Serpent in the Mist

by Cleave Bourbon

  “Somewhat. Isheza the Bold was the last ruler of Ishrak because General Sythril had soothsayers curse him and his army on the fields of Roan. Isheza died the night before a great battle was supposed to take place with the Sythian army, and as a consequence, the Ishraki army retreated. General Sythril pursued them against the soothsayer’s warnings and somehow became part of the curse himself.”

  “Close enough, I suppose. There is a little more to it than that. It is true that Ishrak was cursed and fell to ruin, which is why this is such a splendid hiding place for mindwielders, but what you left out is that prominent features of this old kingdom were changed based on the curse. For example, the Great Ishraki Plains became known as the Plain of Storms because of the constant, never-ending thunderstorms that ravaged it.”

  “Aye, and the Mountains of Madness. I remember,” Rennon assured him.

  “The storm has stopped. I thought the cure might have this consequence, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “What do you mean, it stopped?” Deylia asked.

  “The skies are calm, completely cloud-covered, but calm. With the madness gone, there is no need to project the energy out onto the plain.”

  Rennon took another bite of bacon. “That’s good news.”

  “It’s also a beacon that something has changed. The storm was a deterrent. It was a grand reminder of the curse, and because of it, people feared to enter the kingdom of Ishrak. With it gone, who knows, people may venture in and stick their noses where they don’t belong.”

  “So you never thought of this before now? So what if they come?”

  Theosus fidgeted as if he was trying to figure out how to carefully structure his words. “For many years, I have searched as an apothecary for a cure to the madness that plagued mindwielders. I dreamed of the day when I could cure, or find a cure, for my people here in this ruined city. In my dream, I would establish a new Ishrak. None of the reality has followed the dream. I fear we are in danger if we stay here. Without the Plain of Storms, we are vulnerable here. We need to go north.”

  “I must have cured a hundred people over the last day and night. I figured they would go home now and live out their lives.”

  “I am afraid that isn’t possible. Most of these people are known to be some kind of wielder, and some were rescued from death just as you were. Going home for many of them would mean death or exile.”

  “They are exiles right now, Theosus,” Rennon stated flatly.

  “What do you propose I do, mindhealer?”

  “Don’t call me that,” Rennon said, pointing his finger at Theosus.

  Theosus cleared his throat. “There are two other reasons why I came to you today. Would you hear them?”

  Rennon put his forehead in his hands as if he might be suffering a headache. “You are here, so you may as well.”

  “The Enforcers have been slowly disbanding since the battle at Brightonhold, but the far reaches of the Enforcers’ power have not yet heard of the incident. In northern Ardenia, there are an unusual number of wielders imprisoned. They are being tortured and killed. My sources tell me they are mostly mindwielders rounded up within the Trigothian kingdoms and sent there for judgment. I mean to go there and liberate them.”

  “Now wait a moment. You aren’t proposing that I take over here while you go crusading?”

  “No, I would never do such a thing. I am proposing we all go together to liberate our brothers and sisters. We are now a force of strong mindwielders, and—”

  “Theosus, we don’t know how to use our abilities. We were fueling a storm because we didn’t know how to do anything else. We are not strong.”

  “Master Rennon, you said we!” Theosus exclaimed.

  “Don’t mince words; you know what I mean. How are we supposed to fight?”

  Theosus sat down opposite Rennon and looked him directly in the eyes. “There is a tome. It was given to man by Fawlsbane Vex to teach him the ways of magic. It has been lost for ages, but recently one of my fellow dragons came across information that places the tome in By’temog. It’s hidden there.”

  “Not very well if your dragon friend found out about it. You really want to go chasing after a myth?”

  “There is more. The tome is supposed to be guarded by General Sythril’s spirit and undead army.”

  “Well, there goes that idea!”

  “You are not afraid of some dead general’s ghost, are you?”

  “Theosus, you are talking about fighting an undead army for a tome that may or may not exist in hopes that it will tell us how to mindwield. That is sheer folly, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I don’t know. I have fought undead before, and they were not so difficult. They do a lot of complaining. It gets irritating,” Theosus mused.

  Rennon ignored Theosus’ comments. “We are what, a couple of hundred? How many undead are in this army?”

  “I suppose we will need to do some scouting to find out exactly. I don’t think anyone really knows at this point.”

  “This is out of the question, Theosus. We would never be able to get through the city, much less rescue a book guarded by a cursed ghost. I have some experience with this sort of thing. We had to fight undead at Signal Hill, and it was not as easy as you might think.”

  Theosus did not seem to be deterred. “Why don’t I get a scouting party together and find out some more of the facts? In the meantime, our library here has a few books that mention mindwielding of old. They are not instructional by any means, but they might lend some insight.”

  “I get the feeling that you will do as you will regardless of what I say. I am not your long lost leader. When we got here, I felt very much like a prisoner.” He sighed. “Go, get your scouting mission together, but know that I am not saying we will do this by any means.”

  “I will go at once,” Theosus said, bowing and backing up toward the door. “Before I go, might I ask if you know the history of your own kingdom? Do you understand the War of the Oracle?”

  “Yes, I know it. There was a huge battle that scarred the land, and there were so many essence users that they used up all the essence, making the area we call the Blight a wasteland. The Defenders guard it so that we never forget what magic does to the land, and magic of all forms was banished and outlawed. Now, one thousand full years after the war, the magic is coming back to the Blight and will be able to provide more essence than anyone can imagine,” Rennon stated matter-of-factly. “That’s why everyone is fighting over control of it now.”

  Theosus shook his head. “It didn’t work; we did forget what happened.”

  “I think I recounted it pretty well.”

  “Let me enlighten you. According to your rendition, why don’t wielders get a large group together and scorch huge tracks of land and draw out all the essence? It would come back more powerful than before, right? Why don’t they do it all over the world and make essence double or even triple?”

  “Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Rennon said. “Why don’t they?”

  “Because it takes hundreds, maybe thousands, of wielders to draw all of the essence from the land, and even then, once the land becomes devoid of essence, it creates an imbalance that must be filled.” His red eyes seemed to glow as he spoke. “So, the desolated land sucks all the essence from around it, and then that area takes essence from around it and so forth until it collapses in on itself and destroys everything—the entire world.”

  He almost seemed angry now. “You see, the Blight isn’t sacred just so we don’t forget what magic can do if left unchecked. The forgotten reason is it’s sacred because it is the graveyard of the four hundred mindwielders that sacrificed themselves to stop the devastation from consuming the world. Only the mindwielders had the magic to do this. They died and left no elder mindwielders to teach the children growing up how to use the power they were born with. It became known as the wild magic, and children born with it died here, where I brought them.” He turned and left before Rennon could respond.

  There
was silence for a long moment before Rennon talked to Deylia. “I never knew that. It seems so simple now.”

  Deylia got up and went to Rennon. “You cured us. Theosus believes he fulfilled a promise he made to the people who died in the war and to these people. He promised to one day cure them or find a cure for them. You are a hero and a savior.”

  “Aye, I cured them, but that does not a leader make. I don’t even know if the cure is a cure.” He squirmed in his chair. “I know Theosus has searched for someone like me for a long time, but I am definitely not a leader. Devyn was always the one making the decisions for us. I miss him. I know we parted on rotten terms, but I do miss him.”

  “I think you are a stronger man than you think you are. You are not suppressing your ability anymore. You are being more decisive.”

  “I don’t have Sanmir’s concoction, for one,” he joked.

  “I am sure Theosus would know how to mix it up for you.”

  “I will leave it up to you to ask him.” Rennon chuckled. “Oh well, I suppose you are right, but I will tell you this: I am not going to a city full of undead after a book for anybody. I don’t care if we know every facet of our abilities. I have seen Spectres and such, and I don’t want to see them again.”

  “Scared of a few ghosts, are you?” Deylia bantered.

  “Aye, I am,” he said. “And you would be too if you were face-to-face with them.”

  “What are they like?”

  “Nasty, smelly creatures with rotting flesh falling from their bones, and they attack you while pleading for you to kill them. They even tell you how to kill them, like some unknown force is controlling them and making them kill against their will.”

  “How horrible!”

  “It is. Wait a moment. I wonder.” Rennon became thoughtful. “I wonder if something is controlling them against their will. I don’t think they would fight if that control was suddenly gone.”

  “See, you are thinking like a leader already.”

  Rennon beamed at Deylia and gave her a big kiss. He recoiled from her horrified expression. “Sorry for that.”

  Her face softened into a smile. “It was the excitement.”

  He grabbed hold of her hand. “Come on. Let’s go find Theosus before he sends out that scouting party.”

  Chapter 19: Fading Embers

  The rising morning sun took away some of the sting of the cold morning, but Trendan still pulled his cloak tightly. Despite the sun’s warmth, the morning was still cold enough to make him shiver. Trendan made his way steadily back toward Brightonhold Keep, careful to cover his tracks. Fayne would certainly try to track him. He wondered if he should have waited for the poison to do its job before leaving. He would have had to face Fayne, but at least he would have known if he had succeeded. He dismissed the thought. That poison was strong enough to kill a horse; no one could have survived it. He doubled his efforts to ward off the cold.

  Trendan reached the ruins of Brightonhold Keep about midday. The Enforcers’ former stronghold already had weeds growing around its perimeter. A few Enforcers tried to keep the order alive for a time, but without the numbers they previously enjoyed, the task proved to be impossible, and the keep was now destined for ruin. Trendan surmised that the order was probably doomed from the beginning and would eventually cease to exist entirely, even in the remote parts of the known world. He also presumed that some other, similar organization would rise up to take its place.

  He searched around the façade of the keep, looking for signs of which direction Devyn’s party might have gone. It had rained sometime in the last week, and the rainwater had washed away almost all trackable marks. He was about to give up when something peculiar caught his eye—a shattered stone. He poked around at the stone, turning it over and noticing that it was charred black in places. He picked up several pieces and sniffed them. They had an acrid burnt smell that reminded him of how singed hair smelled. He caught sight of footprints leading away from the shattered stone. He got down on his knees and examined the print now mere inches from his face. Although he could not be sure, the prints looked very close to the print of the boot Devyn wore. A faded crisscross in the upper left of one boot print convinced him. Devyn had stepped on some broken glass in the kitchen at Brookhaven once, but he never had the sole repaired, and the now faded pattern imprinted the soft ground from the rains before. Mysteriously, the footprints were single. What is Devyn doing walking off by himself? Trendan wondered. He decided to follow the trail.

  Trendan estimated that he was approximately one and a half to two days behind Devyn. He moved quickly, fearing all the while that Fayne might be following. In fact, he was sure she would try, but he expected that she would take time to bury her mother before heading out after him. She was good, too good; she rivaled his own tracking skills. If she really wanted to track him and catch up with him, she would find a way.

  Even though the Blight was in the process of rejuvenation, there were still immense tracks of land where the sparse trees, long since dead, and barren landscape offered little in the way of protection from the harsh cold of winter. The season was still young. The snows had not yet fallen, but the west wind hollowed on occasion. The north wind blew bitter cold, and neither wind was ever a pleasant breeze.

  Trendan trekked across the Blight, carefully choosing his path. There were no game animals or plants to sustain life, so he had to rely entirely on his meager provisions. By now, Trendan realized that Devyn was traveling to Signal Hill. He remembered the way from a scouting expedition when he trained as a youth, but he still had to consult his map. He had found evidence twice of where Devyn might have made camp, and he kept to the crisscrossed boot print as his guide.

  It was midmorning on the fourth day of tracking when Trendan caught the scent of something burning in the wind. He could see no smoke, but the smell was unmistakable. By late afternoon, he could see the smoke rising in great black billows on the horizon. The evening sun hung heavily in the sky when Trendan reached what he presumed used to be Signal Hill. Bits of rocks covered by a slag of molten metal marked the village entrance. He could only see one man alive, digging among the charred remains.

  “You there,” Trendan called out. “What happened here?”

  The man took one look at Trendan and bolted behind some of the rubble and was gone. Trendan knew that Devyn had helped save the village and that it was being rebuilt. He couldn’t imagine Devyn would have anything to do with destroying it. He combed the village until the sun went down but saw no other living soul. At last, he found a building with a roof still intact and three standing walls. It faced a direction defensible with his bow, so he decided to make camp there for the night and continue to search in the morning.

  Trendan awoke the next morning to an arrow pointed at his head. Dressed all in black leather adorned with silk stood Fayne. Her bold, emerald green eyes were transfixed on Trendan’s face. Even though she appeared incredibly angry, Trendan thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The moment hung awkwardly in the air for several long moments.

  “Fayne, I—”

  “Don’t you say a word!” she commanded.

  “But I—”

  She pulled back harder on the bowstring, and Trendan closed his mouth.

  Several more moments passed.

  “Are you going to shoot me with that arrow?” Trendan asked.

  “Are you impatient to die? Would you like me to hurry this along?”

  Trendan sighed. “Not particularly, no.”

  “Why, Trendan? Mother had not posed a threat to you.”

  “She was a spy and a traitor. I had to do it, out of duty.”

  “You are half right. I am a spy, but I was never a traitor.” Kimala’s voice came from beyond the wall. She entered the dilapidated room. “But you never gave me the chance to prove it, did you?”

  “How can you possibly be alive?” Trendan gasped.

  She eyed Trendan for a moment, contemplating. “All right, I will tell you.�
� She sat on the end of a broken rock wall. “When Fayne was a little girl, I was working in my garden and was bitten by a snake. Only, this snake was put there by Toborne. I was married to a man that opposed him, and he wanted to destroy that man’s family for leverage or Fawlsbane knows what for. The snake venom was made to corrupt me and turn me into whatever Toborne suggested. I was given to Naneden, his apprentice, and forced to turn against my family. It worked for a while, until I was ordered to kill Ianthill’s family. Enowene caught me before I could follow though, and with the help of Erinthill and Brynna, cured me and restored my free will. I vowed to destroy Toborne and Naneden for what they did to me and my family. I have been working as a spy for Enowene and Lady Shey ever since.” She smiled wickedly. “The venom of the snake had one happy side effect. I took on the properties of that snake forever. Its bite made me immune to all known poisons.”

  “Who were you married to?”

  “That, my dear boy, is another story. The rest of this story will have to wait for safer times to be revealed. I would be happy to tell you if I could, but there are others I must protect—more of my family than whom you see here.”

  “You realize that you have done nothing to convince me. How do I know you speak the truth?”

  Fayne let the tension out of her bow. “Believe it for me.”

  Trendan softened, but he still could not forget that Fayne had given him cause to doubt her. If he had not gone looking for her that evening, he might have never found out that she was carrying on a secret conversation, or that she was Kimala’s daughter. He looked into Kimala’s eyes. Something was still not right. He could feel a coldness there. He could follow Fayne’s wishes and keep Kimala close with caution. He decided that he did not entirely believe Kimala’s story, but he would go along with Fayne as if he did, for now. He would keep a sharp eye on the traitor and, if the time came, use something stronger than poison. This time, he would wait to see the results for himself.

  “All right, I will believe it for you, Fayne.” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Did you two see anyone out there among the rubble who could tell us what happened here?” He wanted to change the subject as soon as possible.