Chosen

by Jolea M. Harrison

  Maralt thought he would take that power for himself. He would know better than a child what to do with it. Vast kingdoms opened before him. He sat on a throne of diamonds in a hall of light in command of millions; Kings, Queens, worlds at his feet.

  Maralt pulled in a breath as the vision faded, and then he didn’t know what he was thinking. There wasn’t time to sort it out either. The transfer pulled through the gates of the Temple.

  ~*~

  Chapter 10

  The smell of smoke filled his nostrils, mingled with dirt and some other putrid stench. Swarms of flies buzzed over his head. Dynan heard people weeping, others crying out in pain and anguish. A baby’s wail rose and then abruptly cut off. A woman screamed.

  The angle of his body suggested he was on a hill, though Dynan didn’t know how he got there. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t remember at first where he’d been before.

  An alley flashed into view, pulling him off the hill. The same man who’d stabbed him stood over him. Dynan heard Dain calling for him, but couldn’t answer. His heart made a strange thrumming sound in his head. The darkness returned, swallowing him and then spit him back out. He was on the hillside again and this time it held him there.

  The sounds of people dying filled the air. Dynan was afraid to move from all the noise. He didn’t want to look, but his eyes blinked open and focused.

  The entire hillside was covered in bodies, some of them charred to lumps that didn’t resemble a human being. Some were still smoldering. Some were barely touched by whatever flame had scoured this hill. Some lay without a mark on them, lifeless eyes staring at him.

  Beneath him, near the base of the hill a wraith touched down on a protruding rock. Wings arced upward before they folded. It shrieked as it landed, a piercing cry that hurt and made Dynan cover his ears.

  He scrambled to his feet, choking on the smell of burnt flesh that was very much like the smell of a slab of beef the Palace cooks pulled off the grill for his dinner. Intent on getting as far away as he could, he aimed for the top and then the other side of the hill. He clawed his way up using clumps of dead grass for purchase.

  The moment he moved the wraith whipped around. Even as Dynan looked back over his shoulder, it launched at him. With one sharp sweep of its wings, it raked halfway up the hill before Dynan moved barely a few steps. He tripped over something because he was looking behind, a body it turned out, and fell into the ground hard. The wraith swept by over his head, and a wave of rotting stench filled his lungs. One of its legs raked over him, drew across his back and barely missed his head.

  Thinking only of escape, Dynan made ready to move again while trying not to be seen at the same time. The wraith had already turned around, but for some reason, it didn’t pinpoint where he was right away.

  “It can’t see you among the taken,” a voice said to him from a couple bodies to the right. “Unless you move.”

  Dynan froze in the act of rising, wanting to believe it, but didn’t see how that was possible. He didn’t know where the voice came from or who it was or if the speaker could be trusted.

  The wraith was looking right at him, sniffing the air. It threw its head back, a strange kind of bark coming from it, high-pitched and loud, as if it was telling other creatures right where he was. Dynan decided the nameless voice couldn’t be right and started to get up again.

  He was tackled from behind this time and plastered into the hillside by the weight of someone on top of him, his face in the fetid dirt. Dynan tried to heave upward but couldn’t.

  “Stop moving, or you’re going to get us all taken,” he was told.

  Dynan tried looking at who was on top of him, but all he could see was a hand pressed into the ground beside his face. The fingernails were darkened by dirt, and in the places that weren’t covered in tattered wrappings, the skin was torn, red and flaking off as if diseased.

  The wraith stopped barking, hissing instead. By the sound of the wings cutting through the air, the hot blast of wind that smelled of death that came down on him, Dynan could tell the thing had taken to the air again. A moment later it started shrieking, but it was further away.

  The man on top of him relaxed and shifted his weight a little, rolling over the body next to them to reach a clear space in the carnage. Another man detached from the ground, looking not much different from the dead scattered around them, and started up the hill at a low scrambling crouch. There was another behind, and he too clambered upward. He was wrapped up the same as the others with flaking skin.

  “Stay down and follow, or stay here and wait for it to come back,” the one who'd tackled him said in a voice of gravel and air. “Your choice.”

  Dynan didn’t want to go with these three strangers, watching while they went up the hill at a crawl, seemingly unaffected by the slaughter of bodies they were using as handholds. He didn’t want to stay where he was either, looking at the bloated, blackened face of a woman, her eyes eaten from her head.

  Dynan rolled away from her, staring up at the leaden gray sky instead. He was shaking uncontrollably. He remembered what happened, but didn’t have any idea how he was supposed to find Alurn Telaerin and then bring him back.

  He remembered Dain screaming after him. He thought the only way back would be through his brother like he’d been told. If it was true and there was a way back. If he wasn’t really dead.

  Dynan concentrated as hard as he knew how and found nothing.

  “Kid,” someone said. The man with the gravely voice looked back. “There are other things that can take you as easily as a wraith.”

  Fear and grief kept Dynan from moving, even when he saw that there were other creatures snuffling along the base of the hill. A pack of dogs with hairless, gray bodies with a fan of spikes around their heads nosed through the carnage. Dynan knew this place. He’d only taken an oath warning he’d end up here if he broke it.

  Acceptance of the horror of it, the thought he could be here forever, wasn’t possible. He didn’t know what he’d done to be sent here. He wasn’t a murderer and he wasn’t a thief. He hadn’t broken that vow. He hadn’t done anything to deserve dying in the first place. He shouldn’t be here.

  “It can’t be real. It can't be happening,” he said. “I’m going to wake up. I’m going to wake up.”

  “I’d just as soon leave you,” gravely voice said in his ear, making Dynan jump, “but somehow I think it might come back on me if I do. You’ll get used to the idea, boy. It’s better if you do it sooner than later.”

  With that bit of advice, the man, if he was a man, took Dynan by a fistful of jacket and started hauling him up the hill. Dynan didn’t want to go with him, but he didn’t have any leverage to pry him off. He was only able to get a hold of the man’s wrist, which had no deterring effect at all.

  The man readjusted his grip and kept going. That Dynan had a jacket to grab struck him as odd since he thought having one wouldn’t be necessary in the afterlife, but there was a lot about this afterlife he hadn’t expected. He was dragged up the hill, over rocks, over bodies, over other things he couldn’t identify.

  They reached the top of the jagged, rocky mound and Dynan was slung over to the other side of it. There were even more bodies. Dynan yanked away from his captor this time before he could be dragged down the hill, but even as he wrenched free, the man pulled his hand back and stared at it, turning his hand over while he flexed his fingers. He looked at Dynan and then back to his hand, scraggly brows of gray and brown drawn down in awed confusion. All Dynan saw was a normal hand.

  “Pol,” one of the others called, the younger of the three. He had a yellow scarf wrapped around his neck. It was hard to tell what color the rest of his clothes were except dirty. “There’s something coming. I think it’s...You should come look.”

  Pol glanced back at Dynan, adjusting the strap of the leather pack he wore. “Stay there,” he said gruffly, and then crawled back to the top of the hill. He peered over it but only for a second, cringing back
down.

  “Is it?”

  “The Six, yes,” Pol said and he looked to Dynan again, swearing. “We need to get under cover right now. Run. Get into the scrub at the bottom of the hill. As far in as you can. Move!”

  The other two scrambled up, no longer worried about staying low, and started leaping down the hillside. Before Dynan could decide to go or not, Pol had him again, not giving him a choice and shoved him down the hill until he went on his own.

  “Faster than that, boy,” he said, but stayed with him. He kept looking back over his shoulder.

  The scrub was an expansive patch of short, bent trees with dead looking foliage that covered a wide plain before running up against a rocky hill and a forest of taller trees, if they could be called that. Those trees didn’t have leaves at all and stood as blackened sticks against the horizon.

  The first two reached the scrub and ducked into it. They didn’t stop, scrabbling along the ground almost on all fours. Dynan didn’t know what or who the six were, but understood that these men were afraid of them. Pol pushed him again and kept him from falling at the same time. They reached the bent trees and scrambled for cover.

  Pol raced back out and grabbed one of the bodies that lay scattered like wood at the base of the hill, dragging it back with him. Dynan started to run from him, having no desire at all to be around the dead things any more, but Pol reached him and pulled him down to the ground again. Pol shoved the body on top of Dynan and then threw himself on the ground beside him, an arm over Dynan’s head, pushing him into the dirt.

  “Don’t move,” Pol said, the gravel voice a harsh whisper.

  The next instant Dynan was seized by the desire to get up and show himself. A sunlit field, a meandering brook, and a meadow of long, green grass awaited him if he came out into the open.

  “Don’t believe a thing they show you,” Pol said, his teeth clenched together. “It’s all a lie, boy. There’s no such thing as Paradise. Not here. Don’t listen to them.”

  Dynan squirmed under the heavy arm and the weight of the dead on top of him, knowing without a doubt that Pol was lying to him. He had only to get out of these twisted trees, and he’d be saved, taken to a place where the dead didn’t exist. He’d go home.

  Off in the distance, someone screamed. He and Pol looked up as the sound rose into the air. Dynan recognized one of the men who’d gone into the trees ahead of them, thrashing in the claws of a wraith until abruptly his screams cut off and he stopped moving. The wraith took up the scream, its voice rising to an unbearable pitch as it tossed the body aside.

  Dynan stopped trying to get away, covering his ears with his hands, his body curling into a ball in an attempt to be as small as possible. Off in the distance, a crack and crash reached them, followed by the thud of the body hitting the ground.

  The command to show himself went on as the wraiths wheeled by, swooping in low to the ground. Before too long, Dynan started shaking from the effort to ignore them. If Pol hadn’t been there, periodically telling him not to listen, Dynan would have done it. He would have gotten up and gone out into the open where he was certain they would take him. Not to a good place. Maybe a place worse than this.

  Finally, it eased, leaving him panting on the ground, spent. The wraiths moved off. Through a break in the scrabble of branches above him, Dynan could see them wheeling through the sky a distance away. He squirmed out from underneath the dead body, and crawled over to the nearest scrub tree he could lean against.

  He couldn’t seem to get his hands to stop shaking. His eyes burned but when he wiped them, there weren’t any tears, only the stinging sensation that meant they might come. He wanted to curl up in a little ball and never move again. He wanted this to go away. He wanted to be home, wished it so hard it hurt. At the same time, he knew he wouldn’t ever see home again.

  Unless that man who sent him here was right and if he found Alurn, somehow doing so would get him a way out of here. Dynan wondered if Pol knew anything about it and at the same time didn’t want to ask. He was a rough looking man. Despite the fact he’d just saved him, Dynan was afraid of him.

  “We have to move,” Pol said.

  He had a rope out and he was tying it around the torso of the body. He flipped his hand front to back again, examining it, and he grunted over it. Pol stood to a half crouch. That was as far as he could straighten under the branches. He tugged on the rope to check it.

  “Right now.”

  Pol didn’t wait to see that Dynan followed, but set off under the scrub, dragging the body behind. It hurt to move, but Dynan pulled himself to his feet, crouching down under the hanging limbs, and went after him.

  The body thumped along in front of him. The smell coming off of it was immense. Finally, Dynan couldn’t stand it, unable to take his eyes off of it, and dodged around it to catch up to Pol. He glanced back once and wished he hadn’t. The flies were starting to follow.

  “You get used to it,” Pol said, and Dynan found him watching.

  Dynan only shook his head, the thought of being around this long enough to get accustomed to it sickening him even more. Pol didn’t try to convince him. He kept the pace without slowing.

  The landscape didn’t change. The bent trees remained bent. The floor of the thicket was clear of underbrush. The smell of putrefied leaves hung in the air, but after a while the stink eased to something less gag inducing. Every now and again, Pol changed directions, veering off to the left or right, going that way for a time, and then aiming back the original direction, always toward the base of the distant hill.

  Dynan didn’t think he could go much further without stopping for a break, or even just a moment or two. His legs were shaking from the exertion of staying constantly bent to get under the trees. Before long, he was back with the body.

  He ended up falling over it when Pol finally came to a halt. By then the light had started to fade, though it didn’t get completely dark when Dynan thought it should. He back-peddled away from the corpse only to end up with his back against a stack of them.

  A small clearing opened up where the scrub trees ended, and the hill and the forest of sticks began. A rock wall rose over Dynan’s head by a few kem. At its base there was a hole. Around the hole, and all around the clearing the dead were piled up, for protection, Dynan guessed, since the bodies of these taken souls seemed able to trick the eye of the wraiths.

  He maneuvered to his feet as best he could, finding it painful to stand up straight. A noise not far off made him jump. Pol instantly moved to him, pushing him toward the hole in the rock.

  Before Dynan could react though, Pol was already relaxing. The noise came from the other man who’d been with them on the hill. He had with him the body of the third, who’d been taken by the wraith.

  “Did you see?”

  “Yes, Grint,” Pol said and moved to help. “It’s good that you brought him. He’d like that. We’ll post him as sentry.”

  Grint didn’t want to hear that. He was angry and crying at the same time, though again, there weren’t any tears. His face was all twisted up, and he turned a glaring eye to Dynan. He came at him, still carrying the body, shaking it at him so that the head jogged back and forth.

  “This is your fault,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Grint, no it isn’t,” Pol said, and moved to stop him, but Grint was already right in front, shoving the body at Dynan.

  “You did this. Faul’s been here from the start and you come here, and now he’s gone because of you, pulling the wraiths after us...All six of them! It’s your fault!”

  With that he shoved the body of Faul at him. Dynan put his hands out to defend himself, but ended up catching the dead man. The weight of him dragged Dynan to the ground with Faul on top of him.

  Grint followed him down, and put his hands to his throat. “I’m going to snuff out the last little bit of life in you,” he said. “It should have been you anyway.”

  Dynan wondered if it was possible to die twice and then knew it
was. Hands clamped down on his neck cut off air to the point little black specks started appearing before his eyes.

  The next instant though, Grint was ripped away from him. Pol threw him off, across the clearing and into the other pile of stacked bodies. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Grint, and you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Pol went on, trying to calm Grint down. Dynan shoved against the body, but couldn’t get it to budge. After struggling with it, he gave up, and lay for a moment without moving, half trapped. He tried to fathom why he was breathing, and why there was pain when he thought being dead took those things away. The thought crept in that maybe he wasn’t dead after all. He put his hand to his neck. There were welts there.

  Faul groaned in his ear.

  Dynan jumped while Faul sucked in a breath. He blinked his eyes open, raising himself up enough to look down at Dynan with confusion, and then wonder in his eyes.

  Pol and Grint stopped arguing. Faul rolled off and sat, looking at his hands, and feeling his face. Both were clear of lesions. He started laughing next, a sound that seemed to send a shudder through the air, a ripple of discontinuity that made everything stop and listen.

  “Faul?” Grint came over, and took his hand to help him up.

  “Yes, Grint, I’m all right.”

  Dynan rose cautiously to his feet, and edged away from them.

  “But what happened?” Grint asked.

  Faul looked at Pol, and pointed a questioning finger at Dynan, eyebrows raised in expectation. Pol nodded and Faul laughed again. “So then it might be time, finally?”

  Pol nodded again. “At last, it might be.”

  Pol thought of something then, looking to the piles of the dead. He went after Dynan, who’d gotten only a few steps away, and took him by the wrist. Pol dragged him over to the bodies and forced his hand down on one of them, waiting and watching expectantly.