Chapter One
Niam And The Dog
Scratching . . . and sleep . . . and scratching . . . and sleep . . . and . . .
Finally, Niam sat up in frustration. What had that noise been? His skull felt heavy, as if it were a sack full of damp earth. Only, when he turned his head, instead of a heavy sloshing sensation of shifting mud, it felt as if his thoughts all had come loose and gotten jumbled up by the mounting weight of fatigue. And still, he could not manage to stay asleep. How long had it been since he had gotten a decent night’s rest? Three, four days?
He inhaled deeply. The night air lay cold and heavy against the world and pushed its way between every crevice and opening around the house, allowing it to sink its fingers into the dark rooms within. Shivering, Niam reached down to where he had kicked his heavy blanket off of the bed sometime in the restless hours of the night and pulled it around his shoulders.
Only silence met darkness.
Not even the comfortable serenade of crickets filled the forest beyond his window. Autumn nights such as this were too cold for that.
Niam snuggled into the blanket and sighed. For the past several nights he had hunted sleep, but like a clever trickster, it always seemed to elude him. And worse, when he finally found it, the nightmares always came. With a sigh, Niam lit the oil lamp by his bed and turned it up high enough to send a long shadow of himself scurrying across the floor and up the wall on the opposite side of the room. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light. The wooden bed frame creaked as he turned and sat cross-legged, staring out through the window into the night sky beyond.
Now what was that he had heard?
Almost on cue, the sound came again, a faint, insistent scratching just outside his bedroom window. More silence followed. Then it came again. Three rough scratches, and again, three more; then it stopped.
Silence flooded around him. Like darkness beyond the halo of lamplight it pressed eagerly inward. There was some kind of animal out there. Probably a cat sharpening its claws on the wood. Three more scratches sounded against the wall outside. Niam froze. What could it be dragging its claws across the wood outside of the house? Goosebumps rose across the nape of the neck. The sound was so . . . purposive, so full of intent that for a moment he felt scared. Too small to be a bear . . . too small to be a dire wolf, he reassured himself.
Then he remembered.
Niam hung his head back and laughed. The fear that had suddenly gripped him fled just as quickly.
“I’m so stupid,” he muttered to himself and jumped up from his bed and winced. The floor was cold. He slipped his pants and shoes on. “I can’t believe I forgot,” he said under his breath. “Poor thing must be thirsty.” Shivering, Niam wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, walked to his window, and opened it. “Hi there,” he said softly, “I’m sorry I forgot about you.”
Curiously, both the food and water he had set out earlier remained untouched. The dog that had followed him home earlier in the day looked up at him, its pellucid eyes, liquid brown, stared up at him intently. Its tail wagged eagerly. Niam reached down to pet it, but it stepped back quickly.
“Silly, I’m not going to hurt you,” Niam told it, “Although I ought to. You nearly scared me to death.”
The dog cocked its head and seemed to regard him for a moment. Then it appeared to chuff silently.
“What’s wrong, boy?” he mused. “Cat got your tongue?”
The dog just continued to stare at him.
“No? You’d probably eat it wouldn’t you?” Niam said, leaning against the window ledge, considering the strange animal.
The dog had followed him yesterday as he walked home from town. He had found it sitting by the side of the road that ran by the sharp overlook above Siler’s Lake just beyond the point where the gorge began. The animal had acted strangely from the beginning, growing animated the moment he rounded the curve where the overlook opened into the spectacular vista of the lake where the mountains undulated off into the horizon beyond. The moment he saw it, the dog began to dance around in a circle, then trotted to the edge of the overlook and barked into the open air at the cliff’s edge… almost like it wanted him to take in the mesmerizing view before him.
“Already seen that view,” he told the dog and walked on. But a few moments later, he discovered that the dog had sidled up next to him, continuing to prance around, turning frequently to stare intently back the way they had come. It was almost as if it had been trying to tell him, “Go back, go back, you’re missing the view.” Niam tried shooing it off. But that didn’t work. Nor did waving his arms and yelling at it to go home. Finally, he gave up and tried to scratch its ear, but the dog shied away from his touch.
Niam figured someone had beaten it.
Once again, however, the dog’s behavior baffled him. The thing still continued with its antics, dancing round in a tight circle, and then it stopped, and went down on its front legs with its paws stretched out before it in a gesture of friendly supplication. Its rump remained stuck up in the air, and its tail shook its rear comically as it wagged back and forth. Niam laughed. He could not escape the feeling that the dog wanted him to go back with it. “Alright,” he said, “you’re an odd one, but I’ll come.”
The dog lifted its snout and appeared to sniff in acknowledgement.
Hoisting himself through the opening, Niam muttered, “You better not be luring me into the woods to feed me to the rest of your pack.” Once he was out, he left enough of a crack in the window to get himself back through if it was still dark when he returned. The chill was not as bad as he thought it was going to be, but he still sank into his coat.
“Let’s go,” he said, but when he turned, the dog had already padded down the path leading from the road to his home, and was turning back toward the gorge.
As Niam followed, he thought about where his sympathy for this stray came from. For the past year, since the death of his brother and sister, he had come to feel like a stray himself. Had it not been for his friends, Davin Hapwell and Maerillus Sartor, he did not know how he would have made it through the year. His mother and father had been too absorbed in their own grief to attend well to Niam’s. Many nights he had stayed with the Sartor and Hapwell families, and drawn strength and comfort from their kindness and understanding.
Above him, the stars stared down from on high, and their silver luminescence bathed the landscape softly in a pale light, and in places where the trees had already shed their leaves, white and dark naked branches were bent and twisted like dancers forever frozen in wild contortions and bizarre poses. On the horizon, the faint light of the rising sun began to waken the night sky from its slumber with its ruddy morning kiss. As the autumn birds woke and sang the sun higher into the eastern horizon, Niam’s thoughts turned to his loss. Memories of Sarah filled Niam’s mind, and his stomach clenched as his mind settled upon her memory. She had been dead for over a year now. Lithe and willowy, she had been seven years Niam’s senior the day she drowned. Some of his fondest childhood memories were of her. His mother and father were often away on business for Lord Joachim, leaving Sarah home to raise him. Sarah had been not all of his world, but the part of it that always seemed filled with color, laughter, and warmth. If jokes could ever collect golden interest from the laughter they produced, Niam’s family would have been richer than a king.
Her body had been found floating a quarter mile beyond the narrows where the gorge pinched the upper third of the lake from the lower two thirds. Count Joachim’s physician said her head had obviously struck a rock, and that she must have slipped and tumbled down the steep rocky wall to the water below. Her basket had lain by the trail until someone found the body and searchers had been sent out. Beside the basket, with its contents spilled across the ground, were Seth’s sho
es, where he had taken them off before jumping in after her. Had he hit his head as well? His body had never been found, but miles of rocky and inaccessible shoreline surrounded the lake.
Seth, ten years older than Niam, had always been something of an enigma. Quiet and reserved, he had gone away to the academy at Kalavere to study for the Advocate’s bar. Niam had never spent much time with his older brother. When he came back from the academy, he had taken up a post for the crown as an official of deeds and surveys. Growing up, Seth had been close with Sarah. It came as no surprise to anyone that he had given his life to try to save her. When he returned from Kalavere, his brother had been a close friend of the Mayor, and indeed, the mayor had been especially distraught following the news.
Was it bad of him that he rarely thought of his brother?
At last the grogginess of the night was finally gone. Niam knew that it had taken the rising of the sun to dispel the heavy shadow of fatigue cast by the nightmares that kept him tossing and turning at night.
And always, they were of his sister, always the same. When he plunged into that waking realm on the other side of slumber’s nocturne kingdom, he always found himself drawn along behind Sarah.
Running . . . running for her life, he could sense the heavy fear rolling off of her as she plunged through the thorny thickets. Her dress trailed her willowy form as she cast terrified glances behind her. The fear on her face sent palpable waves of terror coursing through him. Her mouth moved, but he could not tell what she was saying.
The worst part about this was that he knew her flight was in vain, that whomever she was running from would catch her and kill her. He knew because he felt her pursuer’s malevolent intent. A thick and cloying miasma hung in the air and clung to him as he moved along with her . . . behind her. Always behind her. And always, just before he reached her, she fell and he woke with a start, covered in sweat.
Ahead of him, in the growing light, his furry companion began dancing with excitement. Niam’s mind turned away from the dark thoughts that had settled over it. As he drew closer to the overlook ahead, the beautiful expanse of lakes and mountains spread out once more. The dog ran to the edge of the overlook where a low safety rail had been erected to keep travellers from straying too close to the edge. As its behavior continued to perplex Niam, he heard a word spoken aloud, but the sound of it came from every direction at once. Niam looked all around, but aside from the dog no one was there. He cocked his head to the side. “What?” he asked aloud.
The word came to him again. GOOOO, it said.
The hair on the back of Niam’s neck stood up.
“Um . . . go where?” he asked, certain he had heard something, but not completely certain he had heard someone.
Like a far off whisper of thunder, the voice came again. HELP HIM, it told him. And in that voice there were hints of wind in autumn leaves and the soft spatter of summer rain in mud. Niam felt the words this time as much as he heard them. Deep in the pit of his gut, he felt the nearly unshakable urge to go to the dog.
Niam approached it, and that was when he saw that the dog actually wasn’t looking out across the valley, but down the steep drop-off below the gorge wall. Niam stepped over the rail and walked to the edge. When he looked down, he let out a loud exclamation.
Forty feet below, lying like a broken child’s doll was a body.
Niam looked at the animal in astonishment. The dog’s eyes bored holes into Niam’s. See, I told you, they seemed to say. “Hey!” Niam screamed. “Hey! Can you hear me?” Peering intently down on the prostrate form, Niam thought he heard a small groan, but he couldn’t be sure. I’m going to have to go down there to see if the person’s still alive—to see for sure, he thought to himself. Then another urge hit him, equally as strong to just run for help, to let someone else have to deal with the sight of spilled brains. Niam didn’t have to see it, did he? But now he didn’t have a choice. Whoever it was, if they were still alive, had to be dangerously cold, and the ground might easily still be wet from strong rains earlier in the month. The dog continued to look imploringly up at him.
“It’s okay. I’m going to help him,” he said, as much for his own benefit as anything. This is going to be dangerous, Niam thought fearfully. Why couldn’t it have been his friend Davin instead? Or Maerillus? Davin could have made the steep descent, thrown the person’s prone form across his shoulder, and climbed back up while eating a sandwich.
Or Maerillus.
He would have simply had one of his father’s servants go down and do it for him as he sipped on of the wines grown on his family’s estate.
“But no,” Niam muttered to himself as he slipped over the edge and gingerly climbed from rock to rock, making his way down like a frightened cat from a swaying tree trunk. “It had to be me that got stuck with this!”
Thankfully the rocks were dry, and once he began to assay the descent the going was much easier than he expected. When he got within seven or eight feet of the bottom, Niam leapt and landed easily beside the victim of the fall. Niam recognized who it was immediately.
Tim Hodshaer lay with his face pressed into the grass. One of his arms was indeed bent in an impossible direction. Across his forehead, his skin lay open in a large gash. It had bled copiously, and a rather large pool of congealed blood framed the left side of his head. “Tim,” Niam said gently. “Tim, can you hear me?” Tim made no sound, and Niam feared he only imagined hearing the boy’s groan from the overlook above.
“Tim!” Niam said more forcefully, “Tim!”
A small groan issued from the boy. Quickly Niam removed his coat and placed it over the child’s still form.
“Wha . . .” the boy moaned softly.
“Shhhhh. It’s okay, Tim. You’ve had a fall. Lie still, it’s me—Niam,” he said. “I’m going to go get help for you, okay?”
“N-Niam, it hurts,” the boy groaned pitifully, “It hurts sooooo bad.”
“I know,” Niam said gently, “but help will be coming soon.”
“Hurry . . . Mom and Dad will be so scared.” He began to cry. “I’m in so much trouble, Niam.”
“Honestly,” Niam said, “I think they’ll be happy you’re alive.”
More feeling began to seep back into the boy’s mind, because he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh it really hurts!” And then he gasped suddenly, “My arm feels like it’s on fire!”
“That’s because you broke it. The bone must be pressing up against the nerve, but we’ll get it fixed before the day’s over—I promise,” he told him. Then he asked, “What happened, Tim?”
Tim began to sob, and between hitching breaths told Niam, “My dog went after a groundhog. He went over the edge… had to get to him. He fell the whole way. Made it half way down and then I slipped. Where is he, Niam? Tell me,” he begged. “Is he dead? He wasn’t moving.”
“Does your dog have wild yellow hair?” Niam asked.
“Yes,” Tim cried, “that’s him.”
Niam felt a great laugh begin to build up within his chest, but before he could let it out, before he could tell Tim that his crazy dog had led him here to the place he had fallen, something to the left of them caught his attention.
Lying on the dirt a few feet away lay the familiar shape of the very dog that had followed Niam home, then awakened him, and persistently worked to him into following it back to the overlook. Niam walked over to the dog’s body and placed his hand gently upon the animal’s chest. There was no prance or clownish antic left in this dog now, for it lay where it had fallen the day before.
Lifeless, cold, and stiff.
Niam stood there for a moment in stunned silence. He thought about the dog’s bizarre behavior, the fact that it never allowed him to touch it, the fact that the food and water he
had set out for it had never been eaten. Niam sucked in a deep, unsteady breath, and prepared to climb back up the sharp wall of rocks. He didn’t bother looking up to see if a dog was waiting for him. He knew it would not be. Its purpose had already been fulfilled.
It had traveled its last journey leading Niam here. And as Niam carefully navigated the rocky incline and made his way cautiously to the top, his eyes glowed like yellow flames in the cool morning air.
The Dread Lords Rising Page 3