King's Shield (63 page)

“I was going to write a letter to Tdor. How do I start?”

Signi’s profile lifted toward the west as the sun dropped beyond the city of tents. “If she were here and you had the space of a hundred beats of your heart to say anything to her, but then she’d be gone, what would you say?”

Someone had come to the tent, interrupting him, and he’d put it away for later . . . a later that had stretched out until now. Seemed reasonable at the time.

Inda shifted uncomfortably, forcing himself to the truth: he didn’t know how to write a letter, not to Tdor. Strange. What to do had always come easy. Not what
was.
She’d always been the one to tell him what was.

Inda whooshed his breath out again. Stupid, but maybe a place to begin? Yes. And if he didn’t live, it wouldn’t matter about being Harskialdna, and maybe living in the royal city, and all that.

Inda ducked his head down, and printed neatly:

Then he signed it just
Inda,
and stuffed it into the golden box, hating how tight his throat felt. The tap, the words, and it was gone.

Chapter Sixteen

GRADUALLY, dawn’s blue lightened to the peachy clarity of a rain-fresh summer day. The molten gold of the new sun limned the reedy edges of grass tufting the sand dunes. It glinted off the minerals in the heavy rocks lugged to the shore all through the night when the tide was lowest. There they squatted as sea water hissed and foamed all about them, edges pointed seaward, ready to tear apart boats trying to land.

Sunfire glinted in the loose pale hair drifting below the cold, muted gleam of helms, along the cruel edge of drawn weapons, the tips of fish skewers, and in the grain of newly sharpened bits of wood planted all along the shore south of Lindeth. The same sunlight glinted in similar pale hair under similar helms out in the boats waiting for the signal.

A tangle of sea wrack pulled up during the recent storm had been artfully draped over holes dug in the wet sand, all evidence of a very busy night as Buck’s, Barend’s, and Rat’s combined forces labored to make that shore as lethal a landing place as possible.

The last of the ebb tide hissed and flowed out, and then the surges gained strength as tidal flood began. The inrush ing sea brought boats filled with warriors, all with shields angled upward, complicated arrow-fouling nets draped from the single masts to the boats’ blunted prows.

A weird, moaning note from a horn and sails jerked up those single masts. The boats launched together, a hundred across. Then another hundred, fifty boat lengths behind them. The snap of the single sails as the air filled them, the lift of prows, caused hands to tighten on weapons, fingers to check the tension on snapvine bowstrings, whispered exchanges and shiftings of crouched positions.

The chief of each boat swept the shoreline through field glasses. The slowly strengthening light pricked the bristling of spikes, skewers, sharpened posts. Huge rocks. Nothing they hadn’t expected. They knew the landing was going to be rough, they knew men crouched behind every boulder and shrub on that desolate stretch of beach where not a single seabird pattered or rooted.

They were the advance force, the Drenga. They had been honored with the task of making it possible for the Hilda coming in behind them to break through the enemy lines, even if they didn’t. Hearts began to drum, bellies to tighten, mouths to go dry.

Breakers formed, surged under the boats and rolled beneath them. The breakers crested, rushed up the beach in creaming foam. The boats picked up speed as the rising waves pushed them forward; a command and the sails were loosed, brought down, the masts stowed under the benches.

On a second command, the men snapped out oars and rammed them into the pintles for the last ride toward the shore.

 

 

 

A strange sight wound its way up the glistening white stairs of the white tower. Three men per upside-down narrow-hulled canoe went first, followed by others carrying paddles as well as bows, and packs with helms attached to loops. The last of the line of men carried rolls of weapons.

Evred halted on the landing outside the archive doors, head bent.

Inda could not see his face, but the stiffness of his shoulders, the audible breathing, brought back the memory of the other morning, when Evred had taken Inda’s good news about the archive like a blow to the heart.

Inda was distracted by Tau’s face, half lit in the torchlight. “Those marks
are
bruises. You been fighting?”

Tau grinned. Vedrid, behind him, smiled. “No, no, everything’s fine.”

“What?” Inda demanded.

Evred turned around, his face and voice neutral. “My father was not yet Harvaldar when you left, and so you did not know. The Captain of the King’s Runners protects the king, but there was usually a competition to determine who protects the Harskialdna.” Evred gave a brief, bleak smile. “Do you think my uncle would have tolerated Captain Sindan else, jealous as he was? But no Runner could best Sindan in those days.”

Inda met Tau’s eyes, got a rueful shrug of one shoulder.

Evred thrust away the memory. “Shall we go?” He indicated the open doors.

Inda jerked his thumb toward the shelves, slanted in from the round walls. The men in front shuffled inside, looking around warily at the tall shelves, the ancient books and scrolls. When they got inside they turned around again, the ones carrying canoes wedging in uncomfortably, and doing their best to keep the canoes from whacking the bookcases. This was only possible because of the tower’s high ceiling, enabling them to turn the canoes upright.

Nobody wanted to touch anything. Nearly ninety people were crammed into that tower room, along with packs and nine canoes, as Inda inspected the wooden carving around the door, with words in some ancient language worked into the images of green and growing things.

Not knowing what to expect—afraid he might not get any response at all—Inda touched the round figure of a sun with its stylized rays, said the word
atan
—

—and jumped violently back when the door to the landing flickered and vanished, leaving them staring not at the landing, but a flagstoned terrace with snowy mountain crags in the distance under a weepy gray sky.

“Damn!” someone exclaimed behind him.

Inda smiled. This would be about as far from damnation as one could possibly get.

He braced for the remembered transfer wrench and plunged through into the shock of almost-frozen thin air that smelled of wet rock and pine. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “It didn’t hurt!”

The men hustled through, crowding on one another as if that magical door might flicker away again and cut one of them in half.

Inda backed out of the way and stared at that door, which was even stranger than the way the doorway had looked from within the tower: in the middle of the air a rectangular door-shaped hole existed, beyond which was the archive with its glistening white walls, the light slanting down from the unseen high windows, shelves visible behind the men, seemingly extending into nowhere.

When the last man was through, Inda spotted weather-blurred carvings in the carefully fitted, rainwashed stone flagging. The carving matched that around the door in the archive. He stepped on the carved sun and the weird door vanished in a blink.

“I wish you’d waited.” Tau sighed. “I would have loved to go around behind it, and see what it looked like from there.”

“It’s magic,” one of the men exclaimed. “Like as not your nose would fall off.”

“Or your nob,” one of the younger men cracked, and though some laughed, many made a surreptitious check to make sure they still had all their parts.

The change in air had clogged everyone’s ears and noses. For a few moments they sneezed, sniffed, shook heads and stuck fingers in their ears in order to get them to pop. It was cold enough that their breath puffed brief clouds of vapor in the chilly drizzle.

Inda said, “The path seems to begin right here.” He pointed to a broad, flagged path cut in switchbacks down the rocky incline. The path was edged with small stones.

As the men filed past, Inda said, “Sp—Evred. I meant to remember, and I’d better do it now.”

Evred half turned. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just, if we get separated. These rings. I, ah, got ’em in Ymar. They
find
one another. All you do is touch it, turn around, go in the direction the ring, ah, buzzes at you. I don’t know what else to call it. Feels like a bee caught in your skin. No sting.”

“More magical surprises?” Evred asked, with a slight smile.

“Just rings,” Inda said, sliding one onto his little finger; his other knuckles were too large for the plain golden band to fit comfortably over. “Don’t do anything else. But now I don’t have to worry about losing track of you in case something happens.”

Evred took his in silence. Vedrid started ahead; Tau was the only one who observed the slow deliberation that was almost ritualistic as Evred slid his onto his left forefinger.

“Let’s go.” Inda plunged down the path.

Evred followed. Tau fell in last.

 

 

 

On board the flagship, Commander Durasnir finished his morning drill ritual, stepped from his inner cabin to the outer cabin. He drank a spice milk while he read the night’s dispatches. Then he walked his accustomed morning tour of the ship, finding everything efficient and orderly as always under the watchful eye of Battle Group Captain Gairad.

He proceeded at an unhurried pace down one deck to the cabins for the leaders. Erkric was gone. The wardroom assigned to the mages was empty except for a young mage attending the communication device that eventually furnished the dispatches up in the cabin, and except for Dag Ulaffa, who was eating some berries and drinking a spice milk.

Ulaffa regarded Durasnir for a few moments, then said, “Alfrac, please bring me another spice milk. Would you like one, Commander?”

Durasnir made a brief sign, the dag whisked himself out, and Durasnir said, “Can you transfer me to some vantage so that I may see the battle in progress?”

Ulaffa’s gaze went diffuse. His old hands gently caressed the sides of his glass, then he said, “I will see what I can do.”

Durasnir put his hands together in peace mode and departed.

 

 

 

Inda and Evred followed the bobbing canoes down the slanting switchbacks. Stones clattered over the edge and down into an abyss as Inda’s toes kicked them up. He scarcely noticed, he was too busy peering down into the enormous canyons to the east as the rising sun slowly lowered the shadows. He hoped they’d be able to spot the pass—or rather anyone in the pass—from these heights.

Evred’s attention was drawn in the opposite direction. He rounded a wind-twisted pine and gazed upward, until at last the bends in the path led to a place where—however briefly—the cliffs and the ancient firs all parted. The drizzle had lifted in the west, promising respite later; the clouds were underlit like silver streamers, an arrowhead of ocean sparkled in the distance to the south. Green hills, fields, flower-dotted meadows all demonstrated the healing power of rain after the previous month’s drought.

It was beautiful, and deceptively peaceful.

Aware of the irony, he rounded another cliff, which gave out onto an open vista, rank on rank of climbing crags. His eye was caught midway up by a rocky structure never made by nature. Ah, there they were at last! Tall stones curved, dimpled with wind- and weather-smoothed carving made by hands an unimaginably long time ago.

“What?” Inda asked over his shoulder, alarmed at Evred’s intent stare upward. “Venn?”

“Wind harps.” Evred’s face was cold-reddened like everyone else’s but his voiced burred with deep pleasure.

“What?” Inda asked, curious at that rare note of elation.

“The Morvende archivist told me about them,” Evred said. “I did not explain them already? No, though I started half a dozen times. But we were always interrupted. Anyway, the harps were apparently meant to evoke the resonance of some old Sartoran stone called disirad. Supposedly, the tower is made of it, though all the magical virtue has long gone out.”

Inda had a vague recollection of hearing something similar, though not about wind harps. Tdor? Fox? He couldn’t remember anymore.

“They consider them a failure,” Evred continued as the next switchback carried the wind harps out of view. He wished the wind would rise and sound them, but the soft rain remained vertical. “How could such a thing be a failure? I used to listen to them when I was alone in the tower, my first winter at Ala Larkadhe.”

“What did they expect?” Inda asked over his shoulder, hopping over a tiny stream cutting slantways across the path to drip down the cliff on its way to some distantly booming waterfall. “What’s disirad supposed to sound like?”

“It resonated in the spirit, the Morvende archivist said. It sang
.
”

“Wonder what
that
means?”

And as they clambered down the path, feet sometimes sliding on mossy patches that were always in the shadow of a rocky outcropping, they speculated, drawing on old readings and half-remembered stories. It was for a brief, exhilarating time just like childhood.

Inda felt it as well. He’d had such conversations with Fox, and sometimes with Tau. Meaning—people bring meaning to things—Fox’s thoughts on meaning—is there any meaning, and if not, why do human beings see meaning in so many things? Inda stumbled cheerfully over a tangle of questions and observations, wishing he’d made an effort to get books and read more as he fumbled for the words to express his conviction that there is meaning beyond the meanings.