Call of the Wolf (The Kohrinju Tai Saga)

by Nelson, J P

  Two squads of troops were even going as our supply and chow unit.

  Of us fourteen scouts, I learned Kisparti had a wife and three children. Vensi also had a wife expecting their first child, it wouldn’t be easy for him. It wouldn’t be easy for any of us, but he would have it especially tough.

  The cavalry, Lieutenant Commander Eppard and Hoscoe were riding Arabian Chargers. I approached Lahrcus with granting the scouting unit these animals, as well. They were the fastest, most durable horses in the known world. He thought about it, and slyly suggested, “You think I can get the king to approve this?”

  With a straight face I answered, “It would give me easy access, and a choice of animals to commandeer, should everything go bad and the need arise.”

  There were fourteen of us, but since we were so important to the mission we were granted a compliment of twenty Arabian Chargers. I picked out a strawberry roan as my personal mount.

  Five hundred and forty-nine men were riding out on the morning of 4.15.20, Keoghnariu dating. That included eight commissioned officers, twenty-six non-commissioned officers including a metal smith, a surgeon who was also going to write a history, eleven men responsible for supply, and twenty-one platoons of men who had no idea if they were going to return. Some of us, maybe all of us, were not coming back. But we rode out for a cause. Whatever happened, we were making history.

  Have you ever donned a uniform and taken up a weapon to fight for a cause? Have you ever met the enemy face to face knowing it was either them or you? To kill brings the end to something, to someone’s life. All people have pleasures, nuances they enjoy in day-to-day living. And to end such a thing is a big responsibility which should not be taken lightly.

  One of Hoscoe’s favorite rants, “There are those who like to speak against warfare and fighting, and I will be the first to say I prefer to sup my coffee and take up a brush or quill. But someone must be willing to do the necessary deeds which enforce order and safety for all. Let those who preach peace over war speak their mind. In some countries citizens have that right, but do not do it behind the walls of safety I, and others before me, have fought to provide. Let them step up to the front of the battlefield, away from my protection, and speak their words before the enemy. Otherwise, step back, shut up, and let me do my job.

  “Speech is a good thing, as long as both parties are willing to make discourse under such terms. But the swine does not know that swine stinks, and the vermin does not care that it spreads disease. When all honest men and women lay down their weapons, the armies of malevolence shall rule the world. And then, then shall the weak-mouthed fools cry for the warrior to rise up.”

  Hoscoe had a major problem with cowardice, and he believed all boys breaking into manhood should serve two years in the military. He said, “It gives perspective, let alone discipline. No one, man or woman, has any right to discuss how combat should be conducted unless they have successfully faced their foe in battle. And I have fought beside and against both.” He once poked me in the chest and said, “Dare you to consider, an equally well trained woman can be every bit as dangerous as a man, and a drawn and loaded crossbow does not care who aims and pulls the trigger. Therefore underestimate a woman not!”

  Riding out in a two-by-two column formation, my own position in rank and file was directly behind Eppard with Maedhith to my right. The last time I was part of a big procession, I was in the back of a slave wagon leaving the town of Heins, and it wasn’t anything as grand as this. Now, I was an officer, and to my left I saw Riana in a place of distinction. She was waving to me with her head held high in pride. Waving back, I burned her visage into my mind for ever-safekeeping. Dressed in a beautiful array of green and gold, her red hair was flowing long over her shoulders and a white flower was in her hair.

  She wasn’t weeping as many of the women were, she was seeing me off the way the lady of a warrior should; for what person wants what may be their last vision of someone they care for to be one of despair and mourning. Riana was standing strong, radiating courage and honor. Sitting tall in the saddle, I waved back to her. Would I return for her hand, would I touch those lips with my own once more?

  Before us was the main gate to the city, and as it opened wide for us a host of horns sounded and I saw my friends, my brothers of another kind. They were holding their fists out to me in salute, and then the Dom let go with his saxophone as the rest made quiet. Out of the gates we rode to war, forward to our destiny … somewhere out there was the enemy’s lair and their point of entry into our realm … we were going to find it.

  ___________________________

  Our first destination was the old ruin I had wanted to return and investigate. As we traveled, and due to the nature of the enemy we were dealing with, I adopted the policy of sending scouts out by twos or fours. In the jungle, that would move to fours and sixes. If necessary, I could draw on LCB troops. I generally partnered myself with Izner, Kisparti, Deakir, and sometimes Patriohr; Izner because we worked so well together, Kisparti and Deakir as much to learn from as anything else, and Patriohr because it was my job to teach him.

  Kisparti, Izner, Patriohr, Cavalry Sergeant Pakur and I came up on the farm keep first. The place was desolate and as bad as I wanted to go on down there, we waited for the command to arrive as per orders. Truth to tell, had I been alone I would have gone on down.

  One of the neat things about Pakur was that he had a communication system with Major Maedhith involving a Three Horned Falcon named Chymthina. The creature was beautiful to watch, well trained in her craft and turned out to be invaluable in our mission. I had Pakur send a message to Maedhith giving the good-to-go, in the mean time we kept a constant vigil on that old keep. I wasn’t trusting anything. Kisparti I put on a rise with that 400, ready to take the first thing that didn’t look friendly.

  Everything was still quiet when the command rode in, but I was feeling mighty uneasy. Out last camp was less than a half day’s ride away, so when they arrived the area was secured straightway, then they took a nooning. The keep had a small well with good water, so our water supply was freshened.

  My personal interest was the ruin, so while the bulk of our command secured the farm area and investigated the keep, I took two squads of cavalry, two squads of foot-men, one squad of LBC’s, Deakir, and Izner’s whole squad of scouts the mile and a half to the old ruins. Hoscoe had seen the well at Biunang and I had seen the runes in the hole in the ground with Lahrcus. Hoscoe saw where cogs had gone, I got to see the blurring anomaly dissipate and it gave me the same feeling as I had felt at this ruin. Deakir, who we called Deak, was a former clansman who knew the wilderness. So, hopefully we might find something of interest.

  Hoscoe had been taught much of general history from an elvin perspective, and history specifically relating to the Dsh’Tharr and Kn’Yang’s lineage in particular. Since then he had been fascinated with all forms of military history, and he learned much from his journeys. He had been stranded in the frozen northeastern Wastes of Zynshai, spent two years as an able-bodied sailor on the Alburin Sea, and had traveled all over the northern half of Aeshea. Fascinated with culture, he absorbed what he could in his exceptional lifetime. But there is only so much you can learn.

  Use of magic was dying out in the growing civilizations of the north, and this, clearly a situation intertwined with magic, was out of Hoscoe’s field of expertise. Strategic warfare, no problem; dealing with wizardry or worse, this was a new challenge.

  As we got close to the knoll upon which the ruin set, I kept seeking out that weird, tingling sensation I had felt the last time. It wasn’t there.

  Deak said, “It’s an old outpost, goes way back before the times of Set. The same kind of brick was used as is in them pyramids, just used different. There’s maybe two, two and a half dozen of ‘em all through the country. No one knows for sure who built ‘em. Wasn’t human, though. Or no human I ever heard of.”

  Hoscoe asked, “How do you figure?”

  “I seen som
e pictures on cave walls. The clansmen call them Picture Caves, showing some kind of insect-like creatures walking on two legs building ‘em. Tall, elf-like people, pointed ears but sort of birdlike in the face, were in charge.” Hoscoe and I passed glances at each other and Deak kept talking, “One cave I saw showed a bunch of those people bowing down to someone with the head of a falcon, he was painted all gold.

  “Anyway,” he said, “those paintings are thousands of years old. Ain’t been anyone like any of those since the clansmen migrated down here after the Great War.”

  “The Kl’Duryq War?” Hoscoe asked.

  “Yup, that one. They’ve been fightin’ Tiskites, Minotaurs and each other ever since.”

  “Weren’t there humans here when the clansmen came?”

  Deak looked at Hoscoe with curiosity, “Well now that’s the thing, there used to be a huge civilization under the Mhn’O’Quai Jungle, before it was a jungle. Then they all up and disappeared. There were a few who supposedly stayed behind. Most married into the clansmen families. But the tale is they went to someplace they called Quas’Thyr, the fourth world. No one knows for sure exactly when or how they went. Some tales have them goin’ down into the Great Pyramid and not comin’ back. Other tales have them goin’ across the hanging bridge to Xibalba. I heard one tale that they went up into their temple and sacrificed themselves to the sun gods, in hope their souls would be taken to the sun.

  “But these outposts, or whatever they really were, were here long before they came. My old chief said they were over five thousand years old. He said they were here before the pyramids.”

  I asked, “Are you familiar with deep pits inside the walls?”

  “Yup. The oldest ones are square, but then they started digging them round. It was where they lived. The wall was built up around the pit. Some of ‘em had a door you had to climb steps to get to, then there was stairs you had to go up or down into living levels. Some you had to climb a ladder to get to the top, then you went down from a door in the roof. In the southern jungle, there’s a whole city of the square ones built on top of each other, like a pyramid but only square.

  “Up next to Sky Rock, there’s a round one, maybe eighty-ninety feet tall. Looks like a huge mud-hornets nest built into the ground. All of ‘em are built on hilltops or in the mountains. I seen a whole city built into the side of a mountain, but there wasn’t no way up there.”

  I asked, “Have you heard of people disappearing in one of those pits?”

  Deak just looked at me with a real serious expression, and then he said, “My mah told me of a time when she was out with her pah in the jungle, they were huntin’ for a rare flower to make some medicine. They got caught in a storm and accidentally happened on this ruin with some of the walls knocked down, just like this one up yonder. Her pah stepped down in a pit and reached up for her so they could have some shelter. Then it got all strange and as she was starting to reach down, he faded off to nothing.

  “She made a three day trip in one day, but when she begged the clansmen to go back with her and find her pah, they wouldn’t go. He ain’t been seen since. The old ones tell of two, maybe three places around where the Lihtosax live that you don’t need to step into no pit and you might disappear. It’s almost like those bugs are helping to keep people out.”

  Patriohr suggested, “Or keep something in.” We weren’t discussing this stuff in secret. My people needed to know what we were looking for, besides just the enemy. I glanced at Hoscoe, and I could tell from the expression on his face he liked Patriohr’s thought.

  We were close enough to dismount and I wanted the knoll secured with every weapon trained on the center. I still didn’t feel that sensation, but I grabbed a rope as I dismounted. Hoscoe raised an eyebrow and Izner said, “Oh shizen.”

  Hoscoe, Izner, Deak, Kisparti and a pair of six feet, four inch tall footmen with two-hand swords went up the knoll with me to examine the place. Crossbows were at the ready and we carefully checked everything. I was hunting for a pit when Deak found a scrap of cloth. It was little more than a few threads, but it had been caught on a rough edge of rock. It wasn’t weather beaten, as if it had been there for years, but it was a material he hadn’t seen before. Hoscoe thought it was a type of satin and it was purple.

  Most of the walls had been broken in from time and weather, and there were several of those squared pits, but almost secluded I found a smaller one with easy access to the inside. On one side a metal rod rose up out of the rock beside it. There was still no tingling sensation, but Deak found another thread of the fabric. Kisparti suggested it might have come from a cape.

  As I looked down into the heavily shaded pit, I couldn’t see the walls clearly. Shaking out a loop in my rope, Deak looked over at me and said, “Captain, I like you, but I hope you don’t expect me to do no trackin’ down there.”

  “Nope,” Izner said, “he’s two fingers short of a full tankard of ale,” he quickly looked around, “meaning no disrespect. I mean, he’s going to go down himself.”

  We anchored the rope and one of my footmen secured it on his shoulders. Easing back I went down a little ways into the shadows, and never did my backend feel more exposed than when I was walking backward down that wall. I pulled out that metal firebox and snapping the lid open, rubbed the little wheel of the fire-starter against my leg to ignite the match-sized flame and started reflecting it off of the walls.

  I was down about six feet from the top when I saw what I wanted. Those runes were there, just like the one in the jungle. The floor was about another seven feet below and I was thinking about going down further, when a sudden streak and crack of ear splitting lightning hit the rod, which was fifteen feet away from my footman.

  He was all man, that fellow. He jumped a foot, and me hanging on the rope, but he held his ground. He didn’t have to hold it long however. I was out of there faster than you can pee your pants, which is what I almost did. Another bolt of lightning and we were all against the brick remains wanting down off of that hill.

  It took me a minute to realize the tingle I was feeling was the lightning, and not something magical in the ground. Fortunately this was a natural lightning storm. A little rain came down, but not much. We started heading to the horses when I exclaimed, “Mon’Gouchett!”

  “What?!” asked Hoscoe.

  “My firebox, I dropped it!”

  Deak looked at me as if I were insane, “You’re goin’ back down in there?”

  Matter of factly I replied, “Absolutely! There’s nothing wrong, it turned out to be only a little storm, and my firebox was a gift.” I looked at Izner who in turn just raised up his hands.

  The only shelter at the ruin was under a couple of those structures, and nobody wanted any of that. So we waited with the rest of the unit at the bottom of the hill. We would be just as wet after riding back as if we waited the storm out, and I wanted my firebox back. It wasn’t just a sentimental gift, I saw it as an invaluable tool, an unlimited amount of fire; think about it.

  As we made way back down I heard Deak mutter to Ize, “That mug is either crazy or he’s got balls of iron.”

  Ize muttered back, “Not sure, but sometimes you hear knockin’ sounds when he uses the head.”

  “So you use the head together?”

  “Shael’s no, the sound is deafening.”

  “Ain’t you supposed to be chums?”

  “I know nothing about him, I just met him a couple of months ago …”

  Deak responded, “Really? I heard you were born in different countries together. You even don’t look alike, exceptin’ in the chin.”

  “Not really, mine’s real. He just holds his that a’way to look like me.”

  I was making mental notes to keep them separated.

  The shower didn’t last long, and when I went back down into the hole Hoscoe went with me. He wanted to see those runes for himself. We went down to the floor, this time. My firebox was easy to find as it was still burning and illuminated the whole pit, up t
o a point. As I reached down to pick it up, Hoscoe said, “Wait a minute.” He got low to the floor, then on his hands and knees, and he had that seriously intent look on his face.

  I got down with him and whispered, “What is it Hoscoe, what am I missing?”

  He paused, then with a smile he said, “That is just it … there’s nothing to miss.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look … there is nothing here. It is perfectly clean. There are no packrats nest, no bones of creatures who may have fallen in and were trapped, no debris of any kind or even dust.”

  Hoscoe picked up my firebox, examined it and said, “Nice gift.” Stepping back against the wall, we noticed a spiral type design on the floor. Looking to the runes, they were almost exactly seven feet from the floor. Twelve of them were perfectly spaced out around the wall, a thirteenth one was centered in the floor. Thinking about the alignment outside, I looked up and placed myself on the compass. The one on the floor was facing south. ‘Thirteen,’ I thought. Scrutinizing the room, out loud I figured, “The room must be exactly thirteen feet across each side.”

  “And from the floor to lip is another thirteen feet,” added Hoscoe. We were on the same train of thought. What ancient group based their culture on the numbers five, ten, thirteen and thirty-nine?”

  “The D’Rhaotna Ieshintow, Followers of the Dark Path,” I answered, “Kicked out from the original Elvin Council, builders of Xibalba …” I was thinking, “… and often called the Drow, or Dark Elves. But didn’t they disappear long ago?”

  “That is the theory. But those who call them Dark Elves generally construe they are indeed dark in color. The Analects of Puhtnam Jai warn that the D’Rhaotna Ieshintow are often seen as creatures of beauty, with hair of gold or silver, which actually refers to a bright to platinum blonde color. Only sometimes is their hair black or dingy orange-red. More often than not, they have a pale skin tone with commonly brown to rough blonde hair. It is their soul and intent, which render them the dark definement.