Warautumn (19 page)

“So I expect,” Avall agreed with a twinkle in his eye. “Tell Bingg and Lyk that we’ll try to be back in a hand. That should be long enough.”

Myx nodded and continued down the trail, with Riff close behind.

“Long enough for what?” Rann chuckled as he and Avall dashed around the corner.

“For almost anything—at least once,” Avall laughed back, skinning his shirte over his head. Nor, he found a short while later, with a very wet and naked Rann pressed against him, and cool water throwing spray across his body; was that remotely an exaggeration.

“Cutting cane won’t be as bad as I thought,” Rann murmured eventually.

“No,” Avall agreed into the juncture of his neck and shoulder, “it won’t be—if any of us actually manage to get any cut.”

“We’ll have to,” Rann said solemnly. “We can’t get so mired
in idleness and pleasure we forget caution, responsibility, and danger.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Avall assured him. “But we can’t forget that we’re alive, either.”

And for the next little while, they didn’t.

“And this is
all
?” Zeff spat. “These are no better than the first ones!”

He snatched the carved wooden box his chief engineer had just delivered to his quarters and stared the man straight in the eye as he inverted his other hand and let the contents fall one by one back into the container. Multiple thumps sounded softly: stone against a padded velvet lining, punctuated by an occasional click. He closed the lid with a snap.

“We were lucky to find those, Chief,” the engineer retorted, his voice as hard as his face, which was all angles, as though it were rock that had fractured. “The crawl was mostly blocked, and what we could get through was narrow—and wet. Some refused to work there at all. The rest—”

“Give me their names—those who wouldn’t work.”

The engineer’s jaws tensed as though he had more to say, and none of it complimentary. “There were also bodies. A lot of them. And having been dead this long, the smell—”

“They’ll smell their own guts in the field if they’re not careful,” Zeff snapped. “And don’t think I can’t tell that one of these had been shattered.”

“They’re fragile, Chief,” the engineer protested. His tone had softened but his gaze had not. “The spade hit that one before we knew it.”

“Then use brushes!” Zeff growled, even as he cursed himself for losing his calm. It was the Nine-damned gems, is what it was! That one rash contact with Avall’s mind had planted something in him that day by day was eating away at the wall of control and discipline that had given him his position to start with.

He shook the box in the engineer’s face. “This could be victory—right here. This could be our way out of here and home. Instead—we may have to face Avall and the Lightning Sword.”

“He won’t dare,” Ahfinn offered from the corner. “Not with his people at risk. Besides, weren’t you—” He broke off, his face white, knowing he had said too much.

“You may leave,” Zeff told the engineer, with an absent wave of his hand. “I have business with my adjutant.”

As soon as the door slammed, Zeff turned his wrath full on the younger man. “Never do that again,” he gritted. “Never mention any of my plans beyond those who already know them.”

“I thought he
did
know,” Ahfinn countered, with a rebellious edge in his voice that had been appearing there with increasing frequency of late. “Else why have him in the mines?”

“To find those cursed gems!” Zeff growled. “Gems indeed! Grains of red sand, they look like—except the shattered one, and curse him for that, too.”

He sat down abruptly, face buried in his hands. “I don’t need this, Ahfinn,” he continued, as though he had not, bare instants before, been furious at the man. “One moment I’m euphoric because I’m told they’ve broken into the mines and already found gems. The next—they’ve found gems indeed, but gems the size of peas. And now these: even worse.”

Ahfinn looked up hopefully. “Have you tried them yet?
They might not be—that is, size might not be important. You haven’t had time to try the
first
ones yet, have you?”

Zeff shook his head, lacking the energy to answer. It had been like that all day: emotions stimulated every which way, and far too many decisions to make because, with most of its population serving as visible hostages, the daily workings of the hold were running on inertia.

For only one reason, too—and maybe a futile one.

To—hopefully—hold off Avall until Zeff could match the King of Eron on the field.

“Are you still planning to wreck the hold?” Ahfinn dared from where he still sat, stone-faced, in his accustomed chair.

“If I have to,” came the slow reply. “But that idea makes much less sense than it did. The plan was always that if Avall didn’t come here, we would destroy the hold, and High-Clan would then turn on him, him being untried, and so on. Alternately, we would destroy it anyway, and he would be blamed for pressing the issue. But that was when we stupidly assumed we could find more gems. And before I truly knew how loyal—against all reason—his friends are to the man. Now—too many would know the truth, I fear, because they will have seen it with their own eyes. And from what I hear, our brothers in Tir-Eron are not playing their role well, either. They’re being far too ruthless, for one thing—for all that they’ve had to be. This was all planned to be subtle and it hasn’t worked out that way.”

“We moved too soon—I think,” Ahfinn offered.

The rage returned, like a forge flame newly plied with bellows. “You
think
,” Zeff snapped. “What do you know?”

Ahfinn regarded him coldly. “I know the people in the southern two gorges made far more demands than expected. I know they don’t care who
rules
them as long as someone
feeds
them. If we’d waited, they would have petitioned Avall for food and he’d have had no more than we’ve had, and they’d have saved us a river’s worth of work.”

“You’re a brave little sod!”

“Someone has to be. Forgive me, Chief—but you have not been yourself these days.”

“Have I not?”

“Not since you tried to master Avall’s gem.”

“I did master it.”

“Barely—but it escaped you.”

“Escaped—? You think the gem—?”

“It might have. It fits some things.”

“And these?” Zeff indicated the box in his hand.

“I think you should try to bond with one of them.”

“Largest or smallest?”

“That’s hard. The smallest should in theory be less risky, but the largest might give you a clearer idea of what you have to work with.”

“Then large it is. You may leave now.”

“Are you sure?”

“You may leave now.”

Ahfinn rose and departed, good Priest that he was—and probably good man. Better than he was, these days, Zeff concluded—or at least more alert and … focused. But maybe he could fix that. Winter would arrive eventually, and the army would have to withdraw. Of course he would prefer not to spend a winter here, either, but it would give him more time to prepare. More time to seek better gems in the mines, and more time to—

To let the prisoners starve, for one thing, since new supplies would certainly not reach the hold this season if affairs didn’t soon shift in his favor. And if they didn’t change—Well, one thing was for certain: They would be eating nothing but vegetables—from the hold’s greenhouses. And maybe bread, if the granaries were still fairly full by then. But meat—That would be cats, dogs, and rats, in all likelihood, since they would need to reserve the horses.

Not that it mattered. For now he had a goal. Something real and imminent that did not depend on “ifs” and “somedays.”

He had a gem—a virgin gem—with which he could try to bond.

And the choices were either to sit there and dread that bonding, or slake his curiosity.

It took blood. That much he knew, and little more—save how it had felt that one time when he’d swung the sword and lightning had replied—and scared him half to death, though he’d told no one. Not how little control he’d had then, and not how much he’d wanted to swing it again and again.

Now—

Best to do it. And with that, he snared a paring knife from the cheese tray and settled back into his seat. There should probably be more ritual, he supposed. Then again, he doubted that Avall had taken special precautions when he had first bonded with the master gem, nor that he took any when he worked with the sword. Rrath clearly hadn’t.

Which awakened another sore point.

He would have to attend to Rrath soon; that much was clear. Should have before now, in fact, for Rrath—in his right mind—knew as much about the gems as anyone Zeff had to hand. And if Rrath couldn’t reveal that knowledge consciously—Well, perhaps Zeff could enter his mind by means of a gem and ferret out the facts that way.

But all such speculation was stalling, he realized with a scowl. And that was unconscionable in one who still had a hold to run, a siege to endure, and a battle—eventually—to be waged and hopefully won.

And so he wasted no more time making a tiny slice in his palm.

Now to choose a gem
. Ahfinn had suggested he use the largest one, and Ahfinn was usually right when it came to practical matters, if perhaps too much the pragmatist. A deep breath, and Zeff opened the box one-handed and selected the largest stone—at that, no larger than a pea. Another breath, and he set it against the tiny wound welling in his flesh.

And closed his eyes.

He felt nothing at first, and almost hurled the gem away in disgust. But then he noticed that the candle flames were flickering
more slowly, and that the dust motes that pervaded the air seemed to be twinkling ever so slightly as they described their endless, draft-blown, dance.

So it was working after all
. His hand felt warmer, too, and something was trickling into his hand and up his arm. Something that held the same relationship to the mad rush of power he had felt when he had used the master gem as the brush of a feather had to a sword blow—yet clearly the same in kind.

And there was also a vague sort of greeting, though not to him in particular. This felt more like a simple recognition of one presence to another, like a pair of lodestones pulling at each other, maybe; or metal gaining sympathetic heat from a fire. Or even a mirror showing a phantom face when confronted with a real one.

So
something
was certainly occurring.

And maybe, if he added a second gem, more might follow.

“Something’s dead,” Merryn announced, giving Boot’s reins a gentle tug to shift him to the slowest gait he could manage without stopping entirely. She pointed northwest, where the grassy slope they had been traversing for the last two hands ended in a fringe of trees a shot away. And thank The Eight for that open land, too; it made ambush by geens less likely on the one hand, and made them easier to track on the other. Heavy animals on soft earth typically left clear prints.

Not like a day ago, when they’d had to rely on the birkit’s ability to track across hard earth far too frequently, as sand gave away to more fertile, if still sun-baked, soil. At least there was no more desert; they had left
that
a hand past sunrise and were now enfolded by an eruption of ever-higher hills that seemed to sport equal amounts of open meadow and hardwood forests.

The air was clear today—as clear as Merryn had ever seen. Which was probably why she had seen the vultures riding the thermals across the ridge they were approaching—riding them, but using them to spiral down, not up.

“Something big, I’d say,” Div offered, joining Merryn at the
head of the file. Behind them, they heard Strynn and Krynneth slow as well—on one horse, since the women all took turns doubling with Krynneth. Skinny as he was, he weighed no more than they did. “Places like this,” Div went on, “small animals are going to be snapped right up by hawks and eagles and such. Anything that would attract circling vultures would have to be big enough not to be carried away by something else.” A pause, then: “A deer, maybe; we’ve seen plenty of sign.”