Shadow Walker (The Sword Saint Series Book 3)

by Michael Wallace

  “So we’ll make the determination later,” Kozmer was saying.

  “It’s not that I’m unwilling to push myself,” Sarika responded, “but don’t you think we should have a better idea of where, exactly, we’re going, before we run ourselves into the ground?”

  “I agree with the old man,” Miklos said. “We’ll leave those questions for later. Today and tonight, we just get down to the plains, move north along the post road, and see what we can discover. Hopefully, as we get closer, we’ll feel her.”

  “As we get closer to what?” Sarika insisted. “She could be anywhere by now. For all we know, she’s all the way to Riverrun. Maybe beyond.”

  “She’s not,” Katalinka said. All eyes turned in her direction. “I can feel her from here. What’s more, she’s not on the move. She’s staying put.”

  “You feel her?” Miklos said. “Where? How far?”

  “Northeast on the plains. Twenty miles today and tonight, twenty tomorrow, and we’ve got her,” Katalinka said. “What we do with her once we meet is another question, of course.”

  “We’ll figure that out on the road,” Miklos said. “Meanwhile, we follow your lead. If you can feel her from here, it should be easy enough to—”

  A loud crack came from uphill before he completed his thought. One of the stone demons broke in two and fell over. More cracks appeared on the surface of the others, and one by one they fell to the ground. The decay didn’t end there, but seemed to be accelerating. Large chunks of stone broke into smaller ones, and then into piles of black volcanic ash.

  They had climbed to their feet to watch, and Kozmer twisted his staff. “That’s strange.”

  “What does it mean?” Gyorgy asked.

  The old man shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

  It wasn’t nothing, though, proving the limits of the elder sohn’s knowledge. A breeze came and stirred the ash, which lifted into the sky, and to Katalinka’s astonishment, began to swirl in the air like a million tiny black moths.

  While she was still gaping, the moths coalesced into individual clumps and then into familiar, bird-like forms. In an instant the sky was filled with crows circling overhead with jeering, knowing caws.

  The entire scene wasn’t merely baffling, it had become alarming. Surely they were spies and enemies. Before Katalinka could cry a warning and tell the others to join her in attacking with their sowens, the crows turned in concert and sped away toward the plains.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was two weeks after killing Lord Balint when Damanja felt the presence of another crowlord in her lands. She first sensed him in her dreams, a lurking, phantom-like presence spying on her. The following day, she noticed a strange presence in the crows bringing word of the capitulation of Zoltan’s forces on the delta. The crows all looked like her own—including those she’d captured after the deaths of her two rival crowlords—but as she studied their auras, she felt hostile minds burning within.

  Damanja’s first inclination was to call all of her crows to her, then sort through them until she found the enemies. She’d blind the traitors, crush their wings, tear off their beaks. Maybe one or two she’d send back to their master, half-plucked, as a warning.

  But no. Better for the enemy to think she was unaware. Better that he think she was weak and vulnerable. Let him come.

  She sent out spies of her own: crows, as she could now speak to them directly, or even, she discovered, take one of their minds for her own so she could see through its eyes. Meanwhile, she moved north with her army, as if toward Lord Balint’s lands, even as her crows spied farther south, gradually drawing closer to the malignant presence in her land.

  And then she found him. It was Lord Horvard, and he appeared to be traveling by himself through hostile territory. Alone? She’d never heard of such a thing; why hadn’t he brought an army?

  Horvard was a minor crowlord with a fiefdom to the south of her own. The man’s father had been a powerful crowlord who’d commanded two ports, one on the ocean, the other on the banks of a major river, with a series of castles that controlled the southern post road, as well. But after the elder Horvard’s death, his sons had warred among themselves, and by the time the youngest son emerged, rivals—including Damanja—had devoured fully half of his land.

  The younger Lord Horvard’s remnant was a secure stretch of land protected by a coastal range to the east and a spur of the high mountains that wrapped around the northwest of his territory, and there he’d holed up for the last six years, licking his wounds, afraid to offend his more powerful neighbors.

  But afraid no longer, apparently. He’d set out on his own, determined to. . .what, exactly? Kill her, apparently. Steal her growing power. The thought made her laugh.

  It was dawn when she dropped a crow into a tree above his camp and used her sowen to take command of its mind and body. Other crows lingered in a copse of trees to the north, out of sight. Their sheer numbers weighed down the branches, but she whispered silence into their minds, and none of them made a sound.

  It was raining heavily, and Horvard had taken refuge in an overgrown irrigation ditch like a common bandit. It must be cold and muddy down there, but the man seemed to have chosen discomfort if it meant staying hidden. Not that it had mattered. Crows had spotted movement in the brush, and Damanja felt a disturbance in the auras that no mere bird could have sensed.

  Now, with her mind inside the crow, she cocked her head as she perched in the tree above the overgrown ditch. She opened her beak and spoke with a cawing, jeering cadence.

  “Lord Horvard. Come out and face me. It is your master, Lady Damanja.”

  There was no movement in the brush. She sensed him, though. Awake and alert. Something was coiling around him. What the devil was he up to?

  Curious, she hopped down from the tree. Her wings spread to cushion her landing. She cocked her head and hopped forward until she was at the edge of the ditch.

  “Horvard. Come out and face me. If you wish to live, you will obey.”

  Now there was movement. The branches parted, and a man dressed in boots, heavy trousers, and a riding cloak emerged. It was Horvard all right, although she hadn’t seen him in person for twelve years—not since he was a boy of fifteen or sixteen—and now he looked just like his father. A fresh scar curved from his right ear, across his face, and to his chin. Standing at the bottom of the ditch, he was still tall enough to look down at the crow facing him.

  “You are in my land,” she said. “Tell me why I shouldn’t destroy you.”

  “Where is your army?” he asked.

  “Where is yours? Why would you be so foolish as to approach me alone?”

  “What good are armies in these times? None could stand up to the sword warriors, let alone a crowlord. You and I could destroy a hundred men with an outstretched hand.”

  Horvard’s face may have hardened with manhood, but his voice still had a boyish quality to it. She wondered how he’d bested his brothers, each of whom had been many years older and possessed castles and military forces while the boy had still been living with his parents. Treachery, no doubt. She’d better be careful with this one.

  “All the same, you didn’t travel alone,” Damanja said. “You have your crows. I’ve felt them spying on me this past week.”

  “Ah, so that’s how you found me. I was wondering. I thought I’d hidden them well. Apparently not.”

  “It was trivial to find them, and even easier to follow them back to their master. You have no idea the powers I’ve come into.”

  “I’m sure I don’t. Fortunately, I have powers of my own.”

  There was something in Horvard’s tone in this last part that put her on edge. Sudden suspicion bloomed. She’d already opened her wings when he lashed out with the rope-like aura he’d been coiling around him.

  She only just got airborne when it snapped at exactly the point where she’d been a split second earlier. As it was, the coil of energy exploded her wing feathers, and
a jolt of pain went through her. She tumbled to the ground with her wing aflame with pain, and crashed into the overgrown, weedy rice paddy opposite the ditch.

  Fly home! To your body!

  She’d moved effortlessly in and out of crows ever since her battle with Lord Balint, when these and other powers had come to her. But now she couldn’t get free of the bird’s mind and body. Every time she struggled to get free, it was as if the aura flicked at her was too strong, and held her down.

  Damanja sensed her real body thirty miles to the northeast, lying rigid in her tent, staring up at the canvas roof as if dead. What would happen if she were killed here? Would her lungs stop drawing breath and her heart stop? She thought they would.

  A low, cunning chuckle reached her ears, and the rice stalks swished. “Now you understand,” Horvard said. There was naked delight in his voice. “You’re trapped, aren’t you? Hilarious. All that power in you, and you don’t even have the ability to return home. So clever, finding me like this. So easy, wasn’t it? I was all alone—what could go wrong?”

  So the whole thing had been a trap to lure her here. Somehow he’d known what she’d do when he found her. Maybe his earliest, undetected spying had shown him the way. Now, he’d trapped her in this crow’s body, and though his initial attack hadn’t quite hit her in time, she was crippled and unable to escape. Meanwhile, he continued parting the weeds and rice stalks, looking for her.

  “Come out, little bird,” he said. “Come show me your feathers. So black and pretty.”

  Lady Damanja couldn’t escape, but neither was she helpless. She sent her thoughts northward, to where she’d left the rest of the crows hiding amid a copse of trees.

  To me! she cried. Rescue me!

  “Aha!” Horvard said. “There you are.”

  He spread the rice stalks above her and looked down with a wide, smirking grin. Compared to her crow’s body, he was a giant. He lifted a boot and pressed it down on top of her. Damanja’s bones groaned, so weak and fragile.

  “You put your mind into a crow,” Horvard said. “Impressive. It makes me wonder what other powers you have, little bird. They must be awesome, indeed, and they’ll all be mine. Except, hopefully, your ability to fall so carelessly into a trap of your own making.”

  He lifted his foot and made to stomp. Damanja could only cringe and wait for him to crush her into a heap of bloody, splintered bones and feathers.

  There was a cawing scream, and suddenly, Horvard fell backward, flailing. Her crows descended on the rice stalks in their hundreds, tearing them apart and attacking the enemy where he’d fallen. He’d so completely disappeared beneath their flapping wings that they muffled his cries.

  But the man had crows of his own, and they slammed into her flock, dozens of small, hostile minds who were just as determined to rescue their master as hers had been to rescue their own. Horvard swung his arms and kicked his legs, and soon regained his feet as the battle became one of crow-on-crow.

  He used the brief interlude to come for her again, this time screaming curses. He knocked aside remaining rice stalks and leered down at her with blood dripping from tattered lips and a bleeding nose. One of his ears dangled loose and bloody.

  But before he could crush her underfoot, three crows took Damanja’s broken body in their talons and lifted her away with flapping wings. Horvard flailed at her, his grasping fingers just out of reach.

  As they lifted her higher, she could see her crows had already won the fight. She cocked her head to watch as her flock renewed its fight. They mobbed Horvard by the hundreds, and his screams of pain and terror rose above their caws. A handful of other crows were still carrying Damanja’s battered shape toward the trees when Horvard’s spell fell away from her. Instantly, she was back in her tent miles away, in her real body.

  Damanja rose to a sitting position in the cot, and felt so lightheaded she thought she would faint. She lay back down until it passed, but her heart was still thumping hard, and sweat stood out on her temples. The low voices of her bodyguards murmured from outside. It was raining lighter here than to the south, and the pattering drops against the tent roof soothed her. Her mind cleared.

  Something felt different. She stared at the tent wall, and it became as transparent as cloudy glass, which allowed her to see her soldiers and hear their words. The bodyguards outside were discussing in low tones whether Damanja would grant them lands in the newly conquered fiefdoms.

  The fools still didn’t understand. There would be no end to this war. Not until every nation had fallen to its knees, and the demons who ruled this land had withdrawn their holy wrath. Few would survive the cataclysms to come.

  Her senses had already grown, but now they seemed stronger still. She must have gained power after the fight. Did that mean Horvard had been killed? He must have been. The crows must have torn him apart. What new abilities had he given her in death, and how would she discover their extent?

  What she wanted to do was experiment, maybe starting with her sword. The warbrand falchion had already turned to shadow in her hand when she killed Balint. Maybe her fighting abilities had grown yet again.

  But she needed to be sure Horvard was gone, that she wasn’t deceiving herself about his death, and that meant returning to the torn-up rice paddy. She lay back, closed her eyes, and sent her mind south to look for crows.

  Her consciousness flew over the landscape, faster than any diving hawk, and moments later she arrived and found what she was looking for. She took hold of a crow, shoved its mind aside, and implanted her own so she could command its body and see through its eyes.

  Crows had shredded Horvard’s clothes and were tearing at his flesh. The hungriest seemed to be Horvard’s own crows, those who had been defending him to the death only minutes earlier. So ravenous were they that the man’s bones already lay exposed in several places, and there was little left of his face. A gruesome sight, and at one time, Damanja would have chased the birds off, disgusted. Now, she no longer cared. In fact, she wanted to search his body and look through his provisions, so far as that was possible while wearing the body of a crow around her mind.

  While she waited for the crows to sate themselves, she flew back to the waterlogged ditch where he’d been hiding. Here she expected to answer the question about how he’d been armed, and whether he’d arrived on horse. If so, there should be saddlebags. Could she find dispatches to and from his army, some indication of how he’d planned to take control of her lands?

  Unfortunately, the crow’s body, while perfect for observing from the air, couldn’t see so easily into the brush. She was wary about flying down where her wings might get caught in brambles and a hungry fox or weasel might pounce on her. Instead, she landed on the muddy bank above the ditch and hopped back and forth with her head cocked, searching with growing frustration. If only she could somehow be here in person.

  The instant the thought clarified in her mind, she found herself standing in human form. A crow—the animal she’d possessed only moments before—exploded away with a frightened caw and beating wings. She ignored it, looking down at herself in wonder and growing excitement.

  She wore a cloak, gloves, a belt, and the warbrand sword over her shoulder. For a moment she thought she’d returned as a ghostly apparition, incorporeal, but the raindrops were heavy and cold, and by the time she’d drawn the hood to protect her head and face, there was no question she was really present.

  Damanja had started to lower herself into the ditch, careful not to slide down the mud and fall, before she realized her mistake. The man had no supplies hidden down there; he had no need of them. She turned back to the feasting crows while she thought through the ramifications of her discovery.

  “Oh, Horvard. You were carrying a secret. No wonder you were so confident.”

  The man hadn’t crossed into her land on foot. Hadn’t needed an army. And a good thing, too; his forces were too small to challenge hers.

  Instead, he’d flown in, using the body of a crow, then
landed and called forth his human form. Perhaps he’d considered landing in her camp and attempting to assassinate her. Instead, he’d settled on a different plan: penetrate far enough to lure her here, capture her soul within the bird, and then knock her to the ground and kill her. He’d possessed several different powers, all of them valuable.

  “And now your powers are mine,” Damanja said. “I will use them to subdue the world.”

  There was no need to linger. Once she’d chased off her crows and verified that Horvard’s body contained nothing of interest, she tried to send her body back to her tent. It didn’t work.

  After trying again, giving up in frustration, and thinking about it for a few minutes, she realized why. This was different than sending her mind back and forth. Instead, her entire body must have vanished from the tent, and remained here. To get back she could travel physically, or she could find a place to hide, take the mind of a crow, and fly it to the tent, then call her body across the distance.

  Damanja trudged through the battered rice paddy until she reached the copse of trees where she’d sent the crows to wait. There she sat with her back against a trunk and her hood pulled, partially protected from the elements. She set forty or fifty crows into the branches above to keep vigil until she’d landed safely on the other side and could call her physical form back across the landscape. Then she put her mind into one of their bodies, lifted into the air, and ordered the rest of the flock to travel north.

  This was her first time abandoning her human body outside the protection of her own military camp, so she didn’t play games, but set a straight course for her army, with a buffer of crows surrounding her. Not that she expected a problem, but she’d already been caught in one trap that morning, and didn’t intend to repeat that error. To be safe, she sent scouts winging away to scour the landscape ahead and to the flanks, and kept her mind on edge, ready to leap from this host to another crow should she fall under attack.