A Warrior's Legacy (17 page)

I passed the city far off and to the right
in the moonlit darkness. It was a beautiful looking city. Too bad
that it had to be populated with the Sorcerer’s assassins and
strong arm men.

I made camp later that night without a fire.
It was early when I broke camp to leave and continue experiencing
the scenic wonder of these mountains. I saddled Relentless and went
for my saddle bags that lay on the ground a couple of feet away and
froze.

In the soft ground there was an unclearly
defined footprint. One of the straps on the bags had not been
retied right either. Looking around but seeing nothing amiss I
cautiously approached the bags and opened them expecting a snake to
come striking out at me or a poison dart of some kind.

Nothing appeared to have been taken however,
but the contents were slightly rearranged. I caught a whiff of
something sweet smelling and I lifted the bags up to smell them,
but I smelled nothing more than the natural leather smell of the
saddle bags.

A chill coursed through me as I considered
that whoever had done this had been within six feet of me while I
had slept.

How had I not heard whoever it had been who
had been rummaging through my pack?

Why hadn’t Relentless alerted me to
someone’s presence?

The involuntary thought went through me and
I swallowed looking around me. Mountain demons?

I got up and walked over to Relentless.
“What’s going on here big boy?”

I noticed something in the corner of
Relentless’s mouth out by his gums and I picked it off and looked
at it. It was part of an apple skin!

Relentless loved apples, what horse didn’t,
but this! What kind of a mountain demon sneaks into a warrior’s
camp in the dark of the night to feed the warrior’s warhorse apples
and engage on rifling through the warrior’s saddlebags without
taking anything from them?

Relentless held his head low, as if he knew
he had been bad. As mad as I was at him I couldn’t get over the
fact that Relentless wouldn’t have allowed himself to be bribed by
apples and put his master in danger unless…… unless it had been a
woman!

Relentless was putty in a woman’s hands. It
was a secret I tried to avoid getting out.

“Still you think you could have snorted or
something!”

Relentless looked away holding his head low
and I smacked his shoulder a little harder than I should have.

I was disappointed in both of us, as it was
I was lucky to still be alive. I expected I’d only have a couple
more nights in the mountains and they were shaping up to be
interesting ones, especially if my nighttime visitor came once
again.

The coming night was all I could think of
throughout the day. I had never been surprised before like I had
been last night and it really bothered me.

I set up camp and this time I had a fire,
but I let it go out in the early morning hours. My bedroll was back
from the fire’s edge a good ten feet or so only I wasn’t in it.

The night had been a quiet one, and I was
just getting the feeling that I had wasted a whole night’s sleep
for nothing, when something changed.

The atmosphere of the night was different.
There was someone or something there that hadn’t been there before
and as certain as I was of that I was also sure that it knew that I
wasn’t in my bedroll and in fact was probably looking straight at
me this very moment.

Chills went up and down my spine at the
prospect of being seen in my concealment and yet unable to see my
opponent. I at least thought I knew where the ‘it’ was, but I
wasn’t sure.

Deciding to end the pretense of hiding, when
it was clear to me that the game was up I stepped out from the
dense thicket I had been standing motionless in for hours and drew
my sword. The sword immediately brightened, as if it sensed my need
for light.

A wispy ray of blue light peeled off into
the darkness away from me in search of the something that I had
sensed was there. The wispy ray of colored light seemed to run into
something in the blackness of the night and it stopped only to then
encircle around the object it had encountered until a narrow dark
column was illuminated in the dark.

I saw a hand come out of the pitch black
column. I watched as a finger played with the strands of light
encircling it wonderingly. Something in the darkness moved and I
realized its head had been bent forward.

The head lifted even as two hands lifted
back the hood of a black cape. I swallowed hard as I stared at my
first mountain demon.

Chills coursed up and down my spine. It was
like nothing I had ever seen before and yet it was as beautiful as
any woman I had ever seen and more.

‘This is not good Zevin’ I said to myself
inwardly.

‘Not good to be infatuated with a demoness!
Get a grip on yourself!’

But all I could do was stare helplessly like
a moth flying into a burning flame. It was definitely female or at
least I hoped it was. I had to admit that I didn’t know much about
demons.

She was taller than the overall height of a
woman of Assoria by several inches. Her facial features were mostly
similar to the people of Assoria, but they were different slightly
and she looked of a bigger build overall, but it was hard to tell
because of the cape she wore.

Her eyes though!

Zalisha had been right about these mountain
demons. Their eyes glowed!

They glowed so much that they castoff
considerable light. It wasn’t just the eyes, but individual strands
of her black long hair glowed softly too. She for all her odd
exotic appearance was utterly bewitching.

“Who are you?” I managed to get out as her
full lips parted in a sensual smile that revealed sharp teeth that
looked like silver and glinted like polished knives in the
reflected light given off by my sword.

In a wicked tone of voice she said, “You
mean what am I? That would be a better question.”

Her face displayed the haughty demeanor
common of evilness, but all I could think was that it made her look
sort of cute.

Okay I’d play along, “Okay then what are
you?”

“Your worst nightmare if I so choose to be!”
She said assuredly.

I didn’t doubt her. But what she didn’t know
was that she was already better than any fantasy I’d ever had.

“What business do you have in trespassing
across our lands uninvited?” She said directly, with a hint of the
savagery I instinctively knew she possessed creeping out into her
tone.

Trespassing?

“I wasn’t aware that I was! Tell me do
demons claim territory?”

She looked uncertain for only a moment and
then she drew herself up as regally as any queen would, “We possess
these mountains and we don’t like outsiders traipsing through them
disturbing our solitude!”

I had to bite back a smile, ‘Disturbing
their solitude’ yeah right! It seemed to me that she had sought out
my company on two separate occasions already.

“I’m sorry to have imposed on your solitude.
I’ll be out of the mountains soon.”

She nodded her head solemnly, “See that you
are or else!” She left the rest unsaid and turned away and started
to fade away into the darkness.

Quickly I followed after her, but it was
next to impossible to keep sight of her. All I had to go by was the
deeper darkness of her cape in comparison to the dark grayness of
the early morning light just before sunrise.

I lost sight of her.

Suddenly a void of blackness opened up
before me in the mountainous terrain and I desperately flung myself
backwards grabbing at the rocks to keep myself from falling over
into the chasm I’d started to step into.

Pulling myself up I heard the sound of soft
taunting laughter behind me. The sound grated on my nerves and I
turned back angrily to view its source.

There she was on the other side of the chasm
still laughing softly her eyes glowing with merriment. The little
witch had almost let me kill myself!

How had she crossed the chasm in front of
me?

It had to be over twenty feet in distance
side to side! I couldn’t jump that on my best day, had she?

As if in answer to my unasked question she
smiled her sharp teeth glinting. I was about to say something, when
she threw something at me and I had to reach out and catch it
before it smacked me in the head.

Looking at what I had caught I saw that it
was an apple. I looked back across at her, but she was gone.
Looking down at the apple I pondered on the mystery of her. What
kind of a she demon runs around the mountains at night feeding
horses apples and watching men sleep?

A dangerous one was the answer as I
remembered how close I’d come to falling into the chasm. Getting up
I stumbled through the early morning darkness back to my camp. I
walked up to Relentless and cutting the apple into pieces I handed
him some as I said to him.

“You’re forgiven old boy. She is quite
bewitching! I can see why you fell for her. You shouldn’t drop your
guard around a female like that all the same though. Their smiles
of welcome conceal hidden dangers!”

Relentless shook his head and seemed to
snort derisively at me.

“That’s right! Take it from one who almost
found it out the hard way!”

I decided to lay down and get a couple of
hours of sleep at least.

The twill of a songbird awoke me. From the
brightness of the morning I gauged that I had slept for more than
just a couple of hours. My senses caught the smell of something
familiar.

Something sweet!

I sat bolt upright grabbing my sword up and
looking all around for the sweet smell’s mysterious owner. I saw
nothing and then my eyes drifted downward. On a rock less than two
feet away from where my head had been while I had slept sat a big
red apple on a rock.

Unbelievably I glanced toward Relentless and
saw him busy nosing through the grass in search of the remains of
what must have been a veritable feast of apples, if the empty sack
on the ground was any indicator.

I hit the ground hard with my fist. She’d
done it to me again!

My anger dissipated slightly when I
considered on a somewhat more positive high note that she must not
want me dead. Goodness knows she could have done it if she’d wanted
to. Still I didn’t like being played around with like a helpless
mouse caught in the sharp talons of a playful cat.

The next time we met things were going to be
different!

It was interesting that I had already
subconsciously decided that there would be a next time.

To say that the northern plains were dry
once you got away from the mountains was an understatement. Desert
would have been a better descriptive word for it.

Nothing but desert with some clumps of grass
here and there. It was hard to believe that this much natural
devastation could occur in just over one hundred years.

I rode Relentless at a steady run across the
flat plain kicking up a cloud of dust as I went. I had brought a
spear with me and to this I had attached the flag of the Eastern
Kingdom in the hopes that it would at least give me a chance to
speak my piece instead of being run through on the spot, with
questions asked later.

I saw some small wild deer flee from my
approach off in the distance, but that was it. It was hot and I was
beginning to wonder if just one extra satchel of water would be
sufficient for this arid climate.

A shadow fell over me from above and I
looked up to see a vulture drifting above me on the hot air
currents. The bird’s presence seemed to describe the spirit of the
place, dead.

Farther out in the distance I saw a series
of projections that stuck out and up from the flatness of the plain
and I headed for them, as there were seemingly no other kinds of
landmarks to be seen on the flat plain.

Not my kind of land for sure. Give me the
cool rainy green mountains any day over this place. Eventually I
rode into some irregularities on the flat plain. Diversion
ditches.

These must have been fields and pastureland
then at one time. As I grew closer I could see that my destination
was one of the abandoned cities of the North.

I reached the old riverbed before I did the
city. It was empty and barren except for a few shrubs clinging on
to life here and there along the sides and bottom of the once
powerful Yasana River. I had come to see far too many such
desperate and hopeless places like this in my short time on
Assoria.

The destruction of what had once been great
was evident almost everywhere one looked. The greed of one man
comingled with the envy of one kingdom had brought all this
bitterness and destruction upon the land and caused the suffering
of so many. Assoria was due for a rebirth and with the Creator as
my strength I would do what I could to reverse the ravages of the
past and usher in a stronger new future.

I skirted the perimeter of the great
abandoned city. I had no desire to travel down the lonely forgotten
streets of yet one more relic from the past. It was as if the pain
and suffering from the past had somehow seeped into the ground and
pervaded the very atmosphere of the place.

I followed the old riverbed northward along
its old course. Zalisha had said that except for a few isolated
springs the northern peoples got most of their water by collecting
the morning dew from the northern coastline beaches in a process
that I was curious to see for myself.

Most of the remaining population was
concentrated in the far north, because that was where the reliable
water sources were and it was far away from the casual raiding
parties sent out by the Western Kingdom to continually harass and
weaken the Northern Kingdom further.

I made camp that night in a stand of scrubby
pine trees that sat back off from the old riverbed. When I woke up
it was with some regret that I didn’t find an apple laying beside
me on the ground.