Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01]
Page 18
Jay was having a hard time listening to their cheerful banter. Not simply because she was the butt of their jokes, but for some other reason as well. Something she couldn't quite pinpoint was bothering her.
She considered, frowning. English, she realized. The beast speaks English, as does whatever it's talking to. They haven't said a thing in Galti.
The beckoning light; the hideous bat-winged creature; this English-speaking monster on her back. She had a real sympathy for Dorothy when she found herself in Oz.
"I know the Watchmistress gets them," Grah said. Its growling voice still held a hint of amusement. "But I pleasure myself to think of if she did not."
"Pleasure yourself later. Let her up, and let's take her, shall we?"
The pressure on Jayjay's back vanished. She lay still, trying to make sense of what was happening to her, but events refused to untangle into anything but a mess.
"Up, you." The voice that had been so suave and urbane a moment before turned gruff. "Now. Morning will be here soon."
Jayjay rose, hurting. If she lived long enough, she ought to have interesting bruises to show for this night. She spat out the dirt in her mouth, and waited. No place to run. If they weren't going to kill her immediately, at least she'd gained some time in exchange for her pain.
"Follow me," the voice that did not belong to Grah said.
This other was a man. He stayed out of the direct moonlight, so she couldn't see him clearly. But he was only a man; two arms and two legs in the normal places, a head and hands and feet. He scared her, though; scared her as much as the talking dog. She had the feeling he would have watched Grah devour her without saying anything—or perhaps he would even have encouraged him—if it hadn't been for these two wizards they'd been looking for. "Follow you?" she asked. "Where? Where are we going?"
"Move," Grah snarled from behind her.
"But what just happened here?"
Grah butted her in the small of the back with his head, and she staggered forward a step. "Follow Bewul."
Just because they weren't going to kill her, it didn't follow that they would be kind to her. All they had to do was be sure she was still alive when they got her wherever they were going. She shut up and followed, limping and feeling the aches that would undoubtedly get worse for the next two or three days.
Bewul led her back to the clearing; the first thing Jayjay noticed was that the tent was gone. The second was that Sophie wasn't. Jayjay limped to Sophie's side. They hugged.
"You're still alive," Sophie said at last.
"At least for a while. Do you know what's going on?"
"Maybe. Several of our rescuers helped me pack our belongings while I was waiting for the rest of them to find you after they chased off the Watcher."
"Our rescuers?" Now Jayjay felt really lost.
Sophie looked around, making sure no one was listening. "That's the story. They were out hunting and they came across the Watcher that was attacking us. Several of the hunters and their dogs chased off the thing…not before the horses were dead, but they saved our lives."
"What do you think?"
"I think they were hunting for something they don't want to admit. Us, maybe. Or the men who chased us into the woods yesterday morning."
Jay nodded. "I heard one of the two tell us that they were supposed to take us to…their…" She thought a moment. "Their Watchmistress. He didn't think they'd found the right people, but they were definitely looking for someone."
"When they find out that we aren't who they were looking for, do you think they'll let us go?"
Jay thought of Grah's paw pressing her facedown into the dirt, of his speculation on how tasty she would be.
"No."
"Me, either. I think if we see a chance to run, we'd better take it."
One of the hunters approached. "Get your belongings, please. We must hurry." His voice was gorgeous. Rich and deep. Sexy. It so startled Jay that for a moment she forgot to worry about the trouble she was in. She had a sudden overwhelming urge to take her flashlight and shine it in his face.
"Where are you taking us?" Voice or no voice, Jay remained suspicious.
"Home. Don't ask questions now." He sounded annoyed. "We're in a hurry; her Watchers might decide they want you more than they want to obey their Mistress."
She didn't want another run-in with the lights. She grabbed her pack and swung it onto her shoulders. She hated leaving the saddles and bridles and horse supplies in the woods to rot, but she couldn't carry them. Sophie stood beside her.
The men surrounded her and Sophie, their weapons out. They started marching, talking rarely, but always speaking in English, even to each other. What were English-speaking hunters and their English-speaking dogs doing in the middle of the great forests of Glenraven? And what did they want with her?
She marched through the moon-silvered darkness, hoping for a chance to run and figuring she wasn't going to get it. She wondered what the Watchmistress wanted from her. She wondered why she was in Glenraven at all, but she didn't let herself think too long about that. Some questions were better left unanswered.
Thirty
Yemus sat next to his brother, Torrin, in a secret meeting of the Machnan elite. Dressed in the clothing of commoners, the hoods with which they had hidden their faces thrown back for the time being, nearly a hundred of the most powerful men and women in Glenraven stared at each other with worried looks, waiting in silence.
A stout, red-bearded man burst through the door, flung back his hood, and bowed briefly to Torrin. "Lord Wethquerin," he murmured, and found a seat on one of the long, crowded benches.
"Lord Smeachwykke." Torrin nodded back.
Haddis Falin, Lord Smeachwykke, was a genial man most times, but Yemus sensed suppressed fury in him at that moment. Yemus suspected he'd had some rumor regarding the purpose of this emergency meeting. Or perhaps he had a natural bent to pessimism that Yemus had never noticed before. In any case, the leader of the northern hold of Smeachwykke looked around at the silent men and women who glared at Yemus, then cleared his throat. "I rode a horse to death getting here," he said. "One of my best. What's happened, and why all the secrecy?"
Torrin looked at Yemus, disdain in his eyes. "Utter disaster has happened," he said bitterly. "But had you all come racing here openly, you would have tipped off the Alfkindir that we are aware of their coup. We believe that we have no hope of salvaging the situation, but perhaps, with the element of surprise in our favor, when they take us down we won't go down alone."
Yemus felt the weight of a hundred hostile stares fall on him.
Torrin turned to him. "Tell them what has happened. Tell them the outcome of this perfect plan of yours, this plan in which we have all invested our lives."
Yemus swallowed hard. "The heroes came, but somehow the Kin found out about them and subverted them. They escaped here yesterday morning, having learned whatever it was they had hoped to learn, and though the Wethquerin Special Guard and I chased them, they eluded us by hiding in the Faldan Woods." He heard the gasps around the room, and nodded, grim and heartsick. "We pursued them into the Faldan Woods, and as a result, the Watchers decimated the Special Guard. Those few of us who survived retreated to regroup. Meanwhile, according to my auguries, our 'heroes' continued into the heart of the Faldan Woods, and met up with their contacts among the Kin only moments before you began arriving. The artifact is in the hands of the Kin now."
Stunned silence greeted his statement.
He watched the people, many of them his friends, most of them men and women he'd known since childhood. They were people who had put their lives and the lives of their loved ones, their husbands and wives and children and parents, into his hands because he had believed he could set them free from Aidris Akalan and her Watchers and the Alfkindir overlords who were draining the lifeblood from their Machnan subjects.
Stunned silence. He saw men turn their suddenly tear-streaked faces from him, saw women stare down at their hands or up at th
e ceiling, breathing hard, swallowing convulsively. He saw two enemies from rival villages turn to each other, rest hands on each other's shoulders, and weep.
Smeachwykke stood and stared him straight in the eye. "It's over then."
"At their whim, yes." Yemus clasped his hands in front of him and nodded slowly.
The lord sucked his bottom lip into his mouth, nibbled on the flesh until Yemus saw a trickle of blood well up beneath his teeth. "I suppose the only question is, shall we execute you now, while all of us can watch you die, or shall we let you live so that when the Kin destroy the artifact and us with it, you will be left utterly alone?"
Yemus nodded. He'd expected the question; his brother had asked him the same thing.
"Wall him into his tower," Bekka Shaita, Lady Dinnos, suggested. "Feed him, take him water…and let him ponder the effects of what he's done. And when we are gone, he'll know it, because no one will come to his window again. That way we will die with the comfort of knowing the one who killed us will die, too, but that he will suffer first in a suitable manner."
Yemus saw Torrin glance around the table, taking rough count of the nodding heads. At last he said, "So be it. Most of you are agreed—"
"I want to stand in front of him and watch a sword run through him. I want to watch his blood pour onto the ground," one of the lesser lords of Zearn said. Yemus remembered that the man had three daughters and two sons, all of them still young, and he understood how the man felt.
Torrin shook his head. "We will wall him into the Aptogurria. That way he can work toward a solution that will save us from the Kin. If he succeeds, we all live. If he fails, he dies with us."
Torrin nodded to the Special Guards who stood at the doorway to the assembly room. "Take him. Wake two masons, and have them construct the wall immediately. Kill anyone who approaches the wall, whether they wish to kill him or to offer him comfort. One of the Special Guard will be designated to take him food. That man must never utter a word to him, nor make any sign in response to anything he says, except to bring me should he ask for me."
Torrin stared into Yemus's eyes. "The Aptogurria has water. Leave that as it is. Better he dies slowly of hunger: hunger for food, hunger for friends."
Better he dies slowly.
Yemus didn't fight the men who led him away, though as the only Machnan who still wielded magic, he didn't doubt that he could have escaped them. The truth was that he didn't want to escape. He wanted to die.
He wished they would have executed him immediately; he couldn't argue, though, with the fairness of their decision. He had consigned every one of them and all their families and friends to an early and probably horrible death. They had every right to decide the method by which he died.
In his little apartment in the Aptogurria, listening to the soft "click-click" as the stonemasons walled up the door and most of the lower window, his brother's words kept running through his mind.
Better he dies slowly.
Better I was never born at all, Yemus thought.
Thirty-one
The ground twisted under Sophie's feet. It was the third, possibly the fourth time she'd felt the phenomenon. For an instant she felt she was falling forward…and then, before she could catch herself, she wasn't falling anymore. The sensation reminded her of something. She puzzled while she walked; then it clicked. Cycling through the tunnel on the way to Glenraven, when she had turned that last corner before they came out of the tunnel, she'd had the same shifting feeling.
"What was that?" she asked the shadowed form next to her.
"What?"
"The ground shifting. Didn't you feel it?"
"The ground didn't shift." The voice belonged to Matthiall, the one who'd captured her. "Perhaps you're ill."
"I'm about to be." Sophie turned to Jay. "Did you feel it?"
"Did I feel the earth move under my feet?" Jayjay groaned. "Yes."
"What do you suppose it was?"
"A very quiet earthquake."
At first, Sophie had been grateful she'd been captured; after all, she and Jayjay were minutes, maybe even seconds, away from death when their captors arrived. But the longer she walked between their circle of drawn weapons, listening to them talk to each other, the more flatly terrified she became, and the more certain she became that her captors were something she'd never encountered before. With the giant talking dogs, of course, that was obvious. But something about the men frightened her even worse.
She'd never seen one of their faces, never gotten a good look at any of them. From their silhouettes, they seemed normal enough, and the few times one had walked through a patch of moonlight, he had looked like a man. Their voices were clear enough, too, but something about them struck Sophie as wrong. Perhaps it was a musicality of tone she'd never heard in anyone's voice before, or maybe it was the little burr at the back of her skull that tickled every time one of them spoke.
She wanted to take a hard look at them. It wouldn't be long before she could. She noticed a slight grayness along the horizon to her right. Dawn coming.
The trees thinned out, and through them Sophie managed to discern the hulking outlines of towers and battlements; they had come upon a massive outpost in the middle of dense forest.
"Day comes," one of the hunters muttered. "Quickly!" Another put a curved horn to his lips and blew a rippling arpeggio.
That guy could give Winton Marsalis a run for his money, Sophie thought. He got the attention of whoever ran the gate, too; in the next instant, chains rumbled and a drawbridge lowered rapidly to the ground.
"Inside!" shouted the hunter who'd noted the coming of dawn.
Everyone obeyed, including Sophie and Jay, since they were in the center of the circle. The whole weary crew trotted across the bridge. She figured between the people and the dogs, more than twenty living beings ran over the wood planks at the same time. Yet Sophie noticed uncomfortably that she and Jay were the only two runners whose footsteps she heard.
Then they were through the gate and behind the battlement walls. Sophie looked up, expecting to see the sky. Instead she saw a low stone ceiling and a corridor that ran off to right and left; little spheres of light placed irregularly along the inner walls made the corridor about as bright as outdoors at late twilight. Sophie had never seen any place so poorly lighted. Nor had she ever seen a fortress that didn't include inner and outer baileys to protect the main keep.
The men stayed away from the lights.
"So, are you going to drag these two up to her now? Going to tell her you've captured her wizards?" Sophie recognized the mocking voice as one of the three she could put a name to. Bewul. Jay had told her his name, and what she'd thought of him.
She recognized the second voice, too. Matthiall. "No. I want to be sure of them. I think I'm right about them, but what you said has given me something to consider. I'll take them to her when I'm sure I'm right."
Bewul laughed. "Then she'll be waiting a long time to see them. Feed them to your friend Grah, why don't you. Save yourself the humiliation you'll get if you take them to her." Still laughing, Bewul strode away, followed by most of the men and dogs.
Matthiall sighed. One of the giant dogs growled. "He will take the news straight to her, Matthiall. He'll take word of your failure."
"I know, Grah."
"Why don't you go to her, let her know that you haven't failed, and that these are the people she wants?"
"Do you think they are?" Matthiall sounded surprised.
There was a pause. "I have no opinion on the matter at all. I merely assumed that you must think so, since you brought them here."
"She told me I would find two people in the forest, and that these two people would be powerful Machnan wizards. I found two people in the forest. But I confess, old friend, the longer I walked beside them, the more certain I became that they were not wizards at all."
"So what will you do with them?"
"I don't know. I'll lock them away for a time, until I've decided."
"When I've decided what I must do, you can assist me. But for now, I'll take them alone."
"What if they escape you?"
Matthiall laughed softly. "They can't get out of here. All they can do is run through the labyrinths. If they're stupid enough to do that, you and the other warrags can catch them and eat them. You haven't had Machnan in a while, have you?"
"It's been far too long."
"Well, Grah, if they try to run, it won't be much longer."
"I'll take that happy thought with me," the warrag said. He trotted away.
As far as Sophie could tell, she and Jay and Matthiall were alone.
"You heard what I said to Grah?" Matthiall asked.
Sophie said, "Yes."
After a moment, Jay agreed.
"I wasn't exaggerating. If you run from me, the kindest death you'll find is at the teeth and claws of the warrags." Sophie heard him sigh. "Come with me."
He didn't sound cruel, as Bewul had sounded. Sophie dared to ask him, "Where are we?"
"Inside the main gate."
"The main gate of what?"
"Oh. This is Cotha Maest."
Jayjay said, "And where is Cotha Maest? I haven't heard of it."
Sophie heard Matthiall inhale—one sharp, short breath. "No more questions," he said. "No more words until I tell you that you may speak again." When he said that, she would have expected anger in his voice…but instead, she thought she detected fear.
Matthiall led the two of them past empty twilit rooms and through long meandering halls, down and ever farther down beneath the surface of the earth. Silver shimmered on the cold stone walls, falling in pale shining curtains of metal like frozen waterfalls. The silence of the upper levels gave way to voices echoing from far off as the three of them traveled downward, and as they reached level passageways at last, those voices resolved into singing and laughter, high and tinkling, as if it, too, were made of silver. The stone hallways changed; rough and crude in the upper levels, they had seemed to melt as she and Jayjay descended until the tiny puddles of light revealed that both walls and columns curved in graceful fluted lines; stone carved so beautifully it almost seemed to live. Sophie touched a pillar, curious, and her fingers told her it was still stone—still hard and cold and faintly damp—but it rested, feeling so sinuous and almost muscled beneath her fingers, that she could have believed it would move.