CHOSEN (12 page)

Dynan stopped trying to get away, covering his ears with his hands, his body curling into a ball in an attempt to be as small as possible. Off in the distance, a crack and crash reached them, followed by the thud of the body hitting the ground.

The command to show himself went on as the wraiths wheeled by, swooping in low to the ground. Before too long, Dynan started shaking from the effort to ignore them. If Pol hadn’t been there, periodically telling him not to listen, Dynan would have done it. He would have gotten up and gone out into the open where he was certain they would take him. Not to a good place. Maybe a place worse than this.

Finally, it eased, leaving him panting on the ground, spent. The wraiths moved off. Through a break in the scrabble of branches above him, Dynan could see them wheeling through the sky a distance away. He squirmed out from underneath the dead body, and crawled over to the nearest scrub tree he could lean against.

He couldn’t seem to get his hands to stop shaking. His eyes burned but when he wiped them, there weren’t any tears, only the stinging sensation that meant they might come. He wanted to curl up in a little ball and never move again. He wanted this to go away. He wanted to be home, wished it so hard it hurt. At the same time, he knew he wouldn’t ever see home again.

Unless that man who sent him here was right and if he found Alurn, somehow doing so would get him a way out of here. Dynan wondered if Pol knew anything about it and at the same time didn’t want to ask. He was a rough looking man. Despite the fact he’d just saved him, Dynan was afraid of him.

“We have to move,” Pol said.

He had a rope out and he was tying it around the torso of the body. He flipped his hand front to back again, examining it, and he grunted over it. Pol stood to a half crouch. That was as far as he could straighten under the branches. He tugged on the rope to check it.

“Right now.”

Pol didn’t wait to see that Dynan followed, but set off under the scrub, dragging the body behind. It hurt to move, but Dynan pulled himself to his feet, crouching down under the hanging limbs, and went after him.

The body thumped along in front of him. The smell coming off of it was immense. Finally, Dynan couldn’t stand it, unable to take his eyes off of it, and dodged around it to catch up to Pol. He glanced back once and wished he hadn’t. The flies were starting to follow.

“You get used to it,” Pol said, and Dynan found him watching.

Dynan only shook his head, the thought of being around this long enough to get accustomed to it sickening him even more. Pol didn’t try to convince him. He kept the pace without slowing.

The landscape didn’t change. The bent trees remained bent. The floor of the thicket was clear of underbrush. The smell of putrefied leaves hung in the air, but after a while the stink eased to something less gag inducing. Every now and again, Pol changed directions, veering off to the left or right, going that way for a time, and then aiming back the original direction, always toward the base of the distant hill.

Dynan didn’t think he could go much further without stopping for a break, or even just a moment or two. His legs were shaking from the exertion of staying constantly bent to get under the trees. Before long, he was back with the body.

He ended up falling over it when Pol finally came to a halt. By then the light had started to fade, though it didn’t get completely dark when Dynan thought it should. He back-peddled away from the corpse only to end up with his back against a stack of them.

A small clearing opened up where the scrub trees ended, and the hill and the forest of sticks began. A rock wall rose over Dynan’s head by a few kem. At its base there was a hole. Around the hole, and all around the clearing the dead were piled up, for protection, Dynan guessed, since the bodies of these taken souls seemed able to trick the eye of the wraiths.

He maneuvered to his feet as best he could, finding it painful to stand up straight. A noise not far off made him jump. Pol instantly moved to him, pushing him toward the hole in the rock.

Before Dynan could react though, Pol was already relaxing. The noise came from the other man who’d been with them on the hill. He had with him the body of the third, who’d been taken by the wraith.

“Did you see?”

“Yes, Grint,” Pol said and moved to help. “It’s good that you brought him. He’d like that. We’ll post him as sentry.”

Grint didn’t want to hear that. He was angry and crying at the same time, though again, there weren’t any tears. His face was all twisted up, and he turned a glaring eye to Dynan. He came at him, still carrying the body, shaking it at him so that the head jogged back and forth.

“This is your fault,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Grint, no it isn’t,” Pol said, and moved to stop him, but Grint was already right in front, shoving the body at Dynan.

“You did this. Faul’s been here from the start and you come here, and now he’s gone because of you, pulling the wraiths after us...All six of them! It’s your fault!”

With that he shoved the body of Faul at him. Dynan put his hands out to defend himself, but ended up catching the dead man. The weight of him dragged Dynan to the ground with Faul on top of him.

Grint followed him down, and put his hands to his throat. “I’m going to snuff out the last little bit of life in you,” he said. “It should have been you anyway.”

Dynan wondered if it was possible to die twice and then knew it was. Hands clamped down on his neck cut off air to the point little black specks started appearing before his eyes.

The next instant though, Grint was ripped away from him. Pol threw him off, across the clearing and into the other pile of stacked bodies. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Grint, and you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Pol went on, trying to calm Grint down. Dynan shoved against the body, but couldn’t get it to budge. After struggling with it, he gave up, and lay for a moment without moving, half trapped. He tried to fathom why he was breathing, and why there was pain when he thought being dead took those things away. The thought crept in that maybe he wasn’t dead after all. He put his hand to his neck. There were welts there.

Faul groaned in his ear.

Dynan jumped while Faul sucked in a breath. He blinked his eyes open, raising himself up enough to look down at Dynan with confusion, and then wonder in his eyes.

Pol and Grint stopped arguing. Faul rolled off and sat, looking at his hands, and feeling his face. Both were clear of lesions. He started laughing next, a sound that seemed to send a shudder through the air, a ripple of discontinuity that made everything stop and listen.

“Faul?” Grint came over, and took his hand to help him up.

“Yes, Grint, I’m all right.”

Dynan rose cautiously to his feet, and edged away from them.

“But what happened?” Grint asked.

Faul looked at Pol, and pointed a questioning finger at Dynan, eyebrows raised in expectation. Pol nodded and Faul laughed again. “So then it might be time, finally?”

Pol nodded again. “At last, it might be.”

Pol thought of something then, looking to the piles of the dead. He went after Dynan, who’d gotten only a few steps away, and took him by the wrist. Pol dragged him over to the bodies and forced his hand down on one of them, waiting and watching expectantly.

Nothing happened. For a second, Dynan thought the person might wake up like Faul had, but it remained a motionless body. Pol grunted under his breath.

“So only the recently taken,” he said, and grunted again. “That’s still something.”

He took him to Grint then, who was the only one left with bumps and flaking skin. Pol forced Dynan to touch him too, his hand flat against his chest. Grint grabbed his wrist when Dynan tried to lurch away. The scars on Grint’s face melted from sight, absorbed back inside him. The flake of skin along side his nose went away at the same time, and he pushed back the wrappings to feel his face, laughing as he did.

“You’re still just as ugly,” Pol said to Grint who turned to Dynan.

“I’m sorry about what I did,” Grint said. “I didn’t know. I mean, I thought my friend was gone. You won’t hold it against me, will you?”

Dynan backed away from them again, only this time he was hemmed in against the wall of rock and the bodies. He wanted to run. He didn’t know how he could have been the cause of Faul’s resurrection. Dynan shook his head again, and backed himself into the wall.

“He’s awfully young, Polen,” Faul said and Dynan started at the name, a number of realizations coming in.

“Polen,” he said. It was the first word he’d spoken to them, and they all stopped to look at him. Dynan knew them then, remembering their names. He'd only just been thinking about them a few moments before being stabbed, thinking about them because he had to write a report on them, these men who helped secure the Telaerin Throne a thousand years ago. “Faulkin Yeld. Grint Heddly. And you,” he said to Polen, who nodded, smiling because Dynan knew them all.

“I’m Polen Forb,” he said. “And you...you are a son of Alurn Telaerin.”

~*~

Chapter 11

A trail of blood, in drips and long drizzles led from the road to the door. Ambrose Telaerin looked up from it into the glare of lights and a sea of faces. The Information Bureau was out in force, but he didn’t pay them any heed, along with the rest of the gathering crowd who’d come for news. The Lord Chancellor was taking care of information dissemination, and the old man went off to do that, reading the official Palace statement as they discussed in the transfer on their way over.

Melgan Lon preceded Ambrose on his right, leading him off the path to avoid the blood. Roth and Brendin followed. Ambrose ignored the string of questions being called to him, and went into City Medical through the side door.

The blood trail led down a long corridor, through a number of turns left and right, smeared from an attempt to clean it off the floor. Ambrose was taken finally to a set of rooms immediately off one of the critical care units where surgery was performed. The trail stopped there. A young man was down on his knees mopping up.

His eldest son, Kamien was there too, staring at the floor. Recalled from the Rianamar Base where he was stationed, still in the dark blue uniform that made him seem years older than twenty-three, even with his red hair so closely cropped. Ambrose could see he was worried, and angry, too, though he was trying not to show either emotion. He didn’t get along with Dynan and Dain so much, and hadn’t for some time. He didn’t want to act like he cared when of course, he did.

Ambrose looked to the door of the surgical unit. Kamien started shaking his head, and then grabbed him to stop him.

“You can’t see him yet. They have him cut open on a table right now. They won’t let you in. Even you. Eldelar Elger is here, and Geneal. They’re doing everything they can.”

Ambrose didn’t want to accept that, but knew he had to. He didn’t want to accept any of it, struggling to hold down a growing rage. It was the only thing he had left to keep despair and fear from overwhelming him.

“There’s still no word on Dain,” Kamien said, easing his grip but not letting go. “It seems likely that Dynan’s attackers took Dain with them when they ran. No one saw anything.”

“The one time in their lives when it would have been helpful,” Ambrose said. He turned to Melgan, Roth and Brendin. “I want that crazy bastard questioned until he begs for mercy, and the others too. I want answers, Melgan.”

“Ron Feldor too?” the Captain said evenly.

Ambrose turned from him. Really, he didn’t want anyone tortured for what they knew, locked in their suddenly deranged minds.  Ambrose had known Ron for years, ever since Dynan started working with him.

“We’re going to get the answers,” Melgan said quietly, and then gestured to the room again.

Ambrose looked back to the other door, and resisted the overwhelming desire to go through it, moving instead to the place where they wanted to tuck him away. He supposed there were safety concerns. Maybe the same men wanted to try and kill him too. Ambrose wasn’t concerned they’d succeed since City Medical was surrounded by a hundred Palace Guards, all of them from the King’s Guard, their training mission cut short. Nothing shy of a brigade would satisfy Melgan though. Ambrose relented.

Kamien followed him into the sitting room that was just off the hall, the first of many rooms. The apartment sized space was designed a long time ago for the Royal Family’s use should the need ever arise. Ambrose tried to remember as he took a seat in a large leather chair in the corner, if it ever had been before and couldn’t.

“Their friends don’t know anything,” Kamien said of Ames Lithford and the others.

Kamien stopped when he heard the alarms sounding from the hall and the rushing of footsteps. Try as he did to remain detached, Kamien was as worried and afraid as everyone else that his brother might die.

“They weren’t with him,” Kamien went on. “They walked him about half-way to the library—”

“The library?” Melgan said and rolled his eyes over that.

“—and left him to go the rest of the way on his own. Dynan walked right by the guards. Colin Fryn found him on Brescott just outside the library. The next thing, a minute or two, the guard hit his alert pin, the one that automatically triggered the priority alert.”

Kamien paused a second, looking around the room and behind him to double check who was listening. “Dain knew something had happened almost exactly the same instant. He out-ran everyone else trying to get there, so no one saw what happened. Ralion Blaise was the next guard there. He found Colin dead, no sign of Dain anywhere, and Dynan lying in the center of the old Sacred Seal, blood everywhere.”

Ambrose breathed at that, having not heard this before – his father’s very last words, coming back to haunt him. Ambrose remembered thinking in the throes of dying, Dionin had gone out of his right mind. He warned Ambrose about his son’s blood spilled on the Sphere of the Gods. He’d been afraid of it. He said the end of the world would come if it happened. Dionin tried to tell him something else too, something Ambrose hadn’t believed at the time. Believing in demons was for children, not grown men. The words came back, brought to mind by the ravings of a lunatic.