The Eighth Born: Book 1 of the Pankaran Chronicles

by C. Night

  “Hell, no!” Rhyen shouted vehemently.

  Cazing laughed at him as he mounted Brefen again.

  Eventually the rain did stop, and the two men enjoyed a nice fire and a hot meal that night. Rhyen braved the chill and exchanged his wet clothes for merely damp ones from his packs. Cazing, of course, produced his spare clothes from his strange little sack, and they were perfectly dry. Together, they suspended their wet things from branches near the fire so they too could dry out.

  * * *

  A week passed, or maybe more. It was difficult to track the time as they weaved up and down mountains and gullies, and Rhyen lost count of the number of nights they had spent since leaving the desert. The air grew steadily colder as they moved up the Guntoriens. Though not as high as the Shunglus to the north, this range seemed wider, for even a week into travelling, Rhyen and Cazing were only just coming out of the foothills.

  That night another storm hit. It was pouring even harder than their first night in the mountains. “I feel like I just got dry,” Rhyen sighed as he pulled his cloak closer around him.

  Cazing gave a bark of laughter. “Me too.” He looked mockingly at his apprentice. “What’s the point of having magic if you can’t change the weather, right?”

  Rhyen snorted. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  The rain was too complete to allow for a fire. They made camp under a huge oak, tying Tuprine and Lezo close to the trunk to shield their supplies from the rain. Rhyen unsaddled both riding horses and tossed their reins over the mound of saddles. Then he hunkered down next to Cazing, wrinkling his nose at the wet bread his master passed him.

  Cazing clapped him on his back. “Nothing better than wet bread! Don’t worry, Rhyen, we’ll have us a feast once the rain stops.”

  Rhyen smiled into his damp dinner. The leaves gave some shelter from the rain, and eventually Rhyen fell into a doze. The rain ran in rivulets down his face and once dripped into his nostrils, causing him to splutter awake, snorting the rain out of his nose. Cazing, who usually snored loud enough to cause an avalanche, had given up sleep because of a similar situation. He was staring grumpily at his pipe, which refused to stay lit.

  Toward midnight, lightning suddenly began to flash across the sky, so violently that Cazing wrenched Rhyen away from the trees, pulling the riding horses with them. Cazing shoved Rhyen to the ground, which shook with a frightening violence every time the thunder rolled across the sky. Cazing started back to the tree to free the packhorses tethered there, but before he could do so a huge bolt of lightning struck the tree, and in the blinding flash that followed, Rhyen smelled the charred scent of burning flesh.

  “Oh, gods!” Cazing shouted, and flung himself on the ground beside Rhyen. Cinnamon and Brefen reared and screamed with fright and bolted off into the darkness. Rhyen cowered into the earth and covered his ears as the thunder continued. The flashes of lightning were so brilliant that they pierced even his closed eyelids, leaving a jagged white line imprinted on his retinas for several minutes thereafter. The rain was still torrential in its downpour, and the noise was incredible, pounding against his eardrums.

  After several more minutes, the lightening flashed off to the north and west, and with it the thunder went also. Gradually the rain quieted until it fell so lightly it might have been snow. Rhyen opened his eyes and unclenched his ears. The sky was lighting up as the lightning flashed against it, and the thunder still boomed, but it was apparent that the storm had passed them by.

  Rhyen looked at Cazing, who was staring dumbstruck at the tree. “In all my long years, I’ve never seen that before,” his master said quietly, almost with reverence.

  Rhyen glanced at the tree. “The packhorses,” he moaned.

  “They’re quite dead, I’m afraid,” said Cazing dully. “I wish I could have saved them.”

  Rhyen pulled himself to his knees and put a hand on Cazing’s shoulder. “You couldn’t have, Master. There was no time.” He shuddered as he looked at the stark burned base of the tree. “But you saved me, and I couldn’t be more grateful.”

  Rhyen smiled but then swiftly stopped. He felt numb, and guessed that he was in shock. Cazing definitely was. He was staring open mouthed at the tree and the remains of the poor packhorses. Rhyen caught sight of the horses and gagged. The smell was overwhelming, and the thing Rhyen felt keenest was that, if he didn’t know it was their horses, it would have smelled wonderful, like a roast over a fire. He was sickened with himself for thinking so.

  The tree, which they had chosen because it was the tallest on the hilltop, was no more than one blackened stick that rose to the sky, completely stark save four or five remaining, but equally charred and barren, limbs. The other branches lay smoldering, even in the rain, around the trunk where they had fallen. Rhyen realized with a cry that the burning branches were on top of and around their packs.

  At once he remembered that all of their food supplies had been on or near the horses, and he jumped to his feet. Anxious, he hurried over and, ignoring the gruesomeness of it all, began to check the supplies, to see what was still good. The horses were very dead, and Rhyen held back his nausea as he looked to see what he could salvage.

  Cazing shook his head and pulled himself together. Slowly, like an old man, he rose to his feet and joined Rhyen. Only one package of food was intact, and it was the one they had pulled off the packhorse to use in their supper so many hours ago. It carried several days’ rations of dried meat and bread, but the cheese and other groceries were completely decimated, melted and burned to the ruined leather bags and stuck to the charred horseflesh. Cazing discovered another bag that was somewhat unscathed, though it was close to the base of the tree, and they eagerly looked inside. It contained the rest of their dishes and a single loaf of bread, which was burned to a crisp on one end. They looked at each other glumly. That was all that had survived of their supplies.

  Fortunately, the saddles of the remaining horses were safe, since they had been pulled off and stacked farther from the tree than the other bags, and the worst that could be said of them was a burn mark in Rhyen’s saddle blanket where a small chip of the burning tree had landed at it’s edge.

  “What do you think, Master?” Rhyen said gloomily, surveying their meager rations. “Is this enough to get us to Avernade?”

  Cazing tossed his hands in the air. “I suppose it’ll have to. But we’ll have to tighten our belts before we get there, make no mistake.”

  Rhyen looked around. He missed Cinnamon. “What should we do now?”

  After a long sigh, Cazing answered, “We’ll have to get some sleep. We’ll look for our horses in the morning when it’s light.”

  “Do you think we’ll find them?”

  “No, I think they will come back to us,” Cazing said tiredly, “Elven horses, you know. But if they don’t, we’ll find them regardless. Get some sleep, Rhyen.”

  Chapter 9

  Rhyen awoke to find Cinnamon’s nose at his, and she snuffed him good-naturedly. “Cinnamon!” Rhyen whispered. “You came back!”

  Cazing was already awake and heard him. “Of course she did. She’s hungry! But our spoiled ponies will have to live off the mountain grasses for the next few weeks, because the grains burned with our poor packhorses.” He spoke condescendingly toward the horses, but Rhyen knew it was a show because Cazing was petting and rubbing Brefen as he spoke.

  They skipped breakfast and saddled the horses. “How long to Avernade?” Rhyen wondered as he mounted Cinnamon.

  Cazing chewed his lip for a second. “It depends on the road. If we are very, very lucky, a week.”

  Rhyen glanced at the carcasses of the packhorses and the burned lightning-struck tree. He laughed hollowly. “And if we’re unlucky?”

  “Two weeks. Two and a half, if the snows come early.” Cazing smiled. “You can’t say our trip hasn’t been an adventure!”

  Rhyen l
aughed for real. “No, you can’t at that!”

  They worked their way up higher and higher into the mountains for the next several weeks, until the foothills were left far below them. Rhyen liked these mountains, and even though his stomach growled in hunger as they refrained from meals to preserve their stores, he found that he appreciated the scenery that surrounded him. These mountains were grassy, and sprinkled with stones. Rhyen had been to the Shunglu Mountains before, and knew them to be sharply pointed peaks, but these mountains were different from the rocky cliffs to the north.

  The base of the Shunglus were covered with pine trees, which in some places reached to the very peaks. But these mountains, the Guntoriens, seemed wider and friendlier, moving between stretches of grasses (and Rhyen guessed wildflowers in the summer) to large deciduous trees that towered hundreds of feet in the air. True, there were stretches where small stones littered the ground, but for the most part these mountains were more earthy, and less rock, than their northern counterpart. Rhyen knew they were thousands of feet shy of the Shunglus, and while snow covered the peaks of those mountains year round, Cazing had told him that the Guntorien mountains were too short and too far south to hold snow for much more than the winter season. Also, these peaks were rounded, and there was room to stand and explore the very crown of the mountains, whereas the Shunglus were topped with jagged stone points that were impossible to scale.

  Despite his hunger, Rhyen enjoyed the journey through the mountains. Cazing took them on what might have been a path, for it was much flatter than the surrounding ground, but it was so speckled with undergrowth that, if it was, it was rarely used. Whenever the path became too steep, they were forced to dismount and lead the horses. Fortunately, the horses had plenty of grasses to eat, crisp and brown thought it might be, and Cazing had managed to identify roots and nuts that were edible for the humans. But it wasn’t enough, and they were hungry still. But Rhyen thrilled at the sights around him. Cazing seemed to get no pleasure from their journey, which Rhyen attributed to his lack of tobacco, for much of his stores had been burned in the lightning storm.

  Eventually, though, the lack of food began to gnaw at Rhyen. One day he snapped at his master, vexed by hunger. “But you’re a sorcerer! Can’t you just conjure some food?” he demanded grumpily over his crumbs of stale bread.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Rhyen. No sorcerer can pull something from nothing.”

  “You did in Ikha,” Rhyen muttered sullenly.

  Cazing turned to him. “What do you mean?”

  “The water! From the spigot! You pulled that from thin air.”

  “No, I didn’t. I can’t pull something from nothing,” Cazing repeated. His face was understanding. Any other time Rhyen was sure he would have been reprimanded for his complaining, but under the circumstances his master seemed to dismiss it.

  “Well if you didn’t pull it from nothing, where did the water come from?” Rhyen pressed, now a bit more intrigued than bad tempered.

  “The well, of course. It was close enough that I was able to pull from it without overtaxing my strength. But,” he added, anticipating his apprentice’s response, “we are not close enough for me to pull food from anywhere. Sorry, Rhyen. We’re on our own. We just have to made do with what we have, and with what we find.”

  After a week or so, there was another huge storm, this one less terrifying but far more cold. They were on the path on the side of a rather high peak, and fortunately there was something like a cave they drew into at the first sign of lightning. The cavern was triangular at the entrance, tall and sharply steep, and so narrow that Rhyen and Cazing had to bodily push the horses through. But it kept them dry and away from the elements.

  Rhyen declined the food Cazing passed to him. Instead, he got up and stood at the very entrance to the cave, watching with awe the lightning streaking across the sky. Cazing, it seemed, had not recovered from the terrible lightning storm that killed the packhorses, because he cringed with every thunderbolt, and kept his eyes, wide with fear, averted from the flashing sky. Brefen seemed to sense his distress, for the golden horse lay down on his side behind Cazing, and without at word the old sorcerer leaned back against his great belly. Rhyen drew his eyebrows together with concern. He had never known Cazing to fear anything at all, and knew not what to do for his master. But he said nothing, for the murderous expression on his master’s face was frightening, and dared him to speak at all.

  Rhyen, at least, was not afraid of the lightning, despite what had happened to poor Tuprine and Lezo. Even that horrible accident could not wipe his appreciation for the awesome power of the weather. So for the duration of the storm he stood there, watching the jagged streaks light up the sky. Gradually, the rumbling of Cazing’s snores replaced the sound of the thunder, and Rhyen turned from the night sky, making his way to his blankets.

  That day passed far too quickly. The days were growing shorter, and the sky whiter. Cazing and Rhyen both took to glancing nervously at the sky every few minutes. With their supplies very nearly gone, they both knew that if the snow came before they could reach Avernade, they might not make it at all. Neither mentioned supper that night. They both knew there wasn’t any food to make.

  The next morning they rose early, the icy fingers of dawn creeping into their blankets and chilling them to the bone. Rhyen shivered as he rolled his bedding and stamped on the coals of the previous night’s fire. He drew his cloak firmly around his shoulders and huddled down beneath his hood. The days were getting shorter. The frozen grass crunched beneath his feet as he made his way toward Cinnamon, and even as he saddled her, golden leaves fell around him like rain. There were few now left in the branches of the lofty trees that towered above them.

  He untethered Cinnamon and walked her in circles around the camp, trying to stretch her legs and get the cold out of her hooves. Cazing was saddling Brefen and rubbing his legs down with the edge of his cloak. The chill of winter was upon them. Cazing was puffing as he smacked Brefen’s rear to get him moving. The horse reluctantly padded forward.

  The mountains were silent today. Not a bird chirped, not an elk bugled. If there was a breeze, they were fortunate not to feel it this far beneath the treetops. The sky shone foggily through the bare branches, the sun watery, and set fire to the grass as the frozen dew sparkled in the light. Rhyen swung into Cinnamon’s saddle. She patiently rested on three legs, chewing on the bit in her mouth. Rhyen ran his hands down her neck, warming them. He murmured compliments to her and patted her fondly, trying not to see the bones that now jutted beneath her beautiful coat. She leaned her head back and nipped his sleeve affectionately.

  Cazing mounted the golden stallion and turned south. Rhyen saw that his nose and cheeks were red under his beard. He reached up and touched his own face. His cheeks and nose burned his fingers with cold. Rhyen looked down at his hands. They were raw and stinging from the dry winter air. He desperately wished that he hadn’t lost his gloves. Instead, he gripped the edges of his cloak in his hands and wrapped the cloth about his knuckles. It provided only slight relief.

  They travelled for hours before either master or apprentice spoke. The air never warmed, and the wavering sunlight never grew stronger. In fact, Rhyen could barely tell that the sun was moving at all, because as they weaved up and down the mountains it never seemed to change position in the sky. Rhyen noticed with interest that they seemed to be going slightly downhill, as though they were over the peak of the mountains. Granted, there were still times when they were forced to dismount because of the steepness of the terrain, but overall Rhyen thought that the mountains were getting shorter.

  They took only two short breaks. Their food was scarce to the point of nonexistent, and they refrained from a noon meal. Rhyen had settled into a cold numbness. If the terrain had been more forgiving, he would have gladly nodded into a doze on Cinnamon’s back. As it was, navigating the mountain passes required concentration and vigilance. At
any point the horses could loose their footing on the rocks or icy ground, and though the path was wide, sudden movements could result in a fatal fall. Rhyen was forced to pay attention to the paths as Cazing led them forward in wide sweeping arcs through the hills.

  Rhyen finally warmed up in the late afternoon, as they were cutting a wide swath in the tall, dry grass. The sun finally dissipated the fog, and the frozen dew melted and ran down the long blades of yellow grass in the sudden brilliance of sunlight. The whole sky was golden, and though the temperature had not changed, Rhyen pushed back his hood and turned his face west, closing his eyes and soaking in the warm rays. Cazing followed suit. There wasn’t a cloud in the golden sky, and the leaves tinkled like a music box in a sudden breeze as the grasses waved softly in the thick, dry air. But the wind was chilly, and Rhyen opened his eyes again. Already the sun was receding behind the mountains. The warm beautiful moment had passed. Too quickly, the golden sunset became twilight.

  He turned toward Cazing and spoke for the first time that day. “How much farther?” he croaked, his voice rusty from lack of use.

  Cazing cleared his throat. “I think we’re close. Honestly, I had expected to make it there before today.”

  Rhyen nodded and glanced around at the frozen ground. “Do you think we should keep going? I’d rather find an inn than sleep on the cold dirt again.” He tried to speak lightly, but what he didn’t say was that he feared stopping here would be like hammering the nails in on their coffins. They were too weak from hunger, and Rhyen doubted that the horses could be made to move again, should they let them stop.

  Cazing chuckled hopelessly. His expression told Rhyen that he was thinking similar thoughts. “Me too, me too. It is too dangerous to continue in the dark, although we can go on until it is very black, I suppose.” They both fell silent. Rhyen felt too hopeless to be worried, too weak and tired to summon the energy to feel fear. Cazing looked like he was feeling much the same thing.