by Jon Kiln
“I appreciate your work, thinker. You don’t have to stop being afraid. You just have to do your duty anyway even when you are.”
The scholar nodded timidly, but still looked as pale as before. “The man said that he knows this appears like the chamber where the dark lord sought to do you harm, but just as you passed that test, you must now pass the test of trusting what the gods offer you here. Step inside alone, Captain.”
“Sir,” Nisero warned, “I must protest, if you are thinking of playing along. I can see the pedestal is empty from here.”
“It is good they did not ask you to trust then,” Berengar said, but he did not step forward as instructed. “Tell them that the chamber appears empty. Explain.”
The scholar spoke Berengar’s words and then translated the response. “Your enemy took the false piece thinking it was genuine.”
“How did he not know it was false? Caffrey might be dark, but he is far from stupid.”
“It was a very convincing lie. Some men wish to believe so strongly in their success that they are blind to failure.”
“If the Eye allows one to see all paths, how did Caffrey not see that he had a fake piece?”
“Eyes see outward,” the scholar translated. “Even the best eye is blind when trying to see back into itself. He says it is time for you to trust, Captain. Walk in alone and place your hand upon the pedestal.”
“Captain,” Nisero cautioned.
“Lieutenant, you have made your reservations known. I need to move forward with this quest. If this does prove to be a trap, cut down all these bearded bone carvers and then get me out.”
Nisero’s features hardened but he agreed with some reluctance. “Yes, Captain.”
Berengar turned back to the scholar. “Don’t translate that.”
“No, sir. Of course not.”
Berengar stepped in and crossed the dark chamber. He could hear his boots scratching against the grit on the floor. He looked at the walls expecting to see ports to pour in water or slots to spring fire bolts at him. He saw none, but still did not feel safe.
Berengar stopped in front of the pedestal, standing tall and without fear.
The man spoke behind him and the scholar translated. “Place your hand on top.”
“I heard him the first time,” Berengar said.
There were not finger marks or indentions. He had half expected to find an imprint that perfectly fit the shape of his hand, but it was smooth stone.
Berengar locked his hand over the top. There was no blinding light or release of power. After a moment of silence, the Captain exhaled.
The man spoke again and the scholar repeated in their language. “He says it is a false top. Just lift it off.”
Berengar did as asked and lifted the square top off the hollow interior of the pedestal.
He looked down inside and saw a crystalline sparkle. Berengar expected the object to shoot into his face plunging him into eternal darkness, leaving Nisero to finish the bearded men and the mission.
Nothing happened.
The scholar translated. “Take what was meant for you since ancient days, Captain Berengar.”
Berengar reached in and lifted out the heavy item. It was smooth like glass. When he hoisted it up, he saw it was a quarter of a circle and just large enough to fit in the grip of his hand. The crystalline wedge looked like a quartered cut of a green eye with the black center on the point of the wedge. Yellow and black swirls weaved through the green ring of the Eye as if he were staring impossibly close to someone’s pupil.
It was a magnificent piece, but hardly seemed magical at all.
Berengar opened his mouth to speak, but then was plunged through the green of the Eye even as he felt his feet still planted on the chamber floor. He tried to open his own eyes to see the chamber wall, but he saw past the room and past the temples across the world like a bird looking down in flight for prey. When he did allow himself to see the world below him in the vision, the ground splintered and he was looking at thousands of worlds splitting further and further off from each other.
He was tumbling down through the broken worlds faster than his mind could process the images even as he told himself that they could not be real. He could still feel his feet planted on the floor of the chamber no matter what he thought he was seeing.
Nisero cried out in alarm. “Captain!”
Berengar heard it as if from a great distance and then he saw thousands of Niseros following as many different paths.
All of them ended in painful bloody deaths.
Chapter 9: What Blindspots Reveal
The darkest paths were the heaviest and pulled on Berengar’s free mind as it drifted through the vision. He had no way of knowing if this was the case with everyone that touched the Eye, but in his case, the thickest paths with the greatest gravity were shrouded in shadow.
He saw himself aboard a ship trying to rescue Belsh. He turned to see where he was and when he was, but ended up staring down a branch of a path where he stood over the boy’s body with a bolt in his skull.
He turned away entirely.
The Captain found himself in a desert, but he was traveling in a caravan with no one he knew. The landscape looked familiar. He had visited few arid lands, so he could not imagine where he thought he knew it from. The feet of the strangers in the vision with him sped up to impossible rates leaving dark tracks across the wasteland. They split off ahead of him in multiple versions of themselves. Along most of the branches, he saw blood in the sand.
Berengar turned away again.
He tried to find his way back to the valley and back into the high temple to return to his own body. He could feel the smooth surface of the corner of the Eye gripped in one fist and the stone top to the pedestal in the other hand. He felt his toes move inside his boots on the chamber floor, but he could not seem to force himself back into that moment.
As he circled back, he found himself lost along another path that led to the capital. He tried to find the King, but there was a dark spot over the palace that prevented him from seeing.
“Is the King dead?” Berengar’s words echoed back to him from a thousand voices that were all his. In some, he was screaming the words in rage and sorrow. In others, he spoke them quietly. In a few, he actually sounded pleased.
He looked for Arianne and his grandson in their apartment, but he kept getting lost as the configurations of the streets kept shifting into shapes he did not recognize. In some places, he found himself wading through ankle deep blood with swords clashing around him. In others, he was covered in flowers and laurels and the citizens cheered on all sides as he passed.
He had more and more trouble seeing as he found himself along a path shaded from the sun and growing darker. The path felt thin under his feet and ready to snap, but the farther he traveled along it, the thicker it grew. Soon, he could not seem to pull himself free at all.
He found the palace finally. It was still very dark, but not blind to him along this path. He stared at his own lined face with the crown upon his head.
“This is not meant to be,” Berengar whispered.
The weary face of King Berengar raised his eyes to stare directly at Captain Berengar invading his throne room. The King spoke in his own gravelly voice. “No man is meant to look upon himself too closely, no matter what the philosophers might say.”
Captain Berengar tried to back away from this version of himself, but the weight of the scene pulled him forward deeper into the palace. Berengar found himself now staring at his son Hallen wearing the crown.
“This is not possible,” Berengar whispered in echoes. “You are dead.”
The palace splintered and Berengar watched the young king fall to the blade along some paths while narrowly escaping on others. As the young king grew old, there were fewer and fewer paths growing thinner as they went.
The gravity weakened and Berengar felt himself pulling away.
“Hallen? How?”
“Not Hallen,” an older version of this
king responded. “Drethallen.”
As Berengar fell away from the vision, he realized that his grandson would grow up looking remarkably like Berengar’s son in his youth, and like Berengar in his old age.
The Captain backed up to a moment with a blood soaked crown in his hands. Nisero raised his sword to Berengar’s throat and the Lieutenant spat with venom. “This cannot be allowed to stand.”
Berengar heard the bloody version of himself with the crown return the challenge. “You are not the man to be Captain, much less to slay a king.”
Nisero’s blade cut and Berengar choked.
He stumbled away from his own death.
Berengar said in a thousand voices with as many different emotions from different paths, “I’ve seen enough.”
He tumbled free and found himself back in his own body, at last staring at the chamber wall. Nisero’s hand rested on Berengar’s shoulder near his throat. Berengar stumbled away, dropping the lid to the pedestal. It struck the floor and shattered into dozens of fragments and powder.
Berengar stared down at the broken pieces on the floor thinking about different worlds.
Nisero reached out tentatively toward the Captain. “Sit down, sir. If you are dizzy, you shouldn’t try to stand.”
“Not allowed to stand?” Berengar shook his head and dropped the piece of the Eye to the floor with a clunk. It did not break. The Captain muttered, “I’m not trying to become king.”
Nisero blinked in confusion. He looked toward the teardrop shaped door of the chamber at the scholar, who looked worried.
The man spoke outside and the scholar translated. “We told you not to go in. The first vision is always disorienting.”
Nisero placed his hand reassuringly on Berengar’s shoulder. “What did you see?”
Berengar cleared his throat and rubbed under his chin. “Nothing useful. Get me a cloth and some bag I can carry this in. I don’t want to hold it with my bare hand and no one else needs to touch it.”
Belsh stepped in and removed his own cloak and a satchel strapped to his side. Berengar accepted the offering.
Berengar knelt and used the cloak to pick up the piece without touching it directly. He used the cloth to wrap it over in several layers. Even with the additional material between him and the green corner of the Eye, he could still feel it humming with power in his hands.
He tried to convince himself that it was just the numbness and tingling in his fingers and he was imagining the rest. The vision could have been from some alchemist’s powder on the Artifact. Some men went down dark avenues in cities to indulge in such things. It was possible. Either way, he had no intention of contacting the stuff again.
He slipped the bundle into the satchel and started to hand it back to Belsh. The boy reached for it, but Berengar hesitated. He drew the satchel back and clutched it to his chest.
“Ask them,” Berengar called through the chamber doorway. “Can we leave the fragment here? If Caffrey missed it before, could they not hide it from him still? Is it not safer from his evil right where it was?”
The scholar relayed the message and the response. “It is meant for you, Captain. This is your destiny. Your enemy’s defeat is found in this.”
“Destiny is what we choose for ourselves,” Berengar said. “If the Eye shows all possible paths, it shows them that we might be able to choose one.”
“Perhaps,” the scholar translated. “But there are times when the path chooses you. This path is for you to walk and the fact that you came here to take the Corner of the Eye speaks of the path you are already on. If you had any chance of leaving this behind, it was long before you entered this temple.”
Berengar sighed and shouldered the satchel. “Where did my enemy go next?”
“His path is dark to us since he took possession of the Blue Corner just as yours is to us now that you hold the Green Corner. We have faith in your way as we did the great king before you.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Don’t translate that. Let’s go before the men below think we have been eaten.”
The four made their way from the chamber and the strange priests led them back to the ladder. Staring down from the height, Berengar thought about his visions of flight above all the possible worlds. He swooned a bit and looked away. They climbed back down with the ladder swinging under them the entire way.
The scholar bent down and held his knees once they reached the ground again. “I hope the next piece is on the ground.”
“I was hoping you could tell me where the next piece is,” Berengar said.
“We can try to look through the materials we have, but it may take a while. Finding this temple was but a vague notion. We were hoping there would be some clue found here.”
“You can go up and talk with the priests again.”
“We’ll consult the texts, sir.” The scholar quickly walked away.
The ladder and rope retracted slowly, leaving the King’s men on the ground.
Stoleck approached. “Are you well, Captain?”
“I’m fine. See about finding us a place to camp near one of the lakes. I don’t know how long we will be here.”
***
Berengar checked in with the scholars over the next few days. After that, he sent Nisero to see to the progress. The strange priests descended and eventually directed the people of the valley to resupply the Captain’s caravan, but otherwise the native people kept their distance.
Berengar called on the scholar to translate during the visits. He questioned the priests about their order and any documents they might be able to share. They were forthcoming with their own texts that the scholars found interesting, but not useful in locating the possible location of the third or fourth fragment.
Captain Berengar sent a pair of Guardsmen back to the capital to report their success and current search.
“Perhaps we should return ourselves,” Nisero proposed. “The King might be pleased to have a piece of the Great Artifact, especially if it keeps it from Caffrey and holds power itself as you seemed to have experienced.”
“That’s not our mission,” Berengar disagreed. “And I am not yet convinced that the power of this Eye is benign.”
“We would not want to unleash it upon the King in that event,” Nisero said, looking out across the lake.
“I’m not sure it is meant to be experienced by any man, good or evil. We need to find Caffrey to strip him of his fragment or find the others before him, if he does not yet possess the other three-fourths of the Great Artifact.”
“The priests of the valley and cliff kept the Green Corner from Caffrey. Maybe the guardians of the next two fragments were also successful.”
Berengar shook his head and let his hand rest upon the satchel near where he sat. “I find it difficult to believe that Caffrey mistook a replica for the real thing no matter how good it might be. It seems unlike him to fall for so simple a deception.”
“We foiled him once.”
“We were lucky and he escaped to begin his search for the Great Artifact. I hardly claim that as a victory nor mark Caffrey as defeated no matter how greatly it might vex him that we did not fall to his plans.”
“Understood, Captain.”
“We might have to advance on the southern border if we do not find a better option sooner. Maybe if we get word out that we have a Corner of the Eye, he will come to us to try to take it.”
“It is more his style to set a trap or to send others to waylay us, I think. I fear we might not be quite up to facing all the forces on the southern border at our current troop strength.”
“Probably not,” Berengar accepted, “but being outnumbered has never slowed you or I before.”
“Perhaps we are a bad influence on one another. Arianne has been saying as much for years.”
“Maybe we should bring my daughter along. We recaptured an entire kingdom with her and she was with child.”
“I do not like how she looks at me when she thinks I’m doing so
mething stupid.”
“I dealt with more years of that from her and from her mother before her,” Berengar said. “Maybe we should give the scholars more time to continue their own search.”
“You could use the Eye to try to see which path leads us to the next fragment,” Nisero suggested quietly.
Berengar closed his fist over the satchel. “The Artifact is blind to the other pieces of itself and those that hold them.”
“Maybe you could look for the place where the object is blind and we will know that is where we need to go,” Nisero said hopefully.
Berengar stared at the ground under his hand. “That feels like a dangerous game.”
“Are you afraid, Captain?”
Berengar thought about holding a crown in his bloody fists as Lieutenant Nisero sliced his throat. He wondered how far away and how heavy that path was in its pull.
“I’ll need you to watch for me, if I’m going to let the Eye carry me away again.”
“Yes, sir. You can depend on me.”
Berengar looked at Nisero and his sheathed sword. He sighed and unbuckled the satchel. Berengar pulled forth the bundle of Belsh’s cloak. He had not seen the boy that day and wondered what he was up to in the Valley of the Tear Drops. If he wanted, Berengar could see everywhere the boy might go and all the ways he might fall.
He did not feel the hum of power from it, but he felt little comfort in that. The Captain unwrapped it carefully and stared into the swirl of bright and dark lines twisting through the translucent surface of the wedge. He wondered if those lines represented the power of all eyes to see what might be.
“A close eye, please, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir.”
Berengar rested his hand upon the Corner of the Eye and his mind raced out of his body and across the sparkling surface of the lake, even as he still felt the grass under him. He spiraled around the valley and landed in one of the cottages on the other side of the inland sea.
Belsh was with a girl. He was with her or would be with her or might possibly be with her along the right combination of choices. Berengar was not sure which. He saw the girl slap him at the same time that another version of the couple kissed.