Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (22 page)

“Boy, I—”  Rail abruptly halted.  Marik expected the
exhaustion to hit his father.  Instead, Rail’s eyes narrowed, then, annoyed, he
cast a hard glare up toward the ceiling.  “I’ll thank you to keep your copping
nose on your own copping face!”

Marik was stung.  He opened his mouth to protest when
Rail barked a new chastisement that bore no relation to the conversation.  “I
don’t recall asking for your flaming advice, you cheeky lizard!”  He lifted a
hand to his forehead, and Marik felt
a strange shift through his mage
senses.

When he opened his magesight, he could see nothing at
all out of the ordinary.  Rail’s aura, though thinner than it ought to be,
displayed no alterations.  The etheric mists saturating the room looked as they
should.  Had he actually sensed anything?

Rail faced him, irritated, wrestling with his
thoughts.  “You have duties enough to see to already, by the sound.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t handle knowing what you’ve
been working on.”

“I won’t allow you to fall into this mess.”  He
glanced with hesitation at his round sword-grip leaning on the bar between
them.

Marik waited patiently while Rail downed the last
swallow of warmed gin.  Any assurances would probably sound false.  Better to
sit and look like a man who could handle anything the world chose to test him
with.

“So, Spirratta then.”  Rail sighed.  “I’ll keep it
short.  I was on my way home as usual, when…a contractor ran across me.  Said I
was exactly the fighting man he’d been looking for.  Or keeping an eye out for,
if you ask me.”

“The man with the red eyes,” Marik stated.  He had
glossed over that part of his knowledge since revealing it also meant revealing
how Marik had come to know of him in the first place.

Rail shot him the hardest look yet.  His tight mouth
twitched.  This time, Marik knew Rail would push the matter.

Except he didn’t.  Maybe he thought to provide an
example of not prying where the other clearly intended not to go too deeply. 
“Yeah, him.”

Marik’s curiosity had sharpened greatly over the
years.  It insisted on further details.  “What’s his name, and what did he
want?  I’ve never seen eyes like that.”

“He’s got a name, right enough,” Rail responded,
flipping the glass upside down on the bar.  “Problem is a normal man would need
a tongue six inches long to pronounce it.  I’ve never been able to spit it out,
so I just call him Red.

“As for what he wanted, it was help tracking down a
walking snake-bastard he’d been chasing.  He offered those gold nuggets I sent
on home, and what free-sword could pass that up for a rat?  That was ten years
worth of contract coin, easy.  Never heard of pure nuggets that fat before.

“So we followed the trail Red had been dogging.  Took
us all the way north, up to the northwestern coasts in Rubia.  We barely missed
the snake after he slaughtered a shepherd family.  Followed him around through
nearly every damned kingdom on Merinor before he finally hightailed it off into
the ocean.

“You mean,” Marik asked, thinking of Tru, “off the
southern coast to the archipelagos?”

“No.  Out to the west.  Far to the west.  Across more
water than any ship in Merinor has ever dreamed of sailing.  Out there are
lands you never heard of.  Kingdoms long forgotten, if anyone ever knew of them
in the first place.  That’s where he went.”

“How did he go there if ships can’t sail that far?” 
It sounded like a skeptical concept at best.

Rail merely shook his head.  “He got to Arronath. 
That’s a kingdom large enough to make you blink when you see the copping maps
of it.  It could swallow everything from Nolier to Rubia whole, along with half
the gulf.”

Marik interrupted before his father could proceed any
further.  “Are you going to tell me why you were chasing him or not?  I can’t
get involved simply by knowing.”

“You’d be surprised.”  A jaundiced gaze rested on him
momentarily before Rail’s face shot skyward a second time.  He refrained from
any exclamations, yet his expression could have curdled milk.  “Against my
better
judgment,” he at last muttered, the words filled with meaning beyond Marik’s
understanding, “I’ll give you a splinter to worry at.  I doubt you’ll believe
any of it since the histories older than six-hundred odd were wiped out when
darling Basill destroyed the old lands so he could make them over according to
his own whim.  Not that the details survived much in the other Merinor kingdoms
anyway.

“Way back when…”  Rail trailed off with a silent
chuckle.  “I sound like a copping bard, don’t I, starting like that?  No, no”
he added when the barman approached with a fresh glass.  “I might pick up where
I left off later, Dryden, but what I could use here and now is one of your
head-clearers.”

Dryden, the barman, nodded.  He proceeded to mix
together a gods-awful concoction with the darkest tea Marik had ever seen as a
base.  After a generous dollop of mustard went into the mixing vessel, he
averted his eyes in mild repugnance.

“So you’ve been away for years working on a problem
that’s been lurking since before the Unification.  The details must be
fascinating.”

Rail cocked his head at his son’s sarcastic slant. 
“Buy or sell, that’s up to you.  I’m only going to tell you the facts as I’ve
learned them…learned them hard.  Have you ever been to the cathedral here in
Thoenar?”

“The Eternal Twelve, yeah.”  A memory drifted up from
his subconscious sludge.  “That’s the only building in the whole city that
dates back to before the Unification.”

“On the mark,” Rail agreed.  “Basill was a fellow
heavy into his religion.  No matter what anyone else says, you can bet his
decision to put his capitol city where he did had as much to do with the
cathedral as any other.  He wanted it in the center of his city, but after the
hell he’d raised over every inch of soil from the Stygan to the Southern Sea,
the cathedral people thought he was the blackest mongrel any jilly had ever
bore.  They kept their doors locked against him.  Couldn’t have expected that
to make much difference, but Basill left well enough alone on that front. 
Started building his city next door to the cathedral, ripping down what was
left of the buildings they’d started destroying in the war so they could plant
their own seeds.  By the time Thoenar expanded enough to surround the
cathedral, Basill was dust in the wind and the two places had enough time to
get to know each other.”

The barman placed a taller glass before Rail.  It
looked like a concoction town boys would religiously dare each other to
consume, then be secretly glad when their mothers called them in before the
other boys could force the issue.  Dryden drifted away along the bar without
demanding any sort of payment.

“And what’s all that hoo-rah have to do with anything,
I can hear you thinking.”  Rail raised the murky mixture to his lips and took a
small sip.  It made his nostrils flare.  A massive inhalation fill his lungs
through his nose.  He pursed his lips to blow the air out.

“It crossed my mind,” Marik admitted.

“You’ve been in there.  It’s about what you might
expect from the reputation.  Except, there’s one part of it that’s downright
strange, isn’t there?”

And without warning, the smile that Marik remembered
broke through the weathered face.  It transformed him, restoring much of what
the years had stolen.  Marik almost felt winter sunlight playing across his
face.  Looking across on a level plane to meet his father’s eye felt acutely
wrong.  The proper perspective should be from about two feet lower, looking
upward into that confident, easy, grin.

Marik had been here many times before.  Whenever Rail
left a question hanging in such a manner, it always meant he expected Marik to
guess at the answer, even if he missed completely.  With no trace of lingering
adolescent irritation, Marik slid comfortably into the role.

“If you aren’t talking about how the statues seem to
watch you, then you’re talking about that one archway.”

“In a bull’s eye.  The cathedral keepers might still
have records of why it was sealed, but everyone else has forgotten.  And they
sure as green grass don’t mention it in their sermons.  When everyone talks
about the Eternal Twelve, they always talk about the eleven gods they can name,
right?  They don’t so much as
think
about the last.  Odd, don’t you
agree?”

“I’ve never thought about it much.  So what’s the
punch line to it?  Sounds like you know well enough what happened.”

“I do.  Red told me all about it.”

“How would he know details the rest of the world has
forgotten?  Unless he’s a priest who worked there.”

That made Rail laugh.  “Never a priest or a holy man,
that bastard!”  The humor quickly died within him.  “Though he got conscience
enough to be one.  I don’t know half of his story.  The parts I do know you
wouldn’t buy from me, so I’ll leave it at saying he’s like no man you’ve ever
met before.  And if you live to be a shriveled gaffer your daughter-by-marriage
has to dust off whenever she remembers to, you’ll never see his like again.”

“That’s an easy sell since I already believed that
much about him.”

A single nod from Rail punctuated it.  “So I ask you,
what would it take to drive men in lands across the entire world to expunge a
god from their thoughts?  A god who most everyone accepted as a true god and
not some heathen deity.  Simple answer.  It would take a god going barking mad,
and who damn near dragged the entire world into insanity with him.”

*        *        *        *        *

Excerpt
from introduction of “Lumin ap Veoticon”

Archbishop
of Sheirleon: Vertick Durannam

And shadows fell across the world and the suffering
was great.  The altars of black obsidian ran with sacrificial blood.  His
priests, clad in green robes stained with crimson hue, performed His will.  And
His Power grew.

The stolen Life garnered from countless sacrificed
souls enabled Him to shear away the veil separating the physical realm from His
domain.  And so in darkest blasphemy did a Deity cross bodily into the world.

And yet the Earth God could not sustain physical
form.  He was forced back across the veil.  The defeat enraged Him.  He
determined not to be thus thwarted a second time.

He commanded of His priests to create a great
obscenity; a great statue to act as anchor for His Power.  A permanent link
that could house His being and defy the veil.

And crafted they for a decade a form from blackest
obsidian glass.  It stood taller than the largest of men and they set it within
a basin.

The Great War had raged unending and continued to
escalate as His anchor neared completion.  On the final day, His priests
gathered five-thousand prisoners plundered from the Known Lands.  So began a
terrible baptismal right.  Blood spilled over the vile blackness until the
basin filled.

The Earth God grew greater in Power.  He filled the
statue with His Power and His presence.  The black stone came alive and many of
His priests were driven mad.

The Paladins of His armies grew stronger, empowered
were they with God Power flowing into them directly from His anchor.  All the
Known Lands hovered on the brink of eternal darkness when the Earth God was
struck down by mortal hands.

A warrior-priest of Sheirleon visited the temples of
the Eleven.  He carried a vial of liquid silver for each High-Priest to call
down the Powers of their God into.

The warrior-priest and his companions did arrive by
stealth in the unholy chamber.  He called upon the Power of the Light, and
smashed the volcanic glass with the Power of Eleven Gods.

Power ran wild through the veil between worlds.  The
Power streams to His paladins burned to cast them down where they stood.  The
Earth God was broken and hurled across the veil, Powerless with His followers
dead.

*        *        *        *        *

Marik kept silent while he digested the odd tale his
father spun.  At last, he observed, “I can’t imagine it’s healthy to be
standing next to a statue containing a god after you broke it.”

“Not in this case,” Rail agreed, downing the last of
his head-clearer.  “The accounts say the temple collapsed on top of them. 
Killed the entire group before the rest of us could carry them away on our
shoulders to worship forevermore.”

“Can a god actually be killed?  It seems incredible! 
Man shouldn’t be able to kill a god.”

“I don’t expect man can.  Not truly.  The gods aren’t
mortals, so even if you shred them to pieces and jump on the remains, they’re
stuck enduring it all.  Or so I believe.  Being immortal means suffering the
worst, no matter how bad, without ever escaping through death.  I wouldn’t want
it.  And don’t ask me where the cringing whelp has been lurking ever since,
because I don’t have the foggiest.”

“The God of Earth,” Marik mused.  “I should have
realized that much.  His partner goddess is Lor’Velath.  What else could be the
opposite of magic?”