The Eye of the Hunter Read online

  THE ELFESS CLIMBED TOWARD THE GOLDEN LIGHT—

  Heedless of the enemy, Riatha climbed. Suddenly she called back to her companions, “Quickly! Aid me!”

  Leading Aravan, damman Faeril and buccan Gwylly scrambled up through the slithering mass of ice, coming at last into the luminance. The bulk of the glacier loomed high above and the light from within suffused through the myriad splits and cracks, shining as would the Sun through a fractured glass window. And even as they stood up to their knees in the sliding shatter, stood in that fragmented golden glow—Elfess and buccan and damman, Riatha with the Lastborn Firstborns at her side—overhead the Eye of the Hunter streamed crimson through the sky.

  But neither gold nor crimson caught their sight. Instead, it was what they saw in the center of the scattered light: for out from the shattered wall jutted a hand, a large Man’s hand…

  …and the fingers moved!

  The

  Eye of the

  HUNTER

  DENNIS L. MCKIERNAN

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto,

  Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

  Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

  Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,

  Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin

  Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Roc hardcover edition.

  First Roc Mass Market Printing. August 1993

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65943-4

  Copyright © Dennis L. McKiernan, 1992

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To Martha Lee McKiernan:

  Helpmate, Lover, Friend

  Acknowledgments

  Appreciation and gratitude to the following: to Daniel Kian McKiernan, without whose help the transliterated ancient Greek used as the magical language would have never been; to Dr. John Barr, whose advice on sleds, sledding, and sled dogs proved invaluable; to Al Sarrantonio, who pulled me from slush; to Pat LoBrutto, who launched a career; to Janna Silverstein for planting a seed; to John Silbersack for his faith; and to Jonathan Matson, who moves mountains.

  And to Chief Seattle and all the others who heed the words of Elvenkind.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Notes

  Map

  1 Out of the Storm

  2 Mygga and Fé

  3 Faeril

  4 Gwylly

  5 Glacier

  6 Grimwall

  7 Legacy

  8 Journey to Arden

  9 Riatha

  10 Deliverance

  11 Aravan

  12 Equinox

  13 Honing the Edge

  14 Dangerous Journeys

  15 Monastery

  16 Bolt–Hole

  17 Awakening

  18 Elusion

  19 Reunion

  20 Urus

  21 Flight

  22 Stoke

  23 Vanishment

  24 Trek

  25 Lógoi tôn Nekrôn

  26 Pilgrimage

  27 Pendwyr

  28 Avagon

  29 Karoo

  30 Kandra

  31 Dodona

  32 Prey

  33 Mai’ûs Safra

  34 Crossing

  35 Nizari

  36 Extrication

  37 Sanctuary

  38 Restoration

  39 Mosque

  40 Vengeance

  41 Wings of Fire

  42 Passages

  43 Retribution

  44 Auguries

  About the Author

  Foreword

  At times I’ve been asked, “Where do you think legends come from? Was there ever a time that the tales were true…each perhaps in a simpler form, before some tale-teller’s imagination embellished it beyond recognition?”

  Along with those questions come corollary probes: “Do you think there ever were Elves, Dwarves, Wee Folk, others? If so, what happened to them? Where are they now? Why did they go? Did iron drive them out?”

  I am a tale-teller, perhaps guilty of embellishing tales beyond all recognition…but then again, perhaps not. Perhaps instead I am working on a primal level, unconsciously tapping the ancestral memory embedded in my Irish genes. Mayhap in the telling, or in the dead of the night, ancient fragments bubble up, knocking on my frontal lobes for admittance, or slipping over the walls of disbelief like heroes in the darkness coming to rescue a consciousness entrapped within humdrummery.

  If it is ancestral memory, then mayhap there once were Elves, Dwarves, Wee Folk, others. Mayhap they did live on earth…or under…or in the air above or the ocean below. If so, where are they now? Integrated? Separated? Hidden? Extinct? I would hope that they are merely hidden, at times seen flitting at the corner of the eye. Yet deep in my heart I fear they are gone. Where? I know not.

  There have been times when surely I have glimpsed what my ancestral memory has safely locked away, visions which come in the depths of the darktide when the sleeper sleeps and the walls are less patrolled. Mayhap these are the fragments which help shape the tale in the telling, glances of the visions seen in the fathoms of the night.

  Come, let us together explore the latest ancestral fragment, this midnight stormer of the bastion, for embedded within The Eye of the Hunter we may find answers to our questions, can we just riddle them free.

  —Dennis L. McKiernan

  August 1991

  Notes

  1. The source of this tale is a tattered, faded copy of the Journal of the Lastborn Firstborn, an incredibly fortunate find dating from the time before The Separation. Printed by an unknown printer (the frontis page is missing), his claim is that he took it from Faeril’s own journal.

  2. There are many instances in this tale where, in the press of the momen
t, the Warrows, Elves, Humans, and others spoke in their own native tongues; yet to avoid the awkwardness of burdensome translations, where necessary I have rendered their words in Pellarion, the Common tongue of Mithgar. However, some words and phrases do not lend themselves to translation, and these I’ve left unchanged; yet other words may look to be in error, but are indeed correct—e.g., BearLord is but a single word though a capital L nestles among its letters. Also note that waggon, traveller, and several other similar words are written in the Pendwyrian form of Pellarion and are not misspelled.

  3. From my study of the Journal of the Lastborn Firstborn, the arcane tongue of magic is similar in construction to archaic Greek, but with a flavor of its own. With help, I have rendered the language into transliterated eld Greek, with uncommon twists thrown in here and there.

  4. I have used transliterated Arabic to represent the tongues of the desert since no guide was given in the Journal.

  5. The “Common tongue” speech of the Elves is extremely archaic. To retain a flavor of this dialect, in the objective and nominative cases of the pronoun “you.” I respectively substituted “thee” and “thou.” Also, in the possessive cases, I included “thy” and “thine” in the Elven speech, along with a few additional archaic terms such as hast, wilt, and so forth.

  6. To avoid minor confusion, the reader is cautioned to pay heed to the dates denoting the time frame of each chapter. In the main, the tale is told in a straightforward manner, but occasionally I have jumped back to a previous time to fill in key parts of the story.

  7. This tale is about the final pursuit of Baron Stoke. Yet the story is tightly entwined with three earlier accounts concerning the hunting of Stoke; these prior tales are recorded among others in the collection of stories known as Tales of Mithgar.

  “Auguries are oft subtle…and

  dangerous—thou mayest deem they

  mean one thing when they mean

  something else altogether.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Out of the Storm

  Late Winter, 5E988

  [The Present]

  Predator and prey: the sudden blast of snow interrupted the race for life, the race for death, the boreal owl taking to the swirling branches of a barrens pine, the arctic hare scuttering under the protecting overhang of a rock jut. And driven before the wind, a wall of white moaned across the ’scape, while both hunter and hunted sheltered, waiting for the storm to end, for the race to begin again, for flight and pursuit, for life or death.

  But now the race was suspended as snow and ice hurtled across the land, hammering upon anything standing in its way, the wind sobbing and groaning and filling the air with the sound of its agony. And the hare crouched beneath the rock and closed its eyes against the snow pelting inward, while high in a distant tree, a furlong or so away, the owl blinked and turned its head northerly, and deadly talons gripped tightly, disputing the lash of the branch.

  And they waited.

  Yet these two were not alone there in the Untended Lands, there along the north face of the Grimwall Mountains, for something deadly raced across the icy waste.

  Perhaps the owl sensed it first, or mayhap the hare—who can say?

  Out from the north it came, there where the owl stared:

  Dark shapes bobbing in the distance, obscured by the storm. Nearing.

  And an eighth of a mile north of the owl’s tree, under the rock the hare felt the vibrations, not the occasional shaking of this unstable land, but a ragged drumming upon the ground:

  Feet pounding, furred, clawed, racing southward, down from the north. Killers.

  In the thrashing branches the owl peered at the oncoming running shapes, ready to take flight should the need arise.

  More than one. Through the storm. Coming swiftly. Still obscured.

  The hare opened its eyes but made no other movements, relying upon snow and white fur and utter stillness for protection.

  Thudding paws. Many. A pack. Racing, running.

  Onward they came, the owl watching.

  Three of them. In a line. One after another. Long, flowing shapes. Each with something large racing after.

  And mingled in with the sound of the wind came strange cries and a sharp cracking, and the ears of the hare twitched.

  More than a pack. Several packs. Killers all. One after another. Hammering. And something calling out.

  Now the first was close enough for the owl to see.

  Wolves, or the like. Running in a line. And behind, another pack. Or so it seemed. And another pack after.

  Past the hare’s shelter they raced, mere yards away.

  Flashing legs. Wolf legs. Killer legs. All running. Grey fur. Black. And silver. Bound together. Running before something large. Something gliding upon the snow.

  One after another they passed the hiding place of the motionless hare. First, nineteen racing animals, then another nineteen, and another. And something crack! snapped in the air, and something called out Yah! Yah! as they thundered past, killers running through the wind and snow and hauling the gliding things after.

  And though they had hammered past and away and were gone, the storm swallowing them up, still the hare remained motionless.

  And a furlong beyond in the wind-tossed tree, the white owl watched as the three teams emerged from the whirl and hauled the sleds across the frozen white, the drivers behind standing on the runners and cracking their whips and urging the part-wolves, part-dogs onward, the passengers on the sleds bundled against the chill.

  The owl’s head rotated ’round as they came on and past and away, racing through the blowing snow and toward the south, through the blowing snow and toward the looming Grimwall Mountains standing ominously in the distance, barring the way.

  Swiftly the sights and sounds of the intruders faded away, lost in the storm.

  And only the yawl of the wind and pelting of the snow remained.

  And time eked by.

  Still the owl gripped the branch.

  Still the hare crouched below the stone….

  The storm blew itself out sometime after nightfall. And the Moon rose and cast its argent light across the snowy ’scape. In the silvery luminance the white hare warily sniffed the air, its long ears twitching, listening for danger.

  Nothing.

  Cautiously, the hare emerged from under the rock jut. After a hop or two, again it stopped and listened, ears turning this way and that, eyes wide and gazing.

  At last it set off for its burrow, some distance away.

  And from the high branches of a remote tree, a white owl quietly launched itself into a long, silent glide.

  CHAPTER 2

  Mygga and Fé

  Late Winter, 5E988

  [The Present]

  “Yah! Yah!” called the sledmaster, urging the dogs onward, Shlee in the lead, maintaining the pace.

  Gwylly leaned out and squinted past Faeril sitting before him. How can they see where to run?

  Snow blew horizontally across their direction of travel, and Gwylly’s vision ahead was baffled by the storm. He could see all the dogs, swift and true, tails straight out, ears laid back and flat, running hard against their tug lines fastened to the gang; but ten yards or so beyond Shlee, Gwylly could make out nothing but whirling white. Glancing back, the Warrow could see Laska, lead dog of the team behind, and he could barely see Riatha’s sled gliding after; but of the third team, the one hauling Aravan, there was no sign, although now and again he could hear the crack! of Tchuka’s signal whip.

  Leaning forward, he called out to Faeril above the steady shssh of the runners. “The dogs—I hope they know where they are going.”

  Behind, B’arr, the sledmaster, laughed, a sharp bark “Shlee know, little ones. Shlee know.”

  Both Gwylly and Faeril twisted about in the sled basket to look back at the Aleutan’s smiling face, with its bronze features and dark eyes and straight black hair and moustache and beard. The sledmaster was dressed in a fur-lined parka with matching bree
ks and mukluks, his mitten-gloved hands firmly gripping the hide-wrapped handlebar, his feet well-planted on the sled runners.

  In turn, the Aleutan saw before him two beings of ancient legend, dressed in quilted down: Mygga he had named them, though they called themselves Warrows. A small, slender folk, with tilted, jewel-like eyes, and pointed ears, and a ready smile—eyes and ears and pale skin much like that of the Fé, the “Elves,” in the sleds behind. But unlike the Fé, the Mygga were small, child size, no bigger than six- or seven-year-old Aleutan children, standing as they did somewhere between three and three and a half feet tall, with the male Mygga, Gwylly, being slightly larger than the female, Faeril; why, they were barely taller than Rak or Kano, B’arr’s great power dogs at the back of the team.

  The Fé, the Elves, on the other hand, with their tilted eyes and pointed ears, stood slightly taller than an adult Aleutan, perhaps five foot five or six for the female, Riatha, with the male, Aravan, a hand or so higher.

  But no matter their height, both Mygga and Fé, they were proud, like Chieftains, standing erect and walking with purpose and looking you straight in the eye, as if they owned the world.

  And they were dangerous, with weapons of steel and silver and starlight and crystal:

  The Warrows, the Mygga, bore missile weapons: The Myggan female was armed with two belts of throwing knives crisscrossed over her torso, five steel blades to a belt, ten steel knives in all; but there was more, for one belt held a silver blade—yet, strangely, on the other belt was an empty scabbard where the silver one’s mate should have been. The Myggan male, too, bore a dagger, yet his weapon of choice seemed to be a sling, and he carried two pouches of bullets at his waist: one filled with steel spheroids, the other, smaller one with bullets more precious, bullets of silver.

  On the other hand, the Elves, the Fé, bore weapons suited to close combat: The Féan female was girted with a long-knife and with a splendid sword whose blade glittered like starlight. The Féan male also wore a long-knife at his waist, yet the long-knife seemed insignificant when compared to his black-hafted spear with its marvelous crystal blade.