Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [41]
I was watching and wished I hadn’t been. The shock of it was like knowing that a snake has struck you and might be venomous. The face I saw was different, but the same. It was my cousin from Earth. It was Eric Ryall’s face that gleamed at me from beneath the disguise.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A TALE SPUN BY NIGHT
I rushed to Eric, hands going out to grasp my cousin’s shoulders, shaking him, shaking him. He groaned and his eyelids fluttered. I winced to see his hazel irises overlain with crimson. And his normally ruddy face was pallid and wet looking—except where black and blue tattoos gleamed sullenly and intricately.
I shook him again. And again his eyes fluttered, then opened fully. He gazed at me without recognition, with an inarticulate madness etched in his pupils. I slapped him.
“Eric. It’s Ruenn. Eric!”
He murmured, then jolted as my slap seemed to register. Or perhaps it was just my voice. I remembered how it had affected him during our fight, how each time I’d spoken he had paused. But it wasn’t enough merely to “affect” him. I needed to find a way to break through to him, to connect to the mind of the man he’d once been.
“Where’s Bryce?” I demanded, trying to reach him that way. “Eric!” I shook him a third time. “Where...is...Bryce?”
Again my voice did more than any slap or shaking; his mouth twisted and he thrashed his head from side to side. Still, there was no true awareness in him. Something held him in thrall and I knew no way to free him.
I glanced helplessly at Valyan and Graye. Valyan’s eyes burned with sympathy but all he could do was shrug and turn away to see to Kreeg. Graye, however, walked over to squat next to me.
“He’s not as bad as your bro—” Graye started, then paused to glance quickly at me. “As bad as...he could be,” he finished.
I looked at the mercenary. I don’t know if there was a question in my stare, but he went on as if there had been.
“I mean the hair and eyes,” he said, motioning to the white that only streaked Eric’s rust colored hair, and to the eyes through which the true color still peeked. I recalled how Graye had described Bryce’s hair and eyes—dead white, blood red.
“So?” I asked, my voice bleak and rough.
Graye did not reply but leaned forward to study the tattoos on Eric’s face and neck. I had already noted the resemblance of those inked lines to the tattooed map of Talera on the chest of that Nokarran assassin I had killed back in Trazull. Yet, Eric’s markings were more elaborate and detailed, and were scrawled over with runes that shone like surreal glyphs.
A frown creased Graye’s face and he glanced to me. But I’d already seen what he’d seen. On Eric’s forehead there coiled a winged pattern of colored patches—blue, red, green, gold—rotating around a central mandala of entwined thorns. And at the mandala’s center, at the point of reintegration, there glistened a small oval of whitish matter, like glass or marble. At first I thought it a speck of dust and reached to wipe it away, but it clung like a leech to Eric’s skin and felt warm and oily to my finger. Then I knew what it was.
“A milkstone,” Graye said needlessly.
I shivered. “Aye,” I said. “And embedded in his flesh.”
I wondered, then, if that Nokarran assassin in Trazull had worn such a stone amid his tattoos. I had not noticed one but had not been looking for it either.
Graye interrupted my thoughts. “That...thing may be how he’s being controlled.”
“Perhaps,” I agreed.
And what of Bryce, my mind added. Was he, too, being controlled?
Graye reached to his hip and unsheathed his knife. I caught his wrist above the wolf’s-head hilt.
“What do you?” I asked.
He stared hard at me, his eyes asking—I thought—for trust.
“I’m going to remove the milkstone,” he said after a long pause. “It might free him.”
“Or kill him,” I murmured.
He nodded. “There is that possibility. But….” He cocked his chin toward Eric’s slowly writhing form, as if willing me to note the lost gaze and the drool-flecked lips. “…would you rather he stay like this?”
My hand tightened on the mercenary’s wrist. I growled