Last King of Osten Ard 02 - Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  Nezeru began to wonder whether she was losing her wits.

  Perhaps the farther I get from Nakkiga, the less of me remains, she thought. Is that what happened to our people in the War of Return? Did all that makes us what we are, brave and true, the queen’s sworn servants, just sift out of us like sand in an hourglass as we entered the mortal lands, until we were left weak and empty?

  Then, as she rode down a long slope thick with wild arum, ugly thoughts flitting through her head like biting flies, she smelled smoke.

  She reined up, pulse beating in her temple and her skin prickly. For a moment she thought it was her pursuers, much closer than she would have guessed, but a little consideration told her that was unlikely: the Hikeda’ya seldom made fires even in the coldest weather, and never when they were tracking. Her heart slowed a little and she gave the stolen horse the lightest of taps with her heels to set it moving again. Her nose told her the fire was linden wood, which didn’t burn well, as Jarnulf had taught her when they had been skirting the southern Dimmerskog, and she wondered that anyone would use it when the surrounding forest was full of ash and birch.

  A little farther down the slope she reined up again in surprise. Drifting in and out through the smell of burning wood was the scent of something being cooked, and while it made her mouth water, it also made her heart beat fast again. It was a fungus that she knew well, called Dead Fingers, and despite the unpleasant name it was a delicacy in Nakkiga. By reassuring herself that Hikeda’ya seldom lit fires, she might have made a fatal mistake.

  But after she sat motionless long enough for birdsong to fill the air again, she realized she could also hear voices, so faint that she could barely separate them from the wind in the high branches above her. To her surprise and relief, though, the words she could hear were not Hikda’yas speech.

  She silently dismounted, looped the horse’s reins around a stout branch, then began to make her way through the undergrowth toward the smoke and murmuring voices. Soon she was close enough to see the dark cloaks the strangers were wearing. Her mouth was watering from the smell of the roasting fungus, but she remained cautious. She crawled even closer, until she could see the faces of those gathered around the fire. She was relieved that they were not Hikeda’ya, but they were not mortals either. Their spidery fingers and huge heads seemed straight out of childhood tales her mother had told her, and for a moment Nezeru could almost believe she had stumbled onto a pack of forest goblins. Then, with a start of surprise, she recognized them.

  Delvers. The dozen or so creatures were Tinukeda’ya, and although this kind of Changeling was now rare in Nakkiga, their imprint was on most of the city inside the mountain. Delvers were gifted beyond understanding at digging and shaping stone. Most of the great cities of the Keida’ya had been built with their help—or rather with their forced labor. But thousands of them had died from fevers that had swept through the Tinukeda’ya of Nakkiga, and few still lived in the mountain. A company of them in the middle of Oldheart Forest was as unexpected a sight as a living dragon.

  But I’ve seen those, too.

  The breeze shifted direction and wafted the smell of the roasting fungus into her nostrils, driving other thoughts from her mind. Her stomach clenched painfully and her mouth watered. She climbed to her feet, drew Cold Root from its scabbard, and pushed her way through the bracken.

  All of the Delvers looked up as she entered the clearing, large heads swinging around on their slender necks like flowers swiveling to the sun. Their pit-dark eyes widened with terror, and a few of the creatures farthest from her got up and ran clumsily into the forest, but the rest only cringed and stared. As she had guessed, these were not the sort of creatures that would fight back.

  “Give me some food,” she said in her native tongue, but none of them moved. “I know you can understand me. I am also from Nakkiga. I have not eaten in many days. Give me food.” She pointed at the campfire, where bundles of Dead Fingers wrapped in leaves were cooking in the embers at the edge of the fire.

  “I speak your tongue,” said one of them, a female, after a long silence. “Do not hurt us. We will give you some of our food. Go—take what you want.” She pointed a long, trembling finger at the hissing bundles. Nezeru leaned forward and snatched one from the ashes, burning her hand a little but not caring, then retreated to the edge of the clearing. She laid her sword across her lap, then used her knife to poke open the leaves and let out the steam. As she blew on the roasted fungus to cool it, the Delvers who had fled at her appearance came back to stand at the edge of the trees and watch her.

  The fungus was bland, with none of the usual seasonings, but after days with no more than an occasional handful of berries it was like devouring pure bliss. It was still very hot, and her lips and tongue and the insides of her mouth suffered for it, but she could not stop until she had bolted the whole thing. She sniffed the fire-wilted leaves it had cooked in, then brushed off the ashes and ate those too.

  “Do not hurt us,” the female Delver repeated. She had gray hair, sparse as spider moss on a rock, and looked to Nezeru like nothing so much as a wrinkled and particularly scrawny child grown to adult size. But her hands, like those of her fellows, were big as platters, the fingers almost impossibly long. “Eat all you want.”

  “Who are you?” Nezeru asked, still chewing the last of the leaves.

  “Zin-Seyvu am I,” said the speaker. “And these my fellows are. We mean you no harm.”

  “I have little fear of that. Why are you here?”

  Zin-Seyvu turned and murmured to the others. As they carried on their quiet conversation, Nezeru returned to the fire and took another packet of fungus, watching the Delvers all the while for any hint of treachery. The Changelings, though, seemed unwilling to do anything but watch her, and she saw no evidence of swords, knives, or bows.

  What kind of foolish creatures stumble through the great forest without weapons?

  “We are Tinukeda’ya,” said Zin-Seyvu finally. “As you must know if you are Hikeda’ya. We come from the mountains called Clouds’ Rest.”

  Clouds’ Rest was the range far to the northwest of the forest, home to the great city of Hikehikayo, once one of the greatest homes of her people but now empty as an abandoned rabbit warren.

  “Truly, we mean no harm to you or any others,” the Delver said, perhaps fearful of Nezeru’s silence. “We wish only to go our way in peace.”

  “You keep saying that.” She swallowed a last mouthful of fungus. Her hunger had eased enough for her to mourn the absence of some puju to make the meal more palatable. Still, beggars could not call for salt, as the old saying went, and if Nezeru was not a beggar, she was certainly not the founder of this particular feast. “But whatever mountains you come from, you obviously don’t belong here. What are you doing in the middle of the Oldheart?”

  Again a whispered colloquy. “We are here because we have been called,” Zin-Seyvu answered. One of her fellows said something that sounded angry, but the speaker shook her head. “No, there is no point in hiding it. This soldier has a sword. We have none. There is no need to hide the truth of the voices that summon us.” She looked at Nezeru, her huge, heavy-lidded eyes so imploring they seemed on the verge of tears. “You do not bear us ill-will, do you, brave Hikeda’ya? You need not harm us. We will give you whatever you want.”

  Nezeru was gratified that there seemed little chance of a fight, but she was obscurely irritated by the Delvers’ unwillingness to defend themselves. All through her childhood she had been told that the enslavement of the Tinukeda’ya was itself enough to prove they deserved no better. “They did not even fight to save their own people,” one of her superiors had told her when she lived in the Sacrifice order-house. “Creatures so weak and cowardly not only deserve to be enslaved, slavery is doubtless all that has kept them alive.” The way these Tinukeda’ya had given in so easily, despite their greater numbers, seemed to prove those wor
ds beyond doubt. Once again she felt a pang of angry sadness for all that she had lost since leaving Nakkiga—her people, the comfort of her past, everything. Her first meal after a long time of hunger was scant recompense.

  The rain returned now, pelting down on the clearing and dripping from the leaves all around. The Delvers huddled together, their large heads like so many mushroom caps. The worst of her hunger sated, Nezeru knew she had to move on. Her pursuers would not be sitting and listening to woeful stories—they would be hurrying after her.

  * * *

  On his way back into camp Jarnulf stopped to watch Goh Gam Gar helping to assemble the monstrous wagon that would carry the dragon back to Nakkiga. Its wooden wheels were almost as tall as the giant himself, and it took six Sacrifice engineers to hold one in place while the giant lifted the wagon to raise the axle to the necessary height. The wagon was so heavy that Goh Gam Gar groaned aloud as he held it while the Sacrifice engineers used cloth-wrapped hammers to ease the wheel onto the axle.

  At last the giant was allowed to set the wagon down again. Still groaning, he staggered into the shade of broad yew tree, though the autumn day was not terribly warm.

  Still, thought Jarnulf. All that hair.

  Jarnulf had a brace of rabbits in one hand and a fat goose he had caught rising too slowly from a pond. He handed them to one of the slaves at the cook tent before wandering over to Goh Gam Gar.

  The giant watched him from behind half-lowered lids. As Jarnulf sat down on the ground a few paces from the tree, the giant settled back against the broad trunk of the yew, which creaked like a ship’s mast in a storm but held, though the whole crown of the tree quivered and needles fluttered down like gray-green snowflakes.

  “You are not much in the camp these days,” the giant said. “You go out in the morning light, you come back late.”

  “If I had wanted a wife I would have taken one,” Jarnulf replied, untying his jacket. “And I suspect I could have found one less ugly.”

  The giant curled his lip, showing his yellow, finger-length fangs. “I say only what Higdaja must notice also, mortal man.”

  “I go out hunting. A man can only eat so much fungus, so much sour mushroom broth, so many creatures with an excess of legs.”

  “And yet for the time he is gone, great hunter Jarnulf brings back a poor bag. Goose and two rabbits? That will not even feed old Gam one meal.”

  He glared at the giant. “I don’t hunt for you, I hunt for myself, and that fat goose will keep me happy for several days.”

  If the giant had been a mortal man, Jarnulf might have thought the expression on his leathery face was one of amusement. “Why are you angry? You can leave this place if you want. For me . . .” Goh Gam Gar reached up and fingered his heavy collar, thick enough to bow the head of an ox. “. . . not so lucky.”

  “We are both slaves. I am of a different kind, that is all.”

  “If you were a slave, you would run if you could.” The giant looked out across the camp, then turned his huge, lambent eyes back to Jarnulf. “Why are you still here, mortal man? Don’t you know who comes?”

  “I know.” And that was the true reason he remained, of course. But he did not trust the giant much more than he trusted the Hikeda’ya. “Let us say I wish to see the Queen Who Never Dies. I have heard of her since I was a child, but I have never seen her in the flesh.”

  “I have,” said Goh Gam Gar, and from the way he said it, Jarnulf could not be certain whether he meant something more than just stating a fact.

  Jarnulf stood up. “Even though you insulted my skills, Master Giant, later I will bring you a rabbit roasted in goose fat, and I doubt you will turn it down.”

  Goh Gam Gar showed his teeth again. “Come too close and I will have your arm as well. That would taste good with goose fat too, I am thinking.”

  “You make me sorry that neither you nor I will get to try such a delicacy,” said Jarnulf, and executed a mocking bow before walking away. “But I still have some use for my arms!” he called over his shoulder. “Both of them!”

  * * *

  • • •

  The giant’s words troubled him more than he wanted to admit. Had the Hikeda’ya indeed begun to notice his long absences? A worrisome thought, but things were going to happen soon that would change everything. Jarnulf had no idea whether he would succeed or fail, but either way, there was almost no chance he would survive.

  As he settled himself into his customary resting spot at the edge of camp, Jarnulf looked around to see if anyone was watching him. He spotted Saomeji soon enough, pacing back and forth beside the cart where the dragon was being force-fed. The Singer spent a great deal of time making certain everyone knew that he was the one who had captured the prize the queen had demanded—as if the giant and Nezeru and Jarnulf himself, those who worked hardest to bring the creature down the mountain, had simply ceased to exist. But that did not surprise him. Even mortal men in the slave pens of Nakkiga fought to ingratiate themselves with their masters, informing on other slaves, sometimes even making up lies that would mean execution for others, simply to keep themselves alive and fed. Why should it be different among the rigid, militant Hikeda’ya, with their fanatical loyalty to their queen? They were as dangerous and untrustworthy as wasps. Some of that rigidity worked to his advantage, of course. Jarnulf had come to this place with Saomeji, and as long as Saomeji was considered to have achieved a great feat, the Hikeda’ya were willing to overlook the presence of someone they considered little more than a beast, as Jarnulf’s own people might think someone’s hunting hound to be beneath their notice.

  And by the time I have changed their opinion, he told himself, it will be too late for them to correct their mistake.

  The truth was that during the last fortnight the Hikeda’ya had been in this camp, Jarnulf had spent only a fraction of his time actually hunting. The rest of those hours he had put into refining a certain set of skills—skills that, though considerable by most standards, were not to a point where he felt confident of success. He knew he would only get one chance to act, most likely in very the hour of Queen Utuk’ku’s arrival, when all was in confusion and all eyes were fixed on the Mother of the People.

  His eyes, still roving around the camp, fixed on a pale, unmoving shape in front of Akhenabi’s wagon. It was Makho, or at least the thing that had once been Makho. The hand chieftain scarcely moved most days, often spending all the hours of light and long into the night sitting motionless in the same place, the twisted, dead gray face empty of any recognizable emotion, the bright hawk’s eye fixed on nothing obvious. The Hikeda’ya were a famously patient race, but this was something different. It was not weakness: he had seen the reborn Makho performing exercises with the heavy sword he had been given to replace Cold Root, acting out the Dance of Sacrifice with terrifying grace and speed.

  Jarnulf turned back to the dragon, now moving its head fitfully as it tried to escape its handlers, unable to take in any more food. Saomeji and the Sacrifices under his direction removed the funnel and sack of mashed meat and bone, then tightened the straps around the beast’s mouth once more. It was clear that the meal had revived the dragon’s strength: it struggled against its chains and groaned in frustration until Saomeji blew a handful of dust into its snout and the thing finally quieted. For a moment, Jarnulf could not help sympathizing with the imprisoned brute, but then another thought occurred to him.

  Even small things can defeat the largest and most powerful enemies. After all, had not he and a few Hikeda’ya captured that immense monster? He thought instead of the queen in the silver mask, as powerful as a goddess, as dangerous as any dragon. But even she could be defeated with the right tools—or at least so he hoped and prayed. Wits. Planning. Surprise, he told himself. Those are the tools by which the small can defeat even the greatest enemies. But only with your help, of course, my great Lord, my God.

  Jarnulf knew he was
not ready. He also knew he did not have much time. But whatever happened when the moment came, he was unlikely to survive it. There was a kind of terrible comfort in that.

  * * *

  Nezeru woke when water splashed onto her head, startling and frightening her. She leaped to her feet brandishing Cold Root, poised to defend herself, but she saw nothing except the Delvers watching her in sudden fear. A moment later she realized it had only been a broad leaf on the tree just above her that had filled with rainwater, then folded beneath the weight and dumped its contents on her.

  She was horrified to realize she had fallen asleep sitting up, leaving herself defenseless, though it seemed as if it had only been for a few heartbeats. Despite all her years of training, her weariness had been so great that with a little food in her stomach she had simply dozed, like any ordinary creature—like a helpless mortal. She sheathed the blade, disgusted with herself. In any case, it was time to be moving: the pursuing Hikeda’ya were likely only a few hours behind her.

  Her horse was cropping at the greenery where she had tied it. This creature is tired too, she told herself. Days on end without stopping.

  Reins in hand, she led her mount across the clearing to the place the Delvers huddled. “I am sorry I ate all your food,” she said to Zin-Seyvu. “I have not eaten in a long time. I am being hunted. I will leave now, and then you can go on your way.”