The Mask of the River King
The Mask of the River King
Title Page
Chapter 1: Frog
Chapter 2: Vinegia
Chapter 3: Soulstones
Chapter 4: Prison of the Balagnar
Chapter 5: The Balagnar
Chapter 6: Rana
Chapter 7: The Euskara
Chapter 8: Loligo
Chapter 9: Daimler Murad
Chapter 10: Discussions on the Loligo
Chapter 11: Sudul
Chapter 12: Invasion of the Hidoi
Chapter 13: The Battle for Atalaya
Chapter 14: Niran Battles Dravikos
Chapter 15: Garin
Chapter 16: Umsu and Burduggis
Chapter 17: The Balagnar’s Rescue
Chapter 18: The Treasury of Garin
Chapter 19: Burduggis
Chapter 20: Into the Mountains
Chapter 21: The Gadus Morhua
Chapter 22: The Village
Chapter 23: Attack on the Gadus Morhua
Chapter 24: Umsu
Chapter 25: Sendara
Chapter 26: The Umuqu’s Rescue
Chapter 27: Judgment of the Euskara
Chapter 28: Umuqu Haven
Chapter 29: Island of the Optifexes
Chapter 30: Cave of Storms
Chapter 31: The Floating City
Chapter 32: Zwun
Chapter 33: Initiation of the Optifex
Chapter 34: The Thralls
Chapter 35: The Marking
Chapter 36: Rana and Zwun
Chapter 37: Sea Battle
Chapter 38: Esus
Chapter 39: Dravikos
Chapter 40: The Arzaldar
Chapter 41: Elamtur
Chapter 42: The Barge of Blood
Chapter 43: Frey on Esus
Chapter 44: Zwun’s Return
Chapter 45: The River King
The Mask of the River King
By Jules Wellesley
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 Jules Wellesley
Discover other titles by Jules Wellesley at Smashwords.com
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Chapter 1: Frog
Frey placed his hand against the ancient door and pushed. Under his calloused fingertips, the stone slab hummed on its hinges, making a blur of discoid etchings and hexes. A backwards glance over his shoulder showed the antechamber still safely empty, the steaming tray he’d balanced on the narrow steps still undisturbed, which was good because that was the supper he was supposed to be retrieving for his taskmaster, Kolya Malin. He listened for the voices of the other young men who labored away high up in the mines, but heard only the ringing of pickaxes in the hollows of the blue slagheap, plus Kolya’s occasional bellow and the warning smack of his club against the palm of his thick hand. Frey shuddered at the sound, knowing the punishment if Kolya found out he had gone down to the well again. And yet, thought Frey, forcing the door slightly with a loud scrape, something summoned him to the room under the ground, some force that wanted him to contemplate anew the pit of dead water that had brought him forth as an infant. It was a tale that Kolya Malin would tell anyone who would listen, by way of apology for the ugly young man who made most people’s skin crawl.
Putting his back into it, though already sore from the morning’s work, Frey managed to nudge the door wider and slid through into the foul darkness beyond. A moment passed as his eyes adjusted to let in the dull phosphorescence that coated the curving walls. The room had once been enormous, Frey guessed, though most of its space lay buried under rubble from a collapsed level above. The well itself had been spared and occupied a clearing at the center of the chamber, its perimeter of beveled blue stones fringed with albino fronds. The cracked ceiling seemed to drip permanently from the fumes that arose from the stagnant waters. They had found him there, a baby bawling fiercely in the slime, spawned by the well just as naturally as it put forth lichens and stinking vapors. Sometimes he entertained the idea that he’d been abandoned by a mother so indigent that Kolya Malin’s fifty-storey-high mines had seemed loaded with promise, yet this scenario seemed highly doubtful: there was no town nearby and no people around for several thousand dunum.
Frey rested the flat of his hand against the filmy surface and saw his reflection corrugated by weak ripples. Wide-set eyes glowered back at him while bulbs of cheek and lip retracted to reveal triangular teeth. He cleaved the image with a splash, hating the well that had formed him so crudely, and wished once more that he could have been bought or stolen the way normal children were. Instead, he had been spit out of a slimy pit, and that was why they called him …
“Frog! Frey the Frog!” A high voice echoed harshly in the burrows. “Hurry up with master’s dinner or you’ll be digging in the mines with your tongue!”
Startled, Frey had to catch himself from tumbling forwards into the depths. It was Ashur, one of the thugs appointed by Kolya Malin to brutalize the other workers, and one so cravenly toadying that Frey thought him more deserving of the nickname “Frog” than himself. Scrambling to the door, Frey peered into the antechamber and was relieved to find it still deserted. He quickly slipped through the opening, glanced up the steps again, and then turned to tug the door back into place. The immense slab resisted and Frey had to dig his feet into a crack between flooring stones to get any purchase. At last, the door closed with a hollow thump, followed by the sound of someone clearing his throat dramatically.
“I should have known,” Ashur taunted. Frey whirled to see him looming on the steps, with Kolya Malin’s precious food dangling from his hands. “You had to have a fresh coat of pond scum, is that it?”
“I thought I heard a noise,” Frey explained, not entirely falsely. “Maybe it was only a rat.”
“It was your frog mother,” said Ashur, deepening his voice to a croak, “saying, ‘Feed me, frog son.’ You were going to get warts on Master’s meal!”
Ashur snorted as he began to rummage through the goods. Frey lunged for the tray and wrenched it away, but not before Ashur had swiped a greased lump of stringy roast.
“Late with lunch and half of it eaten?” Ashur muttered, chewing greedily and shaking his head. “And snooping in the well? Master will have to cane you again, Frog, until you learn.”
“He’ll smell it on you,” said Frey. “Then he’ll know it was you.”
Ashur swallowed painfully and his protruding jaws slackened with worry. Then the usual expression of malice returned as he seized Frey by the shoulders and began to wipe dripping hands on his shirt.
“That’s better,” said Ashur, standing back as if to admire a painting he’d done. “Now follow me. I’ll do the explaining.”
Frey lingered a moment in the antechamber after Ashur had ascended. It wasn’t too late to club him with the tray and throw him in the well, Frey thought happily. Yet already his tormentor was shouting impatiently down the stairs.
“Hop to it, Frog!” Ashur yelled and Frey trudged along behind him, up through the tunnels where the other workers joined in a chorus of raucous croaking.
The mineshaft angled sharply before narrowing between the heavy walls of the ruined building. Frey climbed over piles of mattocks and hammers that were stored by the entrance and shouldered his way out, bli
nking back the sting of the reddish daylight to which he was so unaccustomed. Gradually he could make out the marshland far below and the long terrace ahead, a precarious footbridge that looked made from the lustrous green bones of some ancient beast, one whose sagging spinal column had been strung from the wall as decoration. Ashur was already leaping from one stone to the next, but Frey stood there rubbing his eyes, trying to rid them of a cloudy speck he saw. He blinked again and realized that the dark shape was something else, a person riding towards him across the wide savannah.
Frey squinted at the figure, catching the outline of a thin man on an even scrawnier paleohippus. In his eighteen years, Frey could recall only two people who had ever come out to the mines, not counting the workers that Kolya Malin abducted or the women bought occasionally from far-off villages to take up with him for the few weeks they could stand it. The one visitor, Frey recalled vaguely, was ambushed and beaten when he got too close, and his body crammed in an unprofitable shaft. The other, years later, had gone wide of the ruins and passed on by, yet the hired men still hunted down the stranger that night. Even so, Kolya felt it necessary to remind the miners often to alert no one to their presence.
In the distance, the thin man crooked his head inquiringly at Frey and then waved. Frey found himself waving back.
Across the terrace, Ashur had noticed that his victim was falling behind and turned, his eyes tracking from Frey to the rider and back. Immediately he hunkered behind the crumbling parapet and gestured frantically for Frey to do the same.
“Get down, you slimy frog!” Ashur hissed.
Frey stooped half-heartedly, keen to watch as the paleohippus came splashing through the wetlands. Ashur gave the rider another look before racing across the terrace towards Kolya Malin’s lair. A miner that everyone called Ratface was just bringing a cart loaded with debris down the narrow terrace and Ashur, in his panic, nearly hurled both cart and driver over the side. Frey, too, began to run, if only to know the accusations that Ashur might spew about him, though he slowed to let Ratface pass when they met. It was rumored that Ratface was really a young woman mistakenly purchased by Kolya Malin in a moment of drunken sightlessness. Looking at the bluntly cropped hair and mousy features that faced him now, Frey thought it an easy mistake to have made.
“Sorry, Ratface,” said Frey, slipping past.
“That’s okay, Frog,” said Ratface. “It’s nice to see him being chased for a change.”
Up ahead, Ashur had already disappeared from sight. Frey ran to the end of the gallery and went up, taking the crudely hewn steps two at a time, until he came out onto the colonnaded porch where Kolya Malin often sunned himself like the sullen lizards that clung to the outer parts of the ruins. Rounding the corner, Frey could hear Ashur breathlessly announcing the coming of the stranger and stepped in just as Kolya glanced up from his worktable.
It was a moment before the man hoisted himself from the brocaded chair where he sat shirtless, the tufted flaps of his torso turned to the sun. The day’s plunder lay spread before him, complicated trinkets pried from stone: a bent inlaid flower with an empty socket at the center of jeweled petals; a thing that looked like brass knuckles with a coil attached to the finger-holes; a translucent ball, like a tiny paperweight, which held a lacquered scarab grotesquely magnified by the glass. Frey distracted himself with these treasures while Kolya Malin extricated himself from the chair to grab his club.
“And Frey waved at him,” Ashur added officiously.
Kolya Malin straightened to full height, his furious gaze descending on Frey now. Not knowing what else to do, Frey extended the ransacked tray towards the taskmaster and said, “Here’s your food.”
The club was a blur as Kolya cracked Frey’s outstretched arm. Frey felt his hand open, the tray falling flat on the table, and he doubled over, clutching at his throbbing wrist. A look of momentary satisfaction crossed Kolya’s face, before he frowned and began to bark at Ashur: “Get everyone under! Not a hair in sight!” Then stabbing a finger at Frey, he added: “Most especially you, Frog.”
Ashur scurried away with Kolya storming importantly after him. Frey followed them down the steps and across the terrace, listening with pained amusement at the break in Ashur’s voice as he herded the miners underground. Pausing at the entrance to the mines, Frey flattened himself against the wall until he was certain that Kolya had gone and then crept towards the fractal battlements that lined the terrace and looked down.
The rider had reached them sooner than Frey expected; already he could see the tall, hunched man slowing his bony mount to a trot among the rubble heaps far below. The stranger bowed his head and Frey saw Kolya Malin rushing out to confront him. Straining to listen, Frey noticed that the noise of hammers and axes had ceased, replaced by the silence of espionage.
“You’re on my land,” Kolya announced, his tone somewhere between bullying and inquiring, trying to fix the other man’s status.
The stranger cocked his head towards the slagheap, as if he hadn’t heard Kolya. The paleohippus snorted to a halt near enough that Frey could make out details: a weather-beaten hat that shielded the man’s face from his view, two black pouches slung across the chest, and, inexplicably in the heat of the savannah, long sleeves and long trousers made of green husks. Close up, the overall impression was of someone lean and threatening; Frey suddenly regretted garnering the attention of a man so lethal in appearance.
“I’m looking for a well,” said the stranger.
Kolya shifted deceitfully. “There might be one around these parts.”
“I’d like to have a look at it,” said the stranger, turning towards the slagheap as though he could see through its walls.
“That would cost you,” said Kolya, his voice betraying new enthusiasm. “I run a business here.”
The stranger tilted his head to the sun until Frey could see the hard scars that framed the man’s unsmiling face. “It would have to be the right one. The well I’m thinking of has a stone in it.”
Kolya Malin let out a pleased grunt. “I’ll go you one better, stranger. One of my wells spit up a stone with two brats attached to it. Babies, one of them dead. Find the damnedest things in these old ruins.”
Frey felt a jolt run through him at the words. He’d heard the taskmaster tell the story a hundred times, to the echoing laughter of the miners or the sympathetic tutting of rented women, but never with a mention of two babies in the well, or of any stone they held. Was Kolya lying? Frey wouldn’t put it past him to twist the truth out of shape once the promise of gain was so near. Still, the taskmaster had responded so readily that there seemed little room for doubt.
“What happened to the stone?” The stranger posed the question as a disinterested afterthought. There was a pause as Kolya rummaged for the wanted fact. The paleohippus swung its toothsome head and lazily bit at the swamp bugs that buzzed and snapped in the momentary quiet. Frey tried unsuccessfully to make out Kolya’s indistinct muttering and started to crawl across the terrace to a better location when a creaking sound coming up the mine made him freeze. Shrinking into the corner, he saw Ashur and two other overseers emerge, the three of them driving a cart full of rocks stealthily ahead. Frey edged into the shadows of the mine entrance to observe them, finding that the voices below resounded clearly in the hollows of the tunnel.
“I remember now,” said Kolya triumphantly. “Sold it to a one-eyed pimp in Vinegia who bought it for one of his ladies. Funny thing it was; had a tadpole inside it.”
At this, Frey heard a few cackles from down in the mines, while Ashur and his helpers nearly toppled their cart as they tried to restrain laughter. Frey watched them elbow each other, pulling frog faces, before setting to work positioning the load of rubble just over the stranger’s head.
“What happened to the boy?”
“I might be able to find him, too,” said Kolya, stretching out his words, “but that’ll cost extra. First what’s it worth to you to see the well?”
“Not a thi
ng,” the stranger said flatly. “It’s the stone I want. You can keep your slime pit to yourself.”
Frey chilled at the turn of events. The negotiations were falling apart, he realized, probably just the sign that Kolya had told Ashur to wait on. Frey edged towards the heap of tools at the mine entrance and retrieved a good-sized hammer, testing its weight in his hands before advancing towards the terrace. His heart thumped far up in his neck as he sneaked across the walkway with the hammer behind his back, fearing that the three older boys would turn and see the obvious intent in his face. Yet it is a strange face, he told himself, and difficult to read. Thinking this, he calmed himself and came within striking distance of the three who focused so intently on the proceedings below. Frey stopped, his back to the wall, trying to work out how he might deflect the cart that was now tipped against the parapet without causing it to fall. Yet his calculations were interrupted when he realized that Kolya Malin was now talking about him.
“What about the boy? Surely that’s worth a few dalders to you. A freak of nature he is, monstrous to see. What about it?”
“Yes,” the stranger said plainly. “I will take him.”
Frey felt his heart flip and continue thudding. The stranger was going to buy him, but for what reason? At least with Kolya Malin, it was clear that the young men had been obtained for cheap labor, yet Frey could not imagine what sinister purpose the stranger might have in mind for him. The hammer seemed heavier in his hands.
“Fine, then,” Kolya thundered, a tidy profit finally coming within reach. “Not your garden variety, though. A rare specimen. Two hundred, no less.”
A gasp went through Ashur and his gang. They exchanged such wide-eyed looks that Frey thought they would surely see him. He could feel his resolve wavering; saving the stranger no longer seemed the best course. Then Ashur scooted forward, muscles flexing as he gripped the handles of the cart, preparing to deliver a deadly cascade.