Grudgebearer (44 page)

“I know . . .” Rae'en had frowned. “It's stubborn. I can feel part of myself reaching out, touching the weapon, but it won't take root.”

“I remember before the Sundering,” Kholster had said, running his thumb along the central blade, giving a satisfied smile as the blade bit into his flesh, “when Crimmar was still among us. He made a bow with which he wanted to become one. He worked on it for days, tried everything he could to make Flitter take in his spirit. It was the same way with his warsuit and with his first warpick.”

“Did it work?” Rae'en had asked.

“In the end. All it needed was encouragement!” As Kholster had spoken the final word, he'd swung Testament over his head and down toward the cavern floor.

“No!” Rae'en had reached for the weapon to snatch it from her father's grasp, to protect it. Now she suspected he'd had no intention of smashing it, but then, it had been so clear he meant to break it. A low rumble, deep within Rae'en's chest, had risen up and out. Time had slowed, and an irkanth of pure spirit had torn free of her body, lunging into the weapon. Mortal irkanths have light-brown fur, but this one had been the color of spring grass. Her father had shortened his blow, swinging Testament in an arc a mere hairsbreadth from the stone below and tossing it up and over to Rae'en.

“Yours is a reluctant spirit,” Kholster had told her. “Like Crimmar's, it was loath to make such a strong connection, but once made . . .”

“It is unbreakable,” Rae'en whispered to herself.

She had seen the spirit within Testament that one time, but now, running through The Parliament of Ages, whipping it through the air, she felt it and wished she could hear him roar. Grudge cried out like a hawk in battle from time to time, but Testament remained silent, reluctant. Kholster had said if she ever faced the Zaur, it—

Testament roared inside her mind, bringing her to a quick stop, Testament at the ready.

Um . . .

Rae'en crept through the forest in the half-light of dawn. Around her, birds woke and the forest prepared for a new day. The dew dampened her boots, but she spared it no thought.

Is that? Guys, I think I feel something. A vibration.

Rae'en pushed her hand gently into the cool soil, eyes closed in concentration.

I swear
, she thought at her absent Overwatches,
I'm not imagining . . .

Did she hear something at the edge of her mind, too? A muffled shout? Or did she miss them so much she was imagining voices in her head?

Kazan? M'jynn?

Ignoring the inner thrill at receiving even such a distant mental murmur, focusing on the vibrations, Rae'en lay her head against the sod.

There it is
, she sent.
Skritch-scratch. Thum. Brum. Thum. Brum. Testament roared, and in the silence after I heard . . .

Rae'en stood up sharply, arms akimbo, long red braid dangling over her right shoulder.
The real question is whether that is digging or someone traveling through an underground tunnel.

Rae'en chased the phantom vibration, darting from tree to tree, treading as lightly and quickly as she could.
This would be so much easier if Uncle Glin were here.
She tried not just to bring back all the things her uncle had ever taught her about danger signs in a mine but also to apply them to the current situation. Back home, huge steam-driven fans endlessly turned, forcing fresh air throughout the deepest of tunnels. She still knew how to recognize black damp (air that was too bad to breathe) and ways to safely test for fire damp (air that was dangerously flammable), but she hadn't needed to ever really use the counter-insurgency training in how to detect an enemy tunneling into her territory before, not since the Mining Kingdoms all joined together under one democratically elected Foreman. That was before her dad's time, before the Underminer Wars were ended by the arrival of the Aern . . . she didn't even know if there were any Rock Dogs left in the world, but if there were, they stayed away from the Dwarven-Aernese Collective.

Unslinging Testament from her back, she began to alternately pound the ground and scan the terrain for any spot that might naturally conceal a hole or air vent or . . .

Whud. Whud. Whud.

There's definitely a big hollow space under here. Somewhere, but kind of deep down. I—

Rae'en spied a lump of banded gneiss. It wasn't that such a rock couldn't be found in the middle of a forest, but there was something “placed” about it. It wasn't poking out of the ground, it . . .

She walked a wide arc until she could see the way it abutted a large tree. A dead tree.

“It's an air vent,” she whispered smugly as she approached it at a crouch. “But who could be tunneling under The Parliament of Ages? The Vael would have shaped the earth, not dug into it . . .”

The rough, banded surface—a sequence of grays and browns—would have spoken volumes to Uncle Glinfolgo. She pictured him licking the rock and making some deeply insightful pronouncement like: “They live in the mountains, born of foreign stone.” He would close his eyes and point far off toward the Sri'Zauran Mountains, his face blank and motionless as if hewn from the rock the Dwarves so loved. “The foreign stone,” he would say, “is that way, miles and miles of it, mountains that Jun has long since abandoned.”

Bird squirt! She'd just been joking, but . . . there couldn't be Zaur here, could there?

*

Kholster smelled Zaur in the forest. A salty, lizard scent—like fish and Oathbreaker mingled together—lingered low, clinging to the short, broad blades of violet-tinted myr grass. His muscles tightened, body taut, eyes closed, senses straining.

Where are you?

Sunlight broke through the boughs of the ancient oaks overhead, playing along his brow, highlighting his close-cropped red hair that had been bleached almost blond during the long trip from South Number Nine to The Parliament of Ages. A familiar wolfish expression spread across his lips, half-grin, half-snarl, revealing not only the doubled upper and lower canines but the slightly enlarged, almost saw-like, first molar.

There are Zaur here
, he thought at Vander, scratching absently at the flaking skin at his pointed ear tips. It took a great deal of sun to give an Aern sunburn, but Kholster supposed close to a hundred days above ground traveling all day each day counted.

A scouting party?
Vander asked.

This far south of the Eldren Plains, it could hardly be more than that.

Even though a century had passed since he'd last ventured through The Parliament of Ages, the forest belonging to the Vael, Kholster thrilled at its sounds and smells. The myr grass underfoot released an acrid odor as it crushed beneath his boots with a lack of stealth his trainers would have beaten him for when he was still a slave all those millennia ago.

As much as Kholster wished otherwise, the forest was no longer truly his home. Each time he returned, it took longer for his senses to become used to the primal world from which he had been exiled. He, like all his people, had embraced his new life on the sea and under the ground. As a result, his tread was heavy, not as heavy as when his people had stalked clad in their warsuits, sheathed in their metal skins, their true skins, but heavy enough for the Zaur to feel the vibrations if he wasn't careful.

He hadn't seen a Zaur scouting party in five centuries, not since a chance encounter years before while trading at Port Na'Shie with the humans in northern Zaliz. To discover them now, so close to the Conjunction, was both curious and exhilarating. Since their last warlord's death, the Zaur had shown little evidence of organized leadership. They stayed close to their tunnels and burrowed deeper into the cracks and crevices of the Sri'Zauran Mountains to the north. They were the humans' and Oathbreakers' problems.

He felt vague pang of guilt that Rae'en hadn't stumbled across them herself and gotten a chance at them.

Then why am I tracking them
, he asked himself,
and why am I so excited?

Because
, Vander laughed,
killing Zaur is why we were forged in the first place.

A flash of memory stained Kholster's thoughts. In his mind's eyes, a wizened Oathkeeper, his robes drenched in the bright-orange iron-deficient blood of the Aern, screamed at him. A reptilian creature writhed on a stone table, chained in place. “You! Will! Eat!”

Kholster had indeed eaten . . . had been compelled to do so. . . . He'd never understood all the screaming, the beatings . . . the other cruelties. Why not simply order him in a calm clear voice?

Ah, well. To his surprise, the Zaur had tasted good.

Putting the memory of his creator out of his head, Kholster circled the central oak to where the scent was the strongest and found the still-damp mark where a Zaur—a scout, he assumed—had voided itself. Definitely Zaur.

Kholster crouched down, outlining the tracks with his fingers. Zaur moved on all fours, and Kholster knew the signs intimately, even though he had grown unaccustomed to tracking prey overland. He eyed the markings in the soil, noting the sign of the hind feet—four front claws and one center back claw on each pad—and the indentation which ran along the middle, made by the belly and the tail bumping the ground as the Zaur ran. The forepaws were set wider, leaving not claw holes but knuckle marks in the dirt. Two thin lines to the outsides proved that his quarry was armed with twin Skreel knives.

Kholster fancied that he could almost make out the tongue trail. Warpick slung on his back, Kholster ran after the Zaur. He ran silently, careful to break step, letting each footfall land on the softest earth. Within the space of an hour, he spotted them in a clearing.

Do you see it?
Kholster asked Vander.

I see what you see.

One of the scouting party flattened itself prone, flicking its tongue along the ground, and Kholster froze. Like snakes, the Zaur weren't known for their hearing, but they sensed vibrations well enough, especially when they lashed the ground with their dull gray tongues. Kholster waited until the scout's tongue flicked out over the grass, then he stamped his feet on forest floor and, reversing his grip on his warpick, struck the ground with it in a pattern he hadn't used since the last war.

Kholster spoke Tol passably, but he had never been good with the language of vibrations and tail slaps Zaur used to supplement their verbal speech. He did know one phrase well. He tapped the message out with his warpick and watched to see what the Zaur would do.

<>

The lead Zaur grabbed one of the others, forcing his head toward the ground. Kholster stilled himself again, grinning wickedly from his vantage point between the trees. Years of tracking over rocky terrain or underground might have dulled his skills for the forests of his old home, but not so much so that he couldn't outwit a few Zaur. He waited until the other Zaur looked like it was about to rise and then moved forward, using the loping, skip-like run the Aern had developed in the wars to ensure the Zaur knew who was coming for them, to repeat that same phrase with every few steps.

Bloodmane is coming.
If only that were true.

*

After only a little digging, Rae'en managed to widen the air shaft enough to lean in and get a look. Holding onto the withered roots of the tree, she slid down far enough to look both ways. The root snapped, dropping her unceremoniously into the tunnel proper.

In the tunnel, Rae'en found traces of blood.

Whatever it is, in the dark our blood looks the same.
Something had put up quite a fight, but this was where whatever or whoever it was had been taken down. A lance pinned a Zaur corpse to the tunnel wall.

Rae'en tugged the weapon free of the wall, bringing the dead Zaur down with it. The sight of shredded muscle, covered thickly with clotting blood, pulled at Rae'en's senses. Her stomach grumbled hungrily.
Now is not the time for the Arvash'ae
, she told herself.

Perhaps only discernible due to the nearness of the Arvash'ae, Rae'en caught other scents beneath the reptilian pall. A human maybe? And some other smell. Like the half-blood in the Arena. An Oathbreaker?

Zaur never take prisoners
, she thought to her Overwatches. “So where are the bodies?”

Teeth gritted, Rae'en skipped over the body of another dead Zaur. Rough gashes around the reptilian throat of the Zaur corpse showed that the creature had been garroted with a length of chain. A gentle breeze carried the earthy scent of sweat and blood through the underground passage. Rae'en's nostrils flared; a low growl slipping past her lips.

The Arvash'ae
. Early. She snarled, her mouth watering. Something about the reptilian scents was more appetizing than the most succulent cuts of beef.
I should have been fine for at least another three days. Back to the vent.
She forced herself to turn, teeth clenched, hands tightening around Testament's haft to keep them from shaking.

She took one step and then another, heading back the way she came as she fumbled in her saddlebag for the soul-bonded ring on its fine chain.
Out. Out. Out. Report this to Kholster. Out. Out. Out.