Chapter-3-2

⁠—⁠—⁠— II ⁠—⁠—⁠—

For a while it was all the Mongauli captains could do to simply remain standing as they looked at the man Amnelis called “Cal Moru.” The face that weighty hood had lifted to reveal was freakish and cruel—a horrid thing that no man would care to look upon twice. It was not merely ugly; it was the face of a living corpse, only, more horrible still—a skull plastered with a thin, baked leaf of skin. Only a few teeth remained clinging to the thin gums that jutted from the crack that must have been the mouth. Yet in that visage of death, the eyes, set in sunken sockets, shone with a terrible brightness.

Is it human? The thought came unbidden to the captains’ minds once those minds began to work again. How can this be? But this man was no victim of the black death, that they could see. The skin of one afflicted with that disease drooped in folds like wet, melted wax, but this one’s skin was dry, as though all the blood had been drained centuries past.

It was impossible to tell what that bizarre face might have looked like before the unknown, terrible events that had made it look as it now did. And his eyes! They shone in the dim light of the pavilion, returning the stares of the captains as though the mind behind them were not the least bit aware of the terror that gaze would cause in any sane man. After a while, Amnelis decided the captains had seen enough, and on her signal, the man slowly replaced his deep hood and concealed the dreadful sight.

The spell on the captains was released, and they woke from their stupor and breathed sighs of relief. There was something in Cal Moru’s face that had caused them to tremble and fear for their very souls, perhaps because to look on that face was to wonder what possible chain of events could have changed a human—if, indeed, he had ever been human—into something so alien.

“Cal Moru comes from the land of Kitai, in the east.” Whether she had become used to the sight of his face, or whether there was something unshakeable in her nature, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the archduke spoke without a trace of the horror that still lurked in the captains’ minds. “As a young spellcaster, eager to master the high secrets of his art, Cal Moru was consumed by a desire to meet the legendary magus, Agrippa, and become his disciple. Is that not so?”

The creature gently nodded his head, a motion barely visible within the heavy folds of the hood.

“Agrippa?!” stammered Viscount Leegan. “But Agrippa is said to have been born many thousands, no, tens of thousands of years ago. Yes, they do say he lives an eternity, but there are none who really believe that!”

“But, Leegan,” said Amnelis, raising her hands like an oracle about to deliver a revelation from the gods, “Cal Moru did. And that is not all—he believed he had proof. That proof is something that only spellcasters might comprehend, and so I will not speak of it now. Suffice it to say that Cal Moru had heard that the legendary Agrippa was alive somewhere in this world, working his secret alchemy, and so he left his homeland of Kitai to find him.

“He thought the lost sage would most likely be found in the Kanan Mountains, and so he explored the peaks and looked for signs of the ancient empire of Kanan. But there he found nothing, and so he continued on to the barren wastelands of Nospherus.”

The captains listened, holding their breath. The story she was telling was surely nothing more than a fairy tale! Yet the captains did not have the luxury of disbelieving, for they could see Cal Moru right there before them.

“Of course,” said Amnelis, “for a man to cross the wastes of Nospherus and emerge alive is not something many of us think possible, not even in a dream. However, Cal Moru is no ordinary man. He is a spellcaster. He knows many secret arts, and at the time he was a strong, young man—far stronger than any of us here.” At this the captains cast dubious glances in the direction of the living corpse, thankfully still hidden in his robes.

“And Cal Moru was blessed by good luck,” Amnelis went on, once again drawing looks from the captains. “Unafraid of the wastes, he walked over great and terrible distances, and walked, and walked.”

“Allow me to tell the story that follows, if I may,” a voice sounded suddenly from beneath the hood, and the captains froze. It did not seem possible that this living corpse could speak, yet speak it did. Cal Moru’s voice, issuing from the lipless crack of his mouth, was low and ragged. It was like a wind blowing through long-abandoned ruins.

“I walked,” came the dry and evil-sounding voice. “Even were I a caster of considerable skill in the arts, to cross Nospherus would be no easy task. In the forbidden black magicks, there is an ancient art that allows one to warp the very fabric of space and time to one’s liking, but I had not that art. I had to walk on my own weary feet and thus seek out the hiding place of the great Agrippa.

“So I walked. I battled with the sand leeches, and I scraped off the vampiric sand moss where it grew on my boots and the hem of my robes, and I hastily diverted my course when I happened upon the village of the Lagon barbarians. I walked for what seemed an eternity but was in fact several months, trekking through the endless rocks and sand in my search.

“I did not lack for food or drink, for even a humble spell-caster such as myself knows the arts of creating nourishment from nothing, and of floating in the air to sleep in safety. As I walked, I learned something about this land of Nospherus, something that sets this place apart. The people of my country call this a land forsaken by the gods, and what I saw made me agree, for all the plants and animals of this place have monstrous forms. Nothing is natural. It is as if the entire region had been brought here from another star, so alien is this land.

“Because spellcasters study the ways of plants and animals, I understood how unnatural these things that I saw were. This served to strengthen my certainty that, were the great Agrippa truly alive, such would be the place he would choose in which to conduct his experiments. As evidence that I drew close to him, I had noticed that the otherworldly air of Nospherus—the miasma of this place—had clouded the crystal sphere I had brought with me on my journey. Try as I might, I could not clear it.

“Then, when I woke up one morning, I found that my sphere had gone jet black, and the moment I reached out my fingers to touch it, it fell to the ground and shattered. Then, to my further surprise, the pieces evaporated, leaving not one trace!”

No one in the pavilion uttered a word. Even Amnelis, who surely had heard this story many times before, was quiet. She listened intently, as though not wanting to miss a single detail.

“Rather than take the event as an ill omen,” continued Cal Moru, his voice even and calm, “I felt that it was a sign that I was close to the great Agrippa for whom I searched. Agrippa had learned his arts from the ancient ones, the old gods—and thus his arts were anathema to Janos and his pantheon. My sphere had touched this ancient power, and that was why it broke, I reasoned. In truth, for several days I had been feeling an unusually strong presence, an otherworldly spirit in the air. As I progressed on my journey, the feeling only became stronger. With my spellcaster’s senses, I felt as if I were walking into a waterfall of keening noise, shining light, and overpowering smell. This, I thought, this is the miasma of Agrippa, for none other than Agrippa—not even the demon-god Doal himself— could exude such a strong presence in all the four directions. It was something that had no connection with the pattern of life and magic in this world.

“Like a moth drawn to a flame, I continued walking on towards the center of that miasma. And then, one morning…”

Cal Moru paused. Briefly he appeared to rest beneath his hood. A few tense moments passed in silence before, just as suddenly, he resumed his tale.

“One morning, I noticed a distinct change in the scenery around me. I had reached an otherworldly place, remarkable even here in the wastes of Nospherus, this land outside the domain of man which is, itself, called a place of death, and is populated by wildling barbarians and all manners of monstrosities. The place I had entered was verily a valley of death, a land made of bones that lay in a blanket of ghostly white—surely the design of some fickle demon. No, to call it a valley of death would cheapen it. It was not a place that could be described in the language we speak, or any other the human tongue is equipped to utter.

“The bones under my feet were a mottled white and gray, and very brittle. They crunched and crinkled when I walked upon them, sending up clouds of gray ash. I looked down at my feet—and then I realized: this land, this bone, was once as alive as I was. In the end, all of us are naught but bones, bones, and more bones. And among those bones lying there I saw something like the rib of a gigantic ancient beast, sticking straight up towards the sky as though it still begrudged the life that had been taken from it. And I could make out smaller bones, human-like, probably once belonging to the Sem.

“They were all so very brittle, so white, and—” Here Cal Moru gasped, remembering what it had been like to stand in that place, and the startled captains gasped in turn. “I realized that what I was standing on was a field of bone, and beyond it I could see a bone forest, a bone jungle, a bone island floating on a bone sea! And nowhere was there anything moving, anything alive. It was as though death had taken shape and appeared before me and I knew then the color of death. It is white and ashen gray.

“I remember that I stood there, speechless, my thoughts forming slowly as though I were in a dream. How can this be? I asked. This is not the work of Agrippa! Though Agrippa is a man of legend and believed in the ancient gods, still he is human! But this, this was not something that could be wrought by a man. No human being from any time or any land I knew of could even think of creating such a thing. It was not possible. Even I, a spellcaster of some standing who had participated in the secret rites of black magic and feared nothing, was stricken. The death I saw there was so terrible and so incomprehensible that it threatened to plunge me into an abject terror deep beyond all deepness in which I feared I would forget myself and lose my mind.

“For a while, my self-control and my power of reason quailed to uselessness. When I came to my senses, I was on my knees, scooping up handfuls of the dry, brittle bone in my hands. I do not know what process those bones had endured, but all it took was the slightest touch—they would shatter and scatter in the wind. I could not say what kind of spell, what overwhelming magic had transformed this place into a hell on our earth. Suddenly a burning need to know filled me, and I found myself walking toward the center of the valley. It was easy enough to find my way, for all the bones as they lay on the ground were pointing in one direction and I knew this had to be toward the heart of the place.

“I did not know why, but my body felt incredibly heavy, as though it were filled with lead, and my throat became painfully parched. I could feel all the strength leaving my body. Yet I did not wonder at these things, for my mind had long since ceased all rational thought, and my soul was locked in a nightmare. I had no power to feel, no strength to suspect—all of that, was lost to me. I had forgotten who I was…

“I staggered on, crushing the bones beneath my feet, until I looked upon what I knew to be the center of the valley. There, to my surprise, was nothing of the kind I expected—no palace of Agrippa, no gaping hell-chasm out of which noxious vapors spewed. All that was there was a large rock. But this rock—it was an ugly, misshapen thing, pitted with pockmarks.

“Why? I thought, or thought I thought, deep in my paralyzed and terribly heavy brain. How could this rock—this entirely ordinary rock—turn the surrounding land, three tads in all directions, into a valley of death, a forest of bone? It was as though thousands of creatures had been drawn there, to a stone, and approaching it had perished, leaving their skeletons facing the center of the valley as evidence of their fatal endeavor. The bones to the north lay facing south, and those to the south lay facing north, in a great circle around that stone.

“This is no ordinary rock, I thought, no ordinary thing! This rock hides some terrible, dark secret! Then, foolishly—perhaps it was because of the paralysis that gripped my brain and made me forget all caution, all instinct—I stretched out my hand and touched a piece of that rock.

“I do not know if you can believe me, but when I laid my hand upon that rock, I felt a strange sensation in my fingers. I stood there dumbfounded and looked at my hand. Or rather, I should say, looked at where my hand had been. Before my eyes, the flesh on my fingers eroded and evaporated into thin air. In the blink of an eye, my hand crumbled down to bone, leaving no trace of living flesh beyond my wrist.”

Cal Moru thrust his right hand out from underneath his cloak. The captains averted their eyes, for his hand, from the wrist to the tips of his fingers, was nothing but bones.

“Oddly enough,” the scarred spellcaster continued, “I felt no pain. That is to say, it happened so fast I did not have time to feel pain. Stupefied by these events, I stared up into the sky. Bone ash danced higher and higher above me, and it was as though even the wheel of the sun was wrapped in a veil of pallid cinders. Then I saw something black rip through the white veil that obscured my vision. It was a lone desert crow. It flew through the miasmal air over that valley of death as though naught were amiss, until, suddenly, it began to dive, flapping its wings. Then it fell like a stone.

“The crow fell toward that circle at the base of the rock, no wider than a single pace, where there was no bone, as though all the skeletons had made a wordless pact not to approach any closer. There, the bare ground was made of iron sand the color of blood. Then, the very instant the crow fell, there was a whooshing sound, and the bird simply… evaporated, leaving no trace that anything ever living had been there—just as my right hand had lost all life.

“The life-killing stone… the valley of the life-killing stone, Gur Nuu! The words ran through my head. Then a thought formed, powerful, at the nethermost layer of my consciousness: I had to escape the place.

“There is something I should explain before I go on,” croaked Cal Moru. “We spellcasters are not entirely human, you see. The trainings and processes we undergo to make our bodies suitable for channeling the elements of our trade change our very nature and structure. Our flesh becomes more spiritual, much deeper than ordinary flesh, and in response our spirit becomes more flesh-like and takes on physical form. In this way, we are able to change our shapes into those of other things, and our bodies become better attuned to the many and various energies of the universe.

“If this had not been the case, then I can only surmise that, had I been only foolish enough to come within a few hundred motad of that stone, its miasma would still have grasped my life and taken it from me, as it had done to the other beasts that had met their end in that valley. Even for one such as me, a spellcaster, standing there for a twist had taken its toll. My sanity was waning, and the strength had left my body. I felt that, if the wind blew up, I would crumble. I wanted to lie down, but I knew that doing that would seal my fate—the bitter lesson of my right hand had taught me that.

“I do not know how I lived to escape Gur Nuu, nor what strength of will and spirit carried me to its edge, for during that trek my mind reeled as though I were intoxicated. I remember nothing of my escape. When I came to my senses, I was lying in the middle of the familiar rock and sand of Nospherus. My soul had reached the limits of its endurance, and I had fallen. I say, I do not know how I escaped from that hell. Perhaps I did not survive, I thought back then, and I was no more than a wandering ghost; I had no way of confirming this one way or another. My thoughts were filled with pain, and I think I went mad. One thing I was sure of was that all my humanity had abandoned me. I was a shell, a cursed husk of a man.

“I walked on unsteady legs, and no matter how far I went, the barren scenery did not change. For a time I feared that, after my encounter with the stone, it had spread its miasma throughout the world, making every land into a soulless place, killing all life. There was nothing growing and I could sense nothing alive.

“I remember once that a kind Sem called to me. He called to me in that high-pitched voice of their kind, asking if I needed help. I was filled with joy that there was still life, and the world had not ended, and for the first time I felt a burning thirst in my throat. But when I lifted my head, revealing my face… the Sem ran away, leaving only a scream of terror.

“I suspiciously thrust out the skeletal remains of my hand into the glazed pot the Sem had dropped when he ran, and I praised the gods, for it was water. But when I looked at the surface of the water I completely forgot about my parched throat, and stared hard and unblinkingly at what I saw there. All the flesh that could be called flesh had burned and melted away from my face, and it had become as you saw it just now—a living skull—inhabited only by my swollen tongue, thrusting out painfully from between my jaws, and by my two eyes open in eternal terror, never to close again. And so I became a living corpse, returned from hell itself.”

The captains of Mongaul were speechless.

“Cal Moru made his way to the Kes River,” said Amnelis. “There, he was rescued by settlers.” The general’s voice, high and clear, blew like a breeze through the pavilion, sweeping away the chill that had frozen the men in place. “The settlers feared that Cal Moru carried a contagious disease, but when they heard his story, they quietly handed him over to the Marches patrol. Word of his adventure passed through them on to Torus, and that is why we are now here.”

Amnelis related this with a finality that made it clear to the captains that she intended them to learn no more. She brusquely dismissed them with orders to begin the march again in two twists’ time. None of the captains felt any need to ask questions. They were utterly astonished by the tale; without a word more, they exited from the lady-general’s pavilion, glad to be outside.

Only the lady-general herself, Gajus Runecaster, the mysterious Cal Moru, and one other remained inside.

“What is it, Count Marus?” Amnelis asked, turning a cold glare at the noble. Marus was quite old, but he was in no way decrepit. His face was stern and drawn, a warrior’s face, and it was clouded with concern for the lady over whom he had watched ever since she was born.

“So, this is the reason why the Golden Scorpion Palace moves into Nospherus with the speed of spreading flame?” he asked in a low voice, moving around the table to stand next to the general.

“What are you trying to say, Uncle? You think the Palace acts unwisely?” Amnelis flared.

“If I may be so bold,” said Count Marus, a flicker of deep unease in his eyes, “I have not felt at ease ever since the orphans of Parros escaped. As you know, we all have orders to find and capture them.”

“We have not given up our search for the twins, nor our efforts to divine the secrets of the device that allowed them to escape the crystal city.” Amnelis’ beautiful face was twisted by a bitter look of frustration. She remembered the little girl Rinda, a princess without a country, and how she had stood before her in defiance, heedless that Amnelis was the general of a mighty army. “In any case we can assume they’ve holed up in some Sem village, or have met their end in these wastelands, Either is acceptable—what matters is that their secrets do not pass to another country. If we do capture the twins of Parros, we will drag those secrets out into the light, whatever means we must use to do so. None of that, however, eclipses the importance of what Cal Moru has found. Or do you disagree with the Golden Scorpion Palace?”

Amnelis paced as she continued, “Right now, both these secrets are firmly in our hands. No country but Mongaul has claim to them. And once we have grasped these mysteries—the mystery of the transportation device and the mystery of the rock that kills all it touches—Mongaul can conquer the other two archduchies, and even the whole of the Middle Country.” She smiled, a cold smile that froze Count Marus’ heart. “And why stop there?” the young general added, more to herself than to him. “Why not rule the world?”

“Amnelis, Amnelis!” said the count, entirely forgetting he had been forbidden the use of her name. “I… have a horrible feeling about this. Nothing good can come from possessing a weapon of that power! This is beyond the ken of humans! It is Doal’s work, this thing that would curse anything it touches. It has to be.”

“If you believe that, then you are a fool,” Amnelis snorted. “A weapon is merely a weapon, nothing more. What matters is how you use it.” She smiled at him without warmth. Then, in a tired voice, she declared that it was time for her to sleep in preparation for the next leg of the march.

That was Count Marus’ signal to leave, and, bowing curtly, he stepped out of the pavilion. But his face held a look of great anxiety. “Weapons use people, too, sweet Amnelis,” he said to the morning sun. “You are young… too young!”

The only answer from the pavilion was silence.