“Cal, do you hear that?” Deryn said, the sound of his bright voice interrupting the cadence of hooves and boots upon gravel. “The river must be close; I can hear its music upon the wind.”
“Aye,” Cal agreed. “I remember the last time I followed a river. It brought me to the halls of Petros, and to the great bowels of Islwyn. How I do wish for some similar hospitality for us on this journey … for at least some liniment and perhaps a fresh bandage for Farran.”
“I would gladly sail across the Dark Sea all over again to see that prayer answered, my friend,” Deryn told him as he flew next to his charge.
“I know you would, Deryn.” Cal replied. “You must miss your home very dearly. Let’s just hope that our return will be a happy one, one of brighter circumstances.”
The three of them traveled like this for what seemed like leagues, ever upward and inward into the highlands of the Wreath, following the banks of the fens of the Argiñe until at last the waters merged into a mighty river before their very eyes.
“I don’t understand something,” Cal mused aloud. “We can all hear the sound of rushing water. The falls ahead must be massive, but I still don’t see it anywhere before us; the water must be going in some other direction.” He glanced at the Wreather beside him. “Have you ever been this far North before?” Cal asked her.
“No, I haven’t, though I have heard stories of the realm. The cities of Asier and Clarus were both here in the Northern marches of the Greywood. My grandfather told me of how Clarus and its people were mighty mariners of old; their city was the color of the foam of the waves upon the sea. He used to say that the birds of the sea first led them to the springs that fed their lands.”
Cal stopped suddenly, and his friends slowed their march and followed his gaze. They beheld a once-ornate stone bridge, carved with runes and markings that had become overgrown with ivy and moss.
“Clarus,” he said as he walked warily towards the ruined bridge, taking in the broken statues that flanked its entryway. “Did their city and its people dwell this far inland? These are chariots, not ships, that mark these ruins.”
“I am not sure, but I don’t suppose so,” Astyræ told him. “Perhaps the Asierians … they were the brave and the learned. Grandfather used to tell me of their city made of redstone, with palaces that climbed into the sky.”
She came closer to see the markings for herself, while Cal brushed the dust away and splashed a handful of the cool water upon the stone bridge
“It is redstone! Or at least it was once,” Cal said with a self-satisfied smile. “It is rather faded and weather-worn now, I would say.”
“This must have been built by the people of Asier!” she wondered aloud. “Maybe their city was nearby?”
“Whatever happened to them? The cities, I mean?” Cal asked.
“Clarus fought for a time, but most of them finally left upon the wings of their mighty ships. They refused to bend the knee to the Sorceress but forsook their homeland in the process.”
“And what about Asier?” Cal asked. “What happened to them?”
“That is a mystery in itself, groomsman,” she told him, her face alight with some nearly forgotten memory. “Legend tells it that one day everyone in the city vanished. They all just disappeared into the darkening mist.”
“Disappeared?” Cal said as he led Farran over the redstone bridge and on to the northern bank across the river. “How does a city full of people just … disappear?” Did she have something to do with it?”
“No one knows. One day they were here, and the next … they were not.”
“Has anyone ever heard of their whereabouts?” Cal asked, his curiosity growing.
“No,” she said as she followed him. “And that is why they say she hunts them, those who have escaped her rule. She is always looking, always plotting to subdue all of Aiénor, and to those who oppose her or evade her, she bends her wrath and pours out her vengeance. “
“I would like to know what happened to them … that would be a story to hear, of that I am most certain,” Cal said as they made their way closer and closer to the distant stag markings.
“There are many stories in Aiénor, Calarmindon Bright Fame, many whose deeds have put quill to parchment and words to song; many whose tales have long been forgotten,” Deryn said mysteriously into the pale violet gloom.
They walked and talked for leagues along the northern banks, sharing histories and poetry, and at last they came to a fork in the river. The Argiñe split, its main source coming from the north, and yet a branch of it forked off south and westward away from the shores they had just traversed.
“Well, there is your water music,” Deryn said as he flitted high above to take in what lay before them. “There are some falls just ahead.”
“Aye, I can hear it,” Cal replied. “And I see more markings, there, just on the other side of the bank between the fork of the river.”
“Do you see where it leads?” Astyræ asked him.
Cal whirled around, spinning in search of something, anything that might point him in the right direction. “No, I can’t see any other marking.”
“What does it mean?” she said nervously.
“I think it means that we ought to reach the destination that we can see before we worry about the path beyond,” Deryn said to them both.
“Alright then,” Cal said as he surveyed the depths of the waters of the river. “It doesn’t seem too swift over there!” He pointed a few dozen paces north. “In fact, it looks rather shallow.”
“Well come on then, let’s be about it already,” Astyræ said.
Chapter Fifteen
“What in the damnable dark,” Celrod shouted in a whisper, “is that?”
“Do you not know, schoolmaster?” Timorets said grudgingly as he gulped back the rise of bile in his throat. “Have you never seen a footprint before?”
“Aye. I have beheld many boots’ markings in my day, brewer,” Celrod replied. “Though not once have I seen one span the entirety of a man.”
“What does it mean, Fryon?” Margarid asked as she held Georgina closer to herself.
“I can’t be sure,” he said as he examined this impossible mark upon the foreign shoreline.
“I didn’t know men could be so large,” Michael said as he frantically surveyed the wilderness about them.
“Over here!” Fryon’s brother beckoned. “There are more … many more. They seem to be coming from all directions.”
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! The sound continued, hammering against their already frayed nerves.
“Whatever it was that made these tracks did not welcome the Raven Army to an easy passage,” Portus said nervously.
“That’s a good thing, right?” said Harmier. “If it, this … whatever it is, is not a friend of the Ravens, then maybe it will be friendly enough to us.”
“I don’t know,” Fryon told them. “But I don’t think we should wait out here in the open to see what hospitality it might offer us, unprotected as we are.”
“He is right. Come on then, all of you; we have to keep moving,” Michael ordered.
“But where to?” Margarid asked.
“North,” he replied. “That is all we know, so we have to assume that we will find our way there, no matter what lies before us. Come on then, let’s be gone from this river.”
“Aye,” Celrod agreed.
The remnant huddled close, hands upon hilts and eyes keenly sharpened as they made their way north and east through the valley before them. Rising high on both sides of their passage grew the craggy, granite, black mountains, and littering the valley floor was the unmistakable disruption of an army’s worth of footprints, and the broken bodies of hundreds of their makers.
They walked what must have been nearly a league of hesitant steps, following the path of their great city’s intruders in reverse, when the valley took a sudden turn towards the north.
“Do you feel it?” Margarid said as she squeezed Michael’s strong arm.
“Aye,” he replied, straining to listen into the darkness before them.
“We are being watched,” she continued in a whisper.
He turned and met her worried gaze, fear present upon his weary face. “Wait here; take the girl and the rest, and hide here against these outcroppings.”
“And what do you plan to do?” she asked him.
“Find out what we are walking into,” he told her.
“Celrod, Timorets!” he called in a hushed voice. “Stay here with the rest. Fryon, his brother, and I will scout what we can. If something happens, keep them safe!”
“And then what?” Celrod said.
“I don’t know. Just … keep them safe,” Michael ordered. “Please.”
“Alright, groomsman.” Timorets agreed for them. “Just don’t be a fool if you don’t have to.”
They clasped arms in agreement, and Michael and the brothers took their torches and blades and made their way past the bend in the valley.
“Do you think the giants are friendly giants?” Georgina asked innocently.
“Giants?” the schoolmaster asked, dumbfoundedly.
“Well, what else would you call them?” the child replied. “No one ever thought there were such things as dragons either, but we saw them with our own eyes,” she reasoned. “Why shouldn’t there be giants, too?”
“I don’t … well … I mean, I can’t say, girl,” Celrod shook his head with a smile. “We have seen quite a lot these last days, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” Timorets said, almost willing the childish thought to be true. “And why shouldn’t they be friendly giants?”
“Well, you could look around you and reason that out for yourself,” Harmier said doubtfully.
Georgina scrunched her face up as she tried to find words for her reasoning. “Well, yes. But … ” She let out a frustrated exhale. “But maybe they were just not friendly to those who were not friendly to them!”
“I do hope you are right, child,” Margarid said as she looked out behind her hiding place.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! The ominous sound came again.
“It’s getting closer, isn’t it?” Portus asked.
Nobody dared to lend credence to his observation.
Michael and the brothers had not gone more than two hundred paces past the bend in the valley before their blood went cold as ice. He lifted a finger to his lips, motioning for them to halt and watch.
They crouched low behind a smattering of broken rocks and boulders, and what they beheld seemed just as impossible as all the other events they had lived through.
A giant, nearly the size of four grown men, raised a massive, black, iron hammer and struck the side of the mountain with violent rage. They heard rocks splinter under the weight of its fury, then crumble and crash to the valley floor below. The giant reached down and gathered, in a single armful, what would have taken a team of oxen two cartloads to carry. Then he moved his harvest into a single pile at the center of the mountain pass.
“What is he doing?” Fryon whispered to Michael. “Why the rock? Is he trying to block the way?
“I don’t know. But I’ve never, in all my days, seen such strength before,” Michael whispered in return.
The giant set the stones onto a heap of rubble in the middle of the pass with surprising care. He bent down and picked up the mighty hammer, growling in what seemed like grief, and then he angrily strode off to strike the mount again. His braided and metal-bound beard reached clear to his belly, and his arms were clad in massive leather vambraces, giving him a fearsome and wild look as he raised the hammer high over his head and poised to strike again.
But before the hammer struck the stone, he froze, mid-swing. He sniffed the cool, dark air about him. His enormous head turned sharply northward, towards the pile of his rubble, and then suspiciously southward in the direction of the hiding scouts.
They were close enough to him that the sound of his sniffing was something akin to the growling and snorting of an army of wild hogs, or like a terrible beast, and the three brave scouts felt their bodies shake involuntarily with worried reverberations. Without warning, and with his hammer still frozen in mid-swing, he spun in a gracefully horrible motion and flung the hammer not twenty paces from where the three of them had taken cover to watch.
“Have you come for me now?” the thunderous voice bellowed. “I will NOT BE TAKEN UNAWARES!!!” he screamed in outrage. The giant leapt towards them and the ground shook as he collided with the rocky floor. He ripped and tore at his leather tunic, beating his enormous chest as he shouted into the valley. “Do not hide like the carrion fowl, do not linger in the shadows like cowards! Show yourself to Vŏlker, and be done with it!” he roared.
Hilts were gripped tighter, and blades were unsheathed as Michael and the brothers prepared themselves for unimaginable violence.
“I will not suffer you passage a second time, crows! Not without vengeance being taken first!” the giant bellowed.
“He thinks we are Ravens,” Fryon whispered as he kissed the flint that hung from his neck.
The giant reached down to retrieve the massive hammer, then stood tall and angered, rage blazing in his wild eyes. “Show yourselves!” he screamed against the darkness. Then he hurled his hammer a second time against the cleft of the valley, a mere thirty hands above their hiding place.
The side of the mountain exploded in a torrent of rock and dust, and the three of them ran from their cover out into the pass, coughing and straining against the aftermath of the monster’s rage.
“Ravens!” Vŏlker shouted.
“No!” Michael shouted, still coughing against the granite dust that hung in the cold angry air about them. “We are not Ravens! We are not who you think!”
“LIES!” Vŏlker shouted, enraged all the more.
“We are not liars, Lord Giant!” Michael pleaded as Fryon and his brother held their blades at the ready.
“Do you think I will suffer the dark birds passage on my road a second time?” the giant bellowed angrily as he grabbed a massive rock and hurled it just above the heads of the three scouts.
Michael, Fryon, and his brother dived to the ground, barely eluding the missile that was sure to have unburdened them from their heads if they had not acted so quickly.
“LIES from SPIES!” Vŏlker spat in disgust. “Where are the rest of your kind? Where is your God-forsaken murderous army? Did they send ye out here again to see firsthand the wrath of we Mågąn?”
Michael stood warily back to his feet, his hands held out and open before him, willing for his calm display to disarm this mighty giant. “We are not spies, and we are not Ravens either, Lord Giant!” Michael swallowed to steady his shaking voice. “Please, my friends and I mean you no harm or offense.”
Vŏlker stood menacingly over them, impossibly tall, with a mountainous piece of granite in his hands. His bushy, grey brows pinched in on themselves as he weighed the words of these strangers before him. “If ye not be Ravens … then who are ye?”
“My name is Michael,” he managed to say, his hands still open before him. “My friends and I are just strangers in this strange land,” he said, with resignation in his voice.
“Strangers!” Vŏlker shouted as he raised the rock above his head. “Let me show ye what strangers are to we Mågąn!”
“No!” Michael begged. “We are not your enemy! We mean you no harm! We are—"
Michael’s words were stolen from his voice as the sound of skittering stones echoed from behind their hiding place. Vŏlker turned his mighty head with a surprising quickness towards the origin of the small sound, as his dark eyes surveyed the path behind them with feral intent.
“LIES from SPIES!” Vŏlker growled under his breath.
“We are not! I assure you … please believe me!” Michael begged. Fryon eyed his brother, then glanced at their blades upon the road before them.
Vŏlker’s eyes shot back to the three scouts and then again to the sound of footsteps, e
choing a few hundred paces behind them.
“This is lies, I can feel it. I can feel it in me bones,” Vŏlker mumbled. “The same lies, the same Ravens that cut down me HlÍf. I know your kind!”
“No, please,” Michael tried again. “I don’t know who your HlÍf is, but I do know the Ravens, and they are not our friends, either!”
The steps came again, soft and muted in the wake of the giant’s booming voice. Vŏlker hurled his massive rock towards the small sound, and Fryon and his brother darted for their fallen blades.
“No! Wait!” Michael called to his friends.
As their hands grasped their hilts, a child’s scream froze them in their places. Vŏlker turned his head curiously, like that of a herdsman’s dog who caught wind of a curious scent.
“No,” Fryon whispered.
“Georgina?” Michael managed as he peered hard into the darkness behind him.
“What kind of trickery is this?” Vŏlker said warily.
“Let me go to her!” Michael begged.
“Michael?” came the voice of the child.
“Spies,” Vŏlker said as he bent to pick up another of the massive stones. “Strange spies, indeed.”
“Let me go to her, please! She is just a child, just a small girl!” Michael shouted at the giant, his protective nature outweighing his trepidations.
“Lies from spies.” The giant muttered the words again and again, but his mantra had begun to seem like more of a question than an enraged fact.
“We are not spies!” Fryon shouted. “Why won’t you listen to us?”
“Georgina?!” Michael called again.
“Michael?” she replied, her voice seeming closer than before.
“Lies from spies,” Vŏlker continued.
“Please, let me go to her! Please!” Michael demanded.
A glint of amber and yellow flickered out from behind the rubble at the bend of the mountain pass. Vŏlker raised his huge, ink-embroidered arms back up and over his head, taking aim at the coming glow.
“Georgina!” Michael shouted. “NO!”
Fryon and his brother charged the giant’s legs, swinging their blades at the iron greaves. Sparks flew as metal clashed with metal, and the giant tore his gaze from the bend and diverted his attention to the skirmish at his feet.
The Coming Dawn: Epic of Haven Trilogy Book 3 Page 11
