by Paul S. Kemp
"More wood! They don't like the fire," said Jyme, and moved to throw another log on. Nix grabbed him by the arm.
"You'll smother it!"
In moments the wood Egil and Baras had thrown onto the pit crackled and burned. But still the creatures came on, and Nix, Jyme, and Egil plied their weapons and tried to stay on their feet.
When the flames rose high behind them the door to the carriage flew open and the eunuch lurched out, followed by Rakon. Immediately scores of the creatures attacked them. A dozen of the scaled, toothy creatures flapped around the eunuch, biting and scratching his face and bare arms, but he seemed barely to notice, instead methodically grabbing the creatures one after another and squeezing them in his hands until they burst in a shower of gore and blood.
"Stay near the carriage, eater!" Rakon said to the eunuch, and stumbled toward the fire, hood pulled up, waving his thin blade wildly as he went.
Baras and two of the guards left the fire to meet him, shielding him from the creatures' attacks. Egil, Nix, and Jyme awaited them near the fire, slashing, stabbing, and cursing.
A short break in the attacks gave Nix a moment to look up and assess the swarm. He could barely see the stars through the fog of them. There weren't hundreds – there were thousands, wheeling in a dark cloud above them, diving to attack by the score.
"Keep them off me," Rakon said to them.
"Aye," Baras answered.
While Baras, Egil, Nix, and Jyme did their best to keep the onslaught of creatures at bay, Rakon stood over the fire incanting. The syllables he uttered hurt Nix's ears and seemed to excite the flames, which roared and danced in answer to Rakon's words. In moments the flames swelled to a bonfire and still Rakon incanted, his hands weaving in the air before the flames.
Nix stabbed a creature, slashed another, another. The heat from the fire grew uncomfortable. The crea tures squawked and squeaked, withdrew from the growing flames and smoke.
Rakon's cadence grew more rapid, louder, reached a climax. He threw his hands over his head and the fire erupted upward in a searing column that blossomed into a disc of flame, exploding outward in all direction, for a few moments roofing the campsite in fire. Nix turned away, blinking, his eyebrows and hair singed, as a collective shriek went up from the creatures and the stink of charred flesh perfumed the night.
Thuds sounded around them, the bodies of the creatures raining from the sky, scores of them, hundreds, maybe a thousand. Nix looked up and against Minnear's green light saw what was left of the flock fleeing into the distance.
"Gods," Jyme breathed. He put the point of his blade in the ground and leaned on it. Dead creatures lay all around them.
Nix could only nod. The men stared at one another, hands on their knees, gasping, bleeding. Baras cleared his throat, wiped the blood from his face.
"We have to go after Lormel," he said.
Nix presumed he meant the guard who'd been carried off by the creatures. "Baras…"
"He's dead by now," Rakon said, lowering his hood to reveal his own face scratched by a claw. "Or will be before we can get there."
"My lord–"
"He's dead, Baras. There's nothing to be done for him. We have to break camp and get moving."
"Moving?" Baras said. "My lord, the men are wounded, exhausted."
"Truth," Nix added, sagging to the ground.
"And the horses…" Baras continued.
Rakon looked past Baras to the darkness outside the firelight.
"Do as I say, Baras. The Vwynn will be coming. If they didn't see the light from the flames, they'll smell the sorcery. We must hurry or we'll all die." He looked over to the horses. Two were down and bloody. The other two bled from many small wounds, but at least still stood.
"Yoke the two still standing to the carriage. Put the other two down. Divide the supplies from the wagon amongst the men and leave the wagon behind. I have poultices for the wounded men. Quickly now, Baras."
Baras stared for a long moment, then said, "Yes, my lord."
"The bodies we saw on the road," Nix said to Rakon. "Those are the Vwynn?"
Rakon looked up at the moon, at the high walls of the cut that hemmed them in. "Yes. The demons of the Wastes. Debased descendants of the people who once ruled these lands."
Egil took a step toward Rakon, but the thoughts implied by his angry expression triggered the spellworm. He doubled over with a groan and Rakon sneered.
Nix gave voice to what he assumed to be Egil's thoughts.
"You knew about these Vwynn the whole time and see fit to tell us only now?"
"I'd hoped to avoid them altogether," Rakon said. "Now do as I've said. We must hurry."
"Hurry to where?" Egil said, teeth gritted against nausea. "The Wastes are two days in every direction. If these Vwynn are coming…"
"If they're coming, they'll catch us," Nix said. "This is a decent place to defend. I didn't see wings on those corpses, so they'll have to come at us on the ground. With these walls, they can approach from only two–"
"No," Rakon said.
"We're vulnerable if we get caught in the open," Egil said.
"There's a… refuge ahead, not far out of the cut. The Vwynn will not enter it. If we can reach it, we'll find safety there."
"Safety for how long?" Egil asked.
"And how do you know about this refuge?" Nix asked. "And that the Vwynn won't enter it? Why not mention it before?"
"I know many things about which you are ignorant, Nix Fall, and mentioning all of them to you would occupy all of my days."
"Now he's a wit," Nix said to Egil.
"Assist my men in breaking camp," Rakon said. "Then we'll see to the wounded. We leave as soon as it's done."
Rakon returned to his carriage and soon provided Baras with several large pouches of herbal poultice. Baras mixed it with a small amount of beer, turning it into a lumpy yellow paste flecked with bits of leaves, and the men smeared it on their cuts. All except Egil.
"The only magic I trust comes from your gewgaws," he said to Nix. "And those only half the time."
Scratches and a few oozing bites marred the priest's face, scalp, and arms. He daubed at them with bits of burlap cut from an unused sack. Of course, Nix had seen Egil endure far worse wounds without slowing and without complaint.
"You're sure?" Nix asked.
"Aye."
For his part, Nix was too wounded to be particular about the source of relief. He spread the paste over the many wounds on his arms, his legs, his scalp and face. The paste went on cold but grew warm as it did its work.
After about a sixty count, it lost its warmth. When Nix scraped it off he found that the shallowest of his cuts had vanished, the deepest reduced to pink lines that would heal in a day or two.
"The man knows his craft, I concede," Nix said to Egil.
"Don't get too fond of him," the priest answered. "It'll be awkward when we have to kill him."
Mention of violence against Rakon caused the spellworm to twist up Egil's guts, which he endured with a grimace.
"Fair point," Nix said, and his own violent thoughts triggered nausea and cramps that doubled him over.
There were several hours of night left, so the guards lit torches, Nix pulled forth his crystal eye, and the caravan got underway, traveling the high-walled cut under the lurid, nearly full eye of the Mages' Moon. The night sat heavy on them and they moved in near-silence, the only sound the low rumble of the carriage wheels on the road and the occasional whicker from the horses.
Only when dawn lightened the sky did they breathe easier. Yet still the cut – really a canyon, a long, deep gash in the earth – went on so long Nix feared it would never end, that it would just continue forever, condemning them all to a subterranean existence where sky and wind and sun were forever just out of reach. They watched the sky, the walls, fearing the return of the flying creatures, dreading the appearance of the Vwynn.
When the road at last began to rise, so too did their spirits. The walls of the ca
nyon shrank around them and Nix could see the end of the cut ahead, the road gradually rising to elevate them out of the Hellish pit.
Several of the guards gasped when the group reached the top of the canyon and emerged into the unfiltered light of day. The leagues they'd traversed seemed to have transported them to another world.
Instead of boulders and scree and broken hills, they saw instead monumental ruins. Huge rectangular stone blocks jutted from the red landscape at odd angles. Faded script showed on some, the whorls and twists of the characters mostly lost to time and the weather. Looking too long at the script that had survived made Nix's eyes ache. Everyone stared about in awed silence. Baras made the protective sign of Orella.
"What do you make of them?" Egil asked, nodding at the blocks.
"I don't," Nix said, shaking his head.
"Man-made," Egil said, nodding at a huge stone sticking out of the earth, the bones of a lost civilization.
"Made," Nix agreed. "But I'm not sure it was by men. The size of them…"
In their day, the blocks must have been part of structures larger than anything in Dur Follin, larger than anything Nix had ever seen. He could not imagine the destructive force it must have taken to topple them. The mere passage of time seemed insufficient to the task.
"Norristru has a great interest, it seems," Egil said, nodding at the carriage.
Rakon had opened the carriage's window and stared out at the blocks, his eyes gleaming, his thin lips set in a straight line.
All day they traversed the gigantic architecture, the residuum of a people who constructed wonders and died – shattered domes, megaliths the size of small buildings, and pyramidal blocks, the sharp points of which stabbed at the earth and sky.
"How many do you suppose have seen this?" Egil said.
"Few," Nix said, and thumped the priest on the shoulder. "And now us among them. This is why we do it, yeah?"
"Aye," Egil said. "Though I'd prefer to be doing it of my own accord."
"Seconded."
The carriage set a brisk pace and the ruins grew denser as they traveled. Towering shapes loomed on the horizon ahead. At first Nix mistook them for hills and rock formations, but as they drew closer, he saw they, too, were ruins, great heaps of stone.
"Gods," Egil breathed.
All of the guards slowed in their steps, shared worried glances, and tightened their grips on sword hilts.
"It's all just ruins, men," Baras said, his tone false.
Rakon called out from the carriage. "We need to reach those ruins before nightfall, Baras."
"Is that the refuge you spoke of?" Nix called, but Rakon ignored him.
"You heard him," Baras said. "Leg it."
They picked up the pace, but the day wore on and still the high ruins seemed too distant.
"Faster," Rakon urged them. "We must go faster."
"Easily said by the man riding in the carriage," Nix said, jogging along with the rest. Sweat soaked his jack and shirt. Despite the pace they'd kept, they hadn't covered enough ground. The cloud-shrouded sun sank low in the west. Dread settled on the men. They watched the sky, the ruins around them.
"We press on until we reach the ruins," Baras said.
When night outvied day for rule of the sky, the Vwynn showed themselves.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nix caught motion in the dark crannies of the ruins that loomed around them.
"I saw something," Nix said, pointing with his sword at a pile of rectangular blocks that formed a makeshift post and lintel. "There."
"Keep moving," Rakon called. "Do not stop."
Nix spotted more movement, a lithe form dashing through the shadows.
"There!" he said.
"I saw it, too," said Derg.
"Faster!" Rakon shouted. "Everyone, faster!"
"Is it the Vwynn?" Baras asked. "Is it?"
Rakon didn't answer, the driver whipped the reins and the exhausted, wounded draft horses whinnied and picked up their pace. The men followed suit, almost running. There was no way they could keep it up for long.
Nix's eyes darted right and left, following motion, trying to discern the details of the creatures. A small stone fell from atop a megalith, disturbed by the motion of something. He saw more movement on the other side, a lot of it, a mass of forms. Over the sound of his own labored breathing, he heard growls, snarls, a growing chorus of them.
"We should find a defensible spot, Baras!" Egil said, rattling his dice in one hand, holding a hammer in the other. "We're going to get caught in the open!"
"No," Rakon countered from the carriage. "Faster. We must make the ruins."
"My lord has spoken," Baras said, breathing heavily, his mail jingling as he ran. "Move it!"
The sun shot its last, hopeless rays into a sky being overrun by night. As darkness stretched over the land, the Vwynn emerged from the shadows, hundreds of them.
"Here they come!" Nix said.
"Onto the carriage!" Egil ordered. "Now, now!"
"Wait," Baras said. "We should–"
"Go!" Egil said. "Now, Baras, or we're all dead."
The Vwynn charged out of the ruins, seething from all sides, the stonescape vomiting up their muscular, clawed forms.
"Onto the carriage," Baras said, echoing Egil. He bounded onto the driver's bench and took station beside the driver, already cocking his crossbow.
Egil, Nix, Jyme, and the rest of the guards leaped onto the step rail of the carriage and grabbed hold where they could. Rakon leaned halfway out the open window of the carriage and shouted at the driver.
"Go, man! Go!"
The driver shouted at the already straining horses, snapped the reins. The animals laid back their ears, snorted, and ran as best they could. They weren't chargers, and with the weight of the additional men to pull, they moved alarmingly slow.
"Faster!" Baras called, and the driver snapped the reins again and again. The draft horses snorted, lowered their heads, whinnied, pulled.
Behind them, before them, and to their left and right, Vwynn poured out of the night, loping over the ruined terrain on their long legs. They moved with an odd jerky stride, more leap than run, and their clawed feet threw up clods of earth behind them at every stride. Muscles rippled in their thin, scaled frames as they moved. Their claws flexed open and closed as they ran, as if in anticipation of rending flesh.
The carriage wasn't going fast enough. The driver beat at the horses mercilessly and the beasts picked up speed.
"Crossbows!" Baras shouted. "Clear the road!"
"Do not stop for anything!" Rakon ordered the driver.
Baras took aim and fired. His quarrel slammed into the chest of a Vwynn ahead and to the right, sent the creature tumbling head over heels to the earth. The Vwynn's fellows ran over and past him without slowing.
The horses picked up more speed, but not enough. Guards cursed as they tried to load, the bumpy ride making it difficult to lay quarrels into cocked crossbows. Nix held his falchion in one hand and held onto a rail on the top of the carriage with the other. Beside him, Egil held a hammer in one hand and held on with the other. His dice had vanished back into his pocket.
The guards got their ammunition set and crossbows sang, the bolts sizzling into the moonlit darkness before the wagon. Two Vwynn fell, a third, all of them screaming as they tumbled into the rockscape. The rest closed from all sides, fangs bared, claws flexed, their muscular bodies lurid against the stone.
The road behind them closed like a drawn curtain as the Vwynn coming from either side met up in a churning mass and ran frenziedly after the carriage, which was now careening wildly over the road.
"Don't overturn us!" Nix shouted at the driver, and the older man nodded.
"Don't let them get the horses!" Baras shouted over his shoulder. "Crossbows! Crossbows!"
Jyme, loading his weapon, lost his balance and would have fallen if Nix hadn't grabbed him by the collar and steadied him. He didn't bother with thanks, just loaded his crossbow as fa
st as the situation allowed.
Vwynn poured forth from the sides, before them, a mob of claws, teeth, and violence. One of them leaped onto the driver's bench, its claws scrabbling on the wood. Baras stabbed it through the midsection with his blade.