The Stricken Field - A Handful of Men Book 3 Page 9

  Crunch, crunch, crunch, said her feet on the grit.

  The light was strange, an ethereal blend of silver and jet. Even the stones had taken on a transparent look, the shadows were indistinct and ghostly. Although the air was calm, it was bitterly cold on her heated face. Her breath came in puffs of rainbow-tinted fog.

  Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

  An ordeal could not possibly be so easy. She began to use a little commonsense caution, slowing down at each blind corner, edging around cautiously in case some horror barred her path. Always the Way was empty in the moonlight.

  Leeb! Think of Leeb! Whoever you are, my darling, I am coming back to you.

  How far would she have to go? The great peaks glimmered against the sky, unchanging. Surely the Defile could not take her right through the range, whatever range it was, because then she would be Outside, and pixies never went Outside, where the demons lurked.

  She had argued with the Keeper! Talking back like an impudent child . . . She paused at another blind corner, where the Way angled around a wall of rock. Hugging that wall, she peered cautiously, first one eye, then both. She saw rocks and dirt and a few patches of snow and the gravel path. Nothing more.

  As she moved away from the wall, her shadow moved upon it. Out of the corner of her eye—

  Two shadows!

  She screamed and was running before she knew it.

  She had not looked back! She had heeded the Keeper’s warning! But out of the corner of her eye she had seen the second shadow right behind her own. It had been a trick of the light, hadn’t it? Just dark streaks in the stone? Sticks . . . the shadow of a tree maybe! But there were no trees.

  She hurtled along the path with her hair flying and the air cold in her throat.

  Cru-unch. Cru-unch. Something had changed in her footsteps. They did not sound the same. They seemed to echo off something right behind her.

  At her heels.

  Keeping pace. Cru-unch, cru-unch, cru-unch . . . It was staying with her, at her back. Twigs. Weathered branches. Just a freak of moonlight—not truly bones! Do not look behind you!

  She ran until a stitch stabbed her side and she could run no more. Staggering with exhaustion, she slowed to a walk. Nothing ran into her, nothing grabbed her. Over the thunder of her heart she heard those steps still there, keeping time, stepping where she had stepped, following right at her back.

  There was nothing there, she told herself firmly, and knew that she lied. It was right behind her, close enough to breathe on her neck, if it breathed. Close enough to touch her, if it could touch.

  Everyone in the College had done this, had walked the Defile. They had not been eaten by monsters! It was a trick to frighten her, an illusion.

  “Who are you?” she shrilled, not daring to look around again.

  There was no reply, no wind. Only her leaping heart, and those wrongly repeating footsteps.

  “Tell me who you are!” she cried, louder. “In the name of the Keeper, tell me!”

  This time there was an answer, but whether it was a sigh on the night air or only a thought in her head, she could not tell.

  I am your guide.

  “I don’t need a guide! Go away!”

  There was no reply, but she sensed that the wraith or whatever it was had not gone away. It still paced right behind her, matching stride for stride. She walked faster. She slowed down. Unseen, it clung like a shadow. She stopped completely, cringing lest something dry and hard should blunder into her. Nothing did. It was standing still as she was, waiting for her to move again.

  It was nothing! She should spin around and she would see only the empty path behind her.

  “You cannot hurt me!” But others can.

  She still could not tell if that was a voice or only a thought in her own head.

  “And I don’t believe that, either!” Raising her chin, Thafle began to march, swinging her arms vigorously. “Mistress Mearn said she had come this way. Mist came this way. I expect Jain ca—” She stopped.

  A shadowy shape stood in the distance, athwart her path. It was so vague that she could hardly make it out, a hint of moonlight and shadow against the rocks, the image of a man. It was illusion, a trick of vision like shapes seen in nighttime embers or in clouds by day. Yet the more she squinted and strained her eyes, the more definite it seemed to be. Sudden anger replaced her fear—tricks and illusions! The Keeper herself had commented on her courage. She would not let such foolery frighten her. Big, soft Mist, yes. Mist might have panicked at hints of shadow, but she was not going to. She was doing this for love, for Leeb.

  She took two, or three steps more and the shape was clearer. She stopped again.

  “Who is that?” she demanded.

  It is a jotunn, one of the white-haired demons.

  Her teeth chattered on their own for a moment, refusing to obey her. “Is it alive?” Maybe she did need a guide. It died in the War of the Five Warlocks. The voice—if it was a voice—was utterly devoid of emotion. No amusement, or anger, or sadness. Just answers.

  A thousand years dead? “Then it cannot hurt me!” Thaile insisted, as much to herself as to the unseen presence at her back. She lurched forward shakily and continued along the path toward the thing . . . the illusion.

  If it was a trick of the light, it should fade as she drew nearer. It did not. It grew more solid, although it was still only a silver patch of brightness against shadows, a man in moonlight among the rocks. Against her will, she began to make out detail, a man so huge that her head would barely reach his chest. He wore a shiny helmet, and breeches, and boots. His flowing beard and mustache were the brightest part of him, except for his eyes. His eyes were watching her come. He knew she was there. He was waiting for her, starting to smile.

  Moonlight glinted on his helmet, his eyes, his sword. She stopped again, reluctant to draw near.

  Now she knew why there was a wraith at her back. There could be no retreat; she must go on.

  “What does he want?” she demanded. He wants to kill you.

  “Then he will be disappointed.” She eased forward on absurdly shaky legs.

  The white-haired demon grew ever more solid. Moonlight shone on the long blade, and the silver beard, and the heavy, hairy limbs. Teeth gleamed.

  Thaile stopped.

  The demon began to walk, and now he was openly grinning at her and hefting his sword in anticipation. She could see his chest move as he breathed.

  She almost backed up a step, and then remembered that what was behind her might be a great deal worse than what was in front.

  “Go away!” she shouted. “In the name of the Keeper!” The demon laughed, as if he had heard that. He was striding toward her and now she heard gravel crunch under his great boots.

  “What’s he going to do?” she wailed. He is going to kill you.

  “No!”

  “Yes. You are Stheam. You die now.”

  She smelled a strange salty tang in the air.

  Stheam was only sixteen, a herder of sheep, and no one had ever shown him how to use a sword, but jotnar had come ashore at Wild Cape, and Grandsire had called in all the young men from the hills and issued swords and shields. Stheam had been told to stand watch here by the moorings in case more longships came.

  He couldn’t fight a giant!

  Dropping the awkward, cumbersome shield, Stheam bolted off into the rocks. There was no path there. He scrambled up as fast as he could, but in a moment he knew he was cornered. Boots rasped on stone behind him.

  He spun around. “Please! I don’t want to die!”

  The monster loomed over him, grinning, flaxen-haired, with a sheen of sweat on his shoulders and wind-reddened face, a joyous gleam of hatred in inhuman blue eyes. He probably did not understand the words. He would not heed them if he did.

  He poked playfully with his sword. Stheam threw up his own blade instinctively and it was smashed aside like a twig, sending spasms of pain up his arm. With a snort of disgust the giant thrust his sword into
Stheam’s belly, pushing it deep and twisting until the point grated on the rock behind.

  The pain was beyond imagining. He fell to the ground, clutching the bloody mess falling out of him. He tried to scream, and that hurt even more.

  Oh, Gods! The pain! He whimpered animal noises, feeling blood rush hot through his fingers.

  The warrior kicked him a few times to roll him over, then leered down in triumph and contempt. He spat, and even through the awful torment in his gut, Stheam felt the spittle splash cold on his cheek. The jotunn walked away, leaving his victim writhing in death agony.

  It was not quick, and nobody came.

  Thaile lay facedown on the path, the gravel hard and cold on her face. She was shaking violently and felt sick. She must not be dead, then. She was a woman again, Thaile.

  “Am I alive?” she whispered to the ground. You are alive.

  “I thought he killed me.” He killed Stheam.

  She raised her head. The Way stretched ahead of her, empty. The warrior had vanished and the eerie shadows were deserted. She felt her abdomen with nervous fingers, but found no wound. The awful pain had gone, too.

  Her convulsive shivers warned her that she would freeze if she stayed. She struggled to her knees on the sharp rocks and then to her feet. She did not look behind her. She began to walk unsteadily through the frosty stillness of the night. Her shadow walked at her feet, sometimes two shadows.

  Was that all? Could that be all? Had she survived the ordeal? Then why did she still see two shadows? Whatever was casting that second shadow was not human. Had some experience like Stheam been enough to drive Mist into madness?

  Something moved in the darkness ahead and her heart leaped wildly. She stopped. Not again!

  Again. She saw another movement. Hint became form as she watched; form became substance. Tricks of the light became watchers. Three shapes waited for her on one side, two more on the other. She tried to take a step backward and there was a wall there. The rocks were more like corners of buildings, high board fences. The moonlight was yellowish, not so bright now, it was lamplight from a window, but they had seen her. She had no weapons this time. She was a woman, trapped in a courtyard.

  Trapped by shadows-but she could see them solidify as they approached, and their voices were becoming audible. They were between her and the gateway. They were chuckling and making jokes in words she did not understand and did not need to. The wall was cold, rough stone at her back. It was not to be death this time, at least not at first.

  “Stop them!” she screamed.

  You are Hoon, sighed that faint inhuman voice in her mind. They are imps, the dark-haired demons.

  “They are men!” They were real men, not mere shadows, living bodies, brown-skinned, dark and bearded and armored. They were not as large as jotnar, but every one was larger than Hoon. Hoon could hear her sister-in-law yelling at the children upstairs. She could hear horses and wagons going by in the street. She opened her mouth to scream for help and legionaries rushed at her. She dived for the gap between them. Hands caught her and reeled her in, in to the heavy male laughter.

  More hands seized her face and forced it up to meet bearded lips. His mouth was foul. Hands held wrists and ankles. More hands were fumbling with her clothes, stripping them off, fumbling with her body . . . Pain and humiliation. Then just pain. And finally death of course, when they were all satisfied.

  Again Thaile lay on the cold, cold gravel of the Way, and the moon had not moved in the sky.

  “How many more?” she whimpered. All you can endure, and then more.

  She was uninjured, except where she had scraped her hands on the ground. Her body was uninjured. Her mind was another matter. It would crumble to nothing if it had to take much more of this. She heaved herself up again and stumbled forward. There was no going back.

  She had not gone a dozen paces before she was Keem, drowning while a boot forced his face down into the mud. She was Drume. She was Shile.

  “What lies Outside?”

  Death and torture and slavery. All of those, and more.

  She died in darkness and in sunlight. She was stabbed, and clubbed, and raped to death by jotnar twice her size. She was a soldier in a squad trapped by a dragon, rampaging in quest of bronze as the men desperately stripped off their armor and hurled it at the searing, incandescent monster. It roared and flamed, and charred skin from flesh and then flesh and bones, too.

  Reen was tending his father’s herd when a squad of refugee djinns came by. He did not realize his danger, or he would not have waited to speak with them. They spread him over a stump and sodomized him repeatedly. He lost a lot of blood and died two days later of a fever.

  Quole had screamed for help until she could scream no more, and none had come. Clutching her child tightly, she backed into a corner of the cellar. The gnomes knew she was trapped now. They came creeping forward through the gloom, piping in shrill excitement. There was barely enough light even to show the gleam of their eyes and their innumerable little sharp teeth and nails. Gnomes could see in the dark, though. They were tiny and had no weapons, but they were starving.

  The red-haired demons were djinns, cruel and ruthless. The gold-haired demons were elves, whose arrows nailed living bodies together.

  “We need to make an example,” the impish centurion said. “Take that one. String him up and flog him to death.” It was all real, every time. Always it was real death, personal death. It was never Thaile, never just pretend. It was Why me? and I am not ready! It was always pain and humiliation and the discovery that a human body was only a sack of fluids that could be made to leak and suffer unbearably. Dying was the ultimate degradation, and sometimes it took days.

  And always it was becoming Thaile again, and realizing that this was not Thaile’s death, not yet, and climbing to her feet again afterward and going onward until the next one came.

  Kaim was chained in the cell. He smelled smoke . . . They were the wraiths of the pixies who had died in the War of the Five Warlocks. They had been waiting in the Defile for a thousand years for someone to die their deaths again and release them—someone with Faculty.

  Looq was a slave, being worked to death as a matter of policy.

  “You will talk,” the djinn told Reil. “You will tell us everything.”

  Reil did not even know what they wanted to know. And it could all happen again! The demons were still there, Outside, waiting. Only the College and the Keeper kept them away.

  Thaile knew that, in the moments when she was Thaile, staggering along the Way in the moonlight, waiting for the next wraith. She knew that her own death, whenever it came, could never be so bad. She knew why she had been sent to walk the Defile, why everyone in the College was sent to walk the Defile.

  She knew who followed her.

  She knew also what she would tell the Keeper in the morning—that Leeb did not matter anymore.

  Lonesome road:

  Like one that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And, having once turned round, walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows a fearful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  — Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  THREE

  Doubt and sorrow

  1

  A cruel north wind was marching flurries of snow over the moors. The sun had already lost whatever slight warmth it had offered at noontide. The foothills of the Isdruthuds lay ahead, white and inhospitable, while the towering ranges beyond promised much worse.

  No defined road crossed the scaly gray landscape. The convoy of wagons was well scattered, as each driver sought the smoothest way. Being neither foot-sloggers nor good horsemen, dwarves traveled on wheels by preference. Their wagons were always stoutly built, and a single vehicle hauled by six dogged mountain ponies could carry a dozen or more armed warriors all day. In this instance most of the carts were high-piled with loot, but one of them include
d a couple of prisoners.

  Wrapped in several layers of fur, Inos huddled next to the imperor, using him as a windbreak. She wished that those famous Dwanishian craftsmen had thought to provide at least an awning to keep off the weather, plus springs of the superb steel that only they could manufacture—but doubtless dwarves would view both as decadent luxuries. Dwarvish transportation rapidly converted nondwarves into bruised jellies, baked or frozen as the case might be.

  Up front, the driver slouched on the bench as if half asleep, yet he bounced at every rock. The next wagon ahead was being driven by Raspnex. Imperors as windbreaks, warlocks driving carts? The world had gone mad. She twisted her head to make sure Gath was still in sight. He preferred to walk as much as he could, just as she would if she had a decent pair of boots. He was visible in the distance, striding along between two diminutive trotting goblins. The guards did not object because the goblins were allies and could run down any jotunn pup with one leg tied behind their backs.

  The caravan’s nominal commander, Sergeant Girthar, was a mundane, but he took orders from the warlock. That seemed to be more politics than sorcery. There was another sign of insanity in the world—that sorcery should now be banned as dangerous. Raspnex had discarded his Long Runner goblin disguise; he had refused to use power to save Kadie. And where was poor Kadie now? What was she doing, seeing, suffering, feeling? Inos sighed.

  Snowflakes swirled in the air.

  “You mustn’t brood, Inos,” Shandie said.

  Brood? She choked back an angry retort, for of course he was right. She had been brooding, about Kadie. She would never forgive herself for what had happened to Kadie—or was going to happen to Kadie, abducted by a horde of savages. Kadie filled her nightmares and was waiting for her when she awoke and haunted her days. She had very little hope of ever seeing her husband again, but the thought of doing so and then having to tell him of her folly and the loss of Kadie was unbearable.

  “No,” she said. “Who am I to argue with the Gods?” Shandie raised an eyebrow. The abrasions on his face had mostly healed now, or been covered over by his beard. He was a ragged, dirty, disreputable excuse for an imperor. Not that she was a notable example of queenhood. “What about the Gods?”