Ashes Of Memory

by Aiden Bates

  Nkendi shook her head. “Not quickly. This is far worse than the last time.”

  “I didn’t see what happened,” I said. “He made me look away, before it did. Compelled me. There was an abyssal mage, though.”

  She put a hand to her forehead, closed her eyes tight, and gave a tense sigh of frustration. “To survive such an encounter once is miraculous,” she murmured. “Twice? I do not know that I am equal to the task. Not in any short time. Stay here. Touch nothing, do not leave this room. Either of you.”

  As she stood, I moved to stand between her and the door, one hand up. “Where are you going? It’s been six hours since he was hurt, there’s no time to—”

  “I am going,” she said, putting a hand on my arm to move me aside, “to collect an IV drip so that he does not dehydrate, and sedatives to keep his neural activity minimal, so that more damage is not done. Then, when we have seen to the safety of his body, we will see to the safety of his mind.” She looked me over. “And I will collect something for you to wear, so that you will not take up quite so much room.”

  I was still in my half-form, my head nearly brushing the ceiling of her quarters. When she gave me a push, I stepped aside to let her pass, and watched Vance’s chest rising and falling in slow, shallow breaths.

  “Is Uncle Vance going to be okay?” Baz asked.

  I realized that tears were steaming in my eyes, and wiped them away. “I don’t know, buddy. How are you feeling? Are you okay?”

  He watched Vance instead of answering me.

  I went to his side and knelt, and took one of his tiny hands into one of my massive half-form paws. “Hey,” I said, trying to be quiet though it was difficult at this size, “it’s okay if you’re still scared. Sometimes, when something really bad happens, we stay scared for a long time afterward. You can talk to me about it, if you want.”

  He looked away from Vance, and met my eyes. I didn’t see fear there. I didn’t see much of anything, which was maybe worse. “I’m not afraid,” he said simply. “When are we going home?”

  “Soon,” I said. “But... Baz, do you remember what happened? Before they took you?”

  His eyes dropped. “Mom and Dad died. Right?”

  I swallowed against a lump in my throat. “Yeah, buddy. I’m sorry. I’m sorry we weren’t there to protect them. I’m sorry that you went through all of this. But I’m going to take care of you, okay? You won’t be alone.”

  He raised his eyes again. “I know.”

  Some instinct inside me worried about what exactly that was in response to.

  The door to the room opened, and Master Nkendi returned with another young mage in tow. I hadn’t noticed the armband the other wore, but this one was no older than twenty-something, and wore a sky-blue armband over her uniform blazer. A life mage—healer. She had a small white box with her, and a stand for an IV drip. While she settled down next to Vance, Master Nkendi handed me a large, folded suit. “I recall you are quite large in your human form,” she said. “This will hopefully fit. May be a little tight.”

  I nodded, and when she turned away, I turned to face the door and shifted quickly to human form before tugging on the slacks, then buttoning up the shirt. The blazer I didn’t need. Once dressed, I turned back to see the life mage hanging the drip from the stand. A tube ran from it already leading to the needle that was taped onto Vance’s arm near the elbow.

  The younger mage spoke softly to Nkendi, as if I might overhear. Which I did. “The IV alone won’t be enough,” she said. “His nervous system is failing. It will lead to a lot of other problems, and it would take a dozen of us to keep them from cascading into organ failure, among other things. He doesn’t have long, Master. I’m sorry.”

  “Then get a dozen life mages,” I growled, drawing worried looks from both of them. I took a step forward. “If it takes a dozen, then go get them and bring them back here to fix him.”

  The younger mage’s cheeks were bright. She spread her hands. “I-I’m sorry, sir, but... there are only five here.”

  “Then get them from somewhere else,” I pressed.

  “Obviously, we will make the necessary calls,” Nkendi assured me, putting one hand protectively out in front of the woman as if I might leap at any moment. “But it will take time that we may not have.”

  “Then what’s the other option?” I asked. I waved at Vance, growing more and more agitated by the second. “You say you can’t just fix his mind, and now you’re saying you don’t even have the people to keep him alive? What the hell do I do then, Oba? Just watch him die? What the fuck do we do?”

  She swelled, seemingly gaining a few inches as she took a slow step toward me. “A fine time to ask the question,” she said, acid in her words. “Now that the damage is done? Now, you wish to know what can be done to help this boy? Always, you have leapt before you looked, and bad enough that you should do it yourself, given your position, Tammerlin, but when you take the most dangerous leaps, you insist on taking my student along with you. What did you say to him this time to convince him to undertake this suicide quest? Did you tell him that you love him? That you would keep him safe, as you did before? What could you have been thinking that you would come back into his life only to cast him to the darkness again? Huh?”

  Her eyes were bright with anger, her nostrils flared. I had never seen Master Nkendi truly furious before. Now, I could feel it. Anger flooded the air itself, pressing against me like I was underwater in a boiling ocean.

  “I told him there was a child in trouble,” I said quietly. It was the truth.

  Nkendi’s fury cooled some. She closed her eyes and shook her head, then turned back to Vance, her arms folded. “I suppose that would do it.”

  “I... should leave,” the young life mage murmured. “I’ll come and replace the bag every two hours. And I’ll call Custodes Solis and Mare. They have life mages.”

  “Do,” Master Nkendi breathed. “Thank you, Amelia.”

  Amelia gave a nod, and then cast me a sympathetic, if slightly frightened, look before she scurried out of the room.

  “Tell me what I can do, Master Nkendi,” I urged, stepping up behind her. “Anything. I’ll do anything I need to.”

  For a time she said nothing, and I thought perhaps she was angry enough with me to simply ignore my presence in advance of telling me to leave. That there was nothing to be done—that I’d finally killed him.

  Instead, though, she eventually hung her head. “There is... something. But it is dangerous and I do not know—”

  “I’ll do it,” I said without needing to know the rest. “Whatever is. Even if it...” I glanced at Baz, and hated that I was momentarily torn. But there was a whole weyr to take care of him, now that he was safe. “Even if it kills me.”

  She looked up at me, one eyebrow raised. “It may do worse than that. But if you are willing... then we may be able to at least salvage enough of his mind to build on.”

  It was hope, however slim. That’s all I needed to get my heart racing. “Okay. What do we do?”

  She reached up and touched my cheek. “You must go and get him.”

  14

  Vance

  I must have walked for days in that place. At first, I was too afraid to move, to leave the rubble of those walls that had collapsed around me, but after hours of huddling up there, shivering in the cold, harsh wind that seemed to scour the land constantly, I knew that if I stayed too long, I would die. So, I picked a direction and started walking.

  Something about the rubble felt safe. Well, safer than the rest of the place. Like I’d been born there, I was drawn back to it after just a few minutes of walking. But eventually, I had to leave it behind.

  There was no one with me. I yelled for hours, trying to make contact with anyone, but if there was another soul here somewhere, they were out of range. The ground was dry and cracked, riddled with weeds in some places that I didn’t recognize. The horizon was warped, and changed constantly as I moved, so after a while I stopped wa
tching it and stared at the ground in front of my feet instead. Even that wasn’t consistent.

  The world was tilted, which made travel difficult. One moment I’d be leaning to the right to keep from falling left, and the next I’d be falling over as the direction changed abruptly. I’d brush myself off, get back up, readjust, and try to walk ‘uphill’ even though everything seemed flat for miles.

  The thing was, it never stayed flat. It never stayed anything. It was like someone had been rewriting the rules of physics, but had a shaky hand while they did it. By the time I reached the houses, I didn’t know the way back to the rubble heap and couldn’t have gone back if I wanted to. The landscape behind me didn’t look the way it did when I passed through it. Nothing was familiar.

  The neighborhood, if that’s what it could be called, at least offered shelter from the wind.

  Something about the way the houses here had been built was as wrong as the rest of the place. Some were just a wall with a door. Others were just windows, floating in space with no apparent house to hold them. The ones that did look mostly intact were built at strange angles, or balanced on one corner, or upside down. Some mad architect had designed the place, but gotten bored with one house and moved on to the next while the last was only half-built, or just a free-floating concept.

  All of it was wrong, and one part of me seemed to know that. The other, though, urged me to ignore the strangeness. Things just were what they were, and worrying about why would only make it harder to keep my sanity. And that was quickly slipping away from me.

  They say that the truly insane don’t know that they’re insane. Like how your eyeball can’t look at itself. Somehow, though, I felt like I was split in two. One side could see the other without actually turning to look. The rational part of me knew, when I got hungry, that there was nothing to eat. The other part eyed one of the houses and thought that the bright red door looked like it was probably edible, and would taste like moonlight on a blade of grass.

  So, at least if I was losing it entirely, there was a witness to it.

  I found a house that I could get into through a window—the mad architect had failed to remember doors—and found a couch on the wall above a narrow, curved table where I could finally lay down and try to rest. Getting up there was easy enough. If the couch could do it, so could I, and while my rational ‘self’ complained about that fact, the irrational ‘self’ was smugly satisfied when I stepped onto the wall, the world reoriented itself, and I found that it was now the kitchen on the wall, while the living room was securely on the floor. Even the world visible through the sideways windows agreed, apparently reorienting to accommodate my strained rational side.

  I didn’t sleep, exactly. I hadn’t slept since I arrived here. Instead, I slipped into a kind of fugue state and observed the ways that the house slowly reorganized itself depending on the time of day, or maybe the direction of the wind that pounded on the windows. The couch changed, too, which made trying to get comfortable on it difficult. It would be a cushy leather sofa one minute, then the wind changed, and suddenly it was a chaise lounge. The old antique kind that wasn’t really meant for sitting on at all, having been designed without such a thing as ‘comfort’ in mind.

  And in all that, I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here, or where I’d been before.

  The days and nights weren’t on any kind of regular schedule, and sometimes happened simultaneously. Trying to predict when it would change became something of a pastime. I never actually managed to guess correctly. I watched for animals, for signs of other people here, but nothing ever happened to indicate that was a possibility. During the days, I would leave the semi-comfort of the house with the couch and explore the others, looking for signs of life, and if I was caught out in one of those starless nights—the stars here only shone during the day, little pinpoints of darkness in the bluish sky—I just settled down where I was until day decided it was bored with wherever it went and pushed the night back out of the world.

  There was something out there in the night. I never saw it, never heard it. But it was there. I knew that like I knew I had ten fingers.

  It never got boring, exploring the place. The house I rested in seemed consistent enough, although there was sometimes a door and sometimes not—but the rest of the neighborhood was different each time I left.

  It was weeks before I saw another person.

  Someone knocked on a door. I sat up from the couch, and checked to see if the house had a door at the moment. It didn’t, so I reasoned it wasn’t that one, and climbed down off the wall to go check if there were other doors in the house somewhere I hadn’t looked, or which weren't there that last time I did.

  When I couldn’t find the source inside the house, I went out into the most recent version of the neighborhood, and followed the sound through the yards and various incomplete versions of houses until finally I spotted a door that was different than the others. It was in the middle of the road, for one thing. But for another, it actually looked familiar.

  I approached cautiously. Weeks on my own, without any sign of life—and no door in the road, although that was really the least disturbing thing about the event—had made me paranoid that this was some trick of whatever it was that lived in the nights. It was a crafty beast, I was pretty sure, and this was the sort of trick it would almost certainly try on me. Both my rational and irrational sides agreed on that point, at least.

  Still, there was the knocking. And I was so lonely.

  I came close to the door, and realized that I must have been on the inside of it, because the deadbolt latch was facing me, along with the chain, and a series of doorknobs that were all locked as well. I pressed my ear to the door, trying to hear what was on the other side. When I couldn’t be sure, I knocked twice, experimentally. “Hello?”

  “Vance?” a voice called.

  Something teased at my thoughts. An instinct. A breath of longing. It was another voice. Or at least it sounded like a voice. I couldn’t be entirely sure that wasn’t just the acoustics of the door. I knocked again to be sure.

  “Vance, listen,” the voice said, “you... you have to let me in. Your defenses are up. Can you open the door from your side?”

  If that was just the sound the door made when I knocked on it, it seemed needlessly complex. But then again, so was the whole place. “Why should I?” I called back.

  “Shit,” the voice said. A man? Or something that did a good job sounding like one. “Okay... Nkendi said you might be... um, listen, Vance... remember when we first met? You were at a park, meditating. It was in the spring, which you said was your favorite season because everything seems so happy to be alive again. And the sun was in your eyes, you kept squinting and furrowing your brow. I saw you, and I thought that you looked... uncomplicated. I stood nearby, blocking the sun, and watched you. You ignored me, pretended I wasn’t there, but you knew. And when you were done, you stood up and said thanks. I asked your name, and you said it was Vance. Vance Beauregard. Remember? And I said—”

  “Tam,” I murmured, a reflex just as if someone had tapped a nerve.

  “Right,” he agreed. “Tam. It’s me, Vance. It’s Tam. You have to open the door, let me in. I can help you.”

  “Help me what?” I asked.

  “Help you get out of here,” he said, insistent. “Help you get back to the world. Back to yourself, back to... back to me, Vance. Please, open the door.”

  I weighed the possibilities. On the one hand, I was very alone here, and it was getting old. On the other, the creature in the night was probably very good at sounding like a person. Looking like one, even. If I did open the door, and someone did come through it, it could easily just be the creature in disguise. I was pretty sure it had done that before, which is why I hadn’t seen it.

  That, ultimately, was why I opened the door at all. Because until I did see it, I wouldn’t be sure what to look for. I undid the chain at the top first, then the deadbolt, then each of the doorknobs, and very car
efully turned the last one to pull the door open.

  I have to admit, if this was the night creature’s choice of disguise, it was a good choice. Tall, broad-shouldered, handsome square jaw, thick lips and soft brown eyes were all excellent choices. Of course, a pitcher plant is really pretty, too.

  “Tam,” I said. Again, by reflex. But it seemed like it suddenly meant more. That sound was important, somehow.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s me. I’m Tam. You’re Vance.”

  “I know I’m Vance,” I said, squinting at him. “Are you reminding me, or yourself?”

  His brow furrowed. “Right,” he murmured softly, as if to himself. “She said you might... um, can I come in?”

  I stepped aside. “Make yourself at home.”

  ‘Tam’ stepped through the door, and made a face like he’d smelled something bad. He blinked, facing the distant horizon, which at the moment was arranged in a jagged sort of spiral that was difficult to look at for very long.

  I put a hand over his eyes. “Yeah, don’t do that,” I told him. “It can fuck with your head. Hey, you aren’t the night creature, are you?”

  He reached up and took my hand from his eyes, but very smartly did not look at the horizon again. He also held my hand tight in his, unwilling to let me go now that he had me. “Night creature?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He shook his head slowly. “I... no, I’m not. What is that?”

  “It’s a creature,” I said, uncomprehending what was confusing about it, “that lives in the night. Hence, ‘night creature’. The answer is in the name. How do you not know about this?”

  “Sorry,” he said, penitent as he added his other hand to mine. “I’m not... from here. I’m not the night creature.”

  “If you were, would you tell me?” I asked.

  His brow knit slowly. “Yes?”