Gorinthians (36 page)

"Indrico the Idiot, you
mean,” Morindessa muttered darkly. Looking down at Jesha,
Morindessa made a quick decision. She knew if Jesha somehow
survived the day’s violence on her own, it would only be a matter
of time before the provincial villagers found another reason to
harm her. I am turning into a real sucker for hopeless cases,
Morindessa sighed inwardly, knowing she could not leave Jesha to
the mob waiting outside. "Jesha, I would like you to come with
us."

Jesha looked up at
Morindessa, her eyes scared. "What about Derek and his
family?"

"That's one of the reasons I
want you to come with us.” Morindessa gestured down the hall toward
the common room where the shouting was growing in intensity. "Derek
will fight these men to protect you, and probably lose his life in
the process. If you come with us, the villagers will have no reason
to harm him."

Jesha's eyes grew distant as
she thought it over, her delicate features thoughtful. A moment
later, she focused on Morindessa, "I don't want anything to happen
to Derek,” she said quietly. "Will I be able to say
goodbye?"

Morindessa nodded, gripping
her shoulder comfortingly. "We need to let the men out there know
you will be leaving with us anyway."

Ferrich and Seranova hurried
out of their rooms, joining them in the hall outside Morindessa's
door. "What's the plan?” Ferrich asked tensely, watching the
direction of the common room nervously.

"We are going to take Jesha
with us,” Morindessa replied shortly. "Follow me and let me do all
of the talking.” Morindessa started toward the common room,
reaching down to hold Jesha's hand. Her hand felt tiny, even in
Morindessa's own slender hands.

Rounding the corner to the
common room, Morindessa paused to study the scene before them. The
crowd of more than thirty men, and even some women, had Derek
backed up to a corner. They filled the entire common room, with
more outside the inn shouting angrily.

A large man with a dark
beard held a pitchfork up to Derek's neck, making him stretch up
against the wall to avoid being impaled. "This is the last time we
are going to ask you,” he snarled. "Where is the little
monster?"

Derek stared at the men
coldly, his lips clamped together. The large man with the pitchfork
spat on him in disgust, pulling the pitchfork back to ram it
through his throat.

"Hold!” Morindessa called
out sharply from the hall opening. Everyone in the room turned
their heads to stare at Morindessa and Jesha. With a wordless roar,
the mob surged forward toward Jesha. Derek shouted something that
was lost in the noise of the mob, his eyes stricken. A moment
later, Morindessa struck out with her
yar
and ignited a series of sharp air
concussions between her and the mob. The sound was deafening,
causing those closest to the explosion of air to drop to the ground
holding their ears, while the rest of them backed fearfully
away.

"All of you, leave
immediately,” Morindessa said softly in the sudden silence. "If any
of you are still here by the time I count to five, you will have to
be carried out."

As Morindessa began
counting, everyone in the room began stampeding to get out of the
inn, as the crowd outside demanded to know what had happened.
Morindessa looked down at Jesha, who was staring in wide-eyed
astonishment at the fleeing mob. "You will need to say your
goodbyes quickly, before the mob finds its courage
again."

Derek ran forward to hug
Jesha once the crowd between them had cleared, squeezing her
tightly in relief. Standing up, he hugged Morindessa as well,
thanking her profusely while she tried to fend him off.

"Derek, we need to talk,”
Morindessa told him, pushing him away. "Jesha is not safe here. We
are going to a place where she will be accepted and would like to
take her with us."

Derek nodded reluctantly,
"As much as I hate to lose her, I know aashe is not safe here.” He
knelt down once more, pulled her close and whispered something to
her that was too low for Morindessa to hear. Nodding, Jesha pulled
away, a single tear running down her cheek. Derek reached out and
gently brushed it away, smiling at her through his own brimming
eyes.

Morindessa squeezed Jesha's
shoulder again, and began walking toward the front door with
Ferrich and Seranova behind. She could feel the mob still watching
the inn from a safe distance outside. Walking through the front
door, she saw a ring of men watching the inn uncertainly, gripping
their crude weapons with white-knuckled fists.

"We will be leaving now,”
Morindessa called out to the men surrounding the inn. "We are
taking Jesha with us. Any of you that wish to continue living would
be wise to stay out of our way,” she finished in a deadly tone,
while using her
yar
to create a deep chord of sound that was almost too low for
hearing, but filled with ominous certainty. She delved into the
plants that surrounded the inn, making a small set of harmonics
that emanated from the miniature hairs on the stems, which created
the same unsettling sensation around the inn.

Walking toward the road that
exited the south edge of the village, she intensified the pitch
until the men finally began running away from an unknown doom. She
felt like killing the lot of them. Trying to harm what they thought
of as a child because she had strange eyes.

"Do you think that Derek
will be all right?” Ferrich asked quietly as he stepped up beside
her.

"I left a Continuance on the
inn," Morindessa assured him. "As long as the plants around the inn
are alive, the people will feel the same uncertainty and fear that
they did when we left."

"Is that what you were
doing?” Ferrich asked curiously. "I was only able to see some of
it."

"What about customers?”
Seranova asked pointedly. "Won't it scare them away as
well?"

Morindessa glanced sideways
at Seranova before answering, "More than likely. The plants will
only be alive for a few more weeks though, and then the feeling
will leave. By then, the villagers will have forgotten the
incident."

They continued traveling
into the night until they reached the village of North Fork, a
considerably larger village than Fair Venning. A log palisade
surrounded the town, with watchtowers on each of the four corners.
It was just before midnight when they reached the gates, ringing a
bell to get the sleeping guards’ attention.

"Who goes there?” a grouchy
voice called down to them from a small window in the tower above
them.

"Travelers from Fair
Venning,” Morindessa called up to him. Reaching out with her
yar
, she scanned the
inside of the tower. There were three men inside, one of them still
fast asleep and all three of them inebriated. She could feel their
disjointed auras floundering as their spirits tried to work through
their alcohol-saturated minds. The one that was looking down at
them had small barbs emanating from his aura, a sure indication
that he was going to be difficult.

"We don't open the gate at
night,” he growled at them, slamming the small wooden slat back
into place.

"Charming fellow,” Ferrich
observed dryly. "Whatever they are paying him, it is too
much."

Morindessa grunted her
agreement. Reaching out with her
yar
, she felt the gate for a place
that was free of iron brackets and slowly changed the
yar
in the wood until it
was as supple as bread dough. "Follow me," she called over her
shoulder, and then walked into the wooden gate. The spot that she
changed gave way as she pushed into it, like a finger stuck into
bread dough, until she exited on the other side of the gate. A
moment later, the other three squeezed through and she changed the
wood back to its normal makeup.

"You know, the longer I am
around you, the more you amaze me,” Ferrich said in admiration as
he studied the gate with his own
yar
. "I mean, where do you come up
with these ideas?"

Morindessa felt a thrill of
pleasure course through her at his praise. "From a very misguided
youth.” She had spent a lot of time sneaking into people’s homes
after Riah taught her how to change an object's
malleability.

The street they were on had
three inns immediately inside the gate, each with small torches
burning in sconces around the doors. Morindessa led them to the
furthest one from the gate. It had a sign with a picture of a hawk
flying below a sky full of stars. Beneath that was the inscription,
The Night Hawk. The Night Hawk was much larger than The Woodsman,
with two stories and at least twenty rooms. The inside had a large
common room that was almost empty at the late hour, with the
exception of a table with two men in uniforms that probably should
have been on the night watch. Neither man looked up from their ale
when Morindessa and her companions walked in. A fire pit on the far
wall had burned down to coals and there were only a few oil lamps
still glowing, casting shadows throughout the large
room.

Making her way to the
counter, Morindessa rang a little bell. A moment later, a
sleepy-looking woman appeared from a room behind the counter,
yawning widely at them. She was already in her nightdress and
plainly had not expected any new customers for the
night.

"We need three rooms,”
Morindessa said brusquely, pulling her purse onto the counter and
reaching for some coins. "One of them will need two
beds."

The woman nodded and led
them down the hall and up the stairs to the second story, walking
as if she were still half-asleep. She showed them to three rooms,
two next to each other and one across the hall. Morindessa slipped
her a silver piece, since she had obviously forgotten to ask them
for money, and quietly thanked her.

"Everyone, get some sleep,"
Morindessa said, opening her door and entering her room with Jesha.
"We have an early start in the morning."

When she turned around, she
found Jesha studying her, a serious look on her childlike face. "Do
you have magic?" the small Zeran asked, with a hopeful look in her
eyes.

"I don't know that I would
call it magic," Morindessa replied with a wry smile, "but I do have
a few skills that are a little out of the ordinary."

"Could you teach me?” Jesha
asked earnestly, her entire face lit up with hope.

"Yes, if you like,”
Morindessa studied her in turn, unconsciously seeing a ten-year-old
rather than someone that was only a decade younger than her. "Why
do you want to learn magic?"

"If I knew magic, then I
might be able to find my mother and sisters,” Jesha said
determinedly. "I don't think that they are in a good place,
wherever they are."

Morindessa nodded in
understanding. It seemed that the two of them were on a similar
quest. "Which bed do you want?"

Jesha walked over to the
smaller of the two beds and crawled into it. Morindessa untied her
pack and set it next to her bed. She lay down on top of the covers,
trying to sort through all of the events of the day. When she had
found Lochnar's symbol in her pocket, she had felt a sense of shock
so profound that she could barely answer Seranova. She had not seen
Lochnar since he and Riah had left Shalilayo all those years ago.
She had no idea how he had put it in her pocket, but it had to have
been after she was already on Seranova's strange vessel. She had no
idea how much knowledge Lochnar had that he had not shown her, but
she suspected it dwarfed her own understanding of the Spiritual
Realm. Morindessa reached out with her
yar
and extinguished the small oil
lamp on the wall, casting the room into darkness.

"Good night, Des,” Jesha
said sleepily from across the room.

"Good night Jesha.”
Morindessa felt good about her decision to bring Jesha with them.
Perhaps this was her second chance at having a family again. Third
chance actually, she thought ruefully. Before she drifted off, she
reached out with her
yar
to sense the surrounding area as far as she could
reach and found nothing out of the ordinary. Something felt
somewhat familiar in the inn across the street, but she could not
pin down exactly what it was, so she went to sleep, wondering what
Riah would think of her rescuing Ferrich and Jesha if she were
still alive.

---

Lieutenant Sanders stood on
the southern shore of Lake Magnus, studying the strange vessel tied
up in the small cove. He was dressed in an officer’s uniform of
black linen trousers with knee-high boots and a black coat buttoned
to the neck. Sanders had the broad shoulders of a soldier who had
made his way to a position of command through a mixture of physical
strength and cunning. His face was finely defined, almost like a
fox, and his eyes gleamed with an intelligence that was uncommon in
his line of work. He had a short sword belted to his waist, as well
as a heavy dagger at his other side and two smaller throwing knives
sticking from the tops of his boots.

"Sergeant Dennel," Sanders
called out, "I want you to stay behind with your company and wait
for anyone that returns to this vessel. Capture, but do not
kill."