Chapter 23

I drifted above the sand, my Hurlon form sparkling as its gravitic fields brushed off tiny motes of static discharge where the raindrops hit it. The sparkling was coming faster and faster as the atmospheric potential in the vicinity built up to the inevitable. A normal Hurlon would have called me crazy for spending hours floating above the empty sea instead of safely and comfortably basking within its depths. The thought that I would do it in the midst of a lightning storm would have boggled that Hurlon's mind, or any Hurlon's for that matter.

I'd come to Cloudburst as usual to bury myself in her depths and in my Hurlon form, and think. I'd found the deep no place for my thoughts this time though. There was no calm there, only rage, anger and frustration. Frustration over not finding another answer. Anger at finding myself in a position of having to apply an answer I didn't want to use and rage at myself for having thought of the answer and found in myself an ultimate willingness to use it when required.

I'd returned to Aruh and the Yaru to continue my meditations on what it meant to be a Walker, and to give further consideration to the Yaru question. I'd returned to find my old unwanted-but-accepted companion Splay imprisoned in one of the buildings the Legion built for their use as a prison. The Harim used to build them but they weren't really fond of leaving their forests, so the Legion took over the task once they came on the scene.

"He was careless, unthinking and unmindful of his duty," Glint, the leader of the hunt told me. "Splay was in charge of a pack of young being taken along the cliff road to the high springs. Their safety was his responsibility. He shirked that duty, choosing instead to join them in rough-housing and playing. He shouldered past young Far Light Gleaming on the Canyon Spires while chasing another of the youngsters. She fell. From High Cliff."

"It was an accident," Splay said, his head down. Splay had always sought eye contact with me in the past, seeing it as a challenge. The challenge was gone now, replaced by shame. "We were all having a good time. It was a pleasant day, and the accident just happened."

"As I hear it, the accident was allowed to happen. It could have been prevented."

"I did not intend this!" Splay cried out. "I did not choose this!"

I opened my emotive sense and listened to the sincerity that lay behind the words. Even Splay didn't truly believe his words. How then could I?

"You chose," I accused, his emotional center still bare before me. "You knew the dangers of High Cliff. You had received instruction, were aware of the hazards. You knew your duty to the hunt and to the children. In choosing to play with your charges you chose to disregard what you had been taught and what you knew was your duty."

Splay gave no answer, but I could see it in his heart. He agreed completely and was only waiting to die, hoping he might at least sway a few hearts so that they would not hate him once he was dead.

My Hurlon senses could feel the lightning building now, a massive discharge was only moments away. Little knots of ball lightning formed within the troughs and valleys of the storm-tossed sea and bounced from peak to peak across the choppy sea like drops of water on a hot griddle. I boosted the strength of my inner shield and spun around, doing a complete circle looking for the highest wave peak in the vicinity. I found it to the south of me and moved swiftly across the intervening water, climbing the face of it finally to confront the storm. I'd timed it perfectly. As I reached the peak of the wave, the lightning struck and a flash of blinding light seemed to strike up and down simultaneously.

The air around my shields ionized instantly and it briefly flickered into visibility. Beneath me the ocean shone with a ghostly white light as the discharge excited countless millions of normally invisible luminescent plankton. Again the lightning struck, and again, and when it was done, the rain came again harder, doubled and trebled in strength. The rain struck the water so hard it sounded like I was in the middle of an avalanche, and that was despite my Hurlon form not even having ears with which to hear it!

"I can save you," I told Splay, hating myself for it.

"I cannot be saved," He answered. "Even by the likes of you."

"I can save you, but you will have to choose to be saved."

"Glint will not allow it."

Glint was, as Splay knew he would be, completely against it.

"Give Splay to me once again, wise Glint," I asked before the Elders of the hunt.

"I cannot," he told me. "The Elders Council has ordered his death, and I may not oppose their will."

"If the council has ordered his death, then he is dead. Give him to me. Let me make him mine."

This set the council off in a very big way. I heard 'Walker' from the murmuring several times. "We must speak privately," they told me, and I left them to their discussion. I sought out Splay again and found him laying in the dust of his prison. His eyes blinked at me but he lay still otherwise.

"Splay, do you love me?" I asked. He raised his nose at that, looking up at me for a moment, but he dropped it back onto his forelegs again without answering. "I will ask you again, and you will answer."

The lightning storm abated finally and the wind shifted, the driving rain easing a little before changing to hail. Thunder rolled in across the water from the east. I rose higher, gaining altitude and speed as I went. My Hurlon body wanted to protest, but I reminded it that we were not just Hurlon, but Walker, and it stopped. Once I was well out of the atmosphere, I slowed and turned my senses back towards the planet beneath me. From here I should have seen the familiar oceans and continents of the Earth and Meadow that I knew, but the cloud cover would have prevented it if I'd had eyes to look at it with. What my Hurlon senses could see looked achingly familiar and foreign at the same time. I had my Hurlon facility for manipulating gravity fields. I'd glimpsed inside the art of crafting it from the High Wizard of Westhal on Arbor. I had an appreciation for the possibilities that Constantine Fylakas had taught me in his workshop on Obsidian.

With my mind I built a deep space gravity drive around me, fashioning it from fields of gravity, bits of Dream Stuff and a little of myself for good measure. When I had it set firmly in the real and the now, I touched it with Light and I broke orbit, destination: Moon. Perhaps a desolate stretch of battered lunar soil would be the place I could properly consider my shame and resolve within myself what I knew to be wrong and what I knew I must do.

"The Elders have considered your request, Walker." Glint began. The way he called me Walker told me this was to be a much more formal conversation than the last. "You may have Splay, but when you take him, he must leave Yaru and may not return. The dead leave us when they die, and as all know, the dead may not return from the other world. Can you assure us that this will be so?"