Return of the Guardian-King Read online

  “Sit down, Alaric,” Trinley growled. “Ye were only dreamin’.”

  Dreaming? He glanced around at the rough stone walls bathed with the warmstars’ orange glow, and at the back of the chamber he found two other lights—one purple, one green—pressed into the cracks between the stone and the slate roof, hiding from him, even as they laughed at him. For they knew as well as he did that the discovery was not one he could share.

  Trinley laid a hand on Abramm’s shoulder, giving him a little shake. “Relax, man. We’re safe for now.”

  But were they? Were those other minds he’d touched nothing but dream creatures? His disquiet intensified.

  One of the children began to cry. Then Rolland shoved aside the blanket and stepped inside, a giant in the cramped quarters. He shoved back his icecrusted hood and looked about at them, his expression tense. “I think I just heard wolves,” he announced.

  Abramm’s heart stopped. “Light’s grace!” he muttered. “That’s what I sensed!” He looked around at the people staring up at him. “This is a trap,” he cried loudly. “It’s probably not even a real hut.”

  Trinley shook him again, harder. “Stop it, now! That’s enough of yer nightmares.”

  Abramm turned sharply, knocking the other man’s grip loose with his forearm and forcing him back a step. “It wasn’t a nightmare!”

  Trinley gaped at him, his long gray hair straggling over the cast-back fleece-lined hood.

  “There are rhu’ema here,” Abramm said, scanning the back wall. “Ells.

  They’ve worked some sort of spell.” An errant draft from the back chilled his face.

  In the corner the baby whose crying had been temporarily silenced by Rolland’s entrance started up again, while the adults muttered one to another.

  Trinley stepped close to Abramm again. “What the plague is wrong with ye, man?” he growled. “Are ye tryin’ to set us all apanic?”

  “Of course not!”

  When Abramm didn’t back down, Trinley turned to scowl at the shadows in the drafty rear of the hut. The others followed his lead, twisting round in a rustling of fabric and leather. For a moment the babe cried and the wind shrieked and the rope-slung kelistars rocked gently back and forth in the draft.

  Then someone grunted dismissively. “It looks fine to me.”

  More voices echoed him, and Trinley nodded. “Ye’ve done a lot for us, Alaric, but ye know ye’ve been hallucinatin’ for days.”

  “I’m not hallucinating,” Abramm said. “If we stay here, we’ll die.”

  Trinley’s grizzled brows drew downward. “We can’t go blundering out into that storm again. If ye fear t’ stay with us, leave. No one’ll stop ye. But I’ll cock ye on the head m’self if ye don’t stop this wild talk.”

  Abramm quelled a flare of irritation, wondering what would happen if he did leave. Which of the two of them would the others follow? He snorted inwardly. As if there was any doubt. Besides, he knew he wouldn’t be able to abandon the children, and anyway, Trinley was right as far as he understood things.

  My Lord Eidon . . . they won’t follow if they don’t believe me. But how can I persuade them to believe me if they can’t see the truth? Open their eyes. . . .

  More children started to cry, frightened by his mention of the ells. Their mothers assured them there were no ells, and shot angry glances at Abramm while the men glowered at him. Across the ring of warmstars, though, the widowed Marta Brackleford spoke softly to her sister. “Surely if this hut was a safe place, the Highmounters would have mentioned it.”

  “So d’ you see these ells o’ his, then?” Kitrenna Trinley asked her sourly. She brushed a wet strand of gray hair from her wind-reddened face and glanced at the rafters.

  “No,” Marta admitted, looking up, as well. “But I sense something here. A crawling up the back of my neck, as if unfriendly eyes are watching us.”

  Kitrenna huffed. “Stop it, Marti! Ye’ll just encourage him.”

  “What if he’s right?”

  “What are the ells goin’ t’ do t’ us, anyway?” Kitrenna demanded.

  “Hold us until the wolves get here,” Abramm answered grimly.

  Kitrenna looked up at him. “We don’t even know there are any wolves.”

  “Rolland heard them—and so did I, earlier.”

  “Rhu’ema spawn can’t travel through falling snow,” Oakes Trinley pointed out.

  “I don’t think they’re rhu’ema spawn,” Abramm said. “I think they’re something else.”

  “And how would ye know that?” Kitrenna sniffed disdainfully and turned back to her sister. “He just wants to get t’ the monastery as fast as he can so he can lose the rest of us and strike out fer Trakas on his own. Ye heard him the other night—he doesn’t care a pin what happens t’ us.”

  The accusation stung precisely because of its element of truth.

  “Indeed!?” the ells sniggered. “You can hardly wait to leave them behind.”

  Abramm ignored them and kept his focus on the issue at hand. “How is it you even saw this place?” he asked of Trinley. “Given how far it sits above the trail, hidden by all the snow . . . I’d think we’d all have walked right past it. What drew your eye?”

  “What the plague difference does that make?” the stocky alderman snapped. “I happened t’ notice it. Ye’re not the only one with sharp eyes in this group, ye know.” With a snort of disgust he raised his voice and assured everyone they’d be safe here for the night and better able because of it to tackle the forest in the morning.

  Abramm glanced back at the two rhu’ema, smug and malevolent in the shadows.

  “Ye know, ells bein’ here would explain poor Pearl’s refusal t’ come up here,” Rolland mused from where he stood before the blanketed doorway.

  As Abramm turned to him, the icy draft from the chamber’s rear washed around him again, and with it came inspiration. Wordlessly he wheeled and picked his way across the crowded floor to the back wall. There he bloomed a kelistar into the darkness, making it hard enough he could hold it in one hand while he fingered the wall with the other.

  Furious now, the rhu’ema crammed themselves back into their crevices. He touched the cold stone, the rough bristles of grass, then the faint, hairlifting vibration of the spell. A rush of threats, alternatives, and condemnation flooded his mind from the panicked ells. He ignored it, seeking the Light. . . .

  It flared from the shield on his chest and down his arm into the stone veneer of the illusion, shredding it to streamers of mist. A hole big enough to fit two horses through gaped in a wall riddled with holes, many of which had already been chinked with blowing snow or grass. More snow piled up on the threshold as flakes held back by the illusion fluttered through the opening.

  At Abramm’s back, people gasped and a woman cried, “There’s nothing there.”

  Other exclamations followed the first, the pitch of the voices escalating until in moments Trinley’s feared panic was upon them. People raced about, jabbering, grabbing this or that without heed. One woman snatched up her baby and hurried for the doorway without cloak or blanket.

  Abramm caught her arm as she went by him and shouted, “Enough! Stop this NOW!” The old kingly imperiousness rang in his voice, and the command produced an immediate and startling effect. Everyone froze and turned toward him. Only the children continued to cry.

  “We must go,” he said firmly. “And we must hurry. But we must do so in a sensible manner. Eidon has brought us to this point, and he knew we would take this detour.”

  “Aye, an’ now we must pay fer our foolishness,” old Totten Ashvelt said fiercely, glaring at Trinley.

  “How will we find our way in the dark?” demanded Kitrenna.

  Abramm reminded them they had at least an hour of light left.

  “Will you lead us, then, Alaric?” This was from young Galen Gault, Trinley’s newly wed nephew. “We all know you see better in the dark than anyone.”

  “Aye,” Trinley said sourly. “Please
. Lead us. ’Tis what ye’ve wanted from the start, isn’t it?”

  Abramm opened his mouth to deny it, then realized this, too, was a distraction. What’s more, he knew it didn’t originate with Trinley but with the two glowing forms at the back of the hut. Thus, he gave Trinley a quick nod and set about directing their preparation to leave. Soon, with Pearl repacked and rucksacks redonned, Abramm led them down the trail from the promontory, Rolland on his heels and Trinley bringing up the rear.

  The track widened swiftly, and soon the twisted trunks and snow-laden branches of stunted evergreens sprang up along its downward side, further defining the trail, even in the driving snow and gathering gloom. If the wind howled at their backs, it also swept their path relatively clean of snow.

  The trees grew in size and number as they descended, the wind lessening, as well. The wolves howled again, and Abramm stopped, tossing his hood back to listen as Rolland, immediately behind him, did likewise. A second scream answered the first, followed by a chorus of strange, sharp squeals, undeniably closer than they’d been before.

  “Are those the wolves, Mama?” a small voice asked as the wind lulled.

  “Shh, poppet,” said the child’s mother, Rolland’s wife, standing behind her husband.

  “Are they coming to eat us?”

  “No, son,” Rolland said. “Now, hush!”

  “They’re still down in the valley, where the deep drifts will hamper them,” Abramm assured them. “We’ll reach Caerna’tha long before they get here.”

  But a dry voice in his head grimly reminded him that the men at Highmount had said these wolves were like no others. Huge, agile, able to leap twenty feet at a bound, they were not real wolves at all, in fact. But something worse.

  We’ll make it, he assured himself. Eidon will see to it. The wolves screamed again, as if to contest that view, and he quickened his pace.

  The snow had been knee-deep for some time when Rolland moved to take over breaking the trail. Stepping aside, Abramm stood gasping back his breath as the others slogged past him, heads down against the storm. With no faces to look at, his eye caught on the lights that glowed in the surrounding tree trunks. Green, blue, red, and gold glimmered from the cracks in the trees’ platelike bark—always on the side away from the wind, as if taking refuge from the storm.

  “You’re not going to get away, you know.”

  He frowned, realizing that again he was hearing their voices, and irritated he should be able to.

  “We’ve been waiting for you. They’ve been waiting for you. Especially for you, O great slayer of shadowspawn.”

  As if on cue, another ululation wailed on the storm winds, closer than ever.

  Now Oakes Trinley approached him, trudging at the end of the line, face turned downward like the rest. Only as he came even did he glance up. “Still think we’ll make it before dark, Alaric?”

  Abramm let him pass without comment. Before long Rolland surrendered the trail-breaking job to Galen, who eventually gave it off to Cedric Ashvelt, and on down the line as the light continued to fail and the wolves’ cries drew ever nearer.

  Finally, the party rounded a hill and the clouds parted to reveal a wide valley whitened with snowfall and cut through by a dark stream. Out of the near bank rose a great bulk of stone walls and peak-roofed turrets, levels upon levels stairstepping up the jagged outcropping on which it had been built and surrounded by a high, crenellated outer wall. In the dimming light, it stood dismayingly dark, its great mass lit by a mere handful of tiny lights.

  A deep ravine spilled riverward out of the draw to their right, their trail running along its near side and finally crossing over it by means of a snowcloaked stone bridge.

  Abramm took back the lead and they switchbacked down a forested slope to the lip of the ravine, then headed back out toward the valley. The wolves felt so close now, Abramm feared his little group wouldn’t even break into the open before they were attacked. He urged them repeatedly to hurry, to pick up the children and guard the mare, but they were all too muzzy with fatigue to obey him for longer than a few steps.

  As they neared the forest’s edge, Abramm rejoiced to see two men tramping through the snow beyond the trees. A thicket of spruce momentarily obscured them, and when Abramm emerged into the open, no one was there. He thought he was hallucinating again until he saw the trail that had been stamped through the snow, paralleling the ravine to the bridge and over it, then up to the monastery, looming on the far side. But where were the men who made it?

  The others found the track and burst into excited chatter. Abramm quelled it sharply. “We have no time to dawdle. Our enemies are close.”

  Trinley took over the lead, and Abramm dropped back to protect the rear. Implicitly reassuming command now that the end was in sight, the alderman called for the lanterns to be broken out and kelistars placed in them. Though Abramm chafed with impatience at the delay, he did not object. The kelistars might have a warding effect, and he feared they’d need all the help they could get.

  Finally they were hurrying along again, the wind pressing them up the trail as it pelted their backs with snow. Just as Abramm dared believe they might reach the monastery in time, the wolves burst into loud, triumphant song, sounding as if they were coming up the ravine even now.

  Their howls spurred his people to panic, and they ran all out for the dubious safety of the bridge.

  CHAPTER

  2

  They’d all crowded onto the length of the stone span by the time Abramm got there, Trinley, Cedric, and Galen at the far end, Rolland and the other men at the near, with the women, children, and mare in between. The wolves’ howls and yips still tumbled madly around them, and yet the wolves did not appear.

  Abramm stepped away from the glittering path to peer into the gloomfilled valley. And sure enough, there they were—seven dark forms bounding through the deep snow, not nearly as close as they’d sounded, their voices amplified and carried by a trick of the wind.

  “They’re still a ways away,” he said, turning back to the others. They stared at him mutely. His eyes lifted to the tramped-out path beyond them, the kelistars’ light reflected in a long ribbon of illumination that stretched up the slope all the way to the monastery gates. It was a straight path, not too steep, not all that far. Most of them could probably make it. . . .

  On the bridge, a man cried, “We’re trapped! They’ll have us for sure!”

  “Let’s all fall down and pretend to be dead,” another suggested. “Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

  “Aye, there’s naught else we can do—”

  “SILENCE!” Trinley bellowed from the bridge’s far side. When he had it, he rebuked them angrily. “Listen to yerselves! Are ye cowards or men? We didna come all this way t’ lie down and die. So put away that woolwash and stiffen yer spines. If they do get us, let’s make sure they pay fer it.”

  “Pay fer it?” his own wife protested. “How about making sure we stay alive, instead? If we take refuge under the bridge, we could defend ourselves easily. Tuck the little ones under it—”

  “Have ye even looked under the bridge, woman?” Trinley snarled at her. “The ravine’s far too deep to provide shelter, even if we could get t’ the bottom of it.”

  “I didna mean go t’ the bottom. There’s a ledge just under the bridge. Ye’re practically standing on it.” She leaned over the edge of the bridge. “There’s even a path to it, Oakes. Right there. Don’t ye see it?”

  The wolves’ cries clamored around them. Abramm eyed the path up the hill again, noting how it wasn’t filling with snow, though fat flakes were coming down thickly all around them. He glanced toward the portion of the broken trail they’d already come up. Sure enough, it was already losing its definition as the snow gathered upon it. It was also significantly dimmer in reflecting the kelistars’ light, especially near the forest’s edge where it began.

  And there was still no sign of the men who’d made it, though they had to have been out tramping the p
ath until right before Abramm and the others had shown up. Now his glance caught on something else—the trees beyond the trail, all of which glowed with at least one rhu’eman occupant. They’d been more spread out before. Now it was as if they had gathered to watch. . . .

  He looked again at the gleaming line of light at the trail’s midst, thinking it seemed too bright and too localized to be merely reflected light. What if. . . ?

  His heart pounded with sudden excitement. Of course!

  “We have to keep going!” he shouted, breaking into the Trinleys’ argument.

  Again the entire gathering turned to look at him, eyes haunted with fear.

  “Have ye lost your mind?” Kitrenna demanded of him.

  “I think the path they broke for us here is protected,” he explained. “As long as we stay on it, I think we’ll be safe.” He shoved his way through the clot of women and children on the bridge, and stepped smoothly between Oakes and Kitrenna, pulling the man away from his wife and off the bridge onto the path.

  “Look at it,” he said. “Can you see the way it sparkles all the way up to the monastery? I believe it’s under Eidon’s Light.”

  But from the length of time Trinley looked at the path, the lack of comment he gave, and the troubled expression in his eyes when next he looked at Abramm, Abramm knew he’d seen nothing.

  “Just look at the trough itself, then,” Abramm pressed. “The way it’s not filling up with snow when by all rights it should be. When the part we’ve already come up is, and if anything, that should be the clearer of the two.”

  “The wolves will be here any moment,” Kitrenna protested. “And ye want t’ spread us out before ’em like dainties on a tray?” She turned to her husband. “He’s lost his mind, Oakes. Tell him. We need to take shelter on that ledge. Wait ’til daylight when they’ll have to seek the shadow.”

  “If we do that,” Abramm said calmly, “some of us will die. Maybe all of us. I believe Eidon has provided us this path, but it’s up to us to trust him.”