Journey Beyond the Edge

Red-faced from the terror he had endured, the deputy poured his rage upon the soldiers.

“But the fairy was in there…” the officer protested. “Allow me to take a detachment after the raiders and bring her back.”

That only fed the furnace of the official’s fury.

“Do you truly believe a creature that small—even one endowed with magic—can set Samsara in motion again? The Great Wheel of Souls? Are you prepared to abandon your commission, condemn your family to starvation, and pursue the raiders alone? And for what? So the soulless will cease being born in Virania? Brainless fool. It is the punishment of the gods!”

The captain shook his head.

“Then do not contradict me, unless you want me to charge you with heresy and throw you to the Inquisition. You are not even fit to shovel pig shit. I said we return to the city.”

Chapter Twelve

The Glamour

Another evening found the young duke lingering in the library until long after dark—until the candles in the candelabra had melted so low that their light could no longer hold back the gathering dusk.

The broad-shouldered, blue-eyed ruler of Katatida turned the pages of ancient folios without purpose, seeking only to postpone his return to the bed where his young princess awaited him. In recent days, his wife’s obsession with bearing a daughter had grown absurd. The bills from healers and physicians of every description already equaled the payroll of Arpven’s personal guard—the strongest citadel on this bank of the Tariman.

His citadel.

Having left every concern for domestic comfort to the servants, the ruler of Katatida’s wife now spent all her time surrounded by fortune-tellers, seers, and healers.

The duke tucked a stray lock of red hair back beneath his nightcap and set the book aside. A storm raged beyond windows that looked more like arrow slits. Arrows of rain drummed a strange rhythm against the tower’s blood-red copper roof, beneath whose dome the library lay. A flash of lightning flooded the young ruler’s refuge with white fire, followed by a deafening crack of thunder.

Lafren flinched despite himself.

The mica panes rattled, and a scroll veiled in dust and cobwebs fell from a shelf. The wood of its case had rotted through. It split upon striking the floor, exposing the yellow flesh of papyrus covered in crimson hieroglyphs.

The ruler rose to his full six feet and rolled his stiff shoulders. A heavy candlestick fashioned in the shape of a seven-headed dragon rested easily in his broad palm. Lafren picked up the scroll and studied the shelves, trying to determine where the ancient manuscript had fallen from.

In vain.

Every upper shelf was packed with books standing as straight and orderly as soldiers in a battle line.

Hm. So be it. I’ll give the chronicler something to puzzle over in the morning.

Lafren meant to leave the scroll upon the escritoire. At that moment, however, its case crumbled completely, allowing the papyrus to unfurl and reveal ancient runes and cuneiform script. The duke brought the candelabrum closer and tried to read the strange inscriptions. Some symbols were familiar. He could guess at the meaning of others, and his keen mind deciphered a few more. Most of the text remained a mystery.

How old are you? They stopped using papyrus during the reign of Ornar the Merciful, and that was two hundred years ago—if not more…

The duke returned to the shelves and took down a chronicle. Pages whispered once again. He had remembered correctly, and the lessons beaten into him at the temple between brutal training sessions had been precise. Hieroglyphs were outlawed after Feonir’s great-grandson, Tomus the Brilliant, discovered the recipe for the poison used to taint Arpven’s wells during the Sorcerers’ Rebellion.

The ruler put the chronicle back. If there was one lesson the Knights Templar had thrashed into the young paladin’s mind, it was this. No wonder the fallen scroll troubled the former Outbearer—the Wanderer of the Oath.

Cuneiform was outlawed by Feonir the Great himself because the witches’ grimoires were believed to have been written in it. So this scroll must be three hundred years old. Perhaps even older?

The bronze base of the candelabrum rang against the oak desktop, pinning the papyrus in place. The duke tried to unroll the ancient sheet and accidentally sliced his finger. A drop of blood struck the compressed fibers.

The writing came alive.

The hieroglyphs flowed together, becoming something almost visible: a living vision that told of an ancient sorceress. Lafren returned to his chair.

No rain shall cleanse the blood-red moon.

Once every score of years,

O dreadful, ravenous fate,

To her the appointed tithe of blood

Must still be paid.

Upon the altar they shall lay

The heiress of the Vine,

In whose veins runs

The blood of mighty kings.

And the dark lord shall set Akhtare free,

Dispelling the glamour

Of spectral shadows…

Lafren never noticed himself drifting off. Then the small ventilation window flew open with a clang beneath a gust of wind and another crash of thunder. The ancient papyrus collapsed into dust as though it had never existed. Only a fine gray residue remained upon the ruler’s fingers.

The duke started awake. The candles had almost burned out, and the little window beneath the library vault creaked resentfully as the wind rocked it back and forth.

The ruler rubbed his eyes, closed the book, and carried the candelabrum downstairs to his wife’s bedchamber, muttering, “The things a man can imagine…”

Erna was waiting for her husband. Her translucent nightgown did nothing to conceal the enticing curves of her young body. She reclined upon their marriage bed in the company of two very young maids and a healer who was no longer young and was nearly naked, with magnificent, rounded breasts.

Those breasts. How many times had Lafren cursed himself for staring at the nipples visible beneath the healer’s thin linen?

The northern herbalist wore an enormous wolf pelt over her shoulders and a linen tunic beneath it. She showed no embarrassment over her bare thighs or almost naked breasts.

That only infuriated him more.

Erna caught her husband staring at the herbalist’s tits, and fresh venom entered her voice.

“So you’ve finally decided to appear. I was beginning to think I’d freeze tonight. And I hope you haven’t forgotten your marital duty.”

“I’m not entirely convinced you’re cold.” The duke’s tone made his opinion of strangers in the marriage bed quite plain. “What happened? Why do I find anyone but you in my bedchamber at this hour? And what is that stench?”

“Evshan grass soaked in tears,” one of the maids whispered, bowing low. “It smells harsh, Your Grace, but the infusion helps with burns.”

Lafren looked at his wife.

“You burned yourself? How?”

“I was trying to keep warm! I keep telling you—our bed is too cold. And I was bored and alone!”

“It was the storm, Your Grace,” the healer put in acidly. “Her Highness was frightened. And very, very lonely.”

“Open your mouth once more without permission and you and your herbs will be fed to the livestock,” Lafren said slowly, reminding the commoner of her place.

“But—” the princess began, trying to defend her friend.

“And if you show me such disrespect again, you will take up residence with the Sisters of Silence.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” his wife hissed.

“Not even war with the entire North would stop me. Would you care to find out?”

Rage seized the duke, and two strides carried him from the threshold to the bed. The room emptied of unnecessary company at once. The women understood that quarrels between husband and wife were ordinary enough, but when the marriage belonged to a royal house, witnesses simply did not exist. The winged mice caged above the city gates cared little what secrets their fresh meat had once possessed.

“Is this how you keep your promises?” The princess burst into tears. “I wait for you while you vanish half the night, no one knows where. You promised to do anything for me. To pull the stars down from the heavens. I don’t need stars! All I want is the chance to bear a child, and you—you scream at the servants who came to calm me while you were gone. If you’d been here when the thunder started, I would have found peace and safety in your arms!”

Her tears became hysterical sobs.

“Don’t you love me anymore? Tonight was auspicious. I might have conceived a girl. The healer said so. She brought herbs and scented candles and everything.”

“The room reeks of sex!” Lafren growled. “Do not forget that I am still a paladin.”

“How dare you! I waited for you. The potion heightened my desire, and now you accuse me of adultery because you can smell my passion?”

Tears streamed down the young woman’s cheeks, and sobs shook her body.

“Forgive me,” Lafren whispered, putting his arms around her shoulders. “It’s just that lately the devil knows what has been happening. Nomads in the west are slaughtering entire villages and burning the fields. Burmila is gripped by panic. People are afraid to leave their homes—they say some man-eating beast has appeared in the forest. And in the south—”

“I went to the temple. The wise women asked for a sacrifice in return for their blessing. They promised that if you… then I would conceive.”

The duke drew her closer.

“Was the burn bad?” he whispered in her ear.

Erna held up the reddened pads of her right fingers.

“Call a servant next time. We don’t feed them all for nothing.” The duke blew gently across the princess’s palm.

Erna stopped crying. Her lips found his.

The kiss did not last long. She pulled the nightgown over her head and bared herself to her husband.

“Take me. Water me with your seed,” the princess whispered as she tugged off his shirt. She lay back and spread her legs.

It had been a long time since Lafren had felt his old passion for Erna. He felt like a breeding bull, and he wanted more than sex. He wanted passion. The duke loosened the cord at his waist and lowered his trousers. His spear resembled a dangling noose more than a weapon, but Erna was undeterred. She took him in both hands and began to work him vigorously, never once using her lips. It only deepened his sense that they were mating rather than making love.

Lafren pushed the thought away and covered his wife with his body. His lips touched her throat, then traveled down toward her breasts and their pale pink areolas. His tongue had barely circled one hardened nipple when Erna flinched and pulled her breast away.

“Don’t. Not like that.”

The manhood that had only begun to gather strength went limp again.

Erna was already breathing hard. She locked her legs around her husband’s hips.

“Not like that. Take me like a conqueror,” the princess whispered.

He caught her wrists and pinned them above her head. She submitted with the obedience of a slave. With his free hand, Lafren pinched her nipple. Erna writhed beneath him and begged him to enter her. His hand slid lower, toward her sex, and his fingers sank into the molten mouth of the furnace.

Her arousal passed into him. The ruler did not hesitate.

Her body admitted him.

“Yes, my lord.”

Erna moaned and began to move with him. Her nails dug into his broad back, leaving scarlet scratches.

Lafren thrust with a measured, almost monotonous rhythm, like an athlete at practice.

“Yes… yes,” the princess breathed, arching beneath him. “Please… more.”

Her moans grew louder. Her legs tightened around his torso with strength astonishing in so delicate a creature. The duke turned Erna onto her stomach. She raised her hips, and he entered her again, allowing her to close her legs. Her sex clenched tightly around him. He gripped her buttocks and drove his hips forward several times.

“Yes…” escaped Erna’s lips, and Lafren quickened his pace. The duke’s finger touched her anus and slipped slightly inside. The young woman convulsed in orgasm. Lafren came a moment later.

It brought him neither bliss nor sweet oblivion. Only the exhaustion of a duty performed settled over him, and his soul seemed to sink beneath the dark scum of a marsh.

Spent, Lafren collapsed beside her.

The princess lifted her hips higher, arching like a cat.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“The healer said I should stay like this for a while after intercourse. It makes it easier for the seed to find its way.”

For some reason, that sentence enraged Lafren. He pulled on his trousers, shoved his bare feet into his shoes, and left the bedchamber, slamming the door behind him.

Chapter Thirteen

Waking hurt.

I forced my eyelids apart. A bent sprig of wild rosemary swayed in the breeze inches from my face, while an industrious bee plotted its approach to a flower. Bright sunlight caressed the earth and drew tiny rainbows from the beads of dew.

I tried to move. Pain answered from every part of my body, and nausea surged into my throat. My stomach cramped, forcing my knees toward my chest. I meant to groan, but all that came from my lips was a strange growl.

“Errrr.”

My body scarcely obeyed me. It felt like someone else’s. With an effort, I sat up and looked around. To my right, the snowcapped peaks of a mountain range held up the sky above densely forested slopes. To my left and straight ahead, beyond a narrow stand of trees, the steppe stretched all the way to the horizon—a boundless green sea of grass rolling in the wind.

I looked down at my hands.

They were enormous.

And for some reason, they were blue-green.

One part of my mind accepted this as perfectly ordinary. Another recoiled from it.

My thoughts tangled. I had the distinct impression that someone else was locked inside this body with me. As though I wasn’t me at all.

Who am I, anyway?

My head began to ache from useless attempts to revive a memory that someone seemed to have erased. I knew a great many things about the world around me, yet absolutely nothing about myself.

A faint breeze carried the coolness of the forest—and a savage, unfamiliar stench.

With a tremendous effort, I made the body rise and stagger away from the foul-smelling clearing. I swayed so badly that my feet could barely keep me upright.

A hundred paces from where I had awakened, I realized the clearing had never been the source of the smell.

It was me.

I shuddered, and nausea rose again. My mouth tasted as though a hundred cats had used it for a litter box. I desperately needed water, and something had to be done about the stink. Through the slim white trunks of young trees crowned with strange green curls, I glimpsed the blue gleam of water.

Taking enormous strides, I headed toward a bend in the river.

It was only a small stream. I waded in up to my waist and stopped beside a granite boulder jutting from the water.

Or rather, the body stopped on its own, ignoring every order and intention I gave it.

My empty stomach tightened with a sudden, inexplicable thrill.

The body bent and plunged headfirst into the water.

Only then did I see the tail of an enormous fish.

Guided by instinct, my hands seized it by the gills. The fish thrashed desperately, twisting and beating the water with its tail. My massive fists smashed it against the edge of the boulder.

Its soft, faintly sweet flesh melted in my mouth. The migraine eased, and my stomach rumbled its approval of the offering.

Fish. Doesn’t taste like much, but it kills hunger quickly, my subconscious observed, filling the holes in my knowledge one grain at a time.

The wind died. Ripples faded from the river, leaving its surface smooth as a mirror.

An unfamiliar and thoroughly repulsive head appeared in the reflection: enormous, with a broad mouth, a wide brow, and tiny eyes. The creature was unnaturally tall, with huge hands endowed with terrifying strength. Its strange blue-green skin was covered in black tattoos.

What the hell is this? This can’t be happening.

Some instinct told me that the creature was not me—or at least not the me my subconscious remembered.

The eye of the heavenly orb slipped behind a snow-white cloud. The water turned clear. I could see a crayfish stirring along the bottom, and there a school of strange little fish circled beside a large bush of weeds.

Water weeds. Plants that grow underwater, my memory supplied. Whether underwater plants grew in bushes, it could not say.

A bush it is, then.

While I tried to remember what a cluster of weeds was properly called, the cloud continued across the sky and sunlight brought the glitter back to the water.

Gentle. Not burning yet. Or already?

The thought filled me with horror. Sunlight could be dangerous. I remembered that much. I could not remember why, only that I must not remain beneath it for long.

And is that even the sun?

I shuddered.

Driven by a terror I could not name, I rushed beneath the forest canopy and sat on a broad old stump.

Where am I?

I remembered nothing. Nothing at all. Like a drunk coming out of a monstrous bender. There was only pain—savage and burning, though not physical. A strange sense of irreparable loss gnawed at me from within.

Wait. I knew what a hangover felt like.

I ran a hand across the stump. The tree had not fallen. Someone had cut it down.

A human.

But the notches were much too small.

“Course too small. Nasty man-things and their nasty iron,” a rough voice said inside my head.

I tried to turn toward the speaker, but something resisted me. Someone seemed to be exerting every scrap of mental strength to seize control of my body.

“This my body! You stranger here. Me Er, cave troll. My head usually quiet. You break in, then think so loud! You must leave.”

Startled, I raised my eyes toward the sky. It was so blue—blue like home. Sunlight poured into the clearing through the thick leaves of the white-barked trees. I lifted my head, trying to look around and understand who was speaking, where I was, and what in hell was happening.

I clapped both hands over my head, trying to cover my ears. They were not where I thought ears ought to be.

“You not troll. Me troll. You extra here. Get out!” Er growled, and my fist suddenly smashed into the stump.

“That’s it. I’ve finally lost my mind. Schizophrenia,” I muttered.

“Me not skit-so-frenia! Me troll. You extra! Get out!” the troll howled.

For no reason I could control, I slammed my head against a black rock protruding from the ground.

Stars blotted out the landscape. The pain was unbearable, and a lump was clearly rising on my forehead.

“What the hell? Where are you? Come out! I’ll find you and kill you!” I bellowed.

“Brazen body-thief climb into my body, now throw me out? I show you—”

I jerked backward and launched my head at the boulder.

Instinct moved first. I thrust my hands out and braced with all my strength, trying to stop the collision.

“Hey! Stop!”

“No! You crawl out of my body! Or me smash head on rock and pull you out with fingers!”

“That obviously won’t drive me out!” At last, the meaning of the words inside my head began to sink in. “So you’re in here too? Inside me?”

“You inside me.”

The owner of the body arched his back, preparing to strike the stone again.

“Wait. That won’t help. You won’t drive me out—you’ll just kill both of us!” I shouted in my thoughts.

“You think too much. Make my head hurt!” the troll shot back. “Worse than fight with rock.”

“If I’m not you and you’re not me—”

The voice cut me off.

“Cursed body-thief. Get out of my head.”

The body obeyed his will and drew back for another blow. I strained my arms to keep us as far from the granite as possible. A concussion was not part of my plans. A strange struggle for control of the body began.

Despite his slow, broken speech, my opponent had no intention of surrendering.

He drove our fist into our own knee. While the pain distracted me, he smashed our head against the rock again.

The world went dark.

A creature appeared before me in a reek of brimstone. It had a goat’s beard, crooked legs, and small ram’s horns curling from its temples.

“Listen to me, clever boy,” the dark one began imperiously, making no effort to hide his irritation. “Try that suicide nonsense again—or find any other way to shirk your service to Evil—and I will put you to work beside the fire hyena. You’ll spend eternity feeding wood beneath the cauldrons.”

“I’m not trying to kill myself.”

“I saw what you were doing with my own eyes. Consider yourself warned. This is your last chance to prove your loyalty. Fail me again and you will never see the Wheel for all eternity, much less the Rose. No shard will ever raise you again.”

Rage showed in every movement of the demon.

“If it were up to me, you would have been boiling in a cauldron long ago. Your fall damned you. Your soul belongs to me.”

Er was plainly terrified of the little dark creature, though I thought I could break it in half with a single blow. Whatever the reason, my bodily neighbor curled up inside himself, and control passed to me. The sudden freedom threw me off balance, and I fell facedown in the grass.

The goat-bearded creature bent over us until its ram’s horns almost touched my forehead.

“You will do as I command. One way or another. Do you understand me?”

Er, something about this stinks. Let me talk to him.

The troll grunted something. I chose to take it as permission.

“You dark one trick. Soul not yours if no free will,” I said.

The troll’s speech apparatus mangled my thoughts like a broken translator.

The dark one fixed me with a suspicious stare. I decided to use his hesitation to learn whatever I could.

“I remember nothing. Memory empty, like just born.”

“Only strange loss feeling,” Er added aloud, jabbing a finger at our chest. “Like hole here.”

“I care nothing for your holes. You are my weapon. Your task is to sow terror and fear.”

“He only—” Er searched for a word to finish the thought. The right one flew out of his head like a bird startled from its nest.

“Me… me… man!” I forced out.

“A human?” the dark one finished for me, then burst out laughing. “The Master was right about you. He promised I would not regret this.”

“Hu… man,” I repeated in the troll’s language, forcing the disobedient tongue to form the familiar word.

“No. You are not human. You failed your Trial spectacularly. Look at yourself. You are a troll, a cave-dwelling monster. A man-eater. Nothing more than a beast. I gave you this reality, and you are my servant. Do not presume to exercise a will of your own.”

The dark one flicked his tail.

“There is a village at the river bend. When you grow hungry, the body will tell you what to do. By sunset, I want not one stone left standing upon another.”

“Now there man-things in iron. With biting smoke and flying sticks. They bite me in head, and then—”

Er never finished.

“Agsbest brought his war band. Everything is proceeding according to plan,” the goat-bearded creature muttered.

Then he vanished into a haze of blue smoke as though he had never existed. Only a lingering stench—somehow even fouler than my own—remained to mark his visit.

I’m not human anymore. My thoughts drifted as slowly as clouds in windless air. It took a tremendous effort to make my mind work. So I used to be one… and I failed something. Probably something fragile.

I studied my enormous hands again.

“If fragile, you probably break it,” Er added aloud. “Must fix broken thing, and then… then my head quiet again.”

“Listen. I don’t know who I am or why I’m here with you. And I like it every bit as much as you do. We have to find some way—”

“Me know way.”

The troll drew our head back toward the rock again.

“Fine! Have it!” I shouted and smashed our forehead against the stone myself.

It was a terrible blow. The skin of my forehead burned, and the savage pain nearly paralyzed us both.