The Bard of Sorcery

by Gerard Houarner

  The constrictions died down. Air whistled in his ears. Unseen hands buffeted him on every side, until he was flailing about like someone with the falling sickness. The covers were ripped away, exposing Tralane. Desperately he tried to take hold of the bedposts, but his limbs did not have the strength to obey. Like driftwood in a stormy sea, he was tossed out of bed and suspended in air, riding the violent waves of unknown sorcery. A cry struggled in his throat, close to the sound of panic, but it was unable to fight through to release.

  Sorcery! Tralane held Wyden's Eye tightly and was aware that it burned in his hand like the scar on his shoulder when it had been a fresh wound. But despite the pain, Tralane held on to the amulet. He refused to let go, and tried to concentrate on healing.

  The dance of colors stopped. Tralane was wrapped in total darkness. The buffeting, like the constrictions, slowly lessened in intensity and he floated back down to the bed. But he did not reach the bed. Before he could do so, something closed in around him. Successive layers of weight pressed in all around him, locking him in a spread-eagle position. Then, instead of convulsing, the darkness throbbed, the pulse of its life pushing Tralane closer to panic and madness.

  Tralane's hold on his sanity was rapidly slipping. The helplessness, the surprise and complete mystery of his predicament spurred his thoughts on to outstrip his racing heart. Had he reached for, had he actually drawn on the magic in Wyden's Eye? The possibilities overwhelmed him. He lost his tentative grip on his self-control as power flooded through him, responding to his needs. He forgot Cumulain, forgot Mathi. Magic was lost in the maelstrom of panic that came with the remembrance of his shoulder, the wound, the mistakes he had made, and the controls he had never properly exerted. It would happen again; he would overlook the proper sign, his timing would be off—he was reaching too far, too quickly, asking the wrong questions, questions that should not be asked, beseeching those who laughed at his presumption and lanced shoulder, striving for his heart, with fire

  Coldness numbed his senses. Time lost its shape. The passing of moments was subsumed by the beats of throbbing darkness, each pulse a self-enclosed lifetime, gently caressing his body. The beats became his world, his reason for existing. But between the pulses of life there was emptiness, as if life had surged through him as melt water inundates a normally dry creek bed. A void stretching infinitely into the past and future rushed in once each constriction of darkness. Tralane forgot the beat of life and allowed himself to slip slowly into the emptiness, but then the pulse returned and the solitude of death was just as easily obliterated from his consciousness.

  Fluctuating between these two states of existence, Tralane did not at first grasp the meaning of the new sensation stimulating him. Then dimly he recognized sight. Streaks and blotches of color returned. Hanging on fragments of memory, pieces of ritual, and spell work, Tralane concentrated on their disquieting appearance. They were, he thought, his own injuries, which along with the rest of his body he could no longer feel. With that association, identity bolstered his will and purpose. The shapeless, mindless creature drifting in a void became Tralane again.

  The suppurating wounds started to heal, closing in on themselves. The moist, infected borders crumbled before the invading darkness. The harsh red, purple, and blue splotches faded, their violent intensity dwindling as gentler, lighter shades seeped through from beneath. Fine filigree networks of red and blue lines meshed to form larger patterns, which were then subsumed by the night. Rustlings replaced the whine of funneled wind as the air settled into quiescence. Unseen structures moved and mended into predefined patterns. The pulsing beat dimmed along with the colors and the rustlings as time flowed with measured pace through Tralane's body, until the mechanics of life were set and coordinated and the groundwork of his existence was restored.

  The night receded, assuming its proper proportions in relation to the rest of the world. Tralane found he could move at will again. He stirred, rolled to his side, rubbed his arm with his hand, and felt the scars gone. For the first time since he had awakened from the weeks-long sleep of sickness, he was free of generalized pain. He was stiff, not with sore muscles and stressed limbs, but with untried tissue. His nerves tingled, and his body was bathed in sensuality. It was as if he had been cleansed and washed ashore on a new land by a stormy, starless night. He stared at the amulet in his hand, and marveled as much over its power as at his instinctive use of that power to heal himself.

  A shriek pierced Tralane's pleasurable indolence. He sat up and heard a long, wailing moan amid the scuffling of feet and furniture coming from beneath the floor boards. He grabbed his sword, which had fallen with the blanket during his thrashings, and stuffed Wyden's Eye back into its pouch. As he ran down the hall towards the glow which marked the stairwell, he noted with satisfaction that he moved with an energy and ease he had not possessed in a long time. He bounded down the steps, the chill air and unexpected smoothness of his motions thrilling him with their vitality.

  The scene confronting him stopped him short. The main room was darkened, with only two hearths supplying light and the heat to the room he had been sleeping in. The fires painted a shifting backdrop to a set piece framed by the open door at the bottom of the short hall leading to the main room. However, this set piece was not a performance mounted as a spectacle to amuse those courtly nobles momentarily bored with their games for power.

  Cumulain knelt, bowed over the head of her mother which lay in her lap. A few men, bundled in furs and thick leggings and heavily sprinkled with moist snow and blood, were clustered behind her, their gaze fixed blankly on the far corner opposite them. Tralane did not have to follow their eyes to discover the object of their fear.

  Tralane descended the remaining stairs and walked to the doorway, where he stopped.

  "Welcome back to the living, my dear Tralane," the Jade Warrior commented superciliously.

  "Would you have it so, stone man?" Tralane responded in kind, eyes narrowed as he peered into the corner, barely making out the outline which framed the twin ruby stars glaring back at him.

  "The trials of mortality are none of my affair, fleshly one."

  Tralane smiled. "Keep it so, then, Jade Warrior."

  There was a testing silence, in which neither Tralane nor the Warrior turned down their steady gaze.

  "You stand before me anew, master Tralane," the Warrior said casually. "I have never seen you," he continued, with a shadowy wave of his hand, "quite so naked. You have these good people to thank for your new, soft, pink skin and mended bones. As grand a display of sympathetic sorcery as I've ever seen. Most diverting."

  "I also found it so, Warrior. A rougher road, perhaps, than the healing with time, but there's a stronger sanctuary at journey's end."

  One of the men standing behind Cumulain spat and, with his mouth turned up in a snarl, drew out his dagger. He faced Tralane, feet apart, defiant and angry.

  "By Krasok and Gel, you're playing with words while these two suffer on your account. I'll gut you now, before we bleed for you again."

  The others followed his example, forming a threatening semicircle with an edge of steel. The point of Tralane's black sword came up to meet the challenge, but he looked to Cumulain to stay their anger. She remained oblivious to the events occurring in her tavern, having spent the last reserves of strength. She had nothing left for her mother or for the hero in whom she believed. He could not look to her for protection anymore. He had to find his own formula for changing the hearts of men.

  He took a step in retreat as they advanced. He was unwilling to shed the blood of Cumulain's neighbors, yet the choice was being taken out of his hands.

  Suddenly the door burst open, and Jax staggered in, followed by a blast of frigid air and a swirling cloud of snow. His sword was notched and streaked with frozen gore. His left arm hung loosely as his knee-length animal skin coat flapped in the wind, revealing torn and bloodied mail underneath.

  He whispered hoarsely, "The Beast … came back …" His
face was caked with frost, but his eyes were fixed on Tralane, questioning and accusing at the same time.

  Tralane did not have time to ask what the Beast had returned for.

  Jax collapsed onto the floor, the dull sound of his body as it landed on the floorboards sending dim reverberations through Tralane's mind. He took a step towards the fallen man, but another powerful blast of cold air and a faint shuffling sound outside the doorway brought him to a halt before he could go to Jax's aid. Acutely aware of his own vulnerable state, Tralane backed off and looked about for some garments for himself and dressings for Jax's wounds. The other men dropped or sheathed their weapons and gathered hurriedly around Jax, and even Cumulain stirred from her self-absorption to watch as her brother was lifted gingerly onto a few tables lined end to end and his outer garments removed. One of the townsmen went to shut the door and glanced outside as he laid his hand on the lintel. Tralane, keeping an eye on the proceedings as he searched the storage cabinets behind the counter for clothing, saw a flash of white wrap itself around the man's head. In a moment, the doorway was empty.

  Cumulain had also noticed the action and she cried out weakly. The three remaining warriors whirled about, concern for their comrade fleeing before the terror of the empty doorway. With one mind, they retrieved their weapons and faced the storm that was lapping with rapidly increasing fury at their doorway.

  Cumulain stood, took notice of Tralane's condition behind the counter, and motioned agitatedly for him to go upstairs. He had reached the first step of the stairs when a shrill, piercing ululation transfixed him to the spot. He looked over his shoulder, waiting for the next event to happen, gripping his sword tightly.

  He was about to continue going up the stairs when a long, pale object flew into the room, leaving an arcing trail of blood. The dismembered arm struck one of the men who had recently challenged Tralane and knocked him backwards onto the floor. The downed man moaned with shock over the nature of the attack, while the others tried to help him up. Then a furry whiteness filled the door frame, and a stifling, fetid stench rolled into the room. Tralane gagged and retreated up the stairs, watching the townsmen falling back around the injured Jax. Cumulain knelt back over her mother, leaning across her face to protect her from the sight of the grisly arm lying on the floor. An invisible border divided the Wilderness Flower into two camps—fearful, mortal men against a white, murderous shadow.

  The monstrosity darted a long appendage into the inn, searching, grasping the air. Its fingers and talons were covered with the same blood that matted its fur. Then a howl, like the one Tralane had heard when he had first ridden into town, was flung at everything that lived in the tavern. The rage and frustration impelling the voice drove Tralane and the others back a step. When neither the lunge nor the howl produced any overt panic, the white shadow disappeared from the doorway. But the tension did not end with its departure.

  "The Beast …" Jax repeated. "Don't let … it …"

  "We won't," whispered the man who had been knocked down. He rose to a half-kneeling posture. "Someone had better stay with Jax. I'm going to round up the others, before it manages to pick us off one by one."

  Tralane did not stay to hear them discuss plans. He raced up the remaining stairs. By the glow of the hearth fires which followed him up the stairwell, he tried the three remaining doors besides his own on the floor. The first two were locked, but the last opened at his touch. In the room he found a chest full of clothes lying at the foot of a bed. Some of the garments seemed too large for Jax.

  As he sifted through the collection, picking out what looked as if it might fit him, he began to feel jealous. Then he realized, by the age and condition of the oversized garments, that they had not belonged to one of Cumulain's lovers, but to her father. Feeling foolish over his needless burst of emotion, Tralane busied himself with donning shirt, jerkin, leggings and boots. As he turned to leave, he saw the remnants of his old net pack. Its provisions had been thrown away. His bow and arrows were propped against the wall behind the pack, and next to his old weapons hung a greatcoat put together mostly from Oram's furs. He took the coat, acknowledging it as a gift from Cumulain. He drew the hood up around his head, tied his sword belt tightly around the coat's bulky waist, and went from the room. He left the bow and arrows behind.

  By the time he returned downstairs, two townsmen had gone off to warn the neighbors and gather a hunting party. Only one man remained, sitting by Jax and idly staring at Cumulain and her mother. Tralane's appearance in the doorway drew the townsman to his feet, sword in hand. The bard and townsman glared at one another.

  Simultaneously, the Jade Warrior and Cumulain stood. Cumulain approached her neighbor, who lowered his weapon when he saw himself bracketed between enemy and friend. She stopped a few paces away from the man and looked at Tralane pleadingly.

  "Now is your time, Tralane," she croaked, her voice as old and cracked as what he had assumed her mother's to be. "Hurry, before the others find the monster and waste their lives. Next time, the Beast will not stop at the threshold."

  She evaded his grasp. Her vacant eyes offered their depths to him. The cold suddenly penetrated his awareness, and he shivered. He remembered the task he had to perform. It was an obligation, and he saw in her eyes that there was no choice but to fulfill that moral call to duty. She had seen too many dead to allow anything but justice to be served. In her simplicity and purity of purpose, she was almost a stranger to him. Tralane, whole and solidly entrenched in life due to the workings of this woman and her mother, turned sadly away from her. Cumulain's only demand was the fulfillment of duty. That the duty was to himself as much as to the town awed him. Reluctantly, he put aside his childhood desires and went to meet the challenge.

  He left Cumulain to look after the two survivors of her family as best she could. He stepped over the dismembered arm and crossed the invisible border that had marked off the safety of the inn from the dangers of the outside world. He passed into the night.

  A green blur appeared at the edge of his vision. "So now we leave, eh Tralane?" the Warrior said over the screaming wind. "To another town, or another world?"

  "Not yet," Tralane replied in a commanding, tone. His eyes were slitted against the gusts, and he battled forward against the lacerating particles of snow to take the first steps of his hunt.

  The outlines of buildings were hardly distinguishable in the furious descent of snow. Portals of light could be dimly made out, but the rest of the landscape was lost in the white haze. The wind blew steadily against Tralane as he made his way up the town's main street, plowing through the drifts and almost toppling over whenever a pocket of swirling air sprang up beside him, pushing him from a new direction.

  The storm was at its height. Relentlessly, it pounded at whatever stood, quickly burying the fallen victims of its might beneath a heavy, frozen blanket. More than once, Tralane tripped over a buried object; when his hands came forward to break his fall, they struck hard flesh. Thorts, abandoned or lost as the storm's frenzy had rapidly increased, had panicked themselves into exhaustion and collapsed. No doubt, the two visits by the Beast had also unnerved them.

  Tralane glanced over his shoulder as he approached the outskirts of the town. Anxiety was beginning to gnaw at his will. He dreaded falling across the remnants of the dismembered man's corpse, since it would only be a token of the creature's raw, uncaring hatred for the living. And in the storm, Tralane would be a victim of that hatred sooner than the Beast would become a prey to the bard's hunt.

  Tralane was about to turn his attention back to the land ahead when he recoiled before a faint green shape looming close behind him. Then he recognized the Jade Warrior, faithfully following his charge. Ignoring the Warrior's inescapable presence, Tralane resumed his fruitless probing of the white curtain that had fallen around him.

  The last cluster of houses was behind them, and Tralane found himself in the wilderness. He had never known the fear of death when in the fields and hills of his homeworld,
running from a past adventure headlong into the next. He drew his sword, hoping its black blade would drive the fear away. Of course, the blade was no defense against the Beast's coloring, which would camouflage it until it was upon Tralane. Driven by the certainty of doom, but disciplined by his new-found sense of duty and obligation, his mind danced nimbly around the dangers, seeking a flaw in the well-laid death trap he had freely entered.

  Tralane settled down to examining Cumulain's words more closely. The amulet was indeed a tool, as she had said, and as such it could have many uses. The Eye was a source of power; his will had already been able to channel that power, and there was more he could do if only he knew the limitations of the magic and the laws governing its existence.

  The amulet's origin was unknown, and thus its nature and powers hidden. But Gibron had said he was a Keeper and that a bond existed between him and the Eye. Even without full awareness of the amulet's secrets, he had access to its power. It was his choice either to face what Wyden's Eye had to show him or to turn away and allow the Eye and whatever entity influenced the Eye, to control him. The strength had to be summoned from his being, or that strength would be fragmented and turned against him.

  What truly great magicians possessed, Mathi had said, were not the words which summoned the gods and demons, nor the phrases and implements which invoked the underlying forces moving all of existence. These were all shovels and buckets with which knowledgeable fools dug through the earth to bring up small doses of water from underground streams. Such people were rare and potent enough. But a sorcerer who wielded ultimate power, who had tapped and could unleash not mere buckets but torrents of power, knew himself in relation to that power. He knew and could call upon, by the action of his will, the forces governing existence. Such sorcerers had merged with the forces binding matter in the universe. They could transmute objects and substances, create and destroy whatever they beheld, and, most important of all, lose their physical selves and join that binding power. To know and mingle with a primal force was to survive the blinding light in which such a transformation had occurred. Sorcerers achieving this state were almost unknown, though it was the goal of all magicians who placed themselves, like Mathi, in exile. The price too often was paid with madness and self-annihilation. But the reward was freedom from the constraints of life and death.