The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (57 page)

As the hours passed, the surroundings began to subtly change.  The dirt of the trail darkened and thickened into a pasty mud wherever there was a spot of low ground.  That nasty smell began to seep into the atmosphere, the rare breezes bringing strong, distasteful puffs of it.  The air, which had been the perfect warm weather of late summer, turned warmer, moister, thicker, and the breezes brought barely any relief from its humidity.  The woods were full of strange trees that Ari had never seen before, with thick grey trunks and low branches that kept them all ducking.  Or, in Rodge
’s case, with a constant headache.

They camped that night with their backs up against a splayed pile of big boulders, a little rivulet of fresh water allowing them to refill flaccid waterskins and wash up a little.  It was the first time since Dorian had joined them that they had stopped before full dark, and everyone could feel the gloom settle in like a physical thing as the light faded.  Even the Jungle, at its densest and most terrifying, had not had this same sense of …oppressiveness to it.

They gathered close around the fire as Loren did his best to make some kind of dinner, and the mess in the skillet made Ari think longingly of Selah.  She’d been a renewed ache on his mind since his little trial of prayer, though it was becoming harder to imagine her ever catching up with them now.  Of all her wonderful attributes, cooking had been right up there with the best of them.

He wasn
’t the only one thinking of female companionship.  Rodge casually asked, as soon as Dorian had seated herself (Traive had brought his saddle for her, which made Ari want to kick himself for not thinking of it first), “So, who was that woman we met on the trail today?”

“Vashti,” Dorian answered, shooting him a knowing glance.

They all waited politely for her to go on, but Rodge, eventually feeling she needed encouragement, prodded her, “She’s a Dra?”

“She was.”

The boys exchanged glances.  “What is she now?”

“A Follower.” 

Cerise rolled her eyes.

Melkin, feeling perhaps this wasn
’t going anywhere—or at least nowhere he was interested in—changed topics.  “What do we do once we reach the Sheelshard?” he asked bluntly.

“Nothing.”  Dorian looked at him sternly.  “It is imperative that you stay out of the way, both for your own sakes and for the success of the mission.”

“And what exactly
is our mission
?”
he growled, leaning toward her.  There were times he seemed truly wild, as if any civility were only a nod to social convention; his grey eyes gleamed yellowish in the small cook fire, his lips were drawn back from his teeth.
     

As composed as ever, she merely looked gravely back at him.  “The less you know of that, the better.  If the Sheelmen catch you, they will kill you.  If they think you know something, they will torture you until you
’ll wish they had.”

The fire went very quiet.  Rodge looked horrified.  It was one thing to be told there was danger ahead; it was quite another to be handed a nice specific example of what dropping in on Zkag might actually entail.  Ari, feeling worse than ever, exchanged serious looks with Loren.  What had he done?  None of his friends would be here if he hadn
’t agreed to come.  Was he going to feel this horrible sense of responsibility for them all until this was over?

“The First Mage of Merrani,” Banion began in his slow rumble, apparently not much disturbed by thoughts of torture, “prophesied Raemon would return so powerful that he would destroy the gods.  Can we stop him?”

Dorian fixed her glowing eyes on his big, hairy face, her own suddenly still.  She usually looked at all of them but Ari as if they were uninteresting children, to be tolerated and tended.  One of the kids had accidentally stumbled onto something worth notice, apparently. 

“It is impossible for the gods to destroy each other,” she said quietly.  “No matter how powerful Raemon is—and he has not gotten any more so while being time-locked with the Empress—they have an elaborate system of protections in place to prevent such a thing.”

“Mmm,” Banion grunted.  “Thought he was a little loopy anyway.”

But Dorian was not so quick to dismiss it.  She continued to look thoughtfully at the Merranic, eyes so golden in the firelight they could hardly be called brown.  “Perraneus
’s death
was
most…unusual,” she mused.

By now it didn
’t even occur to anybody to wonder—let alone ask—how she managed to come by that knowledge, and Banion, shrugging, said, “Vangoth isn’t one to mince words.”

“No,” she agreed wryly.  “His choice of violence as his preferred problem-solving tactic is not one of his more endearing traits.  However, he at least reserves these drastic kinds of penal measures for cases he feels are truly a threat…”

Banion and Melkin looked at each other, and Melkin asked slowly, “You’re saying…the Mage wasn’t just crazy?  You think he was on to something?”

“Evidence would suggest it…” she said.  “If he was foretelling Raemon
’s return with a blaze of power that would make him, finally, supreme over the other gods…well, that would be the sort of thing he would hear from Raemon.”  She looked at them both now, very directly.  “There’s no chance he could have been under his influence, is there?”

“Under his influence!?” Melkin snarled, looking like he was going to leap for her throat.  Ari stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth at the vehemence—until he remembered Perraneus had once been Melkin
’s friend.  And then he remembered something else.

“There was that box,” he said slowly.  Melkin turned livid eyes on him, but he had Dorian
’s interest, too.  Narrowing her eyes, she said quietly and very distinctly, “What box?”

He described it as best as he could, that box with the red stone on Perraneus
’s desk in the cluttered tower, straining to remember the physical details.  It was mostly the feel of it that had struck him, an oily sort of smear on his mind.  Melkin, calming down after a minute, remembered it, too, much better than Ari.

And Dorian, when they had finished, said like one of the boulders around them suddenly dropping into their midst, “That sounds like one of Raemon
’s trieles.”  Mouths fell open.  Loren said, awed, “I didn’t even know he had trieles,” at the same time that Cerise echoed in disbelief, “Trieles!”

“Explain,” Melkin said tightly.  “How could there be a triele of Raemon
’s in Merrani—without Vangoth knowing about it?”

“Perhaps he did,” Banion suggested thoughtfully, glancing at Dorian. 

She nodded at him and said, “The gods of the other Realms keep their trieles close: The Rainbow Scepter of the North, the Lance and the Gate of the Sea in Merrani, the main Torque Gates in Cyrrh, plus all the Trieles themselves in the Temple, the Forges, and the Skypalace.  Raemon is different.  His Triele lies in the Hall of Sacrifices at Zkag, but the rest of them are scattered as far as he can spread them.  It has been so since he first left Ethlond, for his purpose is different.  He is not on the defensive, trying to protect his people from the scourge of the Enemy; he
is
the Enemy, trying to seed his evil across the Realms.”

There was something affecting about that quiet, rich, sure voice, something that made silence seep into the little group around the campfire.  They had seen a triele of the Ruby god.  It made it somehow more real, more possible.  It was easy to think of Raemon in an intellectual sense—everyone knew there were four gods.  You learned it at your mother
’s knee.  But it was very different than dwelling on the idea of his presence, of his being evil, of his being the leader, the director, the whole reason behind the creation of, the Enemy.

Dorian turned her head and said into empty air, “Scholar.”  Surrounded by the pressing weight of the gloomy forest and by dark thoughts of Raemon, more than one of them jumped when a young woman materialized out of the gloom.

Ignoring the surprise this engendered, Dorian asked her thoughtfully, “What happened to the Coffer of Gkri?”

The young woman looked at her just as thoughtfully out of light-colored eyes, shaking very fine, pale hair off her face.  She rested her bow—she was packed with weapons, too—on the ground and said, as if concentrating, “I know the Faracens had found it, and were bent on
destroying it…but I think it was lost—taken, I’m sure—before they got around to it.”  Despite the fact that her boots were muddied with the dark, slimy stuff they’d been walking through all day, her fitted leathers stained from the wilds, she seemed enveloped with a sense of cleanliness, a brightness that had nothing to do with dingy clothes or mussed hair. Rodge and Loren, radiating approval at the sight of more females, inconspicuously craned their heads around to see if the other one had come with her.

“The First Mage of Merrani may have had it.”  Dorian indicated the group around the fire with her chin.  “They describe it almost exactly, as a box they
’d seen in his chambers.” 

The Whiteblade looked over at them.  She was younger than Dorian, and had an up-tilted nose and an air of mischief sparkling about her, even when she was serious.  “That
’s not good, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Dorian looked at her, considering, “It
’s a hard two to three week ride…”

The pale eyebrows rose on the new one
’s face.  “Each way!” she said, considerably more expressive than the dignified blonde she was addressing. For a moment she stared, then elaborated, “Dor, we are
stood to
!  Would you stand us down to go chasing after Raemon’s toys?”

“They
’re hardly toys,” Dorian said quellingly.  The Northerners looked between the two, fascinated.

“We don
’t even have the horses, yet!” 

For the first time any of them could remember seeing it, a flash of irritation crossed Dorian
’s well-controlled countenance.   “Where are those horses?”

“At least a week out.” 

The two went quiet, Dorian deep in thought.  Finally she looked up and said quietly: “Oratrix.”

CHAPTER
27

It wasn’t a very restful night, despite their weariness.  Like their first night in the jungle, where every sound startled them awake, they tossed fitfully in their blankets.  There was an almost sepulchral silence, the normal nocturnal sounds nonexistent, like the cheerlessness of the place had run out all the animal life. 

Grumpy and ill-tempered, they were just mounting up the next morning when the clear young voice of last night
’s Whiteblade came across their campsite:  “She should be in by tonight.”  Heads picked up interestedly, eyeing the morning version of last night’s vision.

Dorian nodded in acknowledgement and strode out of the clearing, leading off into another unknown day.  Only Kai followed her, though…everyone else paused, trapped by curiosity as the little blonde continued to stand there.  She only had eyes for Ari, for her part, shooting him a smile like pure sunshine.  Her eyes were all blue and green and gold, like summer sky and spring grass and sunshine all mixed together.  And full of laughter.

“I’m Jordan,” she said conspiratorially.  “You probably don’t remember me…but we’ll talk more later…”  Ari stared at her, oblivious of the darts of envy from his friends, windows slamming open in his mind, memories flooding in.  He did remember, suddenly, with that one look right into his eyes.  He remembered playing tag, being tossed in the air, meals and bowing his head to pray, being tucked into bed at night…and laughter.  Always, smiles and laughter.  He sat there, stunned by the rush of images and feelings and afraid to move lest he lose that frolicking sense of happiness. 

She slipped back into the woods.  Most of the rest of the party, shooting him a last look, followed Dorian, and he was left sitting there, staring at the empty spot where she
’d been.

He was vaguely aware he had a stupid grin on his face.  “She used to tickle me,” he said
faintly.  Traive, the only one left in the clearing by now, nodded as if that was the most natural thing in the world to say. 

“You
’re a lucky man, Ari.”

That magical feeling didn
’t last long.  The forest around them grew steadily darker and danker and more dangerous.  The trail lost all trace of packed dirt, becoming a variable thickness of mud, sometimes so deep and strong that the horses stumbled, anxiously yanking their hooves out of its sucking clasp as their momentum propelled them forward.  Strange cries and calls had made them nervous already, and their riders grew more and more on edge the more the horses started and shied.

The big
, grey trees had roots sticking up in knees now above ground, and dark, foul-smelling pools of water appeared on either side of the trail.  The scraggly, soggy underbrush was thinning, and once it gave way completely for almost a hundred yards, revealing an endless series of dark trees and darker pools for as far as the eye could see.  It was a haunting, grey-shrouded landscape, the color leeched out along with everything else normal about a forest.  Midmorning, they all about jumped out of their skins when an enormous black heron lifted up out of the water right next to the trail, winging his ghostly way through the gloom.

The day seemed interminable in the unchanging landscape, and there was no lessening or firming of the viscous, foul-smelling mud.  It grew increasingly more pervasive, until it seemed a minor miracle to find a spot of solid ground big enough to camp that night.  Dorian, who
’d been the only Whiteblade they’d seen since that morning, led them unerringly to it.  And in the center of the precious raised hump of dry earth, tending a blessedly cheerful campfire, was Adama. 

“The Whiteblade from Merrani,” Loren said in surprise.

“Oratrix,” Dorian said formally as they walked up, and the girl rose, crossing to greet her.  She was just as Ari remembered.  Tight coppery curls, face freckled, eyes full of light and mischief.  Not wanting to miss anything, he dismounted hurriedly, and found everyone else crowding in close with apparently the same idea.

They were speaking quietly, but the travelers caught Adama
’s comment at the end.

“But it won
’t matter,” she was saying in her strong voice.  “If we succeed, it will be irrelevant, and if we don’t…well, there’ll be a lot more loose ends than just a Coffer of Souls out there floating around.”  Dorian nodded slowly and Adama’s gaze left her face to sweep over the little crowd around them.

She glanced back at Dorian with the same look Vashti had given her.  “All of them?” she asked
in an undertone.  She got a shrug for an answer.  “They wanted to come.”

She turned back to them, pasting on a bright smile.  “Well, dinner
’s almost ready.”

It was the best they
’d had since their fresh chicken almost a week ago, but no one paid it much mind.  Adama sat with them for a few minutes, her conversation so much more engaging and playful than the austere flow of information presented by Dorian that they pushed aside the fatigue and vague sense of depression and pursued the exchange of information.

“Why didn
’t you tell us any of this in Merrani?” Melkin asked her accusingly. He had not shown himself to be as charmed by her conversation as the boys.  She spread her graceful hands.

“What shall I say, Wolfmaster?  That you would not have believed me?  That I should have told you that you had to be in Cyrrh regardless of where the Statue was?  That I should have said you must continue on a difficult and dangerous journey in which you hardly believe even
with
a reason?”

“So you manipulated us to get us here?” he said flatly.

“I told you the truth,” she shot back unhesitatingly.  “That your answers lay in Cyrrh.  Are you any happier for the knowing of them?  Would you have pushed on as hard if you had known everything up front?  The Paths of Il are not the paths of men.  There were things you all had to go through before you got here, things that have changed you.”  The twinkling amber eyes glanced briefly into Ari’s.  “There is just no sense in crying about it now.”

“CRYING about it?!  Crying?!  We
’ve faced untold dangers, hardship, ambush, deadly beasts, poisonous plants, obstuctionist kings, all in a desperate search for an object that didn’t exist and wasn’t important even if it did—sped along our path,” he almost spit it out, “by the machinations of a bunch of meddlesome, arrogant females that think they have the answers to everything under the sun—and you blame me for wanting to know what was going through your brainless skulls?”  He was seething, eyes snapping, stew forgotten on his plate.

“You misunderstand,” she said placatingly.  “I do not blame you for asking; it is your refusal to give up the subject that is so senseless.  You will not admit that there are forces greater than your own will at work here.”  She smiled pleasantly.

Melkin, whom the Northerners were afraid would have a seizure, he looked so apoplectic, fumed, “Would you rest as easy if it weren’t you and your twisted cohorts moving all the pieces around on this game board?!”

“My dear Wolfmaster,” she affected surprise.  “You forget, I am a Follower.  I have happily submitted to the Will of Il for centuries.  Neither I nor my twisted cohorts are in charge of anything.”  She looked at him wide-eyed and he, utterly disgusted, went wordlessly back to his dinner, shoving the stew in with such vengeance that Rodge whispered, “It
’s already been killed.”

Cerise, unable to let this pass, said with her own air of innocence, “And just how old are you, exactly?”

Adama frowned, thinking.  “Mmm.  Fifty, carry the one,” she murmured, working at it for several seconds before finally announcing with a faint sense of accomplishment, “Nine hundred and eighty seven.”

“Don
’t believe her,” Jordan called invisibly from the perimeter of the camp.  “She always forgets that year imprisoned at Czagaroth.”

Adama snapped her fingers.  “Nine eighty-eight,” she corrected.

There was a moment of pregnant silence, then Cerise asked with quiet scorn, “Do you really expect us to believe that?  That you’re almost a thousand years old?” 

Adama looked at her with huge, serious eyes, the reddish freckles seeming to dance over her pale skin in the flickering light.

“No.”

She slipped a wink at Traive.  “If you cannot believe in gryphons or centaurs, I would hardly expect you to embrace the idea of divinely extended longevity.”

“’Dama,” Dorian said in firm warning.

Adama gazed at them
, unrepentant.  “How is steel sharpened if it is never challenged with a whetstone?” she asked, low and enigmatic.  Melkin and Cerise both gave her notably hostile looks in return. 

“A blade beaten on river rocks can lose its edge forever,” Dorian answered dryly.  “Perhaps you should join the guard roster,” she added, in a voice that made it clear it was not a suggestion. 

Melkin stalked off to his blankets, which weren’t very far in their tiny camp, and soon everyone followed.  And Ari, glancing around in excited disbelief as Dorian also rose, realized his chance may have come.  He dashed after her as she headed out of their small area, running up to her and gushing out in a whisper, “Why did you take me from the Tarq and raise me like a Realmsman?  Why didn’t you tell me I had Enemy blood?”

  She turned to fix her glowing, calm eyes on him, unperturbed by all his intensity.  “You were brought to us,” she answered quietly.  “And you were far too young when you left us to understand such
empty classifications.”

“Brought by whom?” he asked, wonderingly, hardly daring to believe he was at last discovering who he was.

“By Il,” her voice dropped, so that the words seemed to shiver through his breastbone.

He stared.  Like, physically by Il?  What did she mean?  “That is why you made me Illian?”

In the dim, flickering gloom at the edge of the campfire’s light, he thought he saw one of her brows twitch.  But her voice was quite prosaic when she answered, “Il is not a collar, Ari, that someone can put on you or take off.  He is a God that is part of your soul—the best part.  You can either ignore that and live a life of senseless, searching selfishness, or embrace it and know the utter freedom of redemption and love—”

“Uh, excuse me,” Rodge said ingratiatingly at their elbows.  “I noticed you were still here, and I, uh, well I was wondering if you know about any plants for bug-bites.  I
’ve got this really nasty one, right here…”

He literally faded into the background.  Ari had no idea what he was saying, he just knew that Dorian gave him one last, deep look out of her luminous eyes, and turned away.

He didn’t sleep any better that night.  It had been a draining day—the Swamps seemed to suck energy out of you, but you didn’t wake up feeling particularly rested.  Especially if you had a tortured and murky past you were trying to make some sort of sense of.

It got worse before it got better.  The trail virtually disappeared under a thin layer of water the next day, and mist lay heavily, obscuring vision for more than a couple of yards.  A few lanky, mud-spattered ferns uninterested in photosynthesis were all that w
as left of the underbrush, growing limply in spots here and there around the base of knobby trees.  Tattered vines and great sweeps of a blackish, gauzy plant draped almost everything in sight.  A tangled net of the stuff disgorged a whole shrilling mass of bats early in the day and Cerise screamed, the echoes fading hauntingly off into the grey distance.

How Dorian knew where the path was—if there was one—Ari didn
’t know, but they’d only been on the trail a few hours when she turned to face them, saying soberly, “You’d better clean off the horses.  There isn’t much grass here for them to begin with, and those leeches will just draw more energy out of them.” 

Glancing down at the horses
’ feet, the party saw their pasterns and fetlocks were covered with black globs.  There was more than one exclamation of revulsion as everyone rushed to dismount and get the things off.  Traive’s white mare was grey with mud, and Tekkara’s flashy white stockings were filthy, but they looked even worse with blood dribbling down onto their hooves after the leeches were removed.

They continued on.

They had to repeat the process every couple of hours, whenever they came to a spot of higher ground, and they had just remounted and headed off again when suddenly Kai plunged in almost to his waist ahead of them.  You would have thought from his face that he’d simply walked into the next room.  Calmly, searching for firm ground as he came out, he explored until he’d found a path that had him in water mid-calf.

Dorian nodded,
striding onto the ridge he’d found, and they all moved reluctantly into line to follow.  Most of them were across when the horses began to nicker nervously.  Their heads began to toss and eyes to roll.  Tekkara pranced fretfully in her temperamental way, side-stepping herself right into the deeper part of the pool.

“This is not the place to dally,” Dorian warned, coming back quickly.

Cerise, a look of disgust on her face, was trying expertly to coax the mare up out of the deeper water when suddenly the horse screamed, throwing her head frantically and lunging up the bank.  The other horses were obviously frightened, too, and Ari felt cold fingers of dread creep around his collar.