Serpent Mage (9 page)

The elf's bloody eye sockets turned in the direction of the voice. His words came forth slowly, with many pauses to draw pain-filled breaths.

“The Masters of the Sea bid me say thus: We will allow you to build the boats to carry your people to safety provided you give us in payment the eldest girl-child from each royal household. If you agree to our demand, place your daughters
in a boat and cast them forth upon the Goodsea. If you do not, what we have done to this elf and to the human fisherman and to the dwarven shipbuilders is only a foretaste of the destruction we will bring upon your people. We give you two cycles to make your decision.'”

“But why? Why our daughters?” Eliason cried, grasping the wounded man by the shoulders and almost shaking him.

“I … do not know,” the elf gasped, and died.

Alake drew away from the window. Sabia shrank back against the wall. I climbed down off the footstool before I fell.

“We shouldn't have heard that,” Alake said in a hollow voice.

“No,” I agreed. I was cold and hot at the same time and I couldn't stop shaking.

“Us? They want us?” Sabia whispered, as if she couldn't believe it.

We stared at each other, helpless, wondering what to do.

“The window,” I warned, and Alake closed it up with her magic.

“Our parents will never agree to such a thing,” she said briskly. “We mustn't let them know we know. It would grieve them terribly. We'll go back to Sabia's room and act like nothing's happened.”

I cast a dubious glance at Sabia, who was as white as curdled milk, and who seemed about to collapse on the spot.

“I can't lie!” she protested. “I've never lied to my father.”

“You don't have to lie,” Alake snapped, her fear making her sharp-edged and brittle. “You don't have to say anything. Just keep quiet.”

She yanked poor Sabia out of her corner and, together, she and I helped the elven maid down the shimmering coral corridors. After a few false turns, we made it to Sabia's room. None of us spoke on the way.

All of us were thinking of the elf we'd seen, of the torture he'd endured. My insides clenched in fear; a horrid taste came into my mouth. I didn't know why I was
so frightened. As Alake had said, my parents would never permit the serpents to take me.

It was, I know now, the voice of the One speaking to me, but I was refusing to listen.

We entered Sabia's room—thankfully, no servants were about—and shut the door behind us. Sabia sank down on the edge of her bed, twisting her hands together. Alake stood glaring angrily out a window, as if she'd like to go and hit someone.

In the silence, I could no longer avoid hearing the One. And I knew, looking at their faces, that the One was talking to Alake and Sabia, as well. It was left to me, to the dwarf, to speak the bitter words aloud.

“Alake's right. Our parents won't send us. They won't even tell us about this. They'll keep it a secret from our people. And our people will die, never knowing that there was a chance they might have been spared.”

Sabia whispered, “I wish we'd never heard! If only we hadn't gone up there!”

“We were meant to hear,” I said gruffly.

“You're right, Grundle,” said Alake, turning to face us. “The One wanted us to hear. We have been given the chance to save our people. The One has left it up to us to make the decision, not our parents.
We
are the ones who must be strong now.”

As she talked, I could see she was getting caught up in it all: the romance of martyrdom, of sacrifice. Humans set great store in such things, something we dwarves can never understand. Almost all human heroes are those who die young, untimely, giving up their brief lives for some noble cause. Not so dwarves. Our heroes are the Elders, those who live a just life through ages of strife and work and hardship.

I couldn't help but think of the broken elf with his eyes plucked out of his head.

What nobility is there in dying like that?
I wanted to ask her.

But, for once, I held my tongue. Let her find comfort where she could. I must find it in my duty. As for
Sabia, she had truly meant what she said about being a queen, “But I was to have been married,” she said.

The elven maid wasn't arguing or whining. She knew what we had to do. It was her one protest against her terrible fate, and it was very gentle.

Alake has just come in for the second time to tell me that I must sleep. We must “conserve our strength.”

Bah! But I'll humor her. It's best that I stop here anyhow. The rest that I must write—the story of Devon and Sabia— is both painful and sweet. The memory will comfort me as I lie awake, trying to keep fear as far away as possible, in the lonely darkness.

CONSCIOUSNESS FORCED ITSELF ON HAPLO.

He awoke to searing pain, yet, in the same instant, he knew himself to be whole once more, and pain-free. The circle of his being was joined again. The agony he'd felt was the tail end of that circle being seized by the mouth.

But the circle wasn't strong. It was wobbly, tenuous. Lifting his hand was an effort almost beyond his strength, but he managed it and placed the fingers on his naked breast. Starting with the rune over his heart, slowly and haltingly, he began to trace, began to reconnect and strengthen, every sigil written upon his skin.

He started with the name rune, the first sigil that is tattooed over the heart of the squirming, screaming babe almost the moment it is forced from the mother's womb. The babe's mother performs the rite, or another female tribe member if the mother dies. The name is chosen by the father, if he lives or is still among the tribe.
¹
If not, by the tribal headman.

The name rune does not offer the babe much magical protection. Most of that comes from the tit, as the saying goes, from drawing on the magic of either mother or wet nurse. And yet the name rune is the most important sigil on the body, since every other sigil added later traces its origin back to it first—the beginning of the circle.
⁹

Haplo moved his fingers over the name rune, redrawing its intricate design from memory.

Memory took him back to the time of his childhood, to one of the rare, precious moments of peace and rest, to a boy reciting his name and learning how to shape the runes….

… “Haplo: 'single, alone.' That is your name and your destiny,” said his father, his finger rough and hard on Haplo's chest. “Your mother and I have defeated the odds thrown for us already. Every Gate we pass from now on is a wink at fate. But the time will come when the Labyrinth will claim us, as it claims all except the lucky and the strong. And the lucky and the strong are generally the lonely. Repeat your name.”

Haplo did so, solemnly running his own grimy finger over his thin chest.

His father nodded. “And now the runes of protection and healing.”

Haplo laboriously went over each of those, beginning with the ones touching the name rune, spreading out over the breast, the vital organs of his abdominal region, the sensitive groin area, and around the back to protect the spine. Haplo recited these, as he'd recited them countless times in his brief life. He'd done it so often, he could let
his mind wander to the rabbit snares he'd laid out that day, wondered if he might be able to surprise his mother with dinner.

“No! Wrong! Begin again!”

A sharp blow, delivered impersonally by his father with what was known as the naming stick, across the unprotected, rune-free palm of the hand, focused Haplo's mind on his lesson. The blow brought tears to his eyes, but he was quick to blink them away, for his father was watching him closely. The ability to endure pain was as much a part of this rough schooling as the recitation and the drawing of the sigla.

“You are careless today, Haplo,” said his father, tapping the naming stick—a thin, pliable branch of a plant known as a creeping rose, adorned with flesh-pricking thorns—on the hard ground. “It is said that back in the days of our freedom, before we were thrown into this accursed jail by our enemies … Name the enemy, my son.”

“The Sartan,” Haplo said, trying to ignore the stinging pain of the thorns left stuck in his skin.

“It is said that in the days of our freedom, children such as you went to schools and learned the runes as a kind of exercise for the mind. But no longer. Now it is life or death. When your mother and I are dead, Haplo, you will be responsible for the sigla that will, if done correctly, grant you the strength needed to escape our prison and avenge our deaths on our enemy. Name the runes of strength and power.”

Haplo's hand left the trunk of his body and followed the progression of the tattooed sigla that twined down his arms and legs, onto the backs of his hands and the tops of his feet. He knew these better than he knew the runes of protection and healing. Those “baby” runes had been tattooed onto him when he was weaned from the breast. He had actually been allowed to tattoo some of these newer sigla—the mark of an adult—onto his skin himself. That had been a proud moment, his first rite of entry into what would undoubtedly be a cruel, harsh, and brief life.

Haplo completed his lesson without making another mistake and earned his father's curt nod of satisfaction.

“Now, heal those wounds,” his father said, gesturing to the thorns protruding from the boy's palm.

Haplo pulled out the thorns with his teeth, spat them on the ground, and, joining his hands, formed the healing circle, as he'd been taught. The red, swollen marks left behind by the thorns gradually disappeared. He exhibited smooth, if dirty, palms for his father. The man grunted, rose, and walked away.

Two days later, he and Haplo's mother would both be dead. Haplo would be left alone.

The lucky and the strong were generally lonely….

Haplo's mind drifted on a cloud of agony and weakness. He traced the sigla for his father and then his father was a bloody, mangled body and then his father was the Lord of the Nexus, whipping Haplo with the cane of the rosebush.

Haplo grit his teeth and forced himself to blink back the tears and bite back the scream and concentrate on the runes. His hand traveled down his left arm, to the sigla he'd drawn there as a boy and those he'd redrawn as a man and those he'd added as a man, feeling his strength and power grow within him.

He was forced to sit up, in order to reach the sigla on his legs. His first attempt nearly made him black out, but he struggled out of the whirling mists and peered through the blinking lights of his mind, choked back the nausea, and sat almost upright. His hand, trembling with weakness, followed the runes on thighs, hips, knees, shins, feet.

He expected, every moment, to feel the sting of the thorny cane, the reprimand, “No! Wrong! Begin again!”

And then he was finished and he'd done it correctly. He lay back down on the deck, feeling the wonderful warmth flow through his body, spreading from the name rune at his heart through his trunk and into his limbs.

Haplo slept.

When he awoke, his body was still weak, but it was a weakness from prolonged fasting and thirst—soon cured. He dragged himself to his feet and peered outside the large window on the bridge, wondering where he was. He had a vague memory of having passed through the horrors of Death's Gate again, but that memory was literally ablaze with pain and he swiftly banished it.