“There will be a bloody battle,” Vanx said. “They are bitter fae, full of venom and hate. They have creatures on their side as well. They miss what fate has taken from them and, after losing Pyra, I sort of understand their rage. I saw the savants fighting with us, though. We won’t be in this alone.” Vanx paused and got Zeezle’s attention. “The savants all wear those dark gray robes, trimmed with red, and have shaved heads, right?”
“They do.” Zeezle laughed.
“Kooks.” Chelda laughed with him. “Back when I was a wagoneer, some man and a woman dressed that way, used to stand inside the Frozen Gate, at Cold Port, with a kettle begging for coins.”
“These are not the same kooks, Chel,” Zeezle said. “These are Zythians who have dedicated their entire lives to the quest for knowledge.”
“Kooks.” Chelda laughed again.
When the dragons returned, the group remounted. Vanx had to keep his chin held high so Moonsy’s head didn’t slam back against it when Cora took her two leaping strides into flight.
He thought he heard Chelda and Zeezle cursing each other, for not being as aware, but he let the elation of riding dragon back again carry away his errant emotions. The blood tingling rush of the wind was good medicine, but it couldn’t erase the fact that he missed his pup or dreaded what was to come.
He sent soothing thoughts the dog’s way and hoped his familiar could sense them.
It wasn’t long before the dragons came down in the location where they would crack the citrine. For, as far as Vanx could see, in any direction, there were great mounding hills, all covered in dry yellow brown grass. It was odd because he’d been so lost in thought that he didn’t remember leaving the greener treetops of the forest behind. It looked like this whole part of the world had once been underwater. The Lake of the Savants was a three day hike by foot and, by the way the loose sandy ground felt under his boots when he slid off of Cora, it would be a taxing three days, at best. He wasn’t worried about anyone sneaking up on them by foot.
This area was as unfamiliar as Harthgar had been, but he reminded himself it was Zyth. He tried to feel his homeland, but the cliffs above Little Haven were the only place he had a connection with. If the savants had kangas, which they surely did, they could get here in a day, though, not three. If any were out on patrol, it could be sooner.
“What do I smash it against?” Chelda asked after giving Moonsy a quick, wide-eyed hug. “The ground is all pebbly.”
Good question.
For a moment, everyone just looked around, then Moonsy let out an exasperated sigh before casting a spell.
A stone cube, about a stride wide and tall appeared. Vanx threw Chelda the citrine and smartly positioned himself on higher ground than where the jewel dust ring would expand.
Stay near, but in the sky, Zeezle told the dragons.
Vanx drew the Glaive of Gladiolus, for here came Moonsy scrabbling to get above the height of the gem before Chelda smashed it. It didn’t look as if she was going to make it. But with an agile, last moment leap, she did.
Vanx felt the depth of the concussion in his chest when the gem was quickened, caused him to fear Chelda might have been ripped apart by the powdery stuff blasting away from her hammer’s impact.
Vanx pulled Moonsy up and stared until he saw her. Chelda grinned like a child but, from her belly down, she was peppered with gem dust and bleeding.
Vanx had to stick her with the glaive twice, for the first time he did, one of her legs was still in the stuff.
It was amazing watching the terrain around them change. The thirsty grass, started to green, and then, underneath it all, a newer turf emerged. The tree that shot upward split into two separate trunks near the bottom. Vanx stumbled back watching it. Like a willow, the limbs grew heavy with their leafy burden. These blooms were bright yellow, dangling clusters, like a bunch of melon-sized grapes, only formed of soft curling, lemon yellow petals.
Soon, a large area was under the huge tree’s draping canopy. Vanx and Zeezle hurried the others out from under it for they knew the pea-like pods the tree produced were full of deadly poison.
Zeezle blew the whistle to call the dragons down, but he stopped for moment.
“We are going to fetch the aid of the savants, yes?”
“Yup.” Vanx nodded and was glad to see Cora and Avz landing to greet them.
Oddly, as he helped Moonsy onto Cora’s neck, he wondered what he would see if he looked through one of the Goss’s magical webs into the Mirror of Portent. He had read in the Hoar Witch’s books about magi doing that sort of thing and finding terrible results, so he pushed the idea out of his mind, so that he wouldn’t be tempted.
Chapter
Nineteen
Ogres are full of rage,
but still he took the chance.
That crazy man, did it again,
and tried to get one to dance.
– a song from Dyntalla
Vanx felt strange under the gaze of the nearly identical savants. Only a handful of the uniformly-robed Zythian men and women bothered to listen, though quite a few more looked on curiously from the background. One woman, standing behind the ones listening, stared at Vanx with yellow eyes full of lust. She licked her lips and seemed transfixed by him.
Her head was shaved, and almost perfectly round. She was attractive despite this, but he had no desire to think of such things. It was his green eyes, he knew. The goddess often called him her emerald-eyed champion.
Every part of the large, but modest temple the savants had built was made of the same light gray marble. Everything was elegant, yet plain. The halls and corridors were somehow uniformly illuminated, as if the light radiated from the stone itself, but Vanx couldn’t see how. Unless the stone was magically formed, like the towers had to have once been, or like the university built below the spike in Harthgar, and the lazing stone, had been.
He wanted to ask them of these things, but some other time, when the fate of the world didn’t hang in the balance.
To the savants, Vanx figured he was an anomaly. He was a one of a kind impossibility. He was also the one who had ridden mighty Pyra against the Paragon and now arrived on their doorstep with an elf, and a gargan, riding Cora, no less. He’d banished and destroyed the leader of the Trigon fighters who had killed so many of their fellow Zythians.
On one hand, they probably wanted to dissect him and figure out why he lived when every other human-Zythian child had been stillborn. And on the other hand, he was a hero, a legend among his people.
“I am not half-human,” Vanx explained, in hopes of snuffing their curiosity. “I’m half-Zythian, half-warlock, and the gossamer lens has shown me you will come and fight alongside us.”
What I don’t know, is how we all get to the other side of the world, Vanx finished to Zeezle alone. I didn’t see the dragons fighting with us. It was more of a ground battle.
Step close, Zeezle responded. I have an idea. I felt things change when Chelda quickened the goldenrain.
Vanx, standing in the clean smelling hall of the savants, felt Zythian magic tingle over him. He also knew that Zeezle was right. The Heart Tree they’d just quickened was a Laburnum, commonly known across Zyth as the goldenrain for its draping bunches of poisonous pods looked like sacks of golden coins. Only the one they rooted was now probably two hundred feet tall.
His eyes fluttered and he stood with Zeezle, under the great Elmwood Heart Tree on Dragon Isle. On the ground, a few strides away, a brown leaf the size of a bed sheet fluttered in the stiff breeze. The air was cool, if salty with brine. Chelda’s horses whinnied across the meadow. The two animals started toward them, but Zeezle cast the spell again.
“What just happened?” Vanx asked, seeing he was back among the handful of Zythian scholars, listening to their plea for help.
“With all but one of the trees in place, the ability to teleport by memory has been restored,” Zeezle explained as if he’d just discovered fire. “I just did it. There was no way th
e place we just went could have been in my sight.”
“That part is true.” Vanx nodded. “If you’ve a globe, I can show you the location of the dead Heart Tree, where the last gem-seed is. If we do not take it from the malevolent fae, and place it where it should be before they place it somewhere else, a darker sort of future awaits us.”
One of the savants disappeared and reappeared again with a grin on his face. Then another.
“What say this elf?” one of the savants asked. It was hard to tell their ages. Any of them could have been as young as Vanx or three hundred years old or more. After about three hundred years, though, wrinkles and loose skin started to reveal the truth.
“Any fae creature who will not swear loyalty to good King Longroot is a possible threat.” She shrugged at Vanx. “If they’ll kneel to the king of the fae, they will have my protection, and they will have no choice but to follow my orders. But if their tree has died, their souls are ruint, and the point is mute. In our lore, any fae clinging to a dead Heart Tree is already lost.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the questioning savant answered. “The map room is this way,” he directed them down a few sparsely inhabited hallways. Every one of the Zythians they encountered, either hurried by with an open mouth, or stopped and looked in awe. Most of them had never seen a gargan or an elf firsthand, and even fewer had seen the sea witch’s half-breed.
“Of course we will seek counsel before we choose our path,” the savant said. “We understand the need for haste so we will not be long to return.”
The four were left in a room full of book shelves, but with no books along the walls. There were two dark-slabbed wood tables lined with chairs. There was a globe on one table, and its surface was almost completely covered in maps and charts. Vanx hurried to it as soon as the savants left them.
“Show me where,” Zeezle and Moonsy both went with Vanx to the globe. Chelda didn’t seem to care.
Vanx spun it around and found the place. It was a sizable land mass, with cities marked along its coast, but there was nothing inland where the dead Heart Tree was. Nothing but a vast area marked Unexplored Territory.
It was on the lower side of the globe, like Harthgar, not across the globe as he had pictured in his mind. Highwander and the copse of Great Carpi Ultura was the land directly on the other side of the orb from where they were.
As he studied the shape of the continent, memories of what he’d seen through the gossamer lens both helped and plagued him. He was able to perfectly visualize their destination, but as he did, it all came to life again, around him.
Vanx was pulled from frantic visions of dodging poisoned darts and the razored pinchers of something large, long, and skittery, by the sound of the returning savants.
Vanx couldn’t tell if they were the same ones or not, but he eagerly awaited whichever one of them was going to speak.
It turned out that a female, clearly a female, Vanx saw, now that he gave her robes a longer look, was in charge.
“Seven of us will go,” she said as if it was a grave decision, which Vanx knew it was. “We do not lend ourselves to violent causes lightly, though. General Moonseed must give these so-called malevolent fae the opportunity to swear loyalty to her king before we will seek to harm them in any way.”
“I’m ready,” Zeezle informed.
Vanx counted that there were indeed seven of them. A few looked eager, but one of them looked to be fighting back tears.
As much as he was going to miss Cora, he missed Poops even more. Then the feeling of Zeezle’s magic started tingling over him, and he made sure to draw his familial blade, not the elven blade of healing he’d been forced to use so many times of late.
Chapter
Twenty
Gather in and gather close,
don’t misunderstand.
In the end we’ll wage a war
to keep our sacred land.
– Balladamned (a Zythian song)
The dead Heart Tree sat in a mostly barren valley and was surrounded by ashy dust and charred scree. The morning dew caused the stuff to be sticky like mud, and there was no way the group could cover their tracks as they made their way toward it, but at least it was daylight in this part of the world.
What had done such a thing? Vanx couldn’t fathom it, but the stench of brimstone dragon breath lingered in the area as if it had been there for eons.
He knew the scent well, for he had ridden the fire queen herself. The idea a dragon had destroyed this Heart Tree came to him in the same heartbeat that he realized they were not alone.
Vanx dodged a well thrown dart-sized spear, and then took a kick at the gnarled, knee-tall creature that had thrown it. There were dozens of the small, two-legged things. They had fat bodies, small apple-sized heads, and long spindly arms, and they were all the same ashy gray color as everything around them. Their teeth were stained berry blue and looked sharp. They were hard to see, and they’d managed to bring one of the savants to his knees already, probably with poison.
“Cast a—” Vanx started to give Moonsy the order, but a glassine dome flickered around them and showed itself when the next sharpened stick came at them.
Two of the savants smartly zapped the creatures with sharp, jolting arcs of bright lime colored magic. Each time they got one of the little goblin-esque bastards, it shuddered and crisped in place, and after only a few moments, there were smoldering child-sized bodies scattered all around them. The dead were still cooking, it seemed.
It was a surreal scene. They were in a foul valley of ash and death surrounded by pillars of smoke rising from grotesque little husks.
Something similar to the banging of a gong resounded over Vanx. Chelda, Moonsy, and the four Zythians who were also protected by Moonsy’s spell, all went to a hunched and ready stance. A large object had slammed into the protective dome and left it ringing.
Zeezle and the other two savants had cast protections on themselves and, while Vanx tried to clear a dull tone from his ears, he watched them cook enough of the miniature trolls that the others began to flee.
Vanx was just about to let out a sigh of relief when he heard the loud clicking skitter of some creature. Even his dull nose could tell it was an insect coming up behind them. No, Vanx was shown his mistake in brutally vivid fashion. Its tail end had only been behind them. Vanx turned and saw a wicked looking giant centipede.
In its pincers, it had one of the savants.
The terrified Zythian screamed. His yellow eyes were wide open with terror. His voice gurgled to a hush when the thing cut him in half and let him fall into a gory heap.
One of the male savants let out a girlish sob, but Zeezle engaged the creature, using his acrobatic skill to avoid its deadly grasp.
A pair of sprites came zig zagging out of the smoke and buzzed their way around the terrible, multi-legged bug. They landed in the savant’s remains, not five strides from Vanx. The two skinny, finger-tall fae, snarled at the group, but then started feeding, face first, on the opened guts of the Zythian. Vanx was amazed at how evil the little chumps looked, with their glassine, plum colored wings fluttering in fits. They didn’t even have weapons, but one would be wise to fear them, for killing a sprite with a sword, or bow, was next to impossible, and there was no telling what their bite might do to you.
When some spiders, and several types of beetles joined the feast, the sprites had to fight for their meal. Thankfully, one of the other savants blasted them, and the remains of his fallen comrade, halfway across the valley. The massive centipede slithered around behind them.
Vanx looked beyond the immediate area and saw a cavern. It was on the other side of the dead Heart Tree. The Sun’s rays reached a good way inside the natural looking cave, and Vanx recognized the carved row of columns from his vision. The swarm of insects and ruined fae pouring out of several staired-alcoves was unmistakable.
There were more centipedes, fat ticks, and buzzing hornets. There were spiders with legs longer than Vanx was tall, a
nd others the size of a cat, and just as furry. Dangerous looking beetles with pincers, stingers, or both. Some of the bugs had sharp horns on their snouts, others long stinger-tipped tails or snapping crab claws.
There were fluttering fairies draped in black gowns with the look of eternal longing in their dead, soot blackened eyes. Several of them had bows, and so did the few white-haired elves Vanx saw. They, too, had blackened their eyes in the same fashion as the sprites. But all of them looked frail and malnourished.
They looked like a mob of children all dressed for Death’s Day, but these were vicious fae lusting to kill them. They looked just as they had in the gossamer lens, only there were easily ten times more of them than Vanx remembered.
Vanx cast the detection spell he’d used to locate the sapphire and citrine gem-seeds.
“We need to get in that cavern,” Vanx yelled. “That is where the yellow eyed queen of these—these—these things is. The last gem-seed is in there, too.”
“Room,” one of the female savants in Vanx’s group stepped forward and went to a knee. She made a slow, elaborate throwing motion toward the mass of creatures streaming toward them. A wavering flow of power, formed by strands colored in complex shades of yellow, blue, and then green streaked like a comet right over the dead tree. It came down into the first mass of insects and exploded a great divot in their path. A good number of them were killed, but not all. The ones that still came were the ones with wings and the fleet.
A tunneling rat was blown out of his hole, and seeing it made Vanx wonder if there were evil bugs coming to get them from beneath.
His first instinct was to wade out into them with his sword, but remembering the way a single poke from a sharpened stick had taken down the first savant kept him from leaving Moonsy’s dome of protection. He glanced over and saw that Chelda wrestled with the same urge. She, too, wanted to be out in the heat of the fight smashing heads.
A Gossamer Lens (The Legend of Vanx Malic Book 10) Page 7
