Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) (52 page)

A horrible metallic shriek sounded behind him, and he turned to find the
sun had somehow come to hover directly atop the mound. Flinging up an
arm against the brilliance, he reeled away from it, as if it had struck him a
physical blow.

“The Heart!” someone cried. “He has awakened the Heart!”

Abramm had one startled moment of understanding, followed by a new
eruption of the poison in his body, and that was the last he saw.

The old Terstan’s hand bit into Abramm’s skinny arm, jerking him
around. Though he was crippled and bent almost double, he still loomed over
Abramm, blind eyes fixed upon him with unnerving accuracy. His gold shield
glimmered on his chest, and the curd of an advanced case of the sarotis oozed
over his lids and dribbled down seamed cheeks. He bent closer, shoving his
face into Abramm’s, the curd quivering, the sickly sweet stench of it making
Abramm gag. `Answer me, boy?” he rasped.

But Abramm yelled and twisted free—

And found himself in a sandy arena, bathed in a white spotlight amidst a
darkness filled with whispers. Zamath stepped out of the shadow before him,
the red light of his amulet glinting off the sword in his hand. He cackled and
bared his pointed teeth as he approached.

Abramm drew his own sword and dropped to ready position, eager to
fight and confident of victory. But then Zamath turned into Beltha’adi, who
laughed and mocked him. “You think that mark will save you? Fool? It has
already killed you?”

Startled, Abramm looked down to find a gold shieldmark shining on his
own chest, then blinked at the sudden obstruction in his eye. White curd
plopped onto his hand, and when he felt, trembling, at his face, he found his
eyes billowing with a wet, sticky, globular goo.

Beltha’adi laughed again and, Commanding him to immobility with a
deep bellow, attacked. His sword flashed up through the darkness, then
changed to an ax as it came down, chopping deep into Abramm’s arm.

He awoke, gasping and shaking and sick to his stomach. Frantically he felt
for his arm, found it whole and hale, though the scar at his wrist throbbed
with a vengeance. Nor did he wear a Terstan’s shield. It was only another
dream.

He thought he’d had a lot of them recently, but he didn’t remember waking up between them. Certainly he didn’t remember waking up here.

He lay on a straw-filled pallet in a windowless chamber, clad only in soft
cotton britches, his chest and feet bare beneath a scratchy woolen blanket.
An oil lamp sputtered atop a low table near the pallet; its ruddy light danced
off plastered walls and the pale folds of a curtained doorway beyond his feet.
From outside came a metallic clinking and the murmur of voices. From an
even greater distance, goats maaaed.

Where am I?

Besides his wrist, his head and ribs ached, but he had no other pains,
though he thought he should.

Frowning at the plastered ceiling, he groped past the dream images for
real memories-the veren’s death, the Dorsaddi’s mass conversion, the rising
of the Heart….

Had that really happened?

He touched his temple, as if he might physically pull the memories from
the fog in which they hid. He had been wounded, covered with poison, and
the poison had made him sick. He remembered that. But there was something more. Something important, something even more disturbing and
frightening.

The pulse of his blood throbbed in his ears as he lay staring at the mosaic
of cracks and watermarks above him. Then, hesitantly this time, his hand slid
again over the flat plane of his belly, across his chest, up to his throat. There
was no chain, no magical stone. He really had thrown it away. After nearly
making himself a Terstan.

Nausea swirled through him as his fingers went back to the hard flat bone
over his heart, assuring himself once more that no golden shield lay there,
assuring himself he really had escaped its power. But Khrell’s Fire? He had
come so very close.

He closed his eyes, shuddering with relief. No wonder he’d had that awful
dream.

The door curtain stirred, and a boy stuck his head into the room, lamp light gleaming off the shieldmark on his chest. Even one so young as that
could be changed! The boy blinked at him with dark, hard eyes whose inscrutability reminded him painfully of Shettai. Then he was gone, the curtains
swaying in his wake.

Shettai. That last look on her face, of wonder and joy. “It is so beautiful….”

And she, too, wore a shield.

He thought he knew, at least in part, what she had seen. And it was beautiful. And, saints help him, in spite of everything, in spite of all he knew and
all he’d seen, part of him still wanted it.

“I have fallen to deception once already,” he whispered to the ceiling.
“How can I even think of doing it again?”

Because it may not be deception this time, a quiet voice in his mind
responded.

For a moment he could not breathe, feeling poised at the brink of a terrible epiphany. It can’t be that easy. It can’t.

What if it is?

He swallowed. What of the sarotis? You can’t forget that. The dream of the
old man had held more of reality than imagination. He had met that horrid
crone, had been caught by him, threatened by him, had seen that awful,
stinking curd. Nor was the man the only one affected. How could Eidon be in
anything that causes such wretchedness and suffering?

Trap does not have the sarotis, said the quiet mental voice.

Not yet. But it is only a matter of time.

Perhaps. But how do you explain the rest of it, then? The protection? The
penetration of the Shadow’s illusions? The shield and the healing?

Deception! All deception. It had to be.

His headache was growing worse, aggravated by the shifting kaleidoscope
of his thoughts. He wanted to reach in and wrestle them to order, to demand
they make sense of themselves, but the demanding only made his head hurt
more.

He shut his eyes and gave up. Later, he told himself. When he was clearheaded it would make sense.

It was some time before he opened his eyes again and sat up. The room
spun. Crossing his legs before him, he propped his elbows on his thighs, holding his head in his palms. His mouth tasted horrible, and he felt dirty and sticky. He speared fingers through his hair. Thick and oily, it hung past his
shoulders in a tangled mass that would be a nightmare to comb. And this
well-grown stubble on his jaw … How long had he been asleep?

Ah, so you’re finally back.” A Dorsaddi youth entered carrying a tray of
flatbread and tea. And just in time, too.”

He set the tray on the table beside Abramm’s pallet, then rocked back on
his heels, waving at the food. “I’ll wager you’re starving.”

For the first time Abramm realized he was indeed. His stomach burbled
as if on cue, and he frowned, still fingering the stubble. “How long was I out?”

“Four days. The fever broke last night.”

“Four days?”

The other nodded. “In an hour, if you keep this down, you can have
more.”

“Four days,” Abramm muttered again. A lot could happen in four days.
Especially after … “What did you mean `just in time’?” He reached for the
flatbread.

The youth’s chest swelled and Abramm noticed then how the slitted
neckline of his tunic had been deepened and the flaps sewn back to reveal his
Terstan shield. “With the Heart awakened,” he said, “we mean to retake Jarnek and drive out the Army of the Black Moon?” He bowed. “I will tell the
Deliverer you have awakened.”

Alone again, Abramm crunched the hard bread, sluicing away its dryness
with sips of tea as he thought. So that was the Heart, then. It really had
happened. He pushed the memory away, shivering. And Jarnek? That was
the northernmost Dorsaddi city on the main road through Hur, first to fall in
the original conquest. The place Beltha’adi had sent those two Hundreds in
preparation for his final invasion.

The Hundreds should have arrived nearly a week ago. Could the Dorsaddi
possibly have held them back this long? And what did the awakening of the
Heart have to do with it? Was it just a morale booster, or was it more?

He found a pale robe hanging on a peg beside the pallet and shrugged it
on, then slipped through the curtained doorway. A short, vaulted corridor led
to a spacious chamber plastered in a salmon hue and carpeted with an ancient
Sorite rug. It was, Abramm realized at once, one of those rugs rarely seen
anymore, woven with thread of gold and sturdy wool dyed with the rich carnelian that was derived solely from a worm native to Sori. A worm said to have gone extinct at least a century ago.

Low benches scattered the room beneath ornate hanging oil lamps, and
one whole wall was an arcade of arched openings hung with wind chimes and
sculptures of colored glass, glowing in the light of the sun outside.

Yes. The sun.

Abramm strode to the window in astonishment and stared at the valley
that cradled ruined Hur. Blue sky arced in a glorious vault overhead; sunlight
washed over the red-and-ochre cliffs encircling the city, bathing the gold-andsalmon stone of its broken buildings and reflecting off the pale pavement of
its great plaza. The great orb stood above it all, blazing on its stanchions, a
miniature sun in itself. Even from here it caught at him, its power singing
through his soul, reminding him, inviting him—

He looked away, aghast that he could be so vulnerable, even without the
stone on his breast. Truly he had worn it too long.

A herd of goats browsed along the near edge of the promenade that
stretched away in front of him. Chickens scratched at weeds that had grown
inexplicably green and vigorous. The vines along the walls, no more than
thick bare stems last time he had seen them, now wore a mantle of vigorous,
bright green growth, and the olive trees lining the promenade sported dense
crowns of shiny new leaves. Birds chattered and fluttered in their branches.

“The spawn have all left,” came a low, familiar voice from behind him.
He turned as Trap stepped up to join him.

The Terstan was dressed in white-britches, tunic, and robe, the latter
stitched with gold-and-green olive branches along its front edges. The tunic’s
neckline, of course, was slit and stitched to deliberately reveal his shield. His
red hair was tied back in a warrior’s knot, and his half-grown beard was
already showing its curl.

Meridon did not look at him, his gaze on the view outside. “It rained all
night and through the first morning after we came,” he added. “Been clear
ever since.”

Abramm let his eyes be pulled back to that wonderful light outside, to
the sharp lines and angles, the brilliant colors. “I thought the rainy season
lasted a couple of weeks.”

“It does. It’s still some days off, in fact. This is the result of the Heart’s
aura, warding away the Shadow. I’m told it extends some three leagues in
every direction.”

Below them, the goats moved from clump to clump, their coats fancifully
patterned in brown, black, and brilliant white. One of them wore a bell,
which tinkled as it moved.

“I had forgotten how it was,” Abramm murmured. “The trees look so
green. And these rocks are almost red.” Even the patchwork patterns of the
goats’ hides seemed alive and vibrant.

The Heart, blazing on its straightened stanchions, snagged his gaze again,
stirring those dangerous longings. Truly, I am enspelled, he thought grimly,
forcing his eyes away and his thoughts to other subjects. “The young man
who woke me said something about attacking Jarnek?”

Trap nodded. “Shemm means to leave tomorrow, so we can strike just
before the rains.”

“I thought the rains stopped all chance of fighting.”

“They do. If we can take Jarnek before they start, Beltha’adi won’t be able
to launch a counterstrike until they’re over. By which time we should be well
dug in.”

Abramm cocked a questioning brow at him. “We?”

The Terstan grimaced. “Well, I have been rather involved in the planning.”

`And hope for no less in the plan’s execution, I’ll wager.”

“My first duty lies with you, my lord.”

Abramm blinked, not understanding what he meant at first. “You mean
your oath to Raynen?” He huffed and shook his head. “I think we’re way
beyond that, Trap.”

Meridon stared stubbornly out the window. ‘An oath is an oath. And even
the White Pretender needs someone to cover his back.” The dark eyes came
around to fix upon his.

“I’m not the White Pretender anymore,” Abramm said with a scowl.

“You are in the minds of the Dorsaddi. And in the mind of Beltha’adi,
too, I’d guess.”

He had a point. So here it was-another choice. Another opportunity to
step deeper into the affairs of these people who were not his own. His presence as the White Pretender would undoubtedly provide some motivation to
them, even if he hadn’t turned out to be the Deliverer. And he would surely
unnerve the opposition, seeing as he was supposedly dead.