3435 words (13 minute read)

vii 0000111-07

The coach had sufficient room for as many as six people inside, providing they were prepared to sit fairly close together, and had three unsheltered seats outside at the rear for those unable to afford full fare. A rough-looking wild-haired man wrapped in a ragged grey cloak and strapped patchwork boots was asleep in the window seat when they had first climbed aboard. Shortly afterward a woman in a bright green dress and very expensive shoes, who had more bags than she could possibly carry, got in. She eyed Jeff, Keenley and the sleeping man suspiciously before deigning to sit beside the elderly distinguished priest Ginnsley as the least undesirable option.

After several minutes of sitting in awkward silence, a final passenger, a hooded figure, climbed aboard the rear seat outside, immediately behind Keenley’s seat, and the driver finalised preparations to leave. The coach set off along the main road out of the city headed southward along the coast toward Eswell.

The land immediately surrounding Amin Thiering was relatively flat, and Keenley could see that beyond the road in all directions lay broad fields of scrubby grey bushes, sporadic yellowed grass and randomly scattered short crooked trees. Some distance off to his right, he could see a rocky beach and the wide blue ocean. Initially, the temple had been built on a tall and isolated jagged outcrop, magically raised up by the builders to inspire a sense of awe and reverence for the practitioners of magic who were trained there, but some years later the whole outcrop had slid sideways into the ocean and only the rapid response of the senior theologians at the time had kept the school intact and minimised the resulting loss of life. Since then, a large town had grown up around the temple and a community had formed there.

“So we can talk now, right?” Jeff said looking first at Ginnsley, Keenley, the sleeping man, and then finishing on the woman in green opposite him, who promptly became fascinated with something outside of the window to avoid making eye contact with him. “I need to get to the throne room of the Great God. I’m pretty sure you priests know how to do that.”

“As it happens, we need to go to the throne room as well.” Ginnsley said. “We are on our way to meet with an old friend of mine, I believe he can help us find the way. Since our destination and yours are the same, I think we had best travel together.”

“You were already going to the throne room?” Jeff asked.

“Yes. I believe the Great God requires our presence right away.”

“He told you that, did he? The Great God?” Jeff smirked. At least Keenley thought it was a smirk. Father Ginnsley didn’t answer. It seemed wise to Keenley that they didn’t share the details of the motivation for their journey, especially not with this creature who clearly thought their faith was nonsense. But he was confused about why this creature was so determined to go to the throne room. He was considering whether it was wise to ask about it when there came a sudden rumble and a violent upheaval as the whole carriage was flung sideways off the road.

Keenley heard the horses scream as they were swung around by their harnesses and the roar of some huge creature breaching the ground beneath them. The passengers were flipped and buffeted around as the carriage rolled over twice before coming to a stop on its side several metres from a great hole in the road. Whatever it was that had come up through the ground had gone back down again, and Keenley feared it might return. He scrabbled to right himself and looked for the others. Father Ginnsley groaned and sat up. Jeff was upside down and swearing, but didn’t seem too badly harmed. The woman in the green dress was lying on her side and breathing very rapidly. The other man was curled into a ball of grey tattered cloth.

“Is everyone alright?” Keenley asked.

“What the hell was that?” Jeff shouted as he awkwardly turned himself around.

“Land shark.” came a response from the man in grey.

Father Ginnsley looked at Keenley with eyes wide and shouted, “everyone out, right now!” With a hurried phrase of Vexa, Ginnsley blasted the carriage door above them with blue fire-like energy from his left hand and pushed Keenley toward the opening with his right. Noticing the sudden urgency, Jeff leapt past Keenley and out of the carriage. Keenley climbed out behind Jeff and reached in to assist the others. The woman in green was panicking and refused to move, so Ginnsley had to lift her bodily up to the door and Keenley heaved her out, followed by Ginnsley and the man in grey. The carriage driver was sprawled across some yellow grassy bushes some distance away, and wasn’t moving. The passenger from the back was nowhere to be seen.

The old man in grey grabbed a bag from the carriage and turned to Keenley with a strange expression. Keenley was struck by his eyes, one large and yellow like a cat’s and the other much more normal with a steely-grey pupil like his father’s.

“Run, boy!” the man said, and leapt off the carriage, a leap like he would have expected from a giant locust, and certainly not from an old man. As soon as the man hit the ground he ran like a gangly insect in a widening arc, circling around and away from the carriage eventually heading back in the direction they had come, his eyes constantly scanning the area. Keenley watched bemused but, distracted for a moment by Ginnsley retrieving his pack from the carriage, looked back to find he had lost track of the man completely.

“We have to get away from the carriage,” Ginnsley said, handing Keenley his bag and climbing down. “Land sharks don’t attack unless they’re hungry. It might be content to eat the horses since it won’t need to chase them.” Keenley looked across at the horses, still harnessed to the carriage, their twisted bodies writhing in the throes of death. The sound they were making made his neck quiver. “There’s nothing we can do for them, Keenley. Run!”

Father Ginnsley and Keenley ran perhaps a dozen metres from the the carriage before Keenley realised that the woman in green was not running with them. He looked back and saw she had gone back and was struggling to free one of her bags from what was formerly the top of the carriage. Keenley was about to call to her, but was interrupted by another roar as a great pair of snaggletoothed jaws sprung up out of the ground and snapped shut around her and much of the carriage and horses, carrying them up several metres in the air. The huge maw was followed by a large black eye and a bony fin. The land shark eased back into the ground leaving only a great crater and some scattered fragments of the destroyed carriage.

Keenley sat down involuntarily. His mind swam and he felt the urgent need to throw up. He tried to take long slow breaths and not to imagine the sound of the horses and the image of the poor frightened woman in the green dress. Trying not to just made the memory all the more persistent.

Keenley threw up.

“Wow, those things’re so much more scary up close!” Jeff said, as he stepped out from behind a dry twisted bush that passed for a tree in this region. “Do you think it’ll come back?”

“Perhaps,” Father Ginnsley said, as he helped Keenley up. “We should move away from here… quietly.” He was interrupted by a groan from the carriage driver, still sprawled in the bushes. Keenley and Father Ginnsley went over to the man and helped him up. He had a smart blue uniform and tall black boots and sported a very impressive moustache.

“Can you walk, sir?” Keenley asked him. “Only we have to move away in case that thing comes back.”

“Name’s Denneth, and yeah, we should move away. Probably won’t bother us now it has a mouthful. No guarantee he doesn’t have a mate nearby.” Denneth got up and limped along with the others as they made their way back to the road.

“Have you seen one of those before?” Keenley asked.

“Me? No. Never. Heard stories. Travellers from up north. Never heard of one this far south before. It’s like they’re migrating or something.”

“Migrating?”

“Last week I heard one attacked a courier two days’ ride north of the temple. Wouldn’t have believed it except now we don’t run carriages that way anymore.”

“There they are.” A familiar voice came from the direction of the road ahead. It was Miyako, wearing a brown hooded cloak and walking beside the man in grey. “I was thrown off the back of the carriage when the creature attacked, this man helped me.”

“Miya!” Keenley shouted and ran to greet his friend.

“Miyako! What are you doing here? I told you not to come with us.” Ginnsley shouted.

Miyako bowed low. “I am sorry Father Ginnsley, in my country we say ‘friends are known first in hardship’. Keenley has been my friend, and the one person who would have been aware of my absence, if he is in trouble, I wish to help him.”

Keenley utterly failed to stifle his grin.

Father Ginnsley turned away with a frustrated growl, but after a moment he relented. “Very well Miyako. I understand that you care a great deal for Keenley. I believe your people also say that you should send your adorable children on a journey and also something about a girl kept in a box, which I believe would be relevant to this situation. I can tell that I’m not going to talk you out of this, so you may come along.”

“You know my people?”

“No.” Ginnsley said, “I had a friend a long time ago who understood your culture well.” He shifted the weight of his bag and turned to look southward along the road. “We should continue, we have a long way to go.”

“What will you do now?” Keenley asked Denneth.

“Hike back to the city and start packing. Not gonna run carriages on this road any more. Have to move my family south. Far south.”

“What about us?” Jeff called from several metres away - keeping a significant distance between himself and the cluster of potential shark-food. “You were supposed to take us to… where was it the old guy said we were going again?”

“Sorry folks, you’re welcome to come back to the city with me and book the next coach or wait here by the road and hope someone comes by. Not sure I’d be keen to hang around.”

“We’ll walk from here,” Ginnsley said, I had hoped to shorten the trip, but it seems we are destined to walk.”

“Ughh, more walking?” Jeff groaned, “I hate walking.”

“What about you?” Keenley turned to ask the man in grey, but he had apparently slipped away while no one was watching.

They left Denneth and set off southward along the road as he turned and began limping north toward the city. The main road that led from Amin Thiering to Eswell City was not a direct path, and after a few hours of walking they departed from it in favour of a more direct route. There were hills ahead, and somewhere off in the distance, Keenley knew that at the mouth of a sizeable river, Eswell City lay roughly ahead of them.

As they walked, Keenley took the opportunity to press for some more information.

“Will you tell me about what happened with the prayer glass? I really don’t understand what happened or what I did wrong.”

“Before I say anything, Keenley, you need to know that this wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. You also need to know that some of what I am about to tell you is considered heretical by most of the church hierarchy.”

Keenley had no idea how to respond to that statement, so he just stopped walking and stared at the old cleric. Jeff, who hadn’t been paying attention, ran into him.

“Are you a heretic?” Keenley asked, and then wondered if this was an impolite question, or if there was a more delicate way he could have asked it.

Father Ginnsley smiled and continued walking, prompting Keenley and Miyako to follow. “I’m certain there are many who would think so, if I were to tell them what I know to be true, but I’ll leave it to you to decide what you think.” Keenley considered this statement and decided that he could certainly listen and consider whatever Father Ginnsley was about to say. He nodded and waited for Father Ginnsley to continue. “The prayer glass doesn’t communicate with the Great God at all. The face you see there is like his servant. It has his likeness, and it speaks as he has apparently instructed it to, but it is not the Great God Avatar - even though it claims to be.”

“Like an answering service,” Jeff said. The others all turned to look at him. Jeff turned as if to pretend he had been talking to someone else, but was immediately reminded that there was no one else, so he smiled sheepishly and dawdled a bit further behind.

Father Ginnsley came to a large cluster of rocks and took the opportunity, groaning as he lowered himself down, to sit and drink some water. He took off his sturdy but well-worn boots and massaged his feet. “Have you heard of Elder Vehrens?” he asked.

“He was a theologian a long time ago, wasn’t he?” Keenley said, as he accepted the water bottle from Father Ginnsley. Jeff caught up with them and parked himself on the ground under a tree a short distance away and lay down as if to go to sleep.

“Yes, he was a rather unorthodox theologian. He had been a travelling bard before he began his studies in theology. His ideas were …” Father Ginnsley paused while he considered the best choice of words. He settled on, “...creative.”

Keenley stopped mid-drink. “What’s so bad about that?”

“Vehrens had been a travelling bard before he began studies in theology. After he graduated, he composed fictional stories to teach his observations of the nature of the Great God. He taught about a being he called the Visage that wore the Great God’s likeness and spoke his words in the way a servant of a monarch might carry a message for their master.” Ginnsley raised his voice and gaze to indicate that he intended Jeff to hear the next part, “a servant who answers.” He returned his attention to Keenley and Miyako. “When the Council of Inquisitors brought him and his teaching to the attention of the Great God, he neither confirmed or condemned the new teaching, but simply told them ‘just ignore him,’ so they did.” Ginnsley took a drink of the water. “Initially they took this to mean they should leave him unchallenged, but as his ideas became more problematic, they reinterpreted the instruction to mean that they should see to it that everyone ignored him. They set about casting doubt on his orthodoxy and his sanity as well as casting doubt on the accuracy, authorship and credibility of his texts.”

“The Ohl-Mitahrehn,” Keenley said, after a few moments of thought. “Vehrens wrote it, didn’t he? Why isn’t he credited with having written it? On the copy we have in the tower back at the temple, it’s just attributed to ‘a poet and seer of the Great God,’ like the Tilasi-enn-Melaknaim. Is that his writing too?”

“Yes and several other books as well, in fact, at least half of the books that are anonymously published in the tower library are probably written by Elder Vehrens, or one of his students.

By this time, Father Ginnsley had re-tied his shoes and was getting up to continue on. Now that the subject was open, Keenley seized the opportunity to learn more about this intriguing figure from history. He grabbed his pack and hurried after Father Ginnsley. Jeff frowned at them and took his time getting up to follow.

“Is it true that Vehrens knew how to speak Vexa fluently?” Keenley had wanted to ask someone this question for a long time. “I heard that he could fly and shoot fireballs from his eyes, and that he could make a person die just by saying their name. Is it true?”

Father Ginnsley cleared his throat and paused a moment, perhaps considering how to best approach the subject. “It is widely known that Vehrens was an avid student of the language of making. He knew many Vexwords, and more importantly, had an excellent understanding of the syntax, the way the words need to work together to make effectual phrases. As for flying and making fireballs, the stories are sensational, but not incredible. But Vehrens was not so reckless as to meddle with Vexa without proper consideration.” He turned to catch the full attention of both Keenley and Miyako. “A person’s Vexname is a very powerful tool, this is why we have the Naming Ceremony for senior students - to hide your true name and keep you safe from unwelcome sourcery.”

“Sourcery!” Keenley said, his eyes wide.

“Our world is made of words, they are the source of everything living and unliving. If you possess the Vexname of a thing, or indeed a person, you can enact powerful and potentially permanent effects upon them. Sourcery is high level magic and should be used with extreme caution. We do not teach sourcery until your final year, and then only under very strict control.” Father Ginnsley took a breath here and relaxed his furrowing brow. “I trust Father Harrington has been teaching you to use the euclyx to locate spell targets and give them instance names?”

“Yes.” Keenley frowned. He had been so eager to learn about Vexa, but Father Harrington’s classes were achingly dull. He wanted to tell Father Ginnsley all about how bored he had been, but he wasn’t sure how the information would be received, so he didn’t say anything more.

“Father Harrington has us memorise and recite spell sentence constructions in Commonspeak much of the time,” Miyako said, “and seldom allows us to try anything for ourselves.”

“I might suggest he is being overly cautious, if I had not seen firsthand what can happen where Vexa is used recklessly.” Father Ginnsley turned to her with kind eyes. “Perhaps I can teach you a few things - if you promise me you will be very careful about how you use them.”

Next Chapter: viii 0001000-08