Unbonded (First of the Blade Book 1)

by D. K. Holmberg

  She glanced around as quickly as she could, and she did not see anything. The sense of magic was near her, but she had no idea where it came from.

  Power exploded from behind her. It came from near Timo. Near Benji.

  This attack was designed to draw her away.

  She darted forward, sweeping the sword around, feeling that power as she continued to dance in the pattern until she could feel something there. She spun, and a shadowy form separated from one of the trees. Whatever was out there, whatever creature was in front of her, was different than the adlet—and perhaps just as powerful.

  Timo remained motionless, but he was left alone as it moved toward Benji. Imogen slipped ahead, sweeping her blade in a sharp arc, and then she began to flow through a series of her traditional, numbered patterns, carving from one to the next.

  It was a sequence she had long ago learned, which helped her find her way through those patterns. As she had progressed, she no longer needed the numbering, and she blurred from one to the next in reaction to what she felt.

  Without meaning to, Imogen found herself twisting again from the traditional patterns to Petals on the Wind. It forced her sword out at strange angles, almost in a way that prioritized attack over defense, but certainly enough to prevent any attacker from getting too close. This also gave her freedom to move through her other patterns as she did.

  She didn’t see the shadowy form she thought she’d seen before as she continued flowing through the patterns. Nothing that would explain who—or what—might be controlling the adlet.

  She moved back toward Benji. His hand rested on the tree, his face contorted as though he was straining against the magic that was holding him. Somehow, she would need to help, but she had no idea what it would take.

  A shriek came from nearby.

  She jerked her head around and followed the sound, staying within the pattern as she moved.

  The adlet was near her brother. She spun one more time around the tree and around Benji, completing the pattern and flowing toward Timo.

  The creature lunged, and Imogen was ready this time. She moved between the trees and reached the adlet right as it made it to Timo, and she brought her blade up. This time, now that she was flowing through one of the sacred patterns, her swing came with far more power than it had before. She could feel that power through the sword, energy that erupted through her, as if it was drawing upon something more.

  Imogen brought the blade around, and she struck at the adlet. The blade slashed into its midsection. Rather than continuing that movement, she spun, twisting her sword and finishing Petals on the Wind like she had been while moving through the trees. There was a rigidity to the pattern that she knew wasn’t quite right, but it still granted her strength.

  She slammed into the creature. Unlike the last time when she’d faced it, her blade passed through whatever magical protection it carried, cleaving into the meat of its shoulder. The adlet cried out. The shriek split the air, painful, and different than it had been before.

  Timo stirred, but Imogen did not hesitate, and she continued to flow through her movements. She dropped, dodging the claws that raked toward her as they swept over her head, and she brought the sword around again. Her blade sliced into the creature’s arm this time. She twisted and brought her weapon back around. She stepped forward, moving in one of the sacred patterns known as Lightning Strikes in a Storm, and then she withdrew her blade.

  Normally, she wouldn’t have even attempted that sacred pattern. That particular one didn’t have nearly as much use as many of the others, but it had felt right. She had learned to trust that instinct. When something felt right, it usually was.

  The adlet staggered back and crumpled. Imogen stayed within the patterns while heading toward her brother. She looped around and protected him, glancing over her shoulder briefly at Benji, uncertain whether the Porapeth was in any danger.

  She began to circle over toward Benji, but realized it was unnecessary. He had stepped away from the tree, and though he was moving more slowly than she would’ve expected from him, at least there was movement.

  He regarded her. “Did you see it?”

  Imogen swept her gaze around her, continuing through the patterns, trying to be prepared for the possibility that the shadowy figure might return, or that the adlet might get back up. Thankfully, Timo also seemed to be coming back around from whatever enchantment had been placed on him and Benji, but she had seen how quickly it had taken hold. She knew that she needed to be careful.

  “I do not know what took place,” she said.

  “Did you see it?” Benji asked again. “What held me?”

  “I saw a shadowy form.”

  “Was it a sharlon? A targoth? Or maybe a hellaren?”

  Imogen shook her head. She knew none of those words. “I don’t know what it was,” she said. “What if it was a Toral?”

  “No Toral could hold me,” Benji replied.

  “Then a Sul’toral?”

  Benji fell silent for a moment.

  Timo staggered over to them, and he looked over to Benji before turning to Imogen. “What happened? I could hear, but I couldn’t see what was going on. It was almost as if—”

  “You were in something of a trance,” she said.

  “How is that possible?”

  “Dark magic,” Benji said, shaking his head. “Of course it would be. With the damn adlet out here, the fuckers likely decided to unleash something else.” He snorted, nodding to the fallen form of the adlet. “Maybe you are right. Maybe there is an active Sul’toral out here. Damn if I can’t see a thing like I normally should. If only I could, then I could guide your blade right to that fucker.”

  “I’m not exactly sure I’m going to be able to bring down a Sul’toral,” Imogen confessed.

  Benji frowned at her. “No?” He glanced at her sword for a moment. “Well, protections need to come down first. We can track them back to whoever is responsible for them. Lucky for us, they didn’t plan on a First of the Blade. Otherwise, we might all have been slaughtered.”

  Imogen looked over to the adlet, which held its hands over its belly as it whimpered. She headed toward it.

  “What are you going to do?” Timo called after her.

  She ignored him and made her way to where the adlet was lying. As she stood above the creature, holding her blade over it, she almost felt sorry for this horrific half man, half wolf. She had no idea how such a thing even existed, but the way it had shrieked when it had attacked suggested that it was not humanlike enough for her to feel any remorse at cutting it down. Not that she would. She would do whatever was needed in order to bring down a dangerous magical creature. And that was what it was, after all.

  Imogen held her sword in front of her, staring down at the adlet. “Who is your master?”

  The creature returned her gaze. There was nothing human in its eyes.

  She couldn’t save it.

  “I am sorry for your fate.” She whipped the blade around and, using Lightning Strikes in a Storm, drove the point of it down into the adlet’s body. Her sword struck its chest, blasting through whatever residual magic was there.

  The creature made no sound, but as it looked up with eyes that locked onto hers, Imogen allowed herself to believe that there was relief that swept through its gaze. She withdrew the blade and wiped it on the creature’s pants, then sheathed it.

  Benji watched her as she walked over to him.

  “Could we have turned it back into…” Imogen trailed off as she realized she had no idea what it had been before.

  “It is fully a creature of darkness and pain. You could not have saved it.”

  Imogen let out a sigh. “You said we must find its protections.”

  Benji nodded. “A bastard like that is going to have some protections, sorcery or enchantments or something that had been given to it by whoever controls it. Might be that Sul’toral you’re chasing, though this would be new. The problem with what you are suggesting is that
the Sul’toral don’t give power to creatures. That’s typically something sorcerers try to do. Even the Toral know better than that. That’s what made it so difficult for you to kill.” He smirked for a moment, but it faded when she did not return the expression. “At least, that was what made it difficult for you to kill yesterday. Today is a new day, it seems.”

  “Yes,” Imogen said.

  “You managed to learn what it would take to bring down the creature in the matter of one night?”

  “I prepared this time.”

  Timo watched her and didn’t say anything, though she knew he did not need to. He would know exactly what she meant.

  She nodded to Benji. “We must find the one who controls it.”

  “The adlet will have a den nearby,” he said. “For it to be here, at least prowling in these woods, it must have a den. That is where we will find what we need.”

  “And the one who controls it?” Timo asked.

  Some part of him seemed to have softened, but not completely. She still didn’t know what to make of the darkness she saw from her brother, darkness that was far starker than what she had seen from him before. Perhaps, though, it was not his fault. Perhaps it was tied more to the injury he had sustained and how he had been tormented, rather than something within him.

  “To have the kind of power to control it is impressive,” Benji said. “I would like to find that bastard and have a few words with them.”

  “It seems like you are having too many words with the trees,” Timo observed.

  Benji grunted. “The trees like to talk. Don’t get the opportunity often, and I figured I might as well listen. That was my mistake. I will not make it again.” He patted the tree next to him and leaned in, whispering something. Then he peered back over to Timo. “And now I have asked the trees to keep an eye on us. I should’ve done that before, but I didn’t think we had that much to be concerned about.”

  “You asked the trees to keep watch?” Timo asked.

  Benji nodded.

  Timo started to laugh, but it faded as Benji didn’t laugh along with him. “Fine. Your trees are going to watch, but do you really think they will be of much help?”

  “I do,” he said. He started off, tapping on each tree as he went, as if he needed to say something to all of them.

  “I didn’t know the Porapeth had a way of talking to trees,” Timo said.

  “Few know much about the Porapeth at all,” Imogen replied. “They’re as mysterious as the delagar.”

  “At least delagar have been seen before. I don’t remember the last time I heard of anybody interacting with a Porapeth.”

  Imogen looked behind her, glancing around the forest before turning her attention back to Benji. She didn’t remember, either. Porapeth were rare, and they had their own unique and sneaky sort of power, but obviously not enough to withstand whatever had attacked.

  She was going to have to protect her brother and Benji. At least while they recovered.

  This wasn’t how she had intended to spend her time, but if it was what Timo needed, perhaps it was necessary. More than that, it felt strangely right.

  Benji led them through the forest, and he moved quickly, at least compared to what he had done before. He continued patting trees and whispering as he went past them, seeming to share some great secret with them.

  They reached the edge of the forest. It happened almost suddenly, as if they neared some great barrier that the trees could not grow beyond. The land ahead was rocky, stretching downward toward a valley far below them.

  “Not much here for the trees to keep an eye on,” Timo said.

  “You don’t think they did?” Benji asked. “Why do you think we had no distractions?”

  Timo snorted. “The trees protected us? I think Imogen scared them off.”

  “Perhaps. She is a First of the Blade, so it would not be terribly surprising that they feared her, but I’m not completely convinced she’s the reason they left us alone.”

  Benji looked back, expression almost disappointed that they were leaving the forest. With his connection to the trees, perhaps he was.

  Imogen nodded. “Where now?”

  “I can feel something,” Benji said. “It should not be far.”

  She stared, and rather than arguing with him, she followed as he descended. They headed down the rocky valley until they reached a cave. Benji paused, holding his hand out and murmuring something softly. It seemed almost as if the rock itself started to stir.

  “Do you see this?” Timo asked, looking back at Imogen.

  There was a rune worked into the stone. Not just a sorcery rune, but an ancient one.

  “I don’t know Dheleus’s mark,” Timo said.

  Imogen didn’t either. She knew names from her list, but she didn’t know individual markings.

  “That would be his,” Benji said, tapping the rune. “He might be involved. Why out here, though?” He frowned, screwing up his face into a twisted expression. “This isn’t where any of the Sul’toral have been active before. Bastard is keeping me from seeing clearly as well.”

  Imogen didn’t know which of the things Benji was going on about bothered him the most. Was it that he couldn’t see anything well? Was it what was happening to them? Or was there something else altogether?

  She looked back up the slope, then turned her attention to Timo. “We need to go in.”

  “It will be dangerous,” Benji said.

  “You can tell that?”

  He stopped and held his hand up, tracing an outline of Dheleus’s symbol in the air. The one above the doorway crackled with faint yellow light before fading. “The rock tells me.”

  Imogen and Timo shared a look.

  They were going to have to fight sorcery. And it would be powerful.

  She had faced only one Sul’toral directly before, and she would need to be ready.

  Chapter Eleven

  Imogen took a moment to pause, holding her sword in front of her with the blade pointed toward the sky. These days, though she understood the traditional patterns and even knew the sacred patterns, she still had to prepare herself before fighting.

  She opened her eyes, looking over to her brother. He was not focusing like she was. She had never seen him prepare the way she did, though there weren’t many of her people who used this technique. It was a part of her now, something she had picked up during her time in Yoran as a way for her to focus her mind.

  “You’re still doing that,” Timo said.

  “And you still are not.”

  “It’s just not all that useful. I’ve tried, but…” He shrugged, and he glanced behind him at Benji. The Porapeth leaned forward and tapped the stone, looking as if he was talking to it, much the way he had been talking to the trees.

  “You learned the patterns the same as I did,” she said.

  He watched her for a moment, then nodded. “I learned the patterns. I trained the same. And…”

  Timo trailed off and shook his head, almost as if he didn’t know what else he could say. When it came to trying to understand her brother and how he used the patterns, Imogen no longer knew.

  “Are you sure this is the adlet, then?” she asked Benji without looking back to him.

  “You saw the mark,” he said.

  “Just because I have seen the mark doesn’t mean it is the adlet.”

  He chuckled. “Perhaps not. But this is the den. I can show you once we get inside.”

  He crouched down, holding his hand above the ground, and the stone trembled slightly. Imogen was aware of it beneath her boots, as though the ground itself were trying to communicate something to her but refused. Perhaps it could not.

  She looked back at Benji. For the first time, she truly studied him. This was a man—a Porapeth—who had been targeted by the adlet. What if all of this was some ploy to coax her into helping him with something beyond just the creature?

  “See if your blade can take down the magic here,” Benji instructed both of them. “Once
it’s down, we can track the one responsible for all of this.”

  Imogen stepped forward, and she immediately felt resistance against her. It wasn’t significant enough to stop her, but it was an invisible barrier nonetheless.

  She knew two dozen different traditional patterns that were perfect in tight confines. She flowed with those, staying as precise as possible, using the techniques she had learned and mastered what seemed like decades before. Imogen crashed forward with power, but each time she did, she bounced off the barrier. Normally, when she tried to deal with sorcery, there was a spell she would disrupt, but she couldn’t in this case.

  She thrust forward, realizing that she had shifted into one of the sacred patterns without meaning to, using Lightning Strikes in a Storm. She didn’t do it perfectly. She never had. Imogen was sure that Master Liu would have admonished her for her poor and sloppy technique. Still, she slammed into some barrier, and it blasted outward, throwing her back.

  Timo had been tossed down the slope, and he got up slowly. He moved tentatively, the ginger way suggesting just how much he had been injured by the strange attack the day before.

  Imogen faced the cavern and started to flow again, staying in a confined pattern. A hand grabbed her wrist as she turned, and she froze.

  “You don’t need to dart forward quite yet,” Benji said. “Let me shake the fucker free.”

  She frowned at him. “You intend to shake him free?”

  “If there’s anything in there to be shaken. Unless, of course, you would rather go in without knowing? I thought that a powerful Leier like you would prefer to have some assistance, and not want to go in completely blind.”

  Imogen shook her head. “You’re right. I’d rather know.”

  He grunted. “Then let me shake him free.”

  He touched the side of the cavern. The rock was irregular and looked as if it had been stacked in place, rather than formed naturally. It was as though somebody had made the tunnel and chamber here. Perhaps that was what it was. As he touched the stone, it trembled again, and a bit of debris rained down. Imogen took an involuntary step back, moving away from the entrance to the chamber. Timo was there alongside her.