“My mate arrived in the morning with twenty riders. We swore we would slaughter the intruders, but somehow the gray demons had slipped away during the night. There, in the ash of their campfire, were the broken shells of griffin eggs. It was then that I determined to wage war on this sorcerer and his forces. When my people learned of the atrocity, all agreed to join me.”
“What were the marauders thinking?” Nathaliey said. “Doesn’t Toth have enough enemies already without provoking more?”
“Does it matter his plans?” Yuli asked. “The sorcerer king is cruel and determined. He must be driven from the mountains.”
“But why provoke you now? Why incite open conflict?”
“To intimidate us,” Yuli said. “To frighten us into abandoning the high passes. In this he has failed.” She looked down at her hands. “Our griffins are no more common than we are. They might pass years or even decades between clutches. This was Ageel and his mate’s first laying.”
“I’m sorry about the eggs,” Nathaliey said. “It was an act of senseless cruelty. But I’m glad to have you on our side.”
“It’s not a friendship, Flatlander. Remember that. When this war is won we will expect you to keep to your lands, and we will keep to ours.”
“Understood.”
“This woman I spotted, the sorcerer. What is her name?”
“Jasmeen. She is a dark acolyte, a slave of the sorcerer. She was trying to turn me into another slave.”
“Then I suspect you feel the same way about this woman as I do about the gray demons.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good. Then today we will both take a measure of revenge.”
#
This time there was no sneak attack. Wolfram’s forces streamed down the Tothian Way from the passes, fought a brief skirmish to seize the road leading from the highway to the castle gates, and sent the enemy scurrying behind the walls, where they hunkered down to wait. Dozens of griffins wheeled overhead, screaming, while riders dropped projectiles on the defenders: stones, spears, and flaming pots of oil. Hurled from two hundred feet overhead, even stones the size of a man’s fist could kill or maim, and the larger missiles demolished roofs and smashed crenelations atop the battlements.
But this was more harassing fire than anything, and watching with Yuli from the ledge, Nathaliey knew that it would take more than an aerial bombardment to force Montcrag’s capitulation. A whirlwind of griffins falling from above with armed riders on their backs would be a challenge to resist, but at the same time the attackers would be vulnerable to arrows, bolts, and sorcery. Yuli said she expected as many as twenty or more riders could die, and an equal number of griffins. By Nathaliey’s count, that amounted to nearly a seventh of the griffin army, a brutal toll.
Nathaliey proposed a different tactic. Yuli listened and quickly agreed.
Wolfram’s forces at hand numbered four or five thousand foot soldiers and a few hundred cavalry, including the Blackshields. Once they had bottled up the road-facing side of the castle, the Eriscobans put together a few small siege engines. These hurled stones and balls of flaming rags over the walls, but again, this was incapable of subduing the castle, only causing the defenders aggravation.
Once the defenders seemed fully distracted, Nathaliey indicated that it was time. She climbed on behind Yuli, let the woman loop leather thongs around her ankles and waist to keep her from plummeting to her death, and held tight as the griffin rider gave a shout and they shot into the sky. The ground receded, and Nathaliey’s stomach was in her throat. They kept rising and rising. Up and up and up, until they’d reached the highest peaks.
From above, the Dragon’s Spine looked even more impressive, the mountain range stretching in a massive row of ridges north and south. From this vantage it seemed like the backbone of the entire world, and she could see both east and west. East, an endless plain, dry and brown under the crippling drought. To the west, lush green hills and valleys. The world curved, bent toward the horizon in either direction.
The air was so thin that she was gasping for air, and so cold it felt like knives in her chest with every breath. Her lips chattered, her hands turned numb. The other griffins and riders swooped back and forth below, with the castle only a child’s toy on a ridge, insignificant against the deep canyon over which it had been built. Even the king’s highway itself was a barely visible line snaking along the mountainside, and it seemed to represent the whole of human existence. A triviality among the grand wonders of creation.
They were so high that Ageel struggled against the buffeting gales. Yuli turned around and said something, but Nathaliey could only shake her head, unable to hear and unable to catch enough breath to respond.
“I said we can’t go any higher!” Yuli shouted. “And you won’t find any stronger wind than this.”
Nathaliey nodded her acknowledgment. Gripping Ageel’s haunches with her legs until her thighs ached, and forcing herself to trust the leather thongs, she released her grasp on Yuli’s waist and placed her hands palms down. The swaying, bucking motion of the griffin flapping his wings and the howling wind made her lightheaded with terror. She closed her eyes and pictured the gardens, certain that serenity would be impossible to find. She would never raise power under such conditions; it was better to tell Yuli to bring them down again.
But there was a reason Memnet had trained her with daily meditation, year after year, and her mind cleared. Gone was the cold, the wind, the thin air. Gone was the heaving beast below her. The heights, the fear of battle. Everything vanished but her connection with the power rising from within. Blood came to the surface, and when she opened her eyes, incantation at her lips, magical power emerged from her palms and was swept away in the current.
The wind gathered itself and released a long shrieking howl, and suddenly Ageel was fighting for his life in the middle of a giant vortex. Nathaliey couldn’t breathe, couldn’t tell if she was up or down, could only hold on and ride it out. Yuli shouted something, but the wind destroyed her words.
They were going down, hurling toward the ground as if thrown by the hand of some vast, cloud-dwelling giant, and Nathaliey thought she’d made a terrible mistake. Her magic, carefully considered, was too much, and it would lead to their death.
And then, when she was bracing herself for the impact, Ageel broke free. The air was suddenly clear, preternaturally calm. The sun gave off unexpected warmth. Nathaliey, tears streaming from her face where the icy wind had buffeted her, looked down. Griffins scattered as a howling cyclone slammed into the castle. Witch-hat roofs lifted from their towers and flapped away like giant wooden birds. Men threw themselves to the wall walk, but were swept clear all the same.
The vortex thundered into the castle, and with nowhere to go, it burst out the top again. Those who hadn’t been thrown from the castle walls in the first blast were now hit by a massive column of air. It lifted them and threw them back down.
Yuli let out a piercing whistle, and Ageel dove for the castle, with the rest of the flock following. The towers rushed up on them, and the griffin swerved hard to bank around the main keep. Caught once more in the terror of unexpected, turbulent movement, Nathaliey held tight as Ageel alighted atop the wall walk. Yuli slipped off his back and untied Nathaliey’s tethers, then jumped back onto the animal’s back.
“Ska!” Yuli cried, and they lifted off again, leaving Nathaliey alone at the battlements.
She could scarcely believe the scene before her eyes. Veyrian soldiers lay motionless all about the castle. Some had fallen from the wall walk and smashed against the stone bailey, but many others lay motionless atop the walls or below, killed where they stood during the initial attack. Most had no obvious injuries. It was only when she looked at the man lying at her feet that she understood the results of her spell.
Blood streamed from his ears and nose. The man next to him bled from the mouth, too. The pressure of Nathaliey’s column of wind, confined by the castle walls, hadn’t only torn off roofs and li
fted men from the ground, it had ruptured lungs and burst their ears.
Unfortunately, not all had died. Maybe a sixth of the defenders were gray-cloaked marauders, and they were already rising to their feet, finding their swords, and moving to defend the castle. Some of them spotted Nathaliey and made for the stairs or ran around the wall walk toward her. If Yuli had merely dropped Nathaliey onto the castle walls, the marauders would have been at her throat, and she didn’t have enough power left to defeat them all.
But the griffin riders hadn’t abandoned her, they were pressing a ferocious assault. They soared above the walls and around the towers to evade crossbow bolts, then dove in for rapid attacks whenever they found an opening. One griffin feinted to draw an enemy’s attention—darting away before coming into sword range—while a second griffin swooped in from behind. Another griffin snatched a marauder from his feet and raked him with talons before hurling the man to the ground from thirty feet in the air. A second griffin slammed into one of the marauders coming around the wall walk and knocked him into the gorge on the far side.
There were still marauders trying to get at Nathaliey, and she began to feel like bait. Yuli and Ageel came down on one man from above and struck him on the shoulder in an attempt to knock him over the edge. The man twisted at the last minute and grabbed at Ageel’s leg. They went flying over the gorge with the marauder still holding the griffin’s talons with one hand while trying to stab his legs with the sword held in his other.
Yuli launched herself from Ageel’s back, and her sword slashed as she fell past the marauder. Tethers arrested her fall, and she twisted acrobatically in the air to stab twice more. The marauder lost his balance and flailed as he went down. Yuli dangled upside down, but somehow sheathed her sword, grabbed the tether, and hauled herself back up, all within a few seconds.
Nathaliey hadn’t been waiting passively. While ducking the swooping griffins and edging away from marauders, she’d pushed magic through the castle, sniffing for sorcery. It was weaker than expected, and she worried that Jasmeen had cast a concealing spell and slipped away.
Suddenly, she felt a dark presence behind her, and whirled about to see Jasmeen pulling back her cowl to show her gaunt face. Her eyes glittered dangerously from within deep-set sockets. The dark acolyte thrust out her hands, and shadowy ropes slithered toward Nathaliey.
Nathaliey had given the shadow attacks a good deal of thought since she and Markal had battled them together. A light spell would counter it, but she’d already expended too much power on the cyclone, and if she did that, she’d leave herself exhausted. Instead, she cast a different sort of spell, the kind of magic one used to deepen a concealment at night, to swallow shadows and make them too black to penetrate.
Jasmeen’s shadows hit her. The sun was suddenly blotted and vanished altogether. Everything turned black, into a night with no stars, no moon. Like standing at the bottom of a well inside of a deep cave.
The darkness only lasted a second, and then the shadow was gone. Jasmeen wore a look of triumph on her cruel gaunt face, but it vanished into rage when she saw that Nathaliey remained standing in front of her. Unharmed.
“You!” Jasmeen snarled. “How did you . . .?”
“Your elixir did it. Left me immune to your power. I simply swallowed your shadows. It was almost too easy.”
Confusion raged on Jasmeen’s face at Nathaliey’s bluff. Before the woman could recover, Nathaliey called up the rest of her power. Blood rushed to her pores and ran down her forearms.
Deminutum consummatio.
It was a spell to weaken an enemy in combat, to sap his energy. To give one swordsman an advantage over another. But Nathaliey remembered the associated lore from her study in the library. It was most effective with an enemy who’d been long on the march, who’d slept little, who was already suffering from thirst, and the writer of the tome had speculated that the magic worked by tearing sustenance from the body.
Jasmeen didn’t eat, ever. Or so she’d claimed, and her gaunt look gave credence to her boasts. Instead, she drew energy from the suffering souls who fed her sorcerous power. There was precious little natural strength in her body.
Nathaliey spoke the incantation in the old tongue. “Dry her bones. Starve her body. Render it brittle and weak.” She hurled the magic at the dark acolyte.
Jasmeen braced herself as the spell hit. Her defiant expression melted, replaced by terror as she swayed and trembled. She dropped to her hands and knees with a gasp and lifted one hand, as if trying to call up sorcery. Tried to wheeze a response, but no identifiable words emerged. She collapsed facedown.
The spell hadn’t killed the dark acolyte; this was a weakening spell that had no ability to kill, and Jasmeen was still gasping. Soon enough the strength she drew from dying men and women throughout the castle would bring her to her senses. Nathaliey cast a glance at the battlefield.
Griffin riders had cleared the bailey, fought their way into the gatehouse, and were opening the castle to Wolfram’s men, who rushed forward, eager to flood into the castle. Yuli’s forces seemed to have seized the keep as well, but the marauders had holed up in one of the smaller towers on the wall, where they continued firing bolts. That kept most of the griffins in the air and otherwise occupied, and there was nobody around to come in and kill Jasmeen.
Nathaliey had no weapons left to finish the job herself, nor were there any dead enemies nearby to loot. Between the cyclone and the deminutum consummatio spell, she’d used all of her magical strength, too, and was lightheaded and unsteady on her feet.
With no tools but her own hands, she grabbed Jasmeen by the hair and dragged her toward the crenelations. Pushing her into the courtyard might not do it, and Nathaliey couldn’t risk the dark acolyte surviving, calling up a quick concealing spell, and escaping yet again. She had to throw her into the gorge.
Exhausted by the struggle, Nathaliey was too weak to have pushed a soldier over the battlements, but Jasmeen was all bones and skin. Nathaliey got the woman up and partially draped over the top and was bracing herself for a final heave, when Jasmeen’s eyes flew open, and she grabbed Nathaliey’s wrist with her bony fingers.
Nathaliey shoved at the dark acolyte, grunting and trying to get her over. Jasmeen cursed and struggled, but though her tongue had regained its sting, the rest of her was weaker than Nathaliey, and little by little she went over, until her legs dangled, and her upper body draped across the crenelations. Her grip tightened on Nathaliey’s wrist, and her eyes radiated fury.
“I’ll take you down with me,” she snarled.
Nathaliey lifted her arm and slammed the woman’s wrist against the stone crenelation. Jasmeen didn’t release her grip. Nathaliey did it again, and the bones in Jasmeen’s wrist crunched as they hit. She screamed, and Nathaliey gave a final, violent twist of the arm to free herself. Jasmeen lost her grip.
Jasmeen’s eyes bulged. She twisted like a cat trying to land on its feet as she fell, but there was nothing to grab, nowhere to land, only the long, long drop to the rocks below. Nathaliey didn’t look away as her enemy went down, half expecting some final bit of treacherous sorcery. Jasmeen hit a boulder some hundred feet down, bent double the wrong way as she bounced off, and fell again. When she struck the bottom, she didn’t move.
Nathaliey pulled back from the edge with a gasp, scarcely aware of the sound of a ram slamming into the door of a tower a handful of marauders had taken refuge in. Wolfram’s forces were everywhere, running past her on the wall walk, down below searching for hidden cellars and enemies barricaded behind doors, and still she stood, too weak to do more than lean against the wall and wait for the fighting to end.
Sir Marissa found her a few minutes later to tell her that the battle was over, by which point Nathaliey had recovered enough to warn them to collect all the dead—including sending a griffin to recover Jasmeen’s body from the gorge. Cut off their heads or burn them—it was the only way to be sure they didn’t rise again.
Montcrag had fall
en. The final castle before the eastern plains. From here, a straight journey east on the Tothian Way led to Aristonia, and from there, to the garden fortress of the Order of the Crimson Path.
Chapter Twenty-One
Markal remained still atop a clump of swamp grass. He and Memnet had picked their way from the road into the marshes by following a series of mounds, hillocks, and squishy, saturated ground that threatened to sink them into the mire. Their path had led them here, to the side of a smooth inky-black pool, one of the few bits of open water that wasn’t glowing with submerged wights.
They may not be visible, Memnet assured him, but they were still down there. Dozens in this pool alone. Thousands across the swamp.
The dead of Syrmarria, Markal’s own people. Just a few short days ago they’d been breathing, eating, laughing . . . living. King Toth had first burned them alive, then bound their souls and dragged them here. Their very existence was a torment, a terror held for the Harvester and his hounds. The dead feared the Dark Gatherer, even as they needed him to gather their souls and bring them peace.
As if to prove his point, Memnet bent and touched his index finger to the water. Almost instantly, bluish lights appeared in the depths and came swimming toward them. He withdrew and rose to his feet, and both wizards waited motionless until the lights dissipated.
“This spot is as good as any,” Memnet said in a low voice. “I’ll break the bonds and flee for the road. They’ll chase me, and once the area is clear, you’ll call the Harvester.”
Markal cleared his throat. “Call the Harvester. Yes, well. I’ll address that terrifying suggestion in a moment. But first, can you tell me why the wights won’t simply tear me apart once you free them?”
“Simple. My spell is going to draw them. You, being concealed, will remain invisible to their eyes. So long as you don’t so much as breathe, of course.”
“And you’re sure we can’t just throw up some more concealers and run like hell until we reach the bridge?”
The Emerald Crown (The Red Sword Trilogy Book 3) Page 19
