5 - The Walkers of Whiteeye
A rumble shakes the air. It swells up the jagged hills, wrings the bristles of the firs. It ripples across the surface of pools. It scatters the fleecy clouds, like a wolf in the fold.
Sourceless the rumble resounds, like thunder, yet not quite. For the rumble holds a tune. It is a Stomach Song, with growling, animal notes. It seems almost as if words should accompany the tune.
“Come love, come sugar, come morsel. “The supper-sun sets very soon. “Hunger’s a terrible malady. “And I’m hungry in the shine of the moon.”
Last Look
You stand by your Blue Lady on the Road of Graves. She sits atop a nickering palfrey. The hood of her green cloak is down, and a soft wind pulls the strands of her blue-black hair, out in a western direction.
West, towards The Lake of Tomatoes.
In the distance the great lake that shines ever-red under the slate-colored sun. Now it is only the size of an apple. The mesa and the forests that hug its shores, and the twelve huge towns built along The Road where it curls around the lake, are pinprick features. The humid hay smell that permeates the land is fading from the wool of your clothes.
You hold silence as your Lady stares at the distant red spot.
“My eyes cannot blink. As though some fingers fix my sight on a ruined home. “Winding to infinity behind me are the far places of The Road of Graves. “My Cracked Cup Knight, have you not walked there? “The Whiteeye Waste before us - I have heard that this Waste is the origin of nightmares. “Nightmares worse than the warring families. “Can some stronger hand turn my eye toward such sights?”
You consider what she has said.
You can’t comfort her. The way of virtue is to always speak truly with your master and mistress, but the truth would frighten her. You have walked beyond The Lake, it is true. That was before your body was cracked. That was when you hoped you would see The End of the Road. Someday. You went with a caravan then. The Coffin Rollers. As a troupe, The Waste was a perilous place. Now there is only you to keep your Lady fed, watered, sheltered, safe. Do it then.
You turn to face east. You take the palfrey by its reigns and walk the Road of Graves.
The Road runs progressively narrower with each step you take from home. The cobblestones become hardly more than a single line of epitaphs. The grass on the hills whisper with the voice of the wind.
You pass between six black obelisks. Five stand upright, five times the height of a man. One has toppled on its side. These are the border of your Lady’s world; no lake men dwell beyond. Many miles lie between you and the next farm or village. What shelter is to be had will be found under canvas, in caves - must be claimed by the bite of your Polished Steel Longsword.
The little tin bells woven into the mane of your Lady’s palfrey tinkle as it follows your guiding hand. It’s four-beat gait taps a rhythm on the thin stones like a treadle.
Thin grey dust begins to blow. The valleys to either side take on a darker hue. At first, you think it is the setting of the sun. Gradually, however, you notice that the palfrey steps more softly. It’s shoes are muffled by a gathering dust coat that covers the whole landscape; dust that is thin and fossil-colored when it is in the air, but thickens blackly as it settles. Soon, the palfrey shoes make no sound on the earth.
The tinkling silver bells ring out-of-place in the muted space. Your Blue Lady unties the bells and stuffs them with wool.
The Whiteeye Waste
Lady Horsehair, sixth of the seven necromancer-gods, dictated the creation of The Whiteeye Waste.
“A door erected must be, “Between Middlemoss, “And the Red Lake of Gallbladder. “Erected, and shut fast.”
The goddess was not born in a barn. She commanded her dollmakers to weave a great curtain of dust; weave it from the shed winter pelts of animals; a hairy curtain door, separating Gallbladder and his flock, from civilized peoples of the middle of The Road.
With the dust and dusk quickly constructing a deep shade in the air, your first goal should be shelter. You will find none on the road. Trudge into the disorder of hills whose shadows squat to your left. Keep your eyes open for a conical silhouette with a flat top.
You will come under the umbra of an enormous tree stump. The wood is dry and black as coal. The stump is wide as a clan-fort in diameter, and pockmarked with a tunnels.
This is The Last Tree of Old Wormapple. It must be your arbor tonight.
The glow of your firebug lamp gleams against amber in the wooden walls. The floor is packed dust. There are signs of animal passage.
As you enter this Last Tree of Wormapple, that stomach song - that rumble which must have been playing still in the air, somewhere almost below the level of human hearing - fades.
You have just begun to strike camp in the hollow trunk when you a hear growling.
Stump Dugs
Out of the adjoining blackness, they prowl. Like hounds they seem, in shadow. In light, their hair is that coarse powdery texture of newly burned hair. Their eyes are matte white. Their mouths are full of soft, wriggling teeth.
Retrieve your Steel, it is needed. Set yourself before your Lady and keep your shield raised. The dugs will come to you. They attack repeatedly in groups of two to four. You’ll have to hold off at least six waves of dugs. Cutting their forelegs off is the easiest way to disable them; their jaws work independent of their bodies.
No matter how many you slay, more dugs will flood in. More than your Steel has edge to cut. You will eventually be knocked to the dirt. Only your armor spares you their bite. The pack closes around your Lady. She has a knife, but hers is a noble hand. She stands helpless before the wriggling teeth.
It seems as though both you and your Lady shall die within this rotten tree.
Then you hear a shout from one of the tunnels. The pack snarls, swirls. Meaty thuds resound in the hollow trunk, blades and clubs striking dug flesh. The snarling pack eddies to the opening. You regain your feet, and your Steel. You set yourself again before the Lady.
After a furious bout of hacking you are met by a troupe of wild-looking men and women. They wear full leather coats that fall past their knees, cloth masks, and heavy gloves. Their masks hide their faces, but their eyes are grim.
No sooner do you raise your voice to thank them than three spring at you. You are taken by surprise. Your arms are pinned to your sides.
One of this band, a man, tells your Lady to disrobe. You struggle, helpless. Your Lady does as the man says. Her dress falls. There is something ancient and serene in her movement. You turn your eyes away. The man grabs your Lady and pulls her naked body close.
Another of their band - a woman with violent grey hair and the eyes of a black widow - steps in and yanks the man back.
Vettel, the Captain
“No bites? Then leave her, Swineling. “You two are lucky indeed. “The dugs would have bitten you, infected your bodies with the Blight that has no cure. “Trying to cross the waste? “Alone, you’d only feed the Hearse.”
This woman introduces herself as Vettel, captain of this company of The Walkers of the Waste. It is fortunate that you encountered her party. Only The Walkers regularly cross the dust-expanse that covers The Road of Graves, where it runs between The Lake of Tomatoes and Middlemoss.
Vettel offers to take you and your Lady across. In exchange, she demands your Lady’s palfrey. With no immediate alternatives, you accept.
You spend that night with the walkers, inside the stump that they have secured. They are a grim company, mostly men, and you don’t shut your eyes much through the starless night.
The captain herself is hard as frozen stone, with all the pity of a cobra. When you ask her about that stomach song which you heard, she tells you that it is the song of The Hearse. Then she tells you not to venture out by night.
Over twelve days you resign yourself to the habits of The Walkers. Each day Vettel barks the company into marching with the rising sun, even when that sun isn’t visible. Each day you trudge through the desert of greyblack dust. The time of day when you come to a halt depends upon the location of your nightly shelter - and you take shelter in a cave or ruin each and every night.
One of the walkers is a man with high cheekbones and a broad shiny forehead, named Wrathmaige. He is the kindest to you and your Lady, and answers many of your questions about The Whiteeye Waste. He carries the company astrolabe, by which they navigate the dusty plain from shelter to shelter. For, the Road of Graves has long vanished under the carpet of fuzzy dust.
Other Walkers
| Novel A shriveled ochre-colored man. He understands you, but will only speak in his own imaginary language of whistles and coughs. | Greymalkin The company scribe. Punctuates each of his sentences with a jerk of his head or fingers. |
|---|---|
| Cemetery Stones A jovial, bald, pale, violent killer. | Worms for Lashes If you retrieved it from Birchbark the Necromance, you can use the Sorrowful Father Mask to gain this ancient woman’s trust, though she is fated to be no person’s friend. She will give you one copper penny each day at noon, but will spit on your sabatons if you refuse. |
The Walkers take special care to find a roofed, sturdy shelter every night. You realize that there is more to this than simple protection from the cold and the wind-blown dust. That stomach song has followed you across The Waste.
One night as you sit in a ruined holdfast, just protected from the wind by three-and-a-half worn walls of faded green bricks, with the fire’s honey glowing against your Pinecone Crest Shield, and your Blue Lady asleep at your side, you ask Wrathmaige what is the stomach song.
Wrathmaige’s smooth forehead wrinkles in rage.
“That is I think too many questions! “Like ripples at the sand of a pond. Smoothing the shore. “That is just how you are, knight. “Gah! This flame is a crowd.”
Before you can say another word Wraithmaige storms away to a darker corner of the holdfast.
The following morning the stomach song is gone. It never plays in the day. Long after the sun has risen and you have stepped out into the dust beyond sight, Wrathmaige walks up beside you and your Lady. He apologizes.
Wraithmaige explains that the song is the call of a creature called a Hearse. It is one of the blighted monsters that roam The Waste, more dangerous than the dugs. The Hearse flies. It is like a dragonfly, says Wrathmaige, with a long tail of a hundred stingers, and shimmering wings covered in a thousand eyes from which you cannot hide.
Wrathmaige tells you that the Hearse will kill and eat Walkers of The Whiteeye Waste if it catches them out at night.
This Walker has lost a friend - perhaps many friends - to this monster. He is afraid. You will try to keep him alive. Don’t make an oath of it. You have your four oaths already. But you will hold your Steel and Pinecone Shield in his defense.
The next day there is a strong wind. Your Lady holds her shawl close against the biting dust. You stand with shield raised to shelter her.
As the day progresses, the wind rises until it howls inside your helmet. Captain Vettel scowls. Along with the wind comes a fog of dust. Soon you cannot see more than a dozen paces.
The atmosphere darkens. The walkers cannot find their nightly shelter.
The rumbling starts. The stomach song rises in pitch, growing so loud that it is like sitting on a vibrating stone; it rattles your ear bones.
It is dark.
There is a sudden scream.
Then, silence.
When dawn comes, the man named Novel is gone.
The dust storm continues without relenting. It covers the sky the next night. And the next. And the next.
You and The Walkers will have to navigate The Waste without the blinded stars and sun. The stomach song will cease at sunrise, then rumble louder as each night approaches. For every day that you fail to find shelter by sunset, the Hearse will kill and eat exactly one member of your caravan. On the third night that a single Walker is taken Cemetery Stones will remark cheerily, “Just room for one inside, sir.”
While The Walkers have no fixed harbor, you may still stumble by accident on several possible places to rest without loss of life.
| The Hive House A windowless house of green stone, lying in the cleft of a valley. Shaped and structured like a beehive. | Dry Boardwalk This broken boardwalk hangs beside a parched lakebed. You can ask Greymalkin to use his Velvet Mirror on the shadows under the boardwalk. If you do the shadows will reveal themselves to be unquiet ghosts, broken and maddened, from when the lake was full. You may put them to rest by pouring red wine over them, at which time the shadows disappear. |
|---|---|
| Old Spot’s Place A calcified mushroom, standing alone at the top of a dustless brown hill. There is a magic toad underneath, which may cure one company member of a mundane curse, but only if you agree to carry it to fresh water. | Fossil-Shell Currently inhabited by a tribal mancer who commands swarms of lethal, undead moths. Use a lamp to distract the moths while you cut down the mancer, and earn yourself a good night’s sleep. |
One night your Lady wakes from fitful sleep.
“My cracked cup knight, I looked upon the red lake again. “From a tower, whose windows were of leaded glass, and locked. “The earth shook. “I saw it ripple across the lake. “It climbed the tower, and I felt it shaking in my hands.”
After at least seven days and nights in the storm, the sky will clear. The slate-colored sun shines through the fog of grey-black dust for only a moment. But a moment is all Wrathmaige needs. He takes a reading with his astrolabe. You currently stand about six miles north of the Walkers’ regular route through the waste.
With the sun already past its zenith, you’ll have to hurry. Captain Vettel orders a forced march south. Your wool dampens with sweat under your armor.
The faint outlines of Whiteeye’s dust-girt trees and dust-girt hills turn indistinct, as simultaneously the storm clears and the sun sets. In the air all around you, the sound of the flying monster with the singing stomach rolls.
One of the lead Walkers - you cannot tell which - shouts.
You see an altered texture in the distant darkness ahead. A precipice. A cliff. Some indistinct structure protrudes from its surface.
Captain Vettel shouts to keep moving.
The song swells high and sharply. The Blue Lady grips your gauntlet. There is a scream.
In the dark you cannot see who has been lost. The captain drives you on. When you reach the precipice, you follow along the edge, until you pass under the shelter of the protruding structure. In the dark you cannot see the structure either.
Dawn reveals the ledge. Wrathmaige sidles up next to you, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his leather coat.
“Much is the distance you will fall if you trip. “Best to hold arms wide, palms flat. See, like this? “Gah. You mad knights with your steel sleeves. You make it harder. “Take comfort in the one thing. “Not many miles are left to reach Middlemoss - after we cross The Waste Bridge.”
The Waste Bridge
Between where you stand, and the distant dusted surface of The Waste to the east, a canyon of immense proportion unseams the land. It must be miles wide. You cannot see an end to the north or south.
A bridge spans the gap. It is a single, unsupported curve of whitish rock. You know it cannot be a part of The Road of Graves - there is no earth under the bridge, within which a body may be set beneath an epitaph. (Unless the constructors of The Road buried the bodies far below, with stones suspended; the thought is unclean).
The bridge is wide at your embankment, but narrows as it stretches over the gap. This is no illusion of distance. Wrathmaige explains that the bridge becomes as narrow as two arching, stone beams. The beams offer just enough surface for a single person to walk on either.
The crossing of The Waste Bridge is precarious and windy. You take care to grind each of your metal boots firmly against the windswept stone. When you reach the middle where the bridge splits in two thin tracks, the wind fades. The air turns unnaturally still. Your hairs stand on end through this narrow climax.
You cross the twin splits safely. Your Lady crosses as well, her arms stretched to the sides, her blue-black hair lying flat against her head.
It is just before he steps up to the twin bands of stone that Wrathmaige is bitten by a Nickel Beetle. The Walkers hisses, and bends down and rubs his foot. By then, the beetle as scurried back to the underside of the bridge.
Wrathmaige successfully crosses - all the walkers do - but by the time he reaches the other side he is already sweating.
Walkers or Hearse
As your walk through the waste proceeds east after the bridge, Wrathmaige deteriorates. His skin turns white as alabaster, with his broad forehead and cheekbones standing out almost crimson, and shining in sweat. Wrathmaige cannot keep up with Captain Vettel’s remorseless pace - and the captain won’t wait around for dusk.
Here, you may choose one of two paths. You can continue on with The Walkers, leaving Wrathmaige behind. If you do, you will reach Middlemoss in two days. Wrathmaige will be taken by The Hearse that very night.
You can instead choose to remain with Wrathmaige. This of course puts your Lady in peril. It is also of little practical value; the Nickel Beetle’s poison always kills within ten days.
The sun has snuck past the noon hour while we stepped over that chasm. If only that Hearse descended while it still shone. If only you could see the thing. Then this Steel of an edge to wound the wind, which you carry in your hand, might cut the thing carried on those gusts.
Wrathmaige notices you staring between the sun and your Steel. He stops shivering for an instant, and rubs his forehead.
“Gah, I see your thinking, knight. “I say that there is a way for us to summon The Hearse. “We must loudly sing it’s belly song ourselves. Hungry calls to hungry. “I tell you to leave me, but I see your Lady will stay, and so shall you. “You are friends.”
You stand alone with your Lady - Wrathmaige breathing heavily on the dust beside you - amidst a field of jagged, crumbling stumps atop a round hill. It must have once been a birch wood. The dust is not as severe atop the hill, the sky more clearly visible.
Your Lady’s palfrey is gone. The Walker captain, Vettel, took it. Your Lady has kept the horse’s small silver bells. Now she jingles them one-by-one, playing their varied notes in a familiar tune.
“Come love, come sugar, come morsel. “The supper-sun sets very soon.” “Hunger’s a terrible malady. “And I’m hungry in the shine of the moon.”
From sky a grumble seems to reply.
Something slides across that shining moon, like a wet ball of cotton sliding across a cornea. A shadow slithers up the round hill. The bell falls from your blue Lady’s fingers as she dives between a pair of stakes. You keep your visor on the sky. Your knuckles whiten on the hilt of your Steel.
The Hearse
Buzzing it sinks. Softly it lands. Its body is a long, two-ton tumor of chitin; like the gnarled undergrowth of an old forest. It’s face is eyeless, all the eyes are upon its humming wings.
The Hearse is as Wrathmaige described, like a giant dragonfly with a hundred stinging tails. Despite its bulk, however, its gossamer wings propel it swiftly over the earth.
When the battle begins The Hearse will try to return to the sky. To keep it grounded, your Lady or Wrathmaige must continually hum the tune which your Lady struck upon the bells.
Even grounded, The Hearse is fast. It charges after you like a bull - don’t bother trying to create distance. The Hearse will repeatedly launch its thousand stingers up and over a wing and send them plunging at you in a barrage.
To survive, use your Pinecone Crest Shield to block its attacks. If a stinger gets through your shield your armor might deflect it, but there’s no guarantee. While it’s retracting the stingers, you’ll have a moment where you can swipe at them with your sword.
After you’ve cut about half its tail stingers away the Hearse will bury you under its bulk. Get your sword up and wedge it between the Hearse’s belly and the dusty earth. This is your only chance. If you fail, the Hearse will crush you under its mass. If you succeed, it will be impaled.
The Hearse tries to rise, then flops sideways. It hums once more - a last refrain of the stomach song. Then the air is silent but for your heavy breathing.
Middle of the Road
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Your steps create a staccato and rhythmic tapping sound as you step over The Road of Graves. The air swaddles you in its stillness, windless and silent. You feel as if you are stepping down the aisle of a towering stone cathedral, so loud do your footsteps seem.
As The Whiteeye Waste and its grey dust fall farther behind with each step, the colors of the landscape and the sky return. Leaves budding on a shrub. Tawny turf just coming out from last winter’s snows. The sky, slate. The transition from huelessness to color is almost like the shift in bleary eyes fresh from sleep.
Finally you emerge out of a deep gulley, onto a promontory where you behold the land ahead.
Old growth forests cling to the slopes of short, solitary mountain peaks, a kind of creeping greenery. Thick, pale, and distinct mist clouds obscure valleys and divets. You see the cobalt veins of many running rivers. And through it all, a widely-cut trail wends.
The Road of Graves.
In this land, it is one tangled, crisscrossing squiggle. You stand upon one end of it - you cannot see where the other emerges.
Wrathmaige sighs as he leans upon your pauldron.
“Though many times I have seen The Middle of the Road, yet it is always freshly shining in my eyes. “You see those two white peaks? Closer together than most? That span of high heath between? “There is Middlemoss. “The Heart of an endless road, or so I’ve heard men’s mouths say. “I will not see it again. Though my thanks I give, your rescue was for nothing.”
Wrathmaige doubles over in a fit of coughs. The poison is killing him, slowly, surely.
You hear a rumble that shakes the air. You step away from the feeble Walker - he falls - and draw your Steel.
Wrathmaige only laughs, however, where he lies on the ground. A moment later you understand; rain plinks on your helmet.
Your Lady has said little since the other Walkers left. Now, she speaks.
“Sleep-mists that gild the forests here. “I have never seen their like upon The Lake. There, the mists are red. “From white mists, ghosts emerge. “I have seen one face in such mist… “Never thought have I seen the face of our enemies.”
Wrathmaige says that there is a hotel only a few miles up The Road. He recommends a quick journey to its door; the rain is picking up. Wrathmaige thinks you may even meet the other Walkers of Whiteeye there.
You will keep your Lady safe here, as you did at home. She does not dream of enemies, now that we have put the lake behind. Perhaps the old enemies are behind as well. Yet, like that Hearse, this world is full of things that would harm her. Harm her, if you did not stop them with your shield and your Steel.