The Guardian (29 page)

It was no such wood as I’d ever seen. The trees were black and hung with spiked boughs, and none higher than the head of a mounted man. The thorns that stabbed from the thickets were crimson—the brightest color I’d seen in days—and long as my thumb. They rattled in the wind as if they clutched toward us, and I felt a great reluctance to enter. I would have found a way around, but the wood stretched out before us and Shara pointed to a path and bade Ellyn and me follow. So I drew my sword and set my buckler on my left arm and did as I was told.

I swear that the branches parted as Shara rode through, then thrust toward Ellyn and drew back, and clutched at me. I supposed that the women’s magic protected them; I had only my sword and shield. And I knew that I felt thorns rattle against my buckler, and that my pretty mare snorted in protest of the pricks that stung her. I felt stings on my flesh, and slashed at limbs that shifted and moved and sought to entwine me before Shara called back, “Offer no offense. Don’t hurt them.”

Them?
Sad, sorry thornbushes were
them?
I rode into mysteries I could not understand.

I felt a spike prick my thigh, another my sword arm, and I felt a great desire to strike out, to cut my way through this mad wood, but I obeyed, and the questing boughs drew back as if leashed by Shara’s magic. They granted me passage and we followed a winding trail that delivered us onto a wide plain that ran out all grey as the withered flesh of long-dead corpses to the great cliffs of the Styge.

I thought that it should take us no more than a day to reach those peaks, and could not understand how we had reached our goal so swiftly—save that it was as Shara had said—that time was different in the Barrens. Surely we had crossed them sooner than the time I understood allowed.

And surely our path was barred.

I thought they were likely the creators of the tracks we’d seen. Their paws certainly fit, for they were huge and clawed, descending from massive legs of scabrous flesh that
rose to groins kilted with orange hair, so that it was impossible to determine their sex. Their anger, however, was clear, for they waved taloned hands toward us and roared a challenge that overcame the howling of the wind. Their upper bodies were bare as their legs, nor less muscled, nor any less scabrous. Indeed, as I studied them, I saw that their worst deformities lay above. Sores decorated their torsos and faces, which resembled those of the simians I’d seen carried by Nabanese sailors. The jaws thrust forward beneath wide nostrils, the eyes small and red and glaring from under overhanging brows tufted with the same red hair as hid their midriffs. Their arms were long as their legs, and they seemed undecided whether to stand or settle on all fours—save as they beat their clawed fists against their oozing chests to challenge our intrusion.

The wind carried their scent to us, and it was foul. My horse snorted and began to kick. Ellyn cried out, struggling to retain her seat. Shara waved us back.

“I’ll deal with these.”

I forced my anxious mount past Ellyn’s curvetting black

“How? With magic?”

Shara nodded, staring at the creatures that blocked our way.

“And leave that trail you spoke of? I thought you had better not leave such spoor.”

“What other choice have we?”

“Are they mortal or magic?” I asked.

She answered, “Both.”

“Are they mortal, they can be slain.”

I sheathed my sword and slid my bow from the quiver. Strung the curved wood and nocked a shaft. I took another and set it between my teeth. Then I slammed my heels into the bay’s ribs and—willing as she was, for all her fear—we went charging toward the monsters.

I loosed my first arrow as we closed on them. I saw the shaft drive deep into a bare, greyish-red chest, the creature
stumbling back, pawing at the fletchings. I snatched the second from my mouth and fired within a few hoofbeats of the other. I was proud of that shot, for it took the thing in the right eye, and it fell down screaming, the bloody arrowhead protruding from the back of its skull.

I was on them then, and I drew my sword and cut down at the first I saw—which was the one pierced through the eye—even as I wondered how either could still fight, still live. I clove its skull and heeled my horse around to swipe a blow across the other’s back as it rose, snarling, its paws reaching for my horse’s belly. I cut it from massive shoulders to hairy ribs, then took a blow on my shield that near unseated me. Instinctively, I reined back, so that the mare reared and plunged and drove her forehooves down against the creature, which roared and pawed at her even as it was knocked away. I turned her and swung my blade against the monster’s face, then cut deep into its neck. It fell onto all fours and I reached from the saddle to stab it in the spine. It slumped, whimpering, onto the bare ground.

Blood red as mine came from its back, and in a while it ceased its twitching and lay still. I waited until I was sure both were truly dead, then beckoned the women on. Shara approached with troubled eyes; Ellyn’s contained that mixture I’d seen before, of admiration and resentment. Both skirted around the corpses, which gave off a most foul odor.

“Best we leave these fast behind,” Shara said, “for their deaths are likely to call other things.”

“I thought there were not so many.” I wiped my blade as I spoke; I feared the blood of such beings should corrupt the honest steel.

“There aren’t,” she replied. “But even so …”

I glanced at the bodies—and saw that little tendrils extended from the ground where their blood pooled. Small shoots, like plants rising to the spring sun, but black and withered as mummified flesh until they touched the blood, whereupon they became crimson, thickening and moving
with much greater unnatural vigor. I gaped, caught in horrified fascination, and saw thorny leaves sprout even as I watched, reaching toward the sundered flesh, grasping like taloned hands, fresh tendrils growing to drive deep into the wounds. I spat, for it seemed my mouth was filled with the foulness of this land, and heeled my horse away.

Shara lifted her black to a gallop and we set out toward the ravine. I looked back once, and saw that both bodies were hidden beneath a mass of writhing foliage, from which rose prickly bushes akin to that black wood we’d traversed. I mouthed a near-forgotten prayer to those gods I was no longer sure I believed in—and wondered if we had not been wiser to go with the Dur.

But I was committed now, and so I rode northward, trusting in Shara. Even had I not come to believe in her, I had no other choice now.

W
e came to the ravine and she turned her mount east a ways until we came to a precipitously descending trail. The stone of this deep gully was black, and the trail was smooth as glass, falling sheer away on the open side. Our horses’ hooves slithered on the uncertain surface and after a while, Shara reined in and dismounted, proceeding on foot. Ellyn and I followed suit, she cursing and I nervous, fearing that one animal or another might fall and drag its owner over the brink. But we reached the foot safely and found ourselves facing a wide stretch of gritty soil, like dark sand. I wondered if once a river had run here, for things protruded from the bottom that seemed to me like the bones of huge fishes. Indeed, I thought I saw a vast and many-fanged skull thrusting up, but I had no chance to question Shara, for she urged us on and mounted and took her black horse across the shaley bed at a fast canter to the trail that rose on the far side.

There, we dismounted again and climbed a winding traverse no easier than the descent. Ellyn gave up her cursing in favor of a labored panting that was broken only by her
requests that we halt and rest. Shara would have none of that, but called back that we must reach the summit before night fell.

Before night fell? It was now only noon—as best I could tell under so grey and featureless a sky—and for all the climb should take us longer than the descent, I could not imagine it lasting out the day.

Save as we climbed, the sky blackened and a bitter wind came yowling down the ravine. What little light there had been faded altogether, and we climbed into night.

“Quick!” Shara called. “We must reach the edge before …”

What else she shouted was lost under the screaming of the wind. It buffeted us, and it was horribly chill, but I saw no danger in it. The stone of the ravine protected us from its worst gustings and I thought that we needed only to continue upward to find safety on the rimrock.

Then I looked back and saw what the wind drove.

The ravine filled with foaming black water. It came like a flash flood. In the instant of my looking, the bottom was no longer a grey shale bed, but washed with the torrent. There was no rain to explain this, only a raging tide that swept from the west and filled the bed with a tremendous current that lapped angrily at the walls, rising to send foam splashing at our heels. I saw the bones disturbed and take on flesh, so that vast piscine monsters darted in the current, their skeletal fins rising above the tide, half-fleshed jaws snapping as if they’d leap up and take us like trout rising to snatch flies. I heard Ellyn scream in terror and yelled for her to hurry, my words snatched away by the wind; I saw Shara’s face, pale in the dimmed light, mouthing words I could not hear. I felt a great splash of icy water against my back, and fear. My horse screamed and began to buck. I fought her down and slapped her rump, driving her upward so that she collided with Ellyn’s mount and both hastened their pace. I heard a sound like a sword striking a shield, and darted a
look back in time to see vast jaws closing behind me and sinking back on a fully fleshed body into the raging tide.

Gasping, panting, cursing, we reached the rim of that horrible ravine and halted in wonder.

Or Ellyn and I did; perhaps Shara had known what we might expect.

Below us, the flood raged, filled with massive bodies that tore at one another. Behind us, the Barrens stood limned in darkest night, black cloud sent running by the hammering wind obscuring the moon. Before us spread a verdant meadow lit by a descending sun that seemed oblivious of the darkness behind. Yellow and blue and white flowers decorated the grass that stretched toward a wood of honest pine, and past that the foothills of the Styge, magnificently vast in the setting sun.

I could not help asking her: “Did you know?”

Shara smiled nervously and answered, “Not truly. Sometimes it happens like that. Sometimes nothing at all occurs.”

“You should have warned us.”

“Perhaps,” she allowed. “But had I told you, would you have followed?”

Ellyn gave her answer:
“No!
By the gods, we might have been killed there. We’d have done better to go with my grandfather. That should have been safer!”

Shara caught my eye, and I said, “Save Eryk likely pursues the Dur; and the clans shall likely fight ere long. And you must learn to use your talent—which Shara shall teach you to do, so that you can defeat Talan and get back your parents’ throne.”

She stamped a heel into the flower-covered grass and scowled furiously.
“Shara
shall teach me?
Shara
shall take me to the Styge and teach me what my grandmother cannot? Shara shall lead you …
me
… like some … some bull with a ring through its nose to wherever
she
wants to go? And all you do is pant and follow?”

I crossed the few paces between us and set my hands on her face. It came only to my chest. “Because I’m sworn to guard you,” I said, “and see you safe until you can regain your kingdom.”

“You love her!”

I had no answer to that. I did not want to say, No, nor could I say, Yes, so I only stared at her, seeing tears course her cheeks. They wet my hands, and after awhile Ellyn pulled away, rubbing furiously at her eyes, her face flushed. I was unsure whether that redness stemmed from embarrassment or anger, and I did the only thing I could think of.

I drew my sword and went on one knee before her, my blade resting on the palms of my upturned hands. The lowering sun struck bright sparks from the steel, glinting like the tears on her cheeks.

“You are my ward and my queen,” I repeated. “I pledge my sword to you, and my life.”

“And your heart?”

I stared at her. She was a child, too young to ask such questions, but in her eyes there shone a terrible intensity, so that for a moment I was lost for words. Did she think she loved me? That was insanity: I was old enough to be her father. I wondered how to reply, aware that futures likely hung on my response.

At last I said, carefully, “My heart is my own, Ellyn. You own a part of it, for you
are
my ward; and when you take the throne, you shall own my life to command. But …”

She cut me short with an irritable gesture. Her eyes were reddened from her crying, now they glowed with anger and spite.

“And do I command you to forsake
her?
Do I command you to slay her?”

Still kneeling, I said, “That should be an unworthy command. Shara is your friend—your ally—and wise rulers do not order the deaths of allies. Neither Andur or Ryadne would ever issue such a command.”

She glowered at me, her hands fisted on her hips. “But if I did?”

I turned my blade so that the point drove into the verdant ground and cupped my hands over the pommel, my chin resting on my knuckles. I stared at her—this child-woman, whose emotions and motivations I found so hard to understand—and found my gaze met with frowning, red-rimmed anger. I could not understand her; I could not understand women.

“No,” I said, “for such a command would render you no better than Talan. Do you not understand? I offer you my loyalty, but loyalty is something you earn. It is not a gift, not some pretty present, packaged for your amusement, your whim. It can be given only in honesty, and it is not be played with.”

“You choose her.”

I shook my head, and rose, sheathing my sword. “I make no choice,” I said, “for there’s none to be made. My blade is yours; my heart is my own.”

She said, “I hate you,” and spun on irate heels to stalk off to her horse.

I sighed. I looked to Shara for help, but she only studied me gravely and turned away, going to her own horse. I looked at the sky, but that offered me no better answer, and so I climbed astride my bay, wondering if she, too, would find me annoying. But she only snorted and turned her pretty head that I might stroke her neck. I thought I got on better with animals than with women.