Stormblade

18

The low ceilings of the caves grew high before Lavim had gone several yards past the entrance. The river’s moisture glistened on the rock walls and plastered the dust to the smooth stony floor. Dim light filtering in from the rangers’ cache place did little to illuminate these interior caves and only served to cast confusing shadows. Behind him, Lavim heard Tyorl and Kelida stepping carefully in the darkness.

“Piper,” he whispered, as something that looked like a spider with too many legs scuttled across his boot. “I don’t suppose you can do a little magic from where you are and give me some light? That looked like a spider, but I’m not real sure and—”

No, I can’t. Don’t waste time stumbling around in the dark and getting lost. Go catch up with Tyorl.

“Oh, don’t worry. I never get lost. I just find new places to be. I—hmmm, I wonder what’s over here?”

Dirt. Lavim, Tyorl and Kelida are getting ahead of you now.

“Uh-huh. Thanks for telling me. I’ll catch up.”

The kender intended to—in a minute. Though he couldn’t see very well, Lavim still had his hands and his curiosity. He’d told Tyorl that these were bandit’s caves and, in the course of convincing the elf that this was so, he’d convinced himself as well.

He made his way around a pile of heaped rubble, felt around a small chamber, backed out of it when he found nothing of interest, and edged into another. With a sound like restless wind in the tree tops, the far wall began to rustle.

“Piper! Look! I think that wall way back there is moving!”

Bats, Piper warned, get out, Lavim!

“Bats? So? I’m not afraid of—”

They’re afraid of you and when they fly they’ll warn everyone in sight that you’re in here. Get out!

Lavim sighed. He supposed Piper was right. He backed out of the cave, moving as silently as only a kender can.

Tracking east, following the scent of the river, Lavim veered aside—only a little—to squeeze himself into a spider-webbed corner. Piper, who in life had thought himself the most patient of men, lost his patience for the fourth time in a quarter hour. Lavim! Get moving!

“But these are bandit caves, Piper, and I—”

They’re not bandit caves. Go catch up with Tyorl. And give him my flute!

Lavim poked at the rubble and dust in a natural alcove. Tyorl and Kelida had passed him by a few moments ago, but he was sure that he could catch up with them again. All he had to do was follow the scent of the river and the sound of their breathing.

“You said they were bandit caves.” Though he did think, even as he said it, that Piper might have been mistaken. The alcove held nothing but scatterings of rock. Not even a tumble of old bones.

What were you hoping for, a skeleton? And you said these were bandit caves, I didn’t.

Lavim sighed heavily. He wasn’t at all certain that he liked having someone right inside his head and reading his every thought. “No, Piper, I really do think it was you who said these were—”

Damn it, Lavim!

Not only a ghost, Lavim thought sourly, but a testy ghost who’s as bad as Stanach and Tyorl ever were about letting him finish a sentence. Aye, testy! When you start a sentence that makes sense, then maybe you’ll get to—

The scream shivered through the darkness, a hollow, forlorn echo of pain. Like what a ghost should sound like, Lavim thought. All hope of finding bandit treasure fled as the kender suddenly remembered why he was here.

“Stanach?” he whispered. Up ahead he heard Kelida’s gasp and a low, murmured word from Tyorl.

Aye, Stanach. Lavim, stay back a minute.

“But you just said to catch up with them. Piper, how am I supposed to figure out what you want me to do if you don’t even know?”

Stay! Wait here.

“Yes, but-”

Take out my flute.

Lavim grinned. Aye, that he’d be happy to do! Though he thought it a little odd to be playing music now when Stanach needed his help, he dug into his pocket, pulled out the flute, and raised it to his lips. No! Piper bellowed. Not yet! Put it down and listen to me very carefully.

Reluctantly, Lavim lowered the flute.

Aye, now do exactly as I say, Lavim. The gods know I must be half-mad, but if you listen—very carefully!—and do just what I say, exactly the way I tell you—

A second scream, like horrible laughter, tore through the cave. Listen, now. The flute knows I’m near—no, don’t start asking questions! It senses my mind—my spirit, I guess is a good word, eh? It will lend its magic to my needs. Take a deep breath—no, deeper than that. Aye, that’s it. The flute will play the tune, and the tune is the magic, but you have to supply the air and the intent.

Aye, Lavim thought (because he couldn’t very well speak while holding his breath), and what do I intend? Can I summon monsters? Am I going to be invisible? Can I turn all Tyorl’s arrows into fire?

None of that, now, Lavim. Piper said sternly. This is what you intend—and only this.

Lavim felt Piper smile and, because the mage seemed to be in such a good humor, he quickly decided to try a little idea of his own. The low-roofed, narrow-walled tunnel connecting the woodland cave to the one opening onto the river held the echo of the scream for many moments. Tyorl shuddered and glanced over his shoulder at Kelida. She stood where he’d told her to, in the webbing of shadows and darkness where the tunnel bent left and back in the direction they had come. Her eyes bright in the darkness, her mouth a hard, determined line, Kelida grasped her dagger in a firm and steady hand the way Lavim had taught her.

The tunnel stank of musty earth, and rank, stagnant water pooled in the center of the floor. The litter of rubble and mud lay mostly undisturbed but for a footprint or two. If the Theiwar had explored this corridor at all, or the cave beyond, they’d likely been turned back by the seemingly impassable wall at the back of the woods cave. Tyorl wondered fleetingly how Lavim had found an entrance.

Aye, but a kender will find his way into a miser’s purse if he wants to. No reason why solid rock should stop him.

The half-rotted carcasses of beached fish, washed into the tunnel from a high tide swollen by storm rains, shimmered with the strange, evil light of putrification. His back to the wall, Tyorl edged around the water careful not to cause even the faintest whisper of a splash.

A second scream, a deep-throated and terrible roar, made the muscles in Tyorl’s belly wrench sickeningly. Under cover of the echo, the elf inched forward until he reached the entrance to the river cave. Narrow, barely wide enough for Tyorl to get through sideways, the entrance was blocked by a cloaked and hooded dwarf who stood with his back to the ranger.

The dwarf shifted his stance, moved aside and forward, and Tyorl closed his eyes. He hadn’t seen much, just an arm and a hand. Tyorl trembled with a cold rage. Each finger of the hand had been twisted and broken. His own fingers tightened around the hilt of his dagger. The hooded dwarf stood within striking distance, and Tyorl knew he’d smile to feel his dagger’s blade slide between this one’s ribs. Before he could move, the sound of a flute’s voice, hollow and chased by its own echoes, floated through the tunnel. From behind.

No! Gods, no! The kender has the mage’s flute!

The Theiwar turned sharply. One eye, he had, filled with hatred and the love of death. He snarled a curse when he saw Tyorl. His hands groped at the cold, damp air of the river cave, and took sudden flight in magic’s winged dance. Tyorl barely had time to see the Theiwar’s hands falter, like arrow-shot birds, before his own knees went weak and watery. Back in the tunnel, Kelida cried out, her cry torn by gagging and choking.

The music, a perversely light and merry air, drifted toward the elf on currents of the vilest odor he’d ever smelled. The stench of middens years uncleaned, eggs rotting, dead rats under a tavern’s floor, and vegetation moldering and turning to thick, greasy slime, filled the tunnel. Tyorl dropped to his knees, helpless to do anything but wrap his arms tightly around his belly, and clamp his back teeth against the overwhelming urge to vomit.

From within the river cave, and more distantly from without, came gagging and the sounds of wrenching pain. A voice, one that could only have been Lavim’s, echoed from behind the elf in deep, booming laughter. Small hands pounded at the elf’s back and pulled at his arms.

“Tyorl! Doesn’t this smell awful! Everyone’s just about throwing up everything they’ve eaten in the last week! Isn’t it great? Hey, Tyorl! Get up, would you? Tyorl! You ought to run in there and rescue Stanach and get rid of those wad-dayacall’ems while they’re all—uh, Tyorl?”

“Kender,” Tyorl gasped weakly, “I swear by every god there is I’m going to—” Caught by a stabbing belly cramp, he doubled over and knew very suddenly that trying to speak had been the wrong thing to do. He finished his threat in groans and gagging. When he was able to look up again, Tyorl was alone.

I am going to kill him, he thought as he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He staggered to his feet, braced his back against the wall, and tried not to breathe. I am going to lay that damned kender open from neck to gut and kill him!

A hand, shaking from the sudden and violent attack of nausea, gripped Tyorl’s arm. Kelida, dazed and weak-kneed, leaned against the elf. Shuddering, she whispered, “Are you all right?”

“Aye.” Tyorl lifted her chin. Then, surprised by his own gesture, he dropped his hand and held her gently away. “You?”

She shrugged and managed a wan smile. The noxious odors were beginning to drift in the direction of the river, dragged reluctantly away by damp, cold breezes. “Tyorl, what happened? What is this horrible smell?”

“The damned kender has the mage’s flute! Did you see where he went?”

Kelida looked quickly around then shook her head. “Those screams—”

Her face was white. “Stanach.”

Within the river cave, the hard, bitter noises of retching and choking had fallen still. Lavim’s laughter rose and then stopped with ominous suddenness. Tyorl stepped into the cave, Kelida right behind him. The freshening night wind cleared away the last of Lavim’s malodorous spell. Tyorl took a tentative breath and then another. The aching nausea left him. He looked around the cave and saw Stanach lying in the shadows against the wall. Kelida slipped past him and ran to the dwarf.

Realgar’s assassins lay on the stony floor and did not rise again. The skulls of two were crushed and the rock that killed them lay near Tyorl’s foot, smeared with blood and brains. The third was dead of a dagger in the ribs. Tyorl quickly checked outside and saw a dwarf lying far down the river, sprawled half in the water, half out.

“Lavim,” Tyorl said, his voice low with astonishment, “you killed all of them?”

Lavim, crouched in the darkest shadows of the night-filled cave, looked around. “I wish! One of ’em got away, Tyorl, and he was my favorite, or, he was the one I wanted to kill the most. I should have waited for you, I suppose, but you seemed to be having some temporary difficulty and—”

“Stanach!”

A small and pitying sigh on her lips, Kelida dropped to her knees and laid light, hesitant fingers on Stanach’s throat. She nodded to Tyorl; she’d found a faint lifebeat.

Tyorl’s belly went tight with what the dim starlight showed him. Blood and dirt matted the dwarf’s black beard. A dagger’s trail scored his face between eye and chin. It was the wreckage of Stanach’s right hand that sickened him.

If he had been schooled in the craft of war, Tyorl had also been schooled in other things. An artisan’s hand, someone once told him, is sacred. Without it, there is no bridge between what he envisions and what he can ultimately create. Stanach’s bridge lay in twisted ruin. A low, bubbling moan, thick with pain, startled Tyorl. Stanach, his blue-flecked black eyes flat and dull, looked at Kelida. When Stanach spoke, his voice was only a thin whisper.

“I don’t—I don’t feel my hand.”

A glimmer of panic broke the dullness of his eyes. He shifted a little on the ground and tried to move his fingers. When not even his smallest finger responded, Stanach closed his eyes again.

“Is it there? I feel my arm—but not my hand.”

Kelida tried to speak but found no words. She stroked his head gently, brushed his blood-matted hair away from his forehead. Tyorl, his heart aching, caught the glimmer of tears on her cheeks.

In a voice strangely thick, Lavim said, “Aye, young Stanach, your hand is there.”

“I don’t—feel it.”

For Stanach’s sake, Tyorl mustered a crooked smile and dropped to one knee beside him. “You may thank some god that you can’t just now, but your hand is there, Stanach.” Tyorl’s heart went cold and aching. All the better for you that you don’t feel it, he thought. Aloud he only said, “Rest easy now.”

Stanach’s breath shuddered in his chest. “Piper. They killed Piper. They want—Stormblade.”

Tyorl saw understanding darken Kelida’s eyes. Aye, Hauk, she hopes you’re alive. Lad, I hope you’re dead. They had a few hours at the dwarf. They’ll have been a week or more at you. Gods, I hope you’re dead!

Kelida’s hand dropped to Stormblade at her hip and then jerked away as though her fingers had been seared. She knew she would be dead now if Stanach had not somehow managed to keep silent through the agonizing ruining of his hand.

“No,” she murmured. “Oh, Stanach, no!”

How do you bear the weight of knowing that you live because others are suffering and dying? Tyorl shook his head. You tear your cloak for bandages, you cool the unbearable fire with the water from your flask. Watching Kelida’s gentle hands, listening to her soft words of comfort as she cleaned Stanach’s face and soaked the strips of green cloth for bandaging, Tyorl understood that he had fallen in love with Kelida just as surely as she had fallen in love with Hauk.

No, he thought, no. I’m tired, half sick still, and I don’t know where we’re running to next. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not in love with a barmaid, and a human one at that. No, and not with the woman who loves Hauk.

Tyorl nudged Lavim and walked slowly to the cave’s mouth. He needed air to clear his lungs and his head. The kender rose slowly and followed.

“Lavim, you said one got away?”

Lavim nodded. “He was fast, that one-eyed piece of gully dwarf—” He glanced over his shoulder, saw Kelida, and shrugged. “Lucky for him. Besides, I had my hands full with the others.”

“Aye, you must have.” Tyorl looked downriver. “And that one?”

“Uh, he’s dead, too. Pretty near, at least.”

“So I see. You were a busy fellow for a minute or two.”

“Oh, yes, really busy, Tyorl. There wasn’t a whole lot of time, but did I ever tell you what a good cave-fighter I am, unless I’m outnumbered too badly, and my hands are tied, and I’ve lost my knife, and—”

“Where’s the flute?”

Lavim studied the night sky. “Urn, the flute?”

“The mage’s flute.” The elf held out his hand. “Give. And don’t waste any breath telling me that you don’t have it.”

“But, Tyorl, I don’t—uh, I think I lost it back there in the cave.” Lavim dug into the deep pockets of his old black coat, searched a couple of pouches, and even patted himself down, eyes puzzled and innocent all the while. “I, um, I must’ve lost it back there somewhere. That smell-spell was awfuller than I thought it would be, and, well, to tell you the truth, it kind of startled me. Didn’t it startle you? You looked pretty startled when I caught up with you. You were kind of green, Tyorl. Not a lot green, you understand, but sort of. Around the edges, so to speak.”

Around the edges! Tyorl had no doubt that he’d been as green as moldy bread. He didn’t want to argue the matter or even think about it now. He knew he should go look for the flute himself, but there was something about the dwarf by the river that piqued his curiosity.

“Go find it, Lavim, and bring it right to me.”

“Well, sure, but I don’t really know where I’d look.”

“Look in the cave!”

“Oh. Right, in the cave. Which—?”

Tyorl didn’t hear the rest of the question as he stalked away from the river cave. There was something about the way the dwarf lay sprawled on the bank, arms wide and hands frozen in a grasp at the air that made Tyorl think he hadn’t died of a broken skull or a dagger in the ribs, and that he hadn’t been killed by the kender at all.

Stanach wanted the windswept ledges above Thorbardin. He wanted the peace. His dreams were filled with endless searching for the feel of ancient stone against his back, the frosty scent of gold autumn. He longed for the heatless wash of starlight, the silver spray of Solinari’s light on the early snow, and Lunitari’s glow, edging the crags and peaks of the mountains with crimson.

He found none of these in his fevered dreams, and none in his few moments of waking. All he had was pain.

Pain was what he was made of. Not bone and flesh, nor blood and breath. Each time he tried to climb to the sky, pain stood, a grinning demon with Wulfen’s mad eyes, to block his way. He could not reach the golden sunlight, the diamond night, the sapphire twilight. He was lost in darkness, listening to the weeping of moisture down a black stone wall. When he cried out none heard and no light was brought. He was alone with no way back, no path to Thorbardin under the mountain. Lavim returned to the river cave. As he did, he dipped his hand into his pocket and touched the smooth cherry wood flute. He was almost surprised to find it. Lavim did not consider himself a liar, or even a temporizer. What he said, he believed wholly. At the moment he said it. He cocked his head, listening for Piper’s comment. The mage, it seemed, always had something to say about what Lavim was thinking. Piper had nothing to say now.

Piper, he thought. Piper?

Nothing.

Lavim dropped to his knees beside Kelida. He supposed Piper might be just the least bit annoyed about his improvisation.

Well, he told himself, the flute hadn’t seemed to mind.

Apparently it had played exactly the melody needed to produce what Lavim had come to consider the smell-spell.

A nice little spell it was, too, he thought for the benefit of the silent mage.

Kelida had wiped the blood and dirt from Stanach’s face, cleaned the dagger cut, and covered him with her cloak. With one hand she was carefully lifting his head, with the other holding her water flask to his lips. When he didn’t swallow, Lavim leaned forward and stroked the sides of his throat with his gnarled old hands. The dwarf swallowed once, and then again, though he never opened his eyes.

“Sometimes that helps,” Lavim said. He looked at Kelida and shook his head. “Poor Stanach.”

The girl looked ragged and tired. She brushed straggling wisps of red hair away from her face with an absent gesture. “We—we should do something about his fingers, Lavim, but I don’t—I don’t—” She stopped, unable to find words to express her reluctance to tamper with that swollen ruin of a hand.

As though he sensed her feeling, Lavim drew in a long breath and let it out in a sigh. “You’re afraid you’ll do something to make it worse?”

“That,” she whispered, “and—oh, Lavim, whatever I do is going to hurt him so much!”

“It’s a shame we don’t have any dwarf spirits. I’ve heard that if you have enough of that stuff in you, you probably couldn’t feel a tree if it fell on you. We don’t, so you’d better do what you have to do before he wakes up. I don’t think he’s going to want to watch you straighten and bind those fingers.” Lavim shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think I want to watch you, either.”

“Lavim, will you help me?”

Lavim certainly didn’t want to do that. His stomach went all squishy when he thought about it. “Kelida, I don’t think—well, that is, I’m not really very good at this sort of thing and—”

Help her, Lavim.

Oh, but I don’t think—

Hold his hand at the wrist and straighten the fingers as she binds them.

Lavim’s stomach was really acting up now. Leftover smell-spell, he told himself and didn’t choose to remember that he, as the spell caster, hadn’t been affected by the odor at all.

No, Piper, he said silently, I don’t think I want to do that. Piper’s voice was very gentle inside his head.

Lavim, he’s never going to have the use of that hand again. But you can help Kelida ease the pain.

“All right,” Lavim whispered.

Something was eating Stanach’s hand. It gnawed one finger, chewed flesh, spat out bone, and moved on to the next. Voiceless and surrounded by hollow voices that should have been familiar, but were not, he tried to scream and failed.

Three!

(Two or seven … )

Four!

(One or six … )

Reorx! I beg you! Grant me grace or strike me dumb!

Fire ran along the edges of Wulfen’s dagger; the steel of its blade sent fear rebounding around the cold, wet walls of the cave the way the echoes of pain and old, spent thoughts echoed around Stanach’s mind.

“Where is Stormblade?”

Pieces of twilight and a midnight star.

“Lyt chwaer.”

“Now, one more, Stanach.”

Stanach heard a distant scream. Faint and very thin, it shivered the darkness surrounding him.

Five!

“Rest easy, young Stanach,” the god said with the voice of an old kender. “Rest easy.”

Stanach sighed as the clean, cold wind of the mountains dried his sweat and tore through the echoing voices, shredding them the way it would smoke.