Soulgatherer, Chapter 5 of 6

Soulgatherer, Chapter 5

Chapter 5, Buried

Rachael woke up. She had been sleeping face down on her dining room/kitchen/living room table. She shook her head. What time was it? She had to go to work. There was a knock at the door. Who could be wanting to talk to her at this time of day? What time was it, anyway. She looked at the clock. 6:20. She looked out the window. It was still dark out. It should already be bright at 6:20 in the morning. She managed to stand up after stumbling a little and went over to the door, opened it.
Allayard was standing there looking at her.
“What?” she said.
“Are you ok?”
“I’ve gotta get ready for work. What do you want?”
“Work’s already finished. You didn’t come in today. No one could reach you. I came around to see if you are ok. Ribbenstock is pulling out his last few hairs, I can tell you,” Allayard said with a small chuckle.
“Oh,” said Rachael. “I must have... fallen asleep.” She saw him glance at the table behind her, which she knew must have been littered with empty crystals. Pink flared in front of her eyes, and she lost her balance. Allayard caught her.
“Easy now,” he said, supporting her back into the apartment and closing the door behind him. “Where’s your bed now? This way?” It only needed a few seconds to explore her entire living space, and he soon had her lying down on her narrow bed. He perched delicately on the edge of it next to her.
“Don’t you worry about Ribbenstock,” he said. “I’ll let him know that you’re sick.”
“I have to finish my work,” Rachael said, half sitting up. “People are dying! People need to know!”
“I know, I know,” Allayard said, stroking her hair. “When you’re feeling better. You need to sleep now.”
Pink flared again, and she grabbed her head with both hands.
“You can’t sleep like this,” he said. “You’re half in and half out. You need to be all the way one or the other, and you can’t be all the way here right now.” She opened her eyes and saw him taking out a pink crystal. He snapped it in half between his fingers. “Just a little one,” he said, “to calm you down. We’ll reduce your usage little by little until you don’t need it anymore.”
“My report,” she said.
“I know, I know.”
“You already said that,” she said, and then he was holding the crystal fragment in front of her eyes. A pink cloud wafted up in her mind between her and her worries and cares. They were still there, shrouded, but they weren’t touching her anymore. The tension went out of her body and she lay back down. She was vaguely aware of Allard putting the broken crystal into her fingers. She automatically put her hand down on her pillow and turned her head so she could look at the light without interruption.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Allayard said, his voice coming from far away. “If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Rachael said. “Everything is ok here.”
“Ok, then. I wanted to tell you about the partner I had before you at Golden Shield.
“She was like you in many ways, Rachael. Idealistic. Compassionate. And she also found a lot of people who needed help, and she wanted to help them…”
Allayard’s voice hovered around the edges of her awareness like the cooing of distant pigeons. She knew it was there but she didn’t attach any particular meaning to it.
Her vision was almost all pink now. She could see the vague outlines of her body lying on her narrow bed, the walls, although not anything hanging on the walls. Allayard beside her was almost a uniform mass of pink, except for little ripples that formed when he talked or shifted on the bed, and for the peaks and extrusions of his nose, chin and forehead and the valleys of his eyes and mouth, subtle gradations and angular variances in the vast yet immediate pinkscape.
She reached a hand out to that face. Her hand and the hand that intercepted it were wraiths swimming through ether, intermingling. A hole appeared in front of her. It wasn’t pink, but she wasn’t seeing it with her eyes, either. It was a place. A tree, twisted and gnarled, hunched over in the middle of a miserable field of blasted dead grass. Fumes seeped out of cracks in the earth. Even though she couldn’t see under the ground, she could feel that the soil was a sour mix of dead and decaying, devoid of sustenance and yet sustaining… something. The puddles and ponds that formed after the rain, corrupted after passing through the fetid atmosphere of the place, were poison.
“Tigrit’s Hollow,” she said. She had never heard the name before, but it came to her now with the force of a fever. “It comes from Tigrit’s Hollow, and that’s where it has to go back. It’s where he is going back. And she.” She was a leaf floating in the sea of pink, the words flowing through her.
She felt her hand being placed down beside her body. Allayard recommenced his cooing, but words were breaking through to her now.
“He? She? Who are you talking about?”
He she? What was Allayard even saying? Had she been talking about someone?
Parts of his face could be seen now, skin tones pallid and plain compared to the overwhelming vibrancy and vitality of the pink. But once she saw those parts of him, her perspective shifted and the pink began to break up and flutter away like cinders in a campfire.
“What happened?” she said.
“What happened to you?” he said.
“I... I couldn’t see. Everything went... went blank.”
“Went pink, you mean? What did you see? What did you hear?”
“What? I don’t know. I told you, I couldn’t see.”
“Ok,” he said. He left the room briefly and came back with a basin, a jug of water and a drinking cup. “I’m going to look back in on you again in a few hours. Stay here and get some rest until then.”
“Can I have some more crystals before you go?”
“What about your investigation? Don’t you want to have a clear mind for that?”
“Investigate? Oh, yeah. Soon. I just need a bit more pink and I’ll get straight back on it, honestly.”
Allayard’s mouth stretched into a thin grim little line.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. He left the room and closed the door behind him. She looked around the tiny bedroom to be sure, but it certainly appeared that he had not in fact left any crystals. She scrambled to the door faster than she had moved all day. Her head swam and her vision swarmed with black and pink sparks. She tried to pull the door open, but it was locked. The door didn’t even have a lock, though.
“Allayard, what did you do?” she said weakly, her head against the doorframe. “Allayard?” She heard the door to her apartment close. “Allayard!” she screamed.
***
Lizel found Tarn’s signs and markers, and went under the mountain through an abandoned mining path. It was dark and dusty, and Copper was afraid, but Lizel summoned a warm, strong flame to light the path, and Copper stayed close, and they made it out through to the other side without incident. They managed to catch the last of the sun before it sank below the horizon, and then it was dark again, but the air was fresh and they were outside.
But they were only a few miles away from Tigrit’s Hollow, where the air would be fresh no longer.
***
McDurgle was lying face down on the back of a cart hauling refuse out of the city. Said refuse was piled high on top of him. It stank. He dared not use magic to create a barrier between himself and the trash, or to block the smell - inspectors at the city gates scanned everyone leaving the city for thaumic resonance. And he had to leave the city, because he knew where Okasto was going.
He had spent a restless day and night thinking about his contact with Calthor’s mind. Okasto, connected to a group of people, standing in a field. He was channeling their energy somehow. And the place where they were standing, beside the mountain. But on the other side of the mountain from Tramalane. A place where the magical walls were weaker. All that power gathered in such a place was like placing a red hot coal onto a piece of paper. It was bound to burn a whole clean through, if not burn up the entire parchment completely. And then whatever was on the other side of that parchment would be able to come through.
A visit to the public archives (not as well stocked as the libraries of Ravendish but good enough for his purposes), a look at some maps for places that matched what he had seen in his dream, and he was fairly certain he had a location: Tigrit’s Hollow.
And so McDurgle, professor of Ravendish Academy for seventy five years but probably not anymore, made the astonishing even to him decision to go chasing after Okasto. Dragging him back to Ravendish by the ear was the best and only idea McDurgle had for getting on with his life. And whatever he was up to couldn’t be good, but also seemed to be acknowledged and consented to by Calthor, and therefore half of the academy and the royal bureaucracy. So there was no point in asking anyone for help.
And so McDurgle, one hundred and forty nine years old, had climbed into a pile of garbage that almost made him vomit from the stench of it, in an attempt to be taken out of the city so he could pursue Okasto. The city didn’t like for people to leave. Very few people were given permission, unless they were on business of the state.
The large flat tray autocart, powered by a thaumic engine, trundled slowly through the packed streets. Something sharp dug into McDurgle’s side. He prayed to the gods that it hadn’t broken skin, whatever it was.
Time became meaningless. He imagined how it would feel to not be buried in garbage. He tried to ignore it, to calm his mind, but being semi crushed by refuse is about as intrusive as you can get, and he was soon fantasizing once again about being free. Even just being able to walk the crowded streets of the city would be better than this. And he was going to leave the city. Open spaces! Fresh air! He had only ever been outside once before, decades ago, as part of a research assignment for the academy.
Would he even make it out, though? The gate guard was so strict and thorough in checking any outgoing traffic. Surely they would check garbage piles, too. Everyone must have had this idea. It was a stupid stupid idea, the most obvious of stupid ideas. What would he do if they found him? What would happen to him? He tried not to think about that, either. This was probably the daftest idea he had ever had in his entire life. He decided that if he was found, he was just going to blast his way out and see what happened. If he died, he died. Better a blaze of glory than ending his years in humiliation.
At last, at long long last, the cart came to a stop, and he heard the driver being questioned. His heart pounded heavily in his chest. He could hear the garbage in front of him being moved. Sunlight shone down on him. He looked up to see a guard looking down at him, hands to either side of large pieces of junk.
“What’s your name?” the guard said.
“McDurgle,” McDurgle said.
“Ok, you’re cleared to go through,” the guard said. “Do you want this shit back on you?”
“Ah... no thanks,” said McDurgle. As the cart moved on through the gates, the guard plus two of his colleagues watched McDurgle go. His legs were still covered, so he just lay there and tried to make eye contact with them with as much dignity as he could muster.
Soon he was through the gates and into the countryside. The gates swung smoothly shut and locked with a clang. He was out. He stumbled out of the cart, shaking off moldy vegetables and pulling a soggy piece of cloth from his cheek, and went in search of running water. He felt better already.