The Mountains Rise (17 page)

Thillmarius led him from the field and back toward the wardens waiting at its edge.
“You surprise me again, wildling,” said the She’Har, “Carwyn was generally expected
to win. This was to be his last fight.”

“Last fight?”

“The Centyr Grove had decided to reward him with elevation to the rank of warden.
This fight was to be an easy victory for him before taking his new position, or so
they thought,” said Thillmarius with a sly grin.

“You knew I would win?” asked Daniel.

Thillmarius shook his head, “I can lay no claim to such knowledge of the future, but
I do look forward to more surprises from you, wildling.”

Daniel was left alone with the two wardens who had originally brought him
,
and
after one of them sealed and treated his wounds
,
they led him away.
He watched them with new eyes as they left the forest and entered Ellentrea again.

“Were you both like me once?” he asked them when his curiosity got the best of him.
Thillmarius’ remark about a slave being made a warden had him wondering.

One of the two grunted, but the other paused before answering, as if giving the question
some thought. “I was never like you, baratt. I grew up in Ellentrea.”

“But you were a slave once?”

“I am still a slave. I just have clothes and a reasonable chance of living another
year. Most never get this far,” the warden replied.

Emboldened by the warden’s sudden willingness to talk, Daniel risked another question,
“Are there many other ‘wildlings’?”

The warden
who
had remained silent laughed suddenly, but still didn’t respond. His companion looked
at him for a moment and closed his mouth. They walked in silence the rest of the
way back to Daniel’s room.

The previously talkative warden opened the door while the quiet one stood back. As
Daniel passed him
,
he said a few words quietly, “You’re the first one, ever.”

Daniel looked at him, a dozen questions leaping to his mind at once, but the door
closed
,
and he was again left alone with his thoughts.

Two more days of silence passed
,
and the solitude began to eat at Daniel’s patience. He practiced relentlessly, creating
shapes and walls of pure force, both with and without lines or other boundaries to
reinforce them.

One thing that had bothered him most during his fight with Carwyn was the difficulty
and time that was required in drawing lines on the ground. Dropping to one
’
s knees and using your finger to sketch in the dirt wasn’t practical or timely when
you had another person busily trying to kill you. Plus, he had noticed that parts
of the ground within the arena were stony, which would make drawing with his finger
impossible.

After a series of experiments
,
he finally arrived at a method for using a focused line of power to draw on the ground.
He would use his finger as a guide for the power, extending it as far as necessary
to reach the ground. He practiced within his room, drawing lines on the floor with
his invisible ‘stick’ as he thought about it. If he encountered something harder
than dirt
,
he was pretty sure he could sharpen the end of it enough to cut the lines if necessary,
but he wasn’t able to test that idea in his room.

Daniel was also concerned about the way Carwyn had healed himself. One of the warden’s
had done the same for him before they left, using a light touch to seal the skin over
his wounds. He had also repaired one of the muscles in Daniel’s shoulder.

Examining the place with his spec
ial senses
,
Da
niel could detect the join line
where the muscle had been reconnected. His skin had scars as well, where it had
been knitted back together. It wasn’t a perfect method of healing, but it was fast
and effective.

It’s damn handy when you’re bleeding to death.

His biggest problem was that he didn’t have any wounds to practice mending. The first
thought that occurred to him was waiting until his next fight, if he was injured again
,
he could try
to
fix it before the wardens did, assuming he won.
But you might lose for being unable to stop bleeding during the fight itself.

He needed to learn sooner.

Gritting his teeth
,
he created a sharp knife-like blade of force around one finger and used it to car
e
fully cut a two inch line across his right thigh. He kept the cut shallow, to avoid
damaging the muscle beneath the skin, but he made it deep enough to ensure that he
had a genuine separation of the skin itself. Luckily the sharpness of his aythar
made the incision almost painless, although it began to throb almost as soon as he
had finished.

The blood welling from the cut made it impossible for him to see the edges with his
eyes, but his mind found them easily enough. He tried pulling the edges together
and willing them to glue themselves to each other, but that failed miserably. After
several more failed attempts he finally hit on a solution.

Weaving a thin thread-like line of power in and out
,
he could draw the edges tightly together and hold them in place. Focusing his perception
even closer he could then find the
tiny ‘bits’ of skin that had been severed and torn. With practice he learned to knit
them together again. They weren’t linked exactly as they had been before the cut
occurred, but they were at least connected to similar pieces. He had no names for
what he was working with, but he could see things far too tiny for the human eye to
perceive.

After fixing the first cut he realized that while what he had done worked, it was
far too slow.

“I need practice,” he told himself, wincing at the thought while he gazed at the neat
line of the silver scar on his thigh.

That’s it!

Using his left index finger he cut a long line along the outside of his
forearm, following the bone. He stopped to reknit the skin every couple of inches.
Now and then he had to stop when the pain got too much for him. His mind had begun
to anticipate the cuts, making them hurt more intensely than they really should have,
but he kept going anyway.

Half an hour later he had a neat line extending from his elbow to the tip of his pinky
finger. Then he began a corresponding line on the inside of his forearm. The second
line took even longer, becoming especially painful as he worked his way along the
outer edge of his thumb and index finger.

Once he had finished
,
he stopped to admire his work. He had gotten much better at fixing cuts. So good
in fact that he had been forced to relax his standard of perfection for at some points
he had almost failed to leave a scar line.
And the line is what it’s all about.

Holding his arm up in front of him
,
he
visualized the force blade he had used to defeat Carwyn. It appeared instantly
,
and his steadily improving perception could tell it was better than before. The
amount of aythar required to create it was less now
,
and its form and edge were stronger. Daniel experimented with changing its length,
getting a feel for the differences in how much power it required.

“I feel sorry for anyone
who
gets within range of this,” said Daniel aloud. Range would be anywhere from three
to ten feet if he wanted to use the blade effectively. He could also see using the
lines to focus his power for ranged attacks as well, but he didn’t have enough space
in his tiny room to practice that as he might have liked.

Daniel stared at his other arm, which was still free of scar lines. He winced inwardly
as he contemplated repeating the process on it
. Mentally steeling himself
he got to work. It was painful and bloody, but he was already learning that most
things in this life were like that.
Bleed now or die later.

***

More than a week had passed
,
and Daniel hadn’t seen anyone other than the woman who brought his food and water
twice daily. She was turning out to be wonderful company.

“Good morning, Brenda!” he said to her when she entered in the early part of the day.
She refused to give him a name
,
so he had picked that one for her out of spite.

“You look beautiful again today, Brenda!” he told her when she returned in the evening.

As the days had gone ceaselessly from one to the next without any reply from her
,
he began to come up with more creative greetings to amuse himself.

“Brenda, I must confess that I’ve fallen in love with you,” he told her sadly that
day. She kept her eyes on the floor and moved to deposit his tray on the table.

“I’ve tried to get you out of my mind, but I just can’t,” he added. “You’re the only
woman for me.” She had claimed the empty tray and was making rapidly for the door.

Daniel moved to block her exit, “Really, Brenda, you’re quite literally the
only
woman I can see anymore.”

“Please move,” she told him
.

“But you haven’t told me your name, or do you prefer Brenda?” he teased.

The woman looked up at him, brown eyes framing her bent nose, “I
have
no name. I am not worth fighting.” Her expression conveyed a sense of pain, long
held and well accepted.

Daniel remembered being taken before Lyralliantha after he had killed the girl. They
had seemed to feel that he would be happy to be awarded a new name.
That’s sick,
he thought to himself,
these people have to kill someone before they get a name?
Even worse, they apparently looked forward to it.

“From now on, I will call you
Amarah,” he told her, feeling bad about his previous teasing.

Her eyes grew wide with fear, “You
mustn’t
! They will whip me if I take my own name!”

Her aura flared for a moment
,
and Daniel could see the reaction was genuine. Although she possessed the same gift
he did
,
her aythar wasn’t much stronger than some of the people he had known back in Colne.
Her weakness must have made her unfit for the arena
,
and while it
assured
her of a safer existence
,
she was clearly unhappy with her lot.

“Only here, when no one can hear,” he told her reassuringly. “You will be Amarah
to me from now on.” He stepped back to give her more room
,
and she ducked past him, running from the room as if it were on fire.

“That went well,” he told himself. He was surprised when only moments later one of
the wardens opened the door again.

Did they hear me name her?
he wondered. His back was crawling with the memory of his last whipping
,
and he regretted naming the woman.

The warden was the same one
who
had spoken to him the week before, after he had killed Carwyn. He led Daniel silently
toward the edge of the forest again.

Still afraid
,
but hoping that it wasn’t more punishment awaiting him, Daniel spoke up at last,
“Am I being taken to another fight?”

“No,” said the warden flatly. They walked for another minute before he added, “I
am commanded to bring you to your master.”

“Lyralliantha?” said Daniel, using the opportunity to refresh his pronunciation of
the strange name.

“Yes,” said the other man.

They had reached the edge of the god-trees when Daniel spoke again. “What is your
name?”

The man looked at him with faint surprise before answering, “Garlin.”
One hand rose and he made a fist, showing Daniel the back of it. His name was tattooed
on the skin there.

“Nice to meet you, Garlin,” said Daniel.

Garlin’s eyes narrowed, “Keep your sentiments to yourself, baratt.”

The warden’s sudden anger confused Daniel, but he held his tongue. It seemed that
friendliness angered the humans of Ellentrea faster than any insult, though he still
didn’t understand why.

When they reached the base of the right tree
,
the warden started upward immediately, but Daniel paused, watching the way the man
shaped his aythar. It looked as if he had two extra appendages crafted of invisible
energy, one above and one below him that alternately pushed and
pulled to maintain his gravity-
defying stance as he walked.

Daniel tried to imitate the smooth movement of the warden
,
but he was forced to go slowly, stopping and starting as he tried to copy the other
man’s technique. Garlin watched him intently but didn’t comment.

Even with the awkwardness
,
Daniel still moved almost twice as quickly as he had been able to while crawling.
He felt a subtle sense of pride when he reached the platform where Lyralliantha waited.

She said something to the warden before he could leave. Garlin straightened up and
moved to stand beside her, when she spoke again he followed her words with his own.

“She wishes to ask you a few questions,” said the warden. “I will remain to translate
for her.”

Daniel nodded.

The She’Har spoke again and after a brief pause Garlin translated, “
Are you well fed and watered?”

Daniel stared at her then, searching her brilliant blue eyes for any hint of mockery
or amusement. He found none
,
and her aura gave an impression of sincere curiosity as well.

“No,” he replied sincerely. “I have been given only what is necessary to survive
and nothing more.”

The warden gave him a sour glance
,
but after a moment translated for Lyralliantha. Daniel could only hope that the
message would be relayed accurately.

The She’Har seemed to think for a while before speaking again
,
but Garlin’s translation this time was brief, “What more do you require?”

Daniel tried to put the emptiness of his current life into words but failed. Even
if he could have described what was missing
,
he doubted the taciturn warden would have been able to accurately translate it to
her. Frustrated
,
he pointed at his temple, “May I show you?”

Garlin spoke to her
,
and she nodded promptly, stepping forward to within arm’s reach. Garlin then said
in Barion, “She warns you to avoid attempting to manipulate her as you did the first
day.”

Daniel was confused for a moment, but then he remembered how he had touched her aura
that day, when he had kissed her foot. “Forgive me,” he told her, “I was ignorant.”

After that had been translated
,
Lyralliantha touched his forehead with her fingers and lifted his hand to her temple.
A trickle of aythar flowed through him at her touch and he tried to emulate what she
was doing, to connect his mind to hers. The world grew hazy around him while a new
vision grew in his mind with sharp clarity, pushing reality aside.

They stood together in an empty space
,
and with a simple gesture
,
Lyralliantha caused flowers to grow up around them, basking in the warm sunlight
of an open sky. Daniel could feel her emotions clearly now
,
and he knew she was demonstrating
,
as if to say,
this place is a blank palette, show me what you wish.