The Lure of Fools

by Jason James King

  “No,” Gymal drawled, and his tone sounded thoughtful. “Those are quite expensive.”

  Jekaran’s sudden worry faded.

  “But the king is certain to have one.”

  Damn it! “What’s going to happen to me?” Jekaran rasped, and he was angry at how frightened he sounded.

  “If what you say about the Allosian woman giving you the sword is true, then you will likely not be facing execution. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

  Give your will to me, and I will free us.

  Jekaran flashbacked to feeling his body move outside of his control while he was a prisoner in his own mind. “No!” he snapped.

  “No, what?” The man’s tone sounded confused.

  I will never let you have control again! He projected to the sword. You nearly got me killed!

  But, I destroyed your enemies. The sword said.

  Jekaran could feel its hurt confusion. “Nine hundred ninety-seven. Nine hundred ninety-four…” he whispered, slipping back into Kairah’s trick for keeping control of his bond with the sword.

  “You said his brain was not damaged,” Gymal accused Hort.

  “I believe I said,” Hort coolly responded, “that it was likely not damaged.”

  “Keep watching him and signal me if he lapses back into a coma!”

  Why did Gymal care if he was hurt? Why did the man care if he even lived?

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Gymal walked away, the slamming door jolting Jekaran’s head once more.

  Tyrus Gymal, baron of Saldren and junior heir to the house of Myadra, shut the door to the brig behind him, perhaps a little harder than he had intended. Seeing Jekaran battered and still half-dazed had shaken him, and he offered a prayer to Rasheera for the boy’s complete recovery.

  He ground his teeth in frustration as he climbed a narrow set of stairs that were really no more than warped wooden rungs of a slanted ladder. The boy was making his job difficult. First with that business in Rasha–he had paid the magistrate an obscene bribe in order to keep Jekaran from being hanged–and again when they were in the western rock lands. Then there was the catastrophe in Imaris. Tyrus had been certain Jekaran was going to be killed by that fire-flinging madman, and it had only been the boy’s miraculous swordplay that saved him. And saved me.

  Oh, Kybon. It should be you doing this, not me.

  After ascending three narrow staircases, he emerged onto the deck of the ship. He had to squint as his eyes adjusted to the new morning’s sunlight. Tyrus made his way past a pair of hung-over sailors grumbling about something. The cool ocean breeze was refreshing, and for the first time in years, Tyrus’ nose was clear. He breathed in deeply, relishing his unobstructed nasal passages. As he rounded the cabin that led below deck, he caught sight of something tall in the distance. It had to be tall for him to see it this far from shore, but then again the Apeira well was said to be the largest in all of Shaelar.

  “Aiested,” he whispered. They were almost there. If I can see the well, does that mean we’re close enough to drink in its energy? Tyrus looked down at his chest where he hung his dousing stone. To his disappointment, the medallion-set amethyst was still dark.

  Tyrus strode toward the stern of the ship where the captain’s quarters of the Queen’s Honor was situated. Tyrus snorted. Giving an old galleon a fresh coat of paint, and dressing its crew in uniformed livery did not make it a luxury liner; though the price Tyrus had paid made him feel like he had booked passage on one. He ascended the four steps to the door of the captain’s quarters, fished in the right pocket of his robe for the key, and then unlocked and entered the cabin.

  The interior was wood paneling decorated by hand-drawn maps adorning the walls. The only furniture not bolted to the floor was a few chairs, none of which were very comfortable to sit in. Tyrus pocketed the key and walked to a cabinet hanging on the wall to his right. He opened it, snatched a glass decanter filled with amber liquid, and took a long pull right from the bottle.

  Haeshalan brandy was a rare find and technically illegal in Aiested. Tyrus would be sure to remind the captain of that should he take issue with his involuntary sharing of it. Tyrus put the bottle back and closed the cabinet.

  He surveyed the small cabin while enjoying the warmth that bloomed in his chest. It had cost him an additional fifty silver Aies to rent the quarters from the captain. Normally guest quarters suited him just fine–Tyrus never had been one to indulge in comfort for its own sake–but he needed a secure place to stow the sword–and her.

  He looked through an open door at his right to the room’s sleeping quarters. Lying on a feather-stuffed mattress was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. With skin as pale as ivory and hair impossibly the same color as translucent amethyst stone, the woman was an Allosian. An actual Allosian; one of the fey folk of legend!

  Tyrus walked to stand just outside the doorway to the sleeping room. The Allosian woman– Kairah, Jekaran had named her–slept peacefully. He was embarrassed that she still wore her damp dress; it made the silk cling to her skin in several immodest ways, but he didn’t have any maidservants about to tend to the woman. And he wouldn’t even think of being so crass as to change her clothing himself. Tyrus became conscious of staring at Kairah’s form and quickly turned away, cheeks feeling hot and not from the brandy.

  He walked away from the sleeping room and sat down in one of the hard wooden chairs. Yes, he had definitely over-paid for the comfort of using the captain’s quarters. Perhaps that justified his polishing off that bottle of Haeshalan brandy. Tyrus made to stand but stopped as his eyes fell on the pommel of the weapon-talis sticking out from underneath his bags.

  He slid off the chair to kneel next to it, and carefully drew the sword out. It was a very strange piece of talis-craft, like nothing he had ever seen before. An oval-shaped amethyst was set in the middle of the cross-guard and the tapered blade was dotted with tiny emeralds.

  This is connected to Jekaran somehow. He had learned that the moment he had tried to use the talis. Tyrus supposed that made sense. While he had never seen a weapon talis that bonded its wielder, he knew of other kinds of talises that did similar things; the blood seeker that he had used to track Jekaran to Imaris for example. That posed a singular problem. If he was to present it to the king, then the connection would need to be broken. With the blood seeker, it was a simple matter of feeding it a new blood sample. Perhaps the sword worked like that? Perhaps Jekaran could willingly pass the bond to another. Tyrus didn’t even want to think about what it would mean if Jekaran couldn’t give it up.

  Oh, Kybon. He shook his head. Why hadn’t his cousin been content to marry the viscount’s daughter? Life would’ve been so much easier and their family’s status elevated had he just done his duty. Tyrus had never had any problem attending to his duties. But then again, he hadn’t ever had those kinds of opportunities, he being a hopeless case when it came to attracting women.

  “I’m in love with her, Ty,” his cousin had affirmed. “High society will never offer me the kind of joy that I feel by just staring into her eyes.”

  It had all been nauseatingly romantic, but then again Tyrus’ cousin had always been led more by his heart than his brain. Tyrus smiled wanly at the memory of embarrassingly bad love sonnets his cousin had tried to compose.

  “Your eyes are like really blue and deep water,” he whispered with a chuckle.

  Between the two of them, Tyrus had been the scholar, excelling as a student as much as Kybon excelled as an athlete. In the end, Kybon had prevailed upon him to write to the peasant girl in his name. They had been as different as night and day; Kybon tall, handsome, and attracted to adventure, and Tyrus short, homely, and completely apathetic to the world outside his books. Yet they had been close, more like brothers than cousins.

  The boy is just like him, down to that insufferable arrogance and a tendency to act without forethought. The only difference was the color of his eyes–green. No one in their line had green eyes, at least a
s far back as Tyrus had followed the genealogy.

  Light–soft, purple, and dim–began to emanate from his chest. The dousing stone was beginning to glow. He looked up from his position on the floor, through the doorway at the sleeping Allosian woman. She would be receiving a trickle of Apeiron now. How much did she need to heal? How long before she would wake?

  Tyrus stood, and shook out the pins and needles in his right leg as he hobbled toward the sleeping chamber. Again, he stopped just outside the room. For some reason it felt inappropriate for him to move any closer to her. And it wasn’t just for the sake of propriety. Tyrus didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he was afraid of the fey woman. He needed her to wake for the sake of the message that she bore, but he had seen some of what she could do. She was powerful in a way that wasn’t….well, wasn’t human.

  She stirred, and Tyrus held his breath in anticipation of her waking, but she remained unconscious. However, he could see some life coming back into her already pale face. She moaned softly, causing him to take a wary step backward. Tyrus could see movement underneath her closed eyelids. That hadn’t happened before. The only sign of life she had displayed was slow, shallow breathing. Now it appeared that she was dreaming. Was that a good sign? Tyrus decided that it was.

  Kairah stood on a beach she didn’t recognize. Gentle wind fluttered the fabric of her dress and tickled her eyes with strands of her loose hair. She brushed it out of her face and looked behind her. An endless, rolling sea softly churned and frothed. She turned back and took a step forward. The wet sand molded to her bare feet as she moved away from the tide line and up a sandy incline.

  How had she come to be here? The last thing she remembered was Jekaran destroying the crystal golem. I slipped into unconsciousness. She worked through the memory. And fell into the sea. Could that be how she had ended up on this beach? She looked around again, but nothing was familiar and she couldn’t see any signs of civilization anywhere on the coast.

  Kairah gasped as she crested the sandy hill and froze. The sight before her was awesome in its terribleness. Hundreds of miles of barren rock lay before her beneath a sky of roiling black clouds. It was a scene of emptiness and death the likes of which she had never before seen.

  “Where am I?” she whispered aloud, but the eerie quiet of this place made Kairah feel like she was shouting.

  She took a tentative step off the soft sand and onto the black rock ground. Intuitively, she knew that nothing lived here, not a single blade of grass, scurrying insect, or tiny microbe. The land was truly dead in every sense of the word. Kairah took two more steps, the bare ground scraping the soft tissue of her feet. She ignored it as best she could and continued to make her way across the ground.

  Mountains rose in the distance, black things devoid of any greenery. Nor were their peaks capped by snow like they ought to have been. They didn’t resemble any of the mountains with which Kairah was familiar, and she had a superior knowledge of Shaelar’s topography. A flash of green lightning washed over the dead landscape, quickly followed by an angry clap of thunder. Green lightning? She reflexively reached out for Aeva but stopped. The distance between the two of them would be too great for communication. She was alone here.

  Kairah stopped walking and surveyed the black land. Another flash of emerald lightning lit up the sky and revealed something else in the distance. She strained her eyes at the horizon, but it wasn’t until a third flash of lightning streaked across the sky that she was able to see it–a city. It looked to be a large city; its buildings made of white stone set in architecture not unlike those of Allose.

  The sight of something familiar rallied Kairah’s courage, and she quickly moved off in the direction of the city. All of her senses continued to report a total absence of life, but she wanted to see the city to know for herself. It wasn’t impossible someone dwelt in that city although she should be able to sense it. But then again, her core felt unusually cold and vulnerable, meaning that her Apeiron was very nearly exhausted. That could impact her ability to sense other life even from a sizable population if the distance was great enough.

  Kairah lifted the fringe of her dress and began jogging. The black rock landscape cut her feet, and soon her footprints were wet with blood, but she ignored it. Something beyond her sight drove her toward the distant city, and it seemed to Kairah that she ran upon the very threads of fate.

  She had to get to that city. There she would find something, something she had long searched for. Answers, the city held answers. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, she just did; the same way one knows an abstract fact in a dream. She just knew.

  Stoic, Prince Raelen Lesta Taris stood at parade-rest next to his father’s throne as he watched the men of the court file in. As was typical, the group of lords and generals were lost in a milieu of conversation that blended together into a dull roar–like a waterfall, Raelen thought. He glanced to the side and out one of the throne room’s tall, narrow windows.

  It had been weeks since his father had allowed him to take a trip into the northern woods, and the stress of palace life was making Raelen itch for another hunting trip. He had to call it that in order to convince his father to allow him outside of Aiested. It just wouldn’t do for the king to have his firstborn son–the crown prince of the realm–taking trips into the forest solely as a kindness to his Ursaj servant, Gryyth.

  Raelen glanced to the back of the room where an eight-foot-tall figure stood. He was covered from head to foot in smooth, white fur with a charcoal grey muzzle and azure eyes. The bear-man wore a fine tunic over his fur and a small spike through his ear. The earring was gold capped by an amethyst jewel–a slave awl. A talis connected to a companion ring worn by the king allowed Raelen’s father to dominate the bear-man along with several others.

  That had never sat quite right with Raelen when he was a child, and only became worse as he grew older. It was when he had actually started to talk to, not command, but to talk to Gryyth that Raelen began to understand that the Ursaj was not a willing servant. No, the bear-man was a slave.

  “But slaving is illegal,” he remembered his eleven-year-old self protesting to his father.

  “That law is for men, not animals,” his father had replied. “And Ursaj are fierce animals!”

  The king had gone on to warn Raelen that if Gryyth were free of his slave talis, he wouldn’t hesitate to claw Raelen into raw meat and he devour him. Raelen recalled having stayed away from Gryyth for several days because of his father’s graphic description of what the Ursaj would do to him if it had the chance.

  That fear became progressively more ridiculous each time the boy Raelen had looked into Gryyth’s bright blue eyes. They were not the eyes of a ferocious monster, hunger making it eagerly strain against its restraints in hopes of breaking free in an explosion of blood and violence. No, those eyes were kind, and every bit as human as Raelen’s own eyes.

  It was then that Raelen had begun to notice a quiet sadness in his Ursaj servant. It was always so with the white bear-man, except when Raelen could take him into the forest to run, hunt, and climb trees. That seemed to provide Gryyth with some relief, and so Raelen took as many hunting trips as his father would allow.

  As his official protector, Gryyth had been continually in the prince’s presence as long as Raelen could remember. He loved the bear-man’s booming voice as it told him the lore of his people, and he often slept in those huge furry arms when he was small. No, if there was a monster in the palace, it wasn’t Gryyth. Raelen turned to his left where his father sat straight-backed upon his ivory throne.

  King Raeleth Joran Taris the eighteenth was the very picture of kingly dignity. His handsome face was square-ish in shape, with a black beard that lined a jaw that looked cut from stone. His nose was slightly angular, and his brow beetled, but not in a way that subtracted from his good looks. But it was Raelen’s father’s eyes most people noted; stern, cold things that could shake even a hard man with their penetrating stare. Yes, Raelen’s father a
ppeared every bit the image of the gallant-looking statues that lined both sides of the throne room. And he acted the part superbly well.

  Diction, formality, and strict emotional control were the King’s most notable qualities, attributes he expected mirrored to perfection in his children. Failure to adhere to the King’s impossibly high standards resulted in severe corporeal consequences when Raelen and his siblings were children, and more subtle punishments as they grew older. His older sister, Saranna, had served as his father’s greatest warning example in that regard.

  Prone to fits of rebellious defiance, Saranna had no fear of calling into question their father’s strict and sometimes contradictory expectations. The king mostly abided Saranna’s fits, as he was wont to call them, chalking them up to her monthly bout of feminine insanity. Not that they would ever go unpunished, but the punishments were not physical, not after Saranna began to become a woman.

  No, it was against Raelen’s father’s code to strike a woman, although he had no such compunctions about striking his sons. Instead, he would publically humiliate Raelen’s sister, preferably in front of her suitors. Once, the king even went so far as to have Saranna’s diary stolen from her quarters, a particularly delicate passage copied, and then distributed amongst the nobility. Saranna had been so angry and embarrassed, she’d sequestered herself in her quarters for nearly two months.

  The final offense that had won Saranna the full measure of their father’s wrath, and taught the other children just how far the king would go in the severity of his punishments, came when she exploded at him before the court. Raelen didn’t doubt the spectacle had been planned by his sister, for it had come on a day when the king was addressing a full assembly of his advisers among the military and nobility. And since such assemblies only occurred once every three months, Raelen knew Saranna had at least been thinking about it if not actively planning it.

  He couldn’t remember what the actual conflict had been about. No, all he remembered was the deep scarlet his father’s face had flushed as Saranna aired their dirty laundry for all to see. His sister had all but accused their father of causing their mother’s untimely death by his habit of fathering bastard children with a variety of mistresses. Saranna had even gone so far as to hint that not all of the king’s extra marital affairs had been with women.