“Who goes first?” she asked.
“Depends on where the Maizan are,” Khory replied, searching the scree for any sign. “Behind us, it’s you. Ahead, me.”
“Flip a coin? Hope for the best?”
“Can you do this, Elora?” Thorn asked in total seriousness.
“Is there an alternative?”
“Khory can carry you.”
“What about you?”
“Two trips,” Khory said.
“Bollocks.”
“Sometimes, child,” Thorn said with a parental sigh, “you talk like a stevedore.”
“Sometimes, Drumheller, you deserve it. I can make the crossing.”
He looked at Khory for confirmation. Elora wanted to slap him, her cheeks burning with outrage at how automatically he dismissed her opinion. Khory gave him the barest of nods, while her eyes offered Elora an apology.
Elora gathered up her skirt, fastening it fore and aft to her belt to make a rough pair of leggings. They didn’t bind her stride in the slightest—she had full freedom of movement. She looked around for any sign of pursuit, or manifestation of the Malevoiy, and was disturbed to find neither. She tried to gulp some big breaths of air to supercharge her lungs but found it wasn’t worth the effort. She couldn’t sweat here; her heart was pounding, her body beneath the skin was hot with exertion, yet all the mechanisms for cooling had apparently broken down. This Realm simply would not tolerate extremes of any kind.
At some point, if they remained and continued at this pace, she knew she’d collapse. She wondered what would happen then…
…and spun around full circle where she stood at the faint sound of chittering laughter. Save for her two companions, she appeared to be alone.
“So,” she said under her breath as she readied herself to make her charge, “you are here.”
We are Malevoiy.
“So you said when we met.”
Thou art the Danan.
“Likewise.”
Hast thou come to claim thy destiny? To embrace Us?
“Who says the two go hand in hand?”
There was the driest of chuckles, like the crackling of dry tumbleweed.
The Danan must bind all, or she binds none.
“There must be a balance,” she hissed, repeating what she’d been told her last visit. “It must be restored.”
Thou art the key.
With a cry that wove together rage and defiance—and provoked a stronger laugh from the Malevoiy that was itself laced through with approval, they liked this feral aspect of her—Elora threw herself forward, honing her focus totally to the length and force of her stride as she rushed toward the precipice. There was no turning back, she’d have no second chance and she gloried in the all-or-nothing danger of that moment. She bared her teeth in a snarl and uttered a cry that would have rocked the foundations of the world if the air had the body to carry it, as her trailing foot thrust her over the edge.
Five great leaps, like a sequence of giant steps planted square in the center of each pillar, and she was across.
Thing was, she’d built up so much momentum that she found it impossible to come to a graceful stop. She’d pushed herself too hard at the end and had almost sailed right over the final pillar, managing to catch just enough of a purchase with the ball and toes of her foot to kick herself across the final stretch. Her leading foot struck awkwardly and she came down too hard on her heel, with a sharp thud that jarred her all the way up her leg and made her teeth clack together. A surface layer of stone powdered from the landing, so that her leg shot away to the side. There was no time to think, only the barest matter of instants to try to break her fall so she wouldn’t break any bones. Reflexes twisted her body with the manic, boneless agility of a cat and a rude grin of triumph split her face as she came down hard but safely.
Elora’s elation was short-lived however as something tight wrapped itself around both ankles and her legs were yanked hard out from under her. Elora managed to break this fall with her arms, so her breath wasn’t wholly knocked out of her, but she hissed from the scrape of rock on flesh, as though her skin were being raked by coarse sandpaper. It made her regret not taking the time to change out of her dancing costume.
Her first thought was that the Malevoiy had decided to intervene directly, but she knew instinctively that wasn’t so. This wasn’t their style. What they had in store for her was seduction more than outright conquest; they wanted her to join with them of her own free will.
Her first act was to try to scissor her legs loose of their bindings, only to find her legs wrapped tight to the knees. She sensed rather than saw another tether arcing toward her and levered herself to the side, pivoting over her bottom like an infant and moving away in a three-point hobble on hands and knees that took her quickly to where she’d dropped her staff. Her outstretched hand caught it by the end just as a Black Rose assassin leaped from his hiding place and lunged for her, evidently figuring that his hands would suffice instead of the tether she’d managed to dodge. Elora scythed the staff toward his shins and he made no attempt to hide his contempt for her as he leaped over her attack. The expression froze on his face as she shifted her grip on the staff far faster than he could follow and hammered it forward straight to the pit of his stomach. His torso was armored, which meant she didn’t do him any real damage, but she had worn the same armor—adapted from garments she’d taken off one of their fellows—and was well aware of its strengths and weaknesses. The protection it granted the wearer was balanced by the need for flexibility. So, while she didn’t drive the air from his lungs, as she would have against an unprotected foe, the man’s own momentum doubled him over the staff, as though he’d run headlong into a post. For a couple of seconds, he was vulnerable. It was all the time Elora needed.
She brought the staff around like a bat, with the full strength of her shoulders behind the blow, to crack it across the length of his skull. He dropped like a poleaxed steer.
Sadly for Elora, he hadn’t come alone.
Neither had she.
A second tether caught the far end of her staff and yanked it from her grasp, hard enough to make her wrists ache. Unfortunately, the Black Rose had no chance to capitalize on his advantage, as one of Khory’s knives caught him full in the chest with the force of a cudgel, to drop him where he stood.
Khory’s legs were longer than Elora’s, which had made her crossing a tad less helter-skelter. Seeing what was happening, she was able to pick up speed as she went, so that she reached Elora’s side in a full-throated charge. As she made that final leap, Thorn swung himself free of her, hitting the rock in a hedgehog roll that brought him quickly to where Elora lay. With both hands free, Khory drew her sword and swung for the body of the nearest Maizan. The armor they wore was cured leather sandwiched over a layer of finest-quality chain mail, which made it proof against most attacks. Khory possessed more than human strength and a blade to match. She opened her foe down the whole of his chest and moved on to the next before his lifeblood had begun to spray from his gutted heart.
Thorn was busy with a blade of his own as he hacked at Elora’s bindings, which imprisoned her now to the hips very much like a mummy’s wrappings.
“Be careful,” she cried. “They’re using tanglefoot! If it catches hold of you—!”
“I know the risk,” he barked at her and then uttered as rich an epithet as ever she’d heard from him as the best of efforts yielded only the most minimal results.
“What’s wrong?”
“This damnable place” was his reply, as he cast a quick glance all about to check on the opposition. Khory’s assault had drawn the bulk of the Maizan’s attention but their breathing space wouldn’t last for long. “My blade’s coated with an enchantment to counteract the properties of a tanglefoot line but some aspect of the Malevoiy Realm mutes its effectiveness.”
“T
hey’re not fond of extremes,” she told him, “except their own.”
“They ought to love Khory, then,” he said with an appropriate dollop of acid to his tone. It was strange to behold a fierce clash of arms no more than a half-dozen body lengths away yet hear only a muted sound of steel on steel, the grunts and bellows of the combatants, the piercing cries of the fallen, as though the battle were actually occurring far in the distance.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Elora said, while thinking, and be grateful for that. “How many are they?”
“Hard to tell, Khory’s moving too fast, I’m finding it difficult to focus.”
“The Realm, you think, affecting our MageSight?”
“Anything’s possible.”
Suddenly, he cried out, pitching himself away from Elora as though he’d just thrust a hand into blazing tar. In his growing fury to see her released, he’d come into direct contact with the tanglefoot line and now the end of the filament he’d severed had wrapped itself around his wrist, beginning to climb his forearm.
Now it was Elora’s turn to react solely from instinct, just as she had when she’d landed. She lashed out with both hands to grasp the tanglefoot on Thorn as she might some deadly serpent, ignoring his shout of warning and the free hand he used to try to bat her away for fear she’d only imprison herself all the more. That was the nature of tanglefoot; like wisteria, it loved to cocoon everything it came into contact with. With anyone else this ploy would have spelled immediate and total disaster, but the properties of the tanglefoot derived from magic, and magic didn’t work terribly well in the Malevoiy Realm. Moreover, and far more importantly, Elora herself was imbued with a total immunity to spells and enchantments. They could affect her, but only temporarily.
That was what she was counting on. If she was wrong, she figured, she’d be no worse off than before.
She caught the leading end of the filament wrapping Thorn’s arm, just as it tried to make the jump to his chest to bind limb to body, and called on the Nelwyn to cut the line free. Thorn did as he was told and both of them were rewarded by the sight of the severed vine shriveling to dust in their grasp. Even as she looked back to her own legs, Elora could see that the tanglefoot looked far more brittle down around her ankles, where it made its initial contact, than her thighs. Thorn’s mistake was in cutting the wrong end.
Thorn’s shout of warning came at the same instant as her own inner flash of alarm. Elora swept up her staff above her head just in time to block a sword swipe aimed at her companion. It was no mean attack, the impact nearly jarred both arms from their sockets, but her parry gave Thorn the opportunity to pitch a length of tanglefoot back at their Black Rose assailant. In a trice, the man was off his feet, one arm stretched across his body and bound to the opposite shoulder, a leg twisted up beneath him.
Then came Elora’s mistake, in thinking this Black Rose was out of the fight. Freed of the last of her own bonds she rolled lithely to her feet, intent on joining Khory. Thorn was trying to catch sight of the World Gate and as well any Maizan reinforcements. Elora wasn’t sure if she caught a movement out of the corner of her true eye, or perhaps some instinctive equivalent that Khory and Thorn’s tutelage had implanted in the back of her head flashed a warning. Whichever, she spun around in time to catch a blur of motion from the fallen Maizan’s free arm aimed toward Thorn.
With her, at that moment, thought and execution were one. Her staff formed a blur of its own as she spun it in her grasp, and set a faint whistle in the tired air as she used it first to bat aside the nearest of the steel spikes he’d thrown and then to complete the move by cracking the end of the staff upside his head hard enough to knock him out. At the same time, she stepped sideways to put herself between the Maizan and his intended target, adding a hipcheck to Thorn’s shoulder to knock him clear of danger. There was no time, less chance, to count the number of spikes; she knew she’d caught a pair with her staff, one deflected, the other stuck in place. She felt a third whizz by her ear and registered a tickle of severed hair from its passing.
Then, quite without warning, all the strength went out of her legs and Elora dropped to her knees, with no more integrity than a castaway puppet. She couldn’t understand why she found it so impossible to move and thought for the first few moments that she’d been caught by another tanglefoot or some such snare. But that didn’t explain why it was suddenly just as difficult to breathe until she found Thorn’s dumbstruck look of horror and followed his gaze down her torso to find bare skin streaking as red as her dancing costume. There was a burning sensation along her right ribs and the suede of her bandeau top had been slashed almost all the way in two. It was a nasty cut, and messy; it was the source of most of the blood she saw but wasn’t the wound that did the damage.
The last spike had stabbed her right beneath the curve of her rib cage, angling up and in to strike deep into a lung. That was why she couldn’t breathe and her mouth was filling with a bloody froth. All at once, Elora felt like she’d been plunged into an ice bath and a pit of fire; half of her was going numb while the rest was being stuck through with white-hot pokers.
Her vision blurred, Thorn’s face flowing like wax into the features of the Maizan, and Elora saw such a look of desolation and stark terror that her heart couldn’t help but go out to the man, even though she knew he was her enemy. In his zeal to serve his lord and master, whom he knew as the Maizan’s own Castellan Mohdri, he’d struck down the object of his lord’s desire. Mohdri—the Deceiver—wouldn’t take kindly to such a mistake, and Elora knew the assassin’s fate was as sealed as her own.
Time for her ticked ever more slowly, yet around Elora the action hurtled past at a headlong rate. A trio of Maizan moved in her direction, attempting to take advantage of the situation. Thorn scooped up Elora’s staff and, wielding it more effectively than Elora, drove them back, striking with pinpoint precision at ankles and knees, elbows and the knob of the jaw, knuckles and toes, all those hard-to-reach, hard-to-protect places of the human body where hits are more likely to annoy than outright disable. For Thorn, that was sufficient. His goal was to keep them occupied. Khory’s was to finish them.
The warrior’s sword was plain steel, albeit as finely forged and honed and cared for as metal could be, yet in her hands it left a trail of light in its wake, an afterimage of fire as though it were managing to set even the ancient, weary air of the Malevoiy Realm ablaze.
It’s not flame, Elora realized, chiding herself for being so slow and wondering why finding it hard to breathe should make it equally hard to think as well. That’s blood. Maizan blood.
The Black Rose were feared from one end of the continent to the other. They had no peer, so the stories went, in the arts of skullduggery and those of mortal combat. They possessed as many ways to prick a body as their namesake blossom had thorns, and each was reputedly fatal.
Khory was outnumbered a dozen or more to one, yet the battle was no contest.
We taste thy life, Danan.
The voice was withered, ancient and desiccated, one small step removed from powder. It spoke in so dry and distant a tone, anyone hearing would have thought the Malevoiy was discussing nothing of consequence. Elora knew better, because she was listening, not simply to the words, but the emotions behind them. There was an all-consuming hunger, a great and terrible desire, the like of which could never be comprehended by any mortal creature from either side of the Veil. She felt such passion that she knew the slightest expression of it would crumble this entire Realm to nothingness.
Enjoy it while it lasts, she thought and felt a tickle of amusement from the Malevoiy.
We would savor it a while…longer. This is not the time, not the place, for thy life to meet its end.
How kind of you to care.
We know naught of kindness, Danan. Thy survival is Ours.
What do you want of me?
No more, no less, than all the wor
ld. In return, We offer Our strength.
I can manage on my own.
There was a silence, she couldn’t tell for how long; there seemed to be no connection between the presentation of events within her head and what occurred outside. Time held different meanings, almost as if she existed in two distinctly separate worlds with no way for her to cross between. She wondered if the Malevoiy had abandoned her and was torn by warring emotions in response, as relieved at their departure as she felt devastated.
That was the cue they’d been waiting for, the chink she’d opened in her own inner armor.
Thou art the Danan.
So you keep saying.
The Thirteenth Realm, that Binds all the others.
A chill laced its way through her, that had nothing to do with her physical wound.
That binds all the others.
Including you.
Without Us, there is no fulfillment of prophecy. Without Us, there can be no salvation.
She was conscious of her breath tearing at her in a succession of quick, panicky gasps, as desperate for air as a baby for milk. There wasn’t a lot of obvious pain but she had this overwhelming urge to cry, in a way she’d never allowed herself to when she was growing up in Angwyn. In those days, tears for her were a weapon, a means to garner attention and gain her own way. The aching misery of loss, the gnawing sense of abandonment and aloneness, she tucked deep away, a twisted version of some potentate’s private treasure trove.
There was fear in her now, and it held a resonance of those awful days. Back then, it made her a brat. Here it drove her surging and yowling to her feet, with an animal cry of blind rage that was answered by one of alarm from Thorn.
In her imagination, she saw herself fly forward, unhindered by her wounds, to join her friends in battle. Reality turned out to be simpler, yet more complicated. She lasted upright for all of a couple of steps before stumble-staggering into Khory’s grasp.
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