City of Torment (4 page)

CHAPTER FOUR The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Near the Ruins of Starmantle Darkness defined the length and breadth of the world, forever. Timeless intervals passed. Ages and epochs, or days and tendays, no consciousness persisted to measure the void’s period. Other worlds were born, matured, grew old, died, and passed away in that interlude. Or had the darkness lasted the duration of an eye-blink? Or somewhere in between… The void’s edges wavered, blurred, and then peeled away. Behind was exposed a pale, misted light. The darkness contracted upon itself, becoming a dome, then a sphere, then a blot as it lifted up and away to nothing. A cloud-shrouded sky of gray, lit with occasional flashes of distant lightning, was revealed. Eyes slowly integrated elements, as if assembling pieces of a puzzle. Concepts of sky, time, and cloud leisurely assembled within a man’s fragmented, subconscious mind. The man’s brow furrowed. A sudden disorientation collapsed his blank observation of the heavens. Where was he? And… Why couldn’t he remember his own name? The man turned his head. Or tried to. Some force resisted. His gaze rotated less than an inch. Scanning with only his eyes, he saw he was surrounded in some cold, unyielding substance. He was caught like a bug in some sort of greenish material. Anger’s flame woke. He tried to suck in a deep breath. He failed�he was completely isolated, apparently, even from air. A sliver of his mind wondered why he hadn’t already suffocated. The greater portion of his attention focused on the crisis at hand. He must break free, or he would die. Whatever had kept him alive prior to this moment was failing. Already, lack of air made dark spots dance on the periphery of his vision. A subconscious instruction surfaced: Shout! Scream a single syllable of concentrated desire with the last of your stale breath, and hope it is enough. The man focused on his diaphragm, then expelled the final vestiges of air from his lungs with an explosive, guttural, “Kihop!” The material surrounding his head shattered like dry adobe struck with a maul. Cool air suddenly caressed his face. He was still caught, but at least he could breathe. He sucked in a long, deep breath, expanding his chest so much that the material surrounding him cracked. He wrenched his body with a violent strength his limbs remembered, even if he did not. Pain knifed through his left shoulder, and the man loosed a surprised yell. His left arm throbbed with a twinge so intense that blackness threatened to rob him of consciousness again. Was it broken? No way to tell while he remained trapped. The man deliberately isolated his left arm while thrusting with his legs and remaining arm. It was difficult to accomplish, and agony spiked through his body once more. What options did he have? He rested a moment, considering. The problem of his imperfect memory swam once more to front and center. It was maddening. He had to get free! He wrenched his body again, sucking in his breath against the hurt. And again. Each time he tensed and thrust with his arms and legs, he gained a sliver of additional clearance. Each effort was accompanied with a sound not unlike splintering ice. With unflappable determination, the man struggled in the grip of the strange substance. When his right arm broke through, extricating himself from the remaining brittle, honeycomb-like stuff suddenly seemed an actual possibility instead of a wild hope. Finally, the man wrenched completely free. A powder of greenish material still clung to his body. He examined his erstwhile prison, cradling his left arm in his right. He’d been encrusted in a cocoon-like material thrust from the earth. It wasn’t mineral, or at least, if it was, it was particularly brittle. The portion from which he’d freed himself was a hollow space, still partly molded to the shape of his body. The man looked around and saw he stood on a grassy plain. Here and there, other mineral encrustations broke to the surface, rising only a few feet in most cases. A few spires were larger, and reached dozens of feet into the morning light. Between the strange outcrops, prairie grass waved to the western horizon. A forest, apparently partly dead of some blight, lay to the south. Skeletons of trees still remained mostly vertical, though newer growth was thick beneath the dead canopy. An ocean of saplings reached up through old, dry underbrush. The man was surprised a wildfire hadn’t cleared out the detritus already. Rain and lightning seemed particularly thick in that direction. He wondered if he would witness a lightning strike touch off a blaze even as he watched. He returned his gaze to the strange outcrops nearer at hand. At first the man thought the extrusions must be quite old. He saw dozens of instances where greenish spires had cracked and collapsed. Other outcrops, like the one he’d just emerged from, had weathered and broken into fragments. Of course, as brittle as the mass he had emerged from had proved, perhaps the extrusions were not actually that old, in the geological sense. He stood in place and slowly rotated, looking for something or someone recognizable. His own name seemed just on the tip of his tongue… but he couldn’t dredge it up. He looked east to the line of the horizon. Something in the texture of the landscape, the color of the sky, a scent in the air seemed familiar… Bumps prickled across his arms and back as if with a chill. Something terrible had happened there. A monstrous calamity� The man suddenly remembered. Raidon Kane remembered. His breath came harsh. His eyes tried to spin in his skull. Nausea threatened to bend him over. Raidon clapped his hands to his brow, the pain in his left elbow nothing in that moment. The world had ended. How could he have forgotten? The fire. The pillar of blue fire had reached up over the horizon. He saw again the pillar’s fat crown of molten sapphire, tumbling and boiling upward. Closing his eyes merely brought the memory into sharper focus. And the blast! That awful, land-erasing storm front that had swept out from the burning spire. He remembered horrors: His horse, stumbling and disappearing in the azure turbulence. The woman who’d grown wings of fire, only to be incinerated. The awful, twining hair pulling a goblin’s head along the ground� His amulet! It had burned away. The wind tousled his hair, bringing scents of spring flowers and grass. “By the Ten Tenants, have I gone insane?” bellowed Raidon, his voice hoarse. He closed his eyes. He calmed his breathing. A monk of Xiang Temple did not comport himself thusly. Raidon searched for his mental regimen. He was a master of meditation. Images of a pillar of blue fire could not haunt him if he did not wish it. He visualized his legs, his arms, his head, and that immaterial part of himself that recognized itself as his working mind. He visualized his thoughts as lines of energy. Normally serene arcs, now they were tangled and disordered. His confusion was a vibrating knot, a nest of snakes, preventing him from achieving clarity. He imagined an unseen force smoothing those lines, untying the knot, releasing the hissing snakes. Slowly, his higher will overcame his body’s adrenal turmoil. Tension leaked from his shoulders, and an incipient headache faded. Such was the training of Xiang Temple. Like all who graduated from that monastery in Telflamm, Raidon was a master of his own body. His techniques for visualization allowed him to control natural processes within himself normally beyond conscious control. He looked deeper, and saw where other lines, the lines representing his wholeness of body, were strained and even broken in the vicinity of his left elbow. He applied his focused clarity to the severed lines. The snapped cords of visualized energy merged, fused, and relaxed. The pain in his shoulder faded. He could see all the lines representing himself, vibrating with vitality, forming a shape in three directions: breadth, width, and height. Furrowing his brow, the monk began tracing his identity lines in the fourth direction, in time. Perhaps he could discover some clue as to what had happened to him. An oddity in the wire-frame model of his own body snatched his complete attention. A pulse of a color he couldn’t describe slowly glimmered across his upper torso. Something blue, like the ember of some slumbering fire. Raidon opened his eyes and looked down at his chest. His shirt, silk jacket, and overcoat were mere tatters, burned away, revealing a broad tattoo etched into his flesh. Overlapping inscriptions in a lost language, tiny and crabbed, radiated outward from the symbol, like stylized flames drawn around the image of a tree. It was the Cerulean Sign from his destroyed amulet�now scribed on him! How could that be? He ran a hand across the tattoo. The image possessed a palpable texture on his skin. It was real. The vision of his amulet consumed in blue fire assaulted him. He recalled in those final moments how the symbol itself had persisted, as if liberated, while the substance on which it was inscribed dissolved. He had reached toward the crumbling amulet, ached for it… and the Sign had flashed into him. That was the very last thing he recalled, try as he might. A tracery of the Cerulean Sign decorated his flesh. Had the reality-smearing blue fire transferred it from his amulet to his body? Why… how? And then, having so marked him, sealed him within a pillar of brittle mineral? It made no sense. “Too many unknowns vex me,” he verbalized, then he coughed. His throat was sandpaper, unused to speech. He swallowed, shook his head. Spinning unsupported scenarios based on guesswork would avail him nothing except the creation of unwarranted assumptions. To comprehend what had happened, how he had survived, and how much time had passed since the blue fire storm, he would have to investigate. He turned east toward Starmantle and fell into a light run. Unless he was misplaced in space too, it shouldn’t take him too long to reach the port city, or what remained of it in the aftermath of the blue fire. As a monk initiate of Xiang Temple, and exemplar of its code, few things could long eclipse his extravagant martial prowess and conditioning, even long miles of travel. A false comfort? Perhaps. The brittle extrusions grew thicker the farther he traveled. Once, he saw a humanoid shape silhouetted in a large, green mineral outcrop. He stopped, thinking perhaps he’d discovered some other prisoner held timeless within, just as he had been. It was a woman, but one whose flesh was half burned away. An expression of pure agony made her face a demonic mask. She was completely encased in the extruded, greenish sap. If the woman in the amber-like stuff was still alive, but held in a strange stasis, it would be cruel beyond words to release her to suffer the pain of her burnt flesh. Raidon turned away, his expression tight. He resumed his eastward run. He didn’t investigate any other half-glimpsed shapes preserved in green. **** The monk reached the edge of Starmantle, or at least the hints of its foundations. The city itself was no more. Starmantle was gone, replaced with a madman’s fancy. The emerald outcrops, akin to the one he’d emerged from, were thicker than ever as he approached the ruins. Perhaps the blasted city was their locus and origin? No longer brittle like the one that had trapped him, these were gemstone hard. Worse, this close to the city, each hummed a single, flutelike note. In sum, thousands of spires produced atonal melodies that clawed at Raidon’s ears. Between the spires gaped fissures that harbored a flickering blue glow, the same blue he recalled from the original firestorm. Raidon backpedaled a dozen yards. Obsidian masses slowly drifted on the open ground between spires and ravines. In shape they were like irregular chunks of black stone. A palpable animosity emanated from them. Whether merely animate or actually alive, Raidon couldn’t tell with the distance. Not that he particularly wanted to know. His eyes ached as they scanned the insane vista. He blinked and turned away. He would find no answers here. But Starmantle’s skyline tugged at his thoughts, unearthing a memory of his daughter, Ailyn. “Oh,” he gasped. The shock of his awakening had robbed him of why he’d set forth from Starmantle… how long ago? A mortal fear for Ailyn’s safety squeezed all the breath out of his chest. “I must go to Nathlekh,” he whispered. A screech snatched his attention back to the demolished city. A humanoid figure bounded up from the nearest blue-burning fissure. Three more gibbering figures appeared over the ravine’s lip as the first saw Raidon. It gabbled something that almost sounded like, “I told you I smelled supper,” and charged. It was naked. Its flesh was drawn tightly over its bones. A carnivore’s sharp teeth clacked in its mouth, and eyes like hot coals fixed on Raidon, communicating a ravenous appetite so pure it was nearly mystical. A ghoul? A seam on the charging creature’s stomach opened, revealing a gaping, toothed cavity. A tentacle-like tongue emerged from the abdominal mouth, flicking like a purple flame. It was not a ghoul, or at least not completely. It was something aberrant. As Raidon fell into the left guarding stance, unexpected coolness tickled his chest. A quick glance down revealed the symbol upon his chest flickering with empyreal flame. Surprise ambushed him, nearly distracting him from heeding his attacker. The creature was upon him. Melting from guarding stance to offensive stance, Raidon caught a clawing strike with his left hand, pulled the arm diagonally forward and down, and delivered a hammer blow to the back of the creature’s elbow with his right fist. The ghoul-like monster screamed with both mouths. Its right arm now flexed loosely from the elbow, the joint shattered. The monster’s two compatriots rapidly approached. Their abdominal maws drooled and gibbered like the first’s. Raidon retained his hold on his foe’s broken arm. He twisted his body around, tripping the creature with a foot, and hurled its body into the oncoming attackers. One of the two newcomers was slow to dodge Raidon’s contrived missile. It stumbled and went down in a tangle of limbs. They began to writhe and thrash, clawing and biting each other. The final creature paused. Its eyes gleamed as it studied the monk. Blood, not its own, darkened its cheeks and chin. Its lower, abdominal mouth chomped and writhed, and grinding noises issued from it. Raidon glimpsed something white and red inside being chewed. “Hunger does not rule me as it does my brothers,” the creature crooned in an awful, piping tenor. “I just ate.” It could speak! Could it explain what had occurred? His normal rule of avoiding all interaction with abominations was suborned by his need to learn. Raidon clenched his fists
and demanded, “What happened here?” The creature cocked its head and blinked. It was obviously taken aback by its prey’s lack of fear. It responded, “We have selected you to be our meal.” “No, no. Tell me, what happened to Starmantle? How much time has passed since the blue fire came? I woke encased in�” The creature tittered, “You are soft in the brain? Scream and run, as food should. Trouble me not with memories of the Spellplague!” “Spellplague? What is that?” The creature growled, turned, and swept its arm past the grappling, biting forms of its “brothers” to Starmantle’s skyline. “The Spellplague was the blue fire that came when the Weave failed. Pockets of it still live here. It is a fire that eats all things. Like a ghoul!” It wheezed in something like laughter. “A blue fire that eats?” prompted Raidon. He remembered his compatriots and stones alike burning away in the fiery blast that preceded his long darkness. “Some things the blue fire consumed, leaving nothing behind. Other things, it ate, then spat back, different than before… plaguechanged.” Raidon took in the warped landscape and the warped creature. He asked, “Is that what happened to you?” Raidon gestured at the creature’s abdominal maw. It tittered again. “Maybe… maybe not,” it replied. It huffed with amusement as if recalling a funny story, but this one it refrained from sharing. Then the ghoul pointed at Raidon’s bare chest. “But you! You are spellscarred, yes? You hold back some trick to surprise me?” “What are you talking about?” The image of the firestorm branding him with the Cerulean Sign swam before Raidon’s inner eye. The coolness on his chest increased. It wasn’t painful�it was more like the feeling when the sun moves behind a cloud… or like the coolness of his amulet when it detected enemies it was forged to destroy. The creature tittered, then said, “Spellscarred or not, you are made of meat. It wouldn’t do to let a sack of blood and meat wander off un-tasted.” The creature lunged. The monk reflexively extended one leg in a buffer-kick intended to keep his opponent at bay long enough for Raidon to follow up with a real attack. He had only a moment to understand his mistake when his foot plunged directly into the gaping, abdominal mouth. The mouth began to chew. Pain, the worst he’d ever experienced, exploded up his leg. He nearly cried out. Raidon jerked savagely, trying to retract his foot. The abdominal maw’s tentacle-tongue whipped up around his calf, holding him fast. The white teeth within the cavity mashed and clacked and red fluid bubbled and spilled forth. Was that all his blood? The ghoul’s head snapped forward, its real mouth hardly any less horrid than the one trapping the monk’s foot. It struck at Raidon’s throat. The monk’s rising uppercut smashed teeth and jolted the creature’s head away. Raidon wouldn’t be overcome so easily. The creature savagely jerked on his leg with its clutching tentacle, pulling his leg farther into its abdominal cavity. His foot, calf, knee, and lower thigh… how could it be? His whole lower leg was inside the thing, and the questing tentacle began to wrap around his thigh. More reddish fluid spilled forth in thin, steaming rivulets. How could his foot and calf fit inside the gaunt monster? Had it bitten off his lower leg? Queasiness clawed at Raidon’s focus. Agony poured up his nerves, making his arms quiver and his head ring. Would it hurt so abominably if his leg were already unattached? He desperately hoped the ghoul was bigger on the inside than its shape suggested. The chill on Raidon’s chest intensified. Without quite knowing why, he laid his left palm across the symbol blazoned there. A snap and contact was made. Cerulean energy poured into him. It was the energy his amulet once lent him in the presence of aberrations. A sky blue gleam shone from his body. It seemed the Cerulean Sign etched on his chest was more than a mere tattoo. It was alive with the old power of his amulet. His touch awakened it. The symbol emanated the cleansing light he had once been able to invoke from his destroyed amulet. The Sign embodied the purity of the natural world. It was anathema to aberrations. The ghoul’s eyes widened as its horrible, abdominal tongue retracted. The cavity spat Raidon’s leg out with such force that he fell to the ground. His foot remained attached. “Thank Xiang,” muttered Raidon. The thing’s second mouth was bigger on the inside than the outside. But strips of skin were absent from his extremity, dissolved away as if by acid, revealing red and oozing muscle. It was the most serious wound Raidon had ever received. But his mind passed over that particular realization to consider what he’d just invoked, unaided. He had become his amulet. The energy pouring “into” him issued from him. Raidon grasped his focus, visualizing his mind and body again as lines of flashing energy. The glimmer of blue he had earlier observed blazed cerulean at its heart. At its edges, it burned the wilder, darker blue hue of the Spellplague. Had the firestorm he’d survived… had it infused him with his amulet’s power? If so, why was its cerulean color contaminated� The ghoul-thing smashed into him, bearing him to the ground. Raidon blinked away his untimely retrospection too late. The creature’s claws and both mouths tore at his flesh. It panted, “I don’t like your taste. Maybe you’ll taste better dead.” A thumb to the creature’s eye and a knee to its side did little to dislodge the ghoul. A crushing elbow directly to the creature’s throat cut short its constant, maddening titter. That blow would have killed a mortal man outright. The ghoul-thing was undead, and its nerves did not communicate messages of pain. Raidon struggled in its grasp, his breath coming quicker. The monk’s deep knowledge of how to attack vital areas, like pressure points, joints, and organs, was almost useless against the walking dead. He squirmed right, trying get out from under the crushing weight, then shucked left, hoping to fake out the creature. The ghoul’s tongue-tentacle held the scrabbling monk fast. Raidon was pinned on his back. The creature’s disgusting, abdominal jaws gave it an unholy advantage, and the pain in his leg was slipping more and more into his consciousness, threatening to cripple his ability to seize the initiative. Even as he inched one hand toward the sign on his chest, the ghoul managed to grab his wrist. It quickly snatched his other wrist too. Its claws bit painfully into his palms. It tittered, “No, you mustn’t touch! Hold still, now, while I nibble the skin from your face.” Raidon’s focus faltered. Concentrate! Hold onto your calm, or you are lost, he commanded his wavering discipline. But what chance did he have if he could not reach the symbol? If I have the power of my amulet, what need have I to touch it to trigger it? Wasn’t he always in contact with it, since it was part of him? He concentrated on the cool point above his heart. The symbol of a dead order. The Cerulean Sign. He imagined himself touching it with a tendril of thought. The Sign was a metaphor, an emblem that served as a door, a door Raidon visualized himself swinging wide, revealing wonders beyond… The Sign on his chest pulsed. Shafts of cerulean light speared heavenward. Where the light touched the aberration, it howled. Pain was no longer beyond its ability to sense. The ghoul’s abdominal tongue retracted, and it writhed and fell away from Raidon. The light from the Sign faded. The monk staggered to his feet, shaking and bleeding. Zai zi, he was sorely hurt! If he didn’t tend to his raw foot and lower calf soon, he’d lose his leg, then soon enough his life. The ghoul remained prone, writhing and drooling without regard to its environment. Its senses were overloaded, maybe burned out. He’d seen a similar response many times during his decade of abomination hunting. The Sign’s mere manifestation affected weaker aberrations just so. The most powerful aberrations were less affected. Lucky these were not the most potent of their kind… A flicker of movement brought Raidon’s attention up and back. The ghoul-thing’s two compatriots had ceased their rivalry. They stared at Raidon and the glowing symbol on his chest with calculating and fearful eyes. Despite their trepidation, they advanced. They saw the Sign and obviously recognized its potential to eradicate them, but they could also smell his blood. Raidon supposed that smell pierced their sense of self-preservation. For these ghoul-monstrosities, hunger was a drive purer and fiercer than fear. They charged. The monk cried, “Husks of abominable hunger, see the Cerulean Sign!” His chest blazed anew with sky blue light. Shafts of radiance flashed like blades from his body to lance the attackers. One of the ghouls sidestepped the glow, but the other ran headlong into the brilliance. Its eyes shuttered in pain as the purifying radiance dazzled it. It tripped and fell, mewling. The second ghoul, oblivious of its “brother’s” fate, reached him. A claw slipped past Raidon’s shielding forearm, slashing directly across the symbol tattooed on his chest. The Sign’s radiance instantly failed. Raidon fell back, holding his focus. He released a flurry of fierce kicks to the ghoul’s knees even as it clawed and tentacle-lashed him. While the creature couldn’t feel physical pain, its body could be broken with sufficient force. Unfortunately, he couldn’t kick with his ravaged leg. Simultaneously, he shuffled left as he dodged, slipped, and blocked the ghoul’s assaults. His adversary was too intent on sinking its teeth into Raidon to worry about the terrain. When the ghoul was in position, Raidon feinted, and then pushed. It tripped backward over the ghoul who had nearly bitten off the monk’s leg, who was just rising from its dazed fall. Raidon took advantage of the reprieve to glance down at his chest. A bloody stripe bisected the symbol blazoned there. He closed his eyes and dragged forward his healing visualization yet again. There was no time to deal with his foot�but that was the lesser issue now. He concentrated on his upper body. He saw the partially severed lines of his symbol within the greater model of his own body. In a manner no different from the method he used to heal other minor hurts, he imagined the severed lines growing closer, bridging the gap, and rediscovering the connection just severed. Coolness returned to his chest. Not as strongly as before, but enough. Raidon’s eyes opened. His opponents were already on their feet and advancing. He pulsed with cerulean light once more. Both creatures screamed when the light touched them. This last radiance proved too much for them. Shrieking and crying, they retreated backward toward the gates of Starmantle. His reserves were exhausted. He turned his back on a chilling, rain-laden wind from the north. He looked south toward Gulthmere Forest. Black smoke furled into the sky, and he caught a whiff of burning pine. The already blasted forest was burning, again. Without a word, Raidon hobbled west. He wondered which would be the agent of his death: his wound, pursuing Starmantle ghouls, fire, or freezing rain?