Wrenogal: Act II, xxviii-xxxii
Nevgondian was watchful. He could see
that here was more than there appeared to be.
He looked from Zlyr, who he knew quite shrewdly,
to this brash, bold, yet bright mercenary.
His eyes he narrowed, and his lips he pursed—
Their guest had shoulders that seemed prone to shrug
when other, guileless mortals would have cursed
to hear what he’d heard; but this man was smug.
The knight looked over to his Aerandel,
who eyed him back—her own gaze just as keen.
They two would have a few shrewd words to tell
of what had been said, and what had not been.
But now he silently allowed his king
to sign this sellsword’s fresh indenturing.
~
To many places Erison then went,
informed by whispers from the Shroud he wore.
To hiding places he himself had spent,
to shady taverns and shadier shores.
His tactics were somewhat like little Durn’s,
though with the leer of one whose aims were worse.
Secrets drawn from life’s seediest cisterns
were chief among the tricks hid in his purse.
To Kothe first sent the hunter seeking trail,
it would have been the quickest place to fly
for one who, from Lewellen, had turned tail—
it would have been where he would first have tried.
But Kothe brought nothing. As the Shroud had said:
“your quarry would have tried a place of dread.”
~
To Thalynvriy, then, Erison pressed on,
to where there could, no manmade force, break through,
to where there were a thousand eyes upon
the walls of fortresses no man could hew.
His papers, as a vassal of a king,
he bore before his face, avoiding those
who knew his garments were as mismatching
his vassalage as dove’s feathers to crow’s.
“This place is dread enough,” he said to none
but that which rested on his shoulder. “Still,
you know there is a dreader place. The one
where feral things do more than claw and kill.”
He knew the place the Shroud spoke of. And dread
indeed embodied the Hills of the Dead.
~
The bones of men were not to be here found,
but this precisely was what caught the heart
into its own ominous beating sound,
and echoes of the stories that took part
in these Dead Hills, where only those returned
who gods rejected and who devils spurned,
who drank and spake naught but what they had seen
that none should see, that should not e’en have been.
Now Erison approached, his failing frame
nigh tripping over dusty, scattered stones,
and at the howl of one or two, who’d blame
his fleeing, seeing half man-half beast bones.
“Mountains, at least, you ought to try for next,
if you are, by a few cute creatures, vexed.”
~
Of dreaded mountains there were only three.
The range of Ostia, where bandits roamed,
whose visage matched their peoples’ villainry.
The ones he’d just now timorously combed,
where, if the Wren was hid, he might as well
have hid in his own coffin. Then, the wreath
of shipwreck, where they say Locrien dwells,
the dire, tortured crags that make the Teeth.
They said that Wrenogal flew on the wind,
no ship he’d need to spare to make that cove.
And if society you must rescind,
where better than that merciless karst-grove?
To Warponde, then, and then to Dustan’s door.
If not, his Ostian haunts he would endure.