Hollow Road

by Dan Fitzgerald

  “Yes, I noticed your elbow went from broken to completely fine in, what, three days?”

  Finn stretched his arm out straight, feeling his elbow with his fingers. It did not hurt at all, and his arm had full movement. “I never knew I could do that,” he admitted. “I guess it’s the first time I’ve had to try it on a real injury.”

  Gummache smiled. “Your skills are much greater than I thought,” he said. “I trust my draught did not impede you too much in the battle with the Barrow Lord?”

  Finn gave a weak chuckle. “Not at first, though it did give me a burst of energy. I didn’t really notice anything during the battle, but by the time we had carried Carl all the way up to the road, I felt like I was drunk.”

  “I guess I can tell you now. What I gave you was no magical potion, but a potent narcotic, mixed with alcohol. I hoped it would suppress the fear response enough to get you into the battle but not slow you down until afterward.”

  “Well, it worked like a charm. And now, after my big nap, I think I’ve pretty much returned to normal. I’m willing to try to help Carl, but like I said, I don’t really know how.”

  “Neither do I, but I see no other remedy. The Barrow Lord’s bite may have a kind of life-draining effect. In theory, the deeper the bite, the worse the effect.”

  “Like some kind of poison?”

  “In practice, yes, but if I am correct, it is not a poison. The touch of some undead creatures is thought to somehow drain out the life force of any living creature that comes into contact with it. If true, it would be something beyond the physical body, which would put it outside of my realm of influence. But you...” Gummache studied Finn’s face, smiling sadly. “If you are willing to try, you might be able to transfer a bit of your life force to Carl, which might be enough to get him back on the road to recovery. As to its effects on you, I can only guess.”

  Finn stared at him, expecting him to continue, but Gummache seemed lost in thought. “And if you had to guess?”

  Gummache seemed to awaken from a reverie. “Yes, um, well, if I had to guess, by giving some of your life force to Carl, you would weaken yourself in the process. Which you would recover from, so long as you stop the transfer at the right time.”

  “And how would I know when that is?”

  Gummache turned his palms up, shrugging his shoulders. “You are the mage. I suppose you would have to go by feel. I should think the moment Carl wakes up would be a good time to stop.”

  Finn nodded, deepening his breath. “Give me a moment to prepare myself,” he said. “I need to work through it in my mind before I do anything.” Gummache patted him on the shoulder and turned to a mortar and pestle, which had dried herbs and some kind of oil in it, and began grinding in slow circles.

  Finn sat on the floor, closed his eyes, and centered his energy. He felt remarkably stable, given all that he had gone through. He moved the energy from his center, up through each of his limbs, letting it flow naturally from place to place, through his head, then back to center. He stood up slowly, adjusting his breath, then stepped to Carl’s bedside, looking down at his friend, unsure how or where to start.

  “Try the heart,” Gummache commented, stepping to the other side of the bed to observe. Finn slid his hands under Carl’s mail shirt, which left just enough room to get to Carl’s heart. Though the position was awkward, he was able to make a stable connection by laying his head on Carl’s stomach with his hands over Carl’s chest. He closed his eyes and visualized the red heat of his core flowing up through his arms to his hands, interlacing with a silvery energy, which he had often glimpsed and felt but had never known what to do with. He held the energies together with his mind, forcing them to his palms, which felt as if they were sinking into Carl’s icy chest. His head throbbed from the strain as he felt the energy trickle through, drop by drop, and when it reached a certain point it began to flow more freely, widening to a stream, then pouring out, gushing from his own heart to Carl’s, and his head began to spin, his body grew heavy, and the world grew dark around him. He floated motionless in the void, his body disintegrating like sand blown by a great wind, then his mind began to fragment, losing its shape, becoming one with the nebulous all-consuming darkness.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Carl drifted up out of the cold shadows, his eyes fluttering open, then slamming shut as the light flooded into his brain. He opened them a crack, using his eyelashes to filter out the worst of the light. After a few moments, he was able to open his eyes all the way with minimal pain. As he focused on the candles at the foot of his bed, he came to realize he was in the chapel, and Elder Gummache and Sinnie were talking in quiet tones a few feet away. He tried to raise his head but cried out with the pain of his wound, which felt as if the Ka-lar’s teeth were still embedded in his neck.

  “Carl!” Sinnie held his hand, her fingers tracing delicate lines across his face.

  “I’m fine, I’m...” He closed his eyes. “I’m not dead.”

  “No, you’re not.” Gummache’s voice was like aged honey. “Thanks to your friend Finn, who brought you back, at great peril to himself.”

  “Also, I kind of killed the Ka-lar, so you can thank me too, if you want.” Sinnie squeezed his hand. “But you definitely softened it up for me. Oh gods, I’m so glad to hear your voice, I’m so glad...” Sinnie’s voice trailed off, became one with the sizzle of the candle above his head, and the world faded to silence, and darkness, and nothingness.

  CARL LAY STILL, WIGGLING his fingers and toes but not daring more lest he awaken the searing pain of his wound. He was alive, to be sure, and had not lost movement in his limbs, and his thoughts, if foggy at times, felt like his own. But an ache in his chest, where he had suffered no wound, kept pulling him down, filling him with a sense of hollowness, of hopelessness. No amount of cajoling or mutton broth could pull him up from where he lay, for he simply had no desire to arise. He could lay there forever in that chapel, with candles burning at his head and feet. Finn, Sinnie, Massey, and Elder Gummache could come and go, and it was no more to him than birds chirping outside the window on a cold, rainy day.

  After another day he decided he’d better sit up, since he was getting sore from lying down. He did so slowly, with Sinnie’s help; she had picked up that he wasn’t interested in anyone’s talking, so she remained mercifully silent. It took Finn a while to catch on, and Carl rested his eyes whenever he heard Finn’s footsteps enter the chapel. But even that couldn’t last. As Carl grew stronger, he began sitting up all the way, even taking little walks around the walls of the chapel. He let Sinnie or Finn help at first, but really there was nothing wrong with his legs, and he recoiled from the touch of human hands. Even the paintings of the gods, which had so fascinated him as a child, had lost their luster. He saw them as only faded lines and color depicting gods who had never existed, made for the benefit of those like Gummache, who fooled everyone into believing in them, even if only halfheartedly.

  He said none of this to anyone, instead exchanging rote pleasantries as the situation dictated, playing off his lack of social graces as fatigue, or pain, and even spitting out a feeble attempt at humor from time to time, just to throw them off his scent.

  After a week, he was well enough to do just about anything he wanted. The trouble was, there wasn’t much that fit that bill. Talking was excruciating, and he began to feel caged inside the chapel, so he started taking walks outside. He skirted around the edges of the village, following the game trails, some of which were the same as they had always been, others new. He finally broke down and returned to stay at Massey’s place, though the acrid stench of Massey’s body odor and the half-rotten food he served made this challenging. But he knew he needed to eat, and to sleep, which he did with great abandon, and Massey gave him all the space he needed. They went entire days without saying more than a few words to each other, which was just fine with Carl. He resumed his sword drills, though he could not yet carry a shield due to the lingering pain from his wound. He fou
nd himself favoring the bronze sword, despite its weight; it had a satisfying downward swing which, though slower than that of his steel sword, could deliver a heavy blow, and he was a patient enough fighter to wait for his opportunities. So he practiced his swings, thrusts, and cuts, adjusting his mechanics for the new weapon, and before long he felt a desire rising within him, for the first time since he had awoken, to do something other than sleep and avoid human contact. Holding the Ka-lar sword made him feel alive, and he found himself longing to stick it in something. And for that, he was going to need to leave Brocland.

  He thought about returning to join the military, as that would give him ample opportunity to do some damage, but as little joy as he found in the village, he had even less desire to be surrounded by men with short tempers and sharp swords. He knew the fire slow-burning inside him would explode at the first opportunity, and he had no desire to meet his end in a petty quarrel with an ignorant fool on a pointless mission in some gods-forsaken place.

  And so he began to engage with Sinnie, who seemed bent on helping the Maer return to wherever it was they came from. While Carl half-wished he could wade through them with his sword like a child whacking the heads off dandelions with a stick, ridding the village of the problem altogether, he saw greater appeal in Sinnie’s idea of setting off on a great adventure to return the Maer to their ancestral whatever-it-might-be. There would be fewer voices to ignore, fewer people to avoid and a considerably greater chance of bloodletting, which he found was the one thing in all the world he could bring himself to want.

  THE NEXT DAY, HE AGREED to join Sinnie on a longer walk up into the hills. He let her do most of the talking, though the way she rambled on about the Maer was difficult to hear.

  “The head mother, her name is Grisul, Grisol, something like that.” Sinnie’s eyes lit up with excitement. “It’s hard to pronounce, but she can say my name, and Finn’s, and Gummache’s, more or less. And yours, Carl. She called you hero, or at least that’s what Gummache thinks she said.” She stopped to touch some feathery moss on a tree trunk, pulled a sprig, and twisted it between her fingers. “He’s been down there for hours at a time each day, reading and trying to talk to her. He’s got some book about Old Southish, and he says he thinks their language is related or something. It’s...” She stopped, her serious eyes fixed on Carl’s.

  “Go on,” he said. “This is important. We need to know everything we can before we go.”

  “Are you...are you sure you’re ready?” Her voice was quiet, hesitant.

  Carl closed his eyes and nodded. “I’m fine. I’m good enough anyway. This—” he rotated his left arm slowly, wincing with the pain, which diminished slightly with each day but showed little sign of disappearing altogether. “It may take time, time we don’t have, but I’ll be fine. I’m ready.”

  Sinnie kept staring at him, and he was forced to look down. “Go on,” he said, beginning to walk again along the old trail that led up toward the Hammer’s Blow, a big hill with a huge depression at the top. “What else have you learned?”

  She talked excitedly about the Maer, about the children, which she described as “adorable” and “so cute.” Some of the children were picking up words and phrases in Islish, and one of them had shown more promise than the others. Carl tuned her out after a time, his eyes soaking up the sights that once filled him with such joy. The day was warm and sunny, and the last of the summer blooms filled the meadows and rocky areas between stands of firs. They passed the Giant’s Playground, an area between two hills littered with boulders, where they had fought some of their most pitched battles as kids. It was here that Sinnie would always put an arrow in the giant’s eye to save them from being smashed to bits by the giant-hurled boulders. A faint smile came to his lips but quickly faded; these childhood memories were like a vanishing dream, half-remembered in the morning before disappearing into the mist of forgetting.

  Carl’s ears perked up when Sinnie talked about what they had learned about the route the Maer had taken to get to Brocland. Through a combination of pointing, gesturing, and Gummache pawing through old books and maps, they had communicated, more or less, and Gummache believed their route would lead around the side of Hawthorne Mountain, which appeared on the southernmost edge of the map. Grisol had drawn a fairly detailed map of the lands beyond Hawthorne Mountain, which Rolf confirmed, as he had been there prospecting several times.

  “When I was a kid,” Sinnie said, “he told me he saw a baby dragon on the other side of Hawthorne Mountain, mottled gray with little greenish splotches, coiled up tight so it looked just like a boulder, complete with lichens and everything. I never believed him, but last night he told me it was true, and that there was plenty to watch out for past Hawthorne. He called it the beginning of the South.”

  “Sounds like a real adventure, with children trailing along no less.” Though the idea of bringing the Maer children on a long journey made him want to run screaming into the hills, Carl’s heart leaped at the thought of the dangers they might face. He pictured himself rushing toward a dragon, his bronze sword held high over his head, using the full momentum of his run to drive the blade through the leathery scales and into its beastly heart. And if they did manage to find wherever the Maer came from, who was to say they would be welcomed with open arms? A band of three humans who had slain six of their warriors, three more adults, and several children, bringing back a small group of captives—it was a recipe for disaster. Carl licked his lips.

  “You know, Sinnie, I’m glad we went for this little walk. Maybe it’s the fresh air, I don’t know, but I’m feeling my strength return, and I’m eager to do something besides sit around this nowhere village.”

  Sinnie whacked him on his good arm, and he feigned a smile. “Is that any way to talk about our dear little Brocland? I rather like it here. But I have to say, it does seem a little...small, now that you mention it. And there’s a wide world out there. With so much to do and see, why stay in just one little corner of it?”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Carl said, rubbing his palm over the hilt of his sword.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sinnie frowned, picking the last bit of lamb off the chop, until it was ‘bone clean,’ as her mother liked to say. She had been puzzling all day about their travel arrangements, and there was no getting around it: they were one adult short. There were three Maer adults, two females and a male, and four children, none of them of age to ride a horse, even if they had known how. So even assuming that each of the Maer adults could be taught how to hold onto a mule and a child at the same time, that left one child unaccounted for. Finn wasn’t much of a rider, and even as a child, he’d never been fond of children. And there was no way Sinnie was letting one of the Maer children ride with Carl, the way he had been acting, even if he would be willing, which he most certainly would not. In fact, she wasn’t sure he would be okay with the only logical solution, for her to ride with a kid on her saddle. It didn’t feel safe or wise, but unless they wanted to walk and take twice the time for the trip, there it was.

  She thought she could convince Anbol, the curious little Maer girl, to ride with her; her father Sabnil would have to be okay with it, but she was pretty sure Grisol could convince him. It would be a pain riding with the squirming little furball sitting in front of her, but it seemed the only choice. And besides, she had started to bond with the girl, just a little. And she wasn’t the only one to have made a connection. Elder Gummache clearly enjoyed his time with the Maer more than he let on. And Sinnie’s mother had been allowed to go in and do some music with the children, so long as Sinnie was there, plus Nicolas, whom the Maer hated, but also feared. Her mother had brought her little bone flute and played some nursery rhymes, which delighted the children, and even got the Maer women’s heads nodding. She tried to teach the children to sing “Blow the leaves down,” which they did, in their fashion; the eldest, a boy of about nine who was called Dunil, listened as intently as any child at lessons and sang every syll
able, though he was way off-key. When Sinnie’s mother had finished and was leaving, Dunil followed her to the opening of the furniture barricade, his arms outspread, repeating: “Sing! Sing!”

  Sinnie had to keep reminding herself not to trust the Maer, not completely anyway. If she were in their situation, half-prisoner, half-refugee, she would bide her time and wait for her opportunity to escape, or if the perfect opportunity presented itself, take out her captors. She and her companions had killed all of their warriors, not to mention three other adults and two children. However well the Maer seemed to be reacting to their situation, it would be strange if they didn’t harbor some resentment, hate, and rage deep down. And whatever the humans thought of the Maer—that they were cruel, vicious, soulless monsters—the Maer would likely think about the humans as well. Even if Grisol and the others wanted to protect them, the Maer they were heading to find would not likely see the situation the same way. They had to go in peace but prepared for war.

  Sinnie was doing the sword training Carl had taught her, as best she could anyway. She liked the feel of his sword, the swing, the thrust, the balance, the weight of the steel, but she was far from competent. Carl had practiced with her a little each day so she would be able to defend herself up close if her opponents got too close for arrows. She had felt a little claustrophobic with the Ka-lar, who’d kept throwing her off her balance with the chain and getting closer and closer. Not that she could have done much with a sword against it, but it had gotten her thinking.