Rotbloom

Chapter 1: The Sword That Grieved

The sword would not stop singing.

It was a low sound, barely louder than breath through a reed, but it never ceased. In the grey hours before dawn it hummed against his hip like a second heartbeat, and at night it droned through the leather wrapping he'd bound around the scabbard, a mournful vibration that seeped into his bones and kept him from true sleep. Hedrek Stolz had carried the weapon for forty-three days—he kept count by scratching marks into the pommel guard with a bent nail—and in all that time, the sound had not once relented.

He did not know why the sword sang. He did not know why it had chosen him.

The morning was colorless, as most mornings were since the Collapse. The sky hung low and bruised, the clouds not so much clouds as a permanent membrane stretched between the earth and whatever remained of the sun. Light filtered through in diffused sheets, casting no shadows. Hedrek moved south along what had once been the Oldway Road, though the cobblestones had been heaved and shattered by the great cracking, and in places the road simply ended at the lip of fissures too wide to cross. He navigated around them with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be except alive.

The infant rode against his chest in a sling he'd fashioned from a horse blanket—the good kind, the felted wool he'd once used for the destriers of Lord Vollmer's household cavalry. That life felt like it belonged to someone else. In a sense it did. The man who had shod horses and trimmed hooves and known the name of every mare in a stable of forty had died in the rubble of Karrenfeld, buried under three floors of collapsed stone. What had crawled out was something quieter.

Hedrek had not spoken since the Collapse. Not a word, not a whisper, not even the involuntary sounds of pain or surprise that the body sometimes produces without permission. His throat worked. His tongue was whole. He simply could not find the mechanism that connected thought to speech, as though the Collapse had cracked something inside him just as surely as it had cracked the earth.

The baby stirred against his chest, and he adjusted his stride to keep the rhythm steady. She was small—impossibly small, it seemed to him, though he knew nothing of infants. He had found her in the ruins of Karrenfeld's Temple of the Risen Gate, laid in the crook of a dead woman's arm. The woman had been a priestess, judging by the silver cord around her wrist, though her face had been so covered in dust and blood that he could not tell her age. The baby had been silent, eyes open, staring at nothing. Not crying. Breathing.

He had picked her up because there was no one else to do it.

The sword he had found in the same room, driven point-first into a crack in the temple floor, standing upright like a marker on a grave. The bodies of seven holy warriors—the Order of the Risen Gate—lay in a ring around it, their armor cracked open and their flesh consumed from within by the grey-black tendrils of rot that the Riven left behind. They had died fighting. They had died failing. The sword stood among them untouched, and when Hedrek had wrapped his calloused farrier's hand around its grip, it had come free from the stone as easily as pulling a fence nail, and it had begun to sing.

He did not understand it. He was not a warrior. He was not holy. He was a man who knew the angle at which to drive a horseshoe nail so it wouldn't split the hoof wall, and that was the full extent of his expertise. But the sword had chosen him, or at least it had not rejected him, and in a world where the Riven crawled through every shadow and the dead outnumbered the living a thousand to one, a man did not refuse a weapon.

Now he walked.

The Oldway Road descended into a shallow valley that had once been farmland. Hedrek remembered this stretch—he had ridden through it twice a year when Lord Vollmer's household moved between estates. The fields had grown barley and rye, and in autumn the stubble had glowed copper in the low sun. Now the fields were grey. The soil had a crusted, mineral look, as though it had been baked in a kiln. Nothing grew except the rotblooms—those obscene fungal flowers that sprouted wherever the Riven had passed, their caps a livid purple-red, their stalks weeping a clear fluid that smelled of copper and spoiled milk.

He gave the rotblooms a wide berth. Everyone did, those few who were left. The blooms were not dangerous in themselves, but they marked territory. Where rotblooms grew, the Riven had claimed the ground, and what the Riven claimed, they watched.

The baby made a sound—not a cry, but a small exhalation, almost conversational. Hedrek looked down. Her eyes were open, that startling pale grey that seemed too old for her face. She was perhaps two months old now, if his count was right. She should not have survived. He had no milk, no proper food for an infant. He'd been feeding her a thin gruel of grain meal and water, sometimes mixed with the juice of whatever edible roots he could find, administered through a scrap of cloth she could suck on. It was not enough. It should not have been enough. And yet she grew. Slowly, stubbornly, she grew.

He touched her forehead with one rough finger. Cool. No fever. She grasped the finger with a grip that surprised him every time.

The sword hummed louder.

Hedrek's head came up. He scanned the valley ahead—the broken fields, the skeletal remains of a farmstead, the dark line of a tree row that had once been a windbreak. The trees were wrong now. Many had inverted in the weeks after the Collapse, their root systems clawing at the sky while their crowns burrowed into the earth, as though the world had flipped and the trees were the only ones who noticed. The upturned roots formed a canopy of sorts, pale and tangled, and in the spaces between them, shadows moved.

Or didn't. It was hard to tell. The light played tricks in this new landscape.

He slowed his pace, right hand drifting to the sword's grip. The leather wrapping muffled the hum but could not contain it, and as his fingers closed around the pommel, the sound sharpened, climbing from its usual low drone to something more insistent. A warning.

He had learned to read the sword's moods, if a blade could be said to have moods. The low hum was its resting state. A rising tone meant Riven were near. A harsh, almost metallic whine meant danger was immediate. Right now the sound was climbing but had not yet reached that urgent pitch, which meant the creatures were present but not close.

Hedrek altered his course, angling away from the tree row and toward the open ground to the east. Open ground was dangerous for different reasons—exposure, weather, the roving bands of human scavengers who were sometimes worse than the Riven—but it was better than walking into a nest.

The baby closed her eyes and slept.

He walked for another hour through terrain that offered nothing—no water, no shelter, no sign of human passage. The road had vanished entirely here, swallowed by one of the great fissures that ran north-to-south like wounds in the earth's skin. Some of these cracks were narrow enough to step over. Others were chasms, hundreds of feet deep, their walls lined with the same grey-black rot that the Riven trailed behind them. Hedrek followed the edge of one such fissure for a long time, looking for a crossing point, and eventually found a place where a slab of stone had fallen across the gap like a crude bridge.

He tested it with his weight. It held. He crossed quickly, one hand on the baby, the other on the sword, and did not look down.

On the far side, the landscape changed. The grey crust gave way to something softer—mud, dark and wet, smelling of iron. A river had once run here, he thought, though now the water that pooled in the low places was the color of ash and moved sluggishly, as though reluctant. He had learned the hard way not to touch the grey water. Three weeks ago he had knelt to drink from a stream that looked almost normal and the water had burned his lips and tongue, raising blisters that took days to heal. Since then he drank only from rain catches and the occasional clean spring, which were becoming harder to find.

The mud sucked at his boots. He was tired. He was always tired. The sword's constant hum disrupted his sleep, and the baby needed tending every few hours, and the simple act of walking through a landscape that wanted to kill him consumed whatever energy remained. He ate poorly—dried meat when he could find it, roots, the occasional cache of grain from an abandoned farmstead. He was thinner than he had ever been, his farrier's bulk melting away week by week, his clothes hanging loose on a frame that was becoming more bone than muscle.

But he walked. South. Always south.

The Veyrhold Enclave. That was the name that every survivor whispered, the rumor that passed from camp to camp like a prayer. Veyrhold still stood. Veyrhold had walls. Veyrhold had clean water and organized defense and something resembling civilization. It was south, far south, past the Fenway Barrens and the Ashenmere and the ruins of half a dozen cities that had been great once and were nothing now.

Hedrek did not know if Veyrhold was real. He did not know if it still stood, or if it had ever stood, or if it was just a story that desperate people told each other because the alternative was to lie down and wait for the rot to take them. But he walked toward it because walking toward something was better than walking toward nothing, and because the baby needed walls. She needed warmth and milk and safety and a hundred other things he could not provide in the open waste.

So he walked.

The mud gave way to harder ground as the land rose, and by midday—if the slight brightening behind the clouds could be called midday—he had reached a ridge that overlooked a broad, flat expanse of scrubland. The Fenway Barrens, or the northern edge of them. He'd heard the name from a scavenger he'd traded with two weeks ago, a gaunt woman with one eye who'd drawn him a map in the dirt. The Barrens were bad, she'd said. Open ground, no cover, and the Riven moved through them in organized columns, not the scattered hunting packs he'd encountered so far but something more deliberate. More military.

Hedrek studied the landscape from the ridge. The scrubland stretched to the horizon, broken only by the occasional outcrop of rock or the dark smear of a rotbloom field. He could see movement far to the west—a column of something, dark shapes flowing across the grey earth like a river of shadow. Riven. Too far to be a threat, but close enough to confirm the one-eyed woman's warning.

He could not cross the Barrens alone. Not with a baby. Not with a sword that announced his presence to every Riven within earshot.

He sat on the ridge, the baby cradled in his lap, and considered his options. They were few. He could go around the Barrens, adding weeks to his journey through terrain that might be worse. He could wait and watch, trying to learn the Riven patrol patterns, and attempt a crossing at night. Or he could find a guide.

The scavenger camps dotted the edges of the Barrens like barnacles on a hull. He'd seen the smoke of their fires from a distance, had skirted them out of caution. But caution was a luxury he could no longer afford. The baby needed food he didn't have. He needed information he couldn't get alone.

Hedrek wrapped the sword tighter, muffling its hum as best he could, and descended the ridge toward the nearest thread of smoke.