by C. Greenwood
Copyright © 2016 C. Greenwood
Edited by Victory Editing
Formatted by Polgarus Studios
Cover art by Michael Gauss
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Excepting brief review quotes, this book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written permission of the copyright holder. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, real events, locations, or organizations is purely coincidental.
SUMMONER OF STORMS
CATALYSTS OF CHAOS, BOOK THREE
The catalysts of chaos are divided. As Rathnakar’s evil army marches toward the fortress of Endguard, Eydis is plagued by dark visions and stalked by a shadowy assassin. Orrick is torn between the schemings of the oracle of Silverwood Grove and the White Lady, two powerful women who may yet betray him to a ruthless thieftaker. Tested by a hazardous journey across the wetlands, Eydis and Orrick battle enemy spies and their own diverging loyalties.
Meanwhile, an injured Geveral is stranded in a haunted forest. Still reeling from the death of a friend and determined to protect the mysterious scepter that has fallen into his hands, the dryad finds himself hunted by ravenous hunger hounds.
Will the three catalysts survive and evade enemy capture long enough to block the Raven King’s next move?
* * *
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Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
Varian Nakul watched the rising flames of the village of Piperfield light up the night sky. Every roof was ablaze, every barn, every hovel unworthy of the name house.
Before his eyes, panicked villagers fled their burning homes. But they didn’t get far. Some were cut down by monstrous corpse soldiers—Varian’s undead army. Other villagers, those neither too young nor too old but strong and healthy enough to be of use, were spared. Varian had given instructions for these men and women to be taken alive and brought to him. The rest he allowed his soldiers to destroy in whatever manner best satisfied their bloodthirsty natures.
The man of peace Varian had once been was a distant memory now, but there was still a shadow of him left, enough to make him avert his eyes from the distasteful carnage before him. He looked instead to the horizon, where the black sky was giving way to the deepest shades of gray heralding the approach of dawn.
Asincourt City and its now-abandoned seclusionary lay only a few miles off in that direction. Soon, when the last stars had faded from the sky, the townsfolk of Asincourt would wake to witness the rising smoke of Piperfield. Perhaps their indolent ruler, Lord Karol, would bestir himself to send men to help the village, as he had so recently failed to do for the neighboring seclusionary when it had been overrun by Varian’s soldiers.
But it would make no difference. By the time any aid could arrive from Asincourt City, it would be too late. Varian’s soldiers were efficient in their work, and it did not take long to raze a village as small and defenseless as Piperfield.
“Why keep these alive?” an approaching undead soldier growled at Varian.
At least, Varian thought that was what the creature asked. His second-in-command, Gnash, had not been underground as long as some of the other corpses before Varian had awakened them from their deep sleep. But it had been long enough for Gnash’s throat and vocal cords to have begun the process of decay.
Gnash’s cheeks had also rotted enough to offer a view of his teeth and inner mouth. But Varian was accustomed to the disturbing display of decomposing flesh and exposed bones and no longer recoiled from it. He looked beyond the walking corpse to the row of bound and helpless villagers being prodded toward him by his other undead servants.
“The why of it is not for you to question, Gnash,” he said. “The master commands me to grow his army by any means available. We will march hard to reach Endguard and must increase our numbers as we travel.”
He didn’t explain that there would not always be convenient graveyards to raid along the way or that this was probably for the best. The undead, although merciless in war and easily commanded, did not always make superior soldiers. Their half-decayed state left the weakest of them easily reduced by a single well-aimed blow into a pile of useless bones.
He surveyed the captive villagers being lined up before him. These peasants who would soon join the ranks of his army were lean from lives of poverty. But their years of toiling to scratch out an existence from the land had left them strong limbed and hardened to the elements. They would make effective tools in service to the master.
Varian walked down the line of prisoners, laying his hands on them and calling on the power of his master’s amulet to reshape their wills and make them his own creatures. The enchanted amulet dangling from the chain around his neck glowed and grew uncomfortably hot until Varian felt as if it was burning through his shirt to sear his very skin.
Accustomed to the pain and weakness that so often accompanied the use of the magical object, Varian ignored the effects and continued mesmerizing the dozens of villagers as quickly as his corpse soldiers herded them to him.
The bespelled peasants looked at first glance unchanged from their previous selves. But a stillness had descended over their features. They quickly ceased to demonstrate any fear or resistance to Varian and the corpse soldiers surrounding them. Every face was expressionless, every pair of eyes vacant, as if the humans inhabiting these bodies had been removed to someplace distant and only empty shells of flesh and bone remained.
Watching the light of individual will and feeling fade from his victims as he moved from one to the next, Varian felt a twinge of some nameless emotion. Once, he had been a humble keeper of the Umanath crypts. It had not been in his nature to do violence to others. Not until the day the master had come to him. With a single touch, the master had disfigured his face and altered his being in much the same way Varian now robbed the peasants before him of their freedom of thought. A small part of him, buried deep within, recognized the similarity of their circumstances. It was the same part that sometimes recalled happier days of walking the cool dark passages of the Umanath tombs.
But those thoughts were smothered and crushed by the greater resolve now controlling him. It did not matter that once he had peacefully served the First Father. The First Father and the master had since become one and the same, and they called upon him to vanquish the weak and the disobedient. To bring the world under the rule of Rathnakar.
CHAPTER ONE
Eydis
Eydis woke in a sweat, expecting to be confronted by the scenes from her dark dream. But there were no burning homes or undead soldiers surrounding her. There was only the gentle light of early dawn and the peaceful twittering of the birds nesting in the leafy green branches of the tree she rested beneath.
For a moment Eydis lay still, blinking up at the patches of lightening sky visible between the branches. Had it been only a nightmar
e then, the events she had witnessed in her sleep? Or was it another of her visions, signaling true happenings? Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference between meaningless dreams and the dire warnings she so often had of things that were or would be.
The one thing she could be certain of was that the people in her dream were real. She had faced that undead army once before, when escaping the fall of the Asincourt seclusionary. If the enemy had now abandoned the seclusionary and was on the move again, increasing in number as they went, she would not be surprised. The master commanding them wouldn’t be satisfied until Lythnia and all Earth Realm was under his power. If this latest development was real, it was yet another piece of news she must bring to the oracle.
Sliding out from beneath the cloak that had served as her blanket during the night, Eydis looked around for Orrick. But her barbarian companion was not asleep at the other side of the campfire, as he had been last night. The fire had burned low while she slept, and his place near it was empty.
For a panicked moment, she wondered if he had abandoned her for good, slipping away in the night. Such an action wouldn’t have been out of character. For although he had taken the trouble to search her out in Castidon and defend her from the shadow monster, his loyalty was not always dependable. She was all too aware how often his aims didn’t align with hers. The big Kroadian cared more for clearing his name of treason charges than he did for saving Earth Realm from the clutches of Rathnakar.
But to her relief, Eydis spotted Ilarion lingering nearby, his pale muzzle buried deep in grass, looking for all the world like an ordinary mortal beast instead of a ghost horse.
Orrick wouldn’t have left without the animal that had carried them this far. Wherever the barbarian had disappeared to, he must be intending to return soon.
Reassured there was no cause for alarm, she went to the traveler’s pack resting against the base of the tree and rummaged for an oatcake to fill her rumbling stomach. Strips of jerky and oatcakes were her only meals since leaving Castidon. They had been on the road for a day and a half since and shouldn’t have much longer to go before reaching their destination: Silverwood Grove and the oracle’s temple. Ordinarily, this journey across the kingdom would have been a long one. But Ilarion traveled like the wind, covering the distance with an extraordinary and unnatural speed.
They couldn’t put the miles behind them quickly enough for Eydis. Yet no amount of distance could dull the ache she felt when she contemplated the recent calamities that had occurred since the fall of the seclusionary. After her flight into the Arxus Mountains, she had been forced to separate from the adherents and dwarf children in her charge, leaving the seclusionary’s refugees in Geveral’s keeping. She had been told since that none had survived and, painful though the information was, she had no cause to doubt it.
The loss of Geveral was a particular blow, since she believed the dryad weather mage crucial to her mission to defeat Rathnakar and his army of darkness. She didn’t know how she was to accomplish her quest without the aid of her friend. As the third catalyst, Geveral was to have been with her until the end.
Another blow was the loss of the Tears of the Mother, the gems Eydis had carried away while fleeing Asincourt. These had been magically transformed into a mysterious golden scepter, a powerful object that had eventually fallen into the hands of the enemy.
But heavier than any of these failings weighed her guilt over the death of her half sister, little Asfrid. Eydis had unwittingly drawn the shadow monster that stalked her into her family’s home, where it had killed the child and escaped with the scepter.
Eydis shoved the memory from her mind as she washed down her dry oatcake with a cold drink from a waterskin. She couldn’t afford to dwell on her mistakes now. She must focus on the path ahead. That promised to be difficult enough.
She packed away the few supplies scattered around camp and kicked out the smoldering remains of the fire. It was time to mount Ilarion and continue on down the road that would take them to the oracle.
There was just one problem. Orrick was still mysteriously missing.
CHAPTER TWO
Orrick
Orrick didn’t know what to make of the tall chimneys and stone rubble looming out of the forest shadows. In the morning mists, the abandoned ruins of the great house seemed ghostly and threatening.
His first instinct was to go the long way around the site, to avoid the ancient ruins and continue his hunt for rabbits or other small game to bring back to camp. But the crumbling chimneys and roofless shell of the house beckoned to him. There was a haunting beauty to its ruined opulence and to the ornate arch, overgrown with vines, standing alone at the entrance gate.
Once, this must have been a fine house. What little now remained of the walls testified to the size of the structure. An even larger outer wall encircled the surrounding grounds. Most of the outer wall was decayed or collapsed altogether, leaving the house accessible from any direction Orrick chose to enter.
At one of the many gaps in the wall, he climbed over a pile of stone and slipped into what must once have been an immense garden fronting the house. Scraping aside a path of moss underfoot, he uncovered a large flagstone that was part of a path of similar stones leading up the garden. He passed statues veiled with green ivy half disguising the carved shapes beneath. The way was lined with trees and shrubs, doubtless planted and tended with care but now tangled and oversized. Whatever long-ago inhabitants had carved this place out of the wilderness, the encroaching forest was in the process of reclaiming the site.
Feeling compelled to take a closer look, Orrick crossed the garden and approached the house itself. Most of the structure had been reduced by time into piles of rubble. But there remained support columns here and there as well as part of a crumbling staircase and the tall chimneys rising higher than the treetops surrounding the clearing. Parts of the floor remained intact, although weeds grew up between the marble stones.
As Orrick approached the grand sweeping staircase that wound upward into nothingness, something moved beneath the shadow of the stairs. A pale, flickering light slowly separated itself from the darkness. Gradually the apparition took on the form of a woman wearing a trailing white gown and a silver circlet atop loosely flowing hair.
Orrick knew this ghostly figure. He had met her before at the stone circle near Silverwood. There she had helped him escape his enemies and had given him his armor, his sword, and the ghost horse Ilarion. The White Lady’s interest had been mercenary then, and he suspected it was no less so now.
“I told you I would find you again at the right time,” she said when she stood before him. “Have you brought me the agreed-upon treasure?”
Orrick debated whether to lie. He needed the White Lady’s help, and the truth was unlikely to earn it. But before he could speak, she seemed to read the answer on his face.
“You have lost it!” she exclaimed, her voice trembling with cold rage. “You have allowed the scepter to fall into the hands of another.”
Orrick kept his expression bland. There was no need to let her guess that events had frustrated his plans as badly as hers.
“I found Eydis in Castidon and had the scepter she carried under my control for a time,” he answered. “But a shadow creature wreaked destruction and fled, stealing the object.”
“Then in so doing, the creature stole your life away with it,” she hissed. “For the oracle of Silverwood Grove is not known for her patience. When she sees you have failed to bring her the scepter, she will give up your location to those who hunt you for your treacheries.”
It was true. Orrick had been prepared to defy the oracle and deliver the scepter to the White Lady instead on condition she would use her powers to remove the tracing mark the oracle had planted in his head. That should have rendered it impossible for the oracle to seek revenge. But in losing the scepter both women wanted, he had lost his bargaining chip.
Still, he was not prepared to give up easily.
“You
can thwart the oracle,” he suggested. “Remove the tracing mark, and she will be unable to search me out.”
The White Lady’s icy laughter shattered the stillness of the surrounding ruins.
“That I will not do,” she said. “We had a bargain, barbarian, and you failed to uphold your end of it. Now the scepter will go to Rathnakar or, just as unfortunately, to the oracle. For such a clumsy mistake, I will not reward you.” She turned her back and walked away, the hem of her luminescent gown trailing across the leaf-strewn floor.
Orrick gritted his teeth, thinking of a particular thieftaker and his gang who would be all too happy to learn his whereabouts.
“Perhaps I can retrieve your precious scepter yet,” he offered.
“It is too late,” she called over a pale shoulder. “The scepter’s fate, like your own, is already sealed.”
* * *
Orrick exited the rubble of the house to find Eydis waiting in the ruined garden outside.
“What are you doing away from camp?” he asked, irritated at her unexpected appearance. Had she heard what had passed between him and the pale ghost?
“I woke to find you gone. I waited for you, and when you did not return, I came looking.”
She looked beyond him, toward the remains of the great house. “Was someone in there with you? I thought I heard a woman’s voice.”
“Our old friend the White Lady has been stalking us again,” he said. “I encountered her in the ruins.”
“Why did she come to you?” Eydis asked. “Does she want something from us?”
“Only the same thing she wanted before. The scepter the shadow monster stole in Castidon.”
Eydis looked puzzled. “Even if it was still in our possession, why does she imagine we would turn it over to her?”