Chosen

by Jolea M. Harrison

  Polen glanced back to the tunnel again. Maybe there was something there he didn’t like, or his thoughts disturbed him.

  “Something has happened now to change the way of it. Maybe it’s as you say, and Alurn is here. If it’s so, and you’re here to find him, it’s best you get on with it. With you both here, all they need is one more.”

  Polen didn’t explain what that meant even after Dynan waited for it. Alurn’s old mentor was getting more nervous by the moment. “Or what?”

  “It all happens again, boy, or haven’t you been listening? They know you’re here. It won’t take them long to break our defenses and take you. Your loving brother will try to come save you, won’t he? He’ll be the weak link. They’ll count on it.”

  “Dain?”

  “Rash,” Polen said as if he knew. “Impulsive. Reckless. Immature. Doesn’t really have much thought for anyone but himself, except when it comes to you. He’d die for you. That devotion makes up for most of the flaws and imperfections. Yes?”

  That was Dain, to some degree anyway, on all counts, but Dynan refused to agree with the assessment. “He isn’t weak.”

  “Just where they need him to be. They have you. That’s going to be their plan to get you all. The priest sent you here to find Alurn because you’re the only one who can. You just got the anointment, didn’t you? And they kept your brother to get you back out, if he’ll stay. The longer you’re here, you and Alurn, the worse it’ll be for those in the light. The land of the damned isn’t for the living. We should get started. Where is he?”

  “Alurn?” Dynan said. “I don’t know.”

  “They had to have told you something,” Polen said. “You’ve forgotten it. Think.”

  Dynan shook his head, knowing he hadn’t forgotten anything. But he did stop to think about it, and the answer came when he looked again to Polen Forb.

  “They sent me here and you found me. You taught Alurn everything. You were with him for years. You know him. You tell me where he’d be.”

  “Well how am I supposed to...” Polen stopped and grunted something about Telaerins always telling him what to do, but his gray-flecked brows drew downward over his eyes as he thought about it. “It’s going to depend on what they drew him here with. He wouldn’t have come for just anything, and I don’t think they could force him. Your side obviously wouldn’t have sent him.”

  “He had more than one child, didn’t he? What happened to them, to his family?” Dynan asked, thinking that would be the only thing that would make anyone volunteer to come here.

  “He had a daughter, Riella, about seven, and year-old boys. Twins. They all died together. Trapped. Adiem meant to take the children but...Fadril stopped him.”

  “Take them?” Dynan asked. He hadn’t known that the first Queen of Cobalt died with her husband.

  “Their souls,” Polen said, his voice lowering. “Alurn was already half dead, like the rest of us. The children were gone – dead. Adiem was...well, I’m not going to tell you what, but it was the most horrifying thing you can think of. He wanted those boys. Fadril was mortally injured. She was the last of us standing. She took up her husband’s sword and somehow, against all odds, she got through. I remember the look on Adiem’s face when he realized he would die, that his plans wouldn’t succeed. And then the dark came in. When I next looked, it was us here – Alurn, Adiem, Faulkin, Grint and myself. We made Alurn take the way he was offered. The children and Fadril died, a violent death, but it was a real death, and not by the touch of a wraith. They can’t be here.”

  “If you don’t know where he is, or what brought him, then I can’t tell you,” Dynan said.

  Polen nodded to that, looking down the tunnel. “We’re going to have to figure it out on the move.”

  “What? Why?”

  A second later, Dynan heard yelling coming from the tunnel. Pol took him by the jacket, yanking him around and pushing him the opposite direction from the noise.

  “Go down this way,” he said, pointing, but looking back over his shoulder at the same time. “Not too far. There’ll be a shaft. Climb it. Stay with the dead, and don’t listen to what the Six tell you. If you see something pretty, it isn’t real.”

  “Wait.”

  “They’re coming. Go. Right now, boy.”

  “I can’t find Alurn without you.”

  “Look for the place he died,” Pol pushed him again, harder this time, and Dynan staggered back.

  “I don’t know where that is!”

  “Is there anything you do know? It’s in the mountains behind where you live. I suppose that might not be the same these days. In the Tarameik Mountains, if they’re still called that. Near the summit of the tallest peak, there are two cliffs that shelter a meadow. Find it and you might find him. There’s a Temple there. Go in it.”

  “Come with me.”

  Polen smiled at that. “I’ll try and catch up with you. I swore an oath to protect him and all his kin. You’re the last of them. Even in death it holds. Be careful of the river crossing. It’s treacherous. Go on now. Run while you can.”

  The yelling down the tunnel turned to screams then, full of fear and terror. Polen headed off that way at a run, toward the danger, and Dynan thought he’d never see him again. He wanted to go with him to help, but fear stopped him cold. The shriek of a wraith echoed against the stone. He thought about Faulkin and Grint who blamed him for bringing this terror down on top of them.

  He heard Polen’s voice then, rising in a cry of defiance, but that changed to one of fear, and then one filled with pain, a gagging intermittent noise that made Dynan think Pol was being pulled limb from limb. The desire to go see, to do something, anything, grew to a pitch he couldn’t withstand as the screams rose.

  “Ru—”

  The last scream shook through him. A shadow cut across the tunnel stones, coming toward him. Dynan turned, stumbling backward, trying to move when his limbs were locked. He fell and scrambled back to his feet, blindly racing away.

  He forgot what Polen said about the escape shaft until he came on a dead end. He couldn’t think what to do except to know he’d just ended his brief existence here, maybe in the world too. Turning around and going back, going toward the thing that was after him wasn’t an option. He couldn’t make himself do it, but the realization that his survival depended on it came in and forced the issue. He had to get to that shaft and up it before one of the Six reached it first.

  Dynan moved in sporadic fits, stopping to listen, his fingers gripping into the wall. He needed something to hold onto to stay standing. He remembered to look up after he’d come back more than halfway.

  The air around him turned cold. He saw a layer of darkness advancing where the chamber widened ahead. It pulled light from the air as it came.

  Dynan looked up in desperation, and saw it, the shaft, barely a break in the dome of rock overhead. He started climbing to get to it, aware he was out of time. He reached the hole, and looked back.

  The man he’d seen before as an apparition in his bedroom walked into the narrow chamber, looking immediately to Dynan, his black eyes lighting with pleasure. He didn’t seem like a maniacal monster. He seemed only a man. Dynan had expected the wraith.

  “Come down,” Adiem said, his voice calm and unconcerned, even pleasant. “You don’t need to run away. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Dynan almost did what he said, muscles relaxing as he perched on the edge of the shaft, half in and half out. There wasn’t much point of running, was there? He reached down and put his hand on a lower hold. Adiem smiled, his teeth locked together. Dynan heard him pull in a breath through his nose, and the pleasant smile widened.

  That stopped him. Polen told him to run and not listen to the Six. This man was definitely one of them. Trying not to telegraph his intentions, Dynan glanced upward as he lowered himself down another notch, looking for the means of escape that would get him up that hole. Adiem was coming closer, his hand outstretched.

  Dynan lurched
upward for a protruding boulder, landed on one foot, and surged to the next, hopping from boulder to boulder like a mountain goat. He grabbed hold of a ledge and hauled himself up, scrabbling to get up and get away. He drew his legs up after as soon as he was all the way inside the shaft.

  Adiem was right there, moving with unnatural speed, not smiling any more, and grabbed him by the ankle. Dynan was dragged downward. If he hadn’t already wedged himself in he’d have fallen at the first haul. It felt like his leg was being ripped off his body. He knew then that Polen had been pulled apart, bit by bit.

  Trying to wrench away did nothing except make it hurt worse. He screamed because of it, but he held on, using his free leg to keep himself from being dragged down farther, and then the heel of his boot to smash it into Adiem’s face and even into his own ankle to get the hand off. The thing beneath him was snarling after him.

  Freedom came the next instant. Dynan used it to throw himself upward, hands and feet propelling him deeper into the shaft as fast as he could move. He heard Adiem fall, and then come back, tearing away rock, growling as he came.

  The light failed the higher Dynan climbed. His teeth clenched together to keep welling screams from bursting out. Something way worse than death was coming for him. Despair and fear of failing clothed every movement.

  He ran into something soft in near darkness. Adiem was right behind him. Trapped, Dynan pressed upward using both hands and his last remaining strength. He broke through, and realized the soft thing was a body. There were stacks of them piled up around him. He scrambled out of the hole and didn’t hesitate.

  He dove into the grisly mound, shoving aside the dead, worming his way under them, around them, even through them to escape the thing that exploded from the hole behind him. It wasn’t a man anymore, but monster, frenzied, tearing into the dead and flinging them away.

  But on the wrong side. Trying not to breathe, Dynan looked back beyond an arm, the bridge of a nose, between a set of splayed fingers, and saw the wraith across from him. It was in the wrong place.

  He didn’t look long. Turning, he dug in farther, squirming his way through, stopping only to cover his ears when the wraith started screaming. He ignored the images that assaulted him, the beautiful green meadow his whole body ached for, the white castle gleaming in the light, and worst of all, images of his family that Adiem had plucked from his mind, standing around as if they were waiting for him.

  Dynan saw his mother looking out expectantly, long blonde hair tied in a clasp. Shalael called his name. He was taken back to a day he remembered being with her in the arbor, one of the few true memories he had of her. He’d gone off after a flying lady wing or a bug of some sort. He saw her coming around a bush down the garden walk, calling to him when she didn’t see him. He heard her calling now, sounding just like she did when he was four.

  He wanted to hear her voice, but he tried not to listen. He wanted to stay and see her, even when he knew it was all a lie. He held in the tearless, painful sobs until he was shaking from the effort to suppress the noise. He kept crawling forward, inching his way along, moving in and around and under cover of death until he was far away and the wraith couldn’t hear him anymore.

  ~*~

  Chapter 14

  It took a long time to stop shaking, longer than he wanted to spend curled up in a ball in a hollow among the dead. Their faces were all familiar now. Dynan knew it was an illusion the wraith had planted in his mind, but it didn’t matter. Dain, three different versions of him, lay twisted in a heap, one on top of the other. His father was there. Shalis was there. Kamien. His mother. Everyone he knew lay in a pile all around him while he used them to hide.

  In this place crying didn’t bring anything but more pain instead of release and relief. The pain of it finally forced him to stop. The effort to do so left him shivering. His breath came out in a visible plume, rising and dissipating.

  Dynan shrank down into the bodies as the realization of danger came, and he reached for the arm of his fake father to draw over top of him. He took one version of Dain next, pulling until he was able to move his brother’s body over his own, hiding underneath as first one wraith came snuffling up over a stack of bodies hardly four kem away, and then another and another.

  Dynan breathed into the frayed jacket his brother wore, and squeezed his eyes closed against the sudden compunction to get up and show himself. His body was on fire. A weight landed on his chest and released, followed by another compression that squeezed all the air from his lungs.

  The bodies on top of him collapsed under the pressure, the taloned foot of the wraith sinking through. The only thing keeping it from touching Dynan was a layer of threadbare cloth, and he thought if the talon did touch him, they’d find him.

  He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t make a sound. He thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, and had to have some air. Finally, when black spots started playing behind his eyes, the wraith moved off.

  Dynan gasped. He couldn’t stop the sound. The wraith spun around, sniffing the air for him, and pouring out mental commands to show himself. Dynan shrank inward, trying to think of anything else.

  Its own impatience saved him. After it moved off, Dynan sat frozen, waiting until he was certain it was far enough away that he could risk getting up.

  Carefully, watching the three wraiths searching among the dead, he crawled out from underneath the bodies. There were three more out there somewhere, so he moved slowly, cautiously peering over the edge of an arm at the top of the heap.

  Beneath him on one side stood the forest of sticks. Behind him on the other side, the land sloped downward until it met a narrow plain before climbing again. There were a lot of hills and dells. Everything was covered with the dead.

  Dynan tried to find some correlation to where his home should be but couldn’t do it. He couldn’t place where he was at all. He thought maybe to get to the other hill, but that meant crossing an open space that had fewer bodies to hide under, and going the same way as the wraiths.

  ***

  The dead man behind him was very giving. The long plain was slightly less terrifying with him, but no less difficult. Dynan crawled the entire distance, pulling the body along by an arm until the arm came off. The other arm didn’t last much longer. The legs held up better, but it was harder to move, until Dynan tied the limbs together at the ankles.

  “I'm sorry,” he said to the corpse as he went, and wondered what kind of soul he'd have left if he ever made it back home.

  He kept low and moved carefully, keeping an eye on the wraiths already on the ground ahead of him. He used the body to take cover whenever they turned around.

  It was the ones flying overhead, raking by without warning that were most difficult to avoid. Dynan kept still when they were aloft. He even fell asleep, or some version of sleep that meant he closed his eyes and didn’t move. He saw things though, grotesque recreations of death and dismemberment that jerked him back awake and made him not want to close his eyes again.

  He reached the other side of the plain covered in grime and other things, stinking of it, but all in one piece. He left what remained of the dead man’s body at the foot of the hill. Using the dead already in place, he climbed to the top to look over.

  A dry wind blew up from the base, carrying with it the smell of something he couldn’t place. He didn’t know it, except to know it was foul. He thought for a second about the wind off the Wythe Sea hitting the tall cliffs the Palace stood on, rattling the windows. The desire to breathe the salt rich breezes from his home was so suddenly overwhelming it made breathing in the stench unbearable. There was physical pain with the thought, like hot stabbing knives. It was a punishment for seeing a thing of beauty in this place of horror. He put the thought of home out of mind.

  There was some benefit to making the arduous trek across the plain and up the hill. He recognized where he was. It still didn’t have much correlation to Rianamar and the Palace. Everything was backward or slightly
off where it ought to be. The city didn’t exist. Neither did the Palace or the Temple, but the land was mostly in the right place. It made him feel like he was in some kind of alternate universe, but then he supposed purgatory qualified.

  Cutting through the low valley, as it did through Rianamar, was the Wyvern River, only there seemed something distinctly different about this version. Polen said there wasn’t any water and yet there seemed to be a river of it.

  The dryness of his mouth intruded. Thinking about water was a bad idea too.

  He became obsessed with it, the thought of it driving him down the hillside and halfway across the valley toward it before the realization that he was out in the open struck him still. Slowly, Dynan sank down to his knees, willing himself to be as small as possible.

  There weren’t any bodies all the way to the riverbank. The longer he sat out in the open, the faster the Six would find him. He lost track of them the moment he came down the hill. He didn’t know where they might come from next.

  He pulled to his feet and kept going, hunched over, half running and then racing to get there, the hair on the back of his neck standing up. When he turned around, still running, there was nothing there when it felt the Six were right behind him.

  He reached the riverbank, recoiling as the realization came. He understood the saturation of salt in the air. He wondered how he’d ever be able to live with the smell of the sea again, standing there on the edge of a river of blood.

  He started throwing up from it, only there wasn’t anything inside to come up. He leaned over his knees, retching in spasms.

  The desire to drink didn’t leave him. His mouth was parched. His tongue felt twice its normal size. He didn’t have any spit to swallow.

  Dynan sat down and hugged his knees on the riverbank beside a pile of something that resembled bodies but was distinguishable only by a jumble of protruding limbs. Polen had been right about getting used to it.

  “I’d like to know,” he said under his breath, “what the hell I did? Was it sneaking out of the Palace a few times?” he asked the air and then didn’t know why he was talking out loud. “Getting my guard killed?”