Filed Teeth

VII

"All right, you goat-lovers! Drag your dead asses out. We got some hiking to do today."

Fetch had a way with words like no lady I've ever known. I slithered out of my blankets, scuttled to the fire, tumbled some wood on, and slid back into the wool. That circle may have been springish, but there was a nip in the air.

Chenyth rolled over. He muttered something about eyes in the night.

"Come on. Roll out. We got a long walk ahead."

Chenyth sat up. "Phew! One of these days we've got to take time off for baths. Hey. Toamas. Wake up." He shook the old man. "Oh!"

"What's the matter?"

"I think he's dead, Will."

"Toamas? Nah. He just don't want to get up." I shook him.

Chenyth was right.

I jumped out of there so fast I knocked the tent down on Chenyth. "Fetch. The old man's dead. Toamas."

She kicked a foot sticking out of another tent, gave me a puzzled look. Then she scurried into the black tent.

I tried to get a look inside. But there were inside flaps too.

Lord Hammer appeared a moment later. His mask was paintless. His gaze swept the horizon, then the camp. Fetch popped out as he started toward our tent.

Chenyth came up cussing. "Damnit, Will, what the hell you..." His jaw drooped. He scrambled out of Lord Hammer's path.

Fetch whipped past and started hauling tent away. Lord Hammer knelt, hand over Toamas's heart. He moved it to the grass. Then he walked to the gap we thought of as a gate.

"What's he doing?" Chenyth asked.

"Wait," Fetch told him.

Lord Hammer halted, faced left, began pacing the perimeter. He paused several times. We resumed our morning chores. Brandy cussed the gods both on Toamas's behalf and because he faced another miserable breakfast. You couldn't tell which mattered more to him. Brandy bitched about everything equally.

His true feelings surfaced when he was the first to volunteer to dig the old man's grave.

Toamas had saved his life in the mountains.

"We Kaveliners got to stick together," he muttered to me. "Way it's always been. Way it'll always be."

"Yeah."

His family and Toamas's lived in the same area. They had been on opposite sides in the civil war with which Kavelin had amused itself in the interim between the El Murid and Great Eastern Wars.

It was one of the few serious remarks I had ever heard from Brandy.

Lord Hammer chose the grave site. It butted against the wall. Toamas went down sitting upright, facing the forest.

"That's where I saw the thing last night," Chenyth told me.

"What thing?"

"When I had guard duty. All I could see was its eyes." He dropped a handful of dirt into the old man's lap. The others did the same. Except Foud. The Harish Elder lowered himself to his belly, placed a small silver dagger under Toamas's folded hands.

We Kaveliners bowed to Foud. This was a major gesture by the Harish. Their second highest honor, given a man who had been their enemy all his life.

I wondered why Foud had done it.

"Why did he die?" Chenyth asked Fetch. "I thought Lord Hammer fixed him."

"He did. Chenyth, the circle took Toamas."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do 1."

I wondered some more. Ignorance and Lord Hammer seemed poles apart.

Maybe he had known. But I couldn't hate him. The way Fetch talked, thirty-seven of us were alive because Toamas had died. The circle certainly was more merciful than the forest.

Lord Hammer gestured. Fetch ran to him. Then he ducked into his tent while she talked.

"Get with it. We've got a long way to go. We'll have to travel fast. Lord Hammer doesn't want to spend any more lives. He wants to leave the forest before nightfall."

We moved. Our packs were trailing odds and ends when we started. Our stomachs weren't full. But those were considerations less important than enduring the protection of another circle.

As we were leaving I noticed a flower blooming in the soft earth where we had put Toamas down. There were dozens of flowers along the wall. The few places where they were missing were the spots where Lord Hammer had paused in his circuit of the wall.

What would happen when all the grave sites were full?

Maybe Lord Hammer knew. But Hammer didn't have much to say.

We passed another circle about noon. It was dead.

The day was warmer, the sky clear. The ice began melting. We made good time. Lord Hammer seemed pleased.

I stared straight ahead, at Russ's back, all morning. If I looked at a tree I could hear it calling. The pull was terrifying.

Chenyth seized my arm. "Stop!"

I almost trampled Russ. "What's up?" Lord Hammer had stopped.

"I don't know."

Fetch was dancing around like a barefoot burglar on a floor covered with tacks. Lord Hammer and his steed might have been some parkland pigeon roost, so still were they. We shuffled round so we could see without leaving the safety of the trail.

We had come to a clearing. It was a quarter mile across. What looked like a mud-dauber's nest, the kind with just one hole, lay at the middle of the clearing. It was big. Like two hundred yards long, fifty feet wide, and thirty feet high. A sense of immense menace radiated from it.

"What is it?" we asked one another. Neither Lord Hammer nor Fetch answered us.

Lord Hammer slowly raised his left arm till it thrust straight out from his shoulder. He lifted his forearm vertically, turning the edge of a stiffened hand toward the structure. Then he raised his right arm, laying his forearm parallel with his eyeslits. Again he stiffened his hand, facing the structure with its edge.

"Let's go!" Fetch snapped. "Follow me." She started running.

We whipped the mules into a trot, ran. We weren't gentle with the balky ones.

We had to go right along the side of that thing. As we approached, I glanced back. Lord Hammer was coming, his mount pacing slowly. Hammer himself remained frozen in the position he had assumed. He was almost indiscernible inside a black nimbus.

His mask glowed like the sun. The face of an animal seemed to peep through the golden light.

I glanced into the dark entry to that mound. Menace, backed by rage and frustration, slammed into me.

Lord Hammer halted directly in front of the hole. The rest of us raced for the forest behind the barrow.

Fetch was scared, but not scared enough to pass the first tree. She stopped. We waited.

And Lord Hammer came.

Never have I seen a horse run as beautifully, or as fast. It may have been my imagination, or the way the sun hit its breath in the cold, but fire seemed to play round its nostrils. Lord Hammer rode as if he were part of the beast.

The earth shuddered. A basso profundo rumble came from the mound.

Lord Hammer swept past, slowing, and we pursued him. No one thought to look back, to see what the earth brought forth. It was too late once we passed that first tree.

"Will," Chenyth panted. "Did you see that horse run? What kind of horse runs like that, Will?"

What could I tell him? "Sorcerer's horse, Chenyth. Hell horse. But we knew that already, didn't we?"

Some of us did. Chenyth never really believed it till then. He figured we were giving him more war stories.

He never understood that we couldn't exaggerate what had happened during the Great Eastern Wars. That we told toned-down stories because there was so much we wanted to forget.

Chenyth couldn't take anything at face value. He worked his way up the column so he could pump Fetch. He didn't get anything from her, either. Lord Hammer led. We followed. For Fetch that was the natural order of life.