The Forge in the Forest

by Michael Scott Rohan

  "Would you light a fire in this place?" cried Ils.

  "I would!" barked Roc. "We'll need shelter and more to stay living this night!"

  "There is a rapids!" cried Bure. "See the white water about the rocks? And past the island as well! It goes right over! There's our crossing!"

  "If anywhere!" agreed Kermorvan. "But go with great care! The rocks will be icy, and death swift in those black waters. I will lead."

  Of that crossing Elof remembered little save weariness and terror, the cold rocks and the roar and swirl of the river around their feet as they clambered between them. The moonlight was clear, or they would never have managed some of the wider leaps; Bure and Ils were at a terrible disadvantage, and had often to be swung across on the single length of rope they had. But even longer legs were aching before they came beneath the first overhanging branches, and saw the island rise stark above them. "Find a hollow," gasped Elof as they clambered up the steep bank. "Screen fire… with branches…"

  Ils shook her head fiercely, and he caught the glint of fear in her look; but even she, stronger and hardier than most men, was too chilled and weary to argue. Elof and Kermorvan were little better, and Roc, Tenvar and Bure staggering as if drunk. Bure had fallen at least once, and leaned on Kermorvan's arm for support. Nevertheless they waited on the bank, slumped against the lichen-encrusted trunks of the black spruces, while Ils with her night eyes searched the gloom. The wind whined through the branches overhead, their hard needles rattling and whispering horribly; it reminded Elof of gibbets he had seen outside the ruined farms of Bryhaine. But at last she grudgingly admitted she could see nothing amiss, and the travelers hobbled gladly into shelter. As Elof had suggested, they found a hollow, a deep gully carved by some flood long ago and now well screened by the wiry undergrowth, taller here than in the open. Kermorvan kindled flame in a hastily dug pit, and while the others cut branches to screen the little camp Elof decided to fetch water for a hot broth. Very slowly and carefully, keeping low and rustling the bushes as little as he could he slid out from among the trees and along the bank to a spot where he might fill a waterskin without falling in. He lay down at a place where the water had cut away the bank, shuddering at the freezing touch of the soil, and lowered the skin into the dark water. The cold river bit agonizingly at fingers just recovering from their numbness, and he leaned down further to make sure he could hold the full skin. A gleam caught his eye, and he stared in horror. The water had sliced a section through the bank, and the face of it glimmered gray white in the river's reflection. Under a hand's depth, little more, of brown grass and peaty soil there lurked a layer of some whitish substance. He reached down to touch it, and jumped at the chill throb in his fingers; it was a deep layer of solid ice. He looked up and down the bank opposite and saw many such gleams, always at the same shallow depth, though in some places it seemed to have forced the ground upward. Suddenly the whole wide land seemed to him no more than shriveling skin atop a cold empty skull. This far, within a day's march of the Forest, the distant Ice had already its hidden vanguard beneath the surface.

  The full skin tugged at his hand, and he reached down to put in its stopper. But as he did so he saw a brief flicker of movement mirrored in the water, a swift dark shadow sweeping over moon and star. In one movement he heaved up the skin and sprang back to cover; then he saw it clear, a shape of sable wings out-swept, arcing down the sky onto the moonlit blackness of the river. He heard the fierce wingbeat as it settled, and then the graceful folding, the curving of the delicate neck into its shape. Down the flow of the flood it drifted, a huge swan gliding upon its own shadow over the glittering waters; but which the swan, which the shadow, was hard to tell, for in every feather it was black. And as Elof stood there, beyond movement, beyond understanding, he heard a low music drift across the waters, a haunting, somber singing of dark things. For the music was a voice, low and mellow as that of a human woman, and its words of deep lamentation came clearly to him over the relentless lapping of the flood.

  Birds of the night sky! Sorrow pursues me, Far as I have flown over the land! Gather! Hear me! Far flew I! Grief sought I! Found I my fill!

  Of unstilled yearning I sing,

  Of unquiet waters

  Of loss, of wandering I sing

  By seas endless, tides ceaseless

  Under the empty sky

  Alas! Alas for sorrow!

  I sing of living.

  Far flew I! Grief sought I! Found I my fill!

  Of hope past hoping I sing

  Of wounds unhealed

  Of rue, of suffering I sing

  Of mouth on mouth, breast on breast

  All that may never be.

  Alas! Alas for sorrow!

  I sing of loving.

  Far flew I! Grief sought I! Found I my fill!

  Of last despairing I sing

  Of the dark River

  Of pain, of lamenting I sing,

  A brand quenched, a flame swallowed,

  The stream flows silently.

  Alas! Alas for sorrow!

  I sing of parting.

  Far flew I! Grief sought I! Found I my fill!

  Elof stood astounded as the creature glided slowly toward the bank. What he saw, what he hoped, was a whirling in his mind; the song was sorrow and terror, and it gripped him fast. Not far along the bank arose a stand of reeds, dry and half withered, whispering and creaking, and into these swept the dark swan. But even as it slid among them it seemed to rear up, its immense wings beat as if in fury, then shuddered closed across its breast. Upward rose the shadow, taller, more erect than any swan, and with sudden grace the wings swept open and back to reveal a breast of gleaming black mail. A human breast, a woman's breast; for below the mailcoat bare legs gleamed, and above it lifted a woman's delicate throat, strong chin and full lips. The rest of her face, her hair, all was hidden by the eyemask of a shining helm. But from her shoulders sprang not arms, but the same wide wings held open to their fullest, blotting out the moon, shadowing her beyond recognition. Yet among the feathers it seemed to Elof that he saw a gleam of gold.

  Suddenly she cried out, in a voice grown so harsh, so terrible, that Elof dropped to one knee, shivering. "Rash wanderer! Man astray, in realms men dare not dream of, hear me and beware! Already for some the lot is cast! Doom approaches, doom no mortal turns aside! Flee, if Hee you may! Or what is owed you, call for it! Seize it!"

  The wings whipped closed, beat once, powerfully, sending the reeds hissing low to the water. A great black swan lifted from the river and went wheeling high off across the water, over the island, out of sight. Elof's eyes followed it till it vanished behind the crests of the trees.

  "What have I seen?" he asked himself aloud, and heard his voice tremble. "Like… so like, and yet so terrible… What land of visions is this?" Terror clawed at him; he scrambled up, seized the waterskin and bolted back up the slope toward the trees and the faint glimmer of the fire. As he stumbled and tripped through the wood, he heard Kermorvan's low voice, and Roc's; they seemed like the finest and most comforting sounds he had ever heard.

  "Something might be made of that southward way poor Korentyn told us of. If Vayde followed it to take his folk west, it might also be a safe route back east…"

  "Maybe, if it hasn't grown worse in all this time… Elof! What's the matter? Look as if you've seen a ghost!"

  "I have seen…"he muttered. "A warning, perhaps… I know not…"

  "You sit down and get warm!" ordered Ils sharply. "Here, give me that water! Don't drop it in the flames! Now, what was it you saw?"

  But Elof could not shape words around what he had seen. "A warning…" he gasped. "A judgment… We are in peril!"

  Kermorvan sat up straight, and swung the gray-gold blade across his knees. He looked at Elof intently, his face set, brows drawn tight. "I need no vision to tell me that. Is it near?"

  "It approaches…" gasped Elof. "She… It… said that…"He stopped, because Kermorvan's intense gray eyes had widened abrupt
ly. He was no longer looking at Elof, but was staring over his shoulder, brows arched, lips parted in amazement. In the same instant Elof's skin crawled with the icy awareness of some presence at his back. He knew better than to look round; he was about to hurl himself forward, away, when out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure, somehow familiar, step forward and slouch casually down by the fire, holding out his hands and rubbing them hungrily. Steam rose from his clothes, which clung damply. The travelers stared, aghast. Then, just as Elof realized who it was he was looking at, Roc found his voice.

  "Stehan! By all the halls of Hella! How'd you come to escape those… those water-things? How'd you…"

  The corsair made no reply, but suddenly looked up with such a look of cold contempt on his face, dull and gray in the firelight, that Roc stopped short, opened his mouth as if to say something more, and then slowly closed it. Kermorvan seemed not to move, yet suddenly all the tension of a drawn bow was in his body, drawn and ready to loose; his knuckles gleamed white on his sword hilt. Across the little hollow, at the far edge of the firelight, other shapes were moving, approaching slowly, unhurriedly through the freezing night. Down through the encircling bushes they came in an uneven file, and the icicles that festooned the meager branches chimed and rang and shattered like glass at their passing. And as he saw the first of them Elof sought to cry out, to spring up, but his limbs would not obey him, his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth as if the chill air froze it there. For the first was Holvar, and he paid no heed to any, but came and sat by the fire as easily as if he had but left them a moment before. Bure hid his face in his plump hands, and the blood drained from the brown skin; Tenvar sat rigidly immobile among the capering shadows, but a faint moan of horror broke half-voiced from his lips. The wind screeched and flailed the branches overhead, the fire blew flat and roared like a trapped beast, light and shadow flickering faster than the eye could mark. Into the hollow they drifted, one by one, just as quietly, still without speaking, those members of the company whose quest had ended, who should be walking in the world no more by night or day. Behind Holvar strode tall figures that were Eysdan, and Maille the bosun, and Dervhas, who walked easily on a leg Elof had seen stripped to a tangle of raw sinew about the bone. Close behind Dervhas moved Borhi, hunched up and clutching his arms tight around himself, as a man might to close his cloak against the chill. But he too, like the others, quietly took a place by the fire, with neither look nor word for those already there, and sat silently staring into the beating flames. And though his face was fixed in a grimace of fear, he spared not even a glance for what shambled in his steps. Kasse the huntsman, eyes glittering malevolence where empty sockets had been, took his place by the fire, and within that firelit hollow, with the black pines sighing and rattling above them, the living were outnumbered by the dead.

  No word was said, no figure stirred; like silent statues they sat, the fire's smoke eddying this way and that about them, and it seemed to Elof that the chill which gripped this land, the ice below its soil, had flowed up and into his veins, and set the fire's warmth at nothing. He was shivering violently, too violently to speak, even to form the words in his mind. The dead had joined them, but their eyes were not dead; a living will dwelt in them, and a glare of menace and accusation he could read as clearly as words. Then a thick branch toppled and rolled in the fire, unstopping a vent of flame blown blue by the wind. In the waft of smoky scent Elof was suddenly reminded of his smithy on the Marshlands, of lying by the forge during his long illness there, and of the tormenting phantoms that had gathered around him; those horrors he had faced, and in facing overcome. The log split with an explosive crack, spattering sparks; a pulsing fire traced out the grain in its bared heart, and a like flame surged up within him, a bitter anger at the silence around him. It was mockery, contempt, and that unearned. Whatever the outcome, he could at least voice a challenge and a defiance. He clenched his jaws to quell their shivering, and he spat out the words as if he hammered them hot from his anvil.

  "What do you want with us? Our friends you once were, but you do not come as friends should. Speak, or be gone! Leave what no longer concerns you!"

  "Leave?" whispered a voice suddenly, and a cold breath of laughter coursed across the hollow like an echo of the wind. The voice was Stehan's, but might have been any; the same meaning burned in all those faces. "Good smith, it was you left us. All of us! In ambush, in fight, in flight you left us!"

  "Pulled me down…"

  "Shot in the throat!"

  "Spitted like a fowl!"

  "Hunted like vermin!"

  "Broken and drowned!"

  "Stripped the flesh from me like the bark off a willow twig, while you played tug o' war…"

  "Said, promised, you'd keep me safe—left me to that beast…"

  "You left us! Left us! Us! Us! Us!" The voices came together, blurred into a hissing chant almost void of human meaning, a wordless litany of hungry menace that battered at Elof's mind. He quailed for a moment under the weight of it, numbing, drowning, as under the impact of a waterfall. Then another voice sheared across it with the clean force of a swordcut.

  "Enough!" barked Kermorvan, and his voice rang clearer and harder than Elof had heard it for many a day. "Enough, I say! Have I not laid such charges against myself, and worse, in all the long hours of these our wanderings? There are worse trials than you can put me to, worse terrors than you can inflict!" For a moment his voice lowered, his gaze dropped. "And did I not all but break myself in answering them, all but resign myself to inaction, to stagnation, where at least I need lead no others into harm?" Then he lifted his eyes again, and a fierce glare, a stormlight, shone in their grayness. "Bitterly did I regret your loss! Aye, even you, Kasse, trothbreaker who would have sacrificed a sworn comrade for a catch of meat! Craven who ran blindly to his own doom, out of the mercy of those who would have shielded him! I would have saved you, all of you, if I could, and risked my own life to do so; you at least should know that, Eysdan! But I could not. And the burden of regret ground me down. But by the help of Elof I was shown my answer!" He stood, and the long gray sword he rested point down upon the ground before him, leaning his crossed hands upon its hilt. Weary as he seemed, it was as if strength flowed into him from the very horror he confronted, for his shoulders straightened and his voice grew stern as stone. "I was shown that to live eternally shielded from all the chances of life is to live shielded from life itself, from good as well as evil. It is to do no good, to receive no good, merely to exist, and in existing inevitably diminish. That the perils of life should be lessened, is good; but that all risk should be avoided, even when great good may come of it, that way lies a path of foolishness. You knew there would be perils on our quest, you knew you risked your lives; but also you knew great good might come to pass. The only amends I may offer you is to fulfill that quest, to give value and meaning to the sacrifice you made by saving lives that would otherwise be lost, and ensuring that your names live on in honor. That is as much as I myself would wish. If you yet keep some aspect, some part of the true heart and mind of the men that once you were, then you will understand. And if you are not…" The tall man laughed suddenly, though in his voice there was no mirth, and he slapped one hand hard on the hilt of the sword. "Then I bid you begone! For among the living you have no place!"

  The last defiant words rang out into silence so absolute that Elof caught his breath. Even the wind had died; not a leaf stirred, the fire sank down to a flameless glow that spilled no color into the night. It was as if the whole scene were carved in blackened silver, with a great red stone at its heart.

  It is you who have no place here.

  The voice jolted them all to their feet. Whose lips it came from Elof did not know, nor was he sure such a sound could come from human mouth at all, so bloodless, so hollow, so vast. It was like the stark echo of some greater sound, greater and more terrible, though what he could hardly imagine.

  You have no place here. From the moment you passed the tr
eewall, the lands you have walked in, the Gray Lands, are mine. And it is to the Island of the Dead you have come. Elof heard Ils give an involuntary cry of alarm, and as quickly stifle it; evidently the name was known to her. They have no place here who are yet weak prisoners of the flesh, and here they spy and trespass at their most deadly peril.

  It was all the dead who spoke. Their heads were lifted now, their eyes fixed upon the travelers with an intensity that made them even less human. And the voice seemed to course at random from one mouth to another, sounding always the same, hollow and terrible. But Elof was as much angered as daunted, to see those who had been his friends and companions so grievously abused, and though Kermorvan, guessing his mind, flashed him a glance of caution, he spoke boldly in reply. "You, whoever you are! If we have no place in your domain, then equally you Ve no sway over us! Let us pass, and have done—"

  One day I shall hold this whole circle of the world in my hand. None are beyond my sway. I am the Keeper. I am Taoune.

  The name fell upon Elof's ears like a blow, dizzying, sickening. This was disaster, this was ruin. He had spoken with Powers before, grown reckless, almost, in confronting them. But Raven seemed to be benign, and Tapiau believed himself to be. Not so this presence, this appalling sound of waste and desolation given voice. This was what he had been warned against, what he had striven against, what he had most feared. Perhaps they had strayed too far north; or perhaps, since the land was so underlaid with ice, they had been foolish ever to enter it. But whatever the truth of that, they had come directly under the eye of Tapiau's great adversary, one of the primal foes of life, betrayers of their trust, lords of the world's worst ills. In his arrogance he had dared to bandy words with one of the ancient Powers of the Ice.

  But he remembered what Tapiau had told him, that this Taoune was a defeated Power, reduced to a shadow of his former majesty, a mere marchwarden for the greater Powers that had succeeded him. The greatest of these was Louhi, and had he not spoken to her, aye, and outfaced her in defeating the Mastersmith her servant? And as he had started, so he must go on; there was no turning aside. So, though every hair on his head bristled and lifted, he steadied his voice, and strove to copy in his deeper tones Kermorvan's proud ring. "Keeper? What have such as you ever kept, save a vigil over the woes of men?"