“You can die in peace, quickly, but if you do not tell me what I wish to know, you will regret having ever looked upon me.”
The prisoner edged his face around, and spat at him. Garias jumped back, wiping his face clean. Nobody had ever dared such a thing, not in the centuries of his existence.
The prisoner sneered at him, defiant eyes wide in hollowed sockets. “You do not want answers you piece of filth,” he hissed, “You want me to fear you. You want a supplicant that you can draw from in order to bolster your own measly attempts at focusing.” He turned his face away, contorting, as if he were reaching with his teeth at something inside his mouth. He turned back and spat a tooth at Garias. “Well you shall have neither.”
Garias burned with a barely contained fury, to the point that he would have stabbed the prisoner, had he but had some kind of blade to use. Unfortunately there was not even a spoon in this cell, as the old man had barely eaten since his capture. Refusing to lose his temper and give the prisoner a sorely fought after victory, Garias calmed the stab of fury in his belly enough to whisper quietly in his ear. “You will rue this, forever.” He then turned, and in a flash of robes, left the room, not even bothering to shut the door.
In the hallway, Garias stopped one of the guards. See to it that the prisoner is fed and watered. I want that cell in a fitter state when next I see it.”
“It will be done, my Lord.” The guard stood to attention.
“What good will that do?” Said a voice from within the shadows. “His life is all but spent. He is too weak to survive much longer. Why prolong it?”
“For exactly that reason. For the sensation.”
“Then why do you need us if all you are going to do is sit in a torture chamber living off of other men's wretchedness.”
“You are here at my bidding, to serve me. Always remember that. Question the motives of anyone with more wit than you again, and you shall find yourself a permanent resident down here. You have been summoned to bear witness to the re-emergence of another type of magic. The days of sifting through rocks will soon be gone.
Caldar stopped. “You have found the secret to emotive magic?”
Garias smiled. “Prepare to say goodbye to your Old Law Gods, Law wizard. They are about to be handed their notice.”
Chapter Two
Keldron watched Raoul hurtle across the road and behind some bushes where he noisily threw up. “What's he doing that for?”
“Don't know,” Belyn shouted back. “He opened the door of that cottage, took one look inside, and then ran for the bushes.”
Coughing now, Raoul stood back up, his narrow frame towering over the bushes that had previously concealed him. “I've never seen anything so horrific in my life. I wasn't prepared for it, that's all.” Raoul remained where he was, trembling.
Keldron opened the door of the cottage and peered inside. “Oh good Gods above!” Keldron was amazed with the reaction he had shown. His own hands felt cold. He was surprised that the blood still ran in them, as the cold had spread all the way up to his arms. His feet were cold too, but the breeze was unforgiving. Back in Eskenberg, he would have just thrown more wood on the fire, but here he had to make do with extra clothing that still seemed not to help. Clenched up as he tried to control himself, he felt shivers running through him, and he was sure that they were not all physical. Seeing that bloody mess had rocked him to his very core.
“What?” Belyn shouldered past him and came to an abrupt halt. “Oh.”
“It stands against everything that the Old Law and therefore we stand for. Murder, and on such a scale. How can people do this?” The mere thought of such a contravention, and the agony that must have been involved set his own stomach to clenching, and he tried to heave, but Keldron had not eaten, and he just concentrated on the pain in his ribs until he calmed down once more. Moving a few paces away from the site of the bush, Raoul stood up, pale and weak. He held onto one of the stubby trees that grew in defiance of the weather, and forced calm breaths of the frigid North air. “That wind is penetrating.” He observed.
“Well it would be if you gulp it down like last orders, Raoul.” Belyn tried to sound jovial, but it had little effect.
“It is the only way I can concentrate.”
“Breathe through your nose. It will seem easier.”
After one final breath, the Guildsman, until recently of the Order of Law in Eskenberg, sighed and opened his eyes to the picturesque village once again. “Is this all we are here for now, to traverse the land and stumble across horrors?”
The time had long passed when Raoul had accepted the arguments of his two closest friends, Belyn Stroddick and Keldron Vass, that they had in fact suffered a de facto expulsion from the order that had been their home for so many years. Middle aged, they still looked young, a bi-product of the magic produced by the focus stones which wizards used to sharpen their abilities and perform feats that while everyday occurrences to them, were viewed as spectacular and wondrous by those not of their orders. Many commoners were afraid of the magic, but most, especially those who held to the tenets of the Old Law, accepted it as just another facet of the seven Gods' blessings upon the land. As for Raoul, he had proven that he was no mean practitioner of the art, but Keldron knew it was not the reason he had joined the guild. A childish ambition of being a wizard often amounted to nothing in most cases. Raoul was more interested in preserving the law that so many seemed to be forgetting. He himself was not above bending the rules occasionally, but at heart he stuck to what he believed in.
“Are you going to stand there all day Raoul, you skinny son of a goat,” Boomed Belyn, the words aimed to repel the feeling of dread.
“I am over it brother,” he called, moving out from behind the tree. Belyn, as visually loud as his voice, stumped over to him. The big man had flame-red hair, and possessed one of those great bushy beards that made a face come alive with comic effect. He was a man who enjoyed his food, and it showed in his girth. His dark red cloak just set the colour of the man off perfectly; Keldron could not help but feel better when he saw his friend. Belyn was the man responsible for them not starving on this little venture. In fact, he had saved their lives several times with his extended knowledge of the properties of focus stones and which suited different situations best. His friend had come across a book, unsigned, that contained extensive research into what most had considered a lost topic. He was the only member of the Guild prepared to experiment with focus stones. Keldron remembered with regret and not a little disgust how all the old farts in their guild had stared down their noses at the three of them when sending them on a 'pilgrimage' to restore the temple in Caighgard. He would prove them wrong, and actually do it. The bonus for him was that somewhere in this great expanse of bitter cold land there was about a third of the Merdonese forest tribe wandering around willing to aid him.
Belyn strode up to Raoul, and peered at what Raoul had left under the bush. “That much, eh?” he observed. Receiving a nod from Raoul he grunted. “Well I can't say that I blame you my brother, it is one sticky mess in there.”
Keldron opened the door to the cottage.
“You actually intend to go inside that building?”
“I try not to think about the agony they went through. That I bet is what got you, much though you would think it to be a smell or a sight. I need to go in there. It is not a case of choice. I am searching for the reason behind this all, so I have to be objective.” Raoul remained where he was, leaning against the tree shaking his head. “It just doesn't make sense. I tell you what though; the Merdonese won't even go near the buildings. Joleen is all freaked out and Yerdu will not come any closer to the cottages than she has to. It was all she could do to actually stay inside the village. I tell you, this place reeks of evil. Something bad happened here, and not something obvious.”
Keldron thought about this for a second. “They are much more sensitive to the aura of events that transpire around them, are they not?”
“Per
haps. It may be that the focus they lived under for so long has made them sensitive to certain aspects of nature.”
Raoul shrugged. “You have a good point, Bel, but forgive me if I do not go into any of those buildings again. I cannot face it.”
This brought a chuckle from his large friend. “Brother, I thought your face could not actually get much paler in this wind, but I swear that after your little episode your skin has actually gone grey. I do not think that anybody would begrudge you staying out here. Besides, Keldron could do enough work for all of us the state he is in. There has been murder here on a scale unheard of in twenty years.”
“I have to go in there, Raoul. You do not have to stay. Belyn, would you scout around and see if our worst fears are actually true?”
“You do what you have to Kel, I'll survey the graveyard.”
Keldron knelt close, examining the wood. He was careful to crouch down without actually kneeling on the floor as much out of respect for the spilt lifeblood of the poor soul that had perished in tortuous agony here as the fact that he didn't want to risk soiling himself in the blood of another. The result left him in what would have been a comical squatting pose, but for the gravity of the situation. “The blood poured from this person as they half stood, half hung here on the stake,” he said as Belyn entered the grisly scene. “I take it there were more cases.”
“I have never seen the like, old friend. Is that all blood?”
“Indeed. It's all dry. One good sweep of a broom would remove all the evidence, but this has been left for a reason. There is much of importance here, not the least being the fact that the body is still on the stake. Nobody has been here since this happened. The back of this poor person had arched and twisted so much when it was impaled that it had become wedged against a table.” Keldron judiciously avoided looking at the face of the corpse. Agony and death-encompassing pain were things that he really preferred to stay apart from, and he was here to do a job. Instead he concentrated on the wood, which was much more likely to give away a clue about the attackers. He carefully peered around. The stake was covered in blood in all but a few places.
“Anything?”
“Perhaps. Where the wood is clear, it reveals that it has been scraped free of bark.” The once-shiny wood was now dark in places, mostly around the knots. “It is chipped too, where somebody had obviously been in a hurry to finish the job.” Cracks rose from the knots along the shaft of the spear where the moisture of the blood had gotten into the wood, giving the spear the impression that it too had been bleeding. Keldron picked at one of the knots with a knife that had been left on the table. The wood from the knot crackled and popped out as easily as if it were paper. The stake was rotten, but it was also bone dry. He decided to poke around no more, for fear of disturbing the garish scene. Avoiding the stiffened limbs of the corpse, Keldron untangled himself from the mess and looked around the house.
“All in all, I am uncertain as to my conclusions. I need to think upon this some more. Aside from the leavings of small animals, nothing has been touched.” It surprised him that no predator or scavenging animal had come near any of the corpses in the village. Perhaps the animals too had sensed the enormous wrong that Keldron was feeling. He had not managed to convince anybody other than Belyn to enter the houses, and he had doubted from the look on his skinny friend's face that Raoul would even last long in the village. “I don't think we need to look any more in here, or the other houses for that matter. It will be pretty much the same.”
“Good. I am out of here.”
Keldron stood up, stretching limbs that had been bent at awkward angles, and scribbled a few notes in a journal he kept about the whole affair of the Night of Spears. As he made to follow his friend out of the cottage an impulse stuck him as he felt the lump of his focus stone in his pocket, and he grabbed it, pulling in his concentration and focussing on the stone. Immediately the room became animated. Keldron found that he was witnessing the bloody rite. He had no idea who the men were that held this poor soul in front of the spear. The victim struggled like a rat in a trap, but he was hoisted as if he were a child up into the air and then literally thrown onto the spear. Blood erupted from his chest, and his head sagged backwards and to the side, causing his body to twist. The men were gone. Keldron watched in shock as the blood ran in rivulets away from the body, pooling on the stones of the floor. Then his vision shifted. There were still cobbles, but instead of the blood, he saw a cell.
An old man hung huddled up against a wall, trying to speak to someone. Trying to speak to him. The old man widened his eyes and mouthed a name in question. “Keldron?” There had been no noise to the voice, and yet he heard it as clearly as if he were there. Thrown back to himself for just a moment, Keldron lurched out of the building and into the slate-grey afternoon light of the Ardican winter.
He saw Joleen in the distance, but couldn't control his own movements. The yellow-haired member of the Merdonese tribe, for a while now Keldron's closest companion, came running over to him, her eyes full of concern. She ran her hand over his face and cupped his chin.
“Keldron what is it? You look like you have seen a ghost.”
Keldron could not speak. Even to respond to the honeyed tones of one that he had to admit was beloved to him was a greater challenge than he could accomplish. A man of strong moral stature, and hardy endurance as a result of their extended journey thus far, Keldron could do no more than stare at her, breathing shallowly. The cold of the wind was as nothing to the piercing cold that cored into his soul.
Joleen was not prepared to wait for an answer. “Belyn!” The powerful voice seemed too loud for her lithe woodlander frame. “Come over here now!” He watched her staring into his eyes, several of the tribesmen hurried over in the background. “It is Keldron. He has done something. What did he do in there?”
“He was right behind me, just writing some notes.” Keldron saw the face of his long-time friend stare at him for a moment before moving out of the way. Malcolm, the near-giant of a man who had been the landlord of the only inn of the Forest of Merdon and had been a rock so many times, peered closely at him. Keldron saw Malcolm up close, but as with Joleen, he could not respond. The pain of the memory he had experienced was too great. Malcolm lifted Keldron's arm with one huge paw. “He is as cold as ice.”
“He witnessed a sacrifice,” replied Aynel Deeproot, one of the warriors that had accompanied them. “It has affected his mind. Do something quickly, or you might lose him.”
“What do you mean witnessed a sacrifice?”
Aynel spread his arms around him. “You feel the emotions that surround this village. Hate, woe, fear, agonising pain. There is a reason that we did not want to come into this village and the seeker of Truth has discovered it to his detriment. Only the biggest of shocks can bring someone around from a spell such as this. Emotion has too great a hold on the human soul.”
“A shock, is it?” she answered. “Let us see what we can do.” Joleen grabbed Keldron and shook him, trying to make him come awake. “Keldron! Wake up! Snap out of it!” From the point where consciousness was held in check by the icy haze that had fallen on him as he had exited the house, Keldron fought to say something, but he could not. It was as if ice had frozen his jaws shut, and his face was numb. He felt himself descending away from consciousness, into an abyss within his mind that he was afraid that he would not rise back up from. The light faded to a point far above him, and he clawed at it, grasping, seeking to widen that point. Then a shock of red-hot pain flooded his senses, and the light came shooting back towards him, slamming into him with a violence of colour and noise.
Keldron dropped to his knees, and looked up. The first thing he felt was joy at the relief evident on Joleen's face. The next thing he felt was agonising pain on his arm. He grabbed around with his left hand to his right arm, and instantly regretted the reflex that had made him do it. “Ow! What did you do to me?” He pulled away from his arm and looked at it. A great crimson burn covered mo
st of his upper right arm on the sensitive flesh underneath. As Keldron peered over his shoulder at the crisped wound, he heard a familiar voice.
“Sorry I had to do that brother,” came Belyn's sombre and regretful tone, “but we were losing you there. You had to be shocked out of it according to our tribal friends, and it looked like our timing was just right.” Belyn was clearly abashed at what he had just done, his face was a conflicting mix of morose guilt and relief. His head dropped for a moment, and then Belyn faced him. “If there was any other way, I would have chosen it.”
“What did you do to cause this?” Keldron held his arm up, causing the pain to spread and his close friend to wince at the sight of the huge burn. The wound stood out like an accusation, though everybody was relieved at the fact that Keldron had recovered from his shock in the house.
In return, Belyn brought out one of the muddy red stones that he had carried with him from Eskenberg. “The focus power of flame, Kel. You needed a shock to return from whatever was holding you. It seemed that something hot was exactly the tonic needed to bring you round.”
“Well, have you learned anything about focussing on the power of healing?”
Belyn looked abashed. “No my brother I have not, though you raise a very good point there. It seems that the easiest focuses to accomplish all end up with a destructive result. The more we try to learn of the different properties of rock, the wider our ability to do damage can be utilised.”
“Almost as if the base focussing skills are a direct affront to the Old Law,” chipped in Raoul, frowning at this sudden realisation. In contrast, Belyn's face was alight, as he revelled in the increased understanding of his chosen aspect of study.
“Well before you boys get into one more argument, how about we bandage Keldron's arm?” Interrupted Yerdu, the dark haired and very diminutive tribal woman who was as close to Belyn as Joleen was to Keldron. Despite her size she could hold her own, and had repeatedly proven this. She was the perfect foil for Belyn, constantly taking the wind out of his sails and reducing his overburdened pride to a more humble level. He appreciated this, despite his bristling beard and narrow eyes whenever she brought him back down to her level. It was an unspoken feeling of affection for each other that this pair, mismatched to the casual observer, held for each other. Their relationship was very private, but when the situation required it, Yerdu took control.
The Path of Dreams (The Tome of Law Book 2) Page 4
