Saint Elm's Deep (The Legend of Vanx Malic) (8 page)

*

Darbon caught Vanx’s eye, and a knowing look passed between them. Brody should have said Skmoe, gargan, Parydonian and Zythian. But the wild-haired heathens from the island were barely considered civilized beings by most of the other races.

The irony was that the Zythians were far more intelligent and capable than the other races that walked the world on two legs. They had far sharper senses and more capable minds and lived for hundreds of years longer. The wealth of recorded knowledge they’d compiled over the centuries was far beyond anything the nearly primitive Skmoes and gargan folk could even comprehend.

Even though they didn’t accept them as equals, the Parydonians at least respected the fact that the Zythians were more than civilized, but as Brody had just proven, Zythians were easily overlooked or dismissed during conversations of men and their affairs.

“What does any of this shit have to do with killing our shrew?” Endell blurted out. Apparently, he’d already grown tired of the subject. “That bear we found is older than the lot of us combined. How or why it came to be where you found it, and all that other stuff is for another day.” He then pulled a flask out from his boot. After he unstoppered it and took a big swig, he passed it to Chelda.

No one attempted to fill the silence with conversation, so the old hunter turned to Brody. “Can you rig a line to one of them fargin spears your bow shoots and still get where you’re aiming for?”

“If the line is fine enough,” Brody answered. “I think I saw some coiled in one of the sleds that might work.”

“Good.” Endell looked at Vanx.

Vanx took the flask from Chelda and took a sip.

“If it was my plan we was to follow,” started Endell, “then here’s how I’d do it.”

“It is your plan we follow.” Vanx winced down the stout liquor with a grimace. “It’s our plan. We’re all in this together.” Vanx passed the flask to Brody and wiped his mouth with a furred sleeve. “If someone doesn’t agree with part of your idea, I’m sure they’ll say so.”

“Yeah,” Darbon chimed in. “Let’s work this out now and get it over with. The sooner we kill that damn shrew, the sooner I can get back to—to…” He stopped himself before he blurted her name out loud and then found his cheeks aflame.

Brody patted him on the back and passed him the flask. “If a pull of this don’t take your mind off of her for a bit, then nothing will.”

Brody was right. It was a good while before Darbon could breathe, much less think.

*

“Are they thawed yet?” asked Smythe. Xavian had been listening with his eyes closed and the man’s voice mildly startled him. The others were sorting out the details of how they were going to catch a live snow leaper.

Xavian blinked himself out of his reverie and gave Smythe a kind, yet slightly irritated, smile. “I think they may be.” He looked at the others. They were already in a heated argument over whether staking a leaper in the open to draw a shrew was right or not.

“That’s insanity,” Brody snorted. “It’s just cruel.”

“You put a live krill on your hook to catch a mackerel,” Endell argued back. “What’s the difference?”

“I agree,” Chelda said. “Who cares what happens to the leaper? It’s bait.”

“I see your point,” Brody conceded. “But, by the gods, it’s almost like staking Poops out there. It’s a living thing, not a fish.”

Poops barked from the back of the shelter. He was lazing with the haulkats.

“Fish alive,” one of the Skmoes said with a grin, as he backhanded his brother across the chest. “Leaper just meat.”

“Poops meat, too,” the other Skmoe joked while giving Vanx a sharp look.

A sudden hush fell over the others.

Skog broke the silence by somehow ripping loose a long, noisy fart and belching at the same time. The Skmoes both gave him a nod of respect, and Chelda snorted out a disgusted grunt. Darbon laughed out loud when the sound caused Endell to spray a mouthful of his fiery drink. Within seconds of the eruption, Brody resumed his argument, and the others fell right back in.

Xavian shook his head, as if he were dismissing a group of children. At least they were occupied, and he could go through the packs in peace.

“Go fetch us a dry workspace and some absorbent tatters,” Xavian said.

When Smythe looked at him stupidly, Xavian chuckled. “A blanket and some rags, man, blanket and rags.”

They spread out the blanket and Xavian gingerly laid one of the packs down at its edge and patted the moisture away with one of the rags. When he was sure it was reasonably dry on the outside, he unfastened the buckles and opened the satchel flap. He was surprised to find that only a tiny corner of the papers inside had gotten wet. He used a bit of wizard fire, a small, flickering blue flame that he kept palmed in his hand, and carefully dried the old pages over it before laying them out.

They were written in some script that he couldn’t quite grasp. This caused his curiosity to suddenly override his desire for privacy.

“Vanx, come have a look of this,” he called, and before he could look up, half a dozen curious faces had ceased their argument and were crowding around the blanket. He handed Vanx what looked to be the first few pages of whatever the document was.

*

Vanx studied the parchment for a few moments, fumbled through the other pages, and then handed it all back. It was written in an ancient Zythian script called Drog. Vanx was so stunned by the implications that he made no comment.

A king who had ruled for three hundred years, attack plans and other orders written in Drog, and being carried by shagmar-riding gargans, or whatever they called themselves before the Skmoes labeled them such--it could only mean one thing, he knew, but he wasn’t about to heap more suspicion on the Zythian people just yet. Trying not to feel guilty about the deception, he looked closely at the mage.

“Can you read it?” he asked.

Xavian shook his head but held Vanx’s gaze, as if he knew Vanx had just been reading the words. “Can you?”

Vanx averted his eyes and made a slow nod. “I recognize the script; it’s called Drog, but no, I don’t think I can read it to you.” He was about to say more, but Chelda’s excited voice broke over the mumbling of the others.

“A map,” she blurted excitedly. “And you won’t believe what it shows on it.”

“What?” Vanx asked.

“What?” Several of the others asked over each other as well.

“It’s a map of the Bitterpeaks.” Chelda’s voice was giddy. “I recognize the location of this lake and the frozen falls. I’ve been there before, even slid across them. This valley over here is marked Lurr. The Lurr is a fabled forest from my people’s lore. If you enter it, supposedly, you’ll never find your way back out.”

“Let’s go there,” Darbon said in a dry tone that was dripping with sarcasm. “Sounds just like the Wildwood.”

“I’m not done.” Chelda’s glee turned into venom for the two heartbeats she stared at Darbon. Then, as if she’d never been interrupted, she pointed at a place on the map. “This little castle-looking thing right in the middle of the Lurr is marked.” She turned from the map to the others with a grin. “That can only be one thing.”

“It isn’t,” Xavian mumbled. “Rimehold?”

“Yes.” Chelda stabbed her finger at the map again. “It’s right here. The legendary palace of Aserica Rime.”

“Bah!” Endell thundered into the moment. Apparently, he was more than a little into his flask. “What does any of this dung-muttle have to do with killing a fargin saber shrew?”

Chapter Nine

On an old barrel keg,
with a flask in hand,
I watched him turn
from a boy into a man.
-- Parydon Cobbles

“I still don’t like this,” Brody whispered to Vanx, who was holding a fidgety, overexcited dog in his lap.

Vanx was feeling the thrill of the hunt mingling in his veins, almost as much as Poops was.

They were huddled in the snow under the skirt of a towering pine, waiting for one of the fat, barrel-keg-sized snow leapers to come bounding by. Endell and Smythe were working their way through the trees toward them in an attempt to startle a few of the leapers out of their shallow dens. The Skmoes were hiding, not too far away.

“Think, Brody,” Vanx reasoned. “You fought with the King’s Guard. You put an arrow in a big rock troll before. It’s not like it died on the spot. Arrow wounds kill slowly.”

“This here is an animal, not a cold-hearted, man-eating rock troll.” Brody shook his head and sighed. “Hunting and killing is one thing. Staking out live bait is barbaric. But don’t worry. I’ll do my part. I just don’t like it.”

“The shrew will die slowly, either way,” Vanx went on. “Remember Chelda saying that the one her people killed took out nine men before it stopped attacking. It was bleeding out the whole time. Are you up for that?”

“Those hand-thrown spears didn’t penetrate into its vitals when they hit. My arrows will. These blades are designed to tear up the guts of whatever they’re stuck in.” He flexed his hands. “In any case, the shrew is a flesh-eating beast, not a grazer, and using leapers to bait it is akin to us hunting sheep in a pen.” He chuckled softly, sending a plume of breathy fog roiling upward. “As far as our shrew goes, two of these well-placed arrows, and in less than a quarter glass he will be bled out and done. It’s that simple.”

“Not if it dies off in one of its tunnels, it won’t be simple. It will be—”

Just then Poops pricked his ears up and stiffened in Vanx’s lap. Vanx’s hearing, while far better than any human’s, wasn’t honed to the same frequencies as the dog’s. He trusted Poops’s reaction, though. The dog was beginning to shiver with anticipation and started trying to get loose. Vanx would have little choice but to let go of him soon. He could plainly hear now the crashing sounds of the approaching creature.

Vanx tapped Brody on the shoulder and motioned for him to be ready, then pointed in the direction from which the sound was coming. The whole while, he fought to keep a firm grip on Poops’s furry body harness.

Vanx was surprised that the young dog hadn’t growled or barked yet. He was breathing heavily, though, and the leapers were close. He hoped Poops could refrain from sounding out and redirecting them just a little longer. It would aggravate Endell to no end if the dog frightened their prey away before they could take it.

He’d just finished the thought when Poops’s high-pitched yapping split the air like a whip crack. Three big leapers shot out of the trees in front of them. One was ten feet in the air when it exited the trees, and it burst through the branches in an explosion of snow and pine needles. Another was only a blur as it sped past them in an arcing, ground-hugging streak. Before Vanx could even catch his breath, Poops tore free and was off after that one.

The third leaper had the extreme misfortune of landing right in front of where Vanx and Brody were hidden. Brody didn’t hesitate. He loosed his big arrow before it could leap away.

Vanx saw the missile trailing its cord like a streamer into the trees beyond the startled creature. For a heartbeat, he thought Brody had missed, maybe even missed on purpose, but as the creature leapt up through the trees away from them, Vanx saw the tiny line of red trailing in the air behind it. The arrow had gone through the leaper’s haunch.

Inda and Anda came bursting out from their nearby blind and chased down the arrow to get a hold of that end of the line. The other end was tied securely to a tree, leaving the leaper strung like a bead.

They’d managed to get their bait before the sun reached its zenith, but there was much more to do this day.

*

A short while later, the terrified leaper was limping on a tether-line in a wide open area west of the forest. Xavian had detected a possible hollow there, and there was a big tunnel running off from a cavity that was plain to the naked eye, because it had collapsed into a long, straight ditch for a few dozen yards and hadn’t filled back up with windblown yet. The mage assured Vanx that there were other tunnels below the surface as well.

Endell had said that where there were leapers, there were shrews, and the small copse of trees where they’d gotten their bait was but an arrow-shot off to the east. All of them had to agree that this was as good a spot as any.