Warautumn (11 page)

As the door—oak, well made, and leading to an exercise run before the stalls—would likewise have resisted such assault.

There was light because there were two windows no wider than her outstretched fingers and thrice that high—too narrow to crawl through unless one went a bone at a time—which seemed increasingly likely.

There was heat because it was summer and the cooling effect of yesterday’s freak late-evening shower had long since dissipated, along with most of the surface water.

There was clothing because they’d been imprisoned in the clothes they had worn when that same cadre of Ixtians who terrified Krynneth had captured them—minus armor, weapons, and jewelry, unless one counted manacles at wrists and ankles among the latter.

And there was water, because the stable’s pump was in their room and—blessedly—still functioned, if only at a trickle, recent rain notwithstanding.

There might be food, if they could catch a rat, or stall-snake. Or if straw could be chewed long enough to coax forth some nutrition.

But mostly there was despair—and weariness—and sleep.

… dust drifted within golden shafts between window wall and floor …

… and the horses abruptly screamed louder
.

Merryn blinked to full alertness, cursing herself for letting complacency rule her. For hiding within the sounds of panicked horses were others, from the courtyard beyond the stable: sounds which had not been present before: mostly a kind of sporadic grinding crunch, coupled with heavy, thudding footsteps and an occasional raspy hiss. She blinked again, waiting
for the dizziness that had ambushed her upon waking to disperse.

Fine, then: She knew.

Geens:
man-sized lizard-things that generally hunted in packs of four, and which she was more convinced than ever might be intelligent.

But now that she had identified their low-pitched vocalics, she was both cheered and alarmed. Cheered because anything alive moving around beyond their prison was likely to change
something
, which might result in them
not
being stuck there for good; and alarmed because geens, though they were perfectly willing to scavenge, as these were clearly doing, preferred live prey when they could get it.

All of which took Merryn maybe five breaths to assess before she was on her feet and staggering, somewhat unsteadily because of the manacles, toward the wall in which the windows were set. The nearest showed nothing, but the other was quite a different matter.

Framed by limestone walls as thick as her forearm, she gazed out upon a sand-paved courtyard maybe twenty spans square, with the bulk of a collapsing hold-house barely visible to the right. It was late in the day, and the westering sun was painting the far wall an attractive shade between purple and red, and the snowcapped mountains beyond a nicer shade of pink. It was edging the leaves of the fruit trees along that wall with red, too, but more to the point, it was casting its light upon four healthy-looking, full-grown geens, three of which were tearing vigorously at the corpses of the five dead Ixtians—who, as recently as yester eve, had been full of dreams of conquest and extravagant passions. The last time she had seen those men alive, they had been relaxing around what had once been a campfire, recently bathed after days on the nonexistent road, and getting happily drunk while they plotted how they would take the magical royal regalia Merryn was supposed to be in the process of concealing and use it to depose Ixti’s new king, Kraxxi, after which it would serve to
spearhead a march north into Eron on the second war of conquest in half a year, only this time they would be victorious.

They hadn’t. In the manner of disaffected soldiers, they had quarreled, and then one of them had killed all the others—the ones who were being eaten now. Whereupon the sole survivor—a man named Orkeen, who had been fool enough to don the entire achievement of regalia in a moment of drunken, vain, madness—had blithely doffed that regalia and, still under its influence for whatever reason, strolled casually into the campfire. His blackened corpse lay athwart the ashes now, where even the geens seemed disinclined to touch it.

They were proving to be picky eaters, too. Most carnivores went first for the organ meat; these seemed to favor the big muscles of hip, leg, and lower back. Even as she watched, one planted a three-toed foot on the torso of the man named Inon (who had been nominal leader of the crew), bit into his thigh, gave a savage wrench, and gained not only the chosen morsel, but the entire leg, which it transferred to its short forelimbs. Looking oddly human, it proceeded to gnaw the meat to the bone. It had been a bare leg, Merryn noted. They were having little truck with meat that had been clothed.

“Merry?”

Krynneth’s voice startled her so much that she yipped in alarm and jerked back from the window, rattling her chains in the process.

Nor was she the only one who heard that noise. Geens could hear better than most reptiles, and before she could steady herself, the nearest one squatted down on its haunches, then leapt with blinding speed toward the window behind which she had been crouching. Its lizardlike head filled the narrow slot, yellow eyes distorted by the wavy glass set behind the heavy bars. Claws drew streaks on the pane. And then, with another oddly human gesture, it drew back a claw and flicked the pane—hard. Cracks starred out from that impact, and Merryn was more than glad that the opening was too narrow for any part of a geen to insert itself far enough to do damage.

Not that it didn’t try. Another flick sent glass rattling against the stone sill, and brought a hint of breeze, atop which rode the musky scent of reptile. It also brought the scent of sun-ripened carrion. Merryn was grateful that the glass had been intact ere now.

The commotion further roused Krynneth, who blinked once, saw what was transpiring, and retreated to the opposite wall, where he recited his entire vocabulary, which consisted of
yes, no, shit, piss, damn, key
, and
Merry
.

“Stay calm, Kryn,” Merryn hissed. “They can’t get in this way. And there’s a wall and a door between them and our door.”

“Damn,” Krynneth repeated, which seemed to be more than sufficient.

Somehow Merryn managed to hold her ground, though it took all the willpower she possessed to make no sudden moves that might rouse the geen to greater exertions.

Abruptly, it was gone, bounding away out of sight to Merryn’s right. Scarcely daring to breathe, she returned to the window and gazed out, fearing every instant to find herself facing the claws of a very cunning beast that had lain in wait outside.

In that, however, she was fortunate. More to the point, she got close enough to renew her investigation, and that revealed two things. One was that the beast
had
moved on, to judge by the way the others had ceased their munchings and were gazing toward something out of sight to their left. The other was that the already fractious horses, which had been housed in the other end of the stable, had now gained confirmation of the fact that four of their primary predators were not only skipping about three spans and a wall away from their stalls, but were also now cognizant of
their
existence—with the result that the poor, trapped beasts had redoubled their already cacophonous—and probably suicidal—ruckus.

Which only served to fix the geens’ attention squarely upon them.

Horses whinnied and screamed. Even six spans away, Merryn heard thumps of bodies against stone and hooves kicking sun-hardened wood.

The geens were a fury of movement as they hopped, leapt, and scurried toward the source of that noise, which clearly proclaimed fresh meat. A terrible scrabbling sound ensued, coupled, incredibly, with the heavy smack of one leaping atop the roof. Tiles shattered; wood groaned and splintered. Dust shifted down from the ceiling.

But the geens, for the nonce, were thwarted. Certainly three of them came stomping back into view.

And then Merryn saw something that froze her heart indeed. The geens were stalking around the courtyard, peering intently about, as though in quest of something particular. One picked up a limb that had fallen from one of the fruit trees, shook it experimentally, then smacked it against the wall, as though to test its strength. It shattered—but the more supple limb that same geen wrested from the tree did not.

Another followed its example, while the third one—the one that by the pattern of spots mottling its hide was the one which had tried to get at her and Krynneth—prowled through the human detritus around the fire, reached down, fumbled for something on the ground—and to Merryn’s abject horror, rose again with the Lightning Sword clutched in a scaly, black-clawed fist!

“Damn,” Merryn muttered, only then aware that Krynneth had crept over to stand beside her. “Damn, oh damn, oh damn,” as she clutched his arm for comfort that would have shamed her any other time. Krynneth was sweating profusely, but saying nothing.

As for the geen …

Something
was clearly occurring within its narrow, scaly skull, because it was standing absolutely frozen, with a startled expression—if something with so little flexible flesh on its bones could be said to
have
an expression—on its face.

Thought roared out at her so strongly that she flinched.

Geen
thought.

It
was
thought, too.

Not the raw ravening instinct she would have expected from a beast.

Except, perhaps, from a birkit—if what Avall, Div, and Rann had told her about their sentience was true.

As to what the geen thought:
That
was hard to determine, if for no other reason than because it proclaimed itself so loudly. Mostly she sensed surprise, overlying an endless pit of hunger like froth upon a sea. But there were images along with it, the bulk having to do with eating horses—which made Merryn cringe in revulsion.

Yet along with those baser impressions came a keen curiosity about the world at large, and especially about these other two-legged predators that were so strong and weak by turns.

“You want free.”

The thought was a jolt in Merryn’s mind. Had the geen “thought” that at her? More to the point, if it had learned that from her, what else had it learned? Maybe how to get in to where she and Krynneth were trapped? How to secure a free meal of humans at its leisure?

“The long claw will not let me,” came the unexpected answer
.

And that was all. The contact shattered as though it had been smashed with a hammer. Merryn uttered a cry, and reality came whirling back, only to vanish once more as what sounded like lightning slammed into the stable to the right. Light flared through every chink in the doorjamb; the walls shook and trembled, and another healthy cascade of dust poured down from the ceiling. One arch cracked but held. The rattle of sliding tiles filled the yard.

There followed the worst sounds Merryn had ever heard: the screams, wails, and cries of seven horses having their throats torn out and their bellies opened.

Or maybe not, for there was another sound as well: one full of anger and fear combined, as at least one doughty equine
proved unwilling to surrender its life without cost. Hooves sounded loud on stone floors as the beast lurched from side to side. And hard on those noises came the dull thud of something large being kicked, followed at once by the clear crack of bone breaking and the long shivering screech of a geen in pain. Wood ripped and splintered.

But then—miraculously—hooves clattered in the yard. Forgetting the geens, Merryn dashed to the window—to see that one bleeding horse had indeed broken free—her own faithful Boot, in fact—and was careening around the courtyard. Once, twice, the mare made that circuit, but on the third, Boot found sense and charged through the gate that the geens had conveniently left open.

As for her fellows, they were surely all dead now, or at least they had all stopped screaming. But that wasn’t the worst sound anyway. Indeed, for a fair long while, Merryn had to put her hands over her ears as she waited for the slurps, grunts, and tearings of the geens’ grisly feast to cease.

Yet even that was not the worst of the waiting; for every moment, she feared to hear the slapping tread of heavy reptiles approaching. Forbidden, she and Krynneth might be—to one geen; she doubted the others would care, if they were still unsated.

But to her surprise, they seemed to have eaten their fill. Or at least they left the now-silent stable and, one by one, stalked back into the yard to disappear through the open gate to the right.

All save one.

Merryn’s heart skipped a beat when she saw that one. It still had the sword, she realized with a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. And it grasped that sword very much as a man would grip one.

Twice, that geen stalked about the yard as though searching for something—and Merryn had a terrible feeling she knew what. Indeed, it paused the second time it passed what remained of her window into the courtyard. A yellow eye peered
in at her. Somehow, Merryn met that gaze clearly—until it blinked and continued on.

She lost sight of the geen after that, and did not locate it again until it had reached the ruined gate. It turned there, raised the sword once more, and slashed it down.

Lightning followed it straight into the stable. And Merryn knew no more.