The Warslayer(58)

She led Ivradan down the trail and off into the wood. Her drag-marks from the previous day were still there—hard to cover your trail in a pine forest—but when she got to the spot where she'd left the body, she found that what she'd been afraid of had happened.

The monster was gone.

Kurfan's head was still there, wrapped in the leather vest, wedged between the roots of a tree, as though it had been carelessly rolled away when whatever had come for the monster's body had shifted it.

And there were no drag marks. No drag marks at all.

"This," said Glory, "is not good." She looked at Ivradan. "Something came and took the body." I hope. I hope it didn't just get up and walk away. She looked around. "I don't see any tracks. Do you?"

Ivradan considered the question carefully, looking around the clearing. "None. Not even deer have been here."

For one fey wild moment Glory thought about going back to the monster's campsite and seeing if it or something like it was there, and firmly quashed the notion. She'd gotten far too much luck yesterday to squander it today on an idiot gesture designed to impress someone who was already terrified of her anyway.

"Let's go back and spread the good news. Belegir isn't going to like this. And . . . when do you want to leave, and how long will it take us to get there?" And do you reckon there's any possibility—any at all—that we'll arrive alive, with things like that bear-wolf out there in the dark looking for us?

"We could leave tomorrow at first light, if that suits you, Slayer. From the Oracle to Great Drathil is not far—half a day, if that, and a good road to follow. From there . . ." his voice dropped, "I do not know the length of the path that leads to the Forbidden Peak."

"Well, maybe Bel will know. He knows a lot of things," Glory said philosophically.





CHAPTER FIVE:

Smoke and Mirrors

According to Belegir and Ivradan, Great Drathil had once been a sizeable stone-and-timber city in the foothills of the High Hilvorns, surrounded by sprawling fields and orchards.

That was then.

Great Drathil was now a sizable charcoal-and-large-rocks wasteland surrounded by scorched earth and tree stumps, with only a few bits of wall to get in the way.

She and Ivradan sat a-pony on a rise at the edge of the forest, overlooking what used to be the city. They'd left Cambros, Tavara, and Belegir behind them at the Oracle early this morning, and on Felba and Fimlas (it was Marchiel who'd been the blue-plate special after all, so said Ivradan, not that Glory could tell any of the ponies apart), and leading another pack-pony, she and Ivradan had taken the supply road that had once connected Great Drathil with the Oracle of Erchane.

And now they were here, at what had once been the Allimir's largest city.

Once.

It was an area at least as big as downtown Melbourne, and it wasn't there any more, just charcoal and grey mud and pieces of buildings, but not quite enough of them to let her guess what the living city had looked like. There wasn't even green on the mountainside beyond the city—just bare rock and more bare rock and a few hundred million kilos of lab-sterile potting soil, all in shades of grey. The surrounding hills were nothing but bare mud, deep-cut with the erosion-furrows of five years of rain.

What the hell had happened? The city looked as if it had been firebombed. Supposedly it had been the first place in the Land of Erchanen to feel the Warmother's wrath, and that was five years ago. Surely there ought to be weeds and vines by now. Something to soften the look of utter destruction.

There was nothing. It looked like somebody had drowned the place in weed-killer and kerosene and then set it alight. Grey, and grey, and more grey, as bleak and sterile as something Glory couldn't think up a good comparison for. Not the mountains of the Moon, not even the death-camps of the last big war: the Moon was empty and neutral as a glass dish, and the death-camps had been the ultimate expression of human monstrousness. This was different than either one, disturbing where it ought to be terrifying, as though it were something so far beyond merely human comprehension that the human mind couldn't get a good hold on it.

But she'd better. Because this was where the danger was, and if she couldn't recognize the danger when it came, she was going to be buying a quick ticket to the boneyard, with the Allimir to follow her in pretty quick order.

And you might even be able to take a step back out of your own skin and look at that from a philosophical point of view, were you so inclined (it was amazing, as a noted Outback philosopher had once said, how much mature wisdom resembled being too tired), except that Glory had the sneaking suspicion that the nastiness wouldn't stop here. She already had ample evidence that the Warmother's magic didn't confine her to this world alone. Why should She stop here, once she'd turned the whole place into a bigger version of Great Drathil?