“It’s true that I was just a body to be kicked around.” He clapped the bard’s shoulder again. “Thank you, Randler. You’ve given me a new focus. I truly needed it.”
“I’m happy to oblige.” He smiled, tipping his mug in homage.
“Now,” Gabrion said, sobering quickly. “You’ve given me this task to carry out and all the while, you said that I would be going, not we. What are your plans?”
Randler’s face flushed, caught off guard. “Very astute, Gabrion. You’ve really grown on this journey.” He cleared his throat and answered, “I intend to go after Dariak.”
“I’m not surprised, but how? Those mages will destroy you if you go back there.”
“It’s a risk, I know,” he admitted. “Yet, Frast and I have a plan in mind that may work. We know the mages have been irrational in some of their dealings. However, when faced with new knowledge, they stop, learn what they can, and then discard what they no longer need. I spent a good bit of time in the library there and the history that precedes them echoes these practices.”
Gabrion considered for a moment, then gasped. “You’re going to offer Frast as a hostage, exchanging his knowledge of spells with Dariak’s life!”
“Not quite, though we did think of that,” he teased. “But Gabrion, you need to put us out of your mind right now. You have to focus yourself on Mira and you have to find her. Until then, you won’t be able to reconcile a new tomorrow. You will always be stuck in yesterday. Now is your chance to find her. Don’t make her wait any longer.”
The warrior stood up without a word, and Randler was momentarily perplexed, thinking Gabrion would run off at once. Instead, he walked over to Randler and hoisted him up onto his feet before wrapping his massive arms around the bard. “Thank you, Randler. I know you’re worried about your own plan, having avoided telling me about it. Just promise me that you’ll be safe.”
Randler returned the embrace and nodded. “You too, Gabrion. You too.”
* * *
Gabrion walked around Marritosh, feeling resolute with his new direction. The sun shone brightly overhead and his mind was clear once again. He was no longer the moping, lost warrior with no purpose. He hadn’t realized how draining his time in Magehaven had been until this moment of clarity, with his goal lay bare at his feet.
Many of the warriors that had come with him from Kallisor were already awake, stretching or sparring quietly so as not to disturb the rest of the people. Gabrion was amazed by how well his fighters were accepted into this place. However, it was a warrior’s town and the children were all raised to be as strong as possible so they could one day become members of the king’s guard. The people understood fighting, and having so many able-bodied battlers among them must have felt like a giant homecoming of their kin.
Indeed, Gabrion was slapped on the back so many times he grew numb to the sting. The residents themselves welcomed him with smiles and friendly nods, seeing that he and his crew were not a threat, but merely warriors needing a respite. It was the only place other than Savvron that felt even remotely like home.
After wending his way through the streets, Gabrion sought out Ervinor, who had taken up residence at the home of one of the town’s elders. Gabrion knocked on the wooden door and was admitted by an older woman, whose apron depicted a sword cutting a prize choice of meat.
“A good morning, deary. Yes, we were waiting for you. Your friend is out in the back, if you’ll go on through there.” She pointed the way across a lavishly decorated main room, which housed all sorts of trinkets the elder had collected during her husband’s tenure with the king’s guard. Gabrion couldn’t help but stop to admire the collections of goblets on one wall, arranged by size rather than by the importance of the deed for which he had obtained it. A collection of bronze coins had been crafted in the man’s honor and were housed in a glass-covered case to keep them from dust, and to reduce the desire to spend them. Of course they weren’t proper currency, but in a quick transaction a careless merchant might accept them.
The far wall, which led toward the rear yard, was an oddly undulating surface of shiny metal slats. As he walked closer to it, the sunlight beamed through an upper window and reflected off the wall, casting myriad rainbow shapes on the floor. It was as dazzling as it was beautiful. As he stepped closer to the shifting wall, he realized that they were, in fact, weapons. Each long sword and spear was highly polished and they were hanging from the ceiling close together. To keep them from clanging into each other, they were spaced into four receding rows, but he could only see that from up close. Also, the bottommost blade along each strand was secured to the floor with a slightly loose rope that would allow only a little movement; just enough to give the shimmering effect from across the way.
“Each one,” the elder’s wife narrated at Gabrion’s prolonged pause, “was given to Herchig at the end of a successful battle. Not all of them have shed blood, but each represents a time when he would have died without it. Come now, son, you may look at this later.”
He allowed himself to be ushered from the room and into the backyard, which was one of the few in town that was enclosed with a fence. Gabrion had never seen a wood fence this tall surrounding a house such as this. His ogling eyes were noticed.
“Built it myself, I did,” said a gruff old man, who sat in a rocking chair on a wooden deck. A small table rested by his hand with the remnants of his morning meal. Beside him sat Ervinor, a welcome smile on his face.
“Greetings, Gabrion,” the young commander said, rising to greet his companion. “It has been too many days, indeed.”
“I agree. It has been some while. How do you fare?”
Old Herchig slammed his tankard on the table. “Close your mouths and sit a spell. There’s time later for you two to yammer on about the time you’ve had apart. It’s only been a week or two anyway. Not like it’s years or as if you’d never reconnect. No, not like the time I was off to the battle at Sarrithon, leaving poor Nesseria here with the little ones. Frian was almost old enough to go off for advanced training and, after the mishap with Sheina before him, I knew she wouldn’t want to deal with it on her own. And it didn’t help that the sandorpions were going wild because a mage had lost his wits and was sending them every which way. Blasted thing nearly took off my hand. Lucky it only got half a finger instead. Why if I hadn’t been missing my Nesseria so much then, I might not have charged that mage to kill him. I might not have been wounded that day; I might have all my digits, but then again, the fight might have gone another way entirely. But as I was saying, no sir, you weren’t facing things like that when you two parted, from all I’ve heard, so sit a minute and stop your blabbering.”
It took everything Gabrion had not to start laughing at the windy tale and he could see that Ervinor was having the same kind of struggle, though he’d clearly had more practice. The warrior took the offered seat and readied himself for a long morning.
“Now your friend here,” Herchig started right away, jerking his thumb toward Ervinor, “said you’ve brought this army here for a couple of reasons, but I have to tell you that you’ve got to focus on just one goal or else you’ll be wandering all over the place. See, it happened once to General Therrus back when I was a trainee. He wanted to squash an uprising at the border, but he also wanted to plunder one of the northern caves. He didn’t have a true goal in mind, so while he was planning to tackle one task he was dividing himself without knowing it and trying to plan the other excursion. No, if you’re off to fight, you can’t think about the loot. And if you’re off to loot, you’re just a damned fool anyway, but if that’s what you’re into you have to go for it and not stop to defend the kingdom on the way. It’s the same here with you.”
Gabrion nodded. “It’s true that we have been focused on too many things at once. It’s—”
“That’s a good lad, fessing up to your elders and admitting your mistakes. But I have to warn you,” Herchig said, aiming a gnarled finger at Gabrion’s eye, “that you have
to keep yourself in check with how much you admit you’re wrong. Why if you don’t, you’ll end up like jolly Jonifer. He was promoted before his time and he made sure everyone knew he wasn’t ready for the task, so he kept apologizing for things left and right, blaming his ignorance or what have you. Thing is, when you’re in a fight and you need a leader, you can’t have your leader send you off and say they’re sorry if they’re doing wrong by sending you that way, but hopefully it all works out right for you. No sir, you can’t be all apologetic all the time. Sometimes you have to decide and let your errors be things only you know.”
Ervinor couldn’t resist. “Whatever happened to Jonifer?”
“Oh he took quite a beating from his fellows and their families, he did. They dressed him up in lurid clothes, apologizing all the while for not being able to find him something more suitable. Then they tied to him to a pole ‘accidentally.’ And kept throwing sticks, punches, and stones over his head, but they kept missing at missing him. Oh they rightly pummeled the poor thing, and every time they made contact they said they were sorry for actually hitting him. They stopped before they outright killed him and he lost himself that day. Never picked up another weapon again, I heard. Had to find himself a woman who was willing to cut his meat for him; he wouldn’t even pick up a knife. On the up side, his indecision led him into entertainment and he became a bit of a slapstick performer for a while. True, some days people would throw things at him for his show, but at least he wasn’t tied up anymore. Quick runner, if I recall.”
Gabrion’s mind was already reeling. He had already forgotten why he had come.
Herchig didn’t seem to need the warrior’s input anyway. “So you’ve got yourself an army here, and I’ve seen them in training and they’re a far better set of fighters than the ones I first traveled with. No, we were more likely to spear ourselves in the back with a missed thrust than by the enemy. But yours is a good, coordinated team, and Ervinor here has done a great job of setting up responsibilities among them. Sure, a man follows orders for a time, but when he’s working toward something, then he really gets the job done. It’s why my father freed his father’s slaves when I was a boy and grandpaps died. He offered them all a piece of the land they had worked on all their lives, offering them to live there if they kicked back some of what they produced. All but one of them stayed on to live in freedom because it was something of their own to work for.”
“And the one that didn’t stay?” Ervinor prompted, sliding a humorous glance at Gabrion who was starting to squirm with all the long-winded responses.
“Fool couldn’t recognize a good opportunity. Found himself another farm to work at and was enslaved without knowing it. Yep, he went in, offered to do some work for some food. That’s all a slave really does anyway, right? But when he got tired of it, which wasn’t long, out came the whips and then the chains. He didn’t live much longer after that. He’d dug himself a grave and pulled the dirt in on his own head. They only found him because his chains went into the ground. At first they thought he had just run off, but he didn’t turn up anywhere nearby, so they finally did some digging and were horrified by what they found.”
Gabrion slammed his eyes shut at the thought and wondered how he could focus this conversation a bit more.
But he had paused for too long. “Right, so this lad here,” he reached out toward Ervinor again, “did a right smart thing and made captains and such among the men. Why, in fact, he did such a wonderful job of it, most of the folks here decided he was a better commander than the king’s commander, and that’s not a light thing to say. Why back in the day, the king’s commander was a position to be feared above all else, and if you spoke ill of it, you were drawn and quartered. Ever see a man drawn and quartered? No? You’re lucky. It’s not an image you ever forget.” He paused briefly to shudder. “Today’s commander, though, has been focusing on hunting errands for the past few years now and the cohesion of the king’s guard has crumbled. Why, if Ervinor here took over the king’s guard, he’d fix it right up, I’d say.”
“Hunting errands?” Gabrion interjected. “Don’t you mean invasions into Kallisor?”
Herchig shrugged and sipped his drink again. “Call it what you will, but one man’s plunder is another man’s hunt is another man’s duly assigned task. The king has been sending his guard out across the land in search of a precious treasure, more precious than any other treasure, so it’s said. Sure at first it was just something for them to do to keep limber but then it didn’t stop until a year ago. Since then we’ve been sending fighters to the border to keep the Kallisorians on their side. Now that gets rather boring after a while and a man needs variety in his life.” He looked over his shoulder and smiled, “Except in a woman like Nesseria. No, that’s not something you mess with, I’ll say. Why, I remember the time I was late for meeting her and not only did I hear about it, so did the whole western quadrant! Passing through there every day, all I heard were jeers and cheers, urging me to be on time and not to keep the lady waiting!” He laughed to himself for a moment.
Gabrion grumbled. “They wouldn’t need to be guarding the border if they hadn’t invaded my town in the first place and kicked up this war.”
“Bah, both sides start the wars each time. It’s never one over the other, not really. Why it’s like a game of cards. There’s a deck just sitting there and one guy picks it up and shuffles it, but whatever he does with the cards doesn’t mean anything until the next guy sits down and joins in. They wager, they gamble, they win or lose and in the end someone goes home unhappy with his night. Sometimes he turns around and knifes the guy who was at the other side of the table.” He lifted his tunic, exposing a deep scar over a wrinkled belly. “Lucky I had some good reflexes, even when I was drunk, or I wouldn’t be here today, I’d wager. But our kingdoms go to war if someone sneezes too loudly.”
“Well, it has to stop,” Gabrion said.
“Right, right, of course it does. Then you have to wonder what all the fighters will do once there’s no more fighting to keep them in shape. Maybe they could start up games of skill and such and just compete that way. Hmm, now there’s an idea…” He paused for a moment, but then prattled on. “Your friend here told me of your rescue mission, though, and I think it’s noble of you to want to ride in and save her if she’s still there, but it’s just another big sneeze, if you ask me. It’s only going to lead to more trouble for the Kallisorians at the border already fighting. And more trouble for them means more trouble for us and that means more of our children are dying.”
“That’s why I need to confront the king, so he can try to right the wrong peacefully and without creating more war. Then he can go back to hunting for his treasure and leave my homeland in peace.” Gabrion looked at Ervinor, who nodded his head in support.
“You’re a noble lad there, son, and you remind me of young Gethric. He had great lofty ideas in his heart and he would go around to all the houses trying to collect supplies to help the people in need. He would have been great if not for the thief, Kelsh, who merely grabbed him and slit his throat for all the things he had gathered. I always wondered what the world would have been like if Kelsh hadn’t made that strike. Would this world be more wholesome or would another Kelsh have risen and done the deed anyway? Or would Gethric have been overwhelmed by the poverty in this world and succumbed to it? Or maybe, maybe, what if he had succeeded in getting his message across? Where would he be today?”
“Hopefully, he would have succeeded the king,” Gabrion offered. “A peaceful regent with an eye toward altruism would be the best way of turning our countries away from war.”
“Indeed, that is quite the fantasy you have there in your head. Not as wild as the ones my little Leeda once fancied, but that’s a tale for another day. Yet let us say that a kindly king sat upon the throne, what then of the neighboring tyrant? He would crush us surely as glass and there would be blood. Endless blood.”
“There already is endless blood. And if this Gethric
could have overcome the odds within the land, then why not within other lands as well?”
“Well…” And for the first time, Herchig fell completely silent without a story to tie in.
Gabrion took the opportunity. “Ervinor, I intend for us to visit the castle, as a united force. There, I will ask for Mira’s return and the king will have to listen to us. He will have to surrender her.”
“The men will be excited with the prospect of moving on. They will have to be ready for resistance, though. The king may not quite welcome us with open arms.”
Herchig laughed at that. “No, he certainly will not, especially when he sees that the rest of Marritosh is on your side! It has been a long time now that someone has spoken of peace. Of change. It’s many years since I ever believed in the chance to make a difference. I grew up here in Marritosh and raised like any good crop, like all the other children born or sent here. Here we break many of our family ties and reconnect them to the king and the kingdom itself. For a long time, we have been the well from which the king has drawn the water drops that are his troops. Upon hearing you now and your hope for a different tomorrow, I feel you’re just like that one man so long ago whose vision changed this land forever.”
Gabrion bit his lip. “One man with a vision of peace…”
“You’ll know all about him, of course. And you’ll know about him because his work ended in the most paradoxical way. He was the man who summoned the colossus at the last major war.”
“Delminor!” Gabrion gasped, then realized he should have known.
“You know his name! I am most impressed. Yes, that man opened many eyes wide, but greed can often be more powerful still. And though I hope you can do right in your quest, I fear it too that you may fall to greed. If you reach your peaceful agreement with his majesty, will you then seek to cast him out and replace him, or would you walk away? In the moment you may not react the way you expect. Circumstances may forbid you from doing what you think right now you’d do. I know not how your books unfold the story of the war, but I was one who knew Delminor in his prime. His heart was pure and true and strong, and he was powerful indeed, but like Gethric, the deeds of others defeated him in the end. You may be striking out on this quest, young warrior, but be wary that your odds of success are minimal, and your odds of survival are infinitesimal.”
The Shattered Shards Page 27