Free The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay Page B

of the Giants, and the form the magic took was fear. They are not ghosts, she told herself, over and over. They are alive. They saved my life. Even so, even with the vellin, she felt terror brushing her mind with the quick wings of night moths. The two men and the Dwarf with her had no green vellin bracelets to guard them, no inner voices to reassure, yet none of them made a sound and none broke stride. Humbled by their courage, she felt her own heart flame with resolution, and as it did the Baelrath burned brighter on her hand.
    She quickened her pace and moved past Dalreidan. She had brought them to this place, a place where no man should ever have had to come. It was her turn to lead them now, for the Warstone knew where to go.
    For almost two hours they walked in the gathering darkness. It was full night under the summer stars when Kim saw smokeand the distant blaze of bonfires and heard the raucous laughter of svart alfar. And with the brutal mockery of that sound she found, suddenly, that her fears, which had walked with her until now, were gone. She had arrived, and the enemy ahead of her was known and hated and in the caves beyond those ridges of stone the Giants were imprisoned and were dying.
    She turned and saw by starlight and the glow of her ring that her companions’ faces were grim now, not with strain but with anticipation. Silently Brock unslung his axe, and Faebur notched an arrow to his bow. She turned to Dalreidan. He had not yet drawn a sword or unslung his own bow. “There will be time,” he whispered, answering her unspoken question, scarcely a breath in the night air. “Shall I find us a place where we can look?”
    She nodded. Calmly, silently, he moved past her again and began picking his way among the strewn boulders and loose rocks towards the fires and the laughter. Moments later the four of them lay prone above a plateau. Sheltered by upthrust teeth of rock, they looked down, sickened, on what the glow of the bonfires revealed.
    There were two caves set into the mountainside, with high vaulted entrances and runic lettering carved over the arches. It was dark in the caves and they could not see within. From one of them, though, if they strained to hear past the laughter of the svart alfar, they could make out the sound of a single deep voice chanting slowly.
    The light came from two huge fires on the plateau, set directly before each of the caves in such a fashion that the smoke of theirburning was drawn inwards. There was another fire just over the ridge east of them, and Kim could make out the glow and the rising smoke of a fourth about a quarter of a mile away, to the northeast. There were no others to be seen. Four caves then, four sets of prisoners dying of starvation and smoke.
    And four bands of svart alfar. Around each of the bonfires below them, about thirty of the svarts were gathered, and there were a handful of the nightmare urgach, as well. About a hundred and fifty of them, then, if the same numbers held true beyond the ridges. Not a very great force, in truth, but more than enough, she knew, to subdue and hold the Paraiko, whose pacifism was the very essence of their being. All that the svarts had to do, under the guidance of the urgach, was keep the fires burning and refrain from shedding blood. Then they could claim their reward.
    Which they were doing now, even as she watched. On each of the pyres below lay the huge body, charred and blackened, of a Paraiko. Every few moments one of the svart alfar would dart close enough to the roaring flames to thrust in a sword and cut for himself a piece of roasted flesh.
    Their reward. Kim’s stomach heaved in revulsion and she had to close her eyes. It was an unholy scene, a desecration in the worst, the deepest sense. Beside her she could hear Brock cursing under his breath in a steady invocation, bitter and heartfelt.
    Meaningless words, whatever scant easing they might afford. And the curses of the Paraiko themselves, which might