by Ari Marmell
Half a dozen bodies, made crimson by both wounds and tabards, sprawled in the dust. A few warhorses stepped carefully between them, awaiting new orders that would never come. Some way back, at the edge of the tree line, the more skittish, less well-trained mounts pranced nervously, disturbed by the scents of death.
For two days now, Corvis and Irrial had sought some compromise between stealth and speed. They chose back roads and even the occasional cross-country gallop rather than the main highways, rode well into the night, and holed up in overgrown copses to placate their fatigue with a few hours' slumber. And still the Cephirans were everywhere, ubiquitous as ants. Every night, they spotted the gleam of campfires in the distance. Every day, they picked their way through fields of dead horses and dead men, littered with broken armor and shattered blades, redolent of old blood and new rot. Irrial's predictions, however cynical, had been spot-on: Torn banners suggested that these were all that remained of the brave forces fielded by those Imphallian nobles desperate enough to take a stand. And to their credit, they'd taken a great many Cephiran soldiers with them, but not nearly enough. A patriotic gesture, the fielding of these tiny armies, but a futile one. There seemed no end to the crimson tabards.
This patrol was the fourth-fifth? Corvis had lost count-that they'd already been forced to battle, and they'd outrun or hidden from half again as many.
Damn it! Scattered as the Cephirans must be, to cover so much terrain and still maintain their hold on the cities, they had to be spread thin. If the Guilds had just gotten off their asses and contributed, the Imphallian soldiers might've actually accomplished something, instead of just smashing themselves to pulp against the Cephirans like birdshit on cobblestones!
'My, how poetic. "Birdshit" are they, Corvis? And you always used to think so highly of people…'
He strove, as always, to ignore that voice. Instead he watched Irrial sink exhaustedly to the earth, back pressed to the slope of one of the region's scattered foothills and rock formations, weeds of stone sprouting from Daltheos's garden. Her eyes were dark and sunken, her hair hanging limp, and though she tried to hide it, Corvis could see she favored her left arm where, just yesterday, a Cephiran broadsword had split muscle from bone. Seilloah had done her best to heal the injury, but in her current state, her magics weren't quite up to completing the task.
The witch herself lay slumped over a rock, paws dangling, tongue lolling in an uneven pant. A smattering of open sores beneath mats of fur oozed a constant trickle of yellowed pus and the sickly sweet scent of disease.
And Corvis knew damn well that he was no better off. The face he'd seen that morning, reflected in a small pond at which they'd halted to rest, was hollow, skin grey with fatigue. His neck and back ached as though the horse had been riding him, rather than vice versa, and it took him longer and longer to catch his breath after each engagement.
'Crybaby. I'm feeling just fine.'
Axe trailing in the dirt like a child's toy, he staggered over to the others and collapsed, badly scraping his left palm. The pain scarcely registered; just another complaint among many.
"We can't keep this up," he wheezed, gulping for air.
Irrial managed what was probably meant as a shrug. "What choice have we?"
Corvis nodded, frowning. They had no idea what territory was whose around here, how far the invaders had moved beyond Emdimir. Worse, some of the patrols seemed to be hunting them specifically; they might even pursue beyond Cephiran lines. Clearly, whoever in the ranks of the Black Gryphon had been studying Corvis Rebaine-General Rhykus, Ellowaine had said-didn't want them escaping with what they'd learned.
On the back roads, it would still be days before they reached any major Imphallian cities, before they could be certain they'd moved beyond the reach of the Black Gryphon's claws. On the main highways, it would take less than one-assuming half the invading army wasn't spread out along the way.
Either way, they'd have to fight both enemy forces and their own fatigue for every yard they covered. For long moments, Corvis stared at the rock above Irrial's head, ignoring the squawking crows and buzzing flies bickering over the bodies, ignoring the instincts that ordered him to get up and keep moving before another patrol happened by-ignoring everything but a weariness so heavy it threatened to crush him against the unyielding earth.
They'd still not decided if making for Mecepheum again was truly their best option, and right now the question brought nothing but the sting of bitter laughter to Corvis's throat. The idea that they'd survive to get anywhere near Mecepheum seemed about as likely as climbing to safety on beams of moonlight.
Climbing…?
Corvis peered more intently at the rock face, then around at the hill-really just a spur of stone-against which they'd slumped.
"Most people fail to realize," he said didactically, "because they're so far apart from one another, that most of Imphallion's southern mountain ranges are actually all part of the same range. They're sort of a smaller mirror to the Terrakas Mountains."
The cat and the baroness looked at each other, then at Corvis. "Yes, that's true," Seilloah told him, using very much the same tone in which one might address a small boy who was proving just a bit slower than the other children. "I've seen the southern mountains, remember? I was with you when…" She blinked, her back arching and tail growing bushy. "Corvis, what are you thinking?"
He gestured awkwardly with Sunder, first at the stony protrusions around them, then toward the southwest where, after some distance, the rocky hills grew substantially more common. "I was just wondering," he said, "if there's any possibility that these hills here are in any way connected."
"You're not serious!"
'Oh, he's serious. He's just mad as an inbred hatter.'
"If you've got another idea, Seilloah, now would be a great time. Actually, yesterday would be even better."
"Give me a few minutes," the cat growled. "I'll come up with something. What in Arhylla's name are you planning to offer them, anyway?"
"Whatever I have to," he told her, rising to his feet with a low groan.
"I'm so sorry to interrupt," Irrial said peevishly, "but would it be too much to ask that one of you tell me what the hell we're talking about?"
"We're talking," Corvis said, limping over to gather two of the horses, "about finding allies."
"Who very well might save us the trouble of fleeing the Cephirans by killing us themselves," Seilloah added darkly. EIGHT HOOVES pounded over what had petered out into little more than a game trail, sending twin plumes of dust into the air behind them. They moved with the rumble, not of thunder, but of an earthquake, a constant and unbroken roar-for they ran with a speed unseen in nature, spurred not by their riders' boot heels but by the prod of Corvis's enchantment. Corvis and Irrial hunkered down, squinting against the wind and the sting of the horses' manes in their faces, devoting their attentions entirely to holding on. On occasion, amid the deafening cacophony, Corvis thought he heard a plaintive, feline yowl from the depths of his leftmost saddlebag.
The scrub and dried grass along the road blurred into a thick carpet. The trees were a solid wall, until the riders moved far enough into the rocky terrain that there were none. The occasional battlefields of dead knights and infantry become tiny pools of metal hue, gone almost before they could reflect a single gleam at the passing travelers. More than once they shot past a Cephiran outrider who could only lift his horn and hope to warn his companions up ahead; the soldiers might as well have tried to slap a ballista bolt from the air as to impede the riders' headlong plunge.
From the horizon's edge, the first of Imphallion's southern hills-true hills, these, not the rocky lumps through which they'd been riding-drew ever nearer, ships of stone on a sea of cracked earth. From within those hills, barely visible, crimson-clad soldiers rose and lifted longbows toward the sky. Unprepared as they were for the unnatural speeds at which their enemies pounded toward them, the distant horns of their scouts had warned them to stand ready.
And Corvis, his body a tangled knot of agonized strands, his head heavy with exhaustion, lifted Sunder from his side and drank from the power of the Kholben Shiar.
Still he did not unleash the full might of the demon-forged blade; he never had, and he hoped, swore, even prayed he never would. But he delved now as deep as he ever had, and his mind cringed from the weapon's lustful, sadistic howl. He felt the surging of infernal magics flow through him, until he thought he must scream as the blood threatened to boil within him. A veil of fire shrouded his senses, so that he could see only a handful of yards-but within that distance, his sight was that of the gods. To him, every pebble that lay upon the earth, every blade of grass, even the currents of the wind, were painfully clear. In his ears, he heard the hoofbeats of the horses, not as a constant rumble but as separate and distinct sounds, the steady beat of a slow drum.
When the arrows fell around him, they fell not as a rapid rain but as the light drifting of snow. He rose in his stirrups and it was nothing to him, nothing at all, to reach out with Sunder and sever them from the sky before they could draw so much as a drop of blood.
Without pause they were gone, past the slack-jawed archers and deep into the shallow, winding gorges of the stone-faced hills.
Corvis dropped from his horse and advanced along a narrow pathway, casting about for any sort of hollow, cave, overhang, any entrance into the rocky depths. Internally he wrestled with the power flowing through him, struggling to shove it back into the weapon in his fist. Like a slow tide it receded, leaving burns across his soul.
He had just enough time, as his body yielded to the searing pain and he felt himself crumple limply to the earth, to hope that the others would have better luck finding shelter than he had. CONSCIOUSNESS AND VISION RETURNED as one, and Corvis discovered a cat in his face.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Sweet merciful gods aplenty, Seilloah, what the hell have you been eating?"
The cat nodded and turned away, leaving Corvis to his gagging. "He's all right!" she called out.
A set of footsteps-Irrial's, of course-drew near, and Corvis took a moment to orient himself. He was lying atop his blanket at the rear of what, so far as he could see in the dim light, was a remarkably shallow cave, little more than an impression in the stone sort of like a sideways bowl. He was naked from the waist up, unless one counted Seilloah sitting on his chest. He shifted his weight, and discovered that the blanket beneath him was soaked with sweat.
That realization brought a sudden awareness of a bone-deep ache that covered his body like a shroud, and he couldn't quite repress a groan. "Maybe not entirely all right," he admitted to Seilloah through pale, chapped lips.
"You were clinging to life by a single fingertip, Corvis. That damn thing burned you out from the inside. You're lucky I managed to heal you even this much."
"I've been lucky to have you do a lot of things for me, Seilloah. Thank you."
The cat smiled-rather a disturbing image in its own right-and then Irrial was kneeling beside them. He craned his head and discovered that the faint light he'd noted earlier was the result of a tiny campfire, barely more than two crossed torches, in the midst of the cave.
"I've never seen anyone move like that," she said, pressing a wet rag to his forehead. "Was that the same spell you used on the horses?"
"No." He waved a finger at Sunder, lying some few feet beside him. "That." Then, blinking, "Where are the horses?"
"Gone," Seilloah told him. "They were dying. We pushed them too far under your spell. I thought it best to walk them some ways before they keeled over, lay down some false trail."
"Damn."
"Yeah. Your plan better work."
'We're reliant on your plan? Well, shit. I'm not even real, and even I'm buggered.'
Corvis struggled to sit up. "We don't have much time before they find us. This cave's not that deep, and…" His eyes widened as he realized the implications of the fire.
"Relax, Corvis. From the outside, the cave looks just like any other span of rock." She lifted a paw, licked it and ran it over her head. "I taught you some of your best illusion spells, remember?"
He smiled and allowed himself to lie back once more. "How long do we…?"
"Long enough. You need to be rested for what's to come. I'll wake you if I think time's getting short."
Corvis's smile widened further, but he was asleep before he could sculpt his gratitude into words. FEELING A LOT MORE RESTED, but only a bit better overall, Corvis moved about the cavern on hands and knees, alternating between scrawling strange sigils on the rock with a lump of charcoal and complaining about what the stooped posture was doing to his back. He was once again fully dressed, and everything the travelers owned was packed and ready to go. "When we move," he'd warned, "we may have to move quickly."
Every now and again Seilloah would rise up from a puddle of fur, totter awkwardly and in obvious pain across the floor, and point out a spot where Corvis had misaligned a design or muddled a rune. (At which point, of course, the echo of Khanda in his mind would mock him unmercifully.) Irrial, still not entirely certain what was going on and a bit put out that they'd not deigned to explain, hovered to one side and occasionally fed another stick into the meager fire.
And then she jumped so violently she nearly swallowed her own eyes as Corvis, in a single swift motion, rose to his feet and drove Sunder into the nearest wall. The crunch reverberated vacantly throughout the cave, but it was the subsequent screech as he worked the enchanted blade from the stone that really set hair and teeth on edge, gnawing on the fringes of mind and soul like a maddened beaver.
"Buggering hell, Rebaine! What in the gods' names are you doing?"
Corvis froze in mid-swing. "Why, Lady Irrial, wherever did you learn such language?"
"Probably from spending-" She paused, wincing, at the second crash, and then the third. "-spending too much godsdamn time with you!" Another crash, a second wince. "Would you stop that!"
He glanced at the small chunk he'd carved from the stone, then down at the powdered rock at his feet. "Sure, that's probably enough. I-ow!"
For several moments he hopped on one foot, waiting for the pain to ebb from the other. "What was that for?"
Seilloah spat out a few strips of leather. "For not warning me. These ears are sensitive."
"Fine! Fine, I'm sorry. I should've told you it was coming."
"I believe I just said that." And, simultaneously, 'I believe she just said that.'
This was not, Corvis knew without even taking the time to ponder it, an argument he was likely to win. "Irrial," he said instead, "I need a gem."
"What?"
"A gem. Diamond, emerald, doesn't matter, though more valuable is better."
"I don't-"
"I know you took a few bits of jewelry from Rahariem."
The baroness frowned. "And you think you're just entitled to them?"
"Consider it fair price for escaping here alive. Unless you don't think it's worth the cost? You're welcome to take your business elsewhere…"
Muttering a few more of those words that she must have learned from Corvis, Irrial slipped a glinting blue ring from her finger and handed it over. He took it, flipped it over a time or two, and then snapped the sapphire from its setting and handed the silver band back to her.
"Your change, m'lady."
"Thanks ever so," she grumbled.
He took a few more moments, gathering rocks from around the cave into a circle, for reasons that neither Irrial nor even Seilloah initially understood. Only when he placed the tiny sapphire in the midst of it and raised his axe high overhead did they comprehend: He wanted to ensure the shards and powdered gem didn't get lost throughout the cave.
And it was a good thing he did, too, as he first struck the tiny target only obliquely, sending it skittering across the floor, bouncing and rolling
until it fetched up against the edge of his work space. His entire posture daring either of the women to comment, he stomped over to it, put it back in place, and tried once more.
This time it shattered cleanly beneath the Kholben Shiar. Again bending over, and again struggling with the pain in his back, Corvis scooped up the dust and splinters into one palm and sprinkled them into the pile of rock dust he'd already gathered. Then, using an eating knife rather than Sunder, he drew a thin line down the palm of his left hand and squeezed exactly nine drops of blood into the mixture, adding water from a leather skin until the whole thing was a gritty paste.
"What-?" Irrial began, only to have Seilloah look up and shush her.
Corvis moved about the symbols he'd sketched, chanting an atonal, discordant litany as he went, daubing the gunk at various points across the runes. When he was done, he sat cross-legged in the center of it all and, pausing just long enough to draw breath, raised his voice to a shout. Sounds and syllables that were not words echoed across the cave-and then, though Corvis never wavered and his chant continued, those echoes stopped, sucked away by the stone.
A minute passed, then two. And then they were there, appearing through the shadows and even the rock wall as though stepping between the curtains on a stage.
There were five, or rather there seemed to be five; it was impossible to say for certain. They were half Rebaine's height, but there was nothing remotely child-like about them. Filthy, maggot-pale skin covered long and gangly limbs that hung at improper angles and bent in unnatural directions. They did not walk so much as convulse, each twitch carrying them the distance of a single pace. Pink, irritated eyes sat, uneven and far too close together, above a jagged, tooth-rimmed slash.
Corvis thought no less of Irrial when she whimpered and retreated as far as the cave's walls would allow; he'd dealt with the foul things before, but it was all he could do to hold his ground.