Taking Flight

Kelder stood for a moment, considering, and then began stumbling toward the caravan. It was not that he particularly wanted a closer look at the corpses, or the wagons, or anything else, but he was afraid that if he turned and fled the demonologist might decide he was a bandit after all. Kelder looked up, seeking Irith, intending to urge her to join him.

She wasn’t there. There was nothing above him but empty sky, clear and bright blue, with a few fluffy white clouds drifting here and there.

Kelder stopped dead in his tracks. Where had she gone?

He slowly turned, studying the heavens, and finally spotted her, far to the west; she was little more than a dark speck against the sun. For a moment he panicked; he didn’t want to lose her. He couldn’t lose her, that would destroy the entire prophecy! He waved and shouted, but then stopped, feeling foolish; she wouldn’t be able to hear him from so far away.

He considered running after her, but the speck seemed to be growing; he stared, and decided that yes, it was definitely getting larger. She was coming back.

He stood and waited for her while, three hundred yards to the east, the caravan regrouped and moved on, ignoring him and the flying figure. By the time Irith dropped to the earth beside him the wagons were almost out of sight over a distant rise. Only by shading his eyes with his hand and staring hard could Kelder make out an upright pike at the back corner of the last wagon, and a bloody head impaled upon it.

Irith’s wings fluttered, stirring Kelder’s hair, and he turned his gaze on her. “What were those things?” he asked.

Irith shrugged prettily. “I don’t know,” she said.

“You didn’t learn about them when you were an apprentice?” said Kelder.

She stared at him as if he had said something exceptionally stupid; when it sank in that indeed he had, she replied hautily, “I was a wizard’s apprentice, not a demonologist’s!”

Her disdain was actually painful, and Kelder tried to recover by asking, “But didn’t you learn about the other kinds of magic? To keep up with the competition, as it were?”

“No,” Irith said. “Just learning wizardry was hard enough!” Her tone softened. “Besides, nobody around where I lived knew anything about demonology back then.”

Kelder blinked. She was doing it again, speaking as if her apprenticeship had ended years ago, when it couldn’t possibly have. “When was that?” he asked.

She glared at him, obviously annoyed, but he was unsure why.

“Ages ago,” she said. Then she turned away and pointedly ignored him for a few seconds.

“Oh,” he replied feebly, after a moment.

She turned back. “Let’s get going,” she said.

He nodded, and they began walking. Irith’s wings vanished after a few paces.

Five minutes later they reached the first of the dead bandits. Blood had sprayed across the highway and the neighboring grass, but it was already dry and brown, no longer red. The corpse was absolutely ghastly-pieces were scattered about, while the main mass was unrecognizable.

And of course, the head was gone completely.

A score of other corpses, all equally mutilated, were scattered along the roadside ahead, interspersed with the carcasses of an equal number of horses. Flies were settling on them all, crawling across the faces.

Kelder’s stomach cramped, and he fought to keep down his breakfast. He had seen death before-in farm animals, and sick old people who died at home in bed. He had never seen anything at all like this carnage.

“Ick,” Irith said, stepping carefully across one of the dried streaks of blood.

“Ick?” Kelder stared at her. “Is that all you have to say?”

She looked at him, startled. “What else should I say?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Kelder snapped, irritated, “but something a bit more respectful than ‘ick’!”

“Respectful?” She looked at him in honest puzzlement. “How is ‘ick’ disrespectful?”

“You don’t think the dead deserve something a bit more … more…” Words failed him. He was unsure he could have found the right phrase even in his native Shularan, and in Trader’s Tongue or Ethsharitic it was hopeless.

“Oh, the dead?” Irith said. “I thought you meant you!”

“Me?” Kelder was taken aback. He had expected to earn Irith’s respect eventually, but had hardly presumed he had it already. “No, I didn’t mean me, I meant the … the corpses.”

“What do they care?” Irith asked. “They’re dead, they don’t care if I say ‘ick.’ And they’re really yucky. I don’t like blood.”

“I don’t either,” Kelder said without thinking. Then he caught himself, and said, “Can’t you be a little more … more compassionate? I mean, these were people, with homes and families, probably.”

Kelder was struggling with an internal conflict; Irith was so incredibly beautiful, so obviously magical, so widely knowledgeable, that he kept expecting her to be noble and pure and perfect in every way. Whenever she demonstrated that she wasn’t, he balked at the incongruity.

Besides, he expected his wife to be caring and compassionate, and Irith was destined to be his wife.