The Mountains Rise

  Before it could spring back, he bent down and traced a circle in the ground around him and then used his power to create a new shield based on the outline. This time, his shield held with hardly a tremor, firm and unyielding even against the bear’s terrible claws. Now he was only using a fraction of his strength, even though his defense seemed much more powerful. He used the remainder to level a well-focused lance of aythar at his enemy who was nearly finished with his latest creation.

  Carwyn had neglected his defenses, keeping only a token shield while letting the bear distract his opponent. Daniel’s attack tore through the light shield as if it were tissue, continuing on to pierce the man’s abdomen.

  He’s dying now, unless he finds a way to kill me quick, thought Daniel.

  The second monster was charging toward him now, racing to join the first. This one was twice the size of the first, though its basic construction was the same. Daniel felt the shock of its assault in his bones when it struck, but somehow his shield continued to hold.

  Putting more of his effort into maintaining the shield, Daniel drew a second circle inside the first and in the space between the two he added a wavy line, moving back and forth between the two. It was a sloppy piece of work, as far as art went, but once he finished and shifted his power into the supporting lines, he felt the load on him ease.

  Daniel waited for what must have been two or three minutes, hoping his opponent would weaken as he lost blood, but then he saw the impossible. Carwyn was walking across the open ground, approaching him to get a better view of Daniel’s defenses. The wound in his side was gone, leaving only a silvery scar.

  One more thing I need to learn, although the timing is terrible, thought Daniel.

  “You blooded me, Tyrion,” said the other man, “for that I salute you! But it will take more than a single wound and such a formidable defense to win the day.”

  Looking at the other man, Daniel could see that Carwyn had used much of his strength creating the monsters that were now slowly wearing down his defense, but while Daniel was growing slowly more tired, Carwyn seemed to be recuperating.

  So it’s not costing him anything to maintain them after he finishes them, although it took much of his power to create them initially, surmised Daniel. The conclusion was simple enough; he had to kill Carwyn while he still had his own strength and before Carwyn recovered his.

  The other man had a stronger shield up now, but otherwise he merely watched while his beasts tore at Daniel’s shield.

  I need something like the lines to focus my attack, observed Daniel silently. Looking downward he stared at his hands, and then he was struck by an idea. Kneeling he drew a pair of lines across his double shield lines, imagining them as the defining edges of a doorway. Focusing his will he brought his vision into being while leaping forward. The doorway let him pass even as the two monsters were beating at the sides of his shield zone.

  Carwyn was only ten feet away, staring at Daniel with surprise on his face. Daniel released the shielded circle behind him and focused his power on his hands, ignoring everything else. The beasts were already reorienting to attack him from behind anyway. Holding his arms flat, he created two powerful sword-like blades that extended down his forearms and past his fingertips.

  The older man tried to strengthen his own defense, but he had spent too much on his pets. Daniel’s bladed arms sliced through his shield as if it was non-existent, and his body put up even less resistance. His body fell in two directions as he came apart at his mid-section. A look of horror crossed his features for a split second before shock rendered him senseless. Carwyn was dead.

  Unfortunately for Daniel, his opponent’s creations didn’t disappear with their creator’s death. He felt their proximity and dove for the earth, trying to fall beneath their raking talons, but he couldn’t move quickly enough. Unshielded, the larger beast’s claw caught his shoulder and sent him tumbling and bleeding twenty feet across the arena floor.

  The force of the blow saved him, though. The distance bought him time, and he used it to create another simple circle, filling it with his power even as they charged him again. His right shoulder was numb, torn and bleeding, but he knew he had won. Weak, he sat down on the ground, focusing his efforts entirely on maintaining his shield while the maddened constructs raged outside.

  “You blooded me, Carwyn, and for that I salute you! But it will take more than a single wound and such formidable beasts to win the day,” he muttered to himself, rephrasing his opponent’s words. That did strike him as humorous, and he began to laugh quietly as he sat in the dirt, watching the monsters trying hopelessly to reach him.

  A new chime echoed across the arena, and the lights changed from red to blue. Daniel kept his shield up, though. The monsters seemed to care little for the rules of the arena. They kept at him until Thillmarius appeared and used some strange type of magic to destroy them.

  Daniel had seen that sort of magic produced only once before, when Lyralliantha had produced his slave collar. Watching it, he was fascinated. Twin ropes of intricately formed power emerged from Thillmarius’ hands and wound their way around the two magical creatures before constricting and tearing them into smaller pieces.

  If I could do that, this wouldn’t have even been a contest, noted Daniel as he lowered his shield for the She’Har. Thillmarius took his hand and held it high over his head, speaking in his native tongue.

  There was no applause or response. The crowd remained silent, as if uncertain how to react. Daniel could see Lyralliantha, though, standing on one of the balconies. She watched him, but she did not cheer.

  Thillmarius led him from the field and back toward the wardens waiting at its edge. “You surprise me again, wildling,” said the She’Har, “Carwyn was generally expected to win. This was to be his last fight.”

  “Last fight?”

  “The Centyr Grove had decided to reward him with elevation to the rank of warden. This fight was to be an easy victory for him before taking his new position, or so they thought,” said Thillmarius with a sly grin.

  “You knew I would win?” asked Daniel.

  Thillmarius shook his head, “I can lay no claim to such knowledge of the future, but I do look forward to more surprises from you, wildling.”

  Daniel was left alone with the two wardens who had originally brought him, and after one of them sealed and treated his wounds, they led him away. He watched them with new eyes as they left the forest and entered Ellentrea again.

  “Were you both like me once?” he asked them when his curiosity got the best of him. Thillmarius’ remark about a slave being made a warden had him wondering.

  One of the two grunted, but the other paused before answering, as if giving the question some thought. “I was never like you, baratt. I grew up in Ellentrea.”

  “But you were a slave once?”

  “I am still a slave. I just have clothes and a reasonable chance of living another year. Most never get this far,” the warden replied.

  Emboldened by the warden’s sudden willingness to talk, Daniel risked another question, “Are there many other ‘wildlings’?”

  The warden who had remained silent laughed suddenly, but still didn’t respond. His companion looked at him for a moment and closed his mouth. They walked in silence the rest of the way back to Daniel’s room.

  The previously talkative warden opened the door while the quiet one stood back. As Daniel passed him, he said a few words quietly, “You’re the first one, ever.”

  Daniel looked at him, a dozen questions leaping to his mind at once, but the door closed, and he was again left alone with his thoughts.

  Chapter 21

  Two more days of silence passed, and the solitude began to eat at Daniel’s patience. He practiced relentlessly, creating shapes and walls of pure force, both with and without lines or other boundaries to reinforce them.

  One thing that had bothered him most during his fight with Carwyn was the difficulty and time that was required in drawing li
nes on the ground. Dropping to one’s knees and using your finger to sketch in the dirt wasn’t practical or timely when you had another person busily trying to kill you. Plus, he had noticed that parts of the ground within the arena were stony, which would make drawing with his finger impossible.

  After a series of experiments, he finally arrived at a method for using a focused line of power to draw on the ground. He would use his finger as a guide for the power, extending it as far as necessary to reach the ground. He practiced within his room, drawing lines on the floor with his invisible ‘stick’ as he thought about it. If he encountered something harder than dirt, he was pretty sure he could sharpen the end of it enough to cut the lines if necessary, but he wasn’t able to test that idea in his room.

  Daniel was also concerned about the way Carwyn had healed himself. One of the warden’s had done the same for him before they left, using a light touch to seal the skin over his wounds. He had also repaired one of the muscles in Daniel’s shoulder.

  Examining the place with his special senses, Daniel could detect the join line where the muscle had been reconnected. His skin had scars as well, where it had been knitted back together. It wasn’t a perfect method of healing, but it was fast and effective.

  It’s damn handy when you’re bleeding to death.

  His biggest problem was that he didn’t have any wounds to practice mending. The first thought that occurred to him was waiting until his next fight, if he was injured again, he could try to fix it before the wardens did, assuming he won. But you might lose for being unable to stop bleeding during the fight itself.

  He needed to learn sooner.

  Gritting his teeth, he created a sharp knife-like blade of force around one finger and used it to carefully cut a two inch line across his right thigh. He kept the cut shallow, to avoid damaging the muscle beneath the skin, but he made it deep enough to ensure that he had a genuine separation of the skin itself. Luckily the sharpness of his aythar made the incision almost painless, although it began to throb almost as soon as he had finished.

  The blood welling from the cut made it impossible for him to see the edges with his eyes, but his mind found them easily enough. He tried pulling the edges together and willing them to glue themselves to each other, but that failed miserably. After several more failed attempts he finally hit on a solution.

  Weaving a thin thread-like line of power in and out, he could draw the edges tightly together and hold them in place. Focusing his perception even closer he could then find the tiny ‘bits’ of skin that had been severed and torn. With practice he learned to knit them together again. They weren’t linked exactly as they had been before the cut occurred, but they were at least connected to similar pieces. He had no names for what he was working with, but he could see things far too tiny for the human eye to perceive.

  After fixing the first cut he realized that while what he had done worked, it was far too slow.

  “I need practice,” he told himself, wincing at the thought while he gazed at the neat line of the silver scar on his thigh.

  That’s it!

  Using his left index finger he cut a long line along the outside of his forearm, following the bone. He stopped to reknit the skin every couple of inches. Now and then he had to stop when the pain got too much for him. His mind had begun to anticipate the cuts, making them hurt more intensely than they really should have, but he kept going anyway.

  Half an hour later he had a neat line extending from his elbow to the tip of his pinky finger. Then he began a corresponding line on the inside of his forearm. The second line took even longer, becoming especially painful as he worked his way along the outer edge of his thumb and index finger.

  Once he had finished, he stopped to admire his work. He had gotten much better at fixing cuts. So good in fact that he had been forced to relax his standard of perfection for at some points he had almost failed to leave a scar line. And the line is what it’s all about.

  Holding his arm up in front of him, he visualized the force blade he had used to defeat Carwyn. It appeared instantly, and his steadily improving perception could tell it was better than before. The amount of aythar required to create it was less now, and its form and edge were stronger. Daniel experimented with changing its length, getting a feel for the differences in how much power it required.

  “I feel sorry for anyone who gets within range of this,” said Daniel aloud. Range would be anywhere from three to ten feet if he wanted to use the blade effectively. He could also see using the lines to focus his power for ranged attacks as well, but he didn’t have enough space in his tiny room to practice that as he might have liked.

  Daniel stared at his other arm, which was still free of scar lines. He winced inwardly as he contemplated repeating the process on it. Mentally steeling himself he got to work. It was painful and bloody, but he was already learning that most things in this life were like that. Bleed now or die later.

  ***

  More than a week had passed, and Daniel hadn’t seen anyone other than the woman who brought his food and water twice daily. She was turning out to be wonderful company.

  “Good morning, Brenda!” he said to her when she entered in the early part of the day. She refused to give him a name, so he had picked that one for her out of spite.

  “You look beautiful again today, Brenda!” he told her when she returned in the evening.

  As the days had gone ceaselessly from one to the next without any reply from her, he began to come up with more creative greetings to amuse himself.

  “Brenda, I must confess that I’ve fallen in love with you,” he told her sadly that day. She kept her eyes on the floor and moved to deposit his tray on the table.

  “I’ve tried to get you out of my mind, but I just can’t,” he added. “You’re the only woman for me.” She had claimed the empty tray and was making rapidly for the door.

  Daniel moved to block her exit, “Really, Brenda, you’re quite literally the only woman I can see anymore.”

  “Please move,” she told him.

  “But you haven’t told me your name, or do you prefer Brenda?” he teased.

  The woman looked up at him, brown eyes framing her bent nose, “I have no name. I am not worth fighting.” Her expression conveyed a sense of pain, long held and well accepted.

  Daniel remembered being taken before Lyralliantha after he had killed the girl. They had seemed to feel that he would be happy to be awarded a new name. That’s sick, he thought to himself, these people have to kill someone before they get a name? Even worse, they apparently looked forward to it.

  “From now on, I will call you Amarah,” he told her, feeling bad about his previous teasing.

  Her eyes grew wide with fear, “You mustn’t! They will whip me if I take my own name!”

  Her aura flared for a moment, and Daniel could see the reaction was genuine. Although she possessed the same gift he did, her aythar wasn’t much stronger than some of the people he had known back in Colne. Her weakness must have made her unfit for the arena, and while it assured her of a safer existence, she was clearly unhappy with her lot.

  “Only here, when no one can hear,” he told her reassuringly. “You will be Amarah to me from now on.” He stepped back to give her more room, and she ducked past him, running from the room as if it were on fire.

  “That went well,” he told himself. He was surprised when only moments later one of the wardens opened the door again.

  Did they hear me name her? he wondered. His back was crawling with the memory of his last whipping, and he regretted naming the woman.

  The warden was the same one who had spoken to him the week before, after he had killed Carwyn. He led Daniel silently toward the edge of the forest again.

  Still afraid, but hoping that it wasn’t more punishment awaiting him, Daniel spoke up at last, “Am I being taken to another fight?”

  “No,” said the warden flatly. They walked for another minute before he added, “I am commanded to bring
you to your master.”

  “Lyralliantha?” said Daniel, using the opportunity to refresh his pronunciation of the strange name.

  “Yes,” said the other man.

  They had reached the edge of the god-trees when Daniel spoke again. “What is your name?”

  The man looked at him with faint surprise before answering, “Garlin.” One hand rose and he made a fist, showing Daniel the back of it. His name was tattooed on the skin there.

  “Nice to meet you, Garlin,” said Daniel.

  Garlin’s eyes narrowed, “Keep your sentiments to yourself, baratt.”

  The warden’s sudden anger confused Daniel, but he held his tongue. It seemed that friendliness angered the humans of Ellentrea faster than any insult, though he still didn’t understand why.

  When they reached the base of the right tree, the warden started upward immediately, but Daniel paused, watching the way the man shaped his aythar. It looked as if he had two extra appendages crafted of invisible energy, one above and one below him that alternately pushed and pulled to maintain his gravity-defying stance as he walked.

  Daniel tried to imitate the smooth movement of the warden, but he was forced to go slowly, stopping and starting as he tried to copy the other man’s technique. Garlin watched him intently but didn’t comment.

  Even with the awkwardness, Daniel still moved almost twice as quickly as he had been able to while crawling. He felt a subtle sense of pride when he reached the platform where Lyralliantha waited.

  She said something to the warden before he could leave. Garlin straightened up and moved to stand beside her, when she spoke again he followed her words with his own.

  “She wishes to ask you a few questions,” said the warden. “I will remain to translate for her.”