Umber

Chaos erupted all around Mahlanda. Kalak toppled forward, but no sooner had he fallen than his would-be assassin was ejected from the viewing stand and a massive cloud shaped like a dragon billowed forth in the sky. “Oh no,” she whispered. “It’s begun.” She scanned the arena for Opa Skarp’s brood and saw them for a few moments, conspicuous as an island of preternatural calm in the midst of the pandemonium, keeping their band of loyal slaves and allies together while they assessed instead of reacting to the unfolding situation. But then her own situation grew more precarious and they were lost to her sight and attention.

Just avoiding a trampling might have been challenge enough, as all of Tyr’s massed population’s swelling fear translated into stampeding action. But the – man? – creature? – who had chased away her neighbors to sit beside her was exerting only marginally more effort to keep their immediate vicinity clear even in the panic. Still she couldn’t deny that she was feeling queer, a lightheadedness and nausea that exceeded mere tension and sudden fear. The dragon cloud was growing more solid with every passing moment. And people were dying – not clubbed by the guards or trampled underfoot, though there was plenty of that. Just gasping, crying out, and dying.

Her strange companion squinted with the intensity of his concentration as he studied the light bursting from the men and women falling all around them and shooting with the precision of perfectly aimed arrows for the ziggurat. “You won’t be able to withstand this for long.” The hand he had extended earlier reached for her with more purpose. “We should go.”

She pulled away from him. “Then we need to help the people who can’t withstand it now! We need to get them out of here!” She pointed to a nearby entrance, the least well-defended but still barred by half a dozen templars and a dozen guards. “There! If we can find some other preservers…” She cast her gaze wildly around her, to have her search interrupted by irresistible fingers fixing her chin in place.

“Never mind other preservers,” he snarled. “This is folly, but let’s go. Stay behind me. Get your little peasants to follow, if you can. And watch my back.”

Determined as she had been a moment before, now she hesitated. “You’re going to take them all on – alone?”

He gave her a grim smile. “I have you, don’t I?”

It didn’t take her long to understand just how superfluous she was. He brushed aside the guards like flies, the templars following in their wake before they had time to cast a single spell, and disappeared into the maw of the coliseum with no more concern than if he were walking into a tavern. Mahlanda’s more immediate concern became keeping the spectators from killing one another in their haste to escape as, seeing a cleared way, the crowd streamed forward. Another hasty scan of the arena revealed that the exits untended by guards were if anything more dangerous than those that were defended, as the surging mass failed to flow. She could protect herself but not them, and she began to fear that the mob would accomplish what guards and templars had not, securing the end of their own lives if she could not devise a means to hold them back.

Her companion proved more effective at that as well. For although the cloudy outline of the dragon was growing more solid by the moment as the life force Kalak had gathered into the arena passed through the ziggurat and into his disembodied form, when the Preserver reappeared he had also grown – in height and breadth and a more intangible menace – into an apparition nearly as frightening. “They’ve blocked the exit with – oh Hells.” She did not recognize the oath and in a moment recognized little at all as a paralyzing terror overcame her and everyone else in the vicinity. He seized her by the elbow and dragged her bodily with him until she was out of range of his spell and recovered her senses.

But when she saw what confronted them she wished she could lose them again. “Why is there a wall here? There should be an exit…” He led her into an anteroom where a templar and two guards lay slain on the ground next to a heavy winch from which one end of a frayed rope dangled. She tightened her lips into a thin line at the sight. “It was built to be a deathtrap all along.”

“Does that surprise you?” He shook her lightly to get her attention. “Can you repair it? Quickly?”

She tore her gaze from the winch and looked up at him. He was growing smaller again, looking more like a mortal and less like a force of nature. “Repair it? Yes. Quickly? No.”

“All right,” he sighed. “Stay here.”

Before she could even begin to contemplate her defenses she heard a rumble and then a loud blast. The Preserver reappeared in the doorway, gesturing to her. “Come on.”

She started to ask why there was only a trickle of dust left in the entry, then decided she didn’t want to know. She looked back the way they’d come. “What about – ”

“After we’re out.”

“Out? But I want to go back – ”

“No.”

She clutched at his arm. “We at least need to help the young people and the Jura Dai – ”

He glared down at her hand on his sleeve and she yanked it away as if he’d burned her. “I said no.”

“But you could – ”

“Interfere with Skarp’s brood at a time like this? Definitely not. They get out on their own, or they don’t get out.” He pointed a warning finger at her when she started to object. “I don’t make the rules.”

He had his way, as she was beginning to suspect he always did. And when he left her after several days in her company she couldn’t have said whether relief or regret were uppermost in her mind. But then, like all the other local preservers, she turned her thoughts to the rebuilding of Tyr, and if forgetting him was impossible she had at least pushed him to the back of her mind when he appeared on her doorstep near sunset a month later. “This is a surprise,” she said when she opened the door. She stared at him a moment, then stepped aside. “Won’t you come in?”

“I’d rather you came out,” he replied. With a bow and a sweep of his hand he gestured to a portal she could see shimmering dimly behind him. “Dinner, at my home?”

Her eyes narrowed in reflexive suspicion. “Why?”

“Call it a thank you. For your assistance at the arena.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I did nothing. Less than nothing, compared to you.”

“Then let’s say I want the pleasure of your company.” The hard lines of her face did not relent, and he sighed. “Fine. I want to show you something. We’ll call dinner the favor you’re doing me.”

She hesitated. From the first moment he’d sat down next to her in the coliseum she had suspected he wasn’t fully human, and now that the odd smooth, hard, nodes on his forehead were growing into horns she was convinced of it. What was it that Opa Skarp had called him at Barunus’ excavation a month earlier? Daimon. The last and the first of his kind, whatever that meant. She stepped out the door, closing it behind her. “Very well, Daimon.”

“That isn’t my name,” he scowled.

“Then what shall I call you?” she asked.

“Klavicus,” he paused for a moment, “Starton the Third.”

She considered him for a moment. “The third what?”

“It’s a joke,” he flashed a quick smile. “I was never third at anything.”

“I can believe that,” she murmured as she stepped through the portal, and into cool air. In her experience the world was never the right temperature, always too hot or too cold. For a whimsical moment she wondered what world they were on, then realized that they were in fact in a cavern: spacious – not to say massive – and tastefully – not to say almost luxuriously – decorated, with a bank of cleverly hidden windows letting in the last light of the sun.

“Make yourself at home,” he said, but of course she had no intention of doing that. Friend of the Avangion, he said he was, but that didn’t make him worthy of blind trust. No one in this world was worthy of that. “I have a little preparation to finish. Feel free to look around.”

She stood stiffly for long moments, but he had retreated behind a panel and sounds of clinking pans and cooking utensils made it clear that he was likely to be occupied for some little while. She made a slow, cautious circuit of the cavern, noting with interest the almost altar-like displays of the four elements and finally halting before a large alcove full of books, lining bone shelves, neatly stacked on long work tables, and spilling out of a dozen large bags on the floor. After looking furtively behind her she began to pick through the latter, finding among flyleaf inscriptions what she had half-expected to find.

She jumped and let out a small shriek at a hand on her shoulder; she hadn’t heard Klavicus approach. But she couldn’t let the matter stand; she took a deep breath and tried to sound casual. “When stock was taken in Tyr, it was observed that every book was missing from every home and archive.” He cocked his head sideways and smiled faintly, but said nothing. “Now that High Templar Tithian has stabilized the situation there I don’t suppose,” she plowed on, “that you’d consider returning them?”

“No.” His tone was pleasant, but unequivocal. He took her arm and steered her out of the alcove. “Let’s find you something more productive to do. If I recall, you were peevish with me for preventing you from returning to rescue the youths. Perhaps you’d like to see how they fared?”

She looked at him, confused. “But we saw them after – ”

He had led her back to a cleft in the floor from which drafts of air wafted, now warm, now cool. Without warning an image shimmered into focus, indistinct at first then crystal clear. It was the coliseum, packed with the entire population of Tyr, and seven young people coolly studying the growing confusion around them.

“I don’t understand – ”

He gestured toward the image. “That is memory. Focus on a person, a thing, or event at a given time and it will be shown to you.” He bowed again. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m not quite finished.”

It took some practice for her to see what she wished to see, but soon she had a clear vision of the young people at the coliseum. Clustered around them were the Jura Dai slaves, the half-giant Uurgos whom one of the psions had rescued from the constant humiliation that was his lot in the slave pits, and Orman, the half-elf beggar who had attracted Mahlanda’s attention to Opa Skarp’s brood in the first place. An outcast like Uurgos, the youths hadn’t entirely come to his defense but they hadn’t left the elven nobles to their tormenting sport either, and in Tyr that was still an almost profligate act of charity.

Their clear-headedness astonished her. Before taking any action at all they assessed the overarching situation. They watched the dragon-shaped cloud billow out from Kalak’s viewing booth, studied its growing solidity as the life force of Tyr’s trapped citizens was expelled from their bodies and made fuel for Kalak’s new, more powerful form. Only then did they bestir themselves to take stock of the nearby exits available to them. To the center two templars and two half-giants stood a wary guard, and no one dared approach. To the right a crush of hapless spectators trampled one another underfoot in their panic. The leftmost exit had no obvious guards, but any attempts to flee that way seemed to result in only shrill screams and bits of disembodied limbs flung back through the doorway.

Mahlanda murmured aloud in amazement as they considered the shortest route, not out but down to the floor of the arena where Kalak’s would-be assassins lay stunned on the ground. “Folly,” she murmured to herself.

“But noble folly,” a deep voice spoke, and she jumped again as Klavicus appeared silently behind her.

“‘Noble?’” she stuttered over the pronunciation. “I’m not familiar with the word.”

“Watch,” he instructed, drawing up a chair.

It took the youths little time to dismiss the sinister exit, but they argued for some little while over which of the remaining two options was the most viable. No one particularly relished a conflict with templars – their last almost fatal encounter was a little too fresh in their minds – but there were qualms about the peasant-stuffed path as well. Some thought it would be too slow; one of the warriors drew his weapon and said he could solve that problem, but that created a problem of a different sort, as a handful of their companions objected to preserving their own lives at quite that price.

But the dragon’s growing solidity muted their protests. As they watched Kalak regained enough physical substance to swoop down on the two gladiators, snatch them up in his claws and fly high over the arena as they fruitlessly struggled. With no further argument the warrior made his way toward the oblivious citizenry, but at the last moment, taking measure of the tactical situation at closer range, veered off for the guards. “Likely a life-saving decision,” Klavicus observed.

“What was beyond the other two exits?”

“You were there,” he scolded. “You should be able to guess the one.”

“Another stone block.”

He nodded. “But because either the guards left their post or were overwhelmed, a mob formed, the early arrivals crushed by those who came after into a nearly solid wall. Even if they had hacked their way through…some jungles weren’t meant to be penetrated.”

“What’s ‘jungles?’”

“Never mind,” he sighed.

The view swung around with disorienting speed to the other tunnel, and seeing what lay within Mahlanda gave a little cry. “A gaj!” She watched with flaring nostrils as a six-eyed, four-legged beetle-like creature six feet in diameter snapped its giant mandibles at a hapless citizen, killing it instantly. Other corpses lay indistinct in the cloud of poisonous gas that surrounded the monstrosity, and just beyond the cloud a handful of men and women stood staring at the gaj as if mesmerized. Its antennae waved menacingly in the air. “How vile!” she exclaimed.

“I’m sure Kalak would have stationed one at every exit if he could have found and controlled enough of them,” he said wryly. “In any case, that way lay certain death. As opposed,” the view shifted back to Skarp’s young people, where one of the psions lay collapsed on the ground as the bard moved frantically toward her, “to nearly certain death.”

It was a close thing. They were fortunate in their allies, as the Jura Dai distracted one of the templars and Uurgos took the brunt of the half giants’ attacks for as long as he could, which proved to be long enough for skill and a healthy serving of luck to enable them to vanquish their foes. Even so they might have failed but for fate smiling upon them. For just as one of the templars prepared to unleash a killing spell, the top of the ziggurat exploded.

Mahlanda had been with Klavicus for that, of course, and if he hadn’t told her of the sabotage and she hadn’t seen the grin of malicious satisfaction on his face she would have believed it to be some new foul scheme of Kalak’s. The nearly corporeal dragon had turned to smoke and fallen from the sky, taking his two captives with him. More importantly for the youths, the templar’s magic stuttered and fizzled, the corona of lightning they feared never materializing. Deprived of his power he died easily.

The young people did not rest easy, however, having no idea if Kalak’s fall was permanent or what would emerge from the chaos even if it were. They paused only long enough for the warrior psion to strip one of the templars of his insignias of office and toss them to the bard. “Might be handy to have one with us.”

Even though she knew the outcome, Mahlanda gripped the arm of her chair tightly as they moved toward the exit, knowing what they yet did not: that an immovable block of stone barred their way, that the winch-rope used to lower the block was cut, that even still the winch was guarded. Desperate residents coagulated in the halls. She frowned as the same warrior tried to direct the mob to overwhelm the guards and a spray of lightning crushed the budding rebellion. “That was unnecessarily ruthless,” she muttered.

Klavicus looked over at her. “So you do know that word. Congratulations.”

Already battle-fatigued they braced for another fight, until the bard recalled the badges of office they had stripped from the templar. The templar guarding the winch was skeptical, but she was persuasive and threatening by turns, and in the end he took his unit and left them alone. The two psions repaired the winch and began to raise the block just as the High Templar Tithian called to the troops to stand down.

That had been a stroke of luck for the preservers, converting Tithian to their cause. He was not a good man, but he was a practical one and enjoyed ruling in Tyr, and the more he learned of Kalak’s plans the less he was convinced a populace would remain to rule over unless something were done. It would have been nearly impossible to insert Kalak’s assassins without his cooperation, or to disable the king’s shield.

Mahlanda had already seen much of what followed. Klavicus wanted, he said, to “witness” what happened after and offered to bring her along. There had been some argument over whether to return to Barunus immediately or to prowl Tyr in search of personal gain, ended when the Jura Dai announced their intention to make for the excavation immediately. The youths had rested in Barunus’ company nearly a week. Mahlanda and Klavicus had camped unseen just outside and she was growing restless. On the fifth morning she was about to ask her companion to return her to Tyr when the young people emerged in the company of Barunus and some of his laborers. Klavicus growled with satisfaction. “About time. Come on.”

They followed them unnoticed to a dig site where Barunus had uncovered what appeared to be the crenels and merlons of some ancient battlement, guarding nothing other than an equally ancient massive and tarnished horn. Barunus backed away as the young people surrounded it, a strange glint in his eye. The warrior bent to touch his lips to it.

And vanished.

One after another his companions vanished as well.

Mahlanda had started backward in surprise. “Where did they go?”

Klavicus extended his arm. “If you want to know, take my hand.” She hesitated. “I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer twice.”

She felt no menace from him, just the intuition that if she refused he would leave her standing there and she would never see him again, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She put her hand in his. They were there, in the desert, and then they weren’t.