Kian ran to her side. He did not speak, but grabbed her elbow and all but dragged her along until they came to a dilapidated building. He cast about, looking for a safer place, but there were none. He pulled her into its roofless interior, hiding them behind a collapsed wall. “Stay here,” he whispered. “Out of sight.”
“Your company is too diminished to lay aside even one sword.”
“You do not wield a sword,” he said, glancing at her dagger.
“Then I will take up the blade of the demon I just killed,” she retorted, trying to get past him. He shoved her back hard enough that she fell on her backside. “You great-”
Kian’s hand clapping over her lips cut off the flow of curses before they began. He stared straight into her eyes. “What demon?” he demanded, then carefully drew back his hand.
“It was a man, but with the glowing eyes Azuri and Hazad described at El’hadar.”
His stare glittered darkly. After a moment, during which he seemed to be struggling over something, he again ordered her to stay put. Closer now, men were shouting, and the sounds of clashing steel echoed off the narrow canyon walls.
Ellonlef tried to stand, but he pressed her down. “I do not have time for this,” he said, exasperated. “Stay here and remain out of sight. I cannot divide my attention between your safety and fighting.”
She had to force herself to relax in a false show of acquiescence. He stared at her a moment more, as if trying to read her intent. Seemingly satisfied that he had cowed her, he stood and sprinted away.
Muttering oaths under her breath, Ellonlef waited and listened, torn in her heart whether to obey, or join the fight. No matter what Kian said, she did not need looking after, whereas she knew he needed an extra sword in this fight. The Life Giver wants you, she heard the demon say in her mind. Imagining more of those creatures lurking around decided her. She would not wait like a lamb tied for the butcher’s knife. She jumped up and hastened back to the thing sprawled in the sand. It looked like the discarded skin of a man gone to some foul and thick liquid. Of bones and flesh, there was no sign.
Looking away from the gruesome mess, she hunted until she found its sword. Her fingers closed over a clammy hilt, and she almost flung the weapon aside, her insides revolting at the nasty feel of the weapon. She could not afford to be squeamish, so she lifted the blade and whirled.
As she closed on the battle at a soft-footed trot the shouts and yells, and clangor of steel smashing against steel, grew into a chaotic din. Drawing nearer, she faced the immediate dilemma of choosing a target. In the pervasive darkness, enemy and companion all looked the same. As she searched, she sensed a presence. She twisted, bringing the sword to bear. A few paces off, a pair of silvery eyes regarded her. Not only did those eyes serve as a target, they separated friend from foe. With dagger held low in one hand, and sword held high in the other, she advanced, studying her enemy.
The shadowed figure had no apparent weapon, save its flesh. Ellonlef attacked without warning. With a practiced lunge, her dagger sank into its middle, and an instant later her sword whirled, striking off the demon’s upraised hand. Again, where her steel met flesh, there were brief, almost unseen burst of azure fire.
Where a man would have retreated, this creature laughed in her face. Unlike the other mahk’lar, this one attacked before its shadowed spirit could fully disperse. With unnatural quickness, it caught her sword arm in its remaining hand. As Ellonlef struggled to push it away, the stench of corruption filled her nose. The demon swarmed over her, flesh and spirit intent on subduing her. As she fought, cold thick blood splashed across her face, gagging her. The stump of its wrist battered against the side of her head, making her hair fly. The next blow scattered a cascade of twinkling lights across her vision.
Desperate, Ellonlef lashed out with her dagger, stabbing and stabbing again. The demon broke off with a strangled hiss, backed away, its breathing labored. Seeing her chance, she aimed her sword at the creature’s neck in a brutal attack.
The blow never fell. Something heavy slammed into her, knocking her to the ground. She landed on her belly with a muffled cry, her dagger and sword spinning from her grasp. Deathly fingers curled around her neck and squeezed. Her eyes bulged as the pressure mounted. Ellonlef fought to cry a warning, but only a high, wheezing sound escaped her throat. As she wallowed about in the sand with the demon’s weight pressing her down, the already dark world began to fade before her eyes. She sunk her fingers into the mahk’lar’s arm and tried to heave it off. In response, the demon wrenched her head back until her neck popped, then slammed her face into the sandy ground, once and again. Somewhere Kian bellowed, oblivious to her plight. Her face struck the ground again, and all went utterly black.
Chapter 27
Through a veil of cold fury, Kian saw the silvery eyes and knew them for the same kind that he had seen under the Black Keep, those of the mahk’lar. These eyes, however, were set in the face of a man.
He parried a thrust and lunged, slamming his blade through the demon’s skull, creating a wild flaring of blue radiance where his steel hacked into unholy flesh. Shrieking, the mahk’lar fell away. Puffs of inky vapor far darker than the night’s shadows flooded from its wounds, and the figure slowly collapsed in a shapeless mess. Spinning around in a tight, guarded circle, Kian sought more foes, but there were none to be had. As fast as it had begun, the battle ended. One moment the demons were fighting, the next they had disengaged and vanished.
Kian shouted, “Light anything that will burn!”
Following his own command, he moved to the nearest banked cookfire and tossed a handful of tinder on the ruddy coals. A few puffs of breath set the dry wood and grass alight. From all directions, the Asra a’Shah closed in, the whites of their eyes wide and stark in the dark skin of their faces. Without question, there were fewer now than had rode into the valley.
“We need torches,” Ba’Sel said, his accent thicker than normal for the pain he must be feeling from a deep slash to his cheek.
Azuri strode out of the dark, filthy and spattered with blood, as if he had been dragged across the floor of a butcher’s shop. The blood, black and thick, was not his own. “This will work well enough.” He tossed a shredded white tabard into the dust at Kian’s feet. As Kian spread it out, revealing a silver fist floating on a field of black, Azuri added with disgust, “Men of House Racote attacked us.”
“They were not men,” Hazad said, hollow-eyed.
“Mahk’lar,” Kian hissed as if it were a curse. Then he remembered Ellonlef.
Without a word, he sprinted down the sandy path. Someone shouted after him, but he ignored them. When he got to the place where he had left Ellonlef, he found only an empty hut. He searched, thinking his eyes must have betrayed him, thought that she was probably balled up in a corner somewhere.
But that made no sense, not for a woman like her.
And then he knew what she had done.
He cursed under his breath to hide his growing alarm. Despite having a good idea of her actions after he had left her, he called out her name. Echoes of that cry were his only answer.
Hazad and Azuri trotted to the hut’s ragged doorway, each bearing a hastily made torch. Kian snatched Hazad’s away. “I’ll search to the north. You two head back toward the camp.”
“What are we looking for?” Hazad asked.
“Ellonlef,” Kian answered, even as he rushed away down the trail.
He ran with the torch held high, his heart pounding. He kept telling himself to slow down, get a better look at the disturbed ground, but he could not help but push forward at a near sprint. After a few hundred paces, he concluded that the only tracks in the sand were his own, and those left by creatures of the desert.
More desperate than ever, he turned and forced himself to walk back the way he had come. He halted when he reached the spot where she must have killed the first demon. All that remained was chainmail and a tabard resting amid a jellied pool of some reddish-black substance
that roughly defined the shape of a man. One thing he noticed was that there was no sword-the same, presumably, that Ellonlef had spoken of retrieving.
Hazad’s frantic shout from the direction of camp sent Kian into a dead sprint. As he ran, he saw Ellonlef in his mind, saw her smile and her eyes. On my life, I will protect you, he had promised, and he had failed. He ran all the faster.
When he reached camp, he halted beside Azuri and Hazad, who were staring down at two objects on the ground. With torches held aloft, the flickering glow rippled along the edges of a sword and Ellonlef’s dagger. Black, congealing blood covered both. There was another pile of clothing and armor soaking in a grisly stew. The ground was much disturbed, and more splashes of the black blood were sprinkled everywhere. Kian swallowed. In one spot, the blood he saw was red, human, and surely Ellonlef’s.
Feeling trapped by the swift passage of time, Kian began giving orders. “Spread out. Search each side of the canyon. She must be wounded and insensible.”
For an hour or more, each moment of which hammered at Kian’s soul, the company scoured every tumbledown hut, delved into splits and hollows in the canyon walls, and wandered far in each direction. When all had gathered again, each man, bloodied and dusty and despondent, reported that they had found no trace of Sister Ellonlef.
“They must have taken her,” Kian said, voicing his greatest fear. He wrapped another swatch of cloth torn from the enemy’s tabard around the head of his torch. “Did anyone see tracks leading out of the valley?”
“They came from the east, and returned the same way,” Ba’Sel said, coming into the flickering torchlight at a trot, his untended wound making his face a gruesome mess.
“Are you sure?” Kian demanded. “We cannot afford to waste a moment more following a cold trail.”
“Between our own tracks-those we left when scouting the valley for Bashye, and those made during the battle-it is hard to say,” Ba’Sel admitted. “But the tracks coming from the west are ours alone, where those in the east are from both parties. If she was taken, her captors escaped that way.”
“To horse!” Kian ordered, dropping his torch and moving toward his horse.
Azuri and Hazad stirred, but the Asra a’Shah did not move an inch. Kian halted abruptly and searched their faces. All looked back impassively.
“We do not blame you,” Ba’Sel said slowly, “but my brothers and I have paid too much blood for this quest. If Prince Varis were still under our watch, honor would obligate us to stay. As it is, Prince Varis destroyed our pact to guard him when he tried to kill us in the Qaharadin Marshes. We continued on with you as long as we have only out of respect.” He bowed his head then, as if in shame, but his words were firm. “That respect remains, and should we find our way home, we will tell of your exploits and courage, and the name Kian Valara will be praised by our elders down through an age of men. But respect cannot compel us to continue this journey.”
Kian’s anger subsided under a wave of regret. He needed these men, now more than ever, if he was to find Ellonlef. “If it is gold you seek, I assure you that you will be compensated for helping me find Sister Ellonlef.”
Ba’Sel shook his head. “Gold will not breathe life back into our brothers. Even if it could, we would turn away. If what has happened in Aradan has happened in our homelands, the few of us left will need to help our people. Our numbers will not be enough, but we few are better than none at all.”
Desperation overcame Kian’s pride. “Can you, at the least, help us find the trail of those who took Sister Ellonlef?”
Ba’Sel thought about it for a moment, and nodded. “We will do that and no more.”
“Then let us begin.”
Chapter 28
Thrice over since Ellonlef had been taken, night had given way to day, only to fall again. Tied into the saddle of a galloping horse, she swayed and bounced, barely in control of herself. Her cheeks and brow hurt from being slammed against the ground; her throat was raw from the fingers that had throttled her, and from too little water since then. None of those who had taken her, nor their mounts, seemed to need rest, food, or water. On and on, at a full gallop, she and her captors surged eastward, league after league.
By dawn of the first day after her capture, the land had risen to reveal a high, scrubby desert. All visible brush off either side of the road was dead and gray and brittle, a sight just odd enough to gain her notice, but she was too weary to contemplate it. Just before the last sunset, despite the heavy smoke, she had seen a jagged line of mountains rising on the eastern horizon, a sight that left her stunned. When riding across the Kaliayth, only the Ulkion Mountains lay in the east. And amongst them, high in the Pass of Trebuldar, sat Ammathor. Even in her debilitated state, she calculated the trip had taken a fraction as long as it should have. Whatever hope she’d had of Kian being able to find and liberate her from Varis’s followers, died in her heart. It would be many days before Kian and his men could travel so far.
Looking through bleary eyes at her captors, it was hard for her to accept them as demons, not when she knew them by name, rank, and allegiance to House Racote. There were three: Spear Leader Huruga, and Swordsmen Caulir and Naa’il. To the last, she had helped them or their families during her time in Krevar. Huruga, soon after she had arrived at the fortress, returned from a border skirmish with a Tureecian arrow buried in his back, and a sword slash to his scalp. Each wound had grown septic, leaving him with a killing fever. Despite Magus Uzzret’s conclusion that the man would die within a day, Ellonlef had brought him back from the brink. And, if not for her, Swordsman Naa’il would have died from a snakebite taken while patrolling the Qaharadin Marshes; Swordsman Caulir’s young wife had needed help delivering her first child, a boy.
Those men were dead now, though their bodies survived, given abominable life by the demonic spirits within each of them. And demons they were, of this she had no doubt. She had seen the dull, silvery glint of their eyes shining in the night.
When Varis had first raised the dead, and Otaker had gone to his lady wife, Ellonlef recalled thinking that Lady Danara, and all the rest who had been raised, seemed to be lacking their normal traits. She had named them soulless. In that she had been wrong, for they had souls-not their own, but rather those of the Fallen, the first vile children of the Three. Now those monstrous spirits were loosed upon the world. But how many? Hundreds, thousands, and more….
She let her head loll back, hoping for a glimpse of the stars, but the pervasive smoke obliterated sight of anything. The worst had come to visit the world, she considered, and the age of men had fallen. The Madi’yin, with all their swatarin-induced visions of apocalypse and marauding demons, had finally been proven right.
As the night fled by, Ellonlef slumped into a tortured sleep. At some point, a growing sense of panic jolted her awake. She knew without having been told where and to whom she was going. Prince Varis Kilvar, the Life Giver. What Varis wanted of her, however, she could not imagine, and that unknown caused her the greatest fear. With her trepidation growing, she remained awake.
In time, the eastern horizon took on a bloody cast, heralding the coming dawn. Ellonlef sat straighter in the saddle, and set bloodshot eyes on the road ahead. It was then that she noticed the dust in the air. Not the thick plumes churned up by the riders around her, but of that raised hours before and yet to dissipate in the still air.
As the day brightened, Ellonlef scanned the roadway for any indication of the size of the army her captors followed. Outside of Ammathor, she knew, Fortress Krevar maintained the largest force in the kingdom, a full seven spears of cavalry, fourteen hundred horsemen, and near three times that number in archers and foot soldiers. These latter she dismissed out of hand, for armed and armored men on foot could not hope to keep up with horses. More than that, without a slow-moving caravan of supply wagons, such numbers simply could not be supported by the desolate lands of the Kaliayth.
Soon after, with the smoke-obscured sun doing little to abate th
e previous night’s chill, Spear Leader Huruga made a series of hand gestures to his cohorts, then kicked his mount into a faster pace, quickly leaving them behind. Ellonlef’s eyes followed him, stunned that the warhorse could find such a burst of speed after galloping for several days and nights without end.
As her mount crested a hill and rode onto a wide plateau, a sight came to her that exceeded her worst fears. Her eyes, weary from lack of sleep and full of grit, crawled over the host before her. While she could not say how many warriors waited ahead, she knew it was more than seven spears. Many times more. Thousands, she thought, sick with alarm. Only a very few were mounted. How could they have run so far so fast-
With a sinking feeling in her bowels, she understood. Varis’s powers were greater and broader than she had imagined. Somehow, he had infused multitudes with impossible endurance, which explained how his raiders had brought her across half of the Kaliayth in but three days.
As her captors swerved out into the desert to come abreast of Varis’s army, the full, terrible scope of his power came into view. Many of the arrayed forces were indeed soldiers, but most were made up of common men, women, and even children. They had not camped, but simply halted and stood fast, faces coated in thick layers of dirt, their glazed eyes fixed on some point in front of their noses. They did not look around, they did not talk, nor eat or drink, they just stood still, fixated on some collective vision. To the last, the leagues of running had worn the shoes and boots and sandals off their feet. But, other than dirt, their feet showed no sign of injury from racing over roadways of sand and sharp stone.
Ellonlef’s horse abruptly slowed behind Swordsman Naa’il’s mount. He led her away from the army and toward a gathering of men some distance away. As they came closer, she noted Magus Uzzret’s skinny frame, but he ceased to exist in her mind when she caught sight of the pale, white-eyed man sitting astride a tall dark horse. Though the mounted man looked different, what with his full mane of pale hair pulled into a top-lock and his slightly fuller cheeks, she recognized him all the same. Prince Varis Kilvar, the Life Giver.
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