Between Worlds: the Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories (18 page)

The curseling reined in and turned to come at them
again. Giliead hefted the sword, making it look as if he meant to cast it. Knowing
it was a ruse, Ilias backed away to give him room.

Unfortunately, the curseling must have realized it was
a ruse as well. The beast made an abrupt turn and bore down on Ilias. He had a
heartbeat to decide whether to dive out of the way or try to cut the curseling
off the horse. He went for the cut, and stepped sideways and swung his sword up
for a two-handed blow. The curseling’s short sword chopped down; it met his
blade with all the power of the unnatural creature wielding it and the beast
bearing down on him. Metal rang, jarred Ilias’ arm to the bone and sent his
blade flying. The force of the charge should have carried the creature well
past him, but the curseling reined in with superhuman strength. As Ilias spun
away, a hand seized him by the hair and the back of his shirt.

His feet left the ground and with stunning force he
slammed head-first into the hot sweating side of the animal. Leather scraped
his chest as the curseling dragged him up over the saddlebow. The air was
knocked right out of his lungs and everything went dark.

Hanging head down, Ilias came to only a few heartbeats
later, saw branches fly by and knew they had just entered the forest; under the
trees it was dark as the inside of barrel. Ilias’ first dazed thought was
Great.
Giliead is going to kill me.
       The curseling had one hand still knotted
painfully in his hair, the other holding the reins. Even jolting like this,
Ilias could tell the creature under him wasn’t a normal horse, at least not
anymore; the smell was foul, like rotted meat. It plunged through the dark
forest as if this was an open field in broad daylight, and its breath came in
low growls. Ilias reached up under his shirt, managed to grip the hilt of the
knife tucked through his belt and pull it free.

He could feel the armor plate on the curseling’s leg,
and it felt more like bone than metal.
Maybe that’s how he got the armor,
maybe a curse grew it on him.
That wasn’t a pleasant thought. Ilias knew he
had one chance and instinct told him to lift the knife and drive it into the
ribcage of the sweating beast instead of the rider.

It screamed and jolted sideways. The curseling let go
of Ilias to grab the reins with both hands. Ilias shoved up and catapulted
himself free, hit the ground and shoulder-rolled to his feet. He staggered and
caught his balance, braced to move; it was so dark he could barely see the damn
thing. He heard the beast plunge and scream, heard branches break as it moved
further away.

Ilias tried to pace it but the creature was so fast he
lost it within moments.
It’ll go back for Gil,
he thought, turning back
toward the open fields.

Running as fast as he could in the dark, Ilias
re-traced their path, ducking half-seen branches and dodging trees. After only
a few moments he heard something big moving through the forest toward him. Something
big on two legs. Ilias slid to a halt and called cautiously, “Gil?”

“Ilias?” Dead leaves crunched underfoot as Giliead
burst out of the brush. He grabbed Ilias by the shoulders. “You-- I--”

“I couldn’t help it, he caught me, and that horse is
cursed too, it’s not-- Wait, listen.”

They both froze and faintly, in the distance, Ilias
heard branches crashing in a rhythmic beat -- the curseling heading back
towards open ground. Giliead swore, letting Ilias go. “Come on!”

Ilias plunged after him and they ran, barreling
through the trees. They burst out of the brush and into the moonlight of the
open meadow.

The curseling emerged from the trees down toward the
end of the meadow, and reined in when he saw them.

“Now what?” Ilias asked, breathing hard.

“We need to get him off the damn thing, whatever it
is,” Giliead muttered, studying the creature silhouetted in the dim light.

“I stabbed it. It can feel pain.” Ilias scanned the
field, looking for his dropped sword, and spotted the moonlit gleam of the
blade where it lay in the grass about thirty paces away.

“That helps.” Giliead started forward, lifting his
sword. “Stay with me this time.”

“Really?” Ilias snapped. “I thought I’d stake myself
out in the middle of the field like a stalking goat.” He wasn’t incredibly
pleased with himself for his mistake either.

Giliead spared a moment to throw him an angry glare,
then turned it on the waiting curseling. “We need to get him to charge us.”

Ilias didn’t think that was going to be a problem.

With a yell, Giliead plunged forward, Ilias with him. The
curseling took the bait and spurred his mount forward. Giliead lifted the sword
as if he meant to try another useless throw. Then at the last moment Ilias slid
to a halt, waving and shouting to distract the rider and Giliead swerved in
front of the horse, almost under its hooves.

The curseling tried to rein in but too late; the horse
slammed right into the sword and shrieked in pain. It reared back and dumped
its rider, and fell with a thump. The rider rolled to his feet, his shortsword
ready. Ilias had been right; his armor was bone, and seemed fused to his body.

Ilias ran back a few paces and snatched up his own
weapon. He returned to Giliead’s side, watching the armored curseling warily. Giliead
was breathing hard, still holding the much reduced stump of the sword, his
hands covered with the animal’s blood. He said, “You were right. That isn’t a
horse, not anymore.”

Ilias threw a glance at the creature, which lay
unmoving in the grass. The pale moon glinted off a set of gleaming fangs in a
distended snout. He held out his sword to Giliead. Giliead dropped what was
left of his weapon and took it.

The curseling watched them, though the bone helmet
covered his face and Ilias couldn’t see much detail.

“Delphian,” Giliead said the name evenly. “You’re not
a wizard. But you know a wizard, don’t you? He gave you something, something
that affects anything it touches. Your body, that horse. My father.”

“It was a gift.” Beyond a doubt, it was Delphian’s
voice, hoarse but clearly recognizable. “It wasn’t meant to do this. It makes
me the greatest poet of this age.”

The bone-carved panpipe,
Ilias thought. “But where is...” He trailed off. The
bone armor.

Giliead seemed to know already. He said, “Was it last
night that it started to change, to cling to you, to grow over you--”

Delphian snarled, “You did that. You made it do that. Just
being near a Chosen Vessel--”

Giliead ignored that. “Why did you use it on Ranior? Did
he suspect you? Did he know--”

“It was a bargain, when the wizard gave it to me.” Admitting
it made Delphian seem to shrink. He crumpled, sinking to the ground. “If I ever
came across a Chosen Vessel, I was to let someone close to him hold it. He didn’t
say what it would do next.” He looked up at Giliead, and Ilias saw the helmet
was fused to his face, that blood leaked from under it. “Please...”

Giliead stepped in, spun into the sword stroke and put
all his weight behind it. The blade connected with flesh and bone and drove
through it.

Ilias stepped back as Delphian collapsed and his
severed head rolled away.

Giliead stood there for a long moment, then he tossed
the sword down. He said, wearily, “Well, that’s done.”

Ilias nodded. It didn’t change anything, and it didn’t
help. He didn’t feel any relief, or pleasure in Delphian’s death. He felt
tired, and sorry for the horse.

* * *

Giliead had to keep Delphian’s head, to take back to
show the god and the people of Cineth, but they had to dispose of the rest of
the body, to make certain the curse didn’t linger here. No one at the farmstead
would help them, so Irissa spit at their feet and took shovels out of their
shed, daring them to stop her. She, Ilias, and Giliead dug a shallow hollow in
the field and piled brush on it to burn Delphian and the horse’s corpse. It
took the rest of the night, and it wasn’t until dawn, when they were shoveling
in the last of the dirt over the charred remnants, that Giliead broke down.

He dropped the shovel, sat down on the ground, and
wept, harsh broken sobs that made Ilias’ heart twist. He sat next to Giliead
and leaned against his side. Irissa dropped her shovel and settled next to
them. She didn’t cry, she just looked sick and weary.

This is it,
Ilias thought.
This is what it’s going to be like, the rest of his life, the
rest of our lives.
They had been lucky up to this point, astonishingly
lucky. And he understood why Menander had put off taking Giliead on hunts. Menander
had loved Giliead too well, perhaps, and had been trying to delay this moment
as long as he could.

If Ilias had any sense, he would get up now and walk
into the woods, trick some farmer woman into marrying him, and spend his life
digging fields and fathering babies. Happy, but not safe. Never safe, and
knowing too much about what was waiting out there in the dark, just beyond the
god’s limited boundary. And how clever it was at slipping through that
boundary.

Looking at Irissa, he knew it was the same for her as
well, why she hadn’t wanted to look for a husband among the young men of
Cineth. She couldn’t bring a brother-in-law into the Chosen Vessel’s house, to
be another potential victim and hostage to fate.

The thought that Irissa might turn to Ilias eventually
out of desperation, because they both ran the same risk, was bleak past
bearing.

Irissa avoided his eyes, and they sat there until
Giliead quieted and wiped his face awkwardly on his arm. Irissa said, “We
should go. Mother will be worried.”

Giliead nodded, gripped Ilias’s arm once, hard. They
got to their feet to walk back down the hills to Cineth.

Ilias didn’t notice when they stepped over the
boundary of the last god’s territory.

They were walking over mossy ground in a beech forest,
and had come out on a hill that overlooked a meadow. In the distance, tall
trees climbed the foothills up toward the peak of the low mountains, and Ilias
could see the notch where the pass was, the sharp-etched outline of the cliffs
that framed it. The rock was sandy-colored where the trees thinned out, and he
thought the country up there would be fairly barren. Scrub and brush maybe, and
not much else. Not many places for curselings to hide.
Maybe that was why
they thought it would be safe,
he thought, lips twisting. If his foster
father Ranior hadn’t been cursed in the middle of the city of Cineth, despite
the god and the Chosen Vessels, Ilias might have thought so too.

Giliead came out of the trees behind him and stopped
to contemplate the view as well. His expression was resigned. “What do you
think we’re going to find?” Ilias asked. He had held off asking until now,
through the long days and nights of walking, and thought he might as well get
it over with.

Giliead took a deep breath. “Dead people. The wizard
long gone.” He looked down at Ilias, smiling a little. “You know as much as I
do.”

“That’s not comforting. I don’t know anything,” Ilias
commented as he followed Giliead up the hill. But that was the first time he
had seen Giliead smile since Ranior’s death. Maybe the trip was doing him some
good. It was still the work of a Chosen Vessel, even if there was nothing much
left to do.

The message asking for help had come for Menander, the
Chosen Vessel of the Uplands, but Menander was wounded and still recovering,
and had conceded that it was time for Giliead to hunt on his own. Especially a
hunt like this, where it sounded as if there wasn’t much left to do but assure
the survivors that the wizard was gone.

Ilias kept walking, only realizing several steps later
that Giliead had stopped.

He turned to face him, taking advantage of the pause
to tighten his queue and tie the rest of his braids back. “What?”

Giliead’s face had that look of inward concentration. He
said, “The Uplands god’s territory ends here.”

Ilias stopped. A cold sensation settled in his belly
and he had the sudden urge to look around for curselings. He shook it off; he
had scanned the meadow from the top of the hill and it was empty. The woods on
the far side were another matter, but there was nothing in the meadow.
Don’t
be an idiot,
he told himself.
You’ve been at sea, that’s godless
territory
.

But somehow the sea was different.

He realized Giliead was regarding him with a lifted
brow, as if expecting more of a reaction. Giliead had been gifted at birth by
the god that watched over Cineth, the city nearest the family farm; the gift
made him into a Chosen Vessel with the ability to smell curses and see the
traces they left in air, earth and water. This was different for him. Ilias
glared. “All right, what are you waiting for?”

Giliead’s brows quirked, and he stepped over the
boundary.

* * *

It was the morning of the next day when they walked
into the traders’ camp. The traders had put their wagons in a half circle,
stretching oiled canvas between them to make a large tent, and had dug a
firepit at the front. Fur rugs and wool carpets had been spread under the
canvas to make a seating area, with a few carved camp stools. Heavy mountain
draft horses with shaggy manes and a few mules grazed nearby.

Sentries had seen them approach and had followed them
through the trees at a distance, though everyone Ilias saw looked more tired
than hostile. A man came out from under the canvas shelter to greet them, his
expression understandably wary. Camping in godless country, even for a group this
large and this well-armed, was still a calculated risk. He asked cautiously, “Travelers?”
He was big, his red-brown hair braided with a collection of metal trinkets and
beads.

“I’m Giliead of Andrien, Chosen Vessel of Cineth,”
Giliead corrected him. “This is Ilias, my brother.”

“Ah.” His brows lifted, but he didn’t comment. At
seventeen seasons, Giliead looked young to be a Chosen Vessel, and Ilias was
only a couple of seasons older. They didn’t look like brothers, either. Ilias
had been adopted by the Andrien as a boy; he was short, stocky, and blond like
the inland Syprians, and Giliead was tall, chestnut-haired, and olive-skinned,
like the coastal people. The man said, “I’m Macchus.” He turned to call toward
the wagons, “Laodice, they’re here!” He waved for Ilias and Giliead to follow
him, saying, “Come and meet the women, they’ll tell you what we found.”

More people were coming out of the wagons, men and
women of various ages but no children or elders, which was what Ilias had
expected. It looked as if there were at least two families here, and they
looked like ordinary traders, except they wore a great deal of copper and
bronze jewelry with polished stones, earrings, armbands, wrist cuffs, hair
clasps. They must deal in metal, which explained why they had been associated
with the family that had wanted to establish the gold mine. Macchus led them
under the canvas, gesturing for them to sit. Giliead took a camp stool, pulling
off his baldric and setting aside his bow. Ilias settled on the rug beside him,
shedding his main weapons as well. The traders were gathering around, anxious
and concerned, and somebody stirred up a brazier and put a jar of wine on it to
warm.

A woman took a seat on a camp stool brought by
Macchus. “I’m Laodice.” She was small, plump and blond, and older than she
looked at first glance. “I own the wagons.” She looked at Giliead, her
expression a little uncertain. “You’re the Chosen Vessel from Cineth?”

Giliead nodded, calmly pretending not to notice that
it was obvious that everyone thought he was far too young. “Tell me what
happened.”

Laodice took a deep breath. “You know the story of the
Taerae, how they wanted to build a city in the godless section of the pass to
mine gold?”

“I do now,” Giliead told her. “It wasn’t heard of in
Cineth until recently.”

She nodded. “They kept the word of it close, and only
drew settlers from the villages on the far side of the pass. The trading isn’t
good there, because the routes from the larger city-states are so long, so many
were eager to be persuaded. The Taerae’s reasoning was that since there were
gods on both sides of the pass, it would keep the curselings off and wizards
wouldn’t dare to come.”

“It doesn’t work like that.” Giliead’s face was grim.

There was an uneasy shifting among the other traders,
and someone murmured, “That’s for certain.”

Ignoring the mutters, Laodice continued, “But they
drew settlers, probably close to two hundred people, and started to carve a
city out of the rock. They hired more people from the villages down in the
valleys to help with the building, and of course they had to buy their supplies
from the valleys because there’s little land for farming in the pass. They did
mine the gold, and for the past few years they did a good trade in it, shipping
it out of Cirrdon to the Chaeans.” She nodded to someone standing behind Ilias,
and he glanced back, surprised to see a Chaean woman. She was dark-skinned as
most Chaeans were, her curly hair drawn back in a single braid, with full lips
and a nose like a hawk’s long profile, and somehow the effect of the whole was
that she was beautiful. She wore a short silk jacket over knee-length pants,
with a Syprian wool wrap over her shoulders. Laodice said, “This is Tolyi, who
negotiates the trade for the Chaeans.”

Ilias nodded to her and she gave him a grave nod in
return, and he tried to drag his attention back to the story.

Laodice was saying, “At the turn of the moon we went
up the pass with our wagons, to pick up the Taerae’s shipment and to bring
Tolyi to make the trade agreements for the next year. But as we came up the
road into the city, we knew something was wrong.”

“It was too quiet,” Macchus put in, his face hard with
the memory. He had taken a seat on the rug next to Laodice’s stool. “No one was
on the road, and then no one at the gates.”

“The gates stood open?” Ilias asked. Some of the
people watching twitched and stared at him, and he realized he hadn’t spoken
until now.
Ilias of Andrien, the Chosen Vessel’s mute spear-bearer.
The
irreverent thought made it difficult to keep his expression sober. “It didn’t
look as if there had been a battle?”

“No, there wasn’t a sign of any disturbance,” Laodice
answered him, recovering first. “The gates were open as if they had seen us
coming, but with no one at watch.”

“We did look for tracks in the dirt,” Macchus added. “But
the road was hardened mud, so...” He shrugged helplessly.

“No one came when we called out,” Laodice continued. “We
knew that something was badly wrong, but thought it might be bandits, or that
there had been trouble in the mine or at the river. I left most of the men to
guard our wagons, and took Tolyi and a few others to search.”

“I thought it was the mine as well,” Tolyi said
suddenly. Her voice was as beautiful as her face, rich and full. “But as we
went through the town, it was too quiet. We saw no one. And of course, we
reached the diggings and there was no one there, and no one down by the river
panning. There was no hint of anything wrong. Except that there were no people.”

“We started to go into the houses.” Laodice frowned,
rubbing her arms as if she was cold. “We found food laid out on the tables,
tools set aside. The animals were unhurt, if hungry and thirsty. They couldn’t
have been left untended long. We drove the horses and cattle down to the valleys—”

Ilias had been listening in increasing incredulity. He
looked up to meet Giliead’s puzzled frown. Giliead said, “But there were
bodies? They had all been killed?”

Half a dozen people spoke to correct that and Laodice
raised her voice to be heard over them, “No, that was the frightening thing. No
bodies, no smell of death, except for goat’s milk or meat that had gone bad.” She
lifted her hands. “They were just gone.”

* * *

“This isn’t what we were expecting,” Giliead said
later, leaning against a wagon. It was evening and torches were lit in the
traders’ camp as the darkness crept up through the trees.

From here they could see it was still light on top of
the mountain, the peak and the notch of the pass outlined in red. Ilias didn’t
think it could look more ominous if the rocky cliffs near the pass had been
carved into skulls. Curseling skulls with horns and big teeth. “No kidding,” he
said, his voice dry. “I don’t remember anything in the Journals about a whole
city’s worth of people disappearing.”

Giliead grunted, sounding both annoyed and distracted,
his eyes still on the mountain. Ilias glanced back at the traders, several of
whom were at the firepit making dinner preparations. He caught the scent of
roasting meat and his stomach grumbled.

Wizards created curselings and set them loose to kill
people. Even in territory protected by a god and a Chosen Vessel, curselings
could still creep in and attack isolated villages or farms, if you weren’t
careful. People who built a city out of reach of the nearest gods and in such
an isolated spot as the pass, frequented only by heavily-armed swift-traveling
traders, were not being careful. If curselings killed them it was terrible but
not exactly unexpected. This... This was something else.

Giliead shook his head. “I wish I could talk to our
god. It’s not good at answering questions, especially ones that begin with ‘why,’
but at least it could tell me if it’s a bad idea to go up there.”

“I can tell you it’s a bad idea to go up there, but we
still have to go.” Ilias scratched his chest absently. Back in the circle of
wagons, Tolyi had come out to talk to Laodice. The two women stood near the
fire, the light painting Tolyi’s dark figure in different shades of bronze and
gold. “What about the Uplands god, couldn’t you talk to it?”

Giliead let out his breath. “It would take too long. I’d
have to travel back down the forest road at least two days, and then get its
attention. There’s no telling how long that would take with a god that doesn’t
know me. And it’s been too long already. If those people are alive somewhere,
trapped or imprisoned, it’s been long enough for most to die just from lack of
water.”

Ilias frowned at him. “Macchus and the others looked
for tracks.” But Macchus had also said the ground was too hard to leave any. Ilias
looked up at the pass again, considering it. He had been deliberately thinking
of the inhabitants of Taerae as all adults, avoiding the image of dead
children, though it was highly unlikely that the settlers had had none. But
Giliead was right, even if the people had been trapped, unless they had had
some source of water, it had already been too long.

“If they were taken by curses, I might be able to see
the traces of it,” Giliead said. He shrugged, his mouth twisting. “Curselings
would have left something. Blood, bones, skin, disturbed ground. And they would
have killed the goats and horses, too.”

“Not guls,” Ilias pointed out. Guls only wanted
people. They preyed on travelers who were alone, or in small groups. They
devoured people whole, leaving no remains, and no way to release the victims’
shades.