Springwar (64 page)

Whereas close to a third of Eron’s population was still snowbound. He chuckled at that. Folks from the northern holds might well return to Tir-Eron to find it in the hands of the enemy. He wondered if they’d surrender peacefully, or if he had an extended war on his hands.

He’d be meeting Gynn soon, in any case—probably tomorrow, if he knew his adversary. And although torture was his specialty, Lynnz knew that the best way to subdue something past doubt was to cut off its head.

After all,
he
still had Prince Kraxxi. There
was
no royal heir in Tir-Eron.

And, if things went as he hoped, soon no Council of Chiefs to elect one.

Unless, of course, they could make that decision without their heads attached to their bodies.

Rrath peered around yet another snow-crusted boulder, and saw yet another sweep of snow-covered plain. It was a cold night, though not so dire as the last several had been, when he’d grown so chill huddled in his cave he’d thought he might freeze to death—since he, like everyone, had been caught unaware by the late-season blizzard.

As best he could tell—from a great deal of spying, lurking, and general overhearing—its sole virtue had been to buy the King time. Gynn’s first battle had dispirited him—all agreed on that. He’d rallied as best he could, but his early loss had forced a slow retreat into open country, where Ixti’s larger army could stretch his to the limit. He’d resisted valiantly, but in vain—until he’d reached Priest-Hold-Summer, which was the only remaining place to make any useful stand. Most of the land south of Tir-Eron consisted of long rolling ridges running almost due east and west, covered with grass and used for forage during the summer—though those closer to the city still retained their forests, and that closest south was almost, but not quite, a true mountain. Not that dissimilar to the situation at South Gorge, actually; Barrax would have to win through a guarded pass or go around. And the latter led through a marshy lowland that didn’t rise to open plains until close to the sea.

But that wasn’t Rrath’s concern.

No, once he’d amassed enough information, mostly from haunting pubs that catered to the unclanned (which Rrath, in effect, had become), he’d had one thought in mind.

Geens.

Not the ones back at Priest-Hold in Tir-Eron, either, but another, larger population that had long been housed in secret near the very hold in which His Majesty might well be making his final stand. A
breeding
population.

Why he was concerned with the scaly beasts, he had no idea. Indeed, they might not even be there now, given the chaos that had marked the last eighth. He’d only seen them once, and that with Nyllol.

They could be
dead
, for all he knew. And even with the court effectively on top of them, there was still a good chance no one outside his clan knew they were present.

But he
had
to know how they fared. People—he no longer trusted them. They were at once too simple and too complex. Eager to manipulate, but blind to manipulation: both sides of which art Rrath had experienced too intimately.

Geens, however … you knew where you stood with them. They … Well, they never
loved
you, but at least you
knew how any one-on-one encounter with them would resolve.

So Rrath, who had nothing else to do and no loyalties to anyone any longer, was acting on impulse alone.

Steeling himself, he stepped from behind the rock and marched off across the plain. It was night, but the place was alive with campfires, for most of Eron’s army was bivouacked between the south rim of the gorge and Priest-Clan’s Hold. The bulk, of course, was farther on: clumped about the foot of the small mountain atop which the hold was situated, and climbing in ever thicker numbers up that slope, so that the whole ridge looked like a dark forge with embers showing through the black. The bulk was straight ahead, where the hold guarded the pass. But smaller concentrations showed to east and west, where forces had been massed to protect the flanks. To the right, where the nearest bridge across the Ri-Eron lay, Rrath could see a steady line of flickering lights where, even this late, forces continued to filter in from north and west and east.

Closer in …

The nearest camp wasn’t far away, a square of tents around a small fire, with the banner of one of the fishing holds flying above it. Whalers from the mouth of Mid Gorge, he imagined. The army was vast and shifting and not well organized, for all the Eronese prided themselves on such things. And this close to the gorge, there were few sentries, nor much need for any. Once Rrath got inside the camp proper, he’d have no trouble. His countrymen all looked alike, and most of this force were male and within ten years of his age. He could wander from camp to camp with impunity. And once he reached the ridge that bore the hold …
Then
he had another option entirely. One few in his clan knew about, and none outside, so far as he was aware.

So two hands passed, and midnight raced two of the moons up the sky, as Rrath syn Garnill made his way through his country’s camp. Someone hailed him once, and he stiffened, until he realized it was a case of mistaken identity. Once, too, he shared a cup with a drunken young man, since that was the only way to dispose of the fellow. Finally,
he accepted a kiss from a clanless woman someone had smuggled into a camp of Brewers. He kissed back—then, on impulse, had her quickly. And didn’t regret that indiscretion. Tomorrow they might all be dead.

Eventually, he found himself at the camp’s western edge, where a series of boulders thrust up from the earth. It was an abrupt shift of terrain and there were few campsites about, so he had little trouble making his way past the last one—though he did have to mumble something about needing to piss to the bland-faced young woman on sentry duty—to disappear among the tumbled, snow-shrouded stones. The laurel and rhododendron that would normally have sprouted between those boulders had been harvested for firewood, but the trees above and around them had not. Rrath therefore had a fairly easy time making his way with no source of light save the moons.

The ridge rose to his left, ever more abruptly, and he angled toward it until he came to a place where a sheer wall of stone rose up from the woods. He followed it west, running his hand along the rock to brace himself, for the forests were darker than the plain, and he could no longer see nearly as well as heretofore.

So it was that his hands informed him of what he’d found before his eyes did.

A cleft in the rock, through which a slender Eronese man could squeeze.

It was no secret—not really. This close to a major city, there was no way young Eronese folks would not have found it—not with centuries of afternoon rambles to provide time and opportunity.

But what he sought … Almost no one knew about
that
.

A deep breath, and he slipped inside the fissure, still working by feel as he followed the tight squeeze first left, then right. Soon enough it opened into a small cavern, which he sensed by a change in the air, for the place was utterly black. A quick fumble at his waist produced a candle and quick-fire to ignite it, and in the flare of golden light, he made out another fissure.

So it looked, but Rrath knew otherwise.

Taking a deep breath, in anticipation of he-knew-not-what, Rrath knelt before it, and inserted four fingers. It took a bit of probing before he found the matching depressions, and a bit more to get his fingers properly seated upon them. And then he pressed in a certain order.

And withdrew his hand.

The same fingers inserted in a crevice in the opposite wall rewarded him with a click, whereupon, with a slow grating rumble, a series of cracks on the wall he’d first assayed grew darker, eventually forming the outline of an irregularly shaped opening.

Stale air rushed out, but not as stale as one might have expected. And in the candle’s wavering glare, Rrath saw steps he’d seen but once before. Steps going up.

When another set of depressions had closed the portal behind him, he followed the stair for what seemed longer than he remembered, until he reached a landing where archways opened to left and right. His goal lay to the right; he could tell by the odor that issued from there. He’d even started that way when something gave him pause.

Voices. Distant, but voices for all that, coming from the other archway. And along with them, the sound of hammering.

And since Rrath had no desire to be discovered on his nocturnal ramble, he decided it was best to investigate—especially when he thought he heard someone call out to … Eddyn.

A
vall’s mouth was set in a thin, grim line. Sweat poured off him, though he worked bare-torsoed, with a sylk sweat-band binding back his hair. It
should’ve
been easy, this fixing of gold-leafed plates to the steel backing frame of the helm, which he’d only completed the evening before. Four had been salvaged from the version Eddyn had smashed. The rest were new. Probably more complex than need be, too—for the purpose for which they were contrived. Or maybe not. The gems, it seemed, loved complexity, whether that complexity be the bodies of the humans they … co-opted—Avall was never certain if he controlled his gem, or the gem controlled him—or the complexity of the things they made. Somewhere in his brain were theories of how the two interacted; he could feel them in there when he worked. But whatever else they were, they were lazy about manifesting. For what he did now, he had to rely on the fact that he could simply stare at the pattern awhile and know where the bloodwire should be laid.

Trouble was, the only place to work in private these days was in the forge beneath Priest-Hold-Summer. It was a royal caprice, but Gynn was the King, and when he said he wanted Avall—and Eddyn and Merryn and a Strynn he’d recalled from the coast when he finally got a count of the numbers arrayed against him—absolutely as close to hand as possible … Well, when the King said that, you obeyed.

And if that meant doing what still had to be secret work in the heat of the forges, while less accomplished weaponwrights beat out more prosaic objects in the open smithy outside the room Avall had claimed. Well, there were still worse places to be.

If only it weren’t so hot. Not because of the heat itself (and who could complain of heat when yet another blizzard had just finished assailing Eron?), but because the heat made him sweat. And when sweat got in his eyes, it made it hard to do close work—in spite of there being more glow-globes blazing here than in any place he’d ever been.

Except in the adjoining chamber, where Eddyn likewise labored, similarly driven and similarly constrained.

More
driven, actually. He’d never seen a man work so hard.

But Avall had no time to ponder Eddyn. He was almost finished, he’d suddenly discovered, after emerging from a haze of work to stare at the pattern, where the bloodwires snaked around the helm like veins in a human body, joining certain parts of the helm to certain triggers, all leading to a cast-gold boss between the eyeslots, where the nasal met the thick steel band that arched across the skull. There was irony there, too, for that was where he’d first considered placing it, back when it was only a curiosity he’d found in Gem-Hold’s mines. He’d rejected that location then, fearing it might look like an enormous carbuncle that had risen between the King’s eyes. A small adjustment in the overall design had altered that, so that it now resembled a third eye, all-seeing, all-knowing, and unblinking.

Only one thing to go now, but not quite yet. He rose, stretched, and blinked into light that approximated day but wasn’t. A deep breath, then another, to calm himself. Reality shifted, whether because of the gem under whose influence he worked, or for some other, more obscure reason. Certainly he was still obsessed with his senses. Sight, at first, which had occupied him since shortly past the noon meal. But now, his attention shifted abruptly to sound: the continuous clankings of his clan-mates at work in the forges, repairing old armor and weapons and crafting new in equal numbers. If he
listened carefully, he could hear the cadence of their breathing as well: gentler echoes of the roar of the bellows that heated the forges. And once his hearing was
that
finely tuned, he could distinguish one smith’s technique from another. Why, he could almost hear the patter of sweat drops falling, the hiss of evaporation when they hit hot metal.

But not much talk. His clan worked silently, intent on their work. Too aware of the importance of their art to distract themselves with unnecessary commentary.

There
was
music, however: harp music from a small girl named Toree, who was a prodigy from Music. She was good, and her melodies had the desired soothing effect. But she was certainly no better than Kylin.