1 The Outstretched Shadow.3 (86 page)

 When they left the canyon and Kellen took his bearings, returning to their northward path, they found themselves heading up a narrow cleft in the rock, a track with sheer walls on either side. After the previous day's ambush, none of them liked it, but to seek another route would take them days out of their way, time they could not afford to lose. They had to act now as if Shadow Mountain knew they were coming, and in that case, speed was their best ally.

 The path was barely wide enough for them to ride single file. Kellen and Shalkan led. This time Kellen wore his helmet, with the unfamiliar weight of the round shield strapped to his left arm. The helmet protected his head and face, but left him feeling closed in, unable to see the world very well with his side vision cut off. Fortunately Shalkan's senses were better than his own to begin with. He'd just have to trust Shalkan to spot any potential ambush.

 As in fact the unicorn did, before the sun was very much higher.

 "BACK!" Shalkan shouted suddenly, rearing up and turning in place.

 Kellen took in the situation behind him at a glance. Valdien couldn't turn on the narrow path, and the destrier couldn't back up if the mule didn't move. Kellen leaped down from Shalkan's back and squeezed past Jermayan, grabbing Lily by her bridle and putting his shoulder into her chest. Speaking soothingly but urgently, he pushed, and to his great relief she backed up readily enough. Valdien followed swiftly, backing neatly, with Shalkan jammed in beside him.

 Just as the Elven destrier was starting to move, a stone the size of a young pig hit the center of the trail right where Valdien had been standing a moment before. It landed with enough force to crack it in half, and a second later it was followed by another, only slightly smaller.

 The travelers stared up at the walls of the gorge, knowing that if further attack should come, they were powerless to avoid it.

 But no more stones fell. After a long moment Shalkan walked forward, looking down at the stones with dissatisfaction.

 "I believe that they are gone," Shalkan pronounced. "Having failed to topple us, they had no wish to encounter arrows, I suspect."

 "They didn't originate from above," Jermayan said unemotionally, gazing down at the boulders. "Those are river stones—see how smooth? Not boulders from farther up the cliff. And soft enough—that's why the one broke when it landed. They were carried here from some distance away to be flung down at us."

 "By who—and why?" Kellen asked.

 "These and other eternally unanswerable questions…" Shalkan commented with a sigh, shaking his head with a rattle of his armored collar as if flies bedeviled him.

 His friend was right, Kellen realized with dismay. They had no way of knowing who was trying to kill them—or why. There were too many possible answers. And what was more, there might be no more sinister reason to this attack except an attempt to kill them and steal what they owned. After staring at the stone for a few moments more, Kellen mounted up, and they reluctantly continued on.

 Eventually their path led them out of the gorge into a region of windswept hills covered with sparse grass. What few trees grew here were low, twisted by the constantly blowing wind. In the distance, Kellen could see taller hills dark with trees, and beyond them, true mountains at last, bare rock, their peaks white with snow. Perhaps Shadow Mountain was among them. I just hope we don't have to go all the way there to find the Barrier, Kellen thought worriedly. Such a journey would take months—and Sentarshadeen needed rain soon, for the sake of the spring crops.

 As he rode, he'd been continuing to think about all that Jermayan had told him the night before—about the War, and the reason Armethalieh had outlawed the Wild Magic, and the Demons. It made a certain amount of horrible sense, and it certainly didn't make him feel any better about his own emerging Wildmage—or Knight-Mage—powers. True, Jermayan had said that the Wildmages who did fall to the Demons did so because they wanted to get out of paying the price for their powers and spells… but that was a temptation every Wildmage faced every time he cast a spell. Hadn't Kellen himself worried about it when he'd done his Healing Spell for Jermayan? What if the Wild Magic had asked a price that had interfered with him going to trigger Idalia's spell at the Endarkened keystone (and it still could, he knew, because the voice he'd heard hadn't been very specific about what his payment would be) what then? If he refused to pay the price of his magic, was he on his way to being Demon-bait, even though he only refused because it would get in the way of him fighting the Demons and saving Sentarshadeen?

 It was all very confusing. And the confusion didn't stop here. Even if he paid his Mageprice this time, it was a choice he was going to face every time he cast a spell for the rest of his life.

 It was worse, in a way, than when his fears had just been based on a formless misconception that the Wild Magic might be evil in itself. Now he knew it wasn't. Now that Jermayan had told him about the Great War he knew exactly how a Wildmage got himself into trouble using the Wild Magic, and that was worse, because it wasn't something that you could make up your mind once and for all not to do. It was a decision you had to keep making, over and over.

 What if you got tired? What if you got careless? What if you made a mistake?

 How could anybody keep making the right choice, over and over and over again, when the choices kept getting harder and harder?

 How could he?

 "We should look for a place to stop and eat," Jermayan said, breaking into Kellen's thoughts. "Perhaps that grove up ahead."

 To call it a grove was a serious overstatement, but at least the few scrubby trees would provide some shelter from the wind.

 But when they neared it, a Centaur came charging toward them from among the trees, shouting angrily.

 He had a thick grey beard, and was wearing a long rough coat of goatskins that draped over his dark bay flanks, the goat hair blending with his own shaggy uncurried coat. He carried an iron-shod crook as well. They couldn't make out his words, but the intent was plain.

 "Fool of a shepherd!" Jermayan said angrily, reining in. "Does he think we're after his flock—wherever they are? Look here, fellow—"

 Seeing them pause, the Centaur-shepherd stopped as well. He thrust two fingers into his mouth and whistled sharply.

 "I don't think he likes your tone," Shalkan commented dryly.

 Instantly half a dozen shaggy grey forms appeared out of the grass, loping toward the party purposefully. For an instant, Kellen thought they were wolves, then realized they were instead the largest dogs he'd ever seen—dogs that could easily kill wolves, should they happen to meet any.

 "Come on," he said, urging Shalkan into a run. Jermayan followed— with some reluctance, Kellen thought.

 Behind him Kellen heard the sound of the Centaur's laughter.

 He'd thought that would be the end of it. That should have been the end of it: they'd intruded, they'd been driven off, the shepherd should have whistled his dogs back and that should have been that.

 But it wasn't.

 Shalkan turned and began to circle back, just in time for Kellen to see Jermayan slipping the mule's lead-rein free to give Valdien room to maneuver. She was running flat-out, but even her top speed wasn't as fast as Valdien's, and neither of them could match Shalkan's turn of speed. To Kellen's horror, he saw that the Centaur-shepherd's grey hounds were harrying her, snapping at Lily's flanks. One of them had already drawn blood.

 "Hold on," Shalkan said.

 He charged directly at the running hounds, head lowered. His horn slid into the nearest hound's shoulder, skewering the beast neatly. He tossed his head, flinging the beast away. It landed with a thud and a yelp, getting painfully to its feet and limping quickly away.

 Jermayan and Valdien were sweeping through the rest of the hounds, Jermayan beating them away from the mule with the flat of his sword, Valdien encouraging them to flee with hooves and teeth. Though the hounds had obviously been trained to take down prey, equally obviously they weren't prepared to face this much resistance, and a few more well-placed blows from Jermayan's blade encouraged them to flee back to their master. The one that Shalkan had wounded limped along behind, bloody-flanked.

 The moment the hounds broke off their attack, Kellen and Shalkan took off after the mule. Though terrified, Lily was already starting to slow her panicked headlong flight—mules, even Elven mules, were built for endurance, not speed—and Kellen and Shalkan were able to catch up with her easily. Actually catching her was another matter, and Kellen finally had to dismount and have Shalkan drive her toward him until he could grab hold of the trailing lead-rope. They were just lucky she hadn't gotten tangled in it and broken her leg.

 She pulled a little against the rope, shaking. "Here now, girl. It's all right. It's all right, girl. You've had a rough day, haven't you, poor girl?" Kellen spoke soothingly, coiling the rope up in his gauntleted hand as he approached her, until she finally allowed him to lay a hand on her neck and stroke it comfortingly. She was trembling and covered in sweat, but she seemed to be all right. The bites on her haunches didn't go very deep— the hounds had been trying for the bite that hamstrings its prey and leaves it helpless, but fortunately hadn't been able to manage it. An application of allheal should see her right, but he wasn't sure that they dared stop for it now.

 Jermayan rode up on Valdien, sheathing his sword.

 "I should have shot the beast when I had the chance," Jermayan snarled, and Kellen somehow knew Jermayan didn't mean any of the hounds.

 "He was only protecting his flock," Kellen answered, not sure the words were true even as he spoke them. He handed the mule's lead-rope up to Jermayan, who made it fast to Valdien's saddle once more.

 "Was he? He had a very odd way of doing it, to be sure," the Elven Knight answered angrily. "Come to that, wolfhounds such as those are more likely to savage a flock than to guard it; they are hunters, plain and simple. I wonder whether there was a flock at all, or whether he was set to watch for us, and lull us off our guard."

 "By running out of cover and shouting at us?" Kellen asked doubtfully. Still, it was possible. The shepherd had been quick enough to set the dogs on them—and Jermayan was right—they looked nothing like the kind of flock guards Kellen had seen in Merryvale.

 "Come on," Shalkan said pragmatically. "The sooner we go on, the sooner we can stop."

 THEY moved on at the pace that the mule set, which was even slower than before; she was having trouble with the trail, and it was clear that her wounds were hurting her. The hilltops were bare and rocky, and between them were narrow ravines filled with all manner of brambles. The trouble was, you had to go down one hill to get to the top of the next. At the bottom of one such gully they found a stream where they could pause to rest and eat and tend to the mule's injuries, but they didn't linger for very long. Where there had been one attack, there could be another, and all of them knew that whether their attackers were hill-bandits or agents of Shadow Mountain, if the attack succeeded, they would be just as dead.

 They rode on, into a cold wind out of the north that howled among the peaks like a damned soul and ate away the faintest trace of warmth.

 IT would be dark soon, and they'd reached an unspoken agreement that the next little valley, if it was at all suitable, would be where they would spend the night. Camping on one of the hilltops in the constant wind would be impossible—or miserable at the very least. At least down in the ravine they'd be out of the wind, and warmer.

 But they'd barely dismounted when Valdien began behaving skittishly, fretting and shaking his head nervously.

 "Trouble," Shalkan said briefly, his nostrils flaring. "I smell something—odd—"

 Kellen drew his sword with a metallic grating sound. He cast his eyes to the left, the right. Down here out of the wind it was quiet, and hard to see much in the heavy undergrowth, but Kellen saw no sign of any trouble. He glanced at Jermayan. The Elven Knight had his bow ready, an arrow nocked, but from his puzzled expression, he saw as little reason for alarm as Kellen.

 Even the mule had sensed something wrong now. She was grunting and pulling at her lead-rope, ears laid-back.

 "Anything?" Jermayan asked tersely.

 Kellen shook his head, and concentrated, trying to invoke the battle-trance. Even to Othersight, the ravine seemed deserted, nothing but shadows moving within the branches as the wind above in the tops of the hills stirred the withered leaves down below.

 "I could try a spell…" he began, feeling as if he should be whispering.

 Suddenly there was a crashing through the underbrush and a pale rush of movement. Before Kellen could react, Jermayan had drawn his bow and fired several arrows in an action too fast for Kellen to see.

 There was an unearthly scream, and a crashing as something fell to earth and began to thrash wildly. Shalkan whirled, and charged, head down, his horn glinting wickedly. He plunged it into the creature, once; the beast convulsed, and was still.

 By the time Kellen joined him, it was over, and the unicorn was shaking his head, flicking his horn clean.

 "What is that?" Kellen asked, looking down at the body, still outstretched and twisted sideways in its final convulsion.