Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (19 page)

Instead…this man appeared as no man should.  Could.  On
neither man, beast nor plant had Marik ever seen an aura of purest white.  Life
force that perfectly matched the wild energy flowing through the etheric plane
in lines deep beneath the earth.  The color alone left him speechless, yet the
shape…

No ovoid hovered in a vague egg-shape around his
body.  This bizarre, impossible aura shone
inside
the man, in the form
of a tree, yet like no tree that grew anywhere in Marik’s knowledge.  A massive
spike formed the trunk from his feet up to his hair.  Branches came off at
sharp angles, straight lines created by thinner spikes.  Increasingly smaller
spikes shot out in severe directions like nails until he resembled a mad
sculpture in iron of a bramble brush.

The pure whiteness of the aura tree shone
incandescent.  No sun could burn so hotly or as bright.  And, surreally, in
outright denial of common sense, his brilliance refused to illuminate the
alley.  Despite the raw energy that threatened to blind Marik, he could only
see the blazing aura when he looked directly at it.  Faint purple etheric
illumination against the dead black walls only inches from the stranger
remained unchanged.

Marik felt his eyes water as they had from the worst
case of snow-blindness he could remember.  He abandoned his magesight.  A faint
ache throbbed behind his forehead.  The only time he’d felt that particular
headache had been the time he’d drawn too close to the raw power flowing
through an etheric line without being properly shielded.

The stranger ignored the wavering question.  He continued
to peer down on Marik.  “Perchance, if you are not his, then might you be a…a
hunter?  Or one who seeks fortune out of rumor?”

This entire situation was too disjointed for Marik to
absorb.  Briefly, the idea that he must be asleep, dreaming this encounter,
passed through his head.  He expected to open his eyes and see the fluttering
canvas walls that could shelter four within its cramped confines. 

“I don’t know who you are, or
what
you are! 
You attacked me!”

“Yet I sought you only once I sensed your prying
renew.  How came you to be searching me out in the very city where I had come
personally?”

“What are talking about?”  Marik barked the question. 
Yet a shadowy meaning from the stranger’s earlier comment, vague and nearly
shapeless, occurred to him.  “My essence?  You mean you felt the scrye
searching for you?  The scrye using my blood?”

The red stranger’s fingers left his chin, his arms
cocking in a posture that looked both relaxed and battle-ready nonetheless. 
“You have utilized the blood from your veins to hunt for me?  How can such be
effective?”

“I don’t care about you!”  He rose to his feet, steady
this time, his tone fierce.  “I’ve never cared about you, though there are
plenty who do!  What I want is to find my father! 
You
tell
me
where he is!”

“Your father?  I discern no meaning in this.”

“Don’t you give me that!”  Marik advanced a step,
bringing him close enough to touch the man.  The urge was strong but he kept
his fingers clenched in a tight fist.  Whatever else this red-eyed stranger
might be, he was most certainly dangerous.  “I saw him with you that night,
over a year ago.  The first time I tried scrying you.  Except I was really
scrying
him
, and you were sitting next to the fire with him!”

Surprise lit within the stranger’s eyes.  “Can it be
so?” he murmured, questioning the night rather than Marik.  “Might it be true?”

Marik swept a fist across the air, not quite daring to
brush the red buttons along the front of the open, body-length coat.  “I know
you broke that scrye!  And since I haven’t been able to scrye father since
then, I know he’s still with you!  So tell me where he is!  Where is Rail
Drakkson?”

Surely a denial would follow.  Or an inquiry meant to
lead him astray.  The red stranger gazed at him with that same surprise continuing
to flicker in his jeweled eyes.

Finally, “No hunter in the end of the end, it seems. 
Or rather, a hunter after other trophies.”

“I’m no gods cursed hunter!  I’m a mercenary, same as
my father!  I’ve spent years searching for him, and you’ve kept him stolen away
somewhere!”

“Years indeed.”  And the damned man smiled!  “Where
one perceives enemies is often naught but the innocent.  Too, the smallest
consequences resulting from previous action will often rebound back onto the
path ahead.  Causality as the unavoidable law.  How I hear your laughter,
Otos.”

“Who—”

Marik never finished the outraged demand.  With the
stranger still smiling, etheric power swelled around the crimson glove.  Before
he could think to raise shields against it, Marik felt the blast hit him when
that hand pushed forward against his chest.

Only a fragment of conscious awareness registered the
absence of flames.  The power hit him in a murderously hard punch.  It drove
the breath from his lungs, throwing him off his feet.  Marik’s earlier angry
steps had led him away from the wall.  This time he was hurled into a dozen
boards leaning against the opposite building.  Wood scattered, making racket
enough to raise the dead while he tumbled every which way.

He felt an acidic burn tickling the back of his
throat.  It became a struggle to suck air down while keeping his last meal from
coming up.  One hand supported his weight while the other fended off boards
that sought to bury him.

A great, filthy dust cloud enveloped him.  It worsened
his ability to breathe until he feared suffocating to death.  The irony of
dying in such a fashion while lying on an open street played across a sardonic
corner of his mind, thinking it a shame that Kerwin was not there to appreciate
the joke.

He threw his body sideways, crashing through the mound
that had been piling around him.  Leaping in the stranger’s direction made no
difference.  All he wanted was air to sooth the burning in his chest.

No further attack met him as he knelt on all fours,
the first gigantic inhalations slowing to shorter gasps.  When he glanced
around for his assailant, he saw why.  The red stranger had vanished.

Marik groaned when he realized that.  The full import
of the encounter crept further into his awareness by the moment.  Finally
finding the stranger after…well, after months!  A year!  Longer!  Every other
possibility for finding Rail had panned out, leaving only this one remaining
chance.  This man with the ruby eyes had become a brick wall between the sure
bet of locating his father through scrying and accomplishing the task.

And he, Marik, had let him escape.

Celerity’s concerns that the stranger might be a
driving force behind the Tullainian turmoil mattered little to him.  It was
through this man alone that Rail might be found.  Nothing else prevented the
scrying magics from locating him.  How could he have let the stranger get away?

For the second time in five minutes, Marik’s legs were
in debate regarding the wisdom of returning to service.  It was while he tested
their stability that a flash of movement caught his eye.

Out in the street, where light shone faintly. 
Moonrise had suffused the slums with enough illumination to see by.  Marik
scrambled over the ground, fighting his stomach the whole way, half-bent so his
knuckles scraped the pavers.  He snatched his sword from where it had landed
and burst out of the alley.

Far down the street he saw the hanging coat on the red
stranger billowing with each quick step.  To be certain, Marik opened his
magesight for an instant.  He immediately slammed it shut when the terrific
glare burned into his brain despite the distance.  Whatever this man might be,
he had no time to muse over the problem.  Under no circumstances could he allow
the stranger to escape.

Marik ran.  He clumsily slid his sword into its sheath
as he went.  The coiled pain squeezing his gut lessened the longer he forced
his body to move.  By the time he reached the street’s end, he felt normal, if
battered.

This street, despite being a straight shot to the
larger roads in western Thoenar, also emptied into a minor network of shorter
streets.  Last summer he’d learned which ones led into the civilized districts
and which only spun back on themselves in the slums.  Upon reaching the corner,
he glared hard in the direction the stranger had gone, seeing that flapping
coattail dodging around a second corner.

It could have been worse, he reflected, while jogging
through the nearly deserted street.  A turn to the left there would have meant
the man would enter the worst areas, where sunlight at high noon lacked the
power to dispel shadows darkening the alleys.

Right was little better.  That direction would keep
them within the seedy districts.  Marik had never spent time there.  His
limited knowledge had been a gift from Ilona when she explained the exact route
his small group of bodyguards would need to take in order to reach a certain
refinery outside Thoenar.  He hesitated only briefly before plunging after.  It
could be no worse, he reasoned, than particular towns the Fourth Unit had
passed through on their way to contracts.  A logger town in the far north came
to memory, where the buildings were crude, the residents mostly human bulls. 
They drank beer rather than good ale and were rumored to eat the tankard after
draining it.

This might be another ‘beertown’, as his shieldmates
referred to such.  The secret to getting information or passing through, as
during the contract to capture a bandit gang, was to act tough, firm,
strong…all without showing arrogance or pomposity.  As sore as he felt, he
would need to walk with purpose, his sword visible.

If the stranger allowed him to slow to a walk at any
time.  When he reached the next corner, the man was already several hundred
feet away, preparing to enter the next alley.

Marik abandoned caution.  He lengthened his stride to
a sprint, afraid the stranger might make several sharp turns during the time it
took to reach the alley.

Then what would he do?  Stop him?  Follow him?  He had
known since last summer that the red-eyed man must be a powerful mage. 
Powerful enough to give Celerity pause.  The brief encounter moments ago only
mortared that suspicion.  What could he hope to achieve by catching him?  Yet
what could he gain by following?

He had no answer.  Nor did he have time to work the
problem.  It took everything he had simply to keep up.

Three corners later, the stranger emerged onto a
busier street.  The buildings still resembled town structures rather than the
larger city edifices typical in the cleaner districts, though were in better
repair than the harder slums behind him.  Marik passed two or three shops that
were closed against the nocturne world.  Mostly they looked to be residential.

In other districts the pressing crowd would be thick,
most corners inhabited by vending carts selling food while a handful of others
might be hawking trinkets.  The city’s ass-end reflected nothing of the
prosperity transpiring a short distance off.  If pole-mounted lanterns had ever
been placed within these shambles, they had long since fallen to disrepair and
been removed, if not stolen outright to be sold for scrap.

The residents made a show at keeping crime under a
semblance of control by lighting the streets after nightfall.  Most doorways
bore lamps bolted to the walls beside the frames.  Several were dark, covered
in grime mixed with cobwebs.  Those which shone did so feebly on short wicks or
through glass dirty as a con-artist’s soul.

Such feeble lighting made the canyonesque streets
appear gloomier.  Eerie, too, was the relative silence.  He had quickly grown
re-accustomed to the background din of raucous noise created by vast crowds. 
The low babbling occasionally drifting from the residential buildings seemed to
bestow on the night an unnatural silence rather than gift it with voice.  What
people he dodged on the street walked with heads lowered, shoulders hunched,
mouths closed tight.

Marik ran around them.  Several hurled stinging oaths
after him when he thundered past.  Not a few started to spin when he charged
down at them, daggers in hand, hard expressions meeting his while they braced
for a fight.  He never stopped to explain or see what became of them after he
continued on.

Each time he skidded to a halt on a corner, he would
barely catch a flash of swirling coat rounding the next.  One time he arrived
soon enough to see the stranger moving fast, easily at jogging speed, yet
looking as if he strode along in a sedate manner.  Enough people laced the
street that Marik thought they might be approaching the deeper city, especially
since two men who walked along the opposite side were dressed in cityguard
uniforms. 

He paused, struggling with whether to call out to them
or not.  With Celerity’s keen interest in the red stranger they would surely do
everything within their power to help apprehend the man.

Marik moved on after a moment.  Everything within
their power, yes.  Which would be meaningless against a magic wielder.  Not to
mention the time it would take to explain why they needed to chase after anyone
with him, if he ever managed to convince them to.  In those precious moments
the stranger would vanish faster than tobacco smoke in a high breeze.