Revelation (Seeds of Humanity: The Cobalt Heresy) (4 page)

“Can you bring down the gate?” the man asked earnestly. “We’ve come too far to give up now, Tyreva,” he pleaded.

The woman turned to the man and nodded her head. “I will try,” she replied.

Now was the time. I didn’t care what their reasons were, and I didn’t care who they thought were their enemies. These people had orchestrated attacks which had taken the lives of thousands, and I intended to stop them from dealing any more death.

I raised my weapon and aimed it directly at the woman’s head. The weapon itself was real inside the dream world, and discharging it would consume most of my remaining power reserves—which were dangerously low since I had spent precious time listening to their conversation.

Without further delay, I fired and was enveloped in an explosion which threatened to overcome all of my senses. Fortunately, I had prepared for this and I canceled the spell connecting our consciousnesses as soon as I used the weapon. If I had remained for even for a second longer, I would have been swallowed up in her dream death and there is a good chance that the experience would have killed me—or worse.

I found myself lying on the black stones of the walkway on top of the wall. I tried to stand, but immediately began retching uncontrollably. It felt like my ribs would crack from the intense seizures, but after a dozen or so spasms I managed to drag myself up to a standing position with Aemir’s assistance as I wiped traces of vomit from my lip.

I looked out on the field and I could no longer see the juggernaut’s green glow. My magic reserves were nearly depleted and my entire body was shaking with the exertion, but I had been through worse and knew that the worst was likely over.

“Dancer!” I yelled before realizing he was mere meters from me. Lowering my voice and trying hard to keep my hand from shaking, I pointed to the field, “Get down there and find Antolin. He’s no longer in flight, and his wards have failed.”

Dancer nodded his head eagerly. “I find him…then?” His eyes were filled with a kind of savage anticipation.

I drew a deep, steadying breath. That was actually a good question, and had Aemir not been present there is a very real possibility I would have given in to the little man’s instincts, but I shook my head emphatically. “Protect him from danger as you would me,” I said pointedly, and the fire left his eyes.

He shrugged his shoulders with a measure of disappointment in his visage. “Yes, Master,” he replied, and without warning leapt over the wall with his spear in hand. I didn’t care to see how he intended to get down safely; I knew that he would do so somehow.

I turned to Aemir. “I need you to help him. Dancer could keep Antolin safe for a while, but we need to return him to the castle walls as soon as possible and Dancer isn’t big enough to carry him if he can’t walk.” I looked out on the field, and when I saw no movement I continued, “I believe the battle is done for tonight, but we can’t be sure so we need to act quickly.”

The Desert Knight bowed low, in that infuriating fashion I had come to know in my youth among men from very, very distant lands than my Champion’s. “It shall be done, Master,” he said before rising to his full height.

Aemir produced a coil of rope from under the many folds of his garments. He fastened it to a stone block and threw it over the edge, quickly following it as he rappelled to the ground below.

I looked back up at the High Sheriff’s position on the inner wall, and saw the yellow, Centurion-style plume nod curtly in my direction. Baeld was once again at his post beside the High Sheriff with his massive sword in hand, but I didn’t recognize any other faces around them.

I looked again toward the field and saw Aemir was making his way through the curved line of rubble which had, at a time prior to my first arrival here last month, been the First Wall of the castle. Repeated nights of siege like the one we had just defended against had destroyed it, and in truth, the Middle Wall was soon to follow with huge holes in the upper sections of it having been filled with broken timbers in preparation for this latest assault.

Aemir bounded over the pile of rubble with his effortless, graceful movements which at times made him resemble a cat as he pounced and leapt from one stone to the next. Once clear of the rubble, his speed seemed to slow but I knew it was a trick of the eye. He was easily one of the fastest runners I had ever seen, so I guess watching him make his way over piles of shattered boulders with such ease suggested to the mind that he must be inhumanly fast, but he—unlike Dancer and Baeld—was very much a normal human.

The walls would remain manned until the break of dawn, and the gates would also be locked shut until the same time. The High Sheriff’s people had reported that in previous battles the enemy would use surprise to overrun their defenses if they were lacking in readiness. Apparently, this was how the previous High Sheriff had met his end a month before.

I followed Aemir’s form in the moonlight, which had only moments before returned, as the mass of clouds moving across the sky had temporarily blocked it from sight. He came to a stop near where I had last seen the juggernaut, and I saw him bend down to examine something before his head snapped up and he proceeded further out.

Looking out in the direction he was going, I saw the diminutive form of Dancer with his spear at the ready but could see no other movement around him. Aemir came next to him, and after a moment I saw him reach down to pick something from the ground, but it was not the body of Magos Antolin. They remained there for a moment before running back toward my position at the Middle Wall.

When they got to the remains of the First Wall, I could see what Aemir had brought back and my heart sank: he was carrying the robes and staff of Master Antolin but nothing else.

They scaled the rope quickly enough, with Dancer coming first. His incredible power-to-weight ratio allowed him to easily scamper up the line without even touching his feet to the stone surface, opting to use a rapid hand-over-hand technique which I could have emulated years ago at my physical best—but even then likely not for fifty feet without pause.

He brought himself up, and Aemir followed a minute later. When they had both caught their breath, I took the robes and examined them. There wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere on them; there was no damage I could see of any kind. They hadn’t even been unbuckled or untied, which would have been necessary to remove them without causing damage in the process.

Dancer shook his head. “Nothing else,” he said firmly. “I look far, but nothing. Only that,” he said and pointed to the staff and cloak.

Aemir nodded his agreement. “I also found nothing,” he said between deep breaths. “It is as if he vanished…perhaps by his own design?” Aemir offered bleakly.

“No, he wouldn’t have left his staff ‘by design’,” I shook my head for emphasis. “Whatever happened to him wasn’t a part of his plan.” I reached out and took the staff from Aemir, and as soon as my hand touched it the red and blue lines glowed with a dull light. I could feel something coursing within it, but I didn’t want to risk an accident by misusing it somehow. So I took Antolin’s robes and carefully wrapped the staff with them before tying the entire bundle to my back.

We stood watch there on the walls for hours until the first, pale green rays of dawn crept over the horizon and I could almost feel the sense of relief as it swept through the soldiers manning the battlements. It would be accurate to say that I was also relieved, but I knew that this was merely the beginning of something which would only get worse before it had any hope to get better.

I looked out over the desolate, blasted landscape surrounding the castle as it was once again illuminated by the cold, green light of the sun climbing high into the sky. As its somehow alien-looking orb rose above the horizon, I was reminded that I was very, very far from home. I slumped down against the battlements, suddenly weak and fearful of another seizure. I knew I needed to stay awake but in my current condition I was useless to everyone including myself, so I closed my eyes in the hope that a few moments of rest would give me a second wind.

I thought about how I had gotten there and how utterly fantastic the entire situation was and for the first time since I had arrived in this strange, new world over a year earlier I felt homesick. I actually felt a pang of longing for cable TV, the internet…and even the warm, yellow glow of my own sun.

But my last thought was the most troublesome: if anyone knew who I really was — or that I didn’t really belong in their world — the events of last night would look like an appetizer compared to what was in store for me.

Chapter II: Reflections

“Oh, come on Adam,” I protested as we cruised down the road at nine o’clock in the evening. We were in the 1965 Mustang, and my brother was driving. I’d had a few shots of some really outstanding rum a buddy had been raving about, and my brother had wisely picked the keys out of my pocket before we had gotten back to the car. “I don’t want to listen to any more of this ‘Nu-Metal’ crap. Let’s get some real music going,” I pleaded.

“Aaron,” my brother replied, “if you hadn’t done half a dozen shots of that crap with your buddies, you’d be driving right now and
you
could choose the music. But since I’m the one who had to get us home,
I’ll
be playing DJ for the next twenty miles. Besides,” Adam quipped, “this is way better than that euro-pop crap you’ve been listening to lately.”

“Like you didn’t go out and have a few drinks on your twenty first birthday,” I retorted, but I was actually grateful that he had been on top of things. I liked having my brother home, even if it was only for a few weeks.

Adam shook his head. “I never said I didn’t,” he argued, “but I sure as hell had the good sense to know that if I was going to be the passenger while someone else did the driving, I was going to have to listen to whatever he wanted to play!”

I groaned loudly. “Why do you like this garbage, anyways?” I complained. “I mean, she can’t even sing that well and all the instruments sound like they came out of a computer!”

I could see my brother was enjoying the banter as much as I was, and for at least one car ride home things could be like they had been when we were younger. “Most of it’s not really that good,” he admitted “but there’s one later on that has such amazing imagery, it seems like I can see the scenery come to life in my head as she sings that first verse.”

There was a pause in the conversation as the CD shuffled to the next song, which was number six on the album according to the display on the disc player. It started off sensibly enough with a soft techno beat, but then it exploded into the usual over-amplified electric guitar riffs about twenty seconds in, and I lost interest.

I decided to change subjects for some reason. “So how was the season?” I asked, having purposefully kept myself ignorant of his baseball career’s status.

Now it was Adam’s turn to groan. “Well,” he began as he turned the volume down a bit, “the workouts are good but nothing special, and the travel is a serious pain in the ass, not to mention all the over-inflated egos on the field—half of which don’t even speak English. To top it all off, the team’s got some high-powered kinesthesiologist working with all of the top guys on specific exercises…but apparently hitting over .300 with twenty six home runs isn’t good enough to break into that particular group.”

I whistled appreciatively. I had managed to hit .300 once in high school but I’d never really had any talent at baseball. The only reason I’d had any success was because Adam had drug me out to the cages with him every day during our teenage winters, and then he’d drug me onto the field with him whenever there was an active league within fifty miles of home. I hadn’t minded, and since Adam had shown serious natural ability at a young age I’d tried as hard as I could to support him in his pursuit of his lifelong dream to play in the big leagues.

“How are you doing on the bases?” I asked without thinking, wincing at my own stupidity after the words had left my lips.

Adam tensed up momentarily before shrugging. “Got ten swipes, but also caught seven times. Those catchers have pretty good arms down there,” he grudged, rubbing his right knee.

“At Low A ball?” I blurted. “I thought most of those guys were still trying to figure out where all the pads went!”

Adam burst into laughter and I immediately joined him. After settling down he shook his head knowingly. “You really aren’t paying attention to my career, are you?” he asked in bewilderment. “I got promoted to Double A just a couple weeks into the season. Managed to hit .500 over fifteen games at Low A with nine homers and a dozen doubles, which kind of forced their hand,” he said with a triumphant smirk as we pulled off the freeway and made our way onto the county road that led home.

My jaw dropped. “You beat the crap out of Double A already?! That’s great, dude!” I congratulated him.

“Thanks,” he replied, wincing as he continued to rub his knee.

I looked down at his obviously painful leg and winced. “I just hope four tools will be enough to get you to the big leagues,” I muttered, suddenly overcome with regret.

Adam stopped rubbing his knee and shot me a look. “Don’t talk like that,” he reprimanded. “It’ll be fine with a few weeks of rest. Besides,” he continued, “even
with
a bum knee, I hit better and field third base cleaner than anyone else in the system. My thirty five homers led the entire organization—including the Majors—and so did my hundred and two RBI.”

“Still,” I argued, “you would have been drafted in the first round if you’d had two good knees…”

My brother pulled the car over to the side of the road, slamming on the brakes after we were well away from the pavement and into the wide patch of gravel lining this part of the road. “Aaron,” he said after putting it in neutral and turning toward me, “you need to move on from that. It happened ten years ago and I would make the same decision again without a moment’s hesitation if the situation presented itself, even if it cost me my
entire
baseball career. You’re my brother,” he added seriously. “You’re all I’ve got, and I’d do anything for you.”