by Cindy Dees
—and then it all blinked out of existence.
In the enraged mage’s place stood a young, beautiful, green-skinned woman, clothed only in woven leaves and artfully draped vines, staring at them curiously.
In a sweet, trilling voice, she asked, “I’m Callisia. Who are you?”
* * *
Thanon looked around in the damp and gloom of the Sorrow Wold in disgust. Even his best trackers could barely tell where they were, let alone reacquire the trail of Raina and her companions through this light-forsaken place. He could not believe that a young girl and a handful of her friends had slipped away from the Talons of Koth, one of the most elite units in Maximillian’s entire army.
A commotion at the edge of their camp drew his attention away from the roughly sketched map of the Sorrow Wold his scouts had assembled for him over the past few days. Not that it had done them one bit of good when it came to tracking the emissary.
A pair of his scouts escorted a rough-looking fellow forward toward him. The bearded hydesmyn was dressed in little more than bear skins and looked half-crazed. “And who might you be, sir?” Thanon asked pleasantly enough.
“Get your hands off me, you filthy soldiers!” the prisoner shouted, tearing free of his escort and charging toward Thanon with a ferocious-looking battle-axe raised aggressively.
That, of course, earned the man a quick tackle and a foursome of soldiers sitting on top of his limbs. Thanon approached the cursing wild man and crouched beside him. He laid his hand on the man’s head and used a mind touch to force his way past the fellow’s resistance to his mental invasion.
Once inside the man’s mind, Thanon casually ripped through the fellow’s recent memories—ah hah! Will Cobb, the black lizardman girl he ran with sometimes, the big jann—
And then Thanon became aware of a subtle alteration to the hydesmyn’s mind. He reached out to probe it and recoiled, stunned. He yanked his hand away from the man’s head and lurched to his feet, taking a few stumbling steps backward, staring down at the prisoner in shock.
“Is aught amiss, sir?” one of his lieutenants asked quickly.
“This man. He’s been touched by one whom I recognize.” He ordered quickly, “Let him up. Get him food and bind his wounds. And for stars’ sake, get him a basin of water and some soap.”
“Who is he?” the lieutenant asked as several men hurried to follow Thanon’s orders.
“One we would do well to leave alone.”
Thanon had experienced that chaotic mental vibration once before, many years ago. It was not a thing a paxan ever forgot, to touch a mind so consumed by ambition, lust, and rage. How—and why—was a filthy barbarian out here in the untamed lands touched by a Kothite? Ammertus, no less? Maybe not Ammertus directly, but certainly the familial signature was unmistakable.
A little while later, a considerably cleaner, bandaged, and well-fed hydesmyn was brought to Thanon.
“We did not get off to a good start. Let us begin again. I am Commander Thanon of the Talons of Koth. And who might you be, sir?”
“Berengar’s the name. I’m a hunter from way back. What brings a fancy gent like thee to these parts?”
Amused, Thanon answered, “I’m also a hunter. And my prey is a young woman wearing white as well as a half dozen of her friends.”
“Ain’t seen no woman in white. Ran into a bunch of kids a few nights back, though. Brats stole my kill from me and left me half-dead.”
Thanon had, of course, seen the encounter in Berengar’s memory. He was pleased that the man was being honest with him. It would make this interview so much easier. And no way was he touching the man’s mind again. Whatever Imperial machinations this fellow was involved in were above Thanon’s pay grade to interfere with.
“Tell me, Berengar. Where did this attack upon you occur?”
“About a day’s walk east of here,” the surly hydesman replied.
“Could you show me and my men the place?”
A snort. “Wouldn’t be much of a tracker if I couldn’t backtrack my own cursed trail, now would I?”
“I suppose not,” Thanon replied, smiling. “Did you happen to see what direction this pack of youths was heading when they left you?”
“Of course. I tracked them for a solid day, but I didn’t want to mess with that cursed boar-man they had with them. Once the rage came over him, he was something fierce, I tell you.”
A boar-man? A boar changeling, huh? Thanon had personally never seen one, but he could imagine such a man would be strong and aggressive. He ordered his troops to prepare to move out.
What in the world was Raina tangled up in out here? More curious than ever about what she was up to and why a powerful Kothite was influencing people in this region, Thanon formed up his men. He gave the order to move out, and they followed the hunter east, marching fast.
CHAPTER
17
If there was a more miserable place than the Sorrow Wold, Will surely had never seen it. Their path was blocked by webwillows—trees with long, trailing branches, and leaves coated in a milky substance. When brushed against, they wrapped tightly around a soul like spider silk and left behind a sticky residue that no amount of scrubbing would remove. Not to mention the biting spiders that dropped down out of the willows to suck one’s blood while a person’s friends swatted them away and tried to cut the trapped person free.
As if that were not enough, the party was attacked by a swarm of giant wasps, each insect the size of his hand and the stings of which took almost all of Rosana’s magic to heal. And it was not even noon yet.
By midafternoon, it had poured rain on them for a half hour and then grew so cold Will swore his clothing had frozen to his back. Drenched and shivering, they slogged onward in the gathering gloom.
A dozen bipedal creatures vaguely the size and shape of men—but made entirely of twisted, growing vines—attacked them at a spot where the path narrowed to a single person wide and was crowded on all sides by thick brambles. Will was in the lead and slammed his staff into the closest one.
“Vinemen!” he shouted.
The rest of the party crowded close together, alternating who faced left or right. For his part, Kerryl Moonrunner merely stood in the middle of the path and stared vaguely at the vineman, who ignored him in return.
The vinemen waved their sinewy, green arm-appendages, brandishing long thorns at the end of each, and Will and the others dodged and slashed at the creatures. When an appendage was cut off, it oozed a bright green, foul-smelling slime.
“Their blood is poison!” Sha’Li called.
Will seriously did not feel like sparring with some poisonous weed. Every blow his foes got in on him stung like frozen fire against his chilled flesh.
So short-tempered he didn’t even bother to warn his friends to stand back, he blasted the vinemen with bolts of force damage channeled through his staff. It was tremendously wasteful of magic, but he was too cold and tired and out of sorts to care. And besides, his magic would reset at sunset or thereabouts.
The rest of the party, who’d had to duck for their lives to avoid his blasts, straightened cautiously behind him to catch their breaths and adjust their armor, making a few minor repairs and wiping off the slime the creatures had left behind.
Rynn asked cautiously, “Do you have a particular dislike for vinemen that we should know about?”
Will scowled. “Not particularly. But what’s the point of having all these combat skills if I never use them? I didn’t feel like wasting my time in a training session against a bunch of plants.”
Rosana sidled past Eben to stand close beside Will. She put a soft hand on his forearm. “Patience, Will. We’re all uncomfortable, but this day will pass.”
He scowled a bit more but allowed silently that she was right.
They resumed walking, and Rynn said from the back of the line, “While I’m grateful that you obliterated those vinemen, in general, it might be wise to preserve the tide-turning power of your magics fo
r times when we have need of it to stay alive.”
Will made an irritated face at the forest ahead of him. He knew that. His father had drilled the lesson into him from the day he’d first learned to cast magic. Save his precious and finite magic for when it was really needed. Rely on the infinite number of swings in his sword the rest of the time. He didn’t need some smug paxan monk telling him how to use his magic.
Eben spoke up. “I sense something. If we could stop for a moment, mayhap it is a thread of water…”
Will stopped with alacrity. Eben had discovered a talent for dowsing last fall, and it had saved their lives more than once. “If you can find us water, my friend, I will be in your debt for life.”
Eben grinned. “I’ll hold you to that. It’s over this way.”
The jann took the lead, slashing his way through thick brush with his sword at right angles to the path.
If Will thought the wold was awful while walking a path, it was nothing compared to the horror of it once they had to fight their way through nigh impassable brush, poison ivy with stems as thick as Will’s wrist snaking up the tree trunks, and face-height spiderwebs that made instant paxan fist fighters of any who walked into one.
“It has to be right around here,” Eben muttered, walking in a tight circle in a small gap between several sickly trees with thin trunks, straining upward among their bigger cousins for scraps of light.
Frowning, Eben bent down and pushed back a cluster of weeds. Will was disgusted when only black dirt showed and no upwelling of water. But Eben gasped and fell to his knees, digging eagerly with his hands and belt dagger.
The jann lifted a muddy stone in triumph. “Look at that!”
“It’s a rock,” Will declared. “A muddy one.”
“Can’t you see it glowing?” Eben asked, enthralled with his find.
“Nope. It’s just a rock.”
“Cast some magic at it,” Eben challenged him.
It was Will’s turn to frown. “Rynn just chastised me for wasting my magic, and now you want me to cast it at a rock?”
“Just a little,” Eben urged.
Huffing, Will cast the simplest magic he knew, a light spell, at the rock. The magic struck the dirt-smeared surface and disappeared. Completely. The stone absorbed the magic like a dry sponge took up water. “What the—” Will blurted.
Sha’Li cut him off, breathing, “Nullstone.” She added in confusion, “How did that get here? It comes only from dragon-touched places. I see nowhere around here that could be the lair of a dragon.”
Rosana asked, “What does nullstone do, exactly?”
Rynn answered, “It absorbs magic and is impervious to magical damage. It’s so hard that it’s nearly impossible to mine or work. It takes special tools and training to cut or carve it.”
Eben used his sleeve to wipe the dirt off his find. “This side of the stone is worked. And this line across it, here”—he traced a smoothly arcing groove across its face—“is man-made. I’ll wager this stone was a piece of something larger at one time. This other edge, here, is jagged like the stone was split by some sort of impact.”
Will stood back as the others exclaimed over the stone like it was a nugget of gold. Finally, when they’d fawned over Eben’s find until his nerves grated, he grumbled, “Yes, but we can’t drink that stone or wash with it.”
Eben rolled his eyes. “Fine. Step back, Grouchy Pants, and let me look for some water.”
He was not grouchy! He was simply looking out for the good of the group. Glaring, he moved back a few steps so Eben could stretch out face-first on the ground, his fists clutching at the moist dirt.
It took only a few seconds for the jann to hop to his feet. “This way. There’s a creek close by.”
After he drank his fill and wiped the noxious slime off his clothing and armor, Will’s mood improved somewhat. He led the party along the creek, using his Bloodroot-inspired affinity for trees and plants to move branches aside and make their travel easier. He led the way until they came across another path heading roughly west. Rynn took the lead once more, declaring that Will could use a break. He didn’t need a break, curse it!
Rynn set a blistering pace, while Kerryl muttered direly of ghosts in the wold and dreamweaver spiders that came out after dark. As the perpetual twilight deepened into a colorless gloaming made up of monstrous silhouettes, the path spilled into a large clearing littered with broken boulders. It looked like a ruin of some kind.
“Who lived here when this place was whole?” Rosana asked curiously.
Rynn looked around, frowning. “This must be a forgotten place, and very old, for I have no knowledge of it.”
Will turned to Kerryl. “Do you know this place?”
The nature guardian was still not in his right mind and muttered of doorways with monsters pouring out of them, a great army of creatures that stole the minds of their attackers.
Eben, who was examining one of the boulders, said over his shoulder, “The damage to these stones did not happen that long ago. No more than a few hundred years at most.”
Rynn’s frown deepened. “I’ve been alive that long and traveled this wold many times, yet I have no memory of a village—or a structure, for that matter—of this size or in this place.”
Will looked around with interest. He never could resist a mystery. In the last of the light, they gathered wood and built a fire, eating rations left over from the Black Widow rather than trying to hunt this late. After the rough meal, he fashioned a torch out of twisted grass and a stout stick and thrust it into the fire. Using it for light, he explored the ruin further.
He found a pair of square stones mostly sunk into the ground, but sheared off only a few finger spans above the dirt. They were placed slightly wider than both his outstretched arms apart. Studying the broken stones around them, he spotted several with arcing sides. An archway of some kind might have stood here once, but strangely, he saw no sign of a foundation or debris on either side of the arch that might have indicated that it had once been a doorway to a building. Odd. Shrugging, he made his way back to the fire.
“Who wants first watch tonight?” he asked.
“You take it,” Rynn said. “I took it last night. I’ll take middle watch tonight.”
The middle watch was least desirable because it meant a night’s sleep had to get broken into two parts.
“Done,” Will said briskly. He found a sturdy boulder about the right height to sit on and made himself comfortable, staring out across the clearing as the others settled down behind him.
Kendrick commented, “If you see a ghostly woman moaning and sobbing, it’s only the Lady of the Wood. Don’t attack her and she won’t attack you.”
Will snorted. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
Rosana laughed. “I’ll bet two years ago you thought there were no such things as tree lords or dryads or dragons either.”
With that discomforting thought foremost in his mind, he commenced sitting the night watch.
A bulging gibbous moon glowed sullenly from behind a thin layer of scudding clouds. The day’s chill turned into a night so cold that it pierced all his clothing as easily as needles. He shivered in his cloak as the darkness deepened.
A sudden break in the night sounds caught his attention. He thought he spied a figure lurking in the trees at the far edge of the clearing. He stood up, throwing back his cloak and taking up his staff. “Show yourself!” he called.
As he knew it would, his voice precipitated sounds of quick stirring behind him as the others jumped up and grabbed weapons.
Simultaneously, a half dozen humanoids stepped out of the trees. They came from all directions, and Will retreated into the tight defensive circle his friends had already formed. The attackers were completely silent, not communicating with one another by any visible means. Although they advanced slowly, their hands, and hence their weapons, were fast.
Will was no slouch as a fighter, but it was all he could do to block the barrage
of incoming blows that peppered him from the front and both sides. His attackers appeared human, but they stared blankly at him, never blinking, never showing the slightest reaction or emotion when he landed a smart blow with his staff.
Even the most stoic of warriors winced when he hit them sharply enough. Given how hard he was swinging his metal-clad staff now, these fellows ought to be howling in pain every time he clocked one of them, but they didn’t make a single sound and fought on in eerie silence.
Behind him, he heard a low grumble that grew into a roar.
Over the sound of it, Eben shouted, “Kendrick, no!”
Will dared not turn or even look over his shoulder for fear of being skewered immediately, but he knew well enough what he would see if he looked. Kendrick had transformed into a were-boar. Now he could only pray that Kendrick had enough control, or Kerryl had enough control over him, to target their attackers and not his own friends.
Another shout from Eben, something along the lines of “What are you doing?”
Without warning or visible cause, Will’s attackers disengaged from their assault and moved purposefully around him and his friends, heading for the trees.
“They’re chasing Kendrick!” Eben called, racing after the pack of retreating humans.
Swearing under his breath, Will shouted at Kerryl, who was still badly injured, to stay by the fire. Will took off after Eben, and Rynn joined him. Sha’Li was nowhere to be seen, but he had faith she was racing through the trees in the dark close by, paralleling their course and positioning herself for some sort of stealth attack when their prey finally slowed. Forced to pay close attention to his footing while ducking vines and leaping over brambles, he couldn’t look back to see if Rosana was keeping up with them. He just had to hope she was. They would likely have need of her healing skills before this ended.
As the silent humans spread out in front of them, Rynn peeled off to the right and Eben to the left. Will hesitated, unsure which way to go. The last thing they needed was to get lost and separated out here in this infernal forest. He caught a glimpse of Eben darting ahead of him and gave chase since he was likely following Kendrick and the silent humans.
