The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (24 page)

He had come to this world in anger. And now a final spurt of that anger rose in him. It took a firm hold
within his spirit. The force of it struck back from the triangle against the Preceptor’s blade. The thin man was taken by surprise, thrown backward onto the bloodied ground.

But the Preceptor was too powerful to be more than temporarily overcome by this small show of resistance.

With a hiss, he urged the encircling Storm Wolves closer. “This one is dangerous. Kill him immediately. I want his head and the bauble on it!”

As if from a disembodied distance, Alan felt his head drawn back once more to expose his neck. The howling began again as the legionaries celebrated their lust for blood. In those same few moments, through the flaring triangle, Alan sensed other minds closing in on them from the surrounding trees. He sensed the feral instincts of born hunters, moving too stealthily and quickly for his confused mind to follow. Through the ruby on his brow he heard another mind communicate an order:
Blood-rage!

Immensely powerful, the order radiated from that single focus, as, from the shadows, Alan sensed how the same mind was now focused on the centurion, with his sword arm rising. Through the triangle, Alan saw how, in the glare of the watching eyes, the figure of the centurion was haloed in blood-red.

As if sensing his own danger, the centurion whirled, his sword arm still rising. In that same instant Alan felt the blood-rage turn to fury. It was lightning quick—far quicker than he recalled of Siam. He sensed a huge body
contract, as if timing the precise moment to spring, then the whip-like arc of that streamlined shape, the shriek of contact and the quick snap of fangs and rip of claws that ended combat so quickly the attacker was gone before the fountain of gore was spent. Even before the clawed feet had touched back to the ground, the blood-rage had already focused on another red-haloed figure. Alan’s head jerked back with fright at the terrifying nature of the combat and the grisly sound that had accompanied the snap of jaws.

Shackled by the crucifixion of his limbs, all he could do was swing his head from side to side in an attempt to see what was happening.

His breath caught in fits and starts as the deadly warfare ebbed and flowed around him, the blurs of movement that were all he could make out of the attack of . . . of what? Through the triangle, the sensations of hunting and attack were too strange and inchoate to remain focused on them for more than seconds. The guttural shouting of Storm Wolves was quickly submerged under a rising thunder of snarls and roars.

By degrees, Alan sensed how the attack on the Storm Wolves was precisely coordinated. A single focus of power controlled the attack, a single mind, yet a mind that seemed to be accompanied by a feral soul spirit guided by instinct, much as he had sensed with Siam at the ice-bound lake, but a mind and soul spirit far more intelligent and deadly than Siam’s. From that focus, instructions swept over the battleground, fusing spirit
with purpose, and translating to a deliberate and controlled fury and annihilation.

Then, abruptly, he had his first clear vision of that focus. His heartbeat quickened and began rising into his throat.

A massive snow tigress emerged into the clearing. With a swirl of her head, two implacable blue eyes gazed at his bound and trapped figure and blinked; then she was gone, returning to her command of a hunting party of great cats that pursued the Storm Wolves among the trees.

Shit, shit—sheeeeee-it!

Sweat drenched Alan’s face. His breath caught in his throat. His limbs writhed in a useless effort to break his bonds and his skin contracted with fright as, in a continuing ballet of death, these furies took control of the clearing, panting steam through slavering jaws, great heads swiveling through wide arcs, dilated nostrils scenting the air.

With wild eyes, the Preceptor rose out of concealment and stabbed with his twisted blade at the eyes of the leading tigress, but she evaded the weapon with a toss of a great head with a crystal embedded in its brow. A flash of power from the crystal threw the Preceptor high into the air, his snarling figure smashed back into the undergrowth.

Within minutes the battle was over. Slender dark-skinned women were appearing out of the trees, organizing the aftermath with urgent whispers. They
carried clothing and armor to clothe the gigantic figures who were manifesting, like liberated souls, among the shadows of the trees. Alan clenched his eyes shut with shock. The great cats were the soul spirits of . . . of some kind of warrior women.

He shouted with pain as he was lifted from the ground, his limbs cut free, then assisted in standing by the attendant women. He found himself in a circle of dead legionaries and Leloo, their carcasses still oozing blood into the snow. Kawkaw was the only other survivor within the clearing, although he appeared to be unconscious. Alan ignored him, grinding his teeth at the agony of release in his joints and ligaments. He felt shattered, mentally and physically, and the sense of intense cold was returning to his skin. But he had no inclination to feel sorry for himself.

Mo was still missing.

With an effort of will, he lifted his head to confront the gaze of a statuesque, bronze-skinned woman who was studying him with luminous eyes the speckled brown of tortoiseshell. He had no idea who she was, or what army she represented. But he was in no doubt as to what was needed, and needed urgently. He spoke with a voice croaky with exhaustion and pain:

“I need your help to find my friend!”

The Shee

“Save your strength!” The woman waved to one of her companions, who took a fur-lined greatcoat from one of the dead Storm Wolves and wrapped it around Alan’s shoulders. Then, with the help of one of the others, she offered him a turquoise flask containing a honey-coloured elixir.

“This is healwell, from the Guhttan Mountains, the homeland of the Shee.”

“The Shee?”

“These warriors who saved you.”

For a moment his eyes darted about the clearing, contemplating the slaughter, the tall female warriors now encircled by ministering smaller women.

“Drink!” she urged him. “Take no more than a sip. It will help you to recover your strength.”

He coughed, wincing with pain where the legionary had kicked his ribs. He murmured, “Oh, man!”

Then he took a sip from the flask. The elixir was as thick as syrup and it burned his mouth, like his grandfather’s poteen. But it worked. It dimmed his pain so quickly it must have entered his blood through the lining of his mouth and throat. His strength improved and the pain lessened in his limbs. He felt a little more able to think about what he had just witnessed.

A rhythmic chanting began in the distance, somewhere behind the line of trees. It sounded like a much larger force of Storm Wolves, raising the hackles on his neck. Glancing past the woman, he eyed her astonishing companions. None other than this woman had spoken a word to him.

“Who are you?” He turned back to address the bronze-skinned woman, his voice still weak but now with much less pain.

“Forgive me. I am failing in my duties as diplomat.” She allowed him a second sip of the honey-colored elixir before taking it back and passing it to one of the assistants. Then, after closely inspecting the triangle in his brow, she bowed deeply before him.

“You are the Mage Lord, Alan Duval?”

Alan stared at her in confusion.

The woman’s words implied a familiarity with his name that he didn’t understand. The tall figures standing in the background were now clothed with long capes that appeared to offer them some camouflage. Through
the triangle he sensed a vision that still shocked him. Unlike Siam, where the bear soul spirit had been embryonic, the great cat soul spirit crouched immediately beneath the surface of these tall female warriors. It was an integral part of them, as if the two beings existed as one in the same person. He saw swords now being fitted to their belts by the smaller ministering women.

Great cats turning into women, armed with swords!

He realized that the spokeswoman was studying him closely. Her voice had become urgent, impatient.

“We have come in haste to meet you. Permit me to introduce myself and my company.” She stood self-consciously erect. “My name is Milish Essyne Xhosa. My matrilineage is that of a Princess of Laàsa. I was until recently a stateswoman of the Council-in-Exile. But need demands honesty between us. No council edict has sanctioned our coming here. Yet still you might regard me as an ambassador for my world.”

Alan sighed. “Hey, look!” He still winced with pain from the bruised ribs. “I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying to me.”

Desperate as he was to rescue Mo, he realized that a few minutes of composure would be more likely to help her than going out on a reckless hunt on his own. Somehow he had to enlist the help of these powerful women and, to do that, he needed to understand them. He inspected Milish, who, even without her headdress, must have been six feet tall. Her face was haughty, perfectly proportioned even to the deep shadows below the
high cheekbones. His eyes darted past her once again, drawn with open incredulity to the armed women watching him from the background.

“My companions are bred for war since ancient times. The others are their helpers, known as Aides.” She bowed in the direction of her taller companion. “Ainé bears the Oraculum of Bree upon her brow. It is the mark of Kyra—the hereditary leadership among the Shee.”

Alan studied the ferocious-looking woman called Ainé. Her hair extended, in luxuriant tufts of sideburns the color of ivory, down the sides of her down-covered face to the angles of her jaws, and there were symmetrical markings, like large brown freckles, over her brow. There was a scar, like a sword cut, running from her left brow down onto her cheek. Her eyes were the same eyes he had seen in the snow tigress—huge and a glacial blue. There was a rippling strength in her broad arms and shoulders. Her facial markings resembled Maori war tattoos, but hers were as natural as the decorations on the wings of a butterfly—thick brown marbling that followed the center of her brow in two widening tracks, with stripes like broad ribs moving out to either side and dappling down over her cheeks to fuse with the luxuriant sideburns. He saw a puckering of scar tissue in the center of her forehead, broken veins about a flat oval of glistening crystal that was embedded there, like his own ruby triangle—what the stateswoman, Milish, had called “the Oraculum of Bree.”

There could be no doubting that this giantess, Ainé, had been the fulcrum of command during the battle action, and that her soul spirit had been the snow tigress that had thrown off the Preceptor. Inspecting the crystal in her brow more closely, it looked as if a wafer of jade, perhaps an inch long by two-thirds of an inch across, had been welded to her skull. Its surface was as smooth as a pearl’s, yet deep within its surface he saw a constantly changing pattern that pulsated, like silk held at a constantly varying angle to the light.

“The Kyra’s companions are Muîrne, the teacher, and, by her side the warrior-in-noviciate, Valéra. If you cheat death on the road that lies before you, this will be your debt to them.”

Although there were other Shee present, Milish did not trouble herself to name them. Alan turned from Milish to speak urgently to the Kyra, Ainé. “There was a girl with me. Her name is Maureen—Mo. The Storm Wolves have taken her. We have to save her.”

The Kyra met his gaze. She was astonishingly tall, at least seven feet, with thick fair hair coiled into a braid and fastened over her left shoulder with a plain silver pin. But there was nothing romantic about her: she looked more like a bloodied survivor from countless battles. “Why risk many lives to save one girl?”

He recognized that deep, authoritative voice. It was the same voice that had called out to him in the river.

She took a step closer, grasping the hilt of the sword that dangled from her belt. “A cloud of blood hangs over the province of Ulisswe. Word has spread of the
arrival of the Mage Lord Alan Duval, the Redeemer of the Olhyiu, bearing the Oraculum of the First Power of the Holy Trídédana on his brow. And now we see that the rumor is true. The hearts and souls of the oppressed have been set aflame. Already new rumors are spreading of the destruction of a platoon of Storm Wolves in the icy north. Such hopes have been stirred even more by the flight of the Temple Ship, its new master heading south to confront the Council-in-Exile at Carfon.”

Redeemer of the Olhyiu! The Oraculum of the First Power of the Holy Trídédana . . .
Alan’s hand reached, instinctively, to the ruby triangle embedded in his brow.

Was that what the old woman had really done to him—embedded an oraculum of power in his head? And how had word spread about him—or for that matter the killing of the Storm Wolves around the lake? He shook his head, desperate for explanations, yet aware that it just wasn’t the right time.

“We have to save my friend.”

“Tell me why we should save one girl when the armies of the Death Legion have taken to war. They are fanning out over all the occupied lands. Rebellion is in the air. Many villages and towns are in open insurrection. It was this rumor of the Mage Lord that led us to you. It is also the reason why so few of the Storm Wolves could be diverted to this ambush. The Shee are moving eastward from the Guhttan Mountains in such numbers as have not been seen since the fall of Ossierel, though they are too distant yet to assist us.”

“Mo isn’t Olhyiu. Four of us were brought here from another world. If I’m important, then so is she.”

The Kyra reared back in astonishment and Milish joined her in confronting Alan. But he had no time to waste in argument. “There’s a thin man among the Storm Wolves, armed with a twist-bladed dagger. They call him Preceptor. If we find him, maybe we’ll find Mo.”

Milish whirled to gaze eye-to-eye with the Kyra. No words were exchanged between them but Alan glimpsed a more intense flickering in the patterns of the Kyra’s oraculum. Then, in a blur of camouflaged movement, the Kyra was gone. Milish also melted away, as if under a cloak of invisibility, into the surrounding forest. Meanwhile the remaining Shee formed a guard around him. They included the novice, Valéra, who had amber eyes and golden blonde hair fastened with a silver pin, and Muîrne, the smallest and sleekest of them, who had creamy white hair that contrasted with eyes as gray as granite. Like Ainé, Valéra conveyed the soul spirit and strength of a tigress, while in Muîrne Alan sensed a soul spirit more akin to the speed and cunning of a snow leopard.

Under Valéra’s direction, the Shee led him through the trees. Their movements were lithely graceful for such large and weapon-encumbered women. Under their camouflage cloaks, which fell almost to the ground, they wore loose-fitting trousers of olive green cotton, tied at mid-calf over the leggings, and boots. Their downy arms were tattooed with fantastic imagery of animals.

In the gaps between the foliage, Alan saw that it was late in the day, with no more than a couple of hours of daylight left.

They emerged onto a sandy beach upriver of where Alan had been dragged ashore, and here he saw several long canoes that had been beached in a hurry. These, he assumed, were the vessels that had carried the Shee into the battle zone. They were powerful craft, carved from whole trunks of cedar, their prows uplifted six feet out of the water, and Y-shaped in their end sections. Sleek in design, they contained packs that Alan guessed must belong to the assistants they called Aides, but the lead canoe also contained a trunk made of polished ebony and inlaid with silver, which looked so ornate it had to belong to Milish.

Alan could find no trace of the Olhyiu boats, including the Temple Ship. He hoped that the bulk of them had escaped from the trap—and Kate too. He didn’t want to have to worry about Kate as well as Mo.

Above the sand, a series of tracks led away into the forest. The Shee led him among the trees, away from the river and in a new direction, until they arrived at a clearing that looked as if it had served the main body of Storm Wolves as an encampment. Here, what appeared to be several dozen Shee, led by Ainé, had spread out to encircle a force of about sixty Storm Wolves, who had assumed a close-knit circular battle formation.

Milish appeared by his side, her voice sounding weary. “These will prove difficult to defeat. They are the Chosen, from the fighting arenas of Ghork Mega.”

Peering about the clearing, Alan could see no sign of Mo. Then a new chanting began. It was the Shee who were chanting now, a deep-throated battle hymn. Then, suddenly, as if goaded into fighting, the ranks of Storm Wolves appeared to dissolve, the legionaries already among the encircling Shee in a fury of hand-to-hand combat.

Alan had never seen hand-to-hand fighting move with such speed. It seemed that the Shee could fight ferociously in human or animal form. He saw the flashing green of their sword blades, eerily luminescent. But the battle was far from one-sided. Ainé’s reluctance to divert her forces for one missing girl now made sense, for these Storm Wolves fought back with a maniacal passion, glad, it seemed, of this opportunity to kill Shee. Alan saw several Shee stagger and fall, the movement of the legionaries’ blades so deadly it happened in a blur. Suddenly, with the same lightning change that had begun the fighting, the surviving legionaries fell back into their common defensive formation and the Shee closed ranks to complete the encirclement.

Alan studied the shields of the Storm Wolves. They were long and rectangular, decorated with the same familiar symbol he had seen on the handle of the Preceptor’s dagger, a triple-looped infinity. He also noticed that the shields were curved in their transverse section so they slotted together along their long sides to form an interlocking wall. Others carried their shields aloft,
creating a defensive dome. Even from this distance, he sensed the same darkness that had recently enveloped him. The Preceptor had to be among them.

“Ask the Shee if they have seen anything of a girl, Milish.”

Word came back that several Shee had glimpsed a small bound captive among the legionaries, but that the head was covered in a sack. “It’s got to be Mo,” he muttered, with a surge of hope. “That has to be the reason they are being so defensive. And the Preceptor is there. I can sense his presence.”

The soldiers were performing another coordinated battle strategy with a harsh, guttural chanting.

A filthy looking smoke curled from the fissures between the shields and then coalesced over them to envelop the shield-wall, as if welding them together in a power-charged unity. The calculation involved in this strange warfare, the rhythms and formalities of it, appeared important. The Shee were passing items from one woman to another. Alan glimpsed a jade-green glow the color of Ainé’s oraculum. It looked as if they were charging the points of arrows and the blades of swords, using crystals that were carried by each of the women. For several minutes nothing happened other than a repeat of the ritualistic chanting. Yet the Shee were tensing as if with a tangible expectancy. Then sporadic fire, with long plumes of white smoke, broke out of the shell of shields, and with the erratic volley the Shee became a blur of movement, dodging the smoking trails.

The smoking missiles streaked through the air, trailing a putrescent green glow. Alan remembered the green fire during the attack at the frozen lake and more recently in the attack on the river. There was that same stink coming from the burning missiles, a vile sulphurous smell.

With a groan, one of the Shee was hit. In a final act of defiance, she hurled her sword into the glistening force of the shield wall, but it fell where it struck, incapable of penetration. Alan saw that there was something crawling over the sword. It appeared to be a living growth of some sort, a glistening contagion that proliferated as it spread, as if attempting to devour the metal it came into contact with. Even the fallen giantess was being consumed by the same living poison of the legionaries’ weapon. It invaded every organ and tissue with horrible speed and malignancy. Within minutes, he saw that the charnel-green was glowing inside the dead warrior’s eyes.