The Pleasure of Memory (18 page)

The warrior bristled at that. For just the barest instant, he seemed to waver.

“Would you care to debate that order?” the demon said to him.

The warrior suddenly looked terrified. “No, my lord.”

“Perfect,” the demon said, gesturing toward Chance, “Then do your duty to your king and kin. Kill this miserable bag of meat.”

The warrior looked from the wyrlaerd to Chance. He hesitated only for the briefest moment, and then nodded and said, “Ay’a, Lord Wonugh. By your will.”

With that, the wyrlaerd simply turned and walked away with Chance’s staff still in its hand.

“You need hacks to do your dirty work?” Chance yelled after him.

The demon didn’t stop.

“Divinic Demon?” Chance shouted, “You’re a coward!”

The demon stopped near the window overlooking Chance’s desk. Then it slowly turned and leaned into Chance’s staff. Its tarry face twisted into a perverse interpretation of a grin. “Carry on, Vaemyn,” it said as it laughed, “Let us be done with this monotony.”

“I’ll kill you before this is over!” Chance yelled after him, “Do you hear me? I swear to gods, I’ll kill you!”

Someone grabbed Chance’s hair from behind and wrenched his head back viciously so that his neck was again exposed. The uncompromised warrior stepped before him. He looked scared to death as he pressed the cold blade tip into Chance’s trachea.

“I’ve defended your people!” Chance pleaded with him, “You have to listen to me. I’ve championed your cause to the Allies. I’ve worked to return Na te’Yed to you, to end your isolation. I can help you!”

The warrior hesitated. He readjusted his grip on the sword. He swallowed, hard.

“Don’t do this,” Chance said carefully, “You can’t turn back from this. You’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

One of the possessed warriors abruptly rushed forward and shoved the uncompromised Vaemyn out of the way. “Don’t plead for your life with lies, mage!” he said as he pressed his own blade to Chance’s neck, “You’re a tool of the Allies, just as you’ve always been.”

Chance recognized the tone of the wyrlaerd in the warrior’s voice. The demon was speaking to him through the mouth of the hack. Pleading was useless. He needed to retrieve his staff or he was going to die.

“Do you know what you’re called among their people?” the demon asked through the possessed warrior.

Chance tried to grab the hand locked on his hair, but another warrior seized his arm and twisted it hard behind his back.

The offending warrior released a queer laugh and said, “They call you the Head with Many Faces.”

Chance struggled uselessly against the warriors restraining him. Desperate, he looked over at the uneasy warrior who stood off to the side looking worriedly back at him, “Make him stop!” Chance demanded of him, “If you don’t, you’ll throw your people’s fate into the fire. You’ll condemn everyone and everything you love to damnation! They’re hacks! Can’t you see that? You’ll all be hacks when Prae’s done! Do you want to be possessed? Do you?”

“Shush now, mage,” the possessed warrior said, “It grieves me to see you suffer so.”

Chance closed his eyes and threw his essence out into the caeylsphere and toward his staff.

“And now you die, Magi,” the warrior said.

Chance looked up to see the hack snarling weirdly as he cocked the blade for the killing blow.

But the blade never landed. Instead, the possessed warrior shuddered and stiffened, and his hollow eyes filled with the first mortal emotion Chance had seen in him: Surprise.

X

INTERVENTION

EAM WAS LOOKING AT THE BIGGEST LOG HOUSE HE’D SEEN THIS SIDE OF FARK’S FREEHOLD.

It sat in a square clearing in the forest. Two behemoth redwoods flanked its sides, each large enough to drive a cart through, each big enough to dwarf the long dead giant he currently crouched behind. An expansive covered porch ran the full length of the front of the house, and windows with actual paned glass lined the side. The roof was thatch and coated in an emerald green moss that shimmered in the fading sunlight. A broad stone chimney towered over the far side of the house. He could see the outlines of a few barns, outbuildings, and stock pens scattered back in the woods behind it. It looked like a squire’s estate, and seemed a sight too homey and respectable for being so far out in the middle of nowhere.

However, as appealing as this setting was, it was the activities in the foreyard that most piqued his interest.

A hundred paces out into the meadow, halfway between his shelter and the log house, were six figures. Four were savages who wore the same camouflaged ring mail as those sneaky bastards back at the river. They stood in a half circle around a kneeling man with drawn swords and expressions as lethal as a heart seizure. He knew the look intimately. It didn’t bode well for the kneeler.

Standing directly before the kneeler was a remarkably tall man dressed in silver armor and cloaked in a garish blonde cape. His hood was back and he appeared to be wearing some kind of black mask or cowl, though it was hard to tell which from this distance. He was holding some kind of tall scepter with a blue gem mounted at the head that sparkled a tad too brightly in the fading daylight. Given his brash dress and the positions of deference presented by the savages, he figured this one to be the leader.

The kneeler seemed the least out of place here in this hideaway in the middle of the backwoods. His shoulder length brown hair was disheveled and unkempt. He wore a dirty, tattered tan robe tied at the waist with a frayed piece of rope. He was almost certainly some kind of monk, probably from some fringe priory dedicated to seclusion and an apparent rejection of hygiene. He was unarmed and appeared to be pleading with the warriors, who weren’t playing fair. As usual.

As if in confirmation, the savage standing directly behind the monk brutally kicked the poor man into the grass. Another savage immediately dragged him by the hair back to his knees.

Beam’s anger heaved up, hot and demanding. Even by the darkest standards of villainy, such barbarity was reprehensible. Why would they gang up on a helpless hermit anyway? What possible threat could a fanatical monk living so far from any kind of civilization be to them? It was the lowest form of savagery, even for a savage. The sight was simply further proof that the Vaemyn were no better than animals and they deserved every ill that came their way.

The monk tried to stand up, but one of the savages booted him back to his knees. Beam dropped his forehead into the moss-covered bark. No, he told himself. No, do not do this. Don’t even think about doing this. That monk is none of your concern. You’ve got your own damned skin to worry about. You don’t have the bloody
right
to intervene, let alone the responsibility. Anyway, where’s the stinking payoff? There isn’t any, that’s where! This is just the natural order of things and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. You need to walk away and you need to do it now.

There! Decision made. Now move along.

With the savages’ collective attention focused on their game, his flight would be much more efficient. He turned away and crept low along the log toward the deeper woods. From there, he could make a safe flight to the north. He was sorry, truly sorry for the monk, but the pitiable fool’s death wouldn’t be in vain, would it? It’d help him get away, at least. That was something, right?

The monk cried out again, louder this time.

The cry landed like a kick in the stomach.

Beam dropped to his knees and cupped his hands over his ears. No! No! No! Don’t do this! Keep going! There’s no helping him now. The monk is as good as dead. You have to keep moving. You have to keep pushing forward and resist looking back. It’s the looking back that will get you killed. You just need to leave this all behind.

“But Be’ahm, surely you know nothing is ever left behind.”

Beam felt the ground dissolve beneath him. He slumped into the log and seized his face. That voice!
His
voice.

The memories crushed down on him from a mountain of guilt. His mind fled to his youth, to his parents, who died while he was an infant, to the extended family that abandoned him in shame, to Brother Dael, who took him in at the priory without question or prejudice. To Brother Dael, who’d raised him as a son, who’d stayed with him through all his bad decisions and dark deeds. To Brother Dael, with his long hair and threadbare robes.

His eyes burned with the heat of his shame. “Goddamn you,” he whispered, “Getting yourself killed over a ghost. Well, that’s just brilliant, it really is.”

He unbuckled the wide belt strapped across his chest, slipped the weapons from his back, and quickly freed the crossbow. His damaged fingers worked with more ease than they had a right to. Perhaps stupidity had some kind of numbing effect. He sure as hell hoped so, because it’d make it so much easier to bear when the arrows found his back.

He quietly freed his new sword from its bindings and propped it carefully on its tip against the fallen tree. The red eye shimmered in the hilt as if watching him. He lowered the crossbow’s tip to the dirt and braced the stirrup with his foot, then slowly spanned back the bowstring. Once locked, he slipped a black-feathered bolt in place. With three more bolts in hand, he crept up the side of the fallen tree.

The crossbow slid out across the bark. He laid the extra bolts on the moss beside it. Dusk was falling fast. He prayed the forest behind him was dark enough to camouflage his appearance, at least for a couple shots.

Out in the yard, one of the savages had his sword poised at the kneeling man’s neck. He looked uncertain, confused even. But then another warrior roughly shoved him out of the way and replaced him in the executioner’s position. Beam recognized the lusty smile worn by this new bastard. It was a look he’d seen many times before, up close and personal.

The revelation that the savages were fighting over who got to kill the poor monk pushed Beam’s ire to the limit. They were goddamned barbarians, and he was going to thoroughly enjoy seeing the bloody bastards go down for this! As he hugged the bow and drew a bead on the grinning warrior, he realized that this opportunity was actually a gift. He may yet get caught or he may yet get away, but either way he was going to enjoy this delicious moment while he had it.

Just as the bastard savage cocked his sword back for the killing blow, Beam nudged the trigger. He didn’t wait for the bolt to find its target, but instead fell back behind the tree and reloaded. Seconds later, he was back up top and aiming at his next victim.

The warrior he’d shot lay on his back, stone cold dead in the grass with a black bolt sticking whimsically up from his brow. The other warriors whirled about in confused circles. The tall, armored man remained back near the side of the house, watching the commotion in a detached, disinterested manner. Whoever he was, he showed no sign of alarm.

Beam smiled as he sent another volley.

The second bolt sliced cleanly through the neck of the next luckless savage. He felt no remorse as he watched the savage floundering about with the lifeblood spraying out of him. In truth, he loved the sensation of murder by distance, of adding the chill of surprise to the agony delivered by the strike. And the fact that the stinking savages were on the receiving end of this particular surprise only made the dish that much tastier.

Still, even as he relished the moment, he remembered the promise he’d made to change his dark ways, to abandon the man he’d been. But standing here now with that dirty pleasure tickling in his stomach, he knew the old ways could never be left behind, not completely, not by men like him. Some desires run deeper than habit.

The third warrior was on his hands and knees, his head slung low to the grass as if sniffing at the earth, though Beam knew he was actually listening for vibrations with his horns. Before Beam could even slide back from the tree to reload, the savage’s head twisted around toward the fallen oak and his eyes locked on him.

Beam grabbed for the third bolt, but in his haste knocked it away. He watched in horror as the last two bolts rolled over the side of the tree and out of his life. The third savage was already charging across the grass for him.

Beam retreated back from the tree. He heaved the crossbow at the savage just as the bastard crested the log, but the Vaemyn easily knocked it away. The warrior flew over the tree and landed in the soft humus with his sword at the ready. He was dressed in a foreboding grin. He immediately began walking toward Beam, waving his sword lazily back and forth across the space between them.

Beam grabbed the knife from his belt and held it up defensively. Sadly, it didn’t look anywhere near up to the task of facing the savage’s dancing sword.

“Well, well, well,” the savage said in perfect Parhronii standard, “I believe I know you, skeechka.”

“You should,” Beam said as he backed away in tandem, “In the world of brutes and savages, I’m the Angel of bloody Death.”

The savage laughed at that. Then he nodded at Beam’s face and said, “I pray that’s the result of my kinsmen’s hands?”