That ax would kill him if it so much as nicked him, and the longer this battle continued, the more likely such a nick became. At the same time, he assumed that as long as he kept the creature engaged at such close range with weapons, it would not throw fire at him or the others, and maybe one of them could take its life.
Daerwin had taken advantage of the distraction to move inside the creature’s guard, but then the demon was also inside his, so they were both unable to bring their long weapons to bear effectively. Daerwin would likely not survive this, but just now, he had one chance to end this.
He saw Renda running toward him. No matter what happened, she would be able to finish this even if he could not. She was shouting something as she ran, something urgent. He could not hear her over the sounds of battle; she was still too far away. She was signaling with her hands, but he could not afford to turn his attention to her long enough to see. No matter. Once this creature was dispatched, he would talk to her.
“The eyes!” Renda shouted to her knights. “Blind them first or they will leap bodies! Grayson! Qorlin! Shoot for their eyes!”
Grayson nodded. The two knights with bows had been pushed in by the hordes and had abandoned their bows for swords in the close quarters, but now, they took up their bows and fired.
Arrows flew all around the swordsmen, not finding the eyes of the demon generals. Amara stepped forward and smashed the demon’s eyes right into its skull and Kerrick hacked its throat to the spine.
Renda took a precious moment to assess the battlefield.
The creature Shanth and Laniel fought had bled a lot, and now it was weak, but it fought its fear and pain to try to regain control of its body and heal itself. But it was too badly injured. The glow faded suddenly from its eyes, and it fell to the ground, all but lifeless. Suddenly, from one of the demons behind them, Renda saw the same glow in the eyes and shouted warning to them. Without hesitation, Laniel smashed its face with his staff and sent it reeling backward, and before it could heal itself, Shanth struck off its head with a great cry of triumph.
Terrorized by the blinding apparition and without their generals to guide them, many of the demons were panicked and directionless.
Two generals remained, only two, and after that, they could finish off the stragglers at their will. The sheriff was fighting one, and Laniel and Amara went to help him, leaving Renda to join Shanth and Kerrick against the other. The knights were exhausted, barely able to lift their weapons, and worse, the generals’ wounds were starting to close faster and faster. They seemed to have recovered from their fear as soon as they realized the vision was not attacking them.
“The likeness is remarkable,” the duke murmured. “But if the demons did not know for certain that I was here, they must now. It is a risk.”
“More than you know. It won’t last much longer,” Dith said, shaking the sweat from his brow. Maintaining the vision and strength of what he had seen at the Lacework took a surprising amount of will, and he was still fairly depleted.
“It need not last,” whispered Trocu. He nodded to the Keepers.
Nestor nodded. Nestor and Jath slipped forward and reached out toward the last two demon generals.
The eyeless corpse of a slain demon general rose from the ground, its limbs jerking awkwardly, and Nestor and Jath jerked back in surprise. The knights seemed not to see it at all, whether because they were so engrossed in their own battles or because it had shielded itself from their eyes. But it ignored them and hobbled and shambled straight toward Damerien.
“Do not extend your protections yet. We do not yet know what we face here. Best to save your strength and not let it know too much just yet.”
“Did you do that?” Dith asked quietly.
Nestor shook his head. Jath’s eyes grew wide, and he was repeating something over and over to himself.
“He’s saying, ‘It’s dead, it’s dead.’”
“Wyt’stra! I see you! I see your power!” the dead monster growled in Brymandyan, awkwardly working its strange split jaw. It pointed a bloodied claw toward the center of the camp. “Show yourself.”
“Wyt’stra.”
“It’s dead, it’s dead.”
Dith felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He had seen the strange Wittister energy that held the sea at bay when the Byrandian mages tried to call it to their will. The same energy which had drained the life out of the body he had found… Who else could have done it?
He looked at the two, and suddenly their eyes shone black and sinister to him.
Damerien’s Keepers were Wittister mages.
“Yes, of course. It makes sense, now that I think of it. I never understood why he insisted having these Keepers who peopled his castle as guards rather than soldiers, especially during the wars.”
Dith’s head was spinning. These two, this good old man and the dim witted stable boy whom he had known for years, these were the black beasts of his nightmares as a child? Damerien kept these evil creatures as his protectors? Why?
“Wyt’stra,” the creature mewled again, and threw the blaze of white light over them and bellowed with rage. “Show yourself!”
Before the light hit them fully, the duke had vanished against the lean-to behind him in the very act of unsheathing his sword, thanks to Gikka’s cloak. Gikka herself stepped in front of him with her sword raised toward the disgusting creature.
As the dead thing came closer, Dith felt power surging through him, and he drank it up like a man at a desert spring. The being animating the dead demon general had to be a mage, and its proximity amplified and refreshed Dith’s own power, but the other’s power was likewise enhanced. Dith suddenly felt a tremendous heat at his back and dropped the rucksack to the ground. The strange stone wobbled out across the grass toward him, glowing with energy: the same glow he’d seen in his dream.
Dith looked at Nestor and Jath, then at Gikka. With a dark smile, he stepped forward into the light.
“This could be a mistake. We do not know what we face here.”
Dith wondered if they did not.
Before the creature noticed him, he summoned up his power and rained a burning hail of darkness over it. The dark stones, pulled from the depths of the Verilion’s deep night, twisted the light around them and tore and burned the dead creature’s flesh before vanishing back into the void. The dead thing itself felt nothing, but the being inside it howled in agony and rage.
The monster’s body stretched to its full height, burned and severed sinews crackling and breaking apart. Around it, the threads glowed rich with power, and he could see protections building heavily around it––magical protections.
It sniffed the air and turned its great destroyed head toward him. He did not know if it could see with its ruined eyes, but he assumed it could. If it could move a dead body, he reasoned, it could see through destroyed eyes.
“You are not wyt’stra,” it managed through its mangled jaws.
“And you are not…whatever that is.” His own protections flared around him as the beast came closer.
“You are powerful. You are he who raised the landbridge.” The beast shifted, and a great charred flap of its flesh fell open, slowly tearing the skin on its way toward the ground. “We could be allies.”
Dith said nothing. He found it curious that he could understand what the creature said, but he was certain it was not Syonese or Hadric or Bremondine. He supposed Galorin was translating it for him. Likewise, Galorin must be translating what he said before it reached his mouth––a curious sensation.
“You are not the one I seek. You may go in peace, only give me the Wittister mage and Prince Damerien.”
Dith cocked his head and grinned. “You are full of demands, for one who has lost.”
“I have not lost!”
Dith waved dismissively and turned to walk away.
He felt a crackle on the threads, and his protections fired so violently that the dead creature flew backward, scraping over the ground for several hu
ndred feet, crushed into a smoking heap of red and black mush. Dith did not miss a step.
“I can destroy you with a thought! I can make you never to have existed!”
This was a new voice, a human voice now unhindered by the broken mandible of the monster, and the ugly rock was too bright to look upon.
“I know that voice. Have a care.”
Dith turned, electricity crackling angrily about him in his rage, and he stalked toward the disgusting lump of broken flesh. “Here I stand. Go ahead, unmake me.”
Behind him, Nestor and Jath reached out again. This time, they did not stop.
The arrows were striking the creature’s throat, his jaw, his foreleg, everything but his eyes. In frustration, Renda gestured to Kerrick, and together, they hacked and clawed their way up the creature’s shoulder, setting foot on a foreleg and climbing. The beast had long since abandoned its ax as useless in close quarters with the knights, and now it tossed and scraped at them, trying to get them away. Its claws ripped through Renda’s mantle, throwing it to the ground, but within only a moment, she and Kerrick were at the beast’s throat. The plunged their swords into the monster’s eyes….
Dith and the Other watched at a crucial nexus point in the threads. Laid out before them, invisible to those battling around them, were the endless threads of probabilities and possibilities, some as thin as silk, others as thick as the trunks of trees, all interwoven and knotted together….One plucked at a single thread, pulling it slightly aside, a subtle tiny change that began a maelstrom of chaos, and the other countered by plucking another, and back and forth for what seemed an eternity, the one creating one chaos, the other reversing it with his own. The resulting vortex threatened to rip apart the fabric of existence, with both creating violent storms of probabilities.
The two worked faster, and faster, deeper and deeper in the threads, faster than any mind could follow save another Guardian…
The sheriff turned his sword point upward, put his body under it and drove it with all his strength through the creature’s split mandible and up into its brain. As his blade sank into the monster’s mind, he understood what Renda had been shouting to him. “The eyes!” she had screamed to him. “Take its eyes first!”
He turned the blade viciously and wrenched it free.
Then his whole world exploded.
Twenty-Eight
Renda fell to the ground and covered her head as the demon general’s withering, smoldering body gave way beneath her in a burst of liquid fire. Kerrick had fallen not far away from her. He was not moving, and his cape was burning. She ripped it from him and threw it aside, and in so doing, brought him back to consciousness. The others were cut and bruised, but not badly.
She looked up to see her father stagger to his feet beneath the burning husk of the creature he had fought.
Around them, the few demons who had survived the enormous blast limped or crawled away, some still ablaze. As the rest of the knights regained themselves, they chased down the dying demons they could catch and dispatched them until they area was secure.
Some distance away, she saw Dith kneeling on the ground. Gikka knelt beside him, and the duke stood not far away. She assumed the mage had had something to do with the massive explosion, and she was grateful. The duke was once again safe.
Renda saw Qorlin sitting on the ground, just staring at a cut on his sleeve.
“How now, knight?” she said, approaching him. “Are you injured?”
He looked up at her stupidly. “They cut me again,” he said. He touched the edge of the cut in his sleeve and held up his fingers to show her the gray-green resin of the ha’guaka poison mingled, as she feared, with his blood. The cut on his arm was not life threatening by itself, but the poison had not missed the wound. “Please, my Lady. I cannot endure it again. I cannot. Kill me and spare me the agony.”
Renda looked at him uncertainly and beckoned Laniel over. “Peace, Qorlin. Perhaps it is not as bad as it looks.”
The priest looked at the wound, then looked at once in his eyes and his mouth.
“Do you feel ill?”
“No” the knight answered quietly. “I felt a bit queasy at first, but now I feel nothing. Am I dead, then?”
Laniel smiled reassuringly, a piece of healing he had learned from Amara. “If you are, we all are.” On a hunch, he stripped off a piece of Qorlin’s shirt and bade the knight touch it to the blood in the wound. Then he told him to set it against the poison on his sleeve.
The poison turned black.
Laniel’s eyes narrowed. He ripped several more clean strips from the knight’s shirt. “Sop up the blood with these,” he told the knight, “and give them all to me once the bleeding stops.”
“Laniel?”
“I do not want to raise your hopes,” he said to her, “but in Qorlin’s blood, we may have a cure for their poison.”
The priest then looked at the back of Renda’s bloodsoaked shirt and unceremoniously ripped the thin cloth away beneath the straps of her breastplate. The filthy cotton of her shirt, a poor substitute for Bremondine silk, had begun clotting into the cuts made by the demon general’s claws, and by ripping it away, it began bleeding anew, but not dangerously. He took some vials from his pouch and slathered the unguents on the cuts.
She grimaced with pain. “That hurt more than the claws themselves,” she breathed.
“You have no battle fury to steel you against the pain,” he replied. “Keep the cuts clean. They are not deep, but they will leave fine battle scars.”
“Battle scars, a trait not much prized in the women of Syon, I’m afraid.”
He looked at her and smiled an enigmatic smile. “But then we are not on Syon anymore,” he murmured.
She remembered their talk in the abbey and blushed in spite of herself.
All would be well. What had taken them five hundred years to learn on Syon had proven invaluable in this battle. Against one such creature and its armies, Syon had thrown countless millions of her young men over the centuries, never getting close enough to see Kadak, much less destroy him. Yet here, thanks to what they had learned and with the power of a Guardian at their disposal, they had destroyed several of these creatures by themselves. Now that they knew their enemy and knew how to defeat them, they might succeed in liberating Byrandia as they had Syon. Surely such liberators would be welcomed by the rulers of Byrandia and could forge a lasting peace. Perhaps this was the nature of the prophecy, but if that was the case, why did her father dread it so?
Through the corner of her eye, she saw her father approaching, staggering with his exhaustion as they all were. She stood to greet him, wincing at the pain on her back. “I’ve good news, Father. We had no casualties and only minor injuries.”
“Renda,” the sheriff said, his voice broken and weak. His body was in spasms, as if it were fighting against itself, and he fell to the ground. “I…can’t…fight…”
“Father?” she ran to him, scanning him for injuries. “No, everyone stay back! Where are you hurt? Was it the ax? I don’t see…Laniel! Come quickly! My father may have been poisoned!”
Suddenly, smoothly, the sheriff’s hands were wrapped around her throat, a leering grin on his face, a sickly yellow glow in his eyes as he scrutinized her. “New blood,” a strange voice hissed at her from his mouth, a voice unused to speaking Syonese, a voice unused to working a human jaw. He sniffed at her, then vexed with the limited senses of this body, he snarled. “Blood of kings, but not of this land…Wyt’stra… ”
Renda clutched at the hand at her throat, barely able to breathe. “Father…no…”
The hand released her, and his eyes closed so tightly, she saw blood well at the corners.
The rest of the knights had come toward them, but Renda waved them back. She could not afford to have this creature’s spirit jump to one of them.
“Renda,” her father’s voice breathed, “You must not…” He fell to his knees, all strength suddenly gone from his body. “I carry…the soul
of… ” He looked toward the withered carcass behind him.
“Father,” she cried, bewildered, then strangely hopeful, then terrified. “You can fight against it? Then you must! Listen to me, you must. You must drive it out.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Listen to me, child. We were wrong about Kadak. These do not command.” He looked over at Dith, then back at Renda. “Something else…creates them, commands them…even Kadak, even on Syon. I see inside…its mind. The battle is bigger than…”
“Never mind that now,” she sobbed. “We will take you to the duke. He will know what to do––”
“No!” the sheriff bellowed, and the strange glow flickered in and out of his eyes again, “I must not go near the duke.” He looked around him fearfully, but his fear was clearly not for himself. It was for them. “I must not be near you or the others. Listen, come with me now, away from the others. While I still have control, you must destroy my eyes, and then…”
She shook her head adamantly. “I will not hear it. I will not!”
“Knight, I gave you an order––”
“No.”
“Renda, you must. And soon. I can barely keep…myself…”
“Father.” She looked into his glassy eyes. “Lord Daerwin of Brannagh, son of Vilmar, Duke of Damerien, hear me, you will fight this! And you will win. And you will live. Do you hear, knight? By the gods, you will live!” She turned and shouted again, choking back her tears. “Laniel! Come quickly, my father is gravely injured!”
“Why must I live? What binds me here?” Daerwin touched her hand gently. “You must do this, Renda. Do not let me become an abomination. Do not let me dishonor myself. Please.”
“Do not give me such an order, I beg you,” she sobbed, clutching his hand. “Fight against it, father. It has not defeated you yet.”
“We cannot wait until it does. If you cannot do this,” he gasped, clenching his teeth, veins pounding in his temples, “No, by B’radik, this body is yet mine, demon! If you cannot, my child,” he continued, “ask it of…Gikka.” His muscles twitched violently, as if the muscles fought against each other. “She will…for me…”
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 44
