torg 01 - Storm Knights

by Bill Slavicsek

  "Repent!" the preacher yelled out, his gaze was again fixed on the reporter. "Admit your sins and seek the True Church!"

  Guerault shivered, though the day was unusually warm. A side effect of the longer days and nights, she assumed. The world was changing, she realized. Maybe the preacher was right, maybe she should repent.

  She almost laughed aloud at the thought, then dismissed the preacher and his crowd as she went to file her story.

  61

  Tolwyn dreamed. She dreamed of confusion and alarm on a bright, rolling plain. She dreamed of battle in a field where the wind-rippled waves of crys flowers were crushed and stained red with the blood of warriors, where a once-beautiful land was churned under foot and claw and cloven hoof. There were other memories associated with the battle, but they refused to surface yet, so her mind traveled further into the tunnel of time.

  Now her dream was of the day she ran out of childhood and directly, unheedingly, into the back of Duke Tancred himself. He walked through the narrow,

  flagstone-paved lanes of the castle gardens, with his hands clasped at the small of his back and his head bent in thought. Tolwyn's lithe, running form caromed off the solid, warrior's body of the Duke, and she spun to a standing halt in a bed of fragrant mint. The Duke, caught completely off guard, went sprawling from the path, his hands digging up the soft earth, crushing the leaves and releasing the strong aromas of basil and chicory as he tried to halt his fall. With her hands covering her mouth and her eyes wide with apprehension over the consequences of her action, Tolwyn silently watched the Duke roll quickly onto his back, gather his legs under him, and reach for the gold-hilted dagger he wore at his belt.

  "Tolwyn!" the Duke roared laughingly, his eyes losing their feral, battle-ready hardness as he recognized the girl standing knee deep in a bed of mint. "Never," he grunted while hauling himself to his feet and brushing dirt and leaves from his clothing, "Never in all my campaigns have I been dealt such a blow. Do you realize, child, that you have succeeded in doing what the assembled hosts of continental chivalry have never done? You, Tolwyn of House Tancred, have 'unhorsed' the mighty, undefeated Duke Tancred."

  He chuckled and added, "I suppose I shall have to change that last epithet. I may still be mighty, but I am certainly not undefeated."

  "Oh, how the mighty have fallen," said Tolwyn softly, forced by her quick humor to speak the words aloud to the Duke.

  The Duke's soft laughter subsided as his thoughts returned to the troubles beginning to plague his country. Soon it would be called the War of Crowns, but for now it was just "the troubles." Quietly he observed Tolwyn where she stood watching him, her smile of relief brought about by the Duke's good humor faltering as somberness overtook him. She feared she had pushed the Duke too far with that last spoken jest.

  Abruptly, he asked, "How old are you now, girl?"

  "Twelve, father," Tolwyn answered, quietly at first, then gaining animation as she continued. "But I shall be counted thirteen at the summer solstice and gain the right to wear the maiden's twin braids as I wait to be taken to wife."

  "Your mother was the best warrior who ever fought at my left hand side," Duke Tancred said, studying Tolwyn, almost as if he had not heard her answer to his question.

  "I do not remember her, father."

  "We are both more aware of that than we would ever want to be, daughter." The Duke shrugged his shoulders as if trying to shed the weight of a heavy, water-soaked mantle. "Well, conquering maiden of House Tancred, what is it you would wish to do?" he asked lightly, attempting to force the river of his thoughts into other, shallower channels.

  "Was it truly a mighty blow that I struck?"

  "The mightiest," he answered with mock seriousness.

  "Perhaps, then, father," Tolwyn said musingly, "I should be a soldier and a warrior as was my mother."

  The Duke reached out his hand to his daughter. As Tolwyn began to reach out to her father, she saw his palm turn to cinnamon brown, and the skin of his wrist and arm become black. She looked up and her father was gone, replaced by an old black man clad in a loincloth. She looked about for her father and saw that the gardens were gone, and the castle. She and the black man stood high on a wind-swept shore overlooking a turbulent ocean.

  The black man was lean and wiry and held a knotted rope in his right hand. When his broad face broke into a grin, she saw that he was missing one tooth, and she saw the hole in his tongue. "G'day, luv, where's the blokes that are supposed to be with you?" the black man asked.

  When Tolwyn had no answer for him, the aborigine studied her, shook his head from side to side, making his mound of white hair jiggle. He lost his grin, and said comfortingly, "No worries, it's too soon for you to be out here in the never never. Best you go back, now."

  The aborigine pointed into the eastern distance, and Tolwyn felt herself hurtling through the air. She flew over desert lands; blue, white-capped waves; a rocky, shore; large cities full of tall buildings and milling people; and landed, on her hands and knees, in orange sand sparsely dotted with scrub brush. From somewhere in the long shadows of late afternoon, she heard a hunting howl. The horizon and the nearer distances were pierced with craggy, vertical formations of rock that rose starkly from the orange sands into the gathering blackness of the sky. Nearer still, illuminated by the sinking sun at Tolwyn's back were two monumental, weather-carved formations that looked like two mit-tened hands, with clumped fingers and separate thumbs, raised in salute to the coming of night.

  "I am in the gorge," Tolwyn realized. Deeper still, down in the great crack in the ground, she saw a subtle blue-red glow emerging from a cave. The light spoke to her, but she couldn't hear the words. She only felt the pain and fear, the unfathomable call for help.

  "I am coming," she whispered, "I vow that I will finish my mission."

  Then she fell into a deeper, dreamless sleep.

  62

  Tolwyn awoke to sunlight and the smell of bacon. She blinked away the sleep and saw that Christopher Bryce was at the window, opening the curtains to let in the light.

  "So, at last you're awake," said Bryce in a glad voice. "You've slept away the whole morning and most of the afternoon." He seemed pleased that she had awakened.

  "I remember my father, Christopher Bryce," Tolwyn said. "I dreamed about him last night."

  "That's good, that shows progress," Bryce said. "What was Mr. Miller like?"

  Tolwyn looked at him strangely, but ignored his question. "What manner of beast is calling?" she asked.

  "Beast?" asked Bryce, startled at her question.

  "Aye, that howling I hear. Do not tell me you cannot hear it screaming madly just outside the walls of this castle."

  "Oh, that's the wind. There have been incredible storms since everything began. And now I hear that they think the planet is slowing down. I honestly don't understand what the world is coming to."

  Tolwyn looked questioningly at Bryce. "You mean it is taking longer for the light to make its journey through the world?"

  Now it was Bryce's turn to be confused. "Come over here. Take a look out the window."

  She threw the sheet back and started to slide out of the bed. She swung her legs over the side and placed her feet on the floor. Her hospital gown began to rise up her thighs.

  "Wait," said Bryce, "let me get a robe for you."

  Wrapped in a blue, antiseptic-smelling hospital robe, Tolwyn stood next to the short figure of Bryce and looked out the window. Winds of hurricane force hurled litter, debris, leaves, and unidentifiable flotsam through paved streets lined with tall brick buildings. Hard-driven rain rattled against the glass of the window. Huge clouds scudded visibly across the sky and over the towering rooftops, looming ominously. In the streets below, a few military and police vehicles fought to make headway against the wind, uselessly trying to enforce martial law in a city whose citizens had locked themselves up in whatever safe place they could find, trying to survive the storms.

  Tolwyn looked from the sk
y to the buildings and then to the vehicles moving slowly through the streets. "Christopher Bryce," she said, "this is not the world in which I was born and in which I died."

  "What ...?" But before he could ask more, the young woman spoke again.

  "I must find the gorge in my dreams, Christopher Bryce. It is my mission, the purpose for which I came here."

  "Tolwyn, I don't understand."

  "I am Tolwyn. My father is Duke Bordal of House Tancred. Those are the sum of my memories right now, but I know that something calls to me from the bottom of the gorge. I must go to it, I must answer its call."

  "That's crazy," exclaimed Bryce, "I won't let you go anywhere. You're not well, and ."

  "I am not a child to be ordered, Christopher Bryce!" Tolwyn shouted. Her voice was strong, full of authority. It made Bryce pause.

  "I want to help you, Tolwyn, don't you see that?"

  "Then help me find the gorge, Christopher," Tolwyn pleaded, suddenly all the power was gone from her voice. "Please."

  63

  That afternoon, after a quiet lunch with Rick Alder, Coyote and Rat in the hospital's cafeteria, Father Christopher Bryce walked Tolwyn back to her room. She did not speak to him, and the silence was disturbing. But he still had questions, so he sat down in the chair beside her bed to gather his thoughts.

  "Were you really dead, Tolwyn?" Bryce asked.

  "Yes," she said, not bothering to adjust her blue hospital robe as she sat upon the bed.

  "And you're not a woman named Wendy Miller?"

  "No."

  "You were never her, were you?"

  "I have always been who I am now, Tolwyn of House Tancred."

  "Do you know what happened to the woman whose body you wear?"

  Tolwyn looked down at her arms and hands. She glanced at her image in the mirror over the small chest of drawers. "This is my body," she said. She pointed to the scars on her arms. "These are my scars. That much I know. And that is my face in the glass."

  She ran one hand through her hair. "But someone has cut my hair."

  "Where have you come from, Tolwyn of House Tancred ... and why?" he asked slowly, hesitantly, concerned that his questioning would alarm her or send her back into herself. He saw the tension ripple the muscles along the lines of her jaw and feared the worst, that he had driven her away again with his questions to which she seemed to have no answers. But she sighed and the hard planes of clenched muscles softened in her face as she shook her head from side to side, apparently indicating that she did not have the answers he sought.

  "What land is this, Christopher Bryce?" Tolwyn asked as she looked out the window at the storm-beaten city. He told her.

  "It is difficult to know what you know and what you don't know," he said.

  "For me also," she said. She reached to the night stand beside the bed and picked up the vase that held the blue and red flower. "Do you know what this is?"

  "I don't think I've ever seen its like. But, then, I'm not very knowledgeable about flowers. You called it a crys, didn't you? A strange name ..."

  "Not to me, Christopher. I ran through fields of them when I was a child. They were trampled into the ground in the battle in which I died."

  "Where was this battle, Tolwyn?"

  He watched anger and frustration at her own lack of recollection chase each other across the windows of her eyes. "I do not ... wait ... Aysle ..." At first, the word was forced from Tolwyn's stiffened lips. But as she said it, rolled it around in her mouth, it calmed her. "My home is Aysle."

  However, no other memories would surface, nothing but a name and a feeling of terrible homesickness. "My mind is a war, and I am tired." And then she turned to Father Bryce. "This bed is narrow, but I've loved on narrower. Would you lie with me, Christopher Bryce?"

  Bryce felt the blood rush to his face and cause it to redden. He watched Tolwyn as she looked oddly at him where he sat red-faced and speechless as he searched for the words to explain his vocation and his vows to her.

  "How odd," she said wonderingly after he had found the words and gotten them out. "Vows I understand, but to deny one's nature ..."

  "That is the way it is," he said softly.

  She shrugged. "I would have enjoyed it, Christopher Bryce."

  "My friends call me Chris. It's short for Christopher." She looked puzzled, then grinned at him and asked, "Does that mean you have to call me Tol?"

  Bryce laughed and inwardly thanked her for lightening the tone of their situation. "I'll see you later, Tolwyn," he said, rose from the chair, and walked toward the door of the room.

  "Until later ... Chris," she said and lay back on the bed, closing her eyes as her head rested on the pillow.

  64

  Lambent energies flickered, coruscated, and Dr. Hachi Mara-Two appeared in the center of the flowing, dimension-spanning beams. Then the lambency died, the coruscation faded, and Mara found herself standing in a downpour. Mara absently wiped rain from her black jumpsuit, as she looked up at the brick building in front of her. She pulled her language logic enhancement chip from a pocket and plugged it into one of the slots behind her ear. The chip did its job immediately, and the metal letters embedded in the wall of the building, moments ago unreadable, now clearly proclaimed it the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

  "Giga-rad," Mara exclaimed to the empty street. "It worked. I'm here."

  Suddenly, the thrill of success slipped from her mind, and she remembered the incident in the transference chamber that had occurred not more than thirty seconds ago, her time. Quickly, she looked around to see if the one who had introduced himself as Thratchen had followed her. The streets were empty of people. She had not been followed. Off in the distance, some sort of wheeled vehicle passed by, its spotlights burning holes in the darkness of the storm. Mara rolled her leather gauntlet up, uncovering the inside of her left wrist. The wrist, like the rest of the arm, was sleeved in metal flesh that protected metal sinews and veins of circuitry. She squeezed her fist and a panel slid open, revealing a keypad and display line. The code running across the display told her the program was still operating, controlling the sensor unit built into her left eye.

  Mara had developed the sensor unit during the early days of the Sim War. It was apparent that select individuals on her world had undergone a change in response to the invading reality. These individuals — herself included—had started storing a form of energy that Mara could measure but not identify. Even the Sims registered on the sensor, or at least some of them. In fact, the sensor identified the energy in everything, but most things had it in such minute quantities that it was never noticed before. She theorized that the energy buildup was a natural defense mechanism that kicked into effect in the wake of reality storms, but she hadn't had time to prove it.

  "I don't like this storm," Mara muttered, remembering the storms that rocked Kadandra prior to the coming of the Sims. "Okay, let's see what the energy level looks like on Earth." A few taps on the keypad shifted the sensor lense into place over her pupil. Then the world exploded into a blinding burst of blue and red light.

  Mara shut her eye, but the vivid colors were burned into her retina. Even with the lid closed, she still saw the after image in her mind. "By the Net! This entire world glows like the selects! The energy is in such abundance here," she said to herself. She recalibrated the program, adjusting for the heavier concentration, and opened her eye again.

  Now the scenery was as normal, without the blue-red cast. To test the sensor, she held her hand before her. It was surrounded by the blue and red glow. "Because of the abundant energy here, I seem to be absorbing more of it. Giga-rad."

  Scanning the building before her, Mara saw a faint glow pulsating from an upper window. Okay, she thought. In and up. Mara found the entrance and pushed open the glass doors of the hospital. No one in the busy lobby took much notice of the young woman in the black jumpsuit as she made her way through the corridors and up the staircases of the building, following the displays in her e
ye. On the fourth floor of the hospital, she found a high concentration of energy coming from an open doorway. Whoever the select is, she thought, he must be positively crackling with the stuff. Quietly, she approached the portal and looked in.

  65

  "Put on this robe, Tolwyn," Father Bryce pleaded for the hundredth time.

  Tolwyn turned, leaned close so that her nose almost touched his, and said, "If you tell me what to do one more time, Christopher Bryce, I shall personally demonstrate twenty-seven ways to disable a man without using a weapon."

  Coyote and Rat giggled at the thought, but Bryce could hear the seriousness in Tolwyn's voice. It scared him, but not for his own sake. For her's. He dropped the garment onto the bed, then dropped himself into a chair.

  "Tolwyn, tell me again where you want to go," said Rick Alder.

  "There is a wide, deep gorge. At the bottom, a rushing river winds its way through the gorge. There is a cave in the gorge, and in that cave is the entity that called me to this world. It is in pain. It is afraid. And I must go to help it," Tolwyn finished.

  "That isn't a lot to go on, I'm afraid," Alder said. "We don't even know which direction to go."

  Tolwyn jumped up excitedly, grabbing the police officer with powerful hands. "But we do, Rick Alder! We do! In my dreams I am always moving west. We have to go west."

  "It was a dream, Tolwyn," Bryce said, trying to calm the excited woman.

  "I must find this gorge, Chris. I must!"

  "Why, Tolwyn?" Coyote asked.

  Before Tolwyn could answer, Rat exclaimed, "Cool hair!"

  Bryce, Tolwyn, Alder and Coyote looked up inquiringly at the young woman with the mane of silver hair who stood in the doorway. She was dressed in an oddly-tailored black jumpsuit that bristled with pockets. She looked directly at Tolwyn.

  "She must find the place in her dreams," the young woman said. Her voice was tinged with an accent as strange as Tolwyn's, but definitely not of the same origin. Bryce noticed that she wore a mask of makeup that reminded him of a raccoon.