VI
VI
MASTER OF WHITESTORM
CYONDIDE returned to Whitestorm just at the fading of twilight. Haldeth and Korendir were caught exposed on the ridge, sweaty from the labor of cutting timber. Warned by a sudden plunge in temperature, and a scream of wind-whipped water that bounded across distance to reverberate beneath the cliffs, they dropped their tools where they stood. Side by side they bolted for shelter, leaving planks cut with adze and plane abandoned half-dressed on the ground. They took refuge in the depths of the caverns. The lair they chose was dry, smoothed by time, and well removed from any opening to the outside.
The whistling cold of the elemental’s breath touched them, even there, while the smash of ice-ridden waves beat a furious tattoo through the rock. “Mortal! Cyondide duelled Ishone, and triumphed. Ishone is now nothing but a lament sung by the breeze. Ishone, delivering to Cyondide his final word, said no envoy had been sent in his name.”
A gust eddied snow across the outside cliff face. The melted runoff from the glaciers froze instantly to the hardness of quartz. “Mortal, you have lied. Cyondide will pick apart the rocks to find you. Cyondide can hear the whisper of your breath.”
Korendir flung off his cloak. He glanced at his nervous companion and said, “Loan me your torch. I’m going to take Whitestorm from Cyondide.”
A gust drove a rattling fall of hail against the cliffs. “Mortal! You progress from lies to insolence. Cyondide will tear away your life.”
A sudden snap of frost pried an avalanche from the heights. Boulders fell, tumbling and grinding down the slopes to splash geysers of spume from the sea. The spray blew in sheets on the wind. Droplets iced into hail which battered the cliffs with a rattle like shaman’s bones. Gale winds tossed through the thorn forest, and the ancient network of dragon caves rang like a flute to its passing.
Korendir threaded through the gusty drafts of the caverns. He passed through an opening of natural stone and entered Sharkash’s lair. The bones of the King Worm remained there, entombed on the mound of his hoard. Korendir climbed a hillock of priceless treasure. He threaded a path through the dead dragon’s ribcage, and gold coins rang beneath his boots. The torch burned raggedly above his hand. His breath plumed like smoke in flickering, wild light, while relentlessly, Cyondide sucked the warmth from the air.
Korendir swung his leg over the barrier of the skeleton’s breastbone, then vaulted over razor-finned vertebrae to reach his objective. Ahead, above the vacant eye socket of the skull, a shaft rose into the ceiling. Korendir set the end of the torch between his teeth and clambered up a ladder of reptilian incisors. He stood on the dome of the dragon’s crown and felt amid cobwebs and darkness until his fingers touched cold metal; the piton Haldeth had driven when he mistakenly hammered his thumb.
Korendir approximated the stance the smith must have assumed to set the pin. As he did so his ears were battered by the tumultuous thunder of the elements. He listened to the effects of Cyondide’s rage as if he stood exposed upon the cliff face level upon level above. The illusion was uncanny. The scream of the winds and the crash of storm waves sounded real enough to provoke a shiver of dread.
Korendir gripped the torch in sweating fingers. He raised his voice with all the contempt he could muster and directed a shout up the shaft.
“Cyondide!”
Like Haldeth’s curse, the acoustics of rock deflected the sound. Korendir’s outcry reverberated through tangled, dragon-smoothed passageways to the outer cavern once used as a campsite; ringing defiance, it broke over the cliffs of Whitestorm, audible even over the roar of gale and tide.
Cyondide responded instantaneously. A shaft of lightning seared the ledge from whence the sound issued. Thunder snapped and rolled, shaking the caverns and deafening the ears of the man who stood with an upraised torch many yards beneath the surface.
Korendir filled his lungs with air that held the sheared scent of ozone. “Weak are the lightning bolts of Cyondide, that a mortal stands against them!”
A howl of rage tore the night. The darkness cracked open, flickering and lurid as full noon as charge after charge of electrical force hammered the ledge. The growling crash of thunder shook rock and ice from the heights, and debris plummeted downward into the millrace of current beneath.
“Weak is Cyondide!” yelled Korendir. He dropped the torch and flung both hands over his ears. The endless, rumbling boom which followed all but shook the life from his body. He sank to his knees, curled with his face against the bone of the king dragon’s skull. Still the thunder pealed. The brimstone smell of scorched rock wafted down the shaft. Sweat dripped from his brow and heated air stung the linings of his nostrils. Huddled and helpless before a violence that paralyzed thought, Korendir closed his eyes.
A final, smoking bolt tore across the ledge on the clifftop; enraged beyond self-preservation, Cyondide channelled the sum of his being against the mortal who had mocked him. The rock glowed red, melted, and reformed into a permanent epitaph of wrath.
Thunder slammed like a blow upon the air. Echoes bounced and roared across the cliffs of Whitestorm, then faded away into silence. For a time, nothing moved along that gale-whipped coastline except the dash of waves and dwindling eddies of wind.
Cyondide the elemental existed no more.
Far beneath the earth, Korendir stirred. He lifted trembling hands from his ears, then fumbled among the time-polished horns of a dragon and recovered his fallen torch.
“Great Neth,” he said gently.
His words roused nothing but stillness. Korendir leaped to his feet. A smile surged over bruised features, and a wordless shout of victory escaped his throat. Funnelled outward by the very rock which had tricked Cyondide to his end, the cry reverberated like the triumph of a god over the crags of White Rock Head. The weatherstripped skulls of a thousand dead dragons rang with the sound, and spirits whose fires had been quenched by an elemental’s icy tyranny at last were freed to find peace.
* * *
The warmth of high summer cracked the ice from the cliffs of Whitestorm. Frost left the ground for the first time in fifteen decades, and life reawakened in the thaw seemed all the more vibrant for its dormancy. Grasses raised blond heads to the breeze and spread a living, sun-burnished carpet over the heights. The close-woven boughs of Thornforest burst into blue-violet blossom, then shed scented showers of petals to unveil shiny, black-green foliage. Overnight, White Rock Head transformed from the frigid, wind-ridden hell of an elemental’s caprice to a wide place between sea and sky where the seasons turned with savage, unspoiled grace.
Yet nature no longer ruled the site undisputed. A jumble of great, gray blocks had been imported by sea from Southengard, then raised by means of ox-driven winches to the summit of Whitestorm cliffs. There, Korendir raked a hand through sweat-tangled hair. Shirtless, clad in breeches dusty and torn as any craftsman’s, he regarded the line of foundations newly laid for his holdfast. For a heartbeat his features softened with contentment as deep as the summer.
Baileys, walls, and keeps had been designed in harmony with the landscape. Though the levels of gold coins in the coffers decreased with shocking speed, Korendir had not compromised. Whitestorm keep on paper promised the most impregnable defenses in all the Eleven Kingdoms. The ring of the stone mason’s mallets, the creak of the massive winches, and the calls of the oxdrivers blended to rhythms like music in Korendir’s ears. As he measured the progress he had earned with his hands and his wits, his spirit knew rare satisfaction.
Haldeth saw, and paused with his mallet poised over his chisel. The moment of apparent fulfillment did not fool him. The adventurer who had three times accomplished the impossible still woke sweating from his sleep, the outcries from unknown nightmares stifled behind iron control. Other nights, Korendir avoided his dreams altogether; hours at a stretch he would pace the cliffs by moonlight. Through days of summer dust and weeks of backbreaking labor, the restlessness never left him.
Once the walls were raised, with roof slates secured and great engines of defense set in place behind the battlements, Haldeth prayed to Neth the tension would pass. Likely his hope would prove futile. Like a wound that festered beneath an apparently healthy scar, the driving recklessness which had won their freedom from the Mhurgai lay dangerously near the surface; however much Korendir might yearn to settle behind secure walls, Haldeth wondered how long such a life could hold him.
As if he sensed the observer at his back, Korendir suddenly turned. “In that pose, you’d make a splendid model for a gargoyle.”
Haldeth shook off a shiver at the intensity of his friend’s gray eyes. “The moment I hauled you out of that blasted, water-cursed shaft, I knew I was going to regret it.” He lifted his mallet, prepared with all of a smith’s trained strength to direct a stroke onto his chisel. But his arm poised at the height of an arc that never completed. Around him, the clang of the stone mason’s sledges wavered and died. Silence descended over the construction site, heavy with the muffled beat of the sea.
Korendir’s levity faded. His eyes darkened as he looked to the edge of the clearing. “That’s no craftsman of ours.”
His tone had changed like a blast of cold. Haldeth followed his companion’s gaze in time to see a hunched, miserable figure stumble through a gathered crowd of craftsmen whose tools hung idle in their hands.
“He looks like he just crawled through Thornforest,” Korendir observed bleakly. He threw down his measure and chalk and broke headlong to a run.
Haldeth dumped his mallet with an oath. The statement was no exaggeration; even from a distance, he could see the unfortunate’s clothing lay shredded almost to ribbons. The flesh underneath would not be much better. Beneath their mantles of shiny leaves, the trees atop Whitestorm were close-woven, impenetrable, and vicious. Not even deer inhabited Thornforest’s dark depths. Whoever the stranger was, and whatever his reason for hacking a passage through the briar wastes, Haldeth already hated him for shattering the peace.
The smith shook stone chips and dust from his apron. He threaded his way reluctantly between ditches, granite blocks, and the abandoned teams of the oxen, his heart braced for trouble.
The masons had closed about the stranger by the time Haldeth arrived. Unable to see through the crowd, he waited on the sidelines while others took matters in hand. Presently his forebodings were confirmed.
“Fetch Jonnir’s wife,” said Korendir, his voice raised and terse. “Tell her to come with her herb basket.”
“If her bread burns, there’ll be hell to pay,” remarked a man from the middle ranks.
Korendir’s reply drove every other worker within earshot to an involuntary step back. “Fetch her now!”
A mason broke away at his bidding. The crowd parted to let him through, and Haldeth stepped into the gap. He saw what prompted the call for a healer’s skills, and immediately wished he had not.
Supported in Korendir’s arms, the stranger knelt on the beaten soil. His jacket and tunic of cured leather hung in tatters from shoulders gashed bloody from the thorns. The fleece lining dripped dirty crimson, and a clotted snarl of hair obscured the man’s features. Yet when he raised his head, the onlookers shuddered with horror. One eye had been gouged from the socket. Weeping tears of blood, the man drew breath and spoke in the accent of a farmer. “I seek the Master of Whitestorm.”
“You’ve found him.” Korendir accepted the title as if destined to position from birth. “Your need must be great if you saw fit to crawl the breadth of Thornforest.”
“No ship out of Northengard would sail the coasts of White Rock Head.” Self-conscious embarrassment showed even through the stranger’s pain.
Haldeth considered the man’s raw courage and felt cold. By now, Korendir’s reputation for perilous undertakings must span the breadth of two continents. Sailors who hailed from Fairhaven had loose tongues and a penchant for sharing tales; that folk threatened with disaster now came asking at Whitestorm for assistance should come as no surprise. Haldeth studied the bleeding, hopeful face of the farmer, and bit back an oath of sheer anger. At the least, he wished the inevitable could have waited until just one building had a roof.
A shout from Jonnir’s woman broke the spell of horrified fascination. “Move aside! Sure’s thunder, I won’t be walking over any man’s backside, not for some clumsy lout what’s bashed his thumb.”
Bent beneath her wicker herb hamper, the frowsy, frizzle-headed woman cleared laggards from her path with the tongue of a harborside fishwife. As the onlookers thinned to let her pass, she realized her patient was no careless stonecutter. The railing string of oaths that followed drove all but Korendir from the site.
A safe distance removed, Haldeth watched the confrontation.
“You’re going to need help,” the master said as the plump, diminutive healer shook her fist in his face. “This man is my guest. He’ll not be treated like a horse, in the open.”
“Stubborn, you are, and quite justly you’ll die of it,” the healer snapped. But even she could not hold that steady gaze for long. Defeated, she knelt and examined the stranger with hands that were learned, and astonishingly gentle.
Haldeth moved off after the departed workers, grateful to escape the task of bearing the litter. His own past held tragedy enough. Determined to avoid involvement, he applied himself wholly to the shaping of stubborn gray granite. Later, when muscles and fury both failed him, he would drink himself into a stupor. If he was lucky, the stranger would perish of Jonnir’s wife’s rotten tongue before he gave voice to his plea. Then Korendir could dig a new grave at Whitestorm, and the fortress with its promise of impregnable safety could be completed without interruption.
* * *
Sundown forced an end to the labors of Haldeth the smith. Tired, but not from exhaustion, he laid aside hammer and chisel. Clouds crimsoned the sky above Thornforest. The wind off the sea blew damp with the promise of rain. Resigned to another night of wet blankets in a tattered tent that would chill him to aches come the morning, the smith stretched, then sauntered off. He did not go to the fires to share laughter, complaints, and boiled stew. Instead he sought his ale jug, fortuitously refilled the day before by the master of a ship out of Fairhaven.
Yet even as Haldeth stooped to enter his miserable dwelling, a shadow stepped between.
“I’m leaving for Northengard,” Korendir said into the gathering dark.
Haldeth curbed the oath that waited on his tongue. In an appeal already futile, he caught his companion’s shoulder. “What prompts a four-week passage, and an overland journey of fifty leagues, when all that you value lies here?”
Korendir shrugged clear of the touch. “Gold.” His voice was stripped of nuance.
Half-sickened by the reek of the healer’s herbs which clung to his friend, Haldeth gave way to temper. “Great Neth, man! Already you have everything riches can buy. What are you, obsessed?”
Deepening night hid Korendir’s expression; Haldeth waited, sweating, unsure what reaction his outburst might provoke. The crickets sang obliviously on in the grass, and breezes musky with the perfume of dying thornblossom stirred the air. Softened, perhaps, by the land where he had chosen to sink roots, Korendir sighed.
“You saw Torresdyr before the Blight lifted,” he said quietly. “Even when fitted by the finest stone masons, Southengard granite cannot withstand an attack by sorcery.”
Haldeth lashed back with a sarcasm prompted by memories as ghastly as any that haunted Korendir. “What can a mortal do against a wizard? Buy the White Circle’s favor for a wardstone? Man, you are obsessed. How much gold will that take, does any soul on Aerith even know?”
“I’ll find out,” Korendir said.
“You’ll find out alone, then!” Haldeth heard the hurt in his tone, and strove unsuccessfully to harden delivery of his next line. “I’ve known men of your stamp before. They start with only a little more ambition than most folk. But somewhere between one adventure and the next, they acquire a taste for danger. Then, like pipe drug, they find themselves addicted. Risk becomes a thrill they cannot live without.”
Haldeth tried to push past; Korendir only fell into stride beside him. The smith cursed. “I’m not that sort of fool. Luck has spared my life for the last time, young master. No gold on Aerith, and no illusions of White Circle charity will make me change my mind.”
Korendir met the tirade with amusement, the cold sort reminiscent of a hell-ridden sail out of slavery. He paused by a loose spill of stone chips, and his maddening, steely voice answered: “I don’t recall asking you to go along.”
As his friend tried again to shoulder past, Korendir moved and obstructed him. “If you’re going off to get drunk, at least take a sober half-minute to hear my instructions beforehand. The stone haulers and the masons have to be paid next fortnight, and the plans for the south keep have been adjusted to allow for another armory.”
“Neth’s pity, you won’t stop!” Reminded, suddenly, of the stranger who had come with a quest, the smith sought a nearby foundation and sat down. “What sort of terror are you going out to fight?”
“Wereleopards.” Korendir spoke matter-of-factly, as if creatures born of hell itself were no more consequential than rabbits. “The beasts found a way through the mountains, and villagers along the Ellgol River are being slaughtered.”
Haldeth felt as if the wind had been kicked from his lungs. “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow. The ship which brought your ale weighs anchor on the dawn tide.” Like a shadow, Koredir departed. He took with him the odor of sour unguents, and left winds that smelled of grasses and empty dark.
Haldeth took a long, lonely time to resume his interrupted intent. He could not shed the suspicion that a point of significance had escaped him; that something outside his comprehension underlay Korendir’s motivation. Now, even more than before, the smith needed comfort from his ale jug. Aerith held no beasts more fearsome than the wereleopard. Man-shape during night hours, and cat-formed during daylight, the shapechangers were irremediably savage killers. Their bite was venomed, and their reflexes, faster than sight. Korendir would be a dead man the instant he stood ground in Southengard.
Haldeth banged his shin against a log paling and cursed in a muddle of self-pity. Whitestorm castle would shelter nothing but echoing, empty halls, and across the Eleven Kingdoms, only one idiot of a smith was crazy enough to ache as if that were a tragedy.
* * *
Late summer heat wilted the leaves by the time the trader made landfall at Northengard. Too impatient to wait through the lengthy negotiations for dockage, Korendir personally rowed the captain’s longboat ashore.
The farmer who accompanied him had healed well enough to walk. Clumsy yet, and unaccustomed to his new eyepatch, he followed through wharfside crowds, surprised when Korendir flung wide the door to the waybroker’s and impatiently motioned his intent to enter.
“But we can’t go on by sea,” the farmer objected. His backcountry accent caused heads to turn in the foyer.
“The overland walk doesn’t bother me,” Korendir said shortly. “Now will you come in and witness signatures, or must the rest of your countrymen bash through Thornforest because chicken-hearted captains from the mainland won’t sail past Irgyre’s Rocks?”
The farmer widened his remaining brown eye. “Coin won’t move them,” he warned. “Believe me, I already tried.”
Korendir lifted his hand, and the counter-weighted door swung closed with a thud that shook the rooftree. “I don’t pay people who annoy me.”
His sword sang from the sheath, gold lit by the flame of the wall lantern. The farmer gaped as, like a sable hawk in a henyard, the Master of Whitestorm shouldered a path into a crowd of merchant magnates and overwhelmingly made his point clear. He left behind shrieks of outrage, result of a half dozen judiciously slashed brocades; but no bloodshed. The parchment he dictated to ensure the villagers gained access by sea to Whitestorm acquired signatures with hysterical alacrity.
Then, before the traumatized waybrokers ceased bewailing their finery, farmer and mercenary left town.
From the coast they traveled overland, a tortuous journey through mountains with narrowed passes that only pack ponies might cross. Rather than break the legs of a blooded horse, Korendir went on foot. By now, the farmer had learned not to interrupt the silences that sometimes extended for days; Korendir of Whitestorm was not a man who loved talk. Effusiveness did not impress him, and even the wittiest jokes failed to brighten his sword-gray eyes. Cold as the frost which carpeted the ground in the mornings, he followed his guide into low country, where fields and pastures stitched the landscape like a crabbed old grandmother’s patchwork.
“Yonder lies the trade road.” The farmer gestured as evening spread shadows over the valley entered that morning. “Our journey will be easier from there. Once we tell of our errand, no carter will refuse us a ride.”
Korendir showed no sign of apprehension that only a few leagues’ travel would deliver him into danger. Lean and dusty from days of hiking over grades, he strode at a pace that was cat-footedly graceful, even over freshly ploughed furrows. The farmer stumbled after, red-faced, sweating, his good nature suffering sorely from short wind. He regarded the black-cloaked champion he had summoned with a respect that bordered upon awe.
Rain might fall, or grit rise choking from the roads, but Korendir never cursed. The animals he snared for the dinner pot fell cleanly under his dagger; so sure was his hand at dealing death, the farmer might have doubted his humanity. Bronze hair and gray eyes were unknown among the mortals of Aerith; the killer who walked wrapped in silence might have been a demon sent from the spirit world of Alhaerie.
Except that after nightfall, crouched beyond the embers of the evening’s cook fire, Korendir drew out an ordinary whetstone and honed the edge of his sword. Wrapped in blankets upon soil still soggy with rain, the farmer fell asleep to the sound.
Ten leagues down the trade road, they forded the river Ellgol and bargained for space on a barge bound upstream to Karsford. Beyond that town, they walked again, for since the migrations of the wereleopards, neither riverman nor trader would venture farther.
* * *
Once the town of Mel’s Bye was a prosperous community with a market renowned down the Ellgol. Yet on the day during harvest that Korendir and the farmer arrived, the central square stood empty. The wooden stalls remained tenantless, their canvas covers flapping forlornly in the breeze off the river. The desolation of the place brought no surprise to the mercenary; for the past five leagues their travels had crossed through acres of unharvested fields. The stalks of oats bent weathered and gray, and what livestock remained in the pastures had grown ill-kempt from neglect. Cottages were shuttered tightly, or abandoned, and cart ruts on the roadway sported cockscombs of weed.
Where Korendir saw emptiness with new eyes, the farmer was haunted by memories. Life-long he had toiled for the autumn market, with its creaking, laden wagons, piled pyramids of produce, and the boastful bargaining of traders eager to buy. But on that windswept afternoon, the echo of their footfalls in the deserted square at Mel’s Bye rocked the simple man to his core.
“My folk should surely offer better welcome than this.” He shrugged in shaken apology. “The wereleopards cannot have slaughtered them all. Not in the course of one summer.”
Korendir grasped the man’s shoulder. “They aren’t all dead.” With a firmness that steadied, he pointed toward the public tavern. Although the shutters were closed and the main doors tightly barred, smudges of woodsmoke arose from the chimney over the kitchens.
The two men crossed the courtyard. Breeze scattered leaves before their boots, and not a single stray dog skulked in the shadows by the stoop, hopeful of a handout from the cook. Unremarked, and almost as travelworn as the day he had bowed before the King of Torresdyr, Korendir hammered with his sword hilt upon the inn’s oaken door.
The panel did not open; instead, the shutter of a nearby window cracked slightly. A dark eye peered suspiciously through. Then the shutter banged closed, and behind the door came voices, then rattling chain, and at last, the clang of a bar being drawn back.
Korendir thoughtfully sheathed his sword. Then the door swung wide. A pasty man in a tavernkeeper’s apron beckoned across the threshold.
In contrast to the sunlit courtyard, the taproom was smoky, dim, and fetid with the odor of confined humanity. The innkeep refastened his door. Shut in darkness only partially alleviated by an oil lamp, the travelers waited while their eyes adjusted.
The patrons of the tavern held no such disadvantage, but the farmer’s leather eyepatch stalled immediate recognition.
“It’s Lain!” a woman shouted, “My own husband, an’ by Neth, I hardly knew him. Lain, ye’ve grown so thin. Did ye get to Whitestorm, man, and horrors, what’s happened to yer eye?”
Too overcome to speak, Lain returned a shrug; suddenly, bewilderingly, he found himself accosted by a press of jabbering townsmen. The wife had to push to reach his embrace. Lain buried his scarred face in her loosened, gray-streaked hair, and shamed to respect, his countrymen gave him space. The tumult of talk died. At last the folk in the taproom noticed the stranger who waited at Lain’s back.
Clad all in black, his presence had been easily overlooked. Now, in the subdued glow of lamplight, the bronze hair, the level gray eyes, and the hands crossed and still over an unadorned sword drew every eye in the room.
“Lain has brought us the Master of Whitestorm,” a man whispered.
“It’s true, do you see,” murmured another. “He really does have hair the color of coin bronze.”
Korendir did not warm to the comments, but remained, stone quiet, before the doorway.
The innkeep was first to recall manners. “Carralin!” he bellowed over the din of a dozen excited voices. “Bring beer for Lain and the Lord of Whitestorm.”
A dark girl in a linen smock left the crowd. Graceful despite her size, she made her way to the tap and returned with brimming tankards. Unnoticed at first, her hands were large, and chapped from hard work at the spit. The first draft she handed to Lain, who raised a nervous shout. “To the death of the wereleopards!” He quaffed a deep swallow and leaned down to kiss his wife.
As the townsfolk cheered, Carralin offered the second tankard. Korendir accepted with a dry murmur of thanks; his glance lingered. The shapeless shift of a serving maid could not quite hide her soft figure, and if her bones were big, and her jaw too square, she handled herself with a deftness that spared her looking clumsy.
Aware of the stranger’s regard, the girl blushed.
“Lord, are you hungry?”
Korendir’s interest underwent a subtle change. “Thank you, but I’d rather hear about wereleopards.”
At his mention of the enemy, the bystanders all raised their voices, anxiously eager to speak. The innkeep intervened to instill order. Hesitant to presume friendliness with a swordsman, he caught Lain by the elbow and steered for an empty table. Korendir followed, beseiged, while unnoticed in the commotion, the maid effected an embarrassed retreat.
The taproom grew thick with pipe smoke as the afternoon progressed. Men drank, and their tongues loosened; one by one they related the horrors which beset their town and farmsteads. They told of children dragged from their beds, to be found mauled in the morning; of wives, cousins, and livestock savaged, and stout doors unhinged by razor claws. Korendir listened, intent, to accounts of death by venom. His beer tankard warmed, barely touched, while unseen beneath the table, the fist which rested between his knees slowly, dangerously clenched.
“The fields were abandoned before harvest,” the current speaker lamented. “Had to be, and no question. The hell-spawned creatures even kill during daylight, particularly just before rains.”
Korendir raised his tankard and took a sip. Sailors had told him similar tales. Two things a wereleopard could not tolerate: water, and changes in air pressure. Wetlands they avoided out of distaste; but the lows that brought in a storm, or the rarefied air of high altitudes, invariably drove the creatures to fits of bloodthirsty slaughter. Indigenous to the dry wastes of Ardmark, wereleopards seldom strayed. Routes into inhabited lands were protected by boglands, or to the east by the peaks of the Doriads. Given that Mel’s Bye suffered the worst attacks before rainfall, the creatures’ avoidance of altitude still held; which meant some other feature in the landscape must have changed.
“Where does the River Ellgol originate?” Korendir asked at last.
The folk of Mel’s Bye regarded him as if he had downed an imprudent quantity of beer. Yet the tankard at the mercenary’s elbow remained three quarters filled. His hand was steady on the table, and his eyes shone disturbingly sane. “Do I have to take a hike to find out?”
Across the trestle, a burly, black-haired fellow banged a fist on the boards. “Did we all beg loans from the merchants for this man to take air in the countryside?”
“Emmon, hold your tongue!” snapped Lain.
Korendir shifted his regard to the one who had called him from the cliff site that meant more to him than life. His voice went suddenly cold. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“A jaunt upriver won’t kill wereleopards,” shouted Emmon in surly provocation. Wild-eyed, and muscled like a bull under his patched and faded doublet, he looked crazed enough to murder.
Under the table, Korendir’s fingers tightened on his sword hilt. His body angled forward, ready at an instant’s notice to kick clear of the table.
Only one in that tensioned atmosphere dared interference. Silent as a sprite, Carralin appeared at the huge man’s elbow. Up close, their resemblance was striking, and only possible between siblings. The girl murmured something, and Emmon subsided with a frown. The rest of the folk in the taproom sighed as one with relief.
Korendir waited still, his posture indicative of extreme impatience.
The innkeep was quick to speak up. “The River Ellgol springs from a fissure in the hills, my lord. Onmak Tarris raised sheep there, years ago, before his wife died of a fall. Nobody else ever settled that way. The path is steep, and very rough.”
“Not for a wereleopard,” Korendir said softly. Few in the room overheard him. With a swordsman’s disciplined grace, he rose and called out to Lain. “Find me a guide willing to walk this town until sunset. The autumn rains are not far off. Unless the wereleopards are confined to Ardmark before then, not one of your people will be safe.”