by Tom Deitz
“I’ll do it,” Bingg volunteered gamely. “It nearly ate me; it’s only fair.”
“I’ll help,” Lykkon chimed in. “I might learn something. We can take turns being lookout.”
Avall found himself facing Rann. “Which I guess leaves us to do what we came for.”
Rann grimaced resignedly, but doffed his tunic, then his shirte. Avall followed his example. Unfortunately, the thick-cane proved all but impervious to their efforts. A strong hack with their most expendable sword produced sore hands but the barest nick in the hard skin. Knives used in a sawing action worked better, but the process was tedious and progress impossibly slow. Rann’s saw worked best of all, but even that was slow, and the blade showed signs of being unequal to cutting as many spars as required.
It was also hot, sweaty work, though Avall found himself enjoying the exertion. It had been a long time since he’d used his muscles so fully, a long time since he’d engaged in simple labor with his friends.
Time lapsed into a long, drifty languor, as everyone found a rhythm to his task and fit himself to it. Voices floated around the clearing, though no one ever relaxed entirely, to judge by the furtive looks constantly aimed at the shore. Still, no other threats made themselves known. And so a hand expired.
“Where’re Myx and Riff?” Rann wondered abruptly.
Avall rose from where he’d finally sawn one shaft of cane through, a half span from the bottom. It still remained upright, however; courtesy of leaves tangled with others higher up. “They went to check the area above the cave,” he replied, with a scowl. “They should’ve been back by now.”
“They should,” Rann agreed. “But they were covered with blood—and there’s water …”
“They still should’ve told us if they were planning to be gone this long.” A pause. “Myx!” Avall yelled. “Riff! Please acknowledge.”
Silence.
Rann grimaced sourly and shoved the saw back into its leather holder, then scooped up his shirte and used it for a towel. “Think we ought to check?”
“Guess we should,” Avall grumbled. He trotted over to where Bingg and Lykkon were freeing the second loin. It would be a lot of white, tender meat—if it proved edible. “We’re going to look for Myx and Riff,” Avall told them. “If we’re not back in a hand, come looking for us.”
Lykkon nodded, and wiped greasy hands on his tunic. It was, Avall realized, the first time he’d ever seen Lykkon dirty, sweaty, and disheveled.
Rann was waiting for him at the bank. Footprints showed in the soft earth there, one set bare, the better to assay what was a steep but not impossible climb. A ladder placed just so would work wonders. When they had time to build one.
Rann scrambled up a span, waiting for Avall to follow. A convenient vine made a nice handhold, and a moment later, they were above the level of the cave. Another span put them over an edge and onto the continuation of the path they had seen earlier, beyond the troublesome fissure, this side almost completely flat, half a span wide, and covered with soft grass. It ran to their right, where it ended at the stream that, lower down, became the waterfall. The escarpment rose beyond, but it had a back side, they saw, which made it a spear of rock rising upward. The mountain proper loomed to the left as they faced the spear, and the stream flowed from that direction. Their companions’ footprints followed it. Another slope soon blocked their way, but Myx and Riff had clearly climbed it, for it was barely twice as high as Avall’s head, and since it was covered with vines, it was easy going. That put them on another ledge—and a good six spans above the beach, which was masked by a froth of ferns. The ledge swung left again, with the stream beside.
“Beautiful place,” Rann murmured. “No wonder they tarried.”
“And another waterfall nearby,” Avall noted, cocking his head. “The roar sneaks up on you. You can imagine why they kept wanting to go just a little farther—and that they might not have heard us call above the sound of the water.”
“Let’s hope,” Rann agreed, leading the way around a knife-edged slab of stone, beyond which the trail kinked out of sight. Avall heard Rann gasp, then guffaw, by which time he’d joined his friend, who had halted where he stood. Rann grinned broadly and pointed farther around the rock, even as he motioned silence with his other hand, but Avall had seen enough already.
There was indeed a waterfall where they had expected one. And there was a pool below it, into which it part-slid, part-fell, so that one might either stand clear of the falling water or stand in it.
Myx and Riff were doing the former. Naked, they stood thigh deep in the pool, locked in embrace, their hands sliding across each other’s shoulders and backs and now and then lower. They didn’t kiss—bond-brothers rarely did. Rather, they were simply sharing closeness. Myx was slimmer and taller, his hair dark, like most of his countrymen’s, and his skin was darker as well. Riff was shorter, stockier (though only by Eronese standards), and unmistakable by his fair hair and fairer skin.
Rann grinned again. “Should we let them know …?”
Avall shook his head. “Would you want to be interrupted? They’ve had no time for this since we got here, and little since we mustered out.”
Rann’s grin widened. “Maybe so, but I’m hot and sweaty, too—and not keen on climbing down again quite yet.”
Avall matched his grin. “Me neither.”
Eyes said the rest, as Avall took Rann by the arm and drew him back around the corner, assuring their friends’ privacy. Wordless, they sank down against the blade of stone. “Could be worse,” Rann murmured eventually.
“Could be,” Avall agreed. And then more comfortable silence.
Not a long one, however, for Myx and Riff were too conscientious to shirk duty indefinitely (and they had been covered with water-beast blood, Rann stressed). It was therefore no more than a finger later that they came ambling around the outcrop. Nor did either seem particularly surprised to find visitors, though Riff’s skin reddened visibly. “We found the way up—Majesty,” Myx all but stammered, genuinely chagrined. “We thought we’d better clean up, and we got … distracted. It’s quite beautiful around there.”
“So I expect,” Avall agreed with a twinkle in his eye. “Tell Bingg and Lyk that we’ll try to be back in a hand. That should be long enough.”
Myx nodded and continued down the trail, with Riff close behind.
“Long enough for what?” Rann chuckled as he and Avall dashed around the corner.
“For almost anything—at least once,” Avall laughed back, skinning his shirte over his head. Nor, he found a short while later, with a very wet and naked Rann pressed against him, and cool water throwing spray across his body; was that remotely an exaggeration.
“Cutting cane won’t be as bad as I thought,” Rann murmured eventually.
“No,” Avall agreed into the juncture of his neck and shoulder, “it won’t be—if any of us actually manage to get any cut.”
“We’ll have to,” Rann said solemnly. “We can’t get so mired in idleness and pleasure we forget caution, responsibility, and danger.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Avall assured him. “But we can’t forget that we’re alive, either.”
And for the next little while, they didn’t.
CHAPTER XIII:
EXPERIMENT
(NORTHWESTERN ERON: GEM-HOLD–WINTER–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXVI–LATE MORNING)
“And this is all?” Zeff spat. “These are no better than the first ones!”
He snatched the carved wooden box his chief engineer had just delivered to his quarters and stared the man straight in the eye as he inverted his other hand and let the contents fall one by one back into the container. Multiple thumps sounded softly: stone against a padded velvet lining, punctuated by an occasional click. He closed the lid with a snap.
“We were lucky to find those, Chief,” the engineer retorted, his voice as hard as his face, which was all angles, as though it were rock that had fractured. “The crawl was mostly blocked, and
what we could get through was narrow—and wet. Some refused to work there at all. The rest—”
“Give me their names—those who wouldn’t work.”
The engineer’s jaws tensed as though he had more to say, and none of it complimentary. “There were also bodies. A lot of them. And having been dead this long, the smell—”
“They’ll smell their own guts in the field if they’re not careful,” Zeff snapped. “And don’t think I can’t tell that one of these had been shattered.”
“They’re fragile, Chief,” the engineer protested. His tone had softened but his gaze had not. “The spade hit that one before we knew it.”
“Then use brushes!” Zeff growled, even as he cursed himself for losing his calm. It was the Nine-damned gems, is what it was! That one rash contact with Avall’s mind had planted something in him that day by day was eating away at the wall of control and discipline that had given him his position to start with.
He shook the box in the engineer’s face. “This could be victory—right here. This could be our way out of here and home. Instead—we may have to face Avall and the Lightning Sword.”
“He won’t dare,” Ahfinn offered from the corner. “Not with his people at risk. Besides, weren’t you—” He broke off, his face white, knowing he had said too much.
“You may leave,” Zeff told the engineer, with an absent wave of his hand. “I have business with my adjutant.”
As soon as the door slammed, Zeff turned his wrath full on the younger man. “Never do that again,” he gritted. “Never mention any of my plans beyond those who already know them.”
“I thought he did know,” Ahfinn countered, with a rebellious edge in his voice that had been appearing there with increasing frequency of late. “Else why have him in the mines?”
“To find those cursed gems!” Zeff growled. “Gems indeed! Grains of red sand, they look like—except the shattered one, and curse him for that, too.”
He sat down abruptly, face buried in his hands. “I don’t need this, Ahfinn,” he continued, as though he had not, bare instants before, been furious at the man. “One moment I’m euphoric because I’m told they’ve broken into the mines and already found gems. The next—they’ve found gems indeed, but gems the size of peas. And now these: even worse.”
Ahfinn looked up hopefully. “Have you tried them yet? They might not be—that is, size might not be important. You haven’t had time to try the first ones yet, have you?”
Zeff shook his head, lacking the energy to answer. It had been like that all day: emotions stimulated every which way, and far too many decisions to make because, with most of its population serving as visible hostages, the daily workings of the hold were running on inertia.
For only one reason, too—and maybe a futile one.
To—hopefully—hold off Avall until Zeff could match the King of Eron on the field.
“Are you still planning to wreck the hold?” Ahfinn dared from where he still sat, stone-faced, in his accustomed chair.
“If I have to,” came the slow reply. “But that idea makes much less sense than it did. The plan was always that if Avall didn’t come here, we would destroy the hold, and High-Clan would then turn on him, him being untried, and so on. Alternately, we would destroy it anyway, and he would be blamed for pressing the issue. But that was when we stupidly assumed we could find more gems. And before I truly knew how loyal—against all reason—his friends are to the man. Now—too many would know the truth, I fear, because they will have seen it with their own eyes. And from what I hear, our brothers in Tir-Eron are not playing their role well, either. They’re being far too ruthless, for one thing—for all that they’ve had to be. This was all planned to be subtle and it hasn’t worked out that way.”
“We moved too soon—I think,” Ahfinn offered.
The rage returned, like a forge flame newly plied with bellows. “You think,” Zeff snapped. “What do you know?”
Ahfinn regarded him coldly. “I know the people in the southern two gorges made far more demands than expected. I know they don’t care who rules them as long as someone feeds them. If we’d waited, they would have petitioned Avall for food and he’d have had no more than we’ve had, and they’d have saved us a river’s worth of work.”
“You’re a brave little sod!”
“Someone has to be. Forgive me, Chief—but you have not been yourself these days.”
“Have I not?”
“Not since you tried to master Avall’s gem.”
“I did master it.”
“Barely—but it escaped you.”
“Escaped—? You think the gem—?”
“It might have. It fits some things.”
“And these?” Zeff indicated the box in his hand.
“I think you should try to bond with one of them.”
“Largest or smallest?”
“That’s hard. The smallest should in theory be less risky, but the largest might give you a clearer idea of what you have to work with.”
“Then large it is. You may leave now.”
“Are you sure?”
“You may leave now.”
Ahfinn rose and departed, good Priest that he was—and probably good man. Better than he was, these days, Zeff concluded—or at least more alert and … focused. But maybe he could fix that. Winter would arrive eventually, and the army would have to withdraw. Of course he would prefer not to spend a winter here, either, but it would give him more time to prepare. More time to seek better gems in the mines, and more time to—
To let the prisoners starve, for one thing, since new supplies would certainly not reach the hold this season if affairs didn’t soon shift in his favor. And if they didn’t change—Well, one thing was for certain: They would be eating nothing but vegetables—from the hold’s greenhouses. And maybe bread, if the granaries were still fairly full by then. But meat—That would be cats, dogs, and rats, in all likelihood, since they would need to reserve the horses.
Not that it mattered. For now he had a goal. Something real and imminent that did not depend on “ifs” and “somedays.”
He had a gem—a virgin gem—with which he could try to bond.
And the choices were either to sit there and dread that bonding, or slake his curiosity.
It took blood. That much he knew, and little more—save how it had felt that one time when he’d swung the sword and lightning had replied—and scared him half to death, though he’d told no one. Not how little control he’d had then, and not how much he’d wanted to swing it again and again.
Now—
Best to do it. And with that, he snared a paring knife from the cheese tray and settled back into his seat. There should probably be more ritual, he supposed. Then again, he doubted that Avall had taken special precautions when he had first bonded with the master gem, nor that he took any when he worked with the sword. Rrath clearly hadn’t.
Which awakened another sore point.
He would have to attend to Rrath soon; that much was clear. Should have before now, in fact, for Rrath—in his right mind—knew as much about the gems as anyone Zeff had to hand. And if Rrath couldn’t reveal that knowledge consciously—Well, perhaps Zeff could enter his mind by means of a gem and ferret out the facts that way.
But all such speculation was stalling, he realized with a scowl. And that was unconscionable in one who still had a hold to run, a siege to endure, and a battle—eventually—to be waged and hopefully won.
And so he wasted no more time making a tiny slice in his palm.
Now to choose a gem. Ahfinn had suggested he use the largest one, and Ahfinn was usually right when it came to practical matters, if perhaps too much the pragmatist. A deep breath, and Zeff opened the box one-handed and selected the largest stone—at that, no larger than a pea. Another breath, and he set it against the tiny wound welling in his flesh.
And closed his eyes.
He felt nothing at first, and almost hurled the gem away in disgust. But then he not
iced that the candle flames were flickering more slowly, and that the dust motes that pervaded the air seemed to be twinkling ever so slightly as they described their endless, draft-blown, dance.
So it was working after all. His hand felt warmer, too, and something was trickling into his hand and up his arm. Something that held the same relationship to the mad rush of power he had felt when he had used the master gem as the brush of a feather had to a sword blow—yet clearly the same in kind.
And there was also a vague sort of greeting, though not to him in particular. This felt more like a simple recognition of one presence to another, like a pair of lodestones pulling at each other, maybe; or metal gaining sympathetic heat from a fire. Or even a mirror showing a phantom face when confronted with a real one.
So something was certainly occurring.
And maybe, if he added a second gem, more might follow.
CHAPTER XIV:
SOMETHING DEAD
(SOUTHWEST OF ERON–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXVIII–AFTERNOON)
“Something’s dead,” Merryn announced, giving Boot’s reins a gentle tug to shift him to the slowest gait he could manage without stopping entirely. She pointed northwest, where the grassy slope they had been traversing for the last two hands ended in a fringe of trees a shot away. And thank The Eight for that open land, too; it made ambush by geens less likely on the one hand, and made them easier to track on the other. Heavy animals on soft earth typically left clear prints.
Not like a day ago, when they’d had to rely on the birkit’s ability to track across hard earth far too frequently, as sand gave away to more fertile, if still sun-baked, soil. At least there was no more desert; they had left that a hand past sunrise and were now enfolded by an eruption of ever-higher hills that seemed to sport equal amounts of open meadow and hardwood forests.
