Forest For The Trees (Book 3)

by Damien Lake

  “Pay heed unto my hands, friend of Marik Railson. An answer comes forthwith.”

  Dietrik watched the stranger clasp both hands together. They drew apart until thumb tip touched thumb tip, and the other fingers matched the action. Rather than a circle, his fingers formed a triangle.

  The satin coat’s hem abruptly vanished from its framing within the Red Man’s fingers. In its place, a swirling rainbow spun inside the triangle, the colors luminescent, mother-of-pearl, oily refractions, and hues for which Dietrik’s mind could generate no description. None were simple. All were strangely beautiful.

  After a moment the colors began separating from one another. Dietrik looked into the Red Man’s hands as if into an artist’s pot where various paints, each poured into the same vessel, were disassociating themselves from each other. Many colors slid sideways, up against the stranger’s hands, vanishing from view. It uncannily looked like they were absorbed by the gloves.

  “Barking!” Dietrik exclaimed a moment later. “I see him!”

  “I concur. That indeed is the man born of my kkan’edom.”

  “How did you do that? Where is he?”

  “Relatively near,” the Red Man answered, avoiding the first half of Dietrik’s question. “I will perform adjustments.”

  Dietrik’s eyes were glued to the scene cradled in those gloved hands. He could see Marik on a mountain trail devoid of vegetation. Marik walked between a woman he recognized as the insatiably cheerful Caresse, and a man unfamiliar to him. The rain pelted the three as mercilessly as it did Dietrik and the red stranger.

  Abruptly the view wobbled, though the Red Man’s hands remained rock-still. Marik and the others sank rapidly, too fast for Dietrik to count the new figures shooting downward, or identify them. Mountain walls and peaks crowded out the tiny forms. The bird’s eye view zigzagged violently across the Stoneseams.

  “Hold up, there! You’ve lost them!”

  “Most intriguing,” the Red Man murmured with a growing smile. “Quite astonishing, in the least. Is it… Of certainty. There is no doubt, but it is the old Tuuwathae’korsa. That it still exists…astounding.”

  “Too-wath-aye-ee what? Speak sensibly, chap!”

  “An ancient road, constructed and walked in times before came Galemar or Tullainia,” came the reply. The view in his fingers had halted with the Stoneseams filling the triangle’s right half. “In the days when the council of kings decided the matters of Merinor, and the greatest mages of the day were lords beside their noble counterparts. The Tuuwathae’korsa long ago fell from the memory of man, even in the lands through which it wound. Time has robbed it of form and purpose. See where it has degenerated mightily, today less than a mountain pathway.”

  Dietrik shifted his gaze back, seeing Marik and the man behind filling the triangle as before. Marik’s hand trailed along the wall to his left. To his right descended a steep, boulder-strewn slope.

  “If that was a road across the mountains, I would have willingly spent and extra eightday riding around the northern range.”

  “Erosion and neglect have played their hands most patiently,” the Red Man explained. “Where once a vital road unwound, what remains only is a narrow path, without question broken and fragmented in places uncountable.”

  “Is that so? How do you know about it in the first place?”

  The Red Man pulled his fingers apart. For a brief instant, the colors hovered in the air. Then the pelting rain destroyed Marik’s image. Each drop took on a different color when it plunged through, carrying away the oddest scrye Dietrik had ever heard tell of.

  “You seek your friend. With care, you will arrive at the Tuuwathae’korsa before the setting sun. Barring vagaries of life or man, Marik Railson will arrive no later than you.”

  Dietrik blinked. This man was a far greater mystery than he ever could have guessed in spite of all he had heard about him over the years. He felt an indescribable air surrounding the figure clad in red. A sense of knowledge fantastic. Of immutable time moving from day to day. As if the man were as much a part of the world as the mountains or the sea.

  He listened to the Red Man, understanding that the directions to reach this ancient roadway would be the last words during this encounter. Other questions would remain unanswered. And that was fine.

  It should not be, he knew. Yet he understood that the stranger simply would say nothing further. For some reason, the Red Man’s decision seemed the right way to go about it. He could sense the man’s strength of will, and he, Dietrik, had no desire to challenge it. Which was fine.

  Marik was alive. That was all that mattered. The damned fool was running about without a proper brain in his head and needed looking after. This man, this bizarre apparition in the pouring rain, mattered for nothing in the face of that.

  The moment the last instruction left the red wraith’s lips, Dietrik chivied his horse into a trot without a single word of gratitude or a look back. It was all…fine.

  * * * * *

  The Red Man watched the form of Marik Railson’s friend dissolve into the rain. Regret filled him that he had been forced to tamper, however lightly, with the man’s free will. Yet the man could not be allowed to linger. It was too bad that such meddling left the mind easier prey for further outside manipulation, but the ward he had set in place might, in some small measure, recompense for it.

  He returned to where he had stood when Marik Railson’s friend first approached. In fewer than a hundred heartbeats, two new forms coalesced from the day’s grayness.

  They froze the instant they sensed him, wary predators realizing they might have become prey. The left man deduced that their presence was known and drew his sword quickly.

  “On this dreary day, I humbly await those with whom I share similar goals.”

  Neither broke the silence for several moments. The Red Man waited until the man with the drawn blade advanced cautiously. “This is a pooch. I wasn’t expecting no one to be standing out where anyone could see.”

  * * * * *

  Jide waited to see how the man would reply. He had no idea what was going on, but the cat who landed on its feet was the first to reach the food bowl. Whatever black market dealing they had stumbled into, it would be best to act like they were fully informed, knew what to expect and had come expressly to buy what this stranger wanted to sell. Or to sell what he wanted to buy. Men neither waited in the rain nor greeted strangers with cryptic code phrases like that just for a lark.

  He and Adrian could hardly afford arrows in the back from common thugs before they managed to sneak into the supply camp in the pass.

  “To intercept men on your course, it would be inadvisable to stand elsewhere.”

  Jide frowned. He felt Adrian moving a step closer. Before the general could say the wrong thing, he hastily said, “Listen, laddie. We haven’t been pissed on by the gods and their entire rotten heavenly host all morning for a logistics lecture!”

  “Indeed not, spymaster. I would conclude you have endured the wrath of nature on the prayer to uncover a core of truth. For the truth has always been of superior significance to Adrian Ceylon than power and its wielding.”

  Jide’s knuckles whitened on the sword hilt. Bad enough that this stranger in the rain knew who Adrian was...

  Beware, there be Danger here.

  His teeth ground as the old underworld gag/maxim flashed through his mind. No one had ever referred to him as spymaster before. Adrian only called him that as a joke, and a rather feeble one at that.

  Adrian addressed the man clad in red. “I would know who speaks to me so, when they have the advantage of me.”

  “Man called Adrian Ceylon, my name is rarely spoken by your tongue. Those who I treat with suffice to call me Red. I have long grown to accept the simplicity of it.”

  “You speak as one apart from us,” Adrian replied. He kept his voice neutral, though his back straightened from abrupt apprehension. “Am I to assume you are a counterpart of Humus?”

  A laugh e
scaped the man styling himself Red. “A nimbler mind than most, Adrian Ceylon! Yet I can lay no claim to being a lord of the elemental spirits. Neither Humus, nor Ventosus, nor Fontis, nor Ignis, nor Navitas. I am flesh.”

  Adrian examined him from head to toe, taking in the clothing and the jeweled eyes. “I would have suspected you for Ignis. Or at least related, after a fashion.”

  “I must disappoint, general of Arronath.”

  “All well and with flaming icing!” Jide snapped. He held his sword pointed firmly at the stranger. “If you don’t say something to blow my skirts up in the next three seconds, we’re stepping out of this hoorah. I don’t much care for people who play around with my dick without my permission!”

  “Matters have escalated beyond my anticipation,” confessed the Red Man. “I intended to put down the instigator while still he was a seed. His roots had delved deeper than ever I feared. It has reached a plateau where plucking the body of the weed is, doubtfully, sufficient. The roots will remain, unseen, until a dozen sprouts break the surface.”

  “Let’s push on,” Jide growled. “We have important business to finish.”

  “The creature known to you as Xenos,” the Red Man announced, freezing Jide in his tracks, “is far more dangerous than apparent to your eye, spymaster. Where he goes, corruption stains. His return to this, his homeland, was only affected once guaranteed the crops sown in Arronath would continue their growth, free of his constant hand. He intends to return, unquestionably, yet should he not, his designs would fail to perish with him.”

  “What the—”

  Jide’s furious outburst was cut short by Adrian’s forceful demand. “I would know what connections you bear to Arronath, and by what convictions you speak so regarding the king’s counselor.”

  Adrian’s voice had grown colder than the rain. Jide clenched his jaw, exasperated that Adrian still persisted in his fierce belief for king and kingdom. What else would it take to make Adrian accept the whole truth before him?

  “My convictions stem from knowledge, Adrian Ceylon. Knowledge gained through experience. I would pass certain knowledge to your stewardship, that you might root out the corruption spreading under the feet of Arronath. It must be expunged if Arronath is to fulfill the duty under which the eleven-point crown was forged.”

  “That’s a mighty claim,” Jide husked. His voice felt desert dry. “Especially seeing as that old god is dead, along with every last one of his followers!”

  The Red Man met his eye with equanimity. “Is it within your credulity that a god may ever truly perish?”

  “He flaming well did!”

  “Standing in the rain,” Adrian cut in, “on foreign soil in hostile territory is not the place I wish to discuss theology. Red, you have succeeded in garnering my interest. Let us find a shelter of sorts, and I will listen to you.”

  “I am heartened. Step this way and I will bring you to the shelter you desire.”

  Jide jerked his body from its paralysis, firmly keeping himself between Adrian and this…creature. He could look as human as he liked, but Jide was not fooled for a moment. This ‘Red’ raised too many danger flags.

  A higher number of them than he could ever remember from a single encounter before this.

  The Red Man led them to the mountain walls where they found a deceptive fold in the stone that opened onto a wider pocket once they squeezed through. Several trees grew in the enclosed space. It felt like a miniature forest hidden away by woodland denizens intent on protecting their home from rampant men.

  Jide sword whipped up to the ready position again when he saw a prone figure draped over a cart-sized boulder. The man was clearly a local by his dress and facial features. Being unconscious, and looking like a drowned ragman, might be a sham.

  “I pray, to him devote no attention,” the Red Man kindly stated. “He has been through most difficult ordeals, little of which is of concern to you.”

  “I am not comforted, seeing you in company with inhabitants of these lands,” Adrian stiffly replied. “A dark threat is growing on this side of the ocean, one that threatens every soul in Arronath. You speak of the eleven-point crown and its forging. If there is any merit to the tale you intend to spin, it may be that we have at last begun unearthing the source of the seers’ nightmarish visions.”

  The Red Man tugged the cuffs on his long-sleeved coat to straighten them. “Several matters of which you believe to be well informed are, in fact, vast unknowns to you. The first, and most inconsequential, is this man. He is no threat to your homeland. As the man Jide Cray serves as your maen’edom, so does this man Rail Drakkson act as my kkan’edom.”

  “Old words,” Adrian observed, while Jide kept as neutral an expression as he could. “So old, in fact, that I can glean no meaning from them.”

  “Not in the precise, to be certain,” smiled the Red Man. “But in the general, you understand me well, I believe.”

  “Perhaps. Yet I only have your word that he has no relation to the danger my kingdom faces, or ties to the council of kings.”

  “The days of that august union of leaders across all of Merinor are long past, Adrian Ceylon. Not for over a thousand years has a ruling summit been convened.”

  “Your credibility just went down the jakes,” Jide growled. “The damned council murdered the king’s diplomatic envoys three years ago! Sent back a lone guard to tell us where we could put our alliances!”

  “Then they took great care to see to it he returned alive to tell the tale. Having made the crossing in person, can you see a single man surviving months on the sea alone, with no geomancers to sooth the elements?”

  “He made it back, plain enough!”

  “Yes, for he never left Arronath for a single moment. Here I begin to pass the tale I bring you. It begins with a man who, by darkest fortune, discovered an artifact from the ancient days. The days wherein your ancestors stood on a continent ravaged by the god of earth. The time when a crown with eleven points was forged to symbolize the union of eleven gods who had united to bring down their mad brother, and too was forged a vow by the founders of Arronath to never again allow His sects to gain in power.”

  “If ever a threat could be so dark as to destroy Arronath…it must be the rise of that unholy cult!” Adrian whispered harshly.

  “What artifact? And what man?” Jide demanded to cover Adrian’s muttering, though the rain still sounded loud enough in the enclosed woods to dampen the words. He already suspected whom Red would name.

  “An artifact well known in Arronathian lore. A shattered fragment of blackest obsidian.”

  Both Jide and Adrian sucked in identical, hissing breaths.

  “Indeed,” the Red Man continued. “One of the many pieces gone astray after the destruction of the obsidian monument depicting the god of earth.”

  “It must be recovered!” Adrian’s fist clenched tightly. “It must be destroyed, as the others were! If the earth cult is rising anew, then they too must be stamped out! Tell me, where in this benighted land are they? This is what we came so far to accomplish!”

  “Sadly, Adrian Ceylon, your long journey has brought you farther from their place of rites. If it is your desire to eradicate their ilk, you must return to Avenlight.”

  “What?”

  The Red Man answered Jide’s bark with a calm, “Long have I sought to put end to these happenings before they could incept. Sit, and listen, and take understanding from my tale.”

  He spoke at length, the story made lengthier by their constant interruptions and angry demands. For all Jide had wallowed in humanity’s foulest slime, he still felt incredulous hearing this stranger explain that the sect was being reborn. Every child in Arronath was taught the histories. A festering, abiding hatred for the acolytes in acid-green robes was passed through the generations from father to son, mother to daughter. No one in Arronath would ever dare think of rekindling that abhorrent faith.

  Adrian in particular argued fiercely, convinced that if the old religion wer
e active anywhere, it must be in Merinor. The Red Man’s insistence that the seers’ visions were a deception crafted by Xenos’ powers found difficult purchase in Adrian’s ears.

  “Xenos continues to change apace,” the Red Man finished much later. “His humanity is long since burned from his existence. He marches along a path leading to places unknown to all but he, leaving behind his touch in the places of his passage. This is why you must return to Arronath, Adrian Ceylon. In the catacombs, the ancient temples pulse with life reborn. You must fulfill your ancestral duty and put the new followers to trial.”

  Jide watched Adrian sit in silence for a long time. He knew what conflicts warred inside his old friend’s heart. When at last he spoke, Jide was not entirely surprised at the words.

  “If your claims are true…then Councilor Xenos must not be allowed to escape the king’s justice.”

  “You hold no power to combat the creature who once was Xenos, Adrian Ceylon.”

  “I hold the power of a general over the Arronathian Armed Forces! And I will not accept such accusations without solid proof!”

  “General, your duty lays in your land of birth. By the day your foot touches soil in Arronath once again, Xenos will have fallen by my hand.”

  “No.” Adrian stood. “Red, I will not abandon my duties, as you have pointed out. First and foremost must be the recovery of the obsidian shard. If Xenos is in possession of it, then I will return it to Arronath for immediate destruction.”

  “That is a course possessed of less wisdom than others.”

  “Nevertheless, it must be verified. We will go to Xenos together, you and I. I will question him regarding this tale you have spun. Should the worst come to pass, I shall return to my king with the proof, and also with the other news you have imparted. The long isolation has wrought numerous changes to Merinor, the dissolution of the council of kings being the least among them.”