Book Of Shadows Part 31

'Yes! Big one not fit.'

The Tormentor, if it had heard the exchange, did not react its slow dance went on. Siel took a deep breath, counted to three, then yelled, 'All of you, up and run, now!'

She got up and dashed toward Tii without pausing to see if the others followed. Tii darted off like a rabbit, out of a groundman hole too small for the rest of them to fit through. He dived into a slanted cut in the ground she'd not have seen without him going through it first. She dived in after him, her feet hitting its floor painfully hard.

She rolled away to make room for the others. Gorb's head poked in but his shoulders would not fit. 'Tii! What about the giant?' said Siel.

Tii eyed Gorb nervously. 'Cave, that way,' he said, pointing. 'Go in. Big enough. Meet there soon.'

'I'm going to go find Bald,' said Gorb, 'I left him down the path. They might've got him.'

'Fine, but go! You're blocking the hole!'

Gorb stood aside for the Mayor's men, who slid down the dim tunnel and gazed about as though hardly daring to believe what they saw. The small s.p.a.ce filled with their hoa.r.s.e panting. Tii looked at them pensively as though he'd not expected this many would be coming underground with him. Siel was too relieved to care. She laughed, embraced the man next to her, embraced Tii. 'Why are you here?' she said, crying tears of relief.

'Follow,' he said. 'Follow you from place with water. Never far. Tunnels all beneath. Secret tunnels, big people never find. Found friends, below. They come too. Not far.'

'You followed me all this way? Since the tower?'

'Followed, by stone paths. Deep path.' He tapped the cavern wall. 'Felt you. Felt bad things, near you. But no way up. Stone told us where you came. Hard work to follow. You go fast. Where Shadow?'

Eric, he means where's Eric. 'I don't know, Tii. He's not with us. Can you help us? Can you lead us all back to Tanton, underground? It may be the only safe way for us to get there.'

'I take you,' Tii said, still eyeing off the Mayor's entourage with grave concern. 'These men come?'

'Yes. I know that's uncomfortable for you. But Shadow would want it.'

'For Shadow. I take men to city. Only for Shadow.'

5.

Their brief walk through the caverns was the closest Siel had come to happiness in a while now: a rush of relief and joy to be alive. Her head spun with what she'd seen in Far Gaze's spell. Generations had known only inevitable defeat or long and bitter stalemate. She felt she were dreaming. What would her parents think, that this day had come in their daughter's lifetime? Would they feel avenged by her part in making history, or just saddened by all she'd gone through?

'I did it for you,' she whispered, tears coming to her eyes as she imagined them with her now, hearing her. 'I did it all for you.'

If Tii's groundman friends were nearby, they were too nervous to show themselves. Soon he took them to a part of the tunnel he had to widen out for them to pa.s.s through. On the other side, Gorb the half-giant waited in a hillside cave. Next to him Bald rocked back and forth on his heels, face covered with his hands. Gorb spoke consoling words. One of the guns was braced on his knee. A small dead Tormentor lay in broken pieces at the cave entrance.

The Mayor touched Gorb's gun barrel very carefully. 'What is this device?' he said.

'Bald made it,' said Gorb. A hint of anger had come into his slow speech. 'I got six more of em in the pack. It's what I wanted to show you earlier. But you rode off, left me behind. It cost one of your men his life. That matter much?'

'Watch your words, giant,' said Tauk.

'Watch yours, human. Your bones break easy; your skin is soft; that sword won't kill me.'

'This is an ally of ours,' said Siel, mortified.

Gorb scoffed. 'Not of mine. His city never did much for my kind. Made it a crime to hunt us. But that didn't stop em. One bribe and the Hunter's free. I'm not loyal to him. I could break all these guns. Or I could take Bald and run to some other city. Think a different city would want a look at these guns? They might make a thousand more. Then they'll make war on him,' he jerked his thumb at Tauk, 'whether they call him friend today or not. Like he'll do to them.'

'I do not make war on friends,' said Tauk in a gentler tone. 'I can't speak for past rulers of my city. You remain free to go where you will.'

'And not because of some human boss's say-so,' said Gorb.

'Of course. You're invited to come with us to the safety of my city's walls, if you will mind your words. I cannot be spoken to this way before my people.'

'I'll go with those two if they want me.' Gorb nodded to Siel and Far Gaze. 'I'll ask them that in private.'

'I've not decided my course,' grunted the folk magician. Still naked, he sat with legs crossed on the stone floor. 'It is now a very changed world. Leave me alone, all of you. Mayor, some advice. Get back to your city, prepare it for battle, if battle is not already upon it. I'll visit to claim my debt when I am ready. And I will claim it. Lives are expensive. The lives of Mayors? More so.'

Tauk's jaw clenched; he didn't reply. He and his men filed out through the cave, back into the tunnels.

Siel picked up from the ground one of the broken pieces of Tormentor Gorb had blasted apart. She had to will herself to touch it, but it was just like holding cool stone. The spikes were slightly flexible. 'The corpses get weaker, but very slowly,' said Far Gaze, watching her with his eyes half closed. 'They stay hard but become easier to cut and break. It is not like any other flesh I know.'

'What are they?' she said, and suddenly tears were in her eyes. Angrily she wiped them away. 'I can't understand them. Not anything about them.'

'The wolf scented things which I now understand. The airs that changed them are not normal, not even in Levaal South. They are like poisonous silt on a river bottom. Something kicked them up, probably the stoneflesh giant that crossed. They settled quickly and sank again. Your friend Tii and his people will need to stay away from tunnels near the Conflict Point, once this poison settles again.'

'Conflict Point,' she repeated, intrigued by the phrase. 'What is this poison? A flung weapon?'

'In effect. But so is a violent storm. Maybe we just got in the way. Maybe it was hurled at us on purpose.'

'Must you abuse the Mayor?' she said.

Far Gaze laughed. 'I have the same regard for him as the giant does. He may be fine as lords of men go, but I have known many polite thieves, charismatic traitors, articulate fools. Barbarians who trouble to sc.r.a.pe the blood from their hands don't much impress me either.'

'He is none of those things!'

He looked at her with renewed interest. 'I see.'

'You see what?'

He chuckled. 'What is your course, Siel, now that the old war is not quite lost?'

She sat and buried her face in her hands. 'I'm tired. I want it to be over, I want to live a different life.'

'Poor child. You've done more than most. But you've seen too much now to ever have peace. The nightmares will always come. Part of you will always trudge through battlefields and the reek of death. There are ways to dull the sting. What of the next few days? Those first.'

'I don't know.'

'Giant?'

'I won't fit in the tunnels,' said Gorb, whose voice had lost its edge of anger and was ponderous again. 'I'm better alone, or hidden somewhere. I'll just wander, or go back to the tower. There's a mage there. I've seen him in the valleys. He spelled the village, made it vanish. He might want strong hands. What about you, wolf?'

'The night has changed everything,' said Far Gaze. 'I'll return to the place we left. If there is a mage there I wish to speak with him. A master of disguise he must be, to have hidden himself from me. I'll get there fastest alone.'

'So you won't go with me, if I choose to go to the same place?' said Siel.

'I don't know, I have not been asked,' he said drily. 'Why do you think I spoke to Tauk that way? We are in the age of mercenaries now that the Mayors' alliance has collapsed. My services are for hire. You may make offers.'

She had to get away from the magician. She felt on the brink of tears again and didn't want him to see her; an old instinct not to look weak before men she fought with. She stumbled outside, heard Gorb call a warning about going out there but ignored it, tripping as she went on the stretched limb of the Tormentor's corpse by the cave entrance.

The glade was quiet and still, with many limp vines hanging from tall woods like braids of hair. There was no sound or sign of Tormentors roaming nearby. The first tentative bird calls sounded the way birds sing after a storm has pa.s.sed.

She sat on a tumbled piece of stone fallen from the hillside long ago, now covered in moss. Mushrooms grew beneath it. She plucked them easy food was not to be turned down and checked their underside for signs of poison, pitching one with odd pink markings into the distance then eating the others.

To be alone, to be not mindful suddenly of danger, seemed a protest, an appeal to the G.o.ds or the Dragon or against life itself: let the perils take her. But there was no danger here just now, only a quiet rustle of leaves, branches and vines as a breeze swept through the glade. Her head spun from exhaustion. She could sleep here, and in fact why not lie awhile in the soft gra.s.s? So she did, just resting her eyes from the incessant light, just resting ...

6.

Shadow watched her, asleep in this glade as if she'd grown out of the forest floor like the other living things. She looked truly beautiful to him for the first time, beautiful because there was no trickery to it: she was just here, just being. Her chest rose and fell, pulling in air to keep her alive, which itself seemed a kind of magic, one he was newly aware of. His life did not depend on sucking in air, nor on eating and drinking.

So where was she now, while she slept? The dead ones lay like this too, but their chests did not rise and fall. It would be easy to kill her, and to kill the others in that cave just yonder. Easy as swiping his arm down fast.

His rage had died in the long journey. Though his body was again whole, the pain from his wound throbbed slow and dim, now and then flaring like the man's sword had flashed through him again. For a long time his side had burned like molten silver was stuck to him.

The sword had given him something else, a new and peculiar feeling: fear. He'd known what fear looked like in others, the way their eyes widened, their gasping breaths. Even animals had displayed it. But he'd never understood it.

The other girl still called him. Rather, he was called by that thing she wore around her neck, the little place he knew he'd fall into if he got too near to her. Yet it held the same promise and intrigue as when he'd followed its pull across the world. Soon its pull would again become irresistible, and he would forget, he knew, the necklace's danger.

There was a lure to Siel too, which drew him not as keenly.

He pondered the two effects. This lure came from within him, that was the difference. The other pulled at him as would hooks dug under his skin. Every hour, it pulled him with more strength.

Eric had left Siel behind. Why? What had she done to offend him? He shadowed her and learned what she dreamed of: walking through an actual past hidden in this glade; that happenstance magic of hers was confined for the moment to her dreams. Her body revolved in cycles, purging itself. Soon she would have these visions while awake again. She hated having them. Strange creature.

Ah, she was stirring now. Eyes open, sitting up, backing away as he'd known she would, hand quite uselessly going to her knife, face indicating despair upon seeing him. He didn't like that. Why not be glad to see him? What could he do to make her smile and laugh? He kept his distance, spun through the ground from nervous energy, though he knew she didn't like it.

'You dreamed of this place.' He waved an arm about the glade. 'Three women sat about a fire trying to do something to make one of them have a baby. They were going to kill an animal in a way that would make magic happen. But two of them killed the other woman instead. Buried her here.'

'I don't remember,' she said, looking back at the cave where the others sat and talked. She wanted to run over there, he saw.

'I'll leave soon,' he said. A strange and unpleasant emotion went through him. It was pain, of sorts, but not physical. He didn't understand it.

'What do you want?' she said.

He considered the question as best he could. 'I don't know.'

'Where is Eric? And Loup?'

'Away.' He pointed north. 'Far. When I was near them, I knew where they were going, and why. Now I forget.'

'Shadow. Will you do me a favour? Will you forget me too? Altogether, forget me? Pretend I am dead.'

That pain again. 'I'll try.' Then anger. 'I could make you dead. If you want.'

'I don't want that,' she said.

Had he hoped she'd be scared? She wasn't. But she wished he wasn't here. 'I don't want it either,' he said.

'What do you want, Shadow?' At the cave mouth the half-giant scanned the glade then headed outside to search for her. She called to him, 'I'm fine. Leave me be for a moment. I'll be back soon.'

Shadow thought again about her question. 'I want to learn things. That's all. What am I? Do you know what I am? I understand things for a little while but then it's all gone. I knew things about the man who cut me, the man with the sword. I even knew why he wanted to cut me. But now it's gone. I knew things about the dragon I saved you from, but it's gone.'

'Anfen? Was the man's name Anfen?'

This seemed to excite her. 'Yes,' he said. He tried to remember what had happened but the order of it all was muddled. The basics: 'I fought him. He cut me. It hurt.'

'He cut you? How?'

'His sword has power to it.'

'Where did this happen?'

He pointed in the direction. 'Far. I fled. Came to see you.'

She chose her words with care. 'You have been tricked before, Shadow. I will speak to you as truly as I can. I do not know what you are. A man named Vous created you. He is your father, not Eric. Why he really made you I can't answer. Maybe he can't answer either. But if you will take me to him, to Eric, I will owe you a debt.'

'Why?'

She blinked at him. 'Why what?'

'Why do you want to see him, but never me? We look the same, him and me.'

'No. You don't look the same.'

That bad new emotion came through him like a trickle of poison. It was as if she had cut him the way the man's sword had. If she would cut him like this, why shouldn't he cut her back? This was a kind of duel now; she'd made it so. He didn't know how to use the invisible weapons she used, the pain she invoked just with words and a look on her face. He was growing dizzy with pain.

And she watched him coolly, not reacting even as he made his eyes go wide as pits, sucking her into them. His jaw fell wide too; sounds came out of it designed to scare her. The men and half-giant, hearing, came to the cave mouth. She fell toward him, but still a look on her face said she was perfectly willing to meet her death here and now, not afraid like the others were, who had known they would die. She did not care that she'd lie here broken and unmoving!

He grew so confused that some vital piece holding him together pulled taut and threatened to break. He screamed a sound of rage, shoved her away into the rock she'd sat on, watching her body bounce hard against it, then fall limp. With great speed he tore himself far away, not knowing if he'd left her dead or alive, broken like something dropped from a tall height, but still beautiful, in the quiet green glade.

THE CASTLE.