"Long... long ago. Ah, fuck it, who am I trying to fool? It was not that long ago after all. I was there when the damned thing almost killed all of us.
It all began on the first night. Listen well, they begin weak, sucking from the world, growing slowly the way every root does. At first, we thought we were going mad. The forest seemed to move on its own, toying with us, mocking us. Branches creaking, almost as if they were laughing, only to fall silent the instant someone paid attention. We thought we were thinking too much, that was it, paranoia. A man outside the walls begins to hear his own fear in every corner.
Then the first death came. Not a man's, nothing so severe. Perhaps, looking back now it would have been better if it had been, maybe we would have found some sense and run with our tails between our legs, but the victim was a diamond elk. We found the beast dried out and full of holes on the ground and judged it to have been something of the night.
It is always easier to deceive yourself when coin is at stake. We are stupid and greedy, we ignored every little sign, every warning that now seems obvious until it was too late.
It happened in the Star's eighth hour, and perhaps that was another reason we suffered so much.
We did not expect shit like that beneath her light. The first man to fall was the mission's announcer, a branch as thick as an adult man's leg pierced the bastard's chest and split apart inside him. The rest of us fared little better, we were good warriors, brave and violent so we fought and cut, we broke the trees. But the whole forest seemed to be against us, the roots in the soil, the branches above.
Styr was our savior, that skinny guy. He is a sneaky wretch I tell you. If you ever meet him, do not trust a single thing of yours to him. But he was useful, as he wass, always saw what the others did not. We called him dance-eyes, because those sockets never stayed still.
He was the one who found the literal root of the problem.
A little thing, I can tell you some would even call it cute if they saw it elsewhere. But to us, in that moment it looked like the devil himself. The damned thing barely reached half my shin, and yet its little arms stretched for meters and meters, branching once, then again, going into the ground, twining around the trees, hemming us in. I had no idea how that was possible and I still do not.
In the end, after nearly all of us had died with some new hole in the body, whether a thin branch through the eyes, a thick one through the chest or in worse places... poor Herdis, may the Star have him and his ass ripped open by a branch... I finally managed to kill the thing, I was able to crush the damned body beneath the weight of my hammer. The beast dried out in seconds, became just like its own victims, giving back to the world what it had stolen.
I brought the body with me, and when I returned to the city an apothecary told me the thing was a mandrake.He showed me drawings, roots, his uses and recipes. Laughed in my face, as if I were some retard when I said the thing had killed ten grown men, said mandrakes would not kill even an ant. But I know what I saw, and that is why I write this story. If you are reading this, know that I am not mad, damn it.
Stay away from mandrakes."
* * *
Hrafn closed the old book's cover and remained for a moment with his hand resting upon it.
Nanna liked that story, liked the frightening ones in truth, though she told everything with far more restraint for children than what was written there. She cut the worst blasphemies, softened some of the details, made the old idiots sound less drunk and less stupid. Even so, the fear always remained in the proper place, Hrafn was grateful to have heard it and even more grateful to have remembered it. It seemed Nanna might have been right, it seemed there might have been more in the stories.
He ran his thumb along the volume's worn spine. Many of those tales seemed absurd, many spoke of other times, different kingdoms, almost other worlds. Most were probably invention, exaggeration of a traveler's delirium or the lie of people with no work to do. But some perhaps were not, some perhaps had root. He had remembered that tale the instant he received Alva's first request together with the contract and the little jewel box. The message spoke of frightened miners and a forest moving, of things happening beneath the Star's light, on top of that.
"What do you think of mandrakes, Ed?" he asked. Edvard remained as always, at his side. He left only when called for, to work or when Hrafn slept. The man adjusted his monocle and took an instant to search his own memory. "They are roots, my lord. Many believe them to be alive, because of the sound they make when they are pulled from the earth. It resembles, in some measure, human crying."
"In some measure," Hrafn repeated. "So they do not truly cry."
"No, my lord. They are not alive, the noise is only a preservation method of the plant. The fact that it resembles a human sound is, to the best of my knowledge, mere coincidence."
"Coincidence." Hrafn let the book rest in his lap. "And they do not kill people."
"I have heard reports of men injured trying to pull them from poor soil, people frightened by sounds in the dark, made ill by preparing remedies incorrectly. But no." He straightened the cuff of his sleeve. "I have never heard of a mandrake dragging an entire forest behind it to kill ten adults."
I thought so.
Not even Edvard who seemed to know something about nearly everything that mattered, knew tales of that kind. It made sense, in the end it was a fable, a story lost in an old book, told by someone who ought to have died a very long time ago. And yet, something pulled him in the opposite direction, and he passed his hand over the cover once more. Perhaps it was the kind of intuition born when the world has already shown once that it knows how to be stranger than it should.
The overworked box rested untouched upon the table. Hrafn did not like overly delicate things and liked even less gifts that came with implications shining inside them. The grain of light remained there, waiting for a better moment.
He turned his face toward the butler. "I will accept Alva's request," he declared, rising to his feet. "We leave as soon as possible."
Edvard seemed to want to protest. He looked at him for a moment and adjusted the monocle, breathed like a man rearranging ten objections and burying nine, in the end he merely nodded. "As you wish, my lord."
He would go there, see what was happening, try to discover whatever it was. If he found it too dangerous or discovered something beyond what he could handle, he would notify the Hird. It was simple, his presence on the site would serve above all to lend weight and voice to the miners' ravings, who swore that a fallen walked beneath the Star's light, tormenting them.
"Do you wish me to prepare the men?" Edvard asked.
"A few," Hrafn answered. "I am not dragging a procession to a hole in the ore because a pack of men saw too many branches where there ought to have been fewer."
"Lady Alva may have expected a greater display."
"Lady Alva can wait sitting down."
Hrafn walked to the window and cast a glance at the city, Sahirid rose beautiful and broad. There was comfort there already, routine as well. A clean room, good coffee, a good bed, a frighteningly efficient butler and even gifts in pretty boxes. Privileges, he was beginning to understand them better than he would have liked, but he had not been made to rot inside polished walls, surrounded by silver and courtesy.
Unfortunately.
There was too much out there trying to tear the skin from people like him, he needed to be strong. And if Nanna had been right, then perhaps old stories deserved more respect than the men who spent their whole lives protected by walls gave them, in any case it was time to leave Sahirid. And if some damned root was walking beneath the Star, Hrafn wanted to see it with his own eyes.
He already had a few ideas in mind.