Douglas Niles - Circle at center

“What is it?”

“We all felt the world shake a few days ago. I am convinced that was just a symptom of much greater disturbances. And so I ask you, my friend: What have you heard of unusual trouble in the Fourth Circle?”

It seemed to Natac as if Belynda’s pale skin got a touch whiter. “The sage-enchantress Caranor… she died by fire in her home. And then an interval later the sage-enchantress Allevia was killed the same way!”

Miradel gasped. “Allevia dwelled in the Lodespikes, did she not?”

“On the fringe of the mountains, yes… in a high valley overlooking the Greens.”

“The Greens,” the druid repeated seriously. “It is there I feel the danger lies.”

“There are a lot of people there,” Belynda countered, though she didn’t speak with a great deal of conviction. “Surely we would have heard something in Circle at Center about trouble? Or you druids… Can’t you look there with your viewing glass?”

“That’s part of the problem,” Miradel said. “For a long time, now, the Greens have been masked to our magic. Druids have gone there, talked to centaurs and giants and faeries… and though they haven’t learned anything suspicious, it is not uncommon for them to encounter unusual secrecy. And that was before Debyra’s visit, just last year.”

“What did she learn?” Belynda asked.

“Nobody knows… she was never heard from again.”

“That is bad enough-but can you be certain?”

“Not yet… not about everything. But Cillia has been watching, and she has told me what she’s learned.” Miradel looked at Belynda curiously. “Did you know that there are now many elves living in the Greens?”

“No!” The sage-ambassador blinked, for her a dramatic expression of surprise. “I always knew of a few renegades, restless souls who never seemed to fit in. But there are no realms there!”

The druid shrugged. “There are more than a few, and perhaps it is right to call them renegades. They seem to be content to live in the wilderness, away from the sanctity of borders and councils.”

“Perhaps that’s where they’re going,” Belynda mused softly.

“Who?” probed Miradel.

“It’s just… for some years now, an unusual number of elves have been leaving Argentian. And no one seems to know where they go. Just this morning I learned that the same thing is happening in Barantha and Kel’sos.”

“All realms within a hundred miles of the Greens,” the druid observed.

“And such migration is unquestionably a change… an unusual one, in the annals of Nayve. But even so… what harm is done? Where is the trouble?”

“I believe that there is something dangerous there,” Miradel informed her friend, and took in Natac’s eyes with a brief glance.

“Dangerous elves?”

“Elves… and others. Centaurs and giants, I’m certain. But there is something holding them together, driving them… and it is a force that resists even detection by druid magic.”

“But stay-I admit that you are making me think,” declared the elfwoman, her hand trembling slightly as she raised it before Miradel’s aged face. “Now explain something: You were going to tell me why you brought this warrior here.”

The druid took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I did it for your people,” she said to Belynda.

“For the elves? Why in the name of the Goddess would you do that?”

“Because,” Miradel said, and now her dark eyes turned to Natac, “you are needed to train the elves in the ways of battle… to teach them how to fight a war.”

F lames rose high around him and he saw Satan writhing against a desperate onslaught. The demon twisted and shrieked, helplessly suffering the torture of his righteous punishment. Slowly, inexorably, the valiant knight pressed forward with sword and staff… victory was there! And then that triumph slipped away from him in a gust of wind and a waft of smoke. The fiend had made his escape, and the knight was left alone, facing the enemy horde…

The dream had its own form, and it followed the pattern each time it tormented his sleep. Constructed from the events of Sir Christopher’s past, centuries distant, it wove a tale of temptation and failure, and it left alive the hope of redemption and triumph.

It always began with the same disaster: The Saracens attacked from ambush, striking from both ridges above a parched, arid valley. They caught twelve Knights Templar by surprise, slaughtering many of Sir Christopher’s companions with their short, lethal arrows. Only three of the twelve reached the great portals, the gates to sacred Jerusalem herself.

But the Saracens cut them off before they could enter the safety of the great fortress-city. Finally Sir Christopher stood alone, hacking to right and left, slaughtering his enemies for the glory of God. He prayed aloud, calling the names of his slain comrades, praising the bravery of his loyal, perished horse. Thirst was a claw at his swollen tongue, talons of fire ripping at his parched throat. His shield, emblazoned with the red cross of the Templars, was torn and broken under the onslaught of a hundred weapons.

His red blade was knocked from his hands. A Syrian lance pierced his flesh, slicing into his heart and lungs. In that instant he knew he was dying, and he commended his soul and his being to Heavenly Paradise. His life flowed away, spattered in crimson blood across the rocks of the Holy Land. In the last glimmer of awareness, he reached upward, sought and anticipated the welcoming embrace of God.

Instead, he found himself in the arms of Hell’s Harlot, a beautiful temptress who touched him shamelessly, bringing arousal from his traitorous flesh. At first he fought against her obscene advances, twisting and kicking fruitlessly in an attempt to escape her tender fingers, her soft lips. But his blows passed through her without effect, while her own gentle touch produced a pronounced reaction in the knight. His soul weakened, his flesh yielded, and the witch used him for her obscene pleasure.

And he, in that foggy weakness, he enjoyed the same carnal gratification. He ravished her as if she were the whore of Babylon, and he relished each salacious convulsion of his loins. Only when at last he lay exhausted, and she fell sound asleep, did he realize that he had been tested by God.

It was a test he had failed.

In his surging grief he strangled the harlot, but he knew that his vengeance was too late to cleanse his soul of sin. He staggered from her lair and found himself in a world of blasphemy… a world in which he had struggled and labored for more than three centuries.

And once again he awakened, and God’s work lay before him.

But now he had a tool, a talisman that would make that work so much more effective. As he did every morning, he reached to his breast, found the stone there, still suspended on its golden chain. He looked at the pearl, at its crimson cross, and understood again that he had been chosen for an important task. The red sigil on the stone was not a perfect cross, since all four of the lines were the same length. Even so, his discovery of the talisman in the possession of the heretical witch Caranor had convinced him anew that his work was here.

And so he emerged from his tent, ignored the stirring of his small army, and raised the stone toward the already bright sun.

“Come to me, Children of God,” he whispered, his fingers clenched around the pearl. “Come to me, and join my new crusade.”

Despite the planned early departure, the homebound Argentian delegates needed most of the afternoon to cross the long causeway from Circle at Center to the lakeshore. Tamarwind wasn’t surprised that the homesick elves of his pastoral realm were ultimately reluctant to take leave of the city’s splendors. Indeed, the scout surprised himself with his own regrets, wistful thoughts centered on the woman with the delicate frame and the strong face. He had known her for centuries, had given her the seed that had created offspring, and yet during the last tenday she had made him feel like a giddy youth. The emotions were strong and unusual, but he liked them.