Shannivar (3 page)

“It's taking too long,” Danar said, pushing away his half-empty bowl. “Something's gone wrong.”

“Relax. These things take time to arrange.”

“I don't like it. We're just
sitting
here, waiting for the Elite Guard to catch up with us.”

“Best not to speak that name where it can be overheard.” Zevaron rubbed his eyes. He felt sick and unexpectedly weary, and his heart ached. He should be here with Tsorreh, talking about the freedom that lay before them. “There's a time to run and a time to wait. And the time to wait is when the men we've employed are doing their work to get us out of here in the only way possible. Slowly. Carefully. Quietly.”

“But can we trust that man?”

“Look at it this way. If he gives us away, it's his execution as well.”

Danar's mouth fell open. He closed it and went back to pretending to sip his warm ale and pick at the remains of his fish.

After a time, the Denariyan came back, closely followed by a Mearan in the clothing of a barge captain. It took only a few minutes, using the coded phrases Zevaron had learned from Chalil, to establish the man was accustomed to “special cargo,” meaning smuggling both goods and passengers. Despite his uneasy stomach, Zevaron's spirits rose. It was exactly the kind of arrangement he'd hoped for. The only drawback was that the barge, the
Mud Puppy
, would not be ready to depart until first light tomorrow. Danar looked as if he were about to burst out in objections, but Zevaron said, “Done!”

He paid the Denariyan the second part of his fee, and a portion to the captain, and then another, smaller amount to the Denariyan for the location of the worst brothel in the district.

Danar looked scandalized until Zevaron explained that, should the hunt for them reach the river district, that would be the last place the patrols would look. “Not because they wouldn't raid a whorehouse, because they would, but because they'd be sure we would not dare take the time.”

They hired a room and a woman, went up a creaky flight of stairs, and paid an exorbitant price for another pitcher of sour ale. Zevaron handed the pitcher to the woman and stretched out on the floor. Even in his weariness, the inevitable bed-lice were not worth the dubious comfort of a lumpy mattress. Danar propped himself against the corner and rested his forehead against his folded arms. When Zevaron opened his eyes again, the woman was curled up on the bed, the empty jug at her side. She was snoring gently. Asleep, she looked even younger.

Zevaron blinked, trying to clear his head. He could not shake the uneasy sensation of having dreamed something intense and meaningful but without any specific memory of it. He felt a twinge of pity for the girl, but there was nothing he could do for her.

He pulled aside the greasy curtain and looked out over the lane. A gust of air brought the smells of human waste and rot. Across the narrow gap, an old woman emptied a bucket on top of a refuse heap. He could not make out her features, only the lighter color of her head scarf. Only a trace of brightness remained in the western sky.

It was time to find a place for the night. The tavern looked as if it had rooms for rent on the second floor, but it would not be prudent to return to the same establishment, in the event their presence had been remarked. Where there was one such place, he told himself, there would be others. He felt less tired now, although still groggy. He should be able to stay on guard most of the night.

I'll sleep once we're safely under way, trading watches with Danar. Let him do his share of the work when fewer things can go wrong.

Rubbing the sore place in his chest, he woke Danar. The girl roused at the same time. To Zevaron's inquiry, she replied that her mother rented out rooms for a few coppers a night.

Outside, the street was no emptier than before but filled with a different sort of crowd. Most of the women, the smaller children, and laborers were gone. Lights winked on in drinking and eating establishments.

Outside the corner tavern, the one Danar had first pointed to, lanterns of colored paper had been hung on strings. The enticing aroma of fried pastries mingled with the curling smoke. A table had been set up outside the door, and a woman in a greasy apron was fishing bits of crisp dough from a kettle, dusting them with powder, crystallized honey most likely, and handing them out as fast as her customers could offer their coins.

Danar glanced at Zevaron, mutely pleading. Zevaron's stomach gurgled, reminding him that they had not eaten since the fish at the tavern. Maybe hunger was what was wrong with him.

“Get us some,” he said, “and I'll keep watch out here.”

With a grin, Danar waded into the little crowd. Zevaron turned slowly, trying to look casual as he scanned the intersection. All seemed as normal and undisturbed as things ever were in a place like this. Two seedy-looking men, obviously drunk, started a fight. A pickpocket, perhaps the boy from earlier, had chosen the wrong victim and was sent sprawling.

Zevaron relaxed, but only for an instant. A pair of armed Gelon, whether soldiers or ordinary patrol or royal guards he could not tell, entered the intersection. One of them carried a torch. They ignored the brawling drunks and moved across the square, stopping to peer into the faces of the younger men. They questioned one ragged fellow, who looked too terrified to give a coherent account of himself.

Zevaron turned toward the pastry seller, putting his back to the soldiers. As he did so, he glanced about for the quickest way out of the square. Not back the way they'd come. Too many onlookers, and too much could go wrong—

“Got them!” Danar's clear tenor voice, with its unmistakable aristocratic accent, rang out. He emerged from the throng, and the light from the nearest soldier's torch lit his face.

“You there!” The harsh-edged voice carried above the noise of the crowd.

Zevaron reached for his sword. His head whirled sickeningly, and his muscles felt as if they had turned to clay.

The soldiers now had a clear path to Danar. Danar stared at them, holding a pair of crullers by their thin wooden skewers. His eyes widened as they rushed toward him.

No battle reflexes!
Cursing silently, Zevaron yanked the sword free and lunged between Danar and the patrol.

“Run!” he yelled at Danar.

The first Gelon reached him, sword swinging. The heavy steel slashed down, with all the soldier's larger mass behind it. Zevaron reacted without thinking. His early training, enhanced by years of practice on a pirate ship, took command. He caught the blow on the flat of his own sword, deflecting and blunting its full force. Steel whined and then hummed as, for an instant, blades joined and swept through the air in a single spiraling pathway. Now to end the dance with a flick that sent the other sword spinning free—

Zevaron's stomach lurched and his skin went cold. He wavered, his balance broken. The swords jerked apart. Voices swept over him, people crying out, shouting, some of them almost upon him—

“Never mind that one! Get the boy! Jaxar's cub!”

—and others dim and distant, the surging roar of a great army—

“Khored! Khored!”

The Gelon recovered with a grunt of surprise and raised his sword again. Overlaid on that image, Zevaron saw a thousand other swords, flashing in the sun.

He stood on a hilltop, looking down on the massed armies, knowing they waited only for his command. Snow-crystal clouds glowed across the horizon. Wind whipped his cheeks, tasting of ashes and ice.

Retching, half-blind, Zevaron lifted his hand to the gathering storm. Almost too late, he saw the hilt of the sword clenched between his fingers. Instinct and training took over again. Quicker than thought, he scrambled to his feet. He parried and fell back, fighting for balance.

The voices rose about him, a whirlwind—

“Khored! Khored!”

—and somehow, beyond all hope and reason, his mother's voice sang in his blood, rising and falling in ancient rhythm.

May the light of Khored shine ever upon
you;

May his wisdom guide you,

May his Shield protect you . . .

The sky went dark, as if the shadow of something vast and terrible stretched across the living world. At the very margin of Zevaron's vision, light gleamed on steel. A face loomed over him.

He staggered backward. Slow, too slow.

The storm reached down to him with fingers as cold as ice. Burning white and beautiful, they plunged into his side. For an instant, he felt no pain, only wonder.

In the distance, someone screamed his name. The world slipped sideways.

He raised one hand to the place where the ice had branded him. His fingers came away hot and sticky.

Pain shocked through him. Laced his breath. Sent him to his knees, sword loose in his grasp.

He looked up, forced his bleared vision to clear.
Get up
, he screamed, but no sound came. He hauled himself to one foot, then the other.

Someone appeared in front of him, beating back the Gelonian soldier, not the one he himself had fought, but another man.

He could not breathe. The wound in his chest burned, molten. His fingers were going numb, and yet he managed to lift his sword again, bracing one hand over the other. Darkness lapped at him.

“Zev! Let's go!”

At the sound of Danar's frantic shout, a mist fell away from Zevaron's vision. He was standing, but just barely, on a darkened street, lit only by a guttering torch and a string of garish paper lanterns. The knot of people had scattered. The one remaining Gelonian soldier sat in an awkward jumble, clutching the front of his shoulder. Blood streamed through his fingers.

“Zev?” Danar sheathed his own sword and reached out his free hand to Zevaron. “Can you walk?”

Zevaron's injured side throbbed with each pulsation of his heart. He struggled for air, managed to wheeze out, “Got to—” and then toppled into Danar's outstretched arms.

Danar cursed in earnest now, phrases in Gelone Zevaron had never heard, not even in all his time with Chalil. Zevaron didn't care what the words meant. He had to stay on his feet and keep moving. Grunting with the effort, he straightened up and managed a shambling run.

“Hold on, Zev. I've got you. Just stay with me. A little further and then you can rest.”

Air rasped through Zevaron's chest. From the pain and his shortness of breath, he thought his lung had been punctured and collapsed. Once in Tomarziya Varya, he'd seen a wound like this.

He couldn't think what to do. His muscles had turned to powder. Grayness, like a surging tide, washed in waves across his vision.

Hold on
, the voice had said.

He held on.

S
TREETS
blurred, lights smearing together into a wash of agony. Zevaron heard Danar's voice, asking directions.

Which way to the river barges? Do you know where the
Mud Puppy
is? Down this way?

His hand pressed over the still-bleeding wound, Zevaron leaned heavily on Danar. Somehow he managed to stay on his feet, one lurching step after another. Now they had no hope of disguising their flight. He must be leaving a path of blood that even a blind man could follow. Once or twice, he came close to fainting.

Eventually Zevaron realized he was no longer staggering across cobbled paving stones or hard-packed dirt, but over planks of wood. River-tang filled his head. He heard the creak of timbers, of ropes stretching against their moorings. Before him, in the shadowed dark, lay a boat. He heard a distant wail, the sound of pain too great to bear.

“. . . we've got to . . . right now, do you hear me . . .” Danar pleaded.

Zevaron shook his head and stared at the flat, clumsy outlines of a river-barge. He did not know the man who stood before Danar, anger and fear in his every gesture.

There was more discussion in hushed and urgent voices. Then hands slipped beneath his armpits and lifted him as if he were a baby. He felt a bed under him, a thin straw pallet, and then the rocking movement of a vessel over water. Paddles splashed. A voice called out orders. The boat settled as the current took it.

Light soared and swooped above him, an osprey hovering over its prey. It stung his eyes.

“Seen somewhat like this before,” a man said with quiet authority. Zevaron felt a touch on his side, over the center of red pain. “Sword musta slipped between the ribs, maybe nicked a rib, I can't say.”

“But what do we do for him? There must be something.” Danar's voice was laced with desperation. “He can hardly breathe.”

“Nothin' to be done. If the fever don't get him, if the wound don't go bad, then he'll mend.”

Movement, a stir of the air, and then he was alone. And not alone.

Voices spoke to him, at times a woman's—his mother's?
No, she was lost forever, dead!
Laid over her words like a ghostly echo, he heard the deep bass of a man's.

“Gelon is not the enemy,”
Tsorreh whispered.
“Qr . . . and its progenitor . . . Forgive me, I did not have enough time to prepare you . . .”

Qr? Gelon?
What was she talking about? The fever must have affected his brain. Yet as he heard the word
progenitor
, another phrase resonated through his thoughts:
“Shadows that cast themselves upon the souls of men . . .”

The words hung before him, as if written in fire. He had read them a hundred times in the
te-Ketav
, the holy book of his people. He could trace every line and loop of the letters that formed them. Almost, he could feel the texture of the age-worn pages between his fingers.

Shadows. And darkness, and fire. Fire and Ice.

Khored and his brothers and the magical Shield, the Shield of seven crystals . . .

“Rivers boiled, mountains crumbled . . . fields became peaks of hardened ash.”

Swords sang beneath a sky torn with light and thunder.
“And it came to pass that Khored and his brothers defeated Fire and Ice and exiled it to the mountains of the north.”

Once again, he sat with his mother in Jaxar's laboratory and climbed the ladder to the tower observatory. In hushed, urgent tones, she spoke of a comet sweeping through the northern sky. He stood alone now on a platform, surrounded on every side with night. Above stretched a band of stars. The air was cold, the points of brilliance edged in ice.

“There,”
Tsorreh whispered,
“look there.”
And he lifted his eyes.

At first, he saw only a smudge of dimness, a thread stretching to the north. As he watched, it grew brighter and larger. Its light shimmered, an iridescent corona that filled the heavens. Moment by moment, it drew him. He soared with it, higher and faster than any bird, than any arrow.

Around him and through him, the firmament glowed, cold and burning like moonlight on ice-clouds. Its music sang in his veins.

High and wide, sweeping, arching, he sped faster. Faster. Ahead lay high desert plains of grass, silver in the moonlight. Beyond them, hills rose into mountains, massive and ancient, forming range upon snow-whitened range. Zevaron watched as the flaming ice plunged to earth beyond the peaks.

The ground shuddered as it struck. Sheets of glacial ice broke apart and tumbled free down the sides of the mountains. Rock shattered, setting off more avalanches.

The Shield is scattered, the mountain prison breached.

Was it Tsorreh's voice, or some other's, deep and ancient?

The vision was shredding now, the mountains tattering into mist, into bits of flying whiteness. Behind the images, he sensed a stirring, as if a vast, incomprehensible force roused itself from slumber. He had no sense of its nature, hidden as it was behind the thickening mist, the vapors that froze and burned. He only knew, in the shivering marrow of his bones, in the innermost chamber of his heart, that something terrible had happened.

* * *

Zevaron woke again from a dream of sailing past the Firelands, with gray-blue icebergs to either side. He had been standing at the
Wave Dancer
's
prow when a chunk of ice clipped him on the side. Melting, it trickled down his skin.

No, he lay on his back, naked to the waist and shivering, and the slow chill touch was the sponge Danar used to wipe him. Light streamed in from above. The cabin was narrow and low-ceilinged, and the vessel beneath them rocked gently.

Danar lifted a metal cup to Zevaron's lips, but Zevaron pushed it away and struggled to sit up. His head barely missed the sloping ceiling. The effort left him gasping, and he realized that he was now able to draw air into both lungs. Gratefully, he accepted the cup. The drink in the cup was watered wine, thin but pleasantly fruity.

“How long until we reach Verenzza?” He slid his feet off the edge of the built-in bed and craned his neck to look at his wound. It had closed, although a ring of fiery red bordered the scabbed area.

“Two days, but as soon as it's dark, Aratchy will put us ashore.”

Zevaron frowned, trying to think. Going ashore in midpassage wasn't part of the plan. They'd have to find another boat, and that might not be easy.

“Word on the river is the ports are being watched,” Danar went on. “Nothing gets on or off a boat without Cinath's men searching. They'll be waiting for us at Verenzza. This is as far as we dare take the river. We must go overland instead.”

“Overland? To where?”

“Isarre, of course. Our captain says there's a trading post inland where we can buy horses without too many questions. Um . . . can you ride?”

“Isarre? Are you crazy?” Immediately, Zevaron wished he hadn't spoken so loudly. Bolts of pain jagged through his skull. He lowered his voice. “We can't get there by land.”

“I think we can. Remember, I brought maps from Father's library. I've been studying them while you were asleep. It
is
possible. But that's not the problem. Our route will take us along the borders of Azkhantia. That will be the most dangerous part, but it's also the safest. The steppe is the one place Cinath will never think to look for us. We can do it if we don't lose our nerve. We
will
do it.” Zevaron heard a stubborn note in Danar's voice and remembered how fiercely he had worked to free both his father and Tsorreh. “We have to. There's no other way.”

“Where's my shirt? I've got to talk to the captain.”

“You're wasting your breath.” Danar crossed his arms over his chest. “I've already paid him, and he wants us off the boat before he reaches Verenzza. Do you think he's going to risk his skin by keeping us aboard? Or do you propose throwing him to the fishes and piloting this thing yourself?”

Danar was undoubtedly right. If Cinath's men were searching all boats on the water, they had to get off the river as soon as possible. This Aratchy, this barge captain, had already stretched his own agreement to take them this far, and then probably only because Zevaron had not been fit to travel in any other way.

Danar had saved his life back at the Aidon river district. He'd been unconscious for longer than he realized, wounded and ill, seeing visions.

He had promised Jaxar to see Danar to safety in Isarre. At the time, it had been the logical choice, for Tsorreh was of that royal lineage. As her son, Zevaron could claim the bonds of kinship. Jaxar had thought it a suitable sanctuary for his son. But Isarre was barely capable of holding Gelon at bay.

Azkhantia, on the other hand, was home to bloodthirsty savages, horse-nomads who obeyed no law and knew no restraint, or so the stories said. They'd thrown back Gelonian invasions time and again, not just in Cinath's time, but in his father's, and his grandfather's before him.

Perhaps it was not in Isarre but in the wind-swept steppe that he would find the allies he needed to free Meklavar and avenge his mother's death. The route Danar had described would take them close to the borders of Azkhantia.

“In that case,” he said, “I can ride.”
And then . . .

Zevaron's fingers curled, claws tightening into fists. In his mind, fire raged across the hills of Aidon, as hot as the blood pounding through his temples, and the ashes of the conquerors blew away in the wind.

He would return with an Azkhantian horde at his back, bring down the towers and palaces, and set all the seven hills ablaze. The Golden Land would crumble into salt, and no man would remember those who once lived here.

By the Shield of Khored, by the memory of my mother, by everything holy, and by all that is unholy if need be, I swear that Gelon will pay.