“We found people there, living in squalor you wouldn’t believe. Servants, sort of, and livestock in lean times. They don’t speak a modern language. We couldn’t have communicated without Goblin and Silent.” Those two being senior Company wizards.
“Your new Taken is Blind Emon. She is blind. She’s the slave of something called the Master, which sounds more intimidating in their language. He was human once. He made himself immortal. Now he just lays around and eats, too bloated to move. No one has seen him for ages except Blind Emon. Anyone else gets that close, they end up on the menu.”
Ours is an ugly and challenging world.
“So Blind Emon is a Taken, just not the Lady’s Taken.”
Much that had leaked to me from her now made more sense.
“If that’s how you want to see it. It doesn’t matter. What does is, we need her not to notice us.”
Hmm. The hiding off the road now made sense. He wanted Blind Emon’s caravan to slide by rather than us falling back toward Whisper.
He said, “You know what you need to do. Go do it.”
Blind Emon’s mules would not be long arriving. Time to get the clinic hidden inside a glamour.
LIKELY THE BRIDGE and road had been built to connect the settlement and the Master’s hangout. I could not imagine why, though.
Everybody hid in the best glamour.
Warning came. The mule train was close. I needed no word of mouth. I felt Blind Emon’s pain. I was more sensitive to her than was anyone else. Bless my happy days as a prisoner in the Tower!
This contact was the worst yet. It wormed inside more deeply. I became disoriented and distraught. I suffered fifteen minutes of condensed torment, reliving Blind Emon’s Taking.
There had been others like Emon, once. She was the sole survivor of the Master’s ancient collision with the Domination. He actually antedated the Domination era. He had repulsed the bilious sorcerer-tyrant known as the Dominator, at the cost of becoming the darkness-bound buried horror that he was now.
Emon had started out as a brilliant mage known for her clever mining of ancient mysteries. She was beautiful, she was young, she was in love… Then she unearthed something foul that had faded to a dreadful rumor and should have been left to fade even further.
Blinding was the first of a thousand atrocities she suffered.
Too much of her torment leaked over. I was so bowels-voiding scared that I was leaking back.
SHE WAS PAST. She had become an intermittently visible scarlet lily blossoming over the improbable bridge. Countless mules and men crossed that dispiritedly, making an art of their absence of enthusiasm. Blind Emon barely kept them moving.
Shit. Toss it in a hot iron skillet and fry it up, shit!
Distracted, I thoughtlessly moved to get a better look at Blind Emon. Now I had a frozen muleteer staring at me, mouth agape.
I froze, too, hoping to disappear into the glamour.
He dropped his mule’s lead tether and oozed away, never breaking eye contact and never showing expression. As I began to have trouble keeping him in focus he stepped out briskly toward home. He never said a word to the mule driver behind him.
Him just taking off was as good as doing some yelling. He was too near Blind Emon to exit unnoticed.
Emon was a ruddy shimmer amidst the high foliage of illusory trees when the muleskinner began his heel and toe dance toward home. She solidified as she moved my way.
I tried becoming one with the forest. That worked, some. She failed to pick me out of the mast but she for sure did sense someone who could be touched, mind to mind.
She searched but never pinned me down.
Kill me!
She knew I would hear her.
Kill me, I beg you!
Her dash round the sky turned frantic. My head felt ready to explode. Normal men ground their knuckles into their temples. Mules brayed.
The plea for surcease from pain, Kill me! eventually knocked me out.
ELMO AND THE original patrol, with my apprentices, surrounded me. I mumbled, “Shouldn’t have tapped that last keg.” My head throbbed, worst hangover ever. There was a foul taste in my mouth. “I puked?”
“You did, sir,” my apprentice Joro admitted. “In record fashion.”
I was dizzy. The dizzy was getting worse.
Elmo added, “You yelled a lot, too, in some language nobody knows.”
“That was only for a minute,” Joro added. “Then you were out and the thing in the sky shrieked in tongues.”
Dizziness morphed into disorientation. I fought to focus. “What about her?”
Elmo said, “She went away. She gave up looking for you.”
No. Even unconscious she had left me with news enough to know that she had been summoned by the Master.
The lieutenant appeared. “He going to make it?”
“Yes, sir,” Joro replied. “The problem is mostly in his head.”
“Always the case with him, isn’t it? Move out now, Elmo. Let him get his shit together on the road.”
THEY PLANTED ME on a captured mule. The old jenny had been loaded with produce that was in Company bellies now. Other captured mules had carried kegs of salt pork, salt and pepper color granules, or sacks of what looked like copper beads. Elmo thought the beads were ore. Others said it was too light. I felt too lousy to work up a good case of give a shit.
Prisoners had been taken but were almost useless. Nobody understood their turkey gobble.
“What the hell?” I blurted when I realized Elmo was headed across the bridge.
“Super shitstorm about to hit. Our guys will be in it. They need you there.”
A fight? I was headed for a fight? Feeling like this?
A lone crow, notably ragged, watched us pass from a perch on the rail of the bridge. It offered no comment.
THE EARTH TREMBLED. My mule shied. She had been skittish for a while, now.
We were two hours west of the bridge, near where our guys were operating. Twice we heard distant horns.
I was lost. Nobody else had a clue, either. Some thought that the lieutenant hoped to engineer a collision between Whisper and the Master. If that happened Whisper would have to consult the Lady, who might recall the Master from back when she was the Dominator’s wife. She might want to get in the game herself. All that would cost time. The lieutenant could build a bigger head start.
The road west of the bridge was better hidden. The farther we went the healthier the glamours became. The earth trembled again. There was noise ahead, muted by the forest and the hill we were climbing.
We found a gang of mules and mule drivers hiding beside the road, just short of the crest. They were unarmed and disinclined to resist. They were terrified. I did not blame them. Blind Emon was not happy.
Some heavy-duty shit was shaking beyond that ridge.
I urged my mule forward. I had friends involved. Some might need help.
Came an epic flash. An invisible scythe topped every tree rising above the ridgeline. Whittle observed, “First news you know, de weader be gettin’ parlous roun’ dese parts.”
Rusty did a credible job of managing his fear. This would be his first experience with battlefield sorcery. A little real terror might be just the specific to purge his soul.
We clambered through fallen limbs that had been shredded like cabbage for kraut, reached a tree line, looked out on a bowl-shaped clearing more than a mile across. It had been farmland once but most was going to scrub, now. A natural rock up-thrust centered it. Ruins topped that. They were ugly and, though it sounds ridiculous, they felt abidingly evil… probably because Emon had prejudiced me.
Emon was a roiling storm of cardinal strands above the ruin, filling far more sky than she had over the bridge. Three Taken on flying carpets circled at a respectful distance. A fourth carpet lay mangled in a field, smoldering while someone dragging a damaged leg crawled away.