The Pleasure of Memory (65 page)

A hundred feet deeper into the corridor, he stopped. He dropped against the marble wall. He pressed his hands flat against the smooth surface, pressed his face into the cool, soothing stone, and closed his eyes.

The Vaemyn in his dreams was haunting him even when he was awake now, pestering him from the back of his mind, whispering suggestions in his ear. He found himself saying things that he didn’t understand, though he somehow knew them to be the absolute truth. He was beginning to sense things that he’d never been aware of before. He knew when the savage was lying. He sensed when Chance was worried or angry without even looking at him. He was getting flashes of images in his mind, images that could never ever have reason to be there, images from his companions’ most personal thoughts.

The cold, hard fact of it was that Chance was right about him. He had indeed changed since he found the blade. He’d changed in ways he didn’t understand and couldn’t begin to explain.

“We need to keep moving,” Chance said as he passed down the hall behind him.

Beam pushed himself away from the stone and looked toward hollow clacking of footsteps. Chance was already marching off into the darkness, his reflection dutifully following beneath him, a strange doppelganger hanging in the polished marble as he walked away. As Beam watched him, he cursed himself and his wretched lack of impulse control. He’d stupidly exposed himself. He’d opened his mouth and let the truth spew forth like vomiting this morning’s breakfast.

And yet, if he were to be honest about it, Chance had actually spared him. Chance was pulling back when most other men would’ve taken such an opportunity of weakness to strike and strike hard. Chance had just done him a favor by showing him once again just how superior a man he was. Chance was walking away without a victory.

Beam fell back against the marble. He buried his eyes in the butts of his hands and rubbed at the aggravation. Gods, he was a fool! He should’ve been born a goddamned mute.

When he dropped his hands, he was surprised to see the Vaemyd standing directly before him. Her arms remained bound back around that miserable-looking bone. Her eyes, however, had no such restraints. She was looking at him like she’d suddenly found the way into a forbidden building.

“What are you looking at?” he said as hard as he could manage.

She didn’t answer, though her blue eyes continued to probe him closely. Then, after a moment’s study, she whispered, “I’m not certain. Not yet.”

And then she simply turned away.

∞

Chance placed a leather square of food on the floor in front of the Vaemyd.

The warrior barely glanced at the food before returning her gaze to the fire, saying, “I’m not hungry.”

The lie didn’t fool Beam. She was hungry, all right. She was hungry as hell. He could feel the pain in her belly as surely as if it were his own. She just wasn’t about to lean down and eat like a pig at a trough. As long as her hands remained tied, she would not submit, and he took that as a little victory. Let her eat the air, then.

Chance crossed over and stopped before Beam, then reached an open hand down to him. “Give me your knife,” he said plainly.

Beam continued to watch the savage stewing before her food. As he did, he slipped the blade from his boot and held the handle up to the mage. Chance grunted something that Beam took for a thanks, and then he walked over and knelt down behind the savage.

Beam suddenly understood. He stood up. “Wait!” he said, stepping directly before the Vaemyd, “Just you hold up there now! What the hell are you doing?”

Chance looked up over her shoulder at him as he sawed the ropes. “What does it look like?” he said as he worked.

“This is against my council,” Beam said quickly, “I don’t trust her.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“She’ll run straight to her tribe.”

Chance didn’t stop his work.

“Damn me, you’ll regret this,” Beam said harshly, “You know that, right? We’ll both regret it!”

“I don’t believe there’s any truth in those words,” Chance said.

Beam looked down at the Vaemyd who was glowering up at him with an antipathy he completely recognized. Her gaze was nearly physical in its intensity. As he watched her watching him, he understood that she had every right to her anger. Why wouldn’t she hate him? He’d taken much from her people over the years. Hiding behind the rage of his blood grudge, he’d stolen their material wealth, he’d violated their sacraments, and he’d sent more than his fair share of their souls along their merry way. Were their roles reversed, he’d hate her just as deeply.

And with that thought, he suffered an unwelcomed epiphany. He suddenly understood that this was the very truth of the matter. He didn’t hate her. Of course, he still held his share of animosity toward her people, but he didn’t hate
her
. Not personally. She was just an individual, a singular soul. What responsibility does one solitary individual hold for the actions of their people?

“How can he be the one?”

Beam flinched. For an instant, he was sure she’d said something. But she wasn’t even looking at him anymore. She was staring down into the polished marble at his feet.

“What if he’s the wrong one?”

Beam choked and backed a pace away. He grabbed his stomach, which suddenly felt on the precipice of revolt. They were her words, but she wasn’t speaking. The words were in his head, not his ears. Was he having a brain fever?

“What if he has it by mistake? What happens to us then? Do the demons simply win?”

His head flew into a spin. The air was suddenly too thick to breathe. He grabbed his brow. The colors in the tunnel were shifting strangely, as if he were looking through the heat of a fire. He felt faint. He reached out for the wall to steady himself.

“I’m not strong enough to act on faith, not on faith alone. It’s not enough.”

He winced as the words appeared. They materialized in his mind exactly as if they were his own thoughts.

He braced his arms against the steel girder and struggled for composure. He couldn’t feel the floor beneath him anymore. It was like he was floating just a breath above the marble, like he was separate from the world and watching it from the outside in.

When he looked up, he again caught the Vaemyd’s eyes, though there was something different about her face now. It looked as if the air had suddenly turned to liquid, like she was looking up at him through the ripples on a pond. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t release her. Their shared gaze felt like a portal, like they were studying each other through a long, dark tube.

Then something eerily familiar rushed into that hollow space, a sense of knowing, of understanding one another. It was like there was some dark secret they shared, one that neither of them understood, one that couldn’t be articulated even if they did.

He felt a tingle of warmth on his hip and looked down at his sword. The caeyl was awake. He threw a hand over the red light. Somewhere deep in the fog, he saw the Vaemyd rubbing her wrists. He saw Chance toss the restraining bone to the side. He heard the echoes of it clatter boldly through the tunnel.

Beam tried to push away from the wall, but couldn’t find purchase to do so. She was doing something to him, corrupting him with some kind of hypnosis or mind control. He wanted to warn her, to threaten her against any tricks, but he couldn’t manage the words. Everything was terribly out of synch. He wanted to move toward her, but couldn’t will his legs.

A white light pulsed violently through his head.

Someone groaned.

The wall hit him from behind.

Another blinding flash struck him!

The color suddenly drained out of the world. Everything around him, the dead Baeldons, Chance, the savage, everything devolved into a metallic shade of gray and then faded completely away like water evaporating from hot stone. In the same instant, the ground dropped out from below him.

He was falling!

And then it stopped.

He found himself standing on a wide, stone stairway. The sight was vague and colorless like the dying remnants of a dream. The stairs hugged the inner wall of a huge round tower, circling over and over as they made their way skyward. He looked down over the edge to see a flagstone chamber a hundred feet below him. The chamber floor milled with people.

A man cried out.

Beam recoiled at the sound. He fell back tight against the wall. Another cry rang loose. He looked up toward it. Timber scaffolding stretched across the forty-foot breadth of the tower above him like a giant spider’s webbing. There was some kind of construction going on, and it blocked any view of the tower’s crown beyond it. A man hanged by his hands from a joist just below the lowest gangplank. His feet kicked uselessly at the air. Above the dangling man, another man, a huge Vaemyn, lay on his belly on the planking. He was stretched down over the side, groping for the hanging man, who Beam realized was also a Vaemyn.

“Grab it!” the rescuing giant yelled down at him, “Don’t do this! Grab my hand!”

The hanging man made no effort to comply, but only looked back over his shoulder at the void beneath him. Though the saving hand was easily within his grasp, he didn’t accept it, wouldn’t accept it. And as Beam watched the desperate scene, he understood that the man didn’t want to be saved. He was there in that lethal position by choice.

“Goddamn it, Pa’ana!” the large Vaemyn above him shouted as he strained lower for the man, “Grab my hand! You can’t do this! I won’t let you do this!”

The hanging man again looked up at the reaching hand, and then up to his would-be savior. But instead of taking the proffered help, he only whispered, “Forgive me, Mawby.” And then he let go.

He plummeted away from the scaffolding like an acorn falling from an oak as the Vaemyn called Mawby screamed above him.

The white light pulsed again.

Beam winced and seized his skull.

When he eventually opened his eyes again, he found himself standing in a forest. It was dark. The moon was just rising over the tree line. A man, another Vaemyn, was on his knees before a stagnant pond. He was gaunt and pale, his dirty white hair cut short. Beam knew this man. It was the troubled Vaemyn he’d seen back at the hatch, the one who’d slipped the knife into the big one, the same one who’d betrayed his comrades with a flash of armor back on the road.

The Vaemyn looked ghoulish in the weak moonlight. He cried out and threw himself to his hands and knees. He beat his fists against the wet embankment. He hit that bank again and again. The blows spattered his face and chest in mud. The man’s mind was on fire, his thoughts corrupt and full of poison. He was shrieking nonsensically.

Beam turned to see two Vaemyn watching the man’s suffering from the cover of a dead log well off from the pond. A woman, a Vaemyd, had her face buried into the emerald moss. Her grief and her rage were as palpable as a toothache. She wanted to intervene, but she wouldn’t. No, he realized, not wouldn’t. She
couldn’t
intervene, though she desperately wanted to. This was Koonta’ar, and these events had happened before their encounter back at the hatch. The man with her was the same one as in the tower, the man called Mawby.

Another flash of light. Another charge of pain.

Beam was standing in a field of deep grass atop a rolling hill. The sun was full and warm, the breeze gentle but determined. Another bigger hill lay just to the north. A great tree towered at the top of that hill, its trunk like a pillar, its crown like a cathedral. This place looked much like the Nolands, though he knew that wasn’t right. The plains here rolled and swelled with massive hills like small mountains, and the wind blew relentlessly. This was somewhere much farther east of the Nolands.

He sensed the taer-cael of someone approaching. Beam turned his attention toward the foot of the same hill he stood upon. The same poor Vaemyn who’d suffered so on the bank of that miserable pond was running up the hill toward him. His gait was raw and indelicate. He had to use the deep grass like guide ropes to keep himself upright. The side of his face was burned nearly beyond recognition. A shaft of red light shone out from a raw and empty eye socket. He’d just reached the crest of the hill when he abruptly stopped. He stood there panting and staring up into the sky. A shadow quickly formed over him. He backed slowly away from it. Then he threw his hands up and cried out pitifully as a living black cloud descended on him.

The white light exploded again.

Beam landed hard against the marble wall. He slid gracelessly along its cold surface and rolled over the protruding boots of one of the dead Baeldons before collapsing to his knees and vomiting onto the ethereal granite floor. His heart was ramming his ribs. The corridor was a blur of shadows and sparks of torchlight. He vomited again and again.

Sometime later, he swiped the back of his hand across his mouth and spit into the pooled emesis. A drop of sweat slipped from his nose and splattered into the vomit with more force than it had a right to.

“What the hell did she do to me?” he whispered into his hands.

“No,” he heard Chance say, “What did
you
do to
her
?”

Beam pushed himself away from the vomit and sat back against the cold wall. He dragged a sleeve across his beard and fought for composure. He had somehow moved across the corridor to the wall opposite where he’d been when this…this
occurrence
began.

The warrior was where he’d last seen her, but now she was on her back, her head and shoulders cradled in Chance’s lap. Her eyes were wide and vacant, her open mouth frozen with shock.

“What…what the hell happened to her?” he asked, though he was fairly sure he already knew.

“You touched her and she collapsed,” Chance said. His voice was angry and accusing. “She’s had some kind of seizure.”

“I touched her? When…when did I touch her?”

Chance was examining the Vaemyd’s eyes. He didn’t answer.

As Beam again wiped his mouth, the memory of it sparkled back at him. He remembered the falling Vaemyn in the tower. He remembered the foul warrior in the field, and the Vaemyd struggling behind the mossy log. He remembered the hill and the odd darkness that fell upon the befouled warrior.