Taking Flight

Chapter Six

Kelder began to back away more quickly; above him he heard a strangled squeak, and the beating of wings fading into the distance, and then nothing.

The demon-things were grinning at him, and making weird whooping noises. Then one began to run toward him, axe raised, and a second followed, waving a short sword. The black-robed man atop the wagon was waving his arms and chanting again, and Kelder took an instant to wonder why before he turned and started running for his life.

The demons came shrieking after him as he fled, the noise growing closer with every step he took — until it abruptly stopped.

The total silence was so astonishing that he stumbled and fell. His arms came up instinctively, shielding his face; he curled into a ball and rolled in the dust of the highway, waiting for the first blade to cut him, the first club to batter him.

Nothing happened.

Carefully, he opened his eyes, lifted an arm from his face.

There was the caravan; the man in black was climbing down from his perch, and the merchants and guards were returning to their places, preparing to move on.

There were no demons.

There was no sign of them anywhere.

The only evidence that any demons had ever existed was the mangled corpses of the bandits and their mounts.

Kelder slowly uncurled, and got cautiously to his feet.

There were no demons. The demonologist had presumably sent them back wherever they had come from, and they were completely, utterly gone.

One of the caravan guards on foot had drawn his sword and was whacking the heads off the corpses of the bandits. This was obviously not necessary to ensure that they were actually dead; even from this distance, Kelder had no doubt at all that they were all dead. The guard was presumably collecting trophies. The battle was undeniably over.

Kelder stood for a moment, considering, and then began stumbling toward the caravan. It was not that he particularly wanted a closer look at the corpses, or the wagons, or anything else, but he was afraid that if he turned and fled the demonologist might decide he was a bandit after all. Kelder looked up, seeking Irith, intending to urge her to join him.

She wasn’t there. There was nothing above him but empty sky, clear and bright blue, with a few fluffy white clouds drifting here and there.

Kelder stopped dead in his tracks. Where had she gone?

He slowly turned, studying the heavens, and finally spotted her, far to the west; she was little more than a dark speck against the sun. For a moment he panicked; he didn’t want to lose her. He couldn’t lose her, that would destroy the entire prophecy! He waved and shouted, but then stopped, feeling foolish; she wouldn’t be able to hear him from so far away.

He considered running after her, but the speck seemed to be growing; he stared, and decided that yes, it was definitely getting larger. She was coming back.

He stood and waited for her while, three hundred yards to the east, the caravan regrouped and moved on, ignoring him and the flying figure. By the time Irith dropped to the earth beside him the wagons were almost out of sight over a distant rise. Only by shading his eyes with his hand and staring hard could Kelder make out an upright pike at the back corner of the last wagon, and a bloody head impaled upon it.

Irith’s wings fluttered, stirring Kelder’s hair, and he turned his gaze on her. “What were those things?” he asked.

Irith shrugged prettily. “I don’t know,” she said.

“You didn’t learn about them when you were an apprentice?” said Kelder.

She stared at him as if he had said something exceptionally stupid; when it sank in that indeed he had, she replied hautily, “I was a wizard’s apprentice, not a demonologist’s!”

Her disdain was actually painful, and Kelder tried to recover by asking, “But didn’t you learn about the other kinds of magic? To keep up with the competition, as it were?”

“No,” Irith said. “Just learning wizardry was hard enough!” Her tone softened. “Besides, nobody around where I lived knew anything about demonology back then.”

Kelder blinked. She was doing it again, speaking as if her apprenticeship had ended years ago, when it couldn’t possibly have. “When was that?” he asked.

She glared at him, obviously annoyed, but he was unsure why.

“Ages ago,” she said. Then she turned away and pointedly ignored him for a few seconds.

“Oh,” he replied feebly, after a moment.

She turned back. “Let’s get going,” she said.

He nodded, and they began walking. Irith’s wings vanished after a few paces.

Five minutes later they reached the first of the dead bandits. Blood had sprayed across the highway and the neighboring grass, but it was already dry and brown, no longer red. The corpse was absolutely ghastly — pieces were scattered about, while the main mass was unrecognizable.

And of course, the head was gone completely.

A score of other corpses, all equally mutilated, were scattered along the roadside ahead, interspersed with the carcasses of an equal number of horses. Flies were settling on them all, crawling across the faces.

Kelder’s stomach cramped, and he fought to keep down his breakfast. He had seen death before — in farm animals, and sick old people who died at home in bed. He had never seen anything at all like this carnage.

“Ick,” Irith said, stepping carefully across one of the dried streaks of blood.

“Ick?” Kelder stared at her. “Is that all you have to say?”

She looked at him, startled. “What else should I say?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Kelder snapped, irritated, “but something a bit more respectful than ‘ick’!”

“Respectful?” She looked at him in honest puzzlement. “How is ‘ick’ disrespectful?”

“You don’t think the dead deserve something a bit more... more...” Words failed him. He was unsure he could have found the right phrase even in his native Shularan, and in Trader’s Tongue or Ethsharitic it was hopeless.

“Oh, the dead?” Irith said. “I thought you meant you!”

“Me?” Kelder was taken aback. He had expected to earn Irith’s respect eventually, but had hardly presumed he had it already. “No, I didn’t mean me, I meant the... the corpses.”

“What do they care?” Irith asked. “They’re dead, they don’t care if I say ‘ick.’ And they’re really yucky. I don’t like blood.”

“I don’t either,” Kelder said without thinking. Then he caught himself, and said, “Can’t you be a little more... more compassionate? I mean, these were people, with homes and families, probably.”

Kelder was struggling with an internal conflict; Irith was so incredibly beautiful, so obviously magical, so widely knowledgeable, that he kept expecting her to be noble and pure and perfect in every way. Whenever she demonstrated that she wasn’t, he balked at the incongruity.

Besides, he expected his wife to be caring and compassionate, and Irith was destined to be his wife.

Irith shrugged. “Well, I didn’t kill them,” she said.

“Doesn’t it bother you, seeing them like this?” he asked, still hoping to restore her to her pedestal.

Her expression turned to outrage.

“Of course it bothers me!” she yelled. “That’s why I said ‘ick’!”

Kelder felt as if he were trapped, somehow, in a web of wrong words and misunderstandings. He didn’t want to argue with her; quite the opposite. In fact, looking at her, he was overwhelmed anew by her beauty, and found himself unable to argue with her.

Maybe it was he who was imperfect.

“I’m sorry,” he said, surrendering. “I just never saw anything like this before. It’s got me upset, and it seems as if you should be more upset than you are, too.”

“Oh,” Irith said, looking around at the corpses. “Oh, I guess I see what you mean, if this is your first time on a battlefield. But it’s not the first time for me; I saw lots of dead people in the war, you know? I mean, this is really gross, but I used to see other stuff that was just about as bad.”

“You did?” Kelder looked around and struggled to hold down his rising gorge.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “There was one time when a spell backfired and these people got all ripped to pieces...” She saw Kelder’s expression, and concluded apologetically, “But I guess you don’t want to hear about that.”

“No,” he agreed, “I don’t think I do.”

“Well, then,” she said reasonably, “let’s not talk about it, let’s just get out of here.”

Kelder nodded. When Irith did not immediately move he took the hint, turned away from her, and started walking.

Irith looked at the blood, the flies, the debris, and made a small noise of disgust. Then her wings reappeared, and she flew on ahead, avoiding the mess.

As Kelder stumbled past the last of the corpses he found himself wondering what war Irith had seen. There were always border wars going on somewhere in the Small Kingdoms — wars were inevitable when you had two hundred and some separate governments jammed into an area the size of the Small Kingdoms — but he hadn’t heard about any particularly bad ones recently. And the kingdoms along the Great Highway reportedly tried harder than most to avoid fighting, since it cut down on traffic and therefore hurt business. Reportedly, the kingdoms along the road were generally significantly smaller than the regional average because of this — rulers were slower to put down secessions or to go empire-building here than elsewhere.

So what war had Irith been talking about? Had she studied under a master wizard in Korosa or Trothluria or some other land that had recently fought a war? Had she been involved in the war somehow, that she saw the battlefields? Had that been part of why she fled?

But the Small Kingdoms didn’t use magic in their wars — at least, most of them didn’t, though there were the stories about the new so-called Empire of Vond in the far south, where just last year some warlock had reportedly used his magic to conquer everything in sight. A wizard’s apprentice wouldn’t be allowed near the battlefields in Korosa or Trothluria.

Irith had said a spell had backfired, though. Where could that have happened? Vond?

Just where was she from? He still hadn’t asked her directly; he suspected she wouldn’t answer, would avoid the issue somehow. It was all very mysterious, and he wondered about it, but looking at Irith, who was waiting for him a hundred yards up the road, he decided not to ask her about it.

Not yet, at any rate.

And maybe, he admitted, never. She didn’t look as if she wanted to talk about wars she had seen, and he wasn’t sure that he did, either. He was interested in Irith’s past, all right — but he was much more interested in her future. Forgetting about the dead bandits would probably be the best solution all around.

He trudged onward, intently not looking back — but then his steps slowed.

Had he heard something move? Did he feel someone watching him?

Irith had turned back and was watching him, waiting for him, tapping a foot impatiently, but even so he paused and glanced back over his shoulder.

Nothing was on the road behind him but dust and blood; nothing moved among the dead but flies. He glanced to either side, and saw nothing but rolling grassland. He looked harder.

Was that someone, on the northern horizon, crouched in the tall grass?

No, it wasn’t, he decided. He was just spooked. He turned east again and marched ahead, calling unnecessarily to Irith, telling her to wait.