Nightwalker

by Jacquelyn Frank

  It always started in his hands. It felt like a stinging sensation, and then it intensified. He put his hands under the water, as if that might somehow delay what was coming.

  It did not.

  In the center of his palms his skin began to blacken. Then, like the sharpest burning cinder, the centers of his hands began to glow. That was because they were cinders. His entire body was burning from the inside out and even the water could not douse the ferocious burn. He began to glow hotly, like a star caught on land, and agony clawed through him again and again. But he gritted his teeth and refused to shout out, even though it took everything that he was to keep from doing so.

  The water around him began to steam and boil, hissing as it lapped up against his fiercely burning body. It overtook him completely, every molecule of his body on fire. The water did not help or soothe.

  Nothing could help.

  This was his punishment and he must see it through, every night from dusk to juquil’s hour. There was nothing he could do to change it. He would never be able to change it. He must suffer it alone, far away from anyone who might be accidentally harmed by what he became.

  But what he didn’t know was that he wasn’t alone. Curious eyes were watching him, growing wide as they watched him burn and the water around him bubble.

  But Jaykun was far too overwhelmed with his pain to realize it.

  —

  At juquil’s hour the burning stopped. His body still glowed like the hottest ember in a fire, but now the water was able to douse that ember. The water was still steaming hot around him, but it was better than the temperature of his body, so he lay down in the water and let it cool and soothe him.

  He began to heal almost as soon as the fire was out. Healing was not an instantaneous process, but it would happen quickly. As soon as his vision had healed enough to allow for it, he got up and stumbled and waded out into the colder, deeper water. The salt of it burned even as the cold of it soothed. He could hear the hoarse barking of the seals, even though he could hardly make them out in the darkness.

  Slipping into the ocean, swimming into the calm waters of the cove, he let the water cool him completely. The dead, burned skin sloughed off his body, and within an hour freshly healed muscle and pink skin could be seen in odd patches on his flesh. By the time two hours had passed, there was no more blackened skin, only the scarring of the healing burns. Given several more hours, that scarring would disappear almost completely as well.

  Jaykun swam back to the mouth of the cave and waded into it, looking for his clothes. He was nearly dressed when he thought he heard a splash that was somehow out of place in the rhythmic lapping of the waves. Probably a seal, he thought. But he was on his guard just the same. The last thing he needed was to be ambushed by a stray enemy contingent. Especially since he had foolishly left his weapons behind. He had not been thinking straight when he left the camp, but still, the lapse was inexcusable.

  He moved to the shore, stepping around the shale outcroppings with sure footing, the darkness meaning very little to him. He had keener eyesight and senses than most, so he was able to navigate pretty easily. It also helped that the moon was newly full so it shed a fairly bright light upon the beach.

  Jaykun stepped from the sand and into the low, scrubby vegetation, picking his way back toward the camp. That was when he heard a shuffle of sound—the sound of brush being disturbed, but not by him. He turned about in the darkness, his eyes narrowing. He could sense that he wasn’t alone.

  “Get him!”

  The shout preceded the launch of dark bodies out of the vegetation. Three men in dark clothing. They had been crouched down low, indiscernible from the shale rocks and long grasses. Moonlight gleamed off a raised sword and Jaykun had to move swiftly to get out of its path. As it was, the tip of it nicked his already abused skin, leaving a thin cut on his cheek in its wake.

  That was the last lucky shot they were going to get, he thought with rising temper. But even though his temper began to bubble, his movements were sure and calm, almost rote. He caught the hand wielding that sword and jerked on it, throwing the wielder onto the rapid rise of his knee. His enemy grunted as Jaykun belted the breath out of the man’s body, and then Jaykun disarmed him, arming himself in that same fluid movement.

  The sword he had acquired was heavy in the pommel, making it poorly balanced, but it was just right for smacking the butt of it into the nose of the second man. The third man rushed in, tackling Jaykun to the rocky sand. Jaykun rolled with the weight of the man until his enemy was beneath him. Jaykun straddled the man’s chest and brought the pommel of the sword down hard on his nose, breaking it and stunning him all at once. Then Jaykun jammed the heel of his free palm up under the man’s chin, pushing his head back and opening his neck to the swipe of Jaykun’s blade.

  Blood erupted from the man’s cut throat and splashed against Jaykun’s clothing. Not that he cared. He was more concerned with the two remaining men, who had since thrown off the effects of his stunning blows and were now rushing him as a single force, tackling him back onto the sand. He felt his shoulder wrench under the impact, but he literally shrugged the sensation of it off. His heavy—bottomed sword, however, went flying from his hand.

  He wrestled for control of the situation, trying to throw off the weight of two heavy bodies sitting on his chest and legs. He arched his back hard, twisted every way he could think of, but the fact was, he was wrung out. After being run through the heart and then suffering his nightly torment, there was almost nothing left inside him. Oh, he was immortal, but he felt every single solitary second of that immortality in one way or another. Tonight it was in the injuries he had been forced to sustain. They weakened him, made him vulnerable. And gods help him if by some rare chance one of these men was wielding a god—made weapon. All it would take was a simple beheading by one such weapon and that would be the end of him. Although, sometimes…at some very low times…he wondered if that wouldn’t be for the better. It would certainly end the torment he suffered night after night. But who was to say he would not face an entirely new torment should he end up in the eight hells? At least alive there was some reprieve.

  And so he fought. Oh, how he fought. He kicked and snarled, threw the both of them off himself, but they quickly pinned him down again. Still, he did not go down easy. The two men were panting hard as they held him down, their faces battered from where he had managed to punch them, their bodies bruised likewise.

  “Stay down, trega!” the one nearest his head snarled at him, calling him what the Krizans called foreigners to their lands. The Krizan on Jaykun’s chest was built for sheer brute strength. There was no grace to him, merely muscle and ferocity. His bottom canine teeth, as with all Krizans, tusked up over his upper lip, and they were capped in a silvery metal that gleamed in the moonlight. The Krizans liked to adorn their prominent teeth in all manner of ways, but the warriors preferred to keep them sharp to make the men appear more vicious. A Krizan was not above biting his enemy.

  His nose was flat, his nostrils wide. He looked a great deal like one of the morari Jaykun had seen on the jetty. He had on a sealskin hat, the floppy ends of it hanging over his ears.

  “So, trega, you fall to Lukan! You are perhaps not so formidable after all!” he said in his guttural, heavily accented voice.

  “I presume you are Lukan?” Jaykun said dryly. He had relaxed, saving his strength for an opening when it came.

  “Lukan! Greatest of all the mighty Krizan warriors!”

  “Your mighty warriors looked more like sleepy women out on that battlefield today,” Jaykun said.

  The Krizan roared in outrage, spittle flying from his lips. “The demon trega leaders use sorcery to win their battles! Evil trickery!”

  “I hate to break it to you, but we don’t have any mages with us at present. The most dangerous things we have along those lines are the mem healers. Not very dangerous at all, I’m afraid.”

  “You are a liar, trega! All trega are liars and
demons!” He hissed past his plump lips. “Now we will disembowel you and cut you into little pieces, painting a picture with you on the beach for the other trega to find in the morning.”

  So they didn’t realize he was the trega leader. That was perhaps a good thing, Jaykun thought. Otherwise, they would have tried to kill him immediately, using him as some sort of trophy or whatever it was the Krizans liked to do to the leaders of an enemy force.

  “Why don’t you all just give up already? We’re going to come over your walls tomorrow, whether you like it or not. No one else has to die if you simply open the gates.”

  “We would rather die than let trega like you into our city, where you will kill our children and defile our women.”

  “Trust me, we don’t want anything to do with your women,” Jaykun said. To be blunt, Krizan women were twice as ugly as their hideous male counterparts.

  “Again he lies,” the second warrior said. “Who wouldn’t want the beauty of a Krizan warrior woman? Kill him. His words irritate my ears.”

  “Yes, do get on with it,” Jaykun said with a sigh.

  His blasé tone enraged the Krizan warrior. He balled up his fist and punched it dead—on into Jaykun’s face. And it hurt. There was no two ways about it. Krizan warriors were definitely strong, if not exactly bright. Had they been bright, they would have learned how to fight on land…seeing as how they lived on land and not on the ocean.

  The Krizan pulled a dagger from his boot and reared back to plunge it into Jaykun’s chest.

  Oh no. Not that again, Jaykun vowed to himself. He wrenched a hand free somehow, surprising his over—arrogant attackers and reached to catch the downward plunge, his hand grabbing the meaty forearm of the warrior and stopping the dagger dead in the air. The warrior seemed as though he couldn’t believe his eyes for a second, couldn’t believe that Jaykun had the strength to counteract his strike.

  The two struggled for several long moments, the warrior pushing down, Jaykun staving off.

  Then the softest little sound slid through the air. Like a musical note, only gentler and more beautiful. The Krizan warriors froze, and to Jaykun’s surprise, all the strength behind the dagger was gone. Instead the men were suddenly tripping over themselves to withdraw.

  “Prava!” one said to the other, their eyes wide. Both men scrambled off Jaykun, turned, and ran. They were trying to run so fast that they fell more than once.

  Jaykun sat up, at a complete loss to explain what had just happened.

  Then he heard it again. That soft, lilting note. Like a laugh. The sweetest, most singsongy laugh he’d ever heard.

  He got to his feet and peered out into the moonlit darkness. That was when he saw a figure standing there in the moonlight. A woman. She was slight of build, tall but slim. She had long hair that whipped around her body in the ocean breeze. He could not tell what color it was, only that it was dark. It fell all the way to the backs of her knees. It could cover her entire body, he found himself thinking. And a good thing too, for she was completely naked.

  She was dark skinned—again, an undetermined color—but it appeared to be an even and beautiful tone in the moonlight. She had small breasts, curvy hips, and long legs. And though he couldn’t make out her features perfectly, he knew she was quite beautiful. Not a Krizan woman—she was too tall, too lithe, too pretty.

  She came closer, increasingly revealing her beauty as she drew to within five feet of him. She was smiling softly, her eyes running down the length of him, no doubt sizing him up just as he was assessing her. She seemed…fascinated. She reached out as if to touch him and he jerked back. Her hand lowered.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she said, her voice musical and sweet.

  “Who are you?” Jaykun demanded of her.

  “I saw you. Saw you burn. Saw the waters boil. How did you do that? Why would you do that? Do you enjoy it? Does it not hurt? Do you do that often?”

  She barely paused between questions, leaving him a moment to get over the shock of knowing he’d been watched. He supposed it had to happen sometime, but he had not seen anyone in the cave. He could have sworn he was alone.

  “Did the Krizan hurt your tongue? Can you not answer? Is the moon not beautiful tonight?” She turned her face up toward it, closed her eyes, and drew in a deep breath. She opened her eyes again and looked at him, and he saw they were a pale, silvery color in the moonlight.

  “Who are you?” Jaykun asked again.

  “Jileana. Who are you?”

  “Jaykun,” he answered in turn. “Where did you come from?”

  “From the beach,” she said. “Can you show me how to make the water bubble? I want to learn how to do it.”

  “No, I can’t, and trust me, you don’t want to know how.”

  She frowned at him in consternation. “Very well. If you don’t wish to share. Let’s go back to the beach. It’s safer there.”

  “I would much rather go back to my encampment.” He eyed her nude state. “You shouldn’t be out here…unprotected.”

  “Yes, it is not safe. Men make war.”

  “I am one of those men,” he told her baldly.

  She took a hesitant step back. “Are you going to make war with me and my family?”

  “I…I don’t know who your family is. But I don’t make war on just anyone. In fact, I prefer not to make war. When I first go to a city, I see whom it is they worship, then I try to convince them to let mems of my goddess set up temples there. If they refuse, I become more…forceful in my request.”

  “But my family worships Diathus. We have always worshipped Diathus.”

  “The goddess of the land and oceans. That would make sense, coming from…Well, I assume you are from around here. But everyone should worship Weysa as well. For without conflict there can be no peace, of the mind, the body, or the soul. We must be conflicted from time to time so that we may make the best choices and judgments, making us stronger and more sure.”

  Jaykun couldn’t believe he was in the saw grass philosophizing with a naked woman, but it didn’t stop him from doing so.

  “You make a very good point. I shall have you speak to my father one day. He is quite learned and enjoys such debates. My mother as well.” She turned her head suddenly and looked back toward the beach. “I have to go now. Will you come back tomorrow night?” she asked.

  “You can be certain of it,” Jaykun said wryly.

  “Very well. I will see you then! Goodbye!” She waved at him and hurried off. She was fast, moving sleekly into the darkness. All Jaykun could do was watch the line of her bare body until she disappeared into the cove he had come from. Odd—there was nothing down that stretch of beach. It was the very reason he had chosen it. Where could she possibly be going?

  Jaykun didn’t have time to dawdle over the matter. It was late and there was danger of another enemy patrol coming by. Although, he suspected that raggedy band were soldiers who had fled the thick of the battle, waiting for darkness to hide their presence so they could perhaps escape or, as they had done, cause trouble.

  Jaykun went back to the encampment without any further molestation, which was a good thing, because he found himself completely preoccupied by the appearance of Jileana. Not just the baffling question of where she had come from but so much more. Why had she been naked? There were dangerous men from both armies encamped just a short distance away. It was madness for her to be out and about at all, never mind in such a vulnerable way.

  She had been really quite beautiful. As Jaykun thought about it, he could not recall having seen any woman to compare. All the more reason for her to be more cautious. Beauty could be a curse for a woman, drawing unwanted attention. Dangerous attention. And if he had to confess it, he himself had been incredibly drawn to her. Had she actually touched him…there was no telling what his reaction might have been.

  No. Not true. He would not have had any reaction, Jaykun told himself sternly. She was just another woman who happened to be pretty. No more, no less. And he had no
place in his life for women, pretty or otherwise.

  He made it back to the command tent, the encampment quiet now in comparison to the activity of earlier. When he entered the tent, he found both of his brothers pacing anxiously, still fully dressed in their armor.

  “At last!” Dethan cried when he saw Jaykun. “What took you so long?”

  “You know why I must go.”

  “Yes, of course we do,” Garreth said with a manner of impatience. “But you are usually back—-Have you been in a fight?” he asked abruptly.

  “That is why I was delayed. I was waylaid on the way back.”

  “Oh. I see you made it out in one piece,” Dethan said.

  “Don’t I always?”

  “You know, it is not a given that you will make it back with all your limbs or your head attached. You can still be beheaded by a normal sword and left on the ground, unable to heal until your body parts are reunited.”

  “Yes,” Garreth said. “It is very hard to find one’s head with one’s body when the body cannot see the head for lack of eyes.”

  “This is all a moot topic. I am fine,” Jaykun said, impatient with his brothers’ worrying. He did not like to be coddled. He was perfectly capable of handling himself in any situation. “If you wish to discuss something, then let us discuss how we will approach the city walls tomorrow.”

  “I was thinking we would send a messenger, offer the leaders one last chance to open their gates peacefully to us. Their army, such as it is, has been decimated. Our taking of the city is only a matter of time. Surely they must realize it at this point.”

  “They might. It does not follow that they will behave wisely. Would you risk the life of a messenger?”

  “Better one life than the lives of many.”

  “Yes, but the Krizans are very dishonorable,” Jaykun pointed out. “It is very unlikely they will respect parlay.”

  “So we don’t try at all?”