by Sam Bowring
I must learn more , Losara told himself, and stepped out onto the plateau.
Quickly he wove around himself an illusion of Bel, then stooped to pick up a spear from the ground. There was a grunting by the fire as his presence was noticed, and trolls began to rise. Giving a shout of what he hoped sounded like anger, he threw the spear at one of them. It flew wide and went clattering to the ground – certainly he did not share his other ’s excellent aim, Losara reflected wryly.
The trolls growled and advanced, some crawling on all fours. There was a scraping as other spears were lifted from the ground. Losara raised his hand to point away down at the land far beneath, where the tiny light of their campfire could be seen.
‘We come for you,’ he told the trolls. ‘To kill you and steal from you.’ He then made it appear as if Bel went sprinting back down the mountain, as he simultaneously melted back into shadow. The trolls sprang to the edge to find Bel gone, but now they saw the light, and they whispered to each other. They began to spring down the mountain, toad-like as they pounced from tree to rock. Losara was impressed with their speed.
He overtook them back down the mountain and reached the camp, where he slipped back inside the illusion of Gellan. As he took it over from Fazel, he made it fit the contours of his real body and opened his eyes with a gasp.
‘What is it?’ said Bel, sitting up on his bedroll.
‘Something approaches.’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Bel. ‘What have you sensed?’
Before Gellan could answer there was a crashing in the bushes, and Hiza, who had been on watch, burst into view.
‘Trolls!’ he called.
‘Get down!’ shouted Bel, and Hiza dropped to his knees as a spear flew over his head. Trolls sprang from the darkness and landed amongst them.
Without thinking, Bel stepped into the pattern of the fight. He moved forward, slashing a second hurled spear from the air with his sword, then whirled low to slice out the thrower’s legs. Another troll came at him, spear held like a lance. Bel stepped smoothly sideways, hooked the troll under the arm as it rushed past, swung it around and hurled it yowling off the ridge. For a moment it seemed as if time stood still, as the hapless troll hung suspended over the sheer drop, its face a mix of rage and terror. Bel’s blood soared to boiling point.
He heard Jaya shout and twisted to see her fending off two of the creatures. They were taking turns to swipe at her with spears, while they bounced backwards out of reach of her sword. He tried to go to her but his feet did not want to obey, as the dance with death tried to lead him towards trolls closer to him. Although he greatly desired to charge them down, a part of him was able to resist, and he forced his way out of the flow to stagger towards her. Immediately a troll crashed against him, and he landed hard on his back. The next moment the creature was atop him, gnashing at his face with its tusks. He brought his hand up with enough strength to break the tusks back into its mouth, and rolled it off him to spring to his feet. Again the pattern pulled him away from Jaya and again he ignored it to go towards her.
Just before he reached her, M’Meska landed close by and plugged an arrow into one of the trolls’ backs. The second one gasped as Jaya managed to land her sword in its belly.
‘Stay in my wake,’ he told her, pulling her roughly to him. It was difficult to form words through the fug of frenzy. ‘I can protect you better when you’re close.’
‘I don’t need your protection,’ she muttered back. ‘Though I will guard your back if that’s what you mean.’
Then he moved onwards, his sword ready to meet any blow, or cut and rend, or stab and slice. Sometimes the pattern offered up different paths, and he chose the way that best protected his friends, though his awareness of that choice grew dim as ecstasy filled him. How good it felt, his senses awash with screams and the taste of fear, the smell of sweat, and above it all the pounding of his own heart.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. Though he cast his gaze back and forth, eager to find another enemy to skewer, all the trolls lay dead. Hiza whooped, giving Bel a clap on the shoulder. Bel was annoyed with him for interrupting this moment, knocking him prematurely back to himself. The bloodlust, not yet truly sated, sought another way out …and he opened his mouth to roar triumph.
•
Losara watched Bel with great curiosity. For his own part, he had not done much throughout the fight, mainly kept an eye on everyone to make sure they were safe. He’d nudged a spear off course once or twice, and tripped several trolls in his ethereal grip when they had looked like landing blows, but apart from that, he’d held back from getting involved. His desire had been to watch Bel in action, and it would not have been served by blasting all opponents instantly to smithereens. He’d also had to be careful about what spells he’d used, avoiding anything that would obviously appear as shadow magic to the naked eye.
Now he considered Bel, standing over the bodies of the fallen, his feverish eyes rolling in search of more death.
He is not happy the fight is over.
Losara remembered the dreams in which he had experienced fights in Drel Forest through Bel’s eyes. Although the feelings they had evoked were gone, intellectually he remembered the need for blood, the joy of the dance, the way it had filled him with a sense of perfect belonging and purpose.
It must be hard to return from such a place , he thought.
The look on Bel’s face did not contradict him.
•
Sleep was evasive for the rest of the night. Gellan and Fazel levitated the bodies away, off the ridge into the forest, but the camp still stank of death. Bel lay with open eyes, experiencing the same melancholy that had come on him after Drel. Back then he had told himself that what he felt was guilt over failing to protect the other members of his troop. That was why he’d gone back to the keepers …it wasn’t because he lacked the courage to face the fact that he enjoyed killing so much. No, not at all.
He tried to remember the words of his father after he had returned to Kadass. Corlas had spoken of fighting Battu at the Shining Mines, of how the bloodlust could be a good thing, how it could help a man survive and win – not quite the same as Bel’s growing desire for any excuse to unleash violence.
Also Bel did not think Corlas experienced it in the same way he did, for his father had never mentioned any patterns or paths tugging at him.
Tonight he had managed to keep a part of himself anchored, and had had the presence of mind to protect Jaya – which he would continue to do whether it annoyed her or not. But the frenzy had taken him over so fast, he didn’t trust himself to be able to exert control every time.
He hugged her tightly, and she grunted.
‘Promise me something,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Whenever we get into a fight, you come and stay close to me. The way I get, I don’t know if I’ll always think to protect you.’
He did not know if she fully appreciated what happened to him in a fight. He had tried to explain it to her one night at The Wayward Dog, but had gained the impression she thought he was exaggerating. He had let it go at the time as he’d been unsure himself, having only experienced the phenomenon a couple of times. After tonight, however, he was growing more certain that this special ability of his was here to stay.
‘I can look after myself,’ she retorted. ‘I survived long before you came along. I do not need any man to be my chaperone through life.’
‘But Jaya,’ he said, irritated himself now, ‘I am the fighter. In the moments I spend treading the pattern of a fight, nothing can touch me. And if you’re behind me, I’m hoping nothing will reach you either.’
‘Like I said,’ she answered, ‘I’m happy to watch your back.’
‘If that’s the way you want to put it. It matters little to me as long as you do it.’
‘Don’t make it sound like an order, or I won’t.’
‘Arkus, Jaya, I’m only concerned for your safety because I love
you. Why are you being like this?’
‘Never mind. Just go to sleep, Bel.’ And she rolled away.
Even as the camp grew quiet, Bel could not sleep. He had flown so high that the return to earth was difficult. Not only that, but some sense of the pattern seemed to remain, faintly, an unspooled thread leading off the ridge and down into the forest. It was not insistent, for there was no immediate danger, and it was fading. Soon he would not be able to follow it.
Let it go , he thought, but his yearning was strong. Carefully he rose, and stole over to the edge of the ridge. It was not far down to the forest from here, some ten paces or so, and the slope was gradual enough to climb. He glanced back to make sure no one was watching. Fazel would be out there somewhere, but Bel did not care right now what Fazel thought. He lowered himself over the edge and clambered down to the forest.
At the bottom he found the ground splattered with trolls, where Gellan and Fazel had dumped the carcasses. He made his way into the trees, past a staring corpse wearing a twisted snarl. His path was clearer now that he trod it, and some way through the trees ahead he caught a glimpse of movement. As he drew closer he saw it was a troll still alive – must be that one I hurled off the cliff – and limping slowly away from the camp, bruised and broken.
The troll heard him, looked around, and yelped in fear. It tried to run, grunting as it put pressure on a bad leg, its gangly arms flailing as it grasped at branches to steady itself. The result was pathetic and uncoordinated, and it did not take Bel long to catch up with the creature. It turned to see him right upon it and its legs gave way in fear. It fell and didn’t get up, lying before him, cringing.
‘Please,’ it said in a thick voice. ‘I go away. Not come back.’
‘That’s right,’ said Bel, and stabbed it through the eye.
The pattern’s last remnant fell away.
The moment was not enough to return him to his prior state; it was more like a crumb of sweetness when he wanted a whole cake. Feeling the emptiness all the more, Bel trudged back to camp.
A watching shadow slipped along after him.
•
Some distance to the south-east, six strange figures bounded across the moon. They moved almost in their natural shape, though they were thinner and had no tendrils. Much of their muddy selves had been diverted into lengthening their legs, giving them wide, distance-crunching strides.
Eldew was pleased with how fast they had travelled. It had been, in fact, a pleasant journey. Settlements in Dennali, though numerous, were mainly small and easy to avoid. The land had proved moist, full of streams and lakes and fields of wet grass after rain. By night they moved in this form, by day they slithered along like snakes, low to the ground and harder to spot. When they’d happened to stumble across people, Eldew had allowed his companions to have a little fun, and sometimes they had even slipped a little out of their way to do so …but never had they tarried long.
‘Hold!’ he said, and the other Mireforms came to a halt. He reached to his side, where the end of the rolled-up map protruded, and pulled it out of himself. Shaking it free of mud, he examined it briefly, then turned to consider the silhouettes of the great mountains in the distance.
‘That way,’ he said, pointing with a knife-like claw.
The Mireforms took off again.
Duskwood
Lalenda walked through skeletal trees, bare and dead for a long time now. There wasn’t even leaf litter on the hard, barren ground. Broken trunks lay askew at various angles, some piled atop others to create brittle hills of collapsed wood. Others stood densely, grasping one another with spidery, claw-like branches. Dry lichen coated many surfaces, sending up musty grey clouds when disturbed. Grey upon grey upon grey.
She heard a twig snap, and turned. From amongst branches stared a pair of grey eyes, dry themselves, dry as the wretched face they inhabited.
Grimra swirled protectively in front of her, hissing.
She awoke.
‘Be all right, flutterbug?’ came Grimra’s voice, ghosting over the bed towards her. ‘Startling in her sleep she be?’
‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Dreaming?’
‘Yes. You were there too.’
‘Aha. Explains why Lalenda be frightened then. Grimra be very, very scary, ho ho!’
Lalenda smiled at him – or at least, where she thought he might be.
It had been some time since any prophecy had come to her. She’d taken to wondering if her usefulness in that regard had ended. Perhaps the major prophecy she’d been born to have had been predicting for Battu where and when the blue-haired boy would be born. If that were the case, she would not have minded. Prophecy was not controllable and hadn’t exactly made her life happy. Except that without it, she wouldn’t have Losara.
Perhaps she was lucky to be a prophet after all.
‘Duskwood,’ she murmured.
‘What’s this?’ said Grimra. ‘Why speak this name?’
‘I had a vision of us in Duskwood.’
Grimra gave a low growl. ‘Nothing good be there. No rabbits to chase, no birds to snaffle. Only resting for those without rest.’
Lalenda swung her legs out of bed. Through an opening high in Losara’s chambers she could see the light of early morning. She reached for the water jug and splashed her face, careless of the drops she got on the bedding.
For all its proximity to the castle, she did not know much about Duskwood. It ran out from the mountain on which Skygrip was shaped, from the bottom of the sheer cliff on the southwards side. It was rumoured to be a place for the undead, and that thing in her vision had most certainly been undead. But Losara had told her that Battu had been charged by the Dark Gods to clean the land of such creatures, sending their souls back to the Great Well. Battu had done a half-hearted job, and left spirit creatures called the Trapped intact along the border. Was it possible he had been lax with others as well? With Battu, anything was possible.
Still, what she knew of the place did not answer the important question – why would she go there?
Maybe because a prophecy said she would.
That, in her experience, was not the way prophecy worked. Visions showed things that would come to pass; they did not cause things to come to pass. If no strange reason arose to make her go to such a place, her prophecy would be proven false. If she did go, however, the prophecy would be true, but it would also be the cause of itself coming true. A circle, a paradox, or maybe evidence that the forces of fate were intervening in the natural flow of events?
Lalenda was surprised to discover that she actually found the idea of visiting the wood appealing. Her recent experience of life outside the castle made the walls seem even more claustrophobic than before, made her dissatisfied with reading books day in and out, waiting for Losara to return. Was it so implausible that, given the taste she had recently developed for exploration, she would wake up one morning wanting to see something new, and remember there was a place just behind the castle that she had never seen and knew little about? Was it so improbable that her confinement would drive her to take a short outing just to pass the time?
Idly, she picked up a book from her stack, one she had not delved into yet, and flipped it open. Last Home of the Ebons read the title. The story detailed the demise of the Ebon Elves who, like the Sprites, had not long survived the breaking of the Great Well. Unlike the Sprites, however, there were no traces of Ebons left. They had never interbred with other races, considering them unclean, and so had died out completely. It was with some surprise that she realised the book was about how the last Ebons had made their home in Duskwood, back when the trees were still alive.
It had been the top book in the pile. Perhaps , she thought, if not for the prophecy, I would have awoken and started reading, as I often do on these lazy mornings . Perhaps her curiosity would have been piqued, inspiring her to go and poke around the nearby place that she had just visited in her mind’s eye.
Should she go?
‘Certainly,’ said Lalenda. It would give her a chance to mull things over.
The castle was emptier than usual, not only because of the purging, but also because Tyrellan and Roma had taken with them most of the guards and sundry others. As she walked the quiet corridors to the kitchens accompanied by Grimra, Lalenda wondered whom she could ask for permission to leave the castle …and realised that she didn’t really answer to anyone any more. A joy came upon her like tiny stars exploding in her heart.
She decided to go. If Losara could take off on a whim to creep around Kainordas, why should she be restricted by mere force of habit?
She arrived at the castle kitchens, where Greys used to putting out food for an entire castle were, maybe for the first time in their lives, taking their ease on the job, sitting around chatting in front of the iceplace. Saray noticed her enter and nodded to her as he rose. She took her usual place at a bench while he fixed her a breakfast of soft bread and cheese, and a haunch of meat for Grimra.
‘There we go, mistress,’ he said, sliding a plate in front of her. He put down the meat more gingerly.
‘Thank you,’ she replied, as Grimra began to worry noisily at his food.
Was it significant, then, this prophecy? Had it come to her for a reason? Hard to say, for sometimes she dreamed things of little consequence. Not every prophecy had to be ground-shaking. Still, she wondered about it, for it seemed odd that fate would pre-emptively reinforce a notion that she may have had anyway.