6. Departures
“All quest-paths lead to adventure, treasure, combat, perhaps death. Which route will you take?”
—The Book of Rules
Vailret felt uneasy watching the dark-haired Sorcerer, wondering how much Enrod remembered. What if Scartaris had damaged his mind so much that he would always be a threat?
With the curious army around him, Enrod stood by the bank of the Barrier River, digging his fingernails into the bark of a tree. He sniffed, then turned his head to one of the still-smoldering fires along the bank. He smiled, then nodded to the gray ash-clumps of other dead fires.
“I can still make fire.” He bent down and smeared his hands in the cold remnants of one fire, pawing about for an ember. He held up a blackened lump of wood, but it held no spark. He dropped it with a disappointed sigh.
By the bank, Vailret looked at where Enrod’s crude raft had washed up against dangling roots. Vailret remembered riding on it with Delrael and Bryl, surrounded by mist. Enrod had poled on, not seeing, only continuing his endless journey as decreed by the Deathspirits. When Vailret tried to snap him out of his trance, Enrod had moved with lightning speed, sending Vailret sprawling against the wet logs. The Sentinel had never spoken a word.
Now Enrod splashed his ash-coated hands in the rushing water, confused by all the characters watching him.
“How long have you been … awake again, Enrod?” Vailret asked. Despite his misgivings, Enrod of Tairé would be a great ally if he fought with them against the enemy horde. Delrael stood watching, as if he had not yet made up his mind about the Sentinel.
Enrod continued to stare at his broken raft hung up on the black hex-line. Mud and silt had clogged up under one corner. A broken blade of grass drifted by, bobbing on a ripple, and then continued out of sight downstream.
“Days. Not sure.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth. Some of the wet ashes stained his lips.
“Like a dream. The Deathspirits … held me. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t move. Back and forth across the river.” He stared out at the hexagon-wide current. “Until now. Scartaris is dead, Deathspirits gone. I’m left here on this side. Where do I go?”
He looked at them, turning his head so he might see all the characters there. But his eyes remained unfocused. “Something happened in my city. Scartaris.” He closed his eyes and pushed a hand against the side of his head. “Made me think things. Do things. It still echoes in my head!” His expression snapped into clarity and the words came out with sudden focus. “I always wanted to rebuild Tairé—that was my goal, but I could only think of burning.”
He fixed his stare on Delrael, but it seemed to carry no antagonism. “Because you created this river.”
“We destroyed Scartaris,” Delrael said. “You shouldn’t want to hurt us.”
“Not … anymore,” Enrod said.
Vailret bent forward. “The Earthspirits came to fight Scartaris. So did the Deathspirits. They vanished from Gamearth again, gone dormant to rest. Maybe they forgot about you, loosened your curse.”
“Forgot about me.” Enrod made a thin smile. “But I can still make fire.” He kicked at the ashes in a circle by his feet.
“The Deathspirits could have gone off to their other realms, to play Games of their own creation,” Tareah said. “That’s why they made the Transition in the first place.”
“I don’t know. But they’re gone.” Delrael sounded impatient with the discussion. “It’s a good thing you didn’t stop trying to fight against them.” He hesitated. “Are you all right?”
“Never stop trying. Never.” Enrod turned his gaze back to the washed-up raft. “This is no longer part of me. Gone.”
He planted his foot on a corner of the raft and, bracing himself against the tree, he shoved the log. The raft lurched out into the current, leaving a cloud of mud in the water. The raft swerved one way and then curled around the other as it crawled into the current.
“Why I stayed in Tairé for so many turns. In the desolation.” Enrod stared away from the river, back to the east. “Never stop trying.”
Jathen came up beside Enrod. His heavy eyebrows and dark hair hung about him. His eyes glinted bright against the nightmares behind them. “Enrod, you and I are the last survivors of Tairé. When Scartaris sent you away, he made the rest of us Tairans do his work. We had to create weapons and shields for him!”
“Weapons—from Tairé?” Enrod sounded astonished.
“We supplied his horde of monsters. We sweated and worked—” Jathen swallowed and turned his face away. “We gave ourselves. Hundreds of us were skinned for leather, butchered and dried for meat to feed his army—” Jathen looked as if he were about to gag, then he whirled back. All the nightmares had resurfaced.
“That’s the worst part, isn’t it, Enrod?” He stood up straight with his anger. “Yes, we’re free of the control. We can do what we want now. But we’re not free of the memories. Scartaris made us do what he wanted. But he didn’t hold our minds tightly enough to make us unaware of our actions. And now that I can remember what we were doing, it’s burning me up inside. Because if I can remember so clearly, why couldn’t I refuse?”
“It’s not your fault, Jathen,” Delrael said.
But the Tairan turned to him and snapped. “It isn’t? I worked in the tannery. Didn’t I know what I was doing? Was Scartaris so powerful that he could direct every finger that moved? Every step I took? Every … cut with the knife? I can see it all in front of me. I spent days there, skinning people, characters that I had known and grown up with, fought with and worked with. But none of that stopped me. Maybe if I’d tried harder I could have resisted. But I didn’t. I took the knife. They stood before me—their eyes were pupilless, focused ahead, unseeing.
“But if I can remember what I was doing, surely they knew what was about to happen to them! Scartaris wouldn’t let them do anything more than stand there and wait as I drove a knife into their throats. At the last minute, did he release them, let them feel their own dying? I wouldn’t doubt it. Why should he bother to waste energy controlling them as they bled out on the floor of the tannery? While I stood waiting for them to stop jerking and writhing so I could skin them more easily and not waste a bit of their leather.”
Enrod interrupted him and spoke in a quiet but piercing voice. Jathen’s words seemed to intensify Enrod, forcing back the maze of shadows in his mind. “If you’re responsible for all that, then I must be responsible for everything that I did.” He paused. “And that’s not a burden I can bear right now. Look ahead, not back.”
“And forget about Tairé?” Jathen asked. His expression looked dumbfounded that his hero, the great Sentinel Enrod, would suggest such a thing.
“No, never forget,” Enrod said. He looked behind him to the clustered trees and the quest-path that wound eastward away from the river. “Go back there.”
Jathen held his breath in anticipation. Vailret could feel the tension in the air. Enrod brought his attention back to Delrael. “I will follow your army. Fight for Tairé.”
Delrael’s voice was gruff. Vailret could see that his cousin wasn’t sure how much to say about their plans. “That’s where we’re going.”
Enrod drew himself up, didn’t quite smile, but tugged a lock of black hair away from his face. Vailret noticed for the first time a thin streaking of white hairs in his beard. “I still have many powers. Spells.” Enrod looked down at his own hands, his tattered robe, as if embarrassed at the level to which he had sunk. “I lost the Fire Stone.”
Delrael appeared about to say something, but Bryl suddenly broke in. Vailret realized that Bryl had covered up his own two Stones as soon as they saw Enrod again. Since Scartaris had used the eight-sided Fire Stone as a conduit to corrupt Enrod, Vailret silently agreed with Bryl’s decision.
“The Fire Stone is—safe,” Bryl said.
* * *
The following morning, Vailret and Bryl prepared to go down their own quest-path as the remainder of the army broke camp.
“Time to go,” Vailret said, clapping Bryl’s shoulder. He had not been looking forward to this moment, but they had no time to waste. “The Earth Stone is waiting for us.”
“I’ll be sad to see you leave,” Tareah said, smiling at him. Her words made Vailret’s skin tingle with delight. He shuffled his feet.
His mother Siya gave him a brief hug, hesitated, then gave him a much larger one, to his embarrassment. Siya turned with tears in her eyes and snapped at the characters around them. “What are you looking at!”
Vailret felt uncomfortable with the entire ritual. He did not look forward to leaving the protection of the large army. As he stood there, wishing he could just be on his way, he had to wait as Delrael and Jathen bid them luck on their quest, as did other fighters he had come to know during training. It seemed to take forever.
“With all the luck we’re being offered, we shouldn’t have any troubles at all,” Bryl muttered to him.
“No,” Vailret said, “none at all.”
***