Then hit the force of that agony, that searing pain in every cell of my body. I reeled back, staggering, but this time that terrible pain only fuelled my anger and resentment. I exploded, no longer a thinking being, but a mass of raw emotions, a hatred such as I had never known all concentrated on this one terrible little man.
I stumbled and fell to my knees; yet as that animal fury took complete control, I no longer felt the pain the way I had. It lessened, Still agonizing but somehow no longer relevant.
Slowly, deliberately, I pulled myself to my feet and took a step toward him.
Kronlon’s bushy eyebrows rose in surprise; his expression showed confusion, then concentration as he threw everything he had at me.
I bellowed, a ferocious primal roar of rage that echoed throughout the whole village, then charged the startled and suddenly very frightened supervisor.
He retreated a couple of steps, then came up against the table he was using and almost fell back onto it. I was on him in an instant, my huge hands around his beefy throat. Kronlon had taught me more than the true meaning of fear; he’d taught me absolute, single-minded hatred. He struggled to pry my hands loose from his throat Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind I was aware that the pain, the agony, was fading now, fading fast. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t relevant.
I felt a surge of energy grow within me, a strange, tangible power like some terrible fist. But before I could even comprehend what was happening, the tension broke and flowed outward from me, outward to the man whom I had pinned against the table. There was a searing burst of light and heat so intense I let him go and reeled backward. I recovered quickly but was still stunned as my head came up to see the supervisor lit in a strange glow, like some eerie supernatural flame.
And then he started decomposing before my eyes.
It was a gruesome sight, but one that, given my mental state, I could view without thought and, suddenly, without feeling of any kind. His skin fell from him, then his tissues, and finally the skeleton itself, which first glowed with a terrible brightness, then faded.
As my senses started to return, I just stood there, gaping at the impossible scene I had just witnessed. Finally I approached the place where Kronlon had stood and stared at it in the near darkness.
Everything, literally everything that was solid or liquid on Lilith burned with the tiny glow of Warden organisms. Everything—the table, the grass, the dirt, the rocks, the trees, even the lamp post. Everything. Everything but the grayish powder that now coated part of the table and a little of the ground beneath it.
All that was left of Kronlon.
Intellectually I was aware that I had caused it, but deep down, I could not believe it. The truth was incredible, impossible. Somehow, in my animal fury, my own Warden organisms had picked up that emotional power and transmitted it to those in Kronlon’s own cells. Burned them up. Killed them.
I turned, stunned, suddenly aware that I was not alone. A crowd of villagers stood just outside, gaping in shocked silence at the scene, scared but unmoving—almost, it seemed, afraid to breathe. As I walked toward them, they quickly drew back, their fear a real and tangible thing. Fear not of Kronlon or of retribution.
Fear of me.
“Wait!” I called out. “Please! Don’t be afraid! I’m not—like him. I won’t hurt you! I’m your friend. I’m one of you. I live among you, work among you.”
My protestations were in vain. Clearly I was not one of them any more. I was a man with the power. I had separated myself from them forever, drawn an unbridgeable gap between my own existence and their eternal toil.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” I almost pleaded with them. “It doesn’t haye to be a tyranny. Kronlon’s gone, and I am not Kronlon.”
Torlok, an elderly man in a village where most never survived that long, was something of an authority figure; he ambled forward. The others were shrinking from me as if I had some terrible disease. Even Torlok would only come so far, but he was old and experienced and past a lot of caring about men and women with the power.
“Sir, you must go now,” he croaked. “You are no longer one of us.”
“Torlok—” I began, but he put up a hand.
“If you please, sir. When Kronlon does not check in tomorrow morning they will send someone to see why. They will find out why and they will send us another Kronlon. Things have changed only for you, not for us.”
“You could leave,” I pointed out. “You have until at least midday.”
Torlok sighed. “Sir, you think you understand, but you do not. You are still new on this world of ours. You say flee—but where to? To another Keep run the same? To the wild to live in near starvation with the savages, unprotected from the nobles and the wild’s own beasts? Or perhaps to be hunted down like some sporting beast?” He shook his head. “No, there will be no change for us. You must go now. You must go to the Castle, tell them what you have done. You belong to their life now, not ours. You cannot go back. We cannot go forward. Go—before you unknowlingly bring the wrath of the Masters upon us. If you feel anything at all for us, go—go now.”
I stared at them for a moment, not quite believing what I was hearing. They were fools, I thought, who deserved their miserable lot. They actually preferred it to any sort of challenge!
Well, let them go back to their miserable lives, I told myself. This mention of the Castle reminded me that I had more than one good reason for going there. As Kronlon had said, we didn’t have a choice, any of us, least of all me in this situation.
The adrenaline was ebbing, though, and I no longer felt as cocksure and all-powerful as I had only moments before. I turned and looked off into the distance, up at that fairy-tale place built into the side of the hill. Somewhere in there was Ti.
Without another word, I turned my back on the crowd that had disowned me and walked silently out of the village, out across the grassy fields toward the Castle.
Before I was halfway there Td come down completely from the high that the power and emotional fury had given me. Now my intellectual self, my old self, was able to assume control once more—not necessarily for the better, I realized.
Up to that point I had never been anywhere near the Castle. The only people I knew who had were those like Kronlon who weren’t exactly the chatty sort. I had no idea how many people were there, and of what potential power. The Knight and his family were there, of course,, most of the time, and I already knew that I was no match for a Master, let alone a Knight. I wondered if I was even a match for a trained person of Supervisor rank. Kronlon was where he was because of the land of person he had been—petty, mean, cruel, and stupid. I suspected that the first three might not matter so much, but the last was unforgivable.
I began to think that individuals like Kronlon, with a little power and small mind, were actually the sacrificial lambs. Somebody had to do that kind of work. But the risk always existed that one of the pawns who had been abused was potentially as strong or stronger than the Supervisor. When that happened, you’d probably scratch one Supervisor.
That observation led to a different line of thought. If I had been merely as strong as Kronlon, we’d have fought to a draw. If I had been slightly stronger, well, he’d be in terrible pain but probably alive. Master strength, at the very least.
Master strength… yes, but untrained. I was unable to muster that power on command, automatically, as even Kronlon could. More like Ti, I supposed, at least at this point. I wondered if that had been the reason for the caution about her. Had she at some point gotten mad and fried somebody to atoms? Somehow done so, and yet been unable to repeat the act.