The Forgotten (The Lost Words: Volume 3)

by Igor Ljubuncic

  Jarman felt his mind racing. “What is a half Sirtai doing in James’s camp?” he retorted.

  Lucas stepped closer. “Like Armin used to say, it all begins with the first murder. All the questions and answers we need about the gods and goddesses and their Special Children and all these folks, we will have them once we unravel this story.”

  The story that had made Lucas a life slave. Jarman nodded.

  CHAPTER 47

  For the first time in months, Ewan was alone. Naman was sick with fever and coughing. Some old woman was taking care of him, making him chew willow bark and drink elm tea. That left the king of the Oth Danesh without a translator and without much company.

  On his own, Ewan racked his brain, thinking, reliving every moment since coming out of the Abyss, trying to figure out what purpose his life had. He remembered the early days in Eybalen and meeting Constance; he remembered traveling with her through Caytor. Then, he recalled that monumental encounter with the pirates near Monard and the deadly game of Sleeper, when his life had taken yet another new spin.

  He tried to find logic in the legends this strange, divided nation had, but could not find any. They had no names for their cities, for their foes, they would not let their mariners step inland, and those who dwelled far from the sea would not venture north. Crazy.

  The Pains of Memory was not any better. A collection of morbid stories that chilled his soul. He still did not believe those ugly words described some past life of his. He refused to believe that. Still, he clung to the bits and pieces that seemed understandable, tried to figure out the ancient truth behind the old texts.

  He was not very good at reading in Oth Danesh yet, so he refrained from opening the books. Instead, he spent his time touring Kamar Doue, watching people cringe away from him. Day after day, no matter what he did, they kept fearing him on an almost religious level. A deep primal fear, laced with revulsion, the kind of thing that shocked you when you saw it etched on someone’s pale, bloodless face.

  The first flowers had broken through the winter crust, tiny, sad snowdrops making a white blanket of their own. There were patches of sodden brown earth showing. The nights were not as cold as they used to be, and the city was livelier and smellier. Ewan wished he could at least pretend to enjoy the stench of cooking and eating the stale cabbage and the touch of frost on his skin. But even those sensations were denied him. Love, friendship, the caress of nature. He understood them, because he knew he had once felt them. And sometimes, his invulnerable body would yield an odd tinge, reminding him of his long-lost humanity. Still, most of the time, he was a ghost walking through another’s world.

  His footsteps always led him to that magic-made lake, where he stood and stared toward the far shore, his eyes vaguely focused on the center. Sometimes he saw a ripple stir the surface; sometimes the wind chased the tiny wavelets. Now and then, a fishing boat would slice through his vision. Inexorably, he gazed at the leaden surface, trying to figure out its mystery.

  There was more to it than just a defeat.

  More than the last stand of his champion. Something else.

  He rolled the paragraphs from The Pains of Memory through his head. For some reason, he remembered every passage all too well. He could hear Naman droning, his voice dry and raspy and his tongue swollen.

  There is hope when the night returns. There is hope when the champion is born again. He shall be the king’s hand; he shall slay. Destroy those that cannot be killed. Scythe those who oppose his rise. In the blood of the fallen, he will seed the future. Through death, reap power. The king awaits his champion. In his hand, the scepter, from the muddy darkness.

  Ewan watched fishermen return to shore. They saw him and paddled away, toward a distant beach. Ewan shook his head.

  Stay here and await the king. Count the years and remember the defeat. No one will venture past the curtain of treason. No one will speak or see until the king returns. His champion will wait to present him with his scepter, for a king cannot rule without one.

  Maddening, stupid riddles. Worst of all, Ewan could not figure out what his role really was, according to these books. Was he supposed to fight someone? Wage a war against an ancient foe? The Pains of Memory did not name his enemy, so how could he really fight it, even if he wanted to? Was this some kind of a cruel mind trick? Or did those writing the books omit the names by vicious necessity?

  That pirate Toraan had told him he was promised to them, but there was nothing that tied Ewan to the memories. Nothing that mentioned him in any way. The chapters rambled about the king and his glory, his return and his revenge, and the champion that awaited him to present him with some gift. Any lunatic could have written that, and hundreds or thousands of years later, people shaped their lives based on a moment of madness.

  Ewan rubbed his temples. A man from the legends. They thought he was the man from the legends, because he had defeated a pirate in a game of Sleeper.

  A game of Sleeper…

  He froze.

  What if Naman’s translations were wrong or just figurative? What if the texts were deliberately vague to deny any enemy from understanding and interpreting them correctly? Muddy darkness? What was there? Where could one find mud and darkness at the same time?

  At the bottom of a lake.

  Where only the hale can crawl…

  Hale, healthy? Strong? With strong lungs? Crawl, perhaps they had meant swim? Crawling was not much unlike swimming.

  The lake, the lake. The place where the king’s champion had died, destroyed by powerful magic, so vast that it had upended this gigantic bowl of rock and scattered debris for miles around, shaping these hills and riverbeds.

  A thought occurred to him.

  Ewan undressed, let the white clothes the Oth Danesh had given him slither to the wet pebbles. He stepped into the lake, the icy water sloshing round his toes and ankles. But he was not cold. He only remembered what the cold used to feel like back at the monastery, when he and his friends Adrian and Tomas had dipped naked into the stream in the middle of winter, laughing and screaming breathlessly. Those were memories from his previous life.

  He slipped into the water and began to swim with slow, deliberate strokes, advancing toward the lake’s center. At the beach, a small crowd had gathered, watching him. Men in their little boats stopped trawling the nets and stared, curiosity mixed with terror in their big eyes. No one could predict what their king might do now. Even Ewan did not know what he would do.

  He reached the spot where he thought he remembered that Oth Danesh drowning. Taking an unneeded gulp of air, more on instinct than need, he pulled his knees close to his chest, bowled over, and dipped below the surface. The world turned blurred and gray. Less than a pace away, the water became murky and impenetrable. There was a definite feel of silt between his fingers, stirred by underwater currents from the rivers flowing into the lake.

  Ewan began diving, lugging great gushes of water with his hands behind him. Small fish that lived in the cold depths slithered away from him. The light began to fade, until he was surrounded by a brown darkness. A muddy kind of darkness.

  Blind, he plowed onward, long past the limits of a human body. Any other swimmer would have given up by now, or died from exposure, or had his lungs burst. Not him. He could endure this forever, if needed. As long as it took. He kept diving, fairly certain he was almost vertical and maintaining his course toward the center of the lake’s bottom.

  Suddenly, his hands slammed into sand. He felt a curtain of grains snake over his skin, a strange, unexpected, welcome sensation. Gently, he lowered his feet, and they sunk in the soft sediment. Still, he could not see anything, not around, not above. So, he let his magical instinct guide him.

  Like some slow-moving drunkard, he weaved left and right, making small crablike steps, shuffling over the lake’s bottom. Then, his foot tripped against something slim and hard. He bent down further, without haste, making sure he did not disturb too much water around him. That would only make him wob
ble and maybe scatter whatever he had found. Time was of no essence, but his former human instincts wouldn’t let him waste any.

  His hand closed around a calcified length of wood, overgrown with some lake growth. It was two fingers thick, slightly bent, about a foot long. Then, his fingers found another—and another. All connected. He yanked the strange object from its resting place and brought it close to his own chest. And then, he understood what he was holding.

  A human rib cage.

  Soon, his fingers found other bones, a whole skull, the long hipbone and its ball-like joint. He paced around some more, and there, he stepped over the remains of another human.

  An hour later, he had mapped perhaps a dozen bodies, all within a hundred paces from one another. They were never quite whole, the pieces scattered by eddies and hungry lake creatures. Some had a thick layer of polyps growing on them; others were more recent, smoother. Victims from the yearly suicide attempt to become the king’s champion, Ewan thought sourly.

  But he was not interested in the skeletons. He was looking for something else. So he began to dig with his palms, pushing sand and small rocks and weeds away. It was an agonizingly slow effort, but he could afford it. After so long, doing something useful made him almost joyous.

  Later, much later, his fingers brushed against a harder layer of earth. It felt like solid rock. No. He could feel crevasses around individual blocks, could move them. Peeling layer after layer of sharp, jagged stone, he dug deeper. At one point, his gut feeling told him he was looking in the wrong spot, so he left it there and slithered to a new location, starting anew. He had no idea how much time he spent disturbing the lake’s bottom.

  Then, his hand closed on a piece of metal. He was certain of it. Temporary blindness heightened his sense of touch, and he knew the chunk in his hand was metal. He burrowed deeper still, levering rocks away. More bits of metal, all fused into grape-like shapes.

  There, he found it.

  Another skeleton, only this one wasn’t human. Rather, almost human.

  The skull felt like any other, but it was too big, and the front teeth were elongated. He wondered how the bones could have been preserved so well after all this time, but then he figured it out. Extreme magical heat. That explained the shards of blasted rock, the slugs of metal.

  In the dead center of the explosion, the remains would have remained intact, a reminder to all of the catastrophe that had happened. Only, Ewan doubted any other man had ever touched this skeleton. It had lain buried under heaps of molten earth, waiting for him. The one man who could brave nature’s whims.

  So did that make him the champion? Or the king?

  He could feel water coursing around him in fat, ropy currents, angry that its natural flow had been disturbed. Ewan had no idea how deeply he had gone underneath the silty bottom, probably three dozen feet at least.

  He hated riddles, but he was going to solve this one. Patiently, his hands groped and probed and raked against ancient, compacted mud and knobbly shapes of exploded stone, and his imagination made them beautiful in his head. He found other remnants of the fossilized champion, his hands, his legs. Human in every regard, apart from the size and the ridged spine. In the right, five-fingered hand three times the length of his own, he found something else.

  A smooth length, a rod of some kind. He yanked it free from its resting place, a solid groove against the flattened rock beneath. Other things, pieces of metal and armor, were fused into the bedrock, but the thing peeled off like silver from a velvet cushion.

  He pulled it through his hand, trying to figure out the details. Some kind of a knob at midlength. There was a clawed appendage on one end. Ewan had no doubt what this was.

  The king’s scepter.

  He began a slow ascent toward the surface, leaving the dead champion’s burial spot behind. With time, mud and sand and little crabs would pour in and consume everything, hiding the evidence of the ancient magical battle forever.

  There was a gray bloom above him. It became a ripple of a clouded sky, and then he broke through the surface into the cold morning air. He wanted to inhale deeply, but there was only a hollow emptiness in his chest. Was it the same day as before? He was not sure.

  He swam back to Kamar Doue to find its entire population waiting for him, on their knees, faces touching the cold ground. Only two persons stood, Naman and the blind girl, Raida.

  The fat man was looking decidedly sick, his skin pale and oily with sweat despite the winter chill, the skin around his eyes black and wreathed with fatigue. He barely managed to stand, but he weathered his agony, waiting for his king to return. Raida was bobbing her head like some bird, listening to the splash of water from Ewan’s swimming. No one spoke. There was a deadly silence hanging above the city.

  Ewan emerged from the gray lake, crunching over the slate-colored cobbles, walking toward his translator and the blind girl who was supposed to be his wife. He gripped the relic he had found in his hand, staring at it.

  The scepter was made from glass, smooth, clean, without a single scratch or any dirt on its spotless length. That rod looked hollow, making the thing look brittle, but somehow Ewan knew it would easily break the sharpest sword. At the blunt end, there was about a foot of red ink-like mass pooled inside the staff, shiny and translucent, almost like a precious stone. The other end had three sharp claws touching one another. He figured the red end was the bottom, so he placed it on the wet ground and stared at his nation, at the cowering crowd, at the fat and sick man, at the fanatic prophet.

  It all felt wrong.

  The winter was caressing his bare skin, trying to make him care, but the only emotion was the deep, churning feeling in his belly, stronger than ever. It had intensified the moment he stepped out of the lake. North, it beckoned him north.

  “How long have I been underwater?” he asked weakly.

  Naman looked like a ghost when he replied in a rattly groan, “A whole day.” Then, he took a deep breath and stood a little more erect. “You have retrieved the weapon. You fulfilled the prophecies.” His guide cracked a weak smile.

  Prophecies…Ewan wished he could remember something, anything. A whole day underwater. Once he would have marveled at such a feat, fighting his horror and astonishment. The thought no longer excited him, but it didn’t repulse him either.

  Naman reached forward with a weak, trembling hand. The other leaned on Raida’s shoulder. “We failed you, King. All these years, we tried to find the champion who would serve you, but no one was strong enough. Now, you have done it yourself. We can go to war now.”

  Ewan swallowed. War?

  More secrets, more riddles. “What war?”

  Naman coughed wetly. “In the last volume, it is promised.”

  Some books are meant to be read from their first page, Ewan thought morbidly. Others, perhaps, from the last one. In a land where people would not name their villages and towns and their enemies, it all made perfect sense.

  Ewan forced himself to concentrate, trying to sort this madness out. “In your language, the word for leader and champion is one and the same, is it not?” He rolled the strange syllables inside his head. Kala meh.

  Raida said something, too fast to catch.

  “She says you must bed her now. It is vital. She must tell you your future,” Naman urged.

  Ewan began to feel anger rising, almost like smoke, off his limbs. “Answer me, Naman.”

  The fat man nodded weakly. “Yes. It is. But the context is very important.”

  Ewan lowered the staff on the ground near him. He could see big white eyes throwing furtive glances at him and the thing he had fished from the bottom of the lake. There was pure fear there. They might have never seen the weapon he held, but they had lived for countless generations learning about it from their distorted books, the truth inflated by centuries of obscure terror. Ewan wondered what it could do. How was it used? There must be magic involved somehow.

  The answer was there, in The Pains of Memory.

&nbs
p; He began dressing. Raida mumbled again, her words a staccato. Naman conferred briefly with her.

  “Now that you have the scepter, you must wear your cloak. Please.” The fat man was on the verge of collapsing.

  Ewan sighed. He was exhausted from trying to figure out these strange people. “All right.”

  Naman translated. Raida clapped her hands. A girl detached herself from the crowd, coming forward, holding a folded garment in her small arms. She looked as if the cloth was the only thing that kept her from certain doom.

  Ewan accepted the cloak. It was that albino skin thing. He felt disgusted. Later on, he would burn it, but until he accepted it, they would not stop pestering him. Despite his best judgment, he donned the cloak they had given him, pure white like the snowed-over world. He lifted the scepter and, for the briefest moment, felt like some king. Then, he quickly dashed the silly notion away. This is not my world, not my life.

  The answers to why he was here were hidden in the final tome of The Pains of Memory. Which meant going back to his prison and reading it. Only he would have to wait until the magic wielder got better.

  Staying at the lake’s shore would not improve things and definitely would not help Naman heal faster. So Ewan walked back to his ugly palace, and the Oth Danesh followed him.

  CHAPTER 48

  In this very hall, a year ago, she had been raped, Sonya remembered. The feeling of rough, callused hands pinching her soft, noble flesh, smelly beards chafing her skin, greasy hair rubbing into her eyes and nose, smothering her. She remembered the press of bodies, the pain all over, the impotent fury hollering in her narrow throat, even as they pummeled the breath out of her, knees and elbows jabbing in the hollow of her stomach, her kidneys, her groin. They laughed and leered and tore her clothes off and took her like a common wench. The knowledge that the lowborn nomad peasants got their way with her infuriated her more than the painful act itself.