Matrick offered a stiff bow in return.
As her girls dissolved into the forest Jain turned to take them all in. “Keep well,” she said, leaning on her unstrung bow. “With any luck we’ll meet again before you fools hit the Heartwyld, but if not …” She squinted at Gabriel, and her eyes went hard above her bandit smile. “I hope you find your little girl. I truly do. She’s lucky to have a da’ what looks out for her.” Jain looked as though she would say something further, but instead she stepped away, waving a silk-gloved hand in farewell before strolling off into the woods.
“What a nice bunch of girls,” declared Matrick, watching her go.
“They certainly were,” Gabe agreed.
“I mean, they made us breakfast and everything,” said Moog, and the other two nodded.
Which left Clay to state the obvious. “Y’all are fucking crazy,” he said.
Around noon the next day Gabriel asked to see Moog’s crystal ball. Clay had actually been wondering why his friend hadn’t done so already, which didn’t make it any less distressing now that it finally happened. Moog, at least, did an admirable job of dissembling the matter.
“What? Oh, that old thing? Whatever for?”
“You know what for,” said Gabriel.
They’d stopped for a brief rest, each of them scarfing a handful of berries and mushrooms the wizard had pointed out as they walked. Matrick, sensing the awkwardness at hand, wandered off to relieve himself in the woods.
“It probably won’t even work, you know. Damn thing’s been dropped a dozen times or more. It’s as unreliable as a barbarian librarian!” Moog laughed at that, but when no one else did he looked genuinely shocked. “Really? Because barbarians … well, never mind.”
Gabriel favoured the wizard with that broken smile of his. “Even still.”
“All right. Okay. Once we get to Fivecourt I’ll have a look for it. Sound good? Or maybe we can find a proper diviner who—”
“Now. Please.”
Moog tugged nervously at his beard. He looked to Clay for help, and Clay took a good hard look at a really quite fascinating knot in the tree he was standing next to. At last the wizard relented. With a sigh he rummaged in his bottomless bag until he found what Gabriel had asked for.
“She is very, very far away,” Moog warned as he handed it over. “You might not be able to see that far, or very clearly, even if it does work.”
Gabriel sat cross-legged on the loamy earth, nestling the crystal ball in his lap. Moog plunked himself down across from him. Clay remained where he was, unsure he wanted to see whatever the glassy orb revealed.
“So what do I do?” asked Gabe. “Say her name? Call out to her somehow?”
“You don’t have to say anything, no. She can’t hear you at all. You just sort of … summon her to mind. Form a picture of her in your head, and then hold on to it for as long as it takes.”
Gabriel did as he was told, squinting into his lap and biting anxiously at his bottom lip. The whirl of violet mist inside the ball was so sudden all three of them started.
“Concentrate,” said Moog. “Once you have her in mind, try to make every detail as vivid as possible.”
The smoke within the orb continued to roil, now and then coalescing long enough for Clay to pick out a small detail—the curve of an ear, the arch of an eyebrow—before it was lost to the swirl and eddy of purple vapours. At last the smoke began to clear, and they saw a vast black ocean heaving beneath a grey sky.
Not an ocean, Clay realized. It’s the black forest. The Heartwyld.
The sea of desiccated wood went on and on, and Clay shuddered to think what horrid things lurked beneath those gnarled eaves. At last the trees gave way to stony foothills; then a wall of imposing mountains—the Emperor’s Mantle—reared up like the battlements of some ghastly, snow-capped fortress. They were armoured in sheer ice, their hearts infested with monstrosities that thrived in the deepest, darkest places of the world. Clay caught a glimpse of something soaring among the mist-shrouded peaks. Long necked and leather winged, it dived behind a bluff and was gone.
A loud snap stole his gaze from the orb. Matrick had returned and was standing behind Gabriel, who was too intent upon the sphere to notice.
Beyond the mountains lay a plain of yellow grass, traced here and there by stone roads and dotted by small hamlets. Endland. Gabe’s vision swept along the course of a frothing river. They saw a herd of wild horses splashing through, and then, after a few fleeting seconds, the image in the orb came to rest on a village bisecting the river.
Something was wrong. It was a moment before Clay’s mind could reconcile what it was he was seeing. There were corpses in the water. Thousands of them. A mound of bloating bodies so huge it threatened to dam the river. He saw pale limbs and weeping red wounds, white-eyed faces frozen in horror and pain and madness.
“They’re polluting the water,” said Gabriel. “Poisoning the city with their own dead.”
“Focus!” snapped Moog, as a haze of purple mist began to overtake the scene. “Keep going.”
The view ambled on, but Gabriel’s sight seemed transfixed on the river below, choked by an oily morass of bloody gore. At last he managed to wrest his eyes from the fouled water, and Clay, who had taken a few steps closer to the orb without realizing he’d done so, felt his breath catch and his heart go cold.
Castia was a mighty city, or so he’d been told. It was the farthest outpost of human civilization, a testament to the indomitable spirit of those who had built the city of their dreams in a place beyond nightmares. But Clay couldn’t see it. Or rather, he couldn’t make himself look away from what surrounded it, on all sides, to the limit of every horizon.
He’d seen a few armies in his day. He’d seen a number of levied militias, and too many mobs (angry and otherwise) to count. He’d seen what a crowd of a hundred thousand could look like, when every band in Grandual gathered for the War Fair in the ruins of Kaladar. But he had never seen a Horde until now. His mind reeled at the sight. His mouth went dry. The hope he’d nursed of bringing Rose home safe drew the shutters, blew out the candles, and curled up under its bed.
Gabriel cried out as though he’d been struck. The image in the orb winked out, and for a long while no one moved. Matrick stood rooted to the spot. Moog covered his mouth with his hands. He was watching Gabe as if he expected the other man to explode before his very eyes.
Which was exactly what happened next.
Gabriel seized the crystal ball and lunged toward a knob of exposed rock.
“Gabe, wait!” Moog reached out, but made no move to stop him. The wizard knew better than that, at least.
With a sound that was part anguished scream, part bloodcurdling war cry, Gabriel raised the orb above his head and brought it violently down onto the stone. It clinked like silverware striking glass. Again, and again, he smashed it against the pitiless rock, until at last Clay heard it crack. With each successive blow the sound grew louder, until he feared the orb would shatter, and whatever magic it held would boil out and, well, he had no idea what to expect, really.
But now Gabriel was on his feet, running downhill through the trees, roaring like a Kaskar berserker toward the river below. A trail of purple smoke billowed behind him, issuing from within the fractured sphere. When he reached the riverbank Gabriel hurled the orb—which vanished with hardly a splash—and then, his fury spent, he sagged to his knees and wept by the water’s edge.
Moog was on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry,” he said to no one in particular. “I thought if maybe he could see her it might lift his spirits. Or if nothing happened … well, then at least we would know.”
“So she’s there, in Castia?” asked Clay. “She’s alive?”
The wizard blinked. “Well, yes, she’s alive, or we wouldn’t have seen anything at all. But …” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. Rose was alive, but no more so than an insect struggling in a web, while an uncountable legion of spiders closed in for the kill.
>
But you knew that already, didn’t you? Clay asked himself. And so did Gabriel. What they’d seen in the orb changed nothing. Going to Castia was a shitty idea, but no more so now than it had been the week before.
Shouldering his depleted pack, Clay called down to his friend. “Hey, Gabe, the boys and I are gonna go ahead and rescue your daughter. If you feel like doing that instead of crying down by the river, we’d love to have you along.” Saying that, he turned and trudged off eastward without bothering to look if the others were following.
But they were, he knew. Of course they were.
Chapter Sixteen
Snakes and Lions
Gabriel lagged well behind for several hours after the episode with the crystal ball, and shortly before evening they lost track of him entirely. Clay bid the others to stop and rest while he retraced their path. He found Gabe curled up among the tangled roots of a toppled maple, shaking and sobbing into his hands.
“She’s dead,” he moaned. “She’s dead, Clay. She’s dead.”
“No,” said Clay, willing a certitude he didn’t feel into his voice. He crouched, using one hand to steady himself when his knees protested. It had rained briefly this morning, and wet leaves plastered themselves to his knuckles. “Moog says she’s alive, or else we wouldn’t have seen …” His mind recoiled from the memory of what the orb had shown them. “She’s alive, Gabe. Right now. Your daughter is alive.”
Gabriel looked up, his eyes red-rimmed. “But you saw,” he said. There was an edge of accusation in his tone, as though he resented Clay’s persisting optimism. “You saw. Everyone in that city is dead. It’s only a matter of time. Even if the courts sent an army—which they won’t—it would be too late.”
“Which is why we need to keep moving,” Clay told him.
His friend began nodding, but his face crumpled as another wave of grief swept over the bulwark of his resolve. “But what can we do? Moog is dying of the rot! Matty couldn’t climb a flight of fucking stairs, and we expect him to walk a thousand miles? To cross the Heartwyld? To scale a mountain? Even if we do reach Castia … even if we somehow get there in time … what chance do we stand?”
The words none at all stood poised on Clay’s tongue like an actor ready to stride onstage, but he kept the curtain closed. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I really don’t, Gabe. But then again, I don’t know how we did half the stuff we’ve done.”
Gabriel wiped at his nose with a mud-soiled sleeve. “What do you mean? What stuff?”
“Coldfire Pass,” Clay said. “Hollow Hill. Castadar. How many hopeless battles have we fought?”
“A few …” Gabe admitted.
“And how many did we win?”
His friend considered that a moment. “All of them?”
“All of them,” Clay confirmed. “And yeah, sure, we’ve just been robbed by a gang of girls—”
“Twice,” said Gabriel.
“Twice, yes, well … we’re a bit rusty. Of course we are. But we’ve beaten the odds before, is what I’m trying to say. Remember Turnstone Keep? Three bands against five hundred bloodthirsty cannibals, and still we survived. We’ve killed how many gods-forsaken murlogs? How many orcs, and ogres, and shit-spawned warlocks bent on destroying the world? Frozen Hells, we killed a dragon once.”
Gabe frowned. “You mean Akatung? I thought—”
“Okay, we almost killed a dragon once. We definitely hurt him real bad. But he didn’t kill us, did he? We’re still here, still fighting. And Rose is fighting, too, but she’s desperate, and she needs our help. She needs you, Gabe. If you don’t save her from Lastleaf and his fucking Horde, no one will.” He could see hope kindling inside Gabriel, and so offered the last log at his disposal to the flame. “We were giants once, remember? Kings of the Wyld.”
Gabe’s ghost had uttered those words to Clay on the night his old friend appeared on his doorstep, a prodding reminder of what they’d been. Of what they were daring to be again.
“Kings of the Wyld,” whispered Gabriel, and Clay saw the words catch fire in his eyes. “We were giants. We still are.” He exhaled a long, shuddering breath, and appeared to take in his surroundings for the first time: the wet earth, the fallen tree, the dripping eaves of the forest around them. When he spoke again there was a note of shame in his voice. “Thank you, Clay. Without you …”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Clay, and then shrugged, since it seemed the only appropriate thing to do.
What remained of their journey to Fivecourt passed almost without incident, at least until the clowns attacked.
Clay thought at first that they had come across a troupe of mummers rehearsing their act, but they were brandishing weapons and screaming bloody murder, which set off a few it’s an ambush alarms right there. The face of the first man to reach him was painted white, with red stars over each eye and a broad, bloody grin smeared from ear to ear. Clay introduced that face to Blackheart’s with a sickening crunch, and the man dropped like a corpse cut loose from a tree.
He cast around, trying to number their assailants. Three, four, five, he counted. Two swords, two clubs, one spear, and a bow. An arrow zipped past his legs, whining like an iron-nosed mosquito. Two bows, he silently corrected himself. Six clowns total. Or no, not clowns. Mercenaries. A band, maybe, or something like one.
He recalled Gabriel mentioning the rising trend of face paint among would-be warriors these days. It had sounded ridiculous at the time, and was no less so now that this bunch of idiots had come howling between the trees.
Gabriel, weaponless, dodged a club’s heavy swing and retreated toward Clay, while Moog sidestepped a sword’s thrust and ducked behind Matrick, whose attempt to reach his knives cross-handed was hampered by the bulge of his gut.
“To Hell with this, I’m the king of Agria!” Matty blurted, prompting Clay to wonder why they’d bothered to fake his death in the first place. “Surrender at once!”
The nearest merc sneered, revealing teeth the colour of rotted wood. “You don’t say? Well I’m Vail, the Son of Autumn!” he said mockingly, then pointed out a scrawny woman with stringy wet hair and even worse dental hygiene. “And that there’s my sister, the Spring Maiden. Say hi, Glif.”
The woman, who was most definitely not Glif (and probably no maiden, either), growled like an animal and launched herself at Matrick, chopping at his head with a rusted sword. The king got a knife up just in time to deflect the blow, but she lashed out with a foot, striking his knee, driving him to the ground with an unkingly yelp.
Clay missed what happened next, as two more attackers closed on him. The first, a spearman, came in point first. Clay twisted, grasping the haft of the weapon and pulling hard. The spearman tripped, pitching onto his face.
“Got ’em,” said Gabe, landing a boot on the back of the man’s skull.
The second man’s hair was spiked like a flail and dyed bright blue. He swung his sword at Clay’s legs, but the blade bit harmlessly into Blackheart’s mottled flesh. The swordsman tried something similar to what had worked on Matty, throwing a punch over the rim of Clay’s shield, but Clay was ready. He caught the man’s fist on the meat of his palm and clenched. The swordsman blew a breath through gritted teeth, trying in vain to pull his hand free. Clay met his rictus grin with one of his own, and wrenched.
His foe’s gasp became a squeal, then a curdling scream as the bones in his wrist gave way with a click. Clay released his shattered hand and the swordsman stumbled away.
“You f—” he started to say, until an arrow sprouted in the side of his head.
Somewhere deeper into the forest a bowman swore. Clay ignored him, since the shooter would need a moment to reload, and faced up to his next assailant. This one wielded a heavy club spiked with nails. His face was painted red, with a gold moon carving down the bridge of his broad nose. He was built like a Kaskar berserker, and hollered like one as he charged, broadcasting an overhead swing that Clay swiftly decided not to be on the receiving end of.
He rushed forward, bowling himself shoulder first into the big man’s legs. It was a desperate move, and it half-worked: the giant came down, but he came down directly on top of Clay, crushing the breath out of him and pinning him to the forest floor.
Clay had a brief moment in which to assess how the rest of the battle was going. The so-called Spring Maiden was down, crying, clutching her stomach with blood-soaked fingers. The one who’d mockingly named himself Vail was still on his feet but retreating frantically now that Matrick had found his rhythm. Roxy and Grace took turns darting at the man’s face, and finally one landed a kiss. The merc yelled in pain, raising both hands to protect himself, and Matty went in low, opening a slice behind the poor man’s knee that left him sprawled and screaming in pain.
Gabe took off at a sprint toward the other bowman. Moog was on his knees, rooting around in his bag for the gods-knew-what.
A wand that shoots fireballs would be nice, Clay thought. Or one of those chain-lightning bolts. Anything but another dose of Magic Moog’s Magnificent Phallic Phylactery …
Someone—the giant on his back, presumably—pushed Clay’s face into the damp earth. He got a mouthful of dirt, and when he tried instinctively to breathe he got a lungful of it. He struggled to roll away, but the big man had him trapped like a fox in a snare. Or, more aptly, like a fox flattened beneath a huge fucking rock. Stars swirled across the black of his vision, and Clay felt the muscles in his legs start to spasm as he slipped toward shock.
And then suddenly, light. Blessedly, air.
The pressure on his back eased enough for Clay to lever himself up and drag his body free. He coughed once, and then vomited a short stream of mud onto the patchwork leaves below him. Rolling over, he saw Matrick standing behind the big man, whose expression had gone slack in death. The king’s knives were buried to the hilt on either side of the giant’s neck.
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