Snowbrother (10 page)

He recoiled at the disloyalty, but the feeling remained, a curdling in the pit of his stomach.

Mind whirling, he scarcely noticed when Shkai'ra came up behind him and laid proprietorial hands along his flanks. It was the smell that brought back the memories, made him tense and quiver and press back against the wall. The scents of oil and tallow and musk, and the rough long-fingered hands.

"Good," she said. "I was beginning to think it was your
blood
I'd been draining." She ruffled his light brown hair and gazed into the hazel eyes. "You look like a fawn caught in a trap." Which, she reflected, was true enough. She gave him a playful swat across the buttocks and continued:

"Run along. I'll find time for you tomorrow. Today's too soon. Even at your age, males have no staying power."

It took the Newstead hunters three days to reach Garnetseat; the outlying sentries met them a full day out. No Kommanza could have covered that ground so quickly, or even believed it possible to make such speed on foot through wooded country. Even for those used to long treks on skis, for bodies tempered by a lifetime of such effort, the toil was grim. Little strength was left in the pair by the time the broad clearing came in sight.

That land was the best in the eastern reaches of the Haanirylsan-Minztannis, being the bed of an ancient lake and free of stones. Around were wide stretches for hunting, timber, mining. The settlement had prospered in the century since its foundation, and over five hundred souls dwelt there. Yet it also bore the marks of the borderlands: earth rampart, log stockade, blockhouses at the corners, and a ditch planted with sharpened stakes. Many from the heartlands of the deep forest would have winced at that, considered the ways of the frontier folk tainted with the un-Circled customs of the outlanders.

Yet more than one raiding band had retired baffled
from those walls, and a few had left their dead impaled on the stakes or twitching under the high walls. Siegecraft was not an art in which the steppe peoples excelled; they preferred skirmish, ambush, the vast swirling campaigns of the grass sea that ended with the boot-to-boot charge of armored lancers. And this was the main trade route to the east, south of Bemedjaka. Garnetseat stood as a barrier against the Kommanz. Thus it held many adherents of the New Way, and had sheltered the Seeker herself from time to time. And it had contributed in goods and people to the effort that had colonized Newstead.

The news of the fugitives' arrival brought the folk murmuring into the streets, calling out questions and then falling into silence at the sight of gaunt, shuttered faces. But to Ewennu and Sasimi it was a return to sanity. Seeing the faces of Minztan folk, hearing the singsong lilt of their native tongue, the fearless
closeness
gave them strength. Still more were their spirits lifted by the sight that awaited them in the central square, before the round meeting hall and chapel that was the prime feature of any Minztan garth. The cone-shaped roof stood serene against the bright winter sky, supported by pillars carved and painted in the forms of guardian spirits human and animal and abstract. Before it stood something new.

In any other land, the twenty young men and women would have been commonplace enough, dressed alike in round helmets and leather back-and-breasts, shortswords and daggers at their belts, crossbows or billhooks in their hands. To a Minztan it was revolutionary to have full-time fighters of their own people, forest folk who had no trade but war and weapons training. The leader was a tall man, lanky, at age thirty older than his troops by a decade. He wore a knee-length chainmail hauberk and steel strips on leather armguards, a plain double-edged sword at his waist. Rare and precious and hideously expensive, the armor marked him as one of the Seeker's elite cadre, one high in the ranks of the New Way. Still more unusual was the weapon he carried, a dart rifle with a six-shot magazine, powered by a coiled spring in the stock. Imported from the fabled eastern realm of Fehinna, on the shores of the Lannic Ocean, it was almost as costly as a firearm would have been.

Such a display of might and wealth would have been enough to awe Sasimi and Ewunnu; it was the presence of the Adept that brought deep bows. He was plainly dressed, in the mottled coat of a hunter; unarmed, save for a flint knife at his belt. The blood of the First People was stronger in him than was common, showing in the dark skin and flat, high-cheeked face. Laugh lines crinkled beside his eyes as he gravely returned their salutes; he could sense their unease, that a sage should be in the company of armed violence, New Way radicals though they were. Silently, he motioned their attention back to the mail-clad figure. That one smiled, and touched the symbol of the New Way on his chest; it was graven on his followers' armor as well, a circle opened at the top with silver flame leaping through the gap: change and rebirth.

"Come in; rest, eat, and let us give each other our names," he said in friendly Minztan wise. "My name is Narritanni." As was the custom of the New Way, he had taken a use-name: Narritanni, in the Minztan tongue "Man of Stone."

Later, bathed, fed, soft clean clothes on their backs and horn cups of hot mead in their hands, the questions began, quiet and friendly, but very thorough. Narritanni and his detachment had been given the guest-hall traditionally attached to the chapel and had moved in maps and racks to make one chamber his office.

"Like this?" he asked, showing them a page in a book. It bore the likeness of a fanged skull impaled on an upright sword.

"
Doa
," Sasimi replied. "All of them had that on their chests, on the armor."

"Stonefort," the commander mused. "No worse a nest of robbers than any other, but rich. They could field two thousand lances… How many horses did you see?"

Sasimi shrugged and tapped his kinmate on the shoulder. "Ewunnu had a better chance to count," he said.

She blushed at being singled out in such august company. "Well, enlightened one," she began. She was unsure of the title, but the term for a sage was the only honorific apart from "elder" that her people possessed. "There might have been as many as two hundred mounts, or even more. Apart from the ones the scouts were riding, of course."

"So," he mused, running a hand over close-cropped fair hair. What that meant would depend on any number of factors.

"Many sleds, you said?" he continued.

"Yes, twenty at least. It looked as if they were loading grain from the Newstead storehouse. Why would they steal grain, when their land is so much richer for crops?"

"For the horses," Narritanni answered absently. His mind churned.
So
!

That would explain how they managed the raid in this season. The Seeker had used some of the wealth of the New Way to buy her aides a comprehensive military education. Narritanni's lakelander teachers had never tired of saying that any reasonably intelligent human being could master strategy and tactics; it was logistics and supply that took real talent. On the steppe, Kommanz lancers liked to keep at least four remounts at hand. That way they could cover up to a hundred kaelm a day, changing mounts every half hour or so. The limiting factor here was fodder. Even if they went more slowly on the return journey, the horses would still have to eat, not as much as when they were being pressed for speed but nearly as much. And there would be the problem of feeding the captives as well… He leaned back and sipped at the hot, sweet mead.

"Fine," he said to the two hunters. "Go and rest now: you'll need strength soon." He took it for granted that they would join the rescue party; they had kinmates in enemy hands, and that was the strongest of ties.

Worry was on their faces. "You… you can do something for our folk?" Ewunnu asked softly.

"Of course." Nanitanni was crisp and decisive; another legacy of his training, never to show doubt or hesitation even if he felt uncertain. That was essential for morale, but sometimes he wondered how alien such thinking made him to the ways of his folk, whether he would ever again be able to live among them wholesouled.

When the Newsteaders had left he sighed and turned to his second. "At least a hundred of them," he said. "Four Banners, and I doubt they took many casualties storming Newstead, since the fools left the wall unfinished. Maybe a hundred and sixty of them, maybe more."

"Not fools," the Adept said. Narritanni started; he had never grown used to the way the man could make you forget he was there. It was not even a Wreaking, merely a serenity so deep that it left nothing for the attention to touch on unless the Adept willed it. The sage had taken little part in the interrogation, but
the Minztan commander knew his calming presence had been an aid.

"Unused to war, perhaps," the man continued. Like most of his kind he had abandoned his human name; such was unnecessary to one who simply
was
, without consciousness of self as separate from the world.

"Even so, they should have had warning-from the Inner Eye, if nothing else. I fear… the plainsdwellers have brought an Eater into the forest with them."

The Minztans shuddered. The sage went on: "I am not a man of war. Or even of politics; but this is more. The Land and the Otherworld are menaced too, and they will fight for you, in such wise as is permitted."

Narritanni grimaced. "It will be welcome; we have twenty of the Fellowship here, and let's not lie among ourselves, none of us is a match for the average steppe killer in a stand-up fight."

The second-in-command stroked her swordhilt. "Well, yes," she said, glancing sidelong at the Adept. He had said that they could call him Leafturn if a name was needed, but somehow it was difficult to think of him as anything but
himself
, purely. "But we don't have to stand and fight their type of battle; we'll have volunteers, not well trained, but they can ski and shoot. And
. . "

She hesitated; what she had to say touched on forbidden matters. "Wasn't there an Initiate in Newstead?"

"Maihu Jonnah's-kin," Leafturn said. "An Initiate, and one who might have been more, if she desired it." He paused, closed his eyes. "The Snowbrother is a strong friend," he continued at last. "To those it knows; I have not walked these woods in winter. Some things I could do, but not that. Maihu could."

"If she's still alive," Narritanni said. "If she has access to the instruments, and if she thinks of it at all."

He sighed again, frustrated. This was not at all like the staff wizards his instructors had told him of. "We can't count on… it."

He was not a reverent man, but he still hesitated to shape that word.

"What I can do, I will do," Leafturn said with unruffled calm. Then he smiled, with a hint of a child's impishness, and touched a ball of rock crystal that hung on a leather thong around his neck, no larger than a bird's head. "For instance, if there were to be heavy snow…"

Narritanni swore eagerly. "Exactly! What we need most is to slow them down. All they have to do to win is get back to the steppe; a guerrilla can harry them out, but that won't rescue our folk. But if we slow them, perhaps… And if the New Way can't offer protection, why should the folk make sacrifices for it?"

"Truth," the Adept said. "And best I make my preparations." He rose gracefully and left with a swiftness that was somehow unhurried; the soldier noticed a faint, wild smell of leather and pine as he passed.

Narritanni closed his mouth and laughed ruefully. "I was going to ask him to help us with the elders," he said. "But…" He gestured helplessly.

The other soldier grinned and began packing a pipe with Maishgun tobacco, a habit picked up from the lakelander mercenaries she had studied with.

"I know how you feel," she said. "Try to ask him something he doesn't want to do…

Well, it just doesn't happen, somehow." She flicked the flint of her ceramic firestarter and puffed. "If he keeps the Eater off us, that will be enough."

Narritanni's mouth twisted. "Don't remind me." He ruffled a sheaf of papers.

Organization did not come easily to his folk; if the stories were true, escaping it was one of the reasons his ancestors had come to these
woods, even before the Fire and the Dark.

Still, he forced briskness. "Let's get the elders in, and see how many volunteers we can bugle up."

They walked through the door: the heads of kinfasts, those respected for wealth or wit or holiness, the closest thing a Minztan settlement had to a government. Not very close: they had no authority to compel, save in small matters such as cleanliness, or to levy tax in labor or land. The forest people had many customs but few laws; mutual helpfulness sufficed, enforced by the shunning of evildoers in the rare oases where serious offense was given. It needed many hands working together to live in this land, a fact anyone could see. Narritanni considered them. Most were middle-aged or older, dressed in the embroidered jackets reserved for festival or serious occasions. And they regarded him with grim attention; at least there would be none of the blank incomprehension he had met in the central regions, where outlanders were seldom seen. Still, those not of the New Way would tend to be more fanatical about the nonviolence canons for all that.

Best come to the point, he thought. "Dwellers-in-the-Circle, Newstead has been raided and taken."

There was a collective sigh, mingling sorrow and horror with the relaxation that comes when the long-suspected worst is known.

"We of the Fellowship are going to attempt a rescue, but there are too few of us to have any chance of success alone. We need help, to travel and to fight. Will you counsel your kinmates, and give of your substance?"

A sharp-faced oldster leaned forward, gnarled hands gripping the arms of a chair, wood carved into the likeness of paws.

"You mean, you wish our help to make war!" she said.

He answered gently. "No, to help defend our folk. Your own blood has been spilled at Newstead—"

"More death will not help the dead," the elder said stubbornly. "But it can harm us, not only what is done to those who go but what they do to themselves by going."