Gorinthians (14 page)

“
I went for a walk
earlier,” Celdic replied looking uncomfortable.

“
What’s the matter?”
Selindria asked curiously.

Celdic ran his hand through
his hair again. “Every time I walked further than a quarter mile, I
ended up walking into this clearing again.” He grimaced slightly
with the memory. “It doesn’t seem to make a difference which
direction I go, I always end up walking down the path that leads to
the front door.”

Selindria just nodded
calmly. She could see the layers that made up their cocoon even in
the cottage. Distance was relative in this place. For instance, she
knew that from the outside, this cottage looked big enough to house
one person but on the inside, it was large enough to house a
family.

“
Do you know why we were
brought here, Selindria?” Celdic asked her, watching her intently.
She had never noticed how sharp his eyes were before.

“
I am not entirely sure,”
she admitted as she sat down across from them. “If I had to guess,
I would say that he wants to teach you something. Remember, he is
the one that formed the Derinian Order. He may have it in his head
to do something similar now that the planet is healing.” She did
not tell him the other reason, which she had learned as soon as she
saw him next to Terrance. If Terrance wanted him to know, then he
could tell him.

“
Do you
mean how to use
yara
?” Celdic asked eagerly. Selindria’s biggest surprise was to
find out that Celdic could tap into the planet’s limitless reserves
of power. It explained a lot of the phenomena that had occurred
around him as he grew up. It also made her feel like she had been
looking into her own grave.

Nodding slowly, Selindria
said, “As far as I know, there is no one else alive today that can
teach you.” No one that I would trust to teach him anyway, she
thought.

Selindria turned her gaze to
Jalorm. “Tell me how you came to meet Terrance,” she commanded, her
eyes catching the light as she focused on him. You never wanted
that look directed at you.

Jalorm shrugged, “I was just
watching my post when he walked up and told me that he needed to
teach me,” he returned, self-deprecatingly. “As soon as he entered
the border, I knew who it was because of the bond. He told me not
to mention it to anyone, though.”

Selindria tsked in
annoyance. Not knowing about the bond Terrance claimed existed
irked her more than she wanted to admit. It was past time to
prepare for contingencies that might arise should Terrance do
something foolish. One of the few things her father taught her was
never to put your trust or safety in another person’s
hands.

Arising from her chair, she
moved it to where the other two were so she was within touching
distance of them. They watched her somewhat apprehensively and
leaned back in their chairs in spite of themselves.

“
I think that it is time to
prepare the two of you for life outside of Chasel Ri’ Aven,” she
said firmly. “The world you are about to enter is so vastly
different from anything you have experienced that you will trip
yourself up at the first stranger you meet.” She held their gaze,
making sure that she had their full attention before moving
on.

Jalorm cleared his throat,
“How do you know what it is like outside of Chasel Ri’ Aven?” he
asked curiously.

Selindria sat silently in
thought for a moment before answering. After a moment, she sighed
quietly. “I suppose that you will find out soon enough when we get
back to civilization,” she muttered under her breath. Leaning back
into her chair, she watched them closely to see what their reaction
would be.

“
I was not born in Chasel
Ri’ Aven,” she said finally. “I lived the first half-century of my
life on the Moltaran continent.” They did not need to know there
was even more time between the fifty years she spent on Moltara and
her arrival at the Tar Ri’ San.

The two of them were gaping
at her as if she had just told them that she was a Swamp Dragon in
disguise. Not that they even believe a Swamp Dragon exists, she
thought wryly. She had been teaching at the Tar Ri’ San for just
over a hundred years, something that all of the students were aware
of because she had taught their parents and parents’ parents. They
thought her proximity to the Rajan gardens had affected her life
span and accounted for her odd eyes; a belief she had strongly
encouraged.

Celdic finally found his
voice. “That’s impossible!” he protested and Jalorm nodded his
agreement. “No outsiders are allowed to enter Chasel Ri’
Aven.”

“
Yes, that is the standard
practice,” Selindria replied dryly, “but there have been more than
one exception over the last three thousand years.” She indicated
Celdic.

Celdic’s jaw dropped. “Me?
How can you say that? You know both of my parents.” As much as
Celdic protested it, she could see that the thought had occurred to
him at least once since they left Chasel Ri’ Aven; his eyes shined
with doubt.

“
I know
Selnric and Char,” Selindria agreed, “but they are no more your
real parents than I am. The same is true for Cha’le. When I look at
your
yar
, I see a
completely different resonance than that of either of Selnric and
Char.” Selindria remembered when Char had announced that she was
going to have a baby and Selindria had thought that she was coming
down sick. After an unusual nine-month seclusion from everyone but
her husband, she had appeared with Celdic. Lendel’s mother had a
similar experience with her two children. The Elders had told her
firmly to mind her own business when she had voiced her concern
over the incidents.

Jalorm looked at Celdic as
if seeing him for the first time. Selindria could tell he was
examining Celdic’s
yar
by the way he was studying him. Celdic shifted uncomfortably.
Selindria knew he could feel it when other people reached out with
their
yar
, even if
he could not reach out with his own. Jalorm's eyes widened with
recognition as he realized the similarities that Selindria had
noticed earlier. She shot him a warning look, not wanting Celdic to
find out from someone else.

"The point is," she
continued, gazing at Celdic with a meaningful look, "there are
people living in Chasel Ri’ Aven that were not born there. Why the
Elders allow it, I do not know.” Shaking her head slowly, she
muttered, "Then again, who said they ever needed a reason for what
they do."

The other two stared at her
expectantly. I suppose there is nothing for it but to press on, she
thought with an inward sigh. "Let me put the figures out on the
table for you." She held up her hand and began ticking items off on
her fingers. "First, the Elders do have contact with the outside
world that goes beyond our knowledge.” She ticked another finger.
"Second, a man claiming to be Terrance shows up who has a bond to
all of the people who were raised in Chasel Ri’ Aven. Third, we
know that Terrance was the leader of an order that brought about
the cataclysmic events that wounded the planet several thousand
years ago. Fourth," she leaned forward as she raised her last
digit, "he came back to a city he engineered and took one of the
inhabitants.” She leaned back in her chair and let her small
outline sink in.

Selindria looked at each of
them in turn. "We really do not know who this man is or what his
intentions are. Even if they are benevolent, there could be a
catastrophe as bad as the last one before he is done. Do not become
too trusting of this Terrance," she warned in a soft voice. "Use
your own mind to work things out and question everything. You are
both exceptionally brilliant. Remember that you rule your mind, not
the other way around."

Celdic stared reflectively
into the distance as he rubbed his chin with his knuckles. Jalorm
looked troubled and Selindria began to wonder if she should have
said so much this early with Jalorm present. What is done is done,
she thought with an imperceptible shrug of her slender shoulders.
Now all I need is a little time and a little luck.

---

Several hundred miles off
the west coast of the Moltaran continent, a merchant ship cut
through the waves at full sail as the wind pushed them steadily
west. Inside the main cabin, a man sat at a simple table bolted to
the floor. He sat and tapped a small round object that looked like
a river stone against the tabletop. His full lips were pursed in
thought and blue eyes shown with an intelligence that failed to
mask the madness in them. He was clean-shaven with dark black hair
cut short around his neck. He wore red trousers with a white linen
shirt tucked in and enough lace for a lord covered his wrists and
collar. His velvet slippers lay next to the small bed that was also
bolted down, next to his blood red coat. Branded into his forehead
was the scarred depiction of a six-pointed star inside of a
triangle where the points met the inside points of the triangle.
The symbol was branded onto his hand as well.

It had been a very long time
ago that he wore flesh. He felt weak, like a piece of porcelain.
Flesh was such a delicate substance, slave to so many masters. When
he had first taken this body, he vomited everything that the former
inhabitant had eaten as disgusting smells assaulted his nostrils.
The first to reach him were the stenches of human hygiene and
pollen from the budding trees outside. Even after a few months of
wearing flesh, he preferred the dark and dank smell of the cabin to
the salty fish smell that was so strong above deck. Even the carnal
lusts of the body held no interest to him. He had a vision of the
way life was meant to be, the perfect life. From the time that he
discovered the purpose of life, he spent every moment designing a
plan that would bring the world to heel and fulfill that
vision.

He ran into diversions that
he had been unaware of before, however. Though he had no interest
in the pleasures of the flesh, he had discovered that he had an
insatiable appetite for misery. The acts of cruelty did not seem
wrong to him, anymore than painting a picture with dark colors
would seem wrong. The tapestry of existence could not exist without
a fair amount of shading to accentuate the brighter colors. Jerard
considered himself the artist appointed to this task. Selindria
would be the lead soprano in his next piece. He had nearly had her
a century ago before Terrance neatly trapped him in a vacuum that
he had only recently escaped. That Selindria did not know Terrance
came to her rescue, only served to make the trap awaiting them more
certain.

White-hot fury erupted in
his mind as he thought of Terrance. The man was responsible for
every single failure he had experienced thus far. As smoke began to
lift off the floorboards and table, Jerard forced himself to calm
down. Thinking of the plans he had for Terrance made him smile
madly. A hundred years in a small prison had given him a lot of
time to plan his retribution.

Jerard stood up, went
through the narrow cabin door and walked up to the prow. The
sailors flinched and cowered as he passed them on his way to the
front

"Captain, halt this tub of
boards,” he called without turning around. He could feel the soft
spot in the planet’s
yar
just in front of them. Reaching out with
his
yar
, he
studied the piece of land that lay submerged a half-mile beneath
the water. Digging deeper, he found a fault beneath the underwater
mountain. He concentrated his
yar
on the minutest particles within the fault. With a
grunt, he triggered a chain reaction of splitting atoms that caused
the fault to heave and shove the mountain up into the air and out
of the water. A tsunami engulfed their ship and crushed it like a
nut caught in a vice. All that remained of the merchant ship was a
tall figure walking across the water to the new island that had
risen out of the ocean.

Chapter 9

The man called Crevance
stood above the town of Millport. He was in a guard tower that
looked over the low foothills gradually rising up to meet the Ghost
Peak Mountains. No one knew where the name originated but it was
common knowledge that anyone venturing into the mountains would be
found unconscious at the town limits if they tried to enter the
large mountain range.

That was also the reason he
was in a guard tower in a town much too small to justify it. For as
long as anyone remembered, the people of Millport kept watch on the
mountains both night and day. No one had ever seen anyone come out
of the mountains, but there were plenty of rumors of the phantom
hosts that lived there, else why would the tradition of guarding
the mountain have been started? The people of Millport were
satisfied with the way this logic worked and so they always passed
the tradition on to their posterity. It also made for great stories
of the gruesome phantom hosts that would one day invade, stories
that were told to the children around fireplaces in the dark of the
night.

Crevance had been standing
watch since his fifteenth birthday, almost thirty years. In all of
those years, the only thing he had seen on his watch was local game
and people that came from the universities at Shalilayo. The latter
were just foolish enough to try entering the mountain, scoffing at
the local community’s paranoid superstitions. So it was with great
astonishment that Crevance spied four figures in the distance
coming down the mountain. He peered intently at them, trying to
glimpse their features, but they were still just specs in the
distance. He felt his heart beating in his throat as he reached
shakily for the rope attached to a large bell. It had been brought
on a large wagon all the way from Shalilayo. He hesitated, thinking
how foolish he would look ringing the alarm--only used in
celebrations before--if the figures in the distance were just
travelers that had never been up into the mountains. Even as he
watched them intently, one of them flickered and vanished, leaving
only three. Gasping in terror, he jerked the bell-pull with all of
his might.