"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c05_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)5 HUNTING AND HUNTED
Tensing like a spider that feels a tremor on the web, Jordam flexed his claws. Goreth, standing at the top of a ridge, kept his hand in the air to halt the brothers’ pursuit. If the boy from O-raya’s caves was just over this ridge, he was as good as dead. Jordam had given him a chance, but he could do nothing to stop the hunt now. As Jordam relayed Goreth’s silent caution, Jorn collapsed, glad for an excuse to catch his breath. Obeying Mordafey’s orders, he had hauled the pile of salvage on a makeshift sled of interwoven reedweed shoots. With straps from the sled bound around his lash-whipped hide, Jorn felt punishment in every step—punishment for the cargo he had cost them on Baldridge Hill. Mordafey shrugged his woodscloak back over his shoulders, freeing his arms. He held a short spear newly tipped with a rawblood tooth. “Steps.” Goreth’s whisper was a gust of rustling leaves. “Not far.” He spread his arms to indicate something enormous. Mordafey’s eyes widened, and he knelt to press his ear to the ground. Deep quakes pulsed beneath Jordam’s feet. A premonition scrambled up his spine. The Keeper. He remembered his fall from the cliff into Deep Lake, and the presence that had prompted it, as if it had only just occurred. Alone, he would have fled. But Mordafey was smiling. The rider had kept the brothers moving north and west from Baldridge Hill through the Cragavar all night. Mordafey was too stubborn to call off a hunt he had begun, and Jordam refused to give his brothers the pleasure of seeing him surrender, even though their dens were close by, stocked with dried meat, eggs kept cold in deep cavewater, and bowls of crunchy beetles. Pride had pushed them forward. Now, newly inspired, Mordafey would press on to know what manner of creature shook the earth. Nothing frightened Mordafey. “Wood dragon?” Jorn, afraid, began to fade into moss and ferns, his skin greening to disguise him. “Cent Regus killed every wood dragon.” Mordafey pointed to the top of the rise. “This…something new.” A wave of sound—branches shattering, roots ripping from soil, trees crashing down—broke over the ridge. Jorn jumped into a tree, and the jolt on his tethers caused the heavy salvage sled to dump some of its cargo. Mordafey rushed past Goreth, weapons ready, and stared down the other side of the forested ridge. Interlocking branches in the thickly wooded forest had forbidden the brothers’ passage in the past, but as Jordam reached the top of the rise he saw that something had tumbled through the trees beyond, blazing a new path. He could smell the shock of sap where boughs had snapped. And something more. Jordam’s nostrils flared. Smoke. Hadn’t that creature at the lake breathed fire like a dragon? “Other Cent Regus will fear us if we catch it,” said Mordafey. “We will be like…like…” “rrWe should go back.” Jordam groped for words that would convince them to retreat. I’ve seen a terrible creature. Same one that roars in bad dreams. No, Mordafey needed something more substantial. “If we chase it, we leave prizes behind for other Cent Regus. We need prizes. For Essence.” “Mordafey stays with prizes.” Mordafey grinned. “Jordam, hunt.” Jordam was about to protest when a firm grip fastened to his arm. He turned to see Goreth scowling. “Older Brother, send me too. For Jordam, too dangerous.” Jordam disliked thinking about a charge before it began. Thinking kindled fear, and fear could slow and distract him. Closing his eyes, baring his teeth, he launched into what he knew very well could be his final run. And Goreth’s as well. The twins bounded over the seven-toed prints as if trying to fly. The world about them melted into a blur. The path led them down, north and west. “Strange,” Goreth barked, trying to keep pace. “Smells of water.” “rrLakewater.” “No. Deeper.” He fell behind as the ground rose sharply. Jordam circled back to find his brother sharpening his claws on a rock. “Don’t tell Older Brother,” Goreth growled. “I smelled that smell before. In a dream. We were cubs. Big animal, smelled like deep water. I told the Old Dog about it in the morning. He thumped me.” Jordam was amazed and strangely comforted. Goreth had confided in him, confessing something he had withheld from Mordafey. This was new. This changed things. Jordam and Goreth had always resembled each other, with their black manes and fur the deep red of rust. Their appetites advanced together, and their sufferings for want of Essence slowed and tormented them. But their differences were stark as well. Jordam’s browbone was broken, but his mind was quick, while Goreth’s memories slipped away as easily as wrigglers through a fishing net. Jordam was obstinate, willing to growl at Mordafey and pay the price; Goreth cowered in conflict. Goreth’s expressive whip of a tail betrayed fear, agitation, and delight, while Jordam buried emotions deep. With this confession, Goreth opened a conversation between them. This, Jordam realized, could be useful should Mordafey ever become too dangerous. If he could teach Goreth to conspire with him, perhaps they could gain an advantage. “Same Brother dreams of the creature too.” Goreth shoved him. “I hear you. In your sleep.” Jordam fought the urge to respond with his own revelation—an account of his fall from the cliff. He could feel the words in his mouth. But Goreth’s mind, moods, and memory were unreliable as weather, and Mordafey’s suspicions were flammable. “Must hurry now,” he said. “rrTracks are deep, but the animal is fast.” Together they climbed through the next run of trampled trees, crested another ridge, and looked out across a valley of long whitegrass. A dark swath parted the field. The creature had crawled into the foggy stand of trees that covered the valley floor like dark brine in the bottom of a white bowl. “Going back to its den?” Goreth drew in a deep breath. “Could be a hard hunt. Older Brother will scar us if we’re gone for long.” Jordam glanced back over his shoulder. “He’ll scar us deeper if we come back without a catch.” “Older Brother scars us whatever we do.” Goreth seemed relieved to hear Jordam’s aggravation. “I want some honey.” Clouds crowded the sky like cattle moping in a pasture. Frost glittered across the low woods in waves. Goreth pointed to a monolith there, the tower of a long-neglected Bel Amican bastion, and Jordam found the source of the smoke on the air—a wisp rising from the tower, spiriting away to the southeast. Perhaps the boy rested there. Goreth began to rhythmically puncture the soil with his spear. “Weakerfolk.” “Bel Amicans,” Jordam mused. “rrWe tell Mordafey, brothers need a new plan.” “Big animal guards Bel Amicans?” Goreth whispered. “No. Not this animal.” But it guarded a girl. Jordam realized that he had no choice. If the Keeper was here, and the boy as well, O-raya might have returned. “rrGo back,” he said with resolve. “Tell Mordafey, I run on ahead.” “Alone?” Goreth shuddered. “Mordafey say w’three go catch it!” It was Jorn, released from his burden, arriving on the scene as sudden as lightning. “Mordafey’s angry.” He rubbed the raw lines where pallet straps had burnt him. “Must catch something for him, he say.” Jordam and Goreth glanced back down the slope. It was not like Mordafey to keep himself out of a hunt. “rrOrders? Crolca!” Jordam pointed to the tower. “Weakerfolk, arrows and swords, not far away. Go back, both of you.” He reached down to scratch at a sharp sting in his ankle. “I hunt the animal.” His hand closed around the shaft of an arrow. He blinked at it for a moment.
“Urg!” snorted Jorn. “Urg!” He fell, two arrows protruding from his thigh. “They’re behind us!” Jordam snapped. “In the trees!” Jorn, his skin flushing white as the grass, shuddered and clutched at the arrows. Goreth dove into the field for cover. Jordam remained where he stood, staring into the shadowed trees behind him. When the next arrow came, a fleeting glint in the faint light, he blocked it with his club, and the arrow embedded there. Jordam sniffed the feathered shaft.
Poison.
As he dropped to the ground, he guessed that the attackers were Bel Amicans securing a perimeter around their newly enlivened fort. Jordam, Goreth, and Jorn had broken that border. The whitegrass he disturbed would betray his position, but Jordam had no choice. He crawled low, frantic for a place to hide. If the brothers scattered, they might divide their pursuers, but they would lose their combined strength. If he took one of the hunters hostage, he could bring back a trophy for Mordafey’s praise. “There!” rang a cry in the Common tongue. A spear pierced the ground beside him. Like oil catching fire, bloodlust blazed within him. His toes dug into the earth for the spring. His thoughts blurred as the weakening traces of Essence in his blood quickened. The killing fever, so familiar and invigorating, took hold. But then a man shouted, “Hunt!” Jordam heard the yelps of unleashed hounds tearing through the grass toward him. The killing fever faded, replaced by a chilling fear of paralysis. Jordam got up to make a run for the swath of trees that darkened the low valley ground, but his left leg was going numb, and he fell. The arrow had only nicked him, but Jorn…Jorn would already be captured. Or dead. Jordam ran like a three-legged animal, lurching down the hill. The dogs were close. The numbing sensation spread as if carried by small, crawling things into his hip, up his spine, down into his other leg. It gave him little comfort to think that when the dogs caught him and tore him apart, he would not feel a thing. At last among trees, he forced himself to his feet and staggered in zigzag. His senses wavered. He smelled rain-wet trees; hot, streaming blood from his wound; smoke from damp wood burning; wet dogs. He heard the hounds rejoicing at his clear trail, and he stumbled to his knees. A coil tree loomed in his path. He grasped at its bark, reached a low branch, and pulled himself up, legs hanging useless behind him. He swung up through the serpentine sprawl of black, slippery boughs. And then as he reached for the crook of trunk and branch, his arm plunged directly into a hollow of the tree. A sharp pain pierced his wrist. Teeth. He yelped. Instinct charging ahead of thought, his hands closed around a fat, squirming, hairy creature deep inside the coil tree. It shrieked. He yanked it out of its den—a gorrel. With hardly a moment to act, Jordam brought the squealing animal down to his bleeding leg and smeared its head, belly, back, and tail with his own blood. The scattered dogs converged on the coil tree. He dropped the gorrel as feeling faded from his arm. The bloodied animal fell into the bushes. With no time to celebrate its survival, it scrambled, dripping Jordam’s blood across the frost, and led the howling dogs away. Jordam crawled into a twist of branches like a dying bird into its nest. He wrapped his arms around a limb. His brothers, the journey, the tracks, the hunt, the arrows—all slipped from his mind’s grasp, leaving him to fight the poison. He was conscious of nothing else, until the poison took his consciousness as well. When Jordam opened his eyes again, daylight fell in soft white flakes all around him. Was it a dream, the blur of motion high in the window of the Bel Amicans’ stone tower? The sight brought him swiftly from his daze. He could not see the structure clearly; it was just a straight-edged shadow with one glimmering eye near the top. A woman of the weakerfolk stood there in an extravagant headdress and gown, a candle glinting starlike in her hands. She watched the woods awhile, then looked up at the blurred smudge of moonlight. Jordam heard his own voice then, a faint rasp dry as bone. “O-raya.” His lungs were open again. He could breathe. But he could not move. Nor could he escape the claws of sleep that closed around him once more. In his sleep there remained a sensation of falling—not of tumbling down to darkness, but skyward, into light. 5 HUNTING AND HUNTED
Tensing like a spider that feels a tremor on the web, Jordam flexed his claws. Goreth, standing at the top of a ridge, kept his hand in the air to halt the brothers’ pursuit. If the boy from O-raya’s caves was just over this ridge, he was as good as dead. Jordam had given him a chance, but he could do nothing to stop the hunt now. As Jordam relayed Goreth’s silent caution, Jorn collapsed, glad for an excuse to catch his breath. Obeying Mordafey’s orders, he had hauled the pile of salvage on a makeshift sled of interwoven reedweed shoots. With straps from the sled bound around his lash-whipped hide, Jorn felt punishment in every step—punishment for the cargo he had cost them on Baldridge Hill. Mordafey shrugged his woodscloak back over his shoulders, freeing his arms. He held a short spear newly tipped with a rawblood tooth. “Steps.” Goreth’s whisper was a gust of rustling leaves. “Not far.” He spread his arms to indicate something enormous. Mordafey’s eyes widened, and he knelt to press his ear to the ground. Deep quakes pulsed beneath Jordam’s feet. A premonition scrambled up his spine. The Keeper. He remembered his fall from the cliff into Deep Lake, and the presence that had prompted it, as if it had only just occurred. Alone, he would have fled. But Mordafey was smiling. The rider had kept the brothers moving north and west from Baldridge Hill through the Cragavar all night. Mordafey was too stubborn to call off a hunt he had begun, and Jordam refused to give his brothers the pleasure of seeing him surrender, even though their dens were close by, stocked with dried meat, eggs kept cold in deep cavewater, and bowls of crunchy beetles. Pride had pushed them forward. Now, newly inspired, Mordafey would press on to know what manner of creature shook the earth. Nothing frightened Mordafey. “Wood dragon?” Jorn, afraid, began to fade into moss and ferns, his skin greening to disguise him. “Cent Regus killed every wood dragon.” Mordafey pointed to the top of the rise. “This…something new.” A wave of sound—branches shattering, roots ripping from soil, trees crashing down—broke over the ridge. Jorn jumped into a tree, and the jolt on his tethers caused the heavy salvage sled to dump some of its cargo. Mordafey rushed past Goreth, weapons ready, and stared down the other side of the forested ridge. Interlocking branches in the thickly wooded forest had forbidden the brothers’ passage in the past, but as Jordam reached the top of the rise he saw that something had tumbled through the trees beyond, blazing a new path. He could smell the shock of sap where boughs had snapped. And something more. Jordam’s nostrils flared. Smoke. Hadn’t that creature at the lake breathed fire like a dragon? “Other Cent Regus will fear us if we catch it,” said Mordafey. “We will be like…like…” “rrWe should go back.” Jordam groped for words that would convince them to retreat. I’ve seen a terrible creature. Same one that roars in bad dreams. No, Mordafey needed something more substantial. “If we chase it, we leave prizes behind for other Cent Regus. We need prizes. For Essence.” “Mordafey stays with prizes.” Mordafey grinned. “Jordam, hunt.” Jordam was about to protest when a firm grip fastened to his arm. He turned to see Goreth scowling. “Older Brother, send me too. For Jordam, too dangerous.” Jordam disliked thinking about a charge before it began. Thinking kindled fear, and fear could slow and distract him. Closing his eyes, baring his teeth, he launched into what he knew very well could be his final run. And Goreth’s as well. The twins bounded over the seven-toed prints as if trying to fly. The world about them melted into a blur. The path led them down, north and west. “Strange,” Goreth barked, trying to keep pace. “Smells of water.” “rrLakewater.” “No. Deeper.” He fell behind as the ground rose sharply. Jordam circled back to find his brother sharpening his claws on a rock. “Don’t tell Older Brother,” Goreth growled. “I smelled that smell before. In a dream. We were cubs. Big animal, smelled like deep water. I told the Old Dog about it in the morning. He thumped me.” Jordam was amazed and strangely comforted. Goreth had confided in him, confessing something he had withheld from Mordafey. This was new. This changed things. Jordam and Goreth had always resembled each other, with their black manes and fur the deep red of rust. Their appetites advanced together, and their sufferings for want of Essence slowed and tormented them. But their differences were stark as well. Jordam’s browbone was broken, but his mind was quick, while Goreth’s memories slipped away as easily as wrigglers through a fishing net. Jordam was obstinate, willing to growl at Mordafey and pay the price; Goreth cowered in conflict. Goreth’s expressive whip of a tail betrayed fear, agitation, and delight, while Jordam buried emotions deep. With this confession, Goreth opened a conversation between them. This, Jordam realized, could be useful should Mordafey ever become too dangerous. If he could teach Goreth to conspire with him, perhaps they could gain an advantage. “Same Brother dreams of the creature too.” Goreth shoved him. “I hear you. In your sleep.” Jordam fought the urge to respond with his own revelation—an account of his fall from the cliff. He could feel the words in his mouth. But Goreth’s mind, moods, and memory were unreliable as weather, and Mordafey’s suspicions were flammable. “Must hurry now,” he said. “rrTracks are deep, but the animal is fast.” Together they climbed through the next run of trampled trees, crested another ridge, and looked out across a valley of long whitegrass. A dark swath parted the field. The creature had crawled into the foggy stand of trees that covered the valley floor like dark brine in the bottom of a white bowl. “Going back to its den?” Goreth drew in a deep breath. “Could be a hard hunt. Older Brother will scar us if we’re gone for long.” Jordam glanced back over his shoulder. “He’ll scar us deeper if we come back without a catch.” “Older Brother scars us whatever we do.” Goreth seemed relieved to hear Jordam’s aggravation. “I want some honey.” Clouds crowded the sky like cattle moping in a pasture. Frost glittered across the low woods in waves. Goreth pointed to a monolith there, the tower of a long-neglected Bel Amican bastion, and Jordam found the source of the smoke on the air—a wisp rising from the tower, spiriting away to the southeast. Perhaps the boy rested there. Goreth began to rhythmically puncture the soil with his spear. “Weakerfolk.” “Bel Amicans,” Jordam mused. “rrWe tell Mordafey, brothers need a new plan.” “Big animal guards Bel Amicans?” Goreth whispered. “No. Not this animal.” But it guarded a girl. Jordam realized that he had no choice. If the Keeper was here, and the boy as well, O-raya might have returned. “rrGo back,” he said with resolve. “Tell Mordafey, I run on ahead.” “Alone?” Goreth shuddered. “Mordafey say w’three go catch it!” It was Jorn, released from his burden, arriving on the scene as sudden as lightning. “Mordafey’s angry.” He rubbed the raw lines where pallet straps had burnt him. “Must catch something for him, he say.” Jordam and Goreth glanced back down the slope. It was not like Mordafey to keep himself out of a hunt. “rrOrders? Crolca!” Jordam pointed to the tower. “Weakerfolk, arrows and swords, not far away. Go back, both of you.” He reached down to scratch at a sharp sting in his ankle. “I hunt the animal.” His hand closed around the shaft of an arrow. He blinked at it for a moment.
“Urg!” snorted Jorn. “Urg!” He fell, two arrows protruding from his thigh. “They’re behind us!” Jordam snapped. “In the trees!” Jorn, his skin flushing white as the grass, shuddered and clutched at the arrows. Goreth dove into the field for cover. Jordam remained where he stood, staring into the shadowed trees behind him. When the next arrow came, a fleeting glint in the faint light, he blocked it with his club, and the arrow embedded there. Jordam sniffed the feathered shaft.
Poison.
As he dropped to the ground, he guessed that the attackers were Bel Amicans securing a perimeter around their newly enlivened fort. Jordam, Goreth, and Jorn had broken that border. The whitegrass he disturbed would betray his position, but Jordam had no choice. He crawled low, frantic for a place to hide. If the brothers scattered, they might divide their pursuers, but they would lose their combined strength. If he took one of the hunters hostage, he could bring back a trophy for Mordafey’s praise. “There!” rang a cry in the Common tongue. A spear pierced the ground beside him. Like oil catching fire, bloodlust blazed within him. His toes dug into the earth for the spring. His thoughts blurred as the weakening traces of Essence in his blood quickened. The killing fever, so familiar and invigorating, took hold. But then a man shouted, “Hunt!” Jordam heard the yelps of unleashed hounds tearing through the grass toward him. The killing fever faded, replaced by a chilling fear of paralysis. Jordam got up to make a run for the swath of trees that darkened the low valley ground, but his left leg was going numb, and he fell. The arrow had only nicked him, but Jorn…Jorn would already be captured. Or dead. Jordam ran like a three-legged animal, lurching down the hill. The dogs were close. The numbing sensation spread as if carried by small, crawling things into his hip, up his spine, down into his other leg. It gave him little comfort to think that when the dogs caught him and tore him apart, he would not feel a thing. At last among trees, he forced himself to his feet and staggered in zigzag. His senses wavered. He smelled rain-wet trees; hot, streaming blood from his wound; smoke from damp wood burning; wet dogs. He heard the hounds rejoicing at his clear trail, and he stumbled to his knees. A coil tree loomed in his path. He grasped at its bark, reached a low branch, and pulled himself up, legs hanging useless behind him. He swung up through the serpentine sprawl of black, slippery boughs. And then as he reached for the crook of trunk and branch, his arm plunged directly into a hollow of the tree. A sharp pain pierced his wrist. Teeth. He yelped. Instinct charging ahead of thought, his hands closed around a fat, squirming, hairy creature deep inside the coil tree. It shrieked. He yanked it out of its den—a gorrel. With hardly a moment to act, Jordam brought the squealing animal down to his bleeding leg and smeared its head, belly, back, and tail with his own blood. The scattered dogs converged on the coil tree. He dropped the gorrel as feeling faded from his arm. The bloodied animal fell into the bushes. With no time to celebrate its survival, it scrambled, dripping Jordam’s blood across the frost, and led the howling dogs away. Jordam crawled into a twist of branches like a dying bird into its nest. He wrapped his arms around a limb. His brothers, the journey, the tracks, the hunt, the arrows—all slipped from his mind’s grasp, leaving him to fight the poison. He was conscious of nothing else, until the poison took his consciousness as well. When Jordam opened his eyes again, daylight fell in soft white flakes all around him. Was it a dream, the blur of motion high in the window of the Bel Amicans’ stone tower? The sight brought him swiftly from his daze. He could not see the structure clearly; it was just a straight-edged shadow with one glimmering eye near the top. A woman of the weakerfolk stood there in an extravagant headdress and gown, a candle glinting starlike in her hands. She watched the woods awhile, then looked up at the blurred smudge of moonlight. Jordam heard his own voice then, a faint rasp dry as bone. “O-raya.” His lungs were open again. He could breathe. But he could not move. Nor could he escape the claws of sleep that closed around him once more. In his sleep there remained a sensation of falling—not of tumbling down to darkness, but skyward, into light. |
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