A Bitter Brew

by Greg Curtis

  “You'll –.”

  “Stop threatening me! It's embarrassing. I mean, look how pathetic you are. A withered crone, old before her time, crying.” He had to say that. He had to break her. Make her think she was helpless. Why else would she talk to him unless she was frightened?

  “Three times you've attacked me now. And three times you've failed. Now look where you are!”

  “Now tell me about your master.”

  “So beautiful.” Sana abruptly closed her eyes and started squeezing her ghostly limb more tightly, like a young girl squeezing a doll. The look on her face was much the same.

  “Beautiful?” Had she gone mad Hendrick wondered? Had the shock of losing her ghostly limbs broken her mind? Because if she had he doubted he was going to learn much from her. And he hadn't been that confident to begin with. If he had to guess he would have thought she was suffering from shock and blood loss, much as she would be if he'd cut off her actual limbs.

  “Glorious. And he welcomed me. My father locked me up. He had men try to steal my mark from me. And my mother couldn't look at me. But he did! He welcomed me from the start! He told me I was perfect!” Her eyes were still closed as she spoke, and there was a blissful note to her voice. Almost as if she was dreaming. Or retreating into her memories.

  Strangely, Hendrick understood her then. Or at least a little of who she had been. And he pitied her. She was afflicted. Her parents like many had been unable to accept it. They had hidden her away and tried to hide the markings. It wasn't a completely unheard of story. They'd even tried to remove the affliction.

  There were a great many so-called healers and sages who claimed to be able to do that. All of them were lying. There was no cure. And many of the so called cures were barbaric. The charlatans fed their patients poisons or flogged the “demons” out of them. Sometimes they even tried to burn the marks out of them. He had even heard of one healer who had actually tried to rub the markings away with scoria and sand. It didn't work, and usually left the victim with scarring. Sometimes it killed them as disease set in.

  And yet even knowing that, some parents still chose to have such people work on their children. It was better perhaps to have a dead child, than an afflicted one.

  Val had said long ago that there would be darkness in her heart. Something that drew her to the behemoth. Now he could see what it was. Her parents’ treatment of her had taught her to hate them. The great beast had exploited that and welcomed her. He had told her she was beautiful. Perfect. And she could not see past that – because it was all she had ever wanted to hear.

  The irony of course was that the behemoth really did think she was perfect – as a host for his parasite's offspring.

  But this wasn't the time or the place for sympathy. She had just tried to kill him. Her pets had just attacked his home and hurt or killed a great many friends. This was the time for cold, hard truths.

  “You were never anything but a tool to him. Livestock. He planted a parasite in you. It robbed you of your mind and your freedom.” Hendrick pointed out the obvious.

  “My baby!” A smile crept over her face. “So wonderful!” She lost herself in the thought. But then her expression changed. She became angry again. “And you killed it!”

  Even though he was a dozen feet or more from her and to all intents, Hendrick briefly worried that she would try to attack him again. The return of her raging fury was a scary thing in itself. But what she could do with it was worse. He had seen her strength before. If she got her remaining hand on him he would be in serious trouble. But at least the anger returned her thoughts to the world.

  “I'll kill you!” She started struggling, wriggling around on the ground. But with one arm and one leg gone all she ended up doing was rolling around on the grass.

  “You're free of the parasite,” he told her simply. But she didn't listen. He supposed he shouldn't have expected her to. She was completely under the spell of the beast. Val was right. She'd started out with darkness in her heart and the beast had used that to twist her mind completely. It was like giving the milk of the poppy to someone who was already drunk.

  “He knows what you've done! He knows everything!” She stopped rolling, sat up and glared at him. “And he's going to punish you! He's going to hurt you as no one else could!”

  Was that an idle threat, Hendrick wondered? He knew Sana didn't do such things. She was always deadly serious. But was it just anger and bluster talking? Or was there some actual knowledge there?

  “Really? All his servants seem to have failed time and again.” He mocked her master, even though he worried about whether there could be any truth in what she said. The more she lost herself in her hatred, the looser she became with her tongue.

  “He knows where your family is. And he's killing them – slowly.”

  “My family?” Hendrick was shocked by that. But when he saw the anger in her eyes he didn't doubt her. A cold sweat started running down his spine. His family were still in Styrion Hold. At least he assumed they were. It was where they had most of their remaining property. Where else would they be?

  Hendrick immediately summoned a window of far sight and gazed down on the city, only to see another dimensional wall around it. It was similar to the one that had encircled the inner terrace of Styrion Might except that this one enclosed the entire city. And in the heart of it he could see smoke belching out of the ground. Thick black smoke.

  The behemoth was raising a volcano in the centre of Styrion Hold and using a barrier to trap the people inside from running away! It would also trap the air inside as well. Soon he knew, the thick black smoke inside the city would grow so dense that people couldn't breathe. The beast was about to kill a million people!

  His mother, and his brother and his family were all going to die. His father too. And it would be a terrible death. He could not let that happen!

  Meanwhile Sana was laughing at him. Rolling on the ground and laughing so loudly that her whole body shook. She shouldn't have done that.

  With barely a thought he expelled her from the world, sending her to the twilight realm. There he knew or at least hoped, she would not be able to return to her master. He would not be able to find her – assuming he was even looking. And she would slowly starve or die of thirst. It was a cruel thing to do. But as he stared at the image of the Hold in front of him, and all those people trapped inside, slowly choking to death, he simply didn't care.

  Then he started running.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Things were worse than he'd thought Hendrick discovered when he finally arrived at the Hold and collapsed on the ground from exhaustion. The dimensional barrier was higher than he'd realised, and extended so far into the sky that the shimmer seemed to almost disappear in the distance. It extended down into the ground as well. Deep down. He could feel it. There would be no tunnelling beneath this barrier.

  The great beast had also sent a score of his servants to keep watch, just in case some of those inside somehow escaped. They were flying too high up for their shrieks to affect those on the ground – kept out by the wards the Mythagan had provided. But he was sure that if the people who'd been outside the city when the barrier had appeared move too far away from it, they would strike.

  Hendrick was in no mood to tolerate the beast's existence. It had only taken him ten minutes of real time to run scores of leagues, and though he was practically falling down, the creatures would not stop him. Carefully he sighted them with his dimensional arrows, and cut them in half one by one. By the time he had finished with the last one, the first had just begun to start coming apart high above. Hendrick would have liked to have seen it fall, but he simply didn't have the time.

  Instead once he'd regained his breath he raced around the barrier, looking at those people gathered at it on either side, searching for anyone he knew. For his family and friends. Maybe, he hoped, just maybe they had been outside the city when the barrier had been raised? But it was a faint hope. Even the bards wouldn't praise
it. They would know it for the desperation it was. And desperation seldom resulted in a heroic song.

  Still he kept trying and circled the entire city half a dozen times. Barely even a blur to any who saw him. Eventually though it became clear that they weren't among the bystanders. At least with the behemoth’s creatures dead, those outside the barrier would be able to flee beyond the area protected by the ward stones. Most of them by then though were staring and pointing up at the sky in wonder as they saw a score of the ghostly creatures plummeting to the ground in pieces.

  Meanwhile those inside were still trapped, and he had to find a way to get them out. Already he could see that the air inside the barrier, was darker than that outside.

  Hendrick collapsed once more to the grass and summoned his strength. And then when he had his breath back he tried to create a portal inside the city. As expected, it didn’t work. You couldn't pass one portal through a dimensional barrier. All he ended up doing was to create a shower of shimmering pieces of magic that scattered everywhere.

  Next he tried to destroy the spell itself. But that was even more impossible if such a thing could be said. It was like trying to push a mountain with your bare hands. The barrier spell was simply that immense, and he was insignificant.

  Still he tried. He put all his strength into the spell and attacked it with everything he had. The barrier didn't give an inch. It didn't even flicker. By the end he was left half collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily and with sweat pouring off him, while the barrier remained firm.

  It wasn't coming down. Hendrick understood that as he lay there, exhausted from his efforts, and stared at the city trapped inside it. There was absolutely nothing he could do about it. His entire family and a million others were about to die and if Sana was to be believed it was because he had upset the behemoth.

  How could hurting Sana have even bothered the great beast? Surely she was just as insignificant to it as he was? Unless he was missing something. But he also knew it didn't matter. They were going to die and he couldn't stop it. He couldn't reason with reason with the behemoth. He couldn't beg. He couldn't even go near it. He could kill every single one of its servants and it simply wouldn't matter. No more than killing all the fleas on the back of a dog would bother it.

  All he could do was sit and watch as his failure cost him his entire family.

  It occurred to him then that he didn't even know them. He had only seen his brother from a distance over the last twenty years. He'd seen a woman with him who he assumed was Myka's wife, Ells. But he didn't know for sure. And he'd never even seen their children. That somehow made it seem worse. What sort of brother or uncle had he been? None at all. And now when it mattered he was going to fail them.

  The air started rippling as he sat there, and he realised that he was about to be visited by the Mythagan. He'd been sitting in one place for so long that they'd spotted him. But it wasn't a spell of portal they were using. He would have felt that. Besides, he knew the shimmering effect it caused. This was a spell of invisibility slowly unravelling. The magic of fire and light – of Infernium. He did not have that magic.

  Somewhat annoyed by the length of time it was taking for them to appear, he called on his haste spell and extended it to include them – something he hadn't known he could do until just then. A moment later half a dozen of the Mythagan appeared before him.

  “What do you want?” He didn't want to see them. Not when he already knew that they were as powerless as he.

  “You sped us up?” One of the women asked.

  “I don't have time to waste on pointless conversation.” Hendrick indicated the city. “Now what do you want? You've already said you can't do anything against a behemoth.” In fact, everyone had said it.

  “No one can.” She stepped up to him and then in a surprisingly direct manner, grabbed his chin and started moving his head about so she could better see his markings. “By the Gods! Miss Holdwright told me, but I didn't think she could be right.”

  “Then what's the point in your being here?” Hendrick ignored the woman. He just didn't care what she thought.

  “To see. To learn. To find a protection against this in time in case it happens again. But you don't need to be here for this. There's nothing you can do after all. You can come with us.”

  “My entire family is in there,” he told her simply. “All my friends. I need to be here.”

  “Even if you had all the magic in the world you could do nothing,” she told him gently. “There has never been anyone or anything that could even scratch a behemoth. They're just too powerful. They can only be managed.”

  Hendrick didn't answer her. He knew she was right. But even as he listened to her, a tiny voice somewhere in the back of his mind was suddenly shouting at him that she was wrong. It wasn't about power. It was about knowledge. Immediately Hendrick tuned his attention to that voice – the whisper of the ancient wizard.

  But it was so quiet. Such a tiny voice screaming in the darkness of everlasting space. An ant crying at the heavens. And he had to wonder, why was it so small?

  And then it hit him like a bolt from the blue. It was so small because it wasn't a complete voice. It wasn't his voice. It was instead an echo. The residue of an ancient wizard. And they had been beings not just of great power and great ambition, but also of great knowledge. They knew what others didn't. If there was an answer to be found, it would be with the ancient wizard.

  Hendrick had to make that voice louder. He had to learn what it knew. And there was only one way to do that.

  “I have to go.” Then he released the others from his spell of haste and started running. Because finally he had a destination and maybe a shred of hope. Dumas Line.

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Hendrick had never been to Dumas Line before. And he didn't know much about it. There were a lot of cities in Styrion, and it wasn't a major one. But it was easy enough to find the city at least. He just followed the road south west for fifty leagues, and there it was. Strange and impressive. It would have been more so if he wasn't almost on his hands and knees by then, gasping for air. He'd stuck to the roads and pushed his long stepping to the limit, with every stride being more than a thousand. With his haste spell strengthened as best he could. And between those two spells he'd made it to the city in only a matter of minutes. But for him he'd been running for several hours. And he just couldn't do that.

  Dumas Line wasn’t built of stone block work like Styrion Might and the Hold. Instead it was carved from limestone and built back into a cliff. And somehow it was all the more impressive for it. The cliff formed a natural buttress against any attackers, and left only one way in and out of the city. A huge stairway leading up the side of the cliff.

  From a distance it looked delicate against the immensity of the cliff it scaled. Scarcely a hair thin line. But from the bottom step, staring up to the top, it looked enormous. Each step was thirty feet wide and six feet deep, each rise perhaps eight inches. And the whole thing extended nearly a league so that it almost seemed like a stairway to the heavens themselves. Most amazing of all, on one side there was a sheer cliff face with a precipice extending thousands of feet out over his head, and on the other a sheer drop down another cliff face.

  The other thing that impressed him about it were the people on it. Surely thousands of people were walking up and down it, so many of them that they looked like two parallel trails of ants. And all of them were seemingly frozen in space because of his spell of haste.

  But Hendrick didn't have time to waste staring. He didn't even have time to collapse. He had to get to the top His family were choking to death in Styrion Hold. So he started running. Long stepping from one step to another, moving far too fast for anyone to see him, and ignoring the pain in his legs and the lack of breath in his lungs.

  At the top, even more winded by his run, he had to rest for a moment. But instead of collapsing to the ground as he wanted to, he managed to keep walking, or at least staggering past the squad of
soldiers keeping watch, and into the heart of the city. Into an entire city of carved limestone.

  The roads were made of it, the buildings too, and at the end the massive structure that he assumed was the Council Chambers. He had to admit it was quite a pretty city. The pale green limestone that had veins of orange, and little pieces of missing rock dotted through it. He thought it was stunning. But he didn't have time to stare.

  Hendrick hurried along the main street leading from the top of the stairs to the grandest building of them all, right at the back of the city, carved into the cliff behind it. He guessed that it was the Council Chambers and his destination.

  As he hurried he had to carefully weave his way around the frozen citizens in the streets, knowing that if he hit them when he was this hasted, it would hurt. But that wasn't easy when he was all but dead on his feet and the streets were crowded. Still he reached the Council Chambers quickly and sped in through the gates.