From Across the Clouded Range (23 page)

In shock, he grabbed his bench and
clung to it for his life. He looked up and found that Tethina had
assumed a similar posture. Her face had gone white. All of her
concentration was focused on maintaining her seat against the
suddenly wild ride. The knife had been jarred from her hand and was
bouncing across the floor like a wild animal. Her head shot up,
face contorted in fear, and she screamed, “What was
that?”

“
Arrows,” Dasen said with
stunned calm. “We’re under attack.” It was only the statement
coming from his mouth that brought the reality of the situation
home. They were under attack. Someone had fired arrows at them, and
they were now trying to escape.

The coach hit a rut and leapt into the
air, leaving its occupants momentarily weightless then depositing
them back hard onto their benches. The blow was enough to break
Dasen’s grip on his seat. He slid off and crumpled to the floor.
His eye caught the glimmer of the feral knife. It leapt toward him
and planted itself in the side of the bench inches from his head.
He gasped and struggled against the shifting coach to find his
equilibrium.

When he managed to get a grip on the
bench and pull himself back up, he saw that Tethina was keeping a
careful watch out the back window. She held the frame with white
knuckles to maintain her seat. “Four of your worthless guards just
ran off,” she screamed, “but I don’t see anyone following
us!”

“
The guards are going to
hold off pursuit,” Dasen yelled back. Another bump nearly sent him
back to the floor. “That’s their job.”

A glance out the shaking window to his
left showed trees streaking by in a green blur, nearly touching the
sides of the compartment. Dasen marveled at how Esso was able to
keep them on the road, but he did not want to tempt fate any longer
than necessary. Struggling to maintain his seat, he pulled aside
the small window to open the infamous line of communication. “What
in the name of the Order is happening, Esso?”

A rut made the coach shift ominously
to its side as Dasen spoke. He felt two of the wheels lift off of
the ground as he slipped down the bench. It was only his grip on
that window that kept him from landing back on the oak floor when
the wheels returned to the ground with a bone-rattling
thud.

Esso was obviously having an equally
difficult time holding his seat because it was several seconds – it
seemed like hours – before he answered. “An ambush, sir!” His voice
was breathless from the distraction of keeping them on the road.
“Out of nowhere, arrows started ‘ittin’ us. Jack, Willem, Roger,
and James gone back to hold ‘em. Darryl and Raif rode ahead to
clear the way. I’ll keep us runnin’ till we’re sure the dangers
past. Ya’ll should hang on. It’s gonna be bumpy.”

As if responding to his words, the
coach leapt from the road then slammed back down with a sickening
crunch. Dasen clung to the window and heard Tethina scream behind
him. Esso had tied himself to his bench but was still whiplashed.
His head cracked on the wood behind him then flew forward into his
own knee. His hands went limp, and Dasen watched the reins slip
from his fingers. He drew the breath to yell at the driver, but the
words died on his lips, drawn away by something
inexplicable.

In front of them, a black sphere
appeared out of nowhere. At first, Dasen thought the blur was an
illusion caused by the rattling of the coach. He blinked his eyes
hard to clear them, but the vision only became stranger as the
figure of a man stepped from the middle of the disk. The man’s
appearance was inconceivable in every way, but Dasen somehow did
not feel panicked by it. Rather, he felt an incredible calm rush
over him. It was as if the entire world stopped and came into focus
around the man until time itself crept by like a glacier. He used
that calm to study the man, amazed by his ability to see the
strange figure despite the shaking of the coach that turned all
else into a blur. The man looked old with a bent back and a wild
grey beard. He wore a black robe with a heavy cowl that cast deep
shadows over most of his face, but his smoldering eyes and thin
lips were clear through the shadows. Those lips held a broad smile
as he watched the coach close on him, a lunatic welcoming death
with delusional glee.

Then Dasen realized that the man was
speaking. He knew that he should not be able to hear the words over
the roar of hooves, but they were as clear as an intimate
conversation in a quiet room. Yet the words were not like any that
Dasen had ever heard. Each of them formed in his mind as a strange
rune-like shape that did not appear to follow any pattern:
twisting, turning, shapeless yet formed, conceivable but utterly
indescribable. The words themselves were nonsense. They had no
uniformity, sequence, or structure. No sound was anything like the
one before, like a hundred languages spoken at once yet none of
them properly formed.

Dasen listened to those words with a
strange analytical calm that seemed to stretch for hours. He did
not feel the bumps that threatened to shake the coach apart, could
not feel it careening off the road as the horses reacted to the
loss of the driver’s hands and the inexplicable appearance before
them. The only things that existed were the runes and the words
they evoked. Each rune formed and faded like a firefly in his mind
until the last image slowly died to black and the last chiming of
the words grew distant. With the last rune’s disappearance, his
mind crashed back upon him at the same moment a ball of fire
appeared in the old man's outstretched hands and raced toward the
coach.

Without thought, Dasen threw himself
from the bench and felt fire sweep over him from the small window.
An instant later, he landed unprepared on the floor just as it came
up to meet him. The collision knocked him senseless, nearly snapped
his neck, and left him writhing. That blow was followed by another
as the coach careened from the road, spun, toppled, and smashed
roof first into a tree. He was shot like a rock from a sling into
the roof then deposited none-too-gently back against the door as
the vehicle splintered.

Lying beaten and battered
against the door of the upturned coach, Dasen struggled to regain
his senses.
There is a
fire
, he told himself,
you need to get out
. But even that
plea seemed far away and his body was not listening. Dots raced
before his eyes. He could not decide which way was up, did not know
where his legs were, or if they worked. Confusion overran him. The
dots formed into a swirling mass of black. He struggled to hold off
that creeping darkness, knew that it was the enemy, but the battle
was futile. His body had already given up, and the darkness was
growing stronger, overrunning his defenses. The last thing he
remembered as the void claimed him was the burning heat of a raging
fire.

Chapter 11

Dasen was first aware of the ground
beneath him. It was rough, uneven, like lying on a mattress of
pinecones, but he did not move to deflect the discomfort. In his
semi-conscious state, such a minor inconvenience could not muster
the motivation required for the monumental task of movement. He was
not even certain that he was capable of such effort. His body felt
distant, detached, no longer under his control, but he did not
begrudge its absence. Its innumerable complaints would only delay
his return to the magnificent solace of sleep.

He allowed that sleep to take him and
was on the border of oblivion when his journey was arrested by the
image of runes playing before his mind’s eye. He tried to ignore
the intrusion, but the images were relentless in their display, so
he studied them, wondered what they meant and why they chose now to
interrupt him. The runes were familiar, he realized, but
nonetheless incomprehensible. They were complex but at the same
time simple. They were smooth and flowing, yet jagged and sharp,
and they seemed to follow no pattern at all, as if someone had
scribbled with no known purpose. Watching again and again, he began
to see a pattern in those scribbles, something that suggested a
method to the apparent madness. He searched for it, concentrated on
it, almost had it.

Like an avalanche, memories crashed
through his mind: the ambush, the wild ride, and the ball of fire
that ended it all. Those images overran him, crushed him with their
weight, and exiled the runes to dark subconscious
corners.

If the memories were not shock enough,
his body was simultaneously reattached to his mind, and all the
pain in the world hit him in one breathtaking moment. His head
burst, throbbing like it was being hit with a hammer. His face
burned with the fire of the sun. Every muscle and joint in his body
screamed in dreadful sorrow. The pain was so complete that he could
manage nothing more than a sharp inhalation through gnashing teeth
– unable even to vocalize the myriad miseries.

No sooner did the sound slip from his
lips then a hand was clenched over his mouth. He immediately
recognized the significance of that restriction, and his eyes shot
open, searching for its source. A hazy blanket of green slowly
fragmented into individual leaves, delineated only by the soft
light that filtered between them. The leaves were dark green,
thick, and round with the moist appearance of a recent rain. There
was layer after layer of them so that not even a speck of sky
showed trough their multitude, yet the sturdy branches sprouting
around him like the bars of a birdcage held those leaves high above
so that he could sit upright without any touching his
head.

The hand at his mouth came into view,
and Dasen followed a long arm up to Tethina’s face. She was sitting
on folded legs, coiled like a taut spring, with her head ducked so
that it was just below the first leaves of the bush. Her eyes
watched the foliage expectantly, examining the green shield for
gaps. She was setting so close that her firm thigh was pressed
against his side, almost on top of him. That leg trembled slightly,
in sync with the tremors in her hand where it held his
mouth.

After an anxious minute, Tethina's
face came down to his. Her cheek rubbed against his, soft and warm.
Her lips stopped so near his ear that he could feel her rapid
breath tickling across its surface. "They’re here.” The whisper was
so soft that he could barely hear the words. “I’m going to move my
hand, but you cannot make a sound. Understand?" The words were
tightly controlled but laced with desperation.

Dasen nodded his reply and felt
Tethina's cheek retrace its path past his – her skin felt as soft
as the silk dress that draped across his hand. She returned to her
perch. Her hand left his mouth, moving to rest on his chest in what
could have been a comforting or restraining gesture. Dasen took a
slow, deep breath. He did not even consider rising, concentrating
instead on staying as still as possible despite his aching body and
throbbing head.

Glad to close his eyes, he reached out
with his other senses, searching for anything that might tell him
what was happening. He heard the gentle rustle of the leaves
blowing in the breeze. Then the crackle of a fire. He smelled the
smoke. The coach burning, he realized. He wondered how he had
escaped that trap and made it to this sanctuary but knew that the
answer was as close as the hand on his chest.

Voices rising above the sound of the
flames ended his contemplation. The voices were distant, but they
grew louder until they eclipsed all other sounds. It was men, and
from the volume of their words, they were not concerned with
stealth. Their words were like muted thunder, deep rumbling
syllables pounded out in the rhythm of a chant, but Dasen could not
understand a single one of them. He focused on the words, trying to
decipher them, but the men were not speaking any language he had
ever heard.

That realization shocked him. The
Church and Empire had ensured during their long reign that all
people were unified by a common language, the Imperial tongue. They
had stomped out the use of other dialects and now very few
remained. Most of those were concentrated in the wild lands of
Sylia – none still existed in the Kingdoms. It posed the question
of why a group of bandits – as these men must be – would be
speaking in a foreign language. Unless they were from Sylia . . .
.

It was a ridiculous answer to an
unnecessary puzzle. The only important thing now was avoiding
capture. Dasen locked the oddity into his memory for later
contemplation and focused on listening for the attackers’
positions. Some distance to his left, he thought, near the fire,
but they were spreading out to search.

The men did not speak as they searched
but their steps were heavy, and Dasen was certain that he could
give the position of each of the five men to within a few feet.
Unfortunately, one of them was circling closer until his steps
stopped at the edge of their bush. Dasen prayed for the man to keep
moving, but he just stood there for what seemed a lifetime then
called out in a hushed tone to his fellows.

The man was close enough for Dasen to
hear his heavy breaths, so his hushed call was a thunderclap.
Dasen’s eyes shot open. They only saw green. And Tethina, more
tense than he had imagined possible. The muscles of her leg
quivered. Her hand pressed on his chest until it hurt. The small
dagger was clutched in her opposite hand so tightly that her
knuckles were white. The blade was poised just below the first
leaves, its razor point sparkling in the sparse light that made it
through the canopy above.