Chy

by Greg Curtis

  Ten minutes later they reached Stonely and her thoughts had to return to more serious matters, as they got down and headed for the centre of the town. Because whatever the leaders had planned, she was certain it would be dangerous. Chy had told her about the giant harpy that had come out of nowhere and given chase. The sprites surely had more to protect them than just those foul creatures. People could die. But she kept her worries to herself as they headed towards the little platform in the centre of the square that had been set up for people to speak from. She would find out soon enough.

  The first thing she found out though was that Fylarne was there. Guarded by a couple of sun elves though not bound, and apparently waiting to be told what was happening like everyone else.

  She shuddered a little when she saw him. And then she had to look away. It was always hard to see him. She gathered that it always would be.

  “I'm sorry.” Chy wrapped a strong arm around her shoulder. “I should have guessed he would be here. Whatever scheme the leaders have come up with, it's based on his work.”

  “It's just so … hard. Knowing what he did.”

  “It is,” he agreed. “And so was what was done to him and his family. I keep trying to imagine what I would have done in his shoes, but I can't. He's both victim and villain – and maybe fool as well. It's awful but I simply don't know how to judge him.”

  Maybe he had a point she realised. But somehow that didn't make it any easier. Nothing ever would. So she was glad when Chy led her away from him, to the other side of the growing crowd. To where she didn't have to see him. And she was more so when the leaders took the stage and she could think about something else. But then she found herself surprised by how many leaders were there – and that more were still coming, joining the others on the stage. They must have brought in leaders from all of the towns on all the worlds they were using as outposts. And she didn't know any of them. And yet there had to be five hundred people in the crowd to listen to what they were going to tell them and more coming. So maybe having so many leaders there made sense. Whatever plan the leaders had come up with, it was major.

  They had to wait a surprising amount of time before everyone was ready, and by then she was sure that over a thousand casters were standing with her, waiting to find out what was happening. Or more. And she, like everyone else, was growing impatient.

  “People,” an elderly sylph finally addressed the crowd as they muttered nervously among themselves. “We have things to discuss.”

  The sylph was right and her words, somehow carried to the back of the crowd by an enchantment of some sort, brought silence. At least for the moment. All eyes were on her, as were Elodie's. But she knew that the others were also impatient. The woman would have to have something interesting to say.

  “As you know we are fighting a war on three fronts. We are dealing with the seemingly endless problems brought about by the reunification of the world piece by piece. And most of our efforts are going to that single effort. But even as we trying to bring some order to that nightmare, our people are being attacked by these shades. We now know how to fight them, but they are still a distraction and there have been deaths. Deaths we cannot afford.”

  “And then we have the sprites, determined to rebuild their volcano through the use of slaves, and despite it being surely the worst possible time for all concerned, once more hunting.”

  “Balls! Pissing balls!” Chy suddenly swore under his breath.

  Elodie would have sworn too save that she was too surprised by the news. She hadn't realised that the sprites were once more out there, taking more people. No one had said. But then there was so much happening in the worlds, maybe it had just been missed. And it was across so many worlds too she realised, as the sylph told them of the attacks. It sounded as though the sprites were slaving on a scale never seen before. In fact they were attacking cities and had returned to the world of the dwarves. But with everyone so caught up everything else that was happening, maybe it was the perfect time for them to strike.

  “Did you know?” She whispered to Chy.

  “No.” He shook his head. “But I've been so busy. Every day I have to go rushing off to another town or city with another problem to deal with. Sometimes it's two or three a day. I don't really know much of what's happening around me.”

  Elodie believed that. He was a wizard and one of only a very few human casters. Given that wherever possible the leaders were trying to keep the casters they sent to each new crisis as local as possible, he was likely rushed off his feet. And what she'd seen on his clothes line as they'd walked over to meet the steam wagon had suggested the same thing. All his great cloaks with their leather patches, drying out in the sun. Many with burns, holes, rips and tears in them. They had seen a lot of battles. So had he.

  But looking around the audience and seeing the looks of surprise on their faces and hearing their muttering, she guessed they also hadn't known that the sprites were returning to their reprehensible ways. And it was for the same reasons that Chy didn't know. The casters were all working day and night to keep their homes safe.

  And there was another thing stealing away their time. The gaols were filling up with shades. Or former shades. Once they were treated with Fylarne's spell, they weren't really shades any longer. They were just empty. But they still had to be cared for, which was where the gaols came in. Because left to their own devices they would die of thirst or starvation. There simply wasn't the will in them to do such basic things such as eat or drink. But then their whole lives had been taken away and even if they had been false lives, they had nothing else. Recovery, if it was even possible, was going to take years. And someone was going to have to care for them for all that time. More casters.

  They were being attacked on too many fronts at once. And on top of that they were trying to build a spiderweb of portals across so many different worlds, when many of those portals kept failing as the worlds moved out of alignment and they constantly had to be recast. She had no idea how many of their people were busy spending all their days doing that, but it had to be a lot. There just wasn't enough time left for any of them to pay attention to what the sprites were doing. Which led to an obvious question. How were they going to fight them? They simply didn't have the time or the people.

  Others realised exactly the same thing as her, which was why questions abruptly started being shouted at the leaders on their make shift stage. Or that one question at least, shouted over and over again in different guises. It was quite a while before the leaders could restore a little peace to the proceedings. And when they did it was only thanks to the booming yell of a giant.

  “But we have found out some things,” the giant continued when people were able hear him again. “We know what the difference is between the shades and the sprites. Why the slaves can't seem to be freed.”

  “Everyone knows that!” someone in the audience yelled back at him, and then the argument started up once more.

  He was right, Elodie knew. They did know that. The enchantment laid upon the shades was taught to them. They were taken as children and raised with it. They didn't need the magic to be sustained – it was practically bred into them. They believed it with every fibre and sinew of their being. Which was why when it was taken away from them, there was nothing left and they got these half dead people sitting around waiting to do nothing.

  With the sprites and their slaves it was different. The enchantment was somehow constantly reinforced. The enchantment was like a dream that they could never break free of. A shared dream. And no matter how much reality you threw at them, it pulled them back in and they wanted to start mining again. The enchantment was actually woven into their being somehow. And as far as she knew, no one had found a way to make it not a part of them. Naturally the others yelled that back at the giant. Clearly he was losing the crowd as the bards said.

  “But did you know that it's less a machine than a disease?” The giant yelled back.

  That drew some silence. Even El
odie was quiet, not that she'd been saying anything. But for a moment she needed to think about what he was saying. A disease? An enchanted disease? That she had never imagined. And it did explain some things – like the fact that the enchantment kept reasserting itself. A strong drink and a warm bed could often help to ease the fevers and chills but often only time could get rid of a disease. Except that time didn't seem to be helping in this case. The patients kept slipping back into delirium.

  But even if this enchantment was some sort of disease, how did you treat it? She didn't know. And as she held on to Chy she knew that he didn't know either. In fact he looked completely bewildered.

  Mostly when someone was ill you simply eased their symptoms and waited until they recovered by themselves. Sometimes you gave them various potions to boost their strength, calm their fever, ease their pain and so forth. But there was little more you could do. Except that sometimes as she suddenly remembered, you could treat a disease by giving someone a milder version of the same illness. Cutting it into them. Variolation.

  The dwarves practised the technique, cutting red spotted fever into their children to protect them from the much more dangerous blister pox. And the trolls gave all their children black rot as protection against nearly every other disease they knew.

  But the leaders couldn't be thinking of doing anything like that – could they? That would be madness. It wouldn't make any sense. Could it? And then the giant had to prove her wrong.

  “We fight one disease with another,” he told them. “We use a minor enchantment of confusion to teach a victim of the illness how to fight his way free. And little by little, the victims free themselves from the greater one holding them. In the end, the enchantment binding them becomes a dream that they can wake from.”

  The silence held for a time after the giant had told them all their grand plan. But it wasn't the same silence as before. At the start it had been the silence of listening as they'd wanted to learn. Now it had become the silence of shock and disbelief. Because no one knew how to take in what had been said.

  Then the yelling started. The cries of “madness” and “drunkenness.” Because it was exactly that. Everyone there knew it. Elodie knew it. And besides her, judging by the the shocked look on his face, Chy knew it too.

  She'd thought they had a plan to find this ancient, worn out volcano, find the temple within it and destroy it, thereby freeing everyone. Instead they wanted to find all the victims held in this enchantment's grip and infect them with another enchanted disease. There were just so many problems with the idea that she didn't know where to start.

  Nor did anyone else which was why the arguments and the yelling just kept growing louder. No one could accept such an idea.

  And then she caught a glimpse of Fylarne through the crowd, standing there looking surprised, but thoughtful. This clearly wasn't his plan. He had been caught by surprise by it. And yet as the others yelled and told the leaders they were mad, he stood there, thinking about it.

  That troubled her. Because he was a man who from everything she knew, had put himself through an entire underworld of pain on the sphinx throne, to gain the knowledge he needed to fight the sprites. He was a man whose entire family was held by this evil enchantment. Who would do anything he could to free them. And he was considering the idea.

  She nudged Chy in the side as he stood there, mouth still hanging open in disbelief, and when he turned to her nodded at the former guardian so he could see Fylarne for himself. Chy was another one who was known for his wit.

  “I see him,” he told her quietly while the others raged against the leaders. “But I don't know what to make of him – or this madness. I don't think he does either.”

  Sadly that was close to what she herself was thinking. But the mere fact that Fylarne imagined there might be some hope in this plan worried her. As did one thing more. It was the only plan they had. Everything else they'd tried had failed. And could this make things any worse for them?

  The arguments and the invective raged on for a good half hour as everyone there wanted to tell the leaders that they'd lost their wits, while the leaders wanted to explain their reasoning. But at least Elodie knew why there were so many there on the make shift stage. To defend themselves. To make it seem as though they really did have some idea of what they were saying. And that gave her time to put her own thoughts into some sort of order. And to find something of an answer when things finally grew quiet again.

  “A test,” she told them, when she could finally make herself heard. She had to repeat herself a few times before people listened.

  “We have something over two hundred former slaves, all still held by the enchantment. Take say ten of them, prepare your new enchantment, and see if it works. How well it works. And for how long. Or if it makes things worse. Then we come back to this.”

  Was that the wisest course of action? Was ten enough – or too many? Elodie didn't know. She didn't even know if this idea the leaders had come up with had any hope. Or if it could somehow make things worse for those held by the sprites' enchantment. But it seemed like the only plan they had. And little by little the others agreed with her. The arguments slowly died away to be replaced by murmurs of agreement. Small ones perhaps. But there had been none before.

  Worst of all, though perhaps it was right, Fylarne nodded in agreement. She knew that he wouldn't have agreed if he hadn't had some hope.

  Eventually the meeting came to an end. Not because someone concluded it. But because people simply ran out of strength to let it continue. And Chy took her hand, and started leading her to the nearest portal. It wasn't a long journey. And a heartbeat after that they were standing on the terrace outside his home. Back once more in the peace and quiet. Able to sit and talk and share a little tea.

  “What do you think?” she asked as she made herself comfortable in one of the chairs while he set to work with the kettle.

  “I don't know. I've sat on the sphinx throne three times and gained a little from it each time. But nothing it's shown me lets me think clearly enough to find an answer.” He started reaching for the cups. “Maybe it can work, somehow. But I don't know that it will. And I fear that it will only make things worse for those caught in the enchantment.”

  “But you have access to the thrones themselves. To the ancient library. And the ancient caster who became the sphinx. I think he or she might be able to find something within all those books or whatever knowledge the thrones have, that might provide an answer. I don't know that anyone else can.”

  “Could it really make things worse for them?” she asked. And in her thoughts were the memories of what she'd seen of the slaves. Their pitiable condition. The suffering they'd endured. They were already in the underworld surely, even if they believed they were in the heavens.

  Chy's answer was only a shrug. He didn't know. And of course he didn't know. No one had ever dealt with anything like this before.

  But at least it was only a test. Only ten, she told herself. How much harm could that cause?

  Chapter Forty One

  Fylarne paced the floor of his cell nervously. For the moment he had no more books to translate, and in fact nothing else to do save to stare at his neighbour across the way who spent most of his days staring aimlessly at nothing. Was that any better than before when the shade had screamed and yelled and threatened him? Fylarne didn't know. It was quieter he supposed.

  What he did know was that today was the day. Today the leaders would be testing out their plan on the slaves. Only ten of them. But that would be enough to see if it worked. Even if it was only a few of them. He didn't have any idea if it would work or not. But what he was certain of was that the future of his family depended on their theory. Because there wasn't another one. If this didn't work, he had no way to free them. The release his wife and daughter and the rest of his loved ones from their prison of the mind depended on this.

  But maybe it would work? … He kept pacing. And step by step he imagined, he started wearing o
ut a track in the stone floor.

  Praise the gods! He would have loved to have had something to do. Some more books to translate. Something to read. Anything to take his mind off what was happening and the interminable wait. But he didn't, save to quietly mutter a few prayers to the Lady of Grace and a few others as he waited for someone to arrive and tell him how it had gone.

  Of course the chances were that nothing would happen. Or if it did, it would take time. You couldn't defeat a disease in a few beats of a worried heart. This new disease the leaders were going to infect the slaves with, would take time to settle in. And then it would take more time for them to throw it off. And longer still before the lessons they learned from that experience kicked in and allowed them to throw off the actual enchantment that was holding them. It could be weeks before they knew anything.

  Or it could be sooner he realised as the floor was unexpectedly pulled out from underneath his feet! Then he hit the stone, cried out in pain and stopped thinking about much at all.