The Aperture

Chapter 11

Bandits and Blood

Connie rushed up to Rahl as the men encircled the party. “Who are they? What do they want?” she asked him.

“They're bandits,” he replied. “And I do not yet know what they want. We shall soon find out.”

“What should we do?”

“We should be prepared for anything,” Rahl replied, scanning the group. “Fortunately, it does not appear they have a spellcaster in their number. Do you have an enchantment for my weapon?”

“An enchantment?”

“Yes. Sharpening? Blood Letting? Temperance? Anything you have will help.”

“I don’t cast spells,” Connie replied.

He stared at her with a hard, incredulous expression.

“It’s what I keep telling you people,” she added emphatically. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“What can you do, then? Can you handle a weapon, or must we protect you?”.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m a seventh-degree black belt. I can take care of myself.”

“I know not the meaning of your words, but if you believe it will aid us, then do it.”

By now the party was surrounded by seven armored men wielding a variety of weapons. The party contracted to a tight group with the river to their backs. Only Tristana stood by herself at the bank of the river. One of them men stepped forward. He was the tallest and largest of the gang. He wore a hodgepodge of mismatched armor, seemingly collected from a variety of sources. His face bore a long, scarcely healed scar from a close call with an edged weapon. As he walked toward Rahl, a broadsword drawn, he kept glancing at the party's hanyaks. This was the leader. He stopped about five paces from where Rahl stood.

“Your hanyaks,” he said to Rahl. “We want your hanyaks.”

“You won’t have our hanyaks.”

A smug grin appeared on the lips of the leader. His straight-arrow scar distorted with his cheek. “You are outnumbered. Your lives are not worth the possession of six beasts. Either you give them now willingly, or we will take the beasts along your lives.”

“I say, give them the hanyaks,” Jalban said to Rahl from behind.

“Shut up, Jalban,” Connie said.

Rahl spoke, “We are on a mission from the Castle Maray. Lord Maray himself has been killed, and the population of the castle and town have been slain. Chaos now wanders the land freely. We must return to warn those in Roggentine before it is too late. We will be unable to reach Roggentine by tomorrow morning if our hanyaks are taken from us.”

The leader narrowed his eyes at Rahl. “You lie! Lord Maray is not dead. And nothing has happened to the town, as you say. Give us the hanyaks.”

Three of the men stepped forward at these words. Theo took a step back to give himself some room. Connie noticed he clutched in his hand a few mummified animal parts.

“I have warned you, and yet you resist,” the leader said to Rahl. “Die with your companions, fool.”

With those words, the leader leaped forward and swung his sword broadly at Rahl’s neck. Rahl ducked just in time. He swung his sword and gave the leader a glancing blow at the shin level. Without his strength behind the blow, Rahl’s blade glanced harmlessly off the metal greaves the leader wore.

“Seize the spellcasters first!” One of the bandits shouted. In response to this, one of the bandits, this one short and stout with a three-day beard, homed in on Theo. He ran toward him with a spiked club poised over his head to serve the mage a death-dealing blow. When he was a mere five paces from Theo, the mage made a small hand gesture toward the eyes of the bandit. Instantly, the bandit closed his eyes and screamed. Theo deftly moved aside while the bandit charged right past him, blinded by the spell. The bandit struck the tree and stumbled. At this moment, Theo drew a dagger and thrust the weapon deep into the back of the bandit’s neck. The bandit crumpled to the ground with a choking sound.

At this time, another bandit saw Connie. This one was nearly as muscular as the leader, but not as well armored. The bandit swung a broad-bladed scimitar at her. She moved aside to dodge the blow, and using her martial arts training, spun around and attempted to give the bandit a roundhouse kick in the groin. To her utter surprise, her body did not respond the way she was used to. She was nowhere limber enough, agile enough, nor did she have the strength she thought she had. Instead of kicking the man, she fumbled awkwardly to the ground. Before she could recover, the bandit was on top of her. She struggled fiercely in his grasp, cursing him viciously as he tore madly at her robe.

Two bandits brandishing spears backed Jalban and Sind up against a tree. Jalban swung his morning star at one of the bandits, but the business end of the weapon clipped a branch of the tree, which ruined the blow. The bandit took advantage of the situation. He thrust the spear at Jalban. Jalban attempted to dodge the blow, but he was too late, and the spear impaled his upper left arm. Jalban cried out. The other bandit grabbed Sind and yanked him away from Jalban’s side. The boy writhed within the bandit’s grasp. Then Sind bit him on the arm. The man howled with pain.

“Animal!” the bandit shouted at the boy.

The leader swung at Rahl a few more times. Rahl parried the first two blows, then dodged the rest. Rahl knew the bandit was an inexperienced fighter, and so he allowed the bandit to tire himself while Rahl waited for an opening. The bandit tried to strike Rahl with another wild, overhead swing. Rahl dodged the blow. The bandit’s sword struck the grassy earth. Rahl saw his opening. He seized the moment. He quickly flipped the sword around his hand, and using the strength in his upper arm, he thrust his sword up into the bandit’s ribcage from below the leather breast pad. The bandit let out a guttural yell and fell to the ground. Rahl withdrew the sword from the bandit’s ribcage, using his boot to gain leverage. Then he thrust his blade into the bandit’s chest again to finish him off. Wet, gurgling sounds issued from the bandit’s throat, blood trickled from his mouth, and then his body went limp.

While struggling on the ground, Connie managed to withdraw her dagger from the scabbard in her belt. Now, she and the bandit wrestled with the knife. She tried to cut him as he tried to disarm her.

They slid off the bank of the river onto the mud at the bank of the river, where they resumed their struggling. Jalban saw her in trouble, and though his left arm bled profusely from the spear attack, he jumped down the bank with his morning star and skittered around them, looking for an opening in which to plant a hit on the bandit.

Theo had just removed his dagger from the bandit’s neck when another bandit came running at him, this one with a spear. Theo stood where he was casting his next spell. Just before the bandit reached him, Theo’s spell went off, and the bones in his legs broke in two with a muted crack. The man let out a sharp cry and tumbled to the ground at Theo’s feet. Theo quickly converged on the bandit and cut his throat.

The bandit thrust the spear at Jalban again, but Jalban had recovered from the previous blow. He swung the morning star at the bandit’s head with all his strength. The bandit tried to duck the blow, but he was too late in his reaction time, and the spiked end of Jalban’s weapon smashed against the side of the bandit’s head. The bandit let out a cry and crumpled to the ground. His body jerked and twitched a few times as dark green blood seeped from a skull-baring wound in his scalp.

Now Sind withdrew a short dagger he carried, and he swung it at the bandit who tried to take it from him.

“Give me the knife,” he said to the boy in a manner that suggested that Sind was a disobedient child that had just stolen a treat from the cookie jar. “Give me the knife, and I won’t hurt you.”

Seeing this, Rahl came up from behind the man and struck him on his helmeted head with the broadside of his sword. The man tumbled aside, dropping his spear. He looked up from the ground, his eyes filled with anger. Rahl watched the bandit’s every move, waiting for the bandit to get to his feet. But unarmed and somewhat disoriented from the blow, the bandit scrambled away from Rahl and the fight.

Now only two bandits remained. One of the bandits still struggled with Connie. Then Jalban saw his opening. He swung his morning star at the bandit and struck him squarely on the back. The bandit yelled and got to his feet, quickly forgetting about Connie.

The bandit whipped out twin daggers from his belt. “Come hither, fat man,” the bandit said.

Connie rose to her feet.

“Alyndia! Do something!” Jalban shouted to Connie, holding his weapon in his wounded arm to parry the bandit’s blows.

Connie ran up to the bandit and struck him in the ribs with her fist, as she'd learned during her years of martial arts training. But instead of breaking the man’s ribs as she should have, a searing pain filled her hand and forearm on contact. She felt as if she had broken her hand. The man took a second’s worth of attention away from Jalban and backhanded her with his fist. The blow landed squarely on her jaw, and she tumbled back into the water.

At that moment, Theo appeared at the top of the bank. With a few hand gestures, there came a double report as the bones in the bandit’s wrists exploded. The man let out a scream. The twin daggers tumbled to his feet. Now Jalban approached him with the morning star. Disarmed and outnumbered, the man took off, running up the river bank away from the party, holding his ruined hands at his chest like a young mother protecting her child.

Now, all was quiet except for the frantic clatter of metal to metal twenty paces downstream. Tristana and one of the bandits were still engaged in a battle. The bandit swung his sword at her, grunting as he put his might between each blow. Tristana blocked each of these blows with deft parry with a battle axe. The bandit now swung at her wildly. Expertly, she used the metal end of her axe to block these blows. Rahl and Theo ran up to the two and watched, uncertain as to whether he should interfere. Tristana and the bandit seemed unaware that most of the battle had already been resolved.

The battle raged a minute longer. Now the bandit was getting tired, and as he grew more tired, her movement seemed to become ever more precise. She did not strike once but seemed to be waiting for the perfect moment. Finally, the bandit left an opening. Tristana swung once, directing the blade to the bandit’s head. The bandit tried to dodge, but she seemed to anticipate his move. The edge of the axe struck his neck and passed through it like so much butter. The bandit’s head flew off and tumbled down the bank of the river. The bandit’s body instantly collapsed to the ground while a narrow fountain of blood spurted rhythmically from the clean, open neck wound where the bandit’s head had been seconds before. After taking a moment to catch her breath, she kicked the body toward the river, sending it tumbling down the bank to join the head. She stared coolly at the body lying on the riverbank, then she turned to Rahl and Theo, her eyebrows raised as if to question them what they thought of her deed.

Theo said nothing. He turned to the swordbearer, who had already been looking to him for a reaction.

Rahl spoke first. “I am impressed with her skill with that axe and more than a little surprised.”

“Likewise, it is a surprise to me,” Theo said.

“Where did she get the axe? I thought she dropped it a long way back.”

“I don’t know,” Theo replied.

“Are you wounded?” Rahl asked Theo. “No. Not a scratch. And you?”

Rahl did not answer.

Theo turned to Tristana. “Are you all right?”

Tristana did not respond to Theo’s question but regarded him with a stoical, cool expression that revealed nothing of her thoughts.

“She looks uninjured,” Rahl said. “Let us check the others.”

Rahl walked back to the party while Theo ran down the bank to do something with the headless body.

Back in the main part of the group. Jalban applied healing ointment to the wound on his arm while Sind fetched a roll of special enchanted bandage cloth from the pack hanyak. Connie sat brooding beneath a tree, holding the breast of her ripped robe shut.

“How bad is it?” Rahl asked Jalban.

“It is merely a flesh wound,” he replied. “It will heal quickly, no thanks to Alyndia.” With those words, he shot Alyndia a scowl. “What were you trying to do, Alyndia?”

“What was I supposed to be doing, Jalban?”

“You are an elemental sorceress. You are to defend us with your magic, but you never even attempted a spell. And what were you doing, striking the bandit with your hand?”

“I am a seventh-degree black belt. I could have killed him with a single blow. Although—” she paused, feeling bewildered, “I don’t know what happened. I knew what to do, but my body didn’t know how to do it. It’s as if I’ve unlearned how to fight.”

“An elemental sorceress does not fight with her hands,” he said, taking the roll of bandages from Sind. “An elemental sorceress lets her magic fight for her.”

“I don’t know how to cast spells.”

Jalban got to his feet, his wounded arm not yet bandaged. “What kind of nonsense is that?” he shouted at her, his voice filled with rage. “You studied seven years at the academy, and you dare tell me that you don’t know how to cast spells?:

“That’s what I said,” she replied in a defiant tone.

“Are you possessed by a demon? Or would you like to have seen your uncle killed?”

“At this point, Jalban, I don’t give a damn what happens to you. And you’re not my uncle.”

Jalban turned to Rahl and Sind who watched the exchange without interfering. “Did you hear what she just said to me? She said I was not her uncle and didn’t care if I was killed!”

He turned back to Connie to check her response. She looked away from him. He stormed over to her.

“I have had enough of your flippancy and arrogance, Alyndia.”

Before she could rise to her feet, he heaved a kick to her head. Caught entirely by surprise, she fell over, instantly disoriented from the blow. She tried to strike back, but standing over her, he had the advantage. He kicked her again. This time, the blow fell against her ribs. She feebly reached for him to stop. He kicked her hard in the belly. She doubled over in pain. Now he kept kicking her. After he got tired, he broke in half a spear left behind by one of the bandits and started beating her with the blunt end on her back, arms, and legs.

“How do you like that, Alyndia?” he shouted as he beat her. “You want to fight me with your hands? Come on! Show me what a good fighter you are!”

Rahl led Sind away from the scene to help search the bodies for valuables. Unable to defend herself, Connie placed her hands over her face and curled up into a ball.

“Rahl! Theo! Don’t let him do this to me!” she called out between Jalban’s punishing blows, but neither responded.

The illness came over her quite suddenly. Alyndia ran into the kitchen and vomited into the sink. MacGregor followed her from the living room and turned on the light.

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

She could not reply. The pain in her abdomen was so intense that she could not speak. She vomited again, bringing up the contents of her dinner. Now her whole body hurt, as if she had tumbled down a long staircase. She feared her bones would break with the weight of her flesh upon them.

“Connie—are you okay?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong, Will. It came on so suddenly.”

He sniffed his glass of wine he was holding. “Is it the wine?”

“Does wine normally do this?” she asked on the verge of vomiting again.

“Not unless you have a lot. But you didn’t drink that much. Maybe it was the food.”

“By the gods!” she said, clutching her abdomen before vomiting some more.

Finally, the end of the spear split and broke over Connie’s back. Jalban now stood over her, panting heavily as he stared down at her. Blood from his open wound dripped down his arm and onto Connie’s ripped robe. Connie made no effort to rise, having been beaten black and red from Jalban’s kicks and the shaft of the spear. Now, she only kept silent while gritting her teeth in a body filled with pain, expecting that more blows would come at any moment. And yet she did not cry.

“Your mother would be ashamed of you, Alyndia, for the way you have carried on these last few days,” Jalban said.

“No one does this to me! No one!” Connie spat out, her voice faltering and muffled behind her hands that she’d raised to protect her face from the blows. “You'd better kill me now, Jalban, because I’ll kill you. So help me—I’ll kill you for this!”

Jalban tossed away the broken end of the spear. “Go ahead, Alyndia, or Connie, or whatever you choose to call yourself. Cast a spell on me. Kill your uncle with one of your spells. Your mother would be proud.” He spat once, then stepped away to leave her in agony on the earth beneath the tree.

No one bothered her for a long time while she lay there battered and bruised, shivering in her cold robe. She felt a sickness in her stomach, which rose until she vomited. Her mind drifting in and out of her body, the pain ebbing and rising like an ocean tide. She felt thoroughly confused. Since she woke up a few days ago, she was no longer herself in mind and body. This troubled her. This charade was going on too long. She wanted it to end. She did not know how long she could continue before she snapped.

After a while, she felt a large, gentle hand on her shoulder. She looked up. It was Rahl. She looked into his eyes. His face wore an expression of pity.

“Are you able to ride?” he asked her.

She shook off his touch. “Get away from me, Rahl. You let him do that to me. All of you did. I’m so humiliated. Just leave me be. I’ll go my own way when I’m ready.”

“We cannot leave you here. There may be more bandits, and Chaos may be lurking close by.”

“I don’t care. Let Chaos take me. I want to stay.”

“You don’t know what you say, Alyndia. You don’t want to end up as those people in Maray.”

“I’m an adult, Rahl. And nobody that I know of assigned you as my guardian.”

“But I am your guardian, Alyndia. I am sworn to defend you against Chaos.”

Rahl looked over at something occurring within the party out of view from Connie. He winced. Connie noticed him do this. She sat up, wincing in pain as she did. She was sore as hell, but at least no bones were broken. Now she looked over to what Rahl saw. There, Theo had laid open the chest of the bandit that Rahl had killed. He had his hands buried into the man’s chest cavity as he cut the heart out of the corpse. Purplish-red blood covered Theo’s arms up to his elbows. He lifted the organ out of the body all the while chanting softly to himself. Sind stood by, watching, his gaze transfixed by the spectacle taking place before him.

“Ugh. What is Theo doing?” Connie asked.

“I believe he is removing the humor from the bandit.”

“That is awful.”

“Indeed. I don’t understand the ways of magic, but unlike my brother, I respect the ways of magic, though at times it is repulsive to me.”

Connie allowed herself to fall back to the ground. She realized her face was caked in vomit. She realized what a sight she must seem to Rahl. “Leave me alone, Rahl. I don’t feel safe with you. I don’t feel safe with any man who would stand by and watch another beat a woman.”

“We depended on you for your spells. You did not aid us. We easily defeated them, but things might have turned out differently if there had been more of them.”

Connie looked up at Rahl from the ground. “Rahl, you must hear me out on this. If I’m the Alyndia everyone claims I am, then something is wrong with me. When I woke up two days ago, I had no idea where I was or even who I was. I feel like I’m another person. I know nothing at all about spells, or Chaos, or any of the customs in this culture. Everyone is a stranger to me. Even Jalban, who claims to be my uncle. I swear—I’d never even met the man before yesterday.”

Rahl gazed into her eyes. This time, to her, he seemed to be listening.

She continued, “I have memories of a land far away from here. A place that is much different. The sky is blue, not green. The clouds are white, not yellow. And blood is red, not green or dark purple. It is a place where magic does not exist and machines are used for the same purposes you use magic. We don’t ride hanyaks. We drive carriages that move without the use of animal power. We have machines that fly through the air.”

“Flying machines?” He ruminated over her words for a moment before he continued. “If what you say is true, then we will do as Jalban suggested and take you to the temple. They will surely be able to help you. Come now, we must go. As it is, we must ride throughout the night. We will be fortunate if we reach Roggentine before dark.”

“I’m not going with you, Rahl. I’ve had enough.” She rolled over, her aching belly to the ground.”

“I beseech you. Please come with us.”

“No, Rahl. I will not. You will have to beat me again to get me to go with you, and still I will not go willingly. And if you force me, I will desert you at the first opportunity.”

Rahl sighed. A moment of silence passed between them. All was still in the party except for Theo’s soft chanting.

Rahl placed his hand gently on the small of her back and spoke again. “If you come with us, I promise you, I will never willingly let anyone lay a hand on you again. I will defend you as I would someone I love. If your words are true, and you really are not Alyndia, then you have proven yourself to be very brave.”

These words of sympathy touched Connie. Finally, someone is beginning to believe me, she thought. To her amazement, she felt a lump in her throat. A flood of emotion rose up in her. She wanted to put her arms around Rahl and cry on his shoulder just the way she had done with her father just before he died—and had never done again in the years that passed since.

“Rahl, do you really promise to protect me until I find out what is going on?”

“Yes, I do.”

She wiped her eyes, which had become moist despite her best effort. She turned over and painfully raised herself from the ground. “Help me, Rahl. In this condition, I’m going to need some help getting on my hanyak.”

Finally, Alyndia had stopped vomiting. She let MacGregor guide her into the bedroom, where he gently lowered her to the bed. The room was dark compared to the living room. She found this darkness pleasing, though now she felt strangely despondent. She also realized this bed was incredibly soft and plush, much better than she was used to.

MacGregor sat on the bed next to her. “You feeling better now?”

She nodded weakly. To say she felt better was to say that a bruise felt better than a knife cut.

“You want to go to the emergency room?”

“No. I think I will be better now,” she said. “I just need some sleep.”

“Maybe it was that Chinese takeout we had for dinner. That orange chicken tasted a little off to me, and you ate more of it than I did.”

“It’s not just my stomach—it’s all over my body, my arms, and my legs. I cannot describe the pain. I feel as though somebody has beaten me.”

“It could be food poisoning, or maybe you’re coming down with the flu.” He sighed. “You know I’m feeling a little sleepy. Mind if I lie down next to you, or do you want me to sleep on the couch.”

“I don’t care.”

He got undressed and got into the bed next to her. When he did so, she rolled over on her side to face away him. He began stroking her back.

“I’ll be fine, Will. You don’t need to do anything. Just let me sleep.”

But Alyndia was nowhere close to sleeping. She very well knew that her condition had nothing to do with food poisoning or illness of any sort—at least not in this world. Very likely, the spirit of Connie Bain was inhabiting her body back in Cerinya. Up to then, she hadn’t taken seriously the possibility that Connie’s displaced spirit would end up on Cerinya, as the chances of it actually occurring were astronomically low.

The reality that this anomaly existed terrified Alyndia. From what she understood of the nature of the spirit, she was now bound psychically and spiritually to this despicable woman, and what she felt and experienced on Cerinya might also be felt by her. The reverse might also be true. And this evening, something intense or traumatic must have happened to Connie for such physical pain to be transmitted to her across the vast spiritual wilderness. Had she been beaten? It certainly felt like it. Alyndia wondered what mischief had Connie had gotten herself into to receive such a beating.

Aside from the transmission of powerful sensations, Connie’s existence in Cerinya presented an ever greater threat to Alyndia: If Connie should somehow be killed in Cerinya, her body on earth—the body Alyndia currently inhabited—would also die. Unfortunately, while she was bound to Connie’s body on earth, without outside help it, was impossible to for her to return to Cerinya an perhaps a cast a spell that hopefully would break the tangled spiritual bond she had with Connie’s spirit.

“What a mess,” she said to herself aloud while staring at the unlit glass light fixture affixed to the ceiling of the bedroom.

“What did you say, babe?” MacGregor asked sleepily on the bed beside her.

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

Even though Alyndia had spent only a short duration on earth, she already realized that one’s existence on Cerinya was much more fragile, more precarious. Life there was relatively cheap, and death came easily compared to earth. This contrast was one of the reasons she’d jumped at the chance to leave her world. With that thought in mind, Alyndia direly hoped that Connie could keep her former body on Cerinya alive long enough for her to sever their tangled spiritual bond—provided it was even possible.