In the night sky high above them was a cloud; only it could not possibly be a cloud for it was indigo blue in colour and shone with an unnatural radiance. Its shape kept changing as it floated through the air, its wispy, fragile beauty scarred by the streaks of lightning that crawled over its surface.
‘Hey!’ Hugh said to Tomas. ‘Remember Krago the barbarian, from Tolmareon in the frozen north. He used to tell tales of such things, lights and great clouds of colour that danced in the air. The torches of the Gods, he used to say. I wonder if this is the same thing?’
‘Whether it is or it isn’t,’ Tomas growled, ‘it is moving towards us, even though there is no wind.’
Tomas was right. The cloud, if indeed that was what it was, moved swiftly and as it did so it sank in the night air, growing larger and larger as it drifted towards them.
‘Artorus’s teeth, the thing is huge!’ Tomas was shaking his head in fear; Hugh next to him, though, was shaking his in wonder. The rest of the men had joined them and all stood staring at this great vapour that now floated directly overhead. It sank low in the sky so that it was barely higher than the tops of the trees. And then it stopped.
‘What by all the Gods can it be? What a wondrous, wondrous thing.’ Hugh was smiling beatifically, enraptured by the sight. Tomas, though, along with some of the other men, started to edge away from it until they stood outside the pool of radiance it cast on the men underneath it.
And then, without warning, from the very heart of the cloud streaks of jagged lightning shot forth. Many of the men were struck, impaled by the blinding bolts of white light. Their bodies shook as they screamed, steam or smoke rising from under their armour. More lightning came. A bolt struck Hugh and Tomas saw the horror in his one eye as his hair crisped and his skin started to blacken.
‘It was enough for Tomas. ‘Run!’ he called, in a voice that rang with terror. He turned and fled, tearing off his armour as he did so, desperate to escape the dying screams of his own men. The river was close by. Without thinking he jumped into its icy waters. It was not deep and his head and shoulders remained unimmersed. Several of his companions did the same, the infiltrator squad making an incredible noise as the water splashed and sprayed with more and more men jumping in it.
Tomas turned and looked behind him. The cloud had gone ... no, it had moved. He saw it lift into the sky again and pass overhead, mercifully sparing him and his fellows in the water. Back at the spot where Tomas had stood not minutes before, he saw bodies on the ground, none of them moving and smoke rising into the air from them. Tomas tasted rather than smelled the reek of charred flesh. He saw the ladders on the ground were all burning.
Behind him men pointed to the cloud. As Tomas watched, he saw where it was headed. Felmere or maybe the camp outside. He offered a silent prayer for those who would encounter such a terrible thing next.
The camp was in uproar. Night it may have been but everyone in Trask’s army had to shield their eyes to look at this mysterious cloud as it hung low in the sky, such was the brightness and intensity of the display. People were shouting in both wonder and fear, wondering which of the Gods had sanctioned such a spectacle. Only one man stood unmoved. Trask looked like a man turned to stone as the sound of the crackling energies reached his ears, with the whiff of ozone arriving shortly afterwards. A man ran over to him, his face displaying excitement and concern in equal measure. It was the captain he had thrown into the ditch earlier; his face was still smeared in dirt.
‘What are your orders, sir? What do you wish us to do? And which of the Gods are responsible for such a wonder.’ He sounded frightened; he sounded excited; most of all he sounded confused.
Trask did not reply for a moment. He stared transfixed at the constantly fluctuating aurora of colour across the plain. Its light had dimmed somewhat – no more lightning issued from it – but it was moving, up into the air and onwards, right in the direction of the camp.
‘You want orders?’ Trask finally spoke, his voice thick with anger. ‘Then I will give you one. Run. Run for your life as though the fire from Keth’s demons were licking at your very heels. For to stay here, to stay by me, will mean death for all of you. And as for the God responsible, well, you are jesting. For this is witches’ work and finally, it seems, I must pay for entrusting others to do a job I should have done myself. Run and take those you command with you – that is, if you wish to see your family again. ‘
The man stood dumbfounded. What kind of orders were these? Trask glared at him and bellowed at the top of his lungs. ‘Run, you whoreson little imbecile!’
The captain needed no second invitation; he turned on his heels and sped away from the camp, from the tents into open country, calling for others to join him.
Trask unsheathed his sword and strode through the camp exhorting the men to flee. Some did but many others held their ground, unsure that they had heard correctly. Trask had told them many times that to run from the field meant a hanging, so how could he be saying such a thing to them now?
The strange phenomenon in the sky moved ever closer. It was huge, covering the sky, hiding the stars from view. Trask strode forward to meet it. That damned witch! he kept thinking. If he had but known of her true capabilities, he would have foregone taking pleasure from her and cut her throat immediately. He had known great generals in battle who had achieved much honour in war, yet who had finally been undone by one seemingly tiny mistake, the true magnitude of which was not seen till much later. Well, now it was his turn.
The cloud was directly above him now. It started to sink in the sky, lower and lower until it hovered barely twenty feet over him. He could see the coruscating fires licking at its heart, the smells of fire and sulphur. It ceased moving just as Trask had expected. It was here for him, after all.
Trask gripped the pommel of his sword in both hands and held it outwards and upwards, its point aiming at the very centre of the shimmering apparition.
‘Well, witch’ he called out to it. He knew she could hear him; he just knew it. That is exactly what he would do if he could wield such power, gloat over the demise of his adversary. ‘Aren’t you the clever one? Before you claim your revenge, though, know you this. I have seen many mages in my life and none of them, and I mean none, could wield this power without paying for it with their life. Send me to the furnace if you will, but I will make a place right next to me, especially for you. As we burn in eternal torment for ever, at least I will have your tight little arse to keep me company. Now, whore, burn me!’
Trask continued to hold the sword pointed at the sky and as he did so he started to laugh. He laughed as a streak of vivid blue lighting ran up the length of the blade; he laughed as it finally struck him and danced around his armour, igniting his bear-pelt cloak. He laughed even louder as the smoke started to rise from inside his armour and he started to fry. Nothing stopped his cruel laughter – even as his hair caught fire and the flesh on his face started to cook and peel; even when his eyeballs liquefied, turning to vapour before him. He only stopped when he became a pillar of flame through which could be seen his skull, stripped of flesh, jaw still open in mockery. Finally, Trask was fully consumed by fire as lightning bolt after lightning bolt struck his corpse until, with nothing to support it, his blackened armour collapsed into a scattered heap, the man inside it little more than dust and air and a vague memory of malice and fear.
A lot of Trask’s men stayed rooted to the spot, unable to fully comprehend what they had just witnessed. Too late for many of them for the cloud, this great demon of tempest and storm, had barely begun to be satiated. At last, it unleashed its full power, a hundred bolts of lightning poured from its heart, burning the catapults and reducing men to blackened cinders in seconds. And so it fed, reaping the souls it needed to survive, though, as far as it was concerned, its feast had barely started.
Cheris fell backwards on to the cold earth, feeling several small sharp stones dig into her back and legs. Blood ran from her nose and she could taste it in he
r mouth. Her head swam with wild visions, flashes of light and colour. She was blind for a minute, too, red after-visions floating before her; it felt like a knife had been stuck through her head. She swallowed great lungfuls of air, her body heaving and convulsing until her heart finally slowed and she could see the distant stars scattered in the clear sky.
That had been far more difficult than she had ever imagined. Staying with the spirit, guiding it until Trask was dead had hurt her badly. Even in death he had his small victory, taunting her that she would be next. Of course, it was more than possible that he was right. She had released the demon; it was no longer bound to her will and so she imagined that it was now killing indiscriminately among Trask’s camp. But she knew that it was her that it really wanted. She needed to prepare for its return, for come for her it would. She climbed slowly to her feet, wiping blood off her face with her sleeve. No time to be weary; she had unleashed something not seen in this world for centuries and it was her job to send it back into oblivion before the chaos it unleashed destroyed thousands.
From the tiny leaded window in his room in the tower Mikel watched, pale as a ghost, at the horror unfolding outside. One of the knights was with him, watching equally intently and shaking his head slowly.
‘It’s her, isn’t it? It has to be – nothing else could cause that.’
Mikel croaked; he could barely form words. ‘Yes, it is her. She got out of the city.’
The knight could not keep the disapproval out of his voice. ‘Did you play a part in her disappearance? What is this spell that she has cast?’
‘It is not a spell,’ Mikel said quietly. ‘She has summoned a demon.’
The knight was quiet for a second, digesting what Mikel had said. ‘Then if we find her, she has committed a crime punishable by death. I thought the sort of mage that could summon such a demon only came around every couple of generations.’
‘You are wrong,’ said Mikel. ‘Such a mage comes around maybe twice in a thousand years.’
The knight spoke, his voice hushed. ‘Then we have to catch her; we cannot let such a creature roam free in our country.’
Mikel smiled. ‘You do not know her like I do. She is no fugitive. If she survives this, she will come back of her own volition, never fear.’
‘If you know her so well then, could you tell me why she has done this?’
Mikel pulled the thick wooden shutter over the window and walked away from it. ‘Somebody wronged her. Badly. And she wanted revenge. It is as simple as that.’
The knight was astounded. ‘She did all this. For revenge? There was no easier way to obtain it?’
‘Probably. But she was always one for grand gestures. In all fairness targeting a spell to kill one man in thousands is all but impossible. She was just being thorough, that is all, leaving nothing to chance.’
The knight sounded incredulous. ‘If I ever run into this girl again, remind me to hold the door for her. I would hate to make her annoyed.’
Mikel sat at a low wooden table in the sparsely furnished tiny room and spooned some partly congealed oatmeal mash into his mouth from a solitary bowl at its centre.
‘You don’t know the half,’ he said. ‘You really don’t know the half.’
And outside the lightning continued, the sturdy walls preventing the screams of men from reaching their ears.
The demon had grown in size and power, nourished as it was by the souls of the men it had destroyed. It was running out of targets, though; it knew there were many more creatures to feed from behind the great walls but stone was an anathema to it. Its power would be sapped quickly if it tried to pass through or even over such a construct. It needed another food source, and quickly.
And then its answer came. The mage was bleeding herself again. The soul of such a being would nourish her far better and for longer than those of a legion of ordinary mortals. It soared high into the air once more, leaving the city and its terrified inhabitants behind and headed back towards the mountains, back to where it was brought into this world, back to where it could feed from the life blood of the mage.
And the mage was waiting for it, standing silently by the same rock, in exactly the same place where the demon had left it. It rose above the plateau so that it was hovering level with the mage. The demon had to act fast before its enemy could attempt another binding spell on it.
And act fast it did.
A fork of thick lightning shot through the mage’s body. It was so powerful it passed clean through into the mountain behind, shattering the rock, causing giant-sized shards and splinters to fly into the air and fall into the woods, into the waterfall and into the demon, where they became white hot before dropping into and starting fires in the trees or spiralling into the water where they hissed and steamed as they plummeted to earth. The demon did not stop, using much of its power as the lightning it expelled crawled over the mountain side like a spider’s web, a honeycomb of sizzling white and blue energy climbing higher and higher so that the rock seemed to marble and glow.
But something was wrong. The demon was trying to suck the soul from the dead mage but was feeling nothing. All that energy expelled and no reward. Where was the nourishment from the mage’s corpse? The lightning stopped, and the floating gaseous cloud – the demon’s form in this suffocating alien world – hung dully in the sky, uncertain and denuded of much of its power. The mage unaccountably still stood there; no flesh creature should be unaffected by what had happened to it. It was impossible.
And then the mage fragmented and disappeared.
The illusion, a subtle but complex spell learned from Mikel, was no longer needed and now, staff in hand, Cheris emerged from behind the rock she had been hiding and put everything she had, including the energy of her staff, into one word of power.
‘Utenyetis!’
Such was the intensity of the spell that the staff shivered into a thousand pieces, tiny shards of razor-sharp metal cutting into her arm and wrist. She ignored the searing pain. She was taking a colossal gamble; she did not know if her spell would work against such an insubstantial creature. If it did not, then she would be dead in seconds. It was the force spell she had used, first, against the man attacking his horse in Tanaren and then to kill the rapist in the forest, but this time cast with a hundred times the power she had used before. And as she cast it she prayed to Lucan that it would be enough to save her life.
For a second nothing happened, except that the demon realised its mistake. Cheris sensed it readying to strike her, but before it could it started to move.
It started to move away from her; the spell did work after all.
And Cheris watched it all the way. Watched as it was lifted into the air, watched as it moved over the plateau and watched as it was propelled, resisting, directly into the waterfall, contacting untold tons of crashing water as it did so.
And then the entire mountain side exploded.
Cheris dived back under the sheltering boulder, lying flat on her belly and stopping up her ears against the incredible noise. The narrow gorge that funnelled the river over the mountain side was instantly and irrevocably opened, as great chunks of rock slid down into the forest, flattening trees and sending a thousand startled birds high into the air. The waters, hemmed in for so long, were suddenly released as the falls instantly trebled in width. Down they plunged, into the splash pool, and now the land surrounding the falls, too, carrying everything – rocks, trees, earth and the demon itself – before it. All that was left of the demon was a frail blue light, glowing in the midst of the great deluge, firing weaker and weaker bolts of lightning skywards. These fires, feeble though they were, were the last defiant act of a dying creature. By the time the river emptied out into the plains past the woods spilling over the banks and flooding the surrounding fields, it showed as little more than a pale wisp of light, weakly illuminating the bed of the river. By the time the river regained its integrity and the flood that carried over either verge had subsided into little more than a few br
oad standing pools, the demon was dead, its light replaced by that of the pallid moon.
And then the silence returned.
Cheris moved stiffly, brushing the dust of pulverised stone and earth out of her hair. Slowly she eased herself into a standing position and at last noticed the painful scratches on her arms. She started to shake at the thought of what she had just done, how close to death she had just come. And now she had to return, maybe to death at the hands of those knights sworn to protect her.
It was a dawn of smoke and ashes. All night the people of Felmere, including its soldiers, had cringed and hidden and prayed behind walls that had seemed less and less secure. And now, with the feeble light of the early morn showing a sickly yellow over the plain, Morgan, Dominic and a hundred soldiers had the city gates opened so they could see at first hand exactly what had happened.
Some of the catapults were still burning and all were charred and smashed, lying at all kinds of angles half in, half out of the ditches designed to protect them. The grass over the entirety of the enemy camp was blackened and burned; one tent alone remained untouched, scorched but still standing, a solitary sentinel in a land of ruin. But it was the bodies that stunned everyone into silence. Most had had their flesh burned away, skeletons in armour that had part fused to the bones; these smoking remnants of what had once been men lay scattered over the plain as far as the eye could see. Never in this war had the destruction of an army been so complete, so terribly and clinically comprehensive.
‘How many do you think?’ Morgan asked Dominic trying to keep his voice under control.
‘Many hundreds. Maybe over a thousand. At least. I don’t really know.’
Morgan strolled towards the banner poles, the banners themselves long since incinerated, kicking up dust as he went. As he did so, he realised uncomfortably that the dust could easily have been up till recently the flesh and blood of men. Their own countrymen. He looked up at the sky and closed his eyes.
The Forgotten War Page 135
