Amenozume, Heights and Depths, page 4
The Ivaric forces knew who he was and where he was, he realized, as the gap between them started to significantly narrow. They became a line and then a cordon that was going to encircle him.
“Fall back,” he snarled the command as he lifted his head and suddenly swung his arm wide in front of him, knocking three of the men off their feet.
“He’s a sorcerer, I tell you!” one of the men behind his shouted.
“Where’s the girl?” another asked.
Silas felt his knife quiver on his hip in a way it hadn’t in many weeks, while his hand suddenly grasped it and lifted it upward in time to block a knife that had been thrown at him.
Silas looked and saw that the ship was beginning to inch away from the dock, leaving without him.
“Leave me!” he shouted at the Ivaric forces. A new pair had appeared, the three on the ground were rising to their feet, and the rest of the populace in the vicinity were fleeing rapidly. His words carried force, and half the men around him flew backwards.
Three were not affected at all. They sneered at him grimly as they stood together, each with a hand grasping a glowing red amulet on their chests.
“L’Anvien is not defeated with such childish tricks,” the center man spoke with a deadly voice.
Silas stepped back to the edge of the walkway, just a pair of steps from the thick chain fence that marked the end of the pavement – beyond which waves lapped against the stone walls below.
“On your knees!” Silas was scared by the mention of the evil name, the apparent immunity to his power, and the glowing devices the men held. “On your knees!” he shouted the words with as much force as he could, determined to demonstrate his strength and power against the men.
One of the men trembled, and fell to his knees, but the other two stood tall.
Another knife flew at him, and his own knife lifted his hand to block the blade.
“I’ll handle him; you take the others and go find the girl,” one of the standing men said to the other.
Silas looked over his shoulder. His ship was carrying Mata away, it was out in the harbor, aiming for the open mouth that gave passage to the blue seas beyond.
“Mata!” he shifted his voice delicately. “I’ll see you there. There is some trouble for the moment here, but I’ll clean it up and join you later,” he shouted the words that he knew would reach the ears of the girl he loved.
“Is she trying to escape?” the second man with the red amulet asked. “We’ll stop that now.”
Silas flung his knife impulsively.
The weapon flew true. The distance was short and there was no notice. Before the man could begin to defend himself, the blade planted itself in his heart, and he toppled sideways.
“Not wise, stupid young magician,” the remaining man with power chastised him angrily.
“Suffer the consequences!” he pulled his hand away from his amulet, and as he did, Silas saw that not only was the ornament on his chest glowing, but so were his fingertips.
“Knife! Strike him!” Silas shouted the command to his own weapon, which violently shook itself free from the dead body on the ground, then fluttered against the glowing fingers of the evil man, just as he released a glowing beam of light.
The blow from the knife knocked the fingers towards the side, but not so far or so quickly that a portion of the intended deadly beam didn’t strike Silas in the shoulder, leaving a painful burning wound and spinning him to the ground.
He heard a rush of feet, then something struck his head, and he passed out.
Chapter 6
When Silas awoke, he was heavily wrapped in chains, lying in the bottom of a wooden wagon. The wagon was rolling forward along a bumpy road. His jaws ached and his mouth felt distended, which caused him to comprehend that a gag was tied around his head.
And a burning feeling on his chest grew in intensity as his senses returned. He tried to move his head a fraction of an inch despite his bindings, and saw that one of the glowing red pendants hung around his neck and pressed against his chest.
Silas rolled his eyes as he closed them, and groggily tried to recollect that had happened. He had been knocked unconscious at the harbor as numerous men in black had thrown weapons at him or flung themselves at him. He had awoken two times, and been deliberately knocked unconscious again each time – once when he’d been dragged past the drowned body of the Ivaric warrior who had been following Mata. The body had been found and retrieved from the waters, obviously.
And then, when he had been first placed in the wagon, he had started to awaken, but found the chains hastily looped around his neck before he could struggle, and he’d passed out.
And now, he was securely bound.
But Mata was free; he had seen her ship leave the dock and head towards the open water. In time, Silas would find a way to set himself free and resume his own journey to Amenozume. He would find a way to track her down and rejoin her, he thought, as he imagined the look of her eyes and the fragrance of her hair and the taste of her kisses.
There some something like a click in his head.
She was out there, off to the left, he could tell, at a distance. But he would be able to find her even if she were ten times as far away.
Because his Tracker abilities had emerged.
He exhaled deeply and considered the strange occurrence. Another of the barriers that L’Anvien had built inside Silas had been breached because of the waters of the healing spring. He was finally able to Track, in the way that all the others of his village had Tracked, in the sense of knowing with unshakeable certainty where a particular person was, and with the ability to chase after and find that person, regardless of all ultimate dodges, disguises, feints, flights, or other efforts to avoid capture.
His whole life, while growing up in Brigamme, the only thing he had ever expected to do or be was a Tracker, one of the legendary professional villagers who was sent across all the known lands of the world to find and retrieve those who were lost, or those who wished to be lost. The dream had been denied to him, his soul had been crushed, his parents had been humiliated and his village had been embarrassed by his failure.
And now, while he was a chained captive of the forces of Ivaric, the dream had ironically come true. It didn’t matter much at the moment; it would matter more later – as he assumed there would be a later – and he’d hopefully celebrate the victory when he could.
For now, it only mattered because it meant two things – the good Fate of being a friend of the gods must still be working for him. Even while in dire circumstances, the friendly gestures and fortunate turns that accompanied the support of the divinities showed up. And the other good thing it meant was that he would have no problem finding Mata when he eventually landed on Amenozume and wanted to find her.
The wagon rolled over a deep rut, one that jarred Silas and jammed his back, making him grunt, both in surprise and in pain. He had a number of sore spots that he hadn’t known about, probably inflicted by his captors during the battle, or afterwards.
The wagon rolled on for hours, then stopped at a random moment, as far as Silas knew, and men appeared upon the wagon, looking down at him.
“He’s awake; his eyes are open,” one of three black-garbed guards announced to unseen others.
“Don’t touch his gag; don’t let him say a word. That’s his sorcery, in his voice,” some unseen supervisor warned the guards.
“How do we feed him?” asked the guard in the wagon.
“We don’t,” the other answered flatly. “Just pour water in his mouth, and let it seep in through the gag.”
As Silas looked up, one of the men unstoppered a waterskin and casually poured a shower down upon Silas’s face, striking his eyes and cheeks and nose as well as the cloth gag that stuffed Silas’s mouth. Water sprayed up his nose, making him sneeze and snort painfully, until his nostrils were clear and he could breathe once again, causing the guards overhead to erupt in a gale of laughter.
The wagon began to roll again, and Silas tried to imagine where they were destined to go. He hadn’t been killed immediately, so he was bring taken as a prisoner to someplace. Perhaps to Heathrim, back to the home of the Wind Word Guild, or perhaps to Avaleen, the captive nation that Ivaric had invaded, despite Silas’s warnings. Or perhaps all the way north to Ivaric itself, to face the wrath of Derith and Jarvis, the tyrant and his son.
He chewed on his gag, trying to loosen it, destroy it, weaken it. If he could somehow displace the gag enough to be able to speak, he convinced himself he would be able to make something happen, something that would bring his freedom. The gag was leather-bound, and despite his efforts, he could at best only detect a tiny tear start to form where his teeth spent hours in labor.
Two days later, after more of the same treatment by the guards and more of the useless chewing of the gag, still tied down in the back of the wagon as his muscles ached and cramped, Silas saw buildings lining the sides of the road, and heard the hooves of the horses strike pavement. They had reached a city.
Silas longed for his knife. He’d not felt it tremble on his hip during the entire trip in the wagon. He’d never felt it bump against him as the wagon had rolled him from side-to-side over the long road trip. The knife had been removed and seized, thrown away or locked away somewhere when he’d been captured, undoubtedly. And so, it was not available to help him as they traveled. It would have to be trying to follow him, to protect him and rescue him, if there was any way possible to do so.
Silas had struggled to try to exercise his powers without using his voice. He had tried to emulate the Movers of Faralag, who simply willed materials to move, but he found that without his voice, he could not call upon the energy. It was frustrating and maddening. He thought of the lessons that Cover had spent so much time teaching him, lessons he had glibly ignored or only half-heartedly learned at the time. One of those lessons would have undoubtedly helped him solve his problem if he had learned it adequately.
The buildings lining the city road were taller than he recollected from Heathrim. He wasn’t in the small city in the mountain foothills, where the Guild of the Speakers was under the thumb of Ivaric’s forces. And he hadn’t traveled long enough to have reached the distant city of Ivaric, so the likely location was either Avaleen, or some city on the way there.
“Ride ahead and warn the palace that we’re bringing the prisoner in,” Silas heard a voice from the driver’s bench speak to another guard.
The wagon rolled on, and Silas began to see the faces of men peering in over the walls of the wagon to investigate his presence.
Then the wagon rolled beneath an enclosure, and came to stop in a yard that was surrounded by buildings and walls on all sides. Silas listened to the sound of activity in the yard, convinced that the stop was not just a stopping place, but a destination.
Sounds suddenly ceased, and a clapping of multiple heels, striking each other in unison, told of a large number of soldiers coming to attention.
“Haul him out and present him to the palace,” a guard’s voice ordered loudly.
Four men dragged Silas into a sitting position, then slid him out of the filthy wagon and set him on his feet for the first time in days. His legs immediately buckled, and a black clad guard held him up.
“He stinks to high heaven,” the man complained.
“So, would we all in his condition,” another man replied.
Silas looked around. He was in a paved yard, a space between a guarded exterior wall and three building fronts that faced inward, two of them ordinary and one of them elaborately decorated with architectural flourishes and fixtures.
One such fixture was a large balcony two floors above the ground, and a group of men in uniforms were looking down at the crowd in the yard, the wagon and the squad of men who had accompanied Silas back from Barnesnob, and the numerous other soldiers, some wearing ornate uniforms.
But one man on the balcony immediately stood out. Silas recognized Jarvis, the son of the dictator of Ivaric. Silas remembering seeing Jarvis in a prison in Ivaric, where Silas had been taken to be tortured at best as punishment for the accidental breakage of a mirror. Jarvis had left the torture chamber, certain that Silas’s fate had been sealed.
Instead, Silas had been miraculously rescued by his knife, and he had fled from the underground chamber alive, while Jarvis’s cronies had been left dead. Jarvis and Ivaric had taken the escape as an insult even worse than the delivery of the broken mirror, and since then, a search had been carried out across nearly the entire continent, as Ivaric forces had searched for a boy with eyes of purple and gold.
Silas had been safely isolated from all of that while in distant, disguised Faralag, but his decision to travel with Mata had reintroduced him to the dangerous chase, and it turned out that now Jarvis would feel smug about his victory.
Though Silas was prepared to give up hope, he felt an instinctive belief that he would somehow survive; he wasn’t simply counting on gods to intervene. He knew that with the many talents he had been given, he had the ability to protect himself. He only needed to wait for one slip by his captors to allow him to find a way to begin.
The guards that were escorting him hauled him to a spot below the balcony and stopped there, where Jarvis could stare down at him with a mixture of malice and fear.
“So, at last we have back the evil criminal who had been roaming the world. Where have you been hiding for so many months, foolish one? Why did you crawl out from under your rock?” Jarvis shouted the questions down at the prisoner.
“Of course, we can’t let you talk to answer. We’ve learned from some of your former friends that you have gained unusual abilities with your voice, you’ve become some type of evil demon perhaps. And you’ve worked so hard to be an enemy of Ivaric,” Jarvis noted.
“I’m glad I am here at the moment to see you in our care. I’m about to ship out myself, so this is a fortunate coincidence. I’ll tell the men here to punish you severely for all the trouble you’ve caused, before they ship you back to Ivaric to receive your rightful, final punishment from my father.
“Take him away, keep him thoroughly confined, and feel free to whip the skin off his back before you send him north,” Jarvis directed the guards in the yard with Silas.
With that, the evil prince turned his back on the scene and re-entered the building.
“Your fun and games will begin soon, mate,” a guard told him without malice, as his escort began to lead Silas towards a side door in the palace wall.
Now was almost the perfect time for his knife to come flying in to save him, Silas thought. He felt increasingly alert, as though he was shaking off the languor of the long trip in the wagon.
“Stop him there,” someone called. Silas looked around. The convocation in the yard was dispersing, guards were leaving, and his former wagon was being led in a circle, back towards the gate and away from Silas.
Several men with buckets were approaching, then suddenly began to throw the water on Silas, drenching him with gallons of water. The water was cold, evidently freshly drawn from a well, and Silas gasped loudly as his body reacted to the drenching. Buckets of water seemed to unendingly appear and empty themselves, until Silas heard a hissing noise and he realized that the water had soaked a red jewel pendant around his neck, an implement of evil added as a device to control him.
“The red jewel says enough,” one of the guards around Silas spoke aloud, though Silas couldn’t see anyone or anything due to the streams of water dripping in his eyes.
“Why would it care?” someone else asked, as Silas heard the hollow clunking sounds of buckets being dropped to the paving stones.
Silas knew. As soon as he heard the question, he knew the answer. The stone didn’t want him to be clean; it liked dirt. It liked filth. It like chaos and disorder and immorality run amuck. It was a token of L’Anvien, and it shared its lord’s joy in the opportunities than a lack of discipline in society offered for the evil entity to spread his power.
Silas could sense the feelings of the jewel, the red jewel on the chain around his neck he realized for the first time. It was an evil object, but one that seemed to be just as much alive as his own knife was – it was able to decide and act on its own, and it reflected the greater will of its creator. As close as it was to him, he couldn’t help but sense something of its malevolent design.
Guards grabbed Silas’s arms, and began walking him forward again. His legs remained weakened from the long period of inactivity while he had laid in the wagon, and he relied heavily on the assistance from the guards. They entered the door into a relatively dim corridor, and followed it a long way, around a corner, and then to another door, through which they passed before descending into a passageway of unpainted, raw stone walls.
“This is the one you’ve been waiting for,” one of the guards told a roomful of men who were lounging indolently in a room lined with bunks and tables. “This is Jarvis’s golden-eyed dream. I know some of you doubted he was real, but here he is, for you to take care of until he’s ready to be shipped to Ivaric.”
The guard who spoke roughly seated Silas in a chair, as the men in the room rose and strode over to look at Silas, examining his eyes closely.
“Those are spooky-looking,” one voice agreed.
“Do you think you’ve got him wrapped up tight enough?” a voice asked sarcastically.
“If we didn’t do this to him, he’d kill every man in this room with just a word of his voice,” Silas’s escort spoke in a deep, emotional voice. “He killed enough of the Select Force that was sent to capture him, just speaking,” the warning plunged the room into frozen silence, as the others in the room stood still, digesting the fearful revelation while staring at Silas and his miscolored eyes.
“Lock him in a cell, right now,” a command rang out from someone behind Silas, and new arms swiftly lifted Silas and hustled him out of the room, through another door, into a dim chamber. There were multiple doors in the dank, dim, stinking room, and Silas was hurriedly pushed through one metal doorway. The door behind him swung shut, and he was left alone, lying bound on the floor, the side of his face pressed against the gravelly floor.
