The kitchen was a letdown compared to the rest of the library. It was more modern, with a wood burning stove of recent make (though what else would one expect in a nation known for its metalwork) and cupboards full of not only dried goods, but jars of pickled vegetables and cheese floating in brine. Rose discovered this when the man in the blue robes (Prys, who she assumed had put the whammy on her), was asked to plate up some snacks. Cheese, dried cherries, and pickled olives. Senan, who joined them from the hallway and for some reason introduced himself, also brought a very mild hard cider to the table. The alcohol was more for preservation, she suspected, than for fun. But it would also help her refresh her focus and wash away some of the strain she had suffered during the infiltration. She needed some clarity right now if she were to make sense of this madness.
Still no sign of the woman from the library. Stinky – she decided that he was a little older than she had originally thought. Maybe seventeen? But soft – hovered behind the old woman a ways, still looking a little upset about the blast, but mostly now looking curious, much as the rest of them were. All except the old woman – well, it wasn’t fair to call her old. She can’t have been much older than fifty. Or, rather, she didn’t look older than fifty. She was a mage, so Rose supposed she could be old as tree roots and who would know?
“What’s your name?” asked the woman after a bite of cheese and a sip of the cider.
“Rose Pew.” Why the hell did she tell them her surname? What good would that possibly do? Stupid!
“Rose Pew, I’m Ellen.” See? She didn’t give her surname. “Pew. Farhold name. You from Farhold? More importantly, your mother was taken from Farhold?”
“She was. Oxham, if you’ve heard of it.”
“I haven’t, but unlike you, I’m not from here. I’m from across the river, originally.” she said it with a little flourish of her fingers, as if to say, ‘where the magic folk come from.’ “But, lucky for you, we might have a map or two about somewhere.” She paused, watching Rose. Senan was watching Rose. Prys was watching Rose. Even Stinky was watching Rose. Still no woman in blue.
“I told you almost everything I know. Whoever the man was, he has my mother. A close friend saw what happened. He came to our house talking about her blood. He burned that mark into the hearth and took my mother out with him. My friend – he’s a hunter. He stayed hidden, but he saw the whole thing. He sent it to me with a Post scout.”
“The Post are quite resourceful,” said Senan, interrupting. When the woman looked at him, he wilted, saying, “my cousin apprenticed is all” with a rush before taking a step back and lowering his gaze.
“Right. Anyway, a few weeks ago some doe eared elf finds me in the mountains and made a show of how tracking me down was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to her. She gives me the letter and scampers off without so much as asking for a bite to eat. The man wore a red mask and had the sigil from that book on his shoulders. I knew what direction he went, and I followed. They were in Hammerhold about a week ago, but that place creeps me out. Anyway, the markings on his shoulders aren’t anything I’ve seen the Low Folk use, so I don’t think that’s where he’s headed. So I was hoping the book would tell me where’s going or who is he and where people like him hang out so I can find her.” Rose stopped herself saying more, not that there was more to say. But she felt like explaining herself further. The woman had that effect.
Ellen watched her. She took a deep breath and sighed. “So that’s your plan? Steal our book, use it to find your mother, and then, what? Convince this man to give her back? Kill him? Maybe replace your mother with a cabbage when he’s not looking?”
Rose started. She did not, of course, have a plan beyond this night, but… “Something like that, yeah.” When Ellen gave her a level look, she continued, “Look, the plan depends pretty heavily on what the book says, right?”
In response, Ellen took out the aforementioned book and began to read, looking down over top of her glasses. She seemed to take her fucking time with it, stopping several times to nibble dried fruit or sip cider. “Well, it isn’t much to go on, but I’ll give you what I have here. Providing you tell me the truth about how you got the information.”
Rose froze. How the shit did she do that? She turned that fear into anger, or at least fake anger. “Look, lady, if you don’t want to help me -”
“I didn’t say that. In fact, I rather think I’d like to give you the information, but I can’t do that unless I have facts and the fact is that no hunter gave you a description of a magical sigil by way of an elf from the Post good enough to cross reference in our library. So how did you get it?” She watched Rose with a patient face, as if she had all the time in the world. Which, okay, probably she did. And Rose didn’t. Rose was already losing her race. Fuck.
“My friend the Hunter saw some of it, but not enough. I did get the message from the Post. So I asked a …. there’s a woman. She can see things. Things that happened. Like in dreams. I had her look.” Rose watched Ellen’s face. It was shifting, but slowly. “She saw the man barge in and take my ma. It was morning. We live outside the village by a good bit. Small farm. He said some shit about her blood, though. He said,” Rose paused, to swallow. And then had a drink, more for the mild alcohol taste than for the wet and said, “He said they were going to wake up god.”
Rose thought back to the night Lavender had shared the vision with her. The tall man, shaved to the skin with the mask draping his left side. What he’d actually said was, “How lucky you are, that your blood has a small part to play as I wake God. It will be glorious.” The look in the one eye Rose could see had been so sure. Manic. Heartless.
Ellen watched her closely for a good while. Eventually she set down the book and said, “Yes, I believe that’s close enough for my purposes. Your quarry is a member of the Sundered Countenance, a little known cult mostly from the north coast. They’re death worshippers, and like most cultists their god is probably slumbering. Significantly easier to run a cult to a sleeping god. They’re less demanding, I imagine. At any rate, he probably wore a mask to cover up the mess that his face would be. They flay the flesh from half their faces, the Sundered. I imagine it’s some sort of mystical focus. Unfortunately for you, the book doesn’t go into much detail about their locations. The author, I’m afraid, was a bit of a coward. A lot of what’s in there is hearsay or interview material.”
Rose sank into her chair like a sack of beans. So that was it. She’d broken into one of the most dangerous places in Port Oramar and for basically nothing. She had a name and a description that included the words ‘half a face’. Not even a direction. “Well, fuck.” And, of course, now was probably when the guards would show up. That’s probably where the other woman had gone, she realized with alarm, sitting up straight. “Shit. You sent her to fetch the guards, didn’t you!” Rose wheeled herself backwards, looking for exits and likely foreheads to blast.
Ellen blinked at this sudden movement but made no other moves. She did, however, sigh deeply and roll her grey eyes up into her head. When they finished their revolution, she looked at the men and said, a bit put out, “Any idea who she’s talking about?”
The dark man in blue robes – Prys she’d called him – cleared his throat. “I may have crafted an illusion to distract her in the library, ma’am. A woman.” Rose stared at the man and didn’t notice for a moment that her mouth was hanging open. He shrugged, apologetically.
Ellen smiled and relaxed. “Calm down, girl. Nobody’s called the guard. It’s just the four of us here and for crying out loud, stop preparing whatever magic it is you’re preparing, I recognize that look, you know. We are not your enemy. If I wanted to turn you over to the guard, I’d have done it already. And if I thought you were a threat to us…” She left that thought unfinished. Was that because she didn’t want to scare Rose or because she wasn’t sure what she’d have done? In either case, she was right, and Rose was being paranoid.
She forced her gaze, and her focus, away from the woman and took a slow breath. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m … well, this is a tense situation, right? And to be honest, I’m not used to dealing with people who …” Rose wasn’t sure how to finish that, but Ellen did it for her.
“Tell the truth?”
“Look, I’m sorry I broke in. I’m sorry, I busted Stinky’s nose.” (she faintly noted Stinky looking offended, but she was already going) “I’m sorry I tried to steal your book, and I’m especially sorry that you couldn’t help me anyway. I won’t bother you anymore.”
Rose started to push herself towards the door, but before she could get more than a few feet, Ellen let out what sounded like an honest laugh. “Girl, for someone who needs our help you sure are desperate not to get it. Turn around and eat some apricots. Sky Mother, girl, where do you think you are? You found one book. This is a library. Give us some time to research and we’ll see what’s what.”
Turns out that ‘some time’ was six hours. It was well past sunrise when Ellen called for her and Rose had certainly NOT been sleeping in the kitchen, she’d just closed her eyes for a few minutes. “I’ve got you a location,” said Ellen while handing Rose a bowl of buck oat porridge.
“North of Thuung in the Blood Mountains, there’s an old pass. It used to be how the Dwarves traveled from Thuung to Kaldun, before the fall of Kaldun. Kaldun fell to mad cultists, mostly lead by the Sundered Countenance. The city itself was caved in, rather than let cultists take it, but the Matriarch’s had a village for their clergy near their ancestral catacomb. Some of those ancestors were removed before the city fell, but there’s references in those journals to the cultists and their slumbering god there. I can’t speak to what happened after. It’s not like they update the broadsheets.”
Rose took that in. It was a lot. Thuung was far and, being the last of the Dwarvish strongholds, crammed full of dwarves. Rose couldn’t speak the language; she didn’t have any of their currency and she knew next to nothing of their cultural practices. She was also pretty sure they ate rocks, and she wasn’t sure if they sold human food there. Nothing a little luck and starvation couldn’t solve. “Look, I don’t know how to thank you for this -”
Ellen cut her off. “With access to the tomb, of course.”
“What?”
“Looks, Rose. This is a magical library. The dwarves, being dwarves, would have locked a lot of their best magical secrets away with their sacred dead. If those secrets still exist, you’re going to one of the only places they’ll be unguarded. Well, unguarded after you sort out the cultists. So, you’ll go. Emrys will go with you, for both your protection and my information. I can get you as far as Thuung by boat, after that you’re on your own, but it’ll only be a few days north from there and if this man is on foot, you’ll be making much better time on the water. I can help you recover any time you lost.”
Rose wasn’t sure she’d heard the woman correctly at first. As the content of what she’d said sunk in, she found herself with a dozen questions regarding their needs, her plan, the cost of all this nonsense, and when she opened her mouth to ask one of them what came out was, “Who the hell is Emrys?”
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