“Mordecai look at me!” I opened my eyes. Penny was holding my head in her hands while she crouched beside me. I hadn’t seen her look so worried since I had been thrown from that horse a year ago. “Come back to me Mort. Focus… stay with me. Can you hear me?”
“I’m not deaf Penny,” I smiled at her.
“You’re not normal either. You were sitting at the table with your eyes closed, crying,” she leaned in to kiss me, ignoring the eyes of everyone around us. “We have to do something Mort. I don’t think you have much time,” she said.
I was much calmer now. Something about my conversation with the voice had left me feeling better. I tried to convey that to her, “It’s alright Penny. I think I’m better now. I understand a little more. The voice has been talking to me… explaining things. It isn’t as sinister as I thought. Given a little time I think we can understand each other.”
Cyhan spoke up, “It’s almost too late. He’s much farther gone than I suspected. You need to form the bond now, before his mind slips completely away.”
“But I haven’t had any training,” Penny said.
“You don’t need it to form the bond; he’ll do most of that anyway. The training is just to help keep you alive afterward,” he replied.
“Honestly, I don’t think it is necessary,” I put in.
He ignored me, “Do you have a sword Penelope?”
As a matter of fact she did, though we had packed it away after reaching the capital. Rose ran to fetch it from her things while Cyhan pulled a clear gem from a pouch at his side. Marc stepped closer, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Cyhan glanced at him, “Leave. Your goddess may try to interfere with the bonding. He will be vulnerable during the process. If she takes advantage it could be our undoing.”
Marc was incensed, “My Lady is not like that. She bears only goodwill for us. If only men would accept that she could help us!”
“You have a choice,” Cyhan answered, “you may leave, or I can remove you.” He left it open to interpretation what he meant exactly by the word ‘remove’.
Marc left, but he certainly wasn’t happy about it. Rose returned a second later with Penny’s sword. It was the same slender blade she had carried with her the night we fought the shiggreth together. She passed it carefully over into Penny’s hands.
Penny looked at Cyhan, “What do I do now?”
“Nothing, hold the blade up across your palms, as though you were presenting it to him,” he replied.
“I don’t want to do this yet,” I said.
“You don’t have a choice. It’s either that or I’ll see to it that you never walk out of this room alive… understand?” His voice was calm but I could see violence coiled in his large frame. The man was ready to carry out his threat the moment he sensed any resistance.
No! They’ll geld you. This is wrong… don’t let them do this.
“I understand,” I made my choice. “What do I do?”
Cyhan pulled a small scroll from a pouch, “You can read Lycian?” I nodded at him that I could. “She will give you her oath, and you will respond. Place your hands on top of hers where she holds the sword,” he told me.
I put my hands over hers, with the sword between our palms. Cyhan reached over and set the clear gem he had been holding on the flat of the blade.
No!
I could hear the voice again, and the earth shook beneath us. The giant heartbeat had sped up. The gem slid off the blade and fell to the ground.
“What was that?” Penny asked.
Cyhan grabbed up the stone quickly, this time he replaced it and wound a long leather thong around it to hold it in place, “I think he’s losing control, we have to hurry.”
“That wasn’t me,” I said, but no one was listening.
Don’t you understand? This will kill you! the voice shouted at me.
“The voice says this is going to kill me… that can’t be true right?” I asked them.
“Your mind is splintering Mordecai. It’s fighting with itself. You have to focus on what we’re doing.” Cyhan looked worried. It was not an expression that suited him.
“But I can’t shake the ground… it’s impossible. It’s too big, no wizard could do that,” I protested.
He had already begun giving Penny her lines and she recited them flawlessly, “I, Penelope Cooper, do give my faith and trust to you, Mordecai Illeniel. My life is yours, to use as you wish. I am your sword; I will protect you and carry your burdens with you. In the light I will walk beside you, to face your foes, and should darkness enter your heart I will…” She faltered for a moment, “should darkness enter your heart, I will be your death.” She said the words proudly; looking straight into my eyes, though I could see the last part pained her to say.
Cyhan held the scroll up near me so that I could see it, “Read the response, in Lycian, and put your heart into it.”
The earth began a steady vibration that set my teeth on edge, while the house began to shake lightly. No! You are the last hope! They’ll destroy everything if you do this! A form began to flow up from the floor, taking shape from the very stone of the house’s foundation, as if the rock were liquid.
“You’ll need to shield us Mordecai!” Cyhan shouted. I spoke and created a shield of pure force around the three of us.
“I keep telling you that can’t be me… there’s no way I could shake the earth like this. And that…,” I nodded at the stone body forming outside my shield, “I have no clue what that is.”
“You’re much stronger than you realize. Your sleeping mind is fighting to prevent this… start the invocation before it’s too late!” he shouted back at me.
Fear and the unknown are strong motivators. I started the response in Lycian, “I, Mordecai Illeniel do take you Penelope Cooper as my pact-bearer. Our souls will be joined and our lives linked, from now until our deaths…” As I spoke the form outside my shield grew more detailed, until it resembled a young woman.
If you do this I cannot help you. Your life will be short and the darkness coming will devour you along with everything else in this world. Stop!
The floor around us rippled, like water, and then rose up over us to slam into my shield. The force almost made me lose my place in the response, “Your life is my own and I will use your mind for my shield, in return I will give you greater strength. So long as we both live I will allow no evil to shelter within me, and when you die I will join you in the deeper sleep.” As I finished I felt the energy flowing between us… through our palms. The gem set upon the blade glowed a deep crimson and light flowed along the steel. I could feel… something… passing between us and I could feel Penelope’s heart beating within her chest. The sensation was similar to when we had first briefly linked minds a year ago.
The stone had arched up until it nearly covered my shield on three sides, but now it began to crumble and fall away. The figure of a woman still stood facing us on one side.
“It is done,” intoned Cyhan and he began untying the gem. It was still glowing as he placed it into the pouch on his belt. Outside the shield the stone woman still faced us, she had gone still but her face bore an expression of incredible sadness. Tears of pure crystal welled from her eyes to fall tinkling upon the floor, until at last she was motionless again. For some reason I felt like crying with her.
Penny looked at me, “Mort! What happened to your eyes?”
I blinked at her, she looked subtly different. Glancing around the world seemed a little dimmer but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly ‘what’ was dimmer. Then I noticed Penny’s eyes were no longer brown… they were blue, “Never mind mine! Look at yours!”
She got up to find a mirror and almost fell over. When she stood she came a half a foot off the floor and was ill-prepared for the landing, “What the hell?” She moved cautiously after that. “Is it safe to go outside now?”
She was gesturing at the stone semi-circle that partially enclosed the area of my shield. I looked at Cyhan to see what he though
t, “What do you think?”
“I think now that your mind is your own we will have little to fear. Do you sense anything outside the area of your protection?” he answered.
I stretched out my mind, feeling the room around us but sensed nothing. The stone woman was now merely a statue. “I think she’s gone,” I replied.
“You keep referring to it as ‘she’, but it was merely a deeper part of your fractured mind,” Cyhan said.
I still didn’t agree with that assessment. I knew there was no way I could have moved so much stone so effortlessly. At the very least I would have felt the strain from it. It was hopeless trying to convince him of that though. I lowered the shield around us and we moved out into the shambles that remained of the duke’s breakfast room. The floor had shifted and buckled, overturning furniture and popping the doors from their frames. The expensive glass windows were shattered.
The most astonishing feature of the newly remodeled room was the crumbling stone semi-circle around where we had performed the bonding, that and the statue of course. The statue was a flawless rendition of a beautiful young woman. The details even went so far as to include braids in her hair. Even the nails on her hands had tiny almost indiscernible cuticles. I bent down to gather up the small crystal tears that had fallen to the floor. “I wonder what these are,” I mused.
“If I were to hazard a guess… quartz, or perhaps diamond,” Cyhan responded. I made a mental note to myself to have them appraised. At the very least they were a notable memento of the occasion.
“Holy crap!” Penny shouted as she ran back into the room. She overshot her mark and ran into a wall before she could stop. She dusted herself off and walked to me more carefully. “I found a mirror Mort. My eyes are blue!” She was almost vibrating with excitement.
“I know… I noticed a minute ago.”
“But yours are brown!” she said.
“Huh?”
Cyhan spoke up, “It’s a rare side-effect of the bonding. Certain traits are sometimes transferred between the wizard and his Anath’Meridum. Eye-color changes are rare but not unheard of. There are other more deliberate changes you will both notice as well.”
“If I find myself fancying men I’m putting an end to myself,” I replied pithily.
“I feel different already,” Penny enthused, “stronger. And the world looks different. Mort you’re positively glowing… everything is so… bright.” She smiled at me, “I always wanted blue eyes.”
“I liked your eyes the way they were,” I groused. She looked almost unnatural with those blue diamonds flashing under her dark hair.
“The bond will make you stronger, faster, and more able to fight than you were before. The effect is in direct proportion to the strength of the wizard bonded. You may be even stronger than me now,” the older warrior informed her.
With hardly a thought she slapped him, hard. The motion was so fast I hardly saw her hand move. “That was for earlier,” she said.
The warrior grinned as he rubbed his face, “Guess that makes us even.”
“Hardly, I owe you about a dozen more, but they can wait till we train.”
“Don’t get overconfident. You’re still as clumsy as a newborn pup. It will take some time to adjust to your new-found strength and speed.”
I on the other hand, didn’t feel any better at all. It seemed like a very one sided deal. The voices were gone, true enough. I could no longer hear the murmuring of the wind, the heartbeat of the earth or the sound of that all too real woman’s voice. Now that they were gone I missed them, I had begun to get used to them I suppose. The world seemed emptier now, more sterile, as if the life had been drained from it. Then a thought occurred to me, “Where’s Rose?”
We stared at one another. She had been with us at the start but she was nowhere to be seen now. “I saw her step away after she handed me the sword but I wasn’t watching her,” said Penny.
I cast out my mind, exploring the house around us. I immediately found Marc, his father James, and a number of other people, but Rose was not among them. I examined the room around us more closely and then I felt her, buried under a pile of rubble where one wall had collapsed. Her heart was beating rapidly so I knew she was still alive. “She’s over here,” I announced and walked over to the tumbled stones and timbers. “She’s buried, but alive.”
I didn’t wait for Penny or Cyhan to start hauling the debris away, instead I spoke a few words and using my will I quickly cleared away the large granite blocks and fallen lumber. Beneath it all was a hard stone shell. It looked as if the floor had flowed up over and around her to form a solid stone shield. I wasn’t sure how to undo or replicate the way the stone had flowed so I carefully reached out to explore the layout of Rose’s body within the shell.
Once I had a clear image of her body I created a shield of force within the empty space, around her and between her and the stone. Then I applied a sharp hammer-like blow with my mind, shattering the stone sarcophagus-like shell. As the stone broke apart I could see Rose’s frightened expression within. The moment the fragments fell away she tried to sit up, only to strike her head against the hard shield I had placed around her. “Ow!” she yelped.
If it hadn’t been for the serious nature of the situation I might have laughed. I made a mental note to remember this for future harassment, and then I removed the spell around her. “How in the world did you manage this Rose?”
She started dusting herself off carefully. I could almost imagine a cat cleaning its fur she was so meticulous. “I moved back to watch, and then the floor started moving. I fell down over here and the wall collapsed on top of me. I thought I was going to be crushed.”
“Well you survived somehow. How did that stone surround you like that?”
“I think that stone woman did it. When the wall collapsed she saw me, and I think she made the floor rise up around me…or something like that. I’m not really sure, it all happened so fast,” she said.
I glared at Cyhan, “My sleeping mind again I’m sure.” I don’t know why I kept trying sarcasm on him; he seemed completely oblivious to it.
“Most likely,” he replied.
I wasn’t buying it. Whoever the woman had been she was no fragment of my unconscious mind. She was real, and if her actions were any proof, she could not be malignant. Of course by that logic Marc’s goddess was a sweetheart as well. She had a pronounced proclivity for healing the sick and similar good works. I decided I would reserve judgment for the time being. The stone lady might have ulterior motives just as the gods did.
James Lancaster appeared at last, “Is it safe to come in yet?” He looked in through the shattered door-frame. “Damn! Mordecai every time I let you into my home this happens. I suppose you have a good excuse this time as well?” He was projecting mock anger but I wasn’t fooled.
“Sorry, Penny was holding hands with me and I got a bit too excited your grace,” I replied. Inappropriate? Sure it was, but after everything else that had happened I figured no one would care.
James stared at me blankly for a moment, and then Cyhan started snickering quietly. I had never heard him laugh before, but it set off a chain reaction as everyone’s nervous anxiety sought release. James laughed loudest of all, as usual. A great belly laugh, I made more mental notes so I could mimic him better next time.
Chapter 15
We started out bright and early the next morning. I offered to pay James for the damage to his home but he declined saying he owed me enough already for saving his life. I argued with him, but we had too many other things to do for me to put much energy into it.
We rode at an easy pace. We might have made better time but the mules carrying the gold couldn’t manage anything faster. Penny was back in her ‘traveling warrior’ garb, chain byrnie over padded gambeson. She wore her sword proudly now, the bond seemed to have improved it. I hadn’t enchanted it before but now it was every bit as sharp as the one I had done for Dorian.
I thought about that as we rode. W
ithout being enchanted I assumed that the magic that gave it its sharpness must be continually renewed by the bond between us. That meant that the bond had some perpetual cost, a slight drain upon our personal energies would be needed to maintain it. I wondered what other costs there might be, but I knew too little to have any good guesses.
Penny was in a good mood. Exuberant would be the best description for it. She had been ever since the bond was formed; her new strength and energy had filled her with a joyful zest for life. I’m pretty sure she was looking forward to the evening’s training session with Cyhan. She had as much as said she had a score to settle. I hoped the two of them didn’t inflict any injuries I couldn’t heal.
Cyhan nudged his horse closer to mine, “Keep your eyes open, if they have anyone after us they’ll probably make their move tonight or tomorrow.”
I hadn’t forgotten our previous discussion, “I know. I’ve been scanning the hills around us. When they get close I’ll sense them. We should have plenty of warning.”
“Warning would be good, but I won’t count on it. Men can surprise you, they may think of some way to avoid detection you haven’t come across before,” he replied.
Typical, I could have told him they would attack us naked, armed only with spoons and he probably would have warned me how dangerous a spoon could be in the hands of a desperate man. I think he lived in a state of constant paranoia.
Marc leaned over to me, “You need to relax Mort. You seem tense.”
“I’m not the one that’s tense… or rather I wouldn’t be if he wasn’t such a worrywart,” I replied.
We rode until noon before we stopped to eat lunch. When we stopped Penny made a point of leaping down from her horse, the she remounted with a standing jump. The action delighted her so much she repeated it several times. She was about to try vaulting completely over the horse before she had to stop. Her poor mare had spooked at her strange antics and nearly started bucking. She spent several minutes talking to her to calm her down.
“You’re enjoying this entirely too much,” I said a few minutes later as we ate our bread and cheese.
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