Chaosbound (10 page)

“In the past few months, I've begun to realize that about him. I don't want to be around him, for I fear that I might be forced to become like him.”

Baron Walkin shook his head. “Your father taught you to be a soldier. Every father teaches his son the craft he knows. He is an expert at warfare, and that craft can serve you well.

“But don't think that your father doesn't know a thing or two about love. He may be hard on the outside, but there's kindness in him. You accuse him of killing innocents, and that he did. But killing can be an act of love, too.

“He killed the Dedicates of Raj Ahten, but he did it to serve his king and his people, and to protect the land that he loved.”

Draken glared. “From the time that I was a child—”

“You had to flee Mystarria with assassins on your tail,” the Baron objected. “What loving father wouldn't teach a child all that he needed to know in order to stay alive?

“And once you were six, you went into the Gwardeen and served your country as a graak rider. You've hardly seen your father over the past ten years.

“Take some time to get to know him again,” the baron suggested. “That's all that I'm saying.”

Draken peered into the baron's brown eyes. The man's long hair was getting thin on top, and a wisp of it blew across his leathery face.

“You surprise me,” Draken said. “How can you look past his appearance so easily?”

“Every man has a bit of monster inside him,” Walkin said, flashing a weak grin.

In the distance, Draken could still see the giant loping along, leaping over a fallen tree.

Perhaps the baron is right, Draken thought.

He'd only been home from his service among the Gwardeen for a few months, and the truth was that he'd felt glad of the change. From the time that he was a child, he'd lived his life as a soldier. Now he wanted to rest from it, settle down.

Draken felt so unsure of himself, so uprooted. He wasn't certain that he had really ever understood his father, and right now, he felt certain that he did not know him at all—not since the binding of the worlds. That hulking brute rushing down the trail, that monster, was not really Sir Borenson.

Of that Draken felt strangely certain.

Borenson's long legs took him swiftly to the beach two miles inland, where he stood for a moment on a tall promontory and gazed out over the ocean. The waters were dark today, full of red mud and silt. The sun shone on them dully, so that the waves glinted like beaten copper.

But he did not see the ocean, did not focus on the white gulls and cormorants out in the water. Instead he saw a wall. The ocean was a wall.

It's a low wall, he thought, but it's thousands of miles across, and I have to find a way over it.

He turned and followed a line of small hills.

As he loped along, he found wildlife aplenty. The rangits were out in force, grazing beneath the shadows of the trees, and as he approached they would leap up and go bounding through the tall grass.

The borrowbirds flashed like snow amid tree branches, their white bellies and wings drawing the eye, while their pink and blue crests gave them just a hint of color. They landed among the wild plum trees at the shaded creeks and squawked and ratcheted as they squabbled over fruit.

Giant dragonflies in shades of crimson, blue, and forest green buzzed about by the tens of thousands, and tiny red day bats that had lived among the stonewoods until yesterday now flitted about in the shadows of the blue gums.

The sun beat down mercilessly, spoiling the dead fish and kelp that lay all about.

So for a long hour Borenson hiked, sometimes struggling to climb rocky outcroppings where perhaps no man had ever set foot, and other times wading between hills in water as quiet as a lagoon.

He'd seen how Draken had turned his back on him there in camp. The boy had been leaning toward Baron Walkin.

They're getting close, Borenson realized. Draken feels more for him than he does for me.

Borenson felt that he was losing his son.

In his mind, he replayed an incident from yesterday. Rain Walkin had been up, stirring the cooking fire. The other Walkin children had been scurrying about, hunting for any fish or crabs that might be worth scavenging.

Borenson had nodded cordially to the waif Rain, doing his damnedest to smile. But all he had accomplished was a slight opening of the mouth—enough to flash his overlarge canines.

The girl had frowned, looking as if she might cry.

I must have looked like a wolf baring its fangs, Borenson thought.

“Good day, child,” he'd said, trying to sound gentle. But his voice was too much like a growl. Rain had turned away, looking as if she wanted to flee.

Borenson had felt too weary to cater to her feelings.

I'll have to apologize to that girl for calling her a tart, he thought. The prospect didn't please him. He hadn't decided completely whether she was worth an apology.

Besides, he wasn't sure if she would accept it.

There are many kinds of walls, Borenson thought. Kings build walls around their cities, people build walls around their hearts.

As a soldier, Borenson knew how to storm a castle, how to send sappers in to dig beneath it, or send runelords to scale it.

But how do you scale walls built of anger and apathy, the walls that a son builds around his heart?

When my family looks at me now, they only see a monster, he realized.

Borenson's size, the bony protuberances on his forehead, the strangeness of his features and his voice—all worked against him.

My wife is already distancing herself from me. I would never have thought that Myrrima would be that way.

Children will shriek when they see me.

Even Erin recoiled from me as she died, he thought. That was the worst of it. In the end I could give her no comfort, for she saw only the outside of me.

They don't realize that on the inside I am still the same man I always was.

At least Borenson hoped that he was the same.

Borenson felt alone. He worried that he could no longer fit in among his people. He wondered what would happen when he sailed into Inter-nook or Toom. How would people receive him?

With rocks and sticks, most likely, he thought.

But then it occurred to him that he might not be unique. Perhaps others from Caer Luciare had merged with their shadow selves. Men like him might be scattered all across Mystarria. . . .

He sighed, wondering what to do, and trudged over a ridge, seeking footholds among the rocks and bracken. Dead crabs and fish still littered the ground, but these had been left from the binding, not from the tidal wave.

The flood had been violent, of course. The tidal wave had uprooted huge trees and sent them hurtling in its path, and floating debris had been carried along and piled high—kelp, brush, buildings, dead animals and trees—creating something of a dark reef for as far as the eye could see. In some places, the flotsam rose up in a huge tangled mass of logs and ruin.

Gulls and terns could be seen out perching on the debris, as if silently guarding it.

Most of the flood victims would be caught in that tangle, he imagined, and in many places the tangle was a hundred feet high, and it was hundreds of yards from shore.

He had not gone five miles when he knew that he had found some wreckage that had washed inland from Garion's Port. He climbed a tall rocky hill and scaled a pinnacle of weathered red stone, then stood looking down for a long moment.

The blue gum forest was not particularly thick, and now it was all submerged. Trees stood in water as if they had all gone a-wading. Amid some trees he spotted a little wreckage—an old woman floating belly-up, her skin appearing as white as a wyrmling's hide.

Not far away was a bit of an oxcart, and just beyond that floated the ox that might have been pulling it.

The woman looked naked, much as many of the folks last night had been when he searched upstream. At first Borenson had wondered if perhaps they'd all been caught bathing. But apparently the violence of the flood had a way of stripping the soggy clothes from a corpse.

He waded out into water that was chest-deep, until he reached the old woman. Then he checked her for valuables. The woman's pants still clung to one leg, and he pulled them free. They looked too small for Myrrima, but Sage might need them. He found a ring on the woman, too—gold with a big black opal in it.

“Forgive me,” he whispered as he wrenched it from her finger. “My family has need.”

He didn't know how much it might be worth, but he hoped that it might buy passage if he managed to hail a ship.

Then he pushed the woman back out into the waves, in the manner of his folk, giving her to the sea, and waded back to shore.

He continued south for a mile, scavenging as he went, trying to get as close to the huge mounds of wreckage as possible.

Garion's Port had been among the largest cities in all of Landesfallen. It was a popular place for ships to take on stores. The supplies were typically packed in waterproof barrels and then sealed. Borenson hoped that a few barrels might have survived intact, but he saw nothing like that.

Upon a hill he thought he spied the hull of a ship, and so he stripped and swam out to it, nearly a mile, but it turned out to be nothing more than the curved trunk of a gum tree floating in the water. He returned to shore feeling downcast.

A few times he called out, trying to hail any survivors, but his throat was too far gone for much shouting. He saw a few floaters—mostly children and animals—and he wondered why he did not see more.

He lost hope, but kept on trudging doggedly, until the coast suddenly veered back to the east. He stopped atop a small knoll and stood for a moment, staring breathlessly out into the water, not believing his luck.

There, not three hundred yards from shore, a white ship lay amid a tangle of trees, looking as if some vast giant had just lifted it out of the sea and set it there.

It is too whole to be a wreck, Borenson thought. Someone has beached it.

“Hallooo aboard!” he cried. “Halloo in there!” He waved his arms and stood on the hill for a long moment, waiting for someone to come topside and give answer.

The wind was still, the water as calm and flat as a pond.

Perhaps they're scavenging, he thought.

Borenson took off his armor and clothes, and then laid them on the bank. He swam through the water until he reached the pile of flotsam. He climbed up on the logs, fully expecting that at any moment someone from the ship would pop a head up and find him standing there naked.

But as he neared the ship, he called again, and no answer came.

His prize was just dancing on the water, light as a swan. The prow had
beached upon some logs, but other than that, the ship looked whole. There were no sails, but that could be fixed. The Walkins had been sleeping beneath a bit of sail just up the beach.

Borenson climbed over the railing, walked around. The vessel was small indeed, no more than thirty-five feet in length.

It was a small trader by the looks of it, or perhaps a large fishing vessel, the kind used for plying the waters along the coast—not one of the big ships meant for crossing the ocean. It looked odd, for the ship was all gleaming white, reflecting the sunlight.

Borenson appraised it.

This ship is new-made! It hasn't even been painted properly. There is only an undercoat!

He could not believe that his fortune would hold.

He climbed down belowdecks.

The ship had two cabins—one for a captain, the other for a crew of four—but Borenson found that the captain's quarters were not made for a man of his proportions. With only a six-foot ceiling, he could not enter without crouching. He would never have fit on the slat of board that made the bed.

Much better was the hold. The entry was wide enough so that he could climb in easily. The ship had a deep belly, with a wide berth for cargo, and Borenson imagined that he and a dozen more people could make do inside.

But the vessel hadn't escaped the flood completely free of damage. He found water seeping into the hull, and the wood was warped. The ship had been cast into a rock perhaps, or hurled into a tree.

He studied the breach. The seep was not bad, he decided. The ship had apparently been in dry dock when the flood hit, probably up on a cradle, waiting for a new coat of paint. Because it was so light, without crew or cargo, it must have floated high in the water, rising above the flood.

The interior of the vessel had been pitched, and that stopped most of the leakage, but the truth was that when any ship took its maiden voyage, it always had a few cracks. Given a couple of days the wood would swell, and most likely the hull would seal itself. If it didn't, Borenson decided, it
wouldn't take much work to pass a few buckets of water topside each day, to drain the bilge.

When he was done inspecting, Borenson felt so moved that he dropped to his knees to thank the Powers.

I have a ship! he told himself. I have a ship!

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