DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) (22 page)

A very loud and obnoxious voice, Abbot Braumin understood.

P
rince Midalis and Andacanavar sat on a large wet rock overlooking the Gulf of Corona, holding stoically against gusting and unseasonably cold ocean winds and stinging drizzle.

“I keep hoping that we will see a sail, or a hundred,” Midalis admitted.

“That your brother will send the help you requested?” the ranger asked.

“Two score Allheart knights and a brigade of Kingsmen would bolster our cause against the goblins,” Midalis remarked.

“Where are they, then?” Andacanavar asked. “Your brother sits as king in a land that, by all reports, has defeated the threat. Why has he not sent his soldiers to aid in your—in our—cause?”

Midalis honestly had no answer to that. “I suspect that he is embroiled in other pressing matters,” he answered. “Perhaps rogue bands of monsters remain.”

“Or maybe he has his soldiers busy in keeping order in a kingdom gone crazy,”
the ranger reasoned, and that raised Midalis’ eyebrows.

“I have seen such things before,” Andacanavar went on. “The aftermath of war can be more dangerous than the war itself.”

Midalis shook his head and stared back out over the dark waters.

“Where are they, then?” Andacanavar asked. “Where are the ships and the brave Allheart knights? Is your brother so deaf to your call?”

Prince Midalis had no answers. Whatever the reason, it was becoming obvious to him that this fight in Vanguard was his alone among the nobility of Honce-the-Bear. He glanced from the cold and dark waters of the Mirianic back to his ranger companion, and took heart in the sight of the great and noble warrior.

For, whether his brother, the King, came to his aid or not, the Duke of Vanguard—the Prince of Honce-the-Bear—knew that he and his people were no longer alone in their fight.

S
he looked up at the sky and noted the dark, heavy clouds. There would be more rain; every day, it seemed, more stormy weather rolled in from the Mirianic, pounding Falidean Bay and Falidean town, soaking the ground where they had buried poor Brennilee, turning the dirt to mud. That ground had still been hard when they had put the child into it, and some of the men digging the grave had muttered that they hoped they had put Brennilee down far enough to keep her from the rains.

Merry Cowsenfed prayed—prayed mostly that the torrents wouldn’t bring up the little box into which they had placed Brennilee. That had happened several times in Falidean town during heavy storms: coffins sometimes rotted through so that you could see the decomposed corpses, floating right out of the ground. Merry stifled a cry and shook her head as her darkest fears and deepest pain led her to imagine the sight of her beautiful, precious Brennilee rotting within that box.

The woman melted down to her knees, head bent, shoulders heaving with sobs. They could rebury the child, she thought.

Yes, soon enough. They could dig up the grave and bury the child down deeper.

Merry Cowsenfed looked down at the rosy spots on her own forearm and nodded. For, yes, she knew, the gravediggers would be working again soon enough.

“Merry!” came a call from the road behind her. Without rising up, the drenched woman glanced back over her shoulder to see about a score gathered there. She couldn’t make out many faces, but she did recognize Thedo Crayle and his wife, Dinny, the little Haggarty boy, and one or two others; and from the one thing she knew all those she recognized had in common, Merry could pretty much guess the remainder of the group.

They were the sick of Falidean, people with the rosy spots, and with the awful fever and stomach-churning to follow soon enough.

Merry pulled herself up and pulled her shawl tight about her shoulders, bending her head against the driving rain.

“Ye come with us, Merry,” said Dinny Crayle in her gentle voice as she met the
grieving woman and put her arms about Merry’s shoulders. “We’re going to St. Gwendolyn, we are, to ask the abbess to help us.”

Merry looked at her, at all the desperate and sick townsfolk, but there was no hope on her strained features. “Ye’ll be turned away,” she said. “The monks won’t be helpin’ with the plague. They’ll be hidin’ from it, as do our kin.”

“Cowards all!” one blustery man cried out. “The abbess’ll open her door, or we’ll knock the damned thing down!”

That brought a chorus of cheers, cries wrought of anger and of determination, but Merry’s voice rose above them.

“Ye’re knowin’ the rules!” she yelled. “Ye got the rosy plague, so ye stay put and make yer peace with God and accept yer fate.”

“Damn the rules!” another man yelled out.

“Ye got the plague!” Merry yelled back. “Ye stay put, then, so as ye don’t go bringin’ it to all the other towns o’ the kingdom.”

“Damn the rules!” the same man cried.

“But ye know we’re to die, then, and horribly,” Dinny Crayle said to Merry. “Ye know we’re to take the fever and get all crazy, and call out for dead ones, and jerk about all horrible until our arms and legs ache and bruise. And ye’ll get the weeps. And then ye’ll die, and if ye’re lucky, someone else with the rosies’ll take the time to put ye in the ground—or might that they’ll just drop ye off the road and let the birds peck at yer blind eyes.”

A couple of the nearby children started wailing, and so did several of the adults, but mostly, the adults cried that the rules were wrong and that the monks must help them.

“No God’ll let us die like that,” another woman insisted.

“Forty-three dead in the town already,” Thedo Crayle reminded Merry, “forty-three, with yer own Brennilee among ’em. And another fifty’ve got it. At least fifty, and probably with twice that number gettin’ it but not yet knowin’ that they be doomed. That’s near to a hunnerd, Merry. A hunnerd out o’ eleven hunnerd in all Falidean town. Stay put, ye say? Bah to that. The whole town’ll fall dead soon enough.”

“But might be only our town,” Merry tried to reason.

Thedo scoffed. “How many boats’ve come in since we learned o’ the plague? And how many just before that? And where’d it come to us from, if all who got it stayed home? No, good Merry, it’s out and was so before it found Falidean town. The rosy’s out and runnin’, don’t ye doubt, and them monks’ve got to do somethin’ about it. We’re goin’ to St. Gwendolyn, with ye or without ye. We’ll get our Abbess Delenia and her sisters and brothers to heal us.”

“Brother Avelyn kilt the demon, so they’re sayin’,” Dinny added, “and if them monks’re killin’ the dactyl demon, then they’re strong enough to kill the rosies!”

Another cheer went up, and the group started down the long muddy road, with Dinny Crayle holding fast to her friend Merry, guiding the woman along. Merry looked back repeatedly at Brennilee’s little grave marker, her instincts screaming
in protest at the thought of leaving her little girl behind. What would happen to Brennilee if Merry died in some distant land? Who would they put in the ground beside her little girl, or would they even bother to bury Brennilee again if her little coffin churned up? Truly, Merry’s heart broke. She didn’t believe that the Abellican monks could, or would, help them, but she went along anyway.

Mostly it was sheer weakness, the inability to resist Dinny’s pull, the inability to break away from the only comforting hands that had found her stooped shoulders these last days, since she had begun to show signs of the rosy plague.

The group took up a song soon after, a chanting prayer that spoke of the hope and redemption offered by the Abellican Church, that spoke of St. Abelle, the healer of souls, the healer of bodies.

I had to get out of there
.

I knew beyond anything else that I had to get out of Palmaris, away from that place of pain and turmoil. It was overwhelming me—all of it. It was paralyzing me with pain and most of all with doubt
.

I had to get back on the road to the north, to my home: a simpler place by far. In Dundalis, in all the Timberlands, the pressures of survival overrule many of the trappings of civilization. In the wild Timberlands, where the domain of nature dominates that of mankind, the often-too-confusing concepts of right and wrong are replaced by the simpler concept of consequences. In the wilds of the Timberlands, you choose your course, you act upon that trail, and you accept—for what else might you do?—the consequences of those choices and actions. Had I lost Elbryan to a mistaken handhold while scaling a cliff face rather than in battling a demon spirit, then, I believe, I could have more easily accepted his death. The pain, the sense of loss, would have been no less profound, of course, but it would have been outside the realm of the more personal questions the actual conditions fostered. It would have been a simple reality based upon simple reality, and not a reality of loss based upon some philosophical questions of morality and justice. Would such an accidental loss of my love have been more senseless?

Of that I am not sure, and, thus, I had to get out of there
.

My decision to go disappointed many. I have weakened my allies, I fear, and bolstered my enemies. To those looking upon me from afar, it seems as if I chose the easier road
.

They think that I am running away. Friends and enemies believe that I have retreated from my fight, have fled from the peril. I cannot completely disagree, for my stance on the larger battle within Honce-the-Bear now seems to me as intangible as the battlefield itself. Are we fighting a demon spirit or the very nature of mankind? Was Markwart an aberration or an inevitability? How many revolutions have been fought by people espousing a more enlightened way, a greater truth, a greater justice,
only to see the victors fall into the same human failings as their predecessors?

Yes, I fear I have come to question the value of the war itself
.

Perhaps I am running away from the confusion, from the noise of aftermath, that unsettling scrambling to fill the power vacancies. But in the final measure, I am not running away from the greater battle; of this, I am certain. Nor will my road truly be easier. I have come to recognize now that I am charging headlong into the most personal and potentially devastating battle I have ever fought. I am running to confront the most basic questions of my existence, of any existence: the meaning of my life itself and of what may come after this life. I am choosing a course of faith and of hope, and not with any illusions that those necessary ingredients for contentment and joy will be waiting for me in Dundalis. Far from it—for I understand that those questions may be beyond me. And if that is the case, then how can I even begin to fathom the answers?

But this is a battle I cannot avoid or delay. I must come to terms with these basic questions of humanity, of who we are and why we are and where we’re going, if I ever hope to solidify the ground beneath my feet. I have come to the point in my life where I must learn the truth or be destroyed by the doubts
.

Brother—Abbot—Braumin wants me to stand beside him now and fight the legacy of Markwart. King Danube wants me to stand with him now in restoring order to a kingdom shattered by war and the corruption of its very soul. They see my refusal as cowardice, I am sure; but in truth, it is mere pragmatism. I cannot fight their battles until my own personal turmoil is settled, until I am grounded in a place of solid conviction—until I am convinced that we go, not in endlessly overlapping circles of false progress, but in the direction of justice and truth, that we evolve and not just revolve. That we, in the end, pursue paradise
.

And so I go to Dundalis, to Elbryan’s grave site, in the hope that there I will find the truth, in the hope that the place where I learned the truth about living will also teach me the truth about dying
.

—J
ILSEPONIE
W
YNDON

Chapter 9
 

T
HE DAY WAS HOT
,
BRUTALLY SO
,
BUT AT LEAST THE INCESSANT RAINS THAT HAD SO
filled the spring and early summer now seemed to be burned away by the brilliant sunshine. Master Francis, his robes flung as wide as he could get them, would have welcomed rain this day, anything to wash the stickiness from his weary body.