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.
CbApter 23
Iydahoe run for two days and nights, desperate to carry word to his people. He prayed that his father, Hawkan, would be there. The old shaman was the only person who might be able to explain the nightmare of the Silvertrout. Yet Hawkan had left only a fortnight before on a journey into the mountains, and the priest's meditative sojourns often lasted for several moons. The warrior feared that his father would still be gone.
The young Kagonesti runner reached the Whitetail village shortly after dawn, staggering with fatigue as he trotted into the compound.
Kawllaph, seated at his breakfast fire, sprang to his feet in alarm when he saw the grim, ragged expression on his younger brother's face.
"Iydahoe! What happened?" Kawllaph's voice was unusually deep for an elf, and now the barrel-chested warrior's words carried throughout the village.
"Has father returned?" gasped Iydahoe, vainly searching for a sign of Hawkan.
"Still gone," Kawllaph said tersely. He took his brother's arm. "We'll go to the council circle-there you must speak to the warriors."
At the edge of the ceremonial ring they were met by the village chief, Tarrapin, who had been drawn by the commotion. Tarrapin's face was locked in an angry glare, the bear claw tattoos across his cheeks seeming to reach inward, ready to rend.
Quickly warriors gathered as Iydahoe recovered his breath, wondering how he could possibly convey the sense of disaster he felt.