The Simbul's gift зк-6

by Lynn Abbey

  They walked through a sultry afternoon where the only breeze was the hot breath wafting from their lungs. From time to time, Alassra glimpsed Halaern or another forester pacing them in the near distance. Like them, she kept her senses honed for Red Wizard activity. Spread out and nearly mindless, the Cha'Tel'Quessir were vulnerable to attack, but none came. The Thayans were taking their cues from Rizcarn, following him to the Sunglade along with two-score Cha'Tel'Quessir.

  Sunset was a smear of hot-forged steel on the western horizon. Night was black and marked by whiplash winds that came without warning. Halaern could have said whether the storm had followed them as they walked or whether it was as large as the Yuirwood, but Halaern wasn't available for conversation. Alassra knew only that it had been hanging for a full night and day: longer than any summer storm in her memory.

  Rizcarn kept them walking. Alassra cut her finger on her sister's knife and kept pace with the Cha'Tel'Quessir. She wondered how the Red Wizards were faring, but not through any misplaced compassion. Though there were spells that would give a human man or woman elven vision for a night, there was a good chance that they'd do something rash if they thought their quarry was getting ahead of them. Even if it were Mythrell'aa herself pacing them, the illusionist was surely traveling with a wizard who could cast the invocation spell for lightning into the hanging storm to bring it down on them all.

  Alassra's worst fears seemed confirmed when the winds intensified and pummeled the Cha'Tel'Quessir from every direction. Thunder began, not as ear-splitting cracks but in long, low-pitched rumbles. The sky stayed dark; lightning hadn't yet broken free.

  Three steps farther, and Alassra stopped. Lightning was her favorite death spell. When she cast it, the white-hot bolts were met and balanced by a counterthrust from deep within the soil. That force was building under her feet. Looking into the trees, she glimpsed ghostly blue fingers rising from the topmost branches.

  The trees of the Yuirwood and all the life beneath them were about to get caught in a battle between the sky and the ground. Alassra threw aside her bow, her arrows, her steel-headed spear and unbuckled her sword belt: She touched one of the studs on her shirt. Her finger healed and the forest went dark.

  "Get down!" she shouted in a voice that carried over the wind. "Lie flat."

  She might as well have told them to pray to Relkath. When the first bolt struck, a pine tree burst into flames. The second bolt struck an oak. A branch bore the bolt to the trunk, the trunk carried it to the ground where it spread out like a spider's web. Alassra felt it pass beneath her feet, then the thunder fell down on them.

  There was panic among them as the Cha'Tel'Quessir ignored her advice, and perhaps just as well. The burning pine collected three more bolts in blinding succession, then it sprouted arms and hurled fire to the ground. Alassra had no time to wonder if she faced a monster summoned by the Red Wizards or something created by the Yuirwood. She shed her Cha'Tel'Quessir disguise and hurled a lightning bolt at its heart, drawing all its fury to a single target: herself.

  The Simbul met lightning with lightning, fire with fire, all the while trying to maintain a protective shield around those Cha'Tel'Quessir who might still be alive beneath the battle. As with so many wizardry duels, there was no question of wounding her foe. She strove for annihilation, though if her own defenses wavered, by Mystra's mercy she would escape a similar fate-unless she consciously chose to die.

  That thought was never in her mind during the few score moments that the battle raged. It couldn't be, not until sheets of black rain put a stop to the fighting by transforming the creature of fire into a collapsing mass of smoke and ash.

  Exhausted and undisguised, Alassra caught her breath in the aftermath. In nearly six hundred years of wizardry, she'd never felt so impotent. The rain had quenched the monster, not her, not all her magic. She'd never touched it. If it were the native force of the Yuirwood, then no wonder the elven sages worried. If it were something new from Thay, then all the gods of Faerun were at risk.

  25

  The Yuirwood, in Aglarond Before dawn, the twenty-fourth day of Eleasias, The Year of the Banner (1368DR)

  Bro sat where he'd fallen when the storm started, knees drawn up to his chin, trying to take advantage of the shelter a shoulder-high cedar provided from the wind and rain. He was soaked to the bone and shaking, as much from memories as from the cold. From the first thunder crack he'd relived the nightmare of Sulalk while the nightmare of the Yuirwood played out above him. His throat was raw. He'd screamed himself hoarse, but he didn't remember making a sound, didn't remember anything except mindless, endless terror. There might have been a man, tall as a tree and formed from fire, hurling flame and lightning at the Cha'Tel'Quessir. There might have been a woman, too, standing with the Cha'Tel'Quessir, shrouded in silver who fought with fire and lightning of her own.

  Zandilar.

  Zandilar, who'd first come to him when he sat beneath a Sulalk tree, seducing him with promises of the Yuirwood. Zandilar, who'd taken the colt into the ground. Zandilar, who'd surrounded him with soft light when there was a Thayan arrow in his back. Zandilar, who, according to Chayan, had healed him in a deep-water pool.

  Once Dent said the worst thing that could happen to a man was that a god took an interest in his life. Bro had dismissed his stepfather's remark as typically shortsighted, typically human, typically Dent. The Cha'Tel'Quessir were different; their gods were different… better. Of course, he'd been younger then, a least a month younger. Beside the cedar tree, Bro admitted to Dent that he hadn't known what he was talking about. Everything had been simple while he'd lived among humans, dreaming of the Yuirwood.

  Nothing was simple now, least of all, the Yuirwood gods.

  When Bro thought about it, there was a third layer of nightmare in his memory, between Sulalk and the loud, fiery battle he'd just survived. He'd seen the flaming man before, not as tall and not in flames, when he'd cowered behind the Simbul in an out-of-place, out-of-time part of the forest. The Simbul was someone Bro tried not to think about but, like Zandilar, she'd taken irreplaceable things from him and also saved his life with lightning.

  Bro wondered-without wanting to-whether there was some connection between Zandilar the Dancer and Aglarond's queen, some reason that they would both want a twilight-colored colt or would do battle with the same enemies.

  Such thoughts left Bro more uncomfortable than the waning storm. He raised his head and looked around.

  The wind was down to a damp breeze. Rain fell in slow, soft drops from the trees rather than like stones from the sky. Above the trees, the moon-a crescent shy of full-chased away ragged clouds. Bro wrung out his hair. He stood slowly, half-expecting something new and terrible to happened when he straightened his back. His ears hadn't been deafened as they'd been at Sulalk. He could hear the dripping trees… the faint, infrequent moaning of wounded Cha'Tel'Quessir.

  "Chayan? Rizcarn? Yongour?" Bro didn't know the names of the other Cha'Tel'Quessir his father collected. He'd refused to learn them because they hadn't learned his. "Anyone?"

  He heard a moan and saw someone trapped beneath a fallen tree.

  "I'm coming!"

  Bro grabbed a tree limb. It came apart in his hands. He held the broken piece in the moonlight. His mind made sense of what his eyes saw: not a tree limb, but a Cha'Tel'Quessir limb: an arm, charred stiff at the elbow and wrist. Bro didn't so much drop it, as let go and retreat. He gagged bile and forced himself to look at one corpse burned beyond all recognition and at a second that he'd thought-wrongly-had been the source of the moan.

  It was Sulalk again, Shali and Dent again, Lanig again, and Bro was stretched beyond his ability to accept what he saw as the truth. He dropped to his knees, then curled forward, hands holding his head down and against the ground. His eyes were open; no tears flowed. His mouth was open; he could neither retch nor scream. Aching with pain his body couldn't feel, Bro made himself small and prayed for the nightmare to end.

  "Ebroin. Ebr
oin, listen to me. Come around, Ebroin."

  Chayan's voice, her hands between his shoulders, urging him to sit up. She had her sword still, the spear, bow, and arrows were gone.

  "No. Go away."

  "I can't. I need your help, Ebroin. Come around. Look at me."

  "Leave me alone. I want to die."

  "No, you don't. Look at me, Ebroin."

  Chayan got her hand beneath Bro's arm. She dug her fingers between his healed ribs. He flinched; that was all the leverage she needed to get him sitting upright again. Then her hands surrounded his jaw. Her thumbs pressed against his cheeks.

  "They're all dead, Chayan!"

  "Not all of them, not you, not me. You can't help this one, but there are others."

  She pulled Bro to his feet. When she let go, he looked down-by accident, to avoid looking at her. Everything was as it had been: two corpses, one completely charred, the other bloody and torn. When he started to shake, Chayan slapped him hard. Bro's arm came up to return the blow. She seized his wrist.

  "Later, Ebroin."

  "How-?" Bro asked, but he knew the answer. Anger had restored him, if restored was the proper word. A chasm loomed between him and what he saw when he looked anywhere in the moonlight. There were the unlucky ones, the ones who hadn't survived. Bro didn't want to join them, but he wasn't grateful, either, to the woman who'd opened the chasm. "Don't you see? Don't you care? Or have you seen worse, fighting everyone, everywhere?" He made the question scornful.

  "I have, Ebroin. You don't want to imagine what I've seen. And I still care. When we have done what we must, then I'll sit and weep and fold my arms over my head, just like you."

  Still holding his wrist, Chayan led Bro across devastation. Trees were down, burnt or toppled outright, leaving muddy craters. There were more bodies, charred, blasted, and in pieces. The scents of death, charred wood and burnt flesh, hung in the air despite the breeze.

  "How many?" Bro asked. "How bad?"

  "Thirteen dead. Thirteen that I can find. Thirteen alive, counting you and me. The rest are…" Chayan swept her free arm in front of them. "The rest are missing, including Rizcarn."

  Bro stumbled. It was inconceivable that his father-his once-dead father-hadn't survived. Or maybe, not so inconceivable. Maybe Zandilar had taken Rizcarn into the ground along with the colt, leaving him and twelve others alive… as a warning: Don't anger the Yuirwood. Don't go to the Sunglade.

  The other survivors, hollow-eyed and silent, sat in the lee of a large toppled tree. They looked up at him. Bro imagined Chayan had collected them all and wondered, when she released his wrist, why she'd collected him last. One said, "Rizcarn's son," as he sat down. He said nothing; even now, he wasn't one of them, wasn't a person in their eyes.

  Chayan scrounged wood; Bro didn't ask where. She laid a fire. If the decision had been his, Bro would have said he'd never want to see flames again, but Chayan didn't ask. The gently crackling tinder and firefly sparks widened the chasm between death and survival. One of the men began to weep. One of the women took out a broken loaf of journey bread. Bro's share of the baking, tied up in the remnants of his Sulalk shirt and slung from his belt, had become a sodden lump he wasn't hungry enough to eat.

  Chayan appeared at Bro's side. She offered bread from her own pack before saying, "We must search for your father."

  Bro looked at the destruction surrounding them. He thought of the missing Cha'Tel'Quessir, and that missing meant worse than dead, worse than cindered. Missing meant burst into pieces too small to find.

  "Why look? Why not assume he's dead, instead of looking for a bit here, a bit there? Say the wizards got him and say we're lucky they didn't get us, too. Our gods have cursed us, Chayan."

  "All right, Ebroin. I'm not going to argue with you. I'll be back around dawn. You'll be safe enough here."

  He looked at the others gathered around the fire, the Cha'Tel'Quessir who didn't know his name. "I'm coming."

  They were in the undamaged Yuirwood before Bro spoke again. "This time I did see Zandilar. I looked up during the firestorm. I saw her fighting a monster that looked like a man made from fire. That's two times in one day that she saved my life."

  Chayan stared at him sideways. She looked puzzled, maybe jealous.

  "I suppose I owe her a prayer, some sort of offering. With Lanig dead and Yongour-maybe she's decided I should dance with her after all."

  "I wouldn't think you owe Zandilar any more than you think you owe the Simbul. They both saved your life, but Zandilar took your colt, Ebroin. Seems to me that you'd be about even."

  "The Simbul-" he began to explain that Aglarond's queen had started everything downhill when she tried to steal Dancer from him in Sulalk. But he'd said that before. It didn't matter how anything had started, just that it ended in the Sunglade.

  Chayan's cousin, Halaern, served Aglarond's queen and Halaern couldn't have been far away when the storm-framed battle erupted between Zandilar and the flame-man. Like Rizcarn, the forester was missing. Once the thought had occurred to him, Bro realized that he cared more whether Trovar Halaern had survived than whether Rizcarn had, but when he suggested that they might look for the forester instead, Chayan shook her head sharply.

  "We need Rizcarn," she insisted, beginning to sound like Lanig or Yongour, or the Cha'Tel'Quessir sitting around the little fire.

  "We need to go home," he countered, but neither of them had homes waiting for them.

  They wandered, keeping track of their position by the stars and finding the occasional faded Relkath rune, left over from other seasons when Rizcarn had wandered the Yuirwood. Chayan admitted the possibility that Rizcarn was truly missing; Bro suggested that Zandilar had taken him with her after she defeated the flame man. That was the wrong thing to say.

  "Zandilar didn't defeat the Old Man of the Yuirwood. Mark me on this, Ebroin: The storm defeated the Old Man-the way running out of arrows will defeat an archer. All Zandilar did was attract his attention."

  "Still, she might have taken Rizcarn to the same place she took Dancer."

  "She was humbled. She didn't take anything away from this battle."

  Bro argued, but not for long. They both spotted the brightly glowing tree at the same time. Chayan, Bro noticed, had her hand on her sword as they approached. The first thing Bro noticed was that none of the light came from Rizcarn. It all came from the tree where his father chiselled a Relkath rune. Rizcarn's clothes were torn and ragged. A raw burn ran the length of his right arm. It was painful to behold, but didn't seem to affect him as he hammered an iron chisel with a rock-hammer. By the depth of the cuts, Rizcarn had been chiseling and rechiseling the same rune for quite a while.

  "Wake up the trees, Rizcarn." Bang! "Gather the Cha'Tel'Quessir, Rizcarn." Bang! "Lead them to the Sunglade, Rizcarn." Bang! Bang! Bang! "Wake up the trees."

  "Poppa?" Bro called, keep a good distance between himself and the tree, and grateful for Chayan's sword, which he assumed she could use. "Poppa?" he called a second time, louder than before.

  "Ember? Is that Ember?"

  Rizcarn turned around with the rock and chisel still in his hands. There was a gouge across his face that ran diagonally from his forehead to his cheek. One eye was swollen shut; the other had the white-ringed aspect of madness. Yet Ember had been Bro's name before his father died, a name Rizcarn hadn't used since they'd reunited.

  Bro exchanged a glance with Chayan, who nodded in response to his unasked question.

  "Yes, it's me, Poppa. Ember. Chayan and I have come looking for you."

  "You have a ladylove now? You're growing up… grown. I didn't see you grow. How is your mother, Ember? I haven't seen her in so long, either. I've been with the trees, waking up the trees." He gestured with his chisel and rock. "So many trees. Wake up the trees to protect the forest."

  "Poppa, Shali's dead. Lanig's dead. Yongour's dead. A whole lot of Cha'Tel'Quessir died tonight. Don't you remember."

  Rizcarn's open eye blinked. "Shali dead? When? How? Lan
ig and Yongour?"

  Of all the madness Bro imagined for his father, this one, in which Rizcarn appeared oblivious to his own wounds, to the destruction into which he'd led them had never entered his mind.

  "How-?" he began sharply. Chayan took his arm. Bro jerked free and turned his question at her instead. "How can he not remember? How can he pretend he doesn't remember? Look at him. He was there. He was hurt. How can he not remember?"

  "You were lying in the mud with your hands over your head. You told me to go away. You told me you wanted to die."

  "But I remembered!"

  "You weren't responsible for all those who died. There's no guessing what got jarred loose in Rizcarn's mind. You think you saw Zandilar-"

  "Zandilar?" Rizcarn interrupted. "You saw Zandilar? Did she come to protect the Cha'Tel'Quessir? Did Relkath wake up to protect the trees?"

  "See? He does remember. He was pretending."

  But Chayan ignored him; she had her own questions to ask. "Protect the trees and the Cha'Tel'Quessir from what, Rizcarn? What did Zandilar fight back there? What waited in the storm? Why did it want to stop you from leading the Cha'Tel'Quessir to the Sunglade?"

  For a moment it seemed that Rizcarn knew the answers to Chayan's questions and would share them. Then his mad eye narrowed with cunning intelligence. "Where are the others?" He looked left and right before choosing the direction that would lead him back to Chayan's little fire. "There's still time. She cares for you, Ebroin. She's forgiven you. Zandilar will dance with you at the Sunglade. The rest doesn't matter."

  And though the dancing goddess had saved his life, that was nothing Bro wanted to hear. He didn't like the way Rizcarn's manner had changed so suddenly, either, almost as if something sleeping inside Rizcarn had awakened. Bro tried not to think about the warning Chayan and Halaern had given him: Rizcarn might be possessed by a Red Wizard, but at this moment possession seemed preferable to some of the other thoughts in his head. He wrapped his hand around the hilt of the Simbul's dagger.