Tourist - 12
Title: Tourist (Part Twelve)
-In Which A Promise Is Made-
The city was beautiful. It was lit from above by small, dim phosphorous
globes which gave the entire area an ethereal feeling. The other residents
of the Village were as Lee appeared; pale, blonde, white-washed
shadows of their former selves.
Lee led us through a long passage of curved, shaped stone after lengthy
meetings and interrogations by his people. Darren had the questions
well, most of which I did not understand. But Ben and I had stayed
through the entire ordeal, looking less than menacing in our dilapidated
state of travel.
The passage was scarred with glyphs carved into the rock, some worn
away to smoothness after all the years. Lee explained how the city was
lit through a light spell that had been set into the rock’s foundation when
the city was built. When all the glyphs faded, dark would come
permanently to their settlement.
Ben and I were given a room adjacent to Karl and Darren, a perfectly
circular room with a sloping, bowl of a ceiling.
Ben threw his staff to the ground with a clatter as soon as Karl dropped
the curtain and collapsed onto a pallet full of straw ticking that crunched
under pressure.
“How’s it feel?” I asked him, and he shrugged, probing his leg with
meticulous, studying fingers.
“It’ll be all right...” Ben rifted off, his faze flicking to me. Thanks to
you,
the sentence finished itself. I nodded. “Do you...ah...” Ben shifted
awkwardly. “How’s the Siri?”
I held it up and it glistened wetly in the soft light, the shifting sand and
silver moving without noise. “It’s comfortable,” I answered. “And it’s
teaching me.”
Ben sighed. “We should spar, but-”
“Tomorrow,” I promised, and he relaxed. “We’ll rest tonight, and
practice tomorrow.”
“What about...” he nodded his head towards the next room.
Karl.
I shook my head. “Darren trusts him. I don’t know what we can do.
Not yet, anyway...I’m afraid that if we do something, he could hurt
Darren. What kind of mental capacity does he have as a magician,
anyway?”
Ben shrugged helplessly, folding his legs underneath him and leaning
back against the shaped wall. “He’s shown no immediate threat,” Ben
murmured.
I leveled him with a glare, and then pointed to his leg.
“...to Darren,” Ben amended, running his weary hands over his face and
letting him support his head. He stared straight ahead, worried. The
stone offset his dark, brooding eyes. I wondered, not for the first time,
how he felt about the whole ordeal. After giving so much of his life to
another person, he wasn’t easy to understand as a singular being. He’d
gotten too used to defining himself in terms of Darren.
“We should guard tonight,” I told him.
“In shifts,” Ben compromised. I grudgingly agreed. “Do you mind
taking it first?”
I shook my head. “You rest. Four hours?”
He nodded, but made no move to rest. His gaze was burning into the far
wall. After a moment’s pause, I left him to his demons.
The hall glowed pearl in the dim, calm light. It was as if a drill had
burrowed straight through ivory. I settled in front of Darren’s door,
sword across my knees.
Karl was dangerous. My sitting outside this room wasn’t going to do
much for Darren in terms of protecting his mind from the doctor, but it
did feel better to be out here. My presence would at least allow Karl a
steady warning that we knew of his activities and were holding him under
suspicion.
Unfortunately, that also meant that Karl understood we could do nothing
about his actions. The danger to Darren, the strings that might connect
Darren’s sanity to the doctor’s, were too strong to judge.
So for now, I waited.
~*~*~
“Daniel!”
I jerked awake, and I could feel heat rushing to my face in embarrassment
that I’d fallen asleep. Darren stood in front of me, his hands on his hips
and a wry grin on his face.
“Asleep on the job?” he asked.
“Guess so,” I replied, rubbing the bridge of my nose with one hand. “I
thought you were inside.”
“No, only Karl,” he said, crouching down next to me and leaning his back
against the wall. “I’ve been speaking again with the leaders of the city.
I’ve managed to convince them to let Lee come with us as a guide.”
I nodded. That would tip things three to two against the doctor. And
another magician could come in handy.
“You should get some rest, Daniel,” Darren said softly, studying my
profile. “You and Ben have both been working very hard.”
“I’ll be fine,” I told him, waving him off with my right hand. But
something about his request chilled me. How much of his concern was
corporeal, and how much of it belonged to Karl’s desire for us to leave
Darren unguarded? “Besides,” I added, “Ben will be out in two hours to
take my place.”
“No, I mean it,” Darren told me. ‘There’s no violence here. It’s part of
the spells on the city. Until we reach the city limits, no blood can be
shed.”
“Oh,” I said, stuck for a moment. How could I tell him that the reason I
was here was not for worry of blood spilt, but for his own mental
capacities and free will?
“Bed,” he commanded, pointing behind me.
But Karl, I wanted to tell him. Karl could hurt you. And that would hurt
Ben, so keeping you safe is really in my best interests.
“We have a long walk tomorrow,” he added, trying to entice me with
sleep. His blue eyes shone in the soft light, azure specks floating quietly
in a sea of color. But the mind behind those eyes was attached to the
puppet strings of the mad surgeon in the room to my left. I shook my
head, breaking our eye contact.
“What is this, Darren? Where are we going?” I ran a callused finger
over the hilt of the Siri.
He sighed. “We’re going far away, Daniel. It’ll take us a few more days
to get there. You’re going to have to trust me.” He laid a delicate hand
over my own, his fingers brushing the healing scars on my knuckles.
Scars from learning the sword under Ben’s detail.
“Can you trust me, Daniel?” His voice was cold and honest, but near
inaudible.
I nodded jerkily and rose, speaking louder than normal to drive out his
whispers. “I’ll just go to bed, then. To sleep.”
He unbent himself and gazed sharply at me for a moment, then
disappeared into his own chamber.
I waited for another second, making sure he wasn’t about to come out
screaming bloody murder, or to try to kill me himself. Then I retreated
into my own room.
The light had been extinguished. In the glow from the hall, I could see
that Ben was asleep, curled childishly under an mound of blankets, his
back to the wall and his staff in easy range in case danger arose. Even in
his sleep, he was on the defensive. I sat down lightly on the end of his
pallet, and laid a hand on his covered calf to wake him.
“Dan?” he whispered hoarsely, and I felt my pulse surge forward at his
voice. I pulled my hand away and made it busy getting my boots off.
“Darren told me to let him be tonight,” I whispered back.
His eyelids drifted shut again, and I studied his face closely, watching it
for signs of protest. I thought he’d drifted off to sleep again when he
finally spoke, his voice ringing deep and clear with no obstruction of
sleep or confusion at all.
“You know, I’d ask you to sleep with me tonight if it weren’t for...”
He stopped. I stared. His eyes opened again.
“Your mouth is open,” he commented, eyes shining.
I willed my face to hide its reaction, but the damage had already been
done. “Sleep with you?” Now it was my voice that had been roughed.
“Just to sleep,” Ben explained.
“But you can’t,” I went on.
“No.”
“Because of your pledge.”
“Yes.”
I sighed, my shoulders falling in exhaustion. I couldn’t deal with this
now. Darren was a good man, but to lose Ben to him constantly, that
was getting tiresome. I turned back to Ben when I felt his hand around
my forearm.
“But Daniel...” his gaze was intensely serious. “I want you to know, I
would. If it wasn’t for this, for him, I would.”
Great. My silence was enough.
“I mean it,” he promised.
“I know,” I said, and his hand slipped away from me. “Go to sleep, Ben.
We’ve got to go far tomorrow, and fast.”
He watched me for a moment, and then nodded shortly, curling up again.
I turned away, gazing at my own pallet, cold and alone and full of
uncomfortable, stale straw.
I didn’t sleep that night.
tbc...