Chapter Thirty-One
The Tairn Explains Himself
Storm took in the expression on Belius’ face and rushed up the stairs. Both Thrush and Swallow were working healing magics on the wizard’s burnt hands, but the damage had been extensive.
“There’s an apothecary down the street,” Storm called down to the troopers below. “A couple of you go kick the door down and get me some aloe and some silver sulphate, if you know what either of those are, and if they have any. See if you can find some glycerol or petroleum jelly. Oh, hell, if nothing else, get me as much sheep fat as you can.
“We’ll fix up a poultice for those burns,” he reassured the old mage
“Can’t you just heal them?” Belius demanded, pain clouding his eyes and bringing a whiny tinge to his voice.
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“Simply command it done and let the magic work!” the old man exploded. “Like you did with the wagons!”
“There you go with the wagons again,” Storm threw his arms up. “I didn’t do anything with the wagons! I told you to do it.”
Turning his back on the spluttering mage, he held out his arms to the little birds. They came into them gratefully, squeezing him, but not too hard, for he was badly torn up himself although he had yet to realize that fact. “Are you two alright?” he whispered into Thrush Dancing’s hair although he could already feel that they were.
“And what of you?” Swallow demanded. “You left us alone and look what’s become of you! Your fine new clothes are so many rags and you look as though you’ve been making love to a barrel full of knives!”
“What did you find out there?” Thrush asked.
“A greel,” a half-familiar voice stated from the doorway.
Storm looked up to see the dall female from the afternoon’s altercation, unable to tell whether the gasps and muttered prayers he was hearing were because of her sudden reappearance or the identity of the monster he’d slain.
She held out the two throwing knives, announcing to the room at large: “there was among the green ones, a greel,” she announced. “It appeared within the wood this night, not two hands gone, and the green ones there to meet it. This we were able to glean from the spoor they left behind, although not their purpose. But know this. The magicks that summoned the greel were powerful and fell. You have a great enemy, and it hides itself from us that we might not know its name.
A bit dizzy and growing moreso, Storm gave the dall his owl-eyed concentration, struggling to gather his thoughts even as his overloaded adrenal system was shutting down post battle rush, crashing the body along with it.
The little birds were holding him tightly, anger and fear radiating from them.
“A greel,” Thrush Dancing’s voice was awed. “They really do exist, then?”
“Of course they exist,” Belius snapped, temper made short by the pain of his hands. “They simply don’t exist here. Or so I’d believed until now.”
“It is even as the mage says,” the priestess told them. “The greel are said to live far, far to the south, within the remotest regions of Hepiton’s Teeth.”
They’re mountains at the edge of the southern ice wastes, Swallow Courting sent to the man, who’s face showed his confusion.
“None have ever been known to venture further north than the Hart’s Blood River,” the dall continued. “For the heat of the plain is not comfortable to them. They are creatures of the dark ice caverns and the high peaks where the sun loses its power to warm.”
The wolf growled and yipped, inquiring as to whether the body remained where it had fallen. Upon hearing that it did, he turned to address the clustered troopers, two of them nodding and following him out into the night.
“Who are you?” Storm asked the dall when they’d gone. “Twice now you’ve saved our lives, and I don’t even know who you are.”
She smiled down at him, her demeanor warming slightly. “I have possibly saved your life once. You were in no real danger this afternoon. Not a man child who can defeat a greel in single combat.
“In any case, I merely saved you from death. You rescued me from long years of torture and humiliation. The scale hardly balances.”
“Saved you?” he was confused.
“The slavers,” Swallow whispered, shivering at the flicker of cold that washed over them at the simple mention of the word.
“You were there?”
“I was,” she nodded. And I have the tale of how you accomplished our rescue, although I cannot ken the reasons, even now. Tell me, Tairn. Why?”
He shook his head slowly, thoughts clouded with reaction. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know you were even there.”
Her face went to stone, and he hurried to explain. “They were slavers, don’t you see?”
But she didn’t. She’d prepared herself for many answers, but that had not been among them. “There are slavers everywhere.”
His body steadied, his back going straight. Alarmed, the little birds shook him hard, and he fell back from the cold place, collapsing to the floor despite their best efforts to hold him up. “Not for long,” he growled, shaking his head as he untangled himself from their shivering bodies. “Not for long.”
Shaken, the priestess looked to the mage, who simply shook his head. She turned again to regard the fallen man, seeing him as though for the first time.
The little birds had him solidly, stroking his chest and back, using lips and body contact to keep him within the world, and so he was able to answer. “I hate slavery that much. Slavers are only tools.”
“Then it matters not to you t’were dall or dealicus, ogre or man child who is enslaved?”
“Not any,” he didn’t hesitate. “You’ve already seen that I’m not squeamish about killing my enemies or protecting my friends, but I’ll not see even such as those green things enslaved.”
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
“Then you did not rescue us because of what we were?”
“I have no clean answer,” he admitted. “Your question isn’t clear. Do you mean did I rescue you because you were dall? No. I’d no idea what dall even were at that time. But if you mean did I rescue you because you were people.... people who deserved to live free? Then the answer is yes. It can only be yes.”
“But,” she struggled to comprehend, “we are not people. At least not insofar as you could be concerned. We are dall. You are a man child. We can no more be people to you than you can be to us. The two cannot mix.”
“Like the first-born and last-born don’t mix?” Swallow quipped from within the man’s arms.
“Or like the twice-born and last-born?” Thrush added, gesturing toward the door through which the troopers and the wolf had vanished.
The priestess shook her head harder, nearly dislodging the headdress. “No! This is not so! The people who are dall are not people to the men, and the forest people are not people to the dall. This is how it has always been.”
The man shrugged, yawning broadly. “Things change.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Elsewhere
Clouds did battle in the skies, sending bolts of lightning earthward and rain cascading down in torrents. The winds were confused and mingled, following no set path, rushing in no set direction. The gods were contesting the very air, and below, within thatched huts, the slaves huddled in miserable torment.
All but one. Looking for all the world like two meters of drowned rat, Joblar Bonecruncher slithered through the grass, the dangling end of his riven neck chain trailing in his wake. Light shone dimly through the cascading rain, marking the window of the overseers’ cabin, and his goal. He held still as the lightning flared again, pretending to be just another lump in the grass. Little chance there was that anyone would be looking out into the storm, but after six years within the iron, he was prepared to take no extra chance.
The lightning died, and he held his position, waiting for the thunder. There! From within the shielding rumble, he bolted for the wall of the cabin, rolling to a stop within reach of the sodden boards, and well within the shadows. Pressing his ear to the wall, he strained to gather some impression of the number within. It was no use. The storm that so protected his movement, served those within as well.
There were normally four hands of the man children about, always half with the thunderers. But some had left before the storm. Something had happened somewhere, and they’d been called back to the city. They’d locked the slaves within their suffocating pens beforehand, however, and so Joblar had no way to know how many had stayed behind. While he was fully prepared to die within this exhilarating bubble of freedom he’d made for himself, he much preferred to live and cause his hated foes to die.
It was impossible to tell how late it might be. The clouds and rain completely obscured the moons. Would the overseers be asleep or drunken? Or would they be awake and caring for weapons? Judging from the quality of the overseers, the last was unlikely, but the times were unusual, and it wouldn’t do to happen upon them the one night they changed their pattern.
Raising up upon his hands and twisting his head sideways, Joblar stretched himself to bring a single eye within the square of the grimy window. Only a fraction of the room was visible. A figure, indistinct behind the oiled hide, moved between the lamp and the window. Another, or what might have been another, made a stationary lump at the table Joblar knew occupied the room’s center.
He’d wait a bit. Perhaps they’d turn the lamp down when they were ready to sleep. Perhaps one would wander out to the privy alone. Either way, Joblar would take his chance or make one. Afoot, he’d never outrun horsemen, leaving him but the single choice. By the first rising of the sun, he’d be free or he’d be dead. Either way, his years of slavery had come to an end.
* * *
Shelador the First, boy King of Turalee, overseer of the Plains of Gold, Protector of the Tyriss Mountains, and Grand Warden of Bayel’s Wood, shivered within the quilts of his ornate bed. Without, the very sky was rebelling, shaking the walls of his newly conquered palace with its excess. Within, the ruler of the largest kingdom in the known world felt the chill of fate race along his spine like ice.
A veritable phalanx of concubines sheltered the quivering king with compliant bodies, but aside from the dead king’s widow and daughters they were soulless husks, drained of strength. Worthless. Nor were this new land’s former rulers likely to be of any comfort. They offered only moist crevices and humiliated hatred. In any direction he looked, all Shelador could see were empty eyes and slack faces. What protection could they offer? What warmth to chase away the cold?
Angry, he kicked his way clear of the knot of female flesh, taking some small enjoyment from the grunts of pain that erupted. Free of them at last, he ventured to the large, westward facing window, throwing it open, for it wasn’t the weather that had him so cold. The wind whipped at him, tugging his night clothes taught against him. It had the feel of the all about it, the wind, and of the weed. It was some small comfort to know that he worked not alone, although not much of comfort. Something... something deep within him, at the core of his being. Something in that dried out fleck of himself that remained of his human father’s heritage despite the incessantly expanding stain of the all... something told him in a small, amused voice that he might yet lose. That humanity was a different sort of thing than the all could understand.
* * *
The sun shone brightly upon the plains of ice, drowning detail and blending the undulations of the landscape into a single featureless surface. At the center of the plain, burrowed half into the ice and huddled within itself rested an enormous thing of utmost blackness. Alone upon the plain, there was no way to judge its size, no way to gauge its speed. Multi-faceted eyes looked inward, and two or three of the black, heavily spiked arms waved hypnotically before it as it struggled to control the winds half a hemisphere upspin and polar, still within the world’s stellar shadow. The weed was questing again, striving to mark the new presence upon its measly rock. How paltry were its efforts to one who’d controlled worlds that numbered as the grains of sand within a desert.
A limb jerked and far away, lightning tore through a cloud mass, distorting the winds within the weed’s control and turning them against it.
With another part of its awareness, the blackness summoned agents to a temple far to the north. The greel were a hidden people, but they were a strong people, intolerant of others, intolerant of difference. Within that temple, speaking with the voice of a consumed godling, the blackness informed them that the champion had failed. It ordered warriors in number out of the fastness of their mountains. Command the ogres, it told them. Destroy the agents of the weed. Hunt them down and destroy them.
A disturbance. The splinter. Good, good. Shifting a larger portion of its awareness to the splinter it had torn from itself at its arrival upon this putrid world, it segmented its consciousness, forcing an additional schism and focusing the sundered awareness more and more clearly upon the splinter until it looked through the splinter’s eyes, sensed the world through the splinter’s senses.
“--ilady Mim,” the voice was insistent. “Milady Mim! You are summoned, majesty.”
Mim, the Queen Mother, shuddered convulsively as the additional awareness that was communion with the all settled itself within her being. Only dimly aware of her other self and the battle that still raged within the skies to the south, she struggled to her feet, at once wondering what new turmoil awaited and raging at the frustration of dealing with such a frail physical form.
“What is it soldier,” her voice rang within the temple.
“M-milady,” the young soldier faltered back a pace at the inhuman quality of the demand. “Milady, the Lord Chamberlain summons you if it please your highness. He says that some great power has attacked your slaver, Torbal, and wreaked fell magicks upon him.”
The Mim splinter struggled with the all consciousness to moderate their reply, lest tales be carried and governing the kingdom become even more difficult. Twenty years within the brain and largely separated from the all won out, and, voice graveled with effort, she waved the soldier ahead. “Very well, boy, lead the way.”
* * *
The storm moved slowly northwest as the night waned. The half-drowned dall noted its direction absently, concentrating mostly upon staying somehow warm. Even sheltered by the leeward wall of the cabin, the wind tore at his wet hide mercilessly. The dim glow through the window began to take on a life of its own, promising warmth and a dry place to sleep. Blankets, it said, hot food. Khoof. It took all of his will to remain still– to not charge through the door in suicidal desperation.
Patience, he'd relied on these long years. But patience was a commodity he was running very low on.