Time of Daughters II

by Sherwood Smith

  At the front he paused to draw a deep breath, and he began to walk at the steady pace he’d developed at such pains the previous year. From behind Jethren glared at his company to match that pace, and so they proceeded.

  At the same time, down in Ku Halir, Commander Sneeze Ventdor at Ku faced Neit across his desk.

  He knew the Olavayir runner Neit as a young relation—her mother was his second cousin—though she’d been born around the time he left Nevree for good. When she brought dispatches from Olavayir, she was always willing to catch him up on news of his kin and old friends among the Riders.

  Other than that they’d had little interaction, so he was surprised when she came into his command post, dripping rain from her cloak, and said, “I have a report to make. Firsthand. And I think....” She glanced around at the staff coming and going.

  Ventdor set down the folded letter in Tanrid Olavayir’s neat, square hand, and looked a question.

  Neit said stolidly, “It’s personal. Family news.”

  Ventdor’s brows shot up. “Family? Everyone out.” His hand took in everyone but his grizzled cousin Barend, now one of his most trusted captains. Everyone filed out and Barend put his back to the door.

  Neit cast a sharp sigh. “When I stopped at Halivayir....”

  Out came what she witnessed, in admirable scout-report style. If he wanted to hear what she surmised, he’d have to ask.

  At the end, he frowned at her. “You didn’t see anyone.”

  “No.”

  “Hoof prints?”

  “None as far as I walked. I don’t think you could get a horse in there. Branches too low, too many brambles.”

  Ventdor said, “That’s much what I heard when we sent patrols through there after Tlennen Plains. Could it be villager traders? There are a few villages up there. Stick Tyavayir said they’d been preyed on by Yenvir’s rats, but maybe they turn brigand by night?”

  Neit turned up her palms. “All I can tell you is what I saw, and what Leaf Dorthad heard. She’s never been one for fearful fancies,” she added.

  “No, not from what I hear.” Ventdor remembered the tale of Leaf’s defense, and her deliberate dive off the tower to what she’d intended to be her death. “Meaning no insult here, but could it be her brains got addled along with her eyes?”

  Neit pressed her lips together, then acknowledged it was a fair question. Ventdor hadn’t seen her. And what Leaf had said did sound odd. But. “I talked to her a while. She’s no Cassad, talking to ghosts, if that’s what you’re thinking. As sane as they come.”

  “Damnation,” Ventdor muttered, kicking over an unoffending stool. “I’m stretched as it is, holding all my lancers to reinforce Gannan at the pass soon’s I get word. And every patroller I’ve got has been on duty, no leave, for....” His gaze went distant, then he said, “Rat Noth. He rode out not a day ago. I’m surprised you didn’t see him.”

  Neit had spotted Riders on the other side of a river, going the other way. “I think I did. I was riding too fast to stop.”

  “His orders are to cover everything west of us, right?” Barend Ventdor spoke for the first time, turning to the map covered with colored bits of clay.

  Ventdor hummed under his breath, then said, “But surely he could spare one patrol to go over to Halivayir, which is right across from the river. I don’t like not knowing what’s there, right at our back. Yes. Tell Rat to see to it.”

  Neit clapped her hands onto her thighs. “Me? But I do have this letter for the Weaver Chief—”

  Ventdor snorted. “Everybody knows those letters net a stiff reward from the gunvaer. My runners will be falling all over each other to take it to the royal city. Leave it here, I’ll see to it.”

  Neit hated foregoing said reward—and the weekend of fun it would buy—but she knew Rat Noth would have questions only she could answer, and laid the letter on the desk.

  “You’d better talk to Rat directly.” Ventdor paralleled her thoughts. “Let’s do everything right, thin as we’re spread.”

  Neit exited in three swift strides.

  Ventdor gazed at the map, murmuring to himself, “I wonder if they’ve reached Skytalon Peak yet....” He shut his eyes and counted up the weeks since Connar had departed, then turned to his cousin. “I think it’s time to get that damn ram on its way to Wened, where it’ll be just a couple days away when they need it.”

  “Ah, during the daylight? I remember it was brought in during the night.” Barend said.

  Ventdor waved a tired hand. “That was young Gannan, as I recall. Thinking the Adranis wouldn’t notice. But we know there are spies all over the damn town. What’s more, they know we know there are spies all over the damn town. We can’t completely hide our movements, not something like that, anyway, but we don’t have to make it easy on ‘em. Take it out whenever you want. But anyone poking around, treat ‘em as a spy,” he finished on a grim note, then muttered, “Let’s hope Rat Noth isn’t out of reach.”

  Rat Noth was not. He had no reason to expect trouble. If he’d resented being ordered to patrol the quietest portion of the kingdom, there in the middle, he gave no sign of it. He made certain his patrols overlapped, and appointed rendezvous places so that he could always be found, riding in a huge circle that intersected the smaller circles of his patrols.

  Neit found him two days outside of Ku Halir, camping alongside the river, where he had appointed a rendezvous with Pepper Marlovayir and his riding. Neit galloped into their camp just as the sun was sinking beyond the horizon. The Riders had gathered around a cook fire. Rat and Pepper Marlovayir sat a few paces distant, playing a game of cards’n’shards on a flat rock as their first runners grilled fresh-caught fish.

  Neit leaped off her horse, breathed in deeply, and exclaimed, “Heyo, that smells good!”

  Pepper exclaimed, “Neit?”

  Neit turned his way. The Marlovayir twins looked identical, tall, strong, hair (like hers) much the color and consistency of straw. “Salt? No.” She remembered that Salt had a crooked tooth. “Pepper?”

  “That’s Flight Captain Pepper to you, runner.” Pepper puffed out his chest.

  Neit made a business of peering around. “I take it your command is invisible?”

  “Ha. Ha. How’s Floss?”

  Before Neit could report that her brother was fine the last time she saw him, Rat cut in. “You’re coming from the direction of Ku Halir. Is that accidental?”

  “No.” Neit’s grin vanished, and she began giving a report as she rubbed her horse down.

  Rat and Pepper pitched in to help, and when the mare was chomping peacefully at the picket line, Neit joined them around the campfire as the runners brought wooden camp bowls.

  Neit finished describing what she’d seen behind Halivayir Castle, then pulled a knife from her sleeve and speared her fast-cooling fish.

  Rat and Pepper were mulling her words. Rat said, “This is exactly the kind of thing I’m supposed to be looking for. Though on the other side of the river.”

  Neit said, “I thought about that as I was riding. Ventdor by rights should be investigating.”

  Rat stretched out his booted feet toward the fire. “I can think of two reasons he isn’t. One, he’s stretched thin.” Nobody argued with that. “Two, he knows that Ku Halir is infested with spies. If there’s something to be found, the less blabbing about it the better. Which is why I think I ought to go with you, Neit. Though I don’t know the area at all.”

  Pepper set aside his plate. “But I know who does.” His swift steps receded to the other camp, where the Riders sat chatting over their meal. He came back with a youth with jug-handle ears and rusty red hair. “This here is Wim. He grew up in Ku Halir—”

  “Actually, in Alreth,” Wim said in an apologetic tone. “It’s a fishing village at the north end of the lake. I came down to Ku Halir to prentice when I was fifteen, but I didn’t like trading in fish, so I volunteered at the garrison stable—well, what I mean is, I learned to ride, up and down the east s
ide of the Spine.”

  “Spine?” The Marlovans said.

  “It’s what we call the hills north ‘o the lake.”

  Rat, Pepper, and Neit considered that; they hadn’t had a name for that wooded line of rocky hills, as to them it was a merely a border. Spines were in the middle of something.

  Rat shook away the thought and gave Wim a speculative glance. “You know the area?”

  “Favorite place to play around when I was a cub.”

  Rat turned to Pepper. “You stick with this area. Spread out.” To Neit and Wim, “You, you, and me. We’ll ride come sunup.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Winter Company slowed as they neared the peak.

  One evening one of Ghost Fath’s men muttered something about going out to check the perimeter, though they were not posting guards. He got turned around, lost his way back, sat down on a boulder to rest his eyes, and that’s where they found him the next morning, frozen stiff.

  A day later, Stick Tyavayir’s first runner, who had been coughing up pink froth, wandered out seeking clean snow with which to pack his flasks, but nothing looked clean enough with all those dark spots he was seeing...he vanished, never to be heard of again.

  At the other end of a sudden, brutal storm that began with horizontal needles of ice and ended as a thick blizzard, as quickly gone, a third man slipped on ice and cracked his skull, possibly his neck; he was unconscious, breathing halfway through the night before that ceased.

  The first, they sang over, breathless and hoarse, but after that with each the less was said, and the more warm clothing, never more to be needed, was claimed by those who did. Sometimes with shamed glances, for tradition was strong in how the dead were to be respected. Everyone knew the next could be themselves. But the determination to survive was stronger.

  They reached the north end of the morvende geliath just ahead of a powerful storm that boiled up out of the west as the warm air currents from the far seas clashed with the cold of the mountains. Lightning struck the ground twice, to the left of them and nearer on the right, before Quill pointed at a slanting crevasse like a gash in the striated rock and shouted, “Here it is!”

  There was no pretense at toughness as the exhausted Winter Company crowded in after him, nearly running one another over.

  They shuffled a short distance and then almost as one dropped their packs and slumped to the stone floor, breathing hard.

  Connar sat back against a stone wall as thunder reverberated through the stone with such power that tiny stones sifted from the rock curving overhead. They’d made it. Barely.

  Then—he couldn’t help himself—he swung his gaze at Quill, at the other end of the lines of slumped, weary men, straight and tall in that long, piratical black coat of his. Ghost had asked where he’d gotten it, and Quill had said, Handed down in the family. For very cold weather. Connar wondered, from whom?

  Bitter laughter welled in Connar. At least the shit wasn’t aware of the violent conflict inside Connar; anytime he looked at Quill he was aware of equal desires to slam him against the rough rock and kiss him until his lips bled—and to smash his fist into those teeth.

  No doubt, if competition there was, Quill had won this one. Even Jethren looked destroyed.

  Connar braced up, and raised his voice. “Let’s move on.”

  Quill swung to his feet with no apparent effort, reached into his bag, and fetched out a firestick. As soon as the company had dragged themselves to their feet, the first runners, new and old, lit firesticks so that their commanders could see to walk over the uneven stone.

  Quill led the way. It was so good to be back in this beautiful geliath again, especially without the pain of winter breathing. He hoped he might get a chance to sketch the rooms that in winter were too cold for his hand to hold chalk, even with gloves on.

  The long walk sloped downward for the first time, then along reasonably flat tunnels and caves. They camped early, and—safe from weather—set up warm fires.

  The runners in charge of cooking toasted the travel bread that was the only thing left of their food stores, except for a third of a wheel of cheese, which was doled out in such small slivers it was only there for taste. Though everyone was tired of travel bread, they were grateful not to be gnawing it half-frozen.

  Connar let them sleep after the meal.

  Quill was the first one awake. He looked around at the oblivious lumps burrowed into coats and scarves, and took his firestick to do a little exploring. When he returned, the company had roused, the air filled with the dank smell of wet wool, soon replaced by the odor of honey-laced travel bread being toasted. Socks and gloves lay drying over every stone as bare feet, covered with blisters in various states of healing, stretched toward the fire, and bleeding hands were rewrapped with fresh bandages.

  The division between the men was apparent in the buckets. Most of the non-essentials had been tossed away along the trail. Fath’s and Tyavayir’s men shared one ensorcelled bucket for dipping those socks. Jethren’s silent first runner had charge of their own bucket, which he never offered to share, nor did his captain insist. Even Jethren’s men kept a respectful distance from Moonbeam.

  Such small things, Quill thought as he walked softly among the groups. Refusing to talk, to share, could mean so very much in extreme situations.

  “Eat as we proceed,” Connar said once the last of the bread had been distributed.

  Jethren snapped his fist to his chest, gave his men a hard glance, and they leaped up as one, hastily packing and dressing, their bread gripped between their teeth.

  Stick and Ghost’s men ignored them, except for a few mutters and rolled eyes as they put themselves together.

  They formed in column by two, and Connar extended his hand outward, giving Quill a wry look.

  Quill started walking.

  Though breathing was still problematic, it was so much easier to walk in the more or less level stone corridors. Survival was no longer the entire focus; Stick’s youngest runner caught up with Quill, and said, “These tunnels look carved in places.”

  “They are. We’ll soon reach the actual geliath.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s where the morvende live during different seasons. Or lived. It’s difficult, at least for me, who knows so little, to tell whether they were here last year or a century or a millennia ago. They never leave anything when they move, except their art. Past these formations, you’ll see one of their gathering chambers.”

  They entered a vast cavern, the entire ceiling painted a cobalt blue with tiny stars that still glittered with magical illumination.

  “Why this cave and not that one back there?” someone down the line whispered.

  “Don’t you hear it?” Quill said. “How sound carries in here? The chambers they value most are those with echo qualities. They write music around those echoes.” Quill readied himself to share his pleasure in the morvende and their amazing music and art—but his gaze caught on Manther Yvanavayir, pacing beside Ghost Fath, that chevron-shaped dark smudge still below his right shoulder pauldron.

  Quill had feared that Manther would be the first to fall—that he might unconsciously or consciously throw away a life that seemed to have become meaningless—but Manther paced by Ghost’s side, enduring with a silent, grim resolve. What’s more, Stick’s and Ghost’s men still saluted him as a captain, unacknowledged by Manther, the tight lines in his profile revealing deep, smoldering anger.

  Manther wasn’t enduring, he was driven. To? The answer was obvious: vengeance against the man who had seduced his sister into unconscious betrayal, which in turn had destroyed his family, one of the oldest and proudest in the kingdom.

  Quill looked around, evaluating the others, and saw no interest, no appreciation. Except for the curiosity of the young runner, their thoughts were about as far from music and art as possible. He swallowed the words he’d been preparing, and mentally revised their path. He’d intended to lead them through the cavern with the han
ging rocks that looked like lace, and the nearly spherical chamber made entirely of blue and violet crystal, as well as a couple of the better painted caves.

  Instead took them in as straight a line as he could. They ate when hungry and slept when needed. Since he dared not keep track of the passing of days by writing to Lineas, he counted meals. So it was eight suppers later when they proceeded up a rise, toward great shafts of light.

  They emerged into a morning as pure as if the world were new-made. The sun shone, warm and benevolent as Quill said, “Down toward that way you can easily spot East Tower. Go along this path to the right here, and you’ll see West Tower below the next slope. I suggest keeping low. I don’t know if the tower sentries look this way with field glasses. I always assumed they did.”

  Connar lifted a hand. “Jethren. Over to you.”

  Keth Jethren flashed a grin of ferocious joy. “I’m going out to reconnoiter.” And to his men, “Today is liberty. Tonight we move.”

  He slipped out, then bent over, making certain not to create a silhouette that could be seen from below, and vanished among the rocks.

  Connar jerked his head, and everyone withdrew back down the tunnel, the two groups separating off to rest or poke around. No one was calling for hard drill; breathing was still a matter of conscious thought.

  Connar’s attention was on the crevasse leading to the pass overlook, and no one else was paying Quill any attention.

  He slipped away to locate one of the morvende chambers and check his notecase. The upper reaches of morvende caverns were chosen for the angle of the sun at certain times of the year, suffusing the glittering, striated rock with radiance. He’d been trying to guess which season this geliath had been used for, and remembered a chamber above a mighty waterfall, with an unimpeded view westward over the land below.

  It wasn’t that far off. He glanced at the map, oriented himself, then found his way to a cavern with the archway carved in trefoil out of a great slab of rock fallen from some impossible height no long extant. Words had been carved across the arch’s peak in Ancient Sartoran. The archway opened to the air overlooking the west, now caparisoned in the verdure of ripening spring, the distant sky wreathed in wisps of white vapor. Seen from so vast an elevation, the beauty was both detached and exalting.