Legacy of the Darksword (5 page)

And when I did not immediately
move, Mosiah’s tone sharpened. “Saryon will not leave without you. You are
putting him in danger.”

He knew that would rouse me. It
would have roused me from my grave. I closed my eyes and imagined myself rising
up from my bed and joining Mosiah. At first, nothing happened. I was in such a
flutter of excitement and fear that it was difficult to concentrate.

“Relax,” Mosiah said softly,
hypnotically. “Relax and slough off the heaviness of the body that weighs you
down.”

His words no longer burned in my
mind, but seemed to flow through it like running water. I found myself relaxing,
letting the water run over me. My body did, in fact, feel very heavy, so heavy
that I knew I could not lift it. And yet, there was the imperative
that I
bad to leave!

I stood up and I walked over to
join Mosiah. When I looked back, I was not surprised to see the heavy body
still lying in the bed, slumbering soundly, to all appearances.

My fears were forgotten in my
wonder and awe.

I started to move toward the
door, thinking to go through it and down the stairs to my master’s bedroom, as
I was accustomed, but Mosiah stopped me.

“You are no longer constrained by
physical barriers, Reuven. A thought will take you to Saryon.”

And he spoke truly. The moment I
thought about being with my master, I was there beside him. At the sight of me,
Saryon smiled and nodded and then, hesitantly, as if having to relearn skills
long forgotten, his soul left his body.

I was not surprised to see his
spirit suffused with a soft radiant white glow; a distinct contrast to Mosiah,
whose spirit seemed cloaked with the same black robes his body wore.

My master was pained by this, as
I could tell. And so could Mosiah.

“Once—you remember, Father—my
soul was bright and crystal clear as Reuven’s. The dark and terrible things I
have seen since have left their mark upon me. But we must hurry. They will wait
only until they think you are asleep. Don’t be afraid, I will not let them harm
either of you.”

Mosiah’s soul slid back into its
body. He spoke a word, reached out with his hand as if to some invisible door,
pushed on nothing, and walked inside.

“Hurry!” he commanded. “Follow
me.”

The mind thinks of the strangest
things at the most inappropriate times. I remembered, suddenly, a television
cartoon I had seen as a child, in which the character—perhaps a rabbit, I’m not
certain—is being chased through the forest by a hunter with a gun. The rabbit
is cornered, apparently, until he opens a hole in the cartoon, crawls inside,
and pulls the hole in after him, leaving the hunter extremely befuddled.

Mosiah had done the very same
thing. He had opened a hole in our bedroom and was urging us to crawl inside!

Saryon, having lived for many,
many years in the magical world of Thimhallan, was much more accustomed to such
arcane manifestations than I was. He immediately entered the hole,
then
beckoned to me to follow. I started to cross the room,
remembered that I didn’t have to rely on my feet, and wished myself at my
master’s side.

I was in the hole. The hole
closed behind me and formed a bubble around us, holding us suspended in the
air, floating somewhere near the ceiling of Saryon’s bedroom.

“A Corridor?”
Saryon asked, amazed. “Here on
Earth?”

I must mention, by the way, that
we did not speak, but communicated mind to mind. And it occurred to me that, in
this spirit realm, I was no longer mute. I could talk and be heard. The
knowledge filled me with such trembling joy and terrible confusion that I was
immediately rendered more silent than I had ever been in the physical realm.

“Not as you mean it, Father. Not
a Corridor in time and space such as we had on Thimhallan,” Mosiah replied. “That
skill has been lost to us, and we have not regained it. But we do have the
ability to slip inside one of time’s folds.”

I must try to explain the
sensation of being hidden in a “fold” of time, as Mosiah called it. The only
way I can put this is to say that it was very much like hiding behind the folds
of a heavy curtain. And, in fact, I began to feel an almost smothering
constraint upon me, which is caused by, so I learned later, the knowledge that
time was passing for my body and I—the spirit— was standing still.

The sensation is not as bad, I
understand, for those who enter the fold with both mind and body, for one has
only to step out again to be caught up in time’s flow. But, despite the fact
that my body was slumbering, I began to feel a panic inside me akin to that
felt by someone fearing he may miss the last train home. The train—i.e., my
body—was moving on ahead, and I was running frantically to catch up. I think I
would have attempted to escape, then and there, but I would not leave Saryon.

I found out later that he felt
the same, but that he would not leave because of me. We laughed over that, but
our laughter was hollow.

“Shh, hush! Look!” Mosiah
cautioned.

He did not silence us so that we
would not be heard—for that was not possible, not even for the
D’karn-darah.
He silenced us that we might hear them. What we heard and what we saw
chilled us.

Though we could move through
physical barriers, we could not see through them. Trapped inside time’s fold,
we could not move to another part of the house or see what was transpiring in
any other part of the house except Saryon’s bedroom. My hearing is acute,
however, and the nervous tension I was under accentuated it. I heard a slight
clicking sound, which
was our front-door lock
giving
way. The creak of the door’s hinges (which Saryon had been asking me to oil)
meant that the front door was being stealthily opened. At the same time I heard
the snick of the lock of the back door, heard the door itself scrape across the
mud rug which we had placed at the entrance.

Whoever had been out there had
entered the house by the front and by the back. But try as I might, I could not
hear them moving at all through the front part of the house. One of them was in
the bedroom before I was fully aware of his coming.

He was clad all in paper-thin
silver robes that clung to his body and crackled faintly as he moved,
occasionally emitting tiny blue sparks, like the fur of a cat in the darkness.
His face was plastered with the same paper-thin silver, so that only the
outline of features—a nose and mouth—were visible. Silver fabric covered his
hands and feet like a second skin.

He stood in the bedroom and
Mosiah, with a whispered thought, called our attention to a strange phenomenon.
The machines in the bedroom knew the
D’karn-darah
was there. The
machines responded to his coming.

The machines’ response was not
overt or dramatic. I would not have noticed it, except for Mosiah’s mention.
The bedroom’s overhead light, which had, of course, been turned off, flickered
on. A faint hum of music came from the compact-disc player. The reading lamp
gave a feeble gleam.

The
D’karn-darah
ignored
all this and went immediately to Saryon’s body, which continued to sleep
soundly. He put out a silver-covered hand and shook the catalyst by the
shoulder.

“Saryon!” he said loudly.

Beside me, I could feel Saryon’s
spirit shiver. I was thankful, then, for Mosiah’s arrival and his timely
warning. If my master had been wakened in the night and seen such a horrific
sight bending over him, he might never have recovered from the shock.

At that moment I heard a female
voice say “Reuven!” loudly. I felt a slight brushing sensation across my
shoulder. Then I knew that the second person, the one who had entered by the
back door, had gone to my room. She was standing over my body.

The
D’karn-darah
shook
Saryon again, more forcibly, turning the sleeping body over in the bed. “Saryon!”
the man repeated, and his voice was harsh.

I trembled, for I was afraid he
would do Saryon some harm. Mosiah again reassured both of us.

“They will not hurt you,” he
repeated. “They do not dare. They know you may be of use to them.”

The one who had been in my room
now appeared in Saryon’s bedchamber.

“Same thing?” she asked.

“Yes,” answered the
D’karn-darah
who stood beside my master. “Their souls have fled. They were alerted to
our coming.”

“
Duuk-tsarith.”

“Of course.
Undoubtedly the one named
Mosiah, that Enforcer who was once the catalyst’s friend.”

“You were right, then. You said
we would find him here.”

“He has been here. He is probably
still here, hiding in one of their cursed time folds, no doubt. And the other
two are probably with him right now. Very possibly”—the man’s silver faceless
face turned and gazed around the bedroom—”they are listening to us at this
moment.”

“Then it is simple. Torture the
body. Pain will cause their spirits to return. They will be only too glad,
after a while, to tell us where to find the Enforcer.”

The female
D’karn-darah raised
her hand, and where before had been five fingers were now five long steel
needles. Electricity began to arc from one to another. She reached the hand
with the horribly crackling needles toward Saryon’s defenseless form.

Her partner halted her, his own
hand closing around her wrist.

“The Khandic Sages will be here
tomorrow, working their own methods of persuasion. They would know that we had
been here and they would not be pleased.”

“They know that we are hunting
this Enforcer. They want him as much as we do.”

“Yes, but they want this catalyst
more.” The
D’karn-darah
sounded irritated. “Very well, we will leave him
to them. A pity we could not have arrived a few moments sooner. We would have
been able to capture the
Duuk-tsarith.
As it is, our meeting is only
delayed, Enforcer!” He spoke to the air. “And, you, Catalyst.” The silver face
turned toward the figure in the bed. “I leave this, my . . . business card.”

He opened the palm of his gloved
hand, reached into his other palm, gave a twist, freeing some object—I could
not see what. He tossed that object onto the bed, at the feet of Saryon’s
slumbering figure. Then the two of them left the bedroom, left the house by the
back door.

At their departure, the machines
in the house returned to normal. The lights went off, the CD player ceased to
play.

We waited, hidden, for some time,
to make certain the
D’karn-darah
were gone and that this was no trick to
lure us out of hiding. When Mosiah permitted us to return, my spirit drifted
back to find my body. I looked down upon myself.

This was much different than
looking into a mirror, for the mirror shows us what we see every day, what we
have grown accustomed to seeing. Before now, I had never seen myself with such
clarity. And though I was eager to return to Saryon and had questions to ask of
Mosiah, I was so entranced by this ability to see myself as a casual observer
might see me that I took a few moments to do just that.

Physical attributes I knew well.
The mirror shows us these. Fair hair, worn long, that someone in my childhood
once called “corn silk.”
Brown eyes beneath eyebrows that I
did not like.
They were thick and dark brown, in stark contrast to my
fair hair, and gave me a grave and overly serious aspect. The features of my
face tended to be sharp, with prominent cheekbones and a nose that was called
aquiline. It would grow beaky as I aged.

Being young, my body was lithe,
although certainly not strong. Exercise of the mind suited me far better than
running very fast on a machine that took me nowhere. Yet now I looked at those
thin hands and spindly arms with disfavor. If Saryon was in danger, how could I
defend him?

I found that I did not have the
leisure to spend long on this inspection. The nearer my spirit drew to my body,
the more it longed to return, and I had the impression that I dove down to my
body from a great height. I awoke, shaking, stomach clenching, as one does from
a falling dream. And I have wondered, ever since, if perhaps those dreams aren’t
really the first tentative journeys our spirits make.

I sat up in my bed, shaking off
the feelings of sleep that clung to my body. Hurriedly grabbing my robe, I
wrapped it around myself, and switching on the hall light, hastened down the
stairs. Light came from Saryon’s bedroom. I found my master, looking as groggy
as I felt, staring at the object which the
D’karn-darah
had left upon
the blanket.

“It will not harm you,” Mosiah
was saying as I entered. “You may pick it up, if you like.”

“I will do so, sir,” I signed,
and swooped down upon the object, gathering it into my hand before Saryon could
touch it.

Mosiah watched me with a slight
smile, which was, I think, approving. Saryon just shook his head with fond
exasperation.

When I was certain that the
object was benign, not likely to explode or burst into flame or—I don’t know
what I’d expected exactly—I opened my hand and held it out. Saryon and I peered
down on it wonderingly.