Hallsfoot's Battle (21 page)

The darkness swallows him up. It nearly makes
him stop, too, but he has sense enough not to do so. The mountain
dogs are causing the darkness. They must be. It’s moving and he can
see vague shapes appearing and disappearing within it. Red eyes,
the flash of bare teeth, the husky tendrils of their breath, and
always, always, the noise of them. Not simply the overpowering
sound of pack dogs that makes the ear tingle when they’re on the
hunt, but something meaner and more insistent, a baying that
plunders the mind.

He doesn’t know what to do now he’s here, and
he wonders why he ever thought he could do this. His face is wet
and his fists are clenched, but he’s still moving, across the room,
towards the secret door. Now is not a good time to think about
whether he can fit through the gap to the passageway quickly
enough, or whether or not the emeralds are still there. It will be
a strong magic, indeed, if they are. Already, he senses that Gelahn
is not here or, if he is, he’s not showing himself—mocking Ralph’s
attempts to confront him, no doubt, and watching his defeat with
pleasure.

The dogs are onto him now. They’ve caught the
scent. He can see more glimpses of teeth and twenty-strong pairs of
crimson eyes. Perhaps more. The nature of their howling changes,
it’s more purposeful, they have a victim, by all the gods.

If he dies, what will become of his
people?

He lunges at the wall just as the nearest
mountain dog rips into his already injured leg. Blood spurts hot
from his skin and he can’t help his scream. The first dog’s action
is a signal for the others and they tear into him, cruel jaws
fastening on arms, hair, body, whatever they can find. They’ll kill
him here. He cannot defeat them.

Please, please, his thoughts beg for mercy
but there is no one to heed the plea. And, already, the dogs are
beyond his body into his mind. In his last thought before the
terror takes hold, Ralph understands to the full how Simon must
have felt when he was fighting for his life on the mountain.

Then all thought is obliterated as a torrent
of blackness sweeps across him. Not just blackness though, but one
interspersed with crimson and orange and silver, slashing at his
mind like knives. Someone is whimpering. Ralph thinks it’s himself.
All the aspects of his life he has held dear for so long—the
position he has in the Lammas Lands, his family line, the riches,
the responsibilities—are torn from his grasp and vanish in a howl
of pure pain. In real hand-to-hand battle, he could fight this, but
here he cannot. Here there is no time or ebb and flow of violence,
but it all occurs at once and without respite. Ralph cannot tell
how long the mountain dogs rip apart his thoughts with their cruel
teeth and howling but, at some point, only the gods and stars know
when, he becomes aware of his right hand—in the body, not simply a
vision of it. Something hot is digging into his palm. It sends
splinters of pain through the deep ache of his mind. He doesn’t
know what it is, but it makes him think he’s not dead yet, perhaps
not even in the death that is no death which only the
mind-executioner can bring.

In the darkness of the mind, it takes more
than a story’s beginning to open his eyes. When he does, all he can
see is crimson. It must be his own blood, or the blood of his
deepest thoughts, torn open. Impossible to tell which. Still, his
shoulder throbs and slowly, slowly, Ralph follows the faint outline
of his arm, elbow and hand in red. At the end of his fingers, where
the rough wall presses against his skin, something green is
glowing.

He should know what this is, but he cannot
gather together his memories to form a conclusion. The mountain
dogs have taken that ability away. Soon, he will be lost to his
past entirely.

Grasp what you see.

The voice is familiar. A man he ought to
know, someone who means something to him, but he cannot tell what
that might have been, cannot tell, also, whether the voice is to be
trusted.

Believe it. Take it, or you will die.

Ralph’s mind is almost gone. He doesn’t know
what to think, how to think—or what to do. Then, from a memory he’d
forgotten he’d kept—his father’s voice, telling him that in battle
a soldier must fight to the end and never give up. I don’t want to
die.

Of their own volition, his fingers curl
around the green glow he can see but faintly. It brightens and
sends a shaft of colour upwards over his arm, then across his face
and down over his whole body. Suddenly, he hears his own voice and
the word he is chanting, although he doesn’t know how long he’s
been chanting it.

No. No. No. Then: Not yet, you terrors of the
earth.

As Ralph screams out these brave and
meaningless words, the glowing transforms itself into something
hard and round in his hand, the rough surface he has been pushing
at gives way and he tumbles headlong into a passageway that’s hard
and cold against his face. He breathes in dust and mustiness just
as a heavy thump behind tells him that a doorway has swung
shut.

The howling of the dogs disappears from his
thoughts and becomes something heard by the ear alone, but behind
the wooden panelling and not with him. That’s the important thing.
They are no longer tearing him to pieces. The gods or the stars
have been merciful. Ralph catches his breath, blinks, and the
crimson darkness drifts into what he would expect for where he
finds himself.

He’s in the passageway from the bedroom to
the courtyard. It’s familiar. The danger from the dogs has passed,
only the gods know how. He’s not entirely unharmed, however, as his
mind lies in pieces and he is unsure how to bind thoughts together
again. His body, too, has taken its share of punishment once more.
His legs and arms ache where the mountain dogs have mauled them and
he can feel the warm slither of blood on his skin.

Something hard, insistent, still lies in his
hand. When Ralph opens his fingers, the soft glint of one green
emerald greets him.

“How did you get there?” he asks it. “And how
have you saved me?”

No answer, or at least none that he can hear.
As he struggles to his feet, leaning against the stone walls for
balance, it strikes him that the mind-executioner has still not
shown himself. Truly, in Ralph’s desperate attempt to find him, and
during the damage his dogs have caused, Gelahn would have revealed
himself to the Overlord by now. And if the executioner had indeed
taken the Tregannon emeralds, then why would he allow one of them
to help Ralph as it has? Yes, Gelahn wants him for the military
training and prowess the soldiers can provide, but not enough to
spare any punishment.

The emeralds are not yet the mind
executioner’s, then, and his enemy’s whereabouts are still unknown.
No matter. Shaking off the misplaced hope rising in his breast,
Ralph stumbles towards the hiding place where he told the boy to
leave the jewels. He has to know if they are there or not.

It takes a while for his hands to follow his
bidding, but at last the book tumbles to the stone floor and he is
scrabbling inside the alcove for the only treasures he has.

The pouch is there and, in it, the remaining
six emeralds nestle. A sob rises unbidden to Ralph’s throat and he
wipes his free hand over his face. Shaming for a Tregannon to yield
to tears, but he cannot help himself. After the dogs, he is not as
he once was. Trying to control the shake in his body, Ralph rolls
the emerald he thinks has saved him back to where it belongs before
folding the bag secure and tucking it inside his belt.

Best to find another sanctuary for it, then.
But where?

Chapter Six:
The battle begins

Annyeke

“By all the stars above, what is it with
these men?”

Nobody answered her. The snow-raven and the
mind-cane had followed Simon when he’d left and Annyeke had pushed
the door shut to avoid the icy air taking over her domain. Besides,
it was an impossible question and it had always been so. Men of any
lands were not to be reasoned with.

She marched round her kitchen, muttering
under her breath, clearing away leftover herbs and the remains of
the broth, and slamming down plates and beakers. This wasn’t
proving to be a good day, and it didn’t seem set to get any
better.

Having been convinced Simon needed time on
his own and to explore the legends more fully, Annyeke found that
her thoughts now held more than a frisson of doubt. Was it the
right thing to do? Should she have let him go at all? A great deal
appeared to be resting on her mind alone and, not for the first
time, she wondered if the elders had been right about entrusting
her with this task, no matter what wrongdoings they had
committed.

Maybe she should have been more careful. The
Lost One needed to face many more mind-exercises before he could be
truly ready for the war to come. If only they had the time and the
space to do this, but the fact remained they did not. It would make
sense for Gelahn to fight them just as the winter season came upon
them in force. Indeed, the chill in the air as Simon had left told
her in no uncertain terms that the first of the snows would surely
fall tonight.

The battle would be fought in ice and frost
when bodies and minds were least able to fight at all.

Annyeke paused in the middle of her frantic
and unnecessary tidying and leaned her forehead against the cool
glass of the window. The leaves in the garden had ceased to grow,
she noticed. Since the land was now split from the people’s
thoughts, she had no idea whether this was because of winter, the
coming war or something they had not yet heard of. Knowing the day
she was having, no doubt it was the latter.

She gave a hiccupping laugh, unsure what the
foremost emotion in her mind should be, and sighed at her own
ignorance. How could she be seen as the acting Elder of Gathandria
when she barely knew herself? She shook her head. No, this was not
the time to give in to her fears. In fact, it didn’t matter if she
was afraid or not, she would do something to stop the darkness
coming upon them, or fight her way through it if it had to come.
She’d be damned by the gods if she simply turned over and gave
up.

The leaves in Gathandria would grow again, or
she’d die in the attempt to nourish them.

Shaking her head free of all unhelpful
thoughts, she took three quick steps, almost at a run, towards the
sleeping-area where the legends she’d taken from the Library were
kept. While she waited for Simon to return, she would prepare
herself for nurturing what he might have learned there so they
could all use it, and she’d never found a better way of easing that
journey than focusing on the stories they told, the lives from the
past that they lived again. Besides, she needed to clarify her
mind.

Afterwards, she remembered the feeling of
possibility that had followed her and the way the future had seemed
more open than before.

In the sleeping-area, she gasped and
staggered backwards as a torrent of jagged air sprang towards her.
It was shaped like a carving dagger. The kind the Glass-Makers
used. Just before she leapt to one side and covered her face with
her arms, she gained an impression of red and black. It carried
with it despair such as she had never known. Lethargy, too. What
was the purpose of it all? Before that thought had fully ransacked
her mind, she had spun a net to protect herself from this
unforeseen enemy. As she landed on the floor, she gave in to the
darkness and silence, and lay like a child, whimpering.

A moment or so later, her native sense told
her she was alone once again. She opened her eyes. The room was its
usual colour and everything was in its customary place—her bed
linen, her jug and basin of water, and her clothes. Nothing
appeared to have been disturbed.

Had she imagined what had just taken place?
No, she wasn’t a fool or a dreamer. The mind-knife had been there,
glowing as if on fire. Even now, the despair it had made her feel
clung to her like the vestiges of night. She could think of no one
who could do this but the mind-executioner. But such an act was
impossible, as he no longer possessed the mind-cane.

There was something else, too—in the room.
She’d been wrong to assume nothing had changed. Something had.
Getting to her feet, she spun round, trying to understand what her
mind was telling her.

Then she saw it—the book of the Legend of the
Lost One at the end of the shelf. Where once it had been pristine
and glowing with colour, now it was blackened and burnt. How could
that be so? The other manuscripts she owned were untouched. She
reached out and picked it up. It crumbled in her hands and the
smell of charred parchment assaulted her.

Gagging and struggling for breath, she
dropped the book to the floor. At the same time, her outside door
opened and footsteps rushed in.

“Annyeke? Are you here?”

It was Talus and, with him, Johan. The one
man in Gathandria she most longed to see, and also the one she did
not. She had never been so grateful that, for whatever reason, they
had not stayed long at their battle preparation.

She glanced up to see Johan lifting the
curtain at the far end of the kitchen. “What’s wrong, Annyeke? What
happened?”

As he spoke, leaning over her, she caught a
picture of what had taken place at the park. A jumbled series of
images—five of the best men and women from the five main districts
of Gathandria, together with a handful of followers they trusted
most, the theatricals, the glass-makers, the field-tillers, the
stone-cutters and the tradesfolk. Johan had tried to inspire them,
she could tell, using her words—a fact that made her smile. He’d
set up a series of wooden tables turned sideways against the elms
to serve as targets, securing them with rope. Annyeke could see in
his memory the weapons he’d tried to gather, too—staffs, broken-off
branches, table legs. Then, as best he could, Johan had placed the
would-be weapons in the people’s hands, showing them how to hold
them upright in order to bring them plunging down on an enemy. He
had arranged them in a line facing the makeshift targets and had
prepared to charge. It had not gone well. Best she didn’t enquire
too deeply then; Gathandrian men could be sensitive to failure.