“Guess so.” Danner was too delighted with his newfound discovery to be insulted by Trebor’s sarcasm. He flew for a few moments longer, carrying Trebor effortlessly.
Eventually, Trebor stared him in the eye and kythed, “Would you mind putting me back on the ground now?”
“Oh, sorry,” Danner replied sheepishly.
He dipped lower and slowed long enough to deposit Trebor gently on the ground. On an impulse, Danner hovered over the buggy and grasped the uppermost bar.
“Danner, what the Hell do you think you…ah!” Michael yelled as Danner lifted the buggy off the ground. Danner grunted as he lifted the weight of the buggy with the added mass of his friends, but he was doing it. It was exhilarating!
“Danner, put the buggy back on the ground,” Garnet said, his voice serious. Danner jumped slightly in surprise. He’d been so absorbed in his ability, he’d forgotten his unwilling passengers.
He settled the buggy to the ground and then settled himself. He left his wings asolved, their soft presence glowing luminously over his shoulders.
“Can you turn those things off for a minute?” Flasch asked. “That not-quite-feather thing gives me a headache.”
“In a second,” Danner replied. “Garnet, do me a favor. Hit me with your bowkur. Just a swing at the ribs.”
“Um…”
“Don’t worry, if I’m hurt, I’ll bear the pain and feel appropriately stupid afterward,” Danner said. “I want to test something.”
“I think there’s been enough testing,” Trebor murmured, rubbing at his wrists where Danner had grabbed him. “You nearly broke my wrists, buddy.”
“Sorry, Treb. Garnet?”
“Alright, on your head be it,” he said, then he swung.
Garnet’s bowkur was enormous, and the thick wooden blade crashed into Danner’s ribs and knocked him sprawling. They rushed to his side, but when they reached him Danner was laughing.
“Damn but that’s weird,” he said, choking as he inhaled a cloud of dust. “Look, there’s not a mark on me, and it really didn’t hurt, but the force itself is enough to make me not want to do that again.”
Danner lifted his tunic and they saw that, indeed, he didn’t have a mark on him. Garnet frowned suspiciously at his bowkur, then stared at Danner’s side again. Danner allowed his wings to disappear. Dekint, he reminded himself. He felt a twinge of loss, as though he were somehow less a person than he’d been a moment before.
“So what does this all prove?” Flasch asked.
“It doesn’t prove much, but it shows we may be right in thinking Danner’s parents, or his mother at least, was an immortal,” Marc said. They all turned to look at him. “Well I mean, at this point it’s still untested theory, no matter how much we believe it’s true. Immortals are supposed to be incredibly strong, and I think Danner has just proven that, and they’re also impervious to mundane mortal weapons.”
“But Danner cut his thumb on a knife just yesterday helping Faldergash in the kitchen,” Michael protested.
“Exactly. Danner’s symptoms of immortality are apparently only there when his wings are asolved,” Marc said. “The rest of the time, he’s as weak and mortal as the rest of us.”
“Well, gee, when you put it that way, it sounds like I’m a power-hungry freak or something,” Danner said, keeping his voice forcibly light. Uncomfortably, he remembered the feeling of exhilaration he’d experienced when he’d picked up the buggy.
“You didn’t see your face, Danner,” Garnet said quietly. “When you picked us all up, your eyes were almost mad with delight.”
“And I caught that little feeling of guilt,” Trebor kythed to him privately. “It practically leaped out of you.”
Danner felt a flash of anger that they were being unfair toward him, then he stopped and sighed.
“You’re right, guys,” he admitted reluctantly. “It did feel good. Too good, I guess.”
“Danner,” Michael said, “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, because we’ve all seen it in you, and you have too. Next time you’ll be forewarned and maybe control that feeling. I can tell you want to explore this all more, and I think that’s right. Just remember we’re here to help you because we care. You’re our friend. Just, you know, no more spontaneous weight-lifting of your friends, okay?”
“Right,” Danner said and smiled at them. “Oh, can we all remember not to mention this to Alicia, please?”
“What, she still doesn’t know you’re a cross between a butterfly and a gnomish glowlight?”
Garnet reached over and rapped Flasch upside the head. They all laughed, and Danner felt a tremendous weight suddenly lifted from his shoulders. Marc even smiled at him and nodded encouragingly. As Alicia’s brother, Marc had given his unhesitating approval once Danner’s interest in her was common knowledge.
Danner put the incident behind him and allowed himself to slouch down a bit in his seat to relax on the drive back.
Things were back to normal between them.
Chapter 7
Justice: The balance of freedom and responsibility.
- “An Examination of Prismatic Virtue” (801 AM)
- 1 -
When the six friends returned at the end of their leave, Morningham told Trebor the Prismatic Council still hadn’t decided what to do with him.
“There’ll be some politics involved, Dok, I can assure you of that,” he told Trebor. Then he muttered, “Just not the ones they might be expecting.”
Morningham left them with that cryptic message, from which they drew little reassurance. Trebor resisted the urge to look deeper into their instructor’s mind, instinctively trusting the Red paladin.
When they reached the barracks, they found offensive messages scrawled all over the wall near where the six all slept. The other trainees were gathered in little clusters about the barracks, peering at them with no attempt at trying to look innocent or unconcerned.
“Get out, you filthy shad,” Trebor read aloud. “Drink dugger’s[15] blood and die.”
“That’s a myth, you know,” Marc said. His voice sounded unnaturally bright as they stared at the insulting messages. “It’s not really poisonous, it’s just…”
“Marc,” Michael said, holding up a hand, “not now.”
“I was just…”
“Not now, booker,” Flasch said. Marc pressed his lips together and glared at Flasch.
Danner heard a snicker from behind them, and his hands clenched into fists. For one brief instant, he considered asolving his wings and throwing a few of them through the stone walls. Let them laugh then! Danner thought savagely. He was shocked at his own vehemence. Then he heard a sound that made him turn his head in wonder.
Trebor was laughing.
It started as a snort, then a chuckle, but soon enough Trebor’s shoulders were shaking in suppressed mirth. Danner thought for a moment his friend had cracked.
“Treb, are you okay?” Michael asked, laying a hand on his shoulder.
“What? Oh, I’m fine,” he replied, smiling and wiping at his eyes. “I was just laughing at myself and thinking how wonderful it is to be surrounded by imbeciles without an original thought in their heads. Here I’ve been worried all weekend what I would face when I got back, and I find it’s nothing more than the same close-minded idiocy I’ve heard about and experienced my whole life. You’d think I’ve never been called a shadow or a shad before. Sin and San, it’s barely an insult anymore.”
Trebor continued laughing, and Danner couldn’t help but smile, too. Trebor’s laughter was infectious, and in a moment all six of them were laughing. The other trainees in the barracks were silent as they stared glumly at the unexpected response to their actions. Looking at their sour faces only made Danner laugh harder.
And so what began as a horrible start to their week instead became a bright moment they could look back on and smile. They set to work cleaning the wall, and periodically one or more of them would start chuckling again. When they were finish
ed, the room was cloaked with the shadows of the night and the only message left on the wall was the first one Trebor had read aloud. Trebor refused to let them scrub it clean.
“Just as a reminder,” Trebor said, his smile laced with serious intensity.
Danner looked over his shoulder at the other trainees, many of whom had since gone to sleep, then he looked back at the wall. “Right.”
The wall cleaned and their spirits raised, the six friends turned in for the night and went to sleep.
- 2 -
Gerard Morningham stepped away from the peek hole in the wall and walked away down the narrow corridor of the secret passage. For years untold, instructors had used certain hidden passageways to watch their trainees during off hours to see how they acted without the authority presence of an instructor about. Very little escaped their notice, even the midnight wanderings of the trainees like de’Valderat and jo’Keer. Those were overlooked so long as nothing troublesome happened. Gerard had also left instructions with the nighttime watchers to ignore the comings and goings of those six on nights when they were working for him.
That group of young men was certainly deserving of being paladins, every one of them. Gerard rode them harder than any other group of trainees because he wanted to uncover their potential. Individually, he thought perhaps he had found what each of them could do, or at least had a good measure of it. As a group, however, they still managed to surprise even him. He had yet to see the limit of their combined potential, much less test its strength.
He smiled as he remembered his own knot of friendship formed during his training. Jon de’Serrika, Galen jo’Varut, Jason Frist. In addition to those three, Birch de’Valderat had been one of his closest friends, for all that they competed fiercely against each other. Gerard was acknowledged as a better swordsman, but Birch always had a little something extra to him that raised him in their instructors’ eyes. Far from being jealous, Gerard had worked to emulate his friend wherever he could, and where he couldn’t, Gerard found alternative methods and techniques with which he was more capable. Birch had helped him, too.
Eventually, Gerard had risen in the ranks until he was acknowledged as the best swordsman the Prism had ever produced. He knew that wasn’t true, though. Twice now, he’d found someone who could beat him.
The most recent was Garnet, and Gerard was working hard to see that he fulfilled his potential. The mountainous youth was strong and fast, he thought on his feet and adapted to every new scenario Gerard threw at him, and he would probably be one of the finest Red paladins the Prism had ever seen. Gerard was proud he was the one who’d trained him. Garnet couldn’t beat Gerard yet, but it was quickly becoming a closer match between them, and Gerard had no doubts the young man would soon outstrip him.
But before Garnet there had been one other. Malith. He was a trainee at the same time as Gerard and Birch, but he’d been friends with neither one of them. His courage was second to none, but Malith had a ruthless streak in him that nearly prevented him from becoming a paladin at all. In spite of this, he’d been given his cloak on the same day as Gerard and Birch, and he’d become a Red paladin also.
The rivalry between Gerard and Malith was not a friendly one, and on more than one occasion they actually came to harsh physical blows during what should have been a peaceful sparring practice. Twice Birch had had to separate them before they seriously hurt one another. Just before Malith had become a White paladin, the contest between the two had tipped in his favor, and he’d been able to beat Gerard on a consistent basis whenever the two dueled. But then he’d crossed the Merging, and Gerard had no chance to even the score between them. Poor bastard was dead by now; he’d crossed the Merging three years before Birch had, though Gerard was at a loss how Malith of all people achieved the white cloak of beauty.
Gerard shook away thoughts of the past. He had to decide now what to do about the present. He knew what the Prismatic Council’s suggestion was going to be, he was almost sure. They would find some way to eject Trebor Dok, for all that Gerard had argued for his ability to stay. Barring something bizarre, five of those six and a handful of others would for certain be full paladins within a matter of days. Dok was the only real unknown in that area. Many of the trainees weren’t far behind and would be given the opportunity to don a cloak, of course, but rarely were there any surprises. Not only were the instructors sure which ones would become paladins, they had a strong track record for predicting in which Facet each trainee would find himself. Any trainee whose cloak didn’t change from its original off-white sheep’s-wool color to one of the pure hues that represented the Prism’s Facets would be allowed to keep the cloak until it either changed or he disenrolled. For those who stayed, the cloak eventually would change color, and the trainee would become a full-fledged paladin.
There were some who would never be given the chance to wear the cloak. Even if they would have been chosen for a particular Facet, they were the sort of people the Prism did not want among its ranks. There was one of those this time. In Gerard’s opinion, Malith should have been one of those…
There he went again, thinking about the past. Malith was dead and gone, and Gerard no longer had to worry about proving himself. He had more important matters to deal with. With a scowl, he slipped from the secret passage into his private office and sat down to deal with a pile of paperwork nearly a foot high.
“How I hate desk work,” he muttered to himself. “This may turn out to be a blessing in disguise – for me, if not for him.” His scowl deepened.
With a calming breath, Gerard resigned himself to the course he had chosen and started filling out evaluations on the trainees.
- 3 -
For the next week, there was a strange atmosphere of expectancy Danner couldn’t help but notice. Their instructors seemed particularly intent on their lessons, as though they were imparting crucial information and there would be no future in which to pass this knowledge. It made Danner’s skin shiver, and he began to feel uneasy. They trained straight through the next Sabbatha, and even those traditional days of reset were given over to study and practice. It seemed twenty five hours in a day was simply not long enough, and Danner was certain that if their instructors could have found a way to fill the few hours of sleep they granted with more training, they would have done so without hesitation. Erbismanth changed to Vintamanth[16] without anyone really paying attention – they were barely aware of what day it was, much less what month.
They were all progressing quickly with their weapons training, which took even more of their daylight hours than it had before. Unarmed combat was dropped entirely as they focused on their swordsmanship, particularly against multiple foes. Morningham did add a new element, in that he had them focus more on fighting unarmed opponents.
“It may not sound sporting at first,” the Red paladin had announced, “but then demons don’t normally wield swords, now do they? Not this side of the Merging. They claw, they bite, they burn, but rarely will you see them with a weapon in their hands. That doesn’t make the motherless brutes any less dangerous, though. Most demons will be bigger or faster than any mortal you’ll face, they’ll almost certainly be stronger, and there’s likely to be a lot of them at once.”
With more daylight devoted to weapons, even more of their evenings were given over to classroom exercises, and the eight hours their instructors had steadfastly reserved for sleep were now a thing of the past. Here, too, the paladins seemed determined to pass on as much information as possible as quickly as possible. Lapses in judgment or knowledge were sharply rebuked, and more than one trainee began to crack under the stress. Even the paladins began to show signs of strain, sometimes even more than their students. The feeling in the air was a race against time, a rush toward some unspeakable, inevitable deadline.
They know something, Danner mused to himself. Maybe the war was coming soon.
“Maybe we’re about to graduate,” Trebor kythed to him, his mental voice exultant. Danner wasn’t engaged with an
opponent just then, and he glanced around trying to spot his friend, but the disguised denarae was nowhere in sight. Minutes later, however, Trebor’s words were confirmed.
It was halfway through the week, and word of strange events had reached even the remote ears of the trainees locked away behind the walls of the Prism’s headquarters. A troop of three hundred denarae had suddenly appeared outside the gates of Nocka on Duday. No one seemed to know where they’d come from or why they were there, but the rumors were flying around the barracks that it had something to do with Trebor’s unmasking.
This was only partially true, Danner now knew. It had nothing to do with Trebor’s being revealed as a denarae, but it had everything to do with Trebor. After they’d returned to the Prism, Trebor revealed that he’d sent a mental message for help in response to the rumors Alicia related to them about Merishank and its potential threat. Apparently his call had been answered.
Danner had been worrying some of the rumors around in his head before he’d gotten sidetracked watching his instructors and their strange behavior.
“Speaking of which, what did you say about graduating?” Danner asked.
“You’ll see in about thirty seconds,” Trebor replied. Danner could practically hear him grinning.
Sooner than Trebor had predicted, a dozen paladins rounded the corner of the courtyard, several dozen trainees milling along behind them. Danner quickly spotted Trebor by the conspicuous void of people around him. None of their friends was in his training group today, so Trebor had been completely ostracized by the other trainees, as they had expected. Ambling along behind him and smirking at Trebor’s solitude was Ashfen. The look on Trebor’s face told Danner he was completely unfazed by the sour nature of his surroundings.
Danner fought down a fresh urge to reach in and pull Ashfen’s teeth out through his nostrils. Marc had speculated that it could be done – with the proper equipment.
“All trainees, cease activity!” a voice barked. As the din of weapons practice faded, Gerard Morningham parted the crowd with no more than a look from his scarred face, and he mounted the steps to the large platform he used for giving mass announcements. Morningham looked particularly venomous today, and Danner could see he was seething inside, for all his face resembled sculpted granite on the outside. Danner dared to hope Trebor was right, even as he dreaded something he couldn’t bring himself to contemplate.
The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) Page 10
