Days of Air and Darkness

by Katharine Kerr

  “They stand them up and let them die,” Arzosah said. “Do you think it takes a long time?”

  “Anything more than a bare moment would be too long.” Rhodry was surprised that he could speak at all. “Why? Ye gods, why?”

  Arzosah lifted her wings in the long rustle that did her for a shrug. Rhodry found himself staring at each man in turn; he’d shared a meal with them, when he was on his way to Haen Marn. Here hung the young lad who’d served cheese from a basket lined with herbs; there, the old man who’d joked with him about his elven blood. All at once, Rhodry realized that he was dreading a specific thing. He strode forward, weaving his way through the spears from corpse to corpse.

  “What are you doing?” Arzosah called out.

  “Looking for friends. But thanks be to every god in the sky and under it, they’re not here.”

  “We saw other burnt places.”

  “So we did, but we don’t dare take the time to look for them there.”

  “Who?”

  “These two friends of mine. Otho and young Mic. They had an errand to run, taking payment for a debt to Haen Marn, you see, after I left it to look for you. Then they had to get home again.”

  “Well, let’s hope the Horsekin didn’t catch them on the road.”

  “Just so. Let’s get out of here. I’m too sick even to swear, and for a silver dagger, that’s a bad omen.”

  By then, the summer light lay golden over the rums and the dead, and bright on the grass, green beyond the burning. When Rhodry looked up, he saw the sun picking out drifts of cloud in the western sky. He clambered up onto the dragon’s back and slipped his lower legs under a pair of ropes, tied another round his waist, and braced himself as she took to the air. Once she found her gliding rhythm, he could think.

  He was remembering his doubts of the night before, when the thought that life and death might be two sides of a door seemed to mock his warrior’s craft. Now those doubts were gone. He had seen what his enemy did to their own slaves, seen how they treated prisoners. These were the same beings who held the siege of Cengarn. If the city fell to them? He refused to let himself imagine it possible. This was what his long life of war had led him to, as straight as the flight of an arrow, that he and other men like him should stand between the city and this army. As they flew, following the long track across the plateau, he watched the sun sink in a sea of blood.

  That night, he made a fire for their camp, just for the light against the dark. When he searched through his gear, he found one last scrap of flatbread, barely two mouthfuls, but he’d ridden hungry before. He knelt close to the fire and fed it twigs, a few at a time, till he could lay in the dead branches he’d found.

  “I can fly at night,” Arzosah said, “if you want to push on for this Lin Serr place.”

  “They shut it up at sunset, and besides, for all we know, it’s besieged.”

  “Or fallen.”

  “Nah, nah, nah, not Lin Serr. They could hold off a siege for a hundred years if they had to. You’ll see what I mean when we reach it. Huh, though, a thought just dawned on me. Should I be having this fire? It’s like a beacon, truly, if there are some roaming squads around.”

  “I would have smelled them. Rhodry, an odd thing! I begin to think that they’re all gone. The Horsekin, I mean. We haven’t seen a thing move, and I’ve smelled naught.”

  “Well, they arrived up here by dweomer, didn’t they? Mayhap they’ve left the same cursed way.”

  Since the fire had taken, he moved back and sat cross-legged in the dirt to watch it burn. Arzosah sighed and rested her head on her paws.

  “I’m hungry,” she announced. “We’ve flown a long way since I ate that horse.”

  “I’m hungry, too, but we can ignore it.”

  “You are so mean, Dragonmaster!”

  “What I’ve seen today would make any man mean. Ye gods, I keep remembering other wars I’ve fought. Petty things, all of them, or so they seem now, compared to this.”

  She raised a doubting eye-ridge.

  “Well, they were,” he went on. “Some arrogant lord’s feud, mostly, men wrangling over who’d get the taxes from a bridge, or who’d be elevated in rank, or swearing vengeance for some slight or another. Stupid things, stupid, stupid things, though, you know, I never would have called them that before.”

  “Were lots of men killed in them?”

  “They were. Too many.”

  “Well, you don’t need to look so sad. The blame of it isn’t yours.”

  “Of course not. And I never felt this way back then, when I was riding the wars, I mean.” He shook his head, baffled. His life had never allowed him much time for thinking, after all, especially of this abstract sort. “It was seeing those farmers, somehow, that made me realize. Now this is a war worth riding.”

  “Vengeance, you mean.”

  “That, too. But I meant, to keep it from happening to anyone else. Ye gods, vengeance won’t be bringing them back to life, will it?”

  Arzosah laughed in a long thunder.

  “I never thought I’d hear an elven man say such a thing,” she said. “Amazing.”

  “Don’t be snide! You’re after a vengeance of your own.”

  “Of course, but I know I’m doing it for me, not for my poor dearest mate. You people always seem to think the dead will be pleased because you’re avenging them. They won’t, you know. They can’t be. They’re dead.”

  Rhodry started to snap at her, realized that he had nothing to say, and contented himself with putting another branch on the fire. Although the dragon fell asleep soon after, he stayed staring at the flames until he ran out of wood, and his mind was leaping this way and that just like the fire, with strange thoughts forming and rising, only to fall again. When at last he slept, he dreamt of Jill, who spoke to him at length, but in some language he couldn’t understand.

  In the morning, Rhodry’s guess about dweomer proved right. As soon as the sun rose, they followed the army’s tracks as it curved steadily south and east, heading away from Lin Serr, until all at once, out in the middle of a meadow, the trail ended as abruptly as if the army had been snatched away by birds and carried off. Perhaps, for all Rhodry knew, they had. Straight as a carpenter’s rule the muddy track ran, straight as a carpenter’s rule lay the end of it, with naught but grass beyond.

  “This is exactly the way their trail started,” Arzosah remarked. “Back by Haen Marn.”

  “Just so. Ye gods, it makes my blood run cold, thinking how much dweomer they must have! Though it’s Alshandra that’s doing this, if you ask me.”

  “Who?”

  “Evandar’s wife. She’s gone mad, and the Horsekin think her a goddess.”

  “Living with Evandar would drive any female daft.”

  Rhodry knelt down at the end of the trail and studied the grass. On one side, there was naught but trampled mud and horse droppings; on the other, tall grass, green and healthy, nodding in the noontime heat. In between, though, lay a thin stripe of grass turned brown—but not by hooves. It looked as if it had been touched by the first freeze of autumn, left all brown and parched, but still living. Baffled again, he shook his head and rose, wiping his hands reflexively on his brigga as if he’d touched something foul.

  “Well, we can’t follow them, can we? Let’s head back to Lin Serr.”

  “It’s a matter of obligations, and that’s that,” Envoy Garin said. “We signed a treaty with Cadmar of Cengarn for mutual aid in times of war. A time of war is what this is, and we owe him five hundred axmen and another hundred and fifty pikemen, all of them with supplies for forty days, and conveyance for the lot.”

  “I’d never deny it,” Brel Avro said. “But what are we supposed to do? March our men into certain death? The city’s besieged good and proper, or so the scouts tell us. How are we supposed to reach Cadmar, eh? Just answer me that.”

  In the shadow of an overhang of raw rock, the two dwarves were standing on the wide terrace outside the doors of the dwarvehold t
hey both served, Lin Serr. Behind and around them on three sides, a huge horseshoe of gray stone rose, embracing a flat basin a good mile across. In front of them, on the other side of a broad terrace of pale stone, zigzag stairs led down the cliff face some hundred feet to this park land of grass and trees, crossed by a river. Hundreds of years past, dwarven workmen had dug the basin out of living rock and released the river from its underground caverns. The city itself, however, lay hidden in the cliffs and the heart of the mountains behind.

  “You have a point,” Garin said at last, and reluctantly. “But Cadmar has human allies. He’s a well-liked man, and I’ll wager they’re mustering an army right now. Joining up with them’s the least we can do.”

  Brel ran slow fingers through his beard, streaked here and there with a gray to match the stone.

  “I don’t trust these men, Envoy. Never have, never will.”

  “You don’t have to trust them. Our contingent can keep to itself, and I’ll be there to do any negotiating at councils of war and so on.”

  “Hum. Well, maybe so. I—ye gods! What’s that?”

  Garin looked up and gaped. A dragon was flying over the hills. With a peculiar motion—a beat of black wings, a leap, a glide—it flew high and steadily, closer and closer, until the dwarves could hear the thwack! of naked wings on still air like the beat of a slack drum. Just behind its neck, wedged among scales, perched a human rider.

  “It’s Rori!” Garin whispered. “By the beard of the Thunderer himself, I never thought he’d do it, but it’s Rori.”

  With the warleader right behind, Garin took off trotting down the stairs, zigzagging back and forth as the dragon circled, then landed out in the park land on a graceful glide. The two dwarves reached the ground just as Rhodry, his bow slung over his back, slid down from the enormous beast’s neck. Although Garin started over to greet him, the dragon swung its head round and stared right at him. Garin stopped so fast that Brel ran into him.

  “It’s so huge,” Garin said. “Ye gods, it’s as big as a Deverrian house.”

  “They’re not known for their daintiness, dragons,” Brel snapped. “Now get a move on, man!”

  With the warleader laughing at him, Garin drew himself up and strode forward, quite boldly once the dragon waddled over to the river and turned its back to drink. He reached out to shake Rhodry’s hand, but the moment he got a look at his friend’s face, his celebratory mood vanished.

  “What’s so wrong?” Garin spoke in Deverrian.

  “Don’t you know?” Rhodry answered in the same. “Your farmlands! They’ve been pillaged, and your people are all dead. It was Horsekin.”

  Garin’s breath deserted him in a cold stab. Brel swore with three foul words.

  “And you want me to take men away?” Brel hissed in Dwarvish. “For some worm-riddled human lord?”

  With a long sigh Garin recovered himself.

  “A treaty’s a treaty, and you know it as well as I do. As for the other, well, Lin Serr can muster more men than five hundred. And we’ve got a few treaties of our own to call in.” He turned to Rhodry and spoke again in the language of men. “I’d hoped to see you again in better times than this, Silver Dagger, but I thank you for the report. Here, I forget myself. This is Brel, our avro, or warleader. It’s an office rather like your cadvridoc.”

  When Rhodry bowed to him, the startled avro bowed back.

  “But as for the farms,” Garin went on. “No one’s come in for some days now, you see, but that’s normal enough.”

  “But I sent out messengers,” Brel, snapped. “Three days back. They haven’t come home, either. I’d best sound a general alarum and straightaway.”

  “Rori, where are the Horsekin now?”

  “Gone.” Rhodry turned his hands palm upward. “I’ve got a tale to tell you, envoy, that’s blasted hard listening. Here, tell me somewhat first. Did Mic and Otho get back here safely?”

  Again the cold stab, a kind of ice-fire, running up his spine—all Garin could do was shake his head in a no. Rhodry stared at him for a moment, then dropped his face to his hands and wept, while the dragon came padding back to his side, as if in concern.

  Up in Evandar’s country, which lay beyond the physical world in the reaches of the etheric plane, a silver river flowed through a meadow, dotted with daisies and buttercups. Near the riverbank stood a pavilion of cloth-of-gold, glittering under a summer sun. To be more precise, images of these things existed, though they were far more substantial than simple pictures or thoughts. Evandar had built these forms with energy drawn straight from the currents of the upper astral, which shapes the etheric the way that the etheric shapes the physical. Over the thousands of years of his existence, he’d continually channeled energy into them until they had an existence of their own—not as solid and as stable as matter, certainly, but a presence and a duration, there in their proper plane.

  The bodies his people wore were woven of the same thread. Unthinkably long ago, in the morning light of the universe when Evandar and his people were struck, sparks from immortal fire as all souls are, they’d been meant to take up the burden of incarnation, to ride with all other souls the turning wheels of Life and Death, but somehow, in some way that not even they could remember, they had, as they put it, “stayed behind” and never been born into physical bodies. Evandar had instead built them this place, the Lands, as they called them, and fashioned them bodies of a sort, modeling everything after the elven race and the elven culture he loved so much. They were a beautiful people, with hair pale as moonlight or bright as the sun to set off their eyes, violet, gray, or gold, and the long delicate curled ears of that earthly race. For the most part, their skin was as pale as milk, just touched with roses in the cheek, but some had seen the human beings of the far southern isles, and those wore a rich, dark skin like fresh-plowed earth under a rain.

  It was hard to say how many of them there were. They lived lives at times separate, at others merging into one another, rising into brief individuality only to fall back to a shared mind. Only a few had achieved, as he had, a true consciousness. One of those was a blue-eyed fellow, more human in shape than elven. Although he looked like a full-grown man, and a warrior at that, tall and built broad, he was in a sense newly born. Only a little while before had he achieved enough of an identity to take a name, and now he stood beside Evandar and announced it.

  “I would be known as Menw, because in the other world where we do walk at times, there was a great warrior of that name who befriended me.”

  “Done, then,” Evandar said. “Menw you shall be. In honor of the setting of your name, you shall ride beside me as we seek out the howling harridan, that scraggly shrew who nags two worlds, my wife, Alshandra.”

  All round him his men leapt up, laughing and jeering. Suddenly a host sprang into existence, called by that laughter, of swordsmen and archers, dressed in silver mail and carrying weapons, or the images of weapons, made of silver as well. When Evandar raised his hand, a silver horn appeared, dangling from his fingers by a leather strap. He raised it and blew, summoning horses.

  “The hunt is up!” he called out. “Havoc! I cry havoc!”

  The cheer roared in answer like the beating of a winter sea. The Bright Host mounted and rode out in the musical chime of silver armor, silver gear, bridles ringing, and swords flashing in a light turned suddenly pale, a greenish light that thickened to mist at the far edge of the view. At a fast trot, they plunged into a forest. Even though the ancient trees stood gnarled and grasping, and the bracken grew thick among thorn and vine, the horses never stumbled nor slowed, and not a single twig tangled itself in horse gear or the riders’ clothes. On and on they rode in the eerie corrupted light, past huge stones set among the trees, and ruins that hinted of dead fortresses and dead kings.

  As they traveled, other warriors joined them, slipping out of hollows and thickets or riding up boldly on hidden roads. These wore black armor, but of some enameled stuff, never iron. A mix of beast and man they were,
some furred and snouted like Westlands bears, others sporting glittery little eyes and warty flesh like a Bardek crocodile. Some seemed almost human until they raised a paw, not a hand, in salute; others were like great wolves, running along the ground behind the horses. A fair number seemed stitched together from three or four creatures— the head of a boar with human hands and a dog’s tail, perhaps, or dwarven torsos on animal legs, human heads, cat heads, dog faces, braided manes like the Horsekin, dwarven hands, elven hands, ears like mules, hair striped like a tiger, but whatever their appearance, all were armed and ready for war.

  At the last, carrying a herald’s staff wound round with ribands, rode an old man, a hunchback, his face all swollen and pouched, his skin hanging in great folds of warty flesh round his neck. He urged his palfrey up to keep pace with Evandar’s golden stallion.

  “My lord!” His voice rasped like sand under a boot. “The men of the Dark Host have remembered their vow. We come to serve you.”

  “Well and good,” Evandar answered. “And I shall make you a promise. In return and once the war is over, you shall have new bodies to wear, all harmonious and of a piece.”

  They cheered him in a screech of voices and cries.

  “My lord?” the herald continued. “Your brother will meet you at the beacon that marks what used to be the boundary between your lands and his.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Well, my lord, now they all belong to you.”

  Evandar smiled, pleased that they remembered this as well.

  The beacon stood in a clearing, a tall and ancient tree half of which grew like spring in green leaf, while half burned, clothed in fire along every branch and twig—yet never was it consumed. Underneath the green boughs sat a warrior on a black horse. Though he was wearing black enameled armor, his helm hung from a strap at his saddle-peak, and his gauntlets lay in his lap, so you could see that he was more than a little vulpine, with pointed ears tufted with red fur and a roach of red hair running from his forehead over his skull and down to the back of his neck, while his beady black eyes glittered above a long, sharp nose. His hands, too, were furred on their backs and tipped with black nails. When Evandar blew his horn for the halt, the vast army milled round, then came to rest. Oddly enough, there was room for all of them in the clearing.