Octobers Baby

FOURTEEN: The Roads to Baxendala

i) In by the back door

Though April was near, the snow remained deep and moist. The two men fought it gamely, but were compelled to take frequent rests.

"Must be getting old," Turran grumbled, glancing up the long, steep slope yet to be climbed.

Valther said nothing, just made sure moisture hadn't reached his sword. He seldom spoke even now.

"Almost there," Turran said. "That bluff up there ... That's the one that looked like a man's face." The last time they had been in the Gap it had been summer and they had been hurrying to their fates in Escalon. Nothing looked familiar now.

Valther stared uphill, remaining statue-still till a bitter gust reached him. "Better camp," he muttered.

"Uhm." Turran had spotted a likely overhang. It would yield relief from the wind while they hunted a usable cave. Though those were reportedly numerous, they had become harder to find near Maisak.

"Think they've spotted us yet?" Turran asked after they made the overhang.

Valther shrugged. He didn't care. He would feel nothing till they had come face to face with Mist.

"That looks like one," said Turran, indicating a spot of darkness up the north slope. "Let's go."

Valther hoisted his pack and started off.

They had little firewood left. Turran used the minimum to heat their supper, then extinguished the blaze. They would wrap in their blankets and crowd one another for warmth. The mouth of the cave was small and inconveniently located anyway. The smoke didn't want to leave.

During the night Turran shivered so hard that when he rose he had cramps.

Valther didn't notice the chill.

For breakfast they had jerky warmed by their body heats, washed down with snow melted the same way.

Afterward, Valther said, "Time to begin."

"Is she here?" Turran asked.

Valther's eyes glazed. For a moment he stared into distances unseen, then shrugged. "I don't know. The aura's there, but not strong."

Turran was surprised his brother showed that much spirit. He seemed genuinely eager for the coming confrontation.

Turran was not. He saw no way they could best the mistress of Shinsan. Surprise was a tool that could be used against anyone, but how did one surprise a power so perceptive it could detect an enemy's heartbeat a hundred miles away?

But the attempt had to be made. Even in full expectation of death. It was a matter of conscience. They had betrayed those who had trusted them. Just trying would help even the balance.

"Ready?"

Valther nodded.

From his purse Turran took a small jewel the Monitor had given him. He set it on the cave floor. They joined hands, stared into the talisman. Turran chanted in liturgical Escalonian, of which he understood not a word.

In a moment he felt little monkey-tugs at the fringes of his soul. There was a sudden, painless wrench, as of roots pulling away, then his awareness floated free.

The sensing was nothing like that of the body. He did not "see" objects, yet knew the location and shape and function of everything about him.

Valther hadn't shed his clay. He was too distracted by obsessions that Turran could now trace. Valther lay trapped in a sort of in-between, and would remain there till Turran freed him or pulled him back to the mundane plane.

Just as well, Turran reflected. Valther might have gone haring direct to Maisak, to see Mist, and so have given them away.

There was no sense of time on that level. Turran had to concentrate to make events follow one another in temporal parade. He saw why the Monitor had told him not to use the stone unless he had to. He could get lost on this side, and forget his body, which would perish of neglect.

This was how most ghosts had come into being, the Monitor had told him.

While Turran had had no training in this sorcery, the wizardries of his family had taught him discipline. He began his task.

He floated the slopes between their hiding place and the bluff which masked Maisak. He felt no cold, nor any pressure from the wind.

He discovered he could sense not only the realities obvious to corporeal senses, he could look around, beneath, and within things, and it was with this faculty that he searched for entrances to the caverns honeycomb­ing the mountains. Many came clear. Most had been sealed. Those that had not, he probed deeply. He found the one he was hunting.

Just in time. His attachment to his body was attenuating. His will and concentration were suffering moments of vagary.'

As he reentered his body, he learned another danger of the magic.

Feeling returned. All the aches and pains of a hard march, more intense for having gone unfelt for a time. And his senses suddenly seemed severely limited. What a temptation there was to withdraw...

He reached out and brought his brother back.

Turran's eyes opened. Their hands parted.

Valther had less trouble recovering. "Did you find it?" he asked.

Turran nodded. "I don't want to try that again."

"Bad?"

"Just the coming back."

"Let's go." Valther was ebullient.

Turran rose stiffly, got his gear together. "We'll need the torches. It's long..."

Valther shrugged, drew his sword, ran his thumb along its edge. He didn't care about the in-betweens, just the destination.

"What I wouldn't give for a bath," Turran grumbled as he hoisted his pack. "I'll lead."

It was snowing again. That was their fault. The past several months they had used their weather magic to confine winter's worst to the high country.

The cave mouth was a half-mile from their hiding place, naturally but cunningly hidden. He had a hard time locating it. It had to be dug out. It was barely large enough to accept a man's body. He sent Valther in, pushed their packs through, slithered in himself.

"I've got a feeling," he told Valther as they prepared the torches, "that we'd better hurry. My memory's getting hazy."

But speed was impossible. The subterranean journey was long and tortuous and in places they had to dig to enlarge passages for crawling. Once they climbed twenty feet up a vertical face. Another time they had to cross a pit whose Stygian deeps concealed a bottom unguessably far below. At a point where several caverns intersected they found skeletons still arrayed in war gear of Hammad al Nakir. Though they pushed hard, they couldn't make the journey in one day. They paused for sleep, then continued.

They knew they were close when they reached caverns where the walls had been regularized by tools. Those would be passages worked during the wars, when the Captal's fortress had had to have space for thousands of soldiers.

Then they came on a large "chamber occupied by Kaveliners who supported the Captal's pretender. Those who were awake were bored. Their conversation orbited round women and a desire to be elsewhere. Nobody challenged the brothers as they passed through.

"That was the worst," Turran said afterward. "Now we take a side tunnel to the Captal's laboratories and get into his private ways."

Valther nodded, caressed the hilt of his sword.

It was strange, Turran thought, that their coming hadn't been sensed or forseen. But, then, their weak plan had been predicated on inattention by the enemy.

In the laboratories, in a dark and misty chamber they recognized as one where transfers were made, they encountered trouble.

It came in the form of an owl-faced creature guarding the transfer pentagrams. He was asleep when they spotted him, but wakened as they tried slipping past. They had to silence him.

"Have to hurry now," Turran said. The thing's disappearance would raise an alarm.

Because they followed secret stairs they reached the Captal's chambers before they encountered second trouble. And this came as a total surprise.

They pushed through a secret panel into a room full of murder. It had been a library or study, but now it resembled a paper-maker's dump. Against one wall an evil-faced, one-eyed man, unarmed, struggled with a woman. He had the heel of one hand jammed firmly into her mouth.

An old man lay unconscious and bleeding on the floor. Now, with a pair of long daggers, a second killer stalked two weird creatures guarding a child. One creature was a frail winged thing defending himself with a blazing crystal dagger, the other an apelike dwarf wielding a short, weighted club.

All eyes turned to the brothers. The failure of hope in the winged man and ape-thing spurred Kerth. One of his blades shattered the crystal dagger while the other turned the dwarf's club. Then the first arced over into the dwarf's throat. He went down with a squeal.

"Burla!" the child screeched, falling on him. "No. Don't die."

Workmanlike, Kerth wheeled and dispatched the winged man.

When Kerth wheeled on the child, Valther said, "No." He said it flatly, without the least apparent emotion. The assassin froze.

Kerth and Derran exchanged glances. Kerth shrugged, stepped away from the girl.

Sudden as lightning, a dagger was in the air, hurtling toward Valther. The man got his sword up in time to deflect it. It had been a gut-throw.

And a feint. The second dagger followed by two yards, bit deep into Valther's right shoulder. Turran jabbed with his own blade, missed the block.

There was a crack from Derran's direction. Mist sagged in semi-consciousness. The One-Eye blew on his knuckles.

Turran charged Kerth, who had already armed himself with the Captal's weapon...

The universe turned red.

Mist forced herself up on her hands, stared through an open window. In the starkest terror Turran had ever witnessed, she croaked, "O Shing. He's raised the Gosik of Aubochon!"

None knew the name, but each knew Mist. Their conflict ceased. In moments all crowded the window, staring up at a pillar of red horror.

"The portal!" Mist cried. "He'll try the portal while we're distracted. We've got to destroy it."

Too late. The clack of armor echoed up the same stair Turran and Valther had used.

ii) Approaching storm

March sagged toward April. Spring came to the lowlands. The days of reckoning drew rapidly closer. Ragnarson grew ever more dour and pessimistic. Things were going too well. The censuses were in. Crops had suffered less than anticipated. In areas where there had been little fighting there had been surpluses. Only the Nordmen, it seemed, were suffering.

Volstokin hadn't been as lucky. Ambassadors from the Queen Mother were pleading credit and grain in both Kavelin and Altea.

Favorable weather permitted early plowing. This, to Ragnarson's delight, meant more men for summer service. Hedging against the chance they would be in the field at harvest, the Queen was buying grain futures in Altea, a traditional exporter.

The winter had caused changes at every level. Kavelin had shaken her lice out. As the kingdom settled down and vast properties changed hands, the citizens looked forward to a prosperous future. Because good fortune attended the Queen's supporters, her strength waxed. Feelers drifted in from provinces still in rebellion.

With the exception of Ragnarson and his aides, no one seemed worried about the summer.

Bragi never eased the pressure on the rebels. After Forbeck and Fahrig, he launched expeditions into Orthwein and Uhlmansiek, using the campaigns to temper his growing army. He suffered few setbacks. Each victory made the next easier.

Anticipating fat looting in the Galmiches and Lon-caric, squads, companies, and battalions poured into the capital. From the Guild-Masters in their fortress-aerie, High Crag, on the seacoast north of Dunno Scuttari, came congratulations, word that Ragnarson had received nominatory votes for promotion to Guild General, and an offer of three regiments on partial advance against a percentage of booty...

On Royal instructions Ragnarson accepted the merce­nary regiments. He dreaded leading so many men. What would happen when they learned the real nature of the enemy?

Tents dotted the roadsides and woods of the Siege. Long wagon trains bearing supplies rumbled toward the city. Dust raised by moving soldiery hung like a vaporous river over the caravan route. Ragnarson was awed by their numbers, almost as many as Kavelin had raised during the El Murid Wars. His original mercenary command now seemed an amusingly small force. But it still formed the core of his army.

The more he thought about controlling so many men, the more nervous he became.

Nights the worries slid away in the magic of the Queen's arms. No one yet seemed suspicious.

In late March Sir Andvbur went over to the Captal. What negotiations had passed between the two Ragnarson never learned, but he suspected Sir Andvbur's idealism had motivated his treachery.

The knight's coup failed. Having foreseen trouble, and having gotten the man away from the center of power, Ragnarson then had surrounded him with trustworthy staffers. Few men joined Sir Andvbur when, after brief skirmishing, he fled across Low Galmiche toward

Savernake.

Loncaric and Savernake remained in the grip of unnatural winter. Ragnarson took the opportunity to pinch off the depending finger of Low Galmiche and eliminate the last rebel bastions near the Siege.

When he could find nothing else, he wondered what had become of Mocker, Haroun, Turran, and Valther. And worried about Rolf. Though Preshka hadn't been injured in the dungeon confrontation, the exertion had excacerbated his lung troubles.

Yet everything went so well that he received the bad news from Itaskia with relief.

Greyfells partisans had driven the Trolledyngjan families over the Porthune into Kendel. Kendel's military ran hand in glove with Itaskia's. A light horse company had swum the river and slaughtered the raiders. Kendel had decided to send the families on to Kavelin.

What, Ragnarson sometimes wondered, was Elana doing? She wasn't the sort to sit and wait.

On the last evening of March, Ragnarson gathered his commanders to discuss the summer campaign. Meticu­lously prepared maps were examined. Where to meet the enemy became the point of contention. Ragnarson listened, remembering an area he had seen the previous fall.

"Here, at Baxendala," he said suddenly, jabbing a map with a forefinger. "We'll meet them with every man we have. Talk to the Marena Dimura. Learn everything you can."

Before the inevitable arguments began, he strode from the room.

The die had been cast. All time was an arrow hurtling toward the decision at the caravan town of Baxendala.

He went walking the castle's outer wall, to bask in the peace of what would soon be a chill April Fool's morning.

Soon, in the white gown she had worn the morning they had first locked eyes, the Queen joined him. Moonlight like trickles of silver ran through her hair, gayly. But her eyes were sad. Ignoring the sentries, she held his hand.

"This is the last night," she whispered, after a long silence. She stopped, pushed her arm around his waist, stared at the moon over the Kapenrungs. "The last time. You'll leave tomorrow. Win or lose, you won't come back." Her voice quavered.

Ragnarson scanned the black teeth of the enemy mountains. Was it really still winter there? He wanted to tell her he would return, but could not. That would be a blemish on his memory.

She had sensed that he would always go back to Elana. Their relationship, though as intense and fiery as a volcanic eruption, was pure romance. Romance de­manded a special breed of shared deception, of reality suspended by mutual consent...

So he said nothing, just pulled her against his side.

"Just one thing I ask," she said, softly, sadly. "In the dark tonight, in bed, say my name. Whisper it to me."

He frowned her way, puzzled.

"You don't realize, do you? In all the time you've been here you've used it only once. When you announced me to Sir Farace. Her Majesty. Her Majesty. Her Highness. The Queen. Sometimes, in the night, Darling. But never Fiana. I'm real... Make me real."

Yes, he thought. Even when she had been no more than a conception spawned by Tarlson's characterizations, he had felt an attraction that he had pushed off with formalities.

"Gods!" a nearby sentry muttered. "What's that?" Ragnarson's gaze returned to the mountains. Beneath the moon, over a notch marking the approximate location of Maisak, stood a pillar of reddish I coruscation. It coalesced into a scarlet tower.

The world grew silent, as if momentarily becalmed in the eye of a storm.

The pillar intensified till all the east was aflame. A flower formed at its top. The trunk bifurcated, took on a horrible anthropomorphism. The flower became a head. Where eyes should have been there were two vast Stygian pools. The head was far too large for the malformed body that bore it up. Its horns seemed to scrape the moon as it turned slowly, glaring malevolently into the west.

The thing's brilliance intensified till all the world seemed painted in harsh strokes of red and black. A great dark gulf of a mouth opened in silent, evil laughter. Then the thing faded as it had come, dying into a coruscation that reminded Bragi of the auroras of his childhood homeland.

"Come," he said to the Queen when he could speak again. "You may be right. It may be the last time either of us gives ourself freely."

Deep in the night he spoke her name. And she, shaking as much as he, whispered from beneath him, "Bragi, I love you."

iii) Elana and Nepanthe

On the Auszura Littoral, Elana and Nepanthe, up late after a day of increasing, undirected tension, released sharp cries when the Tear of Mimizan took on a sudden, fiery life that was reflected in crimson on the eastern horizon.

iv) King Shanight

From the Mericic Hills, at Skmon on the Anstokin-Volstokin border, Shanight of Anstokin, restless before the dawn of attack, watched the scarlet rise in the east, a head with its chin on the horizon. After meeting those midnight eyes he returned to his pavilion, called off the war.

v) Mocker

In Rohrhaste, near the site of Vodicka's defeat, Mocker suddenly erupted from an uneasy sleep, saw scarlet beneath the moon. For one of the few times in his life he was stricken dumb. In lieu he loaded his donkey and hurried toward Vorgreberg.

vi) Sir Andvbur Kimberlin of Karadja

Sir Andvbur and two hundred supporters, traveling by night to evade loyalist patrols, paused to watch the demon coalesce over the Gap. Before it faded, half turned back, preferring the Royal mercy. Kimberlin continued, not out of conviction, but for fear of appearing weak before his companions.

vii) The Disciple

In the acres-vast tent-Temple of the Disciple at Al Rhemish, a sleepy fat man moaned, staggered to the Portal of the North. This gross, jeweled El Murid bore no resemblance to the pale, bony, ascetic fanatic whose angry sword had scourged the temples and reddened the sands in earlier decades. Nor was his insanity as limited. The red sorcery stirred a mad rage. He collapsed, thrashing and foaming at the mouth.

viii) Visigodred

At Castle Mendalayas in north Itaskia a tall, lean insomniac paced a vast and incredibly cluttered library. Before a fireplace a pair of leopards also paced. From a ceiling beam a monkey watched and muttered. Between the pacer and leopards, on a luxurious divan, a dwarf and a young beauty cuddled.

The lean old man, sporting a long gray beard, suddenly faced south southeast, his nose thrusting like that of a dog on point. His face became a mask of stone. "Marco!" he snapped. "Wake up. Call the bird."

ix) Zindahjira

In the Mountains of M'Hand, above the shores of the Seydar Sea, lay a cave in which dwelt the being called Zindahjira the Silent. Zindahjira was anything but silent now. The mountains shook with his rage. He did not appreciate being involved in intrigues not his own. But by his own twisted logic he had a responsibility to right matters in the south. When his rage settled, he called for his messenger owls.

x) Varthlokkur

Fangdred was an ancient fortress poised precariously atop Mount El Kabar in the Dragon's Teeth. There, in a windowless room, tiny silver bells tinkled. A black arrow inlaid with silver runes turned southward. In moments a tall young man, frowning, hurried in. His haunted eyes momentarily fixed on arrow and bells.

He was Varthlokkur, the Silent One Who Walks With Grief, sometimes called the Empire Destroyer or the Death of Ilkazar. He was the man who had ended the reign of the Princes Thaumaturge of Shinsan. Those

Princes remained like trophies in an impenetrable chamber atop Fangdred's Wind Tower. Kings trembled at the mention of Varthlokkur's name.

He was old, this apparent young man. Centuries old, and burdened heavily with the knowledge of the Power, with his guilt over what he had wrought with the Empire. He spoke a Word. A quicksilver pool in a shallow, wide basin ground into the top of a table of granite shivered.

Iridescences fluttered across its face. A portrait appeared. Varthlokkur stared at a gargantuan, megacephalic demon whose ravenlike feet clutched the feet of mountains.

This manifestation couldn't be ignored. He began his preparations.

xi) Haroun bin Yousif

The long, cautious cavalry column was less than thirty miles from Al Rhemish when the northern sky went scarlet. Filtering four thousand Royalists through the Lesser Kingdoms and the Kapenrungs undetected had been a military feat which, meeting success, had astonished even its planner.

The demon head loomed. Haroun gave the order to turn back.

xii) The Star Rider

On the flank of a snow-deep peak high in the Kapenrungs, on a glacier that creaked and groaned day and night, one surprised and angry old man stood between gigantic pillars of legs and stared miles upward at scarlet horror. He spat, cursed, turned to his winged horse. From its back he unlashed the thing known as Windmjirnerhorn, or the Horn of the Star Rider. He caressed it, spoke to it, glanced, nodded. The demon began to fade.

He then sat and pondered what to do about these dangerous ad libs. O Shing was getting out of hand.

xiii) King Vodicka

Half an hour after the night had regained its natural darkness Volstokin's King concluded that he had been used by greater, darker powers to play attention-grabber while Evil slithered in to gnaw at the underbelly of the

West.

After writing brief letters to Kavelin's Queen, his mother, and his brother, he threw himself from the parapet of his prison tower.