“Give it to him,” Milkeila said.
Cormack looked at her incredulously.
“He cannot run away with it,” the woman reminded.
Cormack reached out and put his fist, clenched over the soul stone, in the stranger’s shaking palm. As soon as the man tightened his grip about Cormack’s fist, Cormack relaxed his grasp and let the gemstone fall to the wounded man.
Shaking fingers immediately stilled and closed over the gemstone, and with a great and collected exhale, the wounded man lay easily on the sandbar. Many heartbeats passed.
“I think it killed him to death,” Mcwigik said, but then the man reached his hand up and pressed the gemstone against his forehead.
“Or not,” muttered the dwarf, and his voice reeked of disappointment.
Many more heartbeats slipped past and the stranger remained motionless on the ground, his hand pressed against his forehead. Then-with hardly an effort, it seemed!-he sat up, still holding the gemstone to his forehead, and said in an accent that was obviously from south of the Gulf of Corona, “Well found in a dark place and know that you have my eternal gratitude. I am Bransen.”
They hadn’t hit anything vital, he believed; the wound was not mortal. It hurt, though. How it hurt, and it was all poor Olconna could do to turn his focus to his surroundings and not the cut in his belly.
He had managed to secure a knife; he surely would have preferred a sword, but the knife he had hidden away in his boot would have to suffice.
He couldn’t deny his fear as the giants lowered him head-down into the ice chasm, a thick rope tied tightly about his ankle. But Olconna had spent the better part of his adolescence and all of his adulthood in battle, and had faced tremendous odds again and again. Always he had found his answer, his way to victory or at least to escape, and he had no reason to believe that this time would be any different. Ancient Badden had erred, Olconna believed, because he had allowed the man to greatly recover from the wounds he had received in the fight when he had been captured.
He brandished the knife. He forced himself to extend downward and stretch the wound, as he couldn’t hope to battle whatever beast might be down here while doubled over.
It was darker now, for he was well over a hundred feet down from the ledge, but not pitch-black. Olconna forced himself into a slow turn, taking in the myriad edges and jags of the chasm walls, trying to pick out a shape among them that foretold something else.
“Faster,” he muttered under his breath, wanting to be on the floor and free of the rope before this beast appeared. In the back of his head, Vaughna’s last words, “every moment precious,” played over and over like a constant echo of regret. For the man, cautious in everything but battle, hadn’t lived that way-until he had encountered Crazy V. The notion weighed on him for a short moment, but Olconna turned that fear that he had lost his chance into determination that he wouldn’t let it end now, that he would find a way to gain some years where Vaughna’s words would guide him as sound advice.
But a moment later Olconna heard a low rumble, like a huge rock rolling down a hill. The beast smelled his blood, just as that old wretch Badden had predicted before he had stabbed Olconna in the belly.
Olconna slowly turned at the end of the rope, his gaze passing the long and open stretch of corridor. He noted a movement down there, a quick glimpse of something large, something awful. He tried to battle his momentum, to stop and face the beast, but he kept going around. He managed to twist about, eliciting terrific pain from his torn belly, to catch a few quick views of the approaching monster. It looked like a gigantic worm, or more accurately a caterpillar, for the many small legs scrabbling at its sides. Giant mandibles arched out in semicircles before its black, round maw-the type of toothy orifice often found on sea creatures, which seemed to pucker as much as open.
“Faster!” Olconna said again, cursing the giants who were lowering him, but as if on cue, the rope stopped.
He hung there, twenty feet from the ground, too high to try to free himself, for the fall would surely leave him helpless in the face of the monster. But too far, he believed, for the approaching beast to get at him. He managed to steady his turn properly so that he could face the crawling nightmare.
They’ll let me bleed out up here, above it, he reasoned, and he decided then that if the worm came under him he would cut free his ankle and drop upon it, all caution be damned!
That thought rang as a beacon of hope in his mind, turned his fear into action, into violence, as he had trained to do for all of his life.
But the worm reared up like a cobra, and before Olconna even appreciated that fact it lashed out.
Olconna tried to respond with the dagger, but so shocked was he that he didn’t even realize that his weapon arm was gone until he saw it disappearing into the awful beast’s mouth!
Now he screamed. There was nothing else. Just the pain and the helplessness-that was the worst of it for a man like Olconna.
No, not the worst. The worst of it were Vaughna’s echoing words, a creed for her, a lament for him: Every moment precious.
The worm took its time, lashing and tearing, and Olconna felt no less than six more stabbing and slashing bites before he finally slipped into that deepest darkness.
Cormack sat on the rail of the beached boat, his shoulders slumped as if all of the air had been sucked out of his lean body. Before him, Milkeila paced nervously back and forth, continually glancing at the surprising man in the black suit.
The man who had just informed them that their entire world was soon to be washed away.
“Are you to let him keep the soul stone?” Milkeila asked, pacing.
“It is your stone.”
The shaman stopped and turned on her lover curiously.
“I would counsel that you let him keep it,” Cormack decided. “It is the most important of gems, I agree, but if what Bransen says is true, then he is all but helpless without it.”
“And with it, he walks with the grace of a warrior,” Milkeila added as both watched the young man, who stood across the sandbar going through a series of movements and turns, the practice of a warrior, as brilliant and precise as anything either of them had ever seen. Cormack in particular appreciated Bransen’s movements, for his training in the arts martial as a young brother of the Order of Abelle had been extensive and complete.
Or so he had thought, but in watching Bransen, Cormack recognized an even deeper level of concentration than he had ever achieved, and by far.
“I believe his every word,” Milkeila admitted, and she seemed surprised by that statement. She turned to see Cormack nodding his agreement.
“It is too outrageous a story to not be true.” “We have to tell them-all of them,” said Milkeila. “Your people and mine.”
“And even Mcwigik’s,” Cormack added. “At the very least, Mithranidoon must be abandoned.”
Milkeila lamented, “A wall of falling ice to wash us all away.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Three Perspectives
On pain of death!” Brother Giavno said again, becoming dangerously animated. Out on rock-collection detail, Giavno and his two companions had been the first to note the approach of Cormack and the strange-looking man in the black suit of some exotic material-Giavno thought it was called “silk,” but as he had seen the stuff only once in his life, and many years before, he couldn’t be certain. The stranger wore a typical farmer’s hat, but Giavno noted some black fabric under that as well.
“Greetings to you, too,” Cormack replied.
“How can you be alive?” one of the other brothers asked, and Cormack tapped his beret.
“God’s will and good luck, I would say,” the fallen monk replied.
“You know nothing of God,” Giavno growled.
“Says the man who whipped him nearly to death,” Bransen, at Cormack’s side, quipped. “A godly act, indeed-at least, according to the mores of many Abellicans I have known. It is strange to me how much like Samhaists they seem
.”
Giavno trembled and seemed about to explode. Behind him, over the rocky ridge, some other monks called out and soon a swarm of brothers was fast running toward the rocky beach.
“Why did you come here, Cormack?” Giavno asked, seeming as much concerned as outraged-a poignant reminder to Cormack that he and this man had once been friends. “You know the consequences.”
“You thought me already dead.”
“A death you earned with your treachery.”
“Your definition, not mine. I followed that which was in my heart, and many of the brothers here, I would wager, were glad of it. I find it difficult to comprehend that I was alone in my distaste for our imprisoning of the Alpinadorans.”
“What you find difficult to comprehend is that you make no rules here, or anywhere in the Church. If Father De Guilbe wished for your opinion on the matter, he would have asked. And he did not.”
“Ever the dutiful one, aren’t you?” Cormack replied, and Giavno narrowed his eyes.
“Alive?” came a shout from behind, and Father De Guilbe, surrounded by an armed entourage, appeared over the crest of the hill. “Are you mad to come back here?”
“How would I know differently?” Cormack asked. “I remember little beyond the sting of your mercy.”
“Play not coy with me, traitor,” said De Guilbe, and unlike Giavno, there wasn’t a hint of compassion or mercy in his tone. He turned to the nearest guards and said, “Take him.”
“I would not,” said the man standing beside Cormack.
Father De Guilbe dropped a withering gaze over him-except he did not shrink back in the least. “And who are you?”
“My name is Bransen, though that is of no consequence to you,” Bransen replied. “I am a man here not of my will, but of misfortune, and I come to you only to repay the debt that I owe to this man, and to the people of some of the other islands.”
De Guilbe shook his head as if not comprehending any of it, and Bransen let it go, for it was of no consequence.
“I bring a grave warning that your world is about to be washed away,” Bransen said. “It is my duty to tell you that, I suppose, but whether you choose to act upon it or not is of little consequence to me.”
A couple of the monks bristled, obviously focusing on the last part of his quip and not the more important announcement. Of the group, now twenty brothers, only a few raised their eyebrows in alarm, and even that became a past thought almost immediately, as one of Father De Guilbe’s entourage announced, pointing at Bransen, “He has a gemstone!”
Cormack glanced at Bransen in alarm, but the man from Pryd Town seemed bothered not at all.
“Is this true?” asked Father De Guilbe.
“If it is, it is none of your affair.”
“You walk a dangerous-”
“I walk where I choose to walk and how I choose to walk,” Bransen interrupted. “Feign no dominion over me, disingenuous old fool. My father was of your order, a brother of great accomplishment. No, not any accomplishment that you would understand or appreciate,” he answered De Guilbe’s curious look. “And more to your pity.”
“From Entel?” Father De Guilbe asked. “Your swarthy appearance bespeaks a Southern heritage.”
Bransen grinned knowingly at the obvious ploy.
“It matters not,” De Guilbe said. “You are here with a criminal and carrying contraband.”
“Contraband?” Bransen said with a mocking chuckle. “You presume to know how I came about this gemstone. You presume that I have a gemstone. You do not understand Jhesta Tu philosophy, yet pretend that you have any understanding of me, or of what I will do to your guards if you send them forth, or of how I will come back in the dark of night and easily defeat any defenses you construct, that you and I will speak more directly at your own bedside.”
It took a while for all of that to digest, and Giavno at last broke the uncomfortable silence by berating Cormack, “What have you brought to us?”
“A man to deliver a message, and then we are gone from here.”
“The glacier north of your lake is home to a Samhaist,” Bransen announced. “The Ancient himself. Ancient Badden, who wars with Dame Gwydre of Vanguard.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was there, just yesterday,” Bransen answered. “Badden claims dominion over this lake and works to ensure that all here, yourselves included-and especially, if he should ever learn that Abellicans reside on this most holy of Samhaist places-will be washed away on a great wave of his murderous wrath. If he executes his plan there is for you no escape. If he is not stopped this place you name as Chapel Isle will become a washed stone on an uninhabited hot lake.”
“Preposterous!” said Giavno, while the monks around him whispered and shuffled nervously, and looked all around for someone to settle their fears from the sudden shock.
Bransen shrugged, as if unconcerned.
“We are to believe you?” Father De Guilbe asked skeptically. “You come to us beside a traitor…”
“A man I hardly know, but one possessed of more sense than you it would seem. I have come to deliver a message as repayment to this man you name as traitor and yet who feels obligated to you still. Whether you act upon that message or not is not my concern. I hold no love for your Church. Indeed, from what I have seen you are more than deserving of my contempt. But I am Jhesta Tu, and so such feelings as contempt have no place in my world.”
He turned to Cormack, but before he could address the man, Giavno assailed him, “Jhesta Tu? What is Jhesta Tu?”
Bransen eyed the fiery man out of the corner of his eye. “Something you could never begin to comprehend.”
“Take them!” Giavno yelled, and immediately a pair of guards, brandishing short swords, leaped at Bransen and Cormack.
They never got close. Bransen, expecting it, even coaxing it, leaped at the first, kicking his right foot out to the man’s right side, then sweeping it across. It posed no real threat to the monk, but had him distracted so that that the real attack, a snap-kick from Bransen’s left foot, caught him right in the chest, blasting out his breath in a great gasp. Bransen landed lightly back on his right foot and propelled himself forward and left, beside the staggering monk’s awkward thrust. He snatched the man by the wrist with his right hand, drove his left hand brutally against the monk’s straightened elbow, then quickly covered the man’s sword hand with his own, bending the monk’s wrist over painfully and stealing his strength-and his grip on the sword.
The blade didn’t fall an inch before Bransen snapped it out of the air, and he spun away, back-kicking the wounded monk in the side to ensure that there would be no pursuit, and also to shift his own momentum, driving him to intercept the second approaching guard.
The short swords collided repeatedly in a series of arm-numbing parries that ended with Bransen looping his blade over that of the confused monk. A twist and jerk sent the short sword to the ground, and left the tip of Bransen’s sword at the stunned monk’s throat. And it all happened in the space of a few heartbeats.
Bransen laughed and straightened, moving his blade back from the terrified man. He hooked the fallen sword with his own and deftly flipped it into his left hand, then turned to Giavno and flung both swords, spinning end over end, to stick into the ground right before the monk.
“You have been warned,” Bransen announced. “Ancient Badden will destroy you.”
He turned and walked away.
Cormack lingered a short while longer, looking mostly to Father De Guilbe. His expression was one of apology, perhaps, but mostly it was filled with pleading. But there was no more to say, so he followed Bransen back to the boat.
Both Cormack and Milkeila accompanied Bransen onto the forested island of Yossunfier. Many more people came out to greet them before they even got their boat ashore. The whole of Milkeila’s tribe, it seemed, came down to the waterfront, shielding their eyes from the morning glare, whispering among themselves at this surprising group approachi
ng their island home.
Many scowls focused on Cormack and his obvious Abellican attire, but Androosis was there, along with Toniquay and Canrak, instructing his kin that this particular monk was no enemy of Yossunfier.
As the trio glided in near the beach, strong hands grabbed the craft and ushered it up onto the beach. Toniquay stepped front and center before Milkeila as she exited the boat, the higher-ranking shamans deferring to him because of his intimate knowledge of this situation and these participants.
He stared at Milkeila for just a few moments, then scrutinized Cormack, his expression giving the man no indication of how much his actions had ingratiated him to the barbarians. Then Toniquay’s gaze fell over Bransen, but only for a moment.
“What do you presume?” Toniquay asked Milkeila. He waited just a short while of uncomfortable silence before adding, “Do you believe that your friend has earned the right to step onto our land simply because he, unlike so many of his kin, took a moral road? Do you think that all past wrongs will be simply forgotten?”
“It was at great personal cost!” Milkeila replied, instinctively defending her lover, who put a hand on her arm to calm her. “But that is not why we have come. Cormack signaled to me and I answered his call.”
“Signaled?” Toniquay said suspiciously. “And how did he know a way in which he might signal you, Milkeila? And how did you know to answ…” He stopped and waved his hand and shook his head. His point had been made that the woman would surely have to answer for her apparent secret relationship with this Abellican, but Toniquay was more interested in hearing Milkeila’s tale at that time.
“Why is he here?” the shaman asked.
“Cormack found this man, Bransen,” Milkeila replied, and she put her hand on Bransen’s shoulder. The man in the black suit nodded, though he obviously understood little of the conversation.
“Bransen fell from the glacier,” said Milkeila.
Toniquay looked at her skeptically, and doubting murmurs grew all about them. “Then he would be dead,” Toniquay said.
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