“Dear Gaigas…” Noilerg said.
“What is it?” Pursaiones asked, knowing there would be no answer. The three sat in silence atop their horses in the middle of the blackened meadow. Other than the alien light rimming the mountains, only the soft light and smoke rising from Deedle’s Tavern could be seen. Slowly, one by one, other small lights appeared from the village: torches of awakened citizens, coming to see what the clamor was over.
“Should we get back in?” asked Pursaiones, looking to Noilerg for direction.
“Perhaps the Vapoury is returning to the mountain paths,” Noilerg suggested limply.
“Perhaps—” Taisle said, giving a disapproving look in Noilerg’s direction, “—perhaps someone’s gotten in.” A chill ran down his spine as he made the suggestion, but all three knew it was the best explanation there was. Taisle was first to ride back toward the congregating villagers, who fought to keep torches lit at the town gate.
“Come on,” Pursaiones called back to Noilerg, who sat bewildered atop his steed, mesmerized by the colossal halo girding the peaks. Pursaiones reached the village by the time Noilerg finally kicked his horse, galloping fast for town.
“Justice is come for me at last, is it—this is Gaigas’s retribution?” Noilerg said to himself, riding alone through high stalks of grass, beating hard for the gate.
“No one panic,” said a freshly revived Mayor Doings, holding his staff with one hand, the other rubbing his blood-soaked head. The rain lightened to a drizzle, and slowly the entire village leaked out from their homes to form a drenched mob.
“What is it?”
“Is it coming to get us mommy?”
“I’ll have at ‘em.”
“Vesleathren!—He’s found us!”
“Zesm’s returned!”
“Quiet!” Taisle shouted in a rage, taking control of the situation for the befuddled mayor. “As far as I can tell it hasn’t posed a threat to us, has it? It is merely light, isn’t it?” No one made a sound; all was quiet but the gentle pitter-patter of rain. “We wait for something to happen—other than that, there is nothing we can do.”
“We could ride out,” Pursaiones said.
“Indeed we will ride out, but I don’t want to contend with whatever it may be in a dark, rain-slicked forest. We will wait for morning, then go—beyond that, I’ll stand watch tonight.”
“That’s about all that can be done, I suppose,” Noilerg resigned, happy at the idea of staying put.
“Right, right, then…” Doings mumbled, fussing over his pipe, now wet beyond use.
* * *
Most of the village disappeared, returning to their beds, as the night wore on. Taisle, Pursaiones, and Noilerg waited for the first rays of dawn to poke through the murky clouds. As the sun rose, all but the faintest trace of the golden band disappeared from the mountaintops. Once more Taisle rode out to survey the full breadth of the encircling range.
“Nothing. It’s gone,” Taisle said as Pursiaones rode up.
“Another sleepless night—two in as many weeks,” she replied groggily, too tired to retain her sense of urgency. Noilerg remained at the town gate, falling asleep against a post.
“Do you really trust him?” Taisle asked, glancing warily at the village’s new sensation, the former ghoul-thief.
“I do,” she said without hesitation.
“You like him, don’t you?”
“What?” She paused. “Of course—doesn’t everyone?”
“I don’t know if I’m ready to give that man my trust,” Taisle opened up.
“He’s more than proven himself here—wait, you think he’s got something to do with the light?”
“No—it’s not that…I don’t think he is who he says he is. Something seems—unnatural—about him.”
“Well, I don’t get it, I haven’t felt that way. He was oppressed, a slave! Can’t you have any trust, sympathy even?”
“Something is strange in him—how can a slave have so many stories? Granted, I am not well-traveled myself, I have not travelled much outside these mountains. But I know enough, enough as I learned from old Remtall, about the outside world, about the slaves. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Taisle, he told you. He was captured and made a slave after the war!”
“Yes I heard—and I heard how he slew dragons and wereverns and carnalfages and Feral trolls…”
“I’m too tired. There are more pressing matters than this,” she said, unable to keep her eyes open. “Good nigh—well, good day—I’m going to bed.” Pursaiones rode off, waking Noilerg as she came back to the town gate. Taisle sat awhile atop his horse, watching the mountain range, now well-lit under the morning sun; the golden band was erased, gone from the horizon. He’d take a short nap, he decided, then ride up and try to find something on the summit.
* * *
Pursaiones shook Taisle. She shook him harder.
“Come on! We’re going up, Noilerg has already gone ahead,” she wailed. Finally Taisle cracked his eyes. He felt as if he’d only slept for a few minutes, but when he followed her outside the sun was already dropping in the west. They quickly made their way to their horses, where Mayor Doings stood by, looking rather ruffled even for him, smoking his pipe with great intensity.
“Good luck! Make sure you find out what that was so that we don’t have to be—well—up all night again,” the mayor urged.
“Of course mayor Doings,” Pursaiones replied, amused by the mayor’s extradisheveled appearance. Taisle and Pursaiones mounted their horses, then raced across the meadow. Taisle rubbed his eyes, surveying the mountain range.
“Can’t see a trace of it,” he said, unable to find the gold light.
“Well, it would be quite impossible in daytime.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Huh?” she looked at him.
“What if they’re up there, waiting for us,” he replied.
“Who?”
“The light people!” Taisle said menacingly; a smiled ripped across his face.
“You’re a bastard, title well-earned, you know that.”
They passed into the foothills of the Rislind mountains, leaving open meadow behind them. Their horses worked up a gradually inclining trail, thick with pine, maple, and birch trees. A half hour passed without event, then another; Taisle and Pursaiones stopped atop a lesser peak with a wide view of the meadow and dismounted for a bite to eat.
“Sun’ll be down by the time we’re back to town,” Pursaiones noted.
“Yea. I wonder where Noilerg has gotten himself off to?” said Taisle, munching eagerly on a buttered biscuit.
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s gone back, or hiked to the far end of the range,” she replied, taking a cool drink from a glass bottle strapped to the leather pouch on her saddle.
Taisle stopped chewing.
“Hear that?” he asked. Pursiaones stopped swigging water, perked her head up, and listened intently for anything. Sure enough, she heard it: a low-pitched clicking sound. Steadily, the noise loudened; neither of them could tell from which direction it came.
Click…click…click…click. It seemed to be all-present, directionless.
“What evil is that?” whispered Taisle angrily.
“I don’t know—where is it?” Pursaiones whispered back. She silently laid her bottle back into its pouch, slowly drew her sword from her side. Taisle, transfixed by the inhuman clicks, followed Pursaiones’s lead; he drew his sword slowly, not making a sound. He looked back, checking the trail they’d come up: nothing but boulders set between shrubs and pines, a thick wall of forest on either side. The lesser peak itself was bare-face rock, nearly flat, hedged by low shrubs; at its edges sprouted tiny evergreens. From the peak they could see the meadow spread out hundreds of yards below, at its center their tiny home. The clicking stopped.
“It’s gone,” said Pursaiones. She waited a moment to be sure, then said it again.
“That was strange,” said Tais
le. “For a moment I was getting worr—”
Click…click…click…click. It sounded louder, closer.
Taisle peered again down the way they’d come up, trying to catch a glimpse of anything, while Pursaiones kept her eyes on the pines surrounding them atop the peak. Adrenaline filled their fatigued bodies, their senses sharpened. Taisle struggled to see anything in the dim afternoon light beneath the trail canopy. Before giving up again, an object popped into view; there it was, ten yards below them on the trail.
“Oh my—” came Taisle’s incredulous voice. Pursaiones rushed to see; the clicking grew softer. Together they looked down the trail: in the middle of the rocky path, surrounded by trees, gleamed a large, smooth tube of shiny steel, unlike anything either of them had ever seen. The vision began to cohere: two people sat in the tube, facing opposite Taisle and Pursaiones. The clicking still sounded as if it was everywhere, but now it had a marked source; Taisle could hear the clicks prominently in the direction of the liquid-sheen steel. The man in the back seat of the contraption flung his head, brown hair waving as he turned: the man’s arms were visibly bound, strapped to the sides of the metallic tube by glowing strips of metal. Their eyes met the bound man’s:
“Noilerg!” Pursaiones cried, unable to control her shock. Immediately, in one miraculous motion, the tube rotated one hundred and eighty degrees, over rock and debris atop which it hovered inches off the ground—now the man in the front of the tube faced them; Noilerg’s terrified expression reappeared behind him.
“Help!” Noilerg yelled. But there was no time to help, nor to do anything. From underneath a shiny steel helmet, armor alien to Taisle and Pursaiones, the man in front of Noilerg stared motionlessly—a flash of purple flickered, then the clicking noise grew to a loud humming. Incredibly, the entire steel tube disappeared.
“Back to the village, the long way,” Taisle ordered, panicking, but Pursaiones was already galloping away from the trail they’d come up. Together they crashed through a thick wall of pine, much to the pain and displeasure of the horses. Hearing the humming noise behind them fade away, they found an overgrown trail; it was slower to traverse, but led safely in the opposite direction of the steel vessel.
“Should we go back?” Pursaiones said, rethinking in guilt.
“It disappeared Pursaiones!” exclaimed Taisle, bewildered, frantically guiding his horse down treacherous granite steps.
“It’s following us!” cried Pursaiones. Taisle listened for it but heard nothing.
“No it isn’t—let’s just get home, come on. Yah—yah!”
They calmed down as much as possible, focusing on the precipitous trail before them. They wended slowly down the mountainside into twilight, taking twice as long to reach the foothills as it had taken to summit.
“They’ve captured him, we have to do something,” Pursaiones wailed as they passed the birth of the foothills. She had begun to accept the strange reality of what they’d just seen—neither of them knew what Vapoury looked like, other than the magic vine wall and boulder path; they’d certainly never seen a person disappear, let alone two people and an entire tube of steel that emitted a clicking noise.
“We can’t do anything right now. Did you see that thing? It was the strangest looking—and that man sitting in it with Noilerg—his helmet was the oddest armor I’ve ever seen in my life! We need to take counsel in town,” Taisle reasoned. Relieved to finally enter the open expanse of the meadow again, they galloped toward the village beneath a setting sun, still listening for noise. The horses bore them swiftly across the field.
Reaching the stable near the gate, Pursaiones heard Taisle shriek loudly. “No,” she thought aloud, hoping the metallic entity hadn’t reappeared; she turned to see Taisle: he gazed mountainward, paused by something. The sun dipped behind the upper crest of the mountains, and already, in the first minutes of dusk, a gold band of light emerged, brighter by each darker shade of night.
“It’s still there,” Taisle shot in anger. He’d hoped that it would somehow have all gone away—the strange Noilerg, the impossible metal object, and the haunting band of light that traced their home’s only defense.
* * *
“We must patiently wait in the village, as long as it takes,” said Doings over a fresh mug of ale, warm and comfortable inside Deedle’s Tavern. Much of the village was present, as everyone wanted to hear news of Taisle and Pursaiones’s trip to the peaks.
“But he’s been shackled, we saw him. He screamed for help,” Pursaiones pleaded, hoping to gather a party to attempt a rescue.
“I am not stepping one foot outside this village,” came a young troll man; his sentiment echoed in all the other young and able people of the village, to Pursaiones’s dismay. Taisle seemed unaffected, unwilling to opine one way or the other—he merely clung to a mug of ale, his fifth in the last hour.
“Perhaps the town won’t listen when I see the damned specter, but now that we’ve all seen it, and Taisle and Pursaiones too, I think we should no longer debate the ghost’s existence!” Miss Brewboil shouted over the chatter. Doings seemed quite disinterested in the whole ordeal, drowsed from pipe and ale, uncertain how to deal with so many differing opinions.
“Well, well. We’ll wait a few more days—maybe this light will disappear, leave us be,” Doings suggested, thinking he had made everyone happy.
“But it was not a ghost. No disrespect Miss Brewboil—it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, but no ghost,” Taisle interjected.
“Have you ever seen a ghost before?” scolded Miss Brewboil disapprovingly. “No? Well then, you can’t be certain it wasn’t.”
“It was the ghost!” croaked Crumpet from a barstool where he’d parked himself for the night. “I knew I hadn’t been deceived…Noilerg was never the original bread thief, it was that thing you saw in the woods!”
Many cheered the remarks of Crumpet and Miss Brewboil, and Pursaiones and Taisle hung their heads in defeat, feeling no possibility of relieving the villagers of their misconception.
“Well, well—not to take any one side—I think we’ll wait one more night, and if the light is still there tomorrow evening, we will hold a real council of urgency,” Doings offered, trying to mollify Taisle.
“There is urgency now—he could be dying!” Pursaiones cried.
“It must be Zesm, come back to kidnap our children again!” cried an elderly gnome-woman, one who had consoled Remtall in nights of yore, when his child had been taken.
“Silence! Enough conjecture, it’s useless!” Doings stammered, sipping from his drink and fixing a fresh pipe. “Zesm—that’s preposterous…”
“It was a steel, shinier than anything I’ve ever seen,” Taisle affirmed. “There was a man in it with Noilerg! I’ve already said this—he wore more of the same steel—a purple glowing helmet!”
The discussion went on for another hour until finally the tavern owner ordered that everyone could take the frenzied debate to one of their own houses, but that he was going to sleep, ghost or no ghost. The villagers wandered under the imposing gold aura cast from their peaceful mountains. They trudged home in eerie light, the glow cascading ambience upon the streets, feeling as if they were in an alternate dimension.
“I wish Remtall hadn’t left,” said Taisle, wishing the wisest man in Rislind hadn’t embarked on a mad quest to avenge his son.
“Me too. He’d know what to do,” Pursaiones agreed. She turned toward her house, stepping away; he stopped her by the arm.
“Thanks for being with me up there. I’d have lost my mind.”
“I think I quite lost mine,” she smiled, the awkward gold light blanketing her vision of his face. “Well—good night,” she said, and turned to go.
“Pursaiones,” he came again, grabbing her arm once more.
“Hm?” she said, exhausted, looking back lazily. Taisle pulled her against him, kissed her quickly, and then released her. She looked confused, glanced away, then returned her eyes to his.
“I�
��m sorry, I…” he tried to explain.
“Goodnight Taisle,” she said, in her voice the hint that she knew; all along she knew how he felt about her.
“Night,” he said. He watched her walk away. Finally, alone under the watchful gold eye that encircled them, Taisle marched to his own bed: whether she loves him or not, he’s gone now, he thought; the short-lived stay of Noilerg had already come to a close. Squashing his selfish doubts, Taisle lay down. In his bed, he tossed and turned to visions of sun-glinting steel and sounds of clicking. He fell into a restless fit of sleep.
XX: FROM THE SMOLDERING RUIN
The night was quiet. Two moons shone, one half-lit, a hanging sickle among clustered stars. The verdant Hemlin hills were dashed of their color, as was the horizon, except for a small lick of flame, impossibly distant: the city of Wallstrong was ablaze. A depression, misshapenly gouged from a symmetrical row of hills, marred the beauty of the Hemlin north; a small stone rolled over in the pit of a giant crater;
Fingers, aglow with a spark of emerald light, unearthed themselves through flame-baked soil. A small pile of rubble tumbled into a thin crevasse at the center of the pit. Bursting through the rock came a dirt-capped mess of hair; next emerged a set of shoulders, two muscular arms: Flaer hoisted himself from his barren grave, lit by an aura of green Vapour—dusting the earth from his eyes, standing in the cooling depression of the hills, he started a slow climb from the black abyss.
Darkin: The Prophecy of the Key (The Darkin Saga Book 2) Page 23
