Drawn Blades (12 page)

“Aral,
wake up. Thuroq is back.”

I opened my eyes to find Faran kneeling beside me. Above and behind her was what looked like the inner surface of one of the domed felt tents the traders of Radewald favored, and I could no longer see the fire. What light there was came from the magelight Faran had used earlier to work on my leg.

“Where are we?” I asked. “I don’t remember moving.” The pain in my leg had kept me from doing much more than dozing. Unless I’d flat passed out again in there somewhere, I couldn’t figure out how she’d managed it.

“We haven’t moved an inch.” Triss said, lifting his head from my chest to meet my eyes.

Faran added, “Thuroq raised an earthen dome around us so that the Durkoth healer could look at you without having to enter the surface world.”

“Another Uthudor,” said Thuroq. “Not a healer, a scholar of stone. As part of his discipline he prefers not to leave the embrace of sister earth.”

I turned my head and saw the Durkoth standing alone on the far side of the low chamber.

“This guy is here to look at Aral’s wounds, right?” Faran asked. “To see if he can make them better? By my lights that makes him a healer.”

The Durkoth’s face took on a pinched expression. “No. He’s not interested in Aral at all. It’s the effects of the hasheth that he cares about, the god-touched iron.”

“So this
won’t
help Aral?” said Triss. “That’s not what you said when you arrived.”

“It will almost certainly help him,” said Thuroq. “That’s why I asked for the Uthudor to come—because my king ordered me to see you taken care of and to speed you on your way as quick as I may. Healing Aral serves that goal. But
my
wishes in that regard have nothing to do with why the Uthudor chose to come here. He is not a healer. He cares nothing for Aral as Aral. He wants only to undo that which the hasheth has done,
because
it was done by the hasheth. He would do the same if the hasheth had marked a stone wall or a tree trunk instead of Aral’s leg.”

“That doesn’t sound very reassuring,” grumbled Triss.

“It is not meant to,” said Thuroq. “Now, since this Uthudor is not a patient soul, can we dispense with further
discussing
and move on to dealing with the hasheth?”

I could feel Triss’s frustration, but instead of arguing, he simply nodded and shifted off my chest.

“Fine by me,” said Faran. “What does this Uthudor need from us?”

“Put out the light, and
try
to remain quiet.”

Faran picked up the enchanted stone of the magelight and dropped it into her trick bag, sinking us in darkness. It felt like coming home. Much of my life has been spent in darkness, and I am always more comfortable at night than under the light of the sun.

As usual when darkness took me, I shifted more of my attention to my other senses, allowing sight to fade into the background of my mind. With greater focus, the scent of the earthen walls seemed suddenly sharper and stronger. The sound of Faran’s breath and the nearly silent shifts of her gray silks loomed larger. Even the pressure of the blanket against my skin took on greater depth and meaning. Once I had grounded myself in my own senses, I was ready to reach outward.

Triss?
I sent.

On it.
My familiar flowed over me, enclosing me in a second skin—a necessary prerequisite to lending me the use of his darksight and other shadow senses.

A heartbeat later, I used Triss’s “eyes” to watch a second Durkoth rise out of the ground between Thuroq and me. He was clothed in a floor-length robe of some porous stone that drank light so deeply that even Triss “saw” him mostly as a sort of deeper void in the darkness around him. He wore a cowl of the same stone, and something like a veil, completely concealing his features. As he slid toward me, his bare hands and feet suddenly flared in Triss’s unvision, shifting to some highly reflective color—though whether that was the usual white, or silver, or even yellow was something I couldn’t read through Triss’s senses.

The ground beneath me rose into a high couch as he approached, lifting my wounded hip to the height of the Uthudor’s ribs. Faran had cut away my pants earlier, and now the earth of the couch tugged aside my blanket, exposing the dressing over my wound.

The Uthudor glanced over his shoulder at Thuroq. “Yathraq, patis!”

“He wants you to remove the bandages,” said Thuroq. “And please don’t speak to him as you do it.”

Faran stepped forward—no doubt borrowing Ssithra’s “eyes” to guide her—and sliced my bandages away with a few deft flicks of her wrist dagger. She didn’t resheathe it when she finished, spinning it into an underhanded grip instead, so that the blade lay concealed along her forearm. It was a shift as quick as any street conjurer’s sleight of hand, and I doubted whether the two Durkoth would have followed it.

The Uthudor leaned forward and held his palm a few inches above the wound in my leg for several minutes. Beyond the gesture itself I had no indication of anything happening. Neither through magesight, nor Triss’s senses, nor any sensation at all. Finally, he lifted his hand away and reached into the sleeve of his stone robe. I saw Faran tense at that, ready to protect me, but she relaxed again when the Uthudor’s gesture produced nothing more threatening than a smooth stone of the sort you might find on any riverbank.

He rubbed the stone between his hands, shaping it into a perfect sphere. Then he set it at the top of the gash—just above and inside the point of my hip bone—and gently rolled it up and down the length of the wound several times. It should have hurt, simply from pressing against my wound, but it didn’t. Instead, it relieved a pressure I hadn’t known was there until it eased. It felt a bit like having an infected wound lanced, but much smoother and without the sharp jab of the lancet.

When he finished, the Uthudor lifted the rock away and turned it inside out by pressing on one side with his thumbs until the stone pushed through and out the other side, folding back on itself. The end result was an egg-shaped rock about half again larger than the original. He set it beside my leg on the earthen couch, barked a quick phrase at Thuroq in Durkothi, then slid down into the earth again.

“Don’t touch that. I’ll be right back,” Thuroq said before following the other Durkoth into the ground.

“Did it work?” Faran asked me.

“It certainly did
something
.” I reached down and touched the wound lightly. It hurt, but not, I thought, as much as it would have earlier. “I don’t know what, though.”

“To me it feels better.” Triss collapsed back into a dragon-shaped shadow as Faran fished out the magelight to look at the wound.

Faran nodded. “That orange tint around the edges is all gone. Now it just looks like your basic mess of ripped-up flesh.” She pointed at the rock. “I wonder what the story on that is.”

“Me, too.”

Ssithra leaned down from her perch on Faran’s shoulder, stretching her long bird’s neck so that she was scant inches away from the thing as she turned her shadow of a head this way and that above it. “I see nothing but a stone,” she finally grumped.

That was all that I saw as well, but when Thuroq returned he lifted the thing in the air, and said, “This is a hasheth-ctark now.” He pronounced the second word with a harsh coughing sound. “The Uthudor has encysted the hasheth of the Fire That Burns Underground in the stone. If you were to crack it open, you would find it hollow and the inside lined with tiny orange and red crystals. It is like a . . . What’s the human word? Ah, yes, a geode.”

“So, the curse has become a part of the rock?” I asked.

“Not quite, but your language doesn’t have the words, and that is quite close to the truth. The curse is contained within, so that it can be dealt with properly.”

“What do we do with it?” asked Faran.

“Take it beyond the Wall of the Sylvain. The hasheth is a thing of the buried gods. It should never have left the lands beyond the wall. Nothing of the buried ones should. You can do whatever you wish with it once you are there, though I would recommend that it be destroyed. That’s the only way you can be completely certain it won’t remain tied to the wound, even long after it has healed.”

“I could send it into the everdark right now,” said Triss. “Put it out of this world entirely . . .”

“No! The buried ones are of a place. I do not think that they could use such a small thing to access another plane, but they should not be afforded the opportunity. Take it beyond the wall and smash or bury it there. Or, if the chance arises, return it to the tomb of the Fire That Burns Underground—that would be the best solution of all.”

“Is there any harm in touching it now?” I asked.

“No. As long as the rock remains unbroken, it is merely a rock.”

Faran took the rock. “And what happens if we break it?”

“I honestly don’t know, but it’s a minor sort of curse. It might do nothing at all. It might return to your leg. It might simply root itself in the nearest available vessel. The Uthudor didn’t say and he has gone.”

I wanted to pursue the subject further, but could see it wouldn’t get me anywhere.

“Now,” continued Thuroq, “we need to see you on your way. My king wants you gone, and he has given me the tools to make that happen.” He raised his hands above his head and made a gesture of parting.

In response, the low earthen dome sank back into the ground around us, revealing a bright dawn that made the Durkoth squint and pull a stone cowl over his head to protect his skin. Another gesture reduced my couch to nothing. A third brought our long-dead fire up from a sort of bubble in the earth, exposing a thick stone floor beneath it that hadn’t been there before. A fourth carved a stairhead into the earth and stone at the front of our slice of misplaced land, and a fifth put a sunshade over the top of the opening.

“That all looks pretty elaborate,” I said.

“As I said, my king wants you gone. Since you can’t travel on your own, that means that we must transport you.”

“We?” Faran eyed the stairs suspiciously. “There are more of you below?”

“Yes. Now. The king’s orders called for haste. By myself I can only move you along the road, and that runs the risk of unwanted attention if we travel under the sun’s gaze. With others to clear the way and close it behind, and to take my place when I tire, we can avoid the eyes of your people and travel both day and night. Add in the escort the king has sent to prevent any further incidents, and you will travel in state the like of which few mortals have ever known.”

Faran made a bitter face. “Delightful. Will we be seeing much of this escort of yours?”

“Only me. None of the others speak your language or wish to spend time here above the true world.”

“How far are you taking us?” I asked. “We must be close to the border of your king’s lands already.”

“We are very nearly there. If we had not been attacked by the . . . Durkoth bandits disguising themselves as wholly mythical cultists, we would have reached the place where I would have had to leave you tonight.”

That sounded interesting. I raised an eyebrow. “And now?”

“My king feels that we cannot simply leave you at the border anymore. If the . . . bandits followed you over into the lands of the Queen of the South after his interactions with you through me, the queen might choose to see that as an act of religious aggression on the part of the North Kingdom and act accordingly.”

I thought I was beginning to see where this was going. “I take it that would embarrass your king diplomatically?”

“I have no official opinion on the matter,” Thuroq said with the blankest expression I’d yet seen on his face. “But it is possible the queen might choose to see it that way. Rather than allow her to make that misapprehension, my king has chosen to have us take you all the way to the Wall of the Sylvain.”

That made me sit up despite the pain it woke in my thigh. “That’ll take us down the whole length of the South Kingdom, won’t it? I thought you were trying to
avoid
a diplomatic incident.”

Thuroq didn’t so much as blink at my question. “It would,
if
we remained in the foothills, but neither kingdom claims the lands that lie beyond the edge of the mountains. We will go south and east and travel above the empty country rather than following the line of the mountains to the southwest.”

“That’ll take us through some pretty heavily populated parts of southern Zhan and the Magelands beyond. Isn’t that going to pose a problem in the not being seen department?”

“No. Your people have no sense of fathudor. Avoiding them with the resources I now have available will be easy enough.” He smiled. “But even if we were seen, there would be no
diplomatic
problem, merely embarrassment. My people do not recognize the boundaries yours have drawn above the earth, so there is no question of violating them. Now, I must leave you before this light does me any more harm than it already has. I am weary as I have not been in a thousand years or more. If you need anything, come down and ask after it.”

He turned and descended the stairs. A few minutes later, our campsite began to move again, sliding south and east through a forest that parted ahead of us and closed in behind. Despite my discomfort with our mode of travel, my injuries weighed heavily against my consciousness, and I soon fell asleep. My dreams were filled with the sound of cypress boughs brushing gently one against the other as they slipped out of our way.

After a few days of travel I grew more comfortable with the stone raft. Some of that was familiarity. More was exhaustion. Healing, even magically aided healing, takes a lot out of you, and I spent much of my time sleeping.

The horses did not join me in my slow accommodation with our unnatural transportation. They didn’t like standing on ground that moved, not one little bit. I’m not much of a horseman, and I prefer my own feet to riding, but I hated to see the beasts so unhappy—eyes wide and white, ears constantly flickering. Blinders helped, but only so much. I don’t know what we’d have done with them if the trip had lasted much longer than it did.