Alliances

Chapter 2

The world changed in a flash.

One moment Kerianseray was riding to her doom against a swarm of Khurish nomads; in the next instant she was swallowed by a sphere of light so bright even clenched eyelids could not keep it out. After the flash, she saw nothing, heard nothing, and, aside from a slight sensation of coolness, felt nothing.

I am dead, she decided, struck from behind by a cowardly nomad. It was just as the old saying had it: you never see the blow that kills you. Kerian was surprised but not alarmed by death. Leaving her comrades behind and going off to face the nomads alone had been her choice. Life did not seem so dear with Gilthas turned against her. By removing her from command of his armies, he had not only demeaned her abilities, he had impugned her honor. Worse, his continued distrust wounded her pride. She couldn’t bear to remain with a partner who trusted her so little.

The notion death had claimed her vanished as feeling returned. She felt herself tumbling, air rushing by her face. She could again feel her arms and legs. Given that she’d been mounted on horseback, the fall was unnaturally protracted. Long after she should have crashed into the parched sands of Khur, she kept falling. Her useless eyes streamed wind-driven tears, so she closed them. On she fell, tumbling head over heels through damp, chilly air. Bards often sang of what lay beyond death, but never had she heard of an afterlife like this.

Gradually she became aware of light against her eyelids. She opened them, blinked several times, and realized she could see. No sooner had sight returned than she wished fervently to be blind again.

She was high in the sky, plummeting through broken white clouds toward the distant ground. The knowledge was so astonishing that at first she couldn’t breathe. When she could, she took a deep breath of cloud and screamed.

It wasn’t fear erupting from her throat. Fear was an old adversary Kerian had bested long ago. Hers was a shriek of pure rage. Her instantaneous shift from the battlefield outside Khuri-Khan to this lofty point could have been accomplished only one way: by magic. Someone had interfered with her last stand.

Her scream died away, smothered by iron will and the tearing wind. By spreading her arms and legs out from her body, she managed to halt her dizzying tumble, and ended up facing the ground. Her armor was gone, how or why, she couldn’t say, and her sweat-stained hacketon rippled and billowed as she plummeted.

The clouds thinned and she saw the ground clearly for the first time. She was not falling toward the desert kingdom of Khur, that much was certain. Beneath her shimmered a body of greenish water, a lake perhaps or a broad river. Leafless treetops jutted from its surface, as did broken pinnacles of stone. Moss clung to them, and vines trailed from treetop to spire to water like rotting shrouds. Everything was deeply shadowed, though the sun was still above the western horizon. She could see little but turbid water and desolate ruins. The rest was obscured by mist.

The stench of decay filled her nose. This was no crystal spring beneath her. She was falling near the western shore of the lake or river. A wide mudflat ringed the water’s edge, connecting the fetid water to the forested shore. It was confusing, seeing it all from such a height, but the terrain didn’t seem familiar. Stumps of stone towers, mottled by lichen and dull green moss, poked through the water here and there. Their tops were shattered as though lightning-struck. Remnants of a broken causeway connected some of the towers.

As the ground drew nearer, Kerian was suddenly aware of the speed of her descent. Fetid water, broken towers, and moss-encrusted trees all were rushing toward her at an alarming rate. She drew her knees to her chest and hoped the water was deep enough to contain her plunge.

Gathering herself mentally for what was to come, she saw Gilthas’s face. He’d betrayed her, disowned her, and yet it was him she saw on the cusp of death. Pushing thoughts of her fickle, still-loved husband away, Kerian closed her eyes and tucked her head into her arms.

Suddenly her fall was arrested. Her hands and feet flew out, and her teeth clashed together so hard that she saw stars. She found herself borne up by unseen forces, as though something had seized her by the scruff of her neck and brought her up short, thirty feet above the water. She descended slowly for the space of a few alarmed heartbeats, then the restraining force vanished as quickly as it had come. Feet first, the Lioness hit the scummy green water.

The air was driven from her chest, not by the impact, which had been scarcely harder than a fall from a galloping horse, but by bone-numbing cold. Although high summer mantled the land, the water was as frigid as the gray seas off Icewall.

She sank, stunned, into the murky depths, weighed down by her hacketon as surely as she would have been by her armor. When she finally came to herself, daylight was only a pale green oval far above. With no knife, she attacked the lacings of her heavy clothes with bare fingers. She couldn’t budge the swollen leather ties. Her lungs burned and the compulsion to inhale was becoming unbearable. Her head thundered. Frantic, she abandoned the lacings and tore at the quilted cloth itself. Weakened by sun and sweat, the material gave and she was able to wriggle free of its killing embrace. She toed off her boots and kicked hard for the surface.

She erupted at last into the air and inhaled with a great gasping shout. When the roaring in her ears and the red veil over her vision had faded, she made for the nearest shore. It was a thin rime of sand beyond which spread a flat sheet of mud. It felt as though hours had passed before she felt mud under her feet. The ooze was charcoal gray and stinking, but Kerian dragged herself out of the water and fell upon it as if it were the finest silk rug in the khan’s palace. After a few grateful breaths, she rolled over and faced the sky.

By the time the quaking in her limbs eased, the light had metamorphosed from late evening to dusk. On her feet she staggered drunkenly. Her entire body felt as though she’d taken a beating from an enthusiastic ogre wielding a heavy stick.

A whooshing sound from behind her galvanized Kerian’s instincts. Despite stiff joints and bruised muscles, she dropped instantly to her belly. Something large had flown overhead. She’d not seen it, but the sound of dragon wings was unmistakable. For two full minutes she lay still as a corpse. Her Kagonesti senses, long battered by the arid, unrelenting furnace of Khur, still served her, and she used them to search her surroundings for signs of danger. There was nothing. If a dragon had flown by, it was gone now. The water behind her was as smooth as a mirror.

Narrow trees grew like a rail fence beyond the mudflats. Whatever might lay beyond, the trees called to the forest-bred Kerian. She sprinted for cover. Her bare toes left clear marks in the mud, but there was nothing she could do about that. Clad only in cotton smallclothes, she was unarmed, unprepared, and alone.

Among the trees she immediately felt better. They were water-loving willows and cypress saplings, none more than four years old, but the shelter they offered was familiar and long missed. She looked back at the water. Must be a lake, she decided. A river would have currents, but the surface of the water was as smooth and unmoving as a slab of polished stone. The shore curved away into the gloom north and south. It was a large lake, several miles across at least. The far shore wasn’t visible even to her keen eyesight.

Alert for the slightest hint of trouble, she moved deeper into the forest. The living trees were all young saplings. When the occasional larger tree appeared, it was never more than a limbless shaft, its top blasted away high up from the ground, its bark sloughed off like skin, exposing the gray trunk to the clammy twilight. Something cataclysmic had happened here, and not so long ago.

A gleam of white, vibrant in the gathering darkness, drew her attention. She headed toward it.

It was one of the ruined stone towers she’d spied during her heart-hammering drop from the sky. The remnant of a mighty spire, the tower was a full thirty feet wide at its base, and its deeply fluted sides rose another thirty feet from the vine-choked ground before ending abruptly. The column was solid stone, marble of the whitest species, yet its upper portion had been snapped cleanly away. No seams were visible. The entire thirty-foot width of marble was formed from a single block of stone.

The tower was elven. No one else could shape stone with such precision and delicacy. Was this Silvanost, a city destroyed by the minotaurs? Her knowledge of the elves’ first home was sketchy, but she couldn’t recall it containing a lake such as the one before her.

Moving around the base of the shattered marble spire, she found an inscription. The letters were monumental, carved deep, and had once been inlaid with solid gold. Someone had hacked the metal away, but traces remained here and there, glinting pathetically in the twilight.

Kananath Kithri Nesti N’Loth Sithelan Sannu, it read. Kith-Kanan, son of Sithel, built this.

She wasn’t in Silvanost, but in Qualinost!

Her head snapped around, and she stared at the now-black lake glimmering between the weedy trees. Somehow she had been plucked from the battlefield in Khur and thrown into the nightmarish ruins of Qualinost. The green dragon Beryl had fallen to her death there, destroying the city founded by Kith-Kanan. The beast’s impact created a huge crater into which rushed the White Rage River. Nalis Aren it was called: the Lake of Death. Kerian’s life had not been spared. Her death had merely been deferred, transferred to a place far worse than the hot sands of Khur.

Like the vile dragon before her, Kerian had been dropped onto Qualinost! Well, she would not share Beryl’s end. She would not die in this dreadful place. She would survive.

When the stars appeared, she used them to navigate away from the noisome lake. The woods were alive with buzzing mosquitoes that swarmed around her exposed limbs. Squat alligators, armored like draconians, lay watchful in shallow pools. She skirted more than a dozen of the lethal reptiles. Their blank eyes followed her, but the animals did not move.

Her thought was to head west, through the great woodland of Qualinesti, then south to the Kharolis Mountains. Qualinesti might be her old home, but it was infested with bandits, brigands, and Knights of Neraka. The mountains contained fewer enemies, and she’d be able to rest and restore herself. As for what she would do then—that would require some thought.

She knew she was in a land beset by anarchy, where evil lived in every town. To the east, Silvanesti was in no better shape, trampled beneath minotaur invaders. Hundreds of miles away, far to the northeast, her comrades in arms were fighting for the survival of their race against the nomad hordes of Khur. Gilthas, her noble, steadfast, stupid husband, had a wild scheme to lead their people to Inath-Wakenti, a fabled valley said to be located in the mountains north-northeast of Khuri-Khan. He had sent Kerian and five hundred warriors to learn whether the mysterious valley really existed. It did. But although the valley’s climate was mild and damp, just as legend held, Kerian’s explorations revealed many dangers hidden within it.

Accessible only by a single pass at its southern end, Inath-Wakenti would be a deathtrap for the last free elves in the world. They could be blockaded easily by their enemies (of which there were many). The valley also was cursed in a strange and mysterious way. In all the time Kerian and her soldiers had spent there, they never found a single living creature. Plants aplenty, yes, but not so much as a fly or bird dwelled within. Something about the valley was hostile to animal life. By night specters wandered the valley’s faceless stone ruins, and weird lights, possibly intelligent and certainly malicious, pursued her warriors, causing several to vanish without a trace.

Kerian tried to make Gilthas understand, to see reason. Their people didn’t need that uncanny valley. They needed to stand and fight! She argued passionately for a new war against the invaders who had taken what rightfully belonged to the elves. Yet Gilthas would not be dissuaded from his dreamer’s notion, even by her report of the dangers of Inath-Wakenti. He insisted their people must make the treacherous desert crossing and conquer the valley.

Kerian halted, realizing she was drenched in sweat. As her mind had raced, so too her pace had quickened through the willow thickets. That was not smart. There were too many enemies about for her to behave so irrationally.

Fireflies sparkled around her. Since her experience in Inath-Wakenti, she had become wary of phantom lights in the night. These proved to be nothing more than luminous insects, sad reminders of the lost serenity of summer nights in Qualinesti.

She was exhausted: first a battle in Khur, then a fall from great height, a near-drowning, and a trek through the wilds around the Lake of Death. It was past time to halt for the night. Food was a problem that could wait, and she’d trained herself to need less water than most, but rest was absolutely necessary. An exhausted soldier was soon a dead soldier.

She wedged herself high up in an elm, above the clouds of mosquitoes. As she had done so many times before, Kerianseray slept in the arms of a tree—a leafless, blasted tree, it was true, yet it would keep her safe, at least from the lesser predators of the forest.

The stars above her were the same ones that sparkled over Khur. She stared at them and allowed herself to wonder what had happened after she’d vanished. Had the nomads beaten her people, or had the children of Kith-Kanan taken the day? Did her comrades survive? Did Gilthas still live?

Only to that last question did Kerian have an answer. As surely as she still drew breath, she knew her husband was alive. Some ties were not easily broken, despite the damage they sustained.

She rested her cheek against the elm’s rough bark. A cool wind eased over the woods, drying the sweat on her face. She trembled a little from the night’s caress, then succumbed to a deep and dreamless rest.

For two days, Kerian dodged many dangers. Qualinesti was dotted with outposts of the Knights of Neraka, and freebooters led by the human Captain Samuval ravaged the roads and cities. Bands of goblins and other vermin infested the countryside, robbing and killing unopposed. Small bands of draconians might pounce on the unwary. Rogue sorcerers were on the loose. She sensed dragons too, patrolling shifting enclaves of their own.

Despite the wounds of recent years, Kerian’s soul could not but rejoice in her return to Qualinesti. She was an elf, and her heart spoke to trees and growing things. The sun and sand of Khur had almost leached the wildwood from her veins.

This was another point of contention between her and Gilthas, She tried to make him see that if they abandoned the forest to live in distant lands, very soon they would cease to be elves. With her bare feet once more traversing the mossy glades and leaf-littered hillsides, Kerian could feel a new strength filling her heart. This was the land of her ancestors, the land to which she and her kind had been born. She would never give up the fight to regain it. Here was where the elf race belonged!

She fashioned a crude knife from a flint shard and made two spears from windfall limbs. Thus armed, she felt better able to face what might come, with one glaring exception. What she could not seem to find was food, despite all her craft. High summer was on the land. There ought to be berries and roots, small game aplenty, but there was none. She blamed the proximity of Nalis Aren. Its miasma of death infected the land for miles in all directions. Trees and bushes grew in abundance, but all were subtly wrong. Limbs were twisted, growth stunted, green leaves tinged with brown and yellow. Of birds, rabbits, and squirrels there was no sign, though insects thrived.

A stream crossed her path. The odor of the water told her it was tainted. Drinking it would mean sickness or death. However, it did provide some useful mud. Liberally applied, that offered some protection to her limbs from the swarms of mosquitoes. It would also aid in concealing her identity. There were likely still some in Qualinesti who might recognize her, enemies who would rejoice in the capture of the Lioness.

To further conceal her identity, she pulled her thick hair into a horsetail and began to saw at it with her flint knife. In moments her all-too-recognizable golden mane was gone. Clay concealed the color of her hair and left it sticking up in spikes all over her head. She doubted even Gilthas would recognize her.

By her second day in the forest, however, even the Lioness’s stamina was sorely tested. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten or drunk. Leaping another tainted stream, she nearly fell on her face on the other side. The emptiness of her belly made her head swim. Yet there was nothing for it but to keep moving. If she were to survive, she needed to get clear of the shadow of Nalis Aren.

Game animals obviously had fled to more healthful surroundings, and the same seemed to be true of her own kind.

Many Kagonesti had not joined the match into exile, choosing instead to remain in their beloved forest, occupied though it was. She expected to detect some traces of them, but in two days of constant searching, she had found none.

At midday of the second day, a scent came to her on the wind: goblin. The odor was unmistakable. She cast about briefly, determined the direction, and moved carefully toward the source.

A band of goblins was camped around the ruined trunk of a gigantic oak. Kerian despised the malodorous creatures. They were notorious cowards, yet hired themselves as mercenaries to the Nerakans. The Knights treated them as sword-fodder, but the goblins didn’t seem to mind as long as they could loot when the fighting was done.

Unsurprisingly, these goblins were thieves. The clearing was filled with obviously ill-gotten goods. Luxurious carpets and tapestries lay alongside heaps of battered metalware; brass, copper, and silver were sorted into separate piles. Furniture lovingly shaped by Qualinesti skill sat in the weeds, the once-fine upholstery filthy. Over everything hung a pall of bluish wood smoke, a smell of cooked meat, and the sour odor of spilled wine.

Five goblins were camped at the oak. Two slept, snoring like bullfrogs. Two were engaged in a noisy argument over a muddy tangle of clothing. The last poked the smoky campfire. Next to the campfire sat a delicately wrought metal table, its top holding wine jugs, bread, fruit, and various other foodstuffs. Kerian’s stomach cramped at the sight of such bounty.

She had to have food. More than that, she could not bear to slink away and leave these villains to continue their plundering. The flint knife she’d made would be useless against the goblins’ armor. Her spears might be more successful against their eyes and faces. One way or another, she would attack. Wasn’t that exactly what she’d told Gilthas they should be doing, attacking those who’d dared invade their lands? Any blow against the enemy, no matter how small, was worthwhile.

An idea took shape. Perhaps she could lure one away, relieve it of its weapon, and use that against the rest. Even if she couldn’t kill them all, she could at least make off with some of their provisions.

Silently she climbed a tree and crouched on a branch, balanced on her toes, ready to pounce. She swallowed several times—her throat was parched—then gave a high, whirring call, the song of the cloth-of-gold pheasant. No goblin could resist the chance to obtain the largest (and rarest) game bird in Qualinesti.

The goblin by the campfire was closest to her. He turned toward the sound. Kerian called again. The goblin dropped its stick and came toward her, moving with a ludicrous attempt at stealth. She called once more. The arguing goblins never noticed their comrade’s departure. They were too busy with a tug-of-war over a two-handled silver urn.

Kerian waited until her prey was directly beneath her. Then, like a bolt from the sky, she dropped behind him. She gripped his chin with one hand, and with the other drew the flint blade across his throat. Blood poured from a severed vein, and he fell without a sound. She relieved the dead goblin of his sword. It was crudely made, but she felt better with it in her hands.

Gruff goblin voices interrupted her triumph. The two had ceased their argument over the urn and were looking toward the campfire and calling for their missing comrade. Before they could rouse the two sleeping goblins, she cupped her hand to her mouth and made the pheasant’s call again. The goblins exchanged a look and came clomping over on the double.

Silent as a shadow, Kerian moved away from the dead goblin, her calls leading the other two deeper into the woods. She worked her way around so the two became separated by a dense briar thicket. Thus she was able to dispatch them one at a time, taking each by surprise.

Back at the clearing, the last two goblins continued to snore on, undisturbed. Kerian thanked her ancestors for this blessing. Her limbs were shaking from exertion. As long as they did not wake, she would spare them. She made straight for the campfire and the table of provisions. She slung two waterskins over her back and picked up two loaves of bread.

Just as she was lifting a small wedge of cheese, one of the sleeping goblins sat up, roused from sleep by she knew not what. His eyes went wide as he took in the clay-caked elf standing by the table. With an outraged shout and a hearty slap, he woke his companion. Then he was on his feet, drawing iron.

She dropped her purloined goods and hefted the sword in both hands. The blade wobbled and she firmed her grip. With two goblins coming for her, she widened her stance, weight evenly distributed, ready to move in either direction. The lead goblin was still several yards away when she saw its gaze flicker past her. At the same time, a blow landed on the back of her head, knocking her to the ground. Vision swimming, she managed to roll to one side. Her sword was jerked away.

The foe towering over her was no goblin, but an ogre, eight feet tall, muscular, with dull yellow skin and shaggy black hair. The piercing shrieks of her attackers had completely masked any sound of his approach.

The huge creature bent and seized her by the throat. Lifting her so her feet dangled above the ground, he cast a ferocious glare at the two goblins.

“Not waste elves!” he growled. “Capture!”

His thick fingers tightened. Darkness rose up and dragged Kerian into its depths.