The Inner Seas Kingdoms: 03 - Road of Shadows

by Jeffrey Quyle

  “We need to catch up with the rest of my companions, and they’re at least a day ahead of us,” Kestrel explained his haste. “And we don’t know exactly where they are, so we need to hustle along.”

  “We need to hustle along anyway, because these hills are haunted,” Allgain said emphatically. “I wouldn’t even be staying here if I wasn’t with a powerful magician like you.”

  Kestrel bit his tongue, and chose not to discuss the fact that he was not a magician. “How so are they haunted?” he asked.

  “They’re haunted, you know – things happen, things are here, unknown and inexplicable occurrences. This isn’t my land of origin, so I only know the vague tales,” Allgain answered.

  Kestrel pulled two pieces of travel bread from his bag, and gave one to the Albanu native, as he chewed on one himself. “Let’s get going, and we’ll watch out for ghost and goblins,” he said without conviction. “And we can watch out for my friends too.

  “Here, climb on,” he stooped and offered his back to Allgain, then began loping once his passenger was securely in place. They travelled on for the rest of the day, and spent another night in the trees, much to Allgain’s distress, and then moved quickly along the following day, without interruption or interference.

  In mid-afternoon there was a rumble of thunder overhead. “We have to take cover,” Allgain said hastily, and Kestrel detected real panic in his voice.

  “Is it a storm?” the elf asked, “or something worse?”

  “What could be worse than a storm?” Allgain asked. “We have to get under cover. That sounded close; it may be sneaking over the hill and could be closer than we realize.”

  “Getting wet isn’t so bad,” Kestrel replied. “Besides, it will slow everyone else down, and drive them indoors. We could slip down to the road and make good time while everyone else is cooped up.”

  “We won’t make good time; we’ll die,” Allgain said bluntly. “We have to find some protection. What do you see?”

  Kestrel swung his head around, looking through the forest for some type of shelter. He evidently didn’t understand what storms were like in Albanu, or else Allgain didn’t understand how basic they were. In either case, Kestrel decided that shelter was prudent, and they could depart from any protection easily if the storm proved not to be as dire as Allgain thought.

  To his left, as the hills rose higher, and the slopes grew steep, there was a tall band of exposed stone, a ribbon of short cliffs, trees and rock slides interrupting and adorning intermittent stretches. There appeared to be deep overhangs, places where they could huddle safely beneath the sheltering stones.

  He swerved and began to climb. As he moved, the sky overhead grew darker in a matter of moments, and a growling, sound suddenly dropped down from the heights of the hill in front of him.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” Allgain begged and cried in terror, and Kestrel redoubled his efforts. He picked out a spot to aim for, and directed the flight of his feet towards it, growing fearful as he heard the approaching sound of something calamitous, a hissing, percussive sound that was growing closer to him as he ran towards it, praying that he would reach the safety of the cliff before danger fell down upon him.

  The cliff was only twenty yards away, he saw, through a thick tangle of bushes, but the approaching sound was very close now. He recognized it as a continuous, overpowering combination of constantly falling rain, or sleet or hail or some other objects, striking the ground just above the cliff, with a constant flow of sound, percussive sound that scared him.

  Suddenly everything in front of him turned grey, an impenetrable screen that fell between him and the shallow caves of the cliff, even though he had waded through half the patch of briers, and come within ten yards of the cliff.

  The grey wall leapt at him as he jumped towards it, and then it was suddenly upon him. He felt himself being pelted down, painfully stoned by a thick shower of devastating hailstones that pounded down upon him, bruising and cracking against him. He felt Allgain being pressed against his back as the force of the stones hammered the small person against Kestrel’s flesh. Kestrel started to fall to his knees as he tried to continue to move forward, and his momentum carried him through the last of the bushes and into the narrow, open verge that beckoned him to crawl forward to the stony shelter that he thought must be only steps ahead of him.

  There was rain mixed in with the hail, he realized. He felt his clothes grow soaked as the hailstones continued to punish him. He made it forward another few feet, and suddenly he saw the stony cliff face again; he made it into the beginnings of the sheltered edge of the ground where the tumult from above was blocked by the escarpment in front of him and overhead.

  One last large hailstone smashed painfully into his ankle, making him moan in anguish, and then he crawled into full protection, no longer hit by the wrathful punishment that the angry red heavens overhead had inflicted upon the world below.

  Kestrel moved to the deepest center of the shallow grotto, and shrugged the unconscious Allgain off his back. He propped his friend up against the back wall, then removed his backpack and his bow and quiver of arrows, with his staff laid aside as well.

  Two fingers on one hand were swollen and he had difficulty as he tried to hold the skin of healing water and open the stopper. After a minute of work, he got the water open, and took a sip of the water, then poured a small amount into Allgain’s mouth. The Albanun sputtered, then opened his eyes for the first time since they had reached their refuge.

  “I hurt so badly,” he moaned to Kestrel.

  “I’m sure you do; I do too. The water I gave you will help you to heal quickly. I’m sorry I didn’t realize how terrible your storms are here. That was awful; are they all like that?” Kestrel replied.

  “This is pretty typical,” Allgain answered, looking out at the curtain of gray and white that still fell only feet away from them. They both spoke loudly to be heard over the noise of the crashing precipitation near them.

  After that, they both sat back in silence, nursing their wounds, for several minutes as they stared out into the whiteness beyond. Finally, as his nerves and his body began to recover from the shock of the storm, Kestrel’s eyes began to rove around, and he discovered that the shallow grotto they were in appeared to have an awkwardly placed passage that ran deeper into the hillside behind them.

  Kestrel stood up, then placed his hands up into the darkness he had noticed, a cave that appeared to rise and twist away as it eventually ran back into the earth. He poked his head up into the darkness, then placed both hands up over his head and lifted himself up completely into a space that he found he could stand up within. In some manner he couldn’t understand, the cave chamber seemed to be well-lit from the opening he had just entered, lit to a surprising degree that allowed him to dimly see several yards deep into a smooth-walled passage stretching in front of him.

  “Where are you? What are you doing up there?” Allgain called up to him.

  “There’s a long cave up here,” Kestrel replied, as his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark interior.

  “Come down out of there,” Allgain shouted. “If these hills are haunted, then that cave has to be chock-full of trouble.”

  An inexplicable light down around the curve in the cave’s walls appeared, seemed to waver, then grew brighter.

  “I’m going to go look a little bit – not very far,” Kestrel assured Allgain. “I’ll just go see what this light is. I’ll be right back.”

  He cautiously began to advance along the surprisingly smooth surface of the cave floor. There was a very faint ambient light in the cave, he realized, coming from a band of some particular mineral that he didn’t recognize as it streaked along the low ceiling of the passage. He reached up to touch the source of the faint pink glow, and touched a smooth, almost glassy, cool surface.

  As he advanced and started to go around the curve of the cave, he found that the glow from the overhead stony band continued to illuminate the distance ahead, but that far off
there was a different brightness – the cooler, blue light he was following, whose source he couldn’t see, and it wavered slightly from time to time.

  “Allgain?” Kestrel called back. “Can you hear me?” he could no longer see the entrance of the cave, but the light that filtered up from where the Albanun waited was clearly visible behind him, a relatively dazzling brightness.

  “I hear you Kestrel,” he heard his companion call back.

  “I’m going to follow this light a little further, to go see where it comes from. Everything is fine, and I’m safe,” Kestrel informed Allgain, as he pulled his knife from its sheath on his hip, just to be safe. He started forward again, and after twenty more yards, the bend of the cave was enough to further reduce the light he could see from the cavern entrance, and after another minute of walking along the way he could see no sign showing that the entrance existed at all, though the glow before him continued to brighten.

  His next step caused him to somehow stumble over a stone he hadn’t seen on the ground. “Brown leaves and broken branches!” he swore in Elven without thinking, nervous about the underground surroundings. He thought of his relief just days earlier when he had avoided having to crawl around in the underground sewers of the village he had escaped from, and grinned at his undeniable elven heritage.

  “Is someone there?” he heard a soft voice, a feminine voice ask from some spot nearby, up ahead, and he froze in shock.

  “Is someone there?” the girlish voice asked again. “I heard you; you spoke in my language,” she pleaded, speaking again in the elven language, he realized with shock.

  Kestrel gripped his knife tighter as he tried to imagine any possible way that another elf could have been transported to this strange world of two suns. His imagination failed him; there was no plausible explanation. Yet he had heard the voice call out; and he fatalistically concluded that he must go on into whatever situation was ahead, in order to find the source of the voice. With a sigh, he moved forward to see what situation existed that could provide such an extraordinary lure.

  The passageway turned again, more sharply than before, and it grew in size to a chamber as large as a sitting room in a palace, a space that was many yards across in each direction, with a ceiling that rose in height to twice that of the passageway. There were several entrances that showed other passages also feeding into the chamber, and each exhibited the same strange band of glowing mineral along the ceiling. The bands all came together atop the chamber, and spread widely across the chamber top, making virtually the whole surface glow.

  But all those facts were lost on Kestrel, who stood with his knife in his hand, his caution forgotten as he looked across the chamber where a girl sat with her back propped against the far wall, her hands and feet bound, her legs bent beneath her.

  The girl was an elf. She wore a gown that was tattered and torn, one that must have been alluring before it was mistreated, but that escaped Kestrel’s notice as he focused on the ears and the eyebrows of the girl. The ears were at least as pointed as his were, not as high and not as intricately whorled as most elves, while the eyebrows arched at a gentler plane than most other elves, but in looking at her, there was no mistaking the elven heritage she carried.

  Nor could one fail to notice that her hair was an unusual color, possibly green, though Kestrel wasn’t sure what it would look like if seen under the natural light of his native land. Her build was not as slender as an elf’s, he noticed as well, and that drew his attention to her dress, one that accentuated the distinctly human-like curves that adorned the girl’s figure. And her face was beautiful. There was no word Kestrel knew to describe just how exquisitely the best features of human and elven beauty had combined in her visage – her cheekbones and nose and chin and eyes, all had a perfection of shape and placement and symmetry that was flawless. She was beautiful, and familiar, yet he couldn’t identify where he had seen her before.

  “You’re a human!” the girl cried out. “You spoke the elven language in the passageway.”

  Kestrel looked down at the ring on his left hand, then discovered that at some point he couldn’t remember, he had transferred the ring to his right hand, making him appear human.

  “I may look like a human, but I was raised in the Eastern Forest, and my mother was an elf,” Kestrel answered in Elvish. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” He walked towards her and bent down, then slipped his knife through the ropes that bound her feet and hands.

  “My name is Moorin,” the girl replied,

  Kestrel’s head snapped up, and he looked at her in shock.

  She looked back at him. For just a moment he seemed to see something in her expression that he couldn’t identify, a probing exploration of his reaction, overlaid with some cynical observation of him. Whatever it was, it lasted less than the blink of his eyes, and then her eyes stared back at his with nothing but fear and hope mixed together.

  “What is it?” she asked, as she began to rub her hands over her ankles, trying to stimulate the flow of blood.

  Kestrel continued to stare, as his mind replayed his memories of the first time he had ever heard the name, back when he had no idea of how incredibly his life would begin to unfold. He remembered entering an inn in an otherwise forgettable elven village in the Eastern Forest, a village he had visited on his way to Center Trunk the first time. At the inn he had been subjected to an unexpected audience with Kere, the elven goddess of fortune. Kere had told him that someday he would meet a girl of mixed blood, and he would have to both rescue her and save her. The two distinct acts remained in his memory; he had asked Kere whether the two were the same, for she had mentioned this separately. The girl’s name was Moorin. He had seen Kere pretend to be her once before, at the healing spring.

  And now, in this place far from where either of them ought by any right be, he had found Moorin, the mixed-heritage girl who he was commanded to rescue.

  “I’ve heard your name before. I was told I would meet you one day,” Kestrel answered in an intense whisper. “I was told to rescue you.”

  “Told? By who? A gypsy fortune-teller? I’m hardly the girl of your dreams who you intend to marry,” Moorin scoffed for just a second. “But thank you for saving me,” she said in a softer tone. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” Did they bring you here too? How did you escape?”

  “I was sent here,” Kestrel answered, his spy training unexpectedly warning him to reveal as little as possible. “I came to rescue some friends. I didn’t expect to find you!”

  “Are your friends here too, in this cave? I thought there were more captives further back in the caves,” Moorin told him.

  She was an incredibly alluring girl, Kestrel thought. Even bedraggled and worn in the dim light of the cave, she combined the elements of both her racial identities in a way that accentuated the best of each. “How did you get here?” he asked her, still crouched down beside her.

  “I was taken captive in Lakeview after Uniontown overran the city. They put me on a boat and took me down south on the Gamble River, all the way to Uniontown. I was put in prison there for months, where I was told I was going to be sold as a slave to join a rich man’s harem. Then something changed, and they put me on another boat one day and took me all the way to the Western Mountains,” Moorin said. “I was taken by a squad of soldiers far up into the mountains, to a cave high up in the tallest mountain I ever saw, and when they sent me in I walked until I came out in this world, and was immediately taken captive by the Parstoles.

  “The red guards escorted me until they were attacked, and I was taken up here to this cave, hours ago,” she seemed to suddenly feel self-conscious about her appearance, and began to tug her revealing neckline up.

  Kestrel stood, and she held her hands up to him, inviting him to help her rise. He clasped her hands then lifted, surprised at how light she felt; it was her elven heritage, he knew. And there was something else, a sense of physical kinship he seemed to feel with her as they touched. She felt war
m, and somehow just the feel of her flesh touching his gave him a feeling on contentment and happiness. He reluctantly loosened his fingers, and after a moment she withdrew her hands from his.

  “Who attacked the red guards and brought you here?” Kestrel asked, thinking of Allgain’s claims that there were ghosts in the hills.

  “I never saw them,” Moorin told him as she smoothed her dress with her hands. “It was dark, and I was tied up in the middle of the squad that took me. Someone grabbed me from behind and they carried me high, up over their heads. They left me here, and I’ve been here ever since. Do you have any water or food?”

  “I left them at the entrance to the cave,” Kestrel said. “Let’s take you there now and get you out of here.”

  “What about your companions?” Moorin asked. “If they’re being held captive here too, shouldn’t we go try to set them free?”

  “Are you sure they’re here?” Kestrel asked. “What makes you think they may be?”

  “Just sounds and words I heard coming down one of these other caves,” Moorin told him. “If there aren’t any ghosts around right now, this is the best time to try to set your friends free.

  “But my feet don’t feel well; can I hold onto your shoulder while we go find them, to help me keep my balance?” she asked hesitantly.

  Kestrel wished he had brought the skin of healing water with him, but he hadn’t anticipated any such need for it. “Maybe I should set you safely outside, and then come back to get them on my own,” he suggested. “That way you won’t have to walk so far.”

  “No,” Moorin answered sharply. “Let’s just go find them as fast as we can, and then we can all leave this place together, once and for all,” her tone softened.

  “Here,” Kestrel gave up the argument. “You can climb on my back if you want to, and ride, so your feet don’t hurt,” he crouched down and turned his back to her. “You’re so light I won’t even notice your weight,” he gallantly said.