The Pleasure of Memory (2 page)

He knew there were some who would consider such an enterprise vulgar. Robbing the dead. Digging through the personal effects of corpses. It didn’t exactly entitle him to bragging rights down at the local tavern. He’d spent most of his life as a blade for hire (whenever he wasn’t otherwise engaged in his preferred career as a smuggler), and even among the thieves and cutthroats he’d considered his colleagues back in those glory days, such a means to acquire wealth would be frowned upon.

But it wasn’t as if he’d been molesting the
civilized
dead, right? These were Vaemysh corpses, for gods’ sakes, demanding little more respect than the carcasses of toads. The Vaemysh were savages at best, primitives barely elevated above the animals they raised. They weren’t civilized and they surely were not human, and they rated the barest respect while alive and none at all once dead.

Of course, at the end of the day, it wasn’t like any of that pointless soul searching and handwringing mattered anyway. It was two years gone now, nothing but a memory fading into the dust far, far behind him. He fingered the lump hanging against his sternum just beneath his leather overshirt. The only notion of any importance was that he’d been successful. He’d found this perfect gem, this treasure he’d worked so hard to obtain, and he’d even found a small fortune in gold along the way to boot. Life was good. Yes, life was damned good indeed.

It amused him to think how abruptly his fortunes had changed. One short month ago he’d been toiling in the desperate scrubs and now he was strolling merrily along the Old Forest Road with a friendly, albeit irritating old vagabond just like the heroes of old returning from battle with their faithful squires at their sides. He was less than a three-day walk from Parhron City, less than three days from a life of leisure, liquor, and lavish indulgence. And all he had to do to complete the journey was keep moving his feet as the road passed away beneath him. The curse of a murdered childhood and a bastardized life was about to be avenged.

He began whistling a bawdry tavern song, or something like what he expected a bawdry tavern song would sound like. Though he’d squandered his youth in every cutthroat’s tavern between Parhron City and the scores of frontier towns spattered across the endless Nolandian Plains, he’d always been too busy gambling or scheming or whoring to pay attention to the music. So now, he simply made up a song of his own devising, whistling an erratic and tuneless ditty as he walked.

He turned his face up to the endless blue sky and let the sun pour its healing light down on him. A cool breeze sifted in from the western meadows in perfect complement to the solar heat. As he enjoyed the generosity of nature, the bum’s words faded to little more than a background buzz, like the cicadas droning their chorus from the mysterious treetops to the east.

This lonely highway was a dirty incision stitching the vast plains of the Nolands on his left to the great and ancient forest on his right. The shimmering Nolandian Plains rose and fell like land-locked waves rolling away into the western edge of the massive sky. Like a great sea, this grassland swept westward for hundreds of miles, an empty, drifting meadow spattered erratically with rare clusters of heady trees and congested shrubs and precious little else. So much like the Vaemysh wastelands, he thought, a vast expanse of nothing sprinkled with rare oases of riches, riches lying in wait for one with the fortitude to go after them.

The great forest on the right side of this road was the exact contradiction to that emptiness. It towered over him like a looming cliff wall, as solid and bountiful as the Nolands were sweeping and empty. Dense with prehistoric trees towering a thousand feet above the forest floor, this forest marched eastward across the jagged hills for nearly a hundred miles before terminating at the feet of the craggy Baeldonian mountain range. The forest had been named Na te’Yed by the Vaemyn savages hundreds of generations ago, a name that meant Forest of Life or Forest of Food or Forest of Fornication or some other such savage bullshit. At least, that’s what he’d heard. He didn’t speak that primitive language and had no desire to foul his tongue by learning it, so the details were inconsequential.

Yet, he’d wanted to trespass those naughty woods for as long as he could remember, and he meant it in the most literal sense. The stories he’d heard of the place were wild and unbelievable, stories of mages and spooks and unnatural beasts. The local common folk called it the Forbidden Forest, though the moniker only made him laugh; the very notion of the term ‘forbidden’ implied there was something of value in there that someone else wanted to protect from someone just like him. He vowed right then and there that when he finally grew bored with his riches, he’d come back and explore those ‘forbidden’ woods. And when he did, he’d find-

Something flashed against the road up ahead.

Beam stopped.

For a moment, he just stood there, studying the dirty two-track road rolling away from him and trying to make sense of what he’d seen. What he thought he’d seen. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything. Maybe it was just an illusion or a trick of sunlight. He’d kept his eyes open, right? Watching, always watching, it was his second nature. Besides, the stinking savages would never consider following him this far north, not so close to the Parhronian border. It was unthinkable. And even if they had, he’d surely have discovered them tailing him long before this. For gods’ sakes, where could anyone even hide out here?

He suddenly wanted to vomit. His pulse was thrumming in his ears. Where could anyone hide out here? Well, nowhere, of course. Except behind that swell in the road up ahead of him. Or possibly beneath the chest-deep grass washing away to his left? Or how about behind that massive wall of trees marking the forest there just a hundred feet off to his right?

“Damn me,” he whispered.

“What was that?” Gerd stood beside him with his fists on his hips staring up at him. He had a strangely curious look on his face.

Beam turned away from him, focusing his attention on the road ahead. “Nah, it can’t be,” he lied to himself, “There’s no way they’re out there. I’ve been watching it too closely.”

“Watching what?” Gerd asked.

Beam threw him a look. “The road, fool.”

“The road?” Gerd scratched at the cobwebbing of hair on his head and looked up the road ahead of them. “You been watching the road? Watching it for what?”

“Take a breather, old man.”

“A breather?” Gerd asked with a snort, “What are you talking about? Man, you got a strange look riding your face there. You having a brain fever or what? I seen brain fever before. Why, it’ll stop a man dead in his tracks before he even knows what happened. Usually happens in full sun just like this, too. It don’t make no sense, but that’s—”

Beam threw a hand over the bum’s mouth. A familiar burn flickered in his stomach, that peculiar marriage of acid and ice that feels like a kick in the gut. Something wasn’t right. He scanned the ocean of grass rolling off to his left and considered the terrible possibilities.

Gerd slapped the hand away and spit into the dirt. “What the hell is that?” he yipped, dragging the back of his hand over his mouth, “Don’t you ever touch me like that! What the hell’s the matter with you? You lost or what?”

Beam looked over at Gerd. Despite the man’s protestations, he was still grinning, though it wasn’t as enthusiastic as usual; he could only see two teeth in it.

“You don’t got to worry,” Gerd said quickly, “I can get you back to Parhron City. By hell, I been this way a thousand times, maybe more. You just keep walking up this here road and sooner or later, you hit the city gates. It’s easy. Ain’t nothing between us and it now. Nothing at all. Hell, the Parhronian border’s only a few hours up the way there.”

Beam ignored him as he studied the road. It was as still as death, nothing moving but the heat ghosts simmering across the gravel up ahead. There were no other signs of life. He glanced back at the road following him. It was equally empty, just two dusty wheel ruts and their fading footprints.

“It’s nothing,” he told himself, “A broken bottle. A shard of mica reflecting the sun. Maybe a cast off piece of tin. Nothing to get jagged up about.”

“Jagged up?” Gerd said with a laugh, “Why hell, I been walking these goddamned roads for fifty-seven years now, longer’n you been off the tit. Takes a hell of a lot more’n you and a brain fever to get me jagged up.”

Beam was a heartbeat away from slapping the old man into silence when he saw it again, a quicksilver flicker near the crest of that same low hill a quarter mile up the road.

He slugged his thigh. It wasn’t his imagination! It was damned well real!

He shucked the heavy pack from his shoulder, but it didn’t come loose. Instead, it snagged on the crossbow strapped across his back and sent him stumbling clumsily to the side. With a growl of impatience, he regained his stance and jerked the pack free. It landed with a metallic thud on a puff of dust. He dropped to a knee and dug a small field glass from the pack’s side pocket. Then he stood up and leveled it at the road ahead.

Even with the lens, he could see little of interest, only a passing dust devil, and a pair of crows tearing at something dead on the shoulder. As he swept it left across the plains, he realized there could be a hundred savages crawling toward him beneath that grass from as many different directions. Maybe it was complacency, maybe simple stupidity, but he’d never considered that the savages would risk following him so far up the Nolands and into civilized territory. Their treaties with the Allies seriously forbid their entry into the Neutral Outerlands.

And yet, here he was, and he was quickly becoming pretty damned sure that there they were.

He lowered the glass and cursed.

“What now?” Gerd squealed, “Good gods, you’re a moody bastard! I sure as hell hope you’re not getting crazy on me! Just so you know, I ain’t too fond of ravers.”

“It’s too far north,” Beam whispered.

“Too far north again?” Gerd snapped back.

Beam looked at him. “They’d never follow me so close to Parhron. It’d be…it’d be a suicide mission, that’s what it’d be.”

“Well, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Suicide mission? Who you talking about? You paranoid or what? Gotta be a brain fever. Maybe you need some shade.”

“Will you shut your mouth for a bloody minute?”

Gerd recoiled at that. “Well, I’ll tell you what, you’re really something! I thought I was the crazy one here. For the gods’ sakes, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and I got me a suspicion you don’t, neither. Should’ve known something wasn’t right about you when you didn’t have no wine. Can’t trust a man what don’t drink wine. Shouldn’t never have done what I did, joining up with you back there. I knew there was something ain’t right with you the minute I laid eyes on you.”

Beam studied the road through the glass again. This was two hundred miles north of their borders, north of Vaen. A savage entering the Nolands was damned well unheard of, at least in these modern times. Besides, if they really were after him he’d never have seen them coming. There’d be no flash of metal, no warning cry, only the cold surprise of an arrow burying itself into his spine.

He dropped to his knees and stowed the field glass back in the pack. His mind was raging with the same suspicious notions that’d kept him alive during his years in the scrubs. “You deserve it if they are out there,” he growled to himself, “You’re a dull-witted bastard.”

“Who you calling dull-witted?” Gerd cried behind him, “My gods, I wish to hell I knew what you’re getting so twisted up about. You ain’t making no sense.”

“Will you shut up?” Beam snapped over his shoulder, “Just shut your mouth for one goddamned minute. Can you do that for me, Gerd? Can you just stop talking?”

Gerd froze at that. His face looked almost serious. “What is it with you?” he said carefully, “What’re you getting all crazed up for? For the love of Calina, now you’re starting to make me mad.”

Beam leaned onto a knee and buried his eyes in his hand. It’s probably a bladesmith or tinker, he thought, just another traveler making lunch on the roadside. Gerd was right, he was just being paranoid, that’s all. There was no way they’d follow him up here. Hell, anyone who saw the savages, whether soldier, farmer, or traveling salesman, anyone who spotted them here in the Nolands would fire on them without so much as a by-your-leave.

Yet, even as he struggled to rationalize it, he knew argument was futile. He possessed an intuitive sense for danger, something like a sixth sense, a product of his natural rogue’s instinct that manifested itself as a kind of alarm bell, and he’d honed that gift to a fine edge during his years smuggling. What he didn’t understand was why hadn’t he sensed this danger sooner, before the flash?

It had to be this new emotion, this goddamned joy. It’d lulled him into lowering his guard, and he cursed himself for ever having succumbed to its weakness.

He stood up. A breeze riled in from the plains, stirring the tanned, seed-laden grass beneath it. Somewhere off in the distance a crow barked. Nothing was obviously out of the ordinary, and yet his alarm bell was clanging like a town afire.

Then he spotted the second sign.

It was directly before him not a hundred yards out in the plains left of the road, a solitary spot in the grass moving ever so slightly out of tandem with the surrounding whirls. Then it stopped and there was nothing left but the dull grass standing lazily at attention. Still he watched it. He didn’t move, he didn’t breathe, he didn’t think. He only watched the grass.

Another whirl of grass bubbled up a hundred feet south of the first, and with it, his worst fears blossomed into truth. It was all true! They
were
out there! Worse, he could now see that there were three areas of grass moving in a line parallel to the road.

He turned away from the plains. The sun suddenly felt like a blacksmith’s furnace, the air thick and useless. He drew in a studied breath and closed his eyes and tried to persuade himself to a calmer, more controlled state, a trick learned from the monks of his childhood, one he’d used a thousand times over his career. Anxiety and fear were as much the enemy as the savages. It was critical to maintain control of his weaknesses at all times.