by Janny Wurts
The caverns rang with the howl of dying enemies and the rough cheers of men. Sethon arose with an armload of ready torches and distributed them among the villagers.
"Quarter the cave," the Master of Whitestorm directed. "Find every entrance that might possibly admit a wereleopard, and flank those holes with torches. If we're lucky the change will disadvantage whatever beasts charge through. Bowfire can take them safely from a distance."
All saw wisdom in the tactic. The woodcutter who had skewered his first wereleopard moved off with a swagger, and the others followed, except one.
"What about yourself?" he questioned Korendir.
For the mercenary made no move to lead, but stood checking his bloodied sword edge for flaws. He found none, wiped his fingers on his hose, and impatiently regarded the speaker, a farmer named Nevel whose face showed the labors of seasons exposed to summer sun.
"I'm going on," the mercenary said. "Somewhere these caverns connect with the watercourse of the Ellgol."
Taller by half a head, Nevel shrugged wide shoulders. "Why not balk the wereleopards from here?"
The Master of Whitestorm looked up with incredulous astonishment. "Neth, man, this place is a warren of holes and shadows. A man caught alone here would die in a minute, and there's no safe haven to fall back to. Need I go on about space to store supplies and dry wood? There are men left out in the open. Every minute we delay, they remain in terrible danger."
Nevel fingered his weapon, an axe designed for hewing planks. "Just you shouldn't be going alone. At least take Sethon, to hold the torch."
"Never Sethon," Korendir returned, abrupt to the point of viciousness. "Vwern was one too many. Now clear my path."
Slow to think, slower still to move, the field hand squared his jaw. "I'll go, then, and no word from you will stop me."
"You're more mad than Emmon." Korendir gestured ahead with his bloodied sword. "That way."
Torchlight showed a seam cut through cavern walls. Beyond a gleam of wet stone, shadows lay thick as the felt used by priests to shroud tombs. Nevel showed signs of misgiving; but Korendir strode on without a glance to see whether his self-appointed escort would follow. Stung by that imperious self-assurance, and too proud to accept that his offer lay beneath regard, the field hand collected two torches and dogged the mercenary's tracks.
The ceiling sloped sharply past the entrance. First forced to stoop, and then to crawl, clumsily fighting the impediment of weaponry and smoking flares, Korendir and Nevel made their way down the damp passage. The light became lost behind, along with the echoed conversation of the others. The air turned thick with the silence of the earth, punctured like harp notes with water drops; always like a litany behind ran the thunder of the Ellgol's mighty current.
Torch smoke made the eyes sting unbearably. Hardly able to discern Korendir's heels in the gloom ahead, Nevel dragged stubbornly onward. The stink of uncured hide filled his nostrils. Slime and mud caked his clothes; once something live squirmed under his palm, and though by nature he respected religion, he cursed the variety of Neth's creation.
Korendir paid no mind, but continued, the scrape of his sword sheath the only sound of his passage.
"What if the wereleopards are able to swim the river?" the field hand gasped. "If so, no rockslide will block them, and all our troubles will continue."
The Master of Whitestorm paused and kicked once; his feet disappeared. The roar of the river swelled to deafening proportions, and his voice, in reply, floated strangely thin through the passage. "That's the other thing we're here to find out."
IX. Rockfall
The shaft quite suddenly felt damper, and the air swirled with draft. The field hand from Mel's Bye hiked forward, torches clamped in both fists. The axe haft strapped to his back scraped shale with a note that set his teeth on edge. Then his shoulders cleared an obstruction. The passage abruptly widened. He slid forward, gained his knees, and looked out from the mouth of the opening. Beyond lay a dizzying vista.
The cavern ahead was vast. Above, the torrent of the Ellgol pelted from an origin lost in darkness; the waters plunged, dashed to arrowed cascades by the rocks through a sixty-foot drop into a cauldron of boiling foam. Far below, picked out dimly in the torches' glare, a snake of black current coiled upon itself and spiraled into a maelstrom that sucked down through some monstrous sink hole beneath the channel floor. Where the river coursed until it resurfaced into sunlight beneath the shale cliffs, only the devil might know.
The field hand shifted grip on his torches. Korendir's cresset bobbed halfway down the shaft. The mercenary's tunic blended into shadow, but the blade he held shone baleful with reflections. He had set his torch between his teeth to free his hands for the descent, and the bronze hair so tragically admired by Carralin was in peril of singeing at the tips.
Unsteady with nerves, Nevel fumbled to rearrange his own cressets for the climb. He edged closer to the drop, cursed softly, and raised a soot-streaked sleeve to blot his brow. Attack that moment by wereleopards seemed less risk than picking a path down rocks made slick by the falls.
"If heights make you dizzy, don't come," Korendir called from below. His words were punctuated by a rattling fall of shale. The farmer shut his eyes and waited for a splash that never came. Korendir's voice resumed without concern. "The footing's not the best and if I have to leave in a hurry, I'd rather know that shaft where you sit stays clear of spotted intruders."
"Got less sense of caution than Neth gave to butterflies," Nevel muttered as he scrambled back from the drop; but his admonishment held admiration.
The crash of the falls into the sucking violence of a whirlpool might satisfy most men that the Ellgol's watercourse was impassable. Only a fanatic might presume differently; out of folly, or madness, or perhaps a mix of both, Korendir seemed driven to search a cavern infested with wereleopards to make certain. The price required to hire the mercenary had been steep; but as Nevel settled gratefully to wait, he allowed that Korendir returned fair exchange. If his plan for a rockfall succeeded, Mel's Bye would be unquestionably secure.
Time passed without measure in the deeps of the earth. The passage was cold enough to cause a man in wet clothing to shiver. The field hand on guard huddled over his torches, then finally wedged the wooden handles in a crevice of rock and tucked his chilled hands beneath his jacket. The night-long trek left him weary. At length, he sat down with his axe unsheathed across his knees. His head nodded; he jerked out of a drowse and swore to Neth he must stand up, slap his knees, do something to keep himself awake. Lethargy kept him rooted. Before long sleep overcame him and he slouched into dreams while the torches near his head burned lower.
* * *
Nevel roused to a crack of stone and a wild flicker of flame light. One of his torches had gone out; the other burned wanly, a charred stump of spent fuel. The farmer stumbled to his feet. Gasping with fright, he clawed at his pack for fresh supplies, and only recalled his axe as the blade fell with a horrendous, echoing clang that barely missed severing toes.
"No wereleopards have ventured through the passage, I see," Korendir observed from the dark.
Caught between shame and embarrassment, Nevel understood he had been wakened by a chunk of shale, pitched with spiteful aim into the rock beside his ear.
"Be glad I wasn't the enemy," Korendir finished. Impatient with clumsiness, he recovered the spent torches and set to work with rags and oil. Light brightened swiftly under his hands. His face, underlit like a demon's, showed bronze hair dripping with wet and eyes over-bright from exertion.
"How long was I asleep?" the farmer asked suspiciously.
Korendir finished with the cressets and gathered up his sword without any break in movement. The blade appeared strangely dulled, and Nevel took a moment to realize the sheen was masked with fresh blood.
"How long?" he demanded more urgently.
Before he replied, the Master of Whitestorm recovered the fallen axe and pressed the haft into the farmer's unsteady h
ands. "Enough to ascertain that the wereleopards enter through another opening higher up. Also long enough for me to set a trap and lure, and entice a live beast into a fall where the river disappears down that sink hole."
Nevel considered this through a sickening recurrence of vertigo; with a nervous catch of breath he recalled the jagged snags of boulders which surrounded the subterranean rivercourse. That any man could stand with his hands on a bloodied sword and list such accomplishments with a calm that bordered on disinterest in itself inspired terror.
The farmer shuddered. "Neth, man, nothin' wholesome lives down there. What hell-spawned thing did ye find to use for bait?"
Korendir's brows lifted with exasperation. "You were sleeping. You don't want to know."
Nevel stared in horror, certain now, and loathing his conclusion. Quite deliberately the Lord of Whitestorm had set himself up as bait in the darkness; what else could attract an unholy predator to tread on bad footing and fall into that sucking cauldron of water?
Through a strained silence, the farmer studied the mercenary's face. He read there an exhaustion that left the flesh bloodlessly pale; Korendir presently maintained alertness on nothing at all but raw nerves. Gold by itself - could never drive a man to such lengths; the possibility of what else might made hell seem merciful by comparison.
"Pity on us all," gasped Nevel. "Ye're crazed as Emmon Hilgate's son, and more like those fey things you hunt than any man born to a mother." Heart pounding, hands clenched in fear on his axe and his torch, he spun and fled into the passage.
The crawl back to the outer cavern seemed interminable. Nevel breathed stale air mixed with the rankness of his own s,weat; he heard like some monstrous impossibility the scuffle of the man who followed at his heels. Nevel scrabbled faster and cursed as he gashed a knuckle on something sharp. Then he hitched himself around a crook into a searing blaze of flame light.
"Hold fire, that's Nevel," shouted Sethon from beyond the dazzle.
The field hand blinked, his spooked imagination slapped squarely back to reason. Very tired, and made aware by the heat against his skin how chilled he had become, he dragged himself clear of the hole.
"Where's Korendir?" somebody demanded.
The farm hand dropped his axe. Aggravation showed through the mud on his face as he snapped, "Neth! Wherever else but behind me?"
"He hates life, that one," Emmon Hilgate's son observed. Come daylight, the huge man had taken refuge in the cavern with the other workers, although he sat apart. No one felt comfortable with his presence; yet if his comments were heard without welcome, he finished his musing regardless. "I should know. I hate life. That's what makes our Master of Whitestorm so accursedly difficult to kill."
* * *
At twilight, the contingent from Mel's Bye searched for the wereleopard which had hurtled headlong into the sink hole beneath the falls. The creature lay dragged against a log snag downstream, a tangle of limbs only recognizable by the diamond spots gleaming wet on its matted coat. Its neck was bent backward until one ear touched a shoulderblade; even from the bank a man could see that most of its bones had been broken.
Emmon Hilgate's son was first to find his voice. "They don't get through from Ardmark by swimming, that's sure as snow." But his tone was mocking and his fists stayed clenched at his sides.
Korendir shrugged without rancor. "I'd thought not.
But I had to make sure before risking any others from the village."
* * *
The days after that passed in backbreaking work. Every man strong enough to wield tools blistered his palms breaking shale. The stone was loaded into baskets, emptied into farm wagons, and hauled off to be dumped and spread across an ever-widening expanse of cleared ground. Korendir had ordered the forest stripped still farther back from the cliffs to afford untrammeled sight for the archers.
Cut timbers were sawed into beams for shoring, and the dead branches split for fuel to keep the inner caverns lighted. The bonfires were tended night and day, that no wereleopard could pass without being forced to change form. Ones who tried were caught in that instant of vulnerability, and brought down by a posted guard. In time the compound before the caves became ringed by a paling of staked skulls. The reek of woodsmoke, and rotting flesh, and sour, poorly cured hide mingled with the smells of cooking as the farmwives and elderly men tended open air kettles to feed the hungry in relays.
Korendir of Whitestorm labored with the rest, but never side by side. Carralin's death had soured the villagers' welcome, and he, aloof by nature, did not seek to win forgiveness. Stripped to his hose and swordbelt, he chipped shale, chopped wood, curried and harnessed the draft teams, or helped the wheelwright make linchpins and spokes, for wagons broke often on the rocky terrain.
Yet for all his reticence, the mercenary seldom worked alone. Like some glowering, muddy giant, Emmon Hilgate's son shadowed his side. As though by dint of zealous work the huge man could resurrect his lost sister, his pick chipped stone in unison with Korendir's, and his shovel tossed gravel until his body trembled in fatigue. Hour upon hour with the Master of Whitestorm, Emmon ignored the changes in shift.
At eventide while weary men rested, Korendir sat separately, wrapped in his black cloak with his hands busy. He mended the fletchings of arrows, or twisted new bowstrings from dried strips of wereleopard gut. Carralin's brother looked on with eyes intent as a starving beast. He had no patience for small tasks; still he slept only in snatches as the mercenary did, and arose in the hours after midnight, to stand watch with the archers in the smoke-shot flicker of firelight within the caverns.
The days of killing labor gradually bore results. By the time the autumn winds sang down off the upper peaks, and frosts touched the leaves to red-gold, the outcrop overhanging the Ellgol stood timbered like a meeting hall with neatly hewn posts and shoring. Still, when the rains fell, driven by biting gusts, men did not shelter beneath that undercut rock. The timbers groaned with their burden of earth; sand and loosened pebbles trickled down between cracks in the planks, and if that in itself did not wear a man's nerves, the storms without exception drove the wereleopards to frenzied fits of slaughter. Archers died on such days, mauled even after they fired a killing shaft.
So died Sethon, grown too cocksure of himself after half a dozen kills. Korendir was informed where he stood, shoulder-to-shoulder with Emmon, and gasping as he labored to free a wagon that had mired. Without a word, the mercenary set aside the staff he had used to raise the axle. He retrieved his soaked tunic from the buckboard, pulled it over streaming hair, and adjusted his swordbelt at his waist. Then he stared through the curtains of falling rain.
The mountain loomed like the shadow of doom over the thrashing waters of the Ellgol; timbers that seemed slender as match-sticks propped tons upon tons of weather-rotted shale, glistening now with streamlets which trailed silver around the skeletal roots of saplings. Korendir regarded the site, thin-lipped and still to the core. As if he could measure the waiting mass of soil and rock, he stirred at last and spoke.
"Tell the teamsters to harness every horse in the camp. Then make the chains fast to the kingposts. The slide comes down today, now. Waken the off duty watches." Then, as if the order held nothing of particular moment, the Master of Whitestorm started up the hill. Reflexively Emmon Hillgate's son made to follow.
The mercenary rounded in barely leashed fury. "I'll take the last watch by myself, son of Hillgate. From this time forward, no other lives than mine will be set at risk in the caverns."
Emmon glowered. He stepped away from the mired wagon so suddenly that the team jerked back in distress. Water snapped from sodden manes, and spattered his mottled face. "By the death you brought my sister, you have no right to prevent me."
For an instant, the eyes of the mercenary seemed weary, rinsed to emptiness by rain, long nights, and days of nerve-driven labor. Then his look hardened, determined as Emmon's own, but icy, where Hillgate's son's boiled with emotions like stirred lava.
; "Don't try me on that score," the Master of Whitestorm challenged, almost too low to be heard. He left then, a crow-dark figure half lost against fields of shale gravel.
"Strange one, he is," muttered the teamster. Paunchy in his cloak of sodden leather, he shook himself and unfurled like a rag from his seat. With reins wadded in his fist, he sneezed runoff from his beard in self-pity.
"Help unhitch my bays, then," he asked of Emmon, his pragmatism a bastion against the grinding misery of the weather. Not at all certain that Hillgate's son would comply, he slapped his hand fondly on the nearest steaming rump, then bent to unhook the traces.
For a moment Emmon stared after Korendir in fixed and surly resentment. Then, for no apparent reason, he shed his sullen mood and began tunelessly to whistle. His unlikely bent of cheerfulness endured, though the sky opened up and lashed rain on his unprotected head, and the team sidled and made tiresome the chore of their unhitching from the mud-mired dray.
Other teams already stood harnessed by the time Emmon and the stout farmer reached the clearing beneath the outcrop. Over the roar of the Ellgol and the ceaseless spatter of rain rang the shouts of men, and the chinking rattle of chain. Horses stamped and snorted in the chilly air. Tempers were short, only partly due to the fact that everyone's boots were drenched, the stockings inside crushed to miserable wads around blistered heels; all the folk of Mel's Bye had striven for this moment. Lives had been lost, families had been separated, and crops had gone rotten in the fields to prepare for the rockfall that would bar the wereleopards from Northengard. Now, as horses were jockeyed into position, and chains were dragged and hooked round tackles and kingposts, every man of the town felt poised on a knife-edge of fear.
If the shale did not fault above the excavation, if the cliff face did not crumble and fall, if for any reason in nature the passage failed to seal, no recourse remained. Mel's Bye would be under siege for the winter, the trade routes impassable for the import of supplies; starvation would kill any wretches the wereleopards spared.