Blood Loss: The Chronicle of Rael (17 page)

And then, the dense foliage crowding the strange road suddenly opens up in to a wide clearing.  Hot sunlight shines down in the clearing, adding to Rael’s discomfort.  A half dozen buildings stand here or at least what he thinks were once buildings, skeletal giants made of what appears to be interlocking pieces of steel.  The road continues into the midst of these with three on each side of it, and Rael follows it intrepidly.  He chooses the second on the left for no particular reason except that it feels right to him, veering off the road into some knee high grass.  He approaches the broken edifice and lays a hand on one of the outer pieces of metal.  He moves his thumb back and forth across its surface, rubbing away some of the grime that it has collected.  Rael closely examines the dark gray surface, finding it unmarred, with no scratches or scars that he can see.

“I have never seen steel like this,” he says aloud, though no one is around to hear it, and he looks up at the framework that towers perhaps forty feet above him.  “Where is the rest of it?”

Rael follows the piece of metal down and finds it fitted into another piece of metal from which four flat plates extend.  These are each fastened to a floor apparently made of the same kind of stone as the road with two huge screws.  He painfully kneels on the ground, and moving away grass and topsoil with his bare hands, he finds that the white rock is in fact a thick slab that is at least six inches thick.  Looking across the building’s floor into its interior, he sees that the slab indeed comprises the entire floor, and though perhaps centuries or millennia of debris, dirt and other detritus cover it, he can make out no grooves or seams in the surface.  Rael has been to several castles and other places with stone floors, and never has he seen one that wasn’t in fact comprised of many small stones fitted together with clay or some type of mortar.

“What manner of men made this place?  Where are they?” he asks.

Rael pulls up on the piece of metal and painfully stretches his legs to stand, and the world suddenly begins to spin around him.  Were it not for his grip on the support, he would have most certainly fallen to the ground or cracked his head on the metal itself.  Sweat pours off of his head and face, and he’s sure it is not just from the heat of the sun on his steel armor.  He doubles over and wretches several times, but he expels nothing but a small amount of water.  Fire rips through his gut from motion of the muscles around his stomach, and Rael can do nothing but hold there until it dulls.

He moves a few feet into the building and falls heavily onto his rear.  With shaking fingers and aching knuckles, he slowly removes his legguards.  He pulls his left boot off with ease, but when he tugs on the right, the fire returns hatefully, causing him to cry out.  He fights through the pain, grunting and clamping his jaw shut so hard that his teeth feel as if they may break, as he finally works the offending boot off of his foot.  His underclothes are soaked with sweat and, where it clings to his lower leg, something else.  The light colored linen has a huge discolored red and yellow stain around his calf. 

Peeling the cloth back almost makes Rael scream, and sticky foul fluids stretch from the linen to a cavity in his leg over an inch across.  Infected orange flesh fills the middle of the wound, and the rest of his calf is swollen and red.  Red striations snake their way through his blood vessels up and down his leg.  In a day that Rael has seen amazing things, all of this is yet another, for he has never seen color touch his Dahken gray flesh.

Rael lies back on the cool, hard floor and closes his eyes.  He needs to rest for just a minute.

*              *              *

Rael shivers in his sleep, aware that he is freezing yet he sweats.  Twisted dreams attack him – thousands of black bodied spiders injecting him with venom until he is purple while their monstrous queen awaits upon her web for her babies to bring her next meal.  A hundred corpses and a thousand skeletons, Dahken all, lay on the ground around the web, and the spider queen shakes it back and forth violently in anticipation.  All the while Garod and other gods laugh, and a fountain of blood weeps.

“Stay alive a bit longer, gray one,” says a woman, but he sees no one from whom the words could have come.  “This will hurt.”

The spiders, their queen and the gods vanish into darkness to be replaced by a giant, flaming sword.  “Please, no,” Rael mumbles.  He tries to scurry away as the orange blade hovers over him ominously, but something holds him firmly.  The huge blade, as long as he is tall, sweeps down in a fiery arc and hacks deeply into the flesh of his right leg.  His blood flows freely, but it does not strengthen him to escape his attacker as it should.  The sword hacks again and then a third time, causing Rael to scream in panicked agony.  Rael closes his eyes so as not to see the next stroke fall upon his mangled leg, but it never comes.

Rael opens his eyes to find himself on a hard, flat surface.  It’s dark, and the only light comes from a small fire that burns nearby.  Something cool lies on his forehead, and he savors the feeling against his burning skin.  He tries to push himself up onto his elbows, but his muscles ache and refuse to obey him.  A hand lightly pushes on his chest, forcing him back down, and then there’s a face, an old woman’s face.  Rael squints as he tries to make out her features, but they begin to blur together as his eyes close again, exhausted from the effort.

“You bore that well.  You are strong, but there’s yet more to do if you should live,” says the woman’s voice.

He feels a warm and wet pressure on his calf, almost as if someone’s open mouth is directly overtop the spider bite.  The pressure changes bringing with it more pain, and Rael struggles feebly, trying to dislodge whatever seems intent on sucking his life directly from the wound in his leg.  After a moment, the pressure disappears, and he hears something that sounds disturbingly like someone spitting a mouthful of liquid to the ground.  He just starts to relax and again drift to sleep when the horrible, sucking pressure returns.  After the second round, Rael is almost numb to the feeling when it returns again.  And again.

“Drink this,” says the voice, waking Rael from a doze. 

He opens his eyes as a small but strong hand helps him lift his head, and he sees the woman kneeling in front of him.  She is a hag, old and ugly, with graying hair and only half of her teeth.  One dark eye looks at him intently while the other, a milky white orb, moves about but sees nothing.  Squinting at her as his vision clears, he begins to see the yellowish skin and round eyes with slight epicanthic folds of a northern Tigolean.

She lifts to his lips a wooden cup containing a foul smelling warm liquid.  He tries to pull away at first, but she is stronger.  The taste almost makes him gag as the stuff flows over his tongue, but once it starts down his throat, he finds that it quenches a great thirst he didn’t know he had.  When the vessel is empty, she gently lays his head back on the hard floor and moves away to busy herself with something he cannot see from where he lies.

The fire that burned only a few minutes ago is just a pile of ash now, and all around him is lit by natural sunlight.
  I must have fallen asleep
, Rael concludes as he tries to look around, but his muscles seem unwilling to obey him.  With great effort he turns his head to his right and sees his armor, shield and sword all laying together in a heap, and he realizes with a start that he is completely naked, laying on what feels like a thick wool blanket.

“You shouldn’t try to move,” says the old woman, her back still turned, and Rael hears the age in her voice for the first time.  “You’ll live, but you’ll be weak for a while.”

“Who are you?” Rael asks, and his voice is scratchy as if he has gone without water for a week.

“I’m a witch,” the woman answers as she turns, and she chuckles softly.  She lays a hand on his forehead and nods.  “Good, your fever is broken.  You’ll be up and moving in a few days.  The potion will expel the rest of the venom and infection, and it’ll protect you for a short time.”

“I do not plan on being bitten again.”

“Oh, so you got bit on purpose?” she asks with a cackle, and she again moves away.

“I thank you for my life.  Is there anything I can offer you?”

“No,” she answers succinctly, and it sounds as if she rummages through a small hoard of belongings.

“For once luck was on my side,” Rael observes.

The old woman reappears in his view, hobbling in an off balance fashion as if something is wrong with her own leg.  “Luck had nothing to do with it.  We both were sent here for a purpose.”

“What purpose?” Rael asks, and he already grows tired from the effort of speaking.

“Yours I cannot say.  Mine?  To save your life,” the witch replies, and she hobbles out of his sight.

*
              *              *

Rael doesn’t know how long he slept, except that he’s sure that he faded in and out of consciousness all through the day, but it could have been several days for all he can remember.  He vaguely remembers waking to the sound of thunder and pouring rain, and he crawled to the edge of the building’s limited shelter to open his mouth to the open sky.  When Rael finally rouses himself, his muscles are fatigued and sore, but the pain of the last few days is only a memory.  He inspects his leg and finds the inflammation all but gone, and the disgusting cavity has been sowed shut.

The old Tigolean witch is nowhere to be seen, and the only remnants of her passing are his memory and the charred remains of a fire that he knows he did not build.

“What brought me to this place?” Rael asks aloud, and he looks across to the far side of the building’s ground floor.  In his feverish state he hadn’t paid much attention to the size of the building.  He would estimate that it is a good hundred feet in each dimension.  The metal beams that build the place’s outer skeleton are spaced perhaps ten feet apart, and about another dozen support the ceiling that stands about ten feet above him.  He assumes the ceiling above is actually the floor of the next level and appears to be made of the same odd steel.  On the southern edge is a set of metal steps, leading up.

Rael crosses toward them as quickly as his weak muscles will allow, and he immediately begins to climb, his hard boots clanging on the stair’s metal steps.  He only climbs a few before he realizes that he something is wrong.  It feels like…he has overlooked something.  He looks down through the gaps in the metal staircase, and in the shadows underneath of it he sees something that at once startles him and yet does not surprise him at all.

Rael steps back off the stair and around the open back side of it to kneel down in the shadows next to a rusted suit of chain armor containing a skeleton.  It is ancient, worn and weathered, and it sits upright against one of the metal beams.  A large leather bound tome lays next to the skeleton’s gauntleted left hand, and a dagger rests in its right.  A sheathed sword is several feet off to one side, and from a cursory inspection, Rael doubts whether the sword could even be drawn from its sheathe for the rust.

Rael gingerly reaches across the armored form for the book, which is perhaps a foot across and half again that tall, but the moment his hand touches its surface, the leather begins to give way.  The inner pages of the tome crumble in upon themselves, turning to dust until nothing is left of the book but an uneven pile of the stuff.  Rael coughs and waves his hand back and forth to clear the air, but the sudden air current only makes matters worse. 

Just enough of the dust caking the floor blows away so that Rael sees a mark on the floor.  On his hands and knees across the skeleton’s legs, he begins to brush away the mess obscuring the floor, revealing more markings.  Not markings – carvings.  Long ago, someone carved Rumedian characters into the floor under these metal steps.  Rael continues moving dust and dirt until he can find no more and looks long and hard at them.

“It has been a long time since I have read Rumedian,” Rael says to the skeleton, who only stares back with a wicked grin.  Rael leans back over the rows of glyphs and reads.

Tell Lord Dahken Tannes we failed.  Keldin fell to a Dulkurian wizard.  I watched as his flesh melted from his bones.  I escaped, but a strange orange snake has bitten my neck.  I know my time is short, Baen.

Rael, still hovering over the skeleton’s armored legs, looks over his left shoulder at the long dead Dahken.  He looks back the runes carved into the rock like floor and reads them again to be sure.  Certain that he made no mistake, he sighs and hangs his head for a moment with closed eyes.  Rael pulls himself back from the carvings and, in so doing, knocks his left elbow into the skeleton’s mailed shoulder.  It falls over to its right onto the floor, and though it does not impact the floor, the skull shatters into a hundred pieces that break into smaller bits as they bounce and skip across the floor.  The chainmail suit seems to almost deflate as the bones within it break and crumble as well.

Rael pulls himself from under the stairs and stand upright over the destroyed remains of a Dahken long dead.  He says nothing, does not even think to offer any words over this forgotten soul.  He just leaves the building to pick up the road heading west, hoping that Captain Ahireo is a man of his word.

20.

“By the gods, you look just like Lorina,” gasps Rael sharply as the girl turns around to face him. 

She’s perhaps a few inches taller than five feet, and her beautiful, almost platinum blond hair hangs freely almost to her waist.  Razor sharp eyes of blue ice look back at him from a face that matches perfectly that of woman Rael knew years ago.  He endeavors to keep his eyes on her pretty face and its pronounced, northern edges rather than let them wander to her body, which is young and strong and at least a few years into womanhood.  She smiles back at him somewhat shyly, though there is a silent knowledge hidden in that smile.

She replies, “I’ve been told that before, but I never met her.  She died before I was born.”

“You are Ricka?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, standing in the middle of his house with a broom in hand.

Rael had ridden back into the village about an hour before, the breath of both him and his horse making white puffs in the crisp early spring northern air.  He recognized few faces, and those he did had aged considerably since he’d left the Jeks and Lorina behind.  Hoping to find someone he knew, he’d found Lorina’s old home.  There he found Lorina’s daughter, now a mother several times over herself, and he solemnly accepted the news that Lorina had died only a few years after he left.  He was told to find her granddaughter, Ricka, cleaning his home as she had done monthly for years.

Rael moves into his home and sets his belongings on the floor next to his open door.  “I understand that I have you to thank for keeping up my home.”

“My mother used to do it, and I’ve done it since I got old enough,” she answers.

“Why?” Rael asks.  “Surely there are more interesting things for a young woman to do?”

“I’ve always wondered if the stories are true, if there truly is a man with the gray skin disease who killed an ice bear single handedly.  If he ever came back one day, I would be one of the first to meet him.”

“Is that old legend still playing around here?”

“Northmen aren’t known for exaggeration,” Ricka says with a slight admonishment in her tone.  “Our legends are truths.”

“Then am I everything the legend says?” Rael asks, and he feels suddenly embarrassed as she looks up and down his armored form.  He’s suddenly aware of how old he must look with his gray streaked hair and specked beard.  Her smile returns to one side of her pale lips, and something about it unsettles him.  He feels like he’s about to be eaten, but he’s not sure it is a bad thing.

“As I said, our legends are truths,” she repeats.  “I’m not yet done cleaning.  Would you like me to finish or shall I come back tomorrow?”

“I am tired.  It has been a long journey home.”

“I’m sure.  I’ll be back around midday tomorrow then,” says Ricka, the smile never leaving her face.  She collects a few implements with which she was cleaning his small one room home and then leaves, flashing him one last smile.  Rael has a hard time pulling his eyes from her as she walks through the crowded village, and finally he closes the door to face his empty home.

“You speak Western very well,” Rael says to her the next day shortly after she arrives.  “So did your grandmother.”

“I know it’s something that sets the Jeks apart from other clans,” she replies.

“An old chief named Kryjek wanted all of the Jeks to learn it.”

Ricka nods as she resumes sweeping the floor, “Lorina’s father.”

Rael nods slowly with the confirmation of something he had always suspected but never asked.  “It was one of his wisdoms, though his longing for conquest almost destroyed the Jeks.”

“And the Purns,” she agrees, and they both grow silent as she goes about her chore.

Rael watches her for a few minutes, realizing just how much she resembles her grandmother despite the difference in their hair color.  She’s beautiful and well proportioned, and his eyes follow her as she sweeps, dusts and wipes down surfaces.  He has to remind himself that he is old enough to have been her grandmother’s father, but he doesn’t feel old!  He remembers the one kiss he’d shared with Lorina, and is again aware that it may have been decades since he touched a woman, the Tigolean hag in Dulkur notwithstanding.  Rael feels suddenly awkward about the silence, and he busies himself with polishing his armor.  Eventually he looks up to see Ricka just standing and watching.  He meets her eyes and finds their blue captivating.  For just a moment, he feels as if his heart stops working properly

“You are finished?” he almost stutters.

“I am.  I’ve other things to do, but I’d like to come back tomorrow,” she says.

“Why?”

“I want to know more about the legend.  I want to know where he has been for the last few years,” explains Ricka.

“I would like that.”

Ricka returns to him every few days for the next few months as spring moves into summer, always asking for him to regale her with some story of his travels.  Every place he had been and everything he had done was told to her eager ears, and she looks upon him with interest and even awe.  Rael comes to take joy in that look, in those ice blue eyes as they watch him unblinkingly while he tells his stories.  He tells her of the ice bear, of Tigol and Dulkur, of fighting for his father’s armor in Martherus and of the ancient Dahken cave in the north, now overrun with lava.  He tells her everything except of his childhood; Demon and his parents he keeps to himself.

A warm day finds Rael outside near one of the gentle streams that falls down the side of one of the mountains flanking the village.  Ricka had asked him there, and he finds a crowd of the village’s younger people sitting raptly as he tells the tale of his slaying the ice bear.  It was the first story he’d ever told Ricka of course, but she had wanted others to hear it as well.  As he looks around the faces of the assembled children and young men and women, his eyes settle on Ricka’s, and he sees something there that he remembers seeing in Lorina’s eyes more than once.  She doesn’t just listen to him; she appears absolutely enamored with his words.  After he finishes, the girl disperses the crowd promising another adventure in a few days, and she walks with him back to his home.

“They loved it,” Ricka says as they walk between the houses and animal pens.

“I have never told my tales to anyone before you and certainly never to a group of people before.”

“It’s natural to you,” she encourages.  “You tell them with such detail, such life.”

“I tell them as they happened.”

“Maybe, but you’re still great at it.  You’ll make an exciting father,” Ricka decides aloud.

Rael doesn’t know how to respond to this, for never has anyone said such a thing to him.  He realizes with a start that the slender fingers of her right hand are intertwined with those of his left, and he uses all of his composure to keep from yanking his hand from hers.  Something about it pleases and sickens him at once.  When they reach his meager house, Rael bids her farewell and quickly ducks into its suddenly beckoning solitude.

He stands before his mirror, appraising the image of the armored Dahken held within it when his door opens behind him, and when he turns to see Ricka closing the door behind her, he curses himself for not having thrown the bolt.  It would have seemed rude.  She crosses the small room to stand less than a foot from him, and he realizes he is trapped with nowhere to go.  The summer sunlight plays yellow across her face and in her golden hair.

“Dahken Rael, I will have you someday.  You will not escape me as you did Lorina.”

“No, I am over a hundred years old.  You are but a child to me,” he replies, but the words sound hollow in his ears as he looks into those blue eyes.

“A child?” she asks.  She lifts his plated wrist and places his hand on her firm, full right breast.  “Do I feel like a child to you?  I am young, but I promise you, I am woman.”

“It is not right.  I am not a Northman.”

“But you are a Jek, accepted into the clan long ago.  You have always had a place here.  My family has seen to it.  Stay here, and be my husband,” she implores, and Rael remembers a similar conversation some years ago.  She adds, “I will make you a fine wife.”

“I would be a poor husband,” he argues, “for I will always have to leave one day.”

“And you have always come back.  Resist if you will, but do not resist too long.  I would marry you before you must again leave for one of your adventures,” she says. 

She stands on the tips of her toes and cranes her neck so that her face meets his in a kiss.  He neither takes ahold of her as he once did Lorina, nor pushes her away.  He enjoys the simple pleasure of a woman’s lips on his own, all the while knowing that it can only end badly, and before he knows it, she is gone out the door.  The only trace of the blond haired Ricka is her laughter on the wind.