The Pleasure of Memory Read online

  The Pleasure of Memory

  The Blood Caeyl Memories, Volume One

  Welcome Cole

  Caelstone Press

  Traverse City Michigan

  Caelstone Press

  5231 Goodrick Road

  Traverse City MI 49684

  Copyright © 2013 by Paul N. Herendeen

  The Pleasure of Memory

  First e-book edition September 2013

  Caelstone Press

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9894249-0-5

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices. For information, address Caelstone Press, 5231 Goodrick Road, Traverse City, MI 49684

  The Pleasure of Memory is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Caelstone Press is a registered trademark.

  Cover design by P. N. Herendeen.

  Cover fonts by Aenigmate Productions.

  Title page fonts by Apostrophic Labs.

  To those dear friends who endured my early scribblings, and who supported me in spite of them, and who kept me from hanging myself in the garage, I cannot thank you enough.

  Melissa

  Stephanie

  Nick

  Amy

  Tyler

  Special thanks to Katherine, who supported me from the beginning, who saw the grain through the mounds of chaff, and who encouraged me from very early on.

  And lastly, but most importantly, I dedicate this book to my once and forever girlfriend.

  To Heide

  I

  A JOURNEY ENDS

  I

  T’S A GOOD DAY TO BE YOU!”

  Beam threw a sour glare down at the old vagabond walking beside him. It was less work than slapping him, though not nearly as satisfying.

  The tattered, shoeless bum defended himself behind a wide grin boasting three lonely teeth scattered haphazardly behind sunburned lips. Sadly, the dental impediment had little effect on the man’s ability to blather, which he did chronically and with great enthusiasm.

  “Yep,” the old man said with a clap of his boney hands, “I’m guessing it’s a real good day to be you. Hell, almost makes me wish I was you instead of me.”

  Beam squinted up into the glaring sun and steadied himself against the wind of tedium about to blow his way.

  “I bet you got enough gold there to buy yourself a castle,” the bum continued, “I used to have me a bunch of gold once, too. Only the good goddess Calina, she didn’t shine down too good on me, praise her glory. I’m guessing it’s on account of the wine. I always liked my wine. Some’d say I liked it a full measure too much, if you take my meaning. Say, you got anything to drink in that pack?”

  Beam fired off another warning scowl.

  “No, no, that’s right!” the bum said, slapping his head, “I already asked you that, didn’t I? Might’ve asked you that yesterday. I’m thinking you got lots of gold, but you ain’t got nothing to drink. Reckon I’d rather have the drink, myself. You know, I owned a tavern once. I ever tell you that? Well, you’re damned right I did, and it was the finest goddamned tavern in all of Parhron City, too. You just ask anyone. But just like you’d expect, I went and lost it. I reckon it was on account the wine. You know, it just ain’t fair that a good man like me’d be so pissed on by the gods just for loving the fruits they so generously gave us, praise their glory. I don’t know how a man can…”

  Blather, prattle, and spew.

  Beam scratched his beard and looked out over the grassy plains in search of a distraction, any distraction. Sadly, the old man took no notice of his disinterest, but simply droned on with his story, free as usual from the burdens of point or direction.

  Gerd had wandered in from the endless grasslands of these Nolandian Plains a couple mornings earlier, sun-parched and stinking like a dead bloatsnake. He looked so weak Beam feared he’d drop dead right then and there if he didn’t offer him some food and water. The old man gratefully accepted the jerky, but he stubbornly refused the water for most of the day until Beam finally convinced him he really, truly, swear-to-the-gods did not have any wine.

  Sadly, the morning hadn’t even passed into memory before Beam realized his mistake in inviting the bum along. Gerd, it turned out, was a blowhard, a liar of mystical proportion. He’d barely gotten his name out before the bullshit started flying. He wasted no time sharing his ridiculous tales of grand and glorious travels across the whole of the world, over the entire breadth and width of Calevia herself, including traversing no less than three of her four known oceans. For two endless days now, his ridiculous stories had continued as he spewed out a seemingly endless repository of lies and mind-numbing fabrications.

  His diatribe began with his valiant battles with the militaristic Pendts, a disgusting race of furred, two-legged curs with mouths full of daggers and an odor to shame a skunk. From there he leapt to his years spent intermingling undetected among the reclusive Mendophs, a race of people equally as unsavory as the Pendts, though a modicum more civilized. Xenophobic to a fault, Mendophs wore metallic masks and covered their bodies so perfectly in fabric that it was nearly impossible to determine the gender beneath. Other than the eerie blood-red eyes peering from behind their masks, their likenesses were legend only.

  The ridiculous stories spewed from his mouth the way water pours through a sieve. And with every new tale, Gerd’s exploits grew grander and more absurd. Beam found it a brutal irony that he’d allowed the bum to tag along for conversation only to discover he had the attention span and self-importance of a five year old.

  Then again, it wasn’t like there was a wealth of company out here in these miserable plains. Only predators and victims traveled this loveless road through the empty Nolands. No one with anything more than time to lose would risk it. Beam had been walking this seemingly endless route for somewhere on or about three weeks now, and his only other encounters had been with a handful of people, each of whom was of dubious character at best.

  On the first day, he passed a couple nostrum vendors heading south against his north. They were hauling a wagon full of colorful snake oils to the worn out frontier towns of the southern scrubs where the people were so isolated that even the arrival of traveling salesmen was cause to take a holiday. The vendors’ normally colorful suits were dirtied to the point of ruin with sweat inspired by the brutal sun of the plains, and they smelled of every drop of it.

  A few days later, he met up with a trio of squinty-eyed men dressed in dirty buckskins, long greasy hair, and too many knives. These hooligans led a sway-backed mule perfectly loaded with obvious contraband, leaving Beam to conclude that they were destined for the wilderness rogue camps in the western Nolands. He knew something of such men, having no lack of experience in smuggling himself, and therefore knew exactly how to encourage them to continue on about their merry ways.

  It was a full week before he met his next passerby, a traveling rogue with the eyes of a raptor and a henchman’s grin. Beam was pretty certain this one could smell the contents of a well-laden purse from a hundred yards out. Easily the most menacing of the three visitors, he was also clearly the wisest. He immediately spotted the beast prowling behind Beam’s eyes and subsequently lost any interest in lingering.

  Still, in spite of the miserable company, or lack thereof, in spite of the m
ind-numbing tedium of this endless walk, Beam felt happy, even joyful. At least, he figured this was joy gripping him. Emotions of happiness weren’t something he had much experience with. He’d always considered joy an emotion confined to the hopeful stories and songs of the nameless civilians surrounding him, something to lighten the burdens of the peasants and servant classes who burned away their years as flames to brighten their master’s lives; it wasn’t something to be wasted on rogues and murderers like him. Looking back over the dreary fugue that mapped his nearly forty year life, he was hard pressed to point to a specific place or time where he could admit to even simple contentment, let alone happiness.

  And yet, after all these years, here he was, at long last fully blanketed in joy, and the only thing left burdening him was the bulging backpack strapped to his back.

  He readjusted the straps on his shoulders. His spine was killing him from carrying so much happiness for so many days. He’d tried to buy the mule from the smugglers, but they apparently took his offer the wrong way and instead of haggling, drew their knives. Not one to let himself be outnumbered by a measly three backwoods greasers, knives or no, Beam quickly bloodied the nose of the biggest of them and sent the rest of them running away. Before he could show the bleeding leader how to use his knives more efficiently, the ruffian fled along behind his pals, dragging their miserable old mule behind him.

  He could’ve easily taken the mule if he’d wanted it badly enough, but at the time, there’d seemed no point. The pathetic beast didn’t look like it’d live to see another week anyway. At least, that’s what he’d told himself in the moment. But now, looking back on the experience from the perspective of a couple weeks out, he realized the truth of it. He was simply too content to bother.

  “You’re looking mighty tired, sir,” Gerd said as if reading his mind, “I can carry that bag a while if you want me to.”

  Beam looked down at the man’s bare, dirt-blackened feet, and at the ragged robe displaying far more anatomy than he’d ever wanted to see, and had to wrestle back a laugh. “I’m fine, old man,” he said, “I’ll manage the pack. You manage the conversation.”

  “Well, I know what you’re thinking, but I’m stronger’n I look,” Gerd squawked, “Before Calina cursed me, I was the strongest man in Parhron. Now, don’t you be looking at me that way. I ain’t telling no lies. Hell, you get me mad and I’m likely to break your legs. Why, I remember one time I was in a tavern way the hell out in Dobb’s Outpost. I was fixin’ to have me a drink when this big ole hairy son of a mule decides...”

  Blather, prattle, and spew.

  Beam shoved his mind back into the hike and put as much mental distance between himself and the old man as he could manage. Unfortunately, the nasally voice continued buzzing around his head, grinding away at the natural quiet of the world as persistently as a horsefly. After two days, the tedium was becoming dark enough to threaten his newfound joy, and the gods knew well that he’d filled more than one hole with remains of men who’d irritated him less than Gerd. He glanced down at the old man’s throat and considered his options. It’d be damned easy, wouldn’t it? To finally get some bloody peace? To pull his knife? To go back to the old ways for just a moment?

  Instead, he fought back another impending grin. Nope. Not today. Today was too damned near perfect to ruin with useless bloodshed. For the first time in his life, everything felt right. For the first time in memory, it felt like everything was finally in its proper place, and he had no taste to jinx it by returning to his dark past. As he again scratched at his beard, he amended that thought: Once he had a decent bath, then everything would finally be in its proper place. He’d never felt so dirty in his life.

  He’d spent the last two miserable years sniffing around an ancient Vaemysh graveyard that was damned near the size of grand old Parhron City herself, the same Parhronii capital he now ventured toward. Two years poking around musty crypts by day and scouting through moldy tombs by night. Two years of dried meat, drier bread, and stale, brackish water. Two years of the cursed elixir he needed to ease his confinement dread, along with the damnable nausea and retching that invariably followed the miserable tonic. Two years picking through pockets of the Vaemyn’s moldering dead. Two years of searching and waiting. And searching and waiting. And searching. And waiting.

  He knew there were some who would consider such an enterprise vulgar. Robbing the dead. Digging through the personal effects of corpses. It didn’t exactly entitle him to bragging rights down at the local tavern. He’d spent most of his life as a blade for hire (whenever he wasn’t otherwise engaged in his preferred career as a smuggler), and even among the thieves and cutthroats he’d considered his colleagues back in those glory days, such a means to acquire wealth would be frowned upon.

  But it wasn’t as if he’d been molesting the civilized dead, right? These were Vaemysh corpses, for gods’ sakes, demanding little more respect than the carcasses of toads. The Vaemysh were savages at best, primitives barely elevated above the animals they raised. They weren’t civilized and they surely were not human, and they rated the barest respect while alive and none at all once dead.

  Of course, at the end of the day, it wasn’t like any of that pointless soul searching and handwringing mattered anyway. It was two years gone now, nothing but a memory fading into the dust far, far behind him. He fingered the lump hanging against his sternum just beneath his leather overshirt. The only notion of any importance was that he’d been successful. He’d found this perfect gem, this treasure he’d worked so hard to obtain, and he’d even found a small fortune in gold along the way to boot. Life was good. Yes, life was damned good indeed.

  It amused him to think how abruptly his fortunes had changed. One short month ago he’d been toiling in the desperate scrubs and now he was strolling merrily along the Old Forest Road with a friendly, albeit irritating old vagabond just like the heroes of old returning from battle with their faithful squires at their sides. He was less than a three-day walk from Parhron City, less than three days from a life of leisure, liquor, and lavish indulgence. And all he had to do to complete the journey was keep moving his feet as the road passed away beneath him. The curse of a murdered childhood and a bastardized life was about to be avenged.

  He began whistling a bawdry tavern song, or something like what he expected a bawdry tavern song would sound like. Though he’d squandered his youth in every cutthroat’s tavern between Parhron City and the scores of frontier towns spattered across the endless Nolandian Plains, he’d always been too busy gambling or scheming or whoring to pay attention to the music. So now, he simply made up a song of his own devising, whistling an erratic and tuneless ditty as he walked.

  He turned his face up to the endless blue sky and let the sun pour its healing light down on him. A cool breeze sifted in from the western meadows in perfect complement to the solar heat. As he enjoyed the generosity of nature, the bum’s words faded to little more than a background buzz, like the cicadas droning their chorus from the mysterious treetops to the east.

  This lonely highway was a dirty incision stitching the vast plains of the Nolands on his left to the great and ancient forest on his right. The shimmering Nolandian Plains rose and fell like land-locked waves rolling away into the western edge of the massive sky. Like a great sea, this grassland swept westward for hundreds of miles, an empty, drifting meadow spattered erratically with rare clusters of heady trees and congested shrubs and precious little else. So much like the Vaemysh wastelands, he thought, a vast expanse of nothing sprinkled with rare oases of riches, riches lying in wait for one with the fortitude to go after them.

  The great forest on the right side of this road was the exact contradiction to that emptiness. It towered over him like a looming cliff wall, as solid and bountiful as the Nolands were sweeping and empty. Dense with prehistoric trees towering a thousand feet above the forest floor, this forest marched eastward across the jagged hills for nearly a hundred miles before terminating at the feet of the cra
ggy Baeldonian mountain range. The forest had been named Na te’Yed by the Vaemyn savages hundreds of generations ago, a name that meant Forest of Life or Forest of Food or Forest of Fornication or some other such savage bullshit. At least, that’s what he’d heard. He didn’t speak that primitive language and had no desire to foul his tongue by learning it, so the details were inconsequential.

  Yet, he’d wanted to trespass those naughty woods for as long as he could remember, and he meant it in the most literal sense. The stories he’d heard of the place were wild and unbelievable, stories of mages and spooks and unnatural beasts. The local common folk called it the Forbidden Forest, though the moniker only made him laugh; the very notion of the term ‘forbidden’ implied there was something of value in there that someone else wanted to protect from someone just like him. He vowed right then and there that when he finally grew bored with his riches, he’d come back and explore those ‘forbidden’ woods. And when he did, he’d find-

  Something flashed against the road up ahead.

  Beam stopped.

  For a moment, he just stood there, studying the dirty two-track road rolling away from him and trying to make sense of what he’d seen. What he thought he’d seen. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything. Maybe it was just an illusion or a trick of sunlight. He’d kept his eyes open, right? Watching, always watching, it was his second nature. Besides, the stinking savages would never consider following him this far north, not so close to the Parhronian border. It was unthinkable. And even if they had, he’d surely have discovered them tailing him long before this. For gods’ sakes, where could anyone even hide out here?

  He suddenly wanted to vomit. His pulse was thrumming in his ears. Where could anyone hide out here? Well, nowhere, of course. Except behind that swell in the road up ahead of him. Or possibly beneath the chest-deep grass washing away to his left? Or how about behind that massive wall of trees marking the forest there just a hundred feet off to his right?