The Dread Hammer (19 page)

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I
s the Lutawan king immortal? Many of his people believe it. Many believe he is the worldly reflection of their god, Hepen the Watcher. I long to know the truth! If my duty was not to the Puzzle Lands I would travel south to find out.

Smoke had gone ahead along the road first thing that morning, alert for any sign of danger, but of course there was none. They were still in the Puzzle Lands, where Tayval kept watch. It wasn’t even midmorning when he settled down at a pretty spot alongside the road to wait for Ketty to catch up.

He passed the time listening to prayers.

Dismay, help me. Come to me, Dismay.

The hour was still early. He was bored and the prayers were compelling.

Dismay, avenge me!

So he left the Puzzle Lands and chased the threads south.

Hours passed on the journey. Noon was near when his reflection took shape in the borderlands, in a grove of oak trees on the outskirts of a farm he’d never visited before. Beyond the grove, the wheat fields were tall and green. A dilapidated farmhouse stood in the distance, with a barn beside it. Between them was a haphazard-looking paddock. Smoke counted seven horses inside it. Too many for a farmer. These were war horses.

Smiling in anticipation, he turned to the girl who had summoned him. She looked to be about fourteen years in age. No doubt she was supposed to be tending the two cows that were tethered beneath the trees, but she did not watch them. Her eyes were closed as she knelt in a shaft of sunlight that reached down through the tree tops. Her lips moved as she called to him,
Dismay, please, please come.

“It’s dangerous to call me,” he said softly.

Her eyes opened. She looked up at him. She showed no fear. “Kill me too, if it pleases you, I don’t care.”

Such cold hatred was in her gaze that he believed her.

“They made me their whore,” she said. “Just because our family is poor. But this morning they sent me to watch the cows because now they want my little sister. She’s only twelve and as fragile as a flower. She’ll be dead by day’s end, I know it!”

Smoke felt his blood heat. A flush rose in his cheeks as his heart quickened with desire. “What would you have me do?”

The girl got to her feet. Her head barely reached his chest but she looked at him with such belief that he knew, in this hour, he belonged only to her. “Go to my father’s house and kill the indolent soldiers who are there.”

“It would please me to do this. Who else is there?”

“Only my sister. My father is away, my brothers have become soldiers, and my mother is dead.”

“This is a dangerous prayer. More soldiers will come. If you flee you’ll be hunted. If you stay you’ll be blamed.”

“Kill them,” she commanded him. “Whatever the price.”

It was his way to submit to the prayers of a woman alone and in need. So he did as he was bidden.

He came too late to save the young girl; she was already dead.

But it was a pleasure all the same.

Smoke returned to the Puzzle Lands, materializing beside a waystone that marked a crossroads in the East Tangle. He didn’t know the roads well, but he knew this was the most likely way that Seök would come because it was a good road that indulged in only the amount of wandering necessary to negotiate the ridges.

The first thing he noticed when he returned was a strange tension in the threads that underlay the road. They felt as if they’d just been run—and not by him.

At once he was alert.

His first concern was for Ketty. He looked for her in the threads. He and Ketty were bound to each other so he found her at once. She was still riding the damned horse, making her slow way up the road in the company of Seök and that bastard Nedgalvin. Before long they would reach the crossroads—

The threads stirred with a faint vibration. Smoke noticed it only because he was already seeking for Ketty. He looked for its cause, but the vibration faded before he could track it to its source. He shivered, certain that some force, some power, some spirit, was close by. He had no idea what it was, but he would find out, no matter if he had to hunt it in the forest or in the threads.

He sat down with his back against the waystone. Out of caution, he drew his sword from its scabbard and laid it across his lap. Then he began to meditate on the structure of the threads.

Two farmers passed by him. He paid no attention to them at all, but they feared him anyway and left sweet cakes beside him to purchase his good humor before they hurried on down the road. They were gone from sight when he again felt a flutter in the threads. He was on his feet even before a white mist swept from the pines. With his right hand he held his sword high, ready to strike, as a Hauntén woman took form in front of him.

Thellan
.

She who had aided Pellas in the abduction of Britta. All the frustration, all the fury of that hour came back to Smoke. He lunged at her, swinging his sword in a great roundhouse stroke. Thellan jumped back in shock. “I am unarmed!” she shouted.

“I don’t care!”

He’d grown used to the sling. His balance was perfect as he lunged at her again, first with a jab that she evaded, then with a swift slice that would have done damage except that she dissolved into mist. The mist retreated and she materialized again a dozen feet away. She glared at him, affronted. “I did not come here to fight with you! I am unarmed.”

“How did you find your way back into the Puzzle Lands?”

“I haven’t left.” Her voice had gone inexplicably soft: husky and seductive. He felt threads twine around him as she spoke. “I’ve waited for you, Smoke. Didn’t I promise to?”

He shifted his feet, beginning to stalk slowly around her, watching for the least moment of inattention. “You promised to come after me. Why have you come unarmed?” He thought of Nedgalvin and his skill at throwing a sword, and wished he’d practiced at it. If he could, he would have murdered her right then. It mattered nothing to him that she was unarmed. He preferred it.

The threads she tried to cast around him broke and slipped away. Her eyes widened, and for the first time she looked afraid. “You’re still angry over the child.”

“Of course I am!”

“Don’t make it a feud. It was a debt that was owed. It’s paid now.”

“Don’t mistake it,” he told her. “I’ll get Britta back if I have to burn the Wild Wood to do it.”

A look of puzzlement came over her. She whispered as if to herself, “Wasn’t it you? That lust I felt in the hall . . .”

Smoke’s lip curled. “It wasn’t me.” Thellan was a beauty, but he hated her all the same. He lunged again. He caught her in a moment when her mind was elsewhere. The sword’s tip touched her throat. Smoke glimpsed a flash of crimson blood as she spun aside. Then she was gone again into mist. This time she fled, streaming away to the east. Smoke followed her into the threads.

Never before had he trailed another through the weft and warp of the world, but he knew the Hauntén had followed his lead into the Puzzle Lands. He knew it could be done. And when he looked he saw the way at once. It was a vibrating path, akin to the leaves in a thicket that are left trembling after a deer has retreated from his arrows. He swept after her, coming up on her ghostly essence with unexpected speed.

Not knowing what was possible, he let instinct guide him. He surrounded her. The pattern of his threads coiled around hers, binding her, arresting her motion in the world-beneath where nothing may remain fixed. So they both became solid creatures, spilling together into the world.

Thellan was unready. She lost her balance and fell rolling across the forest floor. Blood leaked from her throat though the wound was slight, not nearly enough to kill her.

Good.

In that moment, Smoke decided he would not kill her after all. Not yet anyway. Not when he might use her to trade for Britta.

He was still on his feet, sword in hand, so he lunged after her, determined to use his steel blade to pin her in the world just as he’d been pinned.

But the lust that had preoccupied Thellan before was gone. Fear drove her now. She vanished within the threads as his sword stabbed down, so that the blade sliced uselessly through mist. But she formed up again not far away. “I came to make peace with you!”

“I don’t want peace! I want my daughter.”

“Best you protect your wife, because I’m going to kill her as soon as I’m able.” With these words, Thellan dropped again into the world-beneath and this time she shot straight away through the trees. But Smoke couldn’t tell if she went east or west because he didn’t know where he was and the trees in their summer leaf hid the sky so that each direction looked the same.

Let her go then! Let her go. Time to return to Ketty.

He slipped into the world-beneath and raced with all speed back to the Puzzle Lands.

Ketty was still riding the damned horse. He formed up beside her in a swirl of gray smoke that made the animal shy and almost unseated her. “Are you all right?” Smoke demanded as he scrambled to grab the reins of her stupid horse before it could run away with her.

Ketty looked at him, first in astonishment, and then with a sudden rush of anger. “Where have you been? I was so afraid. And why are you covered in blood and dirt? What have you been doing? You told me you were done with murdering, but it isn’t so, is it?”

Smoke glanced in irritation at the bloody sword in his hand. He shoved it into his back scabbard, where the evidence of gore was not so apparent. “I never exactly said that.”

Seök had been riding ahead, but now he turned back, while Nedgalvin brought his horse so close to Ketty’s that both animals danced, flicking their ears in irritation. “Been out slaughtering more women and children, Dismay?”

Smoke had promised Takis to endure the Lutawan, but he had not promised to endure insults. He pulled his sword out of its scabbard again. The only question in his mind: Whether to attack Nedgalvin directly, or his horse. Nedgalvin drew his own blade, but Ketty had other ideas. “Stop it!” she shouted, turning her horse, using it to force Nedgalvin back. “Stop it now!”

Smoke grabbed her reins again. “Are you crazy? He’ll kill you!”

“I don’t care about him! I want the truth from you. You didn’t really kill women and children, did you?”

“No. Just a company of Lutawan soldiers who had raped and murdered a young girl.”

Ketty turned to glare at Nedgalvin. Smoke was surprised to see him look shamefaced. “War is a terrible thing,” he murmured as he put his sword away. Smoke was startled by these words. The Koráyos soldiers would say the very same thing to one another when they did things (when he did things) that were inexcusable.

Smoke slid his own sword back into its scabbard. “Have you seen any sign of the Hauntén today?”

Nedgalvin looked suddenly eager. “Are they around? That whore Thellan—she was a beauty. I’d like to see her again.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Smoke suggested.

Then Seök surprised them all by speaking. “I thought the presence I sensed along the road was you.”

Smoke couldn’t look at the man without wanting to kill him, but he was bound by his oath. “It was Thellan. She’s been hunting me, but I’ll ride with you now, and if she comes again I’ll kill her.”

“Smoke, no!” Ketty protested. “If you kill her, they’ll never give us Britta back.”

Smoke frowned, considering this. Was Ketty right? Really, this was too complicated. “Well, with luck she won’t come.”

Seök handed him the reins of the spare horse. “Tighten up the girth,” he advised. Smoke could tell he was angry, but it didn’t matter. Did it?

A hard rain fell late in the afternoon, striking freezing blows against the bare skin of Smoke’s back and shoulders and forcing him to get out his coat. With Ketty’s help he got his right arm into the sleeve. Then she lifted the coat around his shoulders and secured the first button, but he wouldn’t let her do anymore. “I’m not a child,” he growled, shooing her away. “I can button my own coat.”

“Fine! Have at it.”

His cold fingers struggled to make the buttons work, and twice he caught Ketty watching him with a critical eye. So when at last he managed it, he gave her a disdainful look. “I told you I didn’t need help.”

To his smug satisfaction, she turned her gaze to the Dread Hammer, beseeching help for herself, no doubt.

At day’s end the rain ceased, but fog took its place. All was silent except for the dripping of water until suddenly a tinkling of pretty chimes sounded from the trees all around them. Almost as soon as the ringing began the music of the chimes retreated, rolling away to the east in a wave of sweet sound.

“What in God’s kingdom is that?” Nedgalvin asked. Then, as if just realizing it, “There’s no wind to stir up so many chimes.”

Smoke was secretly glad Nedgalvin had asked, because he wanted to know too, but he didn’t want to let Nedgalvin know he didn’t know.

Seök glanced at him as if he had a perfect understanding of Smoke’s puzzled thoughts. “It’s the trees,” he said. “They keep watch in the East Tangle, and ring the chimes whenever anyone approaches a border post.”

“The trees?” Nedgalvin said. “Do you take me for a fool?”

Smoke snorted. “This is not the Lutawan Kingdom,” he reminded Nedgalvin. “Don’t abuse Seök for answering you truthfully—though maybe he should be less free with the Koráy’s secrets?”

Seök shrugged.

They went on. Before long they smelled wood smoke, and soon afterward a stern voice called to them from out of the fog, “Stop now and identify yourselves.”

They had been discovered by a company of Koráyos soldiers, who had come to investigate the chimes. Some of these soldiers were friends of Seök from his days in the army, so on that night they slept under a roof and were warm.

The border post was nestled in a pass at the summit, so they began the next day with a descent, following a barely visible track down through the forest. Smoke stayed close to Ketty and brooded over the threat made by Thellan the Hauntén. He didn’t doubt she would keep her word and come after Ketty if she had the chance—because that’s what he would do. At midmorning he reined in his horse. Nedgalvin and Seök were riding ahead and didn’t notice, but Ketty stopped beside him. “What is it?”