The Pleasure of Memory (11 page)

If even a word of this was true, there was no worse message the beast could have delivered.

V

THE SWORD

EAM COULDN’T MOVE.

Or maybe he simply lacked the will for it.

Not that it mattered. In truth, he was prepared to lay there until he either wasted away or found the inspiration to move, and he was frankly too miserable to care if the first happened and had no faith the second ever would.

Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that sleep wouldn’t have him back. His ribs were raking at his chest again and his bed was as hard and unyielding as granite.

Certain that any further attempt at sleep was now a lost cause, he opened his eyes. He was surprised to find it still dark. How long had he been sleeping? It seemed like years. He carefully rolled up onto his side. Once stable, he reached for the poultice covering his bad eye, but it was gone. His vision wasn’t obscured by any covering. Rather, the cave was simply pitch black, leaving him wondering if it was still the middle of the night or if he’d somehow gone blind while he slept.

He braced his side and winced his way into a sitting position. He waved his hand before his face but saw nothing. He couldn’t even see the outline of the cave’s entrance. A wave of panic washed through him. What if he really had gone blind? He’d seen people lose their sight after bad head blows. They were typically the same ones who didn’t recover. What if the damage to his head was worse than he’d feared? It’d be his death sentence!

He struggled his way to his knees. He reached out and groped at the blackness. His hand found a smooth, cold ledge beside him. A quick probe told him it was only a few feet high. He used it to climb to his feet. With one hand running the edge as a guide and the other out before him, he inched his way forward. He’d only made just a couple steps when his foot caught something hard. He stumbled forward. A sharp edge bit into his shin. He dropped onto his hands and rolled roughly down a series of ridges before landing on his hands and knees on the cold floor.

At first, he could only lay there, barely able to draw a breath for the pain. It felt like someone had beaten his shins with an iron bar and they were now kicking him in his broken ribs. Was there no end to this torture? What had he ever done to deserve so poor a treatment by whatever entities ruled this wretched universe?

The thought almost made him laugh. What had he ever done? Hilarious.

When he was finally able to sit upright, he realized he could see again. Something white was glowing in the darkness before him. It was just a small spot of light, but it was undeniably real. It must be the remnants of his fire, perhaps the last of the dying embers. He raised his hand and saw the silhouette of his fingers against the radiance.

As he watched, the light slowly intensified. It swelled out across the floor like phosphorescent water poured onto black ice. It spread quickly away from the source like a blossoming flower. It flowed beneath him, flowed up the distant walls, poured across the ceiling high above him until he could see it all: The dais, the pillars, the throne-like chair, the pagan gods cavorting across the domed ceiling.

This was the room from his dream, which meant it hadn’t been a dream at all. The only difference between the dream and now was that the light pulsing through the crystal was no longer red; it was as white as the stars. He looked back at the pillars locked at each corner of the wide dais. They were even more impressive than he remembered, rising up from the floor until they brushed the ceiling a hundred feet above him. Carved into each crystalline pillar, and standing just a few feet above the surface of the dais, were the life-sized images of a man or woman of four different races. He couldn’t remember seeing them in the dream. The front two pillars hosted the image of a Parhronii and a Vaemyn, left to right. The rear pillars held a giant Baeldon and a masked Mendophian in the same order. It was breathtaking. This room was more beautiful than any cathedral he’d ever seen.

The carving of the Vaemyn warrior standing directly above him was dressed in royal fashion like some lost king or nobleman. He seemed to be looking directly down at Beam, and something about those eyes seemed vaguely familiar.

Trust your memories, Be’ahm
.

The images of the battle erupted in his mind. He remembered the Vaemyn warrior. He remembered the man uttering those same ominous words to him just heartbeats before his death. Trust your memories, Be’ahm. You must trust—

Something pinged behind him.

Beam quickly twisted around toward the sound. No one was there.

Then he saw the bodies. A black suit of armor lay sprawled across the dark floor out before the steps. A broadsword rose straight up from its chest as if the suit were an insect pinned in a collection. The armor was exactly as he remembered it from the dream, seamless, like it was set from a single pouring of steel. Lying across the armor were the skeletal remains of a long dead corpse. A bony hand still gripped the blade exactly where it penetrated the armor as if it were still holding it in place after all these years. It was exactly as he remembered, except that, unlike his dream, the reality of this fight had occurred many, many years before, perhaps even centuries.

Beam worked his way to his feet, and then walked slowly over to the murder. Bracing his ribs, he eased himself down into a squat. The sword rising up from the armor had a golden hilt. The grip was composed of two intertwined snakes whose heads met at the pommel, and embedded in the pommel was a red gem carved in the image of a lidded eye.

Beam fell forward to his knees.

This was impossible! This stone was identical to the one hidden in his pouch. He felt for the lump beneath his tunic. It was still there. It was no trick.

The skeleton’s head lay on the armor’s shoulder as if they’d been in a tender embrace when they succumbed. Strings of corroded scale mail hanged between the empty ribs like metallic cobwebs. Clumps of long yellow locks still clung to the skull from patches of dry, shriveled skin. Beam leaned forward and carefully brushed the dead hair back from the bony neck. There was the telltale horn. A dulled, brittle oteuryn curled up from the skull just behind the mummified ear. It was broken at the tip.

Beam suddenly felt sick. As he watched, the warrior’s face superimposed itself over the gray skin clinging to the skull. He remembered the Vaemyn collapsing before him just heartbeats before the dark rogue drove the blade down into his back. He remembered the warrior throwing himself backward as he heroically vanquished the murderous knight before succumbing to his own mortal wounds.

A shudder seized him. He covered his mouth. A wave of dark grief boiled through him so suddenly, so forcefully that he thought for just an instant that he was going to be sick. Tears scalded the scratches on his cheeks. A sob wrenched loose from his chest. He couldn’t breathe.

Then, as quickly as it had taken him, the emotion was gone, leaving only the residue of embarrassment in its wake. He was left feeling strangely hollow, as if a flood had eroded a pool in his soul and then dried away to leave only a cold, loveless pit. He couldn’t explain it. Tears over a savage? A savage he didn’t even know except as the remnant of a bad dream induced by a bit of foul rabbit? It didn’t make sense. It had to be his head injury inducing delusions.

He wiped the evidence away on his sleeve. He tried to remember the last time he’d shed tears. Perhaps as a boy? Maybe he’d cried when his mother died, though he had no memory of it. Sorrow and melancholy were useless, burdensome emotions that he’d never counted among his weaknesses. It had to be his exhaustion making him weak.

He smeared the long hair back from his face and turned his attention to the sword. The carved gem in the hilt of this sword was exactly the same design as the stone hidden in his pouch. It was the same cut, the same style, the same flawless red bloodstone. Could it be a coincidence? Was it some bizarre trick of luck that led him to two ancient artifacts of the same design hidden from the world in locations over two hundred miles apart?

No, it wasn’t possible! There was no mystery in the way of his life. Luck had never been a factor in the misery that’d defined his existence. And yet, there it was. It was looking back at him from that sword’s hilt even as he studied it. How could he deny what he saw with his own eyes?

He thought back over the twenty-year road that’d brought him to this point, back to the mysterious box his mother had left him when he was young. The same red eye with the same heavy, sensuous lid had adorned the surface of that box as well. This couldn’t be anything as simple as coincidence. Was this destiny?

Trust your memories.

Beam shuddered and buried himself in his arms. No, he told himself, it’s impossible. Don’t succumb to it. Don’t abandon reason. The path of superstition is always the easiest, the path of simple minds, and he’d have nothing to do with it. There was always an explanation for the stranger events of life. Always! One just had to refuse to succumb to the temptation of mystical thinking and keep looking for the facts.

Bracing his side, he climbed awkwardly to his feet.

Loitering here pondering the mysteries of life and the roads of fate was a waste of time, time he couldn’t afford. Best to just take what he could, and then get the bloody hell out of here. He grabbed the sword’s hilt and was about to liberate it from the armor when he saw the spark. The center of the eye was glowing, like a fire burned at its heart. He leaned in closer to it. The light intensified as he watched it. It quickly became too bright to look at.

He closed his eyes against it. “Another damned illusion,” he growled as he blindly groped for the hilt. When his hands found the metal, he heaved back on the sword and pulled it free.

The instant he liberated the sword, the red light in the eye died and the white light pulsing through the crystal walls quickly followed it. Gone were the pillars. Gone were the dais and its ornamental chair. Gone were the gods, the kings, and the vaulted ceiling. Soon the only light remaining was the dim glow surrounding the great hall’s exit a hundred feet away, and that was fading fast.

Beam flew out of the room, down the darkening corridor, and past his abandoned camp. He exploded out the cave's entrance and slid to his knees in the sunlight beyond the cave. Only when the pain of his flight finally subsided and his heart slowed to a manageable pace did he open his eyes. When he did, he found the sword resting in the dirt before him with the brilliant sunshine pouring down on it like a beacon. It lay there as if presented for his inspection.

The sword came to life in the full light of day. Two silvery snakes grew out of the sword blade and wound helically around a feathered arm to end with the heads resting atop each other just beneath the pommel. The feathered arm ended in an eagle’s talon at the pommel, and in its grip was the red crystal eye. The blade was wide and flawless, with strings of tiny runes dancing along both its edges like ants marching off to battle. He tilted the blade into the sun and inspected it. Though he couldn’t read the runes, he’d witnessed them often enough in the savages’ tombs to recognize them as Vaemysh.

And yet, all the grandeur of this ornate weapon was simply dressing for the feast. It was the bloodstone eye he found most intriguing. It was every bit as glorious as he’d first thought it was back in the cave. It was larger than the one hidden beneath his shirt, and it was a deep, visceral red that at first past seemed almost opaque, though he could see the spark of sunlight glimmering deep at its core.

He thought back to the vault where he’d found the first stone, the one hidden in his pouch. The stone above the crypt’s door had born the faded image of the same eye, though at the time he hadn’t thought much about it. Pagan images like this eye were painted everywhere in primitive cultures. Totems, they were called. Or maybe talismans. Or something else scholarly like that, he couldn’t recall and didn’t care. Every race had their own version of such nonsense. Even the more sophisticated civilizations had their symbolic images. The Mendophs had their masks, the Baeldons their hammers, the Parhronii had that sentimental drivel they called poetry.

Regardless of the meaning, the eye’s value was his primary concern. The gem hidden in his pouch was already going to make him wealthy. Bloodstones of the quality of the one hidden beneath his tunic were highly valued in the wealthy markets of Parhron. However, this one in the sword, the one gazing so adoringly up at him from the dirt was the size of his fist. This one was going to make him rich beyond his dreams, and all he had to do to achieve that wealth was get it back to Parhron with his skin still on his back.

It took him forever to put his clothes on. His dried leathers were stiff and unyielding, and his damaged flesh was barely up to the task of donning them. Yet, the simple act of fantasizing about his riches proved a most effective analgesic, and before long, he was ready for the road. Once he’d secured the sword to his quiver, he walked back out into the courtyard and looked up at the sun. It was already midmorning.

“Time to get a move on, son,” he said, laughing, “Destiny calls, and I hear she pays very, very well.”