The Pleasure of Memory (77 page)

He climbed back to his feet with the black horror pinned to his chest. He pushed it away, but it wouldn’t give. Desperate, he grabbed the oily wing and ripped it free. His hand was on fire. He held it up to the moonlight and saw a brush of long, dark quills covering his palm and wrist. To his horror, the line of quills ran up the length of his arm and across his chest. It felt like he’d stuck his hands into the coals of a campfire.

The voice of another vile mind screamed down from his left. He tried to raise his sword to intercept it, but nearly dropped it instead. He couldn’t feel his hands. Two black shapes swept by his head, spraying his face and neck with their horrible barbs. He grabbed a fistful of the wet quills and ripped them from his cheek.

He was covered in the monster’s needles! He wanted to pull them out, wanted to get the wretched things out of him, but his arms were numb and useless. He suddenly felt cold. His gut was knotting violently. The ground was swirling beneath him. He couldn’t focus.

Two more creatures lit down out of nowhere. Their talons ripped into his shoulders, but this time they didn’t let go. Their claws gouged deep into his muscles. The bastards were pulling on him. They were trying to lift him! Their leathery wings beat viciously against him as they pulled him upward. Their talons ripped the flesh from his bones. He cried out and managed to twist out of their grip. He fell back against the hatch, but they were on him in an instant. Daggers sliced through his chest and leg. A boiling storm of beating black wings raged across his body. They were dragging him back from the hatch with their claws.

A third creature drove its talons into his back. The pain seared down his spine. Another of the monsters took his arm, its grip like knives ripping through his muscles. He felt himself scream, but heard no sound from it. The creatures’ frenzied, chaotic thoughts raged through his mind like a terrible storm, deafening him, blinding him. But even through the chaos, he could hear one of them most clearly. This one’s mind was singular of purpose. This one harbored the image of a red light. This one wanted the Caeyllth Blade!

He tried to yell out at them, to warn them away, but his throat felt full of poison. He could barely draw a breath. Even the pain of their talons was numbing into silence.

The night was devolving into a blur of black shapes and muted screams. The ground disappeared beneath him as they lifted him from the grass. They had him now. They were going to kill him, and this time it meant more than just his lousy death. This time it meant the end of the story, the end of hope. The Caeyllth Blade was lost. The world was lost. He cursed himself, cursed the gods, cursed his miserable fate.

Then something metallic flashed above him and a screeched ripped the night. His sword arm fell free from the monster’s grip. He looked at his hand and struggled to bring it into focus. It was his hand, wasn’t it? He was still holding it! He still had the sword!

Another flash of metal liberated two more of the bastards from their talons, and with that, his feet found the ground again. As he struggled against the remaining talons, he heard a voice bellowing above him, a voice like distant thunder, a voice as powerful as the gods. The voice was cursing the beasts. It was threatening them. It called them Prodes.

The last of the prodes released him. Beam felt himself falling, felt himself drifting down into the grass as lazily as the fluff floats away from a cottonwood tree. The stone rim slowly rolled by and the ghosts of his past smiled at him from each passing brick. The grass swelled up around him, a field of dreamy yellow and green sizzling past his face toward the heavens above. He landed on his back as gently as falling into a bed.

A god of a man towered over him, his head adorned with a great crown of stars. He was swinging both an axe and a sword. His limbs flew about in a murderous rage as the black remnants of the creatures danced gloriously around him.

Then the world fell silent.

It may have been years before Beam felt the powerful arms slide beneath him, before he felt himself floating back up out of the darkness, before he felt himself hovering in the air like an angel, his arms spread wide like diaphanous wings. He knew he was dying but felt no regret. He’d soon be joining his ghosts in the quiet bliss of death as a thousand crickets chirruped their approval.

Before he passed into that hopeful night, Jhom’s voice hammered through his head, though the words were lost on an unholy wind. Then he felt himself dropping again, dropping through a hole into the earth like a sinner plummeting to the hells. And as he descended into that gaping pit, he saw the Caeyllth Blade. It rose up from the giant’s hand far above him, and his relief at the sight trumped even his pain. Nothing else mattered, not anymore. He could die now. He’d fulfilled his destiny. The future was safe. They had no need of the likes of him anymore.

The stars jittered above him, rocking rhythmically back and forth, pulsing with each step lower, like waves washing onto a celestial shore. They were shrinking away from him as he descended into his grave, gradually crushing into a half-circle of light that shrank smaller and smaller as he fell away from it. At long last, the time had arrived that he’d often dreaded but never feared, and it was beautiful to behold.

As he died in the security of the Baeldon’s arms, he found the strength for one final regret. He wished more than anything else that he’d warned the great man about the quills.

THE END, VOLUME ONE