The Seedbearing Prince: Part I (47 page)

The house in his mind usually took the form
of his home on Shard, only with endless wooden halls marching away
from the hearth room. Sometimes he used the Ring because the warren
of halls and ramps was easier to order, and other times he used the
torrent, where the craters on a thousand erratics opened into his
thousand rooms. He could not decide between them.

Another night found the Preceptor bravely
holding his own in the shelter of a deep split. This latest camp
offered only the barest protection, errant wind often gusted in to
blow sparks from the fire.

“Mind your feet,” Nassir barked, dancing
Lurec into a corner. Dayn knew his own sword play to be weak, but
he had trounced Lurec easily whenever they sparred. The Preceptor
would certainly never make a weaponmaster, and likely not even
become more than a middling opponent, but he set about his lessons
with a determination that surprised Dayn. And, he improved. The
Defender pressed Lurec just as hard as Dayn, though when they were
done he often looked at the Preceptor as though he did not
recognize him.

When it was not Dayn's turn to be tossed
around, or shown how to bound into kicks, he practiced with the
halves of his staff. The two long sticks were awkward, but if a
voidwalker broke his staff as easily as Nassir could―without even
using a sword―Dayn wanted any added prowess he could muster.

A crack across his shin brought him back to
his latest practice session.

“Focus, Shardian,” Nassir called out, already
dodging back out of reach of Dayn’s thrust.

“You almost touched him, Dayn,” the Preceptor
urged. “Keep at it.” He had committed himself entirely to the
training. Sometimes Lurec and Dayn squared off while Nassir barked
direction over the echoed clatter of wood. Other times, they took
on the Defender as a team, or paired with Nassir to go against each
other.

Lurec always pressed for more if the Defender
was not firm. “This isn’t the torrent for me to strap you to my
back, Preceptor,” Nassir would say. “Rest. We cannot afford to
leave you behind.”

With their food running low, Dayn began to
worry whether they would reach Peyha in time. For every three or
four days of bounding, they were guaranteed a sand storm that
forced them into the splits. The worst of the storms lasted four
whole days, virtually remaking the landscape. What they saw after
finally emerging from their dusty cave changed everything.

The Weep

I've walked the sickmetal valleys of Tu'um, and
coursed through Crell's Knot. But if there is a hell in all the
World Belt, it's in the belly of a fleshweep.

-Guardian Benlor

N
assir and Lurec
stared at the windswept road on the evening after that worst storm.
The sun sank rapidly in a clear blue sky. No dust would mar the
stars as in weeks before. Dayn reached up to touch a red flag
hanging from one of the narrow stone columns that marked the way to
Peyha.

“A week ago I couldn’t reach this high on my
best bound,” he said. Over twelve spans of new sand lay under their
feet. “Sometimes I wonder how there is any of Ara left. It could
all just be blown into the torrent, and...what is it?”

The two Ringmen ignored Dayn completely. They
stood before an outcrop of rock, likely a low hill before the
sandstorm buried it. The peak curled to the north and shielded a
flat swath from being completely windblown. There were odd furrows
in the sand.

“We are being hunted,” Nassir said. Dayn
stepped closer to behold the strangest tracks he had ever seen,
made by some sort of massive, wickedly split hoof. But the front
protruded sideways, so it appeared two of the same creature stood
back to back as they shuffled. Unless...Dayn's eyes widened in
dismay.

Lurec read his face with a glance. “Ah, so
you see. Yes, this creature has more than four legs. We think, at
least.”

Dayn quickly eyed the distance where the
belly would be, between the outward facing hoofprints. “But that
would mean it’s six spans wide!”

“Yes,” Nassir agreed, his face even stonier
than usual. “Twice the size of a ragehawk.”

Dayn peered at the tracks. The depression in
the sand between the two tracks looked compacted and smooth.
Almost like a toad on its belly.
He found it difficult to
picture the creature at all. Something about it felt...wrong, in a
way he could not describe. “What leaves tracks like this?”

“A weep,” Lurec said. “It’s feeding, and from
what we can see here...” He pointed to where the strange furrows
disappeared. The Preceptor sounded troubled, and genuinely afraid.
“It can fly.”

The tracks looked lost to the drifting sand
at that point, but Dayn saw that the Preceptor was right. They
simply stopped.

“Defender, this is most troubling. I believed
these creatures myth.”

“Peace shelters us,” Nassir replied. “I first
saw tracks two days outside of Olende, but they were random. It’s
riderless.” The Defender looked Dayn in the eye. “Voidwalkers
have...mounts, Shardian. On the Ring, we call them fleshweep. Dread
creatures, spawned in the caves of Thar'Kur itself. We've only seen
them sparingly over the decades. Weep are hard for the voidwalkers
to control, and just as likely to kill their riders as one of
us.”

“I suppose it changes nothing for our journey
at this point,” Lurec said.

“Yes. The night still protects us. Their
bodies glow with an orange hue, once they have…fed.” Nassir rose
from his squat and wordlessly started off through the sand,
following the red flags.

The Defender’s words made Dayn swallow. They
brought to mind a memory of Joam on the road, before Evensong. The
Southforte folk say they saw an amber light in the sky.
The
voidwalkers had been around them the whole time, what seemed like a
lifetime ago. Dayn decided not to press the subject further, after
a good look at the sick pallor of Lurec's face.

That night they made poor time, trudging over
the hill-sized dunes deposited by the sandstorm. There were no
caves to take shelter in before daylight, so they pressed through
the early morning sun at Nassir's insistence. Dayn’s exhaustion
robbed him of sleep when they did finally find shade, two hours
past dawn. The Defender pressed them to move further each new
day.

One morning they stopped to rest at a spring
bubbling up from a crevasse in the shade of a cliff. Lurec nearly
giggled in relief over spotting the spindly trees the Aran guards
told them to look for. They had not seen another living soul these
past weeks, so Dayn was not surprised they had the water source to
themselves. He filled a skin eagerly and plunked himself down on a
rock to drain it dry. Sweet and cold, the water made his teeth
ache, but he panted gratefully and gulped all the more.

“Peyha is only an hour away,” Nassir
announced upon returning from his customary scout. He brought new
food with him, spotted apples and a white cheese from Peyha’s
goats. The apples were bruised and the cheese was sharp enough to
make a ridgecat spit, but Dayn could not ask for a finer feast.
“The transport is still there. We’ll rest here until it leaves, in
three days. I don’t want to attract notice among the Arans by
taking lodging in the city.”

“Peace be praised.” Dayn sighed in relief.
The journey had wearied him to the bone, weak Aran ground or not.
He wondered how the Defender did not melt under all of his armor.
Nassir favored Dayn with a knowing look that made him frown.

“To think I once complained about the pallet
in my study.” Lurec lay flopped on his back. The Aran sun had dealt
harshly with his fair skin, and he looked ready to begin peeling on
the spot.

At the Preceptor’s request, Nassir actually
permitted an open campfire―a small one―so they sat among the stars.
Dayn watched the sky in awe. A great black mass had appeared along
the northern horizon, swallowing up the stars as it moved silently
through the night. Pinpricks of light in a radial pattern twinkled
within the middle of it, as though the darkness carried its own
stars within.

“We never see other worlds so close back
home,” Dayn said. “Only the torrent.”

“Magnificent, is it not?” Lurec followed
Dayn's gaze. “Montollos. Soon you will walk the ribbons and ride
the skybridges between the endless towers of the Great City.” True
appreciation resonated in the Preceptor's words. Dayn looked on
eagerly, amazed that people were capable of building such
marvels.

“I believe you are ready to attempt another
Sending.” Lurec sat near the fire, his blue eyes steady and
focused.

“Why did you wait so long?” Dayn asked.

“On the Ring, a new Preceptor must perfectly
recount his thousand rooms in front of the Masters of the Halls
before he is judged fit to learn the Sending. We must ensure a
soundness of mind and steadfast heart in order for such an ability
to be taught. Your circumstances are decidedly…different, but you
should still be trained.”

“Sending can be used for evil, Shardian,”
Nassir cautioned. “To whisper poisonous thoughts into the mind of
another, or sway a person’s intentions without their knowledge. A
Sender who does this is no better than a voidwalker.”

“Are you ready?” Lurec asked.

Dayn licked his lips and nodded. He stilled
his mind, looking into the fire once more. The Preceptor’s Sending
came so quickly that Dayn doubted it at first. In his mind’s eye,
he saw an elderly man with a stooped back, surrounded by six
younger people, boys and girls with the same sandy hair. They
waved, all smiling, though one of the younger boys fought away
tears.

Behind them, rose a monument ten spans high,
of three naked granite figures, two women and one man holding a
broken white disk of marble, stretching their arms forth as though
to join the pieces back together. The long limbed birds lining the
figures’ arms rose in flight, just as the door of a transport
closed shut.

Dayn opened his eyes. “I saw…what was
that?”

Lurec smiled. “Good. I was not always a
Preceptor. That’s the Remembrance Crypt on my world, Uhrau. The
people you saw were my family, come to see me off to the Ring.”

“They didn’t want you to go?”

“My cousin Telron took it hard,” Lurec
admitted. “This Sending is one of my fondest memories. I’ve not
seen my family in ten years. I wanted you to understand that we
are…sympathetic to what you are doing for the Ring. You have not
sworn our oaths, but that makes the role you play all the more
meaningful.”

Dayn nodded, staring into the red and white
coals. The faint breeze faded out of his hearing, lost within the
rhythm of his own heartbeat. Montollos passed silently overhead, a
dark swath of gridded stars. The Defender’s lips parted, but then
his face grew wooden, and the moment passed with his words still
unspoken. Lurec sighed and shook his head. “Time for you to
practice, lad. Start with the stillness.”

They stayed several nights under the
protection of the leaning cliffside. The overhang sheltered them
well from the sun, and the spring’s water was cool and deep,
surrounded by tough leaved plants and more needle spires that
helped keep the air cool. The Defender believed the fleshweep would
avoid straying too close to Peyha, and his instincts proved true,
for they saw no more tracks.

Dayn’s attempts at Sending ended in failure
no matter how he stilled his mind, or how simple the image or
memory he formed to share with the Ringmen. The Preceptor's lessons
were taxing, like working a newly discovered muscle, but Dayn
attacked the mental exercises with a determined grimness. He did
not want to be at the mercy of a voidwalker again.

The third night, the Ringmen regarded him
silently as he sat crosslegged, staring into the fire. Dayn had
chosen the easiest image he could think of to impress in the
Ringmen’s minds, the Highest Shir-Hun. The choice did not prove to
be wise because his thoughts inevitably drifted to Soong, and
that
would not do well for his first Sending at all.

“My luck was better with the sword.” Dayn
gave an exasperated sigh and would have stood up, but Lurec’s
raised eyebrows kept him in place by the fire.

“You are doing better than you know.
Stillness.”

Dayn gritted his teeth, but slowed his
breathing as Lurec had shown him.

The Defender sat some distance away from them
at the Preceptor’s insistence, for he was sharpening his sickmetal
blade. “Some talents are as natural as breathing, while others take
years to master.” His whetstone rasping over the ugly metal did
little to help Dayn’s concentration. He closed his eyes. “I’ve
thought little about what I would do after this conflict with
Thar’Kur is finished. My wife will always have her hawks to tend,
but I have no love for those monsters. I’ve often envied you
farmers, your simple life. Maybe one day you will teach me how to
grow things in the soil, Shardian.”

“You will pick it up easily, if you have the
patience for it.” Dayn could not help himself—the thought of Nassir
popped into his head, wearing his Defender’s armor and spiked mask.
Great gouts of dirt flew all around him as he hacked away at some
poor inkroot with his giant sword. A strangled noise made Dayn open
his eyes.

The Preceptor’s face had turned purple, and
he held his sides as if his ribs would split from silent laughter.
Dayn looked at him in utter confusion. Lurec composed himself
hastily, wiping tears from his eyes before announcing, “He’s done
it, Defender. A first Sending, and a memorable one at that. Well
done, young Shardian.”

Dayn winced, but Lurec just smiled and gave
him a wink. The Defender did not even look up from his sword. “He
grows in leaps and bounds,” he observed. “Is it the affinity,
Preceptor, or the Seed's influence?”