Patricia Briggs (8 page)

Halfway up the foothill, below the first cliffs, was a boulder twice the size of my croft. It hadn't been there long. Looking up, I could see the raw places on the mountainside where it had broken loose and bounced. A shattered oak lay in aftermath of its passing, leaves still green with spring's promise.

I whistled. “I'd have hated to be here when it fell.” The sight of the boulder, a reminder that our world had come crashing down around our ears, cast a pall over our party. At least it dampened Wandel's mood, and without his steady cheer, Kith's grim nervousness infected us all.

We were silent as we climbed the gentle rise to the Hob. The mountain was the tallest of those surrounding Fallbrook, but we didn't need to go over the peak. The trail to Auberg twisted and turned over the mountain's shoulder, working its way along the only negotiable path through the cliffs. The route itself was about the same length as the one the King's Highway followed, though it looked shorter on a map. Maps, even good ones, didn't take into account the amount of a trail's climbing and descending.

The first part of the path was easy, just as I remembered it. The trail followed the bottom edge of the cliffs in a gentle rise that traversed the side of the mountain in the opposite direction from Auberg. The only alternative was to go straight up the cliffs. I smiled and followed the others.

It was several hours before the cliff gave way to a steep slope dotted with evergreens. The trail twisted back and forth among the trees until we reached the base of an enormous, steep, skree slope.

It looked as if a giant had taken a bucket of sand and poured it down the side of the mountain. The slope stretched from the very peak of the mountain to the bottom, now far below us. The trail narrowed to a goat's path that traversed the skree at a very steep angle. We'd be going up.

Wandel swore, looked at me, and flushed.

“That's why no one in their right mind would take a wagon through here,” I said. “There's a lot of grazing up there.” I nodded toward the top of the trail. “The shepherds bring their flocks up this during the height of summer to save the fields in the valley—and they lose a few sheep here every year. I haven't ever been all the way through to Auberg, but I've been told this is the worst of it—though there are some other rough spots.”

Kith had already started up the slope ahead of us. It was obvious from the way his horse slipped and scrambled that the path didn't offer much better footing than the looser rock on either side. It was steep, too.

Wandel started his horse across. I waited until he was well on his way before setting Duck to it. On a trail like this, I wanted room to maneuver. Ideally I'd have waited until Wandel was at the top, but Duck was already starting to fret at being left behind. When we crossed, I wanted his mind on his footing, not on catching up the horses ahead of him.

Before we were a tenth of the way up, Duck was coated in sweat and gray dust. I could feel the subtle trembling of his overworked muscles as he hauled me slowly up the mountainside. I sat as still as I could, and crouched over his big shoulders to let the gelding find his own pace.

If the trail hadn't been so narrow, it might have been better to dismount. On my own, I probably would have done so. But since Kith had tackled it mounted, the rest of us manly warriors had to do the same. I smiled sourly to myself. I would have expected childhood competitions to die out with adulthood—but there was no way I was going to dismount if Kith was riding.

Wandel was about halfway to the far side when the Lass lost her footing where the trail crossed the smooth face of a large piece of unbroken shale. The little mare jumped and scrambled frantically but couldn't stop her downward slide even after reaching the end of the slick rock face and hitting the rougher surface of loose rock that made up most of the trail.

I stopped Duck foursquare in the trail. I had few seconds to worry before the Lass's rump hit Duck's chest with considerable force. My stout gelding grunted and rocked back on his haunches, but his weight and his shoeless, big feet gave him better traction than the mare had. He slid backward a pace or two before we all stopped.

“Bless you for bringing that horse,” gasped Wandel, patting the Lass, who was blowing hard. “I thought that was going to be it. If he were any lighter, we'd have all been tumbling down to the bottom.”

I was busy watching a rock the mare's feet had knocked loose finally hit the valley bottom. Duck shuffled back another step, then took advantage of my inattention to snatch a few strands of grass that poked out among the rocks, proof that horses have no imagination.

I shook my head in reply to Wandel's comment. “Nah, that would have been too easy. Surely all the tales that you've told will win you a more glorious and painful fate.”

He laughed. “I'll keep that in mind while we try this again.”

Kith was waiting for us at the top by the time Wandel urged the Lass forward. This time, I held Duck back until the Lass was on the far side of the rock sheet before letting him follow. When I reached the small meadow at the top, the others were already loosening their cinches. I dismounted and followed suit, slipping the bit so Duck could graze while he rested.

“The place I want to camp is about a league from here,” said Kith. “That will give us an early night, but there aren't very many good places to camp past there. We'll make it to town by late afternoon anyway.”

“Right,” I agreed, not feeling all that fresh myself. Sitting in the dark for a week wasn't the best preparation for a trek through the mountains. Wiping the sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve, I looked around and tried to match what I saw with my last journey here.

“Hmm,” I said, “this isn't too far from where we camped that time, is it?” I didn't wait for Kith's reply. “Weren't there some runes or something on some rocks down there?”

“Runes?” inquired the harper.

“Mmm. Want to take a look while the horses rest?”

“I'll stay with the horses,” Kith volunteered.

There was something in his voice that caused me to look sharply at him, but the expression on his face was simply reserved.

“I'd like to see them,” replied Wandel, though he groaned as he stood up from the knee-high boulder he'd been sitting on.

“Walking will help keep you from stiffening up,” I said, trying both to sound wise and not to look as stiff as I felt.

The harper raised his eyebrows with hauteur that would have done Lord Moresh proud. “My child,” he intoned, “when you have traveled as many miles as I, you will understand that nothing—
nothing
—keeps you from stiffening up.”

“If you don't come back by sunset, I'll come looking for you,” Kith offered, watching as I searched for the right place to set off back down the mountain. He might have been amused, but it was hard to tell.

The path I chose wasn't the same one the three of us had taken almost twenty years ago. As I recalled, we'd been trying to find a way down that would allow us to avoid the skree slope (that the boys had already been across once). We'd run into thorn thickets at the very base of the mountain and had had to climb all the way back to our starting point, but scrambling around had led us to…

“There,” I said pointing to a large, reddish rock balanced against another, both easily taller than three men standing one atop another.

I had led us too far down, so we had to scramble back up to the site.

“Here,” I said, panting. “On the underside, where the weather couldn't wash them away.”

They weren't as impressive as I'd remembered them. Merely worn black lines on stone, almost pictures but not quite. Wandel didn't seem to mind.

He scrambled close to the faint marks and crouched on his heels with an ease that gave lie to the stiffness he'd been complaining about. He frowned a moment, then opened his purse and unwrapped a bit of char. With a delicate touch he added a mark here and there, sometimes merely darkening what was already there, but once he added a whole series of the little symbols.

“Can you read it?” I asked in unfeigned awe. I could read a little, thanks to Gram—but that was the king's tongue. Only noblemen knew how to write anything else, noblemen and scholars.

The harper nodded. “A bit. I think. Some of the runes are different.” He pointed at one. “I've never seen anything like that. And here, see, this didn't have this tail—but it makes sense if I change it so.”

“So what does it say? Do you know who wrote it? How old it is?”

“Well,” he said dryly, “it's older than the last time you saw this. Any scholar could have written this. It's an ancestor of Manishe—a common tongue among scholars, though it hasn't been in everyday use for four hundred years or so.”

He said “four hundred years” as if it were a few days. Harpers were strange that way.

“The mercenary patois has its roots here.” He tapped the rock with the hand that still held the char, leaving a dark blotch on the stone. “But of course they have altered it almost beyond recognition—simplifying it to three or four hundred code words that even the stupidest man can command in a short period of time with the proper instruction. That way it doesn't matter what country a man comes from.”

He paused, happily surveying the black marks. “But this, this is very old. Legend says that mankind stole writing from another race—the dwarves. There's some of their work in the museum at the king's castle of state. A goblet, three plates, and a sword. The sword has runes on it, one of which looks just like this.” He pointed to a faded mark, one that looked to me just like the one next to it—or the one above it, for that matter.

“That's a mark we don't have in our Manishe, though it's supposed to be read as if it were two other glyphs combined. Now a scholar who wanted you to think this was a message written by dwarves would probably write something that looked like this, but—” he said intensely, “—but how many scholars do you think would have climbed down the backside of this infernal mountain to do that?” He didn't wait for an answer. “Right. That's how many of them I think came here, too.”

His enthusiasm was infectious—I had obviously happened upon a hobby of his.

“So you think it was written by dwarves?” I asked. The dwarfs had died out a long time ago, victims of plague, war, or the same thing that had killed the rest of the wildlings.

“Perhaps, but we weren't the only ones to steal dwarf runes. This says…” He continued speaking in a language that was harsh and nasal.

H
IDDEN FROM THEIR SIGHT, THE HOB WINCED, FLATTENING
his ears against his head. His spells allowed him to interpret what they were saying, but he
knew
the language the musician was butchering. Manlings had little enough appreciation of beauty in their souls, but this was extreme. Never had he heard such an accent, though he supposed after—how long
had
he been asleep?—things could have changed.

The girl, the one he'd seen in that brief seeking vision yesterday, spoke again. “What, exactly, does that mean?”

The older man smiled, his face lit with the joy all scholars share in new discoveries. Some things had not changed. “It says, ‘Be welcomed here, fair travelers of good heart: benevolent souls have always been welcome on the mountains of the hob.'”

Close enough
, thought the hob.

“Hob's Mountain,” she said touching the stone.

The hob drew in his breath at the magic that pulsed wildly around the girl. Didn't they teach their younglings better than that? Such a signature would attract all sorts of nasties.

I
TOUCHED THE ROCK
. I
T WAS OLD, SO OLD THAT ONLY
bits and pieces came to me.

A dark-skinned hand, twisted with hoary years, held a brush that he carefully dipped in a clay pot of dark ink…a sense of mischief, for hiding the message would allow them to torment the wicked without warning them off.

Foul weather
, I thought—or maybe it was that long ago artist—
mud and rust and broken swords.
I looked at Wandel, but he was still examining the rock. I don't think he would have noticed if I had fallen on my back and foamed at the mouth.

“Unless they were known by another name,” he said, “I've only heard of hobs in two contexts. The first one is the name of this mountain. When I first came here…oh, thirty years ago now, I thought it was named for a man, like Faran's Ridge. The headman before Merewich, Ivn, said not. Said that the mountain was supposed to belong to a hob. No one in Fallbrook, Auberg, or Beresford knew exactly what a hob was, except that it was a wildling and relatively benevolent, and it owned this mountain, or belonged to it. The other is in an old song that I heard far south of here—I'll sing it for you after we make camp.”

T
HE HOB SAT IN THE SHADOWS AND WATCHED THEM
leave. Loneliness and fear ate at him, a loner by choice who had prided himself on his daring and courage.