Ahead, the white ringhawk hovered among the trees, waiting for him to catch up.
Every instinct screamed that he had been lured from Turo and Haaraka into the jaws of an Imperial trap. He stared ahead, sure at any moment that he would hear answering howls as his enemies converged. All this running, struggling, bleeding, all the trust he had dared show to these disparate allies and former foes would be for nothing. He would return to where he had started, a prisoner awaiting execution.
The Guardian stirred as if in answer. It had raised his antlers earlier in the run and mended all his wounds, except for the spots on his shoulders where the Thorn’s gifts still throbbed. Cob sensed that it could expel the thorns if it wanted to, but it seemed to recognize that they were marks of truce.
The rest of the work had been left to him, and he had managed to wrap himself in haphazard bark armor with a few loose pebbles—not the heavy stone he was used to, but not the meager mud he had worn in his dream training either. Most of his attention had been on his companions, on their heartbeats and weariness, their aches and hangovers, and he had done his best to draw strength from the earth and spread it out among them. Now the crusted snow broke before him as if from a ship’s prow, and his companions followed in a tight line, breathing as one, their footsteps falling in cadence: a gestalt, a herd, a single unit of life moving in harmony.
The howls broke the crystalline quiet again, and with great reluctance Cob reached out with his senses, still keeping up the pace.
There was life among the branches, in the bushes, under the snow. He felt the small heartbeats of hibernating rodents and nesting birds, but nothing bigger than an average barn-cat. Some yards to the south was the strange sensation of the Haarakash barrier, and in between Cob felt the network of roots and branches that made up the sleeping forest, content to wait for the warmth and light of spring.
Ahead, at the limit of his senses, something seemed off.
But it was the feeling from behind that held his attention.
Hearts. Many of them. Pounding in their own erratic rhythm, pumping poison through predator bodies and filling the woods with the reek of corrupted life. Not wholly unnatural, not artificial, but twisted—tortured, dying but unable to stay dead. Full of a vitriol that burned them as much as it would their victims.
Just sensing them made Cob feel dizzy with disgust. His awareness of such things had been blunted before now, and the tormented aura of the pack bearing down on him was almost too much to stomach.
And they were faster. They were gaining on him.
He clenched his teeth and ducked his head, aiming his antlers forward at some invisible enemy. Reaching into the earth, he pulled more strength into his legs and through the connection to his herd, picking up the pace, his pack jouncing across his back as he set the new rhythm.
Another howl. Fear like a flutter of displaced birds flashed up from his herd. They were tough, he knew, and none of them were as prey-blooded as him, but no one enjoyed being hunted.
He tried to count the enemy, but beside Dasira’s gut-wrenching presence, they were too many to focus on. Enough to know that they outnumbered his herd enough to pull them all down. No option to stand and fight in his state—tired, still reeling from Haaraka, constantly bleeding support to the others. There was only flight, until the hounds snapped at the stragglers’ heels and forced him as the stag to turn and defend.
He stared ahead, striding strong through the splitting snow, and tried to feel the shape of the land before him. To think tactically, grasp for any choke-point that he could push his herd through and then hold against the pursuit. But the forest stretched on, only the great arcs of old roots breaking up the trail. And beyond these trees, beyond the span of sight—
To the northeast, the land was numb.
He stumbled briefly as he sensed it. An arc of agitated earth and then dead emptiness, like a chancre in the world. On reflex he cast his senses into the trees instead, and flinched to find them screaming in their slow soundless way, rotting from the roots up. Like most here, their trunks were banded with fire-scars, but they were suppurating too—leaking their sap like lifeblood. Down below the snow, below the frozen earth, he tasted poison in the water-table. Oxidizing metal, filmy white fungus and black rot.
Instinct told him to turn south, but that was Haaraka. It was too dangerous to bring the others close to the barrier.
He looked northeast and saw a vast lake through the trees.
Once, it must have been lovely. Even now, with pristine snow upon its shore, it held some cold allure, like a pane of black glass set in a white lead frame. Stumps and skeletons of dead trees littered its banks, and the ones that clung to life nevertheless leaned drunkenly, as if their roots had failed to hold them. In a few spots, the burned husks of buildings protruded through winter’s cloak like rotten teeth.
Distant across the frozen expanse was an island like a grey jewel set untwinkling in its stark setting. Squat buildings ringed its lower slopes, and its pinnacle looked scooped-out, like a puncture in the flesh of the land. No trees clad it, nor did earth or even snow. To Cob’s eye it looked like raw rock, cruel and unwelcoming.
He felt nothing from it. Nothing at all past the tilted ring of dying trees.
An Imperial station, he thought, but that felt wrong. This was no place for people, not even soldiers. It was the sort of place that would eat at the mind slowly, at the soul, until whoever was assigned to that cold chunk of rock was no longer human.
He felt the others’ eyes turn toward it, the tingle of their fear reflecting his own, and he thought to cut sharply northward and circumvent it the long way around. The land between it and Haaraka was pinched with agony, and he was loath to traverse it.
But to turn north now would be to lose his lead. The hounds would catch them long before they could skirt the lake.
“Can you call the mist?” he shouted.
“No. Not here,” said Ilshenrir.
“The shadows?”
“Pike no, not before they reach us,” said Lark.
Cob swallowed. The lake drew closer with every stride, and the Guardian shrank deeper and deeper within him. There was no time to dither. Veer or go straight.
So he chose the gauntlet. It preserved his only other option: pushing the others through the Haarakash barrier whether they liked it or not.
For their sake, he thought, We won’t get caught. I won’t allow it.
No matter what.
*****
Dasira tasted their prey’s fear, and so did the hounds, for they howled until their voices fractured into horrible human-like cackles. She wanted to drive Serindas into the skull of the hound she rode, but knew that would be like cutting off her own foot in this race.
Instead she kept her eyes on the trail of beaten snow that Cob had left.
The cold wind raked through her hair and she thought, They can’t keep this pace. Cob can run forever but not fast enough, and the hounds won’t tire. Not now that they have his scent.
This is my fault, so I’ll fix it. How?
The lake was just coming into view, Akarridi small and forbidding at its center. They were already riding at the edge of its defenses, she knew, and did not understand why Cob did not swing southward. The Haarakash barrier should be miles away, giving him plenty of space to run without alerting Akarridi.
But it had been twenty years since her last visit. Haaraka could have crept closer.
Silently she cursed the sentient Summerland, cursed Akarridi and all its denizens, cursed the Golds, Cob, herself. Everyone with their stupid quarrels, always doing their best to close the distance and strangle each other, crushing every other option in their path. If Cob was this close to Akarridi because the Haarakash barrier had moved north, then it was only a matter of time before he tripped Akarridi’s wards. Only a matter of time before the sky swarmed with haelhene and the ground with akarriden wielders.
For the first time since her assignment to Cob, she knew she needed her maker
’s help.
The shame and hate that arose at the thought nearly washed it away, but she clung stubbornly. Whatever had passed between Enkhaelen and Cob in Haaraka, it could not have ended the bastard’s obsession with this project, so even if he laughed in her face, he had to help. She would not let pride get in her way.
One eye on Calett, she reached back to slide Serindas from its sheath, then lifted it to her right ear to touch the flat of the blade to the stud.
Immediately the arcane device sparked, sending pain shooting through the side of her face. She winced and tucked the blade out of sight but did not sheathe it, ready to try again. The lake drew closer with each breath, and far ahead she thought she glimpsed fleeing movement among the trees.
Long silence passed, the stud still spitting the occasional spark. Teeth gritted, she was about to lift Serindas again when she heard faintly, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
“Cob. Akarridi. Help,” she hissed, and saw Calett glance sidelong after her.
Another silence.
Then: ‘Strike team en route.’
The hairs on the back of her neck lifted. Never had she gotten a response from him so devoid of mockery, so to the point. She did not know whether to be relieved or panicked.
Instead, she jammed Serindas into its sheath and switched hands on the hound’s collar to yank her left glove off with her teeth. The bracer twinged on her arm, then her left hand spasmed as tendrils burrowed beneath the muscle all the way to the fingertips. She reached forward to clamp her hand on the back of the hound’s neck and concentrated on pushing the tendrils out from under her nails and through a gap in the chitinous plates, into its spine.
The beast yelped and jerked, breaking from the pack. Eyes nearly shut, she sent the bracer’s tendrils up the hound’s vertebrae and into the base of its brain, and suddenly she had eight limbs, two sets of eyes, and a small spare mind that struggled against her pointed orders. The hound stumbled and nearly fell, but then the control-strands took over fully, the same way they had for every body Dasira had ever stolen, and the hound was hers.
She saw through the hound’s eyes as Calett shouted at her in concern. The other hounds rushed by, buffeting her with their plated flanks, and though the senvraka tried to come around, the pack mentality pushed the hounds onward together, letting him do little more than slow down.
Dasira took a moment to focus on the four limbs touching the ground, and make sure that the four that were not had properly locked in place so that she would not slide off. Then she wheeled around and lunged for the trailing mages.
I should have practiced this more, she thought as she went for one Gold-robe’s throat but only managed to whack him broadside with her uncoordinated bulk. The impact knocked him free of his levitation spell and broke his main ward, though, and when she leapt on him again he put an energy bolt through the hound’s chest but could not keep her borrowed teeth from his neck. Hot blood filled her mouth at the same moment that pain bloomed through her front, but she pushed that second sensation away, feeding the hound adrenaline through the thin connection to the bracer.
The other mages were still skidding along behind the hounds, but several had turned their attention on her, hands weaving nets of power. Calett too had managed to control his mount and now charged her, regulation sword drawn, a look of confused fury on his handsome face.
Dasira got her four new feet under herself and took off perpendicular to the group. She would not score another easy kill but she could definitely split the Gold team, and since conflict with Akarridi was now inevitable…
Akarridi’s haelhene liked the Gold Army no better than they liked anyone else.
She burst out from the dying trees, her paws pattering on untrammeled snow for only a moment before they hit the ice-coated rocks. There was no barrier here, no sense of having tripped an alarm, but she did not have to feel it to know that her presence had been noticed. Behind her she heard Calett shouting again and felt the tingle of his pheromone-influence trying to turn her, but she was as much hound now as she was female, and hounds lived only to kill and feed. They had been people once—people who had done terrible things—but now were castrated tools, and neither senvraka nor lagalaina had the power to break her bracer’s hold.
Turning, she saw several ruengriin on hounds pursuing her, as well as Calett and one sledding mage. With one of her human limbs she drew the blade from its sheath, reveling in its bloodlust.
Then she charged.
*****
The howls closed in on them and Cob realized grimly that he should have stood and fought outside of this zone of tortured earth. His hold on the Guardian’s powers kept fraying, his steps losing their speed, and he heard his friends’ breathing turn harsh as more of the fatigue of the run seeped through.
As for the numbness, there was no end in sight. Every inch of lake and shore was a blind spot, with Haaraka all but at his shoulder.
He looked past the frightened faces of his companions to the lean, horrid shapes that pursued them, and his heart clenched. They were closing the distance quickly. Lark, who trailed the others in her many layers, would be in danger soon.
In his head, the voice of Maevor—that opportunistic criminal who had tried to take Cob under his wing in camp—whispered, ‘All you need to survive is to be faster than your friends.’ It unnerved him to suddenly think of that.
Won’t happen, he decided, and turned around.
The others clumped about him, confusion on their faces. Ilshenrir, unsurprisingly, had vanished.
“Go on,” he told them, and reached into the aching earth to strengthen the haphazard scales of his armor. His boots hung from his belt, but even barefoot he could not connect without letting in the debilitating pain of the trees. Grimacing, he tried to reach the deep dark earth he knew must be down there somewhere, but it was like trying to reach through a swarm of stinging jellyfish—so much suffering from so many angles, every new stab sapping his concentration.
No one ran, though Lark did scoot anxiously behind him.
“Go!” he snapped.
“And where would you have us go?” Fiora retaliated. “Keep running while they swarm you? We’re here for you. And if they take you down, they won’t have any problem catching the rest of us.”
He looked up to see her unsling her shield and draw her sword. From his other side came the crackle of sinews as Arik shifted into war-form.
Gritting his teeth, he managed a nod. Fiora was right. It was stupid, so stupid to have gone from one conflict straight into another, and he had no idea how to get out of this—not when hiding in Haaraka would only save Fiora and Lark.
He could not bear to see anyone fall for his sake.
So don’t let them, he told himself. Earth is in pain, wood is in pain, but there’s a third element you can touch. Now’s a good time to try it.
“Fine,” he said as the wave of hounds bore down on them. “Jus’ don’t complain if your nice clothes get ruined.”
Fiora barked a laugh and pulled up the hood of her chainmail.
Lowering his head, Cob stepped forward and fixed his stance, detaching his attention from the suffering elements to focus on the snow around him. It had fallen from the sky and thus had no connection to this pained land or that horrible lake, and though he had never tried to manipulate it, he had spent his entire childhood in the cold lands. Ice was as familiar to his hands as stone.
The sensation of the Guardian’s scales swelled within him, withdrawing its aegis from the others to empower him as much as it could. He buried his hands in the snow to feel its intricate crystalline structure, so fine and sharp and yet so malleable, and with a great yank he drew it unto himself.
Snow unfurled from the knee-high banks to clad him, layer on layer solidifying into a glaze flecked dark by particles of earth and bark. Smoother even than the flow of mud, it washed along his legs and back and over his shoulders, down his arms to bristle with razor spikes, then up his cheeks to lock over his face a
s protectively as any knight’s helm. Thin gaps remained for his eyes, black motes swarming beneath to cut the glare from the snow. His antlers branched wider than ever, their fine wooden cores daggered thickly with ice.
All the hounds’ eyes fixed on him. As they tore through the snow toward him, he noted the few riders yanking at their collars in a vain attempt to redirect them, and smiled slightly behind his ice mask. They were the hounds and he was the stag. Who else would they attack?
Not two yards from him, the lead hound hit something invisible that flashed with a pale, searing light. The hound kept rushing forward, its slavering mouth opening wider and wider until it split at the jaw.
Then it fell at Cob’s feet, bleeding and convulsing, a line cut straight through its head and out the top of its spine. The pale strand that had cut it hung in the air long enough to slice through another charging hound, then winked from existence.
Ilshenrir, Cob thought appreciatively.
Then the third hound hit him, leading with its teeth.
*****
As the hound died beneath her, Dasira tumbled free, hitting the ice and rolling just ahead of the next arcane blast. For a moment she could not remember how to use four limbs instead of eight, but then the last remnant of the hound’s nervous system cleared from her bracer and she flipped to her feet, just in time to dodge Calett’s hound. The senvraka’s sword whistled down at her head and she ducked low, almost spilling onto her back but cutting a deep gash in the hound’s foreleg with Serindas.
The ugly creature yelped and skidded as its wounded leg buckled, the other three scrabbling for purchase on the lake’s glassy surface. Another arcane flash caught Dasira’s eye and she raised Serindas just in time to intercept it, the malevolent blade drinking enough to send only a tingle up her arm. From his spot on the shore, the Gold mage cursed then started weaving another spell.
Dasira got her feet under herself again and heaved up, panting. Going out on the ice had not been her most brilliant idea, since it made her a clear target without the trees in the way, but it was difficult for the hounds to maneuver on. The ones carrying the ruengriin had not even tried to approach her until their heavy abomination-masters dismounted. Now they scrabbled after her, too maddened to understand the need for balance and poise, and if not for the mage she would have had an easy time dispatching them.
The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) Page 53
