Guardians of the Lost

G
ustav knew he was being watched.

He had no proof, nothing more solid than a feeling, an instinct.

Instinct had kept Gustav the Whoreson Knight alive for seventy years. He knew better than to ignore it.

He had first experienced the sensation of being watched three days ago, on his arrival in this godforsaken part of the wilderness. He had been following an old trail that ran along the Deverel river. The trail was probably made by animals, although the humans who had once lived in this area might have borrowed it. If they had, they had long since returned the trail to the deer and the wolves, for theirs were the only tracks Gustav saw.

Knowing it likely that he was the only person to have set foot in this region for the past hundred years, Gustav was understandably disquieted to awaken his first morning in camp to the distinct impression that he wasn't alone.

He had no proof that someone was watching him. His nights, spent in a tent in the wilderness, were quiet, peaceful. He sometimes woke, thinking he heard stealthy footfalls outside, but he
found he was mistaken. His well-trained war horse, who would have alerted him had there been anyone lurking nearby, remained placid and calm, undisturbed, except by flies.

During the day, while he proceeded with his investigation, Gustav tried every trick in the book—a book he could have written—to catch sight of the person who was dogging his steps. He watched for the glint that might have been sunlight reflecting off metal, but saw nothing. He made abrupt stops, trying to hear footfalls that continued on after his ceased. He searched for signs that someone else was in the vicinity—foot-prints on the muddy river bank where he performed his daily ablutions, fish heads from the stalker's supper, broken sticks or bent branches.

Nothing. Gustav heard nothing. He saw nothing. Instinctively, he felt everything, felt the stalker's eyes watching him, felt those eyes to be hostile.

Gustav was not one to be deterred from his quest by an unsettling feeling, however. He had come here on a search he had begun forty years ago and he had no intention of departing until he had concluded that search. He had been exploring for three days and had found nothing yet.

He was not even certain he was searching in the right location. His only guide was a brief description taken from the mummified body of one of the monks of Dragon Mountain. Having quested for years, only to come to one dead end after another, Sir Gustav had returned to the Temple one final time.

The monks of Dragon Mountain were the repository of history in Loerem. The monks and their agents traveled the continent, seeing history as it was made and recording it on their own bodies. Preserved after death by the sacred tea the monks drank while they were alive, their bodies and all the knowledge that was recorded thereon were housed in the vaults of Dragon Mountain. Anyone on Loerem could travel to the mountain in search of knowledge of the past and find it among the slumbering dead.

Gustav had studied the historical records dealing with every race on Loerem specific to the time period in which he was interested. He had found innumerable possible sites where the object of his
quest might be located. He had visited all those sites and a hundred more and had come up empty-handed. Was there a fragment of information he might have missed? Anything at all which might provide him with a clue? Had the monks truly studied all the records?

An acolyte listened to the elderly knight with intense interest and, by permission of the monks, took Gustav to the sacred vault. The two of them examined the mummified remains of the historians who lay there, each with their tattooed histories entwined around the composed limbs. Gustav recognized every corpse. After long years of association, he and these corpses had become friends.

“You say you have read them all,” the acolyte stated. “But did you think to include this one?”

The monk paused beside a body of a human female who lay at the very end of the long row. Gustav looked at the body and could not recall that he had ever seen her before.

“Ah, likely not.” The acolyte nodded. “Her area of expertise was the study of the pecwae race. Your earlier guides probably felt that the pecwae could have no possible connection to the Sovereign Stone.”

Gustav considered this. “I cannot think that they would, but I have exhausted all other possibilities.”

“Have you?” the acolyte questioned gently. “Have you considered the possibility that the portion of the Sovereign Stone for which you seek was destroyed in the blast that leveled the city two hundred years ago?”

“I have considered that, but I refuse to believe it,” Gustav replied calmly. “The gods gave us our portion of the Stone, as they gave a portion to the other races. Ours is mislaid, that is all. Let us see what this chronicler of pecwae has to tell us.”

The acolyte perused the tattoos on the body, murmuring to himself and shaking his head. The tattoos were magical. The historian transfered his or her thoughts onto the flesh by means of tattoos that would later transfer those thoughts to the monks trained in the magic. By placing his hand on the tattoo and activating the spell (the magic is a carefully guarded secret among the monks), the acolyte received into his mind all the images and words and thoughts of the monk detailing this portion of history.

Gustav watched the acolyte's face, watched the information pass over it like wind over a still lake. The ripples of thought cleared. The acolyte's eyes brightened.

“I have something,” he said cautiously. “Do not build up your hopes too much. It is nothing more than an oddity, but it falls into the correct time frame.”

“I'll take anything,” Gustav said, hoping he did not sound as desperate as he was beginning to feel.

At age seventy, the knight was nearing his own eternal slumber. A valiant warrior, he had looked Death in the face, had even shaken hands with the gentleman on more than one battlefield. Gustav did not fear the unending silence. He could look forward to his final rest, if only he could be assured that his rest would be peaceful. If he was forced to leave the world before his quest was complete, he imagined himself as one of those pathetic ghosts who are doomed to wander in torment, searching and never finding.

“The clue has to do with the tomb of a bahk,” the acolyte explained. “A bahk known as ‘Guardian.'”

Gustav listened as the acolyte told the story of a starving bahk, his pecwae saviors, and the unusual circumstance of the bahk's burial. When he came to the part stating that the bahk had been buried with a magical treasure, Gustav's interest was piqued. He asked the acolyte to repeat that part again. Was it possible that the sacred and powerful Sovereign Stone had been resting all these years on the moldering body of a monster? Gustav could hardly believe it, but this was the last and only clue he had to follow.

The description that the monk provided of the location of the tomb was general in nature. The history-recording monks use landmarks as markers, for they are well-aware (none better) that artificial boundaries established by man have a way of shifting with the political tides. As it was, the land would have been called Dunkarga two hundred years ago but was now known as Karnu, after a civil war had ripped the nation apart.

The monk described a mountain that was shaped like the beak of an eagle west of an immense river that ran north and south and was west of Dragon Mountain. The burial site of the bahk was
somewhere betwixt and between river and mountain. Gustav had determined that the river must be the Deverel. Going by the historian's guidelines, which included such directions as: “within the shadow of the mountain peak at midday” and “seventeen days' journey from the mountain's base,” he arrived at what he considered to be the likeliest location.

Gustav deduced that the old campsite must be somewhere close to a source of water, for to dig a well or build an aqueduct would simply never occur to the pecwae, who are generally regarded to be the laziest people on Loerem.

The Deverel river formed the border between the Empire of Vinnengael and the kingdom of Karnu. Had Gustav been traveling through any town along the border, he would have found armed guards from both sides glowering at each other across narrow points in the waterway, maybe chancing a lucky shot with an arrow, for the two human kingdoms were currently, if unofficially, at war. As it was, Gustav explored a wilderness area that had probably not been occupied by any civilized race since the pecwae left it a hundred years before.

A Vinnengaelean by birth, Gustav would have faced open hostility or perhaps even worse if he was discovered in Karnu land and his true identity revealed. He had no fear of being discovered. The Whoreson Knight had a talent, gleaned from his years living in the streets and the alleyways of New Vinnengael, that allowed him to pass unremarked through enemy towns and cities. Gustav was, when he wanted to be, just another solitary old man wandering the back roads, trying to outrun death. No one looking at him would have taken him for a Dominion Lord.

Setting up his base camp about a mile west of the riverbank, Gustav began his search for the tomb of the bahk. He went about his daunting task methodically, first dividing up the area into grids, afterward spending his days walking the grids in a set pattern. One hundred steps north. Turn east one hundred steps. One hundred steps south. Turn west. One hundred steps back to the starting point. When he had completed one square, he began another.

Three days. He had found nothing yet, but he was not discouraged.
He had four more squares in the grid marked out, four more left to explore. If he was not successful here he intended to move ten miles south along the river and start the process over again.

All this time, someone was watching.

The morning of the fourth day, Gustav woke from a light sleep that had not been particularly restful. He had wakened in the night no less than three times imagining he'd heard something outside his tent. Every time he woke up, he'd been forced to go relieve himself. A weak bladder, just one of the disadvantages of growing old. The knight emerged groggily from his small tent to find that the day promised to be a fine one, clear and sunny. The season was early summer, the time when the leaves are still shiny green, before the dust of dry weather coats them and the heat wilts them and the worms gnaw them. Gustav looked carefully at the ground around the tent, saw no footprints other than his own.

Gustav walked to the river, performed his ablutions and took a refreshing swim to clear sleep's cobwebs from his head. He saw no tracks along the river. He carried water for his horse, made certain that the animal was tethered in an area where there was sweet grass and clover, and then set off to the starting point for today's search.

Walking through the brush, the sun warm on the back of his neck, Gustav halted abruptly. He took off his boot, peered into it irritably, upended it and shook it, as if he suspected that it had acquired some unwelcome company during the night. As he did so, he listened with all his ears and darted glances left and right.

The birds sang blithely, bees hummed among the bee balm, flies buzzed past him.

Gustav replaced his boot and continued on his way. He wore his sword while he was exploring, something he rarely did, and as his eyes scanned the ground for some trace of an old pecwae camp, he also looked for trampled grass or perhaps a bit of cloth caught in a bramble. His ears were pricked and alert so that if a squirrel a hundred yards distant chittered in anger at being disturbed, he heard it.

“The gods be thanked that at age seventy I have my hearing and most of my eyesight and my teeth,” Gustav said to himself, grinning, as he walked.

With the exception of his enforced nightly sojourns into the shrubbery, the advancing years had used him kindly. His eyesight had diminished somewhat, not long range, but short. After about age forty, he had been forced to hold a book to his nose to read it. An ork sailor had sold him a remarkable invention—two pieces of magnifying glass contained in a wire frame that he placed upon his nose and, with their aid, he could read once more. This weakening of the eyes had been the only harsh symptom of advancing years, that and a certain stiffness in the joints when he woke in the morning, a stiffness that a brisk walk usually corrected.

He was thinking that he'd been especially lucky in keeping his teeth—he'd seen too many old men slurping their supper from a soup bowl—when he came upon the clue for which he had been searching.

Even in his excitement and gratification, the knight continued to listen to the forest sounds, trying to pick out the one sound that had no place there. Hearing nothing except what he was supposed to hear, he bent down to examine his find—a ring of stones, charred black with fire.

Located in the center of a stand of fir trees, the ring had been here a long, long time, so long that weeds and plants had grown up all around the stones. He might have thought them a natural formation, but that no act of nature had formed the stones in that circular pattern. Hands had placed the stones here. Hands had built the fires that had blackened them. Pecwae hands? Gustav needed more clues.

He expanded his search beyond the ring of stones. Pecwae have few personal possessions and what they do have they carry with them when they leave. He was elated, therefore, when he came across the shards of a broken clay pot not many yards from the fire ring. Fitting the pieces together, he found it to be a small pot such as might have been used by small hands.

Gustav continued his search, patiently going over every bit of ground and was rewarded at last. A flash of metal caught his attention. Kneeling down, using his dagger, he carefully pried the shiny object from the ground in which it had been partially buried. He unearthed a small silver ring that might have fit a human child. He
had no doubt that it was a pecwae ring, however, for in it was set one of the turquoise stones which the pecwae value beyond gold, considering them to be magical.