“Do with it as you please,” he said at last. “The boy and I were just about to leave.”
“Wait!” Tolbert put Mirianna aside. “I need—”
“Bloodstone?” The black hood swiveled. Her father stiffened under the weight of the invisible regard. “There is no more bloodstone, old man. Go home, while you still can.”
Tolbert shook his head violently. “But Ulerroth—”
“Ulerroth is a fool,” said the voice that vibrated along Mirianna’s nerves. “And so are you, if you stay another day in the Wehrland.”
A stallion’s shrill scream punctuated his words.
The Shadow Man spun. Below the rock ledge, the tethered horses milled, huffing. The blind boy clung to the pack mare’s halter, his face a pasty white. “Sir, I think I smell—”
“Krad!” Rees coughed, recoiling from a wave of stench that stole Mirianna’s breath.
“They must have followed us!” Pumble wheezed.
“Fools!” The Shadow Man’s faceless gaze raked from Rees to Mirianna. “I should damn you all to Beggeth, but the Krad will see to that soon enough.” He turned. “Gareth, free the horses!”
“Wait!” Tolbert said as an unearthly, high-pitched clamor erupted from the woods below. “What about us? What do we do?”
Only the hood rotated, cocking with exaggerated deliberation. “Why, you die, old man.”
Her father blanched. His grip on Mirianna’s arms faltered.
She saw the Shadow Man turn, saw the muscles of his thighs bunch as he prepared to leap down the hillside, saw, in the corner of her eye, shapes gathering along the tree line below, horrible shapes she’d seen only hours before rushing at her from a darkened clearing. With a shudder, she broke from her father’s grasp.
“Please!” She reached out to the black sleeve. “Help us!”
He recoiled at her touch like one snake-bitten. The sudden, sharp focus of his regard staggered her, but she backed no more than a step. No matter how he terrified her, he’d helped her once. She’d been led to him again, and not, her instincts told her, without reason.
“Please,” she repeated. “Help us. I—we’ll do anything.”
“Anything?”
His voice was a whisper that caressed flesh. Mirianna’s stomach quivered. Her breasts tingled. Her mouth grew even drier. Without thinking, she slid her tongue along her lips. Vaguely, she wondered what she’d done. And why time seemed suspended, as if everyone but she and the Shadow Man had been cast in stone and all sound arrested. All sound except the taut, guttural repeat of his question.
“Anything?”
If she were sane, she would seize the opportunity to clarify, to explain, to negotiate her reply. But even as she watched herself stand on the rock ledge and confront a shadow, she knew the question spoke not to her head but to her heart, and her heart answered in the only way it could, plainly and without hesitation. “Yes,” she breathed, “anything.”
Time returned with a mind-numbing rush of sound and motion.
Leaping from the rock ledge, the Shadow Man seized her arm. She flinched, but he held her fast. “If you would save yourselves, then feed the fire, woman. Make flame, lots of it.” His shove propelled her toward the smoldering ring of stones. To Tolbert, he said, “Get the boy. Bring him to the fire.”
“What are you doing?” Rees’s horse reared, but he pulled it into a tight circle.
“Have you fought Krad?” the Shadow Man retorted.
Mirianna dumped an armload of kindling on the fire. Beyond the sudden whoosh of flame, she saw Rees’s features redden.
“Then hold your tongue and do as I say.” At the Shadow Man’s whistle, the gray stallion clambered up the hill, nostrils flared. Seizing a handful of mane, he swung onto the horse’s bare back and wheeled it around.
“Those dung-beasts aren’t doing anything,” Pumble whimpered, sweat running in rivulets from under his hat. “Why do they keep screaming like that? Why don’t they charge?”
“Because they’re trying to scare you, mutton-head!” Rees snapped, his foaming horse whirling in another circle. “You’ve got a plan, Shadow. What is it and how much time do we have?”
“Not much.” He turned to Pumble. “Krad are afraid of fire. Pile brush into a fire ring. Keep the others within it.” Nodding to Rees’s bow, he said, “Bring down the leaders.”
“And you?” Rees fit an arrow to string. “What will you do, Shadow?”
The hood faced Rees’s sneer, then turned slightly. Mirianna risked a glance at the black shroud and found her attention magnetically drawn to the upper half. A chill rippled down her spine as she realized he’d summoned her gaze, and that his words, though ostensibly directed at Rees, flayed at her nerves.
“Why worry about me?” The Shadow Man’s stallion back-stepped. “I’m only a phantom, mage spawn of Beggeth. What can my kind possibly do to one of their own?” With a touch of his heels, the stallion sprang away.
“That ‘one of their own’ part is exactly what I’m worried about,” Rees muttered.
Me, too. Mirianna dumped another armful of kindling on the fire. Me, too.
****
What he needed, Durren thought, was a torch and a spear.
And a new head! What in Beggeth are you doing confronting Krad? You haven’t fought a battle since—since the mage took Drakkonwehr! What in the name of Koronolan do you think you’re going to accomplish with a broken sword and a knife? And for what? A woman sent by magic and—
Be still! Now was the time for action, not doubts. Or fantasies. Durren shook his head to dislodge an image of the woman’s parted lips. She’d said anything, hadn’t she? That was enough for now. Later, he could sort the ramifications of her promise.
Kneeing Ghost to a halt, he dismounted, seized a small aspen tree and hacked it off near the ground. An eye on the figures gyrating at the tree line, he stripped the branches, chopped off the top, split the tip, and jammed in the hilt of his knife, fastening it with his belt. That done, he hacked off another, smaller sapling and remounted, carrying both.
The clamor at the forest’s edge rose in pitch. The sound shrilled in Durren’s ears and set his teeth on edge, but he didn’t waste a look. His instincts, roused from years of non-use, told him he had only seconds before the terrifying roar of a Krad charge. Holding the two saplings aloft, he galloped back to the campsite.
The fat man, the woman, and the old man rushed like ants to complete a ragged circle of brush around the rock ledge. Near one side, Gareth stood with a flaming brand in hand, ready to light the ring. Skidding to a halt near the boy, Durren stretched over the brush pile and touched the unstripped sapling to the torch. Its leaves caught with a whoosh.
Holding the sapling torch in his right hand, he leveled the makeshift spear like a lance with his left and braced it against his hip. Legs wrapped tight around the stallion’s girth, he heeled Ghost toward the onrush of beast-men.
The ragged line of attack broke before the swish of his torch and the thrust of his lance. He wheeled Ghost, pursuing, jabbing, burning fur. Krad stench assaulted Durren’s nostrils. Their howls tore at his eardrums, making him grit his teeth against the pain, but he knew he was safe as long as he stayed out of thrusting reach of their spears and knives. If these were men or other mage-driven creatures of Beggeth, his lack of armor would doom him. But Krad never threw their weapons.
The scattering beast-men did, however, fling up a shower of stones, sticks and clods of dirt. Durren grunted as a rock bounced off his rib cage. Another ricocheted off his shoulder. Ghost pivoted, avoiding all but a pelting of his hindquarters.
His torch nearly burned out, Durren dragged it across the beast-men’s path, igniting brush. The main body of Krad shrieked. They milled. Some hopped up and down, shaking spears and knives. Others hurled more rocks. This time the missiles fell short.
Durren kneed Ghost to a halt. Between his legs, the stallion’s heart pumped and his muscles quivered. The horse pawed the ground, shaking his head at t
he message of restraint. Durren sucked air through his hood. Smoke, scorched fur, and Krad stench burned the length of his throat, and sweat glued his tunic to his body, but his blood pulsed with a fervor he hadn’t felt in years. His fingers flexed on the makeshift lance, liking the weight of it, the balance.
Once a warrior, always a warrior, said the Voice in his head.
“By Koronolan, yes!” Lifting the charred sapling like a spear, he heaved it toward a cluster of beast-men. The creatures fell over each other scattering. Durren threw back his head and laughed. Drawing the Sword of Drakkonwehr, he waved it over his head. “For Herrok-Eneth! For Drakkonwehr!” Laying his heels to the stallion, he charged the Krad line.
****
Mirianna huddled next to her father and the blind boy. Around them, the brush ring roared at the sky like dragon flame. A wall of heat scorched her face. Sweat trickled down her back and between her breasts, and smoke, thick with ash, stung her eyes.
She and her father clutched bundles of kindling, ready to toss them at any part of the ring that faltered. Pumble paced the circle, sword at ready, guardian charm between his teeth, lips caressing it in constant invocation. The blind boy stood gripping his staff like a club.
Outside the circle, Rees shot arrow after arrow. Now and then, through the blur of heat and smoke, Mirianna could see the creatures scatter where his arrows struck home. To the left, when the smoke parted, she could see the Shadow Man swoop at the Krad like a demon on horseback.
The creatures’ shrieks carried over the noise of the fire, ripping at Mirianna’s nerves. She ground her teeth, trying to shut out the sound, to keep panic from closing her throat entirely. But the noise only intensified, rushing at her ears like the roar of the fire. Stop! she wanted to scream, if only to hear her own voice, to prove the clamor could be penetrated, but it was too late—someone was already screaming.
“Get it off! Get it off!”
Her mind registered Pumble scrabbling on the ground with a dark, writhing mass. It registered her father, his armful of sticks flying away from his body, his hands reaching for the beast-man’s shaggy pelt. It registered a flash of sword, of knife, and the reverberation of the scream rising in her throat.
Mirianna pivoted to launch herself at her father, to stop him, but another dark mass hurdled a break in the fire ring.
The Krad landed in a crouch, a long, curved knife gripped in one paw. Yellow-rimmed eyes, set close under heavy brows, fixed on her. The creature snarled, exposing blackened teeth.
Screaming, “Krad!” Mirianna flung her armload of sticks at its face.
“Get down!” The boy swung his staff, whacking the Krad alongside the head and knocking the beast-man to its knees.
Mirianna scrambled behind the boy. “Hit it again!”
“High?”
“Low!”
The blow caught the Krad full in the face. The beast-man fell backward, blood gushing from its nose. The creature rolled, struggled into a crouch, and spat blood. It raised the knife and pivoted near the edge of the fire ring.
“Push it!” Mirianna grabbed the staff behind the boy’s hands and swung the blunt end toward the beast-man. “Now!”
Driven by the force of their double lunge, the staff rammed the Krad full in the chest. The beast-man keeled into the flames, landing with a crash on the burning brush. The creature yowled, rolled backward out of the flames, and scrambled to its feet only to crumple, an arrow protruding from its smoking hide.
Rees trotted up and jerked the arrow free. Casting Mirianna a look she couldn’t read through the smoke, he restrung it and rode off. Behind her, the boy said, “Did we get it? Is it dead?”
Nearby, Pumble mopped his face on his sleeve. His sword ran with blood. Beside him, her father stood panting, cheeks ashen. At their feet lay a dead Krad. Neither man looked injured. Heaving a sigh dangerously like a sob, Mirianna slid her hand over the boy’s and squeezed it. “Yes, it’s dead. That was amazing...what you did.”
He grinned and his face flushed. “We—we did it together.”
Outside the fire ring, the clamor faded. Mirianna shook her head, wondering if it was only a trick of the blood still roaring in her ears, but when the smoke thinned, she saw the beast-men running toward the trees.
“They’re leaving,” Tolbert said, a dazed look on his face.
Pumble kissed his charm, pressed it to his chest, and kissed it again. “Just in time, too.” He sheathed his sword with a flourish. “Or we would have slaughtered them. Right, Rees?”
An unsmiling Rees looked down from his mount. “Shut up, slug-brain, and get out here. We have horses to catch.”
Pumble’s lower lip quivered, but he hid it behind another vigorous mopping of his face, this time with the hem of his tunic. Drawing his sword again, he used it to poke open a path through the smoldering ring.
Mirianna took the boy’s arm and led him out of the circle.
“Can you—” he said as she released him. “Do you see my master? Is he all right?”
“Speak of the Demon,” muttered Rees, “and here he comes.”
Mirianna followed the direction of his nod. Smoke hung across the clearing like a blanket of blue fog. The air reeked with Krad scent and scorched vegetation. Here and there, wispy tendrils swirled from smoldering brush, obscuring the ground, concealing its solidity. The Shadow Man emerged from the haze first, his head and shoulders a sharp black silhouette, the horse beneath him an insubstantial gray wraith. He glided toward them like an apparition, soundlessly.
Like a dream, Mirianna thought, mesmerized by the play of light about his body. Like my dream.
Awareness clenched in her abdomen. The jolt radiated outward, curdling her skin and raising the fine hairs of her body in wave after wave of sensation. The man of her dreams was nothing but a figment, something conjured by her loneliness, her need for a lover...wasn’t he? The image approaching was not a man, but a shadow, a—a nightmare, not a dream. And she’d promised—she’d promised him—she had promised—
By the Dragon, what had she promised?
Anything.
She tried to swallow, to wet her mouth, but her throat wouldn’t open. She fought against a sensation of suffocating, of drowning in water she couldn’t see. And still he approached, gliding as silently, and as inexorably, as Death.
Chapter Fourteen
The Krad fled in the mad scattering of a terrified horde. It would be hours before the creatures could regroup. To be certain, Durren pursued them into the forest. He returned with the Sword of Drakkonwehr gripped loosely in his hand and the make-shift spear resting across his lap. He flexed his fingers, savoring long-dormant sensations.
Once a warrior, always a warrior, said the Voice in his head.
Durren nodded. He marveled at how easily his body recalled its training. How the scent emanating from his tunic refreshed his nostrils. How the ache in his muscles radiated confidence, pride. Ghost, as if sensing his thoughts, arched his neck and pranced. Durren chuckled and patted the stallion’s shoulder.
It had been ages, too, since he’d laughed...for pleasure.
Ages, he thought, since he’d deserved to.
The smoky meadow dotted with Krad carcasses seemed suddenly all too familiar. Drakkonwehr had smoked, too. And carcasses had littered its courtyard. But there had been no triumph in his passage through it then.
Durren closed his eyes as a wave of humiliation washed over him. Warrior, hah! What kind of warrior lets everything he’s supposed to defend be destroyed? What kind of warrior fails not only his mission, but his best friend, his family, and his heritage? And what kind of warrior—Damn him!—doesn’t even pay for his failures with his own worthless life!
The same kind of warrior, said the Voice in his head, who lives day after day with the memories.
And night after night with the dreams. Durren squeezed his eyelids together until purple and yellow rioted behind them. It was a mockery, this being condemned to life. Cursed by Syryk’s spell with a physi
cal being too horrible for any human to survive the sight of. Damned to never age, but to watch, alone, while everything around him grew...and died. Gall rose, bitter and searing, at the base of Durren’s throat.
Oh, he could die. But not by natural means. And not by the hand of a man. To surrender to a Krad knife, though, would be beneath any man who lived by the blade.
Raising the Sword of Drakkonwehr, Durren considered the broken blade. Directly after the collapse of the Stone Dam at Herrok-Eneth, he should have gathered his wits and gone deep into Beggeth, hunting mage-spawn. With this damaged weapon, doing so would have been tantamount to suicide, but no one would have blamed him for that when they had the fall of the whole world to lay on his head. Instead—his fist tightened on the hilt—he had not acted with honor. Rather, some dim force he even now couldn’t identify had drawn his shocked mind and battered body out of the tumult and led him like a homing bird to Drakkonwehr. There he’d stayed, a captive of honor and pride, until the desire to sustain life, however wretched, had driven him out once a year to trade in Ar-Deneth.
Durren slapped the flat of the blade against his thigh. If only he’d run the whole length of it through Syryk’s black heart when he’d had the chance!
‘If only’ is an illusion, a worthless conceit, said the Voice in his head. There are no second chances. A ‘warrior’ should know that.
Be still!
Why? So you can wallow in self-pity and forget the woman?
The woman.
Durren’s spine stiffened. He lifted his gaze and saw her standing above the haze, the rock ledge an island in a sea of mist. “Illusion,” he said, trying to tear his eyes from her flushed cheeks and riotous hair.
Promise.
The word shuddered through Durren. His groin quivered with it. Even his heartbeat stumbled. He forced a deep breath. She’d promised, hadn’t she? And he’d made her say it twice, to be sure.
But what could she do against Syryk’s curse?
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