Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (56 page)

“You aren’t proceeding anywhere at present,” Dietrik
observed.  “You are standing like a willful child in the rain, ignoring your
mother’s advice.  Were you waiting for me?”

Rain cascaded in smooth sheets over the right side of
that amused face.  On the left, it roiled over the red patches in a whitewater
torrent.  “Here I stand on the watch for a man with whom I have business.  Yet
it is regretful that I reveal that man not to be you.”

“A man you have business with.”  At the words, Dietrik
heard Marik speaking in his memory, relating the conversation he’d had with
Rail in the Queen’s Head.  “Hold up a moment!  There’s only one chap the likes
of you has business with!  You know what happened at the Citadel, don’t you? 
He was there, wasn’t he?  That man you have been chasing with Marik’s father! 
Rail said the fellow might be heading our way.”

“An astute mind.  I take your words to imply that you
were present at the fall of the Arronathian Citadel, or have knowledge of it. 
Your actions were well planned, destroying the gift of Humus by the only means
through which you had the power to accomplish your ends.”

“So, I am right.”  Dietrik stared at the stranger
without blinking despite the water running into his eyes.  “The destruction of
the overlook doesn’t make any sense, unless someone wanted to stop the mages
from destroying the Citadel by killing them all first.  Marik said he doubted
any magic users would be free to find them, let along throw out a
counterstrike.  They would all be too busy fighting to keep the place from
flipping over.”

“An accurate assessment, excepting for the presence of
one Xenos.”

“He
was
there!  Damn, but we never figured on
that…”

“A troublesome one, is he.  And never one to act as
others predict.”

“Wait.  You
know
he was there?  You are
absolutely certain?”

The Red Man traced his garish wound with a gloved
finger.  “What lays before your eyes is the result of his power.  A rear strike
I attempted when presented with the opportunity.  The man who once was Xenos
bent his concentration on a cliff-side.  Irregardless of my presence unknown,
he survived to unfetter power beyond that of ordinary men upon my person.”

The words were meaningless.  Only the fact that Marik
had run smack into the mysterious figure who, by all accounts, sounded like a
Devil unleashed on the world, held him captive.

“Marik survived, right?  If you were watching, then
you must know!  How many survived the collapse of the overlook?”

“It is not for me to say.  My priorities were
elsewhere during the trial of your friend.”

“Damn you for an ill omen, then!” Dietrik shouted with
heated anger.  “I do not care who you might be, or what ends you work toward,
but it seems to me whenever you are mentioned in connection with anything, it’s
a foul wind that blows.  A jewel-eyed man who only causes trouble in the lives
of me and my mates!”

“Calm your spirit, friend of Marik Railson,” the Red
Man soothingly intoned when Dietrik harshly grabbed the saddle horn.  “My
business has never been with you or yours.”

“That sounds an excellent reason to shove off now. 
You have caused us quite enough trouble to be going on with
without
taking an active hand in our affairs.”

“You wish to know tidings of your friend.”  The Red
Man stepped lightly through the rain, his slight movements unnerving Dietrik. 
It almost looked as if he slid around each falling drop rather than budging on
through them.  At his leg, which searched blindly for the stirrup, the stranger
stopped to gaze at him.  Up close, the damaged flesh looked far stranger than a
simple burn.  “I, too, am interested in his wellbeing.  My
kkan’edom
labors
mightily in our efforts.  Sad tidings concerning his offspring would a heavier
burden make.”

Dietrik looked into those otherworldly eyes.  He felt
compelled to say, without truly understanding the meaning, “If you were looking
for a negative counterbalance, you had best keep searching.  Marik does not die
even when you kill him.”

“That would be an outcome most suited to my desires. 
Therefore, let us ask the universe how fares he.”

Before Dietrik knew what the other was doing, the
gloved hand reached upward.  He jerked, thinking the stranger meant to grab him
by his tunic and pull him from his seat.

Instead, the deep red glove closed in a gentle fist
several inches from his chest.  The Red Man withdrew his hand without opening
it, as if imprisoning a flying insect he had plucked away in mid-flight.

“Pay heed unto my hands, friend of Marik Railson.  An
answer comes forthwith.”

Dietrik watched the stranger clasp both hands
together.  They drew apart until thumb tip touched thumb tip, and the other
fingers matched the action.  Rather than a circle, his fingers formed a
triangle.

The satin coat’s hem abruptly vanished from its
framing within the Red Man’s fingers.  In its place, a swirling rainbow spun
inside the triangle, the colors luminescent, mother-of-pearl, oily refractions,
and hues for which Dietrik’s mind could generate no description.  None were
simple.  All were strangely beautiful.

After a moment the colors began separating from one
another.  Dietrik looked into the Red Man’s hands as if into an artist’s pot
where various paints, each poured into the same vessel, were disassociating
themselves from each other.  Many colors slid sideways, up against the
stranger’s hands, vanishing from view.  It uncannily looked like they were
absorbed by the gloves.

“Barking!” Dietrik exclaimed a moment later.  “I see
him!”

“I concur.  That indeed is the man born of my
kkan’edom
.”

“How did you do that?  Where is he?”

“Relatively near,” the Red Man answered, avoiding the
first half of Dietrik’s question.  “I will perform adjustments.”

Dietrik’s eyes were glued to the scene cradled in
those gloved hands.  He could see Marik on a mountain trail devoid of
vegetation.  Marik walked between a woman he recognized as the insatiably
cheerful Caresse, and a man unfamiliar to him.  The rain pelted the three as
mercilessly as it did Dietrik and the red stranger.

Abruptly the view wobbled, though the Red Man’s hands
remained rock-still.  Marik and the others sank rapidly, too fast for Dietrik
to count the new figures shooting downward, or identify them.  Mountain walls
and peaks crowded out the tiny forms.  The bird’s eye view zigzagged violently
across the Stoneseams.

“Hold up, there!  You’ve lost them!”

“Most intriguing,” the Red Man murmured with a growing
smile.  “Quite astonishing, in the least.  Is it…  Of certainty.  There is no
doubt, but it
is
the old
Tuuwathae’korsa
.  That it still
exists…astounding.”

“Too-wath-aye-ee what?  Speak sensibly, chap!”

“An ancient road, constructed and walked in times
before came Galemar or Tullainia,” came the reply.  The view in his fingers had
halted with the Stoneseams filling the triangle’s right half.  “In the days
when the council of kings decided the matters of Merinor, and the greatest
mages of the day were lords beside their noble counterparts.  The
Tuuwathae’korsa
long ago fell from the memory of man, even in the lands through which it
wound.  Time has robbed it of form and purpose.  See where it has degenerated
mightily, today less than a mountain pathway.”

Dietrik shifted his gaze back, seeing Marik and the
man behind filling the triangle as before.  Marik’s hand trailed along the wall
to his left.  To his right descended a steep, boulder-strewn slope.

“If that was a road across the mountains, I would have
willingly spent and extra eightday riding around the northern range.”

“Erosion and neglect have played their hands most
patiently,” the Red Man explained.  “Where once a vital road unwound, what
remains only is a narrow path, without question broken and fragmented in places
uncountable.”

“Is that so?  How do you know about it in the first
place?”

The Red Man pulled his fingers apart.  For a brief
instant, the colors hovered in the air.  Then the pelting rain destroyed
Marik’s image.  Each drop took on a different color when it plunged through,
carrying away the oddest scrye Dietrik had ever heard tell of.

“You seek your friend.  With care, you will arrive at
the
Tuuwathae’korsa
before the setting sun.  Barring vagaries of life or
man, Marik Railson will arrive no later than you.”

Dietrik blinked.  This man was a far greater mystery
than he ever could have guessed in spite of all he had heard about him over the
years.  He felt an indescribable air surrounding the figure clad in red.  A
sense of knowledge fantastic.  Of immutable time moving from day to day.  As if
the man were as much a part of the world as the mountains or the sea.

He listened to the Red Man, understanding that the
directions to reach this ancient roadway would be the last words during this
encounter.  Other questions would remain unanswered.  And that was fine.

It should not be, he knew.  Yet he understood that the
stranger simply would say nothing further.  For some reason, the Red Man’s
decision seemed the right way to go about it.  He could sense the man’s
strength of will, and he, Dietrik, had no desire to challenge it.  Which was
fine.

Marik was alive.  That was all that mattered.  The
damned fool was running about without a proper brain in his head and needed
looking after.  This man, this bizarre apparition in the pouring rain, mattered
for nothing in the face of that.

The moment the last instruction left the red wraith’s
lips, Dietrik chivied his horse into a trot without a single word of gratitude
or a look back.  It was all…fine.

*        *        *        *        *

The Red Man watched the form of Marik Railson’s friend
dissolve into the rain.  Regret filled him that he had been forced to tamper,
however lightly, with the man’s free will.  Yet the man could not be allowed to
linger.  It was too bad that such meddling left the mind easier prey for
further outside manipulation, but the ward he had set in place might, in some
small measure, recompense for it.

He returned to where he had stood when Marik Railson’s
friend first approached.  In fewer than a hundred heartbeats, two new forms
coalesced from the day’s grayness.

They froze the instant they sensed him, wary predators
realizing they might have become prey.  The left man deduced that their
presence was known and drew his sword quickly.

“On this dreary day, I humbly await those with whom I
share similar goals.”

Neither broke the silence for several moments.  The
Red Man waited until the man with the drawn blade advanced cautiously.  “This
is a pooch.  I wasn’t expecting no one to be standing out where anyone could
see.”

*        *        *        *        *

Jide waited to see how the man would reply.  He had no
idea what was going on, but the cat who landed on its feet was the first to
reach the food bowl.  Whatever black market dealing they had stumbled into, it
would be best to act like they were fully informed, knew what to expect and had
come expressly to buy what this stranger wanted to sell.  Or to sell what he
wanted to buy.  Men neither waited in the rain nor greeted strangers with
cryptic code phrases like that just for a lark.

He and Adrian could hardly afford arrows in the back
from common thugs before they managed to sneak into the supply camp in the
pass.

“To intercept men on your course, it would be
inadvisable to stand elsewhere.”

Jide frowned.  He felt Adrian moving a step closer. 
Before the general could say the wrong thing, he hastily said, “Listen,
laddie.  We haven’t been pissed on by the gods and their entire rotten heavenly
host all morning for a logistics lecture!”

“Indeed not, spymaster.  I would conclude you have
endured the wrath of nature on the prayer to uncover a core of truth.  For the
truth has always been of superior significance to Adrian Ceylon than power and
its wielding.”

Jide’s knuckles whitened on the sword hilt.  Bad
enough that this stranger in the rain knew who Adrian was...

Beware, there be Danger here.

His teeth ground as the old underworld gag/maxim
flashed through his mind.  No one had ever referred to him as
spymaster
before.  Adrian only called him that as a joke, and a rather feeble one at
that.

Adrian addressed the man clad in red.  “I would know
who speaks to me so, when they have the advantage of me.”

“Man called Adrian Ceylon, my name is rarely spoken by
your tongue.  Those who I treat with suffice to call me Red.  I have long grown
to accept the simplicity of it.”

“You speak as one apart from us,” Adrian replied.  He
kept his voice neutral, though his back straightened from abrupt apprehension. 
“Am I to assume you are a counterpart of Humus?”

A laugh escaped the man styling himself Red.  “A
nimbler mind than most, Adrian Ceylon!  Yet I can lay no claim to being a lord
of the elemental spirits.  Neither Humus, nor Ventosus, nor Fontis, nor Ignis,
nor Navitas.  I am flesh.”