The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) (5 page)

Instead, there was only the trickery of the Crook, and the deep magic of the Old Stargazer, his wards woven deep into the mountain around them, and the knowledge of that had made Londih chief.

Londih had become the next in line, but at what cost! His father’s heart, and then his sanity, as each year the
Old Stargazer made the father send one of his children away, down into the city at the bottom of the mountain, with a sword and a shield and a bag of silver, to there seek the fortune that Haven no longer held for them, as they would not be chief.

One day there were no more sons, no more daughters. No one left but Londih.

And then his father was dead, and Londih was chief in fact as he had been in destiny, carrying the fading staff up the mountain path to the Observatory, so that the Old Stargazer might anoint him again.

The Old Stargazer changed, became remote as the stars he studied. Then he’d had his own words for the other villagers, his own tasks among them, and it had been easy to believe he was a part of their village, that the task of astronomer was as necessary as cobbler or cooper. But no longer. The Old Stargazer was apart from them, his differentness was revealed, as apart from the other villagers as a sun is from a star.

There was never sign of the old man, only his boy, Nergei, who Kohel had claimed to have rescued from the kenku.

Kohel. The boy was as bad as Londih’s older brothers had been, and just as unworthy of the Crook, the station it symbolized, as Londih himself had once been. Unlike Londih, Kohel was an only child, and
so one day the rule of Haven would be his. It was not an idea Londih enjoyed, but one he was trying to resign himself to, had been trying for the ten years since realizing his wife’s womb would produce no more children. With a son already born, there was no cause for divorce, and so Londih was stuck with his wife—a good problem, because he loved her—and also Kohel, who he did not, not always.

Londih had grown into his position. He had gained the Crook through chance, and through an ill-considered curiosity, then a deadly deception to cover up that curiosity. He had been guilty, but after the guilt had fallen away, after the obligations of the great burden had inspired in him a dedication he was unaware had existed in him, after he had learned that he could be a leader, he had risen to it. In moments of gentler feelings toward his son, he imagined the same could also be true of Kohel. But always reality reared its harsh, unpleasant visage. The boy would never be anything but a boy. He was frivolous. He was unkind. He was endlessly, reprehensibly arrogant. He was spoiled.

“Honored One,” said Pyla. “We are here.”

Londih shook the memories from his head, rubbed the sadness they brought from his face. Before him
stood the doors to the village meeting hall, heavy and hewn of the oaks that grew high in the timber around Haven, their bark as tough as iron, as old as the mountains themselves. He took a breath, put his hands to the doors, shoved them open.

Londih moved into the room without hesitation, letting Pyla trail behind him as they strode to their places at the long wooden table. Normally, village council meetings necessitated a large meal, and mead to keep the council members friendly enough to debate trivialities at great length. But there was no food spread on the table end to end, and no bottomless casks of strong, warm mead, either. Instead, the table was covered with heavy cloth, meant to protect the wood, and atop the cloth were the two dead kenku felled in the woods, one smoldering and one more whole, the wound through its throat the only cause for its state, its feathered limbs curling with the stiffness that comes to the dead.

The kenku had been killed by his boy and Orick’s, if the young men were to be believed, and perhaps that was true of the whole one, which had clearly been shot with an arrow, presumably by Padlur. But the other? It was a lie, but Londih had not called it one yet, and now he wondered if he had it in him to support his son’s deceptions, as his own father had supported his, and perhaps this too was what it meant
to be chief. When Padlur and Kohel had returned to Haven with the kenku bodies, Kohel had done the talking, explaining how they had been killed, and he had done so with confidence in his voice, as if he believed what he was saying when he described the flight of Padlur’s arrows, the skillful strokes of his own blade.

The arrows were easy enough to believe, but the blade?

Unless the boy’s blade had suddenly become enchanted with flame, there was no way it burned through the kenku’s torso, as something certainly had. And yet, so Kohel had claimed, and so Londih would claim too, for as long as he could.

Around the table the landed men of the village were already assembled, as well as the two Peloran counselors, the Voice and the Hand. Orick stood to the left side of the table, as was his due, and Londih would stand between him and Pyla for the duration of the meeting, never moving from their stations, always representing what their stations symbolized. Each had already inspected the body, and stood waiting for Londih and Pyla to begin the meeting. There was panic in the voices that filled the room, a development Londih could only see as positive, a move past the naked shock, the disbelief that had characterized their
first discussions, after the boys had returned but before Orick had gone with Padlur to retrieve the second corpse—the burnt one—and bring it to the village.

Londih barely had time to take in the kenku’s body once more—the feathered torso, the beaked head, the arms that were really half wing and half arm, even the band of burnt bird between the torso and the clawed feet—and then the elders were upon him, all speaking at once, all vying for his attention. Londih pounded the Crook of Haven upon the floor, raised his free hand to claim his right to speak.

“As you all know by now, my son and Orick’s son returned from their hunt not with a deer or elk, but with something just as well-shot—these creatures that attacked them upon their way. Orick—a more knowledgeable tracker than me, or any of you—calls them kenku, says that he has heard of them in the old lore, but that he had never heard tales of them upon the mountain, not in our time or our father’s time. Wherever this one came from, it is not from around Haven, but from somewhere else.” Londih paused, let the elders titter among themselves, the weaker ones speaking the loudest.

Orick was quiet, and Pyla was trying to be but failing. He could not help but engage the fear mongers and gossips, the villagers he knew held suspicions or grudges, or were given to dispiriting words that
played havoc with the local morale. Londih looked at his reeve, ordering his silence with his eyes, then at Orick, who he wished he had chosen himself. Once again Londih regretted the choices he’d made, putting Pyla above Orick when first he’d become chief. Then, Londih had been young, and nervous for his position, so putting the weaker, less stoic and confident Pyla closest to him seemed the safest choice. Pyla the talker. With Kohel old enough to be chief himself, there was no need for Londih to fear his own assassination, or at least less, as there would be more to kill: for Orick to become chief, both Pyla and Kohel would also have to die, and Orick could not engineer such a thing without the suspicion inevitably falling upon himself. Nor would he, of course. Londih had found both Orick and his son to be good men, as tough of character as they were of body. Now that Londih’s position was safe, he wished instead that it was Orick who was his closest advisor, for Orick was strong and smart, good with a bow and a blade, the best Haven had to offer. He was not a leader—he spoke too rarely for that—but he was a man that raised whoever he followed, and Londih wished for that elevation, something the more spineless, more stupid, more trivial Pyla could not provide.

“Orick knows more than I about these beasts, so I will let him describe what he can.” Londih waved his hand,
invited the hunter to speak. Orick did not move, did not uncross his substantial arms, but he did describe the kenku at some greater length, repeating not what he’d learned in a book—as Pyla would have—but what he knew from his own wide ranges across the mountain, from those he had met on his travels down into the city, a trip few from Haven had ever made.

Londih himself had never gone. He could have, but what if he had run into some brother or sister, still bent on reclaiming their birthright, armed and angry across their years of exile? It had not been worth the risk, and so he had forgone the experience, as most of the villagers did. Only a few had ever been to the city, and most never would.

Orick did not speak long, and even Londih would admit that the usually knowledgeable hunter didn’t know as much about kenku as he did about many other things. “Bandit folk. Said to be bred from the divine power of the Raven Queen herself. Cheats and thieves. Skilled with a blade. Often the bow, poisons. But that’s not all, or even the worst of it,” said Orick, and then he did uncross his arms, putting his palms on the table, and onto the kenku itself. Londih watched as the hunter turned the bowshot creature halfway to free its arm, which Orick lifted to its full extension. The arm was as long as a man’s, but heavier and wider, and its feathers were sturdy, stiff as armor. Orick looked around the
table until everyone saw what he saw, or perhaps until he thought they did. Then he said, “Kenku, as far as I know, do not have wings. Only arms, having made the same trade our own ancestors did when the gods made them into men. These beasts have something in between that, according to the boys, allowing them longer leaps and slow, directed falls. They can grip a short blade, too. Some other magic is upon them, or else they are not true kenku at all.”

The council members prattled on again, displayed some of their old panic, but Londih stood firm. He let them continue for a short while, then banged the Crook again. “What else might they be, Orick? Some new beast even you know nothing about?”

“I do not know, Honored One. Perhaps—”

Before Orick could answer, the door to the council chambers opened again, and in strode the one person Londih had not expected, had not even thought to wait for. A man who, while officially a member of the council, had not joined its deliberations in two decades, not since shortly after Londih had become Crook of Haven.

There, in the dust-filled shaft of light, stood the Old Stargazer, Defender of Haven, come down from his mountain home.

The sight of the old man should have filled Londih with courage, but it did not. Instead it turned his
veins, sent a shiver of ice up his spine, cold as the stars Londih had once seen in the old man’s eyes, all those years before, when first he dared breach the threshold of the observatory’s forbidden rooms. He shuffled slowly, the old man. His body was stiff. That was not new, though, and not cause for alarm. All of Haven knew the man was ancient—no one living had ever known him to be anything other than a white-haired, thick-bearded, deeply wrinkled man—but something had changed about him, and it took some moments before Londih realized what it was that shocked him. It was the old man’s eyes. They were wild and peaked beneath his brow. They were, at the same time, emptier. They were the eyes of someone desperate and slipping away. The stars he had seen there when he was a child—the suns—their light had gone out of the Old Stargazer, and only its absence remained.