The Forgotten (The Lost Words: Volume 3)

by Igor Ljubuncic

  “Do not move,” he told her and exited the hut.

  The world outside was gray, cloudy. Calemore looked up and saw a large bird perching on the thatch, ogling him with its garnet eyes. It was mostly black, with white spots on its feathers. In a way, the bird resembled a raven, only it was much bigger. He knew for a fact that no one else in these realms had ever seen it before.

  The bird had flown all the way from Naum, drawn by his magic. It was called Lavea.

  Calemore extended his hand, and Lavea hopped onto his sleeve, gripping tightly with its long claws. There was enough strength in those talons to shred through the flesh and bone of an average man, but not his. The White Witch wove his hand behind the wings, following the thin cords of a leather harness strapped to its powerful body. He fished a message from the pouch.

  The bird perched, balancing, bobbing, flapping its wings and tail, while Calemore unfurled the paper and read. A wicked smile began to creep onto his lips.

  Done reading, he tossed the paper in the snow. Then, he spread his arms in a whiplike motion. Lavea took off, beating its wings in large, mighty strokes, rising in a spiral, then heading north, back home. He had infused it with enough magic to sustain it through the snowstorms without food.

  His army was on the move, coming to conquer the Old Land.

  Now, the tide would turn in his favor.

  The surviving deity might be crafty and quickly adapting to the human reality, but his tricks and luck were no match to what Calemore planned. While the realms had festered in their ignorance and decay for centuries, behind the Veil, he had bred a nation of slaves that obeyed him. An army that still believed the war with the gods was raging.

  Well, in a way, it was.

  He had not really intended to move the forces of Naum south, but Damian had ruined it all when he veered from their original design. Now, Calemore had no choice. The faith was strengthening at an alarming rate, and he had to stop it, even if that meant exterminating everyone in these cursed lands. He would finally finish what he had started so long ago.

  Calemore entered the cabin. Nigella was waiting, posing, looking somewhat bored. He continued as if nothing had happened.

  “Did you kill Rob?” she asked him.

  Gutsy, persistent, he thought. And yet, she had been hiding her whole life, wandering from one abuser to another, from one failure and rejection to a new one. Strange, how these humans lived. If she ever bothered to mold her courage into something useful, she could have anything she wanted.

  “Yes, I did,” he replied.

  “Did he suffer?” Nigella said at some length.

  He pursed his lips. “Not at all. He died instantly. Having your heart ripped out of your chest usually does the trick.” He recalled some of Damian’s inventions from the first war. Well, not all things died easily.

  There was something like relief on her face, resignation mixed with a sad kind of closure. If she had thought the man’s death would bring her satisfaction, she was now pondering what kind of emotion the news did evoke. There was rancid pleasure there, too, no doubt. He liked that. He would have been very disappointed if there had been only guilt.

  If ever there was a woman worthy of sharing his side, it was this bucktoothed one.

  That was a stupid, useless thought, and he banished it instantly. He had to focus on defeating the surviving god and making himself into one. After that, everything would be simpler. There was one little uncertainty wavering at the back of his mind. What kind of emotion would becoming a god evoke in him? Would it be as glorious as he had imagined all these thousands of years?

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You could have told me you wanted him to suffer. I could have sorted that out,” he added with wicked glee. “Any amount of pain.”

  Her face was impassive. “It would make no difference. But he deserved death.”

  Calemore chose another brush and began drawing the pale shadow under her breasts. He still needed her. He needed her to tell him what the future would be like. With his vast armada en route, he was feeling far more confident about his success. The army alone should be enough to defeat the god. Still, he would leave no chance of random strokes of bad luck.

  Besides, he liked being here. Such a dangerous, human thought.

  He painted.

  CHAPTER 46

  Jarman wished he had ten years to convince James and Amalia that the threat of total destruction was real. Alas, he only had an unknown number of weeks or months, and so far, his scholarly approach, no matter how well bolstered by Lucas’s experience, was failing.

  Maybe he was a bad herald of doom; maybe the threat was just too vast to grasp.

  Maybe coming to Athesia and seeking the offspring of the late Emperor Adam had been a mistake.

  One thing was sure, the things he had studied and assumed and guessed at the Temple of Justice were not quite like the reality. Jarman had thought he’d known about Calemore and his weapons, about Adam’s involvement in divine affairs, about magic and how it concerned his children. Time and distance lent everything a shine that became a liability during war.

  Well, it was partly his fault. He had assumed everyone used logic the same way he did. Living among wizards for so long had blunted his judgment when it came to ordinary people and how they perceived the world. They did not have his understanding of history, of magic, of seemingly unrelated events and legends long forgotten. He was no longer able to think like a common man, and that clouded his ability to convey the urgency of his message.

  Now, he was trying to convince the young, frightened brother and sister to put aside all they knew, all they had striven for, and blindly believe in a wild, exaggerated tale of death. Being someone’s adviser did not imply trust, he was learning to his dismay. On the contrary, his insistence seemed to cause even more suspicion and misgivings, distancing James and Amalia away from him, from his goals. He was not sure how to amend the situation without rendering even more damage.

  Time trickled away, bringing Calemore even closer.

  Jarman was sitting on an icy rock, ignoring the cold bloom in his buttocks, watching a fat townswoman clean wolf pelts in the snow. She had big, chubby arms, and fat spilled around the strained folds in her clothes. They’d had a respite from snowfall in the past few days, and everyone was using the opportunity to air their musty homes, scrape mud off tools and boots, and stock up on fresh supplies. With the army maintaining its presence everywhere around the town, Ecol was bursting with activity and trade.

  If he trained his eye away from the fat lady, he saw vast fields ruined beyond recognition by the presence of so many legions and their followers, temporary shelters and tent cities turning into permanent, ugly scars. Frantic repair was being done at the southern fort, and the soldiers were deploying additional defenses against the Red Caps’ raids. Two low walls of stakes had been erected around the town’s wider perimeter, enclosing the mines, and there were a dozen towers, growing like trees, gaining a fresh foot of timber on their toothy canopy every day. In Ecol, anyone deft enough to hold a hammer without crushing their thumbs was hard at work in the smithies, forging new swords and armor plates for the defenders.

  Jarman could so easily stop the bloodshed, he knew. He could interfere, use his magic to halt the killing. But that would be wrong and immoral. He was not here to help James and Amalia defeat the Parusites. On the contrary, he was here to unite them as one nation against the White Witch. The way things were, the best way to achieve that would be to make Adam’s children swear fealty to King Sergei, under some very favorable terms. Using his magic to fight the Red Caps went against everything he strove for.

  But if he did nothing, the continental people would continue butchering one another. James had an excuse to ignore divine matters and focus on defeating the Parusites. It served his interests all too well, both as a diversion and the chief goal of his campaign. Amalia probably harbored a deep grudge, and he could not blame her if she wanted to see her father’s empire libe
rated. Even if she should have known better.

  King Sergei and Princess Sasha were merely continuing their conquest, trying to secure all of Athesia. With each battle, Sasha’s efforts turned bolder, crueler, more violent. She seemed confident in her success, and with each day, it was becoming harder for Jarman to wage peace between the two factions.

  Each day, Calemore’s armies drew closer.

  He saw Lucas approaching, walking in big, efficient strides, his purple robe a striking color in the dull, white-and-gray-swathed world. In the past few weeks, his friend had been busy guarding the town from magical attacks. They still did not know why Calemore had killed that Caytorean, and that meant he might return any day for more death.

  Rob’s death was a worrying, unexpected event. Why him? Why the investor? What made him special? Why had the White Witch targeted him specifically? True, from his perspective, humans were probably worthless vermin, not that much different from one another. But Calemore must have known that Rob had served a relatively minor function in James’s retinue. Killing him served no special purpose. Unless the witch had not known anything about Adam’s children.

  Which was impossible, because he had taken the blood-staff from Amalia.

  So why had he not bothered to kill her? Or James?

  Did he not see them as a threat? Or maybe he did, but he was not worried. Maybe he thought keeping them alive would serve his interests more efficiently. Indeed, James and Amalia were diverting all their efforts to this war against the Red Caps. Every new death was one soldier less to fight against the White Witch. As far as he was concerned, an all-out war in the realms would be the ideal case.

  Lucas reached him and stood looking at the town, at its haze of soot and gray smoke. “The wards had not been disturbed. No sign of tampering. They are untouched. The White Witch has not returned since, and it does not seem likely he will return.”

  Puzzling, annoying. This was the kind of mental game for Armin Wan’der Markssin, the greatest investigator of all time. For Jarman, a man slightly out of sync with worldly affairs, this was a pesky nuisance.

  “What more can I do to convince them?” the young wizard said with some exasperation.

  Lucas did not turn to regard him. “Men will believe what they want to believe.”

  Jarman rose from the frigid rock, feeling passionate. “But there must be a way.”

  “Tell them everything,” the slave suggested.

  Some of the ardor fled Jarman. “No, not that.”

  Lucas shrugged, a very unusual gesture on his behalf. “As long as you feed them only pieces, they will patch together the rest the best way they can. You can’t expect the continental people to understand magic, not after being removed from it for many thousands of years.”

  “What about the bloodstaff?” That was still a mystery to him. He wished Amalia would tell him, but she was secretive and mistrusting. He could not really blame her. But she knew things, things he had not read in the books at the temple, things he had not seen in his dreams. She was a direct link to her father’s legacy.

  He let out a rush of air, trying to calm himself down, trying to suppress the sense of urgency that made him queasy. He had thought James would be the favorite child, the one with all the answers, but the man seemed to be only an unnecessary distraction. He merely served as leverage to keep Amalia away from divulging her secret knowledge.

  That brought him back to the memory of that Eybalen investor, lying in the snow, his chest a red ruin. What was so special about a Caytorean man to warrant a targeted death by the bloodstaff?

  Lucas had a theory. It had to do with what he’d sensed about Rob.

  “We should have gone to King Sergei,” Jarman added after a while. After learning that James and his sister would not be convinced, they should have tried to petition the Parusite ruler.

  “He would have been even more likely to dismiss your story. If not Adam’s offspring, then who?”

  Jarman knew his friend was right. He nodded hesitantly, thoughts rolling. “I am desperate, Lucas.”

  The old Anada did look at him now, his face stern. “Perhaps we need to let these continental folks play out their wicked games. Perhaps they will be convinced once the armies of Naum pour into their homeland.”

  “It will be too late then,” Jarman protested weakly.

  Lucas blinked slowly. “It is never too late.”

  Jarman locked his eyes on a vague point in the horizon. “It is amazing how people can be ignorant, selective about their past. You would think they would have learned from the history books how to avoid having to repeat the same grisly errors, to fight the same pointless wars. Even now, with disaster lurking, they choose to invest themselves in their petty schemes and feuds. They would rather see the world burn than give up on their ego.”

  Lucas did flash a smile now, but it was so quick Jarman thought he had imagined it. “Jarman, you are here because of your own personal vendetta. Do not forget that.”

  “I am trying to save the realms!”

  “Yes, you are,” Lucas agreed. “That is true.” He turned toward Ecol. “Do not expect people to see beyond the span of their lives. Even someone who can grasp the next decade is considered a visionary. Emperor Adam may have been one, and he had magic at his side. Maybe, he misjudged. The time of peace he wanted is now.”

  Jarman sighed. “So, we will see petty human needs decide the world’s fate?”

  Lucas did not move. “Or petty divine needs.”

  “What can we do?”

  “For the continental people, the wars between the gods and goddesses are not their past. They no longer remember those times. They do not know anything about what happened back then, and they do not understand the last war twenty years ago either. There will always be a disaster hanging above humanity, and the humans will always rush to their own rescue at the last moment. Such is the nature of our race, Sirtai, Caytorean, or nomad. We may be blessed with better laws, more science and magic, but we, too, are the victims of the same shortcomings.”

  “We separated from the Old Land because we did not want a part in their pointless wars,” Jarman said.

  Lucas started walking toward the burned fort. “Maybe, maybe not. We will never know the little doubts and fears our ancestors shared. But I am convinced they were not much different from James and Amalia. You must give them a chance. You are asking them to forfeit everything they know and everything they are, Jarman. Would you do the same in their place?”

  “If I understood the reality, yes,” he ventured.

  “Then go home to Tuba Tuba. We will return to our islands and stay apart from the realms, as we have always done. It will not be much different from the First Age. The gods and humans of the Old Land will fight their war. Someone will win. Maybe the humans, maybe Calemore.”

  “They will be destroyed without magic,” Jarman pleaded.

  “We do not know that for certain,” Lucas spoke as he followed the frozen road.

  Jarman recalled seeing that half Sirtai near the mayor’s inn. He thought of Rob’s death. He recalled what Lucas thought he’d seen in the man before his demise. Maybe, maybe the continental people could defeat Calemore. It sounded unlikely, but they probably still had some gods. And their Special Children might come forward in the hour of need.

  Lucas and he were the only pieces that did not belong here.

  Oh, but he had unfinished business in the realms.

  Damian would pay for the death of his third mother. So would Calemore.

  The closer they got to the blackened fortifications, the livelier it became. Soldiers and craftsmen were working hard, some with sweat staining their vests and a layer of frost thickening on the wet clothes. Mules and oxen labored, drawing carts full of metal and fresh logs. Even dogs were busy, dragging sleds behind them.

  Jarman was surprised to see town children running over cleared rubble and snow mounds, some helping, some playing, throwing snowballs at one another, racing with sleighs. For them, the
horrors of war were an experience you could put away, even if just for a few hours of carefree fun. Jarman wished he could share their sentiment.

  Both the emperor and the empress were there, with an invisible shield protecting them from magical weapons in addition to a useless human shield. A flock of officers was hanging nearby, whispering advice, trying to look important and busy. Like everyone else, they had their own personal agenda, and it came first.

  There was no real reason for any of the brass to supervise the repairs. But with half the legions deployed at the battle lines at all times, soldiers sleeping in windy tents and eating cold food, and the threat of a new Red Caps assault imminent, they felt it was good for morale to partake in the suffering. A very misplaced emotion.

  How could he convince the brother and sister to abandon this folly and move north? How?

  One thing reality was teaching him, a cruel lesson he had never learned in Tuba Tuba, was that books always had easy solutions to problems. When you mixed in the human soup of doubt, lies, greed, and simple stupidity—unpredictability and luck took over. He had spent ten years championing intellect and common sense as his best weapons. Now he was learning a lesson in reality.

  Life had no simple solutions. He had invested all his skill trying to ascend the ladder of hierarchy among the Anada wizards to become an ever better scholar, a more talented magic wielder. Perhaps he should have been focusing on the little things: how to make people do what you wanted, make them change their creed for your sake? Could that be done? Ever?

  “Men like to rebuild what was destroyed. It keeps them busy,” Lucas said.

  “Then we must wait for Calemore to descend upon the realms before these people will unite?”

  Lucas lifted a finger. “They might unite then. Might.”

  Jarman sighed wearily. “What do we do, friend?”

  The Anada wizard turned, his face hard. “We try to solve this like your father would have done. Why would Calemore want to kill an Eybalen fop?”