The Legacy of Lord Regret

Book 0: The Strange Threads Series

by Sam Bowring

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Centuries have passed since the Wardens slew the tyrant Lord Regret, but while the Wound that he ripped in the sky remains open, the earth trembles and the sun vanishes without warning. The great warrior Rostigan wanders Aorn, weary of battle and unwanted renown. With him travels his lover, the minstrel Tarzi, who hopes she may soon witness further deeds from him worthy of song and tale. Despite Rostigan?s reluctance to re-enter the world, she may get what she wishes for . . . When they travel to the once magnificent city of Silverstone they discover it has been wrenched out of existence. Journeying onwards, they come to learn the disturbing truth. The land has descended into chaos ? for the Wardens, now craving destruction, have returned from their ancient graves and Lord Regret?s malicious legacy grows ever stronger, corrupting the very nature of reality.

Release date: August 14, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 269

Sample

Rostigan would not have picked the day. Oh, there had been signs to worry him over the years, but no one thought they were
ever coming back. Tales and memories, their names collecting dust on history’s pages, and everyone happier that way. Why they
would suddenly reappear – not one, or two, but all of them, at once … well.


A sunny day it was, even in the cave. Golden beams burst through holes in the roof, keeping the skitterers skulking in crevasses,
wondering what had happened to their usual dank sanctuary. And Rostigan, having hoisted himself up onto a rock shelf below
one of the wider openings, discovered treasure where the light fell. There, nestled between runs of moss and trickling water,
craning upwards with speckled clover-like leaves, grew a patch of curltooth.


He breathed out slowly, almost doubting what he saw. A rare and vague warmth wafted up from the deep place, from the cavernous chambers and shadowed hallways of his self. It connected him to things forgotten – as if, for a moment,
he stood atop the tall tower of his life, aware of every stone and stairwell under his feet, while he looked out on a starry
sky.


He shook his head, lest reverie take him.

Reaching into his satchel for a small pair of scissors, he set about the delicate work of snipping the twine-thin stalks of
the curltooth. He had to be careful, for his hands were big and rough, his fingers barely fitting through the scissor handles
and apt to crush the tiny plants. Each stalk held a single leaf, worth a bag of gold at least.


I’ll have to fix this spot in memory, he thought, though when he’d be along this way again, he did not know.


The very last stalk he left intact. It confused him to do so – it was not as if sparing it would encourage the others to grow
back faster, yet somehow it seemed greedy to take them all. Already the amount of gold they represented would be too much
for him and Tarzi to carry. We’ll have to trade up for gems, he thought. Why not take the last leaf too, then? A few extra emeralds and rubies will hardly break our backs.


He left it nonetheless. The rest he wrapped carefully in a cloth, which he placed in his satchel among less precious bundles
of black cress, ascenia, and scrapings of purple moss.


‘What are you doing up there?’

Tarzi had appeared at the cave entrance. She was gripping a straining branch from a tree at the threshold, using it to hang into the cave, leaving only her feet firmly planted outside.


‘Why don’t you come and see?’ he called.

She glanced around nervously. He knew she didn’t like the skitterers, the way their armoured bodies rasped over rocks as they
moved, or their myriad beady eyes.


‘They won’t hurt you,’ he said. ‘They’re too scared of the light.’

He didn’t mention that, when he’d first climbed onto this shelf, a skitterer had been scuffling about, pausing to watch him
arrive. ‘Hello,’ he’d said to it, and it had come at him, long feelers spread wide to expose its moving mouth parts. Perhaps
it had felt cornered – Rostigan did not think the others would do Tarzi any harm, but he also did not think she would enter
the cave in the first place.


‘I’m hungry,’ she called.

‘Don’t you have songs to practise?’

‘Hmph,’ she said. ‘Give me a title and I’ll perceive every word simultaneously, like a scroll laid out from end to end.’

Rostigan sighed. ‘Why don’t you write some new songs then?’

‘Perhaps if you stopped spending your time scrabbling about in caves, I might witness something worth writing about!’

‘Well, you may get lucky – the skitterers might discover their brown little hearts and attack me.’

He closed his satchel and pushed off the shelf. As he landed heavily on the cave floor, a rock cracked under his booted heel, and alarmed clicking sounded from dark corners. Tarzi yelped, almost losing hold of her branch. She hauled
herself back along it until she was upright, released it to whip away, and disappeared.


Rostigan chuckled and headed to the entrance, avoiding the place where he had cast down the body of the quarrelsome skitterer.
Two others were already crunching on it, working inwards from the legs.


Squinting in the glare, he stepped outside. Low hills overlooked the beach, its white sand a furnace that warped the view
of crashing waves beyond. At the top of the closest rise Tarzi stood facing away with hands on hips, a silhouette in the light,
her tawny curls shining like translucent amber. Her pose suggested that maybe, if she stared it down, the sun might go away.
She moved under the shade of a grey-barked tree where their packs lay, kneeling down to rummage through them. Rostigan arrived
to find her pulling out food, looking hot and bothered – her skin dappled with sweat, most prominently at her temples and
between her breasts, elsewhere making her blouse stick to her.


Such a beauty, my Tarzi, and not modest about it either.


She glanced up at him, a flustered look in her big dark eyes. ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like you enjoy seeing me distressed.’

‘You’re distressed?’ Rostigan gave a surprised laugh.

‘Besides,’ she went back to rummaging, ‘even if they’d attacked you, who wants to hear a song about some fellow fighting a
bunch of beetles in the dark?’


Rostigan shook his head slightly. He wondered if she would ever accept that he was not the type to actually seek adventure
– that his actions at the Ilduin Fields he had considered necessary, not desirable. To Tarzi though, he would always be the
hero Skullrender, a name given to him at that great battle. And ever since then, try as he might for a quiet existence, there
was always someone in need of help. Most recently they had come across a village that had been serving as an ongoing meal
for a Worm of Regret, and Rostigan had been the one to venture into its foul-smelling lair – an unnatural lean-to in nearby
woods, built of trees wilting inwards – and put an end to it. Such creatures had persisted since the time of Regret, but it
seemed to Rostigan there had been more of them lately. Another sign, perhaps, of what was coming, though not enough to pick
the day.


‘Why,’ he said, crouching beside her, ‘you choose to follow around an old statue like me, I will never know.’

‘You’re not old. Or, if you are, it’s just a touch – enough to make you look dignified.’

The stained knees of Rostigan’s trousers and cave dirt encrusting his arms did not make him feel dignified. Still, he’d been
told he was handsome enough times over the years to have come to accept it, despite the stony, angular face he saw in the
mirror.


He drew the sword from his back and rubbed it on the grass, cleaning off skitterer blood.

‘Look at this desultory collection,’ Tarzi said disdainfully, sweeping a hand over the food she had unpacked. There was a
small portion of bread, some dried crab meat, half a vial of sweet sap, berries that looked on the turn, a few sprigs of mint,
and a rabbit she had caught that morning. They had been many days away from settlement, and it was beginning to show in their
supplies.


‘We’re close to Silverstone,’ said Rostigan bleakly, and her eyes lit up.

He knew she grew bored with their treks through the wilderness. It was her choice to be here, however, and she could leave
whenever she wished. That was the original bargain, though if Rostigan was honest, its parameters had muddied over time. They
had shared a bed almost from the start, wherever that bed might be, and so of course that tangled everything. And while there
were days when he wished he was alone, and wondered why he’d ever agreed to let a minstrel accompany him – even one as enticing
as Tarzi – there were others when he was inexplicably compelled to see her happy, and thus agreed to civilisation.


‘Did you find anything in the cave?’

‘As a matter of fact …’ he said, reaching for his satchel. He retrieved the curltooth carefully – there was no wind, but he
remained wary of a sudden gust – and unrolled the cloth before her. The blue-green clover heads had already begun to crumple, and he knew he should get them drying in the sun.


Tarzi scrunched her freckled nose.

‘You don’t know what this is?’ he asked.

‘Weeds?’

‘Curltooth.’

Her scepticism changed to amazement. ‘No!’

‘Yes.’

‘But folk say curltooth is no more!’

‘So they do. And yet.’

She frowned. ‘You’re sure that’s what it is? You’ve seen it before?’


The deep place yawned, threatening to swallow him. ‘Once or twice,’ he said.

‘But then that’s …’ She scanned the leaves, counting up their worth in her head. ‘That’s a fortune!’

‘Yes.’

‘They say it only takes a crumb.’

‘It’s true.’

She poked at a limp leaf. ‘We may never have to work again!’ She seemed suddenly horrified by the thought, and Rostigan felt
affection for her then, vulnerable as she was to her own self-created worries.


‘The value of these,’ he gestured at the wilting leaves, ‘is their own. We could sell them, but then what? Someone else enjoys
the luxury great wealth can buy, and we enjoy great wealth without the luxury? Doesn’t that sound rather roundabout to you?’


‘Are you saying …?’

Rostigan smiled. ‘Why don’t you get some water boiling?’

For a moment she looked like she didn’t believe him, but then pleasure flushed her cheeks. She leapt to her feet, gave a little
clap, and shot off down the hill towards the beach, where a stone ring housed the smouldering remains of last night’s fire.
Rostigan followed slowly, and while she went about cleaning the pot, which involved a run over hot sand to the water and back,
he laid out the curltooth in the sun. Normally he would leave herbs alone to dry without worry, but this day he sat down on
a log to watch over them closely. As Tarzi built up the fire and boiled the water, tore up mint and skinned the rabbit, for
once she did not seem to mind his idleness.


‘Now,’ she said, rubbing sludge off her hands into the sand, ‘what shall we make?’

Rostigan had never cooked with curltooth before, though he’d seen it done. One thing he remembered about the cooks who wielded
it – they were always judicious about the number of accompanying ingredients. Curltooth had no taste of its own, its quality
being to enhance other flavours, and if a dish contained too many, the result could prove overpowering.


‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps a rabbit-mint stew?’

‘Seems a bland meal for such an occasion.’

‘Songbird, we could have mint soup alone and it would make you quiver.’

She froze for a moment with excitement, then rabbit and mint went into the pot. With exaggerated ceremony Rostigan lifted
a curltooth leaf, tore a tiny shred from it, and dropped it in also.


‘Now what?’

‘We wait, as with any meal. Come,’ he patted the log beside him, ‘you can rest in my shade.’

After a while Tarzi gave up peering into the pot as if she could actually see the magic taking place, and seated herself.
He put an arm around her, but she was too restless, and soon got up to pace and fuss about in a way that had him worried she
would kick sand onto the drying curltooth.


Once the stew was finally ready, her hands shook as she ladled it into two bowls. She gave one to Rostigan and waited expectantly,
as if it was up to him to take the first taste. Shrugging, he scooped up a spoonful of rabbit and broth.


Perhaps it had been a while, but curltooth worked as well as he remembered. The mint twisted through his mouth in fresh green
ribbons, and the rabbit was so alive on his tongue he felt like he was eating its soul. On seeing his rapturous expression,
Tarzi could wait no longer, and took her first hesitant sip. The face she made Rostigan had seen before, but only in the heat
of certain moments.


‘By the tides,’ she said, and nothing more for a long time. Together they ate slowly and reverently, and when there was no
more they scraped the bowls, then licked them clean and fingers as well. Even the insides of their mouths they licked, eking
wayward morsels from between teeth.


Rostigan realised he hadn’t checked on the curltooth for a while, but a quick look showed it was all still there, some of
it already brown. A jar would be better for it, now that it was in danger of crumbling.


‘If you go and fetch the rest of the food,’ he said, ‘and a jar from my satchel, I will share a little secret with you.’

Quickly she obeyed, running up the hill and back with what he asked for.

‘Now,’ he said, as he took the jar from her and deposited the curltooth safely inside, ‘some of the herb still lingers in
your mouth. Why don’t you try the berries?’


Eagerly Tarzi set about sampling the food they had left. Each new thing brought a moan and eyes rolling heavenwards, and Rostigan
did not mind that she finished their stocks – he might have had a berry or two himself, indeed. Soon the last item remaining
was the vial of sweet sap – which Tarzi unstoppered with a wicked grin and poured down her throat all at once. She sat up
straight as if hit by lightning, her eyes even larger than usual.


‘Everything all right?’ said Rostigan.

‘Wah,’ she said, smacking her lips. ‘That was … by the Spell … I tasted that down my spine.’ She set the empty vial down gingerly.


He chuckled. ‘Maybe we should hold onto this curltooth for a while?’

She nodded. ‘Perhaps we could sell just one leaf? Imagine how much fine food we could buy with that much gold!’

‘That we could.’

Her mischievous look came back.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘I just thought of something else that might benefit from such enhancement,’ she said, and leaned in to kiss him.

As she closed her eyes the sky went black, as if the sun had suddenly winked out. For a moment everything lay in pitch darkness
… and then, just as suddenly, the day blazed forth once more.


‘What’s wrong?’ she said, opening her eyes, annoyed to find his lips unyielding.

‘Nothing,’ Rostigan said unconvincingly. Had he imagined the plunge into night? He knew he had not.

As he stared out at the crashing waves and sunny sky, he let his vision slip beneath the surface. Beside him, Tarzi became
an interlocking series of circulating energies. Translucent bands flowed around each other within the shape of her, thickening
in the cores – the red of her heart, the shadow of her spine, the rainbow sinkhole of her mind. Like all things, she was woven
from threads born of the Great Spell.


Away at the shoreline, the waves were like a multitude of glowing paper-thin reeds thrashing against the sand, scattering
amorphous fragments up the beach. Above the water, breezes ran in silver lines, only briefly visible, like fish turning on
their sides to flash their scales as they swam by. Golden vines of sunlight reached from heaven to earth, a hundred thousand
thick from his eyes to the horizon. He watched for any stir in that wavering forest, yet nothing but distant birds made it ripple.


He sent his gaze deeper, to where there was a sense of how things connected – land to sea, cloud to root, death to life, man
to woman – a tapestry at the outer limits of his perception. Beyond it the threads were fainter still, only discernible at
all because they were so large – shadows of the Spell’s giants, moving beneath the veil of the world, impressions in the corners
of his eyes. They were not clear enough to make out, thus giving no hint as to what had gone wrong. Trying to look at the
Great Spell was like staring into a river – he could catch reflections on the surface, but the depths were impenetrable.


‘Come,’ said Tarzi, touching his cheek. ‘We have been in the heat too long – let’s retire to the shade.’

He allowed her to pull him to his feet, glad she had no inkling of what had just happened. But he had seen the world blink,
and still would not have picked the day.




Later that afternoon they moved away from the coast, through a vale in which the trees stood politely to the sides. Soon the
waves were a distant echo, muffled by wooded hills lying between. Moving around the base of such a one, they stumbled onto
a cobbled road.


‘Well,’ said Tarzi, ‘perhaps we’re not as far from Silverstone as we thought.’

‘No.’ Rostigan stared gloomily at the road. No wonder Tarzi had grown impatient – he must have dragged her along the beach for longer than he’d realised, to have arrived here so
quickly. ‘Perhaps we’ll even reach the city before nightfall.’


The road led through uneven land, up and down hillocks choppier than waves. At the crest of one they passed a guard post –
a rickety wooden tower with an unlit brazier at the top.


‘Strange,’ said Tarzi. ‘That should be manned. Where’s the guard?’

Rostigan shrugged. Scanning ahead, his far-reaching gaze caught movement in the lower distance. A figure ran along a row of
rushes by a stream, wrapped up tight in a red cloak, face masked by a kerchief and a broad hat – a woman, maybe. She disappeared
into the trees.


‘I don’t know,’ he muttered.

‘If I’m right, Silverstone is over the next rise.’

It’s so quiet, he thought. We should hear the city by now.


On they went, up the next hill to the crest. From there they looked over the old floodplain valley on which Silverstone had
been built. Named for the shining blocks used to construct it, the lavish city crept up into the hills themselves, all the
way to templed peaks. Bustling with people, and famous for its bathhouses steaming with mineral salts found in these hillsides,
it had always been a place of abundance.


‘By the Spell,’ said Tarzi, her jaw going slack. ‘What … how can this be?’

A great field of exposed, empty earth lay in the very shape that Silverstone had been. Its edge wandered across the floodplain,
up into the hills and back around again in a huge brown circle. It was as if every brick, every building, every person and
thing had been lifted away, leaving nothing behind.


Rostigan felt heavy, sick confusion bitter in his mouth, as if the residue of curltooth somehow even enhanced the taste of
that.


Was this his fault?

‘Rostigan!’ cried Tarzi, grabbing his arm. ‘Where’s the city?’

‘Shh,’ he said, holding up a hand. She fell silent, wondering what he listened for. Then she heard it too – a voice, female
and lyrical, ghostly and distant. It was too soft to hear the words, until they stole closer like a breeze.


Pride, they say, before the fall

Yet Silverstone stands great and tall

And then a tinkling laugh, fading into the rustling grasses.

A strange feeling took hold of Rostigan. Was it horror, or relief?

‘What was that?’ said Tarzi fearfully.

‘Get down.’ He pulled her to the ground.

‘Ouch!’

‘We do not want to be written about from afar.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Could it really be? How was that even possible?

He remembered the figure fleeing into the trees. Who had that been? Someone afraid of what they had seen here? Or her?

‘Stealer,’ he muttered.

‘Stealer?’ Tarzi echoed, dumbfounded. ‘What are you talking about? She died hundreds of years ago.’

‘Yes,’ said Rostigan. ‘And it was the knights of Silverstone who killed her.’

Rostigan hoped he was drawing a particularly long bow, yet its arrow seemed to point a true target.

‘Come, Tarzi,’ he said, trying to sound certain as he collected his thoughts. ‘You know the tales of her, probably better
than I. Follow me – we stand out here like boils on a backside.’ He began to elbow his way down the slope.


‘Well, of course,’ she growled, huffing after him, ‘but as tales, not current occurrence!’

‘Shh!’ Their voices were carrying well over the eerily quiet hills. ‘Here.’ He crawled to some bushes by the side of the path.

Tarzi peered off through the leaves as if the city might reappear. ‘I know people in Silverstone,’ she murmured. ‘What could
have done such a thing?’


She turned back to Rostigan, who stared at her sombrely.

‘Stealer?’ she said, incredulous. ‘You cannot be serious.’

‘The floating voice,’ said Rostigan. ‘That’s something spoken of, isn’t it? Stealer’s echo, a mark in the air of what she had done? That she had stolen?’


Tarzi’s expression remained dubious. It was not surprising, he supposed. He was not even sure why he tried to convince her
– perhaps as a way of convincing himself.


‘There are plenty of threaders,’ Tarzi said, ‘who can produce a voice from the air. Tide’s end, I even know a ventriloquist
or two.’


‘And these ventriloquists,’ Rostigan wet his lips, ‘are they also able to remove whole cities from existence?’

And, he added to himself, on the beach, you did not notice, but the sun blinked … a thing not seen since the days of Regret, and the Wardens.


Should he tell her about that? He had withheld at the time so as not to worry her, yet now here he was trying to persuade
her of Stealer’s return, apparently based on nothing more than a hunch. His actions, he knew, had become somewhat contradictory.
If he really wanted her to believe him, he should reveal what he had seen. Certainly the disappearance of daylight fit with
histories which she herself recounted, legends known all over Aorn. She told them often – had done so, in fact, just before
they had struck out on their latest sojourn into the wilderness, many nights ago …




Tavern-goers refilled their glasses and settled back to listen as Tarzi walked the tiles before the fire.

‘Once,’ she said, ‘there lived a powerful threader, who would become known as Lord Regret, who ruled over the Tranquil Dale
– back when it was a welcoming place, full of fine folk like you and me. Regret was a colourful fellow, thin as a stick, who
liked to wear flamboyant robes and dye streaks in his wild hair. His bright appearance, however, hid a dark interior, and
as time passed this became more and more apparent. Monstrously gifted, he could conjure rainbows or summon bones from people’s
bodies with equal ease.’


She made a snatching motion at a seated farmer, who flinched, and others chuckled.

‘Worst of all, Regret learned – no one knew how, nor does to this day – how to manipulate the Great Spell itself! Not just
the patterns born from it, which are the domain of all threaders – trees and cows and rainbows and bones – but the very fabric
of existence, from which all things come. He set to work changing the world to match his twisted vision of it, born of delirium
and nightmare. Starting with his own domain, he stripped his once-happy subjects of their humanity, turning them into pitiless
creatures unbound from reason.’


‘The Unwoven,’ someone muttered, and others trembled.

‘Aye, the Unwoven. But creating them was just the beginning. As Regret put his hand behind the world and wrenched at threads
he found there, he injured deep and age-old patterns. Imagine it, my friends – the Great Spell, altered by a madman’s will!
All that sprung from it affected, a forest grown in poison soil, the repercussions felt all over Aorn. Children were born with limbs missing, plants that never
flowered before broke out with aberrant blooms, and sometimes during the day, the sun would simply vanish, as if it were an
eye that had shut.


‘Regret was selfish, and insane, and did not care that his meddling threatened the nature of all things – revelled in it,
in fact. Armies marched to try to stop him, but the Dale entrance was narrow and well defended by the Unwoven, who had an
unnatural strength about them, and an unwillingness to die. They fought as if they loved their master, though to look upon
them, one would not think them capable of love anymore. As Aorn’s soldiers fell in their thousands, it seemed there was no
hope of penetrating the Dale and that the world was doomed to be swallowed by Regret’s chaotic ambition.’


‘The Wardens came!’ called someone excitably.

Tarzi arched an eyebrow, as if to say ‘I’m telling this tale’, and waited until she commanded silence once again.

‘Indeed. Eight heroic threaders – the best Aorn had to offer – banded together to defeat the mad lord. They called themselves
Wardens, and journeyed into the Roshous Peaks, a treacherous place at the best of times, now full of the creatures Regret
had made. Taking this route, they approached the Dale from the north, away from its southern entrance where armies dashed
themselves to pieces. From a high vantage they overlooked Regret’s Spire, and saw that which now hung above it – a strange
rent like a gaping wound in the sky, revealing the threads of the Great Spell for all to see. Here, then, was where Regret had torn open the
veil of the world.’


Tarzi prodded the fire with a poker, releasing a spurt of sparks.

‘The Wardens went to the Spire roof, to see if they could close the Wound. That was where Regret found them, attempting to
undo his handiwork. And do you suppose he was happy?’


She cast the poker aside and outstretched her hands, as if to cast spells. Folk in the front row shifted uneasily.

‘No,’ she hissed, ‘he was not happy! Decidedly unhappy in fact, and when Regret was unhappy, misery washed from him like a
grey haze. He could make a person remember all the ill they’d done in their life – all the mistakes made, all the wrong turns
taken – until they felt like naught but a pale imitation of what they could have been, had they but lived a little better.’


There was more than one shiver at the idea.

‘Through such bleakness, the Wardens fought on. It is said the battle lasted for a day and a night, though for those involved,
time passed differently. Regret had added to and rewoven his own pattern in unnatural ways, giving himself strengths he had
never been born with – even transforming himself during the fight, into something like his own foul creations, with bat-like
wings of human skin, and flesh for hair and glowing eyes.’


Rostigan, sitting alone at the back of the room, drowned a half-smile in his mug. The last time Tarzi had told this tale,
Regret had become lizard-tailed with flaming fingers. He supposed she felt it necessary to add such detail, since little was
known for certain about the fight itself.


‘Standing together,’ Tarzi continued, ‘the Wardens managed to prevail. Some say it was Yalenna who finally burst Regret’s
heart in his chest, others claim it was Mergan, or that as a group they tore him apart, scattering him across the roof. At
least one thing is known for certain – Regret was finally dead.


‘What, though, of the threads he had stolen from the Spell, and made a part of his very self? To give himself strength, to
gain unnatural skills? What happened to them, do you suppose?’


Tarzi focused on a cross-legged boy, staring up at her in wonder.

‘They went into the Wardens,’ she said, splaying a palm wide on the boy’s chest, ‘becoming a part of their own patterns! Worming inside, altering each and every one of them into something other than what they had been. None of them would ever age again – maybe because the threads they now carried were too importa. . .