The Eye of the Hunter (16 page)

Yet now, nought but abandoned silence filled the enshad-owed chamber.

Turning from these memories, Riatha passed back through the wooden doors, coming out neath gloomy skies, a soughing wind skirling. Again the earth trembled.

Leaving her horse stabled behind, the Elfess made her way down from the monastery and onto the crevasse-raddled ice, her thoughts now upon the one she had come to mourn.

Riatha scanned the distant ice.
I came to grieve at thy death site, yet I know not that I can find where thou didst fall, my Urus
.

Out onto the vast frozen river she trod, wending her way past great cracks and crevices in the ice, glancing back now and again at the monastery to get her bearings. At last she came to the point where she deemed Urus had plunged with Stoke down into the crevasse, now gone. She sought some sign that
this
was the place. Yet search as she would, nought
came of her efforts. At last, heartsick, she made her way back to the monastery.

In the night, Riatha fell into the meditative state that Elves rest within, though even Elves sleep true sleep at times, and her mind wandered through memories, some pleasant, some ill.

Riatha startled awake.

In the stable below, the mare slept standing. A chill wind eddied in the rafters above. The Elfess shrugged the blanket from her shoulders and climbed down from the loft. Stepping outside, she scanned the sky above. It was still cast over with clouds, and no stars shone.

Leftward, the monastery tower loomed upward.
Perhaps I can see from there where Stoke landed on the glacier. And thence find where Urus fell
.

Riatha buckled Dúnamis across her back, for she would not enter the dark interior unarmed…not here in the Grimwall.

As she strode for the building, again her mind turned on memories past.

Riatha entered the hall of worship, making her way past the altar and through the sacristy beyond, coming to a spiral stairway winding upward through the blackness and to the bell tower above.

Up these steps she twisted, remembered visions preceding her.

Riatha came to the top of the tower. Making her way past the silent iron bells, she stepped to the archway overlooking the glacier, her gaze sweeping, seeing—

—A light? On the glacier?
Out in the distance upon the white field, a soft glow shone. Faint, as of a firefly in the night, but a glow still. And it moved not, but remained motionless upon the ice.

Taking a sighting, her heart hammering, Riatha hurried down from the tower and out through the hall of worship. Once again she made her way down to the glacier, veering this way and that to avoid crevasses and splits. Crossing the great jumble, she came at last to the place she had seen from the bell tower.

Here the ice was nearly transparent, and a soft golden glow shone up through the glacier, coining from deep, deep below. Riatha looked back up at the monastery in the distance, knowing that a short way from here was where she had spent the day searching.
Surely that was where Urus fell, as near as I can say. Yet I was closer to the monast—The movement! The glacier moves! Urus fell there, but in the years after, the ice moved
.

Riatha’s heart cried out for her to
do
something. But what? If this light truly marked where Urus now lay, then his body was hundreds of feet below, trapped forever in the translucent depths.
Nay! Not forever! Just until the ice comes unto the great north wall. And when that happens, my Urus
,
I will be there to find thee and see that thou art given a fitting burial
.

Riatha wept, tears coursing down her cheeks. And she knelt on the ice and held her hands out in the golden glow, seeking…comfort, solace. And the world trembled now and again, the land yet shaking from Kalgalath’s ruin.

It was dawn ere she returned to the monastery, having well marked the place where glowed the golden light, its soft radiance tugging at her heart.

She rode away that day, leaving behind the monastery, whose iron bells had last rung in the great quaking on that Springday night when Urus had fallen.

* * *

Years passed, some four or five. And came the day when Rael spoke a prophecy, and Riatha journeyed to speak of it to Pebble and Petal, the Waerlinga grim with the portent, yet pledging to instruct their firstborns down through time.

More years fled, and the Winter War came upon the land, and with it the Dimmendark. Riatha was in Riamon at the time and joined the Lian Guardians there to once again battle Modru’s minions.

Many a Death Rede blew coldly through the souls of Elves from the fields of conflict, especially from the Battle of Kregyn, yet everywhere the survivors fought on, risking death despite the fact that they were just beginning their lives, no matter their ages. To do otherwise was to surrender unto Modru’s and Gyphon’s eternal damnation.

When that War ended, again the Elfess returned unto Arden Vale.

Time and years retreated into the past, and word came that Tomlin—Pebble—had died, two years less than four decades after the end of the Winter War. Riatha journeyed to the Boskydells and played her harp and sang of Tomlin’s deeds at his gravesite, keeping faith with words said years past at another wake: the Baeron Gathering in The Clearing in the Greatwood, where Tomlin and she had told and sung of Urus’s deeds; then it was that Tomlin had remarked again that he would be pleased should someone sing of his deeds at his own passing. And so Riatha stood at his grave-side and plucked the shimmering strings of her silver harp and lifted her clear voice into the gentle air, and sang Tomlin’s soul up into the sky.

Then she took Petal with her back to Arden Vale, where the wee damman lived in honor.

Another sevenyear passed, and Petal succumbed to her own mortality. Riatha again journeyed to the Boskydells, to bury Petal at the side of her lifemate, there in the rich earth of Eastdell. Once more she sang above the grave of a loved one and played her silver harp. Too, she carved a headstone and placed it thereupon, its words in Sylva, the language of the Lian; it said merely,
Beloved friends
.

Over the next centuries, Riatha oft made the long journey to the Great North Glacier, each time finding the soft golden glow in the night. Through the years the light slowly drifted north and eastward, driven by the mass of ice, flowing, ever flowing, yet never seeming to hurry its journey through the centuries. And always Riatha wept for her lost Urus.

In these same centuries Riatha learned the ways of forestry and of the use of a bow; too, she sharpened her climbing skills; and she studied the arts of stealth and stalking and of concealment, for the Grimwall was again becoming a dangerous place to be,
Rûpt
and such once more beginning to venture forth after the crushing defeat centuries agone at Winter War’s end and again in the War of Drimmen-deeve. And Riatha’s visits to grieve at the Great North Glacier became more hazardous with the passage of time.

In spite of the danger, the Elfess continued each quarter century to make a pilgrimage to where Urus had fallen, once taking Aravan along, for he would see the abandoned monastery with its iron bells that rang whenever the earth quaked heavily, the Elf yet searching for the lost silver sword. Too, she took him to the ruins of Dreadholt and to the rubble of Stoke’s bartizan near Vulfcwmb to look for the sword in those places as well, to no avail.

But as decade after decade elapsed, eroding away the centuries, she neglected not her studies in music and painting, in decorative gardening, and in the weaving of silken fabrics, as well as her delvings into the mysteries of crystals, of gems, of precious metals.

And she kept up her skill with the sword, practicing with other Elven Masters.

All these skills she gathered unto her, knowing that more, many more were to come. She was, after all, just beginning.

Winters came and went, winters when the earth slept,
centuries of such passing seasons, each winter followed by the awakenings of spring—spring after spring. Summers followed—bright, bright summers, with their seasons of growth and growings. And then came the autumns, the harvest times, the times of gathering the earth’s bounty.

The centuries passed, ticking off the count of their years. And all the while the stars wheeled their arcane courses across the skies above, forming omens and portents for any with the skills to read the shifting patterns. And still the glacier flowed, gradually moving downslope, the light deep in the ice below drifting, drifting, north and east, drifting outward, away from the main flow and toward the eastern edge but moving still. And slowly, slowly, the time drew nigh when the Eye of the Hunter would sweep through the nighttides to come, these drawing nearer and nearer until they lay but some two and a half years hence.

And upon a harvest time nigh a millennium past the Winter War, Riatha scythed in a field of grain. There came a call from behind, from field’s edge. And when the Elfess turned and shaded her eyes, there ahorse was Jandrel, with two Waerlinga mounted upon ponies at his side.

Riatha handed her scythe to one of the gleaner walked toward the visitors. Although she knew not the names of these Waerlinga, still she knew who they were…

…The Lastborn Firstborns had come.

Springday Night, 5E988
[
The Present
]

A
aooouu
…Again the distant yawl of Vulgs on the hunt sounded, echoing from crevice and crag. Riatha looked at Aravan as if for confirmation.

Beneath Aravan’s jerkin at his throat was a blue stone thong, a stone now icy chill. “Aye,” he agreed. “I deem as do thee—’tis Vulgs, a pack, and they are in pursuit.”

Faeril peered down the slope of the twisting canyon, shadowy and dark in the starlit night, the damman staring toward where the defile wrenched out of sight. “I don’t see them.”

Gwylly looked the opposite way, up the slope hemmed by towering stone. “Neither do I.”

Rocks and ice yet rattled and shattered down from the steeps above, loosed by the quaking of the unstable land. Still the faint tintinnabulation of far-off iron bells sounded.

Faeril turned to Riatha. “Perhaps they are on our trail, yet with these echoes I can’t tell which way the sounds come from, the direction of the Vulgs.”

The risen Moon was yet hidden beyond the high eastern him of the deep canyon, though its pale silver rays now splashed against the wall to the west. Weighing their option, the Elfess fixed her gaze on this moonlit stone and glittering ice rising sheer in the near distance. “Whence come the Vulgs—from ahead or behind—I cannot say. Yet this I do know: up slope or down, still we are not fleet enough to escape them afoot should we run.”

As if to underscore Riatha’s words, wrauling howls rebounded along the twisting granite slot, louder still, closer still.

Faeril reached for a throwing knife. “Do we make a stand? Battle?”

“Nay,” gritted Riatha. “Vulgs are a savage foe and a pack would o’erwhelm us.”

Nettled, Gwylly jammed a sling bullet back into his belt pouch, exasperation in his voice: “Well, if we don’t run and we don’t fight, then
what
? What do we do? Where do we go from here?”

“Up!” declared Riatha, deciding at last. “Up the moonlit wall. We must climb.”

Gwylly gasped. “Climb? Up that? But the ice, the falling rocks—”

“Dispute me not, Gwylly,” interrupted Riatha. “Afoot we are certain dead. But up the sheer stone and ice, we mayhap live, for Vulgs cannot climb such.”

In haste they set out for the western rampart. Still, now and again a rock or shard of ice plummeted down. Yet the Vulg howls neared, ringing loudly.

The Elfess led, scanning the wail as they drew closer, while the Elf brought up the rear, his crystal-bladed spear at the ready. Trying to maintain the pace, the two Waer linga floundered in the middle, their breathing harsh as the struggled, the snow deep for ones of their stature. Again howls juddered through the night. Aravan’s next words were ominous: “I am reminded that where run Vulgs, so run the
Rûpt
.”

Gwylly’s features were pale, and Faeril’s lips were pinched into a thin grim line. Overhead, the Eye of the Hunter streamed across the spangle of stars. “If
Rûpt
there be,” replied Riatha, “then we must ascend swiftly, for unlike the Vulgs, Rucha and Loka
do
climb.”

“If maggot-folk come, will they have archers among them?” gasped Gwylly.