All Things Ruin

By R.L. Dean

IN THE WAKE OF HIS FAILED ATTEMPT TO KILL KING HALIN, PATRIN IS ORDERED NORTH TO SEEK THE HELP OF AN ALLY, BUT THE INCREASINGLY PARANOID AND DISTRAUGHT YOUNG MAN WANTS NOTHING TO DO WITH HIS FORMER SAVIOR, THE EXILED PRINCE GALIN ...

Suffering from damaged tech, disillusionment and despondency, Patrin and Xadik head west toward Lordingport, where there’s a promise of medicine and new orders from Galin. From Lordingport, they begin a two-and-a-half month journey to Valenkept, traveling through the factionalized collections of warlords and city-states that make up the Boarsland. During their journey, they face constant threats, brutal fights, unforgiving elements and murderous cultists.

Pushing through the many physical, tech and moral struggles that arise along the way, Patrin grows increasingly paranoid, questioning whether Galin truly cares for him or whether he’s just a tool that the exiled prince is using to retake the throne. At the same time, Xadik’s outlook grows ever more bleak, as he comes to believe that everything eventually falls to ruin.

Will Patrin and Xadik make it to Valenkept and convince King Arbren to back their new assassination plot? Will they make it home? Is there such a place as home?

• Language: English
• Publisher: R.L. Dean
• Release date: Nov 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532387876

R.L. Dean

As a native Texan in the early 90s R.L. Dean created door programs for bulletin board software. In 1998 R.L. became a Christian and has taught expositional Sunday School at his local church for eight years. He currently resides in southeast Texas with his wife of 20 years, ten cats, and two stray dogs. He works in the IT industry as a technician for a large restaurant, but his dream is to work professionally creating novels, television shows, and films.

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AFTERMATH

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Chapter 1

The old man thought there was some irony in the fact that the captain, Brander, was the grandson of Lena's father, Sir Brenit.  Brander's father used to be in the Navy, and Opal was his home port.  Brander took command of a ship, just as his father, but by way of a different route.  He started his career as a merchant marine and then took various officer positions for merchants plying the sea between Denion's southern coast and the Falias.  Now he owned his own ship.  The old man had kept tabs on Lena's family but the last time he saw Brander he was still young and smooth faced.  Now, standing there on the deck watching his passengers board across the gangplank and the cargo lined up on the docks in wagons, he looked like Brenit himself.  The old man led the way, setting his foot on the deck first, and Hefft shepherd the boy behind him.

   Lena was dead.  Xadik was dead.  Patience was dead.  The first two made me sad ... like a weight on my chest that made it hard to breathe.  And the last, Patience falling to crossbow bolts, made me angry ... so very angry.  How much more did I have to endure before the tech would let me die?

   I was in a slough of sewage and run-off on the west side of the city, hunting rabbits.  Whitefield— to the east its white marble walls gleamed like a snowbank, reflecting the setting sun.  I should have been cold, deep winter was coming to Denion, and my torn boots and clothes were soaking wet, but the tech was doing something to me.  Sometimes I felt hot, like I wanted to take my clothes off, no matter the cold.

Target 50 feet and closing ... IMPERATIVE: assault target ... assault target ...

   The tech had caught movement out of the corner of my eye and targeted the offending animal.  It's a rabbit, I screamed in my head.  Out loud I said, "You don't assault rabbits.  You hunt them."

   The water here was ankle deep, but the old pine straw and mud under the water was a little deeper.  I turned full face toward my quarry.  As quiet as I could I pulled one foot free, finding a more solid perch on a rock just below the surface of the water.  It was too much for him, he bolted, and in an instance my field of vision narrowed and I ran after him.  Twenty feet at foot speed and I was out of breath and stumbled to a stop as the rabbit disappeared in the underbrush.  The highlighted frame and target my tech was projecting disappeared with it.

   My chest felt like fire and I fell to my knees in the muck.  A pale outline of my body appeared in my eye, flashing read in several places ... places the tech hadn't been able to repair just yet.  Now the warning flashed again, I needed to eat.

Package ITO11291995k46 SOLDIER.MODEL3v183c67 requesting tactical link, authorize?

Ahh, the ghost, again.

   It happened a couple of day ago.  I was sure it was a ghost so I hid ... burying myself in the mud and muck so it couldn't find me.  Today, however, I realize it's something wrong with the tech.  It was messed up.  It was trying to fix me ... and my head had been hit hard.  The tech was confused.

   Patrin?

   How could I get the rabbit?  The tech absolutely insisted that I had to kill a rabbit.

   Dear He Who is Most Holy ... I've searched for days, trying to use my link to find you.

   I got up, my legs shaking with exhaustion, and something grabbed me.  I turned to look at it.

   It's me, a hooded figure said.  The thing's clothes were muddy and in the same shape as mine.  It let me go and pulled its hood back ... the face was scarred, burned.  One eye was cloudy, and its hair ... there were just patches of it.  The rest of its head was pink skin and stubble.

   It's me, it said again.  Xadik.

   Ghosts will leave you alone if you ignore them.  I hit the NO on the link request and turned to walk away.

   Wait!

   It grabbed me again and I bared my teeth and swung around— I would have fallen if it had not held on to me.

   What are you doing?  Patrin it's me ...

   I know it's not you, you're dead, I told it.  Stabbed fourteen times ... three went straight through your chest and came out your back.

   That got its attention.  It let go of me and leaned back a little.  I could tell it was surprised I knew the truth.  Its one good eye stared at me.

   My tech was flashing:

Package ITO11291995k46 SOLDIER.MODEL3v183c67 allied unit.  Designated non-hostile ...

   Non-hostile?  Now I knew something was wrong with the tech.  Anyone that had been on the other side of Xadik's sword would disagree.

   I'm not dead, It said.  I think something's wrong with you Patrin ... we need to go.  Asaul and the Sentinels are looking for us.  They figured out, just like I did, that the sewers were the only way you could have escaped the guards at the gate ... they were searching every drain between the first and second walls.

   When I didn't say anything it said, "We have to go now, before they start searching outside the walls."

   It reached for me again and I tried to jerk back, but my muscles and reflexes were not what they were just eight point five days ago.  It latched on to my arm and started dragging me through the slough.  I reached for my knife, an old habit, but it was gone.  Lost when I fell from Patience as we crossed the gate ... guards shooting her with crossbows.  They should die for that.  They should all die.

* * *

   I passed out, somewhere in the slough ... I guess.  That was normal for the last week, I was fortunate that I didn't fall face first in a mud hole and drown.  When I woke it was warm, not the warmth of the tech doing its tricks, but warm on my skin, like a fire.  The smell of smoke followed by a pop and crackle confirmed it.  I could hear Xadik moving around, my tech could sense his bodily presence this close.  At some point I realized it was him, not a ghost.  He had somehow survived Asaul and his men, but I chose to lie there with my eyes closed and just listen and think.

   What was I supposed to do now?

   I know you're awake.

   Maybe that was my problem, I never really thought things through ... never really thought about tomorrow.

   I'm not a ghost.  There was some more rustling around, and then I heard him pouring something.  Tea, I thought.

   I know, I said and opened my eyes, staring at the side of a rough-cut wall that reminded me of the inside of Gil's shack.

   If I had been thinking— I mean really thinking about it— I never would have gotten involved with Lena.

   Do you think if I hadn't been involved with Lena ... she wouldn't have died? I asked.

   I heard the slight click of a cup as he set it down on a wood surface.  Then more noise as he sat down and got comfortable.

   I think the people of Brenit would have suffered more if we hadn't been there ...

   I mean, do you think Baler tracked me ... tracked her and ...

   And Lena would still be dead, along with Sir Brenit.

   There was a finality to his voice.  After a moment of silence I heard him sipping.  I sat up and looked at a small table sitting on short legs, about lap high.  A steaming cup of dark liquid was on my side.  Xadik was on the other, drinking from his cup.  The fire was in an old iron stove against the back of the shack ... a pipe ran up the wall and through the roof.  So like Gil's shack.

   Xadik nodded to the cup and said, It's tea.

   What about Patience? I asked.

   What?

   Would Patience have died, if she hadn't tried to get me out of the city?  I wouldn't have been in the city.

   He sighed and looked at me, his one good eyebrow was knitted up in concern.

   Patrin ... I think you're having some sort of ... breakdown.  Link, so I can take a look.

   Trauma feelings, I corrected him.

   What?

   Trauma feelings, that's what it's called.

   He stared at me, with his one eye.  Galin has been trying to reach you.

   I know, I've been deleting his messages.

   Patrin, the mission has changed.  We need to get to Lordingport, to meet Garret.

   Garret?  I'm ... I'm not going anywhere.

   Patrin!  He yelled, then started coughing.  After he cleared his throat he continued, Galin doesn't blame you for what happened.  He knows that Halin and the opposition somehow found out that we were there ...

   I woke up in a sewer, Xadik!  I was getting angry, what more could Galin want from me?  "I had three crossbow bolts in me!  It took two days of crawling through crap to find a drainage pipe in the wall!  And now the tech is telling me to drink blood ... I'm hunting rabbits ... to drink their blood!"  I almost died and those I cared for did die.  What more could Galin possibly want from me, I screamed inside.

   The short tirade left me out of breath.

   "Yeah, well I woke up on fire.  On. Fire. He said calmly, but his tenor was growing the more he spoke.  Asaul's men carried me to a trash pile behind the palace barracks and tried to burn me.  And my tech is telling me to eat wood!  His wrecked face turned even more twisted.  He said it again for emphasis.  Wood.  Like twigs and roots and sassabrush stems."

   He drank some more of his tea and took a deep breath and said, We're messed up, Patrin.  Galin has contacted me every hour of every day for the last week.  He's sending Garret to Lordingport with medicine for us.  I don't think our tech can ... fix all of this on its own.

   I lay back down, turning away from him, and stared at the wall.  I didn't want the tech to fix me.  I wanted it to let me die.

Chapter 2

Hefft was a sissy, the old man thought as he watched Garret's grandson lean over the rail of the ship and puke his guts up.  He doesn't have what it takes, a little voice said in the back of his mind.  He will get you killed before you can complete your mission.  Another voice said, he is fine.  Stop comparing him to Garret.  With a sigh he turned his attention to the boy— Hefft's obvious son, from what woman he did not know.  The kid was making himself useful by helping a sailor sew a jib sail that was spread out on the foredeck.  He was a liability.  If something happened to the boy it would break Hefft.  The old man was going to have to leave them.

   The next morning we left the hunter's shack.  I don't know why I followed Xadik.  After everything that had been done to me— Galin's betrayal in using me, Lena's death, being shot— shouldn't I just go my own way?  Get Idra to take this machine crap out of me and just walk away?

   Xadik took a rusted tin of tea leaves from the shack and an old bottle that he had found somewhere and filled with dirty water, corking it with the end of a small pine tree branch.  We stumbled through the slough until we caught sight of the road and then turned north, paralleling it, but staying in the wet ditches and stalks of dead sassabrush.  It was tough going.  The damage to our bodies was beyond anything that I thought a human being could survive.  My shoulder had a puckering scar that the tech was still healing, there was a critical warning that constantly flashed red in my lower right eye outlining a skull fracture along with the progress of mending it, and a dozen other warnings about my body flashed off and on.  When I allowed Xadik to link I found his vitals no better.  In his case he had lost muscle mass, the tech was taking it to repair his internal organs.  That meant he was now no stronger than a mere barracks sergeant.  In my case it would have meant I was no stronger than one of those girls that worked as copyists in the Archives at the palace.  Which I felt like anyway, but in my case it was blood loss that was causing the weakness.  To recover from our infirmities the tech was insisting that we needed to consume certain material ... like drinking blood or eating plants and wood.  Xadik's tech gave him a seventy percent survival rate, if he could find and consume the things needed to repair his body.  Me, far less ... forty percent.

   We had to rest often and one of those times I asked about Serin.

   I don't know where he or Lady Elsina is, he told me, while chewing on a piece of sassabrush.  For a moment I thought I saw the farm boy in him ... just a shadow behind the set of his burned face.  Otherwise he looked like some monster, if he left the hood of his cloak down.  He was waiting for me at the sally port ... where I left the horses.  He said they were leaving.  Haru was with him, so I'm sure he's okay.

   I didn't care about that viper Elsina, and the bentu kitsu master Haru wasn't within the sphere of my concern, I wanted to know that Serin was safe.  Xadik just didn't have the answers.  Laying back in the dirt and dead grass I gritted my teeth.  The sun was a pale ball of light climbing to its zenith through a faded sky of white and gray.  It was going to rain and my tech said it was thirty-seven degrees.

   We have to find shelter.  Clothes ... food, whatever the tech says we need to survive, Xadik said, as if reading my thoughts on the weather.  He stood and then leaned down toward me with his hand out.  When I didn't take it he said, The tech can't protect us forever.  The temperature will drop tonight, if it gets too cold we'll get frostbite.

   When I still didn't take his hand he huffed in the cold air and stared at me until I finally accepted and allowed him to pull me to my feet.  We started walking again.

   Galin came to mind, I guess it was the tech notifying me that he was downloading a diagnostic that made me think of him.  He had been doing that a lot, in addition to trying to contact me— just making sure his mule was still alive.  His ... using me, I think that hurt the most.  I wonder ... when I was in Emondford, if I had not possessed the Gift would he have told Garret to save me from Gil?  I didn't think so.  He used me.  I was a tool ... a valuable one but still a tool.

   A message came in from him and I deleted it without opening it.  A moment later Xadik said, He wants to talk to you, see how you are.  Stop ignoring him.

   He has the diagnostic report, I snapped back.  Let him read it.

   He took me in, gave me good food, shared with me ... gave me a wonderful life where I felt wanted.  And then he put some sort of metal machine in me and sent me to kill his brother.  Now, I was dying on some backroad in the middle of winter.

   I'm not, blind, Xadik suddenly said as we trudged through a muddy ditch.  He was just ahead of me, so I know it wasn't something he saw on my face that made him say that.

   What?

   You think that I'm blind.  I'm not.

   Xadik, I know you're not blind.  You're the one leading.

   He snorted.  Galin.  I'm not blind when it comes to Galin.

   Xadik talks a lot, but he's not normally ... moody, nor does he talk about his feelings.  I wasn't sure why he picked that moment to express himself.

   You think I'm blind to the fact that he uses his kindness like a tool to get people to do things.  But I'm not.

Uncanny.  I was beginning to think that the tech was somehow letting him read my thoughts.

   Well, you certainly don't feel the same way I feel about it, I told him.

   He's doing this for something important, Patrin.

   I stopped listening at that point.  Lena was important.  Patience was important.  Serin was— hopefully is— important.  Xadik was important but sorting my feelings out about him had become difficult.  He was my friend, he readily fought Baler's men when they attacked Brenit, saved me when I was trying to escape the palace tower ... but he was Galin's man through-and-through.  He was bought, and even admitted it.  And that meant that if Galin told him to kill me ... he might hesitate, but he would do it.  And if that were true, then that meant everything he did for me was just part of his duties as my secondman.  Not as a friend.

   The pains and stiffness of my body pulled my attention away from the pains in my mind.  Xadik talked sometimes, a string of sentences that would end with him breathing heavy.  I didn't keep up with his litany of observations, complaints, or philosophical advice on our predicament.  I still didn't know why I was going with him, why I didn't just lay down in the ditch beside the road and die.  By noon I couldn't go any further and collapsed with warnings from the tech flashing in my eyes.

   Xadik sat down, a controlled fall, beside me and lie back in the dead weeds.

   We need horses, he said in gasps.

   I remember hearing his voice turn distant, like in a tunnel ... then I woke up, the tech was flashing an urgent message in my eye:

Suitable oral-xenotransfusion subject located ... IMPERATIVE: assault target ... assault target ...

   I didn't understand at first, and then saw the data streaming in from Xadik beside me.  We were still linked and he was awake and watching the road.  In that brief moment of confusion as I opened my eyes, against the growing darkness covering the landscape, I saw two wagons pulled by two horses with two old men seated on the wagon and two young girls in the back with bales of hay and sacks.  The two sheep riding in the back of the wagons with the girls were what my tech was framing and highlighting.

   I sat up, closing the box that allowed me to see through Xadik's eyes and the image solidified in to one wagon, one old man, one girl, and one sheep.  Beside me he put a hand out, signaling that I should stop moving.

   Stay down, he whispered.

   Rubbing my face I took a breath and watched the wagon with the man and the girl pass by, the sheep looked directly at me.

   Xadik's tech was starting to pump adrenaline into his system.

   Xadik ... I warned.  We are not robbing an old man and a girl for a horse.  They'll freeze to death out here.

   He pushed up, and then looked at me, Greater things, Patrin ... He took a deep breath and I grabbed at him— missed— and he bolted out of the weeds and stalks of sassabrush like a wild animal, yelling for good measure.

   The old man and girl looked back— I'm sure all they saw was a dark shape running behind them with its arms spread wide and yelling like a banshee.  In the back, the girl screamed bloody murder and the old man started flaying the horses with his reins, but Xadik was already out pacing them.  He grabbed the wagon's backboard and vaulted onto it, then he yanked his hood back.  It was too much for the girl, she screamed again and jumped off the wagon, and when the man looked back he let go of the reins and did the same.  I tried to get up, but I was dizzy.  The tech was still insisting that I needed to assault the sheep when I passed out.

* * *

   A normal person would say they didn't know how much time passed, but the tech's chronometer was very precise.  For the next forty-three hours, twenty minutes, and some tiny parts of time, I lay in the back of the wagon and bounced around as Xadik drove, pushing the horse as much as he dared— or as much as he thought the wagon would take without losing a wheel.  I have flashes of memories; watching the cold stars in a black sky, Xadik squeezing blood into my mouth from a rag, and messages from my tech updating my bodily repairs and projections on my survival.

   When I say that Xadik was in better shape than me I mean that the tech was keeping him alive.  No normal human being could have sustained the damage to their body that he received from Asaul's men, then set on fire, and remained alive.  I remember thinking that it should be impossible for either of us to be alive, regardless of what the tech was doing.

   I wondered about Serin in some of my more lucid moments.  We were drenched from a winter rain and I thought all his scrolls would be ruined, wherever he might be.  Much later I found out that he and Elsina fled to Animi, trying to put some distance between themselves and the fall out that would occur if I was successful in assassinating Halin, or in case of my failure and they were exposed as collaborators.  They kept up appearances until that very moment when Serin walked me to the west tower door and handed me off to the Sentinels.  From Animi more of Galin's agents took them deep into the Grandwood ... Serin still complained about the living conditions even decades later when I was training as a journeyman scribe at the Royal Archives.  I think I would have killed Elsina if I had been forced to live in a small log cabin with her.

   We passed the farmlands that stretched west from Whitefield, roads and byways that I traveled dozens of times on errands for Galin.  Many nights I slept out under the stars on the side of the road or in a field, with only Patience for company.  Each step I take forward it seems, at least in my mind, one step back would be better.  The further I go the further back I wished I were.  Things just seemed to get harder in my life, and that time I spent hovering between life and death in the back of a stolen wagon ... it was better than things to come.  Xadik would eventually be killed, I mean really killed, and others that Galin sent to work with me or protect me would also die.  All sold to me in a turn of phrase called for greater things.

   I woke to the wagon moving oddly beneath me ... it was sliding.  It was morning, and the rain had stopped, the sky was clear.  I blinked the moment of confusion away and grabbed the side of the wagon, Xadik was cursing as the wagon sloughed sideways off the road.  He pulled on the reins and was about to lash the horse with them but I yelled.

   Stop, stop, stop!

   The wagon jerked to a halt and the horse whinnied in protest and leaned forward, trying to resist the pull of the wagon.  We were beyond the farmlands and into the rough hills.  Near where the Rovers found me after the fight with Ann, I thought.  The horse must be having a time with all the muddy ruts and uphill work.

   Xadik hopped down and started walking to front of the horse.  Through the link his vitals seemed erratic— more erratic— as far as I knew he had been awake for at least two days.  He started pulling on the horse's lead and I hopped out of the back, almost falling down the side of the road.

   Xadik, I said, scrambling up and trudging to him.

   What, he stopped pulling on the horse and yelled back, looking at me.  His one good eye was big.  I might have described him as haggard except for the fact that his face was a mass of blistered and blackened skin.  There was red fluid at the corners of his mouth that I hadn't noticed before.

   I took the leader from him.  The horse can't go any further.  It needs rest ... food and water.

   He made a huffing sound, turned and looked up at the sky and yelled something animal like then sank to his hands and knees on the muddy road and started breathing heavy.  My heart hammering from exertion I started unhooking the horse from the wagon and Xadik suddenly fell over, the tech reporting that he had lost consciousness.

   I sighed.  How in the world was I going to get him off the road?

   The horse tore loose from the leader, almost taking my fingers with it, and ran