Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Annals of the Chosen 01 (23 page)

Breaker staggered in astonishment as the
first drops struck his back. He had felt rain before, when he slipped out of
the house late at night, but now it was
day.
It did not rain in the daytime in Barokan.

But that was because the Wizard Lord, who
controlled the weather, did not allow it.

And obviously, right now the Wizard Lord was
not playing by the established rules. After his initial shock, Breaker pressed
on. Daylight rain or no, they had to reach Stoneslope.

The rain was heavy and soaking, but they ignored
it as they half-walked, half-ran through the woods, in the direction of
Stoneslope. The Seer was no longer pointing out the old guide's trail, but
Breaker really didn't think it mattered anymore. The local
ler
knew they were
there, certainly, and he could only hope that there was no local equivalent of
the Mad Oak on the path they were taking—and such a menace could well have
arisen in a formerly harmless spot in the five years since the path was
abandoned, in any case, so the fact that they might have left the old path
might not even matter.

Breaker prayed silently to the
ler,
telling them he was
only doing what was required of him, that he was Chosen and doing his duty,
and hoped that would be enough to protect him as he charged ahead through leaves
and brush.

But then the Seer pulled at his arm,
redirecting him.

Breaker was unsure whether she was still
following the old route or simply aiming them more directly toward Stoneslope,
but he did his best to obey her and follow her lead.

The rain quickly became so heavy that they
could see only a few feet, heavier than Breaker had ever seen even in the
darkest spring night, heavier than he had known was possible, but that was not
a real problem; the Seer was following something other than ordinary vision,
and Breaker and the Scholar were following her.

They hurried on
through the wilderness for hours, slipping on dead leaves or uneven stones,
branches slapping at them, the rain beating down and the wind roaring, but
there were no more talking animals, no more blatant manifestations of magic
other than the unnatural weather. Breaker could not be sure, given the torrents
soaking him, but he thought the hostile feel of their surroundings had
lessened, despite the storm—perhaps the local
ler
had heard their
conversation with the Wizard Lord and decided to tolerate them, as the less
arrogant of the intruding factions.

And then at last they
emerged from the forest into . .. not fields, as Breaker had expected, but
younger forest. The great old trees were absent, but hundreds of saplings had
sprung up on every side.

And the
ler
changed, from the vague inhuman hostility of the wilderness to
screaming terror and agony. Breaker had never before experienced anything even
remotely like it; he bent double a
t the initial shock as his shin brushed past
an overgrown boundary stone, then fell to his knees, clapping his hands to his
ears.

It did no good; the screams were not audible,
but spiritual.

"Oh, my soul!" he gasped.
"What
is
it? What
happened
here?"

"I don't know," the Seer said, and
Breaker saw that she had remained on her feet, but was staggering. Lore had reacted
in a more logical fashion—-he had stepped back across the boundary, back out
into the wilderness.

"We have to go
on," the Seer said, her gaze fixed on something ahead that Breaker could
not see.

"Yes,"
Breaker agreed. "In a moment." He tried to straighten up, and on his
second try regained his feet. He closed his right hand on the hilt of his
sword, and jammed his left into the pouch that held
his silver talisman
and closed his fingers around the sharp-edged shape.

That helped; the
psychic battering of the town's
ler
weakened, as if a curtain had dropped around
him.

Behind him the Scholar took a deep breath,
and advanced again across the boundary. Together, the three of them pressed on,
across what might once have been tilled fields but were now a tangle of shrubs
and brambles.

And as if their
persistence had broken the Wizard Lord's resolve the rain slackened at last,
and ahead of them Breaker
could see looming black shapes, the walls and roofs of the village of
Stoneslope.

The structures did
indeed look black; even when the rain subsided to a faint drizzle and the
clouds thinned from black to gray, even as he stumbled nearer, Breaker still
saw
only vague black shapes.

And then at last he
was close enough to see clearly in the dim light of the overcast afternoon, and
he saw that the buildings really
were
black—or at
least, what remained of them was blackened with soot and smoke. Shadows flitted
among
them—apparently the local
ler
had taken on some of the characteristics of
smoke, and retained them.

Breaker staggered to a stop, and stared at
the charred ruins. Not a single structure was intact, not a single roof whole;
walls were broken, doorways shattered, and the greasy black smoke stains
covered everything.

"What
happened?"
he asked again.

"That's what we're here to find
out," the Seer said, slogging ahead through the flooded remains of what
had once evidently been someone's garden.

"Is anyone here?" the Scholar
shouted, in a passable imitation of the Galbek dialect.

"Hello!" Breaker boomed, cupping
his hands to his mouth. "Can anyone hear me?"

"There's no one alive," the Seer
said, pushing aside the bit of charcoal that still hung from one bent hinge in
the doorway to the nearest house. "No one human, anyway. Not for miles.
Just the three of us, and one of the Wizard Lord's creatures, watching
us."

"But the village
. . ." Breaker looked around, at the overgrown fields and the burned-out
rema
ins
of the town. It appeared to have been almost as big as Mad Oak, covering the
entire hillside for which it was named and a fair bit of the neighboring
valley; that meant it had been home to dozens, or
hundreds,
of people, perhaps as many as half a thou
sand. "Where
did they all go?"

"Nowhere,"
the Scholar said, stooping and pushing aside a charred beam. He held up half a
skull. "They're all still here. That's what you feel suffering. Those
screaming
ler
are
the souls of the dead."

"A// of them? They can't be!" He
looked around, and was horrified to see lumps that looked very much like more
half-rotted bones scattered and half-buried here and there.

"I wish you were
right," the Seer said from inside the ruin. "This is what I saw,
though. This is where I fe
lt those deaths."

"But
..
. you don't mean the Wizard Lord did this, do you? He can't have! It must have
been rogue wizards—and then he killed them . . ."

"Swordsman," the Scholar said
gently, "rogue wizards are the one thing we know he did
not
kill here."

Breaker stared at the Scholar, trying to
absorb this. He knew it was true if what the Seer and Scholar had told him was
true, but how could he really be sure? All he had was their word; the whole
story of the Scholar only remembering the truth seemed so
convenient,
like something out
of an old story . . .

But then, he was living in the realm of
stories, of heroes and villains—he was the Swordsman, one of the Chosen. He was
a hero—and someone here was unquestionably a villain.

But it didn't have to be the Wizard Lord;
what if it was the Seer? The Scholar didn't even need to be in on the plot; perhaps
he didn't remember the rogue wizard explanation because
she had never told
it to him,
not because it was a lie.

Or wait—it could even be an honest mistake.
Maybe she
thought
she had told him, but she never had;
perhaps she had told someone else and confused that unknown listener with the
Scholar. She wasn't a young woman, and Breaker knew that older people sometimes
had trouble remembering things accurately. Ma
ybe there
was
no villain.

But there was a destroyed village strewn with
human skulls,
ler
that reeked of horrors they had experienced, and the Wizard Lord had
tried to prevent them from coming here.

Or
something
had;
did he really know it was the Wizard Lo
rd who had spoken through the squirrels and
crows? He glanced back at the rain-blackened forest.

"We need to be
sure," he said. "You're telling me that the Wizard Lord slaughtered
an entire village, and that would mean he's become a new Dark Lord. If he ha
s, I have to kill
him. I want to be absolutely certain of the truth before I kill
anyone"

"Of
course," the Scholar agreed. "And it may even be that he had a
legitimate reason to do this—though it's hard to imagine what it might be—but
you can't seriously d
oubt that something very wrong happened here, and that the Wizard Lord
was involved."

"I can tell that
much, yes," Breaker admitted. He could feel the souls of the dead—and now
that he had been told, he could not deny that that was what he sensed—shrieking
in lingering pain
and fear, and he could feel it spike in intensity when the Wizard Lord was
mentioned.

And beneath the fear
and pain, he could feel hatred, and a desperate need for something—though he
was not entirely sure yet what it might be. To tell h
im something? For
him to understand something, or do something?

He could not be sure.

The Seer reappeared in the doorway, holding
something in her hand. "It's
very
hard to
imagine anything that would justify this," she said. She raised her hand,
and Breake
r
saw that she held another skull—a tiny one.

A baby's.

"There's half a cradle in there,"
she said, gesturing. "This was in it." Then she looked up suddenly.
"He's watching us."

Breaker turned to follow her gaze and saw a
crow flying toward them; he had no way of telling whether it was one of the
crows they had seen before, but it easily could have been.

The three of them stood in the muddy
dooryard, waiting silently, as the bird came to them and landed atop a broken
beam.

"Tell us what happened, Lord," the
Seer said. "Did you do this? How did it happen, and why? Tell us what
these people did to deserve this. And tell us the truth—Lore won't remember
anything else, and we'll know if you've lied to us."

The Scholar started
to open his mouth, then stopped; Br
eaker guessed he had been about to explain
that he didn't
necessarily
forget lies, but thought better of
undermining his companion's argument. Instead he said, "This was your home
village, wasn't it?"

"I was born here," the crow
croaked. It shook itself, then gestured awkwardly with one wing, trying to
point. "In that house over there," it said, indicating a pile of
blackened stones at the foot of the hill. "My mother died of me; my father
died when I was eight."

"And you
destroyed your childhood home? Sla
ughtered your friends and neighbors?"
the Seer demanded. Breaker could feel the angry
ler
pressing toward her,
urging her to speak.

"I
had
no friends!" the bird croaked. "They hated me, all of them. I
was small and weak and ugly, and I had killed my mother
—they hated me. They
called me Stinker, and Pig-face, and Killer—I didn't even have a real calling
name once my father died, not for years, just insults. They threw mud at me,
and chased me through the stubble until my ankles ran with blood, and beat me
when they caught me, and I swore by all the
ler
that when the time
came I would return their cruelty tenfold. I ran away to become a wizard when I
was fifteen, and never came back—until five years ago, when I honored my
childhood vow."