The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (37 page)

             
A woman was standing over him.  He blinked rapidly, startled, guts squeezing in alarm.  But in the second it took to react to her sudden presence, his fear was already fading into the irrational complacency of the dream world.  There was something familiar about her…She had the narrow, dark face of a Rach or Dra and long, dark hair fanning out from her face in the hot jungle breeze.  In the dim, pulsing magic of firefly light, her eyes glimmered in a way he knew from somewhere, had seen before—his heart leaped suddenly in his chest as recognition dawned, and he almost sprang up to embrace her.  She was beautiful, but it wasn’t her face or body that drew him—this was the woman that had raised him!  The woman he’d thought of as mother for as long as he could remember!  Memories flooded over him, drowning him with a joy he could hardly comprehend.

             
He sat up exultantly, devouring her with his eyes.  With a dream’s disassociated surety, he knew she was a Whiteblade, could almost see the picture of her in the Book of Ivory.  Dim satisfaction crept through his consciousness.  He knew it, had known it all along!  For this one moment, the dark, scattered pieces of his life were all in the same bright puzzle.

             
“Mother,” he murmured.

             
The black eyes smiled warmly.  “Ari,” she said, in a voice he’d heard a thousand times.

             
He stared at her, drank in the sight of her, giddy with delight, his childhood memories so close for once that he could reach out and touch them.

             
“You are under attack,” she said calmly.  His smile faded, heart thudded, eyes blinked rapidly as he looked around in confusion.  Everyone was asleep.  Nothing stirred except the fireflies.

             
“You know there are two forces in the world.”  Her voice was rich, a throbbing, familiar pulse through his very veins, a pleasure so deep that it made it hard to focus on her words.  But she continued relentlessly, shattering the first brilliant joy of her presence.  “You know Il for the greater power, of good.  He appears in many forms, but so also does his adversary.  That evil lurks inside you now, eating at you slowly, as a canker, destroying.”

             
“What are you talking about?” he mumbled unhappily.  He wasn’t even sure he believed in Il anymore…his smug pride in being able to dismiss the other gods as inferior had chilled a little with the realization of how horrible and empty his life was.

             
“He seeks to use your past as a barrier against your quest for Il, to fill your mind with despair, with worthlessness, to convince you that nothing so full of goodness, of purity, of righteousness as Il would ever take you as His.”

             
They weren’t questing for Il, he wanted to say…and he really wasn’t sure that’s how he thought of Il to begin with.  But still, part of that…part of it was scraping salt over a raw wound.  They were talking about that deepest of weeping sores, that inadequacy and self-revulsion inside of him, and he stared at her, facing things in his vulnerable dream state that he’d put a lot of effort into burying in the waking.  He didn’t want to talk about this, not now, when for once in all these long months he was supremely happy.

             
But then she leaned closer, until the warm strength of her eyes seemed to ensconce him in a bubble of memory.  He was a toddler again, laughing and loving thoughtlessly and being loved in return, in a sunlit clearing of green, by the most beautiful women in the world.  Elusive and fleeting, her scent came to him, and another wave of recognition intense and sure swept through him.

             
“Fight him,” she whispered, and the world was her eyes.

             
“What?” he asked, bemused.  “Fight who?”  His voice cracked as he vaguely caught what she was referring to.  How?  How did you fight despair?  What was he supposed to do with this inconvenient disaster of his life?

             
As if reading his thoughts, she said, “With the only thing stronger than he—the power of Il.  Use His strength, His resoluteness, His unending and unshakeable love for you, to stand against that wish to demolish you.  The Destroyer will reduce you to a bitter, pathetic, useless mess of a man.”

             
“Hope,” she whispered, and was gone.

              For the next couple of days, they angled steadily downhill, although not near as dramatically as that first night.  The jungle grew denser, bigger, louder, more stifling and more intimidating with every hoof step.  The trees soared forty yards into the air, though you usually couldn’t tell, what with the matted screen of smaller trees, branches, and endless leagues of snaking vines that hid them.  Their path was fenced by ferns and groundcover that towered at the unlikely level of their heads—Ari had never seen such enormous plant life.  In fact, everything seemed oversized.  Birds flew by with streaming tail feathers longer than his arm.  The mosquitoes were as big as his thumb, their sting a sharp jab of pain—forget the itch.  The entire jungle seethed and churned with scuttlings and scurryings and flittings, a constant, humid slurry of sounds and motion that had them benumbed from the pure sensory overload.  Even the dangers began to seem unreal, part of an unending dream that defied sense. 

             
By their second day within the Copper Torque, Cerise didn’t even jump when a family of chicken-sized cockroaches trundled busily past her mount.  Rodge didn’t bat an eye when an enormous, vigorously pink flower barely missed closing around his head.  The heat and ceaseless bombardment of sound and threat sucked the energy from them.  They were in fear for their lives most of the hours of the day and settled on a strategy of conserving their really animated terror for those exceptional moments.  Hair limp and dripping, clothes clinging to them in sodden, grimy, sour swathes of fabric, alternately dozing dully or wide-eyed in clenching panic, they weren’t the most engaging of companions for the Sentinels.  They’d left their saddlebags with their changes of clothes and cleaning things at Jagstag, and no one even complained about that.

             
Though Rodge did point the fact out, rather drearily, one day to Melkin.

             
“We’ll pick them up on our way back,” he was told shortly.

             
“I don’t have the best grasp of geography,” Rodge said after a minute, “but wouldn’t it make more sense to just continue the way we’re going and cross the mountains up near Archemounte?  I mean, it would just save WEEKS backtracking through this maze of horror.  We might actually get back before term’s over,” he added wistfully.

             
Melkin, unconcerned with one student’s misery in the face of the rising of the Sheel, had already moved away, but Rhuq solicitously responded for him.  “That way lies deep danger…” he remonstrated gently.

             
“Versus this way,” Rodge observed with dull sanguinity.

             
“That is where the Wolven dwell.  And other things unspeakable and unknowable.  And beyond them lies the Crystal Pass, where only the wild things and the Fox dare venture.  Neither skill nor strength nor numbers will help you there.”

             
“Swell.  That’s great.  Just wondering,” Rodge sighed.

             
The constant alertness that had marked their first couple of days in Cyrrh faded steadily in the face of the inescapable, soggy heat and the monotony of the saddle.  The permanent, deafening assault on their eardrums became a litany of screaming mindlessness.  Except, of course, to Ari, who was entranced.  What set off the man-eating flowers?  Which mongoose stared fearsomely from the brush, baring its little teeth, and which black-masked, long-limbed exotica scurried away through the branches?  He was a man with a mission, avid interest compounded by a new determination.  He didn’t know if it had really been a dream, that night vision of the woman he thought of as his mother—it had been so piercingly real—but it had forged a new resolve regardless.  The resolution itself was a trifle ephemeral…but then, so was the dream and the blissful glow that came with that it. 

Since
that charming little catastrophe of the Kingsmeet, his dreams had been saturated with memories of his childhood.  It was always the same, the same clearing, the same exuberant running or crawling through his garden, only now the sense of his having left something was almost overpowering.  He searched, it seemed, for hours, night after night, driven to find something he couldn’t even name.  It was ridiculous, as if the lost toy or whatever it was had become the single most important thing in the world.  But this latest dream had been completely different…so vivid…and for once he’d
found
something.  Arguably, his greatest treasure, a confirmation of his sole, blooming joy.  Complete with thorns.

But then, when had his life last been simple?

              At any rate, he was alert, relative to his droopy companions, filling his days with eager scrutiny and storing away a thousand details with the single-mindedness of the explorer.  That was how he came to be aware enough, several days into the jungle, to register that prickling of his sixth sense.  A shift in the air around him, a sibilant hiss of a body along the damp jungle floor, and then his stag dropped underneath him, launching forward so fast that Ari thought his upper body would be separated from his lower.  The straps cut deep into his thighs, and the whiplash yanked his head and neck so far back over the stag’s haunches that he actually had a view of their rear trail through the Sentinels behind them.

             
What he saw made no sense.  A thick, streaming, solid column a full yard in diameter, bright blue, hairless…and moving so fast along the ground that it was a nothing but a blur.  It had just barely missed the last stag.  They thought the stags had been running that first night, but it was nothing like this rocketing sprint.  The first few steps his stag dropped so low in the hindquarters and pushed off so powerfully that Ari flopped like a rag doll in the saddle, unable to stabilize against the raw force of all that propulsive torque.  The straps bit again and again into his thighs and the saddle’s high cantle smacked against his lower back until it was numb.

             
The difference was that this was over almost as soon as it had begun.  The stags, though trembling and wide-eyed, ears flicking nervously, quieted quickly back to a wary walk, high-stepping alertly.  Ari looked around at his friends’ white faces and huge eyes, wondering if they’d seen the same thing he had.  In unspoken consent, they all turned to look at Rhuq.

             
“Big Blue,” he said succinctly.

             
“I thought their prey was small, youngish animals,” Cerise noted in an admirably steady voice.

             
“He was molting, my Lady.  Makes them cranky.”

             
Loren looked at Rodge.  Rodge looked back at him. 
Cranky,
they mouthed to each other.

             
At the head of the group, Traive turned in his saddle to look at them.  Cerise’s face lightened.  Even Ari thought he was concerned about them this time.  Instead, he announced cheerfully, like an obtuse tour guide, “The Sirensong.”

             
As if they hadn’t just almost been swallowed whole by a monstrous, ill-tempered serpent.

             
For the first time since turning downhill all those days ago, the trail leveled out.  On their left, the sullen, greyish-green waters of a dark river slunk sluggishly out of sight to their front and rear.  All along its banks, wherever the choking green growth of the jungle flattened into sandy spits, crocodiles slid creepily into the water at their approach.

             
The Northerners managed to keep their enthusiasm under control.

             
The good news was that they slept inside that night.  It was only late afternoon when a turn in the trail brought them suddenly to a high green wall.  At first it looked like mossy stone dotted picturesquely with large, pale flowers, but as they drew closer, it became apparent that the entire structure was a depthless mass of twining green vinery, some of it as thick around as Ari’s leg.  The pale spots were enormous, lighter green thorns.

             
“Watch the wall,” Rhuq warned them.  “A little fangvine will numb the skin, but when it’s this size it can stop your heart.”  The Northerners, appalled, shrunk into themselves as they passed through what seemed a very narrow portal.  Rodge rubbed his arm.

             
According to Rhuq, the various Tors were almost all alike.  Only someone who’d stood Sentinel for years amongst them could really tell much difference.  But, since their first experience had been somewhat distracted by external and unrelated events, the Southern Tor, Bronze Torque, was essentially their introduction to the non-botanical structures of Cyrrh.

             
This one was outfitted with the same dimly remembered courtyard behind its stone façade, bare of even a tendril of green on the interior and closed off from the exterior by a heavy gate of iron-plated wood.  Stretching until it was swallowed by the jungle on either side of the entrance, tall walls of stone rose into the air, graced by a beautifully-carved wooden walkway near the top.   Bright, hot sun poured down on their surprised faces, undeterred by the looming, uncivilized riot of flora that had marked their last several days’ experience in Cyrrh.  Here, for many yards in both directions from the entrance, the jungle had been scrupulously (and probably frequently) cleared.  Even the branches overhanging the Torque wall had been neatly dissected, looking like another dappled wall of pruned trunks and branches soaring far overhead.