Niente -- daughter to Riyeska

Riyeska -- child procurement services

Baroten -- husband to Riyeska

Avantreus, one of the dark clad necromancers financing this venture

Prolog

We didn’t have much of a say in the matter by the time their borders were settled.  It all happened so fast, first the blight that ran through the bedrock, some twenty feet from the surface and not nearly so potent beneath our village as it was at the epicenter, but enough to make our women, to make my mother and my sisters, baren.  Or so close to this that it was too risky to engage in those acts which might have otherwise lead to procreation.

The horrors of our neighbors in the true blight had been ignored for centuries.  The curse had been ancient and ebbing, then, and the idea that a child might be born ghost touched, as the common parlance described the cadaverous offspring of those poor souls begat in such a place, with the very earth cursing their spasms of life.  

The priests took seven months to arrive.  That is how quickly the nation fell.  The story has been told a hundred times, a thousand times, even, but it can never be told enough.  I lack the words to describe the monstrous undead constructs of war which were used to bring low the greatest free cities, the fearsome creatures raised from our own ancestors’ bones to curtail dissent.  I dare say, with what we have become accustomed to since, that a second war would not be so easily won, but at its first rising, our warriors and great clerics were stupefied by the displays.

Seven months, three days, and twenty nine miscarriages.  Our village was never huge, only about five thousand with all the farmers hunkering within the hastily built walls.  The plants were not producing much; half of what little blossomed came to fruit, and half again of that rotted and withered on the vine.  Had we known then what our crops would look like now, even those numbers would have been celebrated.  We were afraid when the dark priests finally came into town on their terrible steeds.   There was nearly no resistance -- just a few token jeers and a collective stare of utter contempt.  We did not see, then, how haggard they were, how much each wanted the strife to end that they might go back to their studies.  We did not know, then, that necromancers the world over rejoiced at a nation they could call their own.

First, after what little resistance existed was excised, two churches to their god were built in our town and one to the goddess of their god’s strange union with a goddess of indiscriminate healing.  Once these were built, the first two austere and sharp walled with precise geometric angles that bent sound in odd ways and housed untold thousands of ghosts, wraiths, and other ghastly -- if ethereal -- creatures and the last with brightly colored cushions and colorful paper, it became mandatory to attend at least one of the three at least once each week.  In other villages, in places wherein the fighting had been strongest, the native temples had been burned to ash.  Here, no move was made to interfere with regular worship, and nothing more rigorous than attendance was required.

This little thing, this two hour blip once per week -- and there were four services each day, only one of which, per week, required attendance -- roused the fighting spirit.  This drive toward freedom was short lived, in every sense of the word.

That was before the moratorium on what in the civic world would be called murder.  Those who did not attend for a whole week were dragged from their homes and shoved into the church, their feet catching and the dirt roads tripping them to their public shame.  If they did not resist beyond a few verbal protests, the zombies or flesh-golems would roughly escort them to services and keep them there for two hours before releasing them again to go about their business for another week.  To this day, there are a handful of souls who are so escorted every single week without exception, offering no more than curses and invectives while the rest of us shake our heads at what can only be described as folly.  Some of the necromancers seem vaguely annoyed while at least two can arguably be described as most levitous, bemusement writ plain in the creases at their eyes.

Others, in those first few months when the dark priests arrived, threw more than expletives.  Even then, banishment was the desired punishment for such things, though I still see the first prisoners’ trials in my darker nightmares.  The event itself was not so terrible, but when the first two returned, having spent six months being “conditioned,” sentenced to wear a set of parasitic sugelancas -- strange chainlike creatures -- to their dying days, and having worked hard labor for a further ten months … They were not the same as when they’d left.  The sugelancas that ever feed from them also keep them alive when their actions otherwise would show a graver preference, which does nothing to ease our fear of the dark priests’ wrath.

One thing, though, kept us from either universal rebellion or universal despair.  Always in the past, there had been minimal trade with the outside world.  Now, with the absolute rule of this new god who is so very tolerant of agnostic persuasions, our village has been opened up to trade.  The things which can grow in the blightlands are, by and large, toxic and poisonous, which, strangely enough, translates into being rare or difficult to manufacture components to healing draughts.  We accept all sorts of goods from the carriages that roll through, piling their coffers with things we have no need of and accepting in exchange all those things -- like food -- which are much more difficult to procure.  

Outgoing trade, on the other hand, is more than somewhat treacherous.  That’s my job, now, and what I’m after, what my village and the whole of this fledgeling nation requires, is fiendish to acquire.  The dark priests and their so-called little sisters, the priestesses (and priests -- the term is not gender specific to the individual but rather to the gender of the god served) accompany the wagons as added defense, though they mostly leave us to our own devices.  Families are already so heartbroken to let themselves be parted; it behooves no one to put images of slaughter and black sacrifice in their minds.  It stopped being painful work about half a year ago -- now I’m just numb.

Except when they insist their children are virgins.

Then I know I’m a monster.

Chapter One

Riyeska pulled hard on the rope, drawing the top of the temporary shelter taught while her husband secured the line next to her.  When his thick, leather-hard palm slipped into place just above her own, she released and moved down the line to the rope her adopted daughter held.  They progressed like this, as they did every night they set camp, and Riyeska couldn’t help but imagine they were like a living millipede, each of them a set of legs.  She smiled as her daughter jumped up and down to catch the dancing edge of the next rope -- the last in the sequence -- with her outstretched hands.  Her daughter’s rich skin, so striking at home, was much more natural out here and surrounded by all this green.

Riyeska smiled at her husband’s pale white skin beside her, , noting the almost yellow highlights that in those of another nation would have been considered signs of jaundice.  Her own was a pale grey with black varicose veins crisscrossing her back and stomach, though her shins, calves, and forearms were blessedly free of the marks.  Her family was her pride and joy, her daughter the blessing she’d been three times denied in those sunken hours of blood and tears.  Her sister had born twins, both of whom were still under the near-constant surveillance of the Sisters of Healing and the Brothers of Clinical Necromancy.  Everyone born to the nation, or very nearly everyone, was born ghost touched -- at least to some degree.  

Niente, though, Niente had not been born with that particular curse, and she was shaping into a brilliant and enthusiastic young thing, full of life and vigor.  Riyeska looked at her and imagined that blessing for other mothers, other fathers, imagined that light burning away the grey in other households and neighborhoods.  Anyone could immigrate to the nation and would be treated under the same laws and protections after only two years, but there was something positively magical about children.

It always shocked her that, out here beyond the borders, they were given up so cheaply.  She imagined it was guilt that drove the locals to describe her and others in her trade as children snatchers, when in fact her nation’s laws required that only those willingly given and who were in poor health from malnourishment or neglect or beatings that would have been criminal had they been gifted by those outside the father’s authority were eligible for consideration.  Recompense was never much, but too many mothers cried -- cried -- and swore to their little darlings that they would have a better life now.  Too many did not cry, though; too many saw only the handful of gold and the chance to be rid of their most precious gift.

That hard palm, smooth with years of difficult labor, engulfed her own again, one above on the rope to take the slack as she eased down, her shoulder lightly buffing his chest as she withdrew and his laugh reverberating through her as he took her measure.  Their daughter laughed as she passed over the end of the rope, pulled a little by the breeze as she held firm.  Riyeska felt pride as her daughter immediately ran off to help one of the other families tie down their tent, spreading her joy as she went.  It was strange that no dust rose out here beyond the borders at the behest of her capricious feet.  It was strange, but that did not make it untoward.

Feeling the canvas tightening through the rope she held, Riyeska glanced again toward her husband with doting eyes as he finished this last knot.  As he rose, a shadow fell over her and Riyeska started, almost loosing the rope as a pall fell in the wake of Avantreus, one of the dark clad necromancers financing this venture.  Caught between propriety and the need to maintain her grip on the cantankerous rope, Riyeska lowered her eyes and chin briefly before turning back to her task.

“Brother Avantreus.”

“Riyeska and Baroten, my children.”  The priest, a distant seeming woman with a deep, still swollen scar across her face and the temperament of a precariously perched icicle, bowed from the waist, her salt and obsidian hair, no longer than shoulder length, flowing forward as though the wind did not affect it in the least.  Her black cowl was unmarred save for a bit of pollen, indicating one of the two Sisters had seen fit to bestow a blessing on this priest.