First Rider's Call (66 page)

It took a moment for the words to register. Wasn’t Uxton one of the “people” of these lands? It didn’t make sense to her. She would have liked to question him further, but the blacksmith’s eyes were regaining focus, and a determined glare was forming on the woman’s face. She began to reach for her club.

Karigan sighed and sagged her shoulders as if beaten. Uxton relaxed subtly in response, thinking the day won. It was not.

Karigan kicked the woman out of her way and pelted into the corridor—where she went sliding across the floor and crashed into the opposite wall with an
oomf.
She scrambled to maintain her footing on the . . .
icy
floor? The corridor was freezing. What were these cold wet drops alighting on her cheeks?

“What in the world?”

Snow was falling in the corridor and had already left a thin layer on the floor that glistened gold and silver in the lamplight.

Uxton and his cohorts slipped and slid into the corridor after her and paused, just as astounded as she.

“You see?” Uxton said. “This is the empire’s power! Lord Mornhavon is awakening!”

Varadgrim, Blackveil, empire, Mornhavon. Karigan didn’t like the sound of this, not at all.

They blocked her passage into the main castle, so she had no alternative but to run in the opposite direction. Snowflakes filled in her footsteps as she went, and her breaths emerged in frosty puffs. Her assailants charged after her, trying just as hard as she not to lose their footing on the slippery floor.

She careened around a corner into an unlit corridor. She kept going until she ran out of light and stood in complete darkness. Now, she thought, was a perfect opportunity to find out if her ability was functioning yet.

She touched her brooch, but her ability did not respond. She supposed Uxton and the others only would have had to follow her footprints to find her anyway even if it worked.

Her assailants, bearing a lamp, rounded the corner. She ran blindly into the dark ahead, thinking her only weapon at hand was a snowball—not a very useful weapon.

Some strides into the dark, she collided with a suit of armor standing in the middle of the corridor, and went down in a tangle of steel arms and legs. It seemed the cleanup crews hadn’t bothered to pass this way.

Uxton and the others were on her, grabbing her from the embrace of the armor. She fought like a cat, trying to keep their hands off her at all costs. Using a well-placed elbow here, a heel there, and a few fist blows helped. The club grazed her hip and a fist to her temple sent her crashing down into the snow and armor.

She scrabbled through the snow and her hand fell upon a weapon, a mace entangled in the armor. She whipped it up and crushed the woman’s hand holding the club, and jammed the haft behind Uxton’s knee. He fell onto his back.

The blacksmith held the lamp aloft and glared down at her. “You will regret your resistance.” He raised his sword.

A maelstrom of wind and flying shapes suddenly appeared in the corridor. Snow swirled in great gusts and pelted them, the lamplight leaping and sputtering. A dreadful moaning coursed through the very stone of the corridor itself.

Cold, invisible hands helped raise Karigan to her feet, and there was muttering in her ears. The blacksmith’s eyes widened in fear and Uxton darted glances in every direction, his hand clamped around the hilt of his sword. The woman curled into a fetal position.

Translucent shapes lunged around the assailants, their moaning increasing in intensity. Karigan began to discern words:
Death to the empire, death to the Black One, death to the empire . . .
And the ones who touched her, and urged her on, whispered her name:
Galadheon, Galadheon, Galadheon . . .

She let the ghosts bear her away into the dark. The darker it grew, the more their shapes defined. She glimpsed among them all the races of the lands, from the Sacor Clans to the folk of the Under Kingdoms, and some she did not recognize. Briefly a Green Rider appeared before merging into the mass of formless shapes.

They ushered her into a room, and in the unreliable spectral glow, she stood there, chest heaving from her exertions, and brushed snow off her shoulders. It had not snowed in this chamber.

Now what?
she wondered.

She supposed, on reflection, she should have guessed, but the traveling took her off guard yet again. It latched onto her brooch and dragged her through time. She wailed with surprise and wondered if some residue of her cry, trailing across the ages, came to the inhabitants of those times as the wailing of a ghost.

What were ghosts, after all? Were they beings like her, simply passing through time, or truly the spirits of the dead?

When the traveling ceased, she fell to the floor as if a carpet had been yanked out from beneath her feet. She arose to her knees to find a somber scene, her nose itching at the suffocating smoke of incense and candles. Every reflective surface in the chamber had been shrouded with dark cloth.

A figure lay in a bed, blankets drawn to her chest, her hair splayed across a pillow. There was a deathly pallor upon her flesh, and her breathing was barely perceptible. With some shock, Karigan realized it was Lil Ambrioth.

Two men hovered over Lil, one of whom was Rider Breckett.

“Aye, all that can be done has been done,” the other man said, “magically and with herbs.” He was, Karigan decided, a mender.

“I’d best get the king then,” Breckett said.

The mender gazed down at Lil as if in an attitude of prayer while he waited. Karigan rose and moved closer, and discerned the tang of blood and illness beneath the incense.

King Jonaeus entered abruptly, paused to take in the scene, and rushed to Lil’s side. He fell to his knees beside the bed and took her hand into his, and held it against his cheek.

“Tell me,” the king said after many moments had passed, “the truth of it. Do not hold anything back.”

The mender and Rider exchanged glances, and eventually the mender said, “The babe could not be saved. The women are . . . they’re readying him for his rites.”

The king closed his eyes and squeezed Lil’s hand. “Rites,” he murmured. “Birth and death rites for my boy child.” Then he glanced sharply at the mender. “What else?”

“We—we have exhausted all our gifted menders and used all our skills to help save her. She is very weak, my lord, very close to death. The miscarriage, and the arrow wound . . . Well, she has lost considerable blood, and I fear the wound is festering. I have prepared . . .” The mender licked his lips, and had considerable trouble bringing himself to utter his next words. “I have prepared a draught to ease her on her journey to Aeryc’s embrace should you command it. It would relieve her of pain and suffering.”

The king shuddered.

No!
Karigan cried.

Lil murmured and rolled her head. Her eyes fluttered open.

Karigan could not reconcile this sickly, fevered woman with the Lil Ambrioth she had come to know. This creature in the bed was but a pale wraith of her. Karigan did not recognize her, the hero of the Long War, the powerful leader.

Lil’s gaze took in Jonaeus, who shook as he wept at her side.

“Dearest . . .” she murmured. Taxed by speaking, she squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, her gaze fell upon Karigan. “Are you here to take me to the gods?”

The others in the room exchanged glances, murmuring about delirium.

Thunderous, pulsating wingbeats descended into the chamber, a sound no living mortal should ever hear, the wingbeats of Westrion, the Birdman, god of the dead. Only Karigan and Lil heard it.

Lil blinked at her.

No,
Karigan said.
I thought . . .
She had never imagined seeing the First Rider die this way; maybe in the glory of battle, but not in a sickroom, not from birthing . . .

Breckett beckoned a moon priest into the chamber, who began murmuring scripture at the foot of the bed.

“No child,” Lil gasped. “No legacy . . .”

The king tried to hush her so she might spare her energy.

“Delirious,” the mender said.

Karigan knew Lil wasn’t delirious. She was grieving. She touched her brooch and felt weak resonance within it.

You have a legacy, a great one,
Karigan told her.
I am your legacy, and so is every Green Rider through every generation a thousand years into the future.

Karigan told her of how the Riders were integral to the League’s victory during the Long War. She spoke of how Lil Ambrioth was a celebrated hero in her own time, and continued to inspire Riders and non-Riders alike. She spoke of other courageous Riders who followed in her footsteps, helping to fend off tyranny.

As Westrion’s wingbeats threatened to drown her out, she shouted to be heard.

Lil’s face grew peaceful at Karigan’s words. “It is good then . . .”

Her luminous spirit began to separate and lift from her body. Karigan became frantic, overwhelmed with a sense that if Lil slipped away now, all those things she had described would not come to pass.

The shadow of Westrion’s wings engulfed the chamber.

No!
Karigan cried.
Please! The Riders still need you
—
without you, all is lost!

Lil’s spirit hovered in place, as if undecided. The priest droned on the rites of death. The king spoke quietly to Lil, but Karigan could not hear his words over the wingbeats. The mender began to pour his concoction into a goblet.

Karigan couldn’t let them poison her. She launched herself around the bed and tried to knock the goblet out of the mender’s hands, but her hands passed through his wrists.

Remembering the last time she had traveled to the past, remembering how she had been able to handle a sword from that time, she grabbed Breckett’s longknife from its sheath and rapped the mender’s knuckles hard. The poison toppled from his hands, splattering across the floor.

The mender was too stunned to move and could only stare at the puddle on the floor. Breckett patted his empty knife sheath, and the priest’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head.

“The gods—” he sputtered.

Lil’s spirit wavered above her body, and Westrion’s wings pounded the air.

A WINTER’S DREAM

Uxton jabbed Karigan in the ribs with the Toe of his boot. She groaned, for every part of her body hurt and she was freezing. He kicked her again, and she raised her head with a grunt.

Uxton’s eyes were wild in the light of the lamp he carried. Ghosts whirled around and through him, tugging on his hair, moaning in his ears.

The ghosts gained energy in their frenzy, and grew more obvious in shape and form. Uxton was pale and trembling, and even slashed his sword through them, which, of course, accomplished nothing.

The ghosts, as if sensing the effect they were having on him, made their chant more gruesome:
Find the one, the empire’s spawn, strip his flesh and clean the bones, grind to dust and feed to dogs . . .

“Get up,” Uxton commanded, his voice strained. He lowered his sword blade and nicked Karigan’s neck with its tip. Blood, warm against her freezing flesh, burned along the contour of her throat.

A tic spasmed in Uxton’s cheek.

“Where are your friends?” Karigan asked.

“Doesn’t matter.” He grimaced as a ghost reached into his ear up to its elbow, and twisted. His eyes rolled back and he shook his head violently.

Karigan guessed Uxton’s compatriots could not bear the ghosts, that they had abandoned him, the corridors, and their mission.

“Get up,”
Uxton ordered, teeth gritted.

“Or what?” Karigan was so weary, not so far from darkness. The traveling always seemed to drain her life’s energy.

“Or I will batter you and drag you out.”

Karigan shifted and realized with surprise there was an object in her hand.

Uxton raised his sword to land a blow on her. She rolled, evaded his blade, and drove the object into his foot, through boot leather, through stocking, through flesh and bone. He howled and the lamp careened into the air, its light flickering out before it crashed to the floor.

As Karigan sank into nothingness, she heard Uxton whimpering some distance away, and ghostly laughter tickled her ear.