Firehurler (Twinborn Trilogy) (12 page)

The human sat watching as he approached, and Gkt’Lr
noticed that he now held his dagger in the upturned palm of his hand, as if
offering its return. The human was a strange one indeed. He was small, not
really so much larger than Gkt’Lr, who was considered rather imposing among his
people, and his hair looked white in the starlight. His clothing was crude,
though—animal skins stitched clumsily together—and did not look like it would
provide protection in battle.

“Waaat youuu waaant?” the assassin asked in Kadrin as
well as he was able.

[A bit of an explanation about your intentions, if it
would not trouble you too much,] the human said, astonishing Gkt’Lr with his
fluent goblin-speech. The human smiled at the assassin’s obvious surprise—a
sight that unnerved the normally cool-headed assassin.

[So you speak my language, human,] Gkt’Lr replied.
[But I see no reason to answer to you. You do not look like a soldier, so I do
not believe this involves you.]

[Perhaps not to your mind, no. But I did not notice
you carrying any other weapon, so if you are thinking about murdering anyone in
their sleep, I do not expect you shall have much luck. I do not imagine you
could strangle any of them to death without waking everyone up.]

The human casually tossed the dagger into the ground
at his own feet, the point sticking into the soft earth.

[So what will you do then, human?] Gkt’Lr asked,
inching forward with the thought of making a grab for his dagger.

[Just warn you. I am not going to let you bring harm
to the humans who lie sleeping by my house. I merely stole your dagger to bring
you away from them, so we would not wake them with our talk. I could just as
easily have buried it in your throat, as slowly as you reacted,] the human
answered, and Gkt’Lr stopped his approach toward the dagger. [So do you want
this back?] The human reached down and picked up the dagger again, grasping it
by the hilt.

Gkt’Lr did not know how to answer. Was the human toying
with him, or bargaining? Should he make a break for cover and hope to evade the
human who had snatched a dagger from his alert grasp? He thought back to his
own exploits of the previous night, when he had used a spell to speed his own
movements. Biding his time, he focused his thoughts into the aether, and tried
to discern if the human was using a similar spell and whether it had worn off
yet.

A sudden look of horror crossed the goblin’s face, and
his thoughts snapped back out of the aether. He stared directly at the human
once more, terror evident in his wide eyes.

It cannot be
,
he thought.

[Something wrong?] the human asked mildly, arching his
eyebrows.

The assassin did not stop to answer but turned and
fled toward the west, the easiest direction away from the dangerous human. He
was not silent and no longer cared, having found something far more urgent than
his assignment for the moment. There could always be another attempt on the
humans, but he knew he stood no hope of succeeding that night.

A flashing blur sped past Gkt’Lr’s face, and he
recoiled quickly, hearing a solid
thwack
just inches from his head. His
dagger quivered slightly, embedded to the hilt in a tree just to his left.

“You forgot your weapon,” the human remarked in his
own language, standing just a few feet away.

The assassin looked at the human in continued
amazement, wondering how he had appeared so close by without a sound, then
looked back to the dagger just for a moment. When his attention turned back to
the human, he was gone. Gkt’Lr scanned the area but saw no sign of him. His
immediate, reflexive thought was to peer into the aether winds to check for
signs of him, but he dismissed the idea out of hand. After all, he knew he
could not find the human that way.

He gave a tug at his dagger, but it was stuck fast—not
surprising given how deeply it had been sunk into the wood. Calming himself a
bit, the assassin used a spell to remove the hopelessly stuck weapon from the
tree. Still trembling from the worst fear of his life, Gkt’Lr set off back
toward goblin territory. He needed reinforcements.

Chapter
8 - A Magnificent Curse

Kyrus blinked a few times to clear his eyes of
bleariness and looked around. It was light outside the shuttered windows of the
bare room where Davin had slept just two nights past. Groaning, Kyrus eased
himself up to his elbows and attempted to gather his thoughts. The left side of
his face felt sore, apparently from having it pressed against the wooden
floorboards all night. Sometime after he had passed out, he must have rolled
into a position where he was lying with neither of the two lumps on his head
resting on the hard surface. He shook his head ruefully at the thought that
having his face flattened against the floor was the most comfortable position
he was able to find while he slept. It seemed that the part of his mind that
watched out for him as he slept was an idiot.

No, that was not right. The part of his mind that
watched as he slept had seen many things, and had been quite preoccupied last
night. He remembered a harrowing walk through a forest, and a feeling of relief
at finding out that a friend of his—figment of his imagination or no—was
recovering from a nearly fatal injury. He could still see, if he closed his
eyes, the stranger with the long, white hair who had allowed them to take
shelfter outside his home, and who was tending to his friend—seemingly just a
few moments ago, on the other side of his eyelids. It all felt so real, so
vivid, that the memories seemed not to fade in the few moments after he awoke,
as was common with dreams. He remembered it as well as he could recall the
previous night.

Kyrus drew a shuddering, deep breath to calm himself
as he thought back to the events that had taken place in that very room the
night before. Had it been a strange part of his dream? Had he fallen asleep
before that, only to fall asleep once more within his dreams? Kyrus suspected
not, but there was only one way to find out. He stood up and closed his eyes,
steeling himself against the possibility that he was right.

“Aleph kalai abdu,”
Kryus calmly spoke, gesturing with his right hand.

A rush like a cool breeze swept through him. Then he
felt the brightness, even through the lids of his eyes. Swallowing hard, he
looked to confirm what he already knew in his heart. There was a glow in the
air before him. It lit the room better than the rays of sunlight that poked in
around the edges of the shutters, and Kyrus hoped that the light outdoors was
bright enough that it was not noticeable from the street. He did not want to
have anyone inquiring as to what was going on before he himself could figure it
out. He needed time to sort things through before anyone else found out about
this strange phenomenon. That is, if he was ever going to be ready enough to
have the world think he was either a lunatic or a freak.

That sobering thought brought Kyrus’s attention back
to the softly glowing ball of whitish luminescence hanging a handspan in front
of his face. He stared at it with a mix of child-like wonderment and an
all-too-adult sense of anxiety. He knew that he had created the light, but he
was not entirely sure how. It had seemed natural to him, as easily remembered
as the catchy tune that children learn to remember their letters or the fluidly
sprawling lines of script that flowed from his quill each day: things that had
become a part of him through repetition over years and that he could hardly
conceive of
not
knowing anymore. Until the previous night, though, as
best he could recall, he had never so much as practiced at such arcane
nonsense, let alone had anything of the sort actually work.

The light remained aloft and stationary under Kyrus’s
scrutiny. It became neither brighter nor dimmer. It did not change color or
flicker, as would a candle. It did nothing at all and seemed content to remain
that way, inexplicably lighting Davin’s old room … somehow. He reached out and
passed his hand through it, probing tentatively at first, then waving it about
in the midst of the glowing region when he encountered no resistance. Kyrus
realized just how impossible the light should have been, burning nothingness,
attached to nothing, and hanging adrift and motionless in midair, but he felt
strangely unconcerned by how out of place it was. He was far more worried about
how he would explain it to someone else, should they happen by, than he was
with trying to reconcile it within his own, normally logical, mind.

Kyrus sat down cross-legged on the floor and stared up
at the light, trying to decide what to do about it. He rested his chin on his
clasped hands, feeling the fine, rough stubble of his unshaven face as he
thought. That subtle reminder that he had just slept through the night on the
floor, fully clothed, served to galvanize his thoughts; if he did not come up
with something soon, someone would likely stop by the shop and find a crazy man
with bloodied head wounds, sitting on the floor of an otherwise empty room,
staring at a light that should not exist. Remembering the cool, breezy feeling
that had spread through him when he had created the light, and how it had
momentarily relieved the awful headache he had woken up with, Kyrus decided to
see if repeating the magic would reverse the effect.

“Aleph kalai abdu,”
he spoke quietly as he gestured in the air, mindful that anyone at all
might be on the street below his shuttered windows.

Immediately he felt the coolness wash through him
again. Being prepared for it to happen, he noticed subtle nuances the second
time through that had escaped his notice previously. It was not a breeze that seemed
to blow through his veins and cool him from the inside, but dozens, even
hundreds of tiny little breezes, permeating every inch of him and swirling into
the very center of his being before they coalesced … into a second ball of
light, hanging closer to the floor than the first, just in front of his face as
he sat. Fortunately for Kyrus, two of the lights seemed no brighter than
one—though that did not make any sense, either—but now he had two of the
blasted things to get rid of before someone saw them!

The feeling that accompanied the creation of the light
had momentarily alleviated the stabbing pain behind his eyes and dulled it to
the point where he could think a bit more clearly. He realized that the
spell—and he knew nothing else to call it by—was something remembered from his
dreams. That meant that the answer to getting rid of the lights was probably
also something hidden away in the back of his mind, where his forgotten dreams
lay dormant till he slept again. His immediate problem was that, aside from his
dreams that night, he only remembered very broad concepts from his dreams, not
minutiae such as how to dispose of unwanted balls of light. Kyrus spent several
moments with his eyes closed, trying to conjure up images from his dreams, but
all he could remember was a rain-soaked wilderness hike accompanied by a bunch
of grim-faced soldiers, a friend of his who seemed to be injured, and a
stranger who acted like some sort of enchanter or wizard like in the old
children’s stories. None of them had banished any lights with magic in his
dream, so until he could pay more attention in one of his dreams and inquire of
someone as to how such a feat might be accomplished, he was on his own.

Kyrus drummed his fingers against his cheek as he sat
there pondering, beginning to grow anxious that he would have to either get rid
of the lights or find some way to hide them until he could figure how to manage
it. He could not sit here all day without making people suspicious. Someone was
bound to stop by the scrivener’s shop sooner or later; Davin saw two or three
patrons at least, on most days.

Abbiley
, he
thought suddenly.

Of course someone was going to stop by the shop sooner
or later. Abbiley had promised as much the night before when she had spoken to
him after his mishap. He could not very well let her see him like this.

Why, yes, my head feels fine. No lasting effects of
smacking it on that light pole and the ground last night. When it bothers me a
bit, I can always just poof these little balls of light into being out of
nothingness, and it feels better for a little while—What? No, I do not need to
lie down. Watch and I will show you:
“Aleph
kalai…”

No, that was not going to go over well at all. He
needed to come up with something fast.

He tried concentrating on the feeling that accompanied
the spell he used. He tried to imagine the feeling of those tiny little breezes
all converging in him, cooling his body and clearing his mind. He closed his
eyes, took a few deep breaths, and tried to ignore the throbbing that was
starting to grow worse in his head, the sounds of the early morning drifting in
from outside, and everything else that might distract him. After a moment or
so, he began to feel it, slowly at first and then steadily growing.

Yes, I did it! All right, now what?

Kyrus opened his eyes slowly, still basking in the
pleasant chill of whatever it was that he was drawing into himself—whatever it
was that he had made the light out of. He was at a loss to describe it, but he
could almost “see” the tiny currents of some unfamiliar wind drifting about the
room and “see” some of them being pulled toward him. It was nothing that
obscured his vision of the room around him; he could still make out the walls,
the floor, his clothes, the two weird glowing balls of light … yet there was
something deeper, something that he was not accustomed to being able to see,
underlying his vision of the world around him.

Kryus’s musings about his newfound vision were
abruptly cut short when an urgent feeling began to grow inside him. He suddenly
felt as if he had drawn a deep breath and needed to exhale, yet he did not know
how. The flow of the tiny ethereal rivers as they were drawn into him slowed
and came to a halt, and then seemed to try to reverse their course. The feeling
that had been cool and pleasant just seconds earlier faded, only to be replaced
by one of building pressure and heat, as if something trapped within him was
trying to escape. Kyrus began to panic, realizing that he had no idea how to
stop what was happening. His vision began to grow hazy, and he felt dizzy. As
the pressure within him grew, it became a searing pain, dwarfing the headache
he had been suffering already. Kyrus squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced in
pain, then collapsed onto the floor.

His mind began to burn, and he knew that somewhere he
had seen this before. There had to be an answer somewhere in his memories.
There was little time to act, the sensation was growing stronger by the moment.

Memories of my dreams … Think, Kyrus, quickly …

*
* * * * * * *

Kyrus remembered standing on a battlefield, littered
with the bodies of the fallen. There were men in plenty, and creatures shaped
like men yet much smaller, and with a rough, greenish hue to their skin that he
somehow knew to call “goblins.” He turned his head to look around and saw
everything and everyone about him moving far more slowly than they should have
been. The thud of spear against shield, the cries of the dying and the
victorious, the crackle of the many fires that burned here and there: all seemed
to echo from far away, rather than right around him. When he saw a smallish man
dressed in soldiers’ garb—minus the armor—trading magical bolts of force with
one of the goblins, he recognized this as the place he saw in his dreams.

He saw the sorcerer, for he knew that was what his
friend was, turn one of the goblin’s bolts back at its creator, destroying the
creature. Then the sorcerer, whose name came not readily to his mind though he
was certain he knew it, collapsed to the ground, clutching at the sides of his
head and letting loose an agonized scream. Kyrus tried to race to the
sorcerer’s aid, yet it felt like he had been yoked to an oxcart and was pulling
a load of stone blocks behind him. He watched goblins approach his fallen
friend as he struggled to close the distance. He was too far away to save the
sorcerer from the spears of the tiny adversaries that were sure to reach him
before Kyrus would. Yet as Kyrus looked on helplessly, the goblins’ eyes grew
wide and they tried to turn and run away, then they caught fire and were
consumed in less time than it took Kyrus to gasp his surprise. He saw the
ground all about his sorcerer friend begin to steam … the morning dew boiling
off of it …

Same problem I am having, but offers no help …

*
* * * * * * *

Kyrus’s thought bubbled and churned as he dug through
them hurriedly. He saw a vision of a familiar barn, weather-stained brown and
unpainted but otherwise in a serviceable state. There were fields all about,
and a fenced pass leading up to the front of it. The memory felt so real he
could smell the fresh manure and the distinctive scent of cows, gathered in
large numbers.

Someone rushed past him, carrying a bucket, and then
another. He recognized them as two of his older brothers, Melluck and Vohn. A third
brother, Kedan, slammed into him as he rushed by as well. The older boy was
thrown off his stride, and he spared a quick glance back.

“Sorry, Kyrus,” Kedan said, regaining his balance and
rushing off with a bucket as well, water sloshing out the sides from his
encounter with his younger brother.

No, that is one of my own memories. They were rushing
to douse a fire that had started in the barn. I do not think dunking my head in
a bucket is going to fix this, but it might be worth a try.