Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (29 page)

“Ah,” breathed Gikka.  “They’ve found the sword.  Thinking,
they are, that I’d not have left it behind, and they’ll be searching for me
anew.”

“Your sword?”  Chul’s eyes grew wide.  “But why did you...”

“Peace, lad,” she whispered, engrossed by the tableau before
her.  “See, they’ve not a wit between them where to look.  I could have stood
just there, look you, right betwixt the mews and the stables, and they’d not
have seen me yet.”  She ground her teeth together.  “Best we go now.”

Chul was still staring, watching them light torches. 
“Gikka...?”

“They’ll be setting it afire, now,” said Gikka with strange
resignation.  She patted Zinion’s shoulder and turned him away.  “Their hope,
to drive me out of hiding an I’m still within or to draw me down out of the
hills to fight an I watch.”  She shook her head sadly.  “Best we not stay, or
they might have their way, aye?”

Chul said nothing and she watched him climb into his saddle
to follow her.

Black smoke poured from the house, now, and in a few of the
windows.  Flames crept up the draperies and filled the windows.  She glanced
back only once, to see a stream of lantern light pouring in along the southern
road.  The road from the mines.  The miners were coming to protect what was
theirs.  She had expected no less from them.  She watched the foreman stop for
just a moment at the crypt and disappear down to the gate.  A moment later, he
came out again and routed the villagers back toward the house.  She smiled.

The seal had fooled the miners well enough; they would be
keeping fire out of the crypt, now, and the sundry writs and papers and
miscellany she had stored there would likewise be safe, at least until
Marketday.  By then, she should have had ample time to reclaim it, and
Graymonde, as well, so she hoped.

Her eyes flickered over the boy worriedly.  She had gone to
great lengths to keep him away from the miners, to keep him from so much as
seeing one of them.  The Dhanani hatred for Hadrians was visceral, deep and
uncontrollable.  She had seen Aidan, the merciful shaman of Anado, foam at the
mouth and claw his way through a band of knights to get to a Hadrian.  If Chul
were to look back, if he were to see one of them even at this distance, she
would lose him.

But he did not.  His attention was fully engaged in guiding
his horse up the rocks.

Gikka turned away, trusting that she had sacrificed
everything she ever had for good reason.  They rode in silence for some moments
until at last Gikka broke the silence.

“Tell me, lad.”  She managed a smile and gestured him
forward to ride beside her.  “Have you given a thought to passing the gates of
Farras?”

Hodrache Range

T
he
whole cliff was rotten, veined and crumbly like an old cheese, and even without
touching it Dith knew his fingers could gain no purchase on it, nor could his
boots.  Curdled clumps of the strange orange rock lay in a slump against the
foot of the cliff where sheets of it had fallen the few hundred feet and
smashed to bits, and protruding here and there from that pile, he found rotting
bits of rope and cloth, crushed tools, even some broken bones.  He squinted up
toward the top of the stone wall once more and shook his head in amazement. 
The world was full of fools.

With only a glance back toward the river, he turned westward
along the cliff’s base to look for another way up this peak.  By turning west,
he was taking himself farther and farther from the river, his only sure
connection to the keep, but he had no choice.  The cliff was too treacherous,
the falls themselves too violent and slick.  He would have to trust that he
could regain the river once he reached the top.

He had made no mistakes in his path; he was sure of that. 
Path, indeed.  The way seemed to him nearly a trail laid out for his benefit
and so clearly that he could not have gone astray if he had sleepwalked the
whole way.  The trek had been by no means an easy one, cutting through the
occasional thick clots of forest, but neither had it been the harrowing
gauntlet the legend had led him to expect.  He had met nothing more sinister
than a field of nettles the whole way from Montor.  Except for this cliff.

A year ago, he would have ported himself to the top of that
cliff without a thought.  No.  A year ago, he would have ported straight to
Galorin’s Keep as soon as he found the River Stone instead of wasting so much
time trekking and climbing through these mountains afoot.  He moved a low tree
branch aside, feeling the sack slip on his shoulder again.

His scalp prickled with a chilling realization.  A year ago,
he was such another fool, like the poor souls lying buried under that crumbling
rock.  Did he think he was the first sorcerer to think of porting?  Even if he
were, Galorin was no simpleton.  Dith shrugged the sack up irritably.  How many
others had ported themselves right into the bottom of a glacier, or right over
a thousand foot chasm, and with no strength left to haul themselves out again? 
He swallowed hard.  Or right into the heart of a volcano?  A year ago, he would
have failed.

No more than a mile to the west, the high cliff relented at
last and grudgingly sloped downward to meet a bed of rocks and boulders that
lay nestled against its flank, just where a landslide had dropped them eons
ago.  Dith stopped, a bit unsettled to have found so ready a climb so near the
cliff, so near the falls.  If those others had but taken the time to look...

He crouched beside the lowest rocks and studied the fall of
the boulders carefully, planning his way up the hillside.  This would not be
easy, but it was survivable.  With only a glance back the way he had come, he
began his climb.

He walked easily over the lowest of the rocks to step and
scramble here and there to the higher ones.  For a good part of the way, the
stones and smaller boulders fell neatly so that he could find a way up to the
next larger boulder without too much effort, having only to lift his robes a
bit to test his footing, but about halfway up the large boulders became even
larger, and he found himself having to find toeholds and heave himself up the
sides.  It was strenuous work, but not particularly dangerous.  Were he to
fall, he could not fall far.  Besides, the stones were well settled and so far
he had found them trustworthy.

Then he paused a moment, listening.  What had he heard?

He crouched on the stone and closed his eyes, listening to
the forest around him.  Birds called to one another in unharried tones and
hopped from branch to branch, the trees moved in the breeze, but that was
all...

No, he heard it again.

It was the sound of a horse’s hooves, the quiet crunch of
leaves and pine needles on the forest floor.  Dith opened his eyes and looked
down from his perch high in the rocks, down into the forest, but the trees
shaded the forest floor below him.  He saw nothing but tree limbs and shadows
beyond the edge of the boulder field.  A moment later, he heard the horse turn
and lope slowly eastward toward the river.

He frowned up at the next boulder.  The legends never spoke
of whether another mage might follow his path to the keep.  He set his boot
against a notch in the stone and clawed himself up with a grunt.  To follow
another’s path, especially through the legend of Galorin’s Keep, is to accept
his folly as your own.  If, on the other hand, the man you choose to follow
should be the one mage in almost four thousand years to reach Galorin, then you
were one lucky sod.  Dith scowled down at the forest.  One lucky, undeserving
sod.

Foolish.  That was just foolish.  The hunter whispered
curses and reined his horse in behind a tree.  The mage had followed the river
for nigh on a month, never straying more than fifty yards from it, and the
hunter had grown careless. Now, high on the hillside above him, his quarry hung
suspended like a gold spider against a sheer glassy wall, frozen, listening. 
Dith had heard the hunter’s horse; now he knew they were there.

Hallin had seen the remains of Dith’s last camp, the warm
ash of the last night’s fire and the freshly trampled grasses and plants that
still bled, and he had known that Dith could be no more than a few hours ahead
of them.  So he had sent the Montor men along the river toward the falls with
their noisy ill-mannered horses while he stayed well out of the way, hoping to
use them to draw Dith out and exhaust him, or at least divide his attention
during the attack.  Except that Dith was here, not where he should have been,
and the hunter, if he chose to attack now, would face him alone and unprepared.

Hallin’s mouth twitched in annoyance, and he retreated still
further into the woods, but as soon as he heard his horse’s hooves in the
leaves and needles, he cursed his mistake.  Dith’s easy crouch tightened
against the sheer almost vertical wall, and he stared out over the forest,
calmly scanning the trees with those terrible ice-blue eyes.  Those eyes seemed
to stare right through the wood of the tree, right into the hunter’s heart, and
yet Dith’s gaze continued to move over the trees as if he had seen no one.

The hunter breathed out slowly, grateful for his luck.

But what was Dith doing this far from the river?  For a
month, he had clung to the bank even when following so closely meant climbing
down steep ravines and making his way blithely past suffocating bogs and
bubbling hot pools of mud, as if he did not so much as see them.  So why now,
when all he faced was a simple lift up that nice solid cliff near the falls,
why had he brought himself here, to this impassable place?

The whole of Dith’s journey had been baffling.  Wood fires
started with flint and steel, meals of no more than what he had found along the
way.  But then Dith was shrewd; traveling thus, he left no thready traces of
magic to mark his passing.  But between the Hallin’s ability to track and the
Montorians’ knowledge of the mountains, they had consistently gained ground on
Dith, even through the worst of the journey, until now he hung just there,
waiting to be trapped.

Hallin saw here thick potent strands of power touching every
tree, every rock, a kind of power he had never seen before, staid and confident
as if it had always been a part of these woods.  Dith had not heard him coming,
no; he had felt it through these strands, and he was waiting to close his own
trap on them, waiting to unleash all the power he had been hoarding.  The
hunter licked his lips carefully.  He, on the other hand, had not been
conserving his power, and he would be lucky to escape with his life if he let
Dith force a confrontation here.

Slowly, calmly, he turned his horse and nudged him up into a
gentle gallop, retreating audibly if not visibly to the safety of the river for
a time.

He glanced back to the west as he rode, but the trees were
too thick for him to be able to see Dith now.  He could be no more than halfway
to the top of that wall—that sheer glassy wall that rose straight out of the
ground—and he had a steep climb from there to the promontory above the falls if
he would regain the river.  The hunter grinned and rode still faster toward the
river.  With any luck, he and his men would soon be on that promontory waiting
when Dith came over the last rise.

Dith scrambled up over a stack of smaller rocks and heaved
himself up the last large boulder.  A horse, Dith mused.  Even Zinion would not
let Dith ride him, not for all his Brannagh training, not for all Gikka’s
coaxing and cooing.  Not even for all that he was fond enough of Dith—at a
distance.  The feel of a mage’s power, even separated by as much as a good
Bremondine saddle and blankets, made a horse’s flesh crawl.

Yet this one comes riding.  If this rider were a sorcerer,
and after all, what else could he be, riding through this part of the range,
then that must be a rare horse indeed.  He looked back toward where he had
heard the beast loping away toward the river, wishing he had gotten a single
glimpse of it.  Why, he could not say.  It could be no more than idle
curiosity, he decided.  After all, he was no more inclined to ride than Zinion
had been to let him.

But rare horse or no, it would not be able to find its way
up this peak, and soon enough his pursuer would be forced to continue on foot
or turn back.

Pursuer.  Dith sighed, letting the word roll around in his
mind, and rejoined his climb with concentration.

“Hallin,” called one of the men, Haan by name, who came
running to greet him.  He was the youngest by far of the men whom Dalthaz had
chosen to accompany the hunter.  The youngest of his hostages.

Hallin slowed his horse and raised a hand in greeting.

The six Hadrians had moved themselves to the base of the
high granite cliff near the falls and broken out their climbing gear already,
anticipating Hallin’s orders.  Two of the men were eyeing the wall and touching
it carefully, making ready for their climb.

Haan stopped beside him with a grin and helped him dismount.
“What news?”

The hunter looked up at the rock face of the cliff.  It
looked to be an easy climb even without magic; heavy coarse granite with plenty
of toeholds, plenty of crevices for his men, and the minerals in the stone had
more than enough resonance to lift him neatly to the top.  Were it any more
welcoming as a climb, it would be a marble staircase.  They would have to leave
the horses behind, which meant they would have to leave most of their supplies
behind as well, but if his plan succeeded, they would rejoin the horses before
sunset.

He turned a confident smile to the Hadrian.  “Our mage
climbs a vertical cliff not a mile west.  Assuming he survives the climb,” he
added with a smirk, “he’ll be making his way back to the river, and there,
while he stands drained, we’ll take him.”  He clasped his hands behind him and
walked toward where the men were gathering their equipment.

“But take him how?”  Haan’s voice was almost whining with
insistence, and his brow bunched with worry.  A worry, Hallin saw, that the
young man had been carrying for quite a while.  “This Dith, Hallin.  I seen him
at the tavern, burnt a man’s hand without a thought, and after, I seen what he
done to the temple.  And the prison guards.”  The man’s eyes were widening with
each panicked word he spoke.  “He’s—”

“All hot air and baggage, lad,” laughed the hunter, and as
he hoped, the boy’s fear was allayed somewhat.  “Look you, any mage who spends
power like that...”  He shook his head in dismissal.  “Got no control, Dith. 
Spews out all his power right off, and then he ain’t got none left, is why
you’re not seeing him use his magic now.  He’s saving it up.  But now, he’s got
to use it to get up that cliff, and once he’s wrung out, he’s but a boy in
robes, is all.”

“Yeah, but—”  Haan was not convinced.

“The trick is to catch him when he’s spent.”  Hallin clapped
Haan on his shoulder.  “Spent or off his guard, say.  Then,” he said, spotting
a squirrel patting leaves over its newly buried winter cache near the base of
the cliff, “it’s just a matter of—”  The squirrel suddenly screamed and lay
still on the ground with blood draining from its nose and mouth even before
Hallin finished what had seemed a casual gesture. “—skill.”

The two who had been examining the wall began their climb,
starting up the low mound of granite that lay at the base.  It seemed a bit
slick underfoot, and they seemed to slip over it rather clumsily, but at last,
the one on the left managed to sink his pick into a crevice in the rock face
and pull himself along.  He reached a hand back to the man at his right and
drew him up as well.

“Fine rock,” spoke a soft Hadrian voice behind the hunter,
and he turned to see Tawn Baybric, a Hadrian whose judgment he had grown to
respect, crouching on the ground and squinting up the cliff.  Tawn had been a
miner, a trapper, even a bounty hunter in his own right many years ago, and he
was a fine tracker and a sensible woodsman besides.  While he was the first to
say he did not know this particular part of the Hodrache Range, he knew the
rest of the mountains well enough and had managed to get them past every
sinkhole and moss slicked ravine and boiling mud pit thus far without blinking
an eye.  But just now his words were not confident; they seemed almost
distrustful.  Finally, he stood and tossed away a small bit of rock he had
found.  “Should be a good climb.”

“Aye,” answered the hunter, and he was surprised to hear a
note of challenge in his own voice.  It was unlike Tawn to remark on something
for no reason, especially something obvious, and it worried him.  “A fine climb
indeed,” he added more gently.