Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World Read online

  Kelven’s Riddle

  Copyright © 2007 Daniel T Hylton

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1-4196-7644-X

  ISBN-13: 978-1419676444

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61914-928-1

  Visit www.booksurge.com to order additional copies.

  Kelven’s Riddle

  For my parents,

  And for my little buddy, James

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  He comes from the west and arises in the east,

  Tall and strong, fierce as a storm upon the plain.

  He ascends the height to put his hand among the stars

  And wield the sword of heaven.

  Master of wolves, Friend of horses,

  He is a Prince of men and a walking flame.

  -Kelven’s Riddle, an ancient saying among the horses, though they ascribe its origin to an older, and higher, source.

  I

  The column of dust appeared in the north, moving above the flat, cold horizon an hour after sunrise. It grew steadily larger throughout the morning as the instrument of its creation advanced southward along the road. Aram was at work in his assigned field west of the village and saw it come. He knew whose dust it was. It could be no one else, for only they were allowed use of the roads—though usually they came to his village at the end of summer, not in winter. The last time they’d come in winter, people he cared about had died.

  By midmorning the cloud of dust had grown into a massive gray stain against the pale blue of the winter sky. Clearly, it was the product of a long and ponderous caravan. As it approached the village just before midday, Aram ceased working and stood still, watching it overspread the sky. Trouble surely came with it; the only thing to be determined was the extent of that trouble and whether it would touch him directly.

  In the next field over, Aram’s friend Decius had spent the morning clearing willow shoots from an irrigation channel and watching the ominous cloud expand out of the north with growing alarm. He, too, knew who it was that came down the road beneath it, and the possibilities suggested by their coming filled him with dread. Finally, as the dust and its attendant travelers neared the village, he could stand it no more. He dropped his shovel, hopped the drainage ditch, and sprinted across the frozen field to be near Aram.

  Decius was a year younger than Aram, short and stout, and possessed an uneasy round face framed by hair so faintly yellow it appeared white in the crisp light of the winter sun. He had a compact pug nose, and a rounded chin. In fact, for someone who’d never known the simple expedient of a proper diet, Decius was remarkably round and solid. His eyes, as blue as the sky above him, were open windows to his inner state. On this day those small circular apertures were filled with apprehension.

  In contrast to his friend, Aram was tall and lean, and the features of his face were sharply defined, almost severe. Green eyes with flecks of gray at their edges, like bits of granite showing through a growth of moss, were set under straight, black brows and maintained a serious expression in their depths even on those rare occasions when he smiled. His hair was dark like the rich earth under his boots. Against that hair, his face, though tanned by a life lived entirely outdoors, looked pale as steel.

  Decius nodded anxiously toward the massive blotch defiling the cool blue of the winter sky. “Who do you suppose that is, then?”

  “You know who it is, Decius.” Aram answered shortly and he scowled at the blotted atmosphere as he leaned on the handle of the hoe he’d been using to separate willow roots from their tenacious grip in the frozen earth. “Overseers. Who else would it be?”

  “But why would they come at this time of year?” Decius’ eyes were rounder than usual and there was a current of raw fear in his voice that sounded as if it might easily dissolve into terror.

  Aram reached out and briefly put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. He spoke more gently. “Courage, my friend. It likely has nothing to do with us. They’re probably just here to sort through the new crop of girls.” His eyes narrowed and grew hard, his features stiffened, and the gentleness left his voice. “They’ve done that before, you know.”

  Normally, the overseers came to the village once a year, in autumn, to collect the harvest. Seldom—almost never—did they visit in the waning days of winter. The people of Aram’s village knew from experience that their masters’ purposes, never benign, could be particularly malicious when they came at odd times.

  The caravan halted on the road beyond the village just as the winter sun reached its apex. The two men gazed across the frozen fields in silence, unmoving, waiting for some sign of the overseers’ intentions. Probably, as Aram suspected, they had come merely to look over the young women. They did that from time to time, like dogs scrounging for scraps far from their master’s table. If that were the reason for their appearance, it could not touch him. There was no woman in the village now—of any age—that mattered especially to him.

  It had not always been so.

  Five years before, in the winter when he turned eighteen, the overseers had come and had decided to take his younger sister, Maelee, who was slender and pretty, with hair that shone like gold in the sun. Aram resisted them and they beat him to the edge of death. But since he was young and strong with years of labor in his muscle and sinew, they did not kill him. As punishment for his rebellion, they slew his aged parents instead.

  As he’d recovered from the beating, and mourned the loss of his parents and younger sister, the rebellion in his heart took root, grew and hardened. Over time, it had developed into an iron determination to escape the chains of his servitude and find freedom somewhere out in the world beyond the fields. In fact, it was his intention to put that determination into action at the end of this very winter.

  Remnants of the dust cloud were still drifting in the air above the village when the bell tolled in the square, summoning the workers in from the fields. Aram straightened his back and treated his friend to a grim smile.

  “Looks like they’ve come for something more than a few morsels of flesh.” He said. He swung his hoe in a high, sweeping arc and drove the metal bit into the soil. “Come on, Decius, we’d better go see what our beloved masters want of us.”

  Decius looked up at his friend sharply. Aram often said things like that, in a proud and sarcastic tone, words of contempt for those that ruled them. He was different from other men and seemed to Decius to have little capacity for fear. With his high forehead, clear green eyes and straight nose, Aram looked more like a nobleman—albeit a ragged one—than the slave, and son of slaves, that he really was.

  Decius, of course, had no idea what nobility would look like. Humanity had not been allowed to produce such a thing for thousands of years, since the coming of the tyranny of Manon Carnarven
, the great and grim lord of the world. There were stories that told of the ancient times, before Manon, when men and women of greatness and power walked the earth and were recognized as such. But those days, if indeed they ever existed, had passed long ago into the dim realm of myth. Still, tales of those times persisted, related with grave insistence by old men and women in the solemn quiet of evening.

  Manon had managed to oppress almost everything that was good and decent and significant out of the race of men, but not the old legends. Though vulgarized by time, they had survived in the way such things always do—passed from fathers to sons, and mothers to daughters, across the centuries for countless generations, time out of mind. Aram seldom exhibited much interest in them but Decius loved hearing stories of the old world and he often thought that his tall, fierce friend looked like a remnant of those ancient days.

  The incident with Aram’s sister and parents had been deliberately played out for the benefit of the entire village, an object lesson in the futility of resistance. Decius, however, had taken a lesson from it different than the one intended. No one had ever stood up to the overseers before—until Aram. He’d done it and though severely beaten, had survived a direct confrontation with his masters. So when he spoke of them with contempt, it frightened Decius but it gave him a secret thrill as well.

  They left their tools in the field and headed northeast toward the village. The sun was at its late winter zenith, low in the southern arc of the sky, halfway between the vast, level horizons, east and west. As he strode across the fields, Aram’s tall shadow pointed due north toward the distant dwelling place of the lord of the world, in whose interests the overseers acted.

  As the world went away in all directions from these fields, it was flat. And except for staccato bursts of red willow along the drainage ditches and the clump of drab huts that defined the village, it was also featureless. Somewhere out beyond the cold fields there was more to the world than endless plots of level farmland, but it was all very far away and Aram had never seen it.

  Few of the people of his village had seen much of the world beyond the fields. Most, like him, had seen none of it. Their lives were entailed to the soil, bound to small plots of earth by the chains of servitude. Travel beyond the limited and prescribed paths of their existence was forbidden and was punishable by death. The people of Aram’s village, like those of all the villages of the plains, were forced to expend their labor and their lives in submission to the grim lord of the earth and in ignorance of the broader world.

  But knowledge, like groundwater, tends to seep and get collected, and moves from place to place by whatever means it will. And even if that knowledge is corrupted by the passage of distance and time, it still has value to anyone who will listen to it and sort it out. Aram was such a man. Whenever anyone that might have knowledge of the world beyond the fields—however limited—spoke of such things, he sat silent and paid attention.

  Far away to the north, it was said, in a broad valley set between restless, smoking mountains, there was a great tower. It was the seat of government for him who was named Manon Carnarven, who ruled the world. He’d come down from the stars in fury long ago, in an age lost in the deeps of time, bringing death and chains and darkness of soul and mind. With him came his terrible lieutenants, the lashers, vile and monstrous creatures that affected the reach of his power throughout all the land.

  Eastward, far beyond the plains, were mountains, some of them tall enough to pierce the firmament, with rugged peaks silvered by ice and snow. To the south was a broad, deep ocean verged with cities of trade. And to the west lay a vast marsh, dank and endless, which only a few had entered and none had traversed, for out of it came the rumor of things more terrible even than the lashers, the rumor of things ancient and foul. The water in the ditch at Aram’s feet would eventually find its way there where it would remain until the clouds picked it up and brought it back as rain.

  But Aram had seen none of these marvels in his twenty-three years. He was a field-tender, the lowest of slaves, and the son of slaves for generations. His life, thus far, had been a relative thing, short in years and long on misery. The field in which he labored was the farthest distance he’d ever been from the hut where he was born.

  Except for the overseers who came once a year to collect the crops, the few hundred inhabitants of his village were the only people he’d ever seen. They were all of them like him, born of slaves into slavery, never knowing or having known anything else, wretched segments in an endless, miserable chain.

  But Aram was different from his fellows in one essential way; he would not wear his shackles meekly nor did he intend to wear them forever. In fact, in just a few weeks, with the coming of spring, he meant to be free.

  As he stepped across the culvert onto the path he looked down to his left at the tangle of willow roots edging the ice-encrusted water. There was something hidden there that he had placed. For weeks now, ever since he’d made his decision to escape, he had saved a portion of each morning’s measure of milcush, rolling the small damp grains into a ball and slipping it inside his shirt.

  Once in the field, he transferred the ball of meal to a leather sack he kept hidden in the willow roots near the culvert. There it froze and was preserved. When spring came and the nighttime temperatures rose above freezing, he meant to take the cache of food and escape to the west, into the Great Marsh. He meant to be something of which he had no real concept—a free man.

  Decius saw his glance and stopped him with a tug on his sleeve. “Aram, I’ve seen you put that food there. Why do you do that? Are you thinking about running away?” He cast furtive eyes toward the village and then stared up into Aram’s somber face. “Can it be done?”

  Aram pulled his arm free. “No. No one can escape. No one ever has. You know that, Decius, don’t be a fool.” But his eyes lifted and narrowed and looked for a moment into the west.

  Decius caught that look as well and sucked in a sharp breath. “You’re going into the Great Marsh, aren’t you? Yes, I know you are. My God, Aram, you’re crazy.” But then he stopped and looked toward the village and listened for a moment to the tolling of their masters’ summons. Fear convulsed across his face and he clutched again at the sleeve of Aram’s coat. “When you go, please, let me go with you.”

  Aram frowned and turned away and continued on toward the ringing bell. “Don’t be silly, Decius. The marsh would kill you—it would probably kill me. Nobody’s going to try to escape. It’s folly. Don’t ever talk of such things—not even to me.”

  With a rough hand, he reached back and grabbed Decius and pushed him along the path before him. “Let’s not be the last ones there—there’s no point in getting a beating today.”

  Little was known of the Great Western Marsh except for the thing that interested Aram most; the fact that few went in and none came out. It was a region of such dread that its entrances were not guarded. The rumors generated about it—and of its monstrous inhabitants—were enough to keep the slaves upon its eastern borders out of its swamps and in their chains. A place so desolate, wild, and mysterious that it wrought fear in the hearts of all others was a perfect destination for a man willing to risk much, including life if necessary, to be free. Aram was willing.

  Besides, it was the only direction that made logistical sense to his intent. The mountains to the east, according to common knowledge, were hundreds of leagues away, as was the ocean to the south, both too far.

  And he could not go north. That way lay the capitol city of the lord of the earth. Lashers slaughtered wayward humans with officially sanctioned impunity, and they patrolled all the roads in that direction. An escape into the marsh was his only real option.

  Despite what he’d said to Decius, he turned his head as he walked along the path toward town and gazed back into the west. The marsh was not visible to him at this time of day or from this location, but it was there, a couple of days’ journey beyond his sight. From the top of the ladder on the granary in the village squ
are he’d gazed upon it dozens of times. On clear days, at midmorning, it could be easily seen, a dark band of lush green, edging the horizon.

  He turned his attention eastward toward town and as he walked, pondered what the overseers’ visit might mean for his plans to escape. Maybe, hopefully, nothing. Perhaps they’d come to deliver new farming implements or to change the nature of the crop to be grown in the fields in the coming season. It had occurred before. If that were the case, he would simply have to keep his head meekly down, endure a day or two of instruction, and then the overseers would leave. His plan to escape in the spring would be unaffected.

  But then he saw Decius, who was a few steps ahead of him, stop dead at the corner of the granary and begin to visibly tremble. Aram stepped past his friend around the edge of the granary wall and found himself immobilized in fear and wonder at the sight of something he’d never before seen.

  There was a lasher in command of the village.

  The monster stood motionless on the northern side of the square, a mal-formed and frighteningly large presence of evil intent, like a hideous horned horror from the underearth’s deepest, most shadowed chamber. Only its eyes moved, slowly, as it surveyed the ragged cluster of humans that gathered and trembled before it in the small patch of open ground at the center of the village.

  Aram stared at the beast with a bizarre mixture of terror, awe, and curiosity. Because he lived in a relatively unimportant part of the world, he had never looked upon one of Manon’s lieutenants. In every story he’d ever heard they were described as large, vicious, and hideous, but nothing in his imagination could have envisioned the thing he now saw.

  The lasher was huge, larger than he had imagined, and tall, nine or ten feet tall, at least. Its upper body was massive, with leathery skin and a cape of short, matted dark hair. Large ribbed horns, black and burnished, grew out of the top of its head and curved down to either side of its face before turning upward again and ending in razor points, thin and flat like the blades of scythes.