The Legend of Asahiel: Book 03 - The Divine Talisman (66 page)

The Tuthari snorted. “Dashing. Are we finished here, then?”

The pair accompanied him back to camp, where they consumed a hurried meal before resuming the journey east. Whatever malady or concerns had driven Annleia from him the previous day appeared to have passed. She was his closest companion once more, and seemed to regard him as hers. They traveled quietly much of the time, alert for any sign of enemies. The rest of the time, she peppered him with questions, as she had while they’d made their way down from the mountains. After yesterday’s solitude, Torin found himself happy to answer just about anything, so long as it kept her near him and his darker thoughts at bay.

There was little he felt uncomfortable sharing with her anyway. He had already confessed to her his life’s story and let her judge him for it. Having shed the terrible burden of his secret about her mother, there was nothing left to hide. He still felt awkward about prying into
her
past, but, so long as only she was listening, he regarded his own as an open scroll.

Even when she began asking him about Marisha—and later, Dyanne—he found himself speaking openly of his feelings for each. Difficult as it was at times to understand his own inconstant emotions, he described them as best he could, ever more flattered by Annleia’s seeming interest. He did not believe it to be of a romantic nature, and would not have known how to react otherwise. But the mere fact that she should want to know things about him that had no discernible bearing upon their quest helped him to feel as though he
wasn’t
, perhaps, the most detestable man alive.

“And it doesn’t bother you?” she asked at one point, “that Allion and Marisha—your friends—developed their relationship behind your back?”

“How could it? I practically forced them together.” Though it still felt strange, his only regret was not knowing sooner of the bond his friends had formed, so that he might have felt free to express his own feelings to Dyanne.

“And Dyanne…Would you return to her if you could? Would you tell her this time how you truly feel?”

He resisted the reflexive urge to reach for the pendant Dyanne had given him in farewell. “If she has found happiness,” he said, thinking carefully, “that is enough for me.”

Annleia gave him a long, searching look, but did not challenge his claim.

They forded the trunk of the Emerald River near midafternoon, to the north of where it branched east and west along its southerly course. Soon after, Annleia separated from him again. When she did not return after another hour, Torin strode forward to join her—only to find her unreceptive to his efforts at further communication. The chilly turn left him wondering again what he might have said or done to frighten her off. Or perhaps it was something he
hadn’t
done. He thought to question her more directly, but with Crag
and a handful of Hrothgari within earshot, he did not want to risk starting an argument over so tiny an issue.

On the other hand, they only had so many days left before reaching the coast. Should they not be taking every opportunity to discuss what needed to be done? Granted, so much of it was puzzles in the dark. But those puzzles were not going to solve themselves.

Perhaps she felt that his advice could only confuse her. Perhaps she needed this time to herself to prepare in her own way for the forthcoming challenge.

Perhaps he should forget about her and concentrate on doing the same.

A long, lonely afternoon gave way to a long, lonely evening. He should have been grateful that they hadn’t yet come under attack. He should have found peace in the presence of his comrades, whose expertise spared him a great deal of guesswork on this trek. All he need do was follow along and try not to stumble upon the roots and knobs and tripping ground cover. Instead, he found himself wondering constantly what Annleia might be thinking, and why she chose to keep it from him.

His own disposition soured further when, an hour or so before midnight, the forest fell away suddenly on either side in a charred swath of trampled deadwood. Black boughs carpeted the land like battlefield leavings. Stripped and stunted boles poked forth like grave markers from an ashen earth. Across this ravaged wasteland, a chill wind blew sullen and mournful.

The trail of the dragonspawn
, Torin reflected dourly. Even now, two full seasons later, the devastation wrought by that unholy brood seemed complete and inescapable, a scar from which the forest might never fully heal. Marisha’s home had fallen to that scourge, and with it the kindly healers who had nursed him back from the brink of death. He had all but forgotten—parts of a past that should have haunted him forever. It all seemed now as though it had happened to someone else.

As he picked his way across that nightmare landscape, however, his eye drew here and there to the budding shoots of fresh vegetation. The more he searched, the more such signs he saw. Rotting logs were slick with new moss. Nightbirds hunted insects come to nest amid the decay. Merely the first cries, perhaps, of a world reborn, yet enough to make him wonder if, with time, success against the Illysp might allow life to replenish what he had stolen from it.

To his initial horror, Vashen decided it to be a good place to set camp. There was plenty of debris with which to erect shelters and defenses, she said, and the near-naked terrain would give them a clear view of any unwelcome approach. At this point, it seemed nothing out there was hunting them, but the warder general wasn’t going to start taking unnecessary chances.

Torin did not care to explain to them that lying here would feel like lying with the ghosts of those he’d slain. So he bit his tongue and assisted his dwarven comrades in making the area more suitable. He considered approaching and working alongside Annleia, but she’d made it quite clear by now that if she wanted his company, she would seek it.

The mood around dinner was somber, the enveloping night a shroud of wary silence. Torin gnawed on a tasteless strip of dried meat, drank his helping of stew, then bid good night to those near him.

The sky was mostly cloudless, so he eschewed the lean-tos and laid his bedroll beside a downed log some distance from the group—hoping that the farther he was from Annleia, the less tempted he would be to let her rule his thoughts. With a steady pace and such long hours, they were making swift time, even through the forest. He had only two more days, perhaps three, before—

“You shouldn’t sleep alone so far from the fire,” Annleia said.

He turned to find her hauling her own roll of blankets up after him. While he stood there staring, she arranged her bedding next to his, then crawled within, behaving as if nothing could be more natural.

“You’re not going to leave me here freezing, are you?” she asked after a moment.

Torin tried not to think too closely on what he felt in that moment. It did no good to consider it. Instead, he lay down beside her, careful not to slide too close.

Annleia shifted nearer, pressing herself up against him. “We’ll be back in the mountains tomorrow,” she said. “Last night we’ll have of soft woodland floor.”

Torin did not want to think about
that
, either. The Skullmars were not a place he had ever hoped to return to. Then again, he had not hoped for any of this.

He said nothing, and within moments was listening to the soft, rhythmic breathing of his slumbering companion. He was almost reluctant to shut his own eyes, to allow this evening to end. When finally he fell asleep, he did so wondering which side of her the morrow might bring.

H
E STIRRED WITH A KISS
from the morning sun, a brush of warmth that infused his soul with hopeful longing. He opened his eyes slowly, carefully, looking to where Annleia had slept beside him. She was already gone.

A shadow slipped over him, as a bank of clouds enshrouded the sun’s beacon. The light had come only to tease him, it seemed, to offer a taste of its treasures before flitting away with them.

By the sound of things, he was the last to awaken this morning. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. When he looked out across the encampment, he found Annleia tending the contents of a steaming kettle.

He approached her tentatively, mulling through a list of possible greetings, seeking the most innocent. “I’ve slept too long,” he said.

She grunted with mock disappointment. “You’re actually a few moments early. I decided it was
my
turn to wake
you
with breakfast.”

“I can go back.”

“May as well eat, now that you’re here.” She offered him a smile. “Just don’t blame me if it’s still a little cold.”

He sat down on a stump across from her, and watched her busy herself with the porridge. He seemed to have found her in favorable spirits. Suddenly, his worries to the contrary seemed unfounded and immature.

He might have lowered his guard too soon. With breakfast ended and the day’s march under way, the swings in mood began. Or so he viewed them. He could not read into her heart or mind, but he knew not how else to characterize her unpredictable and sometimes abrupt shifts in behavior. Playful, almost daring, advances would be followed by long periods in which she became inexplicably aloof. One moment, she would not stop staring at him. The next, he could have lit himself afire and scarcely garnered a glance. Altogether, he could make no sense of it.

The forest seemed to thicken with his confusion. U’uyen led them now, seeking a trail, Annleia informed the company, that he had followed before. The hour was difficult to gauge, with the sun screened so thoroughly by the woodland mesh, but Torin judged it to be early afternoon when that trail was found. A
tunnel
, really, that Kylac Kronus had carved through a near-solid wall of underbrush when last Torin had trekked this way.

The Eternal Youth treads upon another path
, Ravar had said of his young friend. Torin could not help but wonder: What
had
happened to Kylac? Would he ever see his friend again? He smirked as he recalled the boy’s infectious confidence, wishing he had some of it now—not only for his looming confrontation with the Illysp, but in dealing with Annleia. Kylac, he was quite certain, would have advised him that no matter—and no woman—was worth such a headache.

And yet, he continued to waste hours, it seemed, wrestling privately with the many reasons Annleia might have to treat him so. Any number of them might explain one set of behaviors or the other, but he could think of nothing that would account for both.

Each persisted nonetheless, alternating throughout the afternoon, as fickle as the mountain winds. She warmed to him for a time after they had emerged from the suffocating woods and onto the desolate trails of the southern Skullmar foothills—enough so that Torin barely reflected upon the awesome majesty of Mount Krakken hulking to the north amid the pile of broken peaks. Later, the mountain seemed his only companion, a looming, mocking presence. Though dormant, it was worse now, Torin thought, than before. For he now understood the ominous feeling that caused his stomach to tighten.

The power of the Dragon God was among them.

He did find one thing in which to take heart. The path they now traced was well to the south of the valley in which that army of goblin Illychar lay in wait. Though it was possible they had grown tired of their vigil and spread forth to join the slaughter, Torin felt it unlikely. Were the creatures unwilling or too impatient to serve the appointed role, they never would have accepted it. Since they had, they would see it done. And Torin, knowing where they hid, held reasonable hope that his company might be able to escape their notice.

The
rest
of the afternoon, and on into evening, Torin thought back glumly
on the past few days, trying to recall each shift in Annleia’s behavior and its potential cause. He found it to be a vexing, fruitless endeavor.

More and more, he faulted only himself. The sole reason her withdrawals troubled him, he decided, was his growing tendency to indulge too deeply in her imagined affections. Upon each lingering look, each flattering word, each unnecessary physical contact, Torin found himself wondering if there wasn’t something more behind it. He assured himself otherwise. He tried to deny that her flirtations moved him at all. But whenever he caught himself smiling, he could invariably trace the cause of his momentary satisfaction to something Annleia had said or done. Given this, he found it impossible not to look at her in a new light—going so far as to think more positively of what his future might hold should he survive this quest. For all he’d lost or thrown away, was she not someone who might help him to fill the void?

A question you’ve no business asking
, he chided himself—even before U’uyen caught him staring at Annleia as the company settled down, finally, within a pebble-strewn mountain hollow. A stream meandered nearby, thin-running and choked with silt. Torin nevertheless used it to refill his waterskin, as an excuse to escape U’uyen’s knowing scrutiny.

What did it say about him, he wondered, that the question should even find purchase in his thoughts? What of his feelings for Dyanne? What of Annleia’s butchered people? What of the task he’d come here to complete?

How, with all of that, could he possibly be concerned with whether or not Annleia might care for him?

Even then, as he admitted privately the truth of his disgruntlement, he found himself watching her, a moth making study of a flame. Only when she laid herself down near Crag was he able to look away, resolved to riddle himself no more this night.

When he turned, he found U’uyen’s eyes beaming at him, wolflike in the darkness.

I
N THE DEAD OF NIGHT,
the Illychar found them.

The fiends were already within the camp when the first scream woke him—knifing through the silence of his dreams. Torin lunged from his bedroll, tearing the Sword from its scabbard. Its eager, billowing warmth could not quite chase the chill that raked along his spine.

The whirring black forms seemed to be everywhere, their shrieks like daggers in his ears. A pair of Hrothgari had one trapped against a boulder—or so it appeared, until it lashed out at them, blindingly fast, impossibly strong, flaying their throats after slapping their weapons wide. Blood spattered against stone, inklike in the near darkness of moon and stars and low-burning watch fires. The goblin left its enemies choking as it moved on.

Two more dwarves rushed to meet it, and were swatted aside almost as swiftly. Then Torin was there, Sword raised, its crimson aura blazing. The creature’s eyes burned with reflected light an instant before its torso was split in triangular halves.

All were awake now, in a mad scramble for their lives. Torin forced himself to draw a steadying breath, to quell his reflexive panic and attune himself to the conflict. Five—no, six—goblins remained. The northern sentries lay motionless upon their ledge, killed before they could raise the alarm. He scanned the slopes farther up, but the host he dreaded was not there.

Still, half a dozen goblins was more than enough to dispatch a score of dwarves caught unawares in the middle of their slumber. They should have been more secretive, Torin thought. They should have banked their fires and trusted to the night to hide them from prying eyes. Of course, had the goblins happened upon them anyway…

Already, the Illychar sought to scatter the few piles of burning brands, while the Hrothgari formed rank around them. The fires were perhaps the best weapon they had against these creatures of the dark, the only reason his company wasn’t battling blind.

He pushed boldly into the center of camp, hollering in challenge. A pair of goblins closed on him from either side, their snapping, batlike maws lathered in blood. Their approach was blurred, each a whipping cloud of leathery wing and flailing limbs. Barbed claws reached for him—

And grasped at air as he stepped forward and back again, ducking one strike, leaping another. He slashed, spun, drew back to avoid a lethal swipe, then raised his blade to intercept another. Sinewy flesh parted like strands of webbing. Hooks and horns were sheared away; bones cracked and splintered.
A wash of crimson light flashed upon horrid expressions of agony and hatred as his wounded enemies retreated into the surrounding darkness.

He did not give chase, for others were already screaming down upon his position. Two, then three, then four. Torin welcomed them with a feral snarl. Better that they engage him than his friends. He thought of Annleia, but could not sense where she might be. He heard a shout, however, that sounded like Crag. If the Tuthari still lived, Torin assured himself, so, too, did Annleia.

That suspicion was confirmed when a radiant light came bursting in from behind him, into the back of one of his foes. A white fire took hold of it, sending up trailers of black smoke. The light flared again, and another goblin found itself wreathed in sudden flame. Torin cut this one down before it could flee. The first had already done so—directly into a wall of dwarves. Though it lashed out at them in a terrible frenzy, they refused to give way.

The tide had turned. As Torin slew another, the last of the four who had converged upon him surrendered the fight, spinning away with a wail and a flourish.

He turned to help the dwarves, but their foe already lay upon the ground, a hacked-up, smoking ruin. He found another—one of the earlier pair that he had wounded—surrounded by the Powaii. One of the elves was down, but U’uyen and his remaining pair of clansmen had slowed the goblin with strikes of their own. It huffed raggedly, seeking an escape from their tightening noose, swiping out now and again only to suffer another spear-prick from behind. A bear in a pit, that one, its baiting nearly finished.

He spied only a pair of survivors. Each was tearing up the slope, tracing a twister’s random path across the ravaged terrain. A ray of light from Annleia’s wellstone touched the trailing one, but the creature only screeched and stumbled before regaining its balance and flapping on.

Torin considered giving chase, but understood right away that he lacked the speed to catch either one of them. Nor could he know for certain what might lie in wait for him if he did.

He turned slightly as Vashen came up beside him, one side of her face a glistening red stain. “Off to warn their kin, I’ll wager,” she spat, as if sharing his thoughts.

Torin looked back to the Powaii. Their quarry had finally fallen. Spears rose and fell as the creature arched and flapped upon the earth, letting loose a chorus of hideous screams.

“Lookouts,” Torin agreed. “Else they’d not have scattered so easily.”

Annleia ran up to them, her wellstone glowing faintly. She clutched Torin’s arm, her expression worried as she looked him over in search of wounds. She then glanced at Vashen. “Your face,” she gasped.

Blood pulsed from the gouges in the warder general’s cheek. Vashen wiped angrily at the mess. Putting her back to the fleeing goblins, she shouted, “How many are we?”

“Ten,” came the answering cry, which ended in a pained grunt. Torin turned to find Brokk, Vashen’s primary lieutenant, who dropped to one knee,
holding an organ that had slipped from a gash in his side. “Perhaps nine,” he amended, looking strangely at his find.

Vashen cursed under her breath, moving toward Brokk and the rest of her Hrothgari company. Crag took her place with Torin and Annleia at the edge of camp.

“More than half our escort,” the Tuthari growled under his breath. His great axe was still in hand, though he stared disgustedly at its clean edge.

“And this from but a handful of the black devils.”

“If any more were in the area,” Torin offered by way of solace, “they would have finished the job.”

“May be,” Crag allowed. “But make no mistake. What you’re watching there is an alarm being sounded, back through the passes. The rest’ll be en route.”

Torin knew it, and swallowed thickly. So much for evading notice. Ravar’s words haunted him.
A spider’s web does not forbid entry
,
but escape.
And they had most certainly wiggled the first strand.

He looked up at U’uyen, hunched over the remains of his fallen clansman. The Hrothgari were seeing to their own.
For one to press forward
,
the rest must be consumed.
His stomach sickened.

“Come,” Annleia bade them. “Looks like we’re to be getting an early start.”

Upon the slopes, a departing goblin shrieked its own, savage lament.

T
HE SUN WAS SLOW IN
rising that day, as if unable to draw free from the quagmire of night. By the time it crested the shattered horizon between him and the eastern coast, Torin had already grown sick of the aches—both mental and physical—that weighed upon him.

They had burned eleven bodies before setting forth from the site of the goblin ambush. Brokk had made Vashen put him down alongside the others who had been slain or mortally wounded. His own wound might not have killed him for days, but killed him it had, he’d insisted. He wouldn’t be able to keep up with them while it bled and slowly festered, and the company could not afford to hold back.

“Besides,” the dwarf had said while arguing with his warder general, “I’m rather sure Tegg is waiting for me.”

A brother, Torin had learned later, left for dead in the first rover to have stalled, way back in the northern Gaperon. “Gave the order myself,” Vashen had added morosely.

Torin had attempted a feeble apology, which only seemed to make the dwarf angrier.

“We left our hole in the earth to fight,” she had snapped, “and are seeing this as a better way to do it. Just be sure you and the elf-lass do your part when the time comes.”

Brokk would have been the twelfth given to the flames, except that the Powaii had not allowed
their
companion to be burned. Instead, they had re
treated into a ravine to carve his body into unusable pieces, which they left to be fed upon by scavengers. All but the heart, Torin had noticed, watching their ritual with a mix of fascination and revulsion. That, they divided among themselves.

“For his journey in the afterlife,” Annleia had explained. “That the strength of the departed may be bolstered by them who carry on.”

She had marched at his side throughout those dismal, predawn hours, clinging to his arm and leaning close. Torin didn’t know if she was trying to
lend
support or
draw
it, but regretted that he did not have more to offer. He felt guilty for having thought harshly of her before.

With the rising of the sun, however, most of the surviving members of his party seemed to regain a measure of their fighting spirit. Subdued silence gave way to happier stories about their fallen comrades. Torin only heard what Crag or Annleia would translate for him, but understood it all to be some form of ongoing eulogy. The bones and ashes were likely still warm, he marveled, and already this people had mustered the strength to press forward with unfettered determination. He only wished he could say the same.

As it had before, the road he traveled on U’uyen’s naked heels merely skirted the southern Skullmar peaks, bearing them over and through what were truly just foothills. Only, these foothills were as monstrously tall, steep, and jagged as any other full-fledged mountain range Torin had trekked through. Trails were narrow; winds were sudden and strong. Pits and fissures abounded, gaping hungrily on all sides. Slow, steady, cautious of their footing and wary of enemies they now knew had been—or soon would be—alerted to their presence, Torin and his companions crawled on.

He resolved not to spend this day fretting over Annleia as he had the bulk, now, of the past week. An easy vow to make while she clung to him, or involved him in her every word. But she left him, of course, as had been her pattern of late, moving ahead or dropping behind to engage in private thoughts or discussions with other members of the party. Whenever he caught her frowning, he would assume that it was at him, though he could not say why. Either way, it seemed odd that she should exclude him from anything, or feel the need to separate herself from him when they had bound themselves to one another—or so he had thought—for the purpose of this quest.

Eventually, his resolution crumbled. Once again, he became as frustrated with her as he was by the uncertain perils that lay ahead. Such bitterness was made worse by his failure that morning to better defend the others, and by the imminent threat of attack. But it all came back to Annleia and her bizarre pattern of approach and withdrawal, leaving him increasingly determined to understand why.

At times, her whole focus seemed to be on coaxing him from his shell. Yet the moment he began to emerge, she startled and drew into hers. It had gotten to be that when she
did
converse with him, he examined carefully every thought seeking to pass through his lips, worried that something in his words or tone might cause her to sour.

It seemed to make no difference. No matter how cautiously he spoke, her moods continued to swing erratically, more often and more abruptly than before. Having puzzled over her behavior too much and for too long already, he had quite grown sick of it. Let her decide, one way or the other, if he was to be her companion or just an oaf forced upon her by circumstance. Whatever her choice, at least he would know his place, and would be able to stand in it without further confusion.

Such feelings, though largely purposeless and juvenile, made the passing hours feel like days. The treacherous winds and challenging terrain didn’t help. Each time a rogue gust threatened to topple him or another member of his company from a precarious perch, Torin would mutter to himself in silent frustration. Each time a bend or rise gave view to only the next bridge or valley or defile, he would wonder if they were but traveling in hopeless circles. Half the time, he would end up looking to Annleia—near or far—as if this were all somehow her fault.

It wasn’t, of course. And he had no right to be cross with her for any of it—not even for the hurt and bewilderment her capricious actions caused him.

Not after the inexcusable suffering
he
had caused
her
.

A bloody sun disappeared into the teeth of the mountains behind them. Shadows lengthened, and color and warmth drained from the world. Now and then, Torin thought he tasted the sea upon the wind, and hoped they were drawing close. He did not even want to think about the blisters upon his feet, or whether his belabored muscles would ever be allowed to mend. All he wanted was for this damnable journey to be ended, for the circle of his life’s misdeeds to close.

Before midnight, they came at last to a bridge of stone Torin recognized. It wound its way through a narrow defile whose floor was slowly being devoured by a widening chasm. This was it, he thought, the final tunnel before they reached the coast. He hadn’t recognized anything else, but he felt certain about this.

Sure enough, at the other end of the wind-chewed path, the horizon opened up, the moonlit sky touching down upon the silver stain of the ocean. He half expected Ravar to be waiting for him, to choose this very moment to unleash His wave of cleansing devastation. But the sea appeared empty. Evidently, the Dragon God wished for him to suffer a while longer.

It took them another hour to descend from the heights, and another after that to creep up near the site of the hole through which Torin had last entered the ruins.

The view made him blanch.

What
had
been a tiny pit—through which he and his former companions had lowered themselves one at a time to a rubble-strewn hall far below—was now a gaping cave mouth yawning downslope toward the still-distant ocean. A tumble of boulders spilled inward against the lower lip—a landslide, but expertly laid, providing a natural stair for those seeking to enter the cave’s depths.