The Dread Hammer (4 page)

“It is such a very little cottage, isn’t it?” Ketty said, in a very small voice.

It was day’s end, and they stood on the edge of a dainty round meadow of tasseled grass. Five deer had been peacefully browsing but at Ketty’s voice they startled, bounding away along the bank of a brook that ran along the meadow’s southern edge, until they disappeared within the towering forest. Mist gleamed all along the brook’s course, made golden by the setting sun, but on the meadow’s north side twilight had already come. A hill stood there, studded with tumbled gray boulders that wore cloaks of moss. A scatter of stunted trees grew between them. At the foot of the hill, flanked by groves of young aspen already gold in leaf, was a tiny round cottage of wattle and daub. It had a single door, woven of sticks. No windows looked out from its brown walls. It huddled shyly beneath the wide overhang of a thatch roof that it wore like a tall, conical hat. Faint skeins of smoke seeped up through the thatch, to escape into the sky.

Smoke looked on it with great pride. He had built it himself, alone. It was the first time he had ever built anything. “It’s a perfect round,” he bragged. “As round as the sun, so fine that a hearth spirit has come to live there, and keep the fire lit.”

Ketty pressed a knuckle against her lip and spoke with some despair. “The smoke is coming up through the thatch. Why is there no chimney?”

“Because this old way is better. The smoke keeps the small creatures of the forest from making a home in the thatch, so it never leaks.”

“But there is no proper door.”

Smoke shrugged. “I wove a door from the wattle, but don’t worry. There’s hide on the inside to keep in the heat.”

“And the palisade?”

“There’s no need for a palisade. No army will come here to assail us.”

“But what of the wolves? The bears? The forest lions?”

Smoke laughed. “Ketty, you worry too much!” He took her hand and kissed her cheek. “Come! Come see our home—and our bed!”

He set off trotting across the meadow and Ketty had no choice but to follow at his hurried pace despite her aching legs. They came to the door. It was fastened only with a loop of leather. Smoke unhooked this and pulled the door open. Ketty peered in, but it was so dark she could see only a faint glow of coals.

Smoke swept her up in his arms. She yelped in surprise. “Put me down!” she cried, even as she clutched at the front of his coat.

He grinned. “You’re always playing.”

He bore her over the threshold, into a murky, smoke-shot darkness relieved only by the red glow of a central hearth, and by the golden shimmer of the hearth spirit, visible for a moment before it sank into the warm, dry ground.

Ketty yelped again as Smoke dropped to his knees. He spilled her onto a pallet stuffed with straw. Her hand still clutched his coat. She stared in fascination at his green eyes, glittering in the darkness. Then she pulled him closer. He kissed her lips as she lay there. He kissed her face and her neck, even with his weapons still on his back.

She returned his kisses. She even found her lips brushing the deep scar given to him by a Lutawan soldier called Nedgalvin. It should have repulsed her, but everything about him seemed suddenly precious.

The cottage was quiet for a time. The hearth spirit returned. But soon after Ketty shed her poncho and Smoke gave up his weapons. Then a noise of sighs and moans and murmurs frightened the spirit once again, and by the time quiet returned, the sky outside was filled with stars.

~

T
hough we’ve waged war against the Lutawan king since the long-ago days of Koráy, none of us has ever seen him. Whether he’s one man sustained over the centuries by magic, or a succession of men, I cannot say. I only know that his people hate him. Given half a chance, the young women from the border villages will abandon their families and flee north to throw in with the Koráyos army, against their own people. Not one of them has ever betrayed us. But their presence in our army infuriates the southern king and makes it difficult to negotiate a truce.

Two nights after her tryst with General Nedgalvin, Takis set out from Fort Veshitan in the company of Chieftain Rennish who commanded the irregulars, and Chieftain Helvero who was charged with holding the captured lands south of the Séferi Mountains. They went on horseback, following a winding trail up through thick forest. The Séferi were steep, rising in knife-edged ridges, but they weren’t high. Tall pines and massive hemlocks grew all the way to the summit.

The riders crested and started down again. The trail reached its end a few minutes later at a lookout above Scout’s Pass. They left their horses among the trees and walked out onto a pier of rock. A gazebo stood at the farthest point, its roof and half-wall providing a token shelter. Starlight and a sliver of setting moon illuminated a sheer drop to the pass on one side, and on the other, a deep and very narrow canyon. The borderlands began at the foot of the mountains—a mixture of tall grass and groves of trees, and beyond, farms, now mostly abandoned.

“We should burn off more of those groves,” Takis said. “They provide too much cover.”

Rennish was nearly fifty, tall and slim, with short hair and a narrow face. She’d trained Takis in combat, and Tayval and Smoke too, and as commander of the irregulars she spent much of her time deep in the field, so she didn’t hesitate to disagree with Takis. “The cover benefits us more than the Lutawan forces—and if you burn it off for no good reason you might find some Hauntén who object.”

“Are there Hauntén in the borderlands?”

Rennish nodded. “I don’t think they live there, but now and then, I see them.”

“Look there,” Helvero whispered. He was younger than Rennish by many years, a powerfully built man, and though he tended to be rash and ambitious he’d proved his worth many times in combat.

Takis followed his pointing hand to the plain far below, where a horse and rider had just emerged from a grove close to the Trader’s Stone. Takis watched him—she had no doubt it was Nedgalvin—as he rode through the grass toward the stone’s tall, wind-sculpted spire. The Trader’s Stone had marked the start of the pass in a long-ago time before it was hidden.

Nedgalvin paused beside the stone. Turning around, he held his right arm out to his side and raised and lowered it three times.

At this signal a long line of horse soldiers issued from the trees, riding in silence toward Nedgalvin.

Takis let out a long, disappointed sigh.

Helvero snorted. “I never took Nedgalvin for a fool. Does he truly believe this pass unguarded?”

“Perhaps he trusted me,” Takis said.

“His mistake.”

Long ago Koráy had fenced the Puzzle Lands with a maze of defensive spells that had been reinforced and augmented in the generations since. The passes were disguised, the trails hidden, but the way would open to those who were welcome: Koráyos warriors, nomadic merchants, the tribal peoples of the Wild Wood and the far north. But any who were unknown or unwelcome in the Puzzle Lands put their lives at risk if they tried to cross the mountains. If they were lucky, such intruders might find themselves on a well-marked trail that doubled back on itself in a long exhausting loop, returning trespassers to where they’d started. If they were not lucky, the trail might take them into a trackless forest, or to the edge of a crumbling cliff or to a mountain torrent that could not be crossed, and then when they turned to go back, the trail would be gone.

Sometimes, invaders would simply be steered into a trap.

Takis sensed the presence of her sister Tayval in the binding threads. Tayval was far away, secure in the Fortress of Samerhen, but she was also in the world-beneath, poised like a spider at the center of a web of ten thousand threads radiating outward, woven into the structure of the air, the land, the mountains. If Tayval should pull on one of those threads a wind might rise, a storm might brew, or a hidden pass might be revealed—as tonight, when Scout’s Pass lay open to General Nedgalvin and his men.

The general’s soldiers caught up with him. Moonlight glittered on their spear tips. “At least two hundred,” Rennish said. “He intends to take the fort, at the very least.”

Takis watched as the horses climbed in a winding line up the trail, to disappear beneath the pines.

She had deliberately tempted Nedgalvin by telling him of the refugees at Fort Veshitan. The god of Lutawa, Hepen the Watcher, despised women. He allowed them to be sold by their fathers and owned by their husbands and any women who objected to this natural order were beaten, and if they still couldn’t learn right and proper behavior, they were executed. But sometimes a woman would escape and flee north to the Puzzle Lands. Many of these refugees chose to become soldiers in the Koráyos army. Their conversion to strong and competent fighting troops directly contradicted the teachings of the Lutawan king, and infuriated the men who made up his army. No officer loyal to the king would forego the chance to slaughter the refugees who believed themselves safe in a Koráyos stronghold. Even if no man in Nedgalvin’s company survived to return, word would escape, and those young women who were thinking of fleeing might then think twice.

Takis had hoped Nedgalvin would be different. She’d hoped that he could think for himself, that he would prove to be a rational man. She’d set her heart on it and her disappointment was bitter. “
Damn you
,” she whispered, feeling suddenly as if her heart would tear in two. She had liked him! But more, he had been bright and irreverent and courageous, and despite Tayval’s dour council, she had let herself believe he was capable of setting aside five generations of animosity, that he had intellect enough to see a different way.

She had imagined too much. “So we go on without him,” she said, with only a slight tremor to her voice. Ever since Koráy had taught the craft of war to the people of the Puzzle Lands, no company of the Lutawan army had been allowed to come over the Séferi Mountains or through the East Tangle. Takis did not doubt it would continue so for another five generations, so long as the Bidden survived.

But if we do not?
Tayval asked, speaking their shared fear.

Both sisters knew that without the Biddens’ maze of defensive spells, the Koráyos people must eventually be conquered, and not because they were weak. They were fabled warriors, men and women both, trained to the field. But they were few. Measured against the great cities of the south, the Koráyos were a tiny tribe. Without the spells of the Bidden to keep the Lutawan king at bay, his warriors would come. If the southerners lost ten thousand men each year for ten years fighting to gain the passes, they would still come, and eventually they’d break through. Then the Puzzle Lands would be overrun and the Korayos people forced to live by the cruel customs of the south—or murdered when they refused.

So Takis and Tayval dreamed together of making peace with Lutawa, and securing the future of their people—and if peace could not be made with the wicked creature worshiped now as king, then they would do all they could to see a new king set in his place—but it would not be Nedgalvin.

In the world-beneath Tayval tugged a thread, and the trail to the pass faded from sight. She twitched another thread—a concert of others—and a false trail opened.

Leaning over the gazebo’s half wall, Takis watched, until far below she saw the line of horsemen emerge from the trees to follow the false path Tayval had laid for them. They entered the narrow canyon.

The moon had sunk so low its light couldn’t reach into the defile, so Takis listened to the distant
clip-clop
of the horses’ hooves to gauge their progress.

It’s time
, Tayval said.

Takis straightened. “It is time,” she repeated aloud, her voice grim. In her heart she did not believe there would ever be another general more suitable for king-making than Nedgalvin.

Tayval tugged on a thread, and the night’s quiet was shattered by a great
crack!
and then by a deafening crash of stone as a cliff gave way in a thundering avalanche and the ground trembled.

Takis walked back to her horse.

Nedgalvin rode at the head of his column of men. The trail was steep, and the horses labored to climb it, but he was grateful for the dense forest that would keep them hidden from any eyes watching from above.

The Bidden witch had said to come alone, and he might have done it, just for another chance of a night with her. Takis was an entirely different creature from the dull and stupid women of the south, who required guidance in the least task. She was mixed blood, of course, part Hauntén and maybe not truly a woman at all, but something more. Nedgalvin had met enough Koráyos women on the battlefield that he suspected all of them were descended from the bastard daughters of wandering Hauntén. They were bright, strong, and daring. He smiled to think of the temerity Takis had shown. It was her ambition to be a kingmaker! To tempt him to treason . . . and he might have listened. The kingdom
was
shot through with rot. Everyone knew it, though no one said so aloud.

But Takis had made a mistake when she told him about the fortress where the refugees were housed. The deepest rot in the kingdom was among its insipid women, those who whispered to one another of sisters and daughters who’d made a new life in the north. Such women were like sheep. If one wandered, another would follow without thought, and another after her, and so it was that many hundreds had disappeared into the Puzzle Lands where, no doubt, they warmed the beds and kept the kitchens of Koráyos masters.

The exodus must stop. The Lutawan Kingdom depended on both the labor and the wombs of such women. Nedgalvin was determined to end the whispers. He would take Fort Veshitan and slaughter the refugees he found within its walls. It was the right and proper thing to do.

Beneath the trees, the setting moon did little to show the way, but as they left the trees and entered a narrow canyon, the moon’s feeble light was extinguished altogether by the high walls. After that Nedgalvin rode with his lantern in hand. Its faint beam picked out the trail. Several minutes passed. Then suddenly his horse snorted, sashaying to the side, its tail whisking the air in irritation. Nedgalvin raised his lantern to see what lay ahead, but his light didn’t reach more than a few feet. He urged his horse on, but it refused, so he dismounted. Behind him, other animals were stopping—champing, stamping, blowing—while farther back in the dark came the
clip-clop
of more hooves. Wind soughed through tree branches, and a tiny stream trickled beside the trail.

Cautiously, he moved forward on foot. Soon the beam of his light picked out a tumble of stones across the trail, and a few feet farther on, a cliff wall studded with sparse brush and stunted trees. He frowned. Had he missed a turning in the trail? He cast his light to the right, walking several paces, hoping to discover the proper way. Then he turned about and explored to the left.

But there was no way forward.

Suddenly, he understood. He spun around, bellowing to his men, “It’s a trap! Turn around. Retreat to the lowlands. All haste! Do not wait—”

His last command was forever lost behind a great, thunderous concussion, as if God had driven an ax into the mountains above and split them wide. Then came a deafening roar that shook him, blood and bone, shook the very ground he stood on. His light went out as grit pummeled him from all sides and a wind blasted up the canyon. He screamed at his men to run, run! But he couldn’t hear himself. He couldn’t hear them. He could see nothing. But he knew where the cliff was. Ignoring his own orders, he began to climb.