“Here?” Ross asked. “Nothing looks any different.”
“This is where they said to go,” Calfon replied. He eyed the terrain. “Let’s back up to there,” he said, pointing to a slight ridge. I’ll have the whole clearing in range, and we’ll have the advantage no matter what comes through the Rift.”
“I don’t like being this close to the border,” Ross muttered. “Bad enough to have Ravenwood’s guards after us. How are we to know where the bloody border even is? Not like there’s a real line.”
“Stay on this side of the clearing, if you have the choice,” Corran said. “If you can’t tell where the border is, neither can the guards so long as you’re not too far inside. If they know what’s good for them, they’ll be far away from here, what with monsters coming through.”
They waited, watching for any sign of a Rift forming. Corran tried to remember what had happened immediately before Rigan and the others vanished. But in the thick of the fight, his attention had been on the monster trying to rip out his throat, not on their surroundings until it was too late.
“Aiden said we might feel something—like a storm rolling in,” he said as the others watched and paced.
“We aren’t even completely certain that this is the spot,” Ross muttered. “From what we scouted, it would be the best place to bring through an attack force—which is what the monsters are. But who knows if the witch opening the Rift knows anything about this area to pick a clearing rather than the middle of the woods?”
The witches had also been less than precise about the time the Rift might open. Time dragged on as they waited for something to happen, dreading the battle but hoping for a chance to connect with their lost friends. As the afternoon stretched toward evening, Corran readied lanterns and torches, kindling a small fire so that they could light them easily once darkness fell.
“Nothing,” Calfon said with a sigh, looking out over the clearing.
“It would make sense not to bring the monsters through until evening,” Ross replied. “Harder to see and fight at night, and if creating fear is part of it, then everything is scarier in the dark.”
As the sun set, Corran felt a sudden chill that had little connection to the warmer air. “Did you feel that?”
The others nodded. Ross ran a hand up the back of his neck. “All my hair stood on end.”
“I’ve got gooseflesh,” Calfon replied.
They turned toward the clearing, straining to see in the gloaming. Pinpricks of light glittered in the empty field, first a few, then more and more. “There!” Corran hissed, pointing.
Calfon readied his bow, aiming toward where the dancing points of light coalesced. Corran tried not to hold his breath. The temperature in the clearing plummeted, and at the same time, a pervasive uneasiness settled over them, as if they sensed on a primal level that something bad was about to happen.
The night tore in two. Calfon let fly the arrow.
Corpse-pale forms tumbled through the split in the darkness, landing in a tangle of emancipated limbs. A circle of dead and diseased grass spread out from the Rift at its center, shriveling and rotting as they watched.
The arrow soared over the outpouring of monsters, into the void.
The Rift snapped shut and disappeared. The dead zone around it stopped expanding.
“Ghouls,” Corran groaned. “I really hate ghouls.”
Ross’s eyes widened. “There are at least a dozen of them. We can’t fight that many.”
Calfon readied another arrow. “If I can get in a few good shots, maybe we won’t have to.”
“There’s no use running—they’ll smell us,” Corran said quietly. “And stay out of the dead grass—we’ve seen what happened to the cattle that got too close.”
Calfon sent off four shots in quick succession, hitting all of his targets before the surging scramble of ghouls forced a change in tactics. Calfon fell back to find a better angle to keep shooting since the bow could take down attackers before the ghouls were close enough to do damage with teeth and claws.
Corran and Ross each grabbed a torch, fending off the ghouls with fire then lunging closer with their swords. Corran kept watch for any sign that the Rift—or the missing men—might reappear, but the tear between realms did not reappear.
“Still too many,” Ross grunted as he and Corran waded into the fight. Calfon’s targets moved fast with an unsettling, spider-like grace. They could scramble up sheer cliffs, climb boulders like a fly, and scale trees to launch themselves airborne onto their intended victims.
“Watch out!” Ross shouted, grabbing Corran back as one of the ghouls dove from overhead. The crunch of bone as the creature landed face-first on the hard ground would have stopped a person, but the ghoul rose to its feet undeterred, though an arm and shoulder hung at an unnatural angle.
Corran was soaked with ichor to his elbows, splashed with gore from head to foot. Ross looked worse after being caught in the spray of foul liquid that pumped from a ghoul’s neck when Ross’s sword removed its head from its shoulders.
“We must have counted wrong,” Ross panted as they chopped their way through the onslaught. Ghouls never tired, giving them still another advantage on top of unnatural speed and strength.
Corran shoved his torch into the face of a ghoul that dared get too close. The undead creature’s hair ignited, but it never slowed its attack, though the skin of its face and scalp blistered and charred. Corran stumbled backward, got his footing, and lunged, this time pushing the torch into the monster’s eyes.
The ghoul shrieked and flailed. Corran thrust his sword through its chest, then followed with a swing that took off its head. It raked his arm with its claws as it fell, opening deep, bloody gashes.
Too many of the ghouls swarmed toward Calfon for him to keep on firing with the bow. He took one last shot, skewering an oncoming ghoul through the throat, which slowed it but did not stop it. Calfon dropped the bow and grabbed an axe from his belt, setting about himself with a two-handed grip that channeled all his anger and strength.
We might not make it back, Corran thought as he kicked one ghoul so he could take a swing at a second. Together, they had cut the number of creatures by at least half, though he was certain now that his original estimate had been wrong by quite a few. Even so, that left several ghouls for each of them, and Corran’s energy was flagging quickly.
“Got a plan?” Two deep gashes marked Ross’s face and a swipe of claws across his chest cut his shirt to ribbons and gouged into his skin.
“Short of setting the forest on fire? Not really,” Calfon rasped.
“Gods! Are there more out there?” Corran thought he caught a glimpse of movement in the shadows. The battle had forced them a distance from the clearing where the Rift opened, and Corran felt sure they had traveled far enough to have crossed the border. Right now, he would have welcomed the appearance of guards, so long as they helped beat back the monsters. If they survived, they could elude the guards, but if they went down beneath the ghouls, they would be done for.
“If we could hit them with vitriol, it might push them back,” Ross said, out of breath as he cut the legs out from under one of the ghouls, only to have it drag itself forward with its arms, still a potent threat.
“We’ll burn ourselves as well if it splashes,” Calfon warned. “And that goes down to the bone.”
Corran set his jaw and kept swinging, fearing it had finally come down to a choice of how they wished to die: by fire, by acid, or torn to pieces by the ghouls. I’m sorry, Rigan. I did the best I could.
The three hunters stood back to back, still badly outnumbered. The ghouls sensed their weariness and pressed forward, teeth bared for fresh meat.
This is it, our last stand, Corran thought.
But before the ghouls could make their last assault, dark forms poured from the woods. At first, Corran feared they were more monsters; then he realized they were people dressed in black, armed much like they were.
Whoever they were and
wherever they came from, Corran welcomed the help. With an advantage gained on their attackers, Corran and his friends fought with renewed energy, battling the monsters shoulder-to-shoulder with their rescuers until the last of the creatures lay dismembered on the ground.
“Thanks,” Corran said to the newcomers, while Ross and Calfon were already reaching for the salt mixture and green vitriol in their packs.
“Stay where you are.” A tall man moved forward from the half-dozen fighters that had emerged from the woods. He and the others had scarves tied to cover their faces except for the eyes. That made it nearly impossible to gauge whether they were friend or foe.
“We mean no harm,” Corran said. “We’re only here to fight the monsters. Let us finish so they can’t return, and we’ll leave.”
“You’re from Ravenwood.”
Corran thought he picked up a trace of a Sarolinian accent. All of Darkhurst had a common language, but the different city-states spoke it with subtle differences in words and inflection. “We didn’t intend to cross the border,” Corran replied. “We were fighting for our lives, and the battle shifted.”
“Are you witches?”
Corran and his friends exchanged a glance at that. “No. Are you?”
The man shook his head. “Then explain how it is you were here before us, how you knew where the monsters would show up.”
Shit, Corran thought. That’s going to be hard to explain without making this worse.
“We were on patrol,” he said. “This is what we do—hunting monsters. To protect the villages.”
“It’s illegal to hunt monsters—in Ravenwood and in Sarolinia.”
“Yet here you are,” Calfon challenged. “Seems to me you came to the same party ready to dance.”
The man’s laughter surprised Corran. “Well then, perhaps we all hang together,” he said. “We also hunt monsters, and we, too, are outlaws.”
The newcomers removed their scarves, revealing their faces. The tall man had sharp, angular features and dark hair, bearing a strong enough resemblance to Rigan that Corran had to blink to keep from tearing up. The others, two women and four men, had a wary, determined look to them that gave Corran to suspect they had been fighting this quiet war for a while.
“We need to get back—” Corran began.
“It’s late, and you’re injured,” the tall man said. “At least come to our camp and eat, and let our healer take care of your wounds. I would like very much to hear your stories.” He extended a hand. “I’m Brock.”
Corran exchanged a glance with Ross and Calfon, whose expressions clearly said it was his call. “Thank you, Brock. We’ll take you up on your offer.”
Chapter Nineteen
“It got too dangerous inside the walls, so we left,” Corran finished a highly edited version of their story. “We’d seen our families and friends die, and the guards wouldn’t stop the monsters and wouldn’t let us stop them, so we came out here and figured we’d try to do what we could.”
Brock and his companions listened intently to Corran’s tale. Corran wondered whether they guessed he had censored the details. The bounty on their heads was too high for him to risk that their new “friends” were entirely trustworthy.
“Commendable,” Brock replied. “And similar in many ways to our own situation. We’ve all seen too much death, and now, there’s the blight.”
“You mean the dead zones, with the tainted grass?” Calfon asked
Brock nodded. “Yes. And more than that. When one of those things appears in a grazing field, the sheep or goats are torn apart. In a crop field, everything either dies or rots.”
“It gets worse,” one of the women in Brock’s team spoke up. “The last time one of those circles showed up, some of the goats that got caught in it were pregnant. Most of them miscarried, but the couple that did give birth—the kids were misshapen, deformed. They didn’t survive.”
Corran knew what she didn’t put into words. It was only a matter of time before the blight caught humans in its taint. Maybe, somewhere, it already had.
“Do you trust witches?” Corran asked, testing the waters before he revealed more.
Brock gave him an appraising look. “Some witches. My wife is a witch. I was raised a Wanderer. So if you’re asking, do we fear magic for its own sake, no. We know better than that.”
Corran nodded. “Good. We have some witches who help us. They believe the blight is something bad leaking out when a portal opens to a different place and monsters come through.” He waited for their reaction.
Brock and the woman shared a glance. “We came to the same conclusion. But we still aren’t sure why the portals open, or how to shut them for good.”
“We can’t shut them—not yet,” Corran said abruptly enough that Brock frowned.
“Why not?”
“My brother, Rigan, and two of our friends—hunters—got pulled through one of those Rifts several days ago. We have to find a way to get them back.”
“If monsters come from the place on the other side, there’s no telling whether your brother and your friends are still alive,” the woman said.
“I can’t accept that. I won’t.”
“Please forgive my wife,” Brock said. “She sometimes speaks bluntly.” He smiled at her. “This is Mina. She is a talented witch—and if there’s a way to find your brother, she may be able to help.”
“Any help is appreciated,” Corran replied. “And I know we’re running out of time. They won’t be able to last for long on the other side.” He met Mina’s eyes. “Please. He’s the only family I have left, and Mir and Trent are good friends. We need to find a way to bring them home.”
“Enough talk for now,” Brock said. “Let’s get you fixed up, and we’ll talk while we eat.”
Mina and one of the other men gathered supplies from a rucksack to treat the cuts the ghouls inflicted. Several of the wounds had already started to go bad, so Mina filled a cup with an odd-smelling liquid and insisted the three newcomers drink, as she and her helper cleaned the wounds and applied a medicinal paste before binding up the gashes.
“I’ll pour some of this into a flask for you,” Mina said, taking back the empty cup. “It’s good medicine, and it will keep the infection from spreading.”
“Our healer would love to have the recipe,” Calfon said.
Mina smiled. “I’m sure he’ll be able to figure it out once he tastes it. Simple, but effective.”
Two of the men brought out trail rations of dried deer meat, hard cheese, and tough biscuits, and the group shared the provisions equally. “It’s not our best cooking,” Brock joked. “I’d hate for you to think this is what Sarolinians usually eat.”
Ross laughed. “Don’t worry. We understand. Can’t pack a homemade hot meal in a saddlebag.”
A wineskin passed around the circle gathered by the fire, and Corran thought the contents tasted like blackberry wine. When they were finished with their meal, he looked to Brock. “We will need to get back soon. Please, tell us what you know of the Balance and the Rifts. We’ve got to find Rigan and the others.”
“You know of the Wanderers?” Brock asked.
Corran nodded. “My mother’s people were Wanderers, though my grandmother left and married outside the clan.”
“As have I,” Brock said, with a sidelong glance toward Mina, who reached over and placed a hand on his forearm. “I saw a darkness coming, and my people were too stuck in the old ways to do all that they could to stop it. Or, so I thought at the time.”
He stared at the fire for a moment before he continued. “The Wanderers help to keep the Balance. It’s part of what their magic does, and some of the reason they always keep moving. Blood magic harms the Balance, and the Wanderers do what they can to restore it, but now—the harm is too great.”
“How did the Wanderers get tied up in this anyhow?” Calfon asked. “They don’t work blood magic, do they?”
Brock shook his head. “No. They were chosen—and cursed.�
� He gave a sad smile. “I’ll tell you a story. You can believe it or not, as you like. Long ago, in the days of the Elder Gods, Eshtamon and Colduraan struggled to see which was the greatest. Now, most people think of Eshtamon as the god of vengeance, but he has dominion over many things. Eshtamon favors creation and the Balance. Colduraan grows stronger in chaos. Colduraan taught humans the ways of blood magic, and he thrives on the bloodshed. The more blood magic is practiced, the stronger Colduraan becomes. Eshtamon does not favor blood magic, but so long as Colduraan has sway, Eshtamon must support the Balance. He chose a small group of nomads who had strong magic and made them his priests. That burden has been passed down from generation to generation, and those nomads became the Wanderers.”
Brock looked up. “I have some of my people’s magic. I had already sensed our blood in you,” he said to Corran.
“My brother is a witch,” Corran replied. “He also has Wanderer magic.”
“Then they might survive,” Mina said, her apologetic smile a peace offering for her earlier words. “I have spent years trying to understand my husband’s abilities. They are different from other magics. I believe they come from Eshtamon himself, a portion of his power as a god.”
Calfon and Ross looked at Corran, who gave a small shake of the head. He wasn’t ready to tell these strangers about the night in the cemetery and receiving the blessing of an Elder God.
“We believe that Colduraan is using the blood witches to force a confrontation with Eshtamon, a proxy war of sorts,” Brock continued. “The blood witches strain the Balance, opening Rifts that poison the land with the taint. Eshtamon has no choice but to respond or see chaos win.”
Brock leaned forward. “This battle has raged for generations, centuries—maybe millennia. Colduraan seduces greedy men with the power of blood magic, knowing they will use too much, push too far. Eshtamon raises up champions to preserve the Balance and fix what is broken, and stop the ones who cause harm.”
Vengeance Page 32
