There is no resisting the power of a curse, this Kerian knew. Stanach didn’t try harder and didn’t argue. He drew the untasted mug of ale toward him and lifted it in silence to his king.
* * * * *
They went out from Thorbardin by secret ways, down to the lowest level, down to where the damage of the recent war showed in scarred stone walls, in broken battlements, in ruined streets and collapsed roofs. They went farther down than that until they stood upon the shores of the great underground body of water known as the Urkhan Sea.
Stanach pointed out across the black waters to a wall pocked with what seemed to be the mouths of caves. He told her to stand still and bade her listen. Beneath her feet, Kerian felt a soft, persistent vibration, a kind of humming in the rock.
“Worms,” Stanach said.
She frowned. “How can that be? Worms can’t eat through-”
“Y’know that for certain, do you?”
She glanced at him, then back to the gaps in the stone wall. The rumbling came closer, beneath her feet the stone vibrated, the vibration shuddering up her legs, to her belly, to her arms and shoulders. At the edges of the Urkhan Sea dark water lapped nervously against the stone. Out from one of the cave mouths came something large, something with two probing horns, like those seen on snails. Even from this distance, all the rippling black water between them, Kerian reckoned that the horns were as long as she was tall, perhaps as thick around as the width of her shoulders. The creature had no face, no eyes, no nose, only a constantly working mouth.
“Worms,” she breathed.
“They eat stone. That’s all they do. The earth back there, behind those walls, is riddled with tunnels. They bore out here to drink and go right back in again. Tame enough, the beasties. Mostly we leave them be.”
He squinted across the water, then turned, saying it was time to go. “Let’s don’t use that pretty little emerald leaf of yours until we have to, aye? I wouldn’t want to find myself lost in some Reorx-only-knows-where tunnel with no way out”
Kerian agreed, and she did not call upon the unchancy magic until they saw clear sky above them again.
Chapter Twenty
Magic did not set Kerian and Stanach down where they hoped, but at least it didn’t drop them down in Tarsis or the Sirrion Sea. It put them down only a few miles from Qualinost, in the thickness of the oak forest north and west of the capital. They were reeling with dizziness. The dwarfs face showed green.
“Not a day’s walk from here to Qualinost,” Kerian said reassuringly to Stanach.
The dwarf was leaning his back against an oak, his eyes closed. He had the look of a man praying. He groaned something that sounded like a curse then, between clenched teeth, “Good.”
Kerian waited for color to return to his cheeks and for her own stomach to settle. “That’s not where we’ll go. We’ll be wanting to go first to Wide Spreading, the king’s hunting lodge. There we’ll find a trusty man who will take word to the king that you’ve come.”
Stanach looked around at the oaken wood, the tall trees thickly growing. “We’ll walk to where we’re going, aye? Enough of the magic now.”
Kerian agreed, counting herself lucky in the way the talisman had treated them. She gave Stanach a little longer to settle while she calculated a route that would take them to Wide Spreading by forest paths known only to hunters and deer, then she led the dwarf along those barely seen game trails as though along the manicured paths of a garden in Qualinost Stanach had nothing to say about that, and she was pleased to take his silence for appreciation.
They went until the sun had climbed past noon height. The season had turned in the short time Kerian was away. The taste of autumn hung on the wind, only the suggestion of it in the fading green of the forest, yet she saw no hunters. When they climbed the slope of a green vale and looked down, they saw no farmers at work in their fields. They saw only great swathes of black staining the golden crops, where the roofs of barns and houses gaped with holes.
Stanach’s good left hand filled with his throwing axe.
“It’s long done,” Kerian said, bitterly. She pointed to the sky. “Look, empty. The crows have quarreled and had the best of the feast.”
“You sound like you’re used to this,” said the dwarf.
She did sound so, and she couldn’t help that. “I’m not used to it, Stanach. It’s how things are.”
Yet it seemed to her that something had changed. The depredations of Knights had, until now, taken place close to the towns or in villages. Elder’s confusion of magic, and the swift-striking Night People who seemed to the Knights like forest ghosts, had kept them out of the woods and away from the smaller settlements and isolated farms.
Something had indeed changed.
Nor did they go alone through the forest. Behind them came the soft whisper of a footfall. To the side, the rattle of browning bracken so faint to the ear that one could be forgiven for doubting one’s senses. Above, down the side of a tall, broad boulder, a shadow, slipping across the dapple of sun, soon gone.
“We’re being followed,” Stanach said, the first night as they sat before a small campfire. “You know that.”
She did. “I know who follows. Leave him alone. Hell come out when he wants to or go away if he wills.”
The dwarf considered this, then said, “You don’t think him a danger?”
Kerian looked out past the fire, out into the shadows and the night. “Oh, he’s a danger; never doubt that. Not to me, though.” Stanach raised a brow. She cocked a crooked grin. “Or to you, Sir Ambassador, as long as he sees you’re no threat to me.”
They said no more that night about it, but Kerian noticed that the dwarf didn’t sleep easier.
* * * * *
Three days later, followed and unchallenged, Kerian and Stanach stood on a high place, a granite hill made of boulders flung during the Cataclysm. Elf and dwarf looked down into a dell where once had spread a thriving village. Nothing stood there now, and the land lay black, scarred by fire and destruction. Kerian went down, Stanach following. She knew the village as one sympathetic to her cause-or had known it Her blood running cold, she saw the head of every villager, man, woman, and child, lining the broad street, piked upon lances. Their cattle lay dead, their horses, their dogs, and the fowl in the yards.
Stanach didn’t stand long in the street. He stumbled away, back to the forest, and Kerian let him go. She knew the look on his face, the greening of his cheeks. She stood alone, smelling burning, smelling death, and thinking that she had not been gone from the kingdom long, hardly a scant month, but something had changed.
Something had happened to bring Lord Thagol’s Knights out in full rampage.
Stanach gagged in the brush, the sound of his retching loud in the stillness. Kerian looked north and south, then east and west. She stood waiting.
Softly, a voice at her back said, “Kerianseray of Qua-linesti.”
She turned and though it had been only since summer that last she’d seen him, she hardly recognized Jeratt, so changed was he. He was not the man she’d left only weeks before, the cocky half-elf who’d led Night People beside her, who had planned raids, strategies and victories. His hair had turned white. His cheeks thin, his eyes glittering, this was not a face she knew. His voice, that she knew.
“Y’never should have left us, Kerian.” He scrubbed the side of his face with his hand. “He knew it when y’left. He took advantage when y’were gone.”
Stanach came out from the brush. Jeratt turned, arrow nocked to bow in the instant. The dwarfs good hand flashed to his side and clasped the throwing axe before Jeratt could draw breath or arrow.
“Hold!” Kerian shouted. She put a hand on Jeratt’s shoulder, felt the muscles quivering with tension. She nodded to Stanach, and the dwarf dropped his arm. “Jeratt, he’s a friend of the, king.”
They stood in heart-hammered silence until Kerian said, “Jeratt, tell me what has happened.”
“You can see it.” He
looked around. “This is what they do now, Kerian. Up and down the land, they do this. Maybe they used to think it would teach us some kind of lesson. Now-now it’s Thagol himself doing it and not caring what we learn, past hating him.” He pulled a bitter smile. “He’s waiting for you, Kerian. You’ve been gone; you haven’t killed any of his Knights. He can’t find you on the dream-roads, but he’s still looking for you, and he’s waiting for you to come back.” Jeratt glanced around. “Him and Chance Headsman and their Knights and draconians. He’s brought in reinforcements from Neraka.”
His eyes narrowed. “They’ve broken us, every band, all the resistance you put together It was you, Kerian, who made it work, you who held us together, who heartened us and gave us a will. Without you-” His arm swept wide. “Y’went away at a bad time, Kerian.”
Ah, gods. Yet there had been no choice.
“Elder?”
Jeratt shook his head. “Gone!”
The word ran on her nerves, like lightning. “Gone? Where?”
“Don’t know. One night she was there, sittin’ at her fire. The next… gone. That was only three days after you left. There’s been none of her confusions now, nothing to help.”
“But you kept on.”
Jeratt’s chest swelled proudly. “I didn’t just keep on. I did what we’d planned, put warriors in the south, and I been back to the dales and roused ‘em there, but … I couldn’t keep it going against Thagol. He’s … he’s like the sea, Kerian. We’re all scattered again.”
Looking from one to the other, the scruffy half-elf and the woman who had only days before spoke in the Court of Thanes, Stanach whistled low. Softly he said, “First time I saw you, missy, you were tripping over a Knight’s corpse on the way out the door. Then you show up in the High King’s court. Now …” He shook his head. “What in the name of Reorx’s forge are you about?”
Kerian looked at him, and the smile she crooked had little to do with humor. “Stanach, I’ve been too long gone from the forest. I will take you so far as where you are safe. After that …”
Jeratt looked at her, his mouth a thin line. In his eyes, though, she saw hope rising.
* * * * *
Around the basin, men and women stood. Most Kerian knew, a few faces she didn’t. Some were gone: Rhyl, who had not proved trusty; Ayensha, about whom Jeratt said they would later speak; and Elder, who had vanished one day between midnight and dawn.
Old comrades regarded Kerian variously, some pleased to see her, some angry for her sudden departure and return. Newcomers stood with shuttered eyes, waiting. Bueren Rose looked upon her warmly, but a group of strangers eyed her with thinly veiled suspicion. Each of them, four men and the two women, looked to Jeratt to reckon the mood of the occasion. These were the leaders of other bands, other outcasts, highwaymen and robbers. These Jeratt had collected in Kerian’s absence, and no one knew her. News of her, tales of her, these things they knew. In their world, that mattered nothing at all. The deed done at your side, the back watched, the Knight killed who would have killed you-these things mattered. Of these things, they had no experience with Kerian.
She stepped past Jeratt, past Stanach Hammerfell, the dwarf uneasy among all these rough, suspicious elves.
Kerian looked around at them all, all of them cautious. Out the corner of her eye, she noted Stanach. The dwarf stood watching, blue-flecked dark eyes on her. He had come to speak with her king, and he intended to do his errand then return to his thane, that doubting uncle of his who sat upon the throne of the Hylar. In his eyes she saw how far from Thorbardin he felt, and he stood very still in the face of this unwelcoming elven silence, a careful man trying to know whether the ground had suddenly shifted under his hoot heels.
Kerian laughed, suddenly and sounding like a crow. “You!” She pointed to an elf woman standing apart from the others on the other side of the fires. This one, a woman with hair like chestnut, seemed to be the one to whom others deferred. “I am Kerianseray of Qualinesti. I don’t know you. Who are you?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. Her hand drifted toward the sword at her belt then stilled. “Feather’s Flight, and I don’t know you either.”
“I don’t care. In time maybe you will. Till then, declare yourself, Feather’s Flight, here in my place, with lightning-” a glance toward the dwarf- “and Thunder to witness: Are you here to join me, you and all of yours to take up arms in my cause?”
“Well, I don’t know-”
“You don’t know my cause? You lie! If you have run with Jeratt, you know it. You know my cause is a king’s, and you know-” she reckoned the woman’s age, she counted on old alliances, and she gambled with her next statement-”and you know that the king’s cause is not far different from the cause of the prince whose name is honored by our elders.”
Feather’s Flight cocked her head, her lips crooked a smile. “I’ve run with Jeratt, true. What if I now choose to run away?”
Kerian laughed. “If you gave me your word to go and go in peace, I would let you go.”
The woman hadn’t expected that. She stood like a deer with her head to the wind, trying to understand a sudden, complicated scent. “You’d let me go! I come and go as I please, Kagonesti.”
Kerian shrugged. “There used to be a man named Rhyl with us. He isn’t now. He didn’t turn out to be as trusty as we like our friends to be. If I thought for even an instant you were untrustworthy, Feather’s Flight, you’d be an hour dead, and I’d be talking to someone else.”
Someone laughed, one of those beside Feather’s Flight. Someone else murmured, and Bueren Rose breathed a small sigh of relief as the outlaw stepped forward and stood before Kerian.
“We are six bands,” said Feather’s Flight. Kerian withheld a satisfied smile as she realized she’d calculated correctly and called out the woman who best represented the others. “We are from the mountains in the western part of the kingdom, past the dales. Even there heads grow on pikes like evil fruit. Some of us did know the lost prince, Porthios, whom some say perished in dragon-fire.” She stood taller. “I came from Silvanesti with him, and we cleaned the green dragons out of the Sylvan Land. I don’t know his nephew, I haven’t heard good of him, but I see you, Kerianseray. I have heard good of you. In the name of the dead, we will join you.”
The others nodded silently. Bueren thumped her shoulder, and Jeratt grinned wide. Beside the half-elf, Stanach Ham-merfell had the look of a dwarf who wasn’t quite ready to relax. Kerian caught his eye and winked.
“Ay, Jeratt,” she said. “The dwarf looks like he could use a meal. Me too, for that matter. Anyone been hunting lately, or is it all bone and stone soup?”
* * * * *
On the hills, elves kept watch. No one counted on magic now, for with her going it seemed Elder had taken all her useful confusions. The dwarf Stanach volunteered to take his own turn at watch, and Kerian didn’t refuse him.
What will he say to his thane about all this? Kerian wondered. How will I get him to Gil so he can form some kind of opinion?
Ah, well, that was for another day’s thinking. She looked at Jeratt. Firelight made him seem older; shadows sculpted his face till Kerian might have imagined him twice his age.
“You know,” Jeratt said, “no matter how well you plan our raids, Kerian, Thagol’s going to find you the first time you kill someone. He’s like a dog sniffing down the road.”
She remembered. Absently, she rubbed the bridge of her nose. There was the old pain forming. From old habit, she gauged the headache, trying to know it for what it was. Not Thagol, hunting. Not yet. This time the throbbing behind her eyes was weariness.
“Before we fell apart, we were all over the place, several bands striking at will and no one for him to grab or follow.” He shook his head grimly. “It’s why he started this slash and burn campaign. Figured he’d cut us off from the villagers and the farmers. He did that right. No one was going to risk his life to feed us, no one would shelter us or even give us news for fear of their own
lives. Let me tell you, Kerian, it all fell apart fast.”
Kerian nodded, thinking.
“The first time you kill, though,” Jeratt continued, “he’ll catch up with us, Kerian. The first time you kill, hell know it.”
Yes, he would. She’d thought of that. She was considering it very carefully. Her outlaw bands would begin a stealthy campaign. At dawn they would scatter through the forest, making a noose around the capital. They would continue Jeratt’s plan of random strikes, each band falling on targets as they would, in no discernible pattern. Tribute wagons, supply wagons, these were of no moment now.
Now the struggle would intensify. Bridges would be thrown down, roads would be blocked with fallen trees.
Streams and rivers would be clogged. “We will not go so far as to fire the woods,” Kerian said. “That is forbidden, but we will fall on his work details as he rebuilds the bridges and clears the roads, we will kill all the Knights who guard those details. We will give the bastard no quarter!”
They would strike hard and strike without mercy. Slowly, in no obvious way, they would move farther out from the city, farther out into the forest, drawing Thagol’s forces into the deeper woods.
“Jeratt,” she said, still rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I’m not going to be at any one of those raids. I’m not going to kill any of the enemy. When I next come to kill, I’ll kill Eamutt Thagol. If I join a raid, it will be to lop the head off Headsman Chance.”
She paused, gave him a moment to digest that, then said, “Jeratt, where is my brother?”
The question surprised him; she saw it on his face. “I don’t know.”
Kerian shook her head. “Yes, you do. Ayensha isn’t here, and you know where she is, so you know where my brother is. Where is Dar?”
The Lioness d-aom-2 Page 24