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They spent the rest of the evening making less momentous conversation, and around
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midnight, Kith-Kanan made his camp among the army of his allies. At dawn, he was up
and saddling Arcuballis, preparing to leave. The dwarves were awake, too, ready to
march.
"Less than three weeks to go," said Dunbarth, with a wink.
"Don't be late for the war!" chided Kith. Moments later, the sunlight flickered from
the griffon's wing feathers a hundred feet above the dwarven column.
Arcuballis soared into the sky, higher and higher. Yet it was many hours before Kith
saw it, a blocklike shape that looked tiny and insignificant from his tremendous height.
He would reach it by dark. It was Sithelbec, and for now at least, it was home.
21
Late Spring, in the Army of Ergoth
Long rows of makeshift litters filled the tent, and upon them, Suzine saw men with
ghastly wounds men who bled and suffered and died even before she could begin to treat
them. She saw others with invisible hurts warriors who lay still and unseeing, though
often their eyes remained open and fixed. Oil lanterns sputtered from tent poles, while
clerics and nurses moved among the wounded.
Men groaned and shrieked and sobbed pathetically. Others were delirious, madly
babbling about pastoral surroundings they would in all likelihood never see again.
And the stench! There were the raw smells of filth, urine, and feces, and the
sweltering cloud of too many men in too small an area. And there were the smells of
blood, and of rotting meat. Above all, there remained an ever-pervasive odor of death.
For months, Suzine had done all that she could for the wounded, nursing them,
tending their injuries, providing them what solace she could. For a time, there had been
fewer and fewer wounded as those who had been injured in the battles of the winter had
been healed or perished or were sent back to Ergoth.
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But now it was a new season, and it seemed that the war had acquired a new ferocity.
Just a few days earlier, Giarna had hurled tens of thousands of men at the walls of
Sithelbec in a savage attempt to smash through the barricades. A group of the wild elves
had led the way, but the elves within the fortress had fallen upon their kin and the humans
who followed with a furious vengeance. More than a thousand had perished in the fight,
while these hundreds around her represented just a portion of those who had escaped with
varying degrees of injuries.
Most of the suffering were humans, but there were a number of elves those who
fought against Silvanesti and Theiwar dwarves as well. The Theiwar, under the stocky
captain Kalawax, had spearheaded one assault, attempting to tunnel under the fortress
walls. The elves had anticipated the maneuver and filled the tunnel, jammed tightly with
dwarves, with barrels full of oil, which had then been set alight. Death had been fast and
horrible.
Suzine went from cot to cot, offering water or a cool cloth upon a forehead. She was
surrounded by filth and despair, while she herself bore hurts that could not be seen but
which nevertheless cut deeply into her spirit.
So Suzine felt a kinship with these hapless souls and gained what little comfort she
could by caring for them and tending their hurts. She remained throughout most of this
long night, knowing that Giarna was tormented by the failure of his attack, that he might
seek her out. If he found her, he would hurt her as he always did, but here he would never
come.
The hours of darkness passed, and gradually the camp fell into restless silence. Past
midnight, even those men in the most severe pain collapsed into tentative slumber. Weary
to the point of collapse, praying that Giarna already slept, she finally left the wounded to
return to her own shelter.
Outside the hospital tent waited her two guards, the men-at-arms who escorted her
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when she moved about the camp. Actually they were a pair of the Kagonesti elves who
had joined ranks with the army in the hope that it offered them a chance to gain
independence for their people. Oddly, she had come to enjoy the presence of the
softspoken, competent warriors in their face paint, feathers, and dark leather garb.
Suzine had wondered how such elves could rationalize their fight, since it was waged
with great terror against their own people. Several times she had asked the Kagonesti
about their reasons, but only once had she gotten an honest answer from a young elf she
was caring for, who had been wounded in one of the attempts to storm the fortress walls.
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