The Sword Of Erren-dar (Book 2) (29 page)

 He led the way up the steep slope to the bridge, with Gorm
bringing up the rear, walking backwards, still prey to misgivings.

 The neat cobbles that had once paved the bridge were now
largely invisible, hidden under an accumulated layer of soil and old leaves. A
tall weed, with pungent yellow flowers, had taken the opportunity to colonise
the space, but it was the weed that caused Vesarion to stop and examine the
ground closely.

He summoned Eimer. “Look,” he said, pointing to a trail of
broken yellow flower-heads that clearly marked the recent passage of someone,
or something, across the bridge.

 When Gorm saw it too, he instantly went down on all fours
and started sniffing around in a rather hound-like fashion.

 “Turog,” he finally announced. “Maybe six, maybe more. Big
ones, too. Many heavy boots.”

 “Your kind? Or Red Turog?” Vesarion asked.

 “Can’t tell. Red Turog means big trouble.”

 Acting on his words, he set off at an ungainly run towards 
the far end of the bridge and disappeared into the grasses without waiting to
see if anyone was following or not.

 For three tense but uneventful days, they crossed the great
plain, heading unerringly northwards, mystified by the absence of any
mountains.

 The only blot on the journey was Gorm, who, convinced they
were being followed, kept checking behind him in an unnerving way that soon was
unsettling everyone – especially as there was nothing to be seen, even from the
height of the saddle.

 The Turog, in the meantime, found an outlet for his unease
by twice managing to purloin Vesarion’s silver box. By this time, it was
becoming something of a ritual. Vesarion, after lighting the fire, would
securely place the little box in his pack and with equal inevitability, it
would be missing the next morning. He would say nothing, but with an air of
weariness, he would cross to the culprit and hold out his hand, who, equally
silently, surrendered the desired item.

 Then, on the morning of the fourth day, they crested a rise
to see something in the indistinct distance that explained the lack of mountains.

The sun had hidden its face since they had left the bridge,
lurking secretively behind a covering of low, grey clouds that pressed heavily
on the plain, right down to the horizon, rendering it cool and a little
cheerless. Now as they halted on top of the ridge, staring at the shifting, gauzy
veil of purple-white, smeared with grey in the far distance, the clouds began
to part company with the land. They gathered up skirts of silver rain and
caught up petticoats of white mist until bit by bit they revealed what they had
hidden for so long – the indigo-blue flanks of a range of majestic mountains.

 “The Mountains of Discelion!” exclaimed Eimer.“They were there
all the time!”

 “Turog call them Cloud Mountains,” volunteered Gorm,
“Nearly always covered in cloud.”

 As they watched, the low clouds rose higher and higher,
unveiling more of the mountains. Darker smudges on their lower reaches
suggested patches of forest, but when the boiling cauldron of grey and white
finally lifted altogether, it could be seen that the jagged, glistening peaks
were thickly draped in snow.

 As they crossed the rolling plain, drawing closer to their
goal, the day grew sultry and dull. The cheerful wind, their almost constant
companion, died away completely to be replaced by utter stillness. Every
delicate frond of grass hung motionless in the air and the only sounds to be
heard were the steady thud of the horses’ hooves and the occasional creak of a
saddle. In the distance, the slate-grey clouds had descended once more to
embrace the peaks. They seethed fretfully around the snowfields and descended
into every fold and pass as if in pursuit of vengeance. By the afternoon their
undersides began to be occasionally lit by flickers of lightning, turning them
a strange greenish colour, and long afterwards, across the still plain, the
faint grumble of thunder would reach the ears of the travellers.

 Gorm told them that thunderstorms were common in the Cloud Mountains,
sometimes creating torrents of rain that turned the streams in the valleys into
roaring cataracts. He also informed them that they had now reached the extent
of his knowledge of the area. Stopping suddenly at some invisible line drawn
across the ground known only to himself, he announced that he had never been
closer to the Cloud Mountains than that. He then opened his mouth to deliver
his usual valediction about something that incurred his displeasure, when he
caught Bethro’s eye and thought the better of it.

 “Mountains dangerous,” he advised, altering what he had
been intending to say with dexterity. “Full of wolfs and storms and too much
snow……and other things, perhaps.”

 “What other things?” Iska asked, alarmed by his ominous
tone.

 “Don’t know. Told you, never been there. Other Turog tell
many stories – but maybe not true,” he added comfortingly.

They were now so close to the mountains that they had to
tilt their heads backwards to look up at the dizzying heights. The range seemed
dauntingly immense, but as it turned out, the Vale of Rithlin was not difficult
to find. Its size and distinctive funnel shape rendered it unmissable. It
burrowed its way relentlessly into the heart of the range, immensely broad at
its base but rapidly becoming narrower and steeper as it forced its way between
the outlying ridges of rock. Although the valley was grassy where it met the
plain, much further up, it became masked in bristling, dark-green pine forests
that smothered every ridge and fold, except here and there where the bare,
iron-hard rocks exposed their bones to the sky. Higher up still, the trees
began to thin out as they became dusted with snow and then stopped with great
abruptness altogether at the line above which the snow permanently lay, winter
and summer.

 As they watched, the restless clouds swirling around the heights
opened and closed, constantly changing the vista. Sometimes they allowed a
glimpse of the hard majesty of the peaks. At others, they cloaked the pinnacles
only to reveal the lower slopes draped in dark swathes of damp forest. Every
now and then, a stray shaft of sunlight found a fleeting pathway through the
besieging army of vapour and lit the snowfields, turning them to a mosaic of searing
white, dappled with splashes of blue and mauve shadow - a moment of the most
exquisite beauty that would be gone in an instant.

 When the company reached the lower slopes of Rithlin, they
made good their word to the Keeper and unsaddling the horses, turned them
loose. However, their mounts showed a marked tendency to linger with their
human acquaintances, especially Vesarion’s horse, which came and nudged him in
the chest with its nose.

 He ran his hand over its mane. “Listen, my friend, the
Keeper has asked us to return you to him and from the look of those mountains,
this is no place for you. So be off with you. Find your way home to your
comfortable stable.”

 Almost as if it understood, it tossed up its head and turning
away sharply, cantered off down the valley followed by its brethren, their long
tails flying like banners behind them.

 Vesarion watched them for a moment, then turned to Eimer. “We
must hide the saddles well, just in case Gorm’s suspicions that we are being
followed are correct.” He glanced up at the forbidding peaks. “It looks like
from here on we will have to rely on our own two legs. I hope you have a good head
for heights.”

 Eimer laughed. “
I
have, but I can’t vouch for
Sareth. Ever since we were children, if she stands on anything higher than a
chair, she gets the overwhelming urge to throw herself off.”

 Sareth pulled a face at him. “Very funny, little brother,
but if I recall rightly, most of the time I was
pushed
off!”

 A busy river took up the centre of the valley, tumbling
over rounded stones on the lower reaches, but as they followed it towards its
source it began to leap vigorously down rocky steps in miniature cascades as
the gradient steepened. Although the forests above them were in shadow, the sun
occasionally peeped into the valley, warming the short mountain grasses and
bringing out the scent of thyme as it clung to the bare rocks. Up and up they
climbed, following the course of the stream, its cheerful chatter constantly in
their ears, until they came to a place where a spur of the mountain thrust itself
forward in a bare, knife-like ridge that effectively sundered the valley in
two.

 Vesarion and Eimer briefly investigated first one branch of
the valley then the other, and it soon became apparent why they had been told
to take the right fork.

 To the left, the rocky walls drew together to form the
sides of a precipitous gorge, sculpted out of the hard stone over the millennia
by the actions of the persistent river. The gorge stabbed like a knife into the
bowels of the mountain and soon vanished into unpromising gloom.

 The right hand way rose upwards at a steady gradient,
through tufted grass interspersed with rocky outcrops and increasing patches of
loose, grey shale, until it reached the eaves of the silent pine forest.

 Only one member of the company was not paying any attention
to the upward view. Gorm was perched on a rock, his back to the mountains,
staring down the valley to the plains beyond.

 Eimer, rendered jittery by days of this activity, finally
lost patience.

 “What now?” he demanded sharply. “We haven’t seen a thing
since you imagined you heard a noise at the old burial ground. I just wish you
would stop that. It’s driving me mad. I mean, just look down there!” he
declared, casting his hand towards the now distant plain. “From this height, we
can see right down the valley to the open grassland and there is absolutely
nothing in sight. So just stop it, Gorm!”

 Bethro repressed a smug smile that his arch-enemy was
getting a ticking-off but Vesarion said nothing. His keen eyes had not missed the
Turog’s anxious frown and a slight, inexplicable unease within him was
responding to it.

 Gorm, too, said nothing but merely jumped down from his
vantage point and began the ascent towards the forest.

 They reached the fringes of the forest just as darkness
began to settle. No pleasant forest here, like the Wood of Ammerith, with
sunlit leaves and birdsong. This was a silent place, dark and labyrinthine.
There was no sound of any bird save the occasional lonely cry of an eagle as it
glided between the peaks. In the manner of pine forests, it had no undergrowth
under the sunless, perennial canopy. The dry ground was uniformly brown, thick
with old pine needles that deadened every footfall. It stretched barrenly
beneath the trees, littered here and there by fallen branches and pine cones.

 When they stopped to make camp, Eimer and Iska went off in
search of firewood, while Sareth busied herself with unpacking provisions. Vesarion,
ever mindful of security, scouted out the surrounding trees, leaving the two arch-rivals
pointedly ignoring one another. Bethro was sitting on his blanket, peering short-sightedly
in the poor light at a book of poems that had inexplicably fallen off a shelf
in the Rose Tower into his pocket. Gorm, rather threateningly, had taken out a
whetstone and was engaged in sharpening his already keen sword, running the stone
along the edges with loving care.

 However, when a faint sound echoed around the silent
valley, they both raised their heads from their respective occupations and stared
into the enveloping dusk, ears straining.

 Vesarion came scrambling up the bank from the river.

 “Did you hear that?” he demanded of Eimer.

 For once, all trace of the Prince’s usual levity was gone. “Yes,”
he replied seriously. “There is no mistaking a wolf’s call.”

 Faintly, the unearthly sound issued again, echoing between
the peaks like a lonely spirit, but  it came from a slightly different
direction to the first cry.

 Vesarion cocked his head to listen. “They are some distance
away. We get them sometimes in the Westrin Mountains. Usually they keep away
from settlements but occasionally, when a pack gets too big, they get bold and
start to attack livestock.”

 “Have you hunted them?” Eimer asked.

 “Yes. A dangerous business, for they are both cunning and
strong, moreover horses are useless as they panic once they get the scent and
can’t be controlled, so they must be hunted on foot. The best weapon is a crossbow
– provided you are both quick and accurate. It is not advisable to get too
close. I’ve seen men attack them with long spears and it’s a chancy business. I
wouldn’t like to have to fight one at close quarters with a sword. The one
thing that usually keeps them away is fire, but if Gorm is right about us being
followed, lighting a fire will give away our position.”

 “I think it’s worth the risk. These wolves are certainly
real, whereas I think Gorm’s fears are all in his head.”

 Vesarion hesitated. “Agreed, but we must set a watch.” Then
lowering his tone, he asked: “Do you think Bethro can be trusted to stay
awake?”

 Eimer’s grin, never long absent, reappeared. “Just tell him
that if he falls asleep, he will end up as a light snack for a passing wolf. That
should do the trick.”

 But as it turned out no one got much sleep.

 Every so often, a faint, eerie howl would issue forth,
echoing between the peaks and along the rocky valleys. Although it was not
Vesarion’s turn to be on watch, he found sleep was a stranger to him. A vague
restlessness had been present in him ever since they had left the old burial
ground. He had at first thought that he was just being influenced by Gorm’s
behaviour, but now he knew that it was something deeper; some primeval instinct
for danger that he hadn’t known he possessed - although how accurate it was,
remained to be seen. Quietly arising from his blankets, he approached Sareth
who was on guard, standing alertly at the edge of the trees, peering across the
valley. The fire had long since died out and the only light was a pale, ghostly
moonlight spilling weakly from behind a veil of silver-edged clouds. When she
heard his step, she spun round, reaching for the hilt of her sword, but her
hand dropped back to her side when she saw who it was. He took up station
beside her, gazing out across the silvered valley as she had been doing.