From their covert, they watched the cape of rock that hooded the charmway. The surf noise ceased, and the witch queen Thylia stepped into the blunt day, tall and regal. A charmwind fluttered gray veils that covered all but her black diamond eyes.
Behind her arrived the cacodemons with their lizard-leather skins aglint in the hot dry air.
"They see our footprints in the sand," Ripcat whispered, liberally rubbing ash over his furred body. "Let's get away from here."
"Wait." Drev removed a power wand from his cloak of amulets and stuck the wand in the sand. When he raised his hands, they shone with golden light. Quickly and deftly, he ran his hands through the space around Ripcat, then threw the golden light away to his side.
The charmlight flattened the bunched grass with the distinct shadow shape of Ripcat.
"Run!" the wizarduke commanded the shining shadow. He pointed deeper into the grass. The double of Ripcat sprinted away, the grass bending before it and flattening under its tread.
Drev repeated the procedure with himself and sent his shadow running in a divergent direction. Then he motioned for Ripcat to sit still.
The thief found that command difficult, because the abrasive ash and sand did little to soothe the acid bites of the tiny spiders. Only the sight of the shambling cacodemons held him motionless.
With her emerald eye charm, Thylia spotted Drev and Ripcat fleeing in separate directions. She sent half the cacodemons after the thief and pursued Drev with the others.
As they charged past the brake where the genuine fugitives lay hot in the pain of biting spider mites, the eye charm blinked. The witch queen assumed that was Drev attempting to shield himself, and she directed the cacodemons to fly ahead with her and swoop down upon him.
Drev waited several heartbeats before standing and swiping desperately at himself with handfuls of ash to quell the burning. "There is a charmway that connects to the Mere of Goblins—but it is a day's hike distant. We must hurry."
From his seeker, Drev took direction, and as they moved out of the brake of thistle grass and into the forest of thorn trees, he used Charm to erase their footprints behind them. The canopy of cobwebs and spider nests obscured their progress from above, and they made good headway before the spiders began stalking them.
Hissing like frying fat, arachnids swarmed over the brittle branches of the forest. There were too many to crush or to leap over. The fugitives soon angled far off course trying to elude the emptying hives of creepers. Streaked with blood, faces and hands swollen purple with bites, Drev and Ripcat knew they would die in the Spiderlands if night found them still in these lethal woods. The wizarduke decided on a bold strategy, too bold to share with his companion.
At the first opportunity, Drev fit his assault knife to the muzzle of his firelock and exited the thorn forest into a swale of burr weed. Ripcat paused among the blowing threads of webs at the margin of the forest and called out in a voice clogged with pain, "The cacodemons will see you!"
Drev waved him on and continued running through the sharp weeds. Spurred on by the frying sound of approaching creepers, Ripcat loped after him. He saw where the wizarduke headed: across the clearing and back into the thorn forest but at an angle that would bring them close to their destination—if they avoided being seen by overflying cacodemons.
A searing scream from above dashed that hope. They scampered through the snaring weeds until a shadow fell over them. Drev jabbed upward with his knife-tipped firelock, and the descending cacodemon banked and alighted among the weeds. An ice-blue blast from the weapon buried it in upthrown sod.
Others appeared on the horizon even as the first threw off the dirt that had knocked it down. Again, Drev turned about in his race for the tree line and fired at the ground. The cacodemon stumbled, and the fugitives scurried on. When the monster leaped into the air and came down on them claws first, they faced it with raised knives.
A talon strike flayed Ripcat's left arm even as Drev's knife scored the beast's torso, jabbing at a shrieking mouth embedded in its belly. It backed away, and the two men hastened onward.
Drev fired ahead. Dazzling blue bolts of charmfire slammed into the thorn trees, shattering them like glass.
Ripcat had no notion what the wizarduke intended until he spotted tendrils of smoke rising from the burning trees. Even then, he was not sure why Drev would create more peril. He led them toward a stand of trees heavily draped with spider cloths. A pack of wild dogs depended from those branches, furry pelts shrunken to skeletons.
Drev kept firing as they entered the forest. Charmfire could not harm the spiders—but the forest fire would. Flames emptied hives and nests, and the woods sang with the vehement songs and booms of the conflagration eating past dried bark to the wet cores of the trees.
Only two cacodemons entered the forest before the pack understood the wizarduke's strategy. Falling webs spilled enraged arachnids upon the chasing cacodemons, and in moments the monsters had stopped pursuing and jumped upward into the air to escape. One burst free of the smoke and entangling webs. The other became snared in a scorpion spider's nest and struggled vainly to free itself from the dense skeins.
Drev and Ripcat shot ahead through the churning smoke. Spiders rained around them and crawled over their bodies, inflicting stinging wounds. By the time they ran clear of the blazing woods, spider toxins cramped their muscles and dropped them writhing to the ground.
The wizarduke applied a healer's net of theriacal opals to Ripcat and then himself. They did not wait for the Charm to take effect fully. Against the spiders it could not, and it healed only their open wounds, not the cruelty of the toxins. As they ran, vision quaked with hallucinations.
Two cacodemons descended before them. Their muscular ferocity broke into segments and planes in their preys' warped vision.
Drev fired into the forest awning. Clots of burning gossamer fell, spewing another swarm of spiders. Drev and Ripcat dodged the fiery torrent and barged through a shivering wall of snake grass.
They hurled onward covered head to toe in spider ticks. Drev set his weapon for rapid fire and, arms shaking with poison tremors, turned about, burning a circle of flames in the surrounding brush. Enclosed in fire, he yanked the knife from his gun's muzzle and began cutting at the ticks. Ripcat, too, scraped at his body with his assault knife.
The fire circle blazed hotly before flaring to the ground. When the wall of flames dimmed, no cacodemons were visible. The fugitives hobbled through the charred trees away from the smoldering underbrush.
Thylia watched them in her emerald eye charm. She remained beside the charmway where she had entered the Spiderlands, unwilling to expose herself to the biting perils of the woods. With a gnashed curse, she kicked at an ashen clod and broke it to dust.
Behind her, through the charmway, Hu'dre Vra waited for her in Mirdath. She did not want to return without Drev's corpse. If she did, she knew she would suffer as he had made the Peers of Dorzen suffer.
A mite dangling on its filament from the rock promontory above bit her neck, and she smacked it and cursed again. For a moment, she considered summoning lightning again. The pain and inaccuracy of that power dissuaded her, and she decided instead to use her Charm.
The wizarduke, weak from spiders' bites, would succumb quickly to her Charmed strength. She unclasped the dragonclaw hooks of hex-metal that secured her cincture of power wands. In the caked dust, she stood four of the wands on their ends, each an arm's length apart. Then she stepped back and rubbed two other wands together. Green sparks flew, and, with a chanted cry, she directed the flurry over the standing wands.
Charmlight unraveled like leaking gas from the power wands in the ground. Human figures swirled up: spectral assassins with rusted claws, hacked faces carved from ruined skulls, and storm bird wings.
Before their chrome eyes, Thylia held the emerald eye charm and showed them the limping figures of Lord Drev and Ripcat.
"Kill them!"
The four revenants flashed away in a h
ellish blur, their hair of cobweb floss webbing the air.
The wizarduke spied them in his eye charms and warned Ripcat, "The witch queen is in the Spiderlands. She's sent four charmwraiths after us."
Ripcat did not respond. He looked about for cacodemons.
“They're fast things," Drev said. "Elusive. I don't think I can stop all four."
He lifted his gaze from his eye charms. The thief was gone. The landscape of sharp trees and bramble seemed to veer and change color as the spider toxins torched his eyes. Before he could find where Ripcat had disappeared among the spider silks, the assassin wraiths whirled out of the treetops.
Drev got off one shot—a white bolt that evaporated the specter it struck. Then another wraith snatched the firelock in its corroded claws. A third and fourth closed from opposite sides.
The wizarduke drew the sword Taran and swung at the multiple images around him. His blow sliced through another wraith and reduced it to smoke. Then claws bit into his shoulders, and the sword toppled from his grasp. He felt the bite of a talon at his throat and, with cold grim certainty, expected the lethal stroke that would tear out his windpipe.
An animal cry burst overhead, and Ripcat, shrouded in spider veils, dropped out of the canopy. He pounced onto the wraith assaulting Drev and stabbed between the assassin's bent wings. With a hurt shriek, the thing shredded to mist.
The last of the wraiths circled madly, waving the firelock it grasped in its claws. Drev bent for his sword, and Ripcat dove to block the wraith's aim. It fired, and the green charmlight struck Ripcat in the chest and dropped him senseless to the ground.
Drev whirled the sword through the air and impaled the ghostly creature to a thorn tree. Screaming like torn wind, it dropped the firelock and wisped away.
At the charmway's rock portal, Thylia felt the deaths of her wraiths as physical blows. The first knocked her off her feet, and the others pummeled her to near unconsciousness. She lay with her back against the cape of rock, legs spraddled, black diamond eyes half lidded. Mites crawled through her veils.
Drev bent over Ripcat, felt the intertwinings of the thief's life force and the magic that had placed beastmarks upon him. In an instant, the beastmarks would fall away, and he would die as what he was, man or animal.
The wizarduke slapped onto the thief's burned chest a gold net of theriacal opals. Instantly, breath heaved through the thief's body, and his eyelids twitched and opened.
Ripcat put both hands to the aching lobes of his skull and groaned, unable to find the strength to sit up.
Drev sheathed his sword, slung the firelock over his shoulder, and pulled Ripcat over his other shoulder. He staggered through the trees and adjusted his power wands for the strength to bear this extra burden.
Vision wobbling, he crossed a field where spiders large as cows squatted, their furry bodies banded brown and white. The day had melted to magenta streaks, and the spiders sat inertly. One sidled closer, its cluster of black bead eyes aglint with twilight.
Without lowering Ripcat, Drev drew his sword. Dusk fire flashed off the blade, and the large spider moved away through the feathery grass.
Loops of star smoke lay across the sky when Drev found the charmway he sought. It was no more than a sinkhole in the ashen ground among more thorn trees and their streamers of spider ribbons. When he lowered Ripcat in and stepped down himself, everything changed.
/ |
The charmway opened in Sharna-Bambara on a pebbly stream. Grasses tossed under wind rifts with a fragrance of pollen and eroded rock.
By starlight, Drev examined Ripcat. He appeared whole but, like the wizarduke, scabrous with spiderbites. His limbs floated lightly, and Drev held him down while he plied the theriacal opals to his wounds.
Dawn found both men healed of their cuts and punctures. The toxins thinned, though colors still appeared burnished and lethargy weighted their muscles. They marched slowly all that day, bearing south, following the stream. To elude the Dark Lord's seekers, Drev periodically shaped charmed manikins and sent them drift-walking in different directions.
Nightfall took them to the river that the stream fed. Its stately breadth reflected the bright choirs of night, and they paused on these banks.
"I must visit Tywi," Drev announced. He breathed deeply and filled his lungs with a breeze of river scent and darkness. "Will you watch over my body while I'm gone?”
"Can I wake you if there is trouble?"
Drev shook his head. "You will be alone until I return. Use my eye charms to keep guard."
"And if cacodemons come?"
Drev threw a pebble onto the river, and it skipped several times, setting rings of starlight rippling.
"Let's stay together," Ripcat advised. Fear stained his heart. "I'm a thief. I'm not a warrior like you. How can I protect you?"
"You have kept me alive longer than my own marshal could," the wizarduke observed tristfully. "And Leboc was the very best."
"Then heed me and do not do this."
"I must see that Tywi is stil alive," Drev answered. He stepped into the canes that clacked gently on a mud bank pocked with tracks of mice. "I will hide here. If I take all my Charm with me, there will be nothing for the seekers to locate. If they find me at all, they will think I am in Nhat."
Ripcat shivered. The spider poison still tainted him. "Will you look for my partner?"
"Dogbrick?" Drev nodded. "I will find him. Though it may be dangerous. There is a warlock who patrols the labor camp, and if he finds me, I may not return."
"And then?" Ripcat queried, green, slant eyes luminous in the dark.
"Take my sword and firelock," Drev said evenly. "Carry on the fight. If you can—free Tywi."
"How will I find her?"
"The sword Taran," Drev told him. "I have used my wizardry to imprint it with Tywi's image. It will point the way—if I do not return."
"For love you risk much."
"Is it love?" The wizarduke stepped deeper into the canes and became a part of the night. "Or something wider?"
Ripcat slid down the moss bank to stand beside him. "Are we going to talk of destiny again?"
"Our days pass like a fever." Drev bent and came up with a tangle of river vines. "Help me tie myself down with these."
"What about vipers?"
"I'd be grateful if you'd keep them away."
Ripcat took the vines and began knotting them. "You ask a lot of vigilance from a stranger."
"You are no stranger to me, Ripcat." Drev spoke with certainty and unsheathed his sword.
"How can you say that?" The thief frowned. "I am a stranger to myself. Who am I?"
"You are my ally. You have saved my life. And I have saved yours." Drev clapped a hand on the thief's pelted shoulder. "We are friends."
Ripcat accepted the sword and firelock. "You will return by dawn?"
"If I am not back by dawn, you must leave my body." He wrapped the knotted vine about himself and lay down on a mat of trampled cane. "Help me tie this off."
The thief complied, and after securing Drev, he grasped his hand and peered hard into his calm eyes. "Be careful."
Drev squeezed his hand and smiled calmly. "I will return with news of Dogbrick and my Tywi."
His hand relaxed, eyes closed, and his body rose against the restraints of the binding vines. Lord Drev had departed.
Ripcat sat back and felt his soul stretch like a scream.
/ |
Daylight blew in through the torn walls of the sunken temple, and Poch watched Caval glide into trance. The aged sorcerer seemed to die upon his bones. His flesh shrunk as if deflating, and a mummied man sat erect in the breezy light of day.
A spicy, resinous scent hazed off his waxy flesh. In that fragrance unscrolled memories long forgotten. Poch breathed them in and partook of Caval's lost past as though retrieving his own occluded reaches of time.
Under a hoarfrost tree, a beardless Caval stood naked, no more than sixty-five hundred days old, little more than Poch's curre
nt age. Yet even at that new-fledged time of life, he possessed Charmed countenance.
In the Brood of Assassins, Caval had been bred as a reconciler, and he displayed the serenity and lucid thinking prized by the diplomatic corps. His people believed him destined for service as a court functionary, and the brood had already made inquiries among the dominions, offering him for hire as a contracts expert and even a court manager. But young Caval's interests lay elsewhere.
A Charmed prodigy, he exhibited a rare talent for retaining Charm in his own body without benefit of amulets. In his child hands, conjure-wire and witch-glass moved as if alive, shaping with their own elemental sentience clever amulets—egg cookers, back scratchers, bottle sealers.
Wizards traveled from distant realms to consult with him. The Sisterhood offered the brood three times more for him than the highest bid from the dominions, and the Assassins reluctantly let him go—for the time being. Caval was too valuable to lose to the witches for a one-time payment when,with his managerial skills, he could be earning lifelong residuals for the brood from the dominions.
Eventually, several thousand days after his service to the Sisterhood began, his brood purchased his contract and installed him in Arwar Odawl for a considerable payout as weapons master—an unprecedented responsibility for one so young. But by then he was youthful in appearance only.
Naked under the hoarfrost tree—Caval had not dwelled on this memory in many thousand days, and he wondered what so distant a time had to do with Irth's peril. He had begun his trance by affixing his attention to an inward image of Wrat, and he startled to witness that wedge face transform into this image of himself naked under the hoarfrost tree so very long ago.
Witches of angelic nudity circled him beneath a leaden sky. Bare plains of sere grass circled them in turn, and all were invisibly tethered to the white tree. They danced, braiding the hairs of silence.
Caval recalled this time in his early training. He had been with the Sisterhood fifteen hundred days when they introduced him to this ritual called Climbing the Ladder of the Wind. He had amazed himself and his teachers with his facility at manipulating Charm, but none expected what happened next.
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 33
