by Roland Green
Still, the old wives would be happier if she kept the vigil, and probably her mother, as well. It was so easy to make people happy, or at least pleased and grateful; even between husband and wife. Although that was probably not true of all husbands and wives, it was true for Rynthala’s parents—extraordinary folk, even among the half-elven.
She came to the northwest corner, and looked toward the forest that way, clinging to the steeper slopes of the mountains as they rose toward the sky. Nothing there, except a glint of light that might be some gnome or dwarf doing forge work too smoky for a cave.
She stood for a while, but saw nothing else, and continued her rounds.
More eyes than two studied the land around Zephros’s camp. But they had no more luck in seeing danger than Rynthala had in seeing men.
It was not altogether their fault. Some of them were seasoned sell-swords, and one woman had the keenest night vision in the camp.
But kender are small to begin with, and deft at hiding. When they become desert-wise, it is as if they possess cloaks of invisibility.
Chapter 7
The Gryphons and Pirvan’s Solamnic band avoided warm friendships, but quickly knit all the bonds necessary for peace, and even alliance. No doubt it helped that Redthorn made it plain how his wrath would fall on any peace breakers among the Gryphons.
Redthorn was in fact so plainspoken in favor of peace, and Skytoucher and the chief’s sons along with him, that Pirvan hardly needed to speak to his own people. He had been choosing them carefully for years; anyone who thought the homeland of “barbarians” began a day’s ride from Tirabot Manor had long since departed his service.
However, for the sake of his own honor and that of the knights, he firmly addressed his company, and while so doing ignored the bored looks on a fair number of faces. Among the most bored were certain men-at-arms whom Pirvan and Haimya had seen “walking out” with warrior maidens of the Gryphons.
“It seems the fascination of the stranger afflicts both men and women,” Pirvan grumbled as he and Haimya were undressing for bed that night.
“You think of Eskaia and Hawkbrother?”
“There are whole hours of the day when I do not think of them.”
“Such moderation in a father!”
Pirvan threw a mock buffet at her head. She replied with a less mock twist of leg and ankle that brought them both down. Pirvan’s head ended between Haimya’s breasts.
“Of course, a man need not be a stranger to fascinate a woman,” she murmured, and tightened her arms around him.
Unseen save by gryphons, the scouts of half a dozen clans of Free Riders, and two kender—Zephros’s men marched across the desert toward the mountains.
They marched slowly, seldom moving beyond the next watering spot in the course of a day, and hardly ever traveling by night. This helped keep down straggling, and allowed deserters from Aurhinius’s camp and the odd sell-sword who did not care whom he followed to join them.
There were enough desert-wise fighters in Zephros’s ranks to keep most of their comrades from doing anything too stupid too often. Straggling also diminished as it became evident that someone followed the band. Stragglers who did not vanish as if into the air were most often found with their throats cut. Sometimes their deaths had been slower.
Strangest of all were those stragglers who were found alive, sun-parched to delirium, but otherwise unharmed save for being stripped of every item of usable gear.
The obvious suspects in such a case were kender, but kender, it was well-known, did not roam the desert. Therefore, suspicion implicated the whole gamut of Ansalon’s folk, human and otherwise.
As the days went by, fear began to feed on that suspicion, and find it a nourishing diet.
The messenger from the Gryphons’ scouts rode into camp as Pirvan and Threehands faced each other in a practice bout.
Pirvan had soon learned he could not have wisely challenged Threehands as he had Hawkbrother. The Gryphon chief’s eldest son had won his name in his earliest fighting days, by wielding weapons with such speed that he seemed to have three hands. He had not lost any of that speed, and had gained skill.
The bout was not being fought to blood, but both fighters were so swift on the attack that accidents were inevitable. Both had slight wounds before the messenger rode up. Threehands tossed his towel to Pirvan and went to meet the man. As Pirvan finished wiping off sweat and sat down to let Eskaia bind the light wound in his thigh, Threehands returned.
“Bad news?” Pirvan asked.
Threehands looked even more sour, whether at the news or at being so easily read, then jerked his head.
“The Istarians are marching?” Eskaia asked. Threehands looked about to put this foreign woman in her place, when Hawkbrother strolled up. The chief’s eldest son shot the youngest an eloquent look, then squatted. While Hawkbrother did his duty patching Threehands’s wounded arm, all listened to the messenger.
The Istarians were indeed on the move, but not in great force. Less than five hundred fighting men, the scouts had reported, perhaps many less. Several clans were watching them, and a prisoner taken by scouts had, before dying, said that desert hobgoblins were also on their trail. Aurhinius was not with them; the prisoner had spoken of one High Captain Zephros.
At this, Pirvan’s eyebrows rose so that all demanded to know what the name meant to him.
“A lapdog of the kingpriest, or rather of the old kingpriest’s faction,” Pirvan said. He explained Istar’s intrigues as best he could to people who had never been within a week’s ride of it.
“So he might be seeking glory for himself, not carrying out a plan of Chief Aurhinius?” Hawkbrother asked. His brother shot another look, but this time the younger replied with a bland smile and an observation: “Duty is done by your wound, Brother. Now we are at council, and I am of Redthorn’s blood as much as you.”
“I would not dispute that if I could, knowing how much time it would waste,” Threehands said, which was the first display of wit Pirvan could recall from him. “Very well, we are at council. But I am chief over the council—”
“Chief along with my father,” Eskaia said. This time it was Pirvan who flung a reproving look, and his daughter who replied with a smile as eloquent as any of her mother’s.
Her message was Somebody must speak up for you, Father, if you are too honorable to do so yourself.
Pirvan briefly contemplated the custom among certain remote tribes, of marrying off daughters when they were no more than fifteen. Doubtless they still developed forward tongues in due time, but at least they exercised them on their husbands or sons, not their fathers.
“Very well, Brother Chief,” Threehands said, and now he even ventured what might have been, without abusing language, called a smile. Pirvan suspected it was not so much new goodwill as the new prospect of a good fight. “What does your war wisdom suggest?”
Pirvan did not have his map with him, and in any case it was one of the knights’ more complete and more secret ones. Memory would have to serve.
“They are either Aurhinius’s vanguard, a feint to disguise his real line of march, or perhaps, as you say, glory-seekers not under his authority. In any case, they are too many to have roaming about unwatched.”
Pirvan went on to explain that where any opponent should wait for Zephros depended on where he was going. There were several possible destinations, but all save one could either move or defend themselves.
“The last is the citadel at Belkuthas. It is half ruined, and the folk there have been at peace with their neighbors for twenty years or more. We were going to visit them before we returned north, to warn them to be on guard and arrange to place them under the knights’ protection, if they wished.”
“Belkuthas is not unknown among the Free Riders,” Threehands said. “Nor unhonored,” he added, “though any who wish the goodwill of the Silvanesti will not be too openly friends with Krythis and Tulia. Even if they need no defending, they will doubtless know much tha
t others have not heard.”
“Also, appearing as their friends will give the Gryphons a fine name among the dwarven folk and the other friends of Belkuthas,” Hawkbrother said. “At times like these, one cannot have too many friends, or at least those who think well of one.”
“Unlike brothers, whom the gods sometimes send in greater numbers than any sensible man could wish,” Threehands said, but he could not quite fight down a smile as he said it. With that, nobody else could keep from laughing aloud.
Then the laughter died, as the council settled down to considering the best road to reach Belkuthas without losing sight of Zephros.
Mostly out of curiosity, Imsaffor Whistletrot and Horimpsot Elderdrake climbed the rocks beside the mouth of a certain pass. They were not likely to venture this way again, and some of the rock needles jutting from the upper portion of the cliff to the north had fascinating shapes that did not seem quite natural.
“I wonder if dwarves ever came out here,” Elderdrake said. “I know they don’t like heat, but maybe once this land was colder. They surely do like to play with rocks, and this cliff looks like somebody’s been playing with it.”
Both kender also felt better getting on high ground above Zephros’s oncoming men. Neither was more a student of war than the average kender, which is to say they could give a junior captain in any regular host headaches and fits. However, old tales they had heard (or read, or maybe both; they had argued over that much of one night) said if you reached high ground ahead of an enemy, you could do more to him than he could do to you, or at least see him more clearly.
So, one night, they scurried ahead of Zephros’s ambling column and were waiting for it at dawn, perched up among the pinnacles.
It had been a hard march and a harder climb. Both kender were sick of the desert and well loaded with items handled from stragglers. They might have had fewer possessions if they had met other kender, but as far as they could tell, they were the only ones in this desert. They refused to simply drop something that might prove useful before long.
This was a display of concentration and foresight rare among kender in their journeying years, and most humans would have been surprised or even frightened by it. But then, most humans had never seriously hurt a kender (not for want of trying), let alone killed one. They had never known a kender to want revenge, to repay them for a compatriot’s death.
The two kender watched as the column marched toward the pass. They had a good view of the approaching men, but Elderdrake wanted a better one.
“If I can count them, maybe we can tell somebody who’s also an enemy of Zephros.”
“Who would that be?”
“Oh, a man like him has to have all sorts of enemies.”
“But do we know any of them?”
“You’re no fun, Imsaffor. You spent too much time with that confounded minotaur.”
“Don’t you dare insult Waydol to my face!”
“Very well, then I’ll talk behind your back.”
“You’ve got a big wind for a kender on his first journey.”
“At least I didn’t stop for years in the middle of a journey!”
At this point Imsaffor Whistletrot turned so many different bright colors (kender can turn more than red, when they put their minds to it) that Elderdrake was afraid. He hurried out of Whistletrot’s reach, then uncoiled a long rope from around his waist.
His plan was simple. He would tie one end of the rope around one of the pinnacles, leaving the other end tied around his waist. Then he would lower himself down the cliff, to where he could count Zephros’s men, maybe even their weapons. He might even be lucky enough to overhear something they said.
The rope would keep him from falling all the way down, and let Whistletrot help pull him back up again. (If Whistletrot wasn’t angry enough to leave him dangling, but that didn’t worry Elderdrake. It takes a good deal to worry a young kender on his first journey, and besides, kender are very strong for their size, and Elderdrake was large for a kender.)
The only thing Elderdrake overlooked was a crack in the base of the pinnacle he used for his rope. Perhaps not quite the only thing—he also overlooked a patch of loose scree some fifty paces down the cliff.
The moment he put his foot on the scree, he slipped and began to slide. The slide turned into a fall as the cliff steepened. His shout warned both his friend above and the humans below—just as his weight came on the rope.
The crack in the pinnacle was so placed that the wind did not enlarge it. Elderdrake’s weight, however, exerted strain from the opposite direction. The rock groaned as the crack widened. The pinnacle swayed, then split off along the line of the crack.
“Oops,” Imsaffor Whistletrot said.
Now, when a kender with human companions says this, the humans normally shake in their boots, or else put them to the ground and run as fast as possible. It is not well known that kender will say that to one another. That can upset even a kender.
Both kender, however, were too busy to be upset. Elderdrake was trying to stop his fall without stopping in the path of the pinnacle. Whistletrot was trying to hook his friend’s rope with his own whippik, also without leaving him in the way of all the falling rock.
The pinnacle took care of the matter itself. It jerked Elderdrake’s rope across the base of another pinnacle. The rope wound itself firmly around the second pinnacle—then snapped as the first pinnacle continued its downward plunge.
Imsaffor Whistletrot had just time to grab his friend’s rope and cut it loose before the second pinnacle was hit by a third, dislodged by the fall of the first. Nor were those three pinnacles the last to go.
As the two kender watched, the entire face of the cliff and all the pinnacles on it split, crumbled, and fell into the mouth of the pass with a noise like the return of Chaos and enough dust to hide the whole city of Istar. Thousands of tons of rock poured like a waterfall onto the trail.
Like a waterfall, too, the rock splashed. A wave of boulders, each the size of a kender hut or larger, roared across the valley and struck the base of the cliffs on the other side. The hammer blow was too much for the fissured base of the cliffs. Like a curtain whose rod has pulled loose from the wall, the other cliffs also fell.
The two kender tried hard to see how much damage the falling rock did to Zephros’s men. But so much dust billowed up, they might as well have been trying to spy on the Dargonesti, a hundred fathoms below the waves.
Long after the crash, clatter, and rumble of falling rock had mostly died away, the dust remained suspended in the still air of the desert afternoon. By the time a breeze rose to thin out the dust, Zephros’s men were far out on the desert. It looked as if they were running, and the two kender half hoped they would run themselves to death.
That was about the best the men could hope for, too. The two falling cliffs had completely blocked the mouth of the pass with a pile of rock easier to fly over than climb. Nobody was going to be taking an army through this pass for a good many years, and neither kender intended to wait here that long.
“I suppose we can still go to Belkuthas,” Elderdrake said. He sounded rather subdued. He was also short of breath, and his ribs and stomach were aching where the rope had tightened around them.
“What for, you son-of-a-gnome?” Whistletrot snapped. Then he had a fit of coughing that kept him speechless, if not silent, for quite a while. There was still a lot of dust in the air.
“I am not a gnome,” Elderdrake finally said with dignity. “This is my first journey. I’ve never been in desert before, and anyway, if I could have seen that crack, so could you.”
“It was on your side of the pinnacle, and I wasn’t foolish enough to go down on the cliff in the first place.”
“Who was foolish? I knocked down more rocks than all the dwarves in this land ever did.”
“Yes, and you wasted them all because they didn’t fall on Zephros’s men!”
“Well, maybe I wasted them and maybe I didn’t. We don’t know
how many of Zephros’s men tripped over their own feet or choked on the dust!”
“No, and we never will, unless they come back or we climb over that pile of rocks and go after them.”
“That’s why I think we ought to go to Belkuthas. Besides, Hallie Pinesweet said she was going to stop there. Maybe she is still—”
“Hallie Pinesweet never thought you were worth a bag of dried nuts.”
“I’m older now.”
“Five years. You think she’ll have sat waiting for you at Belkuthas for that long? Your brains are dried nuts, too!”
“Well, I’m going to Belkuthas. If we can’t catch Zephros ourselves, maybe we should ask for help from some people who can. I think Hallie said there were humans who kept horses at Belkuthas, or maybe it was centaurs who lived in the forest—”
Imsaffor Whistletrot threw up his hands in disgust and despair. It was either go to Belkuthas with Elderdrake or go somewhere else alone, and he wasn’t quite curious enough about this land to roam it alone.
Besides, once Elderdrake saw that Hallie Pinesweet was long gone on her way, he would stop thinking Belkuthas was so wonderful. Then they could go on their way—and, Whistletrot hoped, homeward as soon as possible.
He had much more traveling to do. Elderdrake was right; he had spent too long with Waydol. A kender as young as he was shouldn’t remain in one place. But he would rather live among gully dwarves than travel with a kender who behaved like a gnome—and then boasted about it!
Listening to the little council’s plan, Redthorn and Skytoucher displayed an elaborate courtesy that, to Pirvan, smelled of impatience to end the rituals and mount up. He hoped so. The Gryphons, by his own lowest estimate, could put a thousand armed riders on the march. With such a force standing before Belkuthas, it would be safe not only from Zephros but from any force than Aurhinius himself could field without warning.
