Then about sunset on Erastide eve, Ildera went into false labor. I’m certain now that Chamdar arranged that as well. A village lady brought Geran’s urgent summons to me, and I quickly looked in on Alara. She appeared to be sound asleep, so I carefully reached into her dozing mind and reinforced that sleep. Then I gathered up my instruments and went on down to the other end of town to deliver the newest member of my family.
Ildera’s false labor continued for several hours, and then her contractions and labor pains diminished.
‘What’s wrong, Aunt Pol?’ Geran demanded, his voice a little shrill.
‘Nothing’s wrong, Geran,’ I assured him. ‘This happens all the time. Ildera’s just not quite ready yet, that’s all.’
‘You mean she’s practicing?’
I’d never heard it put quite that way before, and it struck me as enormously funny.
Geran was a bit offended by my laughter, however.
‘She’s just fine, Geran,’ I assured him. ‘This is what midwives call “false labor”. It happens so often that there’s even a name for it. The real thing will come along in the next day or so. She’ll sleep now, and you might as well do the same thing. Nothing’s going to happen for a while.’
Then I closed up my bag and trudged back up through the snow to my own house.
And Alara wasn’t there when I returned.
I should have realized at that point that Chamdar had broken my grip on Alara’s mind. Nobody wakes up after I tell him to sleep until I’m ready for him to wake up.
It had been quite cold for a week or more, but there hadn’t been any fresh snow, so the village itself and all the surrounding area was criss-crossed with footprints that went off in all directions. I concentrated my search to the north, the direction Alara had usually taken on those futile quests of hers, but once again, Chamdar was ahead of me. This time, she went south. Although it was dangerous, I sent out brief spurts of searching thought, but I still couldn’t find her. That seemed very odd to me. I kept ranging back and forth in wide arcs, and eventually reached an open meadow back in the forest. There were deer tracks, rabbit tracks, and lots of bird tracks out in that meadow, but no human footprints. Alara had not gone north.
I judged that it was very close to midnight by now, and it was bitterly cold out there in that dark forest. I’d already covered the north, the northeast and the northwest in my methodical search. Since Annath lay at the bottom of a gorge, sheer cliffs blocked off the east and west. That left the southern quarter, and I was at least five miles away from that.
At that point, I threw caution to the winds and changed form. If that happened to alert Chamdar, that was just too bad. As cold as it had become, Alara’s main danger now lay in the distinct possibility that she’d freeze to death before dawn. I absolutely had to find her.
I had no way of knowing that not long after I’d left Ildera’s bedside, her false labor became genuine. Geran tried desperately to find me, but of course he couldn’t. The local midwife attended Ildera during the birth, and Garion was bom shortly after midnight.
I was nowhere near, but fortunately, the delivery wasn’t too difficult. Ildera was an Alom, after all, and Alom women are all designed for childbirth.
It took me all night to find Alara. Her body lay at the foot of a fairly high cliff six or eight miles south of the stone quarry. That explained why I’d been unable to find her with my mind when I’d first discovered that she was missing. The frozen condition of her body was a clear indication that she’d died before I’d even become aware of the fact that she’d wandered off.
I was absolutely devastated when I found her, and I wept and tore at my hair, blaming myself again and again.
Then I suddenly stopped, staring in horror at the thick column of smoke rising from Annath in that first faint light of the dawn of Erastide. Something was burning in a village made entirely of stone!
I swallowed my grief, and as it subsided, I sensed my father’s presence. He was much closer to the fire than I was. ‘Father!’ It was almost a silent scream.
‘You’d better get back here, Pol!’ he replied bleakly. ‘Now!’
I have no idea whatsoever of how I traveled those miles from Alara’s frozen body to Geran’s burning house. For all I knew, I translocated myself, and that’s very dangerous out there in the mountains. If there happens to be a peak in your way, you’ll go through it, not around, and that’s not the sort of thing I’d care to experiment with.
Father was kneeling over a small, blanket-wrapped bundle in the door yard, and Geran’s solid stone house was totally engulfed in flames. ‘What happened here, father?’ I almost shrieked at him.
‘It was Chamdar!’ he roared back at me, his eyes filled with vengeful fury. ‘What were you thinking of, Pol? Why did you run off like that?’
The question cut into me like a knife, and now, even after all these years, I can still feel it twisting inside me.
Chapter 41
I looked at Geran’s familiar stone cottage now engulfed in impossible flame, and tears were streaming from my eyes. ‘Is there any hope at all?’ I asked father, though I knew there wasn’t.
‘None,’ he answered shortly, wiping his own eyes with a deliberately rough hand. ‘They’re both already dead.’
My entire family had been destroyed in a single night, and no matter how I squirmed and tried to evade it, I knew that it was my fault. ‘I’ve failed, father!’ I cried out in anguish. ‘I’ve failed!’
“There’s no time for that now, Pol!’ he snapped. ‘We’ve got to get the baby out of here. Chamdar got away from me, and he could be anywhere.’ Father’s reddened eyes grew hard as he looked at the fire erupting from the very stones of the cottage. He was quite obviously considering some unpleasant things to do to Chamdar.
‘Why did you let him escape?’ I asked, realizing that I hadn’t been the only one who’d failed that night.
‘I didn’t have any choice,’ father explained. “That idiot threw the baby at me. There’s nothing we can do here, Pol. Let’s move!’
I reached down and tenderly lifted the baby. I turned back the blanket and looked for the first time into the face of the Godslayer. It was a very ordinary face, but the whole world seemed to reel as I looked into those drowsy blue eyes. Someday he might indeed slay a God, but right now, he was just a sleepy, orphaned baby. I held him very close against my heart. Chamdar’d have to go through me to get this one.