by kubasik
I noticed that the child did not rock back and forth as it sat on my chest, though I thrashed back and forth in my pain. The baby seemed above my agony. He reached out his small hand and touched my face. He smiled. With the light lilt of a child, but the vocabulary of an adult, he asked, "J'role? Do you wish to be' free?"
"Yes," I gasped. "Yes. But the straps ..."
The baby frowned in confusion, then laughed with understanding. "J'role, J'role. The bonds that hold you are not these straps. The freedom you seek is not from this magician
..."
"YES, IT IS!" I screamed at the infant.
Out the corner of my eye I saw the guards looking at Mordom for some explanation of my words. Mordom had no answer, though he smiled with curiosity, his eye hand staring.
"I think he needs a rest for now," he said. With silver prongs he withdrew something shiny and white from my skull; placed it in a thick jar. Then he returned to me and applied a magical salve to my cracked cranium. These actions were at the edges of my perception, for the baby held my attention.
"Do you truly wish to be free?" the infant asked.
"Yes," I sighed. Death—any kind of release— would satisfy me now. "Please. Help me."
"Promise me something."
"Yes, yes, yes."
"You will throw yourself over the side of the ship."
This gave me pause only for a moment. I couldn't imagine why I would want to fall to my death from an airship. But, for such a possibility to exist, I would have to first be free of Mordom. I decided to humor the infant. “Yes. All right." He smiled at me, as if he understood the nature of my deceit.
Mordom walked toward the door, saying, "Keep an eye on him." He left, and the guards relaxed a bit.
The baby said, "You are on your way to freedom."
The straps, with no effort on the part of anyone in the room, undid themselves, sliding through the buckles and flying wide. The soldiers gasped. I sat up.
I was free.
15
The soldiers lunged forward to grab me. My head ached, my wounded thigh burned with furious pain as I moved. Yet I was inspired now, and even if I could do little but fall off the table, I did it with the grace that had been mine all my life. I slipped past the grasping hands of the soldiers and up onto my feet. Balance came with difficulty, and for a moment my vision turned dark as though I must certainly pass out. Even as this happened, I wasted no time. I whirled around, raising my hand and balling it into a fist, and smacked one of the soldiers across the face. He cried out and tumbled to the floor.
The attack raised my spirits. The other guard drew his sword and swung. I ducked under the blade, caught his arm, and swung the weapon into the other soldier who was just getting up. The edge caught him in the face, splitting flesh and bone. He dropped to the floor, dead.
The guard whose arm I held gave out a cry of alarm. I twisted his arm back. A crack. He cried out now in pain. I drove him forward, slammed him onto the slab I'd just rested on, smashed his head repeatedly into the slab. I did it for much longer than was necessary.
But they had just stood by while Mordom had done those things to me.
Out the door. I had to find Neden. With drunken steps I made my way through the corridors; Yet I had only just enough energy to keep myself moving. What could I possibly do to help him if he was in trouble? But I knew I could not surrender him. From down the corridor, shouts of alarm. I had only moments.
As I passed a door, I heard voices. Mordom's was among them. "There are fewer ships over Death's Sea," he said. "It's worth the extra time."
"But," said someone else, most likely the airship's captain, "we can catch an airstream that will take us directly to the Badlands."
"The process is going to take a long, long while. Mountainshadow has assured me of that. I'm in no rush. And if we go over the sea, we help guarantee that we won't be disturbed. All that matters is that we finish the process. If it works I'll be able to control the boy with my will. With Varulus dead, the conflict with Throal will end with a peaceful surrender."
"Very well," the captain sighed. "But I've got to get the vessel back to Thera as soon as possible."
"I understand. You and your crew will be freed from your father's debt as soon as you deposit us at my cave."
Another voice said, "We've made contacts with people who know where King Varulus is hiding."
"Good," said Mordom. "Any trouble hiring the assassins?"
"None."
"Just make sure Garlthik One Eye doesn't get any news of this. His contacts are scattered far and wide."
"I've worked with Garlthik in the past. He's always ..."
"I said don't use him! He and I go a long way back. No love lost."
"He doesn't even leave Kratas anymore. From what I've heard, he's an old, broken ork.”
"From what I've heard his information network is big enough he doesn't have to leave.
Just keep all of this tight."
The baby appeared, floating in the air beside me. I moved on. "You promised," it said.
"You have to jump off the ship. Soon. Very soon."
"I know. I know," I muttered. "But he ... he's just a boy." We came up to a door and I paused, listening. I heard the shouts of sailors as they played a game. Neden was most likely not in there.
"Like your sons were just boys ..." The infant's voice trailed off, suggesting all the events of thirty years earlier.
I looked down at him, scowling. Who was this annoying baby?
"If you won't leave him be on my advice, what if I show him to you?"
"You know where he is?"
He rolled his eyes, uncomfortable. "Yes."
Down a corridor, up the stairs. The baby gave me instructions as I cradled him in my arms. Third down on the right.
It was unlocked. Dim. Only the wash of orange moss light from the corridor let me see the sight within.
The boy, eyes closed, still breathing, was dissected and tacked to the wall.
"Spirits," I whispered.
"Yes," said the baby, and he hid his face in the crook of my arm and trembled.
Neden's flesh, flayed and set out in flat strips, could not possibly be alive. Yet the chest, located a few feet from his beating heart, still rose and fell as if a part of a living person.
"How is it possible ...?"
His muffled voice said, "Mordom is exceptionally talented."
"I have to help him ..." I took a step inside.
"J'role, you can't help him. Only someone he could depend on can help him. You're not that person. Not now."
"What I've done for him ..."
"You're there when it's convenient. What you must do to help him, if you're the one to do it, will require a commitment of the sort you're not able to make."
"But ..."
“Jump, J'role. It's over. It's time for you to give it all up. You think you know how to live.
You don't. Jump.”
The sight before me caused me to stagger back to the wall behind me and lean against it.
"I can't leave him..."
"You can try to help him, J'role. But who you are now—your efforts will only kill him.
You didn't quite kill your boys. But that doesn't mean you won't succeed this time."
That made me angry. "It wasn't my goal to kill them," I snapped.
He smiled up at me, knowing and coy. "So you tell yourself. But you have certain beliefs about the lives of little boys. And death is a major part of those beliefs."
"I didn't want to kill them."
"That's another matter. I don't think you want to kill anybody. But as we both know, you sometimes do kill people."
I had an impulse to take him by the shoulders and smash his head against the wall till it broke and bled.
"Ahhhh," he said and shook his small finger at me.
From down the corridor echoed shouted commands. I took one more look at Neden, his face like a mask on the cabin wall, his innards stretched out like trophies f
rom a hunt.
"All right," I said, realizing I wouldn't know how to help him, no matter what my intentions. "Overboard."
With the baby still in my arms I rushed along the corridors, further up the stairs. A few times soldiers came upon me. I was too weak to fight, but I managed to elude their grasp and the swing of their swords. Even as I moved on I sensed something extraordinary was happening each move I used to dodge my opponents was faster, more efficient than I was normally capable of, let alone when half dead. The baby was obviously the source. Yet this fact remained at the back of my thoughts, for he was also a baby cradled in my arms, and I did not truly make the connection between him and my freedom.
As I pushed open a door to the main deck, a wash of hot air enveloped me, nearly knocking me down the stairs. The night air was thick with mist, a mist illuminated from below by red light. "I know where we are," I gasped.
"Over the side!" the baby cried. It sounded like a baby now, wailing and begging,. "Over the side! Over the side!"
Several sailors spotted me and rushed forward. I had a choice. To return to the lower decks or throw myself over the ship's side. It really wasn't a choice.
I raced across the deck until I reached the ship's rail. There, set out before me like some nightmare landscape was Death's Sea—a sea of fire, miles and miles of glowing molten rock.
“I'll die.”
The baby suddenly sobered. "Now you're beginning to get it."
"I don't want to do it."
The child became impatient. The guards rushed toward us. "I know you don't want to do it. If you did, I wouldn't ask you to. In any case, I don't see what choice you have."
Three guards were upon me, their hands outstretched. I twisted to avoid their grasp, turned, leaned over the rail.
"Choose to do it!" the baby screamed. "It must be a choice!"
I did not choose to do it only because the guards were suddenly upon me. Or even because I had no idea how to save Neden. Or even because if I did save him, I might prove to be dangerous.
No, at the core of the choice was a weariness with it all. A life born in pain, lived in pain, and desperate for the release of death. Yet, I would never have given in to the impulse for release had it not been for the small infant in my arms suggesting I throw myself over the side of the ship into a sea of lava hundreds of feet below. It was the ridiculousness of the situation that prompted me. For all my misery, I could still appreciate a good joke. The Universe had truly stunned me this time, and laughing, I leaned back so that I flipped over the rail. For a moment I felt a sense of liberation. The heat of the molten sea caressed me, and the odd sensation of falling, the weightlessness, brought me memories of being in my mother's arms, long before everything went wrong.
Then the baby vanished, and I became fully aware of what was happening.
My speed increased. I plunged wildly toward destruction.
PART TWO
Flames and Flesh
1
Tumble. Tumble. Tumble.
The fall, though brief, carried me with the deliciously interminable sensation of a nightmare; each moment stretched out endlessly, with the promise of another terrifying moment to follow. Red lava below and dark night sky above flashed before my eyes quickly, repeatedly, blurring, and before long I had no idea when I was looking up and when down. This disorientation mixed with thoughts of death. Confusion and terror gave way to acceptance. Of course I would die by plunging into molten lava in the middle of Death's Sea, with not a single soul to ever know of my fate. What else could I expect from my miserable life?
Crack.
My body slammed into hard rock.
Crack.
I bounced.
Crack.
Tumbled forward.
Already the agony of the impact scrambled through my flesh and bones. But I was not yet done. I tumbled and smashed forward, bouncing against one rock after another.
I was supposed to have struck molten rock. Not solid rock. I should have been dead instantly! I screamed out, not only from pain, but bitter frustration. I was tumbling down a low pile of rocks, then came skittering to an awkward stop.
Silence. Stillness. Breathing in air, calmly. For a moment the lack of motion soothed me.
I lay on my back, spine ajangle, right arm raised strangely, hand twisted off to the right.
This did not bother me. The fall had ended. The smashing into rocks had ended. Things were simply better.
I waited, resting. Didn't want to rush. Above me the stars were obscured by the sea's heat.
A thin vapor flowed across the sky, catching the light of the molten lava. A massive sheet of thin, dyed cotton cutting me off from my fixed, icy points of light.
Off in the distance I spotted the airship. The sea lit its gray hull a dim red. In my pain it looked very much like a comet, slow and stately, burning across the sky. A portent sent from the Universe. Dictating something of significance in my life. But I was without my charts and maps, and its meaning was beyond my comprehension.
The ship turned about, sailing back toward the island. It then orbited the island, as if looking for me. Oddly, it drifted over the sea as much as over the island I had landed on.
Equally strange was that apparently no one on the airship spotted me. This was a signal to the strangeness of the island, a strangeness I would not understand for many, many days.
The airship circled several times and then sailed off into the red haze, growing smaller and smaller.
It was upon this sight that I fixed my gaze as I waited for enough energy to move. As the ship drifted further and further away I wondered why they did not come back for me.
They were low enough to know that I had not struck the sea, but had fallen, impossibly, upon an island. If they wanted me, they could come back and get me. But on they went, and though Neden was still on the vessel, I felt relief. It would be some time before I would be ready for another confrontation with Mordom.
The airship drifted into the deeper red haze and out of sight. I waited a few moments more, then tried to rise.
I could not move.
My right arm, held upright, frozen, beside me, refused to lower itself. My body did not roll at my command. Panic rose within me, and I realized I could not feel my body. With the panic came an awareness that I should have died. That I had not was miraculous. For some reason this thought had taken its time winding its way through my mind. Having survived so many dangerous situations so many times, I must have gotten into the habit of it. Become inured to the threat of death.
Of course I was paralyzed! I'd just fallen hundreds of feet from an airship onto a rocky island.
More thoughts came: Even if I could move, how would I ever get off the island? Why had I interfered in Neden's problems? Why had the child made me leap off the ship? Was this the freedom he had promised? And where was that damned baby!?
Turning my head as best I could, rolling my eyes as far as they would go, I searched the landscape around me. Nothing. Just black rock—sometimes towering up into small hills—pocked with countless holes. The only light came reflected from the red haze above. No sound. No wind. Nothing. I remained frozen, lifeless, in a desolate, lifeless land. The freedom I had earned by trusting the child had been the freedom of utter stillness.
Still, I puzzled over chances of escape, considered what I knew of the sea. Ancient stories related that long, long ago some of the Passions, in their love of life, tried to prevent anyone from ever dying. Though Death could not be killed, they banded together and created Death's Sea, transforming a massive body of water hundreds of miles across into a thick sea of molten rock. Within this fiery sea they imprisoned Death, sealing him as one might lock up a prisoner.
Their plan did not work as expected, for it's obvious that people still die. But they say that before Death's imprisonment people could not be raised from the dead, as they can today.
He can claim the living, but sometimes, like Mordom, they escape. It is also said that when enough bl
ood is spilled across the land of Barsaive, Death shall be freed and wreak havoc throughout the world.
It seemed strange that I should have survived such a tremendous fall, only to land on Death's prison. Yet it Made sense in its own strange way. Death was perhaps trapped thousands of feet below me. What could he do about it? There were only so many lives he could claim from his fiery cell.
I 'd spent some time as a mercenary on the sea, escorting Barsaivian airships as they mined the sea for elemental fire. Sifting through these memories, I began to realize how strange were my circumstances. Sailors who spent a great deal of time over Death's Sea had told me that "islands" did form on occasion, but they were only slightly more stable than the hard crust that floats over the molten sea. All in all, the crust constantly melts and cools, so that—even ignoring the terrible heat the crust radiates—only a fool would try to camp on such an island.
