The Book of Sim Nem: The Wizard's Harvest Table, #2

By Tom Mooney

The second book of The Wizard's Harvest Table.
Simnem, Princess of Lual, dreams of the end times, finding they have come sooner than expected, and that she is in part, if not entirely, to blame.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Mooney
• Release date: Nov 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9798215406038

Book preview

Thomas Mooney

First Edition

November 15, 2019

Copyright © Thomas Mooney 2019

All Rights Reserved. This book, or samples of it, may not be reproduced without written permission provided by the author, except for the use of brief quotations with accurate citation.

This digital edition published by Look Dev Ltd.

Fiction, without liability to other works or actual persons or events.

Typeface: High Tower, Tobias Frere-Jones Cover illustration by Shaun Brown © 2019

ISBN 978-0-473-50873-9

Evil sours my battled heart.

Ill-sought vengeance inflames me.

Death breathes down my neck,

Whispering of swift ease.

Destroyed from within,

By nature misled,

Sense attacking itself,

My skull is a nest of furies

Assuaged by the remedy of blood.

Bound by sweven inspired demons, My mind reels, a depleted well.

Waking consumes what little energy Troubled sleep restores.

With portents of untimely demise, Of everything, none withstanding, Inescapable and violent, I weep and laugh And bid all forgive me.

Towards the end times, the mountain realm of Lual sank into a dark age. Outside the pages of yellowing rare books, the past’s caliginous magic was lost. In a land of woodsmen, prospectors, and trappers, most made a business of putting the past to rest, and magic along with it. Even wandering pilgrims devoted to Heira, travelling light, made poor stewards of obscure observations recorded by forgotten wizards and scholars. In ruins overtaken by trees, misty chapters of history disintegrated at the back of rotting shelves.

Memories were short. Lives were short. Beyond the realm, who was there to record its passing? Few knew the state of Lual, except the forlorn dead in their ghostly tomb world and lone demons who came and went of a season seeding the terrors that troubled every soul from cradle to grave.

The last scourged king, who fought and triumphed over Tseudon’s winged horde, was never succeeded. With the untimely drowning of his uncrowned heir, the royal line was severed, remembered in melancholy songs and mouldering heraldry. Remaining lords, who slept under damp, smoke-filled thatch, recollected wistfully as their hair greyed and whitened that, at its height, the flags of Lual’s royal houses flew proud, raised over parapets and glinting minarets of castles littering the mountain ranges like jewels in sweeping folds of lacework. Lual’s standard was emblazoned with three colours: the white of mountain snow, also attributed to the dead; a stripe of red to signify the underworld, rightly feared by even

those with a sanguine nature; and the darkest blue for the crown, a blue almost black, cold and grim, for the realm’s history was rife with defilement and intrigue, ridden with war such that few knew peace.

Pilgrims of Heira often wore these colours, hoping to ensure the goddess would recognise them when they died: sky blue and black, an inky, seeping red like eyes shot with blood, and over them both an unblemished white, as pure as funeral attire.

*

Beidgryt was buried and would complain no more of the cold, even as she lay under the frosty soil.

It harmed Minus Levey’s already beaten sense of civility that the clay-splattered gravedigger held out his gristled hand, inspected his payment, expected more, and waited till he had it. The two of them faced each other like statues flanking a gate, one tall but crabbed, hugging his arms against the cold, and the other short and stalwart, palm open. Minus found himself handing over the last coin he owned to watch the burial without casket of his lime-covered wife. She had been his wife only a few days. He suffered both losses with a pained expression, but his grief was short.

Both could be recovered from. He’d suffered longer lasting skin rashes. Harsh, yes, but he knew from bitter experience how the empty soul could nevertheless drearily stumble on. He rubbed his beard and the greasy, lank lock of hair on the back of his neck. He

attempted to square narrow shoulders ill-suited to keeping any but a downward angle. His lips fitfully compressed into pouts, grimaces, and snarls as bleak storms buffeted his thoughts.

He had not even collected a handful of flowers to lay on the corpse or to scatter on the grave’s filled cavity to soften the blunt message of dirt. Minus rubbed clean his palms. How quickly burial effaces our presence from the world, mostly for the better.

Besides wanting for a wreath, Minus could not manage a tear save for what the sharp breeze produced as he faced into it. This day would remain with him interminably, a black mark to accompany many in his life, a testament to the daily misery he endured, gravid of his own surly thoughts.

Lackening. The thought that ever stained his mind. Lackening, that in itself sounded ill-formed, a fault describing faults. He had ascribed this resentable trait to himself, much as one draws a line under one’s name, a repugnant rank assigned to match his deeds, for it referred not to the lack of what the world had bestowed on him, originally and ever since, but to the lack of anything he could produce in himself, for the world’s betterment or his own. Ambition, sympathy, foresight, any elevated mark of character, eluded him like alchemical secrets. Even though he came from a noble house, all the power, wealth, might, and dominance he’d ever seen had been entirely in the grasp of his father, whose frown was a brand on Minus’ every waking moment. Only a prisoner endured such

captivity, cooped up in algid stone cells under the guard of curs hired for a pittance, thus given to brutality, dullards tormenting their frail charge. He was never sure if their fists were meant to temper him, to give him resilience, or put him in his measly place. Minus groaned, his own capacity for violence limited to wry expressions and wringing of hands.

The grave digger coughed to let Minus know they were done. Long inured to grief and remorse, the old fellow turned his face briefly to Lual’s night sky, where a shooting star raced away, its white glimmer as devoid of colour as the gravedigger was of emotion. He left Minus to his misfortune. This suited Minus very well. His mood was suddenly unconstrained, far too light. It wouldn’t do for his vagaries to disgrace him before a handler of corpses. Then again, the man seemed to have seen everything, at least concerning the disposal of bodies.

It was the shift between seasons when the day’s heat and wind left the hedges bare and brittle with twigs and even hardy plants wilted and dried out, their blossoms mercilessly culled by the night’s chill. The plots were covered with coarse hay. From the lumpy ground, and the smell, it was apparent livestock trod each day between the graves, driven out to pasture.

The night air grew still. Minus bade Beidgryt farewell. His linen-wrapped wife, newly covered with soil, seemed very far away. Her bridal dress had been her last. A better man would have preferred to die in her place. Minus only sighed. He would never be happy

again, but he could appreciate the mockery visited on him by the world, bearing the shame loaded upon him then doubled and redoubled. Yet how alive he felt, filled with energy from his fingers to his toes that he could not expend nor contain.

Near the graveyard, hidden by tilted generations of gravestones, the decrepit village which fed it was waking despite the dark. An elderly choir’s frail lull drifted over rustling frost wilt and stalks left in fallow fields. Minus couldn’t quite make out the words, but they sounded familiar. He’d heard the same reedy tones each morning since his arrival. Only the colonies of lichen speckled over every granite wall, rock, pillar, and flagstone were more patient awaiting dawn. He mumbled the simple tune through thick, chewed lips, distracting himself as he shuffled along the overgrown ruts of a path that left the village to wind along the edge of a wood, into which it petered out, the way fallen into disuse. He resisted the urge to plunge into the deep wood, where he should worry more about nocturnal encounters with predators than early risen villagers.

Pious people, he thought, killing when they thought they had to, letting him go when they thought they should. Was he lucky to be alive, no better off alive than dead? If they’d chosen to stove in his head, they’d have had to pay the gravedigger themselves, and double.

The song dwindled and the edge of the wood stretched on, contained by ancient, toppled stonewalls, a border destined to gradually disappear into the wilds. A bell resolved its cadences into an echo in his imagination.

He stubbed his toe and danced on one foot, sucking in his own sour breath.

He limped on until he could hear no more than the scrape of his feet and the loop of his plaintive litany.

In the countryside, once the glimmer of the village failed, the dark was complete, the crunch of frost and frigid soil the only sound to be heard. He walked further than he ever had, wishing away his life so far even as he recollected every point of folly and suffering with a groan or flinch.

Why did he feel more regret at his choice of sandals than he felt his grief? Why did he fear his father’s censure more than that of his wife’s ghost? If he were not alone and cloaked in nocturnal gloom, he might feel forced to hide his lack of remorse. Walking in the dark was a price well worth paying for leaving as quickly as he could, more like a grave robber than a widower. But his energy waned fast. Unwashed, scratching like a dog, his clothes sodden and blisters developing all over his feet, all he wanted to do was sleep. Yet from every straw-covered hovel and thatched cottage he imagined himself watched by resenting peasantry. Reason told him everyone was snoring, or at prayer, or maybe even tumbling under the blankets, oblivious to the shiny streaks of his self-pitying tears.

He rubbed his eyes with his cuff, disgusted by the unavoidable dirt.

What name the treacherous village was known by had evaded Minus during his three day stay there.

None of the villagers had told him, and he hadn’t asked.

This saved him any temptation to return to his father to beg for the village to be razed to the ground. The poison of revenge could not compete with the acid and bile in which he already stewed himself. Liberated by ignorance, but burdened by the knowledge of his weakness, he sighed. How had it come to this?

Arriving at the village after days winding along precipice tracks from one weald-choked combe to another, he and Beidgryt had disembarked from an ill-favoured wagon, exorbitantly expensive insofar as it lacked all luxury and much in the way of repair as well.

Their mule was at odds with its duty and let them know by braying continually and resisting the whip, so much so that Minus had made good on an oath to sell the fractious devil. Where it was now, he scarcely cared. He was cheered by the thought the braying ass would give whoever took it no end of rude trouble.

But that was only the start of the downward spiral. On the road, Beidgryt had fallen ill, struck by a fever, her head swollen after the bite of some unseen insect carrying an intractable ailment the villagers had taken as an ague or unholiness, preferring to see her dead than to risk its taint. They had locked Minus in a stock, his face pressed against dust-caked floorboards, and freed him only after he had lost track of time.

Silver-haired and ham-faced without exception, each selected from the same dull stock of farm-raised brothers and cousins, they marched him to a cellar where Beidgryt’s body had been stored in a covered bath of ice water. They had strangled and drowned her

and apparently were freeing him to dispose of her corpse only as a courtesy after he had not also fallen ill.

To a total stranger they owed nothing, so their courtesy was as chill as the breeze that patrolled the village. It was quite clear that, once the burial was concluded and paid for, he should make his way elsewhere. There had been no words spoken to come to that agreement, but facial expressions were enough, all cast in cold iron.

And what had they seen? A pasty, spittle-chinned, weeping boy, ineffectual, unable to protect his wife nor prevent the theft of his few belongings. Granted, he had sold the mule before his confinement, but only the gravedigger had profited by the transaction.

He slipped on the tattered soles of his filthy sandals and lurched along, hissing in pain, watching the distant, bobbing sea reflect the moon as it followed him, keeping pace with his oblivion.

The wilderness promised to be a bitter home.

Lual was a sunken realm, disputed and dark. It was a point of some debate that Lual could no longer even claim to survive, its castles destroyed, its nobles and their houses dissipated. Minus had grown up in a run-down palace taken over by a rough and brutal commander. Its estates had gone to ruin as his father poured money into building an army, finding soldiers were loyal to silver first and their leader’s flag second.

Blood and silver then, would determine his new law.

Under his violent regime, there was no heyday of the dwindling nation to be spoken of except in cautionary tales. Wield a cudgel for the future was Lord Levey’s

outlook, his forces massing like armoured beetles around a ball of dung. Minus, now a pauper, was what his father’s men feared to become, and Minus hadn’t even the skills to poach or steal.

Vendors plying their wares from hamlet to hamlet trod the same lane as Minus. First, he passed a family pushing a cart, a wobbling shambles that shook on its sagging axle. They were pilgrim stock, glum as defeated soldiers, white-skinned and white-haired, and they stared at him from below brows bent with suspicion. Two girls marched at the front, each clutching a rope encircling her waist, though it was unclear whether the bond was to restrain them or to assist them in pulling the wagon. Perhaps both, Minus thought, judging by their desolate, downcast looks. By the light of a lantern swinging on a pole between them, they stared in unison like owls. Minus stepped to the side. At home, such disdainful looks from the peasantry kept him to his quarters. Now he smiled alarmingly, hurrying them on their way. He hoped they would soon pass out of memory, and thoughts of home with them.

Garments hung off the cart in all directions. A man with no shirt walked around it, propping up the load, making sure nothing fell. Holding up a flickering taper, he regarded Minus as though he were a vagrant or bandit. Not yet, Minus thought. He thrust out his chin as far as he could. He still had a few days before he crossed that border.

The cart man seemed to recognise Minus as the least likely source of liberation his two girls might pray

for. Clearing his throat, he let Minus pass. Had it been day, he might have taken Minus captive and put him to the yoke. Minus hid his fears. A night on the road had clearly spooked the merchant, who appeared to well know the troubles that might emerge from the dark.

Better to hasten on, hedging against the distance left to go.

Soon after, in a narrow descent bordered by two leafy black stone walls higher than his head, Minus crossed the path of a roaming musician who carried his instrument like a weapon and kept his distance, as from a wild dog. The instrument, probably a hurdy-gurdy, was wrapped carefully to protect it, but not done so finely it might be taken for anything of value. It was hard to imagine that drab volume, clutched like an infant’s coffin, could produce jangling merriment to tap a foot to in a tavern. For a musical fellow, the player made no sound. His slack-lipped sneer exposed teeth that had seen better days. He sidled past with his lantern sputtering, raised on a wood standard painted with a veiny hand plucking strings. They both neglected to exchange greetings. Once clear, the morngy fellow fled. It takes one to know one, Minus allowed and glanced back to see the yellow light shrinking into the dark, dipping to meet its reflection on the damp cobbles, then gone.

At the foot of the hill, the good road struggled to maintain its vector, no more than logs and boards half-sunken in cart mud, shadowed by trees that rustled and creaked. Modest made his way until birds began to

chirp divisively in the branches. He lay down on a stump for a while, but the cold before dawn crept up on him. He was thus curled up, distracted and irritated, when another vendor found him still trying to sleep.

Kipping at dawn ain’t good for yer liver, the vendor said, looking down at him like a bird at a worm.

Back off, jackroller! Minus warned, startled.

Eh, eh? Forfend to harass the overseen. As a rule, the more they’ve taken the less they have to take,

the man replied, taking Minus for a drunk. Obviously long on the road from the dust that covered his legs, he shambled along the way with a rotund, canvas-wrapped keg on his thin back and an assiduous grimace on his face. It appeared he was going the same direction as Minus, who got up, stretched, and matched his pace with the old timer, who didn’t seem to mind.

Walk off yer shivers, youngster, he commented. He widened his grimace, content to let time tell if Minus could keep up. He punctuated his determined plod with an occasional pause to heft the keg, its sloshing propelling him forward so long as he bent with its bulk, compounding his stoop and shuffle.

Minus had never had cause to carry a lantern by night. He now found the lack of one a sore trial.

Propped on his walking stick, which clonked and rattled on the wood boards, the old man held his lamp near his face, its sputtering light very likely the cause of his squints and grimaces. The night shrank the world around its frugal flame. Minus stumbled, unsure of the ground.

Hair of the dog? the vendor asked. Well, it’ll do ye no good. I don’t tote anything distilled, vinted, concocted, or brewed for tankard, stoup, or cup. He twirled his hand. This is demon’s blood. A measure of evil for evil times.

Ignorance is the evil of the times, Minus said, disinclined to talk of the demons of past times at any rate. He felt thirsty. You mean to sell that? To someone nearby?

Nearby would be better than not, for I’ve carried this cask long enough! The old man laughed.

He was of an age where the bulge of his eye had become fixed like a boil. He turned his head to look at Minus, then along the lane. Care to carry the load? I’ll offer one part of ten in shares.

Minus considered the paucity of the offer.

How far is it?

I should say not far, but who knows?

And for whom do I carry this puncheon along the puncheon?

There’s florid talk for a youngster, but ye carry nothing yet. Puncheon? There’s a joke somewhere there. Puncheon your ball sack. How do ye like that?

He laughed once. My name is Edfre, from Easom’s Prize. Can ye guess how long ago I descended upon this realm’s lofty ranges? Long enough to learn yer obstreperous Lual tongue. Puncheon!

It is rare enough to meet those from other places as well as other times, Minus replied, but did not venture a guess.

I was in Lual during the invasion. Yes, I’m that old. Edfre was indeed so old his musty clothes, tasselled and ribboned, evoked a period of more chivalrous customs, though he must have replaced his boots a great many times. He scuffed mud from his heels on a fallen branch. Old as a tree, me.

Really?

"Oh, I haven’t transported this cargo all the while like a crab across the briny ocean’s carpet, but I do mind it fierce. I’ve hidden it in cellars, lofts, under floorboards, in holes, empty wells, even in graves. Yes, even in graves, in the embrace of the departed. Hey?

What’s that? Edfre steadied Minus from stumbling at the mention of graves. I’ve smuggled it from town to town, biding my time. But there remain few wizards to call on in trade, now Lual has fallen."

Minus replied, Well, at least we’ve not to worry anymore about ash and Fellstain.

Edfre dismissed that notion as pure folly as he unharnessed the keg and rested it on the hump in the lane between cart furrows. He refreshed his lantern and stretched. I have yer agreement then? The hogshead is not heavy, but the volume bounded inside is far from light. But I’d say ye’ve good legs for a few days.

Minus tried the keg, which was cumbersome enough to make one part in ten a far cry from reasonable.

Now, don’t think to make off with it, Edfre chided, helping Minus straighten up. "I already have a

buyer in mind. I’m sure ye wouldn’t find one, not between here and the capital. To anyone else yer just—"

A fool on a fool’s errand?

Dare I say yer half right?

Minus tied the strap that pressed the keg against his back. The contents sluiced from side to side.

He floundered for his balance. The hairy ropes crossing his chest and under his shoulders seemed to tighten of their own accord, as if someone stood behind him, securing the load.

Edfre led the way, having measured out enough oil to keep his lamp lit till the sun rose.

The nights are not so long where I hail from that we must go about in the dark. Certainly, we don’t measure a night in thimbles of oil, he said.

Minus, who hadn’t slept, shivered and struggled to keep up, uncaring whether Edfre called Lual home or the moon.

*

While in Lual day finally dawned, over Easom’s Prize, where Edfre hailed from, the sun’s evening glow still lit the roof of a monastery in the mountains.

Known as the Nest, the monastery’s name originally was Refuge of the Seaward Silver Peaks, but few in Easom’s Prize knew of it or sought refuge there, so its inhabitants gradually forgot it too. The Nest’s buildings were packed into a tight fissure high in the uppermost cliffs. No road led to it, only a stair barely wider than two people could walk side by side. Its walls swept up

the bare rock face, taller than any tree, so it was protected, wrapped in seclusion and wool. An eagle would have envied its lofty isolation.

In the slow fading light, nothing seemed to move, only the shadows of clouds and leaves teased from corner to corner. The dwellers of the Nest worked indoors, and only occasionally rushed from building to building, though one patient elder, at an interminable rate, swept a curved courtyard from end to end. He swept, once or twice, rubbed his back, then resumed at the same creeping pace, consumed by his toil as dust blew up the mountain these days without ceasing.

The people who lived in the Nest were obliged to sustain themselves in a spirit of frugal, elegant simplicity. In the evenings they lit lamps tied to small balloons that they released to float out over the clouds, bearing icons to celebrate glorious Heira, the creator Easom, baleful Theram, and the unstoppable Os, the great monad. Many of the monks were fond of flying kites also, taking air after long sessions of scholarly study and communal work. Most had pets, varying from falcons and owls to placid tortoises, and of course goats. Shaggy, sure-footed stock also populated the mountain, defying its vertical ascent. Urma, who sat in a room above the refectory with Inka Gesse, had an orange, long-eared pup, which lay sleeping with its nose against the gap under the door and its hind legs spread, stomach to the ceiling.

Inka Gesse wore her weight in fabric. A great white poplin swathe framed her jowled face, making her look like a specimen of poultry.

"Our labour is a devotion. We are not mendicants dependant on the charity of a village of suppressed peasants. Though it once was, sure enough.

Now we are all peasants."

There isn’t much to tell us from the animals.

Urma laughed, thinking Inka Gesse really was as close to a homely hen as a woman could be.

Everything we do is for each other, young Urma, Inka Gesse claimed, while Urma, who had been born in the monastery, took it for granted. She pressed glossy white onion bulbs into rows of dirt in trays under the ceiling windows, which rattled in the dusty breeze. They had been doing this all day, and Urma’s fingers were dirtier and smellier than Inka’s by a notable degree. She sighed. She was fifteen. Inka was fifty, maybe more, and while not mother superior, was an undeniable authority in Urma’s simple life.

Deservedly, Urma conceded, a good heart handing down her goodness. In any case, Inka brooked no argument, and it was no surprise they had onion soup to look forward to for dinner.

The task feels unrewarding? The tone of Inka’s voice warned of a test. Inka had taught Urma most of her life. She was like a mother. So far as she’d been told, as she didn’t really remember, her parents were long dead, so Urma was grateful Inka Gesse looked after her.

Warring bands of brigands had attacked the Nest several times and they all feared the next time the monastery might be attacked