R. Salvatore - The Ancient

“We? You and the powries?”

“Yes.”

“Cormack?”

The monk paused and took a deep breath. “I was expelled from Chapel Isle, beaten and left for dead. This powrie-”

“Mcwigik’s the name,” the dwarf interjected.

“Mcwigik saved my life,” Cormack explained. “They’ve taken me in.”

“Every dwarf needs a dog,” Mcwigik mumbled.

“We were going to come and get you,” Cormack continued. “We’re leaving the lake.”

“You and the powries?”

“A few, yes. But we found this man, and he will surely die…” As he finished, Cormack reached for Milkeila’s tooth-and-claw necklace, and twisted it out of the way to reveal the string of gemstones he had given to her. “Help me, I beg,” he said, and reached to remove the magical necklace.

Milkeila instinctively bent and helped him do so, following Cormack as he rushed to the supine man, fumbling with the gems to find the powerful soul stone. He went to work immediately, pressing the stone against one egregious wound, where the man’s leg was swollen and possibly broken. Milkeila put her hand atop Cormack’s and began a prayer of her own, using the soul stone connection to the wounded man to impart her energy into the gem to heighten Cormack’s work. The man groaned and stirred a bit.

They went to the next wound and then the next after that, and with each application of gemstone magic their bond tightened. They shared smiles after every victory, though they had no idea of whether or not these little bits of mending would win the largest battle of all and keep this stranger alive.

“He’s wearing your cap,” Milkeila remarked.

“Magic in a powrie beret,” Mcwigik said from the side.

If either Milkeila or Cormack heard the dwarf, neither showed it, for they had locked stares and hearts and to them at that moment, the outside world didn’t exist.

“He fell from the glacier?”

“And somehow he is not dead,” Cormack answered. “The mud, I guess, for the ground at the glacier’s base is soft.”

“It is a long fall,” the woman replied, obviously doubting.

“And yet he lives,” said Cormack with a shrug, as if nothing else really mattered.

They had worked their way up over the most obvious wounds by that point, and Cormack put the soul stone on top of an area of swelling on the battered man’s forehead. Again he sent the gemstone’s magical energy flowing into the stranger, and again Milkeila put her hand atop his to help.

But then the supine man did likewise, his hand snapping up to grab Cormack by the wrist. His eyes popped open wide and Cormack instinctively tugged away.

“No!” the stranger started to say, but the monk and Milkeila had moved too forcefully for him to prevent them from pulling the stone from his forehead, and as soon as that happened, he lost all strength and the two healers fell back, staring at him.

“Gemmm… gem… ge… ge… ge,” the wounded man pleaded, his jaw shaking and drool sliding from the side of his mouth.

“I think ye forgot to put his brains back in,” Mcwigik quipped, seeming very amused by the man’s sudden and pathetic attempts to sit up or even to communicate.

“Ge… Ge… Gemmmm,” the man cried, reaching out at the recoiling duo.

“I’m thinking he lived by landing on his head,” Mcwigik said, and his two powrie companions chuckled.

“He wants the soul stone,” Cormack surmised.

“The poor man,” said Milkeila.

The stranger kept stuttering and drooling and shaking so badly that he seemed as if he would just collapse.

“Give it to him,” Milkeila said.

Cormack looked at her incredulously.

“He cannot run away with it,” the woman reminded.

Cormack reached out and put his fist, clenched over the soul stone, in the stranger’s shaking palm. As soon as the man tightened his grip about Cormack’s fist, Cormack relaxed his grasp and let the gemstone fall to the wounded man.

Shaking fingers immediately stilled and closed over the gemstone, and with a great and collected exhale, the wounded man lay easily on the sandbar. Many heartbeats passed.

“I think it killed him to death,” Mcwigik said, but then the man reached his hand up and pressed the gemstone against his forehead.

“Or not,” muttered the dwarf, and his voice reeked of disappointment.

Many more heartbeats slipped past and the stranger remained motionless on the ground, his hand pressed against his forehead. Then-with hardly an effort, it seemed!-he sat up, still holding the gemstone to his forehead, and said in an accent that was obviously from south of the Gulf of Corona, “Well found in a dark place and know that you have my eternal gratitude. I am Bransen.”

They hadn’t hit anything vital, he believed; the wound was not mortal. It hurt, though. How it hurt, and it was all poor Olconna could do to turn his focus to his surroundings and not the cut in his belly.

He had managed to secure a knife; he surely would have preferred a sword, but the knife he had hidden away in his boot would have to suffice.

He couldn’t deny his fear as the giants lowered him head-down into the ice chasm, a thick rope tied tightly about his ankle. But Olconna had spent the better part of his adolescence and all of his adulthood in battle, and had faced tremendous odds again and again. Always he had found his answer, his way to victory or at least to escape, and he had no reason to believe that this time would be any different. Ancient Badden had erred, Olconna believed, because he had allowed the man to greatly recover from the wounds he had received in the fight when he had been captured.

He brandished the knife. He forced himself to extend downward and stretch the wound, as he couldn’t hope to battle whatever beast might be down here while doubled over.

It was darker now, for he was well over a hundred feet down from the ledge, but not pitch-black. Olconna forced himself into a slow turn, taking in the myriad edges and jags of the chasm walls, trying to pick out a shape among them that foretold something else.

“Faster,” he muttered under his breath, wanting to be on the floor and free of the rope before this beast appeared. In the back of his head, Vaughna’s last words, “every moment precious,” played over and over like a constant echo of regret. For the man, cautious in everything but battle, hadn’t lived that way-until he had encountered Crazy V. The notion weighed on him for a short moment, but Olconna turned that fear that he had lost his chance into determination that he wouldn’t let it end now, that he would find a way to gain some years where Vaughna’s words would guide him as sound advice.

But a moment later Olconna heard a low rumble, like a huge rock rolling down a hill. The beast smelled his blood, just as that old wretch Badden had predicted before he had stabbed Olconna in the belly.

Olconna slowly turned at the end of the rope, his gaze passing the long and open stretch of corridor. He noted a movement down there, a quick glimpse of something large, something awful. He tried to battle his momentum, to stop and face the beast, but he kept going around. He managed to twist about, eliciting terrific pain from his torn belly, to catch a few quick views of the approaching monster. It looked like a gigantic worm, or more accurately a caterpillar, for the many small legs scrabbling at its sides. Giant mandibles arched out in semicircles before its black, round maw-the type of toothy orifice often found on sea creatures, which seemed to pucker as much as open.

“Faster!” Olconna said again, cursing the giants who were lowering him, but as if on cue, the rope stopped.

He hung there, twenty feet from the ground, too high to try to free himself, for the fall would surely leave him helpless in the face of the monster. But too far, he believed, for the approaching beast to get at him. He managed to steady his turn properly so that he could face the crawling nightmare.