The Bard of Sorcery

by Gerard Houarner

  The lessons of the past propelled him forward. His own ghosts—the spirits of the dead he had abandoned—rose up, called from memory, and surrounded his form. Protected by his own flickering aura, Tralane resolved the conflict in his blood. He turned away from the unlimited expanse of possibilities that had threatened to consume him and chose instead to stay and fight the madman before him, even if it meant the death of the father he had sought and the unbounded future he had wished for

  The Emperor, even before Tralane spoke, sensed his decision and faltered before the strength of spiritual walls he had never before encountered. The tide of uncertainty fell back on the Emperor. His shields faltered; the sorcerous transformation of reality into the dreams he harbored broke down. Tralane knew that now, while the Emperor's will failed at the sight of his victim taking a path he could have chosen himself, was the time to strike. If the evil was allowed to recoup, if the Emperor were allowed time to grab hold of his crumbling delusions and summon the mad strength to impose them on reality, Tralane, Akyeetha, and all of existence would be swept away and drowned in the bursting flood that would issue from the Emperor's mind.

  It was the Lady Akyeetha who struck first. Her sword penetrated the Emperor's shield, and she stumbled stiffly toward the startled ruler. The haze blazed about her, then was stripped away as the Emperor faced her with all his power. But before the sorcery could touch her, the point of Wyden's Fang was pricking his flesh.

  Tralane followed an instant after Akyeetha. He broke through the Emperor's shield immediately after her and was singed by the spells the Emperor had directed against her. But his own aura was enough to protect him from their backlash. He drew blood, and the air sighed with the evaporation of magic.

  Their swords pierced the Emperor at the same time, sliding through the ribs on both sides. Instantly, the Emperor stiffened and his arms fell, bouncing off of the broad sides of the swords to hang limply at his sides. Tralane withdrew his sword just as Akyeetha finally gave in to exhaustion, releasing her hold on her sword and sinking to the floor. The Emperor took a few steps backward, cutting a swath through the hanging masks as his sharp movements knocked them into each other and onto the floor. Amidst the clattering, he groaned and finally came to rest against a large, blackened mound protruding from the back wall of the chamber.

  Tralane went first to Lady Akyeetha. The voice of her people was still, the fire of revenge having burned itself out. She breathed, and her face was once again that of a forgotten prisoner just recently released. He covered her with his coat, then went over to where the Emperor lay and knelt beside the body, which still stirred with the dying embers of life.

  The mound on which the Emperor rested shone with splinters of green and blue, as if jewels were buried beneath the thick, stringy growth that darkened the heap. The colors named the mound as Wyden, or what was left of Wyden's head. A thickly bunched cluster of finger-width strings, spilling out from an incrusted pit, showed where the serpent's Eye had been. The god was no farther from death than the Emperor, and did not even stir from its stupor when at last it had the opportunity to avenge itself on its conqueror by swallowing him whole, or lifting its head and crushing the Emperor beneath it.

  Tralane's hand hovered over the Emperor's mask before removing it. When he finally removed the false visage and saw the Emperor's face, he was numbed. He barely felt the frigid breeze that whipped through the room, now that the Emperor's containment of the elements was lapsing and the elements were resuming their siege of the fortress city. Tralane's throat was choked with sounds, his mouth formed inarticulate words. Then he laughed, and tears carried out the pent-up emotions and released him from the fears of madness and murder.

  "You are not my father," Tralane exclaimed, still heaving from the unleashing of so many frustrated feelings.

  The Emperor, his eyes clouded and his limbs lax, turned in the direction of Tralane's voice.

  "Father?" he asked weakly. He coughed, and his lips turned black. The swords' infection was spreading, corrupting immortality with base death.

  "Fool, fool," he continued, shaking his head. "We have none. All the brothers I've sought and slain, singly and in bands, all lured by Wyden's Eye, all slain by their selfishness or granted oblivion by my hand, and not one of them knew. Whose seed are we? Whose blood nurtured us? In all possible worlds, all who carried our face and our form were ignorant of their origin. How can this be? No matter, I would have conquered all. The void would have been filled. Do you understand? Do you see what you've thrown away? What meaning is there for you with no past or future? You cannot conquer as I would have conquered. Artless as you are—powerful, perhaps, like all of us, stained with the unknown, but ignorant, fool… everything is beyond your reach … except death … yes …that…"

  The Emperor convulsed, and his eyes widened with the enormity of a final vision. Then he died, and his body shriveled into an unrecognizable skeleton covered with ash.

  Tralane stood and returned to Akyeetha. He gathered her in his arms, lifted her, and walked out of the chamber. The Emperor's final taunting questions were left with his corpse, along with the necessity of mourning a father or a brother who had shared the same womb. The many surfaces of the bard's mind and emotions, uncovered for the first time, glittered like a friendly star within him.

  He climbed to the parapets of the fortress city and took out Wyden's Eye, in which he searched for and found the familiar moons and star forms of his home world. Holding Akyeetha securely, he stepped onto the wall and looked out across the last, barren earth. The moon glided overhead, appearing ready to pounce on Tralane, but he only smiled at the thought. With the Eye in his fist, Tralane leaped over the precipice and plummeted through the air. His fingers passed over the jeweled center of the Eye, and he continued to fall long after his body should have shattered against the slopes of the mountain. Above him, the overbearing moon began to fade, and with it the reflection in Tralane's eyes of the Emperor's true face, the face he had seen and recognized before, on another world, with the rank of a mere captain, and the name of Detrexan.

  Chapter 19

  Tralane and Akyeetha were camped by a stream in a grove of jehaffa trees filled with trilling sunukon greeting the morning sun and slate-blue sky with their rapid two-note song. Akyeetha was bathing in the stream, oblivious to the two thorts sipping water along the banks and to Tralane, who lay among the twisted, partially surfaced roots of one of the larger trees. She swam up and down stream several times, then rested somberly against the far bank, her eyes closed against the sensual assault of an unfamiliar world.

  Tralane's gaze was fixed on a distant tower peeking over the crests of some nearby hills. Memories blew to him on the cool breeze running from the tower, almost making him shiver. The shade of the tree under which he sat seemed deeper, isolating him from the rest of nature, when he recalled his days of childhood spent with these gentle hills and valleys. How many times had he sat in such secluded spots, staring off at the horizon and following the songs of birds with his heart, wishing his own ballads could travel the wind over the horizon and catch the ear of a possible companion? On such days, he had often been late in returning to the dull studies awaiting him under Mathi's tutelage.

  Even now, Tralane was reluctant to return to Mathi's tower, though the keys to many of his questions lay within those cold and lonely walls. Akyeetha and Tralane had traveled together for a month; she had trusted him to guide her through a new world while she sought, without hope, some trace of her own dead people in the faces of strangers they met on the road. He had taken her from the Ousho Plains, on which he had opened a doorway for them to tumble through after using an elementary wind-harnessing spell augmented by the Eye's power to slow their descent, then led her through the decimated remains of the southern kingdoms, and finally into this beautiful but uncolonized corner of the world where hermits and wizards frequently came to escape the constraints of everyday reality. The journey had been deliberate and leisurely, fulfilling its rational
e as a scouting mission to survey the damage wrought by the Sorcerer King's campaign of conquest. He could just as easily have brought them to the tower first, allowed each to recover from the trials they had experienced, and then ventured out. But he had picked the site where Agathom had lost his amulet to a wandering, scheming bard and archer instead. He had decided to show Akyeetha as much of her new home as possible, so she could absorb and be absorbed by her new environment. He had wanted to retrace the Sorcerer King's steps and work out a strategy to undo the evil Tralane was, in part, responsible for unleashing. And most of all, he wished to delay the confrontation with his past as long as possible.

  From the scene of his last, and most grandiose, flight from the demands of his world to the first place and person to suffer from his abandonment, Tralane's thoughts had dwelt almost solely on Mathi, the only parent he could claim. He had tried to console Akyeetha as she mourned the passing of her world, but since he was not even sure his words of solace could be understood by her, their communication was limited to soothing sounds and physical comforting. Despite these limitations and their individual preoccupations which distracted them from one another, a friendship had struggled into existence which Tralane hoped would be nurtured into strong bonds. But since she could not speak, Tralane's thoughts had rarely been interrupted.

  He wandered the labyrinths of his past, dreading the dead, quiet corners he so often found himself in—walls looming in the shadows, dwarfing the image he had constructed of himself. He could not rise above the walls, like his mythic heroes who, with a twist of their magic rings or the hasty summoning of a familiar, could relieve themselves of any task. He knew the walls were built by him, stone by stone, deed by thoughtless deed, and still he was unable to break through these barriers. Driven to the point of despair, Tralane had frequently wept in the night while Akyeetha slept. Her gentle caresses and questioning eyes, when she awoke to find him thus, could not stem the flow of tears. But the thought of Mathi, outrunning the relentless hounds of death, waiting for Tralane's return, kept him anchored to life. No matter what frustration or pain he had to endure, Tralane was determined not to fail again. The return to Mathi's tower was inevitable, for only through that return could Tralane beat down the walls which closed him in, trapping him in a world of darkness and confinement.

  He knew the passions that had sparked the souls of Akyeetha's people to continue existing on the borderlands of life and death. He was a ghost himself, waiting for the act of redemption that would free him to escape into life, as they had escaped into death. In Cumulain's Wilderness Flower, a part of him had died, been buried, mourned over, and finally forgotten in the rushing of new life. Beneath this sloughed-off shell, a new form was waiting to emerge, pushing and kicking to be born. Akyeetha was also a ghost, since her people had used her to free themselves from the lust of vengeance, and thus released her from the same tyranny that had destroyed them, leaving her to carry on the memory of their race, to grieve for the fall of a world and bear the light of a new life. Together, their souls fought to overcome the shackles of the past and start again the journey through life. Compelled by the dead, Akyeetha was struggling for a place among the living; compelled by the past, Tralane was battering against the insulating armor that had protected him for so many years, and which now threatened to stifle him at the moment of his rebirth.

  The song of the sunukon and the padding of Akyeetha's feet on the ground as she walked by, leaving beads of water on the bowed blades of grass, momentarily raised Tralane from the depths of his reverie. But the nearness of the tower and the prominence of Mathi in his mind quickly cast his brief surge of happiness into gloom. As he watched Akyeetha dress, donning the leggings, skirt, shirt, and jerkin received from a Tribe Nation along with the thorts in exchange for Tralane's help in healing and entertaining the nomads, he thought back to his younger days. A friend such as Akyeetha would perhaps have changed the frigid innocence of his childhood. Reared in the backlands of the world under a brief-worded, unaffectionate guardian, Tralane had moved on into the vast world without any expectations other than meeting people. Their cruelties, blatant as they were, he accepted. Their kindnesses, subtle and equally unexpected, he did not know how to meet and was thus unable to receive.

  The old ache in his shoulder awakened, as it always did when the winds changed and the air became heavy with impending storm. He peered into his shirt and traced the scar, sensing the roots of his past and the fissure that would break open his detached manner. Tralane scowled, knowing from the clouds that the weather was not really changing for the worse. Mathi's hand, reaching out from the tower, had touched the wound as a warning. Death was waiting for him outside of the prescribed path. Tralane had wandered, long ago, and received punishment by a demon's hand. Then he had broken away, wandered, and once again faced death. But this time he was returning, blazing his own trail through the wilderness, to show Mathi that his was not the only way through life, to power, to wisdom, to the strong, firm step that could lead where the eyes and senses and even the mind were clouded and dulled. He would return Mathi's cold touch with a warm one, proving that death had not taken him, and showing there were other things in life besides the pursuit of the obscure and inhuman.

  Tralane's anxiety was somewhat relieved by this realization of his mission in returning to Mathi's tower. By mastering such a small aspect of Mathi's nature, at least some measure of his own freedom would be gained.

  Tralane climbed out from among the roots and helped Akyeetha to dress. He smiled and kissed her as he touched her, and she looked at him with amusement and slight puzzlement. Her dark eyes regarded him somberly. Her hair was bound up tightly in a spiral pony tail at the back of her head, leaving the sharp, angular planes of her slim face fully exposed. She had gained weight to cover the sharpness of her bones, as well as strength and endurance over the course of their traveling. But she would need a great deal of rest and attention to return to the self that had been destroyed by the Emperor, and he knew better than to press his needs and attentions on her at the moment. He smiled back at her. Then he went off to fetch the thorts while Akyeetha gathered their satchels of provisions and blankets. When they were mounted, they rode slowly and in silence towards the tower.

  Chapter 20

  The land had not changed since Tralane's departure, protected as it was for seven times the span of Mathi's living years against the advances and erosions of nature. In this way, Mathi's spirit had time to transform itself into whatever form had been the wizard's goal, and not be hampered by sundry slave-demons released from their bindings to his tower as his prisoners or guards. The tower was also unchanged, standing on a wide clearing at the crest of a hill. The single doorway was closed, the windows dark. The stonework, competent but not spectacular, was still covered with vines which hugged the curving walls and crept into the windows—a sorcerous skeleton reinforcing the physical walls and protecting Mathi's stronghold from being breached by magical forces. To the north, a carpet of forest covered the last of the dwindling hills.

  Tralane and Akyeetha dismounted when they came into the range of the tower's shadow, and led their thorts to the rickety shack leaning against the tower, which was used to house the mounts of occasional visitors. As they walked, Akyeetha was absorbed in studying the tower's every detail, as if she could feel the emptiness around which the delicate walls of sorcery had been constructed.

  At last, the emptiness made itself felt to the bard, and he could no longer deny the sense of his guardian's absence.

  They left their thorts in the stable but and stood outside, each hesitating before choosing a direction. Tralane could not accustom himself to the wizard's death, and so waited for some sign of his approach. He had wanted everything to be the same as when he had left, so that his departure would not have seemed so drastic. His mind knew better, but his feelings did not.

  Tralane finally left Akyeetha and headed for the tower's door. She took the opposite direction and began to wander over the grounds.
She was weary of traveling, and the gentle stillness, brought on by the spells of preservation, visibly relaxed her. She was in a haven where, at last, she could contemplate the currents that had swept her to this time and place. Tralane hoped the setting would help her heal and that a time would come when they could see each other without awakening memories of fear, pain, and distrust. If not, the land would protect them from the world and each other for the rest of their lives.

  Upon opening the door to the tower, Tralane found the antechamber in a shambles, as if a brawl had occurred. Dust blown in through the slit windows had settled into an undisturbed carpet of gray covering the overturned tables, benches, and torch-holders. Looters had broken in after noting that the tower was unoccupied. But what could they have stolen? Wizards who left the commercial paths of the world did not have any wealth to surrender in death, and the spellbooks they used could be more easily bought, or stolen, in the cities to the north. And since Mathi's explorations in the realms of sorcery had been motivated by private desires, any discoveries he would have made had died with him.

  Tralane entered, his foot breaking the seal of dust.

  As he passed through the ground level chamber, heading towards the central, spiral stairs that wound through the heart of the building, the manner of Mathi's death haunted Tralane. Had the wizard known his time was over and sequestered himself in the uppermost chamber, which would serve as his tomb for as long as the spells of preservation persisted? Or would the bard find his tutor sprawled out and mutilated, victim to one of his own conjurings? Had he been interred by a servant or another adopted child, taken on after Tralane's departure? The jumble of furniture and tapestries stoked Tralane's discomfort. He looked into the rooms at every level and found the same disorder, signs of someone's indiscriminate pillaging of the wizard's possessions. Yet, as far as he could tell, nothing had been taken. The same tomes, instruments, charts, and vials that were familiar from childhood studies were still in the tower. Some containers were broken, their contents blown away by the wind whistling through the windows, but there was no other sign of a thief's hand.