Well, he thought, if I can’t use my feet to proper advantage anymore, my hands will simply have to do all the work.
As the lioness clawed, he met the attacks with stop cuts.
At first, the tactic worked. The saber cut deep, and the punishment kept the cat from striking home. He even slashed out one of its amber eyes. But he didn’t kill it or make it relent, and after a breath or two, it caught the saber with another swipe and knocked it out of line.
It reared, exposing its chest and belly, and Anton thrust with the cutlass in the desperate hope of piercing its heart.
He at least felt the blade slide into muscle and scrape a rib. But then the lioness crashed into him and bore him down beneath it. The brush crunched as it gave way beneath their weight.
The cat’s weight crushed him against the ground. Its remaining eye glared down at him, and the blood from its gashed countenance spattered down into his. More gore drooled from its mouth.
Pinned, helpless, Anton could only will the lioness to die. The ploy worked no better than he expected. The beast spread its jaws wide enough to engulf his head.
Then a spike or blade seemingly made of shadow popped out of the back of the lioness’s mouth like a second tongue, stopping just a finger length before it would have pierced Anton’s head as well. The vague shape gave off a perceptible chill during the moment of its existence, then withered away to nothing.
Fortunately, though, it had endured long enough to accomplish its purpose. The lion collapsed on top of its erstwhile adversary.
Anton struggled to shift the carcass and squirm out from underneath. Then, grunting, two of the Thayans rolled the body off him.
As he rose, the reaver looked around. Stedd was close at hand, and Ehmed Sepandem had evidently appointed himself the boy’s temporary bodyguard in Anton’s absence. Good.
And for the moment, no more lions were making a run at the travelers. That too was good.
Breathing hard, Anton gave Umara a grin. “I’m glad you didn’t feel obliged to hurry.”
The wizard snorted. “Whiner. I cast the spell in time to save you, didn’t I?”
“What now?” Ehmed asked, an edge of impatience in his tone.
“That makes two dead lions and only one dead human,” Anton replied. “And we wounded the only other beast we’ve seen. Maybe it, and any others like it, will give up.”
“Do you really believe that?” the Thayan captain asked.
“No,” Anton admitted. “Not if some lurking puppet master is driving the animals to hunt us. The best we can reasonably hope for is that there’s only one lion left, but there’s little reason to assume even that.”
“If magic is controlling them,” Umara said, “then perhaps that’s what it will take to chase them away. Everyone, keep watch while I try something.”
She pushed back her cowl to bare her shaven scalp and drew a long wand of some dark, mottled wood from a hidden sheath sewn in her robes. She took a long breath, then exploded into motion, whipping the rod through an intricate figure with tight, precise motions that would have done credit to a duelist. She finished by pointing it at the sky, whereupon she froze.
She remained silent and held the position long enough for Anton to wonder if she’d forgotten what came next. Then she started murmuring. The rhythmic lines didn’t repulse him the way Kymas’s incantations had, but they projected a noticeable pulse of energy that made him feel as though he was being prodded on each of the rhyming words.
Gradually, Umara’s voice crescendoed, and as it rose to a shout, she lowered the wand, held it outward, and turned in a circle.
Crackling yellow flame leaped up where she pointed. Thayans recoiled from the heat, and Stedd goggled at the spectacle. When the wizard finished, a ring of fire encircled her companions and herself. Like the blaze aboard the Iron Jest, it burned fiercely despite the rain and the wet.
Except, Anton suspected, not really. A moment later, Umara confirmed his guess: “Don’t worry. We’re in no danger of burning up. This is an illusion. But fire ought to scare off wild animals if anything can.”
She lashed the wand from left to right as though making a horizontal sword cut. With a roar, the ring of fire simultaneously leaped higher and rushed outward, seemingly setting brush and branches alight as it expanded.
Anton grinned. An onrushing threat like this should spook any beast, even if some warlock or demon was whispering in its ear.
But the fire had only traveled several paces outward when a thunderous roar reverberated through the forest. Reeling, all but deafened, Anton couldn’t tell if the ground was literally shaking or if the prodigious noise had simply overwhelmed his sense of equilibrium. He did see that it extinguished the illusory conflagration as suddenly and completely as a man’s breath could puff out a candle.
He staggered a step, caught his balance, then grabbed Stedd and steadied him as well. After that, he peered through the trees and the rain to find the power that had overmatched Umara’s.
His eyes were drawn to a dot of flickering blue light amid the grayness. It had an indefinable but undeniable wrongness to it that made him want to flinch in the same way that Kymas’s spells had made him want to cover his ears. He kept peering instead and determined that the glow appeared somehow attached to another quadrupedal and possibly leonine form. Then the enormous cat, if that was what it was, stalked into a stand of oaks and disappeared.
“What was that?” asked Stedd.
“The master of the pride,” Anton replied. “Above and beyond that, I don’t know.”
“The light is blue fire,” Umara said. “The chaotic force that maimed the world a hundred years ago. And if our enemy is bound to it, the thing is spellscarred or conceivably even plaguechanged.”
“Does that mean your magic is no use against it?” Anton asked.
The Red Wizard glowered. “I’ll kill it if I have to.” She took a breath. “But I confess, if it remains content to harry us by sending normal lions at us, I won’t complain.”
“Is it trying to catch me to give to Evendur Highcastle?” asked Stedd.
Umara shook her head. “Who knows? It may have sensed your power and craved it for itself.”
“Whatever it wants,” Anton said, “it’s not here to make friends.” He looked up at the sky, or what little he could see of it through the tree limbs, and attempted the always-frustrating task of gauging the position of the sun despite the cloud cover. “We need to move. We’ll want a better place to go to ground if the thing is still stalking us come nightfall.”
They pressed onward. In time, they heard another cough off to the left. Men jumped, then craned and turned, searching for the source of the noise. Until a growl from the right answered the first noise and made everyone lurch around in the other direction.
From that point forward, coughs, snarls, and the occasional roar sounded periodically. The lions were demonstrating there were several of them still alive and shadowing their prey.
Once in a while, someone caught a glimpse of a brown shape slipping from one bit of cover to the next. Then the Thayan men-at-arms hastily raised their bows and crossbows and shot. Umara started an incantation, then broke off partway through when her target disappeared. The power she’d been gathering to herself dissipated with a sizzling sound and a crimson shimmer.
Anton took a couple hurried shots of his own before he realized what was going on. Then he called, “Hold it! Stop shooting. The lions are showing themselves to provoke us into wasting our quarrels, and Lady Umara her spells.”
“May the Black Hand take it,” Ehmed growled, “you’re right. Everybody, do as the Turmishan says. Don’t shoot unless a lion is making a run at us.”
As the travelers resumed their trek, Umara came to tramp alongside Anton and Stedd. “I don’t like the way our enemy keeps trying new tricks,” she said. “Or anything else about this situation. We’d be better off taking our chances along the shore.”
Anton pushed an eye-level branch out of th
eir way. “It’s a little late for that to qualify as a useful insight.”
She frowned. “I wasn’t finding fault.”
“I know.” He reached to touch her shoulder, hesitated for an instant, and then followed through. She didn’t protest the familiarity. “I just … anyway, if we think it the wiser course, we can head back to the strand and try dodging Mourmyd Jacerryl and those like him. But we won’t make it out of the forest before nightfall.”
“And traveling in the dark with the lions lurking to pick us off would be suicide. You mentioned finding a safe place to camp.”
Anton snorted. “Yes, being the master woodsman I am. I was thinking of high ground or a clearing. Something.”
Now it was her turn to give him a fleeting touch on the forearm. “Maybe we’ll still come to a spot like that before sunset.”
Instead, they passed one blighted tree and then more, with twisted, knobby, arthritic-looking limbs and chancrous patches in their bark. Though Anton noticed, at first, he didn’t care; he had more urgent matters to occupy him than the health of this particular part of the woods. But then, as the gray light filtering down through the canopy was growing even more anemic, he spotted a blue glow.
Thinking the lions’ master had worked its way around ahead of the company, he snatched his crossbow from its bag and drew breath to shout a warning. Then he realized the azure light was only one of a dozen such flames flickering on the ground, in the midst of thickets, or in treetops without setting anything else on fire.
A warning was still in order, but one of the marines shouted it before he could: “That’s plagueland!”
And so it was. A patch of earth where, a century later, the blue fire of the Spellplague still burned. Anton had never seen such a place before, but by all accounts, they were rife with peculiar dangers.
Umara glowered at the poisoned landscape. “Was the leader of the pride driving us here? Is it more powerful in plagueland?”
Anton shook his head. “If a Red Wizard doesn’t know, how should I? I’m just glad we didn’t blunder deeper into the area before realizing where we were. Look, we don’t have enough daylight left to find a way around it. We need to make camp. We can chop brush to make barricades, and we’ll want fires. Big ones, even if you have to spend some of your power to make wet wood burn like dry.”
The wizard’s lips quirked upward in a weary little smile. “I thought you weren’t a woodsman.”
“In my time, I’ve maneuvered around a port or two to attack by surprise from the landward side. Sadly, in this company, that makes me about as close to Gwaeron Windstrom as we’re likely to come.”
Chopping brush proved to be nervous work. Though he checked often and had Stedd standing watch as well, Anton kept suspecting that a lion was stealing up on him while he was intent on his task. But he and his companions finished building their boma before nightfall, even if it did look too low and flimsy to slow an attacking great cat for more than a moment.
The fires were somewhat more reassuring. Umara’s words of command made the flames leap high and burn bright. They might actually serve as a deterrent … assuming the master of the pride couldn’t extinguish a real blaze as easily as an illusory one.
Men faced outward, staring. Some gnawed biscuits and smoked fish, but at first, despite the exhausting day’s march, no one tried to sleep. Everybody was too tense.
Snuffling and wiping at a runny nose, a sailor voiced the common expectation: “They’ll come to finish this when it’s full dark. Night is when a lion normally hunts.”
And, Anton thought, the cats might well come from the direction of the plagueland, precisely because that was the one direction in which they hadn’t revealed their presence during the day. So he kept watch in that direction, where the murk was like a desolate sky in which only a handful of blue stars burned. Of course, he thought wryly, even a handful was more than anyone in the vicinity of the Inner Sea had beheld since the start of the Great Rain.
The azure flames wavered like ordinary ones, and together with the blackness, that made it difficult to tell if they were doing anything else. But abruptly, Anton saw, or thought he saw, that one was growing gradually larger. Or rather, coming closer.
For an instant, he was certain he was seeing the unnatural blaze bonded to the master of the pride. Then the blue fire flowed straight through briars, dimly illuminating the closest stems and stickers in the process, and he perceived it wasn’t attached to anything. It was drifting by itself like a will-o’-the-wisp.
That only made it somewhat less alarming. Anton turned to alert Umara in the hope that her wizardry could douse the flame. When he did, though, he spied Stedd, seated cross-legged among men who were too busy watching for the foe to pay him any mind, staring intently at the approaching glow.
Anton almost shouted at the boy, then remembered that the Thayan mariners didn’t know Stedd the way he did, were already on edge, and might react with brutal dispatch to anyone who seemed to be trying to make an already perilous situation worse. He took the young prophet by the arm, hauled him to his feet, and led him to a spot as far from the others as the confines of the boma afforded.
“Were you pulling the blue fire closer?” Anton whispered.
Stedd nodded.
“In Asmodeus’s name, why?” Anton had to make an effort to keep his voice down. “Blue fire isn’t a toy! It could kill us in a heartbeat. Or twist us into forms so foul we wouldn’t want to live.”
“I wasn’t playing with it! I was figuring it out!”
“Again, why? Never mind, I know. Because your dead god wants you to. Well, as usual, he has a wretched sense of timing. Help the rest of us keep watch, and you, Umara, and I can discuss blue fire in the morning.”
The night wore on. The crackling, smoking fires burned down, and the company built them up again with more deadwood and Umara’s cantrips. Safely above the reach of lions, an owl hooted, but otherwise, any animals in the area kept quiet. Despite the grinding tension, a couple weary men eventually lay down on the ground and dozed with their weapons under their hands.
Anton sat for a time, then stood up and stretched. His back popped. He took a drink from his water bottle, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and took a fresh look at the blue lights.
Then, like the world itself was splitting in two, a prodigious roar pounded out of the darkness. Dropping the bottle, he cringed from it. So did everyone else.
At least, he realized, the fires weren’t going out. But wide-eyed men were stumbling, intent only on covering their ears, and surely, the lions were already charging.
“Fight!” Anton bellowed. The roar was fading, but even so, he wasn’t sure anybody heard him.
“Fight!” Ehmed echoed, and then Umara did the same. Still, it didn’t look like the rest of the Thayans were heeding the command. Meanwhile, bounding shadows converged on the circle of brush.
“Help us!” Stedd shrilled. He held out his hand to the east, and red-gold light pulsed across the campsite. Purged of panic and confusion, the Thayans gripped their weapons and came on guard just as the first lions sought to jump the boma.
Anton shot at the nearest target, a lioness, and the quarrel flew harmlessly over its back. The animal scrambled over the barricade and lunged at him, and, backpedaling, he hurled the crossbow at the felid’s snarling face. It glanced off the beast’s skull without slowing it even slightly.
Anton saw that his blades couldn’t clear their scabbards before the lioness reached him, nor, with men and beasts battling on either side, could he evade by springing right or left. But his scurrying retreat had brought him to a point where a fire seared his back, and he hopped back into the yellow blaze.
He meant to keep moving right out the other side, but his foot caught on a piece of burning wood, and he fell down amid glowing orange coals and ash. The heat of the blaze closed around him like a fist and invaded his airways, too.
Scattering embers and scraps of burning wood, he rolled and flung himself
clear of the fire. Then, gasping, taking stock, he decided he was likely blistered but not burned worse than that. His clothing wasn’t on fire, and the lioness wasn’t pursuing him through the flames. He felt a surge of relief until he realized he and Stedd were now on opposite sides of the boma.
He tried to reach the boy as expeditiously as possible, but there was no way to force his way through the press except by fighting. He slashed a lion’s back legs out from under it while it was intent on a marine, and when its hindquarters dropped, the Thayan thrust a boarding pike into its vitals. Afterward, Anton managed four more strides and then had to clear his path by helping two other mariners kill a different beast.
So far, he and his companions appeared to be holding their own. But how many lions were there? Amid the howling chaos of lunging bodies and dazzling flame, it was impossible to tell.
Anton rounded the fire through which he’d rolled, spotted Stedd, and breathed a sigh of relief. Along with one of the zombies, Ehmed Sepandem stood so as to shield the boy from attackers. The leonine body on the ground in front of him showed he was doing a fair job of it.
But then a shape as long as Falrinn Greatorm’s sailboat and as tall as the lowest yard on a square-rigger’s mast bounded out of the darkness. Coupled with its hugeness, its mane of blue fire should have revealed its approach when it was still some distance away, but it seemed to spring from nowhere all in an instant.
The gigantic lion could have simply stepped over the thorny barricade in front of it. Instead, the beast trampled and crushed it, perhaps because it didn’t even notice it was there.
Mindlessly impervious to awe or fear, the zombie lurched forward with boarding pike upraised, and the lion swiped at it. The attack ripped the animated corpse apart and smashed some of the pieces flat.
His sour face resolute, Ehmed stepped forward with a javelin in one hand and a cutlass in the other. Rushing forward to support him, Anton glimpsed a lioness lunging in on his flank.
The Reaver Page 21
