Lyrec (11 page)

Faubus stood. “No, sir. And—and that’s just the tack I’ve taken thus far.”

Ronnæm murmured, “You are wise beyond your years.”

Cheybal ignored him. “Tell that to your men, captain. And choose your party with care.”

“I will, sir.”

“Also, I want you to assign a second group to ride a patrol along the Tasurlak border.”

“Tasurlak?”

“If the Kobachs are innocent, then consider who could be responsible. Surely not our ally, Novalok. Ladomirus? For all his intrigues, he could hardly assemble a sufficient force that far north and go unnoticed. So we have two apparent choices. The first is the eastern border, the mountains before Tasurlak. A circumspect army could prowl there unnoticed I believe. The second choice is the forest itself.”
 
Ronnæm was nodding; Cheybal congratulated himself and went on, “While you are billeted in Ukobachia, captain, I want you to take some men into Boreshum and have them scour it for signs of encampment or habitation of any sort.”

Faubus fidgeted. He glanced warily at Ronnæm, but the old king was lost in thought, still nodding. “Sir,” he said finally to Cheybal, “that might be the most difficult task of all.”

“How so?”

“The Kobachs claim the forest is haunted.”

Cheybal started to condemn the notion, but the words caught in his throat. He saw suddenly a room in his family’s home in Cajia: the chairs, stools, the rug, a fire; the family grouped there, discussing quietly his uncle’s unfortunate death. Cheybal had been nine. He sat nearest the fire. Something brushed his shoulder and he looked up to see his uncle’s ghost pass him as it walked out of the fireplace, through the group that had fallen deathly still and silent, and straight into the closed door opposite. His first and only ghost—but one was enough.

He said to Faubus, “The notions of the Kobachs need not concern us. The forest has to be searched.” Faubus still seemed uncomfortable. “Is there something more?”

“Ah…no, sir. I’ll go now.” He turned toward the door.
 

“Captain. If there is something to be said…”
 

Faubus lowered his head, mumbled something indistinct, then turned. “I thought I saw a ghost there,” he said to the door.

“You thought?”

“I…thought. Yes.”

“Whose ghost did you see? The King’s?” Ronnæm s head jerked up.

“No, commander,” answered Faubus. “I—I don’t know whose ghost. It was a figure in a hooded robe. Like the oracle at Spern, only the robe was…peculiar, white—I can’t explain it. The face was hidden all the time, in shadows.”

“What did this ghost do?”
His uncle, stepping out of the fire.
 

“It stood and watched us from the forest.”

“How do you know it was watching you if its face was hidden?”
 

“That was my impression. I could feel it looking at me like I know that you’re looking at me now. If I left right now—with all due respect—I would know that you had watched me leave. And the opinion of being watched wasn’t mine alone.” He glanced sidelong at Ronnæm, a look of accusation.

The look gave him minimal revenge upon the old king, and Cheybal noted that the young captain might yet develop into a verbal contender. “In that case, Faubus, I want that forest gone through all the more. Find that white-robed figure or the reason for its presence. A robe may not be a ghost, but it’s certainly somebody. Find anyone or anything that dwells out of place in that forest. Cut down every tree if necessary, but find me the answer.” He then quickly dismissed him.

As the door closed, Ronnæm faced him fully. “Well, we all know where we are standing now, don’t we?”

“I knew where I stood before this. Didn’t you?”

The old king’s mouth pinched tight for a moment. “I hope I haven’t interfered here, commander. I know the task of kingship weighs heavily on those not trained for it. I hope that you will remember I offer you my assistance should the burden become too great. My credentials speak for themselves.”

Cheybal cursed him when he had gone and was mortified by the act. He had no reason to bear malice against Ronnæm. But there was something in the man that nettled him, and right now Cheybal had no patience for bickering. Yes, the burden of kingship did weigh heavily. Such petty squabbles! For a chance to lead a small armed force to his own village, Ronnæm had maneuvered as if vying for a country. Cheybal wondered how Dekür had ever moved the old man out of Atlarma. He could not recall. Perhaps he had never known. He walked heavily back to the window.

Below, the same two guards as before stood conversing in the middle of the rampart.

Cheybal leaned out of the window. “You men there!” They both started in surprise, raised their heads. “That’s right. Up here. Both of you stop idling or I’ll have you scraping moss off the walls with your teeth!” He withdrew back into his room and began to pace. His fingertips flicked against his thumb.

Kobachs. Ghosts. And whispers of violence, possibly even of war.

All on his head; all to be transferred to a child. Ronnæm could dominate the boy, push him into bloody decisions, and even break apart the country he himself had assembled.

Perhaps he had been too quick in his judgment. Maybe he should have let Ronnæm lead the armed party back to Ukobachia—if only to get rid of him. He would have to decide that before Faubus reported back to him. In the meantime he was expected to sit here and judge trifles as if nothing extraordinary had occurred. He slapped the side of the table in an explosion of frustration. The container of ink tipped onto its side. Thick black fluid poured out across the table. Cheybal looked about for a cloth or blank sheet of vellum. There was none.

He stood and pressed his hands into his armpits as the ink dribbled slowly down and spattered on the floor.

*****

The low sun cast Lyrec’s shadow the length of the rope that stretched out before him like a lifeline. If that was his destiny, he did not have to look far to see the abrupt end to his future. Every few steps he stumbled and the rope jerked taut and pulled him forward again. His wrists were swollen and raw, the skin had been chafed away long ago. Marsh gnats swarmed like a simmering black bandage over each wound. Both hands were swollen. The ground had become spongy hours before, and there was a smell of sulphur in the air. His boots were sodden and his feet slipped within them at each step. His legs ached from maintaining balance.

At times throughout the day, he had fallen into fevered fantasies in which he became his original self who merely observed the plight of this unfortunate humanoid. At any moment he would withdraw from this world and return to his homeworld of splashed crystal and faceted blue sun.

He drifted into a dream where his body swelled and changed until it was colors and filaments within the confines of the globular
crex
. He thought then of Elystroya and began to weep, though he was unaware of doing so or of the odd looks the soldiers ahead gave him. He pretended to unite with her again and to tell her of all the wondrous worlds he had seen. Their membranes joined and they became one creature, sharing all consciousness.

But as he spoke to her, the lies disintegrated and he found himself telling her the truth: He had found no such living worlds except for this one where he had been beaten and tied and dragged behind an animal. The other worlds had been dead or dying, the creatures who had once populated them obliterated, and he was powerless to undo the destruction. The vision of Elystroya broke apart in darkness.

He remembered Caudel then. Caudel, of a race of tall, spindly humanoids not unlike these but having hard shell-like patches over their bodies. Caudel, the last of his kind, lying in the last hour of his life upon an asteroid of his former world. They found him, Lyrec and Borregad, before the final wisps of atmosphere drifted away. And, as Caudel died, they lived inside his thoughts and saw his world reassemble to be destroyed again; saw gods take form and descend from the skies with armies of nightmarish things out of legend. The war began. War. Had Caudel been risible then, he would have mocked the term—it hadn’t been war, it had been genocide. People of his race devoured one another in chain reactions of animal violence, ripping one another apart into a stew of unrecognizable flesh. The gods, having marshaled all sides to their deaths, did nothing but watch. The demonic armies hovered above the fields of battle like seabirds awaiting the leap of a fish. Their world trembled and the ground opened up. Mountains collapsed to be thrown back into the sky by massive explosions as the molten core of the world blasted to the surface. The entire planet burst apart, though it had already died. Only Caudel remained, on a chunk of rock whose atmosphere fell away like a shroud from a corpse, and, moments later, he, too, was gone. Lyrec and Borregad left him, carrying with them his last impressions of the war—a memory of the many gods rising up, merging, individuating into a new being who somehow resorbed the wasted energies of the battles and grew with the deaths. It was this being who had destroyed their world. No gods had ever been there at all. This Caudel had known in his heart, though how he knew remained a mystery to him. He despaired at how easily his race had been tricked, how quickly they had taken arms and gone to battle for no reason. This most awful of memories did not die with him. Lyrec carried it with him now, knowing as he did that the ghoulish being had been Miradomon.

Soon a god would descend from the skies into this world—or had he done so already? From Caudel they had learned something of Miradomon’s method—but that was not enough for them to know where next to look for him.

It hardly mattered now, Lyrec thought. He, the great survivor of an extinct race, had been reduced to the level of these creatures—an animal, a killer. The notion made him close his eyes and hang his head.

He would never find Miradomon. Elystroya would never be avenged.

In his misery, he lagged behind. The rope jerked tight, snapping him out of his self-pitying dream and into a reality of raw-ripped flesh. The captain, feeling the sudden tension on the rope, began to laugh and looked over his shoulder with cruel joy. Lyrec concentrated on hating that man, promised himself one more death before they slew him—then was repelled by the desire. He had indeed become human. The mind of the minstrel tainted his every thought and word and deed. The great serene being he had once been was gone, corrupted. It had stayed on the other side of that monstrous hole that had opened between his dead homeworld and an infinity of universes where Miradomon walked a chain of realities in which he didn’t belong, erasing all matter, all life, before moving to the next. Lyrec wanted to know why, but knew now with leaden certainty that he would never find out.

*****

Not far behind him, a large black feline listened to these thoughts and considered that his friend had much to learn about accepting change. Such introspection was fruitless and destructive. What did he have to complain about, anyway? Things could have been far worse for him.

He could have been a cat.

Chapter 8.

The patterned floors in the outer galleries of the temple of Chagri had been swept earlier in the day. The colored tiles were large and smooth, and feet walking across them made a soft, padding sound. But in the central chamber, around the altar, the floor was strewn with large pebbles. It was supposed to be painful to approach the war god. Slyur hated the uncomfortable stones under his own feet, and the way that every movement, every shift of weight from one foot to the other, ground the stones into the tiles with a noise that seemed to scrape at his very bones.

He made the family wait in the antechamber while he went alone into the altar room; even so, he could hear them shifting their stances nervously, scared, helplessly handing themselves over to the powers of a god—an incomprehensible god to them, he was sure. Right then he hated them for their stupid, absolute trust, which he lacked.

In the center of the room, flanked by torches, the altar stood at the top of three steps. It was a twice life-size statue of Chagri carved from the purest white
chidsist
, what must have been the largest block ever found. The figure of the god held its shield like an enormous inverted bowl in its hands. Filled with a small pool of water, the shield acted as the altar stone.

Slyur cast a queasy glance at the statue and noted as he had often done that its expression lacked the loathsome sneer that perpetually adorned the god in person. Nevertheless, the Hespet moved about beneath it with his body hunched up as if the statue were glaring down at him and might at any moment castigate him. He climbed the three steps and looked down into the shield. He dipped his hands into the dark water. This act was supposed to grant one the power of decision—another of Chagri’s attested attributes: God of Decisiveness. Slyur admitted to a mild hope that some kind of strength would be imparted to him—strength of will most of all. Just once he wanted to make his own decisions and not have circumstance or some demonic being forcing him to turn this way and that. His life was not his own, but he did not truly expect to gain power over it from the very being who at present manipulated him.

He half-consciously muttered an invocation, then a few prayers by rote. He shook his hands out of the water. It rippled across the bowl of the shield. The reflection of the god’s face from above took on a series of cruel smiles. The eyes glowed orange for a moment. Slyur looked up in terror.

No. It had only been the torches reflecting in the polished convex eyes. A trick of light.

Slyur wiped his hands on his robes as he returned down the steps. Arriving in the antechamber again, he dismissed the attending priests, who bowed out of the room and went about their various assigned duties. He had told them nothing of what was happening here, and he was certain they would all go off and gossip about it. The large, moist eyes of the child’s father drew Slyur’s attention. He motioned the farmer to enter the altar room with him, but could not help looking at the girl again, lying unconscious on a cover one of the priests had thrown down for her. Her sister watched him warily, knowingly. Turning away, he practically shoved the farmer through the arch. They crunched to a halt at the base of the three steps. The farmer stood crouched as if expecting a whipping and would not look at the statue.