Sons of the Oak r-5

by David Farland

  “Tonight, I want a sentry at the door,” Fallion said. “And I want another about two miles down the canyon. If any of Shadoath’s scouts try to make their way up here, I want ample notice. Depending on their number, we can either choose to fight or to run.”

  “And what then?” someone asked. “Do we stay up here forever without any food.”

  “Maybe we could fight them,” one boy said. “We could drop shot on them from high up, from our graaks.”

  Fallion doubted that such an attack would do much harm, but it was Denorra who objected first. “We might kill a couple o’ golaths that way, but for what? It’s not likely that we’d ’it Shadoath ’erself. And they’d be on our tails sure then, and we’d be next to die.”

  “There are other ways to fight,” Jaz suggested. He nodded toward the leather bag on the floor, the forcibles in plain sight. To the children the forcibles were more an emblem of Fallion’s kingship than his signet ring, for what was a king without endowments? “Perhaps it’s time,” Jaz said, peering into Fallion’s face.

  Valya offered, “Milord, I will give you an endowment.”

  “As will I,” Jaz said.

  Fallion looked at his friends, and his heart felt so full that he thought it would break.

  “I’ll not take endowments from the people that I love best,” Fallion said. “Besides, we don’t have a facilitator. We must find another way.”

  Valya mused, “This may be our chance to strike Shadoath’s Dedicates. She has just sacked a city. She’ll be taking endowments tonight and sending the new Dedicates to her keep. We know that she sailed east from Syndyllian with her Dedicates in the past. It’s likely that she’s got them hidden here on Landesfallen, or somewhere nearby. We only have to follow her ship. We could go out in force, hunt for it in the night.”

  Fallion wondered if it would work.

  The other children looked at Fallion hopefully, and Denorra said, “It’s better than sitting on our asses, just waitin’ to starve-or for one of ’em to come kill us.”

  Could it really be so easy: just fly old Windkris out to where Shadoath hid her Dedicates and dispatch them along with their guards?

  But Fallion had no army to attack with, or at least no army that he was willing to risk. He wasn’t about to send the children into battle.

  He had only his own strong arms, and he doubted that they were enough.

  But I’ve been training for this fight from childhood, he thought. His small size belied his prowess in battle.

  What’s more, there was a hidden fire within him, yearning to blaze.

  He had no endowments, and he knew that if he were to proceed, he would be placing himself in tremendous peril.

  I could find her Dedicates, he told himself. I could strike them down.

  Afterward, killing Shadoath herself would not be hard. Fallion knew a dozen good warriors who might manage it.

  Fallion needed only to seize the opportunity.

  He’d never taken a human life with his own hands, and he was not eager to do so now.

  But he thought of Captain Stalker’s advice: when it comes time to gut a man, you don’t cry out or make threats or apologize. Just be the kind of man who quietly goes and takes care of business.

  “That’s the kind of man I want you to be,” Stalker had said.

  Fallion wasn’t sure that he trusted the advice, but with nothing but uglier choices before him, it was the only decision that he could make.

  47

  FLYING AMONG THE STARS

  I rode my first graak at the age of five, and never have I forgot the wonder. Now I am old and fat, and can fly only in my dreams.

  — Mendellas Orden

  As evening fell, Fallion built a fire up, a bonfire that belched smoke and filled the cavern with light.

  As he did, he felt a familiar tug. A voice whispered in his mind: Sacrifice to me.

  The time for battle was at hand, and after many years, Fallion gave in.

  Yea, Master, he said in his mind. My work shall bring you glory.

  The children took ashes from the fire and mixed them with water, then daubed them upon Windkris, Fallion’s great white graak, painting it black.

  In the darkness, he’d be almost impossible to spot. Then Fallion painted his own face and hands black, and wiped the sweet-smelling ashes upon his clothes.

  Last of all, he honed his blade to razor sharpness.

  Fallion peered through the gloom, taking one last long look at his friends, and then bade them all good-bye.

  He felt as if he were looking upon his own children, and it broke his heart to be forced to leave them now, alone and helpless.

  He went out to the ledge, untied Windkris’s leg, and leapt onto the back of his mount. The graak lumbered forward to the edge of the cliff and leapt, then soared out over the valley.

  A wind was rising from the land, and it bore the graak aloft, sent the great painted reptile soaring through the night beneath stars as bright as diamonds.

  He circled east and then south, hiding the direction of his approach from any unfriendly eyes, and soared through hidden flyways among the stonewood trees until he reached the hills above Garion’s Port.

  There, east of the city, his graak perched in a tree, and he watched a small black schooner.

  Is it the Mercy? he wondered.

  He watched for hours as away boats rowed up to it, loading their cargo. Fallion saw humans being carted up by the score, most of them unconscious or incapacitated to the point that they had to be carried.

  Sometime well before dawn, still hidden by the darkness and a rising mist, the ship stole out to sea.

  He studied the ship’s bearings, and knew where it was headed. Valya had said that it sailed due east from Syndyllian. Now it was taking a course southwest. By triangulating the courses in his mind, he was able to fix an approximate location, one that he recalled from Captain Stalker’s old charts-the island of Wolfram, or one of the other atolls close by.

  Fallion waited until the ship was far out to sea before he gave chase.

  He flew south through a hidden flyway among the trees until he reached the beach, and then let his mount drop into the mist, so that its wingtips brushed the water and he felt the salt spray in his face.

  For long hours he soared above the sea, watching it undulate beneath him, its waves dimpling like the skin of a serpent as it coils.

  As he rode, time seemed to pass slowly.

  I am growing old, Fallion thought. My childhood is vanishing behind me, failing.

  And in the solitude as he rode under the stars, he had a long time to think, to firm his resolve. He imagined the Dedicates’ Keep, filled with cruel people who’d given themselves into Shadoath’s service-twisted bright Ones from the netherworld that had grown perfect in evil. Perhaps she used animals, too-golaths and strengi-saats and darkling glories.

  Monsters. Shadoath’s keep could well be filled with monsters.

  But there would be others, too. Some of the folk from Garion’s Port might be there-the innkeeper or his wife, or perhaps the tanner’s pretty daughter.

  How would he feel about taking her life?

  Nix was crying. Jaz held her in the night and tried to get some sleep. The watch fire had burned down to coals and gave almost no heat.

  And here so high on the mountain, the air felt thin and frigid, almost brittle. Jaz tried to warm Nix with his body, but could not even keep himself warm.

  Fallion had been gone for hours. Jaz could not sleep. The graaks had been restless. Most of them were males, and at this time of the year, they were overwhelmed by the urge to hunt for food for their mates and to search for branches and kelp to use as nesting materials.

  All through the night they let loose with graaak cries, then rustled their wings, eager to be off.

  What would happen if I let the mounts go? he wondered.

  He imagined that most of them would head straight for the sea, back to their nests, and try to rear their young. But not all of
the graaks looked to be adults. The adolescents, those under nine years of age, wouldn’t have bonded with a mate yet, and would be more likely to remain close to their masters, soaring along the mountain ledges to hunt for wild goats or heading to the valleys to hunt for rangits and burrow-bears.

  They’d return after they fed, and that was the problem. They might attract unwanted attention.

  The only thing that he could do was to leave the graaks tied to their iron rings. Let them sit quietly and feed off of their fat. In a few days, without food or water, the reptiles might die-or worse, they might gnaw off their own feet in an effort to escape.

  He imagined the graaks coming after the children, so crazed by hunger that they were willing to eat their masters. It had happened before, many times.

  Jaz pitied the creatures. He knew what it felt like to be chained to a wall, with no food or water.

  At long last, Jaz slept.

  It seemed that he had only been down for a minute when he heard a guttural cry, and woke, his heart pounding in his throat.

  Several of the graaks grunted, and he heard the rush of wings. Someone was riding away!

  Jaz leapt to his feet. Nix was gone.

  He raced outside and saw that the sun was rising, a great ball of pink at the edge of the world.

  Down below him, he saw a graak flying just above the trees. Nix was riding it.

  Gone to get food, he realized, and water. The children would need it.

  Jaz was filled with wrath and foreboding. But there was no stopping her now. He could only hope that she did well.

  Now was the time for her to get supplies, if she was to have any hope at all-now, before Shadoath’s troops looted all of the nearby towns.

  Fallion had warned them all not to go scrounging for food. But you cannot command a child to starve, Jaz realized.

  For all of their sakes, he wished Nix luck.

  Shadoath waited on a pinnacle of a mountain, studying the night sky. She had three dozen endowments of sight, but even then she was blind in the right eye, and everything in her left eye looked as if it were shrouded in the thinnest of mists.

  To the west, her golath armies were marching through the night, fanning out. The golaths were tireless, and by dawn they would have prodded beneath every rock and mossy log within twenty miles of Garion’s Port, looking for Fallion and Valya.

  Shadoath had tried to follow the flyway, had taken it through several long detours and dead ends. Without someone to lead, her graak had lost its way.

  At last she’d come to the end of it, rode out above some trees. She’d wondered if perhaps the children’s hideout was somewhere just at the end of the flyway, there in the jungle, and so she’d landed her graak and searched on foot for a time, sniffing in the shadows for the scent of children, listening for human cries, all without luck.

  But late in the afternoon she spotted a pair of graaks far to the east and suspected that the hideout had to be elsewhere.

  She’d lost sight of them as they flew into the mountains.

  Now for the first time she spotted something in the distance, miles away: a sliver of white, almost like a cloud, appearing and then disappearing, appearing and disappearing.

  A graak, she realized, flapping its wings in the dawn. She could even make out a shadowy rider.

  Perhaps one of the children was on patrol or carrying a message. In either case, it meant that the child would return.

  And when that happened, Shadoath would follow the child to the hideout.

  48

  THE ATOLL

  Each man thinks himself an island of virtue, surrounded by a sea of louts.

  — Jaz Laren Sylvarresta

  In the long night, Fallion’s graak grew tired. It was a far journey, and even with light winds Windkris could not go on forever. The poor reptile began to cough as it flew, and the flesh at its throat jiggled, as if it grew faint from thirst.

  Fallion considered abandoning the beast. He did not want to cause its death. But he was too far out to sea now to turn back.

  By some good fortune, he spotted a small atoll, a rock that thrust up from the ocean. He stopped for a long while and let Windkris rest. The rock was hardly big enough for him to get down from his mount, perhaps fifteen feet across. So he sat upon Windkris as the black water surged all around them and watched the sunrise.

  It was not until late in the early morning, when a pink sun had climbed into the sky, that Fallion reached Wolfram.

  He recognized the island from the charts, its white sand beaches and the play of waves around it.

  He let Windkris drop, and it flapped along its length.

  The island seemed empty, uninhabited. There was no sign of the Mercy.

  He flew up and down the coastline at such a slow speed that it seemed to him that he spent hours observing its every detail.

  There were no fires to warm Dedicates, no hidden towers or compounds to house them.

  They’re not here, he realized. But there are two other islands nearby. I’ll let my mount rest for the morning, and then leave.

  He let Windkris drop to the beach and take a young sea lion as a meal.

  Fallion found a pile of driftwood and curled up in the sand beneath it, gaining a little shelter from the wind as his mount rested.

  As Fallion slept, Sir Borenson made his way toward Stillwater on the family rangit, bouncing and jostling all along the road until his head pounded in pain.

  At each little village, he shouted warnings to whomever he could, telling them of the invasion, thus raising the countryside.

  It was hard work, long work, made all the harder because he was traveling over rough roads in the heat of the day.

  The journey to Stillwater normally took two days by rangit. He intended to make it in one.

  Time and again, his thoughts turned back to the children, and to Myrrima. He’d left her with the family. A couple of years back, she had lost her endowments-all but her glamour. She was no longer the warrior that she had once been. She was a healer, a water wizardess living at the edge of the desert. Most of all, she was a mother, and she liked it.

  She longed for another home, one with a stream or a lake nearby, but had forgone that. “Anyone who is looking for us will know to look near water,” she’d said, and so Myrrima insisted that they move to the hottest, most inhospitable patch of rocky land that they could find.

  “Someday,” Borenson had promised her time and again, “I’ll find us a proper home.”

  Borenson worried that his wife and children would be captured, or worse, and it was only with great difficulty that he turned his mind away from such thoughts.

  It does no good to worry, he told himself. I can’t change what might happen. My course is set, and to turn back is worse than to press on.

  And as he raced over the hillsides, into lush country where wild rangits grazed on the green spring grass, he stopped at the top of a hill and looked down upon a silver river. The grass was of a kind that he’d never seen back in Rofehavan. Rangit grass, the farmers called it, and it had a scent and texture like no other. It was exotic and spicy sweet in its smell, like oat grass with just a hint of sandalwood, and when he sat down upon it, it felt almost silky to the touch.

  As his mount sat huffing and coughing from the labor of climbing- Borenson was a big man, after all, and growing fatter by the year-Borenson marveled at the beauty of the hills and vales that spread before him.

  There was nothing like this that he could remember back in Rofehavan. Nothing half so lovely. And if the journey to Landesfallen had not been so far and the tales of it so frightening, Borenson imagined that folk would stampede to reach this place to lay claim to a few acres of its lush grounds.

  The beauty of it threatened to overwhelm him.

  “I’ll come back here when the war is over,” he told himself. “I’ll buy a place as beautiful as this valley, and I’ll never leave.”

  An hour before dusk, Fallion flew above a nameless atoll and knew by the sme
ll that he had found Shadoath’s hidden Dedicates.

  The island was small, a single volcanic cone rising from the sea. Its surface was almost solid basalt, a hint of smoke rising from the cone of the volcano. In ages past, seals and seabirds had harbored here; fertilized by guano, plants and trees had sprung up in profusion. Thus the lower edges of the volcano were a riot of green.

  There was no harbor, no sign of easy access to the island. The Mercy had come and gone. He’d seen it sailing north back toward Garion’s Port, and had given it a wide berth. But this was the place, Fallion knew as he approached.

  The smoke hung in the still evening air for miles around, and to Fallion’s nose, the attuned senses of a flameweaver, it was the taste of the smoke that told him that humans were about.

  If the smoke were coming from the cone of a volcano, it should have smelled of sulfur and ash, the heart of the world.

  Instead, it tasted of wood and meat-of cooking fires.

  Fallion urged Windkris higher. The old reptile was flagging, fading fast. But it took him above the rim of the volcano, and Fallion peered down into its crater. Even then, Fallion did not see the encampment at first. The crater was filled with stones and a shallow lake, and it was only near one rim that smoke issued.

  Fallion spotted shadows in the sheer cliffs, even in the dim light, suspicious shadows that whispered of hidden caverns.

  He let Windkris make a single pass, gliding above, and the scent of smoke and bread became stronger. A beaten path in the grass led to a single opening, a shadowed tunnel.

  The encampment appeared to be asleep. At least no warhorn sounded at his approach; Fallion saw no guards.

  But a single guard did see him. Lying deep under the shadowed arch, her sea green eyes peering warily out a door, the giant ape Oohtooroo spotted the black shadow of a graak glide across the evening sky.

  She growled in outrage.

  Grabbing a heavy spiked club in one hand, she went to a cot in a corner and shook her beloved master awake.