Part III. Moors of the Danelords
Thankfully Coord handled most of the rowing. Once they were what Drystan guessed to be halfway to their destination she pulled the oars in and bound them in cloth, then altered her direction about a hundred degrees to the west and resumed slicing silently through the water in the cover of the fog.
“Put on the clothing the first mate gave you,” she ordered quietly, her eyes more fixed on the barely-visible shoreline than on him.
Drystan obediently doffed his clothing and dressed himself in the well-mended tunic, trousers and oilskin belts and overcoat of a sailor, only realizing after the fact that he had stripped down to his smallclothes in front of a woman he barely knew. Either ignoring his reddening and embarrassed face or merely not caring, she motioned to a length of poorly formed chain laying at the bottom of the pinnace. “Wrap them up with everything you have bearing insignias of the Rectory and drop them over the side.”
“What?”
Coord stared at him coldly. “Your bearing the Cross of Junan will only get us into trouble.”
With a frown Drystan knotted up his clothing and pulled his practice uniforms out of his satchel, then bound them up in the chain too. With a sigh he dumped everything over the side of the boat and crossed himself quickly lest he offend Junan for wasting perfectly good gifts of the church. “Shall I sink my coin too?”
The Inferi shook her head. “I'll send it off to have it melted down and put on your ledger once we reach the shore.”
“You know destroying ingots of the church is very illegal, right?” He finally processed what she had said and asked, “What do you mean, my 'ledger'?”
“All working with Antenox have a ledger, whether they are Inferi or not. If they die the balance of the ledger is sent to their specified next of kin.” She finally looked him in the eye. “I assume if our adventure here ends poorly for you that you'll wish your things sent to the fellow you were with at the tavern.”
“His name is Tiernan Brennan, though I'm fairly sure he's cursing my firstborn at the moment.” The thought that he might be sloughing off his mortal coil during their little adventure had never actually occurred to him until Coord mentioned it. “What in the Inferno are we going to do that we could die getting it done?”
Coord lifted the oars out of the water and slid them inside the boat, and very close yet still obscured in the fog he could hear the lapping of waves against a pebbly shoreline. “Those legends I was telling the sailors about Antenox facing ferocious beasts hailing from Pandemonium? Corpses that walk after death and eat people's faces, black-blooded ghouls which snatch people's shadows and souls, witches who use magic more foul than the espiri spells that create killing fields?”
His eyes widened slightly as he replied, “I just thought you were trying to one-up their stories about the sea monsters that swallow ships.”
“If you have any more dealings with Antenox beyond our purpose here you'll find that we are not an order given to exaggerating anything.” With a mischievous grin the woman added, “It would be wise for you to take everything we say at face value from here on out. We're generally terrible liars.”
The pinnace collided with the shallow shoreline and Drystan finally caught sight of the coast. They had made land at the base of an obscenely steep cliff at the very top of which towered an ominous forest of shaggy-bark redwood trees and great thickets of what looked like poison oak. Without saying anything further to him Coord snatched up her own satchel and leaped out of the boat, dragging the bow line along with her up the beach.
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The Great Pandemonium: Nobilitas Obligat
Fantasy“Care to find out why you're a fatherless son of a bitch?” That was the question posed to Drystan the night before he was to again swear his undying loyalty to the Church of Junan and join the ranks of the Inquisition, tasked with investigating, hun...
