Trail of Pyres

by L. James Rice

  A cat eats the mouse head first so to use the tail for a toothpick, she recalled her father saying more than a few times, but in the end we’re all somebody’s toothpick. She didn’t know why those words came to her, but she wished her mind had kicked up a more inspirational memory. She huffed and turned into town.

  She needed fresh clothes, which would cost her coins, but poor was better than dead. A mercer’s shop stood a block to the east and so she turned down a street, its cobbles disappearing to dirt after thirty or so strides. A new dress or cloak and a place to sleep, those were all she needed to survive a night in this hell. She’d lived through so much worse, it’d be humiliating to die now.

  A man stepped into the street ahead and walked her way, but he paid her no mind and she kept her head down, studying her boots.

  Maybe she could steal those damned chickens, it’d serve the old woman and her bastard husband fair enough. Her heart pounded with new anger, and she wanted to plunge her dagger into that horse shitting heathen. Both of them. She glanced up. The man ahead walked slow, his eyes a straight stare right past her. Too much past her.

  She called for Light, but the trickle of energy ended with a pressure to the base of her skull, and she fell forward, the ground rushing toward her face before the world went black.

  6

  Returning to the World

  What tragedies Forgotten, what Joys?

  What laughter of girls and japes of boys?

  Sleeping, eyes open. Woke, but broken.

  the river, ferry, the ferryman’s fat tongued kiss,

  choking, breathless, choking.

  –Tomes of the Touched

  Glimdrem stood in front of a cave on a small wooded island. A line of Edan walked with sullen and disciplined strides, disappearing into the world’s black mouth. Somehow, he understood they walked into the Father Wood.

  Glimdrem knew he was dreaming because Uvin stood beside him, hale and healthy, his hands with flesh instead of blackened bone, and Lelishen never deigned hold his hand in the waking world. She stood beside him, her palm warm in his cold fingers. She kissed his cheek and with a playful grin licked his lips with a burning hot tongue, and he found himself embarrassed and aroused.

  Uvin smiled with serrated teeth, pale yellow eyes aglow. “The perfect couple, all the more perfect now the Edan are leaving the world.”

  “Leaving?”

  Lelishen giggled, her fingernails digging the back of his hand. “No more taking orders.”

  He looked to Uvin’s too happy smile. “Sutan wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Lelishen grabbed his face, squishing his cheeks to form kissy lips. “They sent me to frozen Kaludor when I’d rather be heating your bed.”

  It might be a dream, but he liked the direction it took. At least with her.

  Uvin said, “For the first time the Trelelunin will know freedom.”

  Glimdrem smiled, but he winced, a ring piercing his ears and his head spinning.

  A disembodied voice spoke to him. “You may awake now.”

  Glimdrem awoke with every muscle in his body wanting him to sit and scream, but he couldn’t. The only sound was a ringing in his ears, and there was a smoke in the air that bore hints of rosemary. Rosemary, but with a hint of sweet. Familiar, but he struggled for a name. Somotu, a healing incense, kept him in paralysis. Terror turned to comfort; he was being cared for.

  He took a breath and spoke, the sound of his voice raspy. “Hello?”

  A lovely Trelelunin woman hovered over him. “You’ve come back to us.” Her smile eased his mood further.

  “How… How am I?”

  “We’ve removed forty-two slivers of Ikoruv from you. Not beyond healing, despite the number and depth.”

  “My ears. Ringing.”

  She held her hands to his head, and the buzz subsided. He smiled at her, appreciating her eyes as much as her healing prowess. If he didn’t love another, he’d be tempted. He considered that. Lelishen was more infatuation than love, but no matter. He knew the woman of his desire and this was not her.

  “How long? How long have I been unconscious?”

  “Three weeks, and you’ve a visitor that’s been here for two days.”

  A month? His injuries had been far more severe than the healer let on, he was lucky to be alive, but his heart drove his thoughts to a visitor. Could it be Lelishen? The Edan who strode into the chamber struck that thought clean from his head, but it was more surprising. The Edan never left the Mother Wood. “Where am I?” Glimdrem asked.

  “Not far from the Vale.” The man came to his side in the gliding stride that only the Edan possessed. “You may leave us, little sister,” he said to the healer with a smile. She curtsied and exited without a word.

  “You left the Eleris?”

  The Edan smiled, another rarity. “My strides follow the Volvrolan’s words.”

  So this Edan was on a mission from the King, not the Lord Chancellor of Knowledge. This alone would explain his leaving the Mother Wood. “The Volvrolan has taken an interest in me?”

  “What you know, certainly. One of the Twenty-Five died, the others disappeared, and you are the only witness. What did you see?”

  Glimdrem hesitated, it wasn’t polite to question an Edan, but nonetheless. “Who are you?”

  “Inslok Harveredanj.” There wasn’t a twitch of emotion, if the Edan was insulted it didn’t show. Glimdrem, on the other hand, felt his face sag.

  “I am most sorry for…”

  “Don’t mistake me for royalty, I am the Volvrolan’s first sword, nothing more.”

  Nothing more, the words hung in the air and made Glimdrem want to chuckle. Inslok was a legend to rival the Twenty-five… now Twenty-four. Surviving books from the Age of Warlords were dedicated to Inlok’s heroism in saving the Eleris.

  Glimdrem recounted the Resting Winds ordeal in detail without judgment or opinion, and Inslok’s expression only changed once. Glimdrem noted the subtle shift and came back to it when finished with his tale. “Was I in err that all the weapons disappeared?”

  The Edan’s grin suggested he was impressed. “One remained on the table.”

  Glimdrem shook his head. “The table was cleared, no question. The only weapon remaining was Uvin’s Latcu blade and its hilt was in pieces… Some of it in me. Another might’ve been on the ground, but not the table.”

  “You are so certain?”

  “Certainty is my specialty.”

  Inslok’s nod was curt. “Those who carried you from the Vale say the same thing, and not a soul set foot there again until I arrived. Yet, there it was, laying on the arc of the table.”

  “Motu Ensa?”

  Inslok loosed a strap and a bow quiver slid from his back to his hip. He opened its cover, a finger tracing the weapon’s intricate inlays. “Hewn from Eternal-oak with spectacular inlays. It rested east-west, the string to the north.”

  Glimdrem recalled its position. “As I last saw it, but it wasn’t there the last I looked. Peculiar.”

  “The peculiarities don’t end there. Are you able to travel?”

  Glimdrem squirmed. “No doubt the chancellor is curious… but to travel to the Hold so soon, I’m not certain my wounds are ready for such a distance.”

  “The Hold is not our destination.”

  “No?”

  “We’ll be meeting Chancellor Fesele on Mevelensa.”

  Mevelensa Island? Home to Sarlean, the Father’s Cave, the place in his dream. It was said the road to the Elerean was found in that cave. It was the road for immortals to leave this world and return home to the Father Wood. Glimdrem cocked his head. Except for those who guarded the island, none of the woodkin, Edan, Trelelunin, nor Helelindin, traveled to this island with an intent to return. “She isn’t? Is she?”

  “No, she will remain in the Eleris. Something happened on the island, something thought impossible. An Edan walked from the cave, with no memory of who they are, and they claim to have stepped from the cave a month ago. She
wandered there for weeks before found.”

  If returning from the Father Wood wasn’t enough, the coincidence of timing the Archangel event sent his mind scrambling. In his dream, the Edan were leaving the world, in reality, they were returning. “How? Was her nevrenilonis intact?”

  “Indeed, it claims she is Limereu Lesedreden.”

  Glimdrem’s tongue stuck in his dry mouth. Limereu, the original owner of Motu Ensa, returned to the Mother Wood after three and a half centuries with the Father, and her bow just happens to reappear in the Vale at the same time. Coincidences didn’t run this deep.

  “I can travel.”

  Sarlean, the Cave of the Father, hid amongst trees and rocks like a thousand other entrances to the subterranean: a dark gash in the world. But it was no ordinary hole; every breath of his being felt a subtle power emanating. It was one of a kind, a presence, something other. Perhaps it was a trick of Glimdrem’s mind, knowing this cave was a gate to another forest, to what the Edan claimed was another world. There were no guards he could see, but like the inexplicable sense of the cave’s singularity, he knew several sets of eyes watched them from the trees.

  A small tent of waxed linen stood to the cave’s side, a traditional Edan structure fashioned from flexible shafts of willow to create a dome. Ordinary. Nondescript. Except it sat on an island forbidden from all the world except those guarding its location or leaving these realms. And who he knew must be inside, a celebrated legend.

  The tent’s flap opened and an Edan woman strode forth, casting a smile their way. She was beautiful in the way of her people, tall, lean, and with uncanny grace in every movement. Flaxen hair draped to her waist in gentle waves, and her silver-specked green eyes looked Inslok up and down, then Glimdrem. “If I should recognize either of you, forgive me. My memory is faint at best.”

  “I am Inslok Harveredan, and my companion is Denfelu Glimdrem Liljyu. We knew each other in a time you can not remember.”

  “Then you are certain who I am?” Her brows rose and her eyes opened wide, far more expressive than any Edan Glimdrem recalled.

  “I know your face, but only you know who you are. Forgive our suspicions.”

  The woman nodded. “What other choice do I have? I’d offer you wine, but I’m short on amenities right now.”

  Glimdrem couldn’t help but grin. This Edan already displayed more humor than most he’d met.

  In true Edan fashion, Inslok acknowledged no such thing and headed straight to the point. “The Chancellor of Knowledge has sent us here to test your claim to the name Limereu Lesedreden.”

  “I make no such claim.” Her tone was dry.

  “Your nevrenilonis was clear on your identity.”

  “A parchment in a locket reputedly says so, but they have not allowed me to read it. It sounds right, but is it really? What happened to me?”

  Inslok stared, as if every word he might say was as precious as a diamond, so Glimdrem chimed in. “You walked from the Cave of the Father after passing into the Father Wood, a thing thought to be impossible. What you are experiencing memory wise is a permanent state known as a Forgetting. Returning to the Mother Wood, the shift in worlds, is the likely cause.”

  “Permanent?”

  “Your name, some other facts, may return to you. Your nevrenilonis will hold some information, but we need know you are who it says before returning those bits of your past to you. Your isolation so far has been to protect you from building false memories.”

  Her face remained as straight as that of the finest gambler, even her blinks measured and precise. “Prove? How?”

  Inslok stepped forward, cutting off Glimdrem’s rejoinder with a glance. “These things are never certain. It could be a person, a thing, a moment, or it may never happen at all.” He reached into the folds of his robes and produced a sapphire set necklace, the stone lit from within by an Elemental glow. “A precious stone?”

  The woman shook her head at this and the next dozen items Inslok and Glimdrem revealed until she gasped, pointing at the bow hanging from Inslok’s hip, which he had let slip with the subtlety of a magician when pulling out the latest bauble.

  She whispered, “Motu Ensa. My bow.”

  Chills ran the length of Glimdrem’s body. In the back of his mind he’d never admitted the possibility of this woman’s claim being true. For five hundred years everything he had learned taught him that travel through the cave was one way. Nothing in lore more ancient suggested otherwise, either, but now he couldn’t deny it. How many impossibilities could he witness in such a short time? What future could such an unthinkable miracle foretell? The ramifications of a return from the Father Wood would take decades, if not centuries, to understand.

  Inslok’s expression didn’t twitch, it revealed nothing. “It is a famous weapon, how do you know it is yours?”

  “Enough!” A voice rang from the surrounding woods and an Edan woman stepped from hiding with a small entourage of guards. “It is you, isn’t it?” Fesele, Lord Chancellor of Knowledge to the Mother Wood, bore an intensity to her gaze that Glimdrem had never witnessed, not even when he’d angered her.

  The two Edan locked eyes, and the woman now accepted as Limereu Lesedreden cracked a smile, beautiful and rare for the Edan people. “Mesolu Kellis? Fesele? You could have saved us time… I could never forget you.”

  Glimdrem glanced to Inslok. “They’re sisters?” The look he got in return was an emotional blank, but it still made him feel small and foolish. With the two women standing side by side, he wanted to slap himself for not seeing it the flicker he laid eyes upon the returned Edan. The chancellor’s hair was tied back, but the eyes, the cheekbones, the lips… He shouldn’t have missed something so apparent. He cleared his throat and remained otherwise silent as the two women walked to each other and embraced. In this moment Glimdrem bore witness to yet another thing he had assumed an impossibility: Edan tears.

  7

  Peaceless Gods

  In the Darkness,

  amidst hemp woven threads of thoughts and

  the shining introspection done, done, and dying,

  I sigh in sight the fading light of eternity’s Eye

  and question the Questions of the lying beak,

  and point to the Dame’s Tower boiling bright,

  fires fanned by Dragon’s wing and tongue.

  —Tomes of the Touched

  Ivin’s horse nickered, the gelding stretching its lips to nibble slender grasses as they stood on a high hill overlooking Sin Medor. A wide dirt road swept through swaying green, even in the fall more grass than summer on Kaludor, until coming to massive gates which yawned between thirty foot walls. From vantage on high the city was a mass of stone buildings which stretched across the valley until colliding with the sea. Semi-circular towers rose every couple hundred feet along the exterior wall, and inside greater structures stretched higher still, some layered in pyramid peaks with banners flapping in the wind, while other shorter towers sported onion domes covered in hammered gold.

  Ivin shifted his weight in the saddle, his brain struggling to wrap around the enormity of the city filling the horizon. Sin Medor, more people might live here than survived to cross the Parapet Straits, and folks said it wasn’t even the largest city in Tek Hidreng. A chilling thought.

  The fate of the Silone people dangled by a fine thread since the Eve of Snows, but it was all adrenaline and combat with little time to think. Riding from the camp outside Inster supplied days of thinking in the saddle, days to contemplate how a few wrong words, or a poor gesture could doom their people. With Polus Broldun riding in their group, the odds seemed greater of something foul happening.

  He turned from the city to freshen his thoughts and caught sight of a gaggle of Gidebirds a hundred strides away. The fowl were damned near twice the size of a turkey and three times as loud, and with bright blue beaks. If you frightened them they sounded so much like a screaming baby you wanted to flee rather than eat them. Twenty or more going off at once could d
eafen a man, and worst of all, everyone said they tasted terrible. They were all over the Hidreng prairie because of the latter.

  Ivin rubbed his shaved face as the birds passed, the smooth skin felt strange after weeks of lousy shaves and stubble, but Lelishen made sure the men who’d speak for the clans were whiskerless for today’s meeting. He patted his mount’s neck. “How long will these people tolerate us?”

  Solineus chortled. “We’re like flies on a horse’s ass, hoping to go unnoticed or sit out of reach of the tail.”

  “Hush,” said Lelishen. She sat her horse as if born to the saddle, her human guise gone. Her silver-specked eyes landed on Ivin. “They’ve kept the peace, and we’ll negotiate for more before I return to the Eleris. Things will work out.”

  “We’ll see.” Solineus nodded toward the city. “Here they come.”

  A group of six horsemen rode from the gates, two with lances struck into the air with green banners.

  Ivin dismounted, the others following suit, and they handed their reins to Lidin and a couple other Wardens, who had been allowed to keep their beards. The five stepped forward as the Wardens faded down the hill with the horses.

  Ivin’s gut gurgled. He’d met his share of Tek over the years on the Watch, most of them Hidreng, but those meetings were with merchants and sailors on Choerkin turf. This was different, they relied on a four hundred-year-old treaty between Tek and Edan for their survival. If the Hidreng, and he had to remind himself to call them this, not Tek, harmed Lelishen the retribution would be swift and brutal. Or at least so the woman assured him.

  The riders veered from the road at a canter and followed a ridge-line to reach them, reining to a stop some thirty paces away. The lead man, with short cropped hair and a clean face, stayed in his saddle while bearded men dropped from their stirrups. These men hurried to set up a table, tent, and several folding chairs crafted of wood and fabric. The bannermen dismounted next, attaching the plain green pennants to the corners of the tent. Next came two bottles with several heavy glasses, and a loaf of bread with knife and plates. Only when a slice of bread sat on each plate did the leader slip from his tooled-leather saddle adorned with gold.