Robin Hobb - The Complete Soldier Son Trilogy - Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, Renegade’s Magic

‘The Dappled Folk are a loathsome race, sly and slick as yellow and black salamanders under a rotting log. We did not seek a grievance with them. We were willing to exchange goods with them, but when we traded with them, they cheated us. Their women are lustful as war chiefs, but will not keep to one man’s bed nor acquire cattle and manage wealth as befits a woman. They ruined our young warriors with random bedding and children they could not know were truly theirs. They set our warriors to fighting amongst themselves. The Dappled men are worse than their women. They would not fight warrior to warrior with swannecks and spears, but struck from a distance, with arrows and stones, so that the souls of the warriors they killed did not reach the territory of the gods, but fell unaware, disgraced as slain prey, like rabbits and grouse, no more than meat. We did not seek grievance with the Dappled Folk but when they forced it upon us, we did not shrink from it. When we rode through their villages and slew all those who did not flee, they vowed revenge on us. The winds of death they sent to us, so that men died coughing, huddled in their own filth. They orphaned our children and left them to die instead of taking them into their families. They set disease on us like dogs on wounded deer. Such deaths end a man completely; there is no after life for men who are betrayed by their own bodies.’

Dewara fell silent, but his feathered chest surged with his emotion. It was the brooding, seething silence of a man who hates and hates without hope of satisfaction. Then he spoke softly, saying, ‘The warriors of your people are on the edges of the mountain forests claimed by the Dappled Folk. Your warriors are strong. They defeated the Kidona, when no other plainspeople could stand against us. I speak to you of our ancient defeat by the Dappled Folk. I reveal to you this shame of my people, so that you may understand that the Dappled Ones deserve none of your good god’s mercy. You should show them the same sword’s edge you showed us. Use your iron weapons, to slay them from a distance, and never go near their people or their homes, or they will work their sorcery upon you. They should be trampled underfoot like dung-worms. No humiliation is undeserved by them, no atrocity too vicious to inflict on them. Do not ever regret anything your folk do to them, for behold what they did to my people. They severed our bridge to the dream world.’ His hands fell to his sides. ‘When I die, my being will end. There is no passage for me to the birth lands of the spirits of my people.

‘When I was a young man, before our war with your people, I vowed I would reopen this passage. I made my vow before my people and my gods. I captured and shed the blood of a hawk to bind me to it. And so I am bound.’ He gestured at his bird form. ‘Twice I attempted this passage. I crossed and did battle with the terrible guardian they have set upon our way. Twice, I was defeated. But I did not surrender, nor did I give up. Not until your father shot me with his iron, not until he sank the magic of your people deep into my chest, crippling my Kidona magic, did I know that I could not do this myself. I thought I had failed.’

He paused in his account and shook his beaked head. ‘I had no hope. I knew I was condemned to the torment of the oath-breaker when I died. But then the gods revealed to me their way. This is why they allowed your people to make war upon us and conquer us. This is why they showed up the power of your iron magic. This is why your father sought me out and gave you to me. The gods sent me my weapon. I have trained you and taught you. The iron magic belongs to you, and you belong to me. I send you to open the way for the Kidona. It has taken all the strength of the feeble magic that remains in me to bring you this far. I can go no further. I redeem my oath in you and bring great glory to my name forever. You will slay their guardian with the cold iron magic. Go now. Open the way.’

‘I have no weapon,’ I said. My own words made me a coward in my eyes.

‘I will show you how, now. This is how you summon your weapon to you.’

He stooped impatiently and dragged his finger in a crescent in the dust. It left a line. He stooped, and blew upon the dusty stone, and as the dust flew away from his breath, a shining bronze swanneck was revealed. He gestured at it proudly. Then he lifted it from the ground; its outline remained in the stone of the cliffs, like the imprint of an animal’s hoof near a streambed. With a powerful blow, he drove the gleaming blade into the blue stone at our feet. ‘There. That will hold this end of the bridge for the Kidona people. Now, you must summon your own weapon, to use against the guardian. I cannot call iron.’

I pushed my doubts away. I stooped and in the dust, I drew an image I knew well. It was an image I had idly drawn a thousand times in my boyhood. I drew a cavalla sword, proud and straight, with a sturdy haft and dangling tassel. As my fingers traced it against the stone, I suddenly hungered for the weapon to be within my hand again. And when I stooped and blew my breath across the dusty stone, the sword I had left at Dewara’s campsite was suddenly there at my feet. Triumphant, yet wondering, I lifted the blade from the earth. Its imprint remained behind beside the swanneck’s. When I proudly flourished it aloft, Dewara shrank from it, lifting his arm-wing to shield himself from the steel in my hand.

‘Take it and go!’ he hissed, his arms lifted to mimic the aggressive stance of a bird. ‘Slay the guardian. But bear it away from me before it can weaken the magic that holds us here. Go. My swanneck anchors this end. Your iron will hold the other.’

I had become so much his creature that I could not think of any alternative to doing what he had commanded. In that time and place and uncertain light, there was no room for me to think of disobeying him. So I turned from him and walked along the stone ledge to the cliff’s edge. The rocky chasm gaped bottomlessly before me. The standing hoodoos of stone and the flimsy bridges that connected them were my only possible passage to the other side. My destination was faded by distance, as if smoke or fog hung in the air and curtained it. I could see no detail of it. The sculpted pinnacles varied in size; the tops of some were no bigger than tables, whilst others could have supported a mansion. The capstones of each spire were a slightly different grey-blue, a harder stone than that of the softer columns that the wind had eroded away beneath them. There was no bridge between the cliff edge and the first hoodoo. I would have to leap to it. It was not an impossible distance, and my landing place was large, as big as the beds of two wagons. If I had been leaping over solid ground, it would not have been so daunting. But below me gaped the seemingly bottomless ravine. I gathered my courage and my strength for the leap.

Then, as I watched, a bronze path, no wider than the blade of the swanneck, flowed from the embedded weapon to the top of the first hoodoo. Like an unfurling ribbon, the tongue of shimmering metal reached out across the void until it touched the first hoodoo. It was not a wide bridge, but it spanned it. I thrust my cavalla sabre into my belt, spread my arms for balance, and stepped out onto the bronze path.

Almost immediately, I lost my footing. The sword in my belt suddenly seemed to weigh as much as an anvil. I wrenched my whole body against the drag, started to topple the other way, and responded by sprinting forward along the length toward the hoodoo. Its top was slightly rounded, like a very large bed-knob. A gritty layer of sand coated the capstone and I skidded in it and fell to my knees as I tried to stop, halting less than an arm’s length from the edge. For an instant I crouched there, catching my breath and calming my heart. Grinning foolishly at my near mishap, I glanced back at Dewara. He was unimpressed. Impatiently, he gestured me on.