The Hidden Fire (Book 2) (20 page)

While the other three discussed navigation, Kyric slipped away to
find Dorracan, the ship’s carpenter, who also doubled as blacksmith and leather
worker.  He had lost his quiver in the slave camp and needed a new one. 
Dorracan worked in the waist, where he had spent the morning setting up a
foot-pump lathe, and now he stood turning a few belaying pins.  While he was
waiting for Dorracan to finish, Kyric noticed a small tool box among the larger
ones.  It contained several little knives, curved and twisted into odd shapes,
with some pieces of cherry wood and mahogany not much bigger than his thumb.

After he explained to Dorracan the kind of quiver he wanted and
they agreed on a price, Kyric asked him, “What are those funny little knives
for?”

“I use them to carve figures in miniature,” he answered.

“Oh, I see.  Do you have any of them on hand.”

With a wink, he ducked into the crew locker and came right back
with a cigar box.  Inside lay a menagerie in dark wood:  a dolphin, a bear, a
gnome with a pointed hat and many more — all quite tiny and finely done.  The
owl seemed to ripple with a coat of feathers.

“Beautiful,” said Kyric.  “How long did it take you to carve all
these?”

“Long enough.  Carved at least a dozen before I got one I liked. 
The real trick was learning that there was already a figure in the raw wood,
and all I had to do was let it out.”

After Kyric questioned him a while about carving techniques and
finding the figure within, Dorracan finally said, “If you’re interested, you
can borrow a couple of my knives and have a go at it.  If you enjoy it and
decide to get serious, I’ll make you a set like mine.”

Kyric had a good feeling
about it.  If Aiyan wanted him to do some kind of art, he would do this.

So that was how the long reach to The Turtle went — sword practice
in the mornings, attempts to touch the weird in the afternoons, teaching
Baskillian in-between, woodcarving whenever there came a quiet minute, and
Lerica’s bed at night.  The fair weather held, and each day was so much the
same as the last that they blurred together.  For the first time since he was
nine years old, Kyric was happy.  It felt like one long eternal moment away
from the world, with nothing to do but grow stronger and more skilled, explore
mysteries, and make love to the rhythmic creaking of the ship.  He learned of
mysteries there as well.

They sighted The Turtle, a mile-long hump of bare rock, on the 22
^nd
day of their voyage, and Ellec smiled for the first time in weeks.  “A day
early, better winds than I had expected,” he said, giving Aiyan a significant
nod.  The rudders were dead on.

Everyone relaxed a little, and Kyric realized that the crew had
been uneasy.  But he was the one who became nervous when Lerica showed him the
charts.  The Turtle was the only land within a thousand miles.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.  “Tomorrow is
Riankatta
. 
It’s the one holy day that my people observe every month.  So Uncle Ellec and I
will be spending the night and most of the morning alone in our cabins —
nothing serious, mostly prayers and meditation — but we are not to be
disturbed.”

“Sure,” he said, but something about the timing bothered him.  He
had come to learn in the last few weeks that shipboard life revolved around
time, and keeping it accurately.  He thought about how the sky looked this
morning.

“It’s the full moon tomorrow,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s said in Aessia that some people go crazy when the moon is —
wait a minute.  That night in the camp, the moon was full that night.”

“And?”

“Well . . . is that why you were acting a little, uh, strange,
because you couldn’t perform your rights?”

“Must have been.”

The moon had not yet risen, but Kyric and Aiyan dined alone on the
evening of Riankatta.

“So what is it about those two?” Kyric said over a plate of garlic
rice and black beans.  The fresh food had run out weeks ago.

“I would have thought that Lerica told you.”  Aiyan took another
bite of rice.  “Search your memory for the term,
Ariaen’kahta
.”

It took him a minute.  “One of the five elder races in the years
before the War of Mages.  Said to be were-creatures.”  He recited in the Essian
Tongue:

“
For they fell upon the foe in the night.

 Sabre tooth biting shield, ravening,

 Berserk, claws scaling wooden walls.

 Lion’s roar, the moon had come
.”

He looked at Aiyan.  “Are you saying that my girl is in her cabin
turning into a lion-woman?”

Aiyan shrugged.  “I doubt it.  A thousand years have passed and
the nature of magic has changed.  But I don’t think that our partners here are
same style of human as you or I.  Not completely.”

“She doesn’t have claws on her feet or anything.  I can tell you
that.”

Aiyan took another bite.  “Do you love her?”

Kyric coughed on an errant bean.  “I’m not sure.  I’m so
comfortable with her it scares me.”

Knowing he wouldn’t be with Lerica this night, he had decided turn
in early and try to dream.  He wanted to see Rolirra again.  The further they
sailed into the endless ocean, the less she felt real.

He lay still in the dark for
a long time, much longer than he ever had on the island, and he began wonder if
it had been something about Terrula, the pollen of one of those strange flowers
for instance.

He awoke on a thin pallet in a stone cell, the kind a monk might
live in.  The window was shuttered but the door stood open.  Sputtering torches
lined the corridor outside, yet strangely, it remained crossed with deep
shadows.

He heard a metallic echo, the clash of swords, far away, very
faint, and went in that direction.  He came to a long, wide hall where several
more passageways converged.  It lay silent; the echo had faded.  A sunbeam fell
from a skylight to rest on a set of heavy oak doors at the end of the hall. 
Kyric approached them.  They swung open at his touch.

Beyond lay the council chamber of the old sages.  In the brazier,
as in the story, stood a magnificent sword alight with a glowing blue flame. 
It drew him in.  He went to stand before it.  He raised his hand, wanting to
touch it, but he was afraid.  The flame gave off no heat, but he knew that it
would burn him.

The light of the sundered Pyxidium played on the walls of the
chamber in an asymmetrical pattern.  It still rested in its teardrop setting,
and Kyric knelt in front of it, bringing it level with his eye.  White light,
shining through a thousand facets, the crystal glowed softy as he leaned
forward to gaze into it.

It seemed to have limitless depths, and he looked as far into it
as he could, into another world.  Then suddenly he fell into the Pyxidium, and
he looked out from it as if it were his own eye.

He was sitting in a huge wooden chair atop a platform, like a
throne of old, in the courtyard of a great castle.  From the shape of the towers
it had to be Esaiya.  He sat facing the front gate, which stood open, and he
could see far beyond.  The bridge to the mainland was there, the stones clean
and the mortar fresh.  It had been recently rebuilt.  A mass of people crowded
the bridge, extending along a repaved road all the way to the horizon.

They shuffled slowly toward him, a company of guards narrowing
them to a single-file line as they passed the gate.  They seemed to come from
every walk of life — farmers, merchants, porters, the well-to-do and the
nondescript poor, and their children, all with their heads down or looking
away.  Each one in turn stopped at the foot of his throne and looked up at him,
meeting his eye with a fearful expression that instantly changed to a benign,
almost blank stare.  Then they would turn and go without a word, back through
the gate and over the bridge.

Kyric looked down at his own body.  His tunic was blackened by
dragon’s blood.

“Dreamer,” called an unearthly voice.

He whirled, coming to his feet.  He was himself again, standing in
the council chamber.  In the doorway stood a Knight of the Flaming Blade, in the
white tunic of a master.  His face was neither young nor old, but within it
twitched the diamond eyes of the dragon that Kyric had seen in so many of his
dreams.

“I know who you are,” Kyric said, “you’re Master Zahaias.  But are
you real?”

“As real as you,” came the answer.  His voice was like a whisper,
and like the roar of a firestorm.

“I looked into the crystal, and looked out upon another dream.  Is
that possible, a dream within a dream?”

“Within a dream, within a dream, within a dream.  Worlds without
end.”

Kyric met those hard, terrible eyes, so at odds with the
compassionate face where they rested.  “I . . . I think I saw a time yet to
come.  Why do the Powers show me such visions?  Why me?”

“What did you see?”

“Even more frightening than what I saw, was the way I saw it.  I
looked out of the second shard of the Pyxidium, out of
his
eye, into
his
future.  But perhaps it wasn’t him.  What if I was looking out of my own eye? 
The Powers have never shown me a future that I was not a part of.”

“Come with me,” said Zahaias.

He led Kyric through the long hall and down a passageway that
ended in a smaller hall.  A hundred medieval swords rested in delicate racks on
the side walls of this chamber.  Zahaias continued past them to where a great
glittering shield hung at the far end.

“Behold,” he said, “Elistar’s shield.”

It shone like polished silver, like a mirror in sunlight.  Kyric
stepped in front of it and saw his reflection.  It wasn’t him.  The man that
looked back at him from the shield had brown hair streaked with red, a sharp
brow, and the dark rimmed eyes of one who slept little.

“Why do I look like someone
else?  Who is this?” he said, turning to Zahaias.  But he wasn’t there.

All through breakfast, Kyric wrestled with whether to tell Aiyan
of the dream.  Aiyan had never said anything about what a student should tell
his master.  In fact, Aiyan had never actually said that he was his master, and
as Kyric recalled, when he had asked Aiyan about dreaming the answer was, “That
would be a question for Master Zahaias.”  Well, he had already talked to him — unless
Kyric’s dream had simply been a dream.  Gods, it was so confusing.

Once
Calico
left The Turtle behind, they lost the steady
breeze that had been coming over their aft quarter and entered a greener part
of the ocean with light shifting winds.  The mainsail remained furled most of
the time, and the ship tacked a dozen times a day.  It was still a month until
winter solstice, but the days seemed to be getting longer rather than shorter.

Every so often, when he sat on the quarter deck, attempting to
carve a figure in the yellow light of sunset, Kyric would look up to find
Dorracan standing there.  Sometimes he would offer advice or show him a trick
of woodcarving.  Sometimes he would just watch.  Kyric’s first attempt had
resulted in a lump with five sharp protuberances.  Even so, he had found the
process oddly calming — it was the one place where he felt no pressure to excel
— so he had Dorracan make him a full set of knives.

Today Dorracan said, “I think you’ve hit it.  I think you’ve found
the hidden beastie in this one.”

Kyric was on his sixth try at fashioning a recognizable figure. 
“Do you really?  Because I still don’t know what it is.”

“Oh, aye.  ‘Tis clear you’re on to it.”

Eight days out from The Turtle, Ellec sat down to dinner with them
and said, “I just took a sighting.  The pole star is so close to the horizon I
could barely see it.  Our position is one degree of latitude.  If the winds
hold we will cross the equatorial line late tomorrow afternoon.”

He pulled at his moustache, which had grown longer since Ularra.  “One
of the water barrels sprung a leak this morning.  We only lost two days of
water before it got plugged, but it has put us across another line, so to
speak.  Even if we turned around right now, we no longer have enough water to
make it back.”

The next night they all went on deck after dinner and looked to
the north, Ellec using his spyglass.  “It’s gone,” he said.  “We have crossed
the line.”

Aiyan pointed to two stars hanging low in the eastern sky. 
“That’s the meridian pair,” he said to Ellec.  “Athor and Kallux.  When they
rise at the same time, we will be at the latitude of northern Mokkala.”

Mr. Pallan passed the word of the crossing, and it wasn’t long
before a sailor with a fiddle struck up a lively tune, the crew breaking out
little packets of nuts and candy, and a jug of rum they had been saving for
winter solstice.  They lighted extra lanterns.  A party in earnest for those
not on watch went into full swing, with the younger ones wearing stockings on
their heads and dancing crazy jigs to the wail of the fiddle.  They joked and
laughed, but there was edge to it all.

“What the hell?” said Lerica.  She took in a breath to bellow at
them, but Ellec cut her off with a wave.