Everran's Bane

by Kelso, Sylvia

  Ragnor called in the rags of a whisper to a staring Quarreder, “Catch t’warp!” The crew collapsed where they sat. The white-coated dripping ship finally fell still. And Beryx, who had been baling in the thick of it with his right arm anchored over a thwart, got out of the bilge in the scraps of his crimson cloak, looked over to Ragnor, and quietly shook his head.

  Ragnor grinned back, slumped over the steering oar, a frosted snowman with wine-red eyes. “Wanna say anything,” he whispered, “use that bard of yours. He’s not too bad.”

  Chapter VI

  Would you credit that, after Ragnor and his Haxyx rowed their hearts out to get us through the gale, we sat for six priceless hours while the Tistyr commander signaled Heshruan to be sure we were safe to admit? Quarred is permanently panicky about its border isthmus. Ridiculous, because, as Ragnor says, “If I did come, there’s three hundred miles of coast to beach on. Why would I damn well walk?”

  The clearance came at dusk. We hove the gold on a packhorse and ourselves on our beasts. Beryx lifted a hand to Beraza’s blur on the inky water, and said evenly, “Ride.”

  I am unlikely to forget that ride. Clear through the night, steering by the stars, up over Heshruan Slief till a huge ember-red dawn found me flogging the packhorse and Beryx flogging himself. I made him rest an hour by lying down and refusing to move. “And if you kick me, I’ll make a song of it.” The packhorse lay down in the absolute height of noon, the whole Slief aquake in the heat and our mouths too dry to hear ourselves curse. We split the gold, turned the horse loose, and rode in search of a steading, which took all afternoon.

  They were lavishly kind: fresh packhorse, food and drink, demands that we sleep. Beryx looked at the western sky. In a lilac dusk the new moon hung, slim and cruel as a sliver of steel. He said, “Can’t,” in a whisper, and tottered out to his horse.

  Only image-shards remain of that night. Flogging my innocent beast for slowing while I slept. A servant’s arm around me when I woke. Beryx swaying drunkenly, chin on chest, reins knotted round wrist, against a sheaf of stars. Falling off in a wide red cloudless dawn, pulling Beryx after me, insisting, groggy but adamant, “New moon come. No use get there dead.”

  Woken with a vile headache, drenched in sweat by the implacable sun, I recall watering the horses in somebody’s earth-tank. Riding on. The Helkents rising higher and higher, a red rampart in the east, and at last the road up to where Quarred and Everran meet. Staggering into the border-post to meet soldiers whose determination ran to drawn swords. Quarred border was closed for the night.

  Perhaps it was fortunate, if only for the sake of this song. We slept on the border-post floor. Four, how I slept. As the first sun dyed the Lynghyrne, we were eating stale bread as we climbed to the saddle of the pass.

  Thank the Four that Everran does not bother to ward its march. The saddle topped and Bryve Elond engulfed us, a long trough of silvery leaves over twisted stumpy black trunks, our own elonds at last, our own red mountains reared above. Everran, tenuous fawn, filled the V ahead. Beryx looked up, a stick man on a starven horse, and an immense golden-crowned indigo-shadowed thunderhead lit his dreamy smile.

  Then he straightened with a jerk. A shape had plummeted from the cloud, so high it was toy-like, a mere blotted silhouette, but one you would never mistake. Four-legged, serpent-backed, winged with sails, trailing a sting of tail.

  Next instant Beryx was by the packhorse, snatching the halter as he ripped out words. “Ride! You left, you right. Harran, back down the pass. If it chases you, jump off the horse.” The servants fled. He tore madly at the pack bag and I forced my muscles to slide me down, drive me round to the other side.

  He snarled, “Get out! Go!” My fingers shook as I whipped the pack off, tore at the buckles, he ran a few feet and tumbled the gold onto the ground, I copied without knowing why, he slapped his horse savagely on the rump and as it snorted away he snarled again, “You raving idiot—go!” I hit my own horse across the nose—and then it was too late.

  Hawge’s circles had grown faster and faster, lower, smaller, tremendous piston wingbeats expressing more than simple rage. Then fire shot from its nostrils and lashed along the ground. The grass ignited, the elonds went up in fiery fusillades. We and the horses and servants were yarded, walled in rails of flame.

  Beryx took five paces back from the gold. I found myself at his shoulder. The dragon thundered round its trap, braked with a slam, spun and dropped, right in front of us.

  This time it did not waddle. It came like a stalking cat, chin on the ground, spine sunk between the shoulders and then arching up, eyes like burning phosphorus. Only this back rose thirty feet high, the tail that lashed behind covered fifty feet in a sweep, and even the ripple of those huge shoulders was lost behind the lamps of eyes.

  Straight over the fire they looked. Straight through the fire they came. They were brighter than the flames. They were bigger than the flames. They were opening, widening, there was nothing left around them, nothing existed but facetted, sentient, thought-obliterating crystal green...

  A clear, hard, human voice said, “I have brought your gold.”

  My sight cleared with a pop. Hawge was right on top of us, crouched to spring, eyes on a level with mine. Beryx stood unflinching, head up, looking straight back—only later did I remember it—into that deadly gaze.

  Hawge snorted. Red-hot derision does not cover it. Flames struck the ground, ricocheted and shot twenty feet in the air.

  its breath was fire ripping through helliens,

  Beryx spoke clearly, precisely. “I can get it back.”

  Hawge hissed: the cut of a giant whip.

  “Give me,” Beryx persisted, clearly, steadily, still not looking away, “five days.”

  Hawge spat. Then the upper lip lifted in gigantic parody of a human sneer, and the eyes altered from fury to a vicious malevolence.

  it whispered,

  It leapt straight at and over us with a sixty-foot bound caught in the air by the first colossal wingbeat and driven upward on a roar like a wounded earthquake in its throes.

  I stood quaking, knees unstrung, mind a quag of unpent fright. Beryx turned around.

  “You fatuous oaf.” His voice came out a note high, with the fine tremor of a fraying string. “You raving imbecile. You utter incompetent! You risked the pair of us! You should have...” he broke off. Walked unsteadily to the roadside, and was violently and comprehensively sick.

  He had recovered by the time we caught the horses, whose panic made them nearly as dangerous as Hawge. I helped scoop up the gold. “Bring it along,” he said huskily, struggling astride his beast.

  I cried, “Where are you going?” and he looked down at me. His eyes were quite black, but this time it was not rage.

  “Saphar,” he said.

  * * * * *

  Down Ven Elond I just kept him in sight. I was seething with questions: Why had the maerian been unguarded, who could dare to rob a dragon’s den, how was it done, how did he escape, how could Beryx hope to find him if the dragon could not? I had recalled a thick red-crusted slash under Hawge’s right eye. I wanted to know how Beryx had looked in those eyes and not been paralyzed like a mouse, how their conversation had jumped so impossibly and what steps were missed and how Saphar came into it. Aslash, I thought in forlorn hope. Aslash will know.

  In Aslash square Beryx slid down, ignored cries, greetings, questions, told the air, “Get me another horse,” and walked straight, as by willpower, toward the governor’s house. The governor met him halfway, his soldier’s aplomb reduced to a frightened mask.

  Beryx whispered, “How?”

  “Last month the gold ran out. General’s sent messages for you, sir—two, three times a day. The dragon flew two days ago. Came back yesterday. A terrible noise... like the Helkents had fallen down. It flew off. So high we lost touch—”

  “Saphar?”

  Beryx was just au
dible. The governor’s voice shook.

  “Sir, no one’s been able to raise them since... the dragon flew.”

  Beryx turned away. In death itself he will not look like that. The governor caught his arm. “Sir, for the Four’s sake, I’ll send scouts, messengers, you can’t go on like—”

  Beryx freed himself as if unconscious of it. “Horse,” he said to the ground. “Now.”

  Aslash signaled ahead. We had relays at Khatmel, Tirkeld, Asvelos, we rode in two-thirds of a day what I had managed in two. I covered the last miles neither asleep nor awake, a pair of legs attached to a horse. Whatever sustained Beryx, it was not flesh and blood.

  The road dipped, rose, dipped, rose a last time and slid down to Azilien. Our horseshoes thumped on the verge, clattered on the paving. I did not want to think why they were so loud, any more than I wanted to look up.

  Beryx rode onto the bridge. Drew rein: and slowly, so slowly, lifted his eyes.

  Like the Perfumed Vale, Saphar had been slashed with fire. Smoke still wreathed feebly about its terraces, but it did not conceal the huge welts of ruin that crisscrossed the city, wider than houses, slashing in rubble and embers across streets, ripping contemptuously through walls, burning up chains of thatch, and reducing major buildings to heaps of fallen stone. People moved among the ruins, slowly, aimlessly, in the uncanny quiet. Some looked at me, and looked away: not in rejection but in blank disinterest.

  I heard Beryx take a slow, deep breath. I knew where his eyes were. I had looked already, and the heart was ice in my breast.

  The palace had taken the full brunt of Hawge’s wrath. Most of it was roofless, much of it had burnt. Every tower was a truncated heap. A plume of smoke trailed from the Treasury. I knew how the gardens would look. Crazy fragments of wood, fabric, stone, had been strewn broadcast under the impact of the blows. Hawge must have used its tail, over and over, with the most deliberate malice, a child smashing another’s dearest toy. What crowned Saphar was not a builder’s gay extravaganza, but a trashy wreck.

  I think we walked up through the town. I know we walked under Berrian’s arch, for it was intact. Tugging and kicking and clambering over the rubble in the gatehouse, I could feel that eye, a mute, burning indictment on my back.

  Beryx went straight to the queen’s rooms. They were silent, a hideous tangle of crumpled wood. He searched quickly, efficiently, you would think rationally, unless you saw his eyes. I trailed like a shadow, with as much mind of my own.

  He did not bother with his own rooms, any more than he had with Inyx’s tower. After one cursory glance at the Treasury, he turned to the Asterne steps.

  There are a hundred and fifty, ascending the pinnacle that makes a stempost at the plateau’s eastern end. Some royal builder had planed and smoothed it into a tower, with guard rooms delved just below the circular summit where the mirror signalers watch. Some king, perhaps the tower-maker, crowned it with a little rotunda, six marble columns under a circle of peaked roof to shelter Asterne’s silver wind-bells, designed to make music from the play of Air.

  The rotunda had been smashed to smithereens. The mirror-signal unit was in ruins. A couple of morvallin fled yarking as our heads appeared: I know now why soldiers loathe them with such deadly hate. As I eyed a long smear of blood over the southern parapet I heard Beryx grunt.

  Inyx lay under the western wall. He must have been struck by the tail, then clawed. What was left lay on its face, a bloody sword by the limp right hand, the wide desert-fighter’s shoulders still clad in a rag of mail. This time he would not trouble me with ghosts.

  I grew aware that Beryx was speaking, in a remote, numbed voice.

  “He was waiting for the message. From Aslash. He would have been sure I’d come—”

  His voice broke. He looked down. Then he went on, in the same tone, but now on a note of valediction.

  “At least he used the sword.”

  We walked back to the stairs. The guard-room door was ajar. In passing he gave it a shove, glanced in, and spun in his stride.

  Sellithar was under the table, against the rear wall: huddled like an embryo. The folds of blue silk had caught his eye. She yielded to our touch, as a wooden doll’s limbs assume a position, and hold.

  Beryx looked at her with those black eyes empty of all but perception. But then he touched her cheek and said gently, “Sellithar.”

  She blinked. Slowly, her eyes came into focus. She saw me. The woodenness broke and with a great sob she hurled herself into my arms.

  She cried dry-eyed, enormous racking sobs. I do not know what I did. I loved her, had thought her dead, and against all reason had her restored. What Beryx saw, or felt at her choice of comforter, hardly mattered at all.

  Presently, between the sobs, came words.

  “We saw it coming... He brought me up here. On the steps. He said, ‘When it sees us, we’ll run. You run in there.’”

  I could look at Beryx then. He was listening with that same intent detachment. Sounding quite calm, he said, “He knew it would follow him. He must have meant to get in one good cut... I wonder why he missed?”

  “He didn’t.” I recalled that red-crusted slash under the insect eye. When I told him, he nodded slowly, equably. “Good.” Then the pupils contracted and his eyes filled with a laughter green and cold and cruel as Hawge’s own. “I’m glad,” he said, “he managed that.”

  He turned away. “Bring her down, Harran. We’ve a lot to do.”

  “Search for the maerian?” The mere thought appalled me.

  “I never meant to search for it,” he answered calmly. “I wanted five days for evacuation. Four should be enough.”

  Just before he left the door I regained my wits. “Wh-where are we going?” I managed. And he glanced back in surprise.

  “Maer Selloth,” he said. “There’s nowhere else.”

  Saphar was less prostrate than it seemed. Kyvan emerged from the palace rubble with prayers on his lips and a fresh crimson cloak over his arm, there were five or six rational counselors. Inyx had sent the entire mirror-signal watch down from Asterne, and using his souvenir unit they restored the city’s tongue that day. Best of all, Morran met us at the gate-arch, announcing composedly, “Five hundred of the Guard fit and reported for duty, sir. We’ve been fighting fires.”

  A lord’s wife with a whole house took charge of Sellithar. “I know what she needs, poor lamb.” Beryx set up his quarters on the market’s intact side, and with a harper for aide plunged into the task of uprooting a court, relocating a government, and moving lock, stock, and barrel out of a ruined city with zombies for half its inhabitants.

  The details were endless: the Holym cattle, the Quarred gold, the remnant of the oil, the coming vintage, refugees, the dragon, the treasury, the court, the Army, communications, word to Maer Selloth... He cut through it like a knife, cold and tireless. On the fourth morning we rode out behind Sellithar’s horse litter, leaving a post of signalers and a gallant handful of council, lords, guildsmen, and soldiers behind. Ahead of us the rest of Saphar streamed on foot, horse, and carriage down the southern road.

  * * * * *

  Tirs had taken few Stiriand refugees and less damage from Hawge. Its long foothills are poor toward Bryve Elond, but eastward are fertile grain valleys, and Everran’s orchards. Countless songs praise the Tirien apple-buds that blow in white and blush-pink clouds against the red Helkent rock and the blue spring sky. It was less pretty in autumn, with the poor land dull yellow and fawn and the rocks showing through while the storms swept north to soak us in steady succession, but the Azilien valley is charming, a tiny clear river that chuckles below green norgal and finlythe and the odd rivannon, while iron crags of rust and vermilion thrust steadily higher above.

  Maer Selloth is a stronghold, set atop a mountain knee above Azilien’s source, a red wall girdled about the hill summit with the keep lowering atop. At its back is Everran’s only border post: Bryve Tirien, giving on the gorge where the Mellennor heads. Both Quarred and Estar h
ave an interest in that pass, and have not been above using it. It was in my mind that Beryx might mean to use it too.

  I knew he would feel Saphar’s ruin as a failed trust, as piercing to the king as the manner of Inyx’s death had been to the comrade and friend. He never spoke of that. Only, as we rode up to Maer Selloth, I saw him lift his eyes to the citadel, intact, undefeated, with a yearning that held pain and shame and grief. Then he said quietly, “Harran, when you have time... Inyx. Could you make—a song?”

  I was grateful that there were several songs to make in Maer Selloth. The town is small and primitive, grossly overcrowded, there was friction with the people who feared, if they did not say it, that we would bring the dragon on them. Another hearthbard served there, and no Resh lord is happy when his king descends on him, even if that king is his son-in-law. Especially a lord like Tenevel, when he is less subject than ally, and the king is in exile, or what might be seen as outright flight.

  Tenevel was courteous enough. He took in Saphar’s folk readily if not warmly, he met Beryx on his threshold with a grave, reserved smile: a dark man—Sellithar favors her mother—with a Tiriann’s whippy build and ruler’s decision in an alert hunter’s eye. But ruling had taught him ruthlessness as well.

  Hawge returned to complete Saphar’s ruin, expelling the garrison to Asleax on the Maer Selloth road, leveling the very walls, before it went to gorge on Holym cattle and gloat over Ragnor’s gold. Nobody thought that would last. I consoled myself with Sellithar’s regained color, thawed numbness, and a gaiety I rarely saw in Saphar, and if I was not making songs, escaped to the streets.

  I had sought more than weapons in the Confederacy. Whenever I met the rare bard with more lore than I, I would toss Stavan’s question into the talk. “What do you know of aedryx?” I would ask.

  Estarians had never heard of them. A Holymlase bard said they were wizards, but all long dead. A Quarred steading harper told me flatly that “aedryx is an old word for towers—towers of guard—” and cited eight: Stiriand, Histhira, Tirien, Hazghend, Tyrwash, Berfylghja, Havos, and Heagian.