Son of Thunder - Murray J. D. Leeder [38]
"Is that really how you see it?" asked Kellin. She saw a flicker of uncertainty in Vell, and this pleased her. He did not wear his dark cynicism well.
Vell's muscles tensed. "Keirkrad is right. I killed some of my own people last night-Thunderbeasts are dead by my actions."
"The blame is with the wizard who knocked them unconscious. Would not those warriors have laid down their lives to protect Sungar? That's exactly what they did.
"I can't pretend to know what you're feeling," she continued, "but I too have felt things inside me that were beyond my control. When I was a child, I felt magic flowing through me in search of an exit. To stay sane and become who I am, I needed to understand it, tame it, and make it part of myself."
"Then you're what the outside tongue calls a sorcerer?" Vell asked. "Such children have been born into our tribe in times past. They were left to die in the Lurkwood." Kellin twitched. "I don't think that was right," Vell hastily added.
"But that would have happened if I had been born into your tribe," Kellin asserted.
"Yes. You would have been deemed impure and too dangerous to live."
"Is that much different from the way things are now?"
Vell looked around the camp, where suspicious eyes ducked and hid from his accusatory gaze.
"They rejected you," he said. "You came from a world away to help, and they spurned you. Perhaps they don't deserve salvation."
"Vell!" protested Kellin. "These are your people. I wouldn't have come here if I thought that about them."
"Why did you come?" asked Vell. "I still cannot fathom it."
"What reason would suffice?" Kellin said, asking herself as much as Vell.
"Might it have to do with your father?" Vell asked.
"Most assuredly," Kellin replied. "But not in a way you might think. I never knew him as well as I wanted to, and now I've followed his ways and gone several steps beyond the path he trod. He revered your tribe above all the others. I remember so vividly the stories he told me of his time in Grunwald."
"And you won't have any such stories to tell," Vell said sadly.
"Maybe not." Her smile awakened all the dark beauty of her face. "But somehow I'm not upset to be here. In the end, I wonder if I will gain more understanding than he ever dreamed of."
Vell stood silently, then he finally allowed himself a smile. "I look forward to counting you as my companion, Kellin Lyme."
His formality brought a broad, open laugh from Kellin, and she repeated it.
"And I, you, Vell the Brown." As they parted in the fading light, each of them felt a bit stronger and a bit more certain about the task to follow.
CHAPTER 6
Sungar awoke in the dark, with the stench of human waste assaulting his nostrils. He hurt worse than from any beating he had ever taken. His flesh was ripped and torn, his ribs ached, and his mouth was dry and filled with the acrid taste of blood. The only light he could see was the flicker of a torch somewhere down the hall, its light dancing on the thick steel bars of his cage. His cell looked out on the featureless walls of a passageway.
Yet somehow, he found the strength to rage. He rose to his feet, let out a hoarse war cry, and assailed the walls and bars with his fists and feet. If anything had been near enough to smash, he would have demolished it as he vented his rage, but there was nothing, and so he slammed his weight against the bars again and again, challenging his unseen captors to come and confront him.
As his energy left him, and he collapsed into a defeated heap in his cell, it occurred to him that the bars survive the prisoner much more readily than the prisoner survives the bars.
Only a small shower of pebbles broke free from the walls where he had battered them. Sungar reached out to gather them up in his weak hands.
"If yer finished," came a whispered voice, "I'd like to welcome you. If you can call it a welcome." The voice was low and gruff and came from the cell next to Sungar's.
Sungar could barely speak-his throat was parched, his energy