The Lioness

“Nay,” the king said, low. Kerian knew herself to be no longer part of the conversation. “Nay, Stanach, and if I don’t ask you, whose word will Skarr accept?”

“Anyone Hylar.”

“You. He wants you. He’s your uncle, lad. Your da’s own brother. He trusts you.” The king laughed, but with little humor. “It’s your curse, Stanach Hammerfell. You’ve a reputation for trustworthiness among those in power, and damn me if those in power insist on trusting you.”

There is no resisting the power of a curse, this Kerian knew. Stanach didn’t try harder and didn’t argue. He drew the untasted mug of ale toward him and lifted it in silence to his king.

They went out from Thorbardin by secret ways, down to the lowest level, down to where the damage of the recent war showed in scarred stone walls, in broken battlements, in ruined streets and collapsed roofs. They went farther down than that until they stood upon the shores of the great underground body of water known as the Urkhan Sea.

Stanach pointed out across the black waters to a wall pocked with what seemed to be the mouths of caves. He told her to stand still and bade her listen. Beneath her feet, Kerian felt a soft, persistent vibration, a kind of humming in the rock.

“Worms,” Stanach said.

She frowned. “How can that be? Worms can’t eat through—”

“Y’know that for certain, do you?”

She glanced at him, then back to the gaps in the stone wall. The rumbling came closer, beneath her feet the stone vibrated, the vibration shuddering up her legs, to her belly, to her arms and shoulders. At the edges of the Urkhan Sea dark water lapped nervously against the stone. Out from one of the cave mouths came something large, something with two probing horns, like those seen on snails. Even from this distance, all the rippling black water between them, Kerian reckoned that the horns were as long as she was tall, perhaps as thick around as the width of her shoulders. The creature had no face, no eyes, no nose, only a constantly working mouth.

“Worms,” she breathed.

“They eat stone. That’s all they do. The earth back there, behind those walls, is riddled with tunnels. They bore out here to drink and go right back in again. Tame enough, the beasties. Mostly we leave them be.”

He squinted across the water, then turned, saying it was time to go. “Let’s don’t use that pretty little emerald leaf of yours until we have to, aye? I wouldn’t want to find myself lost in some Reorx-only-knows-where tunnel with no way out”

Kerian agreed, and she did not call upon the unchancy magic until they saw clear sky above them again.

Chapter Twenty

Magic did not set Kerian and Stanach down where they hoped, but at least it didn’t drop them down in Tarsis or the Sirrion Sea. It put them down only a few miles from Qualinost, in the thickness of the oak forest north and west of the capital. They were reeling with dizziness. The dwarfs face showed green.

“Not a day’s walk from here to Qualinost,” Kerian said reassuringly to Stanach.

The dwarf was leaning his back against an oak, his eyes closed. He had the look of a man praying. He groaned something that sounded like a curse then, between clenched teeth, “Good.”

Kerian waited for color to return to his cheeks and for her own stomach to settle. “That’s not where we’ll go. We’ll be wanting to go first to Wide Spreading, the king’s hunting lodge. There we’ll find a trusty man who will take word to the king that you’ve come.”

Stanach looked around at the oaken wood, the tall trees thickly growing. “We’ll walk to where we’re going, aye? Enough of the magic now.”

Kerian agreed, counting herself lucky in the way the talisman had treated them. She gave Stanach a little longer to settle while she calculated a route that would take them to Wide Spreading by forest paths known only to hunters and deer, then she led the dwarf along those barely seen game trails as though along the manicured paths of a garden in Qualinost. Stanach had nothing to say about that, and she was pleased to take his silence for appreciation.

They went until the sun had climbed past noon height. The season had turned in the short time Kerian was away. The taste of autumn hung on the wind, only the suggestion of it in the fading green of the forest, yet she saw no hunters. When they climbed the slope of a green vale and looked down, they saw no farmers at work in their fields. They saw only great swathes of black staining the golden crops, where the roofs of barns and houses gaped with holes.

Stanach’s good left hand filled with his throwing axe.

“It’s long done,” Kerian said, bitterly. She pointed to the sky. “Look, empty. The crows have quarreled and had the best of the feast.”

“You sound like you’re used to this,” said the dwarf.

She did sound so, and she couldn’t help that. “I’m not used to it, Stanach. It’s how things are.”