Everran's Bane

by Kelso, Sylvia

  Asc was still quaking. I managed to say, “What was it... anyway?”

  “Ulfann,” answered a quiet, cool voice in the dark. “A big pack, by the sound.” And the night was only darkness, the ghosts’ sobbing the call of feral dogs. “Don’t worry, Asc.” For a moment the coolness held contained, deadly rage. “If they’re hunting anything, it’ll be the dragon’s scraps.”

  Inyx came in at once, in something very like relief. “Horse here you should see. Staked in the coronet.”

  The king moved away. I heard that steely reassurance applied at another fire. Asc did not move. When I thought he could take it, I murmured, “What did you think it was?”

  He did not answer for a long time. When he spoke, the abruptness said his courage had not yet healed. He said, “Lossian’s hounds.”

  “Oh.” There are scores of songs, reserved for the evening’s end, about the Stiriann Hunter and his bloodless pack that course men’s souls. They say that a Stiriann who hears them calling is doomed to join their quarry before the next new moon.

  “But,” I tried to steady him, “the general was right. You’re from Gebria. They hunt Stirianns.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Why should they call for you before—anyone else?”

  Asc turned away, bringing his face to the distant firelight. It was calm now, composure regained. A man looking open-eyed upon his fate.

  “Not me,” he said very quietly. “All of us.”

  * * * * *

  We saddled up in a drizzle coming down in slow gray showers from the north, dulling the Slief, shining thinly on horse-rumps and helmets, oiling sarissa blades, blanching everything. Only Beryx’s green eyes seemed to brighten in that pallid light. When I rode up to the banner, they shone beneath his sodden plume, and he gave me a hunter’s smile. “Just,” he said, shaking off a shower of raindrops, “what we want.”

  The rain shortened horizons. The sky was low too, hiding any trace of smoke or change in light. Almost without warning, the Slief ended and we were on the brink of a precipice, with the Perfumed Vale at our feet.

  Deve Astar is a gorge, little longer than a mile, where the Kelf drops from the uplands into Gebria’s arid plains and flows to join the manifold channels of Kemreswash, thence to vanish in the insatiable Hethrian sands. The water comes down in a cascade famed for its roof of rainbows and the dazzling white of its froth against the luxuriant greens below, a vision to match the beauty of Deve Astar’s air, an invisible paradise.

  The forest is artificial, lovingly planted and tended, with every scented tree in Everran among its stock. The topmost terraces bear flowering helliens, with white, orange, scarlet, and magenta blossoms whose honey inebriates birds. Next come the keerphars, orchid-shaped pink and purple blossoms whose dry, delicate perfume enhances the helliens’ sweet. Below are twisted rust-red yeltaths, shrubby cennaphars, and norgals whose long green leaves droop about papery white trunks, all mingling honey scents with the torch-pines’ aromatic white flowers. At the waterside, the sellothahr’s snow-white, gold-hearted blossoms spread their spring morning smell, and along the gorge flanks stand acre upon acre of rivannons whose fragile brown and yellow sprays breathe an incense to ravish Air himself.

  Tucked in coigns of the terraces lie foresters’ huts and perfumeries, innumerable beehives, and cabins for travelers who come from as far as Estar, less to see than to breathe. The most famous song of the great harper Norhis calls Deve Astar a giant agate: outside are the rust-and-honey bands of the cliffs, then the forest’s variegated greens, deepening to the seam of marble-white froth at the gorge’s heart.

  A shower was passing as we reached the crest. The distant rumor of the cascade, a breath of diluted perfume, floated up. Slowly the farther scarp emerged, glistening sleekly, bay and russet from the wet. Then the rain’s wings lifted from the Vale beneath.

  Inyx stiffened as if struck. Errith let out a winded grunt. Thrim’s was more like a moan. I heard it travel down the column behind us as one by one they reached the prospect of the brink.

  Almost from our feet a lane of felled trunks and broken limbs and dying leaves ran away downhill, scored clean across the vale as if some brutal engineer had been clearing a road. The river was choked: as the cascade poured down, heedless, insentient, the water had backed up to inundate the vale below. We could see its cold, turbid glint up where no water should be, but downstream from the dam was worse.

  Fire had been kindled there. It had been lashed across the forest like a whip, and the trees had burnt behind it, for most of our scented trees are rich in oil. Huge, charred weals ran hither and thither, with pitiful half-stripped skeletons upright in their desolation, some still smoking, some with a few rags of brown leaf or a couple of heart-breaking withered flowers. The helliens had suffered worst: along the upper terraces the fire had run from treetop to treetop, leaving unbroken courses of destruction: leafless, black. But burning helliens had fallen down upon the keerphars, and the keerphars had collapsed onto the norgals, whose papery bark had fired like candles, spreading the blaze to the yeltaths and the ardent cennaphars, thence to the rivannons, which had disintegrated upon the sappy sellothahr, breaking what would not burn. The subtle spectrum of greens, the soft flower tapestry, was all gone.

  A wind moved, and a sickening stink enveloped us: perfumes corroded by the reek of green burning wood and oil-bearing leaves, and the fetor of that burning untimely quenched.

  I found my vision had blurred. My throat was thick with tears. I too had cherished the Perfumed Vale, if only in others’ songs. One day, I had promised myself, I would come there and make a song of my own. When I was at the height of my powers.

  When my hearing returned, men were swearing and mourning all round me. Not loudly, but with the anguish of a hurt too deep for noise. Then, as the first brunt of the blow passed, it became fuel for rage. Everywhere they gathered their reins, clenched their sarissa butts, and looked toward the king.

  So far as I remember, Beryx had not made a sound. I do not think he so much as clenched a fist. He was sitting quite motionless. Except that his head was turning, a slight, deadly movement, as his eyes quartered the vale. This, I remember thinking, is a king. No raving, no lamentation: all feeling kept to power the revenge.

  Then he turned his head.

  His eyes were quite black. The pupils must have dilated until the irises completely vanished, and as he looked at me I covered my own eyes, for that blackness was more blinding than the sun.

  When my sight cleared, he was speaking to Inyx, in a soft, impersonal, terrifying voice I had never heard before.

  “There is nothing to eat. Nowhere to lair. It will not have stayed. How far to Astarien?” Inyx, looking almost scared, jerked his chin upstream and muttered, “Ten miles.” Pulling his horse round, Beryx said with the same glacial ferocity, “Come on, then, you clodhoppers. Ride.”

  The way to Astarien is mostly footpaths, which was fortunate for the horses, for otherwise Beryx would have foundered them. As it was, we slid and swore and skidded along in peril of our necks, with the king up and down the column like quicksilver: saying little, but making that little cut deep as a knife.

  Around noon we toiled up a last ridge, and cross-wise beneath us opened a wide valley whose mouth was shut by the thick green band of timber along the Kelf. Stands of silver-gray tarsal and black-barked elonds scattered the valley undulations, folding up to a silver bezel set above a gray ring-wall. Astarien’s lookout tower.

  Beryx let out his breath. Inyx let out a grunt.

  The valley was thick with trails of ants. From all ways they converged upon Astarien, gray, brown, and colored ants, with the blobs of cattle, horses, oxcarts, and every other sort of conveyance from palanquins to wheelbarrows in their midst. Inyx said tersely, “Evacuation. Town’ll be out of its head.” Beryx retorted, “There’s a governor,” and started his horse.

  But half a mile from the town he too was riding at a walk, and on the rise to the gates he had to admit defeat. “Inyx!” he bel
lowed above the bawling, yelling, squawking, and yammering as a mob of cattle engulfed us, inextricably tangled with a flock of irate geese. “Halt—column!” He raised his voice a notch. “First pentarchy... follow me!”

  Astarien was worse. The gates were jammed with stray stock and fugitives’ paraphernalia, while citizens, refugees, and a frantic garrison churned wildly through the streets, and when Asc and Errith literally fought our way into the governor’s residence, we found a plump bald provincial on the brink of lunacy.

  “No-no-no!” he shrieked as Beryx knocked the door open upon a snowstorm of papers and hysterical suppliants. “No more! Throw them out!” And wheeling to repel the door guard, I was struck dumb to find the king consumed with mirth.

  “Really, Gerrar!” his clear voice cut the racket, crisp, winged with authority, intensely amused. “Including me?”

  Gerrar gaped. Then he gasped, gulped, and nearly burst into tears. Beryx held up an embrace aimed somewhere about his knees.

  “I never thought,” he remarked as Gerrar subsided, “when I ordered an evacuation, that it would prove quite so... turbulent.”

  Gerrar clawed the air for words. “Lord, lord, if you only knew—seven days it’s gone on and nowhere to put them and we can’t raise Kelflase and Sarras said the dragon was headed here and I’ve nothing to fight it with and—I can’t stop them, I can’t house them, I can’t even feed them and now the dragon’s in my Resh and—and—and I don’t know what to do!”

  “First, sit down.” Beryx backed him to a chair. “Then forget the refugees. Then think about the dragon. Is it this side the Kelf?”

  Flopping into the chair, Gerrar mopped at his brow, and presently assembled a reply.

  “Last word was this morning. Coed Wrock . Saw the neighbor’s steading burn and ran for their lives. Coed Wrock—” his face knotted with the struggle to recall knowledge basic as his name. “Coed Wrock is... just across the Kelf.”

  “Good.” Astounded, I saw Beryx was smiling again: a blade-like smile worlds away from mirth. As Gerrar’s jaw dropped, he put a hand on the plump shoulder. “Now forget the dragon too. Just think of someone smart enough to take the king’s authority and picket three hundred horses. And then tell me his name.”

  It proved to be the garrison lieutenant. He had no fresh news, but once extricated and undistracted he collared some farmers and fairly ran them out to the task. As we rode up to our beleaguered column, Beryx gave a little sigh, and there was a kind of gaiety in his eyes.

  “Right, lads!” he called, shouldering past a wheelbarrow load of fowls and two collided ox-carts. “You can get dressed. We’re off!”

  * * * * *

  The men marched in a mood wild as Beryx’s. As they forged through the refugees still clogging our track there were extravagant jests at escape from the horses, extravagant grumbles at the bull-hide armor’s weight, extravagant boasts of the dragon’s doom. Beryx made them soak each other in the Kelf’s shallow fords, which doubled the complaints. Then he formed them in a hollow square with archers and banner in the midst, and after that, to me, the jests rang jarringly false. For as he called the Advance, I saw the high tawny skyline of Astarien’s Slief was limned not against gray rain clouds, but on a bleak blue sky rimed with smoke.

  I reassessed the men around me. They moved solidly, ponderously, thick bone and muscle cased in each sodden carapace, the sarissas swinging with the even ripple of a long distance march, yet now I could read the tension in each familiar face. Perhaps, I thought, the joking was a thing they could not help.

  Beryx alone had retained his horse. Presently he called back, “Harran! Why don’t you help these clumpers along?”

  So it was the rhythm of an old marching song, older perhaps than Berrian, which swung us up the rutted track to the water-blackened, dust-yellow rock divide that names Coed Wrock. Watershed Farm. And it was upon that rhythm that we topped the crest, and a wide bowl of devastation opened beneath us about two fountains of strong black smoke.

  Beryx called the Halt. Inyx went forward to his horse. I heard scraps of talk. “New smoke”... “must be here”... “Where is it, then?”

  The valley was wide, strewn with outcrops of house-sized granite boulders, scattered with thick stands of whippy upland norgal and writhen black ensal trees among acres and acres of scorched, smoldering grass. In all that desolation only the smoke and a black cloud of morvallin moved.

  Inyx was still talking. Beryx shrugged. Inyx’s voice rose. “. . . daft, I tell you—dismount them and not yourself! For the Lords’ love—” Beryx’s jerk of the chin superseded words.

  He came riding back, calm now, but with a mad, dancing brightness in his eye. “Ready, lads?” Perfect confidence in the smile. “Harper, take cover here. You can’t ‘appraise the men of valor’ with their sarissa butts knocking you in the teeth.”

  I opened my mouth, but he had already looked away. It was a command, not open to dispute.

  The ranks parted for me. Iphas gave me a tight grin. Thrim said, “Keep t’head down, harper.” Asc gripped my arm and said nothing at all.

  The Advance was passed. The square began to move. I sat up on a rock and watched, defiant, desolate. They reached the burnt ground. Black ash puffed up, I caught the muffled thump of boots, a cough, squeak of wet hide, clink of belts. Then, high, clear, merrily taunting, the trumpet sounded. Not a war-call. Beryx had offered the ultimate impudence: it was the hunter’s View Halloo.

  I waited, feeling my stomach squirm. The square was well distant now, on an open slope down to the gullies that veined the valley center, swaying and twisting as they held rank over the broken ground. Glaring round, I thought, almost desperately, Damn you, come out.

  The ridge-top beyond me moved. Ten or twelve boulders shifted like a waking snake. A knoll rippled, surged, became a crest of tree-length spines, a spur toppled into a fore-arm, a shoulder, a foot the size of a horse’s trunk, with nails and spurs longer than scythes. Then the whole rock line beyond left the ground and swung slowly, drowsily, sideways in midair. Hawge had lifted its head.

  Out in the valley came the small urgent ring of commands. The square stopped, shifting as the ranks faced outward on each side. The front line knelt, and the men behind them planted sarissa butts in the ground. It was a hedgehog, crouched for offensive defense.

  Languidly, Hawge lumbered afoot. Its back was to me, so I saw the scorpion sting on the dragging tail. The legs sprang lizard-like up from below the trunk and angled down again to the foot, which moved clumsily, hampered by its frightful claws, but the thighs were huge as trees. The back curved up under its crest of spines, as yet lying half erect, dipped to the serpentine neck, and rose again to the head. I still see that in my dreams.

  I suppose it most resembled a gigantic earless, hairless horse. The nostrils were monstrously oversized, and the orbital bones exaggerated so the eyes bulged out far beyond the head: pupilless eyes, multi-facetted, twirling like a fly’s. What struck me hardest was their color. Because like Beryx’s, they were green.

  It took a step, and the membranous wings rattled on its sides. It was mailed, as the lore says, iridescent black, gold, silver when it moved, glinting on its lean greyhound flanks. The tail twitched. Then, slothfully, with a volcano’s insolence, it yawned.

  The jaws seemed to open forever, clean back to the eyes, the lower one pointed and reptilian, both snagged with curving white fangs, clear against black stains on the serrated canine lips, the immense red tongue, and the gullet like a well. It sighed: a forge-like roar. A small jet of fire shot from its nostrils, and I caught the opened-grave stench of its breath.

  It seemed half-minded to lie down again, for the head swayed, low to the ground. The eyes revolved torpidly, a green corpse-light against the leathery skull. Then the trumpet rang again.

  Hawge sighed in answer, unfurled its wings, black leather mainsails, and leapt up into the air.

  The image of those massive flanks and shoulders’ wave-like ripple blinded me. I next saw i
t circling the valley, flying with a vulture’s labored indolence, twirling its eyes to study the men below.

  Whatever Beryx said, the words were inaudible. The huge burst of laughter which followed them was clear enough, and enough, it seemed, to pierce a dragon’s hide. Hawge dropped from its patrol and angled in at them, the mighty wings rowing lazily, the head almost skimming the ground.

  Nor did I know Beryx’s battle plan. I merely saw the sarissas on that side swing apart, heard Inyx’s whiplash, “Fire!” and Beryx yelling above him, “Take its eyes!”

  A flight of arrows flashed up and over with a second flight so close that it looked continuous. They were the Tiriann clothyard shafts that can pierce a shield and go on to kill an armored man, and for all its armed and armored might Hawge lifted over the square like a huge black morval that has mistaken its prey. A yell of, “Everran!” followed it from three hundred throats.

  The dragon snorted in reply. Fire shot out ahead and wreathed back along it sides. It flicked over on a wing, turned in its length with a breath-stopping agility, and this time there was no indolence in its flight.

  Inyx bellowed again. The sarissa points swung out and down as they do for the charge, and the ranks braced their shoulders for the shock.

  Hawge leveled out with tail brushing the ground. Just beyond spear length it reared up as a fighting cock does to use its spurs, beat the huge wings once to give the blow full impulse, and flung itself upon the spears.

  Sarissas broke like sticks, men tumbled head over heels, the square side collapsed like a broken dam. But with a scream of pain and wrath that nearly burst my eardrums, Hawge hurtled past the banner and sought refuge in the higher air.

  I vaguely recall them pulling each other upright, grabbing for weapons, laughing as they scrambled back into line amid Inyx’s brazen roars. I was myself leaping up and down in a manner most unbardlike, yelling taunts to the dragon that now circled fast and furiously, spouting fire as it stoked its rage. Great gouts of flame hung like lurid puffballs in the sky. Beryx was yelling as ferociously as Hawge had, while his horse plunged and gyrated, utterly terrified.