by Dave Smeds
He looked up into the face of an animal.
In another moment, he realized it was a man, but one with hair all over his jaws and chin. Black hair. His skin was nothing like the golden brown of the Vanihr; rather it was pinkish, almost white in places protected from the sun. Even the memories of his ancestors contained no image of such a man. It was several moments before Toren was convinced that he viewed a human.
To the left stood the strange Vanihr he had fought, eating burrost from Toren's cache. One of his arms was in a sling. Beside him was a woman. She at least had no hair on her face, but her complexion was just as pale as the first man's, and her hair a deep brown unknown among Toren's people except in legends. Like the others she wore a loose shirt and full-length trousers tied at the waist and ankles. She carried another of the unusual bows. All three strangers had the haggard look of people who have led a long chase.
"Not feeling well?" the Vanihr asked, between bites. Toren could barely understand his dialect.
"No."
"Good. That was a nasty pin you stuck me with," he said, gesturing at the sling and the poultice of mud and grass over his wound. "I almost didn't find where you kept the antidote in time."
Toren tried to lift a hand to feel his swollen head, but not only were his arms tied to his sides, but his whole upper body was tied to the tree.
"What do you want with me?"
"We need you to kill a dragon."
Toren stared back incredulously.
"It's a long story," the Vanihr admitted. "But we'll have plenty of time to explain. My name is Geim. The lady is Deena. The one who startled you is our leader, Ivayer."
Toren scowled. He was embarrassed to have shown his fright to foreigners. "What is your tribe?" he asked Geim testily.
"I was once of the Ogshiel."
Toren stared. "That is far northeast, at the edge of the Wood."
"Yes. Near the Sha River delta."
"Your people fought the Shagas."
Geim shrugged. "In the past. There have been no Shagas on the lower river in modern times."
"Why have you journeyed so far from your home?"
"For you."
Toren shifted off a rock that was digging into his buttocks. "To get me to kill a dragon."
"You learn quickly."
"I think you have me confused with somebody else."
Geim said something to Ivayer. The latter held out a silver bracelet decorated with blue stones. Identical ones hung on Geim and Deena's wrists. At a word, one of the gems began to glow, throbbing from bright to dull. As the bearded man moved his closer to Toren, the pulsing grew more rapid.
"We used these to find you. When we began our trek, they were as lifeless as an Ijitian's mind. The farther south we came, the more active they grew," Geim stated. Ivayer touched his gem to Toren's ankle. Upon contact, the glow became constant. "There is no doubt. You're the one we want."
Toren shrank back. This was potent sorcery. "Where did you get these talismans?"
"We were given them by our mistress, the god Struth."
In a way, the use of magic soothed Toren's pride. It explained how people unfamiliar to the Wood could have caught him. He could tell from their blank expressions that Geim's companions did not even understand Vanihr languages. But what he was told made no sense.
"There are no gods," Toren said.
"Call her something else then, but Struth exists. I've talked to her, felt the wind of her breath. That's more than I can say for my ancestors."
The implication made Toren pause. "Your ancestors do not live inside you?"
"They do in you?"
"Of course. Ever since I came of age."
"So the legend is true," Geim murmured. "We've heard it is this way among the southern tribes. Our shamans all died in the wars against the Shagas. There are none left to pass the memories from father to son."
Toren felt shame rising. Not only had he been taken, but it had been done by cheli-incomplete beings, subhumans. Better that he had been captured by children.
Geim bit off another piece of the burrost. Toren watched enviously, reminded of his empty stomach. The dried tree serpent was one of his favorite foods. To his surprise, Geim offered him some.
"I do not share food with enemies," Toren snapped.
Geim shrugged, and put the meat back in the satchel. "We're taking you back with us to the temple of Struth. It's in the country of Serthe, on the northern continent. A long walk. Eventually you'll want to eat something."
Toren glared back. "And how are you going to get me there? Drag me?"
"We have a means to gain your cooperation," Geim replied. "Now that you're awake we can proceed." He spoke to Ivayer. Toren could not understand the words, but he felt danger closing in.
Ivayer took off his magic bracelet and set it on the ground near Toren, then inhaled deeply, waved his hands over the talisman, and began uttering soft, rhythmic sentences. The strange poetry probed a place deep inside Toren's skull. He tried to shout in order to drown out Ivayer's voice, but could not. His throat was filled with something. It was crawling upward. Its hard, bulbous contour scraped painfully against his palate. He felt stubby, flat-bottomed legs walk across his tongue. His jaws and lips were pushed open against his will.
Toren panicked. He watched in horror as his totem emerged from his mouth and began walking down his body. When it slid off his thigh to the ground, he could freely observe that which he had seen only once before in all his life, on the day of his manhood ceremony.
His totem was a tortoise. It was blue, translucent, with white, pupilless eyes. It walked sluggishly toward the bracelet. One of the gems-not the same one that had been flashing earlier-was starting to gleam. The tortoise walked straight into the illumination, shrinking, until it vanished within the facets. Ivayer ceased his spellweaving, and exhaled sharply. A droplet of sweat fell from his chin.
"You've taken my ancestors," Toren whispered. He listened in the places of his mind where the familiar voices should be and found silence. The remembrances of past generations, which had seemed so much like his own memories, would no longer come to consciousness. He stared forlornly as Ivayer picked up the bracelet.
"We are sorry it has to be this way," Geim said. "If you had lived in the civilized lands, we might have offered you gold or iron. But we had nothing you value enough to make you leave the Wood, until now."
"You have made me a cheli. It would have been more merciful to kill me."
"The process can be reversed. Your ancestors can be returned to you."
Toren looked up, startled and suspicious. "After I've killed your dragon for you?"
"Before," Geim said. "All we ask is that you come with us to Serthe, and speak to Struth. She'll give your totem back to you. In fact, she's the only one who can. It's easy to put it in the gem, but only a god has sufficient magic to restore it to your body."
Toren stared at his feet. Ivayer spoke.
"Perhaps we should put it another way," Geim translated. Ivayer gestured to Deena, who untied the ropes. Toren winced as a rush of blood returned to his extremities. Ivayer held out the bracelet.
"Take it, return to your shaman. See if he can free your ancestors," Geim said.
"They would cast me out if they knew I had let foreigners defile my totem." Even his son would be compelled to shun him.
"Then it seems to me your choices are suicide, or coming with us, letting Struth restore you, and in time being able to return as a complete man."
Toren found it difficult to care what his alternatives were. That morning he had been a modhiv, one of the best scouts his tribe had. Now he was not even a true Fhali. He could no longer call up the memory of the founder planting the tribe's home tree, only his own meager recollections of the tree at its present, mighty girth. When he rose, it was almost as if someone else moved his muscles.
Geim seemed to smile. "This is not funny," Toren snapped.
"No," Geim answered quickly. "I was merely thinking of somethin
g that Struth said. She assured us that you would be a person with a well-developed sense of self-preservation."
Toren glowered. When Ivayer offered him the bracelet again, he waved it away. He would walk north for now. There did not seem to be any alternative. But that did not mean he had to stop behaving like a modhiv. When they set out, he was in the lead, as if he were the master, not the slave.
II
THE MAIN STREET OF THE hamlet of Old Stump rumbled with the sound of mounted soldiers. Citizens prudently sought the shelter of the buildings, where they peered cautiously from shadowed doorways and curtained windows. A high noon sun washed the community with hard, revealing light, giving the watchers a view more vivid than they would have preferred.
They saw twenty riders seated atop heavy battle oeikani, the thick-necked breed seldom seen in Cilendrodel. The animals' short, knobby antlers had been capped with brass cones, and on their forward feet their cloven hooves had been filed to cleaverlike sharpness, so that they clicked as they crossed the tiles between the hall of the elders and the home of the mayor, the only paved section of roadway in the region. The mayor's wife and daughters heard the clicking and struggled to banish the unwelcome memories summoned to their minds.
The riders were all dressed alike, in chain mail hauberks and bronze greaves. They carried broadswords, dirks, and wooden shields reinforced with copper bands, except that the pair of archers at front and rear had substituted bows and quivers for the shields. But most important for Old Stump's populace, each of the soldiers wore a red and black design on the right breast of their jupons, so that there could be no doubt that they were the Dragon's men.
The second group of ten rode somewhat behind the first, leaving a gap at the center of the procession. In that gap something was being dragged in the dust. Owl the tavernmaster, peering tentatively out through the open half of his main doorway, decided the thing must have once been a man.
It was not easy to tell, even after the soldiers had reined up in the center square of the hamlet and lifted their burden up out of the dirt. The body had no eyes, no nose, no genitals. Several fingers and toes bent at impossible angles. His skin was covered with welts, burns, clotted blood, or in some cases was simply missing.
Four of the soldiers dragged the dead man to the center of the square. Until three years earlier the site had been home to Old Stump's great father tree, which antedated the first house. Now there was only a crudely hacked-off trunk, eight feet high, to which the soldiers tied their trophy. When the last knot had been cinched, the patrol leader dismounted and shuffled lazily to the spot.
The latter was stout but muscular, perhaps a bit less than forty years of age. He wore brass knuckles, polished to hot brilliance, and a sash of fine quarn silk. His cheeks bore shallow scars from a childhood bout with the pox. There were those in the hamlet who could remember the year when that sickness had swept through, taking one in ten of the children, and one in twenty of the adults. Others could recall when the man had been taunted by his juvenile peers because he had been afraid to climb the great father tree. Those were the days before Lord Puriel's nearby castle had been fortified as one of the Dragon's outposts, and many of Old Stump's homes taken over in order to quarter the men of the garrison.
The patrol leader pulled his dirk from its sheath and used the tip to carve a pattern in the corpse's abdomen, leaving gouges that seeped a few drops of cold blood. There were not many in the village who could read what was written; even the writer was merely copying it from a design he had memorized an hour earlier. They were characters of the High Speech of the Calinin, and they formed a name: Milec. In ancient days in the kingdom of Aleoth, this had meant fifthborn son of the weaver. It was a common enough name in Cilendrodel, but there was one particular Milec more famous than any other. When certain watchers saw the letters formed, they knew the rumor of his capture was true.
The carver finished his work and turned away. He found that an old woman was standing in the middle of the street, watching him. She lifted a bony finger at him and shook it.
"May your mother turn in her grave, Claric," she said, strong-voiced in spite of her age.
He laughed. "Aunt Seerie. Where are the menfolk? Afraid to show their faces? They leave old women to render their complaints?"
"This is a good man you have murdered," Seerie continued, as if Claric had not spoken.
"He was a criminal, condemned by Governor Puriel himself," Claric answered hotly. "It isn't murder to execute a rebel."
"And to mutilate him?"
"If he had told us what we wanted to know, he could have saved himself most of that." Claric climbed into his saddle. "The Dragon is not unkind to those who acknowledge his lawful rule."
From oeikaniback, Claric called to the buildings surrounding the square, "Tell the precious prince of Elandris and his whore of a sister that I will see them hanging from this same post one day."
He paused, as if challenging the village to speak, but no reply came. Then he spurred his mount and rode past his aunt in the direction from which he had come, missing her so narrowly that the wind of his passage nearly toppled her. She steadied herself with her walking stick. Half the patrol followed Claric at a gallop.
The ten men remaining, including all the archers, assumed stations around the square, two in the saddle, the rest standing. Seerie gave them a cold stare, which they met with disinterest. They joked as she limped away down the street.
****
By evening, Old Stump came back to life, in a quiet way. Light glowed from the tavern windows, and the lamp above its sign clearly displayed the name: Silver Eel, called that because of the house specialty, delivered daily by local fishermen. A new squad arrived from the garrison, and several of those who had guarded Milec's body throughout the afternoon gladly whiled away the first of their off-duty hours in the pub room. Houses rattled to the sound of children running and wives cooking. Citizens occasionally appeared on the street, until the curfew drew near.
There was even some activity in the square, though no one lingered there. An elderly man with cataract-tainted eyes stopped and peered at the corpse, but a soldier's half-drawn sword kept him ten paces off. If anyone had any interest in the spectacle that went beyond morbid voyeurism, they hid it. Here in the shadow of one of the Dragon's strongholds it was not prudent to show concern for an enemy of the state. As Owl the tavernmaster put it, "Better him at that post than me."
In the small hours of the morning, a sentry yawned and thought once more of the relief squad due at dawn, and of the night's gambling that he had missed. Motherworld hung overhead, full and oppressive, staving off darkness with a bright orange glow. The shadows of the dead man's eye sockets seemed to hide an accusing stare. The sentry almost wished the rebels would try something, thereby relieving his boredom. But they would not. This was too deep in the Dragon's territory. If it had been otherwise, the guard would have been more numerous. The entire scheme had been staged merely to humor the Dragon's sorcerer.
It came as a shock, then, when the latter burst into the square, nearly drawing fire until the guards recognized his fine silk garb. "Have care!" the wizard shouted. "There is magic being cast."
The swordsmen drew their blades. The archers nocked their arrows and pointed them toward the shadows of adjacent buildings. But all they saw or heard for their trouble was a silk moth fluttering across the avenue toward the light of the tavern.
The sorcerer lowered his arms. "It is over now," he said.
"What was it, Master Omril?" asked the leader of the squad.
Omril stepped forward, rubbing his cheek in a habitual gesture, and sniffed the air at various points within the square. Eventually he strode up to the body of Milec. Even before he spoke, some of the sentries saw what he had discovered.
"The name is gone," Omril said.
Where Claric had carved Milec's name, there was now only smooth skin. One of the sentries made a sign against demons.
"Enough of that," Omril snapped. "It
's only a trick." But he knew otherwise. It was a rare enough thing to be able to heal damage so quickly. To be able to do it to a corpse, and at a distance, was a talent beyond even the best of the Dragon's sorcerers.
One of the archers suddenly spun on the balls of his feet, pointing his weapon toward the middle of the street. An old woman bundled in a shawl was approaching, her shaky steps supported by a cane.
"It's Claric's aunt," one of the swordsmen declared.
"She's out after curfew. Arrest her."
Seerie made no attempt to shake off the hands that clamped on her thin upper arms. "A clumsy trap," she called to Omril. "Did you think the prince would let himself be caught?"
"If he wants the body, he or his men are going to have to stand revealed. Trap or not. If he doesn't come, then Milec will stay until he rots, and that will be a lesson in itself."
"I suspect he'll not rot, however long he stays there."
The sentry made the sign again. Omril felt another sliver of doubt, picturing the corpse's fingers straightening out, its skin becoming pink again. "Are you the rebel's spokesman, then?"
"I am only an old woman, who has lived too long already," Seerie stated. "And so I can speak my mind freely." She started to say something more, but stopped to stare behind them, eyes wide.
They all turned to look at the body. One of the archers gasped. Omril's jaw dropped, and he probed more thoroughly, but to his consternation sensed no magic in the vicinity.
"It has wings!" a swordsman yelled.
The body looked as if it were covered with a horde of huge moths or dragonflies, all fluttering at great speed. As the men watched, the ropes fell away, and Milec began to rise upward. Both archers fired. Omril saw at least one shaft strike home in the dead man's thigh, then the body was airborne. It shrank to a silhouette against the globe of Motherworld, and was gone westward, toward deep forest.
Seerie laughed.
Omril turned toward her with fury. "He's gone, but we have you. Will you be so smug in the governor's dungeon?"