“Faster,” I said to Griff as I ducked past him, looking for the slender trails I knew.
He grabbed Olwynn’s wrist again, dragging her stumbling behind. The girl and her screaming child in tow, we splashed across a swollen stream. Once up the other side Griff stopped, still gripping Olwynn by the arm.
“Shut the brat up!” he growled, head up, ears keen for sound of pursuit.
We heard enough of that. Behind us, bodies crashed heavily through the brush, harsh voices shouting oaths and threats. All round us, though, lay silence. No creature of the wood made a sound. In that silence Olwynn shrugged from under Griff’s hand, drawing herself away from him. Sweating in the cold air, her arms trembling as she held the infant to her, she said, “Cae is hungry and cold and frightened. Find me a quiet place, and I will quiet her.”
Cae wailed louder. Griff put his hand on the grip of his sword, a slow, considered motion. The pulse leaped in Olwynn’s throat. She didn’t back away, though, and softly she said, “I have hired you, Griff Rees, to protect me. Surely you don’t threaten me now because my child is hungry and tired?”
She held her ground. Griff smiled the way you’d think Winter itself would smile, heartless and icy. “Am I not keeping your father’s precious treasure well enough, Mistress Haugh? You’re still here and standing, aren’t you?”
Back behind us a rough voice raised up, and another answered. In silence, I cursed. I’d taken this job for easy money, and it seemed to me the money was getting harder all the time.
“Griff,” I said, “let’s get going.”
Snarling, he said, “Broc, take us to some place quiet so Mistress Haugh can tend her child.”
Well enough, I knew where to go-who better than the Dwarf of Darken Wood? — and so I went, thrusting through the low growth, leaving Griff to shoulder through the tall with Olwynn, her child in full voice, behind.
Closer now, the rough voice shouted, “Hear ‘em? Up ahead!” The bandits came crashing along our trail, led by Cae’s wails. We heard one of them howl with glee in the very moment I found the two crossing trails I sought, one broad and clear, the other narrow and twisting. I smelled the stink of goblin on the wind. Maybe Olwynn did, too, for she closed her eyes and breathed softly, as if she were praying.
“All right, then,” I said, pointing to the narrow trail winding out like a snake. “That’s our path, Griff. At the end the ground rises. You’ll find three caves. You want the middle one. It’s deepest, and a spring wells up in the back. Go there, and don’t leave the path, or you’ll be lost before I miss you.”
Behind us a deer leaped, crashing through the brush. Pursuit came closer.
“And you?” Griff said.
I gave him my pack, then pointed to the ground. “Covering the marks of your big boots.”
He laughed grimly and got Olwynn moving again. They took the winding path, Griff ducking low, once or twice holding a whipping branch back for Olwynn when he thought to. I waited until they were gone up the path, then swiftly covered the marks of their passing. That done, I made a trail for the pursuit, my own clear boot prints, indeterminate marks off to the side, and some scuffing that looked as if someone had fallen a time or two and scrabbled up again. A spring bubbled up on the left of the trail not far ahead. I crossed it and left wet prints on the stony ground beyond.
Standing still off the path, I listened. A gravelly voice drifted to me on the wind, a goblin speaking in his own coarse language. Satisfied, I ducked into cover, making myself invisible in thickets as the bandits came closer, my rusty clothing fading into the rusty bracken. Eyes on the trail, ears straining for the sound of wailing Cae, I waited, breath held. Breath held, and Reaper held, just in case.
One goblin came, then another, and several humans followed.
“I’ll wear their skins for breeches,” the first goblin said. He had a look about him that reminded me of the rag-eared fellow I’d killed on the road. Kin, doubtless.
To the west, a crow cried again. Something fainter, smaller, seemed to answer. Cae! The goblin who was looking for new breeches stopped, obliging the others to do the same. He cocked his head, his pointed ears swivel-ing, just like a cat’s.
“Ar, it’s nothin”‘ growled a tall human. “Just a rabbit caught outside its hole.”
The goblin hung on his heel, listening. No other cry sounded. He took his companion’s word and went on. One by one, they passed me, all of them looking as if they’d had a hard time with thorny thickets. Smiling, I watched them. They kept their eyes on the trail and their noses to the wind. I heard them splash in the spring, heard them go on, and congratulated myself on work well done.
With luck, they’d follow the stony trail right back to the road again, though they wouldn’t know that till they’d come in sight of Gardar’s Tower five miles or more away. By then, I thought, slipping silently into the wood, that goblin would be minded to find himself a new pair of breeches somewhere else.
They aren’t long days, those of the Falling, and we’d wasted much of the first day of our journey to Haven on the dancy red mare and the bandits. By the time I reached the three caves, light lay old on the ground, and shadows were long. We’d be going nowhere until morning. Griff knew it as well as I. The middle cave had a settled look about it when I came walking up, packs against the wall inside, Olwynn sitting in the thin sunlight outside, her babe asleep in her arms. She huddled close in her cloak. The wind blew colder up here than down below, and stronger. Few trees grew to break it.
They greeted me variously, Griff with a curt nod and Olwynn with a smile and a glad word.
“I worried for you,” she said, settling Cae more comfortably. “You were a long time gone.”
“As long as it took,” I said. I scooped up a newly filled water bottle and drained it dry.
“Will we have a fire?” Olwynn asked, looking from one to the other of us.
I snorted. “Sure. I’ll build it while you go stand on the hill and shout to every bandit and outlaw in Darken Wood that we’re here.” I reached into my pack and pulled out some jerked venison. “Eat that,” I said, tossing it to her.
The little dove didn’t flinch from that growl of mine. She only tucked her child closer to her body and moved inside the cave, out of the reach of the waking wind. I turned to walk away, thinking I’d take the first watch and thereby gain a night’s uninterrupted sleep. Turning, I saw Griff shrug out of his own cloak, the thick green wool, and pass it over to Olwynn.
Softly she murmured her thanks.
“Never mind that,” he said roughly. “Get some sleep now. We’ll be early up.”
Never mind that, eh? Perhaps she didn’t, but I took it up the hill with me, laughing. What a tender guide he was! Or so she might think. Me, I recalled words of Griff’s spoken harshly in the wood: Am I not keeping your father’s precious treasure well enough, Mistress Haugh? Precious treasure, all right, and more like Griff’s than her father’s, for she was his way into his enemy’s house.
I forgot all that when Griff came up the hill much too soon to relieve my watch. He came walking in the light of the red and silver moons, and something about the look on him, bone-white and skullish, sent a spider-footed chill up my neck.
He said, “What?” when I looked hard at him, and he scowled and spat.
“You,” I said. “You look like. .”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. It was hard to explain. He looked like Death walking, hollow-eyed and unstoppable, and no surprise there. For Olwynn Haugh’s father, Death is what he was. But he looked like one caught by Death, too; like a man gnawed and chewed over and not much left on the bone. Wind cut across the top of the hill, whining a little. It had grown colder since the sun’s setting. Griff put his back to it, hunching his shoulders. Eyes on the cave, that yawning dark mouth, he nodded, almost absently.
“Go on down,” he said, “ and see if you can get a fire going.”
“What?” I almost laughed. “Are you crazy? Every bandit-”
He rounded on me, snarling, “Do it! You hide out in these hills all the time, and no one knows you’re here till you walk up on ‘em. Are you going to tell me you never build a fire?”
I wasn’t going to tell him that. No one makes a quicker or cleaner fire than I do. Still, it seemed too risky now. As quickly as he’d roused to snarl, however, that easily did Griff calm again.
“Those bandits are long gone,” he said. “We won’t see them again. The girl’s my passage into her father’s house. I’ve got to keep her and her child safe and well till we get where we’re going.”
Well, she was my passport too, to a fine fat fee, one that would keep me warm and fed and in dwarf spirits all the winter through. I thought about where the bandits would be now and reckoned they were either back in Long Ridge or cursing me up one side of Gardar Tower and down the other. The wind ran from the direction of that old pile of stone, and nothing in the sky or the scent of the chill air spoke of a storm to change the sky’s mind.
“All right, then,” I said, shaking my head. “A fire it is.”
Griff said nothing, only sat down in the lee of the hill where the wind wouldn’t bite and took out his bone-handled dirk and a small whetstone. Plying one against the other, he watched the blade bleed small sparks while I scuffed around a bit to see if we had more to say to each other. We didn’t, and so I left him to watch.
When I returned to the cave, Olwynn smiled to see my arms full of wood and tinder. She set her child upon the ground, snug among the packs, and rose to help me at the fire-building. One breath she drew to speak, that small smile still on her lips, when all the silent night ripped apart, torn by Griff’s wild war cry.
Seven men fell upon us with howling and steel, seven bandits who didn’t know when the game was over. Moonlight ran like spilling silver along the keen edges of swords. Olwynn cried out, “Broc!” and Cae woke shrieking and screaming.
“Into the cave!” I shouted. “All the way back!” She didn’t wait to argue or ask a question. She ran with her child wailing, hunched over and seeking the safety of deeper darkness. The bandits laughed, thinking they’d have no trouble getting past me. Well, there were seven of them, and maybe they’d have been right. We never learned about that, though. No sooner did I smash the knees out from under one of the goblins than the other one died screaming. Griff’s blade slipped between his ribs from behind. The thick coppery stink of blood filled the air as I finished my man, relieving his skull of his brains, and spun on my heel, Reaper’s weight carrying me, to shatter the ribs, then the whole chest, of another.
We were good, Griff and I, workmanlike at our killing. It took less time than the telling to dispatch two more with sword and hammer, and now there were but two bandits left. One was a tall, thick-shouldered fellow, the other thin with a poxy face. Each had a fine bright blade. The tall bandit lunged for Griff, the other feinted toward me, sword tip circling tightly, taunting just beyond Reaper’s range. Griff’s man lunged again, then sidestepped Griff’s return. In that stepping, he moved toward the cave’s mouth. Cae’s bawling echoed far back in the darkness. Laughing, the bandit vanished, swallowed into the darkness, trusting Cae’s howling to lead him.
“Damn!” Griff shouted, leaping too late to stop him. “Damn and damn!” and he flung himself into the cave, leaving me standing, eyes locked with the pox-faced bandit.
He grinned, that bandit, a baleful light in his eyes. Just a little light flickered, and I spied his intent. I stepped back and to the side just as he lunged. Stumbling, he turned to find me. Reaper, whistling in the air, took him in the back of the neck and shattered his spine. With his own sword I put him out of his pain.
Steel clanged on stone inside the cave, then one blade belled against another. Closer than I’d thought to hear, those sounds, and closer still Olwynn’s sudden cry of dread. In the instant, one sword fell clattering to the stony ground, and then the other. Olwynn bolted past me, child in arms. Like demons, two men followed, the last bandit weaponless, Griff on his heels.
Blood dripped from the bandit’s sword arm, and his other hand clenched tight. I leaped over the corpse at my feet, Reaper ready, but I moved too late. The bandit turned, hitting me hard between the shoulders.
I fell, the breath blasted from my lungs, gasping like a drowning man. The stone-fisted man snatched a sword from the ground, laughing and lunging for Griff. Olwynn screamed again, but not in terror or pain. Here was rage, tearing up the night, tearing up the inside of my skull. In one smooth motion she set down her child among the packs near the wall and grabbed the stone the bandit let fall.
I heard it, then, that sound I’m used to hearing, the cracking of bone, as Olwynn’s stone smashed down on the man’s shouldet I laughed — I actually did as the breath came rushing back to me. The laughter died on my lips as the bandit turned. He shifted his sword to his left hand. Silver and red moonlight ran down the length of the blade, gleaming on honed steel edges. Then there was no light, there was only blood, black in the moonlight, as Olwynn fell to her knees.
She turned up her face to the sky and the stars, just as if she were praying. Cae’s wailing fell to whimpering where she lay shoved among the packs, then to silence. In the first moment of that silence, Olwynn closed her hands round the blade. Her blood poured over her hands, pulsing with the same rhythm of her breath. She opened her lips. Some word trembled there as her eyes met Griff’s. The word fell away unspoken as she collapsed.
The little dove lay dead among the wolves, killed upon the road home.
“Son of a bitch!” Griff shouted.
He kicked the body of the tall, thick-shouldered bandit, tumbling it down the hill to lie with the others. Wolves and ravens would feed well here. We’d picked over the corpses of all the bandits, rummaging for what seemed worth taking, flints and strikers, a small leather pouch of coin, and two good dirks. We’d have taken their swords, too, but those needed carrying, and we didn’t want the burden. I hid them deep inside the cave, a weapons cache.
Only one other body remained, that of Olwynn Haugh. She lay inside the cave, and I’d wrapped her in her cloak and folded her hands upon her cold breast. Now I stood with her green velvet pouch, tossing it gently from one hand to the other.
“Son of a bitch,” Griff whispered, looking at dead Olwynn.
I’ve said it-you could look into the eyes of Killer Griff and see the flames of a long-ago burning. You could see the very place a boy once crouched, bleeding and stunned, a dark and suffocating hold where smoke and terror and grief made knotty fingers to tear the soul from the body. You could hear the voices of that nightmare, a father’s desperate plea for the lives of his family, a mother screaming as her baby died. He was in that place, that dark place of his nightmares, even as the new sun rose behind him and threw his dark shadow over the body of Olwynn Haugh, over her child.
He stood looking down at the child, eyes cold and narrow. She’d wailed the last hours of the night through while we rolled corpses down the hill, hungry and frightened, until at last exhaustion took and stilled her. She stirred now, as if she knew he was looking at her. One little fist waving in sleep, she sighed. Griff looked past her to Olwynn dead, then reached out and scooped up Cae. So small was she that her head fit into one of his big scarred hands. With the other he could have snuffed the life from her, smothering. For a moment I thought he would do that and leave her dead here with her mother. We’d hie us back to Long Ridge, and maybe he’d have the satisfaction of knowing he’d seen his foeman’s kin dead.
But that wouldn’t get me paid.
“Griff,” I said, “we’d better get going if we’re going to make Haven tomorrow.”
He looked at me from those nightmare eyes of his, and he laughed bitterly. “Then what? How do I find the bastard now? I don’t even know what name he’s using.”
I shrugged as if the problem was nothing to worry about, steering him back to where I wanted him to be-in that place where I’d get my money.
“W
e know he’s somewhere in Haven. You still want to find him, so we’ll find him.” I cocked a thumb at Olwynn’s child. “When we do, she’ll get us into his house just like her mother would. How happy will they be to let in the man who saved the grandchild from murder?”
He grunted, thinking.
“Could work,” I said, still tossing the green velvet pouch from hand to hand. The coins made lovely music clinking together, the sound of my warm winter. “We don’t know his name, but we know his daughter’s. We can find him.”
Griff, he still had his eyes on the child, and a coldness stole over his face, ice creeping on a still pond. Yet when he looked up at me again it seemed to me that the coldness wasn’t there anymore, that it had been my imagination painting the expression.
He grabbed the pouch in midtoss and bent to pick up the baby. “Broc, what’s the best way to Haven from here without going back to the road?”
Well and good, I thought.
Cae sighed, and her lips moved in one of those unwitting smiles of babies, sleeping in the arms of the man who planned her kinsman’s death.
“The best way is down through the Centaur Reaches,” I said, easy again and ready to finish what we’d started. “The centaurs and I, though, we don’t get along. I can take you across the wood and around the Reaches to where the Elfstream runs. We can follow it right to Haven.”
All his ghosts peering out at me from his eyes, Griff said that route was good enough for him, and so we left the cave, Olwynn Haugh’s cold tomb, and went away again into Darken Wood.
Ah, my feet like the old stamping grounds! They find their way almost without my eyes, knowing the game trails and the clear runs beside little streams the way townfolk know their streets and roads. So my feet and I led Griff west and south through the golden wood while wind blew chill through the shimmering aspens and bracken rustled under foot. High in the sky, geese went winging in spearhead formation, their calls sounding year’s end. All the world smelled sweet and sad in its last glory. It wouldn’t have been such a bad walk south in the gold and the quiet, but we weren’t long gone from the hill before Cae awoke in full voice and hungry.
Heroes And Fools totfa-2 Page 11
