The Hesta
In this story, Cadovis is a young man who has grown up in the command. As he grew older, his adoptive parents recognized his unusual ability with regard to spirits. Young Cadovis calls it his aura; others call him and those like him beyonds.
To utilize their abilities, the command has organized them and others into unique units sent to investigate and neutralize strange occurrences.
This is one of those stories.
The Hesta
by Luke D Evans
The blizzard had abated before sunup, but still the wind swirled snow into their eyes. Cadovis called a halt before the inn, its sign swinging in the wind. The road outside it, usually speckled with travelers to and from the northern reaches of Praetia, could only be imagined by the slight trough in the mounds of snow.
Five investigators dismounted, their long coats sweeping behind them. Scarves concealed all but their eyes and bridges of their noses.
Cadovis wished for his leader, Tara-Si, who had taken sudden leave some days prior. He could use her mind-sense, how she could get into someone's thoughts, their motives, the very synapses that fired across the gray matter. He felt half-lost without her. She was a little older and wiser than he was, and would not feel the moths fluttering in her belly as he did now. He took a deep breath to calm them.
Together they approached the door cautiously. A release of the catch, and it swung open. Cadovis and Tranton led the way, followed closely by Ister, Xaries, and the cafa Voc-Chyl. Inside was silent and cold. Not a body found, living or dead. But Cadovis could still feel that tingle that had led them here from the command, though it had grown faint.
Upon that day, his spirit-sense had spiked unlike ever before, and he'd cried out in astonishment. Oridon had mobilized whom he could, and the investigators set off, Cadovis and Xaries in the lead. Now the sense that had stung him lingered like an odor behind the wall.
He would have to make-do, rely on Xaries and his time-sense instead. The Kana from Pyadim was strong and capable of leadership, but mostly kept to himself, needing neither guidance nor control. He would leave the management of others to Cadovis. Still, he exuded a calming influence, a sense that everything would turn out all right. Combined with Cadovis' spirit-sense—the aura, as Cadovis called it—they made a formidable duo.
The crew cleared the lower level. The sitting area, the serving area and the dirty kitchen, with its root cellar straight into the side of a hill, were all empty and harmless. The ash under the half-burnt wood held the faintest trace of warmth, and the ale was half drunk, dishes unwashed and chairs upturned. Together they swept upstairs to a few bedrooms. Clothes were scattered in one across a cot, in a heap on the floor, but folded neatly inside a large trunk in another room.
Ister had gathered her hair behind her and removed her woolen hat. Some of it escaped, hanging in curls and frizzing out, but her face had grown serious. She called Cadovis into the bath, where a greasy wooden tub was fed by a large tank perched visibly in the attic above.
A small sliding hatch in the ceiling turned off the water to the trough that fed the bath, but it stood open, as if someone had been using it and forgotten to ready it for the next bath. The water that remained shone with a sheen of forming ice in the biting cold of the abandoned inn. Ister pointed to the drain in the base of the tub.
At first, Cadovis spotted nothing. Ister reached for the drain and all but touched an almost invisible thread snagged on its edge. Cadovis crooked his head, puzzling at it. Surely it meant nothing. A string snagged on a bit of splinter. He pulled out a penknife and coaxed the thread free, snatching it from the maw of the hole.
At its end lay a tarnished pendant, a simple circle, but something was scratched on the back of it.
“Egca-sir?” Cadovis read, unsure, the word nonsense to him. The writing was hurried and incomplete. He handed it to Ister.
“No,” she said, turning it this way and that. “Sheva 31? I think, and then” —she rubbed it with her robe— “maybe a symbol, like a hesta maybe?”
Cadovis shrugged. Name and rank? he wondered.
“Do you recognize the name?”
Ister shook her head slowly, still studying it. “The hesta, isn't that...?”
Cadovis nodded. The A'fuzar used it to denote a meeting place, or a spirit, or a point of interest to their religion. The symbol was integral to their beliefs, showing up everywhere they were found, but the A'fuzar were peaceful and unproblematic.
“But 'Sheva 31’—I don’t see it at all. Maybe... maybe Fyoushi?” The words read uncertainly at disparate angles. He turned it around a few times so the light hit another way. The markings were so faint, so indefinite and unfamiliar. Finally he pocketed it. He couldn't make it out rightly.
Ister stifled a laugh despite the solemnity surrounding them. “Those are totally different. I think it's definitely Sheva-something.”
Downstairs, Cadovis and Ister met back up with Xaries and Tranton. Xaries had bent low over a corner of the inn by some stuffed chairs. “What is it?” Cadovis asked.
Xaries shook his head. “Robes.” His forehead creased and he rubbed it. “Who would leave these robes in the middle of the common area?” He gestured to an unused coat closet.
Cadovis scanned the room. Here and there were other fragments of clothing—stockings, collars, undergarments, overcoats, and other incongruous finds.
“Maybe someone ransacked the place. Left the clothes strewn about. I mean”—she reached down with a fire poker and snagged someone's large underbritches— “how else do you explain these in the common room?”
Tranton chuckled and glanced at Xaries. “Should I tell her?”
Xaries was rifling through a lounge chair and didn't notice Tranton. “Where's Voc-Chyl? He could sniff it out. If anyone is here, or anyone had been here other than the owners of these clothes....”
Voc-Chyl was doing just that, but had come up empty. The little cafa did not speak much, but bore an intense ferocity of mind and spirit, and a fabulous sense of smell. He returned from the kitchen moments later and shuffled around the common area, shaking his head to the negative.
“No,” Cadovis said slowly. “This is without doubt a spirit. Remember why we came here. We did not receive word, and the lords did not send us. I felt this.”
“But the people,” Tranton said. “Where are the people?” Tranton may be the muscle of the group, but he did not lack intelligence. Simple as it was, this struck at the heart of the question.
Where had everyone gone?
“Have you checked outside?” Cadovis asked.
“No footprints,” Tranton said. “The stables are empty too.”
“Dragolains?” Cadovis suggested. “Or...” He was about to say cravons, but stopped himself. The giant crow-like birds, used primarily by the enemies in Gradakh, could not be so far north, he told himself.
Voc-Chyl seemed to agree to the unspoken question. “Very potent, cravons be. Dragolains also.” His shrill voice pierced the air, and he wrinkled his nose. “Not here. No no. Not here.”
That also ruled out the jenalun, uncommon as that would be. “Either this place was abandoned before the blizzard...” Cadovis began.
“Or?” Ister urged after a long pause.
“Or they vanished.”
The word hung in the air for a long moment. Finally Xaries cleared his throat. They all faced him as one, crossed between reticent and relieved. He beckoned them to form a circle.
“Hold on,” Cadovis said, his mind racing with alternatives. He didn’t wish to travel in time with Xaries because the aura went silent whenever they did. But it registered no spirit in this place. At last he acquiesced, and they held hands in the space between chairs.
Xaries inhaled deeply, eyes closed, then regarded them each in turn. They held his gaze, and he nodded affirmation.
No matter how much he experienced un-syncing time with Xaries, Cadovis did not grow accustomed to it. The room spun around him. His stomach churned. Vision blurred. Then everything settled, and, at first blush, the room appeared almost normal, save the sensation of rushing wind inside him.
But little things were incongruous. Sunlight through the window shifted too quickly as clouds raced by. Dust, caught in that same light, raced across the room or in wicked spirals, rather than their natural slow drift. The warmth in the fireplace turned hot and red as coals, followed by a tiny flicker of flame. The world outside the window turned from bright snow to gray to a whiteout blizzard beyond a few feet. Heat returned to the room.
The clothes, scattered throughout the room, rose up, fluffed out, and filled with people. Xaries slowed then halted completely. Cadovis and the group walked around, inspecting each petrified person in turn.
Cadovis rubbed his neck. He was finding nothing. He recognized no one. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except the people had not been there, then were. He pursed his lips to hold back his frustration, then spun his finger in a circle at Xaries. Keep going, it said.
The people unpetrified and moved about the room unnaturally quick. When the other people penetrated the circle, the feeling was as if cold water had splashed across his insides. The people continued through unperturbed.
After a few minutes of this, Cadovis called a sudden halt. He walked across the petrified room to a large mark on the wall. The mark of the hesta: it blazed like fire, but it hadn't been there at all before.
“Did anyone see this appear?”
They shook their heads, frowning or mouths hanging open. The hesta shone and glittered at them, flickering like coals burned inside the etchings. He examined it, seeing inside each stroke. They were more than marks on a wall. They did not protrude from the wall like paint or even a flame, nor were they merely trenched into the wall with a knife. It was, instead, as if they marked a window into another place.
Cadovis wheeled around. “We're not alone. Be alert.”
“I know that mark,” Xaries said.
Cadovis rubbed his chin. “The A'fuzar—”
But Xaries interrupted him. “Not them. It is older than that, much older.”
Cadovis peered sidelong at him.
Xaries turned from the hesta to regard Cadovis. “It's a gateway. You are right. Something traveled here. And it's still here.”
Their blood ran cold collectively, Ister hugging herself, Tranton rubbing his arms. They all felt the chills, and all looked to Cadovis for help. This was his territory. Suck up the spirit, their gazes demanded. But the aura had fallen silent. Unwinding time always sent it dormant. He shook his head, rubbing the back of his neck.
Something caught his eye across the room. A woman, about to head up the stairs, was looking over her shoulder, stuck in place and staring straight at him with familiar eyes. “Tara-Si,” he whispered and bounded across the room. Her gaze did not move with him. She was petrified like the rest.
“Is that”—Ister rushed over—“Tara-Si?” Her hand flew to her mouth. Cadovis reached for Tara-Si's throat, cradling a thread in his fingers and a pendant dangling from the end. The same pendant in his pocket. He flipped it around and showed Ister. It was smooth and blank. Not a mark on it.
#
Ister returned from upstairs. “The tank is full.”
“It was Tara-Si,” Cadovis said, more to himself. “In the bath. That is why the clothes were in the bedroom, where she left them, and not by the bath. But why—how—did she leave the necklace behind?”
He held the one from his pocket before him and scrutinized Tara-Si, her face stuck in time. “What were you trying to tell us?” He wished her mind-sense worked in reverse, that he could will her to enter his mind and show him all she knew. But she was as one comatose.
He gestured to Xaries. “Slower. Toward our own time.”
The people stirred as if reawakening, almost imperceptible at first, then quicker until their movements progressed a little beyond normal time velocity. They witnessed Tara-Si mount the steps, watched the others sit by the fire, crossing their legs a little too quickly, or scurry about nonchalantly, downing a drink to slam it on the table with excessive speed if not force.
And so on. Until, without warning, the clothes unfilled and fell gracelessly to the floor. Xaries halted at once, and they all dashed around, searching for any clues. The hesta yet burned on the wall, but Tara-Si and the others never appeared to notice.
A trace lingered in the air, like a draft of dust blowing across the room, now stuck in time. It was more like a trick of the light than anything real. A prism on the window, perhaps, or distortion through a glass. He set his hand on it, then into it, and felt the same rush as when the people would walk through them. Faces, visages, places, and more beat through his mind like an assault. He removed his hand and they vanished. His blood went cold. His eyes shifted to where the trace headed—directly for the hesta.
Cadovis ran for the bath upstairs. He stopped outside the door, staring at what was inside: Tara-Si, unclothed and sopping wet in the tub with water splashing off her, stood unmoving, droplets suspended in the air as if on invisible threads. Tara-Si was on her feet, bent over backward, a silent cry on her lips and her eyes rolling into her head. In her fist she clutched the pendant, its threads dangling through her fingers.
But worse, as he stared at her, she jerked into a different position. No movement whatsoever from her. One second, she was bent backwards, next she was on her knees hunched forward, a pin in one hand and the pendant in the other.
Before he had time to collect himself, again she shifted, this time sideways, her mouth open and her hand unclasped from around the pendant. Cadovis raced beside her and peered down the drain. The pin hung there, a foot below the tub, nothing to stop it save time until it hit the water chamber far below. The pendant lingered also, above it, but the knot at the back of the thread had already snagged, and it would not fall.
Beside him, Tara-Si shimmered, becoming translucent, and her position shifted again, fallen all the way back across her feet, knees bent one-hundred-eighty degrees. He waved a hand to her as if to grab her, pull her up, embrace her, but his hand passed through her. He watched in horror as she blinked completely away. A trace of her rushed away, so quickly he wouldn't have seen it if he hadn't known to look for it.
Ister and Tranton stood at the door, pale as alabaster. “What. Was. That,” Tranton said.
Cadovis regarded them stunned, then raced for the steps.
#
The hesta was gone. Voc-Chyl shook visibly, staring where it had been.
“It was there,” Xaries told Cadovis. “And then it wasn't. No fading or unwriting. Nothing. Just gone.”
“Time?” Cadovis asked him.
“Hasn't budged. I jammed us here.”
They all took hands again, looking furtively one to the other. Each nodded acquiescence and clinched their eyes shut. Time began to slip past, slowly at first. Of a sudden it stopped. Xaries eyes snapped open. To his right, a formerly lifeless pile of clothes rose up, taking form without body, slowly, jerkily. It stood and faced Xaries—no body, only clothes filled out as with an invisible body.
The wind of time inside Cadovis had ceased, but a bitter cold swept through him all the same. He stood petrified, as if he too had been stuck in a time-halt, unable to move. The incorporeal clothes advanced upon Xaries, only his eyes straining to see the clothes walking toward him. Terror emanated from him, and from the others as well, as they stood helpless before this spiritual form. Cadovis tried everything inside him to summon the aura, but felt nothing. It slumbered.
The clothes reached a slack sleeve toward Xaries' face. When it touched, Xaries' eyes rolled to whites, and the incorporeal clothes fell lifeless to the floor. The rushing wind in Cadovis's body returned, and everything swam before his eyes.
He collapsed to the floor. He did not know for how long, but when he came to, the others were stirring as well. Except Xaries. He lay motionless as one dead, eyes open to the ceiling. Standing opposite Xaries, a big smile across her face and hands clasped before her as if waiting patiently for the class to find their seats, was Tara-Si.
“Hello, Cadovis,” she cooed. She flashed teeth, but her eyes were hollow.
“Tara-Si. We didn't know you were here.” He spoke cautiously, choosing his words.
“Oh, yes.” Her brow lifted and her smile, if possible, stretched wider. “I am so happy you came too.”
The others had all gotten to their knees and stared at her as if entranced. Cadovis alone rose to his feet.
“I was hoping you would come, Cadovis. You most of all.” She tilted her head, her smile slipping as if under strain.
“You called me.”
“Well.” She flashed another smile and leaned forward a little as if imparting a secret. “I am a mind-sense, after all.”
Cadovis!
A foreign voice rattled around in his head distantly. No, strike that. Not foreign—Tara-Si! He recognized her sound in his head, more “her” than this overly sweet version before him. It held a smile like hers, but the eyes betrayed it.
Cadovis!
Yes, he answered tentatively.
This is important. You must listen! Push me, the other me, out of your head!
Out? How? He meant to say this to himself, but she responded.
Close your mind! Empty it of everything except one thing. A vault! Or a locked room, where nothing else can go! A cave or a bunker no one knows about! Think of nothing else!
The Tara-Si bodily in front of him was talking again.
“I'm sorry?” he said.
She regarded him coolly, smile slipping. “I was saying, can you come here a moment? I need to show you something.”
Don't go, the Tara-Si in his head pleaded. You must push me out! You must wake up your aura!
He agreed, he mustn't go, but his feet started that direction anyway. He stopped next to her. A smell wafted from her skin, an acrid odor of burning and ash. He did not mention it to her. She held her hands out to him.
“Take my hands, Cadovis.”
Why?
More distant, almost gone, a second voice cried, No! drawn out but dimmed, fading like a growing distance spread between them.
He took her hands. At first nothing happened. Then a tidal wave of emotion swept through him, raw and unrecognized. He couldn't pull away. They were stuck together. He gawked at her, horrified, as her face melted, features washing away, cheeks slipping onto her neck and eyes stretching downward into long vertical slits.
Unfamiliar memories floated past. Tara-Si in bed, terrified awake after a bad dream. Tara-Si's first mind-read of another young student. Tara-Si in the tub upstairs, visions of the hesta flashing in her mind.
Cadovis fell to his knees. The Tara-Si before him had dissolved into a gooey blob of flesh and blood. He could still feel her inside him, somewhere distant, far away from the avalanche of memories and emotions that had once defined her.
Much bigger, and much worse, he could feel that other. The spirit that had lured first Tara-Si, and now him and Xaries, here. It wanted what they had. He could sense that desire burning holes in him. He could smell its acridity inside him. Its will spread out huge and monstrous. He could only cower before it. The blackness enveloped his mind. His thoughts turned to mush, dried to dust, and blew away on the burning wind. The spirit had taken him over.
He floated in his own mind disembodied, lacking ideas or sense of self, as if aloft in the space between the stars. Neither sadness nor anger nor peace entered him. He was just floating. Just floating, eternally lost, time immaterial.
Drifting, empty. Without thought or form.
#
At first, the sound came as a far-off rumble in an empty soundless vacuum, as if a distant moon had shifted on its axis perhaps. But it grew stronger. Louder. Still he felt nothing, but he knew, impassively, something was happening.
The sound filled everything. It became everything. There was only sound, like a chorus in some great concert hall. It had beats and tones and rhythm. It had time. Somewhere, a great beast had awakened, and it was coming for him.
Not for him. For what though? Without warning or control, he perceived speed, as if objects had come closer. He approached a planet quickly, shooting downward to the ground, a snow-covered world, through a wall as if spectral—and he was back behind his own eyes. The others were staring at him.
“Wh-what happened?” he said.
Ister's mouth hung open, eyes wide. “Are you... are you Cadovis?”
He checked his own hands, not quite recognizing them. “I think I am? How long was I gone?”
Ister blinked, uncomprehending. “Gone?” Her tone shifted upward.
Beside them, Tara-Si lay motionless. Not melted. Not a glob of goo. Simply unconscious, or... dead? At that moment, she stirred. Her eyes slid open and met Cadovis's. She smiled faintly.
“You did it,” she croaked.
“Did what? I did nothing. I was gone. I was nothing, I....” Then he realized. “It was the aura.”
“Did you vomit it out?” Tara-Si rose to her elbows.
Cadovis shook his head. He could feel the spirit like a dead weight inside him, condensed into a single dark and heavy bead. Inside the aura.
“Don't you usually vomit it?” Ister asked, worried.
“Usually.” He pointed to Xaries. “Is he alive?”
Ister leaned her ear to his nose. “He is. I think it's in him too. Part of it.”
Cadovis had seen it, but the fragmented spirit must have lacked the strength to animate Xaries or to manipulate time. The aura rose back up, like a rising gourd. Without thinking, he probed at Xaries in his mind, drawing out the poison within him.
A black tendril snaked out, then a ropy carbon, finally a whole body of inky formless spirit. It sucked out of Xaries and entered Cadovis wholly. He fell backwards to his rump with a huff, then turned and vomited the whole lifeless pile of black scum. Still, the bead remained inside him, a dense mass caught in the aura.
Xaries sat up abruptly, gasping. He stared at Cadovis a long moment. “Thank you, brother. I couldn't hold out much longer.”
“You were holding it off?” Cadovis asked incredulously.
“It was but a remnant. Yet, another minute, and I would have been lost.”
Tranton held out a hand and lifted him to his feet. “It took us utterly.” Cadovis referred to Tara-Si also with a gesture.
Xaries gaped at Tara-Si, seeing her for the first time.
“Long story,” she said with a smile. “Let's get out of here. There's another inn up the road, in town.
“What about them?” Ister gestured to the clothes. “Are they gone?”
Cadovis shook his head and Tara-Si grimaced as they exchanged a glance. Finally Cadovis shrugged. “I think so. We’ll send for help at the next inn. Just in case. Maybe it will take time, and they’ll return.”
#
As they rounded up the horses, Cadovis nodded at Tara-Si. “The pendant... what did you write on that? Fyoushi, or sheva, or...?”
Tara-Si chuckled, her eyes flashing humor. “I was wondering if you would catch that. I'm impressed you even found the pendant. Did it not fall down the drain then?”
Cadovis fished in his trousers and removed the pendant, handing it to her. She fingered it, feeling the etching she had placed there.
“You knew the hesta, then? Figured that out?”
“Wellllll....”
She laughed. “It says skevrali. I'm sorry.” She shrugged. “It's my native Bracha. It means 'devil' or 'spirit.' I reverted back during stress, I suppose.”
Cadovis nodded, biting his lips. “It certainly looked stressful.”
Tara-Si reddened. “You saw me?”
Cadovis felt his own blood rise, and Tranton guffawed from behind them.
“I didn't touch. You were not quite there, after all.”
“Uh-huh,” Tara-Si said, but she flashed him a smile anyway.
They unroped their steeds and mounted, Tara-Si riding with Voc-Chyl.
“Should we burn it?” Ister asked before they rode off.
“It is not the place that is at fault. No, the devil is on the floor inside, and it is dead.” He did not mention the bead inside him. It too was dead, he thought, tucked safely within the aura.