The Plague Wind
by Travis Knight
The storm that threw the sea at the Iron Rose was fierce enough
to clear all but the watch from the drenched deck. Rain came in gusty
sheets nearly as powerful as the waves that swelled and slammed at the
fore of the galley, where shielded lanterns guttered and threatened to
wash out.
Most of the crew and passengers had gathered belowdecks in the long,
narrow mess in the heart of the ship. Lanterns lit the tightly packed
space, but spirits were banked under the endless battering of thunder
and wave that shook the ship.
It was late summer, storm season at peak, and the man who called
himself Breor could smell the stink of fear on the crowd even as he
clumped down the rough-cut stairs into the space below. Angry voices
jeered and snarled at him for letting in a gust of rain and cold wind
from the deck above, but they fell back to the quiet, frightened murmur
and lowing groan as the floor rolled dangerously beneath them. Breor
took in the room from the end, near where the ship’s cook stood behind
his bar, ready to ladle out mugs of hot broth. Somewhere, a man gagged
as the Iron Rose plummeted several feed.
He had come to the mess not to escape the rain, but in search of
quarry. The men below were at the midpoint of a long and now terrifying
voyage across the Center Sea to the city of Aroban. But Breor had
arrived at the end of his journey.
It had surprised him how difficult hunting would be in such a small
space as a Lathian galley. But tonight, with the sky’s wrath and the
pitching sea rising up at them, Breor was sure that the hunt was near
its end. When he’d seen the storm on the horizon that evening, a
bruised ridge of low, boiling cloud sweeping towards them, he’d been
sure. When he’d seen the scrambling crew tying everything down, he’d
been sure. It would be tonight. It had to be done.
Cutting across the agitated, mulling buzz of the crowded mess, someone
blew a simple tune on a flute. The whistling music came fast: a shrill
run that seemed to make the lines of tired faces and neck stand out.
Then, of a sudden, the music mellowed, soothing them in turn, relaxing
their tired faces as the player drew the melody out.
Bodies squeezed into the long table, clearing a space at the far end of
the room. Standing alone, Breor saw, was a tall wiry man in a black
coat with fly-away hair. He held a delicate-looking white pipe to his
lips, ready to play.
“A little music for your souls tonight?” he asked his audience.
The red-rimmed eyes and bleary faces nodded eagerly. The player smiled
a wide, toothy grin at them. Breor leaned against the bar and glanced
at the cook, who stood with arms braced. The wiry player began a new
tune, and one that was evidently a favorite for a handful of the men:
The Stones Below the Sea. A cheer rose up briefly, but was quickly
drowned out by shouts of bad luck and harsh oaths coming from the
others. Eyes laughing at the discord, the player started stomping his
feet, and soon the jeers had quieted down and the men were pounding or
clapping the rhythm along with the bouncing white flute.
Breor, however, was unsettled. The player’s eyes had lit on him when
he’d begun the tune. A bad omen, if ever there was one. However he felt
about it, the effect on the other men was immediate: by the end of the
tune, the bloodless tension had eased considerably, even as the ship
pitched and rolled, knocking over broth mugs and sending the standing
men stumbling. But Breor—and the man with the flute—were unmoved by the
lurching.
He played a second tune, this one to sour catcalls. Breor recognized it
as a southlander’s fire hymn, and the few men who chanted out the
lyrics with the tune were drowned out by the men who demanded a
different tune altogether.
When he came to the end, the player set the flute down, silencing the
room as thunder crackled all around them, and settled to a brutal
rumbling that drowned out the rain for long seconds. Faces turned
nervously upward, and Breor though the storm had worsened considerably
since the playing had started. The ship lurched first to port, and then
back again, rocking the men in the close quiet.
Then, as suddenly as he’d started, the player said, “Tell me a story!”
His gray eyes flashed around the mess as he looked at the crew and
passengers. “Your best story, in trade for more music!”
Breor watched as the seated men looked at one another, murmuring,
reluctant to make fools of themselves. Behind him, the cook muttered an
oath beneath his breath as a wave swamped water up onto the deck, and
it splashed down the stairs and washed around his ankles.
One of the men, an older passenger with a braided gray beard, and
wealthy by the look of his clothes, raised himself half to his feet.
“All right. But you play Halfhand’s Loss when I’ve finished.”
The player’s grin stretched wide as he leaned forward, his gray eyes
locking on the old man. “Agreed,” he said.
Stammering, the graybeard told of a man-sized falcon he’d seen circling
over the roads north of Tosca while he’d been carting goods by wagon
train. The tale was meandering, often hitching back to explain some
overlooked detail, and seeming to start and stop, as if the old man was
struggling to keep it all in order. In the end, it amounted to a bustle
of naked women—Sisters of the Sea, no less—bursting from a hedge, and
the hawk swooping down at them. As if speaking from a fog, the
graybeard claimed he’d been the one to loose the arrow that killed the
raptor before it could carry one of the women off—and there was a
chorus of lewd cheers and disbelieving laughter.
The player had been listening intently, and Breor had been watching him
in turn. As the old man looked around himself, confused, the player at
the end of the table sat back, and frowned.
“Halfhand’s Loss,” he said in a way that was not at all
pleased. He picked the tune up without a pause, and played it
skillfully, but quickly and sharply, never rocking as thunder crashed
so hard in the skies that it sounded as if the mid-mast itself had
fallen down above them.
At the end of the tune, the old man was sitting with his head in his
hands, shuddering. He’d become very pale, and seemed shrunken in his
fine clothes. One of the younger men to his side was speaking quietly
into his ear, and the old man was shaking his head.
Abruptly, the younger man—a body servant, perhaps—stood and hoisted the
graybeard up under the arm. The gathered passengers and crewmen watched
them go wordlessly. The player, however, looked around with his large,
blue eyes, taking them all in with a wolfish grin. Then, which a twirl
of the white flute, he called his audience back. Their eyes on him, the
player licked his teeth with a sharp dart of his tongue, and asked for
another story.
“I’ve got a better one than birds and birds,” a younger man
wearing a black leather jerkin said when no one else spoke. He stood up
fully, and reached up to his throat, where a number of cords were
tucked into the jerkin. He fished out one of the cords, upon which
dangled a bronze coin that flashed luridly as swayed pendulously with
the ship’s tossing. The young man looked around at the bodies packed on
the table, and huddled against the walls, and nodded.
“If you recognize this coin, then you know its home. I paid service to
the Red Prince of Musspelim two summers ago.”
“Wait!” interrupted the man at the end of the table, who rested his
flute upon his shoulder lightly. “What tune, for your story?”
The younger man looked around. “I’ve not decided. When I’m through,
I’ll pick one.”
The player bowed his head gracefully, but did not let his eyes drop
from the man’s face. He watched this new storyteller with as much
interest as he had the old man. Blue—the eyes were definitely blue now,
Breor noted. His jaw set imperceptibly as he watched the player. His
certainty had only grown after the old man had been carried away. As he
listened to the new tale, a plan formed in his mind.
The young man spoke loud above the hammering rain on the deck above.
“It was two years ago, during the Deluge. Sands, we thought it was the
end of the Age! It rained from Morgh to Nilian for three months—some
said the Gyre moved closer by half to the Pillars during the storm, it
was so bad. Almost as bad as tonight!”
He met the raucous laughter with a bobbing chin, but glanced nervously
at the player, and then said a little too loudly, “Yeh, well, when it
rains in the southlands, the deserts turn to mud, and things hidden
below the dust and sand are revealed. Lost things. Things that should
have stayed forgotten.” The young man faltered, and swallowed hard.
The other men watched him closely, but none so close as the player,
whose fingers played along the line of his flute. The floor of the
galley bucked, but the young man’s eager audience hardly seemed to
notice.
Then, nodding to himself, the young man continued in a weaker,
diminished voice. “We were deep on the sands, hunting raiders for the
Red Prince. But the rains hit overnight, and we had to run for high
ground. But as the rain drove us, the hill we were headed for
collapsed, revealing a statue as big as this ship.”
“Bull!” cried a shriveled man from the middle of the long table. “It
weren’t that much rain!”
The player’s blue eyes flashed at the interruption, and turned back to
the young man. As if reliving the memory had conjured up a fear in him,
the young man had begun to sweat despite the damp chill of the wretched
night. “It’s true,” he said. “It was hidden in the dunes. Or the top of
it was, anyhow: a face, a woman’s face, set atop a beast’s body. And
her mouth was a door.”
There was more laughter at this, but it died when the player turned to
look at the crowd. They looked away from his eyes, flinching
unconsciously. Breor marked it without looking away from the player
himself.
The young man suddenly dropped back to the bench, as if unable to stand
as he recited the tale. He cleared his throat and wiped his face,
before starting again. “Yeh, we levered open the door—not my idea—and
revealed a winding stairway, down to the belly.” Grunts of surprise
were banked by a sudden port lurch of the ship that made many men reach
for the walls to steady themselves.
“And what did you find?” the player asked, his voice cutting above the
rest angry muttering.
The younger man looked as if he might be sick. Shaking, staring at his
clasped hands, he said, “Nothing. A black wind blew out the torches,
and we fled.”
In the sudden silence, the player threw back his head and cackled.
Thunder smashed the heavens above, rolling out for many seconds before
it—and the player—quieted. The young man had risen from the table and
stumbled away. He vomited at the base of the stairs as the ship threw
itself to starboard, and fled up the stairs and into the night. The
storm winds slammed the door behind him. Others followed him with white
in their eyes like prey on the run.
Still seated at the end of the table, the player seemed unconcerned by
the curses and the bustle of serving boys splashing water over the
stinking puddle. Indeed, he suddenly took up a new tune, this time
something that sounded to Breor like Morning Flower.
Its bright, high notes rolling one into the other and drawing the
remaining men back to him. He played for a while, then, sweet melodies
all, easing the strain on the faces of the men still around the table.
Seeing the gaps on the bench, Breor came to peace with himself. He
would have to sacrifice a treasured memory to end this hunt, before
anyone else was hurt. He knew immediately what he would have to give
up—and anger at the loss writhed in him dangerously.
When the player stopped his music, Breor stepped up to the table and
said, “I’ve got a tale such as you liars have never heard.”
Faces turned to take him in, but the player’s eyes had settled on the
table, as if he had wished to avoid looking at Breor. But they rose
slowly as he spoke, now a jade green, almost livid with hunger. “A
story for a tune,” he said quietly, barely audible above the rain and
stamping boots above.
Breor nodded. “Do you know Stonetongue’s March?”
The player looked away. “I don’t like that tune.”
“Then I’ll keep my peace.”
But no one else volunteered. The player’s façade faltered for a moment.
Unable to help himself, he stretched his wide grin and said, “Fine.
Where I come from, we call that tune Bitter Rock. It had better
be a good story.”
Breor opened his mouth, but thunder brashed, and the ship pitched
suddenly. The beams above groaned, and a wave of water washed under the
door to the deck, splashing heavily into the mess. Several more men got
up to leave, and Breor made way for them.
But more than a dozen remained. Very well. Looking at the player, he
said, “I travelled to the Steppe, once, many years ago. It was autumn,
and the grasses were tall and white with heat. The fires were overdue,
but no wars—and no storms—had lit them yet, and so the whole land had
turned to waiting for the winter fires.”
He could feel the player’s eyes on him as he spoke, drinking up the
words—and more. As he spun his story, the memory itself seemed to draw
distant, as if drying up with the words, making it hard to speak, to
make sense. He swallowed, and forced himself on. He had no choice.
“The horse lords have no cities but one, and that city is ever-moving.
They cannot be trapped or laid siege to, because every night, they
build it anew. But that does not mean they do not have kings. In the
year I was there, a new Khaite—he was called Three Fires—had been
crowned, and he wanted a bride for the winter.” Breor bit off his next
thought, forcing himself to stop as he tried to remember her name.
“Go on,” the player said from the end of the table. He ran his fingers
along the flute distantly, his green eyes on Breor.
Breor glared at the man. Had he known her name? Yes, he had. But now it
was gone, sucked from him as he spoke. The force of the player’s gaze
was terrible as he waited.
“The woman Three Fires wanted was a princess of Sunwall. The horse
lords have no way to scale the walls—and so they could not simply take
the woman he desired to be their queen, though many would have tried,
to win his favor. But I was there, and he knew me, and he knew I was of
the eastern mountains. So he tasked me to find a way to tell his
beloved to come to him.”
The men at the table looked around at one another, and some nervously
glanced at the player. Breor’s hand had fallen to the heavy belt at his
waist. The strain of the retelling had left his hands to do as they
willed; and had they sought the hilt of his dagger. Breor drew his
hands back, and planted them on the table before him.
“Three Fires paid me a lord’s salary to tell her, but I could no more
march into Sunwall and steal her than they could scale the walls. She
was a princess, and I would have been slapped in irons, had I delivered
a marriage proposal from Khaite Three Fires of the horse lords to the
King of Sunwall.” Breor tried to stop, but the more he said, the harder
it became to measure his pace. Fighting for control, he said, “So I
climbed into the mountains, traveling north and east from the Steppe—”
A blast of thunder louder than any before shattered Breor’s line of
thought. The entire galley slammed to hard to side, throwing men from
the benches, toppling those still standing—all except Breor, and the
man with the flute. The cook’s pots and pans rattled and were thrown
from their hooks, and the kettle of broth was knocked from its stand,
spilling its contents all over the wooden boards and mixing with the
water that flooded down from the deck above. The door was knocked open
and frigid wind screeched into the galley, bringing with it salt and
spray.
The player’s green eyes compelled him to speak, but Breor turned aside,
and stooped to help one of the men up from the ground.
“What did you find in the mountains?” the player asked, his voice sharp
over the calls of men from the deck above.
Breor did not answer. He settled the man on the bench, and helped
another to his feet.
The player was standing now, too, holding the flute like a cudgel in
his hand. “Tell me!” he demanded.
Breor stumbled for a moment. He had to work through the fog to find the
thread of the memory. With an effort, he found it. Some of the men
reseated themselves, looking dazed, but more were leaving, rushing up
the stairs. The cook had vanished, too, and his serving boys. The
serving bar was abandoned, now. The door slammed in the storm above,
and opened, letting down a fresh glut of seawater.
Breor breathed hard through his nose, but the words were forced from
his mouth. “I climbed for weeks. They say the Eastern Ranges are
endless. Perhaps. The mountains get bigger, and so do the trees—but I
came to a vast plain, upon which three giants slept.” He growled, but
continued. “I could not wake them, so I waited for them to rise. It
took many days…but that gave me time to plan.” Breor struggled to order
the fading thoughts in his head, feeling the urge to speak rising as
his own innate resistance crumbled—he would have to tell this story,
bleed this memory, speak until the player released him—
But the storm intervened. The floor dropped from beneath them, and the
ceiling flew at him; Breor raised his arms in time to avoid smashing
his head against the ceiling. He crashed rag-like back onto the table.
It collapsed under his weight.
Above, there was shouting, and a bell clanked somewhere, half drowned
by the howling wind that rushed into the narrow space. The lanterns on
the wall guttered, more than half of them dying out entirely. Shadows
danced madly on the walls as the remaining men screamed, scrambling to
untangle themselves from the broken table and flee up the stairs, away
from the madness.
The grin was gone from the player’s face. Naked hunger remained, his
mouth a rictus of predatory greed. He stood at the end of the table,
and the wind swirled around him, moaning mindlessly.
“Give me the memory, worm!” the player snarled as he slid around the
broken boards of the table. The sweet voice had become wasted and
shrill.
“Plague wind,” Breor grunted as he struggled to his feet. “You’re a
plague wind.”
“Give it to me!” shrieked the man, and the gale of his need
flung him forward at Breor, flying across the last stretch of table and
abandoning its human visage.
Breor set his feet in time to catch the lunge. He grasped at the man’s
shoulders and flung him at the wall. The plague wind crashed to the
side and settled to the floor, stunned for the moment. Outside, the
storm raged harder than ever—Breor thought he might have heard men
calling for ropes, or for rafts—but his storm was down below in the
mess, and the noise outside was only a shadow of the danger within.
“When they woke,” Breor said, the story drawing out of him like blood
from a tapped vein, “I challenged them to see which could throw a stone
high enough to hit the moon.”
Cackling as lightning flashed through the open door above them, the
plague wind swept upwards at him. Mists swirled around it as its
fingers—claws now—reached for Breor’s throat, and found his arm
instead. They gripped, but could not scratch his hide. Breor grabbed it
by the wrist, and the plague wind’s face stared, disbelieving.
“Stoneman! Half-breed!” it shrieked, all cadence of humanity gone as
the creature lost control in its rage and desire.
Breor snarled and hammered it with all of his Stone strength, hitting
it again and again until the icy, insubstantial fingers slid off him
like a fog, and the thing pooled at his feet, shaking itself. Eddies
and swirls formed at the edges as it struggled to hold itself together.
It began to draw itself close, cohering, but not before Breor knelt
heavily on is chest, pinning it in the water. The plague wind snarled
at him like winter winds through dead trees as he drew a long, shining
black dagger from a sheath at his hip.
But even as Breor ran his thumb over the obsidian blade, he felt the
spell calling at him, sucking the memory out of him—feeding on him. He
wished there had been another way, that he hadn’t had to give up his
memory of Three Fires. But there had been no choice; it was the end of
the hunt, and Breor had sprung this trap to catch the monster. Now he
had to give what was promised.
Laying his black blade at the creature’s throat, he said, “I told the
giants that the winner could have me and my mule as a meal. So they
pulled up rocks as big as a house from the ground, and on my mark,
threw them. Up they rose,” Breor said, and he looked up as if
remembering the stones vanishing into the sky, and then igniting,
flaring as they arced upwards into the heavens.
The plague wind screamed beneath him, thrashed, as it sensed the memory
drawing to an end—and with it, its own death looming like the waves
that battered the Iron Rose, and water rushed down into the mess. Soon
it would cover the thing’s face. But could he drown it?
“Release me, half-breed!” the plague wind screamed, but Breor pressed
the knife against its throat. There was more to tell. He was too close,
had risked too much getting on this boat. The ship rolled dangerously
again, lilting hard to starboard, throwing the debris of the table and
the wreck of the cook’s station hard across the room. Boots and bodies
scrambled on the boards overhead. But Breor was unmoved.
“You killed sixty people in the Pillars last year, howler,”
Breor snarled. “I’ve tracked you for eight months, and halfway across
the damn sea. Do you want to hear the end of the story?”
It pleaded and begged, demanded and screamed mindlessly at him, but
could not deny him, or the dagger. It writhed and clawed uselessly at
him. Breor’s clothes fell to shreds under the assault, but he was
untouched.
“They couldn’t hit the moon, those giants.” He spoke fast, as if he
were running out of breath, letting the last dregs of the memory spill
out of him, not seeing the creature below him, but that high plain so
close to the moon. “They threw as hard as they could, but they missed
the shot, and sent three falling over Sunwall for me. Three fires. You
see now?”
A moment of calm overcame the plague wind, as if Breor’s last memory
had sated the creature. And in the moment of peace, he drew the
obsidian dagger hard and deep across its throat, killing it as surely
as the sea quenched fire.
It gasped and gaped at him, clutching at his shoulders, his arms, his
face, and then fell dead as wreckage and foaming water rushed around
them. The boat held still—and the rain on the deck boards above had
faded to a drizzle.
Above, a bugle blared once: the signal of dawn on the horizon.
Breor stood. The plague wind faded below him, its last, foggy wisps
dissolving as he stepped across the ruins of the long table. He
stooped, and pulled the plague wind’s white flute out of the water.
“Did she see them?” asked a voice at the other end of the room. Breor
spun, hand on his dagger, and saw one of the cook’s servants: a boy no
more than thirteen summers, who had been hiding behind the bar. He was
drenched, his hair matted to his face, but his eyes were wide.
“The princess of Sunwall, sir…did she see the three falling stars?”
Breor looked inward, seeking for an answer for the boy. Seeking the
memory, as if he were feeling along in the dark.
“Yes,” he said at last, and snapped the flute in two.
THE END
© 2017 Travis Knight
Bio: Travis lives, teaches, and writes in Central New York with
his wife, their cat, and an army of desperate house plants. You can
find more of his fiction at www.travisoknight.com, or by subscribing to
the Canon Fodder Podcast.
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