Beyond the Hell Cliffs (45 page)

One latched onto his face, tearing through the skin at his jawline and he lost control.  Gripping the creature, he ripped it from his face and dropped on top of it.  As the others swarmed him, he vented all of his rage
on the formless thing underneath him, pounding it into mush with his fists.

He grabbed another one off of his arm and pummeled it. 
Then another and another.  He was sparing only one or two hits for each one now.  He got ahold of what felt like a neck and snapped it without hesitation.  There was no more running; he would kill them all before they could finish him off.  Ignoring the pain and the blood loss, he captured them, one-by-one and killed them until there were none left.

It was too dark to assess his wounds, but he knew from the pain and the slickness of his skin that he was in bad shape.  He struggled to his feet, picked a direction and pushed onward.

He lost track of time and could not remember when it had gotten light out again.  The fever and the humidity were slowly cooking him.  Blood and grit stained him from head to toe and he was aware that he had lost his pack at some point.  He had no food to eat, even if his stomach would allow it.  His limbs were not obeying his commands and he kept hitting the stalks of the mushrooms.  He did not even know which direction he travelled.  If only Onyx would come to him once more and tell him which way to go.

It was not Onyx that appeared before him, though, but Zakk.  Dressed in rags that the Saban soldiers had placed her in, she was badly beaten and bruised.  Her hair was missing in patches and her lips were plump and cracked.

“They did this to me, Raegith.  You let them do this to me,” she said.

“No, it wasn’t me,” he replied weakly.

“How many times are you going to let them keep doing this?” she continued.  “Over and over, until it’s all I know… until it’s all I have left… until all I know how to do is ask for more and wait until they oblige me.  This is what they do, Raegith.”

“I’m trying!” he screamed.  “I’m lost!”

“It’s not enough, Raegith.  It will never be enough until you commit to it.  You know what you have to do, yet you hesitate.  You know what they did to me, why are you hesitating?”

“No!  No, I won’t
hesitate, just tell me where to go!”

“You have to kill them.  You cannot let anyone stop you, Raegith; not anyone.  They will try to stop you; try to satisfy you.  Don’t let them take this from you.  You will kill them all and then we can finally rest.”

“I will kill all of them!”

“Look for the firefly.”

“I’m looking.”

Then everything went dark.  Raegith opened his eyes, not understanding when he fell asleep.  He was half submerged in brown water and there were black leeches all along his leg, fat off of his blood. 

It was after he pulled the last one off of him that he realized his fever had broken.  He was still dehydrated and dizzy and hungry and lost, but his fever was fading.  All he could remember from the night before was the vision of Zakk and something about a firefly.  He had not seen a firefly since he passed out of the forests of the Wilderness in Rellizbix. 

He was beginning to think this was the worst decision he had ever made.  Even if he turned back, there was no way he could survive the climb back up the mountain.  He had lost blood, the wounds on his face felt sore and infected; his insides felt as if they had shriveled into husks and he could feel his heart echoing off of his ribcage.  He
lay motionless for a moment, wondering if the heartbeat he just felt would be the last one.

He needed to climb one of the mushrooms and look around for a landmark or something to base his direction off of, but just the thought of it was exhausting. 

What would I find up there, anyway?  There is no sense of it.  There is no Path, there is no secret to power… there probably aren’t any Junrei’sha.  That symbol on the rock now seems so distant and faded; it could have been just a pattern in the stone.  How could Noriko have gotten through the cave and past the Urufen without them noticing?  I may not even be in the right place!  I’m going to fucking die here and everyone who even cares will have to eventually give up on my ever coming back.  How long will they all last, I wonder?

“The firefly.”

Raegith looked up into the violet eyes of Kalystra.  For a moment he forgot where he was and was elated to find himself back in the Spire with the Empress.  He reached out to grasp the silken sheets of her bed, but his fingers dug into moist dirt and roots.  He was still in the forest and his hallucinations were still just as strong.

“Just stay here with me, Kalystra.  I don’t want to die alone and I can’t go any further.  I’m just getting more and more lost.”

“Okay, Raegith,” she said, sitting down beside him and running her ethereal hand through his hair.

“Really?
  You’ll stay with me?” he asked.

“Of course I will.  You don’t need to keep pushing.  You can just let it all go right now and I will stay with you until the lights go out.”

“You’re much nicer than the other visions,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

“They all want something for themselves.  All I want is you.  All I ever wanted was you, Raegith, even when I sent you away to the Pit.  I would have abandoned my throne, left my people and lived the life of a farmer with you along the coast if you had asked me.”

“Why did I not ask you, then?” he asked, smiling at the thought of spending his life in her arms by a sea he had only read about.

“I did not let you,” she answered, her voice growing cold.  “Instead
, I sent you away from me, so that you may live.  I died knowing that you were safe, though, and now I sit on a beach very far from here.”

“What?”  Raegith’s eyes snapped open and he looked up into hers.

“It’s a nice enough place, Raegith, don’t worry about that.  Your friends are there, too.  The big one with the black hair and red hairband is pretty loud and obnoxious and the little guy that was with you on the night we met has so many stories, mostly of you.  He doesn’t hate me either, Raegith.”

“Where is this place?  How can I get there?” Raegith asked.

“It’s easy, my dear.  You just have to wait here with me for a few more hours, is all.  The difficult part is making that decision; everything afterward is painless.  I will make it so.”

“You’re talking about death,” Raegith said.

“Yes, Raegith, that’s what I’m getting at.  You can choose to take the easy path and come with me, forever; or you can get up and leave and the pain will come back instantly.”

“Then why would I want to do that?”

“Because the motherfuckers who put me on a pole to the applause of an army are still out there and you haven’t done a damned thing about it.”

Raegith’s jaw quivered and two tears spilled from the corners of his eyes despite the wretched dryness in his body.  “I’m not going to see you for a long time, Kalystra, so let me have just a few more moments, please.”

There was no reply and when Raegith opened his eyes there was nothing but a growing darkness.  He had been there for longer than he thought and night was upon him.  She had already left him and just as she said, his pain was back in the next moment.

“I’m not done, yet,” he said, but it was too soft for him.  “I’m not done, yet!”

He screamed at the night around him and rolled over.  His legs ached and it took him a few minutes, but he got to his feet and stumbled forward.

“Not yet, you hear me?  Do you hear me, Helfrick?  Not yet!”

There was a flash in the distance; a speck of light that was there for a whisper of time and then was gone.  Raegith stopped and tried to clear his vision.  It was there again, only in a different spot; another dot of light that left a tiny afterimage in his dim vision.

Raegith pushed harder, reaching forward and falling down.  It was a firefly and there was only one of them.  He knew how easily they could just disappear as soon as you stopped keeping track of them and he would not lose this one.  Every few seconds, only four or five times a minute, the green dot would blink in and out.  It was always too far ahead of him for Raegith to reach, but it was all he could focus on.

His knees buckled underneath him and sent him into the dirt again and again.  Everything in his body protested, threatened to give out completely if he took another step forward; everything but his mind.  Fury built inside of him and he soaked it all up.  He pulled emotion from every source, burning memories like logs for fuel.  He screamed aloud at his failing muscles, threatening to cut them out of his body if they did not move.  He cursed every enemy he had, letting his mind slip into madness to keep his momentum up.  He moved through the dark forest like a raving lunatic.

“Will you shut the fuck up!” a voice called out to him.  “You call in every predator this place has to offer, crazy fool!”

“No more visions, alright?  I found the fucking firefly already,” Raegith cursed aloud.

“I’m no vision and that’s not a firefly,” the voice said.  “I’m not sure what a firefly is, but you’ve been following an
imp that I use to keep watch over my hut and I’m kind of tired of listening to you scream so I had him lead you back here to me.  Can I ask you what you’re doing here in my forest?”

“You’re going to have to wait until I wake up,” Raegith said before collapsing.

Chapter 42

When he awoke, he was inside of a stone-walled room on top of a pallet of animal skins.  There was a fire going in a fireplace along one of the walls and beside his bed was a wash basin and a tray of surgical instruments that he had not seen anywhere else in the Greimere.  All along the floor were blood-soaked bandages and a few strange, worm-like creatures floating in jars of liquid.

He sat up and looked about, curiously.

“Now that you’re awake, what are you doing here?” the voice asked from a shadow in the corner.

Raegith tried to see who was speaking, but the light was too dim and he could not make out anything but a black form in a chair.  The voice did not sound clearly male or female and there was nothing inside the room that gave him any clue who he was dealing with.  That he had been treated and healed instead of finished off was only slightly comforting.

“I am Raegith the Grass-haired, from the Citadel…” he began to say.

“I don’t care about that.  What are you doing here?”

“Can I see who it is I’m speaking to?”

“No and this is the last time I’m asking before I unravel all of the work I just did on you.”

The figure moved and Raegith felt a tugging in his side.  He looked down and saw a black thread zigging and zagging up his side and over his ribs like giant sutures.  He was instantly terrified.  “What the hell did you do to me?”

“It’s conditional healing.  Every piece of you I mended was linked to an individual
stitch and depends upon this thread in order to become permanent.  I pull this thread, your stitches unravel and you get hit with all of those injuries and infections all at once.  It will be a very painful death, I assure you.”

“Okay, don’t do that then,” Raegith said.  “I’m on a journey to find someone here in these lands.”

“You’re looking for me?  You’ve come to put an end to me, like the others?” 

A tug on the thread made Raegith jump.
  “No!  I don’t think so, anyway.  I don’t even know who you are!”

“Tell me who you’re looking for and I’ll tell you if it’s me or not.”

“It’s not you!  Unless… Noriko?  You’re not Noriko, are you?”

“No, that’s not me.  Thank you;
that is all I needed to know.”

The person yanked hard on the thread and all of the
stitches popped and unraveled out of his skin with an unzipping motion.  Raegith seized up and stifled a scream as he braced for the onslaught of pain and misery, followed by death.  He stayed that way for a few seconds, not even breathing.

“Nothing’s happening,” he squeaked.

“Of course nothing is happening,” the person said, lifting up out of the chair.  “Conditional healing?  I’m kind of amazed you would fall for something so stupid.”

“Everything else in this place has tried to kill me, so forgive me but I wasn’t expecting to find a prankster among the thorns,” Raegith said, noticing that he was completely naked under the covers of the bed.  He als
o noticed that it was measurably colder inside the room than it should have been if they were still in the same swamp.  “I wasn’t expecting to find anyone at all out here.”

“If you weren’t expecting to find anyone out here, then why in the hell are you lo
oking for this Noriko person here?  How did you survive this long if you’re that stupid?”

“That’s not what I meant.  I am looking for someone here, but I wasn’t expecting to find someone who wasn’t that someone.”

“You think the Junrei’sha are the only ones that make the lands beyond the southern border their home?  Is that what all your kind think these days?”

“My kind…?  Wait, I never told you that I was looking for the Junrei’sha.”

“You didn’t have to,” the person said.  “Who else would you be looking for this far south?  No one comes here unless they are looking for salvation, but the Junies don’t care about anyone but themselves.  Why else would they sit atop their mountain and watch their would-be disciples perish and be consumed by this forest and do nothing for them?  Here I am, helping whomever I find for very little in return, and yet I am sought by no one and called a witch by all.”

“The Junrei’sha
are on a mountain?” Raegith asked, thinking of the story Thorin told him.  “He was right there and he didn’t even know it.”

“They are and I can’t imagine they have not heard you down here, screaming to the night.  They won’t be journeying down here to get you, though.  No, you have to go to them.”

“If they are close, could you please point out the way for me?  I would be most grateful.”

“I’m sure you would, and I am pleased just to have a visitor of your… liveliness.  If the correct direction is all you ask, then I will give it to you in the morning, after you’ve rested.”

Raegith was about to thank the robed figure, but the wording of that last sentence troubled him.  “You say if a direction is all I ask, then all I have to do is rest here for the night?”

“Of course,” the figure said.

“What if I asked for more than just a direction?  Can you take me to the Junrei’sha?”

“I can take you to their front gate as easily as breathing
.  It will still require you to stay the night here, only you won’t be getting any rest.”

“I see,” Raegith said, remembering his lack of clothes.  “Okay, before I agree to this, I need you to pull back that robe…”

“This isn’t a negotiation.  You’re either willing to pay any price to reach the Junies tomorrow or you’re just willing to take another chance in the forest with nothing more than a pointed finger.”

“I’m not the guy to turn away a girl based off of her looks, but the thing is… if you’re not a g
irl, this decision is going to need some thought…” Raegith said.

“I am a female… that’s all you’re getting.”

“Okay, I can handle that, then.  You have a deal.”

“I could be really, really old,” the robed figure said.  “Are you sure you don’t want to think about it?  The chances that I’m going to be some hideous new race you’ve never seen before is pretty high.”

“I don’t care,” Raegith said, yanking the blanket off of him and spinning up on his knees before her.  “What’cha got, six arms?  Three breasts?  Fifty eyes?  Whip that thing off and get over here; I’m ready!”

“Okay, brace yourself!”

The robe flew off and Raegith immediately wondered if he had made a huge mistake.  The figure before him was a Lokai, but unlike any that he had ever seen in the Citadel or anywhere else in the Greimere.  Her skin was bone white and heavily scarred in neat, criss-crossed patterns all over.  She had the soft, curvaceous build of a noble Rathgar, but the sharp facial features and elongated ears of the Lokai.  Her head was completely bald and her lips were black, as were her eyelids and when she looked at him he saw that her eyes were solid red, like clear orbs filled with blood.  All over her body were silver rings and rods pierced through her skin.  Silky, black ribbon was woven between the piercings along her legs and arms, up the front of her stomach and neck, like the cords of a corset and tied in bows at the top. 

Aside from the rob
e and ribbon, she was completely nude and Raegith wondered if she could even wear normal clothes with such bold accessories stitched into her flesh.

“So, would-be Junie… do you regret your decision now?” she asked with a devious grin, revealing gleaming, flat teeth.

“I’m thinking… how do I put this?  I’m wondering what the hell you are,” Raegith replied.  “Those solid eyes of yours… are you a Stone Seer?”

“I don’t know what that is,” she said, walking closer.  “Some call me a witch; some
call me a ghost… others call me immortal.  My name is Izanami.  I used to be Lokai, as did all of my coven, but they are all gone now and only I remain.  Our religion is an old and unwelcome one among the slaves north of here.

“It’s been a long, long time since I’ve had a victim here who wasn’t screaming by now.  I see I’m going to have to work to get my screams from you.”

“Lady, I’m not the one who’s going to be screaming before the night is through,” Raegith said, reaching up and pulling her down onto the pallet.

A few hours later, they both lay on the distraught pallet, naked and breathing heavily.  Raegith had claw marks over his body and the
witch’s ribbons were untied and loose.

“I should be asking just what you are,” she panted, rolling over and nestling her head in his arm.  “I can honestly say I was not expecting such… vigor.  Most men turn away in fright, but you seemed excited by my image.”

“I’ve been with stranger beings,” Raegith said.  “If I’ve satisfied you, I’d like to have some bit of rest before we walk up the mountain tomorrow and I find Noriko.”

“Twenty years since the last man made it this far into the bogs without dying and he barely lasted an hour before I had broken his mind.  There’s no way I’m letting you go before our time is through.”

Raegith groaned as she threw her leg over him and mounted his waist. 

By the time morning had come, Raegith was completely drained and could not even rise from the bed at dawn. 
Izanami let him sleep for a few hours before waking him and feeding him a gruel that, although horrible in taste, helped rejuvenate him.  Then she fitted him with new clothes, but would not explain how she had boots, pants and a tunic that fit him just lying about in a closet somewhere.  The way she bragged about burning through men, he did not feel like asking.

“Follow me and take my hand each time I extend it to you,” she said.

He stretched his legs and arms and then followed her out the door.

The bog smelled as wretched as it looked and Raegith marveled at how little of it he remembered from his fevered state.  Everything was damp and soggy and the mushrooms blocked out most of the light with their enormous caps high above.  The two of them walked onward, picking their way through the pools of fetid water and moss. 
Izanami seemed at home there, choosing their path with no apparent effort and Raegith let his mind wander as he let his guide do the thinking.  He almost did not see her hand reach back.

“Hurry!” she griped, shaking her hand at him.

Raegith reached out and grabbed her hand and in the next instant they were somewhere else entirely.

“Dragons of hell… what just happened?”
Raegith asked, dropping to his knees from the dizziness that claimed him.

“I jumped us,”
Izanami said.  “I don’t like wasting magic if I don’t have to, but some parts are just easier to jump than walk.  Steady your stomach, Grass-hair, we’ll be doing this a lot once we reach the mountain.  I don’t climb.”

She was right about the jumping and Raegith was grateful for it once they reached the mountain.  It was
high and steep, driving high past the clouds like a sharp tooth biting the sky.  Izanami extended her hand backwards to Raegith and he took it.

They were on the mountain.  She had jumped them up to the first decent ledge and Raegith was experiencing the dizziness again, only not as bad.  She did not stop.  She kept a hold on his hand and jumped them again after only a few seconds break.  Raegith wanted to protest, but he could not get the words out for fear of purging his stomach.

Izanami jumped them four more times before taking an extended break.  She sat back against the rock and laughed as Raegith wobbled and toppled.  He shook his head and realized they were already high enough for the air to get lighter.  His chest was burning already.

He got to his knees and steadied himself.  He needed to meditate and focus on his breathing.

“What are you doing, weirdo?” Izanami asked.

“Getting my breathing under control.”

“Oh, I can give you something for that.  I just forgot because I was so busy listening to you whimper each time we jumped.  Let me get it for you.”

“That’s not necessary.  This is practice I need in order to make it among the Junrei’sha; it makes me stronger to be able to control my own body.”

“That’s a stupid way of looking at things,” Izanami replied.  “If there is a potion or elixir I can take to rid myself of pain or fix something, I take it.  I would be foolish not to.”

“And what happens when you are dependent on those potions?  What do you do when they are no longer available?”

“Then I make more, of course.  The Junrei’sha will make you do things the hard way, you know?  There isn’t anything you need that I can’t give you, Grass-hair, and I will ask a much less demanding price.”

Raegith looked back over at
Izanami.  Something had been nagging at him for a while now and with the way she spoke, he was completely uneasy.  “Doing the hard work, pushing oneself… it makes you stronger.”

“It makes you dumber,”
Izanami replied.  “You want strength?  I have it in a bottle.  You want speed?  I have it too.  You want to lose all the pain in your body?  I have that in abundance and it’s all so easy; just as easy as jumping up this mountain.”

“I would prefer to have my strength independent of a potion,
not to fail me the first time I run out,” Raegith said.  “I’ll pay the hard price for my power and I’ll be leaving you now.”