Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Annals of the Chosen 01

by The Wizard Lord (v1. 1)

  Then he hastened past the shrine to catch up with the guide on the path—the trail was too narrow and faint to really deserve the name "road," Breaker thought.

  And the minute he crossed the boundary, the world around him felt different; the air was suddenly cooler and somehow harder, the ground rougher beneath his boot soles, and everything felt somehow less unified, less part of a harmonious whole. He had always heard that the difference between a place where the ler knew you and one where you were a stranger was noticeable, but he hadn't expected it to be quite so abrupt a transition—especially not after having spent the last several months feeling ever more disconnected from Mad Oak. He gasped.

  The guide did not respond, and Breaker broke into a trot to catch up. He stumbled on the hostile and unfamiliar ground, but hurried on, and a moment later he came alongside the guide. "I've never been outside town before," he explained. "It feels so different!"

  The guide acknowledged this with a grunt.

  "It's .. . it's a bit frightening, really."

  That drew only a nod, and the guide's silence began to worry Breaker. "Have I done something to annoy you?" he asked.

  The guide sighed, and turned. "Do you think I'd have become a traveler if I liked talking to people?"

  "Oh," Breaker said. "But you ... I mean, you talked back in town, and you don't always travel alone ..."

  "I have to earn my keep, don't I?"

  "Oh."

  "And as for doing that earning, do you see that tree ahead? The big oak?" He pointed.

  The tree the guide indicated was gigantic, and very familiar; Breaker had seen it from Mad Oak every time he looked to the southeast, as it towered above its surroundings. "Yes, of course," he said. "That's the Mad Oak that the town is named for; there are all sorts of stories told about it to scare children, so they won't cross the border. I don't know why it's really called that, though."

  "Oh, it really is the main reason the town's lands come no farther along the ridge, and why the priests have made no attempt to tame the ler beyond the shrine. Those scary stories you heard may well be true. It's called the Mad Oak because the tree's ler has gone mad, more than a century ago, and will not speak to the other ler, or to the village priests. If you speak in its hearing it will strike at you; if you sleep beneath it, it will devour your soul, and what's left of your body will go to feed its roots. If you touch it, it will poison you or cut you or club you. If you move swiftly and silently beneath it, without stopping and without speaking, it will not notice you. Now, be silent, and follow me."

  With that the guide crouched and began hurrying forward in an odd, stooped posture. Breaker did his best to imitate this.

  Together, the two men dashed across the broad clearing around the oak—a clearing that Breaker noticed was brown and dead, despite the lush green of the surrounding area and the blossoming leaves of the Mad Oak itself. Dead leaves rustled and crumbled beneath their boots as they hurried, brown powder scattering in all directions and staining Breaker's legs. There were no green shoots anywhere, no weeds, no moss, no mold, just dead leaves. It was plain that nothing lived in the clearing, nothing at all but the immense oak.

  Stooped as he was, Breaker found himself looking down at the deep layer of dead leaves, surely the accumulation of many years, as he ran, and he realized that here and there low mounds rose above the even surface, and that here and there these mounds revealed curves and corners of white bone, gleaming amid the rotting brown leaves.

  This was a bad place; he could feel that. The air around him felt wrong, far more than it had when he first passed the boundary, and that strange and horrible ground cover only confirmed the wrongness. The sensation reminded him somewhat of the wrongness he had felt that day when he went out without his talisman, though there was no weakness or illness this time—just a certainty that this place was wrong.

  And he knew that just as he had felt the wrongness of the place, it had felt something of him. He could not have explained how he knew, but he did.

  The oak knew he was there, he was sure of it—it must have sensed his magic.

  He looked up, trying to see how much farther he had to go, and saw that he had somehow veered from the guide's path, toward the great oak—the oak he could now see was twisted and bent, despite its size. Its house-thick trunk was distorted by bulging growths, its limbs crooked and spiraling; these abnormalities that had been largely hidden by the canopy of healthy green leaves, but he was under the leaves now ...

  That wasn't right. Why was he under the leaves, so close to the tree? The guide had not ventured so near, and Breaker had certainly not intended to.

  But something was urging him even closer, drawing him in. The oak's ler was pulling at him, closing its hold around his own spirit.

  He slowed, and tried to turn his feet back toward the guide's track, clearly marked by the line of crushed and scattered leaves his boots had left.

  His feet would not turn. The oak had hold of him. He struggled, trying to turn.

  He could not. Against his will, he was still placing one foot directly in front of the other, walking toward the hideous tree.

  He could not turn, but he could slow his pace. He could not stop, though—he tried, and his own legs refused to obey him. Dead leaves and distorted limbs filled his sight and his mind, and even as he struggled to stop his movement forward he could feel his own thoughts becoming twisted and somehow treelike.

  At last, though he could not stop, he stumbled, and the dry snap of old bones breaking echoed in the unnatural stillness beneath the great tree. One hand dropped toward the ground to steady him if he fell, and the other hand closed instinctively on the hilt of his sword, as his sack shifted awkwardly and almost fell from his shoulder.

  Touching the grip of the sword seemed to wake him, though he had had no awareness of being asleep; the cold ferocity of the weapon's ler was like a rush of wind in his face, and he was suddenly free again, able to turn his steps and break into a flat-out run directly away from that hideous tree. His booted feet sent clouds of crumbled leaf into the air, and scattered bits of bone across the clearing; he ducked his head to avoid touching the lowest branches.

  And then the guide was beckoning him forward, out of the clearing and into the shade of a towering ash, and the malign influence of the oak faded from his mind like a warm breath vanishing in midwinter air, replaced by the calm presence of the ash tree's sane, if disdainful, spirit. Breaker turned to look back, and started to say, "I never..."

  The guide pressed a finger to his lips and shook his other hand side to side, indicating that he should not speak. Breaker snapped his mouth shut and nodded, and the two men proceeded in silence, under the ash and on into the forest beyond.

  Breaker could sense the ler of every tree they passed, and they were all different; in Mad Oak the trees were cooperative parts of a greater whole, but out here they were all individuals, pressing close to one another but caring for nothing but themselves. Breaker would have liked to slow down and take time to feel their spirits, to see how this strange wilderness worked, but the guide was hurrying him on.

  At last, when they were safely clear of the oppressive atmosphere of the Mad Oak, the guide said, "I thought you were one of the Chosen."

  "I am," Breaker said, glancing up at the sunlight in the leaves overhead.

  "Shouldn't you have greater resistance to magic than that, then? That's the closest I've come to losing a customer in the past ten years. I didn't bother giving you any feathers or casting a spell because I assumed your magic would protect you. It should have protected you; it protected the Old Swordsman well enough when he came north. Going south with me he used feathers, of course, and a talisman, but he said he'd never needed them when he was one of the Chosen."

  "I'm sorry," Breaker said, lowering his gaze. "I'm new at it. I didn't know how to use my magic to protect myself. The tree's spell broke when I touched my sword, though, so I think I... It did help. Being Chosen."

  "It shouldn't ha
ve gotten a hold on you in the first place. Maybe you should wear a feather after all..." He reached for his pack.

  "I'll be fine," Breaker said, holding up a hand. If the Chosen were supposed to be immune to the hostile ler on the road, then he would play that part, he would focus himself on his sword and talisman and not use the magic-blocking feathers the Uplanders sold. Maybe assuming it was true would make it so—and if not, he had the guide to save him.

  "If you ever have to fight the Wizard Lord, I hope you do better," the guide said.

  "So do I," Breaker said, looking back at the Mad Oak with a shudder. Then he squared his shoulders, straightened his sack, and marched onward at the guide's heel.

  A few moments later he asked, "If the Mad Oak is so dangerous, why do you take this route? Isn't there any other path to Greenwater?"

  "The others are worse."

  Breaker opened his mouth, then closed it again. "Oh," he said at last.

  The Mad Oak was the worst of the hazards they encountered, but by no means the only one, and their route detoured around several areas the guide said made the oak seem like a mere game. Even as they made their way through the forest along the supposedly safe paths, vines twisted around Breaker's feet, hostile eyes watched him from the shadows, branches whipped at his face—he began to see, he thought, why the guide wore that leather coat.

  But when he looked at the guide, somehow nothing seemed to be bothering him—even as branches slashed at Breaker's arms, they seemed to move aside for the guide. Breaker remarked on this.

  "They know me," the guide said. "I've made my peace with them. And they know this coat will protect me, too. They might well do far worse to you if I weren't with you, or if you had no magical protection—as it is, you might have a slap or a scratch here and there, but nothing that will leave a permanent mark. If you weren't one of the Chosen and tried to make this trip alone, you might not make it to Greenwater alive."

  "But they don't touch you at all!

  "They know me," the guide repeated.

  "So you're a priest of this road, then? You speak to the ler, and treat with them?"

  "I'm no priest. I don't know any secret tongues. I speak with some of the ler along my route, the ones that deign to understand human words, and I know which to avoid entirely, but there are no compacts or covenants, no cooperation between them. I don't know their true names, I can't tell them what to do, who to let pass—if you seriously anger them, I can't save you. These are wild ler, boy, every one for itself, not a peaceful little community like your town of Mad Oak."

  A dry twig snapped beneath Breaker's foot, and the sharp broken end leapt up to slash at his shin; he winced, though the scratch did not break the skin or draw blood. "I see that," he said.

  'This is what most of the world is like, you know—wild and uninhabited." "I know."

  "You mean you've been told that; you won't know it until you've seen more of the wild."

  Breaker knew better to argue with such a statement.

  "So without you, Mad Oak and Greenwater would be cut off from each other?"

  "Oh, there would still be other routes, but it would be a long way around—maybe a very long way."

  "Do you have an apprentice, then?"

  "No. Your townsfolk might want to think about that."

  That was another statement that Breaker did not care to reply to. Instead he asked, "What's Greenwater like? I mean, I've heard stories about it all my life, but I've never been there."

  The guide shrugged. "It's a town. A hundred families or so. They mostly eat fish and berries, and do some fine woodwork, and they make wine rather than beer. They have priests who deal with the ler so the crops will grow and the fish will stay in the nets, same as any other town. And they have one priestess, who runs the place."

  "I've heard that their priests live underwater." He had actually heard that they could turn into fish, but he decided to start with the more believable part of the tale.

  The guide snorted. "No, they live in the water much of the time, but not under it—they can't breathe water any more than we can, and they'd freeze in the winter, and no, they aren't part fish, they're men like any other. But it's true that Greenwater's most powerful ler are in the lake, the soul of the village is the lake, and the priests spend hours standing in water up to their chests, coaxing favors from the water ler."

  "I've never seen a lake."

  "Then look over there." The guide pointed ahead and to the right.

  Breaker looked.

  When not dodging supernatural hazards their path had led them more or less along a ridgetop for a distance of several miles, but the surrounding trees had blocked most of the view; now, though, as Breaker looked where the guide pointed, the ground fell away steeply ahead of them, and through gaps in the trees he could glimpse the far side of the valley.

  Except the valley was far wider than it should be, and its far side more distant than Breaker had thought possible—it seemed as distant as the Eastern Cliffs. He had been to the ridgetop in Mad Oak many times, and had looked out across the wilderness of Greenvale to the next ridge, and it had been much, much closer than this, closer than the northeastern side of Longvale. Here it was so distant it seemed hazy. The trees on that distant ridge were merely an uneven green blur.

  "Down there," the guide said.

  Breaker's gaze dropped to the valley floor ahead of them, and he saw the lake, a vast blue-green splotch gleaming in the afternoon sun—Greenwater's water was indeed greenish, though not the vivid verdigris color he had always imagined it. It was closer to the dull green of a spruce tree.

  "Oh," he said. The sheer size of the lake was overwhelming. It was many times as broad as the Longvale River was anywhere in sight of Mad Oak. The bargemen said the river grew much wider to the north, toward its mouth in the icy seas, but Breaker had never been sure whether they were telling the truth or just spinning yarns to amuse the townsfolk—and even if the stories were true, Breaker had never seen that. He had never imagined that as much water as he saw down in the valley below could be in anything but the ocean.

  "We should be there in an hour or so," the guide said. "Oh," Breaker said again.

  Then he began pointing, and asking confused fragments of questions, and the guide took pity on him and explained as they began picking their way cautiously down the surprisingly steep southern side of the ridge.

  "Not all the valleys in this part of Barokan are nice and straight like Longvale or Shadowvale," he said. "Greenvale is almost triangular—it's wide here and narrows sharply to the northwest. If we'd gone the other way along the ridgetop, toward Ashgrove, you'd have seen it narrow down to nothing, and this ridge we're on merges with the next. North of that it wouldn't be Greenvale over there at all, it would be Deepvale."

  "But Deepvale is on the other side of Greenvale!"

  "Here it is, and at Mad Oak, but by the time you get to Ashgrove or Bell Hill, Greenvale is gone, and Deepvale is next to Longvale."

  Breaker turned and peered through the trees on the other side, over the ridgetop, and was relieved to see the Eastern Cliffs were still where they ought to be, two valleys away.

  "I thought all Barokan was... there's Shadowvale, and Longvale, and Greenvale, and Deepvale, and Ravenvale, and so on to the sea, lined up nice and neat."

  The guide snorted. "No," he said. "The ridges are just in this area, where the land jams up against the northern wall of the Eastern Cliffs, and only the first two are nice and neat. The farther you go from the cliffs the more the ridges wiggle and split. That's why Longvale is long, you see—it's between the two long, straight ridges. Even so, it doesn't go on forever; I've never been to the northwest end, but I've been to the southeast, where it empties into the Midlands. If you think Greenvale over there is broad, you should see the Midlands! Flat as a table, almost, and fifty miles across, maybe more! Some of the towns there are so close they share their boundary shrines—you can step from one to the next with nothing between. And beyond the Midlands
are the southern hills, and the western marshes—Barokan is big, my boy."

  "Have you seen all of it, then?"

  "No. Didn't I just say I'd never been to the far end of Longvale? And I've never been into the southern hills, or beyond the nearest edges of the marshes. I've never seen the sea, or the islands, or been up the path to the clifftops—I didn't catch these ara feathers myself, I bought them from a Winterhome trader. I know half a dozen safe routes around Longvale where I work, from Bell Hill to Valleymouth, and I've traveled a little in the Midlands with someone else leading the way, but that's all." "Oh. But..."

  "We turn here," the guide interrupted. "And the ler in this next stretch like it quiet, so if you have any more questions they'll just have to wait. Watch your footing; the stones like to slip out from under your feet and make you stumble."

  Breaker fell silent, but found himself staring through the trees at the lake, and thus distracted he quickly discovered that the guide's warning had been apt. When the two of them passed the boundary shrine into Greenwater he was still wiping the dust from the seat of his pants.

  [11]

  Greenwater was arranged along the lakeshore, with every house and workshop facing the water. The village did have a central structure Breaker took for a pavilion, like the one in Mad Oak, but instead of being built into the ridge it stood on wooden pilings in the lake. There were docks and boats along the water, as well, and then a broad clear area, and then the houses in three parallel rows. Above that were the orchards and gardens and vineyards, stopping abruptly at the boundary. There were no broad fields in the river bottom—but then, there was no river bottom, but a lakeshore.

  Breaker had expected to see many different places in the world, but he had not expected one so different to be so close, less than a day's journey from Mad Oak. He stared at the unfamiliar surroundings as he followed the guide down the slope and into the village.

  People working in the vineyards and gardens glanced up from their labors as the pair approached; some then turned back to their duties, while others stared at the stranger the guide had brought.