First Rider's Call (26 page)

“You all right?”

Alton felt his jaw. It was intact, but he tasted blood. He probed his teeth with his tongue, but none were missing and he concluded he had bitten the inside of his mouth. He rolled to his side and spat blood, then took Sergeant Uxton’s proffered hand and rose carefully to his feet. Despite the violence of Pendric’s attack, it looked like Alton would escape with only some sore muscles and bruises.

Two soldiers restrained Pendric who gritted his teeth and issued a growl. Blood flowed from his nose. Landrew had come to see what the ruckus was about, and slipped his gaze from Alton to Pendric.

“Who started this?” he demanded.

“I did,” Pendric said, “to purge ourselves of his evil.”

“What nonsense is this?” Landrew glanced at Alton, who could only shrug.

“His magic brought that monster upon us,” Pendric continued, “the monster that killed Valia.”

“Son,” Landrew said, his voice gruff, “you dishonor me and our clan with such hateful talk. I know you’re grieving, but you’ve no call to make such accusations. Alton is your cousin, your blood.”

Despite Landrew’s words, Alton sensed doubt and suspicion emanating from the soldiers that surrounded them. The special abilities of Riders were not widely known, but the soldiers were aware of why Alton was here. Considering the distrust most Sacoridians held toward magic, Pendric was not helping the situation.

People cannot trust what they do not understand,
Captain Mapstone had once told him. When he replied that no one would ever learn to understand magic when it was concealed, she told him that the tide was too strongly against magic, and it was too soon to expose their abilities. Too dangerous. Maybe, she said, one day magic would be accepted in everyone’s hearts as part of the world’s fabric of life.

Now Alton stood face to face with that distrust and fear. Except for Sergeant Uxton who looked unruffled by Pendric’s accusations.

“My ability with magic is negligible,” Alton said. “There is no way I could have called that creature.”

“Evil calls to evil,” Pendric said.

Landrew slapped him. “You forget, son, what our clan is founded on. You forget what your bloodline represents. Our craft is in stone, yes, but it was also based in the arcane. Now get out of my sight.”

Pendric’s gaze speared Alton with hatred. He shook loose of the soldiers and stomped off toward the woods without looking back.

“I have never known what to do with that lad,” Landrew said, watching after him. “I could never please him, and he could never please himself.” He walked away shaking his head.

That left Alton, Sergeant Uxton, and some uneasy soldiers staring awkwardly at one another. The latter returned to their posts. Sergeant Uxton remained, gazing at Alton as if waiting for something.

Alton sighed. “I’m going to the wall.”

Sergeant Uxton grunted as if this was what he expected.

At the wall, Alton placed his palms against the stonework as he customarily did. This time, however, he let himself feel the stone—really feel it; the cool, individual grains that made up the wall’s rough facade. He visualized the crystalline quartz, the feldspar that lent the rock its pink hue, and the black flecks of hornblende. And as he did so, he began to hear the voices within the wall, threads of song in harmony—and discord.

Beneath his hands, silver writing swirled, shimmering for a bright moment, then fading, and the song with it.

Alton tried to hold onto it, but it was of no use. His connection with the wall was gone, and would not come back.

“
Damn it
to all the hells.” He kicked the wall, which did nothing but hurt his toes.

“Something wrong, my lord?” the sergeant asked beside him.

Alton faced him. “Are you going to tell me you didn’t see it this time?”

“See what, my lord? You kicking the wall? Aye, I saw
that.
”

“Forget it,” Alton grumbled, and he strode away.

Pendric trudged through the woods, pushing branches out of his way. He didn’t care about the blood smeared across his face, or the welt swelling around his eye. No, those things did not concern him one bit.

Away from the encampment and the wall, he finally found a boulder upon which to sit. A beam of sunshine broke through the canopy of the woods and fell softly upon him, warming him. Alton had won again, as he always won. He had won the approval of Pendric’s own father. His father was blind—he had to be! Maybe Alton had cast some evil spell on him; infected him.

Pendric shivered. Ever since Alton had arrived, voices swarmed in his mind like a mass of silvery eels. There were so many and they slithered so easily in his head; he could not understand the words, but they intensified every time he neared the breach in the wall.

Inexorably they pulled on him, hooking tentacles into his soul. He resisted. He would not let himself succumb to evil magic.

He whimpered in exhaustion and put his head in his hands. He just wanted to go home and get away from this place, but his father wouldn’t let him. Landrew insisted he stay because of his duty to his clan.

Pendric did not know how much more of this he could take, how long before he was finally overcome by the taint of Alton’s evil magic.

Deep in the heart of the dark tangled forest, the sentience slept. The guardians of the wall continued their ancient vigil, weaving songs of tranquility and peace. The discord continued to undermine the harmony, but they still retained enough power to lull the sentience into its deep slumber.

The guardians, however, had no control over its dreams.

Dreams of a land called Arcosìa, a land of many lands, many oceans away. A land of soaring architecture and culture. A land of diverse peoples all united into one. A land of powerful magic.

As the dream meandered on, the beauty, people, and especially the magic, faded into a gray, dismal landscape, with only crumbling towers and solitary columns amid bleak windswept grasses to mark the existence of a once-vast civilization, now extinct.

The sentience, still enwrapped in the dream, called out in sorrow. The forest trembled. Trees toppled over, beasts screamed, and rain poured down from the clouds that covered all of Blackveil.

The guardians of the wall shuddered in fear.

THE RAIN

Karigan walked to her daily arms training session beneath darkening clouds. Finally, the long-awaited change in weather had come, and she hoped Drent would cancel the day’s training.

Cancellation, however, didn’t appear to be on the arms master’s agenda. As soon as she arrived, he barked orders at her to run fifteen laps around the practice field, a two pound weight in her left hand. She had to admit that these sessions were making her more fit overall, but after training, all she felt was achy and abused.

It started to sprinkle during her final lap. Drent called her over to one of the small practice rings, and belted her bad arm—sling and all—to her body. He’d begun doing this when the jostling of swordplay, and her natural reaction to use her right arm for balance, left her screaming in pain. It was not unusual, he informed her, for him to belt down a trainee’s dominant arm anyway, when he was working the non-dominant side.

He then handed her a wooden practice sword. When they had begun the sword training, the bouts were pure misery. Drent had worked her through the most basic of sequences, but every few seconds, it seemed, he slammed the sword out of her hand, or jabbed her in the ribs, or slapped his sword across her thigh. In a quarter of an hour, he “killed” her nearly a hundred times over.

Disgusted with her poor showing, he dropped the swordplay for a few days, and repetitively ran her through basic sword exercises. The exercises not only improved the strength and precision of her left arm, but helped her footwork and body control, too. These exercises were less grueling because Drent wasn’t constantly swatting or jabbing her.

When she improved sufficiently, he brought his practice sword back into use.

The sprinkles turned into a soft but steady rain, and still Drent did not terminate the training. He attacked her with the same basic moves, but this time Karigan found herself better able to meet his blows. She had grown quicker and stronger, and her mind and body had begun to adapt to her left side acting dominant.

Then he accelerated the speed of his blows and raised the level of difficulty. Once again, her practice sword went flying out of her hand. She clenched and unclenched her smarting fingers as she went to retrieve it. Usually onlookers watched Drent working with her for the entertainment value it presented, which Drent did nothing to discourage, as though embarrassment would force her to improve more quickly. Today, she and Drent were the only ones on the practice field, and now the rain was coming down in sheets.

When Drent overheard her grumble about her soggy tunic, he pointed his sword at her and demanded, “Do you think battle stops for a little rain? It slows troops down, it rusts steel, it makes soldiers miserable, but battle does not stop for rain.”

And so the swordplay went on. When Karigan thought she could take no more of the cold rain and the pounding she received from Drent, he kicked her feet right out from under her. As she lay there in the mud, the rain pattering on her face, Drent took the opportunity to explain to her that in real battle, swordfighting was not polite.

“If you are going to survive a real battle,” he said, “you will have to learn every aspect of it.”

Karigan was having doubts about whether or not she was going to survive the
training.

The bell down in the city tolled ten hour, and Drent finally released her. He collected the practice swords and strode toward the field house, leaving her lying in the mud.

“I hate this,” she told the stormy sky. “I really hate this.”

 

Rider barracks was deliciously warm and dry. Karigan paused in the mud room, thinking that the only way she was going to keep the mud from tracking would be to totally strip down and proceed in the nude. Male voices and laughter from the common room made her drop that notion immediately.