Once A Hero

by Michael A. Stackpole

  She turned from the rough-hewn, blocky granite building and faced the two males behind her. "Only I may enter the tomb. Larissa cast spells in there that protect Neal, and without this bracelet you could be hurt. You may watch from the doorway—I always did—but be quiet. I am not certain what I am going to find, and I will need to concentrate."

  Aarundel nodded and stepped back a couple of paces. "Count Berengar and I will wait here."

  Berengar's expression told her that he did not like that idea, but he withdrew to Aarundel's side. "Good luck."

  She nodded and faced the tomb once again. The arched doorway had been filled with a single slab of stone polished until the surface reflected her face back at her. She forced a smile, but butterflies flitted through her stomach. She felt sweat rising on her upper lip, so she let her body shudder once to burn off nervous energy; then she set herself for the task at hand.

  Gena looked up at the golden script carved into the stone above the arch. "Neal Roclawzi/Custos Sylvanii. A great hero and greater friend." As she spoke the words, she felt the thrill of hearing stories from Larissa and her grandfather race through her again. With what I am going to do, I will add to the legend and become part of it.

  She raised her right arm and pressed the bracelet against the keystone of the arched doorway. The stone blocking the door went from grey with flecks of black to a milky white. It then faded through translucency to transparency before evaporating altogether. She caught a musty, dry scent from the tomb as warm air drifted out from the stone enclosure.

  She lingered a moment in the doorway, seeing Neal again as she had seen him so many times before. Lying there on a stone slab, his feet toward her and his head on a stone pillow at the far end, he appeared to be sleeping, not dead. She knew the clothes he wore had been enchanted so the yellow silk tunic and green silk breeches would not age and decay, and she guessed that Larissa herself had sewn them together.

  Gena stepped across the threshold with the reverence appropriate for entering into the presence of someone sacred. As she walked around his feet to his left side—exactly where Larissa had always stood—Neal's physical size impressed her. Not only had he been tall, but very robust as well. Scars crisscrossed the hands folded on his chest, with the burn scar on the back of his left hand being predominant among them. His sharp cheekbones, straight nose, and strong jaw gave him a look so vital, it mocked death.

  She realized, as she looked down at him, that his chin and his cheekbones reminded her of Rik. His hands, though larger than Rik's were, had the same proportions. His hair, though a shade lighter than Durriken's had been, featured the same sort of ragtag utilitarian cut and length favored by Men who were more worried about being able to see than about being seen. Because of the resemblance she found herself liking the Man lying there in front of her even before life had returned to him.

  Then she caught herself. Do I see Rik in him, or did I see him in Rik? That question shook her to her core. Gena wondered if, when Larissa went beyond, she had decided her grandaunt had abandoned Neal. Had that prompted her to go out into the world of Men to find her own Neal, and had she done that in Rik? She recalled measuring Berengar by her image of Neal, and she feared she had used the same yardstick to measure Durriken.

  She shivered. Enough time for that later. I need to figure out the spells here. With her entry into the room, she knew she faced multiple sets of spells. The first came from the clothes on Neal and, she suspected, a glamour that kept the roses in his cheeks and the color in his hair. Larissa had warned her about protective spells, and she could pick some of them out from the background, but she could not identify all of them clearly. She felt she would have had more success trying to pick out individual instruments in an orchestral recital in Jarudin than she would isolating and identifying each spell.

  That difficulty did not worry her because she knew the bracelet she wore functioned as a key to all those spells. Larissa had woven her magick strong to protect Neal, but in giving Gena the bracelet she had transferred mastery of those spells over to her. Gena knew she would be operating in a safe environment. She had reread all of her grandaunt's notes on what she had hoped would be a way to save Neal from his death, and she felt certain she could command all the spells she needed to do the job. Care and caution would allow her to take things one step at a time so she could do it right.

  Gena rubbed her hands together and rolled her head around to loosen her neck. She ignored the sweat dribbling down from her temples and started to control her breathing. "Right. First thing is to remove this glamour. Once I see what I'm working with, I'll know which spell goes when."

  Magery had any number of ways to counteract spells. Other spells could crush, dissolve, or slice through magicks, but each of them required an expenditure of energy greater than that used to cast the original spell. Gena chose to unweave the spell, and toward that end she used a small diagnostic spell that helped define the nature of the glamour. Once she had done that, she had an idea how the spell had been begun and completed, so she focused her attention on the end point. By simply manipulating time and chance, she unmade the end point; then the whole spell began to unravel.

  As the glamour began to evaporate, Gena saw the true Neal Roclawzi, and she recoiled from him. Blood covered his pale, grey face—old, dried blood that had broken into tiny chips like a sun-dried mudflat. The silk clothes turned into soiled rags stiff with blood and dirt that covered his loins and little else. Open, ulcerated wounds formed a cross on his chest running from throat to navel, flank to flank. Multiple bruises covered him in purple, swollen bumps, and she saw an odd lump where at least one rib appeared to have been broken. His left ankle had swollen up to the size of a small melon, and his left foot canted in at an unnatural angle.

  Her mind began to reel as she saw Neal's battered and abused body. She felt as if she could not breathe, and she knew she was beginning to panic. She fought to regain control of herself, but something in the tomb prevented her from doing that. Struggle as she might against it, she could not focus, yet through the fog in her mind she realized she had triggered a massive magickal trap and she had no way of counteracting it!

  The spells that had lurked in the background swelled as they drew energy from her panic. They used the bracelet as their conduit. A red haze expanded from the corner of the tomb and washed over the body like a dust-cloud. Where it penetrated Neal's flesh, it liquefied the blood on him and sucked it back down through his pores. Flesh that had appeared bruised drained of color, and a pinkish flush colored his skin.

  Silvery daggers of microlightning descended from a black cloud that coalesced from the tomb's shadows. Flicking down and back like the feathery kisses of a serpent's tongue, the lightning played over Neal's body. It lingered over open wounds and centered itself on his chest. The little forks all retreated into the cloud; then with a thunderous humming a single solid argent spear stabbed down into the cruciform wound at his navel. With the patience of a caterpillar inching along a branch, the incandescent light-bar worked its way up toward Neal's head. Flesh sizzled in its wake, the greasy vapor rising up into the cloud, but the flesh appeared seamless and unmarked as the smoke rose from it.

  The beam lingered over the cross's center point, filling the room with a gout of sickly sweet smoke that made Gena want to vomit. She coughed and the beam flickered for a moment, then continued as she straightened up. It split into three pieces, two running across the wound and the last one up toward Neal's throat. The two flank beams vanished as the third jumped from his throat up to his nostrils. When it plunged in there, she saw light play beneath Neal's closed eyelids and shine out dimly through his ear; then the cloud imploded and the light vanished, leaving her momentarily blinded.

  A wave of exhaustion rode over her, and a moment of mental clarity followed in the trough. She knew she was not as tired as she had been when she hastily cast the spell in the Haladin camp, but the two spells that had used her had drained her significantly. Moreover, they drew sustenan
ce from her panic and fear in violation of the Elven dictum to keep emotion out of spells. The emotions made the spells incredibly powerful, but also unpredictable, and that frightened Gena horribly.

  She tried to stop a third spell from vampirizing her, but that took more of an effort than she could muster. Gena did tenaciously cling to a small portion of vitality, bolstered in her efforts by knowing that if she lost it, the magicks could wring her free of life and discard her like a dry husk.

  A blue-gray light bled up through the stone bier upon which Neal lay and became so bright that all she could see was his skeleton in silhouette. The light pulsed once, then dimmed, and it appeared as if Neal's flesh had become steel. The spot over his broken ribs suddenly glowed red, and sparks shot from it as a metallic hammering echoed in the tomb and shuddered through her. Likewise his left ankle glowed and sparked; then the light flared again and Neal returned to normal, save his ankle and rib no longer showed signs of injury.

  Dizziness swept over Gena as the fourth spell started to draw on her for power. Somehow she knew this was the final spell, the one that would complete the task she had come to perform. She had wanted to be the master of the spelt, directing it and using it, but she found herself just a component in it. Larissa had betrayed her, and the last spell sucked up her outrage like a sponge.

  Heat flashed over her body and she thought she might faint. She fought the weakness, and the spell skimmed her defiance off to feed itself. Gena knew she was being manipulated, but every emotional response was anticipated and harvested.

  Suddenly she felt short of breath. She could not breathe, her lungs lay useless and frozen in her chest. She felt her body begin to burn in its need for air, then that sensation vanished as well. She tried to puzzle together what was happening to her because Larissa's notes had said nothing about this effect—had said nothing about any of this—and she began to wonder if all she had been taught by her grandaunt had been nothing but bait for this trap.

  Then she noticed Neal's chest had begun to rise and fall on its own.

  Gena hunched forward as her heart began to beat wildly, then stopped altogether. When it started again, after only a second or two, her stomach convulsed. She felt her guts shiver and internal organs quiver. Her hands twitched, her toes curled inward. Every muscle in her body jerked and cramped and released. She thought at first that the spell was stealing seconds of life from her to transfer life into Neal's body, but she rejected that idea because the differences in their species and genders would make the transfer flawed and useless. No, she decided, I am just being used as a road map so the magick can show Neal's body what exists and how to make it work.

  Her head jerked back, exposing her throat, as she felt the spell plunge up her spine and into her brain. It prowled around in there, as Durriken might have prowled the curio vaults of rich Kaudian antiquities collectors, examining her memories. She saw everything flick across her mind's eye, yet the spell only lingered over the stories and thoughts, impressions and dreams she had experienced concerning Neal. As if it were picking up all the fragments of a shattered vase, it took every bit of him it could find and sent it flowing into his brain.

  Gena knew it was not to rebuild his mind, but to remind him who he had been. If he were to live again, his soul would have to be plucked from Reithra's grasp and put back in his body. The stories, the memories, merely made it easy for him to return. It made his body receptive again.

  The spell pushed against the last little reserve of energy Gena held. She resisted, but it pressed her. Without words it conveyed to her its need, not for something of Neal she yet possessed, but for a reason for him to return. It had to be potent and powerful, emotional and eternal. It could not come without sacrifice. And it has to come from me.

  Gena opened up and fed directly into it the love for Neal she had seen in Larissa's eyes. Though her grandaunt had never spoken of her feelings for Neal, she never had to. Genevera had seen it from the beginning, and had never seen it dim. She wondered for a moment how Larissa could have prepared all this so lovingly, and then have walked away from it without using it. No logical answer came to her, so she funneled that mystery into the flow and let herself begin to faint.

  Her head came down, and she stumbled back against the wall of the tomb as the spell released her. She saw Neal's body convulse, and she cried out reflexively as his head hit the stone pillow on the bier. A second later she found herself slumping down in the corner, too tired to stand, too exhausted even to try to fight gravity. As she went down, she saw Neal's eyelids flutter, and even though she feared she was dying, she knew he lived again. In that realization she knew everything would be fine, and she surrendered to the blackness stealing over her.

  Chapter 32:

  The Minority Does Suffer

  Late Autumn

  A.R. 499

  The Present

  My 536th Year

  ***

  SHARP PAIN RIPPED through my chest; then came a blackness that I decided was death. Time did not flow, it grew stagnant. Shadow flashes of life, either dreams or visions, occasionally settled on my consciousness the way a leaf floats on a dead pond before slowly sinking to the bottom. They settled down there to molder with the rest of me.

  Brilliant searing lights and heat and tingling shook me. The back of my head smacked something solid, but I felt more surprise than I did pain. The aching that had chased me through the darkness had eased. For the first time in eternity I summoned up the strength to open my eyes, and I found them responding to my command. As they opened, I saw a figure in white falling away to the ground off to my left.

  I sat up enough to get my left elbow under me and took a good look at her. The sunlight pouring through the arched doorway showed me golden hair I could never forget and glinted off a bracelet I recognized. That she sat slumped in the corner with her chin touching her breast alarmed me, but I saw no blood and knew that were I to touch her, I could do more harm than good to the both of us.

  A huge man eclipsed the sun as he ducked his head through the arched doorway. I recognized him more by his size and shape than by the hint of copper in his hair, but I couldn't imagine what he would be doing in Cygestolia. He looked at where Larissa had fallen and shouted "Jenna!" which was an oath I'd never heard the Red Tiger utter before. I wondered if I was dreaming somehow; then I saw him reach toward her, and I knew, dream or not, I had to act.

  Sitting up and spinning around on my rump, I got my feet beneath me and launched myself at Beltran. "Don't touch her. You can't touch her."

  Beltran looked utterly surprised at the sound of my voice. He folded around my shoulder. I heard a satisfying ooofff as my tackle carried him back out of the small building and crashed the both of us to the greensward. I bounced up off him and rolled through a somersault, but as I spun to face him, dizziness washed over me. The world swam before my eyes, and before I could focus them, a heavy left hand clouted me over my right ear.

  The ground hit me harder than the fist had, but not by much. I rolled unsteadily to my feet and felt a hand grabbing my right shoulder. "Neal, hold. Berengar, stop."

  I twisted around, pulling my shoulder from beneath the old Elf's hand. "He almost touched her, doomed her."

  "Neal, friend, he will not hurt her."

  I frowned. "Do I know you? The only Elves I call friend are Larissa and her brother, Aarundel. She is in there, and her brother will kill Beltran if he touches her."

  "In the old days I would have indeed done that."

  I blinked my eyes and took a good long look at the Elf standing before me. Long white hair draped over his shoulders. He wore a black eye patch and stood as tall as my best friend had, but his muscles had atrophied. His skin had an almost transparent quality to it, as if he were more spirit than flesh. "Aarundel? What did the Reithrese do to you?"

  Aarundel shook his head. "They took my eye, Custos Sylvanii, but no more."

  I frowned despite the pain growing at the base of my skull. "But you look so old. Your g
randfather, Lomthelgar, he does not look so old. What happened?"

  He shrugged. "I aged. Five centuries have passed since you last saw me."

  That cut my legs out from under me, and I sat down hard. "Five hundred years? But . . ." I glanced back at the small stone blockhouse. "Your sister, she has not aged."

  "She is my granddaughter, Neal, by my son Niall." Aarundel crouched, then sat on the ground beside me. "Many things have changed, my friend."

  The man with whom I fought emerged from the blockhouse with a sylvanesti in his arms. I waited for a volley of Elven arrows to cut him down, but none came. I looked up and knew I sat beneath the Consilliarii tree and watched this most grotesque violation of Elven law being perpetrated right here. Aarundel barely glanced at the Man dooming his granddaughter to exile, and the Man seemed more concerned for her than for his own fate.

  "How can he be carrying her?"

  "I can because I am strong and considerate, old man." He lay her down in the shade and rubbed one of her wrists. Ignoring me, he looked at Aarundel. "She is breathing and has a pulse. She fainted from whatever went on in there."

  I reached out and grabbed Aarundel's left arm. "What has happened? Why is Beltran here? Wait—can he be Beltran? Five centuries?" I closed my mouth as my mind became a chaotic jumble of ideas and fears warring for control of me.

  Aarundel patted my hand with his right hand. "There are many things I will explain to you, my friend, gladly. I know this is abrupt and confusing." He pointed to the man kneeling beside his granddaughter. "This is Count Berengar Fisher of Aurdon in Centisia."

  I frowned. "Aurdon? I remember the Fishers of Aurium. Are they related?"