The Green Lands
٥ Korunasykli: ٢٢ Days after the Red Storm at Westsong
I can be here … away.
Ayomth ahn oh.
I hold my own.
Oh, and I have fire for…
Oh, and I have fire in my heart.
Oh, and I can die in fire…
Lashjuk dozed, dreaming of fire. Voices—a chorus of whispers—grasped at her as she floated past them. They spoke of vital things she knew she mustn’t forget, and which were gone as soon as that thought had burst upon her.
There were angry, rasping taunts, inarticulate rage that was somehow at once both deadly and impotent, a hunger that would never—could never be sated—yet which burned and roiled as each new meal came near its red, shifty mouth.
Between all of this, surrounding and occasionally overtaking the other sounds, there was the song. The voice was as familiar as her own, though it was certainly not her singing. It was sweet and haunting and full of words she didn’t recognize.
No, I recognize them. I simply don’t understand them.
She hadn’t heard the melody before … had she?
On and on and on, she floated. Every now and again, she thought she heard Maksu laughing uncontrollably, Sulok weeping softly, Eobum speaking to… not to her, but to someone. At one point, she thought he, too, might be weeping, but even in her half-mad slumber, she doubted these phantasms. They may have been true things, and they may have been echoes of her battered heart.
These moments of madness were interspersed with long bouts of utter black silence. She both feared and reveled in these. Oblivion had its allure when all the world made you weary. She knew she didn’t want to remain in that state for long, but for minutes, perhaps even hours at a time? That was a gift she would gladly receive.
“Lashjuk? Lashjuk… Lashjuk, you must wake.” Was that voice familiar? She thought so, but couldn’t be certain. Oblivion was calling her back with its beckoning silence. She turned away from the voice, and for a moment, she thought she’d won the contest, earning her the peace of the utter—the soft emptiness—of the black beyond… whatever that was. She found herself wondering where such phrases had come from. She couldn’t recall having heard them, let alone said them before.
A new sound came to her. No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a sound. It was a sense, a presence… an aspect moving, expanding, undulating in the utter that surrounded her. Was it whispering? Sending out thought rather than sound? Madness, surely, but then what about her life these last few weeks hadn’t been tinged with madness? She couldn’t hear it in the normal sense of that oh-so-familiar word, but she still somehow received it. It was a distant thing, but too certain, too real to be simple fancy.
“I… I hear you. Do I know you?” She felt herself rolling in the grass. The grass? Was she meant to be in the grass? Surely not, yet she was certain she smelled, heard, and felt it as she moved. The presence reached out to her once more. “I… on your back? That makes no…”
Her eyes snapped open in shocked understanding. She saw the deep blue of dusk above her, and yes, she was indeed laying atop the grass beneath that brilliant blue sky.
She sat up, casting about for her… her what? Her friend? Her companion? Her mount? She didn’t know how to think of the creature that had aided her. She found it—smaller than a house cat, yet truly and clearly the same creature. It was wriggling around her in a slow circle amidst the grass.
“Gi awka glem, what happened to you?” Hearing the words made her wince. That had been Eobum’s favorite expression of disbelief or incredulity. It meant blood and iron in her mother tongue.
“Mother tongue,” she murmured. That brought her mind back to where she was and why she was there. It brought her mind back to Maksu.
She scooped the serpent up into her arms, then gave it to lie across the back of her neck, which it did without complaint.
“What? We’re where?” Once more, she had sensed its meaning but not heard its voice. “Is it you I’m… well, not hearing, but…” She trailed off, considering. “Prove it to me.” She paused for a moment, then bowed her head in thought. How indeed?
“Wrap yourself about my brow like a noble’s circlet. If you do that of your own accord, I’ll know it’s you, I’m…” She shrugged. “… hearing.”
Within seconds, the black serpent with the all-too-human head had, indeed, wrapped itself around her forehead.
She shuddered at the realization. “All right. I believe you. Why have you lost your voice? Why’ve you become so small a thing?”
The creature moved back down to rest across her shoulders and the back of her neck.
“…Haven’t bonded yet… haven’t finished the… you’ve exhausted the power you… Wait, all of it? You’ve no ability to help me find my son? To get us back to Eobum?” She cocked her head to the side as if listening. Nodding, she got to her feet and cast about herself.
Lashjuk stood beneath a green canopy of monstrously large trees. She was in a grove of the alien things, on a hilltop she didn’t think she could otherwise have picked out from any of the dozens of others she’d seen in this place.
She sensed the serpent’s urging and nodded, walking through the grove to the hill’s other side. The trees ignored her. She had no idea why that thought should have bloomed in her mind in the first place, let alone why it should bring her such comfort. Of course the trees had ignored her. They were trees, after all. No tree she’d ever seen had ever expressed so much as an opinion in any way she’d ever seen or heard.
As she exited on the hillock’s far side, she saw perhaps fifty men on horseback with a similar force on foot. Both of these surrounded a traveling coach that would likely be the envy of any noble who laid eyes upon it. She doubted the Emperor himself had better. It was tall and long, well-built out of dark woods that seemed to shimmer in the pale light of day’s end.
“What? All right.” She stepped to the left and climbed atop the humped up turves there, giving her a slightly higher vantage from a slightly different perspective. All at once, she understood why she’d been bidden to move.
The magnificent coach had a single blemish to mar the visage its owner wanted to project. The team that drew the vehicle was made up of horses, as one might expect, but any hope of meeting other expectations stopped there. The horses were sun-bleached bone. They weren’t bone-white—they were made utterly of bone.
“Not pos—”
She nodded, shuddering. “They look like the bones of draft horses.” She paused, shook her head, then nodded it. “Warhorses? Fine, but what does it matter? Who are… Ebistian? My Maksu is…” She began to move.
No sooner had she taken her first steps down the hill than the coach and its escort began to move. Mere feet beyond where they’d stood, they simply winked out of existence.
“No!” She began to run down the hill. She knew she’d never catch them, but standing by and crying off Maksu’s rescue never occurred to her.
By the time she’d made it to the bottom of the hill, the coach itself had rolled forward and disappeared.
She screamed … not knowing what else to do. She clenched and unclenched her fists, reached back to pull an azhkast—in her mind, it was the one that had killed the Vodnik, but she didn’t know for certain—and swung the weapon around her head like a quarterstaff.
Finally, she stopped her screaming and fell to her knees, too full of anger to even sob. A moment later, her head snapped up, looking at the air before her.
“You can? Can you get me back?” She paused, eyes growing wide. “What am I to do when I’ve rescued him?” She rolled her eyes in anger, voice bitter. “Hide? Your wise council is that I rescue him and hide?” Her face softened somewhat, as did her voice. “How do I perform the… yes, but I know nothing of magic… but if…” She bowed her head.
“You’ll send me back to Skolf, and when I recover my boy, I’m to hide. When I feel safe enough to sleep, you’ll find me back here, and you’ll teach me the rite, yes? Have I heard that rightly?” A sigh escaped her clenched jaw. “Hells, what choice?” She snorted. “Aye, fair. You’re right, of course. I didn’t come this far to leave him in that demon’s hands.”
She considered walking toward where the column had disappeared. Fenglem had taught her to mark her surroundings—to mark the terrain in her mind, looking for bolt holes, animal dens, and places to ambush from. She was relieved to find she was doing so now, and without prompting.
“Aye, but are there places to hide back on Skolf? Does the land look … like this?” She gestured around with the azhkast she still held.
“You can see through to Skolf? Gi awka glem, yes, I want you to show it to me!”
Her vision underwent a strange redoubling, then she saw the landscape on the other side of whatever vale lay between here and there. The landscape wasn’t simply different from her current surroundings. It was all-too-familiar. She was looking at the outskirts of Count Edmund’s encampment!
A battle was taking place between several hundred men, women… Hells, were those children on the wall? The attacking force seemed predominantly made up of Eodenth and what were more than likely Eodenth Gnoerks.
And the Bluemark are on the damned walls…
She saw, but could not hear, drums being beaten with large wooden mallets from the back of the enemy line. They played in a strange, shared rhythm, each hand striking in lock with his or her fellows.
“What? Where!” She saw Ebistian exiting his coach, smiling sourly as he surveyed the battle—a battle his own forces were not yet engaged in.
A regal-looking woman in a flowing azure dress rode over to meet him, and they began to speak. Their expressions suggested no love lost between them.
No matter. This was her chance. She moved to the coach’s door, then realized she couldn’t touch it. As real as it looked, it wasn’t here—wherever here truly was.
She cast about, trying to find a place to hide once she arrived, then smiled a triumphant smile.
“Do I need to walk when you send me there?… Some movement. Can I roll? Yes, on the ground. Where else would I roll?” She nodded, a darksome grin—a predator’s grin crawling across her face.
Lashjuk moved to the coach and got down on the ground beside it, her body parallel to its length. She rolled back and forth a few times, testing and readjusting her starting position. At last, she was satisfied.
“At my word, then. You’ll work your will, and I’ll roll beneath the coach. Are you ready?” She drew in a few shallow breaths as if she were about to jump into cold water. “Vrek… Tok?… Morl!” She rolled right.
The sound that struck her was almost too much to bear. Screams, drums, battle cries, arrow fire, line commands, calls for aid of one sort or another—it was all there, all at once, and all impossibly loud.
The drums—hells, the drums! She could feel their vibration strongest of all, hammering past flesh, invading—overriding—merging with the rhythm of her pounding heart. It was all she could do to remember her own name, let alone what she was doing there!
Lashjuk’s eyes were watering. She somehow managed to reach up and grasp one part of the keel pole that ran the coach’s length, hooking her ankles over another. If she was patient for just a moment longer, she would be able to…
Ebistian laughed, high and somewhat madly. “You took Haluzfeld to nearly no purpose! You failed utterly! You weren’t able to gain Vagiaedelt. Your position is tenuous at best—another incompetent, small-minded devil serving nothing but its own designs.”
A woman’s voice came in answer, clearly of Kovalunth high birth. “Do you not recognize the flesh I wear, Shepherd?” She sounded indignant now—affronted, and somehow petty. “I am become Eliška of Haluzfeld! I am enough, for now, until Edmund has been brought to heel! Now be gone! You are of no use to our plans. I demand that you depart this place at once, in the name of Nawen of Vápntagh!”
“Yesss, I’m certain you do! Well, T’lendak, fortunately, I answer to only one creature by need and due. Any others must earn my respect themselves, and the Storm Queen hasn’t managed to do so in centuries. Now … I suggest you tend to your men before they’re overrun.”
Eliška met this derision with a throat full of disdainful laughter. “Shepherd, my men have this matter well in hand. We’ve nothing to fear from Count Edmund’s meager defenders, I assure you.”
Ebistian sounded as if he were absolutely delighted as he made his reply.
“No, you’re quite right. You’ve nothing to fear from Edmund’s men… alone. Rikten? Order the attack, please?”
“Yes, Shepherd,” came the reply.
“What?! No!” The woman’s horrified tones were almost comical to hear.
The man, apparently called Rikten, overrode her, a smug and altogether satisfied note in his voice. “Cut the heathens down! Charge! Charge! Charge!”
Ebistian simply laughed as the horses and most of the footmen charged away toward the encampment.
There won’t be a better time… Lashjuk made ready to move.