Redoubt

by Mercedes Lackey

  Insects. Lots of insects still. Some crickets. Lots of crackles and scuttles right under him, which probably would have been disturbing to someone who hadn’t spent most of his life sleeping in filthy, used, vermin-ridden straw every night. He hadn’t heard any of those insect noises by the river, but then the sound of the water had probably drowned it all out.

  He nodded off, and woke, fitfully, remembering to feed his little fire and enduring the empty ache that the silence in his head produced. Again and again, he agonized over the thought that his Mindspeech had been obliterated by whatever those assassins had done to him. It almost didn’t matter that he’d still be able to be a Herald without it—because what really mattered was not having Dallen with him anymore. Or, at least, not in the same way.

  But people go blind, and carry on. And deaf. It would be horrible, but—

  Would it be so “horrible” to just be . . . ordinary?

  Because ordinary people didn’t have Companions, never had that incredible surety of never being alone again. Ordinary people carried on, fell in love, muddled through, had their lives, even did incredible, heroic things . . .

  So maybe you shouldn’t feel so bad about just being ordinary now.

  On that unsettling thought, he slept again, and when he woke, just in time to blow his fire back to life before it died, it was dawn.

  * * *

  These were either extremely tall hills, or else very short mountains. The land wasn’t particularly prosperous either, from the look of it, which probably accounted for why he hadn’t seen any signs of people. The forest was thick down here in the valleys but quickly thinned out on the slopes, and you could see the stony bones of the land poking out through the thin soil near the top. Not good farming land, although he wondered what he would find if he ran into another stream and sifted through the gravel. These hills might well hold metals or sparklies.

  Again, another reason why he probably wasn’t seeing signs of people. Mines concentrated a lot of people on a small piece of property, and they needed to be on roads. Miners didn’t do much besides their jobs, which were backbreaking and difficult and didn’t leave them a lot of energy to waste.

  So you wouldn’t likely find miners out roaming the forest for fun.

  Assuming their masters would even allow them to get off the property in the first place. No telling how mines were run in Karse. Miners might be better off than in Valdemar, but given what he knew about Karse, probably not. In his limited experience, there weren’t a lot of happy mining collectives, where everyone shared and shared alike and no one was worked into exhaustion for the sake of a few rocks, even in Valdemar.

  The rain had indeed leached all of the bitter out of his acorn meal, and he munched that for a change from the cattail roots. Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the ground, watching for greens, even as he kept the sun at his right shoulder.

  And he was, at last, rewarded; in a patch of sun, dandelions grew thickly. He stopped then and there, sharpened a fallen branch for a digging stick, and took the time to get as many of the roots as he could. It was too bad that at this time of year the leaves were too bitter to eat, but now he had lunch, and maybe dinner too.

  And then, just as he was about to stop because the sun was almost overhead, a glint of something shiny and red among the leaves ahead made him dart forward—

  And nearly trip over the tangle of thin, prickly blackberry vines.

  The vines were thin, the foliage sparser than the ones he was used to. Possibly it was the thin soil. But there were berries hiding under those leaves, berries that nothing had wanted to fight the thorns for, and he ignored scratches to get on hands and knees, eating two for every one he harvested. He tucked the berries into a pouch of much cleaner cloth—the cloth that had held his acorn meal until he ate it all and had hung out in the rain all night. It was worth every scratch; the tart-sweetness of the berries nearly brought tears to his eyes, and he chewed the seeds carefully to get all the benefit out of them. He lost track of time as he foraged, getting food and drink in one, saving his precious water. It was only when he realized that the sun was well and truly over his left shoulder that he came to his senses and knew he’d been at this for well over a candlemark. Probably two.

  And now he was faced with a dilemma: find a place to make a shelter here and keep foraging until the berries were gone, or move on and try to find water?

  The berries were food and drink together. He wouldn’t have to search for water if he stayed here.

  But they would also attract other creatures. And he wouldn’t see the things that came for the berries at night until it was too late. Bears wouldn’t care about a few little blackberry thorns.

  He had no more cattail, but he did have dandelion root, acorn meal, and enough berries for another meal. He thought about hiding in a flimsy little shelter while a bear snuffled about outside. It was fall; bears wanted to eat to bulk up to sleep through the winter, and he wouldn’t be able to do much against a bear.

  Move on.

  With a sigh of regret, he gathered and stored a last handful, then took his scratched self out of the patch.

  * * *

  The woods of this valley were quiet; the trees were tall, but there was nothing but trunk down here near the ground. The undergrowth wasn’t as thick, except in places where the sun got past the leaf canopy, or places where saplings had managed to become trees. It was a lot easier making his way through here, but he had to be very careful to keep track of the sun. One more providential find of wood sorrel added to his provender, and at long last, the faint sound of trickling water rewarded his pauses to listen. It took him off his self-appointed path, going to the east, but he tracked it to its source in the side of the hill. It was either a very tiny spring or a seep, but there was enough there to refill his bottle and fill his cooking gourd, and he made a bit of a basin to collect more by damming the outflow with rocks in case the dripping ran dry in the night. Then, finally, he had a bit of luck as he hunted up and down that spot of steep hillside; he located a good place to spend the night. Not a cave, but a solid rock overhang, a place to build his fire out of danger of another storm and maybe get some shelter for himself. And, more to the point, it was a solid bit of stone and earth at his back, with nothing nearby to attract animals.

  By sunset he had a porridge of acorn meal and dandelion root cooking, was slowly munching his trefoil-shaped leaves and stems of sour sorrel, with his slightly squashed berries laid out to finish his meal. He listened carefully to the birds he could hear singing all around him, knowing they would be his first warning of anything coming that he couldn’t see. But as the little valley he was in darkened with shadow, they remained tranquil.

  He finished his sorrel, ate his lukewarm porridge straight from the pot, taking out the cooking stones and sucking them clean, then cleaning out every bit that was left in the gourd with his finger. He wished wistfully for salt. Or maybe some wild leek or onion. But . . . well, at least it was food, and he made sure to get every morsel. Only when he was sure he’d gotten the tiniest bit did he take the cooking gourd to the spring in the growing dusk and rinse it.

  He sat drowsing on his blanket, his back to the rock, after finishing his berries. He was tired, but not yet tired enough to actually sleep. Loneliness, a hundred fears, a thousand doubts plagued him and had to be put down one by one before he’d be able to rest. After a while what sorted through his mind to the top was that last thought he’d had before he slept.

  Would it be so very hard to be ordinary?

  It wasn’t as if he would ever be completely ordinary. He was still a Herald, no matter what happened; he would always have Dallen, and he would always have that special job to do that only Heralds could do. So maybe he should stop thinking of himself as somehow crippled without Dallen actively in his head.

  He’d managed to get himself f
ree without Dallen’s advice. He’d managed to survive this long in the wilderness, even though he hadn’t actually had the classes in doing so. It had been hard, but . . . the only horrible things were the fears, the doubts, and the loneliness. And most people had that sort of loneliness. It was only Heralds who didn’t—maybe some of the Healers, who had Mindspeaking or Empathy.

  Bear’s “ordinary.” So’s Amily.

  They didn’t seem miserable to him. Bear was really happy now, and since her operation, so was Amily.

  Aye, but they can’t miss what they never had . . . can they?

  Well . . . maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he ought to turn things around and try to look at it from their point of view. After all, they lived at the Collegium . . . and surely Bear, at least, after enduring all the scorn his father had heaped on his unGifted son, must at times long desperately for some form of Gift, even the slightest, if only to prove to his father that he was just as good as the rest of his brothers.

  And Amily . . . her father was the King’s Own. She’d grown up among Heralds. There must have been times when she would have done anything to have a Gift and be Chosen. Maybe . . . well, likely . . . there still were.

  But neither of them were bitter. Neither of them—at least as far as he knew—spent most of their time fretting after something they didn’t have.

  I want it back! howled part of him, the part of him that felt crippled and bereft without Dallen right with him.

  But if he couldn’t get it back?

  He wrestled with that problem, stared that possibility right in the face, so to speak, and reminded himself that just because he didn’t want something to happen, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t. Slowly, reluctantly, he came to the understanding that there was only one possible answer to that question.

  Then . . . I don’t get it back. I live with that. I do my best. And I figure out how to make everything work without it.

  Because every moment he wasted in fruitless railing and longing was going to be a moment he could be using to make things work, and every moment he wasted that way would be one less moment when he could be working toward being happy and enjoying what he had.

  That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to cry over it; he would. He knew he would. He was on the verge of it now. But he was not, by all the gods that were, going to let it ruin his life and the lives of everyone around him. Just as he would learn how to make things work if he were blinded, or lost a hand or a foot or anything else, he would learn how to make this work.

  He wouldn’t like it. There was no reason why he should. And he wouldn’t stop trying to get it back, either.

  But in the meantime, just as he wasn’t going to curl up in a ball and wail helplessly and die because he was stuck in the howling wilderness without equipment or food or proper training, he wasn’t going to do the same because he’d lost his Mindspeech.

  Fought my way through everything Cole Pieters threw at me. Fought my way through bein’ called a traitor. Gonna fight my way through this. I got Dallen, I got Amily, I got friends. I got a place I need to get back to. I got—

  Suddenly, the birds all stopped their go-to-bed sounds.

  All at once.

  A cold, frightened silence descended like a curtain over the dark forest; reflexively, Mags started to smother his fire. Then he thought better of it. Fire was a weapon. And if there was something out there nasty enough to make everything freeze in terror, he was going to need all the weapons he could get his hands on.

  Fortunately, he had everything he needed at hand to make a new one. Things that lurked in the dark and hunted in the dark generally didn’t like light, or fire. It was possible that fire wielded as a weapon would even keep a bear or a wolf at bay.

  He had his club; he also had another stout branch he had foraged to make a second. The dried grasses and pine needles he’d gathered to make up a bed, he now pulled by the handfuls out from under his blanket, and bound to the end of that branch, tightly, to make a torch. Then, with stone-ended club in one hand and unlit torch in the other, he waited, eyes straining fruitlessly to see what was out there in the darkness, what was moving among the trees.

  He took slow, quiet breaths, listening as hard as he could. The silence was so intense he could actually hear the trickle of water from the tiny spring. Whatever was out there, it wasn’t something that made noises pushing through the undergrowth.

  A strange, eerie cold crept over him. He shivered as an icy touch seemed to run down his spine. It wasn’t just imagination either; the temperature here really had plummeted in just a few heartbeats, because now his breath steamed out into the dark blue dusk in clouds.

  He couldn’t wait any longer. He thrust the end of his torch into his tiny fire, and as soon as it caught, he held it up like a barrier between himself and whatever it was that was in the growing dark.

  He might not have Mindspeech, but evidently it didn’t take Mindspeech to sense what was out there, because he could feel uncanny eyes on him. And it knew he was here too; it had known even without the torch or his little fire. It had sensed him and come a-hunting.

  It was waiting for something.

  It was like that thing that had been watching him—more inimical, more savage, but very like it.

  Demon?

  He’d read enough about the wars with Karse to know that the priests could call up demons—or, at least, what the Chroniclers called demons. The descriptions varied, and more than one had said that the things were only partly visible at best, but one thing they all agreed on. The Karsite demons were vicious and fully capable of ripping either a man’s body or his mind to ribbons.

  He squeezed himself into the smallest possible space he could, with as much rock around him as he could get.

  Was this why the Karsite captain had told his men that he didn’t want anyone venturing out of camp at night?

  Was this why they had obeyed him without a murmur?

  Did these things prowl the land at night, on the watch for the unwary, acting as some form of control to keep people within their homes after dark? That would certainly cut down on rebellion . . . and bandits.

  There was definitely something out there, something he couldn’t quite see, something that was just a ripple in the darkness. It hovered in the air, moving slowly, back and forth, in front of his shelter. Like a cat prowling back and forth in front of something that it has cornered but isn’t quite sure is prey. The ripple moved back and forth, and he moved the torch to follow it.

  The force of its regard was like a blast of icy air. He wanted to shake his head violently, but didn’t dare take his eyes off it. It felt as if he should be sensing something from it, yet was not. There should be something pressing against shields that were no longer there, but he couldn’t actually feel anything.

  Finally, it made a sound, a snarl that sounded exactly like the air being ripped into two. Evidently, it was frustrated too . . .

  It still couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether to attack or leave him alone. The temptation to shout at it was almost overwhelming, but he resisted. He didn’t want to do anything that might trigger an attack.

  The snarls stopped. That horrid silence descended again.

  But only for a moment.

  The air was split with the most unearthly, ghastly, terror-inducing howl that Mags had ever heard in his life. It turned his bones to water; it made him want to curl up and hide his head in his arms, it knotted his gut with fear and paralyzed his thoughts. The first howl was followed by a second, which was, somehow, even worse. From paralysis, his mind sprang into mindless, gibbering panic, and only the fact that it was between him and any path to escape kept him pinned here. If he’d had even the slightest chance of getting past it, he’d have bolted into the darkness.

  Silence again.

  He shivered, but
the torch seemed to be keeping it at bay for now, frail barrier that it was.

  Another snarl.

  The darker it got, oddly enough, the easier it was to see it—or, at least, see that odd patch where it was. It wasn’t so much formless as it was a sort of series of suggestions . . . not-quite shapes that hinted at limbs, a head.

  Those hints were as horrid as the howl had been; some were spidery, some were vaguely suggestive of a snake, some were . . . unholy meldings of a fistful of knives with a limb.

  It was the change in those suggestions of shape that warned him, the momentary drawing back—it lashed out at him, and he countered by thrusting the torch at it.

  It howled again, this time with pain, and went for him.

  He was in a fight for his life, and knew it. With torch and club he blocked and parried, struck back when he could, and tried above all to keep from being driven out of the scant shelter he had.

  The thing screamed, howled, and yowled in pain. He managed to strike it several times, and the feel of club or torch on flesh was solid enough. But it struck him just as many times, and its talons were razor-keen and icy as blades taken from a frozen river. They left behind a burning ache that slowed him a little for every strike, left slash wounds that, oddly, did not bleed.

  And worse than that, a strange lethargy was coming over him, emanating from those wounds.

  He fought it, but his vision was starting to blur, and he felt himself sagging back against the rock. He could barely hold the torch up . . .

  He saw the thing retreating a little to lick at its own wounds; saw a glimpse of a hell-red eye for a moment as it glared at him. Then it retreated further into whatever half-life it lived in, and he felt that it was watching him.

  Waiting.

  And why not? He was growing numb. He had to drop the club to hold the torch in both hands. In a moment, he would drop that, too, and then the dimming of the world would go to black, and he would . . .