Assail (81 page)

She stood on the grassed lip of the shore cliff, peering south to the slate-hued water beneath the overcast sky. She wondered whether she faced this way because she dared not glance east.

What she might see there would make all this appear pleasant.

She felt, rather than heard, Pran Chole take his place at her side. ‘Almost all human, Summoner. I sense no recent fallen who carry the Jaghut taint.’

‘This is supposed to cheer me?’

‘There are … many,’ the Imass allowed. ‘These invaders do not appear to be handling themselves well.’

She stole a glance at the ancient being. She had ordered him to remain behind but he had simply refused to obey. The nearest thing she might claim as a father – and he millennia old. We are a strange family, she mused. He, I, and – she cast a quick look about for Kilava, found her standing far off staring north – and the disappointed aunt.

‘So they fled,’ she sighed, more relieved than she dared con-template. Yet her aged and crooked hands still shook and even she sensed it: fragility. That she was composed of four souls, four awarenesses, made her particularly susceptible to … shattering.

‘They are close. A day’s journey. Gathered together.’

‘Yes, I sense them. A last stand, perhaps.’

Pran Chole added nothing to this, as there was no more to say. The mummified sinew of his joints clung to his bones as if he were strapped together, all animated by the eldritch ritual of Tellann. Most of the dried leather flesh of his face remained, though patches of it had fallen or been worn away. Mostly along the ridges of bone: the sharp edges of the cheekbones, the upper orbits of his empty sockets, or where the flesh had been thinnest, such as across his forehead where the skull peeked through, smooth and polished like old seasoned wood. The skullcap of the ancient deer he wore as a helmet had fared far worse. Grey with age it was, and utterly dried. It would probably weigh next to nothing in her hands. Its muzzle where it rode high above Pran’s head was longish and narrow.

She knew she was drifting … delaying.

‘Summoner,’ Pran began, and he always used this form of address when he wished to be stern with her. She could almost hear him clearing his throat, had he breath to do so. ‘We cannot delay any longer. We must confront them.’

No.
We
mustn’t. She had made her decision. ‘This time you must remain behind.’

If a desiccated mien of bared grinning teeth could express surprise and dismay, Pran’s features came closest. ‘Summoner …’ his breathless voice whispered. ‘Do not cast us off.’

‘I alone must speak to them. You have brought me this far and for that I thank you. Now you must remain. I’ll won’t—’ She stopped herself. ‘That is, I cannot risk losing any of you.’

‘And what of you?’

‘You know I will be safe. Fetch my horse.’

He inclined his head until the empty sockets of the beast skull seemed to stare at her in direct remonstration. ‘As you order, Summoner,’ he murmured in his sad dry voice.

He shuffled off and she went to talk to Kilava. A cold wind buffeted them all, slicing down out of the mountain heights. The beaded laces of her shirt rattled and her long tangled grey hair tossed about her face. She drew it aside. She sensed something, far in the heights behind the dense cloud cover. But just what it was she couldn’t be certain. Oddly enough, she had no interest in the Jaghut themselves, or their sorcery. Her purpose was not to prosecute the Jaghut; her purpose was to bring an end to the ritual of Tellann. No doubt, however, it was this stirring that had so distracted Kilava these last two days.

She stopped next to the squat muscular woman whose midnight black hair, being even longer than hers, lashed violently in the gusting wind as if reflecting her angry thoughts. She stared north for a time, trying to see what this elder Imass Bonecaster might be seeing.

‘You have not seen a Jaghut refugium before, have you?’ Kilava asked.

She shook her head. ‘I am a child of the warm prairie.’ She might not have seen one, but in response to the Bonecaster’s question there came a cascade of images provided by the three awarenesses that shared her being: Nightchill, crossing one such windswept waste beneath hanging curtains of flickering lights tinged pink at their frills; Tattersail, sailing past gleaming cerulean cliffs of ice far taller than those they glimpsed just to the south; even Bellurdan, sharing a fire with a Jaghut elder within one of these remaining enclaves.

‘I see them through other eyes,’ she said.

Kilava nodded her understanding. ‘What
I
see troubles me. It has been a long time …’ she glanced to her, ‘an unimaginably long time – but what I sense hidden there reminds me …’ She frowned then, losing whatever memory it was she hunted. ‘Well, perhaps we will have to chase the Kerluhm even there.’

‘I hope it will not come to that.’

The Bonecaster turned to Pran, Tolb, and the waiting T’lan. Silverfox looked as well. How painfully few this remaining handful, some thirty only. Yet incalculably precious to her.

‘You have hurt Pran’s feelings,’ Kilava observed.

‘They have no feelings.’

Kilava raised one silken black brow. ‘You know that is not so.’

‘Yes,’ she sighed, exhausted. She was just so tired of their company. Their rigidity. Their silence. Their unrelenting … alienness. ‘Yes,’ she sighed again. ‘They feel twice with their spirits what they can no longer feel with their flesh. I know this.’

‘Do not forget it. It is too easy to forget.’

Pran arrived, leading the watered and rested mount. Tolb followed, his withered hands clasped at his ragged belt. ‘We are to remain behind,’ Pran told Kilava.

The Bonecaster eyed him. ‘I see. Yet why should the Kerluhm listen to her now?’

Silverfox stroked the bay’s neck, avoiding her gaze. ‘I’m not going to ask this time.’

‘Then perhaps I should follow at a distance,’ Kilava offered.

Silverfox felt her brows rising. This was a day of days. The legendary Kilava being obliging. ‘There is no need.’ She added, mounting: ‘You would be too far away to intercede in any case.’

But the three Bonecasters were paying her no attention. All three had turned to the north, as had the faces of the rest of the Imass. She glanced that way, shading her eyes. What was it? She sensed there, behind the bunched soot-black clouds, the stirring of Omtose – was that it?

Then she saw it. Through her own Bonecaster’s vision she glimpsed a kind of wave descending the upper slopes. Invisible, yet visible by the disturbance it evoked as it came, like a wave through water. It came on, descending the slopes at astounding speed.

Kilava spun to her. ‘Protect yourself!’ she ordered.

She could only gape. What was this thing?

Then a hammer struck her across the head and she tumbled sideways off the horse to land numb with the shock of it. Pink coloured the swirling visions that assaulted her. She sensed her awarenesses, like survivors lashed to a raft, battling to remain afloat. The most potent of them, Nightchill, appeared to swim before her.
Not in ten thousand years have they dared!
she snarled, enraged. Bizarrely, behind the cracks widening between her shared essences, came the bellowed joy of Bellurdan as the giant gloried in the unleashed puissance washing over them. Darkness took her then.

*

A jolt awoke her to the utter blackness of a deeply overcast night. Except in one direction: bright mage-fire flickering in greens and blues far off. She was being carried over steep ground while lying flat in some sort of litter. Distant thunder rumbled and murmured and she thought it odd that a storm should be rising – perhaps it was all these clouds. She closed her eyes.

When she woke again it was day, or a fog-choked attempt at one in any case. Branches of conifers passed overhead. The ground was rough. Four T’lan Imass carried her. Again distant rumblings and eruptions rolled over them in sharp distinct blasts; were they moving into a thunderstorm?

‘What happened?’ she asked, rather groggily.

Kilava’s head appeared in her vision. Black flakes of dried blood marked where her nose must have bled. ‘You are with us still – good. They were of course quite worried.’

‘Worried that I had fallen apart?’

The Bonecaster nodded her agreement. ‘Something like that.’

She rubbed her forehead where it seemed as if a spike had been driven between her eyes. ‘What happened?’

‘We are privileged,’ the Bonecaster remarked with something like very dry humour.

She blinked, not certain she understood. ‘Privileged?’

‘To witness something thought long gone from the world. The birth … well, the
re
birth of a Jaghut ice barrier. The T’lan are understandably rather … angered.

She’d like to see that – an angry T’lan Imass. How would one know?

‘What of the Kerluhm?’

‘They travel north as well. The, ah, disagreement has been set aside until we have dealt with this new threat.’

Silverfox allowed her throbbing head to fall back to rest upon the cloth of the litter. ‘Good.’

Kilava, however, appeared not to share her relief. She walked along, one hand on one of the wooden poles of the litter, and brushed aside branches that rained cold droplets. Nearby, rocks clattered and crashed in a slide. ‘Do not be glad, child, nor think those survivors safe. The rejuvenated ice barrier will grind them to splinters of bone if they do not flee.’

‘They will retreat.’

‘Let us hope so.’

She rubbed her head, astonished to find no wound upon it. The impact must have been sorcerous alone. A wave of Omtose Phellack colliding with Tellann. Fraying it with its intensity. She and Kilava, both alive, both Bonecasters, felt the punishment of this dismembering. The T’lan, being undying, remained immune. Thus the ritual of Tellann.

‘So we travel to it, then,’ she murmured, and winced as the litter jerked in the hands of its bearers.

Kilava’s darkly tanned features took on an odd look, almost pained. ‘Well … the truth is, it is coming to us.’

The constant low rumblings took on an awful new meaning in Silverfox’s awareness. She raised her head to try to see, but all she could make out was an army of mist-shrouded trees on a steep rocky slope. Somewhere, though, stones shifted and hissed, punctuated by the crash of a tree falling. Like an enormous beast arising from the black depths, the awareness of what coming clarified in her thoughts and she eased her head down in wonder. Gods. They really went and did it. And we drove them to it. I hope the damned Kerluhm are happy now! And perhaps they are. Perhaps this was what they wanted all along: proof of the Jaghut’s threat. And now it’s a threat that would swallow us all.

* * *

K’azz, Shimmer and Blues led the way up the wide course of the ice-tongue. To either side naked ridges of rock rose like knife-edged barriers. It was snowing now, and above, through brief gaps in the massed storm clouds, the white expanse of the ice-field glittered in a hard cerulean light. They prodded the ice ahead with trimmed branches they had collected, searching for hidden crevasses in the creaking and groaning surface beneath their feet. Indeed, this course of ice, this frost-serpent, struck her as nearly a river in truth as she imagined it bucking and writhing under her boots. She had the unnerving sensation that they were actually moving backwards and making no progress at all.

Yet they struggled on. All without a spoken word. More than ever now was she determined to see this thing to its utter end. They had come too far; too many had fallen. She could never face the Brethren if the day came and she had no answer for them. So she planted one tattered leather boot before the other and leaned upon the long branch, prodding and probing as she went.

Something, however, seemed to be resisting her. Some force pressed down upon her, dimming her awareness. Each footfall felt like an eternity. At times she had trouble lifting her boots as the ice seemed to grip and pull at them. Once or twice she found herself on her knees; these spells she shook off and lurched to her feet once more.

A hand tugged at her mail armour and she turned, blinking. It was the Myrni girl, Siguna. ‘I have been calling,’ she shouted, looking oddly panicked.

Shimmer frowned. Calling? Whatever could she mean?

‘Your friends! They have fallen behind! One won’t rise. Another is missing!’

Shimmer had to force herself to concentrate upon the words and their meaning.
Missing? Fallen?
Understanding finally reached her and she nodded her thanks, pointed to where she’d last seen Blues through the swirling fat flakes of snow. ‘Get Blues.’

The girl gave a quick nod and ran off.

For a moment Shimmer watched her go, wondering at her energy and lightness of foot over the snow. Whatever was weighing upon her didn’t seem to be affecting the girl at all. Then she shook her head and began tramping back to find the rest of the column.

A knot of figures, no more than dark outlines amid the brushing curtains of blowing snow, waited below. She found Gwynn, Bars, Black the Lesser and Turgal with the two Heels, Baran and Erta. They stood around a figure keeling in snow up to her waist. Lean.

Gwynn greeted her, gestured to Lean. ‘She will not get up.’