The Broken Sword - Chapter 19

Part 4 : The Hunt

Chapter 19

His eyes snapped open and he felt the intense pain associated with being alive. Then came the heat and the noise. He lay still on the sand, his nerves on fire within him. Slowly, the light and colors and raw sensations began to coalesce into patterns. Things began to make sense. He gasped, remembering what it was like to breath, then nearly wretched at the pain of inhaling.

He knew there were people nearby, but he could not yet control his body well enough to look at them. He thought back and tried to remember. His understood pain and torture and punishment. Flames and misery as well. Fleeting emotions, things that filled him with dread. Of their causes he had no recollection. He did remember his final moments while alive though. It was here he had died, on this very ground.

He sat up slowly, his tortured body still for ages and unused to moving. His clothes were bleached by the weather and the sun, and in many places rotting away. His flesh remained whole, miraculously.

He looked over and opened his mouth, coughing as he did so. He tried again, finding his voice still too raspy. A figure, a woman, he remembered, tossed something into the sand in front of him. Yes, a dark elven woman. She had given him a skin filled with water. His hands trembling he reached for it and, after fumbling with it for a time, he managed to bring it to his mouth.

He drank, the cool water burning as it went down his parched throat, then soothing at the last. He shivered, his mind and body suddenly afire from illness. He looked at her again, in a swoon and tried to speak a third time. It came out as a croak of unrecognizable sound.

"Sleep, child, and rest," she said, her voice strangely accented. "In time you will be well and you can serve me as once you served your father. You are the son I should have had... the son I will have!"

He opened his mouth again but a yawing chasm of darkness swallowed him whole. He collapsed to the sandy ground and knew no more for a time.

Alesha awoke with a silent gasp. She was resting from a busy night spent using her powers to try and feel out the growing rift between levels of existence. She had hoped to never again use her powers of necromancy, but she realized that it was only wishful thinking on her part. Long ago she had accepted them and made them a part of herself. There was a saying on the world she came from that she had been reminded of many times over the years, 'be careful what you wish for, you might get it.'

What had woken her this time was not Bobo's incantation, though she was also aware of that. No, she had awoke because once again a great spirit had crossed over from the realm of the dead to the living. The familiarity she felt before was nothing compared to this time, for she knew this spirit. She looked around the palatial bedroom she rested in, thankful that Kelnozz was elsewhere. Now she had only to decide whether or not she should tell him... and she wondered what the knowledge might do to him.

She climbed from the bed and, with barely a thought triggering the necessary magic, clothed herself in a fine dress. She glanced at herself in a mirror, not out of interest in primping, but rather because she wondered how long until the time would come for her to once again don her armor.

Rather than wasting the effort on sighing, she hurried from the room. Bobo needed their help now, she could reflect on the future later.

Continued in Chapter 20