Tak

The Gem Lords - Part 7

     He regained consciousness to find his head lying in Alustra's lap, her soft hand stroking his face tenderly. "Easy, easy," she said as he started awake, trying to look in every direction at once for the statue. Then he remembered that it was destroyed and allowed himself to relax, letting his head settle back down into its comfortable pillow. "Thought I was dead," he muttered. "Thought we were all dead."

     "We almost were," the white haired wizard replied. "You saved us. Some of us, anyway."

     He heard her weeping, and remembered Sheena and Talpha-Ja. "They're dead?" he asked, unnecessarily. The images of what the statue had done to them were still fresh in his mind. He didn't see her nodding. He didn't need to.

     "What about Barl? Is he okay?"

     "He's still out, but I think he'll be okay. He's breathing, anyway."

     "Well, that's something I suppose." He decided he'd been lying down long enough and climbed carefully back to his feet, helped by the female wizard. They were back in the statue's room, and he saw Barl lying on his back, a strip torn from Alustra's gown tied around his head while a larger strip was folded under his head as a pillow. Tak walked over to where Talpha-Ja and Sheena were lying, their arms folded across their chests, and looked down at them for a moment. Then he turned away, going back to the door they'd come in through. There'd be time for grief later.

     "It's still locked," Alustra said as he tried to pull it open. "Maybe Lan and Enna will come to see what's happened to us. It opened all right from the other side."

     Tak nodded. The other two wizards were their only chance. Just so long as they weren't caught by the traps Talpha-Ja had spotted. He'd tripped them all as they passed, of course, so did that mean that the corridor was now safe, or would the traps reset themselves after a time? He looked at the fragments of the marble statue, lying in a heap where they'd fallen. Perhaps they could break their way out.

     He winced as his body continued to come back to life and various aches and pains returned, most noticeably his still tender, only half healed collarbone. He began to notice a strange feeling to his body as well. Not an injury, something else. His hands seemed okay, the feeling was more in his legs and torso. He bent over carefully, pausing for a moment to allow a wave of nausea to pass, and pulled up one of his trouser legs.

     Alustra heard his cry of shock and horror and spun around, staring as she saw what he'd seen. The skin of his leg had turned a greenish grey and was damp and slimy, like the skin of a frog or a toad. His other leg was the same, and so was his belly and the lower part of his chest, the skin blending smoothly back to its normal hairy pink at about the level of his nipples. His genitals had vanished. All that was left was a small flapped opening for the passage of urine.

     He stared down at himself for a long time, too shocked and horrified even to speak, until Alustra gently pulled his clothes back into place, repeating over and over, calmly and patiently, that it would be okay, that they'd find a way to put him back the way he'd been. The blast of released magic, Tak realised. When he'd destroyed Khalkedon's ark, a blast of randomised magic had washed over him. Alustra was probably right, it would probably be easy enough to restore his physical appearance, but what if the blast of magic had done something else to him? Maybe something that wouldn't become apparent until many years later?

     The sight of Sheena and Talpha-Ja brought him back to his senses. He was lucky. At least he was still alive. He dismissed the problem of his transformed body for the time being, therefore, and began giving thought to how they were going to get out of there. Maybe there was a control that would open the door. A lever or something. There was nothing in the statue's room, so he returned to the smaller room, stepping carefully over the spot where he'd smashed the ark which was glowing with a greenish light he didn't like at all.

     The room was almost in darkness, and he waited for a few moments to allow his eyes to adjust. Gradually he became aware of a very faint glow in one of the side walls. No, several faint glows. A row of several small, faintly luminous objects sitting on a shelf. He picked one of them up and carried it back into the other room to have a better look at it.

     It was a ruby. The largest, most perfect ruby he'd ever seen. It was over an inch across, circular and half an inch thick, and its perfectly cut facets glittered in the light of the torches. It also pulsed with its own inner light, seeming to grow brighter as it warmed in his palm, and Tak recognised it as one of the gems to which the souls of Khalkedon's thralls were chained. Could it be Barl's ruby? The possibility made him fold his fingers around it protectively, aware that, if he dropped it and it broke, it would be the end of Barl's life, just as it had been the end of Ehr Laing when the rak King had crushed her jewel in his hand. He showed it to Alustra, then went back to get the others.

     There were seventeen jewels in all, including two rubies and three sapphires, one of which had to be his own, although there seemed to be no way of telling them apart. There had been no names anywhere on or near the shelf. Khalkedon must have been able to simply sense which jewel was linked to which wizard.

     One other thing puzzled him, though. "They're all glowing," he pointed out to Alustra. "All of them, even though most of them now belong to dead wizards. They're all still linked to living souls!"

     "Does that mean the wizards we killed aren't truly dead?" asked the white haired woman, her eyes widening as she stared at him. "Does that mean they're not truly dead?" She indicated their two fallen comrades, trembling with hopeful excitement.

     "I don't see how that's possible..." Tak broke off, staring at the gems. "Look," he cried. "Five of them aren't glowing as brightly as the others." He separated them from the others. A ruby, a diamond, a sapphire, a pearl and an opal. One for each of the five surviving wizards. "The gems belonging to dead wizards glow brighter, but why?"

     "Suppose..." began Alustra uncertainly. "You said that when a rak's body is destroyed, his soul is sucked back into his ark, to stop it from going to the afterlife. Suppose this is the same thing. Khalkedon linked our souls to these gems, so that he could punish or kill us from a distance. Maybe that link's so strong that not even death can sever it."

     "Their souls are being held in their jewels!" cried Tak. "They haven't gone to judgement, they're still here, in the world of the living. That's why the gems of dead wizards glow brighter than the gems of living ones. The gems of dead wizards contain their souls."

     "So they're not dead!" cried Alustra, staring in amazement at the mutilated bodies of their friends. "Amazing though it might seem, they're not dead."

     They stared at each other, digesting the implications, each thinking the same thing but afraid to say it out loud. "Is it possible..." began Tak at last. "Could, could..."

     "Could they be brought back to life?" said Alustra, completing the thought. "If we could find a cleric of Caroli... But, I mean, look at them!" She indicated Talpha-Ja in particular. She'd pulled his robes over the gaping wound, but they could still see how wrong the outline of the body beneath was. How the spilled entrails made an obscene bulge over his stomach, and the dip above where the drying blood had pulled the cloth down into the opened chest.

     "Can, can anything cure that?" she asked. "I've heard clerics say that a follower of the Lady of Healing can heal almost anything, if his faith is strong enough and so long as the soul is still in the body. Once the soul has departed, then the victim belongs to the next world, they say..."

     "But their souls haven't departed!" cried Tak, picking up a jet and an opal and showing them to the other wizard. "Their souls are here. Right here! I think we need to find a cleric of Caroli and ask him a few searching questions. And no more drass about us being wicked and evil, undeserving of the Lady's blessing. We've just destroyed a rak, one of the most truly evil creatures in the world. I'd say Caroli owes us one."

     "But first we've still got to get out of here," said Alustra, staring at the closed door. "Any ideas?"

     "Yeah," replied Tak, getting up and crossing to where the statue lay in fragments against the wall. He bent and picked up a large chunk of torso. "I think it's time we stopped talking and thinking and started getting physical. Sometimes there's no solution to a problem other than sheer brute force."

     He carried the lump of marble over to the door and began hitting it, striking harder and harder as he found his rhythm.