She brushed away a few feathers clinging to her cloak and took in her surroundings. There was one final strange moment where she felt the long-seeing eyesight of a crow fade, while the colors of everything became sharper, more vibrant. A crow’s eyesight was superior in some ways, but not in others.
Damanja had landed on a mountainside overlooking a canyon. A volcano on the opposite side of the range was erupting. There were a number active along the range—when she rode high on the currents, she could see their plumes stretching to the heavens for a distance of fifty miles or more to the north, and even farther to the south. This one, however, had fingers of lava extending across its slopes, and it sent out explosive shocks at regular intervals, even as its cone continued to grow.
Not a scrap of vegetation remained on the mountain, and the surrounding forests had burned to wastelands of ash punctuated here and there by scorched, blackened remnants where the fire seemed to have been extinguished before the destruction was complete. Probably halted by the freak snow and ice storms of the past two months, she thought. The gaunt remnants of trees somehow made the desolation even more complete.
Up here, however, the forest remained. Hardwoods had given way to thick, mature stands of pine, with some of the trees six feet or more in diameter. If she looked up toward the highest peaks and ignored the smell of sulfur and ash, it was easy to pretend that all was as it had been. The place looked like a perfect refuge for someone who didn’t want to be found.
“They’re around here somewhere,” Damanja said aloud.
The air was still, and her voice sounded loud. She hadn’t felt alone before, but now a crushing weight of loneliness pressed on her shoulders. She shook it off. All she needed was to feel the residual pain in her leg where the cursed bladedancer had cut it off at the knee to find her anger.
Damanja had spent a week lying in a muddy ditch after fighting Narina, sweating and moaning as she drifted in and out of delirium. A single peasant could have ended her life, bashed her on the head with a stone or hacked at her with his spade, but none found her. One day she woke to find herself shivering with cold. Her leg had regrown itself during her fever, and would even bear a little weight. Now, a few weeks later, it felt no different than her other limbs.
The crows who’d flown with Damanja south from Riverrun circled overhead, and she divided the flock in two and sent them off to scout the area. Her enemy’s lair must be nearby. There would be a clearing in the woods, a path—something to give it away—and she intended to find it.
Meanwhile, she had other prey to stalk.
There was a lingering scent in the air to her left, leading up what looked like a deer path that picked between moss-covered boulders at the edge of the meadow and led into a copse of trees perched on the hillside above her. Damanja pulled in the surrounding auras to hide herself, using what the temple warriors called sowen, as natural to use these days as her sense of smell or hearing.
Based on the way the fools of the plains looked away when she came through their midst, she must appear to their eyes as a shadow, assuming they could look in her direction in the first place. Their eyes seemed drawn in other directions, as if something else had caught their interest and could not be ignored.
But this wasn’t one of her soldiers, a peasant, or a brigand Damanja was trying to fool. She could feel from the residual aura lingering on the path that this was someone not to be trifled with. And so she moved cautiously, with her hand over her shoulder on her sword hilt, ready to draw it at the first sign of danger.
As she came to the base of the hill and passed between the rocks, the strange, aura-bending sensation grew until her skin was prickling with it. She stopped next to a rock that emerged hump-like along the edge of the path, and when she leaned against it to get her bearings, felt a tingling shock when her hand touched the stone. There was something unusual about the shape of the thing, and something told her to scrape away the moss.
The action revealed etchings scratched across the surface, ancient lines that looked like some sort of map. A shape like a crescent moon marked the upper-right corner, while the lower-left edge held a triangle-like figure that could only be a volcano. She stared at the map, trying to figure it out, and eventually decided it had to be the entire length of the island, from the dry, frozen wastes of the North to the hot swamplands of the South.
Damanja scooped up a handful of the sandy soil at the base of the rock and used it to scour away more of the moss. Yes, definitely a map of their lands, with all the major landmarks—the plains, the huge internal mountain range, and the narrow strip of land on the western edge of the Narrow Sea, a land inhabited mainly by small fishing villages. The crescent, she decided, was no moon, but rather the upturned horns of a dragon.
She touched the stone one more time and continued on her way. When she’d scrambled up the hillside and the path had straightened out, she found another stone. This one was half-buried in a century of decayed pine needles and other forest debris, but a little work revealed more lines etched in the surface, along with scratching that seemed to be words in an unknown language.
She didn’t bother trying to decipher it. The more interesting detail was that someone else had come this way. The scent of their aura or sowen lay across the rock, stronger than ever. She followed it, which took her off the animal path a few minutes later.
The scent grew stronger still, as did something else in the auras, which seemed to be vibrating across the landscape as she encountered more of the strange stones, one after another. Some stood on bare patches of ground where vegetation failed to take purchase, while others were completely submerged in the dirt and debris of the deeper patches of forest.
Finally, she penetrated a stretch of forest that was so still and quiet she could hear her own breaths. The trees here were giants, with even the smaller ones eight or ten feet in diameter, and the largest twice that in width, with their crowns far overhead. The entire grove must be hundreds of years old, with neither fire nor woodsman’s ax having touched it in generations.
There were stones all around, and something bent through the auras that felt as ancient as the trees themselves. A sense of disquiet worked into her bones until she could no longer suppress a shudder. Whatever it was wanted her to stay, wanted to take something from her.
Something stirred to Damanja’s right. Her sword was in her hand without her being aware that she’d drawn it. Peering into the gloom, she searched in vain for what had drawn her attention, but could see nothing amiss, nor could she feel it with her sowen. Maybe her prey had come through, drawn by the strange stones as she’d been, then fled in fear of the ancient magic of the place. She should do the same before it was too late.
And then she felt it stir again. This time there was a whisper of sowen. She’d been wrong. There was someone here after all, one of the temple warriors. She moved forward, her sword bleeding shadow.
“I can see you,” a woman’s voice said.
Damanja turned toward it, but there was nobody there, only huge trees and silence, without even a breeze to stir the branches overhead. Once again her breath sounded loud in her ears.
“Then you have an advantage,” Damanja said. “Why don’t you show yourself?”
“This is a sanctuary. You don’t want to fight me, not here.”
“Very well then, I won’t,” Damanja said.
“Yet your sword is still in your hand.”
“I can only assume that you are similarly armed.”
“I won’t attack you, Crowlord,” the other woman said
“So you say. Until you show yourself, I have no way of knowing otherwise.”
“This is not the place nor the time,” the woman said. “And I am not your enemy. I can feel your thoughts—I know you’re itching to take my life, to drink my sowen and add my power to yours. And I’m telling you it doesn’t have to be that way. The curse doesn’t have to carry either of us to an early grave.”
“It’s not a curse,” Damanja said
. “It is a holy calling from the lords and creators of this world. And there will be no grave for you. You will dissolve in a cloud of ash, and nobody will ever know of your passing.”
“You foolish crowlord. You blind, stupid woman.”
Damanja had been moving during this, sliding from tree to tree. She would stop and listen, and then move again based on her perception of the other woman’s voice. Damanja was fairly certain her enemy couldn’t see her entirely, or she’d have attacked, or at least moved. The crowlord came to a spot where she was sure the voice had come from, but couldn’t see or feel anything. It was a small clearing between two of the largest trees, whose interlocking branches suffocated all other growth on the forest floor. The other woman was within fifteen feet of this spot, she would swear to it.
Damanja moved in a blur with her shadowy sword sweeping in an arc. Within seconds, she’d covered the entire range where the other woman could possibly be, and there was no stretch of the forest floor in that space that hadn’t felt the touch of her sword. Yet still nothing, and when the woman spoke again, there was mockery in her voice.
“You won’t find me that way, Crowlord. It was never going to be so easy.”
Demons take her, where was the woman hiding? She had to be here, and yet. . .
And then suddenly, the answer came to her. Damanja lifted her sword and blasted shadow from the end, only this time it wasn’t at anything on the ground, it was at the lowest branch of the tree, roughly a dozen feet overhead. It was a small branch compared to the larger ones higher up, but it was still a good two feet thick, and the wood was dense and old and strong.
She’d thought to sever it with a single blow, but instead she had to drag the shadow back and forth before the branch snapped loose and came crashing down. She jumped clear and felt with her sowen to catch the temple warrior before she could recover from the fall. There was nothing there.
The voice came from above her, but higher this time. “Very good, Crowlord. You almost got me.”
Something flickered into view, and suddenly there was a woman perched above her on a branch roughly thirty feet overhead. The woman had flame-red hair and was dressed in a black cloak with red markings, like stripes of fire across her chest. She had a lean, muscular body, not unlike the bladedancer Damanja had already faced, but instead of the twin blades Narina wielded, she carried a single elegant sword, two-handed but more slender than Damanja’s falchion from the warbrand temple.
Damanja looked down at the sword in her own hand. It dripped shadow, with the tip nearly liquid in appearance. She worked out the distance and abandoned the thought of making another go of it.
“Let me guess,” Damanja said. “A firebrand?”
“I was, yes. I’m not sure you could call me one at the moment. The others will have expelled me by now, I’m sure.” The woman clenched her teeth, and her eyes closed briefly as a look of pain passed over her face. “I would say that I deserved it, but there was a curse on me, and I don’t think I could have done any differently.”
“There was a curse?”
“You’re right,” the firewalker said. “There is a curse. I’m stilled damned by this thing, a bloodlust that makes me want to kill my former friends and anyone else who stands in my way. Especially an enemy like you. You are powerful, and if I take your sowen, I’d be strong enough to assault the bladedancer temple itself.”
“The bladedancer temple?” Damanja said eagerly. “Is that nearby?”
The firewalker ignored her question. “Sarika is there—she is the other surviving firewalker sohn—and others who survived the demonic attack on our temple. But it doesn’t matter. I’d kill them, too.”
“Then what are you doing crouched on that branch like a coward? I’m an enemy, aren’t I? And I have power you want to take. So why don’t you do it? Come down and fight me.”
“No, Crowlord. Here, I am not cursed. Here, my mind is clear.”
“The trees? The carved stones? What is this place?”
“A sanctuary. A place you can fall asleep and wake up from your nightmare, at least for a stretch. This isn’t the first time this war has been fought, you know. Others have faced the same in generations past. I don’t know if they succeeded, or if the world was burned or buried in ice until the monsters finally retreated, but these stones survived, and so did the surrounding forest.”
For someone who claimed her mind was clear, the firewalker seemed to be talking in a confused jumble.
“You’re a part of this, Crowlord,” the other woman added. “You’ve become a tool of the war, nothing else. If you want to survive, you need to step outside of it. Don’t fight for the demons. You will burn in the end, all the same, but only after you’ve seen your kingdom buried beneath a sea of lava.”
“I’m nobody’s tool.”
“There’s another path, you know,” the firewalker continued. “Stay here with me. Let this place do its magic. It won’t cure us, but we won’t fall to the curse, either.”
“Stay here until what?”
“Until the elders find us. Until they bind us with their sowen. I’ll tell them not to kill you. We’ll leave this place together, and they’ll burn it out of us. We’ll be cured.”
Damanja looked around, incredulous. There was no food here, no shelter. Were they supposed to dig a hollow beneath one of the ancient stones and line it with pine needles?
“I came here by accident, you know,” the woman said. “Sarika was hunting me. Miklos, too—he’s a warbrand.”
“I know Miklos. We met on the plains.”
“Then you know he was cursed, too. But he’s cured now. So you see it’s possible.”
“Go on,” Damanja said.
“They wanted to take me. I wasn’t strong enough to fight them, not openly. I was waiting for my opportunity, looking for the perfect spot to launch an ambush. I stumbled into this sacred place, and my mind went clear. I tried to leave—set one foot outside this grove—and the curse came upon me again. I only had time to stumble back inside before it took me.”
This was all interesting. It must mean that the bladedancer temple was near. That’s where Damanja would find Narina and finish what they’d started at the battle near the ruined mill.
“She took off your leg, didn’t she?” the firewalker said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t try to deny it. I can feel the wound in your leg, and I know it was Narina who did it. But now they’ve got her, they brought her back.”
“Where’s Narina now? Where is she?”
“Did you listen to anything I said? Look inside yourself—none of this is necessary. Put your sword away. Relax your sowen. We don’t have to fight. Not here, not now. If we wait, they’ll come for us, and they can help you as well as me. Then we’ll all be against them, and we’ll have a chance.”
“Against who?” Damanja demanded.
“The demons. The dragons. They set us against each other, but if we stand together, the people of the mountains and the plains, we can send them back where they belong. Demons into the abyss, and dragons back to their frozen lakes.”
Damanja snorted. “What a bunch of rubbish. Nothing can stop what has already started. Come down here and fight.”
“I won’t do it. I refuse to.”
“You’ll fight. Demons take you, you’ll do it.”
The firewalker bared her teeth. “If you come up, I’ll just climb higher, jump to another tree if I have to. I’m more agile than you could ever hope to be, Crowlord. I’ll stay above you and kick you to the ground, and all you’ll have to show for it is a broken leg.”
This was a chance to take advantage of the firewalker’s blather, when the woman seemed to be caught up in boasting of her own prowess in spite of her earlier show of humility. Damanja sheathed her sword, tucked in her arms, and closed her eyes. She gathered the wind and called for it to lift her off the ground. Even before the other woman had finished speaking, shadows had wrapped around Damanja and c
hanged her.
She lifted with beating wings, and in an instant had flown up to the branch where the firewalker perched. The woman didn’t appear to notice the blur of an approaching crow, shielded as it was in bent auras, until Damanja was already shifting back into human form. She drew her shadow sword from its sheath and punched through the air to slice the woman in two. But the woman ducked backward just in time, then launched herself from the branch.
The firewalker jumped for an even thicker limb above her, what must have been a leap of ten feet at least, grabbed hold of it, and swung herself up with a speed and agility that should have been impossible. She scrambled to the end of the branch and prepared to make another jump, this one at a branch both higher and farther around the trunk, but Damanja was already on the move to intercept her. She swung her sword, and shadows leaped from the tip.
The shadows sliced through the end of the branch where the firewalker was crouched to leap. Damanja’s enemy was suddenly flailing at the air. Even so, she might have got ahold of the trunk or grabbed for another branch if she hadn’t been mid spring; instead, she couldn’t get clear of the falling branch and windmilled her arms as she fell to the ground. She landed with a cry.
Damanja shifted back into a crow, dropped to the ground with wings outspread, and returned to her human form in an instant. The changes came more swiftly every time, easier and with less delay. She was on top of the firewalker with her sword swinging before the woman had a chance to rise to her feet and bring her own weapon to bear. The first blow sizzled across the other woman’s shoulder, which brought another cry.
The firewalker swung her own sword with a speed that would have overwhelmed Damanja earlier in the year, but with her growing power, she had no trouble fending off the counterattack, dancing clear, and then turning about in time to avoid another thrust when the woman made a spinning leap through the air in an attempt to stab her in the back.
The firewalker ducked back a few steps and eyed the tree behind her as if trying to figure out how to scramble back into the branches. Damanja waited, patient. Let her try; the shadow sword would cut her in two mid-jump. Time was on the crowlord’s side, as the light wound in the woman’s shoulder was already beginning to fester.
Bladedancer (The Sword Saint Series Book 4) Page 2
