Lords of the Shadows, page 8
part #4 of Raven Series
At once the forest erupted into life, birds and creatures scattering through branch and undergrowth, screeching or yattering as they went.
Not all creatures.
Out of the gloom came an animal fast and sleek; its eyes glowed orange, and it hissed and snarled as it came towards Spellbinder.
Raven reached for one of her stars, but hesitated; this was no bestial attack—as she watched the cat so she realised it was being drawn to Spellbinder against its will.
Abruptly Spellbinder made a simple pass in the air with his left hand. The aura about him vanished, reappeared about the cat. As Raven watched so the cat reared up on its hindlegs and froze; it was facing back to the north, along the rough forest pathway they had ridden. A final touch from Spellbinder’s fingers, and the cat statute shimmered for a second, then tripled in height and girth. It now stood higher than a man, a huge animal, a God, barring the way to the irt Loiscim, who would surely have to make some obeisance to their night guardian.
“It will increase our chances of finding safe quarters for the night,” he said, breathless and tired from the effort of the spell. They rode on, increasingly aware that the sky darkened.
Shortly after dusk, feeling cold and edgy, Raven turned about, threw back her cloak and drew her sword. She pushed her sleeve-shield down her arm so the deadly point extended inches out across her fist. Spellbinder rode up to her and joined her in watching the dense woodland they had just left.
“Ride, for Gormiac’s sake!” cried Tu’ilza, but Raven called to her. “They are too close!”
Silver made his body gleam bright, so that the fading light of day was reflected back towards the woods. Naked to the waist, his sword held easily to his side, he joined Raven on the left. Tu’ilza drew a spear from the slings and rode up beside him.
Cold and afraid they waited for the warriors of the irt Loiscim.
They did not have to wait long.
There were ten of them, and they came through the trees and onto the open ground in a single swift movement. Each carried a wide-bladed combat spear, the point angled down. All but the leader were naked of head, their helmets slung across their saddles; short, spiky hair, faces crinkled and tanned by wind and war—dark eyes watched the four intruders, mouths set grim beneath greased whiskers. Each warrior of the irt Loiscim was armoured with thin cross-strips of leather on his torso, and leather and bone greaves. They wore short leggings, tied tightly about the leg, just above the knee; from each binding thong there dangled the blonde and black trophies of each man’s conquests, short locks of hair tied about the shriveled flesh of a finger.
Silver’s horse reared angrily, sensing blood perhaps, or disturbed by the strange mounts these riders used, short, very shaggy animals, with wide-splayed hooves and dense growths of white hair on their lower legs. Raven felt her stomach tense and heard Spellbinder’s careful breathing, sensed him assessing their chances.
Now the leader drew his helmet from his head, and scratched a moment at the short hair beneath it. He looked at the four of them, then fixed his eyes on Tu’ilza. Passing his helmet and his spear to the man next to him he drew his short-blades sword, hefted it carefully, then dismounted. He walked to the young girl, who caught her breath, glanced once, almost terrified, at Raven, then hardened. Grimly she stepped from her saddle and drew her own sword. Raven felt her skin go cold. Tu’ilza for all her energy, was no match for this muscled warrior of the Fanngrioc, with her wounded shoulder still stiff and…
“I will fight!” said Raven quickly, but as she made to swing from the saddle, the Fanngrioc raised his hand to her, stopped her. “No!” he said angrily, glancing at her briefly, before staring at Tu’ilza again.
“You are of the Jhargan,” he said to the girl.
“I am,” said Tu’ilza stiffly. She had flung back her cloak, and Raven saw the knotted tension in the muscles of her sword arm; her legs, above the knee-high leather boots, were shaking visibly.
“I am Bristym, of the irt Loiscim. We have warred with your people in the past and will war again. For myself, I have not yet lifted sword against a warrior of the Jhargan.” There was a moment’s silence, save for the restless shifting of man and beast, and the sound of breathing in the cold dusk air. Bristym said,” You honoured the dead Chieftain in the way of the Jhargan.”
“I am unfamiliar with the ways of the Fanngrioc,” said Tu’ilza strongly. “I honoured him as best I knew.”
Bristym nodded. “He was my brother; they were a hunting party that failed to return, and our Earth-Ones saw that they were dead, slaughtered by warriors who were not of these hills. I have sent others in pursuit of them, and will shortly join them. When you honoured the dead warrior, even though it was not in the way of our people, you honoured the stones of my house.”
And to Raven’s surprise, Bristym lowered himself to one knee, then two, and laid his sword before him, stooping to kiss the blade.
Tu’ilza glanced around at the restless warriors before her. Each, for his part, raised his spear and lowered it. Bristym stood again and sheathed his blade. He turned to the man who held his spear and that warrior tossed the spear to him; this he presented to Tu’ilza, who accepted it.
“These are dangerous lands. The hills ahead of you are the Angry Hills, where even the rain can kill. Why are you here?”
As if sensing that Tu’ilza was not the leader of the four riders, Bristym had turned to face Raven.
“We are bound fo rhte borders of Ishkar, and the ancient Tower that is hidden in the hills there.”
For a moment Bristym frowned, then shook his head. “This Tower is unknown to me; but passage through these hills is hazardous, and since you must pass you will need guides…” He called to two of his men who pushed their spears back into their slings, wrapped heavy woolen cloaks about their shoulders, and kicked their horses forward to stand behind Raven.
Bristym grinned, waved a salute and jumped onto the saddle of his steed. As silently as they had come, the Fanngrioc were gone, slipping back through the wood, towards the distant river.
One of the irt Loiscim behind Raven said, “We should rest, then travel by night for a while, to make first entry into the nearer valleys by dark. The woods are the night grounds of too many of the Mabriv, the people of the Dead.”
And Raven agreed.
They journeyed just three hours through the starlit darkness of the foothills, and then huddled in their cloaks, curled up against the warm faces of rocks; they slept.
Raven was woken by one of their guides and for a moment she thought it was still the dead of night; she could see stars, but at the horizon was the first edge of grey daylight that told her it was morning. Their breath frosted as they shook the dew from their cloaks, and brushed it from the flanks of their horses. They ate biscuits and dried meat, then followed the irt Loiscim deeper into the hills.
The journey through these mountains took all of three days. Their guides avoided the obvious valleys and ridges, instead taking them an uncomfortable and awkward route through narrow gorges, across windswept bluffs, and storm-ravaged forests. They rested in caves, and only if the wind was blowing right did the guides allow a fire to be kindled, to take the raw edge off the small game that Tu’ilza had proved enormously adept at spearing.
On the third day, well before dusk, they rode atop a ridgeback and looked down across a wide sweep of land that was beyond the tribal territory of any of the Fanngrioc tribes. Forests and lakes lay before them and the silver threads of rivers; at once Tu’ilza and Silver cried, “The Ish!”
As abruptly as a night shadow flees, the two irt Loiscim guides were gone. Raven called her thanks as the two horsemen disappeared from sight into the forests, and she heard their cry of response. Tu’ilza hefted the spear she had been given and smiled as she felt its power, saw the sun on the steel blade.
But Raven, though she smiled at the young warrior, had eyes only for this innermost of the most northern tributary of the great river Ish, the river that wound down to the sea at Varand. The mist-hidden land, distant, steamy that land of rich green that was a blur at the farthest edge of vision…
That was her home, and for a moment she was choked with the memories of her childhood, before the slavers had taken her, and her destiny had been taken from her hands.
Then Silver gently drew her gaze to the bleak hills bordering the Lost Lands. He pointed to the bright point of light in those hills, brighter than water, brighter than steel. It was like a jewel, perhaps a star, glimmering in the mournful grey of the hostile countryside that was the mountains.
“What is it?” she asked, and Silver laughed.
“The Obsidian Tower, of course. We are just two days from it, and the last part of the journey is easy.”
Six
“Truth flees the mouth of an oracle like an arrow and like an arrow it can be bent and changed when it strikes its target.”
Dubthag ritual humour…
The Obsidian Tower rose from the land, a giant, shining black column. It stood higher even than the mighty tree near Kharwhan; it was rounder at its base than the perimeter of a small fort. Clouds drifted about its top, but not so thickly that, as Raven approached it, she could not see the long and narrow slit that was the cave Silver had mentioned.
She was awestruck by this ancient monument, overpowered by the pure size of it. Though Silver had often described it to her, she had not imaged anything so monstrously large.
Spellbinder, too, was awestruck. He had never actually seen the tower, never imaged how truly alien it was. “I had no idea about this tower,” he murmured. “I had always thought it no higher than a tree, no broader than a wolfship is long.”
The Tower itself had been built against the excavated slopes of a hill, one of the foothills of a range of mountains that rose to the south and west, snowcapped, forbidding. Where the rock had been hewn it was straight-edged, bizarre, steps and sheer-sided gullies carved through the crystalline bedrock, allowing the traveler the choice of hundreds of approaches. The grasslands below the tower were strewn with boulders, and fragments of great rocks torn from the earth so the tower could be built deep and secure in the crust. As far as the eye could see, in these approach lands there were shells of buildings, the ruined hulls of shelters and palaces and places of worship.
Thousands of generations from all about the Worldheart had come here to question the Tower, and in time departed, perhaps enlightened, more likely disillusioned. Raven saw the unmistakable shapes of Ishkarian temples, built by beastman and true man alike; they were crumbled and decayed, overgrown with creepers, and some shot through with trees, small locations of jungle growth in the middle of the scrublands.
Above them all, the Tower rose, parting the skies.
The travelers who now grouped about the Obsidian Tower had built no stone temples, nor tried to set up permanent residences on the plains, or the hillsides. A hundred tent cities formed a blaze of flapping colour all about the base of the column, and Raven led the way among them, smelling the odours of different foods and spices, hearing the chatter of a hundred dialects, watching the ritual worshipping of a hundred religions. The tents, and more simple hide shelters, stretched endlessly onwards, most of them crude, many of them deserted and flapping lazily in the wind, their pins long since torn from the ground. Groups of horsemen rode away from the Tower, fur-wrapped youths and leather-armoured warriors, their hunting spears sharpened and keen; behind them, to the east, where distant mountains hid any view of the Tower from coastal eyes, the land teemed with game, and Raven could see a hundred hunters riding down the stags and great black animals that had wandered north form the jungles of Ishkar.
Travellers had come from all around the Worldheart. Spellbinder pointed out the sign of the All Mother on tents made from the canvases of a wolfship’s sail; men of Kragg, then, perhaps men with whom Raven had once sailed. There were the galley couloured canvases of the Altanate, square, spacious tents the pennant of the Altan flying atop them, beside the family colours of those who visited this desolate place; there were tents showing the colours and emblems of the Iskarian cities, and the southern city states of Lyand and Gath; there were Xand, tied to crude wooden rails, in front of the rough and ready shelters of Xandronian herdsmen who had shipped north, or perhaps made the perilous trek through the jungle and rifts of Ishkar to find this place of legend.
Raven led the way, in single file, through the chaos of cultures and clans. She was hailed as she rode past, sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes in a coarse one, by rough hewn men from the cold wastes of the north. She tossed back her golden hair and smiled thinly at each and every man that greeted her, but her hand never left the hilt of her sword, and the evil gleam of her sleeve shield hid the hand that held the reins, for it was ready to defend her life, and to slash in offence.
Behind her, Tu’ilza rode grim-faced and uncomfortable, Bristym’s gift to her, the wide-bladed hunting spear, held in her hand as she would hold a sword. Silver had eyes and ears only for the Tower, and the howl of wind about its upper reaches. Spellbinder seemed lost in thought, riding easily and almost unconsciously acknowledging the greeting of those who surveyed the new arrivals.
They reached the craggy base of the Tower without incident, and tethered their horses together before scaling the square-hewn rock face to stand touching the ice-cool obsidian wall itself.
It was strange to the touch, this sheer wall of gleaming black. Raven’s hand did not stick to the surface as it would to the dry ice surface of a frosted blade; and yet the cold was incredible, reaching through her fingers to ache her very arms. Her fingers slipped smoothly across the surface, finding no grip, and she confessed herself confounded as to how they were going to scale this giant pillar. As if to confirm and extend her doubts, as they walked about the base of the Tower Tu’ilza gasped all of a sudden, and pointed to where a thousand whitened bones law strewn about the rocks, and tumbled down as far as the lowlands. On this side of the Tower, beneath the gaping slit of the cave mouth above them, there were no tents, only a scattering of men in flowing robes, standing, straining to see through the veil of clouds, trying to glimpse the entrance to the Tower so high above.
Raven stepped backwards among the corpses and bones of those who had fallen from the very heights of the Tower; some of the skeletons were so compacted they seemed to be of children, but were in fact the remains of men who had hit so hard against the rock that they had crushed like parchment.
Raven and Spellbinder stood away from Silver as the warrior, brightly gleaming like steel, ran his hands lovingly across the cold surface of the Tower. Raven listened to the payers and questions being changed and shouted by the Earth-Ones and priests of many cultures who stood around them. Their voices carried on the wind, and could certainly be heard at the height of the Tower. But no answer came down, no sound but a distant whining, as of wind gusting and moaning through a deserted stone building.
“We cannot climb this,” said Raven angrily, and Spellbinder laughed. He pointed out to her how some of the Earth-Ones, and others of the old men who seemed to be warlocks of minor power, were being frustrated in their efforts to cast magic at the Tower. The Tower was negating, casting back their spells.
After a while, Spellbinder went on, “The secret is how to ask what we wish to know. Perhaps climbing it will not be necessary.” He glanced at Raven. “Perhaps, if my strength is back, I could use a stronger magic than these feeble practitioners about us to send our eyes into the cave, on bird wings…perhaps the bird itself.”
Raven looked up, scanned the skies quickly. The great black bird had flown away two days before and had not returned. She was not unduly concerned. It came and went as it pleased when it could be of little service to her.
“Could you not take us up the wall with your magic?”
Spellbinder glanced around, looking thoughtful and then defeated. “It would seem such a thing is doomed to failure. At the best of times such indulgent magic is hard. Now that I am weakened by Q’Ithrig’s infernal blade the task would be enormously strenuous. I must conserve my strength, Raven, for those times when our actual survival needs more than just the strength of our steel.”
He wrapped his dark coat about his black mail, hunched against the sudden cold. The wailing of the priests rose in volume and faded, and Raven cast a last glance at their motionless forms, robes flapping, hair blowing in the wind, before she followed Spellbinder back to the horses.
Tu’ilza was there already, and hard unrolled the several sheets of hide and canvas they had brought. As she busied herself pinning them together, Raven and Spellbinder found a small patch of soft ground away from the main clusters of tents, and knocked a single pole into the earth to support the unwieldy shelter in its middle.
This was only the second time they had used the rough and ready tent, and as the three of them sat within it, more comfortable and more relaxed than for several days, Spellbinder exercised his magic again and was pleased to find he could magic fire into the tinder, and boiling water into the small cauldron. He flexed his fingers afterwards, obviously in considerable discomfort. “There is always an energy flow through my body when I relocate heat or fire, but it should not feel this bad.”
He undid the leather bindings of his black hide shirt and reached inside to scratch his willowy body. Raven would have loved a hot bath, indulging herself with scented soaps and useless little creams. Her hair felt greasy and tired when she ran her fingers through it; Tu’ilza seemed happier that her own short, red hair was the worse for sweat and body oil. She rubbed a white, chalky substance into her scape, and tugged her hair back to bind it in a short, single plait. The white substance she smeared across her forehead, and down her nose. Spellbinder frowned as he watched the transformation of her from a young and pretty girl, to a young and angry woman, but Tu’ilza smiled warmly as she sensed his scrutiny. “I am not really allowed to wear the warrior’s plait, but until the day of the Dead; but I don’t suppose anyone will know. I would have begun to wear it in two seasons.”
