Tightlipped, Mar shook his head.
“—sorry.” Bewildered and shaking his head, the old man staggered to the awning.
Lowering her spoon, Telriy rushed around the brazier. “There’s something wrong with your master.”
“He isn’t my master.”
Telriy ignored this. “The Gods have addled him.”
“Yes.” Mar felt no desire to say more than that. There was no remaining doubt; the old man was insane.
“What will you do?”
Mar wondered that himself. He still had the gold, tucked beneath his clothes in a money belt provided by Rynthrahl.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
Mar knew he could follow the old man no longer. He should not have followed him onto this barge. He would leave the Waleck half the gold; that was fair. In Mhajhkaei, he would simply disappear once the barge docked. “I mean nothing.”
“You could come with me?”
Mar kept his face impassive.
“To aid me in my journey,” Telriy emphasized, taking a meaning that Mar had not intended. Tilting her head pointedly at Waleck, she grasped his arm and tugged gently. He let her lead him back to the stools before the brazier.
Mar’s stomach growled. He looked into the pot. The water had risen to a slow boil but the beans had yet to brown. He took the spoon from the girl and swirled it in the simmering pot. Beans that had not been pre-soaked took a long time to cook. Their simple supper would be quite late.
At the stern, the Captain, consulting a brass external-spring clock, rang the ship’s bell thrice to signal a change in watch. The mate called out an incomprehensible order, the yell echoing slightly off the trees of the near bank and the dark water of the river. The barge rocked slightly as the thrust of the oars ceased, the rowers, mumbling quiet curses, abruptly breaking their rhythm and allowing their oars to trail through the water. Propelled by the swift water of the channel, the boat slowed but continued to move at a good speed. Mar’s pot swung slightly on its chain and the brazier puffed sparks as the steady movement of air eased.
The mate gargled out another order. Pivoting the long poles skyward, the rowers swung them inboard, dripping. The burly men rose to lash the long poles in racks alongside the benches. Then, released from duty, they clambered about, groaning, complaining good-naturedly, and laughing. The barge rocked one way and another as they moved, shifting its trim. Some fetched food; others simply hunted a comfortable spot to bask. After some moments, the majority had satisfied whatever impulse struck them and a calm, punctuated only by an occasional jest and the gentle sighing of the water on the hull, returned.
Telriy gave him a keen look as the distraction subsided. For a long moment, her face was unreadable. Then, instead of continuing, she ducked her head absently and let her hair dangle. After combing it swiftly with her fingers, she pulled it around to her left shoulder. Without bothering to look, she let her practiced hands begin a braid in the middle of its length. The girl locked her gaze with Mar’s.
“I also seek the Mother of the Seas.”
Mar waited.
“Aid me in my search and I’ll reward you richly.”
Mar wanted to laugh scornfully but did not. “I won’t chase that fantasy any more.”
Telriy finished the braid and flicked it onto her back. Her eyes widened. “You don’t believe?”
“In magic? Of course not. I don’t believe in anything.”
Telriy frowned. “I’m the daughter of witches through endless generations. I’ve lived with magic for my entire life. It’s as real as the earth or the sky.”
Mar did not react to her words, knowing that she expected shock or amazement.
“How can you not believe?” the girl blasted exasperatedly into his controlled expression. “You’ve seen magic!”
Mar shook his head. “Never.”
Telriy smiled thinly, reaching into the pouch at her waist. When she withdrew it, she opened it to show him another black ball. “This is magic!”
Curious, Mar peered at the ball. It was shinny like a bead but had no hole for the string. “You threw one of those into the book at the Library.”
“Yes. This is a blaze. If I dropped it onto this wood, it would burn a hole straight through to the river bottom and consume everything that did not sink.”
“Fire isn’t magic.”
“Everything is magic!” Telriy insisted intensely. “Magic is simply the means by which the unseen forces of the world are controlled!”
“Waleck believes in magic. His belief has driven him mad.”
That stopped Telriy, but only for a moment. “Some foul humor has made him mad. There are magical arts that could remove that humor. The ancient sorcerers had those skills.”
“No myth will cure the old man.”
Telriy fell silent again. She returned the blaze to her pouch and then simply sat looking at him for a long moment.
“One day, Mar,” she said at last softly, “You will believe in magic. You will no longer be able to deny it because it will hammer itself into your pitiful little life with terrible force. It will steal everything you hold dear. It will change you in ways you cannot imagine. Magic has destroyed lesser men. I don’t doubt that it will destroy you.”
Mar stared hard into her eyes. “Maybe Waleck isn’t the only one driven mad by a thirst for the impossible.”
Telriy gritted her teeth. She made no sound, but her anger rode across her face like a pillaging flame. She leapt to her feet, almost shaking, and flung the spoon at him, but Mar’s hand whipped out to catch it before it could strike him. Eyes flashing, the girl spun on a heel and marched to the rail.
Mar turned the spoon in his hands for a moment and then carefully stirred the beans.
Telriy was dangerous.
Mar had seen men do stupid things to please women. It had seemed a common failing, but until now he had not completely understood that insanity. The feelings she was able to brew within him with but a single glance unnerved him.
Yes, she was dangerous indeed.
In another time and place he might have gone to her side and said whatever it took to make her turn her smile upon him again. But now he just sat and stirred the beans.
After some time, the mate called out again, putting the rowers back to work. The barge rounded a bend, then another, and again another in a seemingly endless series as it followed the river toward distant Mhajhkaei.
Toward evening, the eastern horizon darkened. The mate and captain consulted briefly, and then steered the barge to port into a slower channel, passing between bars into calm water near the bank. The oars were lashed again, more permanently, and a rower dove overboard with a line, swimming to the bank. Another pair followed the first and helped him haul a cable and lash it about a large tree. Once the swimmers had returned and were pulled aboard, the entire crew set about preparing for the storm.
Telriy continued to behave as if Mar did not exist. Waleck had climbed into a hammock and was apparently asleep.
Mar, with nothing better to do, stirred the beans.
TWENTY-ONE
Telriy's scream woke Mar.
His eyes snapped open, his heart pounding with a desperate urgency and his senses achingly alert. For a long moment as the hammock swayed beneath him, he did not move, trapped between sleep and wakefulness, in that frontier where dreams seem reality and reality only dreams.
Crying frantic messages, clouded memories tried to stimulate his lethargic body into action, but sleep clung yearningly to him. With soft caresses that stilled his nerves and whispered comforts that soothed his heart, it lured him back to his rest. Half‑heartedly, he fought the dulling embrace for a moment, sorting through the impressions supplied him by his fear‑enhanced senses.
His eyes registered only jet, uniform in an uncompromising solidity, but this was more solace than vexation. Beneath his clenched hands, the scratchy fabric and coarse stitches of the hammock were damply cool. The rough-weave blanke
t lay heavy across his chest, a warming weight. The steady thrum of the rain striking the awning was a soothing tone; the rattle of the oiled canvas curtains a slightly irritating counter. A draught of chill air flushed his cheeks and filled his nostrils with the odors of soaked cloth and rain‑washed air. In none of these could he find reason for worry, and he abandoned his resistance and submitted to the demands of the darkness. His eyelids rolled down.
The first big, splattering drops of fever warm rain had struck the deck before Mar had finished his second bowl of the unencouraging beans. Scrambling about in frantic haste, he managed to soak only half of his clothing before he had tossed, skidded, and hurled the implements of supper under the awning, rolled down and secured the thick weather flaps, and chased an uncooperative and sullen Telriy into the relative dry. He had half‑hoped that the girl would dispute his occupation of the second hammock, such was the dark state of his mood, but she meekly curled up with a tossed blanket into the upswept corner of the bow. Tucking her head with one last baleful glance in his direction, she had soon proceeded to emit a very mild snoring sound, or, at least, a good imitation of one.
Waleck had proven to be locked still into a deep, heavy sleep. Mar, weariness dragging upon his limbs, had not hesitated to climb into his own hammock and let its intermittent rocking lull him into a similar condition.
The spastic flare of a flash of lightning stabbed through Mar's eyelids, piercing like an icy sword. Its accompanying rumble of thunder jolted the entire barge, driving out all other sound before its fury. Gasping, he threw back his blanket and rolled from his hammock to a straining crouch on the deck, the bottoms of his feet stinging as they slapped the wet planks. Lightning erupted then on all sides, lighting the enclosure with every other breath, and the sound of the rain increased to a rapid tattoo as the core of the storm found the barge. In the glimpses afforded by these snatches of light, he found the situation maddeningly normal. Waleck was a motionless lump in his gently swaying hammock, oblivious to the calamitous noise of the storm, for all intents and purposes, a dead man.
Startled by this thought, Mar moved to the old man's side and reached out a tentative hand, a sour feeling welling in the pit of his stomach. Reassuringly, the flesh of Waleck's cheek was warm and dry, and, from his new position, Mar could make out the gentle rise and fall of the old scrapper's chest. His anxiety calmed, Mar's eyes glided around the makeshift cabin once more.
Scattered across the deck, wherever they had come to rest, were boxes and pouches, an oddment or two, and piles of varied commodities. All the supplies that Waleck had purchased from the captain remained undisturbed. The heavy‑footed brazier, an orange glow peeking from the depths of its ash‑filled belly, did not appear to have shifted to any degree from the spot to which he had dragged it. The pot, still begrimed with the dregs of the sodden remains of the beans, sat stolidly beside it. Belatedly, he realized that he should have left it out for the storm to clean. And there, just beyond it, on the little section of deck that Telriy had claimed in the nook of the bow, lay the girl's empty, crumpled blanket.
Confused and then stunned, Mar took half of an undecided step as thunder crashed, a deep, pounding roll that repeated and repeated and repeated. Faintly, an almost familiar sound fought its way through the racket, a noise that sounded too awfully, frighteningly much like a piercing feminine scream.
Instantly alarmed, he concentrated. Amidst the concussion, it came again, loud and distinct, full of frustrated rage, and inarguably the girl's voice. Outside!
He scrambled about for his boots, found one, the wrong one, and cast it aside without sparing breath for curse or prayer. The other eluded him for a long frustrating moment and then sprang to his seeking hands like a chastened hound. Hastily, he fastened his hand upon the hilt and tried to fling the boot away, but the knife tangled in its sheath and then he did curse. With a desperate yank, he ripped it free and was up and running. Restraining thongs parted with one clean slash, and instantly the wind grabbed the ends of the flaps and threw them back. Another hurtling step and he was out into the storm.
Immediately, he was drenched. Half‑ice water lashed at his flesh, and a maniacal wind ripped his clothes in a hundred different directions. He was blind, the darkness total. He screamed for the lightning, and it was there, a wall of brilliant spears springing down to fence in the barge, for one glorious moment turning night into day. The scene revealed was frozen in his mind even as the night slammed back.
The small space of the foredeck was crowded with better than half a dozen struggling figures, arrested in silent poses of conflict. Though all were obscured by the driving rain, mere gray shadows, their identities were unmistakable; the hooded outlines of the majority proclaimed them monks of the Brotherhood of Phaelle. The wildly gyrating slimmer form presented by the tableau in the desperate grip of the monks could only be Telriy.
The storm chose to gift Mar with another glimpse at that instant. In his brief moment of sight, Telriy managed to sling one of her attackers away, raging unrestrainedly with fists and feet. But her freedom survived only a scant second. As a group, the monks swarmed over her and wrestled her to the deck.
With scarcely a thought, Mar hurled himself forward. Almost at the same instant, a wind ripped shout cut through the uproar of the storm. This strident command came from a man whose demeanor gave him a presence even in the deluge, an aura of demonstrated strength and undisputed command. In obedience, one of the faceless Brothers swung toward Mar. The young thief did not see the monk plant his feet firmly and bring his weapon, a poniard of gleaming gold with a two handed hilt and back curling bar guards, to bear. Nor did he hear the three nonsense words the man sang in his brokenly flat baritone. But he did feel the pulse of crimson fire that sprang from it to engulf him.
Mar was swallowed by pain. Every muscle in his body spasmed with indescribable agony. Unable to control even the twitch of his smallest finger, he slammed face first to the deck like so much dead meat. His nose broke with the impact and spurts of blood washed across his lips and into his mouth. He gagged as blood and rain filled his airway, and retched, disgorging the full contents of his stomach onto the puddling deck.
But Mar was ignorant of the physical damage done his body. His mind was filled with nothing but the pain, totally consumed by the torture that gripped him.
Time eclipsed itself. Mar retreated, far, far down into himself, and still the pain was there. He fled on, through the layers of his soul, searching for sanctuary from this reason stealing torment. At last, he came to a place of dreams, a dimension of all‑encompassing stone‑hard monotonically reverberating BLACK. Here he found refuge, for the BLACK – which was heard as well as seen -- held the pain at bay with casual ease. To reach this shelter, it had been necessary to sacrifice all but the most minute shred of his being. All of his memories, his hopes, his fears, his intellect, his name, his future, his past ‑‑ all of the things, major and minor, that made him who he was had been abandoned by the side of the path that led to this place. The fragment that remained was doubly refined, the essential essence comprised of instinct and primal need, and was unencumbered by any of the supra-conscious baggage that crippled the greater whole.
This remnant’s course of action was unhesitatingly evident. It drew upon the power of the BLACK and rotated obliquely through an extra space to view its body. It noted the convulsed features and the rigidly twitching limbs, but felt no concern. Such weaknesses had been sloughed off at the very beginning of its retreat. After a moment of non‑time manipulation, it looked through a second pair of eyes. A grating-light‑blue, softly pulsing energy halo encased the entirety of the body. The fragment studied this. The halo pulsed with a readily discernible pattern, a continuously repeated routine that consisted of a simple twin beat interposed with a double pause. It judged this energy manifestation of minor concern; it could be managed with little effort. The fragment explored further, examining the relationship between the halo and the body.
Anchored in
the nerves, the halo produced the afflicting signals and also served to amplify them to a debilitating level. The fragment reached out matter-of-factly and established control utilizing the BLACK, and then sought for a place to discard the halo. The halo's own point of origin immediately presented itself, being relatively adjacent both in time and normal space. A cursory scan revealed that this matrix possessed a significant flaw in the base order of its fundamental structure, which, unfortunately, would in all likelihood prevent it from re‑assimilating the energy surge of the reflected modulation. The fragment did not rate the possibility of destructive consequences unrelated to its host as of sufficient importance to deter it from its chosen course of action. Gathering the halo into a chaotic bundle, the fragment returned it thence, observing placidly as the originating matrix shattered in a burst of augmented light that incinerated its owner, a small portion of the deck, and a major segment of another monk standing nearby. As expected, the poniard had proved itself quite unable to take what it had given. The immediate threat removed, the fragment allowed itself to expand.
The pain vanished. The rain shoved no mercy, but continued to beat down on Mar's battered face. Sick and weak, he could do nothing for an immeasurable time but shiver, and then when he did move it was only to drag a feeble hand across his mouth to wipe bile and blood away. Propping himself up on his elbows with an effort, he drew a series of ragged breaths. His nose and cheeks were swelling quickly, threatening to pinch his eyes shut. He wanted desperately to lay his head back down, hide from the hurt, forget Telriy, but perversely picked himself up. He spat to cleanse his mouth, his nose throbbing abominably.
Events took upon a disjointed sequence then, the lightning coming with progressively less frequency.
There was Waleck suddenly, his face bright with rage, bursting from the awning.
A long moment passed before Mar could see again.
Waleck appeared a second time, several long steps farther, shouting, his words stolen away by the wind, his arms raised, gesturing.
Key to Magic 01 Orphan Page 20
