Irmina glanced over her shoulder to see Mirza and the Pathfinders galloping for all they were worth on the mounts they left behind. He blew the horn again. Next to him Ancel ran, Etchings aglow, feet barely touching the ground as he harnessed light and wind to spur him on. Charra kept up with them all.
Once more she faced the shadelings. They were so close she made out individual grotesque features. Canine-snouted wraithwolves dropped to all fours for a few leaps before running on two legs like men again. Darkwraiths glided much like Ancel did. The unknown, snake-like, six-legged creatures skittered among them. A sense of calm overcame her.
“DAGODINS, FORMATIONS,” came Mirza’s yell, cutting unnaturally above all other sound.
Irmina didn’t need to look. She felt the men draw up beside her and shift into knots of ten, swords and shields ready. “A good day to die,” she said to Ancel when he stepped up next to her.
“Who said anything about dying?” He replied, and she knew without looking that he smiled.
Power surged from him, prickled across her skin. All around and in front of them dirt, stone, and grass shifted as if alive. And then the combination did live, pushing up from the ground, quickly becoming warriors clad in white and gold, wielding spears.
She released her Forge. Lances of light rained down, tearing into the charging shadeling ranks.
Ancel uttered one word. “Begin.”
His constructs sprinted meet to the enemy, spears whirling. With defiant screams, the Dagodins, Mirza, Charra, and Ancel followed. The battlefield became a sea of chaos, blades, blood, and death.
She lost herself in the heat of battle. With expert precision she chose targets away from any friend, and made certain to keep an eye on Ancel if he should need her. Time seemed to stretch as they fought, and despite heavy limbs and ragged breaths she continued to Forge until there was nothing left on the ground to attack.
Every shadeling but the vasumbral was dead. Of the over four hundred men and women in the Dagodin cohort, a mere fifty still lived, and ten of those would have to be killed, their wounds from darkwraiths’ tainted blades too grievous for her or Ryne to mend. Thankfully, Mirza and Ancel had either been lucky or skillful enough to avoid the worst.
Ancel’s entire construct army moved among the downed shadelings, lopping off heads. Although the majority bore injuries that would fall any normal man, they went about their business as if unscathed. Upon completion of their task, Ancel released them, and they melted into the ground, a part of the Forms once more.
“Any word of Ryne?” she asked as Ancel set fire to the entire field, the heat such that she had to back away.
“He had his own battle in the woods, but it appears that’s over now.”
The words had barely left his mouth when Ryne appeared at the forest’s edge. He peered at the burning field, and then cast his gaze up to the vasumbral and the zyphyl. The two beasts were still tearing at each other, locked in a coiled mass of black and silver. Ryne Shimmered to Ancel’s side.
“I feared one of you might be lost in that trap,” Ryne said. He eyed them for a moment, nodding his approval. Screeches and wails echoed from the two combatants above. “For this to end quickly the zyphyl will need our help.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Irmina began, before she noticed Ryne’s attention had settled on Mirza.
“Your kind, the Dagodins, are the bane of creatures like the vasumbral, beasts that either devour Forges or are impervious to them,” Ryne said.
“You must be mad,” Mirza scoffed. “You two are Eztezians, she’s as a strong as a High Shin, there must be something you can do.”
“Anything we do, that any Forger does, would only make the creature stronger.”
“But—”
“I can explain the finer points explain later,” Ryne interrupted. “But your divya,” he nodded to Mirza’s sword, “unlike ours, does not require Mater or a Forge to be activated, just a Dagodin’s touch. I will Materialize you to the right location. All you need do is drop with your blade pointed down.”
Mirza opened his mouth.
“Delay much longer and we will have more than one of those things to fight.”
“Fine.” Mirza inhaled long and slow. “Whenever you’re ready.”
With his gaze on the two creatures in the sky, Ryne opened a portal a foot away. It twisted from horizontal to vertical. Through the opening the shadeling and her pet battled below her, the ground a great distance under them. She gasped at the sight. Ryne had opened a portal in the sky above the creatures.
“Remember, sword pointed down. Irmina, if you can manage to tell your pet to hold in place?”
She closed her eyes and touched her connection. A surge of hate and desperation made her recoil. She sensed the revulsion for the very thought of the shadeling, of any shadeling. After a moment, the emotions abated enough for her to get her message through.
“Now,” Ryne said, voice distant.
Through the zyphyl’s sight she took in Mirza’s fall through the portal. His sword reflected the meager sunlight. He pierced the vasumbral in the middle of its eyeless head.
The creature screeched, a long prolonged echo. Its black, glistening skin grew to a dull gray pallor, spreading from the head on down. And then it began to break apart in gigantic ashy mounds.
Flailing wildly, Mirza fell through the air, his body bursting through the ash. A portal opened under him and next to Ryne. He flew through it amid remains that swirled like sooty snow. A cushion of air caught him and set him down. The rush of battle energy in his eyes, breathing fast and hard, he stood a dozen feet from them and felt all over his body. When certain he had all his limbs, he peered up at the falling clumps of the vasumbral’s corpse.
“Amuni’s balls, that … that … that was …”
“Frightening?” Irmina finished.
“Incredible.” Mirza grinned, white teeth showing. The grin grew to a chuckle. And then a laugh. Within moments they were all laughing with him.
Chapter 10
They spent the night trying to put as much distance between themselves, the town, and the battlefield. When they finally slowed to a walk, the encounter replayed in Ancel’s head with vivid clarity. Although they had won it didn’t feel like a victory to him. A cohort of over four hundred had been reduced to forty men and women. He’d lost three Pathfinders. The Seifer and Nema warriors were dead, their pets with them. The one blessing was that Mirza suffered only minor wounds Ryne was able to mend. His own lack of serious injury was more the cause of the protection his aura offered than his own skill. He’d been reckless in order to rally his men.
Worse yet was he doubted anyone but Ryne knew how close they’d come to death. In Forging the construct army, he’d used a great deal of his Prima. During the fight, he’d almost called on the voices within Mater to assist him, accepted their power. He shuddered to think what might have happened then, of being corrupted by them.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he muttered to himself. Losing Kachien in Randane should have taught him better.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Ryne said.
Ancel glanced over. So mired was he in his thoughts he hadn’t noticed Ryne’s approach across the frost-covered terrain.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Ancel asked more bitterly than he intended. “People died because of me, a lot of them, many essential to our cause. And for what? My ego? Because I wanted to set an example to future deserters? I may have acted as if this was about saving them, about crushing the shadelings and Amuni’s Children, but it also concerned my wish to dissuade others, my word that I would make those who stole from us pay.”
“Sometimes examples are needed.”
“Not at this price.”
“Then take it as a lesson, and find the positives.”
“I don’t see any,” Ancel said.
“Because you’re not allowing yourself to. Your emotions are in control rather than you.”
Closing his eyes for a mome
nt Ancel submerged himself into the Eye. He pushed his anger outside, and replaced it with calm. When he felt as if he stood in the middle of an undisturbed pond, he analyzed recent events.
He opened his eyes. “We stopped some shadeling creation, destroyed what they might have added to their numbers already, and we discovered how our group can kill vasumbrals. It also makes me think they are those among us who aspire to belong to Amuni’s Children.”
Ryne looked at him askance. “How so?”
“They used me. It was common knowledge what my response would be if any dared steal and desert us again.”
“Perhaps you’re not as frightening as you think.”
“It’s not so much about me as it is that they were willing to risk the hangman’s rope, the Green Wastes, and the threat of shadelings. It leads me to believe they wanted someone to chase after this group. Maybe they didn’t expect you and myself, but once that became obvious they sent an army they thought strong enough to take us.”
Ryne nodded, lips pursed. “If not for Irmina’s zyphyl they might have succeeded. Or at the very least forced us to flee.”
Ancel glanced over to where Irmina rode next to the Dagodins. Their gazes locked, and she offered him a smile. Weariness showed in the tightness of her eyes. The horses’ hung their heads, and the men and women rode with shoulders slumped. Some shook themselves from dozing in the saddle.
“Past time to make camp,” Ancel said. With the recognition of their fatigue he noticed his own aches.
“Agreed.” Ryne nodded toward a hill. “The base of that would offer a place to stay warm and the hilltop would give our guards a good vantage.”
“Mirz,” Ancel called as he angled to the likely campsite.
Mirza spurred his horse forward. “Yes?”
“We’ll make camp there. Charra and I will take first watch. Get as much rest for you and the others as you can.”
After a dip of his head Mirza rode to the Dagodins. A brief conversation passed before relieved expressions crossed many a face.
The soldiers settled in under blankets, bunched close together among the rocks. Ryne was a bigger mound away from them. Ancel sat with his back to a boulder on the hilltop, Charra’s white form a few steps away. Irmina had chosen to say close to him.
“You should get some sleep also,” she said.
“I can’t. Enough people have died on my watch. I won’t lose another. Not today.”
“My zyphyl will keep watch. No shadeling can get close without him sensing anyway. Even if they use a portal, he will sense the Forging.”
“It didn’t seem to make much of a difference earlier.” He wanted to words back even as he said them.
A brief silence followed before she answered. “I didn’t know what to look for then. Now, I do. Besides, he says the shadelings found us by use of Ryne’s Forge that destroyed the Wraithwood.”
He faced her, frowning. “Is it suggesting Ryne did it on purpose?” He didn’t wish to comprehend such a suggestion much less believe it, but the animosity between her and Ryne had become obvious to him. Whenever he broached the subject she avoided it.
“No,” she said, waving him off, “nothing of the sort. Just that the shadelings were able to find us because of his Forge. When I told my pet of what happened in Aldazhar, he felt Amuni’s Children might have been tracking us in that fashion all along.”
Ancel gave the suggestion some thought. At various times during their trek there had been cause to use powerful Forges. When they first entered the Sands of the Abandoned they had fought off a cohort of Ashishins and Dagodins sent by the Tribunal. Another time they battled a shadebane. There was also the instance where the Forgers delved beneath the Sands to locate water. Last had been an attempt to divert or lessen one of the storms that seemed to chase them since entering Ostania. They had failed in that, but the amount of power expended had been great. The various shadeling attacks during the journey seemed random, but now they made sense.
Coincidence, my students, is nothing more than the birth child of intricate planning. Galiana’s favorite saying echoed in his head.
“Your pet might be right,” he said.
“That’s not all.”
Eyebrows raised, he waited.
“The earlier storm,” she paused as if uncertain of her words, “the zyphyl helped to lessen it. He says these storms aren’t natural.”
The statement was surprising. “A Forging?”
Irmina closed her eyes, brows furrowed for a moment. “He still won’t say.” She opened her eyes. “But insists they aren’t natural.”
“Can it help with any others? It would go a long way to us reaching Benez.”
Again, she concentrated. “He can divert them, but not stop them.”
“Good enough.” He considered their entire conversation. As much as he wanted to be the one to guard them, he needed rest, a chance to replenish at least a tiny bit of his power. Many a bad decision had been made due to fatigue. “I’ll trust your pet to let us know of any danger, but Charra will share the duty.” The daggerpaw made a low sound in his throat that Ancel recognized to be reassurance.
She smiled, and it warmed his heart. “Then come help keep me warm.” She raised her blanket.
Without needing further invitation, he stood and walked over to her. When he lay down behind her the day’s burdens eased from him. Sighing, he hugged her close, taking in the scent of her, and soon fell asleep.
Over the next four days Ancel pushed them as hard and fast as he dared. From time to time they encountered stray shadelings or a few still on their trail. The fights were short and brutal. They lost four more Dagodins.
In order to prevent the chance of being tracked, they avoided Forging whenever possible. Not that he minded. The essences’ corruption made him wary of touching Mater. He witnessed the occasional distorted haze on more than one occasion, and concluded it to be part of the change. Whenever he did Forge, he used a tiny amount of Prima, not wanting to exhaust his stores. The one advantage to doing so was the zyphyl’s report that the shadeling trackers couldn’t see Prima. As long as they weren’t Skadwaz. Ryne had agreed.
Ancel had expected to meet the caravan after the second or third day, but they had obviously made better time than he anticipated. After the fourth day, worry began to set in, but by evening all was well. Through the zyphyl Irmina had seen the refugees.
The reunion with the caravan was both happy and sorrowful. More grief than the former. Father greeted him with smiles before going into one of his rages, and Idnal was forced to subdue him.
As Ancel gazed at the Cogal Drin Mountains towering before them, he wondered what trials waited. The feeling that things had just begun would not leave him, not even when Irmina snaked an arm around his waist and leaned her head on his arm.
Intermezzo 1
Through his looking glass’ short metal tube Kester Merin watched the last of the strangers head into the pass, the dying vestiges of sunlight glinting off helms and armor. He ignored the misty swirls of his breath as it spiraled up. Why anyone would want to find a home in Benez’s ruins was beyond him. The spirits of the dead infested the place, part of the lingering taint left by the Shadowbearer and the atrocities he committed. It was said the man’s ghost roamed the ancient structures, and killed anyone who sought to rob the graves and the city itself of the riches rumored to be buried there. Kester knew of at least a dozen treasure hunters who’d braved these same mountains to venture into the cursed city. None of them ever returned. And yet that did not deter others from this same arduous trek.
Approaching Benez from the south was out of the question. The Netherwood spread southwest from near the Vallum of Light all the way east to the Sorrowful Hills. Near impenetrable, it was a godless place of massive black trees, the reek of decay, brooding shadows, and deformed beasts. He shuddered when he thought of the wood.
As a young hunter renowned for his penchant to seek out infamous creatures, for his willingness to take risks, his braver
y, and not to mention his skill, he’d sought to make an even bigger name for himself. The monsters he encountered in the Netherwood had disabused him of such notions. Wolves as big as a pony. Giant dartans, each of their six legs the size of a man, their snake-like necks thick enough to swallow a body whole, and their shells harder than any armor. Rockhounds so large that they put shame to the mountain lions he hunted up here in the Cogal Drin’s heights. With their bodies more stone than flesh, they had shrugged off his arrows as if the steel tips were mere nuisances. The worst of them all were the daggerpaws, manes bristling with hardened bones in the shape of swords long enough to skewer a man whole.
No sane person ventured into Benez.
What he’d seen in the Netherwood and the occasional howls and wails that echoed up through the passes to reach him here at the refuge in the Cogal Drin Mountains made him think of wraithwolves and other shadelings. He could easily picture the wolves, fur bristling black, walking on two legs like the stories claimed. The shadows flitting between the trees gave him nightmares of the tales he heard from old veterans, of men who were more smoke than flesh, whose tainted blades transformed the living into one of the shade’s creatures.
“They’re mad,” Abner said from next to him. The overly tall, wiry Felani had his own horror stories of Benez.
“Hmm, Hmm,” Kester replied absently.
“Worse than mad.” This from Nico, their Astocan counterpart. Mist spilled from the slits on the side of his neck that helped him to breathe. “Keeping daggerpaws for pets.” He shook his head in disbelief.
“And wolves,” Abner said as if they could forget.
When Kester first encountered the group he’d shot an arrow at one of their daggerpaws, thinking the creature was wild. The animal had shifted at the last moment, its bone hackles springing up into hardened knife-like protrusions that ran from its neck to its tail. His arrow clattered away harmlessly. Before the daggerpaw attacked, a man stepped from around the rocky outcrop. With fur covering only his chest and groin, standing a bit over six feet, and built like a draft horse, the stranger stared Kester down and strode through the snow as if the wind howling across the path was a summer breeze. Several other men and women followed, each capable of passing for the scout’s family, and more than one with large wolves or daggerpaws at their sides. Not far behind them came the remainder of the procession, many of them armed.
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