Oath Keeper

by Jefferson Smith

  Be still, Mardu sent. Eliza set her foot back down.

  Why? He deserves it. He’s the one who—

  Not now. Trust me. There is still much for the Flame of the Dragon to do. Scraw, I release you. You may rise. I’m tired of staring at the dirt. Hopefully none of the others saw that.

  On the scrub grass next to the prostrate Gnome, the crow shuddered and then got to his feet before flapping indignantly off toward the trees, but half way there, he jerked in the air and then turned, coming back to alight on Eliza’s shoulder. He did not look happy about it.

  I am sorry, friend crow, but it was unavoidable, and you must now resume your place as Voice of the Flame. In a little time, we will hunt succulent grubs together, but not yet.

  “Scraw!” He shouted this right into Eliza’s ear, and she was pretty sure it was not by accident.

  Unavoidable? Eliza sent. Why didn’t you throw me down like everybody else with that magic judo attack?

  It would not do for the Flame of the Dragon to flop on the ground, victim to her own magic, would it? The only way I could think to effect everyone except you was to speak the charm in the Forest Tongue, directly into their minds, but alas, Scraw understands it too, and there was no time to be more selective. Still, I do not think anybody noticed that your charm felled your familiar as well as the others.

  My charm? My familiar?

  Yes, yours. Remember, to them, you are all there is. You are the Flame of the Dragon, and there is only you. And your bird servant, of course, who speaks for you. Your familiar.

  Right. So when can I start with the kicking? Eliza nudged the Gnome’s butt with her foot, and was rewarded with louder whimpering as the disgusting little wretch trembled in fear.

  Leave him be, Mardu said, this time a bit more sternly. He is important.

  Him? Important? What’s he going to do? Kidnap more children for us? Strip them naked like he did me? Eliza shuddered at the thought of having been so… alone with him.

  He did not bring you to this world, Mardu said. Nor was it he who removed your clothes. I can see that much in his mind. That was how he found you. He believed you were dead, and that your body would bring him great riches.

  Oh. So he only grave-robbed me? Some sort of pimp of the undead? You’re right. That is so much better.

  Think, Eliza. In doing so, he removed you from the power of the one who did snatch you into this world. Do you not think he may have done you a service in this?

  Eliza didn’t like the sound of that. She was still in favor of blaming the little grunt for everything, and now Mardu was messing with the good mad she had going, leaving her with little more than a frustrated seething. You didn’t answer my question, O Great and Powerful Oz. That’s what he did before. What makes him so important to us now?

  I do not know, Mardu admitted. But he is important. He is the sign we have been waiting for.

  Him?

  Yes, but there is no time for further discussion. We must act quickly now, or we will lose our gains. I have an idea.

  Under Mardu’s instruction, Eliza moved around the clearing, releasing the Wasketchin villagers from the charm with a touch. When they were all standing again, they could have gone back to their homes and tasks, but they could see that the Gnome had been captured too, so most of them stayed to see what would happen next.

  We will perform the ritual now, Mardu said. We must claim those who would join our ranks, and it will be good for the others to see this, and to spread the word. Perhaps in time, more will seek us out.

  Unfortunately, now that there was a Gnome involved, none of those who had pressed forward after the speech were still willing to follow the Flame. Eliza stamped her foot in frustration.

  All is not lost, Eliza. One still waits. Do it now, Mardu sent, along with a mental image of the groveling Gnome.

  Wait… What? Him? No way! I don’t want that little—

  Now, Eliza! Quickly, before the villagers leave. Don’t you see? Restoring the Oath is more than simply re-saying the words and spilling new blood. We must show the people—all the people—that there is goodness in their neighbors. We must restore more than an Oath—we must restore their faith in peace, as well. And we can begin today, with him. Let them see that the first to join our cause, the first to stand against Gnome predations upon the Wasketchin, was in fact himself a Gnome. Swear him in allegiance to the Flame. I can hear his thoughts. He burns inside for permission to do so. He fears you will not accept him. Let him stand and he will swear to you eagerly. We must not let this opportunity pass.

  So, against her better judgment, and resisting the very strong urge to simply strangle the little sniveler, Eliza reached down and touched him on the shoulder.

  “Rise, Chaplain of Gash-Garnok,” Scraw said, from his perch on Eliza’s shoulder, and the Gnome got slowly to his feet, eyes wide and quaking so badly with fear that Eliza had to fight down a smug grin. If she had to put up with him, at least his devout worship put her on the power side of the relationship. So at least that was cool.

  There was a bit of awkwardness when she reached the point in the ritual where she was supposed to wipe berry juice over his mouth. How was she supposed to get around the great floppy Gnome nose that hung over his lips? For a moment, she didn’t know what to do, but then she realized that in Gnome culture, the nose was probably a very important feature, so instead of going around it, she adapted her ritual, adding a bit about “Your nose belongs to me. You scent the air at my command.” Then she simply lifted it out of the way and did the part about “speaking for me” over his mouth.

  And then the ritual was over. The little runt had become the first voice to join the Chorus of the Flame.

  But he would not be the last.

  Chapter 15

  In the few days… hours?… since Calaida—his only friend down here—had been silenced, Elicand had made little progress on scouting out his environment.

  The blackness of the cave was total, and the roaring hiss that filled his ears had not abated for even a heartbeat in all the time he’d been here. He couldn’t hear himself talk, he couldn’t hear himself shout, he couldn’t even hear the quiet clicking of his back when he stretched. So with no eyes and no ears to help in his task, he’d been forced to explore with nothing but his fingers.

  When Shondu had first brought him to these strange, dark caverns with his stupid Brownie prank, Elicand had made a game of his investigations, giving names to every feature and every half-dreamed avenue of escape. That first cavern he had christened Ouchyville, in commemoration of the numerous minor injuries that had plagued his blind explorations. Although, in full honesty, those injuries had probably saved his life, forcing him to be more cautious than was his normal habit. But in this cavern, without even his ears to aid him, his fingertips had proven much less effective. Not that there was much for them to see.

  He knew he was on a shelf of rock, perhaps five body-lengths long and three wide that hung out over, well, nothing. The air around him was the same cool dampness it had always been, and just the tiniest bit… oily, although none of that oiliness seemed to linger on his fingers at all. It was more an idea of filminess than an actual feeling of it, which made no sense, but that’s how it felt. There was nothing but this flat jut of stone and the empty space around it.

  Like a tree branch with a flattened top, jutting out from the trunk and broken off cleanly at the end, the rock he stood on was a long and narrow platform that seemed to have no purpose other than to delay his eventual plunge into oblivion. Emerging from a tall, impassible wall of stone at one end, and surrounded by a leap into the dark unknown on the other three sides, it was as much a prison as anything else. A tabletop with no way down, and no sign that there was anything below him except air to plummet through.

  Continuing with his practice from Ouchyville, Elicand had given names to all the features he discovered. At the end of his prison was the flat, cold face he called the Unclimbable Wall, for what should be obvious reasons. Oppo
site that, perhaps ten long strides away, the rocky floor just stopped. This was the furthest extent of the Featureless Lip of Plunging—a smooth edge that ran from the Wall, out into the darkness, and then back to join the Wall again. All of it utterly without crack, bump or crevice. Well, almost utterly. There was one particular section, right at the tip, that had been drawing him back like a tongue drawn to a sore tooth. The Slightly Not Completely Featureless Feature of the Featureless Lip. He could always come up with a better name for it later, if he survived.

  The Featureless Feature was a single knobbly bump on the face of the Lip, perhaps half an arm’s length below where he knelt. It wasn’t knobbly enough to provide any actual support, but pressing his fingertips against its slippery hump, he could almost convince himself that it would serve as a brace, allowing him to reach out just a little further. There was something out there, in the damp and empty air beyond the Lip. He had been over every inch of this jutting prison of stone, and aside from a few loose pebbles and a crumbly patch of dust—all that remained of the protective cocoon that had healed him—there was just nothing else left to try. It was either the almost-knob or wait for starvation to claim him.

  Elicand knelt once more at the Lip and eased his hand down its slick face, feeling around for the bump. When he found it, he took a deep breath and then tried to will the ridges of his fingertips to bite as he pressed them against the smooth stone. Carefully, he reached forward with his other hand, probing outward, stretching, until he felt himself on the very verge of tipping. There it was again. He could sense a changing in the air around his wavering hand. Gingerly, he shifted his left foot, spreading his toes out just a tiny bit wider, and then he stretched forward again, maintaining his precarious balance with nothing more than wishful thinking in his fingertips, and waved again. There! It was—

  (aloneness negation question)

  A wall of water grabbed at Elicand’s fingertips and yanked his whole hand downward. It would have jerked him into the abyss—it should have jerked him into the abyss—but the downward movement broke his contact with the raging torrent. Elicand shot his legs quickly back behind him as the lower half of his stomach crashed onto the rocky floor, leaving his head and chest and the upper span of his tummy projecting out over the not-floor, held there, defying gravity by the sheer willpower of his fingerprints on the wet… slippery… The fingerprints let go of the bump, skidding down over it, and Elicand could feel his body beginning to shift forward. If he’d had anything to eat lately, anything at all, he would have been that much more top-heavy and probably would have plunged headlong into death. But the palm of his hand ground onto that vaguest of bumps…

  And held.

  With his heart screaming an ancient curse at him that he could not hear, but could only feel, throbbing at his temples and pounding in his chest, Elicand, managed to wriggle one foot ever so slightly further back, away from the edge. And then the other. Maybe. He wasn’t sure if it had actually moved, or if he’d only hoped it had moved. The wild card was his free hand. It still dangled below him, limp against the featureless face of the rock. If he pressed it against the Lip as he so desperately wanted to do, the pressure would only thrust his upper body further out into the air, beyond his precarious balance point, and that would be all. But there was nothing for him to brace it against either. What he needed was to get that arm back up onto the floor without toppling himself in the process.

  Slowly, in what might very well be the slowest of panicky movements ever made by a Wasketchin at any time in history, Elicand curled his free arm upward toward his stomach, keeping his hand and forearm as close to the rock as he could. When his elbow was above the edge of the Lip, he began to unfold it again, drawing first the elbow and then the forearm back and then at last turning his hand palm down to grab at the dusty rock floor beside his hip. It wasn’t much. It felt like nothing at all. It had taken him a hundred heartbeats. A thousand. But it was enough. The grip of his palm on the floor was enough to allow him to wriggle his body back from the edge, until at last, with a whoosh of released air that he had not realized he’d been holding, Elicand withdrew his other palm from the Featureless Feature bump and rolled away from death.

  It was almost an hour later, after the jubilant pounding of his life against the walls of his body had slowed to a more decorous tempo, that a curious thought echoed in his mind: (aloneness negation question)

  The voice had been Shondu’s.

  * * *

  His experience with the Featureless Lip had taught Elicand three things. First, that he was not alone—Shondu was somehow, miraculously, gloriously still here. Somewhere. That knowledge was useless however, until he was able to find a way out of his current predicament and then go find the little guy. Second, he was only going to be able to do that by taking chances. They would be carefully weighed and considered chances, of course, but there simply was no safe route off this rock. And third? Elicand was now certain that his end, whenever it might come to seek him, would do so after a terrifying plunge into an abyss. But strangely, all three of these revelations were comforting to him.

  As with all education however, his new knowledge left him with new questions. Which of the pointless, clueless, featureless directions available to him would lead to an escape? Would he be able to reestablish contact with Shondu? And if not, would he ever find the little guy? Somehow, his furry little friend had spoken to him when his own hand had touched the water. There was no way he was going to try that experiment again, but was there some other way to make the connection? Or somewhere else where he could reach the river without risking his life?

  It all came down to a single puzzle that taunted him for hours. If he could find a way to communicate with Shondu again, then he might learn of a way off this rock, or, if he could somehow get off this rock, he might be able to find Shondu again. Each solution seemed to require the other one to happen first.

  Elicand had been over each and every inch of the stone platform, and in all of his searching he hadn’t found even a hint of a way off, nor any other access to the sky river. All he had was the general clamminess of the air and the thin sheen of wetness that coated everything he touched. It hadn’t been until his almost death, when he’d made fleeting contact with the torrent of water thundering past him in the darkness, just beyond his reach, that he had even known there was any water nearby. Of course, now he felt stupid. The roaring and raging of water crashing all around him should have been his first clue. But it had surrounded him since before he had first regained consciousness here however many days or maybe weeks ago that had been. It was so loud, so penetrating, that it had numbed the parts of his brain that might have wondered more about it, just as it had numbed his hearing. It wasn’t a sound, it was a thing, physical and suffocating, crowding him out from the center of his own mind. And such a thing had no connections to those happier, everyday ideas like rivers.

  Contact with the film of water that coated his current world did nothing to reestablish contact with Shondu. He had tried several times now. Clearly, communication would require touching the flow itself again, so that was out. At least until he found another river, or a less death-causing way to touch the one he already had.

  Once again, in a sort of ritualized refusal to give up, Elicand tried to invoke the charm for light, but as before, it simply refused to catch. The vim had never been particularly strong for Elicand—it was one of the reasons his family had always chosen lives of service, because their vim was not usually strong enough to contribute in more conspicuous ways—but it wasn’t like they were dead to it either. Still, no matter what pleas he sang, nor how convincingly he sang them, Elicand couldn’t muster up so much as the glowing nose that he had often used to entertain the little ones.

  Which only left escape. And that meant taking some further risks. But instead of fearing such risks, he was surprised to discover that he felt elated by them. Perhaps it was the utter surprise—after the terror had worn off—of finding the river arcing through
the air a mere finger’s-breadth beyond the world he had previously explored. It forced him to wonder. What lay just another fingernail above the highest point he had yet reached on the Unclimbable Wall? What ridge or foothold might lie just one inch further down the Featureless Lip than the furthest inch he had yet explored? Well, he wasn’t ready to think about the Featureless Lip option again. Not yet. But finding a river in the middle of the sky had been a curiously invigorating experience, so Elicand went back to the Wall with a renewed sense of hope.

  Try as he might however, even with his newfound ambition, there wasn’t a crack deeper than a fingernail nor a bump thicker than an eyelid to be found on the entire expanse. Every feature that might once have been there had been worn away by untold centuries of running, dripping dampness. For hours he had been trying to reach beyond the limits of his body, running from several paces away and flinging himself up the Wall, slapping at it with outstretched fingers. He was sure that if he could just reach a tiny bit further, some finger would catch the crease of some ledge and he would have found his way out. It was the technique he had used to find the Scary Tunnel of Wind when he had first become trapped here in Shondu’s “pocket,” and even though the success of that find was still in question, it had been a find. But with no way to quiz Shondu about hidden exits, and literally no other inch of rock left unexplored, the old Leap and Slap had to work. It simply had to. So he kept at it, long after he’d lost the feeling in his fingers, and long after the repeated poundings against rock had split the skin and added the slick grease of his blood to the dampness of his prison wall.

  Eventually though, his body simply gave out. Elicand launched one last, pitiful assault upon his imprisonment, and then lost consciousness when his face and chest slapped once more against the stone. It was a good thing he was not near either end of the Wall when he did so too, because an unconscious Wasketchin body is neither graceful nor particularly careful about where it sprawls—not even when it is trapped and all alone. He had tried, to the limits of his abilities, and he had failed. So it was a good thing for Elicand when, in the end, both of his problems took pity on his efforts and solved themselves.