Shroud of Four Silences - Chapter 2: Oddities

Cool water sluiced over Eleukas’s face. Soft cloth mopped across his cheeks, gently but thoroughly. He opened his eyes, and was astonished to find he could see. Everything was blurry, and his eyes stung abominably, but he was alive, and he wasn’t blind.
 
“Good. You’re not dead. I was worried. I’ve never heard anyone scream like that.” Wendlyn had been kneeling over him. Her red hair was bright as fire in the sun. Seeing Eleukas open his eyes, she straightened, capping her waterbag.
 
“Not dead,” Eleukas croaked in agreement. Something limp and warm pressed into his back, reeking of animal musk and death. Cooling blood, not his own, gummed his fingers. He flexed his hand, experimentally, and then tried sitting up.
 
He wasn’t hurt. Wendlyn was, but not seriously. Shallow nicks and scratches crisscrossed her arms, but she bore no deeper wounds. Both rats were dead, one slumped behind him and the other sprawled in the underbrush.
 
There was no sign of the black-clawed faceless thing that had frozen Eleukas with fear. Only when he realized that it was truly gone, and they’d somehow prevailed, did his racing heart finally slow.
 
“Did you see–” he started to ask, then stopped, unsure how to describe the thing.
 
“Whatever made you scream like that? No. But it was real. Whatever it was, you didn’t imagine it.” Wendlyn held up the cloth she’d used to wipe his face. A sickly greenish-gray powder was smeared across it, collected on the cloth in tiny balls like pollen, or spores. “This is what it used to blind you. So what was it, anyway? The… creature.”
 
“I don’t know.” Thinking of it made Eleukas’s throat clench again, but he forced himself to continue. The only way to defeat fear was to confront it and push through. “I never got a clear view. What I saw was… a raggedy thing with a black claw for a hand and a face that… wasn’t. I mean it was just an empty space. Like a whirlpool with a… a void in the center.”
 
“Creepy.” Wendlyn folded the cloth carefully around the balled dust, tucked it into a pocket, and looked around the clearing. “Everything about this is creepy. The thing in the woods, the rats–”
 
“What about the rats?” Eleukas asked.
 
Wendlyn raised an eyebrow. She knelt beside the nearest dead rat, the one Eleukas had been leaning against. Lifting up its glassy-eyed head, she pulled back its lips to show him the teeth. The long incisors, which should have been yellow-orange, were dark gray and sharpened to needle points. The pink tongue was spotted black, and the animal’s whiskers had all fallen out. “Does this look normal to you? Does it smell normal?”
 
“No,” Eleukas admitted. There was an acrid odor to the animal’s body, something caustic and alchemical. Could that have had anything to do with the animals’ aggressiveness? Or their intelligence?
 
“And then there’s this fellow.” Wendlyn moved to the corpse in the clearing. “Do you recognize him?”
 
Eleukas approached for a closer look. The body was that of a middle-aged man, black-bearded and heavily tattooed. Savage lacerations tore through his leather armor and the flesh beneath. The wounds were blistered and dissolved into ugly, frothing goo at the edges.
 
“I don’t think he’s local,” Eleukas said. Otari was a small enough town that he knew almost all its people by sight, if not name, and he didn’t recognize this man. Those tattoos looked like a sailor’s collection, too, picked up in a dozen ports around the world. There were plenty of mariners in Otari, but they tended to stay in town, near the harbor, which meant it was unlikely Eleukas would have missed any of them the way he might have missed a forest hermit.
 
He gestured to the scorched injuries. “These are axe wounds, but it’s like the axe was dipped in acid, or lye. Something that eats flesh.”
 
“Naturally,” Wendlyn sighed. “I can’t even chop a load of firewood in peace without some mad rat-poisoning alchemist ruining everything. How tedious. Well, let’s find out why this poor fellow fell afoul of our axe-happy acid-brewer.” She rifled through the dead man’s pockets, coming up with some loose coins and a painted wooden gambling chit, which she laid out on the grass.
 
“And this,” she added, pulling something out that the dead man had thrust protectively beneath his cloak.
 
It was a torn-off book cover. Just the back cover and part of the spine, the title missing except for a final “II” and an ornate sigil stamped in gilt on the pebbled black leather. Eleukas didn’t consider himself much of a reader, but even he could tell that the book had been crafted expensively and with great care.
 
“What do you suppose it is?” he asked.
 
Wendlyn traced the golden markings thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I’ll bet Morlibint will, though. We should go to Odd Stories and ask him.”
 
“We should report this to Captain Longsaddle first.”
 
Wendlyn shook her head. “No.”
 
Eleukas blinked. “What do you mean, no?”
 
“I mean no. Maybe you want to risk his temper. I don’t. He’s still got it in for me after the Merrymead candle prank–”
 
“—with good reason—”
 
“—and he thinks I stole the two-headed pickled baby goat from Wrin’s Wonders–”
 
“—which you did—”
 
“—and he blames me for the goat turning up in the sample keg at Crow’s Casks.”
 
“Because you put it there!” Eleukas threw up his hands, exasperated.
 
“I didn’t say he was wrong, I just said he’s not inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt about anything anymore. You of all people should know that, given how many punishment details I’ve gotten lately.” Wendlyn blew out a breath, her brief good humor evaporating as she looked about the clearing’s carnage. “And this, unlike a pickled baby goat scaring a bunch of drunk farmers, is actually serious. I don’t want to get blamed for a murder, Eleukas. Or even a theft. I don’t know what that book was, but I’ll bet it was important. You know how Captain Longsaddle can be. If he needs a suspect, and he hasn’t got a better one–"
 
“He wouldn’t blame you,” Eleukas said. He was sure of that. Captain Longsaddle did have a terrible temper, but he’d never known the man to be unjust.
 
“What you mean is you wouldn’t blame me.” Wendlyn smiled wryly, as if she were talking to a child who refused to let go of wishful stories. “Eleukas, it’s different for you. The captain knows you. He likes you. He’s been training you since you were old enough to hold a toy axe. But he only knows me as a troublemaker. You’re a good friend, and I’d trust you with my life in a fight, but I’m not going to trust you on this. I can’t.”
 
“Well, all right,” Eleukas said. He still thought she was wrong, but he could see how much higher the stakes would be if he, and not she, were mistaken. “What do you want to do?”
 
“I want to solve the mystery,” Wendlyn said, shrugging and squinting up into the distance, where Giant’s Wheel threw water high over the sun. “I want to know who this man was, and who killed him, and why. I want to be able to give Captain Longsaddle, and the rest of Otari, an answer to what happened here.” She paused, and flashed him a smile. All cockiness and challenge now, no sign of fear. “Do you think we can do that?”
 
Eleukas smiled back. The terror he’d felt earlier seemed small and silly in the summer sun, and curiosity rose in its place. Besides, it was hard not to feel confident when Wendlyn exuded it so easily.
 
“Sure,” he told her, and to his surprise found that he meant it. “To Odd Stories?”
 
“To Odd Stories.”
***
 
Eleukas, like most people who grew up in Otari, had deep, fond memories of the eccentric stone tower and attached bookstore known as Odd Stories. The sign over the door showed a stack of books with lines of colorful energy curling up from their open pages, and Morlibint, the proprietor, did his best to make that promise of boundless imagination come true for the children who visited his shop. He always knew the perfect book to launch a child onto a fanciful voyage to pirate islands or dragon-haunted mountains, and Eleukas often thought that if only all books were as interesting as Morlibint’s, he would never have fallen out of the habit of reading.
 
Just seeing the sign was enough to rekindle some of the old magic. It was a grim errand that had brought them to Morlibint’s door, yet Eleukas couldn’t help smiling as he came in.
 
The red-haired wizard greeted them with his habitual scowl, but his expression softened, like a falconer catching sight of an injured fledgling, as he glimpsed the torn book cover in Wendlyn’s hand. “Now, what have we here?”
 
“A book, or part of one.” Wendlyn handed it over, moving gingerly, as though her arms were sore. “Found it in the woods. Can you tell us what it is?”
 
Morlibint slid on a pair of glass-rimmed spectacles and peered at the sigil. A thin line appeared between his brows. “Yes, as it happens. This is a necromancer’s mark. I recognize this very one, in fact. A cowled fellow came here trying to sell it a few weeks back. Part of a set. I hemmed and hawed over buying it, but it wasn’t entirely up to me. Carlthe didn’t want to spend the money, and honestly, he was right. There’s not much call for such things in Otari, and I wasn’t particularly interested in reading it myself. Grim stuff, from what I saw.”
 
Eleukas and Wendlyn exchanged a look. The dead man had been wearing a hooded cloak. Perhaps it had been he who’d come to Odd Stories.
 
“Do you suppose he would have tried to sell it elsewhere?” Wendlyn asked.
 
Morlibint shrugged. “Oh, probably. I’m not the only book dealer in town. And there’s always the Dawnflower Library, for less commercial texts.”
 
“Yes, there is that,” Wendlyn agreed, with a careful neutrality that made Eleukas wonder whether Morlibint knew about her sister, Lisavet, who was an acolyte there. The two didn’t get along especially well, which was why Wendlyn never went within a hundred yards of the Dawnflower Library if she could help it.
 
He wasn’t sure she’d be able to help it now, though. Not just because of the mystery book, but because Wendlyn was looking decidedly unwell. She’d hidden her scratches beneath a long-sleeved blouse before they came into town, but there was a greenish cast to her skin and a glazed look in her eyes he didn’t like.
 
“Thank you for your time,” he told Morlibint, hastily, and hustled Wendlyn outside. When they were alone, he asked her: “Are you all right? You look a little shaky.”
 
“I feel a little shaky. I thought these scratches were nothing, but–” She pushed up one of her loose green sleeves, showing him that her wounds had become furiously inflamed. Lines of pus swelled beneath the skin, seeping out through the raw red cuts.
 
Eleukas recoiled in shock. He’d had no idea that her injuries had gotten so bad, so quickly. She’d put on such a brave face inside the shop. “You need a healer.”
 
“Afraid so.” Wendlyn nodded, swayed, and nearly fell. She let her sleeve fall back down and gave him an unsteady smile.
 
“Good thing we need to go to the Dawnflower Library anyway,” she added, and collapsed.