by Rex Foote
The mage nodded his assent, and Kellan took a deep breath, then started off over the rise and down the hill. He was halfway down when he shouted, “Ho there!”
Both turned to look at him, and for the first time he saw what his quarry looked like. The Elreni, Hark, was a tall, lean bastard with skin the colour of pine bark and a long black braid of hair running down his back. He was dressed in rough animal hide clothes and had a hunting knife in a sheath at his boot and a bow and quiver over one shoulder. The girl, Esme, had a soft, round face that instantly invited one to underestimate her; her auburn hair was loose and flowed freely down to her shoulders, and she looked lean and fit underneath the same rough-cut animal hide clothes as Hark wore. Both had gear bags over their backs and wore the same expression of utter surprise. I am probably the first Humans they have seen since leaving Caladaria, Kellan thought as he drew close enough to them so he could speak at a normal volume.
“Who are you?” Hark asked, his tone wary.
“My name,” Kellan replied, looking pointedly at Esme, “is Kellan Ellison.”
“Why are you here?” Esme asked, her voice mirroring the wariness that edged Hark’s. Well, thought Kellan, that was always going to happen. After all, this is hardly the usual place to meet fellow travellers.
“Well, ma’am,” he began, damning himself when he saw how his formal tone caused a flicker of anger to flit across her otherwise cautious expression. “I have been sent by your parents to retrieve you and bring you back to Caladaria safe and unharmed.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Hark go rigid and slowly reach for his knife. Kellan would have paid that more heed if not for Esme, who promptly burst out laughing. This got both his and Hark’s attention, the Elreni giving her a concerned look while he himself just stared at the girl wondering if she had lost her mind. She carried on like this for a good while, almost bent over double with mirth.
After a time, she straightened and, wiping tears from her eyes, she said, “Sorry but that was the funniest thing I have heard so far in my life. Hark and I have fought monsters, almost drowned in mud, and lived with Ohruin for a month, and what, you have been following us for all this time? You poor people.”
“Yes, well, we haven’t been following you the whole time,” Kellan replied, feeling put off by her reaction. “We picked up your trail in the woods where you killed that monster and followed you until the Ohruin came, where we waited for about a month and then finally caught up with you today. I hope this shows you how dedicated we are to our task.”
“Well, I am sorry to tell you that you wasted a lot of time and effort for nothing,” Esme replied, still grinning. “I am not going back to Caladaria yet.”
Expecting this and still wanting to try to talk this through, he replied, “Your parents are worried about you, they believe he”—at this, he jerked a thumb at Hark—“kidnapped you.”
This wiped the grin off her face, and it was replaced with a stern expression that seemed ill-suited to her.
“Well, they are wrong. Hark didn’t kidnap me, he helped me.”
At this point, Hark tried to interject, probably to defend his own name, but Esme didn’t let him.
“This whole trip, my parents have tried to stop me; first with that patrol, and now it turns out that ever since we reached the Ohruin, we have been shadowed by another group sent by them. Well, when you return to Caladaria without me, you can tell them that I will be coming back, but only when I am ready.”
“You don’t understand; you are coming back with me. Your parents were very insistent on that point.” Kellan had slowly been raising his voice while talking, and from the way Hark’s head jerked up towards a point behind him, he knew that Aiden had heard and stepped into view. This reassured him, as it meant that these two were about to be put out of action. Kellan allowed himself a small smile of triumph as Hark reached for his knife. It died quickly, though, as Esme held out a hand towards the hill where Aiden stood and a shimmering dome enveloped the pair. Moments later, the surface of the dome rippled as if something struck it and it fell away. Realizing that Esme was a far better mage than he had assumed, Kellan lunged for her, knowing that if he could—
The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back. His jaw ached, and his ears were ringing.
***
Mul had to laugh to herself. Though she counted Kellan as a close friend, he could put more stock in his ability to talk his way out of situations than was warranted. Still, she thought, rising from a crouch and preparing to charge towards the unsuspecting pair, this is where I come in. She lifted her foot to start her charge and was surprised to find that it wouldn’t move. She looked down to see that both her feet were entangled by layer upon layer of plains grass that had risen up around her feet, up and up towards her calves. Roaring in anger, she ripped through the grass as she heard movement behind her and whirled to see a male Elreni dressed in deep crimson robes and holding a plain wooden staff. She started to charge the Elreni, but he raised a hand and a jagged spike of wood shot from his palm, impacting into the meat of her shoulder. However, this didn’t stop her charge, and with a snarl she crashed into her attacker, and bore him to the ground where she rained pain-fuelled blows onto his head and upper chest. Then she felt something slam into the side of her head, and the next thing she knew she was lying on her back trying to blink stars from her vision as a lean, craggy, and eyeless face loomed into view. His face was covered in a delicate pattern of some sort, a good portion of which had been damaged by her punches, and she bared her teeth at the thought of the pain she had inflicted.
“You are a very determined, Ohruin,” the Elreni said, his voice thick with pain. “But I have allowed this to go on too long; the chase has begun, and I must end it.”
He had been drawing closer to her as he spoke, perhaps to gloat, or maybe because he planned to slit her throat. Regardless, she waited until he was next to her feet before lashing out with a leg just as he finished speaking, catching him in his gut and throwing his lean body a few feet backwards. Mul began to leap forward to throttle the fool when he suddenly wasn’t there anymore. Wincing with pain as she got to her feet, she walked over to where he had fallen, and peered down into the yawning maw of a hole that dropped away into darkness; the hole had been mostly covered by long grass, and the mage had fallen into it when she kicked him. She felt a moment of pity for the Elreni. After all, a hole like this only went one place, and she gave a silent prayer to the World Spirit that he simply died where he landed. Then she broke the length of wood impaling her shoulder where it entered her flesh, grunting with pain as she did so, and jogged back towards where she had last seen Kellan. This was far from over, and they would still need her help.
***
Anger and frustration grew within Hark as he ran, Esme leading the way as they sprinted from Kellan and his mage friend. No matter what they did, what they went through, what they planned for, or what they wanted, something was always there to try and set them back or do them harm. At first, it had been the Pale Hulk—not once, but twice. Then it had been the swamp and his own stupid arrogance almost getting Esme killed. And now it was these adventurers come all the way from Caladaria on the orders of Esme’s parents, and Hark had had enough of it. When Kellan had tried to grab Esme, his anger had boiled over and he’d punched the fool in the jaw; then he joined Esme as they both fled straight away from Kellan and the mage who was already running down towards them, no doubt with more spells on the way. Esme stopped suddenly and pointed.
“Look, a ravine. We might be able to lose them in there.”
The valley where they had first met the adventurers turned out to be the start of yet another patch of hilly, rocky terrain, which was a good thing, as there were plenty of places to hide in such land.
“Go,” was Hark’s reply, and they started off into it, but came to a halt a few minutes in when they were confronted by a sheer wall of exposed rock. Esme stood panting, the pace they had set combined with the ge
ar they carried testing her newly expanded limits; Hark, however, was too busy trying to find a way out to be out of breath.
“We can climb out; there are enough handholds to make it, but I am going to have to give you a boost to reach the first one.”
Esme had recovered enough to object by this point, but Hark forestalled it. Handing her a rope from his pack, he said, “No objections. I am stronger, so I can lift you up. Once you reach the top, drop that rope down and I can climb out.”
“Alright,” she replied, her voice tight with worry. Walking over to the rock face, Hark bodily lifted Esme up to the first handhold, adrenaline giving him strength, and she grabbed hold and began to climb. However, she wasn’t far up when he heard voices coming from the ravine’s mouth. Leaving her to climb, he turned, took out his bow, nocked an arrow, and started back the way they had come, only to hear the voices getting closer. He fell back to the rock wall where he said, “They are coming; just keep climbing, don’t worry about anything else.”
“But—”
“No. Climb,” he ordered. Pointing his bow towards the voices, he took hold of the drawstring and prepared to fire. Inside, he maintained rigid control over his emotions, as fear sought to shake his limbs and resolve, while tension and worry tried to sow doubts in his mind about whether he could do what he needed to. The Hark who had left Caladaria would have failed and been overcome by fear, and maybe even the Hark who had left the Ohruin tribe would have been similarly defeated, but not the Hark standing here in this ravine. Now he had a reason to stand not only against the people coming for him but against the fear as well: the person he loved was relying on him to buy her time to climb to safety, and against this his fear had no purchase. As the voices drew near, it occurred to him that he had never told Esme that he loved her. Well, he thought, that’s one reason to live through this. Then the first of the adventurers came into sight, and Hark drew and released on instinct, the shaft cutting a red furrow through Kellan’s left cheek and snapping him back with the force of its passage. He stumbled back into the tall bulk of a large Ohruin, who righted him at once and unslung a quarterstaff.
“Stop!” Hark shouted, his voice echoing off the narrow walls of the ravine. “Don’t come any closer or I will kill you. I take it you know about Elreni and bows?”
Snarling, Kellan spat, “Release consume you, you didn’t have to draw blood. All we wanted was to get the girl back to Caladaria. You could have come back, talked to them, and then once you were done there you could have gone wherever you wanted to. But first your mage hurt Mul badly, and now you have cut my face, so it’s no longer an offer. Give us the girl, or regret it.”
Acutely aware that Esme was listening, Hark replied in a clear, calm voice, “You have no idea what the people you are working for are like. They would have had me arrested as soon as I walked through the gates and would have probably locked Esme up to make sure that she never got the chance to leave. But listen to me now; we don’t want to go back, and we probably never will go back. She doesn’t want that life anymore, and if her parents don’t like it, then that’s too bad for them. But this argument is not yours; don’t shed blood for it.”
Kellan gave him a grim smile. “Boy, for the coin they are paying us, it’s worth getting involved. And if we have to beat you until you can’t walk to get it, then fine.”
As he finished speaking, he motioned with one hand, and the mage beside him gestured at Hark. Before he could even react, he felt his bow tremble, then splinter into pieces, shredding the palm of his left hand in the process. Swearing fouly, he drew his hunting knife with his good hand and looked up. Esme was staring back down at him from only halfway up the rock face. He found at that moment that he had no words to say, nothing to reassure her or encourage her to climb faster—just a sense of absolute certainty about what he was going to do. So he gave her his familiar grin, turned back to face Kellan and the Ohruin, and ran to meet them. Kellan didn’t have a weapon out, and the Ohruin just had a quarterstaff, which told Hark that they didn’t mean to kill him, and that at least was something. The Ohruin reached him first and knocked the knife out of his hand with a single well-placed swipe at the blade. Cursing, Hark rolled and came up alongside her. Seeing that her shoulder had been recently wounded, he punched it with all his might, the blow landing with a wet impact. The Ohruin let out a scream of pain and staggered backwards. He would have had more time to appreciate the result, but a rock thrown by Kellan hit high on his upper left thigh. Grunting, he turned to face the now furious adventurer, and though he knew that it could well cost him later, he beckoned him forward with two fingers. This seemed to be the last straw for the man, who charged, fist held close to his chest. Hark dodged to one side but failed to see or even get the chance to dodge the kick that Kellan had been covering with his attack. Catching him in his ribs, it threw him to the ground, and Kellan was on him in moments, raining blow after blow down on his head until blissful darkness took him.
***
Kellan stopped punching the Elreni once he was sure he was out cold, then he staggered to his feet, looked up, and swore as he saw Esme’s legs scramble over the lip of the ravine wall. Turning back to Aiden, who was crouched by a pale, sickly-looking Mul, he snarled, “Why didn’t you get her?”
“Because,” the mage said without looking up from Mul’s shoulder, “I couldn’t do anything to her that wouldn’t make her drop and fall. That, and Mul needed help. That Elreni really got her good with that punch. Clever bastard, going for her wound.”
“Sore bastard, more like,” Kellan muttered, turning back to the Elreni, his rage dying down. He looked down at the bruised and battered face, and then it came to him. “It doesn’t matter that she got away.”
This got Aiden’s attention, and he looked up at Kellan, his expression curious.
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because,” he said, giving the body at his feet a kick, “we have him. And if I am right, she will do anything for him, even willingly walk all the way back to Caladaria if she thinks it will save him.”
Chapter Seventeen
9th Day of Jiva. The Season of Light. Year 250
At first, coherent thought was impossible, her mind a frenzy of activity with no way to impose the calm she needed to think. She sat against a tree, its branches shading her from the sun. After a while, her mind quieted down and she could start to think, and slowly two iron-clad facts emerged. One was that these adventurers had been sent by her parents to bring her back to Caladaria and had been paid a lot of gold if they did so, meaning that they weren’t going to give up. Fact two was that they had Hark and would use him to force her to come to them, no doubt threatening to harm him if she didn’t. So the obvious thing to do was to go to them and let them take her back to Caladaria, where an uncertain fate awaited her and Hark. She felt the very core of her being rebel against this idea and push it away. After all, she had made her choice, and if she went back now, who knew what lengths her parents would go to stop her from leaving again. This left only one path open to her, and it scared her deeply: fight the adventurers, rescue Hark, carry on to Mymt, and deal with her parents when she got back.
She took deep breaths, trying to calm her nerves at the thought of fighting those three. Kellan hadn’t seemed like an issue, but from what she had seen in snatched glances over her shoulder, the Ohruin certainly looked tough, and when she had blocked that mage’s first spell, she could feel the force of will behind it. She had only managed to block it because he hadn’t put the energy into it to break her defences, perhaps assuming she had none. She cursed her situation and found herself wishing that the cat she had put to sleep when she’d left Caladaria had just woken up, alerted her parents, and put an end to the whole thing before it could begin. Then a thought struck her, a way to get Hark away from his captors. It would be dangerous, and it could go horribly wrong, but she had to try to fight for the one she loved and for the life she wanted to live. She held a hand up to her face and saw how it t
rembled with a mix of tension and fear. It was proof that she was afraid, but she knew that no matter how afraid she was, she had to try this, and if she failed, then chances were she wouldn’t care anymore because she would be dead. Rising to her feet, she set off in the direction of the ravine’s entrance, knowing that the adventurers wouldn’t be far and would want to be found.
“Crone’s paths,” she muttered under her breath, the utterance more a prayer than a curse. For if there was ever a time to invoke the Goddess of Consequences, it was now.
***
Watching her walk towards their camp, Kellan reflected that he really shouldn’t have been surprised that she came this quickly. He had been right about her and the Elreni, and this was the proof of that. He hailed her when she was a few yards out.
“So, you have come to go home?”
Aiden and Mul came to stand to either side of him, the Elreni behind them bound and still unconscious.
“I have come for Hark,” she shouted in reply, and Kellan was impressed with how calm her voice sounded, given the circumstances.
“Sure, you can have him,” he replied nonchalantly. “If you come with us.”
“No, I am taking him with me. Then you can go back to my parents and—”
She never finished. Having learned from the last encounter, Kellan had told Aiden to hit her hard with a sleep spell the moment it became apparent that she wasn’t going to come with them, so the instant she said no, the mage started to cast the spell, with no gestures or outward sign that he was doing it in order to ensure that she wasn’t alerted. Kellan walked over to her and sighed.
“A lot of pain and hassle could have been saved if you had just come with me when I asked you the first time.”
***