Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (51 page)

“Meaning what, exactly?” Adrian demanded.

“We all of us heard about it.  Orders come down from
on high to bring you back to the general, whatever high water we have to wade
through to do it.  Not that any of us would disagree, mind.”

“Bring you back to who?  Who’s your commanding
officer?”

“Mendell.  Who else is in charge this side of the
mountains?”

Jide pushed him back with forceful disgust.  The man
sprawled in the dirt.  “I should have read that plain enough to see,” he spat,
rising to his feet.  “A viper never looses its poison.  First one, then the
other.”

“This…goes beyond insubordination,” Adrian whispered
in outrage.  “Or simple power lust!  Is he so afraid of the punishment he will
face upon our return home that he seeks to destroy me first?”

“Sounds like the slug.  A vile, rotten bastard to the
core, like we figured.  And calling himself a general now…someone has some high
ambitions.”

“Don’t you dare!” the captain rallied enough to yell. 
He struggled to rise and failed, his arm hanging limply to the ground.  “A man
with the guts to stand up and face the threat to our homeland!  If’n he’d been
in charge in the first place, we wouldn’t be in such straights, I’ll wot.”

“You must be a masochist,” Jide snarled, and booted
the captain hard in his gaping wound.  He shouted over the man’s shrieks, “If
you look up to a ragged bastard like him, I’ll be more than pleased to give you
your just comings!”

“Rather put up with…a stern superior…than a traitor,”
the patrol captain gasped.  “At least he’s honest.”

“Treason?” Adrian felt his blood boiling under the
stabbing pain in his head and arm.  “He spins tales to bolster his position?  I
will not tolerate such flagrant corruption!”

“Not him.”  The captain stared balefully at Adrian. 
“The
real
general.  The one who
serves
the king, rather than stab
him in the back.  Xenos, of course.”

“What?” Jide thundered while Adrian felt his jaw drop
at the accusation.  In his entire life, when had he ever done other than
faithfully serve his king?  “Spare me your pathetic lies, worm!  Xenos can’t be
halfway across the ocean yet.”

“If’n you’d been at your duties, land pirate, you’d
know well enough he’d arrived already.  But you’ve been running around greedy
tom-kitty with the
general
and his
Galemaran
friends, so it is
little wonder.  No doubt you were the ones who gave the local miscreants the
knowledge they needed to destroy the Citadel.  How much did you sell that
information for?”

“What?”  This time the exclamation exploded from
Adrian.

“What’s the matter?” the captain sneered with all the
derision he could summon through his pain.  “Didn’t think they’d ever be bold
enough to use what you sold to them?”

Jide kicked him with the steel toe of his boot again,
breaking the cracked gravestones of his teeth still further.  “If there’s any
questions in the air, they sure as rain and hail
won’t
be coming out
from between your lips!”

Adrian felt his mind reeling from the unseen blows
coming one after the other.  The accusation that he had ever done less than his
best for the eleven-point crown stabbed deeper than this pathetic wretch could
have possibly known.  Then the absurd claim about the Citadel…  Absurd, yes,
but remotely possible?  What had happened?  He was stunned.  Battle shocked. 
His head nearly rang with it, unable to do naught but listen dumbfounded as
Jide beat the truth from the patrol captain.

He had expected to return to a deteriorating situation
at best.  But this!  Could it be believed?  If so, what, if anything, was still
salvageable?

Most bewildering of all, would he, the most respected
general the Arronathian Armed Forces had ever known, be
allowed
to
salvage anything?  Xenos, present at the king’s order, declaring Adrian a
traitor?  Issuing orders to apprehend his predecessor on sight?  What madness
reigned?

Jide continued to wring every last detail out of the
patrol captain until blood loss made the man’s head swoon.  At the end, Jide
drew his sword to send the captain along after his men.

“How long has it been since we were last forced to
such brutal actions?” Adrian quietly asked Jide while they departed through the
moonlight.

“Twelve years,” Jide replied at once.  “That warehouse
lieutenant all the way down in pisspot Rensicollo.  The one who was selling his
weaker men to the slaver’s brothel.”

Adrian grimaced in distaste.  “There, I felt that
justice was well served by his hanging.  This…travesty…  I cannot abide such
bloodshed over misunderstandings.”

“Mis…what are you
saying
, Adrian?  Weren’t you
listening to that worm back there?  Xenos is doing his damnedest to turn the
army against you!”

“Councilor Xenos only has the facts he can see to work
with.  Had I arrived on the scene and found a similar situation, I can’t
honestly say I would draw any conclusions other than what he did.  It is
imperative that we return directly and treat with the councilor.”

“And what about the minor fact that every scurvy
jackstraw under Mendell’s command is going to see gold coins sparkling in his
eyes the instant they set sight on your pretty head?  And don’t forget Harbon! 
Xenos
is the one who pulled every string available to thrust those
vipers into our ranks!  Remember?”

“Of course I do.”  Adrian’s mouth set in a tight
line.  “As I said before.  Everyone, including us, keep in mind, is guilty of
mistakes in judgment.  The king trusts the councilor, and that is the end of
the matter.”

“It should be the end of the matter, you mean.  But
there’s too many lefts in this mess where there should be nothing but straight
paths.  You can’t deny it.”

“All the more reason to meet with the councilor
soonest.  As privately as we can manage.”

“Which will mean not at all.  Adrian, you remember the
whole affair with the Marquis of Ostler?  The servants reflect the master. 
That was as hard a lesson as ever we learned.  Only a fool swims over a
waterfall a second time as soon as he recovers from his first attempt.”

“That…is among the many questions I intend to put to
him.”

“I was right about those two from the first!  It would
have been better to quietly put them down than have to deal with the
consequences of their power hunger.”

Adrian’s silence was stony.  He had hated the very
notion of fighting corruption with the same type of actions, even if it purged
such corrosion from the ranks.

“Have you remembered anything at all yet?” Jide
continued, his tone only slightly modulated from before.

“Only a vague darkness.”

“That smells the worst in the whole rancid lot.  I
don’t know what Harbon did to you, but whatever it was must have shattered at
least a dozen death-sentence laws to gods damned fragments!”

“It is fortunate for him that he has apparently
perished,” Adrian agreed grimly.  “Though not so fortunate for us.  Until we
learn how he…he gained control over me…I shall not feel secure in my mind.  Not
merely for the fact that anyone might seek to seize control of the army through
me again, but how may we be certain that our officers, the men we trust with
such a magnitude of responsibility, are acting according to their free will?”

Jide frowned, the stars glinting off his narrowed
eye.  “I hadn’t thought that far into it.”  He collected his thoughts before
cursing, “Damn it all!  Half the army could be under the same type of
brain-bondage!”

“A more worrisome question is, how far can we trust
our mages to investigate the matter?  Does this problem stem from within our
own, or from forces without?  Is this a symptom of the darker threat that
imperils all of Arronath?”

“That’s simple enough!  It’s a symptom of Xenos’
treachery!”

“We must not jum—”

“To the hells with jumping to conclusions!  If nine
facts from ten suggest the damnable man is a corkscrew digging into the crown’s
authority, then you’d have to be a madman to persist in a belief that he is
blameless!”  Jide sidestepped in front of Adrian to face him, hands gripping
the general’s shoulders.  “Your loyalty to Arronath’s rulers is admirable, old
friend.  It truly is a rarity.  But you have to finally accept that the king
has been deceived by a master at the craft.  A poisonous wasp who is hovering
about the throne, buzzing constantly in his ear.”

Adrian removed Jide’s hands from his shoulders,
wincing when the wound in his arm drew tighter.  “We will bring any such
deceptions to light once we have had the chance to speak privately with the
councilor.”

He would hear nothing further on the matter from Jide
as they walked on through the night, searching for enough shelter to house them
until the new dawn.
al

Yet through it all, the nagging suspicions that had
nibbled at the foundations of his faith for so long renewed their siren chorus
in his head, their voices louder than he had ever permitted them to rise
before.

Ilona’s bare breasts glistened magnificently in the
summer sunlight, stealing Marik’s breath away as she rose from the river
water.  Her olive flesh exuded a healthy glow under the wet sheen that
captivated him.  The rivulets of her hair were plastered intimately to her
skin.

She walked to the shore.  The water droplets falling
from her curves were crystal clear, appearing as though she shed diamonds from
her pores.  Her hips swayed in a way that they only did when she was in a
playful mood.  Marik watched his nude goddess moving gracefully toward him,
feeling the excitement building to such a peak that his entire body felt in
pain.

Where he lay prone on the sandy shore, she knelt by
his shoulder.  Her gentle fingers lifted his head into her lap and sent fiery
tingles through his scalp.  She stroked his hair fondly as he gazed up into her
beautiful, endlessly brown eyes.  He reached up to squeeze her breast in one
hand, both treasures so perfectly fitted to his palm that they must have been
made for him alone.

“Doh-ah?  Marik?”

The pain throughout his body intensified.  Around him,
the sunny riverbank blurred.  The water lost its substance, the air twisted in
a paint pot spiral.  Through the haze, new shapes began taking form, first and
foremost being Caresse, whose breast he was squeezing.

He looked up at her from her lap.  Beyond her raised
eyebrows, he could see the rough stone of a cave wall.  Shivers abruptly
wracked him when he became aware of the cold air.  A slight shift, followed by
the struggle to move, told him that the constriction around his legs was from
tightly wrapped blankets.  The hems scratched against his chin where he had
loosened them during the reach to grab Caresse’s—

Marik jerked his hand away as if burned, the
realization that he still maintained his grip jarring his mind forcefully to
awareness.

“I see you are finally awake.  There is no water yet,
so you will need to wait a while longer.  Wyman promised to return before
breaking any ankles.  He will be back before nightfall, so he should.”

He sat up…or made an attempt to before fire lanced
through his chest.  His head slumped back onto her lap, his groan sounding
flat.  When his vision cleared enough to see properly he saw why the noise had
sounded so odd to his ear.

The rock walls had fooled him into thinking he lay in
a cave.  Without thinking he had listened for an echo when his groan bounced
off the walls.  Instead, he lay in a…was crevice the right term?  He could see
little of the surrounding area, only the reaches above where he lay prone.  A
thin crack wound its way along the left side wall.  Sunlight faintly glowed
behind it.  Clearly the right side wall had come to lean forward in the distant
past, creating this near-cave.

He gazed intently at that crack.  It could not
possibly be a straight line to the outside.  The narrow space must curve back
in the opposite direction.  Unless he were the size of a very young child, he
would have no hope of eeling through the crack and reaching the sunlight.

Marik’s eye followed the crack until his head turned
enough to see the crevice blossom outward.  Atop a debris mound thirty feet
tall, the exit must exist as a plague-like pockmark on the mountainside.  A
chill breeze blew in through the opening.  Cold air was funneled directly at
them until it felt like open-plains wind.

“You should stay wrapped up, you should,” Caresse
admonished.  “Two cracked ribs and enough bruises to make a bull cry.”

“My ribs?”  His memory danced, but the sensation was a
familiar one.  Before the wizardess could reply he answered his own question by
corralling his thoughts into coherency.  “I remember, or I think I do.  There
was a spinning tree and it slapped me down.”

“Something landed you a square one,” she agreed.

“I can’t…quite picture what happened.  Everything went
crazy all of a sudden.”

Caresse shrugged her shoulders.  “It is the same with
us.  The same questions no one can answer.”

Marik blinked.  “You’ve been awake longer than I
have.  What day is it?  What’s been happening?”

“I think it is the day after tomorrow.  Or what
tomorrow was when we were battling.  I’ve lost track of time, so I have.”

“We’re still in the mountains, aren’t we?”  He moved
his head enough to have a better look around.  The crevice’s walls came to a
dead end ten feet away after a minor war to see which could produce the
sharpest protrusions.  Blankets and packs were scattered across the floor,
which was surprisingly level considering it was nature-made.  A small pile of
stones sat on the exposed floor in the center of the clutter.

“In the mountains, indeed,” she agreed.  She smoothed
down of lick of his hair which had become mussed at his movement.  Her hand
re-evoked memories of Ilona.  Marik felt her absence stronger than he could
ever remember.  “We must be three miles from the overlook.  Wyman spent an
entire day searching for a way down or shelter before we came here.  Maybe it
is the day
after
the day after tomorrow, then.”

“Wyman…”  A brief swirl of vapor and mist clouded his
mind momentarily before he could force it away.  “Why is he with us?  Is
Dietrik here, too?”

“I do not know.  Wyman says he was walking in the
night when he saw several large, suspicious men creeping to the path we took in
the daytime.  He did not like their bearing, so he followed them to see what
mischief they played at.”

“Large…Beld!”  He sat upright like a branch snapping
until the abrupt pain reminded him that, though made of flesh rather than wood,
he was just as broken.  “Yes, Beld was there,” he grunted, pressing a hand
firmly to his ribs.  Marik scraped his legs across the stone until he sat
side-by-side with Caresse, leaning against the crevice’s wall.  “And his
friends.  Only his friends?”

“Marik?” Caresse asked when his words fell into
incomprehensible mumbling.

“It’s another onion,” he answered without thinking. 
“But I don’t have time to peel it now.  Can you tell me what happened?”

“Partly,” she said hesitantly, concern in her voice
while she studied him carefully.  “The essence of fire came at us from the
flying mountain.  It hit the cliff side, so it did.”

“Essence of fire…you mean a fire-based attack, don’t
you?”

“Indeed, but it was too fast.  I could not see it.  I
only felt the elemental essence approaching.”

“That fits,” he decided.  “There was a strong mage
aboard that thing.  He was starting a counterattack.  Whatever happened must
have been his doing.”

“If he worked alone, then I hope the fall killed
him.”  She frowned at different concerns troubling her.  “Indeed, I do.  After
the first attack, the overlook was shattered.  Did you see?”

“I did.  It looked like a picture puzzle with all the
pieces shaken up and dumped back into the positions where they had been. 
Approximately.”

She nodded once, a severe motion that jerked an image
of Celerity from the recesses of memory without warning.  “The second attack
turned the overlook into a slope over the cliff with rocks and trees sliding
off.  You were sliding off too, except Wyman came running from the path and
caught your wrist at the edge.  He says he pulled you back up, and damned bloody
near rolled off the flaming mountainside with the avalanche four gods damned
different times.”

“His words, I assume.”

“Oh, indeed.  The pathway down was gone.  We had to
move through the mountains since the overlook kept crumbling away every
moment.”

“Carrying me the whole way, right?  That can’t have
been easy.  I’m glad he found this cave for us to shelter in, though.”

“It is not a
cave
!”  She crossed her arms and
pursed her lips.  “Why are men obsessed with
caves
?  The entire time he
kept saying we needed to find a
cave
we could camp in, so he did!  Try
to explain about limestone and granite and all you get are looks when they
decide you are being a silly nit.  ‘
Mountains have caves, so we need to find
one.
’  Honestly!”

“Uh…”  It was the first time he had ever seen her
annoyed straight out of her buoyant nature.  “So…uh, he found a good spot in
the end, didn’t he?  I guess it doesn’t matter.”

She redirected her irritation on him.  “
I
found
it after casting earthsense through the stone.  There was a larger space
with
spring water closer by, except it was two-hundred feet down a sheer wall over a
mile-deep chasm.”

“Oh.”  He cared little for the thought of such a
shelter.  Far too high.  To bring the conversation back to the salient subject,
he noted, “I can see others came with us.  But unless they preferred to carry
their packs with them while they are out, I don’t much like what I am seeing.”

Sorrow drained her ire.  “Seven survived the attack. 
Lynn is here, but Jeremy must have been right in the thick.  We found no trace
of him.”

Marik stayed silent.  He barely knew any of the
mercenary mages beyond Tollaf, whom he knew better than he cared to, and
Caresse, who had helped in his mage training.  Lynn’s survival was good since
he assumed the two women felt a closer bond between them than with any of the
male magic users in their small group.  Yet she obviously felt Jeremy’s death
keenly.  She had welcomed her magical talents, and had been with the Kings
longer than he.  Caresse must have come to accept them all as unblooded
family.  Perhaps even boring old Yoseph.

He averted his gaze out of embarrassment for her
grief.  In doing so, he picked through the shapes populating the shadows around
them.  A thought struck as he did so.  His eyes moved with increasing
apprehension after every shadow absent of—

Caresse continued.  “It is you, me, Wyman, and Lynn,
and three of the city mages.  They are supposed to be checking possible paths
to Galemar I found with earthsense.  Indeed, they are.”

So Yoseph was also gone.  The Crimson King’s mage
force had been cut in half since the time he had joined it.

His roving eye picked out a numerical anomaly after he
was forced to admit that his custom sword was absent.  Ercsilon almighty, after
all that trouble, it hadn’t even lasted half a season!  “Seven survivors?  I
see sixteen packs.”

“Wyman collected as many as he could the next day, he
did.  They were littered everywhere after the overlook blew up.  He says these
were the only ones he could safely reach without pitching ass over teakettle to
the bloody plains.”

“Then…yes.  I don’t see my…things.”

“Mine are gone, too.  I do not know who these belonged
to.”

“Well, that was smart thinking.  We’re going to need
all the provisions we can gather if we are going to get out of the Stoneseams. 
Except I have to wonder how many provisions we have.  When we left, we weren’t
planning to be away from the supply stores for longer than a day or two.  I
hope whoever packed these was smart enough to pack more than they thought they
needed.”

“This one did not think so,” Caresse said, and kicked
the nearest pack.  “I looked through it yesterday.  A bag of dried grapes will
work for us, but I do not think powdered stag antler will taste very good.  Or
mole claws.  Or rat teeth.  Or viper fangs.”

“Must have been one of the city magicians.  His
components seem to have a running theme.  He must have preferred a particular
spell and ones similar in nature.  Any idea what sort of spells those
components would generate?”

She shrugged, as ignorant of a magician’s magic as
he.  Marik eased the pressure his hand exerted on his ribs to see how
incapacitated he might be by the injuries.  Each breath brought mild pain, yet
nothing worse.  They felt cracked rather than clean broken.  Still in their
original position without bone shards shredding the surrounding muscle or
penetrating his lungs.

Caresse spoke on, providing the less essential details
concerning their journey to this crevice through a pathless mountainscape.  It
sounded a hard trek and he appreciated the extra difficulty he must have caused
with his dead weight.  After a candlemark, at the point where the sunlight had
bled to a reddish-orange, Wyman returned with the other four.

Marik expected the typical edged-sarcasm of
mercenaries everywhere.  Instead, Wyman glanced at Marik long enough to
ascertain his state, then marched to the far side of the crevice to root
through several rescued packs.

For an instant, Marik narrowed his eyes for closer
study to recheck that it
was
Wyman and not Sloan.  Well, Wyman never had
been a vernacular type.  Since his first day in the squad, the man offered
little interaction to anyone other than Churt.  The boy archer seemed the only
one whom Wyman tolerated sharing his time and space with.

The other four also moved without words.  Caresse rose
to join Lynn in private conversation no one else could overhear.  They settled
on a layer formed of several spread blankets laid to pad the hard stone while
the city mages hesitated in their movements.  Marik could see they were uncomfortable
with the situation, stranded with four mercenaries, far from home, enduring
circumstances they probably had never conceived being in.  At last, each found
a private spot to huddle in.  They wrapped blankets around their bodies to ward
off the increasingly chill evening winds.