First Rider's Call (35 page)

Eventually he found his horse grazing on leaves alongside the trail. He approached it carefully, speaking softly so as not to spook it again, and collected the reins. Once mounted, he slapped the horse with his riding crop, sending it into a breakneck charge.

The sky was darkening when finally his exhausted horse stumbled into the clearing of the encampment. Bonfires burned everywhere, and many torches and lanterns were clustered at the breach. Pendric kicked his horse onward, until bloody foam dripped from its mouth, and its sides heaved. He’d kill it if he had to, to get him to the wall. The horse took up a tired trot. When he reached the breach, he swung out of the saddle and simply let go the reins of his horse, not caring if it fell over and died.

A couple of soldiers stood atop the breach, peering into the forest. Others crowded around his father, who spoke rapidly with officers. Pendric shoved aside several soldiers to reach him.

“Corporal, I want you to carry the news to Lord D’Yer with all haste,” Landrew was saying to a soldier in D’Yerian blue and gold.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Sergeant, as the only witness to this event, you are to ride straight to the king so he may know what has befallen here.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The sergeant was Uxton, if Pendric remembered rightly. Both the corporal and sergeant left the group at a run to attend to Landrew’s orders.

“What’s happened?” Pendric demanded.

His father finally took notice of him, his regard withering. “Your cousin has been taken by Blackveil.”

An involuntary, almost hysterical giggle erupted from Pendric’s throat. “Evil takes evil.”

His father’s slap rocked him like a blast of white lightning, but it helped clear his head, made him feel better. He almost wished his father would do it again.

“Remember who you speak of,” Landrew growled. “Your own flesh and blood.” Around them, soldiers shifted uneasily. “He at least attempted to do something about the wall, and he was sacrificed for trying.” With that, he totally dismissed his son.

“My lord,” shouted one of the soldiers on the breach, “there’s something going on down there, I don’t—”

Human cries of terror rolled over the wall in waves, and all were shocked into silence.

“Someone’s coming!” the soldier reported. He and his companion moved about the breach to help whoever it was over the wall.

Pendric watched in fascination. The man who descended the ladder was not his cousin, but another soldier.

“What happened, Mandry?” one of the officers demanded. “Where are the others?”

Tears streaked down the man’s cheeks. “It opened up.”

The officer knelt beside Mandry, who sat on the ground, his back to the wall. “What are you saying? What opened up? Where are the others?”

“The ground—it opened up and took them. It almost got me, but I ran. I could hear their screams . . . from beneath the ground. I looked back—there were only bumps on the ground where they’d been, like newly buried dead. Then Carris, I saw his face in the moss. ‘Help me,’ he says. ‘It’s—it’s swallowing me.’ And then he was pulled under. I tried digging after him, but the ground, it started moving beneath my feet again, so I ran.”

Murmuring and cries of dismay broke out among the soldiers.

“Silence!” Landrew shouted. Pendric watched as his father’s face became as set as granite with determination. He then called to his servant. “Bring me my sword. I’m going in there myself.”

The officers protested strenuously, but could not dissuade him. Even as Landrew climbed the ladder, giggles bubbled in Pendric’s throat.

If neither his father or Alton returned, there was a very real possibility he might be next in line to be the lord-governor of D’Yer Province, and for some reason it struck him as very funny.

BLACKVEIL

The sentience undulated in the moss beneath the man’s body, taking in its weight and contours. It absorbed blood that trickled from his head wound. The sentience penetrated the man’s mind, but found only dark nothingness. Bewildered, it fled, back into the world of moss.

The man was not dead, that much the sentience gathered, but the guardians of the wall were keening in anguish. Not only were they alarmed by the sentience’s wakefulness, but they were distraught by the man’s presence in the forest. So distraught were they, their efforts to coax the sentience back to sleep proved weak and ineffective.

The sentience was intrigued. What could upset the guardians so about this one man? Why was he important to them? With him in his darkness, it was difficult for the sentience to learn much about him.

Red stinger ants filed out of the nearby mound of soil and forest debris that was their nest. Attracted by the man’s scent, they formed a line leading in his direction, marching relentlessly forward over leaf and under twig. Bite by bite, they would return to their nest bearing tiny bits of human flesh. If the man’s consciousness returned at some point during the process, the poison the ants injected with each bite would leave him paralyzed, and a helpless witness to the slow devouring of his own body.

The ants were not native to this land, but had adapted well. They had unwittingly stowed away amid some cargo aboard a sailing ship from Arcosia.

Arcosia . . .
The sentience savored the word like a fine wine. Arcosia was a land of many lands. Little fragments of memory had begun to emerge of late, memories of what could only be the sentience’s own origins. Memories of sailing from a far land to this place.

I was once a man.
Of this the sentience was certain. Not only that, it—
he
—had been a leader among men.

Suddenly, it wanted to understand being a man again, somehow connect with the one who lay here. Maybe he had answers.

The sentience turned its attention back to the thousands of ants tromping across the leaflets of moss it currently resided in. Eagerly it diverted the ants, sending them in the direction of some carrion rotting some way into the woods. It had this power, the sentience did, to command the forest, to
be
the forest. But it wanted to understand being a man.

It removed an ant out of line. The sentience became a part of the ant, directing it to climb the toe of the man’s boot, to crawl along his leg and hip, stolidly following the folds of clothing, and march across his stomach and chest.

The sentience skittered, causing the ant to back away from something on the man’s chest.
Something
that was
nothing.
The contradiction made no sense, but the sentience detected some minor power at work here, that the nothingness protected the something by hiding it.

A power. The art.

Perplexed, the ant crawled in circles around it, but learned no more. The sentience would leave it now as a curiosity to be mulled over later. It continued its exploration, stepping onto the flesh of the man’s neck. It climbed the chin and wandered the man’s face, following contours of lips and cheeks, dipping into depressions of eyes.

On the cheek, the sentience allowed the ant to do what it instinctually was born to do: bite. Venom flowed beneath the man’s skin. The sentience prevented the ant from carrying away the tiny piece of flesh to its nest, but made it consume it.

The ant did not possess a wide ranging palate, but it was more the essence of the man the sentience sought anyway, the consistency of flesh, the meaning of blood.

A disturbance near the wall distracted the sentience. It sent a part of its awareness hurtling through duff and moss to the area. The guardians had stopped screaming, but they were taut.

Boots tread across the ground.

The sentience surmised they sought the one who lay unconscious deeper within the forest. It didn’t want them to find him, for it was curious about his possession of the art, and why the guardians were so worried about him.

It simply opened the ground beneath their boots, heaving back moss like a great maw. It whipped roots around their legs and torsos, and pulled them down. It felt the reverberations of their screams, but screams were harmless. The steel that armored their torsos could not protect them, for tree roots were stronger than steel.

It rolled a blanket of moss over the men, using roots to pull them ever deeper, squeezing them apart. Corpse beetles, and other earthly denizens of the forest, would take care of the rest.

All of this sudden contact with men evoked memories of men the sentience had once known. There was the frail, elderly man who sat high upon a golden throne. A fatherly figure, one who loved him well.
Arcos.

There were others—Varadgrim, yes, faithful Varadgrim, and Lichant of the east, Mirdhwell of the west, and Terrandon of the south. All faithful, all friends. Unlike the red stinger ants, they were natives of this land. The sentience called out for them, and could feel Varadgrim somewhere out there, but he was far off. Of Lichant and Terrandon, there was no response at all, but Mirdhwell did stir . . .

Then there was the man who meant the most to the sentience, to the man he had been. Hadriax.

A surge of longing made the rain pour in the forest, pattering the man’s face. On impulse, the sentience called out for Hadriax, and to its surprise, it felt something, a brief hum of life. The sentience pursued it, and once found, held onto it.

This was not Hadriax after all, but something of him was present. As the sentience probed, it found the imprint of a familiar aura of power, but the feeling was decidedly feminine. And far away, so far away.

Desperately the sentience called out to Varadgrim and Mirdhwell, revealing to them the aura of the female before it lost contact.

MIRROR REFLECTION

Karigan plucked bits of straw from her work tunic as she strode away from the stable in the dimming light of evening. She’d been helping Hep with feeding, as much as her bad arm allowed. He forked hay down from the loft, and she threw the appropriate amount into each stall. Scooping out grain wasn’t too difficult either, and helping made her feel more useful.

In light of all her recent and strange experiences, it didn’t hurt that the work was nothing but ordinary. It involved no “traveling,” no hauntings, no magic. Being surrounded by all those horses was a tonic for her soul. They asked for nothing more than food, water, shelter, and a scratch behind the ear, and those were easy enough to provide. For those simple things, the horses returned love and affection in earnest, and unconditionally.

Karigan’s sense of peace, however, did not last. As she approached Rider barracks, a tide of wooziness rushed over her, forcing her to an abrupt, unbalanced halt. The castle grounds darkened in her vision, and she forgot where she was going and why. She thought she heard a calling. Not the Rider call, but a lonely mournful calling tinged with desperation. Something touched her mind, like cold fingers leafing through her thoughts and memories.

Sorrow and loneliness turned to surprise and hope, and led to more probing.

She staggered when it finally released her. A residue of that touch clung to her like moist, black roots. A residue of dark intelligence.

Karigan tried to shudder it off, but could not. Her left arm prickled insistently.

She pushed on toward Rider barracks along the well worn path, caught in a fog. When she entered, she found Yates and Justin in the common room playing Intrigue. As she gazed at their pieces arrayed on the board, she suddenly saw patterns and strategies as she never had before. On impulse she pulled up a chair and started setting up the third set of pieces—the red—while Yates and Justin gaped at her in surprise.

“I thought—” Yates began. He and Justin passed a look between them, shrugged, and started repositioning their own pieces to start anew.

The game ran fairly swiftly in terms of Intrigue. Some matches were known to last for months and even years. Karigan dominated the entire game, first attacking Yates, the stronger player, and lulling Justin into thinking she had formed an alliance with him. With the two-pronged attack against Yates, he was quickly weakened, and though Karigan sacrificed some of her own pieces, she set up the attacks so Justin sacrificed more than she.