Devan Chronicles Series: Books 1-3

by Mark E. Cooper

  Assassins! What else could they be? Lucius had been plagued by them last year, and there had been that pair of street thieves in East Town not too long ago. The attack upon Julia had puzzled him at the time. Everyone knew who she was and that she was a sorceress. Only a fool would attack a mage, yet both men had died trying to do just that. Julia had been very upset by their deaths. She hated killing. Keverin looked hastily around for something that could explain what he had here. All around was chaos. Men were dying, horses too, but Keverin breathed easier when he realised that his men had the upper hand. That changed when he saw Julia crawling upon the road. She was hurt!

  The assassin saw her at almost the same moment.

  “No!” Keverin raged and ran for the man, but he couldn’t reach him in time. “Julia!” he screamed in despair.

  Alvin whipped his head around at the anguished scream and saw The Lady on the ground with a brigand bearing down on her. “Yah!” he shouted and booted his horse into a desperate gallop.

  * * *

  Julia fumbled at her girdled waist and presented her dagger in a shaking hand. Her vision doubled and tripled then came back to normal with the brigand much closer. Keverin was safe, was the thought that skittered through her mind as the man jumped down from his horse to kill her.

  Julia swiped the knife at him, but he smacked her hand aside and raised his sword. Alvin raced toward her like a dream. He cast his shield aside as he bore down on her murderer. He thundered toward her, but Julia knew it was too late. The brigand’s sword was already on its way down. The world slowed and narrowed to that glinting blade coming for her. She watched it descend as if mesmerised.

  Alvin arrived and the brigand’s head leapt free of his body. Blood fountained into the air and the body fell aside. Julia watched the wide-eyed face tumbling upward in an arc to fall moments later. The sound of it hitting the cobbles was horrible. A sort of squishy hollow sound she would never forget. Her gorge rose as the eyes rolled looking at her, but then they stilled in death. Alvin thundered by with his sword still following through. Time returned to normal and with it the screams of the wounded and dying. Julia’s senses reeled and she collapsed back to the road.

  “Julia?” Keverin said. “Julia! Wake up, you have to stay awake!”

  “Tired,” she protested.

  “Stay awake! Your head is broken. You have to stay awake my love. Don’t leave me!”

  “Never,” Julia said and forced her eyes open as Alvin rushed to do something to her head. She winced as he dabbed at the blood and pressed gently.

  “Thank the God!” Alvin said in relief. “Her head is whole m’lord! She has a nasty bump the size of an egg but that’s all.”

  “But she can hardly keep her eyes focused on me,” Keverin said worriedly.

  Julia tried to sit up but she didn’t have the energy. She was so tired of fighting, when would they let her rest?

  “She was knocked senseless I reckon m’lord,” Udall said from somewhere nearby. Julia couldn’t see him. All she saw was Keverin’s worried eyes.

  “She will be all right, m’lord.”

  “Don’t worry so much…” Julia said and blackness swallowed her.

  * * *

  2 ~ Shaman

  Shelim rode at an easy pace. In reality, he lay asleep, but knowing this didn’t help. He had yet to find a way of controlling his dreams. He would keep trying, he had no choice. He patted Nyx on her muscled neck and breathed deeply, but his smile turned to a frown when he smelled smoke on the breeze. He turned in the saddle looking for the source. The day was brilliant and the air clear. The sky was the colour of his mother’s eyes, sapphire blue and beautiful. No sign of smoke up there, nor cloud either. He twisted around. Behind him, his trail stretched into the distance, but again there was no sign of fire. A dream… did dream smoke on the wind mean anything, and if it did, what did it portend? Shelim turned to Kerrion to ask him and gasped in horror. His mentor was shrivelled and wizened beyond belief. Kerrion was old, everyone knew it, but this was ridiculous! He must be a hundred at least! Kerrion turned to him and Shelim gasped again. Half his mentor’s face was a ruin of burned and suppurating flesh, while the other was as he had always been.

  Shelim recognised this Kerrion. His thoughts flashed back to his manhood ceremony, almost a year ago now. He had drunk Tancred along with the others and had dreamed so strongly he flew to Deva. There, in a huge stone tent he found Kerrion injured and attended by the outclan woman. Kerrion was injured in battle, or would be. He frowned. A shaman never joined battle or went raiding.

  “What happened?”

  Kerrion smiled at him fondly. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Of course I worry!” Shelim snapped. “This is the future… is it not?” he said suddenly unsure.

  “One of many.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will in time,” Kerrion said turning to look behind him.

  Shelim looked back and saw two distinct trails in the grass. “Teach me, Mentor.”

  “The future is slippery, my boy. I told you once that I could divine with the aid of the drug. You don’t need it. Both are true, but what you must realise is that the future is not fixed. We don’t go through life following a trail laid down for us by the God.”

  “But… how can we know what will happen?” Shelim said in confusion. “What then is divining?”

  “Good, Shelim. You are thinking,” Kerrion said in approval. “Divining shows us what may happen.”

  “Only what may?”

  “Only that, my boy. Of course one of the many futures will happen and then it will be called the past. We can look backward much easier than forward.”

  “To see what happened, and learn by the doing?”

  Kerrion nodded. “By watching past mistakes, we try to void future ones.”

  “There is a way to find the most likely possibility?”

  “Yes indeed! By viewing each we weigh the possibilities hoping to find the one most likely to occur. Steering away from that one is the hardest of all. Try to imagine everyone in the clan riding with us but each in his own direction. The trails left in the grass would be confusing. The possible futures are endless, many times more confusing than those trails.”

  “How will I know?” Shelim said and Kerrion showed him.

  “Like this.”

  Shelim blinked, the plain was gone. He was riding beside an outclan woman wearing the leathers of a shaman. No woman was ever a shaman, but he looked at her without surprise. He knew her… but he had never met her. He rode on her left, while Kerrion stayed to her right.

  “…are the one Julia,” Kerrion was saying.

  “I know old man, you told me long ago,” Julia said coldly.

  His mentor had changed, Shelim saw. He was still ancient, but the terrible burns had healed. Half his face looked as if it had melted. The hollow eye socket was a horror.

  Where… what… when was this?

  The woman was young seeming, perhaps thirty summers. Shelim wished he could look at himself in his mirror. He was afraid of what he might see—himself at his father’s age?

  Kerrion blinked in confusion. “No… we haven’t met you yet.”

  Shelim gaped. “Kerrion?”

  “What is it my boy?”

  “How can we be here if we haven’t met yet?”

  Kerrion laughed and waggled his remaining eyebrow. “This is a dream Shelim. Ride it out and try to remember all you see. It’s important.”

  “But—”

  The outclanner interrupted. “I will decide what I will do, not you old man,” Julia said coldly.

  Shelim was shocked. Kerrion was a shaman and due proper respect. Outclanner this woman might be, but that didn’t excuse her lack of common courtesy.

  “The prophecy—”

  “Said that the End Times are coming,” Julia finished for Kerrion. “That is done with old man. I have personal business to attend.”

  “He’s dead, child,” Kerrion said k
indly. “He wouldn’t thank you for killing yourself too.”

  “I do this for myself, not him.”

  “Do what?” Shelim said in confusion.

  Julia turned toward him and Shelim gasped. Her eyes burned with rage and madness. “This,” she said and swept her arm in an arc ahead of them.

  The world changed.

  They were no longer on the plain. He didn’t know where they were, but cities had no place on the plain. It was burning, that city. Clouds of smoke billowed into the sky and the stink of burned flesh was heavy on the air. Dead horses and men lay carpeting the ground in all directions for as far as he could see. Hulking metal shapes he had no name for lay abandoned some half melted or buried. Men wearing metal shells lay dead next to others wearing ones made of leather. Black robed men lay in heaps where they had died fighting together, but worst of all, intermingled with them were clan warriors and shaman. He groaned. There were many thousands dead here, many, many thousands.

  “Why?” Shelim gasped. “Why…”

  “Why did I kill them all?” Julia asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Because I am the One, because they understand nothing but force, because there was no one else… and because I wanted to.”

  “Wanted to…” Shelim whispered sickly.

  Julia looked around with a small smile on her face. “They thought to take my people back through the gate. They were wrong wouldn’t you say?”

  Kerrion nodded sadly. “Very wrong. You warned them, but they wouldn’t listen.”

  “How can you be so calm!?” Shelim shouted.

  “Would you have me cry?” Julia sneered. “I have cried enough over this land. It is time for my enemies to weep, and they will. Oh yes, they will weep,” she chuckled madly.

  Shelim glanced worriedly at Kerrion, but his mentor was dismounting and didn’t see. He jumped down to help him with whatever he had found.

  “What is it, Mentor?”

  Kerrion was weeping silent tears from his remaining eye. “Don’t come any closer, Shelim.”

  “What… who is it?” Shelim said and bent to look. He had to know. On the ground was a… a thing that had once been a man. Its chest was a gaping hole and something writhed inside the shattered rib cage—maggots. It was Tomik.

  “NOOOOO!” Shelim bolted awake with the cry building in his throat. He strangled it and staggered out of the tent.

  Shelim sat cross-legged in the grass and shut his eyes trying to hold in the wail of grief that threatened to burst from him. He breathed deeply and composed himself. His father wasn’t dead… but what if? No! Tomik wouldn’t die… but his dreams were never wrong—never! Shelim rocked back and forth in agitation. He had dreamed of Nerina falling from her horse and she did. He had dreamed of Nyx before ever laying eyes on her and knew she would be his no matter that Bardan later refused to trade. He had known beyond doubt or question and so it had come to pass. He had dreamed of riding Nyx to battle. Even knowing shamen never fought in war, he believed it still. All these things he had dreamed before his manhood ceremony made him a give up the warrior’s life to become a shaman… and now he dreamed his father’s death. But wait… wait now. He hadn’t dreamed that he would be a shaman had he? He hadn’t dreamed that he would lose the life he had loved to become a despised shaman, but did that mean anything? Kerrion… the Kerrion of his dream said the future wasn’t fixed. He said a dreamer could learn what might happen and change it! What might happen! That meant what he saw was only one of many possibilities. Tomik might die… or he might not. His death in that battle was only one of many possibilities, just as Nerina’s fall had been. That she fell meant only that she had failed to heed his warning that day. Nothing more.

  “I swear by the clan you will not die, father. I swear it!”

  Shelim rose to his feet and ducked into the tent. He snagged his tunic and slipped quietly outside careful not to wake Kerrion. Denpasser was empty of people, but walking around in only his leggings felt wrong. He waited until he was outside to pull it on, the rattling of the beads might wake his mentor. Shelim watched the sun rise over the plains and thought back over the last few seasons. He had learned so many strange things, it felt as if his old warrior self had died and been reborn. He would never have guessed two summers ago he would become a shaman and be glad of it! A time of change was coming to the people, and if they did not change with it, they would disappear from the memory of the land. How fitting then that his manhood ceremony marked the beginning of the changes.

  Winter had finally given way and Denpasser looked different. The gather had ever been an exciting event to him waiting just over the horizon. Denpasser had always looked new to his eyes, but living here for so long made him yearn for a different view. The river just ahead chuckled and splashed as it always did, and the wind blew the long grass flat as it always did, and even the ruins no longer held the same fascination they once had.

  No one, not even Kerrion knew what significance Denpasser used to have, or so he said. Was the ruin a place to meet with the clans and outclan traders even thousands of years ago? Or did the ruins mean the clans once lived inside stone as the Lost did? He couldn’t believe that. Every clansman had a horror of cities, and anyway, Denpasser was the only stone tent on the plain. It was large, but never was it big enough for more than a single tribe to live in, even if they would. Shelim studied the ruin yet again trying to solve its puzzle. The hole in the wall where a door used to hang was eight yards across—easily big enough for a dozen warriors to enter walking side by side. That wasn’t the half of it though. Wide the doorway might be, but the height of it was ridiculous! The thing was taller than it was wide! Why make something without reason like that? Kerrion said that the holes in the sides were called windows, but they seemed small in comparison to the door. Inside was just as much of a puzzle. There were several dish shaped depressions in the floor. None had any use he could see. Along the sides and rear walls, there were stone benches arranged in tiers that could seat an entire tribe without crowding, but had they been used for that purpose, or something else? No one knew. Kerrion knew the history of the people better than any other, but all he would say about Denpasser was that it had been built more than ten thousand summers ago. When Shelim asked how he knew, his mentor had shooed him outside. The lesson in magic that Kerrion had given him had made him sweat so much that he forgot to ask again.

  Might he be able to dream the building of it? Shelim dismissed the puzzle as unsolvable and turned to regard the tent flap. There was no movement within. Kerrion was old. He would be a while yet in waking, but food was in order, so Shelim went to examine their dwindling stores. How he was supposed to make something tasty out of bison meat that had sat here for four seasons he didn’t know. It was still edible smoked as it was, but even bison meat became bland after eating it every day for this length of time. Shaking his head at the tough strip of meat, Shelim dropped it back onto its hook.

  “What we need is some fresh food.”

  Nyx could use some exercise. Maybe he could ride out and find a stray from the herds. There were always herds of bison on the plains. Some were huge with more than one tribe following them, others were too small to support the people. With luck, he might find one of them. With a definite plan in mind, Shelim fetched his bow and was soon riding away. This was what the people were born for, he thought as the wind blew his long hair behind him and made the beads on his tunic rattle. He urged Nyx into a full gallop. In no time she was racing over the grass so fast it was as if she was trying to take to the air and fly. Shelim’s full-throated shout echoed back to him from the empty plains announcing his joy to the land.

  It was around mid-morning when Shelim decided to turn back empty handed. Rather than retrace his route he decided to circle around. He might yet be lucky and find a stray on the way back. If not, well there was always tomorrow and he had enjoyed the ride. He knew Kerrion would want to begin today’s lesson soon, and he didn’t want to keep his mentor waiting. On the way, Sh
elim noticed some tracks that should not have been there. He dismounted to investigate but what he found made him frown in puzzlement. The grass lay crushed as if a herd or tribe had journeyed this way recently, but clan horses didn’t leave prints like this. Anyway, the people weren’t due back this way for tendays yet. Outclanners had been here, he had no doubt. Clan horses were unshod, but the prints showed a telltale pattern of iron shoes. There must have been a large group of them to tear up the land to this extent, but the tracks were old. He couldn’t tell how old with his usual accuracy—metal shoes left a deeper print. These were faint, but surely not faint enough to be more than a couple of tendays old.

  Shelim shielded his eyes to search the horizon. He had dreamed of smoke. Could there be a connection? He found the sky like his dream, both cloudless and smokeless. He had assumed the smoke was due to the burning city, but it couldn’t have been. He had smelled it before Julia appeared and showed him the burning city. He remounted Nyx and followed the tracks south until he came to the remains of a camp. He could see nothing out of the ordinary, but the absence of bison tracks and droppings nearby confirmed his thoughts. Outclanners, no question. He dismounted to investigate the remains of a camp fire, but it was old. He hesitated a moment, but decided not to follow further. Kerrion needed to hear about this. He could easily pick up the trail later if need be.

  Cantering back to Denpasser, Shelim wondered what a hundred or more outclanners were doing crossing the plains. They were running a big risk doing it in the first place, let alone doing it when the clans were on their way to the Gathering. The people did welcome outclan traders to the Gather, but at any other time they were… discouraged from venturing far onto the plain. At the last few Gathers, Shelim had noticed many of the familiar outclan faces had stayed away. That seemed strange now he thought about it. War would keep traders off the plain, but the clans lived in peace and had done so since before he was born. The tracks weren’t heading toward Denpasser in any case, but toward the south. That meant they had crossed nearly three-quarters of the plain from the north. There was no way for them to reach so far without encountering a tribe or clan of the people so they must have traded for free passage. Shelim couldn’t think of any reason for a chief to grant an outclanner such a boon, but at least one must have.