scream, then a black arm shot from her mouth, lengthening impossibly as it reached for Alec.
This poor guy.
The figure from his dreams appear to taunt him further. Alec's got the wherewithal to realize this is probably Ashnazai's doing. But the chapter just ends with harsh, mocking laughter.
--
The next chapter takes us back to Seregil, Micum and Nysander. They're journeying forth. Nysander's still pretty weak and fragile, but he's keeping up well.
Seregil's plagued by doubt though. He wonders if Nysander's wrong. If maybe when he'd lost in Oreska, Nysander had already failed. What if they're going in the wrong direction and Alec is being taken somewhere else?
But there's a comet in the sky, and Seregil's scar is acting up, so deep down, he does believe Nysander is right. He is restless though. When the others take a moment to rest, he keeps scouting ahead.
And when he does, he finds something interesting:
lambering over rocks and fallen trees, he braced for another disappointment; an equally promising flash earlier that morning had turned out to be the shoulder blade of an elk. Another had been nothing more than sunlight striking a spring-fed pool. As he came closer, however, he saw that it was a boulder of milky white stone nearly four feet high.
Dropping his pack, he pushed his way through the thicket of leafless bushes and dead fern that partially obscured it.
It was real—a great chunk of white quartz that had no business being in this type of country. He circled it, looking for carvings or marks, then reached down through the dry bracken until his fingers found a small, smooth stone. Pulling it out, he saw that it was a piece of polished black basalt the size and shape of a goose egg. Digging in farther, he found more of the black stones, as well as a tiny clay figure of a woman and an ornament of carved shell.
It's the white rock from Nysander's prophecy. (To be honest, I don't remember this part, but I might have been distracted by the torture porn happening elsewhere.) It definitely brightens everyone's spirit: Nysander's right. They have time and they have hope.
Nysander has them help him to it. It seems to revitalize him. He explains that the stone is old - placed long before the first Hierophant arrived in Plenimar. It's something like a shrine, or a marker. They think the temple must be near.
Unfortunately though, they can't seem to find it. Nysander notes that if they're not finding what they seek, then maybe they're not looking for the right thing. Seregil takes that and runs with it, figuring that it's not a building.
Eventually he finds something:
Seregil lay sprawled on his belly, his arms plunged nearly to the shoulder into one of the long, narrow fissures that ran down the lower ledges to the sea.
“Come see for yourself.” Climbing down, Micum and Nysander knelt and peered into the cleft in the stone.
“Look here,” said Seregil, pushing aside a clump of rock weed. Beneath it, they saw rows of crudely carved symbols cut into the rock six inches below the top of the crack. Moving along on hands and knees, they found that the symbols formed a continuous band spanning both sides of the fissure all the way down to the sea. A second crevice near the other side of the cove was filled with the same sort of carvings.
It's another sacred spot. It has some kind of altar stone, similar to what Micum has seen in the Fens and the feeling is similar to what Seregil felt when he found the crown. It's clearl an ancient site.
Seregil then decides to go to the water. He has Micum hold one end of the rope as he dives in.
He doesn't actually find anything, but he realizes that he's looking at it wrong. The eclipse would occur at mid-day, during an unusually high tide. They do some digging:
“Look, a hole,” he said, showing them a round hole a hand’s span wide bored deep into the stone. Scrabbling along on his knees he soon found another, and then a third.
With the help of the others, he uncovered a total of fourteen of the holes, spaced evenly to form a half circle around a broad, shallow depression in the stone just above the high tide mark.
It was an unremarkable looking spot, littered with driftwood, shells, dried seaweed, and other debris, but both of the mysterious crevices in the rock ran through it.
They realize that at high tide, it will form a basin, which will fill at the same time as the eclipse. Mardus will have a very short time to complete his ritual, which, in conjunction with the comet, will have incredible power.
The chapter ends with this exchange:
“By the Flame!” Micum muttered. “And the three of us are supposed to take on that, with however many Plenimarans thrown in?”
“Four,” Seregil amended darkly, shooting Nysander a pointed look. “When the time comes, there are supposed to be four of us.”
I'm very gratified that Seregil hasn't forgotten about Alec. But, um, Nysander, are you not remotely worried about your apprentice?
Alas.
Anyway, see you next time!