The A'Rak by Michael Shea

Author:Michael Shea [Shea, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780671319472
Amazon: 0671319477
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2000-10-02T13:00:00+00:00

LAGADEME VII

We gained the Ribbonrill Valley's eastern ridgeline as the swollen moon reached zenith. We were bone-tired, the way only terror and battle can make you. I chose a high curve of highway that had a bit of shoulder beside it to give shelter from the night wind to the 'shaw and my men sleeping round it. I put Mav and Nifft on first watch with me, all three of us faced outward from the sleepers and each other, I up on the shoulder, Mav and Nifft faced up and down the highway.

I leaned on the butt of my spear, feeling light and pithless as a dead vine. For our whole climb up the valley's flank—all at a dead run, in truth—my rage at this thief we had hired burned in me, fuelled me in fact with the strength to run. But so tired was I now that my anger had little heat in it—it seemed an almost theoretical anger. I felt a certain slack acceptance of the fact that a thief had wormed himself into my mission; how could this surprise me, when the mission itself was a witch's game and I its bonded dupe? Plainly, I was fate's fool. Was I not neck-deep in spider country on some trickster-hag's blind gambit? That I'd hire a thief to run point here, where the gods hunt thieves, merely stood to reason!

After an hour or so of silence I said, "Ephesionite."—I spoke softly, for our ears kept watch as much as our eyes—"Ephesionite, we have met the gods now. Surely, against such creatures as these, all humankind are fundamentally allied. Surely, every moment we stand on this soil, we share a risk that makes us one. Tell us what it was you knew of the a'rak that you sold to the churchman."

Without preamble, then, Nifft recited a poem, an almost impenetrably enigmatic threat directed at the A'Rak, containing one cryptic reference to an exterminating entity named Pam'Pel. "I encountered this lyric," he said when he had done, "on a pennysheet I found in a Kolodrian market. And I encountered elsewhere in the Shallows repeated rumors of some catastrophic civic overthrow in Hagia, specifically of `unguarded vaults.' . . ."

"Unguarded vaults. . . ." murmured Mav. "Yes. . . ."

Down on the floor of the valley we'd just crossed, there were indications that folk were—inexplicably, at first—much on the move this Shortest Night. Around at least three of the villages we could make out, there was a movement of tiny, wavery lights that had to be torches. These lights didn't have a processional, or even organized appearance, but had a fitful, frenetic movement, suggesting folk roused from sleep to a panic. Then, in the largest of these little firefly storms, the torches, with a jerky rhythm, all began to go out.

"List! Oh, hark to the poor souls!" hissed Mav, and I heard rather than saw her tears. And sure enough, up from the Valley's great bowl of moonlight, rose the frail, scattered echoes of agonal cries.

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