Without thinking, the anxious Ashkatar raises his whip, which Caliphestros catches just before the black-bearded commander can bring it down again, silently giving the yantek an admonishing reminder, and looking to the now fully alert panther beneath him. “Avoiding all acts of foolishness,” the old man says, “now that we bear such precious evidence, which is the most accurate and valuable form of knowledge—and persuasion …”
“Send runners to the Groba!” Ashkatar orders, busily turning his attention to immediate matters, in part to hide his own embarrassment. “Let them know that more explanations will follow with us—but that they must heed our warning concerning the water in the northern wells!”
“Well said,” Caliphestros judges. Casting his eyes about the increasing darkness, and seeing a nearby hillock that is crowned with thick, obscuring undergrowth, he gives Ashkatar a nod. “Now, Yantek, I shall withdraw and attend to the needs of an old man’s body, and rejoin you in but a few minutes.”
“Very good, Lord Caliphestros—I shall have our escort ready to march by the time you return!” Moving back into his much more comfortable role of admonishing and administering commander, Ashkatar begins to sound out more orders, to both the units that will remain behind on guard and patrol, and to those who will go ahead to Okot. Caliphestros, meanwhile, urges Stasi toward the hillock—
At which Keera notices something odd: the old man has his eyes fixed, not on his destination, nor on the objects he carries, nor even on the powerful companion beneath him. He hurries Stasi along: a natural enough thing, if his old man’s need to relieve himself is as strong as he has suggested. Yet, Keera decides, there remains something not quite correct about his behavior …
Thus, with darkness now falling in its characteristically rapid fashion, in the springtime hours between bright day and Moonrise within Davon Wood, and with Ashkatar’s troops assembling their torches south of the hole at which the foragers, Caliphestros, and the Bane yantek have only just been standing—and most of all, knowing full well that her small scheme may lead to a moment of profound embarrassment between herself and the aging scholar she has come to so admire and trust—Keera puts caution aside and, backing slowly away from the others as they ready themselves for the last stage of the journey south, quickly and silently slips up the trunk and into the branches of one especially thick elm tree. The higher reaches of this gnarled giant offer connections to still other thickly leaved forest sentinels—maples, oaks, and firs—all of which ultimately lead up and over the hillock behind which Caliphestros quickly disappears.
One secret unraveled, another made more complex …
IT MAY SEEM IMPLAUSIBLE or indeed impossible, that a man or woman, however skilled, should be able to move through treetops every bit as stealthfully as those animals practiced in that form of undetected movement: birds, squirrels, and tree kittens. And yet, with the wind on Keera’s side—blowing, as it so often does, in from the west and pushing both her limited scent and any excessive sounds of movement back toward Ashkatar’s noisy group of warriors—she is indeed able to achieve this feat, despite the added danger of Caliphestros’s continuing to search the branches above him, evidently looking for something or someone with whom he intends to meet.
The discovery of just who that someone is, when it comes, nearly destroys all Keera’s clever, silent tracking in the treetops. She hears the quiet chatter and quickly beating wings of a starling flying at night, and, correctly guessing who is on the way, turns about and smiles at the same speckled, rainbow-tinted bird that the three foragers encountered what seems a long time ago, when they first followed Stasi and Caliphestros back to the pair’s cave. The bird flits about the spot Keera currently occupies, in the middle of an oak limb, then alights on the limb next to her, staring intently upon the tracker’s human features. Keera is delighted to once again hear the starling’s approximation of Caliphestros’s name, which the bird chatters to her proudly; however, she is also deeply nervous that Caliphestros himself will spot the bird and thereafter lock eyes on her, and so Keera urges it along:
“Quietly, now!” she whispers, as softly as she can. Cupping her hands, she tries to urge the starling down the limb, but, as if in a moment of indignation, the feathered fellow simply flaps noisily into the air a few feet, and then lands directly atop Keera’s head. Now utterly at a loss as to what to do—for the bird is no longer making any sound, but rather settling in, as if he means to stay for a bit—she sits as still as her unnerved condition will allow: for Caliphestros has by now heard the starling, and is more quickly turning from one direction to another, imitating the sounds of the bird in an effort to persuade him to come down. When the speckled messenger finally does stir, however, neither of the humans present causes his action; rather, it is the sudden, utterly silent, yet swift and somewhat threatening passing, above, of an enormous pair of dark, gliding wings, which come close enough to the starling to make it shriek once in alarm and then flutter down to Caliphestros in a nervous dart, alighting upon his shoulder.
“Ah!” the old man says, turning to face the starling’s wide eyes. “What was all that business? And where is your associate, if I may ask?”
But the starling’s “associate” is otherwise engaged, for the moment, having swept down to take up the smaller bird’s position on Keera’s tree limb; the difference being that this creature—the same great eagle owl that has been only very occasionally and briefly visible, from time to time, in Caliphestros’s wake, as well as visiting with Visimar—stands every bit as tall as Keera, when she sits upon the limb they share. The tufts of feathers that appear at once to be her ears as well as her stern eyebrows, and which ordinarily sit in a lower and more critical position than do those of the smaller males of the species, rise high above her enormous and severe golden eyes, for the moment, in the presence of this strange human who has ventured into the bird’s realm.
Upon hearing Caliphestros chatting with the starling below, however, the owl evidently feels that she has made whatever point she intended to impress upon Keera, and suddenly half-opens her wings, falling and then gliding in wide circles, with startling simplicity and silence, down toward the section of an ancient log upon which the great master of Nature and Science lectures his frenetic young student of language and diplomacy.
Only when the owl has left Keera’s tree limb does the tracker see that the great horn ruler of the air clutches tightly within one talon the same group of plants and flowers that Keera herself discussed with Caliphestros upon their return from his cave: again, not so long ago as events make it feel. Wild mountain hops, meadow bells, and woad, Keera considers silently; and, although I cannot now see, I would guess that these, too, were harvested by a sharp blade—does the fever then spread inside the frontiers of Broken?
As if in answer to this inward question, Keera hears Caliphestros begin to talk to both of the birds—whose arrival, she suddenly notices, has not raised the least reaction from Stasi.
“… and so,” Caliphestros says to the pair of birds, who are now perched upon two half-limbs that point skyward from a fallen maple trunk which lies close in front of their master’s seat. “It will be for you two to find them—” His expressions become much simpler and more deliberate: “Soldiers—with horses,” he says, repeating the phrase a few times more, until the starling suddenly cries:
“Sol-jers! Hors-es!” And then the little creature turns to the owl to add, “Ner-tus!”
If the two birds were children, it would be a clear baiting of the larger but less intellectually skilled sibling by the smaller and quicker of the two; and the starling darts from Caliphestros’s shoulder to the top of his skullcap, and back again, seeming almost to laugh. The owl’s glare, meanwhile, becomes the more severe, as if to warn, Do not gloat, little man, about your chatter, or I shall swallow you up! Caliphestros, sensing all this, inserts himself in the middle of it, placing a gentle hand around the starling, holding him before his face, and saying, “That is enough of that, Little Mischie
f”—for such, apparently, is his affectionate name for the starling—“and I have told you as much before. Taunting will get you eaten, and then where should Visimar and I be, eh?”
“Viz-ee-mah!” Little Mischief just manages to squeak out in defiance of Caliphestros’s grip, and the old man cannot help but laugh at his diminutive persistence.
And in the tree above, however, Keera’s face has gone puzzled: for the name Visimar is as well known in Okot as it is in the kingdom of Broken. Is the mysterious scholar’s acolyte, then, a part of his plan that he has not yet chosen to share with his Bane allies? And if so, why has he chosen to keep it a secret? For some sinister reason?
“Remember, now,” Caliphestros resumes, below: “It is required that you work together, you two, and so this bickering must stop! Visimar knows of the fever in the countryside and in the city, but he must now know of it in the Wood, so that he can tell Sentek Arnem.” All this elaborate talk again proving largely useless, Caliphestros stares at Little Mischief and says, firmly, “Fever—Wood.”
“Fee-vah Wood! Wood fee-vah!” the starling replies, now struggling to get a wing free of his human companion, who is finally satisfied that he will speak the correct words at the correct time, and releases Little Mischief to sit upon a nearby branch.
“Which leaves but one thing more,” Caliphestros says, reaching into his bag—
And from it he withdraws another golden arrow, indistinguishable from that which he and Keera took from the dead member of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard. The enormous owl immediately flies toward Caliphestros’s shoulder, shocking the human with her speed, then hovers a few inches above him in order to allow those talons that do not carry the flowers—and which are fully as large as human fingers—to snatch the arrow away from him: once again, no instructions would seem needed, but Caliphestros looks to the starling again, if only to be certain.
“The arrow, Little Mischief,” he says. “Also to Visimar.”
“Viz-ee-mah! Awhoh!” the starling repeats, again comically enough to cause Caliphestros to cradle his head in his hands and try to stifle a bout of chuckling, lest the birds think him anything but resolved and serious in his instructions to them.
As both Keera and Caliphestros will shortly be missed by the rest of their traveling party, she is happy to see Caliphestros wave his arms and send the birds off. They circle the little clearing behind the hillock where they have received their latest instructions, and then finally straighten their path of flight so that they head in the direction of the Fallen Bridge over Hafften Falls and, beyond it, the most likely place for the forces of Broken to make camp before any sort of engagement with Ashkatar’s army. Caliphestros then shifts his robe in order to relieve himself (his nominal purpose for coming to this remov place) without shifting from the log, and finally urges Stasi to stand close by and lower her neck, so that he can slide from the log onto her shoulders easily. Keera takes the first indication of the old man’s personal actions as her signal to move back along the treetops that she traveled to reach her perch. In a matter of only a few seconds more, she hears her brother and Heldo-Bah calling her name, a distinct sense of worry in Veloc’s voice.
Even for the famous Keera, the marvelous manner in which she manages to move back through the treetops is a wonder; and it is not long before she is once again among the men and women who have collected for the last leg of their march, and coolly lying to her brother and Heldo-Bah by saying that, as Caliphestros had taken the opportunity to see to his private business, she thought that she would, as well.
“You might have told someone, Keera,” Veloc chides.
“Great Moon, Veloc,” Heldo-Bah bellows, “you would be a thousand times more likely to be taken off by some forest beast than Keera ever would—I really don’t know why you persist in playing this idiotic game of being the responsible brother. It’s almost as feebleminded as your insistence on your being an expert historian.”
“Do not go so far as considering a return to that subject, you two,” comes a new voice; and the three foragers all turn to see Caliphestros and Stasi appearing from the darkness. “The time for idiotic blather has passed,” he continues; but his orders cannot stop Veloc from trembling just a bit as he notes to himself what a truly ghostly apparition the white panther is, in this sort of rapidly fading light.
“Great Moon,” Veloc whispers to Heldo-Bah, “it’s truly no wonder the Tall fear her as they do—the animal appears as out of the night air!”
“Ah, ficksel,” Heldo-Bah answers calmly. “And you dare call me the superstitious one?”
At which point Yantek Ashkatar steps forward and declares, “All right, then—to those of you continuing on: I intend to be within the Den of Stone in two hours—and Heldo-Bah, if we fail to make it in that time, I shall know whose back my whip will cut, in return!”
“Brave words, when you have an army behind you, Ashkatar,” Heldo-Bah answers, nonetheless falling alongside the middling-long column of soldiers to keep pace with them. “But neither the Bane nor the Tall have yet made the whip that will cut my skin, I promise you that …”
Once again walking beside Stasi and Caliphestros as they move to catch up to Ashkatar, Keera shakes her head. “I promise you, my lord—there really are Bane tribe members who are not so devoted to bickering as are those two. Or three, I suppose, if you number Yantek Ashkatar among them, these three—”
“Oh, I am certain of it,” Caliphestros interrupts, an enigmatic smile entering his features. “Indeed, I have seen those among your people who can be almost silent—even as they dance along the treetops …”
Arrival on Lord Baster-kin’s Plain presents Sentek Arnem’s Talons with an eerie silence
ON THE MORNING that Sixt Arnem marches his full khotor of the Talons onto the section of Lord Baster-kin’s Plain north of the Fallen Bridge, he finds no evidence that the men from the Esleben garrison, who were to have met him there, have survived one or the other of the pestilences that Visimar has been able to determine are at work in Broken, during their march to the Cat’s Paw. Similarly, but far more surprisingly, there is no sign of the detachment of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard that has always been assigned to the northernmost boundary of the great family’s most arable and strategic piece of land; yet neither is there any visible token that these men met with some calamity. Instead, as the Talons make their way through the rough, high grass at the edge of the Plain and then south into the rich pastureland that has been chewed to a short and almost uniform length by the Basterkin family’s renowned shag cattle, they encounter what is, in many ways, the most unnerving circumstance for soldiers who are on the march, full of questions, and far from home:
Nothing.
True, the cattle graze in their ordinary manner (or rather, most of them do, for there are clearly more than a few missing), and take little notice of the newcomers, save to move off to a safe distance; yet none shows any obvious sign of disease. Nevertheless, Arnem’s men are all aware that units of the Guard should be patrolling this part of the Plain: and so where are they? Arnem knows that action is the only cure for his own as well as his men’s bewilderment: thus, after ordering the establishment of a central camp, the sentek orders his scouts to employ their keen talents for detection as far as a dozen miles up and down the northern bank of the Cat’s Paw, reminding them, along with the rest of his men, that no water from the river is to be consumed, either by themselves or by their mounts, save from the several collecting ponds for rainwater that the Baster-kin family has constructed throughout the Plain over the last several years. Arnem’s central camp is hard by one such pool; and as his tent is erected, the sentek orders the establishment of an observation post near the southernmost of these small sources of safe water, a post that, situated closest to the Fallen Bridge, offers a commanding view of both the river and the Wood beyond. Tents are pitched, there, campfires lit, watches scheduled, and the men are ordered to be ready at a moment’s notice.
As the sounds of the other fausten p
reparing their own tents around Arnem’s begin to resonate through the midday air north of the bridge, the sentek, Niksar, and Visimar move their horses ever closer to the rough border of the Plain that lines its southern edge, Arnem’s eyes alert for any sign of Akillus or his men returning with news, and particularly for any sign of the missing members of Baster-kin’s Guard. The mood throughout the Plain grows more grim if determined with the passage of each hour, as does the bitterness over the advantage that the soldiers who were supposed to have been already positioned in the area might have offered.
“Damn them,” Arnem seethes softly, and neither Visimar nor Niksar have any trouble understanding who is the object of his ire. “I did not expect to find those brass-banded dandies alert and at their posts, but somewhere in the vicinity of those positions might have been of some use.”
“Would you expect jackals to become wolves, then, Sentek,” Visimar asks in reply, “simply because an air of danger presents itself?”
Niksar nods slowly. “He speaks truly, Sentek,” the linnet murmurs. “Given that this would be the first prize that the Bane would likely attempt to seize during any attack on the kingdom, we might have expected that the Guard would have withdrawn. The sole questions being, in which direction, why, and under whose authority …”
“ ‘Authority,’ Niksar?” Arnem asks. “You think that they had orders to remove themselves from the field? Such orders, I trust you realize, could only have come from one source.”
Visimar desires with all his heart not to be the one to respond to this statement, and so is delighted when he hears the handsome young linnet reply, “Sentek—I do not intend this as anything other than what it is: an observation of what I see as undeniable facts, as well as an attempt to honor my brother, and to question the peculiar way in which Donner’s plight was consistently ignored by our superiors, our civilian superiors, during his time at Esleben; surely this situation suggests that Lord Basterkin, whatever your former respect for him, is not the man you have so often trusted him to be.”