by Roland Green
Sir Lewin prodded his mount into movement, and took his place in the rear of the column.
“Have we a clear road home?” Rynthala asked.
“To Belkuthas?” Darin said, meeting question with question.
“Of course.”
“Never think ‘of course’ when leading warriors,” Darin said. “Seldom will all your band see a matter the same way. Always say exactly what you mean.”
“Well, then I will say that you seem to have appointed yourself my teacher in war. You also address me as a child.”
“Which offends you more?”
If Rynthala had thought this splendid warrior capable of a jest, she would have taxed him with making a rather foolish one. However, it had become her firm conviction that Sir Darin Waydolson had no vestige of humor in his composition.
“If you have eyes, you can see that I am no child. It might be harder to tell what experience I have in war.”
“By your own words, you ride at the head of a war band for the first time in your life.”
Rynthala wanted to shake some of the literalness out of that splendid head. However, shaking Sir Darin would be a task somewhat akin to shaking a full-grown pine tree. Rynthala knew herself to be no weakling, but not adequate to such a job.
“Very well. I say you give advice whether I ask or not.”
“Also, I give it when you are uneasy about something that has nothing to do with today’s battle. This makes you less willing to listen gracefully.
“Is the matter that concerns you the elven embassy coming to Belkuthas? The council of war did speak of it in confidence, but they spoke of it at all only because you mentioned it. So I think I violate no confidence by asking you.”
Darin had used about five words for every two he had really needed, and remained unsmiling and sober the while. However, he had also gone to some lengths to be polite. Rynthala decided she would repay him in the same coin.
“I had not thought I was so uneasy as that, but yes, the embassy is much on my mind. If anything happens to it to give Lauthin a grievance, that grievance will be against my parents. Never mind if it happens three days’ travel from Belkuthas; he will say that somehow they ought to have prevented it.
“Then the Silvanesti will have their excuse to move against my parents. They hate half-elves, those who rule in the south now do. They hate them more than they hate humans or Kagonesti, or even the kingpriest!”
Darin’s massive hands twitched. In another man, Rynthala would have said he was about to try taking her in his arms. She had a full quiver of ways to deal with unwanted attentions, but wondered if any of them would work against a man of Darin’s size. On the other hand, he seemed very unlikely to offer such attentions, and, if he did, she was of two minds about whether to take offense.
Darin instead put his hands behind his back. Then he looked at her with an intensity that held no hint of desire, but appealed far more than if it had.
“Your family’s honor stands in the balance, then?”
“Yes, against enemies where in justice one might have hoped for friends. Can you help?”
“Your family’s honor will be as sacred to us as our own, if we become their guests.” Rynthala tried to keep her face still, and Darin rewarded her by going on. “Even before we are guests, we all wish peace in this land, and therefore no harm to the elves.
“Of course, they may feel we are more likely to do them harm than give them protection. I have yet to hear of Silvanesti admitting they could not deal with any and all foes. But if we can protect them without their noticing, I am sure we shall do as much good as necessary without having to waste time arguing.”
Rynthala heard indignation in Darin’s voice, and thought she saw a hint of a wry smile on his face. Perhaps he was not altogether without feelings—or even humor.
Weariness and an unease that was not quite yet fear ate at High Captain Zephros, from within and without. He felt as if he were infested with both worms and fleas.
Nothing about this journey into the sun-blasted wilderness had been agreeable. He had ceased to be surprised by bad luck; if he had not, he would have ceased to be leader even of this motley array of mutineers, deserters, and street scourings.
That might still come about, as a result of this day’s fighting. His men counted fourteen dead and more than forty hurt, some of whom would need burial rather than healing before the last moon set. They had needed to ask for a truce to remove his losses, which by law and custom gave the victory to the enemy.
An enemy, moreover, consisting of flea-ridden desert barbarians without civilized leadership, and Solamnics under Pirvan the Thief, called a knight, but in truth the worst enemy the kingpriest had. Zephros had had a chance to remove that thorn in Istar’s side, and all he had to show for it was a casualty list of the kind that had driven stouter warriors into desertion or flight.
Zephros’s hearing was acute, and the desert night was silent, with even the normal camp noises subdued. So he heard the footsteps outside his tent and the sentry’s challenge, then a sudden silence. At that silence he drew his sword, remembered in time to save his dignity that a tent wall offered no protection for a man’s back, and met the visitors standing beside his camp table.
There were two of them. One was a Captain Luferinus, of an old Solamnic family that had curiously never produced a knight of any order. He was outspoken in his praise of the kingpriest’s goals and power; whether this had been rewarded in Istar, no one knew. Rumors did run that he knew more about the Servants of Silence than it had been safe to say aloud these past ten years.
The other was a figure in a brown robe with a hood, of almost elven slenderness but otherwise ambiguous as to race, sex, and much else that distinguished one person from another. Zephros decided to call him “he,” and feigning politeness, lit a second candle from the one already on his table.
That only showed him that the face within the cowl was still in shadow. It had to be a trick of the light or his fatigue, but Zephros thought there might be only shadow where the face ought to be.
“Greetings. Forgive my poor hospitality, but the wine is all gone to the hurt, and the hour is late. I will listen if you are brief.” His servant unfolded two camp stools, then at a nod from Zephros departed, with a cautious backward look at the hooded man.
Luferinus was the first to speak. “Zephros, I do not believe those we both serve will be happy with today’s events.”
“Not unless they are fools, which I think we all agree they are not.”
“They are, if they leave you in sole command here,” rasped the shadow face. Zephros would have made a gesture of aversion if he had not been too angry to think of one.
“Oh, and you can do better?”
“You shall do better, guided by myself and Captain Luferinus.” Again the voice had the quality of a rusty file grating across crumbling stone. After listening to only those few words, Zephros already had the beginning of a headache.
“Who are you?”
Both visitors were silent.
Zephros’s headache grew worse.
Emboldened and angered at once, he stepped forward and attempted to push the brown cowl back from the shadow face. Instead, he stopped with his hands in midair as the cowl fell back of its own will.
The face staring at Zephros had once been human. Now the skin was ridged and leathery, the eyes narrow with the slit pupils of some thoroughly unwholesome reptile, and the scalp quite hairless, with a faintly oily sheen to it. There were no external ears, only silver discs where they should have been, and the few teeth revealed in a ghastly parody of a smile were also silver.
Zephros had little knowledge of magical matters and what he had was acquired more by accident than by design. However, in the circles in which he moved, it was impossible not to have heard of the renegade mage once named Wilthur. He had worn, so it was said, all three robes at different times in a life prolonged unnaturally by forbidden magic. In the end he had challenged one of the three pr
imary gods, or perhaps all three at once, depending on the tale.
Zephros suspected it was either all three or Gilean the Neutral. Paladine would have slain him cleanly, and Takhisis would have dragged him to eternal torment in the Abyss. Gilean would have done this, transformed Wilthur to warn all who beheld him to avoid his follies, without forcing the beholder to choose any particular path.
The high captain also realized he had been staring in a manner likely to give offense, at a being—he could not call Wilthur a man—whom it might be death to offend.
Then Wilthur grew taller and paler. A moment later, a Silvanesti elven noble stood before Zephros, so exalted in manner and carriage that the Istarian felt an urge to kneel.
He did not. He even found the wits to speak.
“I had not heard you were a shapechanger as well—it is Lord Wilthur, is it not?”
“As you wish,” and even the voice had the elven musicality to it. Then the elven noble shimmered, and the robed, hideous Wilthur returned.
“I see,” Zephros said. “Or rather, I saw. An illusion spell, correct?”
“As you say,” Wilthur replied. “This, however, is not.”
A fireball materialized, a finger’s length from Wilthur’s suddenly outstretched left hand. It flashed down, scorched a dark path across the camp table, struck one of the stools, and consumed it entirely. A thin curl of green smoke rose into the air, from a patch of sand that seemed to have turned into glass.
“Nor is this,” Wilthur added. Invisible fingers of cold iron seemed to grip Zephros’s throat. He clawed at the air, felt his vision darkening, retained enough of it to see another invisible hand grip the other camp stool and crush it to powder—
—and gasped as the iron fingers vanished and he could breathe again. Zephros rested one hand on the camp table, nearly overturning it, and rubbed his throat with the other.
“I could kill you in an instant and give Luferinus the command,” Wilthur said. He might have been discussing the price of cider after a poor apple harvest. “But it would take time to make the men accept his authority, and some might fight for you, poor thing that you are. Then there would be deaths, disharmony, and delay, yet again.
“None of which we can afford in the presence of an able and numerous enemy,” Luferinus added. “We must be in order and united when the other companies of sell-swords arrive.”
“Other companies?” Zephros said. Doubting the evidence of his senses was not one of his vices, but he simply did not understand.
“Other companies,” Wilthur said quietly. “Better than the rat’s brood Pirvan took today, because you and they could not meet in time. Half of them would have turned their coats, anyway, so I suppose it is no great loss. But more and better are coming, and you may have the glory of leading them to victory. Merely do our bidding, and we shall ask for nothing to take the glory from you.”
And pigs will march into the smokehouse of their own will and come out hams without any human aid, Zephros thought. It was a more elegant thought than he could usually muster; he remembered at least three tutors who would have been proud. He also remembered that he had given up poetry in spite of the tutors, thinking it not fit art for a soldier.
It now seemed rather a pity. Poets would doubtless sing of whatever victories he won, or compose fine epitaphs if he lost. None of them would know the truth, and Branchala did not much care for verses that did not smell at least slightly of the truth.
However, the only important truth now was the two men standing before him, waiting for his answer.
“For our men, for the kingpriest, and for the cause we all serve, I agree to your terms.”
Zephros was relieved when the others merely nodded, instead of asking him to sign in blood or some such trick.
The two kender had been watching Zephros’s camp from a position far ahead of Pirvan’s most advanced scouts. However, by the time ruddy light flashed within one of the tents, Imsaffor Whistletrot was sound asleep.
His comrade Elderdrake wanted to kick him awake, if only to stop the snoring that surely must be waking half the camp, to say nothing of minotaurs in Ergoth and dragons in dragonsleep. He did no such thing. His friend and mentor had been marching and fighting for a long time, and deserved to sleep when both of them were not needed on watch.
Except that if that flash of light meant something, somebody should know about it back in Sir Pirvan’s camp. Whistletrot had told his traveling companion enough about the knight to convince Elderdrake that Sir Pirvan of Tirabot liked kender and was even willing to listen to them … almost as long as they were willing to talk.
But how should anybody know anything if Elderdrake didn’t go back and leave his friend alone and asleep, or else wake him up? It would take a while to go to the nearest sentry, and if the man did not care for kender, Elderdrake might have to go all the way back to Sir Pirvan, and that would take even longer.
Elderdrake decided he would do nothing and go nowhere until either the flash came again or Whistletrot woke up.
In fact, before either happened, Elderdrake himself had fallen asleep.
Chapter 11
The three bands, united into one, rode out in the dawn of what all hoped would be the last day’s travel to Belkuthas. Rynthala’s mounted archers, except for those acting as scouts, accompanied the Gryphons and Solamnics.
This was the logical task for them, knowing the land as they did. However, certain Gryphons were muttering that servants of the lord and lady of Belkuthas might let hurt come to the Free Riders, to win favor among the Silvanesti.
Raising his voice only a few times, Threehands subdued such tongue-wagglers without bloodshed, but as the column rode out, the Gryphon chief wore a face so long it all but dragged on the ground. He also cast sour looks at the two kender, who were riding one behind the other atop a pack horse and singing (at least Pirvan assumed it was singing.)
Pirvan dropped back to ride beside his fellow chief.
“Those cursed kender haven’t done enough damage?” Threehands snapped. “Now they want to deafen us?”
“I thought they’d done us more good than harm,” Pirvan said cautiously. If the kender were still a grievance for Threehands—
“Oh, when all is said and done, I imagine you have the right of it,” Threehands said. “But their knocking down the Cliff of Spikes, and blocking the Pass of Riomis—that will not go unpunished.”
“It was an accident—if they are telling the truth,” Pirvan added. This was partly out of tact. He also knew too well that storytelling was a fine art among kender, and practiced everywhere, even among humans who did not really appreciate it.
“Perhaps, but it still destroyed shrines more ancient than the Knights of Solamnia,” Threehands said. “It also blocked one of the easiest paths from the desert to the wells at Riomis and Felthun. Blocking the path to water is not as vile as poisoning it, but the desert-born will not think well of those who do it. Even the desert-wise like you should be slow to honor it.”
“The gods only know on what side justice—” Pirvan began.
What knowledge he was going to attribute to the gods did not pass Pirvan’s lips. A hail from the scouts up ahead broke in on the conversation.
“Elves!”
Threehands muttered something about scouts who said the first thing that came into their hitherto empty heads, and spurred his mount ahead. Pirvan joined him.
They caught sight of the elves, who were mounted but moving at such a slow walk that Pirvan could easily count them. A dozen or so older elves—one of them as close to elderly as a Silvanesti elf could be and still appear outside his homeland—rode amidst some fifty archers. The archers had no armor save silvered metal caps, and few had any weapons except their bows. No one in his senses, though, despised elven archery. Pirvan matched the elves’ pace. Some of them rode very slowly, indeed, and were poor horsemen, as well.
An angry shout echoed across the hillside.
It did not echo as loudly as it would hav
e a day before; they were up into the forest now, and the trees swallowed much of the sound. But the elf was shouting with the strength of righteous indignation, and could have made himself heard in the middle of a battlefield.
“Rynthala! You do us no honor to meet us only now!”
Pirvan’s head jerked about, looking for the source of the voice. Instead, he saw Sir Darin pull his horse around and ride toward the elves. At the slow pace he needed to maintain on rough ground, this took some time, but the elves seemed so completely bemused by Darin’s size that they kept silent until he was within speaking distance.
“Your pardon, worthy elven counselors and warriors. I am Sir Darin Waydolson, chief of scouts to this band under Sir Pirvan of Tirabot and Threehands, son of Redthorn of the Gryphons.”
Darin had the elves’ attention, and Pirvan was now able to pick out their speaker and leader. He was the eldest one, although his stooped and slight frame seemed to hold a youthful voice.
“Rynthala met us on the field of battle against renegade sell-swords,” Darin explained, “enemies to the peace of all in this land. Because she knew the land, Sir Pirvan and Threehands commanded her to be our guide. So, if you wish to accuse anyone of misconduct, let it not be Rynthala, who also thought you would be in less danger if our band was strong.”
“No danger can come near fifty Silvanesti archers,” the old elf snapped. “It was a matter of duty, not safety. Unless perhaps Rynthala feared to ride alone, and wished to remain in your company.”
Sir Darin at this point turned a color that the two kender found vastly entertaining, judging from their shrieks of laughter. Pirvan had the notion that Darin was about to lose his temper. Though he knew why and did not doubt the justice of so doing, Pirvan could not call it wise.
He spurred his horse to join Darin. “Sir Darin speaks the truth, and with my voice. Make your quarrel with me, if you feel that you truly have one. Or, more honorable to the name of the Silvanesti, let us all be march-friends until we reach Belkuthas. Then weary bodies will not cloud our wits.”
