Kagonesti

Chapter 22

A bit of jealousy robispcrcd in Iydahoe's ear, tbougb the emotion was far from a consuming blaze. Instead, the warrior wrestled with a sense of unfairness, spurred by the envious knowledge that his older brother, Kawllaph, was a very lucky wild elf. Trotting through the woods on this mission for his brother, Iydahoe really wished that he, himself, would soon know good fortune in equal measure.

Kawllaph had asked Berriama to marry him,and she had agreed with almost shameless eagerness. Now Iydahoe ran to fetch Washallak Pathfinder from the village of the Silvertrout tribe, so that the muted notes of the Ram's Horn could signal the solemnity, the timeless commitment, of the wedding vows.

When he thought of his brother's good fortune, Iyda- hoe felt that pang of envy, the feeling that Kawllaph had all the luck. Iydahoe himself would like to court a maiden — indeed, lovely Moxilli, of the long, silken hair, came immediately to his mind. It would be splendid to have her as a companion, a lifemate. A wife was the perfect thing to make his life complete.

But then Iydahoe's thoughts became more practical. He became painfully shy and tongue-tied whenever he so much as greeted Moxilli. And he looked more carefully at his brother's situation-Berriama was certainly not the bride that Iydahoe would have chosen! Like so many wild elf females, Berriama had a noted tendency to nag, as well as a distressing sense of the importance of her own opinions.

Iydahoe felt that a true warrior should be vexed by such assertiveness. He remembered the tales of his grandfather's father, of the dangers that had menaced the tribes during the Dragon Wars, and the courage with which the warriors met multitudes of threats. For a thousand years since then, the wild elves had enjoyed the peace that had reigned across Ansalon. Young warriors like Iydahoe yearned for earlier times, and strong-minded females like Berriama became all too willing to unleash their tempers and their tongues.

Still, Kagonesti life was not bad-in fact, Iydahoe could imagine nothing better. They had the vast wealth of untrammeled forest, the lakes and the heights… They had the freedom to go where they wanted, to take the food that was offered everywhere by bountiful Ansalon.

His regrets vanishing in the cool stillness of the woods, Iydahoe raced easily along the forest trail, skirting the deeper woods to run among widely spaced pine trunks. This was the second day of his journey, and he would need to travel all day tomorrow before he reached the Silvertrout village.

Iydahoe tried to play over his arrival in his mind. The Pathfinder was a revered figure, after all, and the young warrior wanted to convey the invitation with proper formality. He would greet Washallak Pathfinder at his lodge on the low hillock, politely asking if the bearer of the Ram's Horn would journey to the settlement of the White- tail tribe at his earliest convenience to preside over the wedding of Kawllaph and Berriama.

Iydahoe welcomed his mission, grateful that his status as a warrior gave him the right to perform it. The stinging pain of the tattoo needle had faded weeks earlier, within hours after his father, the tribal shaman, had ritually marked him. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the twin symbols on his face still seemed to warm his skin in a way that was not a source of irritation as much as of wonder.

His left eye was encircled by the ornately detailed outline of a long-lobed oak leaf, with extensions reaching around his forehead and a stem that trailed down to one side of his chin. A plain circle enclosed the other hazel eye, and though Iydahoe would have loved to wear the spirals of a veteran warrior, for now he had to settle for the unadorned roundel of the untested but battle-ready brave.

A feather, Iydahoe thought, returning to the pleasant contemplation of his status. He would need to get one or two bright feathers to complete his adornment as a proud Kagonesti brave. Perhaps he would trek all the way to the coast and seek a snow goose. He imagined the pristine plumage against his black hair and tattooed, sun-bronzed skin. The picture was fierce and gratifying. Perhaps he would even tie one of the rare plumes to the haft of his long-bladed knife.

His thoughts wandering, Iydahoe was only vaguely aware of the mountainous shelves rising to his left, the great sprawl of the Solamnic flatland to his right. This was wild elf territory, well south of the Black Feather and Blue- lake villages but still near the wild heart of Kagonesti forest.

Iydahoe recalled his surroundings quickly when he saw a rising, crested pillar of rock. The unique structure triggered one of his prouder memories-knowledge of a place that he alone knew. Along the crest of the foothills, just beyond the rocky pillar, a narrow gorge twisted into the sheltered depths of a granite ridge. Delicate mosses grew on the floor of the gorge and showed no sign that any elf or human had ever visited the shadowy cut or the shady grotto hidden deep within. Iydahoe had found that path when he was younger-a decade before he had gotten his first warrior's tattoo. He had shown it to no one, preferring to keep the place as his own private sanctuary. Now, as a warrior, he felt that it was right and natural to know of such a place.

Before sunset, he killed a grouse with a quick arrow, cooking the unexpected delight on a small, smokeless fire. He reflected with serene pleasure on the bounty that the vast forest so willingly provided to the tribes. For a thousand years, the braves of the Kagonesti had been the sole explorers of this vast realm of forest land. Since the departure of the dragons, the servants of the Dark Queen had mostly left the wild elves alone. The bakali had vanished into their swamps; some said that the race had been exterminated, though elder warriors cautioned against this rash assumption. Ogres still lived among the high valleys of the Khalkists, but these were many marches to the north. Iydahoe, like many other young warriors, had never even seen an ogre, much less been forced to battle one.

Humans, of course, remained the eternal problem. For the first centuries after the Dragon War, mankind had ignored this vast woodland. A hundred years before Iyda- hoe's birth, however, human emissaries had once again tried to claim portions of these wilds. They came from a place so distant that Iydahoe could not imagine it-a mighty city and palace they called Istar. Only a few of these humans had been bold enough to reach the deep forests, and Kagonesti warriors had wiped them out with a savage efficiency that should ensure against further trespasses.

Iydahoe knew that the warriors of the Kagonesti were smarter, faster, and quieter than any of their foes. The elves had better eyesight and a far keener sense of smell. These facts, coupled with nearly endless patience and a complete familiarity with their woodland home, kept the wild elves confident that they could quickly terrify or destroy any invader.

The young warrior slept comfortably under the stars, then rose with the dawn as quickly as any awakening wild animal. Stopping only to drink fresh water from a splashing creek, he started the last day of his journey.

Shortly after noon, a waft of wind swirled around him and Iydahoe smelled the fires of the Silvertrouts. He sniffed again, surprised, then alarmed. The smoke had an acrid taint, and the odor was strong, yet the village of the Silvertrouts was sdll several hours away.

The fires that sent smoke to his nostrils must be burning somewhere else-or else they were much larger than any cook's blaze. He sniffed again, taut with alarm. Mixed with smoke of wood and charcoal were other things-the smell of wet leather, steaming… and the stench of charred, blackened flesh.

Iydahoe sprinted, racing like a deer as he curved along the narrow forest paths. The malodorousness increased, and he knew it originated in the Silvertrout village. But these were not the odors of cooking, of tanned hides and smoking jerky. Instead, Iydahoe knew that he raced toward a scene of destruction and death.

Yet even that foreknowledge could not prepare him for the horror that met his eyes when at last he broke from the woods into the once-familiar village of the Silvertrouts. He saw charred ruins, still smoldering, where huts had stood. Grotesque shapes sprawled everywhere. He had to force his mind toward the realization that these blackened forms were bodies, the corpses of brutally murdered Kagonesti.

Like all of the wild elves, Iydahoe had visited the home village of the Pathfinder on many occasions, and he knew well the orderly layout of lodges, the ceremonial ring in the middle, and the watch posts mounted high in the sprawling oaks surrounding the community. Now those posts-and even the oaks that had borne them-were gone, scattered in the wreckage of felled trunks, shattered branches, and more bodies.

Iydahoe walked through the village in a daze. He stepped over a ragged shape, only afterward realizing that it was-had been-a child. Some force of unspeakable evil had torn it nearly in half.

Nearby, another blackened form was sprawled with sticklike appendages-arms? — stretched toward the mangled child. A steel shaft emerged from the back of the larger form, and Iydahoe recognized it as the arrow that had brought the wild elf down, too late to help its tiny offspring.

All around was evidence of more killing, butchery on a scale that staggered Iydahoe's senses. Over where the ceremonial ring had been surrounded by the lodges of great warriors, he saw only charcoal and the irregular shapes that he had come to accept as bodies. The warrior was not aware of the trembling in his own limbs until he started down the steps into the ceremonial pit. Then his heel slipped off the ground and he tumbled heavily to his side, rolling the last few steps until he lay on his back.

The sky, at least, was normal. He saw white clouds scudding through a rich, creamy blue that seemed to belie the horrors on the ground. For a moment, he wondered if he had imagined it. Surely he had dozed off in some forest meadow and been visited by some gruesome dream!

But then an eddy of wind brought the smells to him again, and he knew that this was no dream, that the death of the Silvertrout village was a nightmare more chilling, more evil, than any sleep-bound vision. He forced himself to sit, then shakily climbed to his feet and stumbled up the steps leading from the ceremonial pit.

His numbness began to give way to grief as he started to grasp that an entire village-one of the four tribes of Kagonesti-had been exterminated. Tears stung his eyes, but very swiftly anguish fell away in the face of a rising, terrible rage. Who had done this? What enemy brought killing on such a ruthless, all-encompassing scale?

His warrior's instincts turned his eyes to the ground, and for the first time he noticed hoofprints. Horses had trampled back and forth through the village, yet so numbing had been his shock that he hadn't noticed the plain spoor when he had first entered the Silvertrout village. Now he saw that the horses must have numbered many dozen, perhaps a hundred.

His first thought, filtered with disbelief, was that the House Elves of Silvanesti had struck this brutal blow. Yet, despite the enmity that had lingered between the two elven clans for more than three thousand years, such brutality seemed incomprehensible. The House Elves drove the Kagonesti out of their heartland, but they had never pursued them this far north. Why, now, would they come with such a killing force?

He remembered the steel arrow shaft, and he knew that this massacre had not been the work of House Elves. Again he turned his attention to the prints in the dust and rubble. Iydahoe saw that the hooves were broad, shod with heavy metal rings. Some legionnaires of Istar rode great horses, he knew. But how could a force of clumsy humans have approached so close to a Kagonesti village? Surely they would have been discovered a day's march away, met by a deadly ambuscade that blocked them from any such attack! If the force had been huge-perhaps a thousand riders or more-they might have battled through the ambush, but they would never have found the women and children in the village when they got here! Yet, from the hundreds of corpses scattered all over the clearing, Iydahoe knew that the tribe had been taken by surprise.

Had anyone escaped? The young warrior's eyes ranged over the wreckage as he forced himself to study the ground with all his skill. The underbrush fringing the camp had been thoroughly trampled, but the branches bent inward, toward the village. It was the attackers who had done the trampling, and they had come from all four sides. Even the grassy hillock where the Pathfinder's hut had stood was smashed flat-it seemed as though a rank of horsemen must have ridden over it in tight formation.

A chill of panic shivered along Iydahoe's spine at another realization. He raced among the ruined huts, toward the gentle elevation where the lone lodge had once stood. He remembered well his first visit here, seven or eight decades ago, when Washallak Pathfinder had played the Ram's Horn on that rise. The surreal sounds had soothed Iydahoe and all the other young elves, filling them with a mystical sense of wonder. As he had grown older, the same music had blown soft breath on the coals of his warrior's pride, keeping his heart fire banked against the coming of danger.

Now the site of the Pathfinder's hut was a blackened splotch, flattened, burned, destroyed. The green grass had been trampled into mud, the lodge itself smashed into bits of charred kindling. A corpse, as blackened as all the others, extended half out of what had once been the doorway. No marks distinguished the pathetic remains from any other warrior in the village, but Iydahoe knew beyond doubt that this was the body of Washallak Pathfinder.

A curled piece of shell lay on the ground beside Iydahoe's moccasin. At first he paid no attention to this blackened litter-what was one more bit of debris among a scene of ultimate destruction? The numbness returned as the Pathfinder's death became further erosion of the foundation of the warrior's life. Encased in that shroud of stupor, Iydahoe started to turn away, wondering where he could look to spare his eyes a vista of horror, heartbreak, and despair.

But at the last minute, some glimmer of awareness pulled him back. He looked down at the blackened shard, saw that it was not in fact a curled shell. Instead, it was a piece of something larger, something that spiraled into a circle. Here was another piece, and several tiny fragments were nearby, flattened in the print of a mighty, steel-shod hoof.

Even as he looked at the pieces, as he felt the collapse of a way of life that had lasted for more than three millennia, Iydahoe struggled against the truth. Desperately he wanted to deny that which he understood, the evidence of which could lead to no other conclusion.

The Ram's Horn of the Kagonesti had been destroyed. Finally his despair rose through numbness, forced aside the anger that had yet to kindle into full rage. Iydahoe knelt beside the corpse of the Pathfinder, trying to gather as many of the pathetic shards as he could find, scraping through the dirt, discarding bits of bark and stone.

Finally, he lowered his head and cried.