Chương 29

The ground heaved. Kang Dae Han rolled off his bedroll and came up in a crouch, his hand on his jian before his eye found focus. The earth bucked beneath his knees like the deck of a ship in a gale. The dead coals of the campfire scattered across the dirt. Somewhere behind him, a tree cracked and fell with a sound like a bone snapped clean. Then the shaking stopped, as abruptly as it had begun.

Silence filled the gap it left, pressed down on the clearing like a held breath, and in afew moments the night birds and insects tentatively resumed their conversation. Dae Han stood and brushed the dirt from his knees. His heart hammered behind his ribs, but his hands were steady on the scabbard of his sword. He looked to his left to find Lodin gone from their campsite. Dae Han stared at the bare ground for three full breaths.

The door of Shin's portable house banged open and the soulsteel man stepped out into the starlight, bare from the waist up, his metallic skin bright as polished silver. His jaw was tight.

"The hell was that?" Shin said.

"Earthquake." Dae Han rolled his neck and felt the vertebrae pop.

"Lodin's gone." Shin looked at the bare patch of ground, then back at Dae Han.

"Gone where?"

"Excellent question." They stood in the dark and listened. The forest had settled. The ground was still. Whatever had shaken the earth had come and gone in a single violent pulse. A haze of dust rose above the treeline to the east, pale against the stars, lit from beneath by a faint glow that pulsed once and died.

"That way," Dae Han said. He grabbed his kasa, set it on his head, and walked. Shin fell in beside him without a word. The forest between the village and the compound passed in minutes. The trail was rough, all roots and loose stone, but soon the trees thinned and the hill rose before them. Atop that hill was what appeared to be a sect compound whose circular wall had split in two.

The near half had slid down the hillside in a cascade of rubble and shattered stone, and the keep behind it leaned at a steep angle, half its foundation gone. The far side still stood, but cracks ran through it like veins in a leaf. Dae Han started up the slope. The ground was bad, loose rubble that shifted and slid under each step, and he used his scabbard as a staff and drove it into the dirt for purchase. Shin moved beside him, his heavier frame sunk to the ankles in loose stone with each stride.

They crested what was left of the wall and looked down. A woman stood in the rubble at the base of the collapse. She wore almost nothing, a wrap of red cloth across her chest and a sarong around her hips, and every inch of exposed skin was gray with dust. A black feathered cloak lay in a heap on the ground behind her. Her short hair was matted with dust. She had her hands around a slab of stone the size of a man's chest, and as Dae Han watched she tossed it aside the way a child tosses a ball.

The slab sailed in an arc and crashed into the rubble behind her and she was already bent for the next one, a boulder twice as large, and that one flew just as far. Dae Han looked at Shin. Shin looked at Dae Han.

"Hey!" Dae Han called down.

"Who the hell are you?" The woman looked up. Her face was streaked with dust and sweat, and her eyes were wild. She looked like she was high on something. Whether or not that thing happened to what gave her such prodigious strength, Dae Han couldn't say. He opened his mouth to ask, but she cut him off.

"Are you bitches gonna help or not?" - - - - Lodin lay buried under a hill. A storm roiled in his guts. Lorn had killed innocent people. He didn't even try to hide it. And that remorseless look on his face, just before the doors sealed shut… The wound flared when he remembered what Sarin Jeida said to him over the campfire. What if you find your loved one, and they aren't the same person you remember. What if you fought and fought, and endured terrible ordeals, only to find someone who didn't want to be saved.

What would you do then? He'd come all this way, only to walk into a trap. Lorn had known exactly what he would do, what would happen down here. Lodin closed his eyes tight, gritted his teeth. It couldn't be real. It couldn't be him. Lorn would never do this. No. It was that thing, Huihun. That thought anchored him, became the bedrock he could use to stand up. It wasn't too late to save him. He just had to find a way to pry them apart, to separate the parasite from its host.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. But first he'd have to get out from under hundreds of tons of rock. Darkness pressed against his eyes. The weight of the earth sat on his chest, his legs, his arms. Damp stone and packed soil held him flat, and the smell of wet rock filled his nose with each shallow breath. He could not tell how deep underground he was, or how long he had been down here. He closed his eyes.

Unsurprisingly, the dark behind his eyelids was the same as the dark in front of them. But when he closed his eyes, Lorn's face surfaced, and the coldness of his expression made an icy feeling spread from his gut. He pushed it off. Put it somewhere he could deal with it later. For now he just wanted to be buried. And to think. To let his mind go where it pleased. It chose to go back to better times. - - - - The morning had been bright and crisply cold.

Frost clung to the eaves of the houses in Stenholt and the harbor below the village sat grey and still beneath a pale sky. Fishing boats rocked at their moorings, their hulls weathered by salt and corrosion. Lodin stood in the kitchen while mom packed them a satchel. Bread, cheese, apples, salted fish, a jar of earthworms from the garden, two fishing lines and a pouch of hooks. She tucked each item in with quick hands and tied the satchel shut.

Even back then, she had to drape her long braid of flaxen hair around her neck like a scarf, otherwise it would touch the floor.

"Stay away from the point," she said.

"The ice is thin past the second bend."

"I know, mom."

"And keep him warm."

"I know!" She looked at him a beat longer than usual, a smirk on her face. Then she ruffled his mop of shaggy blond hair, kissed his forehead and handed him the satchel. Lorn waited on a chair by the door. He was small, even for his age, and pale as the frost outside. His legs hung limp beneath the seat. His arms rested in his lap, thin as kindling, the fingers curled inward because the muscles that held them open had never been strong enough to do the job.

His white hair fell across his forehead and his blue eyes were bright with excitement.

"Ready?" Lodin asked. Lorn grinned.

"Been ready since yesterday." Lodin crouched, and mom lifted Lorn onto his back. Lorn's arms draped over Lodin's shoulders, and Lodin hooked his hands beneath his brother's knees. He weighed almost nothing. Then he grabbed the satchel and the rod bundle with his free fingers and walked out into the cold. The path from the village led north along the ridge above the harbor. Snow crunched beneath Lodin's boots. Lorn's chin rested on his shoulder and his breath came in small warm puffs against Lodin's ear.

"Think we'll catch anything?" Lorn asked.

"I'll catch something. You'll watch."

"I can hold a rod."

"You dropped it in the water last time."

"The fish pulled it."

"Well yeah that's what the fish do when they take the bait." Lorn laughed against his shoulder. They reached the edge of the village where the path forked toward the ridge trail when three boys walked out to stand at the junction, and block their path. Hagen was the tallest, broad for his age, with a flat nose and a permanent scowl. Jurgi and Sven flanked him, thick necked fishermen's sons with red cheeks and mean eyes. Hagen grinned when he saw them.

"Lookie boys," he said.

"It's the cripple and his mule." Jurgi snickered. Sven folded his arms. Lodin set the satchel and rods in the snow. He felt Lorn's arms tense on his shoulders.

"Lodin, don't," Lorn whispered. Lodin walked up to Hagen and broke his nose. The punch was short and clean and came from the hip the way that fisherman Old Gredder had taught him. Hagen's head snapped back and blood burst from his nostrils and he sat down in the snow with a dumb look on his face. Jurgi and Sven stared at their leader, then at Lodin, and neither of them moved. Lodin picked up his gear and walked past them. Lorn couldn't help but grin at them as they passed.

"Why dontcha go fishing boys, it's more productive." The fishing hole sat in a bend of the river, sheltered from the wind by a stand of birch trees. Lodin set Lorn down against a trunk, wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, and baited two lines. He wedged one rod between two rocks where Lorn could watch the tip, and cast the other himself. They ate bread and salted fish and passed a flask of juice between them.

Lorn told him about a book mom had been reading to him, something about a sailor who found a land where the animals could talk. Lodin listened, and watched the line, and felt the cold bite at his fingers. After a while he began to feel a familiar urge, so he excused himself and walked behind the birch stand to piss on a tree. He heard the voices first. Then a yelp, high and sharp, cut short. Lodin ran. Hagen stood over Lorn. Dried blood crusted his upper lip and his scowl had turned into something uglier.

Jurgi had Lorn's rod in his hands, snapped in two. Sven stood to the side with his boot on the blanket. Lorn lay on his side in the snow. His arms were folded beneath him at angles that meant someone had thrown him there. Cuts on his cheek and forehead bled into the frost. One eye had started to swell shut. Hagen drew his foot back to kick Lorn in the face. Lodin hit him at a sprint. The tackle drove Hagen off his feet and into the frozen mud at the river's edge.

Lodin mounted him and hit him, again and again and again. Fists struck teeth, the jaw, the bridge of the nose he had already broken once that day. Hagen squealed and covered his face with both hands and Lodin hammered through his guard until the screams turned to sobs. The other two boys pelted Lodin with their fists, but they didn't know how to punch and weren't especially strong, whereas Lodin was quite stout for his age and always had been. So he ignored their punches, and took his time with Hagen.

And then he got up and went for Jurgi. The bigger boy tried to run and Lodin caught him by the collar and threw him face first into a birch trunk. Jurgi bounced off the bark and Lodin was on him before he hit the ground, fists on ribs, fists on kidneys, until Jurgi curled into a ball and stopped trying to get up. Sven had already exercised the better part of valor, but he wasn't fast enough to keep Lodin from sprinting him down, dragging him to the ground by his hair. He went limp after two punches to the face.

Lodin stood in the snow, breath ragged, knuckles split and red, and looked at the three boys on the ground. None of them moved. Blood spotted the snow in dark circles. He went to Lorn. His brother lay on his side, arms bent beneath him, face pressed to the frozen earth. Cuts marked his cheeks and brow. Bruises had started to bloom across his jaw. Tears rolled down his face in silence. Lodin knelt beside him.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey. Look at me." Lorn's eyes found his. Blue and wet. For a long moment they said nothing to each other. This had happened before, many times. Lodin could see it wearing on his brother, he could see it in his eyes.

"Why," Lorn said. His voice was so small it almost vanished in the cold.

"Why what?"

"Why bother." he let out a breath that shuddered through his whole body.

"Just let them finish it next time." Lodin's vision blurred. Heat flooded his face, his eyes, his throat. Tears welled up in the corner of his eyes. He gritted his teeth, grabbed Lorn by the shoulders and sat him up, held him there because he couldn't hold himself upright.

"There's some fight in you," he said, and his voice shook.

"I know there is. Look at me." Lorn looked at him, one eye wide and wet, the other swollen shut.

"We're gonna find a way. Mom's smarter than anyone, she'll find someone who can help." He squeezed his brother's shoulders.

"We're gonna get strong and we're gonna beat down every bully in this whole rotten world." Then he crushed Lorn against him in a hug, and felt his brother's weak arms slowly embrace him back. - - - - Where was that Lorn now? Not here. Not anywhere, maybe. The thought made Lodin's stomach lurch. His eyes burned, and that twisting feeling in his guts returned.

It was the same feeling as that morning all those years ago, as if a part of him was still there at that icy lake on a morning of pale spring, as if a part of him would always be there. He gritted his teeth as the memory caught flame. The hell with this shit. He hadn't come all this way for nothing. He had a brother to save, even if it meant saving him from himself.