Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01]

by Glenraven (v1. 5) (html)

  Sophie noticed her attention and turned to her. "Why were we so frightened back there?"

  Jay sighed. "Why does my Fodor's guide ask its own questions, Soph? I don't know." She fell silent and rode, listening to the slow plodding of hooves on dirt. Then she added, "I don't think I want to know. I can't help myself for feeling that something terrible waited back there, looking us over and trying to decide what to do with us. I'm probably being an idiot, but I want to get the hell out of here. I'm sorry I brought us."

  They rode along together, neither speaking, companionably.

  After a while, Jay drifted into reverie, and she realized she did want to talk about one thing, desperately—and that one thing had nothing to do with Glenraven.

  She cleared her throat. "Sophie?"

  Sophie's "Hmmm?" had the drowsy buzz of bees in a field of wildflowers.

  "What's been bothering you?"

  "Oh…nothing much. The usual."

  Jayjay frowned. "It's more than that. It has to do with this person Lorin, doesn't it? The one the guidebook asked you about."

  Sophie smiled—an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile—and nodded.

  "I don't want to pry, but I'm worried about you, Soph. You talked about dying here as if that weren't such a bad thing. What's going on?"

  "I'm feeling lost about this. I'm not sure that I want to discuss it, that I can make you understand something I'm not certain about myself. I always thought I knew myself pretty well; I mean, Mitch and I loved each other and we both loved Karen. We were such happy parents. But that became most of what we had with each other—Karen and her accomplishments and the fun we had doing things with her and watching her grow. Now Karen's gone and Mitch thinks if we had another baby, things could be the way they were. For us. Between us. But there are days when I can't stand to be in the same house with him, because he looks so much like her, and because he laughs the same way, and because every time I see him, I bleed." She twisted the leather reins between the fingers of her left hand and stared off into space. "I keep thinking the only way I'm going to breathe again is if I get rid of everything that I ever was. Become someone new."

  "And this other person…well, there wouldn't ever be any question of another child. I'd never have reminders of the person I was before. Still, the whole situation has me thinking I've never really known myself, and I don't like that." Sophie fell silent. It was the sort of uncomfortable silence that made the muffled creak of the saddles sound like screams. Then Sophie sighed deeply and bit the corner of her lip.

  "He might want kids," Jay said. "Men change so much after you marry them. Or they don't, but after you're married you find out who they really are."

  "I don't know what you're going to think of me if I tell you this."

  Jay frowned. "You're my best friend. Nothing you say could change that."

  "Right." That flat affirmative that was really denial again. Sophie shrugged. "Oh, well. If we do survive this, and if I do make it back to Peters, you'll hear." She sighed. "Lorin is a woman."

  Sophie couldn't have blindsided her more effectively if she'd hit her between the eyes with a brick. "You want to become a lesbian?" she yelped.

  Sophie, startled, burst out laughing. She laughed for a long time, and when she finished, she wiped tears from her cheeks and sighed. "Jesus, Jayjay…that's what I love about you. You're all tact."

  "Lorin, huh?"

  "Lorin. Talsach."

  Jay didn't know what to say. Finally she spread her arms wide and shrugged her shoulders. "This is going to sound trite, but, God…I hope it works out. Whatever working out means."

  Sophie smiled, but she didn't say anything. Jay read the look in her eyes, the one that said, Maybe this is what working out means.

  Twenty-four

  Yemus Sarijann, who had invented the persona of Amos Baldwell for Jayjay Bennington, waved his hand to bring the army to a halt. He snarled and stared at the little metal ball affixed in a wire cage to the pommel of his saddle. A reassuring light glowed from it, the same steady golden light that had glowed there from the time he and his men headed down the Rikes Gate road. Jayjay's damned book called to the little globe the way a lodestone called to iron filings. His locator globe should have glowed brighter as he drew nearer the talisman; it should have dimmed to a dull, guttering red as he wandered astray. The damned book should have led him right to his heroes.

  He snarled. Heroes. Lestovru, a decent man and a good soldier, had died on his orders to cover the entrance of these two heroes into Glenraven. The saviors of the Machnan, the saviors of magic; the book had declared both of them this by choosing them. The damned book had taken him to Peters, North Carolina, far outside his world. It had absorbed the magic from the lives of all of his people, had cost them everything they could afford to give. The Machnan had given willingly, because they were dying, magic was dying, their world was dying, and they would offer everything they had to save it.

  He'd spun the spell carefully. He'd woven it of his people's desire to live, of their hunger for the return of magic, of their love of Glenraven—and of their hatred for Aidris Akalan, the foul Alfkindir Watchmistress, and her monstrous Watchers. The spell had created an artifact that had taken the incomprehensible shape of an unreadable book, so he had spun in a language spell with the last of his magic and discovered that his spell had formed itself into a travel guide for tourists. It told him what he had to do from there. He had to take it out of Glenraven and across the seas. He had to find a place to display it. It would tell him when he'd found the place. He had to set it on a shelf, where it promptly disguised itself as another, different book, and there it languished. And he languished with it. Waiting. Knowing that in the world he'd left behind, time passed, friends died, and the magic seeped away.

  When finally the damned book had chosen its unlikely heroes, he'd hurried home, knowing the book could carry on without him. At home, everything had changed, and nothing for the better. His father was dead, his mother imprisoned by Aidris Akalan for treason; his brother, Torrin, who had been a stripling youth when he left, had grown tall and powerful and bitter. Torrin looked into his returned brother's eyes and said, "Where were you when they took her away? If you hadn't sold our birthright for your dream of victory, we would have had the magic to save her."

  And now it looked as if Torrin had been right. The book played games with him. It hid its location. It played with his locator stone. It taunted him.

  He wondered if it had been taunting him all along, if Glenraven's magic had soured against the Machnan and had betrayed them in favor of the powerful Alfkindir. He wondered if his "heroes" had come to destroy him utterly.

  "Go back," he said. "We'll go slowly and look for tracks leading into the forest. They can't have come this far, but something has jinxed the stone."

  A few of his men kissed amulets that hung around their necks. A few more looked up and murmured muffled prayers. The rest sat their horses stoically. None, though, begged to check some other route. He said the heroes had come this way, and they would follow him into the very embrace of the Watchers if they could just get them back. These men had ridden down the road through the Watchers' Wood knowing where they traveled. But they also knew they pursued the last hope of the Machnan. They wouldn't falter.

  Twenty-five

  One of the horses whinnied, and Sophie heard an answering whinny from the road ahead. She and Jay glanced from one another into the leafy, expectant darkness ahead. "Someone coming."

  "Them?"

  "Maybe."

  "Back into the woods." Jayjay looked into the depths of the forest and Sophie saw her shiver.

  "We don't have much choice." Sophie frowned, feeling sick inside.

  They rode single file, urging their horses to a trot. Sophie almost believed that she would prefer to face the men who hunted after them than to go back under the silent watchful hush of the deep forest. The very trees seemed to watch; they waited; and the forest's inhabitants lurked in the long shadows, merely loo
king for a signal to leap out and devour her. But she could convince herself that her dread regarding the forest came from her imagination; she knew the soldiers were real.

  Behind her, a man shouted, his voice harsh with excitement. Other voices took up the cry. Sophie and Jayjay both looked behind them. Vivid splashes of blue and red and gold moved through the trees toward them.

  "Shit," Jay yelped.

  That pretty much said it all. Sophie kicked her mount into a canter and passed Jay. She was the better rider of the two, after all, with years of trail and hunt experience. If both of them hoped to elude the hunters without breaking their necks or their horses' legs, she would have to take the lead. "After me, Jay," she growled as she swung past.

  She submerged her concentration into the terrain, willing the rest of the world away. Her determined focus paid dividends. She and Jay negotiated the maze of trees and uneven ground without mishap. Most of the time they traveled at a canter, though twice the ground broke up and they found themselves reduced to a cautious, step-at-a-time walk. Behind them, their pursuers lost ground. In fact, Sophie was surprised at the speed with which she and Jayjay pulled ahead; she would have expected the soldiers to take advantage of the fact that they were on their own home ground, but if they had such an advantage, they didn't use it. Sophie began to think she and Jay would get away; then the ground descended abruptly into nasty, thorny, tightly grown underbrush that sprang up everywhere. The canopy overhead broke, but not into cultivated land. Jay found what looked like a deer trail and the two of them followed that. The trail led them at an easy angle down to the banks of a swiftly flowing stream. It was past midday. Sophie hadn't realized so much time had passed until she and Jay rode out into sunlight again and felt the dank chill of the forest replaced by the cozy warmth. She would have loved to find a place to hide in the thicket. The sunshine on her skin felt wonderful and welcoming, and the horrible feeling that she was being watched, a feeling that hadn't passed even in the heat of the pursuit, now left her entirely.

  "They'll be right behind us," Jay said. She sat looking up and down the stream while her horses sipped from the stream.

  Sophie looked back the way they'd come. The soldiers were still far behind them, but growing nearer. Sophie let her horses drink, too. She was risking the animals getting colic because she hadn't cooled them down before watering them, but she didn't know when she and Jayjay would find clean water again. Once they escaped, they would cool the horses properly.

  She pulled both animals away from the stream before they had a chance to drink their fill. Later, she kept thinking, you can drink more later…if we're still alive.

  "Sophie?" Jay's voice held a note of panic that stopped Sophie cold. "What is that?"

  Sophie looked where Jay was looking—back the way they had come. She didn't see anything, but then she realized Jay wasn't referring to something she saw. Behind them, the sounds in the forest had changed. She could no longer hear the approach of the soldiers who hunted her. She heard men's voices, but they sounded farther away than they had been. And frightened. And over the sounds of their desperately shouted commands, she heard…

  "Wind," Sophie said. She frowned. "In the forest."

  Not even the faintest breeze brushed past her; yet in the trees, in the forest, wind moved. That didn't make sense. Wind moved over open ground; the shelter of the forest would stop it. Should stop it.

  The wind in the forest blew harder, the soughing through the branches of the ancient trees now punctuated by hard gusts. Moaning.

  A man screamed.

  The horses shifted and stared toward the forest they'd left, their eyes rolling and their ears laid back.

  Whatever was going on behind them disturbed the horses, too. That was a bad sign.

  "I think we should get moving," Jay said.

  Sophie agreed. Then she noticed a swirl of firefly lights moving through the trees, perhaps head-high or maybe a little higher; a layer of fireflies, like a floating carpet of them, beautiful to behold, sparkling gold and soft pale green and white through the darkness, stars fallen from the sky and brought to life and she wanted, wanted, wanted to move toward them, to go to them, to see, to touch, to experience—

  A hand like a talon grabbed her arm and she snapped back to herself. "We need to get moving now," Jay said.

  Sophie, still feeling the pull of those trembling, bewitching lights, nodded sadly. She felt as if she were being pulled away from a glorious, wonderful dream into the dark and ugly confines of reality. But when Jayjay pointed to the stream and urged her horses down into the fast, shallow water and rode away from the light and the wind, Sophie followed.

  Behind them, a moment later, the screaming started in earnest. Not just one man screamed, but dozens. They howled and sobbed, and some of them laughed. Laughed—crazy, wondering, happy laughter—with the laughter cut off by shrieks, too. Sophie knew she was hearing men die. Those bubbling, tearing, wordless howls of pain that clung to the afternoon air and filled it with hellish darkness could not possibly have led to any other end. Those screaming men would not walk away, would not crawl away from whatever had found them in the forest.

  Light—light as lovely as the sparkling trail of magic that poured from Cinderella's fairy godmother's wand—that light that had bewitched her and seduced her, that would have killed her.

  She and Jay splashed along the pebbled bed of the stream as fast as they dared, and the screaming faded.

  Faded. Finally stopped.

  Sophie caught up with Jay and looked into her eyes; found in them a reflection of the haunted fearfulness she felt inside herself. Neither woman said anything. They kept riding, heading upstream. They kept their silence, listening for a breeze, and they watched through the dark stands of trees on either side of the water for any sign that a river of light flowed toward them through the air.

  Will whatever killed the soldiers back there be what kills me? Sophie shivered. The idea of ceasing to exist hadn't seemed so bad to her when she'd first thought of it. She hadn't welcomed the thought of death; she had, instead, welcomed the idea of release of her grief and pain. But she had heard those men die. Her stomach knotted just thinking about it. While she still could not look at life with any joy, she could no longer view her impending death with equanimity.

  Twenty-six

  Yemus counted the men who had survived the retreat. Thirty-two. Out of one hundred seventy-eight men chosen for their skill, their ferocity, their ability to obey orders, their fearlessness…thirty-two remained. He could not let himself think of friends lost. Devoured by…

  He couldn't think. His mind inched toward the images it held of what he'd seen, of Her Watchers, and it recoiled. His mind refused the nightmare reality, refused to let him examine the horrifying deaths his men had suffered. He could bring himself right up to the edge of the disaster, right to the point where his men, who had been frightened, lost their fear and started laughing. Started riding toward instead of away from the formless numberless hellspawn that pursued them. Thirty-two men had followed orders. Had dug their spurs into their horses' flanks and had refused to look back. Had run.

  Like cowards. All of us, he thought. We abandoned our friends, our brothers, to that…that…

  But they would have died. Every last one of them. Outside the forest, Yemus and his men had turned and waited, had prayed that some who had not followed immediately might still escape. No one else joined them. They waited an hour, calling. And an hour past that. Praying.

  And then they had turned away. Ridden to Zearn.

  To report his continuing failure to Torrin.

  "They've joined the Kin," Torrin snarled. "Your heroes have joined the Kin. They're in league with Her, and with Her Watchers. We gave you our souls, all of us, every man and woman and child in Glenraven. We gave you our magic, and you brought us traitors."

  "We don't know that the heroes didn't die, too. After all, they were in the forest, somewhat ahead of us. They could have been taken first."


  "Then our souls, our magic, your talisman, might even now be in the hands of the Kin? In her hands? Should all of us then bend our necks and await our deaths?"

  Torrin had forced Yemus to leave his chambers. Yemus, climbing the stairs to the Wizard's Bell in the Aptogurria, thought, I was going to bring them up here. I was going to tell them how much we needed them, how they were supposed to help us find a way to overthrow the Watchmistress and her Watchers. I was going to tell them everything.

  What if they are in league with the Kin?

  His logical side told him to be reasonable. How could they be Aidris Akalan's minions? Jayjay Bennington and Sophie Cortiss had been in Glenraven only one night when he found them. Granted, he didn't know where they had spent that night, but it wasn't likely that Aidris and her Watchers had picked them up as soon as they diverged from their itinerary, discerned not only that they were outlanders but that they were the outlanders who would bring down her rotten regime, turned them and the artifact to her own uses, and got them back out the door in time to plant them at his dinner table the next day.

  The side of him that had lost most of his best men, the men who would have spearheaded the final attack against Her, insisted otherwise.

  He reached the top of the stairs and stepped into his Wizards Bell. The late afternoon sunshine gleamed on the gilt top half of the sphere, and the mirrors angled outside of each window to catch and reflect that golden light threw it onto the blackwood diviner inlaid on the pale yew floor.

  He settled himself in the center of the diviner and rested his hands on the smooth points of the ideogram of searching. The hands of all the wizards before him—both the Kin wizards whose people had built the Aptogurria and the Machnan whose heroes at last took it away from them—had worn the ideogram into the floor. Countless thousands of ghostly touches reached forward through time, binding Yemus to those other wizards as gently and invisibly, but as firmly, as the spirit of the earth bound his feet to the ground.