by Janny Wurts
Yet even as Haldeth stooped to enter his miserable dwelling, a shadow stepped between.
"I'm leaving for Northengard," Korendir said into the gathering dark.
Haldeth curbed the oath that waited on his tongue. In an appeal already futile, he caught his companion's shoulder. "What prompts a four-week passage, and an overland journey of fifty leagues, when all that you value lies here?"
Korendir shrugged clear of the touch. "Gold." His voice was stripped of nuance.
Half-sickened by the reek of the healer's herbs which clung to his friend, Haldeth gave way to temper. "Great Neth, man! Already you have everything riches can buy. What are you, obsessed?"
Deepening night hid Korendir's expression; Haldeth waited, sweating, unsure what reaction his outburst might provoke. The crickets sang obliviously on in the grass, and breezes musky with the perfume of dying thornblossom stirred the air. Softened, perhaps, by the land where he had chosen to sink roots, Korendir sighed.
"You saw Torresdyr before the Blight lifted," he said quietly. "Even when fitted by the finest stone masons, Southengard granite cannot withstand an attack by sorcery."
Haldeth lashed back with a sarcasm prompted by memories as ghastly as any that haunted Korendir. "What can a mortal do against a wizard? Buy the White Circle's favor for a wardstone? Man, you are obsessed. How much gold will that take, does any soul on Aerith even know?"
"I'll find out," Korendir said.
"You'll find out alone, then!" Haldeth heard the hurt in his tone, and strove unsuccessfully to harden delivery of his next line. "I've known men of your stamp before. They start with only a little more ambition than most folk. But somewhere between one adventure and the next, they acquire a taste for danger. Then, like pipe drug, they find themselves addicted. Risk becomes a thrill they cannot live without."
Haldeth tried to push past; Korendir only fell into stride beside him. The smith cursed. "I'm not that sort of fool. Luck has spared my life for the last time, young master. No gold on Aerith, and no illusions of White Circle charity will make me change my mind."
Korendir met the tirade with amusement, the cold sort reminiscent of a hell-ridden sail out of slavery. He paused by a loose spill of stone chips, and his maddening, steely voice answered: "I don't recall asking you to go along."
As his friend tried again to shoulder past, Korendir moved and obstructed him. "If you're going off to get drunk, at least take a sober half-minute to hear my instructions beforehand. The stone haulers and the masons have to be paid next fortnight, and the plans for the south keep have been adjusted to allow for another armory."
"Neth's pity, you won't stop!" Reminded, suddenly, of the stranger who had come with a quest, the smith sought a nearby foundation and sat down. "What sort of terror are you going out to fight?"
"Wereleopards." Korendir spoke matter-of-factly, as if creatures born of hell itself were no more consequential than rabbits. "The beasts found a way through the mountains, and villagers along the Ellgol River are being slaughtered."
Haldeth felt as if the wind had been kicked from his lungs. "When do you leave?"
"Tomorrow. The ship which brought your ale weighs anchor on the dawn tide." Like a shadow, Koredir departed. He took with him the odor of sour unguents, and left winds that smelled of grasses and empty dark.
Haldeth took a long, lonely time to resume his interrupted intent. He could not shed the suspicion that a point of significance had escaped him; that something outside his comprehension underlay Korendir's motivation. Now, even more than before, the smith needed comfort from his ale jug. Aerith held no beasts more fearsome than the wereleopard. Man-shape during night hours, and cat-formed during daylight, the shapechangers were irremediably savage killers. Their bite was venomed, and their reflexes, faster than sight. Korendir would be a dead man the instant he stood ground in Southengard.
Haldeth banged his shin against a log paling and cursed in a muddle of self-pity. Whitestorm castle would shelter nothing but echoing, empty halls, and across the Eleven Kingdoms, only one idiot of a smith was crazy enough to ache as if that were a tragedy.
* * *
Late summer heat wilted the leaves by the time the trader made landfall at Northengard. Too impatient to wait through the lengthy negotiations for dockage, Korendir personally rowed the captain's longboat ashore.
The farmer who accompanied him had healed well enough to walk. Clumsy yet, and unaccustomed to his new eyepatch, he followed through wharfside crowds, surprised when Korendir flung wide the door to the way-broker's and impatiently motioned his intent to enter.
"But we can't go on by sea," the farmer objected. His backcountry accent caused heads to turn in the foyer.
"The overland walk doesn't bother me," Korendir said shortly. "Now will you come in and witness signatures, or must the rest of your countrymen bash through Thornforest because chicken-hearted captains from the mainland won't sail past Irgyre's Rocks?"
The farmer widened his remaining brown eye. "Coin won't move them," he warned. "Believe me, I already tried."
Korendir lifted his hand, and the counter-weighted door swung closed with a thud that shook the rooftree. "I don't pay people who annoy me."
His sword sang from the sheath, gold lit by the flame of the wall lantern. The farmer gaped as, like a sable hawk in a henyard, the Master of Whitestorm shouldered a path into a crowd of merchant magnates and overwhelmingly made his point clear. He left behind shrieks of outrage, result of a half dozen judiciously slashed brocades; but no bloodshed. The parchment he dictated to ensure the villagers gained access by sea to Whitestorm acquired signatures with hysterical alacrity.
Then, before the traumatized waybrokers ceased bewailing their finery, farmer and mercenary left town.
From the coast they traveled overland, a tortuous journey through mountains with narrowed passes that only pack ponies might cross. Rather than break the legs of a blooded horse, Korendir went on foot. By now, the farmer had learned not to interrupt the silences that sometimes extended for days; Korendir of Whitestorm was not a man who loved talk. Effusiveness did not impress him, and even the wittiest jokes failed to brighten his sword-gray eyes. Cold as the frost which carpeted the ground in the mornings, he followed his guide into low country, where fields and pastures stitched the landscape like a crabbed old grandmother's patchwork.
"Yonder lies the trade road." The farmer gestured as evening spread shadows over the valley entered that morning. "Our journey will be easier from there. Once we tell of our errand, no carter will refuse us a ride."
Korendir showed no sign of apprehension that only a few leagues' travel would deliver him into danger. Lean and dusty from days of hiking over grades, he strode at a pace that was cat-footedly graceful, even over freshly ploughed furrows. The farmer stumbled after, red-faced, sweating, his good nature suffering sorely from short wind. He regarded the black-cloaked champion he had summoned with a respect that bordered upon awe.
Rain might fall, or grit rise choking from the roads, but Korendir never cursed. The animals he snared for the dinner pot fell cleanly under his dagger; so sure was his hand at dealing death, the farmer might have doubted his humanity. Bronze hair and gray eyes were unknown among the mortals of Aerith; the killer who walked wrapped in silence might have been a demon sent from the spirit world of Alhaerie.
Except that after nightfall, crouched beyond the embers of the evening's cook fire, Korendir drew out an ordinary whetstone and honed the edge of his sword. Wrapped in blankets upon soil still soggy with rain, the farmer fell asleep to the sound.
Ten leagues down the trade road, they forded the river Ellgol and bargained for space on a barge bound upstream to Karsford. Beyond that town, they walked again, for since the migrations of the wereleopards, neither riverman nor trader would venture farther.
* * *
Once the town of Mel's Bye was a prosperous community with a market renowned down the Ellgol. Yet on the day during harvest that Korendir and the farmer arrived,
the central square stood empty. The wooden stalls remained tenantless, their canvas covers flapping forlornly in the breeze off the river. The desolation of the place brought no surprise to the mercenary; for the past five leagues their travels had crossed through acres of unharvested fields. The stalks of oats bent weathered and gray, and what livestock remained in the pastures had grown ill-kempt from neglect. Cottages were shuttered tightly, or abandoned, and cart ruts on the roadway sported cockscombs of weed.
Where Korendir saw emptiness with new eyes, the farmer was haunted by memories. Life-long he had toiled for the autumn market, with its creaking, laden wagons, piled pyramids of produce, and the boastful bargaining of traders eager to buy. But on that windswept afternoon, the echo of their footfalls in the deserted square at Mel's Bye rocked the simple man to his core.
"My folk should surely offer better welcome than this." He shrugged in shaken apology. "The wereleopards cannot have slaughtered them all. Not in the course of one summer."
Korendir grasped the man's shoulder. "They aren't all dead." With a firmness that steadied, he pointed toward the public tavern. Although the shutters were closed and the main doors tightly barred, smudges of woodsmoke arose from the chimney over the kitchens.
The two men crossed the courtyard. Breeze scattered leaves before their boots, and not a single stray dog skulked in the shadows by the stoop, hopeful of a handout from the cook. Unremarked, and almost as travelworn as the day he had bowed before the King of Torresdyr, Korendir hammered with his sword hilt upon the inn's oaken door.
The panel did not open; instead, the shutter of a nearby window cracked slightly. A dark eye peered suspiciously through. Then the shutter banged closed, and behind the door came voices, then rattling chain, and at last, the clang of a bar being drawn back.
Korendir thoughtfully sheathed his sword. Then the door swung wide. A pasty man in a tavernkeeper's apron beckoned across the threshold.
In contrast to the sunlit courtyard, the taproom was smoky, dim, and fetid with the odor of confined humanity. The innkeep refastened his door. Shut in darkness only partially alleviated by an oil lamp, the travelers waited while their eyes adjusted.
The patrons of the tavern held no such disadvantage, but the farmer's leather eyepatch stalled immediate recognition.
"It's Lain!" a woman shouted, "My own husband, an' by Neth, I hardly knew him. Lain, ye've grown so thin. Did ye get to Whitestorm, man, and horrors, what's happened to yer eye?"
Too overcome to speak, Lain returned a shrug; suddenly, bewilderingly, he found himself accosted by a press of jabbering townsmen. The wife had to push to reach his embrace. Lain buried his scarred face in her loosened, gray-streaked hair, and shamed to respect, his countrymen gave him space. The tumult of talk died. At last the folk in the taproom noticed the stranger who waited at Lain's back.
Clad all in black, his presence had been easily overlooked. Now, in the subdued glow of lamplight, the bronze hair, the level gray eyes, and the hands crossed and still over an unadorned sword drew every eye in the room.
"Lain has brought us the Master of Whitestorm," a man whispered.
"It's true, do you see," murmured another. "He really does have hair the color of coin bronze."
Korendir did not warm to the comments, but remained, stone quiet, before the doorway.
The innkeep was first to recall manners. "Carralin!" he bellowed over the din of a dozen excited voices. "Bring beer for Lain and the Lord of Whitestorm."
A dark girl in a linen smock left the crowd. Graceful despite her size, she made her way to the tap and returned with brimming tankards. Unnoticed at first, her hands were large, and chapped from hard work at the spit. The first draft she handed to Lain, who raised a nervous shout. "To the death of the wereleopards!" He quaffed a deep swallow and leaned down to kiss his wife.
As the townsfolk cheered, Carralin offered the second tankard. Korendir accepted with a dry murmur of thanks; his glance lingered. The shapeless shift of a serving maid could not quite hide her soft figure, and if her bones were big, and her jaw too square, she handled herself with a deftness that spared her looking clumsy.
Aware of the stranger's regard, the girl blushed. "Lord, are you hungry?"
Korendir's interest underwent a subtle change. "Thank you, but I'd rather hear about wereleopards."
At his mention of the enemy, the bystanders all raised their voices, anxiously eager to speak. The innkeep intervened to instill order. Hesitant to presume friendliness with a swordsman, he caught Lain by the elbow and steered for an empty table. Korendir followed, beseiged, while unnoticed in the commotion, the maid effected an embarrassed retreat.
The taproom grew thick with pipe smoke as the afternoon progressed. Men drank, and their tongues loosened; one by one they related the horrors which beset their town and farmsteads. They told of children dragged from their beds, to be found mauled in the morning; of wives, cousins, and livestock savaged, and stout doors unhinged by razor claws. Korendir listened, intent, to accounts of death by venom. His beer tankard warmed, barely touched, while unseen beneath the table, the fist which rested between his knees slowly, dangerously clenched.
"The fields were abandoned before harvest," the current speaker lamented. "Had to be, and no question. The hell-spawned creatures even kill during daylight, particularly just before rains."
Korendir raised his tankard and took a sip. Sailors had told him similar tales. Two things a wereleopard could not tolerate: water, and changes in air pressure. Wetlands they avoided out of distaste; but the lows that brought in a storm, or the rarefied air of high altitudes, invariably drove the creatures to fits of bloodthirsty slaughter. Indigenous to the dry wastes of Ardmark, wereleopards seldom strayed. Routes into inhabited lands were protected by boglands, or to the east by the peaks of the Doriads. Given that Mel's Bye suffered the worst attacks before rainfall, the creatures' avoidance of altitude still held; which meant some other feature in the landscape must have changed.
"Where does the River Ellgol originate?" Korendir asked at last.
The folk of Mel's Bye regarded him as if he had downed an imprudent quantity of beer. Yet the tankard at the mercenary's elbow remained three quarters filled. His hand was steady on the table, and his eyes shone disturbingly sane. "Do I have to take a hike to find out?"
Across the trestle, a burly, black-haired fellow banged a fist on the boards. "Did we all beg loans from the merchants for this man to take air in the countryside?"
"Emmon, hold your tongue!" snapped Lain.
Korendir shifted his regard to the one who had called him from the cliff site that meant more to him than life. His voice went suddenly cold. "That doesn't answer my question."
"A jaunt upriver won't kill wereleopards," shouted Emmon in surly provocation. Wild-eyed, and muscled like a bull under his patched and faded doublet, he looked crazed enough to murder.
Under the table, Korendir's fingers tightened on his sword hilt. His body angled forward, ready at an instant's notice to kick clear of the table.
Only one in that tensioned atmosphere dared interference. Silent as a sprite, Carralin appeared at the huge man's elbow. Up close, their resemblance was striking, and only possible between siblings. The girl murmured something, and Emmon subsided with a frown. The rest of the folk in the taproom sighed as one with relief.
Korendir waited still, his posture indicative of extreme impatience.
The innkeep was quick to speak up. "The River Ellgol springs from a fissure in the hills, my lord. Onmak Tarris raised sheep there, years ago, before his wife died of a fall. Nobody else ever settled that way. The path is steep, and very rough."
"Not for a wereleopard," Korendir said softly. Few in the room overheard him. With a swordsman's disciplined grace, he rose and called out to Lain. "Find me a guide willing to walk this town until sunset. The autumn rains are not far off. Unless the wereleopards are confined to Ardmark before then, not one of your people will be safe."
VII. Wereleopard
s of Ardmark
Between mid-afternoon and sundown, Korendir walked the breadth and length of the settlement of Mel's Bye. He encountered doorways that had been clawed to wreckage, and the mangled bones of livestock. He saw graves. He listened to tales of assault and tales of loss, standing in the dooryards of weed-grown farmsteads, while those inhabitants bold enough to accompany him clustered at his heels and started in terror at shadows. No safety lay in numbers where the wereleopard prowled. The Master of Whitestorm had been told as much. Still, he strode the roads and fields with no other precaution than a hand left half-curled on his sword hilt.
At this Emmon Hillgate's son shouted derision. The mercenary the town had hired was certainly a fool; or else he had no concept of the speed a wereleopard could charge. The rest of the farmers held their opinion. With winter closing in, they had no choice. The optimistic among them read the mercenary's attitude as an expression of extreme confidence; the keenly perceptive saw differently: the man seemed fearless primarily because life mattered little to him.
As one who had arranged the loans for the mercenary's fee, the chief councilman might have raised outcry over this, except that Korendir's indifference did not extend to his job. When the party stumbled across a freshly slaughtered deerhound, the mercenary's concentration was daunting to witness. He knelt in the spattered dirt and explored the still-warm corpse with bare hands. He measured the depth of the fang bites with his dagger, examined the ground for signs of struggle, and of course found none. The wereleopard was a creature of grace, lightfooted as wind itself; its venom worked with terrible speed. The torn grass, the claw marks in the sod, all had been carved by the hound's own death throes.