Imprudent: Chapter 13: Emissaries

In the entire system, we have found two space-based installations which are still operational—the two solar mirror arrays at the inner and outer primary-planet orbital equilibrium points. These are still functional and assisting with maintaining the planetary climate. However, attempts to contact and dock with each of the arrays resulted in hostile reactions, forcing us to retreat before we were harmed by the focused sunlight. Why these installations reacted in such a manner, we again have no idea, and we do not have the resources to attempt a forced boarding—nor do we wish to attempt to do so, given how the mirror arrays are integral for the continued habitability of the planet.

###

Raavi ava Laargan

The Lynx slid to a halt, despite the wind howling at our backs.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to get any further,” I said, and slammed one hand into the other. “Damn it!”

“We’re still miles from the pass,” Yufemya said, the rustling of the map audible as she consulted it.

“I know!” I said, leaning back in frustration. “The slope is too steep, that’s the problem.”

“Can we try pushing the Lynx? Get out, open the sails a bit, and push?” Stylio suggested.

“We could, but, well…” I waved up the side of the mountain. “Look.” Visible in the glow of the Night-Light, the mountainside was steep. Not as sheer as some of the others we could see, but the way to the pass was still too steep for the Lynx.

Oksyna stood and closed her eyes. Spreading her hands out, she motioned in front of the Lynx. I watched, fascinated despite my frustration, as the snow in front of us started to compact down. It didn’t turn to ice, but it was definitely closer to older snow than fresh.

The Lynx moved forward a few yards, and sort of rocked back and forth on the compacted surface.

Yufemya and Zoy jumped out and started trying to push as Oksyna continued to crunch down the snow, and then Stylio and I hopped out to join them as well.

It wasn’t as heavy as carrying the Lynx up and down canal locks, but our progress was still slow, even with the wind at our backs and Lady Fia manning the sails, and Oksyna packing down the snow as best she could. I could feel the difference down by my boots—the light, windblown snow had packed down into something denser, like the snowflakes had fallen apart, which was probably what happened. I wondered how well that was recharging her reservoir of entropy. I did have to say this much—having a necromancer along made getting logs lit for the fire nice and easy. I would say ‘almost too easy’ except that it was cold enough that I was glad not to have to mess about with kindling and tinder.

We were maybe fifty or sixty yards along from where we’d stopped when I heard Yufemya gasp.

I turned, and saw about thirty or forty revenants standing behind us, down the slope, weapons in hand.

“Oksyna…” I said, staring. But I couldn’t leave the Lynx, or it would start to slide down towards them.

“On it!” she shouted, and raised her hands, holding a small gem in her left hand. Black and purple light started to stream out of her right hand in a nimbus, forming what looked like runes in the air as she moved her fingertips above the gemstone.

The revenants started walking forward, and then one of them held out a spear in front of the others, making them halt.

They started speaking among themselves, and I was eyeing the weapons they held. “Oksyna…”

#

Oksyna Mykyetyav

“Raavi, let me work,” Oksyna said, trying not to snap as she focused. With one finger extended, she drew the runes above the stone, mindful of her limited supply of Entropy. This was going to be delicate, unless she wanted to do something drastic to refuel. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much around unless she wanted to kill some trees.

Finished with the first motion, she gently lobbed the gemstone across the slope to the oathwalkers. Awkwardly, it hit the snow halfway down the slope and vanished with a plop. If not for the gentle glow, it would have been lost.

Now came the ticklish part…

One of the oathwalkers—the one with the spear—spoke to the others and, with a visible sigh, another one of them slogged up the slope and retrieved the tiny gem.

“What’s going on?” Raavi asked as they all watched the oathwalker carry the gem back to its companions.

“I’m negotiating,” Oksyna said. “While I could break their contracts with sheer brute force, it would require more power than I have to spare right now. So I’m hoping for something more voluntary.” She’d tried this before back with that other group, and they’d responded fairly well, but the size of that group had been taxing. And this one was even larger.

So she’d started with a simple proposal for a binding promise that neither her side nor theirs would begin a conflict, and hoped that they weren’t under direct strictures or orders to attack. The fact that they hadn’t as soon as they’d seen the Lynx was a good sign…

The oathwalkers clustered around the gem, and she could see the runes floating in air over it. After a brief moment, the leader touched the gem, accepting its provisos, and then passed it around.

She relaxed. “Okay, they’re bound not to attack, but if any of us starts anything, we’re in trouble.”

“Define ‘trouble’?” Zoy asked.

“I’m oathbound to whack whoever starts anything. So don’t.”

“Got it. Put the weapons down, people,” Fia said. “Oksyna, you’re the expert. What do you need?”

A nice midden pile or a compost heap, or maybe the pile of rejects behind a pottery kiln would be nice. Something I can just reduce down to crumbled chunks of dust without any guilt. Perhaps some paintings someone’s embarrassed by? That hunter squad’s outfits were barely enough. Rather than voice that, she said instead, “For the moment, space to let me work.”

“You got it.”

“And keep the Lynx from sliding into them,” she said, hopping down and landing nearly knee-deep in the snow. Joy.

Pulling herself higher up into the snow, she started slogging over to the group of oathwalkers.

“Oksyna?” She turned back to see Raavi looking at her worriedly. “Be careful.”

She smiled, feeling a moment of warmth despite the frigid chill around them. “I will be.”

Turning back to the oathwalkers, she trudged towards them. Thankfully, under the direction of their leader—and judging by the fancier clothing that one wore, they were the leader—they were stacking their weapons off to the side.

Giving thanks to the Silent and the Quiet that they were reasonable, Oksyna stopped several paces away, and held out her hand.

The leader walked towards her and placed the gem, now exhausted, into her palm.

Now that they were face to face, Oksyna gave the oathwalker an examining look. Old—at least a few hundred years old—and dressed in finely woven and dyed woolens in the form of a cloak over a poncho. A leather bandolier crossed their chest under the cloak, with leather pouches sewn to it.

She bowed politely. “Do you understand me?” This would be ticklish at best, but if all she could do was propose motions blindly, she’d exhaust herself quickly.

The leader frowned—the aged skin surprisingly supple, they apparently took good care of themselves—and motioned back to their group, barking an order.

Another oathwalker stepped forward, dressed in the same cloak-and-poncho woolens, but the weave was less fine and less dyed. Rank hath its privileges even in death, as usual.

It spoke. “What want you, deathspeaker?”

Oksyna relaxed a hair. All right. She could do this. “To find out why you are attacking this kingdom suddenly. My leader,” she motioned back to where Fia and the others stood, “wishes to parley with your king on behalf of hers.”

The oathwalker nodded and spoke to the leader. The two of them conversed for a moment before the translator looked back to Oksyna. “Speak much cannot we. What can do you?”

“I can give you a temporary respite from your oaths. Say, a hundred hours, maybe a hundred-fifty,” she said, judging how much of a reserve she had and the number of oathwalkers. “Enough to give you time to act and explain. It is good that you speak my tongue, or I would have to propose these blindly.”

Again the translator turned to the leader and spoke. Resisting the urge to pull up the wording of their oaths and start running through it to see if she could spot any loopholes, Oksyna fidgeted as they spoke back and forth.

The translator was waving their arms while the leader had theirs crossed, eyes narrowed, and said something curt that agitated the translator more.

Whatever their tongue was, it wasn’t one that she recognized—not that it meant that much. Both her own homeland and the Kalltii kingdoms had been under the thumb of the Dormelion Empire for long enough to leave its stamp on their languages, so coming here had mostly been a matter of learning the differences for the local dialect. But the Gehtun had never been conquered by the Dormelion.

Who were you, she wondered as she looked at the two oathwalkers, when you were alive? Warrior? Scholar? Artist?

She’d spent half of her life as a necromancer. She hadn’t known anything else. So she had to wonder, what would it be like to live a full life and choose to be an oathwalker at the end of it?

The translator hung their head and scoffed before turning back to her. “Complicated things are. Swear you will that our king no harm mean?”

“I can put that in, yes, but I know that I mean him no harm,” she said. “I’m neutral and just want the fighting to stop.”

The translator frowned and spoke again to the leader.

As they spoke, Oksyna took the gem and started inscribing more runes with it. Carefully, delicately.

Once she was done, she turned around. “Fia! Come down here please!” She looked towards the pair of oathwalkers. “The leader of this group will swear that we will give no harm to yours.”

Fia arrived a moment later and bowed politely. “Negotiations going all right? Raavi’s about ready to burst between worry and curiosity. I have him checking over the Lynx to distract him.”

Oksyna smiled a bit, hiding it behind her hand. “Of course he is. And yes, we seem to be doing all right.” She nodded towards the runes. “This is a provisional contract for the next hundred hours that these oathwalkers will be temporarily suspended from their oath and bound to help us—specifically guiding us to their king—and neither side can harm the other. At the end of it, their existing oaths resume.”

Fia nodded. “Sounds good to me.” She looked towards the oathwalkers. “What do you say?”

The leader frowned again and spoke, and then the translator, their eyes narrowed, said, “What catch?”

“No catch. But if you were that interested in attacking us, you would have already. So I’m here to help.”

The two of them spoke again, and as they did so, Fia leaned in. “I wonder what the issue is?”

“Could be anything. Showing weakness, some loophole or conflict in their oath, internal political crap…”

Before Fia could respond, the oathwalker leader barked something to the rest of their group, who marched up behind them.

“Is that good or bad?”

“We’ll find out. We’re still under a truce, though.”

The leader extended a hand and, in painfully mangled but recognizable words, forced out, “We accept.”

Fia reached out and shook without hesitation—which was impressive from Oksyna’s perspective. Most people didn’t like shaking the hands of revenants, or touching them at all. And with that, Oksyna pushed out what remained of her Entropy, binding the contract she had proposed; it cost a lot, especially the part where she suspended their existing contract’s wording, but it was worth it. With them in the binding, she wouldn’t have to sustain it herself.

“All right. So… first off.” Fia glanced up the slope. “Can you help us get over the pass?”

#

Raavi ava Laargan

I gasped for breath and leaned against the rock wall of the pass; at least the snow here was thin, but the rocks underneath were loose and liked to shift.

“Yeah. The air is so thin up here,” Lady Fia said, rubbing her head.

“Oh! I bet that’s part of the reason why the Lynx couldn’t get up the slope!” I said. “Thinner air! It makes sense!”

Zoy’s voice came from behind me. “Raavi, your brain is an interesting place. You’re barely able to breathe, and what do you think of? Puzzles.”

I turned. “Is that bad?”

She shook her head. “No. Just interesting. Come on.” She walked on and I followed after.

The oathwalkers had helped in the most direct fashion possible—we’d broken down the Lynx for portage, and over a dozen of them had hoisted it on their shoulders, while the rest of us carried the supplies, tent, skates and runners. The pass was miles long between two of the mountain peaks; we’d passed the border fort a while earlier. It had been gutted by fire, and abandoned.

But now these oathwalkers were helping us. According to Oksyna, at least. And I trusted her.

A flicker of light came from up ahead. Rounding the bend, my back aching from the pack I was carrying, along with all of my tools, I blinked as I saw the campsite. Several of the oathwalkers were busy raising the tent, and a few others were building up a fire. Where they’d gotten the logs, I had no idea, but the clean woodsmoke was nice. Another group was examining the Lynx where they’d set her down.

My exhaustion forgotten, I hurried over to see what they were doing.

Four of them were clustered around one of the brackets I’d made to hold the skates and runners in place, pointing and exclaiming. One of them held one of the runners, and was latching it in and taking it out before doing it again.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

The one holding the runner turned and held it up before speaking in its language. I tried not to look too closely at the gray-purple skin it had, stretched tightly over its skull. It motioned towards the runner and asked a question. At least… I thought it asked a question.

“I don’t understand you.”

It pointed towards my belt and spoke again.

“Huh?”

It shook its head, put the runner down in the thin snow, reached over, and pulled my small hammer off of my belt.

“Hey!”

Crouching down, it motioned for me to follow, and I did so, resisting the urge to snatch the hammer back.

Gently, it took the hammer and tapped a loose pin back into place, and then handed the hammer back. I took it on reflex, and then it pointed to the pliers that were several places over on my belt.

Staring, I handed those over.

Using them, the oathwalker delicately bent the pin back into place before handing the tool back.

I picked up the runner and carried it over to the Lynx. Slotting it back into the bracket, I realized that the pin had worked itself loose—probably from all of the portages we’d been doing—and would have fallen out soon.

I turned and looked back at the oathwalker, who was smiling in a satisfied way at their work. “You aren’t a warrior at all, are you? You’re a craftsman!”

#

“But why are they sending craftsmen and weavers after us!?” I demanded. We were sitting around the fire that the oathwalkers had helped construct, a cup of soup in my hands.

“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out,” Oksyna said, frowning as she sipped at her own soup and then giving it an appreciative look. “Also, add cooks to that list. This is good.”

“I guess if you’re working at something for a few human lifetimes, you pick up a few things,” Zoy said dryly before taking a sip of her own cup. “And damn, seconded. Can we keep that one?”

“No!” Oksyna said. “They’re not mine to give away!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Zoy said before turning to Yufemya. “So what’s your guess?”

“On?” Yufemya replied, sipping at her own cup.

“Why they’re sending so many worker-types after the kingdom instead of, you know, fighters?”

Yufemya frowned and took another sip. “I don’t want to guess. I feel like that would run the risk of having us start assuming.”

Zoy cocked her head and then shook it. “All right. You know, you can just say ‘I don’t know.’”

“‘I don’t know’,” Yufemya parroted, mimicking Zoy’s tones perfectly.

“Huh. I don’t believe you. You’ve got to have some idea!”

Yufemya frowned as I looked around, and I said, “Well, they’re not saying anything beyond that we’ve got to talk to their king. So we’re going to have to do that.” I looked at Oksyna. “Can you tell us anything? I know that you can’t talk about some things, but can you at least tell us how oathwalkers work?”

She frowned and nodded. “Yes. That I can do. In generalities.”

“I’ll take it,” I said, and the others nodded.

“Yeah, anything solid right now will help,” Fia said.

Oksyna rubbed at her cheekbones with her thumb and forefinger. “Give me a moment to get everything in order up here.”

“Of course,” I said, and took a swallow from my cup before looking around again. The oathwalkers were busy. A group of them were cleaning their tools and weapons, another group were darning and repairing their clothes, and another group were, to my continued surprise, spinning thread from wads of fiber that they had been carrying around in bags. Those last ones were using old-style spindles and distaffs, but that didn’t stop them from producing thread so fine that it left me in awe at their skill. As Zoy had commented, I guessed that if you worked at something for a few lifetimes, you got good at it.

“All right,” Oksyna said. “So, Raavi.”

“Yes?”

“I need to use you to help me here. Nothing permanent, I promise.”

I quirked an eyebrow. “All right…”

She grinned and shuffled next to me. “Good. Do I have your permission to touch you?”

“Sure…?”

She punched me in the arm.

“Ow!” I put my hand over the spot and looked at her, more hurt at the shock and surprise than at the pain. “What was that for!?”

“You said that I had permission to touch you!” she said, and there was a smile on her face that confused me.

“A punch is not a touch!”

“Says who?”

“Uh, most people?”

“Ah, but who?” Her smile went away and her expression turned serious. “And that’s the basis of what I do.”

“What, punch people?”

She reached over and gently put her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry, but you’ll see my point in a moment.”

Giving her a suspicious look, I nodded. “I’m listening.”

“So you and I disagree—for the sake of argument—on whether a touch equals a punch or just a touch like this.” She very slightly squeezed my arm.

“I’d say so! But what does that have to do with oathwalkers?”

“Because being an oathwalker—or any other form of spirit that continues on after they’ve died—is because they’ve made a promise, a contract, an oath. And such things depend on understanding the language.” She looked around the circle. “And that’s what I and my fellow necromancers do. We edit, amend, interpret, and adjudicate the oaths and contracts of the dead.”

“On whose authority?” I asked, fascinated.

“I can’t answer that,” she said. “I’m not allowed to answer that.”

That puzzled me for a moment, and then it clicked. “Oh! Because you have to make a contract with them yourself? And not revealing the details about it is part of that?”

She relaxed a little and nodded. “Yes. And I can’t say more than that, or I have to pay penalties.”

“What form do those penalties take?”

“Entropy… or Breath. And yes, before you ask, I can die that way.”

I winced.

“I also can’t kill anyone with my Entropy directly, outside of immediate self-defense or a few other specific circumstances,” she said. “I know that other necromancers have abused that in the past, and either they’ve got looser or vaguer contracts than I’ve got or they were playing with fire.” She shrugged. “Of course, making someone’s clothes disintegrate when it’s this cold out is fair game.”

“Ouch,” I said with a wince. I didn’t know exactly how cold it was, but I knew that someone without shelter or clothing would be dead in minutes from exposure. “Have you done that?”

“Once. To the leader of a group of bandits. The others ran away when they realized that the little girl they were threatening could kill them all.” She shook her head. “But that’s beside the main point. So for a ‘normal’ revenant, they swear to do something with their dying Breath.”

“Like see their daughter get married,” I said.

“Exactly. Or get vengeance on the ones who killed them… or wronged them, which often turns messy. But let’s take your example,” she said. “Let’s say that revenant, when their daughter’s wedding date is set, realizes that they’ll die right after the ceremony. Which would put a damper on it, to say the least. So someone like me could amend their oath to give them a few more days afterwards… or possibly amend it entirely.” She shrugged. “That’s how Nightshade and others like her managed to get their armies of revenants together, by amending their oaths to swear loyalty to her, and enough of them were scared of dying forever that they accepted.”

“Which is why I asked if she was ‘recruiting’,” Lady Fia asked. “Of course, most of Nightshade’s revenants still went insane after just a decade or two.”

Oksyna nodded. “Where oathwalkers differ from your standard revenant is that they have a formalized contract, inscribed on… well, it’s usually a gem or sheet metal, to which they sign their names before they die. The structure of the contract helps keep their minds intact.”

Blinking, I put that together with what I knew of oathwalkers. “So how hard is it to make those contracts?”

“And that’s something I can’t share. Suffice it to say that I can’t make one, and it took a lot of power for me just to temporarily amend their terms with it.”

As I considered that, Stylio commented, “But as I understand it, these oathwalkers are bound by the terms of their formal contract?”

“Exactly.”

“So what could have made them suddenly start attacking Westernfellsen?”

“That,” Oksyna said firmly, “is what I want to find out.”

#

Emerging from the pass, the first thing I saw was… nothing.

It took a moment for things to resolve themselves into a vast open plain of snow underneath a black, cloud-speckled sky, the Night-Light’s glow illuminating the landscape. There were no trees, no hills that I could see beyond the mountains we had just emerged from, no… nothing.

It was disorienting—to me, at least. The oathwalkers helped us reassemble the Lynx from portage, and loaded everything in. After looking for a bit, I saw that the tips of plants were sticking up through the top of the snow, and there were occasional rocks emerging as well, and there were long divots that looked like paths.

While I’d been looking around, the oathwalkers had produced snowshoes. From where, I hadn’t seen, but they strapped themselves in with an air of long-practice and started helping haul the Lynx up to speed.

“Do we want to start just going?” I asked.

“We don’t know where to go, and we don’t have room on the Lynx for any of them,” Stylio pointed out.

“Right,” I said, frowning and looked over the group of them just hauling the Lynx along like they were dogs pulling a sled. “Maybe we should just extend out the sail a little, just to help?”

“And with one good gust it will run them over. And then we’re on default for Oksyna’s parley.” Stylio patted me on the shoulder. “I know that you want to hurry as much as possible, and I think it’s good, but we need to go at their pace for the moment.”

I nodded, slumping a little, and fell into step with them. For the first hour, it was difficult; the oathwalkers lent us snowshoes, but walking in them was tiring, especially as I wasn’t used to it, and my lungs reminded me that the air was thinner at this altitude.

I found Oksyna walking alongside me; she seemed to be unbothered by the exertion.

“So…” she began to say.

“So?” I echoed, after she trailed off.

“So I was wondering where the idea for the Lynx came from. You mentioned back in the city that it was from something you read?”

“Oh, yeah! I was reading this travelogue on the Slaekkaruune tribes who live down at the equator, and their ice-fishing techniques on the pack ice. They have these leather and wood sailed-canoes that can travel both in water and across ice that use skates carved from whalebone. They use them to travel across the ice to hunt and trade and migrate. Apparently they move across the equator north to south depending on the season, so they basically go from summer to autumn to summer all the time.”

She raised a hand. “Wait a moment. Back up. What do you mean? I’m from Endanchoria, and I know that there’s ice south of there in the winter, and some of it never melts even in the summer. But what do you mean ‘summer to autumn to summer’?”

“When it’s summer here in the north, there’s winter in the southern half of the world, and vice versa,” I said. “They stay on the icy area around the equator. The sun is only overhead for a few days around the Equal Nights in Spring and Autumn, so they basically follow it back and forth; they spent half of the year in twilight and the other half with a day and night like the rest of us.”

She cocked her head. “But… doesn’t the ice melt in summer?”

“No, it’s all about the angle of the sun. Sunlight is coming in so steep at the equator during the summer that it gives barely more light than the Night-Light. Certainly not enough to melt the ice.” I made a fist and held it up so that it was lit by the Night-Light. “Our world is tilted hard on its side. We don’t know why. None of the other planets we’ve studied through our telescopes are tilted like this. If I remember right, it’s something around eighty degrees away from ‘upright’, while all of the other planets around the sun are within ten or so degrees of upright, like a top that’s still spinning at full speed.”

“You mean top speed?” she asked, and I laughed.

“I was resisting making that joke!”

“Good! So I got to make it instead!” She chuckled. “So continue.”

“So since we have such a high tilt, the sun moves back and forth, lighting one half of the planet at a time for each season. On the other planets, they have a day-night pattern all year like we have in Spring and Autumn.”

“That’s so weird to think about,” she said. “How would they tell the seasons apart? When do they sleep?”

“At night, presumably?”

“Huh. So you were explaining about the ice?”

“Yeah, so during the summer, there’s a band around the equator that gets just a little light every rotation, but not enough to melt the ice. So the Slaekkaeruune live there, moving back and forth across the equator in their ice-boats to follow the sun. So when the summer ends in their current hemisphere, becoming autumn, they move to the other one.”

“Amazing. And that’s where you got the idea for the Lynx?”

“Yup! I made my skates out of steel rather than bone, of course, but the idea is the same.”

She smiled at me and we chatted a bit more—and then I saw light coming from nearby, down in what looked like a ravine or valley.

“What’s that?” I moved away from the group a bit towards the light.

“Raavi, come back here!” Stylio called, and I slowed to a halt, but not before getting a look down into the valley. “Raavi!?”

I heard her walk up behind me. “Raavi, what is… it…”

She came to a halt next to me and looked down as well.

Below, down in the valley, there was a shrine. More than a shrine—a temple. Large stones, carved with runes, seemed to glow under the lights from torches and bonfires, the sources of the light that had drawn my attention.

Around them, I could see oathwalkers. Hundreds of them.

And they were tending to the dead.

Large stone tables lay within the perimeter of the outer circle of stones, and on them, the oathwalkers were cleaning the bodies, using pitchers of water—from melted snow, I suspected—and wrapping them in shrouds with their hands folded across their chests and blindfolds around their eyes. One group—I squinted—was ladling small spoonfuls of liquid from steaming pitchers into the mouths of the dead. Still more were carrying the wrapped, shrouded bodies into a passage that cut into the side of the valley.

“Your ways we know not,” said the voice of the translator, and I turned to see it standing there. “But our best we do.”

I glanced back down below and then pointed down, even as I looked back to him. “Wait, those are my people?”

“Yes. Those by ours killed. We show what respect we can.” It turned back to the Lynx before saying quietly, “Not much it is, know I. Sorry I am.”

I looked back and forth between the piles of the dead and the translator. “Why? Why have you done this?”

“Explain the king will. Me I cannot.”

“Damn you!” I spat.

“Already I am.”

That made me pause, and I looked back down at the bodies. Why?

I felt Stylio’s hand on my arm. “Come on, Raavi. Let’s go. We can get answers.”

Scowling, I nodded. “Yes, we will.”

---

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