The Dreamtrails (49 page)

I thought there might be questions, but the shadows were accustomed to obedience. With a shudder of movement, all the black-clad girls and women turned and melted away into the rainy dark of the yard with as little noise as leaves blown before the wind. The woman from the stairs remained, and I asked her name.

“I am Ursa, and we are sisters henceforth,” she answered.

“I am Elspeth Gordie,” I told her. “And it seems we are to play the waiting game together.” But then I froze, for
I could hear the sound of boots on the steps
.

“What would you have me do?” asked Ursa. Fear shone in her eyes, but she did not run.

“We ought to hide, but if we do, they will escape. We must try to delay them, but this will be a deadly game.”

I turned and backed away from the door until I stood beside Ursa, then I drew the sword I had sheathed. A moment
later, the door to the secret stair flew open, and the Hedra master and his men came out. They did not see us at once, for it was dark and we carried no lanterns, unlike the Hedra. But when one spotted us, the silence spread swiftly until all stopped and stared. I was horrified to see that there were closer to forty than thirty. All were demon-banded, and there might as well have been a thousand for all the chance we stood against them.

Yet I spoke in a voice that rang with false confidence. “Give up your weapons, Hedra, for your corrupt Faction breathes its last breath. My people have control of your companions and your masters, and the shadows and many of your novices stand with us willingly. Now is the time to surrender this compound while you can.” The insanity of two women demanding surrender clearly unnerved some of the Hedra, and I could almost hear some thinking that no one would make such a threat unless she could back it up.

“Foul mutant!” said the Hedra master. “Cursed of Lud.”

“Curse your Lud and his bloodlust,” I said savagely. “I am a Misfit, and I do not heed your god. And I wonder if he heeds you. For where was your Lud when we destroyed the armory? Did your Lud protect the One and the Threes from us? Now, your answer. Surrender at once and you will not die, though you will be judged and punished for all the evil you have done in the name of your Lud. Refuse, and you will fall.”

“You will die in great pain and very slowly, mutant,” said the Hedra master.

“If your Lud is so powerful, why does he need you?” I demanded, letting mockery tinge my words. “Why does he not strike me down himself?” I looked up. “Come, Lud of the Faction, strike me down for my insolence.”

Some of the Hedra looked up, and others glared at me and muttered uneasily.

“He does not answer,” I said mockingly. “Could it be that he does not exist? Or maybe he exists but is bored with your bloody prayers.”

Several of the Hedra snarled curses and drew their swords. But the Hedra master turned his cold gaze on me. “You will die quite soon, mutant, and Lud will hurl you into the fiery pit of hell for your heresy. Before he does, you may dare to ask him why he chose the Hedra to do his will.” He glanced at the big Hedra beside him. “Take them, Aleppo, but do not kill the mutant. I would teach her a long, complex song of pain to sing to Lud.”

“What of the shadow?” asked the Hedra.

“Kill it,” the Hedra master said indifferently.

“Run,” I farsent to Ursa, but instead of obeying, she took up a boiler prod and stepped very deliberately in front of me. Oh, it was so gallant and foolish a gesture that it brought tears to my eyes. The Hedra master and his men gaped at the shadow in disbelief.

“Look well at her, brave strong warriors of Lud,” I snarled. “Look at the face of courage, for you have never seen it when you look into the mirror.”

One of the Hedra laughed, but his laughter dwindled and his face fell. He and the others were now staring beyond us. Wary of a trick, I flashed a look over my shoulder, only to see that the laundry and the yard beyond were filling with shadows. But they were not the shadows that I expected to see. They were the male shadows from the mine, and as they drew close, the light from the lanterns some of them carried revealed how pitifully thin and filthy their limbs were and made their hideous sores glisten horribly. They must have
come through the door in the wall that I had not bothered to close. But how had they come here?

“Lady Elspeth, get out of the way!” Elkar called. The urgency in his voice made me obey, and I pulled Ursa back with me, but I lifted my sword in case any of the Hedra tried to seize us.

“Fools!” spat the Hedra master. “You are many, but you will fall before our swords like sheaves of wheat!”

“It is the Faction that will fall,” rang out a new voice.

To my astonishment, the speaker was a tall, frail-looking Herder priest of middle years standing in the midst of the shadows. Elkar stood beside him, and between them was the little shadow boy, Mouse.

“Herder Sabatien, you are possessed by the mutants!” roared the Hedra master.

“No,” said Sabatien in a measured voice. “I am no longer a priest. I am a Norselander again, and I am possessed by courage for the first time in my life. I stand with these men by choice, and I command you to lay down your weapons in surrender.”

“You will die with this filth, traitor,” hissed the Hedra master, and he took a step in the direction of the priest. But one of the shadows hurled something. I reared back, as did the Hedra, but instead of an explosion, there was a wet splat as it fell to the floor. Hedra and shadow alike stared, bemused, at the blackened rag lying on the ground, dribbling moisture.

“Mud will not save you,” jeered one of the Hedra at last.

“No, but it will kill you if you do not surrender,” rasped the man who had thrown it. I saw that it was Mouse’s friend Terka, and now he held up his hand, revealing another sodden rag. The other shadows did the same, and I suddenly understood. I moved farther back, pulling Ursa with me. The
movement caught the Hedra master’s gray gaze. His eyes widened as he, too, understood.

“The cloths have all been dipped into the black pool!” Elkar shouted. “If you do not lay down your weapons at once, the shadows will throw the rags at you instead of the floor. You may then kill them, but look well as you do, for soon you will bear their same ghastly sores and disfigurements.”

There was a long silence as the faces of the Hedra sagged with fear and indecision. They would have rushed us in a second if we had threatened them with swords, but faced with disfigurement, crippled limbs, and bleeding sores, they quailed. Perhaps it was merely that the ravaged shadows were the threat made real. One sword clattered to the ground, and though I could not see whose it was, it was the signal for more to fall until the Hedra master snarled at his men to hold.

“Do not be fools! They will kill us if we lay down our weapons,” he bellowed.

“No,” I said, stepping forward and keeping my voice calm. “That is the way of the Hedra. It is not our way. I told you. You will be judged and punished for what you have done, and in time, you will be given the chance to atone for the horrors you have committed. There may even come a day when you will bless this moment, for the life you have lived within these walls is bleak and loveless, though you cannot see it. Now choose. Throw aside your weapons and kneel if you would surrender.”

Another silence, and then another sword fell and another. I felt a great welling of relief, but when the Hedra Aleppo dropped his sword, the Hedra master turned and clove open his chest in a swift flowing movement. Even as the Hedra toppled forward, life gushing darkly from him, his master spun
and leapt back into the stairwell, barking orders for his men to follow. Many obeyed, perhaps as much from instinct as loyalty, and more might have followed, except another of the sodden rags was thrown. It flew high and landed against the side of the door, splattering the face of the Hedra about to pass through it. He gave a high-pitched, horrified scream and reeled back, throwing down his sword and clutching at his eyes.

That was the end of it. The rest threw down their swords and knelt.

The shadows surged forward to gather up the swords, and when I turned to Ursa to thank her for defending me, she threw her arms around me, weeping and laughing. I hugged her back and found myself weeping, too, wondering what had happened to cool, untouchable Elspeth Gordie.

“I wish I had been there,” Harwood said later when I went to see him in his bed in the healing center. He had been injured badly in the second of the armory explosions, which had killed most of the Hedra. Fortunately, Reuvan had been behind the wall, which had shielded him, so he was untouched. He had managed to staunch Harwood’s wounds and bring him to the healing center.

“I am only glad you are not dead!” I told him.

“I might as well be for all the use I am, lying here like a fool,” Harwood fretted. “We have a long way to go before this place is secured. Sover said there are still Hedra who have some idea of what is happening, and they have demon bands.”

“They are the pair sent by the Hedra master to get crates of demon bands. Unfortunately, they were not taken prisoner, and they have demon bands enough to hand out to at least a
hundred men. But you can’t do any fighting when you can’t even sit up without feeling faint,” I said. “Sover told me you had lost a lot of blood.”

“I would worry less if your Hedra master would surrender,” Harwood responded. “If only he did not have Yarrow and Asra as hostages.”

“If wishes were fishes,” I said more sharply than I had meant to, because I worried about the coercers, too, despite Sabatien’s certainty that it was only a matter of time before everyone surrendered.

Harwood gave me a faint smile. “Gevan would be gratified to know that you have taken his pet sayings to heart.”

“Gevan will be gratified if you would cease demanding to get up and relax and heal. Tomrick and Ode have coerced a veritable army of Hedra now, and Ode is ordering them hither and thither, warning the Herders of the plague-crazed Hedra who is setting off explosions within the compound and bidding them lock themselves up tight until he is caught. Tomrick, meanwhile, has coerced and chivvied the inner-cadre priests into agreeing to hide in the cells of the correction house where you found me, if you can believe that. And we have all the other Hedra generals well coerced. They are busy either hunting down their own men or cleaning up the rubble from the explosion under the supervision of a handful of novices and shadows.”

Harwood sighed and lay back against his pillows, visibly relaxing. “I must say, I can’t believe Elkar did not mention that one of his friends was a renegade Herder.”

Elkar had told Sabatien about us, of course, and the Herder had counseled patience and watchfulness, feeling we were too few to truly take over the compound. He had instructed the novices to aid us as much as possible without endangering
themselves, but neither Sabatien nor the novices had realized how strongly the shadows would react to the vision of freedom.

Sover entered with a Herder healer, and I shifted out of the way as Harwood’s bandage was changed. Sover had told me that Reuvan had found Hilder carrying an unconscious and badly hurt Colwyn from a mess of rubble. Hilder had been in the midst of describing the collapse of the underground cell in which they had been confined for interrogation when another explosion sent a piece of stonework flying, killing him instantly.

Shocked at the suddenness of Hilder’s death, Reuvan had shouldered Colwyn and carried him back to the healing center, where he now lay, still unconscious. Reuvan had gone out again to bring in Hilder’s body and then again to look for me, Geratty, and Yarrow. I had met him on the way to the healing center after the defeat of the Herders in the laundry.

Looking back, I realized it had been madness to set fire to the armory, for we might have guessed one explosion would set off the rest of the black powder. It was only luck that we had not set off some truly dreadful Beforetime weapon, such as those with which the Herders had destroyed the city of Hevon.

Harwood was convinced that the many subsequent explosions were the result of the black-powder fire reaching hidden weapon caches within the wall tunnel I had taken to the mine. A small explosion in the wall tunnel near the library had set off the much larger explosion that destroyed the library and Ariel’s chambers, and given my earlier premonition, neither of us had any doubt that Ariel’s chambers lay at the heart of the explosion. Harwood thought that a cache of black powder or something more potent had been set to
explode as soon as the chamber’s door was forced; he had pointed out grimly that it was proof enough that Yarrow had been right in guessing Ariel had never intended to return to Herder Isle.

The earlier explosions had weakened the wall surrounding the compound, so when the library went up, a great wedge of the wall broke away and fell into the channel, forming a stone ford that had effectively reconnected the islands. When he had brought Cinda to the healing center, Elkar had told me that this fulfilled a legend that claimed the Norselanders would be free when the Girdle of the Goddess had been restored.

“I meant to ask, is the One dead?” Harwood inquired after Sover and the healer had gone.

“Sabatien thinks he is,” I said. “He says that as far as he can make out, the One died after the Hedra master killed the healer tending him. But we will not know for sure until the Hedra master surrenders. Sabatien told him if he kills Asra or Yarrow, he and all of his men will be killed, but if he surrenders them, he and his men will be taken prisoner.”

Harwood ran a hand through his hair. “What of those poor wretches from the mine?”

“The female shadows are moving those not too badly injured into the inner-cadre cottages in the walled garden. It is a good deal closer than the healing center. The rest are gradually being brought here on stretchers. Indeed, between the mine shadows and those hurt by the explosions, there is not an empty bed in the place.”

We were silent a moment, and then Harwood said, “What news of the shipmaster?”

“Veril came in half an hour past to say that Helvar and the Norselanders had come across from Fallo. It seems they
actually witnessed the fall of the compound’s outer wall.”