Saint Elm's Deep (The Legend of Vanx Malic) (20 page)

“Its scales and wings would explain why it simply vanished in the forest,” Brody offered. “If it can fly, it will be very hard for the hunters to track.”

“Why would a winged beast fall through the ice into Three Tower Lake?” Xavian asked.

“Well, there is that.” Vanx shrugged. “That sort of puts a hole in my bucket, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” the mage pondered aloud. “It could be the beast leapt into the air in flight. They said it was snowing rather harshly that day, and terrified people sometimes confuse things in their minds. Or it could be more formidable than anyone thinks, Vanx. The thing could possess some magical ability to do what the hunters said it did. It might be able to turn into a mist and simply vanish.”

“It might be able to make a fargin Parydonian mushroom pie, too,” Brody jested gruffly. “Or imitate a stubble-headed mage whose skullcap has worn the growth off of his crown.”

“What would you say it was, then?” Gallarael asked.

“Pardon my mouth, milady.” Brody fumbled for words, probably thinking his swearing had offended her. Vanx knew his mentioning of mushrooms had gotten her ire up, not his cursing. “It was most likely some mountain beast looking for food or protecting its territory… nothing for us to get overexcited about.”

Chelda was starting to reply, and Xavian had his mouth halfway open, when Vanx hushed them all, as if the beast were swooping in that very moment. When he saw that they were startled into being on guard, he let out a heartfelt laugh.

“Enough bickering,” he said with narrowed brows. “We have to get moving or we won’t make Great Vale by darkfall.”

Vanx had to fight to keep his expression serious. Every one of them was looking at him as if they were children being shamed for behaving badly.

Chapter Twenty-One

I’m off to make a fool of a fool
and a fool of a king as well.
Only a fool can fool a fool,
But with a king’s wits who can tell?
-- The King of Fools

Throughout the day’s travel, Vanx couldn’t shake the feeling that the strange Shangelak beast was watching them from overhead. The sky had grown blustery again and was an ash-gray blanket, shaking loose only a light snow on them in fits and starts. If the thing was up there, Vanx decided, it was having no trouble staying out of sight. The steady wind all but died away as they headed through the heavily forested valley below the Great Vale Ridge, but when they started up out of the denser woods, the wind found a way through every gap in their furs. Only Chelda and Gallarael seemed oblivious to the cold.

Vanx saw a clump of cottages just before Chelda pointed them out. A tract of forest had been cleared away downhill of them, and naught but stumps remained. Not far off, another tract, nearly the same size and shape, was lined with two- or three-year-old saplings. Above and beyond the cabins, a herd of red-and-black-striped devil horns was searching the few exposed shrubs for food.

The way the evil-looking goats leapt, all reckless and graceful, from foothold to foothold made Xavian grumble that he’d rather not ride such a creature. Vanx agreed with the mage, even though Chelda reassured them that the devil horns they were after wouldn’t take such risky leaps with their weight.

“The ramma can’t be much better,” said Brody.

“It will make our hiking that much easier if they carry the packs, though.” This came from Gallarael.

“It will,” Vanx agreed. And for the first time, he felt a curious pride well up over the way the princess was carrying herself out here in the wild.

“Other than a few short passes, there is not much worse than what we skirted yesterday,” Chelda said over her shoulder. She was currently leading them along what might have been an old hunting trail through a pass of cedar trees and taller evergreens.

“Only the ice falls and the stretch of narrow ledges that cut across the cliff they tumble down,” Chelda went on. “Beyond that, we don’t have many more of these to manage. The forests are less hospitable and the passages rockier; the valleys are deeper, and some have full rivers we might have to ford or a swell we must skirt. This time of year, we might even have some snowmelt and flooding. Or worse, slush.”

Poops let out a loud yelp, and Vanx felt a sharp pain. Heat stabbed through him like a pike-shaft. Chelda started screaming, and Xavian was suddenly doing his best to keep Brody from loosing his crossbow bolt.

Gallarael was nowhere in sight.

Two gargan men came charging over and down the crest, right behind Poops. The dog had an arrow sticking out of his furry vest.

Chelda grew furious. If Poops had been lifeless, she would have surely killed the men by now.

The dog came limping briskly up to Vanx. Fear, anger and confusion all intermingled with the weird sensations Poops was sending him through their link. The feelings weren’t animalistic, as Vanx had previously thought. ‘Pure’ was the word he decided described them best.

The dog’s anger wasn’t projected toward the men who had mistaken him for a beast but at his nose for not smelling them out. The fear Poops felt was for the man who had saved him from the cave where his mother was eaten by a dragon. The confusion was that the pain had seemingly come from nowhere, and Vanx decided that, no matter how complex the dog’s thoughts were, Poops couldn’t grasp the concept or the mechanics of a crossbow, just the reality of it.

Realizing Poops was fully shafted, Vanx fell to his knees to help his four-legged friend.

He removed the furred vest he’d made. To the gargans the dog appeared to be something he wasn’t. Knowing about the Shangelak’s recent attack, Vanx found he couldn’t be too mad at them for their reaction. He was glad there were no vitals injured. The arrow had only pierced the upper portion of Poops’s hind end. The puncture had been worn open when the dog ran to him, though. Vanx broke the fletched end off of the shaft and quickly pulled it through. No sooner had the arrow left his body than Poops sent a cool feeling of relief washing over them both.

“Was it poisoned?” Vanx asked Chelda.

“No,” she answered without even slowing her tirade.

“Ask them if they were poisoned!” Vanx yelled, and all eyes fell upon him.

Chelda asked the one who loosed the arrow, and he responded with a negative shake of his head.

“I told you no,” Chelda said hotly, her anger spilling over at him. “We don’t use such foul ways to hunt and kill. Using poisoned arrows is cowardly and despicable.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Gallarael said as she stepped back amongst the group.

“I had to ask,” Vanx said. “And I will not hold this against them; I should have kept him closer.”

Chelda gave a snort then returned her attention to the gargan who had shot the dog.

Vanx made out a few of the words she was saying—“sorethatch”, “rammaton”, and “fool” among them—but not nearly all of them. Her tone was as chiding and condescending as usual. Vanx almost felt sorry for the men.

Turning his attention back to Poops, Vanx found Xavian was beside the dog, struggling fruitlessly to keep him from licking his wounds.

“Brody! Gal!” Vanx called them. When they were in earshot he said, “I need to work a quick healing here. I’m not sure how Chelda’s people will—”

“Got it,” Gallarael cut him off. “Brody, you and Xavian huddle ‘round close. I’ll take care of the rest.”

So sure were Gallarael’s words that Vanx half-expected her to disrobe, or maybe change into her black-skinned other self. Instead, she went to Chelda’s side, reached up and put her hands on one of the fangs that jutted up out of her backpack and got Chelda talking about the shrew hunt. Within minutes, the gargan men talked the girls into letting them have a better look.

“Don’t do too much at once,” Xavian warned Vanx.

Brody shivered and turned away; he’d told them all before that magic unsettled him, as it was doing now.

The healing was over with before Chelda had gotten to the good parts of her retelling of the shrew hunt. Gallarael interrupted, suggesting they finish the story around a campfire. The gargan men did them one better by taking them into the lodge.

“These are rim riders,” Chelda told them. “They are an official ramma rabble of sorts. There are manned outposts along the ridge. They house all the men.”

They followed the rim riders over the crest of the ridge, and the sight that spread out below them was as surprising as it was amazing.

A deep valley full of life and activity was split by a wide, silvery river. There were several torch-lined bridges and a dam at the far end, and the whole place seemed to glow yellow in the dusky light. The illumination was from the hundreds of lamplit windows and the gauzy radiance from the smoke of a few hundred hearth fires. The symmetrical layout of the roads was far more sophisticated than Vanx imagined it would be and the fact that Chelda always referred to the place as her “home village” may have been the reason why.

Great Vale looked like it had a villagey feel to it, but it was easily twenty times the size of any Zythian village. There was no way to judge how many people lived there, but there were a lot of them.

More gargan men joined their procession as they went downslope into Great Vale. Vanx supposed it would take half a day to get down to the river, so he brought his attention back to Chelda’s translation of what one of the gargan men, a commander called Riggaton Manix, was saying.

He was telling them of the Shangelak sightings, and how his men were told to kill it first and worry later. He said that, for a turn of the moon, nearly every day there was a new sighting or a new attack on the people. But for a few days, no one had seen hide nor hair of the creature. Chelda then told them of Vanx’s sighting the night before. The idea that the creature had wings was not a new one to the rim riders. One girl, Manix told them, had seen it take to the air.

The sky had darkened considerably. A torch suddenly flared to life ahead of them and another behind. Vanx lost the advantage of his Zythian vision because of this. It didn’t matter, though, as not even his keen eyes could have spotted the beast circling high above them, but he still felt it was there.

Inside the roomy lodge, the companions were treated to hot, succulent venison stew and warm bread that was a bit stale. While they ate, Chelda had the rim riders tell tales of saber shrews, giant frost grizzlies, and other glamorous hunts from gargan history. The meal was good and relaxing, and all the group’s members were filled with a healthy sense of accomplishment for coming this far.

Chapter Twenty-Two

In that land across the sea,
a dragon queen did rise.
But in the end the great High King
relieved her of her life.
-- The Ballad of Ornspike