The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 17: The Way to Autumnsgrove, Part 1

 There hadn't been room on top of necessary provisions for many books, and so Casimir's lessons were somewhat limited in scope. He and the cursewright sat in a shaft of early morning sunlight in the monastery's library, Ammas with his tea and a plate of bacon and tomatoes; Casimir with a flask of water and a helping of dried fruit and waybread. The boy was laboriously writing out the thirty-three letters of the Therkostic alphabet. Ammas doubted they would get to even the simplest grammar rules before they were done with Carala's situation one way or another, but it would be helpful if his apprentice could pronounce the words that would be most effective on the stilling charm around the princess's neck.

The lighting here was excellent, and Ammas supposed the monks had been justifiably proud of their library's design. Dust lay thick on the long tables arranged in rows before the towering windows, and he could picture the robed figures hunched over their parchments and palimpsests. The shelves at the far end of the library stood empty but for a few ragged tomes that looked as if they had been chewed on by rats. The place couldn't have matched the Othillic Archives even on its best day, but it must have been a pleasant respite of scholarship amid the desolate countryside that surrounded it. 

Beyond the windows stood a wild and overgrown vineyard, and beyond that the white humps of the Chalk Hills. The westernmost end of those hills belonged, nominally, to the Malachite realm of Dyroth. Ammas reflected this was the first time he'd left Munazyr in two years.  He hadn't set foot inside the borders of the Anointed Realms since he'd settled in the city three years before that.

With a heavy sigh Casimir pushed his parchment toward his master, an air of frustration about him that was unusual for the boy. Ammas polished off his tea and bent over to examine the strange, writhing symbols of this most alien of alphabets. 

"I don't know why you seem upset, Casimir. This is a very difficult thing to learn, and I'd say about a quarter, maybe even a third of your letters are recognizable." He favored the boy with a smile. "It's not like learning the letters of the Indorean languages of the Anointed Realms and the Straits, or even the Q'Sivari dialects. Don't be discouraged. These come from another world entirely."

"I know that," Casimir frowned, looking down at his fingers as they toyed with his quill. The feathers were raggedy and picked-over, as if he had been worrying it when Ammas wasn't looking.

"What's the matter, then?"

Casimir didn't answer for a long time. The sunlight streaming through the tall windows began to brighten as the morning drew on, bright autumnal light with that threat of chill lurking within. Finally, in a voice almost too low to be heard, he said, "I'm scared of doing what you do."

Ammas knew he should have expected this. Casimir was usually so eager to hear his stories he hadn't stopped to think how certain aspects of his boyhood time in Munazyr might have affected him. "Casimir, you must understand, what I do is very rare. Few cursewrights ever drew their powers from the spirits of the Dead. There's no reason to think you will."

"Lady Terazla did."

"Yes, and she lived centuries ago. Even then it wasn't common."

"But I'm learning in the same place where you saw them. What if they want to come to me like they did for you?"

"There was more going on with me than just the temple. When I was in Munazyr I was surrounded by death, and I'd been given a touch of the worlds beyond to protect me from the plague. I have never made you a beacon for the dead like I became, Casimir, and I would never do such a thing without asking you first."

"I don't want to see the dead people, Ammas. What if -- " Casimir broke off, staring at the floor.

"You can tell me," Ammas prompted gently.

Again there was a long silence. When Casimir answered, Ammas had to strain to hear it, though the terror and grief in the boy's eyes spoke volumes. "What if one of them is Lena?"

Ammas rose from his seat and clambered between the tables until he was at Casimir's side. Crouching beside his apprentice, he lightly ran a hand over his head. "It doesn't work that way. In all the years I've looked into the worlds beyond, I have never seen someone I knew. Not my family, not my friends. Exactly what I see when I reach out to the Dead isn't something I can explain. There are many mysteries in this world, and where we go after we die, whether to the gods' embrace or to the fires of the pit or to some world we cannot imagine, no one knows. The spirits I see may not even have died in this world. Wherever Lena is, you and I will almost surely not see her again until we join her. If that frightens or comforts you, or if it saddens you, only you can say."

Casimir nodded, looking downcast but not entirely dissatisfied. "And you wouldn't be angry if I decided I don't want to do things the way you do?"

Ammas smiled. "Casimir, I won't be angry with you even if you don't follow me into my trade at all. There are a thousand paths before you, and it's not my decision which one you'll take."

Casimir nodded, mollified but still troubled, and watched as Ammas corrected his efforts at writing the Therkostic letters. "Did you feel like you had a choice, Ammas? After you saw the dead lady? Did you think you had to become a cursewright?"

"Actually," Ammas murmured as he crossed out and penned his own letters, "I was not sure for a few years after that. I quite enjoyed practicing the healer's art. I still do. But in the end I followed the trade I was best at and enjoyed the most. When you meet Doyenne Sulivar, I think you'll understand a little better. No one ought to be bound to a single road for his whole life, Casimir, especially if he has it in his power to change his direction." Ammas passed the corrected parchment back to his apprentice. "Once more. Then we'll practice pronunciation and a few  words. After that, I want you to come outside with me. It's looking to be a beautiful day, and I'd hate to waste it cooped up in this dusty old ruin. Besides, there's something behind the monastery I think you should see."

Casimir attended to his lessons as best he could, and Ammas thought the boy was making definite progress. "Your pronunciation is better than your writing, but gods willing we won't encounter any Therkostic texts on this journey anyway. I don't believe my heart could stand it." 

Afterward, he led his apprentice into the courtyard where Barthim was shouting encouragement to Vos and Denisius as they sparred, while Carala watched on. Ammas noticed she was skimming one of the texts he had brought for Casimir, a history of the Straits of Twilight. They caught each other's eye for a moment as he and his apprentice made their way across the courtyard toward the cemetery. Ammas thought he saw a hint of regret in her face, perhaps at her assessment of the rightness of the Emperor's purge. Or perhaps it was merely his imagination.

In the late morning sunlight the cemetery seemed downright bucolic, and the horseshoe tomb from which they had escaped the Munazyri tunnels little more than an interesting ruin. Ammas paused at the broken door, wondering if he ought to take some measures to ensure the burial grounds remained consecrated. The closest thing they had to a priest, however, was Barthim, and irreligious as the cursewright might be, even he had a respectable distaste for that much blasphemy. Casimir, he was pleased to note, was more curious about the door than frightened of it.

But the tombs and the tunnels were the past, and it was the future that occupied Ammas's thoughts. He indicated the steep hillock behind the tomb door, the stretches of grass breaking here and there to expose long streaks of white stone, the source of the Chalk Hills' name. Casimir looked to the crown of the hill and grinned. Ammas wondered if he had ever seen such a thing in Munazyr. There were some gently sculpted hills in the Doge's parks, but he wasn't sure Casimir had ever had the pleasure of climbing them. The nicest ones were in the richer parts of town, after all, and were unlikely to be frequent haunts of a brothel orphan, however polite he might be. Scrambling with a physical grace Ammas could only envy, the boy clambered up the hill, pausing a good fifteen feet above the tomb door to wait for his master, who was making considerably slower progress.