Palaces Of Light

It was a chilling thought that they were walking toward an enclosed space and people who were most probably aware of their presence, people who had cover while the companions were out in the open.

Perhaps it was his preoccupation with those thoughts that made the distance between where they had started and the lip of the canyon seem to pass by in less than the blink of an eye. Maybe, too, they had increased their pace with the knowledge that they were now within sight of their prey. For there was little doubt that the party they had been pursuing had descended into the canyon. There was a trail that they could follow plainly. It ran from the path that they, themselves, had traversed, and carried on ahead. The number of feet that had impressed upon the land was consistent—the children of the ville, and the men who had taken them.

J.B. thought about what Baron K had told them about the men who had come into the ville: how they had acted, how they had conspired to move themselves into a position where they were able to take the children with no resistance from the men and women of a ville that was renowned for its hard-bitten fighters. He suppressed a shudder at what Ryan had agreed for them to take on. It would have been hard enough to tackle them at any point on the route, let alone to follow them into their own territory.

His mind was still mulling that over when the companions reached the lip of the canyon. The strata of rock spinning away below them into the shadows were layered in geometric patterns that were awesome in their precision. The shadows, too, were layered in this way as shards of light caught on gleaming stone.

Yet that wasn’t what immediately caught the eye. Certainly, it was something even more awesome—and yet completely apposite and bizarre—that caused Krysty to gasp, “Gaia, it’s beautiful.”

Mildred smiled wryly. “Yeah, but it’s got trouble written all over it.”

Chapter Five

Baron K was thoughtful as he left Morgan. The old man had recovered, but had been more taciturn than usual. After his outburst, he had refused to be drawn on what he had seen in his vision state. Even the direst threats that the baron could make—worse than chilling, the torture that preceded but stopped short all the time, suspending him on the edge of oblivion without ever taking the plunge—couldn’t shift him from his silence.

That disturbed K more than anything. If anyone knew what he was capable of, then it was the old man. Trusted lieutenants came and went without much in the way of trust when you were a baron, but someone like Morgan—a seer whose insights were important, and whose cache with a sometimes disgruntled populous could never be an underestimated tool—was an invaluable ally, and as such would be privy to things that it was best others didn’t know. Morgan had seen the worst of the baron, and he knew to what lengths K would go to achieve his aims. The old man had been smart in the past, and had known when to counsel and when to shut up and nod. Never had he been so—what was the word?—defiant.

Whatever the old man had seen, it had frightened him so much that he was prepared to incur the wrath of his baron rather than relive it. For it wasn’t as if he didn’t want to speak. It was stronger than that. It was as though to just speak what he had seen would bring it all flooding back in such a way that would drive him into the abyss of insanity.

K mused that he could make the old man talk. That would be easy. Everyone had his or her point of no return, after which their tongues would be loosened no matter what their threshold and their tolerance to pain.

But what would that achieve? Did he really want to hear whatever it was that Morgan had seen?

He reached his palace. His wasn’t a rich ville, and in truth his home was only a palace in relation to the hovels that the rest of the population had for homes. K may be the ruler of this land, but it was a poor land in relation to much of the rest of the wasteland. The soil was poor for farming and the keeping of livestock, and much of the food they had came about as a result of trade. Not that they had much to trade with. When K had arrived here, it was a ville that was on the verge of extinction. Now it was barely alive and breathing. But it was there, crawling and scratching its way to some hope of prosperity.

It might not be much, but it was K’s own. He had built it from nothing, and intended to keep it that way. To do so he had flexed considerable muscle. So it was that Morgan’s defiance shook him on more than one level. It wasn’t just the refusal, so out of character. It was also the fact that it reinforced that which he had been unwilling to face: his own uselessness in the face of this enemy. Rather than go after them himself, he had been more than happy—no, relieved was a better word if he was honest—to let the one-eyed man and his band of mercies go after the children. Even though his own daughter—the one thing he prized more than his own existence—was among the ones taken.