4.11.05 - EMBER RAIN

PROLOGUE.

Oak leaves murmured against the open shutters, rustled in a salty breeze. A silver-bellied leaf whirled through the window, dipped, and tossed into the Walking Road Inn. It lifted in the airs over candles, scuttled across a table, and pinned under a dwarf’s slamming tankard. Mead sloshed and dribbled.

“To your liking, Master Garbag?” the innkeeper said, heading upstairs to tidy rooms before bedtime.

The dwarf Garbag thrust a hand across his beard and lips. “Not as sweet as before, gratefully,” he shouted after the innkeeper. “You Falgaraad Men fancy honey overmuch!”

The innkeeper said something muffled by the distance up the stairs.

“No doubt a dwarf finds a honey-sticky beard trying,” said another voice, startling Garbag. A slim figure padded silently toward the hearth. His eyes fixed on the hearth.

“Elves!” Garbag growled and chuckled into his tankard.

“Only one, to sober eyes,” the elf replied, and crouched by the hearth, intent on the fire fluttering along the log.

“Aye? Well, not many travel alone,” Garbag said and nodded his tankard at the elf.

“Coal and wood, and such a weak flame,” the elf clucked. He put his hand in the coal barrel.

“Let the fire alone!” the innkeeper appeared at the top of the stairs; his feet creaked the stairs as he came down.

The elf’s eyes blazed as he watched the innkeeper descend. He withdrew his hand from the coal barrel; but he held a piece, and he tossed it at the innkeeper. The coal plunked off the innkeeper's belly. An innkeeper takes abuse well as a matter of profession; he strode to the bar without a word or look back. The elf shoveled a handful of coal into the fire.

Garbag stared into his tankard, remembering. Then he jumped to his feet with a shout and spread his arms.

“By my beard, Marenthalas, I should have known it was you! Do you recognize me?”

Immersed in the fire that gained now in the hearth, the elf only twitched an ear to the dwarf.

“Garbag, that fat old dwarf?” Marenthalas muttered and tossed another handful into the fire. He watched the fire catch and consume, then turned a gray eye to the dwarf standing arms flung wide.

“Garbag, it is you,” the elf said. He turned his other eye from the fire.

The dwarf laughed and slammed the tankard to the table with a bang. “Of course it is!”

“Fancy this!” Garbag slammed his tankard again, and then strode to Marenthalas, who finally turned from the hearth.

“What brings you? Drink with me, let us reminisce, eh?” Garbag said.

Marenthalas pulled a chair to him and sat. Garbag did the same, but sat backward on the chair, stubby legs straddling, his folded arms resting on the chair’s back.

“I am here on emissary from the Empire,” Garbag explained. “More as a show of faith, nothing interesting in the telling—“

Boots clopped on the cobblestone near the window, and now the open inn door. Two men in breastplate and greaves, their white surcoats emblazoned with the gold sword on green field, stood by the door. One leaned in, surveyed the room. On seeing Garbag, he hailed the dwarf.

“Master Garbag, we come from the keep. Our Lord summons you.”

Garbag stood to face the guards and motioned to his friend. “Of course, but this elf I have not seen for—“

“You may bring him with you. If you will come with us, Master Garbag,” the guard said with a bow of his head.

The guards led outside to a carriage waiting.

#

A page arranged the King’s gray hair on his broad shoulders – broad, but beginning to sag under the combined weight of time and duty; thus he sat bowed on the throne. His brows weighed on his eyes, and he muttered to his attendants with wags of his big beard. Yet, he also wore the weight of half a century's reign with strength and will, attending to the matters of his kingdom with vigor. The presence of the dwarf and entourage scarcely distracted the King’s attention.

Aside the King and his attendants, a highman stood.

Marenthalas gazed at the cavernous hearth and its feeble flicker. He frowned.

“Good eve to you, Garbag,” the King’s eyes were on them now. The attendants walked out, heads bowed; the highman looked to Garbag and the elf. The highman stood tall as an ordinary man might if he stood on the throne, rather than beside it. Muscles thick enough to bulge veins broadened the height; sweat tricked down his naked arm, and the muscles of that arm quivered like a horse to a fly. The man wore the King's white for his surcoat, and had a girdle loose about his waste. His boots were black, the leather smooth: he was no sentry left to the ambiguity of the march. Here surely stood a champion.

His face, wrinkled at the brow between narrowed eyes, twitched at the broad jaw, teeth grinding to make up for movement absent in the stillness of his posture.

Garbag looked away from the highman and bowed before the King. Behind him, Marenthalas folded his arms against his chest, and half-turned to the hearth, lending only an ear to the King.

“Who is this you bring with you?” the King motioned to Marenthalas.

Garbag bowed again, apologetically. “It is Marenthalas, an old friend. Forgive his inattention, I assure you, he is loyal as a friend true.”

From the elf’s way, a snort came, slight and mistakable in the chamber’s echoes.

“Indeed.” The King gave Marenthalas no more attention, nor hope of gaining the elf’s attention. “Then perhaps his coming serves him purpose, if he serves you loyally. Your country has generously sent you to serve me, and at last I have an errand you might serve.

“There resides a certain baron in the North with which I have had no contact in a month. Rumors from there do not ease the ill I feel for these tidings, those rumors that escape – indeed, I fear some evil dark enough to blot out word of its existence. I am not given to mythos, Garbag, but so I will not invent further fantasy to what keeps that land silent. Thus, I am sending you to find the truth. Not alone.”

The giant stepped forward.

“This is Ardos. He is most capable, but his talents lack the tempering experience brings. You shall have provisions and horses. Be away, and know my gratitude is with you and your people, Garbag.”

A new trio of attendants strode to the King, and soon the King was ignorant of Garbag once more. Ardos looked over Garbag and the elf again, then without word, began away.

Garbag turned to Marenthalas, cleared his throat. The elf began walking, eyes still on the fire. When another attendant tried to pass by, Marenthalas clapped a hand on his shoulder to stay him. Without looking at the attendant, Marenthalas said, “The fire is weak. Attend to it,” then strode off after the highman.



CHAPTER ONE.



The next day, Garbag, Marenthalas, and Ardos took a carriage north three days; they sailed east a day and half, then two days further east by horse and pony.

Nighttime, Marenthalas took responsibility for the campfire. The fire roared and crackled a man’s height, wide as two men (or one brute large as Ardos). Marenthalas sat close enough his hair curled and tossed in the heat; the fire reflected in his eyes.

At a cooler distance, Ardos watched the elf from the corner of his eye, and resumed picking the gristle from his teeth.

Garbag watched the fire’s embers spiral into the sky before they winked and died among the white stars of the heavens. The hickories formed a thick twilight hedge in a circle above; the west wind passed through, carrying hint of winter runoff. In the wind, the hickory leaves rolled and sighed like a river.

“I should think this campfire a fallen warrior’s pyre, were I looking upon it from a distance,” Garbag’s laugh came as a throaty bark.

Ardos sucked on the twig between his teeth, glanced to the dwarf, and set his sword on his knees.

“This is no pyre,” Marenthalas responded. “A pyre worth any man – who is worth a pyre – that would be something: a day at least to gather the wood.”

“So near the town,” Ardos said, and nodded to the map folded at his knee, “such a fire as this seems unwise.”

Garbag pulled the cork from his canteen. The liquor’s sting flavored the air. “If you desire to sleep by a hearth, then you might have allowed us to enter the town. But not by night you say? Do you really think the townspeople wary enough to attack strangers in the night?” The dwarf tipped his canteen to Ardos, and took a gulp.

“Few consider patience a vice,” Ardos replied. “Strange things have been happening. People are nervous. We are strangers – and fools, if we choose to surprise frightened townsfolk in the night.”

Garbag grunted. He dribbled some liquor onto his twin war hammers, corked the canteen and put it aside, and with a rag began polishing his weapons.

The currents from the fire lifted Marenthalas's grey hair and tossed it languidly around his shoulders. The elf's broadsword remain strapped to his back; when his hair swept away from the hilt, the ornamenting jewels burned like hot coals.

Ardos looked at the jewels whenever they became visible; the sword on Ardos’s lap, and the one at his side, were crude in comparison to the elf's. Though the highman found Marenthalas's lack of inhibition trying at best, he wondered what the veteran elf knew over Ardos in their shared warrior's profession. Either the elf was a rich inheritor of the sword, or he knew enough to have earned its possession.

Occasionally, Marenthalas twitched as he watched the fire; he did this whenever Ardos looked at him most steadily, perhaps sensing the highman's attention.

Finally, Marenthalas said, "Sleep, highman. I do not wish to wait much longer this morning to move on. Sleep now. I wake you first light."

Just when Ardos had settled in to sleep, Marenthalas jumped to his feet. Ardos started and got to his feet, glaring at the elf accusingly, thinking a prank had been played. But Marenthalas ignored the highman and stood still, listening.

Ardos turned slowly, trying to pick up the sound. The horses tethered to the trees held their heads up, ears pricked in the same direction as the elf's. Garbag's eyes rolled side to side, but he made no attempt to hear, relying rather on his friend's senses.

Now Marenthalas had his sword drawn; firelight trickled down the blade like molten silver.

"A carriage makes reckless speed through the forest," Marenthalas whispered. Garbag got to his feet, pulling his hammers with him.

Ardos drew his sword; he could hear it now: the cracking, tumbling, squealing, and hooves.

"Where?" Garbag huffed from his thick beard.

"Cut that mop from your ears, then it will be obvious as it is to everyone else, Master Garbag," Marenthalas replied.

Branches crackled; leaves hissed as the carriage passed through, coming closer.

Garbag gripped his hammers mid-handle and raised them like mantis arms. "I hear it."

"Coming this way," Ardos said. "To the fire."

Marenthalas glanced at Ardos from the corner of his eye. "It is a magnificent fire."

Ardos could hear the hooves tearing loam and soil free, the creaks of the carriage on its wheels. It sounded about to burst from the trees, yet only grew louder.

The horses tethered to the trees started pacing to the length of their reigns and pawing at the ground.

Moonlight through the canopy shaped the black carriage and its black horses in the gloom, falling over them in white zigzags. The carriage broke into the clearing with a thunder; Ardos bent back; his teeth rattled. The fire went into chaos; its logs broke and fell, some rolled; embers sprayed. A horse tethered to the tree reared screaming. Marenthalas and Garbag stood unmoving as the carriage ripped through.

Before the carriage burst again into the forest, Marenthalas swung onto his horse, slashed the tether, and began pursuit.

"Hold, you fool!" Ardos shouted after, but elf and horse were gone. Ardos turned to Garbag, but the dwarf had untied his pony and mounted.

"You will never catch that carriage!"

The dwarf shrugged, and then set his pony running after Marenthalas.

"Charging into that town is folly!"

Over his shoulder, the dwarf answered, "I am a weapons master, highman. My hammers are virtues enough when patience fails!”

Ardos kicked the ground. How did the elf manage to live this long?

Unruly fool!

As guard and soldier, Ardos had seen no real battle, but even he knew the undisciplined died. This you learned first.

The pony's clop ebbed into the night sigh of hickories, leaving Ardos alone. He turned to the fire. Logs that had been jostled free sputtered from their blackened sides. In the fire, logs that lost support crumbled into sparks. Their ashes snowed from the indigo sky. Ardos looked at their rumpled bedrolls, hissed, and kicked dirt onto the nearest log. Its fire went out.

Gods pity the man who tries to understand the reasoning of elves!

And Ardos began to wonder about dwarves, too.

He looked over his shoulder at the path where his companions vanished. Now he heard only snicker of wind-blown leaf, chirrup of cricket.

Finally, Ardos grit his teeth and untied his horse. On this task, succeed or fail, Ardos would not be sitting idly in the end.


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