The Shield of Daqan

by David Guymer

  Sibhard and more than a few of the pilgrim-soldiers looked troubled. Clearly it did not sit well with them to leave their own behind.

  Greyfox stood up and shrugged. “Yes, Lady Runehand.”

  They continued that day as they had the previous three.

  Greyfox led, walking more and more with her face turned up towards the sun that blinked at her through the heavy screen of leaves. The wittering birds, miles away yet but already clear to her elven ears, carried the songs of northern hills and upland dales. The refrains were similar enough to those of the forest to fool the untutored ear, but not to one as familiar with the forest’s voices as its beloved bandit queen. In the same gradual, barely discernable way, the swathe of the forest’s carpet shifted from the yellows and oranges of the forest’s stifling heart to the dull purples and whites of a lingering winter. Even the air began to taste different. It was fresher, sharper, redolent of the rocks of the Howling Giant Hills and the ice of the Dunwarr. The humans did not appear to be conscious of the change, even as they began to huddle nearer together in spite of the widening of the path, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands in the chillier air.

  “The world starts to taste clean at last,” Andira murmured. Greyfox was grudgingly impressed by the keenness of the other woman’s senses. She had only become aware of the changes about an hour ago herself. “The shadow of the forest lifts from my mind. I can almost feel the power of the demon king, and he mine, but…” She paused, her coldly perfect features locked in a frustrated grimace. “Only not quite. The stain of the Uthuk Y’llan grows in the forest’s place. I fear there is little hope of us reaching Castle Kellar ahead of the Locust Swarm now.”

  Greyfox nodded her head, lending her face an appropriately regretful expression. “We are well into the forest’s northern boundaries now. As to the Uthuk, I really couldn’t say. A Daqan army could not have marched the Forest Road in the time it has taken us to cross its heart, but perhaps the Swarm could. They are said to be swift.”

  Andira’s expression became impossible to read, and Greyfox winced as her gaze nudged briefly towards actual north, like the arrow of a magnetic compass, before drifting back to the course that Greyfox had, in fact, been setting for her these last three days.

  She breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Assuming Kellar is even their object at all…” Andira murmured.

  “What do you mean?” said Sibhard.

  “I…” Andira began, then waved the question away unanswered.

  There was something about the woman’s manner that sent a shiver down even Greyfox’s neck. She wasn’t quite right. She certainly wasn’t entirely normal. There was a nobility to her, but the real kind, the kind a person earned rather than the sort that a handful might be lucky enough to be born with. And she had a… reach, as if she extended somewhere beyond herself to touch those around her and share a small bit of whatever destiny she had taken on herself. Greyfox shivered as if to shake it off. From what little she had been told she wanted none of that stuff on her.

  “How long until we are in sight of Kellar?” Andira continued.

  Greyfox picked her words with care. “We will be leaving the forest behind us soon. In fact we have already started to, though I doubt you have noticed it yet. We should be able to make better time from here, perhaps enough even to see the sun set over the Howling Giant Hills.”

  Andira nodded but said nothing.

  Greyfox took that as permission and led them on.

  The sky began to darken. The air turned cold, the forest too thin now, on its northern hinterlands, to hold onto the heat of the day past evening. It was then that one of the pilgrim scouts, a tall Frestan woman named Penn who had once called the Applewoods her home and, by her own reckoning at least, had some wood craft, returned. There was a clearing in the forest ahead, she said, a rocky knoll with a wooden tower, and some kind of camp ringed by a palisade. Greyfox smiled when she heard her report. Despite the best efforts of the forest to lead her astray and of Sibhard to look over her shoulder she had brought them to the right place. Penn and her scouts had ventured only as far as the forest’s verge, to the foot of the knoll, but even that had been vantage enough to glimpse the open country beyond the forest and the glitter of the Lothan from afar.

  “Doesn’t the Lothan run much further east of Kellar?” asked Sibhard.

  “You have never travelled north of the forest, have you?” Greyfox put in quickly. “Several wide streams feed down from the Howling Giant Hills. Most of them would be great rivers in their own right if they weren’t tributaries of the Lothan. Chances are it is one of those that your scouts have spotted, rather than the Lothan itself.”

  Andira nodded. It sounded plausible.

  And it wasn’t really lying as such. Greyfox felt rather pleased with herself.

  “The old baron had a string of forts built along the forest’s northern border,” she said, falling into her habitual way of talking as though she was not nervous. A woman who could use her rune-magic to sense the evil of the Ynfernael when a person lied was not, she was learning, a person she was comfortable being around. Particularly given that she had been lying on and off for the better part of three days. “For his huntsman and his loggers. There are kobolds and goblins, and worse, that lair in the forest’s outskirts. And legends of feral dragons and hybrids, leftovers of the old war, in the deeper woods. Though I’ve never seen one, and even in the Whispering Forest a dragon would be a thing to hide. With its walls and its armies, Kellar has almost forgotten its fear of the forest. Almost. But not quite.”

  “You gave them a reminder, I’m betting,” said Sibhard.

  “It was others who claimed this country north of the forest, but yes. The baron and his father feared his own people more than they feared the Uthuk, or even the forest, and kept these keeps manned while the border forts sat empty or crumbled. How wise he must feel, sitting in his great castle now.”

  “Hindsight will make fools of us all,” said Andira. “I have heard that Baron Fredric is able and just.”

  “To someone looking in from Carthridge or wherever it is you’re from, milady, perhaps he is.”

  But Andira was not listening. Her eyes were on something that no one there could see but her. “If this is one of the baron’s outposts then we will make for it now while the light holds out. We may yet be in Kellar before the sun sets tomorrow.”

  “It might be wise to scout the castle first. We still don’t know how far west the Uthuk Y’llan have come.” Greyfox raised her bound hands. “I would volunteer to...”

  Sibhard gave a snort, almost amused now by her persistence. “I’ll go.”

  Greyfox shrugged as if to say Don’t say I didn’t try.

  “If you insist.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Andira Runehand

  The Whispering Forest, South Kell

  Sibhard called back that the way was clear.

  The Greyfox stiffened and murmured something under her breath.

  Andira turned to her, probing. “You seem surprised.”

  “Surprised? No. Should I be?”

  Andira smiled. “You know you cannot lie to me, Milenhéir.”

  She pronounced the Latari name perfectly, and yet the Greyfox winced at her use of it. The elf shifted, apparently uncomfortable, but not prepared to say anything more, as Sibhard returned to their side. He was red-faced and breathless, his underarm wound torn again from the exertion and leaking into the bandages, flanked by a pair of pilgrim scouts carrying short Frestan bows.

  “We’ve gone right up to the wall,” he said. “No sign of Uthuk Y’llan. Or anything else. The gate’s wide open. We walked right up to it.”

  “Is it abandoned?” said Andira.

  “I don’t know, Lady Runehand. I… I didn’t dare go further.”

  Andira felt a shiver of anticipation at the rep
ort. “Why? Tell me everything.”

  “There was just a… a bad feeling about the gate, my lady,” said Sibhard.

  “Some evil that pitted its will against ours,” said the archer to his left, a tall woman in the mottled reddish garb of an Applewood forester.

  The second scout signed himself. “It was the same evil I felt at Sudanya.”

  At that, all three fell quiet.

  Andira turned to the Greyfox and smiled again. If anything it conveyed even less warmth than the first. A pair of pilgrims took the elf roughly by each shoulder and together they walked towards the abandoned fort.

  “What did happen at Sudanya?” the Greyfox hissed.

  Andira thought back.

  Perhaps it was because she did not have years of needless childhood memories cluttering her thoughts, but there was little of the subsequent years of adventure she could not instantly recall.

  “I had been fighting in the Bloodwood,” she said. “Beyond the southern border of Frest but before the Aymhelin truly begins. After two years the Latari and I finally had a victory to celebrate, having driven the Tangle and its servants from the verdelam outposts and many miles back towards the old city of Athealwel. Only when it returned again in full force the following spring did I understood what Sir Brodun had been telling from the beginning – that the Tangle is a thing of the Ynfernael, and that it can never be fully beaten in this realm. Endless battle could not have been my destiny, so we left the Latari to their struggle and went north, to where Hamma had heard of a place where the walls of the Ynfernael were broached once and remain weak. There is a village there now in its shadow, best known as the site where the lords of orcs and elves and humans and dwarves convened to plot the defeat of the Dragonlords. But the ruins of the original were home only to darkness, an evil that had been there long before the coming of the dragons, before the Age of Steel. The villagers were wise enough to keep away, but I wasn’t the first hero to try and conquer it. A demon called Prutorn, I learned, had made it his castle. What had happened to steep the city so deeply in the Ynfernael I can scarcely imagine, and I doubt even Prutorn himself was powerful enough to have had a hand in it. He was a vassal of greater powers, potent though he was. I banished him, though he almost got the better of me, while Hamma slew his mortal followers. Ever since then I have had Baelziffar the demon king, his master, in my thoughts. I have felt the Turning as it brings about the waxing of the Ynfernael and I have felt it draw us nearer.”

  She paused and glanced at the Greyfox. “You are quiet.”

  “I’m wondering what happened to the Latari you left in the Bloodwood.”

  Andira frowned.

  That was the price of having a heroic destiny, she told herself, the knowledge that you could save anyone but that you could not save everyone.

  “I think about that too. More than I would like.”

  “Do you really hope to defeat him?” said Sibhard, as if in awe of her all over again. “If his lieutenant was almost too great for you.”

  “I’ve heard stories,” said the Greyfox, “very, very old stories, of entire armies being raised to take down one of the kings of the Ynfernael. They don’t always succeed.”

  “Time will tell,” said Andira.

  She had prepared herself for death from the moment she had set out from Roth’s Vale with Hamma by her side. It was the only conceivable end to her quest that she could see. There was a small part of her that was almost looking forward to it. It would be nice to rest. She wondered too, if she would be reunited with her lost memories when she died, the way many people seemed to think they would meet lost loved ones. She had always meant to talk to a disciple about it. But there had never been time. Always too much to be done. She turned and called for her poleaxe and banner.

  The pilgrims who had assumed the honor of bearing them on her behalf hastened forward to present them. Andira took the weapon. The standard she passed onto Sibhard. He clutched it as though it might otherwise take flight and rejoin the firmament alongside Latariana’s stars.

  “I’ll not dishonor it, my lady.”

  “There’s no need to be afraid,” she said. “Victory or defeat, whatever must be will be.”

  There was another two hundred yards to cover before the forest thinned out sufficiently to make out the encampment that Sibhard and the other scouts had described. Pale, jagged stumps took the place of mature trees while those still upright were younger, with fewer branches, warier roots and less pride in their leafy crowns. The rocky knoll at the center of the forced clearing was natural enough and might even have been a site of significance and sanctuary in bygone days, back when the forest had dominated the continent and the threat from the Ynfernael was still unrealized except by the most dark-hearted of elves. Heavy logging had extended it to create a long oval killing ground of pale wooden stakes, and to source the raw material for the raising of the small keep and palisade that now fortified the hill. It was rough work. Even for bored Daqan soldiers.

  A shadow lingered over the vastness now. It had nothing to do with physical light or its lack. Indeed, with the forest diminished and the open vistas of the northern dales before them, light felt uncommonly abundant. Rather it was a darkness of the spirit. As though it was the thing that the First had sung into existence at the moment of Light’s creation to be its opposite that dwelt there on that hill. Andira felt it as a throbbing in her hand, almost as a pull, drawing her towards the gate as if a hand had reached out from it to take hers, and despite her earlier words of encouragement she felt uneasy at the sensation.

  “My lady?” said Sibhard, concerned.

  Andira drew her aching hand forcibly to the stylized steel device of her pectoral plate, leant her poleaxe against her shoulder, and then massaged the back of her hand with her fingers. She had never confided, even to Hamma, who had been the nearest thing she had to family, if not a friend, just how much pain the rune brought her. It was a constant ache at rest, like a burning spear pushed through her hand when called.

  He had always known though, of course. He had been no fool. But he had respected her enough, and loved her in his own cold way, never to ask.

  “What do you see in front of you?” she asked, letting go her hand and retaking her weapon as though it was just a little stiffness there, nodding instead towards the eerie quiet of the hilltop fort.

  Sibhard squinted towards the distant walls. Some measure of the shadow that Andira felt crossed into his face as though the sun had passed behind a cloud. It had not, though. It shone brightly, if coolly, and the boy shuddered, with no sense at all of why. “I… don’t know what you want me to say, my lady. Is he here?”

  “It seems… insignificant for a king of his power. I had expected to face him at Kellar itself. That seemed more in keeping with his sense of majesty. And yet…” She paused, turning her head slightly as if to catch a scent on the wind. “I do feel his presence here. If not the demon king himself then another of his Ynfernael servants.”

  “Another Prutorn?”

  She raised her voice so that the entire pilgrimage, spread out around the rough-hewn stumps and arming themselves with bows and staves, could hear. “Be wary. We are close now, whether he is here to face us in person or not.”

  “I’ll be the talk of every outlaw in Kell,” the Greyfox murmured. “None of them have ever battled a demon before. Fredric might even have to pardon me, eh, Sibhard, rather than force himself to hang an elf of such renown.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” the boy replied, but he did not appear to be listening.

  The open gate admitted them.

  The ground beyond was rugged. Steps hewn roughly from the bare rock wound towards the keep on its promontory. Several wooden huts clustered around the edges of a narrow courtyard, presumably guardhouses and stables, with flat roofs and smoke holes. No smoke climbed from them now. All were empty and silent, but for the wind
that whispered through far-off trees, making a sound like a sea heard from faraway, and the calls of northern birds.

  Andira turned to the Greyfox. The keen-eared elf shook her head. Her expression was drawn. Unasked, the pilgrim-soldiers spread out to secure the courtyard. Hamma may have trained them reluctantly, but he had done it well. Sibhard and the same two archers he had been sent out with earlier hung back between the gates with the Greyfox and the two horses. The Runehand banner fluttered in the wind that came in off the dales and fled through the open gate.

  On her guard, Andira walked alone to the foot of the stair.

  “Where are the banners?” one of the pilgrims called from behind her. Korace, she thought his name was, a soldier of Pelgate once upon a far-off time. He was one of the men that Hamma had trained to wield a sword and had a little skill. The scrap of mail he still wore was decorated in the faded golds and greens of Riverwatch. “If this is a fort of the baron then where’s his emblem and colors? Where’s the purple and gold, and the Owl of Kell that always looks east?”

  At the foot of the steps, Andira halted.

  She raised her hand for quiet.

  She turned slowly, drawn by intuition, towards the narrow berm of rock that encircled the revetment about the keep’s walls and found her answer.

  All her answers.

  A forest of blanched and pointed stakes ringed the wall. At first glance Andira had taken it for an abatis, another defensive structure to add to the revetment and the wall. In a sense it was – an abatis of men and women staked out in forester’s garb. But the real barrier was not a physical one. Its purpose was not defense. Andira grunted, the death energies and last moments of pain of so many that she been unable to cross the forest quickly enough to save crashing over her like a torrent of ice. The rune in her hand burned, the pain suddenly as sharp as Nordros’ spear. She gave an involuntary cry and staggered back from the stair. The laughter of something ancient and profane rang through her spirit, delighting in the crack that that small moment of dismay had opened to the Ynfernael plane. She clenched her hand over the rune and looked hard into the source of the pain.