Amberle was awake as well, sitting next to him, her face white within the shadow of her long chestnut hair. Wil put a finger to his lips.
“Wait here.”
Silently he slipped from the bed and moved to the door. The latch continued to rattle, but the Valeman had thrown the bolt above it, so the room was secure. He bent toward the doorway and listened. The voices without were low and muffled.
“… careful, fool … just lift it …”
“I am lifting it! Step out of the light!”
“… waste of time; just break it in … there’s enough of us.”
“… not if he uses magic.”
“The gold is worth the risk … break it!”
The voices argued on, whispers laced with the slur of ale, mixed with grunts and ragged breathing. There were at least half-a-dozen men out there, the Valeman decided—thieves and cutthroats, most probably, undoubtedly led to them by the idle tongue of someone who had heard the tale of their miraculous cure of the proprietress of the inn and who could not resist a few embellishments in a retelling of the story. He backed away hurriedly, groping for the bed. Amberle’s hand gripped his arm.
“We have to get out of here,” he whispered.
Wordlessly, she moved off the bed into the dark. They had slept in their clothes and it took them only moments to pull on the travel cloaks and boots. Wil hastened to the window at the rear of the room and pushed it open. Immediately below, a veranda roof sloped downward from the wall. From its edge, there was a drop of a dozen feet to the ground. Wil turned back to find Amberle again and brought her to the window.
“Out you go,” he whispered and took her arm.
In that same instant, there came a loud oath from the hall, and a heavy body crashed into the door, splintering boards and metal fastenings. The would-be thieves had lost their patience. Wil all but shoved the Elven girl through the open window, glancing back hurriedly to see if the intruders had broken through completely. They had not. The door still held. But then the door was struck again. This time the bolt gave way. Into the room surged a knot of cloaked figures, stumbling over one another, cursing and yelling.
Wil did not wait to see what might happen next. Scrambling through the window, he leaped hurriedly onto the veranda roof.
“Jump!” he yelled to Amberle, who crouched in front of him.
The Elven girl slipped over the edge of the roof and dropped to the earth below. In a moment’s time, Wil was beside her. Above them, leaning through the open window, the cloaked figures shouted in anger. Wil pulled Amberle back within the shadows of the building, then looked about hurriedly.
“Which way?” he muttered, suddenly confused.
Wordlessly Amberle took his hand and sprinted to the end of the wall, then broke for the building next to the inn. The shouts of their pursuers rose sharply, followed by the sound of booted feet on the veranda roof. Valeman and Elven girl ran silently through the darkness of the buildings, slipping down passageways, through alleys, and along walls until at last they were back to the edge of the main roadway.
Still the shouts pursued them. Grimpen Ward seemed to come suddenly awake, lights flaring in darkened buildings all about them, voices raising in anger. Amberle started out onto the roadway, but Wil pulled her hastily back. Less than a hundred feet away, in front of the Candle Light Inn, several dark forms fanned out onto the road, searching carefully the shadows about them.
“We have to go back,” the Valeman whispered.
They retraced their steps, following the wall of the building until they reached its end. A series of sheds and stalls stood clustered together against the dark backdrop of the forest. Wil hesitated. If they tried to escape into the forest, they would become hopelessly lost. They had to work their way back around the buildings to where the main roadway wound south out of Grimpen Ward. Once beyond the town, they would probably not be pursued further.
Cautiously they moved along the rear of the building. Walls and fences hemmed them in on all sides and barrels of trash cluttered the path forward. But the shouts had quieted now, and the buildings ahead were still dark. A few minutes more and they might be clear of their pursuit.
They turned down a narrow alley that ran through a row of stables behind a feed store. Horses whickered softly at their scent, stamping impatiently within their stalls. A small paddock stretched out before them beyond a line of sheds.
Wil started along the paddock fence with Amberle at his side. They had taken no more than a dozen steps when a sharp cry went up behind them. From out of the shadows of the feed store, a dark form appeared, arms waving, voice raised in alarm. Answering cries sounded from the buildings beyond. Startled by the suddenness of their discovery, Valeman and Elven girl stumbled over one another in their haste to flee, lost their footing, and went down.
Instantly their pursuer was on top of them. Arms flailed and fists pummeled wildly. Wil grappled with the man, a wiry fellow reeking of ale, as Amberle rolled clear. His hands fastened on his attacker’s cloak; with a sudden heave, Wil threw the man sideways into the paddock. There was a sharp whack as the man’s head struck the fence boards, and he collapsed in a heap.
Wil scrambled back to his feet. Lights came on in the rooms above the feed store and in the surrounding buildings. In the darkness behind them, torchlight flickered through the night. Cries of pursuit sounded from everywhere. The Valeman seized Amberle’s hand and they raced together along the ring of the paddock to the line of sheds. There they turned back toward the main roadway, following a narrow alley that ran between two shuttered buildings. Shadows darkened the passage and the two ran blindly, Wil leading. Ahead, the earthen line of the roadway slipped into view.
“Wil!” Amberle cried out in warning.
Too late. The Valeman’s eyes were not as sharp as the Elven girl’s, and he stumbled headlong into a pile of loose boards strewn across the alley passage. Down he tumbled, crashing into the side of the building. Pain exploded in his head; for an instant, he lost consciousness completely. Then somehow he was back on his feet, weaving forward dizzily, Amberle’s voice a faint buzzing sound in his ears. His hand reached for his forehead and came away wet with blood.
Abruptly the Elven girl was next to him, her arms wrapping tightly about his waist. He sagged against her weakly, forcing himself to stagger ahead toward the distant light of the street. He felt himself blacking out again and fought against it. He had to keep moving; he had to keep awake. Amberle was talking to him, her voice urgent, but he could not make out the words. He felt like a fool. How could he have let something this stupid happen now?
They staggered clear of the alley and turned into the shadows of a porch. Down its length they stumbled, the Elven girl fighting to keep the Valeman on his feet. Blood ran down into Wil’s eyes, blinding him further, and he muttered in anger.
Suddenly he heard Amberle gasp in surprise. Through the haze that blurred his vision, he watched a tangle of shadows appear out of the dark. Voices sounded, low and rough, and there was a hiss of warning. Then Amberle was gone, and he felt himself being lifted. Strong hands bore him quickly through the dark. There was a swirl of color before his clouded eyes, mingled with a rush of torchlight. Then he was being lifted again, this time through a narrow opening of canvas flaps. An oil lamp flickered beside him. Voices sounded, whispers of caution, and he felt a damp cloth wipe his face clean of blood. Hands worked busily to wrap him in blankets and to place a pillow beneath his head.
Slowly he opened his eyes. He lay within a gaily colored wagon, its walls decorated with tapestries, beads, and bright silks. The Valeman started. He knew this wagon.
Then a face bent close, dark and sensuous, framed in ringlets of thick black hair. The smile that greeted him was dazzling.
“I told you we would meet again, Wil Ohmsford.”
It was Eretria.
35
For five days the army of the Elves and the Legion Free Corps fought their way back across the Westland to Arborlon. Across t
he broad valley of the Sarandanon, through woodlands dense and tangled, and down forest roads and rutted trails they fell back slowly, steadily eastward, pursued at every turn by the Demon hordes. They marched in daylight and at night, without rest, often without food, for the creatures that tracked them neither slept nor ate. Unburdened by human needs, freed of human limitations, the Demons came after them, purposeful, unrelenting, driven by their own peculiar form of madness. Like dogs at hunt, they harried the withdrawing army, nipping and slashing at its flanks, rushing it now and then in full assault, striving to turn it from its course, to cripple it, to destroy it. The attack was incessant, and the Elves and their allies, already weary from their stand at Baen Draw, grew quickly exhausted. With exhaustion came despair and then fear.
Ander Elessedil fell victim to that fear. It began for the Elven Prince with his own sense of failure. The dead, the defeats of the few days past, and all that the Elves had hoped to accomplish and had not done haunted him. Yet even this was not the worst. For as his battered army struggled eastward and his countrymen continued to die all about him, Ander began to realize that none of them might survive the long march back—that all of them might die. Out of this stark realization was born the fear that became his own private devil—faceless, insidious, lurking just within the shadow of his determination. Leader of the Elves, it asked slyly, what will you do to save them? Are you so helpless, then? So many have been lost—yet what if all those who remain be lost? It teased and tormented him, threatening to turn weary resolve into total despair. Even Allanon’s presence did not help, for the black-robed Druid stayed distant and aloof as he rode at Ander’s side, veiled in his own world of dark secrets. So Ander fought his fear alone within the silence of his mind, the whole of his strength directed toward its defeat, as slowly, grimly he led his failing soldiers back toward Arborlon.
In the end, it was Stee Jans who saved them all. It was in this darkest time of seeming failure and desperation that the giant Borderman displayed the tenacity, endurance, and courage that had created the legend of the Iron Man. Assembling a rear guard of Elves and Free Corps, he began a defense of the main column of his army as it bore its dead and wounded eastward under cover of night. In a series of lunges and feints, the Legion Commander struck out at his pursuers, drawing them after him, first one way, then another, utilizing the same tactics that he had so successfully employed at Baen Draw. Time and again the Demons came at him, sweeping first through the valley of the Sarandanon, then into the forestland beyond. Time and again they sought to trap the fleet, gray-cloaked Legion riders and the swift Elven horse, always to close an instant too late, finding only an empty grassland, a blind draw, a hollow dark with shadow, or a scrub-choked trail that turned back upon itself. With a deftness that baffled and maddened the Demons, Stee Jans and the riders following him played a deadly cat-and-mouse game that seemed to place them everywhere at once, yet always away from where the main body of the army moved back toward the safety of Arborlon.
Demon anger and frustration mounted; as night became day and day night again, the pursuit grew frenzied. These Demons were different from the lean, black creatures that had swarmed out of the hill country north of Baen Draw to seize the Sarandanon. These were Demons that had gone east above the Kensrowe, more dangerous than their lesser brethren, with powers that no ordinary human could withstand. Some were monstrous in size, corded with muscle and scaled with armor—creatures of mindless destruction. Others were small and fluid and killed with just a touch. Some were slow and ponderous, some quicksilver as they slipped through the forest shadows like wraiths. Some were multilimbed; others had no limbs at all. Some breathed fire as the Dragons of old, and some were eaters of human flesh. Where they passed, the land of the Elves was left blackened and scarred, ravaged so that nothing might live upon it. Yet the Elves themselves remained just beyond their reach.
The chase wore on. Elven Hunter and Free Corps soldier fought side by side in a desperate attempt to slow the Demon advance, watching their numbers dwindle steadily as their pursuers swept after them. Without Stee Jans to lead them, they would have been annihilated. Even with him, hundreds fell wounded and dead along the way, lost in the terrible struggle to prevent the long retreat from turning into a complete rout. Through it all, the Legion Commander’s tactics remained the same. The strength of the Demons made it imperative that the Elven army not be forced to stand again this side of Arborlon. So the rear guard continued to strike quickly and slip away, always to swing back for yet another strike and then another—and each time a few more riders were lost.
At last, on the afternoon of the fifth day, the tattered and exhausted army came again to the shores of the Rill Song. With a ragged shout, it crossed back into Arborlon. Then it discovered the price that had been paid. A third of the Elves who had marched west to Sarandanon were dead. Hundreds more lay injured. Of the six hundred soldiers of the Legion Free Corps who had followed after them, less than one in every three remained alive.
And still the Demons advanced.
Dusk fell over the city of Arborlon. The day had gone cool at its end, a bank of heavy stormclouds moving eastward out of the flats to screen away moon and stars and fill the night air with the smell of rain. Lamps began to light within the homes of the city as families and friends gathered together for their evening meal. On the streets and in the treeways, units of the Home Guard began their nightly patrol, slipping through pooled shadows in uneasy silence. Atop the Carolon, on the Elfitch and along the eastern bank of the Rill Song, the soldiers of the Elven army stood ready, staring past rows of iron stanchions filled with burning pitch to the blackness of the forest beyond. Within the trees, nothing moved.
In the chambers of the Elven High Council, Ander Elessedil came face to face for the first time since his return from the Sarandanon with the King’s Ministers, the army commanders, and the few outlanders who had arrived to aid the Elves in their fight against the Demons. He passed through the heavy wooden doors at the end of the council room, carrying the silver Ellcrys staff in his right hand. Dust, sweat and blood covered the Elven Prince; while he had permitted himself a few brief hours of sleep, he had not yet taken time to wash, perferring to come as quickly as possible before the Council. Beside him walked Allanon, tall and black and forbidding, his shadow rising up against the walls of the chamber as he entered, and Stee Jans, his weapons still strapped about him, his hazel eyes cold with death.
From their high-backed chairs about the council table, the seats of the gallery, and the risers at the edge of the Dais of the Kings, those gathered came at once to their feet. A rush of whispers and mutterings filled the hall, and questions began to rise up in shouts as each man sought to be heard. At the head of the table, Emer Chios brought his open hand down upon the wooden surface with a crash and the room went silent again.
“Be seated,” the First Minister directed.
Grumbling, the men assembled did as they were told. Ander waited a moment, then came forward a step. He knew the rules of the High Council. When the King lay disabled, the First Minister presided. Emer Chios was a powerful and respected man, the more so in this situation. Ander had come before the Council with a very specific purpose in mind, and he would need the support of Chios if he were to achieve that purpose. He was tired and he was anxious, but it was necessary that he take time to go about matters in the proper way.
“My Lord First Minister,” he addressed the Minister. “I would speak to the Council.”
Emer Chios nodded. “Do so then, my Lord Prince.”
Slowly, haltingly, for he was not the speaker that his father was or his brother had been, Ander told of all that had befallen the Elven army since its departure to the Sarandanon. He described the injury to the King and the death of Arion. He told them of the battles and defeats at the Breakline, of the withdrawal and gallant stand at Baen Draw, and finally of the retreat back through the Sarandanon and the Westland forests to Arborlon. He told them of the courage of the Legion Free Corps,
of the leadership of Stee Jans when Pindanon had fallen. Graphically, he described the nature of the enemy they had faced—its size, its shape, its frenzy, and its power. The Demons, he warned them, now approached Arborlon, there to exterminate the last of the Elven people, to lay waste to the city, and to take back again the land they had lost centuries ago. What lay ahead was a battle in which one or the other, Elf or Demon, must surely be destroyed.
As he spoke, he studied the faces of his listeners, seeking in their eyes and expressions something of how they judged his actions since the loss of both their King and his heir-apparent. He accepted now that his father might die, and that he might then be King; he knew that the High Council and the Elven people must come to accept it as well. Acceptance had been difficult for Ander because, before the battle at Halys Cut, the possibility of such a thing happening had always seemed so remote and because he had not wanted to believe that he would lose both his father and his brother. But his father now lay within his bed at the manor house, unchanged since his fall. All the while that the Elves had fought at Baen Draw and on the long march home again, Ander Elessedil had waited for his father to wake, refusing to believe that he would not. But the King had not regained consciousness, and now it seemed that perhaps he would not do so ever. The Elven Prince understood that, accepted it, and thus looked past it to what must then be.
“Elven Lords,” he finished, his voice worn and empty. “I am my father’s son and I know what is expected of a Prince of the Elves. The Elven army has come out of the Sarandanon and now must stand here. I intend to stand with it. I intend to lead it. I would not have it so if there were any way that this moment could be undone, if all that had happened within these past few weeks might be wiped from the record of our lives. But that cannot be. Were my father here, you would rally to him to a man—I know that. I stand then in my father’s place and ask that you rally to me, for I am the last of his blood. These men who stand with me have given me their support. I seek yours as well. Pledge me that support, Elven Lords.”