Legacy of the Darksword (3 page)

I am used to receiving mixed
compliments for my work, and therefore I made no reply. It is never dignified
to defend one’s creative endeavors. And I made allowances for the fact that
Mosiah had been one of the central participants.

“As for my leaving the relocation
camp,” Saryon said, continuing the earlier conversation, “I did what I thought
was best for everyone.”

His hand holding the teacup began
to shake. I rose, went to him, and removed the cup, placing it on the
nightstand.

“This house is quite nice,” said
Mosiah, glancing around, somewhat coldly. “Your work in the field of mathematics
and Reuven’s work in literature have made you a comfortable living. Our people
in the relocation camps don’t live as well as this—”

“They could if they wanted to,”
Saryon said, with a flash of the old spirit.

Knowing him as I do, and knowing
his history, I guessed that this must be the same driving spirit which led him
to seek out the forbidden books in the Font library. The same spirit that
helped Joram
forge
the Darksword. The same spirit that
faced the Turning with such courage and kept his soul alive, though his flesh
had been changed to rock.

“No barbed wire surrounds those
camps,” Saryon said, speaking with increasing passion. “The guards at the gates
were placed there when we first came to keep out the curious, not to prevent
our people from leaving. Those guards should have been gone long ago, but our
people begged for them to stay. Every person in the camp could have entered
into this new world and found his or her place.

“But do they? No! They cling to
some hopeless dream of returning to Thimhallan, of going back there to
find—what? A land that is dead and blasted. Thimhallan has not changed since we
left. It will not change, no matter how much we wish for it. The magic is gone!”
Saryon’s voice was soft and aching and thrilling. “It is gone and we should
accept that and go on.”

“The people of Earth do not like
us,” said Mosiah.

“They like me!” Saryon said
crisply. “Of course, they don’t like you. You refuse to mingle with the ‘mundane,’
as you call them, although many of them have as much magic in their bodies as
you do in yours. Still, you shun them and isolate yourselves from them and it
is no wonder they look upon you with distrust and suspicion. It was this same
pride and arrogance which brought about the collapse of our world and put us
into those relocation camps, and it is our pride and arrogance which keep us
there!”

Mosiah would have spoken, I
think, but he could not do so without raising his voice to interrupt my master,
who, now conversing on his pet topic, was on his soapbox—a quaint term used by
the natives of this world.

Indeed, Mosiah appeared moved by
this speech. He did not reply, at first, but remained seated in thought a short
space of time.

“What you say is true, Father,”
he said. “Or, rather, it was true at the beginning. We should have left the
camp, gone forth into the world. But it was not pride which kept us behind
those barricades. It was fear. Such a strange and terrifying world! Oh,
admittedly, the Earthers brought in their sociologists and their psychologists,
their counselors and teachers to try to help us ‘fit in.’
But
I am afraid that they did more harm than good. The more they showed us of the
wonders of this world, the more our people shrank away from them.

“Pride, yes, we had our share,”
he continued. “And not misplaced. Our world
was
beautiful. There
was
good
in it.” Mosiah leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, gazing
earnestly at Saryon. “The Earthers could not believe in it, Father. Even the
soldiers who had been there had difficulty believing what they had seen with
their own eyes! On their return, they were ridiculed, and so they began to
doubt their own senses, saying that we drugged them, made them see things that
weren’t there.”

Mosiah shrugged. “The ‘ologists’
were kind and they tried to understand, but it was beyond their capacity to do
so. Such an alien existence to them! When they looked at a young woman of
twenty, to all appearances healthy and normal—by their standards—who did
nothing all day but lie in bed, they could not understand what was wrong with
her.
When they were told that she was lying in bed because
she was accustomed to floating through the air on wings of magic, that she had
never walked a step in her life and had no idea how to walk, nor any
inclination to do so, now that her magic was gone, they could not believe it.

“Oh, yes, I know that they
appeared to accept it on the surface. All their medical tests confirmed the
fact that the girl had never walked. But deep inside, in the inner core of
their being, they did not believe. It is like asking them to believe in the
faeries of which you wrote in your book, Reuven.

“Do you talk to your neighbors of
your visit to the faeries, Father? Have you told the woman who lives next door,
who is a secretary for a real-estate broker, that you were nearly seduced by
the faerie queen?”

Saryon’s face was exceedingly
red. He stared down at the sheets, absently brushed away a few biscuit crumbs.
“Of course not.
It wouldn’t be fair of me to expect her to
understand. Her world is so ... dissimilar. . . .”

“
Your books.”
Mosiah’s penetrating gaze shifted to me. “People read them and enjoy them. But
they don’t believe the stories, do they? They don’t believe that such a world
ever existed or that such a person as Joram ever lived. I have even heard it
suggested that you pretend to have this affliction of yours to avoid
interviews, because you are afraid that you would be revealed as a fraud and a
fake.”

Saryon glanced anxiously at me,
for he was not aware that I had heard these accusations. He had gone to great
lengths to spare me. I therefore took care to indicate that they caused me no
concern, which, in truth, they did not, for so long as my work pleased one man,
and that my master, I cared nothing for what others thought.

“And herein was created a strange
dichotomy,” said Mosiah. “They do not believe us, they do not understand us,
and yet they are afraid of us. They are afraid that we will regain powers they
do not believe we possessed in the first place. They try to prove to themselves
and to us that such power never existed. What they fear, they destroy. Or try
to.”

An uncomfortable silence fell
between us. Saryon blinked and attempted to stifle a yawn.

“It is your normal time to
retire,” Mosiah said, suddenly coming back to the present. “Do so. Keep to your
routine.”

It was my custom to bid my master
good night and go to my room, to spend some time writing before I, too, went to
bed. I did so, going upstairs and turning on the light. Then I crept back down
the stairs in the darkness. Mosiah did not look particularly pleased to see me,
but I think he knew that nothing short of my death would keep me from my master’s
side.

Saryon’s room was now dark. We
sat in the darkness, which was not, after all, very dark, due a street lamp
right outside the window. Mosiah drew his chair closer to Saryon’s bed. The CD
player remained on, for it was Saryon’s habit to fall asleep to music. It was
much past his usual hour for retiring, but he stubbornly refused to admit he
was tired.
Curiosity kept him awake and fighting his body’s
need for rest.
I know because I felt the same.

“Forgive me, Father,” said Mosiah
at last. “I did not mean to be drawn down that old road, which, in truth, has
long been overgrown with weeds and now leads nowhere. Twenty years have passed.
That young girl of twenty is now a matron of forty. She learned to walk,
learned to do for herself what had previously been done for her by magic. She
learned to live in this world. Perhaps she has even come to believe something
of what the mundanes tell her. Thimhallan is nothing but a charming memory to
her, a world more real in her dreams than in her waking life. And if, at first,
she chose to cling to the hope that she would return to that enchanted world of
such miraculous beauty, who can blame her?”

“A world of beauty, yes,” said
Saryon, “but there was ugliness there, too. Ugliness made more hideous by being
denied.”

“The ugliness was in the hearts
of men and women, was it not, Father?” Mosiah asked. “Not in the world itself.”

“True, very true,” Saryon said,
and he sighed.

“And the ugliness lives still,”
Mosiah continued, and there came a change in his tone, a tension, which caused
both my master and me to glance at each other and brace ourselves, for we each
felt that a blow was coming.

“You have not been back to the
camps for many years,” Mosiah said abruptly.

Saryon shook his head.

“You have not been in contact
with Prince Garald or anyone else? You truly know nothing of what has been
going on with our people?”

Saryon looked ashamed, but he was
forced to shake his head. At that moment I would have given all I own to be
able to talk, for it seemed to me that there was accusation in Mosiah’s tone,
and I would have spoken most vehemently in my master’s defense.
As it was, Saryon heard me stir in restless anger.
He set
his hand on mine and patted it gently, counseling patience.

Mosiah was silent, wondering,
perhaps, how to begin. At length he said, “You maintain that our people could
leave the camps of their own free will, as you did. In the beginning, that
might have been true. It is not true now.

“The guards of the mundane left
us years ago. To give them credit, they fought to protect us, as they were
ordered, but they were not equal to the task. After several had died and more
had deserted, the army pulled out. The guards of the mundane were replaced—by
our own.”

“Fought against whom? Who
attacked you? I’ve heard nothing of this!” Saryon protested. “Forgive me for
doubting you, Mosiah, but surely, if such dreadful things were happening,
journalists from all over the world would have descended on the camp.”

“They did, Father. The Khandic
Sages spoke to them. The journalists believed the lie—they could not help
themselves, for the Khandic Sages coat all their bitter lies with the sweet
honey of their magic.”

“Khandic Sages! Who are they?”
Saryon was bewildered, shocked beyond coherent speech. “And Prince Garald . . .
How could he ... He would have never allowed ...”

“Prince Garald is a prisoner,
held hostage by his love for his people.”

“A prisoner!”
Saryon gaped.
“Of
... of the mundanes?”

“No, not of the mundanes.
And not of us Enforcers, either,”
Mosiah added, with another slight smile, “
for
I see
that question in your mind.”

“Then of whom?
Or
what?”
Saryon asked.

“They call themselves
T’kon-Duuk.
In the language of the mundanes—Technomancers.
They give Life to that which is
Dead
. Most horribly”—Mosiah’s
voice lowered—”they draw Life
from
that which is dead. The power of
their magic does not come from living things, as was true in Thimhallan, but
from the death of the living. Do you remember the man who called himself Menju
the Sorcerer?
The man who sought to murder Joram?”

Saryon shuddered. “Yes,” he said
in a low voice.

“He was one of them. I know them
well,” Mosiah added. “I used to be one of them myself.”

Saryon stared aghast, unable to
speak. It was left to me—the mute—to communicate. I made a gesture, pointing
from Mosiah to Saryon and myself, asking in dumb show why Mosiah had come to us
with this information now, at this time, and what this all had to do with us.
And either he understood my gesture or he read the question in my mind.

“I have come,” he said, “because
they
are coming. Their leader, a Khandic Sage known as Kevon Smythe, is coming
tomorrow to talk to you, Father. The
Duuk-tsarith
chose me to warn you,
knowing that I am the only one of that order you would trust.”

“The
Duuk-tsarith,”
Saryon
murmured, perplexed. “I am to trust the
Duuk-tsarith
and so they send
Mosiah, who is now one of them and who used to be a Technomancer.
Technomancy.
Life from death.”

Then Saryon looked up. “Why me?”
he asked. But he knew the answer, as well as I did.

“Joram,” Mosiah replied. “They
want Joram. Or
perhaps I should say, they want the Darksword
.”

Saryon’s mouth twitched. I
realized then the subtlety of my
master,
one might
almost say cunning, if a man as gentle and honest could be accused of such a
thing. Though he had not known the news Mosiah had imparted, Saryon had known
from the outset that this was why Mosiah had come, and yet my master had not
mentioned it. He had been stalling, gaining information. I regarded him in
admiration.

“I am sorry, Mosiah,” said
Saryon, “but you and King Garald and this Kevon Smythe and apparently a great
many other people have wasted your time. I cannot take you to Joram and Joram
cannot give you the Darksword. The circumstances are all detailed in Reuven’s
book.”