Missing Piece

by Robert Priest

  Tharfen dashed to the wall and scrambled up it, her eyes scouring the darkness on the other side where the creature had skittered. The child screamed and she saw the grotesque shape moving from dark shadow to dark shadow, closer and closer to the heap of broken houses. She checked to make sure she still had the canister of Pathan fire at her side before leaping off the wall and into the dark spell-crossed side of the city. She covered the distance rapidly, but not rapidly enough, and the glomerant disappeared into one of the houses at the bottom of the heap.

  10

  Kone Thrall

  Xemion pushed his way through the still-gathering crowd. Vallaine’s camouflage cloak, the hood partially obscuring his features, reflected some of the dread in the people’s faces, adding an extra authority to his passing. They moved aside without question. For the first time in half a decade, full of dread himself, Xemion made his way to the gateway in the wall around the Great Kone. He cast his gaze downward, away from the Kone itself. Drathis and the others still lay there, red hands in white hands, their bodies crooked and withered as though charred. Xemion knew what spellshock looked like, but this was spellshock so powerful that something began to ache within him as well. But his outrage soon buried it. If they had succeeded in casting a spell, it could threaten everything!

  All this time he had been keeping his gaze away from the Great Kone, but as he lifted his head, his eyes inadvertently grazed the luminous green surface. What he saw there was the imprint of a red hand blotting a letter that looked like it might be an L. He set his teeth in rage, clenched his fists. Something radical had changed.

  He shouted with all his might, “Nooooo!”

  Several of those who were covertly watching him from outside the gate stepped back, frightened. They were behind him, so could only see his long arms reaching up to the stars from beneath the cloak.

  “No,” he said again, quieter this time. Whatever spell had been spoken was now cast and could not be uncast. These fools in their ignorance and weakness had stumbled back to the riddled ways of the past. He had a sudden urge — as though he still had the ability he’d had in the Second Battle of Phaer Bay — to project terrible power from his palms and singe and char the others who had come down here, to transform them into the same withered husks as these poor souls at his feet. The very wish for it caused a surge of pain in every part of his body. He winced, but remained motionless; his eyes fixed on that letter on the kone.

  What word had they touched? He needed to know, but … He balled his fist and held it up to his eye, squinting through it, limiting his field of vision so he could only see that one word.

  Love.

  But now it was crucial to see just the next word.

  Is.

  And the next.

  Not.

  The next four words would surely give him everything he needed to know.

  The answer, love is …

  At the end of the seventh word he stopped. He urgently wanted to read on but he knew if he did he would be lost. He stood there neither moving forward to read more nor moving back to stop reading.

  The words echoed in his head: Love is not the answer love is. Love is not the answer love is …

  He was like the moth at that moment when it can’t fly away from the flame but it can’t quite fly into it either. He was in full thrall.

  11

  The Glomerant

  The glomerant had disappeared into one of the ground-level houses, one that had landed upright and intact and been quickly ransacked by traders and Thralls. Since then more houses at various angles had come down around and on top of it, so that it was currently at the bottom of a heap six houses high.

  Tharfen peered in through the remains of a window. There was a dreadful stench and a dim light coming from somewhere inside. And there was the little boy, Beren, in the middle of the floor, screaming so hard it looked like his throat might burst.

  Gripping the canister of Pathan fire in her right hand, she crawled through the window and snapped him up in her free arm. Immediately everything went completely dark. Frantically, she clicked at the flint wheel on the canister. The Pathan fire did not ignite, but in the quick flash of light from the spark she saw that she was surrounded. The glomerant had broken itself down into three smaller parts, two of them quite large and one of them nothing more than a pair of arms atop a pair of un-matching legs. Desperately she clicked the flint again. Still no fire. But at least the limbs flinched away from the flash of light. Still holding Beren in one arm, she hooked the canister back onto her hip with the other and took out her cutlass. She swung it blindly back and forth until she connected with something in the dark; there was the dull thud of a head or an arm hitting the floor. She slashed again and connected. She slashed in a wide circle all around her until she was able to get her back against a wall. Only then did she let Beren down to the ground so that he could hide behind her, freeing up her other arm. Now she could swing the sword with one hand and keep clicking the flint wheel on the canister with the other. But the Pathan fire was still not igniting.

  She waited. Every sound was intensified in the darkness. Under everything she could hear the rustling whistling sound of traitlings. She fought the fear. Traitlings were insubstantial fragments, aspects of people’s souls magically removed in a quest for moral perfection. Just like the limbs, they had glommed together. But they worked on fear, and she wasn’t going to give them any of it. Something icy gripped her ankle. For only a few seconds there was a feeling of cold so intense it burned. She shouted and kicked, and then the flint finally ignited the fire in the canister and a bright jet of white flame exploded from the nozzle. Still shouting, she aimed it down at her foot and by its light saw what had got a hold of her — some long-ago criminal’s severed hand. One touch of the flame and it fell away and scuttled off quick as a cracked whip. She aimed the jet of white-hot fire at the other glomerant pieces, setting them alight. Illuminated by its own burning, the biggest of them began to flail at itself. Another quick burst of fire and it fell apart, the various limbs that composed it scurrying away, still burning.

  Beren continued to scream his high-pitched gargle, but this was now accompanied by another sound, a rage-like war cry that Tharfen recognized with a shock as her own. She stopped, and for a second stood there panting. Beren also became silent.

  Suddenly, a brilliant white light streamed in through the window and her brother, Torgee, appeared. “I’ve got her!” he yelled, holding a phosphorescent lamp over his head to cast more light into the house.

  From the distance came another voice: “He’s got her!”

  She had never seen such a look on Torgee’s face. “Are you safe?” he asked in a trembling voice. She could see his concern for her, and this knowledge pierced her more than it should have.

  It was the first time she had seen him in five years. She should have had something nice to say. But her body was full of rage and fear. “Are you safe?” she snapped back, embarrassed, her voice unexpectedly ragged and hoarse after all her screaming.

  “You should not go over the wall at night without backup,” he said.

  That piece inside her, which had only recently come together at the touch of Vallaine’s hand, pinged painfully. It was as though a tiny comet was shooting across the inside of her, ricocheting from one rib to the next.

  “Well, I’m so sorry to have rescued a child from a monster,” she spat back. But even as she said this, she realized that Torgee himself must have disobeyed the protocols in order to attempt this rescue. Ping. “And I didn’t need to be rescued, thank you!”

  Torgee looked at her sternly, impassively. His eyes narrowed, he sucked in his cheeks and shook his head with disgust. He started to say something, but stopped. If he spoke, tears would come. Instead he reached for the boy as Tharfen passed him out the window. He let her climb out and then handed Beren back to her. There was hate in his eyes. He looked at her
slick captain’s uniform, her white breeches and her long leather boots. “You are not my sister,” he growled bitterly. “Not anymore.” And then he was gone.

  The crowd, wavering in the shadows cast by the torches, had come as close to the wall that bisected the city as they dared, and when Tharfen, carrying the child on her shoulders, climbed back over, they let out a great cheer.

  The boy’s mother ran forward screaming her son’s name. But Beren’s eyes were twitching and rolling and he hardly seemed to recognize her. She took him from Tharfen and hugged him close but as her arms went around him her hand touched something deathly cold and she dropped him with a shriek. Only briefly visible in the flickering of the torches the large grey hand that had been hiding against the boy’s back scurried away, parting the screaming crowd before it like the prow of a boat. Beren was screaming and bucking now. His mother kept trying to pick him up but he flailed so much she couldn’t get a hold of him.

  “He has to be taken to the infirmary. Now!” Tharfen shouted over the furor. She looked around fiercely at the crowd. Seeing that she intended them to help her pick the child up, the crowd widened away from her, but she jabbed her finger ferociously at a man with a cart and bellowed in her most penetrating voice, “Bring your cart now and help me take him to the infirmary.” The man shook his head, horrified. Once again she drew her cutlass and raised it over her head. “You will go and bring your cart here now or you will be dead! Which is it?”

  The others in the crowd backed away from him as, visibly trembling, he retrieved his cart.

  12

  Not Saving

  All this time Xemion had remained fixated on the letters iof the Great Kone. When Beren’s mother first found the cadaver hand on her son’s back, he heard the screaming of the crowd and he almost succeeded in dragging his eyes away, but not quite. Now he knew with terror and certainty he was trapped. He was in thrall of the Great Kone, just as Vallaine had warned him he would be. The desire to read on, to read it all, was growing ever stronger. If he could not resist it, he would die here. And he could not resist it.

  He had waited so long for Saheli to rise, and now that the equinox was so close, she would surely awaken. But now he wouldn’t be there, and she would need him.

  Even as a part of him flooded with regret and terror, a larger part wanted to shift his eyes onto the next word. Every second was a struggle, and he was losing.

  Then he felt something touch his hand; it had a strange, slightly horrifying warmth that he had felt before. It was the touch of Vallaine’s hand.

  But Vallaine is dead, he thought.

  Still, the electrifying warmth continued radiating up his arm and into his body. Suddenly he was wracked with pain. It was as though something was being squeezed out of every part of him and crushed into one cold, hard fragment. At first it was a fragment of pain so intense he almost fainted, but then it became numb and the warmth was gone and he was still. Staring, enthralled, at the luminous lettering before him. Helplessly his eyes sought to move to the next word, but there was a soft, numb thump in his skull as though someone had launched a stone at it from the inside. Again he tried to focus, but another louder inner thump followed, then another. Finally something banged against the inside of his eardrum so loud he jerked his head away in agony. With that, his eyes were ripped away from the letters entirely. He still wanted so much to turn back to them, though — those letters were like the last possible beauty on Earth, the quick secret of all existence. Fortunately, he had just enough control of himself to turn and walk slowly but steadily away from the Great Kone.

  How he welcomed the closing of the crowd about him as he entered the still-milling mass of them. Every step separated him more and more from those addictive letters. Soon the thumping of the piece had turned to a barely perceptible pinging sound and his terror began to subside. Then he remembered Tharfen. Had it really been her eye he’d caught for that instant when he approached? He shuddered.

  At that very moment, as Xemion shuddered, the girl who had arisen from the bog laid eyes on him for the first time. She had been wandering from shade to shade, away from the bog and deeper into the city, drawn by the promise of That Which Can Only Happen Once. All day, singed by the sun, avoided by any who sensed her, she had caught no scent or sight of what she’d come for. But the feeling was very strong here.

  She’d stayed hidden at the back of the crowd, but now began to move toward Xemion. That Which Can Only Happen Once was about to happen. She focused her attention intently on the black oval of shadow where the hood covered his face. As he looked up to the sky, she briefly beheld the thin line of his mouth. She needed to see that mouth again. This was what she had come for.

  The petitioners and the beggars who had fled the sight of Vallaine’s apparition had not fled far. When they saw Xemion emerge from the Great Kone, they returned. “Sire, sire, save us,” they pleaded, one young woman boldly clutching at his cloak. He swept it out of her grasp, his fear turning back into anger.

  “I can’t save anyone!” he roared. He gestured toward the prone bodies of the spellbinders and those who had taken part in the mass spell with them. “And neither can they. Look at them. That is what happens with the spellcraft. Whatever pain you try to ease with its power will double with every spell you make. Tell everybody — stay away from the Great Kone, and do not dabble in spellcraft.”

  He drew his new steel blade from its scabbard and held it up before him. “Listen to me. I’ve seen you all. I know who you are, and nothing like this will be tolerated.” A flickering torch rippled the light over his chameleon cloak as he spoke.

  Most of the people moved away from him, but there was one who approached, face hidden in a hood of green. A strange aroma emanated from her. She waited. She knew nothing except that That Which Can Only Happen Once was about to happen, and it was good. The wind gusted, and with the shift of the flame she saw nearly all of his face, but still not his eyes.

  I must see into his eyes.

  Just then a voice startled her. “By what authority do you detain these good citizens?”

  The girl from the bog turned and looked into a different face, just as that face turned and looked into hers — it was Lirodello. Their eyes connected and, beyond her control, That Which Can Only Happen Once happened then. Lirodello hardly felt it at first. But something profound had happened to him.

  He returned his gaze to the hooded figure he had first addressed.

  “By the authority of the common safety,” Xemion growled. His hood was still up, his face shaded, but even though Lirodello had not heard this voice in five years, he still recognized it.

  “You,” he said.

  Xemion did not respond. He pulled Vallaine’s cloak closer.

  “So you have returned to us, have you?”

  Xemion didn’t answer. He turned and began to walk back to the wall.

  “You are one to talk about spellcraft,” Lirodello called after him, his voice as close to anger as it had been in five years. Xemion continued walking away. “What happened to the dragon?” Xemion had almost reached the wall now. “Do you still have the sword?” Xemion climbed quickly up the wall and jumped down to the other side. Lirodello turned to the fast-disappearing crowd. There was Drathis and the others still lying on the ground, some of them trembling with agony. “He was right! Look what happens to those who attempt spellcraft. Someone go to Mr. Stilpkin and tell him what has happened.”

  After two members of the crowd had been dispatched, Lirodello immediately began to search for those eyes that had met his only briefly. He could not find them anywhere.

  13

  The Smiling of Lirodello

  Lirodello’s main concern as he made his way through the dark streets back to his quarters should have been either the glomerant, the fact that the three one-eyed spellbinders had cast some kind of spell using the Great Kone or the sudden reappearance of Xemion after five years
. But despite the importance and potential danger of each of these things, his mind kept wandering.

  There was a strange fluttery feather of light tickling away at the dark grief inside him that kept drawing his attention away. Parts of him that had been dormant since the death of his beloved Imalgha were now threatening to dance with joy. Those eyes he had seen at the Great Kone! His mind kept returning to them, reliving the thrill of connection, of possibility. He hadn’t really even seen her face, but something had happened. Something magical.

  A tremble rippled through his belly and his bones, and for a second he was his old romantic self again. The once-familiar longing for a kiss suddenly overtook him. He pictured it happening, him bending down to that dark oval in its hood, their mouths connecting. But then the fantasy ended with a brutal pang of guilt as he pictured his beloved Imalgha dying on the battlefield, staring at him accusingly, somehow foreseeing this betrayal of their love. He imagined her sister, Atathu, finding out, her eyes widening into saucers of rage and coming at him with one of those many handheld weapons she was forever training with. He shuddered and tried to focus on Imalgha and on the necessity and dignity of ongoing grief.