The Pleasure of Memory (7 page)

Still, the man quickly found his way to his feet, though not without staggering a couple paces before catching himself. He slowly turned back to face the giantish man and held his sword point up unconvincingly. He was clearly in a state of exhaustion. He seemed to be defending himself through sheer will alone.

The knight marched in and released a cut that easily slapped the Vaemyn’s sword point away. The warrior stumbled sideways in payment, nearly losing his weapon in the process. The knight showed him no quarter, but flew at him with the ferocity of a wolf while the savage stubbornly resisted, parrying blow after blow with only the greatest of effort.

Beam knew the savage couldn’t hold out much longer, and the thought gave him some measure of satisfaction. In fact, he relished the fool’s inevitable fall. He couldn’t give one shit about the nature of their dispute, or who was at fault, or even who this dark soldier was or what his motives were. He only wanted to see this miserable savage’s blood spilled across the cold, black floor. That simple event would make this entire nightmare worth the trip.

The knight swatted the warrior’s blade to the side and planted a vicious kick in the man’s flank. The savage stumbled sideways, but somehow managed to recover and immediately turned back toward the knight. He held his weapon out with both hands. His sword tip wavered under his fatigue.

For just a moment, the fighters paused. They stood facing each other, the armored rogue seething in unearthly silence, and the Vaemyn wheezing and barely able to stand. Still, in spite of his exhaustion, the warrior continued to hold his sword up in stark defiance of his opponent. There was no way he could ever see this fight through to victory, though he willfully refused to submit. And while impressive, Beam saw the warrior’s act for exactly what it was: Heroic and valiant and utterly pointless.

The rogue knight barked something at the warrior that Beam instinctively recognized as a dare. The giant of a man then stomped the floor, slapped his chest, and threw out a malicious laugh. He was taunting the Vaemyn to strike him, though the savage only stood there with his weapon held up unsteadily.

Apparently tiring of the game, the knight lunged.

Amazingly, the savage parried the strike.

The knight pressed on, knocking the warrior’s sword from one side to the other. The sound of the sword blows bellowed angrily through the cave. The bottomless black floor shimmered beneath a flood of dancing sparks.

Finally, the knight sliced his sword tip in a vicious arc that ripped across the warrior’s chest. The Vaemyn spun away from the blow as a shower of severed scales clattered off into the darkness. He landed on his hands and knees directly at Beam’s feet. His sword hit the floor beside him in a deafening clang, though the man somehow managed to keep control of it.

Beam recoiled back into the steps.

The savage slowly pushed himself away from the floor, forcing himself up with the greatest of effort. Resting on one knee, he braced himself on his raised leg and struggled for air. The gash in his mail armor was breathtaking, running down across his chest from shoulder to hip through a fissure of broken scales. The savage looked down at the colorless blood seeping through the wreckage of his chest with an expression more of resignation than fear. His left horn was broken. Blood bubbled from his lips with each ragged breath. And yet, in spite of the horror of his wounds, his fingers were still scratching for his sword resting on the ground beside him. It lay with the hilt at his lowered knee and the blade shaft running back along the dark floor toward the soldier behind him.

As Beam watched this brutalized savage struggling to survive, he suddenly understood the critical elements of this fight. Though he had no idea how he knew it, the Vaemyn was not the villain in this dispute. The dark knight was the source of evil in this room. Unbelievably, the Vaemyn was the honorable one here, and with that revelation came an impossible emotion. Though he’d never have thought it possible, he suffered a peculiar surge of compassion for this savage.

A dark shadow swelled up behind the kneeling warrior. Beam looked up to see the knight towering over them like a mountain of coal draped in a bloody red cloak. The soldier’s helm was a seamless steel cowl vaguely contoured to the form of a face. There were no vents, no visor, no joints visible anywhere on the armor. It was as if the metal were simply another layer of the man’s skin.

The knight slowly raised his longsword above the dying Vaemyn. The blade dripped down from his hands until the threatening point hovered just inches above the Vaemyn’s back. This was it, the end of the fight. The savage’s suffering was about to end.

Beam braced himself for the inevitable, but the murder never came.

The rogue simply stood there, motionless, poised to drop the killing blow but making no effort to do so. Then Beam heard the voice, a new voice, the Vaemyn’s voice. It arrived in his head like an old memory that appears from the shunned recesses of the mind, unsolicited and unwanted. The words were the same ancient Vaemysh as the chanting voices, but now Beam somehow understood them. He knew these words as surely as if they had been uttered in his own native Parhronii.

“I’m finished, Be’ahm,” the warrior said, breathlessly.

Beam nearly choked. “What? How…how do you know my name?”

“You’re the beginning,” the warrior whispered, “The beginning of the end. You…you’ll finish this.”

“Finish this?” Beam said. He looked up at the knight frozen above them and hoped that wasn’t what he meant.

The warrior coughed weakly. Then he looked up at Beam. “You’ll free us,” the Vaemyn whispered, “You will break this wretched cycle finally and for always.”

“What are you talking about?” Beam whispered, “Who are you?”

“Listen for the voices, Be’ahm. The...the memories. They live within the voices. The memories are part of you. They…they always have been.”

Beam looked at the man. “Memories?”

“Listen to them. Do you hear me, Be’ahm? You must trust the memories.”

“What memories? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

The warrior coughed. Blood spilled over his chin. He dragged the back of his hand over his mouth and looked down at the glistening black smear it left. The sight seemed to steady him. Even as he studied the blood, his other hand locked firmly onto the hilt of the sword resting on the black floor beside him.

Then his pale, bloodshot eyes seized Beam’s own with breathtaking authority. “This is why you were born,” the Vaemyn whispered as he pulled the sword blade up onto his lap, “This is your purpose. You must trust the memories. You must follow them, obey them, honor them until you’ve met your purpose.”

Beam looked up at the black knight, still frozen above them with his sword readied for the finishing blow. “Memories?” he said, looking back at the warrior, “What memories? What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

The answer never came. As quickly as it’d stopped, time rushed back in.

The black rogue drove his sword down into the Vaemyn’s back. The blade erupted from the warrior’s chest and spiked the stone beneath him in a hateful explosion of light and blood. Beam watched the warrior choking on his own blood, watched the dark pool swelling where the enemy sword tip met the cold floor beneath the warrior. And as he watched him, he suffered a ridiculous urge to help the man. He glanced at the sword propped on the warrior’s leg and considered seizing it, but immediately dismissed the notion for the folly it was. There was no helping this one, not anymore. The man was already dead, he just didn’t know it yet.

The dark soldier brusquely pulled his sword from the Vaemyn’s back. Beam winced against a spray of hot blood. The Vaemyn shuddered and threw out a queer little cough.

Beam found himself moving to help him, but the man threw up a blocking hand. “No,” he hissed, “No, Be’ahm. It’s alrea…already done.”

“Done?” Beam looked up to see the monstrous black knight wiping his bloody sword blade against a metal-gloved palm. Then the knight growled something incomprehensible and backed away. In the same motion, he hiked the sword back over his shoulder as if he were about to hack down a tree.

The Vaemyn gripped the hilt of his own longsword with both hands. The blade lay across his raised leg, running back under his arm with the point tilted up at the knight behind him. “Trust your memories,” the Vaemyn whispered through the blood, “Meet your purpose. End this. End it now and forever.”

The dark rogue released his blade. The glistening metal arced down toward the Vaemyn in a beheading blow.

Yet, even as defeat seemed inescapable, the warrior evaded the strike. With his blade secured under his arm, he threw himself backward with a speed that was impossible for a man in such condition. He flew back inside the range of the falling sword and into the knight. Beam more felt than heard the visceral screech of steel offending steel as the savage’s blade impaled the dark knight’s chest. The battling figures collapsed back into the shadows as one.

A horrible shriek rose up from the murders. The dark soldier’s arms and legs thrashed and pounded against the stone, throwing bursts of unnatural yellow sparks with each terrifying blow. The Vaemyn lay atop him, still holding the sword in place where it pierced the knight’s armor. The hideous scream intensified as the rogue fought his death. The cry surged higher in pitch and volume until the crystal matrix of the room itself was vibrating, until the darkness shrank back from it. The sound ripped Beam open and gouged its way into his mind until he was screaming in tandem with it.

Just as the scream reached a frenzied pitch, a yellow light exploded through the room, and the wicked odor of hot tar murdered the air.

Beam doubled forward and squeezed his head between his arms as he fought back the urge to vomit. Then the ground abruptly vanished beneath him and he felt himself falling.

IV

THE CAEYL MAGE

HANCE SHUFFLED SLOWLY THROUGH THE DARKNESS.

He felt his way through the cabin’s main room with unusual caution, determined to avoid the introduction of toe to chair leg, or thigh to table corner. Though the night outside his window was grudgingly surrendering to a dusky dawn, shedding enough of the darkness to make vague form of the colorless objects of the room, the floor remained cloaked in blackness. The great room’s yawning fireplace was dark as death, the fire having long ago fled into the soulless night, leaving him without so much as an ember to guide his way.

As he felt his way forward, every deliberately placed footstep elicited a sorrowful creak from the wide, time-buffed planks, and each obnoxious creak drove a spike of white pain through his head. He wondered if the old floor was perhaps mocking his pain, perhaps enjoying his early morning misery. Perhaps it was trying to punish him out of some arcane spite imposed by its own aging woes. Perhaps that old floor was just another conspirator in a house built of them, a conspirator plotting to rob him of any vestige of comfort as he rounded the bend into the misery of his two hundredth year and all the complaints of middle age brought on by that cursed number.

And perhaps this wretched hangover was simply driving him into delusions.

He fingered for the iron handle of the great door and pulled it. As the door eased open, the growing dawn light rushed into the darkness, and with it appeared a ghostly figure. The figure leered out at him from the shadows of the tall mirror mounted on the log wall immediately beside the door. A tattered web of long, startled brown hair laid siege to this creature’s head and shoulders, and the eyes glaring back from that disorganized cowl were as red as worry, bereft of cheer, and bogged deeply into the dark trenches surrounding them. The long, thin face was gaunt and sallow, the very enemy of hope or goodwill.

The sight of it was more than Chance could bear, particularly while suffering the curse of so fierce a headache. Yet, even after he turned away from it, the image lingered stubbornly at the back of his mind like a good dinner gone bad.

He pushed the wide wooden door open, wincing as the timeworn hinges shrilly complained. As he willed himself out into the spritely morning air, he cursed his affection for wine. Gods, he was an idiot! One lousy cup of wine too many taken one lousy hour too late into the lousy night, and all because of a lousy storm. He loathed thunderstorms. Lightning was one of the few natural events on all of Calevia that actually terrified him, a particularly hilarious flaw for a powerful Blue Caeyl Mage like himself, master of the very elements of the earth and sky. That one such as he would be so sadly and effectively controlled by a storm was ridiculous at best, pathetic at worst.

Sadly, wine was the only nostrum that dulled his ridiculous anxiety with any satisfaction, a fact evidenced by the iron band now crushing his skull. Or perhaps the anxiety was just a good excuse to abuse his wine. Why wouldn’t his dozens of calming tonics have worked just as well? That was the path he’d have prescribed for anyone else with a similar affliction. Why did he always run straight for the wine under such circumstances? It was the same age-long enquiry he’d been asking himself for a dozen decades now. Chance Gnoman versus the evil grape. Destiny or free will? Breeding or culture?