by Ron Collins
Black hunger crackled over his fingertips as he pulled more and more life force. Mages crumbled. Mercenary soldiers ran. Still Garrick gorged on the energy here. He funneled it into his sorcery to bring death until, finally, the Koradictine lines broke completely and their mages fled at full run.
A few Freeborn gave chase, but most turned west to throw their lot to those fighting the Lectodinian army.
Garrick, too, ran toward the Lectodinian line, racing against time, realizing this hunger would fade, unwilling to give up this momentum.
He felt his hunger fade, though. Despite his efforts, his rage calmed.
The plumes of Darien’s helm rose over the battlefield, and Garrick’s heart soared.
Then he saw them.
Men and women scattered across the grounds, twisted and disfigured, crying, and groaning. They lay with limbs hacked away, and with bleeding wounds and faces streaked with dirt and sweat.
And his life force pulled at him, stronger than he had ever felt it pull. He tried to concentrate on the Lectodinian threat, but just as the hunger swelled in a bursting wave that could not be denied.
Braxidane’s sweet voice came then.
You have taken …
“No!” he called.
… now you must give.
He came to a Torean wizard with a gaping hole in his chest and dark blood pooling on the dirt below him.
Garrick poured life force into the wounds, twining the gash together and knitting the bone of his leg. Moments later, the man breathed easier.
“Praise you, Lord Garrick,” the man said.
The next mage was dead beyond retrieval.
A warrior with a cracked skull had bare life remaining, but bare life was still life, so Garrick repaired the damage and left him sleeping.
A man had been felled by an arrow through the heart—irretrievable.
The next had lost his leg and lay on the ground sobbing and bleeding and muttering incoherently. Garrick stanched the wound and comforted the man.
“You’ll see your grandsons grow now, sir.”
Then he left to find the next wounded.
And so it went.
Case after case after case, Garrick raced through the Torean ranks, mending damage, repairing limbs, saving lives.
And once they were healed, the warriors ran to the Lectodinian line like frenzied dervishes, shouting “Lord Garrick!” as if the mere mention of his name would destroy their enemy.
The Lectodinian army fell back.
Still Garrick found wounded warriors.
A female mage lay in shock, her leg nearly severed.
Garrick funneled life force into her, tying vessels together, knitting muscles, connecting bone and marrow. In the process, he found something else there, too—a beating heart, another life force, powerful and strong. He smiled and considered telling her of the child, then decided against it.
He turned to the next man in line.
It was the ranger from the alley. Sweat rolled off the man’s bald pate. His bristled, spittle-knotted beard quivered with his pain as he looked at Garrick. A deep gash scored his side.
Garrick funneled life force into the man.
Despite his pain, the man was strong and firm inside. Garrick felt balance to his purpose, the power of his conviction. Emotion boiled up inside Garrick then, an emotion that had nothing to do with magic or planewalkers or his internal life forces.
When Garrick was done, tears ran down his face.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“What?” the ranger said.
“I asked you your name.”
“Fredric,” the big man said. “My name is Fredric.”
Garrick smiled.
“Rest now, Fredric.”
A cheer rang over the battlefield.
Voices of soldiers of Dorfort rose in a vast cry.
“Darien! Darien! Darien!” they yelled.
The Lectodinians were routed.
The battle of God’s Tower was over.
Chapter 21
Darien rode toward Garrick, his face sweat-drenched and his armor spattered with mud. A trickle of blood ran down his arm, and his leg was stained crimson. He raised his father’s sword over his head and shouted above the voices of his men.
“Hail, Garrick!” he cried to his warriors.
The army cheered, rattling their swords and beating their shields. Mages shouted Garrick’s name. Darien’s smile was bright, and his eyes beamed in the late afternoon sun.
Garrick stood.
His life force was nearly balanced. His hunger was not raging, nor did he feel the deep whispers of excess. He was tired, but it was a good tired. If he could just stay this way forever, he thought. But while the rest of the Torean army could cheer, Garrick knew that was not going to happen.
He scanned the field for Sunathri but did not find her. He glanced at Darien, his chest growing tighter and his eyes wide with the question.
“Where is Sunathri?” Garrick asked.
A dark cloud crossed Darien’s face. The cheers fell to silence.
“She was defending the south pass last I saw,” Darien replied.
Garrick pushed through the gathering and sprinted toward the pass.
Darien rode, his horse easily outracing Garrick.
Still Garrick ran, his stride a graceful lope and his arms and legs pumping. He vaulted broken pikes and destroyed supply wagons, sprinting like a deer through brambles, his straw-colored hair blazed in the late sun.
More men on horseback raced past him.
Garrick reached the saddle of the next horse that came by, and in mid-stride, hefted himself up behind the man. The rider spurred his animal and they rejoined the chase. When they caught the group, Darien had already dismounted.
Four men stood around him as he knelt.
Garrick slid from the horse before it came to a rest.
Sunathri lay on the ground with three other Toreans. Blood pooled under her, and her rib cage had been ripped with a great gash. An entire detail of Lectodinian mercenaries and sorcerers lay dead around them.
An eerie separation came over him. He felt nothing.
He did not hear, did not smell. It was as if this wasn’t real, as if he was viewing it from afar. Except that he was there. This was happening.
Garrick ran to Sunathri’s side, brushing Darien out of the way. He put his hand to her forehead, and felt for her life force.
There was nothing.
Nothing.
He opened one of her lids. Her eyes were dull and lifeless.
A tear trailed like fire down his cheek.
Sunathri’s body lay like an empty shell waiting to receive the life force he could give her. He could do it. He could bring her back, but then she would be fueled by magic and her eyes would carry the cold yellow light that Alistair’s did. For a brief moment, he actually considered it. But then he remembered the shrill sound of pain in his superior call as he stood alone in his desolate manor yard, and he remembered Braxidane’s contempt for him as his simple desire to save life served to destroy it instead.
It was suddenly very hard to breathe.
“Braxidane!”
Garrick yelled as he leapt atop the same rock where Sunathri had made her final defense.
“Braxidane!”
The wind whistled through the clearing.
Sweat from his brow dripped onto the rock.
Perhaps the mages around him would think him daft as he was speaking aloud, but he didn’t care.
“It’s not fair,” he yelled into the wind in a raw voice. “It’s not fair.”
For a moment, Garrick thought he heard his superior’s voice. There is no ‘fair,’ Garrick, he thought he heard. But he was wrong. Garrick may well be as insane as the Freeborn would think he was, but he wasn’t going to delude himself on purpose. He was on his own, now. Braxidane wasn’t with him on God’s Tower, and he wasn’t going to be here on the battlefield.
He despised the planewalker then.
He despised Braxidane for his power, and for his callous nature. He hated him for the way Braxidane played with his psyche, hated him for this “gift” of balance that gave him the blood-mad exhilaration of ripping souls in battle in tandem with the heartbreaking joy of bringing life to the wounded.
“What is it you want, Braxidane?” he finally whispered. “Why are you doing this?”
He was met with only silence.
Garrick turned his bloodshot gaze to the battlefield.
The mages stared at him with expectant eyes. Sunathri was dead—the news spread quickly. Now the mages of her order looked to him.
He was god-touched. He was the one who had changed their fortunes, the one who had brought them back from the very edge of death itself. He felt numb. Bile burned in his stomach.
You monster, Garrick thought. You had this in mind since the first moment.
He sensed Sunathri’s life force around him, then, just as he had once tasted Arianna’s life force. He felt her flow through him, warming him. He tasted her memories, so solid that he thought for a moment she might have risen from the dead. And he remembered her kiss, her willingness to give herself up for her cause, the fire that had been in her eyes the first time he saw her.
Then she was gone.
Chapter 22
Garrick retreated up the mountain to be alone, but instead of solace, he found that the high perch merely served to give him a better view from which to watch the army as it dealt with the blood-price of this victory. He watched as columns of black smoke disappeared into thin air, and he watched as others buried dead in the same pits and trenches that, earlier in the week, they had dug as defenses. He watched as mages picked through the battlefield to retrieve mementos and other reminders of the dead so that they might be delivered back to their families, and he watch smiths and tanners and others as they bent to repair whatever could be repaired for the trip home.
Yes, Garrick thought from this distant perch high on the mountainside, the blood-price for this victory was quite clear.
And as the perch gave him his view, it also lent a view to those who remained of the Freeborn. They looked to him with pressure in their gazes—unspoken, but clear. Crushing. Stifling. It wrapped its tentacles around Garrick like a serpent of the sea, and squeezed his breath away.
It was too much, all too much.
He could not take Sunathri’s place.
As he watched the men and women of Dorfort’s army clean the field of battle, Garrick felt a gap greater than anyone else on that field possibly could. He understood something no one else could possibly understand.
He had been angry at Braxidane because his superior had not come to his aid. It was a fair anger, he supposed. But as nighttime stole over the horizon and the air grew crisp, Garrick felt a deeper truth. Braxidane would have come if he could have—just as the other planewalkers who were so clearly behind the powers of Jormar and Parathay would have come to the aid of the orders’ god-touched mages if they could have.
But all the planewalkers had stayed away.
All of them.
Garrick wished he had paid more attention to Braxidane when the planewalker described his connections, but then, Garrick had never really listened to anyone with power before. At best, he had only taken the pieces he wanted to hear and used them to support his own point of view. But seeing Afarat J’ravi work, then Suni, and then Darien had changed that—or had at least rattled that practice hard enough that he was seeing things differently.
And the way he saw things now said this battle was not done.
Braxidane said pacts existed among the planewalkers, and they each paid prices for meddling in places like Adruin. Garrick didn’t understand the depths of planewalker politics, but the fact that neither Braxidane nor the others had come meant there was something deeper here than he could see—something bigger, something that could well entail the whole of Existence as the planewalkers knew it.
He knew Braxidane would not have been happy to lose him, so it wasn’t hard to guess that the planewalkers who lost Parathay and Jormar el’Mor would not be happy, either. If he understood power as well as he thought he did, the planewalkers would not stand such a defeat for long, nor would the orders themselves.
It all added up to say that the price paid on this battlefield, great though it was, was just one installment of what might well be many, many more.
Epilogue
It was evening time when Garrick returned from the mountain. The grounds had been tended, the dead buried or burned. Those still wounded had been made ready to travel. Garrick came to the camp having decided his future would entail traveling on his own. He could not stay in the city. He knew better than to think the orders would stop hunting him, and anywhere he went would become a target. No one around him would be safe. So he would see the army back to its home town, but then he would set out to face the orders on his own.
And as for Braxidane and the rest of the planewalkers, well … what could he do?
He was just a man. He would deal with those issues in whatever manner he could, and leave the rest for those who could handle them.
He was ready for this, though. He felt it.
The prey would finally become the predator.
Braxidane had once said there was no fairness in this world, no justice. But Garrick knew better. He would see to it that the orders paid for Alistair, and for Arianna, and for Sunathri.
He would remember.
As for what Braxidane would pay, he didn’t know.
But justice did exist.
It existed because he said it did.
This life he was choosing would allow him to deal with the orders in quieter ways, and in fashions he couldn’t manage if he were in a group such as the Freeborn. The idea of being on his own—of being a vigilante, of sorts—had been of great comfort as it settled over him, and now, as he made his way toward Darien’s tent, it felt even more solid.
He arrived there to find his friend engaged in heated discussions with Reynard, a gawky mage who was well-liked among the Freeborn. Mages and members of the guard were gathered around them.
“I don’t care what you think,” Darien said. “We’re not going to start for home without the horses properly healthy. We need them curried and fed before evening is out.”
“Which we will accomplish through our magic,” Reynard replied.
Garrick’s appearance brought a hush to the field.
“Garrick,” Darien said. “It’s good to see you.”
Garrick nodded. “What’s wrong?”
“Lord Garrick,” Reynard said. “The men are tired, and Commander J’ravi is commanding us to expend energy we do not need to give.”
“The horses need to be curried by hand,” Darien said. “There is more to this than cleanliness, and the horses know the difference.”
Every gaze fell upon Garrick.
“The horses prefer to be curried by hand,” he said. “And a wise traveler takes care of his animal.”
Reynard gave a sigh, but turned to the Freeborn. “As Garrick says, we will curry the horses by hand.”
“No,” Garrick replied. “This is as Commander J’ravi said. He has earned that respect and more.”
Reynard held Garrick’s gaze a moment too long. “I agree, Lord Garrick.” He held his hand to Darien. “I apologize, Commander. I meant no disrespect.”
Darien shook Reynard’s hand.
“I will be in my tent, Commander J’ravi,” Garrick said to Darien. “When you are finished with preparations, I would like a word.” Then Garrick turned to leave.
“Lord Garrick?” Reynard said.
He hesitated.
“The order needs a leader if it is going to grow into Sunathri’s vision. Will you serve?”
“I am a poor choice.”
“You are god-touched.”
“That alone makes me an unwise choice.”
“With all due respect, Lord. You are the only one who thinks that.”
The
mages looked to Garrick again. Garrick said nothing. Life force stirred inside him, though, and he felt the urgency of Braxidane’s desire. He knew better than take command of the Freeborn, though. He had no desire to lead, and no skills. And he would not expose Sunathri’s order to the whims of this abysmal force inside him.
“The Lectodinians remain strong,” Reynard continued. “And we cannot be foolish enough to think the Koradictines will not rise from their ashes. We have to grow our roots now.”
“I come with considerable baggage,” Garrick said. “The order does not want me at its helm.”
“Then we are lost,” Reynard said.
The wizards murmured with disappointment.
“You are not lost.”
All eyes turned to Darien.
“The only way the Freeborn would be lost would be to coerce Garrick into serving against his will. He must be free to decline, otherwise you corrupt the base ideal of Sunathri’s vision for the Torean House itself.”
“We need a leader,” Reynard replied.
“If you would have me,” Darien said, “I would lead your house.”
Reynard smiled. “You are no mage.”
“You’re right. But I believe in what Sunathri stood for. I have fought for it. And I’ve grown up amid those who organize things. I can help you build this order.”
The mages shared glances as Darien continued.
“But I am not blind to the fact that I cannot cast magic, and without that I might well struggle to lead. So, if the Torean Freeborn will have me I propose to name a board of mages to provide me counsel in this area. My first two selections will be you, Reynard, and, of course, Garrick.”
“I’m not joining the Freeborn,” Garrick said.
“You don’t have to be Freeborn for me to ask your opinion. It’s always best to hear all sides in a conflict. In fact, your voice, coming as a free citizen, brings its own value.”
Garrick had nothing to say. He didn’t want to tell Darien of his decision in this public moment.
“It could work,” Reynard said, turning to look at Garrick. “Will you serve as Darien’s counsel?”
