The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (91 page)

Rodge held his breath as time seemed to congeal.  Nothing was happening.  Was it wet?  Had the flame gone out?  Not enough oxygen—

It blew.

The next several minutes were gone forever.  He never could remember them; he just knew that when he came to, it was absolutely silent.  Blearily, he raised his head, focusing first on his hands.  They
’d been showered with dirt and pegged so hard with debris that there were several spots of blood on them.  The ledge in front of him was gone.  Empty air where yards and yards of dirt had once stoutly lain.  There was still a heavy cloud of dust out there, but not thick enough to have just occurred.  He’d been out for a while.

Groggily, he looked around, and then jerkily clambered to his feet.  Where the fighting had been off to his side was quiet, too, and completely changed.  There was no more scrubby brush, no more Tarq, no more Merranics.  The ledge had been sheared off and part of the cliff face had come down.  He moved as quickly as he could, alarmed but too unbalanced to move faster.  Something was off with his equilibrium. 

He stopped anxiously at the eastern edge, scanning the huge slope of pure rubble stretching away before him toward the sea.  It was massive, the occasional bodies sticking out of it looking like toys.  Horrified, he ran his eyes over everyone he could find, wishing he’d kept Banion’s spyglass, wishing he’d known there’d been fault lines extending half-way round the mountain, wishing a dozen things in retrospect that were too late to change now.

There was Loren!  Relief flooded over him like the wave motion of blue light. 
Signaling like an overdramatic idiot, he was yards and yards and yards down the slope, laboriously making his way back up.  How he had survived being thrown all the way down there, Rodge could only chalk up to pure, dumb luck.

He suddenly remembered Banion and began to search again, shading his eyes against the glare of the weak sun that was finally burning through some of the clouds.  He couldn
’t believe it when a sound, a groan, caught his ear, and he turned to see Banion lying not five yards away!

Hurriedly, he clambered over to him.  He was half-buried under rocks, and there was a horrid dent the size of Rodge
’s head in his chest armor, but he was alive!

“Banion!  Banion!” Rodge shook him excitedly, and with a louder groan, the Knight came to, slowly opening his eyes.  He looked terrible, face white under his beard, lips bloodless, but he focused on Rodge. 

“We did it!” Rodge crowed at him, knowing that would invigorate him.  “It worked!”

A faint smile appeared through the beard.  “Did we?” he said, very softly.  “Did it get the Tarq below?”

“I don’t know.  I didn’t check.”  He wasn’t very excited, Rodge thought, for the size of their accomplishment.

“Go check,” Banion breathed.  His brows dipped, face contorting for a minute.  He was being really subdued for a Merranic, but then, Rodge figured, he had a boulder the size of his horse resting on his lower legs.  How in the world were they going to dig him out?  Rodge scrambled away over the rocks, his coordination improving so that by the time he reached flat ground he could manage a trot.  The edge was close, and he approached it warily.  Who knew how fragile this fresh bit was.  Leaning carefully over, he saw with glee that the avalanche of rock had collapsed onto an area bigger than he
’d ever dreamed!  For leagues out into the battlefield, once swarming with Tarq, there was now only rock and rubble.    Nothing moved, only dust drifting hazily through the cold air.  Off to his right, he could see battle paused far down the line to the west, shocking, thrilling acres buried under mounds of rubble in that direction, too.    Any movements there were small and scarce—the men were probably stunned from the blast.

Grinning, he backed carefully away, then jumped up and made his way back to the Knight. 
              “Massive destruction!” he crowed in delight as he drew nearer.  “Fell right on thousands of ‘em, all over the plains!”  There was no answer, and Rodge paused as he jumped the last little bit down to the Knight’s side.

“Banion?” Rodge
’s grin faded.  He wasn’t moving.  Had he passed out again?

“Banion!” he cried, loud and stimulating, reaching out to smack the bearded face to bring him around.  His eyes looked funny.  They weren
’t moving at all under the half-closed lids.  Not only did he not respond to the slap, but his big hand, which had been resting on his caved-in chest armor, slipped quietly off and landed with a soft thud in the dirt.

Rodge stared at that hand for a long minute, and then suddenly he was screaming, “Banion!  Banion!” and pounding on the huge arm next to him and shaking the enormous shoulders and slapping the still face.  But there was nothing.  And when Loren reached him, he was still yelling the Knight
’s name, over and over and over.

Kai danced easily, blades spinning without thought like extensions of his hands.  Life and death met and parted at the ends of them in endless waves of numbers.  It wasn’t the life a wise man would choose, but it was the one that had been given to him and he was very good at it.

A bloodhawk
’s incoming scream rent the air and he ducked swiftly.  They were also good at what they did, but they weren’t real careful about their targets when the battle fury was on them.  The Tarq behind him, of slower reflexes, took the full brunt of the creature’s onslaught.  His shrieks of terror and pain distracted some of Kai’s foes, and he narrowed his eyes as the dance quickened in the face of their laxity. 

They did not fight as Tarq.  It was a hundred small details like the reaction to the bloodhawk that had him noticing it.  The Tarq of old were pretty immune to pain and fear.  It was partly their mindless intensity that had been so chilling, as if nothing could affect them, as if their numbers would go on forever and they would never stop until the whole world was ablaze.  
They would stand and be run through if the arm holding their blade was taken.  Now they would scream, horror in their eyes.  He’d even seen some turn and pick up discarded spears or axes in desperation—swordsmen, who knew no other weapon but firearrows.  There was craftiness in their brilliant eyes now, where before they’d shone dully with only blank certainty.

They fought better than ever, but it was not as unnerving.

The battlefield had changed in the wake of the dragon deaths.  Kai had sensed it as soon as the great beasts had sunk defensively to their bellies.  He’d been deep in the field and had been pushing both Northerners and Drae hard to take advantage of the Tarqs’ distraction—it was as if the Enemy were waiting for the outcome of the dragon advance.  And he felt it keenly when desperation had settled over them as their fire devils stalled out…when those enormous bulks had finally keeled over, to be settled on almost instantly by hundreds of carrion eaters happy to get a good meal in the middle of winter. 

The Sheelmen, who had previously fought so thoughtlessly, so uncaring of strategy…now swung their steel with renewed fervor, striving with the impassioned desperation of those whose plan had failed…almost as if they had thought the dragons had been their best chance to breach the North.

A sudden longing swept over him, as sometimes happened when the constant tide of death seemed to wash up against the soul, the dreary need to defend, to constantly fight the   never-ending, tireless forces of the Destroyer.  It was for the Empire that he longed, the Empire and all her devoted ring of Border Realms…that she might be claimed by Light, that there might be dominion over her by mercy and peace and by love.  What did the Destroyer want with her but to ruin her industry and her innovation and her bright, lively beauty? 

Keep her, he prayed.  Keep her from the rapine of darkness and despair. 

Then, abruptly, like a curtain lifting, he realized what lay behind the anxious determination of this strange new Enemy.  The dead, relentless, mindless assaulting that was their trademark was completely gone.  They knew they were going to lose; they saw now, with eyes cleared of Raemon’s fog, that the resolve of the north was greater than their own. 

That their will could not vanquish the hearts of the defenders.

He barely had time for the surge of triumph and gratitude, because the very real necessities of staying alive intruded.  He had danced into one of those pockets of intensity that can be found on any battlefield.  Abruptly the center of considerable attention, his instincts of self-preservation soared into preeminence.  He parried blades and knocked aside spear thrusts, using steel, elbows, feet and legs to try and loosen the tightening circle about him.  But it grew thicker, the numbers around him greater than he had ever faced before—he was going to have to break. 

It was not a move particularly favored by the Drae, having overtones of fleeing, but neither was it unknown.  Especially with the tactics of the
Enemy.  One of their favorites was just this:  simply overwhelm the opponent with bodies, even if they were dead bodies, until he could be brought down and torched.

But just as Kai made his break, throwing himself through the ranks of men before they got too thick for it, he felt an axe take him in the back.  Screaming agony shot through his body, his legs instantly going numb.  The shock was so great and so far beyond what he could control that both blades dropped from his nerveless hands.  Immediately, the press of Tarq bore him down, their weight holding him, twisting his body so that the hot torture of his wound nearly took his mind from him.

Vaguely, as if from a great distance, he was aware they were fumbling at his feet, but any residual sense of panic of being trapped, of knowing what was in store for him, was washed away by the searing pain that consumed his mind.  Drae were practical about death, anyway.  It came to all men; what separated them was to which Eternal Kingdom they owed their allegiance, and which King would meet them at the portals of forever.

He was aware, remotely, of the strong, chemical smell of enflamer.  Then, as his mind left him, the faint smell of smoke.  But he was in a place where such things could no longer bother him.  There, just in front of him, was little Trinki, Traive
’s niece, her tiny face smiling.  She was saying something—she was full of unintelligible knowledge—and she wanted him to come with her.  Her golden curls dancing in the breeze, big green eyes smiling, she held out her imperious little hand.  Almost he could make out her words.  Very gently, so that he didn’t hurt her, he took the soft hand and rose.  He had no wound, no pain, nothing but eyes for the little gold head beneath him and the little hand in his big one.  Chattering up at him with her sweet, tireless face upturned, she led him slowly away.

CHAPTER
45

The fissure in the ceiling was growing broader.  Ari was sure of it.  The days were bright with sun and at night he was sure he could see stars.  But the keen, soaring, rather desperate anticipation waned when the crack began to close in again, long before it grew wide enough for even Selah to squeeze her way up to the surface.

He was discouraged, having tasted hope, but she was as blithe as ever, imperturbable.  He was quite sure, if asked, she would refer to the mysterious ways of Il, so he didn
’t ask.  Actually, he preferred to think it himself.  Life was completely different now that he knew that consuming peace, that transcendent Light.

So the crack got narrower and narrower, and finally one day when their food stores were down to only a few shriveled apples and onions, it closed altogether.  They slowed for a minute, staring into the impenetrable blackness in front of them, then Ari resolutely took Selah
’s strong, capable little hand and reached his other one out to trace the near wall.  There hadn’t been a branching or intersection since the cave-in, and the walls and floors were still smooth, so he was just going to assume it would stay that way.  He felt Selah’s hand pull a little in his, then heard the sound of her hand dragging on the opposite wall.

They walked like that for a long time.  Hours passed.  It was so dark, he was almost afraid to stop, like the motion kept him from having to think about it.  But just when his stomach started to cramp and complain with emptiness, his hand, numb from the hours of unchanging sensory input, ran into an obstruction. 

“I found something!” he said, at almost the same time she cried, “Here!”  They let go of each other, feeling up their respective walls.  “It’s a piece of timber,” he told her quickly, “running up over my head out of reach and to the floor, maybe 4" x 4".”

“Mine, too.  Hang on, I
’m going to—” She stopped abruptly.

“What?” he said quickly.  “Selah!” he cried when she didn
’t answer immediately.

“I
’m here,” she said slowly.  “Ari…the passageway ends.”  Her voice was very calm, which was helpful because he felt panic begin to crawl up his insides before her words had even died away.  Fervently re-interested in the lumber he’d just discovered, he ran his hands the full height of it again, then along the wall towards the end of the passage.  He didn’t have far to go…it was right there barely a yard or so away.  They would have found it with their noses if the wood hadn’t sidetracked them.

“Ari!” she cried in sudden animation, “there
’s a lever!”

He moved over to her, standing perhaps technically closer than he needed to, but, hey, these were times of extremes.  He followed her arm with his fingers, tracing it to where her hand rested on a short length of metal.  It was attached to a longer piece that was embedded into the lumber for as far over his head as he could feel.  Testing it gingerly, he felt it give downwards, but nothing happened.

“Ready?” he said softly.

“Pull it,” she whispered.

He yanked down.

Blinding light flashed down on them from above, though there was no sound but a heavy whooshing sort of air movement.  A strong draught seemed to catch at them, and Ari threw his body across Selah
’s.

But nothing else happened.  He blinked, looking down to see Selah in full light, luminous eyes staring over his shoulder with a smile growing in them.  He whirled and looked up and began to laugh.  She joined in, a rich, infectious, happy sound that bounced around inside his heart for the rest of his life.

It was a trap door to the surface.  An enormous one, several yards in diameter, propped up over their heads and supported by the bracings they’d found, as well as a construction of several others out of their reach.  In Selah’s wall a wooden ladder had been built, sunk into the rock. 

Grinning at each other, unable to believe their good fortune, they climbed joyfully out of their prison.  The trapdoor opened at the entrance to a cave, the familiar dark closeness stretching back behind them, and in front of them—

Ari blinked, huge grin slowly replaced by slack-faced wonder.

The White Oak.  He stared at it for several seconds, unable to process what he was seeing.  Its bare, white branches thrust in winter beauty toward the chill blue sky, the ground around it littered with greyish white leaves and old, maroon-colored acorns.  All around him the pale, frosted-looking grass and bushes and trees of the Silver Hills glowed pale in a weak winter sun.  It was impossibly bright after the caves—actually it seemed impossible altogether.  It had been so long ago…when they
’d been so frightened of the Mohrgs, when Selah had been just a dirty orphan and Melkin had been irritated at Sable for interrupting their quest with the Kingsmeet…when the Whiteblades were a secret joy of his childhood and no one but the Rach and the odd Fox even thought Zkag was real.

“I always wondered what this cave was used for,” Selah mused a few feet away.  “It
’s as perfectly smooth as that warren we’ve been in…”

He swallowed, coming back to the present and aware of
the sudden heady joy of being alive.  His face split into its ridiculous grin again.  Trees!  Grass!  Fresh air and bird song and the sound of running water somewhere!  After those interminable weeks with only rock and dust and stale, dark air—it was bliss to be free again.  Selah glanced over at him in perfect understanding.

“Well,” he said, almost jubilant.  Anything seemed possible now.  Il had delivered them!  “Where to now?”

She walked past him, heading toward the White Oak and the trail they’d scurried so anxiously down those months ago.  “Let us see if we can find the Armies—for the love of Il, I pray they are ready…”

Ari felt like a buffoon as he jumped belatedly after her.  A small, insignificant one.  It came back to him in a rush, the great danger awaiting the Realms, awaiting his friends.  Traive, Kai, Banion, even Melkin, were all warriors.  They would be fighting, might have already started while he was wandering moon-eyed around under the Sheel.

Selah let him set the pace, as fast as he could hobble, and they traveled a good distance before night settled in.  Then there was a campfire, a nice, normal blaze that wasn’t tinged with the smell of burning flesh or rancid with the grease of the Sheelmen torch.  Selah found some tubers and they roasted them into a gloriously sizzling paragon of fresh vegetable delight.  Ari couldn’t remember when anything had tasted so good, couldn’t remember the stars ever being so bright or the breeze so fresh.  It was chilly, though the tunnels had been none too warm as of late, and he happily built up a blaze to ward it off along with any random Mohrgs.

It was the last time for a very long time that he was so conscious of peace.

The next day, just after noon, they turned a corner in the trail and Ari was assaulted by a wave of nausea.  “UHGG!” he cried, pulling his tattered blouse up over his nose and screwing his face up.  “What is that smell?!”  He could hardly stand up, it was so powerful.  It was making his eyes water.

But Selah didn
’t answer, didn’t make any sound at all, actually, and when he glanced over at her through squinted eyes, he forgot his theatrics and straightened up.  She had a look on her face even odder than the one in the gods’ chamber.  One so far away, so unapproachable, so full of sorrow…from eyes that spoke of untold horrors, through countless years.  It was deeply disquieting, that ancient, jaded look in a face so young and unlined.

“What is it?” Ari asked.

It took her a long moment to answer, and when she did, it was in a voice he barely recognized. 

“A battlefield.”

The smell haunted them for hours before its source came into view.  The Silver Hills faded off around them, the normal dead brown growth of Imperial winter gradually replacing the color-washed grasses and underbrush.  And then the trees thinned away to almost nothing, and the wide plains of Daphene spread out before them.

Ari stopped, feeling his throat close up with more than just the smell, almost overpowering here in its full force.  It had been high summer when he
’d last been here, the Plains one vast, endless rolling vista of green and gold, blue sky arcing above them and everything right with the world.

Now, it was one endless stretch of charred brown and black, strewn everywhere with heaps of unmoving, bloated bodies.  Men, horses, and what was left of them.  Vultures rose in a cloud from the nearest pile, disturbed at their sudden appearance.  Ravens, beady-eyed and black as sin, hopped over every mound in sight, heads dipping in and then coming up to look alertly around.  Ari felt his gorge rise.

“Come on,” Selah said quietly, in that bracing, calm voice.  She began to walk out into the nightmare, and Ari, to get his mind off his heaving stomach and the ghastly gore of what his eyes were registering, said, “Are we too late?  Is it all over?”  Then a truly terrifying thought occurred to him and he said hurriedly, “Have we lost?”

She walked, placid and unhurried, by his side.  “I don
’t know,” she said thoughtfully, like Jordan working on a tangled physics problem.  “I don’t see any women or children…”

He looked around, startled.  He
’d been trying not to look too closely, but after a few minutes of stomach-wrenching surveyal, he thought maybe she was right.  He also noticed that the remains of the men were either small and covered in cloth the color of Sheel—or big.  And bearded.  In chain mail. 

Merranic Knights.

The road curved south as it came fully out of the Hills, headed toward its meeting with the Great Southern Road, and Ari narrowed his eyes, squinting at the horizon.  Things looked…different…down there.  There were new, brown hills in the distance, a sloping heap of landscape that had been nothing but featureless plain before, like the Bitterns had grown out while he’d been busy with the gods.  In a short time, the road swerved down to run alongside the Daroe and Ari, who’d been drinking carelessly from his last waterskin in expectation of coming up on it, felt both his heart sink and his stomach rise.

The wide, broad, sparkling river that he remembered was a fouled, sluggish putrescence, choked with corpses, the bank deep in trampled mud for yards out from the water.  Despair seemed to grab at him, not for the thirst he was suddenly aware of, but for all the hundreds, thousands maybe, of dead.  Were they everywhere?  Was the whole world nothing but bodies of the dead and rotting?  The unknowing was an anxious torment, concern for his friends and the fate of the Realms palming in a soundless scream at his soul. 

“Well,” Selah said in delight, and he turned in surprise.  It seemed a rather inappropriate emotion, given the surroundings.

But she was looking at something
else, something coming down the road at them like out of a dream.  Ari cocked his head to the side, gazing at it as it approached.  It was a horse.  A live one.  No saddle, no bridle, and the most brilliant white he’d ever seen.  Of course, it didn’t have much competition for brightness in the current surroundings, but still, it seemed extraordinary.    It drew closer and that old pleasure at sight of a beautiful animal soothed some of the late horrors in his mind.  Delicate, fine-boned, beautifully proportioned, graceful as Sylvar in mid-dance, it came trotting right up to them.  Coming to a stop in front of Selah, it tossed its head, grumbling in horse whickers.  There wasn’t a single grey hair on it, even the muzzle and eyelids pure white.  The hooves were unpigmented horn.  Ari blinked, bedazzled.

Selah, smiling, reached out and patted its nose and it moved forward, quietly lowering his chiseled head to lean against her.

“Ari,” she said, pleased, “This is Spirit.  It’s good to see you, old friend,” she murmured.

It was a Godsend, that stallion.  Not only was their faster walking pace wreaking havoc with Ari
’s leg, but the leather boots he’d gotten eons ago in Lirralhisa had almost worn off his feet.  Rotted out by the Swamps then fried into jerky by the heat of the Tamarisks, they were getting pretty ineffective.  On the rocky road out of the Silver Hills, he’d been limping just from the insufficiency of the soles, nevermind the agony of his leg. 

Spirit carried them both easily, even smallish Aerach that he was, and they began to cover ground in earnest.  In a way, it was a relief to be up off ground level; you didn
’t feel quite so swamped by all the desolate dead.  But it had its drawbacks.  From horseback, the view expanded dramatically…and it was all full of the same.  An overwhelming, oppressive, unending world of rotting graveyard, motionless but for the birds and occasional four-footed scavengers.  The dead stretched literally as far as the eye could see.

Food began to get scarce.  Everything in sight had been charred—and not so long ago that there
’d been any new growth, especially here in the middle of winter.  Ari gingerly procured a knife from someone who would never need it again and used it to fashion a rough slingshot.  He was able to get a bird with it occasionally, but he wasn’t that good a shot.  And then a few days after they’d left the Silver Hills, he found a bow. 

He pulled Spirit to a halt—the animal was beautifully trained—and stared at the two men that had died locked in struggle nearby.  Though their faces and torsos had been badly burned, you could still make out the mud-soaked plain cloth of the one…and the Snow and Scarlet of the other.  A few feet away lay a bow, but all that was left of the quiver and arrows was suggested by the shape of a pile of ash.