Ahead of him, he saw Darien bring his horse to a stop, the mage’s stare angling upward to examine the ridges around them on both sides. At last seeming satisfied, he let his mount move slowly forward, but kept it in check with a close rein. His eyes still scanned the slopes of the mountain as his gelding picked its way carefully over the increasingly uneven terrain.
Kyel was getting the feeling that he didn’t like this place, and was beginning to wonder why Darien had brought him here. Then a sudden, horrible feeling swept over him, like a groping shiver of dread. Kyel jerked back on the reins, his eyes widening as he felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle. The feeling was like nothing he had ever experienced. It was as if something important had just been yanked away from around him, as if a necessary and significant part of the world had been completely withdrawn. Only, he had no idea what had actually happened.
“You feel it,” Darien stated grimly, eyes now intent and studying the play of emotion on Kyel’s face.
“Aye, I feel it. It’s vile.”
Kyel rubbed the tingling skin of his arms, trying to scrub the disturbing feeling off his flesh. Darien did not appear to be affected by the sensation. His eyes turned back to trace once more the folds of the mountain slopes. Without looking at Kyel, he told him flatly:
“Most men can’t.” He brought his hand up in a sweeping gesture, indicating the area around them. “This is a node. It’s a place where the lines of the magic field come together in parallel direction but opposite in energy, and cancel out. What you’re feeling is the complete absence of the field in this place.”
Kyel felt suddenly, revoltingly horrified as the full impact of the mage’s words sank in like a knife. “So, you’re saying that I’ve always been able to feel it, and this is what it’s like when it’s gone?”
Darien nodded. Kyel felt himself shivering. He did not like it here. He wanted to go back. But Darien urged his horse forward with the pressure of his legs, taking them deeper into the node. The feeling of dread intensified. Kyel felt the cold ice of fear chilling his blood.
“You knew this was here,” he accused him. “That’s the reason why you brought me. You wanted me to feel this place.” Suddenly, a new thought occurred to him, and the sinking sensation of dread in his stomach took a nauseating downward plunge. “You’re powerless here.”
Again Darien nodded, eyes sweeping upward to examine the slopes of the canyon. But when he turned back, there was a small, almost sad smile on his face. “Like any other man.”
Kyel felt his hand reaching for the comfort of his bow, caressing the soft wood that hung from his shoulder. How could the man just sit there on his horse, gripped in the terrible absence of the magic field, knowing full well how dangerous it was for him to even be in this place? But then he realized that Darien was by no means as easy about it as he seemed. His gaze kept shifting back to the rocks as if scouring them. The shadows had once again returned to haunt the depths of his eyes.
“I want to go,” Kyel urged him. “This place is...foul.”
Darien looked as if he agreed. Bringing his mount around, he turned it back in the direction they had come. As they started downward again, Kyel asked him, “Why did you bring me here?”
“I think you know the answer. Consider it your first lesson.”
Kyel had figured that. The mage had wanted him to get a taste of what he really was. He had never even known that he could sense the presence of the magic field, not until it had been completely and utterly withdrawn. But now that Kyel knew it was there, out there ahead of them, all he wanted was to get back to the comfort of its familiar presence.
As they moved out from under the awful influence of the node, Kyel felt himself breathing a sigh of relief. The world felt abruptly...normal. It was so peculiar; the feeling of the magic field was something he had always taken for granted. He had never even noticed it there, pulsating rhythmically in the back of his mind. But now that he knew what it was and what it felt like, he could suddenly sense it stirring, flowing around him like the currents of a river or a gust of the wind. There was nothing strange or foreign about the sensation; it was something he had always known, all throughout his entire life. He had just simply never recognized it.
Darien stopped his horse and dismounted on the other side of the boundary. Kyel followed suit, letting his mount move away from him with its head to the ground, as if trying to forage for grass in the barren dirt. He followed as Darien walked back in the direction of the node, then stood with his hand out indicating that he wanted Kyel to walk back through the boundary one more time.
He didn’t want to. But he did.
Again, he felt that dreadful sensation of loss, as if part of the world had suddenly faded completely from his senses. Only, this time, he was prepared for it, and the transition was not quite so shocking. It was as if there had been a quietly comforting cadence in his mind, and now that rhythm was lost. As he reemerged back on the other side again, he could feel the pulse coming back, a clear and steady tempo akin to a fluttering heartbeat.
“Do you still deny your ability?”
Kyel cast a dispirited glance at the mage, wishing that he could. “No,” he finally admitted. There was no use denying it; Darien had made his point all too well.
The Sentinel nodded slightly, his expression enigmatic. He walked away a few paces, upward, toward the crest of the hill. His cloak played out behind him in the breeze as he stood gazing down at the pass, his form a black silhouette against the flickering lights of the cloudcover. Kyel found himself staring openly at the mage’s profile, wondering if it would ever be possible for himself to cast such a similar, imposing portrait. He was a merchant by trade, a woodworker by choice, and now he was an archer in truth and not just in name. Where a mage’s craft fit into that picture, Kyel could not begin to guess. He was a husband, a father...at least he had been, once. He wanted to be again, someday.
“I need an answer, Kyel.”
Kyel brought his hands up to rub his eyes. He already knew what his answer was going to be. But it was not going to be easy, bringing that decision into reality by giving it voice. Darien was looking at him, waiting. Kyel lowered his eyes.
“All right, then. Yes.”
He kept his eyes lowered as he heard Darien approaching. He found himself trembling uncontrollably, the bow in his hand quivering in his grip. The approaching footsteps stopped before him, and Kyel at last looked up at him.
“I think you know what you’re committing yourself to,” Darien Lauchlin stated ominously, his face severe in the strangely iridescent light from the clouds. “I need you to be certain of this decision. Your heart must be entirely in this, or I’m wasting my time.”
Kyel found himself wanting more than anything to reject the man’s offer. But he knew that was impossible; he had never been able to deny someone in need. And he could not think of another time in his life where he had ever been needed more. He could not bring himself to look into Darien’s eyes and tell the man no.
“I’m certain.”
“Kyel.” The way the Sentinel said his name made him shiver even harder. Holding his gaze intently, Darien warned him, “You will not find me an easy master. There is a saying at the School of Arms in Auberdale that I learned a long time ago: ‘What hurts, teaches’. I find that phrase applies to most lessons in life. I won’t go easy on you because I’ve taken you into my confidence as a friend. In truth, I might be harder on you because of it.”
It was no more than Kyel had expected. His father had told him of the harsh burdens and constraints placed upon new acolytes. Kyel thought he understood fully what he was agreeing to. He did not know if he would be up to the demands Darien would ask of him, but he did know at least that he had it within himself to try.
“I understand,” he said, forcing himself to look up into the shadowy planes of the Sentinel’s face.
Darien nodded slowly. “I must ask you to repeat the vow every acolyte of Aerysius swore before they were ever all
owed to pass beneath the Arches of the Hall of the Watchers. The Hall no longer exists, but its ways are all I know.”
Kyel said nothing as Darien reached out and grasped his left wrist, encircling his calloused fingers just above the palm of his hand. His grip was firm, almost painful. Kyel could feel the circulation in his hand being compromised by the pressure of it. As if in a dream, Kyel found himself repeating every word the mage uttered, his lips moving slowly to form the syllables as their grim significance imprinted itself on his mind:
“I swear to exist only to serve the land and
its people. With my life, if possible.
If not, then by death.”
When he was finished, Darien removed his fingers from his wrist. Instantly, Kyel felt a flood of warmth moving back into his hand as the bloodflow returned to it. His wrist smarted where Darien’s grip had encircled it. Kyel raised his wrist, looking down at it, half expecting to find a red welt there from the pressure of the man’s strong fingers.
But instead of a welt, Kyel found a glistening, metallic chain engraven into the flesh of his left wrist. He stared down at the ancient symbol, terrified by its implications.
Chapter Fourteen
Maidenclaw
TRAVER COULDN’T BELIEVE his luck when he was chosen by Corban Henley to pull sentry duty down in the bottom of the pass. He and Baird Walser were the only two recruits picked, which came as something of a shock. He hadn’t thought Henley liked him, with the harsh way the man was always riding him during training, but apparently he’d had it wrong.
To his disgust, Henley presented him with a horse. It was a scrawny brown nag with a wide blaze that ran like a lightning strike down its heavily scarred face. Traver edged behind the animal warily, trying to keep just enough distance between himself and the horse’s back hooves, while remaining close enough so that the beast couldn’t get a good swing at him. It took him a couple of tries to mount up; he wasn’t used to riding. The first time, he got his boot caught in the stirrup and the bloody beast started walking forward, almost dragging him to the ground. Henley and Walser were watching from the backs of their own mounts, visibly amused. So was the bowman who had been selected as the fourth member of their party, Bryce Lynley. The man actually barked out a laugh as Traver finally managed to scramble up into the saddle.
“Are you quite certain you know how to ride?” Henley wondered skeptically.
Traver threw him an aggravated scowl in answer. The horse beneath him reeked, and its tail kept swatting against his leg. The nag started forward without any direction from him at all as Henley’s mount broke into a trot, the others following. He was the last in line as the four of them followed the narrow, winding trail that led down from Greystone Keep into the shadowy darkness of the pass.
The wind was up again, battering against his face in an icy, riotous gale. The sky looked even darker than usual for some reason, the clouds hanging heavier and lower, moving quickly across the horizon. A thin layer of fog clung to the ground in the sheltered depths of the river bottom, seeming to almost glow in the flickering lights cast from overhead. Traver groped at his cloak with the hand he wasn’t using to hold onto the reins. He was starting to think that maybe sentry duty wasn’t all that he’d thought it was cracked up to be. It looked damnedably cold down there in the misty river bottom and in the mountains beyond.
All in all, it was just another beautiful day at the front. Gods, but he missed the sun. His skin was turning pale, almost white. All traces of his summer tan were swiftly fading away. And he really didn’t feel all that well anymore. It was as if a bitter melancholy had settled deep down in his bones. He didn’t understand how Garret Proctor had managed to survive in this bleak darkness for so long, without even a glimpse of summer or sun. It wasn’t natural.
He’d heard that the darkness of the pass was one of the chief reasons why the life expectancy of a typical Greystone soldier was never more than a couple of years. The men called it the Gloom, and it sapped vigor and courage from even the hardiest. From what he’d heard, the Gloom was something of a wasting illness that came over a man slowly, shrouding the heart in doubt and despair. Suicide in the camps was an ongoing problem, contributing a great deal to the rate of attrition of the Greystone forces. The numbers claimed yearly by the Gloom were almost as bad as actual combat fatalities. Men just simply weren’t made to last long in the dark. When times had been better, the soldiers had been rotated down the mountain for breaks. A camp had been established in the foothills, where the men could spend a few weeks in the light of the sun. But there simply were not enough soldiers left anymore to make such rotations feasible; there was a bare minimum of strength necessary to hold the Pass of Lor-Gamorth even in the best of times, and the sum total of its defenders had already been allowed to decline below even that in recent years.
Maybe that’s what was wrong with him. Perhaps he’d caught the Gloom already. Traver found himself sagging lower in the saddle, feeling melancholy, swaying with the motion of his mount. He looked back over his shoulder for a glimpse of the keep, but found that sight of the fortress had been lost above him, swallowed entirely by a dreary haze. They were already lower down in the pass than he had thought. He could hear the soft whisper of water moving in the river bottom, hidden in the mist. Ahead, between the cleft of two tall peaks, he could see the dark haze that veiled the Black Lands. The peak on the left was the Spire of Orguleth, rising almost conically to a sharp point that thrust upward into the dark bank of clouds. The more rounded and sculpted-looking summit on the right was Maidenclaw, and together the two mountains guarded the gateway to the Black Lands.
They were heading to the slopes of Maidenclaw, somewhere up in the foothills above the canyon where the battle had taken place. Their orders were to watch the mouth of the pass and report back if they saw any sign of movement from the Enemy. According to Henley, it was going to be a rather dull and tedious assignment; not so much as a scout had been seen south of the spire in weeks.
It was late afternoon, if such measure of time meant anything here, when at last their horses started up the narrow path that wound upward into the cleft between Maidenclaw’s sloping thighs. The mountain really did look like a woman, Traver was startled to discover. The peak was her upthrust hand, formed into a fist with her index finger extended. The maiden lay on her back, swelling ridgelines depicting her robust and shapely bosom, her hair flowing outward in curving ripples down to the rolling foothills beyond the pass. The clouds moved swiftly just above her raised hand. To Traver, it appeared that the maiden was dipping her finger into their murky layers for a taste, sampling the flavor of the sky.
They made camp on a curving ridge. They couldn’t risk a fire, as the light of the flames might attract unwanted notice. They drew lots for first watch, and Traver groaned when he pulled one of the two short sticks along with Corban Henley. The ride had tired him out, and his rear was sorely bruised from the saddle of his horse. But he tried not to grumble too much as he took his place at Henley’s side, leaning back against an enormous round boulder and casting his stare down at the mouth of the pass.
He soon found that sentry duty was worse than he’d thought it would be. It was hard staying alert. His vision kept blurring as his mind slipped away from the empty river bottom below. He had to fight to keep his tired eyes in focus. Besides, it was bitterly cold up on the exposed ridge at that high elevation. His back ached; Maidenclaw’s breast was made of harder stuff than it had appeared from below in the pass. The wind bit into his face, numbing his fingers. He longed for the comforting warmth of a fire and a hot bite to eat, but all he had were a few strips of jerky and some rock-hard biscuits left over from chow the previous night. He brought one up to his mouth and tried biting into it, but the biscuit was so tough that he thought his teeth were likely to break long before that gods-awful bread ever would. So he tossed the biscuit off the ridge with a sideways flick of his hand, the way he used to skip rocks across the pond back home as a boy.
&
nbsp; “I’ll sling you over the edge myself, the next time you throw something down there,” Henley growled beside him. The sound of his voice startled Traver. The man hadn’t spoken once since they had set up camp.
“Why, what’s the problem with it?”
“Because, Larsen. With your luck, that biscuit’s just as likely to drop right down on the head of an Enemy scout.”
Traver glowered, but he released the biscuit he’d been fingering and let it settle back into the bottom of his pocket. If that’s what the man thought of him, then he didn’t understand why Henley had brought him along at all. Sighing, he brushed a thick lock of hair out of his eyes, returning his gaze to the pass.
“You’ve got it in for me, haven’t you?” he accused Henley. Swallowing, he tried to blunt the force of his words, saying, “Look, I know I never thanked you properly for saving my life, but now I am. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead and in my grave.”
Henley merely shrugged, never taking his eyes from the river bottom. “That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is the problem?” Traver demanded, irritated. “You work me harder than any other man in the practice yard; you’re constantly mocking me and deriding me and telling me what a slouch I am. So, would you pray tell me what I’ve done to get your gorge up?”
To his surprise, Henley was chuckling softly. “You really are stupid, Larsen. In some ways. In other ways, you’re the smartest of the whole lot.”
Traver blinked, not quite sure how he should take that.
While he was trying to figure it out, the Valeman went on, “If you want to know why I’m always riding you, it’s because you’re young, you’re reckless, and you’re soft. That’s a bad combination, Larsen. You’ve potential. I’m just trying to keep you alive long enough to learn how to use it.”
Traver pressed his lips together, nodding smugly. The man was damn right, he had potential. More than that, his sweet Lady Luck was always on his side. Just give him a few more months of practice, and then he would show Henley. Give him a few years, and he’d show them all, Craig and Royce, too.
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