Guthrie gave a slight bow of his head. “I’ll submit to your judgment then.”
Devan shrugged and went back to stand next to Stefan.
“So,” Ryne stretched to his full height, “prepare the people to leave and send the signal.”
Galiana stood erect now and looked around at them. “I am staying to greet the Tribunal’s Ashishin when they arrive. Who else?”
“I’ll have to stay to explain myself.” Irmina looked to him with sorrowful eyes.
He wanted to go to her, hug her. Deep inside, he couldn’t help the feeling that fate fought against him. Why did he keep losing the things that mattered the most? He was about to speak when he noticed his father’s expression. It gave him a sinking sensation down in his gut.
“All the council members will remain also,” Stefan declared, “including me.”
Ancel choked back a cry. “Da, you mustn’t do this.” He’d lost his mother, and now he was losing his father too? He clutched his mother’s pendant, his knees weak.
“There isn’t much choice, son. When the Tribunal’s army arrives and we’re gone, they will come after us.”
“But … but, defeating the shade will take some time,” Ancel said. “Maybe enough for us to be long gone.”
Stefan shook his head. “I know the Tribunal well. What we’ve done here, plus your actions at the winery won’t go unpunished. If they don’t find us, they’ll fight the shade, as well as send a contingent with Pathfinders and Ashishin after us.”
As much as he wanted to disagree, Ancel recognized the truth of his father’s words. “Let them stay then.” He nodded toward Javed, Rohan, and the others in desperation. “Come with us. We need you. I need you.”
“No.” Stefan walked over to him and placed a firm hand on his shoulder. “The Setian need you now, son. They are your people. My time’s come and gone. I won’t risk any more lives. I’ve seen enough death, enough of my loved ones reduced to nothing more than husks. I won’t let them suffer anymore, not when I can prevent it.”
“Da—”
“Son, listen to me. This has been coming for centuries. A time existed when I thought I would be the one to bring us together once more, but that’s your job now. You were named after your brother and sister, Anton and Celina, as a way for me never to forget the suffering I have been a part of. The Tribunal’s actions and Nerian took them away from us. In ways, I played my part as did your mother, and I’ve had to live with that knowledge.” His father’s face was grim, and then he cracked a smile. “I promise to tell you about them one day.
“Your mother and I raised you for this. Ever since those painful days, we prayed, and the gods gave us you. You just needed what we couldn’t provide. To be nurtured. To be trained. Now, you have your true mentor.” His father glanced over to Ryne. “Use everything me and Galiana taught you, and apply it to what you learn.
“The Disciplines. Remember them. Obey them. They’ll be your guide. Let today be the prime example. I see fear in you, uncertainty. Demand bravery by conquering your fear. Demand perseverance, but first show determination. You see, son. Even now, I live by two of them. Make all of them a part of your life.”
“Da, I can’t, I can’t …”
“Yes, you can. You’re a Dorn. Like all us Dorns, you’re strong. The strongest of us all. You’ll get past this. Demand they overcome after you prevail. Demand discipline by first showing mastery of self.”
Hearing his father’s voice so calm, so steadfast, lent Ancel strength. He wiped away the tears he hadn’t realized he shed. “Lead by example,” he whispered.
“Exactly,” his father replied. “Now it’s time for us to prepare the troops and gather our people for exodus.”
Chapter 25
Ryne stood atop the tower next to two Dagodin with a clear vantage point of the northern expanses around the town. Snow fell in ever thickening swirls. Dark clouds hid Denestia’s twin moons, but they made no difference. The barrier around Eldanhill bled its own silvery blue glow onto the land for miles. Beyond the nebulous luminance, shadelings gathered, their forms turning the virginal white of the snowy fields and forest into seething black rot. A vasumbral wailed.
If Sakari was out there, what was he waiting for? The vasumbrals should already be devouring the shield while the shadelings convened. Along the lines, darkwraiths glided back and forth keeping wraithwolves in check. Evenly spaced between those ranks, Ryne picked out the blur of rapidly beating black wings, fleshy locks, mandibles, and the many-faceted eyes of four daemons, their matching legs and arms gesticulating wildly as they passed instructions. Despite their distance from the wall, the fetid stench of death and decay was palpable.
Four daemons meant four shadebanes, each bane divided into a herd controlled by a darkwraith. At four thousand per shadebane against less than five thousand men and women in Eldanhill, the numbers proved more than daunting. They were downright scary.
The sight of Amuni’s minions brought the voices of the essences rolling up into his head. His Etchings writhed, forcing the presences back down so he wouldn’t need to enter the Shunyata. With what he’d expended destroying the Chainin, relinquishing any of his sela to appease those greedy wretches might be too costly if he planned to help here and live.
The thought of life made him ponder Sakari’s possible survival. Contrary to what many believed, netherlings were not immortal. A powerful enough divya through the heart or brain could kill them as dead as any other. He could have sworn Irmina’s sword through Sakari’s chest had struck true. Sakari had opened a portal to the Kassite, but his doom should have been certain.
Tired of speculating, Ryne leaped from the tower and landed softly on the ground forty feet below. He wouldn’t find out more before the attack began. Until then, he intended to help while keeping an eye out for Irmina. The woman had made it plain she still intended to kill him, despite knowing her chances were less than slim. He let out a relieved sigh that she still kept his identity a secret. Ancel was too fragile right now to deal with such a revelation.
Irmina’s death would be the easiest solution to his dilemma. A slight smile touched his lips. Funny how his mind returned to what occupied it when he first met the woman. Even so, carrying out the act wasn’t an option. The stability she meant for Ancel was a thing he refused to disturb, much less sever.
“Feel like sharing?” Ancel said from next to him.
Carelessness will get a man killed, Ryne thought of his inattention. “Just wondering why they haven’t attacked yet and how much time before we leave,” he answered, as if aware of his ward’s presence the entire time.
“The other council members were bickering about staying, especially when my father decided Galiana would be leaving with us.”
“And?”
“My father took out his sword and dared any of them to leave. That pretty much settled it.”
Ryne chuckled. So many years later and Stefan was still the same. Whether it was his soldiers or citizens, he took full responsibility, refusing to risk lives foolishly and willing to sacrifice where necessary. Ryne recalled a time the man was different, when all that mattered was glory. Nerian and the Tribunal had killed that Stefan. They’d given birth to a better man.
“How do they plan to escape?”
“That’s what I’m here to discuss with you,” Ancel said.
“Let me guess … I’m the decoy.”
Lips pursed, Ancel gave a slow nod.
“Tell them I say that after I do this we’ll need to make a detour on our way to Torandil.”
“Are you sure you can manage? When we linked earlier, I could tell how weak you were. I’d rather take our chances, all of us together, than to lose you.”
As touching as Ancel’s sentiments were, Ryne understood the reality of the situation. Their escape route would be out across the
Kelvore River where no wall existed. The shade hadn’t covered the area yet, but sooner or later they would. Unless they found something else to chase after first. “Whether I can manage is irrelevant. There’s no other way.”
Ancel kicked at a patch of snow.
“What they asked isn’t all that’s bothering you, is it?”
“No.” Ancel looked up to meet Ryne’s eyes. “Why does Irmina want you dead?”
“Did you ask her?”
“Yes. She said the reason was yours to tell.”
Ryne nodded. “So it is, but this is neither the time nor the place.”
“Two of the most important people to me want to kill each other, and I can’t get a straight answer from either. What’s worse is, both of you are risking your lives for me.”
“Who said I wanted to kill her?”
Ancel looked at him askance. “What if she attacks you?”
“Not even then.”
Tension drained from Ancel’s face. “I’ll go tell them you agreed.”
The vasumbrals released a keening wail, this time higher and longer.
Ryne tilted his head, judging their distance. “Tell them they only have a few minutes.” Snow crunching underfoot, he began to jog toward the northern gate. “The attack is commencing,” he called over his shoulder. When he reached the tower to the right of the gate, he shouted for the basket. A wealth of shaking and creaking later, he stood next to the two Dagodin guards.
Out beyond the barrier, a fountain of dirt and snow shot into the air with a dull rumble. The tower itself shook. A hole at least thirty feet across appeared in the snow.
Before the debris hit the ground, a form snaked up, black against the snowfall and tenuous light of the barrier. Rocks, dirt, and snow struck its ridged surface before falling to the wayside. A screech resonated from the silhouette, the sound crawling across Ryne’s skin. The dark, wormlike form split down the middle from the top to where it disappeared into the hole, revealing an opening to swallow the night itself. It was not just black; it was an absence of light, a devouring of shadow. The vasumbral made the mass of shadelings beyond it appear bright by comparison. Hundreds upon hundreds of feelers reached out from its interior, sampling the air.
Several thousand feet away, the process repeated. Then again, and again, and again, until Ryne counted a dozen. He understood now why the person controlling them waited. Stretching over a hundred feet into the air and at least a quarter of that distance wide, the creatures were still half-grown.
Ryne sensed a spike of power then. Someone Materializing, a portal opening. First one, two, and then so many at once he lost count. Mater surged from the northeast. The Tribunal’s Matii had arrived.
A few of the vasumbrals turned their eyeless forms toward the convergence of elements. The vertebrae joining each section of their bodies glinted where they humped into ridges. Together the beasts screeched, coiled back, and dived down, crashing into the earth with a rumble before their tails pulled out of one hole to disappear into the new ones their heads made. Snow bubbled up into a swell of white waves rolling across the ground in the portals’ direction.
Ryne waited, but only the equivalent of two shadebanes followed. The other vasumbrals continued to eat into the barrier. “Leave now,” he said to the two guards. “Tell Shin Galiana I said to take everyone with her.” He leapt from the tower over the wall.
A cold wind rushed by his face, sweeping snow in stinging swirls as he fell. Without the benefits of moonlight, he drew on the barrier’s luminescence instead and added that to the corresponding element within his Etchings.
He Shimmered.
One moment he was falling, and the next he reappeared at the shield’s edge without crossing it. He stepped directly into the glow, his skin tingling slightly as he did so. Light essences raced up into him, his Etchings gobbling them up greedily. Ryne’s body replicated the barrier’s blue luminance. The prickling sensation increased to a burn. Energy filled him to near busting. He threw his back.
“SAKARI!” he bellowed, using the wind to increase and carry the sound.
Everything stopped as if the entire world had come to a halt. The vasumbrals and shadelings alike turned slowly to him as if of one mind.
A blur of motion announced Sakari’s presence. “You called, master?” The smirk on Sakari’s face was as out of sorts as his appearance in the form of a typical milk-skinned Granadian.
The essences Ryne held brimmed, leaking from him like blood. “You won’t get what you want. Not now. Not ever.”
“And what is to stop me and mine?”
Ryne gave the netherling a ghost of a smile. “Yourself. We pose no threat to you.”
“Smart, but not smart enough,” Sakari said. “I could have sworn a certain someone shot me with an arrow, and another someone stabbed me. Their actions give me the right to breach any contract to defend myself.”
The breath Ryne wanted to suck in remained between his clenched teeth. Sakari had deliberately goaded people close to Ancel into attacking him.
“I see you understand. I do not need to fight you to get what I require.” Sakari’s eyes changed color, going through several hues of blue to gray to black. “As has always happened, you, like the other Eztezians before you, will lose.”
“Why are you doing this? The people of this world have done nothing to you or your kind.”
“Come now, Ryne.” Sakari shrugged. “What drives the world? What drives man? Power. Freedom. Love. A combination of all three or a lack of one or the other. In our case, we simply would love the freedom to use our power.”
“So the Nine will destroy an entire people to have something as meager as that?”
“They will destroy whoever stands in our way. Is that not what you and your brethren have done for millennia?” Sakari cocked his head marginally. “We gave you Eztezians the means to deliver the world to us, and not your so-called gods, but too many of you became smarter than was good.”
“Trading one slave master for another was never an option,” Ryne said.
Sakari chuckled. “You cannot fight the inevitable. We can give you the same choice we gave the others though. Join us. Enough of humanity will survive. We do need them, and people to rule, to keep them providing us with what we require.”
“Never.”
“Then I wish you the best of luck, and may your gods help you.” Sakari’s form Blurred away. “But not even they can save you.”
Netherlings. Forever arrogant. Ryne smiled. As always, the chance to gloat, to declare superiority had proved impossible for the netherling. The weakness gave him exactly what he needed.
Coiled in the air from where Sakari had blurred was a concentration of Mater. Stronger than normal, the essences combined to form primal elements almost as potent as those within an Entosis. Ryne delved into the Shunyata, reaching out to the elements before him as he did so. The voices screamed promises of power into his head, and he obliged.
He fed the essences Sakari’s Mater.
The glow around his body grew to a blinding incandescence. The heat built to an inferno raging within him. Ryne’s body trembled with the strain of holding the power in. Allowing the Etchings to help stabilize all he held, he drew in more until he had gained the last bit of residue left by Sakari’s own Forging.
Then he released it all at once.
Light and energy shot into the sky in a cylindrical cone a dozen feet wide. If he had not rooted himself to the earth beneath his feet, the explosion would have thrown him back. Instead, it blew away snow, dirt, debris and everything else before him. Unable to bypass the protective barrier, the power expanded in a semicircle with him at the center. The ground steamed. It smelled of char and wet earth after a rainstorm. Tiny fires fluttered on grass once frozen solid.
“No!” Sakari’s voice bellowed in the
distance.
But it was too late. The release of that much Mater had already gained the vasumbrals’ attention. They screeched as one. In response to the issued commands, the shadelings howled and wailed. The ground churned toward Ryne.
Body still aglow, he Shimmered toward the location of the opening portals. When he reappeared, he began sprinting. The snowfall had become a squall now, but through the winter white, he made out the rolling earth of the vasumbrals snaking to follow him. They ate up the distance between them within seconds until swaths of earth and snow twenty feet tall swept behind him like an ocean heaving in angry throes.
He whipped his head around. Rank upon rank of Dagodin spread before him, armor crimson like fresh blood. Ashishin and High Ashishin stood behind them, portals opening and closing to allow in more of the Tribunal’s troops.
Someone yelled a command. In a synchronized dance, the army formed into columns. Gleaming lances pointed toward Ryne and the creatures behind him.
Another command bellowed. Lightning split the sky, striking near Ryne, sending earth and snow showering up. Debris peppered him. Undaunted, he pressed on.
Links bloomed between the Ashishin, spanning from one to the next in continual concentration. They grew until the air itself hummed with their power. He imagined what the scene must look like to them. Some terrible wraith glowing in slivery-blue followed by creatures of the purest black that they had never seen and could not begin to fathom. Not to mention the thousands of howling and wailing shadelings charging in their wake. His lips curled into a smile. The timing needed to be perfect.
The release of Mater from the Shin came in an ear-splitting roar. Whatever Forging they unleashed surged toward him in an overheated torrent from straight ahead and above. The air blazed, the clouds in the heavens lit up, and the ground heaved. Snow and rock melted. Despite the miniature shield around him, his hair began to sizzle, the scent of its burning becoming stronger and stronger.
Aegis of The Gods: Book 02 - Ashes and Blood Page 19
