Elvenblood (26 page)

"We are going to
have
to convince this Jamal that we
aren't
fullblood elves and we can't do illusions," Keman continued urgently. "Otherwise they'll have us sitting there making butterflies and flowers, for the rest of our lives—"

"Unless Collen runs into them and arranges a trade or a ransom or—yes, well, that isn't very likely at the moment." She chewed her lip. "Let's sit here and watch the people for a while. Maybe we can find out more about them, something useful."

They didn't learn much, except that the riders worked the elves to sheer exhaustion—and that both Haldor and Kelyan grew depleted of magic and weary a great deal faster than either Shana or Mero would have under the same conditions.

Even then, the riders didn't seem disposed to let the elves go for the evening. Instead, they were plied with food and drink, allowed to rest for a bit, then put back to work.

This did not bode well for the four of
them
, if ever the riders discovered their real abilities, Jamal would not want to let them go, ever.

It was interesting, though, that although the warriors did not wear their armor here, they did retain their iron neckpieces and armbands, and sometimes added a browband as well. The women wore truly exquisite jewelry of black filigree, some of it faceted and polished in places until it sparkled like gemstones. All of the people here favored bright costumes of light, flowing fabrics; oranges, reds, and golden yellows, in more elaborate versions of the garments Shana had already seen them wearing during the day.

"Who's that?" Keman whispered suddenly, as there was something of a stir at the entrance to the tent. She peered through the half-lit darkness and made out a familiar face among the crowd pushing in through the entrance.

"That's Jamal," she whispered back, as the War Chief and his entourage were offered a hastily vacated set of cushions by those who had scrambled to their feet. "But who's that beside him?"

An older man with the physique of a blacksmith, his short hair as white as sheep's wool, had entered at nearly the same time, with his own entourage. While Jamal's followers were all clearly warriors, though none of them actually carried weapons here, this man's followers were all of
his
type; they all wore an odd headdress of folded fabric, and all wore spotless leather aprons. They differed from Jamal's group in one other striking way:
They
all wore iron torques from which a stylized flame-shape was hung as a pendant, formed out of the same filigree as the women's jewelry.

"Don't know," Keman answered, "But he seems to be just as important as Jamal!"

Indeed, there were as many people waiting to talk to the older man or hastening to serve him. He and his entourage got the same deferential treatment. Shana didn't detect any open animosity between the two groups, but she thought there was a certain undercurrent of tension when the two men glanced at each other.

If she were to hazard a guess about it, she'd say that the Iron People had
two
leaders, not one, and that this older man was the second of them. And that it was just possible that neither of them was entirely happy about sharing power.

Well, that was interesting! It might be useful, too. If there was some rivalry there, it might just be possible to exploit it

The first thing to do was to find out just what, exactly, the function of this older man was. Then she could see if there was some way to use one of them as leverage against the other.

She turned her attention back to Jamal, studying him further. He was the younger of the two, and might be the more flexible and forward-thinking. It might be best to appeal to him, rather than to the older man.

"He's watching us," Keman whispered urgently. "The old man, he's watching us."

She transferred her gaze, quickly. The old man
was
watching them both closely, eyes narrowed. Even as she looked, he turned his head slightly aside to talk to one of his followers, never taking that speculative regard off of them.

"I wish I knew what he was saying," Keman muttered to her.

She nodded; there was a great deal of intelligence in that man's face; something about the determined set of his mouth and chin told her he would be a bad man to cross. He would take his time about a solution to the problem you represented, and when he had his solution, he would methodically and thoroughly implement it. And she could not tell what she and Keman meant to him. Now, more than ever, she cursed the ability these people possessed that enabled them to keep her out of their minds.

"I wish," she replied fervently, "That I knew what he was
thinking
."

"Where did these new green-eyed demons spring from?" First Iron Priest Diric asked one of the acolytes in an aside. He took care to show none of his displeasure in his expression, but he made it very clear in his tone of voice. "And more to the point, why was I not informed of their capture?"

"Lord, as to the first, I was told that they were caught spying upon the wagons this afternoon," the acolyte replied, keeping his voice down and cultivating a pleasant tone, as if he spoke of nothing consequential at all. "As to the second, lord, I cannot tell you. I only heard of them this very evening."

Diric raised an eyebrow, both at the words and at the precautionary tone of voice, and took a sip of his beer, savoring it carefully. Only he and Jamal received beer; there wasn't a great deal of it left, and there was no more barley to brew more. Somewhere, somehow, the Forge Clan of the Iron People were going to have to find farmers to trade with. The People were running short of all manner of grain and grain products; in a month or so there would not even be flour for bread.

For that matter, they would have to find supplies of iron ore, or better yet, iron ingots. The last farmers they had found to trade with had been clustered in a village six months' travel behind them—the last miners, nearly a year in their wake. The forges had not been unpacked for far too long; the war-bulls would need horn-tips soon, surely. The women were already complaining that they needed new jewelry.

But Jamal did not seem particularly interested in finding miners or farmers with whom to trade. He seemed much more intent on finding someone to
fight
.

It was a good thing that the land itself had conspired against this particular plan. The People could not have sustained a war with supplies in their current state. The only creatures they had encountered on this endless grass-plain were
alicorn
s and these new green-eyed demons.

Of which no one bothered to inform me until I saw them myself when I entered the gather-tent
. He had a sour taste in his mouth that the beer could not remove, and a bitter taste in his mind when he considered his War Chief. Jamal was ambitious; he had known that from the start. The War Chief had made no attempt to cloak that ambition, and indeed,
most
War Chiefs were ambitious. Diric himself had outlived three of them—ambition was a good thing in a leader whose functions were all of aggression and defense. But Jamal was also
popular
, and that was beginning to worry Diric. The fact that he had been able to convince his followers to conceal the existence of these new green-eyed demons was very disturbing.

He cast a veiled glance at the War Chief, who reclined at his ease and watched with a paternal smile on his lips while the unmated danced and disported with one another. He had heard rumors that Jamal had greater ambitions than any other War Chief in Diric's memory. Those rumors spoke of Jamal's dream of returning to the homelands laden with booty, to unite all of the Iron Clans under his sole leadership. No one had ever done that before; the only body with any authority between the Iron Clans were the Priests, who oversaw disputes and made all needed arrangements whenever two or more Clans gathered together. Never had any two Clans agreed on a single leader before, much less all the Clans together. Had it been anyone else, Diric would have dismissed the ambition with a snort as idle dreaming. The trouble was, Jamal was just charismatic enough to carry the plan off. If he returned with the wagons groaning with foreign booty, his chances of success were very good.

And then what need would he have of the Iron Priests
? Diric asked himself, knowing what the answer would be. None, of course. And if he coveted the power held by other War Chiefs, how much more must he covet that held by the Priests?

Diric had not realized how much power the War Chief already held until this very evening. It had happened before, of course, that he did not hear of something until it happened to suit his rival—but it had never happened with something as important as the capture of these green-eyed demons.

The original two demons had been caught in the days of Diric's father's father, and were the Forge Clan's treasured possessions. Until that time, the fearsome pointy-eared paleskins had been deemed only legends, the kind of creature one frightened a disobedient child with. Diric knew the legends better than anyone else; it was his job, after all, to remember them and recount them so that the Iron People never forgot them. The legends told of a great war with these demons, who entered the world through a door between this world and their own. The demons had coveted this world—how not, after all?—and had killed and harried the ancestors and their former allies, the Com People, until the Iron People were forced to flee into the South with their herds, leaving their allies to hold the demons back so that they could escape. Only the cattle had survived that flight; there had been another sort of beast commonly ridden by the warriors and used as a pack animal, but these had not been able to bear up to the stresses of the flight or the hotter and wetter climate of the South. In time, the ancestors learned the twin secrets of the Magic-Metal and the Mind-Wall, and the few demons that followed after them were defeated and slaughtered.

The legends spoke of the contempt of the People and of the god, the First Smith, for these cowardly demons, who employed weapons that revealed that cowardice, weapons that killed at no risk to the wielder. But no one had believed in the legends of green-eyed demons except the Priests—until these two had appeared.

The War Chief of the time had made much of the fact that he had captured the terrible demons and enslaved them for the entertainment of the People, but Dine knew these two, Haldor and Kelyan, very well, and he knew they had been little or no threat to a well-armored warrior. They were children, youngsters on some kind of impulsive excursion, and as unprepared for the Iron People as the People were unprepared for them. The
accepted
story of the encounter was that the magics of Iron and the Mind-Wall discipline had protected War Chief Alaj, and had made it possible for him to overpower them. Diric had a rather different view of the encounter.

Those two, Haldor and Kelyan
—they
were not and are not as fearsome as their legended ancestors. Their powers are nothing like the powers those demons were said to call upon
,

Now, either the legends greatly exaggerated those powers, or these
two
were simply weaker. Diric was inclined to think the latter. In general, the legends as he had studied them made very few mistakes—they had not exaggerated the danger of the one-horns, for instance, nor their suicidal ferocity. So why should the danger represented by the green-eyed demons be any less than the legends painted it?

By this point, most of the people took the former view, however; they were used to having Haldor and Kelyan running tame about the camp and making their pretty illusions whenever the gather-tent went up. Diric had not been particularly worried about that until now; he had assumed that the Iron People would never again encounter their old foes. Now he was not so sure, and he feared that complacency could be a danger in itself.

He studied the two new demons; they looked back at him boldly, making no pretense but that they in turn were studying
him
. There were two of them, a male and a female, and he was told by his whispering acolyte that there were two more males back in the prisoners' wagon.

Interesting that one was a female; even more interesting that they did not seem to be quite the same breed as the original two. They were darker for one thing; the skins of Haldor and Kelyan remained white as a dead fish's belly no matter how much sun beat down upon them. They were not nearly so frail-looking, for another; their hair was of colors, and not like hanks of bleached linen fibers. The female's, a brilliant scarlet, was clearly the envy of many of the unmated women in
the
gather-tent. The male's was a proper dark color, although it hung sadly straight and did not wind tightly in proper curls.

Then again, the Corn People were said to be as pale and colorless as the corn they grew. Could these new demons be only half-demon? Could the demons have mated with Corn People to produce these creatures?

"Odd, the female's hair," he muttered to Haja, the acolyte. "I have never seen hair of that color."

"They claim they are not demons at all, but creatures of another sort," Haja replied softly. "Our demons say that this is the truth; in fact, Kelyan was quite argumentative about it, and Haldor was clearly insulted by the very notion. I do not recall them ever reacting so strongly to anything before."

Diric raised an eyebrow. There would be no advantage that he could see for Kelyan to claim that these creatures were something other than his own kind.
Interesting
.

"Are they to be housed permanently with the others?" he asked, taking care that his voice did not carry beyond Haja's ears.

"So I have been told," the acolyte replied. "It seems logical. Two of them did not fare well, walking behind a wagon. There is no reason to kill them with exhaustion when they make such good trophies, but equally no reason to house them separately from the other two. Kelyan and Haldor have made not one successful attempt at escape, and Jamal does not think that the addition of four more demons will make escape any more likely."