Alliances

Chapter 1

No breath of breeze stirred among the trees. A dense canopy of leaves, parched by summer heat until they were brittle as glass, cast a perpetual shade on the forest floor. Although excluded, the sun made its presence felt. The air in the forest was stiflingly hot and still as a tomb. Birds did not sing, and nothing moved that could avoid moving.

A trail no wider than a horse’s hips was worn through the underbrush. It wound up hills and down hollows, following no discernible path. At an uncommonly straight stretch, the path ran along the foot of a hill, between a pair of lofty ash trees. The hill comprised shelves of broken slate, terraced down like a timeworn staircase to disintegrate at last into the dust of the narrow path.

A person occupied the last of the slate steps. Covered in a monkish robe despite the heat, he sat with his forearms resting on his knees, hands hidden in the robe’s capacious sleeves. His head was completely covered by a ragged cloth sack, loosely tied about his neck. Holes were cut out for his eyes. Rips and tears too numerous to count dotted the robe’s faded brown surface, each neatly darned or patched.

He had been sitting there, unmoving, unspeaking, for a very longtime. Where his robe touched the ground it clung, matted by leaf mold. Some who passed took him for a scarecrow. Others saw the stick thinness of his limbs, the knobby shape of his joints, and decided he must be a corpse. One or two, thinking to relieve the dead fellow of his purse, approached. They saw his eyes.

Staring from the sack, the eyes were not dead, but neither did they belong to a sane or peaceful being. The whites were shining and damp, as with tears, but the corners were as dry as dust. Set in them were pupils as hard as gems. When the eyes did blink, their lids were revealed to be mottled red, without any lashes at all.

Upon beholding those eyes, the would-be scavengers fled, calling on long-ignored gods for protection. Word spread that the lonely, ancient path was haunted. It was said the spirit of a murdered priest kept watch at the slate stairs, a man doomed by an unknown transgression never to rest. Soon enough, those few who trod the forest path abandoned it, finding other ways to their destinations. The trail had never been a popular one. It came from no place special and led nowhere worth going.

The one they feared no longer knew how many days he had sat there, enveloped by a stillness only the ignorant could mistake for tranquility. Neither man nor ghost, he was an elf. Silent and immobile as he appeared to the world, his mind was a maelstrom, boiling with memories of the journey that had brought him there.

Had it hurt to be burned alive, to feel the flames consuming his clothing, skin, hair, flesh? There were times he couldn’t remember. The burning seemed a thing apart, sometimes as immediate and vivid as the dreams that sent him screaming into wakefulness, and at other times remote, a thing that had happened to someone else.

For an eon he had known only pain, coupled with an intense desire to live. He crawled away from where he’d fallen, at first using only the tips of four fingers and a few toes. Three sunsets passed before he’d dragged himself ten yards. Every grain of sand, every bit of leaf he slid over, was a knife, shredding his outraged flesh. He kept going until he fell into a shallow, clear-flowing brook. There he was born again. Chill water dampened the raging fire in his body and cooled—but did not extinguish—the fever in his mind.

He arose from the brook in the grip of an undeniable compulsion to go east. Home lay eastward, and he had to go home. There he would find succor. There the fire would be quenched at last.

He crawled out of the stream like a newborn salamander and turned to the rising sun. Living as an animal in the forest, he ate whatever he could find, whatever couldn’t crawl away fast enough. As his damaged body couldn’t bear the slightest touch of clothing, he went naked, garbed only in mud and leaf litter, or rain and air.

All that existed was the journey eastward. He grew strong enough to walk, but a new horror took shape in his mind: that others might see him as he was-mutilated, disfigured, destroyed. The very thought brought a shame so great he could scarcely breathe. No one must see him, not friend, foe, or stranger. He tried to steer clear of settlements and travelers, but his senses, ruined by the fire, no longer served him as they once had, and he learned then what shame really was.

One morning he was looting carrots from a garden when a dog found him. It circled, growling deep in its throat. He had never been afraid of dogs before, but slow and crippled as he was, the approach of the mongrel filled him with dread. When it drew too near, he flung dirt in its eyes. It shook off the grit and began to bark.

Down the hill from the garden was a cottage, a solid homestead built of stone and thatch. Gray smoke spiraled from its chimney. As the dog barked, he heard the cottage door bang open and a youthful voice call, “Wolf! Wolf, where are you?”

He backed away on his hands and haunches, keeping his face toward the dog. It followed, head down, ears laid back, barking. His fingers found a rock just under the surface of the tilled earth. He pulled it free of the soil and hurled it at the dog.

The effort made his arm and shoulder muscles sing with pain, but the stone found the dog’s forehead. Yelping, it ran down the hill to the farmhouse.

He staggered to his feet, a half-chewed carrot still in his teeth, and made for a nearby canebrake, pushing through the wall of green. Bladelike leaves scored his ruined skin in a dozen places, the wounds like fresh fire. Dropping into the cover of the tall cane, he choked back sobs.

Rapid footfalls announced the arrival of Wolf’s master. He glimpsed a shock of sandy hair, a homespun tunic, and tanned bare feet. With two fingers he parted the cane a little wider.

“Is someone there? Wolf, what is it?”

The youth was an elf, with the sharp chin, narrow nose, and upturned ears of a pure-blooded Qualinesti. The boy was a fine-looking lad, and despite the caution ingrained over the untold weeks since the burning, he was moved to speak.

“Forgive me for stealing. I was hungry.”

Actually, those were the words he intended to say. All that came out was a series of loud, dry croaks.

The young elf heard. Shouting for Wolf, he lashed out with the staff, laying open a gash in the cane and revealing the intruder crouched within. Shock and horror twisted his fine features.

“Goblin!” he cried. “Stay back! Wolf, help!”

He tried to reassure the boy, but his scorched throat wouldn’t form words, only inarticulate grunts. He held out a hand, meaning to show the boy he intended no harm, but the young elf recoiled, screaming, and tripped over a furrow. Wolf rushed forward and buried its fangs in the outstretched arm.

Indescribable agony jolted through him, equal parts pain and fury. He jerked his arm, hauling the dog close, and grabbed it by the throat. He would have throttled the animal had not the boy begun raining blows on his shoulders with the staff.

New pain raced through his body. He hurled the dog aside and reeled away, deeper into the scissorlike cane stalks. The elf boy ran down the hill, shouting for help.

Deeply wounded in body and soul, he fled to the deeper woods, resolving never to show his face to the world again. In the days that followed, he was chased by his own kind, harassed by flies and mosquitoes, and treed by a wandering panther. Where insects bit him, boils erupted. He covered the wounds with mud and kept moving. The urge to go home died, destroyed by the elf boy’s reaction and by the glimpse he caught of his own reflection in a pool of water. The monstrosity that stared back at him was so horrible, he actually recoiled from the sight. The reaction was instinctive, but his was a nightmare from which there was no waking.

The day finally came when his hunger could no longer be denied. Berries, beetles, and snails were not enough. His healing body demanded more. One day deep in the woods, far from any habitation, he smelled the fecund aroma of bread baking. Like a marooned drunkard sniffing wine for the first time in a month, he sought the tantalizing odor, braving discovery.

The aroma drew him to a clearing. He hid behind a thick elm tree and studied what lay beyond. The center of the clearing held a crude hut constructed from rough-hewn trees—a human habitation. It was their way to build shelters from freshly killed trees. Besides, the fire hadn’t stolen his senses completely; he smelled the humans before he saw them.

There were three in view, male and bearded. Were their beards not of different colors he doubted he’d be able to tell them apart. Judging by the row of axes leaning against the hut, the three were foresters. A smoky fire burned in a ring of scavenged stones. The red-bearded man tended a flat iron pan by the fire. The smell of bread rose from the pan. However, the sight of the humans caused something other than hunger to twist in his belly: hatred. These three were invaders in his forest.

“Who’s there?”

Without realizing it, he had allowed himself to be glimpsed by the red-bearded man. He moved as quickly as fire-ravaged muscles and taunt, scarred skin allowed, crouching in a dense thicket. His grotesque shape was barely concealed as the other two humans approached.

“What’s wrong?” called the one on the left, yellow bearded and younger than the others.

“I saw something,” Red Beard replied, standing up from the fire.

“Man or beast?” asked Black Beard.

“Maybe neither.”

Black Beard snorted. “What, again? You see elves behind every tree, Gaff. I told you, the only ones in forty miles of here are in Olin’s slave pens.”

“You don’t know that for sure. I heard a bunch of Wilder folk raided Aymar’s camp just two nights past.”

Yellow Beard agreed. “He’s right. We don’t know what might be out here.” He retreated to the campfire. “I’ll be glad to get the job done and get out of here.”

“Not me,” said Black Beard. “I haven’t seen this much virgin timber in ages. There’s a fortune all around us—”

“Three fortunes,” put in Yellow Beard pointedly. “But we have to be alive to enjoy them!”

The two humans persuaded their black-bearded comrade to abandon the camp. Sunset was not far off, and they’d be safer at the logging camp, where there were soldiers.

The three shouldered their axes and departed. He had no trouble following their heavy-footed progress through the forest. He emerged from hiding and crept forward in a stoop, his fingers touching the leafy ground lightly. Beneath the grime, each hand was a mass of fibrous scars, the nails black and hard as talons; he still could not make a tight fist.

The men had dumped the bread in the ashes, taking the pan with them. The bread was underdone, black with soot, but he’d never tasted anything so wonderful in his life. He finished every ash-covered bite.

In the hut he found a half-eaten fowl and two wizened apples. After stripping the bird’s bones of meat and eating the apples whole, he searched for clothing. A pile of rags in one corner proved to be a robe. It was heavy, made of coarse brown cloth, and ragged at its hem, but he pulled it on quickly. Sized for a human, it easily covered his slighter frame from neck to heels. He hiked the trailing hem up so he could walk without tripping and cinched the sash tight. The garment’s deep cowl was a gift from the gods, but he supplemented its concealment with an old flour sack. With two ragged holes for him to see through, the sack made a fine mask.

Tired as he was, he left the clearing quickly. The loggers might return, might bring soldiers.

He followed a narrow stream until the water suddenly vanished. A few yards farther on, he came to the edge of a ravine. Descending, he found a cave perhaps twelve feet deep and eight high. The stream dripped down from the ceiling, pooled on the floor, and flowed out the opening to continue on its way.

Heart hammering, he curled himself into the deepest corner of the cave. The makeshift mask filled his head with the dry odor of old flour. That, and the unaccustomed heaviness of the food he’d so rapidly consumed, caused his stomach to rebel. He crawled to one side of the little cave and was thoroughly sick.

When his stomach was empty and the heaving had stopped, he dragged himself to the other side of the cave and lay on his back, staring into the darkness.

Birds alighted on him, unaware they perched on a living being. Troops of forest ants, black as polished jet, marched over the twin hills of his feet. Still he did not move, only remembered.

Hunger had again driven him to desperate measures, and he was digging through a refuse pile on the fringes of a human village when two women drew near. Their approach nearly sent him fleeing back into the predawn forest, but they ignored the ragged, cowled figure squatting beside the trash. They continued on their way and never interrupted their conversation.

“They bought another one?” said one, disbelieving.

The other woman nodded vigorously. “Emalen and her husband bought another slave, an elf who was actually in Qualinost when it was destroyed! He can read and write, so they set him to keeping the tavern books. He ran away once so Brand had to hamstring him…

The two women passed out of earshot. For a long moment, he couldn’t move, frozen by the casual, callous horror embodied in those few sentences.

He forced himself to approach a dwarf peddler and ask of Qualinost. The dwarf’s laconic account of the city’s destruction took his breath away. Had he heard it from anyone else, he would not have believed it, but dwarves did not exaggerate. Qualinost was no more.

He needed to see with his own eyes the fate of his city. And so he did. From a hilltop a mile away he looked down on the place that once had been his home and saw its mutilation as the crushing mirror image of his own. Gone were the towers, the elegant homes, the vibrant greenery. Lost were the lives of countless elves, extinguished in the very instant of liberation. Qualinost had been freed, only to face its doom. What remained was submerged beneath a foul lake, with the rotting corpse of a dragon at its heart, like a poisoned blade in a sunken grave.

The light beneath the trees changed subtly as another day drew to a close, the sun descending in the west. A fat cicada droned down the empty path, weaving from side to side on unsteady wings. Exhausted, it landed near his left foot. The insect was enormous, twice the size of the elf’s thumb, with wet, gauzy wings folded awkwardly across its back. It struggled through the dry moss, heading inexorably for his foot. When the cicada was an inch away, the elf moved. He lifted his foot and held it steady as a stone, waiting for the turgid insect to crawl beneath.

“Don’t!”

To his left stood an old man leaning on a tall blackthorn staff. He wore the remnants of priestly garb-robe, sash, and stole all grimy with age and inattention. His short white hair stood out from his head in all directions. He pointed a stubby finger at the foot still poised to crush the cicada and repeated, “Don’t!”

Without turning his masked head, the elf said, “Why not?” in a voice as dry as the litter covering him. “It’s dying anyway.”

“Its life is not yours to take.”

The old human came closer, walking slowly with the aid of his staff. “That cicada has spent seventeen years asleep below the ground. It’s been awake only a few days, but in that time it found a female, fought off rivals, and mated. Having fulfilled its purpose, it can only die.”

“Then why not kill it? Further existence now is pointless.” The cicada was just entering the footprint etched into the moss. The foot still hovered above it.

“Stay! Every act has a consequence. Can you know what will happen if you kill without cause?”

He hesitated then lowered his foot behind the struggling insect.

“Another useless life spared.”

Grunting loudly with effort, the old fellow seated himself on the slate ledge. “No life is useless. Each is a gift from the gods,” he said, smiling.

“You talk like a priest.”

The old man inclined his head, acknowledging the truth. He produced a hide waterskin from his robe and offered it. Receiving no response, he refreshed himself.

“You’ve been here awhile. Are you waiting for something?”

The elf was indeed waiting for something, for the same thing that soon would find the exhausted cicada. His lack of response did not discourage the priest. The old man took another swig and asked another question.

“Where does this road go?”

“Nowhere.”

A droplet of red wine clung to the corner of the priest’s mouth. “I thought it led to Qualinost.”

For the first time the elf’s granite façade was breached. He flinched as if struck. “There is no Qualinost! Nothing remains but a fetid lake of death!”

“That must be a sight.”

The elf laughed, a painful, throat-tearing sound. Yes, it was a sight, a sight to turn the heart to stone and shrivel the stomach with despair.

He pushed away those thoughts and tried to retreat again into unfeeling immobility, but his attention was caught by the cicada at his feet. It had been found by the ants. They circled the ailing behemoth, tapping it with their antennae. It ignored them, struggling onward. Satisfied by the cicada’s lack of hostility, the ants seized the larger insect by its legs, each tugging it in a different direction. The result was stalemate; the cicada twitched in place, neither advancing nor retreating. The situation did not persist. Organizing themselves, the ants swarmed over the still-living cicada and dismembered it. They severed the wings one at a time, passing them to comrades, who discarded them in the litter beside the path, then fell to butchering their prey, snipping off its legs and peeling open its soft belly.

“So much for mercy,” he sneered.

“You take the wrong lesson. Crushed underfoot, the cicada would be wasted. This way, it will feed the ants for many days.”

The priest’s voice had changed. Gone was the genial, fatherly objectivity. So different was his tone the elf finally turned and took a good look at him. A chaplet of leaves rested on his head. Brown things clung to the front of his moss-green robe. They looked like leather pouches-until they moved.

“Consider the ants, not the solitary cicada,” the priest went on in the same instructive tone. “They are tiny but many. Birds and spiders reap them by the score, but their colony survives. Working together for a common goal, they overcome far larger enemies. Only when they lose cohesion, with each pulling for its own sake, do they fail.”

The elf shifted position, sitting more upright and folding his arms across his chest. Between gloved hands and robed arms, his wrists showed wasted, scarlet skin.

“Who are you, human?” he demanded. “Do you know me?”

“We’ve never met.”

“But you lecture me as though you have some right!”

The old man smiled disarmingly, showing stained, crooked teeth. “Perhaps I do.” His friendly expression hardened into something sterner. “But it hardly requires magic to recognize your state. You stink of self-pity and despair. You came here to brood and die, didn’t you?”

Goaded at last into action, the elf sprang to his feet. The debris of many days fell in a dusty rain at his feet. By reflex, his hand went to his hip but found only air. His sword was long gone, a melted strip of scrap metal.

“It’s no business of yours! Leave me be!” he rasped.

One of the brown things clinging to the front of the priest’s robe stirred, spreading small leathery wings—a bat. His chest was covered with live bats. The human stroked the tiny animal with the back of one finger. His manner undergoing yet another lightning shift, he inquired kindly, “How long since you ate or drank?”

The elf couldn’t say. The priest reached into his robe and withdrew a packet wrapped in waxed parchment. He parted the flaps. The packet contained a heap of pearl-colored disks, each thinner than the parchment enclosing them.

The elf breathed in sharply, astonished. The small disks were honeydew wafers, impossibly delicate sweets made from honey produced by the silver bees of Silvanesti, mixed with crystal dew and flower pollen. The confections traditionally were eaten at weddings, births, and other festive occasions. None outside Silvanost knew the secret of their creation. He had eaten them only once before in his life. Not only did the decrepit human have honeydew wafers, but they looked and smelled freshly made.

“Take them,” the priest urged.

Like a striking viper, the elf’s gloved hand shot out, tearing the parcel from the old man’s grasp. With trembling fingers, he laid a single wafer on his tongue. The disk melted at once, releasing a rush of flavor. The crystal dew in the wafers was collected one tiny droplet at a time from the leaves of plants and flowers all over Silvanost. The life’s breath of the plant was captured in every drop, and every plant imparted a distinctive flavor. Even more unique was the earthy savor of pollen. Rose was always unmistakable, as were violet and nasturtium. This particular pollen had come from sunflowers. The elf’s mouth was filled with the golden soul of summer, as if sunshine had been turned into fine powder.

“Consider the ants,” the priest said. “Though small, they are mighty in unison.”

Clutching the packet of wafers close to his heart, the elf watched his benefactor rise and depart. The priest’s back was covered with the same small brown bundles as his chest, bats that squirmed against each other as the old fellow’s heavy footfalls jostled them. The elf realized the chaplet of green leaves wasn’t resting on the priest’s head. Its woven tendrils emerged from the skin of his brow.

The priest paused and looked back. Lifting a hand, he said, “Farewell, Porthios. You have yet a part to play.”

In that instant, the elf knew his mysterious benefactor. He dashed forward as the priest shuffled around a curve in the path and was lost from sight. Porthios wasn’t swift—his legs were stiff from disuse and his burns—but the priest was out of view for only a few seconds. Yet when Porthios reached the bend in the road, the old human was gone. The dust clearly showed the prints of his bare feet ending a yard ahead.

Porthios stared dumbly down at the abrupt end of the footprints. The single wafer he’d eaten caused his stomach to knot with raging hunger. He put another wafer in his mouth, waited until it dissolved, then retraced his steps to the waterskin the priest had left behind. The contents tasted like Qualinesti nectar, which surprised him. Nectar was clear as water, yet he had seen the old human drink red wine from that same vessel.

Why should he be surprised? A god could do anything.

Porthios took another drink, capped the waterskin, and slung it over his back. Cinching his rag sash tight, he started down the path, in the same direction the priest had taken. The hopeless torpor that had enveloped him was gone, even as the oppressive heat had subsided with the sunset. He had been given a message, one he could not ignore. Whatever lay ahead, he had a powerful ally. Many more would be needed before the wrongs of recent days were righted, but he would find them.

Putting his back to no place special, he made straight for nowhere worth going.