CHOSEN (25 page)

It was disturbing to him that even in death there were still wars and battles. Then again, maybe that’s what these people had to do to move on as Fadril called it. Maybe at the end of it all, he’d turn around and they’d all vanish. That wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.

There was also the danger of being taken, something he couldn’t fathom anyone would willingly risk since it was for eternity. Maybe that was what the healing powers he had would prevent. He frowned over it and thought to ask Fadril about it. She was just coming out to join them.

A wind came up and blew across the road where they stood in various stages of readiness. Dynan glanced up because there came on the air the slightest hint of decay, like the dead smell of a rodent expired behind the wood paneling, or tucked in the corner of the barn. Everyone else was looking too, and a murmur of disquiet ran through them.

Someone ran up to Fadril, talking rapidly in her ear and she started looking to the sky, causing everyone else to look with her. She walked to the edge of the road and jumped up on a wooden stand looking out beyond the trees.

Something warm spattered against Dynan’s face and on his head and hands, like rain. The droplets swirled red and the mutters turned to cries of revulsion.

The idea of blood raining from the sky in this place was horrifying, and didn’t have an explanation. People stood uncertain for a moment, but the desire to get out of it overcame their hesitation. They started to move for cover. Dynan thought if this was happening here in this pristine land then something terrible had happened to cause it.

The answer came the next second. Dynan saw it as clearly as if he was right there. Dain lay chained to an altar, weakened, trying to free himself without effect. Adiem stood over him, a thin knife in hand, using it to slice into Dain’s arm. A flow of blood drew a long line down the face of the stone.

Dynan grabbed his bicep, feeling the sting of the blade as it cut across skin. The falling rain of blood grew stronger, splattering against the road, the buildings, everyone and every thing. Off a great distance away, Dynan thought he could hear Fadril shouting something, but he couldn’t tell what. He didn’t care either, focused on his brother.

“Dain.”

Adiem turned around then, a deranged grin spreading across his face. Dynan’s immediate surroundings faded away while the area around the altar clarified, sharpening to the point where he was almost there on the shelf surrounded by pillars.

Adiem reached a hand toward him, cackling under his breath.

Dynan was drawn forward, but then something knocked into him, and arms wrapped around him, pulling him down and away from the reaching hand. He was dragged and his vision shifted. The road reappeared, only he was lying on it being pulled along by Polen. Fadril had her arms wrapped around him and she was being pulled too.

“They have Dain,” Dynan said, trying to get Polen to stop.

People were running in every direction trying to escape the gaping hole that had abruptly opened, but then Grint was there with a bow and arrow, determined and sure. He took aim and loosed the shot. Something between a shriek and a howl erupted from the darkness and then the hole closed.

“Dain!”

Dynan wrenched away from all the hands holding him and rolled to his feet. He didn’t want the portal to go away even when he was terrified of it. His brother was on the other side and in trouble. Dynan started looking around for another way to get there.

Fadril scrambled to her feet after him. “They won’t kill him until you’re there. You both have to be there at the same time.”

“So it’s okay for them to torture him until then?”

“No,” she said, and took him by the arms again.

He pushed her off and then pushed Grint out of the way, looking for any hint of the portal, but there was nothing. He thought about how it had opened and concentrated, trying to reach his brother again.

“Don’t,” Fadril said, getting in front of him. “Adiem will be ready this time. He’ll pull you through. If you want to witness Dain’s death, followed by your own, then keep trying to reach him. I’m telling you they aren’t going to kill him until you are there.”

What she meant, and what she was suggesting, finally registered. Dynan started to shake his head. “I can’t.”

“We have to wait. If you go now, through the portal, which is what they want, you’ll go alone and you’ll die alone.”

“I’m not waiting. This rain is...it’s his blood. They’re going to torture him.”

“But he’ll survive as long as you aren’t there to fulfill the prophecy. We go on our own time, in our own way, together, and we have a chance to save you all. Alurn, you and Dain. We can destroy the world or save it. Dynan, it can’t be any other way.” Fadril shook him by his arms. “Don’t you think I wanted to go to Alurn right then when you first told me about him?”

Dynan knew she was right. She understood the desire to go, an almost constant demand that made him want to get to Dain any way he could as fast as possible. It was the wrong thing to do, but the alternative was to leave Dain to suffer at the hands of a sadistic monster.

“How long?”

“Too long for you to stand. It’ll take us two, maybe three cycles to get there, traveling through the mountains like we planned.”

“Cycles?”

“It’s not exactly equivalent to a day. As you know it, there isn’t night here. It will seem longer than it really is. That’s part of the agony of this place. Time doesn’t behave the way you’re used to.”

A sudden rumble grew in the distance, growing to cover them. The ground shifted under their feet, shaking violently for several long moments, knocking some people to the ground.

Fadril turned to Polen even before the sound receded, considering her words before she spoke. “We need to move. We should take all the women and children with us to the Temple. We’ll go through the underground pass.”

Polen didn’t like that idea. Dynan agreed with Fadril. It meant they were getting started. He didn’t know what the underground pass was, or the Temple, or what good it would do the women and children to be there. Maybe it was a holy place that would protect them somehow. Dynan had a hard time believing there were any sacred places here, or any protection.

“I told you I’d never set foot in the place again,” Polen said.

Pain lance across Dynan’s other arm. The blood kept falling. Fadril held her hands out to it, catching it in her palms. “It’ll be faster. I don’t think we have a choice.”

She didn’t wait for him to approve. She turned and taking Dynan by the arm, started him toward the front of the line of people, the army, who were already on the move. Crossing through, she admonished a few to be safe and wished them good luck. Dynan couldn’t talk, fighting off another contact surge from Dain. It wasn’t something he was accustomed to doing and left him shaking when it passed.

“It’ll be all right,” Fadril told him and kept a hand firmly around his wrist.

Others followed them, Polen, Grint and Faulkin among them. The archers were there, who it turned out were mostly girls, except for one. There were a couple other fighters, but fewer than Dynan expected. He realized Fadril had sent the rest with the army so they had a better chance to protect themselves. Doing so left the incursion force very small. The women came too, carrying the infants and the children who were too young to walk. The ones who could, scrambled along after them, or were whisked up by one of the fighters.

They left the road and the masses of people on it, cutting through the trees and then across a field. The rain started to turn the grass a shade of dark brown, but it was turning black in other places. Fadril’s fear that this small oasis would be taken over by evil was coming true. Dynan didn’t know if getting out with Alurn and Dain would save it. He started to think that even if they escaped, everyone else left here would be in the wild. Everyone who came here, who died from now on would be subjected to terrible horrors.

The land rose sharply, mounting upward with rocks dotting the landscape. There was again the sense of the familiar and as they climbed, the feeling grew until he realized where they were. He turned back, looking through a haze of red and expected to see the Palace sitting on its plateau beside the Wythe Sea.

Fadril tugged on his hand, refusing to let him go even for a moment. “We shouldn’t stop.”

“These are the mountains behind the Palace,” Dynan said, remembering what Polen had told him to look for. Fadril nodded. “There’s a Temple? Where?”

“I’ll show you. It isn’t likely to have any correlation to the world you know. A thousand years wears down the land.”

She was right and wrong at the same time. The mountain rose up on either side of them into sheer walls, creating a sheltered canyon. He knew the meadow that stretched between the cliffs when they reached it after climbing for what seemed a long time. He recognized the place where he fell through the hole in the ground, caused, he now knew, by his blood. The stones in the ground weren’t the same though, not exactly. There was a ruined city, and made him wonder how far back in time the beginning of the city went. He thought if he looked, he’d find a stone tablet of the Sacred Seal just like the one in Rianamar.

Through a growing torrent of blood that turned the land slick and treacherous, they kept on. Dynan tried not to think about the grossness of it, preferring to think his brother’s blood could only give him strength.

They reached the far end of the cliff meadow. This was the place where Dain crashed the transport pod against the back cliff wall, luckily. If he’d gone the other way it would have been off the cliff. There should have been a series of caves in the left face of the mountain, but instead there was a kind of stone doorway built out from the cliffs. The interior was carved stone and didn’t resemble the caves Dynan knew at all.

They moved out of the blood rain. Once under cover, they dried off as best they could. They were all soaked with it. Dynan thought of Dain again, and felt the torture he endured. He closed his eyes, hating himself and shut him out again.

Fadril squeezed his hand and led the way through a cavernous hall.  They went through an arched entry over a steep set of stairs that disappeared downward. As with the other cave Dynan had been in, this one grew lighter the farther in, instead of darker.

He was about to ask why that was when they reached the bottom of the stairs. Before him, a huge set of stone doors stood closed. They were thick and at least ten kem tall. Fadril searched the stone face on the left side for a moment. She touched a stone three in from the door in the bottom right corner, pushing inward. Half of it dislodged from its niche and slid backward. A lever came down in its place and she pulled it all the way forward. Off somewhere over their heads, something started humming, sounding strangely out of place. The next moment, the doors started to move.

When they were open all the way, Fadril hesitated on the threshold.

The room was oblong and it took Dynan a moment to realize it was shaped like a diamond. The floor was cut stone. There didn’t seem anything special about it but then he remembered what else Polen said about the place.

“This is where you—” He stopped, unable to say this was where she died. She didn’t seem dead to him. None of them did.

Polen heard him though, and came to the entrance where he stopped with Fadril. He glanced over his shoulder to Grint and Faulkin. “We all died here. Let’s just get through it and into the passage.”

“I’m going to find this place,” Dynan said. “When I get home, I’m going to find it again and I’m going to make sure you’re...”

“Properly laid to rest?” Polen said when Dynan’s voice faded and he scoffed. “You won’t find anything but dust, boy.”

“I’ll find more than that,” Dynan said, certain of it. He smiled. “You’re too stubborn to decay, old man. You’ll get that royal funeral you were promised.”

“I was never promised that,” Polen said, but he was laughing.

“You are now,” Dynan said and looked down at Fadril, nodding to her too. He saw by the glint in her eyes that it was important to her. He put both arms around her. “I’ll make sure of it. For all of you.”

“I know you will,” she said. She patted his arm and gestured to the room. “The passage is on the other side through a small hidden door. You, Polen and the others go ahead. I’m going to make sure everyone is settled. I’ll catch up to you.”

“Why don’t you just stay?” Polen said, but Fadril only shook her head.

“Why do you think this place is safe?” Dynan asked, thinking that where her life ended wouldn’t be on that list.

“Adiem won’t come here,” she said and nodded them on.

~*~

Chapter 20

Getting into City Medical wasn’t as hard as Maralt thought it would be. Turning the mind of a guard wasn’t especially difficult, although, Maralt really hoped he didn’t run into the one who’d seen him with Dain.

Maralt had taken the memory of that lone witness and jumbled it up enough that the man was no longer sure who he’d seen, saving Ralion Blaise a great deal of trouble he didn’t deserve.

Maralt considered for a moment that he wasn’t supposed to do this, erase memories the way he was. He’d been told it was wrong the whole of his life. Here in this circumstance, it seemed the only way to manage and the High Bishop hadn’t seemed angry about it. Maralt told himself he’d stop – once they got everything back to normal –
if
they got everything back to normal.

He could hear the wind howling outside. Everyone else called it a storm, an especially violent one, but only the weather being strange. Maralt knew better. Really, it was the precursor to the end of the world. Throughout the System, on all three planets reports were coming in of abnormal floods, violent storms and ground shifts in places that didn't usually have them.

And here, everyone thought the Gods were such benevolent beings.

“I’m not sure what’s worse,” Maralt said under his breath as he reached a corner and glanced around it.