The Crooked Key, Chapter 11: Remembering a Poem
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
Chapter 11: Remembering a Poem
The banisher bit back a scream, as the hexguards might still be close.
“I’ll look for them!” Skaithness said in that oh-so-helpful way she had.
She turned to climb the hill, but the banisher said, “Don’t bother. They’re dead.” He pushed some scrubs out of the way, revealing an old standing stone with jagged marks on each side. Most had been meticulously effaced, but one, near the base, remained.
“A monster?” Skaithness asked, looking up at the top of the stone as if she expected a dragon to land there.
“A challenge stone,” the banisher said miserably. “The Clanless—the spirit people who lived here before the First Clans arrived—established them so mortals traveling here would engage in ritual combat to the death. Their blood watered the sacred flowers of the Clanless. Banishers chipped away all the marks that might affect humans, but they missed the one for horses. They must have torn free of their tethers to fight each other to the death somewhere farther inland. Shit. I should’ve…”
Should have what? Eilo hadn’t even known that the Clanless had built ritual sites this far east. And the menhir was so worn down that it barely looked like a marker at all.
“I know!” Skaithness said. “We can lure the hexguards here, and then, when their horses—”
“It only works once a month,” the banisher said. “Grab whatever food and supplies we still have. We’re walking.”
So they walked, even when freezing rain fell, and every few miles they walked down to the shore to look for Skaithness’s lighthouse, but it was never there. Finding the dead hexguard provided only a little satisfaction.
“What got him, do you think?” Skaithness asked, studying the cairn of heaped-up stones.
“I’m not going to dig him up to find out,” the banisher said. He looked for clues from the tall steel hat they had left on a pole. The hat revealed nothing, so he circled the cairn, wary in case the hexguards doubled back, until he found a splash of green blood that the rain had not yet washed away.
“One of Nowan’s four-armed giants,” Skaithness said.
“Or something with the same blood chemistry,” the banisher said. “But you’re right. And that probably means both Nowan and Aklurian are after us.”
“Maybe they’ll fight each other until no one is left!” Skaithness said.
Eilo said nothing. He kept walking. The next night brought snow flurries, and no caves for shelter. They huddled between two outcroppings of barren rock and used the rest of Skaithness’s fake religious costume to shelter themselves from the wind. It blew away an hour before dawn and they couldn’t find it. The air warmed up a little and the wind dropped, blanketing the landscape in fog. Though it was warmer than yesterday, Skaithness moved more slowly.
“Are you okay?” the banisher asked.
“Just stiff,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll warm up.”
He checked their packs. Maybe three days of oat cakes and beef jerky left. The fog hid anything past a hundred feet, but also magnified sound, so they had time to hide when they heard hoofbeats clattering over the rocky shore.
They crouched in silence for most of the morning, listening to the hoofbeats all around them until it started to rain.
“Three more days,” the banisher told Skaithness. “Then we turn back. Or rather, we head deeper inland. I can try to make contact with one of the Wolf Tribes out here. We’ve done them favors before.”
“But the lighthouse is just—”
“Skaithness!” the banisher snapped. He enjoyed how the rain let him raise his voice, just a little, with little chance of being overheard. “We are heading west, haven’t you noticed? We have already bent around the Cape of Secret Stars. We’re bending our way back the way we came. There is no lighthouse, there is no secret way to the metal island where you think you can find the crooked key. You listened to some crazy old codger who thinks the Egg of Eime was sent by the gods, and he tricked you. We’re going to winter with the tribes, then see where Lady Ryphonia is when we can move around again.”
“But we’re almost there!”
“You sound like a child! Stop whining!”
“You sound like an old man. You’ve already given up. I was sent to destroy the world and make it again—”
“You were sent by whatever is like the Egg of Eime for the coming age, Skaithness! Some toy of the ancient world made you feel important and now you think you have to share some revelation with everyone, but it’s not real. You aren’t the herald of the next age—Nowan is. Every year there are more men like Nowan, and there’s no one like you.”
Skaithness turned around and started walking the other way.
“Don’t walk away from me!” the banisher snapped. Gods to come, he really did sound like an old man.
“I am walking where I need to walk, Eilo,” the armored woman said. “I have a destiny.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then I’ll drown, because I’m walking back to the tip of the Cape of Secret Stars.”
“Why?” He was already following her.
“Because you said I had one more day, and I’m going to use it.”
She made brutally good time, too: by nightfall, Eilo was stumbling with exhaustion, and Skaithness plodded over the damp grass. But she kept going, plowing through the cold and ugly scrubland of the Cape of Secret Stars. She walked east, then north, then east again, to the very edge of the cliffs.
“Is this it?” Skaithness asked.
“What?”
“Is this the farthest point?” the armored woman asked.
“Yes, I think so. I think we’re being followed. Do you hear hoofbeats, or is it just the surf?”
“I ask because I learned about the Cape of Secret Stars in my vault,” Skaithness said. “Did you learn about it?”
“Of course. I got lessons in geography when my mentor wasn’t hitting me with a stick.”
“Why is it called that?” Skaithness asked.
The banisher searched his memory, and realized that he was so tired that he could barely remember what he had for lunch.
“Oat cakes,” he said after a long moment.
“What? No,” Skaithness said. “We actually talked about this, don’t you remember? When you were quizzing me about what plays and stories I knew.”
“We never really discussed what it means that your education stopped 250 years ago,” the banisher said.
“You were very precise in your dating, I remember,” Skaithness said. “Because the last work of art you and I both knew was The Glass Wings, by Dalussae.”
The banisher felt as if he should understand, but he was too tired. So Skaithness recited the relevant lines of the epic poem:
We Came to the Cape of Secret Stars
Seen from Sea Alone
But the Stars Were Gone
And Teeth of Stone
Rose ‘Round Our Prow
And We Sailed On
The banisher looked down at the jagged stones under his boots.
“The lighthouse,” he said. “You can’t see it from land.”
“Only from the sea, and it hasn’t been lit for centuries. And you can’t get close from the sea because of the reefs.” As she spoke, she walked right to the eastern edge of the continent, bent down, and dropped off.
“Skaithness!”
“What?” Her armored head popped back up again.
“That’s a dangerous climb, even for you,” he said.
“I have to be sure,” Skaithness said. She disappeared again.
That’s when the banisher heard the hooves again. It was late enough that the full moon had risen to the east—he was probably silhouetted against it. He guessed a dozen riders or more were riding hard in his direction. The moonlight revealed mounted warriors who did not ride like humans. The hunched things appeared for only a moment, then disappeared behind a ridge of stone. They would be in bowshot in a minute, and be able to run him down in two.
The banisher unspooled his rope and tied it to the largest, strongest protrusion of stone he could find. He had no one to pray to, as any gods had either left or had not been born yet, so he offered a silent apology to Skaithness and, hoping that she had not just led them both off the edge of the world, began a desperate descent.
A freezing sea-wind blew, alternately flinging him into empty air and knocking him against the frozen cliff. He wore thick gloves, but his hands were already numb, and he banged his knees as he struggled to descend. Some mad urge caused him to look down: the cliff had suffered erosion over the eons, and would become an overhang after another twenty feet. A hundred feet below that, the surf boomed and crashed against the rocks.
He kept climbing until he hung over nothing. Everything was black except the huge moon hanging in the sky and its reflection on the churning water below.
Overhead, men and horrors shouted to each other. They had found the rope.
“We’ll follow him down.”
“Nah. Just cut it.”
“What if there’s—?”
“Just cut it.”
And Eilo could only hang there in the blackness, knees wrapped around the rope.
Then blue light sliced through the darkness: Skaithness’s breastplate! She kept it aimed away from the banisher’s eyes, so it illuminated a slick platform of worked stone maybe fifteen feet beneath him. But he could not reach it.
“Swing!” Skaithness shouted.
Always the optimist. Gritting his teeth, half-blinded by the light and by the tears of pain in his eyes, Eilo kicked off, swung, frantically kicked again, spun around—
They cut the rope. He fell.
Something hit his leg and pain cut through his numbness: acute agony from ankle to thigh. He floated in midair and waited to hit water or rocks—it would not really matter which after a half-second.
A faint hiss. The air around him? No. The rope falling past him. He hung in midair, pinned in blue light.
Eilo looked around. Skaithness had grabbed him by the ankle. He now hung upside-down, staring down at the churning water far below.
“Eilo,” Skaithness said, in the very calm voice of a frightened parent, “could you please move your glaive a little bit to the side? It’s stuck.”
The banisher reached cautiously out with one hand and adjusted the glaive on his back, so it was no longer stuck on the rocky prominence below his head, and Skaithness reeled him in. She took five quick steps back, holding him straight up and at maximum extension like a rotten fish. Then she gently lowered him onto the freezing, slippery stone.
“I’m just going to stay here for a while,” the banisher said. He kept both gloved hands pressed against the stone. The slippery marble felt like it sloped out and down over the cliff. Finally he lifted his numb hands. He didn’t move.
“We’re here,” Skaithness said. “We’re in the lighthouse: the House of Secret Stars.”
“Skaithness?” the banisher said. He rose and tested his bruised ankle.
“Yes?” She shone her beam around at what looked like a long-abandoned docking station of some kind. It resembled the drydocks on the southern shore of the River Chezaun in Baristoc.
“I need to apologize,” Eilo said, once he was sure his voice wouldn’t shake. “I treated you abominably. It was disgraceful of me. I’m sorry.”
Skaithness hugged him. She was gentle, but also freezing cold. The banisher endured it as well as he could, but then Skaithness stepped away and said, “We’re here, but how do we get from here to there? The mendicant I spoke to said that the lighthouse held some kind of machine that would take us from here to the metal island. Has anyone ever built a successful flying machine, Eilo?”
“No, but several people have built unsuccessful flying machines,” the banisher said. “A sad business.”
He followed Skaithness deeper into the unfamiliar structure, which resembled a wide stone trench. It was hard to see, as the armor cast a clear cold light that was the same color as the blue-gray stone, and what metal he could see was black wrought iron. But then the light caught a gleam of metal. He climbed a short flight of steps out of the trench and found a heavy brass lantern. The glass was abraded, but not cracked. And a large stone jug held lamp oil.
“Worth trying,” the banisher said. He filled the lamp and lit it. Then he did the same thing with another lamp Skaithness had found. The increased light revealed a room above them to their left, accessible via a flight of wrought iron stairs. Huge, shattered windows looked down from that room onto the trench. It resembled both an overseer’s station at a pottery studio and the bridge of a modern warship. Skaithness went back down into the trench and climbed out of it on the other side. Then she turned and noticed the wrought iron moon bridge that arched over it.
“What’s it for?” she asked.
“We need to hurry,” Eilo said.
Skaithness dragged something out from behind some more stone jugs.
“A boat!” she cried.
“Your armor!” the banisher said.
For though the moon bridge, the railings, and some of the stairs were wrought iron, the little boat was of the same burnished golden material as Skaithness’s armor, with the same intricate abstract designs all over it. But it was nothing except an empty canoe: no locks for oars, no sail, not even seats.
“Are we sure it’s even a boat?” the armored woman asked. She turned her beam toward the far end of the room, and light immediately refracted in every direction, momentarily dazzling them both.
“We found the lens of the lighthouse,” the banisher said. “Turn that thing off.”
It was easier to see with just the lamps. Eilo examined the lens with one.
“It’s like nothing I’ve seen before,” the banisher said.
“How many lighthouses have you seen?” Skaithness asked.
“Up close? None, actually. But I don’t think they look like this.” He headed up the steps to the observation room with the shattered windows as he talked. From here he could look across at the boat and the lens and down into the trench. A flat desk stretched out in front of him below the broken windows, featureless except for a single brass keyhole.
“A lock,” he said. “Skaithness, can you open this?”
The banisher looked from the lock, to the lens, to the boat, then out to the distant sea.
“This is all the same sort of thing as your armor,” Eilo said. “Even the stuff made of wrought iron. Just like you somehow know that the green stone buildings and Nowan’s helmet are the same sort of thing as...as...I haven’t seen them before.”
Two things like horse-sized slugs crept in through the entrance. They slithered across the walls, moving with frightening speed on wide, faintly luminous skirts. Their faces were masses of writhing tentacles, like entrails, and though they had no eyes, they looked at Skaithness and the banisher with murderous alien malice.
Eilo drew his glaive. Then he tossed Skaithness his knife: looking at those rubbery hides, he knew her fists would bounce off.
“Stay back,” he said. He jumped down out of the observation room, rolling so as not to make his hurt ankle worse, and rushed the closer slug. If he could fight them one at a time, maybe he had a chance. The banisher extended his glaive and slashed at the closer one, ripping open a gouge across a quarter or so of its shimmering body. It squealed and darted away, moving as quickly as a fish—not like a slug at all—until it slithered along the far side of the room and out of reach.
Eilo turned to confront the other slug, which squirmed over the ceiling—still within reach, if just barely. But then a strange radiance traveled from deep within its body toward its head.
The banisher had never faced a fire scarab before, but his mentor had described them in horrific detail. So the moment he recognized the glow, Eilo hurled himself to the side. A split second later, a radiant glob shot out of the slug’s mouthparts: not fire, but sizzling acid. It struck the stone wall and threw up a cloud of reeking steam as it ate into the rock.
Already hurt, Eilo miss-timed his roll, lurched sideways, and fell six feet down into the trench. His glaive hit the ground with an ear-rattling clang, and his palms slapped into the hard stone to break his fall. When he looked up, the horse-riding things he had glimpsed earlier were climbing into the room. Two dropped into the trench with him; the third loped toward the observation room. They had wedge-shaped heads of blue shell and mismatched claws, one huge, the other finer and narrow like long scissors. Otherwise, they looked like men, except their muscles on one side were swollen and knotted to support the weight of their big claw.
The slug on the ceiling dropped off, attempting to crush Eilo. He rolled again, landing better this time, and scooped up his glaive. As the slug wheeled around to face him, the banisher ran with it outstretched, cutting the slug almost in half horizontally. It writhed and bounced off the side of the trench. Though its shimmering skirt clipped Eilo, he kept his balance and climbed up next to Skaithness, who stood at the base of the wrought iron stairs that led up to the observation room.
“I think I know how to unlock it,” Skaithness said as one of the lobster men stalked toward them. The other two were climbing out of the trench.
“Then do it!” Eilo said, not even sure what that would accomplish. “If—roll!”
The other slug unleashed its caustic spittle. The banisher and armored woman leaped apart as the sizzling glob flew between them. A fragment of the stuff bounced onto Skaithness’s tasset and the metal smoked and blackened. She climbed back up into the observation room and Eilo, hoping that the slugs only had one glob in them each, followed as the nearest lobster man closed in. He parried one snapping claw and slashed the lobster man from shoulder to hip. Green blood gushed, but the monster hardly slowed down. The banisher swept the lobster man off his feet with a twist of his glaive, then clambered up into the observation room behind Skaithness. The room was just big enough that he could swing his glaive, and the wide-shouldered lobster men would struggle at the narrow doorway.
“Unlock it!” the banisher shouted as the next lobster man climbed up the steps. Eilo stabbed him in the guts, then kicked him off the stairs to land next to his wounded comrade.
“Working on it!” Skaithness said in that happy sing-song that was not the last thing Eilo wanted to hear in this life. Two lobster men tried to get in at once and got stuck—Eilo stabbed and stabbed, killing or fatally wounding one, and the other fell back. Then the third, the one he slashed first, smashed partway through the grill around the broken window and grabbed the banisher’s glaive with his big claw.
Eilo reached for his knife and realized he didn’t have it.
“Skaithness, knife!”
The armored woman had one gauntlet in the locking mechanism, but with the other she fumbled at her belt, flinched away from the black scoring where the acid had hit her armor, and tossed Eilo the knife. The banisher caught it and drove the point into the lobster man’s elbow, where the carapaced claw met humanlike flesh. That drew a gout of green blood and a humanlike howl from the crustacean-like head. The lobster man let go of the glaive but did not retreat. The other one that could still stand climbed the stairs again, dripping green blood. The badly wounded slug was slowly crawling up out of the trench, and the other slug was nowhere to be seen—probably on the roof, getting ready to lean down and spit into the room, killing them all.
Eilo swept his glaive back and forth, pushing the lobster man at the window away from Skaithness, then struck the one coming in through the doorway with the butt end.
“Got it!” Skaithness said.
Something on the desk uncoiled; it reminded Eilo of how the chains around Skaithness had poured off her like rain in the apartments of Old Rock. The lens at the far end of the room flashed, glittered, guttered dimly, then suddenly poured forth a beam of dazzling sapphire light.
The light hit the slug in the trench just before it crawled out, and sliced the monster in half. The upper half quivered on the far side of the trench, where the bronze boat was, for a second. Then it fell back and landed on the plane of sapphire light. It skittered across the plane of light, like butter on a too-hot frying pan, sizzling and hopping around until, after a little over a second, nothing remained, not even smoke.
A horizontal band of light, as wide as the trench, now stretched from the lens to the far horizon, where it gleamed like a newborn star.
The flash of light had momentarily dazzled the lobster men. Eilo stabbed the one in the doorway; the blow would have disemboweled him if he had normal guts. Instead, he retreated, both claws snipping and trying to catch the glaive. The banisher followed the lobster man out of the observation room and down the metal steps, trying to ignore the pain in his ankle. He shifted the weapon, baiting the lobster man into trying to grab the haft. The foolish creature overcommitted, lurching sideways, and Eilo swept it off its feet with a sudden twist of the glaive. The lobster man bounced, hit the plane of blue light, and sizzled away.
Back in the observation room, Skaithness struggled with the last lobster man, careening back and forth, crashing into the walls. Eilo had seen the woman crush a man’s skull like a baked potato, but now she barely held the upper hand. And the lobster men were strong, but not that strong. Maybe the work with the lock had drained some of her armor’s strength. Eilo turned back toward the stairs leading up to the observation room, then remembered the other slug.
He threw himself backward, not even looking, when he smelled the caustic reek. A glob of acidic spittle splashed across the wrought iron balcony and across the raised stone platform, throwing up a cloud of noxious black smoke that stung his eyes. The banisher dragged himself back to his feet. The slug was directly over the moon bridge that crossed the trench, clinging to the ceiling, and it was already hurt. Could he hurl his glaive? He flipped the weapon around, considering whether to sacrifice it.
Then Skaithness yelled in pain and surprise. The lobster man’s big claw gripped her wrist. Before Eilo could stop him, the lobster man grabbed her with both claws, and hurled the shrieking woman onto the blue plane.
Eilo screamed, but there was nothing he could do. Skaithness hit the blue plane. But she didn’t skitter across it, burning. She stopped, right in the middle, legs kicking, arms waving. Little ripples floated out from her.
The last lobster man climbed out of the window, dropped down near Eilo, and stared at the armored woman. Then he looked at the banisher as if to ask him why it didn’t work.
Eilo cut his wedge-shaped head off.
“Skaithness, stay there!” the banisher shouted. He ran across the moon bridge. The slug lunged for him with its tentacles, but Eilo ducked, then slid down the bridge to land next to the bronze boat. The slug followed him, quick as an adder as it stayed directly above him, but the banisher swung his glaive the way Nowan de Valc’s starfish giants had swung their two-handed swords, in great reaving arcs. He scored two minor cuts on the slug, and it flinched away. But two more slugs had just entered the chamber.
Eilo grabbed the boat and dragged it one-handed toward the trench. Four more lobster men climbed down into the room, just behind the slugs.
“I hope this works,” Eilo shouted, though he didn’t know if Skaithness could hear him. Then he threw the boat down onto the blue plane, and himself with it.
He landed with a bone-rattling impact on the blue plane. The boat wobbled like a canoe on a pond. Eilo forced himself onto his knees and looked for Skaithness. She bobbed in front of him…then beside him...the boat was picking up speed. The banisher grabbed her arm and pulled. Skaithness hauled herself up into the boat. It wobbled, spun 360 degrees, and then pointed straight toward the opening of the lighthouse. They shot out into open air, a hundred feet or more above the sea.
Behind them, the slugs turned around. One spat a glob of acid, but it fell short. Men and mollusk-men stood on the cliff above, helpless to stop their escape as the beam of blue light carried them toward the horizon.
*