Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) (47 page)

She had died to give him that opportunity. To throw it away now, even if
he didn’t have the first notion of how he would do as she asked, was surely
betrayal of the highest order. And did he not have enough on his conscience
already?

“Very well,” he said softly, reining his reluctant horse around. “The SaHal
it is.”

They kept the horses to a brisk pace, following the road through a ravineriddled landscape dotted with gray-green sage and squat, black-trunked
thronetrees. Except for the road itself, there was no sign of human habitation-only lizards, scrawny rabbits, and an occasional raven, flapping and
soaring through the fringes of the misty ceiling.

In the absence of any immediate threat, Abramm became increasingly
aware of his abused flesh. His shoulder was stiffening to the point where he
could hardly move his arm, and a deep soreness webbed across his chest to
merge with the throb over his heart, where an oozing scab had formed. With
no adrenaline to override the pain, he felt his cracked ribs with every breath.
And after more than two days with no real sleep, it soon took all his willpower just to stay on the horse.

Presently Trap gestured at the bags dangling from Abramm’s waist. “Do
any of those have food in them?”

Abramm handed over the sack of hardtack, but when Trap peered inside
he snorted with disgust and drew out a fistful of dried, finger-long, greenand-black caterpillars. “Spima,” he said, inspecting the morsel distastefully.
And they’re not even fried.”

“Is there nothing else?” Abramm took the bag back to look for himself.
The spima’s vinegary smell wafted from the opening, wrinkling his nose.

Some called them miracle worms, provided by Laevion at Beltha’adi’s
request back at the end of the first decade of his Wars of Unification. What
crops had not been consumed or trampled by his soldiers had shriveled in an extended period of drought, producing a severe famine. Beltha’adi declared a
realm-wide holy day, during which all would fast and bring offering to Laevion, goddess of life and plenty. Beltha’adi would and did seek her personally.

On the morning after, the realm was invaded by huge red moths that laid
eggs in the thronetrees, protected by sacks of thick white silk. A month later
the sacks burst open and millions of worms crawled out. They ate only the
leaves of the thronetrees, their presence somehow accelerating refoliation so
the trees were never really stripped bare, despite the worms’ prodigious
growth. Almost overnight they went from thumbnail-long slivers to stout,
finger-sized worms. With nothing else to eat, the people fell upon them
eagerly, and to this day the worms were regarded as both delicacy and staple,
uniformly revered and happily consumed by all good servants of Khrell.

“Plagues, I hate these things,” Trap said. He held one up as if in toast.
“But, better than nothing. Thank you, Eidon, for your gracious provision.”
The insect crunched as he bit into it.

Abramm had never developed a taste for them, either, and only managed
to down four by the time Trap had finished his first handful and took the bag
back for a second one.

“I thought you hated them,” Abramm said. “You’re munching like a
native.”

“Purging spawn spore always does this to me.” Trap crunched another
worm. Actually, they aren’t so bad once you get going on them.”

Abramm flashed him a doubtful glance.

Trap grinned, closed up the bag, and patted it. “I daresay you’ll agree with
me before this adventure is over.”

“I’m hoping we can trade them for something better along the way.”

Trap glanced pointedly at the expanse of deserted landscape sweeping
around them beneath the ceiling of mist. “Who were you thinking of trading
with? The ravens?”

“Way stations were never more than a day’s ride apart on these old
Ophiran highways.”

“Aye, eight hundred years ago. Before the Cataclysm. Before the Wars of
Unification. Before the Shadow came and the wind stopped and all the rivers
dried up.”

“There’s bound to be some settlements left,” Abramm insisted. Not all
the springs would have dried up. And there were always cisterns.

“Well, I’m not sure it’d be a good idea to go blundering into one, even if
we find it. If Beltha’adi’s intelligence system is half as good as they say, word
of our escape has surely preceded us.”

“Not necessarily. He obviously wanted everyone to think we died in the
Val’Orda, so he probably won’t make this search public. Especially when he
doesn’t need men to find us.”

They glanced uneasily at the sky, and Abramm half expected a dark vulturine shape to drop out of the mist right before his eyes.

He was right about the way stations. In the afternoon they came upon
their first, catching the stench of it several moments before they topped a
ridge and saw it nestled in the barren draw below. Three large, blockish buildings, broken and time ravaged, stood within the crumbling remains of a guard
wall. Black fire rings scattered the semi-enclosed yard, and though the place
looked deserted, smoke drifted from one of the chimneys.

They approached cautiously in the deep silence, feeling the touch of
unseen eyes as in the distance a goat bleated.

Flanking the main gate, a pair of brightly colored prayer flags hung limply
from sticks supported by cairns of red stone. Wreaths of onions encircled the
sticks, warding away the staffid. In the yard, several patches of corn, squash,
and more onions had been scratched out of the hardpan. This late in the year,
with the harvest weeks over, the foliage was dry and pale, and at the far end,
someone had begun to pull up the dead cornstalks. In a few months, once the
annual rains refilled the cisterns and the ground had dried enough to work,
they would plant anew.

As the two men passed through the gateway, the stench of rotting flesh
overlaid the aroma of the latrine, drawing their gazes to a fly-enshrouded pile
of fresh goat’s legs and entrails lying beside the wall. A pair of ravens tore at
the offal, while a lone chicken pecked the ground nearby. Somewhere out of
sight in the draw below the station, more goats bleated, no doubt having been
hurried away before the intruders could find them.

Fresh corn cakes and goat cheese were laid out on a low table in the main
room of the building with the smoking chimney. The stone floor was swept,
the shelves and jars free of dust, and the sleeping pallets rolled and stacked in
the corner. A cornhusk doll sprawled beside them, and further on lay a
tumble of small wooden blocks. And of course there were the ever-present
swags of onions, guarding every opening.

The men looked longingly at the corn cakes but left them and moved on
to the spring that erupted from the steep rocky hillside at the back of the
compound. A massive thronetree, laden with white silk bags of spima eggs,
stood guard over a ceramic pipe jutting from the red-brown rock. Water
trickled from it into a square stone basin, which in turn fed a livestock trough.
The trough held only a shallow layer of water now, though the thick green
algae on its exposed inner sides showed it was usually full. The churned mud
and crushed grass surrounding it confirmed what the offal and fire rings suggested-a large party of riders had recently passed through.

Necks crawling with the sense of being watched, the northerners watered
their horses from the trough and refilled only one of their bags from the
already depleted supply in the basin. Trusting there would be another station
and another spring, they determined not to contribute to the hardships of the
locals any more than they had to.

As they prepared to move out, Trap squatted by the tracks around the
trough, thoughtfully fingering the jumble of grooves and ridges. Finally he
straightened, frowning down the draw they would shortly be descending.
“Two days ago at most,” he said, wiping his hands on his trousers.

“Probably a division sent to block the boltholes at this end of the SaHal,”
Abramm said.

“Probably,” Trap agreed with a grimace. With Beltha’adi’s two Hundreds
coming down from Andol to attack the north entrance at Jarnek, there’d have
to be at least a small force sent south to round up any refugees. Abramm and
Trap were supposed to have evaded it using Shettai’s secret routes.

As they rode through one of the breeches in the guard wall, movement
drew Abramm’s eye up the barren hillside, where three shaggy-haired urchins
watched them from atop a red-brown rock. He was close enough to see the
whites of their eyes, stark against gaunt, dusty faces. Each wore a scrap of
loincloth, their bone-thin limbs and hunger-swollen bellies revealed for all to
see.

His gaze seemed to paralyze them, and they stared at him like deer caught
in a hunter’s torchlight. A sharp cry from across the draw jerked them free
and sent them scurrying up the narrow ravine behind them.

The men rode on. At the bottom of the drainage, as they were about to
round the end of a long ridge that would blot the station from view, Abramm
glanced back and found a handful of raggedly clothed people standing near the guard wall. Even from a distance he could sense their fear and desperation, barely one step ahead of starvation.

The thought of the soldiers who had so recently passed through, eating
their goats and drinking their water without a thought, ignited a smoldering
anger in him. To those soldiers these people were worth less than some dogs.
Fit only to serve and sacrifice for their betters, they would have been killed if
they even so much as touched one of the Brogai. Even in the Dark Abode of
death, they would exist only to be ruled by the lesser of the Chosen.

He remembered the arrogant claims of destiny and superiority, and part
of him hoped he’d catch up to those soldiers, maybe teach them a lesson,
exact a little justice-while another part observed wryly that it would be better if he did not, since fatigue seemed to have made him appallingly stupid.
Just what sort of justice did he imagine two stiff, exhausted, weaponless men
might exact from a group of at least twenty trained warriors who were well
rested and thoroughly armed?

Daylight faded to darkness, forcing them to stop for fear of losing the
road. Tying the horses to a thronetree, they collapsed on the sandy bed of the
dry wadi that ran across their path. Trap muttered something about Eidon
having to keep watch over them for tonight, and Abramm’s last conscious
thought was to hope that Eidon was up to the task.

He dreamt of Shettai, talking and laughing in a garden beyond a crystalline latticework aglow with a brilliant white light. Try as he might to peer
through the slats, he could see nothing past the blinding light. Walking along
the barrier yielded no end to it, and climbing it only brought him back to the
bottom again and again. With frustration burning ever hotter in his breast, he
finally hurled himself at the slats, hit them hard—

And woke up, surprised to find a raven tugging at the Terstan talisman he
still wore round his neck.

It was gray daylight, but the bird was so close and its behavior so unexpected that for a moment he lay there and stared at it, sure he was still
dreaming. When the creature put a splayed foot on his chest to brace itself
and jerked at the chain again, both sensations were far too strong and vivid
for a dream. In sudden affront, Abramm exploded off the ground, sweeping
the would-be thief aside with an arm. Squawking indignation, the bird tumbled head over heels, and Trap sprang to his feet, groping for the weapon that
should have been at his hip and turning frantically in search of the danger.

Recovering itself and still squawking, the raven flapped up into the
thronetree across the ravine, ruffling its feathers and glaring down at them. In
the foliage around it hopped a flock of sparrows, chattering and chirping.
Abramm stood in the center of the wash, staring at them, hackles rising,
while Trap picked up a rock and hurled it at the big bird, striking the shiny
black breast. Cawing with renewed outrage, the creature tumbled wildly
from its perch, then righted itself and flapped skyward. Another rock followed the first, then another, both missing their target. By then the bird had
disappeared into the mist.