Senka pressed clasped hands between her firm breasts. “Thank you. Thank you so much, Mistress, for doing this for me, for my people, our legacy. My father’s name remembers you.”
Nyset slowly shook her head. “No, Senka. And please, call me Nyset, both of you. Though I know you won’t.” She grinned, casting her gaze between Isa and Senka. “I am unsure why I keep saying it.”
Isa smirked and produced a sound that might have been a laugh had she thought him capable of such a thing.
Senka gave a sheepish smile and a series of nods.
Nyset continued, spreading her arms and meeting Senka’s eyes. “I should be the one apologizing. You’ve taken great risks for the Tower, Senka. I’m grateful for you, for giving us a chance to repay you for all you’ve sacrificed for us.” She swept her eyes over the group. “We may find nothing in the Black Furnaces. We may find bandits, looters, perhaps squatters. Either way, let’s go take back what’s yours, Senka.”
Nyset turned to face the downward slope of the dune. She flexed her fingers open and embraced the powers. The Dragon always came first, rushing past the Phoenix in a torrent of rage. It swept through her limbs, burned like acid in her gut, and swelled her heart with the urge to destroy. A second after came the tempering energy of the Phoenix. It was an icy wave, muting the Dragon’s mindless thirst for ruin. A shiver tunneled through her from neck to toes. Disjointed thoughts shattered by the Dragon’s rage were mended together in the Phoenix’s calming touch.
She was one of the world’s last dual-wielders, a rare wizard gifted with the ability to embrace both the Dragon’s power of destruction and the Phoenix’s healing and protective energies. She’d only discovered her new talent during the Shadow War within the Shadow Realm. Perhaps it was always latent, or perhaps it had been given to her out of necessity. Regardless, without her discovery, she and her friends would’ve been doomed to live out their days in the Shadow Realm after Walter sacrificed himself to kill the Shadow God. With the Phoenix’s gift, she was able to summon a portal back into the realm of man, the land of the living. She’d tried to replicate the feat to open a portal into the Shadow Realm, finding it a fruitless effort.
She felt all her worries slide away among the swirling tempest in her chest. The Dragon and Phoenix flashed in her mind, a pair of dueling animals intertwining and configuring into a circlet of power.
Halos of flickering fire surrounded her wrists like floating bangles. Her eyes sparked to life with a cool blueish light, her pupils Dragon fire torches. She was the harbinger of death and life, giver and taker, the end and the beginning.
She marched down the dune and heard everyone fall in behind her. Her legs sank deeper into the sand, thankfully stopping at her knees. Each step whispered secrets of what lay in that dark hole. Demons. Ancient gods. The Shadow Princess. But no, none of those things could be there, but one. Death Spawn. The one thing she suspected might be here but feared mentioning it… for mentioning might make it real.
Senka once told her of the horrors that had occurred here just shy of four years ago. There was a Death Spawn raid led by a member of Asebor’s Wretched, Dressna. Senka’s father was slain upon the floors of the Black Furnaces by Dressna herself, Asebor’s winged bodyguard. Along with Senka’s father’s death came the majority of her clan’s by the ravages of Death Spawn.
Thinking of it reminded her of her first experience with Death Spawn in Breden, countless years ago. It was a time when her parents lived. When Walter lived. Before her memories of the Festival of Flames were tainted by the Shadow’s touch. When one of her best friends, Juzo Pulling, wasn’t cursed as a Blood Eater. She wondered how he was in the western wilds. Wondered how he managed to stay sane with such social isolation. She understood though. Some temptations could not be resisted, and conditions had to be put in place to make certain assurances.
Nyset closed her eyes against a particularly strong gust, sending bits of sand scraping at her eyelids. She let a long breath escape pursed lips, shaking her head, turning her thoughts back to Senka.
Nyset only saw Dressna once, and as a mangled corpse in the Tower’s training yard. She was a fearsome creature, reaching a height of almost seven feet with a quartet of horns emerging from the back of her dismembered head and curling around her face. Senka got her revenge with Isa’s help, her daggers bloodied, but had to use Angel’s Moss to survive the encounter. She did what had to be done, and Nyset couldn’t fault her.
Senka’s father had sacrificed himself so she could live. He gave her an opportunity to escape the Black Furnaces. She fled to Helm’s Reach where she found Nyset as the newly self-proclaimed Arch Wizard of the Silver Tower. Nyset realized then that returning to this place might be hard, even for the brave woman.
“Senka,” Nyset said, voice drawing out as a whisper and stolen in the wind. She said her name again, louder this time. “Senka, come join me.” Nyset took long, plodding steps through the yielding sand.
Senka shuffled up beside her. “Yes, Nyset?” The sound of Ny’s given name came out forced.
Ny gave her a warm smile and gestured at the nearly buried village. “Are you… okay with this? Being here? I know it must be hard for you.” She watched her carefully, searching her expression.
Senka’s mouth yielded the flicker of a frown, but then she steeled herself with a hard nod. “Yes. I want to be here. This was my home, my oaths left unfulfilled. I need to be here,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief.
“I know…” Nyset trailed off as a familiar odor brushed her nose. The scent, unidentified made her halt, grit her teeth, and clench her fists. It was a stinging mix of ancient urine and mushroom-covered logs. Her heart hammered against her chest, spine tingling with a surge of electricity. That horrible smell raised the corpse of a long dead memory. “Wait!” Her voice cut the wind like a blade.
Senka froze at her side. “What?” Isa and Grimbald staggered on a few more steps, both stopping to look up at her where the dune went flat. Behind them, not more than twenty paces away, lay the start of what remained of Senka’s village. Hardly an arm’s length of thatch roofs showed above the merciless sands.
Grimbald raised his meaty hand to shield his eyes from the sun, squinting at her. “What is it?”
She stared into that darkness, waiting, and braced for war. “Do you not smell it?” she asked with a wan smile. How? Why? Her mind searched for the reasons. They should all be dead, gone with the Shadow God’s demise. She knuckled her forehead and closed her eyes, searching her mind for answers.
Isa turned his ear toward the steps, eyes slitted, and sucked in a long breath. His eyes snapped open, air hissing out as his eyes burned with alarm. He ripped his sword free from the scabbard, twisting around to face the cavernous steps leading into the earth. “Death Spawn,” he growled, hammer ringing out from the loop and clutched in his other hand. The sun glinted like white stars from his weapons.
Grimbald mirrored him, Corpsemaker dragging down into a two-handed grip, his stance widening. His forearm muscles wriggled under a gallery of scars, fingertips white against the wooden haft. “Where are they? Could be anywhere, a trap.” Sweat beaded on his swiveling head and trickled down his neck.
“Not anywhere. There.” Senka pointed with a drawn dagger, the pommel a masterwork Dragon’s head. “The Black Furnaces.”
Nyset understood now. “A strong source of magic. The forges tirelessly burn with Dragon fire, the same fire that’s used to produce Dragon forged weapons. The proximity to magic must preserve them… like the cluster you encountered in Tigeria at the Dread Temple.” The words flowed out of her, a missing puzzle piece finally snapping into the appropriate spot. “That was why Walter’s Sid-Ho trainer Noah had found them in the Yellow Caverns long after the sealing of the Age of Dawn.”
“Another Black Furnace?” Senka made a face, daggers twirling in her grip.
“Yes, another. There’s a twin Black Furnace near Breden, buried deep in a treacherous cavern. It too must have possessed
enough magic to keep them alive.”
“No.” Isa shook his head, staring at that dark rectangle in the ground. “Why they were there in the Dread Temple… that was something else entirely.”
Nyset’s eyes flicked to the swirling script on Isa’s forearm, the edge poking out from his studded leather bracer. It was a curious story that had occupied some of her most recent research time. Isa received a brand from a creature, quite possibly a god, who had apparently called itself Prodal. He claimed he’d gone by many names in different times. The stories told by him, Senka, and Juzo were almost impossible to believe. But then again, there was a time when she thought a woman holding fire in her palm while her flesh— and even stranger, her clothing— remained unscathed was a child’s fantasy. The world continued to surprise her.
Grimbald cocked his head at her. “Certainly no magic expert, Ny, but if the Black Furnaces are a creation of the Dragon, why would they keep Death Spawn alive?”
“I…” She blinked, pushing away the endlessly branching paths of thought whose trunk started at Isa’s mark. “I’m not sure. That’s a good question. Perhaps their magical energy was all the handle they needed to cling to life. Maybe they were weak like the ones you found in the Dread Temple. Noah had supposedly felled over thirty of them on his own, a practically insurmountable feat for a Norm.”
Grimbald and Isa shared mocking glances, Grimbald chuckling. Isa raised his chin to regard her. “Just remember, Mistress, a well-trained Norm with an Equalizer crystal can make a bad day for a wizard. A wizard whose sole method of self-preservation is granted in the ovarian lottery,” he said with a wink.
“And that is precisely why all wizards now train with the sword,” she said, slapping the crosspiece mounted on her hip. She narrowed her eyes, meeting his stare until he finally averted his gaze, likely out of respect than anything else. He was a bold man, toeing the line of recklessness. She only had a small measure of the things he’d done, the things he’d seen. She knew they could change a man. The things he did required one to disconnect from empathy, discarding compassion, and pitying weakness.
“They come!” Senka barked. Grimbald growled and hunched his posture while Isa spread his arms in a taunting gesture.
Nyset swiveled her stance as a roiling mass of nude figures poured from the stairs and into the light. Ruby eyes flashed. Ashen limbs whipped. Death Spawn. They whooped and shrieked their fury. They were mostly unarmed, bearing makeshift weapons such as clubs and stones. Their bodies were gangling wastes. Flesh sagged and swayed from their bones, mouths pinked, lips peeled back to reveal blackened gums. Black forked tongues darted, lapping at the air in ravenous anticipation.
Some part of her pitied them. Hunger betrayed us all, laying waste to even the best of traps. Had they only waited a moment longer for them to enter the furnaces, this might not have been the killing ground it would soon become.
Nyset waited, stilling her mind, and finding within the dense forests of the Great Retreat. Her patience was the cresting wave, never rolling over, rooted deep in the ocean floor, its depths containing a mountain of frozen fury. It was a patience forged in the trials of her life, mortared in death, fang, and claw. She went deep into her sorrow, a place where babies were gutted by Death Spawn blades, their mothers watching in wild-eyed terror, bodies trembling. It was a place where all was lost, and nothing could hurt her. Deep in this place, fear dared not tread.
Her alliance with the Dragon’s flame burned bright in her eyes, flaring up with tongues of fire over her forehead. She pressed herself deeper, away from all the realm’s burdens precariously balanced on her back. In here, she was as fearless as new mothers and fathers. She was as fearless as love’s first kiss. Her spirit rose like spring buds, yielding to the yawning blue and the crush of careless boots.
And she waited. Her wave bubbled with gurgling white tips. A tingle crawled across her throat, stomach tightening, a great sense of knowing her every cell while similarly in a place far outside her body. Far outside time, wondering why these beasts came to die.
Her wave fell, and she pressed her fists together, causing a second set of fists of flame to thrust from her hands, growing into head sized boulders before colliding with the group’s leaders. There was a series of wet pops, red spray, flames gouting over the back of the group as she bathed their flesh in Dragon fire. Headless bodies crumpled, tripping those pushing on behind them. A few whose torsos had been sheared away flopped to the welcoming sands. More fell with agonized screams, rolling in a futile attempt to put out the fire that could not be snuffed.
Grimbald charged at the mass’s flank, axe whirling through one torso and traveling onward to hack through another, black blood filling the air around them. Corpsemaker begged to be used, made for one thing alone: violence. He carried in his every limb the countless hours of his training, limbs flashing and metal gleaming in a brutal dance. His arms were iron, legs worked into the hardness of wood, gut as tough as stone. Anyone foolish enough to brave his strength was doomed. Nyset grinned as her friends worked.
Isa ducked under a thrown stone, arm snapping like a whip, sword stealing an arm from its owner’s body. His hammer followed the sword’s whisper, possessed of its own ferocity, rising up in a sick parabola and turning a Death Spawn mouth into a place of ruin. His movements mirrored a dancer’s grace. Isa’s every cut was precise, every smashed limb and shattered jaw a thing of beauty. Splintered teeth tumbled across the sand, followed by a pair of severed fingers and spatterings of blood. Up and down went his savage hammer, tearing an eye free from a socket, crushing an elbow, and shattering ribs.
Senka was a storm of blades, spinning a determined course through the squirming limbs. She gave her daggers life, set them plunging in and out of thighs, armpits, slashing through biceps and throats, severing major arteries. She gave her blades more direction than even the most dedicated of parents. Her blades winked like stars when they caught the sun, gleaming behind a patina of blood, charting a path through the black heavens. Death Spawn mindlessly charged onward toward Nyset, felled before they could manage more than a few steps. Senka’s daggers drew cries of pains from their sordid throats.
Death Spawn clubs were dropped from hands whose tendons had been cut. Clutched stones went wide of their targets and struck their compatriots. Nyset carefully chose her targets, well aware that the gifts of the gods could murder her friends. She conjured arrows of fire, cutting clean holes between the centers of Death Spawn brows, leaving smoking holes and spurting wounds behind.
They were all heroes of legend and these sad creatures merely a warm-up for the quartet. Nyset stood before their withering charge, a stark and irresistible target in bleeding red. Raising her arms and splaying her fingers, she drew on both the Dragon and the Phoenix together. She wove their energies into a single spell. A series of blinding white tendrils sprung from her back, each lengthening and darting through the air, homing in on Death Spawn targets. Where they met the doomed bodies, they formed spirals around their torsos and then constricted, butchering their forms into dozens of slabs of sliced meat.
One Death Spawn, black-blooded, bull-eyed, and full breasted, snarled as she hurled a jagged rock at Nyset. The Arch Wizard drew upon the Phoenix, manifesting an oval of blue light forming a shield just big enough to surround her upper body, sending the stone bouncing harmlessly away. The shield vanished a second after, still holding her dual-spell. A tendril of light punched through its bull eye and out the back of its skull, shattered bits of bone and brains hanging on the air. Another came behind it, hands raised and in position to choke her if it could conceivably bridge the ten or so paces. She pulled on one of her ten tendrils, shearing its head from its body, legs carrying it onward for two steps before it crumpled.
About two dozen of the Death Spawn possessed wounds born of her dual-spell, some sprawled and trampled by their kin, choking on their blood as the others finished them off. A few hunched at the side of the battle, clutching at gaping wounds, all the fight drained
out of them and replaced by pain. On and on they came from that dark abyss until their numbers finally dwindled with the last few squinting into the day.
Three Death Spawn dashed for her, trampling over the dead. They were surprisingly smart enough to come all at once, briefly bathing her in their rotting shadows. Their clawed feet left crimson tracks in the sand. The middle of the three slowed, its dead eyes staring at her unblinking. Nyset’s boots were rooted in the sand, purposefully and brutally stilled as she reveled in the god’s gifts. She drew on more of their strength, gathering the raw power to both heal and to destroy. Her body was all but motionless, the tendrils of light from her back working through enemies trying to assail the flanks of her friends. The power that built within her narrow frame made her flesh tremble. Her dress flapped, the air around her quivered, and the light shifted.
The Death Spawn paused to watch her. One even tilted its head, spots of mold covering the bones showing through its cheeks. Cracked lips peeled back to show their teeth, wildly panting with a sudden need for violence. She saw one of the three was spattered with the blood of its brethren, and yet it went on. Curious. Death Spawn jaws creaked like wood rubbing together, muscles twitching, bodies moving.
Perhaps they had never seen a human stand before them. Perhaps they were only used to seeing men run. They advanced, and she smiled. With a great surge of release, she let the brewing spell go. Her skin burned as lightning sprang from each of her fingertips, crackling through the air, and forming chains of lightning through each and every remaining Death Spawn. Their bodies were hurled at least twenty feet into the sky, wisps of dark smoke trailing behind their paralyzed forms. Their nerves were charred crisps, bodies thumping like stones and limbs violently twitching. Words were spoken, cries voiced, but they were just noise in her ears.
Nyset raised her chin to regard the ruin around her. A thin smile formed behind her scarf, filling her chest with a lost joy. She missed combat. The sands were littered with drying pools of blood, but not a drop of it was hers. The combined powers of the Dragon and the Phoenix in one woman allowed her to produce such a slaughter that has never been seen in the realm of Zoria. She had far more time to work with the combined powers than Walter ever had, and thus her strength had grown to surpass any wizard before her since the sealing of the Age of Dawn.
The Shadow Age (The Age of Dawn Book 7) Page 2