by Tom Barczak
Instead, he waited against the tremor of his heart, not of fear, but something else.
Al-Thinneas rested the butt of the spear over her blade, gently pressing it down.
Al-Mariam returned her sword to her side. “Or perhaps it was just a test.”
“It’s a warning,” Al-Hoanar’s thick voice drove back. “From someone who never believed.”
Chaelus slumped down against the tree, unable to stand anymore against the flurry of thoughts that shouldn’t be his.
Among them, the whisper of the Khaalish war chief’s name, Obidae, echoed inside him as did everything the man’s soul possessed; everything he did, why they’d come here, everything that had been promised to them and by whom. They had come for Chaelus, to destroy a false prophet, but had fled instead, touched by the one who now dwelt inside him.
Al-Hoanar was right, though he hadn’t known this would be. Al-Hoanar was right, though he hadn’t, and couldn’t, say the name of the one who had caused it. Al-Hoanar didn’t know it was Maedelous who had sent the Khaalish here. But he suspected.
Chaelus still felt the press of Obidae’s face upon his fingertips. He felt his face and everything beneath it as if it were his own, and he knew that Obidae now felt the same of him. Even more so, Obidae felt it of the one of his own who had fallen.
Chaelus felt a wave of nausea creep over him. Kalek, Kalek was his name. Kalek was dead. Kalek was blood kin to Obidae, and Kalek was not the only one who had fallen this day.
The three Servian Knights looked back with hesitation as Chaelus stared at each of them, desperately searching.
Al-Mariam backed away from him. The ice of her stare shattered as she did. The shadow within her billowed forth like smoke to a fire that was already beginning to consume her.
Al-Hoanar drew closer. His own shadow lessened somewhat as a shade of doubt that was more like truth swept over him. The Goarnni had seen something, and something in him had changed.
Al-Thinneas, radiant, held out his hand.
Chaelus grasped it, trembling, as another shadow, one that none of the others could see, passed over him.
“Where’s Al-Aaron?” he demanded. “Where’s my Teacher?”
***
Blood. Blood and the bitter taste of bile clung to his lips. Tears burned upon his cheeks.
Al-Aaron lowered himself into the matted grass where his stomach had just emptied, beside the stilled body of the Khaalish archer. The deep smell of sweat and leather remained, mingling now with the sharp tang of the life spilled out before him. In the grass, Baerythe waited where it had dropped from his grasp, its gossamer torn and thick with blood.
What had he done?
“Only what you’ve done before.” The memory of Figus’ hungry whisper responded unbidden, unwanted to Al-Aaron. “Only what you did once before to me, my love.”
He had killed a man, just like he’d done before.
The dead warrior stared back to where his own blood lay spattered across Al-Aaron’s chest. Al-Aaron felt it, dried upon his face, where his tears hadn’t cut through.
The dead man wore the same leer Figus had worn, the same expression that had come for him that very last time. It took him back to the dark sewer hole where the slaver had once kept him, where the damp chill and shadow had at last become his comfort. There he would wait until the monster Figus came for him, sometimes to beat him or make him steal, and sometimes to do things that were even worse.
Al-Aaron swallowed, his throat swelling. No. This was different. This time he hadn’t killed for himself. He’d had no choice, and the Giver, the only one that mattered, was safe because he’d done so.
Yet how would he tell the others?
The ghost of Malius crouched down next to him amidst the blood-stained grasses. “I fear this is something they will never understand, let alone forgive. Only you and I will know that you were right. And you were, my love, and now you know what it is that you must do.”
Al-Aaron’s hand trembled as he seized Baerythe’s matted blade from the clinging grasses. He returned it to its harness. The clamor and cries of his friends sounded out across the clearing. He heard his own name being called. Mostly, he heard the voice of Chaelus.
He smeared his hand across his cheeks, pressing away the tears, the sweat, and the blood. He felt cold. He forced down again the bitterness in his throat. No. Chaelus couldn’t find him here. Not like this. Even he wouldn’t understand.
The morning sunlight shattered through the branches like broken glass. Al-Aaron withdrew into the sharp whisper of their shadows.
Yet neither could he leave Chaelus. There was no one else to protect him. If, he thought, like the barbarian who’d died this would be his end too, then nothing else mattered anyway, not even the oath he’d just betrayed. No. He would stay, but he would stay hidden. He would find his place in the shadows. They would welcome him as they used to, even now in the harsh light of dawn.
The crush of tall grasses broke the silence.
Chaelus stood dark against the rising sun, bathed in all the glory that had been promised him. The corpse of the dead Khaalish warrior still stared from behind him.
Al-Aaron’s knees turned weak. He stumbled. The tall grasses met him as his strength fell away. He raised his hand, still trembling, before him. “I didn’t mean to do this. I didn’t mean to. I…I did it to save you!”
Chaelus’ dark shadow drew over him like a shroud but it was a shadow awash in light, Chaelus’ countenance veiled in the thin line between the two.
Al-Aaron choked. Streams of tears broke again against his cheeks. “I’m sorry that after all of this, I’ve failed you!”
Chaelus reached down and cupped the warmth of his hand against Al-Aaron’s face. His eyes glowed with a calm fire and his voice sounded like the tinkling of cymbals. “Then let it pass from you.”
Chapter Fourteen
Passage
Al-Mariam pressed aside the thin gray branches reaching up amidst the stones.
Chaelus’ silhouette broke above the summit of Hallas Barren above. Shafts of amber sunlight still pierced through the clouds gathering overhead. To the north, the sky trembled.
Al-Aaron hadn’t woken, and Chaelus hadn’t spoken.
Al-Mariam’s heart quickened. As best she could, she returned her attention to her charge. She brushed her hand through Al-Aaron’s blood-matted hair. Water and care had not taken it all away. Perhaps nothing would. He didn’t move, or even know her touch as it passed.
“He’s so far away,” she whispered.
Al-Thinneas placed his hand over hers. With the strength of his touch and eyes edged with their usual concern, he was the closest thing she had known to a father since her own had been taken from her. Just as with the child whose head rested in her lap, she realized Al-Thinneas had become like family to her.
“He’s tired,” Al-Thinneas said. “Let him rest.” He looked to the distant figure of Chaelus and the malaise which claimed him. “Let them both rest.”
The sky echoed above them.
“The weather’s already turning,” Al-Mariam offered, grateful for the storm’s distracting clamor.
“Its change has already passed,” Al-Thinneas stated. “By the morrow, we will no longer know the day’s passage.” He placed a finger to the dark spots that showed upon Al-Aaron’s hand. Wrappings still covered his wound above them. “The shadow of the Dragon has been cast over all of us.”
“Shadow or not, the time for our passage has come,” Al-Hoanar said as he joined them. He dropped his pack beside Al-Thinneas. “There’s no safety to be had here.”
“Nor it seems was there ever,” Al-Thinneas returned.
“Whoever sent them though, has much to consider,” Al-Hoanar said, smiling.
“They will know what happened here,” Al-Thinneas said, then paused. “We will leave before dawn, whatever fate or the Dragon bring.”
“What’s happened?” Al-Mariam asked. She heard the tremor in her own voice.
“The machination of prophecy,” Al-Thinneas replied.
“Then you do believe all that Al-Aaron has claimed of him.”
“I believe that the Younger believes. And I know what I saw. I’m no theologian, like Al-Aaron or the Mother. Mine is a simpler faith. And I know that there is much in the ways and desire of man or woman that must yet come to pass.”
Al-Thinneas paused again. He smiled. “The most amusing thing about prophecies is that there is always something that has yet to be fulfilled.”
The silhouette of Chaelus hadn’t moved. Al-Mariam could only guess that he watched the road ahead, and whatever fate waited there. A statue, not unlike the one that watched in vigil above the mount of Col Durath.
“Yet the one we are made to follow speaks no words,” she said.
“Then go to him,” Al-Thinneas said, his stare holding her fast, his eyes knowing her heart as they always did. “And ask for them.”
***
“It seems you were right,” Chaelus whispered. “You were right when you said this would be my death.”
The remembered scent of jasmine drifted over him in answer. His memory of Faerowyn looked out over the ruin’s precipice.
No temptress’ veil marred the innocence of her face, the child’s face that he had fallen in love with so many lives ago. No lies sullied her lips, or the unfulfilled promise they had once borne for him.
To be forced to imagine something lost, to find something safe.
Chaelus’ heart ached at the sight of Faerowyn, imagined or not. At least this time it was no Dragon’s spell that kept her, and there were no words of prophecy or Dragon’s ire that could take the vision of her away from him.
At Faerowyn’s feet, the stain of ashes marked the center of a stone ring the breadth of a man, the only trace of the fire it had once contained. Above her blowing hair, in the distance, the fists of the Karagas Mun reached up to an even darker sky, broken only by the flashes and cries of the suffering storms waging within it.
Against the storm’s tumult, the soft tread of footsteps approached from behind him.
Anguish veiled his sight as Faerowyn disappeared.
Al-Mariam hesitated, unsettled as she came towards him.
At least in this he wasn’t alone.
Al-Mariam’s gossamer-bound blade hung beside her. Her hands clutched each other deep within her cloak.
Chaelus kept his silence, if silence could be had anymore amidst the continuous chaos and murmur of everything around him and within him; the sounds that followed from the blush of the One, Talus, the Giver, the one who had claimed him and colored everything before him.
“Here, the watch fire once burned.” Al-Mariam looked past him as she spoke, her demeanor less forceful and more cautious than before. The shadow of the Dragon within her had dimmed. “It is midway between the Garden and the Line.”
“How fares Al-Aaron?” Chaelus whispered.
“He sleeps a boy’s sleep,” she replied. “I will carry him if he doesn’t wake soon.” Her voice softened more as she spoke of him.
Chaelus could tell that her love for Al-Aaron was deep, no less than his own, and like himself, Al-Mariam claimed Al-Aaron’s suffering as her own. In this too, Chaelus realized, he wasn’t alone.
“And then?” he asked.
“And then we will help you do what you have come to do.”
The wariness in her voice returned but this time, Chaelus knew, surely by the Giver’s touch alone, it was not because of him.
“The Mother should not have sent him with us,” he offered. “His faith has blinded him.”
“Short of his death, you know he wouldn’t have stayed,” she answered.
The growing thunderheads of the Dragon’s storm howled above them. Chaelus could tell that the angst of their bearing was about to be unleashed. Whatever small thing was left to bear against it had already been given to him; a man without faith, a man without reason.
Al-Mariam stared at him in silent wonder.
“Who do you love?” she asked. “For whom do you suffer all this?”
Chaelus drew closer to her, but not like he had when he had taunted her in the woods. He was as powerless to prevent it as he was to stop the second heart beating within him. And this time it was not his own heart but the second heart, the heart of the Giver that was summoned; not by her, but by the need she bore.
Chaelus heard as much as he sensed her tremble in waiting.
He did too.
He stopped only a breath before her.
“Do you believe the things they say of me?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Al-Mariam averred, her stare cast downward.
Chaelus watched a second shadow pass through her, but this time it was not of the Dragon, but of a memory. A memory of loss.
His hand reached out at once to her face. His fingertips brushed against the unexpectedly soft warmth of her cheek. For a moment, her trembling matched his own, carrying with it the face of a midnight-haired boy that was a mirror of her own. Spectral faces surrounded him, searching for him, but still they could not see him, and his eyes still held hope.
Al-Mariam fumbled back from him, one hand trembling against her cheek, where his own had been. The shadow reclaimed her and became something more. “Don’t do that again!”
Chaelus turned from her, stunned, and lowered himself at once to the ring of stones. “Forgive me.”
The imagined spirit of Faerowyn returned to him. He leaned into her hand as it brushed against his cheek. He breathed in the smell and comfort of her memory as he looked past it to the storm-draped mountains, where the black heart of the Dragon waited for him.
The dark-haired child’s face lingered in his vision. His name drew upon Chaelus’ tongue … Michalas. Michalas waited beneath the shadow for his sister. Yet he didn’t wait only for her.
“You say it doesn’t matter what you think,” Chaelus said, “because you haven’t come here for me, or for what I seek. You’ve come for someone else. You’ve come for your brother Michalas, and he is waiting for you.”
Her sharp breath answered him. “How do you know this?”
“Just as I know that it was a boy who raised me from the dead, the same boy who was willing given up his life and his faith for me. Just as I can hear the Giver’s voice inside my head now, and can still feel his touch upon my skin as if he dwells within me. So it was that I saw your brother’s face, even though I’ve never known him.”
“Stop it.”
Chaelus turned to her. “It is the promise of you that keeps him. Though he’s not afraid, he knows he’s run out of time.”
Al-Mariam stepped back. “I said enough!”
“Then at least know that I never wanted this,” Chaelus offered. “Though still, it is mine.”
Chapter Fifteen
Trespasses
The forest thinned into the bare and broken black rocks of the Abadain. The few trees that remained grew stunted, in suffrage amidst the bleak and brackish stones. A ceaseless cold wind blew from the north, from the slopes of the Karagas Mun towering before them.
The happas wound deep within the depths of the jagged hills, and within the illusion of their cloister the biting winds sought the company out, boring into them even more than they had above. Though still the passage boded better than the broken boulder-strewn fields, whose chasms had attempted to claim them more than once as they sought to pass through.
Ahead of Chaelus, Al-Aaron’s head bobbed with the weariness of his march and of his suffering. He had slept fitfully until just before dawn. His words had been few even when he had tried – and failed – to surrender his sword to Al-Thinneas. Al-Thinneas had closed his hands across the child’s and passed the blade back to him. A clean tunic and cloak covered Al-Aaron now. The blood upon his skin had been washed away. Virgin gossamer had been stretched across his blade. Yet none of it would relieve him of the fire from which he suffered.
Chaelus drew alongside him. “It seems I’m becoming
everything you’d foreseen.”
Al-Aaron shook his head. “It’s not by me, but by the lips of prophecy alone.”
“Yet you have no peace because of what you’ve done.”
Al-Aaron turned around, his weak and swollen eyes narrowed, his ashen face tight despite its pain. Beneath the ebbing glow of his spirit, the Dragon’s shadow swallowed him, its smoky tendrils racing through his very breath.