It would not have resulted in her death, but he’d have ordered it just the same. He was loyal to his people as she was loyal to her gods. Nothing would change that. If he were weaker, she would not find him attractive despite his pink skin and his godless ways.
No. Not godless. He worshipped the same god she did. That all of her people did. He just called his god by a different name. He called his god by a different name, even if he did not know it.
“Duty.”
“Eh? What duty?” Jost tilted her head.
“Never mind. I am thinking aloud.”
“What are we to do next?”
“We have caused suspicion in the family. We have saved the Empress not once, but twice, and we have prepared the city.”
“Prepared the city for what?” Jost frowned, her arms crossed over her chest. She, too, bristled with weapons, but hers were more obvious.
“The Great Tide rolls to Canhoon from all directions, Jost. We will soon have armies coming here to take this city. They are overcrowded and already cannot support the weight of their own people. When we add the Sa’ba Taalor, they will falter and then crumble.”
“How will we prepare the city?”
Swech quickly tied her hair back and covered it with a shawl, as many of the fishmongers and elderly did. The fabrics were dark and helped hide her distinguishing features.
“We will remove the methods they have for escaping when the Great Tide comes.”
Jost frowned.
Swech smiled.
“There are three others who left Taalor with me, Jost. There were four but one is dead. The other three have been busy as well, and one of them has prepared something to help us capture our enemies.”
Jost craned her head to the side again, but Swech did not answer the silent question. She had no idea as to how she possibly could.
The Pilgrim stared at the foothills ahead of him and nodded his head, satisfied. Three days at most and they would reach Canhoon.
Behind him close to three thousand followers continued to move. In every town they had crossed, in every city, he had stopped at temples and spoken to the leaders of the different churches. He had spoken and they had listened, drawn to his voice and to the conviction of his words.
The four who were closest to him continued to give him updates, continued to let him know when someone grew too sick to continue or simply changed their mind and tried to sneak away in the night. There was no punishment for fleeing. If their faith in the gods was so weak that they feared doing as the gods asked, then he had no need of them.
This was a sacred quest, a call to arms from the gods themselves, a last chance to fight against the forces sent to destroy everything that the people of Fellein believed in, and the Pilgrim would see it through one way or another, but he would not punish those who lacked the faith to join him.
The gods would see to their punishment instead.
Three days. The sun was setting but they continued on for another hour before he was satisfied that they had traveled far enough.
Once again, no one wanted for food or a place to rest their weary bodies.
The gods provided what was necessary.
Drask looked down at the patterns of light as he had for the last few days, and studied them, fascinated. There were endless patterns, it seemed.
Not far away the Fellein were doing something similar. Tega was, at least. The young man with her paced instead, often scowling toward Drask as if he were the cause of the difficulties they faced.
The lights below them burned, flowing and shifting and whirling, an endless maelstrom of illumination that refused to be categorized. The light was not cold, but it gave off no heat that he could feel. There seemed to be nothing between them and the lights, but currently his backside was planted on that nothing and while he could feel a pressure there, he could not see any reason for him to not be allowed to touch the very lights he was looking at so intently. However, so far, his best efforts had been denied.
He had struck at the solid air with his hand, with his boot, with his axe and even had started a fire with his meager supplies in an effort to understand what it was that kept him from his goal.
There was nothing.
Ydramil said only that he would know when the time was right what he had to do. He would know the weapon when the time was right. He had no doubt that the lights he stood over were that weapon. The challenge of getting to them remained a mystery.
The only good news was that the Fellein had similar luck.
He broke the shell of a logga nut between two of his fingers and slipped the meat into one of his mouths, chewing slowly and methodically.
The young man stared at him, mouth open, and even from a distance Drask could hear the rumble of his stomach. Perhaps if he waited long enough they would simply starve to death and save him from any grief. He had doubts.
There were times when Drask Silver Hand was polite to a fault, especially in comparison to most of his people, but there were also times when boredom did him in. “If you want it, boy, come take it from me.”
The lad was large for a Fellein, but that he was young was also obvious. He was gangly and too thin and also he had very few noticeable scars.
He balled his fists and came for Drask. Maybe it was hunger. Perhaps, he, too, was tired of trying to solve the puzzle of how to reach their prize after waiting for far too long.
As the boy came toward him Drask rose to his feet, grateful for a distraction after too long lost in contemplation. The boy did not draw a weapon and Drask held to that standard.
Tega called out, “Nolan! No!” but it was too late. The youth charged, one balled fist curled back and ready to launch at Drask.
Drask slipped to the side and drove his elbow into the side of the boy’s head. Not hard enough to take him down, but certainly with enough force to make him foggy in the brain.
Nolan staggered and came around faster than Drask would have expected, his face twisted into the same sort of rage he’d shown when dealing with the Mound Crawler. He let anger ride him. That was a strength and a weakness both.
Drask exploited the weakness.
“Come! Come get your meal, boy! Come teach me how well you fight!”
Nolan charged, reaching for his weapons as he moved.
Drask could not suppress his smile.
His silver hand caught the axe blade that came for him with a scream of metal on metal. Nolan was strong, especially for his size, and he was furious, which helped him feel even stronger, but Drask plucked the axe from his grasp with ease and bent the boy’s wrist back in the doing.
The weapon clattered across the barrier that stopped them from falling toward their prize.
The scream that came from Nolan was pure and savage and while Drask could admire that, he could not forgive that the youth was too angry to focus.
Not far away, Tega paced, eyes wide, contemplating the outcome. She expected her compatriot to die.
Drask’s leg swept down and kicked the lad’s ankle out from under him as he started to move. Nolan let out a grunt and dropped to the ground. He caught himself on one knee and both hands, the other leg sprawled out behind him by the force of Drask’s strike.
The boy looked up at Drask and snarled again, struggling to stand.
Drask brought his knee up fast and smashed it into the side of the boy’s head.
Nolan flopped bonelessly to the ground.
Drask considered his enemy.
Tega considered Drask.
Drask looked her way. “A wise man would eliminate a threat.”
“He is not a threat to you. You know this and so do I.”
“He has weapons. He tried to kill me with an axe.”
“He was hungry.”
Drask shrugged. “I tire of games.”
“We seek the same thing. We want to understand what is below us.”
The boy was clever, but not clever enough. While Drask spoke with the wizard’s student, the youth reached for a
dagger up his sleeve and then lunged.
Drask caught the hand with the blade under his heel and stomped down. Bones broke and Nolan screamed. Not one to leave a fool unpunished, Drask ground the hand under his foot a second time and watched the boy thrash, his face stretched into a mask of agony.
“Enough!” Tega’s voice broke.
Drask looked at her and felt the air around him shift. There was a pressure that had not been there before and he could feel his hair moving.
“If you do anything at all, Tega, I will kill him and you.”
She stayed where she was and focused only on him.
Without hesitation he stomped on Nolan’s hand again, breaking more of the small bones and driving the blade of the dagger into soft, pink flesh.
Blood flowed from the wound.
“I have seen what you can do! I will kill him! I will kill you if you do not stop your sorcery!”
Just as quickly as it had manifested the pressure around him evaporated.
“Stop hurting him!”
She had taken strides toward them but he could tell by her body language and her expression that she was more worried about the boy than about retribution. Drask stepped back from him and eased three of his throwing blades into his hand. If the air around him changed again, he would kill her before she could blink.
As she started to reach for Nolan, the air under her softened and Tega fell.
Drask had exactly enough time to make the connection between cause and effect before he, too, was falling. The boy’s blood had broken whatever seal held them away from the ever-changing streams of lights.
There was nowhere to run. He had grown too comfortable with the impossible situation and now he paid the price.
The lights he had seen from a distance came closer and Drask studied them as impassively as he could. The boy fell with him, his eyes once more looking toward Drask with an unrelenting hatred.
The blades were still in his hand. He threw one at the boy. It was simple, really. Sooner or later Nolan would try to kill him. He could see it in the mad expression on the young man’s face.
The blade sank into Nolan’s throat and vibrated there as blood spilled freely from the new opening in his flesh.
Drask focused again on the lights below and watched as Tega hit them and sank with a splash. Whatever it was they were here to find was not solid at all, but flowed like water.
Drask Silver Hand had always been curious. He kept his eyes open as he fell into the endless, shifting lights.
Above the liquid that swallowed Drask and the Fellein, the air screamed again, louder than it had before. So loudly, in fact, that stone shattered and flesh was pulped and the vast crystalline formations of the Mounds visibly vibrated with the sound.
Within the towers of crystal the bodies of the long dead moved and gasped, and the frozen flotsam and jetsam of a city in perpetual ruin shimmered and danced.
In the Blasted Lands, the Mounds themselves shuddered as the sound escalated, forcing dust and ice and even the winds to move, pushing everything away from the ground as the skin of the Mounds split. Light crept through the perpetual twilight of the Blasted Lands, and from as far away as the Seven Forges that light could be seen painting the skies first a brilliant shade of blue and then red and finally white.
Sitting in the protection of a cluster of boulders and feasting in the remains of a Broken wretch, Drask’s mount Brackka died violently when the lights touched his body and incinerated his flesh. His shadow burned itself into the stone, the only sign that he had been there at all.
There were creatures that lived in the Blasted Lands. Like Brackka, they were destroyed, ripped asunder by winds and light and sound that shattered bones.
Along the Edge, the great wall that marked the end of the Blasted Lands, the worn stone was undamaged, but only a hundred yards away, the ground was suddenly glazed with a new layer of glass. That glaze cracked and in some cases shattered a moment later as the perpetual ice and snow in the area heated to near boiling point, billowing up as clouds of steam and drowning a few of the creatures that remained.
At the Seven Forges, Durhallem shuddered under the force of the blast, but, as had been the case for a thousand years, the sentinel of the Taalor Valley withstood the brutal assault. Beyond the mountain the valley was unscathed and the great entrance into the valley was nowhere to be seen. With the Sa’ba Taalor gone there was no reason for the doorway to remain open and Durhallem had sealed it.
The bodies of the dead surrounded Andover Lashk.
His iron hands were dyed crimson with the blood of his fallen enemies.
At first they had come one at a time, and then they came in twos and threes, and even as he brought them down more came, a slowly gathering procession that meant to see him destroyed by their hands.
At first he had known fear, but then the presence of Wrommish filled him. He had felt the gods around him before, had felt their powerful scrutiny and been overwhelmed by the raw potency of their shapeless forms.
This was different. As he fought, the god climbed within his skin, managed to fit within him and speak to him at the same time.
He felt his body change as the god used him. He fought the enemies that came for him and felt the direction of Wrommish. He stood upon the crystalline bridge of Boratha-Lo’ar and felt at peace as his fists crushed flesh and his body was bruised and battered again and again.
They were his fights. Wrommish offered guidance but did not strike a single blow.
The ones he fought were the faithful of Wrommish. Over the centuries the bodies of the faithful had been offered to the furnace beneath him, where they burned and became one with their god. The Sa’ba Taalor were no longer present, but their dead were here and they served their god even centuries later. They fought against Andover Lashk and beat upon him again and again. Sometimes he won, but even with the wisdom of Wrommish to guide his moves, he often failed.
There was no rest. There was no food. He did not die though he was delivered a thousand fatal blows.
What he did was learn. A lifetime of lessons in unarmed combat were given to him and then a dozen more lifetimes were offered him as well.
Time does not move the same way for gods, and when in their presence time moved differently for Andover as well.
He had been in the heart of Wrommish for only a few hours according to Delil, but when he came out he could barely remember her name. She had been a part of his world a very long while back and recalling how to speak was a challenge when he first left the cave.
Within the Heart of Wrommish, Andover Lashk dealt with his trials unaware of any change in the Blasted Lands. As mighty as the explosion was, the gods had their ways of defending against incidental catastrophes.
Deep within the Mounds, neither Drask, nor Nolan nor Tega was aware of the violent transformation.
They had other, stranger things to consider.
Fourteen
The black ships rode steadily up the Freeholdt River and stopped at the town that bore its name. A majority of the people had already fled to Canhoon or points east in an effort to escape the inevitable, but not everyone left. Those that stayed did not believe that the ships would stop, or that the attackers could possibly be as fearsome as the claims stated.
The ships did not go further up the river. Beyond Freeholdt the waters were too shallow and the waters too treacherous. To the south the fires of the second Durhallem spat smoke and worse into the air, and the heat from that eruption was oppressive in the extreme. Refugees had come to Freeholdt and quickly moved on, fearing that the Sa’ba Taalor would come for them.
The refugees were wise in their way. The army disgorged by the ships was large, and each of the shapes that waded in from the shallows of the river came carrying all that they needed to bring death and mayhem with them.
The City Guard of Freeholdt was heavily depleted. Threats of a lashing meant remarkably little to the guards who wanted to see their families to safety, and promises of ex
tra coin held little appeal when the winds shifted and the stench of decay came spilling in from the south.
If the Sa’ba Taalor came expecting a glorious battle they were disappointed. The City Guard quickly surrendered when they saw the size of the army coming for them, and the officials within the town were front and center when the surrender occurred.
The followers of Durhallem, often called the Wounder or the Unforgiving, offered exactly the same mercy as they had always offered. Those that surrendered, those that chose to fight and those who tried to flee were killed. The town itself was constructed mostly of wood and as a result of that simple fact was razed as the sun set and the Sa’ba Taalor moved up the riverside. The Imperial Highway ran along the river here and the Sa’ba Taalor did not hesitate to take advantage of that well paved pathway. Nor were they foolish enough to expect that no traps had been laid for them.
Long before the heavily armored troops of Durhallem’s followers moved along that stretch, the followers of Ydramil, Paedle and Wrommish moved through the woods and scouted the paths leading to Canhoon.
Not all of the Sa’ba Taalor followed the same philosophies as Durhallem’s brood, but for the present time they made exceptions. Most they encountered were slaughtered quickly and efficiently. Those that were not, soon wished that they had been. Ydramil’s King, Ganem, often sought the answers to life’s riddles. Sometimes that required calm reflection and other times it demanded other forms of information-gathering.
Those who asked the questions could have taught the average Inquisitor a few new methods of gleaning the truth.
They were three days away from Canhoon when the Mounds exploded and the Blasted Lands shook and flashed with an unspeakable brilliance.
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