Seeking Sorrow (Guardians of Terath Book 1)

by Zen DiPietro

  Table of Contents

  GUARDIANS OF TERATH: SEEKING SORROW

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  GUARDIANS OF TERATH: SEEKING SORROW

  ZEN DIPIETRO

  SOUL MATE PUBLISHING

  New York

  GUARDIANS OF TERATH: SEEKING SORROW

  Copyright©2015

  ZEN DIPIETRO

  Cover Design by Fiona Jayde

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

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  Published in the United States of America by

  Soul Mate Publishing

  P.O. Box 24

  Macedon, New York, 14502

  ISBN: 978-1-61935-758-7

  www.SoulMatePublishing.com

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Chapter 1

  An archer and a manahi sit in a monorail station. Arc couldn’t resist the whimsical smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth. Passing time by making up little jokes based on his situation never failed to amuse him. People-watching had gotten boring a half-hour ago, since the travelers did nothing but rush to and from their monorail cars on their way to somewhere else. The archer looks at the manahi and says—

  “Apologies for my lateness.” A new voice broke into Arc’s thoughts. “I had to stop by a comm panel to answer a message from Magistrate Trewe.”

  Arc leaned back and took a moment to get a good look at his new colleague as the man approached the benches where Arc and Luc had waited for the past hour. It must have been some message, but no matter. They now could get underway.

  He saw a tall, rugged young man with medium-length curly black hair, a face with a naturally deep-tanned hue, and eyes so dark they were nearly black. The man was perhaps in his early twenties, about ten years Arc’s junior and certainly younger than Arc had anticipated, but was as broad and physically imposing as they came. He certainly looked the part of a professional blade.

  Arc’s livelihood came from teaching archery and wilderness survival, as well as serving as a wilderness guide. He found it highly satisfying to engage both his intellect and his hard-won skills while engaging with other people. This guy looked like he was more of a hit-it-with-a-stick-and-get-a-paycheck type. The kid—well, he wasn’t really a kid, but there seemed to be a youthful naiveté in his eyes—looked like he could casually break a couple guys in half on his way to his next appointment and still have time to stop for a sandwich and chips.

  But the impression of naiveté and the calm politesse of the young man’s apology didn’t match his brawn or his profession. The incongruity piqued Arc’s interest. Blades were usually bold, brash, and impolitic. Most of them preferred punching over talking. This one’s composed speech and courteous body language suggested something more interesting. An enthusiast of people in general and unconventional ones in particular, Arc rarely met someone he didn’t like. Now that he’d met both of his companions for this assignment, he decided that they might prove highly intriguing, which would be a bright spot on the otherwise somber journey ahead of them.

  “Will Azrith.” The young man did not seem discomfited by Arc’s scrutiny. He stepped forward and offered a hand.

  “Arcen Wilding. You can call me Arc.” He stood and they shook hands. Azrith’s grip was just firm enough to suggest confidence without being so firm as to suggest overcompensation for something. Arc’s father had always told him that a person’s handshake revealed things about his or her personality.

  Both of them turned to Luc, whose age was roughly equal to his and Will’s put together. When the man remained silent and brooding on the bench, Will took the initiative by offering his hand. “Lovely to see you again, Luc. You’re looking well.”

  Lucien Petrush raised an eyebrow and answered dryly, “I do try.” With a small sigh, he rose, then gave Will a perfunctory handshake. He swung his pack up from beneath the bench and onto his back. “We should get to the terminal if we want to make the next monorail.”

  With a posture and gait that struck Arc as those of a much younger man, Luc strode across the corridor. Arc and Will shared a brief look of commiseration before following. Luc may prove to be interesting, but he might also prove to be difficult.

  Once settled into his plush seat on the monorail car, Arc ignored the blur of landscape beyond the window and focused his attention on his travel companions. Since they would be working together, establishing rapport among them was a priority. Clearly, the other two men had a head start.

  Not one to let an opportunity for socializing pass him by, Arc decided to close the gap immediately. After all, it wasn’t every day he shared a monorail car with a professional blade and a person born with the ability to harness Terath’s mana. Arc knew from Aunt Ina that Luc was no middling manahi, either. In fact, of the relatively small batch of people on the planet who could harness the natural energy resource, Luc was one of the most talented.

  Arc leaned back and relaxed into the customary affability he wore like a favorite old robe. For him, there was no better pastime than socializing. Luc’s taciturn silence at the station had been a disappointment, but with Will added to the mix, he expected much livelier results. “I gather you two are old friends already.” He let his interested gaze wander between Luc and Will, inviting one of them to answer.

  The men in question exchanged a look, then Will looked down at his hands. He sat straight up, barely touching his seat back, and Arc wondered how he could be comfortable that way. Arc found it interesting that the blade deferred to Luc to provide an answer. Was the blade, perhaps, intimidated by Luc’s mana abilities? Some people felt nervous around particularly talented manahi. But Will had worked with Luc before, so perhaps that wasn’t it. More likely, he was simply dismayed by Luc’s obvious disinterest in basic manners. Will’s own manners had been impeccable, so far, so Arc was betting on Luc’s surliness.

  “We’ve worked together before,” Luc crossed his arms and pushed back deeper into his own seat. He shifted his attention to the window on the opposite side of the car.

  When Luc seemed disinclined to say more,
Arc looked to Will. With an easy smile, he guessed, “For Magistrate Trewe?” She was, after all, the one who had assigned the three of them to investigate the difficulty in a town named Sorrow.

  Will sat up straighter, if that was possible, and Arc noticed that Luc shifted restlessly. Curious. He kept his gaze on Will, letting the silence stretch.

  “Yes,” Will finally agreed. He rushed forward with more words as if to make up for the lag between question and answer. “I’m fortunate enough to be in the Magistrate’s employ with some regularity.”

  When Arc simply sat watching him, Will inquired, “Does Magistrate Trewe regularly employ you, as well?”

  A chuckle escaped Arc. The idea of being the magistrate’s employee amused him.

  “Employ? No, never. Prevail upon me, oh yes. Every day of my life.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I happen to be her favorite nephew.”

  “Not hard to be the favorite when you’re the only,” muttered Luc. He stubbornly watched the blur of passing scenery as it rushed by the window.

  “If there were others, I’d still be the winner. And your awareness of my place in her life means you know my aunt particularly well.”

  Luc’s gaze finally snapped to Arc and he pressed his lips into a grim line. An instant later, his eyes sparked and lit. The warmth in them melted his peevishness, and his mouth curved upward into a smile so charming that Arc felt a shock of surprise. The man now exuded so much vitality and charisma that he seemed a different person altogether.

  Luc barked out a laugh. “She did tell me you’d inherited some of her shrewdness. I’ll admit Ina Trewe and I go back a ways, but that’s all you’re getting out of me. If she wanted you to know details, you already would.”

  In spite of Luc’s amusement, Arc knew that he wasn’t joking. He’d get no further details about their relationship. For now. He tucked the information away for safekeeping, and would wait for another opportunity to dig up some dirt on Aunt Ina’s relationship with this manahi. He hardly seemed like her type. But then, the man had already proved to be surprising.

  Arc waited for either of his companions to pick up the conversation but when neither did, he again took the initiative.

  Catching Luc’s eye, Arc asked, “What’s the difference between a mana-holder and a manahi?”

  A single eyebrow lifted this time. “Are you actually asking, or is this the opening of a joke that I’m sure is not nearly as funny as you think it is?”

  “When you put it that way, I’ll go with actual question.”

  Luc leveled a dubious look at him while Will looked from one to the other. Luc shifted and crossed one leg over the other, staring at the seat ahead of him. Arc began to think the man had simply ignored the question, but then Luc’s eyes suddenly cut to him and he scowled.

  “Since you’re sadly lacking in mana awareness, I’ll give you a condensed version of my Intro to Mana class.” Luc’s sharp tone sliced into Arc like steel claws.

  Arc accepted his comeuppance. He could hardly admit now that he hadn’t, in fact, been asking a serious question.

  “This is a lecture I usually give to adolescents who’ve been identified with latent mana ability. This is the first in a series of lectures developed for the majority of them, who have only modest ability.”

  Great. The mana-holding child’s equivalent of the old “what’s happening to your body” lecture. Arc suppressed a sigh and pasted on his best expression of interest. If his lack of enthusiasm were to show in some way, he had no doubt Luc would enjoy it far too much. He hoped he could maintain the charade. Duplicity was not his strong suit.

  “As you know,” Luc began, “Anyone who can harness mana is called a mana-holder. The few mana-holders who can also transmute or conjure are also known as manahi—”

  Arc interrupted, “Are the less talented kids sad when they realize they’ll never be able to use their mana to transmute one thing into something else? Or conjure something out of pure mana?”

  He’d learned, back in his school days, that if he could distract a teacher with questions, the teacher might just abandon the lesson in favor of an open discussion. Perhaps that tactic could work here. Besides, he really did wonder how mana-holding children felt about their abilities.

  “Sometimes,” Luc admitted. “But they get over it. Even simple harnessing comes with the prestige of being a mana-holder. The few mana-holders who are also manahi study to be doctors, engineers, and so forth. You know that. Manahi can do far more than harnessers, but harnessers are critical to maintaining our power grid. Both groups have an important function.”

  Arc knew a few mana-holders who harnessed for the planet’s power grid, but he didn’t have any manahi friends. He’d visited manahi doctors, of course, but those weren’t personal relationships, and he didn’t get the chance to know them as well as he’d like.

  Luc took a breath and had just opened his mouth to pick up where he’d left off in his lecture when an epiphany struck Arc. He was pretty sure he could derail the lecture this time. “What I meant was, is there a physical difference between harnessers and manahi? Something structural that determines who can use mana and who can only harness it?”

  Luc fixed him with a skeptical glare. “That was what you meant?”

  “Yes.” He widened his eyes in eager sincerity.

  Luc rolled his eyes and sighed. “That’s actually a good question. But don’t let my answer make you think I’ve fallen for your act.” He smirked. “The differences between manahi, mana-holders, and those who can’t hold mana are genetic, and express themselves in detectable differences in the brain. But we haven’t quite solved the puzzle yet. It’s an ongoing subject of research at the Institute of Mana Science. Mana itself is like gravity or the fossil fuels our ancestors used. It exists as a pure energy resource. We’ve developed instruments that can register mana and measure its intensity. What we haven’t yet managed is to make the connection between the raw resource and the oddity of human variation.”

  Arc nodded and tried to appear enlightened. He was pretty sure Luc wondered about the punchline of his aborted joke, but with the lecture now derailed, Arc resolved to keep his mouth shut. He wasn’t one to make the same mistake twice.

  He didn’t need children’s lessons to keep him busy. Not only was he en route to investigate what had happened in Sorrow, he was doing so with an almost painfully polite blade and a mercurial manahi. Said manahi also happened to be perhaps the most powerful conjurer in all of Terath, and apparently was involved with Aunt Ina.

  This was going to be interesting.

  Chapter 2

  Arriving at the monorail station outside of Sorrow had been easy. Setting out on foot to reach the town had also been easy. The brilliant blue skies native to the middle latitudes, which accounted for most of the land area of Terath, stretched out above them and the sun’s bright rays kept them comfortably warm. Weather conditions in the mid-lats were nearly always ideal. No, physical concerns were not the issue.

  The difficulty had begun when they finally understood what Ina Trewe had told them. She’d said that Sorrow had gone missing. Arc had assumed she meant the people had, for some reason, abandoned the town. He’d been terribly, tragically, unbelievably wrong.

  A glance at Arc’s hand comm confirmed that they’d arrived at the correct coordinates, but there was no town. No ruins, even. Arc knew from his research that Sorrow had been a sizeable town, but now there was nothing recognizable to suggest that buildings and people and life had, until recently, existed here.

  They stood on the precipice of the mid-lats’ typical lush, green grass. Inches from their feet, the field abruptly delineated into blackened, scorched ground. Beyond that perimeter, Arc saw only a void of black ash that measured about a mile in each direction. Gone were the lovely homes and brightly-colored gardens Arc had seen on the comm panel. Somehow
an entire town had simply vanished.

  Yet, other than the ash, nothing was out of place. The sky remained blue and the air still carried the refreshing herbaceous scent inherent to the mid-lats. Not a single thing outside of the blackened char line bore witness to the horror. Arc’s mind reeled, failing to come up with any scenario that could explain such a localized, horrific event.

  Luc and Will shared a grimace that echoed the soul-sucking despair that formed a knot in Arc’s stomach. Will’s face had paled and his eyes were wide with shock. Arc didn’t know what more they could learn by walking into the field of ash, but there was nothing else for them to do there. They trudged in silence to the former center of the town. Ten minutes later, they stood there together, surrounded by a blight of death.

  The dust was a few inches deep across most of the expanse, but here and there it rose as high as three feet in wide, sloping heaps that resembled blackened hillocks. Arc didn’t want to think about what those piles might represent.

  After several minutes of mutely staring at the inexplicable devastation, Will, Arc, and Luc turned toward one another. Arc felt the weight of grief on his soul, while Luc wore it on his face. Will’s shock continued to radiate from his features.

  Arc felt a need to do something. Anything. He felt so useless just standing there. He bent down and raked his fingers through the ash. “I’ve never seen dust or ash anything like this.” His low tone rang out against their empty environs, and he winced at the harshness of it. It seemed disrespectful to the dead.

  Luc shook his head. “Because it’s not natural, and it’s only ever happened once before. What you see is the result of a massive shockwave of mana that cremated the city and everyone who had the misfortune of being in it.”