In the Claws of the Tiger (25 page)

Dania climbed the bank to gather woody brush, while Janik and Auftane watched Mathas cast his long spell. Janik continued to smile at Auftane’s open-mouthed wonderment.

A short time later, a large, sturdy cottage made of sod stood before Mathas. He pushed the door open and invited his friends inside.

Seeing Auftane’s face, he said, “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a magical shelter before?”

Auftane shook his head.

“Strange,” Mathas said, frowning. “Your knowledge of magic is otherwise quite impressive.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of the spell,” Auftane said, “and I’ve read about it, but I’ve never actually seen one. Not much call for them in the city, is there?”

“Maybe not,” Janik said, “but House Ghallanda makes them even in the middle of Sharn once in a while. They tend to blend in with the towers.”

Auftane shook his head and stepped inside the cottage. Eight bunks lined the side walls, eight stools surrounded a trestle table, and a small writing desk stood near the door. Opposite the door, a fireplace stood empty, but Dania squeezed in past Auftane to set a load of branches in it, then started working on setting it alight.

Mathas groaned as he settled himself into one of the bunks. “Miserable, as always,” he said. “Someday, we’ll really camp in style. We’ll walk through a shimmering portal into an extradimensional space appointed like a mansion.”

“So do you conjure food for us as well?” Auftane asked, clearly impressed.

“What do you think is in that pack on your back?” Mathas said. “No, for cooking, I rely on—” he broke off.

“Hmm?”

“Oh.” Mathas looked uncomfortable. “Well, you see, Maija was quite a cook. I confess I hadn’t even thought about preparing our food.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Janik said, but Mathas looked pained.

“I don’t suppose you cook, Auftane?”

“Oh, I’ve had dwarf cooking,” Janik groaned. “Let me handle it.”

“Actually, I’m quite a good cook,” Auftane protested. “We’ll do it together, Janik. You can steer me away from anything that doesn’t appeal to you.”

Mathas caught Auftane’s eye and whispered, “Don’t listen to him!” The look on his face made his opinion of Janik’s cooking skills quite clear.

Dania had a fire raging, and she stepped toward the door again. “I’ll see if I can get us some fresh meat.”

“Careful out there, Dania,” Janik called after her.

An hour later, they had devoured a pair of scrawny rabbits and were asleep in the hard bunks. Mathas assured them that the magic of the shelter would alert him if anyone tried to enter, but they all slept fitfully, waking at any sound outside. A few times, Dania rolled quietly out of her bunk and stepped to the door, sword in hand. One time she caught sight of a large, crouching form—a plains lion, she guessed—clearly silhouetted against the moonlit sky, but it stalked quickly away from the cottage. She never saw any sign of Krael or his soldiers.

Janik roused them all early to start the day’s travel, eating jerky and dried fruit as they walked. With a wave of Mathas’s hand, the sod hut melted into the earth behind them. As the morning mist burned off, Janik led them up the side of the riverbed to look around and get their bearings.

He pointed to a small range of mountains far in the southeast, purple and white against the clear blue sky. “Those are the Sun Pillars,” he said. “East of them are the Fangs of Angarak—the main mountain range at the eastern edge of the desert. So that’s our gateway—we’ll go past the Sun Pillars on the north, then turn south between the mountain ranges and enter Menechtarun.”

Dania shaded her eyes against the morning sun to gaze across the plain before them. “Do you think we can just follow this riverbed all the way?”

“Probably,” Janik said. “I expect that most of the rain falls on the mountains and flows down this way. As long as it
doesn’t rain now—and it shouldn’t, since it’s not the season for it—this should be as good as a road.”

“And a good thing, too,” Auftane commented, surveying the nearby plain. “I wouldn’t want to cut our way through all these brambles.”

“Right,” Janik said, leading them down into the riverbed.

As the day went by, Janik stopped frequently to kneel on the ground and look for tracks, and his curses grew increasingly vitriolic with each passing hour.

“They’re getting farther and farther ahead of us,” he said around midday. “I haven’t seen any sign of a camp—it looks like they marched through the night and all day yesterday as well.”

“What’s Krael going to do, march them to death?” Auftane said.

“Quite possibly,” Dania said grimly.

Janik urged them to keep walking after the sun had set and the moons had risen in the sky, but he held little hope of catching up to Krael. Exhausted, they repeated the previous night’s routine, collapsing into the hard bunks after a simple meal.

The days wore into a week. In the soft earth of the riverbed, the tracks of Krael’s party were easy to follow, but clearly, the tracks were getting older. Worse, as the eighth day dawned, the sky did not lighten as it had on other mornings. Climbing to the crest of the bank again, Janik looked to the southeast as he did at the start of every day—and saw a mass of gray clouds towering in the distance, near the Sun Pillars, shrouding the morning sun.

“If I didn’t know better,” he muttered to himself, “I’d say it looks like rain.”

Janik hurried them along in the riverbed, but he kept
their course near the southern bank. Around midday, his caution was rewarded. He heard the rumble of an approaching flood in time to guide them up over the bank, where they stood and watched the torrent sweep down the riverbed, a mantle of branches, dry brush, and other debris draped over its head.

“What is the rainy season in this part of the world?” Dania said.

“Lharvion to Sypheros,” Auftane said blankly, staring at the water.

“Midsummer to mid-autumn,” Janik said, shaking his head. “It should have been over three months ago. I admit I don’t know this area as well as the northern peninsula, but I was almost sure—”

“You were right,” Mathas said. He was not watching the water raging past them, but gazing to the southeast. “This is not a natural storm.”

“From bad to worse,” said Janik. “Could it be Krael, trying to shake us off his trail?”

“It could be anything,” Mathas said. “Could be Krael, could be one of the hundreds of random magical effects left over from the end of the Age of Giants. It could be an elemental storming in the mountains, or even a giant.”

“Whatever it is, it’s damned inconvenient.” Janik kicked a loose stone into the churning water. “It means we’re traveling on the riverbank now, which means scrub and brambles. It also means we’re more visible, without the cover of the banks on either side.”

“Maybe,” Dania said, “but we’re also less vulnerable. We could have been ambushed by archers on the banks at any time in the last week.” She smiled. “I’m actually a little relieved that I can stop looking up every five steps.”

“Great,” Janik said, rummaging in his pack. He pulled out a short, thick sword, not ideal for combat but designed for cutting through the growth of a jungle. He held the leather scabbard and extended the heavy hilt to Dania. “You can put all your extra energy to use in clearing us a path.”

It was slow going compared to the relatively open riverbed, but Dania cut through the brittle scrub and led them at a steady pace, without showing any sign of tiring. They camped before the sun went down, since the moons no longer offered much light and their path was harder to see in the pale golden light of the Ring of Siberys. Around midnight, Janik woke to the sound of rain pelting the thatched roof of Mathas’s conjured hut. He rolled out of his bunk and stood in the doorway, watching the huge drops of rain making tiny craters in the dry ground, quickly turning the dust to mud.

Somewhere far in the distance, a horn blew one long, low note. It barely reached the edge of his hearing, so Janik felt it more than heard it, below the splattering of the raindrops on the ground.

“Mathas is right.”

Dania’s soft whisper at his shoulder startled Janik, but he recovered quickly and did not turn around.

“This is not a natural storm,” she said. “It has a malign air about it, as if …” she trailed off, searching for a way to explain it.

“Now rainstorms have the stink of evil about them, too?” Janik demanded, his voice a harsh whisper as he turned to face her. “Aren’t all destructive storms the work of the Devourer? That’s what my mommy always told me.”

Dania just looked at him, her face draped in shadow. Her red hair stuck out from her head at all angles, a mess that had always appealed to him—particularly on their last trip
through Xen’drik, when he would awaken in her arms every morning. But there was a set to her jaw that he had not seen before, a sternness that hadn’t been present in the younger woman he had allowed to love him those years ago. What had she become? A paladin stood before him—he could see it even in the little hut’s darkness, full of strength and righteous fury and conviction.

Conviction that, to Janik, seemed utterly misplaced.

He shook his head and turned to look at the rain. An evil storm! he thought. He almost envied Dania the simplicity of her vision. The storm was evil. Krael was evil. Maija was evil. All that evil—as if it somehow gave a larger meaning to their conflict. Dania believed she stood on the side of good, opposed to all this evil. As if she were part of some great, cosmic struggle.

“No,” Janik whispered more quietly, almost to himself. “This isn’t about some war between the light and the darkness, Dania. It’s us against Krael. A hatred born out of fifteen years’ rivalry. We hate him, he hates us, we’ll each do anything in our power to destroy the other. That doesn’t make us right and him wrong, us good and him evil. We’re human, that’s all.”

“No, Janik, he’s not human.”

“Right, he’s a vampire. And he drinks the blood of ship captains for his nightly cordial. But he was always that kind of a bastard. He’s got fangs and spooky powers now, but as far as I can tell, he’s the same damned bastard. He hates my guts as he always has—and fair enough, the feeling’s mutual—only now he’s got a little more muscle to back it up.”

“His soul is gone, Janik,” Dania’s voice grew slightly louder. “In its place is a shred of the Endless Night, a shard of pure destruction. He is not like us—he is most certainly not like me.”

“Because your soul’s been bathed in the Silver Flame now? Which makes you pure and perfect, holy and righteous. You’re good and he’s evil.”

“I’m not saying I’m perfect, Janik.”

“We’re all just bastards at each other’s throats,” Janik said. “Predator and prey, or lions fighting over territory. You fought in the Last War, Dania, you know what I’m talking about.”

“This isn’t the same.”

“Why? It’s still us against Krael, just like it was during the war. Only now he’s a vampire and you’re a paladin, is that what you’re saying? Seems to me you changed and he changed, but I don’t see how that means our conflict is suddenly all about good and evil.”

Dania thrust a finger toward Janik’s chin and opened her mouth to speak, but stopped herself. She drew a deep breath, slowly lowered her hand to her side, and lowered her voice to a whisper. She took Janik’s arm and led him out into the rain, pulling the hut’s door almost closed behind her.

“Look, Janik,” she said calmly, “I know you’re having a hard time accepting what I told you about Maija.”

“We’re not talking about Maija. We’re talking about Krael, and I’m not even sure how we started that. We were talking about the weather until you turned it into a force of evil.”

“You’ve been talking about Maija since the word ‘evil’ first came out of your mouth. You think I’m lying to you about Maija’s aura of evil, or trying to make more out of this whole thing than it deserves. And I tell you, I’m not.”

Janik opened his mouth, but she held up her hand and cut him off.

“Listen! You’re right that most of the war and hatred in
the world boils down to human stupidity. We can be a lot like animals, fighting over territory or mates or—or nothing in particular, just for the sake of fighting. Nobody knows that better than I do, Janik, nobody. Like you said, I fought in the Last War—I know this—anyone who was part of the army knows it. For a hundred years the Five Nations tore themselves apart over idiocy and vanity and pride. You’re right, Janik, you’re right—that wasn’t about good and evil. That wasn’t about anything more than people being stupid and killing each other because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

“But this isn’t.” She emphasized her point by slamming one fist into her palm. “Look, you’re even right that for fifteen years we’ve pursued this thing with Krael largely out of the same damned pride and hatred. But that changed in Mel-Aqat, Janik. You haven’t seen it yet—maybe Krael hasn’t even fully realized it, and he’s still pursuing his idea of revenge. But we’re not here just to beat Krael to some ancient ruins, just to get one up on him or pay him back for beating us last time.”

“That’s exactly why I’m here,” Janik interrupted. “You think I give a damn what the Keeper of your Flame says about evil spirits and saving the world?”