The Burden of Memory Read online

  The Burden of Memory

  The Blood Caeyl Memories, Volume Two

  Welcome Cole

  Caelstone Press

  Traverse City Michigan

  Caelstone Press

  5231 Goodrick Road

  Traverse City MI 49684

  Copyright © 2014 by Paul N. Herendeen

  The Burden of Memory

  First e-book edition September 2014

  Caelstone Press

  ISBN- 978-0-9894249-6-7 (softcover)

  ISBN- 978-0-9894249-7-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN- 978-0-9894249-8-1 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number on file with publisher

  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, mailing address: 208 Elm Court, Castle Rock CO 80104

  The Burden of Memory is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s feverish 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 Katherine, who supported me from way, way back, who bought me my first word processor (yes, it was that long ago), and who was the emotional inspiration for Koonta’ar.

  To Stephanie, my fifty foot tall Marilyn Monroe.

  To Melissa, who graciously lent me her nickname for one of my favorite characters, the Watcher Friss Maedroll Cole.

  To Nick, fellow author and lifelong pal, whose grand physique and grander heart inspired the character of Jhom.

  And to my dedicated reader, cyberspace pal and soul brother,

  Mick, the Englishman from Louisville.

  I give you all my deepest thanks.

  But lastly, but most importantly, I dedicate this book to the one person who lives with my epic list of weaknesses and grand failings, and who always packs my lunch anyway:

  To Heide

  Also by Welcome Cole:

  Henry’s Re-entry

  The Pleasure of Memory

  Volume One of the Blood Caeyl Memories

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  I

  THE KEEPER OF THE FLAMES

  CHANCE STARED UP INTO THE BLACK VOID OF THE HATCHWAY.

  Rusting iron rungs, dimly illuminated by his shimmering green torchlight, climbed straight up the round metal walls like a procession of hellish spiders before quickly dissolving into the shadows. A small half-circle of star-cluttered night defined the hatch at the terminal end of the black shaft more than fifty feet above him.

  After a moment, he lowered the torch. The flames only worsened his blindness, making the darkness above him feel that much more opaque and foreboding, and he didn’t need any more fuel to feed that natural fire.

  In the wake of Beam’s screams, the silence felt overwhelming. It seemed days since he’d watched Jhom climb back down over the rim of that half-circle so far above him. The resolute darkness had instantly consumed his form, and Chance worried that it might never give him back up.

  His heart battered his ribs, ticking off the interminable seconds as grudgingly as a miser counting coins from a purse. Just as he was about to scream out his frustration, a shuffling noise and a winded grunt defeated the silence. In the same instant, an immense shadow emerged from the gloom above to pour down over the final rungs.

  The massive Baeldon landed in a squat before him as the sound of heavy boots slapping the marble quickly echoed into memory. Jhom made no attempt to stand, though even kneeling he was just at eye level with him. The mountain of a man stared at him with something akin to prophecy in his dark, widely spaced eyes.

  Chance steeled himself against his fears. He willed himself closer. He raised the torch just high enough to see Jhom’s burden, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  A crush of flesh resembling a human body in only the basest terms lay cradled in his great arms. Shriveled as a desert corpse, its lips drew back into hollowed cheeks to form a skullish grin. The eyes were fully open, though clouded and unseeing, and they bubbled out from a face that looked to be collapsing in on itself. Any skin not covered in blood or quills or black, oily venom was white as chalk.

  “Is he… is he dead?”

  “Nay, I think not,” Jhom said back, “Not yet, anyway. But it’s nothing like good. Where do you want him? I have to seal the hatch before more of those bastard prodes come back. Gods only know if they’re able to come down the tower after us, but I won’t bet our skin on it. Not on this night, I’m won’t.”

  The words bounced through Chance’s head, but he couldn’t put them into any sensible order. How could this horrid corpse be Beam? The sight of the dying flesh held so carefully before him seemed queerly unreal. It felt like a dark dream where you know you’re asleep, where you know you only have to wake up to escape the danger, but where the terror still burns hot as a branding.

  Beam was the chosen one. Prae the Biled would never have made so great an effort to stop him if it weren’t true. And that meant that if Beam was truly dead, their future was dead with him.

  “Chance, where do you want him?”

  Chance looked down at the polished black marble floor. He struggled to bring order to the chaos of emotions holding him hostage. A doppelganger image of Jhom hanged eerily in the glossy marble beneath him, the two figures connected in reality only where the soles of their feet met at the floor’s surface. He could see no sign of Beam in that reflection.

  For just an instant, it occurred to him that perhaps this actually was a dream. Perhaps that image suspended there beneath them was some alternative reality that only needed to be flipped upright to be made real, to put them back on their path.

  “Chance!”

  Chance flinched. He looked up at Jhom.

  “Focus, will you? He’s still with pulse.”

  Nervous sweat glistened like dew in Jhom’s black, short-cropped beard. Yet those large eyes possessed a sense of grim determination, and their strength delivered Chance a much-needed dose of purpose. He turned to look back down the wide corridor.

  An endless procession of marble Baeldonian sarcophagi stood at attention along both walls, standing nearly shoulder-to-shoulder atop a scrolled ridge set a few feet off the ground. Their stone faces glimmered lifelike in the torches mounted between them.

  A makeshift fire made of three Baeldonian torches laid with their heads together burned on the smooth floor a dozen paces down the corridor. A worn bed of field blankets cradled the equally horrific form of Koonta’ar, their Vaemyd companion. She followed the same road to eternity as Beam, a casualty from their encounter with the horri
fic gor’naeyds earlier that day. The venom she’d ingested from their claws was slowly and very effectively killing her.

  “Down there?” Jhom said insistently. Not waiting for confirmation, he rose from his squat and marched determinedly down the wide hall toward Koonta’ar. His leather soles clacked hollowly against the stone. Each footstep reverberated organically into the darkness.

  Jhom’s aura of determination freed him from his angst. “Yes,” he said, following him, “Yes, of course. Put him right there next to her!”

  He hurried ahead of the Baeldon. On his way, he snatched a blanket from the pile next to the Jhom’s huge saddle, shook it open and folded it lengthwise. Then he knelt down and spread it out on the cold stone floor directly across the makeshift fire from the Vaemyd.

  Jhom laid Beam carefully out on the bedding, cradling his head until he could roll a bit of the bedding up under it.

  Chance held a torch out over the body. The light exposed a sight even more crippling than he’d first assessed. Beam was completely awash in blood. There wasn’t an inch of skin not shredded by the prodes’ claws or peppered with their long, glistening black quills. His bulging eyes were half-closed now and looked as vacant as an empty house. The irises floated in a pool of dark blood. The pallid skin seemed to shrink back from his bones even as Chance watched. He couldn’t reconcile this slaughter spread out before him with the memory of his friend.

  He slipped the knife from Beam’s boot and held the flat of the blade over the bloody gash marking the body’s mouth. After several terrifying moments, the barest hint of breath coalesced against the steel. Taking great care to avoid the dense quills, he pressed his fingers into the neck. It seemed forever before he finally found a beat.

  His relief nearly crippled him. “Blood of the gods,” he whispered, looking up at Jhom, “I can’t believe it. He’s alive. It defies belief.”

  He dragged his pack closer and rummaged through a side pocket until he found a set of steel pincers. Though designed to pull teeth, they’d let him get a firm grip on the quills without having to touch them. He held the pincers out over Beam’s body and… froze.

  Where the hell was he supposed to start?

  Dozens of quills, each several inches long, covered the side of Beam’s face and neck, shoulder and arm. They were thick as fur, more than he could count, though he knew the numbers meant nothing. He’d never met a prode face-to-face (they were believed exterminated generations ago), but he knew from his studies that one quill was enough kill a man more than efficiently. And here before him now were so many quills. He didn’t know where to begin. He didn’t know which were the most lethal. Should he start at the neck or the chest? Should he medicate Beam first? He didn’t know what—

  “Just grab one and pull.”

  Chance looked up. The Baeldon’s dark eyes looked back at him.

  “Don’t go overthinking it, Chance. Just grab one and pull it out. Repeat until done. You need to do this. Your fingers are smaller than mine.”

  The statement was as simple and clear as a slap. It perfectly grounded him. Chance nodded and turned back to the body. He gripped a quill sticking our from Beam’s neck. It came free with less resistance than he’d expected. It was a foot long, thin as a boar’s hair, and black as wet onyx. It looked almost pretty as it sheened against the torchlight.

  Jhom knelt forward across the body and spread a pack cloth out on the marble beside Chance. “Put them there,” he said, “We may have need for them later.”

  Chance found the man’s words most curious. He briefly wondered what they could possibly need prode quills for, but quickly pushed it out of his mind. He’d waste no time contemplating it now. Instead, he simply nodded and laid the quill carefully on canvas before moving on to the next one. The process took forever. When he eventually finished, seventy-three oily barbs lay on the bloody cloth.

  He sat back against his heels and swiped his face. He looked down at the sweat simmering against his palm. He smeared the memory of it away on his thigh, then looked back at Koonta lying in the bedding behind him. Her face was gaunt and gray. Her pale, sweat-soaked hair pasted her skull like a white shroud. The two of them made as grim a sight as he’d ever seen, like a pair of undead lovers waiting for the ceremony to end so they could retire to their wedding crypt.

  He pinched his brow and forced the grim image from his head. Such emotions would only defeat him. It would be too easy to follow them down that road into hopelessness and despair, a road that would ultimately lead to a crippling depression, a road he was cursed with a natural inclination to follow much too eagerly.

  Instead, he concentrated on what remained to do. He needed to clean and medicate the wounds, which meant creating a balm. He looked up at Jhom. “I need water and bandages.”

  Jhom nodded, then rose to oblige the request.

  Chance pulled several stone vials from the pack at his side. He swiped the floor clean with his sleeve, then quickly measured an assortment of herbs and minerals onto the marble. Satisfied with the concoction, he ground them into powder with the pommel of Beam’s knife.

  Jhom returned with a canteen and a wet cloth. Chance took the canteen and poured a measure of water into the powder, then used the knife to mix them into a paste. Jhom squeezed off the excess liquid from the rag before handing it to Chance.

  Chance hastily wiped the blood away from the first wound before working the balm into it. It was going to be a very slow process given the number of punctures and the depth of the gashes.

  “Will that draw out the venom?” Jhom whispered.

  “In theory,” Chance said without slowing from his work, “Unfortunately, I’ve no idea what the elemental nature of the venom is, so this is more of a calculated guess than a prescription.”

  Time stopped. Chance had no idea how long it took to complete the laborious task, but the ache seizing his back and legs spoke of days. As he finally neared completion, he glanced up at Jhom. “Do you have a medical kit? I need something to sew up the talon wounds. These rips are as likely to kill him as the venom.”

  Jhom pulled several rolls of hempen bandages from his saddlebag. He unrolled a suture kit on the marble before him and sat back on his heels. “How can I help?”

  “Let’s start on his back,” Chance whispered, “Roll him up toward you.”

  Jhom gripped the edges of the bloodstained blanket and carefully rolled Beam’s limp form away from Chance. Once Beam was on his side, Jhom held him by the shoulder and hip, letting the blanket slip away to expose his back. Chance quickly cut away the remains of Beam’s ragged leather overshirt. As he manipulated the torn flesh of Beam’s back, he felt a traitorous moment of queasiness. For just an instant, he thought he was going to be sick

  “Don’t you be going south on me yet,” Jhom said.

  Chance dragged an arm across his mouth. “I’m pathetic. Not sure I’m up to this.”

  Jhom laughed. “We’ve been friends too long for obvious lies, yea?”

  “I’ve dressed a thousand wounds, but these are the first that ever caught my stomach.”

  “Small wonder. Reckon they’re deep enough to rip a lung.”

  Chance used a bloodied strip of bandage to pull back the edge of one of the wounds. “Look there. You can see his scapula. And there’s a bit of rib. I think the damned prodes may have wasted their venom. Their talons were effort enough.”

  “Yea, it’s a stinking mess, all right. He almost looks as bad as you.”

  “I’m fine. You need to worry? Worry for him.”

  “Sure, that I absolutely will do. Nothing wrong with you. You’re great. Best looking corpse in the room. When was the last time you slept?”

  “Let’s just get started,” Chance said as he studied the suture kit laid out before Jhom. The needles were big and thick, designed for the huge size of Baeldonian flesh, not for a comparatively tiny Parhronii. “Do you have any smaller needles?”

  Jhom didn’t reply.

  “Do you have anything smalle
r?” Chance asked again as he probed the torn map of flesh in search of a starting point.

  “What in the Nine is that?”

  “It’s a bloody mess, that’s what it is,” Chance said as he reached across the body for one of Jhom’s curved needles, “I need something smaller than—”

  “No!” Jhom said, pointing down the hall past Chance, “What is that? Down there. By the hatch.”

  Chance sat back on his heels and twisted in the indicated direction. A brilliant crimson light filled the corridor beneath the hatchway a dozen paces behind him. At first, he couldn’t make sense of it. Then the truth hit him. It was the Caeyllth Blade. It was awake.

  “Blood of the gods,” he cursed, “I’m a damned fool.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the Blood Caeyl. We have to move him!”

  “The what?”

  “We have to move him! Now! Leave him on the blanket, but slide him farther down the hall.”

  “But what’s with that light?”

  “Jhom! Listen to me! Take him! Slide him down there another thirty feet. Do it now!”

  Jhom stood up and looked back into the indicated darkness. “All the way down there? Are you sure you—”

  “Damn it, Jhom! Just do it!”

  The giant Baeldon looked down at him like he suddenly wasn’t sure the company was safe. Then he shrugged and did exactly as ordered.

  As Jhom pulled Beam and his bedding farther down the corridor, Chance ran in the opposite direction, back to the hatch. The Caeyllth Blade lay on the marble floor of the hatchway just beneath the bottom rung where Jhom had dropped it. The red eye in the pommel burned brilliantly, so much so that he could barely look directly at it. He’d no sooner picked up the sword before a wave of pins and needles rushed over his skin. It suddenly felt as if a boulder squatted on his chest. And he was salivating. The Blood Caeyl was entering its protective mode, something it hadn’t done since that first night in the old tunnels. He had to hurry before it shut him down.