LITMIR.BIZ

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orange.’

      Erik flexed his left shoulder, stiff from the blow to his chest. Sho Pi noticed. ‘That is bothering you?’

      Erik nodded. ‘Caught me here,’ he said, pointing to just below his right pectoral muscle, ‘but I can feel it all the way through to my neck and elbow. My shoulder is tightening.’

      ‘Then come here,’ said Sho Pi.

      Nakor watched and nodded as Sho Pi indicated Erik should kneel. He made a gesture with his right hand, then laid his hands upon Erik’s shoulder. Erik’s eyes widened as he felt heat flowing from Sho Pi’s hands. The throbbing in his shoulder quickly diminished. As he knelt there, Erik said, ‘What are you doing?’

      Sho Pi said, ‘In my homeland it is known as reiki. There is healing energy in the body. It is what helps you recover from injuries and disease.’

      As the heat loosened the bruised muscle, Erik said, ‘Can you teach me to do this?’

      ‘It takes a great deal of time –’ began Sho Pi.

      ‘Ha!’ shouted Nakor. Moving from the rail, he tossed a half-eaten orange over the side and said, ‘More monastic mumbo-jumbo! Reiki is no mystic meditation; there is no prayer. It’s a natural thing. Anyone can do it!’

      Sho Pi smiled slightly as Nakor waved him aside. Standing over Erik, he said, ‘You want to do this?’

      Erik said, ‘Yes.’

      Nakor said, ‘Give me your right hand.’

      Erik held it out, and Nakor turned it over, palm up. He closed his eyes and made some signs, then slapped Erik’s hand, hard. Erik felt his eyes water from the unexpected blow. ‘What did you do that for?’ he demanded.

      ‘Wakes up the energies. Now, hold your hand here.’ Nakor moved Erik’s hand to his shoulder. Erik felt the same heat flowing from his own hand he had felt from Sho Pi’s. ‘Without prayer or meditation, it flows,’ instructed Nakor. ‘It’s always on, so whatever you touch you will heal. Now I will show you what to touch.’ To Sho Pi he said, ‘I can teach these men to use the power in two days, boy. None of your mystic nonsense. The temples claim this is magic, but it isn’t even a good trick. It’s just that most people are too stupid to know they have the power or how to use it.’

      Sho Pi looked at Nakor and feigned a serious expression, but his eyes were amused. ‘Yes, Master.’

      ‘And don’t call me master!’ shouted Nakor.

      He instructed the men to circle around and began talking about the body’s natural healing energies. Erik was fascinated. He thought back to those horses he had treated, the ones who should have gotten better but didn’t, and the ones that recovered from injuries against any reasonable expectation of success, and he wondered how much of it was their spirit.

      ‘This energy is made of the stuff of life,’ said Nakor. ‘I think you are not stupid men, but you are also men who do not care much for those things I find so fascinating, so I will not try to explain to you what I think this stuff of life is. Leave it to say that this energy is everywhere, in all things living.’

      Calis came up on deck and caught Nakor’s eyes. Something passed between them as Nakor said, ‘All living things are connected.’ Erik glanced back at where Roo sat, and noticed his friend had also caught the exchange.

      Nakor went on to explain about how the body can heal itself, but that most people don’t know how to accept their own power. He demonstrated a few things the men needed to know to take full advantage of the reiki – where best to place their hands to achieve the desired effect, how to identify different types of injury and illness – but the energy seemed always to be there whenever they touched themselves or one another after Nakor had ‘awakened the power’ in their hands.

      By midday all the men had been slapped on the hand and had spent hours practicing healing energies on one another. Nakor and Sho Pi had led them through a series of exercises designed to help them identify the sources of common problems and how to recognize the flow of energies in another’s body. At the midday meal the men were joking about this laying hands on one another, but they were also obviously impressed at the ability of this simple act to relieve aches and reduce swelling and generally make them feel better.

      After lunch, Erik and Roo were sent aloft, relieving sailors on the day watch so they could eat. Securing a sail that the Captain had ordered reefed as the wind freshened, Roo said, ‘What do you think of all that?’

      Erik said, ‘What Nakor said: it’s a useful tool. I don’t care a fig for what Sho Pi says about its being a mystic thing. It works; I’ll use it.’ With a near-wistful note in his voice, he added, ‘I wish I had known about it when I was tending Greylock’s mare. It would have made her come back faster, I think.’

      Roo said, ‘I think anything we know that can keep us healthy is good.’

      Erik nodded. There was a grim reluctance among the men to consider the eventual end of their journey. After Calis had announced his intention to take them to join this invading host, he had briefly outlined their mission.

      They would land a small party on a beach below a cliff where ships did not normally pass. The thirty-six prisoners and fifty-eight survivors of the last campaign, with Foster, de Loungville, Nakor, and Calis, would climb this cliff face. Once atop the plateau, they would travel overland to meet some allies of Calis’s, then move to intercept the invaders at a city called Khaipur. Their mission was to discover what weakness, if any, existed in this host, and Calis and Nakor would be the ones likely to understand what that would be. But when it was discovered what that weakness might be, then it was every man’s duty to return to the City of the Serpent River with the information, to get back to Trenchard’s Revenge, and get the critical intelligence back to Prince Nicholas.

      If they could contrive a way to balk the onslaught before the invaders could muster a host big enough to cross the waters and assault the Kingdom, all the better. But Calis drove home again and again the risk that hung over everyone. Erik remembered his last words on the subject: ‘No one will escape. This plague of invasion is but the first part of the destruction. Dark magic beyond your ability to comprehend will be unleashed in the end, and should you hide in the deepest cave in the farthest mountains of the Northlands, or in the remotest island on some distant sea, you will die. If we do not stop this host, we all will die.’ He had looked from man to man. ‘That is the only choice, win or die.’

      Now Erik understood why Robert de Loungville had needed ‘desperate men,’ because for all intents and purposes they were about to stick their neck back in noose. Erik absently fingered the one he still wore.

      ‘Mercy!’ said Roo, bringing Erik out of his revery.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Speak of a demon and he appears! Isn’t that Owen Greylock’s silver scalp I see over there on the foredeck of the Ranger?’

      Erik looked hard and saw the tiny figure on the nearby ship. ‘It could be. About the right size, and the hair has that silver streaking through it.’

      ‘I wonder why we didn’t see him at the beach?’

      Erik finished off tying a line. ‘Maybe he didn’t come ashore. Maybe he already knows the tasks at hand.’

      Roo nodded. ‘In all of this there are still some things I don’t understand. Who was this Miranda woman, anyway? Every man I mention her to has met her, sometimes under different names. And Greylock was your friend, maybe, but if he’s on that ship, did he have something to do with our being captured?’

      Erik shrugged. ‘If that is Greylock, we’ll find out when we get where we’re going. As for the rest, who cares? We’re here, and we have a job to do. Thinking about why isn’t going to change that.’

      Roo looked exasperated. ‘You have too accepting a nature, my friend. When this is all done, if we survive, I plan on getting rich. There’s a merchant in Krondor with a homely daughter who he wants to marry

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