The Sword of the South - eARC

by David Weber

  It was impossible to make much speed, despite the wide spacing of the trees and the absence of any underbrush. The leaf-covered ground was close enough to invisible, even where the moonlight broke through, that the horses—even the coursers—had to move cautiously. Still, they’d penetrated several slow miles before Wencit drew rein once more, and all of the others were relieved at the halt.

  “We’ll not make much time this way, Wencit,” Bahzell said. He wasn’t protesting, simply stating a self-evident fact. “I’m thinking as we’d cover the same ground quicker with daylight.”

  “We might,” Wencit agreed. “Except that I couldn’t see my guide marks then.”

  “Guide marks, is it now? In this?” Bahzell sounded frankly doubtful.

  “Watch.”

  Wencit raised a hand and sketched a sign in the air, and his companions’ eyes widened as a line of flickering lights glowed suddenly. They burned like tiny beacons in a long line that arrowed under the trees and disappeared in the distance, lost among the trunks. Wencit let the others gaze at them for several seconds, then chuckled and closed his hand, and the lights vanished abruptly.

  “You see? I could find them in daylight if I had to, but only by using more of the art than I’d like to so close to Wulfra. Block or no, some of it might leak through, especially if she’s laid out a network of kairsalhain charged with guard spells. Of course, it’s not likely she’d care to get close enough to the Dragon Ward for that, but there’s always the possibility.”

  “B-But what—?” Chernion bit her lip.

  “I beg your pardon, Elrytha?” Wencit asked courteously, and she glowered at him in the darkness before she accepted his challenge.

  “Where did those come from?” she asked levelly.

  “Why, I put them here, Border Warden,” the wizard said lightly. “At the same time I set the Dragon Ward. They lead straight to Castle Torfo.”

  “So that’s how you’re after knowing what Wulfra’s about,” Bahzell mused. “You’ve a neat little secret highway right into her kitchen garden.”

  “Perhaps I do, but I’ve never used it,” Wencit replied. “There was never any need to.”

  Bahzell glanced at him strangely and started to speak, then stopped. Kenhodan wondered what the hradani had been about to say, and then felt his own eyes widen in sudden surmise. If Wencit had never used his “guide marks” before, why had he created them? For that matter, he’d set the Dragon Ward only a century or so after the Fall—over twelve hundred years ago. How could he have known he’d someday need a secret path through the Scarth Wood before Angthyr was even settled?

  The questions burned in Kenhodan’s brain, and he longed to ask them. But, like Bahzell, he didn’t. The icicle moving up and down his spine suggested that the answers to those questions had entirely too much to do with their current mission and all those unanswered mysteries in his own past, and he discovered he was less eager to hear those answers than he’d thought he was. Not when they led into something like this. Besides, Wencit had reasons for everything he did, and if he chose not to volunteer them, it was probably better not to know them.

  Wencit’s wildfire eyes glowed at his companions, and Kenhodan wondered whether he was amused or simply waiting. Like Bahzell, Kenhodan had come to recognize the wizard’s delight in confounding his audience with occasional, offhand displays of knowledge or power. But he’d also come to wonder how much of that was because it genuinely amused the old man and how much was carefully designed to serve an entirely different purpose. A wizard with a reputation for baffling others for the simple pleasure of it might find that a useful cover for the times he had to admit others to mysteries he normally preferred to hide.

  Wencit brought Kenhodan’s musing to an end with a respectful tongue click to Byrchalka and the courser started off again, lifting his feet high and half-prancing. If the others wondered whether or not Wencit was truly amused, the coal black courser clearly didn’t, and he flirted his tail impudently at Walsharno as he forged back into motion.

  Kenhodan and Bahzell exchanged baffled headshakes, then Glamhandro followed on Byrchalka’s heels while Walsharno fell back into his trailing position. Chernion rode at center of the small party, leading the pack horses, and her own. mind was busy assessing suspicions about the wizard which were very similar to Kenhodan’s, though considerably less charitable. She knew herself for a subtle web-spinner, but this sort of centuries-long deviousness brought home just how unlike anyone else she’d ever confronted Wencit truly was. If he had surprises like this one up his sleeve for Wulfra’s benefit—and if he’d known that long in advance that he’d need those surprises—who knew what he might hold in reserve for dealing with her?

  After another hour, they slithered down a steep bank into a ravine. At first Kenhodan thought it was natural, but then he noticed its absolutely uniform width and the fact that only moss grew along its level bottom. There were neither trees nor undergrowth, and the ravine’s floor was as firm and flat as most roads. In fact, the more he studied it, the more it took on the appearance of a highway. A hidden highway, for the tops of its banks soon rose well above even the coursers’ heads, and the growth crowning them was densely intertwined. It would be almost impossible for anyone to stumble across it, even if they’d dared come this close to the menace of the Dragon Ward.

  “This is amazing,” he said tentatively, his voice low.

  “What? The pathway?” Wencit shrugged. “I had to do quite a bit of local rearranging when I set the ward, Kenhodan. It struck me this might come in handy one day. It wasn’t much trouble to include it along with everything else, and the power of the working that set the ward was so great I could be confident no one would notice the energy I used to create it.”

  “And that was important because it was obvious you’d need to sneak through the area unobserved one day. I can see that,” Kenhodan agreed just a touch too courteously.

  His manner said plainly that Wencit could be as secretive as he liked, and the wizard glanced across at him, then chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder as they rode side by side. The genuineness of his humor made Kenhodan feel better about him, and Wencit gave him an affectionate shake.

  “Kenhodan,” he murmured, “I begin to have hopes for you. I truly do.”

  He gave the younger man another shake, and then Byrchalka stepped forward just a bit more briskly, as if some silent message had passed between him and his rider. The courser flowed away over the smooth ravine’s floor, leaving Kenhodan to ride thoughtfully at his heels.

  * * *

  They rode all night and all through the next day, pausing only to rest their mounts at regular intervals, and Wencit led them unerringly along the hidden road. It twisted and turned as evening drew on once again, clearly following the line of the most difficult terrain, but it never narrowed, and it never ended.

  The moon had set and a second night crept toward a close as they edged endlessly along. They’d made good time once they entered the ravine, but even Glamhandro was beginning to droop by the time pewter-colored dawn seeped into the woods, and Kenhodan was about to suggest they all needed a longer rest badly when Wencit suddenly stopped unasked.

  Kenhodan peered past him and saw that the ravine ended just ahead in a grove of beech and ash. Fresh-budded branches swayed and whispered overhead and the yellow streamers of dead beech leaves swirled about them in a gentle cloud as they eased up out of their sunken roadbed into the softly breathing sunrise, and as Kenhodan drew up beside him, Wencit touched his arm and then pointed to the east.

  Dying stars twinkled in a deep blue sky, faint and infinitely distant as the sun stirred restlessly just below the horizon. The eastern sky was salmon and palest rose, and the world was cool and fresh, hushed under the soft sigh of wind and murmur of branches as Kenhodan followed the pointing finger with his eyes and stiffened.

  A tall hill stood against the delicately streaked sky, dark and cold with dew. Bare slopes and tumbled rocks climbed up its flanks, barren
and dreary in the gray light…and atop the hill, there brooded a fortress.

  Battlements etched clean lines against the dawn, and a massive central keep thrust high above the inner curtain wall. Shadows hid the foot of the hill, but he saw the vague flicker and white smother of foam of a waterfall far beyond the castle, faint and hard to see with distance in the dimness, and realized the entire hill stood in the midst of a small lake. The fortress sat on its hill, waiting, yellow torches fuming on the battlements, shone through arrow slits, and reflected faintly from rippled lake water as day broke. Lanterns bobbed slowly and methodically along the walls to mark the weary beats of sentries, and light spilled through a barred portcullis in the heavily shadowed western wall to glow on a lowered drawbridge. He could just make out the dark shapes of a strong gate guard in full armor, and the land around the castle had been brushed back to the water’s edge, stripping away all cover along its approaches.

  “Behold Castle Torfo,” Wencit said softly.

  * * *

  “Oh, I behold the castle,” Kenhodan said wearily. “What I don’t behold is how you plan to get inside it!”

  “Aye,” Bahzell agreed. “I’m thinking the lad’s a point. It does seem to be a trifle heavily guarded.”

  “It is,” Wencit agreed. “So we’ll simply have to avoid their guard posts, I suppose.”

  “I see.” Kenhodan looked over at Bahzell and grinned. “I’m surprised at you, Bahzell! All we have to do is find the door Wulfra forgot to lock. Every evil sorceress in every story I ever heard forgot to lock the door before the intrepid heroes turned up.”

  “Actually, you could say she did exactly that,” Wencit said calmly. “Not that she knows she left any of them unlocked. She’s not the most gracious of hostesses, and if she’d known about the door, she certainly would have locked it. Since she didn’t…”

  He shrugged, and Chernion snorted harshly.

  “I don’t especially want to be her guest, or to die trying to break in and failing.” She stretched tiredly. “Tell us about this door, Wizard.”

  “Certainly. But we should rest the horses while I do that; we’ll need them again soon enough.”

  They withdrew deeper into the trees and dismounted, and the horses blew heavily and nosed in the tumbled beech leaves while Bahzell and Kenhodan poured water into Wencit’s old hat for them to drink from. The coursers were just as thirsty as their “lesser cousins,” but they waited until all of the horses had drunk before taking their own turns.

  “All right, Wizard,” Chernion pressed.

  “Very well.” Wencit sat on a rock and leaned back against a straight-trunked ash tree as he pointed at the castle’s battlements, just barely visible through a gap in the branches. “We’d never make it to the lake, much less across the walls, without being spotted by those guards. Agreed?”

  “Aye,” Bahzell said, and Kenhodan seconded him with a nod.

  “So we won’t go that way,” Wencit told him. “We’ll go there, instead—to that hill north of the lake. See it?”

  Kenhodan peered along his pointing finger to find the hill in question. It was perhaps four thousand straight-line yards from their present position and just over a thousand yards back from the lake, with a bare, craggy top, but its flanks were heavily wooded and a dense belt of trees stretched all the way from their present position to it.

  “That’s the door Wulfra left unlocked,” Wencit said. “What we’ve come for is hidden in a maze under the castle. What Wulfra doesn’t know is that there’s a backdoor—a secret way into the maze—from under that hill.”

  “Is there now?” Bahzell murmured. “And it’s certain you are as she’s not found it?”

  “Yes.” Wencit’s voice was flat with assurance, and the hradani nodded, his ears half-flattened in thought.

  “Just what’s this ‘secret way’ like?” Kenhodan asked warily.

  “It’s a tunnel—too low and narrow for the horses, much less the coursers, I’m afraid. But there’s an outer cave big enough to hide them all, with Walsharno and Byrchalka to watch our backs and see to it that none of the ‘lesser cousins’ stray. The tunnel runs out under the lake and—unfortunately—enters the maze at one side, not in the center, so we’ll have to make our way through whatever guards and traps she’s set up in the maze itself.” Wencit shrugged. “At least we’ll avoid her outer defenses.”

  “So even if we go in through the tunnel, we have to fight our way through her inner defenses,” Kenhodan mused. “I have to admit, that idea beats fighting our way through her outer defenses, as well. But how do we get out again afterward?”

  “If we don’t reach our goal, that won’t matter,” Wencit said bluntly, “because we’ll be dead. If, on the other hand, we do reach it, Wulfra will almost certainly be dead. And in that case, do you think a black sorceress’ guardsmen will really want to face whoever—or whatever—was powerful enough to kill her?”

  “I see.”

  Kenhodan pursed his lips and drummed on his sword hilt, and it didn’t seem odd to him that all three of his companions simply watched him think and waited for him to pronounce upon the plan’s acceptability.

  “How likely is she to have arranged something too strong for us to get through?” he asked finally.

  “I can’t say,” the wizard replied calmly. “I would’ve said she couldn’t summon anything we can’t handle, but then I’d’ve said she couldn’t control a dragon, either. I don’t think we’ll meet anything cold steel and courage can’t match, but—”

  He shrugged eloquently.

  “It’s an unhappy man I am whenever you’re after admitting fallibility, Wencit,” Bahzell rumbled.

  “No one’s infallible, Bahzell.”

  “Aye, but it’s a great comfort it’s been to my mind over the years to be thinking as you are.”

  Kenhodan paid their byplay little heed while his mind weighed and analyzed. Yet even as he considered his scanty information, he knew there was no point. They’d come too far even to think about stopping now.

  “Well,” he sighed finally, “I suppose we’ll have to try it.”

  “I’m thinking you’ve the right of it, lad,” Bahzell agreed, rather more seriously.

  “And if you three are fool enough to go, I might as well, too.”

  Wencit glanced at Chernion, but this time she was too busy wondering about her own motives to notice. Even her Elrytha personality had never agreed to this! Yet she couldn’t turn back. Ashwan was dead, and breaking into the castle might get her close enough to Wulfra for the kill. That was her motive, she told herself: vengeance. And the possibility of using Kenhodan for her own ends afterward, of course.

  Her thoughts skittered carefully away from her ambiguous emotions where the red-haired man was concerned.

  “Very well.” Wencit accepted their decision calmly. “In that case, I suggest we move to the hill now, before full daylight. The woods will cover our approach, and we can rest in the cave before we enter the maze.

  “Sounds reasonable,” Kenhodan agreed, and retightened Glamhandro’s girth as the eastern sky turned pale lemon and the rose and pewter light strengthened. He swung into the saddle and the others mounted around him. “How do we get there from here?” he asked the wizard.

  “Follow me,” Wencit said simply, and they fell back into formation behind Bychalka once more, with Glamhandro immediately behind the courser and Chernion’s mare and the packhorses at his heels. Bahzell and Walsharno followed, covering their rear, and each rider rode with a hand inches from his or her hilt.

  Wencit and Byrchalka picked a careful, quiet way through the woods. Their route was well concealed, but its twists and turns made their journey at least twice as long as a bird’s might have been, and the horses tossed their heads uneasily as they caught their riders’ tension. But the presence of the coursers seemed to offset their anxiety and they made no sound beyond the occasional snuffle…usually. Sometimes there was just a bit more noise. When Chernion’s mare sent a loose roc
k clattering down the hillside, the sound threw Kenhodan’s heart into his mouth and they all froze, but nothing happened. Of course not, he chided himself. The actual noise must have been far less audible to any sentries than their fear had made it seem.

  A gully under the trees offered even better cover…fortunately. They’d gone no more than half a mile along it when Kenhodan’s suddenly raised hand halted them instantly. Bahzell eyed him questioningly…and then sat very still, wondering how Kenhodan’s human ears had heard what had been too faint for his own—and Walsharno’s—to detect.

  The twenty-man patrol rode out of the tree cover between them and the lake and trotted past less than a hundred yards away, and Kenhodan only realized he’d reached for his sword when he felt its weight in his hand. He watched the patrol vanish, then sheathed his blade quietly and heard more steel rasp and click as Chernion and Bahzell sheathed theirs as well. At least their reactions were good, he thought, and wiped a sticky sweat film from his forehead.

  Wencit waited until all sound of the patrol had faded before he led them onward once more. Kenhodan followed him, but he couldn’t stop glancing to his right, watching the battlements through the treetops as the castle notched the growing dawn more and more boldly. He knew he wasn’t as nakedly exposed as he felt, but telling himself that seemed to help very little.

  At last the wizard led them up out of the gully, across a slope, and around to the back side of the hill which was their destination, and Kenhodan sighed gratefully as solid earth interposed between him and Castle Torfo. Then Wencit wheeled abruptly to his right and ducked in the saddle to vanish under an overhanging lip of stone. Kenhodan and Chernion followed quickly, with plenty of overhead clearance, leading the pack animals, but Bahzell had to dismount before he and Walsharno could squeeze under the overhang.

  A narrow tunnel pressed tight on them for several yards, then opened into a wider space, and Wencit stopped, murmured a word too soft to hear, and raised one hand in a tossing motion. A globe of light arced from his palm to hang overhead, and Kenhodan looked around at the dry stone walls of a cave the size of the entire Iron Axe Tavern…and its stables.