The boy stood where the man had last seen him, a startled look on his face, blind eyes oblivious to the huge cat rushing at him from the side. “Gareth! Get down!”
But the boy only turned away from the cat, his head cocked, as if listening.
To what? The man could hear nothing but the roar of his own blood, the rasp of his clothing sliding over muscles that pumped and strained to move faster. Faster! The cat made no sound, only loomed larger, a blur although everything in his perception had so slowed each footfall shuddered from gravel to boot sole, from heel to ankle, from knee to thigh. He took another stride, and the cat made two, each longer than the last, each a tawny flight of teeth and claws.
He couldn’t possibly reach the boy before the cat launched itself in a bunching of sinew and muscle, mouth agape and paws spread. But, by Koronolan, he could land on the back of the beast and stab it through the heart!
In a moment when time seemed suspended, the boy turned, ever so slowly. His face registered alarm and his mouth opened. If there was sound, the man didn’t hear it. He saw instead the cat’s ears flatten, the eyes slit, and the black lips curl away from pink gums and bare yellow-white teeth. He flung himself forward, but the beast had already sprung.
Gareth, still turning, must have sensed the beast’s shadow, for his arms flew up in a gesture of self-protection. Helplessly, the man watched the airborne feline wrench her body sideways and slam, shoulder first, into Gareth’s upraised arms. Boy and cat—and something else, something large, dark, and looming behind the boy—crashed to the ground.
The Krad smell hit the man first, even as the cat and the beast-man rolled in a tangled blur away from the boy’s crumpled body. A glint of sunlight on a flint blade brought the man lurching to the right, and he threw himself between another beast-man and the fallen boy. The Sword of Drakkonwehr, like an extension of his arm, arced downward, broken blade gleaming, and sliced the second Krad’s flint knife in half. The Sword’s upward arc rammed the hand guard deep against bone and sinew.
And time returned.
The impaled Krad slumped over the man’s hand. Revolted, he braced his boot against the beast-man’s body and jerked the Sword free. The creature sprawled back and lay still.
The man spun, but nothing moved in the meadow, nothing but the she-cat, less than ten strides away, separating herself from a dark, fur-covered, unmoving mass. With bloodied jaws, she stared at the man, her eyes fixed, yellow-green, and mesmerizing.
—I saved you, Durren. Again.—
There had been two beast-men, and he’d seen neither, though the Sword had shown him where to look. His stomach twisted.
Why?
As if in answer, the lion advanced a stride.
Halfway between his position and the lion’s, the boy lay on his side in a patch of hawkweed and blue aster. A rip across the shoulder and upper arm of his tunic fluttered gently in the breeze. Blood darkened the rust-colored fabric in both places.
By Kiros, no!
The lion’s snarl brought him up short. The beast had advanced and stood, teeth bared, at the boy’s shoulder.
Sweat beaded under the man’s hood and tunic. His fingers tightened on the broken Sword of Drakkonwehr. “Leave him alone. He’s nothing to you.”
The she-cat’s tail slashed the air. She growled, a low, rumbling noise deep in her throat. Her head tilted and the yellow-green eyes fixed on the man.
He recognized the look, but the steady luminescence had already seized his gaze, and its languor spread rapidly through his body, immobilizing his limbs. He could do no more than watch, helplessly, while the beast straddled the boy with huge front paws and lay down beside his head. Eyes fixed on the man, she lowered her bloody muzzle to the boy’s shoulder... and licked it.
Chapter Eleven
Gareth drifted. A warm, cozy darkness cradled him like his mother’s arms. Her hand combed through his hair, tugging gently at knots and tangles. She hummed, and he felt the tune as a rumble of sound where his ear pressed to her chest. Heaving a sigh, he turned to snuggle closer.
Pain seared through his shoulder. Gareth’s breath shuttled in and out of his lungs. The rapid motion roused an echoing burn just below his breast on the same side.
“Easy, now. Don’t move too quickly.”
He recognized the voice, yet he couldn’t place it. The tone transmitted concern...and fear? He rose slowly to an elbow. “I-I’m all right.” An ache at the side of his forehead escalated to a throb with the motion.
“I said, don’t move too quickly, boy.”
At the warning in the low, bitten-off words, Gareth’s mind cleared, and he remembered with a rush where he was and with whom. He’d been attacked—by something—and the stench of it lingered in his nostrils. He would have ducked his face into his tunic sleeve, but his master spoke again.
“Listen, boy, and do exactly what I say. You’re going to move very slowly and very carefully toward me on your hands and knees. Can you do that?”
Gareth flexed his shoulder. The pain made him grit his teeth, but he could move the joint. Besides, his head ached more than enough to distract him. “I think so.” He rolled forward and untangled his legs. His hands found moss and gravel. His knees rested shakily on rock. “That smell...”
“Krad. Dead ones.”
He froze, skin crawling. At the White Boar Inn he’d heard more than once of the beast-men that infested the Wehrland. And of the poison coating their weapons. A man was as good as dead, old Melfick said, if a Krad blade drew even a drop of his blood. A fresh wave of fire seared through his injured shoulder, chest and forehead, and he moaned. He was doomed as surely as if they’d stabbed him through the heart. Mother, I don’t want to die!
Rough hands seized him under the armpits and dragged him into a sitting position. “Don’t be an idiot!” Gloved fingers probed his head. “These aren’t Krad wounds.” Two hands peeled back his tunic and skimmed across his shoulder and chest. “This is rocky ground. You were in the way and—and you were hurt...falling.”
Gareth sniffled. The breeze cooled his damp cheeks. “Rocks?”
His master slid an arm under his shoulders and another under his knees. “Rocks,” the Shadow Man said, standing.
Gareth’s head lolled against his master’s chest. A heartbeat thumped there, solid and reassuring. If his head didn’t ache so, and if he weren’t so utterly drained, he would’ve marveled more at the human sound and the human feel of arms like a father’s bearing him to safety. Instead, he heaved a sigh and rested.
****
The man dug a small hole and emptied a bowl of bloody water into it. He waited while the liquid soaked into the soil, then wiped the bowl with a bit of moss and dropped the moss into the hole. With his foot, he covered the drain and tamped the earth back into place. Only then did he allow his body to straighten and accept the uncoiling of too tight muscles.
The first stars of night peeked through smoke still rising from the brush pyre the man had heaped around the two dead Krad. Had he been alone, he would’ve cleared camp immediately and left the bodies rot. But he wasn’t alone, and he had to dispose of the stinking carcasses before they drew attention to this campsite. He looked upwind where, on a level shelf of rock, the boy slept within a circle of grain sacks, blankets tucked around his body, a fire throwing light on a face that looked too pale under a russet-wrapped forehead.
That had been the easy wound to dress. It was the claw marks that worried the man. The she-cat had licked them clean, but he still had laid on what poultices he could devise, hoping against hope the gashes wouldn’t fester.
Thoughts of the lion made him scan the darkening meadow once more. The creature had disappeared while he tended the boy, but he wasn’t fool enough to believe the beast had vanished entirely. There had been too much of a claiming nature in her behavior.
The man stared at the bowl in his hands as if trying to divine truth from its well. No matter how many times he reviewed the scene etched into his brain, he couldn�
�t deny the she-cat had saved the boy’s life. Nor could he deny such had been her intent. Nor could he deny what troubled him most—the beast’s snarling refusal to let him touch the boy. Not until Gareth had revived and come to him of his own accord, did the beast back away.
Magic, the Voice in his head murmured.
Perhaps. The broken Sword of Drakkonwehr rested like a big-handled knife at his hip, held in place by his belt. He resisted the notion the weapon still belonged there. How could it—unless it suited some cosmic sense of irony that a hollow man should bear a fragment of a sword.
He climbed to a spot halfway between the campsite and the Krad pyre and stood looking at the glowing residue of death. The bloodstone in the Sword’s crosspiece had shown him what to fear, and it was not the lion. He shivered as the breeze ghosted up his back. Bloodstone or no, I still don’t trust the beast.
Good, said the Voice in his head. Magic is never to be trusted.
If it’s magic, then from what source? The bloodstone would show him dragon spawn and mage spell. Indeed, any of the evils of Beggeth. What other source was there?
Koronolan and Kiros.
The man snorted. They’re dead. And I have the only Sword.
Shadowspeech, then.
Unbidden memories flooded his mind. He stared into them, one part of him marveling at the power of the mere name, the other part frustrated he couldn’t defend against it. The language of Kiros was a tongue long forgotten to all but those who dealt in the magic of a birthing world, a magic whose wellspring was the very energy of creation. Owender had use of it. There had been a few pathetic imitations of the Hero Mages and Black Mages who’d tried to wield a power too elemental for the mastery of a mere man. Finally, there had been the Drakkonwehrs, charged as Dragonkeepers with knowing the means to control the beast they guarded.
And Durren, poor Durren. The man regarded his gloved hands as if they belonged to a stranger. He was the last of them. And he doomed them all, didn’t he, when he let Herrok-Eneth fall.
Perhaps, said the Voice in his head, they’re not all dead.
The man’s fists clenched. If one of them didn’t die, why did he wait so long to show himself to me? Why now? Why not after the smoke cleared all those years ago?
In answer, his gaze was drawn to the blanket-wrapped figure lying amid grain sacks. You didn’t have him, then, did you?
The man swallowed. First the lion, then the boy, the Krad, and the woman—both the one of last night and the one in the dreams. Today, he’d used the Sword for the first time since...since it had broken. A shiver raced down his spine. This had to be magic, but whose and why?
He hugged his arms about his body and searched the dark edge of forest again. Where there had been two Krad, the pack couldn’t be far off. He glanced at the sleeping boy. Tomorrow they would ride, even if he had to hold the boy in the saddle himself. Drakkonwehr was the only safe place. Drakkonwehr could keep everything out. Even magic.
****
All afternoon Mirianna had dodged shadows. Now she sat her horse near the lone willow and shivered against growing dread. Listening with half an ear to the men, she watched Wehrland firs swallow the sun. Instantly, deep green under their boughs darkened to black. In the depths, shadows writhed toward each other like droplets of water determined to meld. Soon, the darkness massing across the meadow would advance with talons bared and seize them all.
She forced a swallow despite the panic fisted in her throat. These were merely fears, the product of a particularly vivid waking dream and Rees’ insinuations. Nothing ill had happened in the Wehrland on their first passage, other than the lion’s appearance. Why should anything befall them now? It was Ar-Deneth where evil lay, and they had left the place hours behind them. If only they weren’t pursuing the bringer of that very evil.
“I must have more bloodstone,” her father was insisting. “The Master specifically said he wanted bloodstone—”
“—in every piece,” Rees finished with a roll of his eyes. “I know, old man, but I’ll be damned if I’ll waltz into a demon’s lair in the dead of night.”
“I’ll be damned if I’ll go anywhere but straight home.” Pumble mopped his forehead with his sleeve. “I didn’t get my mutton. With a good mutton dinner under his belt, a man can face just about—well, a lot of things. Now, I don’t—”
“Shut up!” Rees backhanded Pumble’s hat brim. “You’ll do what I tell you.”
Lower lip thrust out, Pumble jammed the hat into place. “I’d be a lot more willing if you hadn’t gotten us thrown out of Ar-Deneth.”
“The man was a demon trader. In Nolar we hang demon traders.”
“We’re not in Nolar.” Mirianna huddled into her cloak even though there was no chill in the air. “And I’m with Pumble. I think we should go straight home, Papa. If the...Shadow Man...is as unwilling to be found as Ulerroth suggested, there’s no point in hunting for him.”
Pumble sat up straighter in the saddle. “See, she knows what she’s talking about.”
“But, lamb.” Tolbert reached out to grasp her hand on the saddle pommel. “I can’t go back without the necessary gems.”
“You have six. You can make do with them, can’t you?” She closed both hands around his. “Put one in each piece. Master Brandelmore will never know the difference.”
Tolbert withdrew his hand and straightened. “But I will.”
Mirianna huffed out the breath she had been holding.
Across from her, Rees sat with one fist planted on his hip, the other gripping the reins. His brows formed a blond line across his forehead. He looked from Mirianna to her father, glowering all the while. “If it weren’t the Master’s express wish—” He dragged his horse into a snorting back step. “We’ll go to the clearing where we last saw this...creature. But don’t expect me to traipse all over this bloody region for a few colored stones! If I don’t find a trail from there, we’re heading back to Nolar in the morning.”
“That’s reasonable, don’t you think, Papa?”
Tolbert frowned. “I suppose.”
“Well, then, let’s move.” Rees laid his spurs to his horse’s flanks. The animal sprang forward with a squeal.
Tolbert’s chestnut jumped to follow.
Mirianna held her gelding back. She watched Pumble send a glance and a sigh toward the road heading east. When he looked at her, she offered a sympathetic smile. He shrugged and gestured for her to fall into line ahead of him. Steeling herself, she lifted the reins and rode toward gathering shadows.
****
They found the clearing just after twilight faded. It came upon them suddenly, opening out to the left. They turned toward it, and into a wall of stench.
“Krad!” Rees gasped. His horse reared.
Mirianna’s gelding whinnied and back-stepped. Around them, the trees erupted with a shrill, high-pitched noise. The sound assaulted her senses, beating at her nerve endings with discordant waves, raising panic in her blood. The gelding fought her grip on the reins, half rearing and blundering to the left.
“Turn around!” Rees was screaming. “Run!”
Mirianna hauled at the gelding’s mouth. The darkness in the clearing’s entrance roiled with shadows, shapeless gyrating and snarling shadows. Some of them sprang from beneath the trees and rushed the gelding. She lashed at them with the long ends of the reins. Something snagged her cloak, ripped through it. She grabbed her knife and slashed out blindly. Yips, howls, and then she was free, somehow, and clinging to the back of her galloping horse while tree boughs whipped at her face.
Long after her cheeks had gone numb with the lashing, after she’d ridden for what seemed like leagues, the gelding finally slowed to a trot. Mirianna raised herself shakily from its neck and looked over her shoulder. Nothing lurked behind her but trees, stones, and a star-patched sky.
Drawing a ragged breath, she unlocked her fingers one hand at a time from the reins. She dragged her knuckles over her cloak, smearing the froth of the gelding’s sweat
into the wool. Between her legs, the horse’s sides heaved, and she could hear the rasp of its breathing over the thunder of her own. She drew on the reins and slowed the gelding to a walk even though her entire body still vibrated with the need to continue running.
But where to? her logic asserted, reclaiming control now the immediate danger was past. She needed to slow down, listen, and locate the others. Her father was no doubt calling for her; if only she could stifle the roar in her ears long enough to hear his voice. Willing her heartbeat to slow, she pulled the gelding to a stop.
All around her night-birds shrilled and crickets chirped. The breeze sighing through the trees carried no sounds but the rustle and scrape of pine cones, branches and twigs. Mirianna forced a swallow. “Papa?”
It was a croak unworthy of a crow. Clearing her throat, she tried again. Only her echo returned, ghostly and plaintive.
She bit her lower lip, stilling its tremble, and tried to think. She was sure her father had been behind her at the mouth of the clearing. He should’ve turned first, when Rees shouted, and fled cleanly. Only Rees and she had been caught in the melee. Squeezing her eyes shut, she remembered Rees swearing, the sound of a struggle, and then his shouted “Come on!” His horse’s shoes had struck sparks, and she’d ridden toward them, but then the gelding had clamped the bit between its teeth and she could do no more than hang on.
She opened her eyes and stared at the dark forest. “Papa?” she called again, louder. She stopped herself when panic frayed her voice. If her father hadn’t answered by now, it would do no good to shriek like a marshwight. The gelding had simply carried her headlong through trees and meadows in a direction different than the others. When it was light enough, Rees would locate her trail and find her.
In the meantime, her horse needed to walk until it cooled down. After that, she would think about finding a suitable spot to wait out the night. She touched her heels to the gelding’s sides.
Bloodstone Page 13
