"This should be fun," his shadow drawled.
Ignoring him, Xavier strode directly over to the door and,
without hesitating, rapped on it with his knuckles. The problem with doing things quickly so they hurt less, Xavier considered while he waited for a response before knocking again, is that it only works if you're not depending on anyone else. Shifting his weight from foot to foot, and alternately tightening and loosening his grip on Colby's bag, he waited. Finally, after his third, much louder, knock, he heard the sound of movement from inside the house.
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The sound of steps approached the door from inside, then there was a sliding noise and a small opening appeared in the door at eye level.
"What?" a woman's icy voice demanded.
"I—I'm looking for Midnyte and Bayne. Colby sent me."
The opening closed, then there was the sound of more latches
being drawn and the door opened enough for Xavier to see the
woman on the other side. She didn't look old enough to be Colby's mother, in fact, they looked almost the same age. No grey streaked her shoulder-length brown hair and scars rather than wrinkles marred her face. There were a half dozen small ones, and one large ragged one that started near her hairline and stopped halfway down her cheek, bisecting her left eye. Still, apparent age or not, she was very obviously Colby's mother. He could see it in the shape of her face, the color of her eyes and even the way she stood in the doorway with her weight on one leg and her hand on her hip.
"Where is Colby?"
How to answer that question? Like a bandage. "It's a very long story, and we haven't much time. I—Colby saved me in the swamp, and it turns out the shard of stone you need to help Bayne is actually here," he gestured at the bandaged wound in his chest. "Embedded in my chest. We'll have to take it out quickly and then I need to go back, because the man who did this to me, has captured Colby."
He watched the expressions flicker over Colby's mother's face.
Pride, relief, fear, horror, and then they were all gone. He watched Midnyte's eyes harden and her chin stiffen as a mask dropped into place over her. Before she could speak he moved Colby's pack from behind his back and handed it toward her mother.
"This is hers. I don't know how to convince you what I say is true, but it is, and either you need to cut this stone out of me to save your son right away, or I am going to take it with me when I go back to Aphanasia to get your daughter."
Later Xavier was lying upon the smooth wooden table that
dominated the kitchen. His legs hung over the side, and he looked out the window at the day's last sunrays playing over the tops of the trees. "This is a far cry from Scholar's operating room," he said and laughed. He knew he was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to break the tense silence around them.
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"Are you sure," the elven cleric asked, peering down at him on the table, "that you don't want me to give you something to make you sleep?"
"No." Xavier shook his head. "I mean to travel at first light and I can't afford to have my senses dulled."
In the glass of the window he saw Midnyte's faint outline nod in approval, then a flash of light caught on the cleric's blade and he closed his eyes and waited for the cut.
When it came it was sure and deep, wringing a cry of pain
from his lips despite his best intentions. He curled his hands into fists so tight his fingernails left half-moon shaped cuts in their wake.
His tentacles tensed around him, stretching out their full length before falling limp at his sides. Still, the cleric knew her craft and with very little digging around, and a small amount of chanting words Xavier didn't understand, she had soon removed the stone from his chest. He felt it as it left him, and heard it drop, with a heavy clunk, into the wooden basin on the table beside his head.
Midnyte scrubbed at it with water while the cleric stitched the wound in his chest back closed, then she chanted some more words and applied a poultice. She left without a further word, moving as soundlessly as a cloud in the sky, while Midnyte poured a sharp-smelling ale over the stone and then held it up to look at it in the dying light.
It was a shard off the larger stone they'd seen at the heart of the sacred tree, alright. Long and thin, with jagged edges at either end, Xavier was filled with a sinking feeling as he looked at it. How was this going to fit into the pommel of a sword any more than the giant stone from the tree would have?
He saw a frown cross Midnyte's face as he sat up slowly on the table. Wordlessly the woman went down the short hall that led off the kitchen and he followed her. His stomach felt woogly and his knees weak. The cleric's spell and poultice relieved most of his pain, and even the ache in his ribs from being kicked had subsided to almost nothing. Still, the day's adventures left him weak, and he leaned on the wall as they walked down the hall.
They entered a very small room most of which was taken up
by a single bed. A small window with rawhide stretched over it to let in a semblance of light was centered in the wall beside it, and a chest of drawers and small night stand completed the furnishings.
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Bayne took up almost all of the bed. He was muscular, but
pale. His skin was grey and his lips had an almost blue tinge around the edges. Long hair, as white as a fish's belly, framed his face and lay fanned out on his pillow around him. Xavier could see a
resemblance to Colby in him too, though it wasn't as strong as in her mother. At Bayne's hand was a sword. It was very long, and its straight blade didn't have a single scratch on it. The leather-wrapped handle was long enough for two hands to go side by side, and looked very well worn. The pommel was concave and looked as though it were missing something.
Midnyte lifted it gently from her son's grip and Xavier,
thinking it must be very heavy reached toward it. "Let me help."
Midnyte jerked the blade away from his reach. "Don't touch him. He—bites anyone he doesn't like."
"Bites?"
"Hurts—it—just don't touch. It's much better that way."
Xavier nodded and took a half step back. He soon noticed that the woman didn't need any help handling the sword, in fact, she seemed more comfortable with it in her hand than without it.
Midnyte took the shard of the stone and pressed it against the concave pommel. If he'd expected a flash of light, or billows of smoke, he was disappointed. Instead, he watched as the stone
seemed to grow soft in the other woman's fingers. They sunk into it as though it were made of clay and then Midnyte pressed it harder against the sword.
"It's getting—" Whatever the next word was going to be, Midnyte never spoke it. Instead, she let go and to Xavier's surprised the stone stayed in place. In fact, as far as he could see it had melded with the sword and now swelled out from the existing pommel
making it slightly convex.
"How did you do that?" Xavier breathed.
"I didn't," Midnyte answered, turning with the sword in hand to face Bayne. "The sword did."
Midnyte touched the flat of the blade to Bayne's shoulder. His body arched, bucking up and bending so that his back was curved at a nearly impossible angle. He sucked in air, wheezing before
collapsing, once more, to the bed. Midnyte set the sword back down at his side and leaned over him to check that he was okay.
He was.
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From where he was standing Xavier could see that his
breathing was strong and steady and the color was already returning to his face.
"Bayne?" Midnyte whispered.
His eyelids fluttered and he turned his head toward her, then opened them. "Hey," he said, his voice sounding worse even than Xavier's shadow's.
"Hey you," Midnyte whispered and then half-turned to face Xavier. "Bayne, this is Xavi
er. He just saved your life."
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Book Two: Back Again
Chapter Ten
Bayne had long heard stories about a crazy man who lived on
the edge of the swamp performing experiments on the unwary,
everyone in Haven had. He'd never given them much thought, but meeting Xavier and hearing that Scholar had his sister made every whispered rumor come flooding back into his memory, their horror amplified tenfold by his imagination.
"And that," Xavier concluded, sitting across from him as Bayne scarfed down a loaf of bread with cheese. The second he'd devoured since Midnyte woke him. "Is how I got here. We need to go help Colby."
Anger flashed through Bayne, hot and swift as a grassfire.
How could Xavier have let that woman take his sister? He opened his mouth to ask the question aloud, but then closed it again as a voice not his own invaded his thoughts.
You'd be undead. If he'd stopped to help Colby first, if he'd failed, you would be a leech by now.
'Perhaps,' he thought back to his sword, strapped securely to his back in its scabbard. 'But if he'd succeeded we wouldn't be in this position.'
The blade didn't reply, and Bayne didn't expect it to. Instead he chewed another hunk of bread, mulling over the situation and
swallowing down his anger with it.
"They've already got a lead of several days," he said at long last, meeting Xavier's gaze across the table. Seeing the anxiety on other man's face he softened his tone of voice. "Mother will have already packed us bags, we can be off right away. We'll talk while we walk."
"Several days? No, just one at most. It didn't take me long to get here, and the surgery and your recovery only a few hours—"
"Time works differently on Terricina than it does in
Aphanasia," Bayne said, rising from the table with the heel of bread in his hand. "For every hour spent here near to seven pass there."
Xavier had begun to rise with him, but then Bayne watched the color seep from his face and he began to sink back down toward the chair. "Oh. Oh—I didn't know. I—days."
And that might also have affected his choice…
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Before Bayne could reply, Xavier planted his hands on the
rough-hewn surface of the table and rose decisively, pushing his chair back with the motion. "Let's go then."
After a quick word with his mother who had, indeed, packed
bags for them, they left. Bayne set a quick pace. They could slow it again once they were through the portal, but now, while time was on Scholar's side sevenfold, it was especially important to go as quickly as they could.
Bayne wore his winter clothes and carried lighter clothing in the pack on his back. Early blizzards like the one Xavier had traveled through were not uncommon on Terricina, so Bayne was well prepared to deal with it. Xavier was a different matter though.
They'd not been able to find any boots that would fit Xavier's feet, they were too wide, and his tentacles weren't something he could stuff into the arms of a shirt. Thus, he was wearing only a pair of wool breeches with leather chaps over top to slow the speed at which they absorbed the snow he walked through, and a thick poncho. He seemed to be favoring his injured side, but he kept up, and in doing so helped push Bayne to move faster than he might otherwise have done.
When they entered Aphanasia it was early afternoon. The
bright sun warmed them, and the pair stretched out their limbs and changed out of their heavy clothing. Slowing their pace only slightly, they headed down out of the hills. As they neared the road Bayne noticed Xavier looking around nervously and hunching his shoulders as though he were trying to hide within himself.
"Let's stay off the road," Bayne suggested. "It might be better to not draw attention to ourselves if we can avoid it."
Xavier very nearly deflated with relief, then let out a long
breath and shook his head. "We need to get to Colby, the road is faster."
They walked in silence for a while longer, both of them
ignoring the looks pointed in Xavier's direction as they passed through the traffic heading to and from Haven. The farther they got from the city, the less people were around, and the higher Xavier's chin rose from his chest.
Bayne tried to think as though this was any other job, to push his emotions to the back of his brain and strategize but it was no good. That son-of-a-harpy had his sister! Every time he started to come up with a decent plan of action it was erased from his mind by
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the image of Colby screaming in agony, or sporting tentacles like the ones Xavier had. Just as his mind began another circuit through images he'd rather not visit, Xavier saved him from their torment by speaking.
"I didn't know, you know, about the time difference. I thought a couple hours—"
Bayne nodded. "I know." He wanted to add something
supportive or forgiving but he couldn't. He was too worried about Colby and despite what his logical mind told him, he couldn't quite douse the little coal of resentment toward Xavier that burned in his belly. Xavier nodded and looked away again.
He did save your life you know.
"Yes, you've mentioned that."
Xavier's eyes darted back toward Bayne. "It's true. I'm sorry I—"
"I wasn't talking to you." Xavier raised an eyebrow in confusion and Bayne explained. "The sword, I was talking to the sword."
"It can talk?"
"To me, yes. He's sentient. I know it's rather difficult to believe—"
"Oh no," Xavier shook his head, a half-smile at the corner of his lips. "I don't find it difficult to believe at all."
~*~
The line where land met sky was a pearly grey, leading
Xavier's mind back to the morning he and Colby had fled from the cave. Then he'd been running away from Scholar and he never would have imagined a time when he would willingly return. Yet, after walking all night, here he was.
He was exhausted. He'd not slept well in days, years if you
counted his time as Scholar's prisoner. Before, the stone's strength had helped sustain him, but now it was gone. In its place he had a wound that, though it did not bleed, had resolved itself into a dull ache hours ago. His tentacle, where it had been cut, and his cracked ribs were bound, but also very sore. What pained him most of all though, were his thoughts.
Around and around his mind whirled, like a feather in a
windstorm, but always it came back to one gut-wrenching thought;
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Scholar has Colby. He tried to push the thought and its
accompanying images from his mind but it was no use. Each time he banished one image it was replaced by another, more horrifying one.
"We're almost there," Xavier said, stating the obvious in an attempt at interrupting that thought before it could fully coalesce.
"Are you sure splitting up is the best way to do this?"
"No, but let's try it anyway. At least this maximizes the chances of one of us reaching Colby."
Xavier shrugged. Truthfully he liked that the plan wasn't
combat-centric. Despite Scholar's best attempts he preferred to avoid fighting, but 'sneak in, free Colby and sneak out' didn't really seem destined to be successful either.
They approached the castle at a good pace, Xavier estimated
they'd reach it before dawn added pink to the sky. Bayne walked at his side, his jaw tight and eyes straight forward. His sword was drawn and Xavier watched him re-adjust his hands on its handle over and over.
He could relate very well to the stress Bayne seemed to be
trying hard to suppress. In all the time he'd held him, Xavier had been the only serious subject of Scholar's experiments, his prototype, as it were. But twice Xavier had seen the madman
perform one-off experiments on thugs who had disappointed him. The first, a man with yellow hair, had his lower body swapped for that of a Reptar.
As far as Xavier could tell he'd died in the middle of the procedure, or at least his screams had. The second, a woman, was far less lucky.
Xavier didn't know what Scholar had been attempting with her, but she'd screamed for days, her voice growing hoarser and hoarser, before finally, mercifully, falling silent forever. Whatever Scholar had done to those poor souls was nothing compared to what he
would do to Xavier if he recaptured him, especially once he
discovered the stone missing from his chest. In his mind the woman's voice became Colby's and he jerked his thoughts from that direction.
Bayne stopped and Xavier followed his example. The keep
was directly in front of them and he studied it carefully. Most of his time had been spent inside the building, he was not as familiar with its eternal layout. It stood up on a small hill, a smattering of poorly-built wooden outbuildings surrounded it like toadstools around a tree. The keep itself might once have been impressive but those days were long since past. It was roughly square with sheer black walls and no windows near the ground. Four towers, had once sprouted up,
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one from each corner, but now two lay as piles of stone on the ground and the third leaned menacingly. A handful of windows
decorated the two remaining towers, their shutters rotten and, in many cases, missing.
"Well," Bayne said, "at least we know which tower he kept you in."
Xavier nodded, but said nothing. Rather he watched Bayne
scan the land in front of them. Eventually he spoke again. "I've hired my sword to many men, some of them used traps…the thing about traps is that they are indiscriminate."
"Yes?" Xavier prompted after Bayne's pause grew overly long.
"So," Bayne said, "if you don't want them killing your men you need to have a way for people to get through them safely. To do that, you mark them somehow—"
"Doesn't that defeat their purpose?"
"Mercenaries are expensive and your enemy only knows to
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