Ilse Witch (26 page)

He sighed and shook his head. “It hurts to admit it, even now. I backtracked into a stretch of land I knew I shouldn’t go into, thinking I could do so just long enough to get clear of the mess I was in. I fell and twisted my ankle badly enough that I could barely walk. It was almost nightfall, and when it got dark enough, a werebeast came for me.”

The fire snapped loudly, and Bek jumped in spite of himself. Werebeasts. They were something of a legend in the Southland, one half believed in by most, but seen only by a few. Part animal, part spirit, difficult even to recognize, let alone defend against, they fed off your fear and took shape from your imagination and almost nothing could stand against them, not even the great moor cats. The possibility that they might encounter one here was not comforting. “I thought they only lived in the deep Anar, farther east and north.”

Panax nodded. “Once, maybe. Times change. Anyway, the werebeast attacked, and I did battle with it for most of the night. I fought so long and so hard I don’t think I even knew what I was doing in the end. It changed shape on me repeatedly, and it tore me up pretty good. But I held my ground, backed up against a tree, too stubborn to know that I couldn’t possibly win that sort of contest, growing weaker and more tired with every rush.”

He stopped talking and stared off into the dark. The cousins waited, thinking him lost in thought, perhaps remembering. Then abruptly he came to his feet, battle-ax gripped in both hands.

“Something’s moving out there—” he started to say.

A fleet, dark shape hurtled out of the night, followed by a second and then a third. It seemed as if the shadows themselves had come alive, taking form and gathering substance. Panax was knocked to the ground, grunting with the force of the blow he was struck. Quentin and Bek rolled aside, the shadows hurtling past them, dark shapes with just a flash of teeth and claws and deep-throated growls.

Ur’wolves! Bek snatched his long knife from its loop at his belt, wishing that he had something more substantial with which to defend himself. An ur’wolf pack was even capable of bringing down a full-grown Koden.

Panax had recovered and was wielding the two-edged ax, shifting his weight left and then right as the shadows flitted all around him at the edges of the light, looking for an opening. Every so often, one would launch itself at him, and he would meet the attack with a sweep of his curved blade and find nothing but air. Bek shouted at Quentin, who had tumbled away from the fire and was struggling to climb back to his feet. Finally Panax moved to aid him, but the moment he shifted his gaze to the Highlander, an ur’wolf slammed into him, knocking him flat and sending the battle-ax spinning away.

For an instant, Bek thought they were lost. The ur’wolves were coming out of the darkness in a rush, so many the Dwarf and the Highlanders could not have stopped them even had they been ready to do so. As it was, Panax and Quentin were both down, and Bek was trying to defend them with nothing more than his long knife.

“Quentin!” Bek screamed in desperation, and was knocked flying by a sleek form that materialized out of nowhere to catch him from behind.

Then the Highlander was beside him, the Sword of Leah unsheathed and gripped in both hands. Quentin’s face was bloodless and raw with fear, but his eyes were determined. As the ur’wolves came at them, he swept the ancient weapon
in a wide arc and cried out
“Leah! Leah!”
in challenge. Abruptly, his sword flared white-hot, threads of fire racing up and down its polished length. Quentin gasped in surprise and staggered back, almost falling over Bek. The ur’wolves scattered, twisting away frantically and disappearing back into the dark. Quentin, shocked by what had happened, but exhilarated, as well, impulsively gave chase.

“Leah! Leah!”
he called out.

Back came the ur’wolves, attacking anew, sheering off at the last moment as the sword’s fire lanced out at them. Panax was back on his feet, astonishment mirrored in his eyes as he retrieved his battle-ax and moved to stand next to the Highlander.

Magic! Bek thought as he rushed to join them. There was magic in the Sword of Leah after all! Walker had been right!

But their problems weren’t over. The ur’wolves were not breaking off their attack, just working around the edges of the defense that had been raised against them, waiting for a chance to break through. They were too wily to be caught off guard and too determined to give up. Even the sword’s magic could do little more than keep them at bay.

“Panax, there are too many!” Bek shouted above the din of the ur’wolves’ howls and snarls. He snatched up the cold end of a burning brand to thrust into the jaws of their attackers.

Half-blinded by ash and sweat, the three put their backs to the fire and faced out into the darkness. The ur’wolves flitted through the shadows, their liquid forms all but invisible. Eyes glimmered and disappeared, pinpricks of brightness that taunted and teased. Unable to determine where the next attack would come from, Bek swept the air before him with the long knife. He wondered suddenly if he should use the magic of the phoenix stone. But he couldn’t see how it would help them.

“They’ll rush us soon!” Panax shouted. His voice was raspy and filled with grit. “Shades! So many of them! Where have they all come from?”

“Bek, do you see, do you see?” Quentin was laughing almost hysterically. “The sword is magic after all, Bek! It really is!”

Bek found his cousin’s enthusiasm entirely unwarranted and would have told him so if he could have spared the strength. But it was taking everything he had to stay focused on the movements of their attackers. He had no energy to waste on Quentin.

“Leah! Leah!”
his cousin howled, darting out from their little circle, faking a strike at the shadows, then quickly retreating. “Panax!” he cried. “What are we supposed to do?”

Then something even darker and quicker than the ur’wolves crossed in front of them, trailing shards of cold wind in its wake. The three defenders shrank from it instinctively. The night hissed as if steam had been released from a fissure, and the ur’wolves began to howl wildly and to snap at nothing. Bek couldn’t see them in the darkness, but he could hear the sounds they were making, sounds of madness and fear and loathing. A moment later, they were in full flight, gone back into the forest as if swallowed whole.

Bek Rowe held his breath in the ensuing silence, crouching so far down he was almost kneeling, his long knife extended blindly toward the trees. Beside him, Quentin was as still as carved stone.

Suddenly the darkness shifted anew, and a huge, tattered form that was not quite human, but not quite anything else, rose against the flicker of the firelight. It came together in a slow gathering of shadows, taking shape but not assuming identity, never quite becoming anything recognizable, formed of dreams and nightmares in equal parts.

“What is it?” Quentin Leah whispered.

“Truls Rohk,” Panax breathed softly, and his words were as chill and brittle as ice in deep winter.

H
unkered down in the sprawling, treacherous tangle of the Wilderun, Grimpen Ward was ablaze with light and suffused with sound. Patrons of the ale houses and pleasure dens overflowed into the dirt streets, celebrating nothing, as lost to themselves as to those who had once known them. Grimpen Ward was the last rung on the ladder down, a melting pot for those who had no other place to go. Inquiries of strangers were as apt to get your purse stolen or your throat cut as your questions answered, fights broke out spontaneously and for no particular reason, and the only rule of behavior that mattered was to keep your nose out of what didn’t concern you.

Even Hunter Predd, a veteran of countless reckonings and narrow escapes, was wary of those who lived in Grimpen Ward.

Once, Grimpen Ward had been a sleepy village catering to trappers and hunters seeking game within the vast and little explored expanse of the Wilderun. Too remote and isolated to attract any other form of commerce, it had subsisted as an outpost for many years. But there was little money to be made in hunting game and much to be made in gambling, and slowly the nature of the village began to change. The Elves shunned it, but Southlanders and Rovers found that its location suited their needs perfectly. Men and women seeking escape from their past, from pursuers who would not let them be, and from failed dreams and constant disappointment;
men and women who could not live under the constraints of rules that governed elsewhere and who needed the freedom that came with knowing that being quickest and strongest was all that mattered; and men and women who had lost everything and were hoping to find a way to begin anew without having to be anything but clever and immoral; eventually all such found their way to Grimpen Ward. Some stayed only a short time and moved on. Some stayed longer. If they failed to stay alive, they stayed forever.

In daylight, it was a squalid, sleepy village of clapboard buildings and sheds, of rutted dirt roads and shadowed alleyways, and of a populace that remained inside and slept, waiting for nightfall. The forests of the Wilderun closed it about, ancient trees and choking scrub, and it was always on the verge of being swallowed completely. Nothing of what it was seemed permanent, as if everything had been thrown together on a whim, perhaps within a few desperate days, and might be torn down again by the end of the week. Its populace cared nothing for the town, only for what the town had to offer. There was a sullen, angry cast to Grimpen Ward that suggested a caged and malnourished animal waiting for a chance to break free.

Hunter Predd walked its streets cautiously, staying back from the light, keeping clear of the knots of people crowded about the doorways and porches of the public houses. Because he was a Wing Rider, he preferred open spaces. Because he was a sensible man who had been to Grimpen Ward and places like it before, he knew what to expect.

He slowed and then stopped at the entrance of an alley where three men were beating another with clubs, already pulling at his clothes, searching for his purse. The man was pleading with them not to kill him. There was blood on his face and hands. One of his attackers looked over at Hunter Predd, feral eyes bright and hard, assessing his potential as an adversary. The Wing Rider did as he had been instructed.
He held the other’s gaze for a moment to demonstrate he was not afraid, then turned aside and walked on.

Grimpen Ward was not a place for the faint of heart or those seeking to redress the wrongs of the world. Neither could survive in the claustrophobic atmosphere of this breeding ground of cruelty and rage. Here, everyone was either prey to or hunter of someone else, and there was no middle ground. Hunter Predd felt the pall of hopelessness and despondency that shrouded the village, and he was sickened by it.

He moved out of the central section of the village, away from the brighter lights and louder noises, and entered a cluster of hovels and shacks occupied by those who had fallen into a twilight existence of drug-induced escape. The beings who lived here never emerged from their private, self-indulgent worlds, from the places they had created for themselves. He could smell the chemicals burning on the air as he passed through. He could smell the sweat and excrement. Everything they needed to escape life was free, once they forfeited everything they had.

He turned up a pathway that disappeared back into the trees, glanced about cautiously to be certain he had not been followed, and proceeded into the shadows. The trail wound back a short distance to a cabin set within a small grove of ash and cherry. The cabin was neat and well tended with flower boxes hung from the windows and a garden out back. It was quiet, an oasis of calm amid the tumult. A light burned in the front window. The Wing Rider walked to the door, stood quietly for a moment listening, and then knocked.

The woman who opened the door was heavy and flat-faced, her hair cropped short and graying, her body shapeless. She was of indeterminate age, as if she had passed out of childhood sometime back and would not change her look again until she was very old. She regarded Hunter Predd without interest, as if he were just another of the lost souls she encountered every day.

“I’ve got no more rooms to let. Try somewhere else.”

He shook his head. “I’m not looking for a room. I’m looking for a woman called the Addershag.”

She snorted. “You’ve come too late for that. She’s been dead these past five years. News travels slowly where you come from, I guess.”

“You know this to be so? Is she really dead?”

“As dead as yesterday. I buried her out back, six feet down, standing upright so she could greet those who tried to dig her up.” She smirked. “Want to give it a try?”

He ignored the challenge. “You were her apprentice?”

The woman laughed, her face twisting. “Not hardly. I was her servant woman and the caretaker of her house. I hadn’t the stomach for what she did. But I served her well and she rewarded me in kind. You knew her, did you?”

“Only by reputation. A powerful seer. A worker of magic. Few would dare to challenge her. None, I think, even now that she is dead and buried.”

“Only fools and desperate men.” The woman glanced out at the village lights and shook her head. “They come here still, now and then. I’ve buried a few, when they didn’t listen to me about letting her be. But I haven’t her power or abilities. I just do what I was brought here to do, looking after things, taking care. The house and what’s in it are mine now. But I keep them for her.”

She stared at him, waiting.

“Who reads the future of those in Grimpen Ward now that she is gone?” he asked.

“Pretenders and charlatans. No-talent thieves who would steal you blind and send you to your death pretending it was something else entirely. They moved in the moment she was gone, laying claim to what she was, to what she could do.” The woman spit into the earth. “They’ll all be found out and burned alive for it.”

Hunter Predd hesitated. He would have to be careful here. This woman was protective of her legacy and not inclined to help. But he needed what she could give him.