Instantly half a dozen shaggy grey forms appeared out of the grass, loping toward the party purposefully. For an instant, Kellen thought they were wolves, then realized they were instead the largest dogs he'd ever seen—dogs that could easily kill wolves, should they happen to meet any.
"Come on," he said, urging Shalkan into a run. Jermayan followed— with some reluctance, Kellen thought.
Behind him Kellen heard the sound of the Centaur's laughter.
He'd thought that would be the end of it. That should have been the end of it: they'd intruded, they'd been driven off, the shepherd should have whistled his dogs back and that should have been that.
But it wasn't.
Shalkan turned and began to circle back, just in time for Kellen to see Jermayan slipping the mule's lead-rein free to give Valdien room to maneuver. She was running flat-out, but even her top speed wasn't as fast as Valdien's, and neither of them could match Shalkan's turn of speed. To Kellen's horror, he saw that the Centaur-shepherd's grey hounds were harrying her, snapping at Lily's flanks. One of them had already drawn blood.
"Hold on," Shalkan said.
He charged directly at the running hounds, head lowered. His horn slid into the nearest hound's shoulder, skewering the beast neatly. He tossed his head, flinging the beast away. It landed with a thud and a yelp, getting painfully to its feet and limping quickly away.
Jermayan and Valdien were sweeping through the rest of the hounds, Jermayan beating them away from the mule with the flat of his sword, Valdien encouraging them to flee with hooves and teeth. Though the hounds had obviously been trained to take down prey, equally obviously they weren't prepared to face this much resistance, and a few more well-placed blows from Jermayan's blade encouraged them to flee back to their master. The one that Shalkan had wounded limped along behind, bloody-flanked.
The moment the hounds broke off their attack, Kellen and Shalkan took off after the mule. Though terrified, Lily was already starting to slow her panicked headlong flight—mules, even Elven mules, were built for endurance, not speed—and Kellen and Shalkan were able to catch up with her easily. Actually catching her was another matter, and Kellen finally had to dismount and have Shalkan drive her toward him until he could grab hold of the trailing lead-rope. They were just lucky she hadn't gotten tangled in it and broken her leg.
She pulled a little against the rope, shaking. "Here now, girl. It's all right. It's all right, girl. You've had a rough day, haven't you, poor girl?" Kellen spoke soothingly, coiling the rope up in his gauntleted hand as he approached her, until she finally allowed him to lay a hand on her neck and stroke it comfortingly. She was trembling and covered in sweat, but she seemed to be all right. The bites on her haunches didn't go very deep— the hounds had been trying for the bite that hamstrings its prey and leaves it helpless, but fortunately hadn't been able to manage it. An application of allheal should see her right, but he wasn't sure that they dared stop for it now.
Jermayan rode up on Valdien, sheathing his sword.
"I should have shot the beast when I had the chance," Jermayan snarled, and Kellen somehow knew Jermayan didn't mean any of the hounds.
"He was only protecting his flock," Kellen answered, not sure the words were true even as he spoke them. He handed the mule's lead-rope up to Jermayan, who made it fast to Valdien's saddle once more.
"Was he? He had a very odd way of doing it, to be sure," the Elven Knight answered angrily. "Come to that, wolfhounds such as those are more likely to savage a flock than to guard it; they are hunters, plain and simple. I wonder whether there was a flock at all, or whether he was set to watch for us, and lull us off our guard."
"By running out of cover and shouting at us?" Kellen asked doubtfully. Still, it was possible. The shepherd had been quick enough to set the dogs on them—and Jermayan was right—they looked nothing like the kind of flock guards Kellen had seen in Merryvale.
"Come on," Shalkan said pragmatically. "The sooner we go on, the sooner we can stop."
THEY moved on at the pace that the mule set, which was even slower than before; she was having trouble with the trail, and it was clear that her wounds were hurting her. The hilltops were bare and rocky, and between them were narrow ravines filled with all manner of brambles. The trouble was, you had to go down one hill to get to the top of the next. At the bottom of one such gully they found a stream where they could pause to rest and eat and tend to the mule's injuries, but they didn't linger for very long. Where there had been one attack, there could be another, and all of them knew that whether their attackers were hill-bandits or agents of Shadow Mountain, if the attack succeeded, they would be just as dead.
They rode on, into a cold wind out of the north that howled among the peaks like a damned soul and ate away the faintest trace of warmth.
IT would be dark soon, and they'd reached an unspoken agreement that the next little valley, if it was at all suitable, would be where they would spend the night. Camping on one of the hilltops in the constant wind would be impossible—or miserable at the very least. At least down in the ravine they'd be out of the wind, and warmer.
But they'd barely dismounted when Valdien began behaving skittishly, fretting and shaking his head nervously.
"Trouble," Shalkan said briefly, his nostrils flaring. "I smell something—odd—"
Kellen drew his sword with a metallic grating sound. He cast his eyes to the left, the right. Down here out of the wind it was quiet, and hard to see much in the heavy undergrowth, but Kellen saw no sign of any trouble. He glanced at Jermayan. The Elven Knight had his bow ready, an arrow nocked, but from his puzzled expression, he saw as little reason for alarm as Kellen.
Even the mule had sensed something wrong now. She was grunting and pulling at her lead-rope, ears laid-back.
"Anything?" Jermayan asked tersely.
Kellen shook his head, and concentrated, trying to invoke the battle-trance. Even to Othersight, the ravine seemed deserted, nothing but shadows moving within the branches as the wind above in the tops of the hills stirred the withered leaves down below.
"I could try a spell…" he began, feeling as if he should be whispering.
Suddenly there was a crashing through the underbrush and a pale rush of movement. Before Kellen could react, Jermayan had drawn his bow and fired several arrows in an action too fast for Kellen to see.
There was an unearthly scream, and a crashing as something fell to earth and began to thrash wildly. Shalkan whirled, and charged, head down, his horn glinting wickedly. He plunged it into the creature, once; the beast convulsed, and was still.
By the time Kellen joined him, it was over, and the unicorn was shaking his head, flicking his horn clean.
"What is that?" Kellen asked, looking down at the body, still outstretched and twisted sideways in its final convulsion.
It was twice the size of the dogs that had attacked them earlier today. Kellen had seen lynxes in the public zoo in Armethalieh, but those were small animals, little bigger than a large house cat.
This was like a lynx grown to giant size. It had long dappled silvery fur, and jutting from its upper jaw, two enormous fangs as long as his hand.
"An ice-tiger," Jermayan said, kneeling beside the body to retrieve his arrows. "Odd that it should be here. They are creatures of the high hills and mountains, rarely venturing this far south."
"Especially this early in the year," Shalkan said, returning from cleaning his horn in the earth. "And very odd for it to be attacking us at all. Look at it, Jermayan. A healthy young male, no broken fangs, no injuries… it should be attacking its natural prey, not an oddly assorted group of travelers like us. They don't like to be anywhere within leagues of humans or Elves or Centaurs either; they're terribly shy."
"Another thing that isn't where it's supposed to be," Kellen said grimly. "But is it just an accident… or is this another trap?"
"Were any of them traps?" Shalkan asked simply. "Or were they all just the sort of misfortunes that would have happened to any traveler that passed this way?"
"Either way, we'd better move on," Jermayan said tiredly, getting to his feet. "Where there was one, there may be more."
THEY made an unsatisfactory camp in one of the hilltop groves, keeping a sharp eye out for more rogue shepherds—or anything else. At this point, Kellen didn't trust anything, not a starling, not even a mouse. Before the light failed entirely, there was time for a few minutes of sparring practice with Jermayan, and Kellen was relieved to find that it was still as easy for him as it had been before the battle.
That night Jermayan began drilling him in the rudiments of shield-fighting—how to draw an attacker's blows to your shield, how to fight using your sword one-handed for greater reach. But there was not time for much of that before it was too dark to see, and neither wished to risk a misstep or a foul blow in the dark.
In the morning, they struck camp and moved on quickly, none of them willing to linger in such inhospitable territory. By early afternoon they were crossing terrain that was dangerous enough in its own right, without the help of brigands, bandits, or questionable shepherds.
They weren't trekking now so much as mountain-climbing, their progress slowed to the slowest walking pace by the need to test every foothold before proceeding along slanting, tilting, nearly invisible trails. Shalkan led—the unicorn was as surefooted as a goat—with Kellen clutching the saddle tightly and trying not to look down.
To Kellen's surprise, for all his size, Valdien was nearly as nimble as Shalkan, the Elven destrier able to follow any path Shalkan chose. The mule scrambled along behind, patient and uncomplaining—or perhaps, now that it had escaped the fangs of wolfhound and ice-tiger, desperate to remain with its "herd" and the protection of the two Knights.
"Once these hills were lush with forests," Jermayan said when they stopped to rest. "Sweet-smelling cedars as far as the eye could see, and flowering alyon, and fragrant vilya. In my grandsire's time, we built ships from the trees that grew here in the Forest of Tilinaparanwira to sail the oceans of the world. Our home was here in these forests, and in the mountains beyond as well. In those days, we thought ourselves masters of all." Jermayan sighed, as if the ancient memory pained him.
Kellen looked around. It was hard to imagine anything at all growing here, let alone trees tall enough to provide the masts for an ocean-going ship.
He glanced at Jermayan. The Elven Knight was smiling ruefully, seeing the expression of skepticism on Kellen's face.
"But my grandsire lived a very long time ago, as the Children of Men reckon time—just as the Great War itself was so long ago that you have schooled yourselves to forget it. We ride now across the lands where many of the battles of that war were fought—and because of that, for tens of your generations, no blade of grass grew from this tainted earth, no bird flew through these accursed skies. Have you never wondered why the holdings of the Children of Men are so few in this land, yet your cities are armed and walled for war? Though you have purged the very hint of it from your histories, there is a reason for those walls, a reason why Men are so few when they breed so rapidly." He closed his eyes for a moment, as if weary. "But now Life returns. I wonder—is it that which has roused Life's old enemy from its slumber?"
There was no answer he could make to that, and Kellen didn't even try. They rode on, with Kellen trying to imagine what this place might have looked like when it was as lush as the Flower Forest around Sentar-shadeen must have been before the drought. Jermayan had said the Great Alliance had paid a terrible price for their victory; looking around at a landscape so scoured that grass barely grew here now, Kellen was only now beginning to imagine what it must have been like.
"Look there," Jermayan said a few moments later, pointing off to the left.