The Shadow Within (55 page)
Simon read his mind. “Men will die regardless. Now or later. Fewer or more. That is why we are willing to give our lives as soldiers, Abramm, to defend this realm from those who would oppress her and steal her and defile her. Whether those come from within or without, the call to fight them remains.”
“There is a time for war.”
“You are Kiriath’s rightful king,” Simon went on. “And more, you are the right man for the job. You know I don’t hold with your religious views, but if I believed Eidon existed, I would believe you are the man he has chosen.”
Abramm sat back in his chair and let his gaze drift over the men around him, seated and standing, their faces grave but determined, all of them looking to him to lead them. He felt as he did that first day he stepped into Katahn’s training compound, staring down at the sword being offered to him, knowing that, should he close his hand around its hilt, his life—and maybe even his soul—would change forever. Right now he was being offered another kind of sword.
But that’s part of what it is to be a king
.
He released a low breath and nodded. “Very well. We stay and fight. For Kiriath. And for freedom.”
Despite a cold and steady rain, Rhiad kept them moving throughout the night and most of the next day. Wet, exhausted, and numb with cold, Carissa followed in a half stupor. Around her, water pelted through the forest, dripping off leaves of red and gold and brown, and pocking the puddles on the muddy track they followed. The clouds hung so low they misted the treetops and all the world seemed dead and empty.
At first she could hardly believe what had happened, her struggle to comprehend and accept hampered by the speed at which events had transpired, and by the unrelenting and surreal nature of this ride through the dark and the rain. She hadn’t spoken a word, nor had Rhiad, since they’d left the fortress at Breeton, though at times he muttered to himself. She thought at first he was talking to the creature he sheltered in his lap, but when at last she’d heard him clearly enough to catch the vitriol in his tone, she decided otherwise.
As to where he was going or why he’d come through that corridor, she had no idea. Nor did she know why he had taken her with him. Revenge, she could have understood, for she couldn’t help wondering if his present scarred state was the result of her own actions four years ago in Esurh. But he’d said nothing about revenging himself on her, and had restrained his pet by telling it he had another use for her.
“She’s very important to him,”
he’d added. Whoever “him” was.
Rennalf? Rhiad
had
come through Rennalf’s corridor, though how he’d come to be in Rennalf’s employ was a mystery that bordered on the inexplicable. Genuine or not, he was a known Mataian, and Rennalf would have no truck with a Mataian. Nor could she imagine Rhiad consenting to work for a border lord. In fact, she couldn’t imagine
this
Rhiad consenting to work for anyone, for he seemed quite mad. Besides, if Rennalf had sent him, shouldn’t they be heading north? Perhaps not, if he was taking her to another corridor. Heading north, they would find travel conditions increasingly difficult, so if another doorway lay to the south, that would surely be the direction to go.
“Eidon will make us a way,”
Elayne had told her at Owl Creek.
Well, if this was the “way” Eidon had made, Carissa was not impressed. Now, after almost twenty-four hours in the saddle, she was so tired she barely felt the pain of wrists rubbed raw in the attempt to free them and was all but falling from Heron’s back every time the mare set a foot down awkwardly. She was beginning to wonder how much it would hurt just to let herself fall. Would Rhiad simply ride on unheeding? When he finally did stop, maybe she would be dead, and wouldn’t that just fix his plans! Whatever they were.
Heron stumbled to a stop and Carissa looked up. Her captor had flung back his cowl to gaze skyward, where streaks of blue sky now showed between the rapidly shifting, orange-gilt edges of the breaking overcast. The rain was slacking off, too, though the forest still dripped vigorously. Suddenly the little beast sprang from under Rhiad’s cloak to the ground and disappeared into the forest. After a moment Rhiad kicked Arrow forward again and Heron followed, their hooves sucking and squelching in the mud. Somewhere a jay squawked, and Carissa decided it was time to drop another ring.
In addition to her four rings, already minus one, she’d picked up a spoon, a hoof pick, a snarl of horsehair, and a handful of coins she’d found hidden at the bottom of one of Rennalf’s supply packs which Rhiad had forced her to go through in the kitchen. These she had slipped surreptitiously into her belt hoping to leave Cooper a trail. She suspected now it was an exercise in futility. Even if Coop was still alive and had somehow managed to escape the prison Rennalf had confined him in, the idea that he’d find something as small as one of her rings in all the long stretch of muddy track they’d traveled was ludicrous. But it was better than doing nothing, and in this rain, he’d have little else to go on.
Guess I’ll just have to trust Eidon to open his eyes,
she thought sardonically.
She had just worked the ring free and dropped it, along with one of the coins, when the little beast returned and after yammering at Rhiad for a bit, led them off the track and through the forest to the hollow, hut-sized stump of a gigantic, lightning-felled tree. A long, dark mound of decomposed trunk marked the path of its fallen upper parts, some of which remained intact, propped on the logs against which they had fallen. The nearest lay ten feet away, swarming with bees in the waning light.
Rhiad dismounted, untied the tether that bound Carissa to her saddle, and pulled her off, leaving her clinging to the stirrup leathers while she waited for her numb and useless legs to work again. She was barely able to stand unsupported when he shoved a water bag into her hands, gestured at the nearby stream, then turned to the task of getting firewood, wielding his ax with surprising strength and agility.
She stood there, working slowly through her surprise, buffeted by thoughts of escape that were discarded as impossible. If she was no longer tied to the saddle, her hands were still bound. She’d be on foot, and even if she managed to elude her captors—unlikely with that beast around—how could she survive alone in this weather? All of which Rhiad had undoubtedly considered.
The beast brought them a rabbit for dinner. Or at least, it brought a rabbit to where they sat inside the massive stump. Rhiad immediately confiscated the animal and began to skin. For a while the creature sat in the stump’s opening growling softly as it watched him. Then it whirled and vanished into the forest to return with another rabbit. This Rhiad also took, though he met greater resistance now, the little beast yammering its protest like a child. Afterward it paced before the opening, growling and hissing until Rhiad straightened from his work and sharply told it to be off.
The third rabbit Rhiad did not take, by now having spitted the other two and set them roasting over the fire. The beast whined at him for a bit, as if it wanted another confrontation, and when it was still ignored, it ran off again, leaving its latest kill where it had been dropped. The creature brought three more rabbits, and finally a porcupine. By then the rain had started up again, so it dragged its latest prize into the shelter of the stump, and lay down with it. Then, seemingly unfazed by having its face full of quills, the beast very deliberately tore open the porcupine’s soft belly and began pulling out its organs—not to eat, but to play with. Carissa had never seen anything so disgusting in her life, and the creature seemed to know it, its great green eyes fixed upon her as it worked.
It had acquired quite an array of “toys” when Rhiad roused from his mutterings and noticed. Instantly furious, the man leaped up, seized the mutilated porcupine, and cast it out into the night, kicking the organs after it and screaming epithets all the while. When his pet snarled a protest, he seized it, as well, and hurled it out into the rain after its prize.
Shrieking as if it were being burned alive and heedless of Rhiad’s ire, the creature returned to them in a heartbeat, throwing itself on the dry ground beside the fire where it rolled about frantically, shuddering and twitching. Its human companions watched in astonishment as gradually its cries subsided. At last it ceased to thrash and rolled to its feet, hunkering before its master with piteous cries and doleful looks. Rhiad stared at it a moment more, then fell to his knees, gathering his pet into his arms and nuzzling the wet, bloodsmeared head as he croaked out a stream of apologies. The beast licked his face almost tenderly in return.
After a bit, when the rabbits were cooked, he let the creature go, and it settled quietly at the edge of the circle, licking the blood from its paws. Rhiad tossed Carissa’s rabbit into her lap, heedless of the hot grease that immediately seeped into her skirt, or the fact her hands were still bound. She heard him mutter something about “he will pay” and “shouldn’t have poked his nose where it didn’t belong” as he settled tailor-style across the fire from her, tearing off strips of rabbit as if it were the “he” he referred to and stuffing them into his mouth. “. . . useless cripple, am I?”
Carissa’s appetite had long-since vanished, but she forced herself to eat anyway, determined to keep up her strength should an opportunity for escape arise. And once she was warm, fed, beginning to dry out, and no longer overwhelmed with terror, she thought it wasn’t an unreasonable hope. It occurred to her now that Rhiad had taken all the supplies they could find in the fortress kitchen, indicating he planned a journey of at least several days. The farther they went along the road, the greater the chance of running into someone who might help her. Or of Cooper catching up before Rhiad could take her through the corridor..
Outside, the rain had once more become a steady downpour. Rhiad broke off his muttering to stoke the fire, then laid on another of the branches he’d cut earlier. Taking advantage of what seemed to be a break in his angry internal ramblings, Carissa asked him if he’d loosen the bonds on her hands, since they were getting swollen. He straightened from his work over the fire and glared at her with his good eye. “You think I am so stupid I would let you free to stab me in the night?”
Carissa frowned at him. “
Stab
you, Master Rhiad?”
“No, you’d lack the courage, wouldn’t you? But you would slip away if you could.”
Carissa’s eyes went to the beast, still licking itself beside the wall of the stump. “I doubt your friend would allow that, sir.”
The madman considered his pet for a moment as it paused in its grooming to meet his gaze. “You’re right. If you leave my protection, it
will
kill you— rip that pretty face right off your skull.”
She stared at him in horrified astonishment, the gruesome images the beast had poured into her mind on first meeting resurfacing in all their bloody glory.
Rhiad chuckled. “I see it’s shown you.”
“What do you want with me?”
“What do I want with you?” The brow over his one eye arched. “I should think it obvious after what you and your brother did to me.”
“That was an accident. I never intended that—”
“You intended to get rid of me, and this is what came of it. For that you will pay. You will both pay. He thinks he has won, sending me away from Springerlan as he did, getting you to help him destroy that corridor. Hoping to finish the job you started in Esurh.”
“I haven’t spoken to Abramm in four years. And I had no idea— You came from Springerlan?!”
But he didn’t hear her, caught up in his own ravings again. “He took it all from me, just as I’ll take it from him. So straight and strong and handsome. I’ll take it all back, you’ll see. I got his blood and hair. There’ll be no mistake. It knows him already, just as he knows it.”
He raved on, making little sense, his voice falling away to that vitriolic mutter that now filled her with an unspeakable sense of dread. For enough came through that she began to put the pieces together. There’d been a gate to the Dark Ways in Springerlan, now destroyed—at Abramm’s hand, apparently— through which Rhiad had barely escaped with his pet. He had not intended to come to Breeton, at all, but to an exit in the sea village of Longstrand. She figured her own efforts to destroy the corridor to Balmark had somehow drawn him to her—along with the flash of Terstan Light Abramm had sent after him—transferring her from Rennalf’s hands to those of Rhiad. Who was now on his way back to Springerlan to revenge himself upon her brother. The part she was to play in it all remained unclear and was not something she wished to pursue. So once she had the gist of things, she stopped really listening to the rest of what he was saying. It was hard to follow anyway, and she had no way of knowing how much of it was even real. Better to concentrate on the good part, which was that Springerlan was less than two weeks away, that they’d be traveling through populated areas to reach it, and that surely there’d be opportunities for escape. Besides which, she was fairly confident Abramm could handle this threat, seeing as he’d already chased both Rhiad and his pet out of Springerlan in the first place—and destroyed the etherworld corridor, as well. After Beltha’adi, surely Rhiad was nothing.
Except . . . Rhiad hadn’t said where the gate to the corridor was in Springerlan. And its destruction had not been a subtle exercise of Terstan Light. It was very possible Abramm’s secret was already out, that he’d already been deposed, Gillard put back in power. Or maybe those hideous Gadrielites had taken him, hoping to “restore” his lost purity. He might be on the run. He might be dead, for all she knew.
Across from her, Rhiad gradually wound down, his rough voice drifting away to inaudible mutterings. His head dropped forward repeatedly, a short lock of gray hair dangling loose against his temple. Finally, after nearly falling into the flames, he flashed a glare at her, then wrapped his cloak about himself and lay down beside the fire. In moments his breathing had slowed and deepened. Over by the stump’s ragged-edged doorway, his pet stopped licking itself and looked up—first at Rhiad, then at Carissa. After a moment it crept over to where his master lay and crouched beside him to lick the cut that slashed across the palm of his gnarled left hand.
