The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (79 page)

But he could not say he had never considered it before.

*****

Far to the east, curtains were drawn open in a wooden house on a cobbled street, and two startled faces looked out upon the white-armored soldiers at their door.  One occupant, the man, growled his intent to fight, but the woman set a hand on his arm and bid him in a watery voice to look more closely at the soldier who led them.

After a soft yet steely conversation, they opened the door, and both crossed from the red-lined shelter of the house to the undefended step.

“
How can this be, Malin?  We were told you died in battle,” said Vriene Damiel, her hands outstretched toward the commanding soldier.  Along the street, other citizens had gathered—men, women, children, all tense, all keeping their distance from the soldiers with their white, flame-marked armor.  A few gestured subtly toward the husband, Sogan, indicating that they would come to the couple’s aid if required.

But the commanding soldier smiled ruefully, his helm tucked under his arm, black hair pulled back from his bluff features and a golden pendant gleaming at his throat.  “Such are the miracles of the Imperial Light, mother,” said Malin Damiel.  “I have been sent to see that you witness them first-hand.”

And at the glimmer of tears in his beloved wife’s eyes, at the ache in his own chest, Sogan found he could not call the townsfolk to war.  When his wife took his hand and stepped down to the street, he could only follow.

Cob and his companions did not stay long in the caravan-shelter.  The white hawk plagued Cob’s dreams, pulling him awake well before dawn to pace restlessly while the others rubbed sleep from their eyes.  Though he waited until they finished drying clothing and mending gear, cooking, packing, it was hard for him to focus.  The hawk kept calling.

On their way out the door, Lark asked him why he was barefoot.  Too edgy to answer in words, he summoned his antlers and the thick sheets of bark and stone that made his armor.  It was easy in this healthy land, and from Lark’s expression, no further explanation was needed.

That day’s travel went swiftly and smoothly, with Cob breaking trail for the others like the prow of a ship, every hoofbeat on the snowy earth invigorating him.  His strength was his herd’s strength, flowing from him to the others, and though he felt Dasira and Ilshenrir hanging back from his aura, Fiora and Arik and Lark took tangible comfort from it, their steps sure on the uneven ground, their skin unchapped by the cold wind.

So steady was the run that he did not want to pause for anything.  Not dinner, not nightfall.  At some point, though, he sensed protests from the others.  The white hawk flew onward, and he wanted to follow it through the thickening forest, across the heightening hills, but he knew he should stop.  Clouds huddled ahead, spreading grey tendrils across the star-strewn sky.  It would be wrong to drag them into the teeth of a blizzard.

Still, it took a tin cup to the back of the head before he realized that he had just thought of stopping, not actually done it.  Even then he merely slowed, looking back to see what was wrong.

That was when they tackled him.

Three women and a wolf were not so much weight as to hold him down, but after flinging Fiora off and seeing her barely miss a tree, he managed to control himself.  Initially their words sounded like gibberish, and it took him a while to focus well enough to understand what they were yelling about.  Finally though, 'freezing' and 'sleep' broke through.

After carving a shelter from the crisp-frozen snow, he let them guide him into it so they could huddle around their little fire, and accepted the bowl that was offered though he felt no hunger.  When Fiora snuggled up to him afterward, he could not focus on her.  He wanted to, but the white hawk kept drawing his eyes, hovering above the shelter and glowing through the ice.  It would not let him concentrate on anything else.

The next two days passed in the same way: a fugue state of constant travel broken only by the needs of the others.  He dreamed ancient dreams as they drew closer to the Trivestean Tablelands.  In them, the hills lowered and the valleys filled until all was a warm, shallow sea.  Stars wheeled in the sky, witnessed by trees of stranger kinds, and dense flocks of birds passed overheard, each twice the size of a man.

The tin cup intruded periodically.  He learned how to ignore it then forced himself not to, because though he could measure the heartbeats of each member of his herd—except for the wraith, who had no heart—he could not read their minds.  Once or twice, he stopped at their behest only to realize a storm was already upon them, thick curtains of snow obscuring the path as lightning crackled in the heights.  That he had not seen the flash or heard the thunder only told him that he had gone past needing eyes or ears.  He sensed with his hooves, with his memories.  All else was transient and thus unworthy of attention.

By the fourth day, they had mounted a good distance through the slow upthrust of the landscape and were running toward low canyons—the toehold of the Trivestean territory.  He sensed the checkpoints ahead, the palisades of dead wood and the hollows in the rock walls where keen-eyed men and women kept watch.  There were no roads in this land, only the canyon paths, and all had been bottled up by the Trivesteans.

He did not stop—barely even slowed.  The palisade stakes were embedded in the ground and so they easily became trees, their limbs stretching to trap the watchers inside their shelters.  The gate spread open before him, pulled by fresh vines, and he charged through with the herd on his hooves, the wraith’s magic keeping back the arrows that sprang for them from all sides.  Shouts rang out but only briefly.  None gave pursuit.

As they passed into the shadows of the plateaus, he heard the tolling of an alarm-bell far above.  He marked it, but was not concerned.

Unwise, perhaps, since the next two days were spent evading the Trivesteans through the landscape they knew so well.  In the shadows of the canyons, the chill in the air never lifted, and light sliced down like a narrow knife to reflect on cascades of ice.  The white ringhawk led Cob onward through a maze of gullies, tunnels and eroded pillars, and his hooves stayed steady on the frozen rock, his herd sustained by his stability.

The Trivesteans never showed themselves in the canyons.  Always they were above, on the swaying bridges that linked the plateaus or on ledges or at cave mouths, always shooting or dropping stones but never approaching.  Black-headed eagles screamed in the sky, circling like sentinels, and Cob knew them as extensions of his enemies.  Pets, perhaps, or working beasts.  No friends to the natural order.

The deeper they went into Trivestean territory, the more thoroughly the cliffs were carved.  Isolated ledge-villages, elaborate cliff-towns, towering fortresses.  At night the canyon walls were freckled with light that reflected endlessly from the ice, and he sensed the living souls within the stone.  Loving, sleeping, standing watch—every one encased by the plateau rock like a firefly in a loose fist, oblivious to the peril that passed below them.

He did nothing.  Arrows could not faze him.  There was no need to retaliate.

By the end of the sixth day, canyon-land gave way to mountains.  Without the confining walls around them, his herd—which had been quiet throughout the Trivestean crossing—suddenly mutinied.  He broke from their tackle easily and ran a good hundred yards before he realized that they were not following.

Reluctantly, he compromised.  He would stay still until dawn, and they would stop throwing things and yelling.  Arik sat on him when he suggested that he could just carry some of them, and when he contemplated aloud what wolves tasted like, the girls said dirty things.  He threw sticks at them, and when they threw them back, he declared that they were violating the terms of their agreement.  Nevertheless, a nice campfire was eventually had, during which no one else sat on him.

Early the next morning, the six ran the rugged foothills, followed by the howls of wolves and the gazes of other, stranger creatures.  Some tried for his attention, but he only had eyes for the hawk.  Ahead, nearer and nearer, the firebird glowed in his mind, and he raced toward it with a fervor that bordered on madness.

For those who followed him, there was some debate as to whether he had already crossed the line.

*****

Now, midway through the seventh day, they were fully within the tree-shrouded Garnet Mountains.  From beneath those interlocked boughs, it was impossible to see either the plateaus below or the peaks above, only to watch their feet as they scrambled over ungainly roots and jumped the many narrow clefts and ice-filled runnels that split the rock.  The sunlight that managed to slant through the trees made the landscape glitter painfully.

Dasira moved mechanically, numbed by something more than the cold.  The Guardian insulated them from the season; though she could feel the chill, it did not penetrate her skin.  Likewise, the wind did not burn her or kick fine grains of ice in her face due to Ilshenrir, who maintained a wedge of energy around them that parted the air as easily as Cob parted the snow.

Nor was it the Guardian’s aura, for after the first debilitating touch, it had changed as if it could sense her distress.  It was no longer a crushing weight but a current that pushed her forward, moved her in time with the others.

Which was a blessing.  Their incessant travel—more than a hundred miles thus far—had drained her of all but their continuing momentum, especially since she could not share in the spiritual bond that connected the others.  Her bracer lay dormant on her arm, and though her body had mostly mended, she was inundated by aches and exhaustion any time they stopped.

The others fared better, but their supplies were nearly gone, and the Garnet Mountain Territory was just wilderness.  There would be no chance to restock unless Lark called upon the Shadow Folk.

Lark had tried to get Cob’s permission for that, but he had been too deep in the Guardian to acknowledge her, and so she had not dared it.  No one knew what the eiyets might do around Cob in this state.  He paid no attention to anyone, only stared into the empty sky during the few marks they were stopped.  Though Dasira was privately amused to see him ignore Fiora’s advances—especially by the look on the Trifolder’s face—she worried for him.

For all of them.

Even with a map, she could not have pinpointed where they were.  The Garnet Mountain Territory encompassed thousands of miles of trackless terrain, and though it was inhabited, none of its ‘people’ built towns because none of them had to walk on two feet unless they felt like it.  The Trivesteans stood vigilant against feral skinchangers or the occasional war party of boar-folk, but their own war parties rarely found anything to attack; it was too easy for the natives to melt away into the woods, the mountains, the river-cut cave systems that riddled this land.

What sort of destination they were being led to, she could not say, but she did not like the options.

No one else knew any more than she did, and Cob only talked about ‘the firebird’.  She dimly remembered his firebird-dreams from the Crimson camp, but the only connection she could see was mountains, and those dreams had taken place in Kerrindryr.  The Garnets were lower, softer, older peaks, nothing like Kerrindryr’s Thundercloaks.

Worst of all, it seemed that they would only know they had arrived once they got there.  According to Cob, he was following the ringhawk exclusively.  He did not see any hallucinatory destination in the distance, no pillar of light or sign in the sky.  When they stumbled upon their goal, would it be in the black of night, with all of them crushed by exhaustion?

So tired, so mentally withdrawn was she that when they found a path at a mark past noon, she did not realize it until Lark said, “Holy Shadow, civilization?”

Dasira stared down at the stone beneath her feet, then ahead.  The path wound eastward, upward, a furrow carved in the land that could once have been a streambed but soon showed signs of paving-slates.  Her heart hiked up to her throat, making a lump there. 
No civilization in the Garnets
, she told herself as icicle-edged ledges mounted to either side of the cut, evergreens looming high above. 
No towns, no humans.

But there were steps carved into the rock—short flights that led up the rise of the road.  Cob took them two or three at a time, the others dragged along in his wake.  Dasira eyed the gash of sky above them, where ice crystals sifted down from the wind-touched heights, but no birds watched, dead or alive.

All was silent but for their panting breaths, their scuffing steps.  A thread of tension laced them together even as their line stretched out, the humans lagging back.  When the narrow path became a long flight of stairs, Dasira watched in dismay as Cob sprinted up it, antlers out, Arik at his heels.  Fiora was barely halfway up the climb and Dasira at the bottom when she saw him halt at the top.

He never learns
, she thought, but nothing nabbed him from that slot of sky, and she kept her eyes on him the whole way up.

By the time she crested the cleft, her body had gone past complaints and was on to serious threats.  Her legs felt like they might fall off at the knee, and the threads on her right side—where the haelhene blast had caught her—had loosened with fatigue, letting the muscles sag.  It was no fit state to fight in.  She felt the weakness from her hip to her shoulder and knew it would affect her grip, her speed, everything.

It was with relief, then, that she saw no enemies before them.  But what she did see boded worse.

At the top of the cleft, the land plateaued for some distance, lightly wooded and almost flat, and so it was easy to see the ruins that clad the rock.  Once it might have been a village or small town, but some ancient disaster had struck it—most likely an earthquake, to judge by the state of the cliffs beyond.  Natural rubble mixed with broken masonry in the streets, turning them impassable, and not a single wall or pillar remained intact.  Snowbanks and winter-killed vines shrouded the fallen stones in profusion, with other opportunistic plant life sticking bare branches through the cover.  One tall soren tree shot crookedly from the throat of a half-collapsed well, its height dating its age in centuries.

No recent civilization
, Dasira amended, though her history lessons told her that the Garnets had never been settled.

She looked to Cob and found that unlike the others, he was not staring at the ruins.  His attention had turned eastward to the broken cliffs and the second set of steps that made a winding path up the rock.  Trees shrouded whatever might lie beyond.

He started to move toward them, and she reached instinctively to catch his arm.

The gaze he leveled upon her was flat black, utterly inhuman.  She recoiled despite the lack of aura, the emptiness in his face like a slap.