Worldbinder (11 page)

Fallion put his arms around the old man. “There now,”
he said. “You’ve given me enough wise counsel to last me a lifetime.”

“I… can’t remember,” Waggit said.

“I’ll remember for the both of us,” Fallion said. He hugged Waggit once more, wondering at the cruelty of forcibles.

Waggit had not been born a fool, he once told Fallion. But he had slipped into an icy creek as a child, while fetching water for his mother, and had nearly drowned. After that, his ability to remember was stolen, and he ended up working the silver mines.

But when the reavers attacked Carris, he had fought them with his pick, actually killing a few. For his courage and strength, he had been granted a few forcibles, and with a few endowments of wit and stamina, had made himself a scholar, one of the wisest in the land.

Now the folk who had granted the endowments, his Dedicates, were all dead, and with their deaths, Waggit’s ability to remember had died too, along with the lore that he’d once mastered.

Did my father do well or ill, granting him endowments? Fallion wondered. Would Waggit not have been happier to remain a fool than to gain great wisdom and lose it all?

Fallion fought back his sadness and ducked through a curtain into the cozy room where Talon lay upon a low cot. She had grown too large to fit on it.

Jaz had covered her with a coarse blanket, and now he knelt beside her, his shoulders slumped from weariness, so still that he looked as if drawing a breath was almost too great a chore.

“How is she doing?” Fallion asked. “Any change?”

Jaz shook his head slightly.

“There is a chair here in the corner, if you would like it,” Fallion offered.

Jaz shrugged. “I know. I was too tired to get up and sit.”

Fallion slumped in the chair.

Jaz did not turn. As he gazed at Talon, his face was lined with grief.

“I thought for sure,” he said softly, “that when you healed the worlds, we’d get cloudbursts of beer, and the meadows would sprout dancing girls as pretty as any flower….”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Fallion said.

“What’s wrong with us? I feel like a burrow bear that’s been pulled out of its hole in mid-winter. I just want to sleep for a few more months.”

“Jaz, we have to go away,” Fallion said. “We have to get out of here, now.”

“What do you mean?” Jaz did not move. He looked as if he was too tired to care.

“That rune, it was a trap. The tree was the bait. Once my mind touched the rune, I knew that I had to mend it or die. But it couldn’t be mended, not really. It was meant to do only one thing, to bind two shadow worlds into one. I didn’t bind all of the worlds into one. I didn’t heal anything. I fear I’ve made things worse.”

Jaz nodded almost imperceptibly, as if he couldn’t muster the energy to care.

“Jaz, no human sorcerer made that rune. It was beyond the power of any mortal to form. I know who made it: our father’s ancient enemy, the Queen of the Loci.”

Now Jaz looked at him, cocking his head just a bit, peering at him from the corner of his eye.

“She’s here, Jaz, somewhere. She knows what I’ve done. She tricked me into doing it.”

“Maybe, maybe she was just testing you,” Jaz suggested. “Maybe she wanted to see if you really could bind the worlds. If the wizards are right, she was never able to do that. If she’d been able to, she’d have bound all of the worlds together into one, under her control.”

“It was a test,” Fallion agreed. “But in passing it, I failed us all.”

Jaz finally drew a deep breath, as if trying to muster the energy to rise. “Go then, if you must,” he said. “I can’t
leave Talon behind. And we can’t let the Queen of the Loci catch you. If she does, we both know what she will try to force you to do—bind the worlds into one, all under her control.”

Fallion hesitated. He couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Talon, not like this. He wasn’t certain what was wrong with her. Perhaps in the melding, her organs had become jumbled up. Perhaps the creature that lay before him had two hearts and only half a lung. He couldn’t be certain.

He only knew that in binding the two worlds together, he had not done it perfectly. There had been mistakes, dangerous errors. The vine that had grown through his hand was just one of them, and the stinging pain and the bloody bandage that he now wore were constant reminders.

What if I’d tried binding all of the worlds into one? Fallion wondered. What if those little errors had been multiplied a million million times over?

It would have been a catastrophe. I would have destroyed the world.

Maybe that is why the Locus Queen set this trap—to see what would happen if I succeeded.

There was a pitcher of water on the bed stand. Fallion felt thirsty but too tired to take a drink. Still, he knew that his body would need it.

Talon suddenly groaned in her sleep. “Ishna! Ishna! Bolanda ka!” She thrashed from side to side. Her voice was deep and husky.

“What did she say?” Jaz asked.

Fallion shook his head. It was no language that he had ever heard, and he was familiar with several.

He wondered if it were just aimless babbling, the ranting that came with a fevered dream.

Fallion got up, found a towel on the bed stand, and poured some of the cool water from the pitcher onto the towel.

He knelt beside Talon and dabbed her forehead, held
the rag there with one hand and touched her cheek with the other, checking for a fever.

She was definitely warm.

He had been holding the rag on her head for all of thirty seconds when her eyes sprang open wide, filled with terror, and she backhanded him.

Fallion went flying as if he’d been kicked by a war horse.

In an instant, Talon sprang to her feet, as if to do battle, knocking Jaz aside. “Wyrmlings!” she shouted, her eyes darting about the room, trying to take everything in.

“Talon, it’s okay!” Jaz said. “You’re all right! You’re with friends.”

Talon stood, gasping for breath. At seven feet tall, she dwarfed all of those around her, dwarfed the tiny room. Every muscle in her arms and neck seemed strained, and she took a battle stance. In that moment, she seemed a fearsome warrior, more terrifying than any man that Fallion had ever seen. Her eyes darted about, as if she was trapped in some nightmare. Slowly her vision cleared. She recognized Fallion and Jaz, but merely stood in shock, trying to make sense of the situation.

“It’s all right,” Jaz assured her. “You were only dreaming. You were just dreaming. Do you know where you are?”

Talon peered down at the floor, so far below her, and then peered at her hands, huge and powerful, as if trying to make sense of them. “Am I still dreaming?”

She studied Fallion, who lay on the floor, holding his arm where she had hit him.

Fallion remembered being trampled by a bull and taking far less hurt. He tried moving his arm experimentally. He didn’t think that it was broken, but it would be black and blue for weeks.

“No,” Jaz said. “The world has changed. Two worlds are combined, and I guess … you changed with them. We’re not sure what happened….”

Fallion waited for a reaction. He had thought that she would weep for her lost humanity or sit and sulk. Instead,
shock and acceptance seemed to come almost at the same moment.

“I see,” she said, peering at her hands as if considering the implications of his words. Then with a sigh she said, “Let’s go see this new world.”

More than anything, this showed Fallion the depth of the change in Talon. Gone was the young woman Fallion had known.

Talon reached down to take Fallion’s hand. He proffered his good hand, but when she grasped it, Fallion cried out in pain. “Not so tight!”

She looked at him in disbelief. “Sorry. I, uh, barely touched you.”

He felt sure that she was telling the truth. He also felt sure that if she wanted, she could tear his arm off as easily as she could rip the wing off of a roasted chicken.

She pulled Fallion to his feet, then stalked out of the room on unsteady legs, as if trying to become accustomed to her new size.

She strode out into the street, went to the gate tower, and by the time she reached it she leapt up, taking the stairs four at a stride. Then she just stood for a long moment until Fallion caught up.

“Damn,” she whispered when he drew near. “You’ve made a mess of things.”

“What do you mean?” Fallion asked. “Are you ill?”

“Fallion,” Talon said, “I feel great. I feel… better than I’ve ever felt before.” She turned and peered at him. “You’ve done me no harm. In fact, it is the opposite. I feel more … whole, than I ever felt before.”

Fallion understood what she meant, partly. It was said that all of the worlds were but shadows of the One True World, and some wizards suspected that a man might have shadows of himself on each of those worlds.

Somehow, Fallion suspected, he had bound Talon to her shadow self.

“Nightfall is coming,” she said. “The … wyrmlings will come with it. We have to get away, get to safety.”

Fallion couldn’t imagine any place safer than the castle, even in its poor repair. Nor did he know what a wyrmling was. But this world was in ruins. And the wyrmlings were the cause.

There is a rule to war. The first rule, Fallion had been taught, was to know your enemy.

“What are wyrmlings?” he asked.

“Giants.”

“Like you?”

“Larger than me,” Talon laughed. “I am human, bred to be one of the warrior clan, large and fierce. My ancestors were bred to be this way, much as you breed dogs of war to increase their size, their viciousness. And though I am larger than a human of feral stock, the wyrmlings are more than a head taller than me, and outweigh me by hundreds of pounds. We are but feeble imitations of the wyrmlings. And we true humans are almost all gone. There are fewer than forty thousand of us left.

“The wyrmlings hunt by night,” Talon explained, “for they cannot tolerate light. They eat only meat, and they worship the Lady Despair.”

“I see,” Fallion said.

“No, not really,” Talon answered. “There’s more to tell, and it will take hours to do so. But first, we must get away from here.”

“Where do we go?”

Talon peered into the distance, closed her eyes in consternation. “I can’t remember…. It’s like a dream. I see the place, but I can’t put a name to it.”

“Then give yourself a moment to wake,” Fallion said.

Talon peered into the distance for a long minute. “Luciare. The fortress is called Luciare.”

“Where is it?” Fallion asked.

Talon closed her eyes, concentrated. She could see her mother and father there. Borenson was much the same in both worlds she decided, but Talon’s mothers were not the same woman at all. How would that work? she wondered.
Where is my father—in Luciare, or back in Landesfallen? And what of my sisters and brothers?

She wanted to find them, make sure that all of them were well, that they had survived this transformation. But the world had shifted, and she was on strange ground.

Talon shook her head. “I’m not sure. Everything’s … wrong. I’m not sure I’ve even been here before. She nodded to a distant peak to the south, one with a distinctive hump upon the eastern flank. “That could be Mount Shuneya. That means that Luciare would be west, west by southwest, maybe—a hundred miles, or a hundred and twenty. We can’t make it tonight, or even tomorrow….”

They wouldn’t be able to make it even in four days, Fallion suspected, not with him in his current condition. But he could hear the urgency in Talon’s voice.

He looked up at her and wondered, Why don’t I have a body like hers? Why didn’t I combine with my shadow self?

Instead he felt frail, worn.

This whole place is a snare, Fallion realized. The one who set it couldn’t know for sure when I would come, or even if I would come. But now that the wire has been sprung, the hunter will be upon us. Fallion suspected it, and Talon seemed to feel it in her bones.

“How long before the wyrmlings get here?” Fallion asked.

“They have fortresses nearby, within thirty miles,” she said. “And there might be hidden outposts even closer than that. If the local commanders know to watch this place, they’ll come tonight. Even if Lady Despair has to send assassins from Rugassa, they could be on our trail by dawn.”

So, Fallion thought, a race is on.

“We’ll have to keep under the cover of trees, lie low in the woods during the night, and run through the days….”

“How do you know all of this?” Fallion asked. “How can you be sure?”

A look of confusion washed over Talon’s face, and she shook her head. “My father, the man you know as Sir Borenson, is … Aaath Ulber—High Guard. I… we are Warrior Clan.”

So Fallion felt even more convinced. Talon hadn’t merged with some beast. She had merged with her shadow self, with the woman she had been on this world.

Are all of them so large? Fallion wondered. It would explain the strange ruins, so high and soaring. But no, Talon had been but a girl, and had been diminutive at that. The humans of this world wouldn’t all be so large. He suspected that most would be larger.

I’ve brought us to a land of giants, he realized, giants that have almost been destroyed by the wyrmlings.

A sudden fear took him. Whatever was coming, he didn’t think that he could fight it. He’d fallen into a trap. He had been forced to join these two worlds together, and he saw the ruin that had followed.

He could not fix what he had done. He had no idea how to un-bind the two worlds.

And he suspected that his Queen of the Loci was rejoicing in what he had done.

Perhaps the best way to thwart her plan, he considered, is to continue my journey to the Mouth of the World and finish binding all of the shadow worlds all into one.

But he considered the damage he had done, and wondered now at the wisdom of that.

If he bungled this further, he could destroy the world, not heal it.

And there was a second worry. Perhaps that proposed course of action was exactly what the enemy wanted.

Talon turned to Fallion, gave him a calculating gaze. Then her eyes snapped to Jaz who was still feebly making his way across the courtyard below, too weak to keep pace.