The three Priests directly before her, still weaving their sorceries, started and looked around at the sound. One reached for her as she charged by, but she was too quick, her eye set resolutely on the distinct shapes of the men she could now make out clearly through the snow. As she passed through the unfinished magics she thought she might have heard someone shouting her name, thought she might have heard shouts for her to stop, but she would have none of it. Fed by her anger, the spells she gathered in either hand crackled and snapped audibly, erupting from her palms in twin balls of blinding flame.
When she was ten feet from the front line, she leapt as high as she could, then slammed the magic into the ground.
Fire, true, raging fire, bloomed outward across the stone from where her hands splayed over the rough slate. It arched like lightning over the courtyard, crisscrossing and cutting through the legs of the tribes before her. Steam blasted upward in a gushing cloud, ice and snow vaporizing in the explosion of heat. The fire spread, dragging back and forth across the plateau until it found the wall and the cliff’s edge to her left and right respectively.
In the same instant, the men before her began to scream, and Syrah felt satisfaction course through her.
She might not know how to kill, but fire is painful, no matter how it is born into the world.
Her victory didn’t last long, however. Men were moving before her, leaping over and around the lines of flames, avoiding the magics as they charged. They came, bellowing their war cries, axes and swords raised, and Syrah suddenly realized she was all alone in the no-man’s-land, facing a flood of steel that threatened to crush her.
Then, abruptly, men stood on either side of her.
“Dammit, Brahnt!” she heard Cullen Brern curse from her right as he sent a shockwave into the very heart of the mountain men, blasting the first dozen over the heads of their companions behind them. On her left, his brother did the same. “Don’t be a fool! Get back!”
But Syrah ignored him. The fire within her hadn't even begun to run dry yet, and she had always had a talent for combat. Before Cullen could say anything else she was casting stunning spells into the crowd at a frightening rate, howling her defiance as men fell like toppled statues about them. Anyone who managed to get too close was knocked back again, either by her or one of the brothers, and before long the forms of the unconscious and injured were piled about their feet. Eventually they found themselves surrounded, and Syrah heard Cullen continue to curse as he shifted to protect her flank, Kallet muttering under his breath as he continued to hurl spells from her left. They were being pressed now, though, every man they knocked down or aside replaced just as quickly by two more. Syrah summoned a ring of fire up about them, willing it to rage and roar, but it only slowed the mountain men down as they stomped out the magic and pressed forward. Like a churning ocean of grey and brown, the tribes tightened the circle. Syrah could see the gleam of the blades, see the hunger in the eyes of the men, fixed upon her. Her rage began to falter, replaced by something darker as she saw what a fool she had been, how selfish and thoughtless. Fear began to take her over as the hungry faces grew nearer, her spells wavering when images flashed before her of the last time she had been so near their savagery.
Her courage was just about to give out when a thundering wave of a hundred shouting voices rose up from behind, and the mountain men at her back broke and split, many tossed aside and into the air on the ripples of a dozen different spells.
The others had joined them in their final stand.
Goaded on by her charge, it hadn't taken much for the Priests and Priestess of the Citadel to find their own courage. Where a minute ago they had been fleeing inward, making for the safety of the fortress, now they poured out in all directions from the wall, wards and spells leading their rush, steel staffs flashing in the dim light of the day. Bloody and dirty snow was trampled to slush beneath their feet as they pressed the enemy, struggling to push them back.
But push them back they did.
Syrah felt a thrill as she realized the line before her was staggering. The tribesmen were being forced off the plateau and onto the path again, giving way foot by foot under the onslaught of spellwork and steel. They were winning, gaining ground and reclaiming the outer courtyard. If they could take back the semicircle of stone, then they might have a chance to get the greater wards up again, which would make it ten-fold more difficult for the tribes to assault the—
There was a hiss, the wet sound of metal burying into flesh, and Kallet Brern tumbled to the ground before her in a tangle of white robes and thick limbs, an arrow through his eye.
Before she had time to do more than gape at the body of the man that had been her friend, there were a hundred more twangs of arrows let loose, and instinctively Syrah cast a protective ward upwards, above her head. As she felt the heavy strikes of the projectiles against her shield she looked up, feeling her heart drop at the sight above her.
Along the cliffs above their heads, sliding down like an avalanche of leather and steel, the rest of the army had come to the aid of their brethren on the plateau.
In an instant, the tide of the battle turned again.
Syrah saw Goatmen standing along the ridge overhead, bows drawn and firing at any white robes they could distinguish through the snow. Kregoan and Amreht and every other tribe tumbled and leapt down upon them to join the thick of the fight, managing the bluffs with ease. They poured forth, a never-ending cascade of bodies, and within seconds the Laorin found themselves no longer fighting for ground but rather struggling to survive long enough to make it back to the relative safety of the Citadel. Priests and Priestesses were falling now, their magics and staffs failing them as the one man they had been dueling became two, then five, then ten. Soon the ground was equal parts trampled snow and still forms, the mountain men unconscious or screaming and clutching at their injuries, the Laorin dead or dying.
“BACK!” Cullen Brern roared, not even blinking down at the body of his brother. “BACK TO THE WALL!”
But it was too late.
The Laorin were crushed, pinched here against the bastions and the outer wall of the Citadel and there with their backs to the drop of the plateau along its southern ridge. Some managed to make it to the tunnel, funneling in as quickly as they could, but not fast enough to compensate for the constant, violent push of the tribes. More men and women fell, more screams echoing over the mountain tops to join with the clash of steel and hiss of arrows. All around Syrah death reared its ugly head, and the Lifegiver carried his servants off one after the other to return them to the cycle of life. Soon Syrah herself began to wonder if she would be allowed the honor of glimpsing the face of Laor as she died, or if she would simply be born squalling back into the world to taste life anew.
But then, in the moment she thought this, a very different face loomed out of the battle towards her, and fear ripped through Syrah like a sword.
Between the writhing mass of tribesmen before her, each fighting the other for space as they clashed, a man was making his way in her direction, his blue eyes fixed on hers. She recognized him in an instant, noting the black, silver-lined hair and the paired swords he held in each hand, as well as the way the army seemed to separate before him. This was a man she had heard of, but never seen with her own eyes until today. He had been banished from Emreht Grahst’s council before the chieftain’s death, his ambitions too bloody and his will unyielding. He had aided Gûlraht Baoill to power, then stood by his side as the man rose higher still. He had led the sacking of Metcaf beside his master, and she had heard rumors during her imprisonment that it was he who had had the idea to poison Harond’s waters with the corpses of slaves.
More frightening still, Agor Vareks had only minutes before performed the Baresk ol-Sayrd, the Blessing of Blades, marking himself as the right hand of the Kayle.
Syrah knew then, without a doubt, that the greatest of Baoill's generals was after her head. He would hold it aloft, proclaiming himself the slayer of the
Witch, and demand the crown his master had died with.
And he’ll have it, too, she thought in a panic, watching the man advance on her.
He was less than then ten feet away, now, barely three or four bodies separating him from Syrah. Not once, as he began shoving aside the battling men on either side of him, did he look away from her. Even as he ducked under a stunning spell she threw at his head, then stepped nimbly over a line of fire that still burned smokeless beneath the feet of the army, he never glanced away. Syrah prepared herself, watching the general manage finally to break through the front line of his warriors, steeling her body and gathering a protective ward about her, summoning a fistful of fire in her free hand.
“Wyth,” Vareks snarled, raising a sword to point at Syrah while the men about him pulled aside to leave their general within a small circle of space. “Ül-mys.”
Witch. You are mine.
Then he brought the swords into a readied stance, his muscled frame tensing in preparation for the charge.
A sound reached Syrah’s ears then, a strange, thrumming note, like the snapping of a banner in high wind. Even as a part of her mind pulled away, wondering at what it could be, something like a shadow flickered overhead, and suddenly the noises of the battlefield changed. Battle cries and shrieks of pain still wound their way within the snap and fizzle of magic and the crack of blades and staffs, but from within these came other sounds. There were gasps of awe and shock from behind Syrah, then wails of horror and dread before her. She had only enough time to glimpse Vareks’ face as it went pale, his eyes flicking skyward, before something slammed down upon the stone in the few feet of space between the two of them, dark and massive and terrifying. It took a moment for Syrah to see more than dented steel armor, to see more than the bloody two-headed great ax held in one clawed gauntlet, or the ugly object that hung by its hair from the other.
Then she saw the wings, flickering and folding themselves along the figure’s back, moving like they had a life of their own as he stood tall, thrusting his right hand and the thing dangling from it into the air.
Syrah felt as though her legs would give beneath her, a thousand different shades of joy blooming in her breast at the sight of the man.
“ENOUGH!” Raz i’Syul Arro rumbled in a pitching roar that drowned out the battle all around them, echoing a hundred times across the cliffs as Gûlraht Baoill’s severed head swung aloft.
CHAPTER 53
As though time itself had taken pause, the world froze. In the cliffs above their heads Syrah could still hear the continued shouts and bellowing cries as more men came down from the mountain in the hopes of joining the fight, but even those began to die away as the seconds ticked by, until they were only distant sounds to be soon drowned out by the storm.
Syrah’s eye, though, was fixed on the scaled, lithe shoulders of Raz, her heart hammering so hard she thought it might leap from her chest.
“YOUR KAYLE IS SLAIN!” Raz bellowed, so loud the words continued to carry over the wind. “IF YOU DESIRE PROOF—” he dropped Baoill’s head at the feet of Agor Vareks “—THEN TAKE IT!”
Vareks gaped down as the thing settled in the slush a foot from his fur-lined boots, struck dumb by the unmistakable sight. Behind him, cries of denial began to rise up from the tribes, muddled by a resonant murmur as those learned in the Common Tongue translated Raz’s words for their less knowledgeable comrades.
“ANY WHO WOULD CHALLENGE THIS CLAIM,” Raz continued, hefting the Kayle’s great ax above his head with one hand now, “ARE FREE TO STEP FORWARD!”
Not a soul moved. The scene as a whole looked almost like it were holding its breath. For a long few seconds Syrah waited, still standing behind Raz, watching for the twitch from the dark crowd before her that would mean someone was stepping forward to take the atherian at his word.
No one came, though. Only the wind, blowing in their faces, seemed willing to make itself known.
And then Vareks knelt down, his eyes on the ground, falling to one knee before sheathing a sword and reaching for the former Kayle’s head with his free hand.
For a long time the general studied it, turning it slowly this way and that, taking in the eyes and nose and ears and the beads in its brown hair with wide eyes. He had the look of a man searching for something—anything—that would show the lie for what it was, the look of a man for whom the truth weighed too much, was too painful to bear, and who needed another explanation for the facts laid out in all their bloody glory before him.
Finally, reverently, he set the head aside and looked up to Raz. Without getting up from his knee, Vareks took his other sword and brought it up to hold lengthwise in both hands.
As he set it gently down on the ground at Raz’s feet, Syrah understood what needed to be done.
Forcing herself to look away from the scene—away from the inexplicable miracle that was the atherian—she turned and pushed her way through the Laorin behind her. Quickly people caught on to her same thought, because soon they were moving for her, murmuring a name as she sought the man out, praying to the Lifegiver he still lived.
When she found Carro, she almost sighed in relief to find him whole and well.
The former Priest looked shaken, his scarred eyes wide when he met Syrah’s gaze. His grey robes were torn and singed, and he held a Priest’s staff in his good hand—something the Broken were forbidden from ever touching again—that looked as though it had seen some use. Ignoring this, Syrah reached out, thinking to pull him along with her, to coax him forward.
Finding herself unable to touch the man, though, she paused, let the hand drop, and gave him an uncertain smile.
“Come on,” she said quietly, turning to lead him through the crowd.
The Laorin parted before them again as they walked, eyes wide and mouth agape. No one spoke a word now, all eyes on the pair, the gravity of the moment weighing too heavily for something as trivial as their victory to be of any importance. Together Syrah and Carro moved through the lines of men and women, heading for the outline of Raz’s head and shoulders standing tall above the rest.
When they reached him, the sight took their breath away.
In suit of Varek’s submission, others had followed. Even as they watched, men were kneeling by the hundreds, easing themselves down onto one knee in the snow and ice. It looked as though the Saragrias themselves were sinking and settling before them, the army falling one after the other in a wave across the mountainside, bowing their heads respectfully in Raz’s direction.
No, not Raz anymore, Syrah thought, seeing dozens of blue eyes glimpse up in amazement as she and the former Priest came to stand beside the atherian.
And so it was. Like a ripple across a field of black and grey and brown, heads lifted while voices rose to spread the news that Carro al’Dor had arrived. More eyes came up, seeking the man, drinking him in.
Carro al’Dor, whose champion had slain their master, delivering onto them the head of the most fearsome warrior the men of the clans had ever known.
Judging the moment right, Syrah stepped forward, gesturing back to Carro theatrically with one hand as she drew a rapid rune in the air with the other, touching her fingers to her neck.
“GRA! GRA DUSTEN YS-KEHN!” she screamed, her voice magically amplified so that every word shrieked above the wind, making all nearby jump. “GRA DUSTEN YS-KAYLE!”
Then she stepped back, out of the way, and willed herself not to cover her ears as the mountain tribes responded with fervor.
The sound was like the building rumble of a rockslide, distant at first, but growing with frightening speed. It swelled, growing with every passing second, rising as new voices picked up the roar. Before long Syrah thought she could feel the ground beneath her feet shake, and soon after that she was sure of it.
Twenty-five thousand men, before and above them along the face of the mountain, roared in tremendous unison, their combined voices merging together until the air itself vibrated.
At that moment,
Syrah felt a heavy hand settle on her shoulder. She had to battle the desire to look around, had to push down the flush of disbelief and joy that touch flared within her, firm and comforting in its weight. She refused to look away, refused to break her gaze from the bowing army that blotted out the land and cliffs before her.
“What did you say to them?” Raz asked from behind her, just as Carro stepped forward, coming to stand tall before the kneeling form of Agor Vareks.
For a moment, Syrah hesitated.
Then, unable to help herself, she reached up and across herself, grasping the atherian’s clawed fingers in her own.
“Bow,” she responded as Carro al’Dor began to address his people, her voice returning to its normal pitch. “Bow before your master. Bow before your Kayle.”
CHAPTER 54
“It does not take a lifetime of seeking and research to imagine that the years following the Battle of the Pass were turbulent for the clans of the Saragrias and Vietalis Ranges. There were some, pockets of resistance within each tribe, which still clung to their old ways, to their iron devotion to the savage Stone Gods. The Peacekeeper did not press the mountain men to convert, of course. If anything, what can be gleaned from the entries in his journals point in another direction, to a personal struggle with a faith that took much from him, then forced him from their company. He did, however, pick up the work where Emreht Grahst left it, and this time there was no—or at least no successful—coup. What attempts were made to seize power by the remaining radical aspects were hammered down at once by the rest of the tribes, most holding to their new Kayle’s side as they came to understand the prosperity that peace could bring. It would be naïve to think, however, that all stood by the Peacekeeper out of love and respect. There were elements, it can certainly be assumed, that supported him purely out of a desperate desire to save themselves from the potential wrath of his monstrous champion…”
The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1 Page 131