Arm Of Galemar (Book 2) (108 page)

“If they can get anything out of them,” Dietrik
finished.  “They have their own funny language no one can put a name to.  Maybe
they will find a fish big enough to throw into the bucket, but I’m wagering
none are worth the boot leather to bring them that far.”

“So that’s the end of this whole mess.  What a
restless winter.”

“The end?  Mate, we’ve still got two or three thousand
black soldiers tearing around the lower kingdom corner!  They still hold the
pass, and every man on the other side waiting to cross over!  We’re twenty
miles from the battlefield because a whole bleeding army came trotting down
south to express their displeasure.  Them with their monsters to boot.”

“Dietrik, I’m lying here with half my face burned
off!  You could let me have my little pleasant fantasies during my down time.”

“Sorry mate.  Everyone in the whole camp is uptight at
the moment.  And for good reason.”

“Ah, forget it.”  He waited for Dietrik to cool down
before asking the worst post-battle question.  “Who didn’t make it?”

The frown this elicited boded ill.  “Most of the
friendlies in our unit pulled through.  The loners did not fare so well.  The
ones you probably care most about are Floroes.  He fell in the battle. 
Bancroft too.  And Edwin.”

“Ah…Edwin.  Floroes.”

“Churt’s the only archer we have left.  The only
dedicated archer, I should say.”  Dietrik shifted position, bringing one knee
up to his chest and wrapping his arms around it.  He changed the subject by
fiercely announcing, “I hope you finally learned your lesson, anyway!”

“What?”  Marik jerked.  He’d been remembering how
Floroes had tended him without rest during the long trip back to Kingshome from
his first near fatal encounter.  Also about his first contract in Dornory’s
barony, when he had come to know Edwin and count the grouchy archer as a
friend.

“Having your head nearly burned away, you’d better
realize it’s too big a target the way it is!”

“My head?”  Marik’s confusion reared up anew.

“You’ve been acting like you’re the last word on
swordsmanship for the past few months.  You’ve been bloody pushing forward in
battle like you believe you’re Basill Cerella come from beyond the veil.”

“I…My sword skills are—”

“Not half so good as you might think, mate!”  Dietrik
backed down slightly, moderating his tone.  “I’m not denying you are good,
because you are.  But there’s a difference between good and ‘unbeatable’.  You
need to watch your bloody back, because I can’t do it all the time.”

“My…my ‘bloody back’ is fine!  In case you forgot, I
pushed the whole damned frontline straight into their center yesterday!  Or the
day before, or whenever it happened!”

Dietrik nodded.  “As I said, you are good.  But that
wasn’t your sword skill, only your mage strength.  And as strong as you are,
there were a thousand different ways they could have taken you apart if they’d
had a smart commander.”

Marik sniffed.  “They did try.  And I put them down
each time.”

“Oh did they?  How many times did they target you
specifically?”

“Four times.  I can remember them each clearly.”

Dietrik laughed, the sound pure, distilled mockery. 
“Say eleven times, mate, and then you’ll be correct.”

“Eleven?  Don’t be preposterous.  I know—”

“You know what you saw!” Dietrik barked.  “And all you
ever saw was what was right in front of you.  Overconfidence!  While you were
working to push ahead of everyone else hard enough to leave us behind, you never
once looked back to see if you actually had!  Seven times we barely kept your
back from sprouting feathers, or a steel sword, or from being brained by a
bloody monster you never knew was there!”

“The monsters weren’t anywhere near us!”

“That’s exactly the point, mate!  They were!  A whole
force came from the rear and cut their way back and forth wherever they
pleased.  A good thing they didn’t stay organized, or else they would have
ground us into dog food!  You better thank Sloan later, by the way.  He was the
only one who kept two of them from crushing your skull into applesauce.”

“Sloan…they were…they were…”

“They were about ten paces behind you.  Only three
paces to them, and no question who they meant to rip apart.  The white-robes
had them locked onto you like a cutpurse on a fat, dangling pouch.”

Marik searched his memories, wondering if he had ever
felt so stunned in his life.  He must have, but the instance eluded his recall.

“Sloan is not overly thrilled with you, I might add.” 
Dietrik shook his head, though with a rueful air this time.  “You know you are
a great fighter, but you need to work
with
the unit and squad, not
alone.  If we had organized around you, instead of spending all our time trying
to bloody catch you, we would have put a serious dent in their tally roster!”

“I…”  What could he say?  Though it seemed inadequate
beyond description, he said, “Dietrik, hey, I’m…I’m sorry.”

Dietrik studied him, and at last relented.  “I can
tell you mean it.  So, no serious harm done.  But you better be ready for a
twelve round bout with Fraser.  Sloan will only stare at you…you know what I
mean.  Fraser will have heard all-l-l-l about it by now.”

That was worth a new wince.  “I guess…I don’t know
what went wrong.  I got good enough to hold off Colbey during our practices, so
I guess…overconfidence…like you say.”

“Don’t look at it that way.”

“No, you’re right.  I
was
overconfident!  Why
didn’t I see that?  Why?  My father, Chatham, and Colbey too all taught the
same thing!  Strength isn’t everything, and no one is as good as he usually
thinks he is!”  He slapped his forehead, then yelped in pain.

“I meant it the other way around.  To be candid, I
don’t think you became good enough to hold off Colbey.  I think he got sloppy
enough that you could hold him off.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dietrik fingered his chin.  After a long pause, he
said, “I don’t believe he is well, mate.  After the explosion, he got, well…he
got funny.”

“Funny?”

Details followed, Dietrik explaining how he had
noticed Colbey’s peculiar behavior, at first thinking it might be because the
helm he wore as a disguise had been ripped away during the explosion.  He spoke
to the point where Colbey started screaming.

“And you remember how much he changed over the last
months.  I believe something in Tullainia must have unhinged him.”

“Screaming?  I can’t imagine that.”

“It happened,” Dietrik assured him.  “He was screaming
at the ground, then looking at his hands and screaming louder.  He kept
twisting his ears whenever he wasn’t staring at his hands.”

“Where is he?  Is Glynn looking after him as well?”

“Not a bit, mate.  Colbey spent ten minutes screaming
shrill as any woman I’ve ever heard before suddenly jackrabbiting straight into
the forest.  Left his sword and dagger and everything behind.  He never stopped
howling.”

The image of Colbey in such a hysteria…he knew Dietrik
told the truth, and yet he could hardly credit it.  Could form no imagery of it
in his mind.

“We might have seen the last of him,” Dietrik
finished.  “If he
is
completely out of his tree, it might be just as
well.”

“I suppose,” Marik muttered. 
Colbey?  What
happened to you?

“Anyway,” Dietrik mentioned while he rose, “we decided
to move back fifty miles from the Stoneseams and sort out what’s what.  We’ll
mind our own business unless the black soldiers push this far into Galemar.”

Dietrik meant to leave.  Marik forestalled it by
stating, “They’ll send us back to put them down.  No doubt in my mind.”

“Don’t be so hasty to that conclusion.”  Marik studied
Dietrik with curiosity.  “News came in this morning by army messenger.  It went
out to all the division and regiment heads.”

“News?  What next?”

Dietrik’s face soured further.  “Seems with us all so
busy over here to the west, Nolier started feeling frisky again.  They are
sending troops across the Hollister River to seize the land we all bled so much
for to reclaim.”

He ducked through the flap, and Marik felt like
sinking through the cot into the ground.  This on top of the rest was too much.

Marik had become a mercenary in hopes of finding his
father.  So far he had only found trouble and near-death experiences.  There
still existed the chance of finding Rail by working as a mercenary, except with
massive armies squeezing the kingdom from both sides, it forced him to wonder
what future any mercenary in Galemar might face over the next year.

Bird chatter, the random squirrel, a distant forest
cat calling to its mate at a successful kill.  The forest was never silent,
though it seemed far emptier than ever before in his memory.  Cool air filled
the expansive woods.  It felt hollow, a still space through which dangling moss
wafted on slight breezes, and massive leaves rustled overhead.

After generations, the village’s presence could no
longer be felt in the deep Rovasii.

Hardly any damage had been put right, despite the
years since the tragedy.  Thomas still returned every few days.  The
destruction had been his one slip in a lifetime of dedicated service.  His job,
along with the other Guardians, had been to safeguard not only the pool his
ancestors had been at a loss to deal with, but the people most of all.

The people.

His
people.

Two walkways remained, yet no maintenance was granted
to them.  Trusting his weight to the old suspension paths would be like risking
a half-rotted branch.  All the others hung in mossy tatters against the massive
Euvea trunks.  Boards had gone missing, most broken on that terrible day. 
Ropes thicker than his wrist ended in snapped frays, the cords untwisting into
countless fibers.  Frayed ends grown green with time.

Another building had fallen since his last visit.  An
old storage shed only slightly larger than a bedroom.  He remembered it had
housed the multihued lanterns for the Grove Festival nights.  The long lantern
strings had stretched between younger Euveas in the large festival grove. 
Colored paper wrapped around coiled switches housing small candles.  Better
than four-hundred lanterns suspended throughout the clearings, he recalled. 
Long tables beneath had held massive feasts.  Every villager not helping at the
cook pits would sit and talk and laugh.  Children were never content to sit
still for longer than it took to eat the feast specialties that only appeared
at such occasions.  They would always run to every corner and cranny between
gnarling roots in small gangs to search out each lantern, then argue about what
the fanciful creature, picture or words painted in black ink on the glowing
paper might mean.  No prize had ever been offered but there had always been
competition among the groups to see which could ferret out the most and
decipher their meanings.

All gone.  Ten or fifteen lanterns had needed to be
replaced each year when they wore down, new creations with different artwork
taking their places so the search would never be quite the same.  The children
always took great pride in being the one to discover a lantern on its first
appearance.  Thomas could remember that simple pleasure reaching back to his
own childhood, and further beyond to the village’s founding, most likely.  A
simple string of lanterns, yet with so much history wound through the cord on
which they hung.  Gone forever.

He’d found the lanterns’ remains during the aftermath,
when the survivors had canvassed the ruins to uncover any useful salvageable supplies. 
The storage room had since served to house nothing except dust and squirrel nut
caches.  Seeing the broken walls shattered against the Euvea roots breaching
the still pool waters below…it almost pained his heart as much as seeing those
torn and trampled lantern fragments had.

Most buildings, or their ruins, still remained
treeborn.  Only the platforms severely damaged in the attack had finally given
way.  The cats-cradle of walkways, the multileveled village, perhaps they might
be rebuilt someday.  Someday.

That day would be long after his death, if the
survivors ever birthed enough descendants to repopulate the village.  If they
survived so long, and if the limping existence they eked out in the sealed area
did not prove to be a slow death while they slowly succumbed to despair.

A ruined, decaying village, held in the trees above
the shallow waters.  They dared not maintain what little had escaped intact for
fear that if the attackers returned, the signs would alert them to the
survivors’ continued existence.

Shuffling scrapes caught Thomas’ ear immediately. 
From above rather than from the ground.  From a road-wide Euvea branch that led
into the village from the forest.

No outsider had ever climbed to the Euvea pathways
before this.  Thomas knew no scouts would be so careless of the noise made by
their feet.  Who approached his ruined home so oddly?

He rested a hand on his sword hilt, the other on his
dagger.  Whoever it might be would emerge from the shadows soon enough.

The feet came into the soft light first, followed by
the rest of the man.  Thomas felt his eyes goggle while he took Colbey in.  His
clothing was proper for a scout in the winter season, but over it he wore an
odd black leather vest.  It looked as little cared for as the rest of him.

Colbey met his eyes.  Thomas had never seen such a
haunted gaze in his life, the broken despair deeper even than in the villagers
who would be crippled for their remaining lives.  His eyes were half red, the
veins bloodshot, and his face beneath was gummy with unwashed secretions. 
Aside from washing, it had been days since his cheeks met a razor, and his hair
could have served well to house an entire avian family.

Thomas said nothing.  The sight startled him greatly,
though he would have held his silence in any event.  First words belonged to
him who approached.

Instead of words, Colbey shocked Thomas to his soul’s
depths.  He would never have expected it from any man, but this one least of
all.  Not from the proud trainee he knew so well.

Colbey’s face screwed up.  Tears started plowing
tracks through the grime, hardly the first in recent history.  He collapsed to
his knees before Thomas, his head pitching forward.

His surprise barely allowed him movement enough to
catch Colbey’s head when it buried in his stomach.  The younger man’s arms
wrapped around his legs.  He started to bawl.  Great heaving sobs, his entire
body hitching between breaths.

Thomas, thunderstruck, cradled Colbey’s head while the
man cried with raw emotion frightening in its intensity.  The older Guardian’s
words came in a whisper, forced through his clenching throat.

“Oh, you poor bastard.  What in all the lands have you
been through?”

*        *        *        *        *

“I would not have expected that of Adrian.”

“The task, I fear, has always been larger than his
capabilities,” Xenos replied to King Lambert Soieel, lord over all Arronath. 
Or so the man believed.  “Had he entrusted more to the colonels you, in your
wisdom, assigned to help him carry out your orders, then undoubtedly such a
tragedy would never have occurred.”

Lambert nodded absently, his cloudy mind mostly taken
with Secunda’s intimate caresses rather than in focusing on the matters at
hand.  He smiled down to where she stretched across the silken bed large enough
to sleep twelve.  His satin bed robe hung open to reveal his nakedness where he
sat.  Her belly rubbed his lower back, and he bent his head to steal a kiss and
fondle her breast though the sheer fabric, little better than a veil.

Xenos waited.  All to the good that Lambert could see
no further than wherever she stood.  After several licentious exchanges,
Secunda turned her gaze away, in the advisor’s direction.  Lambert followed her
eyes, becoming aware of him again.

“He died, correct?”  The tone that should have emerged
cold and stern instead sounded dreamy and uncaring.  “That is what comes of
wanting to shoulder an entire load on your own shoulders.”

“Indeed, your majesty.  This bodes ill for Arronath. 
There can be no doubt, with the death of your general and one of the colonels
you personally sent to aid him, that the dangers posed by the Council of Kings
must
be the dark threat foreseen by your seers.”

“Yes, no doubt,” he murmured, but his attention was on
Secunda’s hand, which had reached around to caress between his legs.  He leaned
back against her, one hand massaging her calves, the other rubbing along her
veil-covered back.  After a long moment, he remembered Xenos.  “You are certain
the report is accurate?”

“The army mages are well trained in these matters. 
The reporting mage had enough witnesses to warrant breaking the usual schedules
and make a top-clearance-priority message.”

He nodded absently while Secunda’s fingers occupied
his attention.  “What then…ah…what do you propose?”

“It is time you appointed a new head of your army.  A
leader you can trust without question, and who is capable of achieving
success.”

“It was too much for Adrian.  Who do you have in
mind?”

“I am the only one you can trust, as you well know,
your majesty.  With all the schemers and vipers I have uncovered for you among
your court, you can trust none but me.”

That shook Lambert from most of his daze.  “You,
Xenos?  I cannot spare you from my side!  I need you here, to help me root out
the rest of the worms and their plots against me!”

“I have put a choke on them.  And I can see to it that
they are too busy vying with each other to cause any great mischief.  And your
new queen,” he bowed to Secunda, “has proven adept at the court’s machinations,
as you remember.  She will spot any ill advised plays made against you until my
return.”

“I am uncertain.  I do not like the idea.”

“I will deal with the problem in a timely manner. 
Without trusted personnel in place, I must go there to see it done properly.”

Lambert shook his head.  “I never implied you could
not, Xenos.  Still, is this the best idea?”

Secunda quickened her dexterous fingers on his
malehood, distracting him while Xenos briefly touched his mind with the power. 
Care was needed.  The king’s Healers checked him thoroughly on a regular basis,
treating his mind as well as his body.  Manipulating him without detection
required skill.

It had become easier with Secunda distracting him
lately.  His diverted attentions made the work far less complicated.

With a careful ribbon of power touching Lambert’s
mind, Xenos replied, “Yes, your majesty.  It is a most wise decision.  I will
be honored to serve you in such capacity.”

Lambert nodded vaguely, then with firm conviction.  He
stood from the bed, facing Xenos and pulling his robe closed to conceal the
effects of Secunda’s manipulations.  “Advisor Xenos, you have proven capable on
any number of matters.  We wish you to travel across the sea and assume command
over Our forces.  We expect success where Adrian only provided failure.”

“It will be as you command, your majesty.”  Xenos
bowed deeply, one arm folded over his stomach, the other extending sideways.

“Come.  We must announce Our decision to the court!” 
Lambert walked through the bedroom door to find his wardrobe attendants,
Advisor Xenos maintaining a respectful distance behind.

*        *        *        *        *

Rail rubbed his temples.  His heart had finally
settled down, but it took longer each day.  Pain in his head throbbed a dull
drumbeat.  The only saving grace was that it had not flared up too badly this
morning.

He sensed the Red Man outside his door a moment before
it swung open.  “He has announced his intentions.”

“He what?”  Surprise made Rail leave off his
massaging.  “Then every jack-one straight man in Arronath will have his head on
a pike!”

The Red Man’s head ponderously moved in a negative. 
“You misunderstand, friend.  He has announced his next ploy upon the game
board.  As the duly appointed commander of the Arronathian Armed Forces, he
will cross the ocean to continue his war.”

“He’s going back to Merinor?”

“As it would appear.  His sight has long been on the
kingdoms of your birth, though I still know not why.  We must track his
movements with superior caution.  A weakness may arise while he travels to
which he is not susceptible in his underground stronghold.”

“Not…not like last time.”

“We will watch closely until his departure.  Then,
friend, I am afraid I must subject you to the
kkan’korsa
as before.  We
must arrive on the far shore before his foot makes landfall.”

Rail moaned.  He had wanted to never
ever
again
travel in such a fashion, not from where he sat in his room down to the ale
hostel’s dining tables, let alone back to Merinor.  Given the choice, he would
rather swim the whole way home.  “Have you figured out what in the ninth hell
he’s up to yet?”

“You know well what he ultimately desires.  The
details of his plan remain closed to my comprehension.”

“He’s after
something
in Merinor!  Something he
needs!”

“You have the correct belief, I am certain.  What he
searches for is yet unknown.  He might reveal clues while we track in his
shadow.”

The Red Man departed after telling him that
black-jilly Xenos meant to leave on the next ship loaded with geomancers who
would ensure the boat’s safe crossing over the vast sea.  Too much still
remained in question, and the Red Man always hesitated before committing to any
action.  He was not afraid, Rail had decided, just overcautious.