Lingering Haze (The Elusive Strain Book 1)

by James Berardinelli

  His reply was verbal. “Yes. Because you need it and because you would have objected if I had asked you. You’ll learn that dire circumstances often force us to abandon the morally upright choice in exchange for the expedient one. We don’t have time to argue the rightness or wrongness of what I did. Discussion is for later.”

  I was about to say something to rebut him when the part of my mind linked with his recognized that he was approaching a critical juncture. Best not to distract him now. He was right – the time for discussion was later, assuming we survived.

  Bergeron focused on a tributary of one of the many rivers winding through The Southern Peaks. I could feel the potency engendered by so many millions of gallons of water – the power to give life or destroy it. At the point where the roiling stream passed closest to the reavers’ gathering, he unleashed a tightly focused burst of magic that collapsed the left riverbank, diverting the water flow into the canyon area where the creatures were massing. I marveled at the economy and simplicity of Bergeron’s process, knowing I couldn’t have done the same thing with such little effort over a great distance. So little emotion expended to accomplish such an imposing task…

  That’s because you constrain yourself. Distance is a physical barrier; your mind doesn’t recognize it. As for the amount of magic I used…that comes from training. Summoners have a tendency to use more than they need. The excess is not only wasteful but it results in the creation and propagation of magic-based species like reavers and daemons. When you drive home a spike, hitting it with all your might will do the job but the same thing can be achieved with less effort if you strike just hard enough.

  “And now?”

  “We wait. It won’t be long. You’ll know as soon as the daemon takes notice of us.”

  Joined with his mind-sense, I observed the results of his magic. Chaos cascaded through the ranks of the reavers as the water poured from the mountain above them, an impromptu waterfall that inundated them, churning them under. The order that had defined their gathering disintegrated as they fled for higher, drier ground. Some certainly died, torn apart by the flood, but that number wasn’t significant. What was a hundred compared to twenty-thousand? And any sense of satisfaction I might have experienced at the success of Bergeron’s tactic was short-lived. A heavy, baleful influence turned its attention toward me and I felt my heart go cold as it locked on my presence. It was trying to look into my mind but, unlike Bergeron, it didn’t have a pathway. The feeling was similar to what I had experienced when I had first encountered an earth reaver, only magnified a hundredfold.

  “The daemon has found us,” said Bergeron, his voice suddenly hoarse. I could tell he was under strain. “It will come. Now we gird for battle.”

  Everything started shaking at once – a quaking so violent that I thought for sure it would bring millions of tons of earth and rock down on us. Vibrations throbbed deep in the mountain. The floor shuddered so badly that if I hadn’t been sitting, I would have lost my footing. Then, with the sound of thunder, a fissure big enough to admit a car opened in the wall. Through that opening stepped our adversary.

  In the dim light, it was difficult for my eyes to distinguish much in the way of detail but the gross features were evident. The daemon’s form was a grotesque parody of a human’s, although bigger (at least 7 feet in height) and bulkier. Standing upright on legs as thick as tree trunks, its eyeless head was like a boulder and its long arms ended with sharp, prehensile claws. It appeared to be made out of rock and was accompanied by a nearly overpowering smell of dirt – not the clean, cool loam of topsoil but the decaying rot of a compost heap. It adopted an aggressive stance, towering over us as it prepared to strike.

  My mind-sense revealed more. The daemon was a source of unalloyed power. I was unable to tell whether it could use the magic the way Bergeron and I could but that energy formed the essence of its composition, like water for the human body. Recognizing this gave me an inkling of how it could be defeated: the magical equivalent of dehydration. Drain a person of water and they died. Drain a daemon of magic and the same might be true. But how to do that…? I hadn’t a clue.

  As we rose to confront it, Bergeron motioned me to stand behind him, near the room’s entryway.

  “Summoner.” The bass rumble shook the chamber, the voice of such a deep timber that it was felt as much as heard. “How fitting that one of your kind should be the first of my victims.” Hatred dripped from every word; the daemon’s desire wasn’t simply to vanquish but to annihilate. There would be no compromising, no asking for or giving of quarter.

  Bergeron was steeling himself either to attack or defend. I couldn’t tell which but I could feel his tension. He was preparing something.

  “A second Summoner?” The daemon noticed me despite Bergeron’s attempts to keep me hidden from it. The initial puzzlement was replaced by something else (satisfaction?) when it next spoke. “Are you the one who has been promised?”

  I didn’t have time to ponder what that meant because Bergeron chose the moment to act.

  There was no massive frontal assault or explosive display of magical prowess, although I hadn’t expected either. The Summoner’s first attacks were the equivalent of jabs: quick moves that tested the daemon’s resilience against various forms of offensive weaponry like water and magic. Nothing was successful. If our opponent was aware of Bergeron’s thrusts, it gave no indication. Through the link I shared with Bergeron, I sensed resignation. He hadn’t expected such basic tactics to bear fruit but he had been obligated to try.

  The daemon’s retaliatory onslaught was one of brute force. Delivered magically, the blow didn’t require physical contact, although the creature took a step forward to intimidate (as if its bulk wasn’t menacing enough). It slammed its clawed appendages together; the resulting shock wave drove Bergeron and me to our knees, with my companion absorbing the worst of the attack. After it had passed – and it seemed to take a long time doing so - he was slow to recover. My eyes told me little but my mind-sense indicated that he had been seriously injured, all parts of his body traumatized.

  His riposte was more violent than his initial blows – a complex weaving of water and magic that, although imbued with the crushing force of a wave, was ultimately no more effective than his opening gambit. It might have penetrated the daemon’s protection but any damage it did was insignificant, no more devastating than a bee sting. The creature made a sound that might have been a bark of laughter before launching its counterattack.

  This strike was different in nature, an assault on Bergeron using every mote of dust and dirt in the vicinity as a superheated projectile. He was hastily able to fashion a crude shield to deflect the missiles but was taken unawares by either the nature or the ferocity of the daemon’s tactics. The only headway he was making was to prove that no Summoner, even a trained veteran, could stand toe-to-toe against a daemon. Its weaknesses, if any, were concealed.

  I watched helplessly, knowing there was nothing I could do. Anything I tried would be pointless – a drop of water in a lake. At this point, I doubted that retreat would be an option. After our adversary disposed of Bergeron, what chance would I have? It wasn’t likely to allow me to run away.

  A flurry of lightning-fast attacks by Bergeron – expressions of power so elegant that I marveled at their proficiency – left the daemon unfazed. It was effectively immune to magic and it didn’t seem to share the reavers’ weakness for water.

  The creature lunged, surprisingly agile for something so hulking, and raked with its talons. Bergeron partially dodged - enough at least to keep his head from being demolished - but the impact wrenched a cry of pain from his lips as the flesh of his left shoulder and arm was shredded and the bones shattered.

  Panic rose like bile in my throat. Paralyzed by a paroxysm of indecision, I remained rooted to the spot.

  “Whatever…happens…don’t interfere.” For Bergeron, every labored word was an effort. Had I been in that much pain, I don’t think I could have spoken
. As I observed with my mind, he began the working of something colossal – an undertaking he was only partially in control of. It blossomed from deep within his subconscious where it had been implanted for this moment. I understood what he was doing.

  Casting a Summoning was an instinctual process but Bergeron wasn’t going about it in the traditional way. Instead, he was attempting to manipulate it to work in a manner that hadn’t been intended. I hoped he could finish before the daemon realized what he was attempting.

  Going into this confrontation, Bergeron had known what I had belatedly recognized: the way to neutralize a daemon was to drain the magic that comprised its essence. He had figured out a way to do that – or at least a way that might accomplish it. The question was whether he could implement his plan.

  There was so much intricacy involved in the Summoning that it was difficult to follow. The undertaking required massive amounts of energy but Bergeron wasn’t generating any magic. He was holding back, intentionally starving the process of the “fuel” it needed to trigger, forcing it to locate an alternative source. Glowing like a beacon, the daemon was impossible to miss.

  The creature sensed its danger immediately, but that was already too late. Once unleashed, the Summoning couldn’t be stopped. It devoured the daemon’s magic to initiate the process then recoiled on Bergeron to siphon off the rest of what it needed. A Summoning demanded two kinds of energy to function – magic and the life’s essence of the Summoner. To kill the daemon, Bergeron was sacrificing himself and there was nothing I could do to stop it or save him. This had to happen. There was no other way.

  The daemon’s death was strangely anticlimactic, similar as it was to that of the reavers. After raging and struggling for a few seconds, clawing at the air and uttering incoherent roars, it simply collapsed into a pile of steaming debris. So enraptured was I by the magical storm surrounding me that I barely noticed. The Summoning had taken over. With the daemon drained, Bergeron was now feeding it magic in addition to his fading life force and it was nearing its climax.

  There was a moment’s wrenching when time seemed to skip a groove, a flash of light that lit up the darkness like an exploding sun, and the odor of burned flesh and hair. Then it was done. I was left in silence near the ruined corpse of our adversary and the dying body of the man I had hoped would be my mentor.

  I was amazed that Bergeron was still alive. The lantern in the corridor had gone out, plunging everything into blackness, but I could hear his labored breathing and my mind-sense told me that a spark of life (although no more than a spark) remained. Stunned and made dizzy by all I had experienced, I couldn’t get to my feet, so I crawled across the floor toward him.

  “Janelle, are you here?” The voice, a tortured whisper, sounded like the sound coming from someone with a trach tube. I groped for Bergeron’s ice-cold hand and, when I found it, grasped it hard.

  “I’m here.” The words sounded unnaturally loud in the silence.

  “Find my successor. You’ll need each other. There will be more daemons and we can’t afford to sacrifice a Summoner for each of them. Now get away from here. Go fast. The daemon’s arrival destabilized this mountain and it will come crashing down once I’m gone. Flee or be buried with me.”

  Those were the last words he spoke, at least in my hearing.

  Epilogue: Alone Again

  There was no doubt about it: I was going to have to spend the night out here in the foothills of The Southern Peaks. Alone. For the first time since my early days in The Verdant Blight, I was by myself. My companions had a day’s start and by now were approaching The Rank Marsh’s southern fringes. Regardless of how fast I traveled, I wouldn’t be able to catch them but my goal was to be not far behind when they entered West Fork. At least I wasn’t being chased.

  Bergeron was dead and, as he had warned, the caves comprising his home had collapsed in a mini-earthquake only moments after I escaped into the warm afternoon’s air. My mind-sense no longer showed a massing of earth reavers in the mountains. They had scattered – in part because of the flooding and in part because their leader had been exterminated. The snake had lost its head and the tail was flailing about.

  I was still amped up on adrenaline and fear. The two went hand-in-hand and had kept me going for much of the day. Remnants of the dizziness and vertigo lingered as well. The more I considered the events of the day and the extraordinary feat Bergeron had engineered, the more astonished I was that I had survived. Had this been his plan all along? Surely he had suspected from the beginning that no conventional magical attack would have damaged the daemon. The Summoning had been his contingency. He might have hoped to endure it, believing that with the daemon providing the magic, there could have been a path to survival. I suppose that made me his legacy…me and the new Summoner.

  He had tasked me with finding him/her. I had no idea how to do that. Once again, I needed help. I would go first to West Fork. The villagers had to be made to understand how dire their situation was. One dead earth daemon didn’t end the threat. In fact, it might introduce greater peril. All the other elemental forces – reavers and daemons alike – would know the means by which Bergeron had triumphed and would act to ensure his success wasn’t repeated. The advantage of surprise could no longer be counted on to tip the scales.

  After West Fork, my path would take me to find Loremaster Alexander. That had been Loremaster Lawrence’s command. The advice of my Summoner and the man who had visited me in the world of my birth. It would be foolish to ignore it. Bergeron had pointed me to the southeast, to a city called Erenton, once the capitol of a great nation. Perhaps I would find the answers Bergeron hadn’t been able (or willing) to provide. At the very least, I could expect to meet allies and perhaps become part of a coalition dedicated to the survival of humanity in the face of an implacable enemy. An enemy that my kind, Summoners, had been instrumental in creating through their own negligence.

  There were other words to be considered as well – ones not spoken by Lawrence or Bergeron. Are you the one who has been promised? That hadn’t been an idle or random pronouncement. There had been a purpose and meaning. It hinted at something dark. I needed to know what it meant.

  For now, it was time to make camp, break out a portion of the meager traveler’s rations I had left, and settle down for what was bound to be a long and taxing night. Physically, no one and nothing was hunting me, but the ghosts around here might visit me in my sleep.

  Though I might again be alone, I wasn’t the same frightened girl who had fled from the earth reaver in The Verdant Blight. I had discovered unsuspected powers, met faithful friends, and won at least a few fights against a malevolent enemy. Maybe Samell was right – when I thought of him, I wanted nothing more than to hear his voice – and the “old Janelle” was irrelevant. All that mattered was who I was today, who I had become during my brief time spent with Bergeron. I was Janelle the Summoner. I would dedicate my life to saving this world in the hope that I would either find a home here or uncover a way back to the place I had left behind.

  * * *

  Janelle and her companions will return in The Elusive Strain Book 2: The Malignant Elements, in which she will pursue the charge given to her by Bergeron, travel to new lands, and uncover an unsettling truth about her past.