“I know what I’m doing.” Nolo folded his arms over his chest. Inari quirked a brow questioning his statement. The only person he needed to justify his actions to was Jerlo. He was responsible for the Kid’s well-being, not her.
Jerlo cleared his throat and pointed at the papers clutched in Nolo’s offhand. “What’ve you got there?”
“Something the Kid asked for.” Nolo passed the unread pages to his boss who perused them.
“I thought I told him to drop it.” Jerlo shook his head and stuffed the pages into his pocket. “Now I know what caused this.”
“Care to share that rationale?” Inari asked reminding them of her continued presence. She watched both men with her hawk eyes.
Nolo opened his mouth to give his standard reply of ‘Ranger’s business,’ but Jerlo spoke first.
“A sad affair involving some travelers which I told the Kid to forget about since there’s nothing we can do. We were a day late and a few lives short.”
Inari accepted Jerlo's explanation with a grim nod. People died all too often in the wild due to ill luck, disease or unpreparedness.
Jerlo patted his frizz ball and sighed. “What will we do with him?”
“You can’t pawn him and his problems off on busy work. It won’t solve anything. And if you keep this up, you’ll alienate him completely.” Inari met both men’s gazes with a steely one of her own, then she retrieved her bow and returned to the mountain.
Jerlo whistled. “She’s some woman.”
“Yes, she is.” Nolo watched his wife until she vanished behind a rock formation. She was a whole lot more than he’d bargained for ten years ago when he’d wed her.
“We should have Sarn clean up this mess, but he’s been visible enough for one night.” Jerlo kicked a stone; his gaze rested on the target which had fallen on its side. “We can’t leave this mess until morning. I’ve got a meeting down here, and if anyone sees this, it’ll raise too many questions.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Burn it. Get those two,” Jerlo waved in the general direction of the door wardens, “to help you. Impress upon them the danger of speaking about this to anyone. Not even another Ranger, this goes no further.”
“Agreed. What about those pages? He’ll ask if I checked the book.” Nolo pulled out a lumir stone as a shadow fell over them. Gold light illuminated Jerlo, giving his boss a demonic aspect.
“You found nothing, so there’s nothing to tell.”
“You want me to lie to him.” Lie to a kid who could speak only the truth. The idea made Nolo’s heart clench with dread. But he’d lied to the Kid before to protect him.
“I want him to drop this and move on with life. It’s not healthy this obsession he’s nurturing. It stops tonight.”
“No argument here. Do you want me to take care of this now or deal with him?”
“I’ll deal with him. You’re on damage control.” Jerlo turned to go and stopped. “The sixteenth of July—are you planning to be around then?”
“Lord Grecial’s birthday celebration is scheduled for the sixteenth?”
“Yes, but I expect it will change. Don’t make any plans for the last two weeks of July. I’ll need you here for—oh hell, you don’t want to know. It’s madness this spectacle they’re planning. Sheer madness!” Jerlo stalked off grumbling about mad nobles and their ill-timed entertainments.
Whatever Lady Hira planned for her son, it would be a nightmare to secure. It could stay his boss’ headache for a few more weeks while he tried to figure out what to do with Sarn. Inari’s last words repeated like heartburn: you can’t pawn him and his problems off on busy work. It won’t solve anything.
What other choice was there? Nolo looked from the ravaged target to a cairn to the sky. Not even the moon offered any wisdom as she cast her silver eye down on him from a break in the clouds.
Would it help if he took the Kid with him on his rounds? It would give him more time to prize words from the laconic youth, and it might build up some trust. The Kid needed occupation. At this point, Nolo would try anything. But the forest and the Queen of All trees—could he trust either of those entities to leave the Kid alone?
Chapter 19
Sarn woke when two fingers touched his carotid, and swatted the hand away from him. “Don’t touch me.”
“Easy Kid, I'm just making sure you’re breathing. You were stiller than stone, and you look terrible. Don’t you sleep during the day?” Jerlo backed off and parked it on the arm of a flanking chair.
Embroidered dragons glared at Sarn. “Yes, I do.” But his body demanded more sleep than his son allowed.
Bells chimed four times, announcing the shift change. Jerlo’s brow winged up inviting the obvious question.
“It’s four in the morning. Can I go now?”
“You’re physically able to go anytime you wish but you won’t because I haven’t dismissed you. And I won’t until we clear up a few things.” Jerlo folded his arms over his chest and inclined his head.
“What do you want to know?” Sarn rubbed the bridge of his nose. His head felt odd—like someone had stuffed gauze into it after stirring the contents.
“Three things,” Jerlo ticked each point off on his finger. “Why you disobeyed orders—”
“I didn’t. She helped me, and we finished packing them—”
Jerlo gave Sarn a look, silencing him. “I want to examine the stone—”
Sarn pulled the bloodstone out of his pocket and tossed it to his master. He never wanted to see the damned thing again. Its creation was too creepy to contemplate.
Jerlo caught it. “What did you mean when you said, ‘he killed them.'”
“You know who.” Sarn passed a hand over his face and shuddered.
“I wouldn’t ask if I did.”
Sarn struggled to name the nightmare still haunting him, but the syllables twisted on his tongue, changing from ‘Hadrovel’ to ‘I don’t know.’ Memories five years suppressed, ripped open old psychic wounds. Hands seized Sarn dropping him into darkness. Hadrovel’s face appeared framed in a hole in the wall.
“Hey Kid come back to the room. Whatever happened, happened already. Ruminating on it won’t change anything.”
Jerlo's voice cut through the memory dragging the commander’s dragon-themed office back into view. Every reptilian eye fixed on Sarn and he shifted in his chair.
“Sarn, look at me and get your mind out of the past.”
Jerlo’s voice had taken on a compulsive quality and his dark gaze bored into Sarn, yanking out memories of cloaked men. Tenebrous hands gathered every fragment of the memory then withdrew.
When the gaze lock broke, Sarn blinked and slumped against the chair. What were they just discussing? Visits to Jerlo's office always had an underlying reason. What had it been this time? The bells of Mount Eredren struck five startling Sarn.
Jerlo patted him on the shoulder. “Go get something to eat and some rest. You’ve told me what I wanted to know. I’m sure your brother’s missing you by now.”
Nodding, Sarn rose grateful to be vertical again since his backside had gone numb. How long had he sat there? Too long, so he staggered out, pausing when Jerlo called to him.
“Same time tomorrow, be back here.” Jerlo pointed to the floor, meaning his office.
“Twentieth bell?” Sarn hazarded. His head felt stuffed with wool. What the hell had he been doing last night?
“Yes, twentieth bell’s fine.”
Jerlo watched the lanky enigma stagger down a short hallway on unsteady legs. Feeling strange himself, Jerlo rubbed his temples. When he'd met the Kid's glowing eyes, something had happened.
Memories crawled around inside his sieve of a mind, but these new additions belonged to the Kid he'd just dismissed. Could he slide the stolen memory into place and replay it? Something clicked, and his perspective changed.
Hadrovel's miserable eye looked through a chink in a stone wall. “I’ll pull you out when they’re gone. Be silent as
sleeping stone.” The psycho Orphan Master pushed a hand through the hole, but he dodged it. And the sudden movement made him dizzy, so he slid down the wall into a puddle of elbows and knees. Bread, cheese, and a full wineskin landed nearby along with a wadded-up blanket.
"Drink it all. You need the fluids. You have to replace—" Hadrovel broke off, glanced over his shoulder and cursed. But he never explained what the Kid had to replace.
Fitting a stone into the hole, the psycho sealed the Kid in and left him there. A child's hand shot out, broke the loaf in half, and Miren's piping voice offered it to his brother. Jerlo yelped and almost fell out of the memory.
Well, Miren's presence explained how Hadrovel had lured Sarn in there. The stupid Kid would do anything for his ingrate of a brother. Jerlo shook his head, and the sudden movement knocked him out of the Kid's perspective. Crouching down, Jerlo marveled at the verisimilitude.
A teenage Sarn drew back, close to his brother. The Kid had the unfinished look of a teenager, making him fourteen or fifteen at most.
"Who are you?" The Kid clutched his head and struggled to stay upright.
"Nobody important. I'll regret asking this, but are you okay?" Jerlo gestured to the bandage peeking out of the Kid's sleeve.
Sarn clammed up. Some things never changed. Why bleed a mage-gifted Kid? What had Hadrovel gained by such a vile act?
"Why don't you stop them?"
Muffled voices passed through the inelegant stonework walling them in. Maybe even some drumming accompanied the sounds. Since a Kid with damaged hearing had recorded this scene, it was hard to tell.
"Because this already happened. Look, Kid, I didn't find out you existed until you ran away. Don't look so glum. You don't remember this anymore. By some bizarre accident, I stole your memories of this whole event." Jerlo rubbed his temples and pain etched new lines into his brow. "Now I'm stuck in your memory."
"You can't go back?"
"I don't know what I did, so how can I reverse it?"
Chanting interrupted the contemplative silence punctuating his question. The Kid flinched, and their viewpoints merged giving Jerlo an eyeful of the uneven ground. He dug his fingers into the inexpert masonry and pulled himself up to peer through a chink in the cell wall.
Mage-sight rendered the cavern in shades of gray. A white-clad figure lit a forest of candles. Each wick blossomed with a tongue of orange magic. The veiled person finished with the candle-lighting portion of the show and stood up, making eye contact. A gulf of twenty feet separated them.
Bored, Jerlo felt around inside his mind for a way to advance the timeline. While he fiddled with stolen memories, no one was supervising his people. Nor would any of the paperwork piling up on his desk complete itself. All the mucking around pried him loose from the Kid’s viewpoint again.
Jerlo blinked. He stood outside the cylindrical cell in a chest-deep moat. A smart move since the Kid’s magic hated water and Sarn was too drained to knock down a wall.
Free now, Jerlo strolled around the cavern and stopped at one of the thirteen moaning cairns ringing the chamber. Twitching fingers poked out of one rock pile. An eye blinked at him from the heart of another.
Everything outside of the Kid’s point of view blurred as expected. This was Sarn’s memory, not a reenactment put on for his benefit. No matter how hard Jerlo squinted, he could not identify the object crowning each cairn. Likely it was a sigil since symbology played a key role here.
Someone had arranged the candles to form a thirteen-pointed star inside a circle. The symbol was unfamiliar, but the posse of black-robed chanters approaching the flaming sigil greeted it with glad eyes. They ringed the candle-forest as the white-clad sacrifice stepped into its center.
When the chanting reached its crescendo, a wall of sound shoved Jerlo. He fell back into Sarn’s perspective, and the alien words made his stomach crawl up his backbone. Unnatural magic rushed into the working and filth fountained out of it as the sacrifice threw back his or her head and screamed. Pressure built as the working neared its conclusion. Waves of vile magic washed through the cell pushing him down toward a waiting blackness.
Jerlo resisted its undertow and tore free of the Kid, but when he put his eye to the crack, he saw nothing because the Kid had stopped watching and curled into a ball of nauseated misery.
"Did you make him pay for this?" Sarn hissed through clenched teeth as he held to consciousness by a fraying thread.
"You mean Hadrovel?”
Sarn nodded, looking so frail and vulnerable. If only the Kid had fallen into his hands instead of Hadrovel’s. He could have molded such a malleable youngster.
“Yes, the real you saw most of it, though I wish you hadn't." Jerlo shivered at the mention. The execution had gone profoundly wrong. None of Hadrovel's victims should have witnessed that travesty.
"How did they punish him?"
Jerlo caught the Kid’s green-on-green eyes, and everything spun around him. He came to in the doorway to his inner office with the words, "You don't want to know," still on his lips. What had he just witnessed?
Jerlo blinked as the real Sarn turned a corner without a backward glance and disappeared into the mountain. Replaying the Kid’s memory had taken no time at all. "Good day Kid. Stay out of trouble." Shutting his door, Jerlo crossed to a bookcase intent on doing some research. But his gaze snagged on the pages his second had ripped out of the log. Sarn needed to forget the whole thing.
Jerlo picked up a metal bowl and opened the door connecting his inner office to his sitting room. Setting the bowl down on the sill, he cracked open the window and tore up those damn pages. They fell from his fingers into a snowy pile. After pulling on thick gloves, Jerlo removed one of the red lumir stones from the hearth. In less than a minute, a tiny fire bobbed in the breeze. Its orange tongues lapped at the confetti, consigning those pages, and their information, to oblivion's hands.
Smoke curled out of the stained-glass window. Looking to the sky, Jerlo rested his eyes on heaven's cloud-obscured face.
"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned." He bowed his head, and a glimmer in the west caught his eye.
A silver glow rose as the Queen of All Trees summited a mountain. From miles away, she shook her luminous branches at him in mute protest. The enchanted forest shifted, rippling with her frustration.
“Sarn belongs to us you overgrown weed. Find another mage for your schemes.” Jerlo blew out the flames, shook the ashes into a westerly breeze and shut the window. May the wind toss those ashes in the Queen of All Trees’ bark-covered face.
Jerlo returned to his desk and slumped down into his padded chair. What the hell should he do with the Kid? And what should he do about the bizarre power gaze-locking the Kid had unlocked?
Sarn ghosted down the north-south transept. Someone or something had opened his skull and stirred the contents. Could it have been his magic? What had he been doing all night? He rubbed the bridge of his nose where an ache stabbed him right between the eyes.
Only long standing habit gave him a destination—the Middle Kitchen—and a directive—fetch breakfast. He could almost hear his son’s request for sausages, and it became a thread of sanity he clung to as memories of the last three days drifted through his mind. Stars, icy black veils, ghosts, the earth ripping open a mass grave, enchanted trees chasing him—or was that a dream? A whiskered snout poked out of a shadow. He stopped and searched for the rat spying on him, but it scurried between two statues and disappeared.
He remembered Rat Woman and fighting an abomination in a storeroom. Sarn leaned into the wall as his stomach growled. Food might clear out the mental cobwebs. He shoved off the wall and staggered toward breakfast.
Since no one else was stirring at this hour, Sarn kept his eyes open. The corridor passed in a blur of statuary and bas-relief until a section of wall caught his eye. Circles—whole, linked and interrupted—were inlaid in a mosaic ten feet on a side. Since Litherians had used lumir, all the circles glowed like the ones chasing him
in his dream.
Circles were incised on the statues’ bases, the floor tiles, and the buttresses too. None of them wrapped around any stars though. They had to be a piece of the same strange puzzle.
Stay out of this or someone you love dies.
Stay away from what? What had he stumbled onto? Why had a creature appropriated Hadrovel’s likeness to warn him off? Whatever this was, it went beyond the murder of the boy and those hikers. They were part of something worse, and he still had no idea what that worse was.
Steeling himself, Sarn brushed a hesitant finger over a glowing curve, then two and finally his whole hand. He traced the circles, imitating his son’s study of the illustrations yesterday. Not a Fates-damned thing happened.
Disappointed, Sarn ran a hand through his greasy locks, dislodging his hood. He took a second to right his cowl and let his gaze play over nearby carvings for some inspiration. For all he knew, this could have been building since the Litherians occupied this place.
Doubtful since there were no magical menaces left in Shayari, not like in the old tales, thanks to the Seekers. Their centuries-long mage-killing spree had begun with the slaughter of his heroes, the Guardians of Shayari, and continued down through the ages. Extending his hand, he let his fingers hover close to their noble visages. In his heart, the Guardian’s Lament echoed:
On the Queen’s Road, they met their end
in an ambush by the usurper’s men.
They fought for hours on Shayari’s one road.
Too far off for enchanted trees to roam,
so the Guardians had to hold their own.
Outnumbered ten to one, they stained the snow
while on the border, an army knows
no one defends Shayari from their men
Leaving Shayari without a friend
Her borders lay open end to end
There’s no one to raise a sword and defend.
Sarn bowed his head. I would serve you if you’d have me. If only they were alive now. They would know how to untangle the mystery life had thrown at him. But they were gone, and he was stuck unraveling this knot on his own. He let his hand fall back to his side.
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