That didn’t stop him from thinking about her, however: how deeply he cared for Aelwen, how long he had lived with the mingled joy and pain of a love that was not returned. He knew that he was very dear to her, that they were the closest of friends, but always she seemed to carry an invisible barrier around herself. Her heart was shrouded in secrets; he knew that she had long carried the shadows of sorrow and loss. Maybe now that they had left the perils and intrigues of Hellorin’s court, and were away from their many responsibilities; now when they only had each other to depend on - maybe now, if they survived, things would be different. He could only keep on hoping, and wait to see what the future would reveal.
After what seemed an eternity, the violence of the storm abated, and the darkness began to give way to an eerie grey world of mist and shadow. As yet, however, the light was too faint to be any of practical use for travelling, but Kelon could see that the forest floor was a quagmire covered with broken foliage and fallen boughs: the debris of the savage gale’s destruction. Water dripped from the trees overhead, and he shivered in the dismal damp. Though the wind and rain had faded away, there was not the slightest hope of lighting a fire, so he finally succumbed to his hunger and wolfed some bread, meat and cheese from the saddlebags, in the hope that the food might give him more energy to stay warm.
When he looked up again from his meal, Kelon was sure he must have dozed, and dreamed. A globe of crimson radiance hung before his face, dazzling him after the dismal gloom of dawn. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, but the strange vision remained. He stretched out a hand to it and felt a gentle heat, but it glided away from his touch, remaining tantalisingly just out of reach. Drawn by the cheerful glow and the hope of some much-needed warmth, he took a step or two after it, but it slipped away from him again, retreating whenever he moved towards it, yet remaining motionless, just as if it were waiting, whenever he stood still.
This was not Phaerie magic - but it was some sort of enchantment, of that he was certain. It did not feel evil. Glowing there so bright and warm and cheerful, it felt beneficent to Kelon. Half-dazed from cold and lack of sleep, craving the comfort that it brought, he followed it along a narrow track that was no more than a game trail, as though he were in a trance.
So when he stumbled across the body of the horse, the shock hit him like a lightning bolt. Kelon recoiled with a cry as his own mount shied into the bushes, dragging the packhorse behind. Calming the snorting, trembling Alil, he dismounted and tethered his own animals, then went forward reluctantly to examine the dead creature.
It was the most appalling thing he had ever seen, its limbs broken and twisted in unnatural places, its hide split and leaking and its skull smashed open. Only the bloodied scraps of white hide and a glazed blue eye that the ravens had not yet found betrayed the poor creature’s identity. Vikal. Ferimon’s horse.
The poor creature must have fallen from a tremendous height. All around the body lay splintered branches, some even impaling the flesh, obviously broken off when the animal came crashing down through the trees. Kelon turned away and vomited into the undergrowth, but even as his stomach wrenched and heaved he could feel a chill of fear crawling between his shoulder blades.
What had happened to Ferimon? Where was he? Had he survived?
No, surely not. Who could live through such a fall? But Tiolani was bound to be searching for her lover, and the more distance Kelon could put between himself and this place, the safer he would be. Besides, it was more urgent than ever that he find Aelwen. Anxious to put his gruesome discovery behind him, he skirted as far around Vikal’s body as the undergrowth would allow and hurried on his way. The burning globe had hung in the air all the time he had been preoccupied, and there could be no doubt that it was waiting for him. Now, as if sensing his urgency, it moved ahead of him faster than before, leading him through the shadowy ranks of the trees.
With all his attention focused on the light, Kelon was careless of other dangers. He never even realised that he was being watched until a tremendous weight crashed down on his head and shoulders, knocking him out of the saddle.
He hit the wet ground with a stunning impact. Dazed and shocked, the breath knocked out of him, his vision smeary with mud and his nose and mouth filled with cloying filth, he was in no condition to fight for his life, but there was no choice. The assailant was also on his feet.
Ferimon.
Kelon barely recognised the Phaerie as the handsome, charismatic young man who had won Tiolani’s heart. He had come off badly in the fall. His blond hair was matted with dirt and leaves and clotted blood. His face was scratched, bruised and swollen, and his tattered clothes were stained crimson where he had been hurt. A gory socket was all that remained of his right eye, and the left held a searing glare of hatred and red wrath. There was madness in that look, and Kelon was pierced by a fire-ice bolt of fear. Though he had been taught the basics of combat with bow and blade, by nature he was no fighter.
Vile epithets spewed from Ferimon’s twisted mouth, then a snarl. ‘Would have ruled. Should have ruled.’ His voice rose to a scream, then that one eye fixed on Kelon with a terrible intensity, and the slurred tones fell to a whisper. ‘Stupid Tiolani. Had her fooled, everyone fooled. All my plan. Give bows to filthy ferals, bring down Hellorin.’ He spat blood. ‘Should have killed him, like her brother. Wed Tiolani. Rule. Rule!’ His face was contorted with rage. ‘Accursed horse demon,’ he spat. ‘You made it kill Tiolani. Aelwen bitch did. How? Why?’ The voice rose again to a howling crescendo. ‘Kill you now. You. I should have ruled.’
Pulling his knife from its sheath, he took a lurching step forward, and Kelon knew a split second’s disbelief. Surely he can’t really mean to fight me? Wounded as he is? His head cleared rapidly of extraneous thoughts, his instincts working at lightning speed as he backed away to give himself a little more room to react. Almost without his knowing it, his own knife was already in his hand, memories of a hundred stable brawls filling his head. Apprenticeships in the stables were a test of toughness, and the youngsters perforce learned to fight if they wanted to survive.
Then Ferimon, as if he had realised that in his condition he could never hope to win a physical combat, had a change of heart - either that, or the knife had been a ruse all along. Without warning, he launched a spell: a magical call that shot like a bolt of silver into the shroud of blackness that lay beneath the trees.
From the secret heart of the forest, something answered.
Fast, fast, fast: shreds of shadow streamed from beneath the bushes to pool at Ferimon’s feet. They gathered, entwined, clotted together to form a shape like the terrible heart of the night: a creature like a wolverine, black as nightmare with eyes like searing embers burning in a narrow face. Eyes of hatred. Eyes of savagery.
Eyes of death.
They fastened on Kelon, affixing him as though he was held in a vice, while within him, his soul cried out in despair. Legends of this hypnotic stare were manifold - but he had never heard of anyone escaping it. The creature was a Culat: rare and lethal, and possessed of its own magic. Despite its size, it was numbered among the most deadly magical beasts and was one of the most feared.
Ferimon laughed: a sound like a knife blade scraping an exposed nerve. ‘Like my pet, Kelon? Took a long time to find one, longer to tame. Now it comes to my summons. Kills for me.’
The creature opened its mouth to reveal needle-tipped teeth that glittered white as bone. It gave a low hiss, and scores of shadows sprang up around it, ghostly images of itself replicated over and over again. Concealed by the undergrowth, they spread out and clustered around the periphery of the clearing, the claws on their thronging feet making not a single sound, even among the rustling dry leaves.
Ferimon raised a hand, holding the monstrosities in place with his will, enjoying the sight of his enemy’s horror and fear. The Culat’s power lay in the shadowy army of facsimiles that surrounded it. They housed the souls of every living being it had slaughtered, subsumed and enslav
ed; all given animation by its will. Each one of them was as capable of dealing death as the entity itself. And as each victim they slaughtered was absorbed into the Culat’s sinister power, its army of doomed and captive souls increased. The only way to destroy this threat was to find and finish the original, the leader, the progenitor. It was the only one that truly lived; the only one that could die. And if it could be killed, the rest of the soul army would be freed at last from their ghastly imprisonment. But how to kill it? It would be too fast for blade or bow.
As if reading his thoughts, Ferimon laughed again. ‘Needs magic, pure Phaerie magic. Not your pathetic powers; your blood tainted by human slave filth. You can’t kill it, Hemifae.’
‘I think you’re lying.’ Rage swept through Kelon, an anger so powerful that it broke the Culat’s hypnotic spell. He took a deep breath and looked his foe in the eye. ‘Or maybe not - but at least I can take you with me.’ And on the last word he lunged through the shadow army, his knife piercing upward between Ferimon’s ribs, finding his heart with deadly accuracy. The Phaerie sank to the ground, his last breath rattling in his throat, pulling Kelon, whose hand was still locked around the hilt of the jammed blade, down with him.
And in eerie silence, the Culat’s minions attacked.
They were in no hurry now. They closed in on him slowly, stalking, feeding on his fear. Kelon abandoned the futile struggle with the knife and dived behind Ferimon, putting his back against a tree and trying to use his enemy’s body as a shield, but he knew it would be useless. Against so many foes, there could be no defence. He fixed the image of Aelwen in his mind and waited for the end.
And an end came - but not the one he had expected. Kelon cried out in shock as a hissing hail of arrows swept the clearing in a lethal storm. The Culat horde ignored them, the missiles passing through their wraith-like forms, but the onslaught was so heavy that one was bound to find the leader. One of the creatures fell with a piercing scream, spraying gore - and in the blink of an eye, the rest had vanished.
‘You can come out now.’ The laconic voice was female, and sounded quite young. A feral human, she had to be, Kelon thought with dismay. How would they react to someone of Phaerie blood - even half?
‘It’d stupid to hide - you can’t get away.’ This time the voice betrayed impatience - and just a hint of puzzlement.
Though Kelon’s position, tucked down among the roots of a tree behind Ferimon’s cooling corpse, had kept him out of the way of stray arrows, it certainly would not conceal him. Furthermore, he knew that these unknown assailants must have seen him when they made their attack. So what unpleasant game were they playing? They had him helpless. Why toy with him now?
Then he happened to look down, and for an instant, until his sight adjusted, he saw what they must have been seeing.
Nothing.
Kelon was absolutely stunned. He had made himself invisible. But he had no talent for glamourie! He could only imagine that need had ignited some unknown, deeply buried spark of ability within him, a legacy from his Phaerie father. With his survival at stake, instinct had taken over.
‘I said come out, damn you!’ But behind the anger in her voice, he could hear the uncertainty. ‘We just saved your life, stupid,’ she went on.
He had no idea who she was, how many were with her, or what she wanted. He wasn’t that stupid. So he waited, staying very still lest he betray his position.
From somewhere out of sight, there was a murmur of voices. ‘Look here, you idiot.’ The female spoke again. ‘We have this place surrounded and you can’t get by us. You might as well come out. You killed that slimy, cold-blooded, treacherous turd, and that puts us on the same side - at least for now. I’m only disappointed I didn’t get to do it myself. So show yourself, stranger. Come out and parley.’
Not in this lifetime, Kelon thought - but once again, his deepest instincts seemed to be one step ahead of him. This time he actually felt the magic coursing like cool wine through his veins as the glamourie fell away.
‘There he is!’ From all sides, the cry went up. The only way for him to salvage any shred of dignity was to pretend he’d revealed himself deliberately, so Kelon stood up, his skin prickling all over in expectation of an arrow.
They materialised like ghosts, out of nowhere, curious, wary-eyed, hostile; armed with slingshots and bows, and dressed in badly tanned hides and tatters of cloth. Then from the midst of the throng stepped a young woman with short, brown hair that stuck up in tousled spikes and looked as though it had been hacked off with a blunt dagger. She was skinny but wiry, her face smudged with dirt, but she wore her ragged clothing with the dignity of a queen, and her hazel eyes, the colour of forest shadows, snapped fire. ‘Throw the knife away,’ she ordered.
With a bristling thicket of arrows pointed at him, Kelon had no other choice
31
THE GATHERING
The feral leader scrutinised Kelon with those serious, cool eyes. ‘Hemifae, he called you.’
Kelon nodded, though from her tone she had stated a fact, not asked a question. ‘I have human blood in my veins, the same as you.’
She spat. ‘You also have cursed Phaerie blood in your veins, so you’ll never be the same as us. But you killed that snake, so you get to live - at least till we’ve talked.’ Never taking those appraising eyes off him, she jerked her head in an ‘over there’ gesture. ‘Move away from that scheming bastard.’
‘I like your way with words,’ Kelon said. He kept his voice light, but he was not sorry to put some distance between himself and Ferimon. Before today, he had never killed anyone. Inwardly, he was quaking and his heart was thundering, but he held himself together by sheer force of will so as not to betray any weakness to the ferals. Nonetheless, he could not help but flinch as the girl marched over to the Phaerie’s corpse and gave it a number of vicious kicks, the last of which was full in the face. He wondered at the venom in her expression; the hatred and anger betrayed by her violence and her tense, jerky movements.
That was personal, he thought. It was more than a gut reaction to a dead oppressor. So how did this grim-faced crew know Ferimon?
Given the feral leader’s current mood, he decided this was not the time to ask her. With a final kick, she turned away from Ferimon’s body. ‘Loot that carrion, Sim,’ she said. ‘Make sure you get everything - we’ve a use for it all, that’s for sure. We’ll leave now and go somewhere safer, so we can talk with this stranger.’
‘How do we know we can trust him?’ someone asked.
She gave a wry, one shouldered shrug. ‘Who says I trust him?’ Her eyes went to the glowing sphere that still hovered just beyond him. ‘And what the bloody blazes is that thing?’
‘I wish I knew,’ Kelon admitted. ‘Some sort of magic, I think. It attached itself to me in the forest, and it was leading me somewhere when I stumbled across Ferimon.’
‘Maybe it was his spell. He seemed to hate you enough. Maybe he used that thing to lure you.’
Kelon shook his head. ‘Spells don’t normally last long after the caster’s death - apart from the magic that makes the horses fly. If that failed immediately, then—’ He noticed her foot tapping impatiently. ‘Never mind,’ he went on quickly. ‘That spell is no Phaerie magic. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.’
She cast her eyes to the heavens. ‘Then why in the name of thunder were you stupid enough to follow it, instead of heading off as quick as you could in the opposite direction? I may not have any fancy Phaerie blood in my veins, but I’ve got enough sense to know you shouldn’t mess with strange magic.’
‘You should be grateful you’ve a choice.’ Kelon glared at her. ‘It seems to have attached itself to me in some way. It sticks with me wherever I go, but really it appears to want me to follow it. I decided that the only way to shake it off was to find the caster.’
The feral girl’s eyes grew round as moons. ‘My friend, I salute you. You must have balls of iron.’
‘Balls of fire, more like,’ je
sted some wit from among the bowmen, gesturing to the glowing sphere. ‘Still,’ the wisecracker added, ‘this wants some thinking about, Danel. Seems to me we don’t want nought to do with no strange magic. And if we take him with us, the thing’s latched on to us, too. Seems to me that we have but two choices. Either leave him to go on his way, and take that bloody unnatural thing out of our territory - or kill him, and get rid of it that way.’
Kelon thought fast. ‘If you kill me, what’s to stop the spell attaching itself to one of you instead?’
Danel - as her name had turned out to be - hesitated a moment, gnawing on a grubby, bitten fingernail. ‘Let him go,’ she decided. ‘It’s not worth the risk, and I’m certainly not taking him to any of our hideouts with that thing following him.’
‘We could take his horses, at least,’ a woman said hopefully. ‘There’s enough meat there to feed everyone twice over.’