by Tom Deitz
Tryffon bustled up to join him, along with two other subchiefs from War. “Preedor’s coming,” Tryffon grumbled. “He moves slowly in the morning, but he’s moving.”
“As is Zeff,” Vorinn replied tersely. “Is there any more news?”
“Movement and more movement is all I know,” Tryffon replied through an unsuppressed yawn.
“I guess we’ll know by dawn,” Vorinn retorted, gazing east, to where the sky was quickly brightening. The peaks of the Spine were crowned with red fire where the ice on their summits caught the first light, but pink was spreading down their slopes, dispersing midnight blue and purple and banishing black to the shadows where it belonged.
Someone had possessed the foresight to get their horses ready, and Vorinn mounted handsome black Iron with the same casual ease with which he donned his boots. It was mostly for effect, he conceded; he couldn’t imagine that Zeff would press for battle now, given that he had lost two major bargaining points. But Zeff was wily, and the game of feint and parry barely begun. Vorinn would have preferred to fight—perhaps single combat. But he also knew that combat was not—yet—an option.
The gate swung open before them as they exited the camp and entered the slope that ringed the vale. Fires burned everywhere, if small ones: one to every eight soldiers, two of which number changed every hand. They waited there in the predawn gloom: good soldiers from all the clans and crafts, their heraldry like springtime flowers, though Warcraft’s red predominated—entire or quartered with the colors of other clans and crafts.
Nor had discipline lapsed even slightly since the events of the previous day, though speculation and unease had surely increased, as it would have had to among soldiers. But the army, Vorinn sensed, was still strong and perfectly controlled.
They rose as they saw him, saluting him as he and his party advanced toward the centermost siege tower.
Which, he supposed, was marginally safer now that Zeff had lost his principal weapon. No lightning would blast this tower today. But even as he advanced, Vorinn’s gaze scanned the second palisade that draped the vale: the one before him, a quarter shot beyond the first wall of royal shields. There was indeed movement there, but he could not tell more, save that people seemed to be flooding out into the field between Zeff’s palisade and the hold proper, but under cover of dark blankets or other fabric, so that it was impossible to make out what they were doing with any degree of certainty.
And the arcades—movement there, too, but likewise masked by fabric and furtiveness. The galleries would be getting true mornlight soon, and wouldn’t need torches anyway. He hated that: that the foe in Gem-Hold could almost certainly see him better than he could see them.
Wordlessly, he dismounted and climbed the steps that kinked up the center of the tower. Only when he had reached the level below the top did he step out onto a platform. Pausing only to settle his cloak and set his Regent’s circlet on his hair, he strode to the rail and waited. Tryffon joined him on the right, Preedor—with some difficulty—on the left. Veen held his helm, her face hard with determined pride. He wondered how she felt about Avall’s disappearance, given that her star seemed linked with the King’s far more than it was with his own.
Time passed.
Slowly, it seemed, though those who waited below probably felt that it moved far too quickly, if it was battle at dawn they faced. Vorinn didn’t blame them. In spite of the recent war with Ixti, very few Eronese under the age of sixty had seen more than mock training battles hand to hand. He hadn’t either—but he was different. Battle was born into him.
The sun’s rays were moving faster, too, their earlier creep down the mountains now become a precipitous slide. In a moment, a ray would touch the golden ball atop the Hold’s centermost tower, and dawn would officially arrive.
Zeff had demanded that the King’s forces be withdrawn at dawn. But that had been yesterday. This was now.
Where was Zeff, anyway? Would he even bother to appear? Could he even appear? Had his failure yesterday weakened his position past enduring? Vorinn had no way of knowing.
But then it didn’t matter, for gold suddenly gleamed like fire atop the hold, and morning swept down its whitewashed walls.
—To reveal Zeff standing where Vorinn had last seen him: on the lowest of the pillared arcades. Even the tabletop on which he had displayed Avall remained in place, token, it would seem, of arrogance as much as anything.
Zeff wore white, but he did not wear the helm and shield he had captured when he had taken Avall: the ones that were precise replicas of the magic regalia. And the matching sword was gone, of course, as was—presumably—the master gem.
But it did not seem to matter. Zeff looked as composed and arrogant as ever. And he raised his speaking horn to his lips and called out one lone word.
“Behold!”
The sound belled around the gallery and assailed the vale below like brazen thunder.
And was clearly a signal to begin the next stage of the confrontation.
It was as fine a show of coordinated action as Vorinn had ever witnessed, for all it was effected with what looked like draperies, blankets, and ropes. Whatever the mechanism, the darkness fell away from the backs of the galleries to reveal line on line of people roped one to another and likewise tied to the hold’s balustrades—men and women, without distinction, excepting the very old and the very young. Most wore clan or craft colors—probably Zeff’s idea, since it made them easy to identify. Nor was the move unexpected; Tryffon had suggested the possibility in yesterday’s Council.
What was different was the magnitude.
“Unfathered,” Tryffon breathed beside him, voicing Eron’s most virulent curse.
“Indeed,” Vorinn agreed.
“Regent,” Ravian murmured at his back, having rejoined them at the base of the tower. “Look at the ground.”
Vorinn did—and could not suppress a chill at what he saw.
The shroudings they had seen being put in place earlier had been removed there as well, so that the entire area between the palisade and the hold was now revealed to be carpeted with what had to be most of the hold’s remaining population, staked out spread-eagled at intervals along the ground. Not dead or tortured, merely as a taunt. Most were grim-faced and stoic, but a few looked as though they would have cried out had they not been thoroughly gagged. “Eight damn them!” Vorinn spat.
“Damn them indeed,” Tryffon echoed. “That’s a pretty scene.”
“Not one they can maintain, however,” Vorinn replied at once. “That has to be virtually the entire complement of the hold. I’m sure the idea is to forestall attack, since any missiles we hurl will be bound to impact our own, and any attack on foot will probably be a signal to start cutting throats.”
Tryffon nodded sagely. “Which means there’s no one but Ninth Face folk to maintain the hold—which means they can’t soldier. It also means there’s no one to work the mines.”
“Or,” Veen spat, where she stood behind them, “that they no longer have to.”
Vorinn nodded grim agreement, then looked around at his assembled Council. “Tell everyone on the field to move back exactly one span, but that’s all. It won’t mean anything in strategic terms, but it will be a reply—which Zeff, if we’re lucky, will take as a sign of weakness. It’ll also puzzle the cold out of him. And that’s what we need right now: puzzlement and confusion.” He paused, gnawing his lip, then motioned to his squire to bring his own speaking horn, which he raised.
“Zeff the traitor,” he called. “You seem to have odd notions about the proper treatment of Gem-Hold personnel—a lapse in your upbringing which I am sure the Council of Chiefs will address in their good time. In the meantime, I will report what I have seen to His Majesty, Avall.”
And with that, he turned and started back down the siege tower’s stair.
“You won’t be able to maintain that deception much longer,” Tryffon grumbled, behind him.
“No,” Vorinn agreed. “But if t
hings go as I hope, we won’t have to.”
“And if they don’t?”
“I’ll do what all soldiers do. I’ll fight as long as I can—and then I’ll either win or die trying.”
CHAPTER VI:
EXPLORING
(SOUTHWEST OF ERON–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXV–DAWN)
For a moment—that cold, still moment before true awakening—Avall was utterly lost.
Not that he’d had any real home for quite a while—not for more than a few nights at a time, anyway. The dungeons at Gem-Hold certainly didn’t count, and for most of two eights before his incarceration there, home had been a camp tent, around which the landscape changed every sunrise. Before that, he’d divided his time between the royal suite in the Citadel in Tir-Eron and his own youthful quarters in Argen-Hall. And before that, it had been the war with Ixti, which meant camp tents again.
And prior to the war? Why, home then had been the Wild, and bedrooms had been ruined way stations, birkit dens, or the Ri-Eron itself—but it was wisest not to think about that timeless interval when he had floated beneath the ice, sustained only by the gem’s determination to keep him alive. Just as he preferred not to think about his earlier tenure in Gem-Hold-Winter, when he had thought that the only aberration in the life his culture had laid out for him was an early marriage to someone he liked but did not love, and who was carrying a child he had not begotten.
Now, home was to all intents a cave. But at least it was a cave he shared with the people he loved best in the world. The men he loved best, he amended, for the tally of his beloved had always included his twin sister, Merryn; and lately had expanded to include Strynn and Div as well. It was odd, he reckoned, how so many of the people who presently filled his days were people he hadn’t known half a year gone by. Myx, Riff—even Zeff: all were new daubs on the canvas of his life. Veen, he had known but barely, and the same for Vorinn and Kylin.
Well, he conceded, as he rolled over on the section of rug he and Rann had claimed, he supposed he would know some of those people much better before very long. As for the landscape: It was the new thing now, the same as yesterday to the casual eye, but full of mysteries unseen. Mysteries they would begin unraveling with the rising of the sun, which was still a few hands away.
Movement beside him was Rann turning over as well. Avall let him nestle against his back, took the hand that snaked around his body and held it to his chest as he hadn’t done since they’d camped in the snow the previous winter. He’d had the gem, then, to draw strength from Rann, all unknowing. Now they had to draw strength solely from what they had to hand.
As for the war—That was a damned hard call. Everything he had been taught cried out to him that he should not have rested even this one night; that he should have grabbed that handful of gem shards at once, and tried as hard as he’d ever tried anything in his life to jump back to Megon Vale. People were getting ready to die there, for Eight’s sakes—and, more to the point, die for him—for what he symbolized, at any rate. For good or ill he was King, and that meant doing what was best for the people no matter what the personal cost.
But for one crucial, half-mad moment, that cost had been too high, and all the anguish of the last few eights had caught up with him and crystallized in the horrible injustice of the madness that Kylin had caught from his oh-so-brief encounter with the afflicted stone. And in that awful moment, he had done the unthinkable: destroyed—tried to—the most powerful object in Eron. All for his own selfish reasons. True, he had been genuinely concerned that it had driven Kylin insane; but a dark, selfish part of his soul-of-souls suspected with too much certainty for close inspection that what he had really been doing was removing the gem from any future equations that might involve their mutual interaction.
He was saner now, however, and knew that his fate lay back at Gem-Hold-Winter.
Or did it? Fate surely had a hand in this preposterously extravagant leap through space. So perhaps this was where he was supposed to be. Ultimately, he supposed, the best way to determine whether Fate wanted him to jump back was to try to jump back. And if he couldn’t, why, then he would still try to get back as quickly as he could by conventional means, for Strynn’s and Merryn’s sakes, if not his own. But in order to accomplish even that, he first had to get off the island. And the first step toward that had already been planned for shortly after sunrise.
That notion made him feel oddly content—tired, sleepy, and apprehensive, but content.
For a short while longer, he watched the fire die through slitted lids, and woke again to the sound of Bingg boiling water for cauf.
Half a hand later, full of cauf, camp-sausage, and way-bread, all except Myx, who knew more than the rest of them together about healing and would therefore need to remain with the still-comatose Kylin, were splitting up for the first round of explorations. Avall and Rann would scout the shore, while Riff, Bingg, and Lykkon would investigate the heights. They would meet back at the cave at noon to share information and plot their afternoon session.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Rann asked, as he and Avall paused at their shelter’s northern edge. The roof came down to the floor there, like the corner of a pair of lips, but the floor extended farther out than the ceiling, to form a kind of ledge. Runoff from rain had made a channel beyond, going down. Riff, Lykkon, and Bingg were already a dozen strides along it, scanning the undergrowth for some place to turn right and begin their trek upslope. There was growth aplenty, for vegetation covered every surface that was not too steep to support it, while the view above was masked by limbs, save at one point where they could see exactly enough to determine that their shelter was set three-fourths of the way down a massive escarpment of porous gray stone.
“They fed me enough to get by; they clothed me—until yesterday,” Avall retorted. “The Eight know I’ve had enough rest, and, however I may look, I’m not fragile, and certainly not broken—no thanks to Zeff in the case of the latter. I’ve got a bit of a headache, granted, but that could be the result of anything from gem residue to sleeping without a pillow last night. In any case, I’ll be much better when I know more precisely what our situation is.” And with that, Avall led the way down the trail.
Actually, it wasn’t a trail in the sense that anything living had made it. Mostly their route consisted simply of a fairly steep slope leading off to the right, following a depression between two low ridges, so that water kept it swept free of debris. Avall wondered how often it rained here. Or snowed. The sky had been clear so far, but half a day was no indication.
They could see little of the lake or the ring of cliffs beyond, courtesy of the intervening trees, but Rann was watching the landscape keenly. They heard birdcalls and the murmur of the wind among branches, but no other sounds save the occasional rustle of small animals—probably squirrels. What bare rock showed was still gray and porous. “I’ll wager this was once a fire mountain,” Rann mused. “I’d say it exploded ages ago, and the top came down in the middle. There’s one like that up past North Gorge, though I’ve never seen it.”
Avall shuddered. “Do you think this one will?”
Rann shrugged. “Not so soon that we wouldn’t have warning. It looks pretty benign around here.”
Avall indicated a nearby stand of evergreens. “Plenty of wood for whatever we need wood for.”
Rann nodded again. “More wood than we’ve got appropriate tools to work, I’d say. Something tells me we’re going to have dull swords before this is over.”
“You sound like you think we’ll be here for a while.”
“We may be—unless you can get the gem working, which I frankly doubt, given that it’s in pieces.”
“I intend to try.”
“I know you do,” Rann growled. “But we have to be realistic. If this is an island—”
“It is.”
Rann stopped again, and this time he sank down on a knee-high, moss-covered rock that protruded from a froth of bracken to the left of the trail. They’d c
overed almost two shots by then, and looked to be roughly halfway to their goal, though the lake was only visible as an occasional flash of blue ahead or to the left. “But how do you know that, Avall?” he asked wearily. “I truly don’t understand your talk of having seen it before.”
Avall flopped up against a tree, and began stripping leaves from a waist-level twig. “I saw it in a Well once,” he—almost—snapped. “As I’ve already told you. Beyond that”—he shook his head—“all I can think of is what you’ve already suggested: that the gems give you what you want—if you want it badly enough. And I wanted a place away from everything.”
Rann gestured expansively. “But here? How? Not that it isn’t beautiful.”
Avall let got the twig. “I had a lot of time to think about that while I was imprisoned, actually. And I think it comes down to water—or liquid, anyway.”
Rann raised a brow.
“No, think, Rann,” Avall went on quickly. “We know the gems need blood in order to activate. I’m not sure how or why they do, but they do. We also know that they display some of the characteristics of the Wells. Blood is liquid; so—obviously—is water. The water in the Wells has to come from somewhere, and it’s not unreasonable to suppose that all water is connected at some level deep underground. So even if I haven’t been here, maybe the gems—augmented by the Well water, or something—could tell where there was a watery place that fit my notion of what I wanted. I’m sorry, Rann, I know it sounds crazy.”
“It sounds like you think the gems are sentient.”
Avall’s face went absolutely serious. “I believe that more than ever. But even if they’re not, they seem to be—mostly—benevolent.”
“Mostly.”
Avall sighed, thrust himself away from his tree, and started down the trail again, talking over his shoulder. “In any case we have more imminent problems—the main one being that we really can’t stay here. I’m not sure how big this place is, but seven young men could exhaust its resources rather quickly, I’m afraid. We’ll need to burn a lot of wood if we’re to stay warm this winter, for one thing. And we haven’t seen any sign of animals large enough to keep us really well fed; which means that Myx is probably right in that regard, too: The place is too small to support a population of, say, deer. I assume there are fish in the lake, but we’ll get tired of fish soon enough, and really tired of smoked fish if that’s all we have to eat this winter. And we’ll run out of sugar, bread, salt, and cauf long before that. We have to find some kind of tuber or such like—I’m hoping Lyk can help there, as I’ve never been much good with plants or farming.”