by Mike Wild
“His name was Erak Brand,” Gabriella interrupted her. “He was the Enlightened One of Solnos before me. A kind, faithful man.”
“You were close?”
“Erak and I were lovers. We were to marry.”
“Gods, I’m sorry. What happened?”
Gabriella tensed and the stick she’d been about to throw onto the fire she snapped in half. “He was murdered. By a man named Dai Batsen.”
“Why?”
“Batsen was a rogue shadowmage. A hireling of someone who didn’t want us to discover an unsavoury truth.”
“What truth?”
Gabriella let out an exasperated sigh that turned into a cracked, humourless laugh. “The truth is, I don’t know. And now I doubt I’m ever going to find out...”
Kali frowned. “Rodrigo Kesar had something to do with this, didn’t he? I saw your face back at Scholten when you learned he was dead.”
Gabriella nodded. “And with him my chance to avenge Erak. May that bastard Kesar be burning in the hells.”
Gabriella’s cold ferocity took Kali aback, but more than that, it struck her that her companion meant exactly what she said. She wasn’t speaking of the hells in any metaphorical sense, she was speaking of them as real places. It was clear she believed they existed as much as the Clouds of Kerberos floated above their heads. After what she had seen through the shard at the cathedral, it sent a shiver down her spine.
“Is there no other way you can find out what was behind Erak’s death?”
Gabriella shook her head. “My position as Enlightened One of Solnos was only ever meant to be temporary. But I waited and waited and, as the months passed, no one came to replace me. Eventually I found out, from friends, that the Anointed Lord had arranged to have me watched – and then, simply, forgotten.”
“You think Makennon was responsible?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I do know I seem to have little place in a changing Faith. I believed in their mission – still believe – to bring Ascension to the people, even if we have to purify some with fire. But after what happened to you with the Eyes of the Lord – seeing how they accused you and how they were wrong – I realised just how out of control they have become. The Faith threatens to become a dictatorship, ruling with an iron glove and I think something is rotten at its core.”
“Can I take that as an apology for trying to burn me alive?”
“Kali –”
“Joke,” Kali said. “But if you realise all of this, why are you still here?”
Gabriella stared at her as if the answer were obvious. “As a Sister of the Order of the Swords of Dawn, I remain sworn to protect the Anointed Lord.”
“Now that’s a joke, ri –” Kali began, but halted as Gabriella suddenly placed her palm on her forearm, beckoning silence.
At first she thought the Enlightened One had simply had enough of the subject but then saw that she was staring into the dark boundary of the forest, where Slowhand had wandered minutes before to collect wood to whittle into shafts. The archer seemed alone in the shadows but then she sensed another presence in the darkness, watching Slowhand from hiding. Kali stared at the spot, gradually discerning a shape, but she had difficulty making out what it was until there were two simultaneous flares about a foot and half apart at waist height. For a fleeting moment the flares illuminated curled palms, a dark-robed torso, and a white, cadaverous face, steadily regarding Slowhand with malignant intent.
“Fitch!” Kali said, starting to run. “One bastard who should never have got the magic back!”
Gabriella was up and by her side in an instant, the two of them pounding towards Slowhand, but the archer was hacking at vegetation, unable to hear their shouts. The fire in Fitch’s palms, meanwhile, had transformed into crackling spheres of energy. As Kali and Gabriella watched helplessly, Fitch drew his palms back and threw the fireballs at the preoccupied archer. Luckily, Fitch’s aim was slightly askew, and the fireballs impacted with a tree trunk next to Slowhand, knocking the archer off his feet. He scrabbled back in shock and raced towards his assailant, roaring as he recognised Fitch.
He suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and Kali saw the psychic manipulator smiling and weaving some distraction thread with one hand while nurturing a third fireball with the other. There was no question that this one would hit Slowhand full on and she and Gabriella were still too far away to do anything.
“You tackle Fitch!” Gabriella yelled, and then pounded toward Slowhand. Kali ran at the psychic manipulator along with Jakub Freel, who had been alerted by the noise. As she watched the fireball grow all Kali could feel was the pounding of her heart, and the certain knowledge that the fireball was going to leave Fitch’s hand before she or the enforcer reached him. She snatched a glance towards Gabriella and, like herself, the Enlightened One still had too much ground to cover.
Fitch launched the fireball and everything became dream-like and slow. Kali came to a faltering stop and tracked the crackling sphere of fire helplessly, her mouth falling open. As it passed the halfway mark between Fitch and Slowhand, she turned slightly, yelling to Gabriella to drive her onward. Ripping away her armour as she went, driven as much by momentum as muscle, Gabriella left the ground, throwing herself forward through the air, but it wasn’t Slowhand she was throwing herself at, it was the fireball.
Enlightened One and fireball collided in mid-air and Gabriella DeZantez was consumed by the magic, disappearing inside an explosion of super-heated fire. The infernal heat it contained would, had she still been wearing it, have turned her armour red hot in an instant, roasting her inside, but with only her surplice she would likely suffer a quicker death than that. She had no chance of surviving, none at all, and so it came as something of a surprise to Kali when, as the fire blasted about Gabriella and then dissipated, the Enlightened One fell to the ground with her surplice burnt away, smoking and stunned, but otherwise apparently unharmed.
Slowhand looked about him in confusion. Fitch, meanwhile, stared at the recovering form of Gabriella DeZantez in disbelief. For his part, Jakub Freel covered the remaining ground between Fitch and himself where he flattened the psychic manipulator with a single punch to the face.
Kali turned her attention back to Slowhand. The archer had stripped off his shirt and was wrapping it about Gabriella as he lifted her slowly from the ground. The woman was clearly stunned, but there wasn’t a mark on her, not a single blemish or burn. It was no time for questions, however, and Kali and Slowhand took Gabriella between them and slowly led her back to her tent. Slowhand paused mid-route and nodded to Freel.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t mention it.”
The Final Faith enforcer watched them depart with their charge. Neither of them noticed as, behind them, he hauled Fitch to his feet with one hand and roused him. Neither did they hear the words that passed between the enforcer and the cadaverous manipulator.
“I told you not to make a move,” Freel said. “I told you that when the time comes, Killiam Slowhand is mine.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THEY ENTERED THE Sardenne at dawn, not that Twilight’s distant sun ever made much difference in the heavily canopied forest. The first few yards of their ingress plunged them into shadow, the next few beyond that to a darkness equivalent to longnight, and with every step thereafter the ambient light lessened until, in parts, their surroundings were as black as a windowless room. To aid their progress, the mages in the party wove soft and subtle light threads that played about them like fireflies, not bright enough to attract unwanted attention but enough to make the individual members of the party aware of where they stepped and distinguishable from each other. Their beacon, albeit an ominous one, was the pillar of souls. The column of spiritual energy continued to grow, and offered a continuous reminder of why they were treading such dangerous ground.
They were amidst the soul-stripped now and followed the route that the Eye of the Lord had suggested was safest, though watching the i
mages the device had returned to them had still been a discomfiting experience. The small sphere had woven a meandering course through the soul-stripped, manoeuvring up to and around them, between them, but never drawing too near and – in case Kali was wrong about what would alert the Pale Lord – never lingering too long. The Eye’s passage nevertheless allowed it to see a level of detail that no human would have survived long enough to absorb, snatches of facial features of the soul-stripped – an ear, a nose, a mouth, a dangling lock of hair. That close, they almost became individuals again, might have been husbands, wives, sons, daughters or friends, but it only took one glimpse of their rigid forms or whitened eyes to remind all who watched that they were nothing to each other or their loved ones now.
However uncomfortable watching the images had been, the party’s progression along the route mapped by the Eye was worse.
They moved in silence and almost in single file. Every breath, every footfall brought with it a palpable sense of fear. It seemed that each piece of tinder that snapped beneath a boot, each branch disturbed, would alert the soul-stripped, and that it was only a matter of time before one of them turned its gaze toward them. As a result, Kali moved everyone forward with great caution.
It had fallen to her – as one of the few, and certainly the only member of the current party to have ventured deep into the Sardenne and survived – to take point and in that role she had advised them of a few of the realities of the sprawling, ancient domain. The most important was that the soul-stripped were not the only things to be afraid of. The further they progressed into the forest the stranger and more dangerous the threats they might face. She had allocated everyone some floprat render, the olfactory camouflage she found worked best within the Sardenne, but some, the Swords particularly, wore the foul smelling substance awkwardly, as if they thought she was playing some practical joke at their expense. Kali’s sincere hope was that they didn’t have to find out otherwise. Familiar with the Sardenne’s unnatural menagerie first hand, she doubted that any of the men or women present would believe her if she tried to describe some of the things she’d seen, so she didn’t bother.
Oddly enough, though, there were none of the hisses, caws, growls, rumbles, rattles or shrieks from the surrounding undergrowth that she would normally expect to hear. She wondered whether the presence of the soul-stripped, or the aura of Redigor, had actually done their party a favour, driving the wildlife deeper into the forest and leaving the path ahead of them clear. They would only know the truth as they forged deeper.
Though their passage through the soul-stripped was tortuous and took some hours they miraculously avoided detection, reaching a point at last where the Pale Lord’s puppets thinned. Soon after, they had passed beyond them completely.
It was at this stage that Kali instigated the second part of her plan to negotiate the Sardenne successfully. Her main reason for including the mages in the party was not for them to help tackle Redigor – five hundred, not fifty, would have been nearer the mark for that – but because she knew they did not have time on their side. Travelling in a normal fashion, it would take days to reach Bel’A’Gon’Shri, and the pillar of souls would have touched Kerberos long before that. But by using the mages to generate portals – effectively teleporting their way through the forest – they could reduce a journey of days to one of hours.
The ploy was not without its logistical problems, however. For one thing, the effort and energies involved meant that the mages would have to work in turns, and would only be able to move them a league or two at a time. For another, they would be teleporting blind. It was the reason they could not use the same technique to bypass the soul-stripped – the last thing Kali wanted was to materialise in the middle of a mass of them – and they could only hope that more of them, or other hidden hazards, did not lie ahead.
Slowhand looked uneasy as the first wave of mages began to weave the threads. They were helpless to sudden attack from the forest while the weaving took place, so the Swords stood vigilant around them.
“You’ve done this before?” The archer said to Kali.
“Sure. The old man and I travelled from Gargas to Andon during the k’nid invasion. It’s what gave me the idea.”
“And you arrived okay? I mean with... all your bits?”
“My bits? Gods and hells, ’Liam, is that all you ever think about?”
“Did you?”
“Of course I did! Stinking pits, I would have thought you’d have noticed by now!”
Slowhand faltered. “Oh. Right. Yes. They seemed okay.”
“Okay?”
“Dammit, Hooper, you know what I mean!”
Before them, the mages had completed their weaving and the portal had formed, a shimmering circle that flared outward briefly before just hanging in the air a few inches off the ground. Slowhand swallowed as, with a distinct squelching sound, Jakub Freel stepped into it and vanished. DeZantez, Fitch and the ranks of the mages and Swords followed.
“Our turn,” Kali said. “Want me to hold your hand?”
“I don’t think so,” Slowhand answered through gritted teeth. “Much as I love you, Hooper, I don’t want us spending the rest of eternity as some three-handed, twenty-fingered thing.”
“Be a bit more optimistic. We might end up joined at the groin.”
“Yeah?”
“Dammit, we are not going to end up either way, okay?” Kali said, but Slowhand still seemed unconvinced. “Fine then. Go by yourself.”
“If we end up on a different planet...”
Kali had had enough, and pushed him through the portal. She materialised beside the archer a second later, turning away quickly when she saw him looking down and squeezing himself unashamedly. She looked up; the pillar of souls was considerably closer. The portal had worked.
Spurred by their success, another portal followed, and another, and another after that, by which time the party had progressed so far into the Sardenne that Kali was certain she could smell the faint tang of the long burnt-out shell of the Spiral of Kos. The forest felt different from when she’d fled the explosions that had destroyed the Old Race site, however, wildlife still conspicuously absent. What had been a vital, if life-threatening, region of the forest back then now felt abandoned, as if every participant of its predatorial food chain had deferred to a far greater appetite and retreated into caves and broad burrows, or beneath large stones. Even those creatures who hunted not for food but fun had disappeared. The worst thing was, Kali sensed it was neither the soul-stripped or Redigor that had caused this, but something else.
She had to admit to being quite relieved when Gabriella DeZantez joined her at the front of the ranks. The Enlightened One was fully armoured once more and recovered from Fitch’s attack. They walked together in silence for a while, but then Kali found herself broaching a subject that just had to be broached.
“That fireball thing last night. You feel like telling me what that was about?”
“I wondered how long it would take you to ask.”
“Well, hey, a fireball brushed off as easily as a nibble from a worgle? People tend to notice such things.”
“Does anyone ever interrogate you about the things you can do?”
“Things?”
I saw you in action in the library, remember? And some of the eye witness accounts of your exploits in your file – well, let’s just say they raised eyebrows.”
Kali faltered. “Generally I try not to show off.”
“Show off what?”
“I wish I knew.”
Gabriella seemed genuinely surprised. “You don’t know?”
“Hells, no.”
“And yet you always seem to show up where your abilities are most useful. Almost as if it were –”
“Don’t say it,” Kali interrupted. “Predestined? Well, if it is, I wish to gods someone would tell me, because believe me, all I do is make it up as I go along.”
The two of them lapsed into silence again. But only briefly.
>
“It’s happened before,” Gabriella admitted. “In Solnos. A fireball full in the face and... and nothing. There was another time, too, when I was a child, in some ruins south of Andon. We... that is, my friends and I, used to play there.”
Kali’s eyebrows rose. “The Seventeen Steps? Every level is an inaccessible deathtrap.”
Gabriella nodded. “Because of the Dust Curtains.”
“So named because they strip to the bones anyone who comes within fifty feet. I’ve been trying to crack them for two years.”
“Not me.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The Dust Curtains. I walked right through them.” Gabriella took a slow breath. “My friends didn’t react well to that and it wasn’t long after I signed up for the Swords of Dawn.”
Kali felt her heart thud. After all her efforts, all she should have wanted to ask was what lay beyond the Dust Curtains but what DeZantez had just admitted to her was a revelation that made the secrets of the Seventeen Steps utterly insignificant. She turned to face Gabriella, and grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Are you trying to tell me you’re immune to magic?”
Gabriella swallowed. “I guess I am.”
“Hells.”
“Hells? That’s all you have to say?”
“What do you expect me to say or do?” Kali hissed. “Abandon you like your friends – turn you into some kind of freak, outcast, pariah? We’re more alike than that, remember?”
Gabriella stared at her, then nodded. “And I’m not sure we’re the only ones.”
“What?”
Gabriella sighed, but it seemed a relieved sigh because she could finally talk to someone about what she knew. “I told you I sneaked a look at your file in the Faith record but what I didn’t tell you was that next to it I found one on me too. And two others.”
“What the hells are you talking about?”
“Two other files, each relating in some detail the strange abilities of their owners. A thief based in Turnitia, by the name of Lucius Kane. And another, a mariner called Silus Morlader.”
