Reluctantly, the others agreed.
There were no sheltering trees on the High Plains, but by now all of them carried pieces of heavy canvas designed to be joined together by collapsible hollow tubes—a gift of the Elves, left for them at one of the trail huts many days ago. Each piece alone could serve as a windbreak. When they were all joined together, they formed a shelter large enough for humans and Centaurs both to take refuge together from the worst of the storms.
Assembling it was a tricky matter, however, and something they’d never done in the dark.
Cilarnen hadn’t worked any High Magick since Nemermet had joined them—even so simple a thing as lighting a fire. He wasn’t sure why; he didn’t think Nemermet would try to throw him out of the Elven Lands just for being a High Mage. But there was no longer any point in wondering. They needed light. And Mage-light was a simple spell, one that every Student-Apprentice knew.
He concentrated. The ball of blue light grew between his hands. When it was as large as he wanted, he spread his hands. It hovered above them, a small full moon.
“You’re full of tricks,” Wirance said approvingly. He swung down from his mule’s back and began to unpack his piece of the shelter. Cilarnen dismounted as well. The sooner the shelter was assembled, the sooner they could begin to get warm. He thought longingly of tea—though the hot water Nemermet called “tea” was a poor substitute for the real thing.
“You did not name yourself a Wildmage when you stood upon the Border.” If Nemermet’s voice held any expression at all, Cilarnen would have said it sounded faintly accusing. But of course it didn’t. He wasn’t entirely sure Elves had emotions.
“I’m not a Wildmage,” Cilarnen said, struggling to match Nemermet’s even tone. “I’m a Mage of Armethalieh.”
“Armethalieh!” Now there was emotion in Nemermet’s voice.
Surprise … and contempt.
Kardus stepped forward, placing his body between Cilarnen and Nemermet.
“He was Banished, as was Kellen Wildmage,” the Centaur said, and there was warning in his tone. “He has lived for a season among the Centaurs of Stonehearth, and fought valiantly in their defense. And it is my Task to bring him to Kellen Wildmage.”
“Then do so,” Nemermet said briefly, his tone gone flat, and turned to help the others erect the shelter.
In the glow of the Mage-light, Cilarnen stared at Kardus in shock.
Hyandur had known he was from Armethalieh, and had helped him escape. The Centaurs had known where he came from—and they’d pitied him for it, he now realized ruefully.
He hadn’t expected this reaction.
“Armethalieh, too, had a treaty with the Elves,” Kardus said quietly. “But they have not honored it.”
“To help the Elves?” Cilarnen wasn’t quite certain he’d heard the Centaur Wildmage correctly. “Like the Centaurs? To send … troops?” Even after all that had happened to him in the last few moonturns, Cilarnen found that an impossible concept to quite imagine. High Mages—and citizens—leave the City?
“Yes. But they would not even allow Andoreniel’s envoy to warn them.”
A dozen disparate pieces of information came together in his mind, all in a rush. “Hyandur. He was the one who came to warn the High Council, wasn’t he? They didn’t let him in.” He paused, and added, wonderingly, “He saved my life.”
When the City denied him—he still saved my life!
“And so you see that the Elves can be kind. Remember that.”
There were times when Kardus sounded just like his old tutor Master Tocsel, Cilarnen thought ruefully, though certainly Master Tocsel would never have had a good word to say about the Elvenkind.
He turned to help assemble the shelter.
Chapter Twenty-three
Journey’s End
MUCH LATER, CROWDED in among the Centaurs—cramped but warm—Cilarnen found himself lying awake. His mind was filled with questions, but of them all, only one was really important.
If Elves were like humans, or Centaurs, with individual likes and dislikes, well and good. But if Armethalieh actually had somehow had a treaty with the Elven King, and had broken it, how likely was it that the Elves would help Armethalieh now?
And if Kellen Tavadon was living among the Elves, which side would he take? Human—or Elven?
AS Nemermet had promised, they caught up to the main body of the Centaurs the next day.
A few hours after they broke camp that morning, another Elf—this one on a bay mare wearing beautifully fitted armor enameled in a rosy hue several shades lighter than her coat—came galloping back to them.
“I See you, Nemermet,” the mare’s rider said.
He was wearing armor as well, though it hardly looked to Cilarnen as if it would be of any use in a battle. It matched the mare’s exactly, and like the mare’s looked more like jewelry than armor.
“I See you, Linyesin,” Nemermet said, bowing slightly. “Here are the stragglers from Stonehearth: Comild and his levy, and the Wildmage Wirance who accompanies them. I also present to you the Centaur Wildmage Kardus, whose Mageprice is to bring the Banished High Mage Cilarnen before Kellen Knight-Mage.”
Linyesin lifted a horn from his saddle and blew a few notes. After a moment, Cilarnen heard an answering echo of that horn-call in the distance.
“Andoreniel thanks you for your care of them, and asks that you aid the others in helping the Herdingfolk across our eastern border safely,” Linyesin said.
“I go with pleasure,” Nemermet said. Without a word to the others, he turned his stallion around and headed back the way he’d come.
“Come,” Linyesin said to them. “Your comrades await you. We are grateful for your strength, and are eager to hear your news.”
“Not much to tell,” Comild said gruffly, as they followed Linyesin toward the other Centaurs. “One of Them came down on us at Stonehearth. Our losses were heavy—ours and the villagers both. But the Wildmages killed it—them and Cilarnen.”
There was a pause, but though Cilarnen was expecting a sudden barrage of questions from Linyesin, it didn’t come.
“That is welcome and interesting information,” the armored Elf said at last. “It nearly outweighs the discouraging news that one of Them has been seen east of the Elven Lands. That is puzzling news indeed. But perhaps you will have told Luermai or Nemermet more of your tale than you have told me.”
“No,” Wirance said simply. “As for why it came, we are not sure.”
Cilarnen hesitated. He didn’t want to deliver the whole of the message he had for Kellen to this stranger—only Kardus and Wirance knew that the Demon had spoken to him, or what it had said—especially considering how the Elves seemed to feel about Armethalieh. But it couldn’t hurt to fill in a few of the details.
“It saw me,” he put in, hoping he didn’t sound as ineffectual as he felt. “I don’t know why it was there, either, but at first it thought I was Kellen Tavadon. It looked like a human, and it spoke to me, telling me I couldn’t go back to—to Armethalieh. When it realized I wasn’t him, it attacked me. I fended it off, and it decided to destroy the village first before coming back to kill me.”
He stopped, wondering if he’d said the wrong thing. Linyesin was staring at him intently.
“It would be good to know—and it would please me greatly,” the Elf said, “if you would say further how you fended off the attack of one of Them and survived.”
“It was Mageshield,” Cilarnen said. Thinking back, he wasn’t sure his shield had been all that effective. It was more as if the Demon, seeing he was a Mage, had simply decided to kill him last.
“It must have meant to take you captive when it discovered that you were a Mage,” Linyesin said, echoing Cilarnen’s thoughts. “Or to take a very long time over your death. Fortunate indeed that matters occurred otherwise.”
Cilarnen shivered. From all he’d seen at Stonehearth, “fortunate” was an understatement.
By now they were within sight
of the Centaurs. There were a couple of hundred of them, and with them were more Mountainfolk and several more Elves, all in armor. Each suit of armor was a different color; they looked like a handful of spring flowers somehow transported to the midst of winter.
And there were supply carts, like the one Cilarnen had seen just inside the Elven border, but these were much larger, drawn by six draft mules instead of by a pair of horses. He wondered how they’d gotten them over the passes.
Comild gave a grunt of satisfaction at the sight of the carts. “Decent meals at last.”
Linyesin laughed. Cilarnen would hardly have been less surprised if the Elf had dismounted from his mare and turned cartwheels in the snow. “Oh, yes, Comild, ‘proper food.’ Nemermet brought you to join us as fast as he could, and the food the scouts travel on can be less-than-satisfying, but we don’t mean to starve you before we reach Ysterialpoerin.”
HE would hardly have called it “luxury” a moonturn before, but fresh meat, pancakes, hot cider, and a warm place to steep—even if it was a tent he shared with three of the Mountainfolk—made Cilarnen feel more confident than he had since he’d left Stonehearth. The Centaurs had been eager to exchange news as they marched, and apparently their new guides—Elven Knights—were freer with information than any of the Elves Comild’s party had dealt with up till now. In the few hours Cilarnen had ridden with the army, he and Kardus had learned more about what was going on than they had in all their time riding with Nemermet.
All Nemermet had told them was that their eventual destination was a place called Ysterialpoerin. Now they knew that, weather permitting, they would reach it in two sennights. Three at the most—assuming nothing attacked them along the way.
And attack was possible at any moment, though so far they’d been lucky—another reason Nemermet had hurried them along so swiftly. The Elven Lands were already under assault. Not by the Demons directly—apparently they couldn’t come here—but it seemed that they had found a way to slip their creatures past the land-wards. The Centaurs had been warned to be on the watch for a kind of wolf the size of a pony, bats as large as small ships, and (apparently worst of all) things called “Shadowed Elves,” which had to be destroyed at all costs. Though nobody said anything directly, Cilarnen got the impression that the Demons meant to destroy the Elves and the Elven Lands first.
These Demons—nobody called them anything but Them—were nothing like the Armethaliehan nursery-tales he’d been terrified by as a child. He managed to figure that out, though nobody wanted to talk about them much. Cilarnen doubted that the Centaurs he’d talked to knew much more than they’d said; and he wasn’t quite ready to try questioning any of the Elves.
He suspected that Kardus knew more, but the Centaur Wildmage would not answer any of his questions. “This is neither the time nor the place,” was all Kardus would say. “Wait for better.”
Remembering the sight of the Demon at Stonehearth, Cilarnen reluctantly decided to take his advice.
THEY were two days away from Ysterialpoerin when the blizzard struck.
The Wildmages traveling with the army had been warning of truly bad weather to come—in a day, perhaps two. Cilarnen knew that Linyesin was hoping that they would at least reach the edge of the forest before it began, so that they would have some shelter and protection from the storm. The Centaurs had rejoiced when the Wildmages told them that weather magic had been done by the Wildmages with the Elven army, pushing back the storm and giving them an extra day’s grace.
But then the storm struck without warning, and far too early.
It was an hour or two past noon. Cilarnen was riding beside Kardus near the supply carts when suddenly he heard the horns begin to blow.
“What is it? Are we being attacked?” he demanded in alarm.
“No,” Kardus said, puzzled. “It’s the signal to make camp.”
Suddenly the temperature dropped sharply, and the sky turned black.
Cilarnen looked up, alarmed.
The sky was … boiling.
There was no other way to describe it. He heard a rumble, and a sudden crash of thunder, and saw lightning flash across the sky.
A wall of wind—fierce enough to make Kardus stagger—came howling down out of the north. Oakleaf began to sidle and balk as thunder boomed again and heavy wet flakes of snow began to sheet down out of the now-black sky.
Belatedly, Cilarnen realized what the horns had meant. The promised blizzard had come now. And if they all didn’t get under cover they were going to freeze.
He swung down off Oakleaf’s back. The mule fussed and balked, but Cilarnen managed to lead him over to the wagon and tie him fast.
THEY formed the supply carts into a windbreak, and fought to get the shelters up, for without shelter they would freeze, and quickly. But it was useless. The wind was too strong.
It was the Mountainfolk who realized what must be done to save them. They emptied the supply carts, flinging the contents haphazardly into the snow as the Elves struggled to unhitch the mules so that they could be brought to shelter. So great was the force of the wind that the wagons’ contents blew everywhere. Already snow was mounded against the windward side of the wagons, and no one could see more than a few feet in any direction.
Every coil of rope they found, the Mountainfolk passed to the Centaurs, who used it to link themselves together, so that none would be lost in the blinding snow.
Cilarnen found himself unceremoniously lifted—he didn’t see by whom—and tossed into one of the now-empty carts. He landed hard, and immediately tried to scramble back out again.
“Stop that, boy. Do you want to freeze? I’ve never seen a storm come up this fast—not even a Called one,” an unfamiliar voice said out of the darkness. It was one of the Mountainfolk. Others crowded in quickly, and then pulled the tarp closed over the end of the wagon.
“But, Kardus—” Cilarnen said. The wagon shuddered with the force of the wind.
“Your Centaur-friend is warm and safe in the middle of the herd,” the stranger said. “Which is more than you or I would be out there just now; they’re hardy folk. Have patience. The worst of this should blow itself out in a day or two and we can be on our way. And then, I admit, I’d like to have a word or two with whoever Called this blizzard.”
“Called?” Cilarnen said blankly.
“Of course,” the stranger said calmly. “You don’t think this came naturally, do you? This weather was supposed to come tomorrow, or the day after—and not a storm this hard, either. A Wildmage called this up, and I’d like to know why.”
As the wind howled around them, and Cilarnen buried his head under the shelter of his cold arms, he decided that he wanted to know why, too.
Very badly indeed …
“I need to get back,” Kellen mumbled aloud. He was exhausted from the healing but he thought he might as well rest back at the cavern as here. Where he was supposed to be right now anyway.
“You’re exhausted,” Shalkan told him, not unkindly, as Kellen sat at the front of the unicorn’s tent, wrapped in blankets and drinking a cup of soup someone had brought him. “You’re not thinking clearly. If you insist on going tonight, wait for Ancaladar to get back. A horse won’t be able to make it even as far as the main camp in this weather—and don’t make eyes at me. Even if I were willing to take you—and I’m needed here—you’d freeze by the time I could get you there.”
He knew Shalkan was right—the snow was coming down even heavier than before, if that was possible, and in full darkness, even a unicorn might get lost. And getting back to the cavern camp wasn’t really an emergency.
“Why is it snowing?” Kellen finally thought to ask. “The weather wasn’t supposed to turn so soon.”
“The Shadowed Elves tried to burn the forest. Jermayan is pretty sure they used the ever-burning metal you stopped them from using before. He had to bring the storm to stop the fires from spreading. Kindolhinadetil’s foresters are out looking for the pieces now. Perhaps they will be ab
le to save the individual trees that were set afire. But whether they can or not, the forest itself is safe.”
“I should go and help,” Kellen said groggily, trying to get to his feet.
“You should stay where you are, and drink your soup,” Shalkan said firmly, lowering his horn meaningfully. “I will wake you when Ancaladar returns.”
Kellen had no intention of falling asleep—especially here. Not when there was so much to do. But Shalkan was right. He needed a little more strength, and he could get that from the soup. It wouldn’t hurt anything or anyone just to sit there until he finished it.
SHALKAN woke him a few hours later. “Come on,” he said, prodding Kellen with his horn; it was the prod of the horn, rather than Shalkan’s voice, that stirred him out of an unrestful sleep.
Kellen was glad to be awakened. He was as groggy as if he hadn’t slept at all. His dreams had been unsettled, filled with shadowy menace and battles. He’d woken with the same feeling he had all-too-frequently these days: that time was running out; that while they spent their energy on inessentials, Shadow Mountain was winning the larger war.
He got unsteadily to his feet and staggered after Shalkan into the thigh-high snow, pulling his heavy cloak tightly about him. The snow was still falling heavily and steadily; there was a narrow trench where others had walked, but even that was filling quickly, and the snow showed no sign at all of stopping. If the wind kept up like this, they’d have snow dunes up to a dragon’s eye before long.
Ancaladar and Jermayan were waiting for Kellen in the same clearing as before. Balls of Coldfire hung in the trees, illuminating the blowing snow and very little else.
“The forest is secure,” Jermayan said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the wind. “The foresters have found every ring of the Shadowed Elf metal.”
“Good,” Shalkan said, shaking to rid himself of the snow that clung to his fur. “And Kellen has done what he came here to do. So you may take him back to the caverns—as he insists.”
The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy Page 150