A Home in the Hills

by Robert J. Crane

  He crashed into the wall, rebounding with a clatter.

  Kuura and Burund came as one, on either side of him. Burund stepped carefully, his sword drawn, but still low to his hip. He watched Baraghosa’s movements with eagle eyes.

  Kuura had an axe. Not quite as devastating as the one Huanatha had first lent to him, with its barbed prongs, it was still an impressive weapon. Its blade was polished steel, curving up to a pointed tip, so it more closely resembled a billhook.

  He circled around Baraghosa,

  Burund moving at ninety degrees to him.

  They were not close enough to strike, but they were closing in—

  Baraghosa sighed. “This is tiresome already.” And he jabbed out with his cane again, the blast hitting Burund in the shoulder. He was punched backward, flipping end over end.

  Kuura ran at Baraghosa.

  The sorcerer flicked out with the cane, swiping it from floor to ceiling.

  A laceration split open on Kuura’s chest, up his neck, his face.

  He stumbled, blood suddenly gouting—

  “You are old,” Baraghosa hissed. He thrust out with the cane. Shouting wordlessly, Kuura tumbled past Huanatha and Trattorias—

  “Your blade is pathetic, cousin!” bellowed Trattorias. He swept his jewel-encrusted sword in a quick and powerful swing that suggested he had been trained by the same sword masters as Huanatha had. She had to duck into a roll to avoid being lopped in half by it. “Lay it down, and I will make your death swift!”

  Huanatha bared her teeth. “Serpent!” And she threw herself at him again, the tiny stub of Tanukke flashing—

  Longwell hurtled past, lance drawn.

  “You will pay for—”

  Baraghosa flicked out with the cane, and Longwell’s words turned to a grunt as a blast of power bowled him over and backward again.

  Baraghosa turned to Alixa, who approached with her dagger clutched very tight in white fists.

  He appraised her as though he were looking curiously upon a toddler with a toy.

  “You come at me again?” he asked. “After I showed you what I am capable of?”

  “I know what you are capable of,” said Alixa.

  “And do you not fear it?”

  “I do.” She clenched her teeth. “But I wish to save others from that fear.”

  “Hmph,” Baraghosa regarded her with curiosity. “Very well.”

  She stepped in—

  Burund and Kuura hurtled back again, both their blades drawn, poised, and

  Baraghosa ducked.

  They yelped, narrowly dodging to avoid spearing the other, then Baraghosa thrust out his hands at each of their backs, and they were tossed across the room. Burund smashed hard into the throne, so hard it exploded in a shower.

  “Defiler!” Huanatha roared at Baraghosa, her focus upon Trattorias momentarily forgotten.

  Trattorias pressed. Swooping in with his blade, he swung high—

  “Huanatha!” Jasen shouted.

  She’d dodged already, but the blade winged her armor, sending a high-pitched whine into the air, like a bell struck with a hammer.

  Longwell came in again. He was bloody, a dribble of red oozing from his lip. Teeth gritted, he moved in a blur past Alixa and thrust out with the lance.

  Baraghosa flicked his cane—

  —and Longwell froze.

  He stared, eyes wide, his lance stuck out in front of him. And though he pulled at it, it did not yield. It was as if its tip had been buried in the cleft in a rock.

  “What is this?” he breathed.

  “My powers were already great,” said Baraghosa, meandering forward easily, his expression calm. “But now they are greater still.” And he flicked his fingers again, forefinger and middle finger together, in a spiral like he was imitating the twist of a funnel of air—

  Longwell was whipped up and around on the end of the lance. He cried out, whirling overhead, a tangle of limbs. His grip faltered, and he came shooting off of it, across the room in an arc.

  He crashed headlong into the sealed doors, then fell, dazed.

  The lance hung in the air.

  Baraghosa appraised it. “A godly weapon … I suspected as much … one does recognize these things. I could do great things with this. But then … I can do great things already.” His gaze flicked to Longwell’s prone form. “You may have it back.”

  The lance turned in the air, so it pointed directly at Longwell.

  It shot out, like an arrow fired from a bow—

  Jasen gasped—

  Kuura swept in. He deflected the blow with the axe, sending the lance spinning away, so it clattered upon the floor like a dropped broom.

  “I must say,” Baraghosa said, “I am impressed by all of you. To escape my island—no, none of that, little girl.”

  Alixa had crept in behind him. Now Baraghosa hit the ground at her feet with his cane. A rush of energy spilled her over, a head-over-heels roll that knocked the dagger out of her hand. She groped for it—

  Baraghosa sent it spinning aside with a flick of his fingers. “But I find myself most impressed … by you.”

  His gaze settled upon Jasen.

  Scourgey growled.

  They’d kept back so far. What little strength Jasen had managed to hoard during their journey from Nontham had been squandered on the climb up the hill to this fortress.

  So he needed to pick his moment—even if it meant watching his friends get tossed about like they were a child’s playthings.

  “You are so close to the end,” Baraghosa mused, looking down at him. “You know it now, don’t you? Perhaps you did not believe it before. But now … you feel it. Yes, you know death lies within you. Every second is a second closer you are to its door.”

  “Leave him alone!” Alixa screamed, swooping in with her reclaimed dagger—

  Baraghosa didn’t even look back, didn’t even move. The lights floating at his shoulders pulsed, and a blast of energy sent Alixa sailing through the air with a shriek, over the broken throne, over Huanatha and Trattorias as she dodged his wicked flurry of strikes.

  “You’re a murderer,” Jasen said.

  “So are you,” Baraghosa returned. “I can see it—see what you’ve done. There is blood on your hands. You are no longer the innocent boy from Terreas, are you? You’ve become … something more.”

  Kuura swept in again. Blood soaked his tunic, and there was a wild look in his eyes. He spun the axe overhead—

  At the same moment, Burund jagged inward. He brought the blade down low—

  “BARAGHOSA!”

  Longwell thundered forward, his lance pointed directly at the sorcerer’s head.

  All three of them hurtled in, coming almost a perfect one hundred and twenty degrees away from each other. They came high, they came low, they came at his midsection—

  And yet Baraghosa barely flinched. He just twisted on his heel, sidestepping—yet it was as though his body flattened, somehow; he did not just dodge but thinned, so his entire body was a single plane, like a leaf of parchment—

  And all three attackers missed.

  Baraghosa clicked his fingers.

  The blast of energy rolled out of him like an explosion. Kuura, Burund and Longwell all were thrown. Alixa, who was just tottering back onto her feet, was tossed backward.

  It hit Jasen too.

  He and Scourgey were thrown by it. Like a wave had rolled over them, it lifted the both of them off their feet, sending them backward—

  For the first time in what seemed like days, his touch with the scourge was lost, and

  he hit the hard floor.

  It was stone, like the walls and ceilings of the fortress, a sunbaked brown that was decorated only by royal blue carpets. Yet even if it had been a distilled cloud he landed upon, Jasen’s body was too far gone. It would have hurt under any circumstances.

  The pain jolted through him, a white heat that twisted his stomach. He felt sick—and the crack that came with it! His spine had bro
ken, it must have—

  “Of course, I do not blame you,” said Baraghosa, lazily strolling over, ignoring Huanatha and Trattorias’s battle raging about the shattered throne. “The Prenasians deserve death—them and their trolls. You see, it’s they who I’ve been working all this time to raise an army against.”

  The pact Huanatha said he had pushed for, the same he’d wanted from Nonthen.

  “The threat they pose—it is like nothing your Luukessians, or the Arkarians, or these Coricuanthians have ever known.”

  “There are none worse than you,” Jasen spat from where he lay. Fingers formed into claws, he raked them along the ground for a hold to pull himself up.

  Baraghosa smiled. “Oh, but there are. The Prenasians. They will roll across these lands with a fury like no other, an unstoppable force whose only intent is to conquer and subjugate.”

  Jasen looked up at him, the dark ceiling above contrasting with the sorcerer’s pale face. “What makes them any different than you?”

  “What do you mean?” the sorcerer asked, a bemused look upon his face.

  “You conquer the lands you touch too,” said Jasen, and he rose, slowly, on legs that threatened to give out from under him. Scourgey looped around, limping—but she sidled under Jasen’s arms, let him throw them about her neck, the pair of them upright and defiant.

  She growled.

  Baraghosa ignored her. “I have conquered no lands.”

  “You lie,” said Longwell, pulling himself up from where he’d been thrown onto the floor. “You do not take the thrones yourself, but you usurp the leaders upon them. You bring about revolts of your own making in order to fell them, so that you may install puppets who do your bidding. You have done it here in Muratam, you tried it in Reikonos, and I have little doubt that you have done it in a thousand other places.”

  “A thousand!” Baraghosa echoed. “What a compliment you pay me. But alas, Lord Longwell of Reikonos … or rather, former Lord Longwell of Reikonos … I have barely scratched the surface yet.”

  Longwell’s jaw clenched, a hard line. Teeth gritted, blood dribbling down his face from his split lip, he gripped his spear tight and leapt.

  Baraghosa was too quick. Longwell moved in a blur, but the sorcerer’s powers had grown in the weeks since their last battle. Longwell moved, but Baraghosa moved a fraction of a second before him, pre-empting the warrior’s strike. So when the tri-point spear sailed through the air, where Baraghosa’s neck had just been, the sorcerer had already moved.

  He swung his cane out and around, like a conductor to an orchestra—

  It tapped the back plate of Longwell’s armor.

  A flash of purple light, a BOOM!

  The far wall exploded, dust raining out of it.

  Longwell collapsed at its foot, a crater dug in it.

  Burund and Kuura paused, Alixa with them.

  “Thus far,” said Baraghosa, turning casually, “I have been civil.”

  “You possess no civility,” growled Huanatha over her shoulder, ducking the swing of Trattorias’s blade. He was fast, dangerously so, and he drew her back in with a ferocious thrust across her knees. She leapt, dodging it, then rolled—

  Trattorias brought the sword down overhead—

  She jerked aside, so the blade clanged on the floor—then Tanukke flashed, hitting it, a resounding clang cutting through the chamber—

  “I have not killed you,” said Baraghosa, “when I could end any of you at any moment. Even when you come for my throat, again and again, I have spared all your lives. Likewise, you have shown me some civility. You have explained, all of you, the reasoning for wanting to do battle with me—a rare thing indeed.” The sorcerer’s face darkened. “But my civility has bounds. I will not stand for this.”

  “Nor will we.”

  This was Longwell. He had risen, behind Baraghosa, crept up with his lance in hand. Now he thrust out, the spear’s jagged tip glinting—

  Baraghosa caught it in his hand and

  held it fast.

  Longwell stared, terror dawning on his face.

  Again, it was as though the lance had been buried deep within a rocky cleft, so tight it could not budge even an inch. Yet it was only Baraghosa’s hand gripping it—gripping it right around the blade. It should have cut him, should have sliced him open, yet he held it as if it were nothing more than a stick.

  “How—?” Longwell stammered.

  Baraghosa’s eyes glowed, with a light that was a color Jasen could not name, a queasy, nauseating color that had come from a world entirely separate to this one. The chill that ran up his spine threatened to turn him to ice and then shatter him into a thousand pieces.

  The air electrified.

  “My power has evolved,” said Baraghosa in a low monotone. “And you are powerless against me.”

  And he pushed back with the lance, a sudden, sharp thrust—

  The pole slammed into Longwell’s chestplate, which shattered.

  Crumpling inward, a spiderweb of fractures exploded across it. Shards of metal pinged out in all directions, like the vase Huanatha had thrown at the doors to the throne room.

  Jasen saw this for the tiniest fraction of a second.

  Then the blast of energy connected with Longwell’s chest.

  One moment he stood before the sorcerer, utterly dwarfing him.

  The next he was gone, disappeared in a cloud of dust where he collided with the wall.

  “Longwell!” cried Alixa—

  Huanatha, too, shouted his name. Her focus on Trattorias lost for a moment, she thrust out a hand, as if she could catch Longwell with it—

  The king swung the sword—

  The blade crashed against her chest.

  Her own armor protected her. But Trattorias was strong too—not in the way that Baraghosa was, but in a physical, brutish way. Huanatha grunted, careening backward.

  “HAH!” Trattorias bellowed. He brandished his sword. “Foolish traitor.”

  Huanatha staggered to her knees. Her head spun; Jasen could see her eyes flicking back and back to Trattorias before drifting off each time, following a dizzy world while her brain fought to reorient itself.

  Tanukke hung almost limp in her hand.

  Trattorias stepped before her.

  He leered down at her, lips curled in a familiar way that must also have come from some distant ancestor, passed down through the family. This was not just a sneer though, but a victorious smirk.

  He lifted the sword.

  Its jewels glinted, blue and red and purple.

  “Bow before your true king,” he breathed, “and I will make this quick.”

  Huanatha looked up at him. Still spinning, she seemed not to be able to focus. Her own energy had wavered too; she almost sagged there, upon her knees before him.

  But she met his eyes … and she growled, “No.”

  And she swung out with Tanukke at the same time as she rolled—

  Trattorias screamed.

  Blood erupted from behind his knee, where the stubby blade had pierced the gap between the two metal plates that gripped him about thigh and shin and torn him open.

  “I will never bow to you,” Huanatha roared,

  and she flew at him again.

  So did Kuura, hurtling at Baraghosa in the moment’s distraction like a cannonball.

  The billhook-like axe rose—

  Baraghosa spun, swiping his cane through the air.

  One second Kuura surged toward the sorcerer; the next he flipped through the air like a fly slapped with a piece of leather.

  Burund—

  He’d no more than stepped forward before Baraghosa sent him bowling over with a thrust of his cane.

  “Meddling busybody,” Baraghosa said. “Following me from Luukessia to Chaarland to Necromancer Isle … I wrecked your ship upon the rocks, just as I wrecked this Longwell’s to get you off my arse … and still you took it upon yourself to find me.”

  Burund staggered up—

  Baragh
osa thrust out again.

  Another burst of power, like a wave, shot out from his hand.

  Blood sprayed from Burund’s nose as he careened backward.

  “Stop,” Jasen wheezed.

  Baraghosa glanced at him.

  “No.”

  And he flicked out his fingers—

  Alixa, who crouched beside the prone form of Longwell, his eyes closed and unmoving, shrieked as she was lifted into the air on invisible strings and drawn toward him.

  Jasen recalled the battle in Baraghosa’s tower. The way he had bound Alixa in invisible ropes, the way he had lifted her own dagger, pressed it against her stomach—

  “No,” he breathed.

  He drew forward on legs that were unwilling to carry him.

  “Desist, child,” sighed Baraghosa, and Jasen, too, was thrown across the room, Scourgey with him. He sailed, the breath forced from his lungs—

  CRACK!

  This one was worse. If the burst of pain that had ripped through Jasen before was a ten on the scale, this blew past it and rendered obsolete every former measure of pain he had known. It must have broken his spine, not just snapped it but ground every vertebrae into dust. Oh, it was so searing and hot, overspilling his senses—he screamed, or coughed, or only wheezed—whatever sound he was capable of making now, it was not enough to convey the sheer, utter agony …

  “I tire of your cousin,” Baraghosa muttered. “But you, little girl … I see very interesting things for you. A shame—you could have achieved much indeed … been a great ally … but you aligned yourself with these simpleminded fools. All those opportunities to leave them wasted …” He tutted. “How stupid of you. Never mind, though … you will be reunited with your mother and father soon.”

  “Don’t you speak of them,” Alixa growled, and she spat, a fat glob of saliva that struck Baraghosa in the eye.

  He winced.

  For a moment, there was a deathly silence. Even Huanatha’s battle with Trattorias seemed to have stopped.

  Then,

  for the first time, Baraghosa’s voice rose with anger. “You disgusting little—”

  “UNHAND HER!” Huanatha roared.

  Jasen lifted his head—no, that was Scourgey lifting him, snaking under him again, whining, questioning in her own way if he were okay—just in time to see Huanatha sail through the air between Baraghosa and the suspended Alixa, Tanukke’s stub flashing. She swept with it at the sorcerer’s face, Alixa’s spit still glistening upon it.