From Across the Clouded Range (41 page)

Despite the simplicity of the required
response, it took Ipid a long second to gather the Darthur words.
Arin did not appear to notice. He turned to the men gathered around
him and said a few words that sounded like a request to ride. Those
men smiled and nodded their assent. Arin, in turn, nodded to an
especially gruesome-looking man at his side, the same one that
stood guard outside his tent. The huge, silver-haired man put a
great ram’s horn to his mouth and released a single long note. The
deafening blast was answered by a roar from the gathered men, and
as one, they rode from the village.

When they were underway, Arin asked
Ipid to review the verbs that they had learned to this point. Ipid
turned to the section of his book that had been reserved for verbs
and began his recitation. “No buch!” Arin growled and added a welt
to Ipid’s back.

Ipid grunted at the blow but shut the
book and began to recite all the verbs he could think of, saying
the word first in his language then in Arin’s. After a few minutes
of recitation and a few more blows, he looked up and realized that
he was leading the army. He reigned in his horse, but as it came
back into line, Arin reached over and pushed him hard on the
shoulder.

Ipid fell to the road in a heap and
was almost trampled by the next horse in line before he managed to
roll from under its steel-shod hooves. He dodged one more set of
hooves and jumped to his feet. Sore and disoriented, he ran to
catch his shaggy mount, but the other horses bumped him with their
bodies and bit at his hands and arms. When he finally scrambled
back onto his horse, he could no longer restrain his taut emotions;
he broke down and wept like a child.

Arin cuffed him, adding another split
to his already tattered lips. “Te-adeate, be man. Have honor, or I
kill you."

He was not sure how, but Ipid managed
to contain his tears and continue his recitation.

#

Ipid watched a group of riders racing
down the road in a storm of dust that would soon be in his nose and
carefully noted the way they had ridden. From what he could gather
from the conversations between Arin and his advisors, the trip
across the mountains had drained most of the army’s supplies, so
Arin continuously unleashed small groups of ten to twelve riders to
loot the holdings that were off to the sides of the road. This set
of riders demonstrated what Ipid was calling a ‘full sprint,’ one
in which the rider lays himself flat on the horse and gives full
rein so that they can maximize their speed over a short distance.
The verb for such a ride was ‘yulute’.

Ipid recited the word over and over so
that he would remember it when they stopped and was again able to
write in his book. Arin was in the process of teaching him all the
Darthur words for ‘to ride a horse’ – apparently there were dozens
of such words – and insisted that each group of riders demonstrate
a different form. Ipid was preparing to recite all the riding terms
he had learned thus far when the words died on his lips.

A black blur caught the corner of his
eye and drew his attention to the side. He followed it and saw
something in a nearby clearing that nearly unseated him without
Arin’s help. A huge, inexplicable creature was settling on the
ground. The thing was the size of a horse, but its body was that of
a thin dog with two large heads at the ends of long necks. It had
great gaping jaws that bulged with so many teeth that it could not
fit its lips over them and huge wings of black feathers like a
raven. The thing was easing itself to the ground where six
triple-jointed legs, each of which ended in a single curved talon,
were preparing to grasp the earth like a hand might hold a
ball.

Ipid shook his head in disbelief. He
told himself that he was delusional, but the creature did not fade.
It just hovered above the ground until a man in a black robe
steered his horse off the road and into the clearing. The man
motioned the creature down, and it approached the earth as if
afraid then grabbed it with a sudden violent motion. One of the
huge heads turned to the black-robed man, and the two of them
appeared to have a conversation.

“
Te-adeate!” Arin growled
just before the stick snapped across the top of Ipid’s
hands.

He almost dropped his reins from the
pain of the blow and immediately turned his attention from the
clearing. He returned to listing the terms for riding a horse, but
Arin had followed his eyes.

The sight of the creature brought a
smile to his lips. He gestured toward the terrible thing.
“Stoche.”

Ipid nodded in disbelief. Arin knew
about this thing and was giving it a name. “Stoch - ah,” he
repeated.

Arin smiled again. “You have stoche
here?”

“
Certainly not!” Ipid’s
wonderment made him speak before he thought. The disrespectful tone
earned him a welt across the back of his head.

“
Meeny stoche come wit’
Darthur. You stay far. They for te-am’ eiruh.” Ipid did not know
what Arin’s last word had meant, but he certainly planned to stay
away from anything that looked like that thing in the clearing.
Arin gestured at the black-robed man who was talking to the
creature. “Te-am’ eiruh.”

Ipid repeated the words. The
black-robed men – he now saw that there was a large group of them
behind the first unit of the phalanx – must be the ones who
controlled the creatures. He did not begrudge them the job. Still,
he thought he recognized the words that made up their
name.

He looked toward Arin. He was
receiving a message, so Ipid rifled through his book for the word
‘eiruh’. He already knew that ‘ta’ meant ‘they’ and turned to
‘those’ when it went to ‘te’. ‘Am’ was a shortening of the verb
‘amate’ which meant ‘to bring.’ In Darthur, it was common to
combine a pronoun and a shortened verb to create a new word. Thus,
te-am’ meant ‘bringers’. That just left ‘eiruh’. Ipid was certain
that he had heard that word before. Finally, he found it. Scanning
down the page he saw, “ei-ruh; destruction.” He put the words
together and turned to look at the clump of black shapes behind
him: ‘bringers of destruction.’

#

It was shortly after noon when they
reached Potter's Place. They had been riding since before the sun’s
rise without a break, and Ipid was nearly unhinged with pain and
exhaustion. His back and rump were aching from the jostling ride,
his skin was encompassed in a fresh layer of welts, and his mind
was overcome by the unbelievable things he was seeing.

The first creature in the
clearing had only opened his eyes to the dozens of things circling
in the sky above. Occasionally, they flew down to speak with the
te-am’ eiruh and were close enough for him to study, but he had
given up on trying to explain them. None of them looked anything
like another or any other creature he had ever seen, and each was
more mysterious and horrible than the last. They were abominations
to the Holy Order, mocking natural laws with their very existence,
and he could only think of children’s stories and dark verses
from
The Book of Valatarian
to explain their existence. That alone should
have meant something to him – that somehow myth had become reality
and metaphor had come to life – but his mind was too shattered by
misery and consumed with the Darthur language to ponder
philosophical questions.

The sight of Potter’s Place in the
distance did not ease his misery, though he selfishly hoped that
they would stop there for the day. Arin, however, did not react to
the sight of the buildings on the horizon. He simply turned to the
silver-haired man at his side – his name was Thorold, Arin called
him his shidé-ded-ator which meant ‘shield of valor’ – and asked
him a few questions that Ipid could not hear or understand. The big
man responded with a few words. Arin nodded and turned back to the
road before them. The army continued on at the fast walk they had
maintained throughout the trip – it was called ‘turante’,
‘formation walk’. They did not seem to notice or care about the
approaching buildings.

The army reached the village fifteen
minutes later, but it had already been secured – probably by one of
the groups of outriders, Ipid realized. Arin led them through the
empty main street as if the town did not exist. A few bodies
littered the street, but Ipid had to admit that the casualties were
few – relative, at least, to the bloodshed in Randor’s Pass. The
reason became clear a moment later. Most of the villagers had
already been gathered in the green for the midsummer festivities –
he had forgotten in all the confusion that today was the Solstice,
a high holiday celebrated by every nation that followed the Order.
It had probably been near noon when the riders came. The villagers
would have just finished the ceremonies that would mark the sun’s
highest point of the year, the moment it stands between rising and
falling. The children’s pageant, the depiction of Valatarian
aligning his followers to order and using that power to cast out
the Lawbreakers, would have been completed with the rising of the
sun. The children would have received, and likely eaten, the sweets
that were the reward for their display. The villagers would have
been listening to the lessons, the reading of new laws, and the
granting of lands that were typically presented on midsummer. They
would have been oblivious of riders, an army invading from across
impassible mountains. And here they stood, gathered together just
as they had been in Randor’s Pass, waiting for their new masters to
claim them.

At Arin's prompting, Ipid gave a quick
explanation of what was happening, but the people of Potter’s Place
did not appear to hear it. They just stared in bewilderment and
answered with sobs. When the speech was finished, Arin ordered a
small group to remain behind to ‘see to’ the villagers. Ipid
dreaded the execution of that order but forced himself to think
about his hunger and the ache in his back rather than be overcome
by thoughts of the suffering these unfortunate people would soon
face.

The army did not stop at Potter’s
Place. They continued on at what seemed a faster pace without any
pause for lunch or rest. The language lesson also continued and
along with it the beatings. By mid-afternoon, Ipid was swooning
from exhaustion, hunger, and pain. The lessons were bogging down as
his mind faltered under the stress of the day, and he was so
exhausted that he did not even feel the switch. Sensing this, Arin
eased his use of Darthur, concentrating instead on Ipid’s language.
To that end, he had asked Ipid to tell him stories that would test
his understanding of the language, but before Ipid could respond,
Arin’s attention was drawn to a long conversation with three men
riding nearby. Ipid knew that he should be listening to that
conversation, but he could only struggle to pull a reasonable story
from his shattered mind.

He was jarred from his daze by the
sensation of Arin’s stick whipping across his back. He barely
flinched at the blow but straightened his posture and mechanically
started the story he had prepared. The stick hit him again, and he
stopped. He had forgotten that he should never speak unless spoken
to, was lucky that the punishment was not more severe.

“
Te-adeate.” Arin spit the
title, which meant ‘one to be taught,’ as if it had a foul taste.
“You speak where is food for army, I break stick, give you
food.”

The words brought Ipid straight up in his
saddle. It was not like Arin to negotiate. He thought about what
the young man had offered. If he took the offer, he would no longer
be a prisoner; he would be a traitor. But that seemed an
afterthought now, and despite himself, his mind raced through
supply centers – he would do anything to be rid of that accursed
stick, fill the rumbling hole in his middle, and earn some slight
security.

As the Chancellor’s first advisor on commerce,
Ipid knew every major supply center in the Kingdoms, but he had
some difficulty thinking of one that was close enough to be
accessible and large enough to be useful. Thoren was the obvious
choice, but even at their current pace, it was many days away and
would not fall easily. That left Rycroft, the seat of Uhia
District, and its grain silos, but the harvests had not started,
and any grain already there would be unprocessed – less than ideal
for an army on the move. The other option was the stockyards
outside of Holstead. It was slightly farther than Rycroft – three
days rather than two – but there were probably two hundred head of
cattle, sheep, and pigs in the yards this time of year.

Cursing himself for his weakness, Ipid
told Arin about Holstead. Arin asked a few simple questions about
distances, villages on the way, and garrisons in those villages.
Ipid answered the questions honestly and without hesitation – if he
was in for a pinch, he was in for a pound.

The complicity brought a smile to
Arin, but he kept his end of the agreement. He took the stick from
his belt and broke it, discarding the pieces along the side of the
road. A hard piece of flat bread, a small chunk of salty cheese,
and an apple appeared from his saddlebags a moment later. Ipid had
to keep himself from choking as he wolfed them down.

While Ipid ate, Arin whispered in
Thorold's ear. The big man nodded then turned to the warriors
around him. A minute later, two hundred men rode away from the main
force. Ipid did not know if it was meant to be symbolic, but they
rode at ‘eirene’, ‘hunting trot.’