The WorldMight

by Cyril L. C. Bussiere

  Then his assailants broke the rhythm of their offensive. The man on his right jumped toward him, his rods coiled above his head, while the other lunged toward his left flank. The prince dropped his weight down and propelled himself parallel to the ground under the man jumping at him. He slid underneath his assailant and gutted him open from sternum to pubic bone. The men crashed into one another as the prince rolled back to his feet. His back a throbbing mess of embedded glass ,he stepped over them and before the other man had a chance to detangle himself from his gutted companion, he cut his throat open.

  “One more,” the voice blankly stated. “By the platform.”

  The prince dashed forward, weaving his way around the steel machines that stood between him and the alleyway.

  The last of his assailants appeared as he rounded the large machine with the width-long rollers on its ends. The man was dressed identically to the other three. A black scabbard hung from his belt and with both hands he held a small metal contraption with a long rod sticking out of it. At the prince’s sight, the man raised the device and the world compressed onto itself and shimmered. The device jerked and arrow heads exploded out of it in bursts of fire. Reality rippled into green flames around the prince and the Night surged inside of him. Confusion threatened to overtake him, but the stone at his neck flashed a green face in his mind. The sight steadied him. It froze the world of flames that had just erupted in front of him and suppressed the Night, somehow hushing it out of being.

  “Not now,” bellowed the mind beyond his mind.

  The prince did not slow down. He did not try to avoid the shaft-less arrows that rushed through space toward him. He ran straight at them, raised his sword, and his mind pulling onto the world, he dispersed them in one stroke.

  The man dropped his metal casing and unsheathed his sword.

  “Demon!” he shrieked and he threw himself against the prince.

  They met in the center of the plaza hurling their blades at each other, dancing the death dance in the middle of a frozen green ocean. The man smashed his blade against the prince’s and teeth bared in a twisted rictus, more rabid dog than man, he ullulated in rhythm with his blows.

  For a short spell they moved like a deadly tide, rising and retreating ceaselessly among the green flames of the world. Then, the prince picked up on the rhythm of the exchange, and when the man came at him with a low swipe aimed at his left side, he lowered his sword and stepped back. He let the tip of the man’s blade pass less than an inch away from his mid-section before raising his own sword behind it. He pushed the blade of his assailant down in the direction of its own momentum, forcing his opponent to rotate more than he had anticipated. The man lost his balance. Fear shone sharply in his eyes and his shriek died in his throat. The prince brought his sword up, over the man’s blade and plunged it into his throat. A crimson bubble formed at his lips and he collapsed heavily to the ground.

  As soon as he did, the world shimmered and lost its emerald coat. The pressure in the prince’s head instantly resided and the Night surged forward more voracious than it ever had. The prince reeled under the shock and dropped to his knees. He fought to contain the panic that menaced to spread over him like wildfire. He forced calmness onto himself and struggled to raise his familiar wall against it.

  “Get away from me, my black dogs,” he urged.

  The Night tore at him savagely like a starving beast feasting upon an unlikely kill.

  “Get away from me, my black dogs!” he ordered, over and over again.

  The sun beating on him, he sat amidst trash, surrounded by the dead, oblivious to all but the agony inside and his efforts not to succumb to it.

  An hour went by, then two. The sun continued its uncaring course across the sky. The shadows around the plaza slowly danced around the abandoned machines as if they were trying to avoid the sun’s glare by hiding behind them. Nothing moved but for the infrequent wind-swept papers and cardboards clumsily bouncing the length of the plaza.

  The sun had passed over him and was starting its decent toward the horizon when the prince slumped to the side. He did not seem to react to his sudden change in posture. His body oscillated hesitantly for an instant, slowly tilting further and further to the right. For a long second he stood suspended at an awkward angle and then he collapsed to the ground. He did not react to the fall either. He bounced like a rag-doll on the corpse of his last opponent and came to rest on the ground with his arms unnaturally bent. Then, he simply lay on his side unmoving, the back of his shirt a crusty thick mess of congealed blood.

  Shadows elongated and thinned. The world grew gray, then dark.

  When the prince came to, the moon was high in the night sky. Bright, it welcomed him back to a hushed world of ashen tones. He slowly rolled on his back and let the cool feeling of the night wash over him. The moon light was dizzying in its pale omnipresence.

  “Too close, that was too close,” he thought.

  His struggle against the Night had exhausted him. He had no idea how long he had been out: a day, at least, maybe much longer. Slowly, as he re-centered himself, the events that had precipitated the Night so avidly against him came back. He brought a shaky hand to his chest and grabbed the stone at his neck.

  “Thank you,” he whispered to it.

  His back started throbbing; the pain, diffuse at first, sharpened with every passing second. He waited an instant and then let out a grunt between clenched teeth and pushed himself to his feet. His sword lay on the ground a few feet away from him. He walked to it, picked it up and sheathed it delicately, promising to clean the blood from it as soon as he came by a body of water.

  “My pack…”

  He vaguely recollected leaving it next to one of the machines. He ventured around, moving stiffly in its search. He found it where he had left it, picked it up and, carrying by hand, he headed for the alleyway from which his last assailant had come.

  On the other side of the buildings a low fence ran as far as the eyes could see. He managed to climb it, and soon after he found a path that weaved east toward a wooded area. He slowly followed it and half a click later, he was walking amongst trees and the sounds of birds chirping in the night. He drifted along the trail for a bit until he spotted a light between the tightly packed trees to his left.

  He hesitated for a moment, wondering if there could be more of his assailants. He quickly responded to that in the negative and his tired mind argued that he needed to rest. Plus a fire sounded otherworldly.

  He left the path and made his way through the undergrowth, swatting low branches out of his way and maneuvering his pack around bushes and trees as he went.

  The fire was a small thing, set up in the middle of an equally small clearing. An old man was bent over the fire. He sat on a patch of grass and held a forked-stick with a can lodged between its teeth. He was meticulously swaying the can back and forth over the fire. The prince walked into the clearing, and the old man turned his head toward him.

  “Hi there, friend! Care for some warmth?” he greeted him.

  The prince dropped his backpack on the ground and sat as close as he could to the fire. The old man looked at him briefly in the light of the small flames.

  “Had a hard day, huh?”

  The prince nodded.

  “They come, they go, son. We still here.”

  The old man pulled his can off the fire. He carefully mixed the content with a dirty spoon. Then he proceeded to eat in silence, blowing hard on his spoon before gulping down his food and the prince was glad to sit silently in the warmth of the fire.

  Once the man was done, he leaned back. His dark features were an arresting mask of weariness and peace in the unpredictable light of the fire. He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offered one to the new-comer. The prince shook his head and the old man brought one of the white, lissome stick to his cracked lips and lit it with a twig from the fire.

  “You been on the road a long time, huh?” he asked between p
uffs.

  “Yes,” the prince answered.

  The fire felt great on his face and if he did not move the pain in his back was almost a faraway presence. He would be healed in a day or two, but until then he would have to do with the pain. Right then, he did not feel like talking. He was exhausted but also knew he would not be able to sleep for a while. Lolling by the fire in silence was all he wanted.

  “Where you headin’ to?”

  The prince started to shrug. He winced and cursed under his breath.

  “You hurting, I can see,” the old man continued, “body and soul, like they say.”

  He sat up and studied the prince’s face for a long moment.

  “Huh,” he half-grunted, half-belched. “I tell you what, son, the word…”

  The prince instantly snapped to attention.

  “…the word is pain.”

  The old man hung his head, as if about to nod, but instead took a long, slow drag from his cigarette.

  “The word is pain,” he repeated, peering at the prince through the rising smoke.

  “His word is not the one I am looking for,” the prince thought.

  The old man’s graying hair fell in grape-like patches across his forehead. He raised a shaky hand and slowly moved it aside. The cigarette trailed orange in front of his face and flashed long and deep wrinkles. He exhaled without a sound and looked down at his feet where he had dropped the empty can. His stare held there for a few seconds and then his age-yellowed eyes dawned onto the prince once again, dark and deep.

  “Pain’s the most intimate lover a man can ever know,” he said.

  He was looking beyond the prince now, lost in some distant memory.

  “Pain’s the one, true teacher. The one that teaches you all.”

  He paused and then added:

  “Trust me. I know.”

  Another flash from his cigarette echoed his words.

  ‘I know’: a truth, a promise.

  He shook his head and raised a hand up toward some unknown skies.

  “It’ll show you it all, son. It shown me so much. Pain’s God’s flashlight. And that light shows you naked to you’self; if not to nobody else.”

  His hand brought the smoke back to his furrowed lips.

  “Pain shown me how much I could love; it shown me how much I could hate.”

  He paused for a beat and made eye contact with the prince.

  “It shown me how much I could take.”

  He rocked surreptitiously now, following the rhythm of his own voice.

  “I loved a lot, you know, a lot over the years. I hated too, I ain’t proud of it I’d say. But I did too, so it should be said.”

  The prince looked at him, a faint smile on his lips. He felt a kinship with the old man, companion of a night. The old man went on, telling the prince about his daughter, his everything as he called her, about his fall from grace, his losing her; his losing everything. He told him about the dark nights and darker days, about the abuses from friends and strangers alike, about the good moments by fires on roadsides, about the random encounters that made him feel like it was all worth something, that he just did not know it quite yet.

  He talked for a long time, the words taking a life of their own as they drew tableaus after tableaus in the prince’s mind. He would stop now and then to add some wood to their dying fire or to light another cigarette. The prince listened, drifting in and out of the story as the old man’s words triggered distant memories of his very own.

  The night had just started blanching when the old man flicked his cigarette butt into the fire and exhaled, slow and long, a column of smoke toward the fire.

  “So, that’s me, son,” he said. “What’s your story?”

  The prince looked up at the old man, flames from the fire still dancing before his eyes. He blinked at him a few times.

  “My story,” he said slowly.

  “What is my story?”

  He tried to recollect some of it. It was hard. There was his love; his love and the word. The word would save his love. That he knew. That was clear in his mind. The rest however was a vague collection of fragments: His old Master, no face, no name, only his teachings and a feeling of comfort and strength. His home town, bright and joyful, with good people he could not place, though he felt he should have been able to. The royal family, not more than shadowy figures in his mind, good people as well… probably. The ancient beast that held his love, still asleep somewhere in a faraway land. His travels, unfruitful and irrelevant, almost all forgotten.

  The prince forced his mind to piece together those random memories, more feelings than actual facts. And through a fog, he told the old man what he could of his story. Once he was done, the old man yawed and stretched lazily.

  “It’s quite a story, son” he told the prince.

  Afterward, they remained quiet for a long moment and the prince thought they might finally sleep. But then the old man belched and sat up. He picked up a twig from the ground and stuck it between his lips.

  “Tell you what, son,” he said, “there’s a man I know about who can help you. He’s a psychic, the real deal. He sees stuff normal folks like you and me don’t. He’s known around those parts. Miracle-worker some of the old ladies in town call him.”

  A soft wind blew across the clearing and lit up the dying fire red. The old man smiled.

  “Follow the wind,” he said pointing north with his twig. “There’s a country road that’ll take you there.”

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Lahit, Cahifu.

  Year Hundred and Fifty of the New Age.

  The Wavecarver reached Cahifu late the afternoon after Cassien emerged from his cabin. The cliffs that Grimpwind had talked about appeared early in the morning and grew steadily over the course of the day until they towered breathtakingly high around them as they navigated the narrow rocky inlets that sheltered the port of Lahit.

  It was snowing lightly when they anchored and snowflakes twirled around the docks and piled up slowly on the frozen ground and the many rooftops of the city. In contrast to Gray Arlung, Lahit was a city of stone. It was nestled between the steep rock faces of the cliffs and fanned out around a twisting road, which wound up from the spread of docks where the Wavercarver berthed to the top of the cliffs.

  The smoke rising from the houses in the frigid winter air was so thick that from street level only a hazy sliver of gray, cloudy sky could be seen. It gave the city a pervasive oppressing feeling of heaviness.

  The flat rock inclines on each side of the city-port were carved with long, narrow staircases that zigzagged their way up to the cliff tops. Massive pulley systems hung over the edge of the cliffs on cords as thick as a man’s arm.

  Although., the garbs of the people of Lahit were of a different cut than what Cassien was accustomed to and their tongue was a dissonant mishmash of sounds to his ears, he was surprised to find that their features were strangely similar to those of his own people. Their skin was possibly a bit darker and their features might have been pulled toward the center of their faces slightly more than those of Alymphians. But overall, Lahitians were remarkably akin to Alymphians, especially given the vast distance that separated them.

  Cassien debarked last, after the merchants had and after the large amount of cargo was unloaded onto the docks. Grimpwind, who had been most glad to see Cassien emerge on the deck of the Wavecarver that morning, helped him find an accommodation for the night and change his coins into the local currency. He also agreed, although quite reluctantly, to meet him at his inn the next morning to assist him with making travel arrangements.

  And so, a day later, Cassien left Lahit with a caravan of merchants that was heading due east. He sat in the back of a covered wagon with a mother and her three children as they headed up the road that led out of the city.

  Beyond the cliffs, Cahifu was a flat, snow-covered country that stretched seemingly infinitely under a low sky. Cassien traveled with the merchants for a month. Their advance was slow
due to the snowy conditions, the heaviness of the load they transported and the fact that each canvas-covered wagon was pulled by a single ox.

  During that time, Cassien started learning what he could of the language of Cahifu while mostly signing awkwardly with his hands to communicate. Cahifuan was a contextual language which lacked the precision and strict rules that governed the Alymphian tongue. Most words, he soon learned, meant various different things depending on the context and adverbs and prepositions were lamost non-existent.

  The children he was with, two boys and a girl who looked to be between six and ten years of age and were named Fahuit, Talahuit and Luhila, were most enthusiastic at teaching him the words for things he pointed at. The days were long but the simple fact of traveling over land after being at sea for so long and the presence of the children, light and unburdened in all they did, brought him a simple joy he had not experienced in a long time. They parted ways in a small town named Marhuila, not three hundred miles from the coast.

  From there Cassien slowly etched his way east, from villages to towns, from caravan to caravan across a seamless country of shifting whites and muted grays. When he ran out of money, he would, as he had done back in Gray Arlung, rent his skills out to whoever would hire him or take on whatever work was available until he saved up enough coins to move on.

  As he traveled further inland, winter solidified its cold grip over the land. He sometimes found himself trapped for days at a time in a town by one of the violent snowstorms that regularly swept across the flat, barren country.

  Every evening he made a point to sit in silence for a while and inspect the flow of his thoughts and the stream of his feelings for traces of the void. But it seemed that he was rid of it for good. For, day after day, he could not find any hint of it within himself. All that sprang up from his depths was his ever-burning longing for Aria amidst random chains of memories and worries pertaining to whatever situation he was in at the time. Every night, Aria still came to him, although more reassuring and soothing than before. And upon waking he would bask in the calm radiance that her nighttime presence bequeathed upon him.