* * *
The trek from the outlying farmsteads proceeded without talk. Many of the farmers had not crossed their fields since spring sowing, and the rankness of weeds where crops should stand high at harvest weighed sorely upon their hearts. Late-singing mockingbirds called, but corn did not rustle, and the pastures were thick with grass that in better years was grazed short.
Past such evident ill fortune, the unchanged woods seemed a haven. The air under the trees hung thick with the scent of pine. No wind blew, but the footsteps of men who were unskilled at hunting frightened the crickets to silence. Other nocturnal wildlife that might have forewarned of an ambush took flight before the disturbance. The early-rising moon ducked often behind banked clouds; during such intervals the dark beneath the trees became total. Men blundered cursing into branches and roots; except Korendir, who assessed the obstacles as the light dimmed, then paused between steps until his eyes adjusted. Rather than stop and lecture on woodsmanship there and then on the path, the mercenary ordered torches lit. Shortly every other man carried a brand, the unencumbered left to wield weapons.
The party paced onward through oily fumes thrown off by the cressets. If wereleopards lurked close, they stayed concealed in the shadows. The men pressed ahead more confidently. In time they crossed the blackened swath of ash where Korendir had accomplished his first kill. Now not a trace remained of the flayed corpse; the ground lay tracklessly smooth, and even the scratch-marks of carrion crows did not mar the scorched soil of the site. More sinister still, the burned tree stump where Korendir made his stand had been uprooted and clawed to white splinters.
The discovery was sobering, that wereleopards held regard for their dead. Men felt their mortality more keenly after that, and Korendir, grimly silent, questioned whether the hide bands stitched to each man's boots held power to inspire anything but rage from the creatures they marched to eradicate. The torches burned just as brightly, but the heady, close air of late summer seemed to drag at the flames, shortening the circle of light. Korendir looked back to take stock of his men and realized that two lagged behind. Emmon and the miller's son lingered in the swath seared by last night's fire.
"I see no sign of a wereleopard killed here," Emmon said loudly.
"You will, and very quickly, if you don't close ranks and keep moving!" Korendir strode past the column, his intent to assume rear guard where he could keep better watch over stragglers.
Emmon's chin lifted mulishly. "Look, Sethon, we're getting a babysitter."
That moment the wereleopard charged.
Mate of the one slain at that site the night before, she had been stalking in the brush. The scraps of pelt had first deterred her, but now, she sensed dissent among the prey who blundered through the trees. She pressed her advantage and sprang, a bolt of molten gold in the torchlight.
Barely a leaf rustled warning. The men from Mel's Bye watched to see how Korendir would handle Emmon's provocation; for only a moment they neglected to remember the forest which hemmed their backs. The crash of a torchbearer and a cry caused them ail to spin round in horror. Two bodies rolled in the leaves, one tawny yellow and spotted, the other clothed and struggling.
Korendir dodged past a man too stunned to react, and another one yelling in fear. "Steady those torches!" he shouted. He freed his dagger and completed a whipping throw.
The blade buried with a thump in the ruffed torso of the predator, which was nakedly female. Korendir kept moving. Even as the wereleopard's death cry reverberated through the forest, he crouched down, barehandedly grasped the beast's shoulder and flung her off her prey.
Fangs raked the air; venom drops flew like jewels through torchlight. Despite Korendir's swift recoil, spatters caught the linen that bandaged his wrist. The material blackened instantly. Korendir slipped the knot, shredded the tainted fabric off, and with no break in motion, grasped the man and dragged him clear of the wereleopard's death throes.
Blood leaked in trails from the wounded man's body. In agony, striving to stifle screams, he flopped wretchedly in the leaves. Boiled leather wrist guards had spared him the wereleopard's venom, but the elbow savaged by her foreclaws was a mess of mangled bone.
"Merciful Neth," murmured a bystander. Someone else doubled over and retched in the brush.
"Stay together," snapped Korendir. His hands, the same hands that had killed on an instant's notice, now explored the downed man's body with gentleness and dispatch. Yet even had he owned a surgeon's skill, no succor would avail. The smell of blood and feces hung heavy on the air and even the squeamish who averted their eyes understood that the injured man's plight was hopeless. The wereleopard's spurred toes had raked open his abdomen, then shredded the gut inside.
Even Emmon's deranged scorn abated at the sight. A man could not die cleanly from such mauling; if luck ran against him his agony might drag on for a fortnight.
The stricken man was aware. "Don't bring me back to my daughters like this," he pleaded. "I beg you, don't."
Korendir regarded the clustered bystanders. "Does Vwern have kin present?" That he knew the man's name startled no one at the time; their minds were shocked numb by catastrophe. "Is there one friend brave enough to complete this man's request?"
Feet shuffled through leaves; hands loosened from the hilts of weapons, and no man would meet any other man's eyes. Emmon stood with bent head, his great fists sliding up and down the weathered shaft of his pike.
At some point the wereleopard's thrashing ceased. She lay on her back, her surprisingly human breasts upthrust and gleaming in firelight. No one seemed anxious to approach her, but even less willingly would they contemplate what must be done for their comrade.
"Very well," said Korendir, his voice like steel against silence. "Sethon, take Emmon's pike. Bind up the killed beast and sling her on the pole. Then, all of you, move out upstream."
The men did not have to be reminded to stick together. Spurred by an embarrassment of relief, they offered their belts and bootlaces and helped Sethon lash the carcass.
Korendir remained kneeling in fir needles. One hand supported the wounded man's head, while the other eased the collar loose at his neck.
"I am glad it's to be you," gasped Vwern, valiantly trying to shed hurt that had nothing to do with torn flesh. "At least you're a man who knows the best place for the knife."
Korendir said nothing, but slipped his dark cloak and arranged it over the victim's chilled flesh. Then he settled on his heels, waiting, while around them the men finished off with the wereleopard. Trembling with nerves, Sethon returned the mercenary's dagger. Someone had wiped the blade clean. Korendir accepted the obsidian hilt. On the inside of his wrist, where Vwern could not see, he carefully tested the edges. Satisfied that wereleopard bones had left no nicks in the steel, Korendir nodded dismissal to the miller's son.
The farmers banded together and departed. Torchlight flickered and faded between the trees. Alone under the moon's fitful gleam, the motionless man and the doomed one each took a breath in preparation.
"Strike now," urged Vwern. The quick shock of accident was wearing off, and suffering tugged at his voice. "—T'would just compound my mistake, if you got attacked on account of me."
Korendir's reply held a gentleness no ears left living had ever heard. "Not yet." He reached out in darkness and unerringly found the victim's fingers, then grasped with a grip that was warm, as if death did not hover in the wings. "First tell me the names of your daughters."
Vwern stifled a sob. "There are three. Nessie, Mallie, and Tesh.'She's youngest, and blond, like her mother, though Mallie, maybe, is prettier. I love them all," he added, as if the mercenary might not understand; as a father, he had no favorite.
"Nessie, Mallie, and Tesh, who is blond," Korendir repeated. He made a small movement, then added, "They'll be safe, Vwern. On my life, I swear they'll prosper, and marry, and live to raise children in your memory."
The hand that held the wounded man's gave no twitch in warning, but abide
d, steady and firm. The knife seemed to come from nowhere; it entered fast, painlessly clean, precisely below Vwern's left ear. His awareness ebbed swiftly in a flood of arterial blood.
Korendir did not rise. Beside him, the corpse ceased to shudder; the chest quit breathing and sagged motionless, finished with struggle and life. Still, the mercenary remained. He unlaced his fingers from the dead man's and wiped the warmed blood from his knuckles. Meticulously he cleaned his blade. He closed the eyes that gleamed empty within a pillow of leaves and covered the slack face with his cloak. Then he straightened. Moonlight revealed what Vwern, or any other in Neth's Eleven Kingdoms might never be permitted to see.
Tears rinsed Korendir's fine-boned face; as he wept his expression was stripped by an ache of compassion that flowed straight from the heart.
"By my mother, you were brave," he said to the still form at his feet.
That moment, a wereleopard might have taken him without a blow struck in token defense.
The interval ended suddenly, like the immolation of too dry tinder snapped into flame by a spark. Korendir blotted his cheeks. He returned his cold knife to its sheath, retrieved his abandoned sword, and moved off without a backward glance. By the time he caught up with the others, his expression was impervious as quartz.
"That's one on your soul, to equal the one on mine," he said softly to Emmon as he passed.
Hillgate's son slapped a hand to his belt knife. The Master of Whitestorm never so much as flinched, but kept going until he reached the head of the column. Emmon was deranged enough to strike from behind when provoked; but whether Korendir cared at all, or whether some instinct convinced him that the seventeen survivors who had volunteered for this march would have acted to defend him in that moment, remained unclear. The mercenary from Whitestorm had completed a mercy stroke that others shrank to contemplate; the deed had been accomplished with such lack of ceremony that no man's pride became brutalized. For that grace, Korendir earned a respect that admitted tolerance for his presumed abuse of Carralin. The townsfolk would never forgive her murder. But now, only madness offered cause to prolong resentment; Emmon Hillgate's son was left to nurse his grievance alone.
* * *
Night was beginning to fail. On his previous expedition, Korendir had found that twilight was a time of transition for the wereleopards. He had neither been attacked nor had he observed any movement through yesterday's daybreak. Now he banked upon the presumption that the creatures preferred to retire during their vulnerable time of change; in cat-form, in daylight, the beasts were far more difficult to kill. If this band of inexperienced villagers was to win reprieve for their families, their safety must be secured before sunrise.
The River Ellgol sprang from a cleft at the base of the shale cliffs that footed the Doriads. No trees grew there; against the knees of the mountains, the forest ended as if sliced. Seeds that sought foothold on the cracked and moss-rotted stone beyond grew to crabbed saplings, then died, leaving skeletons like fingers hooked in an agony of torture. The river issued from a seamed maw beneath; waters welled up from the earth's dark and roared down a ravine, to carve a more meandering course through the valley.
The party from Mel's Bye paused beneath the crest of the outcrop. In the gray half-light before sunrise, Korendir hurried them through a meal of bread, cheese, and sweet ale. Then the mercenary placed half of the archers in crannies overlooking the forest. Their task was to arrow down any wereleopard who left the cover of the wood, while companions razed the trees in a swath a hundred yards wide by any method that would serve; fire, axe, or landslide, Korendir made it clear he did not care, so long as the glade surrounding the cliffs was cleared to the last standing twig. Seasoned logs from the deadfalls were to be hewn into firewood, and stacked alongside the river mouth.
On the heels of a nightlong march, the work he proposed was brutal enough to wilt the stoutest spirit; yet there were no slackers. Having tasted the blood of the wereleopard which had preyed upon their kinfolk for so long, the villagers felled trees with determination. Even Emmon took up an axe. His frame sweated with hellbent exertion, and his eyes shone fanatically bright; he labored as if by brute strength he could absolve his part in the misfortune that had ended Vwern's life.
In contrast to Hillgate's son's passions, Korendir applied himself with the chill of new steel forged for bloodshed. Stripped to breeches and swordbelt, he assembled a bundle of unlit torches and set the remaining men to climbing. Barely visible in the early light, and dampened by mists of falling water, his picked party toiled upward toward a shelf of rock undercut by the current of the Ellgol. Korendir insisted that wereleopards entered Southengard through the mazes of water-tunnelled caves that riddled the mountains behind. He planned to seal their access by engineering a rockslide above the river, but work could not commence until the caverns had been secured from inside.
Korendir explained in snatches as he climbed, the gist of his strategy based on the wereleopards' compulsion to shift form when exposed to transitions in light. The stone of the cliff face was rotten with weather and age; shale crumbled unexpectedly underfoot, to clatter downslope and crash through the undergrowth below. The most skeptical villager allowed Korendir his point. Protected by bonfires, a work team with pick axes and shovels could undermine the loosened shale, fashion shoring of timbers and plank, then tear such bracing away to precipitate a rockfall.
The men who attempted the ascent pressed forward with a will. Hard the mercenary who led them might be, and lacking in decency and warmth, yet the Master of Whitestorm had proven himself capable. Mel's Bye might be a poor town, if he lived to collect his fee; but his direction offered hope that the farms might be safe to recover prosperity in the future.
Korendir reached the cave opening. Through whorls of mist from the falls, the lead men saw him grasp a crevice and heave his body inside. By the time those following reached the outcrop, he was busy lighting torches. An arc of them burned at his feet. Heat slicked his face like a gypsy entertainer prepared for an exhibition of juggling; except his frown held no hint of gaiety, and his sleeves were crusted with the blood of a man and a beast.
"Sethon goes last," he said without looking up. "Not because he lacks courage, but because he's the youngest." The striker flared between Korendir's hands. "Bachelors march at the fore, behind me. Fathers with young children will follow in back." When the last torch was set blazing, the mercenary's gaze touched each man in turn. "The order of march is a formality. Any one of you careless enough to get killed will find your own way to hell, because the others outside cutting trees have no choice but depend on us."
Korendir pressed a torch into Sethon's hands and drew his blade. Then he stamped the wooden grip of the cresset lying nearest and flipped it like a trickster's flare into his hand.
Eastward, the sky had brightened; mist off the falls changed from blue to subtle rose, forewarning of the dawn to come. Korendir dropped onto his belly. With a scrape of fabric over shale, he dragged himself into the aperture which accessed the caves. The men picked up torches and trailed after in single file. Sethon the miller's son entered last, eyes burned by the soot thrown off by oiled rags. He breathed damp, heated air, and the sourness of other mens' sweat. His ears heard little beyond the confined roar of the watercourse which thrashed and tumbled through the caverns, fed by the drip of countless subterranean springs.
Korendir crawled to the end, where the stone widened out. His cresset guttured and whipped in the draft as he straightened as far as his knees, shuffled forward, and at last gained space to stand.
"Hurry," he encouraged the man who came at his heels.
The cavern brightened as the villagers emerged. Raised torches revealed walls that sloped upward to a ceiling that sparkled with mineral deposits. Korendir advanced across a floor sleek-wet with run-off. His cresset threw orange reflections off his swordblade, the puddles scattered underfoot, and from his wrist, scraped open and freshly bleeding after his traverse through the passage. The stin
g of split scabs must have pained him, yet when one of the men expressed concern, he spurned both help and companionship.
"Stand together!" His rebuke echoed outward like the crack of a marble chipper's mallet. "Pool the light from the torches, and keep your eyes to the walls." Then, as if knowing he had rejected an honest act of courage, he said, "Expect an attack at any moment."
A spill of gravel rattled from the darkness overhead. Pebbles bounced and rolled and scattered ripples across the puddles.
Already Korendir had thrown himself aside, his steel upraised and ready. "Get Sethon to light more torches!"
The wereleopard dropped that moment. Man-formed, muscled for murder, it landed with the recovery of a tiger. Steel sang through air as Korendir lunged. His target twisted clear in a reflex too fast for sight. Somebody shouted. That sound spared the mercenary's life. The wereleopard spun, slit-eyed, and sprang at the farmers clustered before the passage.
"Throw down your torches!" screamed Korendir.
The three men not panicked obeyed. Flame struck wet stone with a sizzle of oil; grease-soaked rags spread a slick on the puddles, and fire flared instantaneously wider. Sudden light rinsed the crannies, and forced the wereleopard to metamorphosis.
Its stride faltered, changed in mid-charge to a stagger.
Korendir swung his sword. "Light more torches. Quickly!"
Sethon fumbled after rags and oil, while someone else cut the ties that contained the bundled wood. Quickly as frightened men responded, the wereleopards moved faster. Another one launched from the shadows.
The first still thrashed, impaled on Korendir's blade. The swordsman fought to stay upright as the wereleopard kicked and slashed. The razor length of steel twisted in its chest, then wedged immovably into bone. Korendir yanked, unable to clear his sword, while the unwounded predator sprang.
Desperate, one of the farmers threw a torch. Flaming rags and a billet of beechwood impacted the wereleopard's flank. It twisted with a ringing snap of jaws and caught the light full in both eyes. Change followed; its outlines blurred. The delay gave Korendir space to free his steel, but the stroke that slew his attacker was dealt by a woodcutter from Mel's Bye.