That night, in the deep hours toward the morning, they saw the strange shadow flying before the face of the moon again, several times. It went north to south and then sometime later back to the north, and this pattern was repeated. Occasionally, there were pale flashes of light off in the darkness to either side of the body of the moon along the tangent of the strange object’s flight, like distant lightning, as if a storm were brewing behind it to the west. Once there were two shadows, a few minutes apart, flying in the same direction, twisting and sinuous, black against the yellow of the full moon.
“Are there two of them?” Aram asked.
“So it would seem, master.” Durlrang answered.
Alvern had stayed near them, settling for the night in the top of a dead cedar, so that he could awaken also and his keen eyesight brought to bear in an attempt to solve the mystery.
“What are they, Lord Alvern? Have you seen their like before? Or is it just a flock of night birds?”
“No, my lord, not birds; it is a creature. And I have never seen its like before.”
Aram thought briefly of the high plains and of the Choalung, the monster living out its anachronistic life in the deep, cold water of the quarry surrounding Rigar Pyrannis. “I wonder – is this creature something ancient, from the world before our time, never before seen –?” Then he had a thought that made him grow cold, “– or something new?”
“I have been alive on the earth for many centuries, my lord,” Alvern answered, “but I have never seen the likes of this thing. If it is from the ancient world, then it must move only at night – so I would not have seen. And it must move rarely, or surely I would have heard tales that told of its travels in the dark hours. Either that, or it is a thing newly discovered.”
“Can you tell what it is?”
“It is like unto a serpent – or a large worm, for it moves its body in a similar manner, as if it swims through the air. But it moves very quickly. I only glimpse it as it passes before the light. I do not know what this creature is.”
After a while, the bottom portion of the moon’s body turned a strange dark orange-red color again as it dropped closer to the earth. It seemed that rather than the moon settling toward the earth, the earth rose up to consume it.
Gazing westward in the dark hours before the coming of day, Aram had the same cold fear invading his gut as he’d had on that day two years earlier when he hid in the trees and looked out over the plains of Wallensia, watching the strange, heavily guarded, conical wagon that bore Manon’s fellring eastward toward Derosa.
Twenty Five
The next day the hills turned ever more sharply northward and there was a village out on the plains a few miles away. About midday, Aram left Thaniel to graze in a small valley while he climbed to the top of a grassy ridge where he lay for a time and watched the distant villagers as they worked their fields and attended to the business of the village. There were no overseers or lashers that he could see, but it was obviously a village of slaves. Aram recognized the old familiar routines being followed by men and women without hope.
For a while, he entertained the impulse to go out to these people and set them free – guide them eastward through the wilderness to Derosa. But that was not a job for one man. He would need help, mostly from horses, to move the few hundred people safely eastward. And he needed to know the country better – how and by what route it would be best to move them so that they could reach the gates of Derosa undetected by the servants of Manon. This was, after all, one of the reasons for his journey into unknown country.
After an hour or so he went back to Thaniel, located Durlrang, and they went on to the west. To their front the area of jumbled hills broadened out and there were even higher, sharper peaks. At the point where the hills angled toward the northwest, Arm turned and went through them the other way. He had seen all that he wanted of this part of the world, now he was more interested in the lands that lay to the south, between Derosa and the sea, than in going further north and west into the plains.
That night they camped in a small hollow beside a substantial stream in a stand of thick cedars. It was the third day of the full moon, but the hills around them were quite tall and they had come far enough to the south that day that the region of hilly country spread out from their camp on all sides, even to the west. Because of this it seemed unlikely to Aram that the moon would set over the marsh from their location. They made no plans to look for the strange flying object, though Durlrang promised to go to the top of a ridge before morning and watch the sky as the moon set.
Morning woke Aram. Despite the advent of summer, it was a cool morning and he had an urge for hot kolfa, but they were deep in enemy territory; he decided to forego the pleasure. He ate a quick, cold breakfast and broke camp; before the sun topped the ridges to the east, they were moving. The hills grew rougher and rockier as they went toward the southsouthwest. Often, in particularly steep and rocky ground, Aram had to dismount and find passage suitable for Thaniel; they went forward at a man’s pace.
At midday, Alvern called down out of the depths of the sky.
“You are almost through the rough hills, my lord. But you must be cautious. There is a narrow valley to your front, a passage through these hills from the plains to the north to a broad, wide land to the south. There is a road through the gap in the hills, and there is traffic.”
“Men, lashers, or gray men?” Aram asked.
“Some men – mostly it is a company of gray men and lashers.”
“How many?”
“More than a hundred.”
“What lies to the south of these hills?”
There was a moment before the eagle answered. “If you go almost due east – but slightly south – from your present position, my lord, you will come out into a wide, flat valley where there is a dry lake. That valley goes east – toward Burning Mountain.”
“How long will it take to go through these hills to that valley?”
“You will make it before nightfall.”
“Thank you, Lord Alvern.” Aram sat on Thaniel’s back for a moment and considered. “Wait for me here, Thaniel. I would like to go forward and look upon this road and perhaps see some of the country to the west. Then we will go back through the hills to this valley of which Alvern speaks.”
“As you wish, Lord Aram.”
“Come, Durlrang.” Aram slid off the horse and headed west below the crest of a ridge that ran almost due west, followed by the wolf. A halfmile later, they came to a place where the hills fell away rather abruptly into a narrow twisting valley. As Alvern had said, there was a road winding through the valley, trending northwest to southeast.
On the road, just now passing to their front, from right to left, there was an army of gray men commanded by lashers. The men numbered a thousand, more or less, and there were perhaps fifty lashers. They were marching in one long column, four abreast, out of the great plains, toward the southeast.
Aram eased across the top of the ridge at a low point where he could not be seen from the valley and looked south. Between the gaps in the hills, he could see where the narrow valley broadened out. Beyond, there was a wide green land and signs of civilization, well-tended fields and clusters of buildings – some large enough to signify the presence of towns. None of them had the telltale drab appearance of one of Manon’s slave-holding villages. Even from a distance, they looked well-tended and prosperous.
As far as he could see, southward through the gaps until the haze of distance cut off his view the land looked rich and orderly. A thrill went through him as he realized that he was probably looking upon the free lands of the south; lands that paid tribute to Manon in goods and materials but that did not serve him directly. Not yet.
The small army before him was marching into that land. Probably, Manon was easing his forces into it a little at a time – enough perhaps to be a concern to the land’s inhabitants, but not enough to frighten them.
Aram looked the other way, northwest along t
he narrow valley. There also, the narrow valley through which the road ran widened out into a broader land, but it was no longer the uninterrupted vistas of the great plains. This land was bounded closely by uplands on the northeast and also to the west, where he could see a distant line of hills that curved away out of sight. There were large, rough patches of dark green also, here and there across that broad land that indicated the presence of forests.
And there was something else. Though the sky above Aram’s head and all across the vast northern plains was clear and cloudless except for a few puffy patches of cloud over to the east, to the northwest the sky just above the horizon was gray and heavy, as if there was a dark mass of storm cloud that hugged the earth.
“Is there a storm over the western portion of the plains, low to the ground?” He asked Alvern.
There were a few moments of silence as the eagle changed his tack and sailed back to the north, looking northwest.
“It is an odd thing, my lord.”
“Odd? Odd how?”
“It is not a storm, Lord Aram, but a thick bank of cloud, low to the ground like fog, and it extends far back to the west, over the marsh almost to the limits of the world.”
Aram frowned at the distant bank of fog, hanging like a palpable shadow above the line of the horizon. “Could it be the leading edge of a storm front?”
“There is no storm above or behind it, my lord.” The eagle answered. “Everywhere else the sky is clear, except down there, close to the earth. The fog is so thick that it hides the ground.”
“What can be causing this?”
“It could be, my lord, that the rivers to the north have flooded for some reason, spreading their waters over the plains near to the marsh, and the morning sun is causing fog to be formed.”
“Is that what it looks like to you, Lord Alvern?”
“I confess that it does not.”
Aram studied the distant shadow for several minutes, learning nothing, not even the reason that it troubled him. He and Durlrang went back to Thaniel and the three of them went eastward a ways and then south through the rocky hills. Night caught them just as a broad valley opened up before them, bounded by hills on its far side, some thirty miles or so away to the southeast. Leaving Thaniel hidden in the shelter of a ravine, Aram dismounted and walked to the edge of the valley and looked eastward through the deepening dusk, trying to catch a glimpse of Burning Mountain, but the mountain’s dark outline, if it was there, was lost in the shadows of the coming night. As he was about to turn away and go back to camp, he glanced due south.
There were campfires spread out across the darkened land over near the far hills. Evidently, the army he’d seen earlier had not gone south into the green land. They had turned east toward Burning Mountain. His chest tightened. That likely meant one thing – they were going to Flat Butte, to increase Manon’s forces on the western borders of Wallensia.
Or maybe they were going on to Derosa.
He slept fitfully, rising before dawn. When it was light enough to see, he hurried down to the edge of the valley and gazed south. A good portion of the central part of the valley that spread before him was flat, almost perfectly smooth, and sandy. On the floor of the valley, a hundred meters out from the hills there was a debris line, like that which is often found along the shores of sizeable bodies of water, but the only place where there was a glint of liquid was far from this line of debris, out toward the middle of the flat sand.
As Alvern had said, there was a very large but shallow run-off lake here, filled with water only in the very early spring or in wet years. After the spring run-off, the water evaporated, leaving this broad area of nearly flat sand. Aram knelt, reducing his profile, and gazed southward, and after a while, saw a cloud of dust appear and begin moving up the valley. When he was convinced that the army across the valley was indeed moving toward the east, he turned and looked in that direction also. Far away, more than a hundred miles beyond the dry lake, at the distant limits of the broad valley, he saw the black summit of Burning Mountain rising over the edge of the world.
Alvern was already airborne. “Is that the army we saw yesterday, Lord Alvern?”
“I believe so.”
“Then they are going toward Burning Mountain?”
“Yes.”
“Are there any villages in this valley?”
“None, my lord.” The eagle answered. “It is too dry.”
“Then we will go eastward as well – along this side of the valley, and watch where they go.”
“Very good, my lord.”
They stayed close to the hills as they went east, moving slightly ahead of the dust cloud across the valley. Though the army across the way had the advantage of moving along a roadway, it nonetheless moved slowly. Several times throughout the day, Aram stopped to rest and to let it come up opposite their position. He took care to stay out of the dry lakebed where they would raise their own bit of dust that might alert the enemy, and kept Thaniel moving eastward across the sparse grass that grew nearer the hills.
That day they covered only a small portion of the distance to Burning Mountain; but still, at evening, they could clearly see its broad bulk shimmering darkly purple in the light of the evening sun. There was a thin tendril of smoke rising above its crown, dissipating off toward the east – evidently the volatile black mountain was clearing its throat.
They found a ravine running back into the hills and camped by a small rivulet that moved sluggishly down the bottom of the sandy wash, the stream often disappearing between pools. The water in the pools was brownish and a bit pungent, but Thaniel seemed to think that it would not harm them. Aram would have preferred to turn it into kolfa, which was supposed to be brown and pungent, but he didn’t dare start a fire, and as he thought about it, was disgusted with himself for even bringing the kolfa. He hadn’t had a cup the whole trip – if it hadn’t been that the stuff was rare and precious, he would have tossed his supply of the granular treat into the weeds.
The next day Aram abandoned the idea of keeping pace with the army, convinced now that he knew its destination. For that day and the next they went eastward quickly along the hills ahead of the army, leaving it far behind, and up onto the broad slopes of Burning Mountain by early evening of the second day. The mountain’s western flanks, though rough in places where lava had poured from its sides in the past, was very broad and gently sloped. It was also by and large relatively smooth and featureless, except for an ancient, narrow rupture of extruded lava that ran horizontally along the whole of its breadth about halfway down the broad slope that lay between the mountain’s higher, steeper ramparts and the valley floor.
In fact, as Aram studied the wide, sloping flank of the mountain, covered here and there with patches of long, bunched grass, he realized that it would be an ideal site for a battle, as long as his army held the high ground. There was plenty of room to maneuver and any army positioned on the slope above its foe would have the advantage of impact.
There were no trees anywhere, however, just small patches of low brush, and he felt naked and exposed out on the side of the mountain. If there were any keen eyes in the host that marched up the far side of the valley toward him, he and the others might be seen as they crossed that broad expanse.
Aram decided to leave Thaniel in the hills to the northwest of the mountain, in a small hollow where there was a spring and some grass, while he and Durlrang eased across the side of the mountain toward the south and the road on which the army approached. By slipping along the horizontal spine of low rock they could hide their movements from the eye of the advancing enemy host. Before they got very far, however, the sun set and far down the valley, they saw the campfires of Manon’s small army flare up and twinkle in the dusk. He and Durlrang went back across the mountainside to the north, to the grassy hollow where they’d left Thaniel and made camp for the night.
Before dawn, he and the wolf once again left the horse and hurried across the mountain’s flank, protected from vie
w by its deep shadow. They went carefully along the rocky spine but they also hurried. Aram wanted to find a place near the road where he could remain hidden when the army eventually marched past and try to get a sense of their assignment and intention, if it could be learned.
By early afternoon, they’d found a series of small cinder cones on the mountain’s southwestern slope, circular depressions where in times past the mountain had relieved its inner pressure. One of these depressions bordered the road, which was nothing more than a narrow, unimproved dirt track, good only for how it was being used – to move men through broken, wild country faster than going overland. They went back across the mountain to Thaniel and for five days waited and watched the army’s progress up the valley.
At midday on the sixth day, Aram lay on the lip of a cinder cone’s crater and looked west, watching for the approach of the army. Durlrang lay opposite, his head on his paws, watching to the east, toward the fortress on Flat Butte. Over the last three weeks, Aram had circled completely around the country north and west of Burning Mountain and now had a better idea of how it lay. Once he got a sense that this army was not intending to push on toward the east – at least that was his hope – but was simply a relief force of some kind, he meant to go on into the south and complete the circle back to Derosa.
If however, an attack on Derosa was imminent, then he would go the other way, through the wilds to the north of Burning Mountain, then eastward through the green hills, and get to the town ahead of them to mount a defense.
Just as the sun crossed the apex of the sky, Alvern’s voice came down from the blue and entered his mind.
“They are approaching your position, Lord Aram – and it is the men that we saw eight days ago in the gap between the valleys.”
“Thank you, Lord Alvern.” Aram slid down the slope of the crater’s interior until he could just peek over the top through a broken gap of rock. After a few minutes he heard the tramping of feet and then the vanguard hove into view. He realized immediately that he would not be able to watch as the army passed. The road came too near the cone, there were several tall lashers with the army, and he could not take the risk that even just the top of his head might be seen, or that his pale face peering through the dark rock would give him away.
Kelven's Riddle Book Two Page 41
