The Wide World's End (7 page)

As night arose, the three moons opened their eyes: Horseman glowering and red in the west, Chariot perhaps halfway up the vault of the sky, with Trumpeter rising, searingly bright in the west.

“
Khai, gradara
,” whispered Rynyrth to the rising moon.

As if in response, the banefires were kindled on the gravehills—but not on all of them. There was a cloud of darkness in the heart of the burning blue graves.

“Rokhlan Earno,” Rynyrth said, “why do they kill the dead Corain? We know it is so because the Guardians said it in their message, and because we in Over Thrymhaiam watched the banefires go out, one by one. But we don't understand. Why kill the dead?”

“Dead is a relative term,” Lernaion began, but Earno, talking over him, said, “Incidental, I think. The banefires are tal-sinks—they are meant to drain away the tal of the dead Corain. Unfortunately, they learned to master them and use them to drink the tal of living beings nearby. It is the tal implicit in the banefire web that the Khnauronts crave. We think they live on tal as much or more than they live on flesh.”

Aloê could feel Lernaion's unspoken anger, Earno's obvious indifference. There was a cleft between the summoners, that much was clear.

She turned her insight outward, to the darkness in the gravehills. She saw no smoke in the sky, tasted no distant fire on the cold wind. If the Khnauronts had made camp, it was far away indeed.

Rynyrth, too, had been looking into the dark gravehills, and now she lay down on the face of the hill and embraced it like a child embracing her mother. Presently she leapt up.

“
Lukharnadh hai, ruthenen!
” she cried. “Be ready, too, Guardians of the south! I hear dwarvish boots on these hills. I hear the tramp of many slender feet. The battle is joined and comes toward us!”

Guardians and dwarves alike leapt to their feet. Rynyrth ran up and down their lines, arranging them in ranks of three.

Aloê reflected that the command of three had shrunk to one. A glance at Thea's face, rueful in shadows, showed that her comrade was thinking the same thing. But the anarchy of the Wardlands worked because people were willing to let the work be done by the one who could do it best. In this place, in this hour, it was Rynyrth.

Rynyrth returned to them, saying as she approached, “Each fighter has only so many gravebolts, and the Khnauronts drink life, as Rokhlan Earno has told us. A warrior without bolts, or who has been wounded, must make place in the front for another. The unwounded shall be a wall for the wounded.”

“Earno told you,” said Lernaion, “yet I think you knew it already.”

“It was in
Harven
Morlock's last message to us.”

“Hmph. He takes a lot on himself.”

Aloê didn't like where this conversation was going. It wasn't for Guardians to be keeping needful knowledge from the Guarded, but Lernaion seemed to think that Earno and Morlock should have done so. She wondered if Rynyrth would be offended, but the dwarf said only, “He was ours before he was yours. He will be ours again when you are done with him. You will pardon him, I hope.” As she spoke, she unslung her songbow, drew a gravebolt from her quiver, twirled it and set it to the bow. The Guardians, more slowly, with less practiced hands, did likewise.

They all waited as the stars spun slowly beyond the moons overhead, and the rumbling in the hills grew louder.

There were lights, now, casting distorted shadows on the steep gray hillsides—real lights, not the deceptive glare of banefire. Aloê could hear the clash of metal on metal but no voices yet.

Stick-thin figures stumbled into sight, lit indirectly by the approaching lights. Most clutched a wand with a clawed end in one hand and a stabbing weapon in the other; some had only the stabbing weapons. The wandbearers pointed their wands at the wandless, who thrashed about and fell and crawled and were suddenly still.

“You see it,
harven
?” Rynyrth hissed in her ear. “These beasts eat their wounded, like pus-rats. Those clawed sticks: those are the lifetakers.”

More Khnauronts flooded into view. There were very many of them—hundreds or thousands—many times the little company stationed on the Hill of Storms.

But they were not alone. Beyond them, driving them, came a cohort of bearded dwarves. They marched in close ranks; each dwarf bore a glass shield in one hand and a spiked silver mallet. Floating above them like banners, supported by nothing Aloê could see, were coldlights illumining the battle.

The dwarven soldiers used the spikes on their mallets to stab, but swung the weights to break weapons or lifetakers when they could. Their progress was slow but relentless.

The slopes opposite them suddenly bristled with gray shadows and fire-red eyes: the Gray Folk, driving another mob of Khnauronts before them.

“The moment will be soon,” Rynyrth said. “When they know we are here, blocking their retreat, they will charge the hill or attempt to flee up the valley to our south. We must be ready.”

“We should tell the others,” Thea said.

“My people know, and they will tell their allies, as I tell you.”

Now, at last, they heard the distant sound of shouting. Opposite the Hill of storms, to the west, Aloê saw a cloud of torches, dark human shapes among them. She thought some of them were carrying pitchforks.

It was the so-called Silent Folk. They came from cities and towns and had no strong allegiances or families to protect them, so they banded together in the League of Silent Men and the Guild of Silent Women. A few decades ago they had settled a valley in the North.

They were farmers with no great sense of discipline or purpose or the dangers of war. They could only be armed with improvised weapons. But they had come to defend their land in this moment of danger. Of all those in this fight, they were the most at risk.

At their head, as she had expected and feared, Aloê saw a crooked, red-cloaked figure; he carried a sword in each hand and no shield. Another red-cloaked form, taller and more regular, stood beside him with shield and sword.

Before she could say, even to herself,
Don't do that, you idiots!
the two red-cloaked figures leapt into the thick of the retreating Khnauronts and began cutting a swathe through their midst. When the dwarves saw this, they finally began to chant, “
Ath, Rokhleni!
Ath
, Ambrosius
!
Ath
, Naevros
!
Ath! Ath!
” Their line bent into a wedge, and the sharp end drove deep into the Khnauronts.

“Ambrose! Ambrose! The bond of blood!” called out the Gray Folk in fell voices as they dropped down on the Khnauronts like an avalanche from the hills.

The Khnauronts were in full retreat. The descent of the Gray Folk had closed off the retreat to the south. They turned toward the slopes of the Hill of Storms.

“Now!” called Rynyrth, lifting her own bow to the ready. “Sort friend from foe and strike for your blood,
harven
or
ruthen
!”

The songbows sang; the gravebolts flew, bright with moonlight against the dark ground; ragged ranks of skeletal Khnauronts went down in the cold light of the dwarvish banners. Aloê saw with disgust that the Khnauronts did indeed use their wands on each other, “eating their own wounded,” as Rynyrth had put it. Every time she saw a Khnauront do that, she aimed a gravebolt at him. Let the eaters be eaten.

Morlock and Naevros' wild whirling course had carried them through the mob of Khnauronts, and they turned again to strike into the heart of the fragmenting mob.

Now the ragged wave of Khnauronts was climbing the slope of Tunglskin. The gravebolts thinned their ranks, but the survivors fed on the tal of the fallen. The enemies were close enough that Aloê could actually see their black wounds closing like mouths. Their faces were full of ecstasy rather than fear or hate.

When there were only a few paces between the foremost of the enemy and the line woven of dwarves and Guardians, Aloê gripped her bow with her right hand just below its runic rose, wielding it like a club; she drew her knife with her left. Then she leaped out of the line and tore into the Khnauronts, smashing their wands with the weight of her bow, stabbing and parrying with the long knife.

Rynyrth followed her, shouting, “
Ath, Rokhlan! Khai, Oaij! Ath! Ath!
”

Glancing about to be ware of friend and foe, Aloê saw that Rynyrth was also wielding her bow like a club. For a stabbing weapon, she carried a forked spear of the kind the Khnauronts used.

Lernaion's bitter, dark eyes were lit with rapture. He stood wavering, like a man about to fall asleep on his feet. But any Khnauront that approached him fell lifeless to the ground.

Earno had seized a fallen Khnauront by the heels and was swinging him in a circle, striking down his enemies with his enemy.

There were moments of wild chaos as all the lines of battle met and mixed on the dark slopes of Tunglskin.

Then the surviving Khnauronts were throwing down their weapons and speaking or weeping with dry, birdlike clicks. They didn't seem to be surrendering so much as despairing. These had no lifetaker wands. The Khnauronts with wands fought to the death, or until their wands were broken.

Now the battle had ended, but the chaos continued to swirl in Aloê's mind and heart. She was wounded, she saw: twice in the left side, once in the left arm. She had lost her knife somewhere. She felt frail and crunchy, like a dry cicada husk.

Moonslit moments, separated by moonless dark. She saw Rynyrth and a band of
weidhkyrren
forcing the defeated Khnauronts to kneel. She saw Deor, his dark eyes fierce, his face unwontedly grim. He didn't seem to see her, and somehow she could not speak to him.

She heard someone speaking, almost whispering, nearby her. “They will make that crooked man king someday. At least in the North.”

She turned toward the voice. It was Lernaion's, and he wasn't speaking to her. He was speaking in Earno's ear, a dozen paces away, but somehow she could hear it, as if this were a dream. And she heard Summoner Earno's curt response as clearly: “Shut your lying mouth.”

She looked around for Thea. There were Guardians gathering by the two summoners, but she was not among them. She saw the Gray Folk and the Dwarves mingling on the lower slope, talking in their harsh language—like rocks breaking, she often thought. She saw Morlock and Naevros at the bottom of the slope, leaning on each other in their weariness. She would have gone to them if she had the strength, but which one should she go to? Thea would know. She would at least have an opinion.

Aloê looked over her shoulder. At last she saw her friend, where she had fallen in the line, a pale shriveled form on the dark summit of the star-crowned hill.

There must have been other things, but she never remembered them later, and I will not tell them now.

P
ART
T
WO

Rites of Spring

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers “Death.”

—Tennyson, “Maud”

C
HAPTER
O
NE

What Really Happened

The price of victory is work. The defeated need only flee or die, but those who win the battle must tend the battlefield like a bloody garden, and even take care of their late enemies, living or dead.

The price of fighting a war at all is forgetfulness. In the thick of fighting, few if any have the leisure to ask how it started or why.

In her time, Noreê had fought with sword and knife and naked fist to maintain the Guard. She would do so again. But, as she and her thains-attendant rewove the maze in the Gap of Lone, she had leisure to think of many things.

One was how to make a stronger defense of the Maze. This was mostly a matter of geometry, redrawing the shifting lines of talic force in the Maze so that they tended to reinforce each other rather than work against each other. She developed the necessary pattern in part of an afternoon and taught it to her assistants that evening.