Complete Magic Lands Books 1 & 2 Omnibus

by William Robert Stanek

  He heard a low rattle and a grumble as the other did precisely what he had asked.

  He shot a hesitant glance towards the retreating form. “Wait!” he commanded. The girl stopped, turning back expectantly. Ray stood, immediately shrank back down. “What is your name?” he asked, not knowing what else to say.

  ***

  “My name? What is your name?”

  “Why would you want to know my name?”

  Kerry shot back, “For the same reason you want to know mine.”

  Ray said nothing.

  “You saved my life. I owe you a debt.”

  “You owe me nothing.”

  “Untrue, and if you’re not going to say anything else, good-bye…” Kerry was playing with him now, trying to coax him from hiding. She knew how to play this game well; this was how she had earned Waring’s affections.

  As she hurried away, playing with him, she was also curious. She had glimpsed the other for only a moment, but what she had saw in that moment stunned and attracted her as the lure attracted her Waring.

  “Nothing out there. It is all waste,” Stirling had told her of the place where they gathered the life liquid. “Its only purpose is for us to apply to the trees so that they may bear meat and to drink when we thirst. You stay away unless you have needs. Strange beasts lie there. Men have ventured out never to return, swallowed whole by the beasts of the wild.”

  She knew the faces of those beasts very well from her earliest childhood recollection to her most recent nightmare. The great crockin abounded in the lore and in life. She had seen their strange heads adorning testaments to the wild beyond preserved in the special houses. It was said the wizard got power from them.

  She felt a chill in the air as the wind stirred, blowing hollowly down the face of the slant. Her pace quickened, though she only took a few more steps before she turned to stare back. “Where are you, Waring?” she asked of the wind, stopping just short of casting a shrill whistle after the gale that was gradually wafting along the hill.

  She wouldn’t be so afraid if she knew the other was near. She replayed the face she had seen in her mind. The dark, fierce countenance, the short thin body, barely clothed. She saw him lunge at her and grab her, and she started to run away, suddenly realizing what she saw was an image in her mind.

  “Are you still there?” she called out, not understanding the curiosity attached to her attraction.

  ***

  Ray stepped out from behind the camouflage, shouldering his pack, raising his arm in a sign of hailing. “I am,” he called back, not knowing the pull of the lure was equally set into him.

  He saw the full, round face tucked into a partial smile, accentuated by thick lines—the laughing lines. The eyes beckoned him to come closer, and he did, again not knowing why. He shifted the weight of the pack until it was comfortably settled and then slowly crossed the length that separated them.

  In his mind, he saw pale, white faces surrounding him and staring down at him, imagining himself slumped to the ground under their gawking gaze, a relentless circle of ominous gloom. He stopped, as he was about to touch the dry and the Out. He glanced up at her, down, looking back up with intrigue at the dangling gnarl of long, flowing hair, hair so light that it seemed to match the hue of the sun itself.

  Scratching at his head, Ray pulled out a tangled, stubby, dark curl, catching sight of his hands as he did this, suddenly comparing his hands to hers. In the back of his mind he saw the other outsiders again, the men dressed in thick clothes with angry faces, crashing headlong into his world. He pulled back, turned away. The smoot had said Ray would make a choice this day and while Ray considered it yet ahead, he did not know that it had already passed the instant he had taken his first step in the other’s defense.

  “What is your name?” Kerry asked, moving back down the hill. “You haven’t told me though I have already given you mine.”

  She regarded him from head to toe, wondering about the long, slender stick in his hand, the store on the back, and all sorts of other things. Where had he come from? She wondered. And why was he here? And why wasn’t she afraid?

  As the distance between them diminished, so did her apprehension and her first impression of him changed as well. Up close, he didn’t look so scant and thin. Well, thin to be sure, though he was, perhaps, her equal in height. She couldn’t be sure because the slant of the hill obscured the proportions somewhat.

  Ray responded after long duress, “Ray, my name is Ray.” He moved closer feeling the tough, gritty touch of the stone land upon his feet. He was unafraid now, his determination was wrought. “Why do you theft that which is not your own?” he asked.

  “Theft?”

  Ray coldly intoned, “Steal.”

  “Steal? I do not take anything that is not freely granted,” Kerry hesitated, pointing a long finger, “If this is what you are implying that I steal.”

  “I am,” said Ray, unaware that he stood firmly upon the dead land and the feeling of it wasn’t as foreign as he had once thought.

  Kerry puffed up her cheeks, walking away without saying anything further.

  Ray followed her up to the flat of the hill, struggling to catch up to her fleeted, long legs. He went no further, however, his heart stopping as he glanced over his shoulder, down, down to the wet.

  Kerry maneuvered around a falling off, coming to a rest on the far side of it opposite Ray, a seemingly safe distance. She could stop now and regard him with full intent.

  Kerry coaxed up the courage to ask him another question, but not before she made a vibrant summons, the high-pitched tone causing him to wince. “What were you doing out there? And where is it that you come from? I have never seen the likes of you, and I have been all the way to Adalayia.”

  Kerry spoke with pride, disappointed with Ray’s confused stare, which had not been the response she expected. She continued, “More than once, mind you. And I have gone it alone, having just returned no more than a few days ago. I have seen the wizard who rules the land.”

  Bewildered, Ray said nothing. He was uneasy with the distance that separated them as much as by her words, and so, as he would cross from house to house without much thought, he crossed the falling off in one all-ensuing leap. He registered the surprise on Kerry’s face, matching it with his own smile. He himself was astonished at the ease with which he had made the swoop, although the landing had been rough. The land did not give beneath his feet, and so he had overcompensated.

  Still, he was surprised—he had crossed the distance with ease. He dropped his pack and his staff, and readied to make another jump. He wanted to try again.

  Kerry’s face was drawn, her eyes wide. She touched a firm hand to his shoulder. Her voice was stern as she began, “No, don’t. You must never do that again. The falling off has no bottom. Are you not afraid of the abyss?”

  “Did I do something wrong? I don’t understand.”

  “You crossed the…” Kerry’s voice grew weak, “…falling off, you are unwary and unwelcome.”

  Ray bundled his face up with confusion, “I don’t understand.”

  “Ha!” she said throwing up her hands, “You are as barbaric as—” She cut short her words, corrected herself. “You truly do not know?”

  “Know what?” Ray asked.

  “The falling off… Are you not afraid? Or do you not know fear?”

  “Fear?”

  “The falling off is endless. If you slip into it, you will never return. Do you understand? There is only one place where it can be crossed, and that is the bridge between City and Country. One place, remember that!”

  Ray answered honestly, “I will,” though he still wasn’t sure exactly why.

  The next question the two began at the same time, it was back to the why’s and the how’s, and the how come’s. Slowly as they went back and forth, an odd sort of understanding grew out of their mutual curiosity. For each similarity they found, they discovered disparity and contradictions. They were different peoples an
d yet the same—and unwittingly, Ray drifted along behind the path his druthers had carved out for him.

  The gray-faced land, the outer fringe of the land beyond the hill, the land of mourning, the still, dead land that Ray had dreaded for all his life, stretched out endlessly before him. He was so caught up in his conversation with Kerry that he didn’t realize the enormity of it all. The simple fact was that he had made a conscious decision to help Kerry and that decision was changing and shaping his life.

  Though countless deeds separated him from the path’s end and innumerable twists and turns lay ahead, he was now a step further along the way. What this meant, he wouldn’t know for some time, but he would later come to realize the point at which it all changed and the point at which he had put his feet upon the true path of his life. For now, he sighed, cast back his shoulders and followed the outsider girl. She for her part smiled, imagining the lure in his mouth, as if he were her Waring.

  CHAPTER TEN: CURIOSITY

  Ray sat in Kerry’s rocking chair, looking through the window, watching Kerry attend to the needs of a distant cousin of his familiar arbor. As he rocked back and forth, ignoring the dizzying sensation this gave him, he sometimes looked about the house, Kerry’s word, not his own. Frustration, an aftereffect from conversing with Kerry, was still evident in his expression, not that he disliked Kerry. It was quite the contrary.

  The two had quickly found that beyond basic speech, the words they used, though often the same, held disparate meanings. Ray even found attempting to clarify his definition of something more difficult than if he had just ignored the questioning glances and plodded through what he had been attempting to say. Even in his sleep, he could sometimes hear the new words repeating over and over in his mind.

  Kerry just thought Ray was thick-headed and their strange attraction grew regardless of these differences. She tended to her trees more often than she normally did, and in this way, she gave him time to wrestle with his own thoughts, thoughts which she knew were troubling him very deeply, thoughts that when he put them into words sometimes frightened her. He told her of things that though he had never seen he knew, and she knew they were true and real.

  What was even more frightening was that he could describe in vivid detail Adalayia and places beyond that she had never seen but had heard about. He also told her of places she had never heard about: a stronghold perched atop Mount Lar, a stone canyon where dragon lizards roamed, a far away land called Korran where undermountain men dwelled, and a land beyond where all were equal and free. This place Ray called Frething. He claimed it was beautiful beyond compare and that the hand of the wizard did not extend there.

  While she listened and was convinced he told the truth, she was also worried about Waring’s disappearance. The collections had stopped altogether. She feared he was lost and would never return.

  Doubts about Ray filled her mind as well. She wondered if the things he had told her about could be real. If there really were such places in the world. But then again, all her ideals about the world were in doubt. Up until a few days ago, her thoughts went no further than City and Country, but now such innocent thoughts were in jeopardy. Ray had showed her, if only by his appearance, that she truly knew little about the world around her.

  She was curious. No, more than curious. Could a place of such as Frething exist, and if it did indeed exist, and Ray could find it, what then? Did she really want to leave her home, the place she had known all her life, the place Stirling had bade her to stay in and she had promised that she would. But Stirling had been wrong before. He had been wrong about the wizard and the tax. Not paying the tax had cost him his life, and Kerry now had to work to repay his debt and her own.

  The very thought of debt and work, brought her to the present, and the task before her. Two mouths to feed meant more work for her in gathering the offerings. Ray had taken a liking to the meat of the tree, surprised that each conveyed variety in taste and texture depending on the tree and her desires. She had tried the light and the dark, as Ray called it, and disliked it. She thought of these things foul-tasting roots, though she never told Ray this. The bittersweet, on the other hand, appealed to the tiny twinge of craving she sometimes had, and so she favored it over all the other things Ray had introduced her to.

  Humming a wordless tune, Kerry labored around the trees, setting them into frenzied vibrations as she finally applied the life liquid, the wet as Ray named it, for the third and final time this day. A passing glance toward the house revealed Ray’s weighted gaze was still upon her, and she recalled another thing that she had been mulling over previously. A thing she did not know how she would explain to Ray or how he would take it when she did.

  The problem she had was with True. The small beast gave her chill dreams at night. She pictured it wrapped around her throat, twisting, and her gasping, gasping for air she couldn’t quite grasp. The thought of it even now gave her cold shivers.

  Turning back, she cast Ray a glum smile. She wanted to like True, mind you, and she told herself this, but her subconscious had conflicting notions.

  Soon afterward she finished her chores and returned indoors, vaguely aware that as she did this, Ray was no longer seated by the window. She turned a full circle, finding the room empty, hearing muffled laughter. “Ray, where are you?”

  No reply came.

  “Ray?”

  A subtle chuckle.

  Kerry turned about again. “Ray,” she said, her tone slightly miffed.

  “Outside,” said Ray, having slipped out the door.

  “The sun will set soon,” she admonished.

  Ray stepped back inside, “I know. Come on, hurry up.”

  “Hurry up for what?” asked Kerry. “We shouldn’t be outside now. The soldiers may come, and I’m not ready yet.”

  Ray ignored her words. “I’ll show you if you hurry. We can be there and back before sunset.”

  “Where and back before sunset? We could get lost in the dark. I don’t like the night, Ray, you know that.”

  “Don’t worry. I have very good eyes,” Ray coaxed away her objection, pulling her after him. “Can’t you smell it?” he asked.

  “Smell what?” Kerry didn’t smell anything.

  “Take a deep breath, feel the sense of vibrancy in the air. Can you not smell it?” Ray was excited now, running away from her, beckoning her to chase him. Kerry followed. Ray led her along the twisted trail that he now knew fairly well.

  By now, they had come quite some distance and she was regarding the dark sky in front of them. “Why are we going this way? It will be dark soon. Ray, it is a dark omen and it will bring ill tidings. We must not go this way.”

  She stopped, grabbed his hands to force him to look at her. “Ray, if the soldiers ever come, you must not be seen. Do not be alarmed by their actions. In the Country, we do as we must. You must let me deal with them. Do you understand?”

  “Have you thought about what I’ve said? It is past time for me to be off. I must journey to the stone land to follow my path. Will you go with me as we’ve discussed?”

  Kerry’s serious expression didn’t waver. “Ray, I can never leave. My home is Country, I am Country. I have made a promise. …. It’s time to return to the house. It’s safest there.”

  Ray ran off, stopped, circled back and dragged her along behind him. “Nonsense, you said you never saw it rain. Can’t you smell it? Isn’t this wonderful?” To be truthful Ray always thought of rain as an irritation, but Kerry didn’t know that. Ray didn’t stop at the edge of the In. He meant to drag her along after him.

  Her shriek brought him to in immediate stop. Panic and fright lit Kerry’s face. “Stop, no! What are you doing? I don’t want to! Ray, let go of me! I don’t want to see it! I’m going home now!” And with that, she retreated.

  Ray already had his feet in the wet and it felt so good that he was hard pressed to turn away. Perhaps he should have immediately pursued her, though he didn’t, and when at last he did pursue her, she was alre
ady gone from sight. It was strikingly odd how the simple touch of the wet drove back familiar thoughts about the gray land he traveled over—thoughts he had considered behind him.

  When he returned, Kerry was rapidly swaying back and forth in the old rocker, soothing away harsh thought. She said nothing as he closed the door. The sun had set as she said it would. The omen she had perceived was commanded forward and Kerry fought hard to drive it away, repeating soft words in her mind, words her mother had taught to her, words that would chase away the evil.

  Ray stumbled through the apology, an apology that was left hanging in the air about them for some time. “I’m sorry, I just thought… Well… You know what I was trying to… I’m sorry, O.K.”