Wars and Rumors of Wars: Complete Edition (Blackmount Book 1) Read online

  “Pilgrim and Advent Ascendent didn’t get the silver inlays you know. They’re making due with brass.”

  Low conversations like these filled the time while the devout and the duty-bound tried hard not to dwell on the gravity of their undertaking, nor on the anxious desire that theirs be the ship to make good on their shared purpose. Their captain brought them back on task.

  “Cut the cross-chatter, people. Witness was originally outfitted with the same real-time Dynamic Thought Guidance systems as the other two, but the minute we brought the book onboard, the whole system stopped taking inputs from anywhere else. Too much interference. As it is, we have to keep the viewer interface firewalled away from Vessel Operations and Guidance controls as long as that thing’s wired into it. Ops station, where are we on that recalibration?”

  “Right planet now, ma’am, I’m thinking the right neighborhood too, but it’s tough to be sure. All I’m seeing are tops of trees... a river a little ways to the East... we’ve got some foothills to the West, then a caldera with a mountain at its center, burrowed into the mountain range beyond them. Text calls it a valley but this looks more like an impact-crater, near extinction-event scale, if I’m right. One village nearby, hoping that makes this the right hill, but no way of knowing from three miles up.”

  “Is there any chance of pushing the reference pane closer?” one of the robed men asked.

  “Working on it. It’s a miracle we’ve even gotten this close a lock. This instrumentation was never meant for such a precise manual-aiming at these distances.”

  “Wait, stop. Whatever you just did there set the contextual titles on. I’m getting translated names like Borderlands, Southern Wastes, Caldera Pass. Why do people always name things so plainly? Even when they sound exotic it’s usually just a native way of saying ‘the tall mountains with nice valleys to farm in between.’ How many ‘ValeHaven’s have you seen the translator spit out?”

  “I think if I just feed it a few more contextual passages from the Remembrance, the computer should be able to reconstruct…”

  “STOP. There. We’ve got it. We’ve got it. The mountain at the center of the bowl. Zoom in.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Silhouette matches historical reference drawings. That’s it. We’ve found Blackmount! Hmm, hardly a hub of activity… Frame of reference - What year are we looking at?”

  “No way of knowing exactly sir, the text isn’t annotated, but the computer estimates this to be at least fourteen years prior to the incident, based purely on the number of stars in their sky.”

  “I wish we knew what more of them used to be called…”

  “Fourteen years… gods, he could be anywhere. I’ll tell you what, frame-advance one year, to the day everything started for him - at least that part of the story we know - and I have a pretty good idea of where we’ll find him.”

  “Roger that sir. Frame advancing one year, make that one year, three weeks, two days. That should put us in the neighborhood.”

  “Monitor’s gone dead, nothing but empty space and; DeadGodsReturning will you look at all those stars! It really is hard to believe there used to be so many more until you see them. Regardless, it appears we’ve lost our little ball of a world.”

  “A minor adjustment. Relocating reference pane to account for one year’s stellar drift, And….”

  The view screen swam, its three-dimensional projection heaving like an ocean’s waves. A planet grew from speck to globe. Shapes of three sizable continents peeked through parting cloud layers and then, as if falling or in flight, the perspective seemed to shoot down through them and across a landscape of labeled geography. It raced across a shining sea and a settled patchwork of preindustrial duchies, flew Westward with the sun as civilization thinned and peeled back to nature and makeshift villages, then parched wasteland. Mild greening overcame the badlands as the reference pane shot on. A broad and lazy river marked the line between that blighted scrub and the acres of fertile farmland on its other side, in service to a modest village abutting a veritable ocean of trees spreading south and the teeth of a mountain range to the northwest.

  Behind the onlookers, on the steel deck, domed under glass on a humming pedestal bedecked with blinking lights and thumb-thick conduit wires winding right into the floor, a heavy tome sat suspended in a field of soft radiance, motes of dust reflecting back white light like magic around its self-turning pages. On its ancient spine read a single word, ‘Remembrance.’

  All eyes in the room were focused elsewhere however, on the circular disc roughly a meter-and-a-half across, set into the steel decking and ringed with handrails of polished hardwood. Above it in the air hung an annotated view of a living landscape, and every face present was eager to see what they hoped the next few moments would show them.

  “We have a positive lock sir. Redirecting.”

  The viewer’s perspective dodged South along a dirt road, through a small but lively village, over waves of autumnal treetops, and plunged down into the thick deciduous canopy.

  Two hunters were frozen in a position of argument, one looked human. The other, halfway up a tree with no harness or ropes, was green.

  “Got Him!”

  “Lock and advance! Today, boys, we meet the genuine article. Play in real-time.”

  Thon - Hunts Past and Present

  Planetary designation: #0 / #138, local name: Orra

  Southern Vastwood - Durang foothills

  17 minutes pre-sundown /local solar reference/

  Contextual Timestamp: ~13 years pre-marker, 3,653 years antecedent to current viewing

  “That’s an ideal way to get yourself killed. You know that, don’t you?” Arghas complained up the twenty or so feet of tree trunk that his half-brother Thon had already shimmied up in search of a better vantage.

  Thon cast a disparaging glower down the trunk at him.

  “Because that would be a world-ending tragedy. Clearly all of history hangs precariously…” He let go with one hand and dangled out into empty space before swinging his arm up to grab hold of a higher branch and lever himself up another five feet. “…on whether I live out the day.” He finished, with a smirk he only half-meant.

  "You fall and break your back, it's me that has to drag your emerald ass back home on a stretcher." Arghas groused good-naturedly.

  Thon would normally have bristled at the reference to his skin color, which in all fairness held more in kinship with an olive than an emerald, and wasn’t nearly so pronouncedly green as the tusked Orc raiders from the mountains who were to blame for his conception. Still, it was a sharp jab, and meant to tell him that Arghas was serious.

  He was in almost every other way the spitting-image of his half-brother; Sand-colored hair, a medium build made lean by labor, and the utilitarian grace of movement that became second nature to anyone who spent enough time stalking buck and lizard through the primeval forests of the western wilds.

  Instead he just chucked a hard pinecone down at Arghas, barely missing his left ear, and resumed his search for the next weight-bearing branch.

  Arghas had roughly three years on him in age, and fancied himself as having some talent for growing attractive facial hair, which in truth he did not; this misconception culminating last year in his adoption of a close-cropped goatee which he said would help the village girls to tell the difference between the two of them. It wasn't hard.

  Arghas was half-a-head shorter than his brother, and Thon was green.

  As far as those girls were concerned, and for that matter the populace-at-large of their small hamlet of Windmere in the foothills of the Durang mountains, that one trait was all that any of them needed, in order to decide that Thon was at least part monster, and not worthy of their consideration.

  From anyone else, even a mention of his tainted ancestry would have come in the spirit of a grievous insult, but from Arghas, the fully human big brother who had practically made a career of standing up for him against the local toughs and at one point even a small torch-wielding mob, it was a gesture of endearment and a reminder of all of the times he had demonstrated allegiance over the course of their inseparable childhood to their mother's conviction that blood and skin were what a man lived in, not what he was made of.

  "Got anything?" Arghas called up the tree.

  They had been trailing this particular lizard all afternoon and Arghas was starting to get hungry.

  "He's good. I don't see him anywhere." Thon hollered down.

  Neither was especially worried about their quarry overhearing them. The lizard already knew right where they were. It had known for hours, and they in turn had known that it did. Lizards were scent-hunters, and today's stalwart southerly wind was doing them no favors at remaining hidden from this one. They hunted it, it in turn hunted them, and the morning had melted away as the dance moved the trio of hunters and hunted further and further south into the Vastwood.

  "I think He might be a She." Thon called down from the branches and considered coming down in acquiescence to his brother's nannying.

  "Because that would make our day so much easier! I have to tell you I'm giving serious thought to giving up this life of leisure to try my hand at carpentry, or mining, or better yet, latrine-digging. I think I could make a genuine impact on the world as a latrine digger; really contribute.” He transitioned from sarcasm to a mocking version of an inspired thousand-yard-stare, eyes fierce with feigned pride.

  Thon laughed, but his brother wasn't far off the mark about the difference a pronoun could make.

  The females possessed the active camouflage ability that was found in some of their smaller reptilian relatives. That made them punishingly difficult to track, able to blend the color of their scales to match surrounding foliage. To make matters worse, leaving asi
de their camouflage, an adult female could flatten her body substantially more than one might expect, becoming to the untrained eye a part of any nearby tree trunk, rocky outcropping, or an especially dense lump of whatever local foliage or ground-cover was nearby, allowing them to spring on unsuspecting prey seemingly from nowhere, or to all-but disappear and throw any but the most canny pursuit.

  Thinking on their mimetic ability took Thon back to an earlier hunt when he was much younger. A female lizard had been poaching goats from the outlying farms and he'd been allowed - at Arghas's insistence - to come along and participate in the sizable hunting party, made up of all the men of half a dozen nearby farmsteads. Arghas had argued, erroneously, that Thon's heritage made him a special asset on the hunt, allowing him to sniff out the beast like a bloodhound. Orcs didn't actually have this capability, but to Arghas and to the satisfaction of the other hunters, it had sounded plausible enough that he'd been allowed to come - unarmed of course; none of the good pale-skinned villagers would cop to being willing to trust even an adolescent orc with a weapon at their backs.

  What they'd thought Thon could - or would - do to an entire hunting party with a single short bow or skinning knife had been the more insulting kind of mystery to him, but it went to prove just how deep the entirely-deserved hatred and mistrust of all-things-Orcish ran among those living in the raiding-path of the mountain greenskins that frequented the Durangs’ Eastern foothills.

  Little did they know, although how it could've eluded them was a mystery to him, how much those attitudes informed the central tenets of Thon’s own belief system as well.

  All those years ago, as he'd watched the green color of the local brush it had concealed itself in drain from the skin of the dying lizard, perforated in a dozen places by the arrows of its human vanquishers, Thon had wished as hard as he had for anything in his life that his skin could change with it. And while the other hunters made camp for the night and built a frame to skin the creature, Thon had just stared at the sight of red blood drying to brown on the pale iridescence of the horse-sized creature's perfect white scales. At least in death, this poor creature had been able to shed its green and become the stuff of mens' boasting. Thon had no doubt that he would die similarly one day, probably at the hands of some Orc or another during a raid, but given the lack of love the village bore him, it didn't stretch his imagination much to picture this hunt having been for him - over suspicion of withering their crops perhaps, or of having taken too much of an interest in one of their pale-skinned human daughters.

  The ever-present raids on Windmere in the six centuries since they’d begun in earnest had been no fault of Thon’s. These Orcish pillagings that had claimed the lives of dozens of villagers, including Arghas's father as he attempted to prevent the forced coupling that had been Thon's siring, had other, greener authors. The Orc that had visited that horror on his mother had taken no orders to do so from his unborn son. And yet all of these sins, in the eyes of the village, lay firmly on the shoulders of the green-skinned baby bastard that had resulted from it. He was the greenest thing they had at hand to blame, and as with all scapegoating, theirs came to rest in the place that was most convenient, not the most accurate.

  They had been too decent to blame the greathearted woman who, even after losing her husband and her honor to an Orcish monster in one night, had elected to bear the infant to term when she had quickened, and to raise him up to be a good man in spite of his heritage.

  To the unending credit of their character, neither she nor Arghas had ever blamed him or looked down on him for the skin he inherited from his anonymous father. None of this had made life outside their one-story-with-a-loft thatch-roofed farm cottage on the outskirts of the forest any easier for Thon. At least at home though, he had his brother's camaraderie and the unending support of a mother who had every reason to hate him instead. He had books to see the world by, and devoured every work of heroism, politics, and of the wide world far afield that made its way in peddlers carts out onto their frontier. When he came of age, looking for work had been nearly out of the question, and so he had learned to do a little bit of everything. At first that meant odd jobs to keep their small farmstead in working order, and eventually, at Arghas's invitation, he’d partnered in his brother's small hunting-and-trapping venture, selling meat and pelts, antlers and teeth. The two of them had set about what so few brothers manage - to scale their childhood inseparability into their adult lives and even to make it central to their profession.

  Over the three years they had been hunting together for profit, the two of them had pulled in enough money on the side of farming to eat quite well all year 'round, to buy the few kinds of components they couldn't make themselves, for use in Arghas's ever more elaborately designed traps and snares, pay for the occasional luxury like imported fruits, or something new to read, and even put some small savings aside for their grand adventure. It would never happen of course, and Thon was sure they both knew it, but planning for the day that the two of them struck out on their own into the Borderlands and beyond; Two brothers against the world, had become a kind of a hobby in itself. In all truth, the savings really ought to be going toward acquiring an Ox for the farm, and probably would. The last one hadn't survived the winter, and the tilling had been an absolute headache without it.

  The trick to finding male lizards was mostly patience. With a poor enough effort at disguising your scent, a male lizard would eventually grow bored or overconfident and try for a kill. After that it was a simple (though not really nearly so guaranteed as the brothers liked to make it out to be) matter of making sure that it didn't get its way. Challenging, but lucrative if you could do it. Besides the excellent qualities of their leather, lizard teeth were needle-thin and wire-sharp, and they traded extremely well for use in seamstressing and country medicine for outlying communities like his that had to rely on nonmagical means of wound-closure.

  "You've been up there half the day now," Arghas exaggerated from below. "Can you see her or not?"

  Thon, legs wrapped securely around a high branch close to the trunk of the tree, scanned the foliage carefully, a broad-head arrow resting lightly on his bowstring, nocked but un-drawn. This pillar-pine ran up through the forest's deciduous canopy, but he was sure it wouldn't climb nearly that high. Sure, because the awful truth that didn’t bear dwelling on was that if it had, it would be likely to get the drop on him any moment, given that he'd spent the better part of the last ten minutes too absorbed in scanning the ground for irregular shapes in the forest floor and disruptions in the ground cover foliage to keep his head about him up here near the forest’s second-floor.