Covered mostly in salt and birdlime, the coastal village of Rye was worse than repugnant. Christopher honestly couldn’t think of a word awful enough to describe it. An hour’s ride south and west of Castle Dulgath, its shacks sat on a beach and looked like wreckage washed up in a storm. Their front yards were tiny slivers of seaweed-strewn sand covered by upturned hulls of little battered boats. Buoys, ratty nets, and snapped branches were heaped in piles. Leather-skinned villagers squatted over smoking campfires, dressed in little more than loincloths. Christopher had asked Knox to find someone unassociated with Castle Dulgath to do the deed but hadn’t expected the necessity to visit another world in the process.
Christopher Fawkes couldn’t claim to be well traveled. While he’d been to the major cities of Maranon, that wouldn’t be considered worldly for a baron. Then again, Christopher Fawkes wasn’t a baron. His father held that title. Christopher was instead the worthless fourth son, but like any contemptible child of a middling noble, he used his father’s title to open doors. Most people never questioned him. This never pleased his father, but then nothing did—at least nothing Christopher ever did. His mother agreed with her husband, as a smart wife of a despot should. Christopher’s brothers and sisters—of which he had six—followed suit in their opinions of him. This didn’t surprise Christopher; siblings in a noble household were, by nature, mortal enemies.
The only surprising hostility Christopher faced had come from his previous horse. The mare had tried to bite him every chance she got. He’d named the horse Melanie de Burke after a woman at court; she was a gorgeous and expensive purebred Renallian. He’d once loved Melanie de Burke—the woman—but he was certain she still didn’t know he existed. Melanie de Burke—the horse and biter—had been dead three years. He’d killed her—the horse, that is—and that singular act had ruined his life. As he thought about it, had he killed Melanie de Burke—the woman—he might have fared better. Such was the insanity of life in Maranon, and the reason he so appreciated Immaculate.
How far have my standards fallen when my love and loyalty are won by an animal that simply doesn’t bite me?
“Are you certain you found someone suitable here?” Christopher asked, getting down from the wagon and scanning the desolate encampment.
This is how the natives in the dark recesses of Calis live. At least he imagined so. He hadn’t been there, either.
“You’ll see,” Knox said with a grin.
Christopher didn’t like the man’s smile, something sinister in it. It had that I-know-something-you-don’t-know look about it. Noting the nick still in the leather collar of Knox’s gambeson, Christopher had to wonder if the sheriff might be plotting a little payback.
Lord Fawkes helped Rissa Lyn down from the wagon and shook his head, pretending that she could understand the million-and-one things that the shake was meant to convey. She didn’t, of course.
How can she?
Her home was likely someplace quite like this, a backwater assortment of listing hovels whose inhabitants shared their beds with their goats and pigs to save their livestock from wolf packs and big cats. She did look adequately apprehensive of the strange world Knox had brought them to, but then she’d looked like that from the start. Handmaidens didn’t normally go off on adventures with lords and provincial sheriffs, and that expression of wide-eyed shock, held in check by a surprisingly resolute determination, was still on her face.
Christopher followed Knox to the beach, and his feet sank into the hot sand just inches from where the surf smoothed everything out with its constant pawing. A wave rushed in, reached out, then receded before him, leaving a residue of white bubbles and green tubular plants. He looked at the waves and at the gray line of the horizon.
This is the end of the world.
Well, not quite. The Isle of Neil could be seen as a line of darkness on the water, as well as the Point of Mann, the strait known to eat ships. Beyond them was the Westerlins, but no civilization. Not a single city, town, hamlet, or village lay to the west of where he stood. This was the end of the known world.
So what is out there?
He’d heard the same stories everyone had about the Westerlins, rumored to be populated by an odd assortment of deformed people. One race supposedly had one large foot—so big that if it rained they could lie on their backs and shelter in the shadow of it. There were also monstrous single-breasted women, and men with the heads of dogs, and others with no heads at all, their faces in their chests. These things, along with dragons, giants, trolls, and ogres, were said to roam that distant shore, where the sun went to sleep each night. In that darkness, no other light would be seen; there was no sound of music or lilt of laughter.
Staring across those waves, Christopher felt a terrible unease, a sense of impending doom, a desire to retreat from the edge of a cliff or the rim of a fire.
What kind of people could live here so close to oblivion?
“That’s him; that’s Shervin Gerami,” Knox said, pointing at a man on the far side of the boats. The man sat cross-legged, fussing with the strands of a net before a particularly strange hut fashioned out of pale twigs. He was bald, and the afternoon sun glinted off his head with a brilliant shine.
Knox lumbered over, leaving Rissa Lyn and Christopher to follow. Sand got into the ankles of Christopher’s shoes, making him grimace. He could feel it grind painfully against his feet.
My shoes will be ruined before this is done…and it’s not like I have another pair. Being not-a-baron pays not-a-lot.
Passing through the cluster of shanties, Christopher was greeted by the powerful smell of fish and wood smoke. A pair of women with bare shoulders, wearing what looked to be just a wrapping of homespun cloth chopped stalks of grass with cleavers against a split log. Their faces held hopeless eyes born from a life of endless drudgery. Another man, dried up and dark as a raisin, sat listlessly against a shack, his bare feet outstretched. He smoked a clay pipe and watched them. There were others, but Christopher chose not to look. He felt uncomfortable here in this place of sunbaked people who slept in skeleton homes built on the edge of eternity. Knox showed no sign of concern, no hesitancy as he trudged through the sand toward the man with the shining head.
“Shervin!” Knox called over the roar of the surf.
The bald man looked up. He had keen eyes, clear and focused, and he fixed them on each member of the Dulgath party. He appeared to make a judgment, and then resumed work on the net.
“How do you know this man?” Christopher asked quietly as they approached.
“I’m sheriff,” Knox replied. “I make rounds. Shervin was accused of murder. I judged him innocent.”
“You don’t have that authority.”
Knox laughed.
For a man such as Knox to laugh at him was more than disrespectful. According to Payne, who got his information from Bishop Parnell, Knox had spent years in the military. He’d served Duke Ethelred of Warric and had seen combat in many conflicts, including the famed Battle of Vilan Hills. Payne had expressed a suspicion that Knox was wanted for murder, which was the real reason he was in Maranon. Once more, Christopher thought about the nick he’d made in the sheriff’s collar and wondered if that had been such a good idea after all.
“Out here, I act with the authority of the earl—excuse me—countess. The Dulgaths can’t be everywhere, and most of these people can’t afford to make a pilgrimage to the castle to plead petty grievances or ask for restitution. That’s my job. I act in their stead. I do the real work, the unpleasant tasks.”
Knox stopped before the bald man, looking down at him.
“Who-low Meestah Knock-Knock,” Shervin greeted him. “You still want me ta keel sum’tin fur you? I tell you a’fore, da Blade of ant-trickery do not slay any but da Old Ones.”
“I remember,” Knox said. “That’s why I brought this woman…to convince you.”
Shervin lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the bright sun and examined Rissa Lyn. No fingernails were on that hand. Christopher searched out the man’s other fist, still clutching a wad of net, and found it also lacked nails. In their place were smooth divots.
Rissa Lyn shrank from Gerami’s studious glare but didn’t retreat. Her breaths were short and shallow, and she looked as if she might be sick. Still, the woman was proving to be quite brave.