He was now within twenty feet of the closest, an armored vye sitting atop a destrier bred to handle the creature’s weight. In his taloned hand, the vye held a long spear. He shifted uneasily in his saddle, gazing back toward the trees.
“They’ve fled into the woods,” he growled. “We should be after them already!”
Another turned his dark face at his comrade and bared his jagged teeth. “They’ve fled on foot, fool!” the vye sniggered. “We’ll have them soon enough. You heard the captain; he wants the humans and the flying machine. Start the chase alone if you’re so eager.”
“But the battle—”
“Can start without us. We get a lucky plum of an assignment—one that whisks us from the front lines—and you want to get it over with? Slow and easy, friend—a bit of luck and we’ll rejoin ranks after Aamon’s crushed. You want to be in the thick when those scuttlers are set loose?”
“No.”
“Then shut it. A nice long chase over wild country is just the thing.”
With a grunt, the vye turned back to watch the balloon as it was dragged to the water’s edge. Once his back was exposed, Max stole forward and slipped the gae bolga between the vye’s ribs. The blade hummed in Max’s hand, growing warm as Max quietly tipped the vye back off his saddle. The attack was so smooth and quiet that the vye’s horse hardly stirred. Such mounts were used to the din and clamor of battle; the scent of blood did not spook them.
But the scent did spook the vyes. Max had silently slain three more before the wind changed and carried the smell of death to their comrades. They whirled about just as Max smacked the flanks of the closest horse and sent it cantering into their midst.
As the vyes charged, Max met them head-on, a lethal blur of motion nearly too fast for the creatures to see, much less strike. He evaded each spear point and cavalry saber with fluid ease as the Morrígan’s blade struck home time and time again. It clove metal in two, shearing through helmets and hauberks in a scream of red sparks. The hunters had become the hunted and the battle devolved into a massacre. When only four vyes remained, they tried to flee.
Max raced after in pursuit, desperate to let none escape and return with greater force. The last made it no farther than the other side of the lake before Max ran its destrier down, tearing the vye from the saddle and ending his life with a savage stab through the heart. It was all over in minutes.
Panting, Max stood and scanned the surrounding country. Every sense was electric and terrifying; his fingers twitched as the Old Magic howled within him—always pushing, straining for total control. The gae bolga burned in his hand. It whispered to Max, urging him to hunt down Prusias and finish what he’d started. He could destroy the King of Blys and save Rowan this very night. Who cared if he ultimately fell in battle? People would sing of Max McDaniels for a thousand years—the boy who slew the Great Red Dragon.
What are you about? Answer quick or I’ll gobble you up!
The wolfhound’s challenge echoed in Max’s mind.
“I’m a god,” he whispered, steam coursing off his body. “A god of war and blood and victory. Every day I grow stronger. I’ll drive every army before me. My enemies will know fear like they’ve never known it before.…”
Visions appeared before him: Prusias’s palace engulfed in flames, the marids’ crystal towers crashing down into the sea. One by one, Max would conquer the other kingdoms. And when he had broken all resistance and sent all evil things slinking back into the shadows, David would set things aright. David would pick up the pieces and govern and heal the hurts of the world. The Great War could start tonight. Prusias was so … very … close.
Night was waning when Max finally put the visions and whispers to rest. He had remained absolutely still throughout this silent battle, a brooding statue locked in a struggle to master the forces within him. The Old Magic wanted so desperately to break free, to purge Max of everything human and mortal, weak and loving. He had struggled all his life to keep it bottled up, to divert these energies and control them until they subsided. But the Old Magic was growing stronger … and in the gae bolga, it had a new and potent ally. Unless Max discovered new reserves of will, this was a battle he would someday lose.
But he would not lose it tonight. Max gazed down at the blade in his hand. It was such a grisly weapon, and now there was blood frozen on its blade, lacing the metal like red syrup. For the moment, the Morrígan’s presence was subdued, but Max knew it was forever lurking, forever poised for its next victim and opportunity. Looking down, Max stared at the body of the last vye. His teeth were bared in a death grimace, the yellow eyes staring blindly at a barren elm. His mount was nearby, quietly nosing about for grass and nettles as its hooves scraped through the crusted snow. Gazing about, Max saw a score of dark, motionless shapes scattered about the shoreline.
He dragged the vyes into the lake, letting the water buoy the bodies until he could shove them farther out. Their armor sank them to the bottom, burying each in a grave of silt and reeds.
The sky was growing light by the time he rounded up two of the great black horses. He had hoped to bring more, but the animals were trained for war, for attacking another’s mount in the midst of a chaotic battlefield. Without a rider to control them, they grew aggressive whenever another stood too near. Max could only manage two. Holding their reins at arm’s length, he led the gigantic horses back into the woods.
Madam Petra was pacing anxiously when Max returned. Their hasty camp was packed and most of the embers were buried beneath dirt and snow. David was bundled in blankets, lying next to the beginnings of a travois so they might drag the injured boy over the snowy ground. The smuggler glanced up, looking utterly spent.
“I’d almost given up on you,” she muttered before eyeing the horses. “They only sent two?”
“Twenty.”
“And they are …?”
“Dead,” replied Max curtly, bending down to inspect Toby. The smee had taken his native shape and was warming himself by a pyramid of embers.
“Don’t fret,” declared the smee bravely. “I’ll be all right and war stories work wonders with the ladies. I can tell them all about how I saved you from going squish!”
Max grinned and crouched over David.
“You changed his dressings,” he observed, examining David’s wounds.
“Did you think we’d leave an injured boy to die in the wild?” the smuggler snapped. “Katarina tended to him all night.”
Max thanked the girl, who merely stared at Max with a glassy, curious expression.
“You killed them all?” she wondered.
Max looked away. “More will come,” he said. “We have to be off and quickly. We’re still much too close to that army. Bholevna’s north of here?”
Madam Petra nodded.
“Well,” said Max, “these horses might be big, but they’re still just horses. You and Katarina can ride one and I’ll take David on the other.”
“So I don’t have to be a steed?” said Toby, audibly relieved.
“No,” said Max, scooping him up. “You’ve earned a ride in style.”
Within ten minutes they were packed and mounted with Max balancing David on the saddle in front of him. The Kosas were clearly expert riders, sitting easily on the great horse and stroking its braided mane. Max noticed Madam Petra staring curiously at him.
“Letting us ride together?” she wondered, a faint smile on her lips. “Not afraid we’ll gallop off?”
Max nodded toward the travois. “Not anymore,” he said, taking up the reins and spurring his horse ahead.
They rode throughout the morning and into the afternoon, the horses picking their way through forests and along snowy streams, cantering whenever it was possible. While David dozed, Toby nestled in the folds of Max’s hood and bombarded him with reflections about casino odds, the meaning of life, and his fondness for baked potatoes.
“But I have to enjoy them on the sly,” the smee reflected sadly. “Otherwise everyone looks a
t me like I’m some damned cannibal. Why, that goose Hannah once caught me feasting on one and practically—”
“So, what’s the matter with you?” interrupted Max, growing weary of these ramblings.
“There’s nothing the matter with me, sir!” thundered Toby. “Potatoes are an entirely different species!”
“No,” said Max. “What’s injured?”
“Oh,” sniffed the smee, lying back. “It’s my latissimus nub. The right one can flare up whenever I carry something heavy. Nothing a hot bath and some Epsom salts can’t cure. Perhaps Madam Petra can give it a deep tissue massage. I don’t want to boast, but the woman can’t keep her eyes off me.”
Max sighed. The smee persisted.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” he declared. “ ‘Come off it, Toby old chap—the woman’s merely staring out of revolted curiosity.’ And perhaps you’re right. But I’ve seen that look before, my boy, and it almost always precedes a scandal.”
“Dear Lord …”
The smee was still telling tawdry tales when Max reined their horse to a halt. Madam Petra and Katarina had dismounted up ahead and were standing where the forest opened onto a broad valley dotted with little lakes. The sun was already setting, flooding the west with brilliant bands of pink and orange. But in the east, the sky was strangely, unnaturally dark. There, above the distant hills and river valleys, an amoebic mass was floating like some vast cloud of volcanic ash. It might have been fifty miles away and still it dwarfed the landscape, a roiling storm that flickered with glimmers of heat lightning as dust clouds and debris swirled beneath. A sound carried to them on the wind, a faint but unmistakable moaning.
The storm was Yuga.
The demon filled the eastern sky, so massive it seemed that one could touch her or trail their fingers through her nimbus of black vapors. Despite the fact that she was airborne, there was something uncannily dense and ponderous about the demon’s form and the slow-moving tendrils that protruded here and there like the hungry, searching arms of an anemone. Max wondered if the inky nebulae were the demon’s basic essence or if they shrouded something else within. It was a horrifying and alien creature whose amorphous shape and blind hunger reminded Max of the grylmhoch he’d encountered in the Arena. But the similarities ended there; millions of grylmhochs would not have equaled her appalling size. Yuga eclipsed anything Max had ever seen by such a stupefying margin that a mountain would have seemed infinitesimal by comparison. The demon was bigger than a small country, forever moaning as she devoured all life and energy in the lands beneath her. She was entropy itself.
Max glanced at Madam Petra and her daughter. Holding hands, they simply gaped at the far-off demon. There was not even fear stamped upon their faces, but rather a blank, uncomprehending emptiness. The mere spectacle of Yuga had overwhelmed their senses.
“D-dear God, what a monster!” stammered Toby, peering out from Max’s hood.
“Don’t look at her,” said Max gently. “Yuga’s far, far away yet.”
“Can she see us?” whispered Madam Petra, retreating back into the wood.
“I don’t think so,” replied Max, projecting a calm that he did not feel. “She is still very far from us, Petra. Miles and miles and miles. The sooner we go on, the sooner we find David’s tunnel and get away from her. Katarina?”
The girl only responded on the third call, tearing her attention away from the demon.
“Katarina, have you ever stared at an eclipse?”
The girl blinked. “No,” she muttered. “It would hurt my eyes.”
“That’s right,” said Max. “There’s something in the eastern sky right now that’s like an eclipse. It’s far away and it can’t hurt you unless you stare at it. You look at your mother instead, okay?”
When the girl nodded, Max turned to Petra. “Do you have any idea where we are relative to Bholevna?”
She scanned the land ahead, the fields and farms that had been trampled by Aamon’s armies. There were no landmarks, nothing but a few burned-out and abandoned farmhouses.
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “Bholevna may be farther north or perhaps east. I can’t say for certain.”
“Toby,” called Max. “How’s that ‘latissimus nub’ feeling? Could you become another bird?”
“A small one, perhaps,” replied the smee, wriggling like a grub. “Let’s see, let’s see.”
Seconds later, a sparrow hopped out of Max’s hood and tentatively fluttered its wings.
“Perfect,” said Max. “Can you fly up and have a look around for a landmark, a river, a road—anything that might give us a better sense of where we are?”
The smee zoomed from Max’s shoulder, spiraling up into the winter sky until he was almost lost from view. Once Toby was gone, Max checked on David.
His roommate was asleep, his cheeks flushed with fever, but his condition did not appear to be deteriorating. Peering beneath the bandage, Max saw that Katarina had done a good job cleaning the wounds, which were already mending.
“Can you hear me?” said Max, reapplying the bandage. “David?”
The sorcerer’s brow furrowed with irritation. He grunted.
“You can sleep again in a minute,” Max assured him. “Is the tunnel in Bholevna itself?”
The reply was so faint, it was little more than an exhale.
“East,” whispered David wearily. “A mile. Farmhouse … stream.”
“The tunnel is a mile east of Bholevna in a farmhouse by a stream?”
David nodded.
“Good,” said Max, patting his friend. “That’s good. We can’t be too far away.”
Toby returned a few minutes later, swooping down into the forest to settle onto Max’s shoulder.
“There’s a brayma’s palace perhaps ten miles to the north beyond that strip of forest,” he reported, gesturing with his wing. “Magnificent, really—reminds me of St. Basil’s Cathedral—but it looks like it’s been sacked. All the surrounding farms have been burned. It appears that Aamon’s armies have already been through this land.”
“I know that palace,” said Madam Petra. “It belongs to Baron Hart—Katarina and I attended a hunt there last spring. Bholevna’s just another ten miles or so northeast of there.”
“Let’s make for the palace,” Max decided. “If the horses aren’t spent and we feel up to it, we can push on to Bholevna tonight. If not, we can take shelter and see if there’s any food about. Agreed?”
The Kosas nodded, and even David managed a weary grunt. Reminding them not to look east, Max swung back up into the saddle, checked to see that the pinlegs was secure, and led the ride north.
The moon had risen high by the time they neared the palace. The journey had been slow going, for the horses were exhausted and the land grew rough and rocky in places, requiring them to pick their way carefully amid the trees and outcroppings. To the west, Max heard the faint blare of war horns. Periodically, there was a flash in the western sky as though lightning rippled through the clouds.
But it was Yuga that occupied Max’s attention.
He had said nothing to the others and hoped they had not noticed, but the hollow moaning was growing louder. The demon was so enormous that it was difficult to gauge her direction or speed—her motions seemed as slow and deliberate as the Earth’s rotation. But she was moving, and it sounded as though she was moving west, drawn perhaps to the warring armies and the vast feast they represented. Despite the darkness, she was still visible—a gargantuan void among the stars as though a huge, ragged patch had been torn from the night sky. Max wondered if Bram, or even Astaroth, could destroy such an abomination.
The dismal truth was that they were caught between terrible forces. He prayed that David’s tunnel still existed. If not, they would have to flee north to the Baltic and rely on Ormenheid to carry them home.
“These horses will keel over if we don’t rest them,” panted Madam Petra, shivering in the cold. “And I’m falling asleep in my saddle. Do you think it�
��s safe in the palace? We can water the horses and see if there’s food. Just an hour or two of sleep,” she pleaded.
Toby flew off to scout. When he returned and pronounced the palace abandoned, they led their weary mounts across its trampled fields and orchards.
The smee had been correct; the place really did resemble St. Basil’s Cathedral with its painted towers and voluptuous domes glinting beneath the moon. Before its fall, it must have been a wonder. But much of the palace was damaged, its gatehouse a charred ruin while several of the towers had collapsed into the inner bailey, obliterating a handful of smaller buildings in the process.
Much had been destroyed, but there was an uncontaminated well. While the horses drank and the others rested, Max went searching for food. He wandered about the empty palace, stepping over fallen stones and peering into ashy chambers that had been stripped of tapestries and furniture and anything else of value. Crunching through broken pottery, Max climbed a spiral staircase to a rampart connecting two of the towers. Perhaps there would be food in a guardroom.
But the upper levels were little better. They had suffered less damage, but the wind was stronger at these heights and went whipping through the open corridors and broken windows like a troop of lost and lonely spirits. There was an oppressive emptiness to the place, reinforced by the surprising lack of bodies. Someone had either buried the dead or taken them for some other purpose. Max declined to speculate.
He climbed to the top of the tallest tower, an immense rounded structure capped by an onion dome. The doors to the uppermost chamber had been wrenched off their hinges, revealing what had been a luxuriant bedchamber or seraglio. The arched walls were adorned with charred frescoes and mosaics and windows set into the curving walls so that the tower commanded a view in every direction. Most of the windows had been broken, however, and the wind swept through, glittering with snowflakes that settled on the inlaid floor.
Stepping to one, Max gazed down at the central courtyard hundreds of feet below. Madam Petra had started a fire, a tiny flicker no bigger than a candle flame amid the shadowed wreckage. Max could not help but admire the woman’s spirit and resilience. She had just lost everything and already she was coping, adapting, surviving. He half hoped she would decide to settle at Rowan—they could use such a capable person.
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