Forest For The Trees (Book 3)

by Damien Lake

  Except the Arronathian mage had managed a poor job of it. He had only broken one of the thick ropes forming both handrail and support. With all the weight dropping to one, the remaining rope had snapped at midpoint. Both halves still hung facing each other across the water.

  The mage and his mercenary friend cautiously navigated the makeshift ladder. They alternated between finding footholds where boards had broken away, and using the thin ropes which had run between the planks and the thicker supporting lines. Colbey watched with mild curiosity. Those ropes had lain exposed without maintenance for years. Would they hold long enough for the two men to reach the ground?

  When they finally stumbled off the hanging walkway to the root it lay jumbled upon, the Arronath soldier shouted at them, holding the bow drawn with an arrow ready for flight. The mercenaries could read the tone in the alien language. They raised their hands. Together they started the uneven journey over the roots toward the Ivy Platform.

  Colbey studied the men surrounding Xenos. Their body language spoke volumes to the trained eye. The soldiers and the Taurs were predictable. Also the white-robes would pose little in the way of a challenge if he attacked without warning. But the man serving as Xenos’ right hand might be tougher.

  He stood with the bearing of a man accustomed to bloodshed. Murder was a tool he would employ without qualms. In fact it would be his preference over more amicable resolutions. The way he acted must mean he stood as a key figure in the organization crafted by Xenos. It might well have been he who led the assault on the village.

  Colbey felt his blood heating. The furious rage that had dominated him so completely stirred behind his cold control.

  No. I am the master of my actions. The manner of this man’s death will be at the hands of my training, and not my emotions.

  The longer he watched, the greater his conviction grew. Mendell and Xenos were perhaps the two men whose contribution to the village’s destruction was greatest in all the world. It was a crime without adequate punishment. Nothing he could do to them would equal what they had stolen from him.

  He was a Guardian. Emotions were secondary. Once before he had lost sight of that. No longer.

  Colbey knew he would kill these two as quickly and efficiently as he could. If he survived to continue the fight, first he would slay the white-robes. Since there was no longer anyone to kill in the village, the Taurs could run wild as they liked while he fought the soldiers.

  If he survived…

  The effort was all that mattered. Succeed or fail, it was only important that he try. Death was inconsequential. It did not effect the decision in the least.

  He was resolved. And with that resolution, the calm demeanor returned. The stirring rage ceased. Colbey studied the enemy to find the weakness in their structure. One crucial weakness that would be their deaths.

  When he felt the cool, phantom hand of departed friends resting on his shoulder, he knew it was no longer a sign of his mental deterioration. Only confirmation that he strode the correct path of the Guardian.

  * * * * *

  Mendell divested them of their weapon belts once they climbed onto the platform. Marik kept his eyes averted. He had noted, and wished to avoid drawing attention to it, that Dietrik’s dagger sheath yawned emptily. Only his rapier clattered to the wood flooring behind the white-robes.

  Marik returned the colonel’s hostility openly. After a sneer, Mendell voiced an opinion in Arronathian to Xenos.

  “Because we have always been on the search for valuable assets, have we not?” Xenos answered in Galemaran. “You were brought into the fold in much the same fashion if you will recall. With the crown-appointed general as a member of the faithful, restoring the true faith throughout Galemar will proceed marvelously.”

  “You’re pretty confident about me,” Marik spat. “But I’ve seen power before. If you think that will impress me into thinking you are an agent of the gods, then you’ve spent too much time believing your own fairytales, Xenos!”

  “I see,” the harvester replied. A gleam sparkled from his eye. He reached a hand to caress Marik’s jaw line. His fingers were hot to the touch, nearly reptilian in their repulsiveness. “There is no question you were drawn to me. Have been for untold months as we approached this day together. God has set you to know me in order than you stand witness to His rebirth.”

  Marik pulled his chin from Xenos’ grasp. Mendell looked no less displeased. He spoke in quiet animosity using the alien words incomprehensible to the Galemarans.

  Xenos nodded. Yet Marik sensed that the monster had little interest in whatever the colonel held forth so adamantly on. He faced the two mercenaries toward the water, standing between them and placing a hand around each man’s shoulders. His fingers were uncomfortable iron bars against their cheeks.

  “Good Mendell is concerned, both as colonel and as my archbishop.” Xenos’ voice floated softly on the forest air. “He, and indeed I as well, have not forgotten your brash interference in Archbishop Harbon’s mission. No one who sets themselves against the faithful is permitted to continue existence. But the will of god is the will of god. Should I be mistaken in this, I am prepared to carry out your judgments upon His word.”

  “Then you had better start praying so you can get your answer.” Marik filled his insolent bravado with as much acid as he could. If he could get Xenos’ full attention, Dietrik could use the opportunity to stab the harvester. “Far be it from us to distract you from the voices in your head!”

  Xenos smirked with one corner of his lips, his eyes lidded in serpent amusement. “Do you realize where you stand, leader of armies? Above what your feet perch?”

  Marik leaned closer to the water as much to escape the fingers stroking his ear as to add to the sarcasm. When he straightened to address Xenos, his voice matched the laconic rhythms his old friend Hayden had been partial to. “A pond?”

  “It is no less than the very lifeblood of this world we call home. Have you realized the honor bestowed upon you yet? No? I promise you will. From this worldly womb will be given life anew to our god.”

  “I doubt…what?”

  “Yes,” Xenos hissed. “The time of His long exile is finally ended within these next moments.”

  In horrified understanding, Marik realized what this madman had meant to do all along. The night in the Queen’s Head with Rail echoed in his ears, the words restarting before they finished until they reverberated awfully without end. He had asked his father, “Can a god actually be killed? It seems incredible! Man shouldn’t be able to kill a god.”

  To which Rail had responded, “I don’t expect man can. Not truly. The gods aren’t mortals, so even if you shred them to pieces and jump on the remains, they’re stuck enduring it all. Or so I believe.”

  How it might be done lay beyond Marik’s comprehension. But Xenos intended to use the massive power in the reservoir to… Was it possible to resurrect a god? It must depend on the deity’s condition, he decided. What happened to a god when He was cast down by His brethren? What did generations of having no followers offering their faith as divine sustenance do?

  Was there truly a method by which a mere mortal could take what remained of the desiccated Earth God and restore Him to His former power?

  Of course there was. Xenos was no simple mortal man. A piece of obsidian, once part of an anchor for the Earth God’s being, granted him all the guidance Xenos needed to perform the resurrection. The only component he had lacked was the tremendous energy it must require.

  A keg of black powder? No. Colbey’s ancestors had sown a cataclysm equal to an entire kingdom twenty feet deep in the alchemist’s product.

  “Do you feel the new dawn breaking?” Xenos whispered to them. Marik’s pupils had dilated while he struggled with his revelations. He forced his blank stare to focus. “Tell me, leader of armies. Do you not feel the excitement coursing through you?”

  Xenos’ fingers cracked loudly next to his ear. Marik rolled his head to see, in horror, the harv
ester’s fingers twisting. The fingers bent at unnatural angles. Two curved backward without stopping until they ground against the back of his hand. They stretched until they were a knuckle’s-length longer than before. Veins pulsed grotesquely in the flesh like carnivorous vines. His fingernails lengthened, darkening to gray, sharpening to razors.

  In only a moment the fingers were inhuman talons. They returned to their usual positions beside each other, the sharp nails tracing patterns lightly along the skin under Marik’s eye. He could see the monstrous digits quivering from Xenos’ anticipation.

  What in the hells was taking Dietrik so long? Xenos was concentrating his attentions on Marik! Dietrik could have stabbed the blood mage’s heart a dozen times over by now.

  Except he could not, he saw with a sinking heart. Xenos had placed his other arm around Dietrik’s back in a posture that looked casual. But the hand rested on Dietrik’s upper arm. Marik could feel the tremendous physical power in the reconstructed hand. The arm held Dietrik as securely immobile as a heavy chain.

  Marik could feel sweat squeezing through his pores. Xenos used his malformed hand to direct Marik’s gaze out over the pool.

  “It will be now. You have arrived at a feast with the tables set, the wine poured, the candles aglow. There is no need to stand on pointless ceremony. Over two-thousand years have passed since the world fell into darkness. Let god be brought back to lead our lost flock again into the light.”

  And he nodded to the four men in the water.

  * * * * *

  Marik could hardly believe he was watching it. The wading soldiers did not hesitate in the least. Each withdrew an obsidian knife. Each grabbed a handful of hair. Each stabbed the nude women in the belly before eviscerating them.

  Screams pierced the quiet forest. They were unlike any death cry Marik had heard on battlefields. The men sliced up with their sharp daggers. A long incision from their belly to between their breasts opened up.

  Red stained the clear water. Intestines spilled out in an awful splash. The slaughter stretched interminably in Marik’s sense of time, yet was over far too quickly for it to have been real. Four innocents could not possibly have been slain in an instant.

  Eight innocents…

  His senses were blurred. Marik felt cut off from himself. The splashes from the bodies falling into the water when the men released them were muffled. His breathing sharpened until he trembled.

  Dietrik made an exclamation Marik could not decipher. Peripherally he noticed his friend’s feet kick out uselessly. Xenos’ iron grasp held him firmly in place.

  The density in the air shifted. Marik saw Xenos’ aura blaze into ferocious life beside him when he opened his magesight. Xenos had released the tight control over his aura. What for?

  So he would be free to work with his talent, of course. Triumph blazed on his face while he reached out. Marik could see the life energies that had once belonged to the women. They had been severed at their deaths. The glowing, shapeless masses moved toward the platform where they stood.

  Marik could not see why until he forced his magesight to a higher level. The channels Xenos drew the energy with became visible to him.

  They were no different than the type he used when he drew from the mass diffusion. The slippery life force slid along the channels until they were absorbed by Xenos’ aura. It flared at the additional energy. His aura shone brightly enough that Marik was forced to avert his eyes.

  A victory cry escaped the harvester’s lips. Twin streams of raw power burst from his hands. Hard as Marik jerked, he could not pull free. The power scorched his senses until it felt as if his face must be blistering. Xenos’ hands disappeared within the fantastic energy streams, making it appear as if torrents of power burst from his wrists.

  Even Dietrik seemed to sense the massive power churning so close to him. The mercenary renewed his squirming attempts to free his arm.

  Down through the etheric not-ground did the power streams plunge. They twisted around each other in eel-like fashion, endlessly corkscrewing, never touching. Both picked up speed until they slammed into the spherical seal faster than a stampeding horse.

  The seal bowed before the streams. Its shaped changed as a clay ball squeezed in the palm, bulging outward at the sides…but holding under the assault. White energy forming the seal darkened slowly where the power streams raged against it.

  Xenos barked a laugh. The torrents flooding from his hands doubled in power. Each stream thickened with it, the power inside flowing indescribably fast.

  The sphere deformed terribly when the increased power struck it. Xenos intended to crush the seal through sheer force. He would channel power greater than any ten mages could produce until the barrier collapsed. Slowly the bulges grew until it seemed impossible the seal refrained from popping like a soap bubble.

  A fiery explosion ripped through the deck behind them. Flaming shrapnel flashed past. The deck rose in an ocean wave. Xenos’ hands finally released the two men when they each fell in different directions, the platform boards tossing them through the air.

  Marik landed with a crash. His legs were in the water up to his knees over the platform’s edge. His head rang from an invisible toller mistaking his skull for a cathedral’s massive bell. On the other edge he saw Dietrik crawling on hands and knees. He scrambled through smoking wood fragments searching for something.

  The gonging between his ears slowly dulled to a mere throb. He shakily regained his feet. Back where they had been standing, Mendell was climbing out of the pool onto the platform. Xenos had moved to the flaming rear and scanned the forest with hostile intensity rather than the shattered decking.

  Pay attention, fool! Xenos has his back to you! What about the seal?

  Far below the seal still held. Xenos had cut off his streams…yet the assault continued. The raw energy had coalesced, forming into vaguely arrowhead-shaped masses. Both arrowheads ground forward on their own, forcing the seal to deform. A moment later the seal would fight back and regain terrain. Etheric sparks burst ceaselessly while both energy forms fought the other, the seal wavering, the arrowheads flaring wildly as bonfires in a windstorm.

  If they could kill Xenos, whatever control he exerted over the arrowheads would vanish. Damn it all, why didn’t Dietrik attack with his dagger?

  He watched Dietrik digging madly through the scattered debris, and understood. Dietrik had dropped the gods damned dagger.

  Mendell rose from his knees with water flooding off him. The crunch of splintering wood alerted him only an instant before Marik slammed into him with his full body weight. Marik shoved hard at the same time, his strength working in full play. Colonel Mendell flew backward off the platform fifteen feet with a startled shout cut short by a splash.

  Marik crouched alongside Dietrik and frantically hurled refuse left and right.

  * * * * *

  Xenos shouted his rage into the forest. Challenging the eul’kkandr to a final duel. It had persisted in interfering from the beginning! Nothing it did could stop god’s divine will. He refused to allow it to escape one single additional time.

  With a flourish he withdrew his obsidian knife. What strong and sweet life force the eul’kkandr possessed. From Secunda’s reports he had expected the four women to provide energy enough to collapse the seal immediately. Smashing it would be only a matter of moments, yet here, now, he had the obstructing eul’kkandr who had warred against god’s plan.

  It would be heavenly justice to open the way with the eul’kkandr’s life force.

  “This will be the last meeting between you and I! Your actions have led you to this juncture! Accept your fate, and face me!”

  The eul’kkandr stepped into view from around the smoking ruins where once had stood the Taurs and their controllers. “My fate I decided on the day I accepted Otos Trine as comrade. Unwavering is my course. Clear is my duty.”

  Xenos paused to consider his adversary. “It comes clear at the last. No one knew that despicable man had befrien
ded the eul’kkandr race. It is not in any memory passed to me from that time period.”

  “Otis Trine befriended me. And never once have I felt cause to regret returning that sacred bond!” The Red Man’s glove glowed as he concentrated his power into the strongest blast he could form.

  “Then it is with considerable pleasure that I destroy you for all time. Your soul will burn for eternity alongside that godless desecrator’s!”

  Xenos hurled a gigantic blast at the Red Man. The Red Man met it with his own.

  Air between them turned to liquid fire. The moisture in the air evaporated in an instant, becoming a concussion wave that expanded across the platform. For a single instant the ball of mingled fire and etheric energy contracted.

  Then it exploded outward as if it would never end. Lightning arced in feelers across the decking boards and left burnt scars in their wake. Black etheric rings contracted inward through the nova ball at the same time flaming mushrooms flashed everywhere. Sound smashed through the surrounding forest as forcefully as the explosion itself.

  Within the incandescent white fire at the core, two dark shadows strove to overcome the other.

  * * * * *

  “Screaming shit!” Marik howled. He grabbed Dietrik at the same instant the two were lifted easily as leaves on a gust of wind. Both were thrown into the water.

  Dietrik coughed when water invaded his nose. It went into his mouth and gagged him until his feet found the bottom. He pushed hard until he broke the surface.

  The deep breath he took made his throat seize worse than it had underwater. Smoke choked the air. In fact, the bloody air was so hot Dietrik marveled it did not burn. Oversized leaves and small branches rained from above where the sound wave had battered the Euvea canopy.