The water was black. Therelin had never seen such a sight before—an entire bay that absorbed the low, grey clouds and returned nearly no light at all. All the waves around Keth City and Portram Point were clear and bright blue, not dark. Therelin didn’t have enough faith to discern if the gleaming obsidian surface was the presence of harmed or angry spirit.
When he arrived in Kedar, he began to understand what might have so aggrieved the sea.
The city of Kedar, sitting cross-legged on a slightly smaller rocky plateau, seemed to gaze down at them disapprovingly. Its frowns were defined in the angles and edges of the sharp towers defining its skyline. Therelin squinted across the bay toward it as the New Comet drifted lazily across the dull saltwater. It was roughly twice the size of Keth, he figured, and didn’t seem to have a single curved edge.
But it was not the architectural choices that bothered Therelin. As he followed a handful of crewmen down the gang plank, he watched another ship offloading caged turkeys. The harbour master seemed to complete a similar checklist for the New Comet as what Therelin perceived to be little more than a blood ship.
One of the passengers from the Comet was a woman approximately his own age, who had come to Kedar to join one of the city factions; she intended to stay at an inn until landing on her feet, so Therelin went with her.
The street seemed to serve men as frequently as sounders of pigs, droves of cattle, trolleys of caged rodents. In the markets, casually placed adjacent to tailors and trinket peddlers were counters laden with red, bloody meat. Slab upon slab, bone against bone, hungry customer after hungry customer… Therelin’s stomach churned.
The woman whom Therelin accompanied, Beatra, seemed equally phased by the carnivorous crowds. She intends to stay here? Therelin wondered in disbelief. He felt as though he could scarcely endure his six-day layover.
Beatra and Therelin found a small form of respite in a large inn built in the east side of the city. This area seemed to exist within the shadows of a five-storey tower that was wider than it was tall. The innkeeper of “Morix’s Stop” agreed to toss them salads instead of the evening stew. Therelin didn’t have a lot of his savings left, but tipped Morix generously for his cultural mercy.
Even then, the salad was hard to digest when surrounded by men slurping and chewing upon a meaty gravy and tough chunks of beef.
“Why here? What faction are you joining?” Therelin asked, despite his preferred tranquility.
Beatra glanced up from her salad and her lips creased down into a bitter frown. She put down the pronged fork she had been wielding and put her hands on the tabletop. “I’m joining the Grey Brethren,” she said. “They own the Tower of Black and Blue.”
Therelin blinked. A foreign religion? He had met a few Grey Brothers in Keth, but had never spoken to them at length. “Why?” he asked his travelling companion.
“I killed a man,” she said, shortly. That was why she had put down her fork. Therelin followed suit, while she offered a brief explanation. “It was the only way to save my family business and buy some safety for my brother. A man, if he can be called that, maliciously attacked our bakery with slander, bribed customers, and vandalism. The guardsmen wouldn’t listen. So, I killed him.”
Therelin took a deep breath. Despite his surprise and concern, he felt pity. “And you were forced from your home.”
It had been a statement, but Beatra nodded as though to answer it. “This is the closest place that practices my faith.” In Ketho society, harming another life was not tolerated. It was given their most severe punishment—banishment.
After a few moments, they returned to their salad bowls with an awkward focus. Therelin made quips about the chatting they overheard from adjacent tables, but Beatra mostly responded with polite smiles. Then, Therelin overheard a man at another table muttering about the war on the Great Isle.
“What war?” Therelin asked, turning in his seat to glance at his neighbour. He had heard mention of it even in the harbours of Keth.
The man did not look bothered by the question. “An alliance of bandits,” he said, but cut off his explanation when Therelin nodded impatiently. The tall shirtless magician wanted to know the full story then, the man determined. He launched into it with a nod and told Therelin of a Baron bringing his army inland. The story differed here, each variant told by another neighbouring table; some versions suggested that the army disbanded and began the wilder’s army. Others suggested an alliance had existed already, anxiously waiting to ambush the Baron during his seasonal sport with the adjacent lands of Oshibor.
The stories disagreed a second time about the fate of the Baron. In some, he returned to his home in New Mallam to die of wounds or illness. In others, he didn’t return from his fateful inland venture. Another telling suggested he was alive still, though his city had fallen to the criminal host.
It all meant very little to Therelin. He reacted similarly, but less physically, to the tidings of war as he had to sight of the livestock in the Kedar streets. It was another place not to go, if he could help it.
“Are there magicians in Kedar?” he asked Beatra, after the tables had gone back to their own conversations.
Beatra nodded. “There are several Grey Brethren mages, I would imagine,” she explained. “The Atmos Septi—the name of the religion—is known for its scholars and academies, as much as for its sometimes harsh rites. There’s also Havard himself, the self-proclaimed miracle-king of Kedar. He’s a deity, if you’d believe his followers, though I do not.”
“Me neither,” Therelin muttered. Did no one know of the spirits, beyond Keth? He had only just begun his quest for a Mage Master. The New Comet would sail for Saanazar after Kedar. They believed in the Sky God there, at least, but Therelin had been raised to believe no spirit was better than any other.
Aside from speaking with the scholars and magisters of the local Grey Brethren, Therelin would pass his time in Kedar by offering his skill as a magician. He was a skilled healer, between his magic and his apothecary apprenticeship, and he could aid in the growth of crops, the cleansing of water, the repair of rusted weapons. Though he was not a master of any of these things, his list of abilities did not end there. Those were just the ones applicable to a townsman’s needs in Kedar.
Or so Therelin thought.