Fury of the Falcon (The Falcons Saga 5)

by Ellyn, Court

  Be careful, a gentle voice whispered. There may be no going back. The voice belonged to someone he had known long ago. Kieryn’s voice.

  Not until she is safe, Thorn replied, and Kieryn withdrew.

  His arms swept forward like wings backing wind and twin columns of fire eddied out from his fingertips. His rage fed them. They grew as fat as towers and chased down ranks of fleeing ogres.

  One ogre did not run away. Nearly nine feet tall and rippling with muscle, the ogre wore shards of glass and twisted metal at the ends of his long plaited hair. Ash and blood streaked his face like war paint. He wielded a serrated sword encrusted with rust and cold blood and shreds of flesh. “ ‘Vedra!” he bellowed. “Dis naeni Korax. You fight dis naeni blade to blade. Not dat fire stick.”

  Thorn cocked his head. On another day, he might find humor in the invitation. But not today. “You want me to fight fair?” He grinned and nodded and dropped his staff into the ash, then unsheathed the sword Laniel had given him in his youth. Spreading his arms, he invited Korax to make the first move.

  The ogre advanced, circling cautiously, sword poised at his massive shoulder. All at once he stumbled and whirled, chest panting, eyes darting, as he searched for the source of pain. He dropped the sword, and his great clawed hands began slapping at his arms, at his face, at his hutza breastplate. His gray-green skin bubbled and blackened. Veins on the backs of his hands and on his forehead ruptured. Korax wailed a pitiful shriek, then his heart boiled and burst.

  Thorn lowered trembling arms, reclaimed his staff, and stepped over the impressive corpse. He wasn’t interested in honor today.

  With the death of their chieftain and the felling of their Elari commander, the ogres of Black Marsh lost their bloodlust. Thorn looked for others bold enough to counter him, but there were none. The ground rumbled with the haste of their retreat.

  A long time later, Thorn found himself kneeling on the riverbank, his forehead pressed to the pommel of his sword. The tip of the blade sank into damp soil. The Avidan’s current churned past, making soft sucking sounds as it sluiced through the grate set into the city’s wall. The wall loomed over him, casting him in cool twilight.

  Douse it, cage it, he chanted, and slowly his rage dwindled to a low smolder. Every muscle in his body quivered, as though he’d been lifting stones and hauling them across country. Queasiness unsettled his stomach, as after a heavy meal and a long run. His palms throbbed, swollen and red. The headache had not yet set in. If he released the energies gradually enough, maybe he could prevent it. Probably not. He didn’t care. His rage glutted on the pain. He had to tuck it away and hold onto it for later.

  He never heard Laniel’s footsteps approaching. “There you are. Wish we’d known to expect you. I’d have panicked less.” Falconeye tried to make the greeting jovial, but it fell flat. Exhaustion permeated his voice. Since parting ways eight or nine days ago, the dranithion had been battling Black Marsh.

  When he gave a damn, Thorn would ask when the tower fell. For the moment, he couldn’t muster the strength—or the kindness—to speak.

  Laniel persisted, “Thanks for the help, I say.”

  Thorn grunted, raised his forehead from its cold resting place.

  Taut silence followed. Laniel was imagining the worst, or what to him was the worst. “I haven’t seen you like this in years. Good thing the trees were already burned up, or you woulda done a fine job of it yourself.”

  Shut up, will you? Thorn yearned to say. He sat back on his haunches and laid the sword across his knees.

  “Look, if you intend to use that blade on yourself, you should’ve done it before I got here. When you’re done, I want it back.”

  Thorn rounded on him. “I might use it on you, mate!”

  Through a mask of blood and ash, Laniel grinned. He crouched down next to his oath-brother, and for a long time they watched the river roll past. The weight of unspoken words, of unexpressed sorrow, gradually settled between them.

  Laniel spoke in duínovan, because in his own language he had no word to express it: “Aerdria is dead.”

  Moments passed before the news settled properly inside Thorn’s head. He turned to look at Laniel, and saw truth in his eyes.

  “So is Commander Tíryus. And Saeralín, and all the Keepers of the Veil. Some days ago. Lothiar came himself. Lyrienn is Lady.” Laniel said it all without emotion, as if he’d grown numb to the horror.

  To Thorn, the news was a sharp claw prodding an open wound. The pain propelled him to his feet. Not Aerdria, not like that. She was supposed to fade into the Light, not bleed at Lothiar’s hands.

  Before he knew he meant to, he blurted his own news. “He has Carah.”

  Laniel gripped him by the shoulder. “Ah, Mother, no.”

  Thorn shrugged off the weight of his hand. Consolation was unwelcome. “I need prisoners.”

  Understanding seeped into Laniel’s eyes. “Better hurry. The Regs are finishing off the wounded.”

  Thorn strode away from the river and back into ash. “I’m going to make them hurt, nethai. Leave if you can’t handle it.”

  Among a bristling barricade of dranithi arrows lay two ogres, seasoned bulls with scarred tusks, frayed ears, and muscles bulging from boiled leather armor. Arrows had peppered the leg of one, crippling him. He snarled and chewed at the ropes binding his hands until a dranithi prodded his face with a toe. The other appeared to have been rolled in Thorn’s ash cloud. Soot blackened his muzzle and the crinkled flesh around his small red eyes. His right arm was burned beyond use, a raw, oozing claw, as if he had tried fending off the firestorm with bare hands. The flames had washed over his chest and throat as well, leaving a swath of scorched flesh and open blisters.

  Beside these squatted an ogreling half the size of his brethren. His ears stuck out clumsily, like a bat’s wings, and his tusks barely protruded from his muzzle, white and unchipped. What was he doing here? Carrying water? Supplying parts for the siege engines? He had no apparent wounds, only bruises and a swollen jaw, likely induced during his capture.

  Thorn knotted his fists on his hips and stared at the ogreling until he raised apprehensive red eyes, then Thorn grinned. The ogreling’s heavy brow puckered with fear, and he slunk closer to the ground.

  “Here’s the last,” announced a dranithi. During the battle, Laniel had reunited with the rest of his troop, those who, according to the Elders’ wishes, he had left behind to guard the Wood. Nyria, his second-in-command, carried the front end of a stretcher. She and Azhien lowered it inside the barricade of warriors.

  Iryan Wingfleet grunted as his bones made contact with the ground.

  The blue roan had nearly crushed him. After confiscating his hutza armor, the dranithi had uncovered a shattered ankle, a misshapen collarbone, and a forearm bent at an odd angle. Ash plastered one side of his face and dulled his midnight-hued hair. “Plan to take my other ear, Dathiel?”

  Thorn knelt beside the stretcher. “I will tear you apart piece by piece until you tell me what I need to know. Where is Lothiar holding the avedrin?”

  Iryan spat weakly at Thorn’s knee, then flopped back on the stretcher.

  With two fingers, Thorn pressed down on the broken collarbone. The pain must’ve been so exquisite that Wingfleet was unable to cry out. His mouth opened, his body tensed, but he made no sound.

  “If you ever want to use this arm again, you’ll tell me.” In truth, he didn’t know if Lyrienn would permit the traitor to live long enough to heal. His fingers let up. Iryan panted and sweated ash-tinted beads. But he clamped his teeth shut and cursed Thorn to the abyss. The fingers pressed again. While Wingfleet screamed, Thorn glanced across the gathering of prisoners and met the ogreling’s eye. “Where are they?”

  The ogreling curled up and buried his face between his knees.

  The big veterans didn’t look too confident either. The burned one squirmed away from his screaming commander. The one with arrows in his leg chewed at his bonds again. A gentle prodding of the
dranithi’s foot didn’t compel him to stop. A bow came whipping down across his hands and face.

  “Tell him nothing!” Iryan bellowed.

  Damn that Book of Barriers and the Elari who had stolen it. Thorn would have found the avedrin years ago if Lothiar hadn’t gotten his hands on that book. There was no conceivable way he could maintain wards over so many ogres over so long a time; he must have taught his troops how to shield their own thoughts from an avedra’s prying fingers. The wards had forced Thorn to stoop to torture time and again. Only this time, he felt no urge to be sick in the bushes.

  He moved on to the burned ogre. “Hurts, doesn’t it?” His hand hovered over the oozing burns. “I can take the pain away, or make it worse.” Even as he spoke he drew the heat from the flesh, then sighed a cooling breeze across it.

  The ogre made a sound that might have been a snarl, might have been relief.

  “Where does Lothiar hide the avedrin?” While one hand healed, flame ignited over the other.

  “Tell him and die,” Iryan muttered.

  The ogre’s glare locked onto the flame cavorting over Thorn’s palm. He growled and tried to wriggle away. “Dis naeni suck ‘vedra bones.”

  The flame lashed out like a tongue and licked flesh already raw and ravaged. The ogre brayed in an agonized treble.

  “Are the avedrin dead?” Thorn demanded. “Does Lothiar keep them alive? Where?” The flame ate higher, crawling up the ogre’s arm.

  “De Pit!” he cried. “Piiiiiit!”

  “Shut up!” Iryan ordered.

  On the other side of heat-quivering air, the brute studded with arrows grunted sharply. Blood burst from his muzzle.

  The dranithi standing over him shouted, “Dathiel! His tongue!”

  Thorn leapt over the burned ogre and wrapped his hands about the bleeding bull’s temples. “You know! Where are they? Where is she? Tell me!” One stray thought, that’s all he needed. One glimpse, one mental image. But Thorn’s intrusion bounced back at him like a slap. It was as if this ogre’s skull was a lockbox forged of baernavë. Not a single thought escaped.

  With a futile shout, Thorn tossed the ogre aside. The creature had the gall to grin at him through a ghastly mask of his own dribbling blood.

  Thorn swept a hand. The ogre burst into flame.

  The dranithion staggered back, shielding their faces from the explosion of heat.

  A shriek speared the stunned silence. The ogreling opened his muzzle at the sky and expelled his terror, then sucked down another chestful of air and shrieked again. He flung himself onto his belly, sprawled out before Thorn’s feet, and buried his forehead in the ash. “No fire! De Pit, dis naeni tell. No fire.”

  “Damn you, wart!” Wingfleet snarled. “Keep your mouth—”

  Laniel’s own fist connected with Wingfleet’s jaw, knocking him half-senseless.

  Thorn knelt and tenderly patted the ogreling on the shoulder. “No fire. Where is the Pit?”

  The ogreling pushed himself to his knees and elbows, like a dog cowering from the boot. Ash coated his forehead and the upper lip of his muzzle. Thorn brushed it away. “Pit … in … in de cave of Tugark. Fire Spear chief.”

  “Where is the cave?” Tedious, asking for every detail.

  “In … in de kaem.”

  “Kaem?” The Elaran word for ridge? Thorn raised the ogreling’s face, forcing him to meet his eye. “Which ridge?”

  The ogreling squeezed his eyes shut. “Brogula.”

  “No!” Iryan’s outcry provided the final confirmation.

  Thorn laid his cheek atop the ogreling’s head; rest washed through him like a cooling sea. Nearing a delirium beyond exhaustion, he staggered to his feet. Brogula Kaem. Direhead Ridge. The great crest of rock reared up on the western edge of the Barren Heights. The marshes of the Gloamheath unfurled at its feet. “I was there, Laniel. Years ago, my team of Regs and I searched the Kaem.” He was so tired that the words seemed to float from his mouth. Was he even the one speaking them? “Around the time Rhian showed up. He wasn’t with me yet.”

  Laniel laid a steadying hand to his oath-brother’s shoulder. “Lothiar must’ve learned you’d been there and moved the avedrin in after you left.”

  So close. Carah was so close. Yet how many ogres guarded her? Thorn needed a plan, but he was too tired to think.

  “Captain?” asked Nyria. “What are we do with these?”

  Laniel looked to Thorn.

  The ogre with the burned arm breathed fast and shallow, fighting the agony of his wounds. “Put that one out of his misery.”

  There was nothing but a steaming mound of gore left of the other bull.

  Of the little one, Thorn said, “Let him go.”

  The ogreling planted his face in the ash again. One of the dranithion cut the ropes binding his wrists and feet, then the ogreling scrambled through the legs of his captors and raced away through the burned trees.

  Nyria nudged Wingfleet in the ribs. “The Lady is going to want to speak with you.” She and Azhien hefted the stretcher up again. Iryan bared his teeth as the cot gave under his weight and shuffled his broken bones.

  “If it were up to me,” Thorn said, walking alongside as they bore the prisoner toward Linndun’s gate, “I’d sentence you to gaze upon your handiwork for the rest of your long life.”

  “I’m sure my sister will take that into advisement,” Laniel said.

  For how many centuries had the southern stretch of Avidanyth been Iryan’s to protect? The former dranithi captain gazed up at the fire-tortured branches latticing a sky growing dark with twilight, and regret trickled from his eye.

  ~~~~

  19

  Ogres loped on all fours like a pack of wolves, Carah’s scent a beacon in their nostrils. Leading them, Rhian smirked with a monster’s mouth.

  Carah woke, startled.

  There was only darkness. Lurching shadows. Hints of a jagged ceiling. A torch guttered loudly nearby, the clink of metal, a cold ache in her bones. An unspeakable reek assaulted her like the wings of some foul bat. She couldn’t breathe shallowly enough to escape it.

  Her bed was clammy stone never touched by sun. She groaned and rolled onto her side. Links of a chain rattled, dragged heavily across her hip, following the motion of her arm. Wide shiny manacles encircled her wrists. Their touch was icy, merciless, and their venom drained her strength. Lead seemed to encase her bones, weighing down her limbs.

  “No,” she breathed. How could she be so stupid? If she had used Veil Sight, she would’ve seen that the azeth belonged to a stranger. A lifelight couldn’t be copied or duplicated. She had let the hope of her eyes deceive her. “Damn it. I’m sorry, Uncle Thorn. I’m so sorry.”

  She remembered him running toward her, shouting something, the Elari taunting him. And that overpowering paralysis. The spellwords the Elari had spoken in her ear had seized her muscles and joints in a terrifying rictus, allowing her lungs scarcely enough freedom to breathe. She must have blacked out.

  Where had the Elari taken her? She tried to raise herself up, examine her surroundings, but she could raise her head only a few inches. Something pinned her. Peering around she found the fissured, yellowed claws of an ogre’s foot standing on her hair. With a screech, she tried to tug free. Pain seared her scalp, but the foot restrained her like a trap about a fox’s ankle.

  Could ogres step softly, or had this monster been there the entire time, watching her stir?

  Quivering torchlight made embers of its small red eyes. A grin stretched a muzzle already abnormally wide. Two small tusks, only as long as Carah’s forefinger jutted past the lower lip. “Wake?” it asked. Or at least that’s what Carah thought it said. The wide, toad-like mouth didn’t take well to speech, and something seemed to be clogging up the ogre’s throat, phlegm or flesh. “Dis naeni hope maybe dis ‘vedra dead, so dis naeni can roast it.”

  The ogre’s foot let up, releasing her hair. Carah scrambled away, pressed her back to a wall damp with natural effusions of moi
sture, and tangled herself inside the long coils of chain. The seven or eight feet of shiny links were bolted to the wall beside her head. She gave them a cursory tug, even as she kept an eye on the ogre, but the bolts held fast.

  “Dis ‘vedra big prize,” said the ogre. “Cap happy now. He come soon. Want to see it. Don’t die, ‘vedra. Make dis naeni look bad. Eh?” The ogre dropped a wooden bucket, a tin cup, and a tin plate beside Carah. The plate rolled on its rim until the ogre’s foot smashed it flat. “Look, ‘vedra. Dis hole its hole.” A clawed finger pointed at an alcove carved into the wall. The torchlight did not reach inside. How deep did it go?

  The ogre pointed out similar alcoves to each side. “Not dis hole. Not dis hole. On’y dis hole. Or dis naeni t’rash dis ‘vedra. Eh?” To prove the point, the ogre bashed Carah in the back of the head. She blinked away the white explosion behind her eyes.

  The chains rattled as the ogre gathered them up and dragged Carah to her feet. “Die, and dis ‘vedra go down de pit.” A mallet-like hand shoved Carah to the extent of her chains, out to the lip of a stone shelf.

  Five feet down, a wide stretch of floor provided ample space for two plodding sentries. In the floor’s center, a deeper basin had been cut from the rock. A mound of bones filled it. Black matter shriveled on femurs, ribs, vertebrae, pelvises. The bones on the top clung to wetter meat, fresh from the stripping. The skulls had been set around the basin’s rim, facing out, dozens of them, grinning, leering, screaming. The tops of some had been sawed off and the brains scooped out like melons of their sweet flesh.

  Carah tried to throw her hand over her mouth, but the chain jerked taut, and her scream shook the fetid air.

  Rhian! Were his bones down there too? Did she gaze upon his skull? Oh, Goddess, oh, Mother, please no.