by David Keck
Deorwen deserved more. Deserved better.
“We must get away from here,” he said, finally.
Feeling like a fool, he stalked after the runaway horses, fighting not to weave between the banks as he staggered toward the mountains.
* * *
ON AND ON they rode, until dusk returned to the high ground above Errest the Old. Once more, Durand had his eye on the ruddy western horizon. His small company had pounded the hills higher and higher since the maragrim oak, pushing the horses as hard as Durand dared. And now, though the blue wall of the Blackroots filled the southern Heavens, Durand knew that they would not reach the Sisters before nightfall.
Every crack and shadow seemed to quiver with the maragrim. At first, they pointed out each horror. Soon, however, the things became too commonplace to mention. They needed to find a shrine or a sanctuary soon, or they would never reach the pass.
Durand remembered a nameless hamlet on the way down from Broklambe. “Ailric, there was a hamlet not far from this place.” It had been littered with the dead, but it would have had a sanctuary.
Ailric looked at him in surprise. Durand imagined that the young man’s eyes were full of the carrion birds and dead men they had seen. It seemed a vain hope.
“There’s nothing else till Broklambe,” said Durand.
“And nothing in Brokelamb would stop the maragrim,” said Deorwen. “We must chance this village, I think.”
18
Whispers in the Lonely Places
They soon found the village: a clutch of low buildings huddled among broken pinnacles on a bare shelf of gravel. Where Durand had expected to see bodies and carrion birds, he found an empty hamlet and an empty sky. Without thinking, Durand had reined in.
“Why do you stop?” said Deorwen.
“There were bodies here, yesterday. A good many. Broklambe was empty. This hamlet was strewn with corpses.”
There were a dozen buildings clustered in a space little larger than a castle yard, every wall fashioned of the same stones on which the huts and sheds stood.
Deorwen urged her mount forward and onto the narrow plateau. “Where are they now, I wonder?” She passed within arm’s reach of the damp stone walls. Every corner and barrel looked like it might conceal monsters.
“Buried,” said Ailric. “Some, anyway,” he added, pointing toward a place of mounded stones. He hopped from his saddle and scrambled to the heaps, peering close before calling. “Yes. The stones are a jumble. Earth on top. Dry lichen under. Fresh laid.”
“And many stones,” said Durand. There were ten or more mounds and the builders had done a proper job. “They did it today and they wanted the dead to stay buried: this will have been a long day’s work, even for a dozen men—and there can’t have been many survivors.” He eyed the few buildings. Not one of the thickset hovels could be mistaken for a sanctuary.
“We must find shelter,” said Deorwen. Already, the western crags were slicing long shadows from Heaven’s Eye.
Durand considered. It was a small village and there were so many graves. “These people had little time to travel after such a task. They must be nearby.”
“Are there cellars, perhaps?” asked Deorwen.
Durand winced. “A man in a cellar might drown in the things. We saw whole horrors folded into a crack in the ground. What would a cellar be like?” He eyed the foundations of the nearest huts.
“All right, Durand. Enough. So we can’t sit down and wait for the maragrim here. There’s Broklambe still. We might reach it, though I don’t fancy digging through the ashes of that old sanctuary again.” They all remembered the curled cinders of the dead villagers. “We’ve no way of knowing whether the maragrim would shy from anything left in that doomed place.”
Ailric, who had been doing some grubbing of his own, stood abruptly, for all the world like a hunting dog who’d stumbled over a scent.
“Ailric, what is it?” said Deorwen.
“It is hard, reading the stones, but there is a path here.” He gestured uphill, where a gravel trail led into the broken hills to the east. “Men have passed this way. It has not been long.”
Durand thought of the empty road behind them and the burned shrine ahead. “It is the only way,” he said. The Eye of Heaven was low and the mountains cast long shadows before them. “We must pray they were not going far. An hour will be too long.”
They followed the unknown path, riding as the track twisted between bare stone crags, sometimes as close as columns in a castle hall. Already, the blazing pinnacles were mantled in swags of shadow, and furtive shapes stirred in the darkest gullies, and fluting calls echoed among the stones.
“They will not wait for nightfall,” said Deorwen.
Durand made out crouched shapes lying in wait. Eyes jittered in the deepest places.
They scrambled up between grim hills with the Eye on their backs. Soon, it was clear that the ravines teemed with a confusion of horrors. From one ditch, spears and glaives jutted like reeds. Great spidery shapes groped the valleys, pressing close. And Durand began to wonder if he had killed them all, dragging them into the highlands.
Soon, the glow of the empty Heavens would fail and the maragrim would have them. They were already unfolding. He heard a hiss like cicadas rising and falling around them.
At this last moment, a strange pinnacle blazed before them. Someone had hewn a shrine from the living rock and a last ribbon of sunlight lay upon its face. This must be their refuge.
It stood across a meadow of boulders and tangled grasses. Durand made out the square sockets of dark windows and the lean-to peak of a roof.
And then that light was gone.
“That is the sunset, Sir Durand,” said Ailric.
And into the gloom rushed a sea of hisses and clicks and screeches, and the maragrim were on the move.
“Ride now!” said Durand, and they bolted over the rough grasses as fiends rose from the tussocks, flexing their claws. The devils lashed from every side as the three charged for the strange stone shrine.
There were people crowding the windows—living men and women who could not help but call encouragement as Durand and his companions galloped the last hundred paces. Durand saw a door flung open four fathoms above their heads.
“You must climb!” said a voice. “You cannot save the horses. Climb!”
Durand threw himself down, catching at bridles to slow the others as they dismounted at the cliff bottom—in the face of a galloping phalanx of thralls. There were hands waving down from the high door and traces of footholds on the way up the rock wall. Durand shoved Deorwen as high as he could and got Ailric climbing as well. And he, himself, only scarcely managed to pull his boots from the talons of the mob.
Refugees and maragrim howled above and below as Durand climbed. Skull-sized stones whooshed past as the villagers drove the maragrim back. A black hand caught Durand’s shin in a grip to grind bones, only to be dashed away by a block of granite from above.
Then Durand felt friendly hands catch hold of him, hauling him into the snug, crowded darkness of the shrine.
“Thank Heaven,” said Deorwen. The pale oval of her face was very close. “I thought you were lost.”
The maragrim screamed a mix of glee and rage over the wild, gabbling shrieks of the poor horses. In his mind, Durand could see the beasts brought down, kicking and lunging, by the teeth and talons of the mob. It was not quick.
“Here,” said a woman’s voice. “As far from the door as you can. There was nothing for it. An hour with ropes could not have got your horses safe up here, and there is no room.”
Durand made out the lined face of an old woman. She slapped a pair of strong hands together; it had been her stone that saved Durand, he had no doubt. “And I wasn’t about to leave any man to those things. We are all that’s left of Gowlins. Four men, three women, and my boy. We have seen what those things are, and you will be safe enough. They did not dare to enter the shrine last night. And though they tried their tric
ks with torches and burning straw to drive us out, it’s all stone. You should have—”
Abruptly, a pale youth stopped the woman. Wisps of beard darkened the hollows of his neck and cheeks. He poured whispers into the old woman’s ear, his eyes fixed on Durand.
“Here,” she replied. “Take your hand from my shoulder and I will ask him.”
She ducked her chin in Durand’s direction, saying, by way of introduction, “This here is the hermit. A young one.” The staring youth gripped the lady’s shoulder again. “Here! What did I tell you?”
“We’ve had a hermit on the rock for ages,” she said. “And it’s good luck we care for ’em, what with them expecting the birds to pluck the juniper in the autumn and to live on air or God knows the rest of the year. This one is new to us, or nearly so. Three winters. The last one came up in my grandmother’s day.”
The hermit ducked, hissing at the woman’s ear.
“I know, I know.” She looked at Durand. “He says he’s seen you. He wants to know who you are.”
Durand grunted. He should have said something before now. “I am Durand Col, this is Lady Deorwen, and this my shield-bearer, Ailric. He might have seen me in Acconel.”
The feverish stare continued and there were more hissing words.
“He says ‘no.’ And ‘shield-bearer’ has him agitated, the silly thing. I fancy he means a dream, Durand Col. He will be thinking it’s the future, and he looks none too pleased about it, I must say.”
Durand looked at the wild eyes for a long, exhausted moment.
Finally, the hermit burst with frustration. “This hollow little place, it is like a bell. It rings with memories and dreams. I have heard the Horn of Uluric resound from the vault of Heaven, and the Hornbearer’s devilish horn making mock of it.”
Durand looked into the mad face, feeling every step of the leagues and leagues behind him. “We have all heard.”
“But there is more, Durand Col. Do you know where you have come? Who climbed this rock and died upon it, Durand Col? And who built this cell? This shrine?”
“I am weary beyond measure,” said Durand.
“Then will it wake you to know that a Lord of Penseval caused this place to be built upon this stone? Duke Leowin, who carried the Horn of Uluric before the Host of Errest.”
“I do not understand.”
“Leowin built it to shelter a man, Durand Col: a man who would not descend into Errest the Old, who could not quite return.”
“What?” said Durand.
“It is no wonder that you vowed silence, hermit,” said the old woman, exasperated. “The whole thing is back to front. Here. What he’s trying to tell you is that there was a crusader came back over the mountains and couldn’t go no further, though whether it was guilt or gratitude that held him, I couldn’t say. And the crusader was one of the men with the Lost Princes and Leowin of the Horn. In fact, they say he was Heraric’s shield-bearer. And sure Leowin would have known him. And would have wanted a roof over the poor man’s head when he sat here by the track. That’s all. A fine story.”
The hermit stared. “Theoric, shield-bearer. Theoric, who rode with the Lost Princes, who fought the Host of Thralls. Theoric, who lost his Prince to the Sons of Heshtar and stood astride his master with bared blade, battling back the darkness. This place of shame and thankfulness.”
The old woman frowned. “That’s what I’ve said, boy. If you must speak, you shouldn’t waste words by repeating your elders.”
Deorwen was very near. Very warm. There was no room in the hermit’s cell.
“This place rings with dreams and memories,” the boy-hermit repeated. “I have heard their voices, those crusaders calling in pain and victory. And there is a voice on the wind, even now. A whisper. A voice that niggles at the memory. Few remember Theoric, but he fought with the Lost Princes and grieved their passing here.”
Durand tried to imagine someone from that long-ago time curled up in that same stony darkness. The man might have known the Herald. He might have seen Godelind in Eldinor. He might have sat with the Knights of Iron in Pennons Gate. But here, he stopped.
“I think that his people should have come to get him,” he said, “but it is our good fortune that they did not.” Durand’s eyes were heavy. Even with Deorwen and the hermit and the cries of the maragrim all around him, exhaustion hauled him down.
“The voice. It whispers, Durand Col,” the hermit was saying, but sleep took him.
* * *
DURAND WOKE COLD and stiff in that crowded hermit’s cell, with Deorwen huddled against his back, small as a dove. In the doorway, Ailric stood watch over the hills. Durand shifted away and joined his man, looking out where the predawn mist swirled over the meadow.
“There,” said Ailric.
A thing like a half-butchered man was hobbling and sobbing through the mist below the hermitage toward a gap in jostling hills to the north.
“That is the last of them,” said Ailric.
“The last?”
Ailric nodded. “The first took his leave around midnight. It was not easy to make out, at first; they left in ones and twos. But soon the crowd grew thin.” The young man squinted into the northern mist. “Always north.”
“Gireth.”
Ailric nodded.
Within the hour, the three searchers bid good-bye to the folk of Gowlins, with the old woman chuckling about how they would all be praying for juniper berries before long. The haggard hermit boy never ceased his staring.
It would be a long climb on foot, but the horses were gone except for a few cracked bones. Worse, there was nothing but scraps and tatters left of their packs and provisions—though Durand’s old hauberk survived, hanging high on a thornbush. He expected that the devils had licked each link for the flavor of old blood.
It was an eerie, empty Creation through which they climbed. At deserted Broklambe, they mounted a search for anything that might keep them alive in the mountains. There were a few sacks in a shed near the mill, a few leather bottles here and there—and plenty of water in the stream—but there was little food after refugees and raiders and thralls had passed.
Yet if they were hungry, how hungry must Almora be in the high passes? And if they were cold, how cold must Almora be in the mountains alone?
The voice of doubt nagged that Almora was likely far colder than they, and far less hungry, but Durand could not stop until he knew, and neither one argued.
“I spoke to the old woman after you slept,” said Deorwen. “The hermit rambled on about the Horn of Uluric and the Hornbearer’s mocking trumpet, and about these whispers he hears. They come at night, though I doubt the boy knows what they say. These hermits, one after another, alone with the echoes of past days, and caught between the mountains and the kingdom below. It’s a wonder any of them are sane.”
Durand scowled. “What sights would those men have known, brawling with the Enemy in his own nation? It is not to be thought of. Yet perhaps they only see what we dare not.”
* * *
THE WHITE BLADES of the Sisters soared against the vault of Heaven and, after noon, they felt the distant spray of the Tresses upon the high chill air.
At long last, they came to the high pass and the campsite ring where Leovere’s men had sheltered, the place where they had crossed in the storm. It was now scattered with abandoned pavilions.
“It is here,” said Deorwen, “where Almora was taken.”
“Why did you not tell me?”
“I did not wish to be left behind, Durand. It seemed a neat way to force your hand.”
She had not needed such a trick. “But why in this place?” wondered Durand.
“Everyone was tired, and it was a league to the next place that suited. Leovere’s men had left nothing behind.” Neither dead men nor blood, Durand thought.
Two of the tents had survived the nights since Coensar had left the pass, and now the slack canvas flapped in the cold and aimless wind. Ailric and Durand slipped across the tang
led grass and wreckage, checking each tent behind the points of their swords.
Deorwen stepped out into the ring. There were shocks of color against the grass: tents, trappers, surcoats, packs. “We’d pitched tents on the level ground with men standing guard. I think Coensar made certain that no one could steal up on us. He remembered how Leovere’s sentries fared.”
Coensar was no fool, not in such matters. “He would have been careful. Men on the track north and south. More than one or two. But he would have been thinking of Leovere and his rebels.”
Durand took in the desolation of the place, laid bare under a clouded sky. Here, the land showed a man how small he was. How could Almora, alone, have survived this? Why had he believed, even for an instant, that he would find anything but a little corpse, dead and frozen like some shattered bird.
A little corpse.
Durand remembered crouching in the sentry’s blood while something watched from the high stones. He had not been sure what he saw.
Deorwen moved between the fire pits and canvas, her hands fluttering. Durand could almost see the fires and shadows shimmering in her eyes. Then she knelt, setting her hand in the ruin. “This was our tent.” It was torn. In places, twisted into the earth. “I woke with the thing right on us. Maybe staggering in torn canvas. The face was horns all around. And then it had Almora. It leapt like a spider, out of the firelight and out of the world.”
She blinked, freeing herself from the memory. “I think it went—” She stopped, looking about herself at the cold camp. “We have been fools. Wishing cannot scratch out what is already written.” The ruins were all around them. Durand had brought them here, and they would be hungry before long. And all for nothing.
Ailric, meanwhile, was grubbing over the earth once more. Durand had become used to the shield-bearer’s constant searching. Now, however, the young man stopped, looking up the wall of the cliff that towered over the camp.
“Something moving,” he said. “There, at the cliff edge. I cannot say what.”
Durand, too, saw a small motion against the pearl vault of the clouds. Something was there, fathoms overhead, flirting with the edge of the cliff. “I see it!” he said. The maragrim could not be abroad in daylight. Without a word, Durand was in motion.