Darkling Fields of Arvon Read online

  "So tell me, Alcesidas, when does Magan Hammermaster plan to make his embassy to the Burren Mountain forgeland?" asked Kal, settling himself on the bench beside the prince.

  "Soon, very soon, I fear, Kalaquinn."

  "You fear? Because of Shadahr? He may break faith?"

  "No . . . No, not because of Shadahr. You know that the terms of his surrender were such that he bound himself under oath to my sire as the rightful king of our Burren Mountain homeland. A hammerson may wreak much toad-spotted evil, commit foul rapine and murder, but never will he yield falsely in war and battle. Even Sör the Usurper did never unbind himself in this way. No. My fear, dear friend, is of a different sort."

  "How so?"

  " 'Tis a strange self-regarding fear—I fear . . . I fear that my father will succeed in reclaiming the throne of his forebears."

  "I . . . I don't understand. You fear the success of his embassy?"

  "He takes my brothers, my sister, and my mother, his queen, with him. She insists, for she knows that much may happen on account of this journey . . . . Oh, no, no, do not be alarmed on that count, Kalaquinn, for I am not. Both Queen Almagora and the princess are trained in the arts of war, as are all noble hammerdaughters."

  An awkward silence descended upon the three, broken only by the trickling of the spring in the watershelf and the shuffle of Lencaymon as he fussed over weapons at the far end of the hall. Alcesidas shook himself free of his distracted reverie and turned to face Kal.

  "I sense that this portends that I shall not see them again. Although King Magan has not said as much, his intent is clear to me. He makes this embassy not merely to make suit for peace, but to establish a lasting peace, and he takes the royal family as warrant of that. The stock of Sör the Usurper may have been malignant, as witnessed by its greenest shoot, Shadahr, but the people of the ancestral kingdom are good. They will receive their true king."

  A movement at the entrance to the Hall of Arms caught their attention.

  "Visitors," remarked Galli dryly. "Artun and a hammerson."

  Wearing a chain-mail hauberk with a belted sword, the hammerson made straight for Alcesidas, his heavily whiskered face serious. He was flanked by Artun, similarly armed with a sword, as well as his longbow.

  "My prince," said the hammerson breathlessly, bowing his head, "you must come quickly. One of our borderlanders—he is dead, attacked by tunnel wolves."

  "Who?"

  "Ranyeth. On his steading."

  "A good man, Ranyeth. He lives near Volodan and Signy, does he not?"

  "Yes, my lord. What with all the livestock that has gone missing, he went out to check his flock and was set upon."

  "Alone?"

  "Alone."

  "Stubborn fellow," Alcesidas said and sighed wearily. "Borderland traits, I'm afraid."

  "That he was, Sire, after we had followed your orders and given folk word not to venture forth alone."

  "With wife and children now bereft, alas."

  "It was his oldest two sons that discovered him." The armed hammerson shook his head. "Scarcely recognizable, worried and torn, his flesh and blood scattered over the grass. Not killed for hunger, but for sheer lust of blood."

  "Where rests he now?"

  "His remains have been brought to his home. Awylla, his wife, is beside herself. Neighbours are there now."

  "Lencaymon! My sword!" Alcesidas called to the swarthy figure at the end of the hall. He pushed himself up from the bench, dropping the sweat-damp cloth on the seat behind him, and restored his empty tankard to the edge of the watershelf. "Kalaquinn, Galligaskin, you will join us? Good. Then we go."

  Two

  "Too beautiful a spot for death," said Kal to himself, admiring the verdant upland meadow that banked gently to a rock-rimmed stream, the midsummer's day edging toward dusk but still mellow with the waning light of avalynn trees and the soft music of songbirds.

  "Like most of our borderland places, Kalaquinn," replied Alcesidas, drawing up beside the Holdsman, his brows knit, worry etched across his face.

  Kal surveyed the countryside around them. Fields and woods broke against the nearby cavern wall, which stretched up into the gathering darkness of the vaulted granite sky. At the edge of a small pasture, a knot of men stood milling about, waiting. The Holdsmen—Frysan, Gwyn, and Garis, joined now by Artun—stood taller by a head than the hammersons of Nua Cearta. Kal caught snatches of conversation carried on the breeze, the melodious texture and tone of the old language mixed with the quick consonance and resolve of the new. The native tongues of Holdsman and hammerson were mingled and used haphazardly, as the language of each had grown less and less unfamiliar to the other over the weeks of the Holdsfolk's refuge in the underground realm. Even Diggory now liberally peppered his talk with words and phrases of Old Arvonian, albeit none too delicately, as he butchered the unfamiliar syllables with his ploughman's tongue.

  "Here, Artun, here's where they ambushed him!" cried Galli, who was crouched down in his tracker's stance, probing the ground with his fingers under an overhang of rock beside the stream. "Leaped on him from above," he said, pointing to the ledge, then downstream, "while others rushed him here on the flats, coming from over there . . . They were hunting him. The poor fellow never stood a chance."

  "How many, Galli?"

  "A pack. Half a dozen, I'd venture. Maybe more. Big brutes. This way." Galli rose to his full height, then strode on ahead, his bow held loosely in his hand. He followed the brook upstream, glancing down now and then, sweeping the ground with squinted eye in the waning light. Sometimes he slowed to study the trail over rock or where the wolf pack had taken to the stream. Often he bounded along at a long-legged lope, as if he himself were a wolf, the hammersons straining to keep up.

  Suddenly he stopped. Turning, his face lit by the eagerness of a bloodhound on the scent, he motioned for the party to join him. By gesture and whispered word, Galli had the men drop to a crouch as he pointed out the direction that the wolf pack had run. The Holdsmen readied their bows, unfastened quivers, and drew arrows. There were a half-dozen muted soughs of metal on hardened leather as Alcesidas and his hammersons each gingerly slid sword into scabbard, exchanging blade for bow. Thus armed, at a word from Galli the hunters struck out from the stream, stalking across the open field, avoiding a flock of sheep that huddled, frightened and bleating plaintively, under an avalynn tree. The men clambered over a fence into a field of ripening hay.

  "What's that?" said Garis in a hoarse undertone, pointing to a bloody lump in the long grass.

  "Sheep's carcass," Galli said and stepped closer to examine the remains. "And freshly killed. They can't be far off." He lifted his head to scan the field.

  "Do you know where they are? Can you discern their sign?" Alcesidas said.

  "This way. They have gone this way." Galli continued to creep forward in a crouch, leading the others through the waving bromegrass, vetch, and clover, then pointed to a stand of looming trees. "There! That copse. They must surely lie hidden there." He slowed his pace, holding his gaze on the dark stretch of woods that crowded the open meadowland not two hundred paces away. The grove lay hard against a steep ridge, its sheer flanks barely visible under the light of avalynn trees that stood rooted tenuously in the higher footholds of soil.

  "Care," Alcesidas cautioned them. "It grows darker, and so the more dangerous. We must be wary in our approach, too, if indeed the beasts lie concealed among those trees."

  They stopped and peered into the veiling gloom of the woods, a shadow that seemed to deepen by the moment. It grew quiet save for the ubiquitous drone of insects. A lone bird fluted a nervous, intermittent song.

  "We should send for more men, my prince?" asked Lencaymon under his breath.

  "Nay, Lencaymon, 'tis too late. We are as travellers that have waded too far into a stream that needs be fordable, else we be swept away."

  It was Gwyn who saw, or rather, sensed them first, pulling at Kal's sleeve in mute alarm even before they burst from
the trees. Then they came—a parting of the underbrush, a formless blur, shadows melting from the inky blackness of the forest depths and resolving into distinct shapes.

  "Let fly! Re'm ena, they're monstrous huge!" Kal cried.

  "To arms! Form a line!" Alcesidas motioned with his freshly unsheathed sword. At the same time, the Holdsmen and a couple of the hammersons loosed the first volley of shafts over the meadow into the wolf pack.

  One, then another, of the black forms slumped, writhing, to the ground.

  "There's more of them than I thought!" shouted Galli as he reached back into his quiver for another arrow.

  Kal felt fear sour in his gut. The wolves had halved the distance. Not only huge, they were fast, shaped to sleekness by the mountain tunnels that were their haunts. Another beast fell, its slavering muzzle twisted to a bloody pulp around an arrow shaft.

  "Well-placed, Lencaymon!" Frysan cried through clenched teeth even as yet another wolf's head split, an ugly mass of bone and blood. "And Gwyn!" Frysan drew his own bow to full bend and loosed.

  Still the pack flew unslowed to the attack, closing fast in the curtaining dusk, though reduced now to but a few animals. Kal could already see the fangs and feral yellow eyes of the snarling wolves hurtling towards the men.

  "Draw blades!" Alcesidas bellowed, springing forward with sword drawn, followed by Lencaymon.

  The lead wolf bore down on Alcesidas, who stood in the middle of the broken line of men. Bracing himself, shieldless, the prince met the mighty leap of the tunnel wolf, which flew at him, lunging for his head, jaws agape. The hammerson fell forward to a crouch and two-handed thrust his sword up into the animal's chest as it passed over him. He drove the blade to the hilt, but before he could dislodge it, he was lifted, still clinging to his weapon, wrenched backwards by the momentum of the wolf's body. As he flew, he let go the embedded sword and thudded to the ground, flat on his back, winded, dazed and defenseless. Behind him, the slain tunnel wolf sailed through the air and crashed into Lencaymon's shoulder, knocking him off stride, so that he stumbled and fell.

  A second tunnel wolf followed in the wake of the first, fangs gleaming in the murky half-light, a blurred black shape.

  "My prince!" There was utter panic in Lencaymon's voice as he staggered to his feet. The creature growled long and low, then coiled itself and sprang at the helpless crown prince of Nua Cearta left lying on his back.

  Above the confusion of the cries of the men and the savage snarls and howls of the blood-crazed wolves, in a moment that seemed to hang suspended in time, the highland war cry resounded. The air parted with a hum as something flew past Lencaymon's right ear. The beast, midleap, let go an eerie, gurgling yelp, fell silent, and collapsed sprawling onto Alcesidas. Its forequarter was cleaved and gaping. Lencaymon lurched forward but was pushed blindly aside by Kal.

  "Alcesidas!" Kal rammed his foot against the twitching black body of the wolf and drew his sword from where it had lodged in the beast, then slid its razor edge across the animal's throat. The wolf moved no more.

  "Alcesidas!—Lencaymon! To me!—Alcesidas!"

  Kal tugged at the sodden carcass to free the hammerson of its weight. Lencaymon laid hold of fistfuls of black pelt and, with greater strength than seemed possible for the size of the man, helped Kal heave the wolf off the prince. Alcesidas lay still, pressed into the ground, his leather jerkin fouled and reeking of blood.

  "Alcesidas?" Kal said, his voice breaking. "Alcesidas!" His heart pounded from the intensity of both the action and high emotion.

  The hammerson's eyes flickered open, and he groaned.

  "Alcesidas!" Kal knelt on one knee beside the small man and, cradling him in his arm, helped him first to sit up and then struggle to his feet.

  "My thanks—" The hammerson coughed, staggered, and recovered himself. Facing Kal, he placed a hand on the Holdsman's shoulder. "My deepest thanks, my friend."

  "You are well?"

  "Yes, Kalaquinn, I am fine. 'Twas a close shave," Alcesidas said, then grinned, "though closer still for the wolf, methinks."

  The two men broke into laughter as the tension of the moment ebbed, leaving Kal weak and shaking.

  "How do the others fare?" Alcesidas asked.

  "Right well enough," said Frysan from nearby. "We've dispatched the brutes with nary a scratch to our own, and it seems there're no more."

  The noises of struggle had subsided. The rest of the hammersons and Holdsmen stepped closer now, clustering around Alcesidas. In the deepening dusk, a pair of avalynn lanterns had been unshuttered, casting a pure light around the group of men.

  The lantern light revealed the sable corpses of three tunnel wolves, mouths open and scarlet with blood, tongues lolling, giving each the aspect of an overeager farm dog. Kal thought of Nightshade, the Clouts' enthusiastic retriever. Before his mind's eye flashed uncontrollably a series of images—the Burrows set on its hillock, white apple blossom, Marya's demure smile, the lush pastures and woodland of Mantling Moss, the greystone bulk of the Great Glence, the sapphire sky reflected crystal blue over Deepmere, a smudge of smoke against the horizon, fire, destruction, Black Scorpion Dragoons, the harrowed faces of a people in flight . . . his people . . .

  As the lanterns swung around in the hammersons' grips, the surrounding darkness was pierced by yellow points of light. Kal started at a pair of lifeless eyes eerily reflecting the avalynn's gleam. A hand clapped his shoulder, and Kal regained himself, drawing a deep breath then exhaling. A skin of mead was pressed into his hand.

  "Well done, my lord Hordanu," said Lencaymon, shaking his grizzled head in disbelief. "In all my years I have never seen a sword used as a throwing knife. I am amazed."

  "That I am, too," said Kal, lifting the flask to his mouth then wiping his chin. "Amazed by the forgecraft of your hammersons. The throw 'twas all Rhodangalas. Truly, with its hawk's hilt, it would seem flight is native to its design. As perfectly balanced a weapon as you are like ever to see."

  "Nay, Kalaquinn," said Alcesidas, grinning. " 'Tis your native skill, to which my bruised pride is witness—the way your arm is wedded to the sword. Sure and unerring. And to that I now owe you my life."

  "As I do owe you mine and that of my people. We are but requited now in small wise to one another. Although uneven the balance still, for I remain deeply in your debt." Kal bowed to the hammerson prince.

  "How now, uneven the balance? Friendship holds no such tally. Besides which, there is much that we have gained from your people—the art of the bow, for one, at which we were an untutored folk before you came." Wiping his brow, Alcesidas took a long pull from the skin of mead that Kal had handed to him.

  "Truly spoken, my prince. There are more than a couple of our hammersons that have profited exceedingly well from the instruction given by the likes of Master Frysan here," said Lencaymon, nodding towards Kal's father, "and Thurfar Fletcher. Why, he is as adept with bow and shaft as Volodan is with hammer and—"

  "Listen. Can you hear them?" Galli interrupted the swordmaster, his ear cocked. They paused in silence. A long howl rose, a hollow note sustained in the depth of night, echoing in the distance. A second voice took up the call. Then a third, closer by. The chill air reverberated with the ululation of wolfsong. The hairs prickled on Kal's neck and arms. The wolf packs were hunting.

  "Yes. Let us be quit of this place. And if we are considering the balance"—Alcesidas returned to his previous line of thought—"we must not leave unmentioned Galligaskin's native gift for tracking, for this has been a boon to us as well. What tales he can conjure from a bent blade of grass or the subtle press of foot or paw!"

  Kal stared into the void of night. " 'Tis the wolves he tracks these days, the likes of which were never seen in Lammermorn," he said, now turning his attention back to the men beside him. "Nor here, in this haven beneath the Radolans, I would wager."

  "True, indeed, and they a more dangerous and sinister foe than Shadahr and his men, who be all dead now, hunted down by their own pets, o
r in our prison chambers, chased there by the same," Lencaymon said.

  "I see much sign of them," Galli said. "More with every passing day, Prince Alcesidas. They grow bolder, coming ever closer to Nua Cearta's outlying steadings."

  "And now this savage death of one of our hammersons. The tunnel wolves are no longer content to harry just our flocks. Already our border folk live in fear, shuttered in their homes, worried for their children, weapons ever ready to hand." Pausing, the hammerson prince took another long draught of mead and passed the skin to Galli. He then made his way to the carcass of the wolf he had killed. His sword had pierced the animal through so that the blade stood point up between its shoulders, as stiff as a grave marker. Already two of the scavenger crows that had been feasting on the sheep carcasses, attracted by the stench of this new slaughter, had settled on the gory remains.

  "Insolent creatures!" Alcesidas drove them away. Reluctantly, the birds abandoned their carrion, croaking, lifting themselves lazily into the night air.

  He placed his heel against the limp body of the wolf and rocked it until it collapsed onto its side. The weapon made a sucking noise as Alcesidas drew it out of the creature, which made Kal, already weak in the aftermath of the fight, as the heat in his veins subsided, feel somewhat nauseous. The prince wiped the blood-smeared blade of his sword clean on the dark fur of the tunnel wolf. He then rubbed dirt off of the hilt where it had been driven into the earth by the weight of the slain animal. Holding the sword up in the lantern light, he examined it and made a thrust into the darkness, as if stabbing some unseen enemy, his brow knit with concern.

  "Our patrols are stretched too thin as it is," he said. "What now? What are we to do? How shall our people work their fields? Attend to their forges? How keep guard in all the waste places where these wolves may lurk?"