However, it was Miriana who spoke next. To her father, she said, "I leave for the west."
The Magistrate glanced, stunned, at the distant storm and at his daughter before him. Conflict turned to grim resolve on his face. He looked at her with wonder.
"I will help you on your way," he said, sheathing his swords.
She nodded, then turned. Her eyes, thoughtful and sad, met those of Talaos, and then they both turned away.
Without another word, Miriana and her father left the square and walked toward their home, while Talaos strode east toward the rising storm. The armed men, and the crowd that had gathered, looked on with expressions of frightened awe.
8. Passage
A light rain fell, driven hard in the wind. Ahead, the looming mountains were shrouded by clouds. On a hill to the right, double rings of battlements rose, black in the darkening air.
Talaos passed the fortress and followed the road as it began to turn and switch back, each winding course higher than the last. The paving stones were slick with the rain. At last he came to a place where the road leveled off, then turned and rounded back east, sloping upward in a long narrow valley. Mist-shrouded trees, mostly of pines, grew on the slopes on either side. The rain up here was stronger, and the clouds loomed like a black ceiling above. Higher up still, he could hear thunder.
At the top of the valley, the road reached a kind of little pass before winding off north along the side of a mountain slope. The paving stones ended, and here was a watch post, no more than a wooden shelter with a roof and three sides. A flat camp area and some posts for horses sat to its right. A fire flickered in the shelter, and a pair of soldiers huddled next to it. One of them stood up on seeing Talaos, and motioned him to join them.
He raised a hand in greeting, but continued on by. The soldier, alarmed, drew his black cloak about him and stepped out onto the rain-tossed road.
"This is the border, and the last shelter for miles!" he shouted over the wind.
"I know," answered Talaos calmly, though his own voice carried over the wind as he continued to walk.
The soldier stopped, and looked at him. He gestured to the high places beyond, barely visible in the driving rain, "You're going on... in that?"
Lightning flashed in the blackness of massed clouds, and night was falling.
"Yes."
The man shook his head and returned to the shelter.
~
The wind roared in the black night, smashing itself against the steep rocky slope to the left, whirling out, and then returning again. The rain had lessened, but lightning still flashed above. To the right, the lower slopes rose to meet the road, as the mountain it traversed joined its flanks to another. Talaos had not stopped since he left the village, and had barely eaten, yet he did not feel tired. Up ahead the two mountains came together, and he guessed in the dark, formed the feet of a much higher third. There was a wider, flatter place dotted with windswept trees. He considered whether on principle, he ought to stop and rest.
When he reached the place, he paused, breathing deeply of the cold mountain air. There was a campsite here. Though it was not particularly sheltered, it had clear ground and a good fire pit. Little use the fire pit would be right now, he thought, pressing on. After walking a bit further, he felt something in the air. He listened, and heard a distant noise. It sounded like a kind of howling roar, carried on the wind from somewhere behind and to the left.
He adjusted the oilskin over his pack, tightened the straps holding it to his rain-soaked body. He loosened the two short spears holstered on its side, leaving them ready to use if needed. Then he pulled his cloak aside, and drew his long blade. With watchful eyes, he continued across the windswept meadow. The howling roar repeated, closer, and after a pause, he heard it answered by another behind to the right. He picked up his pace. The meadow came to an end in a narrowing slope, as the three mountains came together. The road, carved from the rock, twisted and turned as it ascended.
At the top, he reached a kind of wide ridge line running from the right and joining the road ahead. Up here, out of any shelter, the wind howled and the rain whipped against him almost sideways. Lightning flashed here and there in the blackness. Behind him, he heard two howls, and then two more on the heights to his left, hidden in clouds and darkness. What he could see of the ridge line was covered in broken flat rocks, with not a tree or plant in sight. The road, merely a flatter and better cleared line amidst the stones, stretched on, open and exposed.
On instinct, Talaos turned to look behind him, and there cresting the slope he'd just topped, he saw a black creature somewhat like a wolf, but larger. Its vast gaping muzzle, full of long teeth, opened wider than any wolf's ever could. Hooked rending claws gleamed on its paws.
Even as he took a step back, stance ready, he recognized what animal he faced. He knew it from songs and stories... Ferox. They were said to be creatures of the deep wilds, and relentless hunters with savagely violent temperaments. It seemed strange to find one near a traveled road.
Behind the first came another, and down the slopes stalked two more. He heard more howls up ahead, where he'd planned to go. Only the ridge line, its end somewhere unknown in the distance, remained. One more thought occurred to him. If the tales were true, Ferox were solitary things, not pack hunters.
He drew his short blade to join the long. He held both out before him, slowly turning left and right in a defensive arc. Step by careful step, he retreated back on the flat stones. They approached. Four, then five, then seven, with more back in the dark. He looked into the slit-like yellow eyes of the closest, and saw a faint green mist flickering in the depths.
Then they charged him, roaring howls louder than the raging wind.
Talaos dodged and twisted as he stepped back, inches ahead of claws and fangs. His blades slashed and struck. One of the beasts rolled back, twitching, with a gaping wound at its throat. Others splashed dark blood from their muzzles and flanks as they attacked. At last, one struck home. A cruel hooked claw sliced his face open from cheekbone to jaw, and, missing his neck, continued in a line of bloody agony at his collarbone.
In that same moment, he felt as if he'd violently and suddenly awakened, as if he'd been sleeping through a fight for his life. Power and rage surged through him. He struck, and with one sweep of his sword, pared the Ferox apart from neck to bowels. Another leapt at him and seized his right forearm in its snarling jaws. He hurled it loose in fury, teeth shredding his flesh, whirled, and cut its head off in mid air. More came on, he neither saw nor cared how many.
The wind raged, the lightning flashed, and amidst it, Talaos laughed as he fought them. Power, crackling like electricity, coursed through his body, and he could see it arcing around his hands and blades. The beasts showed no fear, and hurled themselves at him with death in their green-misted eyes.
He slashed and stabbed, leapt, spun, and cut. Beasts fell to left and right, but by strength of numbers they pressed him ever back. They snarled and howled, and he roared back at them in a primal voice both furious and joyful. These were foes to his liking, he thought, swift and dangerous and worthy to die on his blades. Claws raked him and fangs rent. He knew his own blood was washing away with theirs in the rain, but he cared not.
At last, he came to a point where two plummeting cliffs met behind him, and there was only the raging wind beyond. Many beasts lay dead before him, but others advanced. Sensing, perhaps, that their enemy was trapped, the remaining Ferox hurled themselves at him all at once, leaping through the air in a black whirlwind of fangs and claws. Talaos shouted to the sky.
A thunderbolt struck his very spot. Lightning coursed through him, and through the beasts. White brilliant light surrounded him, and then just as swiftly, he fell into darkness.
~
Cold. The wind was cold and the sky pale overhead. There was weight, dead weight, nearly burying him. Dead Ferox. He shifted, then with sudden furious strength, threw them off. He stood. All round him were the charred and
ruined bodies of beasts. The rocks themselves were smoked and cracked in lines radiating outward, radiating from the spot where he stood.
Talaos looked at his hands, his arms, and felt his face. Where deep, bleeding wounds had been the night before, there were now only old scars. All around him, on three sides, the panorama of the mountains was harshly, mercilessly beautiful in the early morning light. Before him, the corpses of slain Ferox lay scattered in a long line back to the road.
He found his pack, torn open and scattered not far from the road. Gear was strewn along the path of battle. One of the short spears strapped to his pack had been snapped, but the other was still usable. Talaos smiled, thinking he'd meant to use them if he fought beasts. He gathered everything together, mended the pack as best he could, and ate a quick meal of dried trail provisions. As the clouds cleared, he continued toward the high pass ahead.
At the top of the pass, he found a windswept place, green with a kind of low moss that clung to the stones for life. It was bitter cold. Towering peaks of bare stone rose on either side, and continued in lines far to the north and south. Behind him to the west, the land dropped in steep slopes and narrow valleys, with the rolling plains beyond looking much nearer than they'd seemed in his wild overnight journey. He could see, far away, the little town of Amari. Somewhere past that, if all had gone well, Miriana would even now be on the road.
He smiled.
As he looked around, he noticed a side path to the south. It began as a little trail winding between the moss-covered stones, then became a zigzagging, sloping way cut in ragged ascending shelves of rock. From there, high above, a towering bare stone spur, rounded near its crown, jutted out from steep walls of rock. When the path reached the spur, it became a long flight of steep steps that ascended and disappeared over the top. Out of curiosity, he followed it.
The wind was even colder on the slope, and it whipped around him and through his clothes. He climbed the steep steps and reached the top of the spur. There was a long, flat space. Down its center, the path was cut straight and level to a crack in the rock wall like the mouth of a cave. The beveled sides of the path were carved in patterns. He kneeled to take a look. There was scrollwork or knot work of some kind, and little geometrical shapes. All was now weathered, cracked and worn by the passage of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
When he drew closer, he saw a border carved into the rock around the cave mouth, following the natural lines of the stone. Reaching it, he saw there were runes, worn but still visible, like those at Amari, in long strings forming what might be the words of an unknown language. He ran his fingers along them. The cave beyond the entrance was small, not much more than a niche about nine feet deep in the rock, and three wide. He stepped inside.
On the far wall was a carving, deep set in the rock. It was in an abstracted form, very different from the realistic sculpture and bas-relief he knew, with much use of geometric knot work. But even so, what it depicted seemed clear to him, a man of mighty strength climbing out of the earth, doing battle with his bare hands against a monstrous wormlike thing with many devouring mouths. On either side, beasts of many kinds sat in audience.
Below the carving were more runes, in three lines of nine on the left, and the same on the right, forming words he could not read. Between the two sets of runes was what looked like the print of an open-fingered right hand, but carved in the rock. Talaos wondered if it was carved by the long ago artist, based on his own hand as a kind of signature, or if it was that of someone else and for some other purpose.
With curiosity, he put his right hand in the carven one. It was almost the same size as his own, and he had a strange sense of reaching across the long ages to greet the man whose hand it represented. Then he withdrew, and looked around the little cave.
Many other people must have been here over the long years, and some of them had left refuse. Broken pots, discarded bags, a split sword belt, a chipped, bent knife, and other things dropped carelessly about. Someone had even built a shoddy little fire pit in the corner, though the absence of soot on the roof above suggested that it had not seen much use.
Somehow, he felt like the rubbish defiled the place. He cleared it out, bit by bit, and hurled it down the mountainside. When all was done, he stopped and rested at the entrance, facing north across the pass to the sheer stone walls of the next peak.
There, lit in the morning sun, were three great figures carved in the rock, in a style like that of the man on the wall of the cave, but vastly larger.
In the center was a tall man, facing forward, with a spear in his right hand and a ring or torque in his left. Crackling lines, perhaps lightning, radiated from those hands and from around his head. Birds, perhaps hawks or ravens, flanked him overhead, and a wolf curled at his feet.
To the right of the central figure, and facing right, was a smaller figure of a man holding a bundle of reeds or wheat in one hand, while the other was outstretched with open fingers. Straight lines, like sunlight, radiated in a circle around his head. An ox or bull stood beneath his feet.
On the left, and facing left, was a woman with very long hair holding a large chalice in both hands. She had waving lines, like water or vines, radiating in a circle around her head, and a tree of many branches grew at her feet.
They were all recessed back on the higher cliff in such a way that they could not be seen from the road below, and at a height that made Talaos marvel at how they'd been carved at all.
Talaos stood there for a long while, in silent wonder, as the wind blew all around him.
He reflected on what they might be. Heroes of ages past? Or perhaps Magi? If so, they looked like none Talaos had ever seen or heard of. The figures on the mountain seemed far more primal and grand.
Shapers of the world.
Perhaps they were gods.
As they might have been, so long ago that only the stones remembered.
Whatever gods had truly been, if ever they had walked the earth, Talaos thought, these mighty figures on the rock would surely be how ordinary men would have seen them.
Without a conscious sense of why, he raised his right hand to them in greeting, and farewell. The straight path in the stone faced them. He walked it, and down the steps below.
He returned to main road at the pass and looked east. Before him the descent looked much longer and more gradual than the ascent had been in the west. There were lower ridges of forested mountains, line on line, gently falling into hill country at the horizon. For a long way at first, however, he would be going downhill.
Talaos laughed, and walked with swift steps down the road. After a little while, feeling suddenly exhilarated, he began to trot, then run.
The wind felt cool and fresh in his face. He ran in great loping steps down the switchbacks, rocks scattering in his wake. He ran on. He reached the tree line, still descending. Pines loomed on the slopes around. Every now and then, some animal would panic at his approach and flee into the woods. He reached a valley with a little stream, where the road crossed at a shallow ford, and without slowing, raced up the next ridge. His body sang with life and his pack felt almost weightless, and still he ran.
At last, he came to a wider valley where the trees gave way to meadows. The next lofty forested ridge rose a mile or more to the east. He looked at the sun overhead, and with a start, realized he'd been running, sprinting at almost full speed, for more than an hour.
~
Talaos strode down the deep forest path in the fading light. He'd at last reached the end of the high ranges, and entered the hill country beyond. Though it was supposed to be inhabited, he'd found only devastation.
There'd been a ruined mining operation, equipment smashed and anything of value long gone. He'd passed the charred remnants of a village with blackened skeletons of people and domestic beasts, and then a battlefield where dozens of bodies had been left to rot.
He thought of his own life of violence on the streets, and how petty it now seemed. He thought of the lives being
taken in the violence now around him, and wondered how many of them were tough fighters, like the gangsters of Carai, and how many of them were terrified innocents, pleading as they were slaughtered. He thought of men with expressions of serene calm, presiding over the deaths as they preached peace. He stalked down the road in deepening shadows.
Deep in his roiling, brooding thoughts, he paid little attention to what was around him. It was perhaps for that reason that he failed to see them, until they were upon him.
A large band of armed men, perhaps as many as fifty, fanned out from the woods on either side of the road. They carried a motley assortment of weapons, and some wore armor. They advanced all around, slow and sure, with expressions ranging from greedy leers, through tension and caution, to glum resignation.
He thought about the dead innocents, and these living men of war.
Were these the men who'd slaughtered a village, right down to the animals?
Off to the south, past a line of trees, he could see a ruined, looted farm.
He brooded, dark anger growing inside.
But this war was not his war, he thought. He continued on.
They began to move to stop him.
A big, burly fellow, with close-cropped hair, and a scowl on his scarred face, swaggered forward on the right. He had a battered breastplate, and carried a huge mace over his shoulder.
Talaos ignored him.
"Hoi! Stop, you!" the man barked.
Talaos considered who this man might be. They could have the blood on innocents on their blades, and that man their leader in the deeds. Not his war, but storms roiled in his mind.
"I said stop!" bellowed the man. "Hand over everything you've got, or you're dead."
Blood of innocents. But he was no innocent.
The Storm's Own Son (Book 1) Page 12