Ciarrah's Light

by Lou Hoffmann

“Undreams. That’s what I decided to call them.”

  Han smiled the tiniest of smiles. “Undreams, right. It’s a good word. You remember them?”

  “No, not really all about them, but those mist-shadows—I know there isn’t anything good about them.” He asked Han the obvious, practical question. “What should we do?”

  “Well, Thurlock’s on his way, but I don’t think we should wait. I’m going to stop him. That’s Mahros out there. Looks a lot like Thurlock, doesn’t he? I’m pretty sure he does that on purpose. Truth is he’s just about Thurlock’s opposite.”

  Han took his bow off his shoulder and nocked an arrow.

  “You’re going to shoot him?” Lucky asked, shoving his flopping hair back from his face.

  “Probably not. He’ll be able to stop my arrow.”

  “What if he doesn’t, though?”

  Han gave him a quick side-eye. “I’ll aim for his ass instead of his neck, okay? I’m really just trying to let him know he’s been seen and make him stop what he’s doing. Thurlock can handle him after that. Like I said, he’s on his way.”

  His arrow flew, and as Han had predicted, Mahros turned in their direction and flung up a hand. The arrow shattered. Mahros ran into a nearby thicket, and a moment later emerged on horseback, leaning forward in the saddle and using his staff cruelly to urge his mount to speed. The people who’d been moving about the area scattered and ran into the thick brush behind the stones, and soon Lucky lost sight of them.

  “Let’s go,” Han said, rising and stepping toward the track that would lead back down to the bottom of the ridge. But then he seemed to think again, and he stopped, leveling a serious look at Luccan. “On second thought, lad, maybe you’d better stay back here out of the way. Wait for Thurlock.”

  “No! I mean, please. I want to go with you. We’re going to try to catch him, right? Listen, I’m sorry. I know I should have told you more when I called, and I should have realized you wouldn’t be able to find me if I blocked my thoughts and—”

  “Luccan, you did fine. You saw a problem and did the best you could. And you might have been right—I think Mahros likely does have some ability to intercept thought, though I don’t think it’s likely he could have heard you at this distance, preoccupied as he was. But we don’t have time for this right now anyway. No, I’m not going to try to catch him—I’ll leave that up to Thurlock. I’m going to check out the area and try to track those others who were with him. Ask them nicely what they’re up to. But I don’t want you in harm’s way.”

  “You taught me to fight!”

  “You don’t have any armor.”

  “Han—”

  “Fine.”

  Han stripped off his mail shirt and settled it over Lucky’s frame. It was far too large, and though it wasn’t as heavy as Lucky expected, it did smell funny. Lucky pretended he didn’t notice any of that.

  “Stay close, but stay behind me, don’t look for trouble, and if I say to run, you disappear.” He stopped abruptly and then asked, “Do you remember my terms?”

  That wrung a fleeting smile from Lucky, because somehow the first time Han had told him his “terms,” as horrible as it was then, seemed now like an easy frolic. But Han’s rules were serious business, and Lucky answered soberly. “Stick close to you, if we get separated go to Thurlock’s house, and if trouble comes do what you tell me no matter what I see, hear, or feel.”

  “Exactly,” Han said. “I still care just as much now as I did then, Luccan. My terms apply until Thurlock arrives. If you’re with him, he’s in charge. Meanwhile, let’s stay safe. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Lucky said. He felt compelled to add, in case he didn’t have a chance later, “And Uncle Han, I care too, and I’m sorry I made you angry earlier.”

  “Accepted, lad. But not necessary. We’ve all been on edge lately. Let’s get on the way now.”

  As they hopped and slid down the steep path with its loose rocks and dry sand, Lucky asked, “Do you think Thurlock will catch him?”

  “Mahros? I don’t know,” Han said slowly. He chewed his lip for a moment, then added, “I hope so. He needs to be stopped. He’s dangerous… an exceptional wizard.”

  “Exceptional? Like Thurlock?”

  Han shook his head, but then jumped down off the last few feet of trail to the relatively level ground below before answering. “Nobody’s like Thurlock. He’s pretty old, though—about twice my age, I think—and in the last hundred years or so he seems to have become quite powerful. I’m not sure what his role is in whatever’s going on, but considering the vibes I got from his thinking the other day, the way he behaved at the council meeting, and what he was doing out here today—let’s just say he doesn’t mean well, Luccan. So if he happens to show up somewhere, stay out of his way, okay?”

  Lucky watched Han take a brief moment to commune with Simarrohn before mounting up. He could have sworn he saw the look in her eyes change, as if she’d come to understand something she hadn’t known before. And then Han vaulted sideways and somehow—quite smoothly—ended up correctly seated on her bare back. Sim sidestepped and pranced as if she wanted to take off immediately, but Han coaxed her close to Zefrehl and she steadied.

  Lucky swung up into Zef’s saddle smoothly, but without nearly the dashing aplomb with which Han had mounted Sim.

  “Ready?” Han asked.

  Lucky got his feet firmly into the stirrups and got a proper grip on the reins. “Yeah, but just a sec, Han, I’ve been wondering about your leg. How’d you get better so fast?”

  Han nodded. “Good question. I’m not sure exactly, but… you remember the dragon, right?”

  “You mean you?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, I don’t know how, but that’s when it healed.”

  “Doesn’t it even hurt?”

  “A little. Still mending the muscle, I guess. Not enough to slow me down.”

  If Han gave Sim any kind of physical signal, Lucky didn’t know it. Sim quickly and smoothly moved from a standstill to a fast canter. Zefrehl lagged at first, but she caught up easily, and their pace put a lot of ground behind them in a matter of minutes. Farther out in the fields, Lucky felt his mount’s gait change, adjusting to the uneven ground, but it didn’t seem to slow the horses down any.

  A loop of the nameless stream cut across the valley floor, and just before they got to it Han called back over his shoulder. “They’ll jump the stream. Be ready.”

  Lucky shifted in the saddle at the right time, just as he’d been taught by the Stable Master’s sons during his stay at Morrow’s magical farm. But if he’d been at all nervous about the jump, he shouldn’t have been. Zefrehl moved smoothly through it in a wide, arcing leap that nearly felt like K’ormahk’s flight without the wingbeats. Lucky wanted to smile—did for a moment. Zefrehl’s great-grandsire was none other than Windrunner, whom Lucky had come to know and love as Windy, and he hoped the old horse knew he could be proud of her.

  But then they arrived at the place where Mahros had been working in darkness, and before he even dismounted, Lucky caught a cold draft coming off the opaque, seething mist-shadows, and it froze the joy right out of him.

  The horses stamped and went a little white-eyed, close to the unnatural shadows, and Han handed Lucky Sim’s lead. “Take the horses back behind that screen of willows, over there,” he said, pointing. “There’s a little pond there, I think, and some grass. I’ve told Sim to stay put and take care of Zef, so they should be all right with a little distance between them and this… evil stuff.”

  After he did as Han asked, giving each horse a few reassuring pats before leaving them, he came back and joined Han, who was treading a slow half circle around the small forest of tall stones, which backed against a low, strangely round hummock. The mist-shadows had been anchored in crevices and cracks all around and within the collection of huge stones, and Han seemed to be trying to find an angle that would allow him to peer inside or around them.

  Lucky forced himself to look at the shado
ws, but the more he gazed at them, the more nausea threatened.

  Motion caught Lucky’s eye, and he heard a buzzing sound like… “Han, lots of flies over here, and something dark red….”

  Lucky immediately started in the direction of his find, and Han’s call telling him to wait came too late. He couldn’t unsee what he’d already seen half-hidden in tall grass, though he wished with all his heart that he could. And yes, by the time Han caught up to him, he had already stepped to the side and puked up his breakfast.

  “I’m getting so tired of throwing up, Han.”

  “I’m getting tired of you throwing up too, lad.”

  “What?”

  “Just a stupid joke, Luccan. Seriously, don’t worry so much about things you can’t help. Are you all right, now?”

  For a moment Han’s eyes went distant—the way they did when he was listening to something in his mind—then he said, “Thurlock’s close. Hopefully he’ll know what to make of this. I’m going to have a closer look, but there’s no need for you to do the same. Four dead bodies with more blood outside than in is bound to be an unpleasant thing to study.”

  Lucky thought, Especially when they’re children, but he swallowed his horror. “I have to grow up sometime, Han,” he said, and then he followed carefully in his uncle’s footsteps as he went to examine the bodies and the scene.

  Four children had been shackled and manacled, and then chained to stakes in the field. Each one had a length of plastic tubing Lucky recognized from Earth as medical. Here, though, instead of having medicine being fed through the tubing, it looked like their blood had been slowly siphoned off. They hadn’t been completely bled, though.

  Something interrupted them before they were done.

  Like Han’s arrow… and Mahros’s panic. All of them had been hit with something so violent it crushed their skulls. And Han had said Mahros was “an exceptional wizard.”

  With a grim frown, Han bent to examine each small body, looking for the faint trace of life, but Lucky knew he’d find none. Even without the crushed skulls, he would have recognized the presence of death the same way he recognized the remnants of a dreadful magic quickly withdrawn. He didn’t see it or feel it, exactly; he just knew it was there. Desperately, he wanted to be able to look away, or maybe run away. But another part of him—the Suth Chiell whose cardinal name was Mannatha—needed to see more, needed to understand as much as he could. So he called up the Sight.

  With that heightened, altered vision, little changed about the bodies except for the presence of small, occasional flashes of electric blue over and around them, which were rapidly decreasing in strength and frequency. But a little way back from the slaughtered children, in a place where the grass had been crushed flat, the ground oozed smoke—thick, serpentlike cords of violet, magenta, blue, and black. The substance—or it’s remnants—seemed related to, but not exactly like, the nearby mist-shadows, which weren’t diminishing at all. Part of his mind asked to stop the Sight now, and it made sense, because he’d Seen all there was to See, but he’d become stuck in the Sight like a wheel in a rut.

  Thurlock, who must have arrived while Lucky’s attention was on the Sight, spoke from just behind him. “Luccan, I surmise you’re Seeing this dreadful magic. It’s familiar to you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lucky said, his voice so calm that it seemed foreign to him. “I’ve seen it before.”

  “In the undreams?”

  “Yes. And in the battles the Echo showed me.”

  “Ah, of course,” Thurlock said, but when he continued, he spoke in what Lucky thought of as his wizard voice—different in timbre and tone and effect. “Let the Sight go, now, Luccan. You’ve learned what you needed to know from it. Save your strength.”

  Lucky responded immediately to the gentle magical prod that came with the wizard’s words, and with great relief he closed his eyes and released the Sight.

  “You’ve been standing there staring at the ground for quite some time,” Thurlock said.

  “I didn’t know.” Lucky turned away from the place now, and it was a relief to do so even though in ordinary vision it only looked like a patch of ground with the grass trampled flat. “I think I was like, hypnotized. Colors were twisting around in the air.” He waved a hand to indicate haphazard motion. “Not exactly lights, but not like the mist-shadows, either.” He started to step away but failed to pick his foot up high enough and stumbled.

  Thurlock might have been expecting it. He caught Lucky’s arm.

  Lucky turned his head to meet the wizard’s eyes as Thurlock helped him walk away. “They were disgusting, Thurlock. The colors—almost as bad as the blood and bodies. They made me think of rotten things, and the smell in Isa’s tower when Mahl was there. Sick. But I couldn’t look away….”

  “Shush, now. You don’t have to see it anymore. Come and sit for a few minutes. We can talk while the others continue checking out the area.”

  Again, Thurlock’s voice carried power, and Luccan’s mind cleared, though a certain sadness like grief lingered, and his body remained exhausted.

  Once they’d found a place in the shade of a solitary sehldar some ten yards or so away, Lucky sat cross-legged on the soft mat of needles and breathed in the tangy, cleansing scent of the foliage. Thurlock carefully lowered himself to sit beside him, and quickly produced a snack-sized Hershey’s chocolate bar, a Twinkie, and a Ding Dong from the pocket of his robe.

  “Take the chocolate and choose one of the others,” he said. “They’ll help, I’m sure.”

  They sat and munched and then shared a bottle of raspberry Snapple to wash down the sweets. Thurlock had been right, as usual. The chocolate didn’t help a lot, but it was only a single bite. The Twinkie, on the other hand, had been just what Lucky needed to restore some energy and shed the crawly feeling he’d gotten from all he’d seen—and all he’d Seen. Thurlock remained quiet for a few minutes, only mumbling a word to magically remove the trash, and during that time Lucky reflected on how it was that Hostess snack cakes could help in such a situation. Of course he knew sugar was quick energy, but he wasn’t sure if the benefit was from that or because they felt normal—ludicrously so, considering where he was. He couldn’t deny that’s how he felt, though; packaged cakes and candy bars said “normal” to him, loud and clear.

  “So,” Thurlock said. “Better?”

  “Lots.”

  “Good. As you know, I don’t have the Sight. I can see that magic has been here, and I can sense its malicious nature, but that’s all. You told me that you Saw some sort of undulating colors, that they made you sick. Did you sense anything else about it? And I presume you also looked at the bodies of those poor children with your Sight—can you… are you okay to describe what you Saw there too?”

  Lucky did, starting with a mention of the diminishing flashes of light around the bodies and ending with his ideas about the place where the colors had hung over the crushed grass. “Something had been there—like installed there—where I saw all that magic oozing up from the ground, but it was gone before I Looked. The bad colors—I don’t know how colors can be bad, but—anyway, that was like… residue.”

  “Did you get any sort of feel for what it may have been? Have you seen or felt anything like it—perhaps something in those undreams of yours? Or something the Terrathian creature showed you?”

  Lucky didn’t want to think about those undreams, didn’t want to consider the tragic world the Echo had shown him, so he shook his head in denial before giving Thurlock’s question any honest thought. But in the corner of his eye he caught a slow pulse of golden light emanating from Thurlock’s staff, which leaned against the wizard’s shoulder. Thurlock was slowly, not quite absentmindedly, turning the staff sunwise, and it seemed to Lucky that the light he generated shaped the question, aimed it, and sent it probing deeper into his mind.

  Lucky pushed his troublesome hair out of his eyes, relaxed his eyes, and let himself see what Thurlock’s light revealed, which he had hidden from hi
s conscious mind. He discovered a different answer to the wizard’s question.

  “Yes,” he said, surprise turning the word into a whisper. He cleared his throat and started again. “Yes, I have seen, or maybe felt the same thing before. The children—not the ones in the cave, but the ones in my undream. The ones dying in hospital beds my mother—or whatever she is—showed me. And I glimpsed the same place, the same… procedure again when I was with the Echo. The energy I Saw today—I thought of it as colors but maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, it did remind me of that. I remembered it vaguely before, but now I see it clear. A laboratory, or something like that, and machines, and I felt a… a force….” Lucky went very quiet, concentrating all his brainpower to try to come up with the right words for an answer, but all he got for his efforts was a frightening question.

  “Thurlock, if life wasn’t life, what would it be?”

  No answer came at all, and Thurlock’s silence was sobering.

  After a time Thurlock let the lights from his staff diminish and cease, and at last Lucky’s mind came fully back to the present. He looked around in some confusion.

  “Thurlock, where’s Han?”

  “While you were occupied, he and the other soldiers I brought at his request left to search the area, looking for the people you saw here with Mahros—curse that wizard for a black heart—and for anyone or anything else that might help us dig to the bottom of these troubles so we can keep ourselves—our country, our world—safe.” His voice fell to a quiet hum. “Let’s hope they succeed, Luccan. For the truth is, I’m floundering as it is.”

  Thurlock said those words with such a lack of inflection that it took a moment for their meaning to sink into Lucky’s brain. It was a long moment later when he gasped, alarmed, because they were the scariest words he’d ever heard.

  “But,” Thurlock said a few seconds later, his entire countenance brightening, “let’s put one foot in front of the other on the path before us, shall we? We’re bound to get wherever we’re going.” He stood, and reached down a hand, inviting Lucky to accept his help up from the ground.