(eng) P. C. Hodgell - Kencyrath 03 by Seeker's Mask

Author:Seeker's Mask [Mask, Seeker's]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Interim IV

The Grimly Holt: 59th of Spring

In the northern reaches of Bashti, south of the White Hills, lies a great forest, deep and dark and full of strange things. Men call it the Weald when they speak of it at all. Few enter. Fewer still emerge.

Its eastern corner, the Grimly Holt, is just as feared by ignorant people, although its folk are shy and courteous, much different in manners if not in blood from their wild cousins of the deep wood. The wolvers' keep is another of those ancient ruins which line the Silver, this one smaller than most and unreclaimed by later builders. Its walls lie tumbled around the forest floor like so many half-sunken boulders velvet with moss and a stream runs down the glade which had been its great hall. The loam of countless seasons obscures floor and hearth except where skullcap mushrooms grow along buried veins of ancient mortar mixed with blood.

Tonight, however, the weirding had restored to the keep a ghostly shell of its former self. Glowing mist sculpted itself against low walls long since fallen and pressed down on the thatch of an invisible roof. Wisps trickled in through narrow windows which had admitted no light of sun or moon or star for time out of mind.

This was an opportunity not to be missed.

Since the storm had rolled over them hours ago, the wolvers had been trying to record every detail of their ancient home which the weirding revealed. Long, communal howls slid down the length of beam and stone. Modulated yips described the cunning fit of joints and hunting scenes carved over the outer lintels, seen in reverse as though from inside a glowing mold. As they sang, the mist pressed closer, taking more clearly the long vanished forms, and misty wraiths drifted down the hall to the sound of music lost in a dream.

The song snarled in snapping argument. There was a small structure attached to the rear wall which none of the singers understood.

"It's a privy," said the Wolver Grimly, and explained.

The word meant nothing in their tongue, so they settled for a description: the hole that all men mark but none claim.

Obviously, thought Grimly, they had never been in Kothifir during an outbreak of dysentery.

In fact, few of his kin ever left the holt at all or spent much time in man-shape except during adolescence, when each generation in turn discovered that humans have no set mating time. Here on the edge of the great, dark Weald, there were few true humans to imitate in other matters. Torisen's visit the previous winter was still avidly discussed, not only because he was an accepted wolf-friend but because he had marched the entire Kencyr Host through the Holt on a shortcut to the Cataracts.

Only once before in living memory had the forest been so invaded, by a much less courteous party, when King Kruin of Kothifir had descended on it to hunt wolver.

Grimly well remembered his first sight of humankind. Kruin had

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