When Darkness Falls Read online

  When he was gone, Kellen felt oddly alone, although he was precisely as un-alone as he had been the moment before. Isinwen and the rest of his troop rode behind him; to his left Keirasti’s people did the same.

  Because of the heavy wagons, they were taking a course that would circle around the forest as much as possible, keeping them on the open plain. But for that same reason, their path lay where the snow was heaviest.

  Like the others, Kellen wore a thin veil of gauze over the eye-slits of his visor to provide protection against snow-glare. It was not especially needed today, when the sky was overcast, but he already knew from experience that bright sun on a brilliant snowfield could give you a memorable headache.

  This particular snowfield looked as if it might be especially brilliant if the sun ever came out from behind the clouds. It stretched as far as Kellen could see, snow that was as flat as still water, though here and there it had been shaped and sculpted by the wind into odd dunes and ridges, a surface of powdered ice that chilled the cold wind even further as it blew across it, freezing exposed skin instantly and slowly numbing even the best protected flesh as the hours passed. Occasional animal tracks were preserved in the surface, though the wind had scrubbed at them until they were hard to read: Kellen recognized hare, bird—hawk? owl?—and something that was neither one, weathered away to an anonymous line of dots in the snow. Probably a fox after that hare.

  The snow was also exceptionally deep: certainly up to the shoulder of an Elven destrier, and out here, sun and wind had turned its top layer to a crust of ice thick enough to cut flesh. If the cavalry had to make its own way through the snow, they’d be lucky to manage five miles a day, and the army wouldn’t reach Sentarshadeen until Midsummer, if that.

  But if the Elves preferred not to fight in winter, that certainly didn’t mean they didn’t know how. At the head of the column ran a large sledge drawn by twelve patient oxen. The oxen were hitched in single file, so that except for the first beast, its chest well protected by a shield of studded leather, none of the animals actually had to break through the icy crust of the snow, and only the lead animal had to struggle against an unbroken trail. All their enormous brawn could be concentrated on pulling the prow-shaped sledge behind them, and its only purpose was to turn the snow out of a wide enough path for a sumpter-wagon—or four destriers riding abreast—to pass.

  Kellen had never seen anything like it before. The snow had not been deep enough when the army got to Ysterialpoerin to require it, he supposed, or else there hadn’t been time to build one along the way. But it was very much like an odd Elven sculpture; as the oxen dragged it forward, the snow slid over its curves and angles, pressed into two high mounds several feet apart with a flat firm packed-down area between. If he had not seen it himself, Kellen would have been willing to swear that the trail it left could only be accomplished by magic—and a very powerful spell besides—but it was nothing more than Elven ingenuity. Though every few hours they had to back the team up and change out to fresh animals—and though the whole army could only move at the oxen’s walking pace—they were still making far better speed than they would have been did they have to break their own trail through this snow, and without overtiring the horses, or taking any injuries.

  And we have absolutely no room to maneuver. If something hits the column, and we have to leave the path, we might as well be riding through shoulder-deep mud. And no Ancaladar to look down and tell us what’s coming from miles away.

  Was that why the Scouts had never reported back? Because they’d never reached Sentarshadeen in the first place? But they’d been riding unicorns. The snow would have presented no difficulty for them.

  Coldwargs would. Or Deathwings. And if either of those come after us…

  It was something he’d rather not think about, but now he had no choice. He was the leader of his own small army. He had to think about everything.

  A bright dazzle on the snow ahead—as if the sun had broken through, even though Kellen knew it hadn’t—caught his attention. Kellen relaxed fractionally. Shalkan. If there were anything really bad out there, Shalkan wouldn’t be cavorting around. He’d be crying havoc at the top of his lungs, and Kellen knew from experience just how loud a unicorn could yell.

  So they’d have that warning, at least. And the horns could pass messages up and down the line faster than speech—complicated ones, too.

  What then?

  Kellen spent the rest of the day making plans for every imaginable possibility.

  BEFORE the first sennight was over, he learned the trick of sending the ox-sledge off in the morning with an armed escort before breaking camp. The army easily caught up to it within an hour, but it gained them valuable time. In the evening, he did the reverse: stopped to make camp, sending the sledge on to break as much more trail as it could while there was still light, while the camp was being set up at the same time.

  “You’re learning,” Wirance said approvingly, as they shared tea in Kellen’s tent one night.

  “I’d better be,” Kellen answered grimly.

  While there was very little the Mountainborn Wildmage could teach Kellen about the Wild Magic—their styles were much too different—and nothing at all that Wirance could teach Kellen about war—since the Wild Magic was doing that in its own way—no one born and bred in the High Reaches was a stranger to cold and snow, and there Kellen eagerly absorbed everything Wirance was willing to teach.

  In the cold, every motion, every act, must do the work of two. Food was sleep, and sleep was food—and your body would lie to you in strange ways, telling you that you needed neither one, telling you that you weren’t thirsty when you were, keeping you from being hungry until you starved to death.

  Kellen had thought he had gotten used to the cold and winter back in Yste-rialpoerin camp. On the march he realized how pampered he’d been, with relatively little exertion, abundant fuel and food, and a comparatively sheltered campsite. Out here there were none of those things. Thanks to the Wildmages, they had water in abundance, from melted snow—but if they didn’t reach Ondoladeshiron within a sennight or so of their timetable, there would be no fodder for the animals—which would hardly matter, as Kellen and the others would have been reduced to eating them to stay alive.

  One more thing to worry about.

  The other thing to be concerned about was the weather, and there Wirance was more than valuable. He could not only tell Kellen how the weather was going to run—just as any Wildmage could—but tell Kellen about weather: what was normal, what was unnatural, how long winter would run … while the Elves were willing to talk endlessly about the weather, the great disadvantage there was that they couldn’t easily be questioned about it, and Kellen needed to repair the ignorance of growing up in a city where the weather was controlled by magick.

  Mud and springtime, now. If they all survived that long and the Demons ever actually fought a pitched battle against them, that would all be pretty interesting. He remembered when the Rains had started after he’d destroyed the Black Cairn, and everything had turned to mud. Apparently, it did that every year, though most years on a slightly smaller scale. Still, mud was mud, slippery and inconvenient. And this spring the mud wouldn’t be on a small scale at all, since all this snowmelt was going to have to go somewhere, just as Belepheriel had said once.

  He frowned. Wirance said you couldn’t move sledges through mud, and he knew from his own experience that you couldn’t move wagons through it. What that meant was that by spring the army had better be where it needed to be, because it wasn’t going to be able to move its supplies.

  And who’s going to be handling Spring Planting while every able-bodied fighter from Ysterialpoerin to Armethalieh is fighting Demons? Cilarnen said the Delfier Valley lost most of the fall harvest because of the rains; Belepheriel was saying that they won’t be able to plant some of the usual crops this spring in the Elven Lands because of the weather. If all of the farmers are with the army, nobody’s going to be planting any
thing at all, though. When the stores run out, we’ll all starve unless everyone can put a new crop in the ground this spring.

  A chill that owed nothing to the snow passed over Kellen. He knew their resources were slender, but he’d been thinking in terms of troops and magic. For the first time he realized the stark truth: If they were going to win at all, they had to win fast.

  Very fast.

  AGAINST all odds, Kellen’s force continued to be free of Shadow-borne attack. Kellen wondered if it was because the creatures he associated with Shadow Mountain were massing on the northern border to support the Demons’ Allies, or if, as Redhelwar had feared, they’d left the Elven Lands entirely for easier prey elsewhere.

  But if the Coldwarg and their cousins were absent, that did not mean the convoy was safe from attack.

  Wolves, panthers, and lowland tiger prowled the upland plains and the foothills, just as ice-tiger patrolled the higher peaks. Normally the predators shied away from Men and Elves, coexisting peacefully on the abundance of wild game available.

  But not this year.

  First the Great Drought had come. It had hit the smallest animals first and hardest, killing many and driving others from their usual homes. The larger animals had followed—the predators in search of prey, the grazers in search of grass that was not burnt and withered, and all of them in search of water. The rains had come at last, but not soon enough to save many of them.

  By the time the herds and flocks had begun to return to their accustomed ranges, followed by their hunters, winter had begun, bringing with it war, and the predators of Shadow. They had destroyed everything that might be of use to their enemy—slaughtered the deer-herds and the wild cattle and left their carcasses to spoil in the cold; dug up warrens of rabbits; killed the wild boar and even dug the squirrels out of their winter nests.

  Little escaped them.

  But they had spared those creatures who preyed on the deer and the wild ox and all the others, and moonturn by moonturn wolf, panther, and tiger grew more ravenous, and more desperate for prey.

  THE wolfpack began trailing the army at the end of the first sennight, drawn to them by the scent of food. Reyezeyt reported that the pack was unusually large; he told Kellen his guesses as to the reason, and Kellen saw no reason to doubt him. Reyezeyt had been from Lerkelpoldara; before he had come to the House of Sword and Shield to train as an Elven Knight, he had never slept a single night beneath a roof of stone or wood. He understood the tides of the natural world in a way that no one else—not even other Elves—could.

  And he—and everyone else who came from the northernmost Elven City—now had a greater reason to hate Shadow Mountain than ever before.

  There was little for Kellen to do against the wolves. Some of the Wildmages traveling with the army were skilled in animal communication, but what point was there in telling a starving animal to forsake the only source of food it could see? All he could do was increase the sentries and make sure the horselines and the ox-herds were especially well-guarded.

  The wolfpack shadowed the army for another sennight before it finally attacked.

  The attack came just at dawn—always a vulnerable time for the camp—when the oxen were being hitched to the snow-sledge and the escort was saddling up their destriers.

  The day was overcast, with a low heavy sky that hid the mountain peaks in the distance, and a fine powdery snow fell nearly straight down, for the wind had dropped just before dawn.

  “Kellen!”

  Shalkan’s distant shout was the first warning he had. Kellen was in his tent, awake but only half-armored, when he heard Shalkan’s call. It was almost immediately followed by a volley of horn-song: They were under attack.

  He grabbed his helmet and his sword and flung himself out of his tent.

  In the wild, Reyezeyt had told him, wolves would run their prey down, taking the weakest member of the herd while the stronger ones escaped. Here they were desperate enough to dash into what they saw as a standing herd and attempt to drag their prey out—or eat it where it stood, dead or alive.

  They’d gotten past the sentries with few losses to their numbers, and the animals, scenting the wolves only when they were almost upon them, were reacting violently. The normally-stolid oxen were bawling in alarm, jostling one another in their fear: If they took it into their heads to stampede, they’d do far more harm to the camp than the wolfpack ever could.

  The destriers, on the other hand, were obviously looking forward to a good fight. Ears back and teeth bared, they rolled their eyes and stamped their feet, looking around eagerly for the enemy. The ostlers had already seen what the true danger here was, and were moving the horse-herd as far from the oxen as possible. At the same time, Elves were moving over the snow, attacking the swarming pack with sword and bow.

  Kellen ran toward Shalkan.

  The unicorn was standing on top of the snow, watching things from a safe—for him—distance. Kellen floundered through the snow toward him and dragged himself up over Shalkan’s back.

  “Of all the things that are happening in this war, I think this is the saddest,” the unicorn remarked in conversational tones. “They’re just animals. They haven’t got any choice.”

  “Neither do we,” Kellen said grimly. “We have to get to Halacira in one piece. Let’s go.”

  With a bound, Shalkan sprang off across the surface of the snow, moving faster than the fastest wolf. He circled around the convoy and came upon the wolves from the back.

  Kellen showed no mercy. With the deer gone, the wolves would begin to prey on the domestic herds next—if they hadn’t already. And the Elves were already facing famine.

  Light At The Heart Of The Mountain—the thousand-year sword Bele-pheriel had given him—did her work incomparably. Each stroke severed spines, limbs, heads. The wolves were considerably easier than Coldwarg to kill.

  But he did not accomplish his objective. He did not drive off the pack.

  In the end, it was the oxen themselves that did that. With the wolves diving among them snapping at their legs and flanks, no power on earth could keep them from stampeding, but Kellen and the Knights were able to buy the ostlers and the Wildmages enough time to bunch and turn the ox-herd so that when it did bolt, it went exactly where they wanted it to go.

  Right into the wolves that were harassing them.

  Most of the wolves were able to get out of the way. A few of them were trapped in the middle of the herd and were trampled underfoot. And Kellen was quite impressed at how fast a herd of thoroughly maddened oxen could manage to gallop across a fresh snowfield.

  The surviving wolves fled, pursued by archers, who managed to take down a few more before they were out of range.

  Then all that was left was cleaning up and resuming the interrupted morning routine.

  “You know they’ll be back, don’t you?” Shalkan asked, as Kellen slipped from his back and prepared to walk down into the camp.

  “Not the ones we killed,” Kellen pointed out reasonably. Though there would be others, he was certain, unless the Wildmages could come up with some way of arranging things so that the wolves looked elsewhere for prey. “I’ll see you later.” He began wading back through the snow toward the camp.

  WINTER was as much an enemy as a wolfpack, however, and one that never went away. It was a relief to reach a wind-scrubbed streambed and to be able to trot the horses along it for a few miles, but such reliefs were few. Possibly on the other side of the mountains the snow would not be as deep. Kellen hoped not; as it was, he could not imagine how anyone following them along the trail they blazed would ever be able to find the trail-wands they were leaving behind to mark their passage, even with the carefully built-up snow-cairns to help.

  Kellen had once speculated that winning a battle with a sword in one’s hand was very little like commanding an army, and on this journey he proved himself right a dozen times over. He gave thanks to the Gods of the Wild Magic each time that he didn’t have to figure out how to fight a b
attle in addition to simply learning how to move an army. It seemed to him that he spent his days riding from one end of the caravan to the other sorting matters out: scouting, patrols, halts for repairs, changes to the marching order, and endless administrative details. Without Isinwen and Wirance to remember everything he forgot, or that he simply didn’t have time to hear—as not even a Knight-Mage could manage to be in two places at once—things would not have run nearly as smoothly as they did. It was a full sennight before Kellen felt he was truly beginning to properly understand the fighting force Redhelwar had placed at his disposal.

  It’s not enough to know them as people and to have fought beside them. Redhelwar’s done that, and so have I. I have to know what they can do, and what they’re best at.

  And how to use them …

  Despite the fact that every moment not actually spent asleep seemed to be spent solving problems, Kellen also somehow seemed to have a lot of free time to think. When he’d entered the Elven Lands for the first time it had been late summer, and even though the land had been drought-parched and suffering then, Kellen had been struck by its extraordinary beauty, and, despite everything, its vitality. Now it was deep winter, and you couldn’t see the land at all—unless you counted the mountain peaks in the distance—but that sense of vitality he’d taken for granted was gone.

  “SOMETIMES I forget that you are a Knight-Mage, and not a proper Wildmage,” Wirance said when Kellen mentioned it to him that night.

  “So this is something you’ve noticed all along?” Kellen said. Nice of everybody to mention this to me.

  Wirance shrugged eloquently.

  “The land … ails,” Isinwen said, sounding uncomfortable.

  Kellen sighed and rubbed his forehead. “It would be good to know if anything Cilarnen wishes to do will make a difference to the land.” And if Kindolhinadetil will give him permission to do it, since the land is “ailing.”

  Isinwen looked at him blankly. “That is in the hands of Leaf and Star,” he said at last.