by Lou Hoffmann
L’Ehni relayed the command, and the standard bearer sent a wizard-made whistling rocket into the air. It exploded overhead with a bang that made the horses jump and hopefully the nearby enemy quail. A dazzle of brilliant, rainbow-hued lights rained down over the entire field. Han’s war cry, ever a fear-inspiring sound, echoed from all quarters of the field as both his command and Olmar’s rode hard into the melee, arrows flying and swords swinging.
AFTER LUCKY communicated with Han, he turned back to Thurlock, planning to catch him up on Han’s news. “Han’s contingent is moving into the battle at the encampment…. Thurlock? Are you okay?”
Lucky hurried to Thurlock’s side as the old man struggled to stand, leaning heavily on his staff. Lucky grabbed hold of Thurlock’s arm to help him up, but when he glanced over the lip of the ridge he was, for a moment, distracted. Something crisscrossing the valley seemed to tickle his awareness, and without thinking he let the Sight open. The entire valley floor had been netted with serpents of scintillating golden brilliance. He realized immediately that he’d lost track of what he was doing—trying to help Thurlock—and he intended to drop the Sight, but before he did, Thurlock, who’d struggled to his feet, reached out toward the valley with one hand and slowly waved it, palm down, from side to side.
“Sh,” he said.
Lucky had no idea how to respond to being shushed in this circumstance, so he just kept holding Thurlock’s free arm, trying to keep him from falling over. But then he realized Thurlock hadn’t been talking to him. The golden lights faded and winked out—like the wizard had put them to sleep. Thurlock wobbled in his grip, and Lucky realized the Sight was doing him no good at the moment, interfering as it was with the job of keeping Thurlock upright. He let go of the Sight and used a two-handed grip on the old man.
Yesterday, Thurlock had several times used his formidable size and immense strength to pull Lucky up a climb he couldn’t have otherwise managed. Now, the wizard seemed a shrunken, wrinkled, ancient man barely clinging to life.
“Sir,” Lucky said, agitated with worry. “Have you slept at all? Maybe you should lie down. Do you want some water? Food? How can I help?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Thurlock croaked.
That didn’t comfort Luccan much. “Sir….”
“Not sir, just…. Oh, right. Never mind.” Thurlock started to take shambling steps toward the clear space in front of the ancient grove where they’d made their camp. “Behl’s light,” he said hoarsely. “That’s all I need. Well, maybe some of the good water. And some tea and a breakfast of Fiddle Faddle would go down smooth.”
“Are you okay to walk on your own?” Lucky asked, then quailed at the glare Thurlock gave him. He rushed over to grab the bedroll Thurlock had not used the night before, and then placed it where Thurlock stood with his eyes closed muttering into the sunrise.
“Sit down, okay?” Lucky said, and tried to help him.
It was an awkward maneuver, especially with Maizie underfoot trying to help, but once Thurlock was down, he sat with his staff cradled against his shoulder, elbows on thighs, head hanging near his jutting knees. Lucky rushed to grab the Kindled Springs water and carried it back, then placed it in the wizard’s hands.
“Drink,” he commanded, as if he had every right to give the old man orders.
He couldn’t do anything about the Fiddle Faddle, but he raised some small flames in camp stones and set some water on to boil for Thurlock’s tea. While it heated, he brought out some of the sweet brown bread they’d squirreled away and slathered it with butter. He set it on a cloth next to Thurlock, then went back for the tea and some dried fruit. “I’m sorry it’s not Fiddle Faddle,” he said, “but maybe start with this.”
Thurlock met Lucky’s gaze, his eyes already clearer, some years already washed away from his face, looking stronger and brighter but still old and wizened. “Thank you, Luccan! I could almost believe you’d been getting ‘care of old wizard’ lessons from Han.”
Lucky smiled. “You seem better.”
“Much. Now you should eat too. I’ll be gathering some of Behl’s light, as I’ve just about depleted my stores, and I need it for strength and for magic. When I’m done, we’re going to have our work cut out for us. Things are astir below. Once you’ve had your breakfast, keep an eye on what’s going on while I replenish. Let me know if anything happens that needs my immediate attention. Don’t stir anything up with the enemy. We don’t yet want to call attention to ourselves up here if we can help it.”
Lucky nodded. “Okay.” He started to step away, but then thought better of it. “Sir, Thurlock, what are we even doing here if we’re not fighting? We could be helping Han and the army in the battle out there at the border.”
“This is where our battle lies, Luccan, and we are preparing for that. We will fight, either when we are ready and our friends have come, or before that if we have no choice.”
Lucky fed Maizie some bread crusts and sausage ends he’d saved for her, and then he ate because he knew he should rather than because food held any interest for him. He felt far too unsettled and worried to enjoy such things as the taste of good bread or the sweetness of dried fruit. Thurlock, on the other hand, ate with great relish as if he thought it might be the last meal he ever got. After he finished, he cleaned himself up a bit, and then returned to sitting in the sun as still as any statue except that his lips moved in a nearly inaudible chant. His staff pulsed slowly and glowed with a golden light barely discernable in the sunshine. Lucky watched the old man for a while, looking for some sign that he was about to move, but after a time he retreated to the low wall of loose stones that formed the rise behind their ledge. He found a shady stone, sat down, and settled in to worry about the upcoming fight.
But how do you worry well about something you don’t understand at all? What Lucky actually did instead of fretting about fighting the enemy was think about people. Like Rio. He wished Rio was already there with him, but on the other hand he hoped by some miracle all the fighting would be over before Rio got there, because that way he couldn’t be hurt. Lucky also spent some time thinking about Han, but he tried to keep those thoughts low key. He didn’t want to accidentally take Han’s attention away from the battle he was engaged in—at the cost of a life, maybe even Han’s own.
He hadn’t expected Thurlock to sit and soak up sunlight—or Behlishan’s blessing, if that’s what it was—for hours on end. But when the morning sun had climbed too high for Lucky to find any shade in the area, still the wizard sat mumbling and Lucky sat too, mostly on his thumbs.
He threw a stick for Maizie and lavished praise on her, but he could tell she only played to humor him. Her mind seemed to be on more serious things, and occasionally she paced the edge of the clearing, nudging right up against the shield Thurlock had cast and gazing down into the Valley of the Hand. Lucky did the same thing a few times, but it was pointless, because the shadows always looked the same, and the people moving between them never did anything that made sense, much less anything he could do something about. So Lucky wasted time—practiced braiding his hair, practiced writing the runes of his name in the sparse sand, found a suitable stone and filed his fingernails smooth.
He followed the shrinking spot of shade and sat down in it with Maizie curling up at his side. Thinking again about Rio, he started to doze. He awoke suddenly when Maizie leaped to her feet and ran for the edge of a large flat rock that protruded out over the cliff on one side of the ledge. Lucky panicked thinking she was going to sail right over the edge and plunge to the bottom. She did leap off the ledge, but as she did, a face popped up just beyond it, and it interrupted her fall when she hit it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Blue Drakes and Zombies
L’ARIA HAD been surprised when her father and Bayahr asked her to lead their band of travelers through the tunnels.
“You’ve done it before, and all indications are you did it very well,” Bayahr had said.
“Do not be so surprised, girl,
” Tiro had added, a rare smile causing his black eyes to twinkle in the light of a full moon. “Never think that because you are my child you will never surpass me. I believe you are right for this job—your magic, your song, not mine. All that’s required for it to work well is for you to believe it too.”
And it had gone well. They’d descended underground from a hidden cave entrance in the rocky hills around the Behlvale, some miles west of the Oakridge. The tunnels ran more or less directly north at first, and L’Aria had been amazed at the change in the wights and wolves as they traveled. The temperature dropped, but only a few degrees. When she mentioned how much stronger the northerners were after only a day into the trek, Bayahr said he thought something in them was tuned to the north, like the stones tuned their energies to align with the polar ends of the world.
Whatever caused the change, they journeyed much faster than they had on the trip from Embers Creek to the Sisterhold. A half day had brought them north to the caverns under Hoenholm—some of which held ruins of castle cellars—then west to the mouth of the Kihrn River where they emerged for a time to fish and bathe under the moon. The temperatures were warm, a relief to L’Aria, but the chill waters kept the cairnwights and their glacier wolves content. Across the river, they went into tunnels that traveled northwest, and with Bayahr’s magical help, after less than two days on the road, they’d crossed through a section of West Haven and into the Northern Ice.
They camped in a broad cave with a floor just below the level of the surface outside, with the gaping cave entrance just beyond a shielding wall of stone. As the camp slept, Tiro went swimming, traveling up the Winterspun River in otter form to better deal with its strong and icy current. L’Aria tried to sleep, knowing she’d need her strength for the next day’s travel, but she couldn’t rest with a new song thrumming through her mind. This was the first time she’d traveled so close to a seacoast, and the layered turbulence of the ocean shore wrapped its song around her mind and wouldn’t let go. Drawn, she went overland under starlight, following the sea’s call. All the while, some other song played—a broken, sad melody laid over subtle dissonance. Alongside the intense, almost violent movement of the ocean’s music, it nearly tore L’Aria’s soul.
Before they’d left the Hold, Tiro had a silversmith set Tiro’s Stone in a circlet for her. As she left her pallet that night to follow the strange lament of the unknown woven into the song of the sea, she’d donned the circlet, the heavy stone centered on her brow. As she crested a stone tor and gained a clear view of the sea, the stone flared, shining forth a bright blue light answering the silver of the moon.
There in the near distance, she found the source of the sad song. Blue drakes: some flying but with misshapen limbs or faces, some hungry but unable to hunt or to eat or digest, some blind, some wingless, some like giant worms. All broken things that were meant to be beautiful and deadly perfect. All cursed with the taint of the ugliest of Ethra’s dark magic.
And then L’Aria saw the columns of dense black mist, and she understood. She’d never seen the “mist-shadows” Luccan and the others had spoken of, but still, she knew them when she saw them. Their sound—L’Aria thought maybe only she could hear it, but it was sound nevertheless—their sound hurt. It felt as if something dripped over her and burned in through her skin—not painful enough to merit a scream, just a constant, steady, unwelcome heat. This was part of the attack on Ethra. While Luccan and Thurlock and Han with his armies fought in the Fallows to the south, while Nedhra City struggled to the east, this was the shape of the Terrathian invasion here in the west.
L’Aria vowed to set the waters and the land and the drakes free from their torment, and then she ran for help.
AMAZINGLY, BEING smacked face-on with sixty pounds of dog didn’t dislodge the climber from the slope. Maizie bit too, and tore a hole in the face, but the wound hardly bled at all and the woman didn’t seem to feel any pain. Lucky could guess why—from the gray color of her flesh, she was already dead. He had run after Maizie without thinking and now he reached out for her, planning to pull her back to safety, but just before he made contact, she finally succeeded in knocking the intruder down.
Maizie fell after her, and Lucky just escaped following. He regained his balance at the edge and watched as the intruder Maizie had attacked landed on another death-gray climber behind her, who then fell and landed on another, and on it went, like a line of vertical dominoes. Maybe a dozen altogether, they’d been climbing a crude rope made of vines, following one after the other like ants. They all ended up on another, smaller ledge about thirty feet down, where they’d apparently started the climb. Lucky’s guts heaved as he saw Maizie fall amid a mass of living-dead flesh. The idea of those walking corpses was so horrific, he had trouble stringing thoughts together. But still, he could think clearly enough to be afraid they’d tear his beloved dog limb from limb.
They didn’t. The zombies—yes, zombies, Lucky; how normal is that?—pushed her away when she came at them, but made no move to harm her. Apparently, whatever force animated them, whatever compulsion they obeyed, it hadn’t given any orders about a dog.
But how am I going to get her back up here?
That’s not my first worry, though, is it?
Already the zombie chain gang was shimmying up the makeshift rope, certainly for the purpose of doing harm to him and Thurlock. He thought of Ciarrah, and then seemingly of her own accord she was out of her sheath and in his hand.
Ciarrah called out to him. “Blade-keeper! You have need of me?”
“Sword please, Ciarrah.” Lucky heard the calm in his own mental voice and almost wondered who was speaking. He slashed at the rope, and the zombies fell back to the ground in a heap.
Maizie took off at a run to the east and disappeared around a large rock. She didn’t reappear anywhere he could see. He could only hope she’d found a safe place and crawled in to hide.
He looked around more broadly then and found that a wide stretch of the slope below where he stood fairly crawled with zombies, all seemingly looking for a way to get up to the ledge he and Thurlock occupied. Thinking of the way he’d used Ciarrah on Gahabriohl to help Han fight the black dragon, he asked her—without words this time—to create the long, laser-like beam he’d need to slice through them from this distance. As her form changed, the pitch of her hum—what he thought of as her song—changed too, and almost instantly the zombies closest to Lucky went berserk.
Where before they’d gone about their quest slow and steady, now they made loud, hellish sounds in their dead throats and attacked the nearly vertical slope, pulling themselves up over stone and scree like spiders. Even more horrified and disgusted than before, Lucky lost no time. He swept Ciarrah’s beam over them, slashing two, three, four times across their bodies, cutting them to ribbons and bits.
Their severed parts didn’t squirm and jump like in the worst of the horror movies Lucky had seen in Earth, and for that he was thankful. Still, having a second to think about what he’d done and what he was seeing sent a new wave of nausea through him. He backed away from the edge and bent over, vomiting. He heard Rio’s voice at the same moment that he felt a hand on his shoulder, and he wanted to cry, half in relief that Rio was there with him, half in sorrow that Rio was now in danger too.
Thurlock’s voice boomed in his ear, though in truth the wizard didn’t speak loudly. “Luccan, are you all right?”
For some reason what Lucky responded with wasn’t about the zombies, or how he and Ciarrah had cut them down, nor his horror at their lifeless bodies lying in halves and quarters about the hillside, but about his dog. “Maizie ran off down there.”
“She’ll be fine, Luccan. Come now. You’ve done well, but we’ve got plenty more work to do, and the time is right. Our friends are here, and we’re ready.”
Lucky stood up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Thurlock poured water into his own teacup and handed it to Lucky. After Lucky rinsed and spit and then drank some Kindled Springs w
ater from the skin, he thanked Thurlock, nodded greetings at the others who were nearby, and pulled Rio into a tight hug.
With the slope clear of climbing zombies, nothing immediate threatened, and Thurlock took advantage of the lull to brief the group on “all the things going on down there.” Lucky couldn’t quite understand how Thurlock had seen everything he knew about, but it didn’t seem like the right time to question the wizard’s abilities.
“Across the valley, Droghona warriors—our allies—have taken possession of the mesa and every nook and cranny in the upper reaches of the cliffside. Ranged below them are enemy snipers from Earth with weapons such as you—except Luccan—have never seen before. The projectiles they fire, called bullets, can reach us here, so it is imperative that we keep the shield strong. Mayli, you and your sisters will maintain it, and I’ll shore you up from time to time, but my attention will also be needed elsewhere. Understand?”
He explained that Olana and some additional Droghona light-workers were doing something similar for the Droghona stationed across the valley, but those warriors could only make slow progress against the enemy snipers. He concluded, “Something dark and evil is going on behind those curtains of shadow, and I know it has to do with the Terrathian life-draining technology, but I don’t know exactly what they’re doing with it. That is where I will focus my energy in general—trying to break through and weaken it, stop what they’re doing if I can or slow them down. But as you each fight your battle, if I am needed, I will help if I can.”
He looked around from eye to eye, somehow communicating his trust and his promise to each person in the circle, from Guard soldiers to magic-wielders to Rio, who didn’t quite fit either category. When he asked if anyone had information to add, it was Rio who spoke up.
“Sir, when we arrived, before we came over to this side of the ridge, Captain Hahris thought it would be best to have a look at what was going on over here. I’m a pretty good climber, so I went up to the top of the rocks and had a look. I couldn’t see the valley floor close in here because of the ridge sticking out, but I could see to the east and west. There were some… strange things….”
