Redoubt (27 page)

By sunset he had a porridge of acorn meal and dandelion root cooking, was slowly munching
his trefoil-shaped leaves and stems of sour sorrel, with his slightly squashed berries
laid out to finish his meal. He listened carefully to the birds he could hear singing
all around him, knowing they would be his first warning of anything coming that he
couldn’t see. But as the little valley he was in darkened with shadow, they remained
tranquil.

He finished his sorrel, ate his lukewarm porridge straight from the pot, taking out
the cooking stones and sucking them clean, then cleaning out every bit that was left
in the gourd with his finger. He wished wistfully for salt. Or maybe some wild leek
or onion. But . . . well, at least it was food, and he made sure to get every morsel.
Only when he was sure he’d gotten the tiniest bit did he take the cooking gourd to
the spring in the growing dusk and rinse it.

He sat drowsing on his blanket, his back to the rock, after finishing his berries.
He was tired, but not yet tired enough to actually sleep. Loneliness, a hundred fears,
a thousand doubts plagued him and had to be put down one by one before he’d be able
to rest. After a while what sorted through his mind to the top was that last thought
he’d had before he slept.

Would it be so very hard to be
ordinary?

It wasn’t as if he would ever be completely ordinary. He was still a Herald, no matter
what happened; he would always have Dallen, and he would always have that special
job to do that only Heralds could do. So maybe he should stop thinking of himself
as somehow crippled without Dallen actively in his head.

He’d managed to get himself free without Dallen’s advice. He’d managed to survive
this long in the wilderness, even though he hadn’t actually had the classes in doing
so. It had been hard, but . . . the only horrible things were the fears, the doubts,
and the loneliness. And most people had that sort of loneliness. It was only Heralds
who didn’t—maybe some of the Healers, who had Mindspeaking or Empathy.

Bear’s “ordinary.” So’s Amily.

They didn’t seem miserable to him. Bear was
really
happy now, and since her operation, so was Amily.

Aye, but they can’t miss what they never had . . . can they?

Well . . . maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he ought to turn things around and try to look
at it from their point of view. After all, they lived at the Collegium . . . and surely
Bear, at least, after enduring all the scorn his father had heaped on his unGifted
son, must at times long desperately for some form of Gift, even the slightest, if
only to prove to his father that he was just as good as the rest of his brothers.

And Amily . . . her father was the King’s Own. She’d grown up among Heralds. There
must have been times when she would have done
anything
to have a Gift and be Chosen. Maybe . . . well, likely . . . there still were.

But neither of them were bitter. Neither of them—at least as far as he knew—spent
most of their time fretting after something they didn’t have.

I want it back!
howled part of him, the part of him that felt crippled and bereft without Dallen
right with him.

But if he couldn’t get it back?

He wrestled with that problem, stared that possibility right in the face, so to speak,
and reminded himself that just because he didn’t
want
something to happen, that didn’t mean it
wouldn’t.
Slowly, reluctantly, he came to the understanding that there was only one possible
answer to that question.

Then . . . I don’t get it back. I live with that. I do my best. And I figure out how
to make everything work without it.

Because every moment he wasted in fruitless railing and longing was going to be a
moment he could be using to make things work, and every moment he wasted that way
would be one less moment when he could be working toward being happy and enjoying
what he had.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to cry over it; he would. He knew he would. He was
on the verge of it now. But he was
not,
by all the gods that were, going to let it ruin his life and the lives of everyone
around him. Just as he would learn how to make things work if he were blinded, or
lost a hand or a foot or anything else, he would learn how to make this work.

He wouldn’t
like
it. There was no reason why he should. And he wouldn’t stop trying to get it back,
either.

But in the meantime, just as he wasn’t going to curl up in a ball and wail helplessly
and die because he was stuck in the howling wilderness without equipment or food or
proper training, he wasn’t going to do the same because he’d lost his Mindspeech.

Fought my way through everything Cole Pieters threw at me. Fought my way through bein’
called a traitor. Gonna fight my way through this. I got Dallen, I got Amily, I got
friends. I got a place I need to get back to. I got—

Suddenly, the birds all stopped their go-to-bed sounds.

All at once.

A cold, frightened silence descended like a curtain over the dark forest; reflexively,
Mags started to smother his fire. Then he thought better of it. Fire was a weapon.
And if there was something out there nasty enough to make
everything
freeze in terror, he was going to need all the weapons he could get his hands on.

Fortunately, he had everything he needed at hand to make a new one. Things that lurked
in the dark and hunted in the dark generally didn’t like light, or fire. It was possible
that fire wielded as a weapon would even keep a bear or a wolf at bay.

He had his club; he also had another stout branch he had foraged to make a second.
The dried grasses and pine needles he’d gathered to make up a bed, he now pulled by
the handfuls out from under his blanket, and bound to the end of that branch, tightly,
to make a torch. Then, with stone-ended club in one hand and unlit torch in the other,
he waited, eyes straining fruitlessly to see what was out there in the darkness, what
was moving among the trees.

He took slow, quiet breaths, listening as hard as he could. The silence was so intense
he could actually hear the trickle of water from the tiny spring. Whatever was out
there, it wasn’t something that made noises pushing through the undergrowth.

A strange, eerie cold crept over him. He shivered as an icy touch seemed to run down
his spine. It wasn’t just imagination either; the temperature here really had plummeted
in just a few heartbeats, because now his breath steamed out into the dark blue dusk
in clouds.

He couldn’t wait any longer. He thrust the end of his torch into his tiny fire, and
as soon as it caught, he held it up like a barrier between himself and whatever it
was that was in the growing dark.

He might not have Mindspeech, but evidently it didn’t take Mindspeech to sense what
was out there, because he could
feel
uncanny eyes on him. And it knew he was here too; it had known even without the torch
or his little fire. It had sensed him and come a-hunting.

It was waiting for something.

It was like that
thing
that had been watching him—more inimical, more savage, but very like it.

Demon?

He’d read enough about the wars with Karse to know that the priests could call up
demons—or, at least, what the Chroniclers called demons. The descriptions varied,
and more than one had said that the things were only partly visible at best, but one
thing they all agreed on. The Karsite demons were vicious and fully capable of ripping
either a man’s body or his mind to ribbons.

He squeezed himself into the smallest possible space he could, with as much rock around
him as he could get.

Was this why the Karsite captain had told his men that he didn’t want anyone venturing
out of camp at night?

Was this why they had obeyed him without a murmur?

Did these things prowl the land at night, on the watch for the unwary, acting as some
form of control to keep people within their homes after dark? That would certainly
cut down on rebellion . . . and bandits.

There was definitely something out there, something he couldn’t
quite
see, something that was just a ripple in the darkness. It hovered in the air, moving
slowly, back and forth, in front of his shelter. Like a cat prowling back and forth
in front of something that it has cornered but isn’t quite sure is prey. The ripple
moved back and forth, and he moved the torch to follow it.

The force of its regard was like a blast of icy air. He wanted to shake his head violently,
but didn’t dare take his eyes off it. It felt as if he
should
be sensing something from it, yet was not. There
should
be something pressing against shields that were no longer there, but he couldn’t
actually feel anything.

Finally, it made a sound, a snarl that sounded exactly like the air being ripped into
two. Evidently, it was frustrated too . . .

It still couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether to attack or leave him alone. The
temptation to shout at it was almost overwhelming, but he resisted. He didn’t want
to do
anything
that might trigger an attack.

The snarls stopped. That horrid silence descended again.

But only for a moment.

The air was split with the most unearthly, ghastly, terror-inducing howl that Mags
had ever heard in his life. It turned his bones to water; it made him want to curl
up and hide his head in his arms, it knotted his gut with fear and paralyzed his thoughts.
The first howl was followed by a second, which was, somehow, even worse. From paralysis,
his mind sprang into mindless, gibbering panic, and only the fact that
it
was between him and any path to escape kept him pinned here. If he’d had even the
slightest chance of getting past it, he’d have bolted into the darkness.

Silence again.

He shivered, but the torch seemed to be keeping it at bay for now, frail barrier that
it was.

Another snarl.

The darker it got, oddly enough, the easier it was to see it—or, at least, see that
odd patch where it was. It wasn’t so much formless as it was a sort of series of suggestions . . .
not-quite shapes that hinted at limbs, a head.

Those hints were as horrid as the howl had been; some were spidery, some were vaguely
suggestive of a snake, some were . . . unholy meldings of a fistful of knives with
a limb.

It was the change in those suggestions of shape that warned him, the momentary drawing
back—it lashed out at him, and he countered by thrusting the torch at it.

It howled again, this time with pain, and went for him.

He was in a fight for his life, and knew it. With torch and club he blocked and parried,
struck back when he could, and tried above all to keep from being driven out of the
scant shelter he had.

The thing screamed, howled, and yowled in pain. He managed to strike it several times,
and the feel of club or torch on flesh was solid enough. But it struck him just as
many times, and its talons were razor-keen and icy as blades taken from a frozen river.
They left behind a burning ache that slowed him a little for every strike, left slash
wounds that, oddly, did not bleed.

And worse than that, a strange lethargy was coming over him, emanating from those
wounds.

He fought it, but his vision was starting to blur, and he felt himself sagging back
against the rock. He could barely hold the torch up . . .

He saw the thing retreating a little to lick at its own wounds; saw a glimpse of a
hell-red eye for a moment as it glared at him. Then it retreated further into whatever
half-life it lived in, and he felt that it was watching him.

Waiting.

And why not? He was growing numb. He had to drop the club to hold the torch in both
hands. In a moment, he would drop that, too, and then the dimming of the world would
go to black, and he would . . .

He felt the torch falling from his fingers and heard it rolling away.

And as he, too, toppled over, he thought he heard a voice. It was shouting something
garbled, and the thing turned to face away from him. There was a feline yowl, and
the thing screamed angrily, but also in pain.

“In the name of the Sun, creature of the nether realms, and of the Light and Life,
I banish thee!”

But by then the cold and the blackness had claimed him.

11

C
old . . . the last time he had been this cold, he had nearly frozen to death in that
blizzard. But that had been mere insensate winter, which had no real interest in whether
he lived or died. It didn’t care what happened to him any more than the stars did.
If he’d died, it wouldn’t rejoice, and since he’d lived, that didn’t matter to winter’s
icy blasts either.

This cold had a terrifying life of its own, and it
wanted
him dead. It wanted far more than that, too, but it knew it would not get that—it
knew that once he was dead, he would escape its reach, so there was a frustration
there as well, behind the urgent need to kill him. It was determined that he would
not escape. The mere possibility that he might escape sent it into a rage.

It wasn’t so much an entity as a force, a hatred for everything that lived, for every
positive,
good
thing in the world. It would have liked to crush them all beneath its icy weight
until there was nothing left in the world but cold, and dark, and despair.

It couldn’t get that, so it would settle for crushing him now, pulling the life out
of him and enjoying his terror and grief until he finally escaped the thing into—well,
wherever it was he would go that took him out of the possibility of pursuit.

Oh, that is not going to happen, ye bastard. Not today. I ain’t gonna die fer you.

He felt his will harden against it, mustered up a burst of strength from somewhere,
and somehow thrust the thing away. It was a strange sensation, since he didn’t seem
to have a body, exactly, and neither did it.

If I did have, I’d give ye such a shot in the good bits!

It moved to envelop him.

He eluded it.

“That’s right, outlander . . .”

Encouraged by that voice somewhere past the darkness, he thrust back again, harder
this time. And with the memory of how he had fought against those assassins behind
it. That seemed to help!

“Do you accept the Blessing of the Sun?”

He didn’t even hesitate at that. Of course he accepted the blessing of the sun! Light,
life, warmth—he needed
all
of those and needed them now! He could feel the ice in his veins spreading out from
the wounds the Entity’s creature had made, a cold poison that was intended to make
him give up and die and let the thing add what was left of his life force to its power.

But he wouldn’t give up. And if something wanted to give him blessings, by the gods
both small and big, he would take them!

As if he had opened a door with that thought, light blazed up around him, heat rushed
into him and joined with him, filling him with strength. He sensed that he was only
going to get one try at this, and as the Entity tried to engulf him again, oblivious
to his new source of strength, he allowed it to surround him, a cloud of evil miasma
enveloping him, trying to freeze and choke off life and breath.

He waited a moment for it to feel as if it had won. That moment of triumph would be
its moment of weakness, when it dropped its guard.

He felt that surge of pleasure.

Then he exploded inside it like the sun bursting up over the horizon.

The howl that erupted from the wounded Thing was worse than anything its creature
that had attacked him in the forest had produced. But it was mercifully brief, as
the Entity evaporated into light.

He could feel he had a body again—a heavy, weary, slightly sick feeling body. But
alive, and not being poisoned anymore.

And Mags opened his eyes, conscious of a strange weight on his chest, to find a pair
of exceedingly blue, slit-pupiled eyes in a furry red face staring at him as the huge
cat they belonged to nearly touched noses with him. It peered deeply into his eyes,
and he was conscious of something that was far more than human searching for something
within him

The cat pulled its head back as soon as his eyes were open. Mags was immediately aware
of three things, and three things only.

The first was that he was lying on his back inside some sort of cave and was blessedly
warm again. Every bit of that deadly chill seemed to have been driven from his poor,
abused body.

The second was that the cat was extremely heavy, in fact, the largest feline he had
ever seen in his life.

The third was that he felt as if he had been sliced to ribbons . . . he felt the wounds
as
present
, but not the pain yet. But in a moment, he knew that the pain would start, and when
it did, he was going to start screaming, and he was not sure he would be able to stop—

As if that thought had awakened the agony to its duty, the awful pain started at that
very moment, and his mouth opened—

“That will be all, I think,”
said a voice that sounded very irritated, and a hand touched his forehead, and he
plunged back down into blackness.

* * *

It hadn’t been a
bad
blackness, that darkness that had followed the touch of finger to forehead. Not like
the drug dreams he’d had, and certainly nothing like the place where the Cold Entity
lurked. In fact, it had been a very, very pleasant blackness, a warm and fuzzy sort
of blackness, a place of comfort and vaguely happy lassitude not unlike all those
times he’d floated in and out of sleep in the Infirmary at the Collegium when he’d
been badly hurt. He had the distinct sense that he was being cared for by someone
who had no intention of hurting or imprisoning him and that he was safe, and the best
thing he could do at the moment was to be calm and sleep and heal.

When he woke again, it was with a clear head—though he tested, and his Mindspeech
still wasn’t back—to find that he was, indeed, in a cave. Above him was the rough
rock ceiling, craggy and uneven, with light reflecting irregularly from it. He was
lying on something extremely soft and comfortable and was covered with some fine,
heavy fur blankets, because he could feel the fur soft against his chin. There was
something else on him, weighing down his legs, in fact, and he tilted his head up
to see that the cat was holding him down. It raised its head, gave him what he would
have
sworn
was a look filled with smugness, then stood up, stretched, yawned, and sauntered
off.

That was when he understood he was lying on a bed made up on the floor of the cave.
The rough rock wall was within touching distance to his right. To his left there was
a cut floor not unlike the Pieters’ mine. He appeared to be in a little chamber cut
into the rock, with a passage leading out to where the light was. There was nothing
else in the chamber but him, though he had to admit that the absence of any sort of
a door was something of a comfort.

He heard footsteps, and a moment later a figure in the passage cast a shadow over
him.

“Trouble not to untruths speak,” said a slightly irritated-sounding voice. “Demon-rider
of the North, I know you are.”

He blinked. “Um, excuse me?” he replied. “I wasn’t riding that thing, it was trying
to eat me. Or something.”

The figure came farther into the chamber, dropped down a three-legged stool, and sat
down on it with the air of someone who was being put to a great deal of trouble. The
cat came back in and made a noise that sounded like admonishment. The man snorted.

“Pardon it seems I must beg,” he replied, with faint sarcasm. “Reaylis is to saying
thing you ride is to being like him, not demon.”

Mags put his hand up to his head, feeling a bit bewildered and very foggy. “Uh . . .
right.” Reaylis . . . was the cat? Well, why not? Valdemar had talking horses, why
shouldn’t Karse have talking cats? “Uh . . . why did you help me? Not that I’m ungrateful!
But—”

“Explanation long, time for eating, then sleeping.” The man shoved a bowl at him and
put a cup down beside the bed. Both were pottery as rough as the cave walls. The bowl
held some sort of fish stew, and since he hadn’t been given a spoon, Mags drank it
straight from the bowl. The mug held nothing more sinister than water. The man snatched
up both as soon as he was finished, and before Mags could say anything at all, stabbed
a forefinger at his head, and the next thing Mags knew—

He was waking up again.

He was hungry, and he needed to use the privy. There was no sign of the cat this time
and no sounds from outside the chamber. He decided to try to move.

He regretted the decision a little, because all those wounds he thought he had felt
really did exist. They weren’t
raw
wounds, though; the pain was more ache than anything else, though when he pulled
back the sleeve of the oversized shirt he was wearing, there were neat, clean bandages
running all the way up his arm, so he couldn’t exactly look at his injuries.

It seemed the shirt was the only garment he was wearing, but it was so big it came
down past his knees. The cat appeared as he was getting unsteadily to his feet. It
looked at him with keen intelligence, meowed once, and walked away with its tail in
the air. It had very odd markings, like nothing he had ever seen before: reddish-brown
face, ears, tail and paws, the rest cream colored. There was a suggestion of stripes
in the red parts.

Clearly, the cat wanted him to follow, so he did. It led him through a larger chamber
that looked as if it served a lot of purposes and toward what looked to be a tunnel
out to daylight.

That was exactly what the opening proved to be, and the cat directed his footsteps
to a nicely constructed latrine, which he gratefully used. The area around the cave—or
mine—mouth was well tended; there were a couple of benches, a small herb garden, a
larger vegetable garden. Someone had left a basket of mixed vegetables on the bench.
Mags eyed it, decided it wasn’t too heavy for his weakened state, and picked it up,
taking it back inside. In the main chamber was an actual fireplace—it looked as if
it had been built making use of a natural fissure leading to the surface, or perhaps
an air-channel that had been cut—and an area that looked as if it was used as a kitchen.
Mags washed the vegetables, then began peeling and cutting them up, thriftily saving
the greens and peels together, in case his unknown host had a use for them that he
couldn’t figure out.

The floor was uneven but smooth. The walls and ceiling were rougher. There was a dresser
with shelves holding a few dishes, pots and pans, and implements on one side of the
fire and a second holding some bags, boxes, and sealed or stoppered pots on the other.
There was a small table with two benches just in front of the fire, a little table
or stand near the entrance to “his” chamber with a big pottery basin on it. That was
the extent of the furnishings.

There was a pot over the banked fire, keeping warm; Mags gave it a good stir. There
was a bowl soaking in a pan of water; he cleaned it. And about then was when he ran
out of energy, and he made his way back to “his” chamber to lie down.

He dozed a little and was awakened by his rescuer, who nudged his shoulder with a
toe, since both hands were full. He sat up, and the man handed him a bowl and a mug
again.

“Reaylis says I am to be thanking you for help,” the man said, and sniffed. “So I
am thanking you.”

“You rescued me, you patched me up, you’re feeding me,” Mags pointed out. “I thank
you,
sir, and taking care of a few dishes and vegetables is scarcely going to repay what
you did for me.”

The man hmphed. “Well. Correct thinking,” he said, sounding mollified. “You move.
Come out. Sit in the sunshine. The Sun will give you His blessing.” He went to a chest
in the shadows past the foot of the bed that Mags had not seen, and rummaged, “Here.
Pants.”

He dropped a pair of worn linen trews on the foot of the bed.

Huh. The sun again. All right, this guy must be pretty religious.
Again, vague memories of classes reminded him that the Karsites worshiped the Sun.
If it’ll make him happy, I don’t mind sitting in the sun. ’Specially after being
so cold.

He wondered if he ought to try saying something in Karsite, but his Karsite wasn’t
any better than the priest’s Valdemaran. He suspected that the only reason he had
understood what the Karsite captain had been saying to his captors was the pure accident
of them using words he actually knew.

The man helped him to his feet and then led the way out. Mags paused just long enough
to pull on the trews, then followed. As soon as they got into the main room, which
was now lit by a variety of lamps and candles, Mags got a good look at him.

He wore long robes, which looked too big on him, of a faded red. They’d been belted
up to a bit below his knees, making them more practical for wandering around in a
forest. The sleeves had been tied up too, by the simple expedient of running a cord
through both sleeves across his back and gathering them up that way.

He wasn’t old though; he looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. Much too
young to sound as grumpy as he did.

His blond hair was long and braided into a single tail down his back. He had a square,
severe-looking face, a mouth that looked as if it never smiled, and blue, deep-set
eyes. His hands were big, and it was obvious he was used to doing a lot of hard work,
for the fingers were callused and his forearms well muscled.

Mags moved slowly and carefully; it felt as if he might tear something open if he
moved in a hurry. “My name is Mags,” he said, as they went down the tunnel to the
outside. He noticed something he had not on his way out the first time: a door right
where the tunnel joined the main chamber that swung outward. It would be very difficult
in the confined space of the tunnel to get enough leverage to wrench it open, and
almost impossible to batter it down. At some point someone had set metal brackets
into both the door and the stone wall of the chamber to allow a stout bar to be dropped
into them, holding the door in place.