“Now,” Saria told him, dragging him out of the snow to make a run for it. They soon made it to the rocks and climbed up to wait out the battle.
They had a good view of the whole field, lit by the firelight glowing on the snow, but Nessak was afraid to look out too often lest he attract attention from any quarter. He could tell that the general had managed to rally four or five of the hundreds into a thick defensive ring which the snow elves were having a hard time cracking open. At some point, some of the wagons went up in flames and the horses ran free, but as far as he could tell, his wagon was still down there. A number of Tomerians had fled past them into the mountain pass and had not been pursued. Only the howls of the wolves returned.
Nessak was awakened roughly by a jab to his gut. He jumped up in alarm and was immediately restrained. Tomerians. And there was Saria, held by two others, her tell-tale snow elf features now plain to see. General Marrann stepped out before them.
“Here they are, Sir,” came the voice of the wagonmaster from behind Nessak. “The girl is one of them. Maybe she brought them down on us. As for Lamartos,” he twisted Nessak’s arm, “at the least he’s a conspirator and at the most a traitor to his kind.”
“We cannot accommodate prisoners,” declared the commander to Marrann. “Execute them here and now.”
Saria spat defiantly at his feet. The general met her fierce glare sadly, almost painfully. Nessak felt a pang of guilt.
“No,” the general said, “bind them. We may very likely need them as hostages.” And with that, he left them.
“Hostages,” spat the commander. The others waited for what he might say. “Well?” he asked, “what are you waiting for? You heard your general. Bind them tight—and try to make sure that one” (he pointed a thumb at Saria) “doesn’t leave any snowmarks.” He stormed off.
The wagonmaster bound Nessak. “I missed the end of the battle,” he said with a wince. “How did it end?”
“A lot of good people died,” the wagonmaster snarled.
He noticed the general in a heated discussion with his lieutenant and a few of the commanders of the hundreds. Sometimes one pointed up the mountain, sometimes one down toward the plains. At last the meeting broke up and the remains of the army—somewhat less than half its original size, Nessak estimated—set off with backpacks up the slope into the mountain pass. “What’s up?” Nessak asked the wagonmaster.
“Just move,” the surly man replied, giving him a shove to help him along.
“They’re afraid to go back onto the plains,” Saria smirked. “They will know real fear now.”
It was a difficult climb, for the mountain pass was filled with drifting snow. Fear began about an hour into the climb. The army encountered fresh bodies in the snow. That was about all Nessak could see from his position near the rear. The general called a halt and ordered them buried in the snow on the side of the pass. As the march resumed and they passed by, however, it became evident something horrible had happened there. The snow was beaten and red with blood as though an entire battle had taken place there. They must have been the Tomerian scouts, or else the fugitives from the battle with the snow elves. Whoever they were, not much was left of them now. But there were tracks: all around them, in every direction, wolf tracks.
The camp that night was silent and dark. The sunset spread out red and wonderful over the rolling plains below the crags towering up around them. As soon as the moon came up, the first howl drifted over the mountain peaks, long and loud and passionate. Then a chorus of wolf howls began all at once from every direction: hundreds of voices, maybe thousands. Any murmuring there may have been in the camp stopped immediately. Only Saria seemed unperturbed.
“Commander, ready archers and axe-men!” barked the general. Eyes started appearing, glowing in the dark, all around the camp. A wave went through the camp as the orders were shouted from one to the next. Arrows pointed in every direction as the army huddled together. Barking sounded back and forth from the dark. One of the soldiers thought he saw a wolf-tail springing between rocks and fired an arrow after it. “Hold your fire!” shouted the general. “We are soldiers of the Tomerian people! We do not fear wolves!”
“Do you have an arrangement with the wolves, too?” Nessak asked Saria, noting her direly triumphant look.
“No,” she said. “We are all going to die. No one has ever returned from the Wolf’s Pass.”
“Oh, great,” he said. “Well, at least you seem to be taking it well.”
“Our lives are a small price to pay for the destruction of a whole army,” she declared.
What she said was true, no doubt, but the conviction with which she said it! He wondered if he had taken to his imagined role of uncle and protector for her too seriously and that he had somehow completely underestimated her. “Still,” he sighed, showing her his hands: he had undone the rope binding him.
A lone wolf stepped out into the snow above the army pass. Its fur glistened almost translucently in the moonlight. A gleaming white light shone from its chest, bathing everything around it in a ghostly light: soldiers, fur, bones, snow, and rocks—the rocks behind it were visible through its fur and bones.
Saria gasped. “It’s…it’s the shard!”
Nessak looked closer. The gleaming white light might indeed have been coming from a shard like the one the general had described, like the one Saria and the other knights had described as being with the boy Alik…but he couldn’t tell for sure.
The general and the wolf stared each other down for almost a minute. Someone wondered aloud whether it was a wolf after all and not a dog. Quietly, Marrann told his aide, “We will make one quick, decisive move: take down the leader and put the rest to flight. On my word.”
Solveys spread the word. The soldiers readied themselves. The shadows in the pass seemed to bristle with fur moving this way and that way.
Wolf and general moved as one. “Now!” shouted the general as the gleaming wolf leapt forward and all the shadows turned into wolves. The Tomerians fired a volley of arrows in all directions and all at once the whole line of wolves—for they were lined up in perfect ranks all the way around the camp—pulled up and flattened themselves to the snow away from the arrows. The second line of wolves leapt over them and dashed through the volley of wasted arrows poking through the snow to crash into the front line of the Tomerians before they could reload or defend themselves. All except the lead wolf, who simply passed through all the arrows shot through it to reach the general and take him down.
What followed next was chaos: armor, swords, fur, teeth, cries and yelping. The second line of soldiers tried to help in some places but the first line of wolves struck next, leaping over the tangled first line of soldiers onto the second. The second line of soldiers, armed and ready with battle-axes, fared better in most cases than the first, but in a few places the wolves broke through and started running through the camp.
“Get me free!” Saria hissed to Nessak.
“Yeah, yeah,” Nessak growled, glancing around. The wagonmaster and the other guards were fully occupied.
“Come on, you dogs!” the wagonmaster shouted, brandishing a club and a shortsword. Three wolves charged at him but stopped short of the swinging club, baring their teeth. He lunged out and missed one of them. Another dipped in to hamstring him and took a blow from one of the other guards.
Nessak glanced at the Tomerian lines and then back to his work with redoubled speed. Never mind if he was seen now. Suddenly the knot came loose and Saria slipped her hands through it and grabbed Nessak. He pulled out one of his tube artifacts and fired a shot at a charging wolf, sending it tumbling into the snow at their feet.
The crashing sound of the shot stopped the battle in its tracks. Soldier and wolf alike looked up. One of the guards pointed to them and shouted to the wagonmaster—but then the wolves resumed the battle and the wagonmaster was surrounded with slathering jaws slowly pulling him down. The line behind him had partially collapsed and had reformed around him
. The piles of bloody skin and fur were horrifying.
Nessak, unsure how much longer the line could hold there, motioned toward the general. The general, though he had been attacked first, had drawn up the ranks around him. The wolf with the gleaming shard was nowhere to be seen—no, wait, he had judged too quickly. The wolf shot down through the battlefield like a falling star, tearing down two soldiers with every pass. The lines were collapsing wherever it passed: left, right, forwards, backwards.
Nessak stared. The wolf came down again, flashing through the snow as fast as an arrow, knocking down one soldier to their left, pausing for the briefest moment in the center of the circle opposite them, and taking down another soldier from behind. Nessak could not move. He felt Saria tugging on his arm, but he was frozen still. He tried to reach his heart—where was it? It seemed so distant, lost, cold…as though he were freezing to death from the inside out in a lake of icy water with the ice freezing up above him. He hammered at the ice with all his might—so little!—and yet there was life, if only for the briefest of moments, and here its opposite: fear.
The deathly star winked above in the darkness, then started to fall. A howl echoed out over the mountain pass, tumbling down toward the battle below between human and beast. The ghost wolf crashed through the ranks around the general, pulling down four soldiers closely packed, dancing between them, tearing and crushing with its teeth. Then it charged down through the length of the Tomerian line on the left side, tossing soldiers in every direction, gathering wolves behind it.
The army collapsed.
“Hold your ranks!” The general’s shouts seemed so far away. “Hold your ranks or die flying!” They could not hold: they could not fight this beast. They fled down the mountain, some falling, many torn down by the wolves at their heels.
The ghost wolf turned. Its eyes seemed to glow to match the shard burning within its chest.
The shard, thought Saria, I must get the shard.
The wolf rocketed toward Nessak, burning through the trampled snow. Nessak fell. Saria rolled out of the way and reached her hand for the wolf’s heart. There was no fur, no skin, no bones between her and the shard. There was only a heartbeat. The shard touched her hand and she grasped onto it hard. It cut into her, so sharp she didn’t even feel it. The wolf, glancing down, peered into her eyes questioningly. Its momentum carried it on, and it glanced back, halfway between her and the general and the chaos of the battle…how many years had it lived on and on and on in this cold waste land? How many ages had passed since the day it had come across the half-frozen wizard lying on the embankment, a helpless prey? How long…and now what? it wondered as it slowly evaporated into the air forever.
The other wolves carried on doing what wolves naturally do. The men and women of the Tomerian thousand continued to do what men and women naturally do.
Saria rolled over and fell face-first in the snow, burying the shard in her bleeding hand into the snow. Voices went through her head…halai’ia…courai’ia…xyurvai’ia…. Strange voices she did not understand but she also did understand, intermingled with wolves’ howls and barks which she also did not understand but also did understand. Fire seemed to penetrate through her whole body, intoxicating, overwhelming, ravaging. The leaden metal machine in her other hand and that in her belt seemed to burn with terror. A tremor ran through her and she tried to control it but she could feel it welling up. Here she saw as clear as possible in the dim light her mother and father as she remembered them—their pale skin and loving eyes; her father’s watchful and determined glance, her mother’s tender arms enfolding her baby brother. There opposite was the Tomerian general, watching her warily, unspeaking. There beside her was Nessak Lamartos, blinking dumbly. She shut her eyes with pain. What was going on with her? Were these her parents come to bring her to the hall of new life? Or was this the wolf rampaging through her? She clenched her teeth and tried to hold on. Mother…father…general…Nessak…wizard…wolf…heart…Stone…Halai’ia…Alik….
The light rapidly welled up out of her. The power within her seemed to strengthen and take hold. Light! Light! Burning, the world around her seemed to be, melting in the light it was. So bright. She felt her whole heart poured out as though the shell that held it was also melting: quiet, happy love torn apart by the world and laid open—the heads of her mother and father upon the fence posts—glimmers of hope on a dark, snowy world, the hateful spite of the pursuers, the arrogant violence, the hunger of hope (gather to me, and I shall make you hunters of men!), the wrecked and wounded world beneath them, the longing—how ignorant, ignorant! The secrets of the world that could be revealed if only they would bring it to me! The perfection we could achieve! The lost. No! she howled. A voice cried out, “Look out, it has possessed her!” Someone ran toward her, and she sprang up suddenly, bowling that person over. Blood seemed to cover her eyes. She bounded toward the general, hurling the soldiers like rag-dolls out of the way and flattening him to the ground. Now, general, now, Gradja Marrann, you shall taste the fury of the love your people destroyed. His eyes seemed to stare back in fear—she laughed!—but there was courage underneath the fear. Courage and resolution. She stopped and saw him. He moved his lips as if to speak, but before the words could form in his mouth the tears began to overflow from her eyes, and with a great, worldless cry, she released him and bounded away up the slope into the darkness, watering the snow with her tears so that soon, there was nothing—not even a footprint—left but those frozen crystals to mark the way she had gone.
Nessak rose slowly. Marrann rose slowly, helped by his officers. The battle had died off completely, with only some scattered barking of wolves coming from down the mountain and a mournful echo of a howl from somewhere above them, perhaps not even on the earth. With the flight of Saria and the white shard, all had plunged into deepest black, and only gradually did a sliver of light return from the moon to illuminate the snows and the pale skin of those who were dying from loss of blood, casting all else in shadows.
Saria ran in darkness, unthinking, untiring, unerringly. When she stopped, the shard refilled her with strength and desire. It saw the way for her and guided her feet where they should go. When the sun came up, it was like smoke within her. When the sun set, it was like fire. The cold did not bother her, nor hunger, nor thirst, nor any kind of pain. Her mind was so on fire that she didn’t know if she would even notice such things if they occurred.
What was it? There was a constant buzzing far away within her mind that she could not make out. Closer there was very little: only herself and the ghosts that troubled her. There were the ghosts of her parents that came and went, the ghost of the wolf, the ghost of the wizard the wolf had eaten, and the ghost of the creator wizard, who was always there bent in thought, contemplating the thing he had wrought. Next to him the other wizard was but an apprentice, capable of commanding but not understanding the Stone. The Stone: she looked at the shard in her hand and wondered what it was and what she should do with it, and these thoughts continually returned to Alik.
Alik: as she flashed across the land, he was there. He was like a star in the lifeless waste. He was not far, and she bent her path towards him.
When she stopped, she stared at the shard. Her hand was no longer bleeding: there was not the faintest trace that anything had ever happened to it. Suddenly she looked for the tattoo of the Order of the Page Knights on her breastbone, but it too had faded away. She looked back to the shard. What was this thing and what was it doing to her? Connecting her, the idea seemed to flow into her mind. Connecting me to what? She wondered. Silence: silence grand and eloquent and infinite and wonderful.
“Why did you stop me from avenging my parents?” she demanded out loud.
Silence answered, it was not right.
“Why was it not right?” she demanded furiously—but even before she finished asking it, she felt the answer within her, churning like a hundred thousand creeping things all over her skin and within her chewing away on her. “Stop it!” s
he shouted. “Stop it!” It continued: it seemed to intensify. She saw the faces of the Tomerians strewn across the hills and plains behind her. She felt them pulling on the tube weapons protruding from her belt and she grabbed the weapons and threw them away. “Stop it, please,” she pleaded into the silence. She was overcome by an intense horror of all she had done. “Stop it,” she wept. It stopped.
The world went silent around her. The snow disappeared; the sun vanished; even her hands and feet disappeared. The silence was tangible. “What…what is this?” she wondered. “Have I died?”
And come to life, answered the silence.
Bliss seeped into every part of her. She collapsed in the snow, it was so relaxing. Calm flowed through her. Some great obstacle had been removed, and she knew the obstacle had been her self, so she must really be dead, she thought, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was now nothing else but one with this silent One.
There came to her the buzzing apprehension that she might all of a sudden at some time be separated from that One. She felt as though she were slipping already. The thought of all she had done returned—“But that’s not me!” she murmured. “If I could do it again, I would not now.” She felt the gloom gathering round her. “Please, don’t let me go,” she prayed, and the silence echoed back, don’t let me go.
She awoke—how long?—in the total darkness of complete blindness. Stars or lightning fizzled through her field of vision, disconnected from any reality. There was a sense of evil, and footsteps were approaching in the snow. Was this evil she felt simply the world, compared to what she had felt—no, still felt? Was this darkness simply the regular light of the world, compared to what she had seen? “Where are you, my beloved?” she murmured aloud.
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