The Steward and the Sorcerer by James Peart (small books to read .TXT) 📗

stayed inviolate, rooted in a childish Elysium.  He broke from the company of their fellowship and forged new connections, not in any progressive way but in a sort of degenerative retreat.  Tiring of his peers, he began at first to drink with freshmen, then formed an alliance with the college’s undesirable types: activists and fervent Charismatics, individuals whose families were marked with a slur on their names.  He invited locals from surrounding village pubs to stand choir in the quad outside the bursar’s digs and sing bawdy songs at varying pitch and degrees of lewdness.

Now his mother wanted him to approach Christopher and worry the cause of his unhappiness.  He gazed out at his old friend and wondered what he would tell her.

There was a man on the beach, emerging from a nearby cove, walking toward the lagoon Christopher was situated in.  This man was easily the tallest human being Simon had ever seen.  Six feet eleven, perhaps seven feet.  He was dressed in a long, thick black cloak which whipped around his legs as the wind caught his stride.  There was a sense of purpose about his movement and although he could not see the man’s face clearly, he caught an impression of something grim and harshly commanding.  The man’s eyes roved around the bay, eyes that missed nothing, seeming to peer deep into the Went’s beach house as they swept his way, fleetingly connecting with his own, he swore, before moving past.

“Who on Earth?” Isobel started, turning to Simon, and he found he had to conceal a smile before he could react properly.  The theatricality of it was overwhelming: The Reaper coming for her son, crashing through the forest to claim yet another reluctant life...only the woodland was a mile south of here and this was no mythical being.  There was something horribly real about this man, though he couldn’t put his finger on it.  On closer inspection there were markings along the side of his face- burn marks, he would guess from this distance- and a slight hitch to his gait suggesting an injury resultant from some unknowable encounter.  Something gleamed at the edge of his fingers on one hand and he lifted it in the approximate direction of where Christopher walked.  Simon and Isobel looked on in a sort of light trance as the figure closed the remaining distance between itself and the young man.

It occurred to both of them to act, which they did synchronously, freed of their paralysis, bursting through the house’s pavilion door.  “Christopher!” his mother yelled, waving her arms, and his friend turned about, breaking momentarily from his reverie.  But Simon sensed all at once the futility of her warning and grasped one of her arms to lower it, letting go and running ahead of her and toward his friend.  The man ignored both of them, green fire issuing from the fingers of his raised hand, swallowing the air it touched, Simon was convinced later as he replayed the event over and over in his mind.  The flame streaked from the man’s fingers like the flash of a gunshot, or the afterimage of a very powerful camera, and carried toward his now stumbling friend.  He wasn’t close enough to reach Christopher but- in a decision that took a fraction of a moment and one he spent a long time since bitterly reviewing- he threw himself in the path of the flame, hoping to deflect its course.

His efforts were in vain as the fire consumed them both.

7.

Daaynan walked through the bursting light and emerged into a world of half-light.

He was inside a building of some description, or at least part of a building as a substantial portion of it had been eroded and exposed to the outside, long ago by the look of it.  A red-shadowed haze covered the sky and his first thought was that he had arrived in the night.  As he looked up into the sky, however, he disconfirmed his suspicion: an enormous red sun filled the heavens, far closer to the Earth- if this was the Earth- than he had ever seen the sun in his Northern Earth.  The stars were faintly visible in the patch of sky not absorbed by this sun, a thing he would have thought impossible but for the weak light it provided.  It was surely no stronger than the moon back on his world.

The portion of building he stood in was, or had been, a giant hall, a vast rectangular chamber that stretched at least 200 metres in length and 50 in breadth.  There was nothing inside it, not a stick of furniture or even paintings on the walls, but its great columned arches rising to the elaborate ceiling artwork faintly took one’s breath away.  There were images carved into the plasterwork that depicted men and women in various states of work and rest, the carvings elegant and exquisite.  They captured a certain hauteur in the expressions of the people, even those at work.  This was, or had been, a palace of Kings, he thought.  It would do to explore it further.

To his right stood an arched entryway that led into a chamber smaller than the hall but still very large.  Here there were pictures on the walls, and tables surrounded by chairs, one very long table featuring prominently in the centre of the room.  There was a smell of dried bones, immediately apparent on his entering the room, the cause of it leaning forward onto the table, back against the chairs, or collapsed in heaps on the floor.  There were the remains of what had once been food set out in bowls and plates at the centre of the table, with mats and utensils that had grown rusted.  A skeletal feast, his mind japed, as he turned to dry-retch on the stone floor.  Gathering himself a moment later, he felt alright once more.

At one end of the central table and to either side of this end were three seated skeletons, almost fully intact.