Wolfblade (54 page)

He knew he’d been hurt; probably beyond help.

Time lost all meaning. Wrayan drifted in and out of consciousness so often it became his whole existence. Sometimes there was blessed peace for a while, but the relief was temporary. Other times he woke to agonising pain. Sometimes he felt as if he had drifted out of his body and was looking at the world from above it. He had flashes of memory on occasion. And dreams. Dreams that seemed too real to be a work of imagination. And there were faces. Beautiful faces. Beautiful, silent strangers with eyes as black as onyx, inhuman in their whispering serenity.

I’m dying
, Wrayan decided.

Whatever had happened to him, the pain burned through his brain, damaging him physically as well as mentally. Through the ache he could feel the hand of Death on his shoulder, waiting to lead him into the afterlife.

Only the beautiful strangers held him at bay.

There was a story Wrayan had heard as a child; a story about how when Harshini died, unlike mortal men, Death took them body
and
soul.
Have I got enough Harshini in me for Death to want both my body and my soul?
Wrayan wondered during a rare bout of lucidity. He looked around him but nothing was familiar. Everything was white. Blurred. As if he was looking at the world through an oily lens. Wherever he was, it was no place he had seen in the mortal world. He drifted off and the dream came back again. The dream that lingered just out of reach, with the answers to all his questions. The dream that served only to confuse him more . . .

“Wrayan.”

He always wanted to open his eyes to see who was calling his name, but
even in his dream only a part of him remained anchored to his corporeal body. The rest of him was in retreat, hiding from something fearful. He couldn’t speak; couldn’t even indicate that he’d heard someone calling his name.

“He’s too far gone,”
the unknown voice of his dream remarked.
“And I’m no healer.”

The dream always started like that. Disembodied voices talking about him as if they were unaware he could hear them.

“But he needs help,”
a younger voice always replied.

“Then call Cheltaran. This boy needs the God of Healing.”

“He’ll claim I’m interfering with the natural course of events.”

“That’s because you are.”
The older voice sounded impatient, irritated.

“He needs magical help to heal him. Besides, you can’t let him die,”
the younger voice insisted.
“He hasn’t finished honouring me yet.”

It was Dacendaran, Wrayan always realised at this point.
I sold my soul to the God of Thieves
. He didn’t know how he knew that, but somehow he did.
Or maybe I’m delirious and this is my final madness-filled nightmare
. Wrayan had heard your life was supposed to flash before your eyes just before you died. He’d never heard of anybody having bizarre dreams involving gods and unnamed strangers, though. But then, he’d never really had a conversation with someone who’d just died, so he’d never been in a position to interrogate anyone about it.

“I should do the lad a favour and let him die,”
the other voice replied heavily.
“Do you have any idea what you’re asking, Dace? I don’t even know if I can get through the Gateway with a human.”

“He’s Harshini.”

“Not enough for it to matter to the Gatekeeper.”

“Look, if you don’t want to help, Brakandaran,”
Dace pouted,
“just say so.”

“I don’t want to help.”

At this point, Wrayan always became convinced this was some muddled-up montage of everything he’d seen and heard in his long forgotten past; his broken mind’s last-ditch attempt to scrape up some hope of salvation before it gave way to oblivion.

“But you have to!”
the God of Thieves insisted.
“He’s dying!”

“The lad’s as good as dead, Dace,”
the Halfbreed pointed out with callous practicality.
“His mind has been scoured. Even if you could fix it, without Cheltaran’s direct intervention, it would take months, maybe years.”

“The Harshini could fix him.”

“Why would they want to?”

“Lorandranek likes humans.”

“A
minute ago you were claiming the lad was Harshini.”

Lorandranek, the Harshini King? Wrayan wished he could see the people in his dream more clearly. He wished he could put a face to the man he knew only from legend. There were a lot of names for Brakandaran. The Halfbreed.
The Deathmaker. In Medalon they called him the Sister Slayer, because of the death he’d meted out during the first Purge, but that was more than a hundred and fifty years ago now. The Sisters of the Blade probably thought Brakandaran was dead. For that matter, even in Hythria and Fardohnya, most people thought Brakandaran was dead.

Wrayan wasn’t sure why he could remember such detailed historical information yet was able to recall little more of his own past than his name.

“Well, he is Harshini. A bit.”

In his dream, Brakandaran fell silent for a time at this point and, even though he’d dreamed this scene a thousand times, Wrayan always worried the Halfbreed would refuse to help him.

“All right then,”
Brak replied after an agonisingly long pause.

“You’ll take him? And you’ll promise to make him better? So he ran finish honouring me?’

There was silence for a time. Wrayan wondered if the dream was over and if, this time, the voices had stopped because he was about to die.

But it wasn’t over yet.
“Someone’s coming,”
Brakandaran warned.

“It’s the Innate who hurt him,”
Dace replied.
“And another human. A woman.”

“An Innate did this?”
Brak asked, sounding concerned.
“Maybe we didn’t clean the Library out as thoroughly as we thought?”

“I could come back later and steal some more scrolls,”
Dace offered brightly.

“That may not be a bad idea,”
the Halfbreed agreed.
“But right now, let’s just get your boy out of here.”

In his dream, someone scooped him up from the floor and carried him away from the base of the Seeing Stone. Wrayan heard more voices in the distance. Female voices. But he could never make out what they were saying because, at that point, he was always swallowed by the blackness, only to dream the dream once more and puzzle over the inhumanly beautiful faces of the silent, black-eyed guardians who watched over him.

In time, however, the dream occurred less often, until eventually it stopped completely and even the details began to fade from Wrayan’s memory. The pain receded and finally faded away completely. The silent, black-eyed guardians became less ephemeral, more real; until they resolved into Boborderen and Janarerek, the two Harshini healers who had nursed him back to health. The blurry whiteness took form and became the white walls of a palace.

And the voices he barely remembered from his dream acquired faces and bodies, and Wrayan awoke to discover he was in Sanctuary, the fabled, magically concealed hideaway of the last of the Harshini.

Wrayan remembered little of his life before Sanctuary. There was a hole in his memory, filled with blurry, half-formed images from his former life that never seemed to resolve themselves into coherent memories. Wrayan knew
he was human. He knew he’d been hurt—badly—by magic, but he couldn’t grasp who had done this to him, or how he’d wound up in a battle with another sorcerer in the first place.

The Harshini assured him his memory would return in time.
These things have a way of healing themselves
, Boborderen and Janarerek promised.
You just have to be patient
.

Patience was proving a gift far more common among the Harshini than among humans. Wrayan was desperate to fill those holes in his past that would complete the picture about who he was and how he came to be living among the Harshini.

There were many things he couldn’t recall from his time before Sanctuary, but he was certain of one thing. The Harshini were supposed to be dead, eradicated by the Sisters of the Blade in Medalon during their regular purges to rid the world of anything smacking of magic or religion. Like most of the people living in Hythria and Fardohnya, Wrayan liked to believe the Harshini were merely in hiding until the day they could make a triumphal return, but after nearly two centuries without a sign of them, it was easier to believe they were extinct.

Clearly, they were not. Wrayan had woken to this realisation several months after losing consciousness in the Temple of the Gods of the Sorcerers’ Collective in Greenharbour, following a battle with an assailant he couldn’t name for a reason he couldn’t guess.

Today, however, he would take a step closer to resolving his past. It was the first day of spring and for the second time since Wrayan had been here in Sanctuary, Lorandranek, the King of the Harshini, would return the hidden settlement to real time, to allow the Harshini and their settlement to catch up. Perhaps, this time, some of the memories Wrayan had lost would catch up with him, as well.

For most of the year, Sanctuary remained hidden out of sight and out of time, so the Sisters of the Blade—or, more specifically, their frighteningly well-trained military arm, the Defenders—would think the Harshini dead and gone, and, lately, to hide from the growing number of Xaphista’s priests in Karien to the north who shared the Sisterhood’s desire to rid the world of the magical race. Every spring, Lorandranek released the spell hiding Sanctuary and allowed the settlement to return to the present. Without it, Sanctuary would stagnate and eventually die. Suspended as it was out of time, nothing grew or was replenished. Children could not grow, nor even be conceived. It was a false security, being hidden away out of time. Each day was repeated with the same fragile optimism—the hope that the next time Lorandranek brought them back, it would be into a world where the Harshini might once more be welcome.

Coming back into real time also meant that Brak was coming home. The
Halfbreed didn’t spend a lot of time here in Sanctuary, Wrayan had learned after he woke up in this magical place and realized who it was who had saved him
(from whatever it was that I had needed saving from
, he added silently to himself). When Sanctuary was hidden out of time, Brakandaran preferred to roam the cities and towns of the human world. It wasn’t that he couldn’t cross the barrier when Sanctuary was hidden; Brak had assured Wrayan that he could feel the pull of Sanctuary no matter how far from home he was, and that if one knew where to find it, one could cross over provided the Gatekeeper allowed it. It was just that he felt he was more use to his people roaming the human world.

Lorandranek often jokingly referred to Brak as the “Self-Appointed Head of Harshini Intelligence”, a phrase he had picked up from the Half-breed when he was trying to explain the military hierarchy of the Defenders to a king who couldn’t even contemplate swatting a fly.

It would have been an interesting discussion to sit in on, Wrayan often thought.

Brak’s forays outside were more than just the unsettled journeys of a restless wanderer. Brak kept the Harshini up to date on what was happening in the world of humans. He kept watch over the Sisters of the Blade and their army of Defenders. He kept an eye on the growing power of the Incidental god, Xaphista the Overlord, in the north. And he kept a paternal eye on the people of Hythria and Fardohnya, even going so far, on one occasion, as to reveal himself to the King of Fardohnya some years ago when Lorandranek felt the king had overstepped the mark, even for a human, by trying to start a war using plague-infected body parts.

Brak had what the Harshini euphemistically referred to as a “troubled soul”. Wrayan worked out eventually that it meant Brak had something of a temper. The Halfbreed—as strong a magician as any full blood—lacked the one thing that marked a true Harshini. He was capable of violence.

And he could wield magic while he was angry.

Only one thing frightened the Harshini more than that, Wrayan had discovered, and it wasn’t the Sisterhood, or Xaphista, or any other external threat to their precarious existence. It was the idea that a member of the té Ortyn family—King Lorandranek’s family—might conceive a half-human child like Brak. A demon child.

While Brak’s “troubled soul” was of concern to the Harshini, he was descended from the té Carn family. He could wield the power of the gods as well as any other Harshini, but it meant he was limited in what he could draw on without actively seeking the cooperation of the gods. The king, however, along with his niece and nephew, Shananara and Korandellen, could, if he wanted, draw on the power of all the gods simultaneously—an ability that wasn’t really a problem when you were incapable of even thinking a violent
thought. It was a whole different story, however, when you added human blood to the mix. Human blood cancelled out the Harshini prohibition against violence.

Brak’s temper was something of an inconvenience. A demon child having a tantrum could, conceivably, destroy the world.

Lorandranek, the Harshini King, was a cheerful fellow, but then all the Harshini were cheerful. They were incapable of any other emotion. He was also fascinated by humans in a manner that reminded Wrayan disturbingly of a bug collector studying a particularly interesting colony of ants. Wrayan’s arrival in Sanctuary more than two years ago had been the highlight of the nine-hundred-year-old king’s last century, it seemed. He sent for the young human almost every day and spent hours questioning him about the ordinary lives of humankind. They had become friends over time. Despite the danger humans represented to the king and his family—or perhaps because of it—Lorandranek, and his niece, in particular, spent hours with their human guest, questioning him, teaching him, and sharing the delights of Sanctuary.