The Song of Andiene (24 page)

Andiene stared at her, her eyes widening. “Spare us your dreams,” said Syresh. Ahead, they saw a safehold, and hurried toward it.

It was the same as any other; they walked up its wide shallow steps quietly. The shadow of forgotten times lay heavily on them, and they moved as though they were trespassers in a stranger’s dwelling. “Are they all set the same way?” asked Andiene. “Open to the east?”

“All that I have ever seen,” answered Lenane. “Why it is so, no one knows, unless it be the grizanes, who know all things.”

“Look,” whispered Syresh. The guardian of the safehold stood in the corner. He was carved of gray stone that gave no semblance of life, but his eyes were inlaid with black onyx, so that they sparkled and seemed to follow the intruders as they moved. His head was crowned with a pair of wide-branching antlers sprouting low from his brow. In his hand he held a bow.

“He is the guardian of this path,” Lenane said. “All along our road we may find him, though he might wear a different face. So if any ask how we came through the forest, we may say that we came on Carvarinelan’s way.”

Syresh shook his head. Those eyes, it would be a brave one who would dare to look into them. “What were they, the ones that built these places?” he asked.

“They were blasphemers,” said Lenane cheerfully. “But great and mighty blasphemers. We must be grateful to them.”

Then they went out to pick blaggorn from the clearing for their supper. The kernels hung brittle on the stems, summer-dry and ready to fall. When they lit a fire to cook their food, the smoke eddied and choked them, at last finding its way out through the doorway and the cracks at the eaves. The stones of the safehold made a hard bed. They slept little that night as they listened to the song of the forest.

The next day was the same, and the days after that. The forest wore on their spirits. Syresh bickered with Lenane; that gave him some pleasure, and amused her as well. Impatient to get on with her plans, Andiene seemed to fret under the monotony, like the old songs of swords that were restless in their sheaths.

The constant threat of danger hung over them, even though there was no sign of the forest creatures that Andiene and Syresh knew from the songs only. No sign of anything but innocent grasskits, coursers, and hawks.

“I thought that people lived in the forest, men and women?” asked Syresh. “Where are they?”

“We follow the broad path,” Lenane said. “It is the little ones that lead to the clearings, where one may live, or a family, or a whole village.”

“How much farther to the open fields?” asked Andiene.

“Not too many more days, I would think. We have made good time, only having to retrace our steps twice.”

“I will be glad to see the sun and hear the birds sing.”

“And so will I,” said Syresh. “Still, I do not see where the danger lies in your forest. From all that we have seen, we would have been in more danger walking down a city alleyway on a star-dim night.”

“Maybe,” Lenane said. “But the danger of the forest is swift and sudden, and no man may defend utterly against it.” Her voice rang as though she were quoting, from the Law of the Forest, perhaps.

They walked on, through the green underwater forest light. It was a never-changing scene, or so Syresh thought. Only the safehold clearings gave a pleasant change, the sight of clear water and bright flowers.

“Look,” said Lenane, and she pointed to a low-hanging bough. Syresh shook his head, seeing nothing. “Blind! See the edge, the golden line of death on the edge of the leaf. Summer will be upon us soon. It comes swift and cruel in the forest, and path and forest are made the same. We are leaving it just in time.”

“Good that there is always water where the safeholds are. We have not gone thirsty.”

“The streams make paths of their own, though we cannot follow them,” Lenane said, as if she were speaking to a tiny child. “The safeholds are strung on them like beads on a string.”

Syresh looked at her and said nothing. She was a commoner and a thief. For one who ought to have walked meek and silent among her betters, she had a saucy tongue and arrogant way. Still, he wished that he had not shown his resentment as clearly. Clever and pretty, she would have made a pleasant traveling companion, if matters had not begun so badly.

He watched her as she stiffened, suddenly alert. “Listen!” They were quiet and still. The air throbbed with a faint sound, almost like a man sobbing.

“Where is it?”

“Behind us,” Syresh said.

“Then we are cut off from shelter. Run!”

Syresh stared stupidly at her. Andiene laughed, and her face lit up with excitement. “Here is my chance to do something worth the doing!”

Lenane looked at her in incomprehension. “Run!” she shrieked. Behind them, the sound grew louder, a deep-throated mockery of human sorrow. Then they ran, and ran in earnest.

No sign of the shelter they needed, the safehold. No time to wonder what hunted them. No time to wonder how it could hunt in daytime when the forest paths should have been warded against evil.

The sobbing lost its note of grief as it grew louder. Laughter echoed around them, hollow as a madman’s laugh might be. They entered a long stretch of straight path, a half-clearing. Syresh glanced backwards, and saw the first rust-red hound lope out of the shadows, lean and thin as a symbol of death itself.

“No use,” he gasped. “Let us make a stand, and take some with us.” More of the hell-hounds poured out of the shadows, falling silent as they saw their prey. “Lady, whatever powers you have, use them now,” he said to Andiene, in desperate hope. Then there was no more time for talking.

The leader sprang at him. He stabbed at it, shook it off his sword to the ground. These were mortal creatures, at least. The next ones did not slacken their pace. They flew at his throat from opposite sides. Frantically, he cut at one with his sword, drove his dagger deep into the other’s chest. Teeth slid down his sleeve harmlessly as the body fell to the ground.

The three of them, Andiene, Syresh, and Lenane, formed a circle, to guard their backs the best they could. What Andiene was doing Syresh did not know, but he trusted her to defend herself. Lenane was the weak link, he thought. Her claws were short weapons that would not hold the beasts away from her.

The long hours of sword-training came back to him; he struck and stabbed by instinct alone. Lenane stood to his right; he caught glimpses of her, slashing with her claws at a wounded hellhound. With his sword hand he tried to protect her too. As he turned too far to the right, his left side lay unguarded. Sharp teeth fastened in his wrist and the dagger fell from his hand. A hound dived low, and locked its jaws around his ankle. Then he was down on one knee, still fighting, but crippled.

One fastened onto his right arm, long teeth set like a snake’s fangs in a narrow muzzle. He saw Lenane’s claws hook into its side and tear it from him. Then she snatched the sword from his hand, and stood over him, fighting off the hounds as best she could.

One slipped under her guard, and he fended it from his throat with his already torn arm, while he groped for his fallen dagger to dispatch it. Lenane fought well and bravely, better than he would have guessed, but the hounds streamed from the forest in never-ending waves.

The sound of men’s voices roused him.
Have their masters come?
Then two more joined the circle; they pushed Lenane behind them. The taller one fought clumsily, but had great strength. The other was a master swordsman, making the hounds falter and lose the fury of their attack for fear of him.

“Girl, get your comrade on his feet,” he said to Lenane, a hard voice, used to command. “We may reach shelter if he can walk.”

Her strong hands tugged at Syresh. Dazed with loss of blood, hope gave him new strength, and he staggered to his feet. What he saw amazed him. Andiene was the focus of a half-circle of fire. She did not speak one word. Whatever she did took all her strength. The hellhounds circled outside the fires, but did not try to plunge through.

The strangers wove an arc of destruction with their swords, completing the circle with mortal strength. The bodies of the red hounds littered the ground, but still more poured from the forest shadows, sobbing in the distance, falling quiet as they saw the battle. They fought silently, making no noise even as they died.

Step by step, the circle of battle moved along the path. The stranger, the one more skilled in swordwork, laughed, as there came a brief respite in the fight. “Courage,” he called out. “Courage, we can but die!”

His companion shook his head, and fought on.

Lenane reached in her pack, still slung across her back, and pulled out bandages. Syresh’s arm and shoulder had taken the brunt of the attack. After she had wrapped his wounds enough to stop the flow of blood, his head seemed to clear a little, but still he clung to her. It took all his remaining strength to stay on his feet and stagger forward, as the battle raged around them. There came a time, much later, when they fought themselves around a bend in the path, and saw the broad steps of a safehold—perhaps a dozen paces ahead of them.

That short distance might as well have been leagues. The red hounds redoubled their fury. The taller of the strangers faltered a moment, and a hound slipped in under his guard; he went down. Then they swarmed over him, and he had nothing to do but to protect his throat as best he could.

Syresh staggered forward, picked up the other man’s sword, and tried to tear the hounds from him. They clung like leeches, lapping his blood, too intent on their one victim to turn on the others.

The other stranger could not aid them. His work was to keep the circle of protection from being broken again. His sword cut the air and seemed to be in all places at once.

Lenane caught the last of the hounds with her claws, and Syresh stabbed it and threw its body away from the stranger, but that was only a moment’s respite. They were at bay. They could go no further. The sobbing of another wave of the hounds grew louder. Death seemed twice as bitter, to come with shelter so near.

“Save yourself,” he gasped to the stranger and Andiene, the two left unharmed. “Leave us. You can do us no good.”

They might have been deaf, for all the answer he got.

A movement on the steps of the safehold caught his dimming eyes. A child? That was the last madness. No, the flutter of her white robe caught his eye again as she ran toward them. The red hounds turned, and one lunged at her. A flash of flame in mid-air, and the hound fell in a crumbled heap.

Then fire was all around them, leaping and crackling orange-red flames feeding joyously on air and nothingness.

The stranger stepped back into the circle of safety and sheathed his sword. He knelt beside his comrade, and urged him to his feet. Though he staggered under the other man’s weight, he managed to support him, to keep him walking. “If you cannot walk, then crawl,” he said to Lenane and Syresh. “I cannot carry you all.”

Lenane caught at his arm, and dragged herself to her feet. Syresh shook his head and crawled, one leg trailing uselessly.

Outside the circle of fire, the red ones set up their sobbing again. The short dozen paces seemed an infinity with that cursed sound ringing in Syresh’s ears.

The steps were agony, but he pulled himself onto them. His body was aflame with red pain. All that he saw was fire. Then the fires dimmed to darkness.

Chapter 17

Blood laced the safehold floor, tracing knotted patterns like some wayfarer’s map. Kallan worked the other side of the warrior’s trade, to try to mend and save.

And he waited. Andiene’s quiet voice came almost as a relief. “I swore to kill you once. You and all your kind.”

Kallan did not turn to look at her. “Wait till I have finished binding up my friend’s wounds. You should know him, Lady Andiene, if you can look and remember.”

She stepped to his side and looked down on the wounded man. Her voice was slow and wondering. “The fisherman, Ilbran.” She watched as Kallan bandaged the long torn wounds on arms and legs and chest. “Will he live?”

Kallan did not waste breath on an answer. She was the one to read the future, not he.

“What is he doing in your company?”

“We have traveled many roads together, my lady. All this year, through the winter and spring.”

The bandages were tight now, no blood staining the outer layer of felted lanara. He tested them, all good, all firm. He had no excuse now not to stand and look at her, her hands and clothing stained with blood like the safehold floor. She had helped him drag the others up into safety. She had attended to her companions, had bandaged their lesser wounds. From the moment the wall of fire died to cold nothingness, and he first saw her face, he had known her. He feared to meet her eyes.

“You do not ask why I have called feud on you?”

“No need to ask,” he said simply. “I have not seen so many child-witches that I would easily forget one.” Indeed, she had not changed, for all that she had grown taller, for all that her pale hair was cropped like a man’s, for all that she wore rough and awkward seaman’s clothes. He saw the look of royalty about her, a bright and fierce beauty.

“I swore a vow to kill you,” she repeated, grown impatient, perhaps, with his lack of response.

Kallan laid his hand on his dagger. “You might find it harder than you think, my lady.” Though she was no child now, he was warned as he and his men had not been, on that other day of death. He had been in greater danger. Such things were traps for the unwary.

Then he saw the arrogance and anger in her gray eyes. “You think that your weapons could save you? I will make you slay yourself with your own dagger.”

He did not believe her. For a moment he did not believe her. Then, for all his determination, he felt his fingers close around the dagger hilt. His arm raised itself, obeying her will, not his own, bringing the dagger out of its sheath, up to heart level. The point slid neatly between the iron rings of his shirt to find the softer leather between.

He fought against her grip. Cold sweat drenched him. His hand moved as though he were in a paralyzing nightmare. The dagger cut through the leather, through his flesh, but not far, not too far.