Debt of Bones (Sword of Truth 0.50)

‘I trust you,’ came the small voice.

Abby snatched up a rope lying nearby and looped it around the girl’s neck. ‘I’ll try not to hurt you, but I must make them think you are my prisoner.’

The girl cast a worried look at the rope, as if she knew the rope well, and then nodded that she would go along.

Abby stood, once outside the tent, and by the rope pulled the child out after her. The guards looked her way. Abby started out.

One of them scowled as he stepped close. ‘What’s going on?’

Abby stomped to a halt and lifted the red leather rod, pointing it at the guard’s nose. ‘She has been summoned. And who are you to question? Get out of my way or I’ll have you gutted and cleaned for my breakfast!’

The man paled and hurriedly stepped aside. Before he had time to reconsider, Abby charged off, the girl in tow at the end of the rope, dragging her heels, making it look real.

No one followed. Abby wanted to run, but she couldn’t. She wanted to carry the girl, but she couldn’t. It had to look as if a Mord-Sith was taking a prisoner away.

Rather than take the shortest route back to Zedd, Abby followed the hills upriver to a place where the trees offered concealment almost to the water’s edge. Zedd had told her where to cross, and warned her not to return by a different way; he had set traps of magic to prevent the D’Harans from charging down from the hills to stop whatever it was he was going to do.

Closer to the river she saw, downstream a way, a bank of fog hanging close to the ground. Zedd had emphatically warned her not to go near any fog. She suspected it a poison cloud of some sort that he had conjured.

The sound of the water told her she was close to the river. The pink sky provided enough light to finally see it when she reached the edge of the trees. Although she could see the massive camp on the hills in the distance behind her, she saw no one following.

Abby took the rope from the child’s neck. The girl watched her with those big round eyes. Abby lifted her and held her tight. ‘Hold on, and keep quiet.’ Pressing the girl’s head to her shoulder, Abby ran for the river.

*

There was light, but it was not the dawn. They had crossed the frigid water and made the other side when she first noticed it. Even as she ran along the bank of the river, before she could see the source of the light, Abby knew that magic was being called there that was unlike any magic she had ever seen before. A sound, low and thin, whined up the river towards her. A smell, as if the air itself had been burned, hung along the riverbank,

The little girl clung to Abby, tears running down her face, afraid to speak – afraid, it seemed, to hope that she had at last been rescued, as if asking a question might somehow make it all vanish like a dream upon waking. Abby felt tears coursing down her own cheeks.

When she rounded a bend in the river, she spotted the wizard. He stood in the centre of the river, on a rock that Abby had never before seen. The rock was just large enough to clear the surface of the water by a few inches, making it almost appear as if the wizard stood on the surface of the water.

Before him as he faced towards distant D’ Hara, shapes, dark and wavering, floated in the air. They curled around, as if confiding in him, conversing, warning, tempting him with floating arms and reaching fingers that wreathed like smoke.

Animate light twisted up around the wizard. Colours both dark and wondrous glimmered about him, cavorting with the shadowy forms undulating through the air. It was at once the most enchanting and the most frightening thing Abby had ever seen. No magic her mother conjured had ever seemed... aware.

But the most frightening thing by far was what hovered in the air before the wizard. It appeared to be a molten sphere, so hot it glowed from within, its surface a crackling of fluid dross. An arm of water from the river magically turned skyward in a fountain spray, and poured down over the rotating silvery mass.

The water hissed and steamed as it hit the sphere, leaving behind clouds of white vapour to drift away in the gentle dawn wind. The molten form blackened at the touch of the water cascading over it, and yet the intense inner heat melted the glassy surface again as fast as the water cooled it, making the whole thing bubble and boil in mid-air, a pulsing sinister menace.

Transfixed, Abby let the child slip to the silty ground.

The little girl’s arms stretched out. ‘Papa.’

He was too far away to hear her, but he heard.

Zedd turned, at once larger than life in the midst of magic Abby could see but not begin to fathom, yet at the same time small with the frailty of human need. Tears filled his eyes as he gazed at his daughter standing beside Abby. This man who seemed to be consulting with spirits looked as if for the first time he were seeing a true apparition.

Zedd leaped off the rock and charged through the water. When he reached her and took her up in the safety of his arms, she began to wail at last with the contained terror released.

There, there, dear one,’ Zedd comforted. ‘Papa is here now.’

‘Oh, Papa,’ she cried against his neck, ‘they hurt Mama. They were wicked. They hurt her so...’

He hushed her tenderly. ‘I know, dear one. I know.’

For the first time, Abby saw the sorceress and the Mother Confessor standing off to the side, watching. They, too, shed tears at what they were seeing. Though Abby was glad for the wizard and his daughter, the sight only intensified the pain in her chest at what she had lost. She was choked with tears.

‘There, there, dear one,’ Zedd was cooing. ‘You’re safe, now. Papa won’t let anything happen to you. You’re safe now.’

Zedd turned to Abby. By the time he had smiled his tearful appreciation, the child was asleep.

‘A little spell,’ he explained when Abby’s brow twitched with surprise. ‘She needs to rest, I need to finish what I am doing.’

He put his daughter in Abby’s arms. ‘Abby, would you take her up to your house where she can sleep until I’m finished here? Please, put her in bed and cover her up to keep her warm. She will sleep for now.’

Thinking about her own daughter in the hands of the brutes across the river, Abby could only nod before turning to the task. She was happy for Zedd, and even felt pride at having rescued his little girl, but as she ran for her home, she was near to dying with grief over her failure to recover her own family.

Abby settled the dead weight of the sleeping child into her bed. She drew the curtain across the small window in her bedroom, and unable to resist, smoothed back s

ilky hair and pressed a kiss to the soft brow before leaving the girl to her blessed rest.

With the child safe at last and asleep, Abby raced back down the knoll to the river. She thought to ask Zedd to give her just a little more time so she could return to look for her own daughter. Fear for Jana had her heart pounding wildly. He owed her a debt, and had not yet seen it through.

Wringing her hands, Abby came to a panting halt at the water’s edge. She watched the wizard up on his rock in the river, light and shadow coursing up around him. She had been around magic enough to have the sense to fear approaching him. She could hear his chanted words; though they were words she had never heard before, she recognized the idiosyncratic cadence of words spoken in a spell, words calling together frightful forces.

On the ground beside her was the strange Grace she had seen him draw before, the one that breached the worlds of life and death. The Grace was drawn with a sparkling, pure white sand that stood out in stark relief against the dark silt. Abby shuddered even to look upon it, much less contemplate its meaning. Around the Grace, carefully drawn with the same sparkling white sand, were geometric forms of magical invocations.

Abby lowered her fists, about to call out to the wizard, when Delora leaned close. Abby flinched in surprise.

‘Not now, Abigail,’ the sorceress murmured. ‘Don’t disturb him in the middle of this part.’

Reluctantly, Abby heeded the sorceress’s words. The Mother Confessor was there, too. Abby chewed her bottom lip as she watched the wizard throw up his arms. Sparkles of coloured light curled up along twisting shafts of shadows. ‘But I must. I haven’t been able to find my family. He must help me. He must save them. It’s a debt of bones that must be satisfied.’

The other two women shared a look. ‘Abby,’ the Mother Confessor said, ‘he gave you a chance, gave you time. He tried. He did his best, but he has everyone else to think of, now.’

The Mother Confessor took up Abby’s hand, and the sorceress put an arm around Abby’s shoulders as she stood weeping on the riverbank. Despair crushed her. It wasn’t supposed to end this way, not after all she had been through, not after all she had done.