Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  Goulish taps and scratching came from the other side. Daen screamed at the sounds, willing them to stop, then succumbed to anguish, shivering and sobbing for several minutes in the dark. But Mer’s voice in his head scolded him for being emotional and selfish. He braced himself with several deep breaths, then stood and felt about until his hand encountered the stone wall. Leading carefully with his toes, he started down the corridor, guided only by touch.

  “I will keep your memory, Mer,” he whispered to himself.

  Time crawled in the utter night of the tunnel. Drips punctuated skittering noises and the echoes of his scuffling footsteps. He struggled with his own mind, resisting images that scorched his inner eye, repeating endlessly—a monster slicing through soldiers in a single movement; the faces of Tolec, Barth, and Jennia, both in life and in death; Mer cringing beneath a falling sword. Books burning.

  Accompanying the images, Mer’s last words to Daen—You are the Keeper of Memory now.

  What would he do? Where would he go? Trenna was taken, Cinvat overrun. What cover or comfort would the surrounding wilderness give him? He’d been less abandoned and alone in the fog this morning…had it really only been this morning?

  A memory of laughter made him pause in his tracks—the little girl, Maia, with her dark eyes and innocent curiosity. There were people in the wilds who didn’t know of the Dahak, were still untouched, perhaps less than half a day away. Vulnerable, but they had dragons. An alarm could be raised, word spread. He might be flown to safety, and the memory of Cinvat saved.

  With hope kindled in his heart, Daen hurried forward, anxious now to find the end of this tunnel. Shortly, his toes struck stone, and feeling with his free hand, he discovered stairs going up. When his head bumped on a ceiling of stone, he set his books down and felt about with his hands. Hinges here, and a latch! He studied it with his fingers until he knew how to work it, threw it back, and pushed up. The door resisted. He pushed harder and it swung up a few inches.

  The light of a ruddy sunset stung his eyes—after his long trek in the darkest night of his life, it illuminated trees and boulders like a noonday sun. He pressed the door higher, observing a metal rod hinged to the edge that swung down beside him. He used it to prop the door open as he ducked back inside, gathered up his books, then crawled out into the world once more. Around him lay a small stone courtyard ringed with low benches, but with wild terrain beyond.

  The surrounding light shifted and moved unnaturally—not the glow of sunset at all. A low roar filled his ears. Turning, he said, “Sweet Asha…”

  From eastern gate to far western wall, the city burned. Towers of flame and smoke swirled into the starless void from every quarter. Even as he watched, the roof of the Library collapsed in a fountain of sparks and cinders. On the pinnacle of the Temple dome, the circle of Truth, of the Cycles and of Asha, stood bare against the curtain of fire.

  Daen watched in shock for several minutes, as buildings crumbled and the inferno grew higher. Dragons still circled above, but the combat had ended. Cinvat was lost.

  Daen swallowed his grief. Two thousand years of conquest and refinement and culture now survived only in these three books, and in his memory. He had a mission, and a destination in mind. He fished his record book out of his tunic and flipped through its pages to find the map he had drawn this morning, with an X to mark his best guess at the location of the courtyard and the statue, where he had met an enigmatic little girl.

  The map wasn’t there.

  He flipped back through the book the other direction. But it wasn’t to be found. There were two pages stuck together toward the back. Surely…

  When he peeled them apart, they were blank other than the stain that bound them, and he remembered spilling ink as he sat in a doorway just a few hours ago. But he knew he’d seen the statue, walked upon the pavers, and spoken with a curious wilding child.

  A deep, mournful gong sounded from the Dome of the Temple at that moment, reverberating through the valley and off the surrounding peaks. Daen’s eyes snapped up in time to see the dome list, the walls beneath it disintegrate. It thundered down into a maelstrom of flames, giving out one last enormous peal as it cracked. The Circle of Asha disappeared in a plume of fire and smoke that shot into the sky. Screams of despair sounded from the city.

  All of it hauntingly familiar. Too familiar: his dream of death this very morning.

  As the beat of giant wings filled the air around him, a dreadful thought struck Daen, and he swiped the pages of his record forward and backward in vain hope. The map was not there. Nor were there missing pages where it might have been. He had never made any such accounting in his record.

  The only chronicle he found with today’s date stunned him:

  Waeges’ Day, 207th y. 4th Age: Sun bright and warm. Stumbled upon a huge cache of cinderblack. Mer will be pleased.

  He read it twice, pulse throbbing in his ears.

  But he remembered wandering through fog to a stone courtyard, where he spoke to a mysterious little girl. He’d asked to meet her mother. “I don’t think she will see you,” she had replied.

  As black dragons settled down around him with weapons bolted to their limbs, bearing armored warriors on their backs, he realized the bitter, horrifying truth. He knew it as certainly as he knew his name. A rare gift of Truth, from Asha, perhaps.

  And when the High Dragon, the Dahak, sculled to a landing before him, all doubt was erased. Bigger than any dragon he’d ever seen, so black as to reflect no light at all, its wings like a chasm across the heavens revealing the farthest, lightless void, it stepped toward him. Where its giant talons trod, the grass curled and blackened.

  The monster from his dream, but also the black dragon from the sculpture.

  KEEPER OF MEMORY, it said, in his mind, its lips not moving at all, SEE HOW MEMORY DIES. Then it bent its head down, plucked the three books off the paving where he had laid them, and swallowed them whole.

  Daen cried out in hopeless agony, knowing that his failure was absolute, the story of Cinvat lost forever. Knowing he had relived the final day of his life over and over again, unaware, condemned by his remorse to a nightmarish limbo he would inhabit for eternity…

  Until, after a millennium, a child wandered into the path of his mournful spirit, a child who could see him and speak with him, who interrupted his endless torment with a glimmer of Truth, in a courtyard so distant in time from his failure that a statue had been erected and its story all but forgotten while he repeated…repeated.

  Would he even remember this revelation if…when he woke again? If he could find the girl again, could he somehow give her the history that was about to die with him—that had died with him—or was he doomed to echo this tragedy, unknowing, until the end of creation? It was the slimmest hope of redemption, perhaps not a hope at all.

  But he realized something else, and with it came a strange serenity. The statue depicted two High Dragons in battle, one white, one black. The white one wins, the girl had said to him.

  Even as the jaws of the Dahak opened and descended toward him, he knew that this was all a phantasm, a memory of events long past.

  “You have already fallen,” he said.

  The Dahak faltered for an instant at this ghost whispering to a memory, and a ripple coursed through its wings of night. Then it took Daen in its teeth and crushed ribs against ribs until blood poured from his lungs onto the pavestones, like a bright flower unfurling.

  Toward the end of my medical school pediatrics rotation, I woke in an on-call room from a nightmare about a very sick little girl melting into a cloud of light. I had gotten to know her parents well, particularly her father. It had been a tumultuous year for me, spent in hospitals up and down the San Francisco Peninsula, filled with languages ranging from Spanish to Samoan, and punctuated by strange sights alternately disgusting and beautiful. The people I met haunted me, especially the father of this girl. I will never forget his eyes as he watched his daughter.

  I should
have spent any free time I had studying or working on my Spellwright trilogy, but instead I found myself haunted by a new story that would try to capture something of what I had seen during the year. One rare day out of the hospital, the following story spilled out of me onto the page in very rough form. I showed it to a few people and realized that it would require more polishing than I had time for. So it sat on my hard drive while I finished medical school and pressed ahead on my novels. But when Shawn asked me if I had a story for an anthology to help him recover from all that cancer had put him through, I knew I had to revive the story and try to get it right.

  — Blake Charlton

  HEAVEN IN A WILD FLOWER

  Blake Charlton

  The baby girl floated around the water pump as a small, radiant cloud of light. She illuminated the nearby ferns and made the darkness beyond her darker.

  Joaquin Lopez put his bucket down. He was a tall, thin man. Early forties. Dark eyes and hair. He pressed a shaking hand to his mouth, wondered if he had the balls to gather in the girl. He looked to the sky for a heaven but saw only stars between redwood branches.

  He called to Luis and Collin. When the boys came out of the cabin, he told Luis to fetch a sheet and Collin to go to town for the doctor. Collin was old enough that he turned and ran, but Luis stood staring. “Papá,” he asked, “what is it?” Now that Collin was gone, they spoke in Spanish.

  “Only a baby. You looked the same. Get the sheet.”

  The boy went and Lopez stepped closer. The baby didn’t seem to notice. Tendrils of her indigo light curled around a water drop forming on the pump’s spigot. The drop fattened and fell, dispersing her into a corona. She made a crackling sound, like pine needles burning. Something in the sound reminded Lopez of childish laughter. “Nena,” he asked, “have you come to stay?”

  The nimbus paused. Another drop grew from the spigot, and she coalesced around it. Lopez crept forward until he was standing next to her. The drop fell. Again the corona, again the soft crackling laughter.

  Luis came back with the sheet. Lopez took it and wondered if he should wait for Robert. It’d be safer that way. This wouldn’t be so bad for Robert. A familiar, dark, and doubtful mood began closing in around Lopez.

  “Papá?” Luis whispered.

  Lopez stared distractedly into the nimbus. A trill of irritation had interrupted his doubts. He didn’t want to wait anymore, to do the careful thing anymore. Maybe this would be the last time he came across a baby girl.

  “Papá,” Luis repeated, then switched to English. “Daddy, what’s wrong?”

  Lopez started. “Nothing’s wrong,” he murmured, made up his mind. To hell with caution. He draped the sheet around the baby. She didn’t seem to mind, but when he pulled her upward, some of her tendrils gathered around a water drop. He waited for the drop to fall, and then gathered the rest of her into the sheet.

  “Oh, oh, Nena, it’s okay, it’s okay,” he whispered in Spanish and carried her back to the cabin. Even wrapped in the blanket, she lit up the lowest redwood branches. Then Lopez noticed that his hands glowed. A shiver of fear ran down his body.

  He had the balls after all.

  “Papá,” Luis asked, “where did she come from?”

  “From a heaven. All reincarnated babies come from a heaven, just like you did. She’s your sister now. Maybe she was your sister in your last life too.”

  “But you didn’t come from a heaven, Papá?”

  “I wasn’t reincarnated. I was born.”

  They walked into the cabin. “Will she stay?” Luis wanted to know.

  “Hopefully. Light one of the candles in the dresser.”

  “What is the girl called?” Luis asked while trying to do what he was told.

  Lopez laid the baby on his bed. “We don’t name reincarnated babies for two years. We’ll just call her Nena until then.”

  The boy was fumbling with candle and flint, but Lopez could see by the faint light now radiating from his hands and forearms. He unlocked the closet, fetched his Remington and set it against the wall. His daughter had formed a body and head, but her face was still a cloud of light.

  “Why don’t we name reincarnated babies for so long?”

  “Because they might still go back to their heaven.”

  “I don’t want her.”

  Lopez lifted Luis onto the bed and looked into his eyes. Luis wasn’t a Latino like his father; he was a Hindú, probably. “Mijo, there are so few girls on earth that being a brother will make you very important. You’ll like her.”

  The boy looked at the baby dubiously.

  “I was glad you stayed,” Lopez added.

  “But I was a boy.”

  “Even though you were a boy, I was glad.”

  “Is she going to take you back to her heaven?”

  “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “I don’t want you to die, Papá.”

  “I’m not going to die,” Lopez said and pressed his lips together. They were trembling. But just a little. He looked at his son. Better tell him the truth. “I won’t die, Luis, unless she does.”

  By the time the doctor’s footsteps sounded on the porch, the baby had consolidated. Dr. Lo stood an inch under six feet. Wide shoulders. Tanned complexion. Thick white hair combed neatly back. He was some mix of Chino and Gringo, like many emigrants from the Francisco Ruins. Dr. Lo set a pistol down on the nightstand and sat on the bed.

  “She’s a girl?” Lopez asked in English.

  “Let’s find out,” the doctor said and took the baby into his lap. As he examined her, she began to cry. A sound like flowing water. “A healthy reincarnated baby girl,” he announced when finished. “Congratulations.”

  Lopez took her back. “You think Señora Jenner would come down to see her?”

  “The Jenner outfit moved to the Eureka Camps last month. One of her people up there gave birth.”

  “Like…natural?”

  The doctor nodded. “The mother’s reincarnated, but she delivered a girl. Only natural born baby girl I’ve heard about in ten years, maybe more. It’s a miracle, really. Story goes she was carrying wood when her water broke. She walked home and caught her daughter without a whimper.”

  Lopez fretted his baby’s swaddling. “It’s too bad. With Señora Jenner gone, the closest woman must be…I don’t know.”

  “You mean it’s too bad Señora Jenner took Señorita Jenner with her. She was a pretty one. But word of your daughter will get around. I’m sure your daughter will bring you what you’re after. Now, it’s time I examined you.”

  Afterward Dr. Lo sat across from Lopez. “The glow on your arms won’t last much longer. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m her father now?”

  “You are.”

  Lopez picked up the baby. “How long ’til we know if she’ll stay?”

  “Likely after the first three days. But there are reports of children as old as fourteen years going back.”

  The baby began to cry, this time with the wail of a corporeal infant. Lopez asked, “If she does go back, how will I die?”

  “Sometimes a seizure, sometimes the heart stops.”

  Lopez nodded.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “It’s only been a few hours.”

  “You could have waited for Robert. He’s reincarnated, yes?”

  “He is, but he’s also trading down on the coast. Nena might have hung around long enough for him to get back, but…” He looked back to his daughter.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  Lopez flattened his daughter’s downy hair.

  “Forgive my prying, but what made you pick her up?” Dr. Lo asked. “The chance to find her a mother, yes?”

  “That’s part of it, but…” His voice trailed off. Why had he done it? Now it seemed like a foolish, impulsive thing. He changed the subject. “Do you think she’ll stay?”

  “I think she will.”

  “Is there anything else I can do? Anyth
ing that might help convince her to stay?”

  “Try not to think about what will happen if she goes.”

  In the morning, Robert returned on their horse. He was a stocky Gringo with a dark blond beard and a bald head the sun turned pink. Long ago, Lopez’s niece had married Robert’s brother, making him family. The niece had died in childbirth, but Robert and Lopez had been friends ever since, running the same outfit for near fifteen years.

  When Lopez showed Robert his new daughter, the other man was clearly jealous. “Wolfy, why didn’t you wait for me?” Robert asked through a teasing smile. “Worst she could do to me would be drag me to my heaven.”

  “Daaad!” Collin said and punched Robert’s leg.

  Robert ruffled his son’s blond hair and then looked look at Lopez. “Seriously, Wolfy, what came over you? I didn’t think you had the huevos.”

  “Yeah, well, turns out I do.”

  “Good man,” Robert said. “Well, when word gets out about your daughter, you’ll have to fight the women off with a stick.” He cooed into the baby’s face. Man and girl smiled at each other. Robert wasn’t going to stay jealous for long; it wasn’t in his nature.

  “Hot damn, poontang! Una niña!” Robert said as he straightened and turned to Collin and Luis. “Boys, get the bags inside. We’d better tidy up; we’ll be expecting company of the feminine kind!”

  Later Collin and Luis got into a shoving match. Lopez broke it up and took his boy onto the porch. A brisk ocean wind rushed through the redwoods. They sat on the steps.

  Luis scowled at his toes. “Collin says you’re chickenshit because you weren’t reincarnated.” Luis spoke in sullen English; sometimes he did that when angry with his father.

  “Mijo, I don’t know what will happen to me when I die. It makes things uncertain.”

  “Papá, why weren’t you reincarnated?”

  Lopez sighed. How to explain to a child? “Way back when, there were many people in the world, as many women as men. But when the heavens came, the world fell apart. It happened south of here, in the Valley of Melted Sand, where the smartest people had a technology magic that made the heavens. You were one of the men who made the heavens.”