Hero in the Shadows (18 page)

Yu Yu admitted that he was. She laughed and swung away, swimming out into deeper water.

As swiftly as he could, Yu Yu struggled out of his clothes and hurled himself into the sea, landing on his belly, which was a painful experience. Not, however, as unpleasant as
what followed. He sank like a stone. Thrashing his arms wildly, he fought for the surface. His head broke clear, and he sucked in a great gulp of air. For a moment he bobbed in the water, but then he breathed out and disappeared once more beneath the cold water.

Panic swept through him. Something grabbed his hair, hauling him up. He struggled wildly and broke through the surface once more.

“Take a deep breath and hold it,” the woman ordered him. Yu Yu did so and bobbed alongside her. “It is the air in your lungs that lets you float.”

Reassured by her presence, Yu Yu relaxed a little. What she had said was true. As long as he held air in his chest, he floated.

“Now lean back,” she said. “I will support you.” As she floated alongside him, he felt her arms below his spine and gratefully dropped back into them. Glancing to his right, he found himself staring at a pair of perfect breasts. Air whooshed from his lungs, and he sank. Her arms pushed him back to the surface, and he sputtered for a while. “What kind of an idiot leaps into the sea when he cannot swim?” she asked.

“I am Yu Yu Liang,” he managed to say between great gulps of air.

“Well, let me teach you, Yu Yu Liang,” she said.

The next few minutes were a joy as she taught him a rudimentary stroke that allowed him to pull himself through the water. The sun was warm on his back, the water cool on his body. Finally she bade him to make his way to the shallow water close to the beach. Then he watched as she waded back to where she had laid her clothes. Yu Yu followed her.

She climbed up the rocks to where a small waterfall cascaded down to the beach and washed the salt from her body. Yu Yu gazed on her beauty, almost awestruck. Then he scrambled up and washed himself. They returned to the beach, and the
woman sat down on a rock, allowing her body to dry in the sunshine.

“You came in with Lord Matze Chai,” she said.

“I am … bodyguard,” said Yu Yu. The excitement caused by her nakedness made Yu Yu feel light-headed. His grasp of the roundeye tongue, feeble at best, came close to deserting him.

“I hope you fight better than you swim,” she said.

“I am great fighter. I have fought demons. I fear nothing.”

“My name is Norda,” she said. “I work in the palace. All the servants have heard the stories of the demons in the mist. Is it true? Or were they merely robbers?”

“Demons, yes,” said Yu Yu. “I cut arm from one and it burn. Then … gone. Nothing left. I did this.”

“Truly?” she asked him.

Yu Yu sighed. “No. Kysumu cut arm. But I would have if closer.”

“I like you, Yu Yu Liang,” she said with a smile. Rising to her feet, she dressed and wandered away back up the rocks to the path.

“I like you, too,” he called. She turned and waved and then was gone.

Yu Yu sat for a while, then realized he was growing hungry. Putting on his clothes, he thrust his scabbarded sword into his belt and walked back up the hill.

Perhaps, he thought, life in Kydor will not be so unpleasant.

Kysumu was sitting on the balcony of their room. He was sketching the outline of the cliffs and town across the bay. He glanced up as Yu Yu entered.

“I’ve had a great time,” said Yu Yu. “I swam with a girl. She was beautiful, with golden hair and breasts like melons. Beautiful breasts. I am a great swimmer.”

“I saw,” said Kysumu. “However, if you wish to be a
Rajnee
, you must put aside carnal desires and concentrate on the spiritual, the journey of the soul toward true humility.”

Yu Yu thought about this for a moment, then decided Kysumu was making a joke. He did not understand it but laughed out of politeness.

“I am hungry,” he said.

Elphons, the duke of Kydor, angled his gray charger down the slope toward the grasslands of the Eiden Plain. Behind him came his aides and his personal bodyguard of forty lancers. At fifty-one, Elphons had found the long journey from the capital tiring. A man of great physical strength, the duke had lately been plagued by sharp pains in his joints, most especially in the elbows, ankles, and knees, which were now swollen and tender. He had hoped that the journey from the damp and cold of the capital to the warmer climes around Carlis would relieve the problem, but so far there had been little change. He was also experiencing difficulty at times with his breathing.

He glanced back at the convoy of five heavy wagons, the first carrying his wife and her three ladies-in-waiting. His fifteen-year-old son, Niallad, was riding alongside the convoy, the sun glinting on his new armor. Elphons sighed and heeled his horse onward.

The weather had been clement during their mountain passage, but as they slowly made their way down toward the plain, the temperature rose. At first it had been a pleasant warmth after the cold mountain winds, but now it was becoming intolerable. Sweat trickled down the duke’s broad face. He lifted his gold-embossed iron helm from his head and pushed back his hood of silver mail rings, exposing thick, unruly gray hair.

The slim, balding aide, Lares, rode alongside his duke. “Uncommonly hot, sire,” he said, pulling the stopper from his leather canteen and pouring water onto a linen handkerchief. This he passed to the duke. Elphons wiped it over his face and
gray-streaked beard. Instantly the hot breeze felt cool against his skin.

Unclipping his heavy red cloak, he passed it to Lares.

Far below, Elphons saw the wagons of the merchant convoy enter the deep woods bordering the long Lake of Cepharis. The duke’s mood soured. They had first caught sight of the convoy earlier that morning as a dust cloud on the horizon. Slowly they had gained on it and were now a mere half mile behind them. Elphons had been looking forward to arriving at the lake, divesting himself of his armor, and swimming in the cool water, and did not relish the thought of sharing it with two score of wagoners and their families. As always, the young Lares was in tune with his master’s thoughts.

“I could ride down and get them to move on, sire,” he said.

It was a tempting thought, but Elphons pushed it aside. The wagoners would be no less hot than he, and the lake was common ground. It would be enough for the duke and his retainers to ride close and wait patiently. The wagoners would get the message and move on more swiftly. Even so, it meant that before the day was over the duke and his retainers would be eating dust thrown up by the convoy.

Elphons patted the sleek white neck of his charger. “You are tired, Osir,” he said to the horse, “and I fear I am not as light as once I was.” The charger snorted and tossed its head.

The duke touched heels to the charger’s flanks and began once more to make the long descent. A solitary cloud drifted momentarily between the sun and the land, and Elphons enjoyed a few seconds of relief from the heat.

Then it was gone. With the prospect of the lake looming, Elphons drained the last of the water from his canteen and swung in the saddle to watch his wagons making their slow and careful descent. There was scree on the road, and if it were not handled with skill, a wagon could slide off the road and smash into shards on the rocky slope.

His wife, the silver-haired Aldania, waved at him, and he
grinned back. As she smiled, she looked young again, he thought, and infinitely desirable. Twenty-two years they had been wed, and he still marveled at his luck in winning her. The only daughter of Orien, the last but one king of the Drenai, she had fled her own lands during the war against Vagria. Elphons had been merely a knight at that time and had met her in the Gothir capital of Gulgothir. Under any normal circumstances a romance between a princess and a knight would have been short-lived, but with her brother, King Niallad, slain by an assassin and the Drenai empire in ruins, there were few suitors for her hand. And after the war, when the Drenai declared for a republic, she was even less sought after. The new ruler, the fat giant Karnak, made it clear that Aldania would not be welcome back home. So Elphons had won her heart and her hand, bringing her to Kydor and enjoying twenty-two years of great joy.

Thoughts of his good fortune made him forget burning heat and painful joints, and he rode for some time lost in the memories of their years together. She was everything he could have wished for: a friend, a lover, and a wise adviser in times of crisis. There was only one area in which he could offer any criticism: the raising of their son. It was the only subject on which they argued. She doted on Niallad and would hear no words said against him.

Elphons loved the boy, but he worried for him. He was too fearful. The duke twisted in the saddle and glanced back. Niallad waved at him. Elphons smiled and returned the wave. If I could turn back the years, thought the duke, I would throttle that damned storyteller. Niallad had been around six years of age when he had learned the full story of the death of his uncle, the Drenai king. He had suffered nightmares for months, believing that the evil Waylander was hunting him. For most of the summer the boy had taken to creeping into his parents’ bedroom and climbing into bed between them.

Elphons had finally summoned the Drenai ambassador,
a pleasant man with a large family of his own. He had sat with Niall and explained how the monstrous Waylander had been hunted down and had his head cut off. The head had been brought to Drenan, where, stripped of skin, it had been displayed in the museum, alongside the assassin’s infamous crossbow.

For a while the boy’s nightmares ceased. But then news had come of the theft of the crossbow and the murder of Karnak, the Drenai ruler.

Even now, nine years later, Niall would not travel without bodyguards. He hated crowds and would avoid large gatherings when he could. On state occasions, when Elphons forced him to attend, he would stay close to his father, eyes wide with fear, sweat on his face. No one mentioned it, of course, but all saw it.

Elphons returned his attention to the trail. He was almost at the foot of the slope. Shading his eyes, he stared ahead at the wooded lake a quarter of a mile ahead. There was no one swimming. How curious, he thought. They must have pushed on. Hardy men, those wagoners.

And yet they had women and children with them. One would have thought they would have appreciated a cooling swim. Perhaps they realized the duke was close behind and were nervous about stopping. He hoped that was not the reason.

Lares moved alongside him and waved the troop of twenty soldiers forward. They cantered past the duke and rode ahead to scout the woods.

Sadly, such precautions were necessary. There had been three attempts on the duke’s life in the last two years. Such was the Angostin way. A man held power only for as long as his strength and guile held out. And his luck, thought Elphons. The four major houses of Kydor were involved in an uneasy truce, but disputes broke out often and battles were fought. Only last year Lord Panagyn of House Rishell had waged a
short and bloody war against Lord Ruall of House Loras and Lord Aric of House Kilraith. There had been three battles, all indecisive, but Panagyn had lost an eye in the third, while Ruall’s two brothers both had been killed in the second. Lord Shastar of the smaller House Bakard had now broken his treaty with Panagyn and allied himself with Aric and Ruall, which suggested that a new war was looming. This was why, Elphons believed, Panagyn had sent assassins against him. Angostin law stated that the duke’s forces could not be used in disputes between houses. However, if the duke was dead, his three thousand soldiers probably would join Panagyn. The man, though a brute, was a fighting soldier and highly regarded by the troops. With them he could win a civil war and make himself duke.

Sooner or later I will have to kill Panagyn, he thought. For if he ever slays me, he will see my son murdered on the same day. Elphons found that the fear of such an outcome weighed heavily on him. Niallad was not ready to rule. Perhaps he never would be. The thought made him shiver. He looked up at the sky. “Just give me five more years,” he prayed aloud to the Source. In that time Niallad
might
change.

The duke drew rein as his cavalrymen fanned out and entered the wood. Within moments they were galloping their mounts away from the trees and back to the convoy. The captain, a young man named Korsa, dragged his mount to a halt before the duke.

“There has been a massacre, my lord,” he said, forgetting to salute.

Elphons stared hard into the young man’s ashen face. “Massacre? What are you talking about?”

“They are all dead, sire. Butchered!”

Elphons heeled the charger into a run, his forty lancers swinging their mounts and following him.

The wagons were all drawn up within the trees some fifty feet from the water’s edge, but there were no horses. Blood
was everywhere, splashed against tree trunks, pooling on the earth. Elphons drew his longsword and gazed around the scene. Lares and Korsa dismounted, while the other cavalrymen, weapons in their hands, sat nervously awaiting a command.

A cold, winter wind blew across the lake. Elphons shivered. Then he climbed down from his mount and walked to the water’s edge. Amazingly, there was ice on the water. It was melting fast. He scooped some into his hand. The mud beneath his feet crunched as he moved. Sheathing his sword, he walked back to where Lares and Korsa were examining the traces of an overturned wagon. Blood was smeared on the smashed wood, and a blood trail like the crimson slime of a giant worm could be seen leading away from the wagons and deeper into the trees. Several bushes had been uprooted.

Elphons turned to one of the soldiers. “Ride out and keep the wagons back from here,” he said. The man gratefully swung his horse and rode away.

Melting ice was everywhere. The duke scanned the ground. It was badly churned, but he found a clear imprint just beyond the wagon. It was like the mark of a bear, only longer and thinner: four-toed and taloned.

In the space of a few moments something had descended on forty wagoners and their families, killed them and their horses, and dragged them away into the woods. It could not have happened without a sound. There must have been screams of terror and pain. Yet only a few hundred yards away Elphons had heard nothing. And how could ice form in this cloying heat?