by Alec Hutson
“Savage!” gasped the seeker, and the wraith jerked its head to look at them again, its small red eyes narrowing further.
Keilan took a stumbling step backward as the wraith crouched, gathering itself, but before it could leap at them something caused it to glance over its shoulder. It hissed a challenge at whatever it saw there and turned, then digging its claws into the doorframe it vanished, thrusting itself back into the darkness.
The scholar and Keilan shared a wide-eyed look. Neither moved for what seemed like an eternity, and then both jumped as Xin filled the shattered entrance to the wagon. The Fist warrior’s tunic and sword were splattered with black blood.
“With me,” he commanded, and they hurried to follow him out into the night.
Keilan paused as he passed through the doorway, his breath catching. The seeker had set up his wagon a little ways from the others and atop a gentle rise, so much of the chaos that now gripped the caravan was spread before him. The fire that was kept burning every night had somehow spread, and flames crawled along several of the wagons. In the flickering light he glimpsed long, lean shadows moving quickly, chasing down the smaller stumbling shapes of merchants and guardsmen. The wraith that had entered the scholar’s wagon now lay curled in the long grass a dozen steps away, still twitching and crooning softly.
“We must find Nel and Vhelan!” Keilan cried, grabbing Xin’s sword arm.
The Fist warrior nodded grimly. “Where do they sleep?”
“Near the fire, most nights,” Keilan replied, frantically searching for them, but around the campfire there were just scattered bedrolls and churned earth.
“Nel is smart and quick,” Xin said, scanning the darkness as they descended the small slope toward the caravan. “She’ll have found a safe place to hide your uncle.”
“And your brothers?” Garmond managed between wheezing gasps.
“They are all fine. This one can feel no fear in their minds. We should go to them – the wraiths will quickly learn to give their swords a wide berth.”
“Do you know where?”
Xin shook his head curtly at Keilan’s question. “No. This one can feel the flood of their emotions, but cannot ask them where they are. Delon told me before we split that the fighting was fiercest around the Shan’s wagon, next to the river, and that he was headed there. Perhaps that’s where my brothers still are.”
Xin stopped, eyeing the seeker and Keilan uneasily. “But if that’s where the wraiths are thickest it will be dangerous . . .”
Garmond waved away his words. “We are safest with you and your brothers. Lead on.”
“Very well,” Xin said, stooping next to the crumpled body of a merchant. He slipped a small curved dagger from the dead man’s sash and held it out for Garmond.
The scholar shied away from the weapon. “Give it to the boy. I have my cheeseknife.”
Keilan accepted the dagger, swallowing hard. Its leather-wrapped handle was sticky and warm.
“That way,” he said, gesturing towards a stand of slender trees. Keilan remembered them as white birch, but in the faint light cast by the fire they had been transformed into a jagged patch of deeper blackness. “I saw the Shan leading his wagon over there earlier. He usually sets his camp near water, if there’s any nearby.”
They skirted the edge of the camp, dashing across open ground to crouch beside first a rock, then the wheel of a wagon. Keilan didn’t see any more wraiths flowing through the darkness, but there were bodies of merchants and guardsmen hidden in the grass, and he almost tripped a few times. They must have tried to flee when the wraiths had streamed into the center of the camp, but been overtaken and slain. Keilan remembered the fluid quickness of the creature back in the scholar’s wagon. They were terrifyingly fast.
Xin stumbled and almost fell to his knees.
“What’s wrong?” Keilan cried, trying to steady the Fist warrior.
Xin turned to him, and even in the dimness Keilan could see how stricken he looked.
“My brother is dead.”
“Oh gods,” Keilan whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
Xin reeled away. “No, no, no . . .” he moaned, his body spasming violently one, two, three more times, almost as if he was being struck by unseen arrows or swords.
Keilan rushed to hold him up; otherwise, the warrior would have collapsed in the grass.
“All of them,” Xin moaned, his voice wrenched by pain, “they’re all dead. My brothers are gone.”
Keilan lowered the Fist warrior to the ground. Xin’s head lolled as if his neck was broken. “They were there, inside this one. Then . . . fear, pain. And now nothing.”
“We must keep moving,” Keilan said, shaking him hard. “We must find Nel and Vhelan. They can help us.”
But Xin didn’t answer, staring sightlessly up at the stars. He was like a puppet with its string cuts, arms and legs splayed uselessly.
Keilan caught a flicker of movement in the darkness. A shadow, flowing through the tall grass, coming closer.
“Xin!” Keilan screamed, clutching at the Fist warrior. He could hear its terrible crooning now, and there was nothing inside him except blind terror.
Xin stirred in his arms, as if coming awake.
Garmond cried out, cowering before the monster as it loomed out of the grass near him. The wraith swelled larger, like a serpent rearing back to strike.
“No!” screamed Keilan, wanting to turn away from what he knew was coming, but he could not tear his gaze from the scholar and the wraith.
Then Xin was moving. The Fist warrior surged to his feet, screaming, and the monster hesitated, twisting toward this new threat. They collided in a shadowy blur. The wraith’s crooning sharpened into a piercing shriek, and Keilan heard the sound of metal striking flesh. The monster faltered as Xin hacked again and again; Keilan saw it raise an arm to ward away the blows, only to have the arm lopped off at the shoulder. The creature’s keening wail stopped when Xin sliced sideways with his blade, separating its head from its shoulders. The body stood swaying for a long moment, then toppled forward into the grass.
Keilan rushed to the Fist warrior. Xin was panting heavily, heaving with emotion.
“Are you . . . ?” he began, but Xin had already turned and started running before Keilan could finish. Running towards the river and the Shan’s wagon.
Keilan grabbed the scholar and pulled him to his feet. “Come on, we must go with him.”
The Fist warrior quickly outdistanced them, vanishing among the shadowy trees. Keilan and Garmond followed, stumbling through the copse with arms outstretched.
A faint red light was ahead of them, filtering through the lattice of trees. Keilan slowed, picking his way as carefully and quietly as he could, until he saw the Shan’s wagon in the thicket ahead. “Wait,” he murmured, putting his hand on Garmond’s shoulder.
A red paper lantern hung above the curtained entrance to the wagon. The light stained the pale birch trees fringing the clearing, so it looked to Keilan like Xin stood in the center of a great room bounded by rose-colored pillars, the night sky above a vault of black stone. The Fist warrior was turning slowly, as if unsure where to go next.
Something moved in the darkness opposite where Keilan and Garmond crouched. Three wraiths stalked forth, crooning a challenge to the lone man that waited for them.
“Run, Xin,” the scholar whispered, his gnarled fingers clutching at Keilan’s wrist. “By the Pen, run.”
But Keilan knew he would not.
The wraiths fanned out as they approached, showing the instincts of animals accustomed to hunting in packs. They feinted forward, and then drew back, trying to pull Xin toward one of them. As soon as he did that, Keilan knew, the other two would flank him and close with talons flashing.
The Fist warrior did not move, except to raise his sword into the fighting stance he had first taught Ke
ilan weeks ago, the blade’s point extended and leveled at the chest of the middle wraith.
Keilan was so intent on what was happening between the wraiths and the warrior that he did not even notice at first when someone else calmly walked across the clearing to stand beside Xin. It was the Shan, his black hair now unbound, gripping with both hands the hilt of a long, curving sword. Cho Yuan held the blade sideways above his head, and his knees were bent slightly, as if he was gathering himself to jump. The red phoenix unfurling along his green robes burned like a tongue of flame in the light of the lantern.
The wraiths drew back, hissing. Xin glanced at the Shan and nodded slightly. Then they attacked.
The two warriors could not have been more different. Xin charged the wraith nearest to him like a maddened bull, his sword raised, while Cho Yuan took small, quick, almost mincing steps, his bladework a mesmerizing dance that sent another of the wraiths stumbling backward, its long knobby arms upraised, as if were trying to ward away the flickering sword. One style was like an avalanche thundering down a hillside, the other water flowing over smooth stones.
They were equally effective. Xin’s speed took him close enough to a wraith that the monster could not scuttle back in time before the Fist warrior’s blade lashed out and left a line of black blood across its ribs. The wraith shrieked in surprise and pain as Xin’s following thrust buried a span of steel in its chest, the blade bursting from its back. The Fist warrior pulled his sword free and turned to face the remaining wraiths, but they were already down, the stumps of their necks leaking blood into the grass. The Shan slid his long sword through a silken tie at his waist and picked up one of the heads by its matted hair, frowning. The thing’s slanted red eyes blinked stupidly, its mouth working soundlessly. After a moment its jaw slackened in death, the light fading from its eyes, and Cho Yuan let the head drop next to its twitching body.
Keilan moved to stand, but Garmond restrained him with a hand on his shoulder. “Wait, lad, look.”
Another man emerged from the darkness, striding toward the two warriors. It was the tall Menekarian merchant that had joined the caravan back in Theris. His loose white robes were stained red, and blood covered his arms from his hands to his elbows.
“Are you hurt?” Xin called out.
The merchant paused, slowly looking from the sprawled corpses of the wraiths to the two warriors, shaking his head.
The Shan stiffened suddenly, then quickly returned to his fighting stance, his sword over his head. He said something in a tumbling language Keilan had never heard before.
The Menekarian regarded Cho Yuan without expression. “I do not understand you. But you speak the common language of this land, yes?”
“I do,” the Shan replied, “I ask what you are.”
The man ignored the question, crouching beside the wraith Xin had impaled. “Look at this poor broken thing,” he murmured, stroking the creature’s lank hair. “I remember an age when these sad beasts dressed in damask and silks and sipped from jeweled chalices.” He glanced up at Cho Yuan. “Your race has fallen as well, though not so far.”
“You speak of the Shan?”
The Menekarian chuckled, standing again. “No.”
He seemed to see Xin for the first time. “Ah. Another one. Your death will bring completion – your brothers had delicious souls, but of course there was something lacking in the meal.”
“My brothers?” Xin said hoarsely, raising his sword.
“Yes,” the Menekarian said, making a show of studying his blood-drenched forearms. “What beautiful, piquant lives they’d lived.”
Xin hurled himself at the merchant, his sword an arcing blur. With casual ease the Menekarian struck him down, a backhanded blow that snapped Xin’s head back and sent his sword spinning into the darkness.
The Menekarian stepped over the motionless warrior and strolled toward Cho Yuan.
Garmond’s fingers dug into Keilan’s arm. “Look at his shadow . . .”
Keilan stifled a gasp. In the light of the lantern the man’s shadow was clear – yet it was the shadow of no man. It was tall, much taller than it should have been, gaunt and emaciated and studded with curling black thorns. Its shoulders sloped down at an inhuman angle, and its dangling ape-like arms nearly brushed the merchant’s sandaled feet.
As the man approached the Shan moved backward, his glittering blade sketching a complicated pattern between them. “You serve the Betrayers?”
The Menekarian cocked his head to one side. “Is that what you call them?” He barked a laugh. “They named themselves the Chosen. Vicious little creatures; I care not for them.”
“Then why are you doing this? You must know the threat they are.”
For the first time some tremor of emotion passed across the man’s face. “Because my mistress wills it,” he said, and lunged forward.
The sword flashed, too fast for Keilan to see clearly, but it was as if the Menekarian knew exactly where every thrust would come. He moved with unnatural grace, twisting slightly to avoid each strike, until he stood, untouched, only a span from the Shan. Then his hand found Cho Yuan’s neck, and the Menekarian lifted him from the ground with terrible strength.
The crack of the Shan’s neck breaking carried across the clearing.
The next few moments seemed to happen unbearably slowly.
“Keilan! Keilan!” It was Nel’s voice from somewhere nearby, coming closer.
She burst into the clearing, brandishing black-stained daggers, a cut on her forehead smearing her face bloody. The Menekarian carelessly tossed the Shan’s body aside and turned to her.
Without hesitating, Nel sent Chance and Fate spinning toward the false merchant, two more daggers appearing in her hands almost instantly.
The Menekarian caught one of the tumbling daggers by its handle; the other buried itself in his shoulder, and he hissed in rage, tearing it out and hurling it back at Nel in a single motion. She threw herself to the ground as it passed where she had been standing just a heartbeat ago.
Then it was moving toward her, all pretenses of its humanity flaking away, its skin melting like running wax and strange sharp barbs tearing through its white robes. It was like a fist unclenching – the man opened, swelling huge and lean, all scales and sharp-angles and tapering thorns, the nubs of wings unfolding from its back. It screeched raptor-like as it flowed toward the helpless girl, who seemed momentarily frozen by the man’s horrific metamorphosis.
Keilan stumbled from the trees. “No!” he cried, raising his hands, feeling the great wave swelling within him.
The monster turned, its wide nostrils flaring in alarm.
Green light lanced from Keilan’s hand, carving a burning path in the air and striking the creature in its scaled chest. It was flung back into the trees, smashing through the trunks. Emerald flames enveloped the monster; it shrieked and thrashed within the underbrush, writhing in agony. Then it lurched to its clawed feet and stumbled into the darkness, toward the river, a blazing green torch that suddenly vanished as it threw itself into the water.
Keilan sank to his knees. The last thing he saw before he was enveloped by the warm darkness was Nel reaching out towards him, and he smiled.
The riftstone pulsed, thin and fluttering, like a dying man’s heartbeat.
Alyanna clenched it tight in her palm as she slipped between great slabs of quartz burnished gold by the early morning light, stepping over the slowly-closing petals of plum-colored nightblossoms. The tittering of songbirds, usually omnipresent in the gardens at this time of day, was faint, as no trees crowded near the soaring pillars of white stone. It was, in fact, a district of the imperial pleasure gardens that saw few visitors, feathered or not, so it suited her purposes this morning perfectly.
In the shadow of one of the quartz monoliths she opened her hand, studying the riftstone. It was an unblemished smooth and white circle, utter
ly unremarkable, something that could be found almost anywhere wind or waves had worn down rocks. But this was one of the great artifacts of the old world, an object of immeasurable power and value. Even her colleagues in the Star Towers had been unable to unlock its mysteries. The scholars who had dedicated their lives to studying it had believed the riftstone had been created during the age when the Warlock Kings had established the world’s first sorcerous empire, in the very city where she now stood. It had tumbled through many hands in the centuries since then, but for the last thousand years it had been hers, and she was not about to lose it now.
Which meant she needed to collect the riftstone’s other half while its bearer still lived, and from the thready, uneven pulsing, that might not be for very much longer. Also, she was very curious about what had happened last night.
Alyanna extended a filament of sorcery into the riftstone, sliding inside it like a key into a lock. She gave a twist, and the stone’s power blossomed.
Before her a circle of air began to shimmer and undulate, as if it was a length of silk caught in a strong wind. The quartz pillars and awakening garden encompassed by this floating portal slowly faded, and was replaced by another scene from a very different place.
It was darker there, hundreds of leagues to the west, a few stars still visible in a charcoal sky. Shadows draped huge, tumbled rocks and pine trees, and the silhouettes of mountains in the distance bulked stark and black against the gray dawn. A chill wind slipped through the rift, and Alyanna shivered, pulling her cotton robe – the heaviest clothing she kept in the gardens – tighter around herself.
Sighing, she stepped through the portal and into the forest that bounded the southern Frostlands.
The grass was coarser, the dew colder. There was the faint sound of swift-running water from somewhere nearby, no doubt one of the countless small rivers that veined the north and carried snowmelt down from high in the Bones. She summoned a small orb of wizardlight so that she wouldn’t trip over anything on the uneven ground, and cast about for the other half of the riftstone. It did not take her long to find.
