Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (23 page)

“A hammer, mayhap.  Or a plow.  Which is what he’s
supposed to be well-to-do on.”

“I can’t see any god being proud of that.  And I never
heard anything about this great war.”

“It was a real piss-a-row.  The old Merinor kingdoms
were united with Arronath’s ancestors and a whole slew of others against the
earth lad’s followers.  Who knows how many millions were involved in that.”

Marik felt his brow crawl upward.  “That many?  How
can an entire kingdom forget about something as big as that?  Despite the
Unification!”

“I’d lay the likeliest reason for that on the fact
that everything I just laid down happened over sixteen centuries before Basill
popped his head out of his mother’s crotch to say hello.  Most of it had been
forgotten by then.  Whatever
was
remembered was only thought to be
legend and fairytale.”

They fell silent in contemplation.  That, by no means,
meant the room was quiet.  Shaw had finished making his rounds, talking to the
disparate men, examining each dog with the interest of a man holding his
newborn son for the first time.

Upon reaching the bar he lifted a four-inch hammer
meant for the purpose and rang a brass bell.  The peal cut cleanly through the
din.  Far from silencing the room, the bell elicited enthusiastic cheers from
the crowd, nobleman and chimneysweep alike.

“Two to the midnight bell,” Shaw called out.  The men
roared in appreciation.  “So it’s time, then!  Light up the pit!”

For the first time Marik noticed numerous ship’s lanterns
hanging from the rafters over the circular construction.  They would shine
their light in whichever direction the crew needed, no matter the foul
weather.  These had been set to shine straight down onto the whitewashed floor.

Two men quickly lit them until all nine made the ‘pit’
the brightest spot in the room.  Shaw strode to the narrow space between the
slat-board walls and the counter while both men vanished up the steps.

The crowd pressed together around the pit’s walls,
except for Shaw’s area which they accepted as off limits.  They were packed
tighter than Marik had ever seen.  Elbows were usually in a neighbor’s mouth
rather than pressed hard to their owner’s torso.  The spectacle enthralled him.

“Right then.  If you brought a fancy for a badger,
you’re out of luck tonight, I’m afraid,” Shaw announced.

Over the thick noise, a louder voice could be heard to
shout, “A piss on your badgers, Shaw!”

That brought a rolling wave of laughter.  Before the
good humor died, the dogs abruptly went wild, restrained only by their leashes
and owners’ hands.  The two men were reemerging down the steps.  Each carried a
large basket made from wire.  From the squealing, turbulent roil of furry
bodies within, Marik could see they were filled with rats.

“You gentlemen shut your fancies up!” Shaw roared.  It
was a fruitless effort.  No force in the world could quiet the dogs once they
caught scent of the rodents.  “Clean sport, gentlemen!  Every one swabbed out
from a country house.  No plaguers in the lot, ‘pon my honor.  Who wants to try
a rat?”

Several men in the crowd immediately replied.  Shaw
pointed to one, a man who looked like a clerk from the most prosperous counting
house in the capitol.  The vest was a dead giveaway, though he wore a long coat
over it that hung open.  After he forced his way through the tight knot with
his dog, a squat gray bulldog with more wrinkle than smooth to its face, Shaw
hoisted it onto the counter.  Apparently the odd device at the opposite end to
where Marik sat was a giant scale.

“Twenty-nine pounds,” Shaw called out.  When the
smaller man placed his mouth to the ex-fighter’s ear in order to be heard, Shaw
continued in his bellowing voice that overrode the crowd’s with apparent ease. 
“He’s called for twenty rats.  Let’s give it four minutes for the weight.  You
men all wager as you like.”

Shaw selected a miniature sandglass from a line of
various sizes.  The two men began pulling rats from the wire cages and dropping
them into the pit.  Marik leaned closer to his father.

“Are they crazy, grabbing rats bare-handed like that?”

“Have to,” Rail returned.  “Proves the rats really are
country-born.  Rats from the city usually have any disease you can put a name
to.  No man wants to risk his trained sporting dog to that.”

Marik could barely see into the pit through the narrow
gap between Shaw’s large form and the last man ringing the slat walls.  The
rats had gathered into a writhing ball in one corner.  Or as much a corner as a
circular arena could have.

At the bar, the dog’s owner was looking it in the eye,
baring his teeth and growling menacingly, shaking his head in all directions. 
The dog, getting further into the mood, growled and barked back.

Men leaned over the slat boards.  All manner of coins
were clutched in each fist.  When the man held his dog over the whitewashed
floor, the crowd started chanting, “Send in the wind!  Send in the wind!”  No
matter his social station, each man blew hard with their full lungs, making the
rats’ fur spike.  It agitated the vermin further.

“Go on then,” Shaw ordered.  He flipped his sandglass
over.

The owner dropped his dog into the pit.  He
immediately fell to his knees, his chin resting on the slats.  “Come on then,
Darko!  Go!  Go!  Grrrrr!  Go on, grab it!  Bite!  Grrrr!  Bite it!  Now drop
it!  It’s dead!  Get another, Darko!  Drop it and get another!  Grrr, Grrr!”

With the crowd fixated, Marik and Rail sat in their
side-corner in total privacy.  Marik forced his gaze from the ratting sport to
meet his father’s.

“Oh yes,” Rail said knowingly, reading the unspoken
question in his son’s eyes.  “As good as the tale is for sitting around a
hearth, what does any of it have to do with us?”

Marik nodded.

Rail answered while the crowd’s excited shouts
enveloped them.  “What do you think happened to that statue after that, eh?  It
was the catch-all to the entire war.  With their power gone, the priests in
their green robes were hunted down like you wouldn’t believe.  The leader of
the opposing armies had the temple’s ruins torn apart.  They recovered a good portion
of the obsidian fragments that were left, but not enough to completely reform a
statue as large as that bugger was.  Where the rest went, no one can say.

“But those obsidian chunks are the meat of the
problem.  Red says anything touched by a god is forever afterward marked by
that contact.  I don’t see how he could possibly know that for a hard line,
since as far as I know the only object any god ever touched with his naked
hands is that blasted statue.  It seems true enough to make no difference, though.”

“Forever afterward,” Marik echoed.  “Is that what
you’ve been doing?  Looking for pieces of it?  That doesn’t seem likely.”

“That’s because that’s not what we’ve been doing. 
Red’s made a crusade of hunting down pieces of the Earth God’s statue, because
when they crop up like a stone long buried in a farmer’s field, they tend to be
a nuisance.”

“A big stone can break a plow blade.”

“Yeah.  And a black obsidian chunk can cause all sorts
of nasties, depending on who finds it.  Red’s pretty cheeky when you ask him
how many times before he’s tracked down pieces of it.  My guess is he’s been at
it a long time.  I have a suspicion why, but he won’t say yea or nay on that
score.”

When Rail stopped there, Marik knew this was a point
he would not elaborate on.  “So this man, whoever you were chasing…he found a
piece of obsidian.”

“That’s the size of it.  And before you ask, I’ll tell
you that no, there’s no chance he’s an innocent little lamb who doesn’t realize
what he’s got.  Whatever lingering malice is imbedded in the stone has been
changing him.  I found…”  Rail trailed off, debating how much he should say. 
“Let’s say I’ve found people he’d done things to.  Things that make you have to
look twice before you could be certain they
were
people.  Or had been.”

“The shepherd family you mentioned?”  Rail offered no
comment.  Musing aloud while his thoughts did cartwheels, he saw the most
likely truth.  “So, he’s practicing as a harvester, then.  Walking the blood
paths.  Gathering etheric energy by torturing and killing people.  Probably
that’s what those green-robed priests were doing in the first place back then,
too.”

Rail’s hand grasped Marik’s wrist firmly.  It yanked
his thoughts back to the present.  His father kept silent, eyes closed.  Marik
had no idea what was happening…then felt that slight tingle in his spine as he
had before.  He could see no mage workings being performed, see no disturbances
in the purple mists of the mass diffusion, but clearly a mage utilized his
talent nearby.

Sighing so audibly that Marik caught it over the
crowd’s noise, Rail released his wrist from the iron band his own hand had
become.  “I was afraid of that.”  The exhaustion and weariness returned.  It
weighed his entire body down.  “The second I saw you lifting my sword, I suspected. 
As soon as I recognized you, I was damn near certain.  How long ago did your
talent manifest?”

Marik, not entirely surprised, nevertheless felt
amazed that his father must also plainly possess the same curse of mage talent
that had been laid on him.  While he groped for the words to convey the awful
truth about his nature, the crowd’s voice united in a new chant.

“Twister!  Twister!”

Through the narrow gap Marik could see the bulldog,
Darko.  It hopped wildly into the air, trying to shake off the rat that had
bitten into its fleshy face.  The rat fought back, maintaining its desperate
hold, refusing to be thrown, twisting in every direction from the dog’s
gyrations.

Every man in the crowd cheered at such delightful
blood sport.

Marik finally found his tongue when Shaw called time. 
Several men in the crowd groaned along with Darko’s owner.  Four rats were
still alive, which the two men deftly scooped back into the cages before the
dog could slaughter them after the fact.  Coins in various denominations
changed hands.

When Marik reached the end of retelling his latest
near-death encounter, Rail raised both eyebrows and pursed his lips in a show
of being impressed.  “Sounds like Harbon, if your reckoning is spot on.  He’s
no one-trick wonder, that one.”

“Who is that?  Not the one you were chasing!”

“No.  There’d be nothing left of you if it had been
Xenos behind the punches.  He’s the blackest dog in the hells’ hunting pack,
and no mistake there!  Except even Vernilock wouldn’t touch
that
bastard, even to damn his soul for all eternity.”

“Then tell me who you were talking about.”

“Red’s been tracking Xenos for a long time.  Too
copping long, if you ask me.  We should have taken care of his ass a long time
ago.  Red likes to know whatever he can before he makes his move, though.  It’s
no secret around Arronath that Harbon, and his buddy Mendell, were shuffled
into the army ranks by Xenos.  They’re a pair of cringing toadies if I’ve ever
seen any at all.”

Marik started to ask how this man Xenos could have managed
such a feat, had opened his mouth to do so, when he realized Rail had
deliberately shifted the topic.  “You skipped over mentioning any detail about
how you knew I had mage talent.”

Rail propped his head on one hand.  He caught Dryden’s
attention when the barman pulled a steaming hot fire-poker from a fresh gin
cask.  Dryden filled several glasses at once, depositing one in front of Rail
before distributing seven others in fewer than half as many steps.

“You know damned well the only way I could have
known.  You’re lucky enough that your talent is awake.  If it were still
dormant, then we’d have a skunk to look out for.”

“Lucky?”  An incredulous laugh escaped Marik.  “I’ve
never once thought of myself as lucky for having…
this
!”

“Luck is what you make of it, lad.  If you had mage
talent locked away inside you, talent that was dozing and had never awakened on
its own, then we’d have to make damn certain you got away from Red before he
sunk his hooks into you.  He’d tell you it was your own choice, string you
along like a fat trout until he’d shown you just enough to make sure you
reached the decision he wanted you to make.  Then you might as well be shackled
for a murderer as a second-story man.”

“What did he do to you?  A sort of…magical
compulsion?  What?”

Rail snorted.  “Nothing so easy to get around as
that.  Worse.  He makes it
your
business.  Takes things you had nothing
to do with and makes sure you see that they damned well
could
become
your business!”  He sipped his fresh glass.  “And this isn’t your bleeding
business, Marik.  You stay well clear of it.  You don’t need chains wrapped
around your heart all of your own making.  Troubles enough in the world without
forging new ones.”

“From the sound of it, I don’t have much to worry
about on that front.  I can’t imagine what it has to do with anything, but I
didn’t think dormant talents could be forced open.  They either awaken on their
own naturally, depending on the person, or they need a catalyst to trigger
them.  In my case it was either wrestle the bull out of the pen or turn to
ashes.”  He glanced sideways at his father.  “Did he use a kind of catalyst to
force your talent to wake up?”