The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8)

by P. C. Hodgell

  Jame thought of that incredibly obese monarch, and wondered if his svelte alter-ego Kroaky had also begun to swell now that, presumably, he could no longer play the scamp in low dives. “Truly?”

  “Well, not quite. He can still stand up, with help. Anyway, regarding possession of Tagmeth, Father has sent a one-hundred command north to occupy it. They left this afternoon, when we heard of your approach. You’ll never catch up with them, though, given that cow-tail you’re dragging behind you.”

  So he had also sent out scouts.

  There being nothing more to say, Jame gave him a rueful salute, turned, and rode back to her own command, all the time thinking hard, making up her mind.

  Jeers followed her from the unseen Caineron as word of her retreat spread. Her own troops heard. Disgruntled grumbling rippled through their ranks as she rejoined them.

  She told Brier what she had learned.

  “That’s it, then,” said the Southron.

  “Not necessarily. We’re going to leave the road and bypass Gorbel on the upper slopes.”

  Corvine had ridden up. “Not a good idea,” she said in her hoarse croak of a voice, around long-since axe damaged vocal cords. “You know how tricky the Riverland is away from the keeps. People get lost in the wilderness all the time, if they’re fool enough to go there. Many never find their way out.”

  That was true. Any unoccupied part of Rathillien had a tendency to live its own secretive life. Jame wasn’t sure if it actually changed, apart from occasional arboreal drift, or just seemed to. However, only natives such as the Merikit and animals knew how to navigate it. Another example, she thought, of how unwelcome this world had made itself to her kind.

  “Agreed,” she told Corvine, “but up-slope there are also folds in the land. Those are our only chance to beat the Caineron to Tagmeth.”

  Other ten-commanders had joined them and were listening with profound unease.

  “I’ve heard of those folds,” said Jerr, “but I always thought they were myths. I mean, shortcuts though the landscape from one place to another—how likely is that?”

  “It’s a matter of correspondences. If one spot resembles another in some way, geological or psychic, they tend to overlap. Likely or not, the folds exist. I’ve used them.”

  Yes, mostly with a wise horse like that equine mountain-range Chumley to find the way. But now she had the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi, and the rathorn colt Death’s-head, and no other choice.

  The caravan retreated about a mile, far enough, Jame hoped, for Gorbel’s scouts to give up on it, then cut eastward off the River Road. Here there were water meadows swimming in a soup of fog, and finally the stony toes of the Snowthorns, discovered when the lead horses tripped over them.

  By now, the sun had set and night was falling. As they climbed out of the fog and drizzle, at first the western sky over the Snowthorns glowed cobalt and then, as color faded, the stars came out. It was the dark of the moon, the heavens a vault spangled with tiny diamonds. Looking up at them, Jame wondered what it would be like if they ever went out. Legend said that when Perimal Darkling swallowed a threshold world like Rathillien, first the moon disappeared and then, one by one as the shadows spread, the stars. How far away were they? What were they? How much, truly, had been lost with each defeat of her people? The very thought made her dizzy.

  Then darkness began to spread across the sky, coming from the north.

  It was only the wings of high, tattered clouds, Jame told herself, after the first jolt of fear.

  However, their shadows cast a black, velvet cloak over the land beneath. Kencyr have good night-vision, but they must have some light. Now hands groped unseen and feet stumbled over invisible obstacles. Brier ordered that the horses be roped together and that the foot troops hang on to the nearest stirrup. To be separated now was to risk being utterly lost. Jame clung to Bel’s mane as the mare’s movement beneath her anchored her to the earth. Somewhere in the void, Jorin wailed. Blind since birth, the ounce used her eyes to see, and found the current situation deeply upsetting.

  “Jorin, here.”

  A moment later, his weight landed scrabbling on Bel’s rump. She started, nearly throwing both of them, before settling again into her cautious pace.

  Weirding mists also came from the north, Jame remembered uneasily, and the south wind, the Tishooo, had been absent all season to sweep them away.

  Pale illumination swept down on them—a momentary parting of the clouds. Before, they had looked down on the mist-flooded valley of the Silver. Now they were surrounded by hills and cliffs. A ripple of unease passed down the column. Lost. . .

  Not yet, thought Jame. So far, Bel had not hesitated. Moreover, she was leading them through this trackless wilderness by a way that allowed the jouncing supply wagons to follow, if with difficulty.

  Darkness silently returned, and went, and came again. The night went on and on, as if it would never end. Already tired from a day on the road, horses and Kendar alike began to stumble over undergrowth until they found themselves among tall trees whose leaf canopy cut off most light to the bare forest floor.

  An eternity later, they stopped to water the horses at a rushing mountain stream.

  Word came from the back of the column that Char’s ten and the herd had vanished.

  “Damn,” said Jame. “Of all times to fall behind . . .”

  The night had been eerily still. Now a strange, muffled cry sounded in the distance, like a bass squeal sinking to a series of barking grunts: “Squeeee . . . huh, huh, huh.”

  Horses froze, heads up, ears pricked.

  Brier wheeled, trying to face the sound, but it might have come from any direction.

  “Squeee . . . huh!”

  “Have you ever heard anything like that before?” Brier asked Corvine, who had spent more time in the Riverland than she had.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” said Jame. “Once.”

  She had been hunting with the Merikit north of their village.

  “You saw the yackcarn stampede,” their leader, Chingetai, had said to her. “By the Four, you and that white brute of yours were in the middle of it. But those were only the cows. Yes, only the females migrate. The bulls stay up in the hills. You can hear them trumpeting in season for the mates who climb to seek them out. Oh, they must be magnificent!”

  “You’ve never seen one?”

  “No one has.” Chingetai had puffed out his tattooed chest with pride. “Such is the mystery and grandeur of the male.”

  At the time, Jame had reflected wryly that, despite his title and pride, the Merikit chieftain was actually subordinate to Gran Cyd whose housebond he was, as long as she should care to keep him.

  Could a yackcarn bull actually be stalking Char’s herd, so far south of his usual territory and so far below the snowline? True, what a lure an entire herd of cows in season would be, even if they weren’t yackcarn, but still . . .

  She remembered the stampede thundering down on her as she wrapped her legs around Death-head’s barrel and Prid clung to her waist from behind the saddle. The rathorn reared, but still his head only came to the shoulders of the oncoming behemoths. Four-foot horn spans, ropes of lather swinging from mouths agape, small mad eyes all but buried in bulging, warty foreheads, the stench of them, rolling on before . . .

  Jame dismounted.

  “What are you doing?” Brier asked sharply.

  “I have to find Char.”

  “No,” said Corvine. “You led us here. Into the wilderness. Into the folds of the land. You can’t abandon us.”

  Jame hesitated. She read the same judgment in Brier’s hard, malachite eyes. She was their commander. Her place was here, with the nine-tenths of her force whom she had brought into such danger.

  Delegate, the randon would say . . . but to whom?

  Corvine had caught Bel by the bridle, but the Whinno-hir shook free and drifted away. On the edge of visibility, she paused, no longer an equine but a woman with white, flowing hair that mask
ed the half of her face seared by Greshan’s fiery brand. Jame had never been quite sure if she actually shape-changed or only seemed to.

  “Follow her,” she told Brier and Corvine.

  They looked, and their expressions changed.

  The Whinno-hir’s disfigurement and presumed death had haunted Tentir for decades. It was a terrible thing to defile one of her kind, an innocent, who had been with the Kencyrath almost since the beginning, never mind that she had also been bound to Kinzi, the last Knorth Matriarch, whom the Shadow Assassins had subsequently slain. Her presence reminded them all of the depths of their past, which many now did their best to forget.

  See, she might have said. We are more than the present moment, our duties beyond mortal reckoning.

  “All right,” said Brier in a choked voice. “Go.”

  Jame cut away from the column, moving perpendicular to it. She didn’t want to see those incredulous eyes following her apparent desertion.

  Dark fell again. The sounds of the column faded as if they too had been muffled by the night. Nearer, hooves crunched on the previous year’s dead leaves. Even though Jame was prepared, she jumped when Death’s-head snorted down the back of her neck.

  “Don’t do that!” she exclaimed, spinning around to face him.

  His ivory mask hung in the gloom like the visage of a demon, greater horn curving back from his forehead, the shorter nasal tusk all but pricking her under the chin. She might have impaled herself on it. Blood-bound to her as he was, he couldn’t deliberately harm her, but he never tired of offering her chances to hurt herself.

  The rathorn had stopped next to a big rock. Jame used it as a mounting block to swing onto him, bareback. She hoped that he, like Bel, like Chumley, would know how to navigate the folds of the land, especially since he was a true native of Rathillien.

  “Squeee . . . huh.”

  Whatever it was, they were close to it, and to the voices of Char’s ten-command calling out to one another among the trees.

  Death’s-head nearly ran into a cow. The beast brandished her horns at them and shied away, back into the night. All around them cattle were lowing. They sounded urgent. Cloud shadows chased each other over the ground, alternating dense midnight with patches of faint starlight. What Jame saw then, she saw only briefly, but the image lingered:

  A cow on her knees, rump in the air. Something clung to her haunches, moving. A warty, furrowed brow; horns, one snapped off short; wrinkled skin with gray tufts of bristles, crisscrossed by scars; a short tail sticking straight up and quivering like a pennant . . .

  “. . . huh, huh, huh . . .”

  “What in Perimal’s name . . .?”

  Char had come up behind Jame, with someone behind him. Who . . . oh, Killy, Char’s five-commander, once a member of her own ten. Odd, how he always seemed to slip everyone’s mind. Together, they stared at the spectacle before them.

  The cow gave a startled snort and lurched to her feet, the other still clinging to her from behind. Her rear legs folded and she sat down.

  “Huh!”

  Stumpy limbs shot straight out and small, piggy eyes bulged. A knobby member that would have done justice to a stallion emerged with a plop and jutted skyward.

  Then darkness fell again. In it, the cow lumbered off while another of her sisters lowed plaintively nearby for attention. When star-light returned, the clearing was empty.

  Killy had turned away. Even in the gloom, one could tell that his face was suffused with embarrassment. Char made an impatient sound. Jame leaned over Death’s-head’s neck, helpless with laughter.

  “I shouldn’t, I know,” she gasped, “but oh, it was so funny!”

  Char glared at her as if she had affronted his dignity. Again. “All right. I know what happened—more or less—but what was that thing?”

  “Something never before seen: a yackcarn bull.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows that they must be huge.”

  “‘Such is the mystery and grandeur of the male.’”

  “Stop laughing, damn you!”

  “All right.” She straightened, wiped her eyes, and stifled a hiccup. “Mind you, I had no idea that one of them might mate with a domestic cow—to the extent that this lot are domesticated. This fellow looked pretty old and scruffy, though. Maybe he’s been driven out of the hills.”

  “Damn him, too. We’ve got to collect the herd and catch up with the rest of the column.”

  No argument there.

  The rest of the night was spent routing cows out of the undergrowth where they had settled to sleep. At least, their need remedied, they were easier than before to handle. Jorin proved unexpectedly adept at herding them, probably because he saw it as a wonderful game, and they were too sluggish to gore him. Death’s-head rousted the more stubborn with his horns and scent, both capable of causing panic. The clouds had blown southward, leaving a sable sky sparkling with points of light. Toward dawn, the sky began to glow over the peaks of the eastern Snowthorns, then dazzling light tipped the western range.

  From somewhere ahead came the sound of rushing water. Death’s-head slashed through undergrowth and stopped on top of a cliff that overlooked the Silver. To the north, the river tumbled down a series of falls in the raucous throat of a gorge. The River Road continued, carved out of its eastern bank, joined by the New Road at the foot of the cataracts over the back of a bridge.

  Below was an island in the middle of the river, roughly shaped like a teardrop. Its high, broad prow breasted the swift current, and crowning the rocks were the ruins of a shell fortress. Its trapezoidal tower keep faced the waterfall. Most of its roofs were gone, exposing a honeycomb of intramural rooms circling a center court. However, it was in better shape than Jame had expected, thanks, no doubt, to the efforts of Gorbel’s great-granduncle.

  “Tagmeth,” she breathed.

  An unexpected chill ran down her spine. All of her life, she had been looking for a place to call home. Was this it?

  Char pushed through the bushes on foot.

  “You’re blocking the way,” he said, then saw where they were.

  Below the castle was a walled outer ward set with a double gate; below that, a lush meadow tapering to the island’s nether point. Some horses grazed there while others, including Bel, warily regarded the Kendar who blocked the island’s only bridge, which spanned the Silver to the River Road. Jame saw Brier’s dark-red helm of hair and Corvine’s cropped gray. She couldn’t see whom they faced.

  Char stretched out on the cliff top and peered down.

  “A flag,” he said. “Gold on crimson. So, the Caineron have arrived.”

  “Can you hear that they are saying?”

  “No.”

  His hand dislodged a rock as he shifted his weight. A shout of protest came from below.

  In the meadow, Bel looked up and gave a silvery cry of welcome.

  The rathorn snorted in answer and pawed at the rim. More stones fell. Before Jame could stop him, he reared, screamed, and came down again, hard, driving his fore-hoofs into the loosened soil. Char scrambled back as the cliff top gave way. Death’s-head also tried to retreat, but then he was sliding down on his hocks and rump in an avalanche of debris with Jame clinging to his neck. Caineron troops scattered below. Rathorn and rider thumped down on the River Road in a cloud of dirt. Death’s-head shook himself vigorously. Jame fell off.

  “Well,” she said, climbing unsteadily to her feet and slapping dust off her clothes with shaking hands. “Here I am.”

  Everyone was staring at her.

  “So we see,” remarked the Caineron commander dryly.

  A tall, elegant man riding a tall, gray stallion that Jame had once . . . er . . . borrowed to race across the bloody tatters of a battlefield . . . From above Cloud’s pricked ears, the dark, sardonic face of Sheth Sharp-tongue gazed down at her.

  “Commandant,” she said, drawing herself up with a jerk into a salute.

  “Not at present. My Coman counterpart currentl
y has charge of Tentir, as I believe you discovered on your way north.”

  This was of course, true. However, Jame could scarcely say in front of such an audience that in her opinion Sheth Sharp-tongue and Harn Grip-hard were the only commandants of either the randon college or the Southern Host who mattered.

  “How can I help you, Ran?” she asked instead.

  “I was just about to request that your people turn this keep over to us. As you no doubt know, the Caineron claimed it many years ago and spent considerable effort restoring it.”

  “Then they abandoned it. I’m sorry, Ran, but the Knorth hold Tagmeth now.”

  Movement caught the corner of her eye. With exquisite timing, someone had raised the rathorn banner over the tower keep. Sheth Sharp-tongue regarded it with the flicker of a smile.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Well, we hardly came equipped for a siege and we certainly have lost the element of surprise.”

  He reined, about to go.

  “Lord Caineron won’t be pleased,” said Jame with concern. The commandant was already in trouble for letting her graduate Tentir and for releasing his brother Bear into the wilds.

  Sheth glanced back and smiled again, crookedly this time. “Let me worry about that, child. Fair warning, though: m’lord won’t give up Tagmeth easily.”

  As the Caineron column reversed and retreated, Brier joined Jame on the River Road.

  “A mess,” she said, regarding the tumbled debris of the landslide. “As usual.”

  Death’s-head bared his fangs at her and hissed through them. Jame swatted him on the nose, bruising her hand in the process.

  “Still,” said Brier, “it could have been worse. What d’you suppose Lord Caineron will try next?”

  Jame sighed. “I have no idea. We need to set up sentries as soon as possible, though. Now, how are we going to get the herd down off that cliff?”

  Chapter IV

  Visitors

  Summer 45—55

  I

  JAME WOKE, stretched, and considered the sky through the tower’s broken roof. It was early on the forty-fifth of Summer, twenty days after their arrival at Tagmeth. The sun had not yet risen over the eastern Snowthorns and a few stars still flickered overhead, but she could already hear activity below in the courtyard.