The Terstan backed away from it, gasping and sweat soaked and holding his useless arm as Abramm came up beside him. Abramm himself was already shivering in reaction to the spawn spore that streaked and spattered his arms and torso. Tens of tiny blisters had reared up where each drop of black blood touched him, tiny points of fire nearly lost in the pain now throbbing from the feyna scar in his wrist.
All around them Dorsaddi appeared out of the mist.
“You need to wash that stuff off,” Trap croaked. He was himself completely untouched by the veren’s blood, the wielding of his power having burned it away as effectively as one of his healing sessions.
“Aye. And you need your arm put back.”
Meridon managed a half chuckle before his eyes caught on something past Abramm’s shoulder and his brow creased. Abramm turned to find the king’s party already upon them, gazes flicking from the dead veren to the two of them, their expressions very close to worship. Indeed, a moment later, the men surrounding the king-Japheth, the two priests, and all the others of his coterie-dropped slowly to their knees. At once the rest of the Dorsaddi followed suit, leaving King Shemm standing alone, leather sling dangling from one hand, longbow in the other. He stared at Trap with a stunned, fixed expression, his swarthy face pale, even in the torchlight. After a long moment he spoke:
“Truly you are the one foretold by the Prophet Eameth. The Deliverer who walks the road of death…. By him the Light will return to the people of the Shield, and by him will kings arise to slay the armies of Darkness.’”
And then Shemm, too, sank to his knees and bowed his head to the pavement. “Holy One, have mercy on us. We have been tricked so many times, suspicion has become our way of life. Any atonement you require we will make.”
Around him his people pressed their heads to the ground in imitation.
Trap frowned. “I don’t want your sacrifices,” he said sharply. “I am only a man like the rest of you. Stand and face me.”
At first Shemm did not move. Then, hesitantly, he raised his head and at length got to his feet. “You may be a man,” the Dorsaddi said, “but you carry the fire of Sheleft’Ai.”
As can any one of you who asks.”
Shemm frowned. “Your words dance the edge of blasphemy, Great One. How can we obtain the power of a god?”
Trap raised his hand and a small white orb appeared on it.
Abramm flinched-his mouth went dry and sour. Fire and Torment! Not this. Anything but this!
“‘I will grant you my Light by the blood of my Son,’” Trap quoted from the Second Word. ” And it will dwell in your hearts and give you life. Reach out, therefore, and close your hand about it that you may live and that my power may become yours.’”
Torches hissed and sputtered in the breathless silence.
Shemm’s dark glance flicked up to Trap’s. Hesitantly he reached out and plucked the glowing sphere from the air. He turned it round and round in his fingertips, staring at it as if it held all the truths of life.
Abruptly his fingers wrapped around it, quenching its pale light. A rush of tingling rode the air, and as with Whazel, as with Shettai, a golden shield appeared on the Dorsaddi’s hairy chest, glittering between the edges of his robe.
A susurration of astonishment arose from those around him, a rising murmur as word was passed to those who could not see.
Shemm stared at his now empty hand, then at his chest, and touched the shield with tentative fingers. He looked back up, his jaw slack beneath his cropped beard. “I … I … it is a miracle,” he whispered.
“How may I receive this power?” Japheth asked, stepping forward, his yellow eyes pale in the ruddy light.
`And I?” the priest Mephid echoed.
“I as well,” pleaded the other, Nahal.
Men and women crowded forward, jostling against Abramm, nudging him back out of their way.
Shemm looked to Meridon. “Will you conjure the little orbs for them?”
Meridon smiled. “You can conjure them yourself, my king. Merely remember and call them to life.”
The Dorsaddi glanced at his fellows. Silence fell once more upon the gathering. Shemm’s gaze left Trap and unfocused as he concentrated. Moments later a single white globe appeared, floating in the air above him. Others followed quickly, hovering over the group, tens of them, their soft white light reflecting off the wildly churning mists.
Out in the city somewhere, the roar-moan sounded again, more distant than before and almost mournful. None of the Dorsaddi seemed to notice.
Japheth reached up first; the others followed suit. Golden shields sprang into being right and left, glittering against flesh that moments earlier had been unmarked. Power crackled in the air, thick and heady, raising the hairs on Abramm’s neck, the feyna scars writhing like liquid fire in his wrist.
He withdrew, trembling, an icy claw pulling at his gut. People surged forward around him, and more orbs bloomed overhead. He staggered free of the press to join the ring of those who watched in astonishment from the fringes, drew back even from them, until he found himself with the mound between him and the spectacle unfolding in the plaza.
Yet still that white light washed over him, close, as close as his own—
He looked down, saw the stone blazing against his breastbone, right where that golden shield would lie should he desire it. Suddenly panicked, he yanked it over his head and held it away from him with pounding heart. With his free hand he groped at his chest to be sure there was no shield.
What was happening? Why was it glowing like that? Was it the proximity to the others? It must be. He certainly wanted nothing to do with it! What he had just seen proved it was not of Eidon. That all those people could just … just receive it like that with no regard for their worth or righteousness. It was clearly evil.
He should throw it away now. The protection it offered him was not worth the risk.
And yet he did not move. Already it had him in its spell. How could something evil be so beautiful? How could it seem so right and true, so full of goodness and light and life? How could it pull at him like this, remind him so much of what blazed through that woven wall in his dreams, beyond which Shettai lived and laughed and talked … with Eidon?
Suddenly he realized that even after all that had happened, he still wanted to believe that Eidon lived, that he was good and true and gracious, that he was indeed the ruler of all, that he still held Abramm’s life in his hands. For a moment he glimpsed that mysterious man with the scarred face and gentle eyes watching him, waiting for him to respond, to take the gift that was offered….
His wrist wrenched hard, as if the worms of spore had suddenly expanded to twice their size. He realized then that he was touching the orb with his free hand, stroking the blazing surface with a finger, exactly as Whazel had done, exactly as Shettai had done. Cold horror blasted through him as he jerked it away.
Get rid of this! Get rid of it now, before it enspels you even further!
Without a second thought he slung the chain hard, the orb carving an arc of light across the darkness and vanishing.
He stared after it, shaking and panting, aghast at what he had almost done-and even so, fighting the irrational urge to run after it. Reeling from the waves of grinding pain that throbbed out of his left side, he swallowed down bile and fought to stay standing, his limbs wobbling like gelatin. He still hadn’t washed off the veren’s poison, and there was the wound the beast had dealt his shoulder, as well, festering already. He needed help, needed Trap, who was the last man on earth he wanted to see now.
Maybe if he just got away, just found a place to wash himself or maybe just to lie down for a time….
He staggered around the mound, back among the Dorsaddi again, all of them jabbering excitedly. Golden shields glimmered on every chest, everywhere he looked.
Suddenly they all stopped talking and looked at him. He stared back through a haze of pain and confusion. Why were they staring at him like that? And why was there sudd
enly all this light? Surely it wasn’t dawn already.
He saw the eyes of those nearest him widen, saw their faces pale and their mouths drop open as they stepped back, still staring, though not at him.
A horrible metallic shriek sounded behind him, and he turned to find the sun had somehow come to hover directly atop the mound. Flinging up an arm against the brilliance, he reeled away from it, as if it had struck him a physical blow.
“The Heart!” someone cried. “He has awakened the Heart!”
Abramm had one startled moment of understanding, followed by a new eruption of the poison in his body, and that was the last he saw.
C H A P T E R
33
The old Terstan’s hand bit into Abramm’s skinny arm, jerking him around. Though he was crippled and bent almost double, he still loomed over Abramm, blind eyes fixed upon him with unnerving accuracy. His gold shield glimmered on his chest, and the curd of an advanced case of the sarotis oozed over his lids and dribbled down seamed cheeks. He bent closer, shoving his face into Abramm’s, the curd quivering, the sickly sweet stench of it making Abramm gag. `Answer me, boy?” he rasped.
But Abramm yelled and twisted free—
And found himself in a sandy arena, bathed in a white spotlight amidst a darkness filled with whispers. Zamath stepped out of the shadow before him, the red light of his amulet glinting off the sword in his hand. He cackled and bared his pointed teeth as he approached.
Abramm drew his own sword and dropped to ready position, eager to fight and confident of victory. But then Zamath turned into Beltha’adi, who laughed and mocked him. “You think that mark will save you? Fool? It has already killed you?”
Startled, Abramm looked down to find a gold shieldmark shining on his own chest, then blinked at the sudden obstruction in his eye. White curd plopped onto his hand, and when he felt, trembling, at his face, he found his eyes billowing with a wet, sticky, globular goo.
Beltha’adi laughed again and, Commanding him to immobility with a deep bellow, attacked. His sword flashed up through the darkness, then changed to an ax as it came down, chopping deep into Abramm’s arm.
He awoke, gasping and shaking and sick to his stomach. Frantically he felt for his arm, found it whole and hale, though the scar at his wrist throbbed with a vengeance. Nor did he wear a Terstan’s shield. It was only another dream.
He thought he’d had a lot of them recently, but he didn’t remember waking up between them. Certainly he didn’t remember waking up here.
He lay on a straw-filled pallet in a windowless chamber, clad only in soft cotton britches, his chest and feet bare beneath a scratchy woolen blanket. An oil lamp sputtered atop a low table near the pallet; its ruddy light danced off plastered walls and the pale folds of a curtained doorway beyond his feet. From outside came a metallic clinking and the murmur of voices. From an even greater distance, goats maaaed.
Where am I?
Besides his wrist, his head and ribs ached, but he had no other pains, though he thought he should.
Frowning at the plastered ceiling, he groped past the dream images for real memories-the veren’s death, the Dorsaddi’s mass conversion, the rising of the Heart….
Had that really happened?
He touched his temple, as if he might physically pull the memories from the fog in which they hid. He had been wounded, covered with poison, and the poison had made him sick. He remembered that. But there was something more. Something important, something even more disturbing and frightening.
The pulse of his blood throbbed in his ears as he lay staring at the mosaic of cracks and watermarks above him. Then, hesitantly this time, his hand slid again over the flat plane of his belly, across his chest, up to his throat. There was no chain, no magical stone. He really had thrown it away. After nearly making himself a Terstan.
Nausea swirled through him as his fingers went back to the hard flat bone over his heart, assuring himself once more that no golden shield lay there, assuring himself he really had escaped its power. But Khrell’s Fire? He had come so very close.
He closed his eyes, shuddering with relief. No wonder he’d had that awful dream.
The door curtain stirred, and a boy stuck his head into the room, lamp light gleaming off the shieldmark on his chest. Even one so young as that could be changed! The boy blinked at him with dark, hard eyes whose inscrutability reminded him painfully of Shettai. Then he was gone, the curtains swaying in his wake.
Shettai. That last look on her face, of wonder and joy. “It is so beautiful….”
And she, too, wore a shield.
He thought he knew, at least in part, what she had seen. And it was beautiful. And, saints help him, in spite of everything, in spite of all he knew and all he’d seen, part of him still wanted it.
“I have fallen to deception once already,” he whispered to the ceiling. “How can I even think of doing it again?”
Because it may not be deception this time, a quiet voice in his mind responded.
For a moment he could not breathe, feeling poised at the brink of a terrible epiphany. It can’t be that easy. It can’t.
What if it is?
He swallowed. What of the sarotis? You can’t forget that. The dream of the old man had held more of reality than imagination. He had met that horrid crone, had been caught by him, threatened by him, had seen that awful, stinking curd. Nor was the man the only one affected. How could Eidon be in anything that causes such wretchedness and suffering?
Trap does not have the sarotis, said the quiet mental voice.
Not yet. But it is only a matter of time.
Perhaps. But how do you explain the rest of it, then? The protection? The penetration of the Shadow’s illusions? The shield and the healing?
Deception! All deception. It had to be.
His headache was growing worse, aggravated by the shifting kaleidoscope of his thoughts. He wanted to reach in and wrestle them to order, to demand they make sense of themselves, but the demanding only made his head hurt more.
He shut his eyes and gave up. Later, he told himself. When he was clearheaded it would make sense.
It was some time before he opened his eyes again and sat up. The room spun. Crossing his legs before him, he propped his elbows on his thighs, holding his head in his palms. His mouth tasted horrible, and he felt dirty and sticky. He speared fingers through his hair. Thick and oily, it hung past his shoulders in a tangled mass that would be a nightmare to comb. And this well-grown stubble on his jaw … How long had he been asleep?
Ah, so you’re finally back.” A Dorsaddi youth entered carrying a tray of flatbread and tea. And just in time, too.”
He set the tray on the table beside Abramm’s pallet, then rocked back on his heels, waving at the food. “I’ll wager you’re starving.”
For the first time Abramm realized he was indeed. His stomach burbled as if on cue, and he frowned, still fingering the stubble. “How long was I out?”
“Four days. The fever broke last night.”
“Four days?”
The other nodded. “In an hour, if you keep this down, you can have more.”
“Four days,” Abramm muttered again. A lot could happen in four days. Especially after … “What did you mean `just in time’?” He reached for the flatbread.
The youth’s chest swelled and Abramm noticed then how the slitted neckline of his tunic had been deepened and the flaps sewn back to reveal his Terstan shield. “With the Heart awakened,” he said, “we mean to retake Jarnek and drive out the Army of the Black Moon?” He bowed. “I will tell the Deliverer you have awakened.”
Alone again, Abramm crunched the hard bread, sluicing away its dryness with sips of tea as he thought. So that was the Heart, then. It really had happened. He pushed the memory away, shivering. And Jarnek? That was the northernmost Dorsaddi city on the main road through Hur, first to fall in the original conquest. The place Beltha’adi had sent those two Hundreds in preparation for his final invasion.
The Hundreds should have arrived nearly a week ago. Could the Dorsaddi possibly have held them back this long? And what did the awakening of the Heart have to do with it? Was it just a morale booster, or was it more?
He found a pale robe hanging on a peg beside the pallet and shrugged it on, then slipped through the curtained doorway. A short, vaulted corridor led to a spacious chamber plastered in a salmon hue and carpeted with an ancient Sorite rug. It was, Abramm realized at once, one of those rugs rarely seen anymore, woven with thread of gold and sturdy wool dyed with the rich carnelian that was derived solely from a worm native to Sori. A worm said to have gone extinct at least a century ago.
Low benches scattered the room beneath ornate hanging oil lamps, and one whole wall was an arcade of arched openings hung with wind chimes and sculptures of colored glass, glowing in the light of the sun outside.
Yes. The sun.
Abramm strode to the window in astonishment and stared at the valley that cradled ruined Hur. Blue sky arced in a glorious vault overhead; sunlight washed over the red-and-ochre cliffs encircling the city, bathing the gold-andsalmon stone of its broken buildings and reflecting off the pale pavement of its great plaza. The great orb stood above it all, blazing on its stanchions, a miniature sun in itself. Even from here it caught at him, its power singing through his soul, reminding him, inviting him—
He looked away, aghast that he could be so vulnerable, even without the stone on his breast. Truly he had worn it too long.
A herd of goats browsed along the near edge of the promenade that stretched away in front of him. Chickens scratched at weeds that had grown inexplicably green and vigorous. The vines along the walls, no more than thick bare stems last time he had seen them, now wore a mantle of vigorous, bright green growth, and the olive trees lining the promenade sported dense crowns of shiny new leaves. Birds chattered and fluttered in their branches.
Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) Page 37