“Where is the Sand Strider, gypsy? You have sheltered him here, or I am gravely mistaken. Where can I find him? Speak quickly, or your death will be painful and prolonged.”
The old woman shook violently, as if a fit of sickness were coming upon her, but she stood her ground. Her eyes gleamed as if he had confirmed a hidden belief or suspicion of hers, and she took a shaky step forward. “There is nothing to say. I know nothing of any Strider. There is only one in this city, and he rules it. Go to the Dunelord for answers!” She spit in his direction and glared at him as if she would skin and roast him where he stood.
Gramling stayed silent. To kill her or not was the question. She wouldn’t answer him if she were dead, but she might slow him down or warn the urchin if she was left alive.
“What do you know of the Aura, gypsy?” he questioned her suddenly.
She said nothing.
“Would you like to know something, gypsy?” he continued. “I serve one who is more powerful than any Aura that walks in the heavens. One who will bring them all and every fool who serves them to their knees. They will die in pain, begging for mercy that they do not deserve and shall never be granted. Are you such a fool? Then ANSWER ME!” He roared the last two words, shaking his weapon in her direction.
“I do not pretend to be wise, young one, but even I can see you are misled.” Not the answer he’d expected. Gramling decided words had gone far enough.
“Wrong choice,” he snarled, and threw back his hood. The gypsy gasped.
“It is you… I… no, no, it isn’t! You’re not Gribly! You’re… you’re…”
Gramling leaped towards her, his sword kindling into flame. He impaled her, but as he did her body transformed into indigo smoke and disappeared. His blade clanged off the corner of the wall, jarring his grip.
He spun around to find her behind him, staff swinging, as athletic as if she were twenty and not a hundred-and-twenty. The wood caught him in the side of the head, and the medallion on the end swung tightly around his neck, choking him. The metal slapped into his cheek and burned like a hot iron. He dropped to his knees, coughing. The smoke from where she’d stood a moment ago clung to his robes and began to eat them away like acid.
Enough! He swung his sword and slashed the medallion from its cord. The metal dropped to the floor, spinning like a top, and the gypsy gasped as her power fled away. Aha! Gramling thought triumphantly, She is nothing without her weapon!
“Mercy!” the old woman cried stumbling and falling onto her back. Gramling stood quickly, pulling the wrapped cord from his neck with a jerk, and lowered his sword to her neck.
“Tell me everything,” he growled.
The gypsy closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “I have nothing to tell.”
Gramling sneered and bent lower until he was a foot from her face. “You will when I am finished with you, crone.”
~
But she didn’t, and by the time he was done with her he was almost convinced she really hadn’t had anything to tell him.
“You’ve… made… mistake…” she gasped through swollen, parched lips. Her eyes were sealed shut with burns and she did not open them, but somehow she was managing to find the strength to speak.
“I doubt it,” he shot back, twirling his sword deftly from hand to hand. It was ridiculous, the amount of pain this old woman could handle. Nothing seemed to make her feel it, and she was still alive where hardier men had died under such torture. Gramling knew. He had done many such interrogations in order to find this city, anyway.
“There… will be… penalty…” the gypsy moaned, managing to raise her arm despite its multiple breaks and fractures. For the first time since he began, Gramling noticed that her fist was closed, a bit of black string dangling out from it.
What was she talking about? He kicked her hand and took up the small object that had been clasped in it. Turning away from her, he eyed it suspiciously, eager for any clues.
Behind him, the gypsy breathed her last. He felt her life end and her existence wink out like a candle with nothing left to burn.
Only then did he really comprehend what he was looking at. Clutched in his hand was the gypsy’s medallion, but now a skull had replaced the hawk it had originally bore. What the-
His hand burst into flame. Screaming, he tried to drop the trinket. It stuck to his palm.
Steam hissed up from cracks that began to appear in the floor. Wind whistled in his ears, cursing him with an angry voice. Plants that hung from the ceiling in the shop grew out of their pots and reached for him with thorny, clinging arms.
“No! No! NO!” he shouted, howling in pain and fear. What had his killing the old woman unleashed? Without pausing to fight back, he bolted for the door. It was whole again, and bore no signs of his violent entry only minutes before. Cursing, he kicked it. Nothing happened. “Crath nadt Calimá!” Gramling screamed, resorting to the Nymphtongue that made all Pit Striding easier to do.
A burst of flame and lightning hit the door as he kicked it a second time. This time it fell into cinders.
As he rushed out of the house, the medallion finally dropped from his hand, leaving an angry scarlet mark shaped like a skull. It oozed blood.
Shrieking, he ran out of the house. Smoke billowed from the doorway and fire licked the arch. Gramling flew down the street, furious and afraid of being spotted by the wrong people. This had not gone as planned, no, not at all.
“It shouldn’t be this hard, blast it!” he cursed under his breath. The Golden One would have to be consulted, and a new plan formed. Until then…
~
After crossing and re-crossing his own path, taking several short-cuts and long-cuts, and dodging in and out of different houses to confuse any lingering gremlin pursuers, the proud youth climbed through an empty back window in the second story of the house where he and Murie lived. Here Murie kept shop when her services were needed by the destitute.
It was dark outside; even more so in the house. Shadows crisscrossed everything, temporarily blinding Gribly and forcing him to sit on the window’s edge until his eyes adjusted.
“I’m back, Murie! You won’t believe what I’ve copped for yuh!” he sang out happily.
No response. That was odd, perhaps she was asleep. Then again, she usually left an oil lamp burning for him in his room… this room, the one he always came through when he was late after a day of pick-pocketing and “borrowing”.
There was no lamp, and no sign of Old Murie. As Gribly’s vision adapted to the unnatural dark, his survival instincts immediately kicked in and he dropped to the floor, hunched over and completely alert.
His room had always been sparse, but now it was desolate. Someone or something had blown it apart, ripped it to pieces… shattered it. There were cracks in the walls, and everything in the room was utterly destroyed: chairs were shredded and his small straw palate was torn to pieces and strewn about the room. His few personal possessions were broken, some pounded into powder, and stacked up in the middle of the room. What was left of them suddenly burst into blood-red flames, then vanished with a sound of crazed laughter and one, long scream.
The demon. The Pit Strider had done this, whoever he was. A horrible, horrible thought crossed Gribly’s mind.
“Murie!” he bellowed, and raced out the door into the rest of the house.
~
He found the old gypsy’s body at her loom in one of the rooms downstairs. He had seen enough violence in his short life to know that there had been a brutal fight. Murie had dealt out a fair share of damage, heaven only knew how, but she had lost. It looked as if she had been interrogated, and died from the questioning. For a long time he could do nothing but kneel by the corpse and stare, vainly wishing for tears to come.
Wading through the destruction of the house with her crumpled, limp form in his arms, Gribly could feel nothing but a deep, aching sense of longing for the way things had been. He did not wonder how the demon sorcerer had found his house. He did not thank
the Aura or any other spirits for letting him survive. He did nothing but mourn. Trembling under the weight of the body but hardly noticing the strain, he stumbled out the front door.
It was late evening now, and the streets were crowded with the usual mob of peasants, beggars, and do-nothings. None of them took notice of him, and few even saw him. He took only the least-traveled roads and loneliest of alleys: in short, the briefest route possible to the edge of the city, and Ymeer’s great outer wall.
Just minutes before nighttime would grasp the land completely, the young thief shuffled down the wide, main road out into the wilderness and gray desert of Blast. Two soldiers stood at either end of the highway, and two more mounted the stairs that led to the battlements, where the great bronze mechanism sat that would close Ymeer’s gates for the night. No one else was near in the hour of shadows.
“Hoi, boy!” cried the youngest soldier, a youth not much older than Gribly. “If you leave now, you’ll be shut out all night.” He and his fellows were on easy terms with the thieves of the city. So, though they were interested in the strange sight he made, they made no move to stop him.
“It doesn’t matter,” snapped the lad, violently tossing his head. “I’m not coming back.”
The guards laughed at him, and the young one loudest of all.
“Be careful, brat, or the dust devils will get you! You don’t want to be caught outside the walls when the Children of the Pit come out to play!” Towards the end, the young guard’s voice changed, as if he half-believed the superstitions he was spouting.
Gribly ignored them all. Soon he was through the gate and the gate was closed behind him. He was swallowed up instantly by the inky blackness of the desert night.
~
On and on he walked, off to the left of the beaten path that led back to the city. Murie’s body grew abominably heavy in his arms, and at last he was forced by his aching limbs and buzzing head to put her down. He laid her carefully, reverently on the sand, made a short, inconsequential prayer to whatever god ruled the afterlife, and then began his work.
He used his gift, the gift he had never told Old Murie about while he still had the time. He used it like he never had before.
He dug out a pit ten feet deep and three feet wide, scooping up the hard, caked ground like it was shapeless sand on a dune. He ran his hands up and down and across the sides, willing the sandy earth to harden so that no beast or worm could intrude. Afterward he tediously lowered Murie’s body into the hole.
Standing over the grave, looking down on her cold, gray face, he said his final goodbyes. Then he took the hard soil he’d dug out and poured it slowly, solemnly over her. It changed as it passed through his fingers, though he barely noticed a thing. As he held the hard chunks of earth they melted into a shimmering mass of sand that fell glittering into Murie’s grave, covering her in what looked like a sea of tiny crystal shards.
Finally the grave was filled to the top, and Gribly walked back and forth over the low mound to seal it. Where his feet touched, the strange, shining sand hardened into the solid desert soil again.
An unmarked grave of wonders, he thought. A diamond in the rough.
Rest in peace, old friend. You were like a mother to me, and none shall take your place.
~
Just as he turned away from Murie’s resting place, one of Blast’s rare desert storms shook the earth from crown to foot.
Dark whirlwinds formed in titanic ovals high up in the atmosphere. Black, rumbling clouds formed bastions and fought wars overhead. Lightning screamed in arcs from the sky to the earth, sending up plumes of white fire wherever they touched. Rain fell to the desert sand in sheets, turning the entire land into a sopping, sorrel mess.
Gribly had never dealt with the desert storms before. For some reason they never struck the city- at least not this hard. Water blasted him seemingly from all directions, blinding him and knocking him to the ground with unforgiving force. In seconds the world was transformed into a whirling, clashing mass of light, darkness, and the wet in-between.
The sand was now the sea.
Struggling back up to his feet, the battered youth kept walking… and walking…
Finally he stumbled against a steep incline and knew he had arrived at a dune. Stooping low under the pouring, thrashing rain, he used his gift to scoop a hole in the wet sand, at the same time shaping it into a sort of shelter for himself. The process took several minutes; all the more difficult because the sand, his native element, was wet.
In the end it was done, and he slumped inside his strange shelter with sopping clothes and wet limbs, not wishing or caring if he made it through the furious storm, nor conscious that he had done more with his gift tonight than he had ever done before. None of it mattered, now that the only person who had cared for him without expecting any return was dead… and without any way for him to take revenge.
Revenge. As he fell asleep to the relentless pattering of the rain on his shelter, his thoughts were filled with it. For a long time he dreamed of it.
Chapter Six: Destiny Approaching
Amid the dreams and vengeful fantasies of Gribly’s tormented mind, one dream stood out. It was not like the others. In it, he stood on a grassy, flat space amid a circle of tumbled boulders. On his right rose the crest of a mighty mountain, peaked in snow. To his left the mountain dropped off into a sea of clouds that his sight could not penetrate. The sun was warm on his back, while the breeze cooled his face and moved his hair. He felt peace like he had never known, mixed with the glory of being so high above the rest of, well… everything.
“Well done,” said a voice behind him. He turned and saw… what did he see? He wasn’t sure for a minute. Was it a bird? A snake? A man? The whatever-it-was seemed unsure what shape to be. Finally it became a man and stayed that way; a young man in a long, gray traveler’s cloak and scarf, with a faded blue-gray cap so long that it hung down his back. A knotted, wooden staff was in his hand, and a pair of worn, brown sandals was on his feet. “Well done, indeed,” the man said again. “You have passed your first test.”
The sight was so strange that Gribly could only mumble, “Test?”
“Test,” the man-thing repeated. “Today you met the first of your many enemies.”
“Enemies?” Gribly felt like a parrot, repeating everything his master said. He’d never even seen a parrot.
“Yes, enemies,” said the man cheerily. The idea didn’t seem to phase him. “Because you are who you are, you will always have enemies. Today you encountered one of the worst, but more will come. You escaped one Pit Strider, but what about the next? Or the next?”
Bewildered, Gribly interrupted the babble. “Pit Strider? What’s that? And why is it- or them- after me? What did I do?”
“You were born,” the stranger answered simply, and sauntered over to take a seat on a large, flat rock nearby. He motioned for Gribly to sit next to him, which the lad did hesitantly. He sensed the man was a friend, but his mind was confused and blurry. The stranger gestured with his staff out into the sea of clouds circling the mountaintop. “You are alone in the world, Gribly, much like you are now, up on this mountain in the sky. But just as I am with you here, I am with you there, down below, and you are never really alone.”
The thief absorbed it all without complaint, wondering… and thinking. Finally he spoke.
“You must be one of the gods, then, to be giving me this vision.” Truth be told, he had never thought much of gods or visions, but then again- he hadn’t thought much of sorcerers before today, and he’d met one anyway…
“No.” The stranger’s cap swiveled as he shook his head. “There are no such things as gods. I am part of the Aura, and the Aura serves only the Creator.”
“The Aura!” exclaimed Gribly. “But… that’s just a myth! And besides, in all the old stories, the Aura is just a word to mean the earth, or, you know, the things the earth is made out of.”
“More correctly, the beings behind the earth’s creation
.”
“Yes…” Gribly decided. “That’s what the stories said. I couldn’t put it into words.”
“Well,” said the Aura, or whatever he was, “The old myths were partly true. The Aura were the tools the Creator used to create.”
“My head hurts,” Gribly mumbled, “Even though I’m just dreaming this, and none of it’s real.”
“Dreams are always real, when we haven’t woken up from them yet,” smiled the stranger.
“I’m not going to pretend to know what that means. But if you serve the Creator... is he a god?”
“There are no gods,” he continued, “The Creator is the One who made this world, and every other world. He bows to none, and if there were gods they would serve him. He is, well… He Is. Do you understand?”
“I don’t think I do.” Gribly shifted in his seat, wondering where this dream was taking him. “Why haven’t I ever heard of the Creator before? He’s not in the old stories.”
Brother Thief (Song of the Aura, Book One) Page 5
