The Redemption, Volume 1

by Clyde B Northrup

  Klare had opened her mouth to retort but smiled instead, passing the bag and breath-giver to Klaybear. “How astute of you to notice,” she said sweetly, rising onto her toes and kissing him fondly; Rokwolf turned away and moved to the door. “We’ll wait for you in the hall,” Klare said.

  “Seal this room when you leave,” Klaybear said, “I’ll leave from and return to my master’s room, since I do not think the wards would allow me to enter here, even using breath-giver.”

  “Oh,” Klare said, looking quite surprised, “I had not considered that.”

  “You were too busy being clever,” Klaybear quipped.

  “Be nice, Klaybear!” she retorted, “or I will make you pay for that remark!” but she was smiling as she turned away.

  Rokwolf came slowly around the corner, helping a disheveled-looking wetha with dirty-blonde and matted hair, torn and dusty green robes, nearly as tall as he was, as she leaned heavily upon his shoulder; her face was streaked with tears, but both recognized her at once, and Klare rushed forward.

  “Sutugno!” Klare exclaimed. “What has happened to you?”

  Sutugno stopped, and so did Rokwolf; she stood, looking at Klare, surprised. “Klare, is that really you? Where have you been that you could ask such a question? The whole world has turned upside-down.” She crumpled to the floor, wrapping her arms around her knees, her long hair falling over her head and knees, covering her face but not her sobs.

  Klare knelt beside her friend and wrapped her arms around the sobbing wetha who melted into her arms like a child, continuing to sob. Klare looked up at her husband, then nodded her head at Sutugno. “She’s practically dead on her feet,” Klare whispered, “a little extra energy, my dear.”

  “Oh, right,” Klaybear said, “but I thought you wanted to try it?”

  Klare frowned up at him. “I’m a little busy right now,” she hissed, “or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “Sorry, dearest,” Klaybear replied, carefully igniting the all too willing staff and drawing energy to channel into Klare’s weeping friend; the eye-shaped emerald flared brilliantly, filling the shadowed hallway with green light.

  “Leave me out of it!” Klare hissed again.

  Klaybear grinned sheepishly and turned away and caught his twin’s hastily covered look; turning back toward Klare and Sutugno, he knelt beside them, breath-giver surrounded by green light. Placing his left hand on Sutugno’s head, he let the energy slide slowly into her aching and weary body, trying as he did to soothe some of her pain and weariness. Sutugno’s sobbing ceased and she raised her head to thank him, but instead, her eyes widened, and he saw two points of red light reflected in the tears still glistening in her eyes and on her cheeks. He turned to look at the hand gripping breath-giver and saw half of what she saw: red light glowing at the center of the eye-shaped emerald and emanating from his right palm. Horror clenched his gut; he had not wrapped the cloth around his forehead after he and Klare had bathed, and looking up, he saw the horror he felt mirrored in their faces, saw the red, pulsating glow reflected on their faces staring at him. He stood and staggered backward, letting go of breath-giver, but the staff of life was the only thing holding back the mad gyre of his vision, which had been rising inside his mind, and when the staff’s green glow vanished, only pulsing red remained, the color of blood. In his haste to hide the offending symbol, engraved with fire into his palm and forehead by Gar himself, he made the mistake of trying to hide one red symbol with the other, hurling himself directly into the mad whirlwind of his corrupted vision. Sutugno’s voice came to him doubled: once from the mad gyre of his vision, once standing before him, a living expression of the wounded pain and anger he felt helpless to resist.

  “You!” Sutugno screamed, pointing at him. “You did this! You murdered them all! You took my husband from me on the day before we were wed! You murdered Rebeth!” She lurched forward, hands forming claws, to tear out his eyes, her face a hideous mask of fury in the bloody light. Klare and Rokwolf were both motionless, stunned by her sudden, vehement response to the pulsating marks. She jerked forward, scratching at his face and the mark glowing red in his forehead, face red and livid, a mad grin stretching across her face; insane laughter howled in the whirlwind, echoing from the past-future: “. . . the sign will mark your separation from those whom you would save. . . . Then, perhaps, you will truly taste the bitterness of being chosen . . . sign . . . separation . . . save . . . bitterness . . . chosen bitterness chosen save bitterness claws klare eyes wide dead bitterness claws blind bitterness save chosen dead delgart dead klare dead marilee dead tevvy dead rokwolf dead klare dead thal dead blakstar dead klare dead rebeth avril myron klare rokwolf klare bitterness chosen bitterness chosen . . . pain and fire burning in his mind consuming thought and consciousness at once.

  Arms held him: mother’s arms? No, she died when he was born; Klare’s arms; the scent of roses, soft touch of lips, hand stroking his cheek.

  “Klaybear, dear?”

  He opened his eyes slowly and saw green eyes, red and swollen from crying, looking concerned. His forehead and right hand burned; his cheeks felt hot; he groaned and sat up and saw Master Avril’s room around him. “How long?” he heard his voice croak.

  “Not long,” Klare lied unconvincingly.

  “Where is Rokwolf?” Klaybear asked. “And . . . ,” but he could not say her name, “your friend?”

  Klare sighed. “I put her to sleep,” Klare replied, “they are in the empty master’s quarters at the end of the hall; Rokwolf . . . ,” she began but stopped, looking away before speaking again, “he wanted me to stay with her, but his presence, even as she sleeps, calms her more than mine.” She looked back at him, and he could see hurt in her eyes; she shrugged. “It’s odd behavior.”

  Klaybear shook his head and sighed in turn. “Not really,” he replied, “since they used to spend a lot of time in each others’ company, and since you are married to me, Gar’s agent of destruction.”

  Klare’s response was swift and unexpected, and it surprised him more than anything she had done in the recent past; it was not the physical pain that hurt the most but the emotional, making him feel like a naughty child slapped by his mother for talking back to her.

  “Don’t even think that!” she exclaimed, jabbing her finger at the bridge of his nose with every word. “And it is even worse to voice the thought! I do not believe it, and neither do you, not for a moment, no matter who says it, no matter the authority, no matter how often, no matter how many! That is the way of despair, which is the path to becoming a servant of Gar; is that what you want? If it is, tell me now, and I will waste no more time on you.” She stood and pointed to the door, her face hard; she stopped, looked at him, and her face registered the surprise, shock, and horror on his face, and then her features softened, she sat back down, and gently stroked the cheek she had just slapped. “I do not think that is who you are, or what you want,” she went on in a softer voice, “nor who you will become, even if you are a bit slow, sometimes,” she finished with a weak smile and sank onto his chest, slipping her arms under his neck; Klaybear felt hot tears on his neck.

  Klaybear wrapped his arms around his diminutive wife. “But Sutugno is your oldest and dearest friend,” he reminded her.

  Klare sighed and sat up, picking up his left hand. She lifted up her own left hand and turned them both so that he could see the back of their two hands together. “What do you see that is similar?” she asked, and before he could answer, “and if you reply that they are hands, or they have five fingers, or they are both left, I’ll slap you again!”

  Klaybear laughed, recognizing that his wife knew him too well. “The gold rings,” he noted.

  “And what do they symbolize?” Klare asked, pressing on.

  “That we are joined together,” Klaybear noted.

  “For how long?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Always.”

  “How long is that?” she asked.

  “Until the end of time,” he
replied.

  “No,” she countered, “that places a limit: there is no limit on ‘forever.’”

  “That’s what I meant,” Klaybear noted.

  “Then you should have said, ‘forever,’” Klare snapped, “then I would not think you were trying to get rid of me.”

  Klaybear choked. “I never said. . . .”

  Klare smiled at him. “I know, but I like to see you squirm; my point was, before you sidetracked me. . . .”

  “I did not sidetrack you,” he protested “you did that yourself.”

  “You did,” she noted, “by not being specific; my point was,” she went on, shaking his left hand next to hers, “that when we made the vow to each other, we each put everyone else aside: you put me first, and I put you first, and no one else, nothing else, should ever take your place, or my place. She is still my oldest friend, and my best friend, after you, but if I have to make a choice between you and her, I should not have to tell you what my choice would be, although I will, since you have been quite slow of late.”

  “I have not!” Klaybear protested loudly, sitting up in the bed in mock anger. “And you do not need to tell me, since I know what your answer is, as you are here with me.” He took her again in his arms and kissed her fondly. He looked around after they broke apart. “So what time is it?” he asked. “We really ought to get to work,” he added, and his stomach rumbled audibly.

  Klare shook her head and sighed. “It must be near mealtime,” she replied, “although I do not know which meal . . . ,” she started to say, but then her face went pale and she rolled to the other side of the bed and the empty chamber pot; she started to retch dryly.

  Klaybear looked at her for a moment then raised one eyebrow. “It cannot be evening again,” he said in disbelief, “that would mean I have been out for about a day and a half.” He looked back at Klare. “Have I been out that long?”

  Between dry heaves, she shook her head.

  “Then you are out of your reckoning,” he went on, “since your nights and days got reversed.”

  Klare shook her head again and sat back, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “The baby doesn’t care,” she said in a breathy whisper, “any mention of food. . . .”

  “Nobody mentioned food,” Klaybear protested, “my stomach growled,” he began, but Klare had resumed her dry retching into the chamber pot, waving him out of the room. He shrugged, picked up his master’s bag of healing supplies, breath-giver, and left through the door to his master’s quarters.

  Although Rokwolf dozed lightly, his senses, honed by his seklesi training, were alert for any hint of sound or motion, anything that might disturb the slumber of Klare’s friend who slept in the unoccupied master’s chamber, at the opposite end of the hallway from where Klare kept watch over her husband and his twin brother. Periodically, his eyes cracked open and scanned the room without giving any hint that he was awake; he had seated himself so he could see both the sleeping Sutugno and the door, in case anyone, or any thing, tried to enter the room. Klare had sealed the door with a kailu ward that she claimed her friend could open, but no one else could. Scanning the room again, he fell back into a light sleep.

  He stood again in Tevvy’s room in Kilnar, listening to the awemi tell him of the plight of the caravans while Tevvy easily dodged wild stabs, poorly thrown daggers, and slit the throats of his attackers. His surroundings blurred and became a road, bordered on the north by the forested slopes of mountains and a reeking swamp to the south, the Mariskal and a seklesi camp. His fellows were gathered around fires, repairing leather armor, sharpening swords, fletching arrows, and eating. He heard shouts and screams of pain and turned toward the sounds; he saw a merchant caravan burning; the mercenaries hired to protect it lay dead and dismembered around the overturned wagons; the merchants were strung together, tied by crudely woven ropes, led south into the swamp by odd-looking wedaterem with green skin, but their behavior was what surprised him the most: they appeared to be organized like a seklesi squad, with an obvious leader who barked commands the others moved quickly to obey. Rokwolf turned back to the seklesem moving around their camp, shouting orders, but no sound issued from his mouth; he was choking, sinking into the fetid Mariskal, green waters closing over his head. . . .

  Rokwolf jerked awake, hearing his own strangled shout cut short; he stood on his feet, sword in hand before realizing where he was and what he was doing. He glanced around quickly, then slid his sword silently back into its sheath. Letting the breath he held sigh softly from his lips, he sat back down, glad Sutugno had not been awakened by his sudden outburst and berating himself for such novice behavior. It was not like him to act this way; everything had gone wrong since he had gone on the assignment to guard the east approaches to the Mountain of Vision. No, he thought after a moment, that was not true: it went wrong after he visited that methaghi, and he knew better and was warned against it, but he went anyway, for all the good it did me, he thought bitterly. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, silencing his thoughts, willing himself to go back to sleep, taking up again his silent vigil. His breathing slowed; the dream returned.

  Tevvy swayed drunkenly atop a small round table, dodging mugs of ale flying at him from all directions; he sang at the top of his lungs a tune Rokwolf recognized at once as a bawdy song about a serving wench, but the words were his explanation of caravans attacked and the strange behavior and appearance of the wedaterem on the road between Kilnar and the Forsaken Outpost. As the awemi finished his “song,” his feet flew from under him and he fell off the small table, but as he fell, the inn’s common room melted into what must have been an inn’s cellar, packed with barrels and crates, lit only by a single, weak and flickering lantern. Tevvy somehow landed on his feet, and the noise of the common room faded to a dull, muffled sound from somewhere to his rear and overhead. The little thief was barely visible in the semi-darkness; Rokwolf could just see him moving toward an open barrel; he was there for several minutes, then he moved about the room, and as he did so, Rokwolf’s surroundings melted into the forested slopes along the road west, the same seklesi camp, where his comrades sharpened and repaired, fletched and ate, while the caravan burned and the merchants were dragged south into the swamp. Rokwolf did not shout at them but instead ran toward the nearest seklesa and tried to shake her, turn her around, force her to see. . . .

  He awakened suddenly, arms in front of him grasping empty air; he let them fall, looking around the room; all was silent, empty, and Sutugno still slept peacefully. He stood and stretched. These actions were unusual for him: he had dreams, yes, but none had ever caused him to act while he slept: this was something new and strange. He strode silently across the length of the room, eyes examining every detail, mind mulling over recent events. Did it mean anything that he had now dreamed twice about Tevvy and the seklesem who patrolled the road north of the Mariskal between Kilnar and the Forsaken Outpost? His dreams had always been strange and silly before, or they had been. . . . He jerked his thoughts back from that path as he found himself standing next to the bed looking down at the sleeping Sutugno. No, it had not been the visit to the methaghi; it started before that: when Marilee rejected him; he shook his head and moved the lock of dirty blonde hair from Sutugno’s face. That was precisely what she thought; these words crashed into his thoughts, causing him to take a mental step backward. Sutugno blamed his twin for the death of her intended, and this way of thinking exactly mirrored his blaming Marilee for his own problems. However, this was not entirely true, since Klaybear activated breath-giver, causing the wave of death and destruction that leveled most of Shigmar; he was at least partially responsible for all who died that day, so Marilee could still be partially responsible for what had happened to him.

  Rokwolf sank to his knees next to the bed, leaning against the bed and resting his head upon his folded arms. A hand gently brushed his cheek and rested on one of his hands, grabbing and squeezing it momentarily.

  “What’s troubling you?” a voice, husky
and hoarse, asked.

  Rokwolf leaped to his feet, so surprised by both the touch and the voice that he stuttered. “I . . . I thought you still slept,” he finally managed to say, taking a step backward from the bed.

  Sutugno smiled weakly and raised her head up from the pillow, leaning on her side on one elbow; this action, in the dimly lit room, showed off her shapely figure under the thin sheet. She was taller than Klare, taller than many wethem, and her hair more blonde than brown, with piercing blue eyes. “I’ve been watching you,” she went on, “leap out of your chair as if you were being attacked. Then you sit down, relax, and begin to mumble in your sleep, and after a time, you leap to your feet again, grabbing what is not there.”

  Rokwolf shook his head and sank down into the chair in which he had been sitting before speaking. “I should not be dreaming while on guard duty,” he admitted.

  “Guard duty?” Sutugno snorted. “Guarding me? From what?” she asked. “There is no one here, but us.”

  Rokwolf looked surprised. “No one?” he replied. “No looters?”

  Sutugno laughed, but this made her cough; she drank from the cup beside the bed. “There were a few who tried to enter the city,” she spoke in a husky whisper, “but that was before most of the buildings fell. Watching their comrades buried under falling buildings seemed to cure any desire to look further than the gates, and when the water started rising . . . ,” she stopped and left it hanging.

  Rokwolf nodded. “So none of the kailum who survived remained here?”

  Sutugno shook her head as she sipped more water. “The few masters who survived gathered the handful of novices and apprentices and led them south toward Holvar.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them?” he asked.

  “They are fools!” she spat. “They think to get help from the Fereghen and rebuild the order,” she snorted and looked away, eyes going distant, “but I’ve read the prophecy; I know what is coming, and few, if any, will survive.” Tears wet her cheeks. “He did not survive,” she went on in a whisper, “I should have been with him, died beside him, then we could have gone on together; instead, I’m trapped here alone, forsaken, haunting the hallways we used to walk together, before . . . ,” she stopped and fell back onto the pillow, striking the bed with clenched fists and shouting, “No! I must not go there again! I have screamed myself hoarse over the last few days, and it did no good but led me to attack my best friend’s husband, who was trying to help me.” She turned and looked at Rokwolf. “I have not forgotten those days when we first met, before. . . .” Her eyes again filled with tears, and she started to shake with sobbing. “Why?” she asked the ceiling. “Why him? Why now? Why me? Oh, why me?”