Storm runner, p.12
Storm Runner, page 12
The ache in Dion’s calves had barely begun to dull when the group reached the spot where Aranur and Mjau had left their gear. As Aranur drew to a halt, Dion stayed standing, shifting from foot to foot to keep her aching calves loose. Tomi, reaching the clearing a minute after her, collapsed on the ground. His thin chest heaved, and his breath was ragged. Dion unslung her water bag for him. He reached for the bag greedily, but she shook her head.
“Only a sip,” she cautioned. “And let it warm in your mouth before you swallow.”
He nodded reluctantly, and Dion kept her hand on the bag, pulling it away from him when he swallowed quickly and greedily, sucking the water unthinking.
“One mouthful at a time,” she said sharply. “You’ll get cramps.”
The boy fingered the knife that he still clutched, but Dion ignored the movement.
She took a sip and rolled the water around her mouth before swallowing. She offered him another swallow and, when he was done, one more before slinging the bag back over her shoulder. “When your body cools down,” she added gently, “you can drink deeply.”
In the meantime, Aranur had found what he was looking for in his pack. It was with an air of satisfaction that he pulled out his extra tunic and moccasins. “Knew I carried these for a reason,” he murmured. Kneeling, he did not remove the rags on the boy’s feet, but slipped the man-sized moccasins on over the rude footgear, lashing the leather snugly to his calves with thongs. On Aranur, the moccasins would have barely reached his knee; on Tomi, they flopped over. Aranur, regarding them for a moment, folded them back and retied the thongs, leaving the boy’s knees bare. “Easier to run in,” he said. Tomi stood then, trying out his mock boots. Aranur watched him closely. “Do they slip?”
Tomi shook his head.
“Here.” He handed the boy the oversized tunic, and Tomi took it warily. Another thong belted the garment at the boy’s waist, and then Aranur motioned to the boy’s knife. “The scabbard can hang from the belt. It will leave your hands free, if you need them.”
“No!” Tomi scrambled back. “I’ll do it,” he amended hastily, his face flushing. Then the flush faded and his mask was once more in place. He carefully threaded the loose end of the crude belt through the scabbard so that the knife hung on his left.
Aranur turned and, seeing that Mjau was also ready to go, strode away in a fast-paced walk. Tomi stayed where he was, staring after Aranur, struggling with the wariness that seemed to choke his words. Mjau, regarding him with concern, realized Tomi was trying to say a single word: thanks.
The older woman pointed at the trail, indicating for him to go on after. “He knows,” she reassured him gently.
In another half hour, they returned to the riverbank and made their way quickly upriver. When they stopped again, it was at Tomi’s gesture. Aranur looked back, and the boy pointed again to the place he had climbed up from the water, his face expressionless. Aranur walked gingerly to the rim, testing the ground before putting his weight where there might be little substance beneath him. His gaze raked across the far bank, searching for movement, for any sign that someone might be watching. He saw nothing and, still uneasy, turned to Dion. “Can you sense anything?”
Dion scanned the river, the forest. Even the graysong was quiet, searching but not close. “Nothing,” she returned slowly.
In seconds, he stripped his pack and dropped it among the roots of the silverheart trees. His sword was next, handed to Dion as he slid like a shadow to the cliff’s edge. At the rim, erosion had crumbled away the soil so that a network of roots hung out over the steep, rocky slope. The marks where Tomi had climbed up were obvious. Roots were pulled loose and bent. Some of the limbs were naked in patches and weeping sap. Aranur nodded to himself. That would be where the boy had slipped, his hands stripping the thin skin from the roots as he clutched at their fragile security for balance. New slides of earth and stones marked his upward passage, and Aranur regarded them warily. With his weight, he would scar this slide twice as much as the boy had already done. At least there was plenty of loose dirt at the top. If necessary, he could roll a large boulder down, hiding the marks of his passage with a more-natural slide once he regained the top.
Dion, watching him, could almost hear his thoughts. Then his shoulders tightened slightly, and the tiny muscle in his jaw tensed and relaxed. So, she thought, he has found the little girl. She glanced at Tomi, but the boy’s mask was in place.
When Aranur reappeared, his outer tunic was gone, and he was carrying a small bundle in his arms. He was sweating as he regained the top, but neither Dion nor Mjau stepped forward to help him as he clambered over the roots. He wedged his burden up in the branches of the silverheart, where it would be difficult for the ground predators to get at it. When he lowered his arms, he turned without a word and strode up the trail.
As the others fell in behind him, Dion stretched her senses to the wolves on both sides of the Phye. The gray creatures to the west still did not welcome her, but she listened to their song through Hishn, and they could not refuse her that.
There was time. The western wolves were not yet close to the refugees. They wandered the game trails, leading first one way, then another, into root caves and rock overhangs where the refugees might have stayed. By the time the Bilocctar wolfwalker and the wolves tramped up the ground, there would be little for the raiders to see. Besides, raiders did not waste trackers on a trail when they could rely on the Gray Ones to find their quarry for them. For that oversight, Dion sent a prayer of thanks to the moons.
Three kilometers farther, the temperature rose to a muggy warmth, occasionally cut through by the chill wind that gusted off the canyon. By then, the clarity of Dion’s thoughts had faded to a jumble of painful sensations.
The ground, once fairly even, rose sharply to rocky inclines. They did not jog here. They hiked along the twisted path, leaning into the trail when the steepness stole their strength. Tomi’s breath came hoarsely. Dion stumbled more than once. Aranur, his legs like iron, said nothing until he turned his ankle on a loose rock and swore a blue streak while the pain subsided. He refused the wrap Dion offered, relacing his boots instead and walking gingerly until he could ignore the shooting pain that crept up his calf. Behind them, Mjau walked steadily, her short-cropped silvered hair ruffing only slightly in the wind, and her blue-veined skin barely showing her perspiration. Dion, glancing back, met Mjau’s eyes, and the older woman smiled wryly, acknowledging the wolfwalker’s envy with amused apology.
A low-hanging branch slapped back awkwardly, and Dion let out a stifled curse as it caught on one of her forearms. “Moon-wormed misbegotten branch of a blackroot,” she muttered, thrusting the branch aside and warning Tomi of its arc.
Constantly, Dion’s wary gaze swept the far bank of the Phye, though it could hardly be called a bank anymore. With the cliffs rising over a hundred meters above the river, the channel was steep enough to keep all but the noon sun’s rays from its depth. She stumbled again as she looked toward the canyon’s edge. The voice of the river was muted here, its rush trapped in the canyon. It had not risen with the trail, and now its waters were far below, speckled with white as if to spite the shadow of the rock walls. The sun, though higher than before, had not yet broken through the cloud cover; its light was indirect and dull. On all sides, the forest thinned with altitude; the trees were short and their trunks scrawny. The canopy overhead was more skimpy, letting the dim light through in patches and allowing new brush to grow thickly around the trunks. But for Dion, each shadow seemed to hold the small bundled shape that Aranur had left behind them on the cliff. She had to struggle to see only the ground beneath the trees.
Aranur slowed again. The path they were following led to a scattering of tall stones, and he eyed them warily. This place was a favorite hunting ground for a family of watercats who lived nearby. A ninan earlier, he had discovered their perches when he ran this trail to help bring up the supports for the crossing. He glanced over his shoulder questioningly.
Dion, her eyes unfocused, shook her head. “It is safe.” She spoke reluctantly, as if the silence had been a tribute to the dead child behind them. “Nothing hides among them.”
Tomi looked at her, startled. “How can you tell?”
Dion shrugged.
From behind, it was Mjau who answered him. “The nose and ears of a wolf are ten times more sensitive than those of a human,” she explained. “Dion looks through Gray Hishn’s eyes, not her own.”
Tomi eyed Dion warily. “I do not see any wolf.”
Mjau grinned without humor, a twisted tooth coming into view and contrasting oddly with the nearly straight row of her other teeth. “Seen not,” she answered, “but they are there.”
As they climbed toward the rocks, the sounds around them changed strangely. Their ears were coaxed, then deafened, by noise. Thunder burst, then faded strangely between the stones.
“It’s the river,” Dion explained to the boy. “Its sound echoes off the rocks, bouncing from one to another.” Around them, the sounds grew until they became one dull roar. A strangely irregular beat seemed to punctuate the thunder, but it was not until they stepped out from the rocks into the dull sun that the sound became a booming, crashing beat, and the sight of the canyon brought them to a halt.
“By the moons,” Mjau said reverently. Surreptitiously, she made the sign of the blessing of the wolves.
Aranur stepped to the edge of the canyon. The chill air was damp and biting with the wind. The cloud of mist that clung to the falls and climbed the cliff walls did not reach above the rim of the canyon, and Aranur let his gaze roam the length of the Knee below it and above, as if to catalog every rock and pattern in the mist and water.
Dion joined him, seeing his shoulders relax their wary set when he could find no sign of danger. She looked back at Tomi. “There,” she yelled above the thunder, pointing up the river. “It is power. The spirit of the moons poured out for us. For the little girl. They grieve and give their anger for her so that we can let her go.”
Tomi stared at her. Mjau grabbed his arm, pulling him back from the edge. He stiffened at her touch, only his eyes alive in his dull, bruised face.
Dion turned back to the river. From where she stood with Aranur, the rim curved away under their feet and eroded into an overhang barely an arm’s length thick. Their gaze trapped by the view, the two dark-haired figures exulted in the crack of the river as it exploded from air pockets and slammed the spring snags onto the rocks.
Abruptly, sharply, the river canyon dropped with the falls. Moisture, which clung to the walls of the cliffs, turned the rock faces green and orange. In front, the Devil’s Knee bent the river like a straw in a woman’s hand. Over the cliff, rushing out, then down, the rocks twisted the water into a double fall, a blasting inferno that sprayed back up on itself as it drilled into the rock.
Two snags spun over, tilting at the edge before being sucked down, then followed by the debris of their branches. With wonder, Dion watched the cloud of white that hid the base of the cascade toward which they plunged. The water of the top falls sheeted down, exploding out where air was trapped in a pocket in the pool below. Dion breathed in, her lungs expanding. The wind tasted like the river. In her sight, there was nothing but this—this white cascade flinging itself down the cliff and smashing into the pool below. In her ears, no sound but the crashing thunder of the Phye.
Two dozen times? Thrice a dozen? How many times had she stood at the Knee and let its power invade her soul? And each time, the river was new. The upper falls; the lower; they grew and faded and changed, and repeated not at all.
The upper cascade was a sheet of power. It threw itself off the lip of the river and slammed into the rocks below, splintering and bursting into a thick cloud of mist that climbed halfway back up as if determined for another chance to ride that torrent down. It was a cloud that held rainbows by day and pale moon-bows by night. In the dull, midday light, a faint rainbow floated in the midst of the cloud, hanging over the middle pool and the lower falls like the ghost of a moonmaid. The lower fall itself could not be called a single entity. It was a twisted, plunging, bucking thing that blasted across rocks and arched agonizingly through the stones, demonically destroying and creating its shape each second of its life. Dion flung out her arms suddenly, screaming at the river. She did not know what she screamed, just that she had to add her voice to that of the Phye or she would explode with its power. And suddenly, her mind was full of a gray storm screaming and howling with her. She reeled, blind. She did not notice when Aranur grabbed her arm in his steely grip. Her eyes were sightless. The impression of the falls was burned into her mind, and the gray voices of the wolves rang in her brain with their response. She arched back, lifting her voice with them, and the sound that burst from her lips was not human.
Aranur held her on the canyon’s rim. He had been shocked when he touched her—the echoes of the wolves had passed into his own mind, filled his ears. He looked down at the woman in his hands, feeling her muscles taut and shivering, staring into her sightless violet eyes, unable to keep himself from memorizing the feral expression on her face. The bond of the wolves…
If it was strong enough for him to feel, what had the wolfwalkers in Bilocctar picked up?
Dion shuddered, her voice fading. Slowly, the sight came back to her eyes. Her lips relaxed over her teeth. The thunder of the gray storm in her head blended and became the thunder of the falls. The joyous chill of the racing pack on the heights became the cutting cold of the canyon wind. The young teeth wrestling, chewing happily on her tolerant arms, became the steely hands of her Promised.
Aranur. Her gaze focused. He looked at her searchingly. Shivering suddenly, she leaned against him, and his hands soothed her. Aranur’s eyes were worried as he moved back with her, away from the edge. Dion was one of those people sensitive to other forms of life—a talent that the ancients had recognized and bred into both humans and wolves. Aranur himself was not empathic enough to bond with a wolf, but even he could feel the shattering power of these falls. For Dion, with this power focused through the Gray Ones… He had known that their mental power caught her up when she was tired, but he had forgotten how incredibly strong that bond could be. He turned and glared at the waterfall. He needed Dion, he thought savagely, not a woman who was half-wolf in her mind. He needed her here, strong, concentrating on what had to be done. Mjau was too old to make this crossing with him. The boy—Tomi— was too young. So it had to be Dion. And Dion was only half there. Somewhere, the Gray Ones called to her with a power like the falls. Somewhere, they held her, as tightly as he did now.
Mjau and Tomi watched them curiously. When Dion’s eyes refocused, Aranur motioned toward the path, and Mjau gently pushed the boy ahead of her, following the tall, gray-eyed man and the slender wolfwalker without a word.
Chapter 7
Revel, sang the moonwarriors, in the chilling stream.
Let your skin grow cold and so discard it.
Hunger for our moonlit path.
We lead your feet
so softly,
so gently from your world to ours.
In our stars, your death, your future is waiting.
Run from your hunters now.
Soon, your sleep will be peaceful.
Soon, you will be home.
The trail that Aranur followed curved away from the edge of the falls and wound back into the forest, avoiding the massive boulders that formed the top of the Knee and made riding difficult. This was the traders’ trail—the Silver Trail—or it had been, when crossing the border had been a profitable venture, not a lethal challenge. Except for a few hardy caravans that risked the border raiders, the traders in Ariye rode only the Valley Road now, down to the coast towns. Better a thin skin in Sidisport than no skin at all, so they said.
Dion filed after Aranur, stumbling when her gaze was drawn back to the waterfall instead of to the ground under her feet. When at last Aranur halted, Dion, glancing, then looking sharply at the area, gave him a puzzled look. He grinned, nodding at the pile of boulders on the river side of the trail.
“We disguised the chimney,” he shouted over the river’s din. He motioned at the rocks. Following him, Dion realized why she felt so baffled by the trail. The boulders were new—they had not been there when she had last passed the falls. She stared at them in pleased surprise. There was an opening in them that led between two of the taller boulders. The narrow path went only a meter before it seemed to end in another haphazard pile of rocks, but, as Dion stepped past Aranur and explored the way, she saw that the channel had merely turned, hiding its true direction from curious eyes. The rocks were cleverly placed. Since they pressed out along the very rim of the canyon, beyond the lip of the chimney which plunged down to the falls, the stones would hide the cleft from both sides of the river. Anyone who climbed the cut would be able to rest at the top, out of view of the path.
Aranur nodded smugly at her pleasure. He had argued with his uncle Gamon over placing the boulders, but once they had been moved, even Gamon admitted that the idea had been a good one.
Dion made her way back out of the rocks. Examining the ground, she could guess where the burden dnu had hauled their loads of stone, but the faint limpness of the grass that patched the ground was not from the hooves of the six-legged creatures, but from turf that had been laid down over the tracks and was just now catching its roots back into soil. She looked back and forth along the trail. Had she not known the path at that point, she would not have guessed how it had changed.
Aranur glanced toward Mjau. His gesture was short, decisive. Neither Dion nor the archer argued. The older woman had the endurance to run long distances, to judge wind, to make knots, to shoot arrows, but not to haul bodies up and down ropes. Asking her to climb a cliff, jump into glacial water, and come out ready to fight was like asking a dnu to be a bird—it wasn’t possible. Dion, in spite of her weakness, was still the better choice.
