The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) (2 page)

Voices in the old man’s head. Jibes and discouraging sentiments. The creatures, the once fellow travelers—that advised him, that helped him, that gave him access to ever more powerful magic—were now adversaries. And though they felt as if they were within him, he perceived only that he fought with himself. It exhausted him. It distracted him. It drained away his spirit. And always, the pain
.

So much pain. So much pain in the old man’s hands
.

F
or Nergei, there may as well have been no world beyond Haven. He knew everything beyond the village only from the maps in his master’s books—thin black lines on paper, city names and features illustrated in miniature. His world was as small as his understanding, he thought.

He had Haven, a small village in a sloping valley, surrounded on all sides by high mountains. To the east, the sea. To the west, the plains and the cities of a world the villagers rarely thought about, and where they rarely went. They preferred the safety of their home, preferred to hunt and farm, preferred to hide away from whatever lay beyond the village confines, the woods to one side and a steep incline to the other. To the south, a melt-water river flowed west, searching for a path down the mountain. Sometimes Nergei
wished he was as brave. There was little for him in Haven other than his service to his master. If he had been any other villager, he would’ve known nothing but his small village life. But serving his master had made him aware of just how big the world truly was.

His master’s world was vast. The man, the Old Stargazer, lived in an isolated and old structure up a path to the east. An observatory, he called it, because he spent his time on a rooftop deck observing the heavens. (He also used it to watch over Haven. He had long been its protector.)

Nergei’s knowledge of his master’s arcane art was rudimentary, but he was aware that the old man was, in fact, in league with the stars in some way. He took notes. He drew maps of the locations of the stars. He even spoke to them. His master’s domain was both the heavens and the world. Nergei’s, though, was just the observatory, and the village shops, and a small section of the woods where he was sent with a basket and a parchment filled with drawings of the things his master required.

The village had a square in the center where the people of Haven gathered to trade and celebrate. It had a great hall where the council and the village chief, the Crook of Haven, met to plan out the particulars of their small lives. It had a small temple with two priests, adepts of the sun god Pelor, because even though the
old man offered them protection, the villagers made sure to give a small part of their devotion to the one who helped their harvest come in every year, who kept them not just safe, but fed. The farmland, laid out in widening rings made flat on the gentle village slope, was not much, but enough for the villagers to squabble over now and then. The hunting in the woods to the west was regular. The village was hidden and life was quiet. Nergei longed for something, but was never clear about what. So, instead, he worked.

The master had sent Nergei into the woods to gather hyssop for afternoon tea, but the tea would be late; thanks to the arrival of the others in the clearing where Nergei had been searching. Unable to move from his hiding place behind a felled hardwood three times the breadth of the village’s biggest men, Nergei could only listen to the voices on the other side of the fallen trunk. While he listened, he practiced slowing his breathing and calming his blood as the Old Stargazer had taught him, so that he would not panic or cry out, no matter what he heard.

It was hard—much harder than usual. The reasons were legion. The first was that two of the voices on the other side of the near-wall of wood belonged to Kohel and Padlur. Kohel was the village chief’s son,
and Padlur was the strongest of all the boys Nergei’s age, capable of running faster, jumping higher, and pulling a heavier bow than any of the others. Together, they were the worst of the boys who tormented Nergei whenever he passed through the village in the robes the old master insisted he wear, the pouches he insisted Nergei carry, all his wardrobe a contrast to their heavier leathers and animal hides, their belts slung with dagger and quiver—the trappings of hunter and warrior instead of the scholarly, the weak. That was how the young in Haven viewed anything to do with the observatory, it having been many years since the Old Stargazer had been called upon by the villagers for anything. Memory was often short, and some tales were no longer told. The source of the old man’s power—strange, dark, and uncommon in the villager’s view—relegated most stories about him to whispers among the elderly, scary tales meant to protect the children’s innocence. No one except Nergei and some of those same old men knew that the Old Stargazer had once stood at the center of Haven’s life, participating in generation after generation of the village, without question or comment about his long life and the way he never seemed to age.

It was not so now, had not been as long as Nergei had been alive. But the Old Stargazer had told him
tales of the old days, and Nergei believed them, for he had never known his master to lie.

His master could be many things—quiet, distant, and cruel or melancholy and kind—but a liar was not one of them.

Kohel and Padlur together was the first reason for Nergei’s still-unslowed breath, his too-quick pulse. Luzhon was the other.

It was the presence of Luzhon that doomed Nergei, that guaranteed he would not remain hidden from his bullies as he had so many other times, in all the hiding places a boy as weak as he learned to love: the dusty attics, the quiet spots behind houses, the farthest bench back in the meeting halls, and the deepest part of the forest near Haven.

He continued to try to slow his breathing, as he had been taught, but a forceful thump against the opposite side of the trunk broke any chance of Nergei entering a meditative state. Disrupted, he allowed his curiosity to overtake his fear, began to make the long slink around the edge of the trunk, where he might be able to peek through the berry-choked bramble, a thick patch of brush grown in newly sunlit space caused by the falling of the tree, the removal of its leafy canopy.

He was halfway around the trunk when he felt the tree move again. He stopped, closed his eyes, but saw it there anyway: Kohel, pressing himself against Luzhon. Kohel, saying, “It’s only us. Only us. No one will see.”

Of course it wasn’t only them—Padlur was right there, laughing, and then there was Nergei, hidden but still able to bear witness.

“We are not alone,” Luzhon replied. Her voice lumped Nergei’s throat, added to his urgency. “And we are not promised to each other.”

Kohel snickered. “Not yet, but soon. I am to come into my father’s holdings, and then we shall be matched. So why wait?”

Even though Nergei could not yet see the trio, he had seen Kohel rehearse his flirtation before, had seen him press himself to other, less-comely versions of Luzhon throughout the village. In his mind’s eye—in that imagination that so often tortured Nergei with what he could not have—he saw Kohel prod the girl’s ribs with his blunt hands, saw him pull her to him. Nergei knew she would push back, but not as he would have her do. In his imagination—if not in fact—her push was flirtatious, rather than serious, because no one pushed Kohel away, not in the end, not if they wanted their fathers to retain their seats in the village council, or for their mothers their pick
of the best plots for growing wheat and barley on the communal terraces carved out of the rock. Even beyond all thought of family loyalty, each and every girl in the village had been enticed by Kohel’s attentions at one time, because even with his mischievous nature and oft-discussed reputation, he was by any objective measure a handsome young man. Willful and self-involved, devious and unreliable, but strong and sturdy, unblemished and dark. That was Kohel, son of the village chief.

“Not here,” said Luzhon, and Nergei jumped again as the tree rocked with the force of Kohel pushing the girl against the trunk. Even on the move again, Nergei could not stop himself from seeing what he could not possibly see: the thick meat of Kohel’s hands upon the lovely Luzhon, upon her face, rubbing her painted lips with his thumb. The fingers of his other hand spreading across her belly, then up to the string that tied her top at the neck.

More that he did not want to see, that might be happening despite his aversion: Luzhon’s top opening, then falling, Kohel’s thumb traversing her body from lip to chin to neck to sternum to nipple. Desiring that it was not happening did not make it so. Nothing, Nergei thought, could hold back the inevitable, and nothing could darken the images of it in his mind.

Nergei saw not because he was sure of what was happening—he would have to circumnavigate the tree for that—but because he himself had appeared in the same scene and in the same role, night after night. How many times had he fantasized about Luzhon finding him out in the woods, in a bramble or clearing far away from Haven, in the places where they both went to gather berries and herbs?

How many nights had he lain awake thinking about such improbable moments, wishing even less likely scenarios atop them, scenes in which he might be able to talk to Luzhon as he longed to, where he could tell her the way he felt about her, the way he had felt about her since he was a child, since they were both children together?

Even then she had been the most beautiful of the villagers their age, with her tight-braided black hair, her perfect pale skin that shone in the night air. A decade later, she was not just the most gorgeous of their peers, but also of the whole village, and Nergei knew there was no chance for him, a landless, fatherless orphan, raised in the village but also apart from it, up in the Old Stargazer’s observatory built above the crags of the mountain.

He had tried all his life not to be ungrateful, but was ungrateful still, and like so much else, it ate at him, turned in his guts, another inadequacy he could not defeat.

Luzhon was not just beautiful. She was the child of successful, but certainly not powerful or affluent, farmers, and had many talents of her own. She was bright and capable, good with her hands, able to work the soil as well as her father. She had proven herself to be good at bartering with the other villagers, always coming out slightly ahead, but with no feelings hurt. She was even, it seemed, a fair shot with a sling and a good hand with a small blade. But because of her great beauty, so many other possibilities, so many other ways to be a true leader of Haven—something she might have preferred, thought Nergei—was lost to her and, though she struggled against it, she was something else entirely. To the powerful in the village, the fathers of sons who stood to inherit the most fertile terraces for farming, the tanning house, the smithy, Luzhon represented status.

She was, simply, a prize, and Kohel was determined to win her.

Nergei shook his head to clear it of his thoughts—always these thoughts, always too many thoughts pressing in—and then he had reached the thinner top branches of the fallen tree. So came the choice between concealment and exposure, and for once, Nergei acting brashly, chose the latter. Bunching his robes in his hands, he stepped over and through, crashing into the bramble of dried leaves and cracking branches on the other
side. The noise was significant, and hardly worth the cost, as the blocking breadth of the tree was replaced with the thicket of dead leaves and dry branches, also keeping Luzhon from Nergei’s sight.

Still unable to see but suddenly trapped, Nergei listened as Kohel’s pressing patter stopped, interrupted. Nergei froze, as the quiet, careful Padlur spoke in warning. “Kohel. Someone else is here. Watching.”

Where Kohel was stocky and thick with muscle, Padlur was taller, more athletic, had a fast, lithe build like an elf, but the resilient bones of his human heritage. There were rumors in his youth that his father was not his father at all, that his elf build was the sign of some other heritage, but since Padlur was old enough to walk he had been big enough to knock down anyone who suggested such. And so the villagers stopped suggesting. Anyway, who had ever seen an elf in Haven? The village’s strength was its isolation, and not even the elves or eladrin came so high. Nergei did not hunt with the other boys, but in the market he had seen the elk and deer slain by Padlur’s arrows, had heard the tales of the dark-skinned boy’s prowess at dropping such prey from across gullies, the fast and wide streams of the mountains. Most recently, he had seen Padlur stand in soaked breeches and tell of wading through an ice-clutched mountain river for an hour to return with the gutted weight of a
great bear he had, at close range, felled with a spear. He had seemed to brush away the cold like nothing more than an annoyance, a tiny buzzing insect that did not warrant his attention beyond a quickly flicked wrist, and that too had shamed Nergei, who could not imagine himself possessing such bravery or skill.