Wing & Nien

by Shytei Corellian

  Carly sat up bleary-eyed and nodded. “Be careful.”

  “You, too.” Wing kissed her cheek and followed Nien out the door.

  The night moonsteps were cool and there was a premonition of early Ime in the air. The brothers ran along side by side, the stars gleaming brightly overhead.

  From the many trips across the valley throughout their lives, Nien and Wing knew if they kept up a steady pace they would reach the castle by daylight.

  Pausing for a drink in the browning grasses of the valley floor, the brothers glanced up at Peak Llow. The sun would soon be cresting it.

  “We’re making good time,” Wing whispered, water dripping from his lips.

  Nien nodded. “Let’s see how long we can keep it up. There may be some movement at dawn. From above, on the ridge, we will be able to see most of the inner courtyard and grounds. We should be able to get a good estimate of their numbers — if there are any.”

  Wing slung the water skin strap over his head and around his shoulder, and they were off again. The brush of cool air against their sweaty skin offered a needed second wind. By morning, they were lying low in the tree line atop a ridge on the sunsetting side of the castle.

  Clearly, they could see that Viyer was occupied. The inner courtyard was filled with supplies. Billets were set up under the colonnade of the inner curtain. The ground of the courtyard was trampled, muddy in spots where barreled water was kept, dry and dusty over the rest.

  Remaining in the trees, the brothers watched silently as men began to emerge from within the castle walls and into the bailey. Most of the troops remained within the courtyard, talking amongst themselves and eating. Only a small group left the castle itself, but they wandered no further than the front gates. From amongst this group an argument arose, the opponents disagreeing so hotly that Nien and Wing could hear their voices from where they hid in the trees.

  Scanning the courtyard as well as the towers and open lower compartments, Nien and Wing counted only a few hundred men, but the heavy supplies told a vastly different story. The orderly array of weapons, food and engines of war were enough for at least three Ka’ull battalions. Of course, they had no way of knowing how many men were inside the castle walls; nevertheless, it was apparent from the empty watchtowers and casual carousing of the troops that this was merely provision support.

  The brothers remained hidden for a bit longer before Wing suggested they continue along the ridge where it curved behind the castle and back toward the Village.

  Staying up the mountain and well within the tree line, the brothers began to move, but they hadn’t gone far before Nien stopped. Wing glanced back at him; the blood had drained from his brother’s face.

  “What is it?” Wing asked in an undertone.

  Nien’s features were still as quarry stone, and his eyes were fixed upon something in the distance. Wing followed Nien’s gaze. There, across the expanse between them and the castle, were two enormous mounds. The drying grass that covered them was taller and thicker than that which covered the valley floor.

  A river of ice poured through Wing’s veins. He felt his knees weaken as an overwhelming realization emptied out his gut.

  How could he have been so ignorant?

  It was beneath those two mounds that terrible night had ended for their people. It was there Nien had been thrown, buried alive in one of those pits —

  Wing placed a steady hand on Nien’s shoulder. “Brother...” Wing said. Nien flinched. Moving a little, Wing placed himself in Nien’s eye line. Nien’s eyes slowly focused on him. “Come on,” Wing said gently. “Let’s move on.”

  And they did.

  Remaining high above the castle, they traversed a shallow canyon and re-emerged, facing the back of Viyer where the Village began.

  Pausing, Wing reached out and tugged Nien’s shirt, gesturing toward a stand of trees a short distance from the rear of the castle.

  Nien looked down and saw a fair herd of horses grazing.

  When not taken care of or trimmed, Rieevan horses grew long, thick hair from their knees down to their hooves. The Ka’ull horses they’d seen corralled in the courtyard were sleeker of coat and thicker through the chest.

  For a moment, the brothers pondered the same thought: Our horses.

  But, in unspoken agreement, they cast off the thought. No matter how helpful having mounts would be, retaking them would be an act of monumental stupidity.

  “Before we leave, I’d like to take a look at the Village,” Wing said.

  Nien agreed. “Me, too.”

  Staying deep inside the tree line, the brothers continued on, staying far above the upper portion of the valley. They’d not gone far before pausing to take in the final devastation of the Village that only Wing had seen the beginning of.

  Every single village home was burnt to ash and cinder. Only a few large, charred logs remained of the Mesko-built homes.

  “Nien,” Wing said, “can you recall the families that were not there that night?”

  Nien shook his head, clearly, he was still pondering the shocking ruin that had once been Melant. “I can’t remember, Wing. I’ve already tried — many times.”

  “Well,” Wing said, “we know that those most agitated over the state of the Council and the Cant might not have come at all. But others could have been absent, too — home with a sick child or something.”

  Nien nodded. “I know. I’ve thought of that.”

  “So, what if those that were not in the castle managed to escape before the Ka’ull could find them?”

  “But how would they have known to flee?”

  Wing thought for a moment, and the thing that had been smoldering in the back of his mind, finally sparked. “The same way I knew,” he said. “Pree K.” He felt Nien watching him. Waiting. “The flash I had, our first night out from Legran,” Wing said.

  “You said you thought you saw Pree K. And something about rock and torn blankets.”

  “What if what I saw was not in the past?”

  Even as the words left Wing’s lips, he could see Nien’s mind racing ahead to the same conclusion: “The caves,” they said together.

  It was crazy. But it was possible.

  “Who said your visions aren’t helpful?” Nien said with a droll tip of his mouth.

  Wing eyed him ruefully. “We’ll see,” he answered.

  On their feet, the brothers rounded the back of the Village, dove into the tree line on the far side, passing the Cantfields at a run back toward their house and Carly.

  Carly scanned the distance toward the Village for about the hundredth time that afternoon. Lines of worry traced her face, her eyes growing tired of searching for sight of them. Drawing a deep, frustrated breath, she returned to the task at hand as the sun chased two shadows from the trees.

  At last!

  “Carly!” Wing called with a wave of his hand at seeing her standing next to the barn.

  The three met and went inside the house. “You’ve been busy,” Wing said, looking about.

  Carly nodded. “I had to do something. What took so long?”

  “We went ‘round the castle and the Village. We saw only a few hundred men, but supplies were heavy. And even though there could be as many as a thousand in the castle, we saw no patrols. It appears to be as Monteray said: To the Ka’ull, Rieeve is secure.”

  “That’s good news at the moment,” Carly said.

  “There’s something more.”

  Carly met Wing’s eyes.

  “We think some of the Village families may have survived. We have an idea where they might be.”

  Carly searched the brothers’ faces for less than a heartbeat. “Where?”

  “A place you might remember,” Wing said.

  The following morning the three set out with rope, a small glass jar of oil, worn field shirts, and extra water skins.

  Chapter 82

  Life in the Depth

  “I t’s steeper than I remember,” Wing said grasping for a handhol
d on something to support his weight while he swung a leg up over the edge of only one of many massive boulders they were required to scale.

  “Farther, too,” Carly added, sitting back against a tree just the other side of the same rock.

  Lucin had appeared shortly after the three had entered the Mesko forest. The big cat had not yet entered the valley, but traveled along with them now. Wing couldn’t blame the cat. He wasn’t sure why they had entered the valley.

  Beside him, Nien sat down with a grunt. “We’re older, that’s the problem.”

  “Are we sure they’d come here?” Carly asked. “I mean, none of our people traveled out here — they never even went into the Mesko forest.”

  “Pree K, at least, must have known about the caves. And there’s the vision Wing had by the fire when we set out from Legran.”

  “Ah,” Carly said.

  Still not wanting to delve too deeply into that connection, Wing pushed himself around the boulder he was on and stood on top of it. Lucin leapt ahead, and Nien and Carly, pushing themselves back to their feet, followed.

  As they continued their trek, Wing wondered, if what they suspected had actually happened, how they’d managed the climb, scared as they must have been, finding their way in the dark and the terrible storm that had swept across the valley and mountains that night.

  Surmounting the worst of the boulder field, they fell in upon a thin, familiar ridge. As they filed along the ridge with Wing in the lead, the three silently recalled that day so long ago when above them, on a short outcropping of rock, a shy’teh had sat watching them. It had not been far from that point where Wing had accidentally discovered an entrance to a labyrinth of caves.

  Continuing up the path and winding around the edge of another immense shield of rock, they came upon the exact spot where Wing had fallen nearly nine revolutions earlier.

  As Nien set to making flambeaux with the oil and shirts, Carly began hunting around for the opening through which they had exited that day so long ago, but Wing was watching Lucin. The shy’teh was standing not far to their right, sniffing. He lifted his head and looked back at Wing.

  “Think someone found it,” Wing said. Nien and Carly looked at him and then at Lucin.

  Lucin sniffed again and growled. And then he disappeared like a ghost into a tall, broad outcropping of rock. Wing shrugged, helped Nien wrap another torch, and they followed Lucin.

  Through the nearly invisible crevasse in the rock, Wing went. Nien and Carly came in behind him and, spotting the tip of Lucin’s tail dancing in the light of their flambeaux, began to walk down the narrow slope into the large tunnel they’d explored the first time. At the bottom of the natural slope, where the tunnel went either right or left, Wing noticed a set of engravings in the cave wall — the strange grooves in the rock that Wing had felt with his hand so long ago but been unable to see. Now, they could see that they were indeed engravings, of lone figures, their robed bodies hunched, frozen forever in stone; a reflection of a moment in the lives of their living counterparts.

  Raising his flambeau, Wing caught sight of another engraving, set apart from the others, of a four-legged creature with pointed ears and a long tail.

  Wing stopped and, stepping back, raised his torch higher for Nien and Carly to see.

  Depicted before them now, they could see that the reliefs they’d felt were part of the depiction of a single event. The engraved images of hunched figures were actually in a row, moving toward the entrance of the caves, each with a hand on the shoulder of the figure in front of them, and in the lead of this lowly procession was the four-legged creature.

  Beneath the dancing light of their flambeaux, the astonishing affirmation of legend sunk home —

  It was true, their people had once sought refuge in these caves and been saved by the big black mountain cat.

  As one, the three of them considered the cavernous path leading deeper into the caves. There went Lucin, black into black. The reality of what they were seeing, of what had happened back then and what was happening now lit something surreal and profound in their hearts.

  “Well, I don’t think he’s waiting for us,” Wing said, indicating the dark ahead into which Lucin had disappeared.

  Air moving down through the break in the rocks pushed at the flame of his torch as Wing turned away from the haunting stone-story and followed Lucin into the dark. Carly and Nien fell in behind, and they began their journey down into the depths.

  Wing moved with surprising speed, keeping Lucin just barely in sight. At each turn, Lucin would pause briefly, sniffing, green eyes glowing, and then he would move off smartly again.

  Progressing along the crooked cave walls, the torchlight casting freakish shadows against the damp stone, they made their way in silence. The cold depth of the cave’s walls penetrated their bones as the labyrinth wound its way deep into the mountain. The twists and turns seemed never to end.

  Behind Wing, Nien said, “It can’t go much farther.”

  But it seemed to.

  As fear festered beneath their skin, the three rounded yet another turn, this time coming upon the opening to a chamber on their left. Lucin paused there a moment a low growl beginning to emanate disturbingly from his throat. Wing stepped up beside the shy’teh, eyes fixed on the dark opening.

  Glancing over his shoulder at Nien and Carly, Wing raised his torch and stepped through the opening.

  The scene over which his torchlight fell sucked the breath from Wing’s lungs and felt to pin his body to the cold cave walls.

  Light from Nien and Carly’s flambeaux fell over his shoulders as they came in behind him. As Wing had, they fell into an instant, incomprehensible silence. Beneath the light of their torches, they saw a host of bodies, some partially wrapped in worn blankets, others in nothing at all. In places, Wing was unable to tell what might be clothing, blankets, or — he realized — dried skin. Bony eye sockets reflected the light from their torches. Some still had a few fragile strands of hair. Most of the skeletons lay in fetal positions, eerily still, frozen in death as they had no doubt passed their last moments of life: hunched against the chill.

  Beneath the flickering light of their flambeaux, Wing tried to make sense of it....

  But there was no making sense of it.

  Though pitifully ragged, the blankets and clothing were distinctly Rieevan. These, the last of their people, had escaped the immediate death at the hands of the Ka’ull only to suffer and die in the black belly of a cave.

  Firelight from the flambeaux danced freakishly over the collection of bones, and a suffered cry escaped Carly’s throat. Remembering himself, Wing turned to Carly and wrapping his arm around her, pulled her to his side.

  From within the eerie sanctum, Nien began to back away. Wing and Carly followed, the light from their flambeaux retreating with them, leaving darkness to fall again inside the tomb.

  Back in the tunnel, they stood for a time, unable to speak, unable to make the decision to simply go back.

  And then Lucin reappeared. He was mewling, tail twitching. Turning about, he headed to the right and into the black again.

  Numb, struck with incomprehension, they could think of nothing else to do but follow Lucin once more.

  Wing went first, moving down the tunnel to the right. The light from his torch revealed a narrow passageway through which he ducked, emerging into yet another tunnel, this one larger than the last.

  There, he saw Lucin again.

  The big cat stood just outside of the opening to another chamber, his body bathed in the black outside of the torchlight, green eyes still glowing, whiskers twitching like flashes of jumping starlight.

  Wing gave the big cat a passing touch on the back as he stepped by him and into the chamber ahead.

  Huddled in blankets and cloaks by the light of a single flambeau were seven beings.

  As Nien and Carly came in behind him a small face, drawn and pale, surfaced from beneath a sea of blankets. The eyes blinked at them in the torchligh
t.

  Wing’s hand shook, causing the light of his flambeau to play madly off the cave walls.

  Alive!

  Beside him, Nien looked around for a place to rest his flambeau and saw a notch in the cave wall made to accommodate a torch handle. Slipping the torch into the notch, he hurried over and knelt before the blinking figure. It was a little boy.

  “It’s all right,” Nien said softly. “My name’s Nien. We’re friends — Rieevans. What’s your name?”

  With large, wet eyes the boy looked up at him, but said nothing.

  Nien was about to reach out to touch the boy when he heard a dry voice say. “Nien?”

  Across the room, a man pushed the hood of his cloak away from his face.

  “Grek?” Nien asked.

  “Nien?” the man said again, his eyes squinting against the additional light from the flambeaux Wing, Nien, and Carly had brought into the cavern.

  Wing waited as Nien pushed himself to his feet and moved over to him. “Yes, it’s Nien. Grek?”

  The man nodded stiffly.

  “Grek!” Nien cried, grabbing the hand the older man offered and clutching it tightly.

  “I knew I would live until you came,” he said, his voice fragile as a dried Kojko leaf. “I knew you would find us.”

  “You’re going to live a long time yet,” Nien encouraged.

  Grek’s old eyes smiled. “Save the young ones. They’ve been through so much. Save them, Nien. Get them out of here.”

  Nien nodded. “We will, we will.”

  Grek coughed and squeezed Nien’s hand. “Is Son-Cawutt Wing with you? Has he, too, lived?”

  Wing’s throat tightened as Nien replied, “Yes, yes. He’s alive. He’s here.”

  Apparently, Grek’s eyes were not good or he had gone blind in the caves, for he’d recognized Nien’s voice but could not tell it was Wing standing not far away.

  “Good, good boy,” Grek said, his voice growing fainter.

  Wing noticed how hard the old councilman was gripping Nien’s hand and saw Nien wince slightly realizing the old council member’s grip must have been uncannily strong, the skin appearing hard, like dried leather over sheer bone. And then the grip softened and released. Something in Wing’s blood went cold.