R. Salvatore - The Ancient

“A man to deliver a message, and then we are gone from here.”

“The glacier north of your lake is home to a Samhaist,” Bransen announced. “The Ancient himself. Ancient Badden, who wars with Dame Gwydre of Vanguard.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I was there, just yesterday,” Bransen answered. “Badden claims dominion over this lake and works to ensure that all here, yourselves included-and especially, if he should ever learn that Abellicans reside on this most holy of Samhaist places-will be washed away on a great wave of his murderous wrath. If he executes his plan there is for you no escape. If he is not stopped this place you name as Chapel Isle will become a washed stone on an uninhabited hot lake.”

“Preposterous!” said Giavno, while the monks around him whispered and shuffled nervously, and looked all around for someone to settle their fears from the sudden shock.

Bransen shrugged, as if unconcerned.

“We are to believe you?” Father De Guilbe asked skeptically. “You come to us beside a traitor…”

“A man I hardly know, but one possessed of more sense than you it would seem. I have come to deliver a message as repayment to this man you name as traitor and yet who feels obligated to you still. Whether you act upon that message or not is not my concern. I hold no love for your Church. Indeed, from what I have seen you are more than deserving of my contempt. But I am Jhesta Tu, and so such feelings as contempt have no place in my world.”

He turned to Cormack, but before he could address the man, Giavno assailed him, “Jhesta Tu? What is Jhesta Tu?”

Bransen eyed the fiery man out of the corner of his eye. “Something you could never begin to comprehend.”

“Take them!” Giavno yelled, and immediately a pair of guards, brandishing short swords, leaped at Bransen and Cormack.

They never got close. Bransen, expecting it, even coaxing it, leaped at the first, kicking his right foot out to the man’s right side, then sweeping it across. It posed no real threat to the monk, but had him distracted so that that the real attack, a snap-kick from Bransen’s left foot, caught him right in the chest, blasting out his breath in a great gasp. Bransen landed lightly back on his right foot and propelled himself forward and left, beside the staggering monk’s awkward thrust. He snatched the man by the wrist with his right hand, drove his left hand brutally against the monk’s straightened elbow, then quickly covered the man’s sword hand with his own, bending the monk’s wrist over painfully and stealing his strength-and his grip on the sword.

The blade didn’t fall an inch before Bransen snapped it out of the air, and he spun away, back-kicking the wounded monk in the side to ensure that there would be no pursuit, and also to shift his own momentum, driving him to intercept the second approaching guard.

The short swords collided repeatedly in a series of arm-numbing parries that ended with Bransen looping his blade over that of the confused monk. A twist and jerk sent the short sword to the ground, and left the tip of Bransen’s sword at the stunned monk’s throat. And it all happened in the space of a few heartbeats.

Bransen laughed and straightened, moving his blade back from the terrified man. He hooked the fallen sword with his own and deftly flipped it into his left hand, then turned to Giavno and flung both swords, spinning end over end, to stick into the ground right before the monk.

“You have been warned,” Bransen announced. “Ancient Badden will destroy you.”

He turned and walked away.

Cormack lingered a short while longer, looking mostly to Father De Guilbe. His expression was one of apology, perhaps, but mostly it was filled with pleading. But there was no more to say, so he followed Bransen back to the boat.

Both Cormack and Milkeila accompanied Bransen onto the forested island of Yossunfier. Many more people came out to greet them before they even got their boat ashore. The whole of Milkeila’s tribe, it seemed, came down to the waterfront, shielding their eyes from the morning glare, whispering among themselves at this surprising group approaching their island home.

Many scowls focused on Cormack and his obvious Abellican attire, but Androosis was there, along with Toniquay and Canrak, instructing his kin that this particular monk was no enemy of Yossunfier.

As the trio glided in near the beach, strong hands grabbed the craft and ushered it up onto the beach. Toniquay stepped front and center before Milkeila as she exited the boat, the higher-ranking shamans deferring to him because of his intimate knowledge of this situation and these participants.

He stared at Milkeila for just a few moments, then scrutinized Cormack, his expression giving the man no indication of how much his actions had ingratiated him to the barbarians. Then Toniquay’s gaze fell over Bransen, but only for a moment.

“What do you presume?” Toniquay asked Milkeila. He waited just a short while of uncomfortable silence before adding, “Do you believe that your friend has earned the right to step onto our land simply because he, unlike so many of his kin, took a moral road? Do you think that all past wrongs will be simply forgotten?”

“It was at great personal cost!” Milkeila replied, instinctively defending her lover, who put a hand on her arm to calm her. “But that is not why we have come. Cormack signaled to me and I answered his call.”

“Signaled?” Toniquay said suspiciously. “And how did he know a way in which he might signal you, Milkeila? And how did you know to answ…” He stopped and waved his hand and shook his head. His point had been made that the woman would surely have to answer for her apparent secret relationship with this Abellican, but Toniquay was more interested in hearing Milkeila’s tale at that time.

“Why is he here?” the shaman asked.

“Cormack found this man, Bransen,” Milkeila replied, and she put her hand on Bransen’s shoulder. The man in the black suit nodded, though he obviously understood little of the conversation.

“Bransen fell from the glacier,” said Milkeila.

Toniquay looked at her skeptically, and doubting murmurs grew all about them. “Then he would be dead,” Toniquay said.

“But he is not,” said Milkeila. “Whether through simple luck and soft mud, or his extraordinary powers-and he is truly blessed-I know not. But he is here, and he was up there, and he comes to us with a dire warning. The Ancient of the Samhaists has taken the glacier as his home, and plots now to destroy all of us who dwell upon Mithranidoon.”

“Samhaists?” Toniquay echoed. He had heard the name before, in the private discussions among the shamans about people who lived beyond Mithranidoon’s warm waters. The Samhaists, so it was rumored, had given this place its name, though that had been centuries before. In the lore of Yan Ossum, shamans had gone south to teach their magic to the men of Honce, long before the many battles and wars between the two peoples. In Alpinadoran mythology, Samhaist magic was a direct offshoot of the Alpinadoran Ancient Gods, though in Samhaist lore, the order, and who taught whom, was of course reversed.

“This stranger is from outside of Mithranidoon?” Toniquay asked. “Strange then that he arrives just a few years after the Abellicans. Before them, none had come to us from the outside since the powries, before my father’s father was born.” Even as he denied the possibility, though, Toniquay had to admit that the man’s clothing was fairly convincing, and unlike anything he had ever seen.

“He is an Abellican spy,” someone from the side yelled, a sentiment that was echoed through the crowd.

“He is not of my former comrades,” Cormack answered. “He is no Abellican, and has only been to Chapel Isle on one occasion-yesterday-to deliver the same message there that we deliver here. This is no trick, Toniquay. On my word, for what that is worth to you. I found this man in the mud on the northern bank of Mithranidoon, injured. He came to us with a tale that you must hear, that my people must hear, that the powries must hear. For if he speaks truly, and I believe that he does, then all of us are in dire peril, and will soon be washed from our homes.”