The Last of Her Line

by Valerie Veden

  The princess smiled at him, set her partially completed piece of needlework aside and, at his astonished expression, explained, “It is quite soothing.”

  Stinn eyed the pattern, unable to figure out what it was, and Riel handed him her creation. From the first sight, the result of her efforts looked like great blots of red and black colors, but after closer examination, the man noticed symmetry and clarity of the lines that made him feel uneasy.

  “Unusual pattern,” Stinn raised his brows in surprise.

  The princess sighed.

  “It was embroidered on the tapestry in our audience hall. I made it to remind me of home.”

  Indeed. Stinn must have remembered the pattern from his visits to the kingdom of Shorall a few years ago.

  The princess smiled at him again and stretched her hand, asking for her work back. Stinn swallowed, fighting a sudden and unexplainable urge to burn the thing, and forced himself to give the embroidery back.

  It was surely nothing.

  As Stinn fell asleep, his last thought was that it was remarkable: the last of Shorall, conceived with the help of the el’Kadaries’ magic, would be his people’s way to a brighter future.

  The queen of Shorall had given birth to four sons and had desperately wished for a baby daughter. Yet no daughters had been born into the Great House of Shorall for almost ten centuries, and no one knew why. The king loved his wife, a rare occurrence in the dynastic marriages, and agreed to take the help of the clan Gor’s Mother. From that help a baby girl came, a pretty doll with sapphire eyes and the fair hair of Shorall. Riel’s power seemed much weaker than that of her brothers, a perfect fit for her future role of a sacrificial bride.

  The world of the el’Tuans, Terrine, was almost kind to the el’Kadaries. They could stay here for months, with only a few days a year to spend away on their home islands in the Abyss, as the necessary evil. All the other worlds divested themselves of the el’Kadaries much earlier, sometimes in two or three days, and those daring to stay longer were doomed. First came hallucinations, then the body stopped responding to commands, then their eyes and skin bled. There was a short period of madness followed by death.

  Last night, insomnia visited Stinn for the first time, a hint for him that it was almost time to leave Terrine; but this evening he fell asleep effortlessly and slept soundly until his magic senses cried out in a sudden alarm, breaking through bright and sweet dreams.

  His body felt heavy and unmanageable. At first he couldn’t move or open his eyes. But the sorcerer’s will was stronger than his flesh. Slowly, painfully, the el’Kadari made himself get up.

  Never before he had heard such a complete silence in the camp. There was no sound at all. The forest seemed quiet, too, without predators’ roars, squeaks of scattering little animals, hoots of night birds, or insects’ chirr.

  Stinn staggered up to the tent door, his feet like lead weights, and got out. There was nothing there. Nobody. Even the night watch was absent.

  A dark shadow detached itself from one of the further tents. In the waning moonlight, Stinn could see only its silhouette, but he knew that it wasn’t an el’Kadari. The man called in the threads but no response came. His magic was not blocked, he didn’t feel that terrible emptiness inside, it just slipped out of his reach.

  The dark shadow stopped in front of him and shook its hood back. He gave a start at the sight of the familiar face.

  “I have never liked your people,” the princess’s voice, filled with poisonous hatred, cut through him, shredding the remnants of his strength. Looking at her face, not childish now, but ageless, was painful, and her eyes, chillingly cold, caused Stinn to shudder.

  His magic had disappeared, his body refused to move. The sleepiness returned ten-fold, making it unbearably difficult to stand and keep his eyes open.

  “How did you -” he forced the words out, fighting the growing weariness.

  “Oh, my dear Kadari, the Ancients left behind so many exciting things,” she answered.

  The last thing Stinn heard before sleep took him was her quiet laughter.

  Chapter 2.

  Stinn ar’Gor slumped on the ground, defeated. The power of the Ancients I had called in still sang in my blood. I stared at the man, willing his body temperature to drop, his heartbeat to slow down, willing him to die. There was no pity in my heart. That Kadari had tried to take what was mine. The Shorall didn’t forgive such offences. And yet, his waking sparkled a tiny bit of curiosity out of me because the sorcerer had broken through the spell that was called unbreakable. Much good it had done him, though.

  Still, he was but a minor obstacle to my real destination, the rugged grey tent that loomed ahead with three guards snuffling at its entrance. The rune from Mervin’s book of Ancients was strong: the rest of the camp, bar Stinn ar’Gor, dying behind me, was devoid of any wakeful thought. There were two exceptions, of course.

  In the tent, I sank down onto my heels beside Mervin’s prone body. Earlier that day, I had touched Stinn’s arm and had taken the imprint of his power. Etching that imprint into my own thread taught me how to fool his spells and neutralize them.

  A few minutes had passed, but Mervin neither stirred nor opened his eyes. I remained silent as well, concentrating on freeing his magic from the binding net. I knew Mervin was awake because the sleeping rune I had embroidered included two wakeful people, Mervin and myself.

  “How did you end up in the camp?” Mervin asked, his eyes still closed.

  “I came looking for a stupid taheert,” I answered evenly.

  “A stupid taheert?” Mervin opened his eyes.

  “Of course,” I sighed, making the last spells dissolve into the thin air. “Were you a clever taheert, I wouldn’t have been forced to make this unpleasant trip.”

  “Why have you looked for me at all? A half-blood?” Mervin’s voice broke at the last word.

  “I don’t care about your blood,” I said, surprised.

  “That’s not what you told that Kadari.”

  “Whatever I told him doesn’t matter,” I muttered, feeling suddenly guilty. “It was a backup plan in case something went wrong with the rune. It would have postponed the execution.”

  Mervin sat up and started rubbing the rope burns on his wrists. “Do you know why shyfters were killed at the time of the full moon?” he asked me.

  “No.” I shrugged. That had never piqued my interest.

  “The moon of our world is hostile to the shyfters,” his voice sounded flat. “If a shyfter dies on such a night, his or her soul can’t leave Terrine. Our moon, el’Handeh, doesn’t let the soul return home for a new beginning, doesn’t let it reach the Abyss. The soul is doomed to wander in our world for eternity with no hope of salvation.”

  “It’s just an old superstition,” I countered and stood up, dusting my hands together from the remains of Kadari magic. “That’s it, you are free. We can go now.”

  Mervin nodded and I sensed his threads moving. Suddenly, he tensed and looked me square in the face, black eyes piercing and hard.

  “Don’t you feel anything strange about your magic?” he asked sharply.

  I furrowed my brow. “No.” I felt nothing strange.

  “What’s the matter, Mervin?” I asked, annoyed. It was still me, who he was studying with an unpleasant intensity. Me, not a new riddle in need of solving. “I have saved you. You could have thanked me, at the very least,” I added, feeling hurt. “And stop with the weird questions!”

  “I humbly ask your forgiveness, Your Highness.” Mervin’s lips curved in a grotesque resemblance of a smile. “I have lost all my good manners.” He raised to his feet, turned to the tent’s exit, then froze and began falling down. I ran up to him and caught just in time, not letting him crash to the ground.

  “Mervin, what –? Are you –?”

  The taheert didn’t answer. His face grew white, eyes took on an empty, glassy look and his skin felt cold and wet under my touch. I let him lay on the ground and stared, terrifi
ed, at the growing blood spots on his clothes.

  It was clear the Kadaries’ binding net wasn’t a healing one but it held his body together, not letting his wounds bleed and get infected. As soon as I took the net away, all the injuries reopened and Mervin, instead of curing himself, plied me with inappropriate questions!

  My healing abilities were non-existent, even healing runes avoided my grasp, but there was another way to cure Mervin. I still had enough power to create a rune to stop time for his physical body, the rune that was one more relic of the Ancients.

  Tearing Mervin’s shirt open, I drew the rune on his chest with his own blood. He was still unconscious, his breath hoarse and uneven. Hurriedly, I finished the drawing; the lines lit up with a ghostly gleam and etched into his skin as if they belonged there. The bleeding stopped. Now I had to wait. With his body in stasis, our inborn magic would have enough time to work.

  Mervin wouldn’t wake until I removed the drawing, but how long would the healing take? An hour, a day, a week? It was a new rune, I had no idea how it worked.

  The sky was getting brighter. Stepping out of the tent, I almost fell over a Kadari’s body. Sweet Abyss, I had forgotten about them.

  I couldn’t say I would be sorry if all the Kadaries would sleep to death. No one asked those vultures to come into my world. They had betrayed the Creator; He had condemned them to live in the Abyss, and it was where they belonged. Still, though I couldn’t care less about the Kadaries, I didn’t wish the el’Tuans to die. I hadn’t hurried while embroidering the rune, yet I hadn’t thought to make two different patterns to separate the Kadaries from the el’Tuans. It would have been so much easier to neutralize the latter and leave the former intact. Now I had no choice but to wake them all.

  I sat down in the grass near Mervin’s tent, enjoying the sun. The months in the gloomy confines of the castle made me hungry for the beauty of a bright day. A piece of plain fabric in my hands was slowly turning into Siyat, the rune of borders, to make the campsite impenetrable. It was a necessity because, eventually, an el’Tuan or a Kadari would come, perhaps a spy, returning from the nearest town, or a courier. The level of my power and training was not enough to take on a real soldier, experienced in combat magic. Runes were great but they were slow.

  Unexpectedly, the earth trembled. I jumped to my feet, looking around for the source of it. It couldn’t be a natural earthquake, our kingdom was protected against them. I thought perhaps, it was the rune’s fault.

  The earth was still slightly shaking when I rushed into the tent. Mervin lay inside, pale and indifferent to everything, with rune lines gleaming on his skin. The injuries looked better, the sides of the wounds had glued together. The rune was working.

  Another earthquake nearly made me fall on Mervin. Steadying myself, I ran out of the tent just in time to see cracks in the earth spreading around. Tiny at first, they grew wider and wider, creeping to the sleeping bodies. One more shake, and people, the Kadaries and the el’Tuans alike, began falling down, disappearing in the bottomless pits. The only place without any cracks was Mervin’s tent and a few feet of space around it.

  I inserted spy threads deep into the ground and jolted back. A huge worm was moving there, catching the bodies with its greedy jaws, making the earth shake in convulsions. There was something disturbingly familiar about the monster and the taste of its magic. It reminded me of two things: an Ancient rune activated and the sense of unease caused by the Kadaries’ presence.

  A chill ran over me when I finally understood. The worm’s arrival was my doing! The runes of Ancients were so strong because they used the power of the Abyss, and the Abyss sent Her servant to extract the payment.

  I ran to the nearest crack and fell to my knees, looking down.

  “Stop it! It’s enough!”

  The earth stopped shaking, so the worm had heard me and had listened.

  “Go away.” I told it. “You got your due, now go.”

  I had to be strong, had to be the one giving orders and the worm had to be the one to obey. I didn’t have the right to hesitate or feel fear.

  Rusty yellow eyes looked at me sadly. In my thoughts, I heard the echo of the worm’s hunger and grievance at the cruel mistress who hadn’t let it finish its meal.

  I wondered if I heard it correctly. Was I really the worm’s mistress? How could I be?

  The eyes disappeared; the earth quaked one last time and grew still. I tried to get up but my legs buckled and I fell to my knees again. My hands shook.

  The tents that happened to be in the way of the cracks, stood crooked and empty. How many people had the monster killed? I shuddered. It was my fault. Not directly, but still…

  Then I spotted the rune of Siyat. If finished, what monster would it call? What would be the payment?

  Lost and shaken, I returned to Mervin and kneeled by his body. The rune saving his life was also an Ancient one, but I didn’t dare to take it off. His wounds had closed up and his skin didn’t look deathly translucent anymore. It was a given now. Mervin would live.

  “My el’ero.” For the first time in my life, I said it aloud.

  Our chronicles claimed that once, in times long forgotten, the el’Tuans listened to the seductive voice of the Chaos Gods and joined the uprising against the Creator. We were defeated, and as a punishment, He splinted our Selves. Since that time all the el’Tuans were born with a half a soul.

  It was impossible to notice in any way. It didn’t stop you from enjoying your life until you met and recognized your el’ero, your “soul divided”. To be near your el’ero was both unbelievably beautiful and torturously painful and not in any way similar to the love at first sight some el’Tuans, unfamiliar with such an experience, had described in naive ballads.

  It was different.

  Sometimes it was like my burning desire to possess and never let go. Other times, it was a hatred, as strong as any love could be.

  It became many things but one. It never turned into cold indifference. Nobody could become indifferent to his own self.

  More hours passed. The sun climbed over the line of noon and descended to the horizon. I was still sitting by Mervin’s side, holding his cold hand in mine. As soon as the sun touched the tops of the trees, I would remove the rune.

  When the light of the rune died out, Mervin opened his eyes and raised himself a little. His right hand touched his bare chest; he glanced at the dried blood on his skin, the drawing of the rune, and stared at me with deep painful scrutiny. Then his body relaxed and tension in his features eased. Whatever he had been looking for was in place.

  “We need to go,” I pointed at the Portal I had created, its iridescent arc looming in front of the tent.

  When we went outside, Mervin took one short glance around and turned to me, raising a questioning brow.

  “I will explain later,” I muttered, sending a thread of Fire at my embroidered runes. Soon the el’Tuans and the Kadaries, those who had survived, would wake up.

  With strength, surprising for a person recently close to death, Mervin seized my right wrist. “We’d better enter the arc together.”

  I wondered why since the same Portal never separated people. Still, I nodded and we stepped into the Portal with Mervin holding me tightly.

  Chapter 3.

  Though sense of time during the transition was always highly subjective, this one lasted longer than usual. There were some weird tugs, too, though Mervin’s grip on my hand never slipped. The transition stopped abruptly, tossing me into a real world, which burned my skin with unexpected cold and a blinding brilliance that made me squeeze my eyes shut.

  “Surprise after surprise,” Mervin’s voice sounded drily amused. “And here I thought we were going to my castle.”

  The taheert’s strange announcement made me open one eye cautiously, but the painful brightness hadn’t disappeared.

  “Adjust the vision,” he advised softly.

  Everything in the vicinity was covered with white snow. The brightness
was caused by the reflection of sunlight. The sun appeared to be summer-like, judging by its height and place in the sky. I turned around, but the picture remained the same: snow, deep blue sky and the sun.

  We had stepped from the Portal onto the top of a hill and our legs were deep in the snow. As the first shock passed, I realized I was literally freezing. Having little power left, I had no desire to waste it on warming, but the biting cold didn’t leave me any choice.

  “Riel,” Mervin looked at me with scrutiny. “Do you know where we are?”

  I wished I knew. “I gave the Portal the coordinates of your castle. It doesn’t seem… Is it even our world?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Mervin looked a bit apprehensive, “I was sure you created the Portal, but it turned into the Gate during the transition. Do you have power for another?”

  I shook my head.

  “My power well is nearly empty, too.” Frowning, he turned around.

  “Gate instead of the Portal? Mervin, how’s that even possible?”

  He shrugged silently.

  “Do you have any ideas, at least?”

  “Right now we need a shelter and a fire,” he said evenly. “To the west from here I can see a forest. It will give us both.”

  With that, Mervin turned and walked down the hill. Obviously, he was not in the mood to discuss serious matters.

  A few hours later, we stepped under a roof of interwoven and leafless forest branches. I had managed to strike up a bit of conversation with Mervin, though he said barely a phrase to each dozen of mine. I had told him about the runes and the worm’s attack, but even if Mervin could have explained that, he didn’t.

  I wondered again what had made the worm accept me as its mistress. Had something changed in me? Or was it the seduction of the Abyss? I knew nothing about its signs and consequences, only that I had broken the old rule, the one forbidding the el’Tuans younger than twenty to open either Portals or Gates.

  To shake off gloomy thoughts, I gazed at the trees, monstrous in their height. How many years had they lived? Hundreds? Thousands? What memories did they keep?