The dark man looked genuinely abashed. He furrowed his brows and looked at the ground, biting his lip. It was a child’s expression, and it almost made Dormael feel embarrassed about the way he was acting.
I apologize, the dark man replied, I was only trying to learn. I…have been only one for a very long time.
You mean alone, Dormael realized. Suddenly he felt the thing’s emotions as clearly as if they were his own, and the loneliness and melancholy almost brought tears to his eyes.
Yes. Alone.
Dormael sighed. The thing was obviously feeling…out of place. Perhaps this experience was as new to it as it was to him. Being rude to it and getting angry wouldn’t help anything, so Dormael took a deep breath and summoned two chairs into the dream. He sat upon one, gesturing to the other, as if demonstrating its use to the dark man. He looked to it, a confused expression on his face, and then sat slowly into it, as if testing out the way it would feel. After a short moment, he relaxed, and turned to look again at Dormael with those unsettling eyes.
I’m sorry for getting angry with you, Dormael thought. My name is Dormael. Do you have a name?
A…name. No, I don’t think so.
Then I shall give you one. I can’t go on calling you ‘strange presence’ or ‘alien power’ now, can I?
Can you not?
No.
Why?
Because it’s a mouthful, and it doesn’t feel right. Everyone needs a name. Would you like one? Dormael felt a little stupid. He had no idea what this thing was, but it was obviously something very old, and it scared the hair right off of Dormael’s head – and here he was treating it like some puppy he was about to bring home to his parents.
I should like that very much.
Dormael thought about it. He’d never named anything beyond the odd pet he’d had growing up, and he wanted to do right by this thing in his mind. Something about it seemed important. A name defined you, in a way. It became part of who you were, and this thing was a thinking being of some sort. This would define it in the same way that his name defined him. He had to be right about it. Finally, he came to a decision.
Tamasis. Your name is Tamasis.
“Tamasis,” the dark man said, sounding it out. His voice was soft, but it had almost made Dormael jump right off of his chair to hear him speak. “I like that. Thank you.” He took a deep breath, and as he did, he seemed to grow more confident. He seemed suddenly more solid to Dormael, more whole somehow.
“How long have you been here, in my head?” Dormael asked.
“I do not know,” Tamasis replied in that soft voice of his, “I do not see time as you do. You measure the passage of time by the movement of your world through the Void. It is a strange way to do so.”
Dormael raised an eyebrow at the dark young man, “Is there any other way to count it?”
“Yes, but I do not know how to explain. I can see time as we speak. I can see it before us, and behind us. You cannot see it?”
“No,” Dormael replied, confused, “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“I do not think I can explain it. There is nothing in your memories to help me with the concept,” Tamasis said, shaking his head solemnly.
“Surely you must have your own memories, your own thoughts.”
“Yes, but they are…fragmented. I cannot make sense of them.”
Dormael stared at the young man. He seemed eons old, but at the same time, he seemed very young to Dormael. In his past experiences with the thing – with Tamasis – he had shifted through emotions and thoughts with a reckless rhythm. It had seemed, now that Dormael thought about it, that he was feeling them for the first time, or for the first time in a long while.
“Have you spoken to anyone like this before?” Dormael asked.
“I do not think so. I have been only one – alone – for a long time. I have no memories of sharing this bond with anyone before.”
“I see,” Dormael said. The two of them sat there for a few moments, quiet and awkward. Tamasis made Dormael uncomfortable. He was still an unknown, and since his initial story about his dream, he hadn’t shared the fact that Tamasis was with him with anyone. For some reason, he didn’t feel right about sharing the information. It seemed intensely personal, somehow, as if the act of speaking about it would banish the dark presence from his mind. He realized that he wasn’t ready to let Tamasis go, not just yet. Not until he had some answers, anyway.
“May I ask some questions?” Tamasis asked suddenly, smiling like an eager child. Dormael was so taken aback by him that he just nodded and gestured for Tamasis to go on. Tamasis nodded, smiling even wider.
Suddenly the room around them fell away with an alarming speed. There was a sense of nauseating vertigo as the room fell upward from them, though the chairs remained and the two young men still sat in them. Something rushed at them from underneath, and suddenly Dormael found himself back in Ferolan Castle, in the personal room of Colonel Grant.
He gazed at the scene in wonder. He and D’Jenn were crouched by the large four poster bed, their face masks around their necks. Bethany lay on the bed in that sheer night dress, cringing away from them with her knees pulled up to her chin. Blood matted her hair and stained her face, and her eyes were wet with tears. Everything was frozen, as if Tamasis had reached back in time and stopped it from moving, somehow.
“The young girl,” Tamasis said, “you care for her. Why?”
“I love her,” Dormael said, before he realized it.
“Love,” Tamasis mused, as if he was tasting the word, “Yes. I can feel it as well, in your mind, but why? What causes this love?”
Dormael started to speak, but fell short of it. He realized that he didn’t know how to explain it to the dark young man. He sat back, and thought about it.
“When I first saw Bethany,” Dormael began slowly, “she was so vulnerable. She was laying there the way you see her now, having gone through pain and such that the Gods only know. But she was brave, too. She took a chance at escaping with us, even though she didn’t know who we were or where we were going. She is so much stronger than anyone realizes, I think. That is part of it, but there’s more, too. There are so many small things that have happened with her since we’ve been together. She makes me want to be a better person, and that’s part of it, too. But again, there’s more, and I’m not sure how to explain it.”
“Yes,” Tamasis said, nodding, “I see, I think. If you love her, then, does that mean I love her as well? Since we are sharing your thoughts and memories?”
“No,” Dormael replied, feeling sure about it, “Love is something that you’ll know when you feel it. It is not something that can be absorbed like that. When you love something, you won’t have to ask me if you do.”
“Ah, I see,” Tamasis nodded, and Dormael thought he saw disappointment on his face. Tamasis looked up again and the scene changed. They were now seated along the road that led to his family’s vineyard, watching the reunion with Allen frozen in time. Or rather, it wasn’t the reunion that seemed to interest Tamasis, it was again Bethany. It was the moment that he’d decided to adopt the girl, when she had laid a kiss on his cheek with that childlike happiness.
“Why are you so interested in Bethany?” Dormael asked, feeling a bit protective.
“I do not know. There is something strange about the girl. You know this; it is very much in your thoughts today. You are afraid for her.”
“Yes,” Dormael sighed, “But what does that have to do with you?”
“I am not sure,” Tamasis said, “But I feel that it is important.”
That statement struck Dormael strangely. Why would Tamasis feel that Bethany was important? Was it something that he was simply borrowing from Dormael’s own feelings, or was it a piece of evidence that lent the Mekai’s theory a weight of truth?
Before he could ask, though, the scene changed again.
They stood now in waist high grass that waved in a strange wind. The chairs were gone, and ti
me was no longer frozen. The colors here were muted; the grass was a light brown, the mountains in the distance shaded with hues of gray and white, the sky a leaden mass of roiling storm clouds that produced nothing but wind and an unsettling feeling.
Dormael knew where they were immediately.
“This place,” Tamasis said, “is not of your own making. I can feel it, resonating within me. It calls to me, somehow. What is this place?”
Dormael wasn’t sure how he should respond. If Tamasis could indeed read his thoughts, then shouldn’t he know what this place was, and what it meant? He’d said that it called to him. Did Tamasis have something to do with the Nar’doroc?
“You don’t know this place?” Dormael asked, fishing for something.
“I feel as though I should, but I do not know why. I do not know where this is.”
“You said that it calls to you. How?”
Tamasis began to answer him, but suddenly the entire scene around them wavered as if something were trying to rip it apart. Tamasis grew frightened, and Dormael could feel the young man’s emotions ripping through his own mind as clear as if they were his own. Tamasis turned to Dormael with his eyes alight with green fire, and grabbed Dormael by his shirt as the very world rocked around them.
“We must leave this place, now!” he screamed, and turned to go, but Dormael clutched his robe and turned him around.
“Wait! What is happening, here? How does this place call to you? What do you hear? Gods damn it all, who are you?”
“The Wardens, they come! We must escape this dream, or I will be imprisoned once again! You must go! They will not be gentle with you this time!” Tamasis screamed, ripping his black robe from Dormael’s grasp and turning from him. Dormael growled and reached for the young man once again, but before he could get his hands on him, he suddenly jumped and shot off into the sky so fast that it left Dormael standing there stunned.
Tamasis disappeared into the roiling mass of clouds in the distance, and when he passed into them there was a rippling concussion in the sky. The clouds drew back from where Tamasis had passed, recoiling from the point of his exit as if he’d ripped a hole in the very fabric of the clouds, and they’d been injured by his passing. Where Tamasis had disappeared, there was just a black, roiling hole. The scene began to come apart, unraveling from that point as if Tamasis’s exit had been the catalyst of its destruction.
Dormael heard a shriek that pierced his consciousness as well as his hearing, and it dizzied him and caused him to stumble. The ground seemed to be shaking under his feet, and even as he tried to regain his balance the land bucked beneath him and threw him to the ground. He landed with a thud and a grunt of expelled air from his lungs. The long, brown grass drew away from him.
Dormael suddenly felt a deep instinctual fear. He was not alone in his dream; he wasn’t sure how he knew it, but the hairs on his neck rose in warning and he cowered in the sheltering grass, afraid to rise and look around. That piercing shriek sounded again, and something large passed over his body, barely missing him with powerful legs. It went by so fast that Dormael couldn’t make out what it had been, exactly. All he’d seen was a dark blur. It seemed that he should have felt the vibrations of its steps through the dirt, but he felt nothing. Just as quickly as it had come, Dormael knew that it was gone, following Tamasis to wherever he’d escaped.
He laid there for a moment longer, breathing deeply and trying to slow his beating heart. That thing must have been one of the Wardens that Tamasis had spoken of. Dormael’s hand moved to his chest – to the place where that large, three fingered shaped bruise had risen on his skin. He felt vulnerable here.
Concentrating, he pictured his family’s homestead. He pictured the orderly rows of grapes, the orchard groves with fruit grown fat on the limbs, the raised bath house with its pipes that led off into the nearby stream. He pictured his mother bustling in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up and directing the progress of the evening meal with grace and ease. He pictured his father, seated on the porch behind his home, strumming idly on an old guitar.
He didn’t feel the change, but suddenly he was standing on the lawn in front of his family’s home. All was quiet, and the silence was slightly unsettling. There were no birds chirping, no insects chattering, no workers bustling through the fields and tending the vines. The sun shone down as if it were early spring. The only noise was the wind whistling through the highlands.
Where had Tamasis gone? The Conclave taught that lucid dreaming was an early indicator of being Blessed. Dormael had personally been dreaming lucidly for years, off and on. He knew that this place – his family’s homestead – was inside his own head, a creation of his own dream.
But how had Tamasis taken them into that other place, the armlet’s dream? Was it actually just a place in his own mind, a reflection of something that the armlet had shown him, so as to try and communicate with him? If so, then what had that thing been, and how had it gotten in?
He knew that the Warden was not a creation of his mind. He also knew that Tamasis was not. But where did Tamasis go, when he was not in Dormael’s head? And for that matter, how was it that he was in Dormael’s mind in the first Gods damned place?
There were so many questions. Asking Tamasis about them had proved to be fruitless, at least as of yet. Perhaps over time he’d be able to tell Dormael something, but for now Tamasis seemed just as ignorant as Dormael.
He’d said that the armlet’s dream called to him somehow. In his first conversation with Tamasis, back when he’d been near death, the strange power had shown him something, some picture or impression that seemed important, but was hard to make sense of. Tamasis had shown him a great explosion somewhere in the Void, a convergence of power that had seemed to give birth to things, somehow.
“He called it the Sundering,” Dormael muttered to himself, and as he did he was struck by another impression – one from the armlet’s dream.
Light rushed in from all corners of the Void and coalesced in one pinpoint, and Dormael was at the center of it all. There was a presence there with him, and it caressed him like a curious child and a long lost lover all at once.
“Could it be?” he asked himself aloud.
Could Tamasis really be the same presence from the armlet’s dream – the thing that had fallen out of the Void? It didn’t seem right. The two definitely seemed to be related, though. If the armlet’s dream called to Tamasis, then what else would call to him?
For that matter, was it simple coincidence that Dormael had encountered him in his near-death state – or was there something more sinister and strange going on here? Did his sensitivity to the artifact somehow make him more susceptible to contact with other strange powers? It was an unsettling thought.
Little was known about the denizens of other worlds. The Conclave itself didn’t pour much time into researching the subject. They left those arguments to the priests. The various churches of the Gods all held to the belief that the Gods lived somewhere in the Void, among the stars, but as far as Dormael knew no one had ever tried to make contact with anything in the Void except through prayer. The church had certainly never recognized the existence of other things among the stars.
Of course, the church most definitely recognized the existence of the Six Hells, and the denizens of such. Saarnok, the Lord of Bones, was the God of the Hells and all things within them. The church definitely recognized that there were demons and servants of Saarnok in the Six Hells, but Dormael had never found any lore that explained what they were, exactly. The summoning of demons had long been believed to be the purview of the Vilthinum and other worshippers of Saarnok, and Inera had proven that particular theory.
Tamasis had known about the Taker. He’d known what it was, and what it would do to Dormael. Could Tamasis be some sort of demon, risen from the Hells and trying to win Dormael’s trust through deception? If it was trying to gain the power of the Nar’doroc, then Dormael would definitely be a sure avenue to its goal.
But t
hat didn’t seem right, either. Tamasis was just so childlike. He could feel the thing’s emotions as well as his own sometimes, and they came through with an almost painful clarity. He had no real reason to discount the possibility of Tamasis being a demon, but instinct told him it just wasn’t true.
So Dormael was right back where he started. Confused and filled with questions that he couldn’t answer. As if the armlet, Dargorin, the Vilth and his apprentices, Victus and his rogue Warlocks, and every Galanian in the world weren’t enough of a problem, Dormael now shared his head with something from another place, and he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t a demon.
Dormael sighed.
Things just keep getting better and better.
****
Maarkov watched his brother speak with the thing that had been the child strega. It had returned just after nightfall, appearing so suddenly out of the night that Maarkov had almost drew his blades and cut the thing down on reflex. They’d been waiting on word from them, but that still hadn’t made Maarkov’s nerves ready for the sight of the thing.
It had been injured – or damn near killed, which seemed a more fitting description. Its head was crushed on one side, the irregular shape of it causing one of its eyes to be pushed backward into the thing’s skull. That eye no longer glowed with that strange red light.
One of its arms was a mangled mess of flesh and twisted bone, but it didn’t appear to hinder its movement of it. Maarkov thought that it might have trouble using the hand to grasp things, but it still moved the arm quickly enough. That would have been unsettling to him if he hadn’t seen a multitude of other horrors that his brother had created, summoned, or eaten over the years.
It’s all just meat, Maarkov, Maaz had told him once. He supposed that his brother was right, in a sense.
Maaz hissed something at the Hunter and the thing turned and loped off into the darkness. Maaz walked back over to where Maarkov waited, seated on his horse and ready to ride, and mounted his own horse. The thing shied away from him at first, but Maaz got the beast under control before he climbed into the saddle with a deceptive grace. Looking at his brother’s thin form, Maarkov always expected him to move like an old, decrepit man.
The Sentient Fire (The Seven Signs) Page 77