CHOSEN (11 page)

“I’m not going to hurt him,” Maralt said quickly, willing the guard to stop.

Maralt instantly learned that Ralion Blaise was one of the Hounds. He only slowed a little. He wouldn’t have any difficulty running down the street with both twins slung over his shoulder. The level of dedication this man had for his duty overcame the growing pain in his head, caused by Maralt trying to make him do something against his nature. Ralion was fully intent on getting Dain back and didn’t have the slightest compunction against killing anyone who stood in his way.

“I’m taking him to a place he can be protected,” Maralt said.

“Step back from the transfer,” Ralion said, his hand reaching for an alert pin attached to his collar.

“Stop moving,” Maralt said, concentrating harder. The pin, Maralt knew, would send out a signal giving the guard’s exact position. “I’m a monk with the Temple and I stopped to see what the problem was. Dain isn’t in this transfer. You aren’t going to remember my face. I’m wearing robes that keep you from seeing me. Turn around. Now.”

Ralion winced this time and hesitated, the laser rifle still pointed at Maralt’s head. Ralion had a will unlike most non-telepaths. If Maralt’s concentration faltered at all, the weapon would activate.

“Your place is with Dynan,” Maralt said through clenched teeth. “He’s dying. You should go back to him. Do your job this time and protect him. He’s still in danger. Dain isn’t here. I’m a monk from the Temple.”

The laser rifle wavered but remained aimed. Maralt thought he couldn’t hold him off any longer, but then Ralion lowered the weapon just as strength evaporated.

“There’s a priority alert,” the guard said. His hand rose to the side of his head and he looked at the laser rifle as if he didn’t understand why he had it out. “Everyone is asked to get indoors. Be on your way.”

Maralt nodded and tried not to collapse against the side of the transfer. He watched the guard turn abruptly, walking and then jogging back down the street to the alley. By the time Ralion looked back, Maralt was inside and the transfer moving.

Momentum knocked him over and he almost ended up chopping himself in half on the exposed swords. He discovered he was shaking and his head was pounding. Maralt looked at Dain, lying unconscious in a pile beside him, inside the swirling yellow flame. Maralt felt better, pulling in whatever energy this was. He was renewed by it, and laughed.

“Maybe the old man is right about you after all,” Maralt said, half to himself, watching the flame move in eddies around the interior. He looked out the transfer and saw the Sanctuary Temple towering. “I think you’re going to find out. All of us. Just what all this is for.”

He waved his hand through the glow, cutting the current. The aura had substance, clinging to his fingers like a liquid, though there wasn’t any sense of moisture. Maralt brought his fingers closer but he couldn’t smell any odor to it. Something suggested in the recesses of his mind that going further with this insatiable curiosity would lead to danger or something worse.

Maralt looked at the substance on his finger, at Dain, at the light around him. He put it on his tongue, tasting it. A sudden surge coursed through his body, and he gasped from it, startled by its intensity. In awe and then in doubt, he looked at the boy lying at his feet and couldn’t believe he had the strength or wisdom to wield such power.

Maralt thought he would take that power for himself. He would know better than a child what to do with it. Vast kingdoms opened before him. He sat on a throne of diamonds in a hall of light in command of millions; Kings, Queens, worlds at his feet.

Maralt pulled in a breath as the vision faded, and then he didn’t know what he was thinking. There wasn’t time to sort it out either. The transfer pulled through the gates of the Temple.

~*~

Chapter 10

The smell of smoke filled his nostrils, mingled with dirt and some other putrid stench. Swarms of flies buzzed over his head. Dynan heard people weeping, others crying out in pain and anguish. A baby’s wail rose and then abruptly cut off. A woman screamed.

The angle of his body suggested he was on a hill, though Dynan didn’t know how he got there. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t remember at first where he’d been before.

An alley flashed into view, pulling him off the hill. The same man who’d stabbed him stood over him. Dynan heard Dain calling for him, but couldn’t answer. His heart made a strange thrumming sound in his head. The darkness returned, swallowing him and then spit him back out. He was on the hillside again and this time it held him there.

The sounds of people dying filled the air. Dynan was afraid to move from all the noise. He didn’t want to look, but his eyes blinked open and focused.

The entire hillside was covered in bodies, some of them charred to lumps that didn’t resemble a human being. Some were still smoldering. Some were barely touched by whatever flame had scoured this hill. Some lay without a mark on them, lifeless eyes staring at him.

Beneath him, near the base of the hill a wraith touched down on a protruding rock. Wings arced upward before they folded. It shrieked as it landed, a piercing cry that hurt and made Dynan cover his ears.

He scrambled to his feet, choking on the smell of burnt flesh that was very much like the smell of a slab of beef the Palace cooks pulled off the grill for his dinner. Intent on getting as far away as he could, he aimed for the top and then the other side of the hill. He clawed his way up using clumps of dead grass for purchase.

The moment he moved the wraith whipped around. Even as Dynan looked back over his shoulder, it launched at him. With one sharp sweep of its wings, it raked halfway up the hill before Dynan moved barely a few steps. He tripped over something because he was looking behind, a body it turned out, and fell into the ground hard. The wraith swept by over his head, and a wave of rotting stench filled his lungs. One of its legs raked over him, drew across his back and barely missed his head.

Thinking only of escape, Dynan made ready to move again while trying not to be seen at the same time. The wraith had already turned around, but for some reason, it didn’t pinpoint where he was right away.

“It can’t see you among the taken,” a voice said to him from a couple bodies to the right. “Unless you move.”

Dynan froze in the act of rising, wanting to believe it, but didn’t see how that was possible. He didn’t know where the voice came from or who it was or if the speaker could be trusted.

The wraith was looking right at him, sniffing the air. It threw its head back, a strange kind of bark coming from it, high-pitched and loud, as if it was telling other creatures right where he was. Dynan decided the nameless voice couldn’t be right and started to get up again.

He was tackled from behind this time and plastered into the hillside by the weight of someone on top of him, his face in the fetid dirt. Dynan tried to heave upward but couldn’t.

“Stop moving, or you’re going to get us all taken,” he was told.

Dynan tried looking at who was on top of him, but all he could see was a hand pressed into the ground beside his face. The fingernails were darkened by dirt, and in the places that weren’t covered in tattered wrappings, the skin was torn, red and flaking off as if diseased.

The wraith stopped barking, hissing instead. By the sound of the wings cutting through the air, the hot blast of wind that smelled of death that came down on him, Dynan could tell the thing had taken to the air again. A moment later it started shrieking, but it was further away.

The man on top of him relaxed and shifted his weight a little, rolling over the body next to them to reach a clear space in the carnage. Another man detached from the ground, looking not much different from the dead scattered around them, and started up the hill at a low scrambling crouch. There was another behind, and he too clambered upward. He was wrapped up the same as the others with flaking skin.

“Stay down and follow, or stay here and wait for it to come back,” the one who'd tackled him said in a voice of gravel and air. “Your choice.”

Dynan didn’t want to go with these three strangers, watching while they went up the hill at a crawl, seemingly unaffected by the slaughter of bodies they were using as handholds. He didn’t want to stay where he was either, looking at the bloated, blackened face of a woman, her eyes eaten from her head.

Dynan rolled away from her, staring up at the leaden gray sky instead. He was shaking uncontrollably. He remembered what happened, but didn’t have any idea how he was supposed to find Alurn Telaerin and then bring him back.

He remembered Dain screaming after him. He thought the only way back would be through his brother like he’d been told. If it was true and there was a way back. If he wasn’t really dead.

Dynan concentrated as hard as he knew how and found nothing.

“Kid,” someone said. The man with the gravely voice looked back. “There are other things that can take you as easily as a wraith.”

Fear and grief kept Dynan from moving, even when he saw that there were other creatures snuffling along the base of the hill. A pack of dogs with hairless, gray bodies with a fan of spikes around their heads nosed through the carnage. Dynan knew this place. He’d only taken an oath warning he’d end up here if he broke it.

Acceptance of the horror of it, the thought he could be here forever, wasn’t possible. He didn’t know what he’d done to be sent here. He wasn’t a murderer and he wasn’t a thief. He hadn’t broken that vow. He hadn’t done anything to deserve dying in the first place. He shouldn’t be here.

“It can’t be real. It can't be happening,” he said. “I’m going to wake up. I’m going to wake up.”

“I’d just as soon leave you,” gravely voice said in his ear, making Dynan jump, “but somehow I think it might come back on me if I do. You’ll get used to the idea, boy. It’s better if you do it sooner than later.”

With that bit of advice, the man, if he was a man, took Dynan by a fistful of jacket and started hauling him up the hill. Dynan didn’t want to go with him, but he didn’t have any leverage to pry him off. He was only able to get a hold of the man’s wrist, which had no deterring effect at all.

The man readjusted his grip and kept going. That Dynan had a jacket to grab struck him as odd since he thought having one wouldn’t be necessary in the afterlife, but there was a lot about this afterlife he hadn’t expected. He was dragged up the hill, over rocks, over bodies, over other things he couldn’t identify.

They reached the top of the jagged, rocky mound and Dynan was slung over to the other side of it. There were even more bodies. Dynan yanked away from his captor this time before he could be dragged down the hill, but even as he wrenched free, the man pulled his hand back and stared at it, turning his hand over while he flexed his fingers. He looked at Dynan and then back to his hand, scraggly brows of gray and brown drawn down in awed confusion. All Dynan saw was a normal hand.

“Pol,” one of the others called, the younger of the three. He had a yellow scarf wrapped around his neck. It was hard to tell what color the rest of his clothes were except dirty. “There’s something coming. I think it’s...You should come look.”

Pol glanced back at Dynan, adjusting the strap of the leather pack he wore. “Stay there,” he said gruffly, and then crawled back to the top of the hill. He peered over it but only for a second, cringing back down.

“Is it?”

“The Six, yes,” Pol said and he looked to Dynan again, swearing. “We need to get under cover right now. Run. Get into the scrub at the bottom of the hill. As far in as you can. Move!”

The other two scrambled up, no longer worried about staying low, and started leaping down the hillside. Before Dynan could decide to go or not, Pol had him again, not giving him a choice and shoved him down the hill until he went on his own.

“Faster than that, boy,” he said, but stayed with him. He kept looking back over his shoulder.

The scrub was an expansive patch of short, bent trees with dead looking foliage that covered a wide plain before running up against a rocky hill and a forest of taller trees, if they could be called that. Those trees didn’t have leaves at all and stood as blackened sticks against the horizon.

The first two reached the scrub and ducked into it. They didn’t stop, scrabbling along the ground almost on all fours. Dynan didn’t know what or who the six were, but understood that these men were afraid of them. Pol pushed him again and kept him from falling at the same time. They reached the bent trees and scrambled for cover.

Pol raced back out and grabbed one of the bodies that lay scattered like wood at the base of the hill, dragging it back with him. Dynan started to run from him, having no desire at all to be around the dead things any more, but Pol reached him and pulled him down to the ground again. Pol shoved the body on top of Dynan and then threw himself on the ground beside him, an arm over Dynan’s head, pushing him into the dirt.

“Don’t move,” Pol said, the gravel voice a harsh whisper.

The next instant Dynan was seized by the desire to get up and show himself. A sunlit field, a meandering brook, and a meadow of long, green grass awaited him if he came out into the open.

“Don’t believe a thing they show you,” Pol said, his teeth clenched together. “It’s all a lie, boy. There’s no such thing as Paradise. Not here. Don’t listen to them.”

Dynan squirmed under the heavy arm and the weight of the dead on top of him, knowing without a doubt that Pol was lying to him. He had only to get out of these twisted trees, and he’d be saved, taken to a place where the dead didn’t exist. He’d go home.

Off in the distance, someone screamed. He and Pol looked up as the sound rose into the air. Dynan recognized one of the men who’d gone into the trees ahead of them, thrashing in the claws of a wraith until abruptly his screams cut off and he stopped moving. The wraith took up the scream, its voice rising to an unbearable pitch as it tossed the body aside.