The Ale Boy's Feast (53 page)

As he scrabbled at the flask’s crumbling cork, Jaralaine moved. At first he thought she might be waking. But no, a Deathweed tendril was coiled about her leg, pulling her away.

A groan shocked him as if the chamber were a drum that had been struck. He looked up at the strange pillar of tangled cords and misshapen clay that hung from the ceiling. What he saw this time brought him to his feet.

Sculpted in the clay he saw a face. A face once human. Distorted, swollen, stretched—two dark cavities where the eyes had been, nostrils like deep cuts, and then the cave of an open mouth.

He looked again, interpreting what he had seen before a different way. This column, this descending mass was not made of stone at all. It was a pulsing, living thing imprisoned in a bundle of Deathweed. No, it was the source of Deathweed. This man, suspended upside down, had evolved beyond the boundaries of human definition, his legs becoming roots thick as tree trunks that ascended, divided, and spread across the ceiling.

And those two feeble roots that reached down to almost touch the floor, those were the limp, elongated remnants of the man’s arms, ending in tiny stubs that had once been fingers.

The creature was gasping long, deep lungfuls of air.

“Strength,” it said.

“What …,” the boy whispered. “Who are you?” The creature closed and opened his lips like a fish.

The boy’s eyes traced the suspended creature’s body up to where it frayed into a multitude of limbs that spread and disappeared into the earth. Mosses hanging from those limbs bled the black rain that pooled and sank into cracks in the floor.

“The Curse. It’s from you. The feelers, your limbs. The Essence, your blood.”

The creature did not respond. It faced him, eyeless.

“The Seers … they fed you, didn’t they? For a long, long time.” He looked about at the carts along the wall, loaded with carcasses, bones, faces.

Then he said boldly, with the certainty of solving the riddle, “You’re Tammos Raak.”

The name echoed in empty space.

The creature’s lips closed and opened. Closed and opened.

The ale boy looked at Jaralaine’s broken body. “I want you to let her go,” he said weakly. “Give her back to me. Please.”

The creature’s tongue emerged from between its lips, a stump, pale as a piece of ancient firewood.

“You’re thirsty. The Seers have been gone for a while.”

The boy felt something within him fail. His hope, perhaps. For what he now must do seemed inevitable, as if it had been written down and he could only fulfill it.

And so he made the most laborious journey of his short and troubled life, putting one foot before the other across the poison floor, passing between two cauldrons. He stumbled and nearly dropped the flask.

The creature’s lips closed, then unglued from one another again.

The boy reached up.

Tammos Raak’s nostrils flared. A wheeze of air rushed up into that wretched body. Then the creature unleashed a storm of sound—a lament, a longing, a thirst.

The boy cowered, ears ringing. He clutched the flask to his chest as if it were the last scrap of his raft floating on a turbulent river.
He smells the water. He recognizes
it
. When silence returned, he stood, reaching up to set the mouth of the flask on the creature’s upper lip.

Tammos Raak convulsed and turned, and the flask fell aside.

The room brightened. The boy watched, bewildered, as five blue phantoms swam through the air, curling around the suspended prisoner as if to protect him.

A thick tendril of Deathweed from the shadows above lashed out like a whip, flinging the boy across the chamber. He hit the wall and fell in a heap. The flask dropped, spilling water across the ground.

The boy crawled forward, tipped it upright. “Go ahead,” he shouted at the imprisoned giant. “You don’t deserve it anyway.” Then he crawled back to Jaralaine. Her right arm was still cast out, her left folded across a bundle against her body. He lifted the flask and put the spout to her lips.

Accompanied by a wrathful roar, the Deathweed tendril lashed out again, snatching the flask from the ale boy and casting it like a stone toward the prisoner’s own head. It flew deep into Tammos Raak’s throat. His lips sealed shut, and his misshapen face crumpled in discomfort as he fought to swallow the flask.

The lips opened and closed. It was gone.

The ale boy collapsed against the treasure pile, his head resting against Jaralaine’s cold breast. “That’s it then,” he whispered. “Served my last drink, and I’ve got nothing left.” His hands gripped the folds of cloth beneath Jaralaine’s arm. Something inside him felt broken, sharp-edged, crooked.

He did not know how much time went by. He dreamed awhile, images drifting through his mind.

He was sitting with Obsidia Dram, and she was hunched over a stream, catching water in a basin while he sifted grain in a bowl. She was clumsy, moving as if everything she wore were several sizes too large. And that hunch between her shoulders—had she been born like that, or was it an injury?

“Do you like kites, my boy?” she asked. “I don’t suppose anyone’s ever taught you to make one.”

“Auralia,” he had answered. “I saw some kites in her caves. You should see the ribbons she ties to the tails.”

“I’d like that,” said Obsidia. “I’d so like to go and meet her sometime. She sounds … she sounds like family.”

“Oh,” said a whisper.

The dream shattered, and the ale boy woke, his teeth chattering. The suspended man was staring at him. With eyes. Eyes that had emerged from the dark depths of vacant cavities. Small, human eyes.

“Ohh,” the creature sighed.

He sees
.

So cold he couldn’t move without shaking, the boy reached for the bundle caught in Jaralaine’s embrace. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “But I’m going to need to borrow this.”

Intending only to draw it around him for warmth, he shook it out, and it unfurled. As the cave filled with light and color, a slight red ribbon was cast into the air. The ale boy caught the string and unthinkingly threaded it through the loops to bind it at his throat.

He felt a spark. The cloak brightened. The darkness vanished, vanquished by the full spectrum of Auralia’s colors.

In this way Tammos Raak beheld again the glory of all he’d abandoned.

The light of all colors flooded his cell—whiter than white, infused with every hue the Expanse had ever known and worlds more than those.

The light burned deep into the great ancestor’s gaze. Colors penetrated his mind and body like rivers saturating a desert. They resonated like the meeting of strings and a bow. They sang in a language that his heart—frail and buried deep within the many-chambered engine that had encompassed and overpowered it—had forgotten.

Received, these colors were not discovered but recognized. Memories broke the dam that he had set up against them, and they quenched his fearful, wasteful desire to be separate and solitary, to be disconnected from the whole. For he knew that
these colors had been sent by his sister as a declaration of love, love in spite of all his offenses.

He saw the whole Expanse from a high place, through a lens of crystalline cloud. The stark white and black of winter; the rough, seething green of spring; the ripeness of summer; and autumn’s smoldering fire. This was the view he had once known from the home he had abandoned.

Like a stone cast to shatter a vast and frozen sea within him, the light shocked his broken heart to beating once again.

He was caught by surprise. Before he could open up the deep reservoir of lies he had gathered to shield himself, he felt a powerful emotion welling up from deep inside.

Gratitude.

I abandoned my family. I rejected the gift of who and how I was invited to be. I left my sister and my source behind. And yet here is an invitation. I can be sewn again into their dance, join their music. I can live
.

This burst of life drove the water from the flask that Tammos Raak had swallowed coursing through his body, out into his limbs.

The root of the disease, which fed upon the stony deadness in Tammos Raak’s heart, had nothing left to eat, for his heart was alive again. The shock of that deprival shot out through the roots of Deathweed, out through the limbs, the fingers, the filaments that lurked in the ground of the Expanse, that wormed their way into the trees of the forests, that distorted the nature of all things green and growing.

The trees of the world shuddered in a distress felt by the crawling branches they had cast off to fulfill the Curse’s appetite.

The poisonous pump providing Essence to those who craved its deforming influence slowed to a stop. The Curse of the Cent Regus was broken, and all that had gone out from him began to wither and crumble, unable to poison anything further. It became nothing at all.

Stunned, the Deathweed shivered. For it had always been eating, never satisfied, ever pursuing an ongoing emptiness. But now it had been tricked into absorbing something that satisfied, and all its needs dried up. It tasted relief. Its wretched web
of distortion was cleansed, becoming a net of white threads spreading throughout the fabric of the Expanse—bones around which new forms of life would grow.

This quake cast a cloud of dust into the skies all across the Expanse.

The Seers’ grand designs had failed. They could craft nothing themselves but more opportunities for their rival to redeem and reconcile, increasing mystery’s mastery and sharpening their shame.

All that remained now was a surrender to joy.

Tammos Raak saw the five blue suspended ghosts flaring with rage at their humiliation.

Relief spread out from his tiny heart, warming him to the furthest reaches of his distorted form. He drove the last wisp of his strength into a word of gratitude, hoarse and hollow, spoken into that chamber filled with colors.

His heart, unprepared to sustain a life, beat a few times more, and then collapsed. His sight faded slowly, its last vision a wild dance of colors, as he waited for the Northchildren to come and unstitch him from this exhausted body and carry him home.

Hearing the last word of Tammos Raak, the ale boy sensed the relief in it.

He tried to move, each breath a shock like the blow of an ax. He reached again for Jaralaine’s outstretched hand, and as he did, he saw the wicked grasp of the Deathweed surrender her body and shrivel.

Jaralaine tumbled to the floor beside him. He got to his knees and tried to lift her, but a searing pain ran jagged through his chest.

So he crawled. He crawled, dragging Jaralaine with him, his way lit by the colors he wore, as if he were pouring a river of fire down the stairs. Then the last spark of strength went out of him, and he fell down the stairs toward the river.

He saw a vast creature descend from the ceiling, spreading its wings. He felt the wind from their unfolding, and then he felt a soft embrace.

“Please,” he whispered. “Take us to Auralia.”

his is where I stood in the dream
. Cal-raven did not understand it. He had stepped through a door on the south side of the mountain range, walked a strange, resonating path, a pulse like the earth’s own heartbeat thrumming around him. And when he stepped out onto a stony ledge, he was on the other side.