Terror of the Shadow

CHAPTER NINE

The sound of ringing bells echoed through his dreams, surrounding him, yet coming from seemingly nowhere at all. He pried open his tired eyelids. He saw the bright sunlight breaking through the coarse weave of the fabric that covered him. The dreams faded, slipping quickly out of his memory and into oblivion. But the chiming bells remained. He sat up and looked around. The fog over his mind began to lift. He was at home. If home, at least, was the place where he slept. Rows of cots stretched up and down the length of the cramped hut. They were all empty.

It had taken nearly four months before the nurses had let Laban free from the sick tent. His muscles had grown weak, his skin pale. What little had remained of his spirit after his encounter in the War'ack caves had been leached out of him, wrung as dry as the earth. He was now a broken vessel. He very much doubted he could ever be filled again.

Kol, though Laban could never call him a friend, was the only person that had bothered to talk to Laban since the incident—aside from the nurses in the sick tents, of course. But all they ever said to him was "how are you feeling?" Because it was easier than actually answering the question truthfully, Laban always responded with "fine". Those words had been the extent of his conversation. They didn't even have any meaning to him anymore.

Kol was gone now, so the number of conversations Laban had on a daily basis had again been reduced to zero. Kol was already out with the hunting parties again. Since that was usually a job that required two hands, Laban was not.

The bells continued to ring out their song in the distance. Laban fell back onto his pillow. It deflated under the weight of his head with a soft flump. This wasn't the first time that the others had left without waking him. Everyone else would get up, usually before dawn, to begin their work. Since Laban didn't have any work, they just stopped bothering to wake him. So, he slept in. Honestly, he was surprised that he was able to sleep through their daily commotion as well as he did. They didn't try to wake him, but they certainly didn't make any effort to be quiet.

Today was strange, though. The distant tinkling of the bells told him that today was the Sabbath. Everyone—well, almost everyone—would be at the town center, listening to the Elders and their preaching. Since he had been back, the others had always woken him to participate in the Sabbath celebrations. Laban never really participated so much as stood in the back and very quietly waited for the whole show to be over; he couldn't really hear the Elders' preaching from all the way in the back anyway, and half the time they were reading from ancient texts written in a language he didn't understand. He wondered if anyone at all in the crowd could understand it.

The bells stopped. The preaching would begin soon. The entire city of Ura-chan would be as deserted as a ghost town, except for the very town center, which would be more crowded than the busiest metropolis—exactly where he didn't want to be.

He sat up again, throwing the thin sheets off his lap. He set his bare feet down on the cold floor. Bits of sand, tracked in by careless boots, felt coarse and grainy between the soles of his feet and the battered slabs of old wood. He lazily slipped some sandals onto his feet, in no real rush to get anywhere.

The distant ringing began again when he stepped out the door into the empty street, this time accompanied by the melodic sound of singing voices. The hymns were actually one of the few things that Laban enjoyed about the Sabbath. Even in the midst of his loneliness, the music had helped him find solace. He felt a togetherness with Those Above as he sang, even though he had no talent. Music had a funny way of doing that. He felt a tiny twinge of guilt at having missed it today.

The Sabbath was something that was sacred to every Malkuth. It must have been a part of their traditions from before the War—even his old tribe had always observed the holy Seventh Day. On most days, they would walk. Their clan would wander across the Outland, sometimes towards a specific destination, sometimes not. They only ate when they found food, only stopped when they found shelter. The Seventh Day was always different, though, Laban remembered. Even when he was a kid, he remembered looking forward to that day. Not just because they wouldn't do any walking that day, but because the Elders would sit down with them and tell them stories or ancient myths, older than the desert sands, or older, they said, than the silver moon or the burning sun. There were stories about the War and noble knights and their brave followers that they led into battle, fending off the conquering Territe armies. Even though the Territes' outnumbered their own a thousand to one, it was their faith in Those Above who had given them the strength to win. He remembered one story in particular about a soldier who had been lost in the wilderness but had been saved from starvation and thirst by the blessings of Those Above, who caused the birds and animals to bring him food and lead him back to safety. Other myths told of miracles just as fantastic or more. Laban had heard a few of these legends repeated here at Ura-chan, but most were new.