Neversfall (12 page)

She remembered their probing hands and wished she could hack them off. How could they have known about the pendant? What did they want with it? True it was magical,

but its power was not difficult to come by. Other than her own soldiers and the sly wizard Khatib, no one had known about the pendant. Khatib was dead, which left only her own soldiers under suspicion, and Adeenya did not want to travel that road. She refused to believe that random chance had allowed the attackers to find her pendant. She would be all the more wary until she could figure out for certain how they had known.

“Here, Orir,” Corbrinn said, interrupting her thoughts. “Two dozen or more.”

“More than two dozen? You’re sure?” she asked the halfling, who crouched on the ground before her examining tracks.

Corbrinn stood and nodded before continuing toward the forest. “At least two dozen left the citadel on their own feet,” Corbrinn said. “Some of these are deep, too heavy. Those are from the ones carrying fallen comrades on their shoulders.”

Adeenya motioned to her squad to follow and prompted the halfling to lead the way. At the edge of the woods, huge, dark trees loomed overhead and seemed to speak to her of the many lifetimes that had passed before their watch.

Violent lifetimes, she thought, keeping an eye out for the Aerilpar’s monstrous inhabitants.

Tall undergrowth in every shade of green blocked their way but also showed signs of recent passage, indicating the attackers had fled this way. A few of the soldiers cut a path with their swords, but the going was slow.

Corbrinn seemed frustrated, climbing to the low branches of a tree to look further into the forest, confirming the path they followed. He hopped down and pushed to the head of the line. “Out of my way, boys,” Corbrinn said, taking the lead.

The small man seemed to be swallowed by the plants all around him as he plunged forward. Adeenya followed closely behind so as not to lose track of their guide.

She followed the squirming weeds in front of her for several paces, and she was growing concerned about finding their way back. She could no longer see the edge of the woods behind them, and she did not much care for the notion of getting lost in the Aerilpar forest.

The brush before her stopped moving and she bent down, pushing some of the plants from her path. Corbrinn was there on all fours, and he looked over his shoulder at her, a finger to his lips. She squinted to look past him into the murkiness, the forest canopy letting in very little light by which to see. She jerked back when she saw motion, but she didn’t think her movement had been detected. With hand signals, she ordered the troops behind her to move back quietly before crawling away herself.

Corbrinn was right behind her, and after a short distance he spoke. “A clearing ahead. It’s them. Maybe a dozen or so.

Those were the types of odds she liked. She began to stand but stopped, a thought nagging at the back of her mind. Only a dozen?

“You said two dozen came through here, didn’t you?” she asked.

The halfling nodded.

“Trap?” she askedjhe halfling.

Corbrinn shrugged in response.

“Can’t be certain in all this brush.”

She had no choice. They needed more information, and if this bunch were alone, she could wipe out a large number of the wildmen in one quick sweep. Passing the word quietly through the ranks, she waited until it reached

the last of them before holding her spear high and dashing forward past Corbrinn. The undergrowth pounded her face, the edges of the leaves making tiny cuts across her nose and cheeks. She set foot into the clearing and whirled her weapon high over her head in an intimidating flourish.

She felt her stomach drop to her knees as she looked around and saw nothing but more trees and dense plants. The soldiers with her came to a stop and fanned out to search the clearing. The halfling entered with a confused look on his face.

“They were here. Right here,” he said, bending down to examine the tracks.

After a few moments he stood, his face flushed. “I just don’t understand.”

“You lost the trail?” she asked but could not make herself upset. The ground here was muddy. The interior of the forest was far moister than the fringe where they had entered, but even that could not account for the wet ground. The forest floor looked more like a soup than a trail riddled with tracks.

“No!” Corbrinn said, with a huff. “I lost nothing. It just ends here.”

Adeenya spun all around, looking for any clues at all. The men they’d been following had simply disappeared, it seemed. At Corbrinn’s insistence, she gave the halfling more time to examine the area, but she was not hopeful that they would find any sign of the vanished band. She looked at the faces of the men with her, all of them hungry for revenge, knowing that she could not sate their hunger that day.

“We should return,” Adeenya said.

A soft click answered her.

“Run!” Corbrinn shouted as he brushed past her leg. Adeenya spun to face the direction the halfling had come

from to see bright orange flames rising from the ground and growing steadily stronger. She moved to follow Corbrinn, shoving some of her soldiers along with her until more flames appeared before them and on every side.

“Yes, it’s a trap,” Corbrinn said over his shoulder.

The flames formed a nearly perfect circle. Several of the soldiers lobbed mud at the wall of flames chasing them to no avail. The fire was not spreading on the moist forest floor but that was little comfort to those trapped inside the burning circle.

“I’m sorry, miss,” Corbrinn said. “I should have smelled the oils.”

“Let’s just get out of this,” Adeenya said. “Ideas?”

Corbrinn stepped past the soldiers and stopped a few steps from the fire. His hands moved in strange patterns, and he mumbled something indistinguishable. Above the blazing orange light, a large quantity of water appeared, hanging in the air for a moment before crashing down, extinguishing the flames and creating a plume of smoke. A gap large enough to accommodate their passage opened before them, and several of the soldiers thanked Corbrinn as they fled the trap.

The circle of fire still burned, and although the plant life there was mostly protected by the moisture, leaving the forest ablaze seemed unwise. “Spread out, douse the flames with mud and dirt as best you can from the outside, and then we head back to Neversfall,” Adeenya said. “We can’t let it spread to the citadel.”

“And the invaders?” Corbrinn said.

“They’re gone. We won’t find them this day.”

“How do you know?” the halfling asked.

“If they were still here after that fire,” she said, “they wouldn’t have left us alive.”

? + + +

Taennen and Loraica’s examination of the tower had revealed no clues to Khatib’s death. When they returned to the courtyard, word was waiting for Taennen to join Jhoqo in the formians’ prison.

By the torchlight, Taennen saw Neversfall with all its dancing shadows. He found that he had no taste for the place. He accepted the salutes of the four guards outside the low stone structure and pushed the heavy door open. The smell inside nearly caused him to retch, and he took a step backward.

“Close the door,” Jhoqo’s voice came from the dimness of the interior.

Taennen lifted an orange silk sash to his face and tried to breathe through it, hoping to dull some of the stench. His eyes adjusted to the low torchlight, and he saw the formians divided among cells. Their feces and waste were in one corner of each cell and, although there was very little of it, the stench burned Taennen’s nostrils.

“We’ll get them outside for that in the future, sir,” Taennen said, indicating the mess.

Jhoqo shook his head. “They stay in here. Under no circumstances are they to leave this building.”

One look at Jhoqo’s face told Taennen not to argue the point. He acknowledged the order with a nod and turned his attention to Guk.

“Has he said any more?” Taennen asked.

“He’s talking. In fact, he’ll answer nearly any question you ask him.”

Taennen’s eyebrow went up. “Do they know who attacked us?”

“Ask him,” Jhoqo said, anger rising in his voice.

Taennen knew the anger was not directed at him, but he wondered what the formian had done to provoke Jhoqo. He turned to the big formian. “Do you know who attacked us?

“It does not matter. You and they will all become part of the hive,” Guk responded. He looked smaller, locked in the cell. He was still bound and blindfolded, the gag hanging loose around his neck.

Jhoqo snorted. “That’s his response to everything,” he said.

“It is the truth,” Guk said, his grating voice setting Taennen’s ears vibrating.

“They weren’t involved with the intruders, sir,” Taennen said, risking his commander’s ire.

Jhoqo spun to face him. “How do you know?”

“Because the attackers didn’t head for these cells at all. They weren’t here to free the prisoners. I doubt they even knew of them.”

Jhoqo’s eyes narrowed, his lips pursed. “They did not get the chance to,” he reasoned. “We know what these things can do, if the halfling and the other humans and even your experience are to be believed. And we’ve established that these things aren’t foolish. Their rescuers were outnumbered and ordered to retreat.”

Taennen had not considered that the intruders might be slaves of the formians. He knew the ant creatures had the ability to control the actions of other creatures. Guk stood passively as the two men discussed the situation. The formians ease and lack of expressive or readable features disturbed Taennen more than he could admit. But his gut still told him that the creatures were not involved in the attack on the citadel.

“It won’t matter,” Taennen said. “Adeenya will find the

bastards, and we’ll hunt them to the ground this time.”

“Let us hope so, Durir,” Jhoqo said. “We’re not getting anywhere with these beasts.”

“Sir, a moment, please,” Taennen said.

“Yes?” Jhoqo said.

“Sir, why didn’t I know about the tower? You told Khatib but not me,” Taennen said. He felt young and small again, but he needed to hear the answer.

“You didn’t need to know,” Jhoqo said as though he had been waiting for Taennen to ask the question. “The phrase was shared with me in the mission briefing. I knew that as our only arcanist Khatib would be using the tower, so he needed to know it. No one else had the information, not even the orir,” Jhoqo said.

“What about the lost company, sir? Who among them knew the phrase?”

“Their commander, certainly, and their arcanists,” Jhoqo said. “I don’t know who else. I knew that regiment’s commander. He was a good man and wouldn’t have revealed the phrase even under duress.”

“And their mage?” Taennen asked.

“I don’t know,” Jhoqo said. “Perhaps that’s the answer— the citadel’s former wizard was captured and revealed the phrase under torture. Or perhaps he had been on the intruders’ side all along.”

“That’s possible, sir,” Taennen said. The answer seemed too easy to Taennen but, as his own father had said, often the easy answer was the right answer.

“It’s more than possible. Much as I hate to doubt the fellow, it’s the only logical answer,” Jhoqo said, turning toward the door. “Come to my office at first light, Durir. We have plans to discuss.”

Taennen looked to Guk a few moments after the door

closed. “We’ll see that removed,” he said, pointing to the fecal matter.

“It does not matter,” Guk said.

“It does to me. It isn’t healthy,” Taennen said.

When no response came, Taennen turned for the door. As he grasped the iron handle, his gooseflesh leaped again at the sound of the formians voice behind him.

+ + + + +

From her watch position on the southern wall Loraica studied the empty plains that unfolded before her eyes, seeming to roll on endlessly. Even with their patrol time before the mission, Loraica was accustomed to life in the cities of Estagund, and she missed the smells of civilization, even the unpleasant ones. At Neversfall, she could smell only the nearby woods, and the Aerilpar held an odor of rot and decay mixed with the usual clean smells of foliage that she found unsettling, unlike any forest she’d ever experienced.

She scanned the ground below her in the darkness. Twice she believed she might have spotted something before picking out the movement as some sort of prairie rodent scuttling along the ground. When she spotted the creature again, she was tempted to fetch a bow to make a meal of it for the morning, but she decided to let it go about its foraging. It was nocturnal, much like herself, after all, and she honored that kinship.

“Report.”

Loraica spun, sword in hand in a flash, to face Jhoqo, who had approached her from behind. She did her best to settle her racing heart and school her face against the shock.

“No report, sir,” she said.

Jhoqo nodded and leaned against the outer wall, looking out into the vast night.

“You heard that Orir Jamaluddat returned?” he asked.

Loraica affirmed, sheathing her sword. “I haven’t heard the details.”

“They say a trap was set for them,” he said, jerking his chin toward the forest, “a ring of fire that erupted around them. But they escaped.”

“Are they all right? What happened?” Loraica said.

“They’re fine. Two of the wall guards earlier did report seeing some smoke from the forest interior,” he said.

“So they did not find the invaders?” Loraica asked.

“No,” he said.

“If they attacked the citadel simply to set a trap for us in the woods, they are foolish. They lost several men in the fight,” she said.

“Whose bodies we can’t even examine because they took the damned things,” Jhoqo said.

Loraica nodded. “Sir, I beg your pardon if I’m too bold, but what’s on your mind?”

He looked up from the floor and smiled. “Very well. I can always count on you to get to the heart of the matter, Terir. I need your help,” he said, looking her in the eyes.

“Anything, sir,” she said.

He blew out a long breath, leaning against the walls once again, and looked out into the dark plains. “Watch her. Tell me what she does, who she talks to, where she goes.”