Chaosbound (47 page)

Aaath Ulber had always wanted to try such a feat.

The water held beneath their feet well enough, but it was hard to get
purchase, and harder still to change course. One tended to slide too easily, and stopping was all but impossible. It was much like running on ice, or upon spongy moss, but after a few moments, Aaath Ulber caught the hang of walking on water.

It required him to plan his turns. He could twist his feet a little, use the soles of his shoes to turn like a rudder. Starting required that he take little stutter steps, digging his toes into the pliant water, so that he splashed all of those who ran behind. To stop, he learned to dig his heels in, so that the resistance of the water slowed him.

As he splashed about, the water erupted beneath his feet in slow motion, the droplets hanging in the air like diadems.

All in all, he found water walking to be both a challenge and a joy.

The river gave a decent cover for the wyrmlings' trail, for the water washed most of their scent away, and the stones in the streambed hid most of their tracks. But on the banks of the river one could smell dung and urine among the pine needles and leaf mold. In some places in the river, one could see huge footprints, twenty inches long and eight wide, there along sandbars and the muddy shore where the wyrmlings had marched.

So Aaath Ulber and his heroes raced over the water, negotiating the ripples of rapids, moving faster when the channel deepened into still pools.

Here and there, large brown trout fed, rising to leave rings of silver on the surface, and Aaath Ulber recalled days in his childhood when he would have had nothing more pressing than to sit and catch one.

The river channel led straight into the wyrmling fortress, three miles from where he'd joined it. The river itself poured out of a cavern in the rocks. The hole was tall and wide.

At the opening, the rock walls were covered with deep green moss. Tiny fairy ferns erupted from the cave wall in abundance, wild clover honeyed the air while a few wild blue mountain orchids on the riverbank gave off a scent like night and longing.

The party stopped for a moment, and Aaath Ulber sank into the water
as they searched for any sign of wyrmlings in the woods at their side, or in the tunnel ahead. Aaath Ulber saw none, heard none. But he could not believe that the path ahead was unguarded.

He stopped, and the morning air was still and quiet, in the way that only the deepest woods can be. A strong wind tugged at his back, racing down into the cavern. It was as if the earth was inhaling endlessly.

“There is an old saying on my world about wyrmling fortresses,” Aaath Ulber told the others. “ ‘If it's easy to get in, it will be impossible to get out.' Beware, my friends: There are traps ahead.”

“Should we light a torch?” one of the champions asked.

Aaath Ulber shook his head. “It will foul our air. The wyrmlings use glow worms to light the ceilings and fire crickets to spark on the floors. The white skin of the wyrmlings themselves is faintly luminescent. We should have enough light to see by, even to fight by.”

Each of the champions had taken five endowments of sight, four of hearing. Aaath Ulber hoped that it would be enough to match the heightened senses of wyrmlings that had been raised in the dark for generations.

They raced into the long tunnel for nearly a quarter of a mile, running now on the water again. The channel was narrow and deep, the water as cold as ice.

Overhead, limestone formations dripped minerals, bands of yellow and white. Bats squeaked and clung to the roof.

Suddenly, a quarter of a mile in, a wonder was revealed: Aaath Ulber slowed and looked up in amazement. The cave widened into an underground lake, and overhead a great roof opened, perhaps fifty feet up. Glow worms by the tens of thousands lit the ceiling, and as Aaath Ulber peered at them with his wyrmling's eyes, they seemed like constellations of stars glimmering in an eternal night.

Almost he dared stop, but the water was deep and he did not want to sink. So he merely slowed, plodding at perhaps eighty miles an hour, lost in glory.

The channel continued on, three more long miles, before suddenly it
stopped. The river came cascading from a freshet above, and went churning off down the channel. But beside it was a wide roadway that had been carved with pick and awl—a tunnel.

The sour stench of wyrmling flesh issued from it, as if it was the lair of an old boar bear. Aaath Ulber could smell rotting flesh and bones.

He halted, raised a hand to warn the champions behind him. He could smell wyrmlings near, too near. He almost felt that he should be able to reach his hand out into the darkness and touch them.

He rounded a corner.

He expected a door here, a portcullis perhaps, or maybe a sliding wall of stone.

But the door before him was made of flesh. Wyrmlings stood guard, a wall of them: tall men with axes and battle hooks. They were broad of shoulder and great of belly.

They glowed faintly from their own inner light, and Aaath Ulber felt surprised that he could see so well by it. There were glow worms on the ceiling and walls, and now that there was a floor, a few fire crickets erupted in sparks at his feet.

The guards were not dressed like normal wrymling warriors. They wore no battle armor carved from bone, no ornate helms or shields. They wore only loincloths to hide their ugly flesh—and their war scars, hundreds of scars from the kiss of forcibles.

Their leader halted, raised his ax to bar the way. “Halt,” he said in common Rofehavanish. “You cannot pass.”

Aaath Ulber had suspected that the wyrmlings would have their Raj Ahten, but he had not expected to find one so soon.

Yet he saw not one champion, but five of the wyrmlings ahead.

“Are you sure of yourself?” Aaath Ulber asked. “Certainly you've heard of the prophecy?”

“You have entered the lair of the lich lord Crull-maldor,” the wyrmling said, “from which no man has ever returned. She knows your plans. She sat in on your councils.

“Did you not see the crow on the roof across the street as you plotted our demise? She saw your maps, heard your plans. While your pitiful little
facilitator secured a few endowments for you, ours granted us thousands.”

Aaath Ulber hesitated. These wyrmlings were dangerous. Among the humans, Aaath Ulber had been the greatest of their champions in personal combat. But his people had numbered only forty thousand. If Aaath Ulber guessed right, there were more than forty thousand wyrmlings in this hole.

“Did you come to parlay with us?” Aaath Ulber demanded. “Or to fight?”

“Both,” the wyrmling admitted. “Crull-maldor bids you turn away from here. The emperor is the one you want. He has your people in thrall, those who are left alive.”

“I understand,” Aaath Ulber said. “She doesn't dare try to kill him herself, so she wants me to do it.”

“Yes,” the wyrmling said. “Here is her offer: Turn away now, and she will let your Dedicates live. She will take no action against you.

“But if you forge ahead, she will punish you. She knows where your Dedicates are hid in Ox Port—every boat, every barn and cellar. Forge ahead, and they will not live out the day, for already our champions are at their doors!

“Nor will your wife Myrrima, your daughter Sage, or your son Draken survive the day. Forge ahead, and Crull-maldor will lay waste to your family and to all that you love.”

Aaath Ulber froze in indecision, and could have stood wavering for a year. He knew well that he could not turn back. There can be no bargaining with wyrmlings.

To accept their offer was suicide.

Yet he worried that to go forward would cost him dear.

They're bluffing, he told himself, more from hope than certainty. And even if they're telling the truth, I dare not turn back.

This is the moment that every man dreads, Aaath Ulber realized. This is the moment when all of the future hangs in the balance. At the end of this fight, either these wyrmlings will be destroyed, or all that I have loved most will be gone.

He feared that both might be true, that he could not really win this fight.

There is a saying in Caer Luciare: Frustration is the father of wrath. A killing rage awoke in Aaath Ulber.

The berserker fury had always been strong in him, but now it came as a flame blossoms when the bellows blow upon it in the heart of a forge.

It was hot, furious. Aaath Ulber feared this wyrmling, for the creature knew too much about him. Certainly, the wyrmling's threats held an element of truth.

Yet Aaath Ulber roared a battle challenge, held his war hammer high, and rushed into the throng of wyrmlings at full speed.

Behind him, five heroes gave a battle cry and charged in at his back.

28

Every man's life, no matter how illustrious or how craven, must come to a close. Much is made of the Earth's power to protect, but the time will come when even the Earth seeks to reclaim what once it owned
.

—Gaborn Val Orden

Dawn came silver and splendid to Ox Port, yet Myrrima's heart felt heavy with foreboding.

The sun rose; the cocks crowed and strutted about on the streets and the roofs of the houses. The cows lowed and begged to be milked; the birds twitted in the bushes and sang their morning calls, the males warning one another from their trees.

But this was not to be a normal day. A war was about to erupt, furious and deadly. Myrrima could feel it in the pit of her stomach, a cold dread that left her guts and muscles in a tangled knot.

She took her borrowed bow and an arrow, and stood at the margin of the road, waiting for . . . something.

Each time a crow cawed in the trees, or a horse whinnied, it set her on edge. The mood was infectious.

The celebrations died abruptly after Aaath Ulber and his champions left, and everywhere throughout town, men and women by some instinct began taking up defensive positions, just in case. Thus archers hid in the lofts of barns, while men loitered in their doorways with clubs and swords handy, everyone casting furtive glances up the roads.

The facilitators were still singing in the town square, adding attributes
to the heroes by giving endowments to their Dedicates, thus vectoring more attributes to the champions.

There was a sense of urgency to their songs. War was about to break.

Myrrima studied the scene and wished that there was some spell that she could cast. But she was a water wizard, and there was little that she could do but summon a fog to blanket the town.

Almost without thought she did it, pulling clouds of mist in from the sea. At first the mists sparkled in the sunlight, but so great was her fear that the fog soon became great indeed, blocking out the rising sun.

Shortly after dawn, when Aaath Ulber had been gone for an hour, Myrrima whispered into the ears of Warlord Hrath. He peered at her skeptically for a moment, then nodded.

Hrath turned to the crowd, clapped his hands, and called for attention. “People,” he shouted, “people of Ox Port, lend me your ears! We have an announcement—” He turned to Myrrima.