A House in the Old City, Part II

II: A Month in the Country

The surf was still pounding when he regained consciousness. He slowly came to the realization that he wasn’t dead, he was on solid ground, and he was sweating and shivering at the same time. When he had digested all that, he noticed that standing over him was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his entire life. She noticed he was awake, and graced him with a slow smile. Galiard noticed pointed ears poking out from her light brown hair, and then another chill shook him.

“Try to keep still,” she told him, placing a gentle hand on his good shoulder. “My grandmother thinks your wound may be infected.” The shivers hit him harder, and he suddenly felt sick, but it was not from the wound. No, this wasn’t the beginning of new infection, but the end of an old one.

“Not the wound,” he managed to force out through parched lips and chattering teeth, “dust.”

This served only to perplex her. “I do not see any dust.”

Despite his shaking, he managed a wan smile. “That’s the problem.”




There was nothing his hosts could do for his withdrawal, though they did try. The grandmother, who probably had as many wrinkles as she had years, waved her hands over him and muttered a few words in elvish, with no effect. Galiard appreciated the effort, but knew that it wasn’t the presence of poison that ailed him, but the lack of it. He had no choice but to experience every excruciating minute of his withdrawal. And though he felt he’d aged several years by the time it ended, the ordeal in fact lasted only 3 days.

When he was able to stand again, the two women were nowhere in sight. He took advantage of their absence to check his condition. His wound was still tender to the touch, and he doubted that he’d be able to swing his arm in a complete circle for some time to come, but he had to admit that it was mending nicely. Maybe the old elf knew something of the art after all.

By the way his face itched he could tell that he probably had grown the beginnings of a scraggly black beard to match his disheveled hair, and by the way his frame looked he’d probably lost almost a stone’s worth of weight. Still, he felt better than he had since before his memory took a vacation.

Now that he’d regained the majority of his senses, he was better able to judge his surroundings. He was in a small, single-room hut, thatch-roofed by the look of it, with a few scattered pieces of furniture that were probably brought from somewhere else to store what little possessions the two women owned. Quilts littered the remaining floor space not taken up by the furniture, and Galiard was almost abashed that he had been given the only pillow. A piece of treated skin from an animal that he’d rather not identify served as a door. Decadent it was not.

He was not surprised when he saw that the rest of the village was just as sparse. There were a number of huts of similar size to the one he was in arranged in a semi-circle facing an open fire pit and the ocean, which was less than fifty yards off. There was a hut about three times the size of the others, which probably served as a meeting hall, a ten by ten stone shed, probably to store whatever couldn’t be squeezed into the huts, and a modest garden. The only building that looked out of place with the rest of the village was a 30-foot tall stone building that stood outside the village proper. Judging from the arrow slits and the elf walking along its parapets, long bow in hand, Galiard assumed it was a watch tower. Aside from the ocean to its east, the village was entirely surrounded by thick forest.

The elf who’d been at been at his side when he first awoke exited from the garden, her grandmother in tow. He’d been mesmerized by her face, but the rest of her was no worse. Even though she wore some sort of rough-spun brown fabric that looked more like an altered sack than an article of clothing, there were plenty of curves and angles for his mind to fill in the blank spots. She saw him, and the smile that crossed her face dulled the sunlight in comparison. Until he noticed the grandmother, hobbling a few paces behind, had a scowl that left little doubt of her own feelings on their latest arrival. He tried to bury his pleasure at seeing the younger elf, and mostly succeeded.

“Good,” she said as she approached the shack, “you are up. We are about to make dinner. You are probably hungry.”

Galiard decided then that even if he hadn’t been a marked man back in Freeport, he had no intention of leaving this little village anytime soon. “Starving, in fact.”

The smile again. He was transfixed, a flat-footed footpad paralyzed by a medusa’s gaze. The grandmother broke the spell, a few grunts in her own language. It didn’t break the smile, though.

“Grandmother says that if you are able to stand, you will be able to help prepare our supper.” Galiard noticed that she spoke common with the traces of her native language: a lack of contractions and a tendency to draw out the sibilants. Now he was finding everything about her adorable. If he kept this up, he’d have to keep a napkin under his chin to catch the drool.

“I’d be happy to,” he replied, with what he hoped wasn’t too much enthusiasm.




He learned quite a bit over the stewed fruits and vegetables that evening, including her name: Tressa Velaiya. He didn’t ask the grandmother for hers, and the crone didn’t offer.

The elves had originally come from the mainland, and had thought to make a new home in Freeport, but found the pirate city a little too tolerant of orcs and lawlessness, and not nearly in touch with nature to their liking. Given the general scarcity of elves in Freeport, Galiard wasn’t surprised. Instead, they decided that the one of the other islands in the Serpent’s Teeth might serve their needs better, and settled on the windward island. As there appeared to have already been a settlement here at one time, it made moving in all the easier. They’d been here for a little over a year.

“So I take it that tower was here when you arrived?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Odd, you wouldn’t think there’d be many people who’d want to take over this particular patch of ground.” The elderly elf interrupted, and she and Tressa had a quick (for elvish, anyway) side discussion. Galiard caught his name once or twice, and figured Tressa must be filling her grandmother in.

“Grandmother believes that the tower was built not to stop ones from going in,” the younger elf explained, confirming his hypothesis, “but to keep others from coming out.”

Now his curiosity was piqued. “What, is there something in that tower?”

“Not in, but below.”

“I don’t understand.” But he thought he did. Again, she confirmed what he’d already been thinking, that there was an underground complex, which had long been abandoned. But not empty.

“What do you mean? Did you find something?” Grandmother broke in again, and there was more discussion that he couldn’t follow. But by the way the elder elf was shaking her head, it appeared that the two weren’t in agreement. After a few minutes, however, she gave a sigh and went rooting in a trunk. She returned with a package wrapped in fabric, which she removed to reveal a book which was bound in what could be leather, but Galiard strongly suspected it was something else. There were letters carved into its surface in a language he knew he’d never be able to decipher, filled in with black ink that may not have been ink at all. He knew why they kept it wrapped. Without it, the book radiated malevolence.

And he knew then that he would have to look to see what was inside.

As if she could read his intentions, the elder elf rewrapped the book and stashed it in the trunk with a speed he wouldn’t have guessed she was capable of. She mumbled a few words at her granddaughter, which Galiard guessed were something along the lines of ‘See, I told you it was a bad idea.’

The remainder of the meal passed mostly in silence.




Since he was now well enough to eat, it was expected that he would contribute to the maintenance of the village. This entailed repairing roofs, weeding and harvesting the garden, and even taking a few turns in the tower, which turned out to consist of only a single staircase and a room on the ground floor which he was not allowed to enter. On the top of the tower there was a wheel that pulled up a heavy chain. He’d toyed with it on his first watch, and someone had come up to tell him to knock it off soon after. He wasn’t much good with a bow, and said as much, so Tressa was assigned the task of giving him lessons. He had no complaints at all about that.

“No, you are trying to aim too much. Draw the bow, see the target, release. Just so.” Her arrow flew into the heart of the target as if drawn in on a string. “The longer you hold your aim, the more your arm will waver. A few seconds is all you need.”

Galiard attempted it, and watched his shot go off into the woods. They were practicing at the edge of the village, the better to prevent errant shots like he’d been making for the better part of the last few hours from maiming anyone.

“Well, you are getting closer, at least.” She tried to make it sound encouraging. He reached into his quiver and found it empty.

“I’m going to get better at this,” he grumbled, “if for no other reason than to stop chasing after all these damn arrows.” They pulled her shots out of the target, then walked into the woods to see if they could find his.

“You have never mentioned why you were living in Freeport.” She stated as she pulled one of his errant arrows out of a bush.

“No, I haven’t.” He scratched idly at his wounded shoulder as he thought of a delicate way to explain himself. The clothes he’d been wearing when he came ashore wouldn’t have been able to handle the stress of his chores, so he’d been given what they had to spare. As he’d suspected, that turned out to be sacks. He’d mostly gotten used to the near constant itching—except when he thought about it.

He decided that there really was no delicate way. “I thought I was going to be a pirate.”

She didn’t seem surprised. “Yet you are not.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, somewhat abashed. “Turns out I didn’t have the stomach for it.”

She was quiet for a few moments, and he could not see what she was thinking. “To be a pirate is to kill with a cold heart. There are many things I do not know about you, but I do not think your heart is quite so cold.”

He thought she might disagree if he were to explain how abyss dust addicts typically ended their lives, but decided that was a topic better left undiscussed. Instead, he said, “No, I meant that I really didn’t have the stomach for it.”

She looked back at him, puzzled.

“I had no idea what being on the ocean was like. I managed to talk myself onto some buccaneer’s vessel, and was all ready to wave my cutlass and ‘Yarr’ along with the rest of them. And then we weighed anchor. I held it in for a couple hours, and then I lost my lunch on the main deck.”

That earned a laugh. “Well, they weren’t about to turn the boat around on account of a new recruit who didn’t have his sea legs,” he continued. “Maybe they figured that if they kept me on the water long enough, I’d get used to it. Didn’t work, though. So they kicked me off at their next port of call. That just happened to be Freeport.”

“A city on an island.”

“The irony hadn’t escaped me. Anyway, I did my best to put down roots. I found a place to live, a way to earn a living, made a few friends…” He trailed off, not wanting to delve too deeply in a past that was better off forgotten.

She chewed on that for a bit, mentally fitting the pieces of his life story together in an attempt to make a cohesive whole. And probably finding that everything didn’t quite fit. She seemed ready to ask a question, thought better of it, then forged ahead anyway. “There was…someone else?”

“Yes.” He thought of Hana again, the way she could handle a longsword in either hand, how she obsessively patched holes in her leather armor, how eager she was to delve into the depths in search of monsters to conquer and treasure to liberate. Of how her red hair had shone. Of the tender touch of her calloused hands…and how he’d never experience any of it again. “But not any more.”

She told him she was sorry, and he knew she meant it. There seemed to be no way to escape the past, not completely, but you could try to patch over the old memories with fresh ones. Just like holes in armor.

“Anyway,” he said, trying to bring himself back to the present, “I don’t think I ever quite fit into Freeport either.”

She looked at him for a while then, as if weighing another decision. He wanted to mention how thankful he was for her being so accepting, for trying to teach him how to shoot, for not pressing him to reveal what was still too painful. And he wanted more than that, as well. But not if that’s not what she wanted. He managed a wan smile.

After a few more moments, she broke her gaze to retrieve the last of his errant arrows. “Let us see if you can hit the target at least once today.”

And that was that.




The three of them were having dinner a few weeks later when an elf who was older than Tressa yet younger than her grandmother (Galiard would have been hard pressed to be more specific than that) came barging through the hut’s flap. He spoke to the two women in his native tongue for a few seconds, then went back out as quickly as he’d come in. Galiard had managed to pick up a couple words of the language since he’d landed, and ‘outsider’ had been one of the first, since it was usually applied to him. So whatever the elf was so hot and bothered about, chances were good that it either concerned a new arrival or Galiard himself. Neither of the women glanced in his direction after the other elf left, which meant it was someone else.

The grandmother put aside the remnants of her meal on the side table, grabbed a cane, and hobbled out of the hut. Tressa sighed, took another bite of her dinner, and stood as well.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“Please, finish your meal. We may be gone for some time.” She gave him a brief touch on the shoulder, the first time she’d done so without needing to, and then she went off into the night. He focused on that for a few moments, that touch, imagined that he could still feel the remnants of its warmth through the rough fabric he was clothed in. After a few moments he was able to shake himself from his reverie, and re-focused on his dinner.

Or…he tried to. He was shoveling a mouthful of greens into his mouth when he caught a glimpse of the chest out of the corner of his eye. He made a concerted effort to look back down at his plate, to contemplate the texture of the vegetables as his teeth quickly chewed them into paste. He tried to consider what the gooey mass might look like as it slid down his throat, and decided that it probably most resembled a chest. A chest that contained a book that could have been bound in leather…or something else. A chest that was almost always locked. But it wouldn’t be, this time, would it? Galiard sincerely doubted it. There was only one way to find out.

He tried bring himself back to his plate, but found himself kneeling in front of the chest. He didn’t recall getting up and walking over to the chest, or exactly how long he’d been kneeling in front of it. It seemed like just a moment…

He tried the clasp in front and found that it was indeed unlocked. He grasped the lid at both ends and slowly opened it, trying to prevent the hinges from emitting a tell-tale squeak. The chest was completely empty save for the book, which was still wrapped in fabric, save for a solitary corner that was poking out one side…

Garliard heard a faint whispering from somewhere behind him. When he whirled around to see where it was coming from, he saw only the empty hut around him. Just to be safe, he took a quick glance through the flap. It looked like the entire village was out by the central campfire. A few of them were arguing animatedly at each other, and Galiard once again hoped that he wasn’t the topic of discussion. He looked for Tressa and didn’t see her.

Satisfied, he turned back to the chest, which stood there, its open lid looking back at him like an unblinking, square eye. The book had shifted a bit and its cover was now mostly visible. Galiard guessed that he had probably jostled the trunk in his when he’d whipped about. Hadn’t he?

Pushing his troubling thoughts aside, he reached in and gingerly extracted the book. It was bound in some kind of skin, but Galiard wasn’t able to place it immediately. But he wasn’t taking his chances just to puzzle out what the cover was made of. He opened the book at random.

Inside were horrible, wonderful things. The book was sequenced in what seemed to be a completely random fashion: pages were missing in some sections, sewn in at others. There were copious illustrations, most of which featured a creature Galiard had never seen before. It looked like a giant snake that was moving about upright, with arms and hands. These snakes were portrayed doing a variety of activities; from benign tasks such as harvesting crops and building shelters to more diabolical deeds such as sacrifices and ritualistic mutations. It occurred to him as he was leafing through the pictures, simultaneously horrorstruck and fascinated, that the book was likely bound in the skin of one of those creatures.

He couldn’t understand any of the scribblings that made up the text, yet somehow he got the feeling that what they described would make the illustrations seem inviting by comparison. The scrawls appeared just as random as the rest of the book, and the random splotches of ink and other substances would have baffled anyone who actually understood the language.

As he was flipping toward the end of the book, he found a page that struck a chord. There was an illustration, like a map, of a small city on an island. The town was vaguely circular, and might have been walled. It looked familiar, a place he’d visited before, perhaps. But it looked whoever had drawn the map had selected the part they wanted and skipped the rest. Then it clicked: Freeport, the Old City. It was much larger now, of course, but it had started out small when it was first built.

Next to the illustration was a note, carefully inscribed as if the author had been copying from an original text: 264 Ahlzer. Galiard searched his memory, but neither the number nor the word connected with anything useful. Perhaps it was a calendar notation?

He was snatched from his reverie by a sharp blow to the back of his head. He turned to see the elven crone, who promptly gave him another crack, laced with what were assuredly epithets in her native tongue. He managed a yelp of pain, although it felt somewhat muffled to him, as if coming from someplace distant. Although she had her cane drawn back for a third shot, she paused, studying his face. Then, with a few muttered words, she picked the book up from where he’d dropped it and tossed it back in the chest, which promptly obliged her by slamming shut. And then Tressa came back into the hut.

“Finally,” she said, then noted that Galiard was holding the side of his head. “What happened to you?”

“I slipped.” he answered with a sidelong glance at the guilty party. He decided to change the subject. “What was that all about?”

“A man was caught in the woods near the village.” Galiard tensed. Had Bloody Jack been able to track him down after all? He remembered the rowboat, and thought he might have occasion to use it again soon.

Tressa was still speaking. “He claimed to represent a group of exiles from Freeport who wanted to settle elsewhere. But he was dressed in black robes and had a tattoo on his palm that he tried to conceal. None of us viewed all of it, but what I saw looked like a skull. He asked if his group could join our village.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“We told him no.” The elder elf spoke up for a moment, and Tressa frowned as if her grandmother was bringing up a sore subject. “Grandmother thought that we should not have let him leave.”

“You let him go?”

“Yes, and told him not to return.”

“For once, I’m inclined to agree with your grandmother.” She looked hurt at that, so he quickly continued. “Chances are his friends had no intention of ‘joining’ your village. Why share something you can take by force? They’ll be back, and they won’t be asking nicely next time. Killing him might have made his friends choose somewhere else.”

Her expression changed from hurt to angry. “We are not pirates who kill when the mood is on us. If you are so eager to commit murder, then perhaps you do not belong here either.”

“Now wait a—“ But she was already gone.




He’d intended to explain himself when her blood was no longer up, to tell her that he’d known enough humans to know they’d never live up to the noble ideas the villagers were trying to uphold. And to say that he was sorry, that he didn’t want to lose the only friend he’d had in a long time.

He never got the chance.

The attack came soon after dawn. Galiard had risen early, intending to find where Tressa had spent the night, and had taken less than a dozen steps when the screams began. He could see at least a dozen of them coming out of the woods, most of them armed with crossbows. He wondered idly why they wouldn’t all be armed, but he didn’t have to wait long to find out.

A young elf, whose name Galiard had heard at least a dozen times but never been able to pronounce, ran at one of the unarmed, hooded figures with a dagger drawn. Galiard got a clear view of a tattooed palm as the man calmly grabbed the elf’s wrist to prevent the blow from landing. Then he said a few words that Galiard couldn’t hear and the boy began to bleed. A moment later and he was dead. He hadn’t even had time to cry out.

The tattoo was of the skull and bones…and something else, something above the top of the head that he couldn’t quite make out. But the skull and bones were what mattered. They were pirates, and they weren’t going to be interested in taking prisoners. Although Galiard had never known pirates to be particularly fond of cloaks, especially dark ones that would cause a man to collapse if he were on deck for any amount of time under the naked sun.

Still more of them began pouring out of the forest, and some of the ones with crossbows began taking shots at the guard tower. It didn’t take them long to find the mark.

Galiard was thinking of two items at once. He knew the first one, his boat, was safely tucked away in the forest near the shoreline. He went back to the hut to retrieve the second.

The old crone was standing in the middle of the hut, as if she knew he’d be coming. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and beneath them lay the book. Before he could think of an excuse for running in—like perhaps returning to get a bow—she held the book out to him. And spoke in perfect, unaccented Common. For some reason, he wasn’t surprised.

“I do not think that they are coming for this,” she said without preamble, “but I think perhaps it is better for it to be in your hands than in theirs.”

“Thank—“

“Do not thank me,” she interrupted, “for I am not convinced you are not as evil as they. You walk a knife’s edge, and your next misstep will be your last.”

He had no way to answer that. He had done some things he’d not been proud of, sure, but he never considered himself evil. Not truly, anyway. But he was glad to have the book in any case.

The crone grabbed her staff, which responded to her touch with a flare of magical energy. She looked one last time at him, turned, then turned back.

“Find her,” she told him. “Save her—and she just may save you.”

Galiard followed her out of the tent. The old crone lasted a good minute, and managed to take one of the invaders out, but then she caught a bolt. Then another. He didn’t watch the rest.

By then, the majority of the villagers were trying to organize a fighting retreat into the woods, trading shots with the crossbowmen. Galiard scanned the survivors for Tressa’s face and didn’t see her. Then he heard her voice coming out of the woods from behind them.

“NO!” She was running as fast as she could, stopping only long enough to fire her bow before sprinting forward again. Her shot hit the mark, and most of the pirates quickly took shelter behind some of the huts. If Tressa kept going forward she’d be caught in a crossfire. Galiard quickly ran to intercept her. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hold her back, so he tackled her instead. She writhed under him like a greased wharf rat, drew a knife and probably would have stuck him right in his recently healed shoulder if she hadn’t caught sight of his face first.

“There’s too many,” he told her, “and it’s too late. I’ll take you back—“

“Grandmother?” she interrupted. He shook his head, not wanting to speak the words. She lost her anger, and a lot of her will as well. He tried pulling her up, but she wasn’t helping. The pirates were beginning to poke their heads out.

“We have to go. Now.” A bolt thudded into the earth a few feet away, splashing dirt. This spurred her into motion, slowly at first, but getting faster.

There were still a handful of elves putting up resistance; the best shooters, making good use of cover and their remaining arrows. Galiard ran right past them, heading straight to where he hoped his boat was still hidden. He was in time to see another line of pirates, all of them dressed in those dark robes, break through the trees from the south. Leading them, for there was no question he was their leader, was a buccaneer unafraid to go hoodless. His graying black hair was slicked back straight, and he wore what appeared to be an atomizer on his belt. He was also carrying two pistols.

Galiard pushed Tressa to run even harder, and she complied almost like a freshly animated golem. But not before Galiard had a chance to lock eyes with the pirate leader, and see the man break into a grin. Galiard knew the grin, he’d seen a lot of it in his Freeport days—the grin of a killer. He could almost feel the other man lifting his pistol--

He heard the flash of gunpowder and expected to be dead a moment later. Instead, Tressa cried out next to him and fell to the ground. He quickly checked her, found the tell-tale wound in the back of her leg. He risked a glance over his shoulder, saw the buccaneer calmly ram his pistol into his sash, draw his cutlass, and make for tougher prey. The grin never left his face.

“It hurts,” Tressa managed to whisper.

“I know,” he replied, “but we have to keep going.” Again he pulled her to her feet. She whimpered with pain, but she moved.

Galiard could see the boat as they drew closer to the forest’s edge, right where they’d beached it. He didn’t see the pirate behind the boat; however, until he’d already taken his shot. This time Tressa didn’t even cry out—she didn’t have time.

The bolt would probably have done the trick on its own, but the way Tressa began to spasm as she hit the ground told him it was poisoned. She coughed, spewing out a mixture of blood and froth, and then lay still. It took but a moment, but Galiard felt as though he’d aged a dozen years.

The pirate strode out of the woods, drawing a cutlass. Galiard reached for Tressa’s bow, but it was as broken as its owner. He’d not been smart enough to take a weapon, then he remembered her knife. He searched her frantically, found the hilt. The pirate was taking his time, relishing the thought of his next kill. Galiard didn’t wait, instead hurling the dagger for all he was worth. It caught the marauder in the throat and bit deep. The pirate sank to his knees, looks of shock and understanding struggling for dominion on his face.

Galiard walked over to where the man was kneeling, watched him as he began to gurgle, then calmly grabbed the hilt of the knife and twisted it. He felt something warm coating his arm, but thought nothing of it.

He leaned forward, close enough so that their faces were almost touching. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to join you in the Abyss to watch you burn,” he told him. “Now die.” The pirate drew in a whistling breath as Galiard withdrew the blade; his last exhale was long in coming. Galiard didn’t wait for it. He grabbed the crossbow and the bolts, the latter covered with a sticky substance Galiard couldn’t identify. He’d need them both where he was going.

Tressa’s eyes had already glazed over when he returned to her body. Absently, he stroked her hair, something he’d never had the pleasure of earning when she was alive. His hand left behind bloody streaks. Later, he’d wish that he’d thought to cut off a lock to remember her by. But then it was all he could do to remember to keep living.

No one noticed him as he swiftly dragged the boat from its hiding place and pushed it into the surf; they were too busy looting through the few meager possessions the elves had been able to gather. By the time they saw him rowing he was out of range of their spells and crossbows. He checked the book—it was right where he left it, fitted snuggly under his clothes, its weight pressing against his stomach. It felt oddly warm.

He hadn’t even lost sight of the village when it began to burn.