Jarka Ruus (13 page)

She set it down and released it, pointing at it in warning to keep it from trying to flee again. It frowned at her and folded its arms over its chest, managing to look defiant and frightened at the same time. She tried a handful of Dwarf and Troll dialects, but it didn't seem to understand those, either. Each time, it would stop and listen to her words, then start chattering away in its own language, as if through insistence and repetition she could be made to understand.

Finally, it plopped down in the grass, arms folded over its chest, eyes turned away, mouth set in a disapproving line. She saw the knife at its waist for the first time, an odd-shaped narrow blade that curved and was serrated at the tip. She saw a small pouch attached to a belt, both decorated with beads sewn into the leather. The pockets cut into the sides of its worn pants were sculpted with thread. Whatever species it was, it was advanced beyond the Spider Gnome level. By the same token, it wasn't a member of any race she could put a name to.

She gave up on the Dwarf and Troll dialects and was about to give up on the creature, as well, thinking that it was hopeless, that she should leave it and move on, go hunt for something else. Then she decided, rather impulsively, to try speaking to it in the Elven language, even though the creature looked nothing like an Elf. But the Elves were the oldest species in the world and their language had been around the longest. The response was immediate. The creature shifted to a variation of what she was speaking at once, and she could understand him clearly.

“Stupid woman!” it snapped, the words strange-sounding in the odd dialect, but comprehensible. “Yelling at me like that. Look what you did to me! Look how far I fell! I could have broken every bone in my body!”

He rubbed his arms as if for emphasis, daring her to contradict him. She narrowed her gaze at him. “You should watch what you say to me. If I don't like what I hear, I might break every bone anyway.”

He grimaced. “I could hurt you, if I wanted. You ought to be afraid of me.” His odd face scrunched up, and his tongue licked out like a cat's, revealing the razor-sharp teeth. “Who are you? Are you a witch?”

She shook her head. “No, I am Ard Rhys of Paranor. I am a Druid. Where am I?”

He stared blankly at her. “What's wrong with you? Why don't you know where you are? Are you lost?” He didn't wait for an answer. “Tell me what you did to that Dracha. Magic, wasn't it? I've never seen anything like that. If you aren't a witch, you must be a sorceress or a Straken. Are you a Straken?”

There was another name she hadn't encountered outside of the Druid Histories. Strakens were powerful magic wielders out of the world of Faerie, gone for thousands of years. Like the Dracha.

“Is this the Faerie world?” she asked, beginning to think it must be.

The spindly creature stared at her, head cocked. “This is the land of the Jarka Ruus. You're inside the Dragon Line, above Pashanon. You must know that! Where is it you come from?”

“Paranor. Callahorn. The Four Lands.”

She paused with each name, searching his eyes for recognition and finding none. But the words
Jarka Ruus
meant something to her. She had heard them before, though she couldn't remember where. “What are you?” she asked him. “What Race do you belong to? Are you a Troll?”

“Ulk Bog,” he announced proudly. He smiled, showing all his considerable teeth. “But I don't have a home at present because I'm traveling. This country is too dangerous. Dragons everywhere, all sorts, and they like to eat my kind. Of course, I try to eat their eggs, so I guess it's fair they should try to eat me. But they're much bigger than I am, for the most part, so I have to be careful. Anyway, I don't want to stay here anymore. Where are you going?”

She didn't have the faintest idea, of course, since she didn't even know where she was. She wasn't at all sure she was going anywhere until she figured out what had happened to her. Nevertheless, she pointed west, if only to satisfy him, at the same time trying to figure out how to extract some useful information.

“Ah, Huka Flats. Good choice. Soft earth for burrows and tender rats to eat.” He hitched up his belt. “Maybe I should go with you, since you don't seem to know the way. I know it. I've been everywhere.”

Ulk Bogs had disappeared with the world of Faerie, as well, she was thinking. Everything suggested she had gone back in time to the beginning of things, back before Men were created. The idea was so ridiculous that she kept searching for a better answer, but nothing else suggested itself.

“Are there lots of dragons here in the Dragon Line?” she pressed. “Big ones, as well as the Drachas?”

“You
are
a stranger, aren't you?” he said. He was growing bolder again, more confident. He puffed out his narrow chest. “Of course there are big ones. Wyverns and Frost Dragons. Fire Drakes, too, though not so many of those. Some live right down here in the forests, like the Drachas. You have to watch out for them all the time. That's how I happened to be up in that—”

He stopped himself quickly, looking away into the trees. “Well, how I was, uh . . . how I was . . .”

“That Dracha I encountered was hunting you, wasn't it?” she guessed. She leaned close. “Don't lie to me, little rodent.”

The Ulk Bog sneered at her. “It wasn't my fault it found you instead of me. I didn't do anything to make it come after you. I was just trying to hide in the trees, because Drachas don't climb and they can't fly close in where there are branches that might get in the way of their wings, so I . . .”

She held out her hand beseechingly and stopped him midsentence. She doubted he was telling the truth, but then again she wasn't sure he would recognize the truth if it bit him on the nose. There wasn't much about Ulk Bogs in the Druid Histories, but if they were all like this one, they were pretty good at shifting blame.

“Never mind,” she told him. “It doesn't matter.”

She cast about for help from any quarter, but there was none to be found. She was alone and stuck with this fast-talking creature unless she set him free, which she wasn't ready to do quite yet. She still might learn something from him if she gave herself a chance. Even by just letting him rattle on, she might stumble over something that would help.

“Tell me your name,” she said.

He drew himself up. “Weka Dart. What's yours?”

“Grianne.” She abandoned the Ard Rhys designation because it clearly meant nothing to him. “Tell me more about the Dragon Line. Have there ever been any buildings up here on this bluff? A castle, perhaps?”

He laughed. “Dragons don't need buildings! They rule this territory of the Jarka Ruus. Everything else stays away. If you want buildings, you need to go down onto the plains where the Straken live. Your kind.”

My kind.
She remembered suddenly that they were speaking in the Elven tongue—an ancient dialect, but Elven nevertheless, a Faerie language. The Elves were the original people, the only true Faerie Race to survive the Great Wars. There had been Elves forever in the world. If this was the past, even if she was all the way back to the time of the Word, there would be Elves.

“Tell me, Weka Dart,” she said. “Are there Elves close by? Where do the Elves live?”

The look he gave her was filled with disdain. “Are you stupid? There are no Elves here! Elves are forbidden! We cast them out, back when we made this world!
Jarka Ruus ba'enthal corpa u'pahs!
”

She had no idea what he was saying, but she got the message anyway. “But there must be Elves. You are speaking in the Elven tongue.”

He became enraged. “I speak Ulk Bog,
my
tongue,
my
language, and it does not sound anything at all like Elfish! I will hurt you if you say that again, whether you are Straken or not! No one can call an Ulk Bog an Elf! We are the free peoples, the world of the
ca'rel orren pu'u
! Jarka Ruus!”

For a moment she was afraid he was going to attack her; his face was twisted in fury, and his breathing had turned quick and dangerous. She could not imagine why he was reacting that way. If he knew about the Elves, this must be the Old World, and the Elves had always been a part of it, not separate from it, not until after the war when the bad Faerie creatures had been exiled to—

She went still, realization flooding through her, so dark it threatened to bury her in an avalanche of horror. No, she must be mistaken, she thought. But she remembered now the origin of the words
Jarka Ruus
. She had never heard them spoken; she had read them. They were words from the Druid Histories—Elven words, whether Weka Dart liked it or not. They meant
banished peoples
, and they had been used first in a time before the Four Lands existed, long ago in the beginning, when the war fought between good and evil Faerie creatures reached its climax.

But she had to be certain. “Ulk Bog,” she said to him. “You say there are dragons. Are there giants, as well? Are there demon-spawn and goblins? Are there warlocks and witches and ogres?”

He nodded at once. “Of course.”

She took a deep breath. “Are there Furies?”

He grinned at her with unsettling purpose. “Everywhere.”

She was frozen by that single word.
Everywhere
. Furies. No Elves, only monsters that preyed on each other and those more helpless. The Ellcrys had shut them all away thousands of years ago in a place that no human had ever gone into.

Until now.

She exhaled slowly. She was inside the Forbidding.

Eleven

“What's wrong with you?” Weka Dart asked, leaning forward for a closer look, his ferret face wrinkling with something that could have been either suspicion or distaste. “Are you going to be sick? You look as if you might be thinking about it.”

She barely heard him. She was stunned to the point of being unable to speak.
Inside the Forbidding!
The words roared in her ears like the howl of a high wind, blotting out every other sound and leaving her wrapped in confusion and disbelief. It was such an impossible idea that she could not bring herself to quit looking for a way to dismiss it. No one had ever been inside the Forbidding. There was no way to get inside, for that matter. The barrier was made strong enough to keep the demons and their kind inside, but it had a similar effect on those without. There was no congress between them, not even the smallest contact.

Once, five hundred years ago, the barrier had ruptured with the failing of the Ellcrys. Grianne's ancestor Wil Ohmsford had been instrumental in helping an Elven girl named Amberle, the Chosen of the tree, find the Bloodfire to create a new Ellcrys and restore the barrier. But other than that one time, there was no instance in recorded history of demons or humans crossing over from one realm into the other. There was simply no way for it to happen.

Yet happen it had, because she was inside the Forbidding, and she could argue against it all she wanted, but it was so. If there were Furies here, there could be no mistaking it. Weka Dart was an Ulk Bog, and all the Ulk Bogs of ancient times, of Faerie, had been sent into the Forbidding along with the other creatures who were indiscriminately predatory. The things that lived inside the Forbidding were savage and raw, unable to function in a climate of civilized behavior, unable to overcome their instincts for killing. She understood the darkness that drove such creatures, for as the Ilse Witch it had driven her, as well. When the darkness took hold, becoming the hard edge of emotions best kept buried and unexamined, there was no act a creature could not justify.

“Do you want some water? I can run for some, not far. I don't like the way you look. Did that Dracha bite you? Are you poisoned?”

Weka Dart was pressed so close to her now that his sharp features were only inches from her own. She saw the warts and blemishes on his dark skin, where the hair failed to cover them. She saw the sharpness of his teeth and heard the hissing of his breath. It was like looking closely at a weasel.

“Back away from me,” she said, and he did so instantly, cowering slightly at the harsh sound of her voice. “There's nothing wrong with me, Ulk Bog. I was thinking.”

Thinking of how desperate her circumstances had become. No situation she could imagine was worse. Being inside the Forbidding was a death sentence. She did not know who had found the means to place her there or how she would ever get out again, but she was the Ard Rhys, even there, and she held herself together with an iron will forged in countless struggles she had survived and her enemies had not.

She took another deep breath and looked around to reassure herself that the geography of the land about her was what she remembered it to be. It hadn't changed. The Dragon's Teeth formed a barrier on three sides, allowing small glimpses of grasslands and rivers beyond, all of it familiar, while north the Streleheim stretched away in bleak, misty emptiness.

She tried to reason it through. If she was inside the Forbidding, then the Forbidding was not another place entirely; it was the same place on a different plane of existence, an alternate world and history, one that had progressed little since the time of Faerie. Her world had seen an entire civilization rise and fall in a holocaust of power gone mad. This one had failed to progress beyond the time of its creation out of Elven magic, thousands of years ago. One had seen Races created out of myth, out of a time when they were real, made new again by the changes wrought in the survivors of the Great Wars. The other had seen its denizens frozen in time, until the myth was reality born of nightmare.

No wonder Weka Dart and probably most of those who lived here spoke a variation of the Elven tongue she knew from her studies. Once, all creatures had spoken the same tongue, born of the Word's magic, given life and a chance at unity that they had tossed away.

“Have you always been the banished people?” she asked Weka Dart. “Do you keep histories of this? Does anyone?”

“Strakens and warlocks keep our histories, but they do not agree on what it is,” the Ulk Bog responded. He rubbed his sharp chin and sneered. “They like to change it to suit their own purposes. Liars and cheats, all! But those like myself who are not burdened with magic know the truth. The history is the history! It is not just what anyone says! Jarka Ruus have been here a thousand, thousand years, since they chose to be rid of the Elves and their kind, to come here and be free!”

A reasonable interpretation, she thought, for creatures that did not want to see themselves as exiled, but as self-determinative. The irony was that they still referred to themselves as Jarka Ruus—the banished people. Perhaps it was in the nature of all people that they should reinvent themselves to keep their pride and dignity intact. Monsters and demonkind had the same need for self-respect as humans.

She stopped herself in midthought, aware that she had missed something. “Are there others here like me?” she asked, thinking that since she had been sent here out of her own world, perhaps others had, as well.

“Strakens? Of course!”

“No, not Strakens. Humans.”

He stared at her. “What are humans?”

“People who look like me. Smooth-skinned.” She tried to figure out what else she could say. “Anyone who looks like me.”

He looked uneasy. “Like you? Some, not many. Strakens and warlocks and witches can look like anything with their magic.” He rubbed his hands together nervously and looked about. “Can we go? That Dracha probably has friends. It might have gone to fetch them. Drachas are smart, and even a Straken as powerful as you can't stand against a pack of them.”

She stared him down. He knew something that he wasn't telling her, something important. She could see it in the shift of his eyes and hear it in his voice. But she decided to let it go for the moment. He was right about not lingering. It was too dangerous to stay anywhere for long inside a place like the Forbidding. Everything here was hunter or prey in its turn, and she could not afford to be seen as the latter.

She cast about again, trying to decide on a direction. She would have to choose one, whether it would take her anywhere useful or not. She had to get moving, away from this haven for dragons. Geographically, this world was the same as her own. She could use that, if she could just think how. Something about the similarity between the two should suggest a solution, a place to go, a way to survive.

She would have liked to use her magic, but she couldn't think of a way in which that would be helpful. The wishsong could do many things, but it didn't allow for opening doors between worlds. Besides, she was pretty sure that if she used it for that purpose, the amount of magic required would almost certainly attract unwanted attention.

Then, abruptly, she had her answer. She should have seen it at once. If the Forbidding was a mirror of her own world, it would have an equivalent to the Hadeshorn and perhaps a gateway to the Druids. If she could raise their shades here, as she would have been able to do there, she might be able to discover what she should do. As a working idea, it had promise. Besides, since it was the only idea she had, it was worth a try.

She looked at Weka Dart. “I'm going east, below the Dragon's . . . below the mountains.”

The Ulk Bog furrowed his brow and said something unintelligible, clearly unhappy.

“You don't have to come with me. I can go alone.”

She hoped he would agree with her, thinking that he would be of little help in any case. But Weka Dart, still not looking at her, still frowning, shook his head. “You may need me to help you find your way, being a stranger. The land is unsafe for strangers. It doesn't get any better where you want to go. Safer west, but I suppose you have your reasons for not going there right away. Maybe later.”

He looked up suddenly, eyes narrowed. “But you don't want to go east. You want to go south through the mountains. I know you call them something else, but here they are called the Dragon Line. We should go below them before we go east. Too dangerous to try to go back the way I have come.”

He was so eager to have her do what he wanted that she was immediately suspicious.

“We can take one of the passes,” he continued quickly. “That will put us in Pashanon. There are cities and villages. Fortresses, too. Do you know someone there? Another Straken, perhaps?”

Clearly he was hiding something, but she had already made up her mind to go the way he was suggesting, and she decided to let it drop for now.

“Listen to me, Weka Dart,” she said quietly, kneeling so that she could look him the eye. She held him frozen in place with the force of her gaze, a prisoner to her eyes. “You are not to call me a Straken again. Is that understood?”

He nodded hurriedly, mouth twisting, gimlet eyes bright and eager. “You are in disguise?” he guessed.

She nodded. “I want my identity kept secret. If you travel with me, you must agree. You must call me Grianne.”

He laughed, a rather scary sound, all rough edges and rasps. “I will do exactly as you wish, so long as you do not knock me out of any more trees!”

She straightened. Maybe this would work out, after all. Maybe she would find a way out of here. “Let's be off,” she said.

Without waiting for his response, she started away.

         

They walked all day—or more accurately, she walked while he scurried, a sort of crablike motion that employed all four limbs and carried him from one side to the other in a wide-ranging and aimless pattern. She was astonished by his energy, which was boundless, and by his seeming unawareness of the fact that he was covering twice as much ground as was necessary for no reason. She decided, after watching him scramble about for several hours, that it must be genetic to Ulk Bogs. She knew very little about the species, having only touched on the subject in her reading of the Druid Histories, and so had little to go on. Nevertheless, in this case observation seemed enough.

The country they traveled through was both familiar and strange to her, its geographical features similar to those of her own world, but not the same. The differences were often small, ones she could not specifically identify but only sense. It was not surprising to her that the world of the Forbidding, impacted by an alternate history, would not reflect everything exactly. In her world, the topography had been altered by the destructive effects of the Great Wars. The basic landmarks were identifiably the same—the mountains, passes, bluffs, rivers, and lakes—but certain features were changed. The landscape gave her the impression that she was revisiting a familiar place, yet seeing everything in an entirely new light.

They did not encounter any other dragons. They saw huge birds flying overhead, ones that were neither Rocs nor Shrikes, and Weka Dart told her they were Harpies. She could not make out their women's faces, but could picture them in her mind—narrow and severe, sharp and cunning. Harpies were mythical in her world, thought to be nothing more than the creation of ancient storytellers. But they were among the creatures banished in the time of the creation of the Forbidding, and so only the stories remained. To see one here, real and dangerously close, made her think about all the other dangerous things that were here, as well, creatures that would hunt her for food or sport or for no reason at all. It was an unpleasant prospect.

It had the effect, however, of distracting her. Since her awakening and realization of what had happened to her, she had given little thought to the problems she had left behind; they were distant and just then beyond her control. In a sense, it was liberating. The Druid Council, fractured by its contentious members and constant scheming, was a world away, and would have to get on without her as best it could. She hadn't been able to say that in almost twenty years, and there was a certain relief in being able to do so now.

The weather inside the Forbidding never changed, earth and sky rendered gray and colorless by an absence of sunlight and a heavy, unbroken ceiling of clouds that in the distance flashed with lightning and rumbled with thunder. Sunset was little more than a deepening of the gray they had traveled through all day. Vegetation everywhere had a blighted and wintry look to it, as if sickened by the soil in which it grew. Nothing of the world suggested that living things were welcome or encouraged. Everything whispered of death.

By day's end, they had reached the southern mouth of one of the passes leading out of the mountains and were looking down from the foothills into the plains that Weka Dart called Pashanon, which in her world would be Callahorn. Burnt, stunted grasses grew in clumps over miles of hardpan earth and barren hills that stretched away from countless miles through a scattering of high, windswept plateaus.

“We need a safe place to sleep,” the Ulk Bog declared in his odd, phlegmy voice, casting about for what he wanted. “Ah, there!”

He pointed to a huge chestnut set back from the bluff at the edge of a stand of trees that marched upward into the foothills like soldiers.

“We have to sleep in a tree?” she asked him doubtfully.

He gave her a wicked grin. “Try sleeping on the ground, Straken, and see what friends you make during the night.”

She was not happy that he was still calling her
Straken
after she had warned him, but she supposed there was no help for it. He addressed her as he saw her, and nothing she said was likely to change that.

“Is it safer in the trees?” she asked.

“Mostly. We are less visible in the trees and the worst of the things that hunt at night don't climb. Except for vine serpents.” He grinned, his teeth flashing like daggers. “But there are not so many of those this high up.” He started away into the trees. “Wait here.”