Sons of the Oak

by David Farland

  Myrrima heard a startled gasp, the rustling of clothing, and turned to see the girl peering at her, face pale from terror.

  Myrrima flung herself across the room, dagger drawn, prepared to kill the girl. She threw one hand over the girl’s mouth, grabbed at her throat with the other, thinking to snap her neck.

  But the girl didn’t squirm, didn’t fight. She just held her finger up, as if warning Myrrima to be quiet.

  Taking the girl’s cue, Myrrima cautiously pulled her hand away. She could see the track of tears on the girl’s cheeks.

  “Are you here for Fallion and Jaz?” she whispered so softly that she could almost not be heard.

  Myrrima nodded.

  “Take me with you?” she asked, even softer.

  Myrrima was puzzled.

  The girl hesitated. “Fallion said that he could save me. Will you save me?”

  Save her from what? Myrrima wondered. But instinctively she knew: Shadoath. Even a dull child knows when her mother is evil.

  Again, Myrrima nodded.

  “Follow me,” the girl whispered.

  Quietly, she crawled out of bed, wearing only her night clothes. She did not stop to grab a cloak or shoes. She went straight to the door and opened it, peered into the hallway, and led Myrrima back down two flights of stairs toward the kitchens.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a single candle gave light.

  Valya hesitated a moment, peering about as if searching for the guard, then headed down a hallway.

  They neared the buttery, and Myrrima heard a big man sniffing and moving about, apparently raiding the leftovers from dinner. It was the missing guard. They crept past the buttery, went down two doors, and the girl stepped into a poorly lit room.

  It was the kitchen. There, lying before the hearth where the only light came from dying coals, Jaz lay curled up in a large basket.

  He’s sleeping on the kitchen floor like a dog, Myrrima realized to her dismay.

  She rushed to him, peered down. He had not been taken from the prison long ago, she decided by the smell. He hadn’t even been bathed. He smelled of his own sweat and urine and feces.

  But it seemed that he’d been fed. He was fast asleep, and a salve had been put on the wounds at his wrists, where the manacles had cut him.

  “This way,” the girl whispered, and headed out a back door, quietly lifting the iron bar that locked it.

  Myrrima gently picked up Jaz and carried him out in the back, where the moonlight shone down into a small herb garden.

  The girl led Myrrima down a cobblestone path, under an archway, and Myrrima found herself on the west side of the palace.

  She’d made it out alive!

  Across the green, Myrrima saw Smoker leading two dozen souls out of the prison, many of them maimed. There was a woman with no hands, only bloody bandages. An old man scarred by hot tongs. A golath that limped about on one foot.

  All of the women had bloated wombs, as if they were pregnant, and many of them looked pale and wounded; with mounting horror Myrrima realized that they carried strengi-saat young in them.

  Smoker had Fallion in his arms, and he was leading his band of refugees out toward the front gate.

  “This way,” the girl whispered at Myrrima’s back, and went racing for the front gates.

  Myrrima followed in the dark, bearing Jaz.

  Smoker and the others came after. As the prisoners exited, some could not stifle their sobs of relief or tears of joy.

  Myrrima had to turn and beg them, “Quiet!”

  But fifty feet scuffling over cobblestones were not quiet. One prisoner, wounded and weak, fell with a splat; someone gave a tiny shriek.

  Myrrima peered about, growing more worried by the moment. No alarm had sounded.

  It couldn’t last.

  They raced down to the city gates. The city wall was set atop an earthen mound; a tunnel ran beneath the mound, through the wall. There stood the iron gates.

  Jaz stirred in Myrrima’s arms, moaning just a bit, and he nuzzled against her shoulder, lovingly.

  “Quiet, sweet one,” Myrrima whispered. “We’re almost free.”

  In the fog and wan moonlight, he suddenly came awake. He peered up at Myrrima, as if he’d expected someone else, and his whole body went taut as he woke from a sweet dream into a nightmare. He peered over Myrrima’s back at the cripples and maimed prisoners.

  “It’s all right,” Myrrima whispered as she saw his agitation. “We’re almost free.”

  But Jaz peered at her as if she had slapped him, and screamed in his loudest voice, “Help! Shadoath, help me!”

  Myrrima drew a hand over his mouth, but it was too late. The cry was out.

  In shock, she realized that Jaz wanted to stay with Shadoath.

  From somewhere on the palace grounds, Myrrima heard an echoing report, “Murder! Murder in the palace!”

  She heard the clank of steel boots, the ringing sounds of chain mail, the palace doors being thrown open.

  Cries and screams rose from the prisoners, and they began to stampede. One front-runner was the golath with the amputated foot. It hopped about painfully. Someone pushed it from behind, and half a dozen people fell.

  Myrrima urged Shadoath’s daughter to hurry. “We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got rangits tied to a tree just down the road. Only a little ways.”

  But a warhorn sounded up by the palace, deep and brutish, like the grunt of some great beast. In a moment the whole camp would rise up, hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

  And now they had a fifth rider to slow them, Shadoath’s daughter. Myrrima hadn’t planned on that. She hadn’t stolen enough rangits.

  “Hurry!” Myrrima said, even as Jaz began to fight, trying to get out of her arms, get back to the palace.

  The palace doors flew open, and Shadoath stood there on the porch, peering out into the fog, limned by the light. She held a wicked sword with a wavy blade.

  A pair of guards rushed out behind her.

  The old flameweaver peered at Myrrima, eyes glowing ominously, as if embers had lodged in them, and said softly, “You go. I guard your back.”

  Smoker saw the danger. He knew that the prisoners would never get free unless he bought them some time.

  “Are you sure?” Myrrima said, backing away. She’d seen flameweavers in battle, and she did not want to get too close.

  Smoker nodded.

  He had been carrying Fallion, but now he carefully handed the boy to one of the prisoners, leaving his charge with another, and stood at the mouth of the tunnel with his pipe glowing in his hand. He raised it overhead and the contents of the bowl burst into flame. He whirled the pipe in a circle, creating a glowing afterimage, a circle of light, and as he did, the prisoners raced past him, pushing, bumping.

  Shadoath heard the sounds of scuffing feet and came rushing toward them, running at perhaps six times the speed of a normal mortal, guards sprinting at her back.

  Myrrima carried Jaz in her arms, still struggling, and raced down through the tunnel. At the far end, she turned and glanced back.

  Smoker stood in the tunnel, waving his pipe in the air, as Shadoath charged toward him.

  He raised a dagger and lunged forward a step to do battle.

  Shadoath raced toward the tunnel. An old man with skin as white as a sheet barred her way. He had a long-stemmed pipe in his hand, and he swung it slowly in a great arc as he peered into the fog and darkness. He held a long knife in his off-hand. From his stance, she could see that he was no warrior.

  She lunged out of the darkness with six times the speed of a normal human, swinging her sword so fast that it blurred. She felt the blade catch slightly as it slid through his guts and met his backbone, but with her great strength, Shadoath merely forced the blade on past.

  For half an instant she slowed, wanting to savor the terror in his expression as he realized that he was going to die.

  But instead, he merely grabbed for her with one hand, clutching her cloak for all that he
was worth, and instead of fear or horror or surprise, she looked in his face and saw … a victorious smile.

  She expected to be washed in his blood. Instead, a shower of flames roiled out of the wound, scorching her, boiling her flesh instantly, sending a scent of charred flesh and cooking meat into the air, searing her eyes and face.

  Shadoath wailed and threw up her hands for protection as burning flames washed over her. She whirled, trying to run, but the old man grabbed at her, as if to hold her in death’s embrace.

  She pulled away, hot pain embroiling her, as a powerful elemental of flame began to rise from the old man’s corpse. It sent fingers of fire rippling through the air; one slammed into her back.

  Her robes were aflame!

  The guards that had been racing toward her stopped, recognizing the danger. They turned to run, even as fiery arms seared them, boiling their guts instantly.

  Groaning in agony, Shadoath lunged away, weaving this way and that in an attempt to elude the elemental’s attacks. Lances of fire whipped past her shoulder.

  She made the palace doors and raced inside, screaming in pain, and hurried out the back door, placing the palace between her and her attacker.

  Her right eye was blind. Her left eye seemed cloudy. She could barely see. She ran to her private garden where a reflecting pool lay, and threw herself in.

  Myrrima had seen fiery elementals escape from flameweavers like Smoker before. She knew enough to run.

  The inferno came. A rush of hot air roared through the tunnel. Some of the slower prisoners were caught in the wash, screaming in pain and terror as they died.

  The heat was so great that it smote the tunnel walls, melting the stone, fusing it into molten glass.

  The heat of it blasted Myrrima, singed her hair, scalded the back of her legs.

  Myrrima could hear Shadoath wailing in pain, her powerful voice, amplified by the reason of many endowments, keening through the night.

  Shadoath’s daughter led Jaz, and now she turned and peered toward the inferno, her eyes wide with terror.

  Myrrima saw the elemental reflected in her eyes. It rose up on the far side of the wall, forty feet tall. For half a second it still held the form of Smoker, but then it morphed into something more hideous, more brutal, and went stalking toward Shadoath’s palace, slaughtering guards and palace workers with every stride.

  No one would be safe, Myrrima knew. The elemental was almost mindless now. It would no longer be guided by Smoker’s intellect. It existed only to consume.

  Reeling from pain, Shadoath threw herself into the reflecting pool and rolled, extinguishing the flames.

  She had never imagined such torment.

  She raised her searing right hand to survey the damage. Her two smallest fingers had burned off completely. Much of her palm was blackened. She hoped that it would heal, but even as she watched, a ragged scab of flesh dropped away, exposing bones.

  Her whole torso ached where the fire had ripped into it. She reached down to her right breast, touching it experimentally, and felt nothing at all.

  Burned. The flesh was destroyed.

  The elemental on the far side of the palace was doing its damage. It lit up the night sky, and by that light, Shadoath knelt on all fours in the reflecting pool and peered at her ruined face.

  Her right eye was a milky white orb, nestled in a swollen socket of bloody meat. Her left eye was cloudy at the center. Her right ear was burned away, along with most of her hair.

  The flesh of both of her hands was cooked.

  But none of that mattered.

  For at the moment she was mindless with agony. Gone were all thoughts of revenge or escape or of rescuing her daughter.

  Shadoath wished for the release offered by death, but with hundreds of endowments of stamina, death would not come.

  Myrrima rushed toward the rangits. One escaped prisoner, a man whose back was lashed and shredded, had found their rangits tied to a tree, and now he struggled to untie one.

  “Sir,” Myrrima said, “those are for the children.”

  The fellow leapt up at the sound of her voice, terrified, and for a moment Myrrima feared that she would have to fight him for a mount, but he looked at her, at the children, and nodded his head stupidly, then ran toward the woods.

  Myrrima found that Fallion was too weak to hold on, so she set him in the saddle with Shadoath’s daughter. And since Jaz still fought her and cried for Shadoath, Myrrima did not trust him to ride alone. She put him on a mount in front of her, and clung to him, hoping that in time he would regain his senses.

  Now she saw that there were two spare rangits. A pregnant girl of perhaps fifteen came and mounted one. Myrrima took the other to use as a palfrey, so that the mounts could take turns getting a rest, and off they went, the rangits bouncing down the dirt road, then floating up again.

  Behind them, Shadoath could be heard shrieking in mortal agony, and the sky was ablaze. Smoker’s elemental seemed intent on igniting the world.

  39

  THE FURY

  Our rage may give us power, even as it diminishes us.

  —Erden Geboren

  Fallion rode in a hot fury. Thick fog hid everything, the road ahead and the inferno behind, but Fallion could feel the flames licking the night sky behind him, and it took little to reach out with his powers and summon the heat, use the energy to renew his own depleted strength.

  Numb with pain and fatigue, Fallion wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten here, riding a rangit with Valya’s arms holding him tightly, but for a moment he resented the pain. Each time the rangit hit the ground, the jarring threatened to dislocate his bones.

  His eyes itched and his head ached, and at that moment, he wanted nothing more but to fall back into unconsciousness.

  On the road ahead, he saw men rushing up out of the fog, or something like men. Golaths, their warty gray skin sagging around their breasts and bellies.

  “Clear the way!” Myrrima shouted to them. “Clear the way! The prisoners have escaped.”

  The golaths leapt out of her way, fearing that some dire soldier would ride them down. And after the prisoners passed, the golaths stood beside the road peering at their backs in wonder.

  Let them try to stop us, Fallion thought, summoning heat from Smoker’s inferno. Let them try.

  “Stop that,” Myrrima said from the rangit that raced beside them.

  “What?”

  “Don’t give in,” Myrrima whispered. “Don’t give in to your rage.”

  Fallion tried clinging to the saddle as the rangit bounced ahead, and his mind seemed to spin.

  He’d asked Shadoath what she wanted, and she had not answered. Only now was he really certain.

  She’d wanted the sleeper to awaken. She’d wanted him to summon the fire, to lose himself.

  But why? What would the loci hope to gain from him?

  Did they want him to join them? Or did they need something else from him?

  Behind them, Smoker’s inferno was raging, roaring in intensity. The fire crackled the bones of his enemies and sent clouds of smoke spewing into the heavens.

  Smoker had given himself to the flames so that Fallion would not have to.

  I’m a fool, Fallion thought in dismay, and he tried to let go of his rage. He sagged against the rangit, struggling for the moment to remain a child.

  When the riders reached the mountain pass, they came up out of the fog and the rangits found themselves on a clear road, hopping by starlight.

  In the valley behind them, the palace was aflame and Smoker’s elemental was dutifully attacking the barracks, blasting row upon row of tents, sending out fingers of flames that seemed to have an intelligence all their own, pure malevolence bent on destruction.

  The whole valley seethed like a hornet’s nest.

  Myrrima could hardly believe that a single wizard could cause so much annihilation.

  At the edge of the woods, she got off her mount and drew a rune in the dirt, one that would lock the valley
below in fog for a week.

  Then she lit a torch and they were off again. She worried about patrols in the woods, even though she and Smoker had done their best to take care of that.

  So they raced for hours under the starlight. They picked up some strengi-saats as they rode. The great beasts snarled in the woods, and floated behind them like shadows, leaping from tree to tree.

  Myrrima shivered and kept the children close. Jaz quit fighting her after a while, and seemed to realize who she was, and that she was taking him to safety. He clung to her and wept.

  “I’m sorry,” Jaz said over and over again.

  “You’ve no need to be sorry,” Myrrima said.

  “I got Smoker killed. Shadoath was so beautiful. I wanted to be with her.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Valya told Jaz in a soothing tone. “I’ve seen grown men give themselves to her that way, thanking her even as she twisted a blade into their hearts. Beauty was just another of her weapons.”

  Myrrima worried at that, wondering what kinds of things Valya might have seen.

  After two hours, a half-moon rose, adding a wan tone of silver to the night.

  With a clear road, the rangits picked up speed, and the faster they hopped, the less jarring the ride became.

  They neared town just an hour before dawn.

  Fallion seemed to sleep most of the way, until they reached the docks, where Captain Stalker and some of his men were waiting with a ship’s boat.

  They transferred the children into the boat, and Stalker peered up the road.

  “Smoker comin’?” he asked, his voice tinged with worry.

  “I’m afraid not,” Myrrima said. “His elemental burnt down the palace and set flames to at least half the camp.”

  “Ah, he always was one of the good ones,” Stalker said. “Don’t know how I’ll ever replace him.”

  A good flameweaver, Myrrima thought. She’d never met one that she would have called good before, but now, sadly, she realized that Stalker’s assessment was right.