Songreaver (4 page)

Garrett shook his head. "What's the
difference?"

"Caution is checking to see if there is an
ambush waiting for you behind a stand of trees," Cenick said,
"Worry is making yourself sick over what you imagine someone else
thinks of you. Caution can save your life. Worry drains all the joy
from it."

Garrett said nothing. He tried to force the
image of Marla and Claude together out of his mind. It kept
bubbling back up like a dead bug in the stew.

"Feel better?" Cenick asked.

"No," Garrett said.

Cenick chuckled. "I guess you'll need a
different approach," he said.

"What?" Garrett asked.

Cenick smiled. "Distraction."

"How do I do that?"

Cenick looked down, reaching into his
saddlebag and pulling out a Chadirian short sword. He had wrapped
its red leather belt around the attached scabbard. He reached out,
offering the whole bundle to Garrett. "Gear up," he said.

Garrett hesitated.

"What's wrong?" Cenick asked.

"I lost the last knife that you gave me."

"No," Cenick said, "That blade was taken from
you. Here is another."

Garrett took the sword and straightened his
back to fasten the belt around his waist, swaying a little on
Ghausse's back. "I have no idea how to use this," he said.

"You won't learn any younger," Cenick said
with a grin.

Garrett drew the sword. The steel gleamed a
dull gray to match the clouds above. The fine mist that fell from
the sky settled like dew drops on the blade. The sword felt heavy
and unbalanced in his hand. "This isn't like the knife you gave me
for my birthday," he said.

Cenick grunted. "Neshite blades, like mine,
are balanced for throwing," he said, indicating the curved daggers
at his belt, "A Chadirian believes that the weapon is an extension
of their own body, and they no more care to be separated from it
than from their own limbs. The river folk know better than to
become too attached to anything that sinks when you drop it in the
water."

"Do you miss your homeland?" Garrett asked,
cutting the air experimentally with the sword. It made a
satisfactory whistling noise when he swung it. Ghausse whined and
gave him a nervous look over his shoulder.

Cenick fell silent for a moment. "I don't
remember it much now," he admitted, "I always meant to go back
someday... I just never got around to it." He laughed then. "I
certainly don't miss the slavers."

"Slavers?"

Cenick's lips curled into a sneer. "They took
me from my village when I was just a boy. They thought a shaman's
son would bring a high price. I hate to think what Uncle had to pay
to get me out of that nightmare where he found me."

"What was Uncle Tinjin doing in the jungle?"
Garrett asked.

Cenick laughed. "You know, I never asked him.
I was so glad to be free of it, and he was so kind to me, I just
thought the River Spirit had sent him in answer to my prayers. As
time went on, I suppose I didn't
want
to think about those
days. Perhaps I was afraid that, if I thought about it too much, I
would wake up from the beautiful dream and still be back in that
cage."

"I'm sorry," Garrett said.

Cenick shook his head. "The world is not
always a pleasant place, Garrett," he said, "I once blamed the gods
for that. I felt they must have abandoned us to the mercy of evil
spirits. Perhaps we had offended them, and so they turned their
backs on us. I cried out to the River Spirit and asked her to come
and cleanse my country of such evil men... That prayer was not
answered."

"So, there are no gods?" Garrett asked.

Cenick smiled. "I don't know, Garrett," he
said, "I've seen things that make me doubt. I've seen things that
make me believe. I believe now that, if they do exist, they do not
wish us to know with any certainty that they do."

"That's not very helpful," Garrett said.

Cenick chuckled. "No. It is not. Still, I
have come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter."

"Huh?"

"What matters is what we do with our lives,"
Cenick said, "If the gods sit in secret judgment of us, then let us
give them a show to remember. If there are no gods watching, then
the play is for our benefit alone. Let us live our lives without
fear of what is to come. Either the gods will welcome us into their
home at the end of our days, or we will sleep the dreamless sleep
and feel no more the pains of this life."

"What if the gods are bad?" Garrett
asked.

"Then they are unworthy of our worship in
this life or the next," Cenick said, "Still, I have seen too much
beauty in this world to believe that evil reigns supreme."

"Then why don't they help us?" Garrett asked,
a little of his weariness finding its way into his voice.

"Who says they haven't?" Cenick said, "Both
of us have survived terrible things, against great odds. Perhaps we
were not unassisted."

"But Uncle helped us, not the gods."

"If you are in trouble, and I send a servant
to help you. I am still the one who has helped you, am I not?"
Cenick said.

"Are you saying the gods told Uncle where to
find us and made him go to us?" Garrett asked.

"I'm saying that we are born into this world
with all the power and will we need to be men like Uncle Tinjin,
men who do the gods' work, whether they are told to or not. Where
evil thrives, the failure is ours."

As they rode into the first small trees at
the edge of the forest, Garrett dried the sword blade on the leg of
his trousers and sheathed it. "It makes my head hurt thinking about
stuff like that," he said.

"Mine too," Cenick laughed, "Garrett,
I..."

He suddenly fell silent as Ghausse let out a
snarling growl. The dire wolf's hair bristled, and his muscles
tensed as he crouched, staring into the forest ahead. Cenick rose
up in his stirrups to look into the shadows between the trees.
Then, dropping back into his saddle, he heeled his pony forward,
leaving Garrett and the snarling, snapping wolf behind.

"Stay here!" Cenick hissed, pulling a long
knife from his belt as he and his pony disappeared into the
shadows.

Garrett opened his mouth to protest, but
Ghausse suddenly lunged forward, carrying him after Cenick into the
dark forest. Garrett could do no more than lean close to the big
wolf's back and dig his fingers into Ghausse's dark fur.

At first, all Garrett could hear were the
snapping of branches, the crunch of dead leaves, the thump of pony
hooves, and the bellows whoosh of the great wolf's breath.
Presently, however, a new sound reached his ears, growing louder by
the moment. A sharp
crack
rang out, again and again, without
any rhythm or definite direction. Then, at last, another sound, a
dry hiss like paper snakes tangling together and pulling apart.

Garrett felt his skin prickle and a sickly
sensation of pressure, like a warm, wet blanket laid across his
back.

Ghausse leapt forward, landing beside
Cenick's pony at the mouth of a dark gulley where the earth had
long ago riven apart between the great twisting roots of the
ancient trees. At the far end of the gulley, a woman in stained
white robes stood her ground against a half dozen shadowy
specters.

Garrett's breath caught in his throat at the
sight of the creatures. Taller than a man, but stooped over and
made of coiling shadows, the things had only a pale, fleshy blob
where their heads should be. Their faces twisted and stretched as
though something vast and horrible in some other place was pressing
its face against a little patch of fabric, trying to peer through
into the world of men. Tendrils of flesh roped and drooped from the
polypous heads only to be sucked back again and reformed just as
quickly. All around them, long streamers of dark magic hissed and
fluttered on some unfelt breeze that drew them toward the woman in
white.

The woman stood, weary and wounded, with
long, singed streaks across her arms and legs. She wore her auburn
hair shorn close to her head with what might have been a white hood
fallen over her shoulders. A hopeless defiance burned in her eyes.
In her hands she wielded a silvery staff roughly five feet long.
The staff shone with an almost radiant luster, and little swirls of
steam vapor traced its movement through the air as she spun it
defensively around her. She raised it quickly, bringing it into
contact with one of the creatures' dark tendrils, and a loud
crack
shattered the air. A white brilliance dazzled
Garrett's eyes, and the end of the black tendril shriveled like a
hair in a flame.

Then Garrett noticed a boy, no older than
himself, crouched on the ground behind the woman. The boy's brown
hair was cropped so close that he seemed almost bald, and his white
robes were a ruin of rips and mud stains. He too gripped a staff,
though of simple wood, but his eyes held more terror than
defiance.

"Fell spirits, desist and depart!" Cenick
shouted, struggling to face the specters as his pony neighed and
turned from side to side, unwilling to approach any closer.

As one, the creatures turned to face the two
necromancers, their lumpy faces contorted in rage. Their black
tendrils writhed like angry snakes around their bodies.

Giving up his struggle with the pony, Cenick
swung down from her back and stood, facing the specters with a
dagger in each hand. His pony thundered away into the forest, back
the way they had come.

Ghausse growled and whined but did not flee,
though some part of Garrett wished that he would. Garrett yanked
the Chadiri sword from its scabbard with a shaking hand.

"
Do not interfere, shroud-renders!
"
the shadowy creatures hissed as one. A hundred different voices
seemed to come from them at once, and Garrett could not discern
whether they were male or female, or something else altogether.

"Speak your grievance and heed counsel then,"
Cenick shouted, and Garrett knew him well enough to detect the
slight tremor in his voice.

A tittering, hissing laughter spread through
the beasts, and their almost-faces seemed to melt and run like warm
butter. "
We are not some murdered ghost seeking justice from the
living,
" they cried as their faces hardened again, "
We are
beyond you and the ends of you. We are not to be tested.
"

"Run, you fools!" the woman in white called
out, her voice hoarse from exhaustion, "Run while you still
can."

Garrett looked at Cenick.

Cenick lowered his head a little, his eyes
still on the roiling shadows as they fanned out across the gulley
between him and the woman. "I don't feel like running today!" he
growled. He raised his knives to the level of his shoulders, their
points toward the enemy, and set his feet in a fighting stance.

Four of the six specters began to drift
toward Cenick like leaves in a stream, their putty faces going
blank as they advanced on him. The other two resumed their attack
on the woman in white.

Cenick moved with surprising speed,
sidestepping a grasping tendril of shadow and severing it from its
host with a lightning-quick flick of his blade. The tendril floated
off, dissipating like smoke, but Garrett saw it reform again, just
as quickly, as Cenick's blades moved to other targets.

"Look out!" Garrett shouted, and Cenick
ducked low, just as a noose of shadow closed around the place his
neck had been a moment earlier. Then the creature seemed to take
notice of Garrett and turned its flabby face towards him.

Ghausse yelped and leapt back as a black
tentacle brushed against his foreleg, singing away his fur with a
puff of acrid smoke. Garrett shouted wordlessly and hacked at a
coiling tendril with the Chadiri blade. The tendril wrapped tightly
around the steel blade and twisted the sword from his grasp with an
irresistible strength.

Garrett screamed in fear and pain as he drew
back his bruised fingers. Cenick as well howled in rage as a black
loop closed around his leg and burned his flesh before he could
slash at it with his dagger.

Garrett's specter drifted forward as Ghausse
gave ground, snapping and snarling. Without thinking, Garrett
shoved his hand inside his satchel and grasped the cold metal of
his essence flask, feeling the comforting weight of the magic
within. He pulled it from the bag and held it defensively between
himself and the monster.

His mind raced, searching for a spell that
might do something against the shadow beasts. As the fingers of
black fire reached out for him, Garrett shouted, "
Veiarnna te
noulleanna!
"

A gout of rainbow-colored flame erupted from
the essence flask, burning away most of the shadow creature's body
and half of its screaming fleshy mask. The other creatures screamed
as well, drawing back from the multicolored flames that splashed
across the dead leaves of the forest floor, filling the gulley with
a merry and dancing light.

Garrett's heart hammered in his chest, but he
held the canister above his head. Rainbow flame still licked at the
cold metal in his hands. He knew the flask was empty, drained by
the simple, yet costly bit of fairy magic.

The creatures, it seemed, would take no
chances. Five of them fled, shrieking into the shadows. The one
that Garrett had burned tried to flee as well but unraveled as it
went, dissipating with a piteous cry and crackle of fairy fire. As
it died, the feeling of pressure and wrongness lifted from the
forest, and Garrett sucked in a breath of cool, fresh air.

Cenick stared, wide-eyed at Garrett. "That
was wild magic," he said.

"Yeah," Garrett gasped, lowering his arm. His
hand ached with cold where it touched the flask, and he watched the
last of the rainbow flame flicker and fade.

Cenick was silent for a long moment. Then he
said, "I guess I owe Max an apology. I thought giving you that book
was a terrible idea."