The Pleasure of Memory (12 page)

VI

THE BLINDING

HANCE’S STOMACH FELT AS IF IT WERE EATING ITSELF FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

He wished he’d brought a vial of his stomach nostrum along. He might also wish he were king of the world for all the good it was going to do. It served him right for leaving the damned pack with Luren. Between his stomach and the imp banging those pans inside his head, every step was an exercise in agony. If not for the terror gripping him, he might’ve just lain down in the ferns and had a long nap.

No sentry had ever malfunctioned before, not in a century of service, not like this. Perhaps the world's caeyl energy was decaying more quickly than he’d feared. It was an idea he’d considered a thousand times in the past. Uselessly. The caeyl energy was dying, plain and simple, and no fretting or wishing or praying would do a thing to change it. He had to push it from his head before he succumbed to another of the useless fits of melancholy he was so sadly prone to.

He stepped over a rotting log that was slumbering across his path without a care in the world.

Perhaps it’d been longer than a year since his last appraisal of the sentries. Could it be possible he was becoming complacent? The unfortunate truth was that he wasn’t getting any younger. He thought about his mentor and the horrid confusion that’d ravaged his final sixty years. Though this was the inevitable fate of all caeyl mages due to centuries of caeyl energy exposure, the possibility of it at his young age was simply unthinkable. For the love of Calina, he was barely a hundred and ninety-five.

The ground eventually changed from humus to dirt to barren rock as he climbed the craggy slope leading up to the cliff face. Monstrous spikes of rust-colored rocks erupted from the earth here. Needle shaped and dozens of yards tall, they gradually crowded in around him like the bars to a cell until he could no longer walk a straight line for very long. Streaked with deep veins blue granite, with their bases carpeted in thick, emerald moss, they looked like tombstones for gods.

The incline grew steeper at a dutiful pace as he wove his way through them, and before long, the boulders melded into one single upsurge of rock that evolved into the mountain itself. The climb was rough and irregular enough that he was soon using feet, hands, and staff to propel himself forward. Every other step sent a small cascade of debris clattering down through the boulders beneath him. In time, the climb led to a sheer wall of blue, black, and magenta streaked granite that towered over him like the outer wall to a castle. Once there, he groped his way laterally along a narrow ledge until he came to a split in the rock. Though the gap was wide enough for him to slip through, it was at such an angle that it was nearly imperceptible from any other station.

He passed into the narrow corridor through the mountain and felt his way to a steep, narrow, and perfectly unnatural stone stairway that looked more poured from the rock than cut into it. He’d used his Water Caeyl to melt this passage and the steps from the mountain many decades ago. The stairs terminated at a passage leading out from the crevice and into the brilliant sunshine of an open rock ledge. He shaded his eyes and walked the twenty paces across the ledge to the cliff’s edge. Once there, he threw back his hood and leaned into his staff as he waited for his breath to return.

The view from here was spectacular. The sheer cliff plunged away from his toes, plummeting thousands of feet to the valley, Farswept Green, far below him. The valley was an endless plateau of shimmering emerald that ran off into the horizon, stopped in time only by the brilliant blue wall of an immense southern sky. Slicing its torturous way across the belly of the valley was the white incision of a violent river.

Three vultures circled the air currents far below him, swimming in lazy arcs as they searched for something dead. As he studied them, he considered that they were particularly large buzzards, though they were far enough away that their details were indistinct. Normally he would’ve taken his time here, watching the view and taking his lunch as reward for the miserable climb. Today he turned away.

He followed the ledge as it wrapped its way around the mountain. Eventually he came to his sentry, and the sight of it sent his already troubled stomach into a spin. The winged stone beast was identical to the one in the forest, or would’ve been yesterday or a week ago. But this sentry would never fly again. This sentry was slumped on its low pedestal with a deep fissure gouging the side of its neck. The split gradually narrowed as it cut down across the chest and into the forelegs and eventually terminated in a web of fine cracks that laced through the claws.

For a moment, he couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at. He’d never seen a sentry fail before, not like this, not ever. This creature was one good wind gust away from rubble. The blue glow that normally indicated an active charge was missing from the orbish eyes. It was a most dire sign.

Though it appeared lifeless, Chance still approached it with caution. Caeyl energy was extremely dangerous and could be irritatingly unpredictable, even when that energy was of his own devising. He leaned closer and visually inspected the deep crack in the sentry’s chest. It was wide enough at the chest for him to have slipped his entire hand into. The creature appeared to have reverted to a permanently inanimate state, which would make it no more dangerous than a pile of stones.

He touched the sentry’s brow to test his theory. The contact resulted in a sharp snap and a shock of light. He recoiled, cursing and shaking the sting from his fingers. Yellow sparks danced across the sentry’s mantis-like face before quickly dispersing into the stone. The scent of ozone smothered the air. He looked at his fingers, still red and tingling from their encounter with the foreign energy. The presence of yellow energy in the sentry was more startling than the spark had been. Animation energy powered this sentry, and animation was the work of blue Water Caeyls, not yellow Fire Caeyls. It made no sense.

Again, he tapped the sentry’s face, and again the sparks flashed, but this time the lifeless beast made a sour, grating noise and then shuddered strangely. The cracks fouling its chest deepened. Chance backed away as it collapsed into rubble at his feet.

He watched in utter disbelief as the dust settled around the debris. This was unbelievable. Never in his life had any of his works run so afoul of their design. The caeyl energy of the world was decaying, certainly, but not at a pace that could explain this level of failure. And it surely wouldn’t explain the yellow energy he’d witnessed in the stone.

He squatted before the mess and picked up a fractured piece of the beast’s horn. The stone crumbled with a simple squeeze. He cast the remnants into the dirt and wiped his palm on his thigh. The severed head lay askew in the debris and remained relatively intact, though it was missing one horn and had three deep cracks weaving across the brow. He dug his thumbs into the cracks and easily pulled the head apart. Then he sifted through the remains until he found what he was looking for, a sliver of his blue caeyl, the source of the energy that once drove the creature.

He turned toward the sun with the caeyl sliver in his palm, and then pushed it around with a finger. What had once been a needle-shaped, flaming blue crystal was now opaque and lifeless as a chunk of dirty quartz. The sight of it blew out any candles of doubt he’d clung to since meeting the sentry on the road that morning. Though he’d never witnessed a caeyl transform this way before, he’d surely read about it. The sentry’s energy hadn’t just leaked into the ground. Something had extinguished it.

Some
thing
. Or some
one
.

He pitched the remnants of the caeyl into the stony rubble and stood up. The images of truth coalesced in his mind the way a bad memory serves itself up uninvited. He understood now, understood better than he cared to. That sentry back in the forest hadn’t been wrong at all. It’d been functioning precisely as designed. The Vaemyn
were
invading.

Chance grabbed his brow and wrestled back the terror rushing in on the heels of this revelation. The Vaemyn must be entering his lands through eastern passes. That would explain why his sentries hadn’t discovered them until today. Those eastern passes snaked north toward his forest across the mountains from Na te’Tula, the Southern Forest. That forest was the realm of the only other caeyl mage in the region, the only caeyl mage within six month’s journey of the Nolands. More importantly, he was easily the only mage in Calevia mad enough to befoul the realm of another caeyl mage.

Those civilians unfortunate enough to live under that fool’s sphere of influence called him Prae the Biled, and with good reason. The man was utterly insane. His dungeons boasted the bones of thousands of innocents unfortunate enough to have offended him. And offending Prae could mean as little as an accidental trespass onto his lands or rumor of a dissenting opinion of his rule, or even simple eye contact with his ministers or household.

Chance turned back toward the cliff. He looked out over the sea of trees washing across the valley floor far below. He envisioned Prae’s foul keep squatting in the open plains at the edge of the Southern Forest nearly a hundred miles south of where he stood. It was all painfully clear to him now. The Vaemyn were working with that bastard, they had to be. They’d never have managed safe passage to this southern approach without crossing hundreds of miles of Prae’s lands, not without the lunatic’s blessings. He’d have crushed them mercilessly the moment they stepped foot on his lands if they’d entered there uninvited.

He glanced back at the remnants of his sentry. He thought about the yellow energy that’d delivered him a shock. A Fire Caeyl drove that energy. That was the final proof. Prae had committed the ultimate offense as a caeyl mage; he’d sabotaged another caeyl mage’s works. Such an act was nearly unheard of among his kind. It would mean a death sentence if the Council of Twenty got wind of such an act.

The treachery felt like a dream, like a long fall into oblivion. He was shaking now, whether with rage or fear or both he couldn’t say and didn’t care. It made no difference. He had blood in his eyes now, blood in his heart.

Memories of war and death and despair flamed through his mind like a prairie fire. Prae was rallying the Vaemyn. Prae had somehow coerced them into an invasion. There could be no other explanation.

Chance immediately understood that he had only one course of action: He had to warn the allies. If he failed to warn them, if the Allies couldn’t rally in time to crush Prae’s assault in its infancy, it would lead to a war unlike any seen since the Fifty Year War of two centuries ago.

Na te’Yed was his responsibility. It was the buffer between the southern hazards and the northern Allies. Prae knew this. Prae knew that even with allowing the Vaemyn access through his personal forest, Chance would spy the advancing army long before they could reach the northern realms. Prae knew he’d have to blind him. He knew he’d have to disable his sentries before—

Prae would have to blind him!

The truth filled him so abruptly that his legs threatened to fail him. There it was! Prae’s goal wasn’t simply to prevent him from warning the Allies. That wouldn’t be nearly security enough for the lunatic. Prae wanted Chance out of the way. He wanted Chance dead. This was a trap!

As the implications of this treachery rolled through his mind, he remembered Luren. The boy was at home. And he was alone!

∞

Luren stood in the perpetual shadows of the great room looking down at his master’s wide desk. The afternoon sun spilled in through the irregular panes of the window rising above it and washed across the worn books and scrolls piled across the desk. An assortment of half-consumed yellow candles wept down over tarnished iron sconces at both ends of the desktop. Several tidy bundles of pungent herbs were hanging to dry from ancient hooks nailed into the timbers above the desk.

Squatting in the center of the desk was a grand and massive book with a worn leather cover engraved in the mystical images of Gods of Pentyrfal and other heavenly creatures. Luren pushed the tall stool in closer to the desk and climbed up onto it. The book was several inches thick and too wide for him to wrap his arms completely around. It was a history of the region Chance’s mentor had started hundreds of years ago and which Chance had subsequently continued through his own long life. It was the most recent of a dozen such books, and the stories contained between them dated back well over a thousand years.

Luren ran his hand across the rough, worn cover. He loved the way the tawny leather glowed so brilliantly under the sunlight. He loved the fragrance of the paper. He loved its age, loved the whispering script that was fading from years of hungry, searching fingertips.

Chance and his mentor had written each chapter of each book in the language of the people whose story it described. They believed the tale of a people was best depicted when written in their native tongues. Luren wasn’t sure he agreed, though the fact that he found reading a foreign language significantly more difficult than speaking it tainted his opinion a bit.

He flipped through the centuries until he found the section labeled the Fifty Year War. Though named the Fifty Year War, it’d actually lasted a full two years shorter than the label given it. This little inaccuracy had always annoyed him. Why call it the Fifty Year War when, in fact, it was the Forty Eight Year War? It was illogical, and the irritation of it distracted him whenever he read it.