Sentinelspire

by Mark Sehestedt

  She coughed, and the blood flowing from her neck spurted out like a fountain.

  His mother tried to speak more, but all that came out was a frantic whisper. Her hand, twisted clawlike, reached out for him, missed, and raked through the bloody muck.

  Lewan grabbed her wrist and tried again. Still she didn’t move. Her skin felt chilled, but the room was growing hotter with each breath. Lewan coughed. His eyes were starting to sting and well with tears as smoke filled the room.

  “Burn!” his mother croaked. “Lew! No … burrrr—!”

  A large hunk of thatch, blackened and filled with tongues of flame, hit the floor at the bottom of the ladder. The fire began to lick at the wooden ladder, blackening it. More cinders followed, and the sound of the fire overhead became deafening.

  Covered in bloody grime, tears running down his cheeks, Lewan stood and stumbled over to the hearth. The black kettle his mother used to prepare their meals still hung over the gray coals. Lewan grabbed the handle and lifted it off the hook. It was heavy. Twelve years old, he was small for his age, and the kettle was made of thick iron. It probably weighed almost a third of what he did.

  A fit of coughing grabbed him, and his vision clouded over. The tears flooding his eyes were as much from the smoke in the air as his fear and grief.

  Dragging the kettle behind him, he stumbled to where his mother lay in her own blood. She was still trying to speak. One hand reached out for him—and again failed.

  Crying like a little baby, Lewan stood over his mother and gripped the iron kettle. Her eyes followed him. She was too weak and in too much pain to smile, but he thought he saw something like relief in her eyes.

  Straining, he lifted the heavy iron over his head. His sobbing increased, and he inhaled a great deal of smoke. His lungs constricted and he coughed, almost dropping the kettle. Instead, he used the momentum and threw his strength into it, bringing the heavy iron down on his mother’s head.

  Over the roar of the flames, over the crackling and popping of the fire catching the timber, even over the screams from outside, Lewan heard the crack of his mother’s skull, felt the shock of it go up his arms. The cough and the force of his blow caused him to lose his balance, and he fell. He fell over his mother and felt her limbs give a final spasm. His cheek hit her blood-slick shoulder, and he was close enough to hear her last breath leave her lungs.

  Sickened, he pushed himself away, scrabbling through the mud. Still, he hadn’t been able to look away.

  His mother’s forehead caved in—

  —the skin broken and bloody—

  —bits of bone showing.

  Her eyes stared sightless at the ceiling, that last look of relief—the last look his mother had given him—was utterly gone. Her eyes were cold and lifeless as stones.

  But then she sat up. Not with the sickening, desperate motions of a woman bleeding to death, but quickly and with purpose, like a sleeper wakened by the knocking of someone at the door. Blood ran down her face, one trickle running through her left eye. But she did not blink, and the eyes that she turned to him were still empty, the only light in them that of reflected flame.

  “Lewan,” she said, but it was not his mother’s voice. Lower, more solemn, and with an underlying timbre that was beyond human.

  Lewan tried to step back, to find the door and run. But his feet would not move. His legs were heavy and slow in the way of nightmares.

  “You must listen, my son,” the voice said through his mother. “Death comes. When death comes for you, you must see clearly. You must not run. You must find your courage.”

  Lewan looked down. He was not the little boy anymore. He was seventeen, grown tall and with a lean strength from a life in the wild. He stood in the burning house naked, and the muddy symbols of the Oak Father he’d painted on his skin were still wet. They steamed in the hot air.

  When he looked up, his mother was standing, her throat still savaged, the crown of her head a ruined mess, mud and worse caking her hair. “I will show you,” she said.

  She reached with both her hands—hands that had become claws—and grabbed the skin between her bare breasts. The claws dug into the skin and kept digging. Lewan heard bone cracking, the sound mingling with the burning flames growing in the timbers of the house. His mother’s fingers were all the way inside her, and she pulled. Her breastbone broke with a great crrrack! and the skin tore as she pulled open her chest.

  Lewan’s eyes went wide with horror, but he could not look away. Instead of blood and his mother’s inner organs spilling all over the floor of their croft, a light burned inside—green but warm, like the late afternoon sun shining through a canopy of new spring leaves.

  “See,” said the voice—

  —and Lewan saw, falling into the green light.

  The green glow dimmed and he found himself surrounded by blue, broken only by high, thin streaks of white. Clouds. The white was clouds. He turned, and below him stretched hundreds of miles of golden grassland. The Amber Steppes. And directly beneath him was a mountain, which rose into a broken cone. He’d never seen it from this high up, but he recognized it immediately. Sentinelspire.

  As he watched, an entire face of the mountain—scores of miles of stone, soil, and greenery—fell, collapsing in upon itself. The landslide had scarcely started sliding down when the entire mountain—and several miles of ground around the mountain—exploded. For a heartbeat, a lightning-flash moment, Lewan thought he saw a white-hot center of fire, but then all of the remains of the mountain and surrounding countryside spread outward in a great cloud of blasted rock and fire, moving faster than the sound of the explosion. The fire-shot darkness swallowed him.

  When he could see again, before him was the greatest wonder he’d ever seen. The world stretched out before him. He saw the yellow haze of the Endless Wastes, the darker smudges of mountains and woods, the Great Ice Sea to the north, and hundreds of miles in every direction. So high was he that he could see the curve of the world falling away in every direction. But directly beneath him he saw again Sentinelspire’s explosion, as if time had sped up. The great cloud of ash and fire rose farther than the highest clouds, spread out as the wind caught it, and still grew and grew, covering thousands of miles of land in darkness. Beyond the great cloud where the ash thinned, still it spread a murky haze for tens of thousands of miles.

  His vision shifted again, back down to woods and forests. He saw rivers choked with ash, dead fish floating downstream to rot in lakes. He saw rain filled with soot and sulfur poisoning streams and fields. He saw fruit wither on the vine and crops rot in the fields from the lack of sun. Summer did not come to many lands, and the following winter was harsh beyond recorded memory. Starvation and disease ran rampant, in man and beast alike. Wars erupted as nations invaded the lands of their enemies—or their allies—in a desperate bid for food. Entire cities burned. Villages were laid waste. Tens of thousands died in the first year. Then even the armies broke apart or turned upon their own ranks as soldiers starved.

  But as the seasons passed, the winds and rain cleansed the air, and though Sentinelspire—no more than a gigantic crater—still oozed steam and smoke, the wild recovered. Civilization crumbled as men, elves, and other civilized people tore at one another and became savage in their bid for survival. But forests took root where once men had tilled fields. Trees grew in the midst of ruined castles. Beasts made homes in the broken bones of once-proud cities. Years passed. Where rivers had once run foul with the sludge of sewage from cities, they ran clean again. Sunrises and sunsets were no longer sullied by thousands of fires from cities. Even the great crater hundreds of miles south of the Great Ice Sea cooled and filled with water from clean rain and melting snow. It seemed almost a—

  Paradise.

  The image remained clear, but a new sound broke Lewan’s sense of peace. He heard horns, cries of alarm, and people shouting. He looked around, and the image of the new world dissolved and faded, like smoke on the wind.

  Lewan opened
his eyes and sat up, dislodging the blanket he’d wrapped around his body. A light rain was falling on the balcony, rippling the leaves of the vines clinging to the stone. Clarions sounded from somewhere inside the fortress, echoing off the canyon walls. He heard people shouting.

  The door to the balcony opened, and Ulaan stood there, the thick fur coverlet from the bed wrapped round her shoulders. She had lit a lamp in the room behind her, and it outlined her in a dim, flickering light.

  “What’s happening?” asked Lewan as he struggled to bring his mind out of the dream and back into the world around him.

  “The Fortress is under attack.”

  Part Three

  THE RETURN

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  16 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)

  The foothills of the Khopet-Dag

  Berun hit the ground rolling, careful to keep his blade away from his body, and came to his feet. The tiger was already rounding on him, her lips pulled back over her teeth. Sauk and his men fanned out behind her. Berun crouched and kept the knife out before him, hoping the smell of blood on the steel would discourage the tiger. She gave it a swipe, testing him. He jerked the knife out of the way just in time and stepped back. On the edge of his vision, he could see Lewan trying to force himself to his feet but not having much success.

  “Surround him!” Sauk called out. “Get behind him and close in. He’s done running. He runs and Taaki’ll be on him!”

  The tiger backed up and crouched, baring her teeth and tightening her muscles. Berun knew she was about to pounce. He might be able to avoid the brunt of her, might even slice into her with the knife, but he knew it wouldn’t be a killing blow. He’d either teach her a little caution, maybe buy himself a little time, or he’d get her so angry that she’d come at him, blade or no blade.

  Berun prepared to make his own leap when that slight tickling in the base of his brain suddenly flared.

  Perch hit Taaki, right on her head, coming down in a fury of claws and teeth. Taaki roared in shock and anger and began shaking her head back and forth to dislodge the treeclaw lizard. But Perch held, and Berun knew through the link they shared that Perch’s claws had burrowed beneath the fur and well under the skin. One claw was scraping along bone. Still, the tiger was a thousand times stronger than the lizard, and she dislodged him. Keeping a tenuous hold with his front claws, Perch’s lower body fell on her face.

  Berun saw her flex her right paw—claws fully extended—and he knew what was coming.

  “Perch, drekhe!” Berun shouted, and at the same time urged him flee!

  Taaki struck, and the little lizard leaped away just in time—so close that Perch felt the fur of the tiger’s paw tickle his back in passing. The tiger’s claws ripped into her own eye and the flesh around it. She screamed—a roar that began deep but then went up into an almost human-sounding screech—then she bounded away, running Valmir down as she passed.

  Sauk roared in fury and charged. Berun could see from the look on his face that any orders of taking Berun alive were forgotten. Time for bloody murder.

  The half-orc brought his sword around in a backhanded blow, all of his strength and rage behind the swing. Berun threw himself back, hoping that the downhill slope would grant him some added momentum. It did, but too much. His foot slipped on the sodden ground and he went down hard, sliding a ways downhill into a thick brake of holly. He felt the ground shaking under Sauk’s heavy tread.

  He pushed himself to his feet. Forest detritus and muck covered him, but he knew he didn’t have time to concern himself with any of it. Sauk was almost upon him. Another moment—

  The ground in front of Berun erupted, scattering leaves and branches and shattering a rotted tree into countless pieces. The moist earth swelled until it stood almost as tall as the young trees themselves. Seeing it, Berun’s eyes widened in shock, for the earth was shaped almost like a man—a thick, malformed man. Leaves and mud sprouted from the great lump between its shoulders, almost like a living crown. Broken branches and old roots protruded at odd angles, and even as its thick, loamy scent hit him, Berun could see earthworms wriggling on its surface, some falling away while others burrowed back inside.

  The mound of earth rose, as if dirt from the torso were being forced upward, then split into a mouth. It kept growing, the bulk of the thing’s body shrinking as it formed into the jaws. The mound of earth leaned forward, towering over Berun, then fell.

  When the tiger had knocked him to the ground, Berun thought he’d felt every bone in his body scrape together. This was a hundred times stronger and completely unrelenting. The tiger had struck and bounded away. This kept coming and coming and coming. He felt millions of grains of wet dirt undulating over his skin and falling down his shirt, filling his nose, burying him. Roots and rocks scraped and bruised him.

  It was cold. Worse, Berun could not breathe. Dirt filled his nose, and he knew that if he opened his mouth, he would choke on the wet earth. He pitched and kicked and punched, but it was like fighting the wind. The earth flowed around every strike. He felt his knife swept away in the flood of earth. For an instant, he thought he heard Sauk screaming, but then it was gone, and there was only the roar of the earth surging around him.

  Berun’s kicks and punches were no longer a matter of fighting. With no air, his body had completely separated from his mind and gone into the throes of sheer panic.

  Lights danced in his vision. Were his eyes open or clenched shut? He could not remember, but neither could he feel them any longer. The lights coalesced, bleeding together, and deepened into a shade of verdant green, like dawn’s light on the dew of spring grass.

  The light rippled, a green glow playing over shadow, and the ripples formed an outline, then a face.

  Chereth.

  It was Chereth, his master. Older. His face drawn. Even haggard. But there was no mistaking his master’s visage.

  “Berun,” said Chereth, “you must help me. I release you from your oath. Come to me, my son. Come to me!”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  19 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR)

  The foothills of the Khopet-Dag

  Wake-wake-wake!

  An urgency. A will tinged by worry.

  Wake-open-eyes! Wake-open-eyes?

  Then he heard—really heard, not just in his mind—the chittering, almost birdlike but harsher.

  He didn’t move his limbs or even turn his head. He wasn’t sure he could and was afraid to try. Part of him was afraid that opening his eyes would show him nothing, only the smothering black of being buried alive in the deep earth. But he could breathe. Not well. His nostrils were clogged, and something was partially blocking his lips.

  Berun opened his eyes. Blue sky. Not entirely blue, no. Clouds low and gray floated like islands in a sea.

  The chittering came again, and Berun dared to move his head, looking up just a little. Jagged shapes broke his view of the sky. Branches. Blackened branches. Blackened by lightning. He was lying under the lightning blasted tree where he had agreed to meet—

  “Lewan!”

  Berun sat up. He heard a startled rustling overhead and looked up in time to see Perch scrambling down the tree. Halfway down, the lizard leaped and alighted on Berun’s shoulder.

  That was when Berun got the first good look at himself. He was covered—head to fingertips to heels—in mud. It had begun to dry, and his sudden movement sent cracks across the dark surface.

  Perch chittered in his ear.

  Wake-wake-wake?

  “Yes, Perch. I’m awake.” He smiled and ran a finger down Perch’s back. His arm trembled.

  He felt weak, his limbs heavy, no strength in his muscles, the way he felt after running dozens of miles across the open steppe.

  Berun looked around. Other than himself and Perch and a few butterflies fluttering through the grass, no one was around. No sign of Sauk and his men, nor of Lewan. The last thing Berun could remember was the earth creature attacking, see
ming to swallow him and push him down into the earth. Then the green light and Chereth’s face. Berun, you must help me.

  And then he understood. Somehow, even from his prison far away, his master had sent him aid. Sauk would have killed him. Berun had little doubt of that. Even if Berun managed to best Sauk—and he knew the unlikelihood of that—that still left the other assassins and the tiger. He never could have beaten them all and escaped with Lewan. So Chereth had summoned some sort of earth spirit to save him.

  He raised his eyes and looked to the east. Higher hills lay between him and the steppe, and beyond, a thick haze. He could not see Sentinelspire. But from where he sat he knew it was well over a hundred miles as the crow flies. Over the hills and valleys on foot, it was probably closer to two hundred. His supplies were gone. His knife, his bow, Erael’len … everything but the clothes he wore were either with Sauk’s band or buried in the earth. And the clothes wouldn’t count for much. He brushed at the mud on his sleeve to try to get the worst off, and the fabric ripped. His pants and boots, filthy as they were, were still useable. His shirt was a loss. The dirt grinding him down had done it in. The mud was probably the only thing holding it together.

  Berun, you must help me. Had it been a panic-induced dream? Berun didn’t think so. Besides … Lewan. Sauk had taken Lewan. As far as Berun knew, the boy was still alive.

  His limbs still trembling, Berun pushed himself to his feet. He winced. Mud and grit had filled his boots. He’d have to find a stream very soon and clean himself up, or walking the first mile would rip all the skin off his feet.

  Berun sat down and removed the boots. He’d go slower barefoot, but until he could find a stream, he had little choice.

  “Let’s go, Perch,” he said, “and let’s hope we don’t run into any spiders too big for you to handle.”