by GJ Kelly
“The Ahk-Viell escaped,” Allazar protested.
“Pursuing elves through trees while being pursued by elves through trees is not the wisest course of action when outnumbered,” Gawain announced. “Besides, they’re well on their way to their friends in the south now.”
“Arr, an’ there’s forty o’ those.”
“Forty-two now in all, my friend,” Venderrian announced, deadpan.
“I know, I know Ven mate, I ain’t so dense as I’m ‘eavy, y’know!”
“Do we hold our course south, Longsword, and spring their trap?”
“No we bloody do not!” Gawain exclaimed. “Ride straight into the middle of a Toorsenspit sandwich, are you mad? We turn sharp southeast and deeper into Mornland, and hope to outflank them and slip by unnoticed. Hold our cour… you’re not become that Eldenbeard again are you?”
“No, I most certainly am not,” Allazar protested. “I simply wondered if your constant repetition of the late Captain Hass’ instructions to do what the enemy least expects might have seen us trotting along as if today’s calamity had not occurred.”
“Shows how little you know of the good Captain and his lessons. I rather think we’ve all had enough Arzenn Clenching for one day, don’t you?”
So they turned sharp southeast, and left the valley with its widow’s peak and three-blister hills behind them, and the dead on the ground where they fell. Gawain suspected that it might be some considerable time, or take some considerable persuasion, for Allazar to administer the Rites to fallen elves of Toorsen’s creed. Misty rain continued to waft over them on chill breezes, and Ognorm’s handkerchief didn’t stay dry for long.
“This course will add unwelcome time to our journey,” Allazar sighed while walking alongside the horses hours later. “And with less and less light in the day in the approach to the solstice, even more travelling time is lost.”
“All true,” Gawain agreed, “Though there’s not much we can do about it. Are you still fretful after the battle?”
“Fighting has never been agreeable to me, but I am not so naïve as to believe it is always avoidable. In the aftermath of such battle, brief as it may have been, there is the thrill of survival and the excitement of being alive though others strove so hard to end you. But later comes the sorrow and the misery and the futile wishing that it had not come to pass. At least for me.”
“For everyone not a monster I think,” Gawain admitted. “Though perhaps there is part monster in all of us. Some elden-creature, lurking within us and ready to rise when war and fighting summons it. The red mist is its realm. Sending it back into the shadows when it’s no longer needed, that is the part some find harder than others.”
They were perhaps twenty miles southeast of the battleground when the rise they crested revealed a small lake before them, blocking their path. The water was shallow and fresh, tiny ripples driven by breezes breaking the reflection of the darkening sky above.
“Dwarfspit, we’d only be halfway around before darkness falls,” Gawain protested.
“Trees yonder, melord,” Ognorm nodded towards a copse on higher ground to the east. “Might give us some shelter from the wind at least.”
“True enough. Ven?”
“I see nothing, miThal,” the elf ranger replied with a hint of sorrow in his voice. “Though as we have discovered, this means little.”
“Bah,” Gawain exclaimed. “The crystal armour simply makes them difficult to see at a distance, not invisible. Besides, you have many other qualities which make you a valuable companion on this venture. And if that crystal gubbins was any use at all, you wouldn’t have been able to warn us of their intended ambush as you did. Theirs was a nice try, but as they used to say at the Eastriding fête, nice tries win no pork pies.”
“Oh, I do like pork pies,” Ognorm sighed.
“Why did they say that, miThal?”
Gawain chuckled. “Ah, well, it was an old tradition there in the town at home. Every summer they would hold a fête, and there would be many games. From archery and arrow-throwing to toss-the-hoop and bob-the-apple, and the prize for the winner was a golden crispy-crusted fresh-baked pork pie. They were famous for their pork pies, there, in Eastriding, in Raheen.”
“Pork pie and a pint. What I wouldn’t give. Spose it’s too late to go back to that place in milady’s stories, melord, Fourfields, where they had all them pies?”
Gawain smiled. “Alas.”
They made camp in the shelter of winter-bare trees, and ate frak, and spoke more of pies, and thus kept at bay the memories of screaming elves and horses, and the forty-two elves and elfwizards lurking somewhere out there in the dark and bent on their destruction.
oOo
29. Caballum
On the first of December, according to the knots in Gawain’s string calendar, and in the morning four days after the battle of widow’s peak hill, Venderrian spotted a Condavian. It was circling high and well away to the northeast, and though the day was clear and face-numbingly cold, none but the ranger could see the spy in the sky. It was too far for Venderrian to ascertain whether it was the pitch black of Morloch’s making, or the grey-black of the Viell’s.
Gawain’s course had taken them across Mornland towards the principality’s coastline, and he estimated they were perhaps a day due south of the Castletown-Princetown line and as near as made no difference to the middle of Mornland’s narrow waist. To continue due south from their position would put them into the sea well to the north of Arrun’s northern capitol, Nordshear.
“Leg it for them trees, melord?” Ognorm asked quietly, nudging Gawain out of his visualising of the map he carried in his head.
“No,” he announced decisively. “We can’t hide in the trees for the rest of our lives, and Ven has said the bird is circling north. If we sprint now we might attract attention. We can’t see it with normal eyes, maybe it can’t see us. Let’s just keep going as we have been, with care for the horses. The rains last week have left the ground in the valleys soft, streams swollen, and the hills a little harder to climb.”
“Arr. Grass is good though, there’s that for ‘em at least?”
“Yes, Oggy, there’s that. The horses won’t starve on this journey.”
They continued on their way at a gentle trot, a pace they could maintain comfortably if the ground remained trustworthy enough.
“Morloch’s or the Toorseneth’s, Longsword?” Allazar asked when they were well underway.
“The Condavian? The Toorseneth’s. We’re a long way south of the Teeth now, and even if Morloch had dark wizards and Graken to spare, I doubt he’d bother wasting such resources simply to hurl another tantrum our way. It’s amusing though, to think of it.”
“Amusing?”
“Yes. Morloch in his tower, surrounded by the ruins of his twisted aspirations, suddenly thinking of the perfect insult which he should have uttered at the time but didn’t. Then summoning his last acolyte and the last drop of aquamire from a phial to shout through a Jardember… and another thing, Nothing!”
Allazar’s lips twitched, but the smile remained elusive in the cold. His lips were too numb.
“No,” Gawain continued. “We are too far now for his dwindling power to reach, and his resources too few. And still I cannot shake the feeling that we have seen our last of the far north, and Tarn. I do not think I shall be able to fulfil my promise to Martan of Tellek, after all.”
“A promise?”
“Well, maybe it wasn’t so much a promise as a hope, after all. But I did tell him that perhaps one day he and I would stand on the edge of that canyon’s cliff, and look down into the mess he and eighty-two other miners of Threlland made of the farak gorin.”
“Perhaps you shall?”
But Gawain didn’t answer. He didn’t know why, and he couldn’t explain the feelings, but with so much strange aquamire yet humming in his blade and lurking behind his eyes, he could not ignore them. Not until he was back in Last Ridings, and his future held tightly i
n his arms, would he allow himself the hope that one day they would return, and in peace, and he and the old dwarf might sup a pint or two on the brink of a glorious ruin eight miles wide.
Two hours later Venderrian announced that the Condavian had soared closer, and begun circling again, and still ordinary eyes could not see it in the pale and weakly winter blue above them.
Not until the early evening did they see it, when the ranger announced it was moving towards them and following the pattern it had maintained all day; swoop south, circle, swoop south, circle, and on and on until now it came into view of ordinary eyes. Gawain kept them going at a steady pace towards the tree-lined south bank of a shallow and narrow river, splashing through it carelessly before making the cover of the trees.
Haste, he knew, would’ve been futile anyway. If they could see the bird, it could see them, and so too the Eye slung in its wire harness beneath those great outstretched wings.
“The colour, Ven?” Gawain asked quietly, lifting the saddle from Gwyn’s back.
“Grey, miThal. Viell-grey.”
Gawain nodded. “Then here we’ll camp this night, and tomorrow, we shall see what we shall see.”
While Allazar and Ognorm set about lifting the dwindling packs from the packhorse and making camp, Gawain noticed Venderrian gazing away to the north again.
“What is it, Ven?”
The ranger cocked his head a little. “Perhaps nothing, miThal. My eyes are tired. I have strained them looking hard for crystal-coated traitors of the foul tower. But,” he shrugged dismissively, “I thought I saw another bird, far off to the north.”
Gawain clapped the ranger on the shoulder. “Get some rest, my friend. It wouldn’t surprise me if there weren’t half a dozen birds up there. Captain Byrne did say the Tau contingent had seven Viell in their number, short sticks as well as long.”
“MiThal.”
Venderrian saluted, and attended his horse, and was soon in his blankets.
“Think it saw us then, melord?” Ognorm whispered, trying not to disturb the ranger.
Gawain shrugged. “It would be wise to believe so, Oggy.”
“Arr. Cheatin’ barstids, ain’t they?”
“Yes. Funny thing is though, they probably believe they’re right, and we’re the barstids.”
They rose an hour before dawn on the 2nd, watered the horses and themselves, filled canteens and water skins, and given the temperature of the air and the crystal-clear waters of the river, wisely elected to forego bathing or washing. The Condavian soared on unseen currents of air, inscribing a vast circle in the sky, with Gawain and his men at the centre, and when they moved south, it did too.
When Gawain turned southwest about an hour after breaking camp, Allazar shot him a look of great surprise.
“Smoke, a little east of south,” Gawain smiled, nodding to the faintest of plumes rising above the hills in that direction. “I’d rather ride into the flanks of the Tau than lead them into the middle of a gentle Mornland hamlet, wouldn’t you?”
Allazar said nothing, and Gawain, still smiling, quickened Gwyn’s pace. The going varied from soft to firm and the speed of their progress varied accordingly. By late afternoon they saw ahead of them a high ridge, which seemed to them a barrier, and an ominous one stretching as it did for miles either side of their path. But Gawain seemed unconcerned, and had even ignored the silent and eerie presence of the Viell’s observer and its endless circling above them. He simply declared that he wished to be atop that rise and camped in its trees before sunset, and so they quickened their pace accordingly.
A broad stream, fed by many springs, carved its way east along the foot of the ridge perhaps to join some unseen river nearer the coast, and there the horses were watered and their own supplies checked and rechecked before the climb up to the summit. The slope was steep and muscles were burning by the time they reached the tree line near the top, but Gawain kept going until they reached the southern side of the woodland and were able to gaze out at the landscape below.
If Mornland had a centre point, they stood now upon it, gazing down across the southern reaches, low and undulating terrain dotted here and there by woods, criss-crossed by streams and speckled with tiny finger-lakes where streams had swollen with winter rains and burst their confines.
“Downhill all the way from here,” Gawain announced.
“Arr, apart from them uphill bits down there, melord.”
“Nothing as high as this ridge, though. Not until the hills around Dun Meven. We’re halfway to Arrun. Less than three weeks to the Hallencloister line. Actually, a little more than two weeks. Sixteen or seventeen days, or thereabouts.”
“Don’t reckon them sparkle-elves will want us getting that far though, melord,” Ognorm nodded up at the watchful Eye in the sky which had been their constant companion all day.
“No. They’ll be out there, somewhere, calculating which route we’ll take and looking for the best place to ambush us.”
Ognorm sniffed, and nodded. “Got a plan up yer sleeve though, eh?”
Gawain watched the Condavian swinging slowly around on its southerly arc, the bird always remaining far out of range of Venderrian’s bow.
“Got a plan up yer sleeve though, melord? I only ask again on account of sometimes I do worry about you suddenly going deaf, what with all the noises the wizard makes an’ all.”
“Nope,” Gawain replied cheerily.
“Nope not deaf or nope no plan up yer sleeve? If’n you don’t mind me askin’?”
“Both, actually,” he smiled disarmingly. “Come on, let’s make camp while there’s still light left in the day. At least we’re far enough south now for the worst of the chill to be behind us, and the trees will take the brunt of the northerlies in the night.”
“Glad you ain’t deaf,” Ognorm mumbled under his breath as he moved away to unsaddle his horse, though Gawain caught the words and his face cracked into a broad grin.
Allazar stepped closer, his shoulder almost brushing Gawain’s, and they spoke softly.
“No plan, Longsword? Really?”
Gawain shrugged. “I’m relying on being creative, and on the big stick you carry. Even during my lessons with dear old Captain Hass there would be few expectations for the outcome of four against forty, and those forty with longbows.”
“Forty-two,” Allazar reminded him.
“I know, Allazar mate, I ain’t as green as I am cabbage-looking y’know.”
The wizard smiled, and leaned on the cloth-wrapped Dymendin.
“Oggy was right, though, they won’t let us reach the border with Arrun. I half expected to find these woods crawling with their dim and crystal-shrouded lights.”
“And you brought us up here anyway?”
“Ven would have seen those dim and crystal-shrouded lights.”
“Ah.”
“I’m realistic, not suicidal. And though I’m coming to dislike the word, a little hopeful.”
“Optimism is the badge of impending fatherhood. Though, from my observations, it alternates rapidly with despair and blind panic.”
Gawain chuckled. “Yes, sometimes I do worry what kind of father I’ll be, and despair at how many sharp and pointy things I see people leaving lying around the place.”
“May I know what lends this small but not insignificant optimism to our proceedings?”
“The enemy’s qualities, and lack thereof. At widow’s peak and three-blisters they took a tactic straight from the pages of an ancient Callodon cavalry manual and simply scaled it down according to the numbers they had available. Dwarfspit, they know who I am, and still they employ an old Callodonian ploy against me? If they’ve been isolated in self-imposed exile from the world for so long that they still think Tellemek a modern military tactician, I wouldn’t be surprised to find them digging earthworks and tiny redoubts across our path.”
“I suspect they have something far worse up their sleeves than earthworks and tiny redoubts. They have deployed not one but seven o
f the Viell against us. That is a significant number.”
“They probably don’t want to risk a single wizard succumbing to personal ambition the way that bastard Oze did at Dun Meven.”
Allazar’s eyebrows arched. “I confess I hadn’t considered that possibility. But it’s more likely that they intend to use their sticks against us. Remember, the Ahk-Viell are able to exert their powers far from the domain of the Viell, and with their false aquamire, even the medyen-Viell will have power here.”
“Yes, well. Them, and the horse they rode in on.”
Allazar actually chuckled then.
“I know, it’s a bit rude and unkingly,” Gawain apologised, grinning, “But I’ve had enough of ‘em.”
“There is a phrase in the wizard’s tongue I found myself using recently in the Eastbinding which means precisely the same thing. Et caballum! And your horse!”
Gawain chuckled then, too, remembering the venom with which Allazar had spat the curse after blasting a rock-creature off its feet and into the chasm in the crater floor.
“The first time you used Baramenn’s Surge!” Gawain chuckled again. “Mumble-endum arsenrectum up and over he goes!”
Allazar began laughing too. “And then the chasm erupted, sending mud everywhere!”
“If that thing had had a face, its expression would have been priceless!” Gawain laughed, the two of them caught up in the memories.
Behind them, busy preparing the night camp, Ognorm and Venderrian gaped, and then grinned at each other. What possible chance did any enemy have against the King of Raheen and the White Staff?
oOo
30. Sleeping Dogs
Gawain was worried. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, never mind show it, but he was worried. True, the laughter he’d shared with Allazar was a great release of the tension they all felt, and it was good to hear the wizard chuckling and laughing out loud. But the laughter, he knew, had at times bordered on the desperate, and had it gone on too long after sunset, could have ended in tears.