A Flame in Hali (25 page)

The soup was barely more than grain boiled into thin gruel, with perhaps a little wild onion, but it warmed Eduin’s stomach. He held the wooden bowl to Saravio’s mouth for him to drink.

One of the men watched him break off pieces of bread and urge Saravio to eat. “Yesh, you got to look out for youse selves,” the man said, the words distorted by the gaps in his teeth. His companion grunted and poked the fire with a stick.

“How do you find work here?” Eduin kept his tone casual.

As the two men explained the process of hiring and the best places to find various kinds of work, one of them drew out a leather flask. When he pulled out the stopper, Eduin caught a whiff of crude hard cider. The man took a swig and offered it around. Saravio gave no indication he’d seen it, but Eduin shook his head. One drink would surely lead to another, and he knew himself well enough to be certain he would find some way of getting thoroughly drunk and staying that way. His father’s command throbbed between his temples, his empty belly cramped, and he recoiled at the smells of unwashed bodies and despair, the hard light in the eyes of the men.

“Can’t hold it?” one of the men snickered, but the other narrowed his eyes.

“Ghostweed more to your liking, eh?”

Again, Eduin shook his head. Like most
laran-
Gifted, he had a horror of the mind-altering weed. “No, I just need to keep my wits about me.”

“If you had youse wits about you,” the second man said with a nasty grimace, “you wouldn’t be here to begin with, eh?”

With that, the talk turned to life in the outlying encampments. The collection of tents and huts outside the walls of Robardin’s Fort afforded shelter for a succession of travelers every summer. Most of these were wanderers like the two men, broken soldiers, farmers or herders displaced by war. Once there had been only a few vagrants, and then only in the mildest weather. They had been housed within the Fort. In recent years, however, their numbers had swelled to the point that there was not enough work or housing. Those who could, moved on. Others ended up facedown in the river.

“Eh, but you’ll make it all right, soon as you get youse bearings,” said the first man. “Here now, you bed down next to the fire and we’ll go out tomorrow morning to the hiring place.”

Weary past argument, Eduin unrolled his blanket and helped Saravio to do the same. Wrapped in the coarse wool, near enough to the dying embers to catch a glow of warmth, he fell asleep.

In his dreams, he swerved and darted down the mazework of alleyways. They should have been familiar, but he could not make out his way. He searched for landmarks, but found none, only unexpected dead ends, walls barring his way. The faster he ran, the greater his feeling of dread.

Kill!
came his father’s voice, no longer a whisper but a whip crack.
K-k-kill them all!

Behind him, a dark shape like a woman in a hooded cape condensed from the cloud-choked sky. Eduin dared not take his eyes from the narrow lane ahead. He strained for more speed, dodging this way and that. With a hiss, a rope dropped across his shoulders. The next instant, it tightened around his neck. He jerked to a halt, clawing at the noose. He thrashed about, struggling for air—

Eduin’s eyes jolted open. A thin sharp edge of metal pressed into his throat. Any movement would drive it deeper into his flesh. By the dim light of a single moon, he glimpsed one of the men bending over him. Instinct froze him.

“There’s nothing here,” came the voice of the second man, and the muffled sound of a pack being shaken. “Not worth a single
reis
.”

The first man cursed. He seemed not to realize Eduin was awake. “We’ll have to finish them off, anyway.”

Eduin gathered himself. He was no fighter, even if he had not been weakened by hunger on the long days on the road. But he was not defenseless; no one trained at Arilinn was. He focused his thoughts,
reaching
for the other man’s mind, the nerves that would loosen his grip—

Pain lashed at him, as if the skin had been flayed from his body and the oozing flesh rubbed in salt. His vision went white and the muscles of his chest locked in spasm, so that he could not draw a breath.

With a shriek, the man hurled himself backward. The knife went skittering into the dust. A short distance away, the other man howled like an animal.

Laran
attack!

Saravio, perhaps roused by Eduin’s nightmare, had lashed out with all the power of his Gift. The psychic projection of Rumail’s compulsion spell—to kill—had blasted the tiny camp.

Eduin slammed his barriers into place, as hard and tight as he could. From the day he arrived at Arilinn, he had shielded his innermost thoughts from the most powerful
leronyn
on Darkover. The years of hiding in exile had only toughened his ability to create an unbreachable wall around his own mind.

The pain vanished instantly. He caught his breath. In the dim light of moon and embers from the fire, he saw Saravio sitting up, a look of mingled triumph and bewilderment on his face.

One of their assailants, the man with the knife, lay unconscious. The other had curled into a fetal ball, moaning.

Eduin knew well how
laran
could affect the vulnerable. During the siege of Hestral Tower, he had projected illusions into the minds of the enemy soldiers. Driven mad, each had fallen prey to horrific visions drawn from his own worst nightmares. Some, believing themselves possessed or attacked by Zandru’s demons, had fallen on their swords or hacked off their own legs. For the first time, Eduin began to realize what he had done.

Tentatively, Eduin lowered his mental barriers. Saravio had broken off his attack. It should be safe enough to monitor the two victims. Eduin performed a quick scan of their bodies, looking for physical injury. As he expected, he found none. Saravio had not caused their hearts to stop or their internal organs to rupture.

Eduin searched for damage to their brains. There, in the deep primitive structures that governed primal emotions, he spotted ugly red auric fields streaked with black and purple.

Lord of Light, Lady of Darkness!
Without meaning to, Eduin called upon Aldones and Avarra.

Saravio had blasted the pain centers of each man’s brain with enough force to create a cataclysmic wrenching of their life energies. The tumult of raging colors enlarged, reaching toward other areas, the nerve centers for regulation of breath and heart beat, of sleeping and waking.

“What have you done?” Eduin cried.

“I—I don’t know what you mean. Eduin, what is wrong with these men? Have they fallen sick from bad food? Or do they carry the plague?” Saravio sounded genuinely confused. His thoughts, what Eduin could sense of them, reflected only concern.

“Whatever you did to them, you must reverse it,” Eduin said. “Now, before it is too late!”

Saravio shook his head, his face a pale shadow against the night. “What am I to do? This is beyond even a monitor’s skill.”

A white fireball edged with crimson flared up in the mind of the man with the knife and then collapsed upon itself. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the man’s mental energies fell away to silence. Not all the smiths in Zandru’s Forge could bring him back.

Eduin watched numbly as a similar process consumed the brain of the second man. For long minutes, he sat beside the last dim embers of the cook fire. Saravio rocked back and forth, crooning under his breath. Eduin braced himself, but felt nothing from the other man, other than his fear and sadness. He could not look to Saravio for help. He must decide for both of them what was to be done.

The two would-be murderers were beyond anyone’s help. Eduin did not think they would be missed, especially if they had waylaid other strangers. Certainly, no one in authority in the Fort would come looking for them. If they just disappeared, their neighbors, such as they were, might well assume they had moved on or chosen their next victims unwisely. Which was pretty much, he thought wryly, what had actually happened.

After a time, Saravio roused enough to help Eduin carry the bodies down to the river. The bank was sloped and muddy, laced with water-ferns. The bodies slipped beneath the scummy surface. Even if some fisherman or river scavenger found them the next morning, Eduin thought, there was nothing to show how they had died. In the unlikely event he and Saravio were questioned, they could say that the two men had offered them gruel and a space to sleep, then disappeared in the night. Which was also, in its own way, the truth.

As they slipped and scrambled back up the riverbank, Eduin debated leaving before dawn, at least to another part of the shanty town. In the end, the advantages of the rude shelter and possessions the two men had left behind won out. The cook pot, although thin and battered, had been metal, too valuable to be abandoned.

The next morning, Eduin jerked awake, his nerves scoured raw, his eyes scratchy from lack of sleep, at the first sound of movement in the encampment. Eduin’s fingers closed around the hilt of the knife that was now his. Haze swept the eastern sky, but people were already stirring. The smell of boiling onions came from the next hovel.

No one approached or disturbed them, nor did anyone take any notice of him and Saravio, beyond a stare and a nod, as they made their way to the striped poles in search of that day’s work.

O
ne afternoon, as spring wore into summer, Eduin finished his day’s work and returned to the hovel that was now his home. He clenched half a loaf of bread wrapped in a scrap of cloth against his chest. His other hand made a stiff fist at his side, nails digging into the palms of his hands hard enough to draw blood. He welcomed the physical pain, clasped it to him. It alone was real, not the bone-weary fatigue nor the hunger nor the rows of tents and tumbledown hovels. Not the sour smells, the flat hard light in the eyes of passersby. Not the whispers in his head. Pain. Just pain.

He was almost there. Ahead, near the end of the ramshackle lane was the shed he and Saravio shared with a succession of tinkers and herders who could not afford anything better. The few coins or bits of food in rent eased their own situation, especially on the all-too-frequent days when Saravio could not leave his bed. Eduin concentrated on the familiar sagging contour, the central pole, the ragged panels. Saravio would be there. This night or the next, Eduin would reach that moment when he could not go on, when he had nothing left of will or endurance, and then he would ask Saravio to sing once more. At the thought, his belly quivered and his mouth filled with a sour, stale taste.

He had found refuge in this place, in the dregs and leavings of the trade that flowed along road and river. As one tenday blended into the next, he had sunk even deeper into its dust, until some days he could not remember why he was here and what he must hide from. He had nothing anyone would want, except these secret, shameful moments of pleasure.

That, and the relentless whisper in his mind.

Kill? He had no power to kill, not even himself. His only power was to hold on for one more day, and one more day after that.

Eduin was so tired of struggling against the whispers, so focused on covering the last distance, that he was almost to the hovel before he noticed the brightly-painted caravan drawn up in the field beyond. A slender youth was unhitching a dun cart horse whose sway back and frosted muzzle marked his age, but his coat was glossy and his mane was braided with colored ribbons. A line of Fort women and children, some of them well-dressed, watched the process.

Mingled with the jangle of bells, he caught a lilting melody and the sound of a fiddle. The onlookers moved apart and he saw what they were watching—two women performing an old ballad. The singer was quite young, although no beauty, but with a fresh, pleasant face. She wore a bright green bodice embroidered with straw lilies, open-necked blouse, and gaily striped skirt. A scarf fringed with little bells tied back her dark brown hair. Her sturdy body swayed to the fiddle accompaniment of her older companion, a withered crone in a black dress and shawl.

The music sank into Eduin’s pores. It carried none of the soporific effect of Saravio’s singing, being just an ordinary tune, sweetly sung and lively enough to send toes tapping. The children laughed and the smiles lightened the faces of the audience. If Eduin closed his eyes, he could almost see the common room at Arilinn, where he had first heard this ballad.

Instead of a shanty town and dusty field, walls of pale translucent stone arched gracefully around him. He remembered carpets beneath his feet, cushioned chairs arranged for comfort and intimacy before a massive fieldstone hearth. A girl with hair the color of flame sat on a low stool, her six-fingered hands moving across the strings of a
rryl,
her voice rising and falling. The weariness in his body fell away. He could almost smell the incense added to the fire.

Eduin startled back to the present. His eyes stung. The song ended with a flourish of the girl’s skirts and a scattering of applause. Some of the women threw a coin or two at the feet of the performers. Laughing, the girl gathered them up and folded them into her sash. The old woman had already put away her fiddle and climbed up into the wagon.

“I’m going now,
Tia!
” The boy had finished unharnessing the horse. A muffled voice answered him from the wagon.

“Wait,” the girl said. She leaned into the opened wagon door and drew out a gracefully tapering jar.

“Fill this, will you? And don’t you dare use it for practice,” the girl said, wagging one finger in warning. “Find something unbreakable until you learn to juggle properly.”

Laughing, the boy led the horse toward the riverside. Eduin watched him go. He lingered, drawing out the memory of the music.