Elizabeth Kerner - Song in the Silence

To my amazement, I heard a kind of response. Scattered it was indeed, but it could only be coming from him.

''Marik?

Lanen?

daughter

demons nonono light out of darkness

nono

lostlostlost

destroyer comes Corli Caderan stop

Caderan stopped

dead

dead dead death comes light goes where

where lostlostlost

the swift destroyer stop who were

demons lostlostlost

nononoooo . . . ."

I broke the connection, shuddering. Marik lived now in a vast darkness, but something in that broken mind sought light and life, after a fashion. "It's hard to tell, but he seems to be thinking about something called 'the swift destroyer.' I think he wants it stopped, but he wants Caderan to do it." Varien frowned. I turned to Rella. "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"

"Yes," she said grimly, looking daggers at the troubled form of Marik. "We should have strangled the bastard long since. It's a disease. The Swift Destroyer. Fever, chills, vomiting, and one of every two who get it, dies within the day. It's a demon-spawned illness. Takes a strong demon caller to bring it on, too. Damn Caderan and all like him."

"But surely if Caderan is gone he cannot bring this down upon us," I said.

"Don't count on it. The damned stuff is almost always left behind by a sorcerer as a final piece of viciousness, while they get clean away. There's some physical component to the spell, some fetish that sets it off. If we could find that, we might be able to stop it."

I looked at Rella in amazement. "How do you know so much about this?" I asked, shocked.

"I told you," she said with a grin. "I'm in the Silent Service. All that we do is learn things and remember them. You can believe me."

"What would this fetish look like?" asked Varien, taking all this in his stride. I was surprised at his calmness, until I remembered that, in a sense, it must be his usual state. You can't live more than a thousand years without gaining a certain composure about most things.

"It should be pretty obvious. I'm trying to remember— there should be a mudball about the size of a fist, a few feathers, and a handful of the incense used for the dead. Probably wrapped up together in a cloth somewhere on the ship."

"Start looking now," I said.

Well, that was another sleepless night. We looked high and low, all over the ship, for hours and hours, and found nothing. I began to wonder if Marik wasn't just babbling in his delirium, until one of his guards fell ill.

The one who had taken over Caderan's quarters.

We quarantined the man and went back over the room. We thought we had already searched it thoroughly, but I had been taught that the Swift Destroyer always struck first in physical proximity to the fetish that bound it. It must be in that room.

It was Varien who finally found it, in a hidden panel above the small desk that was bolted to the deck. He removed it with gloves on, as I instructed, and dropped it over the side, then followed it with the gloves.

The outbreak was not nearly so bad as might be expected. The guard died, poor sod, but the rest of us who contracted it had little worse than what felt like a bad cold. Varien seemed to escape the infection, which surprised me, as he had come in closest contact with the fetish. I suppose the gloves held it off.

Maikel helped us as he might, letting Marik fend for himself for a few days. By the time we started expecting to sight land, there were a lot of us on board still sniffling and sneezing, but no worse. It would have been terrible had we not found that thing in the desk. I'd never seen the Destroyer, but one look at what was left of the guard's body was enough.

And of a sudden, in the late morning of the twelfth day out from the Dragon Isle, there was a cry from the crow's nest. Corli had been sighted away off the starboard bow.

We were home.

We drew nigh to Corli as the sun rose to a splendid noon, and some three hours later I tossed the mooring ropes over the side to those who waited on the pier to haul them in and make us fast to the dock.

I sought out Varien as the ship erupted into a mad confusion. We had all been provided with tallies of the lansip we had gathered, and we were to be paid on the landward end of the gangplank. The moment we had docked all the Harvesters ran for their packs, aching to walk again on land and to collect their pay from Marik's people (and, if I had known it, to get away from this Dragon-cursed ship).

Rella and I collected our tallies from the bursar, and I went with Varien to seek out Edril, the merchant we'd bargained with for our passage. We honoured our word and handed over what now seemed to me a tiny amount of gold. Edril's eyes widened and he went so far as to bow his thanks to us. Well, fair enough, gold is exceedingly rare, and Marik never was the sort to inspire personal loyalty.

At the far end of the gangplank there was a milling crowd of Harvesters seeking payment, receiving payment, grinning madly, laughing wildly at family and friends in the crowd that had gathered to cheer and greet the first Harvest ship to return in a hundred and thirty years.

Rella was behind me when I collected my pay for the lansip I'd gathered, but I did not mean to linger. Varien and I, at least, had but one desire—to get away from there as far and as fast as possible.

I had never imagined such a great crowd of Gedrisha—of people. The quay swarmed with them, shouting, laughing, working, begging, a great seething mass of souls intent on their own business yet moving as in a great dance with their fellow creatures. It was dizzying.

We were past the paymaster and heading into the crowd when Rella called out to us. Lanen was in a hurry but she stopped, waiting for her to catch us up. "Whither now, Rella?" she asked. "Now you've made your fortune proper, where will you go?"

The old woman smiled, her pack resting effortlessly on her bent back, a mysterious something in her eyes. "Home, I think," she said. She stared at Lanen, her smile growing wider. "It's a long way to go alone, though. I wondered where you might be headed. If our paths lie together, perhaps I might ride with you—some of the way, at least." When Lanen did not answer, Rella delighted me by standing in what could only be an Attitude, the backs of her hands on her hips, her weight all on one leg and that hip higher than the other, with a quirk of the lips and an expression I had not seen before. Now if only I could learn what it meant.

"I'm making for a little village in the North Kingdom, maybe you've heard of it. It's called Beskin."

"What?" exclaimed Lanen. "Beskin?" Her eyes glowed with delight. "Heithrek. Do you— have you ever known a man called Heithrek, a blacksmith? It would be—oh, near thirty years ago, but his family might still be there."

Rella grinned with delight "Never met him." She paused, and I'd swear she savoured her next words. "I know his daughter, though. Tall woman, looks a lot like you, name of Maran Vena."

Lanen let loose a little cry and her mouth dropped open. Her eyes were shining and she couldn't speak for a moment, lost in wonder at something I could not imagine.

And then from nowhere, out of the seething crowd of humanity, a small dark-haired man came close behind Rella. I saw something flash in his hand and heard Rella cry out in pain.

Lanen cried out as well and caught her as she fell, but from where she stood she could not have seen what happened. I left Rella to her care and ran after the man, or tried to. There were simply too many people. I could not keep up with him— it seemed almost as if the crowd parted to let him through, then closed up behind like an impenetrable forest. In seconds he was out of sight.