No one disagreed.
“If we were to continue on this course along the wall,” Graelalea said, “we would come to the Tower of the Heavens. But we shall take the road.”
It was a pity, Karigan thought, they couldn’t have all just entered the forest through the tower, but the soldiers and Ard, being neither Green Riders nor Eletians, would not have been able to pass through the walls.
They paused where they stood for several minutes while Yates made notations in a journal and Grant and Porter produced devices to take measurements of the road and its juxtaposition to the wall. When they finished, the company turned away from the wall and followed Graelalea down the road deeper into the forest. Karigan felt her last chance to run to safety slipping away.
It did not take long before Karigan decided to make use of her bonewood cane. She had no wish to twist an ankle on a loose cobblestone rolling underfoot. That they were slippery with slimy moss did not help. The stones clicked and clacked as the company made its way, and there were outbursts of swearing when someone tripped or slid. Rotting logs that had fallen across the road complicated matters, and they had to jump over gullies where the roadbed had been washed away. None of the Eletians made a sound.
In fact, Telagioth’s sudden, silent presence beside Karigan took her aback. He said nothing but gazed hard at the bonewood. She stared back at him, at his cerulean eyes and effortless strides, but he did not speak. She could not contain herself.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Your walking stick,” he replied. “It has an unusual quality about it.”
“Would you care to take a closer look?” Karigan thrust it toward him in what she thought was an unthreatening manner but he skittered away.
“No, no,” he said, raising his hands. “I am sure it will serve you well.”
Karigan thought it a curious reaction. Maybe there was something to the Weapons’ assertion about the bonewood after all, but she was hoping she would not have to be fending off Eletians in addition to whatever endangered her in the forest.
Despite Telagioth’s caution, he still walked with her, so she asked, “What do the Eletians call the road? If Avenue of Light is its name in the common tongue, what is its Eletian name?”
“Celes As’riel. Avenue of Light is not a perfect translation. A better translation might be Star-lighted Path. Or just the Lighted Path.”
“Celes As’riel,” Karigan echoed. She liked how it rolled off her tongue, but it had sounded more musical coming from Telagioth.
“This road was made broader than any other in Argenthyne to accommodate travelers from the north, and perhaps that is why it is called ‘avenue’ in the common.”
“I like the Eletian name better.”
Telagioth smiled. He then spoke entirely in fluid Eletian, ending in a flourish with, “Vien a lumeni Celes As’riel!”
At his words light ignited along the edge of the road from behind tangled vegetation. Swords rang from sheaths and Grant and Porter charged toward it with shouts.
Roused by the commotion, Karigan extended her cane to staff length and took a defensive stance. Yates and Ard bared their swords. The Eletians simply looked on in amusement, especially when Grant’s sword rang against what sounded like stone.
“Damn! I notched my blade!” He came back hacking away at vegetation.
The rest of them crowded to the side of the road and peered through brush only to come face-to-face with a statue. Carved of stone, one of her arms had broken off and weathering had scrubbed away much of her features, but her graceful lines remained beneath snaking vines and clinging black moss. She held in her remaining hand a large, cracked orb fogged by age and dirt through which light glowed.
“What is that thing?” Grant demanded.
“It is what you would call in your city a lamppost,” Graelalea replied. “We call it lumeni.”
“But ... but how did it light up?”
“Telagioth used the words of lighting. Such a command may have lit the lumeni for quite a distance, alerting, I fear, any and all to our presence.”
Telagioth bowed his head. “Forgive me. I did not know after all this time the lumeni would light.”
“No need to ask forgiveness,” Graelalea replied. “The action was, perhaps, imprudent, but it is a joy to know Eletians have not been forgotten in this land. And why shouldn’t Eletians walk proudly in their own realm instead of in secrecy?”
“Because the current residents are hungry,” Lynx said, hand to his forehead. “And now they know exactly where we are.”
HUMMINGBIRDS
“Imprudent?” Grant demanded of the Eletians. “You’ve let everything in the forest know we’re here and it’s just imprudent?”
“Your shouting,” Graelalea replied, “will only serve to attract further attention.”
“Oh, so you lower yourself to speak to me now?”
Karigan couldn’t help but smile seeing someone else bridling at Graelalea’s haughty ways. She turned away from the discussion, gazing down the road into the forest. She spotted the glow of another of the lumeni many yards away, on the opposite side of the road, its light ghostly in the mist.
Yates joined her. “Barely into this thing and they’re already trying to start a war.”
Behind them, the discussion had grown sharper, louder, with Lhean joining in with exhortations in Eletian, his derisive tone unmistakable.
“I hope not,” Karigan replied. “We need each other to get through this.”
“Look,” Yates said, pointing.
Karigan heard it before she saw it, a buzzing sound like a bee. It was not a bee, however, but a hummingbird flitting in front of them, its rapid wing movements creating the drone. In the light of the lumeni, its green feathers shimmered with iridescence, a ruby patch at its throat. It looked just like the hummingbirds back home.
“I wonder if it’s lost,” she said. If creatures from Blackveil strayed into their world through the breach, then surely the reverse occurred as well.
“Look, another,” Yates said.
A second darted at the first and chased it away. Karigan wondered what it was being territorial about since there were no flowers in sight. A nest or a mate, maybe?
As the hummingbirds zipped around the group, a third appeared and hovered in front of Yates’ face.
“They’re like little jewels,” he said, mesmerized.
A blur of pearlescent motion, an Eletian moving faster than the eye could follow, swept his sword before them neatly slicing the bird in two in the air. The halves dropped to the ground. Karigan and Yates gazed in shock at what remained of the hummingbird, its blood trickling between the cobblestones.
“Five hells!” Yates exclaimed. “What did you do that for? It was a hummingbird!”
“You cannot trust anything here,” the Eletian said. It was Spiney, the lumeni sparking a silvery glint in his eyes.
“But—” Yates began.
A droning grew in the forest around them, grew in a crescendo into a deafening roar that throbbed through Karigan’s body. The limbs of trees vibrated with it, causing the collected rainwater to shower down on them.
“What is it?” Grant demanded.
“Prepare yourselves!” Graelalea cried.
A shimmering cloud of hummingbirds emerged from the woods and hovered around the company, their wings working furiously, the noise of it overwhelming. They skimmed overhead and darted between them. There were hundreds—no, thousands of them.
Ard screamed. Karigan whirled to see that a hummingbird had impaled his shoulder with its long beak, wings fluttering to drive deeper. Its throat pulsed as it drank, the ruby patch on its throat deepening to a dark crimson.
Graelalea swiftly yanked the bird out of Ard’s shoulder and smashed it onto the road where it remained limp and unmoving, blood streaming from its beak.
“It is not nectar they seek,” she said.
The hummingbirds attacked. Beaks pinged on Eletian armor and pinned Sacoridian fl
esh, yielding cries of pain. Swords flashed through the air and birds were cut down simply because there were so many of them. Otherwise they were too quick, their movements too erratic, to be fought off. Only the Eletians seemed able to cleave them out of the air with intention.
Karigan batted them away with her staff, but her efforts lagged in comparison to the sheer speed in which the birds maneuvered around her. She kept them off her, at least, and she was grateful her pack protected her back though it slowed her own movements.
Yates screamed. A hummingbird stabbed his thigh. She followed Graelalea’s example and grabbed it out, its body nothing in her hand. It flicked a long thread of forked tongue at her and she smashed it onto the paving stones of the road.
She ducked just in time as another hummingbird soared for her eye. One jammed its beak into the leather of her boot. She kicked it off. Another scored the back of her hand, leaving a trail of blood.
Private Porter called out as he wobbled precariously on a loose cobble, his arms flailing. The cloud of hummingbirds paused as one, hovering, wings beating, waiting. Porter crashed to the ground, and before he could even attempt to rise, the hummingbird cloud swarmed him, a moving mass of green and silver and crimson blanketing him. He flailed and thrashed but could not dislodge the birds.
“Quickly!” Graelalea cried.
Several of the company fell to their knees beside Porter grabbing handfuls of feathers and beaks from his convulsing body, while Karigan and the others tried to bat away airborne birds around them. Porter’s screams rang through the forest and curdled Karigan’s blood to her toes.
Soon the screams weakened, and then stopped entirely. The swarm of birds lifted away, slow and ungainly with engorged bellies, and flew back into the woods. Karigan turned away from Porter’s gruesome remains.
“The life is gone from him,” Graelalea announced. “He should be put to rest in whatever manner your customs dictate.”
“What of those birds?” Ard demanded. He bled from numerous wounds. “What if they come back?”
“They shall not return. Not for the time being, for they are sated.”
Porter’s cloak was laid over his body, and a cairn of loose cobblestones pulled from the roadbed was raised over him. Meanwhile, the Eletians, who escaped the ordeal largely unscathed, tended the wounds of the Sacoridians with their evaleoren salve. Karigan’s mind eased as the Eletian woman Hana spread the fragrant salve into the wound on her hand. Compared to her companions, Karigan had fared well.
Once the wounds were treated and the cairn finished, Grant stabbed Porter’s sword into the earth near where his right hand would be and mumbled a few halting words asking the gods to receive the good private into the heavens. When he finished, the Sacoridians made the sign of the crescent moon while the Eletians looked on as curious bystanders.
While Grant took time to sort through Porter’s belongings, discarding most things but keeping tools essential to the mission, Karigan gazed away from the grave and down the road. She had hardly known Porter, but did not doubt he was a good, brave man. Otherwise he would not have been chosen for the expedition. His fate could have just as easily been hers or Yates’—any of theirs. It still could be.
She picked dainty iridescent feathers from her clothes. Hummingbirds, she thought with a shake of her head. She’d expected confrontations with one of the other horrid creatures that dwelled in the forest, but hummingbirds? She would never regard them in the same light again, even on her own side of the wall.
When wings flashed in the branches above, she thought that despite Graelalea’s reassurance, the birds had come back for another attack.
OWL
The wings that brushed the air, however, were large and white, nothing at all like a tiny hummingbird. When the winter owl settled on a limb and tucked its wings to its sides, it looked like a clump of snow until it swiveled its head to gaze at its surroundings. Karigan realized she was squinting at the owl. The white of its plumage was so stark in the gloom of the forest that it hurt her eyes.
The others came beside her to look at it as well.
“Where are your arrows?” Grant demanded of the Eletians. “We should kill it.”
“No.” Graelalea replied. “It is not a forest denizen, and of no danger to us.”
“How do you know? Those other birds looked harmless enough until ...” His sharp gesture took in Porter’s cairn and the hummingbird corpses littering the road.
“I know this owl is not of this forest, and that is enough.”
“She’s right,” Lynx murmured. His eyes were closed in concentration. “It’s from the other side of the wall. Besides, it would not retain its snowy plumage in this forest.”
“I saw one yesterday,” Karigan said, “when I went out for a ride. What would it be doing here? Is it lost?”
“Lost? I do not think so,” Graelalea replied. “It is not here by accident. Such owls are revered in Eletia.” She stroked one of the white feathers braided into her hair. A light shone in her eyes. “We call the winter owl enmorial, memory.”
The owl preened, looking entirely at home in the dark woods. It paid them little heed, as if they were beneath its notice.
“Why memory?” Karigan asked.
“Memory is what it keeps.”
Karigan sighed. It was a typical Eletian response.
The owl spread its wings and launched from its limb, circling around their heads and winding down in a glide until it alighted on Graelalea’s outstretched wrist, its talons doing her no harm because of her armor. She and the owl gazed at one another for a long moment, before it lifted once more into the air. They watched it vanish above the trees and into the mist, a lone white feather twirling down back to Earth as the only proof it had been real.
Graelalea caught the feather before it could touch the ground and smiled. “Memory,” she said, and she tucked the feather into one of her braids.
They left behind Porter’s grave and trudged on along the road, the damp air thickening into a pervasive drizzle that drip-drip-dripped through the trees of the forest and onto their hoods. The gloom and the loss of Porter dragged down Karigan’s spirits. She could not help wondering who would be next. Who would be the next one for whom the rest built a cairn.
Only the occasional lumeni broke the spell of darkness, welcome beacons along their path. Few lumeni still held globes in their stone hands, but those that retained even a shard cast at least a little light, and that light seemed to brighten as the Eletians passed near them.
As they approached another of the lumeni, liquid light splashed across the mossy cobbles before them, and Ard sourly muttered, “Magic.”
Karigan thought the light beautiful and was glad something like the lumeni could endure in the forest for so many centuries, and she tried to imagine a different time, a different forest, when Eletians ruled this land, traveling this road freely and without fear.
“Magic?” Telagioth asked. “They collected light of sun and moon and stars. The lumeni would have been brilliant in the time before the Cataclysm.”
“He means the Long War,” Karigan said in response to Ard’s perplexed expression.
“Oh,” Ard replied. “Well, magic is magic, and you can see what good has come of it.” He swept his arm to take in the whole of the forest.
“An outside influence,” Telagioth said. “This land existed in light and harmony for many millennia before the coming of Arcosians. If you could see Eletia, you would understand.”
“Eletia is nothing compared to what Argenthyne once was.” This from Spiney, who came forward to join their conversation. He spoke as if he knew, as if he’d once tread Argenthyne’s ways during the lighter times before Mornhavon.
“I suppose I’d like to at least see your Eletia, then,” Ard said.
“You would not find your way in,” Spiney replied. “No mortal has been permitted beneath Eletia’s canopy for centuries, though some have tried.” He gazed at Karigan, a glint in his eye. “The last mortal to
travel within Eletia was a Green Rider. It is still spoken of in the Alluvium.” With that pronouncement, he dropped back to walk in the rear with Hana.
Before Karigan could ask Telagioth who, he also left them and strode to the front to walk with Graelalea. Much Green Rider history had been forgotten over the years and so she liked it when she could find out more about the messengers who had come before her. Perhaps she could ask Telagioth more later.
They continued on until the gloom grew into impenetrable dark. Graelalea chose to camp on the road beside a headless lumeni, its light aiding them as they pitched tents and built a fire. The tent of the Eletians was a dark, mottled gray, and it blended so well with the environs that Karigan thought she’d fall over it if she didn’t know exactly where it was. It also seemed too small a tent for six people.
“How they all going to fit in that?” Ard asked.
“Don’t know how they do it,” Yates replied, “but when they camped outside Sacor City last summer, their tents held a lot more than you’d think possible. That’s what I heard anyway.”
Graelalea told the company not to stray far, probably an unnecessary warning with the forbidding forest all around them. Everyone stuck close to the light of the campfire and lumeni as they ate their rations and prepared for the night.
Karigan was assigned first watch with the Eletian Solan. When everyone else turned in, Solan stood unmoving on the very fringe of light, gazing into the night in the direction from which they’d come. Karigan sat with her back to the dwindling campfire, her staff across her lap, and gazed in the opposite direction, down the road they had yet to travel.
Now that the company had come to such stillness, the sounds of the forest grew louder, the clacking of bare tree limbs and the patter of water spilled from branches, the wild screeches of creatures near and far. During her time as a Rider she had spent many a night alone in the wilderness, but the sounds of those nights had been more subdued, held less of an edge to them. Those nights had not been so black.
Blackveil: Book Four of Green Rider Page 41