"Then a sorcerer came, worn and hurt, much as you arrived. But he was far older and weak by the nature of his body as well as the weather. He had been defeated by a rival, and strange wounds—cuts which glowed, movements under his skin as if maggots rifled his inner being, and palpitating, dark green growths on his limbs—marked his nearness to death. He railed against kings and nobles, petty warriors, and insane magicians. He refused to appreciate the town's help; indeed, he seemed to think our care for him was his right. His temper became fierce, and he claimed we were holding back our healing arts when he realized we could only slow the approach of his impending doom. Children suffered burns by his spells, women miscarried and were strangely infected, and men were stricken by weakness and fainting. This wizard was a disease, corrupting us from within, so we ceased our attentions and turned him out of the Wilderness Flower. That night there was a storm, and we thought it would end his misery, for he had taken his bitterness and hatred and carried it up into the mountains, where the winds and the cold were at their worst. It was soon after he disappeared that the Beast took its first victim."
"How long ago was that?"
"Before I was born. Twenty years ago, maybe more. The Beast would take only one victim a year, and the townspeople, feeling unclean over their turning out of the wizard, did not find that too great a price to pay for their unity of passive purpose against a common enemy."
"All this time, and no one fought back?" Tralane asked, disbelieving.
"Tyranny is best imposed on oneself, Tralane. There was no courage to face the wizard directly when he was among us and put him mercifully out of his misery. I think that's what he wanted done. He goaded us and jeered at us, probing for the strength he himself lacked and uncovering only cowardice. He was beyond the medicinal power of anyone, yet there were those among us who would not admit such a thing as death, for to do so would have been to acknowledge this town's and their own eventual doom. So they prolonged the wizard's life and, under the mask of caring, fed their own delusions. In turn, this wizard's madness and desperation grew as he was not allowed to die. He was the prisoner of his own and the town's denial of death, just as we are now imprisoned. We accepted our fate, for that, too, distracted us from the town's eventual demise. The tyranny was steady, but undemanding."
"But people were sacrificed! Isn't that a demand?"
"A stranger, a criminal, a stray or deserter. Oh, it was not fair, Tralane. We did not ask permission from our sacrifices, especially when the sacrifice came from our own people. We kept it a secret, and not even the trappers and hunters who settled in the town to marry our daughters were informed, for they might one day be chosen. The secret united the town, and the bond that had been formed to turn out the wizard became unbreakable. What had been founded on hope was now resting on collusion to deny the inevitable. The town was preserved, and the Beast satiated every year."
"Until?"
"Until only recently, in the past year. The Beast is apparently tired of the game. It is hungry for flesh and power. It taunts us, flaunting the strength we allowed it to gain all these years. Now we are even more its victims."
"Then the Beast is really the sorcerer?"
"No, the sorcerer died. But, according to my mother, who along with a few others here is knowledgeable about magic, it is driven partially by the sorcerer's will. You see, the sorcerer died in the snow, and was probably stalked by a hunting animal—by the look of the Beast, a cthan feline. There must have been one last spell before death took the sorcerer, merging man, snow and cthan into one creature. It is mortal—animal and human—hence it can bleed. But the Beast is also snow, elemental, limitless, easily replenished, and it is also magically endowed. We can wound the flesh, but that is not what holds the Beast together. Winter and the sorcerer have allied to keep us in the borderlands of death, just as the townspeople must have kept the wizard."
Tralane crawled back under the covers and rested his back against the headboard. His gaze wandered away from her.
"Does the Beast frighten you, too?" she asked, her face softening a shade.
"I'd be a fool to say no," Tralane replied, irony adding the edge to his voice.
"Would you have said no, once?"
"Yes, once. And then run away."
"Will you run now?"
"No."
Cumulain approached Tralane, moving his sword aside to sit beside him. She ran her fingers along the weapon, touching the amulet's pouch lying beside the pommel.
"What else do you fear, Tralane?" she asked with deceptive naiveté.
"Too many things," Tralane said, turning to look at the shuttered window.
The young woman rose, closed the door Jax had left open in his retreat, and returned to sit on the edge of the bed. Her mood had changed; her face was still shadowed by the shock of the killing just outside her door, as well as her revelation of the town's darkest secret, but now an intense curiosity renewed the color of her skin. Yet Tralane sensed that hers was not the inquisitiveness of an observer interested only in the entertaining details of a story. She had trusted him enough to lay before him the source of the town's present curse. She had protected him from people who no doubt had their fill of sickly strangers and who, until lately, had sacrificed those passing through their lands to the Beast. Now she wanted reciprocity. She rested a hand on Tralane's chest, leaning on him slightly, and gazed at him expectantly like a woman waiting for her lover to divulge his intimate secrets.
"Your friend downstairs?" she offered. "Is he really a companion?"
"No," he said hoarsely, fixing his eyes on her hand resting on his chest. He had difficulty bringing up the words. It was simpler to imagine his thoughts flowing from his heart to her hand, and from her hand through her arm and to her heart.
"Where did you find him?"
"I didn't. He found me. He calls himself the Jade Warrior and was sent to watch me as I flounder in trouble of my own making."
"And there is no peace from him?"
"No, there isn't. His words cut me, his presence humiliates. He won't leave me, and I cannot avoid him. He's invulnerable, as far as I can see. He does nothing, yet I know he's toying with me. I don't know where he comes from, who sent him, or even why."
"Oh yes you do, Tralane. This," she said, holding up the pouch, "is the bait which has attracted the Warrior to you, is it not?"
"How do you know that? No, it isn't true; he's not after the Eye. I've already asked him."
"I did not say he wanted the charm. I merely pointed out a bond. How did you get it?"
"I stole it. And how do you know it's a charm, as you call it?"
She smiled. "I'm not such a fool as to be blind to sorcery. And the fact that you've stolen this charm does not mean it is so precious that another would try to take it from you. Some things are meant to be taken, and I sense you were destined to come into the possession of this Eye—"
"Wyden's Eye, an amulet with the power to breach the walls separating existences from one another." He spoke authoritatively, seeking to impress her with his power.
"And who is Wyden? Why is his Eye in the hands of a stranger?"
Tralane's expression was blank. "I don't know."
"If you don't know the source of this magic, how can you control it?"
"I can't."
"Then whose purpose are you serving? Where are you going?"
Tralane shrugged his shoulders. "I want to be left alone. I want shelter, food, and peace. I want warmth and the beating of many hearts around me."
"A thief steals, then does not want to spend his prize?" she asked incredulously. "Where do you come from?"
Tralane grimaced at the question and turned his head aside. He rolled away from her so her hand could no longer rest on his chest.
"No past, no future?" she persisted. "Only the present, with power and no purpose. A stranger to whom you have surrendered follows you."
Her summary of his situation was of little comfort. He could not bear to hear such a concise e
ncapsulation of the meaninglessness of his life, nor could he stay with people who, even if they were to say nothing, saw the emptiness within him. He could fulfill his obligation to the town and fight their Beast. Then he would leave.
"You are a dangerous man, Tralane," Cumulain said sternly, getting up from the bed. "You are more dangerous than the Beast, who to us is merely evil."
"An arrow unguided is deadlier than one shot in anger." He repeated the archer's proverb of his world with spiteful sarcasm.
"You know this yourself. Good. I'll bring you some food, and then help the others downstairs recover from their fright. Perhaps I can convince them to keep their wits collected, now that you have promised to defend us. Later, we will talk some more."
She left, to return shortly with a platter of tubular, almost translucent objects which he discovered, after tasting the sweet, juicy meat, were fruit. Again she left. As he ate with the sullenness of a punished child, he heard Cumulain's voice downstairs, shouting. She was arguing with a group of men, one of whom sounded like her brother. While he listened and ate, trying to make out their conversation, an old woman quietly entered his room.
The woman carried a stool, which she placed by the window, and sat so that the morning sun's rays could bathe her with the first light. He offered her a fruit, but she shook her head slightly in refusal and peered through a crevice in the shutters. She watched the street silently, the folds and wrinkles on her face immovable under the weight of time and experience. Her white hair lightened the grayness of her face. Though any resemblance had crumbled under the onslaught of years, Tralane took her to be Cumulain's mother.
A door slammed below them, and a few angry epithets accompanied the exit. The mother's expression did not change as her children bickered in the snow. Then there was silence. Cumulain's mother continued to stare out into the street as the sunlight began to emphasize the lines of her worn features. Tralane said nothing to her, retreating into his own thoughts rather than eliciting them from another.
Yet he felt the need to pry from her the wisdom she had no doubt exchanged for the youth that had been stripped from her by the elements. Cumulain had clarified many feelings and questions, but the resolution of the conflicts were still beyond his reach. The acknowledgement and expression of weakness was of small comfort if he could not also see, at least on the horizon, their elimination. He was afraid that if he fixed his gaze too long on these failings, he would withdraw again into the oblivion of feigned ignorance and pride. He saw only the endurance of an evil aspect within him and wished only for its utter destruction in himself and others.
But fear held his tongue. He could not summon the strength to hear what she might have to say. The paradox of wanting to protect and wishing to expose, of fortifying and tearing down at the same time, weighed his words until they sank to the bottom of his soul. He had to be free, yet someone else had to break the chains that bound him as a prisoner within himself. The old solution—a guide, a knowledgeable companion to direct and take responsibility—was the chief seducer of Tralane's will. Yet the price of this last solution was not to his liking, either, for with it he would forsake all hopes for independence.
A paralysis slowly settled over Tralane. He watched the old woman with mixed feelings of resentment—that Cumulain had stirred his thoughts and that her mother would not quell them—and hope that at last he had found a source of aid. He was like an exile at the gate of his own city, longing to go in, yet suffering from self-banishment. He could no more express himself than control his passage between worlds.
Cumulain returned when the sun was nearing its zenith. Her hair was soaked with moisture, and her face was covered with a film of sweat. Immediately, Tralane's doubts evaporated and his anxieties calmed. The old woman left, as silently as she had arrived, without a glance at her daughter or the bard. Whatever thoughts or judgments she had made went unspoken.
Cumulain fell on to the bed and lay atop the covers, next to Tralane.
"You must get well soon, Tralane. This last murder by the Beast has shaken the townspeople. They're restless, afraid. They'll be coming after you, and I won't be able to stop them."
"I'll go out to fight the Beast," Tralane said angrily. "Tell them—no, bring Jax here, and the others. I'll tell them myself."
"Don't be so headstrong." She sighed wearily. "I believe you. You've nothing to prove."
He raised his hand, hesitated, then caressed her hair. When she did not move away, he continued.
"Your mother said nothing to me. Is she like the others, like Jax? Does she secretly despise me?"
"She wouldn't have stayed with you all these nights if she did."
"Then why didn't she say something?" Tralane asked, piqued.
"Did you speak to her?" Cumulain was talking with a distracted air.
"No."
"Then why should she?" Cumulain retorted with irritation. "My mother's buried husbands and children, seen gods tear at the earth, and watched sorcerers transform men and elements into each other. She's lived in the mountains and in the cities of the north, and now she's watching her last two children threaten each other with death over a spindly stray with an animated green rock for a shadow. She has no words to waste on you, if you've none to offer." She rolled on her stomach and stared at him. He wiped the sweat from her face.
"There was a lot of work to be done," she explained, her voice softening. "Especially with Jax gone."
He acknowledged her statement with a distracted nod, then asked, "The Jade Warrior?"
"He's still downstairs. He hasn't moved—he doesn't eat or sleep."
"What must he think about?" Tralane wondered out loud. The same question had plagued him during their days of travel together and the nights in camp. Tralane would go to sleep only to wake up in the morning and find the Warrior sitting by the ashes of the fire, staring at the horizon, his position unchanged from the previous night.
"More importantly, what do you think, Tralane?"
Her query tore him away from the blurred but absorbing memories of long, harsh, lonely days and nights in the wilderness.
"Think about what?" he asked, perplexed.
"Yourself? Me? The Jade Warrior?" She paused, touched the scab of a wound on his chin, lifted the covers, and traced the path of the old scar on his shoulder with her fingertips. "You've been hurt before. You came to the Inn almost beyond life. How have all these things happened?"
Tralane considered the scope of her question and flitted over the surface of his memory for a place to dip in and start drawing out the past. There were so many things to say, and once cast into the frame of words and given to another, they would be solidified into an emotional reality that had so far eluded him.
"I dreamed last night about my parents," he began, speaking softly and avoiding her eyes. "I'm an orphan. I was given to an old wizard who knew nothing of children, to be raised as an apprentice sorcerer. He had also the need, no doubt, for some kind of unobtrusive company during the days of his dying. Why he picked a child, I shall never know. He never explained where I came from and how he came to have the responsibility of raising me.
"I imagine he wanted some breath of innocence in his life, steeped as it was in the dark ways of sorcery. But I have seen what pesky things children can be to those who do not have the patience or interest in caring for infants. And unlike the ladies of the court, my adopter did not surrender me to nursemaids. He took me into the wilderness and exiled me along with himself. Alone together, I must have been a bothersome distraction from his studies and pursuits of sorcerous power. It's a wonder he did not sell or give me away to some passing wizard or traveler; but then, perhaps he tried, and none would have me. He surely regretted his rash undertaking, for he rarely spoke to me of anything but sorcery, as if he were trying to mold me into his own image. Yet I was not made from his flesh and blood, so why should I have allowed myself to be his shadow? He did not treat me like a son but rather as a wayward pet who would not learn his master's tricks.
"So I rebelled and made his life even more miserable until I finally brought this injury on myself, though I was really trying to hurt him by gaining knowledge of my parents. I failed in my undertaking and raised some monstrous demon. He cared for me diligently, but I sensed his irritation with the reasoning behind my attempt and also with its failure. I had challenged him and failed. I was not worthy of being his apprentice, and he had no need of a mere adopted son. I decided to spare the both of us the irritation of our coexistence and ran away."
"You haven't mentioned your caretaker's name, Tralane," Cumulain interrupted.
"Mathi."
"Is it so painful a name that you cannot speak it?" Tralane shrugged off the probe and continued, his voice a touch softer.
"I toured the royal courts of the kingdoms of my world, thirsty for people, knowledge, and experience. The wives of rich merchants took me in at first, until I learned to entertain the nobility with my tales and defend them with my bow. I slept amid the trappings of power and glory and I spoke only to the famous or powerful. I played for power, using the people around me like pieces in a harmless game. When I lost my pieces, I moved on, banishing myself for a while from the high places of rule and withdrawing into solitude to nurse my wounds. Of course, after a while, my solitude resembled my time with Mathi, and I could not stand that. So I returned to the kingdoms and gambled again. That has been my life, until just recently, when I stole this amulet from an invading Sorcerer King accompanied by a host. I abandoned my world and again set out for adventure.
The Bard of Sorcery Page 16