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The following is the prologue and first chapter of M.C. Planck’s Sword of the Bright Lady. You can leave your thoughts using the form at the bottom of this page and there is also a link to follow for more information on the author and their work.

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Read and enjoy!

1 Stargazing

It turned out that walking between worlds was as easy as stepping over a crack in the sidewalk. Lost in thought, Christopher did not even notice until the snow leaked over the tops of his tennis shoes.

The cold bit at his ankles like a steel trap, and he looked around, stunned. How could there be snow in the Sonoran desert in the summer-time? In the full moonlight, the landscape should have been familiar and reassuring, his regular nightly walk, a route so well traveled that he did not need to pay any attention unless the dogs found a rabbit or a coyote and went barking and tearing through the dry riverbed.

Instead of scraggly palo verde and mesquite, he was surrounded by stately oaks and beeches, their bare branches draped in snow. The ground was snow-clad beneath his feet, where it had been dry sand. The lights of the city no longer beckoned from the south, and even the full moonlight was of a different character, glittering more white and less yellow. He looked up, to see why, and his world was shattered by the sight.

There was no moon. The illuminating radiance by which he could see was starlight. The wrongness of the night sky blazed out at him, a black velvet canopy studded with diamonds crowded together, a terrifying embarrassment of riches. He could not even begin to imagine constellations in that ocean of lights.

He turned in panic and looked behind. His tracks covered a few short steps of snow, and then ended, or rather began, as if from nothing. In terror he fled back, but only bleak and snowy forest lay behind his footprints. He called to his dogs, his heart rising in his throat, but the futility overwhelmed him and his voice died on the silent snow. The jingle of their collars did not answer. The distant hum of traffic, the rumble of a passing plane, were absent, utterly and irrevocably absent. The forest stood in mute disdain, reproachful of the very notion that such things had ever existed. Their silent branches crowded him, forcing his gaze upward again as he sought escape.

He stared at the impossible sky, more numbing than the freezing chill of the air. Pointlessly, even though he knew she was miles away, already asleep in their bed, he cried out for his wife.

But the cold would not be denied. It cut through his thin t-shirt like a knife, battered his legs through his denim jeans, prodded him with icy fingers greedy and cruel. At random, he picked a direction, and began to walk.

He walked for hours, his only purpose to keep moving, knowing that to stand still was to die. The cold numbed his skin, made blocks of ice from his feet, turned his face into a hard mask that pinched with every step. The unspoiled natural beauty of the land terrified him, whispering of isolation and wilderness. He countered the silent harangue with remembered sounds of crackling fires, boiling tea, rustling wool, the warmth of civilization. When the cold weighed on him like stone, and the urge to stop and rest and sink quietly into sleep bore down most heavily, he imagined his wife calling for him behind the next tree, and kept walking.

He was too exhausted to be surprised or even relieved when he found the village. It lay there in the glittering starlight with its quaint thatched roofs frosted with snow and the smell of wood-smoke like some kind of Christmas gingerbread display. One large building stood at the center of the village. From it alone came light, creeping through cracks in the shutters of its narrow windows. He stumbled up the steps to the wide double door, lifted the giant iron knocker with both hands and let it fall. Again, and once more, but the effort drained him to his knees. His body sagged against the rough-hewn wood, the knocker far above him and out of reach. All that was left to him now was to hold onto consciousness, one second at a time, for a time he could not measure.

When the door began to give, the whip that drove him finally lay down to rest.

He fell into the light and into darkness.

2 Wooden sticks and iron men

He woke in front of a comfortable fire crackling in a stone hearth, in a narrow and uncomfortable bed, and not alone. Sleeping, the girl looked no more than sixteen. Black hair, and he knew it was not his wife; still dressed, and he knew relief.

But he was naked except for underwear, and that was quite awkward. A dream, of course; any minute now would come the part where he was late for a math test. Startlingly realistic for a dream, with the pungent smell of wood-smoke and dirt, and yes, body odor. The girl needed a bath. Not terribly pretty, and no one he recognized. That struck him as quite unsatis-fying for a dream. Indeed, the entire room had an unbearably rustic feel, a primitive cabin with the cluttered look of constant occupation. One wall was stone, but the others were rough-hewn wood, like the bench in front of the fire. Odd bits of a household lay about, and something about them disturbed him. In the firelight it was hard to tell, but though he saw clothes and wicker baskets, firewood and stoneware, something was missing.

Telephones. TVs. A stereo. A light, or even a lamp. These were the things that were absent. He could see nothing in the room that lived on electricity.

A remarkably subtle observation for a dream, he thought. He rubbed his face where the rough blanket had made it itch. Then he waited for the dream to do something.

Waiting, he remembered. He had been cold and lost. He remembered a dazzling night sky. He also remembered putting the dogs in the truck, driving out to the river for a walk. But the memories didn’t connect. There was no bridge between them.

With some unease, he noted that the dream hadn’t gone anywhere. The girl stirred in her sleep, the fire crackled, but nothing changed.

All in all, he didn’t like this dream. Time to wake up.

He’d had nightmares before, the terror of sleep paralysis and the sensa-tion of losing control. Voice was the one thing you kept; you could still scream, though it was always a struggle, and the sound would awaken you. He drew in a breath, and barely had time to wonder how easy it was before the bellowing shout flew out of him, unfettered and unrestrained.

The girl shrieked and fell out of bed, and he almost went with her, tangled up in blankets and confusion. Why were his ears ringing? He should have produced no more than a choking cry, felt the sensation of falling forward, the sudden concern at a sound not normal and the relief that it was his own voice.

Instead, the girl on the floor burst into tears, and the door across the room flew open, revealing an old white-haired man in a nightgown, fear and anger on his disheveled face.

Christopher was as surprised as any of them. He lay there trying to understand why he wasn’t waking up.

“Helga,” the old man said, and his face began to clear, a smile settling into the creases like it belonged there. “Stanser skriking, du er skremmende gutten.”

The girl sat up, sniffling, but looking at Christopher seemed to calm her. He knew he was nothing threatening to look at, half naked and clutching the blankets to himself, trying to shake the sleep from his head.

Except there was no sleep there. In the welling of a strange and terrible fear, he reached out and slapped the coarse wooden paneling with the back of his hand. Hard, so hard the pain made him wince, and a spot of blood appeared where the skin had split. Instinctively he put it to his mouth, and the metallic tang of blood spread truth through him like a poison.

He was not dreaming.

The old man offered the girl a hand, and she climbed to her feet. They exchanged words in their incomprehensible language. She went to the fireplace, lifting an upturned wicker basket and setting it aside to let flickering light flood the room. Christopher’s brain registered that she had been wearing a nightshift, as she pulled a tattered dress over it; that she was older than first appeared, perhaps twenty; that she turned now to preparing breakfast with a clanking of pots and pans. His brain processed this automatically, while the old man came to the bed, adjusted the blankets and made soothing noises. Christopher took it all in but could not make sense of it, could not progress past the brute fact that lay before him.

He was not dreaming.

“Kan du forstå meg?” asked the old man, gentle and concerned.

“Where am I?” Christopher demanded. “How long have I been here?” Christopher stared into the weathered face, looking past reassurance and compassion for understanding, and found none.

Inspiration struck, exhilarating with the promise of hope. He could answer the last question, at least, on his own. His hand went to his chin, stroked the skin and found a hint of stubble. A day’s worth, at most.

The recognition that he had been in his own bed twenty-four hours ago did not turn out to be comforting. The exhilaration molted into genuine worry. How could he be here, from there, and remember only that terrible cold journey?

“Where are my pants?” he asked, searching for something concrete from his past, his semi-nakedness now terrifying. He looked around the room again in dread.

The old man guessed his concern, and a laughing comment to the girl sent her to the rack that stood near the fireplace. From it she extracted his jeans and socks. She gave them to him, trying to hide her curiosity over the material and design, and that chilled him deep inside.

Turning back to her fireplace was all the privacy she was going to give him. Under the blankets he slid into the clothes, grateful for the armor, however thin. Dressed, he felt like a man again.

“Do you speak English?” he demanded.

“Tålmodighet, min herre,” the old man said with a grin. “Piken arbeider så fort som hun kan.”

That was clearly a “no,” although a friendly one. With another smile, the old man ducked back into his room. Through the door Christopher could see bunkbeds and clutter. The old man rooted around until he found a dingy white robe; pulling it over his head, he transformed into a caricature of a medieval monk. Returning to the room, the man accepted a steaming cup from the girl, sat on one end of the bench in the little kitchen, and sipped at his drink. The girl offered Christopher a cup, too.

The sheer normalcy of it all required Christopher to take the warm stone cup in his hands, taste the strange tea. The girl poured herself one and returned to overseeing a pot hung over the fire.

Christopher sat on the edge of the bed, outwardly calm, but inside he walked a narrow track over a vast and incomprehensible precipice that fell into darkness.

The girl put a bowl before him, steaming and hot. Starving, he shoveled food into his mouth with a crude wooden spoon, downing three mouthfuls before he stopped to see what he was eating.

Boiled oatmeal, flavored with peas. Unbidden, an ancient nursery rhyme sprang to mind.

Peas porridge hot,

peas porridge cold,

peas porridge in the pot

nine days old.

Monks and fireplaces, stoneware and serving girls, a flickering torch on the fireplace mantle. It was enough to make you think you were in Medieval Europe.

Except Medieval Europe didn’t exist anymore. Even the smallest villages of the old Eastern Bloc countries had electricity now.

Or did they? Maybe he was in some remote Siberian village. Or a Scandinavian hippy commune. A plane crash, amnesia, wandering around in the dark. That made sense. That was the only thing that made sense.

“My name is Christopher Sinclair,” he told them, wiping the last of the porridge out of the bowl with his fingers.

“Pater Svengusta,” replied the old man with a bow of his head, an obvious introduction. “Og dette er vår kjær Helga,” he added, pointing at the girl.

“Nice to meet you,” Christopher said, although all things considered, it wasn’t. “The porridge was very good,” he told Helga, although it wasn’t either. Lumpy, soggy, and without even a grain of sugar. Still, he smiled when he gave her back the bowl and her face started to glow.

He thought about a girl that would get into bed with him without even knowing his name but blushed when he ate her porridge. Was this a Siberian commune for Frenchmen?

That seemed unlikely, but the idea that he might not be very far from civilization was too exciting to abandon.

“Thank you very much for the food and shelter,” he said, looking around for his shoes. “But I really ought to be going now.”

Helga was already busy with dishes, but Svengusta watched him with keen interest. Christopher found his sneakers next to the fireplace. They weren’t completely dry yet, but he put them on anyway.

“Where is my wife?” he asked, fingers fumbling with the lacings. Wouldn’t Maggie have been on the plane? What if she were still out there? He had to go and look for her, now. The urgency rose like a fountain, drawing him to the door, where he struggled with the wooden bar that held it closed.

Svengusta followed, concern on his face. The old man jabbered in his foreign tongue but Christopher was driven to the edge of panic, trapped by strangeness. When the bar finally fell away, he pushed out into the snow and gulped down the open air of freedom.

The air of freedom was cold. Freezing cold, turning his breath to thick fog in the hard light, but he ignored it and stumbled on. The snow was shallow, three or four inches, but the cold leached through his wet shoes like lightning.

After twenty feet, his arms wrapped tight, shaking in the chill, he could go no further. The village lay around him, silent and dismal—peasant huts, hardly better than log cabins, with thatched roofs. Not a single antenna, power line, or satellite dish to be seen. He was closer to the middle of nowhere than he had ever imagined possible.

The old man stood in the doorway, bemused and sad. One wave of the hand, but in a universal language it said, come inside, you’ll catch your death of cold. The bitter truth stung at Christopher, blurring his sight.

If Maggie had not already found shelter, it was too late. He had almost died in the night; no one would have survived this long.

He shouted at the doorway, rebuking the gentle concern. “Were there others?” Christopher demanded. “Did you find the crash site? Did you check?”

Of course Svengusta could not understand the words. But he understood the message, it seemed. Sadly he shook his head, spread his hands in emptiness and defeat.

Christopher stood and shivered, paralyzed by despair and anger. His heart pounded with the need to run, to search, to find, but his head could not see past failure. The cold would kill him in a few hours, and he did not even know which direction to start in. Fresh snow had covered his tracks from the night before.

He remembered trying to retrace his steps, then, when they had led to nothing, and trembled, but not from the cold.

There was only the hope that Maggie had not been with him on the plane. He would have never walked away from her, under any circum-stance. Even if he couldn’t remember the crash, he knew that.

Not that he remembered being on a plane. And he couldn’t imagine walking away from an aviation crash without a scratch.

What if he had escaped kidnappers and wandered to safety in this obscure town? Maybe he should be lying low, getting a feel for the lay of land. Drugged, kidnapped, escaped. It made more sense than a plane wreck.

None of it made any damn sense at all, which was why he was standing here shivering in half a foot of snow.

Reluctantly, angrily, he slogged back into the little wooden room and slumped by the fire. Helga gave him another cup of tea, her lips trembling with his contagious grief.

Svengusta did not let him sit for long. Throwing the last log into the fire, the old man pointed at a hallway next to the fireplace.

“Er en god unggutt og henter noen mere for en gammel mann og en pike, vil De?” he asked with wink.

The universal price of enjoying a fire: fetching more wood. At least it was something useful he could do. The door at the end of the short passageway was not barred, so he shuffled through it, expecting a storage closet. What he found was a hall fit for a king.

Or a preacher, more likely, once he noticed the wooden pews stacked against the walls. The stone walls were thinly dressed with tapestries where they were not broken by narrow windows. At the far end were the double doors he had leaned against the night before, and at the near end a huge, unused fireplace and a half-cord of stacked wood.

The windows were too narrow for a man to crawl through, with thick but ill-fitting shutters. The double doors were made from rough-hewn planks and bound with iron fittings. It was as fine a reconstruction of a medieval church as he had ever seen, until he looked up to see where all the light was coming from.

Several plain wooden chandeliers held open gas flames sprouting from little stone cups, wholly out of character for a Dark Age atmosphere.

The open gas flames struck him as an incredible fire hazard. The walls were stone, but the roof was timber, and there was open wood everywhere. The tapestries were gray and dusty, not fresh and restored. The rough-hewn benches looked suitably handmade, but they were stacked against the walls instead of laid out in display. If this was a museum, it was a very badly run one.

He knew there were medieval towns that operated as tourist attractions, with the staff dressing in period costume and doing period chores, but this couldn’t be one of them, with dangerous gas lighting and people that didn’t recognize American accents.

Above the mantle of the fireplace was a wooden frieze, a bas-relief carving. He studied it carefully for clues. A hard-faced man stared back at him from the wood, a beautiful woman standing behind him, etched in astounding detail. He tapped the frieze to make sure it was real wood, not a plastic simulation.

The wooden man did not respond, of course, but faced outward with serene determination. He stood between the woman and any possible danger, any imaginable threat. His features were solidly European, with a trimmed beard and moustache, but his stance was Oriental, with a katana held in a classic two-hand grip.

Christopher double-checked. Yes, it was clearly a katana. It had the correct curve, the round guard, the distinctively wrapped hilt. Astonish-ingly, he could even make out the characteristic wavy pattern from the hand-folding process along the blade. But the man was wearing unmistakably Occidental armor: articulated plate and chain formed to his body, styled like clothing.

Disturbed, Christopher slid his gaze to the tapestries on either side of the fireplace. They seemed more prominent than the other tapestries, as if they had more meaning than merely covering the walls.

On the left, four men circled the same woman, surrounded by a crowd at a respectful distance. The costumes and the people were solidly Medieval Europe, but the woman had a halo and was the center of attention. She looked regal, like a queen, or even revered, like some kind of Catholic Mary-idolatry. She was unarmed, but each of the men around her bore a different weapon. One of them was the katana, wielded by the same man in the wooden carving. The other men had a staff, a sickle and a mace, and wore varying kinds of armor, but all variations on Western plate or chain.

The tapestry on the right had only the swordsman and the lady. They stood in a delicate embrace, but their status as lovers was unequivocal. So much for Catholicism!

He turned to the rest of the tapestries, but they did not help. He found pictures of priests praying over the sick—plenty of those. He found charming landscapes with smiling farmers and fat, healthy animals. The people all steadfastly refused to look like anything but Dark-Age European peasants, and the horses were all yoked to plows, wagons, and carriages of utterly boring and commonplace nature. Exactly the kind of things you would expect in a perfectly innocent medieval chapel.

He also found soldiers, engaged in battles and parades. They were armed with straight swords: sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, occasion-ally two-handed, but never curved. Again they refused any hint of Oriental influence, and although the demons they fought had various weapons, some that looked vaguely like Arabian scimitars and others that just looked strange, no where else did he see a katana. He was going to ponder on the meaning of this uniqueness, but was distracted by the demons.

They weren’t classic medieval monsters. For one thing, there seemed to be a wider variety than just horns and tails. But more unnerving, they seemed somehow more realistic. Something about the detail hinted that these creatures had been painted from memory instead of imagination. They were more realistic than anything he’d seen in ancient artwork, cleverer than anything he’d seen in modern cinematics. They made him nervous.

He directed his attention to his chore, picking out an armload of wood to replenish the stock in the kitchen. Being productive made him feel better, and the firewood was comfortingly ordinary. Not very well cut, however. Most of it still needed splitting.

When he got back to the kitchen, he made chopping motions with his hands. Svengusta produced an ax and wedge from the closet at the foot of the bed. Suitably armed, Christopher went back into the chapel to earn his keep.

The ax was ancient, the haft hand-carved and untreated. But the edge was sharp, and it occurred to him that it would make a formidable weapon. Not really his style, however. His college had a PE requirement, and on a whim he had fulfilled it with Kendo, the art of the Japanese sword. The whim had grown into a passion, a love of the pure simplicity, the comradeship of men and women who studied a useless art for the effect it had on their own inner selves. The kata were like dances, half-stylized and half-practical, a silk painting of death and destruction.

Swinging the ax at inert logs was not the same, although it was exercise. As warmth and blood flowed through his limbs, he began to come alive again. Wherever he was, he was safe now. If it was a plane crash, then sooner or later someone would come looking for him. If he’d escaped from kidnappers, then the later they found him, the better, and besides, he had an ax now.

His mind drifting, the next swing missed the target and almost took his leg off. Maybe the ax wasn’t such a good idea.

But then he saw a branch, three feet long and gently curved. Plucking it out of the wood pile, he handled it experimentally. A little trimming and it would make a fine bokken, which was what he used in most of his training and practice anyway. Besides, hadn’t Musashi, the greatest duelist in all history, won half his duels with a wooden sword?

Scraping at the stick with the ax blade, he must have lost track of time, because Helga came in to call him to lunch.

The food was plain: more porridge, plus a strange yellowish bread that was spongy and slightly stale. But the ambience was special. The old man kept up a steady stream of wisecracks that had the girl giggling and blushing. Despite being lost in time and space, Christopher began to relax for the first time since that wakening shout.

After lunch, the old man pulled on a wool cloak, worn and patched but still serviceable. He carefully pointed out to Christopher the building he would be going to, a two-story structure a bare hundred feet from the chapel that looked suspiciously like a tavern. Christopher was happy enough to be left behind, since he was working on the lying-low theory and his impromptu bokken. Back in the main hall, he chipped away at his stick until the twigs and split edges were gone and the balance felt right in his hands.

In the empty, cold hall of the chapel, he found it easy to escape into the kata. Doing the traditional forms took his mind to familiar, comfortable places.

The art was more than a physical workout. It was also mental exercise. The martial arts were a philosophy, a way of facing life. One accepted the world as it was, at the moment, without regrets or compunctions, and sought to find the right place to apply strength to change the world into what one wanted it to be. Steeped in Taoism, an acceptance of what is, but not drowned in Buddhism, the surrender of desire to change what was. Martial artists had lots of desires, they just didn’t let them control their actions. Much like the Enlightenment philosophers, the martial arts taught that desire was a goal, not a method.

And Kendo, focused on the sharp edge of a blade, was clean, shorn of the unnecessary and irrelevant. In a duel, everything was reduced to the sword, often to a single stroke. In that moment one forgot about past and future and concentrated on the now. His duels were only practice, with friends and bamboo, but the act of forcing his mind to the immediate present on a weekly basis was his breath of air, the whale rising to the surface, reconnection to the clear and open world it had abandoned for the murky depths of sustenance and career.

Pausing between katas to catch his breath, he was interrupted by the double doors creaking open and two visitors slipping inside. The disarray of the room had led him to believe the chapel was not used, and he was as surprised to see them as they obviously were to see him.

They were both young, perhaps eighteen. The girl was pretty, the boy was handsome, and though their clothes were poor and plain medieval peasant costumes, the outfits gave the distinct impression of being their “Sunday best.”

He belatedly realized they weren’t dressed for church, but for each other.

They were polite and respectful, the girl curtsying and the boy bowing his head. Christopher decided he was the interloper here, so he was about to leave them to their privacy when a third person swaggered through the double doors.

He was not dressed like a peasant. He was richly cloaked in garish colors and fur trim, was perhaps twenty-five or thirty years old, slightly overweight, and utterly full of himself. Christopher hated him instantly.

The man was as subtle as a fog horn. It was immediately obvious what he had come for. In one glance he dismissed both Christopher and the boy, and began to address the girl in tones that competed for unctuousness and narcissism.

The boy objected; the girl hushed him. Christopher wasn’t sure what was going on. It was obvious that the girl loathed the man as much as everyone else in the room, but she seemed to be agreeing with him. Maybe he had some authority over her? But from the way he was looking at her, he couldn’t possibly be her father. There was too much naked desire for that.

But the fact that he seemed to be arguing his case instead of dragging her off implied he wasn’t her husband, or even fiancé. He didn’t seem angry at the way she clung to the boy, just amused.

She pleaded with the boy, passion quavering under her hushed tones. Christopher understood that part as plain as day: if you love me, leave now. Don’t make a scene. The boy’s face twisted in anger and pain, while the man smirked.

Christopher knew he should walk away, knew that he did not understand the subtleties of this affair or even the culture in which it occurred, but the raw emotion of the drama locked him in.

Suddenly the boy broke and ran, the double doors banging behind him, a swirl of cold snow whisked in his wake. The man all but laughed, and took the girl by the arm. When she shuddered, Christopher snapped.

“No,” he said. In English, but the intent could not fail to be understood.

The man looked at him, his face aflame, and snarled. Christopher didn’t even try to guess at the meaning. Instead, he pointed to the double doors.

The man huffed, but he started to go. He stepped toward the doors, pulling the girl with him. She resisted passively, unwilling to fight, but unable to surrender.

“No,” Christopher said again.

The man spun and advanced on him in a fury, barking like a savage dog. The girl stood rooted, visibly terrified, and Christopher felt a cold queasiness growing in his belly.

The man was wearing a sword: long and straight, like the soldiers in the tapestries. This was no hippy commune, no museum reenactment. The anger that poured out of the man was not an act.

But Christopher had nowhere to hide. Behind him lay a wooden cottage and a girl. Outside lay the village, snowy miles from any kind of authority or civilization or reasonableness.

Or hospital.

Christopher did not want to provoke violence. But he could not retreat, so he stood still, once again paralyzed by impossibility.

The man took his silence as opposition. His barking reached a crescendo, filling the stone chapel with sound and fury. Christopher tried not to be threatening, but the pressure of the man’s advance made him shift his stance and his hold on the bokken.

The man stopped instantly, glaring hatred, fear, offense, indignation. Christopher was under no illusions. Twenty years of smacking people with bamboo sticks, of katas and cutting bundles of paper, did not make him a real swordsman. He had never killed anyone. He had never even tried to hurt someone. This man walked like a professional, the sword hanging from his hip as naturally as the cloak on his back. One mistake and Christopher would not be allowed to restart the fight, recover from his error, learn from the experience. If the man went for his sword, Christopher would have to—

The man went for his sword.

He wasn’t particularly fast, but he was impressively smooth. He had the blade almost out of the sheath before Christopher’s bokken cracked down on his skull. Christopher knew he had held back some, but still, it was a solid blow, and the man should have gone down, cried out, or at least been stunned. Instead, he snarled, and stabbed at Christopher with his sword.

Christopher’s training saved him and he instinctively parried. After all, hitting people in the head in bamboo-armed sparring matches had never stopped them from attacking him before, why should he expect it to now? His body carried on, even while his mind grappled with the stunning ineffectiveness of his first strike.

He snapped his bokken up into the man’s face, smashing the nose. A blow that should have blinded, staggered, distracted, at least gushed blood, only elicited a growl. The man lunged, stabbed again as Christopher stepped back but not far enough, the thick steel blade caressing his left side, opening a six-inch-long gash that spat a fan of red into the air.

But Christopher’s bokken was already in motion, wheeling around his head in a great arc, smashing down on the right side of the man’s jaw. He did not hold back this time—there was nothing left to hold him, as he passed completely into the moment of the fight, surrendering to the reflex of training. He distinctly heard bone shatter, and then the liquid splash of his own blood as the first drops hit the floor.

The man fell like a stone, Christopher crumpling after him. The silent, empty chapel watched them impassively, a single creak from the double doors the only testament that there had ever been any others in this place.

He came back to real time, and ordinary mind. He held his bleeding flesh together and tried not to panic. The brutal pain helped; the mere thought of moving was petrifying. He tried to cry out, but he could not draw the breath for it. A stomach wound, the worst kind. If he survived the hemorrhage, infection would almost certainly get him. Hopefully the girl had gone for help, but he wasn’t sure what kind of help these people could offer. He needed doctors and emergency surgery, not hippies and herbal tea. He needed an American embassy. He needed his wife.

He did not want to die among strangers.

Time passed, unmeasurably. His mind could not focus on anything but the steady pump of blood. One fact finally penetrated: the other man was still breathing. He was not dead. Christopher idly wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

The doors burst open and Svengusta, Helga and the pretty girl flew into the room. The old man knelt to Christopher, examined the wound with professional authority. He reached out to trace the bloody gash with one gentle finger.

The line of fire went out, the pain suddenly just a memory. Christopher looked down in wonder at his whole flesh. Only the drying blood said it had ever been otherwise.

Svengusta was already kneeling over the other man. He examined him briefly, then stood and began removing his own wool cloak.

“Løp,” he said to Christopher. “Knockford. Løp!”

Christopher did not need to speak the language to understand. Knockford was obviously somewhere, anywhere other than here. And “Run!” was utterly self-evident.

But the same lack of direction that had paralyzed him all morning nullified him. He stood up, but did not know which way to turn. Helga was helping Svengusta out of his cloak, and when it was free, the old man threw it into Christopher’s arms.

The impetus released him. He followed Helga out of the doors, through the village, down the road, carrying the cloak uselessly in his hands. After two hundred yards he fell to his knees, gasping for air.

Helga tugged at him, also spent, but fear drove her like a whip. He climbed to his feet and into the cloak. It was too small, hanging barely below his waist, but the warmth it gave was the difference between life and death. Helga hugged her own threadbare cloak tight around her shoulders and they hustled on. She kept looking over her shoulder in terror, until he made her quit. They had no energy to waste.

After half a mile he stopped again and emptied his stomach by the side of the road. He washed his mouth out with snow and looked back. The village was out of sight, and no pursuit was visible.

“Well,” he said weakly, “I’m a bit lighter now.” He tried to grin, but didn’t really succeed. Helga tried to control her anxiety, no more success-fully.

He didn’t notice the cold now, despite not being dressed for it. Shock and adrenaline still flooded his system, one from the fight, the other from the aftermath. He had been seriously wounded, more injured than he had ever been before. It had not been a scratch that could be dismissed with conjuring tricks. But it was completely gone, his belly not even sore.

Nonetheless he could feel weakness creeping up on him. All of his strength was going into keeping warm and keeping moving. He was no longer in any condition for combat, as if he ever had been, and their jogging pace was hardly a run. He was trapped between fight and flight. He kept an eye out for places to hide, but the snow was unbroken on the roadside and would easily give their trail away. They had no other choice but to keep going.

Running away from the refuge he had worked so hard to run to, just the night before. An unreasonable attachment to the little chapel seized his mind. He wanted to sneak through the woods, slip back to the morning in the log cabin with its warm fire and friendly faces.

But Helga’s face drew him on. She looked behind them with fear, ahead with longing. Once again he was driven by cold and fear into the unknown.

© 2009 M.C. Planck

So ends the prologue and first chapter of M.C. Planck’s Sword of the Bright Lady. Let us know what you thought by leaving a comment below.

For more information visit www.WorldOfPrime.com

Posted: June 9th, 2009
Author: Floresiensis

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