by Jeff Ayers
With that warning, Zuri-shantar finished his toying. He described the location and name of the tribe of lizards that Petre had infiltrated, then took flight, snorting flames and smoke in his wake. I assume he watched my meeting with Petre with great interest, but it’s just as likely he forgot all about the encounter as soon as he was airborne. The minds of dragonkind are an inscrutable thing, their interests in mortals and even immortals being transient fancies, passing distractions to whittle away the time between now and eternity.
I stood amid the wreckage of the burning trees and underbrush, momentarily stunned by the unexpected meeting. Zuri-shantar is likely to be the oldest thing alive, one of the progenitors of the entire race of dragonkind. That he should have taken any time to talk with me was a wonder, and remains so to this day. In my musings, I forgot about the flames that were fast spreading in my direction.
I took flight, safe above the treetops, guided only by the words of the fast-disappearing dragon. The tribe he had described was not difficult to find; it was a prosperous community, thriving in the danger and wildness of the jungle. I landed a respectful distance away and made my approach to the village on foot.
The sentries were at first hostile to me; the fact that we seemed to have no language in common proved particularly vexing for both parties. However, I found they had some vocabulary in the language of dragons, which I have some skill in imitating. I was able to get across to these warriors that I was here searching for someone in particular. We stayed where they’d encountered me while a runner went back to the village proper. She returned with a fellow lizard decked in talismans and charms of all sorts. To my great surprise, he spoke to me in comprehensible, albeit raspy and broken, Caribolian.
“Why you here?” he said, gesturing toward me with the gnarled club he had been using as a walking stick, his necklaces and bracelets rattling with the motion. “You want someone?”
“I want to find someone who’s here in disguise,” I told him.
He seemed to work through the words. “Disguise. False face, yes?” When I nodded, he turned his head from side to side, sniffing the air through the narrow slits that served as his nose. “One who looks like lizard, but not, yes?”
I nodded again. “I’ve been told that he’s among your people.”
“Told? Who tells?” His reptilian eyes narrowed in deep mistrust. “No trust for other tribes. They would…lie of us.”
“I came by the information from a dragon, Zuri-shantar.”
At the mention of the name, all eyes went wide, and the warriors immediately dropped to one knee with bowed heads. My conversation partner similarly genuflected, though he kept his eyes fixed on me.
“You talked with Great One? Great One sent you here?” My affirmative almost knocked him over. He stood to regain his balance, and the warriors slowly returned to their feet. “Great One does not lie. Your prey is here. I think I know who it is. Come along.”
With that, we trudged the rest of the way to the village, a collection of mud huts with green-thatched roofs surrounding a particularly impressive hut that must have spanned at least fifty feet. It was into this largest domicile that my hosts took me. Therein I saw the largest lizardman I have ever seen, his hefty paunch jutting pugnaciously from a thick and sturdy frame. He sat upon a rock throne that went through the thatched floor of the hut.
The chieftain, for I assume that’s who it was, and the speaker conversed in their hissing and snapping tongue. The leader then shifted his gaze and weight in my direction, and said some more things I could not understand. My conversation partner nodded once, which I took to be a sign for what I was supposed to do, so I nodded as well. The chieftain nodded to the speaker, who tapped me on the shoulder with his clawed finger.
We left the home of the leader of the tribe and made our way to the outer edge of the village. “We think we have your man. Tried to hide…” He snapped his head side to side and sniffed; I realized later he was trying to find the right word. “…among. Among us. Wearing our skin, speaking our words. We keep him. He wears his own face now.” He gestured to a lone hut ahead of us, isolated from any others. “There. Your prey. Do what you will.”
“You’re giving me your prisoner?”
“If Great One sent you to hunt, we do not…interfere. If he leaves the area, he is free. If we see him after, we kill.”
I stepped into the hut.
Chapter 21
In which a story is finished, bibelots are explained, and bacon is served by the fire.
Belamy paused his telling, and stared into the flames. Skate had stopped drinking her coffee shortly after the conversation started, and it was roughly the same temperature as the room around it. Petre’s globe remained full of vaguely shifting blue smoke. Rattle stayed motionless in the old man’s lap.
“Forgive me. It has been ages since I’ve recounted these things aloud. I’m sure this could have been explained much more succinctly, if I had put my mind to such. Shall I continue?”
Skate nodded, but slowly, and only after a few seconds of consideration.
“You have reservations?”
“Questions,” she said, sipping the room-cooled coffee. Terrible or not, she wasn’t going to waste any. “But they can wait.”
“Might as well get them out of the way now, so I don’t have to stop again until the end. I often find that I’m unable to concentrate if I have unresolved questions needling my brain.” His eyes finally left the fire and turned to Rattle, whom he began to pet at the space where its wings met.
“Okay.” The truth was, the old man was right; the questions would bother her if she didn’t get them out of the way. “How did the dragon know who you were?”
“Dragons are wonderful things and grow more wondrous with age. Zuri-shantar has had untold millennia to age, and his powers are unknowable. I believe, either through some particular insight into the world that eludes the lesser beings or else through the magic of simply being a very old dragon, that he knows things about the world around him automatically. He had no other way of knowing who I was, or for taking interest in me other than a random encounter in the wilderness. It’s possible he can read minds, as well. The short answer is that I don’t know, but there are known ways of doing what he did, and I am sure there are unknown methods as well.”
“So, magic.”
“Yes. Of one form or another.”
“Was Rattle helping you look?”
“No. I left him behind, right here, as a sentry to ward off any opportunistic thieves who might have noticed a seemingly abandoned home and thought it to be easy pickings. He was incredibly helpful during my research, however. For whatever reason, he’s got a real mind for books, and that affinity for the written word was indispensable for cross-referencing and fact-checking the sources I’d been able to locate, evaluate, and eventually return. He excelled in both duties,” Belamy said with a smile, patting Rattle on its glassy body. It looked around the room, avoiding eye contact.
It’s embarrassed by the praise, she thought as it resettled itself, shaking its wings out briefly.
“That thing the dragon told you, about liches always going insane. Is that true?”
He ruminated on the question before answering. “As far as I know, I am the only person to have ever achieved lichdom using the method I have. In that way, I am unique. I am aware that this very subtle distinction between myself and those like me will do little to allay any fears of those who—for the most part, rightly—condemn a lich to damnation for his decision, for choosing to throw away his life for a permanent facsimile of it, for ripping his soul to shreds and throwing the wastage into a pot of filth.” Belamy brought his free hand up and scratched the side of his head, and she winced at the dry rasp of his skin. “Whether this difference will protect me, I don’t know. But what I have seen from the larger body of research and commentaries of the world’s liches seems to indicate that the gradual loss of memory and even the ability to make sense to others are wholly inevitable. The
y can be postponed, alleviated, or simply accepted, but the madness comes just the same. I have taken some steps I think will help to stall it, but only time—and a lot of it, at that—will tell whether they’re of any use.”
“What steps?”
Belamy smiled and patted Rattle on its side. “Go fetch the memories for me,” he said. It slid off his lap and began flapping, winding its way to the stairs. “Shall I continue, or was there anything else nagging at the corners of your mind?”
When Skate shook her head, Belamy continued as before, dispassionate and staring into the fire. It had begun to burn low, so he willed a log to hover into the fireplace before continuing.
My guide stayed behind as I entered the isolated, ill-kempt hut. Though it was a structure of threadbare rope and salvaged branches, it was sturdy; it barely creaked as I rested my weight against it in the doorway. In front of me was my enemy, Petre Hangman. The man who’d killed my daughter.
He was in terrible shape. His ragged hair hung about his face, which had been weathered by a life on the run—by his surviving in the wilderness where no lone man could hope to survive for long, even a skilled young wizard. Dried blood caked the lower half of his face, and further patches of blood were splattered on his clothes, which themselves were little more than rags. He was seated on the floor and bound to the wall, the same thin but resilient rope keeping him there that held the walls of his prison together. He looked up at me but couldn’t see anything but a shadow in the light. The sun was glaring through, and his squint only made his position look even more pitiful.
“Who’s there? Is it you again, Slisthak? I can’t answer more questions today, I’m so thirsty.” He dropped his head, which lolled from side to side in a daze. “Anything; water, juice. I can barely see.” His voice sounded as if his claims of thirst were well-founded. It was more of a croak than his usual sounds.
“Who is Slisthak?”
He immediately recognized my voice. His daze wasn’t gone entirely, but it was more muted. “The shaman of the tribe.” He no longer spoke as a prisoner. In fact, he spoke as he always had to me. He spoke as an equal. “I’ve been teaching him what I know of magic in exchange for food and water, though I try to get more of the latter beforehand. Talking dries me out, you see.”
“I imagine so.” I came into the hut more fully, within arm’s reach of the man. “Why have you not escaped?”
He laughed, a bitter sound. “I would love to, believe me. I’m out of spells. Slisthak has my book. I was caught unready and am paying the price for it. I doubt I shall ever leave this hut alive.”
“I have the same doubt.” I no longer had flowing blood to pour through my ears or heat to rise from my heart, but I still felt anger; I felt it as clearly as I ever had. I bent down to eye level with him. “Why is my daughter dead, Petre?”
He met my eyes and quickly turned away. “Because of me.” He tried to move his legs underneath him, but he failed. The effort took his breath from him, and he slumped down again, coughing and rasping. “I killed her.”
I stood back up. “Why?”
He caught his breath. “Because…because I’m a fool, Barrison. I taught her, and I pushed her too far. When I realized what I’d done, I tried to pull her back, but it was too late, too late.” His throat choked him; by the grimace on his face and the heaving of his breath, I knew that he was weeping, despite having no tears with which to do so. “She tried what was beyond her, and it took her. The spell backfired, and she was gone.”
The report was unexpected. I had thought that Petre had been directly responsible for her death. “You did not kill her?”
“Of course I did; aren’t you listening?” He tried to bolt upright, but his restraints kept him from rising completely. “It was my fault she was studying magic at all; it was my fault she was pushing herself beyond her abilities. Who else could be responsible but her own teacher?”
“Why did you run?” I had assumed his direct guilt from the very beginning for that reason; his immediate escape and subsequent attempts at hiding had made it perfectly clear he had been the one to kill my daughter. It never occurred to me that she might have died for her own efforts, that her own drive to take on more than she could handle had hurt her.
“To get away from you, of course. I knew you’d be out for my head when you learned that she’d died under my care. So to save my own skin, I fled.”
“She was under no one’s care.” I performed a simple trick to release his bonds; he slipped forward and caught himself with unsteady hands. He stayed in that position, shuddering and breathing raggedly. “That was my folly, Petre, and yours. Alphetta was her own person and would not be controlled or made to do anything other than what she wanted to do. Even had you not eloped with her, she would have found a way to learn magic. I knew that, deep down. It was who she was: determined, proud, and courageous. You could have no more prevented it than you could stop the sun from rising or the moons from waning. You’ve wasted a decade of your life fleeing from me, and I chasing you. Your skin is your own. You bear no guilt.”
I turned to leave. I have mentioned before that certain emotions are different in me since the transformation. Fear, I feel not at all, and other emotions are muted and dulled. I remember in that moment feeling echoes of regret and of sadness but also of peace. I did not have to shed blood for my daughter; her murderer was nonexistent. That she herself had been responsible for her passing was upsetting but not unsurprising. I did not doubt for a moment that Petre’s account was true. This certainty solidified shortly thereafter.
“Wait.” His voice was a croak. He had risen from the floor, but remained on his knees, slumping in dejection. “Please.”
“Do you need help getting out of the jungle?” I asked, at first misunderstanding his meaning. “The lizardfolk have promised that you’ll not be harmed should you leave without returning.”
“You can’t. You can’t let me go.”
“Why not?”
“Because I am guilty!” Now he did rise to his feet, and he grabbed me by the shoulders. His grip was weak, and his eyes were wildly searching my own. “I killed her, do you understand? My wife, your daughter, is dead, and it is no one’s fault but my own. You can’t just let me go. You have to do justice. I know you, Barrison. You can’t let a killer go free; it’s not in you. You have to do justice.”
“You would have me take your life from you? You think that would be the just thing to do?” When he didn’t answer, I continued, “I do not think so. There would be no justice in your death, Petre. It was an accident, nothing more. You owe nothing to me, and I would count your death a murder on my own count. Go, and be free.”
“I’ll make the lizardfolk do it, if you won’t. Then you’ll have made murderers of them.” His eyes had become even wilder, and he’d backed away. “I can’t go on, Barrison. I can’t go on, and I won’t do it myself.”
“What good would your death do?” I asked him. “Whom would it help? What use would such a thing have?”
“Justice, punishment, whatever you will call it. I do not know how you have managed to come here, or how you have managed to remain unfazed by the jungle in your old age, but whatever you’ve done must have warped your senses if you can’t tell that this is right.”
“Will you put your judgment in my hand?”
He nodded but pointed a finger. “So long as there be justice in it. I’ll not have you claim that there needs nothing be done.”
“Fine, come here.” I held him at arm’s length. “I will not take your life from you”—I had to hold up a finger, because he tried to interrupt—“but I’ll keep you held. I’ll take your freedom from you, only so long as you’re willing to give it.”
“Barrison, you’re old. Any imprisonment you offer can only last as long as you will, which can’t be more than a decade or two at best. Your daughter’s life must be worth far more—”
“I am not alive, Petre. I can be your gaoler for as long as necessary.” I explained to him
the process that I had gone through, and he recoiled.
“You…you have done this to find me?”
“Yes, and if you believe it, I am glad I do not need to do as I planned. What say you? Will you accept confinement as penance, where you will have a chance to live a good life afterward, a life of wisdom from time spent in contemplation, which you could not have in the event of your execution?”
He had fallen to his knees. He gripped the side of his head with both hands. “I deserve death, Barrison. I know that I do.”
“A lifetime of imprisonment, then. A life for a life, or else until you realize that you’re wrong. Do you accept my judgment?”
He lifted his head. I saw much in his eyes, but what stuck out to me was a sense of hope. He nodded. I cast my spell, and he dissolved into a vapor that coalesced into a glass sphere into my hand. I saw him within, and placed him safely in a pocket. We left the hut and the jungle behind.
Skate set her empty cup on the floor with a clack. The coffee had never recovered from that horrible temperature it had become, but she found that listening to the story had made her thirsty. Rattle returned, bringing with it the jewelry box from her first night here. It plopped the decorative case in Belamy’s lap. It glanced at Skate, then picked her cup off the floor and disappeared into the kitchen.
“So you did all that, chasing him, becoming a lich, because you thought he murdered your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know how she died before Petre told you?”
“Only that she had been killed by magic.” Petre’s globe remained inscrutable. “She is buried in the cemetery near the small chapel here in the Old Town. I stayed only as long as the service took to end before leaving town in search of her husband.”
There was only the sound of the fire for the next few moments. “You should have taught her.”
“I have often thought the same thing in the intervening years. Sometimes I come to your conclusion, but other times I turn the other way. I do not know if I could have prevented what happened to her had I been her teacher in Petre’s stead. He was my most gifted pupil, and I’m sure he’d have been a fine instructor. It is hard to teach one you love, Skate.”