Renown of the Raithlin by Robert Ryan

Author:Robert Ryan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-11-20T18:30:00+00:00

Our duty is to serve and protect

Our honor is to fight but not hate

Our love is for all that is good in the world.

13. They Have Many Names

It took the travelers over a day to reach Caladhrist. The road, arrow-straight all the way from Esgallien, twisted like a writhing snake on descending the gorge.

The landscape was barren. Massive boulders and sweeps of shattered rock littered the steep sides. Loose stones clattered beneath the hooves of the horses, and a cacophony of noise came from the miners: shouted instructions, yells of encouragement, curses and raucous singing.

They followed the road to the bottom. The air, heavy with smoke and dust, made them cough, and the ridges that hemmed them in cast groping shadows.

Erlissa shuddered. “It feels like the bottom of a grave.”

Aranloth lifted his gaze from the barren ground and looked about.

“Many men have died here. Caladhrist has been mined since Conhain’s time, and over the years, there have been accidents. But it was mined even before that. The Halathrin were here long ago, though even they weren’t the first. They found the workings of other people before them, their tools and excavations, and their bones too. Not men killed by mishap they say, but sacrificed. They believe the gorge is haunted by the spirits of the restless dead.”

“The Halathrin discovered bodies in the swamps of Galenthern too,” added Lanrik. “It’s said that they found the traces of a strange and cruel civilization all over eastern Alithoras.”

“Strange and cruel are matters of perspective,” Aranloth said, guiding his horse around a pile of rubble. “Who knows what those people would think of us and our ways? Of their existence though, there’s no doubt. Nor of the men who died here. The miners claim that on some nights they can hear dead men’s voices in the hiss of the wind over the ridges. Superstition, of course, and yet it’s not a favorable place for lòhrengai.”

They continued along the bottom of the gorge in silence. Much of their travel since the fight with the Royal Guard had been quiet. Erlissa was withdrawn, and Lanrik thought she was avoiding him. That she was upset over the killing of the captain he knew, but he did not know how to heal the breach between them. Necessity had forced his actions, but he would not be able to convince her of that. Perhaps it was better not to try.

They slowed to skirt a massive pile of rubble, and Aranloth chafed at the delay.

“We have to hurry,” he said. “It’s a hundred miles to the nearest oak grove in Enorìen, and the mistletoe berries must be picked when the moon is midway between full and dead. That’s only three nights away.”

Lanrik thought something else was making the lòhren uneasy, for the time constraint had been there since the beginning. He wondered what it was while the road meandered past old workings, piles of broken stone and washes of gravel and sediment. There were miners and soldiers all about, but most were on the valley sides and few at the bottom.

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