Chapter 59: At Long Last

Chapter 59: At Long Last

“Purify the headwaters!” echoed in his mind with the same cold, tormented voice as always, startling Paulus awake. He recalled everything else she said, too, of course. It almost never changed. So, it would have been impossible to forget, but none of her other strangled ravings that she made while gripping the bars of her steel cage burned right through him as much as that impossible command. The darkness? The dead? Even the moment when she told him to flee to land before the dragon overpowered her once more hadn’t mattered nearly as much as those three simple words.

He pulled himself into a ball, huddling his legs against his chest under the thin blankets as he shivered in the chilly predawn darkness. The reaction was more from fear than the cold, but it comforted him just the same. The winter had stopped his search for months, but with the spring flood, he’d returned to the Wodenspine Mountains, even though the cold still lingered there. His patched clothes and thin blankets might do little to warm him, but his urgency kept him from freezing each night. He would find the poison the Goddess spoke of because he must. There was no other option.

Why would he do anything else? In the villages where he’d labored for little more than food and place in the barn, all that awaited him were the nightmares as he recalled that awful night. At least when he was out here searching, he felt like he was outrunning the terrible Goddess that had issued him this burning command. That was doubly true on the days like today when he felt certain he was getting close. It didn’t matter to him that he’d felt that way for almost a week now. It seemed like the higher he rose following this stream, the cleaner his soul became. It was like he was slowly but surely rising above the world’s corruption with every step.

There was real relief in the search, and he secretly believed that if he succeeded, he could finally be free of the dead eyes that haunted him. On the days he couldn’t search as she’d ordered him, though, all he could do was relive that terrible night as his mind connected dot after dot in an endless and expanding web of evil. It always started sensibly enough - with the priestess and the Count. However, if he obsessed on it long enough, he could inevitably connect everyone from the fishmonger to his mother in a plan that was too vast for anyone to understand. Anyone but him, of course. He might no longer have the spies or the purse of a true spymaster, but his mind was sharp, and his notes were expansive. No one could take either from him, no matter how far he fell.

Even now that he was free of both the city of evil Fallravea and the cursed county of Greshen, he still imagined that the conspiracies he’d started to uncover followed him. He could never stay with a family more than a week or two now. Even when he was with good god-fearing people that rewarded him with extra portions when he worded until his hands bled, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the washerwoman was watching him. He didn’t know who she was reporting back to, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to if they were strong enough to enslave a river goddess and poison a whole river.

A thin strip of light clung to the horizon, but he would need more than that before he could build himself a fire. Still, he stared at it like a ward against evil until the sun finally peaked above the earth, dispelling most of the shadows on the high slope. This gave him the light he would need to decide which of his pages he could steal an inch of paper from so that he could shred it to kindling.

His overstuffed journal was all he still had after his year spent fruitlessly searching for the source of the taint she’d spoken of. He’d explored four tributaries and three watersheds but found nothing definitive. All he’d accomplished in that time was wearing out the soles of his boots and filling the last of his clean pages with detailed maps of places that few people had ever been to and no one, but shepherds cared about. He no longer had the paper to document this latest trip, but that was okay. He could no longer afford ink either.

“Soon,” he told himself. “Any day now, and you’ll be done with this. Then you can finally rest.” He still had caches in the city. When he was done looking for the source of the sickness, and the river was pure and clean, he could finally return to Fallravea and retrieve them. Then he’d return to the village of Bellmor and disappear; of all the places he’d been on this insane quest, it had been the most picturesque. He could see himself retiring there under a different name as a trader or bookseller while he waited for the world to forget he’d ever been born.

After studying it for as long as he could bear, he decided there was no way he was reaching in there to grab that thing. Instead, he went off in search of fresh air and a long enough branch to fish the object out. The dead trees scattered throughout the glen had plenty of branches to offer. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part came when he tried to use them to pull the thing out. They started falling apart on contact with the water and had fully dissolved in only twenty or thirty seconds. Paulus was incredibly thankful that he hadn’t just waded in there to retrieve the object and instead went off to find another branch.

After four branches, he was finally able to drag it near enough to the edge that he could reach in to pull the thing out with the tip of his short sword. Once it was firmly pierced, he pulled it out and carried it very carefully to the nearest rocky slope, where he placed it on a small boulder to inspect the oddity. From the damage he’d done to it just by poking it with sticks, it very clearly wasn’t meant to be armor. He wanted to bring it down the mountain to deliver it to the church so they could deal with the cursed thing themselves, but one look at his sword showed that to be an impossible task.

His blade had been made of fine steel, and until today it had been pristine, but now it was pitted in places and spotted with corrosion. Everywhere it had touched the strange shield, it was falling apart.

“What in the hells am I supposed to do now?” Paulus asked empty valley as he set his sword down to dry. There was no way he was putting it back in its sheath until it was dry as a bone.

While he waited, he tried to figure out what he could do. He lacked the ink to draw it or any tools to carry it. In the end, all he could do was dig a hole in the scree and push it in with a large rock. Then he covered it up and marked the spot with a stack of flat stones. There it wouldn’t contaminate much water, and if he found someone that could help him investigate, he could always escort them back here, even without a map.

In the end, he belted on his sword and inspected the pool. Even those few hours had made a real difference, and the water was now merely murky rather than hopelessly polluted.

“I did just what you told me to,” he said barely above a whisper while he looked at his bare feet with something approaching reverence. He knew she couldn’t actually hear him from here as he spoke to the water, but he was sure she would feel the difference as the pool became clearer and clearer. “You hear that, Oroza? My task is complete. Let me rest now, I beg of you. That is my only prayer.”

Then he turned, and itching a stray bug bite on his hand, he turned and began to walk back down the mountain. Paulus could finally close the book on this insane chapter of his life.