Warautumn

by Tom Deitz

  The sword did all that.

  The sword …

  He paused, looked at the long shadow that extended from his right hand. And then at that hand itself.

  At bright steel and dulling brass.

  And an odd leather gauntlet.

  No, that was his hand.

  His … hand …

  And then he knew.

  He was a geen.

  A geen with a sword.

  No, a geen with that sword.

  Which was impossible.

  “No,” he whispered into a moonlit darkness that was wavering into light.

  Reality shattered. Moonlight swept away, replaced with rippled rock lit by the last orange flicker of the watchfire. Flat sand swirled and spun and became hard stone. He fell, except that there was no falling, only a realization of lying where he had always been: cloak-wrapped on a rug, with Rann’s back warm beside him. No footsteps followed him: raspy hiss across dry earth; but snores replaced them: a hand’s worth of uneven, uncertain cadences. His hand clinched on nothing.

  No sword.

  No sword …

  He opened his eyes in truth and saw the cave.

  He was also sweating, and the dream still hovered there at the edges of his mind. Too real, it had been. Far too real. It had to mean something, yet the only thing that made sense at the moment was its literal meaning, and that he dared not ponder.

  He sat up slowly, not wishing to wake Rann. The cave mouth was a blot of star-spangled blackness framed with stone limned dull red by the fire. Bingg’s back was a cutout far to the right, facing outward, blocking the only exit from their sleeping place. The boy’s head had dropped forward, however. Probably he was asleep. Probably Avall should rise and chastise him. Maybe even take the rest of his watch, though he had done one of his own already.

  But Bingg was only a boy.

  Or at least not yet a man, though his body had started the change, and he had undergone the prescribed one night of release with an unclanned courtesan.

  Something told Avall that his cousin would never have a typical boyhood. It also told Avall that Bingg would probably not protest that loss overmuch.

  But what about that dream?

  It had to be prophetic, but if it meant what he thought it did, it threatened dire news indeed.

  If only he had some way to contact Merryn! But the only possible means to that end had been shattered past repair. And that assumed it was sane.

  “No,” came a whisper close beside him. Startling him from a reverie that had already begun to draw him down to sleep again.

  He glanced around, determined that it was not Rann who had spoken, which left—to his surprise—Kylin.

  Kylin, who had said nothing since his initial outburst of doom-laced, singsong, quasi-poetic ranting. And now a word. A word one often said while dreaming, granted, but the way affairs had fallen out of late, Avall had no surety that anything in his mind—or anyone else’s—was sacrosanct. The Eight knew that his stronger thoughts and emotions slopped over into Rann’s often enough. And vice versa. Had the same thing just occurred between him and Kylin?

  And what were they going to do with the poor little harper, anyway? He was already blind. He had no harp, so he was now cut off from the only thing he was truly fit to do in any active sense. He couldn’t keep watch, couldn’t hunt, couldn’t fight to defend himself, could eat if one put food in his mouth, but that was all.

  His would not have been a good situation in Tir-Eron with a phalanx of healers to attend him. Here in the wildest part of the Wild, it was unthinkable.

  There were only two alternatives. Kylin would die—or he would revive.

  The former was far too easily accomplished.

  The latter …

  Natural healing—which might never happen, and even if it did occur, might take longer than they dared tarry on the island.

  Or unnatural.

  And the only kind of unnatural healing Avall knew of was the gem.

  The shattered gem.

  The broken gem.

  But still the gem.

  And there might never be a better time to try it than now, when no one was awake to interrupt him. When the world was calm and quiet. When Kylin was himself in repose, but not so far gone that he had forgotten language. When Kylin’s brain, while perhaps injured, had not had time to close off those parts of itself that still functioned behind a wall of ever-thickening scars.

  Scarcely daring to breathe, Avall slid out of the cloak, waiting long enough to make sure that Rann’s breathing did not alter. A quick slide of hands across the rug found the pouch that contained the gem shards. He dragged it to him. Between the firelight and that of the lone moon still in the sky, he could identify the shard he wanted: the smallest of the greater ones. The safest one. But maybe, also, the one he needed.

  One final moment of risk, and it would be over—or else it would be begun, depending on how one tallied such things.

  By common consensus, they all slept with knives close to hand, so it was no problem to locate his particular weapon; yet even as he snared it, he wondered if blooding was really necessary. His palm was still lightly scabbed from his earlier effort, and Kylin’s bore the crusty sign of his gripping of the sword. Gnawing his lip, Avall scraped away at the scab in his palm with the knife, and was rewarded with the merest trickle of red. In the end, he had to cut Kylin’s hand anyway, but only barely: a slight enlargement of the wound already present.

  A final shift—while he prayed that Rann would not awaken and that Bingg wouldn’t notice his movements—and he managed to maneuver himself so that Kylin’s head was in his lap, supported by Avall’s crossed legs.

  This was it, then. Closing his eyes, Avall found the chosen shard by feel and held it lightly between his fingers while he fumbled for Kylin’s blooded hand with the other. The rest was a deliberate rush of movement, done as much from reflex as anything, as he strove for all he was worth to lock his mind away from the worst effects of the gem.

  Yet his hand still closed around it, even as his fingers laced with Kylin’s, trapping the gem between.

  Reality slowed—but not as it usually did. This was more gradual, and seemed to take the form of a slow synchronization of breathing and heartbeats. He tried to focus on the latter: on the purely instinctive. Not on his own fear or desires, or the madness he could sense yammering around the edge of his consciousness.

  And succeeded! Found, for once, a place that was of the gem, but not tainted by its more horrific aspects.

  And with that discovery, he sensed a recognition, as though countless severed parts of Kylin were flowing out of the gem and returning to the mind of which they had been a part. Avall flowed with them, but as passenger, not commander; his strength was only needed when the flow threatened to cease, or seemed … blocked was the only term Avall could find to even remotely define the sensation.

  But it was working! He touched the heart of Kylin’s thought, even shrouded as it was by a massive clot of pain and fear—for Kylin would have seen Barrax’s death and Rrath’s destruction as forcefully as Avall had, but in nowise been prepared to meet them.

  And then, quite suddenly, something ruptured—or broke—or collapsed—and a vast flood of healing poured through. Avall went with it—and met, to his relief, a true spark of recognition from a Kylin that was all Kylin and still in command of his faculties. It was like awakening a friend from a deep sleep: a slight, uncertain grogginess that quickly solidified into a warm, comfortable joy.

  Avall was sorely tempted to remain there, for Kylin’s mind was unexpectedly strong and cleanly made; the paths to his desires well-defined; his convictions set solidly in place. He was strong, too: strong enough to join his will with Avall’s and force away the last of the gibbering dark from the edge of their common awareness.

  And then Avall lost himself utterly in a joining that was closer than friendship or sex, for all that it was not as close as the bondings he and Rann had shared. But it could have bee
n, he realized. It was he that drew back from it, not Kylin. Though whether that desperate desire for prolongation was because Kylin had simply been lonely for so long, or was born of a genuine liking for Avall in particular, he dared not try to discover.

  Instead, very gently, and not without regret, Avall eased himself out of Kylin’s mind. If not healed, at least it was better than it had been. And if he were lucky, Kylin would not even know how his healing had been accomplished. No one need ever know, in fact, for Avall knew with absolute conviction that Rann would rake him over the coals for being so rash and reckless.

  But Rann didn’t know everything, though he often acted as if he wanted people to think that he did. Avall wondered if he should tell him about dreaming that he was a geen who carried the Lightning Sword and what he feared that portended. Probably not. Not now, when survival was uppermost and any distraction a danger.

  As carefully as he could, he eased his legs from beneath Kylin’s head. It took but a moment to restore the shard to the pouch, and the pouch to where it had lain.

  So what did he do now?

  Well, he could return to his place beside Rann and hope sleep found him again—without odd dreams this time. But he was awake now, and that seemed a pointless endeavor, so close to dawn. Without truly deciding as much, he rose and steered a course among his sleeping comrades to where Bingg still sat guard by the nominal entrance. The boy had also awakened, to judge by the way he was sitting up, gazing out into nothing. Avall made no move to approach silently. No need to alarm the lad.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he volunteered, squatting down beside his kinsman.

  “Not for a while,” Bingg replied softly. Then: “I won’t say a thing.”

  Avall regarded him keenly, but Bingg only smiled a sly, secret, little-boy smile.

  “Get some sleep,” Avall told him. “I’ll finish your watch. I seem to be wide-awake.”

  Bingg rose gratefully and slipped back into the shadows in the back of the cave.

  Dawn found Avall still in the same place, but with the false Lightning Sword lying across his knees. He’d retrieved it half a hand earlier, for comfort—or security; both of which he’d discovered that he needed.

  He wondered where the real one was.

  But that concern vanished when Kylin’s eyes opened, along with everyone else’s, at the sounds of Myx making breakfast.

  “I had the strangest dream,” Kylin announced. And then would say no more.

  Nor did anyone ask him to explain, caught up as they were by a flurry of questions and counter-questions: their own about what had happened back at Gem-Hold, and Kylin’s queries about where they were, how they had got there, and why.

  “Thank you,” Avall remembered to say eventually.

  “And thank you,” Kylin replied cryptically. Avall hoped no one besides him saw young Bingg’s grin.

  CHAPTER XI:

  A NEW DAWN

  (SOUTHWEST OF ERON–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXVI–MORNING)

  Merryn awoke to the scent of cauf boiling and camp-bread being baked.

  And thought she must be dreaming.

  Then, almost as quickly, she recalled that there should be only one other person anywhere about who could possibly be cooking if she was in fact awake—and was on her feet in an instant, her pleasant drowse falling away like ice from flexing timber.

  “Krynneth!” she bellowed, even as she checked herself lest she have somehow been hobbled in the night—even as she strode toward the open door between the windowless inner chamber the two of them had shared and what had been the hold-house’s weather-gate—which was the source of what light existed as well as that heavenly odor and not a little noise, some of which seemed to be Krynneth humming.

  At which point she recalled that she had left him restrained when they had gone to bed the previous night. Not heavily bound—not enough to hurt him—but sufficient, so she had supposed, to preclude any nocturnal activities of which she was not aware. Like trussing her up again. Like wandering off somewhere. Like—Eight forbid—making away with the remainder of the regalia, or—worse—trying to make it work.

  But there he stood: three spans beyond the farther door, with his wrists still manacled and connected by half a span of soft chains. Which apparently hadn’t stopped him from rising silently and pilfering what remained of the hold’s larder for items that had survived nineteen years of storage, including cauf (very good cauf, it smelled like; then again the stuff got better as it aged), and grain meal and flour.

  He had also made a fire in what remained of the forge, which was close enough to the house for the cooking smells to find her. At her soft cough, he turned to look at her, fixing her with a disarming and rather silly grin that made her glad she had gone to bed fully clothed except for boots.

  “Eat,” he announced brightly.

  “Eat,” she acknowledged gamely, relaxing against the door-jamb. “And drink.”

  He pointed to a small, oak-bound cask by the step. “Ale.”

  She nodded and reached for it; breached it, and poured herself a portion into one of three intact mugs they’d found in the kitchen the previous evening. A swallow, and she finally allowed herself to speculate about this place in which she had found herself.

  As best they’d been able to determine, Inon’s crew had happened on the hold fairly recently, though the place had been abandoned shortly after the plague, nineteen years before. Whether it had been founded before the plague—during the last period anyone had time, energy, the urge, or the impetus to explore beyond the Spine—or during it, by folk fleeing that contagion, she had no idea. The compound looked well built and decently stocked, but also somewhat threadbare—as though whoever had established it had run low on resources halfway through construction. The stonework was good, however, as were the tiles that comprised the roof, though the ones she had examined had been heavily suffused with the local sand—which made sense. The woodwork was competent, but that was all; and the iron bars on the windows showed no more skill at forging than was typical of someone who had navigated the study cycle of all the clans and crafts.

  All of which suggested that the builders had been from Stone or one of its allies, with a smattering of other craftsmen brought along for the initial construction or else through marriage or other legal bond. Alternatively, just possibly, the place had been built by clanless folk who had spent some elective time at Stone, since no clan sigils were anywhere to be found.

  But where were they now? She had seen no sign of funeral markers; then again, she hadn’t really taken time to look. Confounding speculation was the fact that the former inhabitants had not taken their trek-wagon when they departed (either that, or they had abandoned a surplus one), yet the stables seemed to have been closed up properly. On the other hand, the house had not been stripped, which would surely have been the case if its occupants had vacated permanently—though granted, the kitchen equipment and what little furniture and bedding survived was all of the simplest kind: the sort made by Common Clan or clanless under license by the High-Clan Craft Chiefs, which could easily have rendered it disposable. To further compound the enigma, there were no personal items about at all. No outgrown clothes, no broken toys. Nothing.

  If only the bath had been intact …

  It wasn’t. This was near-desert, and the presence of free-flowing water not a given. Oh, there was a well in the yard and assorted hand pumps about, including the one in the stable, all of which spoke of some deep spring; and there was a river half a shot away. But though her people prized luxurious bathing as much as anything in their lives, such facilities were not easily contrived in places like this. Eventually the builders of this hold would have added a complete bathhouse, but it would have taken a while, by the look of things.

  As for other functions, a garderobe with one of those hand pumps sufficed. Merryn had seen worse, but she had certainly seen better.

  By the time she returned from dealing with necessities, Krynneth had finished breakfast, having add
ed salt pork from the Ixtian’s stash to the camp-bread, cauf, and ale.

  They ate in silence on a side arcade out of sight of the carnage in the stable court. Which reminded Merryn that they really did have to attend to the bodies, and that such things were better accomplished before a bath than after. Sighing, she motioned Krynneth to his feet. “Fetch firewood,” she told him. “I’ll strip them and see if I can locate some fire oil. They practice cremation just like we do, though I have to say that it’s more than some of them deserve.

  “Not all of them,” she amended quickly, gazing at the corpse of the boy, Ivk. “The lad was a good sort, as was Tahlone. Inon had delusions, but they made sense from his point of view. And he treated his men as well as he could, and us better than he had to.”

  Krynneth merely nodded and ambled toward the dwindling stash of fuel.

  Two hands later—with a column of oily smoke rising behind them, and with her own sword back in her hand, courtesy of a tour through Inon’s saddlebags—Merryn and Krynneth pushed through the remains of the outer gate and started toward the river. The geen tracks preceded them halfway to the shore, then veered north. No change there, as if she’d expected any.

  She felt a twinge of guilt at that. She was wasting time, and that was a fact. She was also behaving irresponsibly, and that was very, very unlike her. Perhaps it was the magnitude of the task before her that gave her pause and made her procrastinate. Perhaps her lifelong hatred of futility and lost causes had reared its ugly head. Or perhaps she was merely trying to second-guess Fate by not rushing recklessly onward when more practical affairs—affairs that might slow her now but speed her journey later—needed tending.

  To keep from rehearsing those doubts indefinitely, she paused to get her bearings. South, behind her, was mostly desert, easing into the more forbidding expanse of the Flat itself. East was the hold, with, beyond it, the dark masses of Angen’s Spine, which seemed to flank more desert to the north, though a glimpse at Inon’s map indicated that sand should give way to grassland not too much farther in that direction. The western horizon was obscured by swaths of greenery on either side of the so-far-unseen river. All in all, it seemed safe—for the present. As safe as it was likely to be, anyway.