The Demon Awakens (13 page)

The young woman made her way around the back of the inn, down a dark alley that inspired no fear, and up a gutter, to the one section of Fellowship Way’s roof that was not slanted. The lights of Palmaris spread wide before her, the lights of the night sky wide above her. This was her secret place, her place of contemplation. She came up here as often as her duties allowed to be alone with her memories, to try to piece together who she was and where she had come from.

She remembered wandering into a village, dirty and wounded, covered in soot and blood. She remembered the tender manner in which she had been brought in, followed by relentless questions that she could not answer. Then came the long journey, tagging along with a merchant caravan that had swapped crafted items to the people of the small frontier village in exchange for pelts and great trees that would be used as masts for the sailing ships built in Palmaris. Graevis Chilichunk had been on that caravan, coming north to the Wilderlands to pick up some very special wine, boggle by name. He had taken to the poor lost girl—he was the one who had given the girl the name of Cat-the-Stray—and the villagers had been more than willing to part with the orphan and with many of their own weaker folk, since they were in fear of a raid similar to the one that had sacked the neighboring settlement, Cat’s settlement.

Cat rested back against a sooty chimney, the warm bricks taking a bit of the bite from the night chill.

Why couldn’t she remember the name of her village or of the one where Graevis had found her? On several occasions, she had started to ask Pettibwa and Graevis about it, but every time she had stopped short, some part of her fearing to remember. Neither of her adopted parents pressed her to remember; Cat had overheard them talking one night, making a pact that they would let the girl heal in her own time. “Perhaps she will never remember,” Pettibwa had said. “Perhaps that would be better.”

“And she’s got her new name now,” Graevis agreed. “Though if I’d’ve thinked it would stick, I’d’ve chosen differently!”

And they laughed, and it was not in any way an insult to the girl, just their joy at being able to help one so in need.

Cat loved them with all her heart. Now, though, she was beginning to think it was time for her to figure out who she was and where she had come from. She looked up at the sky. Some streaks of clouds had moved in, giving a different perspective to those stars still visible. It was often possible to look at familiar things in a different way, Cat realized. She let the night canopy absorb her, used it to filter back through the painful barriers. She had seen this sky all her life and used that commonality to recall another place.

She remembered running up a forested slope, looking back to her village, nestled in a sheltered vale, and then turning her gaze above it, to the southern sky, to the faint colors of the Halo.

“The Halo,” Cat-the-Stray muttered, and she realized that she had not seen the phenomenon since she had come to Palmaris. Her face screwed up with concern. Did such a thing as the Halo even exist, or was her memory a mere fantasy?

If it did exist, then her memory was correct, then she had found yet another image of her lost life.

She considered going back into the Way and inquiring about this Halo right then, but her concentration was broken by a sharp, metallic sound.

Somebody was climbing up the gutter.

Cat did not get overalamed—until she saw a familiar dirty face come over the edge of the roof.

“Ah, me lovely,” said the drunk from the bar. “So ye come up here to meet with me.”

“Be on your way,” Cat warned, but the man rolled up over the edge of the roof and started to rise.

“Oh, I’ll be having me way,” he said, and then Cat heard yet another man coming up the gutter, and realized she was in trouble. They had followed her, all three, and she knew well enough what they meant to do to her.

Quick as her namesake, the young woman leaped across and put her knee heavily into the drunk’s chest, knocking him flat to the roof. She slapped away his grabbing hands, then slugged him twice in the face.

Then she was up, meeting the second intruder with a foot in his face as his head came above the roof edge. His head, snapped back; he started to say something in protest, and Cat kicked him again, right in the jaw.

With a groan, he fell away into the blackness, dropping heavily atop the last of the three, then both of them going down hard to the cobblestones. Two kicks and two down, but it had taken too long. Even as Cat started to turn back for the first, the drunk’s arms came about her and locked about her chest, squeezing her tight.

She felt his hot breath on her neck, smelled the stench of the cheap ale. “There, there, me pretty one,” he whispered. “If ye’re not to fight me, ye’ll like it all the more.”

He nibbled her earlobe, or tried to, but she snapped her head back hard into his face, stunning him.

The one memory that Cat-the-Stray held completely from her past was not an image or a name, but a feeling, a deep frustrated rage. She let that memory out now, on the roof of Fellowship Way in Palmaris. She let all the tears and all the unanswered screams come out, channeled them into a level of violence that the drunk could not have foreseen.

Her hands raked at his arms; she stuck one arm between her torso and the drunk’s arm, and let her legs fall out from under her, twisting and squirming.

“Might be more the fun if ye fight!” the drunk squealed, but he wasn’t paying attention and had let the young woman get her face close to his clenched hands.

Cat-the-Stray clamped her teeth over one of his knuckles and bit him hard.

“Ah, ye whore!” he yelled, and lifted his other hand to pound her.

But he had broken his grip, and Cat turned and ducked, accepting the blow across the back of her shoulders, not even feeling it through the turmoil of her emotions. She came around and up and right back in, clawing at his face, raking for his eyes. He pulled her hands out wide, and she used the opening to head-butt him again.

She tore her hands free and grabbed him by the hair. He punched her hard on the side of the head, but she only loosed a feral scream, and tugged down hard with both her hands, while she jumped and curled one leg. She heard the crack of bone as her knee connected with his face. He shot back up straight, then fell over backward, but Cat was not done with him.

She came in hard, screaming all the while, driving her knee into his throat.

“Enough!” he whined, gagged. “I’ll let ye be.”

That wasn’t the point; Cat would not let him be. She hit him a score of heavy blows; she kicked him, she bit him, she clawed him. Finally, battered and bleeding from a dozen wounds, he managed to get to his feet and he ran headlong to the ledge and dove right over it.

Following across the roof, Cat noticed that there was a light below in the alley. She came to the edge, expecting one of the man’s companions to be coming up the gutter, and hoping that to be the case.

She stopped, taken fully by surprise. The drunk lay very still, groaning softly, blood running from his many wounds and from the side of his broken head. The man she had kicked from the gutter was down as well, sitting against the building wall across the alley, one hand supporting him, the other clutching his shin. The leg had splintered in the fall; Cat could see the jagged edge of a bone poking through the skin.

The third drunk was up, hands high above his head and facing the wall directly below Cat, a sword’s pointed tip tight against the middle of his back.

“I heard a scream,” said the handsome man from the Way, the one with the sparkling light brown eyes, the one with the purest white smile. “I took my leave soon after you departed,” he explained, “figuring there was nothing left in the place worth watching.”

Cat felt the blood rushing to her face.

“Some hero I prove to be,” the man said, bringing his sword back in a salute to the young woman. “By my eyes, it seems as if I saved these three!”

Cat-the-Stray had no idea what to respond to the gallant man. Her rage bubbled away, and she turned from the alley, walking back into the solitude of the darkened rooftop.

After a few uncomfortable minutes, the man called up to her, but before she could answer, she heard a commotion as several others, Graevis among them, came rushing into the alley.

Cat-the-Stray didn’t want to face them. She was embarrassed, she was ashamed, and she just wanted to be left alone. That was not possible, she realized, nor could she slip down the other side of the building without having half of Palmaris searching frantically for her. She took a deep breath and moved to the gutter, then down, meeting the eyes of no one, falling into the bosom of Pettibwa as soon as she spotted the woman, and whispering for Pettibwa to please take her to her room.

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CHAPTER 12

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The Windrunner

The hours were endless, up before the dawn and not to bed again until the midnight hour had passed. Brothers Avelyn, Quintall, Pellimar, and Thagraine learned to survive, even thrive, on no more than four hours of sleep. They were taught the deepest forms of meditation, where a twenty-minute break afforded them all the recuperation they needed to press on with their training for several more hours. They studied with their respective classmates throughout the day, learning their religious duties and expectations, the day-to-day functions of the abbey, and the fighting techniques. After vespers, the training shifted to lessons concerning the sacred stones—the collection process, the preparation ceremony immediately after collection, and the various magical properties of each type of stone. In addition, all four were taught the ways of the sea, spending many hours on a small boat rocking in the waves on the rough, frigid waters of All Saints Bay.

Avelyn could not keep up with his three companions in the matters of fighting or seamanship; and in the religious training, the young brother grew more and more frustrated. It seemed that as every ceremony became ingrained within him, it lost a bit of its mystery, and thus, its holiness. Were the fifteen Holy Orders of God, the rules of righteousness, truly God inspired, or were they merely rules of keeping order within a civilized society? Such questions would have broken Avelyn were it not for the training after the sun had set. For in the Ring Stones, the young man found his ideals satisfied. The mysteries of stone magic could not be explained away by human desires of control and order. To Avelyn, these stones were truly the gift of God, the magic of the heavens, the promise of eternal life and glory.

So he suffered the brutal hours of the day, the fighting in which Quintall almost always bested him. By the beginning of the third year, the level of jealousy among the four began to rise noticeably. Avelyn and Thagraine had been formally named as the Preparers, the two monks who would leave the chartered ship and go onto the island of Pimaninicuit to collect and prepare the stones, while Quintall and Pellimar would remain aboard, going onto the island only should one of the chosen pair falter. Sea journeys were not considered safe in God’s Year 821, the year of the stone showers, and replacements might become necessary.

Quintall was easily the best of the four in matters of martial arts. The man was impossibly strong, his stocky frame and low center of gravity giving him the leverage he needed to punish Avelyn endlessly. On more than one occasion, the lanky Avelyn was convinced that Quintall meant to kill him. What better way to get to Pimaninicuit?

The thought was more than a little unsettling to gentle Avelyn Desbris, and he thought it ironic that Quintall’s anger was no more than proof that he, and not the stocky, ferocious man, was the better choice for Pimaninicuit. Avelyn knew in his heart that if the situation were reversed, if Quintall and not he had been chosen to go to the island, he would support the man with all his heart, taking his comfort in the fact that he was allowed to go on the journey and holding faith that the masters, and not he, were better judges of the students. Besides, at night, and especially on those occasions when the chosen students actually handled the stones, Brother Avelyn easily proved that he was the proper choice. By the fourth year, none, not even the masters, could bring forth the stone magic more completely, more effortlessly, than Avelyn. Even skeptical Master Siherton, whatever reservations he continued to hold about Avelyn as a fellow human being, had to admit that the man was the obvious choice, the God-given choice, for Pimaninicuit. Siherton maintained his tight bond with Quintall and lobbied for the younger man to be included—as Thagraine’s replacement and not Avelyn’s. By the third year, Master Siherton also became invaluable as a mediator between the two rivals from the class of God’s Year 816, coaxing Quintall into easing up on his jealousy of Avelyn.

The first three months of God’s Year 821 were full of excitement and anticipation throughout St.-Mere-Abelle. Nearly every day—when the weather was calm enough for the younger monks to go out into the courtyard—the students would glance repeatedly at the dark waters of All Saints Bay, shaking their heads whenever an iceberg floated by but always remarking that it would not be long. As Bafway, the third month, whose end marked the spring equinox, neared, the whispers became a contest to see who might first spot the square sails of the chartered ship.

Bafway proved to be a long, uneventful month. The spring equinox passed, and every time the weather seemed to be improving, another cold front would sweep down from Alpinador, chopping the waters of All Saints Bay into frothing, threatening whitecaps.

As the fourth month, Toumanay, slipped past, the quiet whispers became open discussions, with even the older brothers—even some of the masters—joining in, the older and more experienced holy men admitting that this was indeed a blessed time and a ship was indeed on its way to St.-Mere-Abelle. The only secret remained the subsequent destination of that ship, for only the masters and the four chosen monks knew the magical name Pimaninicuit.

Brother Avelyn’s thoughts were full of that island and of the long voyage ahead of him. He hardly considered the dangers, though he knew from his studies that on several occasions, the monks who had set out for Pimaninicuit had never returned, taken by storms or powries or by the great serpents of the Mirianic Ocean. Even on successful voyages to Pimaninicuit, more often than not, one or more of the four monks did not return, for disease was a very real fact of life aboard ship. What Avelyn focused on, therefore, was the destination, the isle itself. From the texts he had studied, he conjured images of lush gardens and exotic flowers, pictured himself standing in a garden with multicolored stones raining down around him, divine music playing in the air. He would run barefoot through the stones, would roll in them, would bask in his God.

Avelyn knew the absurdity of his fantasy, of course. When the showers arrived, he and his fellow Preparer would be hidden underground, sheltered from the pelting meteors. Even after the showers ceased, the pair would have to wait some time before handling the heated stones, and then the work would be too furious and desperate to pause and contemplate God.

But for all the harsh reality, for all the possibilities that he would not survive, Avelyn watched the watery horizon for hint of those square sails most intently of all. To his thinking, this was the pinnacle of his existence, the greatest joy that a monk of St.-Mere-Abelle might know, the closest, before death, that he could ever get to his God.

Toumanay was less than half finished when the two-masted caravel appeared, gliding swiftly through the choppy waters to the sheltered harbor before St.-Mere-Abelle. Avelyn spent the entirety of the morning in silent prayer, as instructed, and was shaking so badly when he was at last summoned to Father Abbot Markwart’s chambers that Master Jojonah had to lend him a supporting arm. The other three chosen were already in the spacious office when Avelyn and Jojonah arrived. All of the masters of St.-Mere-Abelle were there, along with the Father Abbot and two men Avelyn did not know, one tall and slender, the other shorter, much older, and so skinny that Avelyn wondered if he had eaten in a month. Avelyn quickly discerned that the taller man was obviously the captain of the chartered vessel. He stood with an air of superiority, posture perfect, hand on gilded rapier. He had a garish scar running from ear to chin that seemed to Avelyn somehow gallant, and, unlike his scruffy companion, he was clean shaven except for a neatly trimmed mustache, rolling out from the sides of his mouth and curling up. His eyes were dark brown, so dark that the pupil was hardly distinguishable from the iris; his hair was long and black and curly, and under one arm he had tucked a great hat, with an upturned brim and a feather on one side. The rest of his dress, though weathered, was rich, particularly a golden brocade and jewel-studded baldric. That garment held Avelyn’s attention acutely, for he sensed that at least one of those jewels, a small ruby, was more than ornamental.

Avelyn tried not to stare, confused as to why this man, who was not of the Order of St.-Mere-Abelle, was in possession of a sacred stone—and right in front of Father Abbot Markwart! Surely the Father Abbot and the masters recognized the jewel for what it was.

Avelyn calmed quickly; surely they did recognize the jewel, and apparently, it did not bother them. Perhaps, the younger brother reasoned, the stone had been given as payment for the ship, or perhaps it had only been loaned, a helpful tool for the perilous voyage. Avelyn shook it all away.

The older man caught Avelyn’s attention only because of his constant squinting, his bulbous eyes darting about nervously from man to man, head bobbing and trembling on his turkey neck. His clothing seemed nearly as old as he, worn out so badly in many places that Avelyn could see the darkly tanned skin beneath. He was dirty and gray, his hair cropped short and badly trimmed, and his beard untended. Avelyn had once heard the term “salty dog” in reference to seamen, and he thought that appropriate indeed for this one.

“Brother Quintall, Brother Pellimar, Brother Thagraine, and Brother Avelyn,” the Father Abbot said, indicating each monk, and each, in turn, bowing to their guests. “I give you Captain Adjonas of the good ship
Windrunner,
and his first hand, Bunkus Smealy.” The proud captain made no motion, but Bunkus bowed to each in turn so violently that he nearly toppled, and would have, had it not been for his proximity to Father Abbot Markwart’s huge desk.

“Captain Adjonas knows your course,” Markwart finished, “and you may trust that his is the finest ship on the Mirianic.”

“The tide will be favorable an hour after the dawn,” Adjonas said in a clear and strong voice—a voice befitting a man of his station, Avelyn thought. “If we miss the tide, we will lose an entire day.” The stern man steeled his gaze upon each of the four monks, letting them know right up front that the ship was his domain. “That would not be a wise thing to do. We shall be running against the weather at least until we have turned south of All Saints Bay. Each day we spend this far north brings the very real chance of complete ruin.”

The four young monks exchanged glances; Avelyn was sympathetic to the captain’s wishes and actually took some comfort in the man’s commanding, if cold, demeanor. He saw that his three companions apparently didn’t share his feelings, for Quintall openly scowled as if he were offended by a mere ship’s captain speaking so forcefully to him.

Father Abbot Markwart, also sensing the sudden tension, cleared his throat loudly. “You are dismissed,” he said to the four, “to an early meal and to your rooms. You are excused from all your duties this day, and all the ceremonies. Make your peace with God and prepare yourselves for the task before you.”

They left the office then, unescorted, and Quintall began openly complaining even as the door shut behind them.

“Captain Adjonas will be in for a long journey indeed if he thinks that he commands,” the stocky man said, to the nodding replies of both Thagraine and Pellimar.

“It is his ship,” Avelyn said simply.

“A ship bought,” Quintall replied immediately and brusquely. “Adjonas commands his crew to execute the task they were paid to do, but he does not command us. Understand that now. On the
Windrunner,
you and Thagraine answer only to Pellimar, and Pellimar answers only to me.”

Avelyn had no response to that. The pecking order for the voyage had indeed been determined in just that manner. While Thagraine and Avelyn, as Preparers, were paramount to the mission, Quintall and Pellimar had been given higher positions on the voyage to and from Pimaninicuit. Avelyn could accept that. If things got rough out on the seas, as expected, Quintall, the most physically impressive of the four, would be best prepared to handle any situation.

Avelyn left the group then, heading for his room as the Father Abbot had ordered. He was some distance down the corridor and still he heard complaining near the Abbot’s door. He suspected that Quintall and the others kept up their complaining for some time, long after he was kneeling beside his simple cot, falling deep into important prayer.

The morning ceremony was the grandest event that Avelyn had seen in his four and a half years at St.-Mere-Abelle. More than eight hundred monks, every member of the Order, including four score who were not living at the abbey any longer but were serving as missionaries all along All Saints Bay, lined the docks, lifting their voices in common song. The bells of the abbey pealed repeatedly, drawing curious onlookers from the nearby village of St.-Mere-Abelle. The ceremony began before dawn, intensified as the sun glistened on the horizon across the waters, then went on and on, one prayer after another, each song louder than the previous.

The four crewmen of the
Windrunner’s
boat, which was bouncing noisily against the wooden dock, sat through it all with smirking faces, thoroughly amused and certainly not impressed. As the day brightened, Avelyn could see the rest of the thirty-man crew lining the deck of the caravel, the ship resting at anchor some fifty yards out in the harbor.

The sailors cared nothing for this all-important mission, Avelyn realized, beyond their payment of gold—and whatever other trinkets Father Abbot Markwart had included in the bargain. Avelyn considered again the sacred stone woven into Captain Adjonas’ baldric, and the thought disturbed him more than a little. If the man, like his crew, was so obviously nonreligious, then he should not possess such a gem, not for any reason.

This was just the first hint, Avelyn understood, and he began to suspect that the long voyage—they were expected to be away for near to eight months—would be trying in more ways than physical.

First hand Bunkus Smealy interrupted the ceremony an hour or so after the dawn, calling out in a crusty voice, “Time for going!”