[Warhammer] - Guardians of the Forest

by Graham McNeill - (ebook by Undead)

  He had worn the jerkin beneath his armour and it had felt as natural as any armour ever had, the links of his mail shirt soft against his skin instead of biting into his flesh. He had said nothing, but Tiphaine smiled slyly when she had seen him wear it and he resolved to do her honour by wearing her gift in whatever battles were yet to come.

  Kyarno ran a hand through his long hair, the beads and jewels woven there jingling as he walked below the branches that twisted above him and marked the entrance to Lord Aldaeld’s halls. The Eternal Guard stood to attention further down the leaf-strewn nave of the glittering hall. The spell-sung walls rippled with inner life and movement and Kyarno could feel the magic of the spites moving beneath the surface.

  He ignored them and the sculptures of wood they formed as they played, moving through the curving paths of the inner halls towards his destination. Dressed in his finest attire, a soft green tunic embroidered with silver thread and woven with intricate patterns of leaf and tree, he hoped he looked less like Kyarno the troublemaker and more like Kyarno the peacemaker.

  He sensed the stares of the Eternal Guard and those who served Lord Aldaeld upon him, their wary eyes ever vigilant for him causing some mischief. He felt his anger growing with every suspicious glance that came his way and fought to control it, casting his mind back to the divine presence he had witnessed in the forest.

  Though he knew what it was he had seen, that knowledge made it no less miraculous and he held to the peace and love he had felt at that moment, calming his simmering emotions with the memory.

  He saw Cairbre across the hall, but kept his head down and walked on, not yet ready to face his uncle and the issues they had between them. Until he understood more about himself and the newly unlocked feelings within him, he knew that his anger would only get the better of him, and he didn’t want that.

  Kyarno found who he was looking for in a snowy glade, open to the skies and utterly silent, no sounds of bird or beast to disturb the peaceful solitude. A lone horseman galloped around the circumference of the glade, bare-chested and with an unsheathed sword.

  Tarean Stormcrow swung from the back of his horse and slashed his sword at an imaginary enemy before pulling himself back up and bounding smoothly to stand on the beast’s back. He drew another blade and threw himself forward in a twisting pirouette, his swords flashing left and right like silver darts. The golden-haired elf landed lightly on the back of his steed, directing it in a zigzag course through the glade with gentle pressure of his knees.

  Kyarno let Tarean finish his basic exercises, watching the consummate ease with which elf and steed worked together. Tarean Stormcrow was a fine rider, though Kyarno knew that in a kindred of Glade Riders, there were others of much greater skill.

  “You are leaning too far to your left, Tarean Stormcrow,” called out Kyarno as Lord Aldaeld’s herald finished his exercises. “A right-handed enemy with a longer reach would kill you first.”

  Tarean leapt lightly from his horse, a light sheen of sweat coating his lean, tattooed body, and sheathed his twin swords. He nodded in recognition as he saw who observed him, and pulled his hair back to settle his circlet upon his brow as Kyarno walked towards him.

  “Thank you for the advice, Kyarno, I will remember it.”

  “Your next battle would have reminded you soon enough.”

  Tarean nodded, sensing that Kyarno was not here to argue or berate him for some real or imagined slight, and slapped his shoulder, saying, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, my friend? You didn’t just come here to advise me on my swordplay.”

  “You do not miss anything, Tarean, do you?”

  “You are not hard to read, my friend.”

  Kyarno smiled weakly. “I suppose not. But you’re right, I did come here for more than that, though Isha knows you need it,” he said, reaching up to pat the bay gelding Tarean had been riding. The beast was magnificent, easily one of the finest steeds of the Eadaoin kinband, its flaxen coat smooth and shining. “I came to apologise to you, Tarean.”

  “Apologise to me?” said Tarean, wiping the sweat from his face with a fine cloth.

  “Yes,” nodded Kyarno. “You once said that you offered me friendship. I threw it back in your face, and for that I am sorry.”

  “No apology is necessary, my friend,” said Tarean, offering his hand to Kyarno.

  “Does your offer still stand?”

  Tarean nodded. “Of course it does, Kyarno. I do not make such offers just to retract them later.”

  “Good,” replied Kyarno and reached out to grip Tarean’s hand. “I think that you and I could be friends and I am willing to see if such a thing is possible.”

  Tarean walked to a tree where his overshirt hung and pulled it over his head, settling it over his shoulders and straightening his sword belt.

  “I am glad you think so, Kyarno, but tell me, what brought about this change of heart?”

  “I’m not sure,” admitted Kyarno, unwilling yet to share what had happened in the forest. “I think that I carried a great bitterness and it poisoned me to those who loved me. I shut myself off from them and my heart became like one of the humans’ hateful fortresses of stone.”

  Kyarno paced as he spoke, having to force every word and finding each one both difficult and cathartic to say.

  “When my parents were killed… I… I…”

  “You blamed Cairbre,” finished Tarean. “I know. He rescued you from the beastmen attack and carried you to safety. You blamed him for not reaching you in time to save your parents.”

  “No,” said Kyarno, shaking his head. “That’s not it.”

  “No?”

  “No,” repeated Kyarno. “I blamed him for not letting me die with them.”

  Tarean said nothing, plainly surprised at his admission, but the well was undammed now and Kyarno’s words would not stop.

  “But then I learned that it wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t got to us in time. It was Naieth. She was to blame.”

  “Why do you think this?”

  “Cairbre told me years later that she had come to Lord Aldaeld with a vision of beastmen raiding the Meadow Glades in the south. Cairbre’s Eternal Guard and the Waywatchers had been sent to destroy them.”

  “I remember now,” whispered Tarean. “But she was wrong, wasn’t she? They were not in the Meadow Glades at all.”

  “No, they were not,” said Kyarno. “The creatures of Chaos had penetrated deep into Athel Loren and came upon the halls of my father. They came with burning brands and bloody axes and killed everyone they found. My mother, my father and my sisters… all of them died that day.”

  Tarean laid his hand on Kyarno’s arm, and he could feel the pain of those memories rise up in a suffocating wave. “I was just a child, but I remember it all, the flames, the fear and the blood… so much blood. I can see it even now, clear as a winter’s morning. Cairbre must have heard the forest cry out in anger or felt his brother’s fear for his kin, I don’t know, but he and the Eternal Guard swiftly travelled the secret paths of the forest and destroyed the monsters. But it was too late, I was the only one left alive.”

  The two elves sat in silence for some time, Kyarno lost in the pain of a time long passed and Tarean sitting patiently with a fellow elf and letting him speak in his own time.

  “Cairbre saved you,” said Tarean at last. “You should be thankful for that.”

  “I know,” agreed Kyarno, “but I was young and foolish. I screamed and cursed him for not coming sooner, for deserting his kin and letting them die. Isha alone knows why I said the things I did, for they must have cut him deeply. But I did say them and when I finally accepted that it wasn’t even his fault, it was too late, we had erected impenetrable walls between us.”

  “No wall is impenetrable, Kyarno,” said Tarean. “Remember that.”

  The breath of the gods blew strong, the power of the shaman growing with each passing heartbeat. The presence of the Shadow-Gave in the mountains aided its magic, empowering
the shaman as one chosen by the Dark Gods. The rain continued to fall around it, black and noxious, and the ground turned to a stinking quagmire beneath its hoofs.

  The wind blew cold and hard, flapping the tattered and rotted robes around its twisted and hunched body of shaggy fur. Its horns dripped with black moisture and its magically attuned eyes were filled with the crackling lines of magic that flared from the waystone before it.

  The lethal wall of thorn and branch still stood, though the shaman could see the tips of the furthest growths were blackened and twisted, dying as the power of Chaos touched it. Time had ceased to have meaning for the herd, days and nights blurring into one continual span, though the shaman was dimly aware of enemy magic at work, some unknown force sweeping them up in its wake. Snow froze them, rain lashed them and the sun baked the mud on their backs to hard clay, all within the space of a passing of the sun.

  But for each faerie trick unleashed by the forest, the shaman had an answer, his greater power causing black veins of necrotic energy to leech their way up the length of the waystone. The enchantments woven into the living rock were strong, forged when the world was young, but the breath of the gods was eternal and unyielding.

  The shaman’s staff crackled with energy, bruised arcs of light flaring from its gnarled tip and the stink of raw, dangerous magic.

  The Beastlord paced like a caged thing, its impatience to be about its bloody work palpable and the shaman knew that if it did not bring the waystone down soon, then its life was forfeit.

  Soon the waystone’s magic would be all but spent and it would fall, unable to bend the dark forest around it to its will.

  And then the Beastlord’s herd would hunt.

  As the winter locked Coeth-Mara in its enveloping crystalline grip, the days passed with funereal slowness, each short span of daylight gratefully seized by the inhabitants of Lord Aldaeld’s halls. Leofric spent his days riding into the forest with Kyarno and learning more of the culture he now found himself immersed in.

  Though he and Kyarno often spoke of the Asrai, their history and their society, he never felt any real connection to them, as though there was a barrier between man and elf that no amount of conversation could ever erode. He and Kyarno, and, to a lesser extent, Morvhen, had become friendly enough, but Leofric would not count them as friends. In every word that passed between them, he always sensed a faint air of condescension, as though the elves were somehow lessening themselves by talking to him.

  Of Naieth he saw almost nothing, save for a chance encounter at the spite-wrought sculpture pools where Leofric performed his ablutions each morning. The day was crisp and clear, though not cold, and Leofric had taken off the jerkin Tiphaine had fashioned for him and was in the process of trying to shave when Naieth had silently come up behind him. The sudden appearance of her reflection behind him made him jump and his razor nicked his cheek.

  A drop of blood fell into the pool and the water instantly foamed as though boiling, a trio of water-formed tendrils leaping up from the water, a dazzling core of light in each one. Leofric dropped his razor and stumbled back from the pool as the tendrils angrily reached for him.

  Before they could touch him, his own spites sped forward and interposed themselves between the water spites, shifting to become angry red balls of light with fanged mouths and gleaming stag horns of light. Both groups of spites hissed and spat at one another until Naieth’s lyrical elven tones sang out and the three tendrils of water retreated back into the pool, mollified by whatever she had said.

  “Greetings, Leofric,” said Naieth. “You are well?”

  “Well enough,” nodded Leofric, rubbing his cheek where his blade had cut his skin. “What happened there?”

  “The water spites don’t like human blood,” explained Naieth, sitting on the edge of the pool and waving to something high in the snowy treetops. “They feel it is impure and should not be mixed with the waters of Athel Loren.”

  “That suits me, I would prefer for my blood not to be shed,” said Leofric as a familiar looking, grey-feathered owl dropped from the trees and landed on Naieth’s shoulder. It hooted once and bobbed its head in Leofric’s direction.

  “Is that your owl?” asked Leofric, recovering his razor and warily rinsing his face in the pool.

  “Yes, his name is Othu.”

  “I saw him,” said Leofric. “In the forest.”

  The owl hooted again and made a sound that Leofric could only interpret as laughter.

  “Indeed you did,” smiled Naieth. “Othu asks if you have recovered from your journey?”

  Leofric nodded as he gathered up the rest of his clothes, pulling his dark hair back and tying it at the base of his neck with a leather cord. He was becoming unkempt here without his servants to keep him presentable and he knew his appearance was becoming closer to the elves than a knight of Bretonnia.

  “Tell him I have, thank you very much.”

  “Tell him yourself, he is right here.”

  Leofric looked at the owl and said, “I feel foolish talking to an owl.”

  “Then imagine how he feels,” sniffed Naieth, rising from the pool and walking away. As she departed, the owl turned its head and shifted its feathers in a manner that looked for all the world like a weary shrug.

  Gathering up his things, Leofric left the pool and made his way back through the leafy paths and hollows of Coeth-Mara, intending to change into his armour and practise his swordplay. He might be far from home, but that was no excuse to let his skills become rusty.

  As he made his way through the silent forest of ice, he felt he might as well be walking alone, such was his sense of peaceful solitude and tranquillity. His heart still ached to see his son again and he missed Helene’s soft company, but each day the hurt was lessened and his will to serve the quest entrusted to him by the Lady of the Lake grew stronger.

  He smiled as he again pictured the Lady’s wondrous, aquiline features, her hair of gold and overwhelming powers of healing and renewal. Such visions were a thing of beauty and rarity and he wanted to remember every detail flawlessly.

  So caught up in his reverie was he that he didn’t hear the first shrill yell as it echoed through the forest. It took a second, high-pitched shriek to intrude on Leofric’s senses before he realised that he was not alone anymore.

  Fast-moving figures spun from the trees around him, leaping from branch to branch and corkscrewing madly through the air. Elves, that much was obvious, but these were of a kind he had not seen before. How many there were, he couldn’t say, their speed was too great to make any kind of guess.

  They circled him with whooping yells and bared blades, and as the noose closed tighter about him, Leofric dropped his towel and shaving razor and gripped the hilt of his sword. One of the figures stopped moving long enough for him to take a proper look at his new companions.

  The elf was tall and slender-limbed, though the taut, corded muscles of his chest, stomach and arms belied his frailty. Despite the snow and ice that lay over the forest, the elf was nearly naked, a thin loincloth and golden torques on his upper arms the only concession to attire. His body was covered almost entirely in tattoos, weaving thorns and briars, and a snarling blood-red wolf decorated his chest.

  His hair was a wild coxcomb of red, raised in jagged points, and his face was as tattooed as his body, with looping spirals of thorns decorating each cheek and sharpened jawbones and teeth adorning the skin around his own jaw. The elf wore a thin necklace of gold and bronze, his wild eyes alight with savage mischief.

  Leofric tore his gaze from this barbaric-looking elf as the others closed in, their wild cries and yells disorientating as they leapt and bounded around him.

  Each one carried twin blades and their swords snaked around their bodies like liquid trails of silver, their every movement lithe and supple. One leapt from the ground and seemed to run up the side of a mighty oak before bounding to perch, bird-like, atop a thin branch that was surely too slender to bear his weight. Another spun through
the air, her swords like striking snakes as they danced and she pirouetted to land before him with her blades aimed at his heart.

  Each one performed impossible feats of acrobatics, leaping and twisting through the air in defiance of gravity before landing in aggressive stances around him, not one looking even slightly out of breath.

  Leofric looked beyond the warlike elves, but saw no one that might come to his aid anywhere near. The elf who had stopped moving first spat something in elvish and the others took a perfectly choreographed step towards him, their swords cutting the air with a slow, purposeful grace. The leader, if such he was, looked at him with naked hostility, his perfect features curled in contempt and disgust. As he approached, Leofric saw that the tattoo of the wolf on his chest rippled with life, its fangs baring and its eyes narrowing in feral anticipation.

  Looking at the tattoo he realised the identity of the elf he stood before.

  “The Red Wolf…” said Leofric.

  Quicker than he would have believed anyone could move, even an elf, a tattooed hand snatched out and gripped his throat, the tip of a long knife an inch from his eye.

  “You dare speak of Cu-Sith?” hissed the elf. “Cu-Sith should kill you now. Loec? What say you, shall Cu-Sith kill him?”

  “No!” gagged Leofric, hoping whichever of these elves was Loec could hear him.

  “Let us perform the Dance of a Hundred Wounds,” said another of the elves as they slowly began circling Leofric like stalking cats. A sword slashed out, cutting a lock of hair from Leofric’s head.

  “No, the Masque of the Red Rain,” said another, leaping into the air and stabbing his swords either side of Leofric’s head, a fingerbreadth from his ears.

  “The Tarantella of the Wailing Death!” cried a third, her blades flicking out and kissing the underside of his jaw. Leofric’s heart pounded in fear of these wild elves, fighting to keep his panic in check as more blades licked out and wove a tapestry of silver steel around him. He knew that if he moved so much as a muscle he was a dead man, though the Red Wolf was clearly untroubled by the storm of blades flashing around them.