The Warslayer

by Edghill, Rosemary

  "Let us go back," Belegir urged. "Ivradan will have made all ready for our journey. And we must arrive ere night falls."

  * * *

  Ivradan was waiting for them when they returned. Two dogs sat at his feet, pink tongues lolling happily. He had three ponies with him. Two were bridled and had thick fleece saddle-pads (Glory was relieved to see) on their backs. The third carried a wooden packsaddle, its contents an anonymous canvas-wrapped bundle, but had no bridle or leading-rein.

  "These are Felba and Fimlas," Ivradan said, indicating the two riding horses. "They are brothers, and will wish to stay together. Marchiel will carry your supplies, and Kurfan will keep him honest." The dog looked up at the sound of his name. "You need carry nothing, Slayer, while Marchiel is here to do it for you."

  He reached for her tote-bag, hefted it for weight, and expertly lashed it to the packhorse's load with plaited leather ropes. Glory realized she was still clutching Gordon, and reluctantly surrendered the stuffed elephant as well. Gordon looked incongruously gay perched atop the bundle on Marchiel's back.

  "I will ride with you a little way," Ivradan added. "If it is permitted."

  There was a pause, and Glory realized that both men were looking at her. "Oh, sure, ta very much, mate," she said quickly. It occurred to her to wonder just what Belegir had told his people. Last night he'd brought them a "hero," and today he was taking her away. But maybe the Allimir were as incurious as they were passive—Ivradan didn't ask questions, anyway.

  Ivradan mounted his pony as Glory contemplated her own mount. Fimlas was a bit larger than the pony she'd ridden yesterday—probably one of the largest animals the Allimir had. It was still ludicrously undersized for its rider—about the size of a large Shetland pony—but there was nothing to be done about it. It was this or walk. She took a firm grip on its mane and bounced up onto its back.

  She was relieved to note that either Fimlas was naturally quiet, or the night's exertions had taken the kinks out of his temper. He stood steady as a rock while she settled herself, whisking his scraggly black tail meditatively.

  Seeing them both mounted, Ivradan clucked to his mount and moved off, one of the dogs at his side. The other horses followed. Kurfan circled back and encouraged the packhorse with a few growls and a rush at its heels. Apparently the Allimir ponies were used to such treatment, for Marchiel only seemed to sigh, and wandered sedately after the others.

  The Allimir camp was small, its wagons seeming as if they were constructed on three-quarter scale, but Glory was uncomfortably surprised to realize how exposed she felt once they'd ridden away from them. As if she'd ventured from concealment into exposure, like a cockroach wandering across a kitchen table. Her nervousness embarrassed her—it was the height of un-Vixen-ishness. Her alter ego had no nerves to speak of, and was as phlegmatic as your average granite rock. Sister Bernadette had taken care of all of the screaming and marveling required, which had been a blessing to Glory's limited acting abilities.

  But this wasn't television. This was reality, and she wasn't sure how to behave.

  The day brightened into full color as they rode westward, the last of the mist vanishing from the long grass. The sun turned the sky violet, then to a blazing pink behind them (she looked) and then slowly began to ripen into a deep and limitless blue. Glory was relieved to find that the thick padded fleece beneath her made riding relatively comfortable, though she expected she'd still be sore come tomorrow. They rode through scattered livestock—goats, cattle, a few loitering horses, and several of the (now) placid, plodding oxen, all moving purposefully in the direction of the encampment. The dogs whined hopefully at the sight of so many things to chase, but not receiving any encouragement from the riders, continued following in the horses' footsteps.

  When they had ridden a little way, Ivradan stopped.

  "Here I must leave you," Ivradan said. "There is much work to be done to repair this latest incursion, but I do not envy you your part. Each of us has a task to perform—and may Erchane's grace defend you on your journey!" Setting heels to his mount, he sent it pelting back the way they'd come, wheeling in a wide arc toward a nearby clump of sheep. His dog put on a frantic burst of speed and circled wider, barking authoritatively. Between them, dog and rider managed to get the wooly beasts moving faster and in reasonably good order. The familiar sight woke a pang of homesickness in her.

  Stupid beasts. I suppose this Call of the Allimir's needs a brain to work on, which means they'll be looking for the witless brutes until Kingdom Come, Glory thought sourly. Sheep weren't as stupid as cabbages, but just barely.

  Kurfan woofed hopefully, looking after the sheep, but seemed to resign himself to the task at hand, encouraging Marchiel to close up with the two riders. Glory and Belegir rode on for a while in silence, until Glory finally broke it.

  "You know I'm not a real hero," she said lamely. "You know I'll do what I can for you—but I'll need your help. You need to tell me about your world—what it's like. What I should expect. You can start with this Oracle of yours, for one. Why are we going there?"

  Belegir thought carefully and hard before he answered. "The Oracle of Erchane first told us we must find a hero to save us—that was when Evesal was still alive to tend the shrine. I do not know how she survived as long as she did," he added musingly. "She moved quickly against any who might defy her."

  Which seemed to leave Belegir and his mates right out, if truth be told.

  "So this Evesal's dead now and there's nobody home. So why are we going there?" Glory asked. In her admittedly limited experience, oracles were run by collections of women in sheer draperies, who either read their prophecies out of dusty old books or made them up on the spot.

  "The Oracle itself is undamaged, of course. Its magic remains. And perhaps it will explain why you are here and what we must do now," Belegir said, sounding hopeful.

  Glory realized with a sudden sinking feeling that Belegir had no more idea of what to do in this situation than she did.

  "And what if this Oracle of yours dummies up?" she asked.

  "Do you think Erchane will withhold her grace from us?" Belegir asked, sounding so horrified that Glory hastened to assure him that no, nothing could be further from the case, of course she wouldn't. And Belegir believed her, which only made Glory want to scream louder as soon as the time for advanced screaming rolled around.

  She tried a few more questions, but they all seemed to lead immediately into conversational dead ends. It wasn't that Belegir didn't want to help her in any way he could, it was just that he seemed so convinced that there was nothing he could do. Figuring out what was going on here was like trying to solve an Agatha Christie with half the pages missing, and doing the Sherlock wasn't something that Vixen would have done. Vixen never borrowed trouble—just waited for it to show up and hit it with her sword. Eventually Glory stopped prodding him.

  The journey settled into a quiet rhythm—ride for an hour, walk the horses for a while, then ride again. At least the frequent dismounts kept her from stiffening up, though Glory knew she was going to be sore by tomorrow morning.

  After a while she realized she was straining her ears to hear traffic noises, or the sounds of planes flying overhead, and that she wasn't going to hear either one. Except for the sound of the horses, the wind through the long grass, and the distant calls of unfamiliar birds, everything was quiet in a way that a truly inhabited place could never be. The only things in the sky were the black shapes of high-wheeling birds—hawks, she supposed, or eagles. Serenthodial stretched out around her like a sleeping golden lion, leading her eye toward a horizon as infinite as the ocean's. In the distance ahead, she could see the mountains towering skyward, their lower slopes clothed by the forest she'd come through only yesterday, though so many strange things had happened since then that it seemed a very long time ago.

  At last they came to a road.

  It was pounded earth, two wheel-ruts with a hummock of brittle dispirited grass running between. Its presence
changed the scope of things immediately. Roads implied traffic to run on them, cities for them to run between, but this haunted land seemed to hold neither. Belegir turned his pony onto the road with a small grunt of approval.

  "This will take us past Mechanayas. It is halfway to the Oracle and I believe that the well there is still good; we should stop there to eat and give the horses a longer rest."

  Glory nodded without speaking.

  * * *

  The first sign they had of the village was the trees—orderly plantings of fruit trees, their branches full and heavy with bird-pecked autumn fruit. The ground at their roots was littered with windfalls that soured the ground, and the horses slowed, nosing among the bounty. Even Kurfan gave one of the apples an experimental bite. Glory dismounted and stood, stretching, looking around.

  Beyond the orchards were a series of patchwork gardens, the earth straggly with the green leaves of plantings untended for many seasons and intermixed with the tall stalks of opportunistic weeds. The poles set in the middle of some of the gardens leaned crazily in the buckled earth. Some of the whirligigs of folded paper that had been tied there as scare-crows still dangled from them, drab and draggled by the rains.

  Surrounding the garden plots were a series of low stone walls, no more than two feet high, and as Glory's eyes adjusted, she could see that in many places the walls were buckled and charred. Here and there half a brick wall stood, or some tumbled timbers, and Glory realized that some of the "walls" were the foundations of buildings, and that there had once been a large and prosperous village here, now gone.

  She wanted to ask where the village was, but that would be trivial and stupid. Her eyes could tell her where the village was. It was here, all that was left of it. It was just that part of her hoped that by asking the question she'd get a different answer than what she knew to be the truth.

  She didn't understand at first why so many of the gardens had been dug up and replaced with neat tamped mounds over which weeds and grass ran anarchic riot, but it was only a moment before she saw the place where a pit had been dug and not refilled. These were graves, all of them, mass graves, dug to house too many dead. The Allimir of Mechanayas had been laid to rest in their own gardens.

  She left her horse to browse among the apples, and walked through the orchard toward the village beyond. She did not look back to see if Belegir followed. She did not walk over the mounded gardens, or near the last still-open grave. She had no desire to see what it contained, nor to know why its dead remained unburied.

  The sun was warm on her back, illuminating the landscape with a shadowless noontide glare. Much of the village had burned, it was true, but as much more looked as if it had been simply blasted out of existence. One building was nothing more than a spray of bricks scattered on the ground, as if some giant had just come along and shoved it over. From what she could see and imagine, Mechanayas looked as if it had started life as one of those doll-sized ideal English villages that Anne-Marie liked to collect. Everything was built to Allimir scale, giving the remains of the tidy little houses around her the air of having been built for hobbits. Dead hobbits.

  A sudden movement startled her, and she squealed and jerked in surprise, but it turned out to be only a lean and suspicious chicken startled into flight by her presence. The Allimir had gone to their gardens, but it seemed their livestock had been left behind, to fend for itself as best it could. Those wary and clever chickens that had survived seasons of freedom and predators still haunted their ancestral homes.

  Here and there some things remained, untouched by what had slain Mechanayas. A gate in a stone wall, carved and painted blue. A tile stove, half-sunk into the earth and surrounded by poppies, with no sign of the house that should have contained it. A building's interior wall, the exposed beams shaped and polished, the small-paned window of colored glass, unbroken in its painted carven frame, casting pools of green and blue, gold and red, upon the weeds that grew up through the stones of the floor.

  She kept seeing movement out of the corner of her eye, but every time she turned it was gone. Trick of the light? More chickens? Survivors? She stopped and listened, but heard nothing other than scraps of birdsong and the whistle of wind over the stone. After a pause, she walked on.

  The Allimir village had been built along medieval lines, with what must once have been shops and houses set around a town commons with a well and a watering trough beside it. Unconsciously she'd expected the destruction to get worse the closer she got to the center of the village, but instead there were more partially intact houses—as if whatever had come for the villagers had worked its way inward—and the central green itself was untouched, though the grass had gone weed-choked and yellow. There was a tree growing beside the well—an enormous tree, of village smithy proportions. It looked enough like an oak to be one, and its bark, as far as she could reach, was smoothed and polished by generations of caressing hands.

  Again Glory had the creepy sense of being watched and measured, but saw nothing. She certainly had nothing to fear from the Allimir, if Belegir and the others were any indication, and if there were anything in all the Land of Erchanen capable of even using harsh language in an adversarial situation, Belegir would certainly already have enlisted it in the fight to save his people.

  She turned back to the well. Belegir said they'd need to water the horses here. She might as well see what kind of effort that was going to take.

  To her surprise, the well was pump-driven rather than bucket-and-windlass, though if you wrestled the wooden cover off the well, you could probably get a bucket down it. She did pull the cover off before she started pumping—no point in going to all that work for foul water—but when she'd dragged the heavy lid from the wellhead and leaned in, all she could smell was moss and wet stone. She picked up an acorn from the ground and dropped it in. It fell for several seconds before she heard a faint plash.

  So there was water down there, and odds were it was drinkable. Now to get it out. She turned to the pump. The handle had slipped free and was lying in the weeds. After a little trouble she located it and slipped it into place.

  The rusty, iron-bound wood gritted against her hands as she worked the pump-handle up and down, wondering how long it had been since water had flowed through these underground pipes. Finally, thick black sludge began to ooze from the spout, splatting into the hollowed stone catch-trough. The bottom of the trough was covered with dried ooze, and windblown seeds had taken root only to die. In a few more generations, some chance-flung acorn would grow up through the stone, breaking it into anonymous bits and crumbling it away to sand, just as every stone and timber of this village would crumble. And then nothing would remain but the endless golden grassland and the wild herds of animals that had once been tame.

  The image was eerie, apocalyptic yet strangely mesmerizing. Not with a bang, but with a whimper, hey?

  Finally the water came, stuttering and spraying in a frigid rainbow mist from the half-clogged spout, propelled by gouts of bright clear water that even smelled cold. Glory ducked her head under it, forgetting her makeup and her public persona for one shining moment, and reveled in the shock of cold. She pumped until the trough ran over, knowing that next time—would there be a next time?—it would be that much easier to start the water coming, and then went to duck her face and head in the filled trough. No Wardrobe wrangler stood over her worrying about the safety of the precious leather costume, no Makeup artist stood ready to repaint her face while some hairdresser stood by to make her pretty for the money shot. It was just . . .

  Real.

  No retakes, no second chances, no script. Everything counted the first time.

  When she blinked the water out of her eyes, Glory was staring at a wolf.

  No, a dog. Several dogs, which had approached while she was pumping and now stood staring at her. Their leader was a huge black animal who regarded her from a sitting position, head cocked and tongue lolling. But where Kurfan and the other animals she'd seen at the car
avan were sleek and happy, these animals were gaunt and watchful, obviously in business for themselves. As she stared, only slowly coming to realize how much trouble she was in, he got to his feet, lazily, and took a step forward. The others began to pace to the sides, flanking her. Glory backed up, feeling the warm stone of the wellhead at her back. She could run, but they'd pull her down. She could stand, and sooner or later they'd rush her. These dogs had been companions once. They had no fear of Man.

  She wondered if she could get her sword out without looking away from the leader. "Good boy," she said in a husky whisper. He cocked his head again, listening. In a story she might be able to win him over, but he didn't look well-fed enough for that. He took another step forward, lowering into the crouch that was the prelude to a spring.

  A rock whizzed by her head, striking him in front of his ear. He yelped and jumped back, turning to run as other stones flew around her, hitting the flanks and haunches of the pack with a series of audible thuds.

  Glory spun around. Belegir was walking toward her, a sling in his hands, a sack of stones slung over one shoulder. As she watched he loaded his sling once more and sent a last missile flying after the retreating pack.

  "Forgive me, Slayer, I should have mentioned the dogs," he said apologetically. "I did not think you would wish to sully your sword upon such unworthy prey, so I followed you."

  "Damn skippy you should've mentioned the dogs, mate!" she said hotly. Her heart was hammering and her mouth was sour with fear, and beneath it all she felt a vast betrayed indignation. "The-Allimir-are-a-peaceful-people." Yeah, right. Tell that to White Fang there.

  But a nation of farmers that couldn't even scare crows out of their fields would soon starve. Apparently the Allimir could chastise the animal kingdom—someone after all must have slaughtered whatever had been made into the pot roast she'd eaten last night—but that still didn't mean they could do much about the gods and demons that were giving them their current problems.