Dross (Sphereworld: Joined at the Hilt Book 2) Read online

  Ravilich had been less than cordial when they had previously parted company, but Randall needed answers to some, if not all, of the questions which had just been raised by the odd encounter with Yaeryils—who now well and truly seemed to have become the White Knight, rather than the young woman who Randall had briefly allowed himself to feel genuine affection for.

  Gripping Dan’Moread’s hilt and focusing for several seconds in an attempt to contact her, he gave up and slid her into her sheath. He then wrapped the belt from which that sheath hung around his waist, and made his way outside to meet with Ravilich.

  As he exited the dilapidated main house, Randall was surprised by just how little of the effects he felt from the battle three days earlier. The jarring chronological disconnect caused by the lengthy period of unconsciousness was partly to blame, but Randall could not help to think that he was not suffering while Dan’Moread was clearly still feeling the ill effects of their battle with the Grey Blade.

  Ravilich’s eyes met Randall’s as the Squire finished strapping a bundle of tent stakes to the wagon. “I admit I was surprised,” the Squire said as he squared himself to Randall, “when the White Knight called for our diversion to this place. Then my surprise turned to comprehension when Ser Cavulus drew your limp form from the Underworld.”

  Ravilich’s resentment toward Randall was even clearer now than it had been during their last encounter, and Randall held up his hands in a hopefully peaceful gesture, “Ravilich…I didn’t understand about…” his eyes wandered across the bridge, where the White Knight’s burnished armor was still visible in the midday sun, “about the White Knight when we last spoke. But I think I understand it better now.”

  “What could you possibly understand?” Ravilich spat angrily. “You were a diversion—nothing more.”

  “Ravilich—“ Randall began, but the other man’s eyes flared angrily as he interrupted.

  “Damn you, Randall—I LOVED HER!” Ravilich cried as tears began to well in those angry, bitter eyes. Hot breaths blasted in and out of the Squire’s nostrils as his fists clenched tightly at his sides. He stepped forward and pointed a finger across the bridge, where the White Knight finally disappeared amid the rubble, and his voice broke desperately as he wept, “I love her still…but the worst is not that she doth not return my love—the worst is that she doth not even remember my love, for it has been taken from her by Rimidalv.”

  Randall looked around for the rest of the White Knight’s retinue—Drexil the weapons master, or Eckol the smith—and found no sign of them. “What happened to the rest of Ser Cavulus’ band?”

  Ravilich bitterly wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt and shook his head, “Gone…dismissed by the White Knight shortly after we parted company with thee.”

  “Why?” Randall asked in confusion.

  “She—no…” he corrected, “Ser Cavulus said that a cleansing of our team was required, but we both know it was Rimidalv who gave the order,” he said darkly. “They were paid handsomely for their efforts and sent on their way; I think they were headed for Greystone.”

  “I didn’t pass them on the road,” Randall said with concern, but Ravilich shook his head.

  “They were dismissed near the Binding Chain to the north of the road,” he explained.

  “So…it’s just you to tend to all of this?” Randall gestured to the overpacked wagon and half dozen animals which drew it.

  “I am not helpless,” Ravilich spat. “’Tis but a wagon and team; a child could manage such tame animals—“

  “I meant no offense,” Randall held up his hands in mock surrender. “What were you doing up in the mountains?”

  “Seeking Fleshmongers,” Ravilich replied darkly, casting a baleful look toward the peaks far to the north.

  “Did you find them?”

  “Some,” the Squire said through gritted teeth before sighing, and in that moment it seemed as though half of the tortured young man’s pain fell away, “but not all. Randall…I know thou art not the cause of my torment…but, as a man, you must understand—“

  “I do,” Randall interrupted solemnly as the sheer horror of what Ravilich had revealed began to sink in. “She was taken from you—from us,” he said pointedly, drawing a dark look from the other man, “but now I understand that I, too, played some role in how she was taken from you. For that…I know I could never fully atone, but if it is ever possible to do so you must believe me: I will do my utmost. What Rimidalv has done to her is…monstrous,” he said, searching for the right word for several seconds before finally finding it.

  Ravilich seemed skeptical but, even so, Randall could tell they had reached some measure of previously impossible understanding. “I…I thank thee for thy sympathy, Randall, but I must finish loading the wagon. The White Blade is pitiless to foe and friend alike; I must complete my work and set off to support Ser Cavulus as I am sworn to do, lest I suffer his scorn.”

  “May I help with the wagon?” Randall asked.

  Ravilich looked ready to argue, but he soon relented, “Aye…t’would be appreciated.”

  Less than a half hour later, Ravilich drove the White Knight’s wagon across the bridge and through the rubble on the far bank. Randall made out the wagon for nearly an hour as it rode up and down the hills dotting the landscape on the west bank of the river, but eventually it disappeared from view entirely.

  After the wagon had left his sight, Randall decided it was time to do what he had come to do: retrieve the tablet which Phinjo had sent him for so he could get out of this accursed place.

  Chapter: A Silent Plea in the Dark

  14-1-6-659

  Randall spent the next several hours comparing the map and notes which Phinjo had given him with the structure of the main house. She had written the notes in Ghaevlian—of which he could read precious little—but he had thought during the trek from Greystone that he had divined their meaning plainly enough.

  After three hours of continuous searching, he was no longer confident that he understood them at all.

  “Three blue pebbles warmed by fire, breathe up smoke through star-bound spire…” he read from the note as he examined the massive hearth in the center of the main house’s ground floor.

  Conspicuously placed were three fist-sized stones amid the darker, greyer hearthstones which made the open hearth’s chimney. The hearth itself was magnificent, with gently curved columns supporting stacks of mixed round and jagged stones which formed the chimney that ran straight up through the now-nonexistent roof of the main house.

  He was certain that these three blue stones were the ‘pebbles’ mentioned in Phinjo’s unnecessarily cryptic notes since they were part of the chimney which ‘breathed up smoke’ to the sky where the stars would twinkle on a clear night. But the next passage gave him pause.

  “…point the way to star-child’s line, writ in earth till end of time,” he finished the passage, looking up the chimney in the direction that the triangular arrangement of blue stones seemed to point.

  One of the triangle’s tips was pointed slightly upward at an angle which moved across the chimney, and even after circling the hearth a dozen times in case the indicated path was meant to be a spiral, he was unable to find anything but nondescript stones piled one atop the other as the chimney reached for the sky above.

  Then he heard a voice—the same voice which he had heard in the tunnels prior to the attack—and every hair on his body stood on end as the same, muffled words reached his ears, “Help us!”

  He realized his hand was on Dan’Moread’s hilt even before the thought to place it there entered his mind. “Dani?” he whispered as his bowels threatened to unclench in sheer, unmitigated terror. Thoughts of facing the pale warrior—even without that monstrous creature wielding the Grey Blade—were enough to strike fear deeper into Randall than he had ever thought possible. “Dani!” he repeated, but she made no reply as her cold hilt remained as lifeless as it had been since he had awakened hours earlier.

&nbs
p; “Please,” the voice said, “we are lost…help us!”

  It was only then that Randall realized he was not hearing the voice with his ears—he was hearing it the same way he heard Dan’Moread: with his mind!

  He looked down at his Flylrylioulen and waited until the voice repeated, “Help us!” When the voice spoke, the crystalline flyl pulsed with inner light just as it did when he communicated with Dan’Moread.

  “It could be a trap,” he muttered as he felt his heart begin to pound in his ears, but then he realized that the voice sounded significantly louder than it had when he had first heard it three days earlier. “It must be in the cellar,” he said with growing horror as he instinctively stepped back toward the main house’s front door. The first floor was made of stones, but he had already learned from his exploration of the cellar that this house’s flagstones concealed secrets—and he had no desire to have one of those secrets cost him his life.

  After exiting the structure and holding Dan’Moread out before himself defensively, he fought to steady his breath as the afternoon sun warmed his head and shoulders.

  “Help us!” the voice pleaded. “We are lost…please help us!”

  There was genuine suffering in that voice—suffering which somehow stirred something in Randall that he was unaccustomed to feeling—and against his better judgment he took a few cautious steps toward the cellar.

  “If it was the pale warrior,” he whispered to himself, shuddering as he recalled the horribly scarred and white, iris-less eyes of the Grey Blade’s final wielder, “he would have waited until the White Knight was gone to come for me…”

  That particular thought stopped him cold in his tracks as he reached the midpoint of the main house’s outer wall. He was almost exactly halfway from the front of the building to its rear—where the cellar door was located—and he stood there for a long, taut while as he weighed his options.

  He could no more continue his search for the as-yet missing tablet while fearing for his life than he could fight the pale warrior one-on-one without Dan’Moread’s support—her complete support, not just her passive presence as an instrument which he was still ill-suited to wield in the heat of combat. So his options were simple: investigate the cry for help issuing from beneath the abandoned fortress’ main house, or jump onto Storm Chaser’s back and flee this place never to return.

  In truth, the latter option held the greater appeal at the outset of his silent deliberations. He wanted nothing at that moment so much as to be free of this web of intrigue and death into which he had blindly stumbled, but the sound of that helpless, pleading voice was enough to push a cowardly retreat out of his mind as the childlike voice pleaded, “We are lost and alone…help us!”

  “Damn you and your big heart, Randy,” he hissed, repeating Lorie’s oft-employed admonishment as he resumed his walk—albeit slowly and carefully—toward the cellar door. “As if you aren’t lost and alone—and in need of help!”

  He came to the cellar door and peered inside, sensing motion not far within. He tensed and tightened his grip on Dan’Moread’s hilt as he waited for the pale warrior to fall upon him with tooth and nail—appendages which had appeared well-suited to the task of tearing him into pieces.

  “Who’s there?” he called out, silently cursing himself for doing so only after he had spoken.

  “We are lost,” the voice replied, sounding as though it was no further than a few steps within the dark cellar. Randall took an instinctive step back at hearing its proximity. “Please…help us.”

  “Come into the light,” he beckoned.

  “Too much pain in light,” it said meekly, but it no longer sounded panicked or distressed. Its tone had become that of a confused and frightened child as it said, “Please help us, Randy.”

  “How do you know my name?” he demanded as he thought he saw a flicker of movement just within the door.

  “We know it because you know it,” the voice replied in what sounded like confusion before resuming its simplistic plea. “We are hungry and lost. Please help us.”

  “I would like to help you,” Randall said hesitantly, “but I still don’t know who you are.”

  Slowly, a shape began to form in the darkness. It was short, squat, and decidedly not humanoid as the clacking of tiny, chitinous feet against the cellar’s stone floor brought it close enough to the doorway for Randall to see a good portion of it.

  He drew a sharp breath, more in surprise than revulsion, as the strangest creature he had ever glimpsed—or even heard described in fantastic tales—emerged. Its body was broad like a crab’s, but nearly twice as long as it was wide. Where the crab’s eyestalks should have been was a single, flattened dome-shaped organ which Randall guessed was its eye, and its legs were rather unlike a crab’s and more like a centipede’s. It had four short, spindly limbs protruding from the underside of its body, and Randall thought he saw a glimmer of light across the creature’s flat, chitinous back.

  “What are you?” Randall asked in wonderment.

  “We are lost, hungry and alone,” the creature replied with unmistakable sadness. “Will you help us?”

  “No,” Randall shook his head before correcting, “yes—yes, of course I’ll help you. But I need to know what you are first.”

  “We are lost, hungry and—“

  “Alone, yes,” Randall interrupted with as much patience as he could muster, “I understand that. I mean…what do you call yourself?”

  “We…” the creature hesitated, “we do not understand this inquiry.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “We are Randy,” the creature replied with childlike confidence.

  “No,” he shook his head, sighing shortly, “I am Randy—Randall, that is,” he explained. “My real name is Randall, but my friends call me Randy.”

  “Friends?” the creature repeated quizzically. “What are friends?”

  “Uhh…” Randall trailed off, completely at a loss how to answer that question. “Well…a friend is someone who…umm…helps his friend even if she didn’t ask for it. And she helps him in return, though usually not in the same way as he helped her.”

  “What is ‘he,’ and what is ‘she’?” it asked with what sounded like genuine fascination.

  Randall scratched his head in bewilderment, “Well…some people are male and others are female. See, the females…umm…they make babies and the males…well they make babies too, but it’s more like they support the females in making babies.”

  “Which are you, Randall?”

  “Well I’m a male,” he replied, glad to finally have a question to which he could give a straightforward answer.

  “So you have helped to make babies?”

  “Erm…” Randall’s brow ruffled in confusion—and more than a little self-consciousness, “no, I haven’t…I guess that wasn’t the best explanation, was it?”

  “No,” the creature replied simply. “But we would like to be your friend.”

  Feeling as though he was having a conversation with an enthusiastic toddler whose grasp of language far exceeded its grasp of the ideas which language represented, Randall sat there in silent contemplation for a long while as he tried to decide how to proceed. Eventually he said, “I think I would like to be your friend, too, but I need to know more about you first.”

  “We are lost, hungry, and alone,” it repeated with such overt confidence that Randall could not help but let a stupid grin spread across his face. “We would also like to be your friend, Randall. We have never had a friend, and we do not understand ‘he’ or ‘she,’ but we would like you to help us and we would be happy to help you in return.”

  “How can I help you, exactly?” he asked, finally feeling as though the conversation had taken a baby step in the right direction.

  “We are starving,” it said, pulling a new word out of its apparently limited vocabulary.

  “Starving?” he repeated in concern. “What do you eat?”

  A sound filled his mind—more
a lack of sound than a sound of its own—as the creature replied.

  “I’m sorry,” Randall shook his head, “can you repeat that?”

  The same strange, lack of sound filled his mind for a moment and then it passed.

  “Umm…can you describe it?” he tried.

  “You have some,” the creature raised one of its spindly, spider-leg-like appendages and pointed toward Randall’s face, “there.”

  His hand went up to his cheek before brushing against the godstone earring which he had been given by Shannon, the soldier who had shared his bed the night before she had taken her own life. “You mean this?” he removed the earring, having worn it for only a few days after leaving Greystone.

  “Yes,” the creature nodded, “we must eat it.”

  “You eat godstone?!” he said as his eyes went wide in a mixture of alarm and fascination.

  “What is ‘godstone’?”

  “This thing,” Randall pulled the earring out and dangled it in front of his face, careful not to dangle it too near to the creature, “this earring is made of godstone—and a little bit of metal.”

  “Then yes,” the creature said patiently, “we eat godstone. We are hungry for it. May we eat it?” it asked as it stretched forth all four of its spindly arm-like limbs, each of which ended in the most delicate of three-pointed pincers with each measuring no longer than Randall’s little finger.

  “Umm…” he hesitated, “no…no, I don’t think so. It has…erm…sentimental value to me.”

  “What is ‘sentimental’?” it asked, its single ‘eye’ atop its head blinking for the first time since Randall had glimpsed it. But instead of two lids, it seemed as though an entire iris closed and opened beneath the glassy surface of the ‘eye’ itself.

  Randall sighed, knowing with absolute conviction that if he could not reliably describe the difference between ‘he’ and ‘she’ that there was simply no way he could describe the word ‘sentiment’ or any of its derivatives. “It tells me a story,” he explained shortly before shifting back to the subject of diet, “where do you usually find godstone?”