DemonWars Saga Volume 1 (77 page)

Paulson was caught; he tripped over an exposed root and went facedown into the mud and slush. He heard the giant's victorious laughter, imagined the spiked club coming up high, and covered his head with his hands, though he realized that meager defense would do him little good.

The giant was indeed closing for the kill, lifting its deadly weapon, when an arrow thudded hard into its back, turning its evil laughter into a sudden wheeze. Outraged, the behemoth spun.

Elbryan stood right up on Symphony's back, the horse in full gallop. He drew out Tempest and put his bow to the saddle. The giant was near a wide-branching elm with thick, solid limbs.

"Be quick and be sure," the ranger said to Symphony, who understood his plan perfectly.

The horse angled near a second elm, its branches intertwined with the one near the giant, and Elbryan leaped away, running, surefooted, along one rain-slicked limb.

The giant turned and stared curiously as the suddenly riderless horse continued to bear down upon it, but the monster, after a moment's thought, seemed satisfied with that and lifted its club to meet Symphony's charge.

At the last second, the horse veered sharply to the side, and the giant lunged, and only then did the stupid fomorian notice the second form, running along the branches, running right by its bending form.

Tempest flashed like blue-white lightning, tearing a long line across the monster's throat. The giant came up with a roar and swung hard, but Elbryan had already dropped off the back of the limb, and that sturdy branch stopped the club far short of the mark. Under the limb came Elbryan, Tempest stabbing, then slashing upward into the monster's loins as it tried futilely to extract its spiked club from the stubborn branch.

And even worse for the giant than the stabbing, searing pain down low was the wound across its throat, the wound that spurted blood wildly and refused to allow the monster to draw breath. Its rage played. out, as the terrible wound and the flying blood took away the monster's strength. The giant let go of the club, then, and staggered backward; grasping at its torn throat. It looked down through blurred eyes to see the wicked man back atop his stallion, the other man, the easy prey, climbing up behind him.

The giant reached for Elbryan and Paulson, but its senses were playing tricks now and the men were fully twenty feet away. Reaching, reaching, the giant overbalanced and fell to the ground.

The behemoth heard the hooves receding into the forest, heard the distant voice of a human female, and then the darkness closed in.

"It was a trap, set for you, who lived once in Dundalis," Juraviel said. The elf sat with Pony and Elbryan near Mather's grave in the diamond-shaped grove.

Tuntun was nearby, along with the other elves who had come to the area, and who, Juraviel had informed Elbryan, would soon be returning to Andur'Blough Inninness.

"How would they know that?" Elbryan asked, not yet willing to believe that the cutting, in the evergreen vale had been done specifically for them.

"They knew that many of the folk battling them had fled Dundalis,"
Juraviel answered. "The village was deserted before they arrived. It would follow that they understood the valley north of the town to be an important place, perhaps even a sacred place."

"No," Pony argued. "They would not believe it to be more important than was the village itself, and that we deserted."

"And I doubt that powries, and certainly not goblins and giants, hold any appreciation for beauty," Elbryan added.

Juraviel fell silent, digesting the logical arguments. Still, it bothered the elf that the monsters had gone into that particular valley.

It bothered Elbryan, too, for the scarring of the evergreens made no sense. The monsters' take of lumber would not have been useful; the spruce and pines were too short for catapults, too wet and sappy for wood fires, and too pliable for any construction. With deeper forests all about them, filled with taller trees of harder wood, why would the powries go into the evergreen, valley? Only to lure their enemies, Elbryan had to reason, particularly Jilseponie and him, the two to whom the valley was indeed sacred.

But it made no sense to the ranger, for the plan was too subtle.

How might the monsters have garnered such information about the leaders of their enemies?

"They knew," Elbryan said flatly: "They had to know."

"How?" Juraviel demanded.

A whistle from the trees — from Tuntun, they realized — alerted them of a visitor, and a moment later, Brother Avelyn ambled in to join them. He looked much better, seeming his old bouncy self, except for a slight limp.

"Ho, ho, what?" Pony said to him playfully, drawing a smile from the monk.

"They knew," Avelyn remarked as he sat down hard on the ground. "They knew, and they know much of us. Too much."

"How have you discerned this?" Juraviel asked.

"A ghost told me," Avelyn replied. Elbryan perked up his ears, wondering if the monk had been in contact with Uncle Mather.

"While you fought in the valley, I went far to the north," the monk explained. "I tell you now that this force which has come upon us is but a predecessor, a testing probe, and that our enemy, the demon dactyl, has many times this number of soldiers to send down upon us."

"Then we are doomed," Pony whispered.

"Our enemy has another ally, as well," Avelyn went on, looking directly at Elbryan. "The ghost of a man you killed, in my defense."

"Brother Justice," the ranger reasoned.

Avelyn nodded. "His name is Quintall," he said, for the other title seemed perfectly ridiculous now. "I spoke with this ghost briefly, before we battled, and I tell you, he knew of us, of you and of Pony."

"He and I once did battle," the ranger reminded.

Avelyn was shaking his head before Elbryan even finished the predictable sentence. "He knew that you were in trouble, in the valley. He predicted that both of you would be slain."

"Then it was a trap," Juraviel said.

"Indeed," remarked Avelyn. "They knew how best to draw us — you, two, at least," he said to Elbryan and Pony.

"How could they?" Pony wanted to know. "Brother — Quintall did not know us well, certainly did not know our affinity with the pine vale."

"Perhaps the ghost has been about us," came a voice from a nearby tree.

The group glanced over to see Tuntun sitting calmly on a branch.

That seemed plausible enough, but Avelyn suspected that he would have sensed Quintall's presence had the spirit indeed been about. "Perhaps," the monk admitted, "or might it be that Quintall is not the only one who has fallen to the darkness of the dactyl?"

To the small group whose very lives depended on absolute secrecy, there could have been no more unsettling possibility than that of a traitor in their midst. A thousand questions filtered through Elbryan's and everyone else's thoughts as he considered each person of the band. When he came to privately question the loyalty of Bradwarden, the ranger realized that this exercise was truly folly.

"We know no such thing," Elbryan said firmly after a lengthy pause in the conversation. "Likely it was the ghost, a spy for our enemies. Or perhaps the powries are more cunning than we first believed. Perhaps they have prisoners hidden away and have tortured information from them."

"None from Dundalis, surely," argued Pony. "None who might know of our fondness for the valley."

"It is all speculation," the ranger insisted. "Dangerous thoughts. How will we function if there remains no trust among us? No," he decided, his stern tone showing that he would brook no compromise on this point, "we will not cast suspicion on any in our group. We will not speak of this outside our immediate circle, and not speak of it at all unless some more substantial evidence can be found."

"We must be careful then," Avelyn offered.

"Will this grove be next?" Pony asked, a question that unnerved Elbryan.

"All the world will be next," Tuntun said, shifting the focus, "if Avelyn's words are true."

"They are," the monk insisted. "I saw the monstrous gathering in such numbers as I would never have imagined."

"In greater numbers than their nature would allow," agreed Juraviel, "were they not guided."

Pony, who hadn't been involved in the previous discussion at Avelyn's bedside, seemed not to understand.

"Powries and goblins would not ally for long if there was not a greater power, a greater evil, holding them together," Juraviel explained.

Pony looked at Avelyn, thinking of his prophecies of doom all those weeks together on the road, thinking of the weakness of the world the monk constantly berated and of the name he gave to it. "The dactyl?" she asked. "You are certain?"

"The dactyl is awake," Avelyn said without hesitation.

"As we feared in Caer'alfar," Juraviel added.

"But I thought that the dactyl was the weakness in men's hearts," Pony reasoned, "not a physical being."

"It is both," Avelyn explained, recalling the training he had received at St.-Mere-Abelle and thinking it ironic now that those same men who had taught him of the demon dactyl had, through their own weakness and impiety, helped to facilitate the return of the monster. "It is the weakness of man that allows the demon to come forth, but when it does, it is a physical monster indeed, a being of great power who can command the wills of those with evil in their hearts, who can dominate the monstrous hordes and tempt men such as Quintall, men who have fallen from the ways of God, to its side."

"There are more beliefs than those of your church," Tuntun put in dryly.

"And all our gods are one God," Avelyn replied quickly, not wanting to offend the elf. "A God of differing names perhaps, but of similar tenets. And when those tenets are misinterpreted," the monk went on, his voice turning grave, "when they are used for personal gain or as a means of exacting punishment or forcing submission upon others, then let all of Corona beware, for the demon dactyl will rouse from its slumbers."

"It is a dark time," Juraviel agreed.

Elbryan bowed his head but in thought and not in despair. Such philosophical discussions did not elude the ranger, but Elbryan understood that his role here was to consider their position in terms of their day-to-day existence, that he might properly guide those folk, closer to two hundred than to one, who had come under his care. At that moment, the ranger had more immediate problems than some mythical monster hundreds of miles away, for if there was indeed a traitor in their midst, then the threat would increase.

"They knew, Uncle Mather," Elbryan whispered when at last the image came to him at Oracle. "They knew that scourging the valley would wound me, would, perhaps, even bring me out of hiding. Y4 how can they know of me, more than the name of Nightbird, which I have not hidden, and of my exploits against them? How could they know of my loves, of a place that is special only within my heart?"

The ranger sat back, leaning on the back wall of the small cave. He continued to stare silently, not expecting an answer but hoping that, as was often the case, the image of his uncle Mather would guide him through the jumble of his own thoughts, to reason through his dilemma.

He saw another image in the mirror — or was it merely in his mind? — one of a man he had selected to go along on the raid to the evergreen vale, but who had refused, claiming sickness. Elbryan knew well that the man had not been ill, and he considered the sudden cowardice truly out of character. But with no time for such petty problems, the ranger had dismissed the incident.

Elbryan envisioned again the return of the battered group to the main encampment: Paulson ,dropping down wearily from Symphony's back, Pony leaning against Bradwarden as if, were it not for the centaur's solid frame, she would have simply tumbled over to the ground. He saw reflected in the mirror those images that had been peripheral to him at that time: a supposedly ill man standing at the side of the camp and, more important, the expression on that man's face, hardly noticed at the time, but clear now to Elbryan.

The man was surprised, truly surprised, that they had returned.

Using all the stealth he had learned in his years with the Touel'alfar, Elbryan followed Tol Yuganick out of the encampment late one dark night, several days after the abandoned raid on the evergreen valley.

The big man, supposedly in search of firewood, looked back over his broad shoulders often, Elbryan noted, obviously trying to ensure that he was not'
being followed. His precaution did little against the stealthy skill of the ranger, though, and so Tol was oblivious of Elbryan's presence, obviously so, when he met with a bandy-limbed powrie less than two miles from the band's present hideout.

"I did as you demanded," Elbryan heard the big man complain. "I delivered them, right where I said I would."