Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (31 page)

He topped the ridge and stood to catch his breath, looking
down over the valley below.  As he had guessed, the bowl-shaped valley was the
crater of a long dormant volcano, one of many in the range.  It was by no means
the largest, but neither was it the smallest; it seemed the perfect place for
the keep.

But something was wrong.  The terrain was not right, not
bare and rocky enough.  Galorin’s Keep could not be here.  His heart sank in
his chest, but he shrugged up his rucksack once more and carefully scanned the
walls of the crater, hoping to see thick gray stone walls standing aloof and
inscrutable high above a barren cliff wall.  He had seen the place countless
times in his dreams; he would know it at once.

Instead, he saw a thick ring of forest covering the gentle
slopes of the crater walls that broke only occasionally at falls of rock and
trickles from high springs.  The trees below him looked as ancient as any he
had ever seen, and the underbrush grew thick in the rich volcanic soil, as
thick as if it were still summer.  Where the slopes eased away into the low
grassy valley, the trees and underbrush ended abruptly, as if the land had been
cleared for farming.

He glanced at the old trees and then down into the valley
itself.  Apparently this volcano had been asleep for many centuries; it was in
no danger of erupting today.

Then he saw something odd, something that made him stare for
a moment, and if he had not stared at it so directly, he might have looked
right past it.

Just a few hundred yards from the forest’s edge below him,
he saw a great mass of dark glossy volcanic rock gleaming in the sun.  From
here it looked to be no more than a lumpy bulge of black, the chronic seepings
of a boil on the volcano’s skin, nothing more.  But his eyes would not leave
it, and as he watched, it seemed to reshape itself in his mind, slowly, awkwardly,
until at last he saw what it was.  What it had to be.

His heart raced, and his breath came quickly in the thin
air.  This was nothing like the heavily fortified place he had seen in his
dreams.  Nothing at all.  Thoughts flew through his mind of falling prey to
deception, of having chosen the wrong stone from the river, of having come all
this way to find nothing at all.

Nothing?  His eyes narrowed.  He had certainly found
something here, Galorin’s Keep or no.  So perhaps the dreams had been a
deception, or maybe they were meant to lead him somewhere else.  His heart
jumped again.  Perhaps this was Galorin’s Keep after all.

His inclination was to race down through the trees at all
speed toward that huge dark edifice, but he schooled himself to calm and tested
each step just as he had the whole way up from the rotten cliffs.  He had not
found his way here, wherever here was, only to die of recklessness at the
doorstep.

But just as he had since Montor, he found the path before
him clear and unmistakable.  Huge thorny brambles seemed set to guide him along
the only possible course through the thick forests to the valley floor.  He
could not hope to leave that path if he tried, not without burning the brambles
off first.  So he shrugged the rucksack up on his shoulder and crossed the
ridge.

“Hold,” spoke Hallin.  He crouched below the top of the
blunted ridge ahead of them and moved himself up carefully, only until he could
see down into the valley below.  He would not have Dith accidentally spy them
coming over this rise, not now, not when he had him trapped so neatly in this
bowl and with his back to them besides.  This ugly, rocky hole would be their
battleground, he told himself.  A pity it was that he would have to kill Dith
before he had led them to the keep, but having come this far, he was sure they
could find it alone.  He would not get another chance like this.

He could see Dith moving easily between the highest of the
rocks, the steepest and sharpest; occasionally the familiar gold of his robes
flashed between the rocks and moved as steadily here as it had beside the
river, as if over open ground.  Hallin ground his teeth together again and
spat.  He moved without a care, this Dith did, without a single care, while
three men, men who had stood to guarantee Hallin’s fee—good men, he allowed
grudgingly, who had shared many a cup and meal with him these tendays—lay dead
of Galorin’s traps.  Men whose deaths had served to keep him alive.  Hallin’s
lips thinned.  When he found Galorin, he would kill him, too.

Tawn crept along the ground and stopped beside him,  “He is
just below.”

“I’ve eyes,” snapped the hunter.

“If we creep down, the four of us, we could surround—”

“No,” Hallin answered abruptly. He was going to kill Dith
himself.  He had not hunted this mage for Rjeinar and for Kadak over the last
six years to have him fall to someone else by Limigar’s whim, and he was in no
mood to argue shares of the bounty besides.  There was more to it than just
gold now, and payment or not, legal bounty or not, Dith the Merciless was
finally his.  He glanced sharply at the questions in Tawn’s pinched features
before he turned back to watch Dith’s progress.  “No,” he repeated softly. 
“You’d be done to cinders at ten paces of him.”

“A good bow, and I’d have him from here,” muttered the
Hadrian darkly.  He motioned the other two to join him beside Hallin.  “A
single arrow, just at his neck, and we’d be headed home.”

“Fool, have you been awake at all these tendays?” seethed
Hallin.  “You seen his works; he’ll not fall but to a righteous blast of
magic.”  Then he looked at the men who crouched beside him and gave them a hard
smile.  “You’ve done your piece getting me here, lads; the rest falls to me. 
Now stand ye down and wait.”

From then on, his attention was entirely upon the occasional
flashes of gold between the boulders and the rugged, rocky plain just beyond. 
Very soon Dith would be out there in the open, forced to slow his pace over the
field of rocks and made virtually defenseless, at least for a moment.  Long enough. 
Hallin rolled up his sleeves.  It would have to be long enough.

The trees thinned only a little before they ended rather
immediately at the edge of the wide valley.  It seemed a land cleared and
tilled soft for farming except that no one farmed here, and wild grasses had
filled the fields.  The whole of the valley seemed deserted save the dark and
unnatural edifice ahead.  As he left the shelter of the trees, as his eyes once
more adjusted to the glare of the sun, Dith slowed his step and stared.

Hallin held his breath, held his attack ready for just the
right moment, the moment when Dith was clear of the trees, just a bit away from
those boulders, just a little closer to those rocks ahead.

But instead, Dith had stopped.  Trees still at his back, he
had stopped to gawk at the lumpy stand of rocks just ahead of him, as if those
particular rocks stood out somehow from the rest.  Hallin breathed deeply,
impatiently, and willed him to step forward.  Just.  One.  More.  Step.

“Hallin,” spoke Tawn worriedly at his elbow.  He was
frowning over a handful of soil.  “Hallin, the ground here—”

“Peace,” hissed the mage, raising his hands.  “Sure it can
wait.”

In thick ragged lines below the grass, Dith saw swirls of
clear black sand and shards of ancient obsidian, some made dull by wind and
rain and volcanic heat, others still deadly sharp. The dark curtain walls of
Galorin’s castle had fallen countless centuries ago; the broken rubble of many
battles clotted the valley in great glassy heaps that seemed at first glance
only random seepings from the volcano, and this sharp sand below his feet was
what the elements had slowly broken away.

But the keep itself...

No.  It could not be.  He squinted and stumbled forward in
amazement, and suddenly he could see the whole of the keep itself.  His heart
pounded in his chest.

The high corner towers of the keep rose above the valley
floor, not laid in crude chunks by masons, nor even carved by artisans from
single blocks of stone, but rather moulded and blown from the very blood of the
volcano itself.  It was nothing to make a volcano erupt; he could do as much
now if he so chose.  But to control it, to direct the flow so carefully, so
artfully—he doubted any mage alive, any mage in history, had ever shown such
delicacy—to create such a castle would take the finesse of Galorin himself. 
The glassy obsidian walls were dark, nearly transparent, buttressed with
magical power and protected, not by the destroyed curtain walls, but by the
defenses Galorin had built throughout the range.  The whole mountain was his
castle.

But those famed defenses had failed.  The magnificent towers
stood smashed and shattered, still whole in silhouette, but opaqued to a milky
gray with infinite cracks and breaks and held together such that a sharp breath
might blow them apart.  The walls between those towers were blasted outward,
and their sharp obsidian pieces littered the whole of the crater floor, even as
far away as the fallen curtain walls where Dith stood.

The keep, though still standing, had been gutted.

Grass.  Thin weedy grass. This ground had not been tilled;
the forest near the keep had been razed to the ground.  His scalp prickled. 
Extreme heat had dulled the obsidian sand at his feet, but not the heat of the
volcano.  The heat of an intense magical attack, a fire that gutted not only
the keep but the whole valley.  None of the lush ancient forest of the crater
walls grew in this valley; he saw here no tiny seedling trees, no low brush,
just the last season’s growth of prairie grasses.  Whatever had happened here
had happened since the war’s end, maybe even since he left Graymonde.  He had
come too late.

Galorin is—

Dith scowled, remembering the Hadrian’s comment in Montor. 
He had dismissed the man’s remark at the time, as well as Dalthaz’s silencing
gesture, the careworn eyes over the sly mayoral smile.  His mind raced.  The
shutters drawn shut behind him, the locked stores.  The strangely empty
streets.  The woman who fainted.  They had known, standing in the shadow of
their desecrated temple, they had known right well what had happened here.  He
swallowed anxiously.

Galorin is—

What? he wanted to shout into the sky.  Dead, missing?  His
eyes narrowed in rage.  They might even have had a hand in it somehow, and by
the gods, if they had...

He shut his eyes a moment to force the anger back down into
his gut.  No.  Those people had been terrified of him, even before he destroyed
the temple, even before they learned his name.  If they had destroyed Galorin’s
Keep, they would not have shown such fear over one more wandering mage. 
Something, someone, had made them afraid, and now he felt certain it had
nothing to do with the bandits in the temple.  He opened his eyes and looked
out over the field before him once more.

For the first time, he saw what he had been looking past,
what his mind had refused to allow him to see.  The moist, mulchy soil was
packed firm, but not by rain.  The ground was crushed down by footprints,
hundreds of footprints.  The light breeze had softened the lines of many of them
out in the open valley, but here he saw a few that were undisturbed, and he
crouched beside them.

They were all made by boots.  Seamless boots.  Hundreds of
them.

Dith rose a bit shakily. Hundreds.  Yes, it would have taken
that many to overthrow Galorin.  But so few of his kind had survived the war...

Even before the Syonese Resistance began its efforts to
overthrow his
de facto
rule and restore the House of Damerien to power,
Kadak had waged a separate war of obsession against Syon’s magic users—men and
women who, ironically enough, would otherwise have had as little interest in
Kadak and his agenda as they had in each other.  No one quite understood why,
even after the war’s end, but Kadak had been convinced that his end would come
at the hands of mages—not just any mages, but a special, very mysterious group
of mages.  “Them,” he called them, and he seemed to think he would know them on
sight.  How or why was anyone’s guess; nevertheless, he had expected these
beings at his door as fully as one might expect a dinner guest.

Galorin himself had been the most likely threat, so Kadak
had spent the early part of the war concentrating on finding him.  The
campaigns he had sent into the Hodrache Range either returned with nothing or
failed to return at all, but Galorin himself had raised no hand against Kadak,
which led the rest of Syon to believe that Galorin, like his ally, the Great
Liberator, had vanished into history and legend.

On another front, Kadak had conscripted or killed every
child who showed the least ability with magic, and he had executed outright any
mages who were not in his employ.  Those his troops and bounty hunters could
find, that is.  But even during the worst of the slaughter, those of the Art
had not joined their forces against him, something the rest of Syon had found
curious and still viewed with suspicion.

Some families over the years, like Dith’s, had managed to
hide their gifted children from Kadak, and while the noble houses knew better
than to provoke Kadak by keeping resident mages, those who were sympathetic to
the Resistance quietly supported them as they could, so that Syon always had a
few, a precious few, rogue sorcerers wandering the land, always in hiding,
always under threat of death.  Always under suspicion, even by the Resistance. 
When they were betrayed, for it was always
when,
not if, with the
bounties Kadak offered, they were killed outright.  If a mage had somehow
survived his first betrayal, if he had learned to see the signs of his next
betrayal early enough, then he might have survived, as Dith had.

Needless to say, most had not survived the first betrayal,
much less any others.  Since the war, Dith had seen only two sorcerers, three
if he were to include the horsed one below the cliff, all on different
occasions and all at a distance, and these had gone to great pains to avoid
crossing his path.  But here, before him, he saw the tracks of an army of
mages, apparently united towards one unbelievable end: Galorin’s death.