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Chapter 2

He dreamed of flailing his arms, of thrashing against darting enemies, of being bound and captive. He dreamed in red, bright red, the red of blood. Silent voices cried and shouted at him, and he could not answer. He did not know who he was.

He dreamed that his head was the head of a gargoyle. His face was being remade, turned into that of a poor changeling child: the head of a serpent, the nose of a snapping frog, the eyes and the brow of a newborn baby.

He dreamed that he was being split apart and put back together again.

 

* * *

 

He awoke with a gruesome headache and a terrible thirst.

At first he could not move at all, or even open his eyes. He lay still, conscious only of the thudding of blood in his temples, each heartbeat sending a shock wave of pain through his skull. A time passed that could not have been more than a minute, and yet seemed an eternity; then his eyes were open.

Overhead was the empty chamber of the sky, framed by dancing treetops. The sunlight was angled, the sun itself out of view; but the sky was so bright it made his head hurt worse than before. He remembered thirst. Just the thought made him dizzy, made him almost lose consciousness again.

But he didn't pass out. And as he clung to consciousness, he began to remember. . . .

Images: a tall figure moving through the woods toward him; a bird gliding overhead for a long time before finally flapping its wings and departing; himself climbing a trail along a rocky cliff, the sight of a river winding its way through a forest far below. . . .

The images faded. He tried to turn his head. The effort hurt. He struggled to focus on the nearest object. It was a felker bird, crouched on the ground a meter from his face. It peered back at him, eyes glittering, beak dripping. He held its gaze. . . .

* * *

A strangely frozen moment of time came to an end, and the bird shifted its head a centimeter. It looked annoyed. What had it been doing, preying on small animals while waiting for him to die? "Go on!" he hissed, straining to heave himself up to a sitting position, and danger be damned. He was surprised by the strength in his body. "Get lost!" He batted his hand in the creature's direction.

His left arm throbbed. When he looked at it, he nearly fainted again. His sleeve had been ripped away; and beneath the shredded fabric, his flesh was torn open nearly the length of his arm. Or rather, it had been torn open; the wound, though ragged (as though ripped, perhaps, by a beak?) was already closed over with delicate pink skin. There was dried blood on the remnants of his sleeve, but little on his skin. He swallowed and glared up at the bird, flexing his arm. It worked, but painfully.

"Rawwk!" the bird muttered.

"Get out of here!" he growled, trying to put menace into his voice. He groped on the ground for something—anything—to use as a weapon.

The bird bent and plucked at something reddish brown and stringy that lay at its feet. It looked like a bit of flesh. Human flesh?

Sickened at the thought, he almost failed to notice the dead branch beneath his hand. Then his fingers closed on it, reflexively. He brought it around with all of his strength—intending to throw it at the bird. His hand failed to release it, and it whumped down onto the ground in front of the bird.

"Yawk!" The bird hopped back.

"You little bastard!" he hissed furiously. He gasped, clutching his shoulder. He rocked back and forth until the pain of the sudden movement subsided. He hurt all over.

The bird warbled deep in its throat and lunged to peck at him. He swiped at it with the branch. It squawked away, then lunged again. This time he caught it with the branch and sent it reeling. That was enough for the felker. With a screeing cry, it took to flight, flapping up a cloud of dust as it went.

Coughing, he watched it go. He put a hand to his aching forehead—and cried out involuntarily. His skin felt spongy and tender, and the shape of his head felt wrong—bulbous where it should have been slightly flattened and angular. What the hell happened? He lowered his hand; there was no blood on his fingers. Swallowing hard, he felt his entire skull. The right side felt normal; but the left side of his head felt hairless, soft, and fibrous. He felt no bone under the skin. No bone . . . ?

He stared at his fingertips. Surely they were lying. But that was impossible. At least he could see his fingers.

His mind refused to think further of it.

The sun was dropping low behind the treetops. Did that mean it was going to become cold soon? He wasn't sure; but he knew one thing, and that was that he didn't want to be out here after dark. Whatever his other problems, if he didn't find shelter, he could soon be in far worse trouble.

He staggered to his feet, gasping. With a tremendous effort, he managed to keep his balance and turn around. There was no sign of whatever had attacked him. But what he did see made him reel: a blackened patch of brush; a scorched tree trunk; and, spattered among the scorch marks, bits of white and pink flesh, and a few fragments of—bone. He choked on his own bile and forced himself to turn away. Whatever that was—

He didn't want to know.

But he did know. An image burned bright in his mind: a blazing beam of fire, and an explosion. And then darkness. The darkness of death.

And yet he had lived. Against something that had . . .

Never mind, he thought dizzily. Whatever had happened, he was alive and he could move. If he really knew the answers to these questions welling up in his mind . . . he would probably just have more questions, impossible questions, to answer.

Right now, he really just didn't want to know. Before anything else, he had to find shelter, and that meant walking.

 

* * *

 

It was difficult going, but less difficult than he might have thought. He was weak with hunger, but a stream nearby satisfied the thirst. He gulped greedily at the frigid water; he felt strength returning to his limbs even as he drank. A glance at his arm showed the skin thickening and tightening over the wound. As he rose again, he felt less pain. He took a deep breath and chose a path among the trees.

He was unsure where he was going; but he felt some inner sense of direction that guided his feet, kept them moving. He stayed parallel with the stream for a time, then turned away from it to follow a ridge, less thickly wooded. The ridge ascended toward an escarpment of rock, in the distance.

He felt that he was heading in the direction of home, though he had no idea where or what "home" was. He felt a powerful sense of uncertainty about something else, too; but he deliberately kept that at bay. He did not want to admit to the question.

You are confused. It will come back to you.

He ignored the voice in his head and kept walking.

Higher along the ridge, he found a trail climbing toward the escarpment. At points, it was little more than an occasional smudge on barren rock. Nevertheless, he managed to keep it in sight; and eventually it brought him, puffing for air, to a point near the top of the scarp, a flat table from which he could look out over the top of the woods. The sun was low on the horizon, blazing golden; in the distance, across many kilometers of forest, he saw a river gleaming as it threaded its way through a wooded vale. The forest was blushed with reds and purples and browns; the sweet tangy smell of autumn was in the air, the smell of ripe grasses and changing leaves. The smell struck a chord in his mind—almost, but not quite, summoning forth a memory. Perhaps he had been in this place before.

He inhaled deeply and turned around. The ledge he was standing on was an extreme outcropping of a long, low mountain that stretched away in the other direction. A hazy line along the eastern horizon hinted that he was perhaps in the foothills of a great range of mountains. (Eastern horizon? The sun was setting in the other direction. Did the sun set in the west on this world?)

There were many uncertainties in his mind, but one towered over all of the others. Finally he faced it.

My name is . . .

* * *

Another frozen moment. But when it ended, no name came to mind. No name nor face.

It wasn't just a question of knowing where he was, or why. He didn't even know what he looked like. He had no memory of who, or even what sort of person, he was.

It will come back to you. You're confused, tired, hungry.

Will it?

Of course. You're—

Who? Who am I?

He knelt, feeling the frustration well up inside him, a tangible pressure in his throat and his forehead. He covered his eyes with his hands. An instant later, he stiffened in surprise. He probed his forehead with his fingertips. Then his temples.

The new skin had toughened and grown firm on the left side. The contours beneath it had flattened along the temple, contracted around the brow. He felt resistance when he pressed against it. Bone.

Taking a deep breath, he rose. He had a good long way yet to walk. He wasn't sure why he knew that. But he was starting to remember the way. Once he made it around the point of this outcropping, it would be mostly downhill.

 

* * *

 

It took him perhaps two hours to make his way along the ridge and down the descending trail on the northwest side of the outcropping. The sun disappeared in a blaze of golden-blooded glory, and he continued on into the twilight that followed. Evening came quickly on its heels, and with it a sky spattered with stars and one tiny moon. That didn't last long; a layer of clouds crowded across the sky, blocking the starlight, leaving him in near-total darkness. He nearly stopped, thinking that whatever meager shelter he might find would be preferable to stumbling in the dark. The air temperature was falling. He should probably camp and build a fire. It was stupid of him not to have stopped earlier, while there was still light for gathering wood.

What changed his mind was a realization, as he began groping about for dry branches, that the darkness was actually diminishing—or rather, that his eyes seemed to be adapting astonishingly well to the dark. The trees and their limbs were becoming visible to him, like apparitional figures in the night. When he gazed up into the treetops, he saw clouds still blanketing the sky; but they appeared mottled with an exquisitely faint light. It was as though the stars behind them had somehow brightened, so that they shone through, illuminating the shape and form of the clouds. The small moon could be discerned as a slightly brighter smudge; no other single source of illumination could be seen. His eyes seemed to have become inhumanly acute.

Nor was it just his vision. He felt a resurging warmth in his limbs, even as he was aware of the air growing colder against his skin. His skin felt as though it had thickened and numbed. His arms and legs felt stronger, and he felt little pain now.

Well, if he could see, and if he could withstand the cold, the path lay clear enough before him; so he took it. The trail wound farther back into the forest, and though the darkness deepened, his eyes continued to adapt. He moved among the trees like a ghost passing through a crowd of ghosts in the night.

After a time, the path intersected with a larger trail, this one marked and maintained. Without hesitation, though he did not know where he was going, he turned onto the larger trail and kept walking. Soon his steps took him to the banks of a wide, murmuring stream, and the scent of open-air grasses and flowers began to mingle with the deep forest smells. The path widened and became graveled, and in the distance a light shone.

He regarded the light, his pulse quickening. Was there any reason not to approach it? A memory flickered across his thoughts: a figure walking toward him, and a blaze of light that brought on pain and darkness. Someone had tried to kill him, and failed. But suppose the would-be killer, too, had come this way? He reflected for a moment on that possibility. Still, what else could he do—hide in the woods all night?

Cautiously he stalked forward, coming at last to a lighted clearing. He shaded his eyes as they readjusted to what seemed like dazzling illumination. He finally discerned a lodge building with an exterior floodlight.

Lodge.

He half smiled. He stepped out onto the edge of the clearing, onto mowed grass. The lodge. He remembered it now—almost. The image reverberated in his mind: this building—he could almost picture its interior. But the people? He couldn't quite capture the memory.

His stomach tightened with hunger. He recalled that he had been walking more than half a day and half a night without food. He sighed and set out across the grass without another thought, the smell of broiled callfish in his nostrils.

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Framed