Fire and Frost (Seven Realms Book 1) Read online

  CHAPTER 16

  The sun rose in purple and orange fire. High clouds had moved in overnight and gave the sky the appearance of the feathers of some mythic bird. Behind the purple and orange came the harsh white and yellow light of the rising sun. Alaric and Kahji had already broken camp, and waited only for enough light to see clearly.

  Alaric started walking the horse. They did not have far to go, and a man leading a horse was less of a threat than a man on horseback. He still had no desire to get shot. Alaric set an easy pace, little more than a stroll for Kahji. Alaric was glad of the time for the slow walk; the pace of the last days had been harrowing. Now they were less than a mile from their destination.

  After only a few minutes, Alaric began to sense something was wrong. The land here was not exactly flat; no desert is. Despite the rolling nature of the ground, however, one of the sentries should have noticed them, but Alaric could see no activity at the site. The workers might not be moving yet, given the earliness of the hour, but it would be a logical time for sentries to change the watch. Alaric saw no evidence of the heightened vigilance which would occur with twice the eyes watching the horizon. Certainly he heard no shouts to indicate that he had been seen, and he was walking more or less out in the open.

  “Something is wrong, Kahji. They should have seen us by now. If I were in charge of security for a site like this, out this far from support, I would have already sent someone to challenge us, just in case we were unfriendly. All I see are the sentries standing around, much as they were last night.”

  “You’re right,” Kahji replied, “something smells wrong. I suggest you get on your horse now.”

  Alaric decided the War Leader was right. At this point, he should have been seen. Getting on his horse might make him seem more likely to be hostile, but not so much so that he would expect to receive a particularly unfriendly reception. On the other hand, holding the reigns of the horse when a fight started could be highly inconvenient for a fair number of reasons. They paused long enough for Alaric to mount the steed, and make sure his sword was relatively loose in its scabbard.

  The tension grew as they drew nearer. The rocky desert terrain was not exactly a garden, but Alaric knew there was life here. Yet there was no sound beyond that they were making. It was as though a thick blanket had been laid over the entire area. The horse even began to get spooked.

  While attempting to calm the mount, Alaric realized what that extreme silence meant, “Kahji, there’s no sound coming from that camp. Not even the sound of movement. It’s as though there’s nothing alive there.”

  The great Igni obviously felt the same. His more animalistic nature even made him more attuned to the tension in the air than Alaric. He replied only with a soft grunt of acknowledgement. His nostrils flared as he constantly turned his head to survey their surroundings.

  By unspoken accord, they increased their pace. Alaric allowed the horse to canter both to allow it to work out some of its own nervousness, and to get the waiting over with. Kahji easily kept pace. The last half mile passed in only a couple of minutes.

  None of their fears lived up to the scene before them. All those minutes of tension had not prepared them for what they saw. As they crossed the final rise, Alaric and Kahji could only stare, open mouthed, at what had been an orderly camp only the night before.

  Later, Alaric would only remember flashes and scattered images. Tents lay, burnt, ripped, and torn, on the ground. Broken bodies were scattered around the camp, looking as though they’d been savaged by animals. What they had taken for sentries were bodies standing impaled on spears. The canvas which had been so laboriously and carefully placed on the ground had been shredded. The smell of death lay heavily on the camp site. As his mind tried to process what he saw, he knew he was seeing something that his mind was not registering.

  “Where are the laborers?” Kahji, a veteran of many a scene of horror, had seen it for what it was. The only bodies were those of soldiers.

  “What can have happened? Have you ever seen anything like this? Even surprised, the soldiers should have been able to stop laborers carrying nothing more than shovels and picks.”

  “Seen? No. But there are stories. I do not remember them so well, but I know there are stories of madness and chaos. Stories of Igni going berserk for no reason and killing their fellows. I had put it down to what you might call battle sickness before this. Now I am not so sure.”

  The two moved cautiously into the camp. Alaric dismounted and tied the horse out of the way, but carried his sword openly. Kahji gripped his club tightly. There was still an air of menace about the ruined camp, and neither wanted to be taken by surprise.

  As methodically as possible, they inspected the camp for lurking danger. As they did so, Alaric made sure they took the extra time to gather the bodies. There was no way the two of them could bury them all, but Alaric meant to see to it that they were at least commended to Heaven.

  All that day they worked clearing the camp. Then, once more by unspoken agreement, they moved off about a half mile to make their own camp. The bodies lay, for now, wrapped in the shredded remains of the canvas sheets and tents.

  When the next day dawned, Alaric and Kahji set to work immediately. They knew that the Baron’s men must be closing in on them, and they wanted to waste no time. They moved to the area where they had found the torn canvas sheets, and began digging carefully into the sandy earth. Whatever the group had found in this area, they had decided it was valuable enough to protect it from the elements.

  “What are we looking for?” Kahji asked in frustration. They’d been searching carefully for nearly half the day, and he was beginning to get nervous.

  “I’ll tell you when we find it.”

  “Well, we’d better find it soon. It won’t be long before your father’s men come over that hill.”

  The two continued their methodical digging. The sun tracked across the sky marking the hours they’d worked. Sweat stung Alaric’s eyes, and even Kahji was beginning to show some signs of fatigue. There had been little time for rest in the last several weeks.

  Finally, as the sun began its descent below the horizon, Alaric found something.

  “It’s only a fragment, but it seems to be some kind of plate or placard. It’s too dark now to see what it says, and I probably couldn’t decipher it anyway. Something tells me this is it, though. This is what we’re looking for.”

  “It is too late to continue tonight, but I fear we will be discovered before we get far in the morning if we go back to last night’s campsite. Can you find us another?”

  “No, as distasteful as it is, I think we’ll have to camp here.”

  They made the fire bigger than they otherwise would have that night. Neither was a coward, and both had seen plenty of death, but the dark cloud hanging over the excavation site was something with which neither was comfortable. Not usually one to be skittish, Alaric found himself jumping at unexplained noises or shadows. Neither slept well that night, and both were up before dawn had done more than shade the sky with a dull grey.

  The rising sun found Alaric looking over the plate he had found. On further review it was a large tablet, perhaps four feet by four. He knew there was no way they could lift the tablet and carry it with them, so he tried to seal its image into his memory.

  Central to the tablet was a six-pointed star. At the end of each point was a symbol Alaric did not recognize. At the center of the star, where the arms came together, was another symbol. This one, Alaric recognized from drawings he had seen, but he did not know its significance or meaning. The top point and symbol had been gouged at some point, though the original symbol was still just discernible. Around the strange image was writing in the style of the ancients. Marks which resembled thin claw-marks were arranged in groups of up to four. He recognized some of them; he had learned a smattering of what human scholars knew. There were the symbols for the four elements, life, and death. The rest he could not make out at all.

  After
studying it for perhaps thirty minutes, Alaric felt he knew it well enough to recreate at least an approximation of the image, and perhaps a third of the writing. He knew he simply did not have any more time. Hoping to be able to return with scholars who studied the ancients, he found a small scrap of canvas, and secured it over the tablet. Then he covered the canvas with small rocks and sand.

  “We had best leave,” Kahji remarked, looking at the climbing sun, “I hope you know a roundabout way back to your father’s castle.”

  “I do, but it would take an extra day to get back. We took a fairly roundabout route here; if they’ve found us it should be because they finally found our trail and followed us. That means a straight shot back will not only get us there sooner, it will actually make it less likely we would run into my father’s men. I want to get this image reproduced and into the hands of Father Bayard as soon as possible.”

  “Then I suggest we go.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Despite Alaric’s suggestion that they ride straight back to Castle Dell, they made a brief loop perpendicular to their destination. After going about a league, they then turned on a straight line to the castle. Alaric hoped this would further mitigate any chances of being discovered on the way back. He knew his father would want to know of the slaughtered soldiers, and he hoped that the cryptic image, now rigorously held in his mind’s eye, would provide the answer, or at least another part of the question, to what the Frost Fiends were after.

  Alaric pushed the pace even slightly harder than he had on the way out. By this time, the Frost Fiends might well be recovered, and he wanted to be back at the castle in time to aid in any defense. He also wanted to get the image drawn for Father Bayard as soon as possible. The more quickly he was able to do so, the less likely he was to forget the details he remembered.

  He still believed the one who would be able to provide the best answer was Monsignor Manitoc, but he had to concede that his father was right on this point: without knowing at least an approximate area, it would be futile to continue the search for the learned scholar. It bothered him that no one knew where the Monsignor had gone. As they travelled, he tried to unravel why it unnerved him so. The Monsignor was not a child to require constant supervision. He was a renowned member of the King’s court; certainly he could take care of himself. It wasn’t like he was some knight errant seeking out adventure.

  Adventure. That was it. The Monsignor was not an adventurer. By all reports, he was loath to leave the capitol. It had taken a find of some magnitude to get him to leave the Citadel in the first place. A follow-up tour of the duchies to brief their leading scholars on the find was not completely out of character, but gallivanting off into the Border without letting someone know certainly was. It simply did not make sense for the Monsignor to be leading any expedition without it being well advertised, at least to the duke and his father. That neither of them knew where he had gone was troublesome. Alaric wished he knew what it meant. For now he would just have to be content with having at least figured out one of the right questions to ask. Even those were too few as far as he was concerned.

  God obviously smiled on Alaric. They did not encounter his father’s troops, and their travel was swifter than he had anticipated. There were still a few hours of daylight left when they began to approach the castle. Alaric knew there would be hell to pay with his father, and he decided it would be better to get it over with. If he delayed his approach, he would not save himself any of his father’s ire, and it would just be that much longer before he could recreate the mysterious symbol for Father Bayard.

  So it was that Alaric squared his shoulders, sat up in the saddle, and rode forward to meet whatever punishment his father decreed. Disobeying may have been the right thing to do, but that did not mean he did not deserve whatever consequences would come his way. With much more aplomb than he felt, he trotted up to the castle gate.

  “Halt!” the gate sentry commanded, “Who goes… My Lord Alaric? Open the gate!”

  The gate was quickly opened and soldiers rushed out. Alaric noticed with some surprise that none of them were carrying manacles and the soldiers seemed to be more of an honor guard than an arrest party. Looking inside, he saw his father and brother waiting for him, seated on liveried horses and in their formal garments of office. The great departure from what he had expected had him completely off balance.

  As he drew nearer to them, he saw the hard look on his father’s face, and the gleeful look on his brother’s. He knew that this pomp was supposed to put him off balance. He did not know why, but for some reason his father was playing a mind game.

  “My son!” Boores called in a voice filled with forced joy, “The conquering hero returns!”

  Sarcasm was definitely not his father’s normal style. Alaric flicked a glance at his brother. His father might not normally be sarcastic, but his brother was. Something was definitely wrong here, but Alaric decided he had little choice but to play along.

  “Father, brother,” he began by way of greeting, “I don’t know about conquering hero, but your reception gladdens my leaden heart. It filled me with pain to know how worried you must have been over my fate. You concern, however misplaced, was a balm to me. I am afraid, however, that I can only report limited success. It seems some agency yet to be discovered unearthed an artifact at a site thought to have been thoroughly searched already. I do not know the meaning of the artifact, but I am certain it brings us a step closer to securing the barony once more.”

  Alaric concealed his satisfaction at his brother’s reaction. Martin’s smug visage had weakened, slightly. It now looked somewhat strained. To be sure, he had not completely stopped whatever game Martin was playing, but he had at least given himself some room to maneuver.

  His father, too, looked less sure of himself. Something about his eyes told Alaric that the baron was not completely sold on whatever his brother had peddled. It was that sliver of doubt that gave Alaric hope that he might completely defuse the situation.

  Boores, having set the rules for the encounter by his initial greeting, continued in the same vein, “Surely your news brings hope, my son. Let us repair to my own chambers to discuss it further.”

  “Surely, my lord. If I may, I suggest we bring in your advisor, Father Bayard, to treat with us as well. It would be well if we had his wisdom to help us as we pry further into this mystery.”

  It was a request his father could not afford to deny. Everyone knew that Father Bayard was one of the baron’s chief advisors. They also knew that he was quite fond of Alaric. He was nominally a neutral presence. In reality, he would be someone who could help deflect Martin’s verbal attacks, whatever they may be.

  Seeing what was supposed to be the political equivalent of an ambush quickly unraveling, Martin was beginning to look more than merely strained. His eyes, so mocking just moments ago, were filling with a combination of fear and hate.

  That simply did not make sense to Alaric. His eldest brother was certainly not his biggest supporter, but they had never been at such odds that they would have considered each other enemies. Alaric could have understood chagrin or some embarrassment, but fear and hate were positively inexplicable. This was no ordinary ploy to gain their father’s favor. Alaric’s gut began to turn with real worry. If he did not figure out what was happening soon, he feared he would be sorry indeed.

  In the instants Alaric had used to assess the changed situation, Baron Dell had nodded at one of the ever-present valets, and begun to dismount. Alaric and Martin followed suit, and the three made their way in to the keep. At a glance from Alaric, Kahji remained behind. His near invisibility to Martin and Boores’ obvious distraction made it possible, and Alaric and Kahji both felt it best if one of them were not in easy reach of the baron.

  The baron’s demeanor changed as soon as the three were away from the eyes of the soldiers and most of the courtiers. So did Martin’s. Where they had forced themselves to be welcoming and even jovial outside, now Alaric could almost feel the wa
ves of hostility radiating from them. His father’s face turned hard enough to crush rocks, and Martin’s fairly spoke with murderous intent. Alaric had never seen either of them like this.

  Luckily, neither of them said anything as they made their way up the stairs to his father’s private chambers. Just as with the duke, part of the baron’s rooms had been given over to a private meeting area. The furnishings here were not as fine as those had been, but the chairs were padded comfortably, and the table was sturdy.

  Alaric knew that Father Bayard would still be a couple of minutes behind them, and he wanted the goodly priest present before his family’s hostility could be given words. So, as soon as he entered the small area, he strode purposefully to the table.

  As he grabbed a charcoal pencil, he said aloud, “I was unable to bring the artifact with me; it was too large to carry without a cart. But here is what I saw.” He took his time with the drawing. In some part, it was to make sure he got it right and as detailed as he could. Mostly, however, he was stalling for time. Finally he could stall no longer, and straightened to let the others see what he had drawn. “Here, what do you make of it?”

  The Lord smiled on Alaric once again as Father Bayard strode into the room while Boores and Martin took their first look at the symbol. Tension he had not realized he had been carrying left his shoulders at the sight of the priest. He, too, crowded around the drawing.

  As soon as he saw it, Father Bayard stepped back and exclaimed, “Lord God protect us. Where did you find that?”

  Alaric frowned. “What’s wrong, Father? It was at an old dig site. My friends and I had visited the area once years ago. When we were there, it didn’t look like there was much left. A group before us uncovered this symbol the day before I got there.”

  “Who was this group?” The priest voiced the question, but it was clear all three men had thought it.

  “I do not know. That is the other part of my report. I arrived at the site shortly before sundown two days ago. I saw some forty men, some of those on sentry duty while the others were apparently laborers. I could tell the laborers because they were laying those great canvas sheets the field scholars use when they want to protect a find before they can fully dig it up. I elected to camp some distance away as I did not wish to approach them in the bad light of dusk.