by Welcome Cole
“She was a Blood Caeyl mage,” Beam said from behind her, “The first, in fact. Prave told me she was still alive in our timescape. After a fashion, anyway. I still don’t know what he meant.”
With those words, she felt a tremor that seized her to the core. She suddenly understood: Beam didn’t know why she was here with him. He was unaware of her purpose. He understood his own role perfectly, but her arrival was a mystery to him.
She turned back to the sarcophagus and listened to the voice murmuring in her head. She knew that she herself was Prave’s final gift to him, to Beam. She was the balance to the dark, corrupting blood pulsing through his veins. Beam was an unholy blend of all that was good in this world and all that sought to violate such goodness. Beam was the aez’cael and fou’cael, the water and fire.
She felt the memories awakening within her, and she didn’t fight them. She understood her purpose now as clearly as she understood how to breathe. She was here to purify him.
Prave had designed it exactly this way. Beam was a wild card, a powerful sword blade whose edge could cut either way if mismanaged. He’d kept Beam purposefully ignorant. Maybe he worried Beam would lose his focus, or that his fatalistic nature would compromise him at the moment of truth. Maybe he knew Beam would need a savior in the end, someone to rescue him from the darkness lurking in his heart, someone to cleanse his blood of the vile influence of Goelvar.
She sensed Beam moving behind her. She turned to look at him. He stood with his hands gripping the feet of the new crystal sarcophagus, the coffin of the Father. His eyes had once again descended into darkness as he gazed at the face on the coffin. He closed his eyes, and just like that, Koonta knew he was done with her.
“Your friend’s coming,” he said without looking at her, “He’ll be here soon.”
“My friend? Who do you mean?”
“Use your sight,” he said tersely.
She was about to challenge that when the image forced itself into her mind like some unnatural form of taer-cael. It was Mawby. He was running through the forest toward a burned out house. He was following their trail to the mountain’s bosom where the cave lay hidden.
“You need to rest now,” Beam said, his voice softer but no less commanding, “He’ll need your help when he gets here. You’ll have to let him through the wall.”
“The wall? You mean the entrance to the cave?”
“Yes.”
“How do I open it?”
“How do you walk?”
She watched him slip to his knees before the sarcophagus, assuming the same position of reverence and despair he’d been in when she found him here. And though he said nothing, she knew she was dismissed. He had something more important to attend to. He had to atone.
Still, she despaired leaving him here by himself. She wanted to kneel beside him and hold him as he struggled with his grief and fear. But even as she thought it, she knew she could never help him, not with that. This was a burden he had to carry on his own.
So instead, she offered him a simple, “By your leave, sir.”
Then she walked out of the sacred crypt, leaving him to fend his demons alone.
XXIX
THE QUESTION OF FAITH
MAWBY PITCHED A FINAL SHOVELFUL OF DIRT ONTO THE MASS GRAVE AND CALLED IT GOOD.
He didn’t bother to pat the mound down or place a marker, or even say a few words. He merely stabbed the shovel into the loose dirt and walked away.
He hated burying the fetid remains of the warriors’ corpses under the dirt like so much shit, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t risk the smoke a pyre would create even if he had the time to build and tend one. Anyway, it would’ve been little more than posturing, ceremony for tradition’s sake only. They were hacks, for gods’ sakes. The true owners of those bodies left this world long before their mortal organs stopped functioning. What good would ceremony do them now?
The truth of it was they were lucky to have gotten the attention he’d shown them. It’d been hours before dawn and dark as a crypt when he followed the trail past the burned out house. It was only by a stroke of luck he’d found the shovel resting in the grass beside a chimney brush a few yards from what had probably been the front door.
It didn’t matter. He needed to stop wasting time thinking on it. He turned away and brushed his hands against his breeches as he walked. Halfway across the yard, he stopped before the remains of the wyrlaerd. The mudsteel was twisted and warped like the crispy remains of a toad that’d been run over by a wagon wheel and left to dry in the desert sun. He remembered it from that fatal night, from when they’d tracked the rogue and mage our of here. The sight brought him the first satisfaction he’d felt in days.
He crossed the charred meadow to the strange stone chair at the head of the path where the Watcher’s pony was tethered. The path fled down to the forest proper from here. He couldn’t possibly ride the animal down so steep and erratic a slope. In fact, he’d been on foot since entering the forest several miles back, leading his weary horse in hopes of keeping it alive another day, and he was tottering on exhaustion for it. He hadn’t slept since leaving the company two nights before last. His fatigue was deep and unrelenting, like molten lead weighting down his muscles and dulling his thoughts. He’d planned to hunker down here for a few hours at the remains of Chance’s house when he found the corpses.
If the remains of his kin and the smell of rot they moldered under weren’t vile enough, the stale burn of the long dead fire still suffocated the air here. Even if he could somehow manage to bear the reek, the memories of death and possession still haunted this place even if the ghosts of the dead didn’t. Though not overly superstitious, he’d still be too vexed to get any sleep. The place gave him the creeps. He couldn’t find the will to loiter here overlong.
He began his way down the steep slope, leading the skittish horse to the forest floor where the smells of earth and life would hopefully cleanse his head and nose. He had no idea how far the rogue’s trail would take him, but he had a hunch it wouldn’t be much farther.
Thankfully, their trail had been no challenge to follow. The rogue was pushing his own horse far harder than Mawby had the Watcher’s pony. He’d driven his horse like a slaver, forcing it beyond the ability of any mortal beast. There were no signs he’d stopped anywhere to camp or even rest up for more than a couple hours at a time. He didn’t know how any beast could endure so grueling a run, especially while bearing the weight of two people. He wondered if it were the white caeyl. Maybe he was healing the animal with the strange light even as he ran.
But the piece he was least able to chew was the absolute lack of effort by the Parhronii to hide his trail. In the early days, back when they’d been tracking him for the Blood Caeyl, he’d been like a ghost. He could slip away undetected at the least likely times and places. It was maddening how he’d managed to evade the finest trackers in all of Vaen. Now it was more like he wanted to be followed.
Then again, maybe that was his plan, plain and simple. Maybe this man, this half-breed, this goddamned rogue really was the Father. And if he was indeed their hope and salvation? If he was the holy light at the end of the tunnel that had been Lamys te’Faht? Where in the Nine was he going? And why’d Koo run after him? And why’d he come back for her?
Questions without answers. It was maddening as hell. Yet, he knew that in the end it didn’t matter. If the rogue truly was the Father, Koonta couldn’t be in safer hands anywhere on Calevia.
And if he wasn’t, if the Eyes had been led astray, if he was nothing more than the soulless brute he’d first appeared to be? Well, then this long miserable ride was going to lead to a reckoning.
∞
Mawby led the horse through the scrubby undergrowth. He was more than a little happy to finally leave the white ferns behind him. They seemed to run on forever, their fronds as orderly and tightly woven as waves on a lake. The world beneath them, however, was pure chaos.
He’d stumbled more times durin
g today’s journey than he’d done in his entire life. The land beneath the fronds was a battlefield of hazards, and falling through the surface of that floral sea was no less unnerving than slipping into a swamp. Earlier he’d tripped over something thick and scaly, but it’d crawled away too quickly to identify. Another time his foot met something firm and fleshy that had scurried away in a dozen different directions.
The hazards presented by the forest had slowed his progress to a crawl. The Watcher’s horse had been on edge the entire trip, shrieking and bolting at what it couldn’t see beneath the white waves. More than once, he’d damned near lost the animal to its panic. It’d gotten so bad that he’d seriously considered just letting the damned thing go and moving ahead on foot. But there was no way to guess how far the rogue’s trail would take him and he didn’t want to risk losing time by walking when he could be riding, assuming he’d ever be able to ride safely again.
He climbed the last of the mountain, following the rogue’s trail ever higher through the diminishing forest and up across the growing boulder fields until he reached the summit’s peak and a wide clearing. This bare rock tightly trailed the edge of a breathtaking cliff. He stepped up to the edge, shaded his eyes against the blistering sun, and surveyed the view.
Beyond this cliff spread the vast emerald expanse of the southern forest. Snaking its way through those dense trees a few miles below him was the western stretch of the Boiling River. If he’d followed this same ridge back a half dozen miles east, he’d come to the cliff line where Chance’s sentries once sat in studious silence as they watched for the impending plague.
Mawby felt a dour pang of guilt at that memory. It was his people who’d borne that plague, and he’d willfully assisted in the disabling of those same sentries. He had willfully helped to blind the one man who could help them end it. It was a most disheartening thought.
The rogue’s path followed the ridge in the opposite direction, to the west. The route was a narrow stretch of flat rock face variously ranging thirty to a hundred feet wide, bordered on his left by the steep drop and on his right by a steadily growing wall of mountain. This rocky ledge was a colorless muddle of browns and grays, essentially devoid of vegetation except for the occasional scrub pines that seemed to find purchase in the barest hints of cracks in the rock.
He followed that path until late afternoon when he spotted a shocking splash of green swelling up from the rocks a good ways ahead of him. From this distance, it looked like a royal garden filling the ledge like a roadblock, and it seemed as out of place at this altitude and here in this rocky desolation as a grin on a toad.
He carefully dismounted, then dropped to the dusty stone for a listen. It took several minutes of fighting through his fatigue to finally hear the taer-cael, but there it was nonetheless. A horse lurked up ahead, likely hidden behind that odd shrub line. It wasn’t moving, but he heard the distant vibrations of the animal’s hooves shifting against the stone. There didn’t appear to be anyone with it.
He hobbled his own horse in the shade of the mountainside, then proceeded toward that green oasis on foot. As he grew nearer, he realized the hedge was even larger and sturdier than he’d originally thought. It was a respectably dense wall of scrubby trees adorned at their base with enthusiastic bushes. This oasis ran from the mountain’s base all the way out to the edge of the cliff itself. He figured the foliage must be thirty feet high and fifty feet deep, nearly a little forest of its own.
He crept carefully up to the edge. Many of the bushes were beggarberry shrubs. The green berries were weeks past their prime, still edible but not particularly enticing. Most were already beginning to shrivel as they dried to seed. As he stealthed along the edge of this thicket, he noticed why it grew so enthusiastically here in the midst of this rocky waste. The shrubs were planted in a series of wide, concentric rings of perfectly unnatural trenches. These trees and shrubs were intentionally planted here a long time ago, probably centuries, in deep, wide beds carved from the rock floor itself.
At the southern side of the thicket, directly before the edge of the ridge, he found a break. He peered carefully around the leafy edges and into what was clearly a passage. The interior was silent. The walls of the shrubs formed a natural courtyard like an emerald semi-circle cupped against the mountain. It was empty, save for a solitary horse.
He walked tentatively through the pass, sword at the ready.
The horse stolen by the rogue stood just at the rocky foot of the mountain. It was tethered to the branch of a tall, gnarly evergreen that grew from another unnatural hole in the stone. There was no sign of the rogue or Koonta, and no evidence of a camp. He wondered if maybe they were off foraging. Or maybe they’d just abandoned the horse and made their way on foot. Judging by the manure piles and the trampled grass around it, he figured the horse had been here some time.
As he studied the earth around the horse, he counted through his options. He could try to track them to wherever the hell they’d gone without their mount, not an easy task given the lack of soil on the rock face, though their taer-cael should be easy to detect through the mountain’s rocky matrix. That was assuming they remained anywhere in the vicinity, an unlikely prospect at best.
Or he could simply hunker down here and wait it out. He was leaning toward the second option when he spied the tracks.
The faint outline of long dried mud footprints marched straight up to the mountain’s face and... disappeared. The pace of the tracks suggested the owner had walked straight through the stone.
He stepped back and scratched his head. His first impulse was to deny it as so much bullshit. Then he remembered Chance’s sanctuary back in the plains. Their tracks had mirrored this very event. If this cliff wall was like that earlier one, the truth was as undeniable as it was unbelievable: they truly had marched straight through the stone.
He stood there for several beats, just looking at the wall. There had to be a mechanism to open it somewhere. A portal, like a sentry, that would serve as an access point for gaining entry. Yet, the wall here was smooth and unblemished. He was about to begin searching through the surrounding foliage when everything changed.
The wall shimmered as if it were covered in water.
Mawby backed away from it.
The stone quickly changed. It grew almost, but not quite, transparent. For a heartbeat he thought he could see the ghostly image of someone standing on the other side of it. Then the muddied surface simply washed sidelong into the mountain itself like someone throwing open the curtains to the morning sun, and before he could draw a breath, the cave appeared.
His heart pounded so hard he worried it was going to make a break for it without him. A shadowy figure hovered back in the shadows just inside the cave. He adjusted his sweaty grip on his sword and tried to breathe.
“Are you going to come in? Or do you plan to simply stand there admiring the view?”
Before he could react, the mysterious form walked toward him. It was a woman.
She paused just inside the cave’s entrance, her face still hidden in shadows. She was thin and svelte, and she wore a suit of blue leather that looked more ceremonial than functional. Her long, pale hair flowed unfettered over her shoulders. She looked about as unlikely to be standing in that cave entrance as a mule at a ball.
“Stop gaping, Maw, it’s just me.”
Mawby nearly swallowed his tongue. It took him a beat to process what he was seeing. He took a tentative step closer. “Koo?”
The woman walked toward him. As the sun washed over her face, he felt an opposing rush of joy and despair. It was his beloved Koonta, and the relief he felt nearly threw him to his knees. But she didn’t look at all well. Her face was drawn and ashen, her eyes hollow and dark. He found the sight of her abuse nearly unbearable.
He dropped his sword as they rushed into each other. Mawby swallowed her up into his arms. As he held her, he tried to speak her name, to tell her how much he loved her, to pour his relief into her ears. But his vo
ice only mutinied into sobs, and all he could do was hold her.
“It’s all right, Maw,” she whispered.
He couldn’t respond to her. He couldn’t release her. He couldn’t even breathe. And he realized in that moment that he’d never held any hope of finding her alive.
“It’s all right, Maw. Everything’s going to be fine.”
In time she pushed herself away.
Mawby reluctantly yielded to her wishes. He hastily smeared the wet from his cheeks, saying as steadily as he could manage, “I’m sorry. I’ve… I’ve been so—”
“I know.” She laid a hand on his forearm.
“I couldn’t lose you, too. Not after Pa’ana and… and Maeryc.”
“I know.”
“You look good.”
“You’re a bad liar.”
“So I’ve heard.” Mawby surprised himself by laughing at that.
“I’m a sorry sight,” Koonta said too carefully, “I look ready to meet Skaelyx at the Gate of the Ninth Hell.”
Mawby laughed and swiped his cheek on his sleeve. “Well, not quite that bad,” he said, clearing his throat, “Not quite.”
Koonta laughed. “Thanks.”
They stood there for a moment, looking at each other as the breeze rustled through the trees and beggarberry shrubs surrounding them. Seeing her face glowing in the sunlight, he finally felt a semblance of peace. The rage, the terror, the resentment, all the miseries that’d been screaming him deaf these past days, had fallen abruptly silent.
He retrieved his sword from the dirt and slipped it back into its scabbard. Then he nodded off toward the dark opening in the rock. “Is he in there?”
A shadow seemed to pass over her. She half glanced back at the cave entrance. When she looked at him again, she simply nodded.