“I think it killed him to death,” Mcwigik said, but then the man reached his hand up and pressed the gemstone against his forehead.
“Or not,” muttered the dwarf, and his voice reeked of disappointment.
Many more heartbeats slipped past and the stranger remained motionless on the ground, his hand pressed against his forehead. Then-with hardly an effort, it seemed!-he sat up, still holding the gemstone to his forehead, and said in an accent that was obviously from south of the Gulf of Corona, “Well found in a dark place and know that you have my eternal gratitude. I am Bransen.”
They hadn’t hit anything vital, he believed; the wound was not mortal. It hurt, though. How it hurt, and it was all poor Olconna could do to turn his focus to his surroundings and not the cut in his belly.
He had managed to secure a knife; he surely would have preferred a sword, but the knife he had hidden away in his boot would have to suffice.
He couldn’t deny his fear as the giants lowered him head-down into the ice chasm, a thick rope tied tightly about his ankle. But Olconna had spent the better part of his adolescence and all of his adulthood in battle, and had faced tremendous odds again and again. Always he had found his answer, his way to victory or at least to escape, and he had no reason to believe that this time would be any different. Ancient Badden had erred, Olconna believed, because he had allowed the man to greatly recover from the wounds he had received in the fight when he had been captured.
He brandished the knife. He forced himself to extend downward and stretch the wound, as he couldn’t hope to battle whatever beast might be down here while doubled over.
It was darker now, for he was well over a hundred feet down from the ledge, but not pitch-black. Olconna forced himself into a slow turn, taking in the myriad edges and jags of the chasm walls, trying to pick out a shape among them that foretold something else.
“Faster,” he muttered under his breath, wanting to be on the floor and free of the rope before this beast appeared. In the back of his head, Vaughna’s last words, “every moment precious,” played over and over like a constant echo of regret. For the man, cautious in everything but battle, hadn’t lived that way-until he had encountered Crazy V. The notion weighed on him for a short moment, but Olconna turned that fear that he had lost his chance into determination that he wouldn’t let it end now, that he would find a way to gain some years where Vaughna’s words would guide him as sound advice.
But a moment later Olconna heard a low rumble, like a huge rock rolling down a hill. The beast smelled his blood, just as that old wretch Badden had predicted before he had stabbed Olconna in the belly.
Olconna slowly turned at the end of the rope, his gaze passing the long and open stretch of corridor. He noted a movement down there, a quick glimpse of something large, something awful. He tried to battle his momentum, to stop and face the beast, but he kept going around. He managed to twist about, eliciting terrific pain from his torn belly, to catch a few quick views of the approaching monster. It looked like a gigantic worm, or more accurately a caterpillar, for the many small legs scrabbling at its sides. Giant mandibles arched out in semicircles before its black, round maw-the type of toothy orifice often found on sea creatures, which seemed to pucker as much as open.
“Faster!” Olconna said again, cursing the giants who were lowering him, but as if on cue, the rope stopped.
He hung there, twenty feet from the ground, too high to try to free himself, for the fall would surely leave him helpless in the face of the monster. But too far, he believed, for the approaching beast to get at him. He managed to steady his turn properly so that he could face the crawling nightmare.
They’ll let me bleed out up here, above it, he reasoned, and he decided then that if the worm came under him he would cut free his ankle and drop upon it, all caution be damned!
That thought rang as a beacon of hope in his mind, turned his fear into action, into violence, as he had trained to do for all of his life.
But the worm reared up like a cobra, and before Olconna even appreciated that fact it lashed out.
Olconna tried to respond with the dagger, but so shocked was he that he didn’t even realize that his weapon arm was gone until he saw it disappearing into the awful beast’s mouth!
Now he screamed. There was nothing else. Just the pain and the helplessness-that was the worst of it for a man like Olconna.
No, not the worst. The worst of it were Vaughna’s echoing words, a creed for her, a lament for him: Every moment precious.
The worm took its time, lashing and tearing, and Olconna felt no less than six more stabbing and slashing bites before he finally slipped into that deepest darkness.
Cormack sat on the rail of the beached boat, his shoulders slumped as if all of the air had been sucked out of his lean body. Before him, Milkeila paced nervously back and forth, continually glancing at the surprising man in the black suit.
The man who had just informed them that their entire world was soon to be washed away.
“Are you to let him keep the soul stone?” Milkeila asked, pacing.
“It is your stone.”
The shaman stopped and turned on her lover curiously.
“I would counsel that you let him keep it,” Cormack decided. “It is the most important of gems, I agree, but if what Bransen says is true, then he is all but helpless without it.”
“And with it, he walks with the grace of a warrior,” Milkeila added as both watched the young man, who stood across the sandbar going through a series of movements and turns, the practice of a warrior, as brilliant and precise as anything either of them had ever seen. Cormack in particular appreciated Bransen’s movements, for his training in the arts martial as a young brother of the Order of Abelle had been extensive and complete.
Or so he had thought, but in watching Bransen, Cormack recognized an even deeper level of concentration than he had ever achieved, and by far.
“I believe his every word,” Milkeila admitted, and she seemed surprised by that statement. She turned to see Cormack nodding his agreement.
“It is too outrageous a story to not be true.” “We have to tell them-all of them,” said Milkeila. “Your people and mine.”
“And even Mcwigik’s,” Cormack added. “At the very least, Mithranidoon must be abandoned.”
Milkeila lamented, “A wall of falling ice to wash us all away.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Three Perspectives
On pain of death!” Brother Giavno said again, becoming dangerously animated. Out on rock-collection detail, Giavno and his two companions had been the first to note the approach of Cormack and the strange-looking man in the black suit of some exotic material-Giavno thought it was called “silk,” but as he had seen the stuff only once in his life, and many years before, he couldn’t be certain. The stranger wore a typical farmer’s hat, but Giavno noted some black fabric under that as well.
“Greetings to you, too,” Cormack replied.
“How can you be alive?” one of the other brothers asked, and Cormack tapped his beret.
“God’s will and good luck, I would say,” the fallen monk replied.
“You know nothing of God,” Giavno growled.
“Says the man who whipped him nearly to death,” Bransen, at Cormack’s side, quipped. “A godly act, indeed-at least, according to the mores of many Abellicans I have known. It is strange to me how much like Samhaists they seem.”
Giavno trembled and seemed about to explode. Behind him, over the rocky ridge, some other monks called out and soon a swarm of brothers was fast running toward the rocky beach.
“Why did you come here, Cormack?” Giavno asked, seeming as much concerned as outraged-a poignant reminder to Cormack that he and this man had once been friends. “You know the consequences.”