The Speaker’s face twitched, a crack appearing in his seemingly unflappable composure. “She is not one of Kevlane’s creatures, nor is she in his employ.”
Aaron shrugged. “Not good enough. You can say that, but I know what I saw, and it is suspicious enough. How can you be sure that she isn’t—”
“Because she’s my daughter!” the Speaker roared, his voice thick with emotion, and the mask of calm fell away completely, leaving a face twisted with fear and untold grief.
Aaron studied the man. “Your daughter.”
The Akalian took a slow, deep breath as if gathering his calm once more, but he was not fully able to banish the emotion from his face. “Yes.”
“I didn’t think the Akalians had children.”
The Speaker turned away as if unable to meet the sellsword’s gaze and studied the young woman lying in the bed, fast asleep despite his shouting. “We do not.”
“You’re going to have to explain,” Aaron said, sorry for the pain that thoughts of the woman caused the Speaker, but not sorry enough to risk the lives of Adina and the others.
The Speaker sighed heavily. “You will not be satisfied that she is of no consequence in your quest and leave it at that?”
Aaron didn’t answer, only watched him, and finally the black-garbed man nodded, a sadness gathering in his eyes that was hard to look upon. “Very well. If you must know the truth of it, then I will tell you, but I warn you that I have never told anyone else of these things—not anyone—and the telling of them will be…difficult.”
Aaron nodded. “In my experience, most things that matter are.”
“Yes,” the Speaker said, still studying the girl. “You are right, of course.”
Still, he hesitated, and the sellsword only stood in silence, waiting for the man to recall the memories which seemed to cause him such pain. Finally, the Akalian began to speak, and his voice seemed to come from a long way off, as if some physical part of him were being pulled back into the past. “Thirty years ago, I and some of my brothers heard rumors from the southern reaches of Telrear, rumors of monsters that wore the skin of men, ones that felt no pain and attacked anyone who came close.”
“Kevlane’s creatures,” Aaron said thoughtfully.
The Speaker nodded. “Yes. Or so we thought. Had it been only one voice speaking such things, we might have dismissed them, but there were many, and so three of us went to investigate, to discover the truth of things.” His gaze grew distant as he looked back on that time so long ago. “As we traveled south, we began to hear more and more talk of the monsters, and where the rumors we had heard to that point had all been of a man’s, wife’s, cousin who had a friend who’d seen the creatures himself, or something equally uncertain, now we met several who claimed to have laid eyes on them personally. Or, perhaps ‘met’ is the wrong word, for then, as now, my brothers and I are viewed with fear or open hatred by the people of Telrear.
“Still, over the years, we have learned how to see without being seen, how to hear without being heard, and soon there was too much evidence to believe the claims anything but the truth. And so we traveled on, sleeping in the forests, while forests there were, crossing mountains, sheltering on the desert plains, and never coming too close to any human settlements—growing fewer and further between as we journeyed—that we came upon.
“It took over two months of traveling, but finally we came upon the village from which the rumors had originated. It was a small place of only a few hundred, its people carving out a living in the desert, subsisting largely off of the flesh of reptiles and bugs and what few plants would grow in that sand-covered wasteland. They were a people as hard as the sand-scoured mountain upon which they’d built their homes, not given to idle speech or entertainment, for all their energy was spent scraping out a living in a place that seemed, to me, wholly unwelcoming to the step of man.”
Aaron grunted. “Seems to me that they should have looked for a new place to live—if the sands wanted the village, I say let them have it.”
“Do you?” the Speaker asked, as if genuinely curious. He made a thoughtful sound in his throat. “And what of your own life, I wonder? A life spent with one eye always to the shadows in search of some killer or thief who may or may not be there, a life spent always looking over your shoulder, never able to trust those you would call friend.” He noted Aaron’s surprised expression and nodded. “Yes, Aaron Envelar, I know much about you, but let us leave that, for now. I will say only that as hard as the lives of the people of that village might have been, they were lives, at least, that they understood, and the dangers ones with which they were long acquainted. Sufficient reason, I suspect, for most men to remain where they are, for though the world beyond their own might hold wonders beyond any they have known, it might also hold terrors, ones that their lives have not prepared them for. The same reason, I suspect,” he said, meeting Aaron’s eyes, “that you chose to remain in your own world with its own terrors.”
“Alright, alright,” Aaron said. “So what happened?”
“We saw nothing amiss upon our arrival to the outskirts of that village, and we could not gather our information in the normal way, for, as I’ve said, the people of that place spoke little and gossiped less. They were a practical people, and would have had little time for wiling away the hours in some tavern, drinking and sharing stories, even had there been such a place for them to meet, and there was not. So, my brothers and I took the only option available to us—we waited. We stayed outside that village for nine days, far away, hidden by the scorching sands well enough that we might not be discovered, but close enough, or so we hoped, that we might be made aware when the creatures came back.
“I will not waste your time describing the difficulty of those nine days spent surviving off only what little sustenance the sands would provide. For though we have many talents, we Akalians knew little of how to live in such a harsh environment as the one we now faced. I will say only that, on the eighth day, one of our number fell and did not rise again—though whether from hunger, thirst, or simple exhaustion I could not say for sure. We two that remained were weakened greatly, our well-honed muscles, trained over years spent in practice, were flaccid and weak, our disciplined minds, strengthened by years spent in prayers to the Shadow, were ravished and frail. Even our eyes, once so keen, were blurred by days spent looking at the shifting, sun-battered sand.
“Our ears, though, worked well enough, and so it was that we heard the screams—roars of anger, more than anything else—from the distant village. Not that a man would have needed particularly good hearing to pick them out, for there was little else to hear in that desert save the wind and the constant susurration of the shifting sands, a sound not unlike the warning hiss of those poisonous snakes which called that place home. We set off immediately, our hearts full of sadness for the people but also full of relief that we might be able to complete our mission, that we might discover the truth of that place’s evils and put those lonely mountains and dunes of sand behind us. I will not say we ran, for our weakened bodies were capable of little more than a crooked, desperate shamble, yet shamble we did until finally we came upon the outskirts of the village itself.
“The people of that village had many enemies, but those enemies were starvation and thirst, baking heat in the day and freezing temperatures at night. They had no mortal enemies, for they had nothing worth taking. This was the reason, then, why the village had no walls except for those only a few feet high that served not as a barrier against enemy forces but against the driving sand which always threatened to bury the settlement of people that had dared take up residence there, returning to the desert what was rightfully its own. They were hard men, but they were not warriors.
“So they were not ready for what came upon them. By the time my companion and I made it to the village, two of its menfolk lay dead on the ground, their blood steaming on the sun-baked sand. We thought that, surely, we had come upon our enemy at last, had found him where he�
�d hidden so far away from the world, yet when we made our way into the village square, such as it was, where the carnage was still taking place, it was not the Lifeless which had set upon the villagers, but more than twenty men and women gone mad from the desert heat and a great sickness which had come upon them.
“For these, we saw, were victims of the wasting sickness, their faces shriveled, their gazes fevered and mad, and when we closed with them and drew near enough to give battle, we found that even their flesh was hot to the touch, nearly enough to leave blisters on any who came into contact with them. Still, I understood at once why rumors of monsters had reached so far into Telrear, for they did not fight like men but like beasts—they carried no weapons save for those the gods had given them, nails and teeth, and they showed no concern for their own welfare as they attacked, three or four dragging down the more unfortunate of the villagers and feasting upon their flesh even as my companion and I slew them.
“They did not show any concern for our blades, and when wounded they gave no sign, for the Wasting Sickness had combined with the madness to drive out any understanding of pain or self-preservation. Our task was made more difficult still by the fact that the villagers, with cries of “demon” attacked us as well as their persecutors, and we did what we could to fend them off without giving them serious injury.”
“Gods,” Aaron breathed, picturing in his mind what must have been mass-confusion as the two exhausted Akalians fought against the mad while, at the same time, being forced to defend themselves against those they’d come to save. “It must have been terrible.”
“Yes,” the Speaker agreed. “It was. The battle, if battle it might be called, lasted no more than half an hour, if that, but in my weakened state it felt an eternity.” He paused for a moment, sighing heavily. Just when Aaron thought that he wasn’t going to go on, he began once more. “I do not know when my companion was brought down, do not know even whether it was the occupants of that place or those given over to the madness which gave him his death. I know only that we fought together for a time, he at my back, and that once, when I had a moment to glance behind me, he was no longer standing as he had been, but lying on the ground, still as only the dead can be.
“I remember little of that time, only the weight of the sword in my hand, heavier than I could have ever imagined, the burning, feverish wounds in my flesh where the mad ones had scored it with teeth and nails and, more than either of those, the grief I felt as my sword did its bloody work. For despite what men think of us, we Akalians are not monsters, just as those I fought were not monsters, only men and women driven mad from sickness and suffering. Yet there could be no reasoning with them, for what the desert had left of them was not human any longer, but only cruel, unthinking beasts.
“When the last was slain and lay dead on the sands, I turned to those villagers for which my brother had given his life and saw, in their faces, only hatred. They cursed me, naming me demon and worse, and I left with what speed I might, driven on despite my wounds and, in many ways, because of them, for I knew that to be vulnerable there, among those men, would be as good as death, and I was not yet ready for the True Dark.
“I do not know how long I walked into the desert, any sense of where I was or where I was going lost to the fevered pain which afflicted me. I know only that I walked, putting as much distance as I could between myself and the villagers with their hate, between myself and those poor souls I had slain as well as my dead brother. Yet for all my reasons for walking away, for all my knowledge of what would happen to me should the villagers find me in my weakened state, my body finally used up the last of its strength, and I collapsed to the ground, unable even to move my face off of the burning sand on which it lay.
“I waited, then, for my death to come upon me, to hear the footsteps of Salen at my back, accompanied by Akane, the Dark Watcher, there to ensure the treatment of his loyal servant. But when the footsteps came, they belonged neither to the Death God or my own, but to a woman. She spoke to me, though in my delirious, dying state, I knew not the content of her words, only their tone—soft, caring words spoken to calm and reassure, words that, it seemed to me, did not belong in such a place, in such a wilderness.
“I gave no answer to them, for I could not, and the last thing I remember before unconsciousness took me was the taste of cool water upon my lips, a feeling greater and more powerful than any I have felt before or since.”
“She saved you,” Aaron said.
The Speaker smiled then, and it was a fragile thing, one of joy and pain both. “Yes, and in more ways than one. When I woke, it was dark, and I lay inside a small tent, large enough to accommodate me with only a little room to spare. I was covered in blankets which did much to drive away the night’s freezing cold, and a water skin lay beside me. I do not lie to say that I drank heavily of that skin—too heavily, as it turned out, for soon I threw up much of what I had taken. Yet I could not stop, for the cool moisture felt like the touch of the gods themselves in that scorched, barren place.
“She returned a short time later with food to eat. She was beautiful, Aaron Envelar, even as sick and fevered as I was, I could see that. Possessed of a beauty that somehow reflected the wild, loneliness of that place, yet held a softness as well, as if she was born of two worlds, and I remember thinking that one such as she did not belong in that place, that one so perfect might not, in truth, belong in this world at all.”
He shook his head as if to banish some errant thought. “I will say no more of her than that, only that, for the first time in my life, I felt a need for something more than the training to which my life had been dedicated, to the purpose for which my brothers and I strove. And I will not recount for you the time she and I spent in that tent as she snuck away from her village—the same one I had left—to minister to me and bring me back to health. I will say only that, over those days and nights when we were together, we grew to care for one another, and I grew to love her more than anything in my life. Where once I had worshipped the Shadow God, now I worshipped her.”
He paused, and Aaron watched a range of emotions flicker across his face, joy and pain intermingled so tightly that one could not be separated from the other. “In time,” he went on, “I grew stronger, and regained some of my old self. And as my health grew, so too, did our love for one another, and I decided I would renounce my dedication to the Shadow God, would abandon my brothers and our cause, for my love of her made all else without purpose. I thought it no great matter, for the brothers who had accompanied me on that journey had both ventured to the long dark of death. It was, then, believable enough that I, too, might have met the same fate.”
He smiled. “Time passed, as it always does, and I made us a home hidden from the villagers just as our love was hidden, for in all the places that I have been in my life, of all the peoples I have met, none hated my kind as much as those living in that cruel place, and we left them to believe that I had died somewhere in that scorched wilderness. It wasn’t long before she bore my child, a young daughter in whose perfect face our love was brought to life and evidenced.”
“Her,” Aaron said, staring at the woman in the bed.
“Yes,” the Speaker said. “We lived a life of solitude, the two of us, yet in our love we never felt lonely, for we had each other and our newborn child. Yet, for all that, my wife—for so she became—was forced, from time to time, to travel into the village in search of supplies, for no man or woman can live in such a place alone. As our daughter grew, my wife would take her along on her trips; the villagers believed that my love carried a great shame, that she had produced our daughter out of wedlock with some stranger, yet none believed it to be me, for they all thought me long dead.”
The joy that had crept onto his expression as he spoke vanished now, and his normally timeless face seemed to somehow transform to Aaron, becoming tired and haggard. “It was not perfect, for she was shunned by the villagers when she visited, yet it was manageable, and most importantly, we bel
ieved ourselves safe. After all, the villagers had never seen my face, garbed as I was in the black clothes of the Akalians, clothes which we had long since disposed of. There was nothing to mark me as a follower of Akane any longer. Nothing, save, for the Night Coin, the mark by which one Akalian might know another.” He turned to Aaron. “You know of this thing?”
“Yes,” Aaron said, remembering the black coin Adina had found in the castle courtyard. “I have seen one before.”
The Speaker considered that and nodded. “Few have, you know. It is the mark of my kind, but it is not one that we share with outsiders willingly. I, myself, kept mine close to me, knowing the danger it represented in giving away my identity, yet not quite being able to rid myself of it and, in so doing, rid myself of the life I once led.” He shook his head slowly. “Oh, if only I could go back now, could tell myself to throw the coin away as fast as I could, to let the swirling sands of that place bury it as if it had never been…but time is a river upon which a man is carried, and he may not turn back to visit once more that which has passed.
“I did not bury the coin, did not discard it. Instead, I hid it in the false bottom of a small chest which my wife had purchased for me as a surprise on one of her visits to the village. I put it there, hidden, and I thought no more of it. Not,” he said, his voice growing hard, “at least, until I saw it carried in the hands of men who meant death to me and my family.”
“You see, Seline, our daughter, was clever; even at little more than a year old, she was curious about everything, and our one regret was that our small tent afforded little room for her to explore and play. I suppose, looking back, that it seems obvious enough that she would go through my chest as there was so little else to occupy her, yet at the time I thought nothing of it. Not, that was, until my wife returned with our daughter from town one day, filled with worry, for, you see, my wife had only taken her eyes off Seline for a moment as she shopped, but it was long enough for my daughter to take out the shiny coin—no doubt a worthy trinket to one so young—from where she’d hidden it and begin playing with it. My wife said that she didn’t think anyone noticed before she snatched the coin away and led our squalling daughter from the village, but knowing the world as I do, I had my doubts.”
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