Kelven's Riddle Book Three Read online

  He took one step toward her and stopped. “Are you alright?”

  It was a foolish question, perhaps, and awkward, one that would be asked by an inexperienced boy, and he knew it. Still, he did not want her to feel rushed or forced, so he stayed where he was, and waited for a response.

  After a moment, in answer, she undid the buttons of her gown and let it fall away. The moonlight came in through the window and bathed her fair skin with its subtleness, gently outlining the curves of her breasts and of her hips and thighs. He gazed at her, drinking in the beauty that was revealed to him. Then, desire exploded through him.

  Taut with passion, he went to her.

  14

  Warven Vulgur jogged steadily northward along the road leading through the fringes of that land that was named Bracken by its human inhabitants. After curving around the limits of the hills that tumbled down from the east into the flatter land, the road straightened out for a run into the north as it approached the valley where stood the Great Father’s tower. In fact, when he looked up, Vulgar could see the fang-tooth top soaring into the distant air. Vulgur had been on the move for nearly two weeks now, non-stop, day and night, and he was growing hungry. Once or twice he thought of killing and eating one of the slaves that worked the farmland to either side of the road but even that small thing would take too much time. The urgency of his mission drove him on.

  The Great Father would welcome Warven Vulgur home – the enormous champion was his eldest child, after all, the eldest of all Manon’s First Children, those that the humans called lashers – but he would not be happy with that which his eldest would impart upon his return. Of course, the Great Father might already know the substance of the matter – there were those in his service who were only too happy to report on the failure of others.

  Ten weeks earlier, Vulgur had marched out with thirty-one thousand well-trained troops – twenty-six thousand second children, and five thousand first children, of whom eight hundred had been, like him, champions, eldest and strongest of all Manon’s children.

  The Great Father had sent them into the south under the cover of thick clouds – a magical fog, conjured by those bizarre creatures, the Laish – to remove a problem, to kill a man that had become an unacceptable irritant. At first, things had gone according to plan. Their prey had acted predictably, attacking a city in the southern plains where, except for a few champions sent to view the action – and perhaps get lucky and make the desired kill – the troops had been little more than fodder, easily defeated, imparting cheap and false confidence to the man. Then the troops at the fortress near the smoking mountain had been replaced by a lesser force as well, in the hope that the man would take the bait and show himself.

  He had. It was as if the Great Father could see into the man’s mind and know what he would do – and for all Vulgur knew, this was true, for the man had shown himself at the desired place and time.

  The trap could now be sprung.

  Then, just when everything seemed in place, ready for conclusion, the master’s carefully laid plans had been destroyed, the trap ruined.

  They had come out of the mist to find the man and his small force deployed on the side of the smoking mountain. Vulgur could almost smell the terror emanating from the pathetic group of humans, horses, and wolves, no more than three or four hundred in number, a small, frightened clot on the vast slope of the mountainside. He deployed his own massive force – fully one-quarter of the Great Father’s armies – and readied to do the deed, to remove this pesky impediment to his master’s grand designs.

  Before he could order his forces forward, a strange thing occurred. He had expected the man to run, in fact it was almost desired that he do so. The subterfuge in granting him an easy victory in the south and then bringing a massive force to bear undetected had not been employed to surprise the man but simply to get him to show himself out in the open, to put him plainly in front of Vulgur’s army. If he ran, as expected, Vulgur’s orders were to chase him down and destroy any and all allies, to finally cleanse this troublesome part of the world. Then Manon could focus all his attention on Elam and Vergon, the last two great societies on the earth, and bring them fully to heel.

  But the man did not run. Instead, he came forward, as if in defiance, carried by a great black horse about half the distance down the slope toward Vulgur’s forces. After he dismounted, and sent the horse back up the slope, he drew a shining sword that flashed in the light of the fading sun. Vulgur was surprised but he was also pleased. Killing the man was the main objective, after all. The Great Father had made it clear; if the man was killed early on, before his allies were discovered, the army was free to pass into the east, cross the wide river, and destroy any that he found there not dwelling in obedience to his master’s will.

  The man’s shining sword was known; its power witnessed. Some even called it a thing of magic. Spies had told of the fight on the road in the long valley earlier in the year. The weapon was obviously powerful – the master, in fact, had expressed interest in it, instructing Vulgur to convey the sword directly to him once the matter was resolved – but it was also known that the lashers on the road had come close to killing the man, would have done so, in fact, if it hadn’t been for the unexpected actions of the horse.

  Now this man stood alone on the slope of the mountain as if he believed the sword would save him from more than thirty thousand of the Great Father’s best. It wouldn’t, not today. Today, he would die. Vulgur roared savagely, and ordered his entire force forward.

  The ground shook under the tramping of heavy boots. Like a vast, dark wave, the army ascended the slope. Vulgar roared again and the archers paused to release their missiles. There was little hope of success in this tactic – on all other occasions, the man had seemed impervious to arrows; but everything must be tried. Vulgar was not a commander that departed from established strategy.

  He did not see exactly what happened next. He watched until his leading contingents closed on the man’s position and then had glanced up the slope as – much to his surprise – the rest of the tiny army began to move forward.

  And then, abruptly, he was flat on his back in the dust of the valley. The earth shook violently, the ground rolled and churned. From deep in the earth a terrible sound arose, as if Ferros himself roared in pain and fury.

  Vulgur tried to rise, but could not find his feet. He rolled to his stomach and gazed about him, trying to determine what had happened but his view was oriented the wrong way, down the valley toward the curtain of fog that had covered his army’s march south. He rolled the other way as another tremor shook the earth, and found the mountain. The mountain had awakened from sleep. Fire spewed down its slopes and smoke boiled from its summit.

  But the most frightening thing Vulgur saw was his army rushing pell-mell toward him, falling, tumbling, stumbling past him, eyes wild and round as they fled the field in terror. With great effort he regained his feet and roared at them to hold, to turn and fight, but he was ignored, not just by the second children but by first children as well. Even champions fled westward, away from the smoking, shaking, burning mass of the mountain.

  He looked up the slope. The mountain had split open at the point where his forces had made contact with the man, and a widening river of fire rushed toward him, a flaming avalanche of burning rock, consuming his army as it tried to flee, mingling the smoke of his force’s destruction with the dark cloud of its own fury, hiding everything behind it. Vulgur quickly realized that if he remained where he was, he would shortly die as well, and so – ashamed of the action even as he took it – he turned and ran.

  But Vulgur was old and seasoned – and terribly afraid of violating the will of his Great Father. He overtook the fleeing remnants of his army, catching them as they neared the curtain of heavy mist and then he turned and set his feet wide, ordering them to halt and hold.

  “Fools!” He roared. “Cowards! You are free from threat now. Hold here – form a line.”

  The
first children slowed and halted, by ones and by twos, but a small clot of second children, still caught in the throes of raw terror, tried to run past him. He swung his halberd and reduced them to a mangled heap of bleeding corpses. This action, along with the gradual quieting of the ground, brought the others to a halt, though many turned to look behind, eyes wide, breathing hard, watching the oncoming river of molten rock.

  But the mile-wide, burning stream of rock had begun to slow due to the increasing distance from the mountain. Also, strangely, a furious storm had arisen above the mountain; cold rain poured down in sheets. Though this had little effect on the continuing eruption, the fiery explosions of which flared like lightning through the smoke, it did serve to cool the rock as the leading edges moved out onto the valley floor. But this bizarre action of the atmosphere – no doubt a gift from the Great Father – had come too late to save the vast bulk of his army. Many thousands, by far the greater portion of his force, had disappeared beneath the fiery flood. Vulgur gazed at the astonishing scene for just a moment, watching the slowing, blackening flow of lava and the pounding rainstorm that raged above it, and then turned and found one of his commanders, a champion named Warkemp Grull, standing among the survivors.

  “Tell me the substance of it.” Vulgur demanded.

  Grull was large and strong, nearly as old as Vulgur, and a ferocious beast; nonetheless, his low, rumbling voice shook as he gave his answer.

  “I was on the right as you know, my commander, and behind my soldiers, moving them forward. I was a great distance from the man.”

  When Grull hesitated and then fell silent, Vulgur’s black eyes hardened and his voice became a menacing growl. “What did you see?”

  Grull met his gaze. “The man drove the sword into the earth.”

  “Into the earth?”

  “As I said.”

  Vulgur turned and gazed toward the mountain, now entirely obscured by black clouds of smoke and sheets of driving rain. “His weapon did this?”

  Grull spoke with flat conviction. “He drove his sword downward and the mountain broke open where he stood.”

  “Did the man die?”

  Grull shrugged. “How could he live through such fire?”

  After a moment, Vulgur nodded. That, at least, was something. The Great Father would be terribly displeased with the loss of so many of his children, but if the man that had troubled him was gone then this costly outcome of the expedition, though not acceptable, might perhaps be viewed as at least tolerable. It was Vulgur’s hope.

  The outcome of the campaign having now been decided beyond any ability of his to affect it further, Vulgur organized the survivors into companies at the base of the mist and took stock. There were a few more than four thousand, of which less than two hundred were second children; the surviving soldiers were mostly first children, the majority of them champions, another good thing. These had been in the rear, moving the army before them, the bulk of which had been caught on the slope of the mountain and condemned to death by the violence of its eruption.

  There was no point in going back and looking for injured troops – though the movement of the burning river of rock had slowed, it nonetheless continued to move inexorably out onto the level floor of the valley. Most of his force had been destroyed on the slope; and any that had stumbled and fallen at the base of the mountain or the edge of the valley were now consumed as well.

  Vulgur turned to Grull. “You will march these four thousand back to the north, to the tower of the Great Father.”

  Grull nodded. “And you, Commander?”

  “And me? Who gave you leave to question me?” Vulgur’s lip curled in a snarl, showing long sharp teeth. “I will kill you when next you demonstrate impertinence.”

  Grull lowered his gaze and stood very still. “I meant no impertinence, Commander.”

  Vulgur watched him for a moment, long enough to make the big champion squirm. Satisfied with his subordinate’s contrition, he turned and let his gaze sweep over the remnants of the vast army that had come with him out of the north, and then stared up at the mountain, still obscured in smoke and clouds. After another glance at Grull, and without speaking, he pivoted and began jogging westward down the valley, into the dark wall of mist, toward the junction with the great north-south road where he would turn right, toward the north, and journey unceasingly across the plains to a dreaded but necessary meeting with the Great Father of the world.

  Now, after nearly two weeks, he neared that meeting. The covering mist had dissolved by the end of the first week, for the Laish had ceased from their labors. The giant lasher had jogged northward under clear skies, fine enough for daytime traveling but deeply unsettling through the dark hours. Because duty drove him, he had not been able to find cover and hide from the cold, cruel, shining eyes of the night, gazing down upon him from the black heights of the firmament.

  He looked up as the road began to rise through a cut in the low hills that surrounded the valley from which the Great Father’s tower arose. The stones of the roadbed were set solidly, smooth and black, cut from the very bones of the mountains that flanked the hills to the east and west. Vulgur had helped to lay these stones almost six hundred years earlier. The road was wide, rounded slightly in the center, and ditched to either side so as to let the rain slide from its surface.

  After it passed through the first circle of hills, it crossed over a broad low viaduct beneath which ran a sluggish slough of rancid water, flowing from right to left, toward the west and a great vast marsh that defined the limits of the world in that direction. Then the road rose slightly again as it passed through the broad, rocky ridge that was the last vestige of high ground before the land fell away to the floor of a large, rounded valley where lay the great fortress city of Morkendril, the dwelling place of Manon the Great Father, and the capitol of the earth.

  The muscles across Vulgur’s massive chest tightened as he jogged down the slope and out onto the level plain of the valley. Despite his trepidation at the coming meeting with the Great Father, he was glad to be home. The thin high veil of smoke and soot that always overhung this valley shielded him from the unseen stars, blunting their intrusive gaze.

  The smooth contours of the tower rose before him, anchored to his right and left by outlying, turreted towers connected to the main structure via massive, upward-curving walls, along which sentries moved back and forth. The floor of the broad, circular valley was composed almost entirely of fine gray gravel, deposited there in ancient times by two volcanoes that provided the shielding soot overhead, one rising above the encircling mountains due west of the tower, and another set further back among craggy peaks a bit south of due east. No crops grew here, none could; besides, the production of food was the purview of slaves.

  A couple of miles from the main entrance to the Great Father’s tower, Vulgur entered the dark environs of the city – if such it could be called – that surrounded it. Mostly, it was a collection of low, laterally connected stone-walled huts, crowding along narrow streets that radiated out from the black tower like spokes from the hub of a wheel. It was midday; the inhabitants of these huts were not in them, the first and second children would be away from the main thoroughfare – off to the east and west upon the training grounds.

  A half-mile from the tower, a narrow chasm appeared in the earth, and the road began to descend between black stone-clad walls as the floor of the valley rose above him. The main entrance to the Great Father’s tower lay one full level down. The roadway dipped just before reaching the massive doors, where culverts gaped in the stone to either side, leading to sewers that allowed for the dispersal of rare rainfall and snowmelt.

  The doors opened for Vulgur; his approach had been seen, but Manon did not greet him. The Great Father did not attend others, no, for he himself was attended by others. The one opening the doors for Vulgur was the creature named Hurack Soroba. Vulgur invariably thought of Soroba as the “creature”. He was fairly certain that Soroba was, in fact, a human, thoug
h he could not be sure, for this other lieutenant of the Great Father exhibited powers that other humans almost certainly did not possess. Probably, these powers had been granted him by the Great Father himself – in any event he did not like Soroba. For, though Vulgur was the eldest of all Manon’s children and Soroba had appeared on the scene at a much later date, this human (or whatever his state) was granted access that Vulgur did not necessarily enjoy.

  “Ah,” said Soroba, as the massive lasher pounded to a halt upon the smooth black floor just inside the opening, “the wayward son returns. And how goes your venture in the south?”

  There, at least, Vulgur owed Soroba nothing. “I will speak of these things only to the Great Father.”

  Soroba smiled, the sides of his thin mouth curving upward even as his eyes remained as cold and dismissive as the stars. “Of course, but you will have to wait above. The Great Father is occupied at the moment. He is down below” – Vulgur thought that a grain of contempt entered Soroba’s voice – “overseeing the birth of one of your many younger siblings.”

  Vulgur gazed at the human for a long moment, fervently hoping that his own feelings of contempt were evident, and then turned away and went to the right, up the broad sloping gallery to his master’s reception hall. At the broad smooth-walled opening, Vulgur went left, into an enormous, perfectly round room, a thousand feet across, lit by green crystals imbedded at intervals into the smooth walls and across the surface of the equally smooth ceiling. The room was vast, but empty, entirely without furnishings; the Great father never required rest, and lashers seldom sat. On those rare occasions when Manon allowed the first few dozen of his eldest children inside this hall, they stood about him in a vast circle, and listened to whatever it pleased him to say.

  Vulgur made his way to near the center of the hall and stopped and closed his eyes. Though he never slept, he nonetheless needed rest, and there was no telling how many hours – or days, perhaps – would pass before Manon came to hear his report. So, the great lasher spread his broad feet wide, let his arms drop, and went still.