patrick stephens at psjs.net

Sielle Wer Merrihynday 3584

A lump of rock, roughly the size and shape of a man’s heart.  A dull black, mottled, lumpy little stone.  It could have come from any hill, been plowed under in any pasture.  It had taken twelve years and had cost him his fortune.  Six years chasing rumor and legend, three years establishing a complex web  of couriers, scouts, merchants and spies that spanned three continents, another three years to actually get the rock in his hand.  He’d used four different ships to carry it across the seas.  Every man, every wagon, every horse had cost him coin.  He’d bought and bribed and paid outrageous amounts.  And then he’d paid more to ensure their silence.  He’d sunk the ships and had the men killed.  His vast network unraveled just as it was put to use.  All save one: Will, his favorite and most trusted acolyte.  Will lay writhing on the dirt floor, dying.

Baron Walter d’Gillay, Anointed Prophet of Light, The Living Sight, and the man whom thousands lovingly called their Seer, watched the young man’s mouth work furiously, contorting in pain and surprise.  No sound came; the dagger in his chest had stolen his voice.  Walter bent over and laid his finger to his friend’s lips.  He caressed Will’s head and pressed his lips to Will’s forehead.  “For you, my boy, all for you.”  Then he wrenched the dagger free and stepped to the side, dodging the spurt of blood.  Will’s life poured out of his body and pooled on the dusty floor.

Walter wiped the blade clean on his kerchief.  That was the last who could trace anything back to him.  Well, the last save Beyn, but he needed Beyn a while longer.  Sheathing his blade, Walter pulled off his cape and wound the cloth around the rock.  He put the bundle on the table by the door and then dragged the boy to the great hole in the center of the floor.  He piled the body on the heap of corpses, kindling, firewood and long broken shafts of splintered wood that rose out of the shallow pit.  He grabbed a lamp from the floor and emptied its oil over the cracked wood.  Once lit, the fire would burn for days.

Walter collected his little bundle and shut the farmhouse door carefully behind him.  He measured his gait and cast careful, casual glances back at the trees that surrounded the little farm.  He was alone.  The farm, such as it was–two crumbling mud brick hovels and a lonely, fallow field–sat at the base of a rocky outcrop, high on an empty hill, miles from the spare collection of huts and hovels of the nearest village.  There would be little sorrow when these buildings burned.  It might be weeks before some wandering fool even discovered the charred ruins.  The farm–built on sterile, rocky ground by some desperate peasant with more hope than sense–had been abandoned for as long as he could remember.  As a boy, he had flushed deer from his father’s woods into this very field.  It had lain fallow even then.  Walter smiled at the thought of whatever poor, nameless bastard had last tried to run a plow through this ground.  He was that man’s servant, had always been servant to the nameless.  His calling had not altered; his purpose had not wavered.

He came to an old hut, a building that must once have housed feed for whatever meager livestock the farm managed to keep.  It was old and the walls were made of dry, cracked elare earth, the roof a threadbare and worn thatch with more holes than cover.  There were no windows, just a single narrow open doorway, half the proper height out of which poured a thick, black, acrid smoke.  Walter put his hand over his mouth and braced himself as he bent to enter the hut.

The stench was overwhelming.  The room was foul with the stink of burning flesh.  Walter’s eyes watered and he doubled over with a shuddering series of hard, hacking coughs.  His bundle slid from his fingers as he choked on the vile air.  As his spasms subsided, Walter pawed the floor for his bundle.  With the smoke stinging his eyes and clouding the light from the door, he couldn’t see clearly and his fingers fumbled through the soggy, wet straw at his feet.  The only light came from narrow gaps in the rotting thatch roof, where what little sun did manage to sneak through caught the swirling smoke and made pillars of pale light that seemed to rise as columns from the still smoldering straw.  Walter found the wrapped rock and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand as he stood.  When he spoke, his voice was ragged, “I trust the girl was satisfactory?”

“Yes,” came as the barely audible reply.  The room’s only other occupant lay on a long, smooth slab of black volcanic glass that sat in the center of the room like a ceremonial altar.

Naked, hairless and blue, the man’s body was covered in the raised swirls and puckered ridges of a hundred thousand branding marks, the pattern of scars interrupted only by a thin band of silvery metal.  The strip began behind the man’s right ear and ran like a river down his face.  It followed the contours of his cheekbones, dropped down over his chin, wrapped around the back of his neck, slipped between his shoulder blades and ran across his back and under his left arm.  The metal snaked down his belly and vanished in a pool at his navel.  The smooth surface of the metal, grafted seamlessly to his blue skin, seemed to flow like liquid, as if the narrow band of metal were glass, through which Walter could see soft silver-green smoke roil and billow.  Walter regarded the blue man with distaste.  He thought if such a thing was possible, that the damned man’s skin was a deeper shade of blue than it had been the day before.  The Noruunan raised his head slightly and peered at Walter with those unnaturally white eyes.  Walter turned his eyes downward and began to unwrap his bundle.

“Where is she?”  Walter asked.  “Did she flee?”  If the damn girl had got away there would be trouble.

“She did not flee,” the man on the slab answered.  Walter chocked on the smoke but did not press the issue.  The Noruunan was surely a demon, of that he had no doubt, and you didn’t question a demon if you didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Is that it?”  The Norunnan asked.

“Yes, this is it.”  Walter turned the rock around in his hands.  “Strange to think that so much power could live in a piece of earth so small.”

The small blue man laughed and without moving or opening his eyes said, “You are a fool, d’Gillay.  You are a blind and senseless fool.”

“A fool that is paying you well for your service, providing you women and keeping you fed and hidden.  You should learn to show proper respect, Beyn Rhiall.”

The blue man sighed and turned on his side to face Walter.  “I am not one of your fawning acolytes, Walter.  You are no prophet to me and I know enough of this to know that you are a fool.”

Beyn pulled himself up to sit at the edge of the glass rock and reached for a leather bag and a cup that sat at the side of the glass bed.  From the leather bag he poured a measure of gray-green powder into the cup.  He then traded the bag for a larger water skin and filled the cup slowly with water.  Beyn dipped a finger into the mixture and stirred the slurry until the water, now thick with the powder, turned a dark blue.  He whispered, “Arod’aeo daousas,” and drank the contents quickly.

“Bring it here,” he said.

“Is it enough?  Will it serve?  Is it pure?”

Beyn cackled.  “Pure?  No…. this is not pure.  This is dirty, fouled ore.  It will be a great sin to bond with ore as black as this.”

Walter’s face grew hard, “What are you saying?  After all of this…”

Beyn waved his hand dismissively and interrupted, “It will be a great sin to work with this, but I am a great sinner.  I have worked with worse.”

The Noruunan stood.  “We do it now.  The rock is warm and I am ready.  Remove your clothes and lie on the glass.”

Walter stood still.  Some small part of him hesitated.  He was doing this for them, for all the people that couldn’t…. For all of those that had no hope.  He was their savior.  Surely, surely it would all be worth it.  He remembered Will’s face, how surprised the young man had been.  For Will… the gods will, surely the gods will.

The Noruunan sneered as if he could hear Walter’s unspoken thought.  “You would have been wise to heed your fear, fool.  But it is too late now.  The metal sings to me and demands to be used.  Save your pleadings and your petty fantasies.  Tell them to the pain.”

Too much had been sacrificed.  Too many men had given their lives for him, too many trusted him.  Too many depended on him.  He was doing this for them, for them.  The pain, the sin, this blue man, he would endure it all.  Walter shrugged out of his shirt and leggings.  He took his clothes to a corner of the hut and made a small pile on a patch of dry straw.

“The smallclothes too.  The old gods do not know shame.”

Walter hesitated and then removed his undergarments as well.  Naked, he sat on the narrow edge of the long black slab.  The night glass felt smooth and cool to the touch.  It had taken five men three days to drag the heavy glass up to the farm.  They had worked at night, pulling its mass up the side of the hill in a makeshift wooden sled.  Then he’d had them dig the pit tin the main house.  Now their bodies lay in that same pit.  The boy Will and the smashed remnants of the sled made the rest of the pyre.  Walter reached down and bound his feet with the leather cords that circled through holes in the glass.  He lay back and spread his arms as Beyn wrapped cords first around Walter’s waist and then around his hands.  Beyn tied the cords to straps and stretched Walter’s arms wide.  Walter had no purchase and relaxed himself against the glass, his body bare and exposed.  His eyes darted to the pile of clothes in the corner.  His dagger….

The blue man saw Walter’s eyes and laughed with derision.  “You worry now about the blade?  You think that I might cut your throat and make off with your ore?  You think that I am a simple thief?”

Walter shook his head mutely.  Like the boy in the farmhouse, his voice had been stolen from him.

Beyn stood next to Walter’s outstretched body and traced a finger around the swirls of scars on his own chest.  “I am Beyn Rhiall b’rey Ba’Wren, daven of a house of Noruun.  I am salwa’daousas.  I have these scars by my own hands, that I might remind myself of the pain of my bonding.  I am a servant of the bond and the Raeden is my love.”

With that, he took the lump of rock in his cupped hands and brought it gently to his lips.  He blew out softly and the rock and began to steam.  Beyn blew until the rock glowed red hot and Walter could feel its heat.  Beyn held the glowing rock out over Walter’s body and began to chant.

“Wosai chal wael pele sal raenaecha pele o warho daousas, podal saou soleendes’alo sal poulaefaesedo an dol.  Imwaeel saou womcheda pele o daousas a sal edalamcha son Raeden.”

The ore grew brighter and hotter as Beyn chanted, changing color from red to white.  Beyn moved his hands around the lump of rock, pressing and shaping the white hot ore.  When he had smoothed the rock to a ball, he held it out away from Walter’s bare body.

Beyn closed his eyes and chanted, “Ferel saou womcheda echlewésda naou nalos, poulaefaesel ascha assólaee.  Tono A’ou ous aenpoulo a chal foae faaecho saou salwo, palnaechael saou salwo pele semd’lel ascha assólaee da aenpoulathes!  Poulaefaesel o nacher son aschas nalos da naou.  Poulaefaesel o naemélaeo.”

The ore erupted in green flame and molten rock ran through Beyn’s fingers where it fell to floor and ignited the already charred straw.

Beyn chanted rhythmically as he continued to shape and work the molten rock in his hands, “Cleberho saou womcheda echlewés da naen, palnaechael o assólaee seael daeschemcha!  A’ou palchamsal pele wosai!”

The fire on the ground spread, finally lighting the wet straw at the edge of the room.  Fresh smoke filled the small hut quickly as the molten rock dripped from the blue man’s fingers and the fire spread.

Walter’s eyes were wide with fear and he thrashed in his bonds as panic and heat robbed him of the last of his courage.  He stared, wild with terror, at the man who held molten rock in his hands and stood calmly in the flames.  He opened his mouth as he felt the hair on his outstretched arms crisp and burn, but his voice had fled with his resolve and Baron Walter d’Gillay, Anointed Prophet of Light, leader of the Sacred and the Penitent, mewled silently as tears welled in his eyes.

Beyn fell silent as the green flames that sparked and spun from the rock began to flicker and the ore stopped its drip.  The Norunnan cradled the pool of liquid heat in his hands, passing it from hand to hand like quicksilver.  He moved the molten ore back over Walter’s body and in a flat voice without affect he said, “Ischa é o nacher da o daousas.  Wosai womcheda sal raenaecha pele saou womcheda.” Then he turned his hands over and poured the metal slowly into Walter’s navel.

Walter found his voice.

His body stretched taught as he threw his head back and screamed.  The pain was unendurable.  He could feel the metal burn through his skin and bore into his body.

Beyn moved his hands slowly, guiding the thin line of liquid rock up Walter’s chest.  As Walter thrashed and writhed under the stream, the line of metal snaked up his body in sweeping curves.  When the river of pain had reached his chest, the blue man closed his eyes and spoke again, “Daousas, d’ouaee naou nalos.”

The air filled with the acrid smell of burning flesh and Walter’s chest heaved in pain as he gulped for air.  The smoke choked him as it burned his mouth and throat.  The river of molten metal reached his neck and Walter cried in anguish.  He thrashed to the side and the metal ran up the side of his head and around his ear.  He thrashed again and the last of it pooled into his right eye socket.

He felt his eyeball swell and burst.  The metal ran freely into his skull as the pain consumed the universe.  His bonds fell from his hands and his bed of glass slipped out from under him.  The Noruunan vanished into the smoke.  Even the smoke began to burn in the heat.  At last he felt his very body melt in agony.  Consumed, swallowed by pain, Walter floated free.  He swam in the pain and pressure and heat until it seemed as if his very soul would explode.  His mind reeled as his body fell away and he dissolved into a void of white.  He was alone, a drop of black–a fleck of filth–in an ocean of unending purity.  His mind bent under the pressure of the white and he felt his foulness burn.  He was being pushed into the purity and away from the pain, and even as he felt the pain recede, he longed for it and his mind scrabbled to escape the unceasing vastness of the white.  He entered it as a thorn, tearing it and staining it with his sin and corruption.

And then it ended.

Walter choked on the smoke, his body dripping wet with sweat and exertion.  He raised his head and could see the silver-green river of metal running along his body.  The band of metal blended without scars into his skin.  Like the strip that ran along the blue man’s body, its surface seemed to flow as if covered with oil.  Although the smoke in the hut was still suffocating, the fire on the floor was dying and its heat dissipating.  Walter’s lungs heaved and he was racked by hacking coughs as Beyn untied the straps that bound him.  Beyn fished a square bundle of cloth from a corner of the room and scooped up his cup and leather bag.

Beyn looked down at him for a moment as he unfolded the cloth and shrugged casually into his dull gray robe.  He said, “You have been bonded.  You belong now to the old gods.”

Walter ran his hand along the smooth metal and asked, “When… when will I know?”

“Soon, soon enough,” Beyn replied.  “I require water.”  He turned his back on Walter and left the hut.

After a moment, Walter pulled himself to his feet and looked around the charred hut for his clothing.  The fire had ruined his cape, but his leggings and shirt were still wearable.  Walter pulled on what was left of his garments and followed the blue man out into the day.

The sun was blinding after the dark of the smoke.  Walter swayed and fell to his knees.  He squinted in the bright light and watched Beyn crossing the field to the farmhouse.  Tentatively, afraid at what he might find, Walter brought his hand to his right eye.  The eye was encased in smooth, hard metal, but he had no sensation of losing sight.  He closed his left eye and the world remained.  Slowly, he struggled to his feet and followed Beyn to the farmhouse.  Water would be good.

Walter entered the building to find Beyn sitting on the floor, leaning with his back against a stone wall.  He was mixing his blue slurry with the powder from his bag.

Walter ran his hands over the metal on his chest.  He walked to the edge of the large shallow pit in the center of the room and regarded the corpses of the men who had helped him become what he now was.  He had done this for them.  For all of them.

“For them?  No, you did this for yourself.  You are bonded.  It is no use to lie.”

Walter turned to the blue man, realizing that he had spoken his thoughts aloud.  “I am their Seer.  My sight is for their aid.  Their sacrifice was necessary; I did this for all those who have given so much.”

Beyn regarded him blankly and sipped from his cup.

Walter turned back to the pit.  Will’s, was turned on its back and the boy’s eyes stared vacantly up at Walter.  Walter reached his hand down to close the boy’s eyes and felt the strip of metal that wound along his chest grow hot.  As he touched the dead boy’s head, Walter felt his right eye warm.  In that eye through which the metal had poured, he could see….

He saw a woman, his mother.  She smiled.  No, not his mother: Will’s mother.  Now he saw a baby boy.  His… Will’s son.  The faces rushed by one after another: lovers, boyhood friends, a brother, a wife…. Walter was overcome.  Tears welled in his left eye and he knew the anguish of the life that he had taken.  The images rose and fell as the young man’s life unspooled like thread in Walter’s mind.  Will’s wife, their little home, his own face, Will’s brothers in the Sacred and the Penitent, the farmhouse and the lump of dull ore.  He saw himself plunge the dagger into Will’s breast and felt the shock and surprise of his own betrayal.

Shaking with feeling, Walter lifted the dead boy’s body from the pyre.  He felt the boy’s anger rise.  For him, he had done all of this for him! Walter held the boy’s body to his own.  He could hold the boy’s anger, he would take this anger and hold it as a reminder of all those who had given so much.  Tears ran down Walter’s face as he hugged the body of the dead boy.  He felt the metal flow on his body, felt it ripple and move.  The dead boy’s memories poured through him in a rush, his vision clouded and his arms tightened.  He pressed the body against his chest and bent to kiss the boy’s head.  He was holding the boy’s life inside him, taking it, and keeping it safe.  He felt a rush of heat and love and he sobbed.  He had seen the whole of Will’s life; he would remember it all.

Will moved.

Walter released the body and stepped back in shock.  The body fell to the floor and Walter followed, suddenly weak.  The river of metal on his body ran cold and he shivered with exhaustion.  He looked over at Beyn and saw that the blue man had stood and was staring at Will.  Walter opened his mouth to ask a question just as the dead boy’s body crawled to its feet.

Will looked around the room.  He ran his hands over the hole in his chest and opened his mouth to speak.  His mouth opened and closed soundlessly as his chest quivered and the wound in his chest sucked wetly against the cloth of his shirt.

Walter struggled to his feet as the boy stumbled awkwardly and fell against the pile of corpses and wood.  Walter threw back his head and cried to the gods.  His voice rang in the little house.  “I am become the true Seer; I am the Living Sight!”

Walter whirled to the boy, still fumbling against the unlit pyre.  “For you!  The pain, the sacrifice, all for you!  I have given you life, Will!  I have given you life!”  Walter grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.  “You are the first.  The first to be touched by my gift.”  Will’s face contorted as his wound sucked violently at the air and his mouth open and closed.

Walter turned back to Beyn.  Beyn was smiling, a grin that spread from blue ear to blue ear.  He laughed.  Walter laughed with him and held his hand out in thanks.  He said, “Thank you.  You have brought…”

Walter’s head exploded as a heavy length of wood broke against the back of his skull.  He crumpled to the floor.  He tried to pull himself up on his arms and felt the wood strike the back of his head again.  He turned himself over, slipping in his own blood, and he could hear Beyn’s laughter grow louder. Will straddled Walter and raised his makeshift club.  Walter’s vision clouded and he opened his mouth.

“For you, all for you.”

Will’s face contorted in a rictus of hate as he swung the club and crushed Walter’s head against the floor.

In the corner, Beyn Rhiall b’rey Ba’Wren laughed.