From Across the Clouded Range (40 page)

Dasen stammered to say something, but
Teth did not allow it. “I mean it, Dasen. We have to go right now.
I’m going to pack some things from the shelter. You take care of
the pot.”

Teth sprinted the few steps to the
shelter and ducked inside. A second later, a great variety of
things began flying out until a sizeable pile had formed. Teth had
not realized how much stuff she had accumulated in the shelter, but
it seemed that every nook and cranny was filled with something. She
started to pick through the pile, separating it into two smaller
clumps. Planning on a short trip, she loaded two blankets, the food
and herbs, and a few other things into her frame pack. Several bow
strings went into the pocket of her pants, a second knife was tied
to her belt, and a few other useful items went into a small satchel
bag.

By the time she was finished, Dasen
had returned and was gawking at her like a halfwit. “What took you
so long?” she asked without looking up.

“
Well, I had to clean the
thing, and it was really hot.”

Teth looked at him and saw the, now
half-full, bag of water in his hand. “You used our only water to
clean a pot!”

“
Well, I . . .”

“
Don’t bother! Just tie
the lid on with some of this twine and give me the
water.”

Dasen did as he was told while Teth
crammed the bladder into the pack. When he was done, she grabbed
the flat-bottomed pot by the wire handle and tied it to the pack
with more of the twine.

“
Tethina, will you please
tell me what's going on?”

“
Don’t call me that,” she
snapped. “Only the counselor calls me Tethina. My name is Teth, and
I thought I told you. While I was at the stream, an army, hundreds
of men, appeared out of the forest from the west. By the track they
made, they were heading for Randor’s Pass.”

Dasen just stared at her gap jawed, so
she returned to her story. “When the army had passed, I saw another
creature. This one had wings and a . . . It doesn’t matter. It
talked with a robed man who spoke that strange language you
described earlier, the one that you had never heard but could still
understand. Well, it was half a conversation really. The thing . .
. .” Teth realized that she was getting sidetracked and forced
herself to focus on what she needed to say. “In any case, the man I
could understand ordered the other one to search this part of the
forest. From the way they talked, they are looking for you, and I
don’t think it is to deliver a joining present, so can we get out
of here, or do you have more pointless questions?”

Dasen looked just as dumbfounded as he
had a moment before, but there was no time for more explanation.
Teth pushed his slack jaw closed and lifted the framed pack to him.
The pack wasn’t heavy, but she helped him bring it to his back.
When the weight was on his shoulders, he slouched noticeably. “You
want me to carry this as we're running through the forest?” he
whined.

Teth just smiled and moved in close to
him, wrapping her arms around his waist. The proximity brought a
surprised expression to his face. She smiled back alluringly before
pulling the straps of a belt out from behind him. “These should
help.”

She stepped back as if nothing more
unusual than that had been planned and cinched the belt around his
stomach above his hips until she heard him yelp. She buckled the
belt without giving any slack and allowed the weight to rest on his
hips. There was an instant change in his posture, and he marveled
at the pack.

“
Do you like it?” Teth
asked with some pride. Framed packs were no new invention, but she
had made this one herself.

Dasen nodded as she adjusted a few of
the straps so that the pack would fit his longer frame, but it
turned to a scowl when she lifted the much smaller satchel over her
shoulder. He looked like he wanted to say something, so she changed
the subject. “What did you do with those grouse? We might as well
eat while we walk.” Her stomach rumbled in approval of the
idea.

Dasen looked confused then shook
himself and pointed to the trees. “I left them by the
fire.”

Before he finished, Teth was in the
trees. She pulled a handful of leaves from a nearby bush, grabbed
two halves of the birds, and carried them back to where Dasen was
acquainting himself with the pack. She handed the still steaming
halves to him, strung her bow, tied the quiver across her back, and
reclaimed her half. “Are you ready? I know another way to cross the
river, but we’re going to have to hurry to get there before your
friends.”

Dasen mumbled something through a
mouthful, but Teth was already striding through the trees. She
watched her surroundings carefully as she walked. The shadows were
long, and she did not want to miss the small trail that would take
them to the river. In the light of day, she would have had no
problem finding it, but she was less confident without the sun’s
aid. Twilight made the trees all look alike, and it was easy to
miss the subtle pointers.

She took a bite of the
grouse and was surprised at how tender and juicy it was.
Dasen must know something about
cooking
. She turned to be sure he was
following and realized that it was close to being dark – the only
sun remaining was reflecting off of the few high clouds in the
darkening sky. The clouds were lit a brilliant red by the last rays
of the sun, and she admired them until something else appeared,
marring their surfaces.

The sight stopped her in
her tracks. Silhouetted against the cloud was a large creature with
the wings of a bat just like the thing she had seen by the stream
only far larger. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, but the image did
not fade.
This is real
, she told herself.
There are
monsters. They are not aberrations, and they are coming for
us.

Dasen pulled up beside her and
followed her eyes to the sky. Mercifully, he did not say anything
as they watched more creatures join the first until there were at
least a dozen black shapes bobbing above the horizon in a chaotic
dance. Then the dance shattered. The creatures spread out, flying
east, flying toward where they stood watching in dumbstruck
awe.

With effort, Teth overcame
her wonder, turned, and nearly ran through the trees.
The chase is on
, she
thought. She just hoped it would not end tonight.

Chapter 19

Never in his life could Ipid remember
being so miserable. It was well before dawn, which meant that he
had managed only a few rough hours of nightmarish sleep, and yawns
racked his jaw in a brutal succession as a result. He had barely
eaten in two days and longed for a hearty breakfast with fresh
bread, eggs, sausages, and strong coffee – his painfully empty
stomach rumbled at the thought. His back and rump were already sore
after just a few minutes in the unaccustomed position on top of the
shaggy horse he rode, and his entire body stung from the welts and
bruises that enveloped it.

Ipid allowed himself to concentrate on
these relatively minor annoyances. They kept him from having to
face the real horrors that defined his meager existence. Over the
past two days, he had come to know real fear for the first time in
his previously comfortable life – the fear that came with the
knowledge that his death could come at any moment, from any
direction, in any way. That fear was so overpowering and
all-encompassing that even pain and hunger were a welcome release
from it. The longing for sausages and pain of bruises were minor
burdens in comparison to the images of women and children being
slaughtered, in comparison to the knowledge that he could be
next.

Denying those fears allowed him to
ride through the sea of leather and steel. Huge mounted men were
packed around him on all sides as far as the eye could see, yet he
continued to deny what was happening in Randor’s Pass, forced
himself to deny what he had seen and heard over the past two days,
to forget the events that had changed his life forever.

Near the front of the leather-clad
sea, he spotted a whimpering mass of young men in tattered, bloody,
mud-stained clothes. Their faces were dirty, streaked with grime,
hair matted, eyes vacant. They were crammed together and circled by
jostling steeds. Each had a single hand tied to one of several long
ropes. Their broad shoulders sagged, strong hands, powerful legs
worthless. Most of their heads were down, but those who looked up
were wide-eyed with fear and disbelief. Ipid’s heart went out to
them – they were just boys, most younger than Dasen – and the
thought of their misery nearly dissipated his carefully constructed
shield of denial. His insides shook with a constrained sob, but he
pushed the emotion down and concentrated on his longing for a soft
bed – the only way to help those boys was to keep from being
dragged down with them.

Despite his desire to ignore the boys,
Ipid allowed his eyes to search their numbers for one face in
particular. He scanned the crowd for some sign of Rynn. He had not
seen him since that first night and could not find the lanky young
man this day either. Given what he had seen thus far, he feared the
worst. These men had already needlessly killed countless villagers,
and it appeared that Rynn could be added to that number. A sense of
loss and failure washed over him, but he tried not to think about
the vivacious young man who had been in his care, tried not to
blame himself for his death. At least, Dasen and Tethina escaped,
he told himself, had left the village only a few minutes before the
attack. He had not seen nor heard any sign of them in the two days
since, and he allowed himself to believe they were safe. It was his
only consolation, and he clung to it like an infant to its
mother.

Ipid was led to the front of the horde
– there must have been thousands of men and horses cramming every
inch of the village – until he faced down the road away from
Randor’s Pass. It was only then that he registered why he was at
his current position. Certainly, this was where Arin would ride,
and he was there to continue their lessons.

Ipid scrambled for the leather-bound
book into which he had written the words they had learned thus far.
He did not have to look for long; the satchel he carried only
contained the book, a pen, a bottle of ink, and one change of
clothing just like the ones he currently wore – brown woolen pants
that made his legs itch and a similar dull-white shirt. He opened
the book and scanned the lists of words but could remember far too
few of them.

Over the past two days the language
lessons had progressed at a tremendous pace. They had covered every
word he could imagine, going over each in the Imperial tongue then
in Arin’s “Darthur” language. During that time, Arin had learned
the Imperial tongue faster than Ipid had imagined possible. He
seldom forgot a word once he heard it, took almost instantly to the
conjugation of even the most complex verbs, and seemed to
instinctively understand the intricacies of word order and sentence
structure. Ipid held no such gift, and the welts that covered his
arms, back, and chest were cruel reminders of his shortcomings –
over the course of their second lesson, which had stretched over
the entirety of the previous day, he had earned so many welts that
he could no longer see the new ones that were inflicted.

Despite the abuse, the
most frightening part of the day had come when he started to
understand what was really happening in Randor’s Pass. Prior to
that afternoon, Ipid had allowed himself to believe that these men
were an especially cruel gang of thieves seeking to ransom one of
the world’s wealthiest men, but that illusion became harder and
harder to maintain as the day wore on. All the evidence was there.
The men themselves were like none he had ever seen. They did not
act like kidnappers – there was no talk of ransom or any effort to
move their prize from the village. The clamor of horses and men
arriving in the hundreds resonated through the village. And as his
growing knowledge of the Darthur language revealed, the
conversations that continuously interrupted their lessons were
about troop movements, logistics, and deployments. They were the
conversations that lieutenants had with their general, not the ones
that outlaws had with their criminal mastermind. In the end, the
only reasonable answer was the simplest. Arin
was
a general. He
was
leading an army, an
army that could only have come from across the Clouded
Range.

Taking a pause from his vocabulary
review, Ipid looked out over the men behind him searching for Arin.
He could not be found, but Ipid’s eyes lingered on the multitudes.
The village was so full of warriors that it looked like it might
explode. They stretched as far as he could see, tucked into every
nook and cranny between the burned out remnants of the buildings
into the forests surrounding the village and on across the old
bridge leading to the mountains. And all of those men looked like
the ones that had attacked the village, giants with massive horses
and weapons. How many more could there possibly be? And how far
would they spread their terror before they were defeated? How many
thousands would die in the effort?

“
Goot mourining, Te-adeate
Ipid.” Arin’s deep voice interrupted Ipid from his dire pondering.
He spoke the Imperial tongue with a severe accent.