Everran's Bane (5 page)

* * * * *

We struck up over the Slief, far north of Saeverran town, riding in a fringe of scouts and presently, into a sunset that was a silent hymn to Fire. On our right, the slopes from the distant Helkents were a tide-race of fiery gloom and bloodily glowing crests, on our left the Slief climbed in sheets of scarlet and deepest crimson to a cloudless, wine-flushed sky. But in the north the light rose vertically up an enormous cloud bank whose buttresses of molten copper and alexandrite thrust out between rose-black canyons, burning without combustion in the vacant air. A little warm wet wind arose: a northerly. I sniffed the stink of foul conflagrations, but also the tickle of rain on dried-out earth.

Asc grunted. Thrim said, “Just so it wets that sod as well.”

* * * * *

Around the fires they regained some spirit, but now there was real malice in the boasts and savagery in the jests, and the dragon was the only butt. Presently rose a cry of, “Harper! Where's harper? C'mon, harper, give us a song.” Rubbing his calves, Errith added, “Take m'mind off these galls.”

My own choice was for something gentle, to erase those still-too-present memories. But a harper must know listeners as well as lore, and escape was clearly the last thing in their heads. Moreover, Beryx would not have thanked me for sapping their courage if it were.

In the end I dredged up a thing I dislike and seldom sing, an ancient vendetta chant of Meldene: a tribesman hunting human blood. It brought a hot, eager roar. As Beryx rose, sounding the unofficial turn-in, Asc rumbled, “Come'n check cloppers, harper. You've done me a power of good.”

We lurched off amid the manure piles and hidden stakes and horses luckily too tired to play the fool. A stumble and a clipped, “Uh!” announced Inyx on the same errand, and by common consent we paused at the line end, staring into the starless north.

Asc sniffed. Inyx said, “Ah.”

Asc said, “Reckon it's there?” And Inyx growled in his throat.

“Scouting. Flew a circle round Kelflase and back. It's there.”

Asc's deep voice was musing when he spoke again. “Ever see the Perfumed Vale, harper?”

“I have heard the songs,” I said.

“Ah.” More silence. Then, “I don't have the words. But I reckon songs'd miss the gold, for that.”

He paused. We moved to turn away. And then all three of us froze in our tracks.

A sound was drifting out of the north: tenuous, bodiless, the very emanation of night. It began on a high note, a thin, tremulous wail, wavered, rose to an eldritch howl, hung at its climax till my teeth hurt. Dropped, ending as if slashed. Inyx exclaimed, quick and incoherent, under his breath. I felt the hair rise on my scalp.

It came again, a chorus this time: a quavering, soprano cadenza, a choir's mourning voice. But from no human throat.

The fires' comfortable hubbub was dead. The silence was complete. The very horses must have been holding their breaths.

Once more that shrill, eerie keening wavered up into the dark: trembled, faded, died to a dissonant finale, and was lost. Then the night pressed down on us until I felt myself suffocating. I let out my breath.

Asc backed straight into me like a panicky horse. I never thought such a man could so disintegrate. “Not me,” he was moaning, “I didn't, I never meant, I'm not ready to—” And, as if ungagged, Inyx snarled, “Shut up!”

“Si'sta,” he went on fiercely; he must have been shaken too. I had never before heard him lapse into dialect. “Si'sta, this is Stiriand. And th'art a Gebrian, tha great stupid lump!”

Asc was still quaking. I managed to say, “What was it... anyway?”

“Ulfann,” answered a quiet, cool voice in the dark. “A big pack, by the sound.” And the night was only darkness, the ghosts' sobbing the call of feral dogs. “Don't worry, Asc.” For a moment the coolness held contained, deadly rage. “If they're hunting anything, it'll be the dragon's scraps.”

Inyx came in at once, in something very like relief. “Horse here you should see. Staked in the coronet.”

The king moved away. I heard that steely reassurance applied at another fire. Asc did not move. When I thought he could take it, I murmured, “What did you think it was?”

He did not answer for a long time. When he spoke, the abruptness said his courage had not yet healed. He said, “Lossian's hounds.”

“Oh.” There are scores of songs, reserved for the evening's end, about the Stiriann Hunter and his bloodless pack that course men's souls. They say that a Stiriann who hears them calling is doomed to join their quarry before the next new moon.

“But,” I tried to steady him, “the general was right. You're from Gebria. They hunt Stirianns.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Why should they call for you before—anyone else?”

Asc turned away, bringing his face to the distant firelight. It was calm now, composure regained. A man looking open-eyed upon his fate.

“Not me,” he said very quietly. “All of us.”

* * * * *

We saddled up in a drizzle coming down in slow gray showers from the north, dulling the Slief, shining thinly on horse-rumps and helmets, oiling sarissa blades, blanching everything. Only Beryx's green eyes seemed to brighten in that pallid light. When I rode up to the banner, they shone beneath his sodden plume, and he gave me a hunter's smile. “Just,” he said, shaking off a shower of raindrops, “what we want.”

The rain shortened horizons. The sky was low too, hiding any trace of smoke or change in light. Almost without warning, the Slief ended and we were on the brink of a precipice, with the Perfumed Vale at our feet.

Deve Astar is a gorge, little longer than a mile, where the Kelf drops from the uplands into Gebria's arid plains and flows to join the manifold channels of Kemreswash, thence to vanish in the insatiable Hethrian sands. The water comes down in a cascade famed for its roof of rainbows and the dazzling white of its froth against the luxuriant greens below, a vision to match the beauty of Deve Astar's air, an invisible paradise.

The forest is artificial, lovingly planted and tended, with every scented tree in Everran among its stock. The topmost terraces bear flowering helliens, with white, orange, scarlet, and magenta blossoms whose honey inebriates birds. Next come the keerphars, orchid-shaped pink and purple blossoms whose dry, delicate perfume enhances the helliens' sweet. Below are twisted rust-red yeltaths, shrubby cennaphars, and norgals whose long green leaves droop about papery white trunks, all mingling honey scents with the torch-pines' aromatic white flowers. At the waterside, the sellothahr's snow-white, gold-hearted blossoms spread their spring morning smell, and along the gorge flanks stand acre upon acre of rivannons whose fragile brown and yellow sprays breathe an incense to ravish Air himself.

Tucked in coigns of the terraces lie foresters' huts and perfumeries, innumerable beehives, and cabins for travelers who come from as far as Estar, less to see than to breathe. The most famous song of the great harper Norhis calls Deve Astar a giant agate: outside are the rust-and-honey bands of the cliffs, then the forest's variegated greens, deepening to the seam of marble-white froth at the gorge's heart.

A shower was passing as we reached the crest. The distant rumor of the cascade, a breath of diluted perfume, floated up. Slowly the farther scarp emerged, glistening sleekly, bay and russet from the wet. Then the rain's wings lifted from the Vale beneath.

Inyx stiffened as if struck. Errith let out a winded grunt. Thrim's was more like a moan. I heard it travel down the column behind us as one by one they reached the prospect of the brink.

Almost from our feet a lane of felled trunks and broken limbs and dying leaves ran away downhill, scored clean across the vale as if some brutal engineer had been clearing a road. The river was choked: as the cascade poured down, heedless, insentient, the water had backed up to inundate the vale below. We could see its cold, turbid glint up where no water should be, but downstream from the dam was worse.

Fire had been kindled there. It had been lashed across the forest like a whip, and the trees had burnt behind it, for most of our scented trees are rich in oil. Huge, charred weals ran hither and thither, with pitiful half-stripped skeletons upright in their desolation, some still smoking, some with a few rags of brown leaf or a couple of heart-breaking withered flowers. The helliens had suffered worst: along the upper terraces the fire had run from treetop to treetop, leaving unbroken courses of destruction: leafless, black. But burning helliens had fallen down upon the keerphars, and the keerphars had collapsed onto the norgals, whose papery bark had fired like candles, spreading the blaze to the yeltaths and the ardent cennaphars, thence to the rivannons, which had disintegrated upon the sappy sellothahr, breaking what would not burn. The subtle spectrum of greens, the soft flower tapestry, was all gone.

A wind moved, and a sickening stink enveloped us: perfumes corroded by the reek of green burning wood and oil-bearing leaves, and the fetor of that burning untimely quenched.

I found my vision had blurred. My throat was thick with tears. I too had cherished the Perfumed Vale, if only in others' songs. One day, I had promised myself, I would come there and make a song of my own. When I was at the height of my powers.

When my hearing returned, men were swearing and mourning all round me. Not loudly, but with the anguish of a hurt too deep for noise. Then, as the first brunt of the blow passed, it became fuel for rage. Everywhere they gathered their reins, clenched their sarissa butts, and looked toward the king.

So far as I remember, Beryx had not made a sound. I do not think he so much as clenched a fist. He was sitting quite motionless. Except that his head was turning, a slight, deadly movement, as his eyes quartered the vale. This, I remember thinking, is a king. No raving, no lamentation: all feeling kept to power the revenge.

Then he turned his head.

His eyes were quite black. The pupils must have dilated until the irises completely vanished, and as he looked at me I covered my own eyes, for that blackness was more blinding than the sun.

When my sight cleared, he was speaking to Inyx, in a soft, impersonal, terrifying voice I had never heard before.

“There is nothing to eat. Nowhere to lair. It will not have stayed. How far to Astarien?” Inyx, looking almost scared, jerked his chin upstream and muttered, “Ten miles.” Pulling his horse round, Beryx said with the same glacial ferocity, “Come on, then, you clodhoppers. Ride.”

The way to Astarien is mostly footpaths, which was fortunate for the horses, for otherwise Beryx would have foundered them. As it was, we slid and swore and skidded along in peril of our necks, with the king up and down the column like quicksilver: saying little, but making that little cut deep as a knife.

Around noon we toiled up a last ridge, and cross-wise beneath us opened a wide valley whose mouth was shut by the thick green band of timber along the Kelf. Stands of silver-gray tarsal and black-barked elonds scattered the valley undulations, folding up to a silver bezel set above a gray ring-wall. Astarien's lookout tower.

Beryx let out his breath. Inyx let out a grunt.

The valley was thick with trails of ants. From all ways they converged upon Astarien, gray, brown, and colored ants, with the blobs of cattle, horses, oxcarts, and every other sort of conveyance from palanquins to wheelbarrows in their midst. Inyx said tersely, “Evacuation. Town'll be out of its head.” Beryx retorted, “There's a governor,” and started his horse.

But half a mile from the town he too was riding at a walk, and on the rise to the gates he had to admit defeat. “Inyx!” he bellowed above the bawling, yelling, squawking, and yammering as a mob of cattle engulfed us, inextricably tangled with a flock of irate geese. “Halt—column!” He raised his voice a notch. “First pentarchy... follow me!”

Astarien was worse. The gates were jammed with stray stock and fugitives' paraphernalia, while citizens, refugees, and a frantic garrison churned wildly through the streets, and when Asc and Errith literally fought our way into the governor's residence, we found a plump bald provincial on the brink of lunacy.

“No-no-no!” he shrieked as Beryx knocked the door open upon a snowstorm of papers and hysterical suppliants. “No more! Throw them out!” And wheeling to repel the door guard, I was struck dumb to find the king consumed with mirth.

“Really, Gerrar!” his clear voice cut the racket, crisp, winged with authority, intensely amused. “Including me?”

Gerrar gaped. Then he gasped, gulped, and nearly burst into tears. Beryx held up an embrace aimed somewhere about his knees.

“I never thought,” he remarked as Gerrar subsided, “when I ordered an evacuation, that it would prove quite so... turbulent.”

Gerrar clawed the air for words. “Lord, lord, if you only knew—seven days it's gone on and nowhere to put them and we can't raise Kelflase and Sarras said the dragon was headed here and I've nothing to fight it with and—I can't stop them, I can't house them, I can't even feed them and now the dragon's in my Resh and—and—and I don't know what to
do!”

“First, sit down.” Beryx backed him to a chair. “Then forget the refugees. Then think about the dragon. Is it this side the Kelf?”