Sartor (8 page)

Rel said, “Anyone ever been over that back road, just
to see what’s what?”

“Sure. Every generation some hothead has to go, and
they never come back. Some sort o’ bad magic traps a-layin’ for the
unwary, I hear,” the man said. “But at least whatever’s
beyond it don’t come back over this way. Road’s probably grown over
long since. Sartor is gone from history, except in memory.” He shook his
head. “Well, I’m for bed. Long, soggy ride for the coast, come
morning, looks like.”

“Good night,” Rel said.

The brothers were already in bed. Rel leaned over to
extinguish the lamp.

o0o

The next morning, Merewen sat up, rubbed her eyes, and
sighed with relief.

Lilah sat up with a snort. “Something wrong?”

“I had a terrible dream,” Merewen exclaimed.

Their voices roused Atan, who blinked tired eyes. “Danger
last night.” Her voice came out hoarse. She cleared her throat. “I
didn’t fall asleep until the sun began to rise.”

Shocked and dismayed, Lilah and Merewen listened to Atan’s
story as they walked to the edge of the river.

“A Norsundrian,” Lilah whispered, looking
fearfully around. “Has to be! Did he threaten you?”

“He wanted to take me away, so he must know who I am.
That means someone knows I’m here. But I used the ring. The light is very
powerful. It made my own vision go dark for a time. I think it might have
blinded that man, for he took it full in his face. He rode away.”

“Then let’s put some distance between us and
him. We can go faster without any food weighing us down,” Lilah said
doubtfully, as she watched Merewen’s small hands divide the last of the
journey bread. “My guess is, Norsunder knows the spell got broken. Or
a
spell, or whatever it was you said.”

“One spell was broken,” Atan said. “But
the enchantment still binds.”

“I thought ‘enchantment’ was a fancy word
for spells.” And at Atan’s surprise, “Big ones?”

Atan leaned forward, hands tightly clasped. “An
enchantment is more than one spell, bound together for a purpose. The binding
spell requires a key to hold it all together. That key can be a time, or a
thing, or a person—just about anything.”

“So we broke one spell. What does that actually
mean?” Lilah asked, hoping the answer would be,
No more danger.
“Why would they bother with a lot of little spells, anyway?”

“Cruelty, in part,” Atan said. “From what
we know of the final defeat, the Norsundrian in charge, an Old Sartoran known
only as Detlev, bound the time-enchantment onto us Landises.”

“Ugh,” Lilah said.

“In front of my father.”

“Eugh!”

“Right before he was killed. Saying that only the
Landises could free Sartor, and the last of them was about to die. In other
words, he let my father know that all of his children were dead before they
killed him.”

Lilah shrank down into a hunched knot. “That,”
she muttered with heartfelt horror, “is really, really nasty.”

“It was calculated to be as cruel as possible.”
Atan shivered. “Perhaps we should wait to talk about these things until
we are safely in Shendoral. If we are out of journey bread, I trust we will see
it before too long.”

Merewen smiled. “We are very near.”

“
You
can see it?” Lilah asked, squinting
into the distant gray haze that looked to her exactly the same as always.

“No. But I feel it.” Merewen laid her hand over
her heart. “I feel it is close—maybe today, if we hurry.”

“Can you lead us?” Atan asked, hope banishing
her tiredness.

Merewen faced west, her eyes closed. “It’s all
along there.” She opened her eyes, her hand pointing to the northwest.

“Then we have to leave the road,” Atan said.
“Because it seems to be bending to the south.”

Fear was a better fuel than the dry remnants of their bread.
Ignoring hunger, and then growing thirst, the girls sped through the gently
undulating landscape to the west. Late in the day, a black line began to emerge
through the smeary gray haze, resolving into sharp definition just as the light
faded. From beyond the tangled brambles and dusty hedgerows and occasional
copses of autumn-scraggly trees emerged the sky-sweeping green of tall conifers
and pine, stippled here and there by the flash of scarlet and gold of just-turned
leaves. The brambles gradually gave way to withered blackberry shrubs and
sharp-leaved hazel.

The air smelled different. It smelled
green
, Lilah
thought. To Atan it smelled like life, and to Merewen it was home.

o0o

Kessler recovered his vision with the dawn, and though the
headache still lingered, he returned to where he’d left the girls.

There was no sign on the aged, hard ground of their having
left the road, which continued to bend southward around Shendoral. He wasted
the morning following the road until he came to a shallow valley at the bottom
of which the gradual accumulation of dust revealed that no living thing had
come this way for uncounted years.

He wasted the rest of the afternoon riding back again to
that last campsite, and then searching in widening circles until he discovered
three sets of prints along the bottom of a dried stream-bed. The prints
vanished in the tall, scrubby grass, but their northwestward direction was
enough to give him a vector.

He knew their destination. He also knew Shendoral’s
reputation. Were it true, and were the girls to reach the boundary of the
purported magic, he would be forced to ignore the second part of Zydes’s
orders, a matter that left him indifferent: Shendoral’s magic was said to
visit any violence onto the perpetrator. Kessler did not want to test whether
that was truth or myth, so he would ignore the order to kill the maidservants. But
it might make grabbing his target a little more difficult.

He spotted the girls silhouetted on a brief rise just as the
sun was setting.

Atan heard the approach of his horse’s hooves on the
otherwise silent air, and croaked, “Run!”

Despite dry mouths, aching legs, and gnawing bellies, the
girls ran.

Kessler urged his drooping horse into a steady trot, for it
would go no faster. Trees blocked the straight chase; the animal wove its way
westward through the increasing growth.

Kessler kept watching for signs of magical boundaries, but
there were none. As he neared the girls, he scrutinized them, trying to determine
which was his target. The blinding magic had not permitted him to see which one
was the assailant. All he knew was that the magic had come from some object in
or on one’s hand.

It was time for a fast experiment. He pulled one of his
throwing knives from a boot top, and, choosing the tallest of the three girls,
he threw. The idea was to wing her, and thus stop all three so he could find
the one wearing or carrying a magic artifact; untrained civs usually panicked
at the first sight of a weapon or wound and stood around wailing and fussing.

The three girls veered just as his knife left his hand,
disappearing down a sudden incline.

Then his horse stumbled over an unseen root and almost fell.
He reached, touched the sweaty neck, and decided to retrieve his knife and
abandon the chase for now. He would rest the animal, and track the girls in
daylight.

Lilah had been the one to see the fading light glint on the
blade in the man’s hand as he cocked his wrist for the throw.

All three dived flat into a thick growth of ferns a
heartbeat before the knife thunked in a great tree trunk where they had been. Wriggling
through the ferns, they emerged from the other side and ran until lightning
jabbed their sides and their throats burned.

They ran until they realized the galloping they heard was
their own heartbeats, until the soft, moist air around them soothed minds as
well as tired bodies. They splashed into a running stream, and bent and drank
of the sweet, cold water. Then they collapsed on the soft grassy bank, and once
their terror had subsided, all three fell straight into exhausted sleep.

Kessler knew that Norsunder’s commanders doubted his
hold on sanity. He didn’t care. Surviving childhood in the deliberate
savagery of his uncle’s fortress in Narad, capital of Chwahirsland, had
refined in him the ability to live in the moment, detached from any emotion
except anger, which lent strength and speed.

But even that had to be rationed, for he’d seen what
uncontrolled rage did to his uncle’s plans. Overweening self-indulgence
in a taste for vengeance and cruelty for the sake of cruelty had been the
direct cause of all of Shnit Sonscarna’s defeats. Though King Shnit’s
army was the largest in the world, it was also the worst trained—again
because his uncle was afraid of uprisings. There could be no thinker, no
leader, but him. And that’s why all the Sonscarnas were dead, except for Kessler’s
doddering uncle Kwenz, no threat to anyone, and Kessler, who had escaped.

So he had learned self-control, learned it so well his mind
was like a series of locked vaults behind which little but darkness could be
descried, even in Norsunder, a realm where mind raids were both common and
unheralded.

Here in Shendoral, he sensed the blanketing protection of
ancient magic that denied outside access to his mind. He also knew that the
magic in Zydes’s scope was not able to penetrate the border of the
woodland.

For a brief time, he was free.

But it would be brief. He had no illusions about that.

He let the horse range among the sweet grasses of Shendoral,
and he himself sat on a riverbank to indulge in the luxury of solitary thought
while not being spied upon.

When night fell, he’d resume his duties. As long as he
reappeared at the Base with the Landis girl as ordered, Zydes would not be interested
in an exact accounting of his time.

While he sat down with his back to a tree and the morning’s
ration of hard biscuit and cheese in his hand, an hour’s brisk walk
northwards the three girls roused at last from sleep.

Lilah woke first, looking up at first with non-comprehension
and then with pleasure through a ceiling of interlaced broad leaves to blue sky
beyond. Blue sky! The pure blue of a cool autumn morning. And below it,
crimson, amber, gold, yellow, rust, and myriad shades in-between delighted eyes
that had been looking for a seeming eternity on indistinct gray-grown haze.

“Oh,” she breathed.

Merewen hugged herself, knowing that she was home. Surely
danger could not follow them in Shendoral! “Savar’s house is not
far,” she cried. “There we can find hot food, and bathe, and rest.”

“There are seasons here?” Lilah asked. “I
thought time didn’t work right.”

“Well, we have seasons, and I have grown from very
small to what I am now,” Merewen answered gesturing down herself to her
bare feet. “So time is... time. But not the same in all parts of the
forest, so Savar said.”

All day the girls walked toward the northeast bulge of the
woodland, where Shendoral ridged the gentle valley that led down to the Arveas
Lake. They stopped only to eat. Blackberry bushes grew wild here, as did
grapevines, and they found gleanings of nuts everywhere. The berries were not
the strange, withered ones they’d found on the periphery of Shendoral. These
were sweet and good, evidence of rain and the march of seasons. Munching these
foods staved off hunger, but they all looked forward to the good soup that Merewen
promised would be waiting.

Hunger, leftover tiredness, and memory of the chase of the
night before kept them from talking much. Speed was necessary, they felt—Lilah
out of fear, Atan out of the sense of urgency that had driven her since she
woke up weeks before and knew that she had to leave the Valley. And Merewen
rushed along with the joy one feels at arriving home after a long trip. A
favorite dell, here a mossy stone bridge, the carved patterns on the sides worn
into blurs over the past thousand years, there a path—

“Just ahead,” she cried at last, when the
filtered greenish-gold light was beginning to slant toward afternoon. “Just
down this hill, past all those great redwoods.”

Atan forced herself to hurry, though her feet ached and her
neck felt tight. Here, at last, was a glimpse of the
real
Sartor. Wild
scents assailed her, scents that she had never in her life smelled, or at least
could not identify, except somehow she must have remembered, because it smelled
like
home
. All of it—the mossy bark, the duff underfoot, the
tangled vines and shrubs and the great forest trees—she breathed in, her
spirit winging between anguish and joy.

“There,” Merewen cried. “Beyond the trees.
We should see the chimney in just a moment. Come, come!” She ran, and
Lilah stumped after her, thinking of a hot bath and good food.

In fact, she was thinking so hard about them—trying to
decide which she wanted first—that she did not see Merewen stop, and
consequently she almost ran into her back. She stumbled to a halt beside Merewen,
who gazed, her eyes wide and dark with horror, her mouth open, at a great
stretch of dark soil.

“It’s not here,” Merewen whispered.

Atan joined on her other side.

All three stared at the ground, through which tiny blades of
grass could be seen springing.

“The house. It’s gone,” Merewen said,
louder, as though testing the truth of it.

Lilah frowned, staring around. “There wasn’t any
fire. I know what burned houses look like. Ours at home got burned in a riot.
They don’t all just disappear, and no harm to the things growing next to
the walls. What could have happened?”

“Magic,” Atan said. “I can’t tell
you what kind.”

Sorrow and grief bent Merewen over, until she sank down onto
the ground. Lilah hunched her shoulders up, her hands sliding into her pockets
to close around her thief tools. Only how would those defend her against magic?