Gorinthians Page 11
Li tried to shake her head at Lendel without being seen, but he just nodded to Berdrin Char, thanked him for his hospitality and began to follow. Li looked at Cha'le to see what her reaction would be. Her eyes shone with excited anticipation, much the way they did right before someone fell into one of her jokes. Li felt around with her yar, and realized for the first time that she could not sense Lochnar anywhere. She wondered if he were still there--hiding his yar--or if he had abandoned them.
They followed Berdrin Char down the main street where, deciding it was too late to go back to bed, a few villagers stared at them as they walked by. They continued down the main street until they reached another street that was just as wide crossing horizontally. The house that Berdrin Char led them to was on the corner of the intersection of the two main streets. The house itself was three stories high and twice as large as any of the other buildings that were in the village. It had broad wooden columns--carved into scrolling artwork by a master craftsman--supporting the front of the building. There was a small garden in the front and a pathway that led up to the front door. Berdrin Char led them around to the back of the building, where he said the kitchens were located, and took them into a room at the back.
Inside, there was a long table large enough to seat forty people. As they sat down at the table, Berdrin Char walked into the kitchens that adjoined their room and asked for breakfast. He returned with his shirt properly tucked in, sat down at the head of the table and studied them. Li began to feel nervous as the silence stretched out. A servant brought them water to drink and returned to the kitchen. Li did not need Lendel's warning glance to refrain from drinking the water.
"What news have you from Shalilayo?" Berdrin Char inquired as he sipped from his glass of water. "We hear very little here in the back country."
"I couldn't tell you anything new, governor," Lendel replied with his arms folded in front of him. "We have been away for a long time now. We hoped for information on current affairs ourselves as we returned to civilized lands."
"Ah," Berdrin Char said, smiling into his glass. "Aside from a new guild master, we have heard of nothing new."
Li watched her brother in amazement. If she did not know him, she would never guess he was lying through his teeth. Cha'le was also staring at him as if he had sprouted horns.
"Will you be traveling to Shalilayo from here by ship?" Berdrin Char asked them casually. Li felt a kind of probing in the questions he asked. His dark eyes seemed to glow with an inner light that made Li feel like there was someone else behind those eyes that watched her.
"Perhaps further down," Lendel replied easily. "We have some colleagues we are meeting up with first.” Though Lendel appeared relaxed, Li could see he had not moved his right hand more than a few inches away from his sword hilt.
"I see," Berdrin Char murmured smoothly, contemplating them as he sipped from his glass. Li had a feeling he had been expecting someone to come down out of the mountains. She also did not think they were the ones he expected.
Servants appeared from the kitchens, breaking the silence with clattering platters of ham and eggs as well as toasted bread with jam. Li barely stopped herself from drooling as the smells wafted across to her. They had barely eaten as they descended the mountains, snatching only enough to keep them going at the breakneck pace that their silent guide set.
"Please eat," their host urged them. "It is the least I can do to absolve our village of your rude welcoming."
Li reached out with her yar to sense the food, looking for properties that should not be there. She had eaten these foods enough to recognize any irregularities in their yar.
The difference was immediately evident. The eggs had been seasoned liberally with something that was foreign to her, but she knew what the effect of the substance would be from the make-up of its yar. It was very like Rootsnare, except that it would sever the body from its spirit or similarly damage it. She wondered if Berdrin Char thought that they were helpless or if there was something hidden deeper that she could not sense. She reached into the seasoning with her yar to change the properties to something safe when she realized the trap. She would have to change the properties of each individual grain of seasoning, which would take hours.
She looked inquiringly at Cha'le, who also realized the complications that making the food safe presented. Before either of them could say anything, however, Berdrin Char’s head fell onto his plate while the rest of him sat upright. Li gasped, staring wide-eyed at him as he suddenly burst into a flame that consumed him in seconds. He left no ashes nor did his chair show any scorch marks.
"Gorinthian scum," muttered a voice coming from behind their late host’s chair. "It is time to go. Now."
Unexpectedly, Li could feel a small part of Lochnar’s yar. It was just large enough that she could follow him even if she could not see him. She stood up unsteadily and began to follow. She saw Lendel glance uneasily at the empty chair at the head of the table and knew that he was wondering the same thing that she was. What would have happened had we refused to eat the food?
As they left the building, some of the villagers waived at them. Most, however, ignored them and continued about their business as if no one else existed. They followed the sense of Lochnar’s yar as he led them through different intersections. They eventually arrived at the outer edge of the village opposite the side they had come in on. They began making their way down the South road.
"We need to meet your friends tomorrow morning," Lochnar told them, investing the word friends with scorn.
They just nodded mutely and followed. They were too tired and hungry to argue. They still had not had a decent meal or a decent night’s sleep for four days.
"What I wouldn't give for a bath," Li muttered to herself. Cha'le flashed her a quick smile and nodded fervently. The two of them were still dressed in the same clothes in which they had left Chasel Ri’ Aven and by now they were covered in grime from travel. Li's dark hair was gnarled with tangles and her face was smudged with dirt. Cha'le looked even worse, with her light blonde hair filled with dirt and twigs. Her innocent face was beginning to take on a gaunt cast and her already slender frame seemed ready to wilt. Lendel's normally handsome face was also covered in dirt and his hair looked like a collapsed haystack.
They continued down the South Road for the rest of the day and night. They had fewer breaks than they had before Millport and when evening came, they did not stop to make camp until well into the early morning hours. They were just reaching a place where the road came within fifty paces of the river that they had been paralleling when Lochnar finally called a halt. He gestured for them to follow him off the road and walked over to a small copse of trees next to the river. Li tried to settle down to the ground gracefully, but her legs gave out beneath her and she sat down with a thump. Beside her she heard Cha'le drop as well, followed by Lendel.
---
As the three exhausted youths fell asleep, Lochnar began the nightly routine of scanning the area for enemies, a practice he had been doing for centuries now. He was not looking forward to the meeting in the morning. Terrance had a way about him that rubbed him the wrong way, which made every meeting a thorn in his side. He had a feeling that he would be seeing his daughter as well, something he really did not look forward to.
As he neared the western edge of the trees, he felt a familiar resonance as he scanned ahead with his yar. Pausing, he quickly scanned the entire perimeter to see if anyone else was approaching from the other directions. Sensing nothing, he went out to meet the new arrival, flexing his fingers with the desire to throttle someone.
"Lochnar!" Thistledown shouted jovially as he approached the camp. Lochnar winced even though he knew he was the only one that could hear the shout. If his own continued existence did not depend on it, he would have killed Thistledown where he stood.
"Still playing the faithful hound I see," Lochnar said contemptuously.
Thistledown strolled up to where he waited, unperturbed by the col
d reception. He wore his brown country trousers--held up with suspenders--over a grey farm shirt. His black boots went up to mid-calf and were caked in grime and mud. The way that he chose to look disturbed Lochnar almost as much as the way that he chose to act. To some, the folksy character was disarmingly charming. An idiom did not exist that Lochnar despised more, however.
"Still your cheerful old self, I see." Thistledown said with a sunny smile. "Are the others here?"
"No," Lochnar replied acidly, "I ran out of food on the way and decided to make something useful out of them.” Lochnar felt his already black mood darkening. Asking questions that you already knew the answer to was one of the dumber human traits.
Thistledown laughed as if he had made a joke and walked into the camp to survey the slumbering trio. "They look pretty worn out.” He sounded concerned, another stupid human trait.
"They are still alive," Lochnar growled, sounding not entirely pleased by the fact. "Are you just here to irritate me or is there a reason that you dropped in?"
"Terrance sent me to lead you to the cottage," Thistledown replied, still fussing over the state of the three youths. "Did you have any trouble on your way down?"
"No," Lochnar replied shortly, spitting on the ground next to him.
Thistledown looked at him for a moment longer, sensing that he was not telling the whole truth. "Well, that’s good to hear," Thistledown said finally. "We found some interesting critters on our way down. Terrance thinks they were waiting to meet you."
Lochnar grunted without saying anything. He would not play Thistledown's game of prompting him for details. Thistledown apparently realized that he was not going to ask any questions. Lochnar felt a stab of satisfaction at the flash of irritation that swept across Thistledown’s face.
"Somehow, the Gorinthians have discovered how to create their own hosts," Thistledown said, his face slightly puzzled. "They won't need to be able to use yara to force their way into these hosts, because they don't have a protective aura. They were also about twenty feet tall and made out of some kin’ of ore.” He finished with a significant glance at Lochnar's side, where he kept his sword. He and Thistledown were the only known living people that could see it now.
The sword had been made before the cataclysm of the old world, when Gorinthians were all but indestructible. One of the Derinians had crafted it in such a way that if the wielder beheaded a Gorinthian, it would not only kill the host, it would also unravel one of the elements that made up the Gorinthian spirit. This caused it to consume the host in a spiritual flame. Before the Derinian was able to share the secret of their making with the rest of his order, he was killed by one of the Arachna. Arachna were assassins that derived their name from a spider that had never been seen by anyone living but invariably left a small web around the bite. The assassins also left a small woven pattern of hair harvested from previous victims.
Lochnar ignored the obvious point that Thistledown tried to make. Even if his sword could not kill the stone men of whom he spoke, he would find a way. It was no surprise Gorinthians laid ambushes for him. Aside from Terrance, there was no other person who had killed as many Gorinthians as Lochnar.
"Your daughter is at the cottage," Thistledown spoke up suddenly. "She claimed she wouldn’t let us leave with Celdic alone."
Lochnar did not answer, but his silence was eloquent. He hoped that he was wrong and that it was another teacher accompanying Terrance. As usual, hope was a vain ideal on which to depend.
Lochnar stared at Thistledown with the gaze that most of his dead enemies had received before the killing blow. "If you mention our special link to her, I will kill you."
"Wouldn't dream of it, ol' chap," Thistledown replied, completely unfazed. "In fact, I would be just as happy if never another soul learnt of it."
Lochnar glanced back at the slumbering forms, grimacing at the delay they caused with their constant need of sleep and sustenance. It had been so long ago since he had suffered from the same limitations that he did not remember what it was like. He turned away from Thistledown and began his circuit of the surrounding area, more to avoid the near proximity to Thistledown than any concern of an intruder. It was with some surprise that he felt a form skulking at the outer edges of his yar, as if it knew it would be identified if it came any closer.
In a flash, he had unsheathed his sword and let go of the world around him so that both his yar and physical body vanished from site. He scanned the other directions with his yar, looking for signs of an ambush. Sensing nothing, he pulsed between the fabric of this world and the spiritual plane, a trick that enabled him to cover short distances in the space of a second. A moment later, he was high up in the tree that he had previously been standing next to, gazing toward the intrusion. He could sense it clearer from his perch in the tree. It was clearly not human, though he was not sure what it was. Its yar was so twisted up and tangled that it did not seem possible for it to function within a body.
Using the inner voice that he shared with Thistledown, something that he had almost never done before, he whispered into the stillness, "Get the children out of here."
There was a moment of startled silence and then he sensed Thistledown quietly waking the youths and urging them out of the small copse of trees. Lochnar silently moved from tree to tree, trying to see the form of the creature that skulked around their camp. As he reached the edge of the trees where he sensed the tangled mess of the creature’s yar, he saw a crouched woman staring into the trees where the others were. To say that she was disparate would have been a gross understatement. She wore tattered rags instead of clothing and squatted barefoot in the dirt. Her hair was as long as her waist, but it looked like it had never seen a brush. She made small grunting noises, sometimes followed by a half-legible word as she slowly ambled back and forth at the edge of the trees.
Lochnar felt his veins ignite with white-hot rage as he realized what she was. He had only met two other women in this state because they almost never survived the ordeal. He would have been in that same state had Terrance not appeared when he had. Lochnar’s race did not feel pity, but he had killed both of the other women that he had found like this. He knew that he would have to do the same thing to this one.
As he prepared to leap to the ground and take her head from her shoulders, she looked up at him with her cat-like eyes, recognition lasting only a moment before she scampered off into the distance.
Screaming in fury, Lochnar leaped to the ground and used his yar to strike every tree within sight. As fast as he could, he howled with the need to kill and torched everything within range. Pouring his yar deep into the earth, he sent his shout through the very crust of the planet. "Jerard!” he screamed. “Wherever you go, I will find you and make you suffer for eternity!"
---
On a newly risen island in the Cordaln Sea, Jerard smiled in pleasure as he heard the cry of rage echoing through the bedrock below him.
Chapter 10
Thistledown stood in shock as he heard Lochnar’s voice whisper in his head, "Get the children out of here.” Lochnar almost never used the link that had been forged between them.
Without pause, he hurried over to the slumbering youths and shook them awake. “It’s me, Thistledown,” he whispered urgently. “No time for questions, get your stuff and follow me. Quietly!”
The three of them groggily grabbed their packs and hurried after him, thankfully without demanding to know what was going on. He jogged slowly in the opposite direction of Lochnar, as quickly as he felt the youths could keep up in their exhausted state. As they reached the road and turned South, Thistledown felt a white-hot flash in his mind, something that he came to recognize in Lochnar as murderous rage. He slowed down a little, trying to decide whether he should return to help or not. Before he could make up his mind, the white-hot flash in his mind turned to molten lava so intense that Thistledown brought his hands to the sides of his head in pain.
From behind them, they heard a cry of rage unlike anythin
g any of them had ever experienced. Immediately, all of the trees in the clearing burst into flame. A moment later, he heard Lochnar shouting deep into the planet’s crust.
“What’s the matter?” Li asked, watching him worriedly.
“Nothing,” Thistledown replied pulling his hands away from the side of his head. “Keep moving. We are almost there.”
“What about Lochnar?” Cha’le asked concernedly. “Is he in trouble? Maybe we should go back.”
“Nothing that he can’t handle,” Thistledown replied tersely. “If we go back right now he will probably kill us.” Thistledown knew that it was more a certainty than a probability.
“I will be just as happy without him,” Lendel muttered from where he was, bringing up the rear.
Thistledown led them over to a small game trail that brought them off the South Road and into a thicket of brambles. “Follow me,” he commanded over his shoulder before disappearing into the seemingly solid wall of brambles.
The three of them looked at each other silently for a moment before following. As Lendel walked through behind them, the wall of brambles disappeared to leave an open clearing.
---
The mid-morning sunlight streamed through the trees and onto the field that surrounded the cottage. Celdic sat on the small step in the doorway, quietly organizing his thoughts. He knew Selindria was keeping something from him. He had a knack for knowing when someone was lying, something you had to learn quickly when you had a sister like Cha’le. Celdic thought about some of the revelations that Selindria had told Jalorm and him. Is it really possible that my mother and father are not who I thought they were? Celdic wondered. After the last two days, I would believe anything I suppose.
Terrance returned shortly after Selindria finished talking to the two youths. Thistledown was nowhere to be seen, however. When Celdic asked where he went, Terrance told him that he was going to a short reunion, something that seemed to greatly amuse Terrance, if the twinkle in his eyes was any guide. He told him they would talk later, after he had talked alone with Selindria. Celdic praised the luck that had saved him from that meeting. Selindria was not what Celdic thought of as an angry person, just very overprotective where her students were concerned.