Interim IV
The Grimly Holt: 59th of Spring
In the northern reaches of Bashti, south of the White Hills, lies a great forest, deep and dark and full of strange things. Men call it the Weald when they speak of it at all. Few enter. Fewer still emerge.
Its eastern corner, the Grimly Holt, is just as feared by ignorant people, although its folk are shy and courteous, much different in manners if not in blood from their wild cousins of the deep wood. The wolvers' keep is another of those ancient ruins which line the Silver, this one smaller than most and unreclaimed by later builders. Its walls lie tumbled around the forest floor like so many half-sunken boulders velvet with moss and a stream runs down the glade which had been its great hall. The loam of countless seasons obscures floor and hearth except where skullcap mushrooms grow along buried veins of ancient mortar mixed with blood.
Tonight, however, the weirding had restored to the keep a ghostly shell of its former self. Glowing mist sculpted itself against low walls long since fallen and pressed down on the thatch of an invisible roof. Wisps trickled in through narrow windows which had admitted no light of sun or moon or star for time out of mind.
This was an opportunity not to be missed.
Since the storm had rolled over them hours ago, the wolvers had been trying to record every detail of their ancient home which the weirding revealed. Long, communal howls slid down the length of beam and stone. Modulated yips described the cunning fit of joints and hunting scenes carved over the outer lintels, seen in reverse as though from inside a glowing mold. As they sang, the mist pressed closer, taking more clearly the long vanished forms, and misty wraiths drifted down the hall to the sound of music lost in a dream.
The song snarled in snapping argument. There was a small structure attached to the rear wall which none of the singers understood.
"It's a privy," said the Wolver Grimly, and explained.
The word meant nothing in their tongue, so they settled for a description: the hole that all men mark but none claim.
Obviously, thought Grimly, they had never been in Kothifir during an outbreak of dysentery.
In fact, few of his kin ever left the holt at all or spent much time in man-shape except during adolescence, when each generation in turn discovered that humans have no set mating time. Here on the edge of the great, dark Weald, there were few true humans to imitate in other matters. Torisen's visit the previous winter was still avidly discussed, not only because he was an accepted wolf-friend but because he had marched the entire Kencyr Host through the Holt on a shortcut to the Cataracts.
Only once before in living memory had the forest been so invaded, by a much less courteous party, when King Kruin of Kothifir had descended on it to hunt wolver.
Grimly well remembered his first sight of humankind. Kruin had taken over the old keep as his base camp, never guessing how closely he was watched by his curious, would-be prey. Creeping close to listen, Grimly had heard a court poet declaim rendish verse to a bored monarch waiting impatiently for the dawn hunt. But one wolver cub had already been captured in a net of words. The poet had seen but not betrayed him, his vanity revenged for regal yawns.
No other prey was taken. The Holt is a dangerous place in its own right, the deep Weald even more so. Kruin lost most of his party before the wolvers tired of watching men die and led him out. He wasn't pleased to have his royal hunt ruined, but in fairness he offered any wolver who cared to come a place in his court. That "place," most wolvers assumed, would be on his trophy wall. However, the poet's words still sang in Grimly's mind. When he came of age, years later, he took the River Road south and presented himself to Kruin's son and successor, Krothen.
What days those had been, what pleasure and pain.
He had indeed learned rendish, from the very poet who had come with Kruin to the Holt. Oh, the intoxication of the words, winding through the rhythms of his native forest . . . .
And oh, the humiliation when his audience had howled back at him with laughter. It wasn't the would-be artist they came to hear, he quickly learned, but the freak with whom the old poet had bought his way back into court favor, as he might have done with a dancing bear or a singing pig. So Grimly had become "the Wild Man of the Woods," a caricature of what he wanted to be, usually drunk in order to stand himself, a sorry thing who had forgotten the dignity of the wolf and not yet learned that of a man.
"Why are you doing this?"
Sharp words, in an exasperated voice, from a young one-hundred commander with haunted eyes and bandaged hands.
Twelve years ago.
Grimly looked down the hall at the black-clad figure sitting hunched on a fallen block: Torisen, his first friend, then barely recovered from Urakarn and marked for death by his Caineron enemies, now the leader of his people.
And still a mystery.
Look at him, rocking back and forth, that damned sword still clutched in his swollen hand and his dark head bent as though listening to it, although the only words came from his own lips, lost under the wild poetry of the wood.
Grimly rubbed his tired eyes. No. They hadn't deceived him: weirding lit the ghostly hall and glowered back from the serpentine patterns forged into Kin-Slayer's blade, but his friend sat in deepening shadows as though they flowed off his black garments like murky waters. At his feet lay fire-scarred stone—a different floor, a different place. The fur slowly rose down Grimly's spine. Behind him, a new note entered his people's song as they felt their control slip.
"Tori . . ."
He found himself padding down the hall, then dropping to all fours and creeping. The air seemed to thicken around him. It stank of old burning, and sickness, and fear.
". . . a circular hall," Torisen was crooning, in counterpoint to the wolvers' song, "with two recessed windows to the north and south. Broken benches. Collapsed tables. A private dining room on the other side of the open hearth. A scorched door leading up to the battlements, closed but not locked . . . oh God, not locked . . . ."
Grimly crept to his friend's feet over grating cinders as Torisen's voice built reality around him detail by detail. The song of his kin faded to the keening of wind through shattered walls. His paws ached on cold stone.
"Tori . . . ?"
The other's rocking stopped, then began again as he hunched lower.
"Shhh . . . . I'm hiding. I said I would never come back here, but I had to. I had to. This is the only place she won't look."
"B-but where are we?"
"Why, in the Haunted Lands keep where I—we—grew up. Oh, I burned down the real one last year, but this is a dream, isn't it? I burned the dead, too, haunts that they had become. Gave them to the pyre. That should have satisfied honor, shouldn't it? But they keep coming back. Listen to them in the shadows. Listen . . . ."
The wind keened through the narrow windows, thin and sour with ash, rank soot on the fur, the lips, the taste of forbidden flesh . . . .
Were those still shapes standing to either side of the embrasures and those murky points of light, two by two by two—clinks in the wall or unblinking eyes giving back the glow of the sword's malignant blade?
Run. Out of this nightmare, back to his own simple, sane world only feet away, to his own people, crying for him on the wind . . . .
But he couldn't leave his friend.
Shivering, Grimly crouched at Torisen's feet, to bare his teeth at shadows and bite them if he could, caught in a dream which might never end.