Glamour of the God-Touched (7 page)

“After he’s eaten, maybe we can convince
this lad to tell us his tale,” the stocky man said.

Heads nodded.

“You got a name, boy?” the man asked.

“Garrick.”

“Clem,” the man replied.

“Pleased to meet you.”

Garrick ripped meat from the bone as rapidly
as he could chew, and the flurry of activity surrounding his
arrival subsided. A lanky farmer told a story.

The young girl who had been afraid of him
earlier still stared at him, though. Her attention was a steady,
prattling rain against his mind. Her eyes were big and watery. They
made him uncomfortable. He felt himself reaching toward her,
gently, slowly, reaching like a warm wave toward those watery
eyes.

You have given
…

“No!” he screamed.

He looked up to face silent stares. An
awkward stillness hung in the air.

“He’s scary,” the little girl said
again.

“What’s wrong with you?” Clem said, putting
himself between Garrick and his wife.

“Nothing,” Garrick replied.

But the word was forced, and he knew it was
not the truth. He felt like he was dangling from a cliff that grew
out of a dark morass, his grip slipping away with every moment.

Clem’s eyes slitted and his jaw set.

“Look at him,” a voice came from within the
crowd, and Garrick sensed the heady flavor of fear. “He’s a
demon!”

“No,” he whispered, his voice deep in his
throat.

The hair tingled on his arms, and sweat came
to his forehead.

“You’d best be leaving, son,” Clem said.

“He’ll just come back, Clem,” Another
villager said.

“Kill him,” another voice cried.

His hunger surged at the aggression, burning
inside, the heat of each villager etching pain into his senses.

Men brandished tools like weapons. Melli
gripped her knife and stood beside her husband. A pick axe appeared
further back.

“Don’t do this,” he said.

Fight as you will, Garrick. It will only be
worse in the end.

The villagers of Sjesko edged forward.

“I’m dead serious, boy,” Clem said. “You'd
best be moving along.”

Something clicked inside him.

Garrick felt release greater than anything
he had ever known. He felt power. Desire. Love. Pain. It was as if
the world had turned itself inside out, and he could feel every
bone in its skeleton. He reached through the noise of his hunger
and the panic of the villagers to pull on his link to the plane of
magic. Sorcery flowed through gates. Magestuff mixed with his
hunger to form ecstasy so thick he thought he might suffocate. He
spoke words of wizardry and twisted his fingers, pulling weapons
from the villagers’ hands and twirling them into a maelstrom that
rose around him.

Screams rang out.

An iron rake bit into Garrick’s leg. He
ignored the pain and merely heaved the instrument back into the
flow. Magic burned from his outstretched arms and he waded in the
familiar scent of warm honey that laced his Torean sorcery. Green
fire crackled between his fingers. The essence of this new magic
bordered on spiritual—the expenditure of energy was a glorious
release of pain.

He threw magic left and right, painting with
it as if creating art, conducting his wizardry like it was a
symphony. An ax sliced through a man nearby. A knife embedded
itself in a woman’s thigh. Sorcerous wind howled, and the smell of
blood colored the night crimson. Fire and wood flew through the
air, burning thatch and crushing skulls. The villagers screamed,
and the stench of human flesh rose.

As villagers died, Garrick breathed them
in.

It was like inhaling fire.

What am I doing
, he thought as he
drank life force,
what am I doing?

But he could not stop.

Time became suspended. Magic flowed, and
there was only movement and energy and the sweet, rapturous scrub
of magic.

When the flow finally subsided, not a hut
remained standing.

Mutilated bodies littered the area. Clem lay
on the ground, his chest split open. And the others–the others were
no better off.

Garrick fell to his knees and held his head
in his hands as he tried to understand what had just happened. His
head pounded. His skin felt as if it had been scoured by fine sand.
His blood ran hard through his veins, and every muscle in his body
felt strained and torn.

“I’m sorry,” he cried. “It’s not my fault.
I’m sorry.”

But he was wrong.

It was his fault. He had done this. He had
created this death and mayhem. It was
exactly
his fault.

The ghoulish presence of power surged inside
him, then, a thing so large and so electric that he felt he might
split apart. The skin on his arms crawled. His throat ached from
the coarse smoke that hung like gauze in the air.

Garrick cast a bloated gaze over the
destruction around him.

He could not hide from this, and he could
not merely apologize his way to a new life. Nothing he did for the
rest of his time would ever change the fact that he was now a
monster.

“Enough!” Garrick screamed into the nighttime
sky, his voice harsh and ragged. He had nothing left to lose.

There was no response, though.

He picked up a short, but sturdy sword he
found lying in the dirt. Its edge reflected orange fire as he held
it before him. Falling to his knees, he reversed the blade and
placed its sharpened point below his sternum.

Everything had happen so quickly.

Garrick thought of his mother, and of
Alistair. He thought of Alistair’s apprentices. He thought of
Arianna, beautiful Arianna. Had he actually loved her? Perhaps. But
he had not really known her. She
was
beautiful, though. And
she
had
liked him. If nothing else he
could
have
grown to love her.

Not that it mattered.

Arianna was nothing but a bitter dream now.
A life he could never have. But he could have loved her. He knew he
could have, and as he felt the edge of the blade firmly against his
breastbone, that seemed to matter.

He increased pressure on the blade.

He closed his eyes, and he sensed…

…the smell of honey…

…seeping into the clearing.

Garrick opened his eyes to see a cloud of
smoke the color of deepest ocean roiling upon itself. It flowed
together from the woods, coalescing in the clearing to become a
slender man wearing a tunic and a pair of loose black breeches. The
man rested one thinly gloved hand on the pommel of the ornamental
rapier at his side. Half his face was obscured in shadow, but one
green eye was exposed to the flickering light of Sjesko’s fire, and
that one eye was piercing.

He lowered the blade from his chest.

“What’s wrong, Garrick? Are you finding the
act of deciding who lives and dies to be less comforting than you
thought it might be?”

“How do you know my name?”

The visitor smirked. “Perhaps you’ll think
more clearly if you get off your knees.”

Garrick used the weapon to stand, feeling
the villagers’ energy flow in his veins as he did so. Their flavor
was growing stronger as time passed.

“Who are you?” he said.

“You know who I am.”

“You are clearly no mage of the orders.”

The visitor brought a hand to his heart with
feigned indignation. “The mere idea stings.”

“But if you were a Torean I would have seen
you before.”

The man raised an eyebrow. His gaze was
ancient, his bearing firm. “You think so?”

Suddenly Garrick
did
know who this
was—or at least
what
this was

And once he accepted this as fact, he
realized he should have known what was behind this wild hunger all
along. He had never needed to think at such levels before, though,
and Alistair had mentioned such beings only in passing. To have
missed it, in truth, said nothing about him at all.

“You’re a planewalker,” he finally said.

The man bowed with mock formality.

“Braxidane at your service. Though we prefer
the term
god
.”

“I’m sure you do.”

A planewalker, Garrick thought. A life force
who lived in the space between the thousand worlds. To mages, these
beings were merely creatures of higher power, but to others—those
with no understanding of magic—they were often worshiped as the
gods Braxidane professed to be.

“You need to fix this,” he said.

“Would you have me create a whole village of
the same walking dead you made of Alistair?”

Garrick had no reply.

“Consider this your first lesson, Garrick. I
cannot
fix
what you have done here. Arianna survived because
she was still alive as you tended her. You breathed life into
Alistair’s dead husk and now he has nothing beyond that magic to
keep him alive, so he will be eternally drawn to add to it. If you
are to save a living creature, some shred of existence must remain
in the body or your energy has nothing to build upon.

I didn’t know.”

Braxidane shrugged.

“You could have stopped me.”

“You chose your own course. The problem is
that you did not think things through before you chose it.”

“You
could
have stopped me.”

“Lessons are best learned by
experience.”

“Stop it.”

“The truth does not change merely because
you find it inconvenient, nor does it care if you agree with it or
not.”

Garrick stared at the planewalker, anger
rising. The voices of villagers echoed inside his mind. “You
tricked me,” he said. “This whole thing. You knew what was going to
happen, and you gave me your magic anyway.”

Braxidane gave a lighthearted smile. “You
asked for my help. How could I not reply?”

“I don’t want it anymore. Take it back.”

“I think not.”

“Why not?” Garrick was embarrassed by the
pleading edge to his voice.

“I did not trick you, Garrick. You wanted
this responsibility. You agreed to take it. I’ve paid dearly to
give it to you, and I have no intention of giving you up.”

Garrick raised his sword. “I will destroy
myself before I let you control me.”

Braxidane gazed over the bodies littering
the ground.

“I don’t think you’ll do that—not today,
anyway. Probably never.”

“You’ll lose that bet.”

“No, Garrick. I don’t think I will. You are
free to make your own choices, but there will, of course, always be
consequences. That’s all there is to life, really, actions and
consequences. And you are a good man at heart. If you listen to the
voices ringing inside your head for a moment I think you’ll come to
understand that if you destroy yourself now, all of these deaths
you have created will be for naught.”

Garrick glared at the planewalker.

“Don’t tell me you can’t hear them?”

Garrick grimaced. He
could
hear them.
He could feel them.

The voices were growing more solid inside
his mind every moment—the life forces of men and women with desires
and dreams still eager to be released rolled through his core, with
lessons waiting to be passed on. These lessons filled his
senses—simple learnings of practical lives and the wisdom of common
sense. He felt their power, tasted their humility. Their history
welled up inside him—every person, every name singing him their
stories in stanzas and melodies that wove themselves into a
harmonic tapestry of sounds.

He had destroyed their bodies, but he had
not yet destroyed who they were. If Garrick killed himself they
would be gone forever, but if he lived Garrick could return their
life forces to this world once again.

Braxidane was right about something else,
too.

The more he let the voices in, the better he
felt. The purity of Sjesko's life force rose inside him, and as
time passed his angst slipped away. If he focused on the villagers
Garrick felt…almost happy.

“This is horrific,” he said.

Braxidane gave a sad smile.

“It's not fair,” Garrick said.

“Garrick, Garrick,” the planewalker
chuckled. “Sweet, sweet Garrick. Certainly you can see that things
like fairness and justice are merely human constructs. Life is not
like that, after all. Life is simple. Individuals act, and
consequences occur. See? There is no room for thing such as
fairness
.

“Garrick swallowed. “Am I going to spend the
rest of my life like this?”

“Actions and consequences, Garrick—that’s
all there is, even for us gods.”

“That is no answer.”

“And, yet, it is the only one I have.”

“You are a fiend.”

Braxidane shrugged again, and a smile played
on his lips. “I’ve been called worse. But don’t expect to be
released from your agreement. The world is changing, Garrick.
Forces greater than you can understand are aligning. Trust me when
I say that if I were to grant you your freedom now, you would find
yourself begging for these powers back sooner than you might
think.”