by NS Dolkart
He had just painstakingly freed a mangled pair of hearthside tongs when Atella called out to him.
“This is it!” she said. “You found it!”
Hunter dropped the tongs with an annoyed grunt – how many heavy stones had he had to lift to get the useless things out? – and stumbled his way over the wreckage to see what Atella was talking about. He couldn’t even remember what the last item he’d given her had been.
Phaedra got there first. “Really?” she said.
It was a broken wooden bucket, with a metal handle bent and dangling from one side. A little rainwater had managed to collect at the bottom.
“The map stayed blank,” Atella insisted. “See for yourself.”
They walked twice as far from the house as usual, just to make sure. “If there’s a story behind this,” Phaedra said, “I don’t know it.”
“Well,” said Hunter, “let’s get out of here.”
They left Karsanye for the forest, making sure to avoid the route that led to Bennan’s farm.
“I wonder what the map would have chosen for us,” Hunter said, “if we hadn’t been here ourselves.”
Phaedra pondered that silently, chewing on one of their soggy breads. It was late afternoon by now, and Hunter had lost track of how many days they had left before their window closed. For one thing, he didn’t know how long they had slept on the road. It could have been sixteen hours or forty. Considering their state in the days before, he didn’t want to assume that it was the lower number.
“Do you think we’ll be able to find the place where I met you?” Atella asked. “Because I’m completely lost.”
Hunter looked to Phaedra, who shook her head. “I’ve been hoping that God Most High will lead us there. The mill has to be somewhere northeast of here, but I don’t know how far west we’d gone before we met you. I wish Bandu were with us – she’d know.”
Yes, Hunter thought ruefully, she would. Even on the continent, Bandu never failed to find whatever was needed at the time, be it food, water, or a safe path through the mountains. She probably knew the forests of Tarphae better than the wolves did.
Hunter had known that he would miss the others, but he hadn’t realized how much. There were holes in his life where they belonged, just as there were holes for his parents and brother, and a hole for the man he had thought he would become. He had imagined once, vaguely, that the king’s army would become a second, realer family the next time Tarphae went to war. That war had never come, but his need for its comradeship remained. He had grown to appreciate being one of five, but now even those five were dispersed. Phaedra alone was not enough.
“This way,” Hunter said. “We should go north first and see what we reach.”
He was no tracker, but he had studied a map of Tarphae some years ago, back when the thought of being invaded had been exciting rather than horrifying. When he thought back to those times, studying the maps, he realized that he could still visualize all the little blue squiggles that represented rivers and streams. If they went north early enough, they were bound to meet the Sennaroot river that ran past Mura’s mill. From there, he might be able to retrace their steps.
They followed his instincts and his lead, and within an hour or two they found a little stream that ran northwest. They drank there, pondering their next move. Hunter was sure that this stream was too narrow to be the Sennaroot, especially after the morning’s rains. It must be a tributary, in which case it should meet the river at some point. He thought if they came to the place where the rivers met, he’d know how to proceed from there.
So they crossed the stream and followed it westward as the clouds and rain returned, turning the whole world gray. The stream did meet a larger river not long thereafter, much to Hunter’s relief. If memory served – and if this was indeed the Sennaroot – there would be a ford not too far upriver. They changed directions again.
As they walked, Phaedra asked Atella what interactions the people of Silent Hall had had with the elves.
“They’re horrible,” Atella said with a shudder. “Their queen came to talk to Psander, and promised to leave us alone for ten years if we’d give her four ‘breeding pairs.’ Psander said they want to eat us. She said no to the queen, but every week or two she comes back with her guards and asks again. We didn’t want to go outside after the first time she came, but we had to cut down the trees and try to farm or we’d have had nothing to eat. Psander made a ward that tells us when the elves are close, so we run back in when they’re coming.”
“They have a queen?” Hunter asked. “We met a prince, but I didn’t know they had a queen.”
“I don’t know anything about a prince. The queen is so frightening I can’t even say, and her guards are just as bad. They have no tongues, and they clack at you.”
“Did Psander let them in?” Phaedra asked, horrified.
“No, I saw them from the walls. Everyone told me not to climb up there and look, but I thought I wasn’t afraid.”
Hunter shook his head. “The elves are worth fearing.”
“I know that well enough now. You don’t have to tell me.”
They spent that night in the forest, which was somehow infinitely less comfortable than the road had been the night before. Hunter suspected that this had very little to do with the wet ground and much more to do with their better-rested state before they went to sleep this time. Whatever the reason, Hunter awoke cold, wet, and sore. His neck was stiff, his right arm numb from having been used as a pillow, and when he tried to rise, he found that one of his feet was still asleep. It tingled for nearly a minute after he got up, and hurt whenever he stepped on it.
The others followed his lead for the rest of the day, and for the entire afternoon he felt that they were maddeningly close to the spot they were looking for. He had brought them as far as his memory for maps could take him, but that still wasn’t enough to take them the rest of the way. At best, he had narrowed down their location to somewhere within two or three square miles of where they wanted to be. He missed Bandu even more.
Phaedra went back to praying, and Hunter began to wonder whether she might wear Criton’s God out with all these requests for successively smaller things. God Most High had shortened their path to Karsanye and thus allowed them to evade their pursuers – could He be bothered to help with this last insignificant task, which any competent woodsman would have been able to figure out on his own?
On the other hand, why shouldn’t He? If God Most High had taken them this far, how strange would it be for Him to abandon them right before they could reach their goal?
Hunter didn’t ask Atella any more about Psander’s dealings with the fairies, but that did not stop him from thinking about them. He had felt guilty knowing that the islanders’ salvation from the armies of Magor and Mayar had come at the cost of exposing Psander and the villagers to a world full of child-eating demons – Auntie Gava’s term for the elves had been a good one. But he had had the comfort, at least, of not being forced to think about it terribly often while he and Phaedra were busy following her quest for magic. Now he had to face the reality of what they had done to Psander and her villagers, and it was horrifying.
He wished he could believe that Psander knew what she was doing; that she could stand up to the elves and win; that she could protect herself and those she had come with. From what he’d heard so far, it seemed highly unlikely. The very fact that Psander was relying on Hunter and his friends as magical ingredients for her wards was damning. After all, it wasn’t as if the islanders had actually defeated the elves – their greatest success had been in running away. If Psander was building her wards on the strength of such questionable victories, she must be desperate. An arrow from Narky’s life; a bucket from Criton’s; a handful of dirt to represent Bandu – these were not the stuff of powerful magic. For the Gods’ sake, Psander would be getting Hunter and Phaedra in the flesh, and it still wasn’t worth much of anything.
“When did Psander tell you she was a
woman?” Phaedra asked suddenly.
“The day after we arrived,” Atella said. “That was a shock to everyone. It sounds stupid, but we all felt safer when we thought she was a man.”
“Well,” Phaedra said, and then cut herself short. She had been shaking her head, but now she stopped. “Yes,” she said. “That is stupid.”
There was silence for a time, a silence Hunter did not understand. He had the sense of a second conversation occurring outside of his hearing, a conversation in which somehow Phaedra’s insulting words were not rude but complimentary, encouraging. Such was Phaedra’s expression, anyway.
They kept walking, turning whenever Hunter thought they had gone too far in one direction. At this point they were not so much on their way somewhere as they were attempting to find a place that looked familiar.
They still hadn’t found such a place by nightfall, when the cooler air brought forth a stagnant mist that rose up from the ground and made any further navigation impossible. So they huddled together, trying and failing to find a comfortable position to sleep in. Just as Hunter finally began to drift off, his back against a tree, the wind picked up and roused him halfway with its cool touch on his cheek. He opened his eyes and yawned.
The wind was doing something very strange up ahead, swirling the mist round and round in an ever-growing spiral. Hunter scrambled to his feet. He knew what an entrance to the elves’ world looked like.
“Get up!” he cried to the other two. “We’re here – we found it after all.”
The girls got up hurriedly, Atella grabbing her satchel as she rose to her feet. Together, the three of them walked into the swirling mists. Psander awaited.
29
General Magerion
The word of Xytos’ defeat shook Ardis to its foundations. How could a city famous for its warriors be losing to an enemy that had appeared so completely out of nowhere? First a dragon and now the Dragon Touched were proving that the greatest warriors in the world could not stand against them, that all talk of their extinction had been very premature. It was shocking. How short a time ago had Magor’s city been paramount in the world, its people respected and its army feared? One moment, High Priest Bestillos had been like a demigod, conquering every city that resisted or denied Ardisian might. Now he was gone, and it seemed as if Magor had gone with him.
What good was a leader like Magerion against a reality like that? What chance did his city have, with the Dragon Touched defeating their armies and the worshippers of Ravennis trying to devour them from within? Perhaps it was time to prioritize his enemies differently. He had worked for nearly two months to prevent Ravennis from expanding on His foothold in the city, but he did not fear Ravennis the way he feared God Most High. He had spent his youth in an Ardis ruled by the latter, and he did not mean to go back.
Magerion had succeeded so far in keeping Ravennis and His death cult at bay – that much, at least, he had accomplished. But even if the worshippers of Ravennis did not respond to Xytos’ defeat with jubilation – after all, it was their brothers too who were dying in these battles – the Dragon Touched were nonetheless strengthening their hand. How long until revolution swept Ardis? How long until the Great Temple of Magor fell?
Magerion had no intention of dying in a second purge. His family, his clan, had risen to a place of prominence in the city on the strength of his leadership, and he would not let them down. It was time to switch sides.
The cult of Ravennis could not afford to turn down the support of a man like Magerion. He could bring them an aura of legitimacy and the allegiance of a powerful clan – he would be indispensable. So what if he had spent weeks now slaughtering their worshippers in the most public and gruesome ways he could devise? Their God was a sneaky one – He would see Magerion’s sudden change of heart as a major coup, regardless of its motives. The only question was how to engineer this change of heart in such a way as to deliver the city to him in one clean stroke.
The priests of Magor had to be gotten rid of, that much was a certainty. But would Elkinar then rise from His slumber and make a play for God of Ardis? It was possible. What Magerion needed to avoid was a power vacuum, a moment when the fate of Ardis was unclear. He needed to make sure that none of the other generals survived the new order to take sides in a conflict between Elkinar and Ravennis.
He wanted to get them together somehow, to gather Magor’s priests and the Council of Generals in the same place, where a surprise attack by his loyalists could wipe them all out at once. But how best to arrange such a thing?
It was his scouts who brought him the solution. Narky the Black had escaped to Anardis and was now spreading the message of his cult to the people of that city, where once again Elkinar’s priests seemed to have taken a stance of neutrality. Perhaps they had learned from Magerion’s example that killing the Ravennis worshippers did not always have the desired effect. Or maybe their God was secretly dead, and no one had told them.
In any case, Narky was the key. The capture of the young high priest of Ravennis could draw both the generals and the priests of Magor to a meeting, and the black priest could bless Magerion once he’d disposed of them. It would be perfect.
But first he needed to capture Narky, and that might not be so simple. With Bestillos gone, the people of Anardis could not be counted upon to capitulate to an Ardisian general who had no army to back up his demands. A hundred men would not do for that purpose – but perhaps the priests of Elkinar could help him. They might be officially neutral, but they stood to gain a lot from Magor’s collapse, unless the cult of Ravennis could co-opt the Wilderness God’s following. They had every incentive to get rid of Black Narky.
But how to get a message to them without tipping him off? If Narky discovered that Magerion and the priests of Elkinar were in communication with each other, he was liable to run off and disappear again. Conversely, if Magerion revealed that he was seeking Narky’s aid and not his elimination, word was bound to get back to Ardis long before he was ready for it. It was far too risky a thing to be so open about. This had to be very delicately done.
In the end he settled on his niece, who was a great devotee of Elkinar and very friendly with His Ardisian priests. She would travel to Anardis as a pilgrim and deliver the high priestess of Elkinar a message: Magerion would be coming to town in another week with a hundred men, so that he could take the pesky Narky away from their city and bring him to justice. He would be much obliged if the priests of Elkinar would send the boy out to him when he arrived.
In the meantime, he informed General Stellys of his plan to capture the high priest of Ravennis. “Why do you bother?” Stellys asked. “You executed their first leader, and dozens after her, and what good has that done you? What good has it even done Magor? The cult hasn’t died – if anything, it’s grown stronger. Why not just leave them alone?”
“And pretend that that would make them go away?” Magerion retorted. “Black Narky is more than just their latest leader, Stellys; he’s the man who killed Bestillos. He’s their proof that their God survived Magor’s victory at Laarna and came out the stronger for it. A public execution of Narky would do more than humiliate the cult of Ravennis – it would unravel them.”
“So you say. I say they’ll just find another leader. These people lost their army, their city, and their famous Oracle. They saw their God’s sacred birds fall dead from the sky, and they still insist their God is greater than the one that killed Him. Nothing can convince people like that, Magerion. No matter what you do to them, they’ll find a way to call it a victory.”
Magerion twisted his mouth to conceal the smile that was trying to creep onto it. “We’ll see.”
When he left the city, his hundred men with him, he had still told no one of his true intentions. He informed his men on their third night outside Ardis. They were shocked at first, but eventually they fell in line. Who cared if they had been slaughtering cultists yesterday, so long as Ravennis accepted their conversions and rejoiced at their support? Hu
man life was cheap to the Gods, and to Magerion’s loyalists, it didn’t honestly matter which God ruled the city so long as He ruled through Magerion. For with the other generals gone, Magerion would be the sole ruler – the new king of Ardis. His clansmen would be royalty, his loyalists favored in all things. Who among them could object to that?
When Magerion was king and Ravennis ascendant, Ardis would again be strong enough to turn its attention outward, to the defeat of the Dragon Touched. Ravennis could unify the city as a weakened Magor had failed to, and then Ardis could face its enemies with the backing of a rising God rather than a declining one. With Magerion’s leadership, his city could make this transition without wasting its manpower or resources on a prolonged civil war. His Ardis would be stronger than the one that had purged itself of the Dragon Touched so many years ago.
When they arrived at Anardis, Black Narky was waiting for them. He was standing outside the gate with his wife and a crowd of followers, and as Magerion’s army approached, he parted with the crowd and came forward to meet them.
Magerion did a quick reassessment of the situation. He had more or less expected the priests of Elkinar to deliver the man to him in chains, yet here he was, walking toward the men of Ardis of his own volition. Had his God already told him of Magerion’s plans? The general had thought that he was using Ravennis and His cult to his own ends, but perhaps he had it backwards. Perhaps he was a tool of the Gods after all.
But no, Ravennis had not told Narky what to expect. When the two met face to face, the young man struck him as barely holding in his terror. “You came here for me,” he said. “Well, here I am.”
“Yes,” Magerion agreed. “Here you are.”
Black Narky was much younger than Magerion had expected, and shorter than he had remembered. But then, he had only seen him the once, from a distance. In person, the High Priest of Ravennis was an average-sized teenager, neither particularly impressive physically nor wise beyond his years in any obvious way. Magerion had to remind himself that it was this boy who had killed Bestillos and this boy too who had slain the Boar of Hagardis. There was clearly more to him than met the eye.