Raven's Strike rd-2

by Patricia Briggs

  The game trail they’d been following emptied into a broad, flat meadow half a league across and, as Seraph could judge it, three or more leagues long. Seraph’s horse took four steps onto the meadow and stopped. Seraph realized she’d pulled the horse to a halt, but couldn’t say why.

  “I know this place,” said Jes, who’d been walking beside Hennea just behind Seraph.

  Phoran came up next and stopped just beyond Seraph. He turned Blade in a rapid circle and looked through the trees as if he expected to see a waiting army. But there was nothing except a gentle breeze that moved the tops of the evergreens.

  Tier looked back and saw them stopped. He turned Skew around and began cantering back to them.

  “Shadow’s Fall,” said Ielian in an awed voice, as Tier rode up.

  “There are the remains of buildings on somewhere ahead,” Tier told them. “I don’t know if we’ll pass by close enough to see them. According to the map, our path lies directly through this valley. The first time I came here, I came into it from the north about two leagues from here and cut back toward home before I’d gone very far.”

  “It’s just a meadow,” Kissel said, sounding a little disappointed. “Though it’s bigger than I thought.”

  “Five hundred years doesn’t leave much behind,” Toarsen said. “Leather rots and steel rusts.”

  He was right, but something was calling to Seraph. She dismounted and walked forward a few steps. It wasn’t magic, not really. Just something that cried out to her affinity with the past. Kneeling, she put her hand on the ground and came up with a gold ring. There was a deep mark on it such as a knife or sword might make upon the softer, more durable metal. As soon as she touched it, more of them tried to attract her attention. She’d always thought the reading of objects was a passive thing, but these remnants of a long-ago battle waited for her to read them.

  “They’re calling to me.” She felt as if the air she was breathing was too heavy. “All of the things left here with stories to tell, stories ending here.” She closed her hand on the ring. “He was too old to fight, but there was no one left. No one but old men, women, and children. He had arthritis in his shoulder, so he used his old sword with his left hand. His first wife, his childhood sweetheart, gave him this ring when the world was different, and he was the privileged son of a… some sort of mercer, but the cloth he dealt in came from across the seas.”

  She dropped the ring and remounted. “It will take more than five centuries to clean Shadow’s Fall. I don’t want to linger here.”

  Jes, who’d been shifting from one foot to the other, abruptly swung up into the saddle behind Hennea as they started off again. “I can’t walk on this ground,” he said.

  Gura, his tail down and tucked between his hind legs, kept close to Rinnie’s horse rather than bounding around exploring as he usually did.

  “I wonder if their bones still lie here,” Tier said to Seraph, his voice a little dreamy as they rode through the old battlefield. “Red Ernave and the Shadowed King, I mean. Did the remnants bury their hero, or were they too afraid of the Shadowed’s dead body? Were there scavengers? Wolves and mountain cats or other things, things that had served the Shadowed like the troll Seraph killed.”

  “I’d have let the dead lie,” said Rufort, who was riding beside them. “There would have been too much to do, trying to ensure remnants of the Army of Man survived. It would be a poor repayment of the price Ernave and all their beloved dead had paid to be so busy burying the past they lost their future. I’ve heard said that a battlefield’s as dangerous a month after the battle as it was during the fighting.”

  “Disease,” said Tier. “I agree with you. Best to save the living and let the dead lie. Remember them in song and story—that’s a better memorial than any grave marker.”

  They saw the remains of buildings, though they didn’t ride close enough to see more than a few broken stone blocks that looked to be as large as their horses.

  “I can almost see it,” said Phoran in a hushed voice. “The smoke and the sound of screaming. The terrible task of fighting foes who died so hard.”

  But even as great a battlefield as Shadow’s Fall had to end sometime. There were trees in front of them, marking the boundary between old floodplain and foothill, when Seraph stopped her horse again.

  “Wait,” she said. “There’s something.”

  “Yes,” agreed Hennea. She rode off to the right a little, where three ragged blocks had been stacked one atop another. They were sunk into the soil a little. Hennea handed Jes her reins and, throwing a leg over the mare’s neck, slid off, leaving Jes still mounted. She crouched down so she could get a good look at the stones.

  “Doverg Ernave atrecht venabichaek,” she said, then translated, “Red Ernave defended us here and died.”

  “They left a marker after all,” said Tier. He looked around, then he turned his horse in a slow circle, and an expression of growing astonishment appeared on his face. He gave a disbelieving laugh. “It’s just as I pictured it,” he said. “I wonder how much of the story of Shadow’s Fall is true?”

  “I don’t like it here,” said Rinnie. “And there’s a rainstorm coming soon. I don’t want to be here if the sun’s not shining. I don’t think it would be a good thing.”

  Hennea dusted off her hands. Jes gave her a hand, and she swung up behind him this time.

  “I don’t think so either,” Seraph told her daughter. She wanted away from the things that beckoned her with their stories of the long-ago dead.

  They had to stop, though, at the end of the battlefield because, where their maps had shown a road, there was no trail at all.

  Rufort got off his horse and stretched, while Tier and the women tried to compare the old maps to the current reality. He took the opportunity to look behind them at the wide flat-land with its short yellow grass.

  Shadow’s Fall.

  How had he, Rufort Do-Nothing, come to such adventures? The third son of the fifth son of the Sept of Bendit Keep, Rufort had fought for everything he had, fought siblings and cousins until he was banished to Taela.

  He’d joined the Passerines when the place was offered, hoping for somewhere to belong, to be valued. The Path had valued him, all right. He wasn’t stupid. It hadn’t taken him long to see that the Passerines were throwaway troops in a game the Masters of the Path were directing, but by then he’d also known there was no way out except death. But he had nothing to live for anyway, and the Path gave him a way to use the anger he kept bottled inside.

  It had taken two things to make him rethink his attitude. The first was a beating that had taught him that, no matter how big and tough you are, there is always someone bigger and tougher. The second had occurred one night in the hall just outside of his room in an almost-forgotten corner of the palace, when he’d looked at the dead body of one of his fellow Passerines and decided he didn’t want to die.

  Rufort was a survivor.

  He looked over at Phoran, who’d given up on a quick resolution and stripped his big grey stallion of its saddle and was inspecting a place where the horse’s hide had rubbed thin on the ride over the mountains. Who’d have thought that Rufort of Bendit Keep would find himself embarked on an adventure with the Emperor—and such an emperor.

  Rufort had honestly thought that in the Emperor’s Own he would be a simple guard, a glorified servant—which was better than dead. But Phoran had never treated him that way, not in the practice fields before this trip, and not during it. Phoran asked his advice and followed it—or explained why he didn’t.

  Oh, Rufort knew the things that people said about Phoran. He’d seen the Emperor passed out in a drunken stupor more than once. Had watched the careless cruelties spawned by dissatisfaction and boredom—and hadn’t Rufort done the same and worse for the same reasons?

  But all that had changed. Rufort wasn’t certain exactly how or why it had changed—except that Tier, a farmer of Redern and a Bard, had been loosed among the Passerines and changed Rufor
t’s life forever. He had a place now, a position he was honored to serve in, and honorable men to serve with and under.

  Toarsen and Kissel were men he could follow. He looked at them a minute as they chatted softly together. Men now, both of them, not the boys that they, and he also, had been at the beginning of the summer, men directed their own destinies rather than dancing to the tune of another’s piping.

  Rufort chose to serve his emperor. He’d follow Toarsen and Kissel as his captains gladly. But Phoran, Phoran was a man that Rufort of Bendit Keep, Rufort Survivor, would lay down his life for.

  He laughed softly to himself at his overwrought (however true) thoughts. He looked around and saw there was a place not far away where a line of dwarfed willows outcompeted the fir trees. Probably a creek, he thought. They’d filled their water bags and jugs that morning; but he was from drier country than this and had learned never to pass water by.

  He left his horse with the others and went exploring.

  Ielian found him staring down at a mostly dry creek bed.

  “They’re still trying to decide which way to ride,” Ielian said. “The maps disagree.”

  Rufort grunted. “What do you see when you look here?” he asked.

  “Rocks and mud,” Ielian said cautiously, in a manner of a man who’d been the butt of too many jokes. Being a Passerine made you wary after a while.

  “I don’t want to move, or I might lose this perspective,” Rufort said. “Would you go get…” Whom? Tier? Toarsen or Kissel? “Lehr. Would you get Lehr for me?”

  Ielian nodded and ran back the way he’d come. The others weren’t far, so it didn’t take him long to come back with Lehr.

  “What is it?” Lehr asked.

  “What do you see?” Rufort asked again, nodding at the creek bed.

  Lehr looked, and when he crouched, Rufort knew he was right.

  “You see it, too?” he asked.

  Lehr nodded, stood up, and picked his way down the bank and stood in a dry part of the creek bed, looking first one way, then the other. He reached into the sluggishly flowing water and came up with a large, squarish rock, which he carried back to Rufort.

  “Good eyes,” Lehr said.

  “What is it?” Ielian peered at the rock.

  “A cobble,” said Rufort, patting Ielian on the back. “A cobble put in a road to keep it from getting muddy. Streams meander, Ielian, my city-bred friend, but this one runs straight as an arrow. Straight as a road.”

  Lehr grinned, “Rufort’s found the road to Colossae.”

  Rinnie was right, it did rain. For the next four days water drizzled from the skies as if it were spring rather than late summer.

  “There’s too much water to keep it from raining, Mother,” she told Seraph. “And the storm is going the same direction we are. It’s better for it to fall now when it can do it gently, than if I hold it off, and we get flooded.”

  Everything they owned was wet or damp by the second day. Since they had been heading more north than east since they left Shadow’s Fall, Seraph figured that they would be fortunate if they didn’t run into more snow before they found Colossae.

  In some places, Rufort’s road had become so overgrown it was impossible to tell roadbed from undisturbed forest floor, as it disappeared under years of soil and reappeared a half mile later. Following the old road was made harder when the forest thickened until it was difficult to see more than a hundred yards in any direction.

  In the early afternoon of the fourth day of rain, Jes, who had taken Gura ahead to check out the trail, came loping back from his explorations.

  “River ahead,” he said. “Road goes across.”

  “We can’t get any wetter,” said Phoran, with a grin. “I just hope it’s shallower than the last river we crossed. I’d hate to float away when we’ve come so far.”

  Seraph looked closely at Jes, who was even wetter than most of them from the waist downward. The dog panting happily at his feet was soaked through. “Did you try to cross it, Jes?”

  He nodded. “It’s fast,” he said. “Not too deep for the horses, though.”

  “We could have sent one of the horses across,” complained Hennea. “You don’t have any more dry clothes.”

  Seraph, who had been about to make the same complaint, closed her mouth.

  Jes looked down at himself and shook his head. “It’s only water, Hennea. We are all wet.”

  “Wait until you’re chafed in all the wrong places from wearing wet clothes,” Hennea said. Then, “I’ll try and dry out some things tonight when it isn’t raining.”

  Seraph smiled to herself.

  As Jes promised, the road took them to the edge of a river, where the bank led gently down into the water. Upstream and downstream, where mountains arose on either side, the river was narrow and swift, but here it spread out to twice its normal width.

  “They must have had a bridge here,” said Tier, riding beside Seraph. “In the spring you wouldn’t have been able to ford it at all. I’d not want to try and take a wagon across here even now.”

  “It feels as though no one has ever been here before,” said Ielian, just behind them.

  “I feel it, too,” Seraph agreed. “Even the things that are man-made—the road and such—feel as if they’ve been around so long that they’ve been cleaned of human touch.”

  “We’ll find a good flat area to camp,” Tier told Seraph, when Jes, who had waited until everyone else had safely crossed, arrived dripping and smiling. Tier started up the rise of land that edged the river, still talking. “If Rinnie can put a hold on the rain for a few hours, we’ll rig something to hang up clothes around a fire…” His voice trailed off, and he stopped his horse.

  Seraph stopped her horse beside him and looked down into the valley stretched below them. It was a sight worthy of a Bard’s silence.

  Colossae.

  CHAPTER 13

  If the trip had taught Hennea anything, it was the power of time. Five centuries was enough to bury Shadow’s Fall, where tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, had died—she’d forgotten which. She’d seen that a thousand years was enough to hide a road built to last through the ages by mages more powerful than the world had seen since before the dawn of the Empire. It was time enough to reduce a great city to rubble.

  She’d constructed possibilities for what they would find in the wizards’ city a hundred times on this trip. She’d been prepared for anything except what they found.

  Three-quarters of the way across the lightly wooded valley, perhaps a full league away, a hillock arose, cliff-edged and flat-topped. The city covered the entire ridge of the higher land, and spilled out to the valley below, as perfect as it had been on the day the Elder Wizards had destroyed it to save the world from their folly. Rose-colored stone walls surrounded the entire city, protecting it from invaders who had never come.

  Even from this far away, the city felt empty and waiting.

  “Anyone could have found this,” said Ielian.

  Hennea turned her head to look at the smallest of Phoran’s guards. “No,” she told him. “Only Travelers.”

  “Only if the city wanted to be found,” said Jes, in an odd voice. It wasn’t the Guardian, not quite.

  The gates of the wizards’ city were built of polished brass and were nearly as tall as the wall. They looked just as they must have when the wizard Hinnum had spelled them closed so many centuries ago. Etched into the top of the left gate, in the language of the Colossae wizards, were the prosaic words Low Gate.

  Hennea looked up at the gate towers that loomed on either side of the gate and could almost imagine a face looking down at her.

  There were few cities in the Empire older than the Fall of the Shadowed, and few cities that old outside of it; the Shadowed King’s claws had sunk farther than the boundaries of the Empire. The older sections of Taela were supposed to have been built by the first Phoran, and they proved that even well-built stone buildings shifted and moved over centuries. Th
e stones in the walls of Colossae sat squarely one atop the other, as if they’d been placed there yesterday.

  She shivered, and Jes wrapped a warm hand around her calf in a manner that had grown familiar. “Are you cold?”

  “No, it’s not that,” she told him. “This is wrong. Where are the cracks in the wall? Why is the brass still bright without people to polish or wizards to preserve?” She could feel the power here, but it was oddly distant—a memory of magic rather than the real thing.

  “Illusion?” said Seraph, dismounting. “It doesn’t have that feel, though there is some magic here, right enough.”

  She touched the gates, then jumped back as they began to open. Not swinging inward or outward as the city gates of most places did; nor did they rise up like the smaller gates of a keep or hold. These slid back on oiled tracks set below the road surface and into the walls themselves until the only remnant of the gate was a handspan-wide bar of brass up the middle of the wall edge.

  A wagon length in front of them was another wall wider than the gate, that blocked them from the city so people entering would have to go to the left or the right of it. On either side of it, set between the city walls and the inner wall were two wooden gates of the sort a farmer might use to keep livestock in or out. One was open, the other shut.

  Tier dismounted and crouched beside the brass door’s track, bending down to sniff. “If this is an illusion, it’s on par with the mermora,” Tier said. “This oil smells fresh.”

  “There are people here,” said Kissel. He loosened his sword and tipped his head from side to side, loosening his neck muscles in preparation for battle. “This can’t be a deserted place. Not looking like this.” He pointed at the dirt just the far side of the gate and Hennea saw what he had—there were lines on the ground as if someone had just finished raking the ground clear of debris.