Sentinelspire

Chapter Twenty-Five

That day in the foothills of the Khopet Dag, Lewan had not been entirely truthful with Sauk.

You ever killed anyone? Lewan had evaded the question, then let Sauk believe whatever he wanted. I'll take that as a no.

But Lewan had killed. And not just the animals he'd told Sauk about. He'd killed a person. He'd been only twelve years old. For years after, that day had haunted him, recurring again and again in his nightmares, and the images and sounds coming to him with sudden clarity in the middle of the day while he was in the midst of a task for his master. Years had dulled the nightmares, and even the waking memories now seemed distant and hazy.

Even as a young boy, working the fields with his father or helping his mother cook, he'd seen death. Lambs that did not survive a hard birthing. Sheep or hens slaughtered for feast days. He had seen death. But the first person he'd ever killed…

Most likely, the raiders from the Ganathwood had waited outside the village most of the night. They'd waited until the eastern sky was just light enough to cast the village in a muted glow. The first shepherds had just been walking bleary-eyed out of their homes to tend the fields when the first raiders slew the guards and threw the gates open wide. Lewan didn't know how or when his father had been killed. He hadn't seen the body until it was all over and the raiders were dragging him away.

The sound of his home's front door being kicked in and his mother shrieking had woken him instantly. Outside, the flocks were bleating.

He'd sat up on his straw mattress and started to call out for his mother, but hearing the raucous voices, the main room's table being thrown aside, and his mother continued screaming had filled him with a sensation he'd never known before: sheer terror. As a small child, Lewan had been afraid of the dark, and thunderstorms had often sent him scurrying to the pallet his parents shared in the main room. But this was something entirely new. His hearing and vision sharpened, but his heart was pounding so hard he could feel his temples pulsing. He felt cold all over, like he'd been rolled in snow.

His mother's screams intensified, but amidst the shrieks Lewan had heard the creaking of the ladder that led to his loft. Someone was coming up. His breath coming in ragged sobs, Lewan rose. Taking steps that were far too slow-he'd barely been able to get his feet to move at all-he staggered to the far corner, where their croft's roof almost touched the floor and the shadows were deep and dark. A pile of dirty clothing and his heavy winter blanket in need of mending lay there. He'd crawled under them and waited.

The hatch on the floor next to the far wall slammed up. A wild-haired, unshaven man thrust his head and arm through the opening. That hand held a knife. He looked around- looked right where Lewan lay curled in the shadows-then called down, "Empty! Just a loft. My turn. Now you hold her!" And he'd leaped down, leaving the hatch open.

His mother's voice rose to one long, agonized shriek, then broke into quiet sobbing. With the hatch still open, Lewan could hear at least two men chuckling and another breathing heavily. How long it went on, Lewan could never remember, but in his nightmares of the following years, those sounds went on and on and on, mingling with terrified screams and angry shouts from outside.

"Done?" a man's voice said, then, "Finish her. We'll start the roof."

Lewan heard the man leave, heard his mother cry out once more, a short burst of air, almost as if she'd fallen and had the wind knocked out of her. Then more footsteps, and the only sounds were those from outside the house.

Peeking from beneath the blanket, Lewan had been unable to look away from the open hatch, sure that at any moment the wild-haired man would return. And that's where he was looking when he saw the first ember fall. He gasped and looked up. A large area of the thatch was black, and little specks within the black were glowing like orange stars.

We'11 start the roof. The men had torched the thatch!

Still shaking, Lewan crawled out from under the blankets and made his way to the hatch. More sparks were falling. One lit on the back of his hand, and the sudden pain almost broke his shock and sent him into full panic. He shook it off and scrambled the rest of the way. He peeked over the edge.

The croft's main room was in shambles, their table and water basins shattered, the door cracked almost in half and hanging on by one hinge. His mother sprawled on the dirt floor, her homespun nightshift torn up the middle, leaving her nakedness exposed. She lay in a dark puddle that Lewan first thought was the blanket she shared with his father, but then he saw it had the gleam of wetness. Thickest around her head, it formed a sickly mud on the floor, but where it had soaked into her shift, even in the dim light of predawn, Lewan had seen it was red. And worst of all, the dark blotch under her chin that had seemed like a shadow at first glance… his eyes seemed drawn to it, and he saw that his mother's throat had been cut open from just under her left ear to her collarbone.

"Mother!" Lewan had called, then rushed down. In his haste, he'd slipped and fallen, landing in the mud surrounding his mother. A bit of it splashed onto his face.

Closer to her, he could see the lifeblood trickling out of her, a new wave with each beat of her heart.

"Mother…"

She'd turned her head at the sound of his voice. The blood pulsing out of her neck splattered her cheek. Her jaw hung slack, the tip of her tongue protruding between her lips, the slightest hint of her teeth showing. She swallowed and tried to speak, but all that came out was a horrid groan.

That had snapped some semblance of thought back into Lewan. He remembered his father slaughtering the sheep. One careful swipe across the throat, and the sheep would bleed out in moments.

He rushed to his mother on his hands and knees. The mud squished between his fingers. He grabbed a fistful of her ruined shift and pressed it to the wound.

"Mother, make it stop!" he said, and it was then that the tears had begun to fall. "Make-it-stop-make-it-stop-make-it-stop!"

The fire was growing. Lewan could hear the great roar and crackle of the flames consuming the roof, and large chunks of burning thatch began to fall in his loft: Sparks and cinders rained down the open hatch, and the loud pops all around told him that the fire was catching in the timber itself.

"Mother, we have to get out. Mother!"

She was still trying to speak, making that terrible wet moaning sound. One hand, shaking like an old woman's, rose to reach for him, but fell halfway.

Smoke was filling the room, and the sound of thatch falling in the loft overhead was a constant patter.

"We must leave, Mother!"

Lewan let go of his mother's shift. It was completely saturated with blood. He stood, grabbed one of her wrists, and pulled. She didn't budge. He pulled harder, and his feet slipped in the mud. He came down hard on his bottom and sobbed.

"Mother, please get up."

He scrubbed away the tears, and when he looked down at her again, she was watching him. She blinked once, hard, then swallowed and said, "Lew! Don't… let… me… bur… burn!"

She coughed, and the blood flowing from her neck spurted out like a fountain.

His mother tried to speak more, but all that came out was a frantic whisper. Her hand, twisted clawlike, reached out for him, missed, and raked through the bloody muck.

Lewan grabbed her wrist and tried again. Still she didn't move. Her skin felt chilled, but the room was growing hotter with each breath. Lewan coughed. His eyes were starting to sting and well with tears as smoke filled the room.

"Burn his mother croaked. "Lew! No… burrrr-!"

A large hunk of thatch, blackened and filled with tongues of flame, hit the floor at the bottom of the ladder. The fire began to lick at the wooden ladder, blackening it. More cinders followed, and the sound of the fire overhead became deafening.

Covered in bloody grime, tears running down his cheeks, Lewan stood and stumbled over to the hearth. The black kettle his mother used to prepare their meals still hung over the gray coals. Lewan grabbed the handle and lifted it off the hook. It was heavy. Twelve years old, he was small for his age, and the kettle was made of thick iron. It probably weighed almost a third of what he did.

A fit of coughing grabbed him, and his vision clouded over. The tears flooding his eyes were as much from the smoke in the air as his fear and grief.

Dragging the kettle behind him, he stumbled to where his mother lay in her own blood. She was still trying to speak. One hand reached out for him-and again failed.

Crying like a little baby, Lewan stood over his mother and gripped the iron kettle. Her eyes followed him. She was too weak and in too much pain to smile, but he thought he saw something like relief in her eyes.

Straining, he lifted the heavy iron over his head. His sobbing increased, and he inhaled a great deal of smoke. His lungs constricted and he coughed, almost dropping the kettle. Instead, he used the momentum and threw his strength into it, bringing the heavy iron down on his mother's head.

Over the roar of the flames, over the crackling and popping of the fire catching the timber, even over the screams from outside, Lewan heard the crack of his mother's skull, felt the shock of it go up his arms. The cough and the force of his blow caused him to lose his balance, and he fell. He fell over his mother and felt her limbs give a final spasm. His cheek hit her blood-slick shoulder, and he was close enough to hear her last breath leave her lungs.

Sickened, he pushed himself away, scrabbling through the mud. Still, he hadn't been able to look away.

His mother's forehead caved in — the skin broken and bloody — bits of bone showing.

Her eyes stared sightless at the ceiling, that last look of relief-the last look his mother had given him-was utterly gone. Her eyes were cold and lifeless as stones.

But then she sat up. Not with the sickening, desperate motions of a woman bleeding to death, but quickly and with purpose, like a sleeper wakened by the knocking of someone at the door. Blood ran down her face, one trickle running through her left eye. But she did not blink, and the eyes that she turned to him were still empty, the only light in them that of reflected flame.

"Lewan," she said, but it was not his mother's voice. Lower, more solemn, and with an underlying timbre that was beyond human.

Lewan tried to step back, to find the door and run. But his feet would not move. His legs were heavy and slow in the way of nightmares.

"You must listen, my son," the voice said through his mother. "Death comes. When death comes for you, you must see clearly. You must not run. You must find your courage."

Lewan looked down. He was not the little boy anymore. He was seventeen, grown tall and with a lean strength from a life in the wild. He stood in the burning house naked, and the muddy symbols of the Oak Father he'd painted on his skin were still wet. They steamed in the hot air.

When he looked up, his mother was standing, her throat still savaged, the crown of her head a ruined mess, mud and worse caking her hair. "I will show you," she said.

She reached with both her hands-hands that had become claws-and grabbed the skin between her bare breasts. The claws dug into the skin and kept digging. Lewan heard bone cracking, the sound mingling with the burning flames growing in the timbers of the house. His mother's fingers were all the way inside her, and she pulled. Her breastbone broke with a great crrrack! and the skin tore as she pulled open her chest.

Lewan's eyes went wide with horror, but he could not look away. Instead of blood and his mother's inner organs spilling all over the floor of their croft, a light burned inside-green but warm, like the late afternoon sun shining through a canopy of new spring leaves.

"See," said the voice — and Lewan saw, falling into the green light.

The green glow dimmed and he found himself surrounded by blue, broken only by high, thin streaks of white. Clouds. The white was clouds. He turned, and below him stretched hundreds of miles of golden grassland. The Amber Steppes. And directly beneath him was a mountain, which rose into a broken cone. He'd never seen it from this high up, but he recognized it immediately. Sentinelspire.

As he watched, an entire face of the mountain-scores of miles of stone, soil, and greenery-fell, collapsing in upon itself. The landslide had scarcely started sliding down when the entire mountain-and several miles of ground around the mountain-exploded. For a heartbeat, a lightning-flash moment, Lewan thought he saw a white-hot center of fire, but then all of the remains of the mountain and surrounding countryside spread outward in a great cloud of blasted rock and fire, moving faster than the sound of the explosion. The fire-shot darkness swallowed him.

When he could see again, before him was the greatest wonder he'd ever seen. The world stretched out before him. He saw the yellow haze of the Endless Wastes, the darker smudges of mountains and woods, the Great Ice Sea to the north, and hundreds of miles in every direction. So high was he that he could see the curve of the world falling away in every direction. But directly beneath him he saw again Sentinelspire's explosion, as if time had sped up. The great cloud of ash and fire rose farther than the highest clouds, spread out as the wind caught it, and still grew and grew, covering thousands of miles of land in darkness. Beyond the great cloud where the ash thinned, still it spread a murky haze for tens of thousands of miles.

His vision shifted again, back down to woods and forests. He saw rivers choked with ash, dead fish floating downstream to rot in lakes. He saw rain filled with soot and sulfur poisoning streams and fields. He saw fruit wither on the vine and crops rot in the fields from the lack of sun. Summer did not come to many lands, and the following winter was harsh beyond recorded memory. Starvation and disease ran rampant, in man and beast alike. Wars erupted as nations invaded the lands of their enemies-or their allies-in a desperate bid for food. Entire cities burned. Villages were laid waste. Tens of thousands died in the first year. Then even the armies broke apart or turned upon their own ranks as soldiers starved.

But as the seasons passed, the winds and rain cleansed the air, and though Sentinelspire-no more than a gigantic crater-still oozed steam and smoke, the wild recovered. Civilization crumbled as men, elves, and other civilized people tore at one another and became savage in their bid for survival. But forests took root where once men had tilled fields. Trees grew in the midst of ruined castles. Beasts made homes in the broken bones of once-proud cities. Years passed. Where rivers had once run foul with the sludge of sewage from cities, they ran clean again. Sunrises and sunsets were no longer sullied by thousands of fires from cities. Even the great craters hundreds of miles south of the Great Ice Sea cooled and filled with water from clean rain and melting snow. It seemed almost a- Paradise.

The image remained clear, but a new sound broke Lewan's sense of peace. He heard horns, cries of alarm, and people shouting. He looked around, and the image of the new world dissolved and faded, like smoke on the wind.

Lewan opened his eyes and sat up, dislodging the blanket he'd wrapped around his body. A light rain was falling on the balcony, rippling the leaves of the vines clinging to the stone. Clarions sounded from somewhere inside the fortress, echoing off the canyon walls. He heard people shouting.

The door to the balcony opened, and Ulaan stood there, the thick fur coverlet from the bed wrapped round her shoulders. She had lit a lamp in the room behind her, and it outlined her in a dim, flickering light.

"What's happening?" asked Lewan as he struggled to bring his mind out of the dream and back into the world around him.

"The Fortress is under attack."