Riding to Ridh

Synopsis

Koa went north alone. He tethered the horses south of Haudh-Gwenn, swam to the central island and went down into the Mól sewers for a sample of the ooze, and found somebody already there, a lone Peren worrying at the fissure where the crystal plugs have been broken out. Koa went round him, scraped his vial from the wall, burned his hand on what he was carrying, and on the way out put the man down without killing him, then talked a gate guard aside on Beltran’s name before clubbing him too.

At the Chantry he was recognized and admitted, and without Aldo or Mikhail at his elbow he told Baku rather more than he meant to: the disease, the addiction, and what the reagent actually is. Müde was too busy to leave and sent his Comatose Countess in his place; Baku came south herself, and on the road traded him the Chantry’s own trouble. The dream-catchers are unbinding: sleepers are haunted in their beds, some wake weaker than they lay down, and two are dead. Beltran’s people, having failed to plant spies among the staff, have taken to injuring townsfolk to get them admitted.

The withdrawal began at The Crack and went hard, Gwen throwing off pulses of magic she could not govern. What Koa noticed first was traffic (too many people going to her room), and then a conversation between Gwen and Ashanti whose words did not quite join up. He found Ashanti in her laboratory with no memory of the visit, and ran. The Countess was on the floor, and the Slumbering Queen stood over Gwen’s bed in mask and robes with the vial open in her hand.

She held him still and he broke it; magic, he decided, is only imposed will. He got hold of her so she could not shape a spell, and she answered with a wave of terror drawn out of every sleeper in the camp, and for a moment the mask went clear and Gwen’s face was under it, frightened. Then a draining touch, then cold enough to frost the room, which is the one thing on earth Koa does not feel. Rheem, whom sleep does not touch, came to the door, and at Koa’s order waded in, pried the vial out of the Queen’s fist and ran it to safety. Leon Yaegar arrived awake, because the Peren do not sleep to order, bound her arms and covered her mouth; and with everything spent the Queen slumped out of her and left Gwen asleep in Koa’s arms.

Two people, one body, and only one of them chose any of it. Baku, told plainly, was staggered (the Queen had not been seen in Haudh-Gwenn for the two months Gwen had been at The Crack), and her careful phrasing about helping her friend was enough for Leon to draw his sword and walk her to a cell. Afterwards he sat with Koa in the wine cellar and put it to him straight: it is not that you no longer know her, it is that you never wholly did, and now you have the chance to. Gwen slept and mended, and surfaced once more as the Queen, briefly and contained. The cost came clear too: cut off from the ooze, her Magiauredo has started again, and a cure was never discovered: her father spent years on it and failed, and her mother died of it. Ashanti and Elliot were sent to Harad with the vial and the books, out of the Queen’s reach, into Captain Jack and Luca Green’s keeping. Mikhail, meanwhile, cracked the sacred-geometry book: a great geometric site condenses the thin places between planes onto one point and magnifies what is there, and a distant item commands it, which would make The Crack’s broken basin room one such node.

Ridh was farce. Mikhail got there first and spent a night in a tavern containing a passed-out drunk, a silent one and a horse standing behind the bar, playing lute at a would-be tough named Dan and being watched through the window by a farmer’s daughter. She took him to her barn at dawn; her father, twenty years a militiaman, came looking; Mikhail went out through the horse-window and left two coppers for the stabling. So when Koa rode in that night, raw and exhausted, he rode into thirty townsfolk with pitchforks assembled to punish the Valiant Few. Aldo, drunk, delivered a sermon in the wrong direction. Mikhail came in at a gallop and put six of them to sleep, Dan and the father among them; Koa woke Dan for the fight he had asked for and headbutted him into the dirt, and a thrown stone brought him back to himself. Then he sat down and told Mikhail everything, which he had told nobody. The girl came to apologize, they slept on her floor, and in the morning they collected what they had come for and rode north.