Elven Nations - The Kinslayer Wars Part 24

But though she lay wearily upon her quilt, she couldn't sleep. An odd sense of excitement took hold of her emotions, and suddenly she sat up, aroused and intrigued.

Instinctively she went to her mirror. Holding the crystal on her dressing table, she saw her own image first, and then she concentrated on setting her mind free.

Immediately she espied that handsome elven face, the visage she had not looked upon for nearly eight months. Her heart leaped into her throat and she stifled a gasp. It was Kith-Kanan.

His hair flew back from his face, as though tossed by a strong wind. She remembered the griffon, only this time, instead of flying away from her, he was returning!

She stared at the mirror, breathless. She should report this to her general immediately. The elven general was returning to his fortress!

Yet at the same time, she sensed a decision deep within her. The return of Kith-Kanan stirred her emotions. He looked magnificent, proud and triumphant. How unlike General Giarna! She knew she would say nothing about what she had seen.

Swiftly, guiltily, she placed the mirror back inside of its velvet-lined case. Almost slamming the engraved ivory lid in her haste, she hid the object deep within her wardrobe trunk and returned to her bed.

Suzine had barely stretched out, still tense with excitement, when a gust of wind brushed across her face. She sensed that the flap of her tent had opened, though she could see nothing in the heavy darkness.

Instantly she felt fear. Her elven guards would stand firm against any illicit intruder, but there was one they would not stopdid not dare stopfor he held their fates in his hands.

Giarna came to her then and touched her. She felt his touch like a physical a.s.sault, a hurt that would leave no scar that could be seen.

How she hated him! She despised everything that he stood for. He was the master slayer. She hated the way he used her, used everyone around him.

But now she could bear her hatred because of the knowledge of a blond-haired elf and his proud flying steedknowledge which, even as General Giarna took her, she found solace in, knowledge that was hers alone.

Kith-Kanan guided Arcuballis through the pitch-dark skies, seeking the lanterns of Sithelbec. He had pa.s.sed over the thousands of campfires that marked the position of the human army, so he knew that the elven stronghold lay close before him. He needed to find the fortress before daylight so that the humans wouldn't learn of his return to the plains.

There! A light gleamed in the darkness. And another!

He urged Arcuballis downward, and the griffon swept into a shallow dive. They circled once and saw three lights arranged in a perfect triangle, glimmering on the rooftop. That was the sign, the signal he had ordered Parnigar to use to guide him back to the barracks.

Indeed, as the griffon spread his wings to set them gently atop the tower, he saw his trusted second-in-command holding one of the lights. The other lantern-bearers were his old teacher, Kencathedrus, and the steadfast Kagonesti elf known as White-lock.

The two officers saluted smartly and then clasped their commander warmly.

"By the G.o.ds, sir, it's good to see you again!" said Parnigar gruffly.

"It is a pleasure and a relief. We've been terribly worried." Kencathedrus couldn't help but sound a little stern.

"I have a good excuse. Now let's get me and Arcuballis out of sight before first light.

I don't want the troops to know I've returnednot yet, in any event."

The officers looked at him curiously but held their questions in check while arrangements were made with a stable master to secure Arcuballis in an enclosed stall.

Meanwhile, Kith-Kanan, concealed by a flowing, heavy robe, slipped into Kencathedrus's chamber and awaited the two elven warriors. They joined him just as dawn was beginning to lighten the eastern horizon.

Kith-Kanan told them of the quest for the griffons, describing the regiment of flying troops and the coming of the dwarves and detailing his battle plans.

"Two weeks, then?" asked Parnigar, scarcely able to contain his excitement.

"Indeed, my friendafter all this time." Kith-Kanan understood what these elves had been through. His own ordeals had been far from cheery. Yet how difficult it must have been for these dynamic warriors to spend the winter and the spring and the first few weeks of summer cooped up within the fortress.

"Fresh regiments are on the march to Sithelbec. The Windriders will leave in a few days, making their way westward. The dwarves of Thorbardin, too, are preparing to move into position."

"But you wish your own presence to remain secret?" asked Kencathedrus.

"Until we're ready to attack. I don't want the enemy to suspect any changes in our defenses. When the attack develops, I want it to be the biggest surprise they've ever had."

"Hopefully the last surprise," growled Parnigar.

"I'll stay here for a week, then fly west at night to arrange the rendezvous with the forces arriving from Silvanost. When I return, we'll attack. Until then, conduct your defenses as you have in the past. Just don't allow them to gain a breach."

"These old walls have held well," Parnigar noted. "The humans have tried to a.s.sault them several times and always we drove them back over the heaped bodies of their dead."

"The spring storms, in fact, did us more harm than all the human attacks,"

Kencathedrus added.

"I flew through some of them," Kith-Kanan said. "And I heard Dunbarth speak of them."

"Hail crushed two of the barns. We lost a lot of our livestock." Kencathedrus recounted the damage. "And a pair of tornadoes swept past, doing some damage to the outer wall."

Parnigar chuckled grimly. "Some damage to the wooden walland a lot of damage to the human tents!"

"True. The destruction outside the walls was even worse than within. I have never seen weather so violent."

"It happens every year, more or less," Parnigar, the more experienced plainsman, explained. "Though this spring was a little fiercer than most. Old elves tell of a storm three hundred years ago when a hundred cyclones came roaring in from the west and tore up every farm within a thousand miles."

Kith-Kanan shook his head, trying to imagine such a thing. It even dwarfed war! He turned his attention to other matters. "How about the size of the human army? Have they been able to replace their losses? Has it grown or diminished?"

"As near as we can tell" Parnigar started to answer, but Kith-Kanan's former teacher cut him off.

"There's one addition they've had, it shames me to admit!" Kencathedrus barked.

Parnigar nodded sorrowfully as the captain of the Silvanesti continued.

"Elves! From the woods! It seems they're content to serve an army of human invaders, caring naught that they wage war against their own kingdom!" The elf, born and bred amid the towers of Silvanost, couldn't understand such base treachery.

"I have heard this, to my surprise. Why are they party to this?" Kith-Kanan asked Parnigar.

The Wildrunner shrugged. "Some of them resent the taxes levied upon them by a far-off capital, with the debtors taken for servitude in the Clan Oakleaf mines. Others feel that trade with the humans is a good thing and opens opportunities for their children that they didn't have before. There are thousands of elves who feel little if any loyalty to the throne."

"Nevertheless, it is gravely disturbing," Kith-Kanan sighed. The problem vexed him, but he saw no solution at the present.

"You'll need some rest," noted Kencathedrus. "In the meantime, we'll tend to the details."

"Of course!" Parnigar echoed.

"I knew that I could count on you!" Kith-Kanan declared, feeling overwhelmed by a sense of grat.i.tude. "May the future bring us the victory and the freedom that we have worked so hard for!"

He took the officers up on their offer of a private bunk and enjoyed the feel of a mattress beneath his body for the first time in several weeks. There was little more he could do at the moment, and he fell into a luxurious slumber that lasted for more than twelve hours.

22.

Clan Oakleaf.

The mouth of the coal mine gaped like the maw of some insatiable beast, hungry for the bodies of the soot-blackened miners who trudged wearily between the shoring timbers to disappear into the darkness within. They marched in a long file, more than a hundred of them, guarded by a dozen whip-wielding overseers.

Sithas and Lord Quimant stood atop the steep slope that led down into the quarry.

The noise from below pounded their ears. Immediately below them, a slave-powered conveyor belt carried chunks of crushed ore from a pit, where other slaves smashed the rock with picks and hammers, to the bellowing ovens of the smelting plant. There more laborers shoveled coal from huge black piles into the roaring heat of the furnaces.

Beyond the smelting sheds rose the smoke-spewing stacks of the weapon smiths, where raw, hot steel was pounded into razor-edged armaments.

Some of the prisoners wore chain shackles at their ankles. "Those are the ones who have tried to escape," Lord Quimant explained. Most simply marched along, not needing any physical restraint, for they had been broken as slaves in a deeper, more permanent sense. Each of these trudged, eyes cast downward, almost tripping over the one ahead of him in the line.

"Most of them become quite docile," the lord continued, "after a year or two of labor.

The guards encourage this. A slave who cooperates and works hard is generally left alone, while those who show rebelliousness or a reluctance to work are ... disciplined."

One of the overseers cracked his whip against the back of a slave about to enter the mines. This fellow had lagged behind, opening a gap between himself and the worker in

front of him. At the flick of the lash, he cried out in pain and stumbled forward. Even from his height, Sithas saw the red welt spread across the slave's back.

In his haste, the slave stumbled, then crawled pathetically to his feet under another flurry of lashes from the guard.

"Watch now. The rest of them will step quite lively."

Indeed, the other slaves did hasten into the black abyss, but Sithas didn't think such cruelty was warranted.

"Is he a human or an elf?" wondered the Speaker.

"Whooh, the tardy one?" Quimant shrugged. "They get so covered with dust that I can't really tell. Not that it makes much difference. We treat everybody the same here."

"Is that wise?" Sithas was more disturbed than he thought he would be about the brutality he saw here.

Lord Quimant had attempted to dissuade Sithas from visiting the Clan Oakleaf estates and mines, yet the Speaker had been determined to take the three-day coach ride to Quimant's family's holdings. Now he began to wonder if perhaps Lord Quimant had been right to want to spare him the sight. He had too many disturbing reservations about the Oakleaf mines. Yet at the same time, he had to admit he needed the steel that came from these mines and the blades that were cast by the nearby smithies.

"Actually, it's the humans who give us the most trouble. After all, the elves are here for ten or twenty years, whatever the sentence happens to be for their crime. They know they must suffer that time, and then they'll be free."

Indeed, the Speaker of the Stars had sentenced a number of citizens of Silvanost to such laborfor failure to pay taxes, violence or theft against a fellow elf, smuggling, and other serious transgessions. The whole issue had seemed a good deal simpler in the city, when he could simply dismiss the offending elf and rarely, if ever, think of him again.

"So this is their miserable fate," he said quietly.

Quimant continued. "The humans, you know, are here for lifeof course, a foreshortened life, in any event. And you know how reckless they are anyway. Yes, indeed, humans are the ones who give us the most problems. The elves, if anything, help to keep them in line. We encourage their little acts of spying on one another."

"Where do all the humans come from?" inquired Sithas. "Surely they haven't all been sentenced by elven courts."

"Oh, of course not! These are mostly brigands and villains, nomads who live to the north. They trouble the elves and kender of the settled lands, so we capture them and set them to work here."

Quimant shook his head, thinking before he continued. "Imaginea paltry four or five decades to grow up, experience romance, try to make a success of your life, and leave children behind you! It's amazing they do so well, when you consider what little time they have to work with!"

"Let's go back to the manor," said Sithas, suddenly very weary of the harsh spectacle before him. Quimant had arranged for a splendid banquet after dark, and if they remained here any longer, Sithas was certain that he would lose his appet.i.te.

The ride back to Silvanost seemed to Sithas to take much longer than the trip into the country. Still, he felt relieved to leave the Oakleaf estates behind.

The banquet had been a festive affair. Hermathya, the pride of Oakleaf, and her son Vanesti had been the stars of the evening. The affair lasted far into the night, yet Quimant and Sithas made an early start for the city on the following morning. Hermathya and the boy remained behind, intending to visit the clanhold for a month or two.

The first two days of the trip had seemed to drag on forever, and now they had reached the third and final day of the excursion. Sithas and Quimant traveled in the luxurious royal coach. Huge padded couches provided them with room to recline and stretch. Velvet draperies could be closed to block off dust and weather ... or intrusive ears and eyes. Each of the huge wheels rested on its own spring mechanism, smoothing the potholes of the crushed gravel trail.

Eight magnificent horses, all large palominos, trotted at the head of the vehicle, their white manes and long fetlocks smoothly combed. Metal trim of pure gold outlined the shape of the enclosed cabin, which was large enough to hold eight pa.s.sengers.

The two lords traveled with an escort of one hundred elven riders. Four archers, in addition to their driver, rode atop the cabin, out of sight and hearing of the pair of elves within.

Sithas sat shrouded in gloom. His mind would not focus. He considered all the progress that had been made toward a counterattack. The training of the Windriders was nearly complete. In a few days, they would fly west to begin their part in Kith-Kanan's great attack. The final rank of elven infantryfour thousand elves of Silvanost and the nearby clanholdshad already departed. They should reach the vicinity of Sithelbec at the same time as the Windriders.

Even these prospects did not brighten his mood. He imagined the satisfying picture of the dwarven amba.s.sador Than-Kar captured and brought to the Speaker of the Stars in chains, but that prospect only reminded him of the prisoners of the Oakleaf mines.

Slave pits! With elven slaves! He accepted the fact that the mines were necessary.

Without them, the Silvanesti wouldn't be able to produce the vast supply of arms and weapons needed by Kith-Kanan's army. True, there were good stockpiles of weapons, but a few weeks of intensive fighting could deplete those reserves with shocking speed.

"I wonder," he said, surprising himself and Quimant by speaking aloud. "What if we found another source of labor?"