The docks were congested, people milling around like cattle being herded onto cargo ships. The waves pressed the ships up against the dock pilings, causing sonorous booms to echo over the dockyards.
Without warning, a woman's shrill scream punctuated the noise.
Halfway up the gangplank leading onto the ship he'd booked passage on, Darrick turned and looked back.
Men hauled a young girl from the water, her body torn and shattered in her long dress.
An older woman, probably her mother, knelt beside the little girl as the sailors stretched her out on the docks. "Please," the woman begged. "Can someone help my little girl? Is there a healer here?"
"A healer wouldn't do that one any good," a gruff sailor beside Darrick said. "That little girl had the ill luck to fall between the ship an' the pilin's as she was boardin'. Smashed her up inside. Ain't nobody gonna be able to do anything about that. She's dead, just waitin' for it to come callin'."
Darrick looked at the frail girl, her body busted up from the impact, drenched and in horrible pain.
"Darrick," Taramis said.
For a frozen moment, Darrick remained on the boardwalk. What if the little girl's accident was no accident? What if it was a temptation arranged by Kabraxis to use the healing power again? What if someone in the crowd, a traveling Vizjerei or another wizard, recognized that Darrick's power wasn't given by the Light but from a demon spawn from the Burning Hells?
Then Darrick was moving, vaulting from the gangplank and back to the shore. He shoved people from his path, feeling the old anger and intemperance surging within him. A moment more, and he was at the little girl's side.
Her mother looked up at him, her face stained with frightened and helpless tears. "Can you help her? Please, can you help her?"
The little girl was no more than six or seven, hardly older than one of Mat's sisters the last time Darrick had seen her.
"Ain't no good," a man nearby whispered. "Seen people all squashed up like this before. That little girl's as good as dead, she is."
Without a word, Darrick placed his hands on the girl's body, feeling the broken bones shifting within her. Please, he thought, ignoring Kabraxis's harsh whispers fouling the back of his mind. He wouldn't let the demon's words come forward, wouldn't allow himself to understand them.
Power flowed through Darrick's hands, pouring into the little girl. A long moment passed, then her body arched suddenly, and she stopped breathing. During that still moment, Darrick felt certain that Kabraxis had somehow betrayed him, had somehow made him cause the girl's death instead of preventing it.
Then the girl opened her eyes, the clearest blue eyes Darrick thought he'd ever seen. She called for her mother and reached for her. The woman took up her child and hugged her to her breast fiercely.
"A healer," someone whispered.
"That's not just a healer," someone else said. "He brought her back from the dead, he did. That little girl weren't nothin' more than a corpse, an' he done brung her back like it was nothin'."
Darrick pushed himself to his feet, suddenly ringed in by people who were curious and suspicious of him. He put his hand on his sword, barely resisting the impulse to draw the weapon and clear the path from him. In the back of his mind, he heard the demon laugh.
Taramis was suddenly at Darrick's side, as were Rhambal and Palat. "Come on," the sage urged.
"It's the Prophet of the Light," someone else said. "He's returned."
"No," another said. "Those are the people who killed the Wayfinder and destroyed the Way of Dreams. Hang them!"
"We've got to go," Taramis said.
Was this what Kabraxis wanted? Darrick wondered. Would his death at the hands of a lynch mob allow the demon to step back into the world of men? Darrick didn't know.
The mother rose to his defense, holding her child to her. "Don't you men dare touch him. He brought my little Jenna back to me. If he is the one who killed the Wayfinder, then he had to have done it for good cause, says I. This man is a miracle worker, a chosen one of the Light."
"The Wayfinder was leading you to demons," Taramis said. "If he had not killed the servant of the false Prophet of the Light, all of you would have been doomed to the Burning Hells."
Darrick felt sickened. He was no hero, and he was no saint. He forced himself to release his tight hold on Stormfury.
Grudgingly, the lynch mob mentality gave way, surrendering to the people who were looking for something to make sense out of all they had been through with the Church of the Prophet of the Light.
In amazement, Darrick watched as people came forward with wounded friends and family, beseeching him to heal them. He turned to Taramis. "What do I do?"
The sage gazed at him. "The choice is yours. You can board that ship and tend to your own needs as best you can, or you can stay here in this moment and tend the needs of others."
Darrick looked out over the huge crowd. "But there are so many."
Already two dozen litters with men and women lying near death were spread across the docks. People called out to him, begging him to aid their fallen family and comrades.
"But the power I have," Darrick said, "it isn't from the Light."
"No," Taramis agreed. "Listen to me, though. How do you know that in this moment the Light hasn't had a design in placing you exactly in the position you find yourself in now?"
"I'm tainted with the demon."
"You also possess a demon's great power, and you can do a lot of good with it if you choose."
"And what if in using that power I also lose myself?" Darrick asked.
"Life is about balance," Taramis said. "Balance between the Light and the Dark. I would not be able to champion the will of the Light so strongly, so willingly, had I not been exposed to the Darkness that waits to devour us in the Burning Hells. Just as steel must be tempered, Darrick, so must a man. You've come a long way. Your present is balanced between your past and the dreams you might have. You stand between the Light and the Dark as Kabraxis's gateway, but it is your choice to remain open or closed. Your choice to hide the power or to use it. You can fear it or embrace it. Either way, it has already changed your life forever."
Quietly, thoughts racing inside his head, the demon whispering somewhere at the back, Darrick looked at the crowd that waited so expectantly. Then, taking a deep breath, he went forward to meet his future, his head high, no one's unloved bastard child anymore but a man of compassion and conviction. He went to the wounded and the dying, and he healed them, listening to the demon scream at the back of his mind.
"IT'S THE DEMON'S DOING,"
PALAT SNARLED.
"The demon knows we're down here."
In the next instant, a frightening figure surged from beneath the water. Formed of the rats' bones, the creature stood eight feet tall, built square and broad-chested as an ape. It stood on bowed legs that were whitely visible through the murky water. Instead of two arms, the bone creature possessed four, all longer than the legs. When it closed its hands, horns formed of ribs and rats' teeth stuck out of the creature's fists, rendering them into morningstars for all intents and purposes. The horns looked sharp-edged, constructed for slashing as well as stabbing. Small bones, some of them jagged pieces of bone, formed the demon's face the creature wore.
"That's a bone golem," Taramis said. "Your weapons won't do it much harm."
The bone golem's mouth, created by splintered bones so tightly interwoven they gave the semblance of mobility, grinned, then opened as the creature spoke in a harsh howl that sounded like a midnight wind tearing through a graveyard. "Come to your deaths, fools."