The Gathering Storm
“Eat something,” said Erkanwulf, bringing him the tray. “They said you might feel poorly. We can stay a night here, mayhap, but we’ll have to move swiftly if we want to get out of Arconia before Lady Sabella’s loyal soldiers wonder if there’s anything amiss. If we can cross into Fesse, we should be safer, but, even so, Sabella’s people have been growing bold.”
“Bold?”
“Duke Conrad pushes into Salia. There’s a civil war, so they say, one lord fighting the next and the only heir a girl. Isn’t it outrageous? A Salian princess can’t inherit the throne, only be married to the man who will sit there.”
Ivar grunted to show he agreed, but he had to pee, and he was feeling distinctly queasy with that powerful stink of goat cheese right beneath his nose, yet he wasn’t sure he had the strength to get up off the log bench.
“Do we have horses?” he asked finally. “Or can you ride?”
“I can ride!” Erkanwulf slapped the tray down beside Ivar and moved away, his shoulders tense, by which Ivar deduced muddily that he had offended him. “My lord.” He walked out into the clearing, quiver shifting on his back, and fastidiously wiped off the tiny scroll before tucking it into his belt pouch. Now he didn’t need Ivar at all.
Who did, after all? Not even and not especially his own father, who had given him to the church as a punishment, knowing that Ivar had far different hopes and dreams, which by now had disintegrated into ashes and dust.
It was all too much. He retched, but there was nothing more than bile in his stomach, and after a few heaves he just sat there shaking and wishing he had actually died on that cart. He rubbed his hands together to warm them and caught a finger on the ring Baldwin had slipped on his finger—a fine piece of lapis lazuli simply set in a plain silver band. Ai, God! The token reminded him of Baldwin’s stricken face; he had to survive if only to let Baldwin know he wasn’t dead. It wasn’t fair to allow Baldwin to go on grieving over a man who was still living.
Yet why did living have to entail so much misery?
For some reason he wondered where Hanna was, or if she were still alive, and the thought of her made him begin to cry, a sniveling, choking whine that he hated although he couldn’t stop because his stomach was all cramped and the mallet in his head kept whacking away in time to the pulse of his heart. Just before he wet himself, he managed to push up and reel, stumbling, to the edge of the forest and there relieve the pressure. He shuffled back to the bench and curled up beside the stump, praying for oblivion.
Lady Fortune, or the saint to whom the chapel was dedicated, had mercy on him. He slept hard, without dreams, and woke a moment later although by now it was dusk. An owl hooted. He recognized that sound as the one that had startled him awake.
His headache was gone and although his mouth was dry and had a foul taste, he could stand without trouble even if every joint felt as stiff as if he needed a good greasing.
“Erkanwulf?” he croaked. “Ho, there! Erkanwulf?”
There was no answer.
I’ve been abandoned.
Wind creaked the branches. Twigs rattled and murmured like a crowd of gossips. A pale light bobbed away among the boles, and he rubbed his eyes, thinking some mischievous demon had corrupted his sight to make him see visions, but the light still wove and dipped like that of a will-o’-the-wisp. He got a sudden creeping pricking sensation in his shoulders and back although he stood with his back to the curving chapel wall, which was a stout shield, a comfort to the righteous.
“Erkanwulf,” he whispered, but no answer came, nor did he see any movement except that of the ghostly light.
He heard voices. He took a step back and rammed up against the stump, tipped backward, and was brought up short by the huge iron Circle. The sharp cold of iron burned through cloak and tunic to sear his flesh.
A torch wavered into view, followed by a second, and a dozen soldiers thundered cursing into the clearing. They stopped and turned, standing back to back and holding out their torches to survey the lay of the ground.
“This must be the old church what the man said,” said one of them. “But there’s no graveyard, just this old tree and that bit of a ruin there.” He gestured toward the chapel, but evidently none of them saw Ivar hiding in the shadows. “Captain was right. It were some kind of trick to sneak a man out—”
They stilled so abruptly that the hush that fell had a presence as though it were itself a vast and ominous creature stalking the stalkers. Light flickered deep within the woods. A breathy whistle broke the silence, then stuttered to a stop. Branches rustled. A cold wind brought goose bumps to Ivar’s neck.
“Hai!” shouted one of the soldiers before pitching over onto his face. A thread of light glimmered in his back, then dissolved into dying sparks that winked out one by one.
Shades emerged from the forest on all sides, creatures that had the bodies of men and the faces of animals: wolf, lizard, lynx, crow, bear, vulture, fox, and more that he could not identify as their darts flew into the clot of soldiers, most of whom shrieked and ran while a few lifted shields and leaped forward to fight. Yet the shades had no solid substance, nothing to receive the strike of an ax; they could kill but were themselves immune.
Half of the soldiers escaped, blundering back the way they had come, thrashing through the woodland cover until the noise of their flight ceased. Half lay on the ground, bodies contorted and twisted as though their last moments had been agony, yet no blood marked their bodies where the elfshot had pierced their skin. Shades flowed away into the forest in pursuit, but a fox-faced man and a vulture-headed woman turned to stare right at Ivar. Both were stripped to the waist, wearing nothing more than loincloths across their hips, leather greaves and arm-guards decorated with shells and feathers, and stripes of chalky paint that delineated the contours of their chests. She was young; that seemed obvious enough by the pertness of her breasts, but whatever lust Ivar would otherwise have felt to see so much nakedness was killed by the cruel curve of the vulture’s beak that was her face and the blank hollow behind its eyes.
They are masks, he thought, waiting as they raised their short bows and sighted on him. Instinctively, he raised a hand, although it would afford no protection against their poisoned darts. The lapis lazuli ring Baldwin had slipped on his finger winked blue.
They lowered their bows, glanced each at the other, and faded away into the forest.
He stood there shaking so hard he couldn’t move as the jolt of adrenaline coursed through him. It paralyzed him as efficiently as Sister Nanthild’s concoction had mimicked death.
But after a long while it, too, faded, and the night noises of the forest returned piecemeal, first an owl’s plaintive hoot, then a whisper of wind and the wrangle of branches, and finally the clear and loud snap of a breaking tree limb.
He leaped sideways and crashed into the stone wall, bruising his shoulder, but it was Erkanwulf returning with four horses on a string, two saddled and two laden with traveling packs filled with grain. Ivar could smell the oats even from this distance. The young soldier carried a lantern, and he stopped in confusion and fear as the light crept over the dead men.
“I-Ivar?”
“I’m here.” He stepped out of the chapel, shaking again, shoulder on fire and tears in his eyes. “Where were you?”
“I hid the horses. What happened? How did they find us? Did you kill them?”
“No. I don’t know. Shades came out of the trees. Ai; God! They’re probably still wandering nearby! Let’s get out of here!”
Erkanwulf’s eyes got very round, and his mouth dropped open, then snapped shut. “Here.” He thrust one lead into Ivar’s trembling hands. “I’ve heard they come back to eat their kills. We’ll take the Carter’s track until light. They can’t abide human-made roads.”
“A-are you sure?”
“I’m sure that elfshot kills.” He, too, started to shake with fear, making the lantern light jig across the corpses. The lack of blood made the scene more gruesome. The corpses h
ad already begun to stiffen.
Erkanwulf snuffed the lantern, hoping that the moon would give enough light to guide them. They fled east along the track, walking until dawn with the nervous horses on leads behind them, but they were too afraid to stop. When dawn came after an eternity of walking, they found a deer trail that wandered east, and they kept going at a steady walking pace because, after all, fear prodded them on, so it was only when they reached a stream and had to stop the horses from drinking too much cold water while overheated that they remembered that while they might march on they had to rest and graze the horses.
“Why didn’t they kill you?” Erkanwulf asked after they had watered and rubbed down the horses and turned them out to graze.
Ivar washed his face and drank from the rushing stream before he answered. “I don’t know.” He touched the ring, but its polished surface told him nothing. “I just don’t know.”
3
HE lay winded and gasping, recovering from the panic that had seized him just before the last of his air gave out. For a long time he sprawled in blackness, his only reference points the touch of water on his toes and the grind of pebbles and sand against his skin where he had dragged himself out of the flooded tunnel. The ground sloped gently upward until, at the limit of his reach, it humped up into a curved shelf of rock. The air swelled thickly in his chest; it seemed as heavy as the darkness surrounding him. He could see nothing, not his hand, not the floor, not even the armband that had before this faithfully lit his way in the depths.
After a longer while he shouted, but the caverns swallowed his voice. He heard no answering reply nor the scuffle of curious scouts.
Again he called out.
Again, silence answered.
Buried deep under the ground one heard silence in an entirely new way. No sound but that of his own breathing disturbed the air. If he shifted, then his knee might scrape rocks; his toe might lift out of the cold bath of water and cause a droplet to splash. That was all.
He stood and reached above his head, searching, but could not touch ceiling. He took in air, called out again, and a fourth time, and a fifth, and each time the sound of his voice faded and failed as he stood in a stillness so lucid that he finally understood that this was a dead place where nothing lived. He had swum into a blind pocket.
Without light, he could not explore to see how wide this cavern spanned or where tunnels might spear into stone to make roads that would lead him to light or help. He dared not move away from the water lest he could not find it again and, thus trapped, starve and die.
If he could not explore, then he would have no choice except to swim back to where his companion waited, where there was food and a chance to live buried in a gravelike prison. This taste, like defeat, soured in his mouth.
There had to be a way out.
“What are you?”
He shrieked and leaped backward, stumbling into the water, slipping, and falling to his knees. Then he began to laugh, because he recognized that rumbling whisper. The creature had been crouched in front of him all along, yet he had not sensed it. It made no sound of breathing. Now, it scraped away from him, retreating from the unexpected laughter, and he controlled himself quickly and spoke.
“I pray you, Friend, I am a messenger. I am come from your own tribesmen who are lost beyond this tunnel.”
“They are lost,” agreed the voice. “One among us watches since the time they are lost. If the deeps shift, then the path may open. How are you come through the poison water?”
“It is not poison to me. I am not one of your kind.”
“You are not,” it agreed. “We speak tales of the long-ago time when a very few of the creatures out of the Blinding dug deep. So do they still, but only to rob. Once they brought gifts, as it is spoken in the old tales. Once there was obligation between your kind and ours. No more.”
The words made his head hurt. Each phrase was a bar prying him open, cracking the seals that bound him; thoughts and memories spilled into a light too bright to bear. A great city. A journey through the dark.
Adica.
“No more,” he echoed, pressing his face into his hands as his temple throbbed and his skull seemed likely to split open. But despite his pain, he had a message to deliver. “Can you help them? Some still live, beyond the tunnel, but they are trapped. Can you help them?”
“Come,” said the voice. “The council must decide.”
It shuffled away, but he had to call after it.
“I can’t see to follow you.”
“See?”
“I am blind in this darkness.”
It said nothing, and he tried again.
“The light above that blinds you, that you call the Blinding, is what I need to see. This place, where you can see without light, it is a blind place to me.”
Out of the blindness cold fingers grasped his arm, tapped the armband, and jerked back. “Poison water!” It hissed and gurgled and went still, as though that touch had poisoned it.
He waited, and after a bit it spoke again.
“Such talismans we make no longer. The magic flees after the great calamity. Hold to me and follow like a young one.”
He reached out, grasped its cool hand, and trusting that it did not mean to lead him to his doom, he stumbled after it as it moved away with a strange rolling gait into a blackness so profound that he might as well have been walking into the pit.
The earth trembled beneath his feet, rocking him, then stilled.
“What was that?”
“The earth wakes,” said his guide. “The wise ones shift their feet, and the deeps tremble.”
“Ah.” His head was hurting badly again, and so they walked for a long while without speaking. He had to concentrate on walking; because each step jolted the pain in his head to a new location and back again, he came to dread the movement although he had no choice but to go forward.
After a long, long time he had to rest.
“I must drink,” he said to his guide, “or I will fail.”
“Drink?”
“I thirst. I must have water or some wine or ale, something to moisten my tongue and body.”
“Wait here.” The creature let go of his hand and before he understood what it was about, he heard it scrabble away over or along the stone and knew himself utterly lost.
He had no choice but to trust it—otherwise he certainly would die—so he lay down on the stone and slept. It woke him an unknown time later and put into his hands a bowl carved out of rock and filled to the brim with a brackish but otherwise drinkable water. When he had drunk it down, his head didn’t hurt quite so badly and, although his stomach ached with hunger, he could go on. They walked on for what seemed ages upon ages or a day at least up above where the passage of the sun and the moon allowed a man to measure the passing of time. Time seemed insignificant here, meaningless. Twice more the stone shuddered and stilled beneath and around them, causing him to pause as he swayed, heart hammering with instinctive fear, although his guide seemed untroubled by the shaking.
The second time, as the shaking subsided, he heard the noise of a distant rockfall, a scattering and shattering echo upon echo that propelled in its wake an avalanche of memory in his own mind: He remembered two young men with wiry black hair and short beards, surefooted as they climbed across and up a vast swath of rockfall that had long before obliterated one slope of a valley.
“Shevros!” he breathed. “Maklos.”
There had been another man with them, and two more companions, but to think, to struggle to name them, made his head throb.
“Come,” said the guide, tugging him along.
They walked for another day, perhaps, or so he guessed because in addition to the pain that crippled his head he was now growing weak with hunger and again faint and irritable with thirst. The darkness ate away at him until it filled him and he was empty, even those sparks of memory lost in that vast ocean where night reigns and indeed a thing beyond night because night is elusive and tr
ansitory and this blackness had no beginning of end. The armband abraded his skin where the last of the salt water still stung, and at last when they stopped for him to rest again—the skrolin needed no rest—he slipped off the armband and rubbed the inside with the filthy loincloth he still wore which had dried while he walked. He blew on it until it felt dry and clean—as clean as anything could be under such conditions—and eased it back up on his arm.
“Come,” said his guide, stamping twice on the ground as though impatient, and it seemed the stamp and the low rumbling growl that came from deep in the creature’s body performed as an incantation, or else it had been the irritant of the salt that had poisoned the armband, because a soft glow rose from the metal and the darkness retreated.
He stared in amazement. They stood in a high tunnel whose ceiling was perfectly round while the path they walked on was level. No natural cave would appear so regular. If an arrow forged out of the iron had been shot by a giant’s bow and pierced stone, it might bore a shaft such as this.
“Come,” repeated his guide. “We are close.”
The creature had a pale cast of skin and a handful of crusty growths patching its squat body. It grabbed for his hand, but he took a step away, not meaning to.
“I can see.”
Pale-skin’s huge eyes whirled as it regarded him. He had no way to interpret its expression. It had no expression, in truth, only features that mimicked those of humankind perhaps simply because he insisted on seeing the resemblance.
We recognize only that which we already know.
“I can see to follow you,” he said. “I am steadier on my feet if I walk alone. But I will have to eat very soon, and drink again.”
“So much?” it asked. “Your body is inefficient to need so much fuel.”
“I am no different than any other man.”
“You are a creature of the Blinding. So. Come.”
They walked on, but he was getting light-headed from lack of food, and his tongue felt swollen and heavy. Yet within ten hundred paces, not seen at first because the glow of his armband lit his way no more than a stone’s toss in any direction, the tunnel’s walls became pillars marking the advent of a hall of monumental proportions, so vast that the feel of the air changed as they walked through a forest of pillars, a woodland carved out of the stone, each pillar rising up to an unseen ceiling spanning far beyond the reach of the light, each pillar studded with gems that dazzled before fading into the darkness as he passed, a glimpse of riches soon gone.