Anderson, Kevin J - Gamearth 01 (22 page)

"Father!" Tayron's words whistled out of his throat. He shouted for two of the other khelebar to come to him. "He still lives
¯
take him to Thilane Healer! She can save him. She has the power
¯
I know it."

The burning anger in Tayron's eyes stopped Vailret from voicing his doubts. A male and a female khelebar picked up their Tribeleader between them.

Fiolin's blood slicked their hands.

Tayron grabbed a fistful of arrows. "We shall destroy the Lifetaker!"

His voice cracked with emotion. The khelebar rallied around their fallen leader and the body of Stynod Treescavenger.

Fiolin stirred and wheezed through punctured lungs. "No. Enough killing." But Tayron did not hear, and Vailret chose not to repeat the words for him. The two khelebar tending their dying Tribeleader looked at each other for a moment, then bore him away.

Tayron removed one arrow from his quiver. His jaws ground together so tightly the muscles looked like straining ropes. He ran his fingers along the burned wood of the shaft, then dipped the sharp tip in a pool of his father's blood on the ground. Before the blood had dried, he thrust the doubly poisoned arrow into his braid of blond hair.

By unspoken agreement, Tayron Next-Leader took command of the war party. Vailret signaled to another of the panther-men and scrambled on his wide back. Tayron charged off down the gorge with the rest of the vengeful khelebar in his wake.

Noldir Woodcarver stared at the toppled hulk of the Father Pine. He paced around the dead tree, pausing, frowning. He inspected the char marks, the rough patches where the intense heat had eaten through to the heartwood.

Delrael watched to distract himself from thinking of the battles the others were now fighting. The pungent odor of wet ashes still hung in the air
¯
"the smell of tree blood," Thilane called it. The thought made Delrael uncomfortable.

Before the war party departed, Fiolin Tribeleader had summoned Noldir to the council clearing. "You shall make a monument out of Thessar's remains
¯
the Father Pine will be a memorial for our dead Ledaygen."

Noldir stared at the fallen tree, seeing into it. His eyes glimmered with determined pride.

"You've been just looking at it for hours," Delrael finally said.

The Woodcarver glanced up at him. "I cannot carve contrary to the desires of Thessar. I must find out what it wishes to be, but it eludes me -ah!"

He clapped his hands. "No wonder I could not see it before. Thessar is practically shouting to me that it is upside down! Delrael
Kennok
limb, help me."

Thilane Healer watched for a moment, then came over to help. The three of them effortlessly rolled the hulk of the ancient Father Pine. Delrael blinked his eyes in wonder
¯
he had felt the new power sparkling through him for an instant. The blackened log seemed eager to move and floated like a dandelion seed until it came back to rest on the scorched grass.

"Look!" Thilane paused, then replaced her excitement with a show of dignity. She nodded at the depression where Thessar had fallen
¯
a small seedling, rumpled and nearly crushed, straightened in the sunlight.

"Thessar knew!" she whispered. "When the Father Pine fell, he sheltered this seedling with a hollow in his trunk!"

Noldir called to the khelebar who had remained behind. "A tree still lives! A seedling! Ledaygen is not completely lost!"

Thilane turned away though. "The
dayid
does not live within it."

Delrael tried to offer comfort. "Maybe when you get enough trees to grow again
¯
"

"Yes," she said. "And maybe the Outsiders will feel sorry for us and magically make the forest reappear all by itself. I prefer not to count on miracles. If a miracle was going to happen, it should have stopped Ledaygen from burning in the first place."

Delrael tried to hide his anger. The Woodcarver spoke against Thilane.

"But a miracle
has
happened
¯
Thessar has given us a new seedling."

Thilane said nothing and plodded back into the burned forest. She and the lesser Healers tended the five dying trees, though they knew their efforts were in vain. She walked away, and Delrael watched her bare, weathered back with its wealth of corded muscles.

Troubled, Noldir turned back to the hulk of Thessar. He plunged his hands up to the wrists into the charred trunk, sculpting a wooden gravestone for Ledaygen.

Delrael watched the Woodcarver, fascinated with his work but impatient to be doing something else, to be continuing their quest southward. He walked into the dead forest to find Thilane.

The skeletal branches of the trees closed over him. The gray ash muffled all sound like tainted snow. He came upon one of the Treescavengers who was methodically removing every twig and scrap of wood from a large area and piling an immense mound of debris near the path. The Treescavenger gathered branches, uprooted tree trunks, picked up the smallest twig.

Delrael watched her work. "Want some help?" His leg no longer bothered him, and he enjoyed feeling it as he moved.

The Treescavenger took no notice of his question. Delrael helped anyway, carrying loads of fallen branches to the growing mound. He wiped a wristful of sweat off his forehead, leaving a charcoal smudge on his skin.

"So, why are we carrying all this wood away?"

The khelebar stopped and looked up at him with eyes as blank and empty as the sky. She blinked and fumbled with her words. "That is my work. The
dayid
made me a Treescavenger, and I must collect whatever dead wood I find." She went back to her task again, widening the radius of the cleared circle. She faltered, pondering, then she heaved another branch. "That is my work."

Delrael waited a moment, uncomfortable, and then slipped off into the deeper forest. He knew where Thilane would be working with the two other Healers.

After passing through the wreckage of trees and brush, he reached a place where the ashes had been trampled and the broken branches moved away.

Delrael guessed that this was one of the first places where Bryl had used the Water Stone against the fire. Somehow, two trees had survived here. Two Healers stood beside each other, watching Thilane touch one of the burned trees.

The oak was huge and very old, surviving because of its immense size.

Delrael looked upward through the dizzying crosswork of black branches. A few areas near the top of the tree appeared undamaged. The other surviving oak was a mere sapling, blackened and scarred
¯
but Thilane insisted it still lived.

Delrael didn't know how she could tell, but the Healer expended most of her effort there.

Thilane looked up from her work, removing her palms from the thin trunk and pressing the side of her head against it, listening to the tree. Her garland had wilted: Ledaygen had no more flowers to offer her.

She pursed her lips when she saw Delrael but continued her ministrations. He waited, hesitant about interrupting. Finally, he asked why she had not seemed excited about Noldir's discovery of the pine seedling. "At least you have a start now, a tree from Ledaygen."

The other two Healers heard Delrael mention the pine seedling and looked to Thilane in surprise, but they did not speak. Thilane kept her attention on him.

"Ledaygen was a forest of pine and oak. Both! Because of Thessar the pines may now return
¯
but
what of the oaks
?"

Delrael fidgeted. "Can't you heal one of these?"

Thilane shook her head and pointed at the large oak.

"That tree could have survived its fire damage, but it is old and has already surrendered. This one, though," she ran her fingers along the surviving sapling, "has an extraordinary will to live. How can it cling to life when it has endured more than any of these others? But it, too, has been mortally wounded. It will be dead
¯
dead, like the rest of the forest."

Delrael looked at the emerald eyes of the other Healers, but they avoided his gaze. He spoke quietly to Thilane. "Why can't you bring in other trees? Start over?"

"Stop being so stupid and optimistic! If we brought outside trees, our home would be just another forest. It would not be
Ledaygen
. Better that
Ledaygen
be dead and remembered than absorbed as part of more forest terrain."

She clamped her wavering lips together and drew herself straight. "And now we shall have only pine."

Thilane stepped away from the charred sapling and sank to the forest floor. She tucked her great paws beneath her belly, then reached out to run her fingernail along the peeled bark. The other Healers stopped their own work and watched her.

Delrael felt uneasy. Thilane smiled at something he could not see.

Tears made tracks through the settled ash on her cheeks. She reached behind her neck and undid the long braid of gray-streaked hair that ran like a mane down her bare back. She turned and hissed at the two Healers, "Yes!"

They both took a half-step backward in surprise.

"It is decided," Thilane said.

"What is?" Delrael asked.

The Healer turned. Her eerie eyes stared through him, seeming to see the ghosts of the forest. "Ledaygen has a new Father Pine. I can provide a new Father Oak. I must heal this young tree."

"But you said you couldn't
¯
"

"I can. You must remember how we Heal."

Thilane would say no more, but rose and marched around the blackened oak sapling, contemplating. One of the other Healers took Delrael by the shoulder and pulled him away, silencing his questions with a stern gesture.

Her eyes glittered with a mixture of dread, enthusiasm, and hope.

You must remember how we Heal
.

Delrael watched Thilane, thinking of how she had treated some of the khelebar burns by laying green leaves on the injury; the leaves had turned black and charred.

Noldir Woodcarver had told him how she had treated Delrael's bruises and smashed muscles with twigs and branches, which had somehow become crushed and mangled in exchange.

She had brought his
kennok
wood leg to life by exchanging his flesh leg and burying it in the forest.

He frowned. None of it seemed to be "healing" at all
¯
just an exchange of wholeness and injury.

Then he knew what she meant to do.

Thilane leaned up against the hunched sapling, embracing the thin trunk and holding it between her breasts. Her fingers fluttered up the charred bark, reaching toward the top. She began to hum to herself.

"Don't, Thilane! Please!" Delrael tried to run to her, but the Healers reached out and grabbed him. "She'll die
¯
she'll burn like the trees!" he shouted at them.

"That is her choice," one of the Healers said.

"That is her
right
," said the other.

"It is her duty." The first Healer turned to watch Thilane. "Only she has the power to do this. For Ledaygen."

Delrael gritted his teeth in despair. He wanted to call out Thilane's name again, but he just watched her instead.

She swayed against the tree trunk, smearing soot over her skin. She hummed louder, invoking a rite that only she seemed to know. Her lips sang a song in the language of the wind, the language a dying tree might understand.

Sparks flew from her hair as it drifted upward, alive with static like a wreath of gray flames.

Thilane Healer stretched her arms still farther upward, reaching for the lost
dayid
, and then she let out a low keening. Her body burst into an incinerating white flame, burning from the inside out. She writhed as a living torch for a long, hideous moment until she crumbled to the ground. A dust of fine ash scattered with the wind of her departure.

Delrael fell to his knees, sickened and sobbing. The
kennok
limb bent easily. He wormed out of the stunned grip of the other two Healers and crawled to where Thilane's ashes lay. He took the ash in each fist and let it run back out like sand to the forest floor.

He sat stunned, then looked up. The nearly dead sapling, the new Father Oak, now stood fresh and green and explosively alive.

The war party tracked the Cyclops down the gorge, harrying him, firing volleys of arrows. The khelebar remained unfamiliar with their weapons and missed most of the time. At least Noldir Woodcarver had provided them with more arrows than they could possibly use. Vailret rode along, trying to see details in the shadows with his weak eyes.

Tayron Next-Leader went ahead, oblivious to the other khelebar in the party.

Vailret didn't know how they could kill the monster. The Cyclops had disappeared among the rocky bluffs again. The khelebar could keep pursuing him, and the monster could keep throwing rocks
¯
the chase would go on forever. But he did know that the Outsiders would have set it up properly: