REIA DUELED THE PRINCE every night, often exchanging weapons several times during a fight. Prince Terosh struggled with the banistick being much heavier than his kerlinblade, and Reia had trouble compensating for the seeming weightlessness of the kerlinblade. The duels resulted in many bruises and burns which they fixed with anotechs. They even practiced healing mid-fight. Next, they practiced silently commanding the anotechs.
The true test came late one evening about two and a half weeks into their winter stay with the zaloks. In centuries past, thousands of zaloks inhabited these caves and could readily defend their nests, but in 1230, Channer Mazai discovered how to make a powerful hallucinogen by mixing zalok scales with crela dust and heating it. Since then, unscrupulous adventurers have hunted zaloks, despite protection by the Royal House Minstel and the Rangers.
The prince heard the korver cries first.
“Reia, listen. Is that what I think it is?” He reached for his kerlinblade.
A long, high-pitched, utterly mournful cry pierced the night.
“Yes,” Reia answered, drawing her banistick from a belt clip. “Lenviddunoch, nimfeh, widulsucamcres,” she called to the zalok queen. She could have spoken the assurances in the common tongue, but old habits die hard.
It’s too early. Why attack now?
They had discussed the possibility of a korver attack and arranged some defenses, but she hadn’t expected to need them yet. Reia sprinted toward the main entrance. Bitter, cold air whined and whistled its way through the modified passage. She collapsed several parts of the tunnel as she went. None of the partial blockages would stop the korvers but they would cut down on the number faced at one time.
Controlling her breaths, Reia crouched behind the foremost defensive barrier. Rock extensions narrowed the passage to a half-meter, but the area behind that was still the usual three meters across. Slowly, she opened her banistick to its full two-meter length and centered the handle.
Two of Reshner’s moons, Marishaz and Corid, were nearly three-quarters full. They peeked out from behind the mountains to the east, shining brilliantly down upon the entrance. Reia knew Gemuln hid behind the mountain directly in front of her and suspected he would show his face before the fight ended.
The howls shortened and intensified as the korvers drew closer.
Soon, one pair of blood-red eyes glowed in the night, then two, then twenty, then she lost count.
The average korver stands just shy of a meter tall from the top of its pointy ears down to its front feet and measures about a meter and a half in length from slender snout to tail tip. One korver could be annoying, but a pack this large would kill them.
Sudden silence ruled the valley.
Reia’s blood chilled as she waited.
The chief korver released a long, terrible shriek and received a yipping bark from every pack member. They paused for two seconds then barked again, waited another two seconds, and barked again. This continued for about a minute, with each bark being slightly louder than the last. Then, the leader howled again, and the pack sent up a racket of frenzied barks that echoed off the mountains.
Reia barely had time to brace before the korver tide crashed, forcing her back. Four energy beams sizzled past her and disappeared into the mass. Recovering her balance, Reia slipped the banistick handle down to one end, collapsed the weapon to a meter in length, and smashed a korver aside. The impact jarred her arms, but she used the resulting force to swat the next korver in line. This time, she was ready for the jolt. Leaping backward, she let the banistick unfurl the whole way again, slipped the handle back to the center, and twirled the weapon four times. It kept the korvers at bay and bought her a few seconds to think, but she couldn’t twirl the banistick forever.
Surrendering to instinct, Reia swung left and right before retreating and striking again. Korvers bounced away from her banistick with pain-filled howls, but for every two Reia hit, a third slipped past. Prince Terosh promptly shot them and the few he missed were dispatched by the queen’s mates, but Reia knew they yielded valuable ground.
Centimeter by grudging centimeter, Reia retreated, making the korvers pay dearly for each step. Around fifty-four, she lost count of the sickening crunch of her banistick’s triumph over a korver. Her mind numbed as the violence slammed her sensibilities to pieces. Every muscle in her arms and legs protested the jarring strikes. She hated the loss of life, yet the frustration lent her the strength to fight on.
Before they knew it, Reia and the prince had retreated past all three barriers and reached the entrance to the larger cavern. They had each taken down scores of korvers, but there were still too many. If they retreated further, the korvers would burst into the cave and storm the zalok queen. She and her mates would not withstand such an onslaught for long.
Sensing victory, the korvers paused. Three lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and advanced slowly, deepening their growls.
We must make a stand!
Reia dug her heels into the soft layer of dirt and waited for the final attack.
“Linketalkorvers!”
Reia heard the prince’s shout just as something intensely bright flashed past her right shoulder and caught a korver in the throat. The animal burst into flames like a dry stick. Reia’s mouth dropped and her banistick almost followed as a stream of fire flowed from the prince through the tightly packed korvers, creating a writhing sea of howling madness. The heat drove her back a step. She leaned forward to catch her balance and almost stumbled into the thin beam connecting the prince to the nearest korver.
It must look like half the mountain’s on fire!
The scent of burning fur, smoke, and cooking meat sent her head spinning. At the same time, the screeching korver cries slammed into Reia with near physical force. Her eyes stung from the smoke and heat. Coughing, she turned away just in time to see the prince collapsing.
Terosh!
Attaching her banistick to her belt, Reia lunged and caught the prince before his head could strike the ground. Tears flowed. She gripped the prince under both armpits and slowly dragged him into the central cavern. Reia tripped and fell, breaking his fall with her body. After wriggling out from under the fallen prince, Reia assessed the damage. The shallow rise and fall of his chest told her he lived. When she drew her hand away and watched him, he lay as still as death itself. Both of his hands were raw with burned and bloody fingertips. She winced.
“Hethiciuns.” Reia willed herself to touch Terosh’s broken hands.
He is badly burned. It will take much time to heal him, said a child’s voice in her mind.
“Do what you can,” Reia ordered, too distraught to be awed by the anotechs talking to her.
A low growl came from the shadows behind Reia, telling her the fight wasn’t over yet. Her banistick materialized in her hands as she scrambled to her feet.
A massive korver with smoking fur stepped over the broken bodies of lesser korvers. Its eyes shifted from the deep red back to normal yellow orbs that gleamed with intelligence.
Every mental calculation led to the same conclusion. To fight would be to die.
What are you?
Gaius, answered the anotechs. He is full of Dark Ones.
Reia stepped away from the prince hoping to draw the creature’s attention, but the beast stalked closer and growled. The zalok queen voiced her own challenge. Reia’s insides quivered from the combined effect.
Time ceased mattering as the parties studied each other.
Reia focused on the beast, but she knew the queen’s mates would form a wall in front of their leader.
“Go back. This fight is lost.”
In reply, Gaius growled again, barked, and charged.
LUCAS TELON HAD WATCHED events unfold from the moment the soul-piercing korver cry had ripped through him. He’d been thinking about Reia. Watching her train with the prince had been painful, but he needed to focus. Setting his TT-189 to detect heat signatures had revealed an impossible number: 344. Korvers never gathered in such
large numbers. Even granting that a few dozen signatures belonged to Reia, himself, the prince, and zaloks didn’t bring the number into a reasonable range.
Despite his training, his heart beat wildly. The moment to intervene had arrived.
If he did nothing, Reia and the prince would die. Reia’s death would violate his conscience and Terosh’s death would violate his orders. Lady Altran had been quite clear that he should get the prince through the Kireshana without being detected. He watched Reia’s last stand, mentally ticking off the flaws in her performance.
The big korver swatted her aside like a toy and stalked past her toward the prince. Despite a deep gash in her left arm, Reia smacked the beast’s left flank with her banistick, regaining its attention. The massive korver knocked her again, batting her in Lucas’s direction. The prince was still unconscious.
Lucas waited until Reia’s back faced him before dropping to the ground behind her, wrapping one arm around her neck, and bracing her head with his other hand. She barely had time to gasp before his grip relieved her of consciousness. Then, Lucas grinned at the korver.
“Your move,” he challenged, deciding between a banistick and a kerlinblade.
The beast barked and launched itself at him.
Lucas avoided the brunt of the beast’s attack, but one shoulder clipped him and sent him reeling off to the side. From that moment on, Lucas approached the fight more cautiously. He settled on the kerlinblade. Fire had dealt nicely with the other korvers.
The giant korver charged again and again, all teeth, muscles, and claws.
Lucas smacked the beast with his kerlinblade, landing several head blows. They bounced as if he were beating on a spaceship’s hull with a broomstick. For several minutes, his body fought instinctively, but as he tired, rational thought returned, and Lucas cursed his stupidity. He had fought a beast like this before and knew how to beat it.
After several failed attacks, the korver backed off slightly.
Lucas snatched the mini kerlak pistol off his belt and let three shots fly. The first struck the edge of the beast’s right eye, eliciting a yelp and an involuntary head-jerk. The second two shots entered the eye, causing the beast to howl. Instead of making the beast fall over dead though, the pain angered it. The korver charged Lucas again, driving him against a stone wall and knocking his breath out. It took tremendous effort to keep conscious. He was supremely lucky the zaloks closed ranks around him and drove off the big korver.
He wanted to sleep but had to get away. His mission had been preserved, but his mistress would not abide discovery. Gathering his remaining strength, Lucas limped back to his camp.
REIA AWOKE NEXT TO the prince and marveled at being alive. She wondered how she had gotten there until the sight of the prince’s still form broke her heart and drove off her questions.
Please, please live.
As she clutched his broken hands, Reia realized that somewhere along the journey Prince Terosh had become more than her mission. She had pushed the initial inklings of deeper feelings aside, knowing nothing could come of them. As a Ranger, loving nobles was frowned upon and loving a royal absolutely forbidden.
The tradition came from the 1280’s when Queen Rivira Minstel’s younger sister, Alana, had fallen in love with Ranger Mordeki VaTraz. The pair ran away, pursued by soldiers under the false assumption that the princess had been kidnapped. Once cornered, the lovers had killed themselves rather than face separation. The truth that Sergo, a spurned suitor, had lied about the princess’s disappearance only came out after their deaths. The Royal House and the Rangers bandied blame back and forth for months. Finally, the Rangers—ever the peacekeepers—swore that none from their ranks would ever be allowed to love a royal.
Since that time, people had, of course, gotten around the rule, but the intense stigma was taught to adolescent Rangers. As far as Reia knew, the last Ranger to defy the rule had been Amserd who had loved Crown Princess Loress. He had been cast from the Order, and she had abdicated to marry him. It had been a happy sacrifice until Gedroo, a Ranger purist defending the old ways, murdered Amserd. Loress had pursued her husband’s killer and also fallen victim.
It never ends happily for a Ranger and a royal, Reia thought sadly, forcing herself to stand.
If she sat by him now, she would never leave. She needed a safe emotional distance where thoughts of Terosh lying near death wouldn’t pierce so painfully.
Forcing worry aside nearly cost all of her remaining strength, but Reia finally inspected the well-done korvers. After consulting with the zalok queen, Reia helped the zaloks drag each body into the main cavern and stack them in the back corner, opposite the stream. She kept two korvers for meat and skinned off small patches of unburned fur, using the labor as an emotional balm. Reia turned her meat allotment into korver jerky. The rest she left for the zaloks who had their own storing methods, which involved secreting preservative from their mouths onto the meat.
With the hard work done, Reia worried about Terosh. To keep her hands busy, she made several lengths of korver fur rope. She wondered how they had survived the attack. The floor wasn’t decorated with the giant korver’s carcass so it had to have survived, but someone knocked her out before driving it off.
Who would do both?
If someone was going to fight the korver why knock her out? For that matter, why not simply kill her? People died frequently on the Kireshana. No one would notice one more body.
The thoughts haunted her throughout the night as she kept a vigil over the wounded prince.
ENIS (APRIL) 28, 1538
Same Day
Dalonos’s Campsite, near the Zalok Caves, Riden Mountains
Dalonos’s whole body hurt. Shrieking, he sent anotechs from one korver to another, trying to find one alive. Each new body filled him with more pain, until the anotechs cut the connection and let him go limp.
We’re tired of healing him!
A blue-white pool of light formed around him, seeping from his body and coalescing into a young woman. The figure of False Jalna—Dark Ones in the form of the Maker’s Daughter—looked down on Dalonos with compassion.
“This will set him back, but he is still our best chance. Perhaps a better candidate will come along soon.”
Dalonos looked awful. To gain control over the korvers, the anotechs had established a strong connection with them.
“Yes. Change is good. What about the Lady?”
He’d felt the kovers burn.
The translucent girl shuddered, though she possessed only vague memories of such agony.
“She would make a fine candidate, but no, the being must be a slave,” the False Jalna said.
The universe worked in strange ways. The girl smiled at possessing memories from their worst enemy, the real Daughter of the Maker. Perhaps one day they could convince the Maker’s Daughter to see things logically. Pushing her feelings aside, the Dark One’s manifestation of Jalna spent the next four hours multiplying anotechs to replace the trillions lost on the ill-fated korver attack.
“You may yet serve a purpose, even by your death,” the girl said, as she infused Dalonos’s body with new anotechs.
Chapter 19:
Graveground
RETSI (MAY) 21, 1538
Eighty days into Prince Terosh’s Kireshana journey
Kireshana Path, Resh Grasslands
Winter officially concluded at the end of Enis (April), but the snows remained for another few weeks. Prince Terosh Minstel and Ranger Reia Antellio could have left on the first of Retsi, but they waited until the eighth day to allow the prince’s hands to continue healing. After bidding farewell to the grateful zalok queen, they left the caves laden with two korver skin pouches filled with purple scales, gifts of dried berries, and enough korver jerky to last until the end of the year.
Reia chose a gentle path through the Riden Mountains to give the prince’s hands time to heal. He didn’t complain much, but she knew that they still stung whenever he moved them. While in
the zalok cave, he’d let Reia wrap his hands in toom leaves soaked in corlia. The treatment helped, but once they started moving, the prince refused the wraps, claiming they made his hands clumsy.
They reached the Resh Grasslands on the twentieth of Retsi. The next day, they awoke to a sky full of storm clouds, but since it wasn’t time for the acid storms, they didn’t worry. They hiked steadily for a few hours before meeting Derna and Irek Praem, a sibling pair of tretling herders headed home for a short leave. As the main herding season stretched from Lanolin to Temen (February to July), wealthy flock owners hired herders in cycles. About a meter in length and sporting white, gray, or beige wool, tretlings are blobs of dull color when viewed from a distance. As they possess the constitution of bears and the brains of pill bugs, handling them could be exhausting.
Ten minutes after encountering the herders, Reia halted and seized the prince’s left arm to keep him from taking another step.
“Graveground!”
The prince looked confused.
“Wallays, right?” he asked slowly. “Small, furry, brown things. I think Master Sedir mentioned them. He said they were dangerous.”
“Well, farmers hate them, but they aren’t directly dangerous ...” Reia answered, letting the sentence trail. She pictured one of the creatures. Wallays grow about a quarter of a meter in length and have small, beady eyes and blunt noses. They’d be adorable if they weren’t so destructive. She took a cautious step, angling left, and motioned for the prince to follow. Leaping over a seemingly solid piece of ground, she landed on a patch of slightly taller grass two feet away. “Except when they leave.”
“How does that work?” asked Terosh.
She waited until she’d identified the next dangerous section before answering the prince’s question.
“Wallay colonies can have several hundred members. They maintain underground tunnels by coating the walls with a viscous substance called cradul. The cradul hardens in a half-hour, forming a tough, waterproof wall. No one knows how the beasts learned to make doors, but the system of sliding cradul-treated dirt slabs prevents their homes from flooding.”
Reshner's Royal Ranger Page 13
