Redoubt: Book Four of the Collegium Chronicles (A Valdemar Novel)

by Mercedes Lackey

  He finished his sorrel, ate his lukewarm porridge straight from the pot, taking out the cooking stones and sucking them clean, then cleaning out every bit that was left in the gourd with his finger. He wished wistfully for salt. Or maybe some wild leek or onion. But . . . well, at least it was food, and he made sure to get every morsel. Only when he was sure he’d gotten the tiniest bit did he take the cooking gourd to the spring in the growing dusk and rinse it.

  He sat drowsing on his blanket, his back to the rock, after finishing his berries. He was tired, but not yet tired enough to actually sleep. Loneliness, a hundred fears, a thousand doubts plagued him and had to be put down one by one before he’d be able to rest. After a while what sorted through his mind to the top was that last thought he’d had before he slept.

  Would it be so very hard to be ordinary?

  It wasn’t as if he would ever be completely ordinary. He was still a Herald, no matter what happened; he would always have Dallen, and he would always have that special job to do that only Heralds could do. So maybe he should stop thinking of himself as somehow crippled without Dallen actively in his head.

  He’d managed to get himself free without Dallen’s advice. He’d managed to survive this long in the wilderness, even though he hadn’t actually had the classes in doing so. It had been hard, but . . . the only horrible things were the fears, the doubts, and the loneliness. And most people had that sort of loneliness. It was only Heralds who didn’t—maybe some of the Healers, who had Mindspeaking or Empathy.

  Bear’s “ordinary.” So’s Amily.

  They didn’t seem miserable to him. Bear was really happy now, and since her operation, so was Amily.

  Aye, but they can’t miss what they never had . . . can they?

  Well . . . maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he ought to turn things around and try to look at it from their point of view. After all, they lived at the Collegium . . . and surely Bear, at least, after enduring all the scorn his father had heaped on his unGifted son, must at times long desperately for some form of Gift, even the slightest, if only to prove to his father that he was just as good as the rest of his brothers.

  And Amily . . . her father was the King’s Own. She’d grown up among Heralds. There must have been times when she would have done anything to have a Gift and be Chosen. Maybe . . . well, likely . . . there still were.

  But neither of them were bitter. Neither of them—at least as far as he knew—spent most of their time fretting after something they didn’t have.

  I want it back! howled part of him, the part of him that felt crippled and bereft without Dallen right with him.

  But if he couldn’t get it back?

  He wrestled with that problem, stared that possibility right in the face, so to speak, and reminded himself that just because he didn’t want something to happen, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t. Slowly, reluctantly, he came to the understanding that there was only one possible answer to that question.

  Then . . . I don’t get it back. I live with that. I do my best. And I figure out how to make everything work without it.

  Because every moment he wasted in fruitless railing and longing was going to be a moment he could be using to make things work, and every moment he wasted that way would be one less moment when he could be working toward being happy and enjoying what he had.

  That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to cry over it; he would. He knew he would. He was on the verge of it now. But he was not, by all the gods that were, going to let it ruin his life and the lives of everyone around him. Just as he would learn how to make things work if he were blinded, or lost a hand or a foot or anything else, he would learn how to make this work.

  He wouldn’t like it. There was no reason why he should. And he wouldn’t stop trying to get it back, either.

  But in the meantime, just as he wasn’t going to curl up in a ball and wail helplessly and die because he was stuck in the howling wilderness without equipment or food or proper training, he wasn’t going to do the same because he’d lost his Mindspeech.

  Fought my way through everything Cole Pieters threw at me. Fought my way through bein’ called a traitor. Gonna fight my way through this. I got Dallen, I got Amily, I got friends. I got a place I need to get back to. I got—

  Suddenly, the birds all stopped their go-to-bed sounds.

  All at once.

  A cold, frightened silence descended like a curtain over the dark forest; reflexively, Mags started to smother his fire. Then he thought better of it. Fire was a weapon. And if there was something out there nasty enough to make everything freeze in terror, he was going to need all the weapons he could get his hands on.

  Fortunately, he had everything he needed at hand to make a new one. Things that lurked in the dark and hunted in the dark generally didn’t like light, or fire. It was possible that fire wielded as a weapon would even keep a bear or a wolf at bay.

  He had his club; he also had another stout branch he had foraged to make a second. The dried grasses and pine needles he’d gathered to make up a bed, he now pulled by the handfuls out from under his blanket, and bound to the end of that branch, tightly, to make a torch. Then, with stone-ended club in one hand and unlit torch in the other, he waited, eyes straining fruitlessly to see what was out there in the darkness, what was moving among the trees.

  He took slow, quiet breaths, listening as hard as he could. The silence was so intense he could actually hear the trickle of water from the tiny spring. Whatever was out there, it wasn’t something that made noises pushing through the undergrowth.

  A strange, eerie cold crept over him. He shivered as an icy touch seemed to run down his spine. It wasn’t just imagination either; the temperature here really had plummeted in just a few heartbeats, because now his breath steamed out into the dark blue dusk in clouds.

  He couldn’t wait any longer. He thrust the end of his torch into his tiny fire, and as soon as it caught, he held it up like a barrier between himself and whatever it was that was in the growing dark.

  He might not have Mindspeech, but evidently it didn’t take Mindspeech to sense what was out there, because he could feel uncanny eyes on him. And it knew he was here too; it had known even without the torch or his little fire. It had sensed him and come a-hunting.

  It was waiting for something.

  It was like that thing that had been watching him—more inimical, more savage, but very like it.

  Demon?

  He’d read enough about the wars with Karse to know that the priests could call up demons—or, at least, what the Chroniclers called demons. The descriptions varied, and more than one had said that the things were only partly visible at best, but one thing they all agreed on. The Karsite demons were vicious and fully capable of ripping either a man’s body or his mind to ribbons.

  He squeezed himself into the smallest possible space he could, with as much rock around him as he could get.

  Was this why the Karsite captain had told his men that he didn’t want anyone venturing out of camp at night?

  Was this why they had obeyed him without a murmur?

  Did these things prowl the land at night, on the watch for the unwary, acting as some form of control to keep people within their homes after dark? That would certainly cut down on rebellion . . . and bandits.

  There was definitely something out there, something he couldn’t quite see, something that was just a ripple in the darkness. It hovered in the air, moving slowly, back and forth, in front of his shelter. Like a cat prowling back and forth in front of something that it has cornered but isn’t quite sure is prey. The ripple moved back and forth, and he moved the torch to follow it.

  The force of its regard was like a blast of icy air. He wanted to shake his head violently, but didn’t dare take his eyes off it. It felt as if he should be sensing something from it, yet was not. There should be something pressing against shields that were no longer there, but he couldn’t actually feel anything.

  Finally, it made a sound, a snarl that s
ounded exactly like the air being ripped into two. Evidently, it was frustrated too . . .

  It still couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether to attack or leave him alone. The temptation to shout at it was almost overwhelming, but he resisted. He didn’t want to do anything that might trigger an attack.

  The snarls stopped. That horrid silence descended again.

  But only for a moment.

  The air was split with the most unearthly, ghastly, terror-inducing howl that Mags had ever heard in his life. It turned his bones to water; it made him want to curl up and hide his head in his arms, it knotted his gut with fear and paralyzed his thoughts. The first howl was followed by a second, which was, somehow, even worse. From paralysis, his mind sprang into mindless, gibbering panic, and only the fact that it was between him and any path to escape kept him pinned here. If he’d had even the slightest chance of getting past it, he’d have bolted into the darkness.

  Silence again.

  He shivered, but the torch seemed to be keeping it at bay for now, frail barrier that it was.

  Another snarl.

  The darker it got, oddly enough, the easier it was to see it—or, at least, see that odd patch where it was. It wasn’t so much formless as it was a sort of series of suggestions . . . not-quite shapes that hinted at limbs, a head.

  Those hints were as horrid as the howl had been; some were spidery, some were vaguely suggestive of a snake, some were . . . unholy meldings of a fistful of knives with a limb.

  It was the change in those suggestions of shape that warned him, the momentary drawing back—it lashed out at him, and he countered by thrusting the torch at it.

  It howled again, this time with pain, and went for him.

  He was in a fight for his life, and knew it. With torch and club he blocked and parried, struck back when he could, and tried above all to keep from being driven out of the scant shelter he had.

  The thing screamed, howled, and yowled in pain. He managed to strike it several times, and the feel of club or torch on flesh was solid enough. But it struck him just as many times, and its talons were razor-keen and icy as blades taken from a frozen river. They left behind a burning ache that slowed him a little for every strike, left slash wounds that, oddly, did not bleed.

  And worse than that, a strange lethargy was coming over him, emanating from those wounds.

  He fought it, but his vision was starting to blur, and he felt himself sagging back against the rock. He could barely hold the torch up . . .

  He saw the thing retreating a little to lick at its own wounds; saw a glimpse of a hell-red eye for a moment as it glared at him. Then it retreated further into whatever half-life it lived in, and he felt that it was watching him.

  Waiting.

  And why not? He was growing numb. He had to drop the club to hold the torch in both hands. In a moment, he would drop that, too, and then the dimming of the world would go to black, and he would . . .

  He felt the torch falling from his fingers and heard it rolling away.

  And as he, too, toppled over, he thought he heard a voice. It was shouting something garbled, and the thing turned to face away from him. There was a feline yowl, and the thing screamed angrily, but also in pain.

  “In the name of the Sun, creature of the nether realms, and of the Light and Life, I banish thee!”

  But by then the cold and the blackness had claimed him.

  11

  Cold . . . the last time he had been this cold, he had nearly frozen to death in that blizzard. But that had been mere insensate winter, which had no real interest in whether he lived or died. It didn’t care what happened to him any more than the stars did. If he’d died, it wouldn’t rejoice, and since he’d lived, that didn’t matter to winter’s icy blasts either.

  This cold had a terrifying life of its own, and it wanted him dead. It wanted far more than that, too, but it knew it would not get that—it knew that once he was dead, he would escape its reach, so there was a frustration there as well, behind the urgent need to kill him. It was determined that he would not escape. The mere possibility that he might escape sent it into a rage.

  It wasn’t so much an entity as a force, a hatred for everything that lived, for every positive, good thing in the world. It would have liked to crush them all beneath its icy weight until there was nothing left in the world but cold, and dark, and despair.

  It couldn’t get that, so it would settle for crushing him now, pulling the life out of him and enjoying his terror and grief until he finally escaped the thing into—well, wherever it was he would go that took him out of the possibility of pursuit.

  Oh, that is not going to happen, ye bastard. Not today. I ain’t gonna die fer you.

  He felt his will harden against it, mustered up a burst of strength from somewhere, and somehow thrust the thing away. It was a strange sensation, since he didn’t seem to have a body, exactly, and neither did it.

  If I did have, I’d give ye such a shot in the good bits!

  It moved to envelop him.

  He eluded it.

  “That’s right, outlander . . .”

  Encouraged by that voice somewhere past the darkness, he thrust back again, harder this time. And with the memory of how he had fought against those assassins behind it. That seemed to help!

  “Do you accept the Blessing of the Sun?”

  He didn’t even hesitate at that. Of course he accepted the blessing of the sun! Light, life, warmth—he needed all of those and needed them now! He could feel the ice in his veins spreading out from the wounds the Entity’s creature had made, a cold poison that was intended to make him give up and die and let the thing add what was left of his life force to its power.

  But he wouldn’t give up. And if something wanted to give him blessings, by the gods both small and big, he would take them!

  As if he had opened a door with that thought, light blazed up around him, heat rushed into him and joined with him, filling him with strength. He sensed that he was only going to get one try at this, and as the Entity tried to engulf him again, oblivious to his new source of strength, he allowed it to surround him, a cloud of evil miasma enveloping him, trying to freeze and choke off life and breath.

  He waited a moment for it to feel as if it had won. That moment of triumph would be its moment of weakness, when it dropped its guard.

  He felt that surge of pleasure.

  Then he exploded inside it like the sun bursting up over the horizon.

  The howl that erupted from the wounded Thing was worse than anything its creature that had attacked him in the forest had produced. But it was mercifully brief, as the Entity evaporated into light.

  He could feel he had a body again—a heavy, weary, slightly sick feeling body. But alive, and not being poisoned anymore.

  And Mags opened his eyes, conscious of a strange weight on his chest, to find a pair of exceedingly blue, slit-pupiled eyes in a furry red face staring at him as the huge cat they belonged to nearly touched noses with him. It peered deeply into his eyes, and he was conscious of something that was far more than human searching for something within him

  The cat pulled its head back as soon as his eyes were open. Mags was immediately aware of three things, and three things only.

  The first was that he was lying on his back inside some sort of cave and was blessedly warm again. Every bit of that deadly chill seemed to have been driven from his poor, abused body.

  The second was that the cat was extremely heavy, in fact, the largest feline he had ever seen in his life.

  The third was that he felt as if he had been sliced to ribbons . . . he felt the wounds as present, but not the pain yet. But in a moment, he knew that the pain would start, and when it did, he was going to start screaming, and he was not sure he would be able to stop—

  As if that thought had awakened the agony to its duty, the awful pain started at that very moment, and his mouth opened—

  “That will be all, I think,” said a voice that sounded very ir
ritated, and a hand touched his forehead, and he plunged back down into blackness.

  * * *

  It hadn’t been a bad blackness, that darkness that had followed the touch of finger to forehead. Not like the drug dreams he’d had, and certainly nothing like the place where the Cold Entity lurked. In fact, it had been a very, very pleasant blackness, a warm and fuzzy sort of blackness, a place of comfort and vaguely happy lassitude not unlike all those times he’d floated in and out of sleep in the Infirmary at the Collegium when he’d been badly hurt. He had the distinct sense that he was being cared for by someone who had no intention of hurting or imprisoning him and that he was safe, and the best thing he could do at the moment was to be calm and sleep and heal.

  When he woke again, it was with a clear head—though he tested, and his Mindspeech still wasn’t back—to find that he was, indeed, in a cave. Above him was the rough rock ceiling, craggy and uneven, with light reflecting irregularly from it. He was lying on something extremely soft and comfortable and was covered with some fine, heavy fur blankets, because he could feel the fur soft against his chin. There was something else on him, weighing down his legs, in fact, and he tilted his head up to see that the cat was holding him down. It raised its head, gave him what he would have sworn was a look filled with smugness, then stood up, stretched, yawned, and sauntered off.

  That was when he understood he was lying on a bed made up on the floor of the cave. The rough rock wall was within touching distance to his right. To his left there was a cut floor not unlike the Pieters’ mine. He appeared to be in a little chamber cut into the rock, with a passage leading out to where the light was. There was nothing else in the chamber but him, though he had to admit that the absence of any sort of a door was something of a comfort.

  He heard footsteps, and a moment later a figure in the passage cast a shadow over him.