Appeals to her fighting pride had failed, so he was threatening her? Join me, or never come back to Qualinesti? How dared he... Her hand closed around the hilt of her sword.
“Get away from me, Porthios. Get away before I finish what the dragon’s breath started!”
He came closer still. All that kept her from making good on her threat was his unarmed state. He was as bad as Gilthas, what was wrong with them? Did they think the world was so in awe of their royal blood that they didn’t need to bear arms? Damn all high-born idealists anyway!
Voices put an end to their confrontation. One was shouting for the Lioness. She shouted back. A pair of guards spear-armed civilian volunteers, hurried up. One sported dented bronze buckler, and the other wore a once-elegant (but now badly corroded) Silvanesti helmet. Both elves were out of breath not from exertion, but from excitement. There was a disturbance in the food cache, they reported. An intruder could be heard moving about inside, but he returned no answer to their challenges. Warriors of the regular army had been sent for and were surrounding the cache.
On went the sword belt again. Kerian was certain the strap had worn a permanent groove in her hip.
A single griffon and rider wheeled above the cache, trying to spot the intruder. The low stone wall protecting the foe supply was surrounded by two dozen warriors. The officer, one of Alhana’s Silvanesti guards, gave Kerian a whispered report. Movement had been heard from within, but no one had yet entered to investigate.
Kerian drew her sword. Any place else, the intruder would probably have been nothing more mysterious than a wild dog. Khur was full of them, permanently lean creatures who usually hunted by night. A pack could surround and kill a good horse or drag away an imprudently sleeping elf. But they’d seen no signs of any such animals in Inath-Wakenti, and with their food supplies so low, they could not afford any loss.
Two guards pulled aside the entry barrier and Kerian ducked in. Crates, barrels, and wicker bundles of provisions were stacked in head-high piles arranged in neat, concentric circles. An all-too-familiar rustle of old cloth told her Porthios had slipped in behind her. She ordered him out.
He pulled a chalk pebble from a pocket and drew a thick white smudge on his masked forehead. “If you see anything without this mark, kill it,” he said and melted away.
For a moment, she could only stare after him. Minutes ago, he’d seen her ready to draw steel on him. Now he was going up against an unknown intruder, unarmed, and with only Kerian to protect him should it come to a fight. Whatever else she thought of him, she must credit him with courage.
A metallic clatter sent her jogging around the outer ring of provisions until she came to an opening. A pale shape flashed across the gap. It was slight but stood erect on two legs—nor a wild dog. Kerian called a challenge and gave chase. it darted away sharply right and disappeared into the next ring of provisions. She sprinted after—
—and crashed into a solid wall of crates.
Where in the name of Chaos had the thing gone? She began to climb. From atop the crates she spotted the gray-clad intruder in the path below her. it stood facing Porthios.
She shouted for Porthios to grab him, but he didn’t move. She jumped down and started to put her sword to the intruder’s back but realized the gray figure was translucent. She swept her blade back and forth, but it was like slashing at smoke. The figure had no substance at all.
She moved around to face it. Its eyes were dark holes and its mouth a narrow line. The shape was vaguely elflike, upright, with two arms and an indistinct head.
“Who are you?” she demanded. The gray figure immediately vanished, as though the sound of her voice had chased it away.
Porthios still had not spoken or moved. He seemed rooted in place, staring at the spot where the ghost had been.
“What’s the matter? Did it hurt you?” she asked sharply.
When he didn’t reply, she grabbed his arm. He flinched hard and jerked free.
“It called me… ‘Father,’ “he whispered.
For an instant she was taken aback, but common sense quickly reasserted itself.
“These ghosts have been here for thousands of years, Porthios. It might as easily have called me ‘Father.’ There’s no logical reason to think it was your son.”
“Yet I felt as though I knew him.”
His expression was hidden by the mask, but the gloved hands knotted together at his waist were an eloquent sign of his agitation. Silvanoshei, son of Porthios and Alhana, had died at the end of the War of Souls, killed by his lover, Mina. That she had been an agent of the evil goddess Takhisis was well known; less clear, at least to Kerian, was just how deep Silvanoshei’s betrayal of his people had gone. Whatever his sins, Silvanoshei had paid for them with his life. Kerian could only imagine the pain Alhana and Porthios had faced, losing their only child.
Porthios had stepped into the space where the apparition had stood. By his very silence and immobility, he seemed oddly vulnerable.
“Nothing more than a trick of the night, I’m certain,” Kerian said.
He gave no reply, so she turned to go.
“Say nothing of this to Alhana,” he said. “Her wounds are too deep.”
For once she was happy to do just as he said. Soldiers called for her from elsewhere in the enclosure, and she left Porthios to go to them.
The warriors showed her discarded cheesecloth bags. The bags once had held haunches of meat. Kerian ordered the soldiers to scour the cache. “Look for footprints, handprints on the containers, anything unusual,” she advised. She did not mention the apparition that she and Porthios had seen. Specters did not steal meat.
While the soldiers searched, she examined the bags more carefully. They weren’t torn and the neck of each bag was still tied, the wax seal on the knot unbroken.
The soldiers found no traces of any intruder. Carefully folding the empty cheesecloth bags, Kerian tucked them into her sword belt. Her sun-browned face wore a grim expression.
There seemed no doubt their losses of food were due to the valley’s weird influence. Mere theft or hoarding couldn’t explain the sealed, empty bags. She must tell Gilthas. His plan to cross Lioness Creek and take possession of the valley would have to wait.
The eastern half of the valley stayed light a little longer than the west because of the shadows cast by the western mountains. As the sun slipped below the peaks, two elves walked through waist-high marlberry and olive bushes toward the eastern side. The elder was a Qualinesti, his body haggard and thin from long privation. Favaronas, formerly the archivist of the Speaker’s library in Qualinost, was unaccustomed to such strenuous exercise.
“Less haste, if you please,” he gasped.
His companion, a Kagonesti years younger, halted only briefly. He sported hunter’s togs and hair closely cropped after the fashion of some humans.
Robien the Tireless was a bounty hunter hired by Sahim-Khan to capture Faeterus, a mage formerly employed by Sahim. After years of service to the khan, Faeterus suddenly abandoned Khuri-Khan and had caused Sahim no small amount of trouble before leaving, Sahim-Khan was not a forgiving man. Robien’s charge was to find the rogue sorcerer and return him to Khuri-Khan to face his former master’s wrath. He said, “I want to find open ground before nightfall. I don’t want those lights popping out of the brush so close we can’t avoid them.”
He was right. Favaronas had been in Robien’s company only a short time but had come to realize Robien usually was right. Exhausted, perpetually fearful, Favaronas did not find it an endearing trait.