MAGUS INFINITE

Maybe it was because of the affection showed to him by the tiger that made me look at this Beastkin favorably, and seeing the light of disappointment in his eye when Dorrik did not appear, I coughed, ”He is at the forge, and I think he would be there for a while.”

The Beastkin’s single golden eye studied me. Up close, I could see the damage more clearly. The empty socket had been roughly bandaged, but fresh blood still seeped through. His coat was torn in a dozen places, and the fabric was dark with old stains that might have been blood or might have been something else.

”I am Ruggah,” he said. His voice was deep and rough, like stones grinding together. ”This is my warband. We are all that remains of the Serrath Garrison.”

All that remains. These words had accompanied me for a while now, and the way he said it just brought me back to a different time, when I had stood in the ashes of my village and counted the dead.

”How many of you were there?” I asked. I knew the number, but I wanted to hear him say it to me.

”Thirty thousand.” He said it flatly, without emotion. ”We held for four weeks. You have to know, we were the best, and we did not give up till the end. The first wave came from the east, and we pushed them back. The second came from the north, and we held the gate. The third came from within, and that is when we began to die.”

”From within?”

He touched his empty eye socket. ”The enemy has a way of getting inside your head. They do not need to breach your walls; they need only to reach one person and turn them, and that person turns the one beside them, and so on.”

I looked at him, and what was left of his warband, imagining the horror of their final moments at Serrath, and I was about to ask him what really happened when he turned and gestured with his one good hand toward the dwarf. ”This is Thurrim, of the Deepstone clan. He is the reason we still have water and fire. He can find water in a desert and coax a flame from wet wood. Without him, we would have died of thirst before we reached this mountain.”

Thurrim grunted, and he inclined his head a fraction of an inch towards me. ”You’re a tall one,” he said. ”And you look at us as if we are naked virgins on your bed begging to be deflowered.”

I blinked at the strange observation. ”I suppose you are not the only short man with a dirty mouth that I have seen recently.”

Thurrim’s eyes narrowed, and he became pale when he realized who else I was talking about. ”Fair enough.”

Ruggah glanced at him, then me, a small smile brushing past his lips before he moved on, gesturing toward the massive grey figure kneeling over the fallen horse. ”This is Ogg. He is a healer, though you would not know it to look at him. He has saved more lives than I can count, and he led the medical team before they were...”

Ogg looked up, and I saw the exhaustion in his eyes, and they were filled with a deep intelligence and awareness that drew my attention. ”I am no healer,” he said. ”I am just a troll who learned how to put things back together. There is a difference.”

I did not like the way his voice sounded, so filled with pain. I could understand pain, but despair only won if you let it. ”You are a healer,” I said. ”That is what healers do.”

Ogg’s grey face was unreadable. ”You speak as if you know this. Have you known many healers?”

”I have known one,” I said, and my mind went to my mother. ”She was very good at it. She taught me that healing is not about fixing what is broken. It is about giving the broken thing a chance to fix itself.”

Ogg looked at me, then he nodded, once, and went back to his work.

Ruggah gestured toward the three pale figures who had not moved. ”These are the Shades. Sil, Sef, and Sen. They are the last of their kind in this region. The enemy has been hunting them for years, since their gods were among the first of the Fallen. They do not speak, but they see things that others cannot see. They are the reason we knew which way to run.”

I looked at the three Shades. They did not acknowledge me, but I felt their attention settle on me like a cold weight. They were watching me, I realized. They had been watching me since I emerged from the mountain. I found these Shades to be extremely creepy, and this was mostly due to their disposition and not necessarily their bodies.

The woman in the coat had not been introduced yet. She stood apart from the others, her face hidden in the shadow of her hood, and I could not tell if she was looking at me or through me.

Ruggah seemed to hesitate. Then he said, ”And this is Coin. She is one of the rare Anhalim.”

”Anhalim,” I repeated. The word was unfamiliar, but I had seen it on Dorrik’s tablet. A race that had been nearly extinct, even in this age.

Coin did not move. She did not acknowledge the introduction. But I felt her attention shift, just slightly, and I knew she was listening.

”The Anhalim are an old race,” Ruggah said. ”Older than this world itself, some say. They were the first to resist the Great Fitting, and they paid for it with their blood. Coin may be the last of her people, and she carries the memory of everything they were.”

I swallowed... the end of all of this, all these races and names and stories no longer seemed so distant in the future. They were all going to die, and I was looking at one of the first casualties.

”She carries a heavy burden,” I said. ”I understand something of that weight.”

For a moment, I thought Coin might respond. But she only stood there, silent and still, a statue in a coat.

Ruggah finally gestured toward the two humans who had been watching me from the edge of the camp. They were young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, and they had been through something terrible. I could see it in the way they did not meet my eyes even after all this time, even though I was clearly human.

”These are Tam and Ines,” Ruggah said. ”They were conscripted from their village not too long ago, and after everything they had gone through, they have earned their place in this warband. They were the only survivors of their regiment, and they have been with us ever since.”

Tam was the one who spoke. ”There were fifty of us when we broke through the lines. Only the two of us made it out.”

”I am sorry,” I said. ”That is not a thing anyone should have to live through.”

Tam’s jaw tightened. ”It’s the way of things now. Everyone is dying, and we are just the ones who haven’t stopped moving yet.”

Ines did not look at me. She was looking at the ground, and I could see a tear tracing a line through the dirt on her cheek.

”Tell me about Serrath,” I said. ”What happened there?”