Gorinthians Read online

  “Do you mean how to use yara?” Celdic asked eagerly. Selindria’s biggest surprise was to find out that Celdic could tap into the planet’s limitless reserves of power. It explained a lot of the phenomena that had occurred around him as he grew up. It also made her feel like she had been looking into her own grave.

  Nodding slowly, Selindria said, “As far as I know, there is no one else alive today that can teach you.” No one that I would trust to teach him anyway, she thought.

  Selindria turned her gaze to Jalorm. “Tell me how you came to meet Terrance,” she commanded, her eyes catching the light as she focused on him. You never wanted that look directed at you.

  Jalorm shrugged, “I was just watching my post when he walked up and told me that he needed to teach me,” he returned, self-deprecatingly. “As soon as he entered the border, I knew who it was because of the bond. He told me not to mention it to anyone, though.”

  Selindria tsked in annoyance. Not knowing about the bond Terrance claimed existed irked her more than she wanted to admit. It was past time to prepare for contingencies that might arise should Terrance do something foolish. One of the few things her father taught her was never to put your trust or safety in another person’s hands.

  Arising from her chair, she moved it to where the other two were so she was within touching distance of them. They watched her somewhat apprehensively and leaned back in their chairs in spite of themselves.

  “I think that it is time to prepare the two of you for life outside of Chasel Ri’ Aven,” she said firmly. “The world you are about to enter is so vastly different from anything you have experienced that you will trip yourself up at the first stranger you meet.” She held their gaze, making sure that she had their full attention before moving on.

  Jalorm cleared his throat, “How do you know what it is like outside of Chasel Ri’ Aven?” he asked curiously.

  Selindria sat silently in thought for a moment before answering. After a moment, she sighed quietly. “I suppose that you will find out soon enough when we get back to civilization,” she muttered under her breath. Leaning back into her chair, she watched them closely to see what their reaction would be.

  “I was not born in Chasel Ri’ Aven,” she said finally. “I lived the first half-century of my life on the Moltaran continent.” They did not need to know there was even more time between the fifty years she spent on Moltara and her arrival at the Tar Ri’ San.

  The two of them were gaping at her as if she had just told them that she was a Swamp Dragon in disguise. Not that they even believe a Swamp Dragon exists, she thought wryly. She had been teaching at the Tar Ri’ San for just over a hundred years, something that all of the students were aware of because she had taught their parents and parents’ parents. They thought her proximity to the Rajan gardens had affected her life span and accounted for her odd eyes; a belief she had strongly encouraged.

  Celdic finally found his voice. “That’s impossible!” he protested and Jalorm nodded his agreement. “No outsiders are allowed to enter Chasel Ri’ Aven.”

  “Yes, that is the standard practice,” Selindria replied dryly, “but there have been more than one exception over the last three thousand years.” She indicated Celdic.

  Celdic’s jaw dropped. “Me? How can you say that? You know both of my parents.” As much as Celdic protested it, she could see that the thought had occurred to him at least once since they left Chasel Ri’ Aven; his eyes shined with doubt.

  “I know Selnric and Char,” Selindria agreed, “but they are no more your real parents than I am. The same is true for Cha’le. When I look at your yar, I see a completely different resonance than that of either of Selnric and Char.” Selindria remembered when Char had announced that she was going to have a baby and Selindria had thought that she was coming down sick. After an unusual nine-month seclusion from everyone but her husband, she had appeared with Celdic. Lendel’s mother had a similar experience with her two children. The Elders had told her firmly to mind her own business when she had voiced her concern over the incidents.

  Jalorm looked at Celdic as if seeing him for the first time. Selindria could tell he was examining Celdic’s yar by the way he was studying him. Celdic shifted uncomfortably. Selindria knew he could feel it when other people reached out with their yar, even if he could not reach out with his own. Jalorm's eyes widened with recognition as he realized the similarities that Selindria had noticed earlier. She shot him a warning look, not wanting Celdic to find out from someone else.

  "The point is," she continued, gazing at Celdic with a meaningful look, "there are people living in Chasel Ri’ Aven that were not born there. Why the Elders allow it, I do not know.” Shaking her head slowly, she muttered, "Then again, who said they ever needed a reason for what they do."

  The other two stared at her expectantly. I suppose there is nothing for it but to press on, she thought with an inward sigh. "Let me put the figures out on the table for you." She held up her hand and began ticking items off on her fingers. "First, the Elders do have contact with the outside world that goes beyond our knowledge.” She ticked another finger. "Second, a man claiming to be Terrance shows up who has a bond to all of the people who were raised in Chasel Ri’ Aven. Third, we know that Terrance was the leader of an order that brought about the cataclysmic events that wounded the planet several thousand years ago. Fourth," she leaned forward as she raised her last digit, "he came back to a city he engineered and took one of the inhabitants.” She leaned back in her chair and let her small outline sink in.

  Selindria looked at each of them in turn. "We really do not know who this man is or what his intentions are. Even if they are benevolent, there could be a catastrophe as bad as the last one before he is done. Do not become too trusting of this Terrance," she warned in a soft voice. "Use your own mind to work things out and question everything. You are both exceptionally brilliant. Remember that you rule your mind, not the other way around."

  Celdic stared reflectively into the distance as he rubbed his chin with his knuckles. Jalorm looked troubled and Selindria began to wonder if she should have said so much this early with Jalorm present. What is done is done, she thought with an imperceptible shrug of her slender shoulders. Now all I need is a little time and a little luck.

  ---

  Several hundred miles off the west coast of the Moltaran continent, a merchant ship cut through the waves at full sail as the wind pushed them steadily west. Inside the main cabin, a man sat at a simple table bolted to the floor. He sat and tapped a small round object that looked like a river stone against the tabletop. His full lips were pursed in thought and blue eyes shown with an intelligence that failed to mask the madness in them. He was clean-shaven with dark black hair cut short around his neck. He wore red trousers with a white linen shirt tucked in and enough lace for a lord covered his wrists and collar. His velvet slippers lay next to the small bed that was also bolted down, next to his blood red coat. Branded into his forehead was the scarred depiction of a six-pointed star inside of a triangle where the points met the inside points of the triangle. The symbol was branded onto his hand as well.

  It had been a very long time ago that he wore flesh. He felt weak, like a piece of porcelain. Flesh was such a delicate substance, slave to so many masters. When he had first taken this body, he vomited everything that the former inhabitant had eaten as disgusting smells assaulted his nostrils. The first to reach him were the stenches of human hygiene and pollen from the budding trees outside. Even after a few months of wearing flesh, he preferred the dark and dank smell of the cabin to the salty fish smell that was so strong above deck. Even the carnal lusts of the body held no interest to him. He had a vision of the way life was meant to be, the perfect life. From the time that he discovered the purpose of life, he spent every moment designing a plan that would bring the world to heel and fulfill that vision.

  He ran into diversions that he had been unaware of before, however. Though he had no interest in the pleasures of the f
lesh, he had discovered that he had an insatiable appetite for misery. The acts of cruelty did not seem wrong to him, anymore than painting a picture with dark colors would seem wrong. The tapestry of existence could not exist without a fair amount of shading to accentuate the brighter colors. Jerard considered himself the artist appointed to this task. Selindria would be the lead soprano in his next piece. He had nearly had her a century ago before Terrance neatly trapped him in a vacuum that he had only recently escaped. That Selindria did not know Terrance came to her rescue, only served to make the trap awaiting them more certain.

  White-hot fury erupted in his mind as he thought of Terrance. The man was responsible for every single failure he had experienced thus far. As smoke began to lift off the floorboards and table, Jerard forced himself to calm down. Thinking of the plans he had for Terrance made him smile madly. A hundred years in a small prison had given him a lot of time to plan his retribution.

  Jerard stood up, went through the narrow cabin door and walked up to the prow. The sailors flinched and cowered as he passed them on his way to the front

  "Captain, halt this tub of boards,” he called without turning around. He could feel the soft spot in the planet’s yar just in front of them. Reaching out with his yar, he studied the piece of land that lay submerged a half-mile beneath the water. Digging deeper, he found a fault beneath the underwater mountain. He concentrated his yar on the minutest particles within the fault. With a grunt, he triggered a chain reaction of splitting atoms that caused the fault to heave and shove the mountain up into the air and out of the water. A tsunami engulfed their ship and crushed it like a nut caught in a vice. All that remained of the merchant ship was a tall figure walking across the water to the new island that had risen out of the ocean.

  Chapter 9

  The man called Crevance stood above the town of Millport. He was in a guard tower that looked over the low foothills gradually rising up to meet the Ghost Peak Mountains. No one knew where the name originated but it was common knowledge that anyone venturing into the mountains would be found unconscious at the town limits if they tried to enter the large mountain range.

  That was also the reason he was in a guard tower in a town much too small to justify it. For as long as anyone remembered, the people of Millport kept watch on the mountains both night and day. No one had ever seen anyone come out of the mountains, but there were plenty of rumors of the phantom hosts that lived there, else why would the tradition of guarding the mountain have been started? The people of Millport were satisfied with the way this logic worked and so they always passed the tradition on to their posterity. It also made for great stories of the gruesome phantom hosts that would one day invade, stories that were told to the children around fireplaces in the dark of the night.

  Crevance had been standing watch since his fifteenth birthday, almost thirty years. In all of those years, the only thing he had seen on his watch was local game and people that came from the universities at Shalilayo. The latter were just foolish enough to try entering the mountain, scoffing at the local community’s paranoid superstitions. So it was with great astonishment that Crevance spied four figures in the distance coming down the mountain. He peered intently at them, trying to glimpse their features, but they were still just specs in the distance. He felt his heart beating in his throat as he reached shakily for the rope attached to a large bell. It had been brought on a large wagon all the way from Shalilayo. He hesitated, thinking how foolish he would look ringing the alarm--only used in celebrations before--if the figures in the distance were just travelers that had never been up into the mountains. Even as he watched them intently, one of them flickered and vanished, leaving only three. Gasping in terror, he jerked the bell-pull with all of his might.

  ---

  Li had shed her extra layer of clothing as they descended the mountains into the warmer lowlands. They had been traveling for three exhausting days down the mountains, stopping for only enough time for them to sleep a couple of hours. The three youths had dark circles under their eyes, which were also tight with the strain of uncertainty. Cha’le mentioned to the black-swathed stranger that they could not just say “Hey you,” thereby asking his name without actually phrasing a question. He looked at her with those dark-hooded eyes. They constantly seemed to be deciding whether he would just kill them to get them out of his way or ignore them. After a long, unpleasant silence, he had said that they could call him Lochnar. As far as Li could tell, he had not slept once since they met him. Maybe he did not need sleep.

  After the second day of their journey, the stranger had swathed his entire face in black cloth and donned a set of black gloves. Li also sensed that the holes she had felt in his yar were in different places now. She gazed at his back uneasily, wondering what he was. He had not opened up any more than he had when they first met him. The three youths were too tired to talk to each other and Lochnar had nothing to say.

  As the horizon began to lighten in the North, they crested one of the foothills and found themselves staring down on the village of Millport. Li was surprised at how small it was. After being raised in Chasel Ri’ Aven, she came to expect other cities to be relatively the same size. There could not be more than a few thousand people living in the sleepy village below them.

  “These rural folk are a superstitious lot,” Lochnar growled softly. “I will not be visible to your eyes until we reach the other side of the village. Before he finished speaking, he flickered and vanished.

  Li looked at the other two questioningly, but Lendel just shook his head resignedly and continued moving toward the town. They all stopped dead as the sound of an alarm bell reached their ears. People began to stumble out of their houses in the village, staring at the watchtower where a guard was yanking the pull rope frantically and shouting at the top of his lungs. Some of the people in the village spotted them and began pointing toward them excitedly. They looked terrified, even at this distance.

  “Fools,” Lochnar muttered and Li heard him spit.

  They all halted, staring in consternation at the small village that had turned into a kicked anthill. Some of the Guardians claimed that they had been to Millport in disguise and talked to the people. She had not heard they reacted like this to strangers.

  “What should we do?” Cha’le asked urgently, abandoning Lochnar’s rule of no questions.

  “Keep going,” Lochnar snapped irritably. “They think that you are phantoms from the mountain. Just tell them that you are travelers from Shalilayo and that you are looking for a special plant that grows on this mountain.”

  Li’s mouth was dry as she looked at the other two. Lendel was nodding slowly, but Cha’le was frowning in thought. After a moment, she glanced at Li and winked. Li worked moisture back into her mouth. She always had felt like a coward around Cha’le, but sometimes Li thought that Cha’le would try to make a joke while plummeting to her death. Being afraid of a mob of frightened villagers was only sensible she told herself firmly, even if Cha’le is as crazy as she pretends.

  The four of them walked carefully down the hill to the village below. They slowed down at the edge of the village, making it obvious they meant no harm. A short, chubby man with a bald pate strode out of the mob that was beginning to gather at the mouth of the main road. He stopped a good twenty paces short of them and looked at them doubtfully.

  "Have you come from the mountain?" he demanded with an uncomfortable glance at the mountains looming behind them. He was wearing a pair of dark trousers with a shirt that had been hastily tucked in and boots that went to mid-calf but were still unlaced.

  "From Shalilayo," Lendel replied stepping a little in front of the others. "We are gathering some roots that we had been told grew in this mountain range.” His thumbs were looped through his belt, well away from his sword hilt.

  "Crevance," the short man bellowed, "come over here!” He stood tapping his foot impatiently as the man called Crevance made his way through the crowd, his feet dragging.

  "Do
you mind explaining why you felt it needful to awake the rest of us?" he asked mildly, at odds with the dangerous glint in his eyes. "Perhaps you are beginning to find your position in this community onerous and desire to create some excitement for the rest of us, hmmm?"

  Li found the odd way the short man spoke fascinating. It was very precise; more so than she would have thought for a small village like this.

  "No, governor, not at all," Crevance protested weakly. "There was another person with them and he just vanished into thin air! I didn't imagine it!" he finished with an angry growl.

  The crowd was listening intently to the exchange. At Crevance's reply, many of them laughed while most of them shook their heads muttering about being woken up in the early morning hours. Fully half of the crowd wore only their undergarments. They began to return to their homes quickly as they realized their lack of clothing.

  Frowning at the departing crowd, the short man turned back to them. “I apologize for the unseemly welcome," he said with a cordial smile as he studied them each from head to toe. "My name is Berdrin Char, Governor of West Realm. I welcome you to the town of Millport, a welcome that I hope is not standard practice when I am not here."

  "Thank you," Lendel murmured politely. "I am Lendel and this is Cha'le and Li. We appreciate your intervention."

  "Not at all," Berdrin replied dryly. "I believe that they become weary of keeping watch and so stimulate themselves with enough ale for anyone to see a phantom.” Squinting at the Western horizon where the sun was just beginning to climb into the sky, he motioned them to follow him. "Come and have some breakfast with me, and you can tell me about life in the capital."