Chy

by Greg Curtis

  How could the beast be on them? He wondered about that as the wagon took off and he was jostled violently. Because everything he knew was telling him that it couldn't have chanced upon them by accident. Just when they had started freeing the slaves. That was no coincidence. Someone had to have sent the beast. But he couldn't think who could have such power. Especially when the beasts were considered next to mindless. How did you command a creature with no mid?

  It didn't matter though. They were leaving, running away. That was what mattered. And soon they were once more among the giant trees.

  The harpy followed them though. It couldn't catch them. It was held back by the winds they were blasting at it. But the winds started fading at around five hundred yards, so it was always that far behind them.

  Worse than that though, it passed over the miners, those they hadn't managed to gather up, and he could almost see the disease and death flowing off it, landing on their sleeping forms. He could see them starting to blacken and whither where they lay. Chy shuddered a little at the sight. Others gasped.

  Fortunately they were soon out of sight. Though the harpy followed them, floating along just above the tree tops, like a giant winged dirigible of death.

  It wasn't a long journey he told himself as someone hit it with another massive fireball. He could hold the wind for as long as he needed. And it was good to see the flames attacking the creature. To see its nearly invisible form slowly becoming more clear as its feather's charred and it turned black. But for some reason that didn't seem to slow it down. Nothing did. It just kept coming after them.

  Then someone hit it with a lightning blast. And the beast finally reacted – silently. Its wings curled upwards in a spasm of pain and for a moment it floated a little off course, and even fell into the treetops. But it returned to the skies quickly and continued the chase, only stung.

  How powerful were these damned things? Chy could almost feel the damned disease settling on his body. But as long as he kept the wind blowing, he told himself. And they were getting closer all the time to the portal. Safety was at hand.

  Another fireball added to that hope, and this time it did a little more than char the great gas bag. It set it on fire. Finally they could see the harpy clearly. But really it wasn't something he wanted to gaze on. It was hideous.

  But burning or not, it kept coming, and he had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, that it was never going to stop. It was death incarnate.

  It was death for the forest too. Because as the burning creature floated lower among the trees it set the tops of them alight, and soon there was a trail of fire behind them. Some warmth in this ice cold land. And that gave him an idea.

  “Weigh it down,” he bellowed at anyone who could hear him. “Drop it into the trees!” His idea was simple – it couldn't chase them through the trees. But it could hopefully continue to burn. Maybe even turn to ash.

  The others heard him, and almost immediately he saw everything from blocks of ice to landslides falling on it from above, smashing it down into the tree tops. And while that happened, the beast continued to burn. Maybe, he dared to hope, they had won. It certainly felt like that as they got further away and the flames behind them danced higher.

  But victory came at a price. Even as he was almost beginning to hope, the damned beast exploded. And it wasn't like the fireballs that had been hurled at it. They had been quiet by comparison. This was like a thousand cannons going off at once. A rupture in the world.

  Trees shook. Many of them turned to kindling in the blink of an eye, and a lot of the pieces took to the air. They scattered in all directions like the sparks from a fire when a piece of wet wood crackled. Some of them came crashing down around them. A couple were far too close. Meanwhile the forest screamed its outrage and black smoke started climbing to the heavens. Thick black smoke that turned the sky above to poison and fume.

  Sweet Alder!” he prayed as he continued to keep the wind blowing. But now it wasn't to keep the harpy back. It was to stop that poisonous black smoke from reaching them. If any of it touched them, he suspected it would kill them. All around the distant bonfire he could see trees wilting. How could a beast be even more dangerous in death than life?

  Thankfully they kept the smoke away from them, and the fire grew more distant. But it burnt bigger all the time. They'd started a forest fire, and turned a piece of this world into hell.

  Still they'd beaten it. They'd survived. He had to be grateful for that.

  He was even more grateful when the driver in the lead wagon finally yelled out that the portal was ahead. And when they burst through into the bright sunshine that he knew was Stonely. They were safe. But he dreaded to think what they'd left behind on the other side. Or how many people had just died because of what they'd done.

  But that wasn't his concern, he told himself as he got down and let others tend to those they'd hopefully freed. This mission hadn't been his idea even if he had gone along with it. And someone would have taken his place it if he hadn't been there – probably with the same result. His concern had to be the slaves they'd freed. And the hope that Fylarne and the others could now free their minds. But he knew that that would be a difficult task. The slaves had been under the spell for a long time. Years in many cases. The chances were that they weren't going to be freed in a hurry. Maybe not at all.

  “You alright?” A woman's voice asked.

  Chy looked up to see the last Guardian beside him with a worried look in her eyes. And oddly just the sight of Elodie brought a little cheer back to his soul. Especially when he hadn't expected to see her.

  “Fine. It was just a harpy the size of a small town,” he told her. “And we may have burnt down an overgrown forest and got scores of people killed.”

  “Is that all?” She smiled reassuringly. “It seems like a quiet day for you!”

  “I'm flying,” one of the unconscious slaves abruptly yelled out, apparently lost in a dream of some sort. “Look at me?”

  Chy turned around to look, but there was no flying woman. There was no one even waving their arms about. And he couldn't tell who had cried out. They all had stupid, happy smiles on their faces, even in their sleep. Were they all dreaming of flying, he wondered? Like the sprites seemed to? He didn't know. But something about the idea troubled him even after everything else.

  “Well, at least they're happy, I suppose,” he muttered. And maybe he should be happy too. Because now everything came down to Fylarne and the others who had been studying the ancient enchantments, to start freeing the slaves from it. His task now was to return to what he had been doing – dealing with each new crisis as it arrived in the region.

  “Well you can make me something to eat and tell me all about it,” Elodie told him with a smile as she took his hand. “And then you can start explaining why Percival's latest song, now being heard on several worlds, has me carrying your baby!”

  “Oh!”

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  It should be working! But it wasn't. As Fylarne sat in his cell and tried to understand what was happening, he kept coming back to that simple fact. What had worked for the shades, wasn't working for the sprites.

  In truth it wasn't working that well for the shades. They just sat around in their cells or the yard, staring, and not saying much. They ate and drank and slept. Sometimes they made noises and they did follow directions. But really that was as much as they did. It was as though they'd been freed, but there hadn't been much left to free.

  For the sprites though, they couldn't even get that far. Reminding them of their names worked as it had with the shades. But only for a short time. They would be brought out from under the control of whatever magic had been laid upon them, but then after they began screaming and weeping for a time, they would be pulled back under the spell again. A few hours of freedom. That was all they could give them. And those hours were nothing but suffering.

  Of course even when they were awake and free, they were suffering. Because the only thing
they could concentrate on was the fact that they had been dragged away from their paradise. They wanted to go home. They cried, they screamed and they begged to be allowed to return. But they didn't eat or sleep. There was nothing on their minds but the need to return. And sometimes when they collapsed, a dream of flying.

  That frightened him in a way little else could. Because the sprites themselves had always told him about their dreams of taking to the skies as they once had. Or they had before everything had gone wrong. And maybe they too were under this enchantment – he wasn't sure. But did they all, their slaves included, imagine that they were going to return to the skies? It was as if they were all held by the same dream. Some could function while dreaming, even sound rational and talk to people. Sleep walkers he supposed. Others could do no more than follow the most basic instructions. But all were bound by it.

  And the same thing was happening to his family! He knew that now. That damned sprite who had brought him his daughter's fingers had told him that she had cut them off herself. He hadn't believed her because that was utter madness. He hadn't wanted to think such a thing. Now he realised it was true. These people would do anything to remain the slaves they were. Because they truly believed they weren't. Maybe they even believed they were sprites destined to return to the skies. Which meant that his daughter was even now digging out chunks of lava rock from the ground or doing something even more meaningless, believing it was joy. And she would keep doing that until she died. His whole family with her. But how long could she keep going like that with a ruined hand? Or his mother with one of hers missing completely? Were they even still alive?

  None of the slaves lived until old age. They wore out and died young, if they were lucky enough to even make it that far and not be killed in an accident. The freed slaves, in the few hours of freedom they had after they were taught their names again, had all talked about seeing fields full of corpses. Of stepping over the bodies to bring new ones to it. And every so often, fresh slaves being brought in to replace the fallen. That was why the sprites had to keep abducting more victims. They ran out of workers. Except that most of the sprites themselves, were slaves. Maybe all of them. There was no one in charge.

  There was no hope for any of them save being released from whatever magic held them.

  He worked night and day on the problem, urged on by that understanding. There had to be a way to free them. But nothing he did had any effect.

  It was an enchantment. It had to be. But no enchantment he knew of could possibly reassert itself after it was broken. And in any case there were no markings on the bodies of the freed slaves. Nothing on the rags that had been their clothes. There was nothing there!

  Fylarne wasn't alone in his failure. There were a great many more working on the problem. But none had found anything more than he had. They all ran into the same wall. Completer ignorance of an enchantment so invidious that they couldn't even work out where it lay.

  “More books.” Nga Roth turned up and dropped a pile of heavy looking books on the floor of his cell.

  “Thank you.” He didn't look around. Instead he kept his gaze firmly fixed on the wall as he read all the details of another slave's memories. He was looking for anything that would tell him where and when the enchantment had been laid. But there was nothing there.

  He could shine the memories of the unfortunate sun elf on the wall for the entire first day he had in N'Diel and never see a single thing that looked like magic being cast. It was the same for all of them. All two hundred plus slaves of no matter which people. Their first day was always the same. They arrived at the large portal outside of what had once been a volcano. Walked into a ruined building. And walked out changed.

  No one cast any enchantment on them. No one gave them anything to eat or drink. There were no markings on the floor or the walls of the ruin. No one sensed any magic. Not even those who had a gift. No one even spoke. They simply walked in and walked out smiling. He'd done this fifty times now. Maybe more. And there was nothing.

  “The leaders want these ones quickly,” the ogre told him.

  “I'll get on to it immediately then.” He didn't want to. He wanted to solve this mystery. But he wasn't getting anywhere with the work. And maybe the books would have an answer for someone else to find.

  “I could bring you some tea to sharpen your thoughts?” The ogre suggested.

  “No. Thank you.” He'd seen what the ogres called tea. More importantly he'd smelled it. It was enough to make the strongest of men ill. “I just need to concentrate.”

  He waved at the wall and let the writing and the images fade. It was time to do some translations. And in this case accurate ones.

  Some days it seemed that his gift of knowledge, and all the time spent on the sphinx throne had been wasted. There was so little he could do. But finally someone had found a use for him. Elodie was working with the thrones, getting them to go through the library to find every scrap of information those endless shelves of books had about enchantments, and then to copy those books. Then they were sent to him and he used his own gift to translate the ancient tongue into something everyone could read.

  It was hard work. It required immense amounts of concentration. But at least he was doing something useful. Even if it was only building a library of translated books somewhere in Stonely for others to read.

  Fylarne reached for the first of the books, placed it in his lap and concentrated, letting his magic flow into it. And he forgot completely about the ogre standing on the other side of his cell. She didn't like him anyway. She thought he was a traitor. He couldn't blame her for that. After all she knew what he'd done. Everyone did.

  As always it started slowly. In fact it was as though he was reading the book even though he hadn't even opened the first page. And in fact he was reading it, but not with his eyes. The cast allowed the words on the pages and the pictures and diagrams and everything else, to flow into his mind, and then for the knowledge contained within his mind to change them into something everyone could read. A tongue he knew perfectly. The one they had always called ancient – before they had realised that there was an even more ancient tongue.

  But little by little the work sped up and the words on the pages changed as the knowledge flowed through him. The humans had their electricity thing with bits of lightning travelling through copper wires. He didn't understand all the intricacies of their technology or how it worked. But they called it a circuit. This was like that. A circuit between his brain and the information in the book with the magic replacing the copper wires. And as it warmed up things flowed faster.

  Soon he was reading and translating the book at a rate that was far faster than he could normally manage, and page by page the ink in the paper was being moved around to form the new script.

  He completed the first of the books in twenty minutes, dropped it on the end of his cot and then while his head was still spinning with the recorded recollections of some long dead spellcaster he reached for the next one.

  Was there a limit to his ability to do this, he idly wondered? He didn't know. But it didn't matter. He had to do this. He had to push himself to his very limits until he found the answer.

  Unfortunately there had been no answer in the first book and there would be none in the next. Just as there had been none in any of the hundreds of others he had translated. The problem was a simple one. Time. The Temple was old. Ungodly old. But the books in the library had still not arrived in it until hundreds of years at least after the war of the ancients had ended. They were what he guessed had been gathered up from the ruins of the ancient realm. And what had been written by those who had wandered the divided world after – most of whom had only gossip and hearsay to write down in place of actual history. But worse still, none of them had been sprites wanting to write down what they had done. Because, he assumed, those sprites who had created the enchantment, had then become a part of it.

  So it went on as he used his gift on one book after another and dropped them on
the end of his cot for the ogre to take away. He saw nothing useful in them, but maybe the leaders of this town would. He had to hope so.

  And then he found something!

  At first he didn't know he had. It was just an ancient tale, recorded by an ancient caster of a time hundreds of years after it had happened. There were many such tales. A lot of the ancients who had left their journals in the library had investigated the catastrophe as they had called it. Trying to work out what had happened. Because after the world had been ripped asunder, no one had known how it had happened. They only knew that their worlds had somehow, mysteriously become smaller, and the rest of the original world had vanished. Most had actually imagined that the rest had been destroyed. And it was only many years and even centuries later that others had worked out that they still existed. The same others who had uncovered the ancient writings.

  But this he thought, was an older book. There was no mention of the catastrophe. And that made it interesting.