Certain Signs
The weirding protects from many dangers, yet attracts others. The Wise need fear neither malediction nor riddle, neither storm nor adder’s bite. But the voice in the dark, the eater of flesh, the thing unseen? To be Wise is to know true dread.
—Naethron One-hand of the Barrowhills
There were several hidden routes from the valley; each household under Taeron’s rule knew at least one—only to be used in extreme calamity, of course, and perhaps that is the difference between Elder and Secondborn. For I could not see any of our own inquisitive folk obeying the dictate of secrecy so well as the people of Waterstone. Every mother knows the best way to induce a mortal child into attempting a feat is to make it forbidden, and every father knows how far afield his sons will stray in search of honor or gain.
Then again, even the children of Taeron’s realm knew of the Enemy and his works. Perhaps a mortal clan might achieve something similar in the face of such a dire foe, but I doubt it.
My breath came in silver puffs. So did Arn’s. When Tjorin appeared, moving easily along the line of Elder, his hair bore both ashflake and small melting bits of ice. “Snow,” he said, softly—we were apparently permitted to speak in low tones instead of whispers now. “Yet others have come this way before us. Floringaeld says there are certain signs, and we are now beyond easy pursuit. How fares the lady alkuine?”
“Well enough.” I tried a smile, though my face felt masklike again. “But is there something for Arn? She is pale.”
“I endure,” she said immediately, but Tjorin once more produced his flask gemmed with blue slivers, the stopper a marvel of fluted gilding.
“Endurance is all very well.” He settled into an easy stride beside her, avoiding loose rocks and other detritus with expedience, if not grace. “We have some supplies, and the Elder know how to travel after such things. All will be well.”
I wondered if he sought to reassure us, or convince himself.
Arneior took a scant mouthful, and handed the flask to me with a look suggesting I had best not quibble. It was indeed sitheviel, a comforting heat like mead and the taste of summer flowers in bright meadows unreeling upon the tongue. It cut the sour remains of burning, relieved my thirst, and the world looked a little brighter after a single swallow. I wanted more, but there was little enough in the container and it was awkward to restopper one-handed.
“Aeredh?” I offered him the flask, for after all he had faced a burning horror much larger than a trul, and a lich besides.
The Crownless shook his dark head, though a pained smile curved his lips. “No need, my lady. We are almost at the crest.”
“Just there.” Arneior pointed, and whisked the small blue glittering thing away, handing it back to Tjorin. “Do you think the filthy things may track us?”
“If they do, we shall know soon enough.” The Secondborn man glanced back, and I wondered how he had arrived in Laeliquaende. He did not speak of it, and neither did the princess. “But Taeron and Naciel planned well.” His calm faltered for a bare moment, a grimace rising swiftly and vanishing with the same speed.
Aeredh slowed, which meant I had to. A ripple was passing down the line. Tjorin stiffened, nodded courteously in the Crownless’s direction, and hurried forward. Elaedie and her companion halted at the hillcrown, their arms linked, staring at something ahead.
The defile broadened as it reached the top of the mountain’s shoulder, tendrils of old snow drifting onto the path. The freeze thickened upslope, turning whiter and whiter, vanishing into a membranous haze hanging about the peak. We arrived at a knot of refugees standing solemnly, gazing at a broad space populated by snow-shrouded boulders with wet-dark, gleaming sides. In the middle of the expanse three huge, rectangular grey rocks, of a different type than the surrounding stone, leaned together conspiratorially.
There were other shapes, too, and a confusion of tracks across the thinly snowed field. It took a few moments before I realized what I saw, and my heart gave a sickened thump.
“Oh, no,” Elaedie breathed, the Old Tongue full of mournful despair. She and the girl now clutched each other, staring at the bodies.
For that is what they were—Elder, scattered about the field like so many broken earthenware vessels, some half-covered with flung snow. The wind rose, tugging at my sleeves; Arneior muttered a term I had only heard the warriors of my father’s hall use before, and never kindly.
The thin snow was not dirty, for it had fallen after the murder. Before that, though, the bodies had been savaged, scarlet fluid spattered widely, gold tinges fading at puddle-edges. Deep gouges scarred the field—I looked to Aeredh, an impulse left over from our earlier journey.
We had learned to trust the Crownless’s certainty, even when death drew nigh.
His dark eyebrows had drawn together. Aeredh stepped forward; his right arm extended before me, sweeping gently back. Did he wish to block such a sight from my view? Arn did not move, but her eyes had narrowed and her spear dipped.
“Bare feet?” Her coppery head cocked, and she looked puzzled. “But large, and so many.”
I peered around Aeredh. The stones in the middle looked almost like the massive bluish dolmens at the eastron end of Dun Rithell, always holding a chill even on midsummer afternoons; Frestis the wiseman knew their secrets, and propitiated them with the flint knife every solstice and equinox. Yet while dangerous and watchful, the stones of my home did not seem… malicious.
Not like these.
Whispers raced among the gathered Elder. Tjorin unsheathed his blade, and it glittered in the rising dawn. Floringaeld drew too; they conferred, blond head and dark bent together, and my heart was in my throat.
“No,” I heard myself say. Cold earth thrummed under my soles, a quivering communicated through thin Elder slippers—they had held up well so far, but no doubt I would soon be binding rags about my feet.
“Solveig?” Arn’s head turned, but very slowly; the word drew itself out too, long and low.
“They are not…” Seidhr reawakened inside my bones. The thing in the iron casket hummed, a high drilling whine akin to the song of bloodsucking marsh-insects on wet, warm autumn nights. “Arn, they are not stones.”
Tjorin pitched forward, perhaps meaning to do battle. But Floringaeld was quicker. The captain’s gauntleted left hand shot out, closing upon the back of Tjorin’s tunic. He dragged the son of Hrasimir back as the three grey columns shifted, seidhr blurring and rippling, curltwisted like wood shavings from a master’s chisel.
No. Not precisely like that, but ’tis the closest I can describe what I saw with eye and weirding both. The twisting continued as one rocky shape stretched, rising, its cloak rippling. Fierce cold radiated across the corpse-littered field, biting as a lich’s hatred. The rock melted into a bipedal shape, much larger than even the tallest Elder. Its companions did likewise, stretching and swelling, and noisome, obscene seidhr clotted thick about them.
The first thing turned with a scraping, ear-piercing screech. What could be mistaken for stone was naked, greyish skin marred with frostburn—not the sort called Lokji’s kisses or the playful touches of black-ice sprites. It was the lividity of a frozen carcass, and its huge, discolored face was a corpse’s as well. It wore the expression of a man starving to death in a snowstorm, glimpsing something horrifying between curtains of falling white.
“Draugr!” Tjorin yelled, and my knees turned loose.
Who does not know of such creatures? Stories of their depredations were told far more often than those of Elder or the Black Land, usually in deepwinter when the wind howls about the greathall’s roof and the snow lies thick in every direction. They were never my favorite sagas, Astrid disliked them too, Bjorn and even Arneior grew somber when such things were mentioned. A traveler infected into a restless undead thing, rending its garments to nothing, growing as it feeds upon travelers caught amid the drifts—who would not shiver at the thought?
Worse than the swollen, blackened faces and the high drilling seidhr-whine was the way they moved. The first one jerked into motion, its right hand clamped upon the hilt of a massive, rust-notched sword; it darted across the snow much faster than anything that size should.
Its gaze, yellowed orbs protruding like boiled hen-eggs from filmed, rheumy eyesockets, settled unerringly upon me. They are things of ill weirding, and there is nothing draugr like better than draining the seidhr from one who has more than a whisper of talent. Luck, heat, and life—those are the things they feast upon, as well as the flesh of their prey.
Floringaeld met the thing with a crash of metal. “Go!” he cried in the Old Tongue, and two Elder—one was Daerith of Nithraen, I saw now, and was amazed he had once more survived ruin—grasped Tjorin’s arms, bearing him away. More Elder hurried in their wake. Elaedie let out a single sobbing noise before grasping the girl beside her about the shoulders and pitching forward, forcing both of them into motion.
Laeliquaende’s finest captain leapt, hanging in the air for a breathless moment, and the force of his landing drove the thing back a few steps. Yet there were two more, and the foul seidhr upon them was terrible. The air cringed as they ran upon naked, flayed, gangrenous feet, their jaws champing, slablike yellow teeth making a horrible clacking that echoed upon the mountainside.
Arn’s spear leveled, but Aeredh half-turned. His fingers sank into my arm, and suddenly we were running, the Crownless somehow between me and the draugr. How he withstood the invisible weight of their stare I do not know; my feet skimmed thin snow and once more I could not even fall, so swift was his passage.
Arn bolted after us, and Floringaeld streaked sideways. The sword in his right hand glittered like ice under hard bright sunshine, the shorter blade in his left reversed, the gem on the back of his gauntlet no longer dull but giving a sharp viridian flash. One of the draugr fell, its head hanging from its neck by a thin thread of frost-bit tissue; its scream sent heavy awl-needles through my ears. It did not bleed, for their humors are frozen, but it dropped to all fours with a sound like thundercrack and began crawl-lolloping on all fours. Even then it was unholy swift, and it still clasped the hilt of its rust-rotted blade, which scraped a great dark furrow in ice-hard earth.
The whole night of fire and rapine, death and terror is lamented by the survivors and also their kin of Dorael, Galath, Faeron-Alith, the Harbors—the whole North, and not just by Elder but by the Secondborn who heard of it. Of them all, though, ’tis only the sagas of that last lonely battle I cannot listen to.
Floringaeld must have been weary, and he grieved the loss of his lord. Yet he drove the three draugr back, spinning among them like a whirlwind, singing as he fought. The warriors shepherding exhausted refugees sought to offer some aid, but so swift and deadly was the combat none could approach. Against the slope he pushed his opponents, the crawling one with its head hanging by a thread seeking to tangle the Elder’s legs.
His gauntlet flashing, the Heavy-hand gave true death to a pair of the foul things as the mist froze around them and the snow thickened underfoot. The third and largest he forced up, into the fog, and ’tis said that any traveler in that lonely place will still hear smithy-echoes when clouds touch the peak.
Once the tail-end of the ragged ash-daubed line of refugees was prodded to safety a handful of warriors turned back to render both chase and aid, but a thunderous warning interfered. Those few witnesses barely avoided a wall of snow and rock hurtling downward, freed from the mountainside by the noise of battle. When the rushing rumble faded the clearing lay beneath a fresh covering of white several bodylengths deep, the hidden pass was blocked, and Floringaeld of Laeliquaende was never seen again in those lands or any other, save perhaps the blessed, uttermost West.