The ghost that had been straining for days to get through to Gerin drifted toward him again. 'Captain, I take oath it looks like you,' Van said. 'Face a little wider, maybe, but leave out that and what looks like a broken nose and it could be your twin-'
'Father Dyaus above!' Gerin whispered. 'Dagref, is it you?' He moved to embrace his slain brother's shade, but it was like trying to hold a breeze.
The ghost withdrew a few paces, slowly and sadly shaking its head. Gerin recalled that gesture well. His older brother had always used it when the Fox did something foolish.
The memory brought sudden tears to the baron's eyes, though he and Dagref had not always been close. Dagref was half a dozen years older, while Gerin, as he approached manhood, found the soldier's life Dagref took to so naturally did not suit him at all. Or so I thought then, Gerin said to himself: here I am living it.
The lips of Dagref's ghost were moving, but the Fox still could not make out any words. He heard his brother's voice in his mind, but so windblown and blurred by echoes that he could not grasp Dagref's meaning. 'Once more,' he begged.
The wraith grimaced in exasperation, but started over. This time its meaning, or a sentence of it, was clear: 'You still don't keep the stables as clean as our father would have liked,' Dagref's ghost said. It shook its head again in the gesture so familiar to Gerin, then, satisfied it had finally got across what was necessary, disappeared into the darkness, leaving Gerin more bewildered than before.
'What did it say?' Van asked. Gerin told him. Van tugged at his beard, gave the Fox a quizzical look. 'It's hounded you for days to let you know you're a scurvy excuse for a housekeeper? Tell me, captain, was your brother crack-brained?'
'Of course not.' The news Dagref's ghost had given was plainly important to it. Gerin cursed himself for failing to see why. He turned the ghost's enigmatic words over and over in his mind, but came no closer to understanding them.
Half a night's sleep brought no new insight. He was glad, though, when he woke, to see the sun shining through the trees to the east and all the moons gone from the sky.
'You look like death warmed over,' Van said. 'There's dried blood all over your face.'
The baron scrubbed with his fingers, saying, 'I must have done enough tossing and turning to open up a cut or two.' He pounded left fist into right palm. 'Damn everything, what was Dagref trying to tell me?'
He got no good answer to that, either from his own wits or from his comrades when he put the riddle to them. 'Perhaps he wants you to have a good storage place for my cheap barley,' Rihwin suggested. Gerin glared at him, but it made as much sense as anything else.
Not long after they left camp, they came upon the mangled and partially eaten carcass of a brown bear. Beside it slept a naked Trokme. Awakened by their approach, he leaped up and fled into the woods, red hair streaming behind him.
Rihwin stared in disbelief. 'No man could-'
'And no man did,' Van said grimly. 'Look at the tracks: bear and wildcat. It shouldn't have been too hard. In were shape, the woodsrunner would have taken no hurt. Then he had his feast, curled up afterwards-and changed back when the moons set.'
The forest path was punctuated by random death: another bear, horribly torn; a Trokme with his throat ripped out; a pair of Elaboninan warriors so mutilated as to appall even Gerin's hard-bitten crew; a crofter's cottage, its flimsy door torn from leather hinges, a blackened puddle of blood luring flies at the threshold. Gerin did not need to look to be sure no one was alive inside. He hoped the deaths there had been quick.
Live Trokmoi still lurked in the woods. An arrow from hiding grazed the side of Gerin's helm. He and Rihwin shot blindly into the undergrowth. The sniper, unhurt, let fly again, hitting Priscos' left arm just below the shoulder. The driver cursed and tore out the arrow, then ripped at his tunic for cloth to bandage the wound.
The rest of the Elabonians jumped from their chariots. They ran for cover, then stalked the barbarian sharpshooter. The Trokme, no fool, held his well-concealed position until he had what he thought was a good shot at Van. But in his cramped quarters he could not draw bow to his ear, only to his chest. The outlander's stout cuirass turned his shaft.
Van shouted in rage and rushed at the thicket from which the arrow had come. The Trokme fled. A blow of Van's mace felled him from behind before he had taken ten strides. Like a charging longtooth, the outlander was deadly quick in a short rush.
He surveyed the sniper's corpse without a hint of remorse. 'A pity the craven bushwhacker didn't die slower,' he said. 'If he wanted to fight, he should have come at us like a man.'
Gerin had planned and executed enough ambushes in his time to keep a discreet silence.
When they returned to the chariots, Priscos was matter-of-fact. ' Did you get him?' he asked. At Gerin's nod, he said, 'Good,' and jerked the reins to get the horses moving north again.
They returned to the Elabon Way no more than a couple of hours' journey south of Fox Keep. Gerin was sickly aware he was returning without even the ragtag army which had set out from Ricolf's holding. The werenight had seen to that. His main hope now was that it had disrupted Balamung's men more than the Elabonians.
Then that hope died too. A shout rang out from the flanking forest: 'Here's more o' the buggers!' A score and more of footsoldiers charged from the woods, spears ready to cast, swords bared.
But the Fox was still reaching for his bow when he realized the cry had been in his own tongue, not the woodsrunners'. And when the onrushing warriors spotted him (or more likely spied Van and his distinctive armor), they stopped so abruptly that one man stumbled and fell to his knees. Then they came on again, but now in friendship and joy, raising a cheer to chill the heart of any Trokme in earshot.
Gerin recognized them as Drago the Bear's men; their commander was one of Drago's chief retainers, Fedor the Hunter. The Fox did not know Fedor well. He usually stayed behind at Drago's keep as deputy when his overlord went to Castle Fox. But Gerin had never been gladder to see anyone than this heavyset, scar-faced warrior.
Fedor led his men up to the Fox. 'We thought you dead, my lord,' he said accusingly. 'The Trokmoi and their cursed wizard claimed you were, when they tried to get me to yield the Castle of the Bear to them.'
'Drago's holding stands?' Gerin said. 'You beat back an attack the wizard led himself? Great Dyaus, Fedor, how? His magic has leveled more keeps than I can count.'
'Oh, he tried to shake the holding down after I said no to him, so he did. Fires and smokes and flying demons and I don't know what all. But the Castle of the Bear is good and solid, and it sits on bedrock. As for the rest'-he shrugged with the same stolidity Drago would have shown-'we were inside and they were outside, and that's the way it stayed. The wizard's lightnings blasted one breach, but no woodsrunners came through it alive. They paid a lot more than half the butcher's bill, my lord. After a while, they'd had enough and went away.'
Listening to the bald report, Gerin decided Fedor had not had the imagination to see he had no chance. And, going on phlegmatically where a more perceptive man would have despaired, he had endured. Something to be said for dullness after all, the Fox thought.
But Fedor was not yet done. 'You need not look so surprised, my lord. Fox Keep still holds too, you know.'
The baron's heart gave a great bound within him. 'No,' he said softly. 'I did not know.'
'Aye, it does.' Fedor seemed oblivious to the impact his news had on the Fox. 'They're under siege, true, but they managed to sneak a messenger to us through the woodsrunners' lines: some trick of your wizard Siglorel, I understand. Sixty men set out from the Castle of the Bear two days ago, but after last night-' He shrugged again. 'For a while I thought I'd lost my wits, but I was too busy staying alive to worry about it.'
'Weren't we all?' Gerin said.
Thanks to the footsoldiers, the final approach to Fox Keep was slower now, but Gerin would not have traded them for all the treasures of Ikos. A final fear gripped him: that the keep had fallen after its messenger went out. Then Van pointed north. 'Right on the skyline, captain-the very tip of your watchtower. And I think'-he squinted-' aye, I think it's your banner atop it.'
As his men exulted, Gerin tried to follow his friend's pointing finger. He had to say, 'Your eyes are better than mine.' But that Van saw what he claimed, the baron had no doubt. He had surmounted every stumbling block now, save the last… putting an end to the mightiest mage the world had seen in two thousand years. And even as he quickened his pace toward his castle, he realized he still had no idea how to do that.
