To hell with that! I haven’t come this far for someone else to see the mystery’s end. First light tomorrow I’m going up that pass again, avalanches be damned.
As he drifted happily off to sleep, he realized that the wind had dropped at last.
Someone pounded on Ekrid’s door just before dawn, waking the household.
“Come to the council house!” a voice shouted from outside. “Something terrible has happened. Come now!”
Extricating himself from a soft tangle of arms and thighs, Seregil threw on his clothes and ran for the council house with the others.
Faint, predawn light painted the snow blue, the towers black against it. Snowshoeing through the icy powder, Seregil found the village almost unrecognizable. The storm had buried the towers up to their doorsills, leaving the exposed upper story looking like an ordinary cottage drifted up with snow.
Shouldering his way through the crowd at the council house, he hurried downstairs to the meeting chamber.
The central fire had been lit and beside it crouched a woman he hadn’t seen before. Surrounded by a silent, wide-eyed crowd, she clutched a small bundle against her breast, wailing hoarsely. Retak’s wife knelt beside her and gently folded back the blanket. Inside lay a dead infant. The stranger clutched the baby fiercely, her hands mottled with frostbite.
“What happened?” Seregil asked, slipping in beside Retak.
He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know. She staggered into the village a little while ago and no one has been able to get any sense out of her.”
“That is Vara, my husband’s cousin from Torgud’s village,” a woman cried, pushing her way through the crowd. “Vara, Vara! What’s happened to you?”
The woman looked up, then threw herself into her kinswoman’s arms. “Strangers!” she cried. “They came out of the storm. They refused the feast, killed the headman and his family. Others, many others, my husband, my children— My children!”
Throwing back her head, she let out a scream of anguish. People gasped and muttered, looking to Retak.
“But why?” Retak asked gently, bending over her. “Who were they? What did they want?”
Vara covered her eyes and cowered lower. Seregil knelt and placed a hand on her trembling shoulder.
“Were they looking for the spirit home?”
The woman nodded mutely.
“But they refused the feast,” he went on softly, feeling a coldness growing in the pit of his stomach. “They affronted the village, and you would not deal with them.”
“Yes,” Vara whispered.
“And when the killing started, then did you tell them?”
Tears welled in Vara’s eyes, rolling swiftly down her cheeks. “Partis told them, after they killed his wife,” she sobbed weakly. “He told them of Timan and his clan. He thought the killing would stop. But it didn’t. They laughed, some of them, as they killed us. I could see their teeth through their beards. They laughed, they laughed—”
Still clutching her dead child, she slumped over in a faint and several women carried her to a pallet by the wall.
“Who could do such things?” Retak asked in bewilderment.
“Plenimaran marines,” Seregil growled, and every eye turned to him. “These men are enemies, both to me and to you. They seek the evil that lurks in your spirit home. When they find it, they’ll worship it and sacrifice living people to it.”
“What can we do?” a woman cried out.
“They’ll come here,” a man yelled angrily. “Partis as good as set them upon us!”
“Do you have any weapons?” Seregil asked over the rising din.
“Nothing but wolf spears and skinning knives. How can we fight such men with those?”
“You’re a magician!” shouted Ekrid. “Can’t you kill them with your magic?”
Caught in a circle of expectant faces, Seregil drew a deep breath. “You’ve all seen the nature of my magic. I have no spells for killing men.”
He let disappointment ripple through the crowd for an instant, then added, “But I may have something just as effective.”
“What is that?” the man demanded skeptically.
Seregil smiled slightly. “A plan.”
• • •
Retak called a halt at the base of the pass as the first lip of sun showed over the eastern peaks. Shradin went ahead to assess the danger. The others—every man, woman, and child of Retak’s village—waited quietly for word to move on. Mothers whispered again to their younger children why they must keep silent in the pass. The infants had been given llaki to make them sleep.
Seregil climbed an outcropping and shaded his eyes as he looked back across the snowfield. Blue shadow still lay deep in the valley, but he could make out a dark column of men closing in on the village. It wouldn’t take long for them to see that their prey had fled, or what direction they’d gone.
“There they are,” he whispered to Retak. “We have to move on quickly!”
Hardly daring to breathe, they continued up the pass.
It was a fearsome journey. The villagers moved as swiftly as they could, some bowed under loads of fuel and food, others carrying children on their backs or aged relatives on litters. Only the muffled creak of snowshoes and pack straps broke the silence. Old Timan trudged painfully along near the rear, supported by Turik and his brothers.
Mercifully, Vara had died and she and her child were hidden now in the drifts beyond the goat enclosures. But her death was not in vain; she’d given Retak’s village time to prepare.
Shimmering veils of snow blew across the pass, dislodging small falls down the slopes. These gave out harmlessly in fine bits of crust, rolling down to leave mouse trails across their path. Ominous cracks and groans echoed between the cliffs overhead, but Shradin gave no warning sign and Retak silently motioned his people on.
Trudging along in their midst, Seregil was deeply moved by the mix of fear, trust, and determination that drove these people forward. They’d welcomed him—a stranger—given him the best of all they had. When Retak claimed him as a member of his clan, it was meant literally. In the eyes of the Dravnians he was now a blood member of the community for as long as he wished to claim kinship.
The Plenimaran marines pursuing them had been offered the same welcome.
Looking back as they neared the cave, he saw that the enemy had reached the village and was now turning toward the pass.
You bastards! he thought bitterly. You’d carve these people up like sheep for whatever lies hidden at the end of that tunnel, just as you slaughtered Vara’s village. But you were sloppy in your work, my friends, and that makes all the difference!
Up ahead Retak conferred briefly with Shradin, then motioned for a halt. Seregil climbed up to join them.
“Do those men know how to read the snow?” Shradin whispered.
“Let’s hope not. Retak, tell the others to move a bit higher and watch for your signal. Are the young men in place?”
“They’re ready. But what if this plan of yours doesn’t work?”
“Then we’ll need another plan.” Feeling much less assured than he sounded, Seregil went to take his own position.
The villagers nervously watched the Plenimarans approach. The sun was higher now, and glinted back from spear points and helmets below. What first appeared only as a long, dark movement against the snow soon resolved into individual men toiling toward them.
Whatever the Plenimarans think they’re after here, they’re not taking any chances, Seregil thought, counting over a hundred men. He glanced briefly up the slope, trying to make out the mouth of the spirit chamber tunnel and wondering again what could be worth all this.
The Plenimarans were close enough for Seregil to make out the insignia on their breastplates before Shradin finally waved up to Retak. The headman raised his staff overhead with both hands and let out a bloodcurdling yell. Every villager joined in, bellowing and screaming at the top of their lungs. At the same moment Seregil, Shradin, and the you
ng men of the village shoved at their piles of loosened rock and ice chunks, sending them careening down the steep slope.
For an instant nothing happened.
Then the first rumblings sounded along the western face as tons of snow and ice sloughed off, plunging down on the Plenimaran column.
Seregil could see the pale ovals of upturned faces as the soldiers realized too late the trap they’d been drawn into. The neat column wavered and broke. Men foundered in the snow, throwing aside their arms as they sought some direction of escape from the implacable wave bearing down on them.
The avalanche overtook them in seconds, carrying men like dead leaves in a flood, blotting them from sight. A great cheer went up from the Dravnians and the sound brought down a second deafening avalanche from the east wall. It crashed down the valley to lap over the first with a roar of finality that echoed for minutes between the stark, sun-gilded peaks.
Shradin pounded Seregil joyfully on the back. “Didn’t I say it would fall just so?” he shouted. “No one could have survived that!”
Seregil took a last wondering look down at the massive slide, then waved for Turik. “It’s time I completed my work. This evil must be removed from your valley so no others will come seeking it.”
Amazingly, the tunnel opening was still clear, though drifts were piled thickly around the spot. With the women singing victory songs behind him, Seregil once again made his way down the slick, cramped passage. The noises in his head and the tingling in his skin were as bad as before, but this time he ignored them, knowing what he had to do.
“Here we are again,” he whispered, reaching the chamber. Refusing to consider the various ramifications of being wrong about the nature of the magic, he hugged the box against his side and said loudly, “Argucth chthon hrig.”
An eerie silence fell over the chamber. Then he heard a soft tinkling sound that reminded him of embers cooling on a hearth. Tiny flashes like miniature lightning flickered across the rock face at the far end of the chamber.
Seregil took a step back, then dove for the mouth of the tunnel as the stone exploded.
Jagged shards flew up the tunnel, hissing like arrows as they scored the back of his thick coat and trousers. Others ricocheted and spattered in a brief, deadly storm around the tiny chamber.
It was over in an instant. Seregil lay with his arms over his head a moment longer, then cautiously held up the lightstone and looked back.
An opening had been blasted in the far wall, revealing a dark space beyond.
Drawing his sword, Seregil approached and looked into the second chamber. It was roughly the size of his sitting room at the Cockerel, and at the back of it a glistening slab of ice caught the glow of his lightstone, reflecting it across a tangle of withered corpses that covered the floor.
The constant cold beneath the glacial ice had drawn the moisture from the bodies over uncounted years, leaving them dark and shrunken, lips withered into grimaces, eyes dried away like raisins, hands gnarled to talons.
Seregil sank to his knees, cold sweat running down his chest beneath his coat. Even in their mummified state, he could see that their chests had been split open, the ribs pulled wide. Only a few months earlier his friend and partner, Micum Cavish, had come upon a similar scene nearly a thousand miles away, in the Fens below Blackwater Lake. But there some of the bodies had been newly killed. These had been here for decades, perhaps centuries. Putting this together with Nysander’s veiled threats and secrecy, Seregil felt a twinge of genuine fear.
The singing whine in his ears was much worse here. Kneeling there at the mouth of the chamber, Seregil suddenly envisioned what the victims’ last moments must have been.
Waiting to be dragged into the killing chamber.
Listening to the screams.
The steam rising from torn bodies—
He could almost catch the sound of those tortured voices echoing back faintly over the years.
Shaking such fancies off uneasily, he climbed in to examine the mysterious slab.
The rough-hewn block of ice was half as long as he was tall, and nearly four feet thick. The aura of the place was worse here; a nasty prickling sensation played over his skin, like ants beneath his clothes. His head pounded. The ringing in his ears swelled like a chorus of voices wailing an octave beyond the scope of pain.
More disturbing still was the sudden flair of pain around the scar on his chest. It burned like a fresh wound, driving a deep spike of pain at his heart.
Working swiftly, Seregil took the two flasks from the box, unwrapped them, and poured out the dark contents of the first in a circle on top of the ice. With his dagger, he scratched the symbols of the Four inside the circle: a lemniscate for Dalna; Illior’s simple crescent; the stylized ripple of a wave for Astellus; the flame triangle of Sakor. They formed the four points of a square when he had finished.
Unnatural flames licked up as the liquid ate into the ice and a soft, answering glow sprang up in the center of the slab, revealing the outline of a circular object embedded there.
A fresh blast of pain tightened Seregil’s breath in his throat. He reached into his coat and felt wetness there. Tearing open the neck of his coat and shirt with bloodied fingers, he found that his skin had opened around the edges of the scar.
There were voices all around him now, whispering, sighing, keening. His hands shook as he quickly emptied the second vial onto the ice. More flames licked up, guttering in the faint, unnatural breeze rising around him. Invisible fingers brushed his face, plucked at his clothing, stroked his hair.
A first translucent point of crystal protruded from the shrinking ice, quickly followed by seven more in a slanting ring.
The singing, at once tortured and exultant, rose to fill the cramped chamber. Seregil pressed his hands to his ears as he crouched, waiting.
The magical liquid burned and boiled away until eight bladelike crystal spikes were revealed, set in a circlet of some sort.
Seregil bent to pull it free and a drop of blood fell from his chest onto the ice within the circlet. He paused, strangely fascinated, as another followed, and another. A stone shard had grazed the back of his hand and this, too, was oozing blood. A rivulet of it ran down between his fingers onto the point he was grasping, streaking it like ruby as it trickled to the little pool gathering in the center of the crown.
The singing was clearer now, suddenly sweet and soothing and somehow familiar. Seregil’s throat strained to capture the impossible notes as the blood dripped down from his chest.
Not yet, the voices crooned. Unseen hands stroked him, supporting him as he stooped over the crown. Watch! See the loveliness being wrought.
The gathering blood sank into the ice as an answering rubescent blush spread slowly up through each crystal point.
Oh, yes! he thought. How beautiful!
Their sides were sharp. They cut into his palms as he gripped them. More blood trickled down and the crystal blushed a darker red.
But a new voice was intruding from a distance, rough and discordant.
Nothing, sang the voices. It is nothing. There is only our music here. Join us, lovely one, join our song, the only song. For the Beautiful One, the Eater of Death—
It was distracting, this ugly new tone. But as he bowed his head, straining against this raw new voice he found that it, too, was familiar.
He’d almost succeeded in blocking it out when all at once he recognized it—the sound of his own hoarse screams.
The beautiful illusions shattered as searing bolts of pain slammed up his arms, seeking his heart.
“Aura!” he cried out, wrenching the crown free with the last of his strength. “Aura Elustri málrei!”
Staggering through a haze of agony, he thrust the crown into the silver-lined box and drove the latch into place.
Silence fell like a blow. Collapsing among the corpses, he pressed his bloody hands to the front of his coat. “Marös Aura Elustri chyptir,” he murmured thankfully as he slipped into a half fai
nt. “Chyptir marös!”
The Beautiful One, the voices had said. The Eater of Death.
Gradually he became aware of another presence in the chamber, and with it a pervasive sense of peace mingled with sadness.
This, he realized, must be the true spirit, the one that had created this place and inhabited it until the crown was hidden here. With an ironic grin, he recalled the tale of warring spirits he’d concocted for Turik and Shradin the first time he’d come out of the cave. It seemed he’d spoken the truth in spite of himself.
“Peace to you, spirit of this place,” he rasped in Dravnian. “Your sanctuary will be properly cleansed.”
The presence gathered around him for a moment, soothing away his pain and weariness. Then it was gone.
Shouldering the box, Seregil crawled slowly back up the tunnel. Turik and Timan were keeping watch at the opening when he stumbled out into the sunlight.
The old man clutched Seregil’s arm wordlessly, tears of gratitude glittering in his rheumy eyes.
“He lives! The Aurënfaie’s alive! Bring bandages,” Turik called to the others, examining Seregil’s hands with concern.
The cry passed from mouth to mouth and soon the whole village had gathered solemnly around them.
“Terrible sounds came out of the ground, then all was still,” Retak told Seregil. “Timan said you had driven out the bad spirit, but he didn’t know if you’d survived the ordeal. Tell us of your battle with the evil spirit!”
Seregil groaned inwardly. Bilairy’s Balls, they want another story!
Climbing to his feet, he held up the box. “I’ve captured the evil spirit that troubled you. It’s imprisoned here.”
Round-eyed, the Dravnians regarded the battered wooden chest. Even the children did not venture to approach it. Filthy and exhausted, Seregil did his best to look like a victorious wizard as he mixed fact and fiction to best effect.
“In the time of Timan’s ancestor, this evil thing came to your valley and invaded the spirit home, holding the true spirit prisoner and troubling those who entered the chamber. I found its secret lair and battled it there. It was a strong spirit and it fought mightily, as you can see.”
Stalking Darkness Page 6
