A mob of orcish mercenaries reached us first, axes and swords drawn back to strike. Riordan moved in a blur, hurling a pair of lightning globes at them. He couldn’t hit as hard with magic as I could, so the spell stunned the two orcs. That was more than enough for him, and Riordan killed them both with a single sweep of his Shadowmorph blade. His eyes were flat black, and he killed several more orcs in the space of a heartbeat. The Shadowmorph was feeding on the life energy of the orcs, and that would make Riordan a lot stronger and faster, and he was already pretty fast and strong.
In the time he killed those orcs, I summoned and shaped magic for another spell, and I created a thumb-sized sphere of fire and sent it zipping forward. It drilled through the forehead of an orcish soldier and burst out of the back of his head, sending his corpse to the ground. The sphere kept going, plunging into more orcish skulls, and I killed nine of them before the sphere lost its power. Riordan slashed down the last two orcs near him, and for a moment, we were clear of the enemy.
But that wasn’t going to last.
The explosion and the shouting had drawn attention, and more troops of Rebel soldiers and orcish mercenaries hurried towards the smoke. Worse, I saw Archons coming in our direction. The Archons would wield magic with varying degrees of skill, and they had packs of Shadowlands creatures under their command. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I saw that the giant floating image of Nicholas had stopped talking and was frowning in our direction. That meant the explosion and the fighting had been visible from the heart of the army.
If we didn’t get to Grayhold now, right now, we never would.
“Nadia,” said Riordan, stepping back as his Shadowmorph blade came up in guard. “We have to go.”
“Yeah,” I said, my mind racing. Corbisher, where was Corbisher? If I killed him, that might slow down the response. But I couldn’t find him. Likely the rat had escaped and was running to Nicholas right now to tell him that I was here. “Hang on! I’ll make some cover!”
I cast the fireball spell and hurled a sphere of flame at the base of the truck Corbisher’s men had been loading. This sphere was much wider and not nearly as tight, and it exploded with a smoking flame. The truck caught fire, smoke billowing up from its tires and bed and interior. The gunpowder of the munitions in its bed and the gasoline in its tank wouldn’t ignite, but the rest of the truck would burn just fine. Though it wouldn’t explode, which was a pity. I really could have used some explosions just then.
I threw two more fireballs in rapid succession, setting another truck and a trailer on fire. Then Riordan reached me and Russell, the dark shaft of his Shadowmorph blade in hand.
“We have to go,” said Riordan.
“What’s the plan?” said Russell.
“Run for our lives,” said Riordan.
“Good plan,” I said. “I like this plan. Go!”
We started running up the slope, scrambling towards the lip of the valley and the boundary of Grayhold. I risked a glance back and saw troops of Rebel soldiers and orcish mercenaries in pursuit. The Rebels had more tactical batons like the one Russell had, and some had swords. No crossbows, though, which was good. The orcs had those damned battle axes that they loved so much.
But they would have to catch us first. That was the downside of hand-to-hand weapons. If this had been on Earth, they would have gunned us down already. But this was the Shadowlands, and if they wanted to kill us, they had to get close enough to do it.
Which meant I could slow them down.
I flung my hand back and summoned magic as I ran, using the ice wall spell that Arvalaeon had taught me. White mist swirled and writhed in a wall three feet high, forty feet long, and one foot thick, and then hardened into glittering crystalline ice. The amount of effort to create that much ice that quickly made me stagger with fatigue, and for an absurd moment, I had a nonsensical burst of sympathy for ice machines.
But I planted an ice wall in the middle of the charging orcs and Rebel soldiers, and that slowed them down. I timed it right so that about a dozen of the enemy slammed into the ice wall and bounced off it, and the whole mass came to a confused halt. It didn’t slow them for long. Quite a few of the orcs just vaulted over the wall and kept running, and more of the soldiers ran around it.
But that confused moment gave us a chance to widen our lead, and the top of the valley drew closer.
Then I saw a flare of fiery light behind the running Rebel soldiers.
One of the Archons had gotten close enough to cast a spell.
A fireball shot up the slope of the hill towards us. I had no choice but to stop, turn, and cast the Shield spell, infusing it with the power of ice. A shimmering half-dome of pale blue light appeared before me, and I caught the fireball on the Shield. Strain screamed through my mind as the fire struggled against the Shield, but I held the spell, and the fireball winked out.
“Nadia!” said Riordan.
I blinked, looked at him, and realized that the Rebels and orcs had gotten a lot closer. I had stopped to concentrate on casting the Shield spell, which meant the enemy had covered a lot of the distance.
“Go!” I said, turning to run, and something dark and shiny caught my eye.
Several dozen gleaming black shapes shot past the Rebel soldiers and charged up the hill, moving with terrific speed. They were about the size of dogs, and…
My blood went cold with alarm and remembered pain.
“Spitters!” I said. “Riordan, spitters!”
“Russell, stay behind me,” said Riordan, and he turned and called his Shadowmorph blade back to his hand.
Some people called the insects bomber beetles, and other people called them spitters. I didn’t care what the hell people called them because I hated the damned things. They were beetles the size of a St. Bernard dog, their bodies covered with glistening, translucent slime. They had pincers that could bite off a man’s leg (which I had experienced firsthand), and their legs could stab like a butcher knife (which I had also gotten to experience firsthand). Worst of all, they spat this thick greenish-black slime that was acidic and chewed through flesh and bone.
And, you guessed it, I also had experienced that many times.
The damned things were fast, way faster than a human or orc. If we tried to keep running, the spitters would run us down or throw gobs of that acid at us. We had no choice but to turn and fight. And while we did that, the Rebels and their orcish allies could catch up to us in short order.
Well, that was a problem with an easy solution, wasn’t it? We would just have to kill all the beetles quickly.
I whirled, snarling as I called magic.
My first spell was a fireball, as powerful and as hot as I could manage. The fist-sized sphere of flame leaped from my hand and landed in the middle of the charging beetles. The explosion consumed a dozen of them and sent a dozen more tumbling through the air, wreathed in flames. God, but they stank. I slashed my hand before me and called another ice wall, my head ringing with the effort of the spell. This one was about six feet high and thirty feet long, and I called it into existence right in front of the charging spitters. That slowed them down, but some of the insects just scrambled right over the wall, and others raced around it from the sides.
But I was already casting another spell. Lightning globes whirled into existence around my hand, seven of them, and I released them all at once. Each globe veered off and hit one of the beetles, frying the damned things inside their own carapaces.
That smelled even worse than setting them on fire.
Riordan moved in a blur, his Shadowmorph blade flicking left and right as he attacked. The beetles had tough carapaces, but they were no match for a Shadowmorph, and a single touch from the dark blade sliced the creatures in half. Riordan killed beetle after beetle, and he started getting faster as the Shadowmorph fed some of the drained life energy into him. The beetles focused on Riordan, and I concentrated on blasting them off him, hurling quick blasts of fire and lightning to strike them down.
; Most of the beetles homed in on Riordan, but one of them did not.
The flicker of motion caught my eye, and I whirled just in time to see one of the beetles rear up and spit a glob of black slime in my direction.
I almost dodged.
The gob of acidic slime spattered across the side of my coat, which started to smoke and burn. I snarled a furious curse and jerked out of the coat and my pack before the acid could get to my skin, only to see that my sweater was starting to burn. I ripped off the sweater in haste and threw it aside. The acid hadn’t yet chewed through it to reach the black tank top I was wearing, which was good. Acid burns are the worst.
Unfortunately, while I had been ripping off clothing, the beetle had closed. The pincers opened wide to snap into my thigh, and I cast the fastest spell I could. A burst of telekinetic force leaped from my hand and struck the beetle. My aim was off, and instead of throwing it back, the spell spun it around, and the side of its carapace slammed into my left leg. That knocked me off balance, and I stumbled and landed hard on my back, my head bouncing off the ground.
The beetle whirled and came at me, pincers opening wide to bite off my head.
Russell intercepted it first, and he swung his tactical baton with both hands like a golf club. The beetles are quick and strong, but they’re not heavy, and the beetle flipped head over tail and landed a dozen yards away. I scrambled to my feet and threw a fire sphere that drilled through the beetle’s abdomen.
“Thanks,” I croaked, wavering on my feet a little as I fought down a wave of dizziness.
“Yeah,” said Russell, wheezing. The frostfever mucked up his stamina in weird ways, and all this running was hard on him. I wasn’t feeling all that great either. I had just used a lot of magic in a very short time, and the fatigue was sinking into my bones. And I hadn’t completely recovered from the fight with the Gatekeeper and the two Archons, or from the fighting in Last Judge Mountain.
I felt like I could drop and sleep for a week.
But if I did that, I was going to die. And then a lot of other people would die when Nicholas got the Sky Hammer to New York.
I saw Riordan cut another pair of beetles in half, and I looked around for more.
“I think we killed all the giant death bugs,” said Russell.
“Looks that way,” I said, doing a quick scan of the hillside. Riordan ran to join us as I did. All the beetles were dead, but a mob of Rebels and orcish mercenaries were swarming after us. All of them had melee weapons, swords and axes and tactical batons, and a few of them had crossbows…
“Move!” said Russell, and he grabbed my right arm and jerked me to the side.
For the second time in about two minutes, Russell saved my life.
The crossbow quarrel that would have found my chest instead clipped the side of my upper left arm. Pain bloomed through my shoulder, and I snarled in rage and cast a fireball. It hurtled down the slope and exploded at the feet of the unfortunate Rebel soldier who had just shot at me and killed a dozen more of them. Another wave of dizziness went through my head.
I was running dangerously close to empty.
“Go!” said Riordan. “If we stay here we’re finished. Go!”
I nodded, and Russell and I took off running as the Rebels and the orcs charged after us. Thank God I spent so much time exercising, partly to keep black moods at bay, and partly for emergencies just such as this. My heart thudded against my ribs, my breath sawed against my throat, sweat dripped down my face and chest, and I felt the hot blood ripping against my left arm, which hurt damnably. But I was used to this kind of exertion, and if we didn’t get out of Venomhold right now, then Russell and Riordan and I were going to die, and a lot more people would die in a few hours.
Something similar must have been going through Russell’s head because he grimaced and kept running. That, and he had the massively unfair advantage of longer legs. The jerk.
The attack from the beetles had erased most of our lead, but not all of it, and the three of us were motivated. We tore up the slope, my legs screaming with the effort of it. Then the ground started to level out, thank God for that, and we reached the top of the valley. Ahead of us, I saw one of those weird forests that dotted Grayhold, forests of black trees with blue-glowing leaves. The green fire filled the sky overhead, but right at the edge of the valley, maybe thirty or forty yards ahead, the fire stopped like a line had been drawn. Beyond that, the sky was black and empty.
Just a little further, and we would be in Grayhold. We would be past Karst’s closure of Venomhold, and I could open a rift way back to Earth.
“Go!” said Riordan.
I sprinted across the border at full speed, a half-step behind Riordan and Russell, and then something weird happened.
The green fire disappeared overhead. That was good.
Except the sky over Grayhold filled with blue fire.
I froze in sheer puzzlement and alarm for an instant, and then I took one step back.
The green fire reappeared in the sky over Venomhold, while the blue fire vanished in the sky over Grayhold.
“Nadia!” said Russell.
I took a step forward, and the green fire disappeared, but the blue fire reappeared.
“Oh, shit!” I said, summoning power for a spell. “Shit, shit, shit!”
I cast the spell to open a rift way.
And, as I feared, nothing happened.
The Knight of Grayhold had also sealed the borders of his demesne to rift ways. The seal effect created that sheet of fire in the sky, and apparently, you could only actually see the fire while physically in the demesne. Except the sealing effect still allowed physical travel from Venomhold to Grayhold, which meant the Rebels and their orcish buddies would have no trouble chasing us.
“Rift way?” said Riordan.
“Can’t,” I said, panting a little as I pointed at the sky. “Sealed.”
Riordan grimaced at the sky, the blue fire reflecting in his dark eyes.
“Goddamn it, Temple,” he muttered. He took a quick look around, taking in the forest, the hill, and the charging Rebels with a single glance. “Let’s move. We need to find a defensible location right now. If we can hold off the Rebels, they won’t be able to send too many more men into Grayhold. Sooner or later, we’ll draw the Knight’s attention, and he’ll deal with the Rebels.”
“Well, great,” I said as we ran into the forest. I didn’t particularly want to see Jacob Temple again. Then again, I would definitely prefer to see the Knight of Grayhold over the Rebels. And whatever else you could say about Jacob Temple, he was an implacable enemy of the Dark Ones. If I could talk to him, we could persuade him of the threat, and he would open his demesne and let us get to Earth.
I hoped so, anyway.
“If you want to set some things on fire to slow them down, that would be good,” said Riordan. He wasn’t even breathing that hard after his recent exertions. A Shadowmorph had to come in handy at times. “All this grass will burn.”
“Yeah,” I said, summoning power as I ran. I called a small, weak fireball and hurled it over my bleeding shoulder. It landed about twenty feet behind me and exploded in a small bloom of fire. That said, it doesn’t take a lot to burn grass, and I started a small fire about five or six feet across. I threw more fireballs as I ran, setting more grass fires behind us. I supposed that was leaving a trail that anyone could follow, but the Rebels were so close behind us that it didn’t matter.
“There!” said Riordan, pointing. Ahead of us, the eerie forest thinned into a clearing. A hill rose from the center of the clearing, its sides studded with boulders, its top crowned by one of those odd obelisks of gray stone that dotted Grayhold. The rocky slopes would make it hard to climb, and it would slow down the Rebels and the orcs.
It would give us a few extra minutes.
“Come on,” said Riordan as we came to the base of the hill. “Careful. Don’t trip.”
We scrambled up the slope to the top of the hill, the gray obelisk rising o
ver us. The obelisk was about thirty feet tall, its sides carved with odd symbols that gave off a harsh blue-white glow. I caught my balance, breathing hard, and wiped the sweat from my eyes. As I did, Riordan cast a spell, throwing a lighting globe into the obelisk. It burst apart in a spray of sparks, and the obelisk let out a chiming noise.
“Why’d you do that?” I said, scanning the trees for the Rebels.
“Those obelisks detect magic cast near them,” said Riordan, stepping away from the obelisk and calling his Shadowmorph blade back to his hand. “If they detect magic, Temple knows about it.”
“Does he?” I said. An old memory jerked into my tired mind. I remembered the first time I had come to Grayhold, fleeing for my life with Alexandra Ross to get away from the Rebel terrorist attack in Madison. We’d run to get away from an anthrophage pack, and I had used several spells near those obelisks. The Knight of Grayhold had shown up a few moments later. “I actually wouldn’t mind seeing him just now.”
“Huh,” said Russell. “Like security cameras for wizards.”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Okay,” I said, and I threw a gout of elemental fire into the obelisk. “Hey! Jacob Temple!” I hit it with another quick burst of flame. “Hey, asshole! We’re in Grayhold and throwing fire at your obelisk! Come and find us!”
Russell and Riordan stared at me.
“Figured this would be a good time for Temple to show up and kill some Rebels,” I said.
Riordan snorted. “The man was never reliable.”
Russell frowned. “Aren’t you Graysworn now?”
“Yes,” said Riordan, watching the trees. “That doesn’t require me to pull my punches with him. The first time I ever met Temple, it was our first day of basic training, and the drill sergeant made us both run until we threw up.”
“Hard to hold a man in awe after you’ve seen him puke on his shoes,” I said.
Cloak Games_Sky Hammer Page 7
