by K L Reinhart
“What the—?” Jacques pushed himself up.
It wasn’t coming from the soot circle of the portal that the Arcanum had used to escape in, Reticula saw. It was coming from the lectern, where a single flame was speeding around a small object.
A model, Reticula saw. There, on the Arcanum’s lectern, was a small and simple wooden model of something almost-round, with high walls and the blocky outcrops of towers inside of it.
“The Black Keep!” Reticula realized immediately. It was a child’s toy, and a small purple flame was running around it in a perfect circle, about to meet the place where it started.
“Stop it!” Jacques said, grunting to his feet as Reticula jumped—
But the single purple flame met the place where it began and winked out suddenly . . .
“What was that?” Reticula skidded to a halt by the rough-carved model. She could feel no more magic emanating from it, and nothing disastrous had happened.
The Chief External didn’t answer her, instead looking out of the broken doorway into the courtyard, now filling with white . . .
Oh no. Reticula gasped, realizing the depth of the Chief Arcanum’s treachery.
Outside of the study hall, the frozen wind of the Tartaruk suddenly blew fierce into the courtyard and over the slate eaves of the Black Keep. Fattened flurries of snow drove downwards to hit windows and sit in the cracks between the cobblestones. Those black-garbed and grim-faced Brothers and Sisters who had been caught hurrying between tasks suddenly stopped and shivered.
High up on the battlement walls of the Black Keep, those standing guard rocked and stumbled backwards under the sudden onslaught of the Tartaruk winter. There was only one way that the mountain air could have flooded into them all at once and without any warning.
The Magister’s magical shield that had cocooned the Enclave and kept them safe from the Plague of Darkness had been unraveled.
And now, the black fog quested forward over the scant one hundred fifty feet toward the ancient walls, sending out tendrils ahead of it to test and taste at its new prey.
7
They Tried to Kill You, Again
“Tssss . . .”
Terak opened his eyes at a gurgling hissing sound to find that he was hanging upside down, his leg and side entangled in the rough leather reins and stirrups of the wyvern.
The wyvern was hanging above him. Its long neck and wings draped around him like a leathery cocoon where it had become impaled in the broken crown of one of the scale-trees.
Of the blinded orc that had ridden the wyvern there was no sign. Terak assumed that he must have been thrown in their crash. Only the fact that Terak had become wrapped up in the stirrups had saved him from a similar fate.
Agh! But then Terak’s body exploded with pain. His mind woke up to the fact that he had a deep wound in the side of his thigh, from which his own rich lifeblood was flowing at a steady pace, down over his ribs and shoulders as he hung upside down.
I was stabbed. That orc stabbed me! Terak thought with a mixture of panic and indignation, before a fresh throb of pain brought darkness crowding around the edges of the elf’s vision, closing in, and threatening to engulf him entirely.
It’s only pain. Only a sensation, like any other, he tried to tell himself, biting down to grind his teeth as the Chief Martial had taught him.
There’s no pain that doesn’t teach. Nothing that your body can tell you that you haven’t got the strength to listen to . . . The words welled up from that distant, childhood place deep inside of him where Terak had learned to fight the much bigger, older, and more experienced human boys who had been his fellow acolytes and novitiates.
Well, right now my body is telling me that it’s had enough! A part of the elf’s mind managed to raise a little frustrated rage at the situation. His head pounded, and there was also a terrible drowsiness seeping through him.
It was a slumber which Terak knew that he couldn’t give himself to, no matter how enchanting or peaceful it might appear to be.
“Tskree!” There was a twitch from the broken and leathery body around Terak, and the folds of the wings shifted a little, letting in a wave of foul and fetid air.
The wyvern was still alive! Terak saw the weak lunge of the creature’s head as it lanced toward him, still dedicated to the consumption of elf flesh, even with its body broken and near death.
Terak kicked out with his good leg (sending a fresh wave of white-hot pain up through his entangled injured one), swinging himself away from the loud clack of the wyvern’s jaws. Something gave in the leather straps which held him, and Terak plummeted the short distance to the ground. It was only perhaps three feet, but in his already weakened state, it felt like a hundred.
Blackness. Pain. Exhaustion.
When Terak next blinked, he saw that he was still lying under the impaled wyvern-tree. The creature was moving its neck weakly. The elf was sure he had been unconscious for only a few seconds—but had even that been too long?!
First light, he remembered. Mother Viveni had to get to the top of Malvern’s Point by first light or . . . ?
Terak didn’t know the “or else” of that sentence. But he knew that the elvish matriarch had been adamant that was their only chance at escape. Now that Terak could blink again, he saw that the sky overhead was a light lilac and purple-blue.
It’s dawn. Terak could even hear the distant cries of some strange southern bird.
And something else. Voices.
“Where is he!?”
“The circle’s open! We have no time!”
“I’m not leaving without him—”
“Don’t throw your own life away, too!” Terak’s battered and drowsy mind caught up with this last comment at least. It was Lord Falan begging the Unwanted to heed common sense.
“I’ll find him. We’ll find our own way.” Vorg was shouting angrily, before there was a sharp inhalation of breath from someone else—Denaal? Eosce?
“Look!”
Terak could feel the waves of the creeping darkness threatening to rise up again, all around him. He knew that he had to get up. He knew that he had to shout, to say anything, but when he opened his mouth to draw a breath, it felt like his lungs and body were filling, not with nourishing air, but instead with white fire.
Ribs. You’ve cracked a rib, that small and quiet part of Terak’s mind that was always watchful, that he had been forced to cultivate at the Black Keep of the Enclave, noted. It was the same watchful place that knew that he was already losing too much blood, and that it wouldn’t be long before his limbs would feel leaden and heavy and wouldn’t heed his calls.
Move, dammit! he berated himself, taking another breath.
Another line of white fire swept through him, a second or so before he was thrown into shadow.
No!
Terak thought for a wild moment that the shadow was his body giving up, that it was the sleep of blood loss that was falling over him—until it flashed past. What!?
“It’s Grom! Grom has returned!” He could hear Sister Denaal shouting joyously, as suddenly all of Terak’s hairs stood on end.
It was magic, of course. The jittery nausea feeling he got whenever he was around it. Something was happening above and behind him, but when Terak tried to shift in place, another fresh wave of pain washed through him.
Whoever thought that jumping on the back of a wyvern was going to be a good thing? a part of himself managed to think. That cold quiet part that he had learned to grow. The part that could ignore his own emotions, his own pains—and even the quandaries over whether and when to take a life.
“Grom . . .” Terak managed to breath, but his voice was a bare croaking rasp. The long tail of the creature was swishing through the air above him, disappearing out of view as the First Creature circled the peak of Malvern’s Point.
The peak which was radiating an eldritch purpling glow into the dawn airs.
“Grom’s coming! You can’t stay here alone!” Lord Falan shouted. Ter
ak heard a low groan of dismay from the orc champion who, somehow, had become his friend.
“He’s gone! Leave it—we need you alive!” Another pleading cry from the human lord.
Well, thanks for the vote of confidence . . . Terak’s quieter self thought wryly. But when the elf returned his senses to the state of his body, he wondered whether Lord Falan was right.
I am going to die, he thought with an almost absolute certainty. He had never, of course, experienced death before, but he had come close. He had spent many, many hours studying the associated herbal and medical texts that the Book of Corrections demanded. Many—if not most—of the civilized peoples of the world would have considered what happened in the Black Keep of the Enclave worse than torture to young minds, if they knew.
However, those students and acolytes that failed or showed weakness in their training had a way of failing terribly, and in such ways that not many reports ever got out about what the black-garbed monks and nuns in there requested of such young novitiates and themselves.
By the time that Terak had been only twelve summers, he had already read battlefield reports of death and studied anatomical pictures that showed a myriad of macabre pictures in exquisite detail.
In short, the elf thought that he had a pretty good understanding of how death happened—and how much danger he was in if he kept on lying here.
“No time! Dawn’s first light is already fading!” Terak heard the cantankerous Mother Viveni berating her charges as another wave of magic washed over the elf’s senses. The feeling made him feel sick. It gave him a headache. All because he was a null.
“Vorg . . . ? Falan?” the elvish assassin whispered. His words were snatched from the wind by the beat of Grom’s massive wings. The First Creature, with its skin like bark or scales, appeared to be straining to get closer to the peak of Malvern’s Point. Terak could see holes in the thing’s great and ragged wings, and he wondered how many centuries it had been since the First Creature had flown.
With a gasp and a groan, Terak managed to flop to one side, his un-daggered side. His forehead thumped painfully into the hard earth and scratchy wiry grasses under the scale-trees.
Wonderful. Terak blinked, saw the immediacy of earth, as the hurt made the whole of his body quiver and tremble with exhaustion and weakness.
Breathe. In and out. Keep doing it, he reminded himself. Sometimes it was good to be reminded of such things.
Another pulse of that jittery-magic thing made his bones ache in a new way. Terak could have cursed the fact that he was a null and that magic and he were like oil and water to each other.
But Terak had heard the shouted searching voices above say words like we have to go and portal. He guessed that Mother Viveni had used Malvern’s Point somehow to cast the same sort of circle that Mother Istarion had used to send him into the upper world of the Aesther so many moons ago.
Or was it an entire season? Two? Terak’s mind felt heavy and fuzzy, and he couldn’t remember how to count the times between that and this.
Concentrate, Star’s damn it! That smaller part of the elf started to shout and rail at the dumb lump of pained meat that the rest of Terak felt himself to be.
You won’t let yourself die, Terak told himself, scrunching his eyes and opening them again. Most of the Black Keep tried to kill you—and they failed . . . He thumped one fist into the ground, despite the echoes of pain that it sent up and down his side.
Orcs have tried to kill you . . . He pushed, feeling as though every muscle between the knuckle and the center of his back was pulling on that cracked broken rib.
Beastials have tried to kill you . . . Terak forced himself up. He could see the rise of Malvern Point ahead of him, with its crown of dark black rock pillars. Pillars which appeared to be holding the glow around them like a heat haze.
The Ixcht have tried to kill you . . .
Humans have tried to kill you . . .
And with every reminder, Terak forced himself into a more upright position, using that determination and sheer stubbornness to set his mind against.
And he had done it all with no magic, either. He had done it being a null, which meant that he didn’t have the store of magical healing cantrips and soothing praise-enchantments to speed his healing.
Everyone called you Worm. Called you an abomination! A savage, slightly manic sort of glee started to fill the elf. He knew it was one that was born more out of desperation than any courage or bravery.
Whatever the source of this strength, Terak seized upon it, raising his body to look up at the purple glow of Malvern Point, looking strange against the backdrop of the brighter dawn light behind it.
He couldn’t hear the voices anymore, but the crown of the height had to only be one hundred fifty feet away at most, didn’t it? I’ll crawl that, if I have to—
WHOOOSH! But then something buffeted Terak, forcing him to the side to catch at the ground with one hand. It was the First Creature, Grom. The massive being had eclipsed the sky for the briefest of seconds, flying into the purple airs that hung around the peak in a pulsing miasma—
And had vanished.
“No—no—no . . .” Terak realized at once what had happened, even if it was so very improbable and impossible for his eyes to make sense of. Grom the First Creature, just like Terak’s other companions, must have found a way to open a portal up there, and they had gone through.
The elf remembered the circle that he had used, courtesy of Mother Istarion and the Second Family of the Everdell Elves. That had been excruciatingly painful, and it had appeared to be a one-way trip. He also remembered the magic of the Hexan, which had apparently ripped a hole through the fabric of the world with the Ungol Blade itself, and which the Hexan had jumped through to avoid Grom’s wrath.
And that cosmic tear in the world had healed pretty ixchting fast, Terak remembered.
“No, no, no, no—” If before, it had been stubbornness that had leant the elf strength to get up, this time it was panic that forced him, pained and stumbling, to his knees.
Every lurching step forward made Terak hiss in pain, both from his thigh and the rib on the same side of his body. It was strange, because the pain felt like a weight that hung onto his body, encasing his entire right-hand side in a sheath of iron like Vorg the Unwanted’s armor.
Terak knew that he had lost a lot of blood. Too much, perhaps, for anyone of his size and stature.
But people who were caught and seemingly without hope were capable of amazing things. Terak forced himself to move, bouncing and rebounding from one boulder and scale-tree to the next as he climbed.
Was it his failing vision, or was the light itself growing fainter now? No, don’t think that, he told himself. Just move faster . . .
A knot of stiffened muscles under his arm and down his back tightened with a spasm, and the elf hit the dirt just a few body lengths from the top.
“Ach!” He grunted in frustration, reaching up even though his rib felt as though it were cracking in two. He seized at the rock of the summit to pull himself up with a feral snarl.
Just as the strange dancing purple glow in front of him, forming a cloud that reached high into the southern skies before him . . . winked out.
Terak was left alone on the top of Malvern’s Point at the edge of the Southlands, many, many weeks of travel away from his home in the far north.
And what was worse was that Terak the Null was also dying.
8
Hyxalion, Exasperated
Which way is the North? Terak tried to concentrate, despite the bone-weary tiredness that rolled through him in waves that were dark and heavy. The others were gone, fled into the portal whose magic still lingered in the air. The elf couldn’t see the purple glows anymore, but he could feel the tense jitteriness in the corners of his jaw.
If only I wasn’t a null. If only I knew magic . . . Terak thought, coming dangerously close to despair.
The young assassin was sitting on the hard and rocky ground agai
n—although he didn’t remember how he had gone from standing to sitting. Have I lost time? he wondered, blinking his eyes that felt gummed as he looked at the bright southern skies.
Yes. The first light of the dawn was now long gone, and the skies were marked with the rising wisps of clouds as the plain’s morning started to heat up. The top of Malvern’s Point was a wide domed circle of bare rock, with five pillars of black around it. Past their sentinel bodies, Terak could see the mountains, forests and the large orange-and-ochre plains behind him In front, the land grew greener and flatter, before a wide ribbon of river separated the hot Southlands from the rougher northlands.
The Great Doon River. Terak’s fragmented and scattered thoughts pieced together what he saw. From his studies at the Enclave, he tried to remember all the names of the kingdoms that he would have to travel through to get back home–the Middle Kingdom of Tor, the River Princes of Balla . . . What else?
Water . . . The sight of the Doon ahead of him made Terak thirsty. He couldn’t remember the last time he had drunk at all. Sometime before dawn? His hands moved to his utility belt, only to find that it was empty save for the small bulges that contained the sachets of powder Father Jacques had loaded him up with.
Blind-Eye, Choke-Powder, Skin-Bind . . . His mind ran through his supplies. Nothing that would slake his thirst . . .
Skin-Bind! That was a preparation that would form a tacky bind when mixed with water, Terak knew. Father Jacques had taught him how to use it in order to make climbing all the easier.
But I could use it to seal this wound . . . The elf’s long fingers fumbled and scratched at the small ties and toggles that held the assassin pouch closed to his belt. He finally got it open to rummage and pull one of the tiny folds of cloth secured with a miniature pin, which contained what he needed.
Water? He had none, but Terak managed to pull the packet open and dump the yellowish powder over his thigh, trousers, and the terrible rent in his flesh where the orc had sunk its dagger.
