DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) (168 page)

“We have not taken much of the land as our own,” Lozan Duk explained. “But that which is ours, we guard with all diligence.”

Those words rang true to Belli’mar Juraviel, for his own people held beliefs not so different. The Touel’alfar guarded Andur’Blough Inninness fanatically. They didn’t often kill intruders, because their elven magic, along with Lady Dasslerond’s emerald gemstone, could make those who wandered onto their lands forget the way. But if there was any doubt—if the intruder learned too much about the Touel’alfar, if a ranger, perhaps, failed in his training—then Juraviel knew that Dasslerond would not hesitate to kill the human.

Juraviel thought of Aydrian at that moment, for the young ranger had been walking a fine line for some time. Another shudder coursed through him.

“You cannot do this,” Juraviel said suddenly, hardly thinking before he blurted the words. He craned his head up again, staring at the two intently. He read Lozan Duk’s expression as one of sympathy, though Cazzira’s tightened features showed little understanding.

“There is a possibility here,” Juraviel went on. “How many centuries have passed since our peoples were torn asunder?”

“Since the Tylwyn Tou expelled the Tylwyn Doc from their lands, you mean,” Cazzira remarked.

“Who can know the truth of that distant past?” Juraviel replied. “Perhaps you are right—there was a plague, by all accounts. But whatever the truth, are we two peoples to be held prisoner by it?”

Cazzira started to respond, but Lozan Duk held his hand up before her. “This is not our decision to make,” he said. “King Eltiraaz will have much to say concerning your fate, Belli’mar Juraviel.”

“And what of Brynn?”

“She is for the bog,” Cazzira was quick to answer.

Juraviel shook his head defiantly. “Then that will be your error. And one the Touel’alfar will not soon forgive.”

“You threaten us?” asked the angry female.

“I speak honestly, and in the hope that this meeting need not be a tragedy. Brynn Dharielle—”

“Is a human, and we do not suffer humans who wander onto our lands to live!”

“Brynn Dharielle is a ranger,” Juraviel calmly went on. “She is not like others of her race. She has been trained for many years within the home of the Touel’alfar. She has been given an understanding of my—of our—people that elevates her above her sorry kin. My people have placed much faith and responsibility in her. I tell you this now so that there will be no mistaking the implications if you proceed. I want you to hold no misconceptions on this point. Brynn Dharielle is Touel’alfar in all but heritage, and we protect our own as fiercely as do the Doc’alfar.”

Cazzira was tightening her angular features throughout his speech, and she winced visibly when Juraviel referred to her people using the title of his people and not hers.

“Are we to learn from each other, or are you to sever all possibilities of friendship and alliance before they are ever explored?”

Lozan Duk looked at his companion, holding the stare until Cazzira tore her glare away from Juraviel and returned the look. Then, with a glance at Juraviel, Lozan Duk motioned for Cazzira to follow him a short distance away, that they could speak in private.

Belli’mar Juraviel lay back and tried to sort through the amazing turn of events that night, trying to discern his responsibilities. Had he erred in so forcefully protecting Brynn? Perhaps his duty to his people demanded that he try to save himself,
whatever the cost to Brynn, that he could flee back to the north and inform Lady Dasslerond that the Doc’alfar were very much real and alive.

No, Juraviel decided. He would not sacrifice Brynn. Not for himself, not for anyone. He intended to get out of this, and intended to have Brynn right beside him when he did.

Lying there, cocooned by an unyielding rope on a tree branch and with a powerful zombie hovering over him, Juraviel had to admit that intentions were a far cry from reality.

“T
ell the priests to await the judgment of King Eltiraaz,” Lozan Duk instructed Cazzira when they had moved away from their prisoner.

“His judgment concerning humans was rendered centuries ago,” Cazzira protested.

Lozan Duk looked to Juraviel, then back to Cazzira. “He must speak with this one before rendering his judgment over the ranger.”

Cazzira stared at him hard.

“You know that I am correct in this,” Lozan Duk replied. “King Eltiraaz would not be pleased if we proceeded after what this one has told us.”

Cazzira looked back at their prisoner, her hard look softening, and finally gave a helpless chuckle. “This is amazing,” she admitted. “A legend walks into our midst. Who can tell what that will portend for the Tylwyn Doc?”

“Or the Tylwyn Tou?” Lozan Duk added, nodding, and when he turned to Cazzira, he saw that she was nodding, too.

So many possibilities.

I
t hurt to move at all, but Brynn turned her head to the side and opened her eyes.

She was lying on her stomach, on soft and smelly ground. It was a cave, she realized, as she turned her head more to regard the light hanging on the earthen wall. Her gaze lingered there, for this was like no lantern the woman had ever seen. It had a short wooden handle and was capped by a glowing, blue-white globe, with no flames anywhere that Brynn could see.

She continued her scan as far as her aching neck and back would allow. Many, many small roots hung out of the walls and the ceiling, and it seemed to Brynn as if this whole place, however large it might be, had simply been torn out of the ground.

Brynn coughed, and her ribs felt as if they would break apart under the pressure!

Too weary and battered even to cry, the young ranger turned her face back toward the earth and slowly lowered her head back in place. She closed her eyes, wishing it was all just a nightmare, but knowing better. Knowing that she had failed, that she would not be the savior of her enslaved people.

Fitful dreams awaited her.

When the woman next opened her eyes, she was lying on her back, still bathed
in the same bluish white light, and still in the small earthen cave.

“I thought that you would be more comfortable this way,” came a sudden voice, and Brynn started, then groaned from the pain. Her panic was gone by the time she winced through the agony, for she surely recognized the voice of Belli’mar Juraviel. Slowly and with great effort, the young ranger managed to turn enough to glimpse her mentor, who sat at the side of the room, not bound, apparently.

“They can animate the dead, but they have little in the way of healing magic,” Juraviel mused, and it seemed to Brynn that he was talking more to himself than to her.

“They?” she managed to say, and her lips were so dry and parched that they hurt to move.

“Doc’alfar,” Juraviel explained, coming over to her and putting a small waterskin to her lips. He poured, and Brynn tried to gulp the fresh water, but Juraviel quickly pulled it back.

“Not too fast,” he warned, bringing it forward and giving her another sip. “You have been asleep for a long time. If you drink too quickly, you will shock your body, to no good end.”

“How long?”

Juraviel looked around and shrugged. “Three days at least, I would guess, though time is not easy to measure in here.”

Three days
, Brynn thought. But how had she and Juraviel escaped? And where was the pursuit, for how far might the diminutive elf have traveled with an unconscious woman to drag along?

Those questions swirled about in her thoughts for a short while, gradually blending in with the more general gray that seemed to permeate her thoughts, guiding her back to the realm of slumber.

She knew before Juraviel even told her that another day had slipped past. Brynn turned to the side, to where Juraviel had been—and still was—sitting.

“Ah, Brynn, you have returned to me.” As he spoke, Juraviel lifted the waterskin and came back to her, putting it to her parched lips.

“Help me to sit up,” the young ranger said after taking a few sips and then a few deep breaths—breaths that showed her that her ribs were far from healed.

Juraviel was beside her in a moment, easing her into a sitting position, then helping her to turn so that she could put her back against the wall.

“I remember getting hit,” she said after a lengthy pause. “I tried to fight back, but they were all about me. I tried …”

“You fought well, but the numbers were too great, and the creatures seemed nearly immune to our weapons.”

“How did we get out?”

Juraviel’s expression corrected her even before she had finished speaking the words. They had not gotten out of anything, and were obviously prisoners.

“What do they want of us? And what are they?”

“They—the ones who attacked us—were unthinking animations,” the elf explained.
“Zombies raised as an army by the Doc’alfar.”

“Doc’alfar,” Brynn echoed, thinking that there was a familiar ring to the word, though she couldn’t place it.

“We have been through this all before,” Juraviel said to her. “Though I would not expect you to remember it.”

“Doc’alfar?” Brynn said yet again, for she understood the word to mean “the dark people,” as Touel’alfar meant “the fair people,” or simply, “the People.”

“In a time long past the longest memories of the eldest elves, there was but one race,” Juraviel explained somberly, his eyes staring to the side, as if looking across the miles and the centuries. “Touel’alfar, or Tylwyn Tou. Some had wings, some not, and most of those who had wings had hair of gold and light eyes, while most of those who did not had dark hair and dark eyes.”

“These are your cousins, then,” Brynn reasoned. She glanced all around. “And this is the home of …?”

“This is a prison, and nothing more.”

“But they are of
the People
. You are kin and kind. Why would they treat you—”

“Did I mention the banishment?” Juraviel remarked, somewhat flippantly.

“They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?”

Juraviel looked at her directly. “You, likely,” he confirmed. “They are not overly fond of humans, it seems.”

Brynn considered the undead force that had come against them, human zombies all.

“Though they may keep me alive,” Juraviel went on, “for information or for barter, if ever they should venture to find Lady Dasslerond and Andur’Blough Inninness.”

“Then we have to find a way to fight our way out of here.”

Juraviel shrugged and motioned to the side, to a dark hole in the floor, seeming barely wide enough to crawl into. “One tunnel, through which we’ll have to crawl, blocked at the one exit by a boulder and a host of zombies, to say nothing of any Doc’alfar who might be about. And I trust that my kin have not lost their proficiency in battle.”

Brynn’s shoulders slumped and her gaze fell to the floor. “I cannot die here,” she said. “Not now. My people are in need and I will not forsake them!” She finished with a snarl, but it was one, she knew, more of frustration than determination. For what could she and Belli’mar Juraviel do? They were overmatched, plain and simple, and so much so that there were no apparent options.

She wanted to punch the wall, and turned, meaning to do just that. But a thought came to her suddenly and her face brightened, and her hand unclenched and tore at the soft wall instead, pulling away a sizable chunk of root-filled earth. Brynn spun right about, ignoring the pain in her shoulder and ribs, determined to tear a tunnel out of the soft soil.

“Do not!” came Juraviel’s emphatic cry, and the woman stopped and turned back to regard him.

“The cave is not solid enough,” Juraviel explained. “Our captors understood how to build a prison properly here, and if we weaken the integrity of the walls, it will all fall in on us.”

Brynn closed her eyes, her ribs aching as she gasped in deep breaths, reconsidering her exertion.

“We are very deep,” Juraviel grimly added.

Brynn fell back over to a sitting position, her back against the cool, smelly mud. “What are we to do? To sit and wait, and pray for the beneficence of our captors?”

“How I wish I had an answer.”

And so they did just that, sitting and waiting, Juraviel’s mind whirling as he tried to come up with some manner of negotiation that he might use, should he get the chance, to get both of them out of there. Brynn sat thinking of her failure, of the loss to To-gai and the enslaved To-gai-ru. She would not be their savior, apparently.

Inevitably, the woman’s thoughts turned to her own mortality. What did it mean to die? Would her murdered parents be there at the end of the dark tunnel, as the shamans of To-gai claimed, ready to welcome her to the Great Hunt? Or would there be nothing at all, just an empty blackness, a cessation of existence?

Many times, the woman tried to bring her thoughts back to the situation at hand, tried to fathom some solution to the terrible dilemma. But she was dragged back over and over to the unavoidable contemplations of that greatest of mysteries.

Time slipped past; Brynn knew not if it was minutes or hours or days. She wasn’t hungry, and figured that trying to eat would pain her greatly, anyway. She just sat there and waited, and every so often, she glanced across the way to Juraviel, who sat cross-legged, his elbows propped on his legs, his chin in his cupped hands.

Time slipped past.

T
he sound of movement in the tunnel shook Brynn from a trancelike slumber some long hours later. The young ranger instinctively started to move, and quickly, to a defensive position, but a sudden stabbing pain in her side forced her back to her sitting posture, gasping for breath.

Juraviel didn’t move very much at all, just turned his head to regard the approaching sound. It wasn’t from weakness or pain, though, Brynn understood, but from simple resignation. They were beaten, and Juraviel had fully accepted that. If their captors walked Juraviel to the edge of a cliff, clipped his wings, and told him to jump, Brynn believed that he just might do it, and without complaint!

A covered pot was the first thing that came through the dark hole at the base of the wall across from Brynn, ushered forward by a pair of peat-covered, stiff-fingered hands. The zombie continued to crawl its way into the room, moving more like a worm than a bipedal creature. It set the pot down, then began to recede into the hole, moving slowly backward down the tunnel.