Forging the Darksword - Margaret Weis [44]
Joram gaped in wonder as he approached them. He had never seen anything so tall! Even the trees in the forest did not tower above him like these giant statues. Coming up on them from behind, Joram at first thought they were all alike. The statues were all figures of humans dressed in robes. Though some appeared to be male and others female, there seemed no other difference. Each stood in the same position, arms hanging straight down from his or her side, feet together, heads facing forward.
Then, as Joram drew nearer, he noticed that one statue was different. On one statue, the left hand, which should have been open like the others, was closed, clenched into a fist.
Joram turned to Anja, bursting with questions about these wonderful statues. But when he saw her face, he stopped the words upon his lips so swiftly that he bit his tongue. Swallowing his questions, he tasted blood.
Anja’s face was whiter, her eyes hotter than the hot sand upon which they walked. Her wild, fevered gaze fixed upon one of the statues—the one whose hand was clenched. Toward that statue, she moved resolutely, floundering and falling in the shifting sand.
Then Joram knew. With the sudden, uncanny clairvoyance of childhood, Joram understood, though he could not have framed his knowledge in words. A sickening fear swept over him, making him weak and dizzy. Terrified, he tried to pull away from Anja, but she only held his hand more tightly. Desperately, shrieking words that Anja—from the lost, preoccupied look on her face—never heard, Joram dug his heels into the sand.
“Please! Anja! Take me home! No, I don’t want to see—”
He fell down, dragging Anja off-balance. Stumbling, she landed on her hands and knees, and was forced to let loose of Joram to catch herself. Scrambling to his feet, the child tried to run, but Anja lunged forward and caught hold of him by the hair, yanking him backward.
“No!” Joram shrieked frantically, sobbing in pain and fear.
Grasping him around the waist with a strength her work in the fields had given her, Anja lifted the child and carried him across the sand, falling more than once, but never deterring from her fixed purpose.
Coming to stand before the statue, Anja stopped. Her breath came in ragged gasps. For a moment, she stared up at the statue towering above them.
Its left hand clenched, its fixed gaze looking over their heads into the mists Beyond, it had—to all appearances—less Life than the trees in the forests. Yet it was aware of their presence. Joram felt its awareness, as he felt its terrible, tortured pain.
Exhausted, he ceased to cry out or struggle. Anja dumped him at the statue’s stone feet, where he crouched, quivering, his head in his hands.
“Joram,” Anja said, “this is your father.”
The boy squeezed his eyes tightly shut, unable to move or speak or do anything except lie upon the warm sand beneath the giant stone statue.
But a splash of water upon his neck made Joram start. Raising his head from where it had been pressed into the sand, the child looked up slowly. Far above him, he could see the statue’s stone eyes staring straight ahead into the realm of Death whose sweet peace must ever elude him. Another splash of water struck the boy. With a heartbroken sob, Joram buried his face in his small hands.
While far above him, the statue, too, wept.
9
The Ritual
“I was the daughter of one of the noblest houses in Merilon. He—your father—was House Catalyst.”
Sitting at the table, once more in their shack, Joram heard Anja’s voice coming to him from somewhere above him, trickling down through a haze of fear and horror like the tears of the statue.
“I was the daughter of one of the noblest houses in Merilon,” she repeated, combing out Joram’s hair. “Your father was House Catalyst. He, too, came of noble blood. My father refused to have a catalyst living with us like Father Tolban—little better than a Field