Kelven's Riddle Book Five

by Daniel Hylton

  Aram took stock of his supplies and released another measure of food from them to be distributed. The greenish tint to the ground that rolled westward from the road told him that spring was coming to the north of the world. The people would need something to plant as well as to eat.

  After crossing the river that flowed out of the long valley and passing the edge of the hills, the road angled westward, curving out into the flat lands. Six weeks into the march, they came to another broad river, coiling slowly to the west. Alvern informed him that this was, in fact, the Secesh, which at this distance from Vallenvale, was a substantial stream indeed. On the northern side of that mighty current, Aram gave the order to deploy yet again, for the fifth time since the march began.

  Perhaps it was the ever-increasing proximity to the dark stronghold of the enemy, but the army performed the necessary maneuvers with greater determination, skill, and success than ever. The grim lord of the world, who thus far had shown no inclination to leave his fortress and come south to face Aram and his army upon the open ground, came nearer with every step.

  Over the next week, the road rose up through a line of small, rocky hills that extended out into the flatlands before curving back on a tangent just east of due north, where it then descended toward another broad land, which was also greening up beneath the strengthening sun. The sky grew increasingly hazy and a slight odor of brimstone pervaded the air here. When the wind sharpened out of the dark heights to the north, the odor became amplified and the eyes stung.

  This, Aram abruptly realized, was the land of Bracken.

  One mid-day, he sat upon Thaniel atop a rise and gazed into the north. Along that dark horizon there were darker mountains jutting up. Even at this distance, he could see that two or three of those taller peaks spewed smoke into the sky. Try as he might, however, his eye could not resolve the tower he had last looked upon through the glass from the heights of Kelven’s mountain.

  Speaking to Thaniel, they went on, down the road where it curved out onto the plains once more, this time angling westward and then bending back until finally it straightened out and ran almost on perfect alignment into the north. Surprisingly, the people of the villages of Bracken had fared somewhat better than their fellow slaves further south. Though their stores had been raided, they had not been left in such dire circumstances as most of the others.

  Aram puzzled over this. Did the grim lord feel a measure of pity for those that had labored in his chains so much longer than any of his other servants? He dismissed that thought immediately. More likely, Manon had simply filled his storehouses to overflowing and found no need of further goods. Or perhaps, after all, he had decided that he might find use for a few healthy, living slaves sometime in the future.

  In any event, the people that clustered together in their fields or shrunk away from the road to watch the vast serpentine line of armed men wind past them and tramp off toward the north seemed in much better shape than those slaves further south.

  Before they had traversed half of Bracken, Marcus arrived to inform Aram that the oxcarts with the extra food were yet two weeks behind the army.

  “I’ll send Kipwing to summon Nikolus and Wamlak,” Aram told the High Prince. “The stores of the army are low, but the horses might serve to ferry the supplies from your oxcarts to those of Arthrus if it becomes necessary.”

  He squinted northward, peering into the smoky haze along the horizon. “You’ve done well, Marcus. As you can see, we are getting close to our destination.”

  Marcus looked to the north as well and then stared up into the increasingly murky sky. “What a miserable place this is.”

  Over the next week, as they began to leave Bracken behind, the road passed through another line of rocky hills that tumbled down out of the east to immerse themselves in the plains. Beyond those hills was yet another valley though not so wide as to render itself as a plain. It was just a valley through which flowed a small stream lined with willows and a few trees, all bearing the green of new leaves despite the thin sunshine that struggled to find its way through the smoke-filled overcast that grew heavier with every mile.

  As Thaniel crested the rise in the road, the hills began to fall away to his right and Aram looked into the north, beyond the valley to a horizon defined by much higher ground. Though hills clustered along its base, this higher ground was something else entirely. Dark and rocky, the height curved away in both directions, as if it might be the lip of a caldera.

  Aram raised his eyes further and gazed into the sooty sky above the curve of dark, rocky high ground.

  And there it was, rising up to pierce the clouds.

  The black serpent’s fang tower that was the dwelling place of the enemy of all free people.

  Manon’s lair.

  The dark tower of Morkendril.

  Swinging off the road, Aram brought Thaniel to a halt and studied the tower. Even through the haze, he could see that it was gleaming black. He could not see its base, only about the top half or two-thirds of the structure. Where it came into view, just above the horizon, it was already narrowing. As it soared into the firmament, it narrowed further, until ending far above in a fine, sharp point, like a needle.

  The shape was familiar to him – he’d viewed a much smaller version of this same structure far away to the south, in Panax.

  Duridia came up, boots tramping along the roadway. Boman and his mount moved out of line to come and stand next to Thaniel. The governor also studied the tower for a long moment and then glanced over at Aram. “That is where we are going, I assume.”

  Aram nodded. “Alvern reports that his forces have not moved from his valley, Governor.” He lifted one hand and indicated the high ground to their front. “If he refuses to come out and remains in place, we may find ourselves positioned to advantage atop or perhaps beyond that highest ridge. I will know better when I have been up there and examined the ground.”

  He glanced back at the sun, just now slipping down to the west, and then he turned to look forward along the road, which was altered in substance here where it approached the tower of the grim lord. From Cumberland north, it had been broad and smooth, composed of ancient stone set down long ago, in another age of the world.

  Here, the roadway was yet broad, but the surface was newer, smoother, and the pavement was made up of shining black rock. Aram pointed along it.

  “Let us reach the northern base of these hills by evening,” he told Boman. “The army may encamp along the roadway going back through the hills into Bracken. I will go ahead of you and stay the night between you and the stronghold of the enemy and send the wolves abroad among the hills. In the morning I will cross the small valley and climb to the top of that high ground and see how the ground lies before his tower, and if possible, how he has disposed his strength.”

  Boman nodded as he moved away to the road and rejoined his men. “I’ll stand pickets in a semi-circle to our front through the night,” he called back, to Aram’s approving nod.

  Aram spoke to Thaniel and the great horse surged ahead, making for the last remaining hills that rose between them and that place where the fate of the world would soon be decided. Leorg and Shingka left him to go east and gather Padrik, Goreg, and the rest of the wolves. Those people had gone northward in small bands through higher ground to the east, where food might be found for them. They had shadowed the long column for nearly two months; now they were to be gathered together in order to disperse them into the high ground ahead of the army.

  Aram slept in the saddle in the shelter of a rock outcropping just off the road near a small, tumbling stream, the waters of which were stained pale yellowish brown but which the horse nonetheless declared to be drinkable. The morning sun found him and Thaniel atop a rise, gazing back southward down the gleaming black surface of the road into the small valley, little more than a mile-wide, grassy swale through which a sizeable stream of slow-moving brackish water flowed from east to west. Down there, Boman and his troops from the southern plain
s were beginning to stir.

  He bent his thoughts to the sky. “Lord Alvern?”

  He listened for some time but there was no answer as the sun began to climb the sky to the east. Concern grew in him as the silence from the sky overhead lengthened.

  “Lord Alvern?”

  “Forgive me, my lord,” came the reply then. “We have been engaged in driving away Bezathog and his kin.”

  “Bezathog?”

  “He is the lord of vultures. He and his kind serve the enemy.”

  Aram frowned upward. “Have any of you suffered injury?”

  “None, my lord,” the eagle responded. “The vultures have been driven away, across the mountains to the east of the valley of the enemy. And Manon yet keeps his forces positioned close to his tower.”

  Aram’s frown deepened as he returned his gaze to earth. “Does he send no scouts toward us?”

  “No, my lord. He does not.”

  “Alright, Thaniel,” Aram said to the horse. “Let us go and see.”

  Thaniel turned northward and they descended and passed through the bottom of another small swale and followed the road up where it ran through a shallow cut into the higher ground beyond. The road curved gently this way and that to accommodate uneven places in the slopes of the hills that tumbled up toward the even higher ground that Aram had spied from the valley behind him. Viewed from up close, this highest ground was apparently indeed the lip of a large crater or rounded valley, for it curved gently away in both directions, gradually bending northward out of sight to either side.

  Finally, they came out of the hills onto a long, broad, fairly gentle slope that rose to the horizon.

  Ascending along one last smooth stretch of the gleaming black road they spied to their front where the road cut through this highest ground in a straight line and then bent down out of sight as it fell toward whatever lay beyond. Far away, through that cut, Aram could just make out the icy heights of distant mountains.

  They crested the slight rise in the road where it passed through the cut and Aram brought Thaniel to a halt.

  Immediately to his front, the road ran down a very gradual slope and out onto level ground.

  The valley of Morkendril lay spread out before him.

  At its heart lay a vast cluster of stone structures. These were comprised mostly of enormous concentric circles of interconnected huts that spread out from the base of the tower, separated by narrow streets. The distance too great for certainty, but to Aram’s eye it appeared that most of these huts looked to be of a size that would serve as the dwelling places of small groups of gray men or perhaps three or four lashers. Some buildings, however, especially on the outskirts of the city, were of much larger construct.

  Rising from the center of everything was the mighty tower. Aram was obliged to lean his head back as he peered upward in order to see the top of it, nearly lost in the haze far overhead. At its base, sweeping out from it on four sides, there were other, smaller towers, and while these were also round, they were squat, blunt, and topped with crenellated turrets. Each was connected to the main structure by strong heavily-built walls of black stone.

  The main tower, the seat of him who named himself Lord of the World, appeared to have sprung straight from the earth, smooth, gleaming, black, or maybe it had been punched up and through the skin of the earth, like the serpent’s fang it resembled. The odd thought came that perhaps it was the spike at the end of an impossibly huge dragon’s tail. For just a moment, Aram had a vision of a vast, heavy-bodied creature, inhabiting a deep warren in the barren ground, slumbering in the earth just beneath this desolate valley.

  He lowered his attention to the city at the tower’s base and then brought his gaze back along the road toward him.

  The distance was perhaps three miles from where the road gained the floor of the valley to where the stone structures of the city of the enemy began. Between where he and Thaniel stood and the stone huts of the city of Morkendril began there was nothing but barren and apparently gravelly ground. Then something else, near to the edge of the city, caught his eye. He leaned forward and peered toward the near side of the vast cluster of buildings.

  There was a dark line there, in the small of the distance, just at the edge of the buildings that might have been the vast ranks of an army, deployed to defend the city. If this was, in fact, true, his eye could not resolve it to his satisfaction. He sent the query skyward.

  “Yes,” Alvern replied, “the full forces of the grim lord are deployed at the very edge of the city.”

  “Do they move?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation before the eagle gave his response. “They do not.”

  Aram nodded to himself, satisfied. If Manon meant to meet him in battle, the grim lord was evidently content to do so at the very heart of his domain.

  He glanced over at the sun climbing the morning and then bent his thoughts skyward once again. “Tell Boman that his troops are to remove toward the far side of the small valley, where they will spread out into the hills and encamp,” he instructed Alvern. “This will make room for Berezan to move through and camp next to the hills.

  “In fact, I want as much of the army as is possible to come up and encamp in that valley which will serve as our base of operations. Tell Boman that the water is good, despite its appearance. Send word that I want him and the other commanders to join me here upon this ridge as soon as they may – as soon as their troops are moving forward.”

  “I will instruct them, my lord.”

  While he waited, Aram rode out onto the slope to study the ground. The top of the ridge that had seemed to be quite defined when he had viewed it from the valley to the south and consequently had appeared to possess a sharp-edged summit, did not. It was, in fact, rather broad at the top where it crested and sloped away rather gently into the valley.

  Aram found this fact somewhat disappointing. He had hoped to position his troops upon advantageous earth where the enemy – if they could be coaxed to attack – would be obliged to assault him up a steep grade.

  And he meant to lure them out if at all possible. He had no intention of confronting the power of Manon upon the open floor of the valley.

  To their left, along the top of the ridge to the west, a mile or so from where they stood, the slope steepened as it bent back to the north beneath the flanks of a great mountain that rose there. The lower slopes of this mountain, from whose top a tendril of smoke rose into the sky, knifed down through the slope and onto the valley floor in a jumble of jagged, impassable rockslides, effectively cutting off the gentle ridge. Aram noted this harsh ground with satisfaction. He would anchor his greenest flank, Kavnaugh Berezan’s Elamites, there, up against the ragged slopes of that mountain.

  He looked the other way, to his right toward the east, and felt the sharp pang of dismay.

  That way, the top of the ridge over which the road passed before spilling into the valley continued on around in a gradual swing to the north; its slopes remaining fairly constant in height and pitch. But less than a mile from where the road cut through the ridge, where he and Thaniel now stood, there was obvious difficulty. Aram had come to believe that the roadway would be very near the center of his lines, if not the exact center.

  But where to the west the ground gave him a place to anchor that wing of his army, to the east the terrain was not so charitable. While the main ridge that comprised the crater rim continued curving on around into the north, becoming gradually and then severely more steep and jagged, there was a small secondary ridge that jutted out into the valley, ending about a hundred yards further on in a small hillock.

  If he placed his right flank upon the main ridge, his lines would extend beyond the point where this small secondary ridge jutted out, giving the enemy an avenue of attack into that wing of his army.

  Rising at the end of the secondary ridge and expanding out for perhaps another hundred yards into the valley, the rounded hill defined the extent of that ridge as it bent into the valley.
The top of this small hill was just about the same distance from the roadway as was the place at the far end of his lines where his flank would be relatively secure, anchored beneath the rugged mountain on the west.

  Aram now knew – and his heart sank at the knowledge – just where Mallet and his small band of Wallensians would be deployed.

  He was bent forward in the saddle, studying the distant hill, pondering the lay of this troubling piece of ground, when the wolves flowed over the top of the ridge and came down to join him.

  “We are all here, master,” Leorg told him.

  Aram nodded. “Good.” He moved his arm indicating the surrounding hills to the rear of the ridge. “Patrol all this area while the army moves up,” he instructed them, and then looked both ways along the sloping ground. “Including this ground, especially during the dark hours, for this is where I hope to meet the enemy and I want to keep possession of it if at all possible.” He bent a severe gaze upon Leorg and all the rest of them. “Stay out of the valley. Alvern and his kin will watch that in daylight. Secure this slope but do not enter the valley floor. Patrol in groups of five or more,” he ordered. “I want no one moving alone in hostile country.”

  “Yes, master.”

  After the wolves moved away, Aram looked down at Thaniel. “Walk out to the top of that little hill there,” he said. “I want to see what may be done.”

  The horse began to move but spoke the question as he did so. “What may be done?” He asked.

  “In order to defend it,” Aram explained. “I cannot let the enemy gain possession of it and occupy it; he would split my right wing. If possible, I will have to anchor my right flank on its summit.” He went silent for a moment and then spoke low, as if to himself. “May the Maker help Mallet,” he muttered.

  The hill was far worse, logistically, than it had appeared from a distance. Rounding up at the end of the smaller secondary ridge where it extruded into the valley, the hill sloped away rather gently on all sides, including into a small canyon that the extrusion formed between the hillock and the main rim of the crater.