Fireclaws - Search for the Golden

by T. Michael Ford

  “Andea, could we wait until morning to answer your questions? Right now, I need to check out the area and make sure those things are not following us. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any food, and I don’t think a fire would be a good idea now either. When I come back, it will be as a really big cat, I will make a purring sound so you know it’s me. Then we’ll get some sleep. You can burrow down in my fur and I will keep you warm and safe until morning.”

  I settled her in a dry spot up under one of the logs and piled loose branches around her. Minutes later as a Jag’uri, I prowled around the deadfall, gradually expanding my circle of search until I heard a cracking, gnawing sound down closer to the lake. The large lake beaver had brought down a substantial aspen earlier in the evening and was in the process of noisily stripping off the smaller branches and bark. He didn’t realize his carelessness until my jaws bit down and snapped his neck instantly. Greedily, I quickly feasted on its warm remains, leaving almost nothing to waste. Warm food in my belly, I finally felt like I could change or fight if I needed to defend Andea. Returning to the makeshift camp, I purred as I slid through the branches and rubbed lazily alongside the small human girl. Putting out her hand, my back easily came above her waistline. I made a production out of finding a good place to lie down. Settling in, I felt her crawl up next to me and take one of my huge paws and drape over her side as she snuggled up into the soft long fur of my undersides. We slept.

  By the time Andea awoke the next morning, I had been up for a while. I was already a dark elf and had started a modest fire and began amassing a small pile of apple root, berries, and cattail pollen spikes. Next to the flames on small sticks, a rabbit was dressed out, cooked and cooling. When she did stir, she had a shy smile on her face.

  “Ryliss?”

  “I am here, Andea. Why don’t you warm yourself by the fire here; I will stoke it a bit more so we can get your clothes dry. There is food next to the fire, as well; you must be hungry.”

  The girl got up, brushed herself off, and cautiously oriented herself to the fire, feeling its warmth. It was the first time I had the opportunity to take a really good look at her. She was wearing ragged leggings and a dirty brown overdress, with plain moccasin-like slippers. She had jet black curls and a small impish-looking face that radiated goodwill. This, despite what had been done to her; both eyes looked like they had been destroyed with burning sticks or embers and left to heal without the benefit of magic or even herbal healing. It sickened me to the core of my soul to look at them.

  I walked over and stood next to her, about to show her the food when she put her hands out tentatively and touched me. She ran her hands over my shoulders, hips, and clothing and finally stopped at my face. She gently outlined it with her fingertips, pausing when she touched my ears and I jerked back slightly.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No, they’re just sensitive, that’s all.”

  She nodded. “You are an elf and the woman I told Kerrik to search for.”

  I took her hands and led her over to a flat rock near the fire where she could sit. I filled a section of her over shirt with some of the berries and apple root chunks so she could eat and talk. “Andea, tell me what you know about all this.”

  “It’s a long story, Ryliss, but right now we need to find Kerrik. He will be worried sick and he’s probably looking for me right now.” She said hesitantly, “But I can’t do it without your help.”

  “Andea, I met Kerrik yesterday for the first time. Our conversation lasted all of about five minutes before three dozen armed men and a fire mage kicked open the door to the tavern. They were apparently searching for you, with wizards as a secondary target, as they had a demon crystal that lit up in the presence of magic. Before they could check me, your brother started a commotion that drew their attention away. At the same time, he caused the crystal to light up, indicating he was a wizard. I’m sorry, but they hauled him away in a locked wagon.”

  She looked stricken, paused in her chewing and cocked her head slightly. “What will they do to him?” A tear was forming on the outsides of the ruins that were her eyes. I tore my gaze away and answered.

  “If they wanted him dead, they could have done it on the spot. My best guess is that they will hold him and try to make him work for them in some capacity.”

  Andea gulped and her throat tightened at the thought, but then she surprised me by changing topics. “Would the crystal have lit up if it had gotten close to you?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know, it depends on what the crystal reacts to. Me, personally, probably not, but I carry some items of magic that I wouldn’t want revealed.”

  “But you are a wizard?”

  I sighed; this was getting uncomfortably close to areas that I usually don’t talk about. But I guess she already knew about my wild forms and I was reminded that she apparently knew somewhat more than that, as well. “I am a Druid, actually…but it’s not something I talk about to most people.”

  She nodded sympathetically. “That’s what Kerrik says, too. He doesn’t tell people he’s a wizard; I guess some bad stuff happened in the war. He says he won’t tell me about it until I’m older.”

  “Andea, who did this to you? And why are bad people after you?”

  She nibbled on a piece of root and oriented on my voice. “When I was nine, my oldest, and favorite brother, Kerrik, went off to war to fight against the undead for Elcance, since Ocanse didn’t favor the use of wizards. My father and mother were farmers; we had a medium-sized farm on the edge of Ocanse, but sadly, not far from the evil necromancer’s lands. Just before the end of the war when the Duke was winning, Ocanse fell and our farm was overrun. I don’t remember much about that night except the blood and the flames and my mother bundling me up and passing me off to a shepherd couple who watched our flock of sheep high up on the mountain. Their plan was to escape by following the wild goat trails that wound through the high passes. That was the last I ‘saw’ of any of my family.”

  She cast her eyes down self-consciously and continued, “Anyway, it was bitterly cold and we walked for days through the deep snow on the mountains. Eventually, we made it across and ended up in a large camp for refugees from the war. Men, women, and children lived in tents in the snow, but at least the undead left us alone. I was there for six months or so, living in packs with the other orphans. One day we heard the war was over and most of the adults loaded up and went back to wherever they came from. I was lucky and had always been good with horses, so I managed to catch on with a small traveling caravan that sold cloth, pots, tools, and spices.”

  “What about the shepherd couple who took you from your home?” I interjected.

  She grimaced, remembering that detail. “They felt their duty ended when they delivered me to safety. They were well past child-rearing age and did not want the responsibility of raising a rambunctious young girl. One morning I woke up and they were just gone. So I was on my own…I worked for the caravan leader for several full cycles, mostly for a little food and the right to sleep with the horses at night. Once we even traveled close to my home, and I begged Jedaro, the caravan boss, to let me take a spare horse and ride to go see it.”

  Andea shook her head in dismay. “Ryliss, it was completely gone. Goblins, or whatever fell creatures, had burned all the buildings to the ground and nothing was spared. No one was around or working the land. I cried for an hour at the spot where I had last seen my parents, and then rejoined the caravan folk and never looked back. Time passed and life wasn’t so bad. I was eleven years old when the dreams started…”

  “Dreams?” I repeated.

  “Well, sort of like dreams, but they can happen when I’m awake, too. I see images of places and people doing things that haven’t happened yet. Sometimes I can recognize the players and they’re silent and other times I hear a narrative in my head like someone reading from a book explaining it all. But the words are always hard to understand, like someone really old is speaki
ng. Sometimes I just get glimpses of light and darkness. It wasn’t long before I was riding alongside Jedaro leading the caravan. And every time we came to a fork in the road, he would ask me, ‘Which way, Andi?’ And I would tell him…if I knew…”

  She paused and grinned. “Pretty soon, we were the best and the luckiest caravan on the trails! Jedaro’s wagons were hardly ever hit by bandits or encountered bad weather. Oddly, we always seemed to arrive in the port towns just when new trade ships were docking, so we always had our pick of the best goods. Other caravan bosses would always ask Jedaro what his secret was and, for the most part, he would just laugh, point to his head, and smile. But every once in a while after a big score, he would go out drinking, and that’s when he would talk more than he should.

  “Late one afternoon, right after I turned fourteen, the caravan was bogged down. It had been a very wet spring and we had spent most of the day pulling our teams out of the mud and fighting our way up a mountainside. Everyone was in a foul mood, and to make matters worse, it started to rain again. We had finally made a couple miles of progress when we came to a fork, each trail going around a different side of the mountain. Jedaro looked at me and as usual asked ‘which way, Andi?’ Suddenly, I got a vision of spilled blood, bodies, and leering cruel faces, and I grabbed his arm. ‘Neither, Jedaro, we need to go back the way we came!’ But for once, he refused to listen to me. Even as I begged and pleaded with him, he chose the left path.”

  Andea stifled a sob. “A mile ahead, we came around a small copse of trees near the trail, and suddenly, we were set upon by mounted and armed men. The leader had heard of ‘Jedaro’s luck’. The caravan guards tried to fight, but it was useless; archers were hidden in the trees. Jedaro was slain right in front of my eyes, as were most of my caravan friends. I was captured, tied up, and thrown over a horse. A few of the others who survived were strung together and forced to walk.

  “A day and a half later, we arrived at a fortress still under construction, and we were told that we were now the property of the Grand Wizard Verledn. The entire place was being constructed with slave labor, both common and magical. The stronger wizards were overseeing and bullying the weaker ones who seemed to be doing all the work. The fortress had walls of stone and even a ring of deep water around it. The Grand Wizard himself came out to view us as we entered. He was about my father’s age, but he did not have nice eyes and he never smiled. He had white hair and always wore black robes and carried a big staff; he was really scary. After a few minutes of yelling and threats, the others I had been captured with gave me up right away as ‘Jedaro’s Luck’. But I was pretty sure the leader of the soldiers already knew that. I was shut up in Verledn’s tower and every day I was brought before him and he would ask me questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Why are the stars different but the moons are not? What can you tell me about a place called Sky Raven? And most importantly, if I ever saw winged people in my visions, I was to warn him immediately. But he seemed to be obsessed with this Sky Raven place because he asked about it daily. If he didn’t like my answers, he had the guards beat me until I told him what he wanted to hear. I tried to tell him that the visions come when they will and on their own terms, but he wouldn’t listen. Finally, I had had enough and decided I needed to escape.”

  If this Verledn is trafficking with demons, he should be obsessed with worrying about Sky Raven. I grinned, thinking about what Alex and Maya would do to him and his fortress.

  Andea continued, “Well, the first two times, they caught me before I got out of the tower. The third time, I was on the top of the outer wall trying to figure out how to get down when I was discovered. That turned out to be the bad one.”

  “Couldn’t your visions tell you when and where to go?” I asked.

  “No, see that’s one of the problems...I can never see myself in the visions. Now if I had escaped with someone else, I could have concentrated on that person and perhaps seen how they might have escaped, but I had no one.”

  “So when you told Kerrik to look for me in the tavern?”

  “It was really because Kerrik needed to find you, right…” She smiled, thinking about something. “By the same token, you need something, as well, Ryliss…”

  “What are you really, Andea?”

  “I would have thought you would have guessed by now. I’m a seer, a blind seer now, actually; quite the irony, huh?”

  I quickly reviewed my knowledge of the subject. “My people have no record of seers. I have heard that the Lifebane used them, but you are the first I have encountered. So are seers another form of wizard?”

  “I don’t know, Ryliss. I’m the only one I know of, although magic must run in my family as Kerrik is an air wizard.”

  “An air wizard! Well, that explains a lot,” I huffed, thinking about my experiences at Xarparion. Kerrik was certainly full of himself enough to be an air slinger.

  The girl frowned slightly in confusion but continued, “Anyway, the third time they dragged me back before Verledn, he was actually smiling, which was a very bad sign. He said he had been reading up on seers and he theorized that a seer’s magical senses could be made much more accurate if they weren’t competing with their natural senses. They held me down; I screamed, I begged, I promised on my mother’s grave that I would never run again. The very last thing I saw were the red-hot steel rods getting bigger and bigger.”

  I flinched in horror at her story; I’ll never understand humans. I looked again at the ragged black holes she had for eyes. As much as she tried to keep her eyelids closed, they still peeked out from time to time. “Andea, are you still in pain?”

  “A little,” she admitted grudgingly. “It’s been a month or more, but still there is an ache at the back that doesn’t go away. The first couple of days they just bandaged me and put some salve on them, after that nothing…”

  “Would you allow me to cast a healing spell on you? Druids aren’t real healers, not even close, and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t return your sight, but it might make it feel better.”

  She tilted her head and smiled in my direction trustingly. “Only if you promise I won’t wake up braying like a donkey or wearing marmot teeth.”

  “Hardly, you don’t have to be asleep when I cast it; it doesn’t hurt or anything. Go ahead and finish your story, how does Kerrik enter the picture?” I started to summon the energy for the spell, letting it flow through my fingers, caressing the sides of her face.

  “Wow, that feels strange…I had been lying in my bed in what served as an infirmary for the better part of a week. As I said, my eyes were kept bandaged. In the middle of the night, I felt someone lift me up and carry me to the window. I thought it was a dream, I could feel the wind rushing through my hair, and it felt so nice and cooling. There was a jolt like a slight hop, and then someone wrapped me up in a warm blanket and I drifted back to my dreams. When I woke up, I could hear a male voice softly crying over me, “By the gods, Andi! I am so very sorry!” He kept repeating it over and over; then I reached up and touched a face that I had almost forgotten. That’s when I realized I still had a family.”

  I finished up the spell, my eyes teary as I assessed my work. The destroyed ragged hollowness of her eyes had filled in, and they were at least shaped naturally. But there was no color left at all, just a lid-to-lid opaque whiteness. Spooky to be sure, but they were no longer horrifying to look at. Andea fumbled around until she found my hands, then brought them up to her cheek, smiling. “Thank you, Ryliss, the ache and the phantom burning is gone, and I do feel much better, you are a good person…”

  “But how did Kerrik find you?” I blurted out, confused.

  Andi smiled brightly. “That is a story you will need to get from him, but I believe it started years ago and involved someone you very much would like to talk to…”

  “The golden?”

  “I can’t tell you specifically, but I feel strongly that the path to what you desire and my brother’s
and my paths are strongly linked.”

  “This isn’t just some seer doubletalk just to persuade me to rescue your brother, is it?” I questioned, gently smoothing some of the hair away from her face.

  “Now would I do something like that to my new best friend?”

  Chapter 4

  An hour of firmly guiding Andea through the tightly packed birch, aspen, and beech brought us to within dark elf siege bow range of the tavern, a fact I mentioned to Andea in passing.

  “You can’t leave me at the tavern, Ryliss! Someone would surely turn me in to curry favor with Verledn!”

  “Relax, Andi, I’m not taking you there. We’re meeting a friend of mine nearby, but I do need to find a place to hide you for a while…I don’t think the caves are safe anymore.”

  I pondered the situation, what to do with essentially a helpless human child? If my friend Jules were here, she would just ask Reggie to carve out a comfortable chamber in the ground or watch over her himself. But I wasn’t issued a powerful earth elemental with my Druid robes.

  “No, but you were blessed with me instead!” I heard ominously in my head, just before a half ton of inky blackness slammed into my back, vigorously rubbing her ears and snout across my clothes, reveling in my scent. Fortunately, I managed to keep my feet or she would have rolled on top of me as well. Grabbing her massive head, I ruffled the fur and hugged her enthusiastically. All the while Naurakka growled in what I recognized as her happy ritual of welcome.

  Andi stood frozen nearby, clearly afraid to move or even speak. I imagine with all the wrestling and growling sounds, she thought I was locked in a life and death struggle with a monster! And I was really, but the giggling and purring probably belied the whole mortal danger thing. Soon she was cocking her head in confusion.