The Lion Returns

by John Dalmas

  38 Reverberations

  Macurdy awoke with a groan. It was still night, but now he was on the ground. A fire was burning, tended by a woman. She turned and looked at him.

  "You're awake!" Varia said. "How do you feel?"

  He was covered with a blanket. With an effort he sat up, leaning on an arm. It seemed as much as he could manage. His head ached badly, and he was nauseous. "Not good," he answered. Then lurched to one side, vomiting thinly onto the dirt, a slime of gastric juices that burned his throat.

  After a long minute he sat up and looked around. He was in a crude, three-sided woodsmen's shelter, like the one where he'd tried to destroy the crystal. His manacles were still on his wrists, but the chain connecting them had been cut.

  "It's gotten warm," he said.

  "Warm enough that the new snow is melting on the brush," Varia answered, then pointed upward. "Look at the sky."

  Laboriously he got to his feet and stepped outside. With the branches bare, and the woods thinned by cutting, he had a fair view upward. The aurora was hidden by heavy, roiling clouds that pulsed with reddish light. It shocked him half alert, and he spoke in a near whisper.

  "Where's Vulkan?"

  «Here.»

  Macurdy turned. Vulkan lay a few yards away. "What happened?"

  «You will remember, when it's time. Suffice it to say, you aborted the crown prince's sorcery, and ended the voitik threat.»

  Macurdy frowned vaguely. Aborted? Ended the threat? "How did we get here?"

  «I will leave that for Varia to relate. It was she who handled most of it.»

  "I was in the women's room," she said. "One large room. We had no idea what was going on, only that things had gotten strange. We could smell it. And it felt... as if something was wrong with the Web of the World, as if it was choked with something bad. Sorcerous." She looked at the sky. "It still does, but not so strongly.

  "Then something hit like an earthquake. It didn't shake the building—nothing fell off the table or shelves—but we all felt it. I'd been standing, and it knocked me off my feet. After a minute there were shouts. Cries is the word. We didn't know what to think. We just sat there stunned, waiting for whatever would happen next. Pretty soon we heard people calling back and forth outside, in Hithmearcisc. I snuffed the lamp and opened the window drapes a little. Soldiers, including rakutur, were leading horses out of the stables, and riding away. Not in ranks, just leaving. As if fleeing.

  "One of the other women tried the door then, but it was locked. I told her to stop rattling it. With discipline gone, as it seemed to be, I didn't want anyone reminded of us.

  "The windows were latched too, so after things had quieted outside and I couldn't see anyone, I used a short bench as a battering ram, and knocked one of them open. Then I climbed out and dropped from the window sill. And found Vulkan waiting. He lowered his cloak for a moment when I got up. You can't imagine how glad I was to see him."

  Vulkan interrupted. «I recommend you continue your account while we travel. The clouds portend a storm of worse than snow.»

  Gathering himself, Macurdy followed them. Three horses were tethered to saplings behind the shelter. Two wore riding saddles, the other a loaded pack saddle. All wore nosebags, and were munching corn. He and Varia mounted, and the three of them left at an easy pace. Macurdy's headache made him reluctant to trot his horse.

  They were on Road B before Varia continued the narrative she'd begun. "After I dropped out the window," she said, "Vulkan and I went in the front entrance together. Reception was full of corpses—voitar and a rakutu. No humans. Their faces were distorted; they looked terrible. Then I went upstairs, Vulkan with me. He told me where you were." She half grinned at Macurdy, riding beside her. "He broke down the door to Kurqôsz's office. Kurqôsz and his circle were in a side room, dead. They looked even worse than the voitar in reception. Their faces were more than distorted; they were dark and swollen, as if their blood vessels had ruptured. Their bodies looked boneless.

  "Then Vulkan broke down the door to another side room, and there you were, with a dead rakutu. I almost died myself, before I saw your aura and realized you were alive."

  Her expression changed. "You were the only one, you and the ylvin women. Everyone else had either died or left. The other women helped me get you over a horse. Then they headed west, toward ylvin lines."

  Macurdy nodded slowly. "The dead rakutu must have shared in the hive mind. Did you find Tsûlgâx?" "No. Apparently he left with the others." Macurdy grunted. He couldn't imagine Tsûlgâx abandoning Kurqôsz's body.

  * * *

  A few hours earlier, not many miles south of the clearing, an entire cohort of Kullvordi rode through forest.

  General Jeremid had been unwilling to assume that the voitik command center was unassailable. Even if the place really did have sorcerous defenses, it seemed to him it might be susceptible to surprise attack—a swift strike followed by an equally swift disappearance. So he'd left with his cohort, riding cross-country through the forest, planning to scout the place. Unless he found reason not to, he'd hit it. Raise all the hell he could, then run. Or if things went right... Who knew?

  Again the sky was weird and beautiful with northern lights, a rare sight for Rude Landers. Two nights in a row now, he thought, and wondered what it meant.

  Then something changed. The night took on a deeply ominous air. Evil, dangerous. Jeremid ordered a halt, and sent his bird to scout the place again. While he waited, he took his mittens off and shoved them in his pockets, then raised his earflaps. When the bird returned, it reported that everything in the clearing—everything but the sky—looked the same, but felt very very bad. In the vicinity, the northern lights had disappeared, hidden by thick serpents of cloud, writhing and twining in the sky. Like nothing he'd seen before, even in his species' hive mind.

  "Sorcery is in use," the bird finished. "Big sorcery." Its voice was subdued. Ordinarily the great raven was self-assured, even haughty. Now it sat huddled and ruffled on a packhorse, utterly demoralized.

  Jeremid ordered his men to make camp. Then, leaving Colonel Tarlok in charge, he called a young officer to him, a young hillsman known as a daredevil. Like Jeremid when he'd been young. "Bring the best squad in your platoon," Jeremid told him. "You and I are going to examine the place ourselves."

  They'd hardly left before something else happened. Nothing they could see or hear, but something happened. Jeremid felt it, and the others did too; he saw it in their eyes. But they rode on.

  At the clearing's edge they stopped. There was no undergrowth there—cattle had grazed the bordering woods for decades—but night and the trees hid the patrol. The sky had stopped writhing. Now it brooded, flickered, pulsed, its clouds slowly roiling. They seemed too dense, too heavy to stay aloft. In the distance, soldiers emerged from the house, then from the stable, mounted their horses and left hurriedly. Neither in ranks nor singly, but in clusters, riding east on Road B.

  Then nothing more. Jeremid had the patrol dismount, and they continued to wait. They saw no one else. After a while the lieutenant suggested he be allowed to ride in and see what he could find. Jeremid shook his head without looking at him. His gaze was intent, his senses acutely attuned to the scene in front of them. "We wait," he said. "Something's going to happen."

  The air remained heavy with energy, and a towering, breath-suppressing sense of threat. But for a long hour, perhaps two, nothing happened, except that the sense of threat thickened. They watched mesmerized, almost unable to move.

  Suddenly lightnings erupted from the clouds, monstrous blinding lightnings whose overlapping crashes drove the Kullvordi to their knees. The discharges continued for perhaps a minute, then subsided into spasmodic cracklings, and ceased. The air smelled strongly of ozone.

  When Jeremid's vision recovered and he could think again, the opening held no building at all. Not one. There weren't even rubble piles. Whatever was left, if anything was, was scattered.

  Slowly he got to his feet.
Their horses had fled. "Lieutenant," he said quietly, "it's time to walk." Then they started back westward to the cohort. It seemed to Jeremid the war was over, though how it had happened, he had no idea. Except that sorcery had been behind it. Well before they'd walked the three miles back to the cohort, the sky had cleared. High in the ionosphere, the aurora still danced its stately dance.

  * * *

  As Macurdy, Vulkan and Varia traveled east on B, they heard great thunders to the west, brief but intense. Then the sense of threat dissipated, and in a surprisingly short time the sky was reclaimed by the aurora. Macurdy's headache died, and his mental processes regained their sharpness.

  Before dawn they encountered scouts of an east ylvin guerrilla force. Their sergeant directed them to his captain. Over the weeks, the captain's command had accumulated heavy losses, and its two companies were down to eighty men. Two hours earlier they'd come upon an invader supply train, abandoned. Only its voitik commander remained with it, dead but apparently unwounded, his face a grotesque and blotchy grimace.

  The ylf had no idea what might have happened. He only knew that he, his men and their horses, had been overdue for a rest. After selecting sixteen sleighs of food and fodder, he'd set fire to the rest, and was taking his loot to an old woods road he knew of. Macurdy and his companions were welcome to share.

  Meanwhile his great raven notified Blue Wing where Macurdy could be found.

  The woods road took them to an old forest burn, where there was lots of dense young growth for cover, and deadwood for fuel. There the ylver began erecting more effective shelters than they had previously. Sentries were posted, and a mounted patrol sent out. It was time, their captain said, to catch up on some serious eating and sleeping, but not to go slack on security.

  The guerrillas were as impressed with Varia as with Vulkan. She was not only beautiful. She wore the rich fur robe and other expensive travel clothes that Quaie had provided. She'd gotten them from the storeroom before she left the manor house.

  The captain gave his guests the best lodging available—an old hay shed, in a grove of young white pine just outside the burn. It had enough roof left, that inside, most of the dirt floor was bare of snow. It held no hay, but the captain had captured hay delivered for bedding.

  By that time it was daylight. Over a hot bed of coals, Macurdy and Varia toasted hithik bread, spread it with captured hithik lard, and ate it with fresh, half-roasted hithik horse meat. Vulkan and Blue Wing preferred their meat raw. When they'd finished, Macurdy put chunks of pine stump on the fire, and watched flames begin to lick over them. He felt spent, used up, and almost fell asleep, but got to his feet instead. He still had things to do before he let go.

  He went to the captain and was about to borrow his bird, when Blue Wing arrived. Through the great raven network, Macurdy made known to the entire army that Kurqôsz was dead of his own sorcery, along with some, perhaps many, of his voitar. The hithar, and apparently most of the rakutur, were still alive. Then he gave orders that went far beyond his authority, knowing they'd be accepted. Units were to probe the enemy positions on Deep River and in the Merrawin Valley, and let the ylvin high command know what they found.

  As soon as he'd finished, Jeremid informed him that Kurqôsz's command base had been demolished by great lightnings. The report made Macurdy's skin crawl. It occurred to him that the violent, sorcery-powered death of Kurqdsz and his crystal circle might have exploded with deadly force through the entire voitik hive mind, perhaps even in Hithmearc.

  He returned to the hay barn, where he, Varia and Vulkan lay down on captured hay, covered with captured blankets. Macurdy gazed at the fire, then looked away. They weren't as mesmerizing by daylight as at night, but he wasn't ready to sleep quite yet.

  "Vulkan," he said, "you told me I'd aborted Kurqôsz's sorcery. So I suppose that in a way I killed all those voitar. How in hell did I do that? I don't remember doing anything."

  «Ah, but I do remember. I was with you, in a manner of speaking, monitoring your mind. I did not, and do not understand what was going on at all times, and eventually, sensing the approaching climax, I withdrew to avoid sensory overload. But I know enough.

  «And you will remember when you're ready. Which I suspect will be while reviewing this life, after you've died.

  «What you did was somewhat equivalent to lightning striking an electrical transformer. While the most powerful circle of sorcerers in the world was plugged into it.»

  Electrical transformer? Macurdy was always struck by Vulkan's occasional allusions to things in modern Farside, but this took the cake.

  Vulkan went on. «Kurqôsz and his crystal circle had gathered and were undertaking to manipulate forces of enormous power. And his control was still somewhat precarious. Your intervention disrupted the process, and the result was instantaneous.

  «That at least is how it seems to me. As I said, when the time comes, you will know quite exactly.»

  He paused. «And that is all I have to say—or will have to say—on the matter.»

  Macurdy went to sleep contemplating it all, and never woke up till late at night. Stepping outside to relieve himself, he found the aurora dying in the eastern sky.

  * * *

  By midday, more news had spread via the raven network: everywhere contact had been made, all the voitar were dead. Without exception. The hithar were utterly demoralized. The only clashes had been with small groups of rakutur, disorganized, but still deadly. And reckless now.

  39 Wrapping Up the War

  In Yuulith, all but two of the voitar had died on that night of miscarried sorcery, and within fifteen days, all hithik forces had surrendered without fighting. The last was the most distant, the garrison at Balralligh. It surrendered to two short companies of east ylvin guerrillas, augmented by a remnant of Cyncaidh's ylver, included Ceonigh, his lordship's elder son. Having lost their bird, and unable to locate their cohort, they had joined the easterners.

  Initially the rakutur had been more devastated by the loss of their masters than the hithar had. But on the night of the cataclysm, three companies on anti-raider patrol had retained discipline and organization. Over the next two days they'd found and attached most of the rakutur who'd fled Kurqôsz's headquarters.

  Then they'd gone looking for trouble, more to die fighting than to win. And die they had, partly because of unit coordination by the great raven network. Over the next six days, the rakutur hunted raiders while the raiders dodged them, till enough raider forces had gathered. Then the short east ylvin force Macurdy had met, volunteered as bait, and the combined forces trapped the rakutur in the same large clearing where their crown prince had died.

  The Ozians and Kormehri felt they hadn't gotten their proper share of fighting. So Macurdy assigned them to attack from the nearer forest margin. When they'd engaged and held the rakutur, the Tigers and Kullvordi charged from the farther margin, taking the enemy in the rear. Two green companies of west ylvin cavalry were posted to kill any who tried to escape. None did. However, the west ylver did bag some who got separated from the melee.

  Despite near-zero temperatures, Macurdy's Tigers fought with hauberks uncovered, to avoid being confused with the enemy. The fighting was as desperate as any he'd experienced. He was glad he'd recovered his dwarf-made armor and weapons.

  * * *

  Small detachments of rakutur, totaling perhaps forty, had been assigned as guards for senior voitik officers on the Deep River Line. After the cataclysm, they crossed the ice and attacked ylvin positions. Their goal too was to die fighting, and they did.

  Similar small bands from Camp Merrawin were hunted down and killed by east ylvin guerrillas. A small rakutik detachment had been sent to Colroi after Macurdy's successful raid, and they stayed put. Then the small combined force of east ylvin guerrillas and Cyncaidh's orphans reached there on their way to Balralligh. Badly outnumbered, those rakutur too attacked and died.

  * * *

  Emperor Morguil insisted the Congress of Decision be held
at Colroi, his capital. Duinarog's Lord Gaerimor deferred to Morguil's wishes. Serving as Gavriel's legate, Gaerimor had full authority to act in his name.

  Most of the Rude Lands forces started home. However, from almost every kingdom that took part in the fighting, Macurdy took two short companies to Colroi. Short because of casualties. He also took both cohorts of his Tigers. All together, they would help Morguil and Naerrasil remember who had bled the enemy so badly.

  They and the dwarves, for Aldrik Egilsson Strongarm also took two short companies, riding on sleighs that carried the army's hay supply.