The captain placed Marzen's head on the ground and then stood. He frowned, then glanced up at the bard, surprised at seeing someone so near.
"Detrexan," Tralane said simply, as a way of greeting.
"How did you know—" his twin began defensively, and stopped abruptly.
A flood of questions entered Tralane's mind as the two faced each other. Did this double have his manner of walking and talking, or was the man a stranger in more profound ways? He wanted to talk with this man, to find out if their histories matched, if they had the same hopes and dreams. Did Detrexan know the identity of their mutual parents? A longing came over Tralane for the warmth and closeness of a friendship he had never been able to hold with anyone he had ever met.
But Detrexan's eyes widened with terror, not curiosity. Tralane's clothes were doused in blood, and his face was cut and bruised with the beating he had taken. He was a perverse reflection of his own physical appearance.
"Demon!" the captain screamed, drawing his double-edged sword from its sheath. "The mage has summoned demons to replace us! Beware, look out for yourselves."
Tralane backed quickly away, having no sword to parry Detrexan's attack. He turned and ran towards an unattended kruushka. Detrexan followed him with long, purposeful strides, holding his sword high for the kill. Tralane stumbled over a body as he looked over his shoulder, fell, and rolled, trying to crawl away from his pursuer. The captain waved his troop off as he caught up to Tralane and sent his sword whistling down at the bard. Tralane twisted away but felt the edge nick his right arm. In desperation, he lashed out with his leg and tripped Detrexan, knocking him off balance. He heard a thud as the captain fell, and then a gurgling sound. But before he could see what had happened, a tremor shook the earth so violently that all the warriors were thrown to the ground. Tralane buried his face in the soil and cringed as an inhuman roar deafened him.
The roar was continuous, like an angry storm wind that refused to die. Its unrelenting savagery forced Tralane deeper into the ground, until he thought he would bury himself. After a while, when he had become accustomed to the din, he turned his head sideways, expecting to see Detrexan's men mustering their company and coming at him.
Instead, he saw that the world had been cast into utter darkness. The moons and stars were gone, and he could not even see his own hand that gripped the earth next to his face. His eyes searched desperately for some hold on reality, until he found Gibron in his dome of light. Yet, as he studied the mage, he found this was not the reassuring sight he had been seeking.
The mage's mouth was twitching spasmodically and his eyes were bulging. If he was screaming, his voice was lost in the roar. Around his globe of light darted intangible, wraithlike figures which defied the cohesive focus of human sight. They splashed against the mage's light; with every strike they weakened the shield. The Golden King's sorcerous allies, Those-Who-Search, had found their quarry and were tightening their circle around Gibron. The light grew fainter and the wraiths more numerous until, at last, Gibron could no longer be seen. The darkness was total, consuming even the roaring sound. There was no final cry from Gibron, nor any calls from the flattened warriors or the injured. Tralane at last gave up the struggle to remain conscious and allowed the darkness to envelop him, also.
It was still night when Tralane awoke. Star Speaker had set and the half-full Wanderer was making its way towards the horizon through the clear night. Tralane turned over on his back and welcomed the sight of stars and the peace of a natural night. His hand touched something metallic, and he shifted his gaze to see Detrexan beside him, his armor still bright and an edge of his sword buried in his throat. Tralane grunted in shock and sat up.
Bodies were stretched out across the road and surrounding fields like dead carcasses. Down the road, the town's doors and windows were shut tight against the events that had recently transpired. Gibron was nowhere to be seen, though Marzen was still by the roadside, unconscious but breathing steadily. A few kruushkas were grazing or sleeping in the fields.
Tralane rose to his feet and held his head to stop it from spinning. He was still holding the amulet in his hand, though his fingers ached as he relaxed his locked muscles. He could not find his pack, though his bow and quiver had survived. He gathered his weapons and headed for the kruushkas without delay.
He passed Marzen and began to sing a lament, remembering another he had passed without such consideration. He sang to escape the unfulfilled plans he had made for the both of them, but his efforts opened the way for sadder thoughts. The song stayed with him as his stride became steadier, and he was soon mounting a kruushka and urging the beast forward. He touched Wyden's Eye in the way he had been taught, and it was not long before the first changes—a shifting of some stars, the gradual appearance of clouds, a subtle change in the mountain range outline ahead of him—occurred. He entered this new world singing the lament, hoping soon the period of remorse would pass and he would forget. But even as he rode, he perceived the ghosts from his past flickering in "and out of sight at the edge of his vision, following him as carrion-eaters follow the dying in the wastelands, goading him on even as the future taunted him with its unpromising vastness.
Chapter 7
The mountain stream's water stung his wounds and numbed his flesh, but Tralane did not mind. He continued to swim back and forth between the two banks, letting the calm of valley and the brisk current soothe his body and troubled mind. He stopped beneath an overhanging tree and watched a school of tiny, red and gold fish dart through his legs. Then he submerged and crawled upstream along the bed, studying the pebbles as if they were gems of knowledge. He grabbed a handful of stones, surfaced and climbed up on the bank on which his kruushka was contentedly grazing. Without bothering to dress, for his tattered clothes had still not dried from the wash he had given them, Tralane collapsed wearily onto the grass and spread the stones before him.
The mountain air chilled him as a breeze blew down from a high pass, and the grass caressed him. But the pattern he was laying out distracted him from the elements. On the previous night, while crossing over from Fargouet's unhappy world to his present locale, the bard had taken to staring at the sky. He had been praying, silently, to whatever gods were looking down, for deliverance from the curse that seemed to hang over him and which Gibron had sensed. He had found, instead of answers and aid, yet another mystery. The stars had moved.
Cuelon the Slayer had crumbled before his eyes. The Door to Heaven was warped beyond recognition—only the key star Dothos remained to show him where all sacrifices and incantations had passed on their journeys to the gods. Mophos taming the kruushkas, Alysis herding the shui, the goddess-star Aralaela guiding sailors to land, Wyd Win weeping in atonement for his brother CuChani's treachery—all these symbols of the world in which he had been raised had dissipated into the vast night. Mathi's teachings were useless; even the little magic Tralane remembered would not work if he were not secure in his knowledge of the forces and influences around him.
With each crossing Tralane made, Wyden's Eye took him farther away from his own familiar universe. The subtle changes were accumulating into drastic differences. Gibron's assumption that Tralane had no control over his journey had turned out to be unpleasantly true, and the ramifications—that he had no gods to call on, no spirits to comfort him—were only now becoming apparent. The soil he rested on was alien, as was the grass, the trees around him, the birds and sky above. The gods had not witnessed his birth on this world, if indeed they had done so on his own. But at least he belonged on his home world. Here, he was truly alone, with not even a pebble or a handful of soil to care for him. Mathi had taught him that the power of sorcery was in the merging of oneself with the world. The greater the understanding of the world and the self, the more formidable the power gained. Tralane had no understanding, no power, not even identity.
The urge to leap back into the stream, to breathe the water in, and to let the stream take him made his limbs tremble momentarily.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the ancient, now nonexistent star patterns he had laid down with the stones. He breathed deeply, sucking in air instead of water, and allowed himself an ironic smile as the compulsion subsided. The water he had hoped to join, even the air he enjoyed instead, was a stranger to his being.
Death would not make him any more of a child of this world than living.
He was nothing more than a vagabond orphan to the gods, and so his prayers for guidance went unanswered. He was an unknown element to the waters of this world, so the rites of absolution he had performed in the stream had washed him of only physical stains. The bloodshed he had caused in Fargouet and Agathom's camp was still with him, seeping deeper into his being, untouched by forgiveness.
He resolved never to use the Eye again. He had strayed far from the usual sources of comfort he relied upon in moments of crisis. Also, the vegetation and land formation had changed beyond the range of familiarity, following the transformation of the heavens. The further he drifted from his native reality, the more disoriented he would become.
Tralane began to reason that perhaps it was Wyden's Eye that was cursed and not himself. He regretted the rash theft that had launched him on his current path, but, after all, it had been a necessary act for his survival. The vision of adventure that had struck him in Agathom's camp no longer blinded him. Now all that mattered was peace, security, and the firm rule of the gods. Better never to act again than to have his desires warped out of shape and his actions loaded with unforeseen repercussions by sorcery he could not fully control.
So if he settled on this world, he would need a new purpose in life to protect him from his own frailties and inadequacies that had brought him to Agathom's camp to begin with. If he had learned the spells and incantations of his own world, he could just as well be tutored in the ways of the gods in his present home. A few years as an acolyte in a priesthood would teach him all he needed to know. With the judicious sale of the Eye, his knowledge would be put to good use. He would build a temple in some remote area where visitors were infrequent and unwelcome, dedicating it to a forgiving god, and there spend the rest of his days in isolated worship and meditation.
A simple life harbored no evil or, as the Karthasian saying went, a shadow-less sword did not shed blood. His life from that moment on would be free of shadows and blood. Plots, court intrigues, even the glory of archery in a king's army, were all pleasure of the past. A place would be set aside for him. Once he was rid of Wyden's Eye and its interfering curse, he would be able to lose himself in the intricacies of an idyllic spiritual existence, dedicated to the service of a god who must, if accepting his worship, accept him. Satisfied that because his dreams had changed, he had transformed himself from a burdened knave to a free and noble spirit, Tralane abandoned thought.
He let his mind wander, releasing his heart from the tight confines of plans for the future and trusting that restless part of his being to find its own answers to the questions and problems troubling him. He listened to the strange bird calls and hummed along with the stream's bubbling song. He drifted into the shifting seas of sensation, relaxing, absorbing the new, and carefully savoring the different, secure in the knowledge that he would belong, once he had mastered the proper disciplines and ceremonies.
Detecting something familiar but almost imperceptible, Tralane struggled out of his half-dreaming, half-waking state and clutched at the fleeting memory. Musical notes, hauntingly evocative. When he had wrestled them into the light of awareness, he cried out weakly. The song was a lament, the voice Gibron's.
Cursing, he sat up and glanced nervously about. Everything was as it had been. The kruushka stared at him for a moment, curious, then resumed grazing. He could still see the school of fish, darting from one end of a backwater eddy to another, moving as one. The pouch containing Wyden's Eye caught his attention; for a moment he considered dropping the amulet into the water. He would be rid of it, as he had wanted to be rid of himself. He did not move to act on his impulse.
Sighing with disgust, Tralane rose and, prompted by the sudden awareness of irritating sensations, examined his body. His skin was broken in many places, the cracks filled with blood dried black. Purple blotches marked deeper sources of pain. Even the scar on his right shoulder, which he considered Mathi's gift to him, was sore.
Old wounds never heal, he remembered bitterly—another thought someone else had said more eloquently, though probably less pithily, in some proverb or other. And again he thought of Mathi, but this time without so many of the recriminations that had colored his previous recollections. The curiosity of his childhood returned with all its fresh inquisitiveness, directed at Mathi.
What had made the old one adopt him, out of all the foundlings he must have been offered in his life? Was Tralane a nobleman's son who had forfeited his rightful place on some tottering throne because of his abandonment of Mathi? Or was he some unwanted child taken from doomed peasants? Certainly there were many reasons why parents would have wanted their child to be sent away with a wizard going into a retreat during the chaotic Karthasian civil wars. In those days, with gods, wizards, and mortals battling for supremacy, the future was not something to be counted on. Had Mathi known his parents and taken the child in as a favor in their memory? If so, why had he never spoken to Tralane about them? Was Mathi even still alive? Did some old wound hurt him as well as Tralane, or was the bard's disappearance from the wizard's life the first real brush with another's feelings he had ever experienced?
Once the flood was loosed, he could not hold back the questions that had gnawed at him during his childhood. The boiling inferno that had seared his emotions growing up, turned his love to anger and distrust, now bubbled over the rim of his soul. The tight lid he had kept on that cauldron—his stories, his minor competencies in archery and intrigue, and his wanderlust—crumbled into meaningless fragments. There was no one to catch the overflow. He had run away from Mathi. Gibron was dead, and Marzen was crippled or also dead. There was a tiny, weeping figure, mourning the loss of the mighty Oram, huddled over the giant's smoldering ashes. He had done nothing and received the same in kind.
Tralane wanted to cry, alone in the wilderness and for the first time knowing what it was to be alone, realizing that solitude was not a condition of the present but a product of the past. Even the gods, had they been there, would have been cold comfort. After all, they were immortal, encased in eternity. The twitchings of human feelings were incomprehensible to those who were not bracketed between life and death. The gods and spirits of any world were, in the final perspective, immune to understanding, much less comforting and forgiving the petty lives of humanity.
But Tralane did not give in to despair. If he had asked no questions, there would be no need for answers. Yet his very existence was a question, so he could not believe there were no answers. He did not cry. He looked, instead, to the mountains around him. Among them he saw the stranger, riding down to meet him.
His reaction was instantaneous. He ran to where he had left his bow and quiver and quickly strung an arrow. Disdaining clothes, he retreated from the camp by the stream and hid in a cluster of trees. On the rim of the cluster, the kruushka tugged on its reins, which were firmly tied around the base of a trunk. The animal could not set itself free and did not seem to want to exert itself, so it settled down for a rest. Meanwhile, the stranger had disappeared into the cover of the forest that blanketed the mountains. Tralane followed the example of his mount, sitting down to wait, patient, almost happy, for the real and physical danger to make itself manifest.
The remainder of the day passed uneventfully. Evening began to close in. Enough time had gone by to consider it safe to come out of hiding. Then Tralane heard a noise behind him.
Tralane fell forward, rolled, and came up on his knees with an arrow a finger away from being loosed. The pain in his hand was unbearable, yet he did not release the arrow. He realized the stranger had maneuvered behind him, caught him off guard, and that those who p
racticed such stealth rarely had good intentions. Instincts cried for violence. But the nature of his antagonist penetrated his reason and instincts and dampened his will. He dropped his weapon.
The stranger was not made of flesh, as he had assumed, but rather resembled nothing less than an animated jewel, man-sized and cut to human proportions. The stone surface of the chest rose and fell in a mocking imitation of breathing. Fault lines beneath were throbbing, like veins and arteries carrying blood. And the eyes were cold, many-faceted rubies, set with malevolent purpose in the bald, humorless face of the shimmering green warrior.
An object struck the ground near Tralane's feet. A few moments had to trickle by before the sound registered in the bard's mind. When he finally recognized that the stranger had given him something, he could only stare at the object.
By the time the, stranger had dismounted from his strangely shaped thort—it was taller and more muscular than the mounts he was familiar with, though not as massive as a kruushka, and its eyes glistened with intelligence—Tralane had finally seized the meaning of the object at his feet. It was his pack, which he had thought lost on Fargouet's world. Oram's white furs squeezed against the netting, protecting the bard's supplies.
"Where did you find it?" In his amazement Tralane forgot the usual amenities exchanged by strangers in the wilderness.
"Where you left it," the stranger replied coldly. His voice was as hard as his body, filled with long, sharp edges which cut at the expression of-a simple word.
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