[Lanen Kaelar 01] - Song in the Silence (52 page)

He stared at me in silence for a long moment,
then leaned swiftly down. ”Come then, lady,
the Winds and Lord Akhor forgive
me.”

“Bless you, true friend,” I cried as I
scrambled onto his neck.

“If you think I’m staying here without
either of you, you’re both crazy,” said Rella’s voice
from behind
me, and there she stood, arms on her hips. “Kédra, of your kindness,
either take
us
both or give me directions so I can walk.”

“Get on, then. Quickly!”

She scrambled up nimbly enough behind me. Kédra
was not as strong as Akor, and had twice
the burden. “I do not dare fly
thus,” he said, “but I can run. Hold tight.”

He sped off in the direction of the camp. I
called in true-speech,
“Kédra, may I
bespeak you?”

“Of
course.”

“
I’m
sorry I have had to ask this of you, my friend, but I must be with him. How
should I bear
it
if—
” I could not say it aloud, but there rose in my mind
the image of the wounds Akor had
from the demon. No, no, I would not think of it….

”Lady, fear
not. Rishkaan is with him, and though he bears you no love he is loyal to the
King. There
is no demon spawned that could stand against the two of them.”

“I’m not
very good at hiding underthought yet, am I?”
I said
ruefully. “
I vowed I’d stay well
clear of
this, but I can’t. I can’t. Damn. Damnation. Hell, blast and damnation.”
And
I
can’t tell you why, but that opened the floodgates. Poor Kédra. I started
cursing, aloud and in
truespeech,
beginning with the wide-ranging matter I had learned from the seamen on the
voyage out,
through the many choice oaths of the stablehands at Hadronsstead, and ending
with a good
long string of simple old-fashioned swear words. I must say, it helped, and I
heard Rella
behind me laughing quietly.

When I had done, Kédra bespoke me. Even in the
Language of Truth, they hissed their
laughter.
”Lady,
I am impressed. I thought I knew your language, but through all of that I
caught little
sense. Extraordinary. I could feel the shape of the words in my mind, but I had
no
sense
of their meaning.”

“They
don’t have much, really,”
I said, deeply pleased that
he hadn’t understood.
“I was
swearing. I
don’t know if the Kindred do it, but for humans it’s a necessity. “

“I shall
remember.”

Rella tapped me on the shoulder. I half-turned to
hear her.

“You talk to them, don’t you? Without words.
Farspeech.”

“Yes,” I said. It seemed so trivial
now.

”Dear Lady Shia, is there no end to what I am to
learn on this voyage?” She laughed. ”I must
remember that little skill of
yours.”

In the darkness I had no idea of how fast we were
moving, but now as false dawn began to
lighten the sky, I could see the trees flashing past.
It was frightening, a little, but at that point
it was mostly satisfying. And there
before us was the Boundary.

Akhor

I had flown first to the southern shore, where
the last of the Gedri were taking their goods
onto the ship that lay out in the
harbour. The soulgems of the Lost were nowhere near, so I
flew north
along the trail that we kept clear.

Even as I approached the settlement I could smell
the Raksha-stink. The camp reeked of it,
growing ranker as I passed through
the cleared spaces. There was the blackened site of my
fight with the Raksha, smouldering
yet—there the second of the wooden dwellings that had
been here for centuries, there at the
north end the doused ashes of the great campfire that had
burned night
and day. I landed in the clearing where the tents had been—it was the largest—and
faced north and east. As I stood, I heard again faintly the soulgems’ wail.

The sky to the east began to lighten, an end at
last to this endless night. I listened and waited,
and wondered what I would do when the
creature arrived.

I did not have long to wait. I smelled them long
before I saw them, Raksha-stink and Gedrismell,
two of the creatures hurrying towards
the clearing.

When they saw me they stopped abruptly.

Rella

Kédra leant down and let us off at the Boundary.
Lanen took off at speed as though she knew
exactly where she was going, but I’d
not had even the little sleep she had and I was tired. I
also did not
wish to be any too close to whatever was going to happen. I dragged myself
along,
drifting some ways east along the Boundary.

Sudden as lightning a Dragon landed a good ways
ahead of me (ignoring me entirely, thank
the Lady) and started sniffing along
the ground. I could hear him from where I stood (some
distance downwind of him), so I
decided to stop and watch. Didn’t take him long to find what
he sought; he
turned his head and shot a blazing stream of fire at the ground. Content with
that, it
seems, he ran straight on—and those things can run, let me tell you. He seemed
to
move
even faster than Kédra, low to the ground and fast as a snake. He was out of
sight in a
heartbeat.

My way lay in the same direction, so after a few
minutes I followed him, and came upon the
empty campsite just as true dawn was
beginning to break. I moved forward cautiously, past
trampled grass and ashes of dead
fires—

And there before me sat a young battle ready to
begin. On one side stood the silver dragon,
Akor it was, who had saved Lanen’s
life; I had lost track of the copper-coloured beast I had
just seen. On
the other was Caderan, looking fresh and strong, and Marik looking like a man
at the end of
his tether and ready for desperate measures. At the north end of the clearing,
Kédra and
Lanen had found one another again. He crouched like a great cat about to
spring,
but
Lanen held desperately to the trunk of an old ash tree, as though that was the
only thing
keeping
her from leaping into the fight. I staved well back and well hidden.

The
true words of Rishkaan, from the Kin-Summoning

I stood in the trees to the northeast, silent and
hidden, waiting behind the two Gedri that had
just arrived, waiting for Akhor to
destroy them. To my disgust he did not, but spoke to them
instead.

“Give them back, Merchant. Put down your
burden and give them back to us, and we will let
you live.”

“And so again you break the treaty, with not
even the show of ceremony this time,” drawled
the shorter one, the one who reeked
of the Rakshasa. ”I had heard it said that the Kantri were
creatures of
Order. I must have been mistaken.”

“Chaos breaks order,
rakshadakh
, when it oversteps its lawful bounds,” hissed Akhor
in deep
anger.
“Do not speak to me of treaties, you who have brought the Rakshasa to this
place. Be
glad
I do not slay you where you stand, holding my kinsmen against their will.”

“What do you say? Kinsmen?” said the
tall one. “How should we constrain your kinsmen? We
are mere men,
we cannot command Dragons.”

It was an unfortunate word for the Gedri to use.
Dragons. The Lesser Kindred. Whose
helpless soulgems he bore.

I could bear it no longer. I ran out, flaming,
meaning to destroy these vermin as they deserved
and recover the soul-gems of the
Lost.

My flame did not affect them in the slightest.

Akhor

I moved as one in a dark dream, slowly, as time
sped on and left me behind to fight limbs like
stone. Rishkaan’s flame did not touch
them. He stopped, wide-eyed, and sent again a blast of
purifying fire against the
rakshadakh, the demon slave that stood beside Marik and spoke with
the tongue of
falsehood and darkness.

The
rakshadakh
laughed, untouched, and lifted his hand. An answering flame shot from his
fingers,
black and red, not like true flame at all, and I heard Rishkaan cry out in
pain.

And time snapped back into its place, my limbs
were mine again, and I leapt into the air. If
flame did no good, I might at least
injure them when I landed. I was not thinking clearly, of
course, for
the Lost called to me endlessly. I flew so that I would fall on the Gedri with
extended
claws and that was my saving, for no sooner had the large claw of my foot come
nigh the
rakshadakh
than it was sheared off. If I
had practiced I could not have managed to do
what I did, but somehow I swerved and
tumbled gracelessly to the ground beyond them,
unharmed as yet. I felt that dark
flame pass over me as I fell, and unlikely though it seems I
finally began
to think.

How could we fight them? Our flame was useless,
and now it seemed we could not reach
them physically—what was left? Then Lanen’s voice rang
in my mind.

Lanen

I couldn’t help myself, I called out to him
without thinking.
“Akor! What’s
wrong, what in the
Hells is happening? I saw Caderan shoot flame from his fingers, he’s
Marik’s demon master,
why don’t you fry the bastard where he stands?”

Akor’s answer came swift but wearily
. “Tried—flame no effect—can’t touch
him either, the
rakshadakh has some protection against us. Where are you?”

”Kédra and I
are on the north side of the clearing, in the trees. Are you hurt?”

His answer chilled me.

”Not yet.”

Fear, loathing, anger—in a lucid moment they
transformed into cold, calculating thought, as
Jamie’s drills on battle came back to
me
. If your enemy is unarmed, use your
fist, you’ve a
long reach and he won’t expect it. If
he’s wearing light armour, use your dagger to pierce the
joints. If his armour turns your dagger, use your sword. If it turns
your sword, get under his
guard and
push him over backwards across your ankle, he won’t expect that either.

I knew Caderan must have several spells going at
once. It couldn’t be easy to keep all that up.

If only I could find something to distract him—

The Lady’s servants say that thought is the birth
of action. I believe it, for no sooner had the
thought come to me than Rishkaan,
glowing in the sunrise, leapt into the air and beat his
wings, climbing swiftly into the
morning. I couldn’t believe it, he was running away, leaving
Akor to face
the two of them alone.

Marik, who had seemed to be mumbling to himself
since Rishkaan first attacked, raised his
hand, and in the dawn light I saw the
sun glinting off something on his finger, a ring of some
kind. Then I
realised it wasn’t sunlight; the ring was glowing a bright and hideous red. He
said
something
I couldn’t understand and turned the back of his hand to Akor.

Something small and swift, glowing even in
daylight, flew from his hand and struck Akor in
the chest. I watched helpless as red
blood flowed from him, obscenely lovely against his silver
armour, while
I hid unmarked in the trees, horrified, helpless, furious.

Akhor

I did not know I was wounded until I heard Lanen
cry out. I looked down and saw a small red
stream trickling from a perfectly
circular wound high on my chest, and I knew. Nothing
pierces our hides save Raksha-fire.
Marik was in their service, and I would kill him if I
could. If he didn’t kill me first.

I began to understand for the first time the
actions of my people against the Demonlord.

Foolish as it had seemed, at least they did not
stand still and wait to be wounded. I longed to
launch myself at the
rakshadakh
again—instead I leapt into
the air, seeking height, calling out
to my dearest companions, to Shikrar, to Kédra, even
to Idai as she flew:
” ‘Ware, my
Kindred, the
demons are among us! The Rakshasa have sent their slaves and our doom is
upon us. To
me, my friends, to me!”