Return of the Guardian-King (3 page)

As Abramm turned to him, the icy draft from the chamber’s rear washed around him again, and with it came inspiration. Wordlessly he wheeled and picked his way across the crowded floor to the back wall. There he bloomed a kelistar into the darkness, making it hard enough he could hold it in one hand while he fingered the wall with the other.

Furious now, the rhu’ema crammed themselves back into their crevices. He touched the cold stone, the rough bristles of grass, then the faint, hairlifting vibration of the spell. A rush of threats, alternatives, and condemnation flooded his mind from the panicked ells. He ignored it, seeking the Light. . . .

It flared from the shield on his chest and down his arm into the stone veneer of the illusion, shredding it to streamers of mist. A hole big enough to fit two horses through gaped in a wall riddled with holes, many of which had already been chinked with blowing snow or grass. More snow piled up on the threshold as flakes held back by the illusion fluttered through the opening.

At Abramm’s back, people gasped and a woman cried, “There’s nothing there.”

Other exclamations followed the first, the pitch of the voices escalating until in moments Trinley’s feared panic was upon them. People raced about, jabbering, grabbing this or that without heed. One woman snatched up her baby and hurried for the doorway without cloak or blanket.

Abramm caught her arm as she went by him and shouted, “Enough! Stop this NOW!” The old kingly imperiousness rang in his voice, and the command produced an immediate and startling effect. Everyone froze and turned toward him. Only the children continued to cry.

“We must go,” he said firmly. “And we must hurry. But we must do so in a sensible manner. Eidon has brought us to this point, and he knew we would take this detour.”

“Aye, an’ now we must pay fer our foolishness,” old Totten Ashvelt said fiercely, glaring at Trinley.

“How will we find our way in the dark?” demanded Kitrenna.

Abramm reminded them they had at least an hour of light left.

“Will you lead us, then, Alaric?” This was from young Galen Gault, Trinley’s newly wed nephew. “We all know you see better in the dark than anyone.”

“Aye,” Trinley said sourly. “Please. Lead us. ’Tis what ye’ve wanted from the start, isn’t it?”

Abramm opened his mouth to deny it, then realized this, too, was a distraction. What’s more, he knew it didn’t originate with Trinley but with the two glowing forms at the back of the hut. Thus, he gave Trinley a quick nod and set about directing their preparation to leave. Soon, with Pearl repacked and rucksacks redonned, Abramm led them down the trail from the promontory, Rolland on his heels and Trinley bringing up the rear.

The track widened swiftly, and soon the twisted trunks and snow-laden branches of stunted evergreens sprang up along its downward side, further defining the trail, even in the driving snow and gathering gloom. If the wind howled at their backs, it also swept their path relatively clean of snow.

The trees grew in size and number as they descended, the wind lessening, as well. The wolves howled again, and Abramm stopped, tossing his hood back to listen as Rolland, immediately behind him, did likewise. A second scream answered the first, followed by a chorus of strange, sharp squeals, undeniably closer than they’d been before.

“Are those the wolves, Mama?” a small voice asked as the wind lulled.

“Shh, poppet,” said the child’s mother, Rolland’s wife, standing behind her husband.

“Are they coming to eat us?”

“No, son,” Rolland said. “Now, hush!”

“They’re still down in the valley, where the deep drifts will hamper them,” Abramm assured them. “We’ll reach Caerna’tha long before they get here.”

But a dry voice in his head grimly reminded him that the men at Highmount had said these wolves were like no others. Huge, agile, able to leap twenty feet at a bound, they were not real wolves at all, in fact. But something worse.

We’ll make it,
he assured himself.
Eidon will see to it
. The wolves screamed again, as if to contest that view, and he quickened his pace.

The snow had been knee-deep for some time when Rolland moved to take over breaking the trail. Stepping aside, Abramm stood gasping back his breath as the others slogged past him, heads down against the storm. With no faces to look at, his eye caught on the lights that glowed in the surrounding tree trunks. Green, blue, red, and gold glimmered from the cracks in the trees’ platelike bark—always on the side away from the wind, as if taking refuge from the storm.

“You’re not going to get away, you know.”

He frowned, realizing that again he was hearing their voices, and irritated he should be able to.

“We’ve been waiting for you. They’ve been waiting for you. Especially for you,
O great slayer of shadowspawn.”

As if on cue, another ululation wailed on the storm winds, closer than ever.

Now Oakes Trinley approached him, trudging at the end of the line, face turned downward like the rest. Only as he came even did he glance up. “Still think we’ll make it before dark, Alaric?”

Abramm let him pass without comment. Before long Rolland surrendered the trail-breaking job to Galen, who eventually gave it off to Cedric Ashvelt, and on down the line as the light continued to fail and the wolves’ cries drew ever nearer.

Finally, the party rounded a hill and the clouds parted to reveal a wide valley whitened with snowfall and cut through by a dark stream. Out of the near bank rose a great bulk of stone walls and peak-roofed turrets, levels upon levels stairstepping up the jagged outcropping on which it had been built and surrounded by a high, crenellated outer wall. In the dimming light, it stood dismayingly dark, its great mass lit by a mere handful of tiny lights.

A deep ravine spilled riverward out of the draw to their right, their trail running along its near side and finally crossing over it by means of a snowcloaked stone bridge.

Abramm took back the lead and they switchbacked down a forested slope to the lip of the ravine, then headed back out toward the valley. The wolves felt so close now, Abramm feared his little group wouldn’t even break into the open before they were attacked. He urged them repeatedly to hurry, to pick up the children and guard the mare, but they were all too muzzy with fatigue to obey him for longer than a few steps.

As they neared the forest’s edge, Abramm rejoiced to see two men tramping through the snow beyond the trees. A thicket of spruce momentarily obscured them, and when Abramm emerged into the open, no one was there. He thought he was hallucinating again until he saw the trail that had been stamped through the snow, paralleling the ravine to the bridge and over it, then up to the monastery, looming on the far side. But where were the men who made it?

The others found the track and burst into excited chatter. Abramm quelled it sharply. “We have no time to dawdle. Our enemies are close.”

Trinley took over the lead, and Abramm dropped back to protect the rear. Implicitly reassuming command now that the end was in sight, the alderman called for the lanterns to be broken out and kelistars placed in them. Though Abramm chafed with impatience at the delay, he did not object. The kelistars might have a warding effect, and he feared they’d need all the help they could get.

Finally they were hurrying along again, the wind pressing them up the trail as it pelted their backs with snow. Just as Abramm dared believe they might reach the monastery in time, the wolves burst into loud, triumphant song, sounding as if they were coming up the ravine even now.

Their howls spurred his people to panic, and they ran all out for the dubious safety of the bridge.

CHAPTER

2

They’d all crowded onto the length of the stone span by the time Abramm got there, Trinley, Cedric, and Galen at the far end, Rolland and the other men at the near, with the women, children, and mare in between. The wolves’ howls and yips still tumbled madly around them, and yet the wolves did not appear.

Abramm stepped away from the glittering path to peer into the gloomfilled valley. And sure enough, there they were—seven dark forms bounding through the deep snow, not nearly as close as they’d sounded, their voices amplified and carried by a trick of the wind.

“They’re still a ways away,” he said, turning back to the others. They stared at him mutely. His eyes lifted to the tramped-out path beyond them, the kelistars’ light reflected in a long ribbon of illumination that stretched up the slope all the way to the monastery gates. It was a straight path, not too steep, not all that far. Most of them could probably make it. . . .

On the bridge, a man cried, “We’re trapped! They’ll have us for sure!”

“Let’s all fall down and pretend to be dead,” another suggested. “Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

“Aye, there’s naught else we can do—”

“SILENCE!” Trinley bellowed from the bridge’s far side. When he had it, he rebuked them angrily. “Listen to yerselves! Are ye cowards or men? We didna come all this way t’ lie down and die. So put away that woolwash and stiffen yer spines. If they do get us, let’s make sure they pay fer it.”

“Pay fer it?” his own wife protested. “How about making sure we stay alive, instead? If we take refuge under the bridge, we could defend ourselves easily. Tuck the little ones under it—”

“Have ye even looked under the bridge, woman?” Trinley snarled at her. “The ravine’s far too deep to provide shelter, even if we could get t’ the bottom of it.”

“I didna mean go t’ the bottom. There’s a ledge just under the bridge. Ye’re practically standing on it.” She leaned over the edge of the bridge. “There’s even a path to it, Oakes. Right there. Don’t ye see it?”

The wolves’ cries clamored around them. Abramm eyed the path up the hill again, noting how it wasn’t filling with snow, though fat flakes were coming down thickly all around them. He glanced toward the portion of the broken trail they’d already come up. Sure enough, it was already losing its definition as the snow gathered upon it. It was also significantly dimmer in reflecting the kelistars’ light, especially near the forest’s edge where it began.

And there was still no sign of the men who’d made it, though they had to have been out tramping the path until right before Abramm and the others had shown up. Now his glance caught on something else—the trees beyond the trail, all of which glowed with at least one rhu’eman occupant. They’d been more spread out before. Now it was as if they had gathered to watch. . . .

He looked again at the gleaming line of light at the trail’s midst, thinking it seemed too bright and too localized to be merely reflected light. What if. . . ?

His heart pounded with sudden excitement.
Of course!

“We have to keep going!” he shouted, breaking into the Trinleys’ argument.

Again the entire gathering turned to look at him, eyes haunted with fear.

“Have ye lost your mind?” Kitrenna demanded of him.

“I think the path they broke for us here is protected,” he explained. “As long as we stay on it, I think we’ll be safe.” He shoved his way through the clot of women and children on the bridge, and stepped smoothly between Oakes and Kitrenna, pulling the man away from his wife and off the bridge onto the path.

“Look at it,” he said. “Can you see the way it sparkles all the way up to the monastery? I believe it’s under Eidon’s Light.”

But from the length of time Trinley looked at the path, the lack of comment he gave, and the troubled expression in his eyes when next he looked at Abramm, Abramm knew he’d seen nothing.

“Just look at the trough itself, then,” Abramm pressed. “The way it’s not filling up with snow when by all rights it should be. When the part we’ve already come up is, and if anything, that should be the clearer of the two.”

“The wolves will be here any moment,” Kitrenna protested. “And ye want t’ spread us out before ’em like dainties on a tray?” She turned to her husband. “He’s lost his mind, Oakes. Tell him. We need to take shelter on that ledge. Wait ’til daylight when they’ll have to seek the shadow.”

“If we do that,” Abramm said calmly, “some of us will die. Maybe all of us. I believe Eidon has provided us this path, but it’s up to us to trust him.”

“If it’s so safe,” Trinley asked him, “why aren’t the people in the monastery coming to help us? Why aren’t they at least telling us it’s safe?”

“Maybe they don’t know that it is,” Abramm said.

“But if they made it—’

’ “I don’t think they made it. I think the luima made it.”

And that damped every further word for a long moment.

“We saw no tracks leading away from it,” Abramm said. “And it’s too freshly broken for us not to have seen the men who did it heading back up to the monastery. Not to mention the question of why they’d come all the way out here to make it for us and then not wait for us to get to it. In fact, I believe I saw the men who did it, right before we left the trees. But they vanished before we got here.”

He fell silent, bearing their incredulous and terrified scrutiny. No one had any answers for him.

With the wolves’ howls approaching rapidly now, Abramm backed up the path a bit, then said, “You know I was right about the hut and the wolves. You know sometimes I can see things the rest of you don’t. For all those reasons you trusted me to lead you down here; I beg you to trust me on this, as well. If we don’t go now . . . it will only get harder.”

He eyed the depths of the ravine again, still empty for the moment. . . . He turned his gaze to Rolland, standing on the far side of the bridge and staring back at him in horror. Of all the men here, Rolland was the one Abramm thought he had a chance of convincing first. But it would be hard. The man had three children and a wife, all of whom he’d be putting at risk if he went with Abramm’s suggestion. He could see the big man’s eyes drop to his wife, who had turned back to face him when she saw where Abramm’s gaze had fixed.

In the end, it wasn’t Rolland he convinced first.

“I’ll go,” Marta Brackleford said, stepping forward from the group. Immediately Kitrenna shrieked and threw herself on her sister, forbidding her to do so. Marta pushed her off. “If you wish to spend the night out here shivering to death on that ledge, that is your choice. If you die because of it, it is still your choice. But it is not mine, and I think Alaric is right when he says that trail is Eidon’s protection for us.”