The Silver Mage (40 page)

“The supply train’s only brought so much,” he pointed out. “What if we eat it all before the war’s over?”

“Ye gods!” Laz snapped. “Always thinking about your cursed stomach! You eat too much anyway. It dulls the higher faculties.”

Faharn blushed a dark red and fell silent. When the army stopped for its noon rest, Laz noticed that Faharn ate only a few scraps of dry flatbread and one sliver of cheese.

“Well, you could eat more than that,” Laz said. “My apologies. I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that.”

Faharn stared at him in utter surprise.
Surely I’ve apologized to him for my bad temper before?
Laz thought. Yet he couldn’t quite remember any other time when he had.

During the journey, whenever the army stopped to rest their horses or to camp for the night, Laz made a point of scrying for the dragon book. During the day he saw only the darkness that meant the book lay swaddled in some sort of covering. At night, he got a few brief glimpses of it by the dim light of a single candle, none of which gave him the slightest clue as to its location.

“I begin to wonder if we’ll ever find the wretched thing,” Laz said to Faharn. “The impression I get is that the astral currents are pushing it away from us, not bringing it closer.”

“That’s truly odd,” Faharn said. “Or is it the work of that blue-and-white spirit you told me about?”

“That I doubt. She was so sincerely willing to help. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see if she reappears. I don’t have the slightest idea of how to summon her.”

On the fifth day out, they reached an entire fortified village, some twelve round buildings surrounded by stone walls laced with timber, all of them deserted. Grass grew wild and tall upon the roofs. Unlatched doors banged in the rising wind. A flurry of chattering sparrows rose from the top of the tallest tower, circled the village once, then settled again. Otherwise, not a living thing moved in the dun. Voran called a halt, then sent a squad of men down to scout out the complex.

“It’s amazing,” Faharn said, “that the Lijik Ganda never knew all this was here. It’s so close to their border.”

“Plenty of people did know, Envoy Garin for one,” Laz said. “The information never reached Dun Deverry, is all.” He rose in his stirrups for a better view of the silent fortress below them. “Huh, one of the scouts seems to have found something.”

Inside the walls, the scout was holding up a piece of cloth. When he shook it out, Laz could see the device crudely painted upon it: a Boar.

“So, some of our enemies have withdrawn,” Laz told Faharn. “I wonder where they are, and the rest of them, too.”

Prince Voran apparently shared his wondering. The prince gave a string of orders to make the night’s camp with as many men as possible sheltering inside the walls. The rest formed a defensive ring outside. While the servants and riders carried out the orders, he called a conference, including Laz, inside the broch tower. Since the departing Boars had stripped every piece of furniture, the prince and his dwarven allies all stood in the middle of the floor. Laz knelt in front of them and unrolled the map that Envoy Garin handed him. Voran squatted down to study it.

“Tell me somewhat, loremaster,” Voran said. “Do your people know these hills at all well?”

“Only the priestesses of Alshandra do, Your Highness,” Laz said. “They have some sort of secret road through them, you see, marked out by symbols of some kind, scratched on rocks and the like. Alas, they keep those signs to themselves.”

Voran muttered a few foul oaths under his breath. Warleader Brel knelt to join them at the map.

“My people don’t come this far south,” Brel said. “Neither do the merchants from Cerr Cawnen.”

“So the Boars have had it all to themselves for all these years,” Voran said. “A nice sty to breed in.” He stood up with a stretch of his back. “Well, this place must have been deserted some while ago. Maybe we can pick up their tracks, maybe not.”

Yet, that very night, help came from a completely unexpected source. As they scouted around the deserted fields surrounding the old Boar village, some of Voran’s men caught a cow, left behind and turned half-wild. They slaughtered her and shared out the meat, which the servants soon had simmering at the cooking fires. Even Laz had to admit that fresh beef cooking smelled as good as any fine perfume.

The smell apparently drifted into the forest. Laz and Faharn, who found themselves attached to the prince’s retinue, had been given a spot inside the walls though outside the broch. They were still eating when they heard one of the sentries beyond the gates calling out. One of the watchmen on the walls took up the cry to open up. Slowly the gates creaked open just enough to let in two armed men and a prisoner of sorts. Laz and Faharn stood and watched as the guards marched him along past their campfire.

“Bren!” Faharn said.

Laz hurriedly sat down to hide his face. He did catch a quick look at Bren, so thin he seemed starved, his hair long and matted, his clothes mere rags. The guards took him into the broch. The door had barely closed when the rumors began running through the camp, that the sentries had caught an assassin coming after the prince, or a spy for the Boars, or this thing or the other.

The truth, augmented by Faharn’s memory, arrived with the morning’s muster. Envoy Garin climbed up onto the walls and bellowed the tale to the men waiting below.

“The man you saw on the night past—Bren’s his name—used to worship the false goddess Alshandra,” Garin announced. “But the prince has forgiven him, and no one’s to harm him. He knows where the Boars have gone to.”

The waiting army cheered. Garin held up both hands for silence then continued.

“Bren was sent to this village with messages from a priestess. At first they treated him well, but then he learned that they weren’t what he called true followers. So he escaped this spring. He’s been living in the woods, but he smelled the cow cooking and came forward.”

More cheers, this time for the cow.

“Her bovine sacrifice was not in vain,” Laz said. “I suppose that priestess was Sidro.”

“Yes, it was,” Faharn said. “Huh, she could have gotten the poor man killed, sending him here. Just like her.”

“Since I was ready to kill him myself, I can hardly take issue with what she did. Be that as it may, I’m cursed glad now that I didn’t kill him, so she was right, after all.”

Faharn had the decency to cringe. Laz let the gesture go without comment, because Garin was speaking again.

“The Boars had spies in Cerrgonney,” Garin said. “They could tell that the Deverry High King would be sending an army against them. So they moved their people north to settle new land.”

General cries of “Cowards! Bastards!” greeted these remarks. Garin held up his hands for silence and eventually got it.

“As for the Boars themselves,” the envoy went on, “and this piss poor excuse for a king of theirs, they’re apparently fleeing north to join up with the Horsekin. The question is, can we catch them before they do? Prince Voran intends to try. So, men, to horse! We’ve got to make all possible speed.”

With one last cheer the men followed orders. Laz and Faharn worked their way clear of the bustling mob to find a somewhat quieter spot on the edge of the camp.

“This is infuriating,” Laz said. “I suppose these idiot Boars have taken that slave and the dragon book with them.”

“Seems likely,” Faharn said. “We’d better hope we can catch up with them, then, and that we don’t ride into some sort of ambuscade.”

“Ambuscade? I see that unhappy thought has occurred to you, too. Let’s hope it occurred to Voran or, more likely, to Brel.”

“Just so. Here, I’d best fetch our horses. We need to be ready to ride out.”

“So we do. I sincerely hope I can stay away from Bren. I don’t need him recognizing me.”

Fortunately, Bren, newly shaved, trimmed, and dressed in decent clothing, rode next to the prince at the head of the line of march, while Laz and Faharn could lurk at the rear among the servants.

On the second day, another slow crawl up hills and through twisting ravines, the prince gave orders that the fighting men should arm, ready in case of an attack on their line of march. A contingent of fifty horsemen, horse archers among them, moved back to the rear of the line to guard the supply wagons. Around noon, Laz noticed that the forest was thinning out around them. A road of sorts appeared, a dirt track lined with underbrush that the Mountain Folk set about widening with their axes. When the army stopped to rest the horses, scouts on foot spread out through the trees. They returned to report that they’d not seen any sign of farms or settled land.

“It’s too bad the prince wouldn’t believe that I can turn myself into a raven,” Laz told Faharn. “I could scout for him.”

“Indeed,” Faharn said. “You don’t suppose Bren was lying about this place, do you?”

“I don’t. Who would want to farm in this kind of country? Don’t forget that we’re climbing up to a plateau.”

“That’s right. A much better place to put a royal palace.” Faharn thoughtfully spat onto the ground. “Royal. Huh!”

“I share your skepticism. Where do you think the Boars are going, anyway? Not all the way to Taenbalapan, surely!”

“I doubt it, too.”

Faharn considered, rubbing his jaw in thought. “Most likely,” he said at last, “they’re heading to that fortress that the dragon saw a-building. From what he told Prince Dar, it’s properly sited to provide safety for a retreating force.”

“How wise of them!” Laz said. “And may the gods curse them all for their wisdom!”

F
or some days, Kov and the Dwrgwn had been burrowing south in the hopes of bringing a wyrd more substantial than a curse upon the Horsekin fortress. They had marched through the virgin forest rather than tunneled under it, because they would have had to dig far too deep to avoid the impacted roots of the tall trees. Once they reached the forest verge, traveling on the surface became too dangerous. On a slight rocky rise Kov stood and looked south, a long way south over a landscape of scrub grass and stunted, twisted trees growing only beside narrow streams. If his straggling party of Dwrgwn tried to march across it, any mounted Horsekin patrol would spot them from miles away.

They took shelter underground, but the digging proceeded slowly. They found the topsoil thin over a layer of rocks—bedrock, fortunately, but an oddly random scatter of large rocks, a few boulders, and a lot of loose gravel.

“I don’t understand this terrain,” Kov said. “I’ve seen somewhat like it before, up to the north of Lin Serr, but I don’t know what creates it. It looks like something swept up a lot of mountain rocks, carried them along for miles, and then dropped them, but it would have happened a long long time ago.”

“Giants with brooms,” Leejak said with a shrug. “I care not. Cursed nuisance now.”

“That’s certainly true.”

Rather than try to move several tons of rock to the surface, the Dwrgwn twisted their tunnel around the biggest obstacles and used the small scatter to line the floors and brace the bottom of the walls. As much as they’d hated marching, they loved digging. They worked hard, efficiently, and relentlessly, but still, Kov considered they’d done well if they made a mile in a day. Since he had no idea how far ahead the fortress lay, he could only hope they’d reach it before the war ended.

Now and then the diggers had a tunnel collapse from above. This dangerous irritation always happened in places that someone or something had hollowed out at some time long before. Loose soil had blown in and the ceilings fallen to fill the hollows and give them the appearance of solid earth until it was too late to prevent the cave-in. The hollows reminded Kov of Deverry root cellars, or possibly, he supposed, they’d once been some type of dug-out dwelling. In one of these circular hollows a Grallag found a shard of reddish pottery that looked as if it had been broken out of a shallow bowl. He handed it to Leejak, who gave it to Kov to inspect.

“Someone has to have lived here,” Kov said. “A long time ago now, though.”

“Good. No ghosts, then,” Leejak said. “Horsekin, most like.”

“Most like, indeed.”

Unless, of course, refugees from Lin Rej had reached the area and wintered there—Kov made a mental note to ask the archivists at Lin Serr, assuming he ever saw them again. Two days later, however, when they reached another once-dug area, he found a coin, or to be precise, a corroded disk, green with silver tarnish. After he polished it up, he could see that it came from no dwarven moneyer. On one side, barely legible, was a human face in silhouette, on the other, letters that reminded him of Deverry writing.

“Of course!” he told Leejak. “The Deverrians came through here on their way from the Western Sea. They must have wintered in this area.”

“Interesting,” Leejak said. “Under that Horsekin fortress, then, what lies? I wonder.”

Kov felt a sudden stab of hope. If ancient wooden structures underlay the mound, their job would be a fair bit easier. He wished that the Dwrgi scouts who’d first spotted it had given a better description—not that they would have been capable of precision, he supposed.