"Bard's Tale 08 - Curse of the Black Heron - Holly Lisle UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bard's Tale)

We rode out of Blackwarren without a backward glance. We cantered through the hills to the Gateway of the Mountains; we were all the way to thej first difficult traverse of the Gateway Pass before the pink light of dawn began to creep between the black spears of the trees that rose from the edge of the path all around us. ;
We dismounted and surveyed our situation. Thej path had been nearly level, with mountains rising to either side of it. Now, however, it slid up onto the hip of the right mountain and the left side of the path fell away into steadily deepening ravine. Below and ahead of us, we could hear water rushing.
"Time to get rid of the horses," Giraud said, "while they can still turn around."
I sighed. I almost never got to ride anymore, though when I'd been a young girl—before whatever had brought my father to Blackwarren—I'd had my own horse and I had ridden every day. I'd been delighted to discover that I still remembered how. When I swung down out of the saddle, I was less delighted to find that, though memory had served me well, my out-of-condition legs had not.
"Oh, Neithas, I'm sore," I muttered. The insides of my thighs cramped, my calves ached, and though this is surely indelicate, I'll admit that my rump burned like a brush fire.
We stripped the saddles from the horses and threw them down into the ravine, listening to them rattle and thump and jingle until either trees stopped them or distance muted their movement. We rubbed our mounts down, walked them until they were cool, then slapped them on their haunches and sent them back the way they'd come.
Before us lay a sharply rising scree-covered ledge that didn't look as if anyone had been over it in ages.
"I wonder why this is in such disrepair," I said. "The dwarves of Kekger Deshin travel the pass between their mines and Blackwarren several times a month during the summer."
"Slide must have just happened," Giraud said.
I looked at the mess, wishing that we could wait for brighter light before essaying out onto it. "I'm sure you're right." In the half-light of dawn, it seemed to me that prudence would almost demand that we wait just a bit longer. The ledge appeared to rise above the thick forest quickly, and the few trees that grew on the steep, rocky slopes above were stunted by their poor soil and twisted by wind—they would provide us with no cover. Once we had no trees on either side of us, the passage would become much more dangerous. Surely we needed better light before trying something like that.
To stall for time, I said, "I've never been through the dwarves' city. I haven't even spoken to any dwarves since I visited with the traders and officials who used to visit with my parents. Do you think they'll tell anyone we passed through their city?"
Giraud shook his head. "We deal . . . dealt . . . with them often. They don't care much about humans as long as we leave them alone. And as a rule they actively dislike human politics and human disagreements. I know this. My father and brothers and a handful of village volunteers went riding after a thief once—he'd been robbing the merchants blind every night—and the dwarves let the thief pass because he was alone and bothered no one. But when my father's party tried to pass, even when my father explained what they wanted with the man and why, the Kekger Deshinites blocked the roads with stone and refused them passage. The thief escaped."
"Good," I said, then glanced at him. "Not that the thief escaped, you know. Just that the dwarves will
possibly be kinder to us than they will be to those who come after us."
Giraud said, "Let's get moving."
The light was a bit brighter. I nodded and followed him onto the ledge. We worked our way up the path, crouching over and brushing off scree with our hands so that we could keep both feet firmly planted all the time. Neither of us wanted to try kicking the debris away only to lose balance and go bouncing down the rocky wall of the ravine after it.
The path climbed more steeply, and I realized that seven years of sitting on a stool and weaving had done little to prepare me for a frantic climb through mountains with a pack of killers after me. We climbed for the better part of a candlemark, I'd guess, during which time we left the trees behind and at least part of the air.
When we finally reached a level wide place, both Giraud and I stood panting like dogs on a hot summer day.
"I have to ... stop for a while," I told him.
He nodded. "Yes. This is ... hard work."
I'd thought he would be more able to travel than I, but I'd forgotten Giraud's habits. He spent his days in a library with a tutor his father brought in from Baiter. He skipped every sword practice he could get away with and avoided as much hand-fighting as he could, too.
We sat with our backs against the stone wall behind us, and I said, "If someone were to go through the village and pick the two worst people to run away through the mountains, they would pick us."
Giraud closed his eyes. "I know. I've been thinking that. We have no food with us, and no water, and nothing to carry water; we don't have warm clothes or sturdy mountain boots or ropes or picks or any of the tools people use when they go through the mountains; we have no map; we've never been on this
path; we have no idea where we're going or how long it will take us to get there; we have no weapons nor any tools with which to make them."
Until he listed the problems he saw, I was just thinking that we were neither one of us in very good shape to go mountain climbing. I hadn't thought past that to the fact that we had nothing anyone would need to survive in the mountains. "Thank you for making me feel worse," I muttered.
He glanced at me. "You brought it up."
"I hadn't considered all the details."
"Oh."
We sat in silence a while longer. Finally he asked me how I'd come to find out about his father's murder. I told him. He listened attentively, his face growing darker with every word.
"They were going to sell you?" he interrupted at one point, and, "Your father is dead?" at another. But other than that, he said nothing until I finished. In fact, he said nothing for a while thereafter.
Finally he turned and put an arm around my shoulder and kissed me once on the cheek, firmly. "You are my family, Isbetta dar Danria," he said, "and I am yours. You risked your life to save mine and the lives of my family's loyal servants, and I will die first before anyone touches you against your will." He stared into my eyes and I could see in them grief he could not allow himself to release, and his fury at the betrayal and destruction of his family. "We must swear a pact, you and I," he continued, "that no matter what happens, we will protect each other, and that someday we will destroy those who tried to destroy us." He held out his hand.
I thought of how ludicrous we looked to the gods, sitting on that mountain pass with no guarantee that we would survive the day, swearing the destruction of our enemies—but I took his hand. "By Neithas my patron, who tramples her enemies and feeds their
hearts to her owl, and by my blood and soul, I swear it," I said. My voice trembled.
"By Hadres my patron," Giraud said, "who remembers all things and who finds all things, and by my blood and soul, I swear it."
We sat looking at each other, hands still tightly clasped, until Giraud sighed and loosened his grip. "May we live to make it so."
A terrified whinny and a scream echoed up from the ravine below and behind us, distorted by distance and the rush of water. Both sounds seemed to me to come from a long way off, but as we walked, sometimes our own voices had bounced back to us, making it seem that we were some distance from ourselves. The whinny could have been from a wild horse down in the ravine attacked by some hunting beast, or from one that had fallen and broken a leg, or perhaps from one of the animals we'd set free that had become panicked or injured—any of half a hundred explanations would have explained it. The scream, however, had sounded human, which meant that however far off it was, it wasn't far enough.
"Do you think it's them?" I asked.
Giraud nodded.
"Maybe there was only one person coming after us, and he fell into the ravine," I said. I didn't believe it, but I said it anyway.
"Maybe we're that lucky. But sensible people wouldn't travel into these mountains alone. If that scream was because one of our hunters fell to his death, I'd almost guarantee that there will be others behind who will be more careful."
I looked around. The wide spot where we sat was the only place we'd yet found along the path carved across the face of the mountain that might let two or three pursuers on horseback turn. If there were more, only the last three would be able to turn around. The first travelers would have to continue
on. And if we could force them to travel on to the next wide spot—all of them—while we hid somewhere, we could, perhaps, double back and set a trap for them ... or ...
I didn't know what we could do, but I knew we needed to do something quickly.
Wary of the echoes that might whisper my words to Giraud into the ears of the hunters behind us, I leaned close to him and said, "We need to figure out a way to go on far enough that their tracker will be sure we intend to stay on this path, then either climb up the rock face above us or down over the side below us and find someplace to hide until they pass us."
"So that we can go back the way we came?" he asked, raising his eyebrows. "But that's stupid. We want to get away from Blackwarren."
"I know. But if we just keep running along this path, sooner or later they'll catch us. If it isn't in the next hour or day, it will be when we arrive at the other side. Maybe when we go back we can set a trap for them. Maybe. Or something." I stared into his dark eyes, feeling uncertain and scared, and said, "I don't know what we should do, Giraud, but my gut says we have to do something. Soon. Now."
He nodded and rose. My gut feelings were a bit of a joke between us—along with my father's musical ability, I had inherited his instinct for coming trouble, but where I recalled his instinct being almost magically accurate, my own was erratic. Sometimes embarrassingly erratic. At that moment, it didn't matter to me how wrong I'd occasionally been in the past. I knew we had to get off the path.
"Fine," Giraud said after he'd studied my face for a moment. "Let's move on. We'll be sure to leave a clear trail at least until we're completely out of sight of this shelf. Then we'll go either up or down, depending on what we find."
I stood and readjusted my cloak. I felt the
emptiness of the pack he'd brought for me on my shoulders, and the weight in my pockets that wasn't food and wished I'd taken something to eat from Birdie's larder before I ran, or that I'd had the presence of mind to tell Giraud to get us something .. . but perhaps if I'd taken that time, we wouldn't have hved to escape. And better alive and hungry than dead with a full belly.