The Last Talisman (13 page)

Laio's brain was completely blitzed, his thoughts a swirling mess, and it took him a good while before he remembered the money pouch. Nihal had handled it often during their voyage. He made to grab it from his tunic, but a sharp pain jolted through his body.

Vrasto approached him cautiously. “Does it hurt?”

“I have a money pouch with me that my friend used every once in a while, but I can't seem to reach it. It should be here beneath my tunic.”

Vraśta nodded without the slightest sign of surprise.

Then Laio remembered Nihal's letter and realized he'd been a fool all along. If Vraśta already knew about the pouch, he must know about the sheet of parchment, too. Doubtless his torturer had found it on him at some point. It was probably thanks to the letter that they were so sure that other enemies had crossed into their territory.

Vraśta searched the boy's tunic carefully and pulled out the pouch. It was empty, and stained with blood. He lifted it to his nose, and then sniffed the air.

“They didn't pass through here. We'll have to search for them farther along the way.”

Laio was too tired to press onward, so they rested for the morning on the plain. Vraśta continued to treat Laio's wounds, bringing him water and food, always attentive and smiling.

Throughout their entire search, Vraśta carried Laio on his shoulders. The Fammin was equipped with powerful legs and a keen sense of smell, and both proved favorable attributes in tracking down Nihal and Sennar. He crossed the vast, desolate plain almost at a jog, stopping only to tend to Laio's wounds and to keep him fed and hydrated.

More and more often, the boy struck up conversation with the Fammin, speaking to him almost as if the creature were an affectionate older brother. One evening, he told him of Nihal, of the army, of his life. “In the end, I'm glad I didn't give in and speak,” said Laio.

“If you'd have just told them, you wouldn't be in such pain,” Vraśta replied.

“But I'd have betrayed my friends, and there's nothing worse than being a traitor.”

“What does it mean, ‘betrayed'?”

“It means to lie, to say one thing and do another. My friends know that I'd protect them at all costs, that I'd never do them harm. With your friends, you must always be honest.”

Vraśta felt a pang in his heart. He was beginning to understand. If he was truly Laio's friend, then he shouldn't be doing what he was doing. Since they'd left the prison, he'd been overwhelmed with a torrent of feelings that he didn't know how to name or interpret.

Before meeting Laio, Vraśta hadn't even known what words like
friendship
or
well-being
meant. His life had been a life of warring. He'd dealt with thousands of prisoners, had even tortured some, but none of his actions had ever brought him pain or pleasure. They were orders, and Fammin were incapable of disobeying orders.

But now he was beginning to understand that beyond his insurmountable sense of duty, lay a whole different world, a possible life, made up of thousands of new feelings that had only now begun to take shape within him and excite his curiosity, even when they were unpleasant and painful.

He recalled something one of the Mistakes had said, just before he'd killed him: “You've never felt the desire to live for yourself? To do what you want?” Vraśta hadn't understood, because he hadn't understood what life really was. But now he was beginning to understand, and along with that knowledge came the certainty that he did not want to betray Laio. So that's what it was, the knot in his stomach, the lump in his throat: the desire to
not
do something.

At last, one afternoon, Vraśta caught the scent of Laio's friends, and discovered they were headed toward Seferdi.

That evening, Laio was sleeping peacefully. Vraśta nudged him. The boy roused and rubbed his eyes. “Are there enemies nearby?” he asked, straining to sit up straight.

“I betrayed you.” The moment the words left his mouth he felt better.

Laio was confused. “Huh?” he asked sleepily.

“Someone ordered me to free you. He told me to find your friends and to kill all of you.”

Laio sat up, completely awake by now. “Is that the only reason you set me free?”

“I was following orders,” said Vraśta.

“Do you want to kill me?”

“No,” Vraśta said impulsively.

Laio stared at the Fammin. “I'm right here. If you want to kill me, do it now. On with it.”

Vraśta lowered his gaze. “I betrayed you. …” he repeated.

“You didn't free me because someone ordered you to, and you didn't bring me all this way just to betray me and my friends. You did it because you wanted to.”

Vraśta eyed him. “A Fammin cannot disobey orders. None of the Mistakes I knew had any desire to kill, and yet they killed, because that's what the Tyrant created them to do.”

“It was you who chose to tell me the truth, you who chose to nurse me. No one else commanded you to do those things. You too can follow your will. You too have the freedom to choose.”

“I don't want to kill because I'm told to. … I don't want to betray you. … You're my friend,” said Vraśta, his voice filled with remorse.

Laio reached out and ran his hand over Vraśta's cheek. His touch had a strange effect on the creature. Vraśta felt consoled, reassured.

“I trust you, and I know you would never kill me. Now that you've told me the truth, you have nothing to fear. Lead me to Nihal and Sennar.”

16

Unspeakable Horror

A long, cobblestone street stretched out before Nihal. It ran directly into the city, wide enough for two wagons to pass comfortably. The cobblestones had loosened and shifted, and thorny, twisting plants had sprouted in the crevices. Most likely it had served as the city's main avenue and had once been lined with magnificent trees. Several of them had been reduced to charred trunks, while others rose like contorted skeletons against the leaden sky. Seated on their dead branches were dozens of crows, filling the solitary night with their grim cawing.

The road was overflowing with rubble, glass shards, the odd weapon, fallen, perhaps, from the hands of those who'd attempted to defend their city. In every direction, there were the burned and blasted remains of houses. Nihal turned down a side road and found the same destruction, the same heaps of rubble. There were even strips of torn cloth that had somehow survived all those years.

Nihal entered one of the homes. A few pieces of furniture were still intact, but most of them had been overturned and lay rotting on the ground. The dining table stood still set for a meal, as if merely waiting for the family to take their places. In the other rooms, they were greeted with a similar scene: furniture dashed to the ground, scraps of paper everywhere, bed sheets soaked with blood.

They walked back out into the street and continued exploring the city, where they saw other houses, other signs of fire, and other blood stains on the road and walls.

“It's not normal, after forty years, for the blood to still be so bright red,” Sennar observed. “Someone must have cast a preservation spell over the destroyed city.”

Nihal wended her way through the ruins in numb silence. She could feel nothing. The whole place seemed alien. Nothing in this city spoke to her. The silence of death muted all sound and barred Nihal from fully connecting to what she saw.

Soon they found themselves in a vast, public square. Here, Nihal recalled vaguely, the weekly market was once held, packed with hordes of people bustling about the foot of a grand white fountain with a tall column of black marble that towered up into the sky and shot streams of water through the air. Now the square was crowded with the iron skeletons of what must once have been the vendors' stalls. Burn marks covered the entire pavement. At the center of the square, still gleaming white, was the fountain Nihal remembered, now filled with murky, swampy water. The monotone croaking of frogs, like a funeral dirge, came from inside.

They continued walking and soon came to the royal palace. It, too, had been reduced to rubble, the shards of its crystal walls strewn over the ground. When the tower had collapsed, the roof of the central building had caved beneath it from the pressure, leaving the throne room uncovered. Its columns still rose to the sky in all their crystal splendor, though instead of a ceiling they now seemed to support the mass of dark clouds above. At the end of the long hall, alone amid the ruins, stood the throne itself—a crystal chair with velvet upholstery long since faded, though at one time it must have been a rich scarlet. Nihal imagined Nammen seated there at the height of his power, informing the rulers gathered before him that he would not be taking possession of the lands won by his father, but instead would allow each to reestablish local rule. A throne among the ruins—it made for an absurd and tragic sight: the symbol of power perched upon the rubble. All memory of that civilization had been wiped away, and Nihal—who knew so little of her own people, who'd seen them only in snatches of dreams and visions of death—lived on as its sole guardian.

They wandered from room to room until they reached a grand hall. A banquet hall, most likely. Its back wall remained remarkably intact, with an enormous bas-relief stretching from end to end. There, Nihal saw the carved likenesses of her people, depicted in the bustle of daily life. In the corner of the relief, something caught her attention. A symbol, a coat of arms. The half-elf coat of arms. Nihal examined the bas-relief again and found the very same coat of arms carved into the breastplate of each warrior. She studied the symbol intently, impressing it in her memory.

In yet another room, they stumbled upon the remains of what must have once been an observatory, proof of the half-elves' interest in the cosmos and its mysteries. On one wall, there were the shreds of an old star chart; on the floor beneath it, in pieces, was a telescope. The enemy troops had smashed the lens and dented the metal. Loose sheets of paper covered the floor, many of them burned. A few still bore the markings of an unknown language, or notes regarding the movement of the stars and planets—a life's work, scattered like ashes in the wind.

They continued wandering through the palace and soon ran into a statue of a woman, a half-elf, captured in mid-dance, or so it seemed. Her face bore an expression of joy and deep serenity, though much of her body lay on the ground, the arms smashed to pieces. At the sight of that statue, all of the emotions Nihal had been bottling up suddenly burst forth, and she collapsed in a fit of tears.

“Let's get out of here. You've seen what you came to see, and we have a mission to complete,” said Sennar. He leaned down and helped her back to her feet.

“It was the right thing, to come here,” Nihal muttered between sobs. “Yes, I was right to come here, to keep from forgetting what happened here, to remember the dead.”

“You could never forget, not even if you wanted to,” Sennar replied. “And neither could I, not after what I've seen,” he added grimly.

They stepped out of the palace, hurrying to distance themselves from the mournful ruins. In their blind rush, they came to a road they hadn't yet traveled. All of a sudden, Nihal felt Sennar's arms wrap tightly around her as he pulled her toward him and swung around to keep her from seeing.

“What's there?”

“Nothing you need to see,” he answered.

“Let me go.”

“There's no reason for you to see this, Nihal,” he said. His voice trembled. “Don't look.”

Nihal forced herself out of Sennar's arms and turned.

The streets were lined with gallows, a never-ending series of corpses all strung up by nooses. Resting on the gallows were hundreds of crows, like demon spirits watching over the dead. Hanging there were men, women, children, their faces distorted beyond recognition, their clothes in tatters, their eye sockets empty yet brimming with horror.

“Whoever did this wanted to preserve the evidence. Whoever it was used a forbidden spell to prevent time from erasing this massacre.”

A cry of horror escaped from Nihal's throat.

Sennar ran to her, forcing her to look away. “We should never have come to this place. Come on, let's go,” he said, holding her up, her face pressed to his chest.

They walked through the aisle of corpses, faster and faster until they took off at a sprint, running until the city was far behind them. Sennar let go of Nihal and sat down to catch his breath.

After a short silence, the sorcerer stood and took the half-elf, still sobbing, in his arms. “Let's get away from here,” he said.

With Sennar leading they way, they resumed their journey. Night had long since fallen and finding a place to rest in the swamp would be difficult. When they came to a stretch of land that felt somewhat more solid beneath their feet, Sennar decided it would suffice as a camping place for the evening. They laid down their cloaks as bedding and lit a small fire.

“You don't think about anything but getting a good night's rest tonight,” he said to Nihal. “I'll be lookout.”

“But you should sleep, too,” she protested faintly.

“I don't need to, and to be honest I have no desire to,” Sennar replied, matter-of-fact, spreading his cloak over her as a blanket. Spring had arrived. If he was doing his math right, it must have been mid-April by now, and still it was freezing.

Sennar curled up by the fire, alone with his thoughts, the croaking frogs, and the swamp's asphyxiating odor. He felt exhausted. Standing before all those hanged corpses, it had felt as if the dead were crying out to him, urging him on toward vengeance. An anger he'd never known before filled his soul. For the first time, he understood what it was that had driven Nihal to war. For the first time in his life, he felt the desire to kill.

In silence and in dull spirits, they continued their journey. For two days, they trudged through the swamp. Then the dark crept in. It was a different dark than the shadows of night. One morning, it simply arrived, and it seemed as if the sun had suddenly set. The clouds took on a yellowish tinge, as they had at countless sunsets in the Land of Days, and yet it was hardly afternoon.

“We're approaching the Land of Night,” said Sennar.

They went on walking, and by afternoon, the now-crepuscular swamp gave way to a grim forest. Suddenly, Nihal heard a noise.

She stopped, pricked her ears, and gripped her sword's handle. Sennar, too, was frozen stiff, ears at attention. For a moment they heard nothing; then the leaves rustled again. This time Nihal could hear where it was coming from, and she turned toward its source with her sword drawn. In a flash, she leaped into the bushes.

Whatever it was she landed on—in the fury of her movement she hadn't the time to look—she could feel its bristles between her fingers. She threw the creature to the ground, pinned it, and brought her sword to its throat. Just then she heard a sound coming from another direction, as if there were two creatures now.

“Stop, he's a friend!” came a voice, almost childlike, though with a strain of suffering.

Nihal roused her senses and examined the creature she'd pinned with the blade of her sword: a Fammin, staring straight back at her. She felt herself sink into that gaze. All anger, all desire to kill fled her mind. There was something in those eyes, something she couldn't explain.

“Now, where in the name of the gods did you come from?” asked Sennar.

Nihal loosened her grip on the beast and turned toward the sorcerer. Standing before him was Laio, ghostly pale and draped in a blood-stained cassock, smiling wide.