Anderson, Kevin J - Gamearth 01 (16 page)

Ledaygen thrives. In exchange, the forest taught us true wood-magic and how to heal, using arts previously known only to the
dayid
."

Vailret finished pulling on his clothes and shook his arms. "Then you should have no trouble at all healing Delrael."

Ydaim smiled mysteriously. "That we shall see."

Fire. Sparkling orange, burning bright. Warm fire, hungry fire, reflecting from the glassy yellow of a single staring eye.

The Cyclops stood at the edge of the forest, drawing the smoke into his nostrils. Feeling powerful. The trees were afraid of him, afraid of the fire.

He scraped his fingers together, and more sparks flew.

The khelebar had spread a thick carpet of dried leaves on the floor of Ledaygen. The flames grew.

Sparkling orange, burning bright.

"I have finished my carving, Healer." Noldir Woodcarver pushed his way through the dense trees into Thilane's chamber.

She looked up at him, groggy and blinking her eyes as she broke her preparatory meditation. She waited a moment, gathering her thoughts as the trees around her flickered into focus.

"Help me, Woodcarver. I must take the man to the
kennok
tree." The words scraped out of her vocal cords, sounding harsh.

Noldir slipped his fingers under Delrael's shoulders, shifting the man to get a better grip. Delrael let out a soft, pain-filled gasp, and Noldir almost dropped him. Delrael's bleeding had stopped, but he still looked weak and drained, fluttering along the hex-line between life and death. Thilane encouraged Noldir, though, and he lifted the man onto her dusty gray back.

The Healer held him in place with one arm as they set off through the uncharted ways of Ledaygen. Noldir kept pace beside her, watching and helping hold the man. Thilane could feel Delrael's weight on her back, she could feel his blood on her fur, she could feel echoes of his pain throbbing in her head.

She wanted to drench herself in Ledaygen's cold spring waters when the ritual was finished, lay in the numbing pool until she could feel cleansed.

But she had to succeed first
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the
dayid
held this man in high esteem, enough to ask her for this sacrifice. The risk. The
dayid's
demands were not easy, but the chance to work directly with the soul of the forest outweighed everything else.

Noldir led the way to where the lone
kennok
tree grew. The trees were so rare and precious that few of the khelebar knew their location.

The Woodcarver passed through a thicket of flowers and woven vines to a place where he had left wood chips strewn on the forest floor. Thilane noticed that, in his work, he had heedlessly trampled the grass around the tree.

Then she studied the new limb itself.

Noldir had joined himself to the
dayid
, working with the wood of the small but ancient trunk of the
kennok
. He had shaped the wood like clay with the palms of his hands, stroking off the bark and smoothing, bending, reshaping according to the picture in his mind. The roots of the
kennok
tree still plunged deep into the soil of Ledaygen, tapping into the blood of the
dayid
itself. But the main part of the trunk was now in the shape of a human leg, poised erect and pointing its toes toward the sky. The golden polished wood glowed with rich coppery whorls of grain, strong but soft, and still alive.

Thilane set her mouth in a satisfied line. She tossed her braids back over her shoulders, where they brushed against the injured man. "I commend you, Woodcarver. Your work honors the
dayid
."

Noldir shrugged but looked pleased, as if he had not expected her to give any kind of compliment. "The
dayid
gives each of us our special talents."

He brushed some of the wood chips from an area of grass. Thilane knelt, and the two of them slid Delrael's body from her back, laying him beside the
kennok
trunk. Noldir tried to make Delrael more comfortable while Thilane stood back, stretching her shoulders and brushing at her fur in distaste. She looked at the sticky red on her fingers.

"He must wake now, just for a moment."

She plucked one yellow petal from the garland of flowers around her neck and crushed it in front of Delrael's nose. Noldir stepped back from the acrid odor that sent the man plunging back into consciousness.

Thilane watched Delrael blink. His glassy eyes were strange and gray, different from the emerald green shared by all khelebar. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. She bent down, stroking his hair. He would not know who she was.

Delrael looked startled, and then his face drained back into gray as pain washed over him. Thilane turned his head, directing his gaze to the wooden leg growing up out of the tree stump.

"Behold your new limb, Traveler. Because my own skill was not enough, Ledaygen has offered you a replacement."

Delrael tilted his head, but then he saw the clotted blood that slicked his leather armor, the bone shards protruding from the remains of his leg.

Thilane caught and cradled his head as he swooned back against her.

"Sleep now," she said.

Delrael's eyes closed and he breathed deeply as she whispered him back into unconsciousness.

Thilane glanced up at Noldir Woodcarver. He seemed to be struggling to contain an expression of awe and to retain the composure he thought she expected of him.

Then she ignored the Woodcarver as she ran her fingers along the cloth of Delrael's stained and torn trousers, finding the secret of the foreign fibers in the cloth. They fell away, leaving both of his legs bare.

Thilane drew a deep breath and exhaled as she closed her eyes, humming to herself, floating into the trance she would need. Keeping her eyes closed, she extended an arm to grasp the
kennok
wood reaching out of the ground.

From it she drew strength and deepened her trance.

With her mind she searched for the
dayid
, plunging deep beneath the soil of Ledaygen, following the network of
kennok
roots toward the heart of Gamearth itself. She saw the structure, the patterns ... she learned with awe how the
dayid
slipped between the cracks, bent under and around the Rules that confined the rest of the world. Still shutting her eyes tight, she could see through the eyes of the forest.

Her hand drifted down the polished
kennok
wood until she reached the point where the carving ended and the bark began. Thilane extended her index finger and applied gentle pressure horizontally, slicing the artificial leg from the
kennok
tree.

Eyes closed, she lifted the heavy false limb and carried it on her fingertips until she rested it on the ground beside Delrael's injured leg. She aligned the two limbs, then climbed back to her feet again. On four feline paws, she padded to one of the towering black pines, then ran the palms of her hands up the trunk, brushing the bark, the rough lumps of pitch, until she encountered a branch thinner than her finger. She plucked it from the trunk, leaving no scar.

Noldir watched in awed silence. He saw that dark red sap had begun to ooze from the severed trunk of the
kennok
tree.

The Healer's humming grew louder. Then she sang a song with no words, notes that sounded like running water, chattering birds, blooming flowers.

Thilane laid the thin pine branch across Delrael's thigh, just above his injury.

Her breath hissed through her teeth as she pushed down. She did not hear Noldir gasp as the branch sank into Delrael's flesh, melting through the heavy bone and severing the leg.

Moving rapidly now, Thilane opened her eyes. The green irises glowed with an unseeing power. She discarded Delrael's dead limb and switched it for the living
kennok
leg, pressing it against his stump before the blood could start. The Healer wrapped her fingers along the seam, and her voice broke into a different, more powerful song that resonated in the air. The trees seemed to be singing along with her.

"Melding of flesh and tree. Merging of bone and wood. Joining of sap and blood. Bring the two together as one. Life of tree and man blend together.

Meld. Merge. Join. One!"

A flood of energy from the
dayid
seared through her nerves, leaping across the barrier into the
kennok
wood.

The Healer gave a sharp cry and stepped back, blinking her eyes and seeing the forest again. Her hands trembled with exhaustion. Noldir Woodcarver stood beside her as she fought to bring her mind back through the murk of the trance. Noldir reached out a hand to steady her, but she pushed him away and bent over Delrael's motionless form.

She had attached the
kennok
limb. A sharp line marked the boundary of skin and wood, but that would fade as the man's body accepted his new leg. She smiled to herself.

Only a small amount of the man's blood spattered the grass. She ran her fingers along one of the grass blades, straightening it and wiping off the red smear.

Thilane gave the crushed, dead leg to Noldir. "Take this ... and bury it."

Delrael fled from bizarre dreams, unable to force himself awake.

Something held him imprisoned with his nightmares, but locked him away from his pain. He saw a giant, one-eyed monster hurling boulders. He remembered running. Hybrid man-panthers. The huge rock flying at him. And pain. A great deal of pain.

"Roll the dice again!" He moaned and turned his head. He had better luck than this. "It's not fair." His leg felt very strange.

He lifted his eyelids, expecting to see something or someone he recognized. He didn't. He was in a thick forest somewhere. He could smell it.

He could hear the sounds of wind and night birds. Everything seemed to be dark, but he was not cold. In a disorienting moment, he wondered if he had somehow landed in the Rulewoman Melanie's forest, by her Pool of Peace. He expected to see his own father there, waiting for him.

Then Thilane Healer stood over him. Her garland of yellow flowers swayed, and her face looked lined and weary. Her breasts were tanned and dusty-colored, like her pale fur. He remembered her from somewhere.

Questions ricocheted back and forth in his mind until he remembered everything. The Cyclops, the canyon, the khelebar, the boulder
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his leg. He winced with a pain that was not there, but should have been.

"I am Thilane Healer of the khelebar." She spoke in a quiet yet harsh voice. "Your leg would not heal, so I replaced it."

Delrael looked down at his left leg
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and saw rich yellow wood laced with feathery ripples of copper-colored grains. The Healer held onto his shoulders, squeezing hard enough that her fingernails made impressions in the skin. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, leaning his head back. "It's not fair." Overhead, the leaves rustled in the night. "Look at it," Thilane said.

Delrael felt the words choke in his throat. His real leg was gone, discarded and replaced with something of wood. He was a fighter. He
needed
his dexterity. He needed to move, to attack, to quest, to explore. If he could do nothing interesting, the Outsiders would erase him from the Game.

"Look at it!" Thilane said again.

He turned his eyes downward, looking at the serpentine wood-grain patterns that seemed to move by themselves. He did not want to think of it as part of him.

The Healer shook her head. She took his
kennok
leg in her hands, massaging it. "Time. Give it time. I can feel the warmth in the wood." With one fingernail she tapped against the wooden knee. He heard a light ticking noise. "Can you feel this?"

"No." He drew in a deep breath. He wanted to go back to his nightmares again. "Of course not."

"There's magic in Gamearth. You just need to know how to use it."

"That spell isn't in any book. Ask Bryl." Delrael wasn't sure, but it seemed right to him.

Thilane crossed her arms, accidentally bruising the yellow flowers around her neck. He smelled the burst of perfume they released. "Gamearth has magic the Outsiders don't even know about."

She kneaded his left foot, massaging the wood, working with the toes and bending them slowly at the joints. Delrael watched in wonder as he saw the
kennok
wood become flexible.

"Trust me," she said.

Delrael closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing for several minutes. Thilane offered no conversation of her own. "Where is Vailret?" he finally asked.

The Healer stopped her work as she scowled up at him. He was frightened of the stare behind her oval green eyes. "Your friends are gathering a council of the khelebar. Your Vailret is upset because you were attacked by the Cyclops."

Delrael saw the monster towering on top of the gorge, his brick-red skin gleaming in the sunlight, his one yellow eye like a great torch as he found his target. And hurled the crushing boulder down
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