by Brian Fuller
How to fight on horse and off. How to fight enemies who were quicker, stronger, or magical. How to fight alone and how to command an army. How to attack a tower. How to invade a keep. What to do against demons, evil Puremen, and massive Gagons. Everything seemed a jumble, and just when Gen thought there could be nothing left for them to teach, they showed him more.
Every morning he awoke to a splitting headache, and, in an attempt to get just one good night’s rest, he tried for a solid hour to remove the stones. No trickery of his succeeded. Any attempt to do so was met with numbness that prevented him from raising his arms above his head. He even tried standing on his head to let them slide off, but to no avail. He had no doubt Khairn could hear him banging to the floor with each attempt and was giggling madly. In the end, Gen had no choice but to sleep, but he found he could only grab snatches before waking again from the constant nightmare.
One cloudy afternoon Khairn blinded him and took to throwing rocks at him and swinging his sword around him from every angle so he could hear what it sounded like. Then the Shadan set his chuckling soldiers to firing arrows around and then at his student. Gen tried to dodge out of the way by sensing the path of the arrows from the sound. The only reason the lesson stopped, Gen supposed, was that Khairn had tired of healing him, for Gen knew the Shadan had limits on what he could do without rest. Getting the arrows out of his body without killing him taxed Torbrand to exhaustion.
After being healed at the end of the lesson, Gen entered through the front door of the Showles’s old residence feeling a great emptiness. His clothes were permanently stained a dried-blood brown, no matter what Regina tried when she cleaned and mended them. Gen walked as Torbrand trained him, showing nothing of his tiredness, but he didn’t even see the food before him. When Regina and Rafael tried to talk to him, faces grave, he didn’t respond, going to his room and closing the door behind him. They hadn’t talked about escape for weeks. Rafael and Regina pitied and feared him, and seeing them at the table every evening only tortured him more.
He heard Torbrand come in just after him and order food and music, yelling at his friends as if they were nothing more than cattle, but for some reason, Gen could not find the heart to care about them or even himself. As he slept, the voices of the disembodied warriors continued to instruct him with scene after scene of death and slaughter, each analyzed in cold, dispassionate voices.
He awoke in the deep night. It was quiet, and he found himself weeping, but not because of the pain or for fear of the coming day, but because he finally saw the monster that he was becoming. He knew exactly how to invade any home in Tell and kill its inhabitants so quickly that there would likely not even be a scream. When he saw his friends and neighbors chopping wood or hanging clothes or talking in groups, he instantly knew the best way to kill them all.
And while his mind constantly dwelt on fighting, the stones changed his body, tightening and growing muscles, increasing his reflexes and speed, limbering his sinews and ligaments, sharpening his hearing and sight, enhancing his voice. But all for a purpose, all to make him deadly. While the stones’ lessons were meant to help him protect the Chalaine and the Ha’Ulrich, the Shadan’s were not. Torbrand Khairn took sick pleasure in hurting his student, in molding him into an opponent he could have some fun with before killing him and the rest of Tell’s inhabitants.
Gen lay in the dark, thinking how his whole life revolved around killing. Those things he liked most about himself, the same things he hoped others liked about him, gradually slipped away. His mirth, his art, his courage were all alien memories to him now. He hadn’t sung or even talked to anyone meaningfully in weeks. These realizations sent him spiraling down into a despair he didn’t want to feel but could not control. And in these depths, and in the dark, alone, he made an attempt to end his life, to stop the constant suffering and abort the birth of the Shadan’s monster.
Tying his bed sheet into a convenient noose, he secured one end around his neck and another to a rafter and stepped off of his bed. The Shadan was there almost before his feet could leave the bed frame to dangle free in the air. With a flick of the wrist, he sliced the sheet in two, sending Gen crashing to the floor a sobbing wreck. Torbrand stared at him for some time and then ordered a soldier to take everything from his student’s room. He had Omar fetch a rope and bind Gen so he couldn’t move.
“If you try to kill yourself again, I will kill Rafael,” Torbrand growled.
Gen slept little that night, and if the Shadan felt any sympathy for him the next morning, he didn’t show it, bashing in one side of his ribs and making him fight. As further punishment, Torbrand beat Rafael with Gen as the lone audience. Gen felt strangely distant, and even Rafael’s bruises and grunts of pain couldn’t break him from his cocoon of misery. Every day dawned more pointless than the next. Gen longed for death. At least in dying he would deny Khairn his pleasure.
Chapter 11 - Failure
Rough weather always accompanied the late fall and early winters on the Rhugothian shard cluster. The scholars attributed the disturbances to several shards that passed close overhead during those seasons, stirring up the air and casting large shadows across the land. Flooding of low-lying cities and fields was not unusual in autumn, and in winter snowy tornadoes descended from solid gray clouds like demon fingers to tear apart whatever they touched.
Snow fell heavily and early in Rhugoth the winter after the First Mother returned from Aughmere, and since that time the Chalaine had noticed a change in her mother that disturbed her. Her eyes were tighter, her manner more stiff, and—the most telltale of all—she bit her lip more often, a sure sign that something uncomfortable was churning in her mind.
While the Chalaine had no inkling of what might be distressing the First Mother, she felt certain it concerned herself. Getting her mother to admit as much proved impossible. Disasters fomented by the weather provided the First Mother with plenty of reasons to be busy and to flippantly push aside her daughter’s questions about what she might be feeling.
The Chalaine didn’t doubt that many issues in Rhugoth troubled her mother. She asked about the source of her uneasiness, but she only smiled and said that being the First Mother always carried a weight with it and that the Chalaine should not be concerned.
Then the Chalaine pressed the issue, and her mother was not one to be pressed. As gently but firmly as possible, First Mother Mirelle told her that nothing was the matter and that she should not ask about it again. The Chalaine was crestfallen. She felt close to her mother, but since Mirelle had returned from Aughmere, a certain distance crept into their relationship and the Chalaine felt keenly the want of support and affection her mother had always generously shared with her. Fenna was a good friend but one who could not bear heavy burdens, and everyone else she knew would not accept weakness in “The Holy Chalaine.”
She left her mother’s quarters fuming, Dason trailing behind as she negotiated the maze at the quickest pace possible while still maintaining decorum. What she wanted now was to go into her room and read a book that would transport her out of the Chambers of the Chalaine and into some other place more suited for lighter spirits and laughter—items that had been in short supply since the winter began. The Dark Guard snapped to attention as she entered the Antechamber of the Chalaines and turned toward her own quarters.
As the Chalaine and Dason left the maze and crossed into the hallway where the door to her private chambers stood, Dason circled around her quickly. The Chalaine was startled by the forlorn expression on his face, and she put her hand to her heart as he knelt on both knees before her, clasping his hands as if in prayer.
“Please, Holy Chalaine, forgive me!” he supplicated. “Please let me back into your good graces again! I only wish to serve!”
His handsome face set the Chalaine’s heart to pounding.
“Get up, Dason,” she commanded softly. “Why should you think that you have done anything that offends me or that you have fallen from my good graces? You have don
e your duty well and I have nothing with which I could ever fault you.”
Dason remained on his knees. “I thank you for saying thus much, but you cannot expect my heart to fully take hold of such an assertion when such a wall stands between us! I mean no disrespect, and I know that I may not be the cleverest of men, but it is not the same between us as it was but a few months ago. You must reveal to me in what way I have wronged you, that I may make proper amends and win back your good opinion!”
“You have not lost my good opinion, Dason!” She knelt before him, concerned. “From what actions of mine do you base this claim? Perhaps it is I who have wronged you.”
Dason’s eyes widened. “No! Never, Chalaine. You are perfection, and it is I, weak and vile, on which the blame must be placed. If you would but tell me what I must do so that you can feel to speak easily and happily with me again, to dispel the darkness I feel between us, I will exact whatever penance and go to whatever lengths necessary to win back your favor.”
The Chalaine wrinkled her brow. It saddened her to see him so indisposed and terrified, and she wracked her mind, searching for some slight she might have made or some word misspoken that would cause him such agony of spirit, but she came up empty. Tolnorians worried a great deal about propriety and honor, but she could not recollect any occasion where she had behaved poorly, save that she was taken to brooding more often of late. She reached out to him and lifted his head.
“I swear to you, Dason, that I think as highly of you now as I ever have and hold you in the highest esteem. If you sense some darkness, then I am sorry. How can I prove my regard to you other than my word that it is, indeed, as intact as it ever was?”
“A holy kiss, First Daughter,” he said, eyes penetrating the veil. “Only then will I feel at peace.”
The Chalaine was taken off guard by his request and stood.
He stood with her, eyes tortured. “Forgive me, Highness,” he bowed. “It is improper for me to ask it from you. I withdraw my request.”
The Chalaine thought hard, a strange and unfamiliar thrill building inside her. She had never kissed a man nor had ever been asked to. Dason was the kindest, best man in her acquaintance, and she considered him as much a friend as a Protector. She preferred his company to almost anyone else’s, and to see him wracked with such misery drew out the healer within her, and he needed her healing—at least that is what she convinced herself of.
Lifting his head again, her arm trembling, she stepped close and kissed him lightly on the mouth through her veil. The kiss lingered longer than she intended, his lips warm and inviting on hers despite the barrier between them. She closed her eyes, thoughts addled, and an alarm rang out in her mind. She stepped backward, placing a hand on her lips. Dason remained where he stood, face registering sweet rapture. The Chalaine composed herself before he finally opened his eyes again. His countenance had changed to delighted and self-assured.
“I thank you, Chalaine,” he intoned reverentially. “I shall never doubt your regard again. I am most relieved and thankful for your solicitude!”
“You are welcome,” she responded convincingly enough to elicit a smile from her Protector. “Now if you would let me in, I have some reading I need to do.”
“At once, Chalaine,” he said enthusiastically, crossing to and opening the dark wooden door engraved with a golden rose. The Chalaine went in quickly and he shut the door behind her. Guilt instantly pressed in upon her at every side, and she placed her veil on her desk and paced about the room wringing her hands. She had kissed a man that wasn’t the Ha’Ulrich and had enjoyed it enough to almost let it go too far.
It did go too far! She scolded herself. It should have never happened! I have endangered this world and everyone in it because I am a silly girl.
She knew the right thing to do would be to confess to her mother and the Prelate, but she dared not do it. As guilty as she felt, she would not let her own stupidity hurt Dason, for they would remove him from his post immediately and bring down a shame and dishonor on him and his family that would last forever. They might even kill Dason for what he had done.
She knelt at her bed immediately and asked Eldaloth his forgiveness, although the prayer, she felt, did not travel much beyond the confines of her room. Such a transgression would require severe repentance on her part, and she mentally resolved to focus her thoughts on the Ha’Ulrich more firmly, only wishing that she knew more of him so she had a more solid foundation from which to proceed.
Turning to the tapestry above her bed she stared at the man there, bold and handsome, holding aloft a sword in one hand and holding hers in the other. If she had nothing but a caricature to latch onto, then that would have to do. As penance, she resolved to stare at the tapestry for an hour each day before dawn while the winter lasted.
While her efforts let her guilt dim, her enjoyment of Dason’s company in the following days always allowed it to flame anew. As the winter deepened, she set every hope on the day her Ha’Ulrich would walk off of his ship on Kingsblood Lake and into her life. Then, she felt, she could truly make restitution for her mistake. But every time she saw Dason standing in the hallway, that blessed day seemed long in coming.
Weeks of weariness, torture, and training added to Gen’s burgeoning store of skills and toned his body, but while he learned to ignore physical pain, the unrelenting anguish muddled his discordant mind. Gradually, even that sensation was denied him and he became a mindless shell, scraping by from one day to the next. He no longer cared for anyone or anything. There was training. There was eating. There was sleep with its dreams of fighting, strategy, and war. He felt he had lived through the Mikkikian wars, and the images, blood-soaked and gory, no longer sickened or shocked him.
The Shadan’s exercises tuned Gen’s muscles to the point of breaking. Gen pulled carts full of rocks, held buckets of water extended in his hands, and ran great distances at all times of day and in any weather. Thanks to hours of fighting blinded and the enhancing effect of the stones, Gen’s hearing and reflexes had sharpened to where he could hear a pebble moving through the air in his direction.
While always centered on the sword, his lessons at times deviated to fighting with other weapons or with no weapons at all. His body continued to change, gathering strength, speed, and awareness. His voice widened in range and intensity, a gift to help him be heard in the thick of battle, the Voice of Command, as Telmerran called it.
He saw Rafael and Regina little. At first he avoided them because it pained them to see him. Now the neglect of his friends was routine, and his deep apathy prevented him from wondering what they thought or felt. Even hearing Regina crying in the next room out of loneliness or fear failed to stir him.
A few weeks later, Gen awoke late, the sun already shining outside. Torbrand had always roused him before dawn. Gen thought nothing of it, stretching his muscles and rubbing the grit from his eyes. During the night, Telmerran had instructed him on advanced mounted warfare—he was the only one who fought on horseback of his three masters—while Samian and Elberen combined to instruct him more thoroughly on the bow. The instruction that had burned into the very muscles of his body made him feel as if he had done it a hundred times before, despite relatively scant practice.
Gen left his room, passing into the hall. Torbrand Khairn hummed to himself in the front room, Gen finding him as he often was with feet on the table, drinking a steaming mug of ale. Rafael was gagged and bound in a corner of the room. The old bard grunted furiously as if trying to signal something to his former pupil.
Gen knew he should feel shock, pain, and anger at his former master’s plight, but an extinguished spirit and a mind crammed with violence cast even the most depraved sights into an inconsequential light. Death and pain were his constant friends. Seeing them near was no more surprising than finding breakfast on the table.
Torbrand smiled mischievously. “There you are. I wondered when you would drag yourself out of that bed of yours. Sit. Eat. There is plenty, and I think
you will find the fare rather better than usual.”
Gen knew the Shadan was up to something, but he was beyond caring. Rafael continued to grunt, eventually settling into a quiet sobbing. Gen ignored him and started to eat. The food was of a finer quality—a sumptuous apple pie and moist dark bread with butter. As his master seemed in no hurry, Gen wasn’t either.
“You may wonder at the sudden improvement of our victuals. I must confess that I am upset with you a little on this score, for why did you not tell me that Laraen Fairweather was ten times the cook that Regina is? I can scarce forgive you for forcing me to eat Regina’s parade of the overcooked and under-seasoned for more than two months.”
Gen stopped eating. Something pushed its way through the smothering emptiness within him. Where was Regina?
“And there it is!” Torbrand exclaimed, standing. “A spark! So far I have taught you the banishment of emotion, broken you down and burned your soul to ash. But I left a little ember burning from which to kindle a fire, for the fiercest of fighters are not those who are devoid of passion but those who are filled with it. You are wondering where Regina is, yes?”
“Yes, Shadan,” Gen answered, striving to keep the urgency out of his voice. He wouldn’t give Torbrand the satisfaction.
“Very well, see how this feels. Last night after you were abed, I dragged Regina and Hubert into the Chapel and there had the Pureman marry them. I know it is a bit out of season for your country but not unheard-of. For their wedding gift, I let them leave town a bit before dawn this morning to go wherever they wished. What do you think of that?”
Gen was confused. Why would Torbrand free her? For Mena’s sake?
Torbrand stroked his beard. “It seems that I am forgetting something about the whole affair, though. Hmm, now what was it? I just can’t remember. I think Rafael may know. Let’s ask him, shall we?”
