“Rouse him.”
Nathan woke, struggling to breathe through the hand clamped over his face. He writhed and the hand fell away. Hacking gasps shook him as he tried to spit a plug of oily cloth from his mouth.
A blindfold had been wound so tightly around his head that he couldn’t open his eyes. Rough hands held him upright with casual strength, and when he struggled they tightened cruelly. “Whf th foo?!” he choked through the gag, and a chorus of rough laughter echoed around him.
“He is awake. We can take the gag off now, I should think. Let him see, too.” hissed a familiar voice.
“Will he not put a spell on us, Sen?”
“I am told he knows not how. Do it.”
Fingers tore the scrap of cloth from between his lips and Nathan sank his teeth into the hand, drawing a startled curse and then a thunderous blow to Nathan’s jaw. The blindfold was taken away, and Nathan’s eyes blurred painfully in the sudden glare of firelight.
His vision adjusted slowly, focusing on a tall, scarred man with reddish hair, glaring murderously at his bleeding hand. “I will kill him for that, sir.”
I remember him. Oh. Oh, shit.
“You will not, Milgard.” Nathan turned to the speaker, shaking. Renal sat near a small fire, rolling the end of Nathan’s sword in the coals with his good hand, the other splinted and hanging in a makeshift sling. “He is worth nothing to us dead. Besides, I would have words with the man who stole my sword.”
Nathan took in his surroundings in mute, frightened shock. He was in a shack of sorts, little more than a heap of sticks with a small fireplace sunk into a dip in the floor. Renal’s flunkies lurked in the corners of the little building, hiding like cockroaches in the shadows and staring at him, fingering dirty knives. Maggie was nowhere to be seen and Nathan’s mind raced, wondering where she was or if she was even alive. Renal noticed the look of panic on his face and smirked. “Where are you from, thief?”
“I am no thief, I was given−” one of the men holding him sank a meaty fist into his stomach and Nathan retched. “A touch gentler, friends.” Renal laughed. “We shall not be paid if the wizard dies.”
Paid? What the hell does that mean? Nathan was terrified but refused to let them see it. Well, any more than they already had. Raising his head, he glared defiantly at the little highwayman and mustered all the bravura he could.
“I’m not a wizard, you little−” Renal leapt to his feet and backhanded Nathan so hard the teeth literally rattled in his jaw, an expression Nathan had never believed made sense until now.
“You will address me as sen or knight, wretch.” The little man spat. “Better still, speak only to answer what questions we put to you. Speak with respect, and you might keep all your fingers.” Renal failed to smile reasonably, succeeding only in baring rotted, ratlike teeth. “I ask again; where are you from, wizard? From what nation do you hail?”
Even slumped between Renal’s cronies he was still taller than the little highwayman. Nathan spat blood on the floor and grimaced. “I’ll tell you whatever you want. Just tell me where the girl is. I hope for your sake she hasn't been hurt.”
“Do you think us fools?” Renal’s face knotted angrily. “We know well who she is. The Leiga would hunt us down if we slew one of their own. We let her be and now you are ours, wizard.” He smiled again, and the smell of his breath made Nathan's stomach clench. “Perhaps she'd thank me for taking you, boy, and ask me to show her the workings of a real man.”
“Bastard,” Nathan spat. “Call yourself a knight? Let’s you and me go for a little one-on-one.”
Renal’s cronies glanced at each other in surprise as Nathan pressed on. It was an empty bluff at best: Nathan was still exhausted from the march on the road, to say nothing of being beaten, bound and bleeding. Not that he cared. Let me at him. I’ll floss my teeth with his guts. “I could take you and a dozen like you. Try me, knight.” Nathan spat the title like it was an insult.
Renal stared coldly at Nathan for a few moments. “I have killed children for less insolence, boy. And now this foolish gesture, trying to shame me before my men?” He raised the sword, the tip glowing white. “Enough blood has stained this blade to flood the banks of a river, and you think to try your hand against mine? You think to kill me? Tell me, and tell me true: have you even taken a life?”
Nathan waited for Renal’s lackeys to finish chortling. His words were calm, even bland, as though he was talking about the weather. He saw more than one man shiver as he spoke.
“Once. Once before. I come from another world, Renal, a world very, very different from this one. I was a student, trying... trying to find a purpose. My brother had already found his. He was a soldier, a mercenary, but still a good man. I could never be like him, not in a thousand years.”
“My brother went to war and came back a bloody, blackened stump, his skin gone, his hands, his face, his mind, all gone. But he was still alive.” Each word came out slightly harder than the first, cold and sharp, until it was a wonder they didn’t cut his lips. “We have ways there, Renal, ways to keep people alive, even ones like my brother, to hang their lives on machines and wires, to feed them, to force their hearts to beat even when their bodies are too broken to do the job anymore. They hung my brother on these machines and asked us if we wanted him to continue living.”
Nathan searched the faces of each man listening, but not one of them could meet his eyes. “Our father told them it was a sin to even ask us such a thing. Of course we wished him to live. But I…” Nathan shook his head. “I knew better. I knew because before he had left, my brother told me his wishes should such a thing happen to him, left me his will. I told them what my brother wanted.”
Nathan saw in his mind’s eye Jack’s pitiful lump of a body, laid out on a hospital bed like a slab of meat. His parents weeping as the doctors told them his brother would never wake up, then turning hateful when he brought out Jack’s will.
He had only done right. He had only done what his brother had asked for. And they disowned him, threw him out of their lives as though he was trash. Nathan had lost his family in one cold, sterile moment, simply for granting Jack’s last wish. And he could never forgive himself.
He could feel Renal’s eyes on him, staring like a rat caught in the cupboard as he waited for Nathan to move, to speak, to do anything. I wish I was a wizard, Nathan thought. I would end you.
“You asked me if I have killed anyone, Renal. I could have left him. I didn’t. I pulled the plug, killed my own brother because he asked me to.” Nathan bared his teeth and the men holding him flinched. “Compared to that, snatching the life out of you would be fun.”
“How would you kill me?” Renal asked quietly. “There are no parchments here for you to wield, no ‘plugs’ for you to pull. I have your only weapon. How would you kill me?”
“With my bare hands.”
“Hold out his arm,” Renal whispered tonelessly. Nathan struggled, eyes wide as he watched Renal raise the white-hot tip of the sword to his right hand. “With your bare hands, wizard? Speak to me like that again, speak any word I do not ask of you, and I’ll take your thumb next.” Nathan watched in horrified fascination as the blade came down. He tried to pull away, but couldn't escape the hot blade that moved over, into, through his flesh. Nathan screamed, eyes squeezed shut as he refused to look at the raw, half-burnt stump, and his resolve, like his finger, was simply gone.
It seemed to go on for days. Nathan faded in and out of consciousness as Renal asked questions; where they’d been going, who Maggie was going to kill, on and on and on. They ground his face into the dirt and held him there, ripped the clothes from his back. Each time he didn’t answer to Renal’s satisfaction they pressed the sword to his skin, until it seemed nothing was left of his back but flakes of charred meat.
Even when he was unconscious there was no escape: the nightmares returned whenever he closed his eyes, plains of ash and hurricanes of fire searing the flesh from his bones, whispering of fate and ruin. Hounded by fire and agony in both waking and dreaming, the lines between reality and hallucination became meaningless, lost in a storm of pain.
“You cannot sleep, wizard.” Renal said, seeming to savor the scent of Nathan’s burnt flesh as he pulled the blade away from his tattered back. “Not until you have answered my questions.”
“I don’t… know… where we’re going. I don’t know anything. She… she keeps secrets like a… a…”
Nathan passed out for a moment and was brought screaming back to wakefulness as Renal burned another hole in Nathan’s back. He no longer had any illusions about keeping strong under torture: he knew nothing about what was happening, and told them as much. “I swear… I don’t… know…”
“If it please you, Sen, let him rest. He clearly knows nothing, else he would have told us already.”
For a fleeting moment, Nathan thought Renal would sink the sword in his flunkies’ eye, but the knight nodded and threw a passing kick into Nathan’s ribs as he walked away. Scarcely noticing this small hurt and weeping with relief, Nathan’s eyes slid shut.
The inferno was back, flames dancing and whirling so high above him that the stars seemed to catch alight in the blaze. Where once he might have run from such blistering heat, now Nathan simply sat and stared at the terrible conflagration with a kind of weary disdain.
He had nothing left. Fear, bravery, even sweat had been burnt out of him, wrung out like a cloth ruined by endless use.
Here I am, he thought. Do your worst.
It seethed, writhing around him and reaching out with licks of hellfire but not actually coming any closer. Nathan actually started to grow impatient, annoyed that his nightmare wasn’t even bothering to try any more. “Well?”
There was a sound behind him and Nathan turned, watching as the flames drew back like a curtain around the now-familiar shape of the salamander. It paced slowly forward, leaning close as it had in the forest.
Nathan smiled at the great beast. “Are you going to eat me this time?” Instead, the salamander once again bent to its own limb and sank its teeth in, drawing blood in a slow stream as it offered the wound to Nathan.
This time there was no reason, no rationality was left in Nathan’s mind. Renal had burned it away on the edge of his sword, leaving only a cold, crystal clarity. The question was no longer why drink, but why not, so Nathan threw logic to the maelstrom raging around him and drank deep.
The blood was thick, yet flowed like silk over his tongue. Hot and bitter to the taste, like iron, yet sweet and cool as the first precious mouthful of water after a hard summer day. It ravaged and soothed, burned and chilled, a whirlwind of paradoxical tranquility that set his every nerve alight with glorious, raging life.
“Endure.”
In that moment of dreaming Nathan felt, for what seemed the first time in his life, truly alive. He rose with runnels of the creature’s gift running down his chin, the salamander fading away as though it had never been. Crowing joyfully, Nathan ran headlong into flames that no longer hurt him. They clawed and bit like animals but found no purchase on his skin, and where agony had been was now only fire, a fire that burned yet did not consume. Nathan raised his arms and breathed in the flames, drawing them in the way he might once have drawn in the scent of a flower, and laughed.
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“You’re no knight.”
Renal was still turning away, as though Nathan’s dream had taken place in a blink of time. The knight’s knuckles whitened around the sword as he whirled. “What did you say?”
Nathan grinned into the dirt and the men pinning him shifted, unnerved by the sudden change in their prisoner. “Are you deaf? I said you’re no knight. You know nothing of knighthood.”
Renal brought the sword up to hang inches away from Nathan’s eye. Curiously, and yet not curiously at all, Nathan felt nothing of the blade’s heat, though it was still red-hot from the fire. “And what do you know of being a knight?” hissed the little man.
Nathan bared bloody teeth and snarled harshly enough to do Dennis Quaid proud. “That his wroth undoes the wicked.”
“And that means what, exactly?”
“In a moment, I will be more of a knight than you ever were.”
With a wordless cry of rage Renal pressed the sword to Nathan’s face, driving hot iron into his cheek.
Just as Nathan wanted.
Though the edges of the blade ground painfully into his cheekbone Nathan felt nothing of the agony that should have blazed across his face. Instead the heat flowed into him, filling the empty ache in his limbs and catching his soul alight. The air around him shivered with heat and Nathan roared, the birthing cry of something that hadn’t walked the earth for an age.
The men pinning him screamed in terror as their flesh flaked away in the sudden, raging heat of the youth they held, leaving nothing but motes of ash on scorched bone. The shack and everything in it erupted in flames, energy pouring out of Nathan’s body as though he was the heart of the sun. Only Renal, who’d turned to run the moment his once-victim had opened his mouth in that terrifying howl, scrambled out the door in time, his sword forgotten and his clothes smoldering.
The knight stumbled to the nearest tree and braced himself against it, turning to watch as the shack began to fold in on itself in a tower of sparks and ash. Nothing could survive that, he thought…
His assurances died as a naked form stepped through the door moments before the hut collapsed into a pile of smoldering logs, the figure’s body wreathed in smoke and the blackened, molten remnants of a sword in its fist.
Nathan smiled through the blood weeping from his cut cheek, the hellfire of his nightmares flaring in his eyes as he stalked to the groveling man before him. “What was it I promised you, Renal? Oh, right.” He dropped the sword, then reached out and cupped the knight’s face, willing fire and death into Renal’s body. The night toppled, little more than a slab of blackened meat.
“Kill you… with my bare hands….” Nathan’s eyes flickered. He crumpled to the ground and everything went beautifully, mercifully black.
“He wakes. Be ready to restrain him. Gently.”
I’m sensing a pattern here, Nathan thought blearily. Maggie, Renal, whoever this is. Enough waking, let me sleep. He tried to wave away whoever it was him, but the movement sent jagged spikes of pain flaring up his back and he cried out.
“Much of the skin on your back has been burnt away and the smallest finger of your sword hand is gone. Lie still. There is much to discuss, and you will only delay your healing.”
Nathan felt a cool, damp rag sponging at the burns, blessedly soothing after the torture. He took stock of his surroundings as best he could. He was face-down on a woven mat, straw perhaps, looking at a wall of gray rock speckled with moss and glistening patches of moisture. A cave, maybe? The light was pale, like sunlight through heavy clouds, and Nathan could hear the faint sounds of birds and trees. When he tried to turn to see more there was a faint grinding sound and what felt like the hand of a mountain gently pressed down over his ear.
“We would not have you look upon us just yet. We would not see you frightened. Might I ask your name?” The voice was male, a dry rasp of leather on bone, as though the speaker hadn’t had anything to drink in years.
Nathan had to laugh. “My name’s Nathan, and buddy, after the last couple days, it would take something serious to frighten me.”
A wry humor colored the speaker’s words. “We are, as you say, serious, of that you may be certain, but we have no wish to provoke you. Not after what happened to those men.”
“You saw that?” Nathan panicked for a moment, but quickly calmed down. They wouldn’t be treating my back if they meant to kill me. As he thought this what felt like a thick paste was dribbled on his back and was spread by a gentle hand. He could see more of the paste crusted over the cut on his face if he strained his eyes. The same thing holding him down with one hand was treating his back with the other.
“We saw the aftermath of your fury and would not be caught in it, wizard. To that end, you have been given lichroot extract. We regret the necessity, but we had no way of knowing your mind upon waking.”
Nathan shook his head, or tried to. The hand was still there, gently and yet irresistibly holding him down. “I’m not a wizard.”
“Indeed? We found you streaked with the ashes of dead men, their hovel burnt by fires so hot the ruins were still warm even after the rains. How else would you have survived such a thing if you had not controlled it?”
“Well, yeah,” Nathan admitted. “See, there was this salamander…”
Nathan heard a creak, as though someone was leaning forward in a chair. “Tell us.”
Nathan wriggled his shoulders in a tiny shrug and winced. “It saved me in the way… the whey… the fairy forest.”
“I see. What else?”
Nathan squinted suspiciously at the cave wall. “Look pal, I don’t know you, and the person I was with has some serious stones. She’s probably looking for me.”
“Maggie, the Inameas’ child? Yes, we know of her. She is on her way to Wyvern’s Run.”
“How can you−”
“We have many eyes for leagues around. Little happens along the road we do not know.” The voice interrupted curtly. “We watched the two of you make your way up the road, watched you talk, touch, rest. Watched you as you were taken. Many are, and frankly we do not often care, but when they addressed you as a wizard we took especial notice. When they died, we came to claim you ourselves.”
Claim you. Nathan shivered a little at that choice of words.
“If it is any comfort, the girl seems distraught at your absence. We sent her a message when we retrieved you, informing her of your safety and leaving instruction for your reunion. If she obeyed, she will be watching for your arrival in the city of cutters. If not, she will be hard pressed to find us and harder yet to take you from our hands.”
Nathan sighed. “Well, Jeeves, it looks like you’re holding all the cards. What do you want?”
There was a startled pause. “Want? What an odd thing to ask. I served your kind for centuries before they left us, yet not once was I asked such a thing.”
Nathan doubted the speaker was serious about his age but kept that to himself. “You mean humanity?”
“I mean wizards.”
“Everyone keeps saying that, but it makes no sense. Look, I got… blessed, I dunno, by a big lizard beast in my dream, a big lizard beast that happens to treat fire like a beauty spa. I guess the badittude rubbed off, but I’m not a wizard.”
There was a slow, wheezing rasp that Nathan had to think about before pegging it as a laugh. “Indeed? Let him up, Cain. Let him see you.”
The hand on his head slowly, grinding like rocks scraping against each other. With a slow stretch of his shoulders Nathan pushed himself off the floor. His back still hurt, but it was more like a bad sunburn than a patchwork of burnt skin. A moment’s inspection revealed a thick gray paste covering his back. A bandage was on his cheek where Renal had attempted to brand him with the sword, and his right hand was tightly swathed in bandages as well. His pinky was conspicuous in its absence, but he could still feel it. He turned, shaking his head, and goggled at his ‘doctor,’ unable to comprehend what he was seeing.
His guess had been right; he was in a cave, a shallow scoop out of the side of a hill cutting some twenty feet into the rock and loam. Mats of straw similar to the one he’d been laid on were strewn about the place, but with the exception of a few bowls and powders nearby there was nothing to indicate the place was even inhabited. It had been dug out of solid rock: in places the rock had marks that looked suspiciously like fingers, ripped through the granite like soft mud. And sitting about a foot away was the digger itself.
If its hand hadn’t been stained with the same paste covering his back Nathan would have guessed he was looking at a statue. It was the shape and size of a twelve-year-old boy, the lines and contours of the body perfect, but blank; exquisitely proportioned but lacking any human detail. No fingernails, no facial features, only loops and whorls of writing, mimicking the shape of muscles and bone in graceful, sweeping panes of symbols that were vaguely familiar to Nathan, as though he’d seen them in a textbook somewhere.
The words were noticeably separated into blocks and passages, as though copied from a book. The only surface that wasn’t covered in writing was its face. Instead, a single word was placed where its brow would have been. The word was smudged, as though it had been rubbed out and re-written.
As Nathan watched the statue slowly raised its hands with a now-familiar grinding sound and dipped them in a bowl, rinsing them and flicking the water from its fingers when it was done. My God. It’s washing its hands.
The second figure was much harder to make out, leaning in deep shadows on the far side of the cave. Nathan could see glistenings of light on metal as it shifted, and it creaked like an oiled hinge as it moved deeper into the dark. He thought of scarecrows and stick figures and cocked his head.
“What are you people?”
The figure shook its head, or seemed to. Nathan couldn’t make out anything of its features. “People. You call us people. You throw words about like dice in a tavern, wizard, calling us names we’ve never heard put to us before.”
Nathan raised his hands in a peacemaking gesture, alarmed. “I didn’t mean to upset you−”
A hand swept out of the shadows dismissively, thin and blade-fingered, the hand of a skeleton dipped in iron. “You did not offend, wizard. You address us as equals. You honor us.” The hand withdrew, folding into the dark. “I am called Belias. The one before you is Cain. We have waited a long time for one like you.”
They were the orphaned, misshapen offspring of the wizards. Golems and homunculi; unliving, unloved cobblings of cloth and clay brought to life by men of power who wanted servants without the need for food, rest, or free will. Belias and Cain were the best made: masterworks, exhibitions of skill. Their inferiors drifted in from the forest as the day wore on, little more than walking scraps of wood and rags, most no bigger than Nathan’s foot. Some were shaped like little people, others like birds or animals, and they all regarded him with the cautious, beat-dog reverence due a fickle god.
When the wizards had vanished their servants had lingered, many torn apart by angry mobs that had rampaged through their master’s homes. A few groups had banded together in the wilds, living together and watching the seasons turn as they waited for their masters to return. Some were messengers, others guardians, but most were living repositories of knowledge, the libraries of another age struggling to hold together under the slow march of time. Some jostled amongst themselves to touch him, yammering like children begging for attention. Nathan ignored them as politely as he could. They frightened him, what they were and what they expected of him, hoping, needing him to give them purpose.
That is all they are for, he realized. To serve me, or people like me. It sickened him that someone would do this, create a thinking being that craved control the way junkies craved a fix.
“We are abominations,” Belias noted from the shadows. “We know this, Wizard. Cloth and stone is not meant to speak, to dream, to breathe. Nothing is born a slave, and yet slaves we are. We are a wrong against nature itself, living souls in unliving flesh.”
Nathan threw a helpless glance at Cain, who until now had remained motionless. As he watched, the golem leaned forward and gently shooed the smaller ones away. Grateful and desperate for a change of topic, Nathan gestured at the still figure of clay. “You can talk. Why doesn’t Cain?”
Belias shifted with a ripple of clicking steel, leaning forward. Nathan thought he could see the faint outlines of a human face. “He was not made to. In fact, his story is something of an object lesson. Shall I tell him?” Cain nodded, joints growling.
“His story is old, even by our reckoning. His beginning came even before your kind ruled. He was the progeny of a holy man, a wizard priest. Something of a contradiction, perhaps. His maker was the leader of a small village plagued by a family of nobles. When a sortie of their warriors made off with some of the village girls, a few little more than children, the man took matters into his own hands.”
The homunculus twitched slightly and then leaned back into the dark,“He went to the river nearby and prayed, beseeching the higher powers for a champion to protect his people. Whether his gods or his own power brought the clay at his feet to life, none can say. Magic is shaped by the will of the user, wizard. A man with the will to change the world can do much, if only he believes he can. Whatever his faults, this priest believed, and so his prayers were answered.”
“Cain awoke in the river, a living soul in a lifeless body, and knelt at the feet of his maker to learn his purpose. ‘Protect us, child. End the men who oppress us. End all they love that we might live in peace.’ So commanded the only god Cain worshiped. The work took him only one night, little more than an hour, so well was he crafted for this labor. The knights, the nobles, their homes and families were destroyed, beaten unto dust until all that remained was rubble and red ruin.”
Belias angled a barbed digit at his companion. “The writing you see on Cain’s body is drawn from holy scriptures, the mark on his brow an ancient symbol of duty and service. These sacred etchings were filled with the blood of children when he returned and knelt before his master again. He had served well, fulfilled his purpose to the letter. His disgust with the deed, his despair as he slaughtered the helpless, the horror of killing women and children was not his place to give voice even if he had been able to speak. Cain was made only to serve. Can you guess, wizard, how he was rewarded for his good service?”
Nathan stared openly at Cain. “I heard the story once, I think,or something like it.”
Belias nodded. “Once a great people considered his kind an art, but now he is the last. And, like so many of his kind, his master set Cain to eternal sleep.. I was young, after our fashion, when I found him lying in the river of his birth, deep under the water and muck, the priest and his village ages dead. I pulled him from the mire and woke him.” A cold smirk colored its voice. “We are all of us commanded, Nathan, to serve. To weather the ages, to repair ourselves and survive, serving our masters as they bade us, dead though they may be. Only the luckiest were given an end to their duties, or else were caught and torn apart. To live without purpose or meaning, even meaning so awful as Cain’s, is it not a terrible thing?”
Nathan shivered. “Can’t you… I don’t know…” he shrugged helplessly.
“Die? No. Not, at least, of our own designs. And before you ask, we cannot be commanded to destroy ourselves, an act of mercy though it might be. No, we know only service, for that is our purpose. We gather even now, flocking unto you, our purpose returned.”
Belias stepped forward and knelt, moving full into the light, the mummified face, torso, and withered arm of a long, long dead child melded with a skeleton of cunningly wrought steel. Its face was a mask of bitter patience, dry and crisp as paper, heavy with age and a slow, wry smile of cracked lips and shrunken gums.
“We live to serve you, wizard. What would you have us do?”