Elven Queen Page 7

  Shahondin slipped back into the rock. He followed the course of the tunnel, which rose slowly. Although he kept a little distance between himself and the tunnel, he could clearly feel the disturbance in the rock, the resonance of the magical powers the Normirga had used to create this section of the fortress. Finally, he reached a small chamber from which a door led out to a lookout point. The tunnel ended here, more than a mile from the Snow Harbor gate.

  He slipped out of the wall cautiously. The guardroom there was lit by a single oil lamp. In a wide recess was a powerful catapult beside which stood a number of stools. From its dimensions, he could see that the catapult had been designed to be used by elves, but the stools allowed even kobolds to operate the winch and the locking lever and thus load and fire the weapon.

  Beside the catapult stood a row of clay jugs, some of which were wrapped in strips of linen. The mouths of the jugs had been carefully closed and sealed with wax. The prince sniffed curiously at one of them. A sharp odor stung his nose. Incendiaries!

  A snuffling sound followed by a soft gurgling made Shahondin turn. Along the opposite wall stood five bunk beds with curtains of heavy brown woolen blankets. The musty smell of clothes worn too long lingered in the air, and mixed with it was the faint scent of whisker wax. A large table and chairs and two long chests that served as benches filled the rear of the chamber.

  Shahondin pushed his head through one of the bed curtains. A kobold lay inside, curled up and fully dressed, snoring. The elf allowed the beast inside him free rein. He felt like a bystander as the creature devoured the kobold’s life-light. The small figure withered, his skin stretched across his skull. He died without waking.

  The beast glided up to the bunk above. The kobold there was sitting up with his back to the wall. He had wrapped himself in a blanket and had a wide strip of cloth around his face. For the space of a heartbeat, Shahondin thought his victim was awake—for some unfathomable reason, he had expected him to be awake. He observed how the kobold’s chest rose and fell evenly. The small fellow did not move: he was sound asleep. The odor of whisker wax was more intensive up there. Now Shahondin understood what he was looking at. The kobold had twirled the ends of his moustache artfully and had tied the cloth around his face to stop the elaborate construction from losing its shape. Maybe he had plans to meet a female when he was off duty and wanted to impress her with his striking whiskers. Maybe it would be amusing to let him live? How would he react if he woke up as the only survivor among all his dead comrades? Would he be paralyzed with fear? Would he run out screaming? And would he spend the rest of his life wondering why he alone had survived? He would surely never come to the conclusion that his swaddled moustache had saved him.

  The beast inside Shahondin rebelled. It had no sense for such malevolent pleasures. It wanted to kill! Filled with contempt, the elf stifled the witless beast and set upon the other sleeping kobolds, murdering eight of them. Not one of them awoke. They went straight from sleep into eternal darkness without ever suspecting what had happened to them.

  Satisfied, Shahondin withdrew to the darkest corner of the chamber. He was curious to see what would happen when someone discovered the guardroom filled with the dead—all but the kobold with his proud moustache, who could explain to no one what had happened. Killing like that was more gratifying than roaming through the fortress and murdering indiscriminately. The prince began to plan how his next victim would die. He would raise his assassinations to the level of art, and his applause would be the horror that spread through the mountain fortress. As an invisible, nameless bringer of death, he was infinitely more terrifying than the army of trolls that was soon to gather at the fortress gates.

  THE BOOK OF THREADS

  7th day of the wolfmoon. Alfadas left us today, a day somber and sad. On the other side of the gate of light lay a terrible darkness. I would not have wanted to pass through it. May Luth stand by the duke and his men. King Horsa did not want to linger in the village. He left before dark.

  9th day of the wolfmoon. Kalf found the dog breeder Ole deep in the woods. Ole was attacked by his own dogs, it seems. He is terribly injured and talks deliriously. I cleaned his wounds. Asla has taken him into her house to care for him. The big black dog had to be shut outside.

  11th day of the wolfmoon. Galti the fisherman has disappeared. His boat was found abandoned on the western shore.

  12th day of the wolfmoon. Erek and some of the men in the village have killed the dogs in Ole’s cage, but two were missing. Asla threatened the men when they came for her dog. I had difficulty settling the matter.

  13th day of the wolfmoon. Two slaves disappeared early in the morning: Fredegund and Usa. The village council met in the evening. Every face was fearful.

  14th day of the wolfmoon. The body of an old woman washed up on the shore. She wore Usa’s clothes. No one can explain how that could be. Many seek my help, but I cannot interpret these threads of Luth.

  15th day of the wolfmoon. A strange scourge has befallen Erek’s goats. They were found in the stall with nothing left of them but skin and bone. Ole’s fever grows worse. He babbles about a white elk cow.

  16th day of the wolfmoon. Solveig has not returned from gathering brushwood in the forest. The council, at Asla’s urging, has decided that no one else is to leave the village.

  17th day of the wolfmoon. Kalf cornered one of the missing dogs in the woods and killed it.

  18th day of the wolfmoon. The men went through the woods, looking for the missing hound. They did not find it.

  21st day of the wolfmoon. There have been no mishaps for five days. The fear is starting to fade. Luth be praised!

  From The Book of Threads, a Chronicle of Firnstayn

  By Luth priest Gundar

  Volume Seven of the Temple Library of Luth in Firnstayn

  THE WOLFHORSE

  Halgard pulled on her hide boots grumpily. The little girl hated being dragged out of bed so early. They’d stayed in Asla’s house until late the previous evening, along with the rest of the village. Gundar had addressed them and prayed with them. Halgard loved the old man’s strong, warm voice. For her, it was like sunlight on her face: simply a pleasure.

  Still tired, she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.

  “Come on!” Her mother hurried her along, pressing a chunk of hard bread into her hand. “Stop dawdling. I’ve been up for an hour, and you don’t hear me complaining!” Halgard’s mother helped her get the wide leather straps of the woven laundry basket over her shoulders, then tucked the shawl in warmly over her body and the basket. Mother must have hung it in front of the fire. Halgard sighed and rubbed her cheek against the wool. If only she could have stayed in bed a little longer.

  The door creaked open. The cold breath of the fjord pushed its way into the little hut. Halgard felt her way along the table and banged her knee against the bench. Mother had moved it from its rightful place. Again!

  “White fog is coming up the shore,” said her mother in a droning voice.

  Halgard pulled the door closed behind her and followed the voice, which went on ceaselessly as it described what her mother saw. As she had hundreds of times, Halgard wished Mother would talk about things that Halgard could understand. But that never occurred to her. Halgard could not really imagine clouds. They must be very large, and somehow they wandered across the sky although they had no legs. One could see them readily enough but could not touch them. And what was white? Another word with no meaning, like so many words Mother used in her never-ending descriptions.

  The path they followed was soft and muddy. Halgard liked the slurping, sucking noises her boots made after rain. It sounded as if her feet were giving the earth a wet, high-spirited kiss with every step she took.

  “That black cat is lurking behind the rain barrel at the corner of Erek’s hut again. It looks to me like she’s been waiting for us. Funny that she’s standing there almost every morning.” Her mother’s footsteps stopped. “If I catch you feeding her, you’re in for i
t!” Her voice sounded a little different—she must have turned around. “We don’t even have enough to feed ourselves; we don’t need to also start fattening up some stray beast.”

  Halgard bit into her bread and shrugged. It was pointless to try to talk to her mother. She would calm down again faster if Halgard simply said nothing at all.

  “Cats can look after themselves perfectly well,” her mother went on.

  The cat purred quietly and rubbed around Halgard’s legs. It was a wonderful sensation. The girl bent down and felt for the soft fur. The cat kept purring and pushed its head against Halgard’s hand and licked her fingers.

  “I don’t have any fish today,” the girl whispered. “Maybe tomorrow.” She broke off a tiny piece of her bread and held it out for the cat, though she knew that her little friend did not really think much of bread. But it was all she had, and she did not dare give it nothing at all because she was afraid that the cat would stop waiting for her altogether if she failed to feed it even once.

  “Where are you?” her mother called.

  “See you tomorrow.” Halgard patted the cat’s head one last time and hurried off after her mother, whose feet were already crunching on the gravel. She heard the basket scraping on stone and the sigh that Mother produced every time she put down her heavy load.

  “It’s completely dark out,” her mother explained. “The sun is still hiding behind the mountains. The wind is starting to stir the fog.”

  It’s always completely dark for me, thought Halgard angrily, and she wished Mother would finally stop talking to herself all the time.

  As if her mother had heard her thoughts, she suddenly stopped talking. Laundry rustled softly. Her mother would now sort it all out into small piles and weigh each pile down with stones before she set to work. Halgard’s mind drifted back to the wonderful days before she had to get up ahead of the sun every day, when Father was still with them. In spring of the year before, he had gone off with the jarl on a campaign and never came back. Ever since, hunger had been a constant guest in the house.

  Halgard thought of her father all the time. His voice was always slightly hoarse, and his big, bony hands had often stroked her hair, and then she had been the one to purr like a little cat.

  In the evenings, when she could not sleep, she listened to the sounds of the night. She still hoped to hear his familiar footsteps one day. He had been so tall and strong. Who would ever have been able to kill him? He just got lost somewhere along the way. He was sure to come home again. There just had to be someone who still believed it would happen. Mother did not. She was so infuriatingly pigheaded! Halgard had heard herself how Jarl Alfadas had offered her mother to look after both of them, but she didn’t want that. Instead, she took Asla’s laundry and washed it by the fjord early in the morning. She took in the laundry of a few other women, too, and in return for her labors, she received bread and cheese and sometimes a little meat. Mother didn’t like the other women watching when she did their laundry. She acted as if nothing had changed since Father had failed to return, but everyone in the village knew the work she did.

  “Are you dreaming again?” her mother snapped at her, and then came that most hated of sounds: the sodden splat of a wet piece of laundry on the wash stone in front of her. Reluctantly, Halgard felt after it. Its size and weight told her it was a shirt. The cold gnawed at her hands. She did what she could to wring out the wet fabric while her mother dipped the next item into the fjord and rubbed the fabric together over a rough stone.

  After a morning like this, it felt as if her hands would never be warm again, not even in front of the fire. Halgard groaned. She took out all her anger on the laundry. She twisted it as hard as she could and felt the icy water dribble over her fingers. The cold ate its way deep into her bones, and the best she could manage then was to travel far away, to ride off in her mind to somewhere so distant that she didn’t feel anything anymore.

  Asla was nice. Sometimes, the jarl’s wife slipped her a honeycake when Mother brought the laundry back. But it had to happen secretly, because Mother never took any more than the payment they’d agreed. She was so darn stubborn.

  When she did not have to help her mother, Halgard often played with Ulric. It was a bit boring, because he always wanted to play the same thing: she was the beautiful princess carried off by a monster that wanted to eat her for its breakfast with bread and cheese, and he was the hero who rescued her and killed the monster. Afterward, they often went to see Asla, and then there was really something to eat. That by itself was enough to make her play the silly game with Ulric every time.

  The day before, Ulric had let her touch the magical dagger, the one he’d been given by the elven prince. She thought it must have been the same elf who had spoken to her up on the Hartungscliff. His voice had been strange. The whole time he talked with her, Halgard had thought he was going to start singing at any moment. His hair had been wonderful to touch, as soft as a cat’s, only much longer. He smelled nice, too. Nothing like the other men who sometimes kidded her and who usually smelled of mead or sweat or onions.

  The girl came out of her thoughts with a jolt. Something was missing and had been for quite a while: the sound of her mother rubbing laundry on the rock.

  “Mother?”

  “Silence!” came a hiss beside her. Her mother’s voice was full of fear. Halgard listened. She could hear much better than anyone else in the village. She held her breath. There was the whispering of the little waves feeling their way up the gravel and receding again, and the sound of the wind sweeping across the fjord rustling through the branches of the trees along the shore. She heard her heart beating and the soft hum of her blood. And . . . yes, there was something else. A creaking, wooden sound and regular splashing. There was a boat out on the water, but it was still a long way off. If it was still foggy, then Mother would hardly be able to see it.

  “Is it the boat?” she asked softly.

  “No, it’s . . .” Her mother’s clothes rustled. “Get up! Run! It’s seen us! It’s coming!” Her mother grabbed her by the arm and jerked her up. “Run!”

  Halgard stumbled to her feet. She couldn’t run, and Mother knew it! When she ran, she lost her orientation and fell over.

  “The path’s in front of you. Straight ahead.” Her mother’s breath was coming in gasps. “Along the shore. We have to get to the priest! He’s the only one who can help us. Quickly! There’s nothing in the way. Come on!”

  They were on the path, and again her footsteps smacked in the mud, but now it seemed to want to hold on to her. And it was so horribly smooth. She slipped and was just able to stop herself from falling, her arms swinging wildly. There was no sound behind them. Nothing could move so silently. “What are we running from?”

  “The animal! Quick. Please, Halgard, don’t stop! It came out of the water. Its teeth . . . run! By all the gods, run!”

  Halgard toiled along as well as she could. Her mother described the path for her, staying close behind although she could easily have overtaken her.

  Halgard bumped against a stone, and this time she could not stop herself from falling. She fell flat onto the soft path. Cold mud spattered her face. She began to cry. She couldn’t run!

  “Up! Up with you, my little one.”

  Halgard was hauled back onto her feet. She felt her mother’s breath on her face. “You run now to Gundar. You go to Gundar as fast as you can, and you get him. It isn’t far to his hut. I’ll slow down the animal.”

  “What is it?” Halgard asked, sobbing.

  “It’s as big as a horse, but it has teeth like a wolf. And it looks like fog. Go now! Quickly! Keep straight on until you feel the shadow of the willow, then go left. You know the way. The willow is only twenty steps ahead.”

  “Why don’t I hear it?”

  “Because it’s like the fog!” Mother’s voice sounded like she was holding back tears. “Don’t ask any more. Run now. Please! It’s almost on us.”

  Halgard went on as fast as sh
e could. The wind from the fjord cut through her wet clothes. Her whole body shivered. She listened anxiously for any sound. When she reached the willow, she heard a soft cry. “Mother?”

  Halgard could not see the tree, but she could feel that it was close by. It felt as if even darker shadows filled the darkness that always surrounded her. She heard the thin branches whipping against each other in the wind.

  She went to the left. Suddenly, there was no more mud. She had lost the path. She hastily turned around and went back a short way, but she could not find the path. If only the sun were there! The light on her face would help her get her bearings.

  The wind had stopped. Now she could not even hear the branches of the willow. She could not be far from Gundar’s house. She screamed his name, hoping he was already awake. She knew the old man liked to sleep very late.

  For a moment, she thought about going on, but she knew she would only get more lost. If she was a long way from the priest’s house, then he would not be able to hear her anymore. No, it was better just to stay where she was and shout.

  Suddenly, the air around her grew colder. She felt no wind on her face. Something pushed into her chest. Her ribs felt like ice, like the bones of her fingers after she’d been wringing laundry for too long.

  Very softly, Halgard heard the creaking of a door.

  She was shivering so much that she was no longer able to stand. She could not shout anymore either. Her teeth chattered as loudly as the bone rattle her father had once given her.

  “Halgard? Is that you?” she heard the warm voice of the priest say. Yes, warm like the summer, the girl thought. Like the summer.

  She heard footsteps in the wet grass.

  “Halgard? By the gods!”

  THE GODSWHIP

  What could it have been? No creature from my world would do something like that to a child.” Asla spoke softly, but the whisper took none of the anger from her words.