Blackveil (62 page)

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Authors: Kristen Britain

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #fantasy, #Epic

BOOK: Blackveil
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Thinking about her personal discomforts helped divert her from worrying about the greater threat of the forest, but not entirely. Sometimes she thought she caught the jostle of a branch that had nothing to do with wind, for there wasn’t even a breeze. She heard the occasional
scurry-scurry
in the underbrush. In any other forest she’d have dismissed it as squirrels. Here? She hated to guess.
She felt the watchfulness of the forest, as if it had stopped everything to observe them. It was not the regard of a single unifying presence like Mornhavon, but on some level the forest was
aware.
It did not attack them, but reared up over them like a giant wave, hovering, waiting, inevitable. She wondered if the Eletians gave it pause, if their presence set it back. If it decided otherwise, what would happen if it stopped watching and came crashing down on them as all waves must?
They walked on, the mist revealing little about the time of day, but making tendrils of hair cling to Karigan’s face and leaving her clammy and chilled. She focused on the rise and fall of Yates’ feet ahead. Ard’s raspy breaths followed behind.
Karigan had no sense of how much time had passed when they halted. All she knew was that her shoulders ached and one of her heels was being rubbed raw by the boots. The damp air was acrid on her tongue.
They clustered around Graelalea. “We begin on what is called in the common tongue Avenue of Light.”
Karigan glanced around but at first espied nothing that resembled a road, for the area around them was thick with undergrowth. However, when she looked harder, she discerned where the growth was a little less thick, the lines too regular to be natural. Her foot wobbled on a loose stone which was, on closer scrutiny, a sea-rounded cobble, one among many, the paving stones of a road.
“Not much light here no matter what it’s called,” Ard muttered.
No one disagreed.
“If we were to continue on this course along the wall,” Graelalea said, “we would come to the Tower of the Heavens. But we shall take the road.”
It was a pity, Karigan thought, they couldn’t have all just entered the forest through the tower, but the soldiers and Ard, being neither Green Riders nor Eletians, would not have been able to pass through the walls.
They paused where they stood for several minutes while Yates made notations in a journal and Grant and Porter produced devices to take measurements of the road and its juxtaposition to the wall. When they finished, the company turned away from the wall and followed Graelalea down the road deeper into the forest. Karigan felt her last chance to run to safety slipping away.
It did not take long before Karigan decided to make use of her bonewood cane. She had no wish to twist an ankle on a loose cobblestone rolling underfoot. That they were slippery with slimy moss did not help. The stones clicked and clacked as the company made its way, and there were outbursts of swearing when someone tripped or slid. Rotting logs that had fallen across the road complicated matters, and they had to jump over gullies where the roadbed had been washed away. None of the Eletians made a sound.
In fact, Telagioth’s sudden, silent presence beside Karigan took her aback. He said nothing but gazed hard at the bonewood. She stared back at him, at his cerulean eyes and effortless strides, but he did not speak. She could not contain herself.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Your walking stick,” he replied. “It has an unusual quality about it.”
“Would you care to take a closer look?” Karigan thrust it toward him in what she thought was an unthreatening manner but he skittered away.
“No, no,” he said, raising his hands. “I am sure it will serve you well.”
Karigan thought it a curious reaction. Maybe there was something to the Weapons’ assertion about the bonewood after all, but she was hoping she would not have to be fending off Eletians in addition to whatever endangered her in the forest.
Despite Telagioth’s caution, he still walked with her, so she asked, “What do the Eletians call the road? If Avenue of Light is its name in the common tongue, what is its Eletian name?”
“
Celes As’riel.
Avenue of Light is not a perfect translation. A better translation might be Star-lighted Path. Or just the Lighted Path.”
“Celes As’riel,” Karigan echoed. She liked how it rolled off her tongue, but it had sounded more musical coming from Telagioth.
“This road was made broader than any other in Argenthyne to accommodate travelers from the north, and perhaps that is why it is called ‘avenue’ in the common.”
“I like the Eletian name better.”
Telagioth smiled. He then spoke entirely in fluid Eletian, ending in a flourish with,
“Vien a lumeni Celes As’riel!”
At his words light ignited along the edge of the road from behind tangled vegetation. Swords rang from sheaths and Grant and Porter charged toward it with shouts.
Roused by the commotion, Karigan extended her cane to staff length and took a defensive stance. Yates and Ard bared their swords. The Eletians simply looked on in amusement, especially when Grant’s sword rang against what sounded like stone.
“Damn! I notched my blade!” He came back hacking away at vegetation.
The rest of them crowded to the side of the road and peered through brush only to come face-to-face with a statue. Carved of stone, one of her arms had broken off and weathering had scrubbed away much of her features, but her graceful lines remained beneath snaking vines and clinging black moss. She held in her remaining hand a large, cracked orb fogged by age and dirt through which light glowed.
“What is that thing?” Grant demanded.
“It is what you would call in your city a lamppost,” Graelalea replied. “We call it
lumeni.
”
“But ... but how did it light up?”
“Telagioth used the words of lighting. Such a command may have lit the lumeni for quite a distance, alerting, I fear, any and all to our presence.”
Telagioth bowed his head. “Forgive me. I did not know after all this time the lumeni would light.”
“No need to ask forgiveness,” Graelalea replied. “The action was, perhaps, imprudent, but it is a joy to know Eletians have not been forgotten in this land. And why shouldn’t Eletians walk proudly in their own realm instead of in secrecy?”
“Because the current residents are hungry,” Lynx said, hand to his forehead. “And now they know exactly where we are.”
HUMMINGBIRDS
“I
mprudent?” Grant demanded of the Eletians. “You’ve let everything in the forest know we’re here and it’s just
imprudent?
”
“Your shouting,” Graelalea replied, “will only serve to attract further attention.”
“Oh, so you lower yourself to speak to me now?”
Karigan couldn’t help but smile seeing someone else bridling at Graelalea’s haughty ways. She turned away from the discussion, gazing down the road into the forest. She spotted the glow of another of the lumeni many yards away, on the opposite side of the road, its light ghostly in the mist.
Yates joined her. “Barely into this thing and they’re already trying to start a war.”
Behind them, the discussion had grown sharper, louder, with Lhean joining in with exhortations in Eletian, his derisive tone unmistakable.
“I hope not,” Karigan replied. “We need each other to get through this.”
“Look,” Yates said, pointing.
Karigan heard it before she saw it, a buzzing sound like a bee. It was not a bee, however, but a hummingbird flitting in front of them, its rapid wing movements creating the drone. In the light of the lumeni, its green feathers shimmered with iridescence, a ruby patch at its throat. It looked just like the hummingbirds back home.
“I wonder if it’s lost,” she said. If creatures from Blackveil strayed into their world through the breach, then surely the reverse occurred as well.
“Look, another,” Yates said.
A second darted at the first and chased it away. Karigan wondered what it was being territorial about since there were no flowers in sight. A nest or a mate, maybe?
As the hummingbirds zipped around the group, a third appeared and hovered in front of Yates’ face.
“They’re like little jewels,” he said, mesmerized.
A blur of pearlescent motion, an Eletian moving faster than the eye could follow, swept his sword before them neatly slicing the bird in two in the air. The halves dropped to the ground. Karigan and Yates gazed in shock at what remained of the hummingbird, its blood trickling between the cobblestones.
“Five hells!” Yates exclaimed. “What did you do that for? It was a hummingbird!”
“You cannot trust anything here,” the Eletian said. It was Spiney, the lumeni sparking a silvery glint in his eyes.
“But—” Yates began.
A droning grew in the forest around them, grew in a crescendo into a deafening roar that throbbed through Karigan’s body. The limbs of trees vibrated with it, causing the collected rainwater to shower down on them.
“What is it?” Grant demanded.
“Prepare yourselves!” Graelalea cried.
A shimmering cloud of hummingbirds emerged from the woods and hovered around the company, their wings working furiously, the noise of it overwhelming. They skimmed overhead and darted between them. There were hundreds—no, thousands of them.
Ard screamed. Karigan whirled to see that a hummingbird had impaled his shoulder with its long beak, wings fluttering to drive deeper. Its throat pulsed as it drank, the ruby patch on its throat deepening to a dark crimson.
Graelalea swiftly yanked the bird out of Ard’s shoulder and smashed it onto the road where it remained limp and unmoving, blood streaming from its beak.
“It is not nectar they seek,” she said.
The hummingbirds attacked. Beaks pinged on Eletian armor and pinned Sacoridian flesh, yielding cries of pain. Swords flashed through the air and birds were cut down simply because there were so many of them. Otherwise they were too quick, their movements too erratic, to be fought off. Only the Eletians seemed able to cleave them out of the air with intention.
Karigan batted them away with her staff, but her efforts lagged in comparison to the sheer speed in which the birds maneuvered around her. She kept them off her, at least, and she was grateful her pack protected her back though it slowed her own movements.
Yates screamed. A hummingbird stabbed his thigh. She followed Graelalea’s example and grabbed it out, its body nothing in her hand. It flicked a long thread of forked tongue at her and she smashed it onto the paving stones of the road.
She ducked just in time as another hummingbird soared for her eye. One jammed its beak into the leather of her boot. She kicked it off. Another scored the back of her hand, leaving a trail of blood.
Private Porter called out as he wobbled precariously on a loose cobble, his arms flailing. The cloud of hummingbirds paused as one, hovering, wings beating, waiting. Porter crashed to the ground, and before he could even attempt to rise, the hummingbird cloud swarmed him, a moving mass of green and silver and crimson blanketing him. He flailed and thrashed but could not dislodge the birds.
“Quickly!” Graelalea cried.
Several of the company fell to their knees beside Porter grabbing handfuls of feathers and beaks from his convulsing body, while Karigan and the others tried to bat away airborne birds around them. Porter’s screams rang through the forest and curdled Karigan’s blood to her toes.
Soon the screams weakened, and then stopped entirely. The swarm of birds lifted away, slow and ungainly with engorged bellies, and flew back into the woods. Karigan turned away from Porter’s gruesome remains.
“The life is gone from him,” Graelalea announced. “He should be put to rest in whatever manner your customs dictate.”
“What of those birds?” Ard demanded. He bled from numerous wounds. “What if they come back?”
“They shall not return. Not for the time being, for they are sated.”
Porter’s cloak was laid over his body, and a cairn of loose cobblestones pulled from the roadbed was raised over him. Meanwhile, the Eletians, who escaped the ordeal largely unscathed, tended the wounds of the Sacoridians with their evaleoren salve. Karigan’s mind eased as the Eletian woman Hana spread the fragrant salve into the wound on her hand. Compared to her companions, Karigan had fared well.

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