The Glass Bridge (Bell Mountain #7)

by Lee Duigon

  “I need your best riders on your fastest horses,” she told the captain, and told him why. “Send to the baron up at the Golden Pass and tell him to come back down with all his men, quickly. Send to Lintum Forest. King Ryons left half his army there to deal with emergencies. We need them here at Ninneburky.”

  “I’ll do it right away,” the captain answered. “God help us, we’ve hardly enough troops to man the walls.”

  Now, Vannett thought, she had to mobilize the town without causing a panic. Roshay had greatly strengthened the defenses. If no one ran away, if the women and the elderly and some of the children pitched in so that every able-bodied man could defend the stockade, they might just keep the Heathen out until help arrived. As long as no one ran away.

  Up in the pass, the work went on. There were no more nightly noises, no more murders—nothing to do now but pile up the gold and wait for the men to come back with carts.

  Martis took Ellayne aside and asked, “Where’s Wytt? I haven’t seen him since we came here.”

  “He doesn’t like to be around so many people, but he’s somewhere close by—watching out for us, like he always does.”

  “If you and Jack and I went a little ways into the woods, do you think he’d come if you called him? I want to know what he knows, whatever that may be.”

  “He might,” said Ellayne. Wytt always made up his own mind whether to come when you called him.

  Roshay Bault gave his permission, on the condition that they wouldn’t go far and that Trout would go with them. Trout said his ankle was much better. “I’m fit to fight,” he said, brandishing his tomahawk. “But I think those people who were troubling the camp have gone away.”

  The four of them went a few hundred yards into the woods and sat down on a fallen log. From there they could hear the men working, although the sound seemed to come from far away.

  “Wytt!” Ellayne called, a piercing cry that carried. “Wytt, come here, we want you!”

  He jumped right out of the underbrush, startling them all. “You were here all the time, weren’t you?” Ellayne said, as the Omah hopped into her lap. “Wytt, what’s been going on out here? Martis and my father want to know.”

  Wytt chirped and chattered. Ellayne translated.

  “There were a few men who got here first,” she said. “Wytt can’t count like we do, so it’s no use asking exactly how many. One was killed by an animal. Two we’ve caught. The rest have scattered, and there are only three of them left together. They have a camp a ways from here—no good asking him how far.”

  But their leader, Wytt reported, was the same man who’d carried Jack to Silvertown to sell him to the enemy, thinking he was Ryons.

  “Ysbott the Snake! He’s a bad one,” Jack said. “He was an outlaw in Lintum Forest, until Helki chased him out of there. Those were his men who attacked us, Martis.” Martis nodded, remembering: they’d left him for dead. “What does he look like?” he asked.

  When Jack described Ysbott, Ellayne cried out, “Why, he’s the one who kidnapped me and Enith, right outside Ninneburky! I thought he was dead.”

  But he’d been staying right in Ninneburky for a while, Wytt said. The Omah had been waiting for a chance to kill him as he slept. The children knew that was no idle boast.

  “You should’ve told us he was in town, Wytt!” Ellayne said. “The last time I saw him, he was practically blind. I didn’t think he’d recover.”

  “I’ve heard of Ysbott,” Martis said. “Helki was anxious to get him.” Ysbott was a murderer many times over, Helki said, but Martis didn’t mention that: the same could be said of me, he thought. “Ask Wytt if he’ll take Trout and me to Ysbott’s camp.” And to Trout, “We should finish him off. It would save lives.”

  Wytt would be happy to do just that. He made jabbing motions with his pointed stick.

  Ellayne and Jack understood such things. They’d already seen much more of the world than most see in all their lives—and not just the nice parts, either. They were older now. A good chunk of their lives had been spent in wild and perilous places. They knew what kind of man Ysbott was and understood what kinds of things he did. Martis was right: finishing off Ysbott would save lives.

  “We’ll take the children back to camp,” he said to Trout, “and then we’ll go find Ysbott.”

  Gallgoid woke in a sweat, every muscle tensed, from a dreadful dream that left but a single image in his mind—a blank, expressionless face in gleaming, beaten gold, eyes filled with a devouring blackness. He knew it for the golden mask of the Thunder King.

  Gallgoid had never been let in to the golden hall, never seen King Thunder with his own eyes. But his master, Lord Reesh, had—with and without the mask.

  “The man is mad,” Reesh had said. “He truly believes himself to be a god. He expects me to believe it, too—me, the First Prester of Obann!”

  Gallgoid had known his master well: Lord Reesh had believed in nothing. Not in gods, at any rate—not even in the true God, whose Temple he had ruled for most of his long life. He’d believed in the Temple and its mission, as he conceived it—to lead the nation of Obann, or even the entire human race, back up to the heights of power and wisdom and pride as the world was in the time of Obann’s Empire, before the Day of Fire had consumed it all. For the sake of that future, Reesh had betrayed his city. For the sake of a greater Temple in the future, he’d allowed his Temple to be burned to the ground.

  When he had spoken of his meetings with the Thunder King, Reesh had only been talking to convince himself, trying to find words that would give him courage. Gallgoid had seen through it. There was a part of Reesh’s mind that had surrendered to the Thunder King and believed him to be a god, or that he just might be. Behind his bluster, the old First Prester had been afraid. So afraid, indeed, that his fear had moved Gallgoid to desert him, to flee alone from the Golden Pass into the howling, killing cold of a winter night.

  The dream brought it all back. But it also taught Gallgoid what he ought to do.

  He had to recover the golden mask of the Thunder King. He must present it to King Ryons. If the whole world could see that Obann now held it as a trophy, the Thunder King would be truly unmasked. A false god: a tyrant and a murderer whose great power rested on nothing but a great, towering lie—yes, thought Gallgoid, the whole world ought to see that.

  They had a new Thunder King in Kara Karram, doubtless with a new golden mask as well. It was the same Thunder King, the mardars said: he was a god, he would never die. But if Obann had the mask and held it up for all the world to see, maybe the great lie would finally collapse. The Heathen would rise; the mardars would be slaughtered.

  “And if God is good to us,” thought Gallgoid, “that’s all that would happen.”

  He understood that it was dangerous to get involved with something like the Thunder King’s golden mask. You really never could calculate what would happen. It would be like removing stone blocks to create a door into a huge, complicated mass whose full extent you couldn’t see. Maybe the blocks would slide out and you could go inside, as you intended. Or maybe the whole thing would come crashing down on top of you, because you had unknowingly removed the one block that held it all together.

  Gallgoid never prayed. In his heart of hearts, he, who feared so little else, was afraid to pray. He’d done terrible things at the bidding of his master, Lord Reesh. He doubted God would want to hear from him. But now he remembered something Prester Jod had told him recently.

  “All men are sinners, Gallgoid: there is no one truly righteous. Hear what God says to us through Prophet Ezah. ‘I the Lord cover your sin with my own righteousness: else no man would live. Proclaim my word: if a sinner should repent, and leave off sinning, and do right, I the Lord will not hold his sins against him; that man, in his repentance, shall live. But if a righteous man should abandon his righteousness, and take up the way of sin, he shall die; his former righteousness shall not save him.’”

  So Gallgoid knelt beside his bed and prayed, and
then he made ready to leave Obann and go to the Golden Pass.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Laws of Obann

  The Abnaks moved down toward the lower hills. By now there were three thousand of them. Two new warriors arrived to replace each one who drifted away. They’d heard of Foxblood’s victories and were eager to follow him. Soon there would be hard fighting indeed, and they didn’t want to be left out of it.

  “But see us lose a battle,” Foxblood confided to Orth, “and watch what happens to our numbers.”

  Orth spent as much time as he could in mixing with the men, marching with them, eating with them around their cooking-fires. As he sat and listened to their talk, his grasp of their language grew by the hour. Now he could even speak a bit of it himself.

  One thing greatly puzzled him.

  “Why,” he asked Foxblood, “do so many Abnaks say things that can’t possibly be true? This morning I heard a man say he’d been to a place where the trees spoke to one another and could move from one spot to the next, like men. And then someone else said his father once speared a big fish that turned into a woman, and when he nursed her back to health, he took her to wife and had a son by her. But the boy dived into a pool one day and turned into a fish and was never seen again.

  “No one called these stories lies. They just nodded their heads and seemed to think the tales were true.”

  Foxblood laughed, hard. “Sunfish, my friend—never call an Abnak man a liar! No one believed those stories. They just enjoyed them! My people take great pleasure in fanciful tales—the wilder, the better.”

  It was not a practice that would be esteemed in Obann, Orth thought. “But how will the people believe me,” he asked, “when I tell them about God—that I’m not just telling wild stories, too?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Foxblood. “They will know you speak truth. Except when we’re telling tall tales, we are a very truthful people. You’ll come to know that, by and by.”

  With just two followers who weren’t of much real use to him, Ysbott realized it wasn’t his plan that he now had to save, but his neck.

  “We have to get back down the mountain, and fast,” he said. His outlaw’s instinct was fairly screaming at him to move on. “We can’t manage our gold with just the three of us. We’ll have to lie low until Roshay Bault returns to Ninneburky. Then maybe we can come back with a cart.”

  “If we can ever find our gold again!” said Gwawl.

  You can’t find it, thought Ysbott, but I can. But aloud he answered, “It’s perfectly safe where it is, and there it can wait for us for as long as need be. I know exactly where it is. I’m no pampered townsman!”

  “Tobb knows what he’s doing,” Hrapp said. What a fool, thought Ysbott.

  He’d heard the baron’s two hundred horsemen go back down the road, and crept close enough to get a glimpse of them. “Right now it’s safe for us to go back to Ninneburky,” he said. But he didn’t tell his men that he intended neither of them ever to see their homes again.

  Short of rations, they made what speed they could. The way was all downhill, which helped. During the day they only stopped while Ysbott foraged for food. Their only meat was snakes he caught by overturning logs.

  “I never dreamed I’d ever eat a snake,” Hrapp said. “But they’re really not bad, cooked.”

  Ysbott, of course, had eaten stranger things than that. Here and there, in his foraging, he’d found edible mushrooms. He had also found some fatally poisonous ones, which he’d hidden in his bag. These he would serve to Hrapp and Gwawl when he didn’t need them anymore. But if they could somehow obtain a horse and cart before emerging from the foothills, he would let them live long enough to help him load the gold.

  For the time being there was nothing he could do against the baron. This galled him, but he comforted himself with the thought that someday he would get a better opportunity.

  Lord Chutt had lost several hundred men whose horses simply couldn’t keep up with the pace he’d set.

  “Never mind,” he told his men. “If your horse tires, just follow the rest of us up to the Golden Pass as best you can. Be sure to pick up any carts you find along the way.”

  From various farms and herdsmen he’d commandeered several dozen carts: nowhere near enough, he supposed. But the important thing was to get to the gold and drive off anyone he might find there. The carts would just have to come up later.

  They stormed across the Chariot River and onto the plain between the rivers, bypassing King Oziah’s Wood. Going on to sack Ninneburky was very far from Chutt’s mind. He would have been surprised to learn that the king’s men in Lintum Forest had received the baroness’ urgent plea for help and were already on their way. Indeed, the chiefs were glad to be called to action again, at last.

  “I hadn’t thought there were any Heathen armies left in Obann,” said Zekelesh, chief of the Fazzan. “I hope we’re strong enough to deal with this one.”

  They were some two thousand, all told—Fazzan, Abnaks, and Dahai. They left behind some five hundred Obannese, Lintum Forest men, whom Helki had trained, to defend Carbonek. Zekelesh would have liked to hear their prophetess, Jandra, tell them they were doing the right thing, going to Ninneburky, but no message was forthcoming. There being such a need for haste, they couldn’t afford to wait for one. The Wallekki horsemen, under Shaffur, had all gone east with the king, so it would be a hard march to get there on time with everyone on foot.

  “No fear,” Chief Buzzard said. “Baron Bault will have to come down from the pass, and he’ll have plenty of horsemen with him.”

  It took them two full days to get clear of the forest, but they expected to make much better time on the plain.

  “We could use our long-legged Griffs, just now,” said Tughrul Lomak. “We Dahai don’t mind a long walk, but we’re not built for speed. Still, it’s better than sitting idle all this time at Carbonek.”

  The two hundred Obannese militiamen came out of the hills just in time to run into Chutt’s hands. Outnumbered ten to one, and quickly surrounded by Chutt’s Wallekki, they had no choice but to surrender. Chutt had their captains disarmed and brought before him.

  “You’ve come down from the Golden Pass, haven’t you?” he demanded. “But I don’t see Roshay Bault among you. Where is he?”

  “Who wants to know?” a captain snapped. A Wallekki started toward him with a blade, but Chutt wouldn’t let him strike.

  “I am Lord Chutt, of the High Council of the Oligarchy, the rightful governors of Obann,” he said. “I was duly elected by the other oligarchs under the laws of Obann, and I am entitled to civil answers to my questions. No one has harmed you, sir, and no one will. But you have a duty to answer me.”

  “And what of the king—King Ryons?” said a second captain.

  “He’s no lawful king,” said Chutt. “War has unsettled many things in Obann, but I never heard that we’ve repealed our laws. Roshay Bault is Chief Councilor of Ninneburky, under the ruling Oligarchy. Obann has not had a king since King Ozias was driven from his throne a thousand years ago. Or was it two thousand? We have no law in Obann recognizing any king.”

  Most of these militiamen had never laid eyes on King Ryons or had only a glimpse of him when he’d passed through Ninneburky. None of them was at Obann when the Heathen were about to take the city but were scattered like chaff by the great beast with Ryons on its back. They’d heard of it, but hadn’t seen it. They’d lived their lives under the laws of the Oligarchy. Who were they to defy a lord of the High Council?

  “I ask you again,” said Chutt. “Have you come down from the Golden Pass? And is Roshay Bault there now?”

  A captain licked his lips nervously, then answered. “Yes, my lord, he’s there. He sent us down to fetch carts for the gold.”

  It may be a figure of speech to say a man’s eyes gleamed, but if any man’s eyes ever truly gleamed, it was Lord Chutt’s at the mention of the gold.

  “It’s up there—all of it—the gold of the
Thunder King?” he said. Suddenly his voice was raspy. “How much? How much gold?”

  A captain shrugged and spread his arms, palms out. “How much, my lord? Why, more than I ever thought existed! A great shining hill of gold—no telling how much!”

  “It must all be brought to Obann,” Chutt said. “Gold—to rebuild the Temple and make it greater than it was before! Gold to build a new Obann!”

  “That’s what the baron says, my lord. Bring it down from the mountain and use it to rebuild.”

  “Then he won’t object to another three thousand men to help him,” Chutt said, “and a high councilor to take charge of it! That’s what we’ve come to do. But we’ll have to hurry, won’t we? In case the Thunder King tries to get it back. He’d be a fool not to! Indeed, I’ve come along just in time, haven’t I?”