Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse (40 page)

On the far half of the room, the walls were lined with glass windows, with hardly a space between them. Bran could see over the edge of the building, all across the city, the lights sprawling below. It was a dazzling sight in the darkness, the room dimly lit by the reflection. Outside the windows in front was a concrete ledge long enough for a helicopter to land, and high above, through the glass, he could see the shape of the moon. It was a crescent, just like his necklace, though seconds later black clouds drew over it again, choking its light away.

In front of the windows was a desk, the top of it shining like a dark mirror. Bran swallowed hard when he saw Baslyn’s hand on the side of the chair behind it, the back turned to him.

"Come in, Bran," he heard Baslyn’s voice say. "Sit down."

Bran hesitated but knew it was too late to fight now. With slow steps, he crossed the room and came to one of the chairs. He forced himself to sit across from Baslyn.

The chair turned after a few moments of silence, and Baslyn looked at him closely. Bran tore his eyes from the face, not willing to look at him any longer.

"Can you not look at me without feeling remorse?" Baslyn asked, catching Bran by surprise.

"It is a horrible face," Bran clenched his teeth. "You are the reason for all that happened."

"And what do you believe happened?" Baslyn asked him.

"Everything," Bran said, not hesitating for a moment as the anger welled up within him. "My mother’s death. Astara, Adi, me —
all of it.
" He slammed his fist on the desk with anger. He looked away, even though he could feel his eyes upon him. There was silence between them, and neither of them moved, until Baslyn reached to the side for a smooth glass cup and poured some clear water into it.

"Would you care for anything to drink?" he asked.

Bran kept silent.

"I don’t believe you’ve had anything to drink for a long while," Baslyn said. "In fact, you haven’t slept for a long while as well." He poured the water. "Nor have you done much of anything, except
run
from everything."

"I haven’t run from anything," Bran said, looking up. "I have looked for answers to questions that have haunted me all my life."

"And you were surprised," Baslyn said, "when you found that
I
was the answer."

Bran looked down.

"Are you sure you don’t want anything?" Baslyn asked again. Bran finally reached for the cup, drinking it down furiously as his thirst overtook him. He set it down, and Baslyn filled it again, and Bran drank it until it was empty. When he had finished, Baslyn smiled contentedly. They were silent for a long while, Baslyn watching him closely. It made Bran feel uncomfortable, but he tried to ignore it, knowing that Baslyn was trying to break him.

"You
are
much like your mother, you know," Baslyn started, and Bran’s gaze met with his.

"You want to save the world, to make up for crimes you didn’t commit." Baslyn leaned forward. "You want to be the hero—to right
her
wrongs."

Baslyn’s words had been unexpected, because inside, Bran knew they were true.

"I wonder," Baslyn said, "if you’ve ever seen what your mother looked like?"

Bran’s heart skipped a beat. Without thinking, he leaned forward, eager to hear more. Baslyn caught the movement, and Bran forced himself back again.

"I-it doesn’t matter," Bran said, trying to act as if he didn’t care, but it was too late.

"Oh, but it does," Baslyn insisted. "You thirst for it. It eats at you every day."

Bran tried to show nothing through his face, but he knew he couldn’t hide it.

"When I first saw her, I could hardly believe that someone such as her could be so intelligent," Baslyn went on. "She was so young at the time…"

Baslyn moved his hand, and it distracted Bran’s gaze. Very swiftly, Baslyn slid something across the table: it was a solid white wand all the way to the tip, cold and reflective like glassy snow, and on the back end of it was a long, jagged blue crystal, shaped almost like a knife There was something ancient about it. Wrapped around the sharp crystal were molded shapes of two solid white tigers, their mouths open as if attacking each other, holding the crystal between their fangs. Baslyn gently touched the tip to the side of the cup, and it gave a small ring.

"I remember Emry’s face clearly," Baslyn said.

All of a sudden, something began to shimmer inside the stillness of the glass. It was an image, a picture…but not just any picture. It was a face.

Chapter 33

The Farfield Curse

The face was of a woman. She looked both hard and soft at the same time, like a young person who had been forced to be an adult. She had long, black hair and traces of makeup around her eyes. Her skin was slightly pale, though not like Baslyn’s; it made her look alive before Bran’s eyes, almost as if he could reach forward and touch her. She was beautiful, with a slight smile on her lips—the type of person he could go on looking at for hours. She had a way of capturing his eyes and holding them, where he couldn’t break his gaze for a moment, even with Baslyn watching him. There was a thin white streak through her hair, long and complete. Her expression was so confident that it radiated from her face, as if she had the power to do anything she wished to anyone. And as Bran looked into her eyes, he saw that they looked exactly like his own, so similar they instantly told him who this woman was.

My mother.

Suddenly, Baslyn pulled the wand from the glass, and the image shriveled up.

Bran jumped. "Bring it back!" he demanded.

"I shall not," Baslyn said calmly.

"Put it back!" Bran shouted, jumping to his feet in rage. Baslyn

put his fingers together, very still, and he looked up at Bran through the edges of his eyelids.

"I am a Drimra," he said. "Illian magic in my wand is limited. I will not waste it on you."

"You are evil," Bran spat.

"Am I so evil I refuse drink to my prisoners?" Baslyn asked.

"You do it only to keep me alive," Bran hissed. "You need me."

"And do I?"

"Yes. You know the powers I have. You know I can do what my mother did."

Baslyn was silent.

Bran looked away, closing his eyes and remembering the face. "But I won’t," he said. "Her magic was held to darkness, but I am free from the curse. I am not held to do only evil."

Baslyn nodded slowly in contemplation. "Your mother was held by a curse—and with it, she created a curse."

He began to slide his wand toward the glass again, and Bran quickly turned to look.
Was he going to show her again?
He leaned forward with anticipation, and he heard the glass ring again as the wand touched it. An image shimmered, deep in the water, and came into view—but instead of his mother’s face, he saw something else.

In the middle of the glass was the image of a long room, the view moving across it slowly. It was a warehouse, so long and far in all directions that Bran couldn’t see the end. But what he saw inside was chilling.

There were rows upon rows of white cots, filling the entire floor of the warehouse and stacked one upon the other in towers up to the ceiling. At first, Bran couldn’t see well enough to discern what the cots held, but as soon as his eyes focused on them, he saw that there were people in them, still and motionless, as if dead. But the people in these beds were not what he had expected, for lying one to each cot were thousands and thousands of bald men.

They looked exactly the same as the two bald men Bran had already seen with Joris, their eyes closed and their arms by their sides. Their skin was pale and their faces expressionless, each one exactly the same as the one before.

"Behold," Baslyn said. "
The Farfield Curse.
"

Bran looked at him with wide eyes, the glow from the colors still playing upon his face.

"This," Baslyn said, "is the terrible thing which Adi could not tell you of, the terrible thing which
I
created. It is an army, hidden so far and so deep, the Council still hasn’t found it."

Baslyn looked at the glass. "Those were the bodies—my part of the Curse, or as we preferred to call it, the
Project.
But it’s deeper than just an army. Your mother added the second part."

The image in the glass shimmered. Now it showed another room, lit overhead by florescent lights. In this room, lining the walls, were rows of glass cages, stacked on both sides of the room. They were large enough for a person to stand up or lay down in, seven columns going down the hall and three rows up, so that they almost touched the ceiling.

Inside the cages were creatures, their bodies deformed and destroyed. They were all behind glass, one to a cage, some sleeping, some clawing at the walls, others seeming dead or eating like dogs from food dropped on the floor. Each creature was different, their clothing in tatters. They were thin, bones sticking out from their flesh. Some had large eyes, others had skin so loose it barely fit their skeletons.

Bran struggled to look away but couldn’t tear his eyes from the glass, even as the image began to change, to move across the cages, to display the hideous creatures. It came to one, its skin white and its eyes deep gray with no pupils. The creature turned its head slowly, staring back at him, its teeth jagged and a hungry look on its twisted face, as if it wanted to consume Bran’s flesh. The image shimmered and moved again, to the next cage.

Inside was a creature he felt he had seen before: it looked almost exactly like Shambles. Its skin sagged and its eyes were large and green, with fingernails like claws and a scarred face, but instead of having dark skin like Shambles, this creature’s skin was gray, and it threw itself against the inside of the cage, screaming. Bran could hear no sound, but the shout seemed to leap into his soul, echoing in him. He jerked his gaze away.

"Don’t show me anymore!" he said, struggling to catch his breath. He felt sweat on his forehead and his hands trembling.

"You must look," Baslyn said. "It is the work of your own mother."

"No," Bran said, trying to turn away, to deny it.

"You wanted the truth," Baslyn said, "so I am giving it to you. We brought these people in for her, kidnapped them right off the streets. All had to be mages. She finally got everything right: any mage in our way was instantly drained of their powers and made to feed my army. And thus we have come to the next part of the Curse: the spirits she called to the desert."

Bran remembered with a start what Astara had told him: what his mother had said as she died. The people in the desert, the gathering that had disappeared…

"She needed them to give my army intelligence, to shape them to be complete," Baslyn said. "She needed their minds, so she created the Curse, trapped the souls, and held them for my use."

Baslyn shrugged slightly.

"So I would form the bodies, and she would take one of the spirits and give it a mind. And then she would use one of the mages behind the glass to feed the body
magic.
"

Bran took a quick breath, trying to block Baslyn’s words out.

"And that is it," Baslyn said. "An army of fully functional mages at my bidding, ready to bring down the Mages Council. But there was more."

Baslyn smiled slightly. "In the process of feeding magic to my armies, sadly it would drain the mages day after day, until there was nothing left but a pitiful skeleton of a body in a glass cage, feeding my armies with their power from far away. Thus, any mage who even tried to fight us would soon make my army more powerful. Once they were cursed, there would be no breaking free—and no mages left to oppose me."

"The secret…" Bran realized. "The Council kept it secret so people wouldn’t turn on them."

"Every non-mage would certainly wish to destroy everything magic if they heard something like this was possible," Baslyn said. "They’d kill every mage in sight to keep themselves safe."

"But why was my mother in any of this?" Bran asked.

Baslyn stared deep into his eyes. "Like you," he finally said,

"she also wanted to save the world, to make up for crimes she did not commit. She joined me because she wanted to change the Council. Adi would not tell you. No one would. But now, as always, I will tell you the truth." He slid his fingers across the table. "I wasn’t always a criminal, as they might have led you to believe. In fact, I was rather well-known—a researcher, commissioned by the Council. I specialized in old documents and languages from magic history." His face turned slightly in grim memory. "When you get to be a famous mage—and a Drimra at that—you start to be invited to Council events. It was then that I came to realize just who I was working for." He shook his head. "A bunch of greedy, pleasure-seeking bureaucrats who hardly followed all the laws they made and were ready to assassinate anyone who crossed them."

"I don’t believe it," Bran said.

"It doesn’t matter," Baslyn hissed, turning on him with a sudden anger in his eyes. "It’s true. Even your mother realized it, and thought she could change it. And that was our plan. We were so close. We could have taken the Council by storm, changed it into something better, but—" Baslyn lifted his head, "—
you
were born."

Bran could feel an underlying anger in Baslyn’s words.

"Your mother changed after that," Baslyn said. "She wasn’t the same, lost interest in the Project—practically threw away all the power we had worked so hard to get her."

He hit the desk, but with that, he caught himself, as if realizing that he had spoken too much. "Somehow the police found out," Baslyn went on. "It was mere days before our Project would be set. Your mother escaped, as did some of the others, and thus we are here, every piece still hidden in secret, still as alive as it was before, with only one thing standing in my way."

His eyes met with Bran’s. "The power of Dormaysan."

He looked over Bran slowly. "As your friend Adi said, your mother’s powers are within you now. Shouldn’t it be right for you to follow her path, to finish the job for her?" He smiled slightly. "Maybe it would make her proud of you."