Raymond Feist - A Kingdom Besieged

In a swift series of moves, Lair’ss put down the child, giving it a warning poke to keep it quiet, leapt from the rampart to the stairs halfway down, and was upon the hiding figure before it knew it. After delivering a quick stunning blow, she carried the limp being up to her child.

No sooner had the unconscious figure been laid on the stones than the child threw herself with astonishing energy upon it. The shock of the attack roused the tiny creature, but Lair’ss was ready for it. A long talon slashed its throat.

Fighting back her own hunger, the mother watched her daughter feed. She could swear she saw the child grow before her eyes. The need to push the child aside and feed upon the creature herself was almost overwhelming, but her mind was still relatively free of animal rage and she knew it was crucial that the child grow quickly. She would be too large to carry now, but after this feast, she should grow large enough that she should be able to keep pace with her mother.

Ignoring her own hunger pangs, Lair’ss watched as the corpse was consumed – bone, sinew, hair, and skin – until nothing was left but the simple robe and sandals it wore. Lair’ss’s brow furrowed. In her haste she had not noticed the design of the robes. The dead creature was an Archivist, a keeper of knowledge.

Now her daughter looked at her, her gaze narrowing for an instant. Then she spoke her first words. ‘Thank you, Mother. That was … enlightening.’

‘You can talk …?’ said Lair’ss, stating the obvious.

‘This one … lacked strength or magic … but he had knowledge.’ The child spoke each word carefully, as if trying them out and judging them before uttering a syllable. Then she rose up on slightly unsteady feet; the growth she had gained from her feasting had changed her balance and she needed a few minutes to adjust. Then she looked at her mother and added, ‘A great deal of knowledge.’

Lair’ss knew fear then. Before her eyes, in a matter of minutes, her daughter had ceased being a mewling infant and was now a young adult, one with memories and knowledge belonging to the most guarded caste of the King’s courts, the Archivists.

The child’s face was now almost on a level with the larger female who sat huddled against the inner wall. ‘I am ready, Mother,’ she said.

Lair’ss accepted that. Her child now had knowledge.

The child glanced around to see if they were still hidden. Then she declared, ‘I know a way.’ She turned, and moved downwards, and unquestioning, Lair’ss followed.

They struggled through the jagged rocks. Over the city wall, down the gullies that ages of wind and rain had carved out along the roadside and through the marshes. Flaming jets of gas had barred their way, but the child knew the route to take. From the moment she had devoured the Archivist, she had become a being unlike any Lair’ss had known.

At one point they huddled beneath an outcrop of rocks as a solitary flyer hovered overhead, seeking prey below. The child would be an easy target, and if Lair’ss’s strength became any more depleted she would be no match for the winged predator.

In the quiet of early morning, as the nocturnal predators were sweeping the mountains one last time before returning to their lairs, the child looked into her mother’s face, barely visible in the faint light from the stars above and the tiny moon nearing the western horizon. Softly she said, ‘I know things, Mother.’

Weak from hunger, Lair’ss replied, ‘Yes, I understand.’

‘Do you?’ The child took her mother’s face gently between her hands. ‘The Archivist’s … knowledge, but not his memories, are mine. I know things, but other things are empty, holes in my mind.’ She tilted her head to one side, her eyes fastened on her mother’s features. ‘Tell me.’

‘What, Daughter?’

‘Tell me those things I do not know.’

‘I do not understand.’

The child gazed out from under the sheltering rock at the setting moon. ‘What is that?’ she said, pointing to the faint light on the western horizon.

‘That is Das’taas, or what is left of it,’ said her mother weakly. ‘It was our home.’

‘Why did we leave?’

‘The Darkness came and our Lord Dahun was gone and no one knew how to fight it.’

‘Darkness?’ asked Child.

Lair’ss was so weak now that she sensed this might be her last conversation with her daughter. ‘I know little, but this much is what is known. The Darkness came from the Centre.’

The child tilted her head as if remembering something. ‘Ah, yes, the Centre. The Ancient Heart.’

‘I do not know it by that name, but the Old Kingdoms, Despaira, Paingor, Mournhome, Abandos and the others held sway since the first days after the Time Before Time. Our lord Dahun paid tribute to the Old Kingdoms, and we stood as a bulwark against the Savages.’ Lair’ss inclined her head behind them. ‘There, to the east, where we go now. But we were told a bad thing happened.’

‘What, Mother?’

‘I do not know,’ Lair’ss said wearily. ‘So much of what has happened is a mystery.’ She stared out towards the distant city. ‘I have been told we once lived like the Savages, spawning in pits, fighting for survival from the first moment. Each death returned us to the pits and the struggle was endless.

‘I have been told that the Kings brought order and taught us how to live a new way, how to build as well as destroy, how to care for one another without constant killing. We were told these were good things.’

‘Why?’

‘Again, I do not know,’ she said with a long sigh. ‘But what the King wills is law.’

The younger female was quiet for a while as the sun to the east grew brighter. ‘Where do we go?’ prodded Child.

After a moment, her mother answered, ‘To the east, towards the lands of the Savages and the Mad Ones.’

‘Why?’ asked Child.

‘Because there is nowhere else to go,’ answered her mother softly.

A smile crossed the child’s lips and she said, ‘No, there is another place to go.’ Suddenly she lunged forward and her fangs closed around her mother’s throat and with one pull, she tore it open. Blood fountained and she drank deeply as the light faded from her mother’s eyes.

Thoughts came with the feeding, not her own, but those of the being whose life she ended.

A time of calm, with a male, by the name of Dagri, who was her father. He had vanished with the King.

Images flashed, some understandable and some not, places, faces, struggles and quiet. And some of the holes in her knowledge were filled in as the more abstract knowledge she had gained from the Archivist blended with her mother’s experiences.

There are been a stable time, a time of Dahun’s dominion. Then word had come of a struggle to the west. Dahun’s kingdom was not one of the Old Kingdoms, but one of the Second Kingdoms, those that ringed the five original Kingdoms.

Then there had been a war, not here, but in some other place, against a king named Maarg, and her father and others had gone with Dahun to fight him. No one had returned, leaving only the City Guardians and those who knew magic to face the Darkness when it appeared. No one knew what had become of the Old Kingdoms.

Bits and pieces of knowledge of those times and places seemed to float around the periphery of her thoughts, almost understood, tantalizingly so, but still not coherent. She knew one thing, though: if she were to survive, she needed more knowledge and power.

She regarded what was left of her mother’s body, then consumed what was left. She kept feeling odd sensations as she did so and tried to put a name to them, but couldn’t. In a strange way she regretted the need to feed on the female who had brought her into this world, but her abstract knowledge of her race’s breeding history made it difficult to understand why she would feel a bond with this female more than any other. She paused; the Archivist thought of their collective society as ‘the race’, but her mother had been taught to consider herself a member of ‘the People’. She understood that this was a distinction, but why it was important eluded her.