High Couch of Silistra (22 page)

Somehow, he dragged me, still holding Issa’s reins, by the waist along the ground into the cave. I heard the angry cries of the ebvrasea, whose twice-man-length wingspread would not allow them access. There must have been a great number of them, by the wind sound and the numberless screechings. Ebvrasea never hunt in flocks.

Crumpled where Sereth had dropped me against the cave wall, I felt the blood trickle down my back, down my arm, across my side. There had been no pain when I was struck by beaks and raked by claws, but now my wounds burned unbearably. I heard Sereth moving around. I tried to rise, to see Issa. My legs and arms did not obey me. The last thing I remember, before unconsciousness took me, was silence, as if the birds, as a group, had given us up as a bad job.

I woke to the smell of roasting ebvrasea, from a dream of cowled, beaked beasts who sat in judgment upon me in a crystal palace before an audience of shapeless, glowing forms, just as sentence was about to be passed. The daylight streamed in the open cave mouth, and from where I lay I could see the remains of what must have been a night-long battle. At least a score of the huge carcasses littered the ground directly before the cave. Several were dressed and plucked inside. Sereth had his back to me as he squatted tending the ebvrasea he turned on a spit. As I looked around me, wondering where he had gotten the wood, I realized that this cave was well-used. There were stacked kindling and water-skins against the rear wall.

I tried to sit up, but fell back, dizzy, on my stomach. My back and left shoulder throbbed in their tas bandages, my arm in front of me bore a deep open slash the length of my hand, white and swollen at the edges, angry red in the middle. It had truly happened, then; the solitary predators of the mountains had gone against their nature and attacked us. I shivered and tried to rise again. I had not the strength. I cursed the cowled one, and envied his skill.

I could see Issa and Krist, heads on each other’s rumps, dozing to my left. Issa had a badly gashed shoulder, but she stood squarely on her injured rear foot.

Sereth rose from the fire and came and knelt beside me. I put my hand out to him and smiled my best, and I saw his face relax.

“Lie still,” he said, and he loosened the bandage and removed it from my back. I moaned when he pulled the clotted leather, stuck fast to my flesh, away from the wound and redressed it.

“Do I need a bandage?” I managed.

“Not if you remember not to roll on it. I wanted to keep it clean.” I felt the cooling yellow salve ease the throb.

“Can you sit? You should eat. You lost a good deal of blood.” He eased me up, and I crossed my legs under me and leaned against him until the sight returned to my eyes and the dizziness faded.

He brought me a steaming, black-crisped ebvrasea slice, and watched while I ate it.

“You had me worried, but I should have known better,” he said, getting me another chunk of the dark meat, and sitting beside me then with a leg for himself. It was a huge leg, from that mighty beast, the size of my own arm.

When my stomach would hold no more, I put the meat aside and leaned against his shoulder. My muscles trembled uncontrollably, and my eyelids seemed to have a mind of their own.

“Do you think they will return?” he asked me, his eyes on the sky.

“I doubt it. He has yet to try the same stroke twice.”

The Slayer squinted into the sun. I could see the muscles twitch in his jaw.

“You know, I did not truly believe you until last, night. Now I do not know what to do. I would take you back to Arlet, and forget this thing. You are out of your depth, and I even more so. I cannot fight this spirit, and the whole of nature, which it seems to command. Let it go, Estri. No man is worth this.”

It must have cost him to admit his fear, and his willingness to give up. No man is worth this, he had said. He, then, held the same attitude as Dellin, that I searched for a man to get me with child, more than release from the chaldra of the mother. I wondered what else Dellin had told him. But what he said gave me cause to reflect. If this man found himself unnerved by what had happened, he who lived forever on the edge of the abyss, who was I to insist that we proceed? But I was as loath to face the crevice and the long arduous trek to Arlet as the unknown ahead. And might not the cowled one, seeing us routed, redouble his efforts? I thought so. As long as I proceeded on my father’s business, I had some little protection. If I turned back, perhaps the cowled being would be satisfied, perhaps not.

“If we turn back now, he will surely kill us,” I said slowly.

“Is it a he?”

“I think so. And I think I know the rules of this game. But I cannot be sure. If we wait here a day, and nothing more happens, will you trust me and go on?”

“Even if something does happen, and you still want it, I will take you. I said I would. I will not go back on my word. But I do not like it.”

I could feel him tense, but he did not draw away from me.

“Sereth, let me sleep. I will think on what you have said.”

“Sleep sitting up, then. I do not want you rolling that wound in the dirt.”

So I did, fitfully, waking often, through that whole day, and then deeply through the night.

In the early morning, when I woke, Sereth was not in the cave. Neither was Issa. Krist dozed contentedly, leaning against the cave wall. I felt reasonably healthy; the salve had done its work on my arm. There was only a tiny dark line where the nasty gash had been. My back, when I rose and stretched, did not pain me. I picked up a quarter-full waterskin and drained it, and was starting toward the kindling when I heard Issa enter the cave. She was saddled, walking easily on her feet. Sereth led her, and from the look on his face I could tell that the threx’s condition pleased him.

He dropped her reins near the opening, and she sniffed hungrily at the carcasses piled there. The Slayer picked up one plucked winged corpse and lugged its considerable weight to Krist, where the black stood dozing.

Slapping the threx resoundingly on the neck, he dropped the bloodied bird in front of him. Issa followed of her own accord, sniffing. The two fell to their feed with relish.

Although we had plenty of wood, Sereth hacked cooked meat off the previous evening’s meal and handed some to me.

I ate it greedily, with my fingers, licking the grease from them hungrily. He threw me the knife he had used, and I went and cut another.

“Your back looks fine.” He was leaning over me as I squatted above the bird. “You heal quickly.”

“It is Celendra’s salve that heals quickly.”

“Do you not have it in Astria?”

“I had not needed it in Astria. I suppose we must.”

“It is from the caocu root.”

“Then we certainly have it.” I could hear his unasked question. ”There has been no further trouble? While I slept, were you bothered?”

“Nothing untoward,” he admitted.

“Then we will try it?”

“If it is your wish.”

“But you think me foolish.” I turned, still on my knees, and looked up at him.

“I think you overly determined. But we will try it.” He put his hand on my face, tracing the line of my cheek with a callused finger. The look he gave me spoke for itself.

Sometime later, near midday, we left the cave. Sereth of Arlet would not, at least, face the trail un-sated.

Issa was sound under me, fresh and saucy from her rest. We made good speed that afternoon and slept in the open that evening without problem.

On the morning of the third fourth, the day we had expected to reach the falls, we turned southeast and began descending. Trees became more common, though still small and scrubby, and often we had grassed ground under us instead of sheet rock. By that evening, we could hear the Falls of Santha roaring in the distance. The night was misted and cloudy, and the moon wore gauzy rings around her three-quarter-full girth. I woke near dawn, weeping, with no recollection of the reason for my tears. Sereth held me until I fell back to sleep, but we were both drawn and troubled in the morning. My dreams had proved too accurate to discount, and though neither of us mentioned it, we both held those tears to be an evil omen.

As I got myself dressed in the tatters and strips of what had once been my tas jerkin, now bloodied and stiff and barely enough for breech and band, Krist let out an ear-shattering trumpet and skittered in his hobbles. Sereth shot me a look that said “Get ready,” and went to calm him. I dived for my sword belt and knife and was just buckling them around me when Santh ambled into the clearing, a tawny and obviously pregnant female a pace behind.

“Santh,” I called delightedly, running to embrace him, regardless of Sereth’s drawn sword and the threx’s agitation at being so close to their hereditary enemy.

The Slayer, his hands full with the two plunging, rearing beasts, looked on in wonder as the giant hulion licked my face and arms and extended his head that I might scratch behind his ears.

“Get them out of here, Estri. Now!”

I looked up at Sereth, holding tight to Krist’s headstall. The threx was wild-eyed and foam-flecked, his teeth snapping the air.

“Where were you when I needed you?” I chided the hulion softly.

He purred and followed me down an incline, his huge feet padding silent behind me.

“Who is your lady friend?” I asked him, when we were some distance from Sereth and the threx, but he only licked his tawny mate with his huge red tongue. His golden eyes glowed with pride.

I spent a long time with the hulion, petting and scratching, and getting acquainted with the sand-colored mother-to-be, and would have stayed longer, but Sereth called down an ultimatum: Leave now, or turn back.

I made the quickest farewell I could, and turned to leave. Santh bounded in front of me, blocking my path.

“Not you, too,” I said to him. His tail lashed angrily. “I must do this thing, and I will be back to see your babies,” I bargained.

The hulion growled but did not move out of the way. I sighed and put my hands on his head, one each in front of his ears, where the hair grows thin and swirls, and we considered each other’s feelings for a time. Eventually, not convinced, snuffling, the great beast, with a snap of his mighty wings, let me pass. It disturbed his sense of lightness, I knew, and he was concerned. His nonverbal thought pattern was clearer than words could ever be, and more frightening. Santh had said me a farewell full of finality, and his sense of loss was so strong that I was much shaken when I climbed out of the depression to Sereth and the threx.

“If you could summon hulions, you should have done it when the ebvrasea attacked us,” Sereth observed. His tone was cold and his eyes distrustful, as if I had somehow betrayed him.

“It is only that hulion that I can summon, and only sometimes, when he chooses. I did not summon him. He happened upon us. As it was with you and Wirin, so was it with Santh and M’lennin. The First gave him to me as a couch-gift long ago. But one cannot own such a creature.” My voice sounded sharp and weary. “He thinks we will never see each other again.”

“I was not aware that hulions thought at all,” he said, jerking tight Krist’s girth, so that the threx started in surprise. “I have had more than enough of this whole business, preternatural, supernatural, and downright unnatural. Let us get it over with.”

“Why are you so angry?”

He turned from the threx and faced me, one hand on his hilt, the other on the threx’s headstall.

“I do not know. Perhaps it is because of Tyith, perhaps Issa, perhaps Wirin, perhaps the cowled one, or Dellin, or the trouble you caused me with the Day-Keepers. Perhaps it is because I think, as does your winged friend, that we will never see each other again, or even because if that is so, and you do find your way alone from Santha, I will have trouble convincing the Day-Keepers and Dellin that I have properly discharged my duty, that you are not dead somewhere on the trail. Perhaps it is only that … that I will have trouble collecting my money.” He grinned without humor. “I have a choice of reasons. Any one will do. Now, let us go.” Arid he swung up into Krist’s saddle.

Well-chastised, I went to Issa and mounted, loping her to catch up with him. I had left myself wide open, and I could not blame him for taking the opportunity. But I had never expected him to consider our imminent parting as one of his reasons. We rode abreast at a gentle, ground-eating lope. From the corner of my eye I watched him, slouched effortlessly in his saddle, his body moving with Krist, one with his mount. The roaring of the falls drowned out the hoofbeats.

We topped a rise, and I saw it. The height of fifteen men, rainbow-crowned and mist-robed, the white water pounded, plunging to the rocks below, rising there in perpetual rain before it submitted to the call of the Litess and started its journey to the sea. Out of solid rock it roared, from some underground source never determined.

Sereth signaled me to follow behind, and Krist picked his way down the slope between the boulders, scattered at random as if by some giant hand, that littered our path. It took us as long to negotiate those scant two neras as it would have forty on level ground.

We left the threx, unharnessed, at the foot of the falls themselves and began to climb the rocks up the western side. I was soaked within minutes, as wet as the slippery boulders we scaled, slowly, carefully, inching our way along. Speech was out of the question, so loudly did Santha roar around us. I followed in Sereth’s footsteps until there was nothing in the world but slick wet rock and the Slayer’s agile form in front of me. After what seemed like days, he veered away from fallside and slithered down into a crevice in the rock, mercifully dry.

I lowered myself gingerly after him, hanging by my hands until I felt him take hold of my waist. He set me on the ground beside him, where the roar of the falls was much diminished. I looked about me. We were in a strangely regular passage hewn out of solid rock, and that rock glowed with a green luminescence. Taking my hand, Sereth led me deep into the stone corridor, past many turnings. Once he stopped and fingered a section high on the wall, where two passages intersected with the one we were following, and then took the middle one. The deeper we went within the mountain, the quieter it became. Soon I could hear nothing but the sounds of our footfalls on the rock floor.