by Nunn, PL
“Virginity of spirit and flesh and the deadliest of assassins. I suppose nature balances out all of her creations. And my dear, you’ve managed to rid this world of one less aberration and Azeral of his Ciagenii. I do grant you that.”
She understood what he had meant now. His murmured comment about something being irreversible, and him not being the threat to her that he had been.
Had he come to her planning such a sacrifice or had her actions goaded him into the idea? Ashara was being unreasonable, so she turned to Neira’sha in desperation. But the woman’s eyes had clouded, her brow furrowed in concentration. Ashara’s mirth disappeared altogether in a heartbeat.
“Mother Earth,” she whispered. “They’ve destroyed the wards.”
A dozen mental pleas slammed into the council chamber. They were aimed mostly at Ashara but the overflow was clearly understood by Victoria. The sidhe in the grove were reporting with frantic urgency of the enemy forces spilling into the grove. Of the great battering ram of power that had shattered the outer wards.
She combed the reaches with her own far senses and felt the backwash of destructive power that had been unleashed against the age old wards. Neira’sha must have felt it as it happened, having set up most of those wards herself when she had created this grove. She was reeling on her feet now, struggling to collect her equilibrium. Victoria went to her side, wrapping a supporting arm about the thin waist. Ashara was at the great window, staring out with sightless eyes, magic vision reaching far.
Victoria tagged along in her wake, a frightened observer. The sight took her through the grove, trees whipping by at sickening speed. Past the scattered groups of Seelie scouts, and to the outer fringes of Neira’sha’s grove. There was a black field of movement there. It moved down from the Hallow Hills like lava from a leisurely volcanic eruption. There might have been a three hundred ogre troops. As many goblinish figures scurrying among the slower, massive forms of their compatriots. And sparkling among them, bright spots among dull, were the high sidhe. The Great Hunt had cornered its prey in its hole and was about to spring the trap. The shimmering of the sidhe varied from sidhe to sidhe. She had not noticed that before, then realized that what she was seeing was Ashara picking out the power mongers among them. She was searching out the most powerful, looking for her foe. She found him among the largest cluster of lights. His own shining brighter than the rest combined. Ashara did not venture closer, merely marked the position and began to retreat. The lights flared as they began the backward trek and suddenly shot towards them. Victoria pulled back as far as she might, behind Ashara’s own personal aura. She urged silently for flight, but Ashara held her ground, facing off before the glowing mind’s eye that was Azeral. There was recognition there. Victoria could feel it as clearly as she might a physical pinch. And animosity that had more to do with ego than real hate. They marked each other’s presence and did no more. Ashara was the one to back down, drawing back her roaming eye with such alacrity that it left Victoria disoriented and suddenly leaning on Neira’sha for support.
Ashara turned from the window with grim determination on her face.
“He’s here. He broke the wards.”
“He’s grown,” Neira’sha commented. “Much more than he used to be.”
Had she been there too, overlooking that field of destruction?
“So have I,” Ashara’s voice was tight, level. “I want you here, keeping what wards we do have intact. Victoria, you may come with me.”
She swept past. Victoria exchanged a worried look with Neira’sha, who nudged her away with a nod of her head. “Go, child. Be safe.”
The hallways of the keep were deserted. The gardens outside showed more activity, but they were clearing fast as sidhe hurried to whatever task needed to be done. Aloe joined them at the edge of the grove. She had three white horses in tow. Her bow was clutched in her left hand, a full quiver of arrows on her back.
“Where is the worst infraction?”
Ashara demanded.
“Just east,” the girl declared, swinging up onto her mount. They followed suit and urged the horses into a canter through the trees. It seemed as if the grove had grown denser overnight. Where once there had been pleasantly spaced trees and lush, grass covered ground, there now was bramble and briars. The branches had grown down, intertwining with each other, forming a barrier of living wood. And yet a path seemed to open for the horses. They passed something Victoria had never noticed in her forays into the grove. A waist high stone marker, carved with runes of some sort. Ashara paused by it, reaching down from the saddle to place her hand against its top. She nodded after only a moment and continued on.
“What was that?” Victoria asked of Aloe.
“A ward stone,” the girl replied.
“One of the inner ones. They broke the outer ones. That’s how they managed to get into the grove.”
“I thought they were days away.”
“So did we. It was a ploy. Their lord’s doing, no doubt. There still is a force two days from here. It drew our attention while he shielded the approach of this one.”
Three sidhe darted into their path.
The horses shied and complained at being so abruptly halted. The three were clothed in forest browns and green. All had bows, and blades at their sides.
“Lady.” One of them stepped forward, grasping Ashara’s stirrup, he swung his arm north east to the path they traveled. “The worst of it is that way. They’ve battered a path into the grove.”
“Ogres or sidhe?”
“Ogres only, as far as we can tell.”
“To Annwn,” Ashara muttered. “If they’re not backing them there, then he’s up to something elsewhere.”
They left the scouts behind, heading north east. The forest did open for them. Literally. The trees pulled back branches and the roots and vines slithered back from their path. The snarl of bramble would have been untraversable otherwise.
The further they traveled from the keep the worse it got. It slowed the pace to a trot.
The horses were less unnerved about the living path that opened before them and closed behind, than Victoria. This was what Neira’sha had meant when she said the grove would defend itself.
As they rode, a sense of dread began to creep over Victoria. It was a curious feeling, an almost palpable emotion that seemed to stem from outside. It intensified with each step of her mount. Each yard closer to the source of the intrusion. It was the grove. It emanated its own dissatisfaction over the assault. The sounds of turmoil faintly caressed their ears. The hacking of blades and axes against forest flesh. Occasionally the deep-voiced cry of an ogre. In frustration or pain? More of their own scouts appeared, acknowledging their presence.
Trotting behind them to form a guard of sorts. Ashara stopped beside a cluster of her folk. They stared at a spot in the dense bramble. The sounds of destruction came from behind it. It sounded as if some massive creature struggled to break through.
Victoria broadened her senses, picking out pockets of destruction. The grove cried out in silent agony and rage against the assault. There were a dozen places where stubborn, slow-witted ogre troops methodically ripped their way into the grove. One could almost hear the shift and grind of massive muscles and bone as axes were lifted and dropped. Over and over. The forest struggled to close behind the forerunners, but the dark bodies behind kept at the wounded wood. Sap bleed like amber blood. Somewhere, she thought with a chill, Neira’sha was feeling that pain.
“Shield yourself,” Aloe suggested, on the ground, long bow in hand. There was grim fear in her expression. Grimmer determination.
The barrier of bramble pulsed inward with a dry crackle. Archers scattered for cover, notching arrows. Like a serpent poking its way out of its egg shell, something broke through. The gap widened, the width of a man’s chest. A pause, an expectant breath of air, then the whole of the affected bramble wall burst outward as some great form slammed through. Ogres rumbled out into the first of the small clea
rings. The first to break through, hesitated to get his bearings and a half dozen arrows sprouted from his head.
He floundered back, clutching at twin arrows that impaled his eyes. It took too long for the body to register that the brain had ceased to function. The massive body toppled backwards and its fellows lumbered over, not making the mistake of pausing.
Very calmly, Ashara spoke to Victoria. “A shield, my dear. A large one, if you please.”
Fumbling towards concentration, fighting off horror, she struggled to comply. Her power was at a lull, but more than enough was eager to do her bidding.
She called forth an invisible wall of force, as wide as the clearing and twice as tall as the tallest ogre. A few lagging arrows from their own side bounced off it before the archers realized what was afoot. The ogres rebounded into it and bellowed their outrage. Great fists and axes slammed against it. Victoria could feel each blow.
Ashara stared fixedly into the mass of dark bodies. Her face was serene, untroubled. Victoria had no attention to spare wondering what magic she was about.
An ogre screamed and suddenly let off its attack on Victoria’s shield and flailed about with its battle ax. The blade cut into the closest of its companions.
Blood and bone spattered where the ax met flesh. It chipped away at metal armor and cut through leather. Its companions spared little thought on falling upon it.
They chopped it to bits, but when they had finished no fewer that four of them lay with it on the blood soaked ground.
Another ogre followed the path of the first, then a third. A melee of bloody, psychotic proportions ensued. The lot of them fell upon each other, severing limbs as thick as sidhe torsos, creating sickening gashes in thick leather like skin. Those newly leaving the gap in the bramble wall were sucked into the madness. The sidhe stood and watched impassively, protected behind a magic wall, for the moment invulnerable. When the flow from the forced path slowed, then stopped, silence reigned. The bodies were waist high in the clearing. The grove began to seal itself, growing back to the impenetrable wall it had been before the intrusion. If an ogre body was in its way, the roots grew through it and around it. Incorporating bone and armor and least of all weak flesh into the rebuilding of it’s barricade.
Victoria let her shield falter, then fall away altogether. Her stomach rebelled.
She half fell from the horse in her efforts to dismount. Managed to stumble a few yards away before falling to her knees and retching up the remains of her dinner.
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Part Twenty-one
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Sweetheart. No one had ever in his memory, and sidhe of any sort tended towards long memories, called him sweetheart. He reckoned she had meant in with wry humor. There had been that look on her face. Although human expression was not a study he had ever took much interest in before ‘she’ had come along.
He had never been to the human world. Not even when the master had sent him to bring the two humans back to Elkhavah.
Azeral had never held enough of a grudge against any human in particular to send his Ciagenii to that world in order to amend it. Not within Dusk’s lifetime at any rate.
And he was Azeral’s only Ciagenii. The only one the master had ever been lucky enough to get his hands on.
He had never failed Azeral before.
Had never questioned any task given him.
It was not his place. It had been impossible to think of denying Azeral anything. All possession of souls aside, he had been reared from the very day of his birth to owe allegiance to the lord of the Unseelie keep.
The soul was merely a reminder of how deep a loyalty he must have. He held no least bit of understanding of how the girl had managed to snare him so entirely.
Certainly she had sparked his interest with her total lack of fear from the first day she had demanded he take responsibility for feeding the monstrous bundle of fur, teeth and claws that had been sealed in this room with him. He had been surprised by her appeal for protection of the thing to begin with. So surprised that he had granted that protection.
He had never seen a pure human before. Only bakatu, whose blood was so mingled with sidhe, bendithy mamau and nymph, as to make them nothing like the original stock from which they sprang. She and her male were not so bad to look at.
Round eared and heavier boned than sidhe, but alluring in their own way. Little wonder that the inhabitants of Elkhavah, capable of breeding with them, had done so on frequent enough occasions to create a new breed of being. The Bakatu. He tried to pin point the exact moment when she had stopped being a mere curiosity and become something he could hardly take his eyes from. When he had began following the party just out of sight so he might watch her. He had always understood lust in a distant, clinical fashion. It was something enjoyed and exploited by the court, by just about everyone from the trolls to the sprites who roamed the woods. But anathema to him.
Poison to him. The destruction of what made him so valuable a commodity to his master. He had never once felt its stirrings until the human girl had been forced into his company. And she unwittingly – or wittingly, depending on her mood – drove him to distraction that he had never before experienced.
There was no reasoning behind it.
Nothing that made her so much more attractive than any other female forced in his company. And it generally was force; most contacts of his. No one preferred close association with so elite a dealer of death. No one but the girl.
Victoria. He rolled the alien name off his tongue, liking the sound of it. She defied all logic. She went from hating him to – Mother Earth! – kissing him, back to hating him and finally to a warped pursuance, and he had yet to figure out what triggered her turbulent emotions.
What he did know, was that he had very little defense against her. He could not quite chase her from his thoughts. Her scent. The sound of her laughter. The color of her hair. If he were not secure in the knowledge of his own immunities, he would have thought the attraction witchery. He might not have cared.
Dying for her would not have been an outrageous thing. If not for her interference he might have already done so and saved himself a great deal of trouble. He had sacrificed his talent for her. The thing he had been born with, that set him apart from the rest of Elkhavah. The thing that the highest of sidhe lords would move mountains to possess. He had destroyed it with one simple act. And he had done it for the simple reason that it was the only way he could think of to protect her from his hand. He could kill her physically, still, but he could not banish her soul.
With her own power and the power of her allies, mere physical death might not be permanent. And if his own life was forfeit, so be it. And his soul – Death he could deal with. He had dealt with it most of his life. The destruction of his soul scared him. Even though he knew it not. Had never known his soul as other sidhe did. He felt it sometimes through Azeral, and knew that even severed it was an integral part of him. After his death, Azeral would still control him. Torment him. Or he might choose to simply destroy it and then there would be nothing. And to a sidhe, there was no fate worse than soul death. He had destroyed enough souls to know from the final terror on his victim’s faces, that it was no small thing.
He shivered, thinking about it, wondering how soon Azeral would discover the treachery. Would he feel it through the bond they shared through Dusk’s soul?
The gulun kit made a small inquiring sound. It lifted its head, tufted ears pricking. Its paws, every bit the width of the assassin’s palms, rested on his leg.
There had been an on-going battle to keep overly long claws from shredding flesh with insistent kneading. The cat had taken a liking to him. Its purrs had been a comforting backdrop for his musings.
Now it rose in a smooth predatory motion and paced to the sealed balcony. It stared at the unnaturally stretched stone with great indignation, not understanding why its formerly open portal was blocked.
It let out another cry, this one louder and
more irate. Most likely, it was long past its regular feeding. It was long past his own. It seemed evident that Victoria had been delayed. Or something unforeseen had happened. Or the Seelies had taken none too kindly to her fraternization with the enemy. There were a great many possibilities. Most distressing. None of which he was free to intervene in.
The floor trembled. A mild tremor ran through the stone like a shiver. He pressed his back against the wall, hardly knowing if he might expect worse. But the motion faded and the stone was solid again. The gulun was crying outright now.
Pacing back and forth, ears laid back. It senses were sharper than his own. It hissed before the second tremor hit. The chairs vibrated across the room, and the vases and urns threatened to topple.
No question then. The keep was under attack.
~~~
The ogre breakthroughs were sporadic and numerous. Ashara and the stronger of her magic wielders spent an exhausting day and late evening turning back attack after attack. The ogres were relentless, their numbers unending.
Although easy to manipulate slow ogre intellects, the constant drain of energy was telling gravely on the Seelies.
The Seelie hunters were almost as fatigued. Running from place to place, holding back intrusions until their power mongers could get there and break the attack once and for all. If not for the power of the grove itself, they could have held the attack back not at all.
It was for naught. All the feints and thrusts into the grove that slashed at Seelie spirits and defenses were nothing more than transparent hints at what was to come. Ashara felt the wrongness. Victoria could see it in her expression, even through the veil of her own exhaustion.
Her power was wild and untempered. It seemed so much more of an effort for her to curb its turbulent impulses and force it into an ordered array of action, than to simply expel raw power and let it do what it pleased. It was damned hard following the ‘rules’ and constructing the simple, steadfast shields that Ashara demanded of her.
They had rested little or none between expelling intrusions. She had become numb to the slaughter Ashara invoked. She knew similar slaughter occurred elsewhere. It was simple. Too easy to achieve the wholesale massacre.
