“Trouble with the locks?” Kadmallin asked as he handed Sketkee the reins of her mount and climbed atop the back of his own.
“Rakthor meat skewers make poor lock picks.” Sketkee ignored her mount’s skittish prancing as she climbed into the saddle. She glanced to the flaming tower across the courtyard. “I see your distraction went well.”
“It is surprising how much fire a tapestry and some lamp oil can produce.” Kadmallin reached down to yank the stop lever holding the gears of the gate in place. As the lever left the gear, the counter weight plunged toward the ground, the attached chains running along pulleys to raise the gate. He tugged at a second nearby lever, sending another counter weight upward as the drawbridge slowly lowered.
“The mechanicals make a considerable amount of noise.” Sketkee frowned at the clanging racket of the gate and drawbridge.
“Lack of oil and care.” Kadmallin looked back to the tower. “Hopefully, no one will hear over the commotion of the fire.”
“Let us not wait to find out.” Sketkee dug her heels into her horse’s sides, urging the beast forward over the moat.
Kadmallin followed beside her, both of them reining their mounts to a halt as four large shapes emerged from the shadows at the edge of the moat and drawbridge. The shadows doffed their black cloaks to unveil rakthor guards armed with long curved swords glinting in the wan light of the slivered moons in the sky above.
“Stealthy and efficient.” Sketkee raised her hands, keeping them far away from the sword strapped to her horse.
“I’m surprised we made it this far.” Kadmallin raised his arms as well.
“Indeed.” Sketkee watched as the four guards approached across the bridge.
She allowed the guards to pull her from the horse, bind ropes around her wrists, and lead her back into the castle where Viktik waited by the open gate. He said nothing and she made no attempt to speak as the guards pulled her toward the blacksmith’s shed near the stables.
To continue reading the Philosopher story arena follow this link.
To continue reading Sketkee’s storyline follow this link.
THE TEMPLE
RAEDALUS
INK-LEADEN SHEAVES of parchment lined the wide, age-worn planks of the floor, the stacks casting slender shadows in the candlelight. Raedalus placed a sheet of parchment in one stack, then picked it up and placed it on another. He sighed. He had unbound the pages of The Red Book of Revelations, the collection of Moaratana’s pronouncements, in hopes of ordering them more appropriately. A seemingly pointless process he had begun to regret beginning. How did they fit together? It reminded him of trying to assemble one of those wooden puzzles his father used to fashion for him as a child.
He leaned back where he sat on the floor beside the candleholder and sighed. The day had been long and tasking. Dealing with the charred remains of the ship the Kam-Djen fanatics torched ate most of the daylight hours. Then there came the haggling to procure a replacement vessel. Then discussions on how to ensure such a thing could not happen again. Where to post guards. How many. How to arm them. And the prayers. Prayers for protection. Prayers for guidance. Prayers for swift completion of their fleet.
It did not escape Raedalus that none of the prayers the night before to douse the flames devouring the ship had provoked a response. The Goddess seemed content to let them deal with their own affairs unless lives might be in danger. And even then, she often remained silent. He found no code of order that indicated when the Goddess may or may not intervene in the world. He had hoped to find it in the revelations, the prophetic statements the Mother Shepherd uttered while in trance, but it had not been forthcoming. Neither, of late, had the revelations. The Mother Shepherd had not spoken in trance in a week. Ten days of silence. It worried him, but she thought nothing of it. She said the Goddess would provide them the words they needed when they needed them.
But how to order those words? Raedalus stared at the papers spread across the floor of his tiny house and sighed again. The second home repaired in the once abandoned coastal village that now housed the pilgrims, it sat just beside the one used by the Mother Shepherd. It allowed him to be nearby if she should sense a revelation approaching, and in the event she needed assistance of any other kind. A vision of what that assistance might one day entail arose in his mind, and he shooed it away with an irritated wave of his hand. He had more important things to do than daydream of impossibilities.
A soft knock at the door brought his eyes up from the papers on the floor.
“Enter.”
Taksati opened the door and stepped inside. She bore a small clay cup in her wrinkled hands.
“I saw that you were up late, and I thought you might need some fortification.” She raised the cup, a gesture of truce between two adversaries working on the same side.
“Thank you.” Raedalus pointed to a table nearby. “You may set it down there.”
What did the woman want to arrive so late?
“What task keeps you up at such hours?” Taksati placed the cup on the table.
“I am attempting to order the revelations.” Raedalus stood, stretching his back. He told himself that he stood to relieve his cramped legs, but he knew that truthfully, he could not abide to sit while the old dried rag of flesh hovered over him.
“Is their order not the order in which they were revealed?” Taksati stared around the floor at the stacks of parchment.
“I had thought as much at first, but they are far more difficult to understand in the order the Mother Shepherd spoke them.” Raedalus took the cup of tea and sipped at it. Hayflower and hesop. His favorite. The liquid eased his mind as it warmed his throat and stomach.
“They do tend to carry many buckets at once,” Taksati said.
Raedalus stifled a frown. Servant aphorisms. How helpful.
“I had hoped to arrange them by the nature of the revelation.” Raedalus looked at the parchments once more, again frustrated that the manner of assembling them did not appear clearly to him. “I had thought to put conduct for laity with vows for the priests, to set instructive parables side by side, and to place prophecy alone. However, doing so requires breaking the revelations apart, which seems wrong.”
“I am certain you will find a way.” Taksati nodded as she folded her hands before her.
“Yes. Eventually.” Raedalus looked to the old woman. “Why do you linger, Taksati?”
“I wished to speak with you on a delicate matter.” She met his eyes.
“Proceed.” Raedalus wondered what problem might require a midnight visit and a peace offering of tea. He suspected he knew, but did not want to know.
“You have no doubt noticed the increase in hours that Junari spends in the company of Bon-Tao.” Taksati spoke quietly and softly, as though treading verbally through rough terrain.
“I have.” Raedalus narrowed his eyes. Why would the woman raise such a subject? Surely it could be no concern of hers. Or his, to be honest.
“I wish to ask you not to interfere in whatever may arise from those meetings.” Taksati continued to look at him — a statue of aged black leather, dried by years in the sun.
“What gives you cause to think I would?” Raedalus swallowed, then took a sip of tea to mask his growing discomfort at the conversation.
“I am old, my bones weary, my hands weak, my hearing dim, but my eyes see clearly.” Taksati smiled and put a finger to the side of one eye.
“Do they?” Raedalus could not quite think of a better response, even though he knew it to be appallingly inadequate.
“Yes.” Taksati’s smile faded as she lowered her hand to once more clasp it with its companion at her waist. “And I also see that Junari needs more than we two alone can offer. She is a woman of greatness, and she must have those she can rely upon close to her. We are all her servants, and we each serve her in different ways. You give her things I could never hope to, and I provide others that you do not possess. Bon-Tao can assist her in ways that you and I cannot.”
Raedalus looked down at the clay cup of tea in his hand, his chest constricting with conflicting feelings, a tension growing along his jaw. The old woman spoke truth. A truth he did not wish to hear. A truth that drained away the reservoir of his dreams and left it baking dry in the hot sun of reality. Generally, he found that while reality proved necessary and vital, it gave little comfort in the small hours of the night when all alone in one’s bed. At those times, dreams, especially the waking ones, provided better succor.
“I will not interfere. But if he betrays her…”
“If he betrays her, he will find my teeth at his throat.”
The tone of the old woman’s voice gave no doubt of her sincerity. They might dislike one another, but they agreed on the truly important matters.
“Is that all?” Raedalus handed her the cup.
“Yes.” Taksati took the cup in her hands and made to leave. She paused and looked again at the papers carpeting the wooden floor. “In the temple storerooms, when we could not sort items by their likeness, by their color or shape, we often arranged them by their size.”
Raedalus looked again at the revelations spread at his feet, a sudden wave of dizziness engulfing him. As it passed, he saw the subtle truth in the old woman’s suggestion. He thought through the words of the revelations, the subjects upon which they touched. If placed in the order of their length, shortest first, they became a more coherent whole — passages at first obscure revealing their meaning when juxtaposed with the following revelation of the appropriate size.
“Thank you, Taksati.” Raedalus knelt to the floor and began picking up sheaves of parchment, reordering them by the length of the text.
“Thank you, Raedalus.”
Taksati closed the door as she departed, but he did not notice. He spent the rest of the night aligning the revelations, checking the number of words in each, placing them in the order they had always been intended to be read. By the time the candles burned down to their wicks, he lay upon the floor, fast asleep as he cradled the completed Red Book of Revelations, the perfectly ordered pronouncements of the Goddess Moaratana.
To continue reading the Temple story arena follow this link.
THE SEER
ABANANTHUS
ANCIENT RUINS and a ruby star became a glittering ocean of diamonds floating in blackness beside two shards of pale, pearly light illuminating a distant azure sphere below. Abananthus blinked his eyes, sleep and wakefulness seeming to merge into some third reality. He rubbed his face as he stared up at the twin moons cresting in the sky. He hated the feeling of not knowing whether he dreamed and slumbered or woke and thought in the real world. The pressing pain in his bladder led him to believe he beheld the realm of real rather than imaginary problems.
He sat up and looked around the yard. He saw the tent, candlelight casting a shadow across the canvas of a man hunched over something. He frowned. Rankarus and his secret project. The task he mentioned to no one and only worked on in the dead of night while the others slept. Abananthus did not need to check to know that Kellatra and the old woman scholar had fallen asleep in the cabin. If they had not, Rankarus would not be working in the tent.
Abananthus pulled his boots on and used the support post of the porch roof to pull himself to his feet, bones and joints creaking with the effort. He really had grown too old for slumbering out of doors. He probably should have accepted the old woman’s offer to sleep in the house. Or at least he should have sought a softer resting place in the high grass of the clearing in front of the cabin. But in the first case, he would need to intrude on the old woman’s routine, and in the second, he would have to contend with the morning mountain dew. Better to have a hard bed on the porch. And he did enjoy dozing in the night air, the stars above watching over him as he slept. And it wouldn’t matter where he slept; the damnable dreams would still come. Nothing could be done about that, regardless of how stiff his back became.
He wandered off the porch and around the house. It would not be polite to piss on the old woman’s front lawn, even if she would not know. A thin-shingled outhouse sat away from the cabin near the tree line, but one did not endure that fetid aroma unless the task required it. He stepped over to the wall of tree trunks rising up behind the cabin and began to undo the belt holding his britches up. His legs started to dance uncontrollably as his bladder sensed the impending release of pressure. He managed to free his member without drenching himself with urine. He sighed quietly, listening to the peaceful sound of water striking dead pine needles. It reminded him of the summer rains of his childhood. Odd what memories came unbidden as he aged.
A man truly carries naught but his memories, and even these treasure sacks must eventually be put down in the final stretch of the road.
He hoped his own approach to that final stretch of road lay a number of years off. The uncharitable thought occurred to him that the longer he stayed with Kellatra and Rankarus, the more likely that road might come to an abrupt end. He hiked up his trousers and buckled his belt once more. As he turned to walk around the cabin, a sound stopped him. The sound of footsteps. A single pair of boots softly padding in the night would indicate Rankarus heading back to the cabin after completing work on his project for the evening. There were far more than a single pair of feet making noise in the darkness.
Abananthus quietly eased around to the side of the cabin, clinging to the wall. As he neared the edge, he leaned his head out slightly to get a look at the yard. He grimaced as he saw the six men standing near the tents. As he watched, they pulled Rankarus out into the moonlight. He couldn’t hear what they said, but he didn’t need to. The uniforms of five of the men told him what he needed to know. Kellatra’s father had found them. How he’d done so presented a mystery Abananthus had no interest just then in solving. How they had found the family did not matter as much as how the family might once more escape.
He slowly backed away along the side of the cabin and cautiously stepped into the woods. His best chance at helping the others would be to surprise their adversaries at the proper moment. The problem, of course, came in knowing when that moment arrived.
The wise man knows when to sow the seeds of his destiny and when to leave the field fallow for another season.
Abananthus crouched low as he patiently guided his bulky frame between the trunks of the trees, thankful that so little vegetation grew beneath the wide branches of the conifers populating the mountainside. As he slowly walked, he kept an eye on the ground, both to ensure he did not step on a twig and announce his presence as well as to search for a suitable weapon. While he had a small dagger at his belt, he needed something more formidable to provide his friends with assistance. He found a fairly straight log from a fallen branch. Twice the length of his arm and nearly as thick, it would service as a crude club. He made his way through the woods to a position where he could see the cabin and yard again from the opposite side near the tents and wagon. As he crouched into a position that gave him a good view, two of the men holding Rankarus fell to the ground. It took Abananthus a moment to realize that crossbow bolts protruded from their ribs. As he watched, seven men emerged from the shadows, two from behind the wagon, and one not far from him in the woods. They killed the remaining guard holding Rankarus and proceeded to take him captive again. The thieves who wanted Rankarus, no doubt. How had these men also found the family? Had the children left a trail of sunflower seeds like in that bedtime tale of the Dark Sight witch and the lost twin princes?
He wiped the sweat from his face with a hand covered in the powder of dried tree bark. He noticed the smell of pine clinging to him as he saw the new arrivals pull Jadaloo and the children from the second tent. Fear and anger made his hands shake. He wanted to leap from the trees and smash at the men who pressed blades to the children’s necks. He looked to his fingers and willed them to stillness.
What could he do? How could he change the circumstances of the situation to his advantage? What did all the men want?
Abananth
us crept to the edge of the woods, staying low, aligning himself with the back of Rankarus’s tent, out of view of the men standing in front of it. He heard one of the men call out.
“We gots the family. Yer men is dead. We wants the book.”
Abananthus crossed the short span of knee-high grass and crouched behind Rankarus and Kellatra’s tent. He lifted the back edge of the canvas and peeked inside. Rankarus could not have had time to return the book. It must be somewhere in the tent. He slowly reached around inside, finding what he sought under a folded blanket. His hand found something else there as well. A small wooden box and a stack of papers. Ah. As he had expected. Rankarus’s midnight project.
He heard a man he assumed to be Kellatra’s father speaking from the porch and ignored him, concentrating on his task. He carefully pulled the book out of the tent and then retrieved the wooden box and the papers. Just as he retreated to the cover of the woods again, the leader of the thieves ordered one of the others to search the tent. He knelt on one knee behind a wide pine trunk and watched the man yank the canvas from the ground and rummage through the contents.
Abananthus listened to Rankarus and the leader of the thieves argue about the location of the book. Now that he had it, how could he use it to shift the balance of power between the parties and bargain for the family’s lives? His consideration of a means to barter with the thieves and Kellatra’s father ceased as the leader of the thieves yelled out an order that chilled his heart.
The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Volume 1) Page 66