Storm runner, p.1
Storm Runner, page 1
STORM RUNNER
Tara K. Harper
Tales of the Wolves 03
To Mom and Dad, with love
Chapter 1
The intriguing of a voice,
sung in shadow;
pierced with a breath that
caught
in her throat…
Dion eased forward another meter. The smell of damp earth between the new, spring grass caught in her nose. The gritty edges of the old, stiff leaves sawed on her wrists while brittle weeds brushed against her ear. One of the hollow stalks slipped up inside her warcap, poking her temple sharply until she shifted forward again. Quietly, slowly, one knee, then an elbow, then her body another length. Her heart pounded, but she knew the raiders could not hear it; she had learned her stealth from the wolves themselves. Across the river, watching from the edge of the forest, Hishn’s yellow eyes gleamed. Separated by the canyon, they were linked with their senses. The Gray One breathed through Dion’s lungs and saw through her eyes, while the wolf-walker’s slow stalking filled Hishn’s lupine mind with the lust of the hunt. When the gray wolf growled low in her throat, Dion froze. The scent of the raiders’ camp was faint, then stronger as the wind brought it to the wolfwalker’s nose. When the breeze rose again, shifting the weeds in ragged waves, Dion dug her toes into the ground and crawled forward again.
Behind her, Yagly moved softly in the late afternoon shadows. The shifting stripes were his guide, stretching out and hiding his lurking figure in the long black fingers of the trees. To the raiders’ eyes, he and Dion were ghosts in the grass. Three days earlier, Yagly had gotten within ten meters of the raiders’ guard-post. Watchful as they were, the raiders looked to the boulders and shrubs for their enemies—they did not expect a scout to slither across a near-flat stretch of ground.
Yagly’s faded brown eyes flickered from the raiders’ camp to the bridge they guarded. The raiders were wary. They were right to be: for a year, Yagly and the other Ariyens had been sneaking across the river, stealing back their people, and trying to drive the raiders on. The dark-haired man grinned. The bridges might not be open to cross, but he and Dion did not use those high, stone roads: they forded the river below, then climbed one of the canyon chimneys to reach the raiders’ land. The raiders were not of the mountains; they did not think to watch the cliffs either.
In front of the other scout, Dion edged between the root clumps of two shrubs, and Yagly’s gaze followed her with approval. The wolfwalker was as silent as a thought in the brash. Her black hair blended with the shadows as if it were part of the dark itself, and her lithe body wriggled from shadow to shadow as if she were made of supple rope, not lanky bones. Behind her, she left only a faint worm’s trail where the grass did not spring back before Yagly bent it down again.
With one hand on the hilt of her sword, Dion drew her blade forward beside her, hiding its long length beneath her body when she stopped. A stone gouged her knee and she shifted around it silently. She eased sideways for the other scout to join her, and a moment later, Yagly’s long body lay next to hers.
Dion scowled, adjusting her warcap with a slow shift of her shoulder. The healer’s circlet was well hidden beneath the leather-and-metal mesh, but her braid was frizzing between the two. The rising wind whipped loose hairs into her eyes and across her nose until her face was tickled from brow to chin. She blinked as old leaves whirled up and past, followed by the long, hollow threads of winter grass, straining to break free. The pale, spring sun slipped down in the sky. They had an hour, no more, before they would have to ease back and cross again into Ramaj Ariye. She narrowed her eyes. From here, she could see ten, maybe even twelve raiders in this camp. Their shelters were sturdy; their supplies stacked neatly—this looked more like a soldiers’ fort than a raiders’ stakeout. She eased forward another meter, stopping at the edge of the shadow in which she hid. If there had been no wind, they could have heard every word the raiders spoke, but the gusting breeze brought, then stripped away, the sounds. A word, a phrase—that was not enough to tell anything.
“I can’t make anything out,” Yagly said in her ear, “but I would bet on all nine moons that something is up. Look at their stance. For the last nine days—an entire ninan—they have been guarding the bridge against Ariye. Now they stand as if they guard the crossing from those in their own county.”
“But the refugees are not due for three more days,” Dion breathed in return. “How could the raiders know to guard the crossings early?”
“Maybe it is some other poor fool, running from the camps.”
“But if the raiders are wary now,” she whispered, “the refugees will never make it through to the Devil’s Knee.”
“If they even know to go there,” the dark-haired man returned as he eyed the raiders’ camp.
“They know,” she whispered back. “The north scout crossed back into Ariye yesterday. He got the message through. It was not easy, though—there were raiders everywhere.”
“How did you pick that up?” Yagly glanced back over the river. “The wolf?”
She nodded almost imperceptibly. Her bond with the Gray Ones was strong enough that, like the other wolfwalkers, she could hear the packsong at a distance. Even now, the faint gray voices echoed through her thoughts like a winter wind in a forest.
Yagly turned his gaze back to the raiders’ camp. “Must be nice,” he whispered. “I have to wait for the message birds or the runners to find out anything important.”
She smiled wryly. “At least you’re not assigned down south. Gamon said that the mud there is so thick that even the runners have to walk.”
“You will be walking in mud yourself if we don’t start back soon.” The scout’s gaze flickered to the sky. “Rain will be here in an hour.”
Dion followed his glance. “I’ve still got forty kilometers to go to meet the next scout on the line.”
Yagly gave her a sly look. “And ten kilometers more after that?”
She blushed slowly. “Yes,” she said steadily. “Any news to pass along?”
The other man hid his smile. When Dion worked in the hospitals, she might be as serious as any other healer, but out here, he could make her blush like a girl. “Tell Aranur— and Gamon,” he added while Dion’s flush deepened, “that there are four more camps like this above and below this bridge. Further south, they are thicker than flies on a dead dog. From now on, we won’t be able to use any crossing below the Sky Bridge.”
“The crossings above the bridge aren’t safe anymore either,” she said slowly.
Yagly gave her a thoughtful look. “The raiders are massing there, too?”
“They have not set up permanent camps yet—that we know of,” she amended, “but Gamon thinks that is just a matter of time. Even the Slot is no longer completely safe.”
Yagly’s lips set in a grim line. “The refugees would never make the Slot anyway—not with children in the group. The raiders will be hot on their trail when they escape. Wherever it is they run, they better be able to get to a crossing fast.”
“Which means,” Dion agreed, noting the clouds that swept up over the horizon before turning her attention back to the camp, “that their only choice is the Devil’s Knee.”
Or death, Yagly added silently.
In the dim, gray morning, the river’s surface flashed dully each time the water surged against the soil of the bank. The slapping sounds were like the smacking of a badgerbear as it eats, sending a shiver down Moira’s emaciated back. The roiling waves in the deeper stream refused to hold the reflection of the sky; they turned black instead with the shadows of the canyon. There was no warmth to this dawn. Moira, shivering uncontrollably, hugged herself as if she could hold onto the thought of warmth. Yesterday, the flat, pale sun had disappeared into thin clouds and chill winds, raising bumps on Moira’s bare legs and forcing the children to huddle into the moss as they had huddled through the night. Now, standing on the trail, Moira glanced back at them, her eyes dull and sunken in her face. Like the others, she had wrapped her feet in rags and bark. She wore only a thin tunic. No leggings, no jacket against the bitter chill of the canyon wind that whipped her shirt against her skin and slapped the cold further into her body. Only the tunic that hung to her thighs and left her bruise-striped legs pale and blue in the wind.
She stared up the canyon. The overcast heights were more gray than green now, but there was safety in those stones—she knew it. Her calves burned as she forced herself forward on the trail—her feet were numb from the mud; her breath rasped through the gaps in her teeth. Gods, she prayed, let her body hold out a little longer. She could not stop now: there were the children to think about. Children, with their haunted, hollow eyes…
Old Jered, his knobby hands pressed hard against his ribs, stumbled up beside her. The stitch in his side had gone beyond pain, and the gesture was now reflex. He wondered when he had ceased to care. He motioned downstream with his chin.
Moira shook her head vehemently. The wolves followed them—she was sure she had seen a Gray One just before dawn, though there had been no tracks when she and Jered went to look. Tracks? Her face twisted. As if she could read the marks in the dirt as she once read her council books. Did her ignorance of the woods matter? Even if she knew how to hide their trail, the wolves would scent them out. All she could do was run—run to the river and pray the wolves did not attack while she waited to be seen. Waiting—it would bring their death upon them. Moons help them all, but she had fled the camp too early. The Ariyens would not expect them for two more days, and the raiders had been on her heels from the hour she and the others had escaped. Her group had gained some little time by hiding in a bog. They gained more when they crawled into an old lepa’s den: the wolves had passed them by. Jered said the oily stench of the predator birds was still strong enough to mask the scent of the children. But, Moira worried, her eyes flickering from tree to stone, where could they hide here, at the river’s edge? The trees were thin at this altitude, and the cliffs rose with the trail—soon there would be only rocks to conceal them.
“Two days,” Jered whispered, echoing her thoughts. “Sixty-two hours to hide and pray the wolves will pass us by.”
Moira stared at the river—the one, thin border that taunted them with the safety of its other side—watching it thrust and tumble the spring snags like matchsticks.
Jered followed her gaze to the river. “We could never cross it here,” he muttered. “We would be swept away like leaves.”
But might it not be better, she asked herself, to let the children drown rather than give them back to the raiders? Eight young ones behind her, and not one of them without the same purple marks that marred her own face. The six-year-old who clung to Moira’s aunt would bear the burn scars for the rest of her life. Jered’s own grandson, a boy only five, clutched another elder’s hand, his left eye swollen in an angry, reddish-pink cyst. And Eren, Moira’s last living child, with the blisters broken across her small feet, and her dull voice no longer even whimpering—Eren should have grown this year, Moira thought wearily. She should have sprouted like a speedgreen in a garden. But there had been no meals of substance, no hours of easy sleep—just the beating sticks and the whip-spurred work and the tortured fear at night. Something blinded Moira for a moment. It was not until Jered’s whisper brought her back that she realized it was hatred. Fury, not so much at the raiders, but at those who had placed them in her county. Fury at the faceless ones who built their futures on the soil of children’s graves. She bit her lip violently this time, tasting the sweet blood with a savage satisfaction.
Jered glanced at her, then over his shoulder, taking in the blackheart trees, the bright green edges of the undergrowth, the clumps of rotting leaves that buried themselves in the mud-swollen ground. “This county was my family’s home for sixteen generations,” he said softly. “But home it is no longer.”
“Leave it behind, Jered,” Moira said flatly. “Leave it behind with your heart. It belongs to the raiders now.”
“Raiders, yes,” he agreed slowly, “and the man who claims three of the nine counties as his own: the Lloroi, Conin.” He spat the name. “A Lloroi like his father. A Lloroi who takes other men’s land, other men’s lives for his own. A Lloroi who bleeds his people for his own gain.”
“They say his father was killed—and swiftly—by an Ariyen sword.” Moira smiled without humor. She looked down at her bony hand, clenching it tight and pressing it to her stomach. “I hunger,” she said softly, “for the fire or the sand snakes to bring the justice of the moons to this new Lloroi. I hunger for anything but the quick release his father felt.”
“That he has come here now—to the borders—to see his handiwork, to gloat in his control… Gods, but I curse him. I curse his name to the ninth hell. Damn you, Conin,” he whispered vehemently. “Ruler of the raiders. Ruler of the wolves.”
Moira stirred. “Not all the wolves, Jered. Only those who stayed behind. The others fled to Ariye just as we do now.”
“Does it matter?” he demanded. “Whatever bond was bred between them and the ancients, it no longer holds true. The wolves hunt us here like rabbits—and they do it for the raiders.”
“We have survived a night, a day, and another dawn,” she said flatly. “The moons will give us a few more hours.” She looked into the shadows, daring a pair of yellow eyes to watch her. The hunters were there, she knew it. Why they did not betray the refugees to the raiders, she did not know, nor did she dare question it. It was enough that she was still free.
She took a step toward the fork in the trail and caught her breath as her aching legs pulled against the motion. Gritting her teeth, she cursed the strength of the wolves. The Gray Ones who had left this place had had strong legs to carry them to the borders—strong legs and fangs to chase the hunger from their bellies as they ran. These children had neither the Gray Ones’ strength nor their skills. They had no food to sustain them; no clothes to keep them warm. And they could not run much farther.
Which way to go? Which way to safety? It was two kilometers to the Sky Bridge; eight to the Devil’s Knee. Two kilometers—even the children could make it that far. Peyel, the tavernkeeper, had told Moira that the Sky Bridge was safe now—safe enough to cross. No raiders for three days, Peyel said—they were being moved north, to the new camps. Moira had to believe her. Peyel had been helping people flee the camps almost as long as there had been camps to flee. She had suffered enough at the hands of the raiders to make her resistance a vengeful one. The Sky Bridge, she had told Moira.
What if Peyel was right, and the raiders would not be guarding the whole bridge? It was a wide arch, a hundred meters of smooth stone, three hundred meters long. The raiders could be camped on one side only, letting the traders through, letting shadows—skinny, bruised shadows—creep along the edge…
No, Woss must have gotten through to Ariye. His message ring and the map delivered to her just three days ago proved it, and they promised safety only at the Devil’s Knee. Moons, she prayed, was it Peyel or Woss who was wrong? There were no fighters here to protect the children should Moira choose badly. The resistance group that fought the raiders—their leader, the Siker herself—would not know that Moira had taken the youths and fled. Woss could not come back to help. The Ariyens would not be ready for days. “By all the gods,” she whispered, “if there is just one moonwarrior left to cross the stars, if there is one ancient fighter to come from the First World, let him come to Bilocctar now. Let him crush the raiders with the weight of the gods and avenge the deaths of my people.”
She stared at the fork in the trail. To go north—to go higher in the mountains—meant the Devil’s Knee. To go south would bring less wind, she knew; less cold, and a crossing only an hour away. Gods, but what was one hour when the eyes of the children had haunted her for months? Their small bodies dogged her footsteps like frail ghosts. Would the moons give them any more strength to climb this trail? Any more will to make it to the canyon of the Devil’s Knee? The falls at the Knee were legend, a bogeyman to elders and children alike. Dangerous beyond a badgerbear, it was said, where the stones rose up toward the gods, and the moonmaids played with a man’s balance to see if even the brave would slip and plummet to their deaths. Menacing, too, was the rim, where the shadows of the cliffs promised footholds that were not there. She closed her eyes. Even now, she could see the blasting waterfall they called the Devil’s Knee—the torrent that swept from the heights of the river to the booming rocks at the base of the plunging cascade.
Yes, deadly was the Devil’s Knee; deadly and daring. Daring her to ignore Peyel’s whispered advice. Forcing her to hope that Woss was alive. Taunting her to play god with their lives.
There were ghosts in her eyes: her own sons, her eldest daughter… Grief made her choke, and she fought to breathe so that Jered would not guess. She clenched her jaw and cursed herself silently, using epithets that a year ago would have made her reel in shock. In anger, she regained some measure of control. Death was only another step, a moment, a small event, she chanted to herself. Death was irrelevant. Death was a circumstance, nothing more. For there were living children still to worry over. Children still to flee the raiders’ swords. And somewhere, hidden beneath her death-dulled chant, was the prayer that when those here with her were safe, there would be time for her own tears.
Moira stared at the trail, hearing the oncoming raiders in her mind as surely as if they were beside her. One mistake, one loud sound to draw the eyes of a hidden hunter, and how many more would she lose from this group? Annoc and young Lyo had been left behind that first night, dead of the war arrows through their backs. Little Nita, with her bruised blue eyes and tangled hair, had died from snakebite the previous dawn, when she had pushed Jered’s grandson from the viper’s path. The two youngest boys, hungry beyond reason, had fed each other the sweet leaves from a burrberry plant, and their twisted, frothing bodies had been left in the shelter of the blackheart trees last noon. She had held the youths and watched them die, screaming silently at the moons for the hope of Ovousibas—for the miracle of the ancient healing. She had cried out to the gray-damned sky for a healer—for anyone—to stop the agony of the poison clutching at their nerves. Her soul, she had promised; she would give her soul for a healer who knew the miracle of Ovousibas, the ancient healing that went beyond the warbarbs and poisons, beyond the cut of the sword, and made the body whole. Last night—and she clenched her shaking fists as she remembered—it had been Yana’s daughter who died. Quietly, quickly—no one had even noticed until they tried to rouse her. Only then had they seen the nest of nightspiders crouched behind her knee, the blackened edges of the bite marks making Moira gag as she watched them lay their eggs in the hollow carved in the little girl’s flesh. Today, Luter’s leg was still bleeding where his thigh had been deeply slashed. If gellbugs set in, they would lose him, too. Gellbugs, she snarled silently in fury. Such a simple thing for a healer to prevent, but Moira had no healer. Even now, the tiny bugs were probably swarming in his veins, thickening, clotting his capillaries, planting their eggs in his blood while he dragged himself onward. A healer who knew Ovousibas—such a person could use the ancient arts, she prayed hopelessly, such a healer could save him. But there was no such thing. Ovousibas was the “farce of the faith healers.”
