Nothing? His eyes narrowed. He had certainly found something here, Galorin’s Keep or no. So perhaps the dreams had been a deception, or maybe they were meant to lead him somewhere else. His heart jumped again. Perhaps this was Galorin’s Keep after all.
His inclination was to race down through the trees at all speed toward that huge dark edifice, but he schooled himself to calm and tested each step just as he had the whole way up from the rotten cliffs. He had not found his way here, wherever here was, only to die of recklessness at the doorstep.
But just as he had since Montor, he found the path before him clear and unmistakable. Huge thorny brambles seemed set to guide him along the only possible course through the thick forests to the valley floor. He could not hope to leave that path if he tried, not without burning the brambles off first. So he shrugged the rucksack up on his shoulder and crossed the ridge.
“Hold,” spoke Hallin. He crouched below the top of the blunted ridge ahead of them and moved himself up carefully, only until he could see down into the valley below. He would not have Dith accidentally spy them coming over this rise, not now, not when he had him trapped so neatly in this bowl and with his back to them besides. This ugly, rocky hole would be their battleground, he told himself. A pity it was that he would have to kill Dith before he had led them to the keep, but having come this far, he was sure they could find it alone. He would not get another chance like this.
He could see Dith moving easily between the highest of the rocks, the steepest and sharpest; occasionally the familiar gold of his robes flashed between the rocks and moved as steadily here as it had beside the river, as if over open ground. Hallin ground his teeth together again and spat. He moved without a care, this Dith did, without a single care, while three men, men who had stood to guarantee Hallin’s fee—good men, he allowed grudgingly, who had shared many a cup and meal with him these tendays—lay dead of Galorin’s traps. Men whose deaths had served to keep him alive. Hallin’s lips thinned. When he found Galorin, he would kill him, too.
Tawn crept along the ground and stopped beside him, “He is just below.”
“I’ve eyes,” snapped the hunter.
“If we creep down, the four of us, we could surround—”
“No,” Hallin answered abruptly. He was going to kill Dith himself. He had not hunted this mage for Rjeinar and for Kadak over the last six years to have him fall to someone else by Limigar’s whim, and he was in no mood to argue shares of the bounty besides. There was more to it than just gold now, and payment or not, legal bounty or not, Dith the Merciless was finally his. He glanced sharply at the questions in Tawn’s pinched features before he turned back to watch Dith’s progress. “No,” he repeated softly. “You’d be done to cinders at ten paces of him.”
“A good bow, and I’d have him from here,” muttered the Hadrian darkly. He motioned the other two to join him beside Hallin. “A single arrow, just at his neck, and we’d be headed home.”
“Fool, have you been awake at all these tendays?” seethed Hallin. “You seen his works; he’ll not fall but to a righteous blast of magic.” Then he looked at the men who crouched beside him and gave them a hard smile. “You’ve done your piece getting me here, lads; the rest falls to me. Now stand ye down and wait.”
From then on, his attention was entirely upon the occasional flashes of gold between the boulders and the rugged, rocky plain just beyond. Very soon Dith would be out there in the open, forced to slow his pace over the field of rocks and made virtually defenseless, at least for a moment. Long enough. Hallin rolled up his sleeves. It would have to be long enough.
The trees thinned only a little before they ended rather immediately at the edge of the wide valley. It seemed a land cleared and tilled soft for farming except that no one farmed here, and wild grasses had filled the fields. The whole of the valley seemed deserted save the dark and unnatural edifice ahead. As he left the shelter of the trees, as his eyes once more adjusted to the glare of the sun, Dith slowed his step and stared.
Hallin held his breath, held his attack ready for just the right moment, the moment when Dith was clear of the trees, just a bit away from those boulders, just a little closer to those rocks ahead.
But instead, Dith had stopped. Trees still at his back, he had stopped to gawk at the lumpy stand of rocks just ahead of him, as if those particular rocks stood out somehow from the rest. Hallin breathed deeply, impatiently, and willed him to step forward. Just. One. More. Step.
“Hallin,” spoke Tawn worriedly at his elbow. He was frowning over a handful of soil. “Hallin, the ground here—”
“Peace,” hissed the mage, raising his hands. “Sure it can wait.”
In thick ragged lines below the grass, Dith saw swirls of clear black sand and shards of ancient obsidian, some made dull by wind and rain and volcanic heat, others still deadly sharp. The dark curtain walls of Galorin’s castle had fallen countless centuries ago; the broken rubble of many battles clotted the valley in great glassy heaps that seemed at first glance only random seepings from the volcano, and this sharp sand below his feet was what the elements had slowly broken away.
But the keep itself...
No. It could not be. He squinted and stumbled forward in amazement, and suddenly he could see the whole of the keep itself. His heart pounded in his chest.
The high corner towers of the keep rose above the valley floor, not laid in crude chunks by masons, nor even carved by artisans from single blocks of stone, but rather moulded and blown from the very blood of the volcano itself. It was nothing to make a volcano erupt; he could do as much now if he so chose. But to control it, to direct the flow so carefully, so artfully—he doubted any mage alive, any mage in history, had ever shown such delicacy—to create such a castle would take the finesse of Galorin himself. The glassy obsidian walls were dark, nearly transparent, buttressed with magical power and protected, not by the destroyed curtain walls, but by the defenses Galorin had built throughout the range. The whole mountain was his castle.
But those famed defenses had failed. The magnificent towers stood smashed and shattered, still whole in silhouette, but opaqued to a milky gray with infinite cracks and breaks and held together such that a sharp breath might blow them apart. The walls between those towers were blasted outward, and their sharp obsidian pieces littered the whole of the crater floor, even as far away as the fallen curtain walls where Dith stood.
The keep, though still standing, had been gutted.
Grass. Thin weedy grass. This ground had not been tilled; the forest near the keep had been razed to the ground. His scalp prickled. Extreme heat had dulled the obsidian sand at his feet, but not the heat of the volcano. The heat of an intense magical attack, a fire that gutted not only the keep but the whole valley. None of the lush ancient forest of the crater walls grew in this valley; he saw here no tiny seedling trees, no low brush, just the last season’s growth of prairie grasses. Whatever had happened here had happened since the war’s end, maybe even since he left Graymonde. He had come too late.
Galorin is—
Dith scowled, remembering the Hadrian’s comment in Montor. He had dismissed the man’s remark at the time, as well as Dalthaz’s silencing gesture, the careworn eyes over the sly mayoral smile. His mind raced. The shutters drawn shut behind him, the locked stores. The strangely empty streets. The woman who fainted. They had known, standing in the shadow of their desecrated temple, they had known right well what had happened here. He swallowed anxiously.
Galorin is—
What? he wanted to shout into the sky. Dead, missing? His eyes narrowed in rage. They might even have had a hand in it somehow, and by the gods, if they had...
He shut his eyes a moment to force the anger back down into his gut. No. Those people had been terrified of him, even before he destroyed the temple, even before they learned his name. If they had destroyed Galorin’s Keep, they would not have shown such fear over one more wandering mage. Something, someone, had made them afraid, and now h
e felt certain it had nothing to do with the bandits in the temple. He opened his eyes and looked out over the field before him once more.
For the first time, he saw what he had been looking past, what his mind had refused to allow him to see. The moist, mulchy soil was packed firm, but not by rain. The ground was crushed down by footprints, hundreds of footprints. The light breeze had softened the lines of many of them out in the open valley, but here he saw a few that were undisturbed, and he crouched beside them.
They were all made by boots. Seamless boots. Hundreds of them.
Dith rose a bit shakily. Hundreds. Yes, it would have taken that many to overthrow Galorin. But so few of his kind had survived the war...
Even before the Syonese Resistance began its efforts to overthrow his de facto rule and restore the House of Damerien to power, Kadak had waged a separate war of obsession against Syon’s magic users—men and women who, ironically enough, would otherwise have had as little interest in Kadak and his agenda as they had in each other. No one quite understood why, even after the war’s end, but Kadak had been convinced that his end would come at the hands of mages—not just any mages, but a special, very mysterious group of mages. “Them,” he called them, and he seemed to think he would know them on sight. How or why was anyone’s guess; nevertheless, he had expected these beings at his door as fully as one might expect a dinner guest.
Galorin himself had been the most likely threat, so Kadak had spent the early part of the war concentrating on finding him. The campaigns he had sent into the Hodrache Range either returned with nothing or failed to return at all, but Galorin himself had raised no hand against Kadak, which led the rest of Syon to believe that Galorin, like his ally, the Great Liberator, had vanished into history and legend.
On another front, Kadak had conscripted or killed every child who showed the least ability with magic, and he had executed outright any mages who were not in his employ. Those his troops and bounty hunters could find, that is. But even during the worst of the slaughter, those of the Art had not joined their forces against him, something the rest of Syon had found curious and still viewed with suspicion.
Some families over the years, like Dith’s, had managed to hide their gifted children from Kadak, and while the noble houses knew better than to provoke Kadak by keeping resident mages, those who were sympathetic to the Resistance quietly supported them as they could, so that Syon always had a few, a precious few, rogue sorcerers wandering the land, always in hiding, always under threat of death. Always under suspicion, even by the Resistance. When they were betrayed, for it was always when, not if, with the bounties Kadak offered, they were killed outright. If a mage had somehow survived his first betrayal, if he had learned to see the signs of his next betrayal early enough, then he might have survived, as Dith had.
Needless to say, most had not survived the first betrayal, much less any others. Since the war, Dith had seen only two sorcerers, three if he were to include the horsed one below the cliff, all on different occasions and all at a distance, and these had gone to great pains to avoid crossing his path. But here, before him, he saw the tracks of an army of mages, apparently united towards one unbelievable end: Galorin’s death.
He ran now across the field of tamped footprints, heedlessly adding his own and hoping against every rational thought in his mind that Galorin might somehow still be in the keep, might somehow still be alive somewhere in those ruins.
But something was wrong. Not three paces from where he had started, a great swell of fear and the heat of power suddenly surged through his body, and he paused, confused, suddenly under attack again, naked and alone and in the thick of a war again, but against whom? The ones who had attacked Galorin? Tornado winds whirled around him carrying sharp obsidian shards and chunks of heavy volcanic rock toward him at amazing speed. At the same time, the footprints beneath his feet began to liquefy, to melt away, and the ground began to suck at his feet to pull him down. Worse still, his chest felt painfully tight.
High on the crater’s rim, Hallin had seen Dith start his panicked run for the keep, and his eyes widened. Why did he run unless—Dith knew somehow that they were there, and he was making a dash for Galorin! But Dith knew they were there. Whatever defenses he had readied, Hallin could not stop now; he would never get another chance. Even if Dith was expecting an attack, he might be able to hold off one, perhaps even two, but he could not hope to stand against three. No mage had ever withstood all three.
So Hallin had let loose the tremendous bundles of power he had laid by. His body surged forward, and he had grunted with the effort to control the flow of his energy into the wind and stones, the ground, Dith’s very heart. The veins stood out at his temples and in both forearms where his robe sleeves had fallen back, and sweat dripped to the ground until at last, strength spent, his arms dropped to his sides. He was too exhausted to look up and see the result of his efforts.
But Tawn had been watching Dith, had seen him stumble in the sand and raise his hand back toward them in what seemed no more than a weak gesture of surrender, a plea for them to desist. As distorted ripples of power hurtled toward them through the still air of the crater, and as the huge rocks and boulders below them seemed to flicker and run like mud, seemed to become trees and underbrush for only a moment before they rumbled and fell away, Tawn’s eyes grew wide and a gasp hung soundless on his lips. He jerked Hallin up by the arm and dragged him away at a dead run, shouting for Geretous and Haan to follow. A few moments later, the searing heat and concussion knocked him senseless to the ground.
Dith sank gasping against the trunk of the nearest tree, his heart still pounding furiously but no longer about to burst in his chest. He drew a deep breath and held it, listening, watching. Above him, through the sounds of landslides and falling trees, he heard no movement, none of the sounds that an army might make moving through the trees, not so much as the sound of a single man.
Ahead, between where he sat and the now completely crumbled towers of the keep, the ground had hardened again, though the footprints of the strange army of mages were gone, and the ground lay covered by the rain of obsidian shrapnel that Dith’s latent defenses had so readily hurled away from him.
Defenses. He worked to catch his breath and glanced back over his shoulder through the trees, to where he could begin to make out a great bare swath of land through the falling dust and smoke. High on the newly formed cliffs, at either side, trees teetered and fell into the new canyon, and the unstable soil and rock at the sides sloughed away into the steam and heat below to broaden the cut he had made. He pursed his lips and sighed.
It could have been worse.
His reaction had been no more than reflex, no more than his own instinct for self-preservation crawling from the scaly underbelly of his brain to rip away every shred of self-control and discipline he had built over the last several months. And if it had not, he told himself, he might have been killed.
Where were they, why were they waiting? Surely he had not destroyed a whole army at a single blow. Or was this the last remnant of Galorin’s great defenses?
He listened again to the forest above, to the cries of the birds circling over the fallen land and to the echoes returning from the far side of the valley. Nowhere did he hear the faintest sound of men. No footfalls, no treelimbs moving aside, nothing. Yet they were there; they must still be there. What were they doing?
Slowly, he rose to his feet.
Hallin flattened himself against a large rock and cradled his wrist against his chest. Blood dripped into his eyes from a cut on his forehead, and he shook it away angrily. Above him, high on the edge of the rim, Geretous lay crushed beneath the rocks, and Haan was nowhere to be found. He had just disappeared, carried down with the first great tumbling rush of rock and trees. But for Hallin’s own defenses and Tawn’s reflexes, he and Tawn might have been killed as well; he could not be bothered with a bit of blood in his eyes.
“You see him?” he called.
Below him, T
awn moved awkwardly between the strange boulders, stumbling over broken rock and gravel. His left leg was swollen at the knee, and his back was flayed and raw beneath the torn woolen cloth of his cloak and his tunic. His face, when he turned back to Hallin, was bruised and caked with blood. “He can’t have gone far, Hallin.”
The hunter did not answer, but moved down over the rocks, catching himself on his shoulder or his elbow rather than his hand, until he was beside Tawn. “There,” he spoke darkly, pointing with his good hand down toward the same place where Dith had emerged before. Even as he spoke, he saw a flicker of gold move at the edge of the rocks.
Hallin smiled grimly and raised his hands.
The rocks above where Hallin had pointed, above where Tawn saw the edge of a gold sleeve, seemed to swell, almost to throb with the energy Hallin poured into them, until all at once they blasted apart to thunder down in a great heap. Once the dust settled Tawn cried out in victory and thumped Hallin on the back, for beneath their new heap of rock, he could see the winter sun glimmering off a spot of seamless gold cloth.
But Hallin’s face was pale, and he clutched his broken wrist in agony. The flesh of his forearm was blistered and burned just below his wrist where his power had eddied behind the shattered bone. Tawn tore away strips of his own jerkin and rubbed them with the greasy dried beef he carried in his pack before he wrapped them around Hallin’s arm, the better to keep the cloth from sticking in the burned flesh. The mage would survive it, though Tawn doubted the hand would be worth saving by the time they reached Montor, but if such was the price paid to see this Dith dead, so be it.
“Hallin,” he whispered, casting a glance back toward the gold cloth beneath the stones, “you’ve done it. You’ve destroyed him.”
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 30