by Greg Curtis
Heri though was disappointed. Although all of them were true monsters, none of them could kill his brother. Not when he had such powerful fire magic at his fingertips and could see them coming. And not when he was sheltered by the elves. Two very big problems.
“Like what you see?” The beast-master had apparently decided to join him, hoping to sell some of his creatures. But he didn't sound enthusiastic.
Heri guessed he didn't look like his normal customers, most of whom would have been buying the beasts to stock the arenas that also weren't supposed to exist in a civilised land. Those customers the trader knew had coin. And they probably also bought a lot of creatures. However it was fairly quiet and he was the only customer the man had. So the trader was going to be nice and hope he still might have coin to spend. Others might use his beasts after all. Mostly those who needed a monster or two for some nefarious purpose.
Creatures could be very useful. Often they were used to kill someone and make it look like an accident. Sometimes people just wanted to create a scare, either to drive others away or to create business for themselves as protectors. And occasionally an army would use a few beasts as shock troops. There was always a market for a well-trained monster. And there were monsters and beasts that could deal with elves.
The beast-master was a big man, dressed from head to foot in rough leathers, and carrying a pair of whips large enough to reach from one end of the cavern to the other. He was probably the only man large enough and strong enough to use them. That was probably the way that he controlled the deadly beasts. That, and his smell, which was bad enough to make a strong man faint at twenty feet. Heri held his breath as best he could, knowing that he needed him.
“Not enough. I have an elf problem.” And that was his true problem. Samual could be overcome easily enough once you knew how and what he was capable of. He might have become a powerful fire mage, but a knife in the belly would still kill him. It was getting that knife into his belly when he was surrounded by elves who would all rush to his aid that was the problem.
“Elves?” The beast-master looked puzzled for a heartbeat, then let a slow, calculating grin slide over his face, something that looked more than a little disturbing on his swarthy features. “Tell me about it. How many elves? How badly do you want them dead?”
Heri stared at him, beginning to hope that maybe all of his problems were able to be overcome.
“Very many elves, and it's not them that I want dead. It's the man they shelter. They're just in the way. And they might try to stop me leaving as well.” He let a smile grow on his own face. “I can reach my target and kill him. But after that I'll need a way out. Something to keep the elves busy and which they won't see coming.”
“Tell me what you can do for me and how much it'll cost.”
“I can do a great deal for you. But it'll cost a great deal as well.” The man's smile grew unnaturally broad. So broad in fact that he almost looked a little like one of his beasts.
In the end everything came down to gold – it always did – and Heri had plenty. He'd stashed it away over the years – just in case. And it would go further now that he wasn't paying for an army of assassins who had all failed time and again to find and kill Samual. This time he was going to do it the way he always should have. He was going to do it himself.
Chapter Twenty.
“Elder Bela has asked to see you Samual Hanor.”
Sam started at the sound of the woman's voice coming from immediately behind him, unsettling his horse. Yet he shouldn't have been surprised. He'd heard the hooves clip clopping their way up from behind him. He just hadn't paid them any attention, lost as he was in surveying the barren wasteland that surrounded him.
Four weeks on the trail through the Dead Creek Pass, and the land hadn't improved since they first entered it. Not even now that they were nearly at the end of it. Some days he thought it was all there was to this place; sand and dirt which ran for league after league in every direction without end. It appeared to be a dead land and staring at it constantly somehow sapped at his strength. Perhaps it was the training in nature magic which was making him more sensitive to such things, but the desolation of the land clutched at him almost like a sword at his throat, and he spent hours just staring at it in horror and wishing he didn't have to see it.
Then again it could have been the sand and dust itself which tormented him most. It seemed to get in every crevice of a man's flesh, left the throat dried out and scratchy, and the eyes red and sore. The heat just made everything worse. After a month of it he dreamed of bathing in cool clear rivers.
And the terrible thing was they weren't actually in the wastes themselves. The trail they were following lay on the border between the wastes and the Fedowir Kingdom. A narrow strip of land perhaps a league and a half wide and bordered by shallow hills. The wastes themselves if they headed south into them, were hotter and drier again. Anyone who entered them soon expired from the harsh heat unless they were prepared. If they went north of course things got better, but only a little. The southern part of the Fedowir kingdom merely exchanged sand for dry packed dirt. People would still die there. The trail through the Dead Creek Pass was just harsh.
For anyone attuned at all to the magic of the natural world, this place was like a wound on the world and to wander through it was to experience pain. It wasn't just the scarcity of living things that caused it. It was that so much of what life there was twisted somehow. The wastes were home to manticores and basilisks. Unnatural and deadly creatures created by magic in the ages before the Dragon Wars. Sand scorpions thrived here. So did giga monsters and shaded cobras. If it was poisonous and deadly, it could be found in them. And even what little decent life there was, was twisted. The plants themselves were harsh and dried out, surviving only by virtue of the fact that they too weren't natural.
According to some of the ancient histories, the wastes had not always existed. Not as wastes anyway. But at some point during the time before the Dragon Wars, some great and terrible spell had been cast that had turned a vibrant and healthy land into this waste. Others claimed that it was the wars themselves that had ruined the land. Sam didn't know if that was true or not. No one did. But it certainly felt like it. The land felt cursed. Even the trail that ran alongside them felt the same.
Sam didn't like this place. In fact the only good thing about the wastes that he could find was that they were nearly out of them.
For the last month he'd spent much of his time trying to think of other things. He concentrated on his duties and practised his magic. He'd even flicked through the texts covering the legend of the Fire Angel – Pietral had obtained a copy of the collected tales from somewhere – and it had made for some interesting reading.
The Fire Angel could apparently not just draw and cast fire, but breathe it like a dragon. He could walk on it too. And in what had to be the most amazing thing he'd ever heard, the Fire Angel could apparently call a phoenix to ride on into battle. Or was that summon one? There were no phoenix after all, so surely you couldn't call one. You had to bring one across from another realm. And didn't the writers know that the phoenix fire would turn even a fire mage to ash as he rode? Even if you could somehow ride a giant bird made of fire, death was assured the instant you got on its back.
He would have thought the writers would have known better since they were elves. The phoenix after all was the favoured companion of the Goddess.
As for the battles the Fire Angel had supposedly engaged in, they were even more fanciful. Apparently he'd defeated armies of giants, ogres and dragons, burning them all to ash. No one seemed to have remembered that the dragons were said to be completely immune to fire. That they even kept their eggs warm with it. But maybe the facts about the children of Draco weren't so important to elves. Draco wasn't their god after all.
The tales were outlandish and obviously written by those who had little understanding of the truth. Still, they were something to read and have a chuckle over. Provided that no o
ne took them seriously. Especially when they took his thoughts off the land all around them. Still, it was probably fortunate that someone had come to give him something to do other than sit there and bemoan his fate now that he'd finished reading them.
He turned to greet the speaker and thank her for her message, but stopped when he realised he had seen her before, and forgot what he was going to say. Though it had been some months since he had seen her, he recognised her. It was the stern faced woman who had first brought him to Ry's parents. Now though, here in this dead wasteland, stern was an understatement. Her face was drawn with tiredness while despair and worry had traced their own lines around her eyes.
“I know you, don't I?” It wasn't what he'd meant to say. He'd meant to give a polite thank you, but it was what he'd been meaning to ask since that very first day he'd met her. He'd never seen her before, and yet there was something very familiar about her.
“We've only met the once Fire Angel.” And yet when he looked in her eyes he knew she too knew him. She was simply evading his question with a simple truth, a blatant sophistry and something elves normally didn't engage in if it would lead to deception. But he wasn't about to allow her to get away with it.
“Perhaps, good soldier, and yet I still know you. What is your name?” It was a direct question, perhaps too direct for an elf to ask, but then he was not entirely an elf, and he left her no room to evade his question.
“Mayvelle Ellosian.”
“Ellosian? My mother's name?” And yet as he looked at her he suddenly knew why she looked so familiar. She looked like his mother would if his mother had eaten some particularly sour lemons. He might have only been four when she died giving birth to her second child, his brother or sister had the baby survived, but he still remembered her face. And if he'd ever forgotten, her portraits had been hung throughout his father's bedchamber and his own. He'd married his second wife – though in law she was his only true wife – the Lady Dreasda a mere six months later. She had been a woman of high status as he had to give the kingdom a legitimate heir, but it had been a marriage of necessity. He had never loved her. And the fact that he had never taken down the pictures of his true love had likely not made for a happy marriage.
She nodded. “My mother and yours were sisters in law, my father your uncle by blood. We are cousins.”
Her words caught him by surprise, and yet looking at her he knew them for the truth. He wasn't sure he liked them though. It should have been a good thing, finally finding kin among the elves, but for some reason it wasn't. Perhaps it was simply the terrible bleakness that surrounded them, but the look in Mayvelle's eyes told of no joy, only regret, and even a coldness that worried him. Still, there were formalities to be considered on meeting kin, especially for the first time. Customs he had practised for five long years as he'd waited for this day even while he'd put it off.
“It is an honour to meet you cousin.” He reached out and clasped both her hands in his, bowing his head to her as was proper and tried not to notice the way she flinched and nearly pulled completely away from his clasp, almost as if he was diseased.
“I am Samual Hanor, son of King Eric Hanor the First of Fair Fields, and Alliye Ellosian of Shavarra. Though both are now passed on from this mortal realm, in their names I welcome your company with pleasure.”
“And I am Mayvelle Ellosian daughter of Ellree and Mauric'ell Ellosian of Shavarra. In the name of our family I greet you.”
If he could be blunt, then apparently so could his new found cousin. Blunt to the point of rudeness. For she had greeted him only. There was clearly no welcome stated or implied. She acted as if he were a new found acquaintance rather than kin or even friend. That was shocking and very unelven. The haste with which she let go his hand clasp was more so. Nor had she even met him with either honour or pleasure, suggesting she wanted nothing to do with him. Their meeting was a matter of duty, no more.
Her greeting cut like a rusty dagger straight into his heart. Just when he was starting to feel accepted by the elves, truly welcome among them, his own family rejected him. The only kin he had except for Ry and her family.
“Have I given you cause for offence cousin?” He couldn't think of any way he might have, but he could think of nothing else that might cause such coldness towards him. “If so I apologise, as a man, as kin and as a knight of Hanor.”
“You have given no offence knight of Hanor. This is simply not the time or place for such things. Elder Bela has asked for you to attend to him.”
Once more she addressed him by a formal title rather than as kin, something that wasn't lost on him. Nor was the fact that she kneed her horse's flanks and made to leave without giving him even the chance to reply. Her message had been delivered and apparently there was nothing more to be said.
“I understand. Please inform Elder Bela I will be with him as soon as I have spoken with my family, good soldier.”
Sam called it after her retreating back, and though she gave no sign, he knew she had heard. Heard and no doubt wondered which family he meant. She didn't slow down though to ask. Clearly she wanted to be as far away from him as soon as possible. It was almost as though he had become a plague carrier once more.
Knowing that he might never truly understand all the subtleties of elven custom, Sam did exactly as he had said. He tapped on Tyla's reins and headed directly for Ryshal and her family. Not only might they at least have some idea of what such a response might mean and what to do about it, they were also naturally inquisitive. And though some less tactful elves might call them nosey, they might well know the reason for his cousin's apparent dislike of him. But even if they didn't, they would quickly find out.
Cantering back to the wagon, he soon found his father in law re-packing a pair of ball bearing wagon wheels, and went to help him. Pietrel might know more about workings and repair of wagons than anyone else alive, certainly more than Sam, but he still could use help. Wheels, especially the metal shod ones, were incredibly heavy, and it was a two man job to take them off and put them back on a wagon, and regrettably there was a lot of work to do. Pietrel could have been kept busy repairing their wagons from morning to night for the next year, as they – never having been intended for such long journeys – constantly needed to be repaired. Most of the repairs of course involved repacking the bearings, as once the dust got into them they started squeaking and made the wagons much harder to pull.
“I met my cousin just now.” Not quite knowing what else to say, Sam opened the conversation with his news, even as he reached for the nearest wheel to begin rolling it back to the wagon. Pietral raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“Really. Who?” Pietrel was tired of course – repairing so many wagons he had every reason to be – and that probably explained his parsimony with words. But at least with him Sam knew he meant nothing impolite by them.
“Mayvelle Ellosian, daughter of Ellree and Mauric'ell Ellosian. A woman with a harsh demeanour, and little time for me.”
He could have said more, could have mentioned the way she had recoiled from him but he didn't need to. Pietrel understood him, understood that whenever distant family met there should always be time for greetings and conversation at least, even during these trying times. Especially during such times.
Nothing was said for a little while after that as together they lifted the wheel up to the axle, and then started hammering it home with the large wooden mallets Pietrel carried with him. It was hard work on a hot day, and it was a welcome thing when Pietrel could finally knock home the locking pin and then get the horse to pull the wagon off its blocks. But finally it was done and his father in law looked at him with a small nod.
“Your family is ours. Alendro and I will speak with them.”
“My thanks.” Sam was grateful, that they would, though a little worried about what they might learn. Could it be something to do with the death of his mother as an unmarried woman and the shame that had brought upon the family? There had been little choice in the
matter when his father had been king and bearing the weight of an entire realm upon his shoulders. But that did not make it either right or proper. It had been one of the reasons Sam had been so determined to marry Ryshal the moment they had become close. There would be no shame for her because of him. It was also another reason why he had never wanted the throne. He would choose his love over the throne any day.
Still, he had no time to worry about such things. The Elder had summoned him, and Elder Bela was not a man who enjoyed being kept waiting. So with the work done Sam gave his apologies and left for the vanguard at a canter.
His first thought when he approached the elders was that they had visitors, and that had to be a good thing since it had to mean that they were close to the end of the trail. He knew they were guests because of the way the elves wore their hair. All elves wore it long – he was letting his grow long at Ry's urging – but the elves of Shavarra wore it either free or in long open plats. These newcomers sitting with the elders had their hair tied up in long, thin, tightly wound plats in the way that the elves of Golden River Flats did. They weren't from Shavarra. Their armour indicated the same thing. Rangers had joined them judging by their sigils. And rangers of the order of the blood bear. It was an order he didn't recognise. Blood bears did not dwell in Shavarra, and no one he knew wore their image as a sigil. But the fearsome creatures were found throughout the Golden River Flats.
