Perilous Travels (The Southern Continent Series Book 2) (30 page)

The aim was true, and Grange saw that he was going to spur the sword blade just above Monton’s shoulder, immediately next to the man’s neck, at an angle that should surely find and harm some portion of the demon that protruded – unseen because of the hat and hood – from the back of Monton’s head.

The demon saw its approaching death, as the sword point glistened with its embossed blue color, the weapon seeming to be aware of its own forthcoming success.

The demon wrenched Monton’s body upward with a speed and agility beyond normal human capability.  The body reacted to the command, and where Grange’s sword aimed, the open air next to the neck, was suddenly filled with the chest of Monton’s torso.

It happened too quickly for Grange to stop, and his sword pierced the base of Monton’s throat, cutting into his body, striking below the demon’s perch, and thrusting through and then out the back of the unfortunate animal tender, without touching the demon.

There was still an element of energy left in the body, even as it prepared to die.  The demon again imposed its will on the doomed muscles of the man, and made the body shove mightily against Grange, who stood nearly face-to-face with his victim.  Grange went flying backwards from the force of the superhuman push, and landed on his back.

Monton collapsed slowly to the ground.  But as he did, the demon that had possessed him rose up from the back of his skull, and stood in brooding darkness atop the dead body, looking at Grange.

“Killing him does not kill me – it merely makes you a murderer,” the demon rasped.  Its filmy arm reached down, then astonished Grange by physically grasping the knife that was tucked into Monton’s belt, and lifting the weapon threateningly.

“How can you hold that?” Grange gasped the question, as he sat upright, his body aching from the effort.  The wounds of the battle, coming on top of the injuries imposed by the lion two nights before, felt like a heavy weight on him.

“I am a prince among the demons, a power among my race and a power in your world as well, and once I slay you, the great father of darkness will reward me with more power, and more minions to control, giving me more souls to destroy and capture and torment,” the ill-formed dark shape rasped as he stalked towards Grange.

“But what if you die?” Grange asked.  His right hand was empty, Brielle’s knife having been thrown from it, but the blue sword with Ariana, the sword that had been blessed by the goddess Miriam – given the strength to kill demons – still gleamed with its blue sheen in his left hand.

Grange rose to his feet, and as the demon engaged in battle, Grange threw caution to the wind and stabbed straight at the demon, heedless of the dangerous exposure his own body provided to the monster’s weapon.

Grange’s blue blade struck the shadowy figure, and as it did, there were sparks at the entry point, and a feeling of subtle resistance, while the blade slid into the demon and penetrated it in full.  At the same time, the demon’s’ own blade pierced Grange’s arm, slicing through his now-defenseless black clothing from Rigan, inflicting pain and harm, and making him release his grasp on his sword.

The demon gave a loud billow of incomprehensible pain, and staggered back.  It glared at Grange momentarily.  “This has only begun, and you’re too crippled to matter now,” it hissed, just before it dissolved in a wisp of smoke that blew away.

As soon as the demon was gone, Grange fell to his knees.  There was a flash of light, and a plucking feeling on his forearm, where the last of the jewels had remained.  The bodies of five women suddenly materialized, lying all around him, each of them looking pale and in pain, Brielle and Ariana and Rigan all showing signs of grievous wounds, the other two profoundly unconscious.

“You’re a survivor, Grange,” Ariana said faintly.  Grange felt tears well up in his eyes, and he reached down with his good arm to grasp one of her hands in his.

“What can I do to help all of you?” he asked.  “We’re going to get better and get out of here,” he told her, as they lay in the midst of the empty mining camp.

“We won’t get better.  The demon used your wand to destroy us; the power that binds our essence together is crumbling away, and in a few moments we’ll revert to the elements we once were.  This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she murmured.  Her eyes were clear as she looked at him.

“We were supposed to be with you for the whole campaign, my friend.  I’m so sorry to abandon you now like this, but at least you are still alive.  Now listen,” she started to say.

“But you’re so strong!  This can’t happen to you,” Grange pleaded.

“We can’t be destroyed; we’re similar to the demons in that way.  We simply are going to return to the nature we came from, and at some future date, perhaps the gods and the fates will pull our energies together and reconstitute us.  But don’t you worry about us now,” Ariana squeezed his hand.

“You are now the one who has to carry out the mission we were supposed to share with you.  You have to help the gods; they’ve made their two choices – the mortal and the immortal who will fight to preserve the light and the life – you are the mortal, and hopefully you’ll meet the immortal soon.  You must go across the land to Southgar,” she insisted.

“Then what?  How far is it?” Grange asked.

“It is a long and perilous journey.  The demon not only used your wand to destroy us, but it also disabled you as well, more critically – you’ll not be able to recover your ability to control the power until a god grants you a boon, or until something extraordinary happens,” Ariana said.  “And I’m sure that will happen in Southgar or beyond, but until then, be careful in your journey east.  It is long and dangerous.”

She closed her eyes and winced in pain.

“Ariana?  How can I help you?” Grange asked.

There was a sudden popping noise, and the body of the woman who had been the white jewel, a woman Grange had never really known or interacted with, suddenly disappeared.  As Grange stared at the spot where a small cloud of mist was dissipating, Rigan also metamorphosed into a cloud.

Ariana opened her eyes.

“Kiss me Grange,” she said.

He bent down, trembling and looked into her cloudy eyes.  For a moment the cloudiness disappeared, and they were the shining, jewel-blue eyes he had known and loved.  Their lips touched, and he felt tears welling in his eyes, as he felt how cool her lips were, while life drained away from her flesh.  There was the sound of another one of the jeweled personifications evaporating somewhere nearby.

“Be careful dear, and beware of the water in the springs; you’ll have to drink them, but you’ll suffer.  It’s unfair, but life isn’t always fair, I guess it’s fair to say,” she smiled weakly.  “Then eventually, you’ll be yourself again, or something close to.”

“And most importantly, please follow your heart, when all of this is over,” she told him.

“Ariana,” he said, then gasped, as she too dissipated into a wispy cloud of nothingness, and disappeared.

Chapter 22

Grange knelt in the middle of the empty camp, at last alone with only the dead body of Monton.  The sun was already setting, he was startled to see – the battle with the demon had lasted longer than he realized.  He was feeling cold, there were virtually no supplies at hand, he was wounded and in pain.

He called upon the power to bring an envelope of warmth around him.

There was no response to his murmured request.  He saw no glow of power, felt no energy begin to protect him from the chill.  The meaning of Ariana’s final warning struck him fully, as he grasped what she had meant.  The demon had not only killed the jewels, but it had destroyed his own ability as well.  It had wrought the death and destruction using his own wand against him.  It was his own fault.  Grace had warned him not to use the wand, not to restore power to it until he had visited Brieed once again, so that the master wizard could teach him to implant controls on the amulet.  But Grange had ignored the advice, refilled the energy in the powerful tool, and now the jewels were dead, and he was stranded in the wilderness.

He gingerly approached Monton’s dead body.  Grange had killed the man; it had perhaps been necessary.  The demon had cared not at all about Monton’s fate, and so the man had probably been doomed to die from whatever moment the demon lord had seized control of him.  But Grange has directed the blade that had committed the fatal act.

Now Monton was dead, and the demon was banished, while Grange was stranded and powerless in the near-arctic wilderness.  Casting aside his misgivings, Grange removed Monton’s pack from the dead body, and opened it, searching for supplies that might be useful.  The camp was growing darker, too dark to really see what was in the pack, but Grange was certain that he had found a piece of dried meat, and he carried it in one hand as he walked to the entrance to the mine.

He took a deep breath.  The interior of the mine would be his best potential protection against the nighttime chill that was descending upon the camp, but he dreaded the thought of entering the mine once again, especially if his powers were no longer functioning.  He tried again to call upon the energy to provide light, but no power coalesced, no light glowed.

Grange had no appetite.  He dropped the chunk of meat back into the pack, then resolutely walked into the mine.   He took the first step, then the second, then the next and the next.  The pressure of the wind dissipated, and then the chill slowly released its grip on him as he walked further into the mine.

When he thought he had gone as far as he dared to go, he stopped and put down Monton’s pack, then he unslung his own pack, and put his knife down as well, before sitting down with his sword in his hand.  He was exhausted, and he was in pain, both physically and spiritually.  The loss of Ariana and the other jewels, was devastating.  He had kept an idealized vision of Ariana alive – Ariana the girl who had accompanied him as a virtually intimate partner during his long journey towards Palmland.  She had taken him and trained him, given him confidence, shown him affection, and even after her time as a human ended, she had been the spirit in his sword, making it lighter and faster than nature intended.

He felt an ache in his heart over the loss of all the jewels.  And he also felt aches all over his body.  The attack by the lion, and the wounds from the battle with the demon in Monton, on top of the strain of climbing up and down the mountain, made every muscle ache.  Yet despite the pain, despite the anguish, despite the sense of loss and loneliness and the fear, Grange fell asleep in a matter of minutes.

When he awoke, he could clearly see the sunlight that was visible out of the not-too-distant tunnel entrance, and he could clearly see that nothing had attacked or harmed him during the night.  He gingerly picked up his belongings and limped to the front of the mine, then crouched down in the brighter light, and repacked the belongings from the two packs into one pack, keeping the most useful items and discarding the rest.  He paused when he was finished, and looked outward.  Monton’s body lay where it had fallen during the battle the day before.  He had to do something respectful towards the body he knew.

Grange moved the body to a nearby flat section of ground, and hauled a variety of stones to cover it in a primitive cairn that he thought would protect it from whatever scavengers inhabited the desolate land.  His work was slowed by his injured legs and arms, so that he only finished at midday, and finally had to face up to the next big decision awaiting him – where to go.

A part of him said to simply follow the mule track and retrace his steps along the path to Trade Harbor, but a bigger part told him to remember Ariana’s cryptic message about heading across the land to Southgar.  He had no idea how far the journey would stretch, but in the wintery conditions he suspected it would feel unreachably far.  He would face danger and terrible discomfort, but he had heard Ariana say it was the way to go.  And he suspected that he needed to go – there had to be a next chapter in his story, and it was unlikely to truly include a return to the idyllic land of Kilau, or Shaylee.  The tropical warmth and the lovely girl seemed like long-ago and far-away fairy tales, as he stood and looked out over the frosty valley below.

Ariana had told him to go to Southgar. The gods alone knew how far that journey would be; he didn’t.  He was a few days inland from the coast, but he had no idea how far inland Southgar was.  To the extent he had ever thought about the distant land at all – other than as the home of the pale race that he seemingly resembled –  he had heard of it as a land that was far upstream of Fortune on the Great River, a distant place where the river’s headwaters were located.  It was reputed to be a less refined culture than Fortune – a place where the weather was cooler, life was more tenuous and less precious, and violence used easily to settle disputes.  The courtiers of Fortune had looked down on the reputation of Southgar, as a crude, vulgar land.

And the people there – or from there – were pale.  Grange knew that, given the hundreds of times he had been asked if he was from Southgar.  His heritage might be from Southgar – it probably was, he admitted.  But as an orphan raised in an orphanage in Verdant, he had no idea whatsoever.

He was going to make the effort to carry our Ariana’s request.  He knew that was what his heart had decided.  The decision had been made as soon as the dying jewel had asked.  He hitched his pack up onto his shoulder, bent one last time to pick up the empty, now useless, wand that had changed the course of the battle with the demon and changed his life, and tucked it into his waistband, then he started hiking away from the scene of such pain and horror.

He limped and walked slowly, descending from the mountainside at the best pace he could manage, but by the time darkness fell he was still in the center of the valley.  He finally ate the piece of dried meat he had pulled from Monton’s pack earlier, chewing mechanically as his mind descended into a numb state of depression.  He slept uneasily.  He no longer feared the evil of the valley; he felt sure that his victory over the demon had banished away the curse that had made the mining venture so profitless.  But the memory of the dramatic deaths of the jewels haunted him, and his own role in making their destruction possible – because of his decision to load energy into his immature wand – was like a terrible, open sore that he couldn’t stop examining, as he relived it over and over again.

The next day he followed the trail out of the mouth of the valley, leaving as soon as the first light of dawn made the trail visible.  Once he was beyond the roughest terrain, he left the trail, turning to the east, and began his determined journey to go to Southgar, or to die trying.

He nearly did die trying.  The wounded, despondent boy spent the next fortnight stumbling across the bleak and untamed landscape.  He pressed forward relentlessly, beginning each day’s journey as soon as the sun rose, and continuing until darkness had fallen.  He sparingly ate the small supply of food he carried as he climbed and walked and crawled across the rugged landscape.  But he had little water with him, and found little along the way.  His only solace was the time when he played music on his faithful flute.  He managed to focus on the instrument and the sounds, to the exclusion of his pain and sense of loss.

On a few occasions, he found liquid water in puddles on the north sides of hills warmed by sun light.  On other occasions he found shards of ice he could melt for a few precious drops of moisture.  But mostly he suffered.  The dehydration, the pain of his injuries, and the continuing depression all combined to sap away his strength and his will.

He no longer had his command of the energy – he could no longer wrap himself in a blanket of warmth.  His cloak and clothes were inadequate to keep him warm, leaving him shivering whenever he wasn’t exerting himself to walk across the rugged land.

On the thirteenth day of his journey away from the mine, he grew confident that he was going to die soon.  He was into his third day without water, and his fifth day without food.  He began to see Rigan and Brielle, urging him forward, though he knew they were dead.

He saw a small cloud, or possibly a patch of fog, hanging beyond a ridge that he was slowly, aimlessly, approaching.  Or perhaps it was a hallucination, just as the women were, he suspected.

An hour after he saw the cloud, and hours after he hallucinated that he saw the ghosts of his jewel spirits, he crested the ridge, and stopped, wavering with weakness as he surveyed the scene in front of him.  There was a small pothole of a valley, no more than two or three acres in size, with steep banks on all sides.  Inside, there was greenery growing profusely, growing right to the edge of the banks of the small pool at the center of the depression in the earth.

The water in the pool was bright yellow.

And they valley was warm – he could feel heat rising up from the valley and spilling out over the lip, rolling past him to quickly dissipate in the chilly ambient air that surrounded the thermal spring for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Grange stepped forward, feeling the warmth immediately penetrate his layers of ragged clothes as he stepped down into the valley, his feet crushing the vibrant undergrowth beneath each placement of his boots as he descended the steep side of the bank and dropped closer to the strange water.  The air felt moist, making his skin seem to expand and breath with relief.

Grange unwrapped the covers around his head, before he reached the edge of the yellow water and dropped to his knees.   Something in his memories told him that drinking the water would have consequences, but he didn’t care.  He plunged his hands into the water, cupped them together, and brought the captured liquid up to his lips.  He drank greedily, careless of the slight, metallic tang to the water, and repeated the drink, again and again and again.  The water was lifegiving, and lifesaving.  He felt relief overtake his desperation, as he continued to recklessly drink the bright water, up until he suddenly felt so full of water that he turned and vomited a large volume onto the land.

Then he sat back and looked at the valley, and wondered why he was there.

His memories were jumbled, confused, and growing hazier by the moment.  The water coursed through his veins and to his brain, wreaking havoc as its properties began to hide his memories and diminish his emotions, both good and bad.  He simply sat and closed his eyes and unknowingly lost his identity.

Hours later, he opened his eyes, confused, but aware that he was hungry in the extreme.  He browsed among the plants he found, and ate a few that appeared safe, or that untouched parts of his mind recognized as edible.  Then he laid down on the slopes of his own personal spot of salvation, and fell into a deep sleep.