Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (19 page)

“Neither is what I am, so it is of no matter.”

“Why, again, are you hunting her, then?”

“I slept while she was taken.” Kellach stared hard at the warmage, watching his face for even the most fleeting sign of contempt.

Praetor stroked a hand over his beard. “Your honor demands you recover her more than any beseeching by her family. Very good. Be assured that you were not inattentive. The maggot-folk appear to have an innate facility with magicks that befuddle and fatigue. Curious that they did not kill you all, however.”

Kellach shook his head. “No signs of struggle. Her mother believes Serinna agreed to go willingly.”

“Saving you from harm. She would tell herself that, of course. She would have to believe it.” The warmage’s brown eyes tightened. “However, in my pursuit of her I have seen no sign of struggle or unwillingness to travel. Perhaps she did sell herself for your sake.”

“I followed her trail, but saw no sign of you.”

“No, of course not. You followed the trail here. I used other means.” Praetor opened the arcane chest and removed a tea caddy, a small loaf of bread, and some cheese. He introduced several healthy pinches of tea into the boiling water, and then set it aside to steep. He tossed the small round of cheese to Kellach. “You can divide that in half. How much do you know of the Veils?”

Kellach drew his longknife and sliced the soft cheese disk in half. He exchanged a portion of it for half of the loaf. “I have heard of the Veils. I have seen magick.” He actually knew more of magick than he’d admitted; and far more of it than would have made the warmage comfortable. Kellach saw no vice in letting the warmage draw his own conclusions—something that appeared to make Praetor quite happy.

“There are many Veils, my friend. Were I to look at you through the first, I could see that you carry no enchanted weapons and have no trace of magick lingering about you—your encounter with the maggot-folk notwithstanding.” Praetor set aside the bread and cheese to pour tea. “It was through another Veil that I searched for the girl. She shines brightly— the sun to faint stars surrounding her. I could watch her course, and chose mine to cut her off. Alas, I was slow in my arrival.”

Kellach accepted the tin cup of tea and set it at his feet. “Why do you seek her?”

“I do the bidding of my College. My masters decry the barbarity of infanticide, and the superstition that haunts the lives of these poor afflicted. When rumors of a snowchild, to use your more gentle term, arose—and they travel swiftly through the Veils—I was dispatched to find her, to offer her and her family support and succor.”

“Is she not better off with her own kind, if that is her choice?”

Praetor sipped his tea and frowned heavily. “She is truly but a child, thus incapable of making such a decision. She does not know why they seek her. They desire her not as a companion. The maggot- folk are quite sterile, but they cling to a prophecy that says a white child will come to them. It will mate with their queen, or be taken for their queen, and produce a thousand whole and clean-limbed creatures of their kind. It will breed true and they will emerge into the daylight to reclaim a world that was once theirs.”

“Or is destined to be theirs?”

“Very good. You actually listened.” Praetor gave him a half- smile. “I appreciate that in a companion.”

Kellach dipped a bit of the bread in tea to soften it. “If you listen well enough, even the emptiness will whisper wisdom.”

“Cengar sagacity?”

“I’ve heard it many places. It is seldom heeded.”

“Such is the fate of wisdom, alas.” Praetor sat back in his chair. “I’ve noticed, my friend, that you’ve not given me your name. You are wise to withhold it from the Gifted, but we have broken bread together. We share a fire. Tomorrow we should likely die together. I should know your name.”

“I am Kellach. I am a Cengar far from home.” Kellach swallowed some tea. “Clan names would tell you nothing. I am my own man. My chasing the girl is a matter of honor.”

Praetor extended his cup above the fire. “To men of honor, then, Kellach. May we save the girl from the fate into whose arms she has been cast. And do it without dying.”

Kellach took the dawn watch and let the fire die. Praetor lay cocooned in his cloak. Light pulsed through it in rhythm with the man’s heartbeat. It swelled and fell with his breathing—though it covered him completely. While the cool morning air allowed Kellach to see his own breath, he saw no steam rising from the cocoon. Yet the man breathes, so air must get to him.

Having been raised in the south, amid snowcapped mountains where water was drawn from streams bleeding off glaciers, Kellach did not mind the cold. In fact, he found it something of a comfort. He breakfasted on cold water and dried beef from his own supplies while he waited for the warmage to waken.

Praetor Azurean took his time in that. A momentary flash of disgust when he saw the fire had gone out revealed his dislike of the cold. The warmage made no complaint, however. The cloak reluctantly released him and he rolled to a knee. He warmed water for his tea by holding the pot in both hands, and even offered Kellach a steaming mug. Kellach declined with a shake of his head.

Praetor busied himself cleaning up their camp. He folded his chair down and slid it into the trunk as if the box had no bottom. The bucket was yet half full of water, so the man poured it out, then deposited it on top of the chairs. Everything else went in as well. Then the warmage buckled the lid on tightly. With a wave of his hand he split the chest in half, stacked one half atop the other, and pushed down. One half slid into the other, producing a chest half the previous size. He did this again and again until he’d reduced the chest to a small case the man could have hidden behind his hand. Then he slid his belt through a loop on the back. He brought the box around to his right hip, opposite his sword, and smiled.

“There; all set.”

“You do not carry a staff or a wand?”

The warmage chuckled as he set foot on the path leading back to the ridge. “Hedge wizards and paltry warlocks might use them, but we who are Yag-Ktheru eschew them. Hard to use them in conjunction with a sword, no?” He raised his right hand and flicked his thumb against a gold ring set with what appeared to be an ancient coin. “Easier to focus through something like this. As you and I focus our physical strength through my sword or your axe, so I focus magickal energies through this ring.”

They paused at the ridge. Fog completely filled the valley. No hint of the cave, no breeze stirred the fog. Higher clouds made it unlikely the sun would burn the fog off any time soon. Condensing moisture darkened the rocks and glowed from leaves.

Kellach started down first, filling his right hand with the longknife. The trail was little more than a track for runoff, where thin soil had been eroded to bare rock. Traces of past rockslides required them to pick their way across the face of the mountain, switching back many times. The scrub brush up top and more lush forest below allowed them no more than a dozen feet of visibility along the trail, and often a quarter of that side to side. Kellach would never get to swing his ax in such tight quarters, but the longknife would more than suffice if they were attacked.

Though the warmage had not seemed a likely companion when they camped, he redeemed himself on the trail. They did not speak. He would stop when Kellach did, and study places at which Kellach pointed. They each listened hard, and sometimes Praetor closed his eyes, looking through the Veils for danger. He reported nothing unusual with a head shake, and they moved on.

They continued down to the valley floor, reaching it by midmorning. Kellach refilled his waterskin in the stream there. Praetor filled a flask that—from a faint scent—changed water into something else. They worked up and down the stream for a hundred yards or so each way, looking for other trails. Kellach found one downstream, almost directly below where the cavern mouth should be. Closeby he discovered a small sandbar where the stream turned north and broadened out for a bit.

He crouched and studied the footprints. They belonged to two individuals. Because of the size he thought them a child and an adult. The adult had six toes on one foot, three on the other—and clearly had lost them through some sort of an accident. The child had a clubbed foot on the right.

Praetor joined him, squatting on the shore. “In that little pool, berry pits.”

Kellach nodded. “Bird berries. They ate a few while resting.”

“Harvester’s wage, all fair.” Praetor shrugged. “Though I doubt they have the intelligence to know the old ways and abide by them. They’re little more than animals.”

Kellach had heard that sentiment before, directed by brainproud northerners at the Cengari people. He’d have challenged Praetor to justify his remark then and there, but it was neither the time nor the place for a steely discussion. Instead he grunted. “More reason to rescue Serinna.”

“The girl, yes.”

Working upslope from the sandbar they located the berrypickers’ meandering trail. It took them through several stands of bushes that had been picked clean. Multiple tracks overlaid one another, revealing more misshapen feet and many days’ work to harvest all the berries. Kellach saw no more collections of pits, but did see evidence of brush having been cleared to allow the berry groves to expand. He’d not seen many animals do that.

Working their way up, they also came around toward the east. Given the maggot-folks’ aversion to sunlight, they would be less watchful from that direction. As they reached the level of the cave mouth, they headed west and upward. Praetor slipped into the lead. He apparently found no alarms or ambushes through a Veiled glance, so he waved Kellach on. When the Cengar drew parallel, the warmage pointed with two fingers down below.

Kellach had seen maggot-folk before, but that hardly mattered. No two were the same. Corpse-white flesh with gray blemishes covered them. Excess flesh bulged here and there, though they weren’t fat. It seemed as if their skin was exceedingly thick and hanging there as if waiting for its owner to double or triple in size. Naked save for a gold armlet on one’s third arm—the trinket had likely once been a child’s bracelet—and a rusty iron torc around the other’s neck, one clutched a stone axe, the other a stone-tipped spear. The taller one had no hair, while the smaller had brown pigeon feathers woven into long white locks. They hunched in plain sight, largely immobile, not speaking to or even looking at each other.

Kellach glanced at his companion, then held up a hand and waggled his ring finger.

Praetor shook his head and covered his mouth with his hand. “Magick can be detected.”

Kellach nodded. Praetor wasn’t the first warmage of his acquaintance who hadn’t hidden behind that bit of truth. They don’t mind killing. They mind getting wet.

Though a large man, Kellach moved to the cave mouth with the fluid stealth of a shadow’s sigh. He hid against a large plinth, close enough to hear the guards’ raspy breath, waiting for his final rush. Kellach reversed the longknife, such that the blade ran back along his forearm, well past his elbow, the razored edge outermost. As he straightened, he cocked his wrist so the blade’s tip pointed up near his right shoulder. With the knife thus hidden behind his arm, he stepped into the cave mouth and went to work.

No war cry. No time for the maggot-folk to raise an alarm. Kellach’s right arm swept up, bending at the elbow. The blade slashed the first from breastbone to chin. Blood flew dark, the air full of the foul stench of a lanced boil. The Cengar twisted, driving the longknife back, stabbing the second through the throat. He yanked the blade free, more misty blood staining the fog, and shifted the longknife to a more conventional grip. He brought the blade back around, the return stroke biting deeply into the first guard’s throat. More blood spurted from an open neck.

Both guards crumpled, mortally wounded before either hit the ground.

Praetor came scrambling along quickly, his face a shade paler than before. “God’s breath you’re fast.”

Kellach slid the longknife back into its scabbard. “Fast or slow, killing is killing.” He slipped the great-axe off his back and removed its hood.

The warmage pulled the gold armlet off the dead guard’s third arm. “Opaniri in manufacture. Stolen, obviously.”

Opanir existed an ocean away. Chances were that the mystery of how the bracelet got into the mountains of Zethanis would never be solved. Kellach found the mystery intriguing, but spared it no more than a fleeting thought. The bracelet was there, and the how of its being there would not change that fact. If he later perceived a value to learning the means by which it reached the maggot-folk, he would be relentless in hunting the answer down. Until such a circumstance arose, however, it mattered not.

Without giving Praetor Azurean the option of preceding him, Kellach headed into the cavern. It had begun life as a natural cave, but a dozen yards in showed signs of work. Generations of feet had worn paths smooth. Tools had widened passages. Bridges spanned crevasses, crudely hacked stairs and simple ladders provided access to side tunnels and catwalks. The maggot-folk had created their own little warren within the cave. It reminded Kellach of slum dwellings in the world’s larger cities.

As they moved on, their way lit dimly by luminescent lichen and tiny globes glowing with wan magelight, Kellach noticed things he’d never seen in the slums. The maggot-folk had carved alcoves of various sizes and appropriate shapes into stone walls. Within each they’d placed a statue or marble tile with some god’s visage on it. Some he recognized outright. Others he recognized by style—not knowing who they were but certain of where they came from. Opanir found itself represented well. Likewise statues of Imperial manufacture from before the flood and even a Sepheri totem or two warded the walls. Even more remarkable than the presence of the shrines was the pristine nature of their keeping. It contrasted sharply with the squalor the maggot-folk otherwise endured.

They slipped deeper into the cavern, remaining on the wider, well-traveled track, ignoring side passages that led to more residential chaos. A steady and solemn drumbeat drew them on. As regular as a martial beat, different notes lifted it above mere mechanical timing. It had purpose, but exactly what Kellach could not discern.