Broken World Book Four - The Staff of Law Read online

  “His flesh is cold, and his arms feel hard,” he commented.

  “Get him off the ground,” Talsy said, berating herself for forgetting about the Dolana again.

  Enlisting the uninjured Aggapae’s help, Shan had several dead branches dragged together and covered with soft bracken. The Mujar was lifted onto this, and they all waited for him to recover. After several minutes of fruitless anticipation, she shook her head in bewilderment.

  “We’ll have to ask Chanter when he comes. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

  More than an hour passed before a shadow swooped down, and Chanter landed in the clearing, folding his wings before transforming in a rush of wind. He approached Talsy, taking the water skin from Shan on the way. Kneeling beside her, he laid his hands on her shoulder and pulled the arrow out with a swift jerk, which, to her surprise, did not hurt at all. He poured water over the wound and healed it, engulfing them in the soft mists of Shissar.

  “Where are the others?” she asked when he sat back.

  “On their way here. Don’t worry, Kieran’s fine.”

  Relief washed over her in a welcome wave, and she glanced at the strange Mujar. “There’s something wrong with him, he isn’t well.”

  Chanter turned to study the youngster. “He’s been too long in the grip of Dolana.”

  “Will he get better?”

  “He needs the sea to recover quickly, but it’s too tainted now. The lake in the valley will heal him.”

  She frowned. “You mean he’s going to stay like that -”

  “Until we reach the valley, yes.”

  Talsy sighed as he rose and went to tend to the injured, Shan following with more water skins. When he had healed all of them, golden rays slanted through the trees. Talsy was frantic with worry by the time the rest of the Aggapae rode into the glade, ragged, bleeding and drooping with weariness. Kieran approached and settled beside her with a sigh, gulping from a water skin. His dented armour and slashed leather tunic bore fresh bloodstains, but either Chanter had already healed him, or he had used the Starsword. His hair clung wetly to his scalp and smudges of soot patterned his face, but he smiled at her, glancing over at the new Mujar.

  “How is he?”

  “Chanter says he’s been too long on the tar. He won’t recover until we get back to the valley and put him in the lake.”

  Kieran looked disappointed. “That’s too bad; we could have used his help on the journey back.”

  Talsy smiled. “I doubt that he would help us. He’s not Chanter, remember.”

  “He owes us.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why doesn’t Chanter heal him?”

  “I don’t know. Chanter hasn’t been near him. Perhaps they can’t heal each other.”

  Kieran sipped water with a grimace. “From what I’ve heard, Mujar prefer to live apart from each other. Even when they congregated in cities, they rarely stayed together.”

  “I think we’ll learn much from seeing these two together.”

  He chuckled. “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “How many did we lose?”

  “Too many.” His face fell into grim lines. “Over a hundred, I think. It wasn’t the kind of fighting that suited them, boxed up in that city. They’re plains people; they fight best at a gallop. Those bastards will feast on the horses that fell, damn them.”

  “It was a bad plan,” she said. “It’s my fault so many died.”

  “No, it almost worked, so don’t blame yourself. If they hadn’t seen the mark on the Mujar’s scalp, we’d have been okay.”

  She shook her head. “Jesher’s plan was better. Fewer would have died, maybe none.”

  “Jesher’s plan could have failed too easily. It was riskier than yours. If there was a better plan, I’d have thought of it.”

  She smiled. “Pompous arse.”

  Kieran took a swig from the water skin and pulled a face. “Didn’t we bring any wine?” He spotted Jesher and jumped up. “Hey, Jesher, you old goat, I know you brought some decent brew!”

  The Prince grabbed the startled Aggapae and muttered earnestly to him as he hustled him towards the pack horses. Fourteen of the beasts had stayed in the forest, preserving their supplies for the return trip. The six they had taken to the city were lost, along with their precious burdens. Talsy gazed at the unmoving Mujar, and then went over to settle beside him. Using a damp cloth, she wiped away the dried blood and dirt to reveal his flawless golden skin and almost feminine features. Working her way down him, she found his arms cold and hard, his fingers so stiff they would not bend.

  Law dreamt that he lay on a soft bed in the shimmering blue of his forest. A Lowman woman bathed him with a cool cloth, birdsong soothed his burning senses and gentle breezes caressed his skin. He dreamt that the terrible drain of sickly Dolana was gone, and the wounds in his chest and hands had been healed by the blessed touch of Shissar. He could almost taste its cleanliness on his tongue, and savoured the cessation of pain. Not wanting to wake from this sweet bliss, he pushed himself deeper into sleep. The dream faded, and he allowed himself to drift upwards again into the world of soft sounds and gentle hands.

  Chapter Eight

  That night, when the campfires had been lighted to cook supper, Talsy found Chanter sitting against a tree munching berries. She settled beside him, accepting a handful.

  “Tell me about the new Mujar,” she said. “He’s young, isn’t he?”

  “Very. Six, maybe seven years, one of the last to be born before the chaos.”

  “What’s he going through now? He seems to be asleep.”

  “He has sought refuge in the dark realms of sleep to escape the Dolana. He’s not suffering. He should be aware of what’s happening to him, but he’s withdrawn from the cruelties inflicted upon him.”

  Talsy popped a berry into her mouth. “Why is his flesh still cold, even now that he’s free from the Dolana? And his fingers seem hard.”

  “Mmm.” Chanter frowned. “It’s the sickness of the world, the taint in the Dolana that has invaded him. It sickens me when I use it now, and he’s been lying on dried earth blood for over a month. In its corrupted form, Dolana has grown more powerful, and, in some cases, developed a kind of life of its own, like the living rock that’s sprouting all over the world. This makes it difficult and dangerous to wield. He’s been filled with it for so long that it’s started to turn his flesh to stone.”

  “Stone!”

  “Yes. But he’ll recover in the lake.”

  Talsy ate another berry, hardly noticing its tart flavour. “That means... all the Mujar in the Pits...”

  “Have been turned to stone.”

  “Then... there’s no hope for them?”

  “Hope?” He looked at her curiously. “There never was any hope for them, not from the moment they were flung in.”

  “But... I thought, when the staff was restored...”

  “That they’d all come crawling out?” He sighed and shook his head. “No, my little clan, there’s no escape from the Pits except death.”

  Talsy pondered this for a while, toying with the berries in her palm. “Can’t you heal him?”

  “No. Mujar don’t heal each other, we have no need to. He’s quite able to heal himself, with the help of water.”

  “You won’t even go near him. Kieran says that Mujar don’t like to be close together.”

  Chanter nodded. “We don’t.”

  “Why?”

  He smiled. “You’re full of questions tonight, aren’t you?”

  “And you’re not going to answer that one.” She sighed, knowing him well enough by now to know when he was being evasive, and the futility of pressing the issue. “That’s why you never went close to Travain, never held him, even when he was a baby.”

  “Yes.”

  Talsy was struck by a memory. “And when you held him down, that time, you had red marks on your arms. Does it have something to do with that?”

  “Something,” he agreed, shoo
ting her an amused glance.

  “Why won’t you tell me? Why’s it such a big secret?”

  “It’s not a big secret; it’s just that you wouldn’t understand. I can’t explain it to you, I don’t have the words, but when our young friend recovers, I can show you.”

  “You couldn’t show me with Travain?” she asked.

  “No, he’s not a true Mujar.”

  “But he has all the powers.”

  “He does, yet he doesn’t,” Chanter said. “He’s not as powerful as I am, and never will be. His command of the elements is tenuous at best; his will is Trueman, and not strong enough to wield true power. He can certainly do a lot of damage, and kill, but his powers are weak compared to mine. Why do you think he refused to come on this venture? Why do you suppose he’s never left the valley? He’s afraid.

  “Not of death, for he can’t be killed, but of suffering, humiliation and defeat. He has Trueman pride, and his ego was badly bruised when I forced him to give his name. When he first discovered his powers, he thought himself omnipotent, but I showed him that he wasn’t. He held Crayash, and I chose to wield Dolana, for that’s the only Power that can harm Mujar. He soon realised his mistake, but by then it was too late. I suspect that your son can only wield two Powers at once, not three, and never four.”

  “Why?” she enquired, fascinated. Rarely was Chanter so loquacious, and she lapped up the information.

  “He doesn’t have the willpower. His will is Trueman, with all its distractions and petty thoughts. He’s shallow. Mujar have a deep wellspring of calm within us, like a bottomless black lake, here.”

  He tapped his chest. “This is why we can sit and stare into space all day, as you put it. That calm is our will, the centre of our being, and within that black lake we can build the power to wield the elements and hold them in our thrall. Without it, the Powers would twist and fritter away, slip from our grasp, especially Dolana. It’s that same pool of quiet that holds our rage in check, prevents it from taking over and driving us mad with hate. Travain doesn’t have that calm, but I think he’s inherited some of the rage. I’m afraid the hatred in him is Mujar, and it’s twisted him badly, made him hate all of us.”

  “Then it’s not his fault? It’s not just because he’s a nasty person?”

  Chanter shook his head, popping more berries into his mouth. “No. Travain is burdened with a hatred that he doesn’t understand, for his mind is Trueman and his hate is Mujar.”

  “Couldn’t you explain it to him? Where does this hatred come from, anyway?”

  He smiled. “It comes from the gods.”

  “The gods! They hate us?”

  “Only those who torture their children and defile their world. I’ve only felt the rage when at the mercy of Truemen torturers, never towards you.” He patted her knee. “Don’t worry.”

  “But Travain...”

  “Travain doesn’t understand it, as I said, and he has nowhere to put it aside, as we do. It simmers within him all the time, preying on his mind. Explaining why he has it would only make him hate me more for giving it to him, and explaining why he can’t deal with it would make him hate you.”

  Talsy sighed and leant back against the tree, her appetite gone. “It really was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. You didn’t understand what you were doing. You only wanted a baby to love, and I understand that. But our two races were never meant to breed. We’re much too different. Truemen are fickle, adventuresome, sometimes foolhardy, and mortal. They worry about their death and what will come after it. They strive to live a full life in the time they have, never knowing if it will be cut short. Mujar, on the other hand, have no doubts about their purpose, we know why we’re here, we know how long we’ve got, and we know where we’ll go when we die. Travain has your doubts and worries, but my powers and immortality. He’s truly lost.”

  “Poor Travain,” Talsy murmured, then grabbed Chanter as he started to rise. “What does the broken mark mean? You never told me.”

  “It is the antithesis of Life. It means Death, and, as we all know now, he can kill, and he enjoys it. Only his Mujar name holds him in check, and he hates that, too.” He rose and pulled her up. “Enough now, let’s go and eat.”

  Talsy filed away the rest of her questions for the future, hoping she would not forget them, and followed Chanter to a campfire where a cooked meal waited, her mind whirling.

  When Jesher would have ordered men to stand watch, Chanter assured him that the Kuran and Dargon would guard them through the night, allowing the men to get some much needed rest. Distant screams woke Talsy once, but she drifted back into an untroubled sleep.

  For three days, they rested and gathered food in the forest, reluctant to leave its haven and face the dangers outside. A head count revealed that they had lost ninety-two men and forty-six horses in the battle. The Aggapae mourned their lost ones in silence, but bereft horses neighed for their riders for several days. The young Mujar lay as still as the dead, and the problem of transporting him proved daunting. Kieran suggested that Chanter should change him into something smaller, a bird or animal, but the Mujar rejected the idea, claiming it to be impossible. After he stomped away into the forest, they decided that they would have to tie the youngster over a horse’s back, using blankets to soften it.

  On the fourth day, they set out into the chaos once more, leaving the peaceful forest’s bastion of sanity behind. The haven would die without the young Mujar who had created it, but the spirits let them go. They retraced their steps past the bodies of the two huge animals whose mighty struggle was now over, through the fields of sucking mouths, the plains fanged with growing rock and acres of bone-strewn land. The boiling lake was gone, leaving a hot muddy depression infested with the mud creatures, which attacked them. The Starsword and Chanter’s fire drove them away. The group entered the burning land and passed through it unharmed, as before; weathered a brief encounter with a hail storm so fierce the balls of ice could knock a man senseless. Chanter swept it away, and they escaped with a few bruises.

  Almost two weeks after leaving the forest, they topped a hill to find their scout lying beside his horse at the bottom of a depression. Kieran grabbed Talsy when she would have rushed down to them.

  “No! Something down there killed them. Stay here.”

  “We don’t know that they’re dead,” she protested.

  “They look pretty dead to me.”

  Chanter alighted nearby and took man form, staring at the distant corpses. He signalled them to wait and strode into the valley. Talsy watched him with a worried frown, hoping whatever had killed the scout was not harmful to Mujar. The horse and rider lay amongst the bones and rotting corpses of other animals, as if the entire area was poisoned. She relaxed when Chanter returned.

  “It’s a noxious gas, seeping from the ground,” he said. “They’re dead. We’ll have to go around; send out a new scout.”

  Before Talsy could ask questions, he leapt into the air and took wing again. She frowned and followed the others around the depression, annoyed at his curtness. Sometimes he was patient and talkative, she reflected, other times he did not wish to talk at all.

  They journeyed on for several days, encountering only a violent dust storm that sanded a layer of skin off everyone and left them coughing for days afterwards. Talsy fed the young Mujar a little water every day, hoping to heal him, but he remained unresponsive. Each night they placed him on the supply packs to keep him off the ground, and Chanter stayed away from him. Twice creatures of the chaos attacked them at night, and they lost three men and a horse before Chanter and Kieran drove them away with fire. The massive monsters bit the men’s’ heads off and dragged the horse away to eat. One day the scout ranged too far ahead and fell through the crust into oily sludge, vanishing beneath it before they caught up with him.

  Their nerves worn to tattered threads, they set out across a blasted plain of blackened earth and dead, twisted trees. Two days into it, they woke to find two horses t
urned to stone, slain by the wraith of poisoned Dolana. On the third day they spotted a distant cloud of black dust rising, heading towards them from the side. Kieran squinted at the cloud, trying to make out what was causing it, but it was too far away. Chanter swooped down and took man form in a rush of wind, his eyes wild.

  “What is it?” Talsy demanded, unnerved by his expression.

  “Torrak Jahar.”

  “Oh, no,” she muttered, turning away.

  “They’ve seen us?” Kieran asked, frowning.

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t outrun them, it’s too dangerous to gallop through the chaos, and they never get tired.” Kieran swore. “We can’t fight them either, we’d lose. How many are there?”

  “Several hundred.”

  “Great. What the hell are we going to do?”

  “I could try to lead them away,” the Mujar said, “but they would be drawn by the life force of the Mujar you carry.”

  “That’s what’s attracting them, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Talsy swung back, scowling. “And you can’t use Dolana to delay them, it’s too tainted.”

  “It would be difficult,” Chanter agreed, “and there’s no water for an ice wall. Condensing it from the air is too slow. Fire would slow them, but like all the Powers, it’s unpredictable now. It may have no heat. Using the wind might work, but they’re heavy and strong. It would have to be a very powerful one.” He sighed. “Still, the wind is a good weapon, though it takes a little time to summon. First I’ll try to lead them away; that will allow you to gain some headway.”

  “Be careful.”

  He smiled crookedly. “I will.”