Tethered Spirits

by T. A. Hernandez

  She squeezed the real Amar’s warm hand and looked down at his sleeping face, at the steady rise and fall of his chest. He was still breathing, still alive, but he shouldn’t have died that night. He might not have, were it not for her own selfish fears.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  His fingers curled around hers a little tighter. Maybe it was an involuntary reflex, or her imagination, but she smiled anyway. She hadn’t been able to save him then, but she could help him now.

  “Well, that was…gruesome,” Jameson said. His hands still hovered over Amar, fingers moving in subtle shifts as if he were playing an instrument no one else could see. No one except for perhaps Lucian, who watched the wizard with dark, flinty eyes and a distinct lack of his usual smirk.

  “Is everything all right?” Kesari asked.

  “Yes,” Jameson replied, “but this is turning out to be a bit more difficult than expected. It’s like all his memories are locked up in a cell behind a dozen stone walls. I’ll get through them, though. Let’s keep going, shall we?”

  The torrent of memories began to fly by once again. Glimpses of Amar, Mitul, and Saya traveling together filled the room. Moving farther back, Saya disappeared, leaving only Mitul and Amar. Mitul’s face lost some of its wrinkles as the memories went by, but Amar’s maintained its same, unchanging youthfulness.

  They stopped on another memory, at night again, but now in a city street. “Hang on a minute,” Jameson said. “I’ll get us moving again.”

  “How far back are we?” Lucian asked as a pair of figures appeared. One was Amar, but Kesari didn’t recognize the other man. They staggered up the street side-by-side, and their raucous singing bolstered her suspicions that they were drunk.

  “Not nearly far enough,” Jameson grunted. A thin sheen of sweat had broken out on his brow, but below his outstretched hands, Amar dozed on peacefully.

  A third man stepped out of the shadows and plunged a knife into Amar’s chest. Before his companion could react, the assassin pulled out a second blade and slashed his throat. The killer’s face caught the moonlight as he turned, and the haseph-mark scars there were unmistakable.

  “Zefar,” Kesari murmured, recalling the tale the Sularan mercenary had told them in Hayathu.

  “It’s a good thing Mitul wasn’t with him,” Lucian remarked. “Though I do feel sorry for that other poor soul.”

  Jameson’s face looked a little green. “How much violence has this man endured?”

  “Only way to find out is to keep going,” Lucian said.

  “I’m not so sure I want to.”

  The blur of memories started back up, moving faster this time. Mitul appeared in some of them, the gray streaks in his dark hair and beard fading away the farther back they went, until he was a man of about thirty. He and Amar now sat at a low table in what looked like a tavern, eating a meal of curried chickpeas and flatbread. The rich aroma made Kesari’s mouth water, even though she still had a full belly from lunch.

  “You don’t have to come,” the Amar in the memory said to Mitul.

  “Nonsense,” Mitul replied. “Of course I’m coming. Someone needs to look out for you.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of looking out for myself.”

  Mitul raised an eyebrow. “And what happens if you die out there on your own? Someone should be there to remind you who you really are.”

  Amar shook his head. “You should stay. You have a whole life here. What about Kamaal?”

  Mitul lowered his gaze and went silent for a few moments. “He’ll understand.” He raised his eyes to meet Amar’s. “You’re my brother. I can’t let you do this on your own.”

  They faded away, and new images spun all around Kesari. Mitul appeared in several of them, soon becoming a teenager and then disappearing altogether. There were no more familiar faces in the rapidly shifting memories after that. Amar’s eyes darted behind his eyelids at a matching rate of speed, and his brown skin began to glisten with sweat, though the temperature in the room was still quite cool.

  “What happens if we go too fast?” Kesari asked.

  Jameson didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on Amar, the muscles in his face tensed in concentration as his fingers continued to tap out their silent rhythm.

  “He has to find a balance,” Lucian explained. “We have to go back a long way, and maintaining a bridge like this for too long can be dangerous. So he can’t go too slow, but he can’t go too fast, either.”

  Kesari pointed to Amar’s face. “Should we be worried?”

  “He’s all right for now,” Lucian replied. “I think.”

  This was hardly comforting, but she didn’t know what else to do except watch Amar for any further signs of distress.

  The memories hit another snag, and a battlefield filled the room. Along with it came a hundred different horrifying sounds and smells. Armored men and women screamed and ran in all directions, and Kesari’s nose burned with the stench of smoke and blood. It reminded her too much of the fire at the clocktower, and she wanted to close her eyes, but that wasn’t going to help. She squeezed Amar’s hand and focused on the feeling of his skin against hers to keep herself from slipping into her own memories.

  At Jameson’s feet, another Amar was sprawled out with three arrows sticking out of his chest. His breaths were wet and ragged, and blood dribbled from one corner of his mouth. His shaking hand twitched toward a sword on the ground—the very same sword he still carried.

  Jameson hurried the memories along. There were more battlefields, several of which Amar died on. Kesari stopped watching, instead focusing on the real Amar in front of her, but she couldn’t completely ignore the sounds and smells of war and death all around her. At one point, she made the mistake of looking up to see him leading about a dozen other soldiers over mountainous terrain. A group of enemy Tarja came upon them. There was a flash of light, and then Amar and every single one of his companions began to bleed from deep gashes made by invisible weapons. The horror on his face as he watched his friends die seared itself into Kesari’s mind.

  Sweat beaded on the real Amar’s face, which was now contorted in a grimace of pain. His hand grasped hers so tightly she had to pry his fingers loose. She reached a hand to his forehead. The heat hit her palm before she even touched his skin. “I think he has a fever,” she said to Jameson.

  “That’s normal,” the wizard answered. His voice was strained now, and a few strands of black hair clung to his damp forehead.

  Amar’s entire body suddenly went rigid, then began to convulse. Jameson had warned that a seizure could happen, but seeing it sent Kesari’s heart racing. She put her free hand on Amar’s shoulder. “It’s all right. You’re all right.”

  He kept shaking, and she looked up at Lucian helplessly. What was she supposed to do to help him through this?

  “Watch his head,” Lucian reminded her.

  Kesari stripped off her coat and placed it under Amar’s head.

  “Hold on,” Jameson said. “Let me find something happier.”

  The battlefield faded away, and now they sat in front of a blazing campfire. A thin layer of snow covered the ground, and the smell of roasting meat and burning wood filled the air. The people seated around the fire were the same soldiers Kesari had seen slaughtered by Tarja minutes before. Two of them, a man and a woman, stood in the center of the circle holding hands. Amar stood in front of them, smiling as he spoke the words of a Kavoran marriage vow. The couple kissed, and there were cheers and whistles from the other soldiers, who soon closed in around them to offer congratulations.

  The groom pushed through the crowd to find Amar, who embraced him with a firm pat on the back. “Thank you,” he said.

  “It was my honor,” Amar replied. “May you both have a long and happy life together.”

  The man stared at his bride with a look that couldn’t possibly have been any happier. “I’m sure we will,” he said, “if we can get through the rest of this war.”

  Jameson’
s voice cut through the memory. “How’s he doing now?”

  Kesari looked down at Amar. The seizure had stopped, and the muscles in his face had relaxed a little. “Better.”

  The wizard nodded. “Good. Now let’s try to get to the beginning before anything else goes wrong.”

  The tower became little more than a swirling mass of colors as Jameson pulled them through Amar’s memories at a breakneck speed. Occasionally, the images stopped for a split second, caught on Jameson’s magic like cloth on a protruding nail. War seemed to be the common theme. Whatever decade it was, wherever in Erythyr Amar’s memories took them, he was always a soldier. Jameson managed to pull free and keep moving before these memories could play out for very long, but Kesari still saw more blood and violence than she thought she’d ever witness in her entire life. She shut her eyes against the visuals and tried not to vomit from the stench and the noise and the dizzying speed at which they flew through it all.

  “Don’t look up,” Lucian said, picking up on her distress. “Stay focused on Amar.”

  She followed his advice and put her hand to the man’s damp forehead again. His fever was getting worse, and a few times, his muscles began to spasm. Jameson kept moving, never allowing one memory to take over long enough to cause a reaction as severe as that first seizure. At least, not until they came to a particularly stubborn event that seemed insistent on not being overlooked. It settled into every crevice of the tower with all the weight and density of a boulder.

  They now appeared to be in a tiny, one-room house with packed-earth floors. Amar knelt over a bed in the corner, head bowed and shoulders slumped with his hands clasped in front of him. Three long, lumpy objects wrapped in blankets lay on the bed. They almost looked like…

  Bodies. They were bodies. One was long and slender, but the other two were so tiny it made Kesari’s heart ache to look at them. Hot, heavy air permeated the house with the rancid stench of sickness and human refuse.

  The Amar who knelt over the bed let out a whimper, then broke down in quiet sobs as he buried his face in the blankets. “Why?” he asked pleadingly. “Why did they have to die?”

  The real Amar began to convulse again. His body writhed and twisted more violently than ever, and it was all Kesari could do to keep him from slamming his skull against the hard floor. His eyes flew open, rolling back in his head so far that only the bottom edges of his irises were visible. He began to gasp for air in rapid, strangled breaths.

  “Jameson!” Kesari called out.

  “I know,” he hissed. “I’m trying to get us out of here, but his mind is stuck on this.”

  “Try easing back on the connection a little bit,” Lucian advised.

  “If I do that, it could sever completely, and we may not be able to reestablish it.”

  “You’re forcing it too much,” Lucian said. “Let him take the lead.”

  Jameson’s face twisted in concentration, and after a few seconds, the house with the dead bodies faded away. A field of tall grass and wildflowers at sunset replaced it. Amar now stood in the doorway of a small house and watched a boy of about five run through the grass. A tiny girl toddled after him. They both had the same eyes—Amar’s eyes, dark and hooded, with long black lashes. They were exactly the sizes of the smallest bodies he had cried over in the previous memory.

  A woman in her late twenties came up behind him in the doorway and wrapped her arms around his waist. He turned around and kissed her deeply. They put their foreheads together, and the woman laughed softly.

  On the floor in front of Kesari, Amar’s seizure continued. A thin trickle of blood began to flow from his nose.

  They moved to a new memory. The same woman from before, now a few years younger, cradled a small bundle as Amar wrapped his arms around both of them. He kissed the top of the woman’s head and stroked the baby’s tiny cheek with a finger.

  Another memory. This time, Amar brought flowers to the woman, who only looked a few years older than Kesari. A giggling group of friends surrounded her, and they teased the girl as she accepted Amar’s flowers. He puffed out his chest and held his head high, but his gaze slid shyly down to the ground when she smiled at him.

  Amar’s convulsions became even more thrashing and violent. “Why isn’t it stopping?” Kesari cried out. “These are all happy memories. Shouldn’t it be getting better?”

  “I don’t know,” Jameson said. Beads of sweat stuck in the creases of his brow and ran down the sides of his face. “I can’t get him to let go of this one.”

  Kesari gave Lucian a pleading look as blood continued to flow from Amar’s nose. The Spirit Tarja looked from Jameson to Amar, then back at Jameson. “Maybe we should stop.”

  Before the wizard could respond, the tower went spinning in a chaotic tornado of color again. Jameson grunted, his hands suddenly stiffening over Amar’s body.

  “What are you doing?” Lucian asked, a spark of anger in his voice. “You’re going too fast! He’s getting worse.”

  “I’m not doing this,” he hissed between gritted teeth. “He is.”

  Kesari glanced up at the memories that flickered into clear view every now and again. More battlefields. Amar talking with some friends. Amar riding a horse through the forest. Amar as a child brandishing a wooden sword against an older boy.

  “There!” she called out.

  “He’s so young,” Lucian said. “That has to be from before the curse.”

  “We need to go forward,” Jameson said as his fingers resumed their frantic tapping pattern. The memories began to shift more slowly, but still wouldn’t settle on any one thing. “How is he doing?”

  “A little better,” Kesari replied. Amar’s breathing had returned to normal, and though his body still gave an occasional twitch, his movements weren’t nearly as fitful as they’d been before.

  A forest sprang up all around them, then transformed into some sort of great hall hung with red and white banners. A blooming lotus flower adored every one. The hall became a richly-decorated private room—the kind of room Kesari imagined Empress Dashiva herself might live in. The lotus motif appeared again—on the pillows, carved into a tall armoire, laid out in white tile on the floor beneath an ornate washbasin. She barely had time to take it in before they were back in the forest.

  “When is this?” Lucian asked.

  “If I’ve been keeping track correctly,” Jameson replied, “I’m guessing this is about six hundred years ago.”

  Amar rode through the forest as a young teen, a red banner hanging over him and his black steed. It caught the wind to reveal the white lotus symbol again.

  “What do you think that is?” Kesari asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lucian said. “Some clue about where he is, perhaps, but I don’t recognize it.”

  Jameson merely shrugged.

  The memory shifted again, but this time, it finally seemed to settle on something. They were in the same room as before, but now it was only dimly lit by a few candles. Amar sat upright in the bed with an open book perched on his lap. He appeared to be the same age Kesari knew him as now—the same age he’d been for centuries. He was clad only in a pair of loose pants made of silk, and his bare chest rose in slow, even breaths as he concentrated on the book he was reading.

  A series of muffled noises filtered into the memory—crashes and clangs and shouting voices. Amar stiffened, his eyes darting to the door. It flew open and slammed against the wall with a bang. A young woman burst through it, breathing heavily.

  Her eyes found Amar, and an expression of pure hatred contorted her face. He gave her a quizzical look and opened his mouth to speak, but whatever he’d meant to say to her was drowned out by the distressed moans of the real Amar.

  His body started to writhe once more. Whatever this memory was, it wasn’t a happy one. Kesari adjusted the coat under his head to provide a better cushion, but there was little else she could do for him. Blood trickled from his nose again, and a new stream started at one of his ears.


  There was a flash of light, and Kesari looked up in time to see the young woman in the memory stretch her hands out. Her mouth moved, but her words were inaudible. Twin tendrils of crimson light shot out of her palms to wrap themselves around the Amar in the memory.

  The memory itself seemed to be slipping out of Jameson’s control again. The sounds were almost completely muted now, and the images became abstract, rippling and shifting like smoke. A violent wind tore through the tower. It swirled around them and pulled at Kesari’s clothes and hair. Amar went rigid and let out a long, pained cry that seemed to carve out everything inside her, leaving her hollow.

  Mitul and Saya burst into the tower, the worry on their faces morphing into sheer horror when they caught sight of Amar. “What are you doing to him?” Mitul demanded, rushing to his side and dropping to the floor. He grabbed his friend by the shoulders as the convulsions started again.

  “I’m trying to stabilize him,” Jameson snapped.

  Saya flung herself down next to Mitul and Amar. “You have to stop!”

  Jameson remained where he was, hands stiffly outstretched and every muscle taut as he tried to bring the altma swirling around the room back under his control. Kesari didn’t know if the others could sense it the way she did—the prickling energy in the air, the uneasy sense of imbalance—but something had gone very wrong here.

  “He can’t stop,” Lucian explained over another pained cry from Amar. “If the connection is severed too quickly, the damage could be permanent.”

  For a moment, Kesari saw Amar lying on the ground exactly as he had the night they met, bleeding from a fatal wound while she stood by, helpless and frozen. That same sense of powerlessness started to creep over her, and she recalled his words to her in Sharmok.