A Single Candle (Cerah of Quadar Book 3)

by S. J. Varengo

  Slurr looked unsteadily at his friend, but did not answer.

  “Do I have to remind you of another strategy which failed, far more disastrously than yours?”

  When Slurr continued to sit dumbly, Renton shouted, “Your own wife led you and me and fifty thousand warriors up Mount Opatta, while Surok was already headed to Niliph. Do you remember the frozen bodies of your warriors as they died of exposure on that futile trek? Or were ripped apart by snow beasts, not to mention those we buried at sea…the ones that died of disease before we even reached the ice? And by all that is good, Slurr, you did not see the streets of Roo when they were littered with the corpses of those poor people. But Cerah did, Slurr. She saw her failure played out before her in ten thousand bloating bodies. Do you think for one moment that your guilt could ever match hers?”

  As Renton’s words sunk in, something happened in Slurr’s spirit. He’d seen Cerah’s shame and remorse radiating from her, even long after she had left Niliph behind. When Yarren rescued him and brought him back to his wife’s side, Slurr had told her again and again that she could not carry the weight of the loss of Niliph and hope to move forward effectively. “Surok hasn’t beaten you,” he’d told her. “He’s merely tricked you. But the ancient prophesy is clear. You will destroy him!”

  How dare he let his own shortcomings cripple him, when he refused to let her error stop her? For perhaps the first time in his life, Slurr realized that he’d thought of himself and not of Cerah. As his sodden mind turned from his own sorrow and focused instead on her, a smile crept across his face. It was slight and it was sad, but it was a smile nevertheless. He reached up and rubbed the cheek that Renton had struck. “You hit pretty hard for a one-eyed seafarer,” he said to his friend.

  Renton laughed. “I was holding back. You deserved far worse than that!”

  “Good lord!” said Slurr, still rubbing. “I shudder to think!” Then his face grew serious once more. “Thank you, Adaan,” he said. “It takes a true friend to tell you that you’re being a drunken idiot.”

  “Happy to do it!” said Renton. He raised his hand to give Slurr a friendly clap on the arm, but the lad flinched.

  “No more!” Slurr shouted. “I won’t survive another slap!”

  Renton laughed again, and dropped his hand onto his friend’s shoulder. “No more beatings, as long as you promise to lay off the rum.”

  Slurr pushed the tankard away from him. “Do you suppose Garl has any jakta brewing?” he asked.

  “If he does not, I’m sure he’d be happy to put a pot on the fire for you.”

  Slurr held a hand to his spinning head. “I may need two pots,” he said.

  With Renton steadying him, the General of the Army of Light left the cabin and headed to the ship’s galley.

  Cerah had made Tressida fly low since they’d left Illyria. When the ships had set sail, she’d seen Slurr go into the cabin he shared with Renton, but she did not see him re-emerge. When the admiral was on the bridge, as he was most of the sunlit hours, helming the Marta himself, she flew down no less than eight times each day at sea, asking him to fetch her husband from the cabin.

  In each case Renton had called Krigar to take the wheel, and had dutifully gone to tell Slurr his wife needed him. He’d refused to come out in every instance. On their second day at sea she’d asked Yarren to transfer Ban onto Valosa’s back, as she didn’t want the boy to be caught up in her worries, though she knew he was too insightful not too have noticed her anxiety. “Do you think he’s alright? When we rode to Senchen he talked to me, but his words were hollow and his mind was miles away,” the boy had said as he leapt in mid-air from Tressida’s back to Valosa’s.

  Cerah did not answer, but Yarren said, “Don’t worry, little spy. The general is mighty!” Ban, seeing the look on Cerah’s face as she and Tress dropped to a lower altitude, was unconvinced.

  Now, as she’d observed Renton finish his watch at the helm and take his tour of the decks, she considered having Tressida fly to the ship yet again. This time, however, she toyed with the idea of jumping from the dragon’s back and going to see Slurr herself.

  “You must give him this space,” Tressida said, in answer to her thoughts. “He is an amazing, strong, wonderful man. But his spirit is badly bruised. He believes that he has caused our side a great setback. And as pure as your intentions may be, I fear that should you go to him, the visit will not have the effect upon him that you wish.”

  “Tress, I sense his pain and I am far too familiar with it. He feels as I did upon coming to Niliph.”

  “Yes, but his miscalculation has had a far less serious consequence. And you pulled yourself out of the desperate funk in which the massacre put you. Eventually.” Tressida emphasized the last word.

  Cerah sat quietly. She could feel Slurr’s agony as easily as she felt Tress’s muscles working as she flew. But she also heard the truth in her match mate’s words. She knew that Slurr adored her, but she also knew he had his pride. And to have his wife come to him during this time and try to shake him out of his ill humor might feel like criticism or even nagging. To treat him that way would have been easy when they were back in the Softer. But now her love and respect for the real Slurr, not the one who hid for years behind a façade of crippled intelligence, prevented that and told her that the golden dragon was completely right.

  She saw Renton finish his rounds and retire to the cabin. With a heavy sigh, she lay back on Tressida’s broad body. At no point in all the time Kern and Parnasus had spent training her did they ever, for even the briefest moment, lead her to believe that wearing the mantle of Chosen One would be easy. In fact Parnasus, especially, had told her time and time again this role would be fraught with peril. She had accepted that truth.

  But she hadn’t considered the depth of difficulty she would face. Since she’d realized her love for Slurr he’d been her constant anchor. The people of Quadar called him “her Rock,” and the term could not have been truer. And even in her deepest despair, when the Army had come to Roo on Niliph and found the slaughtered citizens, only to be told a short time later that Slurr was lost somewhere on the Frozen South, the Greater Spark had revealed to her that her husband was alive… and she continued to draw strength from him. Even then, missing in the most hostile environment on the planet, he was her Rock.

  Now that rock seemed to be crumbling before her eyes.

  Cerah had never seen Slurr like this before, and she was completely unprepared to cope with it. She had, as Tressida had pointed out, been able to rise from the depression into which she’d fallen after the raid of Surok’s lair had failed. But she had the Greater Spark, the very heart of Ma’uzzi, burning within her. And Slurr himself had played no small part in her recovery, once Yarren brought him back to her.

  For the first time in nearly thirty minutes, Tressida’s voice came to her again. “Slurr has the spark of Ma’uzzi within in him as well, dearest one. All His creations do. Perhaps your husband’s connection with Him is not as strong as yours, but Slurr will rise.”

  Cerah remained silent. As she lay on the dragon’s back and looked up at the blazing night sky she began to cry. The stars blurred as hot tears filled her eyes. Tressida knew that nothing further she could say would diminish her match mate’s sorrow, so she didn’t speak.

  Until a moment later when she saw the door to the command quarters reopen and Slurr and Renton emerge together. “Cerah! Look!”

  Cerah sat up, wiping her eyes, and saw Renton walking with Slurr. Her husband’s arm was around the admiral’s shoulder, and his gait was unsteady. “Tress, he’s ill! Take me down.”

  The dragon began to comply, but when they were still twenty feet above the Marta’s deck, her superior senses caught the exhaled fumes coming from Slurr’s nostrils and she cancelled her descent.

  “Tress, what are you doing? I asked you to take me down!” Cerah said, frantic in her desire to help her husband.

  “He is not ill, my love.”

  “Of cours
e he is. Look at the way he’s walking!”

  “Cerah, I can smell his rum-breath from here. He is merely intoxicated.”

  “Drunk?” Cerah said aloud. “He never drinks more than an occasional ale. I’ve never known him to…” she stopped in mid-sentence as she watched Slurr lose his balance completely and fall, despite Renton’s efforts to stabilize him. It was not the fall that stopped her, however. It was Slurr’s laughter. “Some crutch you are!” she heard her husband say, as his friend stooped to help him back to his feet.

  “I think you may end up needing three pots of jakta,” Renton said, laughing along with Slurr.

  “By the Next Plane,” Cerah whispered in amazement. “You’re right. He turned to the bottle, instead of to me?”

  “Do not be hurt by this,” Tressida said, climbing again to the fifty-foot altitude at which they’d been cruising previously. “Of all the people your beloved thinks he has failed, it is you he most regrets disappointing. He obviously felt he needed to deaden those feelings.”

  As the two men again began moving along the deck, Cerah saw Slurr suddenly break free from Renton and dash to the railing. He bent over it and began to vomit into the sea. As they listened to his groans, loud enough that even Cerah, without the benefit of dragon-hearing, made them out easily, Tressida said, “I suspect he will not soon chose this particular self-medication again.”

  The retching was so horrible that Cerah felt her own stomach rumble a little at the sound of it. “Don’t you start too,” the dragon warned.

  Cerah held her hand to her mouth, but was able to control her gag reflex. Slurr soon moved away from the side of the ship and Renton once more placed the wobbly lad’s arm around his shoulder. As Tress and Cerah watched they made their way to the ship’s galley.

  “Let’s wait a tick and let Garl’s jakta do its work. Then I’ll take you down to the ship and you can go and see your husband,” Tressida said. Cerah heard a trace of amusement in her voice.

  “Are you enjoying this?” she asked, giving the dragon a light swat.

  “Never,” said Tress, but she instantly broke into raucous laughter.

  “You are cruel and dark-hearted!” Cerah exclaimed, raining a series of play-slaps on Tressida’s thick hide.

  “He doesn’t hold his rum very well!” the dragon said.

  Cerah began to laugh as well. She knew that Slurr would still carry the shame of incorrectly guessing Surok’s reaction to the false news of the Army of the Light’s departure from Illyria, but she felt that his release from his self-imposed imprisonment boded well. And she had to admit that Tressida was right. Slurr’s walk from the command quarters to the galley, a distance of about thirty feet, had taken nearly fifteen unsteadily-weaving minutes and she could not deny that it had been humorous to observe.

  “Very well. We’ll let the jakta work its magic, then I will go to him. In the meantime, you had better turn that attitude around, young lady,” Cerah said. The dragon continued to laugh, in spite of her scolding.

  Jessip kept a constant eye on the sky. It had been three days since Puul, the leader of the small detachment of wizards that accompanied the defending warriors of Kier, had informed him that he’d received a projection from Kern. Surok was headed in his direction.

  Jessip, since the day Yarren and Russa had appeared in his hometown of Orna, had been a tireless force in the Army of Light, first as a brilliant recruiter, then as the commander of the defending battalion. He had met the Chosen One, and though he’d been already been devoted to the cause, seeing her in person had changed his life.

  His lot before the war had been a happy one, and he’d been very content to oversee the administration of the small port-town in which he’d lived his entire life. He loved his family, the good people of Orna, and peace and quiet.

  For nearly a year, however, he’d had none of these things. It was true that his brother Migal, and his son Dedo, were now soldiers, part of the battalion which he commanded. But his wife and two daughters were back in Orna, several hundred miles to the east. He still worried about his village. How would the people run their affairs without him?

  And as far as peace and quiet, well there was little of that in army life. Even though the conflict had not yet come to Kier, the constant strain of keeping his eight thousand men and women ready to respond to crisis at a moment’s notice had taken a toll on him. He was no longer the jovial, rotund character that had greeted the two wizards of Melsa that day, seemingly a million years ago. His demeanor had become far more serious, and his frame had slimmed considerably, both from physical activity and from constant worry and stress.

  Now the words “worry” and “stress” seemed pale compared to what he was feeling as he kept his gaze pointed upward, looking for the tell-tale boiling clouds that appeared where ever Surok’s presence sullied the Green Lands.

  He knew that the bulk of the army was sailing to join his force, but he fretted constantly that Surok would arrive before the reinforcements did. He was confident of his warriors’ skills, but quaked at the thought of the vastly superior numbers of the Dark. Perhaps the full contingent of the Army of Quadar could match Surok’s force, but his defenders could not. They would be overrun, as surely as had been the warriors guarding Niliph.

  As he continued to stare at the blue sky, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see the round face of Puul smiling at him. “You’re going to get a crick in your neck,” the wizard said.

  “I don’t want to be caught unawares,” Jessip said, looking up again.

  “From what I’ve been told the signs of Surok’s approach are not subtle. You’ll know without having to injure your vertebrae.”

  Jessip let out a loud sigh. He turned and faced the wizard. “I fear I am not up to this challenge, Puul,” he said. “I believe General Slurr made a grave error when he selected me to lead this force.”

  “Nonsense!” exclaimed Puul. “Your organizational skills are unparalleled. You whipped these farmers and merchants into a razor-sharp fighting unit. And though you have a force of only eight thousand, you’ve positioned them ideally, to take advantage of both their skill and the terrain.”

  Jessip shook his head. “But my nerves! I am a man who was born to run a small port, not to fight the embodiment of evil.”

  The wizard smiled. “Jessip, all of Ma’uzzi’s creations are born to fight evil. We may take on other roles and live our lives unconcerned with the workings of darkness, but when evil rises, we are all here to oppose it. The spark of Himself that the Creator embeds within our souls will always move against the Dark.”

  The older man let Puul’s words sink in. He knew them to be true. Finally he said, “Perhaps if, along with that spark, a somewhat hardier constitution had been placed within me I might feel more worthy of the responsibility which has been thrust upon me.”

  Puul again placed his hand on Jessip’s shoulder. “Friend, I am two hundred and forty-three years old. I have been trained to serve the people of Quadar, even though for most of those years the people of Quadar had come to believe that wizards were make-believe and that there was no evil in the world. When I was a tiny boy, my mother told me the words written in our sacred cave on Melsa which spoke of the dark goddess Pilka and her hatred for the Green Lands and its abundant life. Although I didn’t understand everything I was told, and never heard the name Surok until the Chosen One appeared, the reality of the matter is that my entire life was lived in preparation for the conflict in which we’re engaged. And do you know what?”

  “What?” asked Jessip.

  “I shiver at the thought of actually having to fight. My favorite thing is to help exotic plant life grow and flourish. I would far rather see my hands covered with soil than with black blood.”

  For the first time since receiving the news of Surok’s approach, Jessip smiled. “I’d rather be sitting down to a platter of steaming shellfish,” he said. “Two platters, if I’m being honest.”

  Puul laughed. “And I believe you sha
ll be able to do so again one day. Perhaps one day soon.”

  “And perhaps you can bless Orna with some of your giant flowers. As long as you promise they won’t eat anyone!” said the man, joining in the wizard’s laughter.

  “I make no promises!” At that moment, the wizard’s laughter stopped suddenly and he placed a hand to his temple. When he lowered it he said, “Kern reports the armada is a little more than one day out.”

  “Is there any word of Surok’s progress?” Jessip asked, his face once more serious.

  “The riders that have flown ahead of the ships have made no sightings of the black sails. Kern believes they ventured east from Illyria.”

  “That way takes far longer than sailing west,” the commander said, his face brightening. “The army may yet arrive ahead of the enemy.”

  “In the meantime, we need to continue to prepare. The citizens of the Two Sisters have an advantage that those of Thresh and Kal Berea and Trakkas did not.”

  “The Caves of Yll,” said Jessip. “They have been evacuating to that safe haven since the news reached us.”

  “Yes, your people have made that action a smooth one, but there are still more who need to go now. The small contingent that had remained behind to help remove food and valuables need to be escorted to safety as well.”

  “I will see that it is done,” Jessip said. He stole another glance at the sky. Still blue and cloudless.

  “You know what, Puul? I can almost taste the shell fish!”

  “And I can smell the blossoms!”

  As they parted, Puul walked to where his black-scaled match-mate Ardessa rested. As he approached the dragon Puul lifted his eyes upward as well. When he realized he was doing so he thought, None of that, Puul. You’ll end up with a crick in your neck as well!

  An hour after she and Tressida had seen Slurr and Renton go into the galley, Cerah could wait no longer. She slid off the golden dragon’s back and onto the poop deck of the Marta. From there she made the familiar walk to Garl’s domain. When they had first made the voyage aboard this ship to Melsa, Cerah had helped pay their way by assisting the cook in preparing meals for the crew. She had grown extremely fond of Garl in a very short time. His wild stories entertained her immensely and helped pass the tedious hours spent peeling and chopping roots and vegetables.