Bearers of the Black Staff

IT TURNED OUT THAT SIDER WASN’T MUCH even for standing. He tried it with Deladion Inch’s help, but he collapsed almost immediately, dizzy and weak. The big man told him to stay where he was, that there was a better way. He disappeared into the woods, but was back again in minutes with a pair of saplings he had cut down. It took him a little less than twenty minutes to rig up a sled consisting of his cloak stretched over and secured to poles that he fashioned from the saplings with an enormous knife. Once the sled was ready, he placed Sider on it, hitched up the ends with his big hands, and set out. It was an uncomfortable ride, bumping along over uneven ground strewn with rocks and debris, and Sider wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have been better off walking. But Inch seemed to feel he wasn’t ready for it, voicing again his concerns that there might be internal injuries he couldn’t know about. So Sider left it alone. He lay back and silently endured, hands clutching the black staff and feeling the magic respond. He knew that healing came more quickly to a bearer of the staff than to ordinary people, and he could already feel himself knitting inside.

The journey lasted a little more than two hours and took them down out of the rocks and into woods that were green and fresh and smelled of living things and sweet water. Sider saw nothing of either water or life, but he could sense that they were there, just out of sight. Breezes blew out of the south, clean and cool. Sunlight dappled the woods and spilled in bright streamers through gaps in the canopy, and Inch hummed and sang to himself as he trudged along.

But every now and then there were hints of darker things, of the past that Sider had expected to find. Smells of decay and harsh chemicals wafting in the wake of the fresher breezes, there for only a second or two and then gone. He caught glimpses of ruined forest and blasted land through the trunks of the trees his bearer negotiated, barren and stark. Once, off in the distance, he saw the remains of what might have been a fortress reduced to rubble. He took all this in and wished he could scratch the itch of his curiosity by setting out for a closer look. But his healing was not complete and his strength still suspect. He would have to bide his time.

“Not so far now,” Deladion Inch advised after they had traveled for some time, but he said nothing more after that.

Finally, they broke clear of the woods and emerged onto flats that were all hardpan and scrub, stretching away for miles until they disappeared into the horizon south. Gullies and ravines had been carved out of the hardpan over time by weather and water, and clusters of rocks formed strange monuments amid the emptiness.

Dominating the whole of this wasteland was a massive walled ruin that climbed from one level to the next, buildings crumbling, roofs collapsed, and doors and windows black holes into the spaces beyond. Towers and parts of the outer walls that were still standing attested to the size of what had once been a huge fortress.

It was the fortress he had seen earlier, Sider realized.

“We’re here,” Deladion Inch declared, setting down the ends of the sled and rolling his shoulders wearily. “You know, you weigh a lot more than I thought you would.”

Sider was still staring at the fortress as he eased himself into a sitting position. It looked like something out of a time he had heard about from those who still kept track of the history of the old world. But it wasn’t from the time of the Great Wars; it was much older than that.

Or newer, he thought suddenly.

“When was this built?” he asked Inch.

The other man shrugged. “Maybe two, three hundred years ago,” he answered, confirming what Sider had suspected. “Built by once-men that survived long enough to complete it and then be wiped out by a plague.” He shook his head. “Legend has it the plague killed more than half of whoever was left after the firestorm that killed almost everyone before that.”

He looked back at Sider. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“In there?” Sider gestured toward the ruins.

“Safe enough.”

“Doesn’t look it.”

“What does? In this world, nothing’s really safe. Didn’t you know that?” He laughed. “Let’s take a look inside.”





NINE