Shadow Walker (The Sword Saint Series Book 3)

by Michael Wallace

  “They’re afraid of us!” Gyorgy said.

  One of the demons was slower than the others, or maybe more reluctant to give up the opportunity to fight. Katalinka recognized it by its bulging abdomen, which was covered with blackened knobs over fire, almost like scales, and nearly dragged on the ground above stubby legs. It was the same monster that had devoured Drazul moments earlier, and it seemed to have developed a taste for human flesh.

  Sarika seemed to spot the monster at the same time. She snarled and gripped her sword with two hands. “Use your sowens—hold that bastard in place.”

  “What are you doing?” Miklos demanded. “Stop her, Katalinka—don’t let her go.”

  She knew he was right, and they needed to stay close together to find a way past the dragons and demons. This was not their fight. She made a grab, but the firewalker sohn was already pacing toward the demon, which leered at her in delight.

  The only thing left was to aid Sarika and hope they could get her out alive, so Katalinka threw her sowen at the monster like it was a whip, engulfing it with bands to slow it. Miklos drove more water into its face. Clouds of steam swallowed Sarika, who leaped through the air with her sword slashing downward from behind her shoulders.

  The woman cried out, and the demon did, too. Katalinka rushed in with her swords glowing. The one in her right hand, her own master blade, seemed to be made of pure light.

  She found Sarika slashing at the demon, who’d taken gaping wounds on its chest and across its belly, but had lashed its fiery tail around the woman and was burning through her clothes and into her flesh. It had also pinned her sword arm to her side, and leaned toward her with its mouth agape to eat her.

  Sarika glanced backward, her face glowing with reflected light from Katalinka’s swords. “Help me!”

  The demon stretched its arm and swiped at Katalinka’s head. She bent nearly backward to avoid its claws, and the blow passed harmlessly overhead. She came back around with swords swinging. The first to hit was Gyorgy’s blade in her left hand, but her balance and training were for a demon blade, and the student’s weapon wasn’t as well balanced or as finely honed. It bit into the demon’s tail where it met the body, but failed to sever it loose and free the firewalker, as had been Katalinka’s intention.

  Her second sword hit the demon on its upper arm. This was her master sword, her own dragon blade. It slid through the creature’s molten flesh, and its arm sloughed away, just as it was summoning a fiery spear to shove through Katalinka’s chest. The spear fell away and rapidly cooled to a black lump of stone.

  The demon howled in rage and pain. It made two more swipes with its remaining arm and one of its clawed legs, but it was only flailing about now, and she had no trouble staying clear. Then she brought her swords together, leaped forward, and buried the tips in its chest. It toppled backward, mouth open, spewing smoke and a burbling, blood-like lava.

  Sarika struggled free of the demon’s tail. Apart from scorched clothing, she seemed none the worse for the wear. Instead of leaving the dead demon alone, she straddled its body, placed the tip of her sword at its neck, and shoved down.

  “What are you doing?” Katalinka said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “The skin is hardening.” Sarika pulled her sword free with a curse. “It’s no good, my sword can’t get through the stone.”

  The woman was sawing at the demon’s skin, which was already solidifying into a stony shell. She apparently wanted to cut the dead elder out of the demon’s belly. Katalinka saw no point in rescuing the charred remains, but the firewalker sohn wasn’t going to leave until it was done, and so she assisted. Her dragon blade did what the firewalker’s sword could not, cutting the demon open like a rotten melon.

  To her stunned amazement, as the demon’s skin split open and exposed its interior, Drazul emerged, still very much alive. The elder crawled out and wheezed and gasped for breath. His robe had been smoldering, and now burst into flames at the first touch of air. He tore it off with a cry. All that remained was his badly scorched underclothes.

  “How did you. . .?” Katalinka began. “But you’re alive!”

  “Firewalkers are not so easily burned,” Sarika said. She stood guard over the old man, and feinted toward another demon that was coming toward them, still being bombarded by a cold, wet wind from Kozmer. “I sensed he was still alive, and I threw my sowen inside to shelter him.”

  “I felt you out here,” Drazul said. “I knew you were trying to save me. I had to hold on a few moments longer.”

  Still, it seemed a miracle to Katalinka. Time was hard to gauge in moments of panic, fear, and anger, but the old man must have been inside the monster for a full minute, maybe longer. There was no way she’d have lasted five seconds inside its belly, sowen or no.

  They fell back to join the others. Drazul was incapable of combining his sowen to Kozmer’s, only able to heal his own burns. His hair was scorched and falling out, and his eyebrows had burned off.

  Katalinka and Miklos took the forward point, Sarika the rear, with Gyorgy lending his immature sowen to Kozmer’s in slowing the movement of any demon that tried to penetrate their defenses.

  “We have to get past the dragons,” Gyorgy said.

  “Great idea, boy,” Miklos said. “Maybe you can ask them to kindly step aside.”

  It wasn’t as foolish a suggestion as Miklos made it sound. The dragons were losing, that much was clear. They couldn’t summon enough ice and snow to batter down the demons, whose superior numbers and heat melted attempts to bury the road. There seemed to be an unlimited number of demons, and though the battlefield was littered with their rigid, crumbling carcasses, scores of them remained in the fight, and more arrived by the minute. The blue drake tried to lift off the ground, perhaps to flee, but a dozen fiery lashes wrapped around its legs and prevented the creature from flying clear.

  Ironically, the only thing keeping the dragons from being overwhelmed seemed to be the small knot of sword temple warriors holding a number of demons at bay. Katalinka had the ability to kill the monsters, especially when aided by her companions, and the fear the demons held for her was telling.

  The monsters think I’m the sword saint.

  Two glowing white swords. A superior sowen. Never mind that she hadn’t grown into the kind of strength that would be needed to cut down an army of the monsters, they didn’t know that. It made them fear her.

  “Fight your way to the dragon,” she told her companions.

  “What, so now you want to die?” Miklos asked.

  Sarika and Gyorgy only stared, as if she’d gone mad. Only Kozmer looked thoughtful. “Why?”

  “The dragons are losing. Look at them, they’re trying to flee. We can help them. Once they’re airborne, they’ll blast down snow and ice to seal their escape. We can use it to get away ourselves.”

  None of the others looked particularly keen on this option, but neither were there alternate suggestions forthcoming. A demon took advantage of the drying road, water boiled off, to charge forward when Kozmer couldn’t fight back with a rain-driven sowen attack. Katalinka and Sarika gave battle, and delivered a pair of light wounds that drove the monster off. Others were still lurking, watching for an opening. Fiery spears and tridents appeared in their hands.

  Katalinka glanced behind her and saw an opening. “Now!”

  She turned and ran without seeing if the others would follow. She felt them at her back though, especially the strengthening force of Kozmer. A huge white foot slammed onto the road next to her with such force that it knocked her from her feet. When she got back up, she was caught in a cold, pouring rain, with dying, raging demons flailing at her in an attempt to kill her before they froze and broke apart.

  She hit one monster’s whip tail, and it shattered like glass. Her sword took off the leg of another demon and the head of a third. Molten blood splashed her skin and burned, but she had no chance to deal with the wounds, as another spew—this one a deliberate, vomited spray—nearly
caught her full in the face. She ducked clear and came briefly face-to-face with Sarika, before the two of them were fighting again, back-to-back, against separate enemies.

  It seemed a hopeless struggle, but their arrival had disrupted the onslaught against the dragons. The demigods seemed to strengthen with the lull, and the rain turned to sleet again. Ice flew down in stinging sheets.

  “Through here!” Miklos said. Something like steaming blood dripped from the end of his falchion as he pointed it toward a gap between the two dragons. They were each battling small armies of demons on their flanks, and a gap had opened between them. It was wide enough to slip through, but close enough that they’d be pulverized should one of the dragons move at the wrong time.

  It took another moment of hard fighting, this time with fiery blows landing on both Sarika and Kozmer, before the six companions fought their way clear of the growing horde of demons.

  That left the dragons. The Blue Drake was on all fours, its tail swinging back and forth, blasting aside demons, while the White Drake reared on its hind legs, opened its mouth to the sky, and seemed to suck in a vortex of black clouds. The temple warriors ducked and weaved to get past their tree-trunk-like legs, squinting through the snow and rain and steam, avoiding both living demons and the broken pieces of the dead flying past their heads.

  They were almost through when the ground heaved once more. Katalinka barely caught her balance. The dragons were lifting off, and they drove a hurricane with their massive wings that battered everyone still on the ground. They spewed snow and ice as they climbed.

  The six humans were now alone, surrounded by demons. But such was the assault from above that the fires were dimming all around. A handful of demons dragged themselves off the road and regained their molten holes, but most froze into stone where they stood.

  That bought the companions a moment before the creatures regrouped and came after them with fresh heat and malice, and they took advantage of it. Or tried.

  Katalinka could barely keep upright as she attempted to follow the others. Her body had gained strength throughout the fight, but hadn’t fully recovered from the ordeal. Just ahead of her was Drazul, hobbling along without his staff. He was old and bony and also recovering from burns—not to mention struggling through the snow practically naked—yet she still couldn’t keep up with him.

  Just when she thought she would fall to the demons emerging once more onto the road, her companions reached back with their sowens and lifted her up. She caught a second wind and forged ahead.

  Moments later, the view cleared down the canyon and she caught her first glimpse of the plains below. It was full daylight still, in contrast to the gloom of steam and smoke and snow they’d fought their way through, and the midday sun bathed the land in gold.

  Above it all flew two massive shapes—the drakes from the mountains—and they pulled a mass of clouds from the south. It was the height of the growing season, with the rice farms well short of harvest, and yet a punishing snowstorm was about to strike the land.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The six companions stopped that evening below the village of Hooffent. Or what had once been Hooffent; a mass of volcanic stone had buried the village, and was still a glowing, advancing red wall along its eastern face. Half a dozen blackened trails scorched their way from the leading edge of the flow, and Katalinka wasn’t surprised to see demons where the burn marks ended, though these ones had given up the fight.

  They leaned forward in death, claws extended, mouths open and tongues protruding, as if they’d been in the act of tasting the air as the cold, or perhaps rain, had smothered their internal flame and turned them to stone. In couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks since they’d died, if that, but they already had an eroded look about them.

  Katalinka joined her companions in flopping down, exhausted, about twenty feet downhill from the stone demons, on a hillside overgrown from lack of grazing. In spite of the greenery, there was no sign of life, animal or human.

  Somehow Gyorgy had grabbed a few of their possessions during their flight, including Kozmer’s change of clothes, which allowed Drazul to dress himself. No food, though. Water, either, though the river hadn’t been dammed, and shouldn’t be far away. The heat and fighting had left Katalinka desperate with thirst, but first she needed a moment of rest.

  “We can’t stop here,” Miklos said. “We need to keep moving.”

  “Are we capable?” Sarika asked. She glanced at Drazul.

  “I’ll be all right,” the firewalker elder said. “I won’t slow us down—you can count on that.”

  Sarika nodded at Katalinka. “And you?”

  “Give me five minutes. Let me catch my breath. And I need water—I’ve never been so thirsty in my life.”

  “The dragons saved us,” Gyorgy said. “We would have died if they hadn’t cleared the way.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, boy,” Miklos said. He drew his sword and flaked off bits of stone that had stuck to the blade. “Who do you think drew the demons in the first place? Those dragons are no friends of ours.”

  Katalinka drew her own weapons, but they were clean and gleaming. The dragon blades had given her an advantage fighting demons. Did that mean the demon blades would have worked against the dragons?

  Then she shuddered as she imagined attacking such a creature. The result would surely be death.

  “Here,” she said to Gyorgy, holding out his dragon blade. “Give me back my demon.”

  He looked down at his weapon after making the exchange. “You were amazing—I never thought this sword capable of what it did.”

  “It served its purpose. But when we’re home—if we ever get home—you need to forge new blades. Your dragon is unbalanced, and the auras needed more folding.”

  “I’ll try,” Gyorgy said doubtfully. “My teacher still had a good deal to show me.”

  “Don’t forget that Narina is still forging her own master blades,” Kozmer told Katalinka.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’d almost forgotten. She’s still wielding Father’s weapons. Excellent swords, but not her own.”

  “And a good thing, too, if we hope to subdue her,” Miklos said. “Even the smallest advantage might make a difference.”

  Sarika grunted. “We have three sohns, and two elders to lend us their power. Even this boy might be of use, if for nothing else than to remind her who she was, and who she may become again, if she lets us.”

  “She grows in power with every killing,” Miklos said. “She destroyed a crowlord, defeated your friend, and has massacred who knows how many soldiers and peasants.”

  “Let’s hope no peasants,” Kozmer said.

  Miklos shoved his sword back into its sheath. “She’ll kill who she’ll kill, peasant and warrior alike. And she’ll grow stronger as she does.”

  “Be that as it may, she’s not the sword saint yet,” Sarika said.

  “We don’t know that,” Miklos said. “We can only guess. What I do know is that we don’t have any time to waste. The longer we wait, the harder it’ll be to defeat her.”

  “Someone else might get to her first,” Katalinka said. “Who knows what kind of fights Narina is provoking? I don’t think my sister has any sense of risk or danger at the moment.”

  Miklos gave a grim nod. “Right, there’s that too. There might be someone stronger. Point is, we’ve got to move, food or no. Water or no.”

  “We need to drink,” Katalinka said.

  “Fine, a quick drink at the stream, and then we’re off.” Miklos gave a grim nod. “Fifteen, twenty more miles to cover by dawn, the way I figure it. That’s the kind of pace we need to maintain if we’re going to run her down.”

  Katalinka was beginning to agree with Miklos, but it was hard to say how well Drazul would hold up. He may be a firewalker, but being swallowed by a demon had left him with burns all over, and he was an elder, not as old perhaps as Kozmer, but he’d need longer to heal than someone younger and in her full p
ower.

  She closed her eyes and reached out with her sowen as Miklos and Sarika debated the best course out of the mountains and through the plains, whether they’d be better off in the bandit-infested hill country or among the warring armies on the plains. In the past, she’d never been able to feel the auras beyond her immediate surroundings, but now Katalinka stretched her consciousness onto the plains with little effort.

  The auras below had dissolved into chaos. Great wounds marred the land where villages had burned, armies had clashed, and peasants and livestock had fallen or fled their lands. An irrigation dam had broken, leaving several miles of terrain flooded. Great swaths of farmland lay abandoned. Along the northern delta, ice had destroyed rice paddies, whereas the river to the south had changed course when volcanic flows from the mountain cut the streambed.

  She sensed something else along that river, too, a twisting strand that led from a village—perhaps burned, perhaps the site of a massacre—toward something that felt like a mill or dam in one of the tributary streams. Something was there that felt a lot like a bladedancer’s sowen, although Katalinka was very far now, at the extreme limit of her range.

  She opened her eyes and breathed deeply as she returned to her surroundings. The first thing that met her gaze were the dead fire demons a few feet uphill. Strangely, they had deteriorated since she’d taken note of them a few minutes earlier. Fissures lined the stone, and the faces had an eroded, slumping appearance, as if they’d spent twenty years in the elements.

  Miklos and Sarika were still arguing about how to squeeze twenty miles out of the company before they stopped to rest. It was a good question, but not an argument she needed to join.

  Instead, Katalinka felt at her body to see how it was healing. She was improved, definitely stronger in every way. And her mind was clear, too. None of that irrational rage that had turned her against her companions. Apart from her thirst, she felt physically and mentally healthier than at any time since Volfram wounded Gyorgy and ambushed the sohns on the mountainside. Not only was she capable of extended effort, she understood now what needed to be done, and thought it could be managed.