Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (38 page)

Kharkara Plains

Lady Glynnis watched Lwyn thump his fist approvingly against
the hard Dhanani battle leathers as the women cinched them around him and laced
them closed with a leather thong.  Like the Dhanani leathers, it left his arms bare,
but with hardened leather layered with thin plates of stone over his chest and
back.  Similar plates covered his groin and his legs. These would not be as
strong as the plate riding armor he’d lost at Castle Brannagh, but they were
perfectly serviceable, and they certainly gave more protection than he’d had in
his shirtsleeves.  Besides, he seemed pleased at the freedom of movement they
allowed.

“Four deer,” one of the older tribeswomen had said, gauging
his size, and the others had laughed at her.  A large man of the tribes would
take two for a suit of leathers, three for the battle leathers.  Then again, he
was half a head taller than the chief and half again as broad top to bottom, so
in the end, she had been right: four deer, and they’d had to supplement with
scraps besides.

Tradition held that as a warrior, he was expected to kill
the deer for his leathers himself, and so he did, fashioning for himself, after
several abortive attempts, a proper Anatayan hunting bow to do so.  Eight deer
later, the tribe was well fed, and he had his regular leathers to wear day by
day as well as these battle leathers.

Having the skins was not enough of course.  The pieces they
would normally cut from a single skin with very little waste instead had had to
be cut from two and then had had to be joined in odd places with scraps here
and there.  They had had to mind where they put the extra seams so as not to
cause him to chafe while still allowing for the plates, and they had fussed
over the appearance of the extra seams, as well.  In the end, however, the
Dhanani women were rewarded with the sight of an Anatayan, even a
half-Anatayan, as he was, dressed in Dhanani battle leathers, a thing no one
would ever have thought to see.  But just as the tribe had welcomed him among
the other knights at war’s end, Anatayan blood or no, they’d welcomed him again
as a refugee in Lady Glynnis’s company and taken him in, as Chief Bakti put it,
“as a son of our brother Brannagh.”

Glynnis had been speechless with gratitude.  Lwyn’s mother’s
people would never have been so accepting of outsiders––they had not even been
accepting of him, being not of pure Anatayan blood.  But then, she supposed there
was a reason he no longer lived among his mother’s people.  She’d watched with
pride as he bowed in thanks to the Dhanani women, and she herself, acting as
his
ka
, had tied the storyskin on his bare arm, his own Dhanani
storyskin to be embroidered one day with the tales of his exploits.

Tero and Dane were likewise fitted with battle leathers made
from the skins of deer of their own hunting, though their leathers did not
require nearly as many and were much easier to come by.  Tero had taken it upon
himself to learn to use the
xindraga
, the curious Dhanani horse flail,
making it a point of pride to get his deer with that weapon.

She had been
ka
to them as well, tying on their
storyskins.

For Sedrik, one of the older men offered an old set of
leathers he had outgrown in his prosperity, and a few women were able to offer
up their old doeskin leathers for Greta and Nara. Greta in her own very
practical way settled into the strange feeling of wearing these odd leather
bloomers out in the world fairly quickly and seemed quite at home in them. 
Nara adapted to them, as well, but Glynnis found the strangeness of seeing Nara
wearing anything but her white cassock a little unsettling.  Like the knights’
need for new armor, it could not be helped.  The thin cloth B’radikite habit
she’d worn through the final battle at the castle and throughout their time in
the forest had simply given out.

Her own clothing was another matter.  The women had surreptitiously
taken it upon themselves to study her now filthy and tattered silk gown, a
thing they’d never before seen, to try to understand how it went together.  Then
they’d surprised her with a remarkable copy of that gown, crafted from all the
doeskin they’d hoarded to make themselves new leathers.  Of course, they’d had
no conception of the undergarments she wore beneath it since they’d only
studied the gown as they could while she’d worn it, so they’d worked quite hard
to make the skirts and bodice to hold their own weight and shape without
anything beneath, using the same stone layering as the men’s battle armor, only
to discover when they went to dress her that her destroyed silks had all manner
of underpinnings beneath to hold them up. 

The baffled looks on the women’s faces as they’d helped
undress her layer by layer, stripping away the filthy stays and corsets and all
the sundry petticoats and such that held up her skirt, had been enough to bring
the first sparkle of laughter from her throat in the longest time.  The gown
they’d made for her could literally stand on its own.  By accident, her new
gown was almost as armored as knights’ battle leathers.

The gesture touched her soul deeply.  These women had known
she was in deep pain at the loss of everything she’d known, and they’d worked
hard to welcome her and to ease her sorrow, to give her something of the life
she’d known as best they could.  Secretly she wondered if they understood that
she was not Renda, their hero from the war, but even if they did not, she
supposed that was all right because it gave her one last connection with her
lost daughter, and through her, to her beloved Daerwin.

Even though she would rather have retreated into the tent
the Dhanani built for her and never come out, she made an effort each day to
rise with the sun as they did, and to walk among them and to smile and play
with the children.  She made herself useful helping to cook or gather herbs. 
When she’d come to the cookfires with some rabbits she’d killed with a sling,
they’d been quite grateful and only mildly surprised, considering that she was,
after all, Renda’s mother. 

The sling she’d made from strips of her now useless
petticoats and a discarded leather thong, and it had taken her a bit or
practice to remember how to use it.  The sling was a sport she’d picked up as a
girl, one her mother did not believe was appropriate for the daughter of a baron,
but when her family had gone into hiding during the war to protect her brother,
her sling had been what fed them night upon night.

“That is your lure?”  The copper-haired girl looked at
her brother skeptically.  She crouched in the brush below the great trees and
rubbed at her nose, sling swinging from her hand as she watched him set the
unassuming sticks in place in the piles of fallen leaves.  At thirteen, she was
convinced that her brother was the stupidest person who had ever lived and
likely to forget to breathe if she did not remind him.

“Aye, it is, and what of it? How it looks matters not.” 
Ander, a handsome boy of sixteen with a shock of red hair and bright green
eyes, stood at the center of the large clearing and smoothed his seamless robes. 
“What matters is the magic I put into it.”

“If it matters not how it looks, Ander, why have you
fussed over it so?”

“Because it still has to be right.”

She could not imagine how the lay of this stick or that
should matter, and she was sure he was just trying to irritate her.  “It cannot
possibly work.”

He laughed.  “Why not?”

“Because you made it.”  She turned her nose up.  “I
should have had a brace of fat hares by now had I just gone on my own and set
to it.”

“It will work, Glynnis.  I promise.  And then you can
simply sit here and gather rabbits all day if you want.”  He ran back to where
she was crouching in the bushes and settled in beside her.  Then he turned and
moved his hands in broad gestures toward the sticks.  Nothing happened.  He
moved them even more emphatically.  Still nothing.

She watched for a few moments.  She squinted at the
sticks, trying to see if anything had changed.  “I told you.  You did it
wrong.  I don’t see any—”

He pulled her close and clapped his hand tightly over her
mouth, dragging her deeper into the brush behind them.  She struggled for a
second against him until she felt the curious crackling of his protections
extending around her, deepening.  Something was wrong, but what?  Then she
froze when she saw what he saw.

At the far end of the glade, three demons broke and
smashed through the thick trees and brush with their huge poison-spiked
ha’guaka
axes, sweeping this section of the woods in a clear search pattern.  Clearly
they were looking for something specific, and Glynnis was certain it was her
brother.  But why?  In all of Syon, why would they be searching this section of
the southern forest so precisely unless…unless they knew he was here?

She turned her face slightly under her brother’s hand,
her light blue eyes involuntarily looking back toward where their mother was
camped not far beyond them, right in the path of the demons.  She turned her
wide eyes toward her brother, and his gaze met hers.

The knights of Brannagh who had come to reprovision at
their castle during the Feast of Didian but two seasons past had shared their
stories of battle with the demons, creatures that up to that point, the baron’s
family had never seen.  “Demon” was a name given the creatures in a time of
deeper superstition, but the name remained.  Whether Kadak had created them
himself or whether they had been summoned from elsewhere was the subject of
many discussions, but ultimately, what was important was defeating them. 

They were fierce and strong and fast, and standing toe to
toe, even a knight of great strength and skill could not hope to hold his own
for long, to say nothing of the farmers and shopkeepers who had taken up arms. 
They had weaknesses, but they were quite adept at guarding them, as any
creature would be.  So the knights and farmers had learned ages ago to engage
the demons at a distance and in ambush when they could.  The biggest advantage
they had was that, at least in the beginning, the demons were not terribly
smart.  They had had difficulty reasoning out any strategy more complex than a
flanking maneuver.

 “But Lord Eris,” Ander had asked over his soup that
night long ago at the castle, “Surely the mages should be able to outthink
them.  How is it that they kill so many of us?”

“Well, let’s consider a moment.” Lord Eris, Sheriff of
Brannagh, said with a grin as he bit lustily into a crust of bread.  “What
would you do,” he said as he chewed, “if you saw one of them come through that
door right now?”

Ander had grinned.  “I’d throw fire at him.  And maybe
lightning if the fire did not do for him.”

“Aye, and you’d be dead in a trice, son.”  The baron,
Ander’s father, sipped from his cup.

Ander’s grin faded and replaced with a burning flush. 
Glynnis chuckled before her mother glared at her to stop.  She cast a glance at
the sheriff’s handsome nephew, Daerwin, to see if he’d noticed, but no, he was
intent on the conversation.  She was glad he had not seen her acting the child,
but she was disappointed at the same time.  It meant he was not looking at her.

“Mark this,” Lord Eris said, leaning over his plate
toward the boy. “The most common thing a mage will do when he’s ambushed by
these demons is to toss some fire at them.  Sometimes it’s not even the mage
that throws it but his protections.  So your instinct is like that of every
mage, and normally, it is a good one.  But, you see, with the demons, it’s a
mistake and likely to cost you your life.”

“I don’t understand.  Do they not burn like all living
things?”

“Aye, they do.  It angers them for the pain, you see, but
it will not stop them because they heal faster than the fire harms them.  Best
thing for a mage like yourself, boy, is to set them a-panic.  Then any weapon,
even a mere knife, aimed true, will suffice.  When they are panicked, like most
animals, they have no sense to guard their weaknesses and their healing slows,
almost as if they must concentrate to make it work.  Trouble is they don’t take
fright easily for all that they’re none too smart.   It’s quite harder than
you’d think to get inside their thick skulls.”

Now, facing them at last, Ander looked at Glynnis and
swallowed hard, trying not to think of the consequences to her or to his mother
if he should fail.  He had one chance to make this work.  “Wait for my signal,”
he whispered.

“What signal?”

“I don’t know yet. But you will know when you see it.”

She nodded.  She gripped her sling and slipped one of her
smoothed stone pellets into it. 

What would terrify a demon, he wondered as he moved, furiously
searching his mind for any mythology, any stories he’d heard, but nothing
came.  They had no easy obvious bane that would send them scurrying away, no
simple phobias, no guaranteed terrors.  No more so, he reasoned, than any other
living, breathing creature.

Living.

Breathing.

His eyes went wide.  Then he looked up into the trees and
smiled.

The demons moved steadily through the clearing, looking
under fallen trees kicking at the brush.  Ahead of them, something soft thudded
to the ground, and they looked up.  A shape lay in the dirt, a crumpled
mutilated shape that looked like…

Behind them, another wet thud, and beside them another. 
And another.  All around them, pieces of dead demons were falling from the
trees, hitting the ground and bouncing to a stop, sometimes just a hand or a
leg, sometimes entire bodies with their throats cut or their chests ripped
open.  One fell right before them with a broken neck, astonished eyes staring
out.  The living demons backed into a circle and watched the glade around them
for the ambush, ready to fight.