Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01]

by Glenraven (v1. 5) (html)

  Hultif squatted at her feet and briefly rested his muzzle in her hand. The gesture came from his childhood, when he had run to her for comfort. That he should regress in such a fashion now, that he should feel the childish need for her comfort after so many years, unnerved her far more than seeing a vision of her face reduced to bone in the black mirror the day before.

  "Death rides two horses, Mother," he told her softly, his face still buried in her hand. The words came out muffled. "It rides in from a place beyond the known, and it brings devastation to you and all yours."

  "Speak plainly."

  "Wizards. Machnan wizards, powerful beyond words, ride here to destroy you now."

  "You're certain?"

  "These are the truest and strongest of omens. I have never been more sure of anything than I am of what I tell you now."

  "Wizards." She stabbed the meat with her dagger, lifted the entire slab to her mouth, and ripped a bite away. The flavor was superb, but the meat itself was tough. She'd insisted that her morning meat come only from Machnan children less than ten years of age. This meat surely came from a boy grown far past that. The muscle was dense and a bit fibrous. Perhaps she needed to emphasize her point more clearly to her Machnan cooks. She was certain she could make them understand.

  She considered Hultif's concern over the wizards. "Glenraven's magic weakens daily. While my own power remains constant—perhaps even grows—the magic of my enemies dwindles until now I sense none who can hope to stand against me." She frowned, tapping thoughtfully on her front teeth with one claw. "Your worries would seem exaggerated, yet your omens suggest the danger is real. How can this be?"

  "These two are fresh somehow. They've found a new source of magic. They are strong enough to destroy you."

  "Well." She closed her eyes, considering. Her Watchers stripped Glenraven of its magic when they fed. They didn't need the magic—they desired only the souls of those they hunted—so what magic they stripped from their victims, they stored and fed to her.

  "You've identified the problem. Have you also identified our solution?"

  "The omens are very bad. We may have no solution. Our hope is thinner than a spiders silk." He looked up at her and added, in a voice so soft that she almost couldn't make out his words, "But spider's silk is strong, Mother, and we might yet cling to this faint hope, too."

  She nodded, irrationally annoyed at his melodramatic presentation. He had managed to send a tiny knife of fear into her gut, in spite of the fact that she knew she was stronger than anything that could attack her. She didn't like feeling fear. So that he wouldn't suspect that he had unnerved her even a little, she tore off another bite of meat and washed it down with a swig of wine. "Tell me what you have discovered without decorating the facts." She was pleased to hear that the edge in her voice sounded like nothing more than annoyance.

  "Send your hunters to bring the wizards here to you, where you may study and later destroy them. The omens are clear. You must seek out these avatars of your destruction and win them over as your allies."

  "And how are my hunters to find them?"

  "I will tell you the exact moment and direction the omens dictate. Just have your hunters ready."

  "I'll have Bewul put together a party immediately."

  But Hultif shook his head. "No. No, no, no. Mother—you must send the traitor Matthiall after them. You must pretend to trust him, and you must elevate him over even Bewul. For the time, make him your favorite. Only his actions can bring the wizards to you and deliver him into your hands at the same time."

  Aidris frowned at Hultif. "Pretend to trust Matthiall. I don't like that. Matthiall is so…unpredictable." She sighed. Hultif gave good advice. "Very well. Matthiall will head this hunting party. What else?"

  "Nothing else. Only have them ready to leave in an instant. I will monitor the omens constantly, and notify you the second they are most propitious for your success."

  "You've done well, dear child." She smiled at Hultif even as she considered giving him to her Watchers and taking his magic for herself. His omen reading served her well, but he alone was aware that she was in some way vulnerable. If he ever determined some way to make use of that information, he could hurt her. Better to destroy him before he had the chance. "When you leave, send me Matthiall and Bewul. I shall inform them of my great pleasure in Matthiall, and of my decision to honor him with a command."

  He bowed and brushed his muzzle against her hand again, obviously touched that she called him her child when she had not done so in years. "You are our one true hope, Mother." He smiled up at her, his lipless mouth stretched back along his muzzle clear to his knife-edged molars.

  She dismissed him, still smiling, thinking, The moment this threat is over, I'll grind the bones of your ugly grinning face into flour, little monster.

  Twenty-three

  Jay felt better. Getting out of Zearn proved ridiculously easy compared to getting out of the Wethquerin Zearn. Unwatched, unquestioned, she and Sophie rode down the road they'd come in on, through the market where vendors set out their goods and called halfheartedly after the two of them as they passed; past the barracks where now no men leaned out of balconies; past the fields on either side of the road outside of the walls where more soldiers practiced fighting each other on horseback and on the ground, using swords and pikes, where they practiced formations; through the cool dew-laden morning air that was not the blessing it could have been. The stillness before the day warmed held into the walled city the miasma borne of rotting garbage and raw sewage and smoky early morning cookfires, and the stink followed them out and clung in Jay's nostrils far past the point where she believed she could still really smell the place.

  They traveled against traffic; most of the people on the road headed toward the city. Many of the peasants carried vegetables or heavy, anonymously lumpish bags. They herded their children, who toiled along with them under the burden of the things they brought to sell at the market, or they herded livestock. Their bodies, their clothing, their faces, spoke eloquently of the grinding poverty, sickness and disease and shortened life spans that were their lot. They chatted with each other as they traveled, they laughed and shouted, they evidenced the excitement that travel to a market fair and a day away from the routine of their lives engendered, but when Jayjay looked into their eyes, she saw hunger and poorly healed grief and the same fear she'd seen in the faces of the men and women and children of Inzo.

  Their faces were a slap to the comfortable notions she'd held about the goodness of life prior to what she had considered the dehumanizing effects of mechanization and industrialization and progress. Life in the Middle Ages hadn't been full of pageantry and chivalry for the great mass of people. These peasants who trudged by her were the great masses, and they were stoop-shouldered and gray-faced and rotten-toothed and gaunt. They shared their homes with livestock and rats, pissed in trenches, bathed rarely, ate when their crops survived the rats and the birds and the late frosts and the early snows and went hungry when the crops didn't. Their children died in droves. So did they.

  She wanted to find Glenraven's leaders and shake them until their brains rattled. How could they keep their people trapped in such misery? All her guidebook's enchanting descriptions of this last untouched medieval paradise failed to mention the completely modern pain it rode upon.

  She felt the bitter taste of helpless rage. Why didn't someone do something?

  They reached the end of the guarded road that led to Zearn. It branched off into a main road then, heading south toward the gate back to the world they knew, and north, deeper into Glenraven.

  Jay, riding first, turned right. The road to the right led south. Back to the gate. Back toward home, and safety, and the troubles they both knew and understood. Sophie had said she didn't think she was going to make it home, that she'd had a premonition she was going to die in Glenraven; the faintly bemused, almost grateful expression on her face when she'd told Jay that had scared Jayjay silly.

  "
I want you to get back, though. You aren't ready to die."

  They left the fields behind; left the soft droning of bees from an apiary they could see near a small, isolated farmhouse; the weeds and wildflowers of the ground lying fallow between the crops of wheat and barley and millet, the hide-and-seek light of the sun as it dropped behind little, fat clouds and slid back out again. They moved into forest, and the weight of the air around them changed. As they moved into the tunnel of cool green overhanging boughs that wove a roof over the road, the sun didn't just hide. It lost its potency, gave over its dominance of the day to a tenebrous, watching twilight that crouched, hush-breathed and waiting. Waiting for what?

  "Jay?"

  Sophie's voice breaking the silence like that sent superstitious little shivers down Jay's spine. "What?"

  "They're going to come after us."

  Jay didn't say anything for a long time. She didn't need to ask who Sophie was talking about. "I know," she admitted at last. "I know. I simply don't know why. Why do you think we ran into Amos? Why did our guide disappear? What do they want from us? Do you have any theories?"

  Sophie shook her head and looked down the road. "No. But I have a bad feeling about the way we're going. They'll look for us this way, because this is the shortest route to the gate. I can feel it. My heart is racing and my throat is dry and I have this itch between my shoulder blades that is giving me the creeps."

  Jayjay nodded. "I'm a little edgy, too." A few peasants passed, but the gloom in front of her was so deep she couldn't tell if any more followed. And she hated the way the forest swallowed sounds, so that mere moments after the people moved by her, their chattered conversation muffled into silence. She and Sophie and their four borrowed horses seemed all alone in the world.

  "Maybe we should have taken the road from Zearn to Inzo, and then back to the gate," Sophie suggested. "That route avoided this forest."

  "There's a road here," Jay argued, but without much feeling. "It's dirt, but it's kept up. It's the shortest way to get where we're going." The forest ate her words so that even to herself she seemed to be whispering.

  Sophie didn't answer, and Jay couldn't think of anything else to say. They rode for a long while, while gloom bore down on Jay and Sophie's premonition gnawed at her. Then Jay caught a sound in the distance, and reined her horse to a stop. "Sophie? Listen!"

  Sophie came to a halt, too, and the two of them strained to hear. Sophie's face froze, and, spine rigid, she turned the horse back the way they'd come. "That way…horses, Jay. A lot of them, coming fast."

  "So soon?"

  "So soon. I'd hoped they wouldn't notice we were gone for a little while yet."

  Jayjay looked at the woods around them. The hard dirt road beneath their horses' hooves showed little sign of their passage. A troop on horseback would obliterate that, if they rode past fast enough to miss the point where the freshest prints stopped. If they didn't, she and Sophie could at least give them a run for their money before being captured.

  "Into the woods," she said. "We'll wait until they've gone by, then decide what we ought to do next."

  Sophie nodded.

  The huge trees grew far apart, and their vast canopies were so dense little underbrush grew beneath them. The forest had an almost parklike appearance, though Jay couldn't help thinking of the park as being one Vlad the Impaler might have found homey, but it provided little cover. "We're going to have to go in deep," she said.

  The soft humus covering the forest floor killed even the dull clop-clop their horses had made on the packed dirt road. Now the only sounds Jay could hear were the sounds of her breathing, the soft snorts of the horses, and the occasional creak of the leather saddles. The wide spaces between the trees and the smooth ground permitted them to urge their horses to a trot. They moved steadily away from the road, trying to get deep enough into the darkness of the forest that they would be effectively invisible—far enough that if their horses whinnied greeting to the troop pursuing them, humans wouldn't be able to hear the sound.

  Jayjay looked over her shoulder and noticed they reached a place in the woods where the road was a series of pale tan squares peeking between massed trees. "Sophie," she said, "This will do, I think. We'll still be able to see them ride by from here, and maybe tell if they're looking for us. But I don't think they'll be able to see us."

  Sophie slipped out of her saddle and dropped lightly to the ground. Jay decided to wait in the saddle, watching from sixteen hands' height. If they watched from different vantage points, they stood a better chance of not missing anything. They could no longer hear the thundering hooves of the approaching horses; the trees muffled the sound. The gentle susurrations of wind through the leaves overhead did the rest; that tiny nearby whisper would have drowned the noises of a war.

  They waited. They waited a long time. The riders must have been farther off than they had sounded. Did that mean there were more of them? Jayjay wondered. Possibly. Probably.

  Sophie pointed left, and Jay squinted through the trees. She caught movement, a flash of something red, bits of blue, dull gold. Then more red, and lots of gleaming black—men in uniform, galloping horses. Jay couldn't begin to guess how many, but the line of moving color streamed from the place where she could first see the road to the place where the last of it disappeared behind trees, rolling over the road like a river that had overflowed its banks. At its height, she and Sophie could once again hear the hoofbeats. They sounded almost as loud as the pounding of her pulse.

  "Jesus."

  Jay looked over to find Sophie's eyes wide and round and horrified.

  Her friend murmured, "So many? After us?"

  The flow of the human river broke, became a trickle heading left, then vanished at last into silence. Jayjay shivered. "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

  "Trouble." Sophie's frown said more than her single word. It said, Maybe my premonition didn't tell me everything. Maybe neither one of us is going to make it out of here.

  Jayjay lifted her chin and forced herself to give Sophie a reassuring smile. "We're going to walk away from this."

  "Right." Flat, emotionless, Sophie's single uttered syllable sent a wave of nausea through Jay. I'm not, it said.

  They were, though. Sophie had been through enough. Jay was going to get her back home alive. If she couldn't make Sophie believe that—hell, if she couldn't even make herself believe it—that didn't mean she couldn't make it happen. All she had to do was keep going.

  "Let's wait a few more minutes until we head back to the road. If they realize they've passed us and turn around, I don't want to be standing out there waiting for them. Once we know what to expect, we'll get out of here."

  "Fine." Sophie settled her back against a tree, her mount's reins loosely looped around her fingers.

  Sophie wasn't buying into Jay's false confidence. Jay only had so much to spare; she decided to wait in silence, and settled into her saddle, letting herself slouch back into the cantle. It might be a long wait.

  Insects buzzed and chirped around them, busy in the cool, dark forest. The leaves whispered wordless stories. Jayjay listened to the calls of birds. She recognized the sound of starlings, the hoot of an owl up past his bedtime.

  The space between her shoulder blades began to itch.

  She shivered again and listened hard, focusing on the sounds behind her; she heard nothing out of place, all four horses were completely calm, the normal forest noises did not suddenly fall silent. Yet she felt compelled to turn around; she was certain something watched her. She refused to give in to the compulsion.

  I'm being ridiculous, she told herself. I'm acting silly. Danger hunts us on the road. This is the safe place.

  The hairs on the back of her neck and on her arms stood up, not reassured by her logic. Sophie glanced up at her. Fear radiated from her; she breathed quickly and her eyes stared, wide and white-rimmed. She felt it, too.

  Behind me. All I have to do is look behind me.

  For an instant
she was eight years old, crouched under the sheet on her bed with her head under her pillow, the cool night breeze touching her through the thin cotton; for an instant, she was eight and she knew something watched her from above her bed. A ghost. White mist and a woman shape, with terrible teeth and glowing eyes. Waiting.

  And then she wasn't eight anymore; she was thirty-five, and she refused to be intimidated. She turned slowly, telling herself there would be nothing behind her but trees.

  She was right. The woods sat quiet on the dark, dank earth; the gentle breeze still stirred, the insects still hummed. Nothing. She should have felt better but she didn't; she waited, instead, for the something that hid behind the parklike facade, the something that watched from just beyond the outside edge of her field of vision.

  "Jayjay?"

  Jay tried to answer, and though her mouth opened, the sounds would not come. She looked at Sophie, scared, and found Sophie back in the saddle with fear settled on her shoulders and in her eyes.

  "We need to get out of here," Sophie said.

  Jayjay nodded. The cold clammy touch of dread stroked the back of her neck—stupid fear, sitting in an old woods in the early morning, safely hidden from the danger that chased after her, with nothing in sight but trees, without any reason to be afraid. She feared, but feared nothing real. It didn't matter. "Yes. Let's." She cleared her throat, trying to force the words to come easier. "We can travel slowly and listen for the soldiers."

  "That sounds fine to me."

  They trotted out of the woods. Jay would have urged her horses to a canter if that hadn't felt like an out-and-out retreat, like something shameful.

  Once they traveled on the road for a while, the fear boiled off until it became only a tiny knot in her stomach, not much bother at all. Not gone, but not devouring, either. She felt better…but she didn't want to think about Glenraven anymore. She glanced at Sophie, whose face was once again composed.