by Barb Hendee
Chap had planned for a fight, even wanted it in part.Or at least enough distraction to take the one person who mattered-Most Aged Father.
He had watched the an'Croan shaken by how the majay-hi cast their
"vote" in this matter. Lily had likely strained her place among the pack in convincing them for him, but they all shared some strange animosity for the leader of the Anmaglahk, a being too old for natural life and yet making claims against Magiere as an undead.
Perhaps his rejected kin were correct-flesh and heart made him reckless. He did not care anymore.
Most Aged Father's bearers had not come for him. Even this did not matter toChap. He wanted answers, and he would take them.
Frethfare stepped in his way as he closed on the old one.
"We only have a message for Most Aged Father," Wynn said.
Chap barked once, not turning his eyes from the patriarch.
"Snaw… hac…" Leesil began, then sighed in frustration.
"Snahacroe," Wynn pronounced for him.
At the name, Most Aged Father's milky eyes widened and he sat up as straight as he could.
"He said to tell you…" Leesil called out clearly, "that he's waiting for his comrade to join him… when you're done."
Chap lunged into the old one's mind, waiting for whatever might come.
Sounds and images rose, led by the face of a tall elf with wide cheekbones. Chap let go of all else, even anger, and sank into Most Aged Father's rising memories.
Sorhkafare stood amid the night-wrapped trees surrounding Aonnis Lhoin'n, First Glade.
It had been the longest run of his life to reach his people's land and what now seemed the only sanctuary in a blighted world. He led his dwindling group to this place hoping to find other survivors, hoping to find help. But he could still hear the grunts and weeping and madness of the night horde ranging beyond the forest's edge.
All through his flight home, every town and village, and even every keep and stronghold, was littered with bodies torn as if fed upon by animals. The few living they encountered joined them in flight from the pale predators with crystalline eyes, always in their wake.
The numbers of their pursuers grew with each fall of the sun.
Fewer than half of those who fled Sorhkafare's encampment with him reached the forests of his people. Not one of the dwarves made it on their stout legs carrying thick heavy bodies. Thalhomerk had been the last of their people to succumb, along with his son and daughter.
In a dead run through the dark, Sorhkafare had heard the dwarven lord's vicious curses. He looked back as Thalhomerk submerged under a wave of pale bodies. He shuddered at the sound of bones cracking under the dwarf's massive fists and mace. And still the horde flowed toward Sorhkafare and over Thalhomerk's son and daughter. He could not tell which one had screamed out, as Hoil'lhan's voice smothered it with a visceral shout. She whirled to turn back.
Her hair whipped about her long face as she swung the butt of her thick metal spear shaft. It cracked through a pale face. Splattering black fluids blotted out the creature's glittering eyes and maw of sharp teeth.
Sorhkafare did not understand Hoil'lhan's preference for dwarven and human company, nor her restless and savage nature. Perhaps she had been killing for too long.
Hoil'lhan spun her spear without pause as three more pale figures closed on her. The spear's wide and long head split through the first's collarbone, grinding into its chest. She jerked her weapon out as the other two hesitated, and she screeched at them madly, ready to charge.
Sorhkafare grabbed her, pulling her around as more of the horde rushed at them through the dark.
"Run," he ordered.
Even in renewed flight Hoil'lhan tried to turn on him with her metal spear. Snahacroe snatched her other arm, and they dragged her onward.
"You cannot save Thalhomerk," Snahacroe said in a hollow voice.
The endless running took its toll. Two more of Sorhkafare's soldiers dropped in their tracks before any saw the forest's edge. All he could do was hope they died of exhaustion before…
In the clearing of First Glade, humans and elves now huddled in fear. Sorhkafare could no longer look at their gaunt faces.
So few… and in the distance, beyond the forest's limits, carried the shouts and cries of dark figures with crystalline eyes. A part of him found that easier to face than to count the small number who still lived.
A small pack of the silver-gray wolves came out of the trees. They moved with eerie conscious intent. At first their presence had frightened all, but they never attempted any harm; quite the opposite. They wove among the people, sniffing about. One stopped to lick and nuzzle a small elven girl holding a human infant.
These wolves had eyes like crystals tinted with sky blue, and neither he nor his troops had ever seen such before. But during his campaigns against the enemy, Sorhkafare had heard reports and rumors of strange wolves, deer, and other animals joining allied forces in battles in other lands.Which made these wolves a welcome sight.
The survivors in First Glade ate little and slept less. If sleep did come, they cried out in their dreams. Every night, Sorhkafare waited for the pale horde to surge in upon them.
But they never came.
On the sixth night, he could stand it no more and walked out into the forest. Leshiara tried to stop him.
Youngest of their council of elders, she stood in his way, soft lines of coming age on a face urgent and firm beneath her long graying hair. She pulled her maroon robe tight about herself against the night's chill.
"You cannot leave!" she whispered sharply. "These people need to see every warrior we have left ready to stand for them. You will make them think you abandon them."
"Stand against what?" he snarled at her, not caring who heard. "You do not know what is out there any more than I. And if they could come for us, why have they not done so? Leave me be!"
He stepped around her, heading into the trees, but not before he caught Snahacroe watching him with sad disappointment. In days past, his kinsman's silent reproach would have cut him, but now he felt nothing.
Sorhkafare followed the sounds of beasts on two legs out beyond the forest, wondering why they had not come for the pitiful count of refugees.These things on two legs… things that would not die… blood-hungry with familiar faces as pale as corpses'. He heard them more clearly as the trees thinned around him, and he stopped in the night to listen.
The noise they made had changed. Screams of pain were strangled short beneath wet tearing sounds.
Sorhkafare stumbled forward, sickened by his own curiosity.
Through a stand of border aspens before the open plain, he saw three silhouettes with sparking eyes. They rushed, one after another, upon a fourth fleeing before them.
Still, he kept on, slipping in behind one aspen.
In days past, Sorhkafare would have leaped to defend any poor victim.But not now. It did not matter if anyone out there on the plain still lived. He peered around the aspen's trunk.
The three hunkered upon the ground with lowered heads, tearing back and forth. Beneath them, the fourth struggled wildly, its pain-pitched voice ringing in Sorhkafare's ears.
The sound of such terrified suffering ate at him.
He lunged around the tree, running for the victim's outstretched hand. Halfway there, the figure thrashed free and scrambled across the matted grass with wide, panicked eyes…
Glittering, crystalline eyes.
Sorhkafare's feet slid upon autumn leaves as he halted.
Out on the plain, dark silhouettes chased and hunted each other with cries of fear and hunger. The moon and stars dimly lit shapes tearing into each other with fingers and teeth. With nothing else to feed upon, the pale creatures turned upon each other.
These things… so hungry for warm life.
One of the three lifted its head.
Sorhkafare made out a pale face, its mouth smeared with wet black. Its eyes sparked as if gathering the waninglight, and it saw h
im. It rose, turning toward him as the other pair chased the fourth through the grass.
Sorhkafare heard his own breath. He retreated a few paces, just inside the forest's tree line.
This pale thing he saw… a man… was human.
His quivering lips and teeth were darkened, as if he had been drinking black ink. He sniffed the air wildly and a ravenous twist distorted his features. He began running toward Sorhkafare.
This one smelled him, sensed his life.
Sorhkafare jerked out his long war knife and braced himself.
The human came straight at him, its feral features pained with starvation. Perhaps it gained no sustenance in feeding on its own. But he no longer cared for anything beyond seeing these horrors gone from his world.
It ran straight at him like an animal without reason.
When it stepped between the first trees of the forest, it stopped short, hissing and gurgling in desperation. Sorhkafare saw the man clearly now.
Young, perhaps twenty human years.His face was heavily scratched, but the marks were black lines rather than red. His flesh was white and shriveled, as if it were sinking in upon itself. The thing cried piteously at Sorhkafare and took another hesitant step.
Why would the horde not enter the forest, if they were starved enough to turn on each other?
Sorhkafare raised his knife and cut the back of his forearm. He swung his bloodied arm through the air.
"Hungry?" he shouted. "I am here!"
The sight of blood drove the man deeper into madness. He charged forward with a scream grating up his throat. Sorhkafare shifted backward, feeling blindly for smooth and solid footing.
As the pale man lunged between two aspens, he grabbed his head with a strangled choke. He turned about and cried out-but not in anguished hunger. This was a sound of fear and pain as he whirled and wobbled. The man stumbled too near one aspen, and he clawed wildly at the air, as if fending off the tree.
Sorhkafare watched in stunned confusion. A howl carried around him from within the forest.
It was like nothing Sorhkafare had ever heard-long and desperate in warning. Two of the silver-furred wolves burst through the underbrush and out of the dark, their eyes glowing like clear crystals tinted with sky blue.
The first slammed straight into the screaming man and latched its jaws around his throat, ripping as it dragged him down. The second joined in, and their howls shifted to savage snarls as they tore at their prey.
The man's scream cut off in a wet gag, but still he thrashed and clawed.
On instinct Sorhkafare ran in to help the wolves, but they kept snapping and tearing at the man's throat.
One of them shifted aside. It pinned the man's arm with teeth and paws. The other did the same, and they held him down as the first one looked up at Sorhkafare.
The wolf waited for Sorhkafare to do something-but what?
The man's throat was a dark mass shredded almost to the spine-yet still he writhed and fought to get free. Black fluids dribbled from his gaping mouth and blotted out his teeth.A mouth that either snarled or screamed with no voice.
He could not still be alive. No one could live after what these wolves had done to him… tearing at his neck as if…
Sorhkafare dropped to his knees and snatched the man's hair with his free hand. With so little sinew left on that neck, it was easy to hold the head steady. He pressed the long knife's edge down through the mess of the man's throat until it halted against bone.
In a quick shift, he released his grip on the hair and pressed on the back of the blade with all his weight.
The blade grated and then cut down through neck bones.
The pale man ceased thrashing and fell limp as a true corpse.
Sorhkafare sucked in air as he lifted his gaze to the first wolf, its muzzle stained with wet black like his own hands. He stared into its eyes as his mind emptied of all but two truths.
The forest would not allow the horde in. And if one got through, these wolves sensed it and came.
He climbed to his feet, still breathing hard, and crept back to the forest's edge to look out upon the rolling plain.
Dark forms rolled, ran, leaped, and crawled in the grass. Others barely moved, little more than quivering masses choking in the dark. Pale figures chased each other-slaughtered each other.
Sorhkafare stood watching, unable to look away. Every figure that came close enough for his night eyes to see was human.
He saw not one elf. Not one dwarf. Not even a goblin, or the hulking scaled body of a reptilian locathan, or any of the other monstrosities the enemy had sent against him.
Only humans.
He turned and stumbled back toward First Glade. The wolves paced him all the way to his people.
He found Snahacroe kneeling behind an injured human youth, bracing the boy up while Leshiara worked upon the boy's leg. In the past days, these two shared company more and more.
Leshiara closed her eyes, and a low thrum rose from her throat. She lightly traced her fingertips around the boy's deeply bruised calf, over and over, and then went silent. She opened her eyes and rebandaged the boy's leg.
When she stood up and found Sorhkafare watching her, she frowned.
"Come with me," he said.
Snahacroe looked worried and followed as well.
They walked into the center of the glade.
In the open space stood an immense tree like no other in this world.Its trunk was the size of a small citadel tower, and high overhead its branches reached out into the forest.
Sorhkafare saw where those limbs stretched into the green leaves and needles of the surrounding trees and beyond. A soft glow emanated from the tree's tawny body and branches,bare of bark but still thriving with life. Massive roots like hill ridges split the clearing's turf where they emerged from the trunk to burrow deep and far into the earth.
Sorhkafare laid a hand upon the glistening trunk of Charmun, a name that humans would translate as "Sanctuary."
"We must take a cutting from Charmun," he said to Leshiara. "Can you keep it alive over a long journey?"
She grew pale and did not answer.
"What are you planning?" Snahacroe asked, moving closer to Leshiara.
Sorhkafare looked at his one remaining commander. "The horde turns upon itself. They have nothing else left within reach to feed upon-but it does them no good. In perhaps days, there may be few enough left for us to slip away."
"No!" someone snapped sharply.
Sorhkafare knew the voice before he turned his head.
Hoil'lhan stood at the clearing's edge, and around her paced three of the strange tall wolves. All four were spattered and dripping in black fluids. All four watched him with equal intensity. Hoil'lhan stabbed the long, broad head of her spear into the earth, and Sorhkafare watched more black fluid run from its sharp edges to the grass.
"Where have you been?" he demanded.
"Where do you think?" Hoil'lhan spit out at him. "The enemy's minions range upon our very borders… and you wish to run?"
"We cannot stay here in hiding within this blighted land," Sorhkafare returned.
"I said no!" Hoil'lhan shouted, running a hand through her white, sweat-matted hair. "I will not let the enemy take what is ours! I will not leave any more that I cherish… fleeing with their screams at my back!"
"Enough," Snahacroe warned.
"It was not a request," Sorhkafare said firmly. "I am still your commander."
Hoil'lhan breathed hard, twisting her hand around the upright shaft of her spear.
"And since when do you alone speak for our people?" Leshiara said quietly, stepping toward Sorhkafare. "You do not sit in the council of First Glade, and we no longer follow the old ways of divided clans. Such decisions are the province ofmyself and the others of the council."
"There is no council left!" Sorhkafare shouted at her. "You are the only one that remains… so do you alone choose for our people, like some human monarch?"
"That is not my meani
ng," she snapped back. "There are too many here who need us."
Sorhkafare shook his head. "What if they are the very ones by which the Enemy can still reach us? Out beyond our forest… those dead things that move and feast… they were once humans, like those still among us."
"You do not know how this was done to them," Hoil'lhan growled. "Or if the Enemy's reach could find any who shelter here!"
Snahacroe turned, staring off through the trees, as if trying to see the forest's edge. Leshiara fell silent and closed her eyes, seeming to grow older and wearier before Sorhkafare's eyes.
But he could not relent.
"We will take our own people. Perhaps the wolves will join us as well. We will get as far from here as we can reach. We will plant our cutting from Charmun and create a haven for our people far from the Enemy's reach."
"Our people?" Snahacroe asked.
"Not the humans," Sorhkafare answered.
"The outsiders are dismissed!"
Chap didn't know who spoke those words, but they jerked him to awareness. His legs trembled as he pulled free of Most Aged Father's memories.
Leesil dropped to one knee beside him, but Chap regained his own footing.
Several anmaglahk came in around Most Aged Father. Under their threatening encouragement, Chap turned away with Leesil and Wynn. Magiere joined them as they were all ushered out of the council clearing.
Chap struggled to follow but could not stop trembling. He looked up at Magiere's black braid swinging as she leaned against Leesil while they walked.
He knew why Most Aged Father feared Magiere so deeply, though the old man did not fully understand what she was. He saw only some new shape of those among the pale horde of his memory. She was far worse than even the old man could imagine.
Magiere was human, born of the undead. Yet she walked freely and unfettered into this land. Chap's mind raced back to his fear-spawned delusion in the Pudurlatsat forest-of Magiere as the general at the head of an army…
No, a horde-one that could not enter a shielded land without her.
If only he could tell Magiere alone, without the need of Wynn to speak for him. Magiere deserved at least that much privacy, but there was no way to achieve such.
