Wildmane

by Todd Fahnestock

  “Of course I’ll follow you,” Mirolah said. The unicorn led her through the trees, and Mirolah followed, reveling in the quiet hush of the forest, the dim light that filtered through the trees as they became thicker. She stopped every now and then, when something caught her attention. She could almost taste the intense green of the pine needles. Squirrels scampered from limb to limb, making quiet squeaking noises. At moments, she thought she could almost understand them, as if they were speaking in a language the way humans did, just that it was a language she didn’t know.

  When she paused too long, the unicorn stamped her hoof, bringing Mirolah’s attention back, and then stepped farther into the forest. She followed.

  Finally, they came to a small glade with a man on the ground, sleeping peacefully, and Mirolah knew him.

  “Medophae,” she whispered, and the unicorn whinnied.

  His long, golden hair spread out beneath his head like a halo. His clothes were ripped, ragged, and dark with blood.

  She had kissed Medophae. He was as old as the mountains, but his lips had felt young, eager. She could feel them again as though they were still kissing, and she closed her eyes.

  She went to him and lay down next to him. She pushed a few locks of hair away from his cheek, then snuggled up to his back, laying her head next to his. Yes. This was how it should be.

  Within moments, she slept.

  63

  Medophae

  Medophae blinked open his eyes. Someone was lying on him, and every muscle in his body ached. Who...?

  It was the young threadweaver, her naked leg draped across his and her head tucked into his neck. What was her name? Mirolah. Orem’s apprentice.

  She had no clothes. Had they...? Were they...? Where were they?

  Flashes of Tyndiria came to him, and the many times he had forgotten where he was, only to be reminded again that he’d been living with her for years. Had he started something with Mirolah out here in this... This...

  Where was this?

  No memories came. He didn’t know this place or why he was here. And he was cold, so cold. He never got cold.

  Carefully, he dislodged her. She murmured in her sleep and curled into herself. The grass curled around her, as though cradling her.

  That was weird. Was this a dream?

  He rose, and the ground canted. He stumbled into a nearby tree, trying to catch his balance. He felt as if someone had scraped a knife along the inside of his skin, separating it from his body. He burned everywhere. His knees, shoulders and hips ached, and he shivered, of all things, and then he sneezed. His head was foggy and his throat sore. Sickness? He hadn’t been sick for thirteen centuries. What was wrong with him?

  Reflexively, he reached for the pouch with Bands’s gem to—

  It was gone.

  “No...” he whispered, patting his waist and looking frantically around the glade. There was no pouch. No gem. It was gone.

  Then the memories came back...

  Zilok Morth... The undead spirit had returned, and he’d attacked Medophae with some new spell. A spell of sickness? Of malaise?

  Medophae’s rage rose. He brought his fist up in front of himself and willed the godsword to appear. Oedandus would burn away this foul twisting of the threads...

  Nothing happened.

  He remembered the cold knife, slicing inside him, slicing until Oedandus tore free. The burning under his skin, everywhere. A cold fear trickled down the middle of him like water. With a growl, he forced the godsword to appear, but it didn’t. He held his quivering fist in front of himself, tried to bring forth his destroyed god.

  No dark voice rose. No golden fire.

  He couldn’t breathe. How could Oedandus be gone? He hadn’t thought it possible. For the past three hundred years, Medophae had boiled in his failures, the pain brighter than anything he had ever experienced. Sometimes, he had longed for death, but now it stood before him, beckoning. Oedandus was silent. He was...absent. Medophae could be hurt. He wouldn’t heal. He could be crushed, and the bones would not mend. He could be cut, and he would bleed. He could die.

  How...?

  It doesn’t matter how. He did it, and now you’re vulnerable. Now you’re just like everyone else...

  Now he was Zilok’s plaything.

  Medophae fought his dizziness by grasping tightly to the rough bark of the tree. Zilok had gone to sleep three centuries ago and awoken to a new Amarion, ripe for the plucking. It all made sense now. Tyndiria had not died at the hands of Ethiel’s minions. Zilok’s long fingers had reached out for Medophae, torturing him by killing her. The bakkaral had been Zilok’s creature.

  I am a fool. He will find me, torture me, and then...

  Medophae paused. The fact that he was free was strange. Why didn’t Zilok have him in a cage already?

  Was this part of the torture already? Never knowing when Zilok would strike? He looked around for that damned raven. Zilok loved to watch things through the eyes of animals.

  His gaze fell on the sleeping Mirolah. This was why. Somehow Mirolah had saved him. Had she battled Zilok and...won? He could scarcely believe that, but how else had Medophae come here?

  He closed his eyes tight, then opened them and looked at her again. If she had bested Zilok, then she was every bit as miraculous as Orem had hoped.

  Medophae sneezed again and almost fell. His legs seemed like the legs of an old man. He grabbed the tree again, wiped his nose, and looked at the wet trail on his thumb. He closed his eyes and leaned his back against the tree, and he began to chuckle softly. He had a cold. Wouldn’t it be fitting if he simply went off into the woods and died here? The great Wildmane, snuffed by a sniffle.

  His gaze fell upon the sleeping Mirolah again, and the mirth shriveled to nothing. Yes. The truth was, he should simply find a place to die and do it. Finally, he could. And maybe he should. Certainly Mirolah was better off without him. To leave her, even naked and alone in the forest, was less dangerous than having him near her.

  If this wasn’t some elaborate game of Zilok’s already—mice in a maze and Zilok as the cat—then Medophae’s presence would bring Zilok Morth down upon both of them. When the spirit caught them—and he would catch them—he would not allow Mirolah to live. Not for aiding Medophae in the slightest. Even if she’d somehow bested him the first time, she wouldn’t succeed a second time. Zilok would analyze her, then he would cut her off at the knees, just as he had finally done to Medophae. Zilok wasn’t like Ethiel. He wouldn’t keep her as a curiosity. He would end her.

  Leaving her was the hero’s path. He could give her that much at least.

  He started into the woods, his steps erratic. He tried to blink away the sweeping weakness, but the ground swayed like he was on a ship. He wiped at the snot on his lip.

  This is ridiculous. This is...

  Medophae fell to his knees, and everything went black.

  64

  Zilok Morth

  Zilok looked down at the spine horse pen. He shouldn’t need to be here, spending time deep in dragon territory. He should already have the Wildmane in hand. He should be spending these precious moments shepherding the volatile Sunrider through the discovery of his newfound powers.

  But the Wildmane had escaped. Zilok wanted no doubt; he needed quick results. Simply looking for the Wildmane was risky. Zilok might be lucky and find him immediately. But Medophae was historically the lucky one; he always had been. Zilok needed certainty. He needed a spine horse on his old friend’s trail.

  The spine horses snapped at each other over the corpse of a freshly killed grizzly bear. They were a throwback to the time when the gods had altered the basic species of the world. Zetu the Ancient had created these. He had a fascination with rock, and transforming organic creatures into rock creatures. These had started as equines. They were roughly shaped like horses, with the barrel trunk, long legs and neck and the long head. But that was where any similarities ended. Instead of fur and hide, their skin was rock, lumpy and uneven like ba
rely-cooled magma. Instead of hooves, the spine horses had four claws of obsidian. Zetu the Ancient, who had followed Vaisha the Changer’s methods of altering the original races, had a bloody sense of things. Such supernatural creatures could easily have been created to subsist on lava or even gravel, but they didn’t. Instead of blocky teeth meant for grinding stones or even flat teeth meant for chewing plants, like the original equines from which they were created, spine horses had rows of diamonds as sharp as arrowheads.

  Zetu’s humanoid constructs, the rocklurs, had died out, but the spine horses were hardy creatures, and nasty. They had been created to track living creatures for Zetu during his time of alterations and bring them back to their master.

  It had taken Zilok a full day of rest before he’d been willing to chance traveling on the threads this far. Visiting the Dragon Mountains, if you were a human, was suicide, even if you were an accomplished threadweaver. Threadweavers didn’t intimidate dragons; they were all accomplished threadweavers.

  At the height of his power, Zilok had been a match for one dragon. Of course, besting a single dragon would only happen in a fantasy. The only dragon Zilok had ever known to travel alone was Bands, and he suspected she was an exception to many rules. Dragons were not solitary creatures. Besides, if the god Avakketh discovered a powerful human threadweaver in his kingdom, he would likely come to exterminate the invader himself. Avakketh hated humans. He certainly did not suffer them in his realm.

  But time was of the essence, so Zilok took the risk. Building another scrying pool would take too long, so he needed a spine horse. The fearsome creatures could find anything, and Zilok couldn’t allow Medophae to vanish.

  So he had bided his time until the four dragons who had come to feed their pets—and watch them kill the bear—had flown away.

  Zilok chose the smallest spine horse. Eight feet tall at the shoulder, it was probably the runt of its litter. It skulked at the edge of the feast, waiting for the remains. The rocky plates of its hide ground and shifted as it moved. Molten red glowed between the cracks.

  Most curiously, and perhaps Zetu’s crowning achievement in the development of this new species, was that spine horses were resistant to GodSpill. Tampering with their threads was almost impossible. It required nearly godlike power to even move them at all. More than a few foolish threadweavers in the Age of Ascendance had met their deaths attempting to collar one of these beasts.

  But Zilok believed in subtlety, and the spine horses’ strange immunity had drawn his interest. During the Age of Ascendance, he had studied them meticulously. While it was nearly impossible to alter the threads of the bodies of the spine horses, such as attempting to throw them, cage them with other elements, or to knit their rocky hides together, they were susceptible to mind control. Of course, trying to alter the color or shape or configuration of the threads of their mind would result in failure. The nature of their protection was that their threads seemed “slippery” to a threadweaver. You simply could not get a grasp on them, but the slippery nature of their threads enhanced the ability to insert a new thread, something that no one except Zilok, apparently, had thought to try. He had found he could winnow a suggestion into the mind of a spine horse like sliding a key into a greased lock.

  Mind control required subtlety, patience, and experience. Most threadweavers from the Age of Ascendance had not even attempted mind-altering spells. They considered it too much work for too little gain. Why change the mind of one man when you could learn to move a mountain in half the time?

  But then, nearly every threadweaver in the Age of Ascendance had been a fool.

  Zilok produced the clipped lock of Medophae’s hair. Traveling the threads with a physical object was exhausting, even with something as small as a dozen strands of hair. Zilok had not learned to travel the threads like this until after his death, because it was actually possible for a spirit. A human body could never do such a thing.

  Of course, now that he was here, the exhaustion was worth it. He could see his prize, the fantasy he had envisioned for hundreds of years. He could see the spine horse capturing his now-mortal friend. He could see Medophae bound and silent before him, on his knees, stoically clamping those lips together until the pain tore into him and his facade cracked in a ragged gasp. He could see Medophae, at long last, apologizing for leaving Zilok behind, for turning on him, for killing him.

  Zilok had decided he would let Medophae be stoic, or sob his apologies, whatever might come. And at the end, the scales would balance, and Medophae would die at Zilok’s hand.

  Let’s see, then, if you can do what I did. Let’s see if you can live past your own mortality without an idiot god to prop you up.

  Zilok let his fantasy fade, and he returned to the task at hand.

  He manipulated the threads near the runt spine horse until a wisp of air became as hard as a hammer. He tapped the horse sharply on the brow. It spun, looked, then gave a spine horse whinny, which sounded like rocks clacking frantically together as wind whistled over them.

  Zilok tossed Medophae’s lock of hair at its feet. The beast pounced, biting the tiny thing, crunching into the rock around it. Then it paused, sniffing. To the horse, the hair would have appeared out of nowhere. The horse made the clacking sound again, deep in its throat, and looked around. spine horses had a rudimentary awareness, much like darklings. The horse knew Zilok was here, but didn’t know where.

  Zilok infiltrated the mind of the horse, inserting his own desire—on a slender blue thread—into the depths of the spine horse’s brain.

  The horse jerked his head up, snapping his diamond teeth together twice, and looked south. He bowed his head, took another thorough sniff of Medophae’s hair and gave a fierce clacking wail at the burning sun. The other horses glanced at him, but seeing that he was not attempting to steal their dinner, they went back to eating. Zilok’s horse leapt at the wall that contained it. Zilok couldn’t lift the creature free of its prison, but he changed the rock wall into a stairstep. The horse climbed up, bounded free, and before the others could follow, Zilok made the tall rock wall smooth again.

  The spine horse charged down the steep, jagged slope, obsidian claws cracking stone.

  South, my pet. The sliver of suggestion planted in the horse’s mind would drive it south, all the way to the Fountain to pick up the scent, ignoring all else except finding Medophae.

  Run, Medophae. Run while you can.

  65

  Medophae

  Medophae opened his eyes. A fuzzy figure leaned over him. He squinted, trying to bring the person into focus. The figure reached out and put something cool on his forehead. The sensation coursed through him, and he shivered. He reached up to knock it off, but his caretaker gently took hold of his hand and kept it away. He closed his eyes again and groaned.

  “It’s cold,” he mumbled.

  “You have a fever,” the figure said doggedly, as if she had said it a hundred times. She kept the wet rag carefully balanced.

  “Mirolah?”

  “Yes.”

  He opened his eyes again and was patient as they adjusted. He was in a room with wooden walls, rafters with a peaked ceiling. Afternoon sun slanted in through the window, drawing a bright square on the wooden floorboards. Mirolah sat by his bed, disheveled. Her windblown hair was a tangled mess with bits of leaves clinging to it. Her shadowed eyes watched him. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days.

  He felt as weak as a newborn colt. He lifted his arm and barely had the strength to move it to the edge of the bed. She slipped her hand into his.

  “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay,” she said like a mantra, like she was speaking to herself, not him.

  “Mirolah?”

  “You’re going to be okay,” she repeated, squeezing his hand.

  He tried to sit up, but his body just wouldn’t do it. It infuriated him.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  At the question, she came alive. “Medophae?” She leaned forward and looke
d into his eyes. “Are you really awake?”

  “Yes,” he croaked. His throat was so dry.

  She let out a relieved breath. “Oh gods, Medophae.” She squeezed his hand and laid her head on his chest, hugged him. “You nearly died.”

  “What are you talking about? Where are we?” He had never felt so weak in his life.

  “We’re upstairs in the tavern.”

  “What tavern?”

  “It’s called Gnedrin’s Post.”

  Gnedrin’s Post. He knew the place. It was north of Denema’s Valley. “How did we get here?”

  “I brought you here.”

  “I’m...sick,” he said, incredulous.

  “It’s the forest sickness. At least, that’s what the tavernkeeper’s wife called it.”

  “Okay.” He had never heard of such a thing, but then, Medophae had never been sick before, not since he was a child, not since his mortal life.

  She brushed a lock of hair away from her cheek and hooked it behind her ear. “The forest sickness practically killed this entire town a couple of generations ago. You were in the final stages. The woman wanted to take you back out into the forest and leave you there to keep you from infecting anyone else. Nobody in the final stages ever survives.”

  Did that mean Oedandus was coming back? But he still felt so weak, and there was no dark voice lurking in the back of his mind. He looked at Mirolah’s drawn face, the rings under her eyes, the way her skin was so pale it was translucent, as though all the blood had gone elsewhere. When he’d awoken in the glade, she hadn’t looked like that. She’d been vibrant, full of life.

  “You did it,” he whispered. “You saved me.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “With threadweaving.”

  “You were dying. I...changed it.”

  “How?”