The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (32 page)

They headed straight north, paralleling the towering mountains and passing several trail
s that forked downhill to their left.  Loren, after the last one, asked the nearest stagrider, “Is Lirralhisa in the hills?”

“
Nay, lord,” he replied.  “But the air is of so much a temperate and more wholesome nature in the heights that we do not descend until we must.  The Sirensong lies at the belly of this valley and her air is so thick and hot, her waters so dangerous, we would not rush to her embrace.”

This eloquence was delivered with such unaffected sincerity, the man
’s soft, lilting accent so marked, that four heads swiveled in unison to look at him.

“
Uh,” Loren said, then smiled charmingly.  “I’m not a lord yet.  My name’s Loren, of Harthunters.”

“
Well met,” the Cyrrhidean said, crooking his right arm and bowing over it.  “I am Rhuquisel, Rhuq.”

Rodge and
Ari introduced themselves, answered with that same odd, very courtly courtesy.  Cerise loftily ignored them.  The path climbed a low hill, and Ari took the opportunity to look back behind them.  Cyrrh fell away from them in swathes of green, green on green on green.  Not all of it was waving tree tops, though.  Not that far beyond Jagstag, hugging the flanks of the Dragonspine, the country stretched away in neat, ordered rows of some botanical enterprise, an orchard maybe.

Rhuq, seeing his interest, supplied,
“Tea and coffee plantations.  So beloved are their fruits to Northern tastes, we’ve had to plant leagues of them to satisfy.”  He grinned amiably.

“
I’m sure it didn’t hurt your coffers any, either,” Cerise mumbled crassly from behind them.  She sat stiffly, offense in every line of her sharp person, face pinched and eyes flashing.

“
That’s Cerise,” Rodge and Loren said pretty much in unison.  “Her talents lie mostly in the anti-bureaucrat realm,” Rodge elaborated thoughtfully. 

“
LADY Cerise,” she snapped.  “What kind of people don’t introduce themselves with rank or title?  How do you keep order?”

“
Or keep track of who you outrank?” Rodge said behind his hand to Rhuq.

Rhuq, gazing at her, stirred himself to say,
“In Cyrrh, my Lady, we’ve found that the Lord Regent can die as easily and basely as the lowliest Sentinel of the Torque…here, rank means nothing off the parade ground.”  To the boys, he said behind his own hand, “She’s very beautiful.”

“
You want her?” Rodge offered hospitably.

Ahead of them, Traive turned in his saddle, warning quietly,
“It is best to move as silently as possible until we reach the first Torque—there are many things in Cyrrh that it is preferable not to attract the attention of.”

“
Like what?” Cerise said provokingly, without dropping the volume of her voice at all.

“
Hopefully you will never need to name any of them,” he said gravely.

She grimaced angrily at his broad back, but everyone stopped talk
ing for a while.  It was easy to get back on edge, Ari found.  The unmistakable wariness of their escort had them all soon scanning the innocuous countryside like the ghosts and goblins of campfire tales were lurking around the nearest tree boles.  The stags, too, were terribly alert, moving in quick, jerky strides that were much more unsettling than the smooth, rolling gait of a horse.  And they didn’t make a sound—no sticks accidentally snapped, no stones clicking on hooves or being ticked out of the way, no whuffling, snorting or passing gas.  Were it not for Traive and Melkin’s low conversation ahead of them, Ari wasn’t sure he would have heard the whole party passing even standing a few yards from the trail.  It was a little eerie.

Th
at contagious sense of alertness may have explained why all the Northerners jumped when a nearby stagrider whipped out one of his axes.  It had been sitting, apparently aimless, in mid-air for only a fraction of a second before something long and slender and pale blue fell across the upturned edge.  Neatly bisected, it fell away to either side, leaving a smear of blood to mar the intricate tracings.  The whole thing took less time than to count ‘one.’

“
What was that?” Cerise hissed.  The boys stared stupidly at the axe, which was being deftly cleaned and returned to its holster.

“
Little Blue,” the stagrider said, just above a whisper.

“
Little Blue?!?!” she demanded in a low, strangled voice, “
Little Blue
?!

“
What a cute name,” Rodge said weakly.

“
WHAT WAS IT?” Cerise cried in a whispered howl.

Rhuq moved close, with a soothing motion.  No one else had even seemed to notice. 
“A Lesser Blue Skysnake,” he explained calmly.  “They live high in the branches and sometimes drop down on passing prey—or just for no reason at all.”

“
They’re poisonous?” She didn’t look the least bit relieved.

“
No, no.  They eat insects, mice and moles, small birds, eggs.”

“
Is, uh, is there a BIG Blue?” Rodge asked, scanning the trees nervously.

“
Of course,” Rhuq said affably, as if they were discussing leather tanning practices.

“
What do they eat?” Loren asked brightly.  He and Ari had done more than their share of snake hunting…though they’d never had one appear in quite this aerial manner.

“
Oh, well, things like wild piglets, fawns, small children—”

“
You said they weren’t poisonous!” Cerise shrieked in a whisper.

“
They’re not,” Rhuq assured her, surprised at her bulging-eyed vehemence.  “They’re constrictors.”

She stared at him, horrified.  Rodge gulped.

“They swallow their prey whole…”

“
Yeah, yeah, we got it,” Rodge nodded quickly.

This effectively quelled Cerise
’s petty rebelliousness and she didn’t say a word for the next three hours.  Ari was in delights, not just over the silence, but for the thick, rustling, beautiful scenery he’d resigned himself to.  He loved the forest…especially now, when he preferred to stay out of sight of civilization for maybe the next sixty years or so.  He’d spent almost his whole life in the North and now the thought of ever returning immersed him in dread.  He was irrationally certain that the first person to see him would rush at him with whatever weapon was handy, screaming
Enemy!

They broke late for lunch, dismounting awkwardly by an idyllic little pool in an emerald glen.
  A few late flowers were blooming and the stag immediately lowered their antlered heads to grab mouthfuls of the lush grass.  Darting dragonflies, tiny and brilliant as jewels, sparkled in the air like iridescent magic.

“
I thought we were in a hurry,” Cerise challenged unpleasantly as stagriders began laying out what looked like a picnic.

Traive
responded equably, “Yes, my Lady, but we will have to make a run for the Torque anyway—” he glanced at Melkin apologetically “—so we might as well stretch our legs a minute.”  Was there no end to the man’s patience?  Ari liked him—he was unaffected and even-tempered and obviously well able to deal with the occasional burr under the saddle.  So to speak.

Melkin, for his part, seemed faintly surprised. 
“We can make the first Torque a day’s ride from Jagstag?”

“
We go in by an eastern Gate…with Cyrrh as, er, restless as she’s been of late, I am reluctant to spend any more time outside the Torques than need be.  Her entertainments can prove disruptive to a time schedule,” he added wryly.

“
Just to a time schedule?” Melkin drawled, equally wry and with an odd air of camaraderie.  He seemed as comfortable with Traive as he had after weeks with Banion.

“
And what exactly is a torque, aside from a sort of necklace?” Cerise demanded, turning deliberately to Rhuq with the air of one bestowing a favor.  If Traive was devastated at the loss of her attention, he covered it manfully.

“
The protective walls around the settled areas of Cyrrh, my Lady,” Rhuq said readily, completely oblivious to her games.  “The outermost wall is the Copper Torque…we will rest easier within its arms.”

Cerise just raised an eyebrow. 
“Is there Enemy behind us or something?”  Ari shot her a look of disgust.  Little Blue could have been bird droppings for all she was choosing to remember of it.

“
My arm’s numb,” Rodge said suddenly.

For as stoic as the stagriders had been
up until now, this seemed to incur a disproportionate amount of concern.  To the man, they looked over at him sharply, then immediately began to scour the nearby ground, the trees, his stag—one even started picking quickly through his clothes.

“
What is it?” Loren asked, vaguely alarmed at this sense of industry.

Rhuq shrugged, peering under some leaves and saying conversationally,
“Could be anything—spider, snake, insect, bird, bee, plant—” 

“
Fangvine,” a stagrider announced triumphantly. 

Rhuq had them all come look at it.  To Ari, it looked like
the young, green branch of a rose, thorns soft and innocuous-looking.  It was wound around a tree at elbow level.

Rodge, looking offended, muttered,
“I don’t even remember touching it.”

“
It’ll wear off after a few hours,” Rhuq said lightly.  “Just don’t make a bed out of it.”

Rodge glared. 
“I’m not PLANNING on snuggling up to it.  I’d rather never see it again; I’d rather not make another single bed out of plant matter in my life.”  His voice was rising.  “In fact, now that you mention it, we’re supposed to be back at University right now—” he shot Melkin a seething look of accusation “—not being accosted by malevolent herbage and at the homicidal mercy of half the known world!”

“
Easy, Rodge,” Ari murmured, though he couldn’t help wondering why Rodge and Loren
were
still there.  Was Melkin really that in doubt about the intruder’s intent in Archemounte—after everything he’d told him under the willow tree?  Because Ari…Ari was becoming fairly certain it hadn’t had anything to do with Rodge or Loren.

Rhuq, looking
uncertainly on this little display of temper, ushered them over to where people were settling around Traive.  Ari sat right next to him, trying not to look like he was listening intently to the conversation he was having with Melkin.

“
There isn’t anything IN the Statue, is there?” the Master was asking Traive.

Just as thoughtful,
the Cyrrhidean answered, “I’ve never heard mention of it, if there is.  We should keep our minds open to possibilities…but there is one thing we can be sure of.  The mercs aren’t interested in it, or in preventing you from finding it, unless it is of tremendous benefit to them to do so.  The White Asps aren’t cheap…either there is fabulous wealth somehow intrinsic to the Statue, or someone is making it extremely lucrative for them to BE interested in it.”

“Maybe they’re planning on blackmailing the Realms with it,” Loren offered.

“
The Realms just found out about it,” Cerise snapped condescendingly.  “And I doubt they’d pay anything for its return…nonsense…I have trouble believing all this interest—to the point of murder—could exist for a hunk of stone.  Even if it is a masterpiece,” she allowed disdainfully, picking up a piece of jerky between thumb and finger and looking at it suspiciously.  “And I’ve heard nothing along THOSE lines.”

“
I think,” Traive said, in his even, neutral voice, “that it is only the North that thinks of it so.”

“
All right then,” she persisted, meeting his eyes challengingly, “even if it has some value as a mythico-religious figure, that is not enough to attract the attention of a group out for profit.”

“
Mythico-religious?” Rodge looked at her askance.  “Only a politician would make up a word like that.” 

Loren shook his head at him. 
“That’s low.”

“
If
the Asps are out for profit,” Traive said thoughtfully.  “Perhaps their motives are more complex…power and wealth often wind round each other indiscernibly.  At any rate, Lady, your assessment of its value explains why the Ivory removed it from Archemounte.”

Melkin stilled.  Ari
’s head came up.  Looking like a hawk ready to pounce on a mouse, the Master repeated slowly, “The Whiteblades took it from the North?”

“
The Empire,” Cerise corrected sullenly.  If people would stop interrupting, she could be having a nice, satisfying, screaming fight with Traive right now.

“
Without a doubt.  There is no record of it, of course, but they are the only ones that could have taken it from under the nose of both Fox and Drae.”

Ari had to gulp water for the glob of venison that had suddenly turned to glue in his throat.  Melkin
’s high-arched nose was almost quivering with the scent of this new trail.

Cerise broke the silence with a derisive snort.
  “Am I the only one that wonders how some bored milkmaid runs off, joins the cult of Il, decides she’s going to play the part of—I don’t know, Elinore—”

“
There isn’t an Elinore,” Traive and Ari said at the same time.

“
MY POINT IS that these eighteen-year-old girls, from completely unremarkable, normal lives, up and join the Whiteblades and are suddenly endowed with legendary physical skills, death-defying heroic feats, overwhelming compassion and self-sacrifice…”