The Forgotten (The Lost Words: Volume 3) (64 page)

Suddenly, his hands slammed into sand. He felt a curtain of grains snake over his skin, a strange, unexpected, welcome sensation. Gently, he lowered his feet, and they sunk in the soft sediment. Still, he could not see anything, not around, not above. So, he let his magical instinct guide him.

Like some slow-moving drunkard, he weaved left and right, making small crablike steps, shuffling over the lake’s bottom. Then, his foot tripped against something slim and hard. He bent down further, without haste, making sure he did not disturb too much water around him. That would only make him wobble and maybe scatter whatever he had found. Time was of no essence, but his former human instincts wouldn’t let him waste any.

His hand closed around a calcified length of wood, overgrown with some lake growth. It was two fingers thick, slightly bent, about a foot long. Then, his fingers found another—and another. All connected. He yanked the strange object from its resting place and brought it close to his own chest. And then, he understood what he was holding.

A human rib cage.

Soon, his fingers found other bones, a whole skull, the long hipbone and its ball-like joint. He paced around some more, and there, he stepped over the remains of another human.

An hour later, he had mapped perhaps a dozen bodies, all within a hundred paces from one another. They were never quite whole, the pieces scattered by eddies and hungry lake creatures. Some had a thick layer of polyps growing on them; others were more recent, smoother. Victims from the yearly suicide attempt to become the king’s champion, Ewan thought sourly.

But he was not interested in the skeletons. He was looking for something else. So he began to dig with his palms, pushing sand and small rocks and weeds away. It was an agonizingly slow effort, but he could afford it. After so long, doing something useful made him almost joyous.

Later, much later, his fingers brushed against a harder layer of earth. It felt like solid rock. No. He could feel crevasses around individual blocks, could move them. Peeling layer after layer of sharp, jagged stone, he dug deeper. At one point, his gut feeling told him he was looking in the wrong spot, so he left it there and slithered to a new location, starting anew. He had no idea how much time he spent disturbing the lake’s bottom.

Then, his hand closed on a piece of metal. He was certain of it. Temporary blindness heightened his sense of touch, and he knew the chunk in his hand was metal. He burrowed deeper still, levering rocks away. More bits of metal, all fused into grape-like shapes.

There, he found it.

Another skeleton, only this one wasn’t human. Rather, almost human.

The skull felt like any other, but it was too big, and the front teeth were elongated. He wondered how the bones could have been preserved so well after all this time, but then he figured it out. Extreme magical heat. That explained the shards of blasted rock, the slugs of metal.

In the dead center of the explosion, the remains would have remained intact, a reminder to all of the catastrophe that had happened. Only, Ewan doubted any other man had ever touched this skeleton. It had lain buried under heaps of molten earth, waiting for him. The one man who could brave nature’s whims.

So did that make him the champion? Or the king?

He could feel water coursing around him in fat, ropy currents, angry that its natural flow had been disturbed. Ewan had no idea how deeply he had gone underneath the silty bottom, probably three dozen feet at least.

He hated riddles, but he was going to solve this one. Patiently, his hands groped and probed and raked against ancient, compacted mud and knobbly shapes of exploded stone, and his imagination made them beautiful in his head. He found other remnants of the fossilized champion, his hands, his legs. Human in every regard, apart from the size and the ridged spine. In the right, five-fingered hand three times the length of his own, he found something else.

A smooth length, a rod of some kind. He yanked it free from its resting place, a solid groove against the flattened rock beneath. Other things, pieces of metal and armor, were fused into the bedrock, but the thing peeled off like silver from a velvet cushion.

He pulled it through his hand, trying to figure out the details. Some kind of a knob at midlength. There was a clawed appendage on one end. Ewan had no doubt what this was.

The king’s scepter.

He began a slow ascent toward the surface, leaving the dead champion’s burial spot behind. With time, mud and sand and little crabs would pour in and consume everything, hiding the evidence of the ancient magical battle forever.

There was a gray bloom above him. It became a ripple of a clouded sky, and then he broke through the surface into the cold morning air. He wanted to inhale deeply, but there was only a hollow emptiness in his chest. Was it the same day as before? He was not sure.

He swam back to Kamar Doue to find its entire population waiting for him, on their knees, faces touching the cold ground. Only two persons stood, Naman and the blind girl, Raida.

The fat man was looking decidedly sick, his skin pale and oily with sweat despite the winter chill, the skin around his eyes black and wreathed with fatigue. He barely managed to stand, but he weathered his agony, waiting for his king to return. Raida was bobbing her head like some bird, listening to the splash of water from Ewan’s swimming. No one spoke. There was a deadly silence hanging above the city.

Ewan emerged from the gray lake, crunching over the slate-colored cobbles, walking toward his translator and the blind girl who was supposed to be his wife. He gripped the relic he had found in his hand, staring at it.

The scepter was made from glass, smooth, clean, without a single scratch or any dirt on its spotless length. That rod looked hollow, making the thing look brittle, but somehow Ewan knew it would easily break the sharpest sword. At the blunt end, there was about a foot of red ink-like mass pooled inside the staff, shiny and translucent, almost like a precious stone. The other end had three sharp claws touching one another. He
figured the red end was the bottom, so he placed it on the wet ground and stared at his nation, at the cowering crowd, at the fat and sick man, at the fanatic prophet.

It all felt wrong.

The winter was caressing his bare skin, trying to make him care, but the only emotion was the deep, churning feeling in his belly, stronger than ever. It had intensified the moment he stepped out of the lake. North, it beckoned him north.

“How long have I been underwater?” he asked weakly.

Naman looked like a ghost when he replied in a rattly groan, “A whole day.” Then, he took a deep breath and stood a little more erect. “You have retrieved the weapon. You fulfilled the prophecies.” His guide cracked a weak smile.

Prophecies…Ewan wished he could remember something, anything. A whole day underwater. Once he would have marveled at such a feat, fighting his horror and astonishment. The thought no longer excited him, but it didn’t repulse him either.

Naman reached forward with a weak, trembling hand. The other leaned on Raida’s shoulder. “We failed you, King. All these years, we tried to find the champion who would serve you, but no one was strong enough. Now, you have done it yourself. We can go to war now.”

Ewan swallowed.
War?

More secrets, more riddles. “What war?”

Naman coughed wetly. “In the last volume, it is promised.”

Some books are meant to be read from their first page
, Ewan thought morbidly.
Others, perhaps, from the last one
. In a land where people would not name their villages and towns and their enemies, it all made perfect sense.

Ewan forced himself to concentrate, trying to sort this madness out. “In your language, the word for leader and
champion is one and the same, is it not?” He rolled the strange syllables inside his head.
Kala meh
.

Raida said something, too fast to catch.

“She says you must bed her now. It is vital. She must tell you your future,” Naman urged.

Ewan began to feel anger rising, almost like smoke, off his limbs. “Answer me, Naman.”

The fat man nodded weakly. “Yes. It is. But the context is very important.”

Ewan lowered the staff on the ground near him. He could see big white eyes throwing furtive glances at him and the thing he had fished from the bottom of the lake. There was pure fear there. They might have never seen the weapon he held, but they had lived for countless generations learning about it from their distorted books, the truth inflated by centuries of obscure terror. Ewan wondered what it could do. How was it used? There must be magic involved somehow.

The answer was there, in
The Pains of Memory
.

He began dressing. Raida mumbled again, her words a staccato. Naman conferred briefly with her.

“Now that you have the scepter, you must wear your cloak. Please.” The fat man was on the verge of collapsing.

Ewan sighed. He was exhausted from trying to figure out these strange people. “All right.”

Naman translated. Raida clapped her hands. A girl detached herself from the crowd, coming forward, holding a folded garment in her small arms. She looked as if the cloth was the only thing that kept her from certain doom.

Ewan accepted the cloak. It was that albino skin thing. He felt disgusted. Later on, he would burn it, but until he accepted it, they would not stop pestering him. Despite his best judgment, he donned the cloak they had given him, pure white
like the snowed-over world. He lifted the scepter and, for the briefest moment, felt like some king. Then, he quickly dashed the silly notion away.
This is not my world, not my life
.

The answers to why he was here were hidden in the final tome of
The Pains of Memory
. Which meant going back to his prison and reading it. Only he would have to wait until the magic wielder got better.

Staying at the lake’s shore would not improve things and definitely would not help Naman heal faster. So Ewan walked back to his ugly palace, and the Oth Danesh followed him.

CHAPTER 48

I
n this very hall, a year ago, she had been raped, Sonya remembered. The feeling of rough, callused hands pinching her soft, noble flesh, smelly beards chafing her skin, greasy hair rubbing into her eyes and nose, smothering her. She remembered the press of bodies, the pain all over, the impotent fury hollering in her narrow throat, even as they pummeled the breath out of her, knees and elbows jabbing in the hollow of her stomach, her kidneys, her groin. They laughed and leered and tore her clothes off and took her like a common wench. The knowledge that the lowborn nomad peasants got their way with her infuriated her more than the painful act itself.

A year ago, in this very hall, Monarch Leopold had given up his realm and his life to General Pacmad. Foolish man.

Now, she stood here, dressed like a queen, bejeweled like a queen, and she held the fate of Eracia in her hands. Past wrongs did not matter. Oh, they fueled her with a deep sense of satisfaction, the fact she had survived her cruel predicament and come out on top, stronger and more powerful than ever. Most women took rape hard, crying themselves to insensibility. As far as she was concerned, it was another tool she could use to advance her position.

Sonya could not deny a single flutter of trepidation today.

An Eracian delegate was coming to see her.

She did not really fear the message he was carrying from his superiors. What she feared was that he might actually know her and that he might choose to talk
about
her and divulge critical information she had kept hidden from Pacmad all this time. Now that she held him in her grasp, now that he almost trusted her, such an incident might ruin everything for her.

Pacmad’s conquest was not going according to plan.

The chieftain had expected the Eracians to negotiate with him. Instead, they had chosen war. North and south, large armies of her countrymen were fighting the nomad tribes through blizzard and fog. The idea of surrender and compromise was a dead, silly notion.

Sonya was mostly interested in the southern front, where her husband the viceroy was. After much begging, wheedling, and manipulation, Pacmad had relented and told her some rumors about the state of her bisected realm. It seemed the defenders had rallied around Bart and were waging a deadly campaign against the tribesmen. There was a rumor her husband was ordering all captives mutilated, sent back home with arms and legs cut off. Bart, a coward, a man who abhorred violence, committing such vivid atrocities. It was unthinkable. Had he really changed that much? Was that man really her husband?

The divisions had left their barracks in Penes, Yovarc, and other garrisons and were slowly marching toward Somar, tightening their grip. Pacmad had responded by sending raiding parties deep behind enemy lines, but the noose was closing ever so slowly. Now that spring was nearing, the roads would become passable again, and the fighting would quicken its pace.

She wondered what would happen then. Would Pacmad stay in the city and endure a siege? Would he retreat back to his
lands, disillusioned with his conquest? Would he take her with him? Or worse, choose to slaughter everyone in the capital as a last act of bitter defiance?