Sons of the Oak

by David Farland

  45

  THE HUNT

  The flight of a graak oft heralds the coming of gore.

  —a saying of Inkarra

  Borenson trudged along a muddy track beside Jackal Creek, a name that was something of a misnomer. There were no jackals in Landesfallen. The early inhabitants had probably named it after something else—the bushtiger. And there was no creek for most of the year. It was early afternoon, and he had been out hunting for wild burrow-bears for dinner. The creatures were gentle and easy enough to take, if you found one in the open. No luck there.

  He had just vowed to himself to climb up into the far hills, where there was better hunting, when he saw a fish: a muddy brown fish eeling along the road, half submerged in a rut from wagons that had traveled this way during the winter.

  It was a walking catfish, about four feet in length, as muddy brown as the water, and had four tiny vestigial feet. Its broad mouth was full of teeth, and beneath its mouth were whiskers.

  He circled the thing, and it peered at him with dull brown eyes, hissing and baring its teeth.

  He didn’t like the taste of walking catfish. It was about like eating mud, and he was wondering if he should kill it and take it home for dinner when a shadow fell over him.

  He looked up to see a huge white graak winging just overhead.

  “Father,” Draken shouted, leaning precariously to his right. The graak grunted angrily, but finally veered right. In moments, the graak landed gracelessly not a dozen yards away, smack in the middle of the road.

  The walking catfish hissed and scurried off into some thick ferns.

  “Father,” Draken shouted. “Shadoath has found us!”

  Quickly he described the attack on Garion’s Port.

  It took several moments for Borenson to gauge the situation. Shadoath had brought reinforcements—a worldship full of them. How many men that might be, Borenson couldn’t guess. It was said that Fallion the Bold had built strange rafts large enough to hold five thousand men each.

  For now, the children seemed to have headed to safety at some place called the Toth Queen’s Hideout. But how long would they remain safe?

  Borenson swallowed hard. It was a long way to Garion’s Port—eighty miles by air. But he was getting to be an old fat man, and he would have to travel a lot farther than eighty miles. There were no passes through the mountains for a hundred miles to the north.

  And he couldn’t just charge toward the city blindly. There were ten thousand Gwardeen in Landesfallen, but they were spread all across the wastes. It would take weeks to warn them of the danger, form an army, and march on Garion’s Port.

  “I’ll head to the fort at Stillwater. If I’m lucky, I’ll reach it in a couple of days. But first I have to go home and tell your mother where I’m going.

  “As for you, I want you to fly to Beastmaster Thorin’s ranch and warn Jaz that Fallion is in trouble. He’ll be needing your graak. Give it to him. He’ll need it to fly back to the hideout. Understand?”

  Draken nodded, then leapt onto the back of the graak. With a cry it rose into the air.

  Shadoath followed a pair of golaths along a wooden bridge, until they reached a point near the fortress where it just fell away.

  “This is where you lost them?” Shadoath asked.

  “Yes,” a golath answered, its voice emotionless. “Fast they were, and cunning fighters. They shot arrows, and pricked at us with spears. Gone they are, I think.”

  Shadoath peered over the bridge. One of her most valuable warriors lay broken below, on rocks stained black from blood.

  Ahead of her, Shadoath could see the little island fortress. There were still a dozen graaks nesting among the white trees. In the full sunlight, it was a dazzling sight.

  “So you saw children flying away from here, heading inland?”

  “Yes, yes,” the golath answered. “All of us spotted them, we did.”

  “Which way?”

  The golath pointed almost due east, into the trees.

  It had to be Fallion. She and her men had searched the city, and come up empty.

  “Search the forest,” Shadoath said. “Look for any trace of them—footprints, smoke from a fire.”

  The golath lowered its eyes in acknowledgment.

  Shadoath backed up, then raced along the bridge toward the fortress. Ahead, a portion of it had been cut away. Sixty feet of rope bridge now dangled uselessly to the stones below. But with her endowments of speed and brawn, Shadoath sprinted up to a speed of ninety miles per hour, then leapt high in the air, seeming almost to glide across the span as she hit the bridge on the far side.

  Ahead, a wooden door was locked, a bar wedged across the inside.

  Shadoath slammed a mailed fist into it, shattering the bar. The door fell open, and Shadoath entered the fortress.

  She found harnesses and bridles inside a crude tack room, then came out.

  The graaks were nesting, each of them sitting in a bowl formed from sticks and soft seaweed. They rested atop leathery sand-colored eggs with flecks of brown and white.

  The mother graaks could not be coaxed from their nests, Shadoath knew. They were good mothers. But the males could be tempted. They were used to hunting for food for their mates at this time of the year, and quickly grew restless.

  She found a nest that still had a pair of graaks, and then bridled the male.

  She peeled off her mail, left it lying in the nest.

  Shadoath was a petite woman, not much heavier than a child. She’d be able to ride a graak for a few miles at a hop.

  She leapt upon its back, and urged it into the sky. It leapt forward clumsily, the branches in its nest crunching and snapping under their combined weight. At last it launched forward over the edge of the nest.

  It seemed to fall a dozen feet before its wings caught the air and it lumbered upward.

  The graak was small for a male, and Shadoath could feel it strain as its leather wings flapped heavily, gaining purchase in the sky.

  Then it was airborne.

  She aimed it to the east, let it fly above the ocean for a moment, and above the trees, giving it its head.

  My mount may have seen which way the children went, Shadoath thought. It knows the paths in the sky. Let’s see if he will lead me to their hideout.

  To her delight, the graak thundered toward the trees for a few minutes, then dove toward a broad expanse, a place where limbs and branches had been cleared, creating a hidden flyway.

  She was hot on Fallion’s trail.

  46

  THE RISE OF A KING

  You men here in Landesfallen, though you were once enemies, have shown yourselves to be true friends. I offer you your lives and your freedom, asking in return for only your eternal vigilance.

  —Fallion the Bold, upon forming the Gwardeen

  Fallion winged away from Garion’s Port, flying slowly, stopping every few miles to let his graak rest, letting his huge mount take its time.

  He had come up out of the flyway just moments ago, exiting the stonewood. His troops were flying low above the trees, following the curves of the valley.

  A graak is so large that it can be seen hundreds of miles away by a vigilant far-seer. But it can only be seen if it is flying in plain view. Fallion’s troops were expert at flying unseen. Their mounts now were winging over a river valley, the graaks skimming just above the treetops. Flying thus did more than keep the graaks hidden. The warm thermals rising up from the woods coupled with the dense air at lower elevations let the graaks’ wings get a stronger purchase in the air, fly more easily.

  Fallion looked all around. Hillsides rose up in every direction. His troops would remain unseen.

  The sun was a golden ball in a hazy sky. Far ahead of him, perhaps eight miles, the young Gwardeen flew toward the hideout in a staggered line, each upon the back of a graak.

  At the edge of the stonewood, Fallion let his mount perch in a tree and rest. He waited for a long while, listening for sounds of pursuit. He hear
d none.

  It was twelve miles back to the city. Following the children on foot so far would have been all but impossible. The stonewood was almost impenetrable. The huge roots of trees lay in a tangle on the forest floor.

  Perhaps a powerful force warrior might manage to follow us, Fallion thought.

  But the flyway was meant to baffle such pursuers. It led through dense foliage, over bogs filled with quicksand, up steep cliffs, and wound this way and that so that even if a pursuer spied them from below, he would not know their true direction.

  Still the danger was very real. If Shadoath’s scouts spotted them, they could follow the children like bees to their hive.

  The only way that Fallion would be able to keep the kids safe would be to have them stay hidden.

  Back toward the city rose billowing clouds of smoke. Shadoath, it seemed, had set fire to the ships in the bay, perhaps even to the city itself.

  Below him, tangles of stonewood gave way to smaller white gums with stands of leatherwood.

  Ahead of him the wind had sculpted the deep red sandstone mountains into bizarre and beautiful configurations, and at the base of the mountains he could see blue-green king’s pine on the ridges.

  Here, the landscape opened up into stony fields. There were no farms, no tame herds grazing on the hills, but he spotted various animals found only on Landesfallen—gentle burrow-bears that looked much like young bears from back home, but they had gray hair and ate only grass. The burrow-bears watched him fly overhead as they grazed, unperturbed by the sight of humans or graaks.

  There were scores of rangits, lying in the shade of fallen gum trees, that would jump up and leap away, the whole ground trembling as they did, for they tended to jump and land in unison.

  There were smaller poo-hares, creatures related to rangits that were the size of large hares, but which hopped much more quickly than any hare.

  He saw spiny anteaters that swung their heavy tails like clubs; and once he even spotted a rare arrowyck, an enormous flightless bird nearly twice as tall as a man, a cruel carnivore that could crush a burrow-bear in its heavy beak.

  Ahead was a stony mountain of red rock, sculpted by the wind. It thrust up from the trees, and its sides—formed from petrified sand dunes—looked almost as if they had stairs carved into them. Natural ridges in the stone created a stairway that rose up and up.

  The Gwardeen had come up into a relatively narrow canyon, and the mountain lay straight ahead. They had already circled it, so that their climb could not be seen from the west.

  The graaks flew upward, skimming the treetops, while the mountainsides around them grew steep.

  Soon, the rims of a canyon flanked him, the rock walls carved by wind and water into tall columns. The path beneath him was safe. A roaring brook surged through the canyon, its surface white with foam. The steep sides of the canyon gave purchase to only a few king’s pines. There was no way that anyone could climb those rocky banks without being spotted.

  Ahead, a stone bridge spanned the canyon. The graaks flew toward it steadily.

  They know the way, Fallion thought with pride, giving his mount its head. In moments they passed beneath the monumental arch, and from this point on, he knew that any scouts on his trail would lose sight of him, for there were steep ridges of rock on either side. The canyon split, and his graak winged to its left.

  The trail below them looked impassable. The swollen creek rampaged over the rocks; stone columns seemed almost to sprout up out of the river.

  A few minutes later, they neared the top of the canyon when the graaks began landing in a shadowed crevasse.

  The refuge was almost completely hidden, even from the air. Stone columns rose up all around, sculpted by wind and rain into ugly shapes reminiscent of half-men or gargoyles; the landing site was secreted in their shadows.

  Fallion rode up and his graak dropped neatly onto the bluff, just before a dark tunnel.

  He leapt down from the beast as a pair of young Gwardeen came to handle his graak. To his right and left, iron rings were set into the stone walls, and each riding graak had a single leg tethered to a ring.

  Overhead, a stone arch led to a tunnel. Beneath the arch, the red rock had grown black, stained by mineral salts as water dripped over the ages, and there on the stone was an ancient tothan mural painted in vibrant colors—purples and blacks, titanium white and coral. It showed a scene of a tothan queen—a four-legged creature with two heavy arms—riding upon the shoulders of a huge crowd of lesser toth, as if being borne to victory.

  The lesser toth carried long metal clubs as weapons, while sorcerers among them wielded staves made of purple toth bones, as clear as crystal.

  Where the queen had been or what battles she had won, Fallion could not guess. Nor did he understand why she had a fortress hidden here in the mountains. But for the thousandth time he hoped that her people were no more.

  At the mouth of the tunnel was a huge alcove filled with graaks. Farther back, sitting around an old campfire, a dozen Gwardeen had assembled, along with Valya.

  None of the children under Fallion’s command was older than twelve. That was not surprising. The only way to reach this place was by graak, and graaks couldn’t carry the weight of an adult for any distance.

  That night, the children huddled in a circle around a small campfire, arguing.

  “I say we stay in ’iding,” one young woman said. “We don’t leave the cave till Shadoath’s army is gone.”

  “You mean sit and starve?” a boy asked.

  “There’s food in the valleys,” an older boy, Denorra, said—the boy who had cut the ropes to the bridge. “The farmers still have some stores.”

  The children were having a moot, a counsel where all voices were to be heard.

  “The stores won’t last for long,” Fallion said. “It’s just past spring planting season, and the winter’s stores are all but gone. They’ll become scarcer still once Shadoath’s troops finish burning and looting. And what will we do then, rob our own people for food?”

  The children all looked up to him. He was their captain, and their friend, and though he tried to refrain from usurping authority in a moot, his voice counted for more than did the voices of some of the smaller ones.

  Fallion wandered over to the fire but didn’t sit. Hearthmaster Waggit had impressed upon him the importance of making sure that when he spoke to a crowd, he assume a position of authority.

  “He’s right,” Valya offered. “Shadoath is building worldships, and she’ll need slaves for that. She’ll take folks here captive, like she did on Syndyllian. Those who go into hiding won’t be able to hunt or farm. In time, they’ll be forced to forage for food, and that’s when her men will catch them. Shadoath is patient that way.”

  She spoke as one who knew, but Fallion noticed how guarded her tongue remained. She hadn’t told these children that Shadoath was her mother.

  I wonder, Fallion thought, if Shadoath is just hunting me. Maybe it’s Valya that she’s after. Perhaps Shadoath would even offer a ransom?

  He would never think of selling her, of course, but the thought made him curious.

  There was a stir at the mouth of the cave as a late rider landed.

  One young Gwardeen, a girl of seven, said, “Aren’t we supposed to warn someone if the toth come back? Shadoath is like a toth, ain’t she?”

  “The king of Mystarria,” another added. “That’s ’oo we’re supposed to tell. But ’ow do we get ’old of ’im?”

  “The king’s already here,” someone said from the darkness. Jaz marched in from the mouth of the cave and nodded meaningfully toward Fallion.

  Fallion had not seen his brother in months, and he was amazed at how fast his little brother was growing. Jaz had become tall and lean. He threw a bag at Fallion’s feet. Forcibles inside clanked in their peculiar fashion, echoing loudly in the small cavern, and a pair rolled onto the ground. “You’ll be needing these, Your Highness.”

  The Gwardeen children stared a
t Fallion in disbelief, mouths open in surprise. Could their captain truly be the king in exile?

  “Show them your ring,” Jaz urged.

  Fallion fished into the pocket of his tunic and pulled out his signet ring—an ancient golden ring with the image of the green man upon it. Fallion had not shown it to anyone in years, not since he’d left Mystarria.

  Most of the children fell silent, awed, unsure how to conduct themselves before a king. A couple of the older ones crept up from their sitting position, and managed to kneel.

  One child, the girl named Nix, said, “But I thought the Earth King was the king of Mystarria?”

  “He was,” Fallion said. “The Earth King was my father. But he died. That’s part of why I came here: to see if I could discover what happened in his final days.”

  Now even the youngest of the children began to kneel, and Fallion saw to his dismay that even Jaz chose this moment to bow.

  “What shall we do, milord?” Jaz asked.

  A wisely chosen question, Fallion realized. By asking it, Jaz was subtly urging all of the others to submit to Fallion’s will.

  They were all looking to him for answers, each of them with eyes shining, full of hope.

  I wanted an army, Fallion realized, and now I’ve found one: but only an army of children.

  What could they do to battle Shadoath?

  Fallion said, “The closest Gwardeen fortress is at the City of the Dead. That’s a four-day march from here, and it holds only four hundred good fighting men. That’s not enough to face Shadoath, not nearly enough.”

  He looked to one of the scouts for help, the boy who had first warned him of the enemy approach. “How many men do you think we are fighting?”

  “I saw twenty ships, big ones, and lots of away boats. I’d think that each could hold a thousand men.”

  Fallion knew that the locals would not be able to repulse so many. Not everyone on the island was Gwardeen. There were plenty of local farmers, the descendants of outlaws. Tough men, many of them. But such folk weren’t necessarily fighters.