The Restless Shore (23 page)

“Where is she? What have you done to her?” she yelled fiercely, each question accompanied by another blow to his stomach or his bleeding face. The constant beat of her fury numbed her aching knuckles.

His only answer was a bubbling stream of bloody bile, a pink froth that squeezed through his fangs and ran down his cheeks. Life was yet within him, and she was determined to extract every moment of it from him.

Uthalion paced nervously nearby, his sword still drawn as his eyes darted in all directions, watching for something. Brindani had wandered some distance away, cleaning his sword and averting his gaze as Ghaelya violently interrogated the singer.

“Leave him,” Vaasurri said and laid a hand upon her shoulder. She roughly shrugged it away, not bothering to spare the killoren the withering stare that crossed her face as she landed another punch in Sefir’s gut.

“He’s as good as dead,” Uthalion shouted above the thunder. “And he isn’t alone! We.need to—”

“No!” she shouted back. “He knows! He told me!”

“I’m not disputing that!” Uthalion replied, kneeling down and catching her fist in an iron grip. “But we need to leave this place! Now!”

She narrowed her blue-green stare and matched his stone gaze until he released her hand and stood with an exasperated sigh. He sheathed his sword and limped away, motioning for Vaasurri to join him as he turned to the southern road out of town. Gritting her teeth and rising to one knee, Ghaelya spared the singer one last glance and caught his wide pale eye staring back at her.

“Not dead yet… child,” Sefir rasped, the effort of speaking leaving him gasping for air and coughing. The others turned, alarmed as a weak hand clawed lightly at Ghaelya’s boot. “I was chosen… to bring you home… to Tohrepur.”

Ghaelya knelt again, suffering his touch if only to keep him speaking, to glean what she could from him before leaving him to die.

“What have you done to her?” she asked, forcing herself to remain calm and clear

Sefir arched his head back, a scratchy sound like laughter escaping his tortured throat, a haunting noise that grated painfully in her ears.

“I do naught but that which my Lady bids,” he answered at length, pausing as a fit of choking coughs left him unable to speak for several breaths. “No one lays hand upon your sister. Only you may have… that glorious honor…”

“You said—” Ghaelya began angrily, then caught herself, clenching her fists. “You said she was in pain.”

Sefir’s twisted smile faded, his morbid mirth draining as he regarded her. His remaining pale orb turned in its scarred socket to look upon her with a solemn seriousness.

“Oh yes…” he replied, sighing and sounding as though he might weep in a sudden ecstasy. “Her pain shames all who gaze upon her… Her blessings outnumber even those of the Choir… as will yours… when you are delivered….upon her restless shore…”

Ghaelya’s breath came quickly as she stood. She could not tear her gaze from the dying thing before her or banish his words from her mind. Yet she wanted nothing more than to take back her question, to erase the sight of his twisted body from her mind so that she could still doubt her quiet fears.

“You failed,” she said simply. “And you will die here, a failure.”

Again came the wheezing, horrifying laugh as Sefir writhed in the mud, craning his head as though looking for someone.

“No child,” he said, a gurgling chuckle still in his throat. “I have delivered you… as sure as I die… our Lady’s will and song… shall walk at your side…”

She puzzled over his words and slowly backed away. The others stood by, listening to her strange conversation with furrowed, thoughtful expressions.

“Kill it,” Brindani said suddenly and turned away. Lightning ripped through the clouds, the rain growing heavier

in a resounding peal of thunder as the half-elf wrapped his cloak tight and headed south.

Uthalion and Vaasurri waited a moment then turned away as well, leaving her to quietly contemplate the mutilated man’s mysterious claims. His broken body’s twitching movements slowed, and his jaw went slack, though a thin, raspy breath still rattled from between his rows of sharklike teeth. She left him, dying in the mud, and stared at the dark, sweet-scented blood on her sword as she followed the others out of Caidris.

&
**

Uthalion felt strange as they made their cautious way out of the abandoned town. His body felt light, his step too soft in the mud. His arms and legs were unprotected by chain mail or greaves; no shield hung upon his arm. The foul blood so real in his nightmares of the town did not mar his skin, did not grow sticky in between links of chain armor, or gum his eyeB shut when he closed them for too long. The storm overhead bore dark shades of blue and gray, coloring everything in azure tones instead of the pall of unending black he had once fought within.

With each breath he realized he had not been dreaming, that this time Caidris had been real—and that horrors still haunted the places in his nightmares.

He could not release the tight grip on his sword, and stood ready to draw the blade at the slightest threat. He flinched as Vaasurri or Brindani splashed through a deepening puddle. His heart pounded as he searched the hollowed homes and shadowed stables they passed, knowing with a grim assuredness that they contained more than nesting birds and rats.

Nothing hurtled from the dark, baring needle teeth and

twisted limns hnt he imairineH them there all the aame

He searched, obsessively for Khault, or rather the thing Khault had somehow become, but the old farmer was nowhere to be seen. Instinct kept Uthalion on guard, a paranoia that had served him well in years past. With Sefir fallen, Khault might come slithering back to finish the job. A shiver passed through him. Though both of them had been truly hideous, the mutilations of Sefir’s visage seemed almost trivial in comparison to those of the brave, kind farmer who had given strangers shelter and had sacrificed so much.

The shallow wounds in his leg burned with sweat and exertion, forcing him to measure his long stride. But the pain cleared his mind some and kept him focused on staying alive until Caidris was far at his back.

The last farm faded to a dim silhouette, and the rain lessened again, rumbling thunder growing softer as the storm traveled north. But Uthalion did not let go of his blade and continually scanned for threats in the tall grass. He paused occasionally, sensing something and holding out his hand to halt the others, lowering it only when he was reassured that danger, if there had been any at all, had passed. He caught a questioning, concerned look in Vaasurri’s eyes, but he ignored it, wordlessly gesturing instead to the path.

His jaw ached, and he unclenched his teeth, trying to calm his shattered nerves. He had the sense that the world would fall away at any moment, that the nightmare would end, and he would awaken in the Spur, back in th&Grove, and Vaasurri would question him about the nightmare. He would jest, avoiding the subject, and try to forget the dream.

But he hadn’t slept in four days, and the silver ring had not left his finger.

“We need to stop,” Vaasurri said at his side, and Uthalion flinched at the break in the long awkward silence in which they marched. “We need to rest, and you are bleeding.”

“Shallow wounds,” he replied numbly. “There’s still some light, such as it is, and we shouldn’t waste it.”

He glanced at the others, searching for-dissent. But Ghaelya and Brindani only trudged along, watching the faint outline of the overgrown path and little else. Quietly he cursed their inattentiveness, shaking his head and ignoring Vaasurri’s solemn stare.

“You’re not the only one who’s wounded,” Vaasurri pressed, an edge of anger and concern in his voice. “And not all of us can stay awake for tendays on end.”.

“We’re not stopping,” Uthalion said a little louder. “Too far to go, not enough distance behind us.”

“Distance from Caidris you mean,” the killoren replied.

“Not now, Vaas. Let it go,” Uthalion grumbled. His eyes remained firmly on the southern horizon as if glued there, drawn like the needle of a compass. He found, after several tries, that he could not look away from it for long. He couldn’t hear the mysterious song, but its constant pull was unmistakable.

“Fine, keep your secrets,” Vaasurri said and turned off the path, gesturing for Brindani and Ghaelya to follow. “We are stopping. Should you happen to work things out and stop for a moment, perhaps we’ll catch up.”

Uthalion did stop and turned on the killoren angrily, his sword half drawn and a swift rebuke on his tongue, but he caught himself. He let the unspoken words go and sheathed his sword, staring at the leather bracers on his arms, the tired half-elf and the genasi. The storm was passing, and he was no longer the Captain he’d once been. These were not his soldiers.

Vaasurri led them to a growth of rock that curled from the ground like the tail of a burrowing dragon. Uthalion cooled his anger somewhat, though he could not quell the sense of eyes spying upon his back, of beasts crawling through the

grass waiting for him tn let. Hrram hin cmnrr) It felt aa tVuvucrh

they were everywhere, and naught could banish them save reaching Tohrepur and dealing with Khault.

The Choir had been to Airspur at least once, he thought and suppressed a shudder. Might they take my family next?

He shivered and made his slow way to the little camp, not sparing a glance for the killoren as he climbed the curl of rock, seeking higher ground from which to observe the surrounding area.

“I’ll take first watch,” he muttered.

From above he noticed the haunted look on Ghaelya’s face as she cleared an area to he down, though Brindani, he noted, looked nothing less than a ghost. He pondered this briefly, then looked again to the south, slowly turning the silver ring upon his finger as the muted sun crawled to the western horizon.

********

Vaasurri sat quietly by the small fire, rubbing the chill from his arms and keeping a worried eye upon Uthalion until well after sunset. The human seemed as though he’d been hollowed out and filled with something else, bearing little resemblance to the man Vaasurri had known in the Spur. Though Uthalion did eventually tend to the wounds on his leg, it was the wounds of an older conflict that the killoren spied in the blank stare of his friend’s face, in the anxious paranoia that started at every sound.

Brindani appeared to have fared little better since leaving Caidris. He was pale and wrapping himself tightly in a wet cloak, trembling with something beyond just the cold. At first Vaasurri had suspected the silkroot, but he had witnessed the addictions of mortals in the Feywild— silkroot having been a popular method of easing the fears and inhibitions of those caught in the fey realms—and the half-elf suffered far differently than he recalled.

The encounter in Caidris had marked both the man and the half-elfin a way that Vaasurri could not fathom, though he suspected both had seen something in Sefir that had been wholly unnatural and yet familiar at the same time. In all his life, even in the fantastic beings of the Feywild, he had never seen anything like the mutilated singer. He had no word for such a thing as Sefir, though he had witnessed sorcerous infections—diseases that affected not only the flesh, but the will and spirit of the infected. Some had worked according to nefarious design; others, occasionally, had spread like wildfire, epidemics attributed to the Spellplague and beasts caught in the terrible blue waves of its chaos.

He shivered, considering their destination, the strange wolflike dreamers, and the thing called Sefir, only one representative of a group Ghaelya had called the Choir. Muttering a curse under his breath, he let the first glimmer of doubt cross his mind. Though he’d been well intentioned when he agreed to help, he doubted one city dweller’s ability to survive for so long, surrounded by such nightmares.

As the idea settled in, darkening his already somber mood, he looked to Uthalion and Brindani. Casually shielding his eyes, he glanced at Ghaelya, dreading what he knew he must attempt. He felt very much alone in that moment, but as the seemingly sole voice of surviving reason, he could not remain silent. Certain that only madness and death would greet them in the ruins of Torehpur, he said what none of them wanted to hear.

“We should turn back,” he said, forcing the words out and shattering the awkward quiet that enveloped them as surely as the darkness of the chill night air.

In truth, he spoke only to Ghaelya, his green eyes watching her reaction closely. She said nothing at first, her expression unreadable as he waited. But it was not her voice that first protested.

“No,” Brindani said, stirring lethargically beneath his cloak, his shadowed eyes reduced to two flickering glints of light in the campfire. “We will not turn back.”

Vaasurri ignored the half-elf, waiting only for Ghaelya to respond. It was her quest he had agreed to, and he would abandon it only by her word. She blinked and looked down, her hands balled into fists as a mix of emotions crossed her troubled features..

“We’ve come too far,” Uthalion said from above, glancing down only for a moment before returning his gaze to the south. “Best to just see it through now, stop these… things… If we’re able.”

Vaasurri glared at the human, wondering what mysterious force had Uthalion in its grip and fearing where it might lead them when all was said and done. He held his tongue for the moment and turned back to the genasi.

“Ghaelya?” he said, and she flinched as if startled from her thoughts. “You heard what Sefir said and saw what he was—or rather, what he had become. I hate to suggest the worst, but your sister—”

“I don’t know,” she said suddenly, fixing him with a hard stare that she quickly broke. She fidgeted with her sword as she prepared to clean the still bloodied blade. “I just… need to think. I need to rest.”

. Vaasurri merely nodded, feeling ashamed for broaching the subject. But he knew he would have regretted turning away from what he felt what right, even if it was painful to hear. He sat back, troubled, but willing to wait for the morning light and Ghaelya’s decision. It was some time before he noticed the dark, withering stare of Brindani from across the low flames of the campfire, and he wondered if his suggestion of turning back had already come too late.