Daniel awoke in a small bed. It wasn’t too dissimilar to his own, and if it hadn’t been for the difference in the room he might have imagined himself at home again. He was shivering badly, although he seemed to be covered by a thick quilt and several blankets. His body felt dry, parched, as though he had been days without water.
A pitcher and a cup sat on a small table next to the bed, so he poured some, or at least he tried to; he got at least half of it on the floor, his hands were shaking so badly. Finishing the cup, he collapsed back into the bed, pulling the covers tightly up around his neck.
When he awoke again there was a woman at the bedside. She was probably in her twenties, though her features were coarse and rough, as though she had lived a hard life. Her nose was bent slightly sideways at the middle, giving her face an off-center appearance. He could only guess that it had been broken sometime in the past, possibly more than once. The most notable thing about her was that she wore no clothing.
One hand was lifting his head, and she had a cup to his lips. “Drink, baratt, or you will die,” she said in a voice that held little sympathy. He could tell by her aura that the task annoyed her, as if she would rather be doing anything other than tending to him.
He drank.
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” he told her, trying to show gratitude in his expression.
Her only response was to spit onto what he now realized was a dirt floor. “If you’re able to talk then you can eat,” she answered. She stepped out and returned a moment later with a bowl that smelled like some sort of broth or soup. She placed it on the table next to him, and then she left again.
Daniel fell asleep before trying the broth, and when he awoke again it was cold, with congealed bits of grease floating across the top. Unable to find a spoon, he simply drank it from the bowl, spilling some down his shirt when his hands shook. He was ravenous, and despite the lack of flavor, he drank until it was gone, swallowing tiny bits of meat and unknown vegetables as they slid into his mouth. Exhausted, he lay back, and soon his eyes closed.
The woman shook him later, and he was surprised to realize that he no longer felt hot or cold, merely sore and uncomfortable. His clothes smelled of stale sweat and he could feel grit under his collar.
He also needed to pee.
The woman offered him another bowl, but as he took it he asked her, “Is there somewhere I can relieve myself?”
She pointed at a clay bowl with a heavy lid that was tucked against one wall, and he understood that it must be a chamber pot. His parents hadn’t used them at home, but he had heard that many of the townsfolk in Colne did, preferring not to leave their homes during cold nights.
“Thank you,” he said, but her only response was a grunt as she left.
He felt a bit strange peeing in the bowl.
Examining the small room he was in for the first time, he wondered where his clothes had gotten to. Cold, he climbed quickly back into the bed.
The next several days passed slowly. The woman returned several times each day, bringing him foods that were increasingly solid, as opposed to the simple broth. She never spoke unless he questioned her, and even then she sometimes refused to answer.
“Where are my clothes?”
Bent-nose ignored the question. He had mentally given her the name for lack of anything better to call her. She had steadfastly refused to give her real name, nor did she seem interested when he offered his own.
Despite the odd care, he was on the mend. His fever was gone, and his appetite was strong. The bandage that had been around his head was gone, removed at some point while he was unconscious. The remainder of his ear had gotten infected, but it had subsided now. The nub that remained was sore and covered with a thick scab. Daniel had a hard time keeping his hands away from it, but he knew that if he worried with it he might start it bleeding again.
The most frustrating part of his new living arrangement was the complete isolation, coupled with unrelenting boredom. He had nothing to do, no one to talk to, and he had been told several times to stay put. Being naked didn’t help either.
He spent much of his spare time watching the world outside his room. He tried to find a good crack or peephole in the walls or door, but they were all too small. Daniel was forced to rely on his special sense to explore the world beyond his wooden walls.
He was in a town, and to his surprise it was much larger than Colne. It might even be bigger than Dereham, although he had never been there, so he couldn’t compare the two. There weren’t any god-trees growing within range of his perception, they stopped some distance beyond the edge of where the buildings began.
The houses themselves were all wooden, but they were oddly constructed. He could find no sign of boards or any sort of cuts. They looked as though they had simply grown up from the earth like wooden cypress knees. They had no leaves or branches sprouting from them; each was simply a gnarled mass of wood rising from the ground. Even the doors seemed to somehow be of one piece with the rest of it. Their hinges turned out to not be hinges at all, but some sort of flexible material that allowed them to swing while keeping the door firmly attached.
Directing his perception downward, he could see that the wood that had risen to form each building was all part of a single root, if that was the right word. He began to suspect that the root itself originated with one or more of the god-trees outside of the town, but he couldn’t follow it far enough to confirm that idea.
The people living in those buildings were interesting in their own ways. In the area nearest to Daniel, there were many similar, one room dwellings. They weren’t part of larger buildings, they were in fact each just one small room, separate and distinct, and each had only one occupant.
The occupants were of varied sizes, genders, shapes and ages, but they all shared one thing in particular. None of them wore clothes. Each and every one was naked, and all of them bore the unmistakable glow of power.
Their brightness varied, according to their relative strengths, Daniel guessed. Some of them used shields to cover their bodies, which made it more difficult to see their aura and to gauge their power. Watching them, it seemed that they spoke little to one another, preferring to spend their time alone. Hygiene was at a minimum, and he knew without doubt that his mother would have been shocked to see how they lived.
Most of them were allowed to enter and leave their rooms without restriction, carrying their own chamber pots to the forest to be emptied somewhere, but Daniel was not one of them. The woman who brought him food had given him strict instructions never to leave. He tried the door at one point, but it wouldn’t yield at his touch the way it did for her, and there was no readily apparent latch or other mechanism to operate it.
He was a prisoner.
After a second week without any real human contact he felt certain that he was going mad. He had begun to consider options such as gnawing a hole in the door with his teeth. That was a measure of the depth of his desperation.
The door opened and two men he didn’t recognize gestured for him to come with them. Both wore the same leather armor that he had seen on the wardens. They didn’t bother with words, simply directing him with their hands.
“I don’t have any clothes,” he protested, mildly embarrassed.
“Silence, baratt!” barked one of them.
“But…” Daniel’s second remark provoked them to action.
The closest one kicked his feet out from under him while the other drew his hands apart, creating a red line of what appeared to be rope-like energy.
“Speak only when spoken to,” ordered the one who had kicked him in the legs, pushing down on his neck with one hand while the other man brought the red whip to bear on his shoulders. The searing pain that it created stole his breath and erased whatever thoughts had been in his head.
After the first stroke they released him, and the red whip vanished. “Stand,” said one of them, and Daniel did as he was told, not daring to reply.
Nudity forgotten, he followed them through the narrow streets of their town. They walked for almost two miles while Daniel tried carefully to memorize their path. The alleys between the houses weren’t straight; they meandered at random, without bending to any apparent rationale or design. Most of them were small, one room dwellings like the one he had been kept in, but as they moved closer to the center of what he was beginning to think of as a city, he saw larger buildings with purposes he could only wonder about.
They stopped at last near the largest building he had ever seen. It towered over the others, rising almost a hundred feet in the air. On the other side of it was a large circular area at least a hundred yards in diameter. It had what appeared to be seats or steps rising around it on all sides, except the side facing the building.
The black-skinned forest god met them, and two other men who were naked like Daniel, took charge of him. The first two, who he guessed must be wardens, left, and the naked ones directed him with their hands. Together the three of them followed the forest god around the building, passing through a small gate and into a sheltered area on one side of the circular field.
“Go out there and wait for the lights to change to red,” said the forest god.
“What do I do?” asked Daniel.
“They didn’t tell you?” asked the golden-haired man. Daniel found it difficult to look at his blood red eyes.
“No, sir,” he answered meekly. He didn’t want another stroke of the lash, although he had noticed by now that the previous one had left no mark on him.
The god laughed, amused by some secret joke. “Just go out there. Your opponent will demonstrate for you in a moment.”
Nervous, Daniel did as he was told, and once he had entered the area, a wall of energy surged upward from the edges of the field, encircling it in a dome of what seemed to be impenetrable power. A small girl stood on the other side, more than eighty yards away.
“Hello?” he asked uncertainly, but she ignored his call.
She was naked, just as almost everyone seemed to be, aside from the wardens and the forest gods, and she couldn’t have been much older than eleven or twelve years of age. Her chest was still flat, and her hips had hardly any curve to them. She had no shield around her, but he could see that she possessed a strong glow. What caught his attention though, was her hair. It was bright red, and while she had cut it short, he couldn’t help but be reminded of Kate.
The circular edge of the field was marked at four points by long poles rising from the wall that surrounded it. At the end of each pole was a wooden sphere that glowed with visible light. They were blue when Daniel entered, but they shifted to a red hue now.
A loud noise, like a musical chime sounded in his ears as they shifted color. The girl on the opposite side from him promptly vanished.
“What the hell?” he blurted out before closing his mouth. One second she had stood there, clear to him with both his eyes and his ‘other’ sense, and then she had completely disappeared. There was no sign of her at all. It was as if she had ceased to exist.
He waited, completely baffled and not knowing what to do, or what was expected of him. A minute later she reappeared briefly, flickering in and out of existence only ten yards away. His mind never felt her—only his eyes registered her momentary presence there. Bewildered, he turned to face the direction that he had seen her.
She appeared again, but this time she was directly behind him, and it was his mind that perceived her rather than his eyes. He saw her aura surge, and a flash of power shot forth from her, passing through his lower back and emerging from his stomach. He felt almost nothing, other than a strange stinging sensation. Glancing down he saw blood running from a small hole in his abdomen.
She stabbed me! His mind was slow to register, but he could feel the pain in his lower back and belly beginning to grow. He staggered sideways just as she reappeared and sent another pulse of power through the space where he had just been standing. She vanished before he could react.
“She stabbed me!” he yelled into the air, hoping someone would hear him. He knew this couldn’t be correct. Daniel wasn’t sure if the word ‘stabbed’ was the proper one to use, since she hadn’t had a knife, but he didn’t have time to find a better term.
There was no response from whoever might be watching, but Daniel thought he could hear the sound of laughter.
The red-head popped into existence again, this time on his left side. She sent a tiny burst of power into him again, piercing the thigh of his left leg. He noted that it was only with his mind that he could see her appear. She remained thoroughly invisible to his eyes. During her first appearance, before she had stabbed him, it had been the reverse.
She isn’t vanishing, she’s making herself invisible somehow, he observed. She can make herself appear either to the eyes or the mind, selectively.
His leg collapsed under him, and he felt her next attack pass through the air where his head had been. That would have been the final blow.
But she can’t tell where I am when she’s completely invisible; otherwise I’d be dead already. He had a feeling that she reappeared to his mind because in order to use her power to attack, she had to become visible to whatever strange power it was that they used. Her first appearance had been to gauge the distance, to see if he had moved. The next attack will be right here, since she spotted me when she missed a second ago.
Rolling madly, he felt his body strike something and the girl appeared suddenly. By chance he had rolled directly into her legs as she approached for her next attack. He was more than twice her size, and his bulk knocked her from her feet. More scared than anything, he grabbed her quickly, wrestling himself on top of her as she struggled to get away, flickering in and out of visibility.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he yelled at her as he got a firm grip on her shoulders.
Abandoning her attempt at invisibility the girl snarled at him, sending another pulse of power through his chest. Searing pain ripped through him, and Daniel found it difficult to breathe, it felt as though he were drowning.
Desperately he clutched at her neck, while trying to bring his own power to bear on her aura. He didn’t bother with soothing; he already suspected he might be dying. Instead, he clawed at her mentally as if he was trying to tear her mind apart.
She fought his efforts, tightening her inner-self into a tight ball, deflecting his clumsy attacks. The only good thing about it was that she was no longer able to send any more piercing bursts of power through him.
Tearing wildly at her aura to force her to keep her defenses up he fought her physically at the same time. She was tiny compared to him, and he had her completely pinned under his body. She bit and raked at his skin with her nails, but she had no hope of getting free. Squeezing his hands tightly around her throat, he fought mentally to keep her occupied until lack of air could do its work upon her.
The girl’s face turned a shocking shade of purple and her eyes bulged, shedding tears of pain and fear. They were a hazel-green, more subdued than Kate’s had been, but similar enough that Daniel couldn’t help but be reminded of her.
At last she stopped struggling, her arms going weak, and her tongue hanging grotesquely from her mouth. Daniel released her then, thinking to let her have air before she died, but once he withdrew his hands he could see that it was too late. Her windpipe had collapsed under the force of his grip. His mind watched helplessly while she turned from blue to purple, and her heart faltered, stuttering to a slow halt in her chest.
Kneeling beside her, he began retching, but his stomach wasn’t full enough to bring anything up. Tears ran from his eyes, but he didn’t sob. His body was too tired for that. A numbness had stolen over him, and examining the ground nearby, he realized that it was covered in blood—his blood. He was bleeding slowly from his stomach, more rapidly from his leg, and—he couldn’t tell about his chest. One lung was full of blood already, and he gurgled when he tried to fill the other lung with air.
He collapsed onto the dry, sandy ground.