Rachel Lee - Shadows of Prophecy

“Music,” she breathed.

“Aye,” murmured Tess.

“But what does it mean?”

“I know not.” Then a thought struck her, and with it a sense of wonderment. “It is as if they are trying to speak to us.”

Sara’s mouth opened with awe, and slowly she placed her hand on the symbol again. “Aye,” she whispered. “Aye. It plays the same notes again.”

Lowering her hand, she looked at Tess. “What shall we do?”

“I think perhaps we should ask the Telneren if they hear the music, too.”

“And what if they don’t?”

“Then we may have found the means of the transmission of the Mysteries.”

“Oh!” Sara’s eyes grew huge.

“It would be wonderful if we could understand it.”

Sara surprised her with a little giggle. “Aye, there is that, isn’t there? What good is an answer if you cannot understand it?”

* * * *

The war councils had already begun. When Tess and Sara returned to the guest lodging, they found that all the men, except Tom, had gone.

“They’re meeting somewhere,” Tom told them. “To discuss strategy for an Anari uprising. Gewindi-Tel is too weak now to act alone, but there are other Tels, many of them, and there are thousands living in the great Anari city of Anahar. So they are discussing how best to get started.”

Sara at once sat beside him. The fire was blazing brightly, and more food had replaced the earlier repast, spread atop one of the stone pallets. “Why aren’t you with them?”

“Archer wanted me to stay here to look after the two of you.” He looked as if he felt a little dismayed by that order.

“Well, I am glad you are here to be our champion,” Sara said stoutly. “I would have missed you.”

Tom brightened, and Tess turned away to hide her smile. She was, she realized, still ravenous, so she picked up a small stone bowl and began to fill it with tantalizing tidbits. “I wonder,” she said, “that they can afford to feed us so well.”

“Apparently the evil winter didn’t strike early here as it did up north,” Tom answered. “I was talking with Jenah about that. He had heard of what was happening but had no idea it was as severe as it was, especially around Derda.”

Just as Tess began to feel replete with food and was considering stretching out on her bedroll, which someone had kindly spread for her, Archer entered the lodging, along with a blast of winter’s breath.

“We must pack and leave at once,” he said.

Tess leaped to her feet. “What’s wrong?”

“The entire village is making ready to leave. Bozandari revenge is about to arrive.”

Archer sat astride his mount, watching the line of villagers as they made their way up into the crags of the mountains above the town. It was a moonless night, but somehow the cliff faces reflected enough starlight to make the path visible.

It was also a terrible night to be exposed to the elements. The bitter, icy wind rushed down from the north, bringing with it the smell of snow soon to fall. Men and women alike carried the younger children in their arms, even though they also bore heavy packs on their backs. Every single member of Gewindi-Tel had tried to bring enough to get them as far as Anahar.

Archer doubted they had succeeded. Even with his party’s packhorses loaded as fully as they could be, no one could carry enough. They would have to hope they would be given food as they passed through other villages.

And that they would grow this small seed of an army.

There were no elderly among the Anari. They did not age as did other men. Created at the hands of the Ilduin, they had been gifted with long life and extraordinary health. Aye, they could die from illness and injury, but illness seldom befell them. They grew older, more mature, and were less likely to want adventure than the younger members of the group, but until the day they died they worked the fields and the stones as strongly as anyone.

The reduction in their numbers, the shrinking of the clans, had come about only because of the Bozandari and their rapacious ways.

The long lives of the Anari, Archer thought, should have warned the Bozandari that eventually trouble would come. For among even this band of Anari, probably a third of them could still remember the times before the slavers had come and conquered them. These elders helped keep the flame of freedom alive in the hearts of their people.

Bowed but not broken, he thought. The Bozandari would never understand.

As the last members of the column passed him, he turned his mount and began to follow. When he reached a promontory, he paused to look back. He could see the torches of the approaching Bozandari army to the northeast, but they were yet a long way from the village.

This group would escape. Satisfied, he spurred after them.

Giri emerged from the night a short time later and fell in beside him. “We’ll be well away by first light.”

“Aye.”

Another icy gust of wind blew down the funnel of the mountains and into their faces. For an instant Archer felt the sting of sleet. Then it was gone.

“What I do not understand,” Giri said, when the wind would no longer snatch away his words, “is why the Bozandari have suddenly become…worse. ’Twas bad enough when they could come into the telners, taking the strongest and best to make into slaves or whores, but never before did it seem that they wanted to rid the world of all Anari. After all, we have been their garden of new slaves.”

Archer rode silently for a minute or two, thinking over how much he should tell his friend. He did not wish to dishearten Giri, but on the other hand…

“There is a worse evil afoot in this world, my friend, than Bozandar and its armies. I fear this evil is using the Bozandari as he used Lantav Glassidor and his minions.”

“What is this evil?”

“Some name him Chaos. Others call him the Enemy.”

Giri stiffened but questioned no further. Apparently the memory of the Anari was not as short as other races, who had long since forgotten such tales or abandoned them as fantasies.

Archer sighed and lifted his head to the heavens, noting that the stars were beginning to blur behind wisps of clouds.

The tight, cold knot that had never quite eased over the countless years seemed to be growing in his chest until it would consume him.

Thus it begins again.

* * * *

The first glow of dawn found them well away from Gewindi-Telner, hidden in the wild reaches of mountains only the Anari knew well enough to traverse. Even here, far out from civilization, there were signs that some rock had spoken to a mason and been harvested.

But the Anari also knew that some of the mountains and rock bound evil in their depths, an evil as old as the world itself. Here they passed quietly, as unobtrusive as might be. Remembering the fire creature they had fought in the Adasen basin, Tom could well understand the caution he saw in those around him.

But at other times there was apparently no evil to concern them, and the pace quickened and conversation resumed.

Eventually, before the canyons and ravines in the mountains had felt the sun’s touch, Jenah called a halt.

“It is safe here,” Jenah told Archer and the rest of his party. “Long have Anari camped safely in the embrace of these rocks.”

Embrace was a good word, Tom thought, looking around them, for it seemed as if they had entered a circle of level ground created by the stones themselves. Dismounting, he helped as much as he could, lifting packs from the tired shoulders of Anari mothers and fathers who carried children now awakening and famished. He helped build cook fires with a strange black rock that burned and seemed to be in abundance here, and carried buckets of water from the waterfall hidden behind the rocks.