The enchanter found himself in the center of a nightmare world of blood and barbarism. The destruction of Ceris’ brother whirled past him in a dizzying circle of images. Scarlet life blood foamed up into a mouth already broken from teeth ripping into ragged lips. Bluish cords of throat and gullet were laid bare with a sweeping downward stroke from a red-streaked silver blade. Dark loops of gut bulged from the belly, a deadly gash oozing unheeded filth. A pale gloss of bone was overlaid with a tracery of blood as an elbow was split, the merciless knife piercing linen, skin and sinew, a calculated move to cripple for life had the boy not already been dead, kept moving only by the will Eresken had sent into madness without limit. Horror surrounded the enchanter in a seamless sequence as each vision came again and again, ever more vivid, ever more threatening. There was nothing beneath his feet, no sound in his ears, just this endless parade of horror and he had no eyes to close to it.
But where was the fear? Where was the desperate seeking for justification, the noisy reasoning as the mind sought to excuse the inhumanity, to distance itself from responsibility and the freezing grip of guilt? There was none. With an intense effort, Eresken managed to force a small stillness for himself in the midst of that abominable array of consciousness. With a sinking horror, he realized he was hemmed in on every side by a hard, hot exultation, reveling in the intensity of physical perception, surging rapture in that unfettered release, overarching ecstasy at facing the ultimate challenge of mortal battle and winning through.
The memories stopped, frozen images fading into crimson darkness. The limits of the enchanter’s refuge of sanity began to buckle and bend beneath an inexorable pressure.
“Who are you?” yelled Eresken into the blood-blackened silence oppressing him.
“My name’s ’Gren, at least that’s what my friends call me,” a cheerful voice echoed all around the enchanter, incongruous against the deepening sense of menace. “But you don’t really need to know that because I’m going to kill you.” Now the threat was all in the voice, hard and bright as steel.
“Do you know who I am?” demanded Eresken, incredulous, forgetting in that instant the inexplicable burden constraining his powers.
“Not really,” admitted the voice. “Livak and Halice both say you and your kind are scum-sucking bastards. Let’s find out.” With uncomplicated brutality, a single-minded curiosity ripped through every defense Eresken had ever learned beneath the blows of his father’s cane and the lash of his scorn. Dragged helpless and unresisting to the furthest edge of memory, Eresken saw people and places he thought long forgotten. That mewling slave girl his father had brought back from one of his earliest forays across the ocean, once he had recovered the lost art of defying currents that swept ships to oblivion. Eresken scarcely recalled his mother, always turning her face from her child of rape, pulling long brown hair across her branded face. Her tears and thinness of unrelenting misery shifted, face swelling, blackening, tongue protruding and eyes bulging in the aftermath of hanging.
His father’s harsh face loomed large in Eresken’s mind’s eye, eyes so brown as to be nigh on black, pale skin crowned with dead white hair. “She was weak, disloyal, of neither use nor ornament. What purpose did her life serve, when so many need food and warmth?”
Nor had she been the only one condemned to die in that harshest winter of his childhood, sacrifice to his father’s wisdom. Fiefdoms ruled by lesser men had fallen to disease and dissension. There was no food to spare in that hungry season when the scant harvest had rotted green in the fields, when the seabirds had flown early and the sea-beasts had come late and few in number, bony and diseased when the hunters’ harpoons had finally reeled them in. The grudging streams had frozen solid, the vital heat beneath the earth seemingly withdrawn for good, and people had murmured in corners that Misaen had finally forsaken them.
Not so Eresken’s father. This was a sign, clear as the eruption bringing the contrary death of burning to so many starving at the icy turn of the year. He had the vision to see a testament to Misaen’s will, that they had been proved by this bitterest trial. This was the signal that time had come to leave their barren fields, the few sheltered valleys where stunted trees clung to life, the pitiless reaches of gravel and broken rock that ran up into the snow fields and glaciers that cloaked the mysterious heights. Once he had knit the empty lands of those cursed by Maewelin into a power to rule the Elietimm, it would be time to reclaim the lands of western plenty. Why else had he been granted the powers over wind and sea so long lost?
No longer was Eresken an unregarded junior in the rigid hierarchy of the keep. Now he had all the attention he could have desired and fully understood the paradox of being careful what one wished for, lest it be granted. To be claimed as his father’s son was to be schooled hard and long in the arts of true magic, to be trained in tactics and strategy, to be sent against rival clans when any opportunity offered itself or pretext could be claimed to cross a border, attack a stronghold, shed competing blood. Finally he had been set in the place that was rightfully his by birth, to defend his father’s shield arm or die in the attempt.
“Strike my stones, but you’re a boring lot, aren’t you?” Memories were pulled out, examined, tossed aside, Eresken raging helpless and wretched as ’Gren went searching for something to interest him, his disdain loud in the silence of recollection.
“If we are to cross the ocean to fight for our rights there, we will leave none behind who might stab us in the back.” His father’s oft-repeated words rang in Eresken’s mind, judgment on a neighboring fiefdom destroying it down to the last infant.
“Sound enough reasoning,” ’Gren’s voice sounded approving, a fleeting instant when his crushing grip relaxed.
“Who are you?” demanded Eresken, trying to drag himself free of the treacherous mire of recall. “How are you doing this?”
“Who knows? Who cares?” The looming threat all around him returned, ever more ominous. “You’re the one came into my head uninvited and now you get to take the consequences. I’m not going down without a fight!”
“But who are you?” raged Eresken, treacherous fear gnawing at him.
“Someone who’s had a shitload more fun out of life than you have, pal.” Scarlet fire shot through the darkness, assailing Eresken on all sides with bright visions that both terrified and perplexed him. The traitor’s brother was holding out a hand, urging him on as the two children explored every last nook and cranny of some remote fess. Memory jumped outside the walls, a furtive foray into the woods, following older brothers, uncles and father on a trapping expedition, nearly fatally lost in a sudden blizzard, only returning half frozen in the dawn light to hysterical women and a day’s slow warming in an outhouse. That last bit had been no fun, the two had concluded. They had to learn how to beat the cold and the weather in order to go farther afield the next time.
Recollection sprang down a dark cavern. Mines weren’t so cold and weather couldn’t reach them underground. That foolhardy premise died beneath the discovery that exhaustion was as insidious a potential killer as the cold, while rain on the surface half a day away could leave a bold youth exploring a cave up to his neck in water inside a few breaths. Fear a hair’s breadth from madness rang through Eresken’s mind, recollection of a dive through flooded tunnels, lungs aflame in the midst of icy water, the insane urge to take that killing breath of drowning. In the next instant, all terror was submerged in the maniacal laughter of the exultation of survival.