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CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

As Druadaen stepped over the threshold, he discovered that the chamber was much wider than it was deep and that there were matching sets of lightless alcoves to both the left and right. From the one in the center of the far right-hand wall, a voice startled him: “I am here.” However, it was not the source of the voice that surprised him, or what it announced, but its sound: almost as deep as a supragant’s bellow, but without its rich bass tones. It was as if words were being formed from the stony clashings of a landslide. If this was Ancrushav, he sounded a great deal older than a man in his twenties.

Druadaen approached the alcove, which brightened, revealing a large, cloaked man behind a table. He stood… and rose until he was a whole head taller than Druadaen. Proportionally, his shoulders were even broader. He was not aware that Aleasha was standing beside him until the man drew back his hood and she suppressed a gasp.

The face was something out of nightmares or legends of otherworldly fiends. The foundation of the features—broad forehead, straight nose, high cheekbones—was human. It might even have been deemed handsome, but for the night-black ridges that broke through the flesh wherever bone neared the surface. Protrusions like small horns dotted his jaw and sides of his neck, while two much larger ones curved forward from his temples, shining like obsidian. His skin was not like any that Druadaen had ever seen on a living creature: a hairless tan-gray hide. Overlarge incisors pushed out from almost colorless lips, and red-irised eyes regarded him, but they quickly became perplexed; he had no doubt seen many different expressions on newcomers’ faces—but not the wondering bafflement that dropped Druadaen’s jaw.

Because his eyes had fixed on one other feature: a feature so jarring that his perception of Ancrushav’s frankly monstrous face had been little more than peripheral. Instead, he could not look away, laboring to understand how what he was seeing could be possible: Ancrushav’s hair was a black-fringed silver-white mane—a match for the one that Druadaen had seen upon Corum Torshaenyx and the other Tualarans he had seen or met.

Ancrushav’s stiff black brows rose. “I was told that both of you were accustomed to beings with different forms from your own.” He nodded toward Aleasha. “Her behavior agrees with that report. But yours… ” He sought and found Druadaen’s eyes. “I am accustomed to terror, even revulsion. But your stare is one of surprise. And possibly… recognition?”

Druadaen shook his head, searching for words. “A bit of both, perhaps.” He added a wan wave. “It is easy to imagine strange resemblances when one is weary from long travels.”

Ancrushav nodded soberly. “Perhaps. Perhaps we shall speak more of these resemblances later. But, to business: I am told that you bear Neeshu’s final words. I would hear those words and how you came to be the bearers of them.”

“That last part could prove a very long tale,” Druadaen warned him.

“In my experience,” Ancrushav replied, “those are the ones that convey the most important information.”

Aleasha shrugged and began with the message they’d been enjoined to convey, but then worked back to their respective origins, how they had met, and why their paths had ultimately crossed Neeshu’s. They had anticipated being required to provide their own backgrounds, so Aleasha had been chosen to be the initial tale-teller, not only because she was native to the region and its languages, but because it gave Druadaen the opportunity to observe how her story was received.

Ancrushav watched her face intently, but also remained aware of the rest of his surroundings; occasional lapses in his focus signaled the kind of peripheral watching that had been common among senior Outriders. Obversely, Steward’s eyes seemed to become empty, as if he were unable to focus… until Druadaen noticed that the wizened head was now raised, eyes mostly open as it tilted toward whoever was speaking. And, halfway through Aleasha’s tale, two of the unnerving workspawn scrambled out of Ancrushav’s alcove and drew close, their antennae and eyestalks swaying to and fro in what seemed to be watchfulness.

When she had concluded, Ancrushav murmured thanks and shifted his gaze to Druadaen. “And do you agree that this priestess may have affined with the cryptigant? Do you believe her capable of that?”

Druadaen was impressed at how blithely he’d received the information that one of his visitors was from an entirely different world. “I am quite sure that she can achieve what we project. The viziers in Sarmasid learned that she had done no less in her journey from what they call the Fickle Haze to their own city. And from what I heard of her researches there—both legal and illegal—I suspect she was aware that she would need it to breach the defenses of the Prow. What I do not understand is why she chose that as her destination.”

“It is a stronghold,” Ancrushav said with a shrug that was not entirely convincing.

“True, and distant from any probable foes. But if she does not mean to remain here, then I suspect she perceives some other value in holding it. Does it guard a ford or pass or some other strategic place, such as this armory does?”

Ancrushav’s bloodred eyes bored into his own. “In a manner of speaking.”

Aleasha asked—hastily, Druadaen thought—a question of her own before he could pursue his line of inquiry further. “What I wish to know is how”—she waved at the walls and the ceiling and the very land upon which the Armory sat—“how this can be. How can you live together this way? Why does the rest of the world not know? How did you come to lead these… these people in this—”

Ancrushav held up a hand. “My memory is poor. I cannot remember so many questions.”

She stopped, stunned—until she saw the hint of a grin at the corners of his mouth. She smiled. “Allow me to rephrase: How have you managed all of”—she waved again—“this?”

He nodded, gestured to a pair of waiting chairs as he navigated to his own. “It is not so successful or laudable an accomplishment as it might seem.”

“How so?” Druadaen asked.

“For every Changeling here”—he gestured beyond the room just as Aleasha had—“there are hundreds who cannot imagine, let alone believe, that such a place exists for them and so will not come. There are thousands more who could not live here at all. They are, as Neeshu told you, ungovernable. And the end is always the same, even for the most Untouched: no matter how long they remain the masters of their own minds, ultimately, their bodies rebel and betray them.”

“How do you live with the burden of choosing who may stay and who may not?”

He shrugged. “Happily, I do not need to choose. There are reagents and compounds which indicate how long and to what degree any Changeling is likely to remain stable.” He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Less than one in a hundred who comes to this place has any hope of mastering themselves.”

“And what happens to those who cannot?”

“I do not send them away, but they must live outside the walls of the Armory. Most cannot. Those who can are the ones who arose behind you as you approached, and then shepherded you toward Lamla. Oddly, they are also the ones who insist on calling themselves my Children, so long as they can still form words.”

“Why is that?” Druadaen asked.

“I am not sure. Most can barely convey their thoughts.”

“Shall I tell you why they call themselves your Children?” Aleasha broke in suddenly, and then answered her own question in the same breath. “Because you brought them as close to the Armory as you could. Because you chose to give them a home rather than forsake them. Because every time they awaken in a protected place, they remember why. And because deep down they know that as long as they can speak, they remain the masters of their own mind. So they keep whispering your name, struggling to remember it as long as they can. They probably repeat it as they go to sleep and then again as soon as they wake. Perhaps even in their dreams.”

She leaned forward, as ardent as Druadaen had ever seen her. “Do you not see it? For them, your name is both an anchor and a prayer. It is how they prove to themselves, every day, that they still belong here, that they are still holding their terrible fate at bay. Because I am willing to wager my one black pearl that when their speech goes, their mind follows soon after.”

He considered her solemnly. “You have seen little yet understood much, except that you overestimate my role in sustaining this place.” Aleasha seemed ready to roll her eyes as he continued. “But you are right about Changelings and speech. First they begin losing words. That is not so bad. But when they no longer have the patience to try finding the missing words”—he shook his head—“blind rage soon consumes what remains of their mind.”

Druadaen nodded. “And as a serratus, you are not subject to such declines?”

He fixed Druadaen with a stare, then pointed. “No more than you or she.” He reflected. “Or at least, if I do become deranged, it would arise from different causes.”

Given the obliquity of Ancrushav’s response, Druadaen instinctively changed the topic. “And what of the humans we have seen here? Do they just appear to be unaltered, or are their Changes too subtle to be seen?”

“It is unlikely you saw a Changeling that cannot be detected as such; they are very rare, even here. Lamla and any others you saw—perhaps those who gather the serae required for affinity philters?—are as you: unchanged humans.”

“Do they come here with their Changeling children, then?”

Ancrushav nodded. “And with those whose forms are atypical for other reasons.”

Druadaen frowned. “I do not understand.”

Aleasha blinked, stared at him. “Of course: you would not know.”

Druadaen shook his head. “I am not even sure what you are referring to.”

Aleasha directed her explanation toward Ancrushav. “In his world, there are no Changelings. So they actually keep blighted infants.”

Ancrushav’s eyebrows raised. “Truly?”

Druadaen held up a hand. “Wait. Are you saying that children who are born”—he could no longer use the word “malformed”—“with unexpected forms or features are not allowed to live?” As Aleasha nodded, he turned toward Ancrushav. “So the unchanged humans here… that’s why they are all women? They are the mothers of Changelings? But I was told—”

“—that Changelings cannot reproduce,” Ancrushav finished for him. “In fact, two Changelings cannot reproduce. And it is a further fact that more Changelings are made than are born.”

“Made? But… how?”

Ancrushav waved the question away. “Too long an explanation, because if the news you bring is accurate, then we have little time.”

We? But Druadaen pushed the implications of that pronoun aside. “I mean no disrespect, but then how is it that you survived at all?”

“In one of the towns that Mistress Aleasha has mentioned—”

“Srimshyr,” she supplied.

“—my mother’s midwife discerned problems soon after she went into labor. She knew that various herbs and philters would be essential if either of us were to survive my birth. I speculate that she also suspected that wyrding might prove necessary. So she sent for a wyldwyrd who lived just outside of that town.”

Ancrushav’s jaw muscles bunched; his teeth ground like stones. “It was the wyldwyrd who actually brought me into the world. The midwife attempted it, but… ” He straightened in his chair, face impassive but rigid. “My savior and protector would never share the details of my birth, but I do know this; after that night, the midwife’s hands were terribly scarred, and the left one had lost two fingers.” He shrugged. “I suppose in the surprise, confusion, and chaos, he was able to spirit me away. For, as I realized the first time I saw my reflection in still water, I was an affront to their notions of purity.”

“But I have heard… ” Aleasha’s query dwindled into pensive silence.

Ancrushav nodded at her. “If you have questions about my past, it is best that you ask them. Knowledge of each other will be a strength, whereas ignorance could prove a fatal weakness.”

Aleasha straightened. “The few times I have heard your name uttered, it was always as either an agent of Pagudon or as their wayward creation.”

He nodded. “At different times, both of those were true. They are not now. Within a year of Pagudon sending me to the Armory, I made a break with those who’d determined I should be its overseer.” One corner of his lips sent out creases from the hint of a wintry half-smile. “I did not, however, deem it necessary to inform them of that change.”

“But how did you go from a remote town in the north of the Godbarrows to… to wherever Pagudon makes its lair?”

He shrugged. “That touches upon another attribute which may have led to presumptions that I am a Changeling: the speed with which I grew. By the time I was three, I was too restless to remain close to my savior’s new and more remote hovel. Curiosity and carelessness brought me to the attention of the townsfolk. I’m sure they had suspected I had survived and lived with him but, to borrow one of their quaint sayings, that was a sleeping bear they had decided not to poke.

“Their reaction showed me that, if I remained near Srimshyr, I would be repaying my savior’s kindness by bringing an angry mob to his door. So I left.”

Druadaen frowned. “Alone.”

“Yes.”

“Across the Godbarrows.”

“Where else?”

Druadaen saw no deceit in Ancrushav’s eyes. To have survived, he had to be preternaturally swift, strong, and resistant to both the elements and injury. And that was when he was three. Druadaen nodded; compared to him, he and even Ahearn were rather pitiable weaklings, one barely distinguishable from the other. “How did you know where to go?”

He shrugged. “I only knew I had to go as far away from my savior as I could. And once I began, I suppose I just kept going. One way in which I was not different from a very young human child is that I do not retain many memories from that time. One day was much like the next and I had no one with which to share them.

“But when the agents of Pagudon came upon me, I was glad for the company.” He paused. “Well, after their wounds disinclined them from further attacks. They, too, mistook me for an ‘abomination,’ but upon returning with them, the Pagudon himself inspected me and realized I was serratae.”

“Which means what, exactly?” Druadaen tried to affect an offhand tone, but, even to his own ears, failed miserably.

“Outcast, devil, fiend, demon, monster. There are many other variations on that theme.”

“I think,” Aleasha ventured, “that Druadaen was hoping to learn about where serratae are from, and the ways in which they are different from—or akin to—humans.”

Ancrushav nodded. “I myself do not know very much, only what I discovered in dust-coated volumes in the most remote corners of Pagudon’s libraries.” He shrugged. “In them, serratae are described as savage, deceitful, domineering, and very, very difficult to kill. Some accounts claim we are not natural beings, others assert that we are. Given the opportunity, we eat, sleep, and learn much as humans do, but are far less reliant upon such niceties.” He mused for a moment. “I have long wished to learn more about my origins and nature but I would hardly know where to look.”

Druadaen glanced at Steward then back at Ancrushav. “The Maw?”

He shrugged. “Whatever that may be. Again, the references are unified only in their disparity. A ghostly domain; a trove of ancient treasures; a place of hellish torment; a lost city or continent: all these have been asserted. None have been proven.” His eyes rested on Druadaen. “But given your arrival from an unknown world, I suppose it would be hasty to discount any of those possibilities.” He frowned. “In truth, I doubted your stated origin, at first.”

“Why?”

“For one who has been here for so short a time, you speak several languages with passable fluency.”

“He has much experience doing so,” Aleasha put in hastily. “He was what his people called a Courier and an Outrider. They travel to far lands in the service of their empire.”

Druadaen was about to correct her by, once again, pointing out that Dunarra was a Consentium, but instead shrugged and drew the unusual torc up over the neck of his tunic. “This has made the process much, much easier.”

One of Ancrushav’s eyebrows climbed. “I am familiar with that periapt. It was common among the agents of Pagudon.” His voice was casual; his eyes were not. Steward roused out of his trance, made a gesture into the room from which they had entered the alcove. Heavy feet thudded closer.

“I am not surprised to learn that,” Druadaen answered, “since one of them was how I came by it.”

“The agents of Pagudon do not sell those periapts; they are not the possessions of those to whom they are given.”

“Happily, money was not an object. When I took it, the owner was in no condition to object. Or do anything else, for that matter.”

“Ah,” said Ancrushav, who seemed to be trying not to smile. “That is well, then. You may be interested to learn that is not truly wyrdcraft.”

Druadaen nodded. “So I have learned. But that is all I’ve learned.”

Ancrushav leaned forward, focused and—enthusiastic? “In your travels, have you encountered sages who assert that there are animalcules all around us, but are too small to see?”

Druadaen shrugged. “It is hardly the province of sages to know how diseases are transmitted.”

Ancrushav’s neck straightened in surprise. He glanced at Aleasha, who shrugged, then back at Druadaen. “And this is… common knowledge, on your world?”

Druadaen frowned. “Common in most parts, but there are certain regions where such learning… is not held in high regard.”

“Well then, Master Druadaen, be warned: if you speak of it here, the best you may hope for is weary tolerance. Laughter or a gibbet is far more likely, and the worst would mean an end of you.”

Druadaen nodded, returned the small smile that had risen to Ancrushav’s lips as he realized, He doesn’t get to talk about such things. Not so long as he’s here, isolated in the most dangerous part of the Godbarrows.

Ancrushav’s face became as animated as his voice. “Within the periapt is a growth not unlike a mold or fungus that deposits some of these invisible animalcules in you through the place where it touches your flesh.”

Druadaen nodded. “That is why the skin beneath it appears light, almost sun-bleached.”

“Precisely! Once they are within you, the growth that sent them forth is attuned to you, the way fish may detect distant movement by sensing waves and currents in the water. Once it has become familiar with your species, it is able to detect the feeling or general concept in a speaker’s mind and convey those sensations to the wearer.”

Druadaen continued nodding, but refrained from asking, all well and good, but… by what mechanism does it know what is in the speaker’s mind? Because it is a surety that a mold cannot learn words.

Ancrushav’s unbroken stream of words would not have given him the space to ask the question, had he dared do so. “Animalcules of this kind are distant relatives of those in the serae from which we produce the affinity philters with which we may pacify—or if necessary, control—Changelings. They are also present in the compounds from which the Changelings themselves are created.”

Aleasha and Druadaen leaned forward at the same moment. She got their shared question out first: “What do you mean when you say that Changelings are created?”

Ancrushav straightened, evidently disappointed to leave the original topic. “As I said, most Changelings are not born; they are made.” He checked their eyes for comprehension. Finding none, he put his fists on the desk before him. “The serae from which I make philters of affinity may also be worked into substances which cause the Change and govern what manner of alterations are expressed and to what degree.”

Aleasha had grown very pale. Druadaen leaned forward and spoke very slowly and carefully. “I understand where the substances come from. But I do not understand what manner of creature receives the infusions.”

Ancrushav’s fists tightened; it sounded like leather armor being crushed. “The very young. And infants.”

Aleasha was half out of her chair. “How—? Who—? What monster would be party to such an act? Truly, they are the abominations!”

“I agree,” sighed Ancrushav. “But is trade in flesh truly surprising in a world where serfdom and slavery are daily realities?”

In his years as a Courier and Outrider, and in the time since, Druadaen had slain enemies, but never had he desired to kill any of them. Now, for the first time, he did. “Let me guess,” he said, noticing the coldness of his tone and not caring. “Infants who emerge from the womb already ‘flawed’ are taken aside so the parents do not have to witness them being ‘put away.’ But if the midwife or an assistant is sufficiently amoral, they pass the newborn to a ghoulish liaison for whatever power wishes to build their own army of ‘abominations.’”

Ancrushav straightened to reply, but Druadaen wasn’t finished. “Or a sickly child is taken by a temple to be healed. Sadly, it is lost—not to the grave, but to that same set of greedy hands. Or a young child of slaves, whose parents are told that their darling has been sold to a new master but is destined for a far more horrific end. Or the toddlers of struggling serfs, put in the care of distant relatives who truly stain their hands with blood money—their own blood, no less.”

Druadaen almost spat instead of concluding. “There are as many ways to steal babes as there are heartless ghouls to plan that crime.” He looked at Ancrushav. “And I suspect you know who pays them so that they may raise up such monsters.”

The serratus nodded slowly, his face like stone. “I know some names, but they hardly matter. The culprits are legion and all of a type: every wyrdcrafter and alchemist whose humanity has been consumed by their lust for power. To a one, their greatest desire is for a force that knows and hungers for nothing but slaughter, and asks nothing more than the opportunity to slake their unquenchable thirst for it.”

“And among all those soulless contenders, I imagine Pagudon creates more Changelings than most?”

“More than all the others combined.”

Aleasha’s voice was thick. “I feel ill.”

Ancrushav’s reply was soft, almost solicitous. “It is a terrible thing to learn that fellow beings can commit such atrocities.”

“That’s not what makes me sick.” She looked up. Druadaen had rarely seen eyes lit by such fury. “It is the pain in my gut, the pain I cannot get out.”

Ancrushav’s concern was palpable. “Pain from what?”

“From the need to kill all those human monsters. Right now.”


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