The Warrior struck first and beat Tralane back. As Tralane's other-self perspective sank to the level of the battle, the sands parted beneath his feet. He fell back, retreating down a ramp into a cave, the mouth closing after the Jade Warrior entered. Tralane turned and ran. The walls and floor of the cave were cold to the touch, yet he stuck close to them, wanting a firm wall against his back when it came time to fight. His two selves were merged; he had lost the position of detached observer.
Tripping once on an unseen object, he lost his equilibrium and started to fall. He twisted and turned to keep from striking the ground. For a moment, he was fright-eningly dizzy, on the verge of collapsing into a pit he could not see. He could only sense a vast openness waiting to engulf him. He managed to regain his balance and rested, leaning on a wall and breathing hard. The wall collapsed and he fell through the opening, landing on a paved stone floor. He looked and listened for the Jade Warrior's pursuit; on seeing and hearing none, he scrambled to his feet and started running along the paved corridor. There were torches on the walls, set at regular intervals and held by mangled arms with rotting flesh jutting from the massive blocks of cut stone from which the walls had been constructed. Soon there were doors, heavy iron and bolted, with portals rusted shut. They alternated on either side of him. He stopped in front of one and opened it. He cried out in terror as the ghostly apparitions of his mother and father spread out their arms to him. They were hanging from the vaulted ceiling, the nooses tightly drawn around their necks, but they were still alive, pleading for him to join them. Again he cried out and tried to close his eyes. Instead he found that he had just opened them.
Chapter 14
Cumulain's concerned face hovered over him, dissipating the nightmare images like a morning sun chasing the fog across the land, driving it from the paths of civilized men. The faces of his parents vanished, though he tried to hold on to them. The stone walls melted, and the dungeon doors receded into the unknowable.
"You were shivering, so I added some more blankets to your bed," Cumulain whispered with sympathy.
Tralane groaned hoarsely and tried to pass a hand over his face, but found his arms weighed down under several thick fur covers. Despite their number, a cool breeze was still gently caressing his skin, sending shivers down his spine. In an odd contradiction he could not wholly grasp, but which seemed important for him to understand, his eyes burned like coals set in a pit of warm ashes. The room was indistinct beyond Cumulain's face, revolving around his head until it was nothing more than a blur. Breathing was a burden.
Cumulain offered him a cup of steaming, herb-scented liquid. Holding his head up, she poured the beverage into his parched mouth. After a few moments, the nurturing heat of the liquid spread throughout his limbs. But along with the warmth came the awareness of pain as wounds, festering with infection, and bruised bones were remembered. Again Tralane groaned, and Cumulain let his head rest on the cushions.
"You've been in delirium for a week, Tralane," Cumulain told him, her forehead creased with anxiety. "My mother Camala and I have watched over you, fed you, and applied all the balms and potions in our knowledge to heal you." She shrugged her shoulders apologetically, her eyes studying him for signs of consciousness. He tried to speak, but the vague words died on inarticulate lips.
"You're weak and very ill. Our magic has not healed you, but at least it's kept you alive. The strength to out-race death must come from you, Tralane. Can you hear me? Can you understand? Your wounds have not gotten better or worse, your sickness steadily consumes the medicines we've given you. The balance is yours to change."
He remembered that her eyes had seemed black when he first met her, but now they were green, the color of summer forests, inviting, comforting. Concern flowed from them into his exhausted spirit. Her eyes anchored him to a reality which resisted the surges and eddies of disease. The frigid, crystalline beauty of emerald, precious stone of rulers, symbol of power, no longer haunted him. The green he saw now was lush, overflowing, invulnerable in its magnitude.
A green mist descended over his eyes, but this did not signal the arrival of demons, their sharp talons clawing and clutching. The field of his vision was free from ominous shadows. There was quiet; in the serenity, the nausea and pain that wracked his mind and body began to coalesce into a fiercely glowing jewel, its countless facets shimmering with the intensity of his suffering. Around that jewel gathered an invisible force, enfolding and crushing the blight. He closed his eyes, allowing something within to tame the chaos, to channel the frenetic energies into life-preserving duties. Relief settled over his troubled mind. He fell into dreamless sleep.
When he awoke, he felt as if time had not passed. Yet he was stronger, and he could see his room clearly by the light of a lantern standing like a sentinel on a table by the door. He moved his head from side to side, taking in the log walls, low ceiling, and single window looking out onto the night. As if by a prearranged signal, the door opened and Cumulain stepped in. She immediately noticed his open eyes and looked at him questioningly. He nodded, croaking words even he did not recognize. She quickly came to him and brushed hair from his forehead.
"I only stepped out for a moment, Tralane. I didn't mean to leave you alone." Her face was pale, drained of vigor. Worry lines seemed permanently etched into the folds of her skin.
He closed his eyes briefly and nodded once. He managed to move his hand from beneath the covers, and touched her face. Her expression did not change, and from his cold finger tips he feared she might be frozen.
"You understand what I'm saying now?" she pleaded. To his puzzled grunt, she replied, "Good, I'm glad something has finally turned for the good. You've been here for over three weeks."
Tralane started at the length of time he had been engaged in his dream battle against illness. Two weeks had passed since Cumulain's last exhortation. Two weeks for the foulness within him to gather into the jewel, to be crushed, and then redirected. He wanted to be tired from the effort, but his thoughts were becoming clearer, his attention rising to absorb Cumulain's words.
"Yes, three weeks. And a few days, I think. I've lost track lately. The others, the townspeople, they're becoming impatient. More were taken in broad daylight. The Beast uses us like a store of food. The heavy snows have cut us off from the other towns. We're penned in. We can't stop it; we're helpless. It can't die by our swords. The men are not skilled enough as fighters to discover its weakness." She paused, glancing at the door.
"I was afraid they might take you and offer you to the Beast. They tried with your friend, but they couldn't budge him. He just … sat, and when they tried to force him up, they cut their hands and notched their swords on his skin. Even the Beast bleeds when cut by a sword, but your companion is as invulnerable as he is immobile. The men have been driven away by his constant presence; they call him another Beast and shun my house. My brother is with them, but my mother and I have tended you despite their threats. They don't dare come for you while one of us is with you—not yet. But now with your wounds finally beginning to heal and the sickness turned back, you'll soon be able to fend for yourself. Don't worry, my arts will take hold now and speed the process."
She rose suddenly and left the room, leaving Tralane dazed by her breathless speech. Without her to distract him, the dim memories of his arrival began to coalesce. Brief moments of consciousness also returned to him, and a pattern emerged with the repetitive motif of the Beast. The townspeople were terrified of this monster they could not destroy. Like the Jade Warrior in relation to Tralane, the Beast seemed to have fixed itself upon a victim, relentlessly stalking, waiting to strike, hovering on the borders between life and death, awareness and dream. The Warrior and the Beast were of a breed. They were the implacable enemies of life. And if they were kin, then so were Tralane and the townspeople. If they considered the Jade Warrior another Beast, then he would view the Beast as another Warrior. Cumulain's enemy was also his.
By the time Cumulain returned, carrying a
tray piled with food, across which lay his sword, Tralane had resolved to return the aid that had been granted him in restoring him to health.
"Here," Cumulain said nervously, laying the tray on the table and bringing the sword to him, "a warrior should not be without his sword. And this," she said, taking out the pouch containing Wyden's Eye. "You should not be without this, also. It is a powerful source, Tralane. You must be mighty indeed to have mastered such a thing."
Tralane laughed, and coughed up phlegm. He wanted to tell her he was nothing more than a thing called a Keeper, a mere playing piece in a game he could not control. The Jade Warrior was not his friend, but a strange, passive kind of enemy who would watch Tralane die without coming to his aid. He needed protection and sanctuary.
Fates, gods, demons, and spirits all reached into the soul to light fires that drove men into the pits dug by these same immortal forces. There was no such thing as mastery; did the scar on his shoulder not prove this? One could manipulate and deceive, and thus win a few short moments of power. But the end always came. The artifice of lies crashed, revealing the bitter core of helplessness in the face of an ancient, malevolent universe.
His confessions died with his voice. With the tokens of his strength by his side, Tralane watched as Cumulain dragged the table across the room to him. Despite her obvious exhaustion, she was still strong, driven by an iron will towards the preservation of life. She was not crumbling; she was a mountain whose face might be changed by a storm, but remained unmoved. She gave him bread, cheese, and meat, along with small draughts of strong wine.
"You haven't eaten anything solid since you've been here. You must build your strength."
Tralane nodded gratefully and offered her some of the food. She hesitated, then let her own hunger dictate her actions and shared the food with him. As they ate, she looked at him with curiosity.
"You are so strange, and your friend is different from anything spoken of in the legends, or even in texts of magic. Where must you come from? Surely not this world?"
Conflicting emotions struggled for access to the frigid portals of his flesh. Tears stung his eyes. Another jewel within him shattered, flaws branching through its core like lightning in an ominous sky. Another sickness collapsed into itself, disintegrating into a galaxy of myriad fragments.
There was a brief flash of light, in which could be seen a cowering, fearful thing, stripped of the accoutrements of meaning, kneeling over the blasted ashes of a dead self, as Fatome had knelt beside the smoldering earth that had taken Oram. The triumphant joy he felt after such fantastic escapades as the theft of Wyden's Eye, the transient moments of security before the visions of a future tamed and uneventful, and the profound depths of hopelessness he experienced when the world within him conflicted with the world around him were all combined and transformed into one swirling truth. There was sadness and bereavement over the loss of some part of him. But with that loss another thing was gained, another self born. The cowering, fearful thing stood, naked, without the veils of imagined power and glory beautifying its existence. In its nakedness was its strength.
The light vanished, and reality seeped back to replace it. The broken jewel fragments were swept away as waters bubbled from a well, irrigating a hard, parched surface. An old suit of armor split, and the skin beneath was raw from the chafing of new flesh against the walls of an unyielding container.
"He is not my friend," Tralane cried desperately, pleading for her to understand.
The lines of anxiety on her face softened. Whatever pressures had been brought to bear on her by angry neighbors, worried and endangered relatives, and the piercing howls of the Beast were momentarily dissipated as she drew from Tralane the few drops of strength she had craved for.
"Yes, my warrior," she said, laying a hand across his chest. "There is no need for shame. He is not one a mortal could ever befriend. But rest, Tralane. Nourish yourself and sleep. Tomorrow we will talk of our dreams and our lives, of hopes and enemies." And she smiled as she brought a cup of wine to her lips and drank from it deeply.
Tralane relaxed, relieved. A burden he had never known he was carrying was suddenly made lighter as the load was shared by another.
Chapter 15
The next day Tralane was torn from his sleep by a shriek which seemed to originate from beneath his window. Dawn had not yet completely lightened the air. Tralane sat up, feeling the emptiness of the room after the unknown voice had filled it. He wondered where Cumulain had gone to, then worked himself free of the covers. He walked on shaky legs to the window, where he leaned heavily against the wall and peered through the glazed, facade of the shutters.
A moon in three-quarters was vying with the still-slumbering sun for the role of light-giver. In the street below, stark against a new layer of snow, was the carcass of a thort-like animal. Its snout was longer, as were its legs, and a mane of hair covered the back of its neck. Beside the slain mount stooped a huge, white-furred creature. It stood upright suddenly, carrying the bloody, mangled remains of a man under its arm. The monster quickly glanced up and down the street, then half-jumped, half-limped away into the whiteness.
The door behind Tralane burst open, and Cumulain rushed in, out of breath.
"Did you see the Beast?" she yelled hysterically. "In front of the Wilderness Flower! It took a man right outside! Did you see who it was? No one will ever cross our threshold again, stained with such evil blood—"
Steps reverberated outside the door; before anyone entered, Tralane was already diving back to his bed to take up his sword. Jax entered, saw Tralane sprawled sideways on the bed fumbling with the handle of the sword, and started forward. Cumulain dove after her brother and held on to him with a tenacity which surprised Tralane as he finally freed the black sword from the sheath. Though he was weak and could not make the anger in him rise to give his body strength, Tralane hardly needed any effort to lift the sword. Again, the weapon was drawing on unknown sources of power.
Jax halted when he saw the black sword and the way it swayed effortlessly to and fro in a defensive arc.
"What are you doing?" Cumulain cried, still venting her fright uncontrollably.
"He was the cause," Jax shouted, pointing his short sword at Tralane. Caught between fear of the Beast and the sight of a man who had just escaped death handling a blade with apparent ease, Jax remained immobile. He allowed Cumulain to stand between him and Tralane.
"The Beast was coming for him," he continued, his voice edged with the hysteria his sister freely expressed. "But he took poor Lythgar instead. Let me send him out now, before someone else dies because of misguided mercy to strangers."
"The Beast was with us long before Tralane arrived," Cumulain said, her will and anger starting to assert themselves over fear. "Don't … you can't abandon him to his death now, so soon after his recovery. He doesn't have the strength yet. Don't join your enemy, Jax, don't help to feed it."
"I'll hunt your beast down for you, Jax. By the sword in my hand," Tralane heard himself saying, as if he were a stranger to himself, "I swear it."
Jax looked at him uncertainly, his eyes weighing the contradiction of man and sword. Suddenly he turned, ignoring his sister, and stalked out of the room.
When he had left, Cumulain's shoulders sagged and she stood hunched over. Then she took the few steps between her and the bed and collapsed on its covers, weeping.
Tralane dropped the sword and crawled across the bed to where she lay. He caressed her head, her hair, and stared absently at her shuddering back. She was so different from the women Tralane was accustomed to dealing with, ladies of the court and their coarser counterparts in the taverns. The range of feelings and their depth was greater than Tralane was wholly comfortable seeing. If he had met such people in his past, he had not thought much of them and had disdained their company, making them his victims rather than his allies. But now he did not feel the need to victimize in others those aspects of himself he despised or could not face. The loneliness of detac
hment was no longer a prize. He cradled Cumulain's head with his other hand.
"Your brother is frightened," he said gently. "Why? Why can't the creature be killed? What is the Beast?"
Cumulain spoke into the bed, looking away from Tralane. "My brother is afraid? We're all scared, Tralane! It haunts us, it can't be killed, and it won't go away. Do you know what that's like, to live in terror from day to day, waiting for the blow to land? Do you know what it feels to have the life drained from you as you watch something approach you, feeding on you even without touching you? You can't stop it, you can only watch, watch, I tell you! You can't even see it, but you can watch. The bodies drop, the houses become empty. The corruption spreads, invisible, except for the eyes. You can see it in the eyes of the survivors. There you see it, so when it comes for you there is recognition. Because you've watched, and you haven't been able to do anything against it. Yes, Tralane, we're afraid of the Beast, afraid to recognize it."
She turned her head and faced Tralane, her eyes puffy and red. Defiance was mixed with horror in her expression.
Tralane tried to touch her but she backed away, still staring at him, as if he were the monster. Despite the heat rising through the vents from the hearths below, Tralane felt a chill.
"Is the Beast immortal—demon or spirit? Is he a sorcerous creation, or a mortal animal?"
"The Beast," she recited, releasing an inner litany of unreason which had apparently been repeated often and in private, in the hope of finding an underlying foundation of logic and justice, "is part animal, part human, and part sorcery.
"Many years ago, this town was an outpost for the northern kingdoms seeking trade routes south through the mountains. We were a prosperous town then, and this tavern, which was built by my father and uncle, was always filled with the restless breed—traders, hunters, caravanners, and soldiers for hire. My family called this place the Wilderness Flower—wild for its location and patrons, and flower for the hopes they had for their future. But then the winters became harsher, as if the years of relatively mild snows were a lure to bring people to their ruin. The passes south were choked, and the caravans and soldiers left. A few hunters, trappers, and small traders stayed, for habit's sake, but they could not keep the town alive.
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