Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) (43 page)

Abramm?” Trap called. “Can you move?” Abramm heard a grit of stone
behind him, a rattle of scabbarded steel, and realized Trap still clung to the
cliff wall and that he himself lay in his way.

Something dark passed behind him, just at the edge of vision. Clawing
with legs and feet, he dragged himself onto the ledge and scrambled forward.
Trap jumped the last few feet and Abramm caught him, the two of them
twisting aside as a blast of air and the sense of the veren’s presence warned of
attack.

Abramm’s net had gone over the edge when he’d fallen, but now Trap
was pulling his own free and handing it over as he drew both sword and
dagger. Abramm whirled to snare the outstretched talons as Trap plunged his blade into the dark breast, showering them with black blood. A jerk of the
net pulled the veren off course and the thing bowled into them, screaming,
flapping wildly, then falling away, taking the net with it.

“I hit it too low,” Trap said as Abramm peered over the edge after it. “It’ll
be back.”

Sure enough it twisted round as it plummeted toward the dark water, the
wings righting themselves, gaining purchase on the air, pulling out of the dive.
Abramm stepped back and tore off his overrobe, the garment spattered and
streaked with red and black. A glance over his shoulder showed him Shettai
had not moved but was no longer beating at her chest.

“We’ve got to get to the tunnel,” Trap said.

Abramm looked at him in alarm. “Hanoch said it was false. That we’d
never get out if we entered.”

“Better that than this. We need broadswords. Better yet, battle axes.”

A great shriek erupted from the bridge, where many of the travelers had
climbed up onto the girders for a better view of the contest, their pale forms
cluttering its dark lines like an infestation of brinybug. More forms and faces
crowded the top of the cliff wall across the way. Many were pointing as they
shrieked warning, and Abramm turned to find the veren coming in for its
third pass. This time, instead of diving and grabbing at them, it landed on the
ledge in front of Shettai and ran toward them, beating at them with its free
wing and jabbing its bare, knobby head, trying to spear them with its beak or
drive them back off the edge.

They had fought long enough together that they needed no words to
communicate. Abramm snapped out with the robe to distract and confuse as
Trap charged in, catching the flailing wing with his dagger and lunging in with
the sword. But though the blade drove deep into the creature’s massive
breast and loosed a stream of black blood, it seemed to have no effect beyond
enraging the thing.

Flinging the robe at the furiously jabbing head, Abramm leapt in and
grabbed it, hands closing upon the hard, pointed beak. As the veren reared
back, lifting him off his feet, white light flashed at the corner of his eye and
he saw the steel of Trap’s blade-now buried nearly to its basketed hilt in the
veren’s breast-ablaze with Terstan power. Screaming its rage, the veren
shook Abramm off, freed itself of the blinding robe, and loomed up over
them, wings half open, eyes burning with red fire, beak gaping, A steady stream of black blood poured onto the white blade, some sizzling into acrid
smoke where it touched the fiery metal, most flowing on over the basket and
down Trap’s arm.

The veren’s eyes flared again, then suddenly dimmed as the vigor drained
out of it all at once. Its wings sagged, its beak lurched drunkenly, and it reeled
back off the blade to stand swaying and dazed, its narrow tongue fluttering in
the gaping beak. The knobby head turned to fix them with a strangely human
hazel eye, recalling to mind the legends that claimed veren were manufactured from men gone too far in Shadow to redeem. Then the whole beast
shuddered, threw back its head, and fell face forward on the trail. It gave one
last twitching convulsion, then lay still. Trap leapt to its side, plunging his
blade into it one more time, just to be sure.

It was well and truly dead.

They heaved a simultaneous sigh of relief, looked at one another with the
same sober satisfaction, then shoved the carcass off the trail, watching it
plummet to the cove below. As the dark water swallowed it in a ring of white
froth a triumphant roar arose from the bridge where the people waved their
arms and cavorted in celebration.

The White Pretender and his Infidel live on, Abramm thought grimly.

Then he remembered Shettai.

She huddled in a fold of rock beside the cliff face. Blood soaked her robes
and stained the wall behind her. A great puddle of it shimmered on the ledge
around her, and she was very still, very pale.

Abramm knelt in her blood and touched her gently. She turned her head
to him, her dark eyes glazed. For a moment she struggled to focus, and when
she succeeded, smiled slightly.

“Deliverer,” she whispered. “Go … awaken the Heart….” Her gaze
fixed on the Terstan orb he still wore. A crease formed between her brows.
Staring intently, she lifted a blood-smeared hand to the talisman, the chain
tugging against his neck as she grabbed it. He felt a flare of warmth, and her
face went slack, her eyes widening. The surprise gave way to a joy and light
so vibrant he thought the stone’s power was healing her.

“So beautiful…” she whispered. “He’s so …”

Then her hand fell away and she sagged against the cliff, her head listing
sideways, eyes open but vacant, the little smile still on her lips. And on her
chest, gleaming between the ravaged edges of her tunic, lay a bright golden shield, burnished into the skin over her heart.

Abramm slumped back onto his heels. The mist had closed in all of a
sudden, blotting out everything but the beautiful hair, the pale, regal face, the
full lips…. The eyes looked wrong, though. Staring like that. He closed
them gently. Now she was just sleeping. He felt like sleeping, too, but he was
so cold. So bone-achingly cold.

The mist crept closer, narrowing around her face and layering a thin veil
across it.

He drew a sudden gasping breath that was almost a sob and realized he
was shivering and that his bruised shoulder throbbed with a hot agony
matched only by the fire in his forearm. His chest ached so fiercely he could
hardly breathe, and all over his arms and face little points of searing pain sang
in counterpoint.

The changing tenor of the cries from the bridge roused him-no longer
celebration but warning again-and he turned in time to see a dark form slide
out of sight into the misty ceiling.

A second veren, of course. Beltha’adi had probably sent every one of his
pets on the chase. He absolutely could not afford to let the northerners slip
through his fingers. Bad enough they’d escaped the Val’Orda.

He heard Trap speaking, but it was as if he were a long way off. “We’ve
got to … the tunnel, my lord.”

Yes. The tunnel.

Why didn’t he care? He turned back to Shettai, suddenly immensely
weary, almost hoping—

Abramm?” Trap’s hand closed on his arm, jerked him around. Abramm
blinked at the other man, and it dawned on him how bad the Terstan looked.

His face was gray, his eyes glazed. His right arm, covered with blood and
black ichor almost to the shoulder, was already hideously swollen. Now, as if
the effort of rousing Abramm had cost him his last bit of strength, he swayed
back against the wall, shaking his head as if he were dizzy.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“The veren’s blood is poison. Like griiswurm, only worse.” Trap shuddered violently. “I can’t heal it here. The tunnel is our only chance.”

Abramm glanced toward the bridge behind-its occupants still screamed
with excitement and fear-then ahead to where the cart path ran into the
false tunnel.

In their present condition, they could not go back the way they had come.
And negotiating the iron-pegged slash was unthinkable. Trap was right-the
false tunnel was their only hope, and not much of one. “Can you walk?”

For answer the Terstan pushed himself upright, refusing Abramm’s help
and cautioning him against touching the black slime. As he started off,
Abramm paused beside Shettai, then snatched up his discarded cloak and
bent to gather her up in it.

Though Trap had looked barely able to move, the Terstan surprised him
once again, seeming to have tapped into one last reserve of speed and agility.
Abramm, burdened with Shettai, fell quickly behind. Her weight pulled savagely at his shoulder, his every breath sent knife cuts of agony through his
chest, and his legs wobbled maddeningly. By the time Trap disappeared into
the tunnel mouth, Abramm had only covered half the distance. But he
wouldn’t leave her body to be picked at by the birds or, worse, collected by
the soldiers and impaled beside the city gates. Somehow he, too, called on his
last reserves and crossed the distance.

The opening loomed just ahead when another screech bounced off the
stone, so close and loud it made his ears ring. He didn’t look back, just drove
himself on, only four more steps, only three, only two….

He heard the hiss of the veren’s wingbeats, felt its bulk close upon him as
he dove through the opening, startled by a sharp, sluicing coldness, as if he
had passed through a waterfall. Barely maintaining his balance, he stopped in
his tracks as he found himself in complete darkness. Gasping and wheezemoaning, he turned back. The opening was gone.

Unnerved, he squatted to lay Shettai on the ground, then put out a hand,
feeling for the emptiness that must be there-and knocked his knuckles
against cold, unyielding stone.

Careful to keep contact with Shettai, he launched a wider exploration.
Trap lay unmoving not far ahead, his skin hot and slick with sweat and blood
and the veren’s awful ichor, which in here smelled strongly of burning flesh.
The tunnel was indeed a trap, a small prisonlike chamber, bounded on all six
sides by solid rock, its floor cluttered with rocks and many, many bones.

He groped around the entire chamber twice more before he finally sat
down, knees crowded to his chest, Shettai on his left, Trap on his right, the
Terstan’s shoulder, already hot with fever, digging into his calf. Fingers pressed to his friend’s throat found a rapid, fluttering pulse. Trap was not doing very
well.

Nor was Abramm, for that matter. The veren’s blood is poison.” In addition to his other injuries, he realized he was now growing sick himself Soon
he would be little better off than Trap.

He leaned his head back against the stone and exhaled a bitter sigh. To
have come this far, fighting free of the Broho, escaping Xorofin, killing the
veren-all that only to die like trapped rats? It was not fair. There was no
sense in it.

No sense.

And Shettai was dead.

He grew aware of her cooling flesh against his elbow and hip, and suddenly the cold ache of horrible loss lashed him with an intensity that made
all his other ills seem as nothing.

Memory flailed at him: Her dark eyes fierce as she flung herself between
him and the veren’s talons; her soft kiss this morning; the tearful joy with
which she’d met him in the drainage pipe after his escape from the Val’Orda;
the afternoon, months ago now, when she had so seriously and carefully
explained the difference in usage between two very similar forms of greeting,
as if understanding that was the most important thing in all the world. He
heard again the soft, startling melody of her laugh, saw the regal, bemused
smile with which she’d so consistently regarded him-until last night, when
she’d told him she loved him.

Like an avalanche it swept upon him, carrying him over the edge of that
inner precipice of grief and sorrow. Suddenly he was weeping, his voice ripping from his throat in harsh, wracking sobs that lanced fire through his chest.

Ah, sweet Fires, Eidon! If you live, why have you done this to me? After everything else! Why this? I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all.

He dropped his head into his hands, digging his fingers into his scalp as if
they might drive away the anguish.

“She is with me. And you, Abramm, son of Meren, remain alive to choose.”

He stiffened, the soft hiss of his indrawn breath sharp in the silence
around him.

Slowly he looked up. Trap still lay unconscious, but already his flesh
glowed faintly with the power of his healing. Barely visible in the darkness
beyond him stood a man of average height, dressed in linen tunic and a heavy robe scrolled with interwoven vines. His face, which Abramm saw clearly,
when the lack of light should have prevented it, was scarred and misshapen,
but his brown eyes-How can I tell they’re brown?-gazed at him with an
expression of heart-melting tenderness.

He blinked, and the man vanished, leaving a track of tingles up the back
of his spine. He blinked again but saw nothing more, aware now that he had
become very warm, that sweat slicked his brow and chest, and his arm
throbbed a tooth-jarring rhythm that overlaid all his other pains.

Plagues! he thought. I’m hallucinating already.

And then his stomach tore at his middle as if it had claws, and he doubled
over, groaning, lurching across the chamber to find a place to be sick without
befouling Trap.