The Dreaming Hunt (12 page)

Kendrick's brow furrowed slightly, like it did when he was thinking hard. The fire hissed quietly, and Kerryl jumped up to pace back and forth behind the log he'd been sitting on. Tarryn forced herself to remain utterly still and not to shrink back farther out of sight. Movement captured the eye long before the shape of an unmoving shadow did.

Kendrick asked, “Do you feel any remorse at all for forcing me to this path? Did you ever consider asking me if I would help you oppose this coming evil?”

Kerryl scowled. “I could not afford to have you say no.”

“You insult my honor.”

She'd never heard Kendrick so angry. Terrible outrage vibrated in his voice, along with a note of something she'd never heard from his before. Bitterness, mayhap? Or grief? She could not be sure. For the moment, she dared not take her unblinking gaze away from the nature guardian to study Kendrick's expression.

“Pierre. Phillipe. Go forth into the wood.”

In unison, the twins stood. Each man was lean but looked wiry and strong. They would be lightning fast in a fight. Dangerous.

Kerryl's voice dropped into a deep timbre of command. “Bring my next soldier to me.” He grasped his left arm with his right hand as he gave the order, and she spied a faint glow from between his fingers. He wore a bracer on his left forearm that appeared made of leather. Intricately carved into it were images of every animal she could think of. So detailed were the depictions that she fancied the beasts cavorted around the man's arm on the leather band.

The twins moved off to her left but not before she saw that each of their left eyes glowed an alarming shade of red. She had never seen the like. The pair disappeared quickly into the trees.

Now was her opportunity to make a move against Kendrick's captor and free her friend. She took a silent step forward, hunting in the way of her lion-aligned clan, her attention focused intently upon her target.

Another step.

The undergrowth on either side of her exploded inward, and the twin brothers came flying out of the darkness, tackling her to the ground before she knew what had hit her. So vicious was their attack that they actually bit at her face and neck. She struggled with all her might, but to no avail. They were much stronger even than she'd anticipated.

One of them tore her short sword off her belt, and the other ripped her bow from her hand. Then one of them stepped on the back of her neck while the other sat on her. No matter how violently she struggled, she could not seem to throw them off. Quickly, they threw loops of thin, strong rope around her, trapping her arms and yanking sharply. Her shoulders were all but torn from their sockets.

“Augh!” she cried. “Kendrick, help me! It's Tarryn!”

A shout of rage and dismay issued from Kendrick's throat, the beginning of her name. But it broke off and became an anguished groan. “Nooo. Not now.” The groan shifted and became a hoarse, unintelligible growl hovering on the edge of speech, just beyond comprehension. The sound was more chilling than anything she'd yet heard this night.

The twins jumped up, and between them, they dragged her through the trees, uncaring that she was scratched by branches and thorns as they thrust her into the clearing. She fell to her knees painfully and looked up at Kendrick crouching beyond the fire, his hand held up in front of him as if to ward off some great evil.

“It's me,” she spoke urgently at his unseeing stare. “It's Tarryn. I've come for you.”

He moaned. “Ahh, no. Not her. Do not perpetrate your evil upon her, I beg of you. Curse you, Kerryl!”

“That's enough out of you, boy,” Kerryl snapped, fingering his bracer again.

As if on command, Kendrick's left eye glowed brighter scarlet than spouting blood. The right eye was still Kendrick's, but not Kendrick's. The fun-loving, charming youth was gone. And in his place was an embittered man consumed by helpless rage.

She looked away, unable to bear the pain in Kendrick's anguished stare. She glared at Kerryl, not bothering to disguise her hatred for the man who had done this to the happy-go-lucky youth she liked so much.

“Who have we here?” the nature guardian asked. “A spy, methinks.”

The dryad trilled in a high, bell-toned voice, “Nay. A friend of Kendrick's. Sweet on him, she is.”

Tarryn scowled at the dryad. Her feelings for Kendrick were a closely guarded secret and most certainly did not need revealing to him.

Kendrick made a growling sound, but no speech issued from his throat. He snapped his jaw shut in obvious frustration.

Kerryl smiled. “Excellent. Her feelings for you will hold the two of you with me to look out for one another. The she-elf was quite skilled in approaching us. Another talented warrior House Hyland has provided me. Well done, wherever you are this night, my old friend, Leland.”

For the first time, real fear for her safety erupted in Tarryn's breast. “What are you planning to do to me?”

“You, too, shall have the honor of serving in my army. Something strong. Cunning. Able to move quickly in many terrains and with excellent camouflage.” He tapped a tooth with a fingernail, considering. Then his face lit. “An alligator speaker lives not that far from here, guarding a scion of the Great Alligator. And he is close to a source of more magical waters of change, in fact. Yes. That will do nicely, I think.”

 

CHAPTER

9

Gunther Druumedar grunted in disgust as the rain intensified from drizzle into a cold, soaking rain. A foul night for a dwarf to be caught out late. Stupid of him to ignore the gray clouds rolling in from the west and not stop prospecting earlier to head home.

He could duck off the exposed cliffside path and take cover under the trees covering the broad plateau atop the Hauksgrafir, but to do so he would have to wade through waist-high grass that would soak him to the skin. Not to mention the weeds would foul in the mechanism of his mechanical leg. The artificial limb was cranky at best and unreliable at worst. But it was better than letting cursed Heart healers use their black arts to grow him a new leg, thank you very much.

The rain became a pounding downpour that gave him no choice but to retreat to the cover of the trees. The exposed granite of the path was becoming too slippery for him to risk. Not with a fall of a thousand feet or more barely an arm's length away.

As if that were not bad enough, a flash of lightning struck so nearby the hairs on his arms stood straight up and he fancied that his beard even tingled. Trading one danger for another, he was. The forest was not a place to be at night. Predators and monsters roamed the woods, and a crippled dwarf would make a tasty treat for one of them.

Gor, it was dark under the dripping trees. Give him a nice, dry mine with narrow, stone walls and rough-hewn ceilings anytime over all this green growing stuff.
Bah
. He trudged along, cursing at the rain and the dark and himself.

But then he heard a noise. A snapping of branches behind him. Had to be something big and heavy to be making that sharp cracking sound. The noises were rhythmic as if someone stomped along behind him without a care for stealth. He frowned. Something wrong with those noises.…

And then it hit him. Those sounds were spaced too far apart for any normal-sized dwarf, or even a human, to be making. Whoever was taking those steps was large. Very large.

Ahh, no. By the Void. Not a yeren
.

He looked fearfully over his shoulder, peering into the darkness, but saw no sign of a great, hairy beast walking upright like a man. Nonetheless he picked up the pace of his own steps considerably. For a creature twice the height and more of a dwarf, yeren could blend into their surroundings with shocking effectiveness. In these mountains the beasts had long, reddish-brown hair that looked much like the dead pine needles carpeting the forest floor.

The cracking noises stopped. Had the thing taken to the trees? He'd heard tales of them swinging through the branches hand over hand with their long arms, strong enough to crush a man. Gunther broke into a shambling run.

Something massive thudded heavily to the ground in front of him. By the spirit of the mountain, it was a yeren as he'd feared. The creature was huge, with a big, hairy belly and disproportionately long arms. Its face was simian and covered in hair, its eyes more intelligent than Gunther expected. And it looked angry.

Gunther skidded to a stop and commenced backing away from the giant beast. He thought briefly about reaching for the pickaxe slung across his back, but the yeren would tear him limb from limb before he could do the slightest damage to it.

When the beast made no immediate move toward him, he turned and ran. He darted to his left toward the lowest-hanging branches and thickest scrub brush he could find. His only hope was to use his smaller stature to duck under obstacles that would slow the pursuing yeren down. Mayhap he could find a rock or burrow to hide in where the beast could not reach him. The tactic worked until Gunther burst into the open. Desperate, he took off running down the bare stone path, ignoring the needles of rain slicing hard against his skin.

The beast bellowed in rage behind him. Stars, the yeren was close. It would burst out of the woods any second and be upon him. He could not see where he was going but ran on blindly, anyway. Stopping or even slowing spelled sure death.

The beast burst out of the trees in front of him, and Gunther tried to stop, but his mechanical leg buckled under the strain, and he pitched over on his side, tumbling head over heels straight toward the cliff.

He grabbed for anything to stop his fall, his fingernails scrabbling uselessly at the wet stone. His legs flew into open air, and the edge of the path gave way beneath him with a sickening collapse of saturated ground.

He pitched over the edge of the cliff.

Thankfully, it was not quite a vertical drop at this spot. He gathered speed, bouncing from outcrop to outcrop, sliding down steep rock faces, fetching up against tiny ledges until they gave way beneath the force of his fall, and then continued crashing down the mountainside. Desperate, he grabbed at every rock and root he could in a blind effort to gain enough purchase to stop his descent.

At long last, he fetched up hard against a rock ledge broad enough to hold his entire body. He lay there, panting hard, waiting for it to collapse out from underneath him. But it held.

Gingerly, he reached for the rock wall beside him. Grabbing an outcropping and doing his best to take weight off the ledge, he cautiously pulled himself upright, plastering his torso to the cliff face.

How far down the mountain he'd scraped and skidded, he had no idea. Hundreds of feet, it felt like. He risked a peek over his shoulder and drew back sharply. He'd caught the very last bit of the mountain before the steep face turned into a truly vertical cliff plunging many hundreds of feet to the valley floor below. Had he missed this precarious ledge, he'd have been a goner. What a humiliating way for a dwarf to die—falling off a mountain he'd known his entire life.

He turned his attention to making his way back up the rock face to safety. Did he dare try it? Would that cursed yeren wait at the top for him or move on? Mayhap he should wait out the night here. Were yeren nocturnal or did they hunt in the daytime, as well? If only he'd listened to the hearth tales over the years.

Cursed rain was coming down harder than ever. And the temperature had dropped precipitously. In fact, if he was not mistaken, those were strings of sleet starting to pepper his back, making seeing up the cliff face impossible. Worse, this north-facing section of mountain was coated in moss that turned to green slime when a man grabbed at it. The stuff made climbing a nightmare even in the best of light and weather, especially for a one-legged dwarf.

He reached down to punch his mechanical knee into a straight and locked position. Cursed contraption and its needlessly intricate moving parts didn't much like the moisture: must remember to oil it when he got back home.
If
he got back home.

Still facing the rock wall, he felt his way along the ledge as it narrowed to mere inches in width. He reached to his right, seeking hand- and toe-holds stout enough to support the weight of his stocky body. Of a sudden, his right hand plunged forward into nothingness, and he all but fell off the blasted ledge before he caught his balance.

What was this? He edged a bit more to the right. Felt again. An opening of some kind in the cliff face. Huh. The stone face gave way to a crack. Crawled all over this cursed pile of rock his whole life, he had, and never had he spied a cave in this place. Of course, no sane dwarf would venture down the slope this far, so close to the edge of a fall into nothingness. Blasted yeren. Might its offspring all be runts who got hunted down and turned into rugs.

He waited out a particularly violent sheet of rain and then dashed the water away from his eyes. A crevasse of some kind opened into the mountain at an oblique angle. Had he not been standing exactly here, he would never have spotted it. That overlapping outcropping of granite would hide it from any soul standing in the valley and peering up at the mountain, too.

Experimentally, he wedged his body into the hidden crevasse. It was a close fit, but he was able to make his way a few feet into the mountain. He paused to shake the worst of the rain out of his bushy hair and red beard.

Gor, the darkness was thick. Not that his kind minded a little dark. Dwarves were no strangers to Under Urth. He pushed a little farther into the crevasse, stopping to untangle his clothing and pouches from sharp edges and to shake off the dripping rain again. If nothing else, mayhap he would find a dryish overhang under which to wait out the storm and then climb back up the mountain to safe ground.

He burst into open space without warning. He stumbled forward and fell a half dozen feet, face-first, down a steep slope into what felt and smelled like a cave. A dry one, praise the Olde Ones. He took a moment to catch his breath, the mountain's cold soaking through his thickest wool cloak and leather jerkin as he sprawled on the stone floor.