Heart's Desire

them. The giant trees rustled with agitated voices. Conraydin made Gaynor ready, his palms itching. Evangel’s sword growled at her side, sparking tiny meteor showers as a blue-robed man stepped from behind a high bush at the side of the road. Conraydin moved in front of Evangel, blocking their way.

  “We have no quarrel with ye man,” the inquisitor said, eyeing Conraydin, “We’ll let ye pass. But if ye stay in the company of this Dryad we will serve ye the same punishment as all who bring disease and death to our cities!”

  “She is no Dryad,” he said, simply.

  “Am I suddenly blind that I do not see the white sword?” the inquisitor shouted, turning to Evangel. “A sign of her sold soul?”

  “You fear the wrong sword!” and Conraydin swung as men leapt into the clearing then, scimitars in hand, flashing in the light of day like moons.

  Conraydin lost sight of Evangel as he swung and hacked, but he could hear the cry of dying souls and the sizzle of a white sword against mortal flesh. In time, only he and she stood among the bodies of the fallen, corpses crowding about their legs like stones.

  “I am glad to see you are still one of the best warriors living,” she said, wiping her soul’s sword on her brown leather skirt.

  “You had doubts?” he grinned, starting away.

  “None. I wish there were more men like you,” she smiled. “My sisters and I have become cursed. We are blamed for the plague because we are immune to the corruptions of the city. Eastaphalia is not as she was, harried on all sides. I fear I may be the last of my kind.”

  He glanced at her, and said with his voice full of bitterness, “Do you mean there will be no more virgin sirens wandering about the woods with the promise of love on their lips but death swinging from their hips? How sad!”

  Evangel frowned. “The world may become a poorer place than you could ever imagine, Conraydin. Without us the last of all magic will leave the land, and without magic, where is the world?”

  Conraydin lowered his head and walked away.

  By noontime, the huge tortured mountain range loomed over them. Their destination was at hand; they had only to travel through a village to reach it. Conraydin was glad. He wanted a bed to sleep in and some wine with his dinner. But as they neared, he saw that the homes of a village were wood and straw huts with roofs left to rot. Strands waved in the air where the bales had worked themselves free and fallen like dead men to the ground beside the hovels. Conraydin peered at the heat rising over the buildings in long waves, squinted down the long row of silent buildings. They were all that way. All blank and still.

  “Do you think the inquisitors did this?” he asked, crouching to brush away a bit of straw that had blown against his leg.

  “No,” Evangel sniffed, “I don’t smell inquisitors . . . I smell death.”

  Not the first house but the third contained bodies. Bodies and wealth. Families, corpses, all seated around stashes of pocked gold. Skeletons with jaws hinged on drying skin grinned at them. Empty eye sockets followed them. Conraydin’s steps creaked over the tired floor boards, while armies of dust charged and retreated in the shafts of sunlight that lit the tomb.

  Evangel stepped in and out of brightness, moving closer to a pile of mottled glitter. Conraydin glanced around, his heart pounding in his chest. He watched her closely as she bent, sniffing and frowning in the middle of a group of dead, her finger nearing the gold.

  “Dragon . . .”

  There was a sudden puff, a hiss that burst from the blistered metal mound. Conraydin shoved Evangel aside. She fell to the ground as the jet sprayed him in the face, covering him.

  “Shut your eyes and mouth!” she yelled. She doused his head with water, wiped at his face. He held his breath, but he could taste the contagion in his mouth.

  “I think that is all,” she said.

  He opened his eyes as she dropped a rag. It was covered with eggs. He spat out the taste in his mouth. They stared at each other. It was the plague. Conraydin left the hut.

  “Why did you do it?” Evangel cried, running after him. “My sword would have protected me. I could have used its life force to heal myself. But there’s no cure for men! Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t think. I just knew you were in danger--he couldn’t say it even now, how much he loved her. “You know why I did it!”

  Evangel looked around at the dry buildings, “We’ll make camp here.”

  “No, we’ll go on until nightfall like we planned.”

  “Conraydin, stay and rest!”

  “It won’t make any difference,” he said. “Perhaps, it’s for the best. My life hasn’t been worth living of late.”

  They walked until he collapsed. Evangel made camp around him. He sat rocking from the insistent pain. He focused on the distant village they had left. It was burning. It whirled red in the coming night, a second setting sun. Evangel had willed that it should burn, and the wood and straw had ignited like her hatred for the place. It had been so easy for her to make that happen. She had power over every element. She could burn this forest, drown the seas, extinguish the wind and bury the earth, but she could not heal him.

  A new wave of pain struck Conraydin, and he moaned despite his best efforts. She came to him quietly, put a stick against his lips. He took it in his teeth.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “My arm,” he groaned.

  She rolled up his sleeve. He was holding his right wrist, trying to stop the progression of tearing agony. Evangel pulled his fingers away. The worm was crawling beneath his skin, making a bruise trail over his lower arm. Conraydin closed his eyes as she drew her sword.

  He felt the acid burning of her magic blade as she brought it down before the slender mound, cutting his flesh and killing the maggot. He broke the stick in his mouth as she pulled its body out of his. She performed this operation again and again, wherever and whenever the worms appeared. Finally, he could take no more.

  “Enough,” he said, and fell back exhausted, his body shaking and his skin cold.

  “But you’ll die,” she cried, helplessly, “Oh please, Conraydin, as long as you live, I can live, but if you die. . .”

  The only thing he was able to sense beyond his own pain was Evangel’s. It spoke louder than anything in him.

  “You can start again in a little while,” he gasped, his eyes opening from sheer will, “Just tell me a story now, let me rest. It’s your turn tonight.”

  “A story.” She mouthed the words.

  “Yes, my angel.” She was so beautiful, even now at the edge of doom he still loved her.

  “Angel?” she asked, wonderingly, then she covered her face. “Yes, an angel of death I have been to you.”

  “No, I always call you Angel in my dreams,” he sighed, remembering. The pain rose in him again, but he did not move, uttered no sound.

  “A story,” he said, trying to keep her in sight, hold onto her a little longer, “And I will call your debt to me paid.”

  “Never paid,” she murmured, stroking his hair as she had never done before. He sighed as the pain subsided in the wake of his pleasure.

  She recited to him in her smooth voice, like smoke rising toward heaven: “In the beginning there was Creation, effortless like the passing of a soul. And the Creater created, with a word, with a thought. And It made Chaos and Order, and from them rose Light and Darkness, and from them rose the Sky and Earth.

  “Then humans came, naked and small, a woman and man, no more than beasts, clumsy creatures, graceless lovers. Yet they were the Creater’s greatest prize. ‘How?’, Chaos and Order asked together, ‘can these animals, these solid, stolid masses rival the heavens, rival Us, who can sweep them from this world into another?’ The Creater answered that It had set the secret of Creation in humans. A touch of Itself spread like a storm in them, so they, unlike the elements, can create themselves from themselves, and unlike the animals, know the meaning of that moment. And though through the imperfections of their mortal bodies woman and man cannot
join and become One, perfect like the Creater, they can fashion that which is their Oneness, their creations, their eternity, their children.

  “This moment of union is set with portents and wonders, traps for the mind and the body. And though all women and men can reach this moment of Creation, few ever know what goddesses and gods they are.”

  Evangel’s voice stopped. Conraydin reached up to touch her tears.

  “A strange tale for an Eastaphalian Warrior to tell,” he murmured.

  “It is one of the first songs we learn,” she said, trying to smile for him, to speak normally as if he were not dying before her eyes. “This one, and the prophecy of the warrior with a black sword who will bear twins. They will free us of our obligation to safeguard magic. They will keep it in trust for the world, so that there will always be magic. Shall I sing of them for you too?”

  “There is another tale you could tell me,” Conraydin whispered. He could barely keep conscious, but he had to know. He was ready to hear her now. Now or never, for the plague would soon reach his brain, and he would fall into a sleep from which he would never awaken. “Why did you leave me? Where did you go?”

  She took his hands in hers, kissed them. He tried to squeeze her fingers, but he could not. The master of Gaynor could not even hold her hand.

  “You must know why I left.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I am an Eastaphalian Warrior,” she said, as her voice overshadowed the night sounds, and the beasts held from their wrestlings to