by Joe Jackson
She dashed over and helped her elestram benefactor dispatch his own opponent, and then they both started scaling the cliff again. With no more lightning strikes coming from below, and the rest of the pursuers too far behind, they made it to the top of the cliff. Kari had no sooner gotten both feet below her than the cliff shattered again, part of it falling away in another landslide. This time, Kari was able to glide to safety at the top of the cliff, ready for the world to fall away beneath her feet. Her companion, though, was not so lucky. Kari saw his head slam against stone, and then his body rolled lifelessly down the bluff with the rubble. Kari gritted her teeth, and the symbol of Zalkar glowed so furiously on her skin, she could swear it was burning her now.
“Murderer now, is it?” Kari growled at the succubus, bringing her weapons to bear as she approached. Kari felt Zalkar’s strength flowing through her veins. She hoped no harm had come to her baby in all the excitement, but she couldn’t worry about that at the moment. She had a succubus to deal with, and she could worry about the repercussions after she survived. “Your daughter was a rabid dog, and she was put down like a rabid dog.”
The succubus screamed in fury and unleashed some attack that made Kari’s hair stand on end even from the distance between them. This time, Sonja protected Kari, and the arcane attack bounced off of Sonja’s shield to shear off part of the rock face at the edge of the bluff. Another small avalanche and hail of shattered stones rained down the cliffs, and Kari wondered if those down below had retreated to safety. There was also the issue of the succubus defacing the land, which was one of the warnings Uldriana had given Sonja that Kari could actually remember. They had to end this quickly, and get away from the bluff before the arcane displays attracted the attention of Si’Dorra’s own hunters and guards.
“Take Se’sasha and go,” Sonja called over her shoulder. “I can handle this.”
“Are you sure?” Kari and Danilynn asked in unison.
“She’s powerful, but I can hold her off until she burns herself out, at least,” Sonja said. “Head into the woods! I’ll find you, one way or another. She won’t dare chase us into the realm of another king, so once we’re out of sight, we should be safe.”
“You assume much!” the succubus growled. She unleashed another attack, but this one was of a different nature. Rather than directly attack Sonja, she shattered the ground between the serilian-rir woman and the cliff face, and the newly crushed rocks slid swiftly toward the edge. Sonja leapt up and took wing briefly until she found purchase on solid ground again. Kari was surprised at the way their enemy circumvented Sonja’s shields.
Sonja did something, and Kari winced as bright sparks flew from an invisible shield in front of the succubus. The two exchanged more arcane strikes for half a minute before Sonja yelled for Kari and Danilynn to take Se’sasha and go. This time, they took her advice, and when Kari glanced back over her shoulder, she could see Sonja working to stop the succubus from harrying her friends further with magic. Soon, there was a substantial wall of trees between the two groups, and Kari concentrated on pushing Se’sasha further into the woods.
They were alone now; no erestram guides would be coming to give them a tour through Si’Dorra to get them safely to Pataria or Tess’Vorg. Now, Kari had to use what she knew of the movement of sun, stars, and moon to get her friends safely home. They paused in a thick stand of trees that may have grown from the same root bundle, and Kari bent over and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath. Zalkar’s symbol had stopped glowing, and the weariness and rubbery feeling in her arms and legs returned, so she sat down heavily.
Danilynn checked on Se’sasha, who made gestures of assurance that she was fine. The girl was still painfully thin and badly malnourished, but eating Danilynn’s conjured food was having a pretty obvious effect on Se’sasha’s energy levels. With the syrinthian girl satisfied that she was fine, Danilynn came over and checked on Kari. She didn’t even ask how Kari felt, she just put her warm hand on Kari’s lower belly and closed her eyes in concentration. Apparently, it wasn’t lost on the priestess that an electrical shock to her baby was foremost on Kari’s mind.
Danilynn breathed a sigh of relief and sat back on her heels. “Everything’s fine,” she said. “However you absorbed that shock, it doesn’t seem to have affected anything where your baby is concerned.” She rose to her feet and patted Kari’s shoulder. “Did you swear a Blood Oath and not tell us? That was the third time I’ve seen Zalkar’s symbol show up on you.”
“Third time?” Kari breathed hoarsely. Her baby may have been fine, but the rest of her was paying the price for that. Too many days of not enough sleep, or food, or even simple things like a proper bed or a bath were taking their toll. Had she felt this way in wartime, she’d have taken it as a sign of personal weakness, but her maternal instincts were letting her cut herself a lot of slack under the circumstances.
“You didn’t notice it happen when we were in front of King Sekassus?” Danilynn asked.
Kari thought about it; the meeting with Sekassus seemed like it had happened months ago. Only the summoned urn hanging from Danilynn’s pack brought the memories back to Kari fully, but she still didn’t remember Zalkar’s symbol appearing during the meeting. She remembered it flashing when she’d made the promise to avenge Uldriana, but if that had counted as swearing a Blood Oath, she had done so without conscious thought. Had Zalkar taken it upon himself to simply grant her one? She had never heard of such a thing; it would require asking the Council of the Order when she returned home.
“I don’t remember,” she finally answered. “I didn’t swear an Oath, though, so I’m not sure what it means. Might just be Zalkar warning our enemies?”
“As if they’re smart enough to take heed,” Danilynn spat. She took a minute to kneel down and pray, and when she was finished, she had conjured some more of their divine food and drink. She passed it out, set aside some for Sonja, and then started to take her fill of it. Around bites of the tasteless, spongy food, she asked, “How long should we wait before we go back and look for Sonja?”
“No need,” came the sorceress’ voice, and she suddenly appeared among them. She took note of the shocked expressions on Kari and Danilynn’s faces, and added, “It should be fine if I use my masking spell here; no one in Si’Dorra is looking for it.”
“Are you all right?” Kari asked, and Danilynn echoed her sentiments a second later.
“Fine,” Sonja said, though she didn’t sound like it. “I drove her off, half with my arcane power, half by telling her she’d be crazy to follow us into Si’Dorra after damaging its border. But that doesn’t mean she won’t be waiting for us somewhere else…maybe even in Tess’Vorg or Pataria.”
“She may just be angry enough to try in Anthraxis,” Danilynn muttered. “That woman was furious.”
Kari straightened out and sighed. “Not sure I understand why; Turillia didn’t seem to feel anything for her parents when I heard her mention them. Well, nothing good, anyway, and she really only mentioned her father’s people, but still….”
“The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, as they say,” Danilynn said.
Kari thought on that for a minute; had that been the reasoning behind the name of the school she went to as a child? She shook the thoughts away, afraid of getting embroiled in those old, bad memories again. Instead, she focused on her sister-in-law. “You were able to drive her off, though?” she asked. “She wasn’t too powerful?”
“Oh, she’s powerful, but one of the things…,” she paused for a second, her breath caught. She frowned, took a deep breath, and sighed. “One of the things Uldriana taught me was that someone who is completely focused on hurting you is actually very easy to repulse, compared to someone who’s interested in besting you.”
“You mean like when she tried collapsing the cliff instead of just killing us outright?” Danilynn asked, and Sonja nodded. The fures-rir priestess turned to Kari. “Remember when the Warlord had us collapse the mountainside t
o clear out the brys archers that had perched behind us? And it wiped out a few columns of enemy infantry, too.”
Kari nodded somewhat absently. She was glad Sonja was able to repel the succubus and her magical power, but even with Danilynn’s assurances, Kari was still nervous for her child. They may have gotten lucky this time, but she was not looking forward to fending off attacks from the succubus or anyone else the entire way back to Anthraxis. She stood up and looked west, her eyes seeing only pines before her, but her memory showing her the high peaks of mountains beyond the forest. That way, she knew, lay Mas’tolinor, the one realm she was forbidden to enter.
She turned east, then, and gestured away into the forest. “Near as I can figure, it’s going to take us about ten or eleven days to get back to the northern border of Tess’Vorg if we follow the border here,” she said. “I have no idea how dangerous Si’Dorra will be, but honestly, I don’t imagine it can be any worse than Sorelizar was. At the very least, though, we’re going to want to be far from here in case anyone comes looking to see who all the arcane damage was from.”
“Well, let’s finish eating, and we’ll see if we can put some distance behind us,” Danilynn said. “Se’sasha may need to rest before we can travel again; that climb was tough even on me.”
“Got too used to working in a temple, did you?” Kari teased. The fures-rir priestess laughed and waved away the joke.
Se’sasha watched them closely after hearing her name, but she offered no words in her own language. When she finished eating and drinking, though, she rose and gestured eagerly to the east. Kari glanced at Sonja and Danilynn, and they both agreed with the syrinthian girl’s unspoken sentiments. Kari got to her feet and her friends followed suit, and they set off to the east for as long as their weary legs would take them.
“Should we get back to traveling during the day?” Kari asked. “Without Etolivor or any places to hide, I’m not sure sleeping during the day would be smart.”
“No, I agree,” Sonja replied. “Let’s push ourselves through the morning and afternoon, even if we have to take frequent breaks, and then we can get back into a regular schedule.”
The first day of getting back on schedule was rough, but the companions found that the forested edge of Si’Dorra that dropped down to Sorelizar below was fairly devoid of life. Only the hooting of the owls at night and the screech of high-circling birds of prey during the day really broke up the muted monotony of the wind and the crunch of pine needles. The smell of the forest was quite pleasant, reminding Kari of the more northern portions of the wooded continent of Terrassia, and at times it was hard to believe they were in the middle of “the underworld.”
Se’sasha’s strength started to wane again after a couple of days, and she made an effort to mime what the problem was to Kari and her friends. It seemed that though the divine sustenance Danilynn was conjuring kept her energetic, the woman needed meat. Once they finished their travels on the third day in Si’Dorra, Kari got the folding bow off the side of her pack and went out to hunt. Even a wild turkey or similar game animal would probably do the syrinthian girl wonders, and they could let her have as much as she needed: the divine food was of no issue to the rir women.
Kari crept along as quietly as she could among the old pine needles, and even managed to bite down a choice expletive when she stepped on a dried, sharp pine cone. Ketava, she hissed, and then nearly laughed at herself. Animals seemed to stay pretty far from the bluff, and Kari wondered if it was natural for them, or if there were other hunters out here on the edges of Si’Dorra. Certainly any erestram or mallasti living out in the wilds away from civilization would be hunting to keep their families fed. After nearly an hour of looking, Kari had found neither game nor tracks, or signs of any having been in the area.
What she did find before she turned back to the camp, however, made her hackles rise. She approached a pine tree slowly, staring wide-eyed at the delicate image carved carefully into a single piece of bark. That she had even noticed it was testament to the fact that her hunters’ eyes were still sharp from her lessons among the elves. That very training was doubly important in this situation: the marking she saw, unless it was an incredible coincidence, had been left by an elven ranger from Laeranore, the elven woodlands of Terrassia.
Kari ran her fingers over the piece of bark softly; it seemed to have been carved in the last few days, based on the fresh edges of the cuts. She glanced around for a couple of minutes, and then up, but if there was an elven ranger nearby, they were keeping themselves hidden for the time being. Kari reached up absently and snapped a short, brittle branch that had long since stopped getting enough light at its elevation. She then drew a knife from the back of her belt and spent a few minutes carving a message of her own on the bark below the elven mark.
Kari returned to the camp and made an apologetic gesture toward Se’sasha, who simply bowed her head in thanks for Kari’s effort. Kari sat and accepted some of the food Danilynn had conjured, but she also pulled out the remains of her trail mix and offered some of it to Se’sasha. The syrinthian girl ate some of the berries and nuts, then she took some food from Danilynn and sat down to eat. Kari stared at Se’sasha for a minute, wishing desperately that she had some means to communicate with the girl. Still, she remembered there was likely little the girl could tell them about anything, especially the lay of the land in Si’Dorra.
“Just so you know, I found something strange out in the woods while I was hunting,” Kari told her friends over dinner. “Unless it’s just an amazing coincidence, I found the mark of a hunter, and it looked like it was left by an elven ranger from Laeranore.”
“Laeranore?” Danilynn repeated with a gasp.
“What would an elven ranger be doing here?” Sonja wondered aloud.
“He could have been brought back here against his will after the battle with Arku on Terrassia during the War,” Danilynn said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Kari said. “It’s possible it was left by an erestram or something, but that their marks would be so close to those of an elf seems unlikely. So I left a return message: ‘Join us by sunset, we head east.’ If it’s an elf, we’ll probably see them in the next couple of days. If not, whoever left that mark will probably have no idea what I was saying.”
They slept the night in shifts, and Sonja did her best to get enough rest first so she could take the morning watch and let Kari in particular get more sleep. The nights could be tense without Sonja’s masking spell, and Kari remembered how exposed she had felt when they did so outside of Braxus Gaswell’s fortress some three years before. At least then, they weren’t being actively hunted, they weren’t in enemy lands to the extent they were now, and they’d had a lot more people to keep watch – half-guardians who could forgo sleep not the least of them. Still, the night remained quiet but for the sounds of nocturnal nature.
The next day passed quietly, just as the ones before. There were no sightings of anyone living in Si’Dorra, no attacks by the succubus, and no sign that anyone even knew they were travelling along the border between Si’Dorra and Sorelizar. They chanced coming out of the woods now and then to look down the bluff into Sorelizar and get their bearings. Kari was pretty sure they had passed the center of Sorelizar, and the way the land graded down toward that arid center of King Sekassus’ domain made it easy to confirm. They still had nearly a week’s worth of travel ahead of them to reach Tess’Vorg, but if things continued as they were, it wouldn’t be bad at all.
Kari kept alert, her hands near her hilts as they made camp that evening. Sonja kept her masking spell up despite the fact that they were expecting company, reasoning that should the elf show themselves, she could dispel her magic. Kari gave their potential elf visitor some time to show themselves, but eventually she took out her bow and decided to try hunting for Se’sasha again. Sonja and Danilynn bid her be careful, and she acknowledged their warnings with a nod before she headed further into the woods.
The scent of a wood fire b
lew past her when she got a decent distance from the camp, and Kari scanned the forest, trying to determine which way the smoke was blowing from. There had to be a cabin nearby, but despite her changing views of the beshathan people, as Uldriana had called them, she was still leery about meeting any – especially in Arku’s realm. Of more interest to her were the tracks of a flock of large ground birds – turkeys, she thought, no matter what the people of Mehr’Durillia might call them. Or close enough, anyway.
She briefly considered that the birds might “belong” to whoever owned the cabin, but it seemed a reasonable risk to take. If worse came to worst, she and her friends would probably be long gone by the time the beshathan farmer or woodsman realized they’d lost a bird. Kari made an even greater effort to be quiet, walking high on her toes and trying to crunch as few needles under her feet as possible while she stalked down some prey. After several minutes, she saw movement through the trees, and heard the strange, high-pitched sounds of the birds ahead.
Kari wasted no time. As soon as she got into position for a good shot, she let an arrow fly and dropped one of the birds. The rest of the flock scattered, but Kari wasn’t as worried about it as she might have been if she was planning to take more of them over the next few days. Instead, she hurried forward, made sure her felled quarry was dead, and then picked it up and hastened back to the camp. It felt as though the forest had eyes, and those of the turkeys that marked her retreat weren’t the ones that bothered her. She wanted to be back at the camp before any inquisitive beshathans decided to see who was hunting in their territory.
The others looked up when Kari returned, and there was a strange expression on Se’sasha’s face when she beheld Kari carrying the dead bird. It seemed to be a mixture of shock and gratitude, and Kari was satisfied with that. She put away her bow and the arrow, which she was thankfully able to salvage; she carried only two, so losing one was always aggravating. She sat down and began preparing the bird to be cooked, and Danilynn used one of her smaller axes to dig a hole for burying the bird’s feathers, guts, and blood once Kari was ready to butcher it.
