Dreams of Fire and Gods 2: Fire

by James Erich

  There were dead shrubs between the trees and the ground was covered in a blanket of dead leaves and pine needles, prompting Koreh to ask, “Why haven’t these leaves turned to dust by now? These trees are completely dead. They’re not dropping leaves anymore.”

  “No,” his companion agreed, “but the magic in this place preserves everything, even in death.” The boy stopped a moment and picked up a withered brown oak leaf from the side of the path. He held it up for Koreh to examine. “This leaf is over six hundred years old. It should have died when the poison spread to this part of the forest, but it merely appeared to die. The life within it was trapped. Now it screams out in pain, longing for release.”

  “It’s screaming?” Koreh asked dubiously. He certainly couldn’t hear any sound coming from the leaf.

  “Every living thing can suffer, in its own way.” The boy blew gently on the leaf, and Koreh jumped back in surprise as it suddenly dissipated into a tiny puff of dust and then disappeared completely.

  “And now it has been released,” the Taaweh said, smiling in a way that reminded Koreh of a young child delighted by the sight of a butterfly taking wing.

  Koreh asked, “Can you release them all? The entire forest?”

  “This will be attempted. Come.” He began walking again and Koreh fell into step beside him, asking, “Why are we walking? Why don’t we just slip through the earth to where we need to go?”

  “The earth here is fouled. It is better to walk.”

  Koreh couldn’t dispute that. As the trees began to thin out, they found themselves having to skirt stagnant pools of putrid, rust-colored water that had nearly eaten away the few remaining cobblestones of the road. Someone— Koreh had no idea who—had lain wooden boards across some of the worst spots to allow wagons to pass without getting caught in the quagmire, but these planks were so eaten away by the poisonous water that footing was still treacherous.

  Koreh saw something up ahead that would have seemed odd to most people —the quality of the light over the lake wasn’t the same gray as the sky, but a pale blue. Yet there was nothing odd about it to anyone who’d been living in Harleh Valley over the past couple of weeks. It was the same eerie blue light that seemed to accompany the Taaweh everywhere.

  And now they were casting it here, over the brackish pond. As Koreh and his companion drew closer, he saw there were a large number of Taaweh here standing motionless and silent at intervals around the water’s edge, the cowls of their shadow robes pulled low over their faces so they looked wraithlike and sinister. Koreh heard a faint whispering sound as though the wind was rustling the leaves and the branches of the dead trees, but he could just make out something like words in the sound. The Taaweh were chanting, as they had done the night he’d met the Iinu Shaa, but Koreh was unable to make out what they were saying.

  The boy led him to a hillock of dead grass at the water’s edge, large enough for both of them to stand on side by side. Only then did Koreh see the Iinu Shaa. The man-god was walking on the pond—on top of it, his armored boots making ripples in the surface of the water with each step yet never sinking into the water itself.

  Even after the time he’d spent with the Taaweh and the few times he’d spoken with the Iinu Shaa, Koreh found the leader of the Taaweh frightening. The man was taller and broader than any human man, heavily armored in the detritus of the battlefield—a massive steel breastplate with a puncture from a spear or halberd over the heart, a bronze gauntlet sliced through by a sword stroke, an iron helm crushed in on one side by a mace… all tarnished with age and sometimes rusted. Within the Iinu Shaa’s helmet was the pallid face of a corpse, handsome but with cheeks sunken in death and hollow eye sockets that seemed to disappear into blackness. But what terrified Koreh most was the back of the Iinu Shaa’s head. Where the back of his helmet should be was a second face—this one blue-black in death, its lips shriveled away from elongated teeth like the face of a corpse long dead, and again those terrible, cavernous eyes.

  Koreh was still uncertain what the Taaweh were doing. Attempting to remove the tainted magic from the water and the surrounding forest, perhaps. What his role was to be, he had no idea, but the presence of the Iinu Shaa prevented him from asking his companion questions. It wasn’t exactly that the god frightened him—at least, he didn’t feel threatened by the Iinu Shaa’s presence—but the aura of power that emanated from the god still awed Koreh as much as the god’s faces chilled him.

  The boy lifted a hand in such a way that Koreh knew he was to take hold of it. The feel of the boy’s hand was somewhat cool, but otherwise no different from the hand of a human boy. Koreh realized this was in fact the first time he’d touched one of the Taaweh. One of the men had touched his face once and kissed his closed eyelids, but Koreh had never touched one of them back. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but the normal texture of the boy’s skin surprised him. Perhaps he’d expected the Taaweh to be as insubstantial as their cloaks.

  As the Iinu Shaa continued his slow circumnavigation of the pond, the Taaweh’s chanting grew in intensity. Koreh’s companion joined in, though he was speaking in the Taaweh language and Koreh could understand little of it. But he could feel the energy building up around them, swirling around the pond like a small tornado, invisible yet somehow tangible to Koreh’s body. The energy passed over his skin, causing the hair on his arms to stand on end, and seemed to pass through him as well, taking his breath along with it. His ears were soon filled with the howling of wind, even though the branches of the trees around the pond were utterly still.

  “Raise your hand,” the boy told him, having to shout over the howling. Koreh saw the other Taaweh were all raising their right hands and extending them toward the Iinu Shaa. He did the same and instantly felt jolted by an invisible arc of energy connecting him to the god. The Iinu Shaa spread his massive arms wide as he continued to walk across the water and the whispering from the Taaweh grew louder, until it seemed to echo within Koreh’s brain.

  Suddenly the water in the center of the pond began to move. It wasn’t flowing so much as… bubbling and frothing. Koreh had almost grown used to the stench of decay in this place, but now a new, overpowering wave of nauseating gases rose up from the depths of the pond and hit him so hard that he staggered back, fighting down the urge to vomit. Rotting flesh, animal and human excrement mixed with the smell of putrefying vegetation and sulfurous mud…. Koreh felt his eyes tearing up and he gasped for breath, but there was nothing to breathe but the noxious vapors assailing him.

  The Iinu Shaa appeared to be gathering power from all the Taaweh and using it to do… something… to the water. Koreh wasn’t sure exactly what.

  Something rose up out of the foaming water, breaching its surface like an enormous splayed hand. But it wasn’t a hand. It was a set of antlers covered in reeking slime and still attached to the carcass of a large elk. It should have been dead. Its flesh had rotted off its bones, leaving nothing but a ragged, waterlogged hide hanging loosely off its skeleton. Yet the elk writhed in the water and moaned as if in agony, thrashing its skeletal legs and struggling to find a foothold.

  As Koreh watched in horror, the animal’s majestic antlers began to crumble. Too wet and slime-covered to turn to dust, they sagged and began to fall apart, dropping in soggy chunks back into the froth. The crumbling spread until the entire skeleton disintegrated into the water.

  But that wasn’t the end to it. Other animals were breaching the surface of the pond—elk, bear, deer, otter, kikid, ducks, wolves—a chilling menagerie of dead forest creatures struggling to live again. But as each tried to free itself from the watery tomb that had held it for centuries, it collapsed upon itself and disintegrated, and Koreh was suddenly overwhelmed by a confusing jumble of emotions. Agonizing pain, constant terror, desperation to climb free of the cold, suffocating darkness. He clenched his teeth against the urge to cry out. There seemed no end to the creatures, and he felt them, felt their suffering and their longing to finally be free.

>   He sensed the animals somehow recognized the Iinu Shaa and were calling out to him, pleading with him. The god brought death and the living feared him, but to these tormented creatures he brought the promise of release. Koreh saw for the first time in his life how death could be wonderful. Underneath all the horror, he felt the joy these creatures felt at being wrenched free of the evil that imprisoned them. Long ago, they had wandered too close to the pond, and the thing in the water had drawn them in, muddling their senses until they bent to drink the fetid water or stumbled into the marsh. It had pulled them down into the muck to feed its anger forever, denying them the mercy of death.

  But death, at long last, had come for them. He knew, though, that it wasn’t over. Something dark and immensely powerful, the same presence he’d felt weeks ago when he’d passed this way with Sael and Geilin, still seethed in the depths of the pond.

  Koreh felt all his energy siphoned off by the Iinu Shaa, and he struggled not to collapse under the strain. The Taaweh had taught him to draw energy from the earth, but that energy was the energy given off by all living things, including the earth itself. Here, there was nothing to draw from. The earth was dead. All the plants and trees were likewise dead. They simply hadn’t crumbled into dust yet.

  The water slowed its bubbling and frothing as the seemingly endless army of undead beasts diminished and at last ceased. Near-silence fell over the pond but for the whispering of the Taaweh. Koreh would have felt relieved, but he knew it wasn’t over. He could feel something in the cold depths, something that seethed with anger.

  But he had no strength left. His legs were beginning to give out, trembling with the effort to remain standing. The thought of collapsing onto the fouled earth here—or worse, into the rank water in front of him!—terrified him and forced him to strain against the exhaustion. He’d never felt this weak in his life, apart from when the plague had nearly killed him as a boy. He knew the energy flowing out of his hand toward the Iinu Shaa was his own life energy. Would it kill him, if he couldn’t stop it?

  He had no idea how to stop it. Once begun, the flow of energy had poured out of him as if someone had cut open his veins and all his blood was gushing out, and now he feared he would be completely drained.

  Then Koreh felt something in his left hand—the one that clutched the boy’s small hand. It was warm, almost hot, and fluid like water. But it wasn’t pouring over his hand. It seemed to be flowing through it and up his arm into his chest, where it swirled around as if bathing his heart and lungs. It had to be magical power, Koreh realized, flowing from the boy’s hand into his own and through the rest of Koreh’s body. It replenished him and he felt some of his strength returning.

  The Iinu Shaa was still drawing energy from him, but now Koreh found he could feed that energy stream with the energy the boy was feeding him. When he focused on his raised arm, the power in his body responded to the focus, following it the way a rivulet of water might follow a channel he dug with his finger in the sand. It flowed through his arm and out of his hand, streaming toward the god.

  Something else was beginning to happen—images were forming in Koreh’s mind.

  He saw the pond as it had been a very, very long time ago. It had been poisonous even then, made toxic by death magic rained down from the sky by the Stronni during the war. Yet though it had been deadly to all plants and animals that came into contact with it, it had not yet become evil. There had been no presence within the pond.

  Koreh watched as a band of men and two horses approached the pond from the village of Denök. There were seven men, and they had with them a young boy of perhaps five years old, riding upon one of the horses. He was beautiful, blond and blue-eyed and bearing a close enough resemblance to Sael to give Koreh a pang of anxiety. But this scene had taken place long before Sael was born. Somehow Koreh knew the boy’s name was Dakh and he had been told he was being taken to see his mother. She was supposed to be awaiting him in what was now Old Mat’zovya.

  The boy was fearful of the place, but his father was with him on the horse, so he nestled against the man, trusting his father to keep him safe.

  But the crops had failed for the fourth year in a row and the livestock in the village was dying. Babies had been born with horrible deformities or had been stillborn. The town elders had performed divinations to determine what could be done to appease the gods, but the old gods had fallen silent. The divinations told the elders nothing. Yet they lied to their fellow villagers and told them a sacrifice would please the gods—a human sacrifice, as had been performed in centuries past.

  Only the most beautiful youth in the village would be a worthy sacrifice, the elders said, and so a meeting was held and a vote was taken. Everyone agreed —Dakh was by far the most beautiful child there. His mother had not been there to defend the boy, but his father had. All it had taken was a few gold coins to turn the man against his son. Then, when the boy’s mother was out of the house, Dakh’s father spirited him away and met the elders at the edge of the forest.

  Koreh watched in horror as the village chieftain stood at the pond’s edge and tossed gold coins and bread into the brackish water. Dakh gradually realized something was wrong and cried out in fear when a man reached up and pulled him roughly from the horse. Dakh screamed for his father, but the man was too cowardly to stay and watch what they were doing to his son. He pulled hard on the horse’s reins and Dakh watched his only hope gallop away down the muddy path, heading not to Denök, but to Mat’zovya. The man would never return to the village, and Dakh’s mother would never learn the truth about what happened to her son.

  Koreh could feel the boy’s terror as he screamed for his father to come back. He continued to scream and sob as the men trussed his arms to his sides, heedless of how the tight ropes hurt him and dug into his skin. Koreh sobbed along with the boy as the men tied Dakh’s legs together and the chieftain callously droned on about sacrifice and the blessings of the gods. Dakh was lifted by two men—one holding him under the armpits and one holding his legs—and swung back and forth a few times to build momentum. They released him, and Koreh screamed one last time as the boy’s tiny body hurtled through the air and plunged down into the icy, putrid depths of the pond.

  Dakh would have died in the pond, had the pond allowed him to. Instead the twisted magic of the place bound his spirit to his body and prevented the escape from horror that death might have provided. For centuries, he suffered under the water, perpetually drowning, driven mad with terror and pain, until his terror turned to hatred and anger. In time, Dakh, the human boy, ceased to exist. There was only the thing in the pond, the seething mass of evil that writhed in its depths. Each living thing that slipped into the water served to strengthen the wretched creature he had become. The thing in the pond slowly extended its influence ever further outward, draining the life from everything it came into contact with, yet preventing the escape into death that Dakh had been denied.

  Koreh gagged as the water began to belch up massive amounts of mud and sulfurous gas, while the Iinu Shaa continued his slow walk around the edge of it and the Taaweh’s chanting grew in strength. It was as if the pond was turning itself inside out, spewing forth the rot from its depths. And more than just decay—Koreh was overwhelmed by a wave of hatred and pain, the desire for vengeance….

  Rising up out of the blackening foam, until it hovered just above the surface of the water, was the tiny, pathetic corpse of a young boy. It was curled into a fetal position, its flesh shriveled and browned from the water. Its hair, once as soft and lustrous as corn silk, was now reduced to sparse strands of dull bone white. The tunic that Dakh had worn centuries ago had turned brown and fragile, but somehow the ropes that bound the body still seemed as thick and strong as they had long ago.

  The Iinu Shaa extended his hand toward the dead thing and the ropes snapped and fell away, crumbling before they even made contact with the water below. Then, to Koreh’s horror, the body moved, stretching its withered limbs and lifting its mummified f
ace skyward as it opened its mouth. The corpse opened its mouth, revealing brown teeth and shrunken lips as it let loose with one final, shrill scream, a scream that reverberated in the forest and forced Koreh to drop the Taaweh boy’s hand so he could press both his palms against his ears to block the sound.

  Then the thing that had once been Dakh began to crumble into dust. But as a last small mercy, his body did not fall back into the rank water that had been his prison for so long, but blew away on a sudden gust of wind, carried upward before disappearing entirely.

  Unlike the animals that had been released, Dakh’s dissolution did not fill Koreh with relief and the joy of being freed from imprisonment. Instead Koreh was overwhelmed with feelings of grief and anger and betrayal, as if it would take a very long time for these to fade. How long would it take for a creature driven insane by centuries of agony to become sane again?

  The forest around the Taaweh collapsed to the ground then, long-dead trees falling into powder on the shore of the pond, sending up an enormous cloud that engulfed everything for several heartbeats. When it cleared, there was little left. Koreh and the Taaweh were standing at the edge of a pond that no longer reeked of death and decay, but merely stagnant water and mud. The landscape resembled a desert. Not a single tree or shrub adorned the dusty ground that stretched out for leagues in all directions. At the outer edge of this wasteland, the forest still stood—the part that hadn’t yet been tainted by the poison’s slow advance.

  When Koreh found his voice again, he asked his companion in a whisper, “Will anything ever grow here again?”