The Fourth Runi (The Fledgling Account Book 4)

by Y. K. Willemse

“It is not likely, Etana,” Fritz said gently. “I am afraid he has not learned how to fight the voices of Nazt.”

  “It is hard for him,” Etana burst out. “He has Spirit Awareness – it is difficult.”

  “I have heard women will defend anything in their husbands,” Fritz said. “Zion knows I never guessed what a rogue we would have for the Fourth Runi.”

  “How dare you?” Etana hissed.

  “Not meanin’ to be rude,” Sherwin said, “but this really isn’ helpin’ things.”

  “There he is!” Fritz cried.

  The king had been glancing back down the slope at two columns of stone, into which a rider was disappearing. He wheeled around and flicked his reins, leaving Sherwin and Etana within his shield.

  “Come on, Etana,” Sherwin said with a tired grin, seizing her reins in one hand.

  Etana stopped him with an impatient gesture.

  “That is not Rafen,” she said.

  The rider had the same hair as Rafen, and things about the figure were similar. His steed certainly looked like one of Cyril’s well-groomed horses. Yet he didn’t move like her husband. Etana was confident it was Francisco.

  “Oh,” Sherwin said. “Yeh’re right. Franny’s jus’ hunchin’, so it’s harder to see ’e’s taller than Raf. FRITZ! I ’ope he tells Franny to get back to the mansion.”

  Fritz had disappeared between the stone columns as well, and Etana gave an exasperated sigh. “Francisco is going to ruin all my hard work on his health.”

  She turned her attention back to the slope, the child within her womb swimming. She should go back and join her grandfather, tell Francisco he was being an idiot coming out here. However, Fritz’s last comment was ringing in her ears. She shook her head angrily and propelled the white horse further up the slope. Sherwin followed more slowly, still staring back at the columns of stone.

  Near a wall of lumpy rock, she could clearly see a depression in the deepening snow, possibly a footprint. She tugged at the reins again, and in a moment she was there. She dismounted with some difficulty, not as graceful as she used to be. Kneeling, she examined the snow, her head bowed close to the ground.

  “Sherwin!” she called. A strong wind was blowing about her.

  “Wha’?” Sherwin said, catching up. Then he gave a strangled cry that was most unlike him. The shield around him and Etana flickered and shattered, as if it had come into contact with an insurmountable force. Fritz’s departure had left it weaker than before.

  A muffled throbbing grew vaguely louder through the earth, and Etana’s heart stopped. With a gasp, she rose and all but threw herself back on the horse, whipping the reins about its head savagely and digging her heels in. Sherwin cantered upward past her, his sword out. He looked as if he were going to be sick. Etana’s horse shot downward, its hooves churning up sprays of snow.

  It was not fast enough. The rapid tattoo was closer now. She didn’t dare look behind. From a distance, she heard the horrible moist impact of Sherwin riding his horse straight into the Lashki, and the Lashki continuing undaunted, throwing the beast over with supernatural strength. Sherwin’s screech cut the air as his steed pinned him to the ground.

  Etana tore her glove off her left hand, ripped the ring from her finger, and transformed it into the thin silver scepter in a heartbeat. She pointed it over her shoulder, the warmth of kesmal flooding her right arm. And then there was a flash – the horse’s hooves were caught and snapped together in a blue cord. The animal screamed and hurtled forward, trussed like a chicken. Etana flew clear, and the child within her gave a startled kick. She swung the scepter around again and landed on her back in a mesh of gold that broke her fall. It vanished as the silver scepter dropped from her fingers with the silent and sunlit impact of her landing, and she was in the snow. When she made to grab her weapon, another rope of blue snatched it from her sight. She glanced up wildly to see the collapsed horse bunched together on the slope, shrieking helplessly as the cord round its hooves grew tentacles that encased every part of its body, crept into its mouth, and poisoned it. A gray figure behind it was illuminated by the blue flare.

  Leaping up, she moved to rush down the slope. Unbelievably, Sherwin freed himself with a blinding movement behind the Lashki. The snow behind her rippled, and blue roots shot out of it and twined around her legs. She screamed, falling forward, her hands thrown out before her. Then there was a violent jerk, and the snow had swallowed her body. She was in darkness like Hell, moist soil in her eyes and mouth.

  Torn from the ground again, legs first, she lay at the Lashki’s rotting feet, coughing and gasping. His long-fingered, slimy hand seized her hair and dragged her into his vision. A gleaming current passed through his grip and down the sides of her head, just as she began to struggle. Paralyzed, she stared at him with glazed eyes, her haggard breathing in her own ears.

  “Rafen went back,” the Lashki said with a yellow-toothed sneer, “so you will have to make do with my company.”

  In an agony of indecision, Sherwin stood behind the Lashki, his sword raised above the slimy head. The blade glittered azure – and then everything whirled and vanished.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The

  Ravine Again

  Rafen rode through the streets at breakneck speed, sending flurries of chickens exploding into the air, knocking over stalls, and alarming running peasants. He reached the gates in record time and stuffed a parchment into the hands of a shocked-looking guard. The guard unrolled it, read Cyril Earl’s message, and ordered the others to open the gates. In another moment, Rafen was outside, at the foot of the slope leading into the Mountains. He slammed his heels into his horse’s sides repeatedly. His steed began its run again, rapidly ascending, its flanks wet with foam. Cyril had urged Rafen to wait for him to gather some men in case there was danger. Rafen had already seen in the lord’s eyes that he intended to take a long time. It was a thinly-veiled excuse to wait for the others’ return.

  “There is little to be concerned about, Rafen,” he had said. “I understand that you were pursued down the mountain. But our city is protected by much robust kesmal and many philosophers, simply because of where it is situated. Besides, I’m sure if your friends and wife did leave the city, they have now returned to be within its protection.”

  Snow splashes broke into particles, and the wind snatched at his hair as he flashed up the mountainside. Two forms ahead, near an overhanging rock, examined a partially white shape lying nearby. Rafen’s heart throbbed painfully. He leapt from the horse’s back, even as it continued its upward surge. The wave of hair passed over his body, and his limbs and face elongated and shrunk at the same time. He hit the ground as the Wolf and shot forward, one leg stinging from where a Naztwai had attacked him the previous day. He was dimly aware of Sherwin noticing him and pointing him out to Fritz.

  The form was a horse, lying in the most awkward of positions, the wind stirring its fur. Brilliant patches of its flesh were exposed where kesmal had eaten through the upper layer of skin. Its eyes were frozen. Glittering, slimy tracks marked the snow near it. A lone woman’s glove lay close by. Rafen viewed it only momentarily. Fritz’s mouth shaped his name, but Rafen heard nothing. He had already smelled the presence of another behind a wall of rock from which an outcropping hung. Darting behind the wall, he found himself on his feet, panting dryly and staring at Annette. Shrouded in a thick, fur-lined cloak, Annette hissed and raised the long knife that was already vibrating with kesmal. Rafen was fixated by her green eyes – there was something within them… The black spearheads took an age to erupt from the knife, and before they reached him, he realized he was seeing the Ravine in her mind. He had found the constant concentration she used to maintain her Connection with it. At the same moment, snowless rock appeared beneath his boots, and the shadows of close, mossy walls fell over him. Annette was gone as if she had been a dream. He felt only momentary disorientation.

  The sounds of Naztwai whistling wildly and the clamoring of both Tarhi
an and Ashurite voices washed over him. Through his Spirit Awareness, he had used Annette’s Connection as if it had been his own.

  *

  “I should never have left her,” Fritz said hoarsely after they heard the piercing shriek.

  Near one of the wide, pillar-shaped rocks, he released a white-faced Francisco, who slid to the ground, his back against the stone and his breathing a rasp.

  Fritz surged up the slope. Ahead, the Lashki was holding Etana by her red hair, like a puppet. Sherwin stood behind him, swinging his sword down toward the rotting skull. Then there was only snow, and a dead horse from which a faint steam rose. Sherwin halted as suddenly as if he hadn’t been moving. With a howl, he doubled over, one hand against his temple.

  No.

  It couldn’t be happening – not this. He felt the queerest sense of betrayal, as if an old friend had done something that had shocked him. Sherwin had wanted to do kesmal, everything in him had, but he hadn’t done it soon enough, hadn’t freed himself from his horse soon enough because he had been afraid the Lashki would abruptly see the truth.

  He ran again, and he was on his knees at the horse’s side in a moment. Even as he looked, the skin was being eaten away by the remnants of the Lashki’s kesmal. Heavy breathing told him Fritz was at his side.

  Sherwin rose with a sick feeling in his gut and turned to look at the city gates below, as if help were about to issue from them.

  A gray flag was flashing up the slope, and a russet steed behind it gradually slowed down after a headlong gallop.

  “It’s Raf,” Sherwin croaked, pointing.

  “You must be mistaken,” Fritz said.

  “’e can transform,” Sherwin said, realizing Fritz didn’t understand this. “’e’s the Wolf.”

  Rafen had stopped four steps from the horse, his wolf’s head lolling and the tongue hanging out as he panted – body language Sherwin had grown to understand as despair during those early years in the Woods.

  “Rafen?” Fritz said tentatively.

  The Wolf was off again, its legs churning blurred circles through the snow.

  “Oi!” Sherwin yelled when it disappeared behind the rocky wall ahead.

  He rushed after it as black spearheads of kesmal exploded from behind the stone, shooting toward his neck. Flinging his hands out before himself, he stumbled backward. A blue sheet jumped into view, and the black points shattered against it. Annette’s eyes widened with brief bewilderment before she too vanished. Sherwin stared for a few seconds.

  “We ’ave to—”

  And then Fritz had seized him by the front of his shirt and spun him around. “I know who you are,” he hissed, his light blue eyes maniacal.

  “Wha’ do yer mean?” Sherwin said defensively. He jerked himself back with fierce strength, and Fritz was forced to let go or topple into an awkward embrace. Sherwin smoothed his shirt front with dignity, taking care to keep the inside button hem folded.

  Fritz slid his sword from his sheath with an ominous scraping. “You are Alakil. I would know his kesmal anywhere – the kesmal I had him trained in.”

  He lifted his sword, and the flare of yellow filled Sherwin’s vision. Sherwin threw up another gleaming shield at the last second and fell back onto the snowy ground when the wart-faced, rocky wall splintered like wood. He pulled himself up as a strange, sunny wind excited the snow around him into a localized blizzard. Covering his face with his hands, he tried to stagger through it, the snow lashing him and stinging his cheeks.

  And then something hit him in the torso and threw him back onto the ground. He fell with a muffled thump, his limbs encased in a molten shell, the inside of which felt like rock. Fritz’s face was directly above his, the sword raised to cleave Sherwin’s skull.

  *

  After discovering a tunnel high up in the rocky wall to his right, Rafen had made a frantic climb. The passage led into the Ashurite palace in the mountain. Crawling through its mouth, he found himself in a religious chamber engraved with crude pictures of Ashurite priests aborting babies. An altar stood against the left wall of the enclosed chamber.

  Zion, let her be all right.

  It was the only coherent thought in his head.

  Light came through a doorway at the other end, and Rafen moved cautiously toward it, straining his ears for any other movement. He was not sure if this place was frequented by members of the camp or not. He paused in the low doorway, which led onto an exposed walk at the top of a stone wall. Behind the walk, the wall adjoined a hall in which pillars held up the overhanging, thick rock roof.

  Rafen let his eyes wander beyond the walk. Nausea in the pit of his stomach told him he wouldn’t like what he would see.

  A glimmering blue cord hung from an outcrop of rock that passed over his head, and from the cord hung a glazed cocoon of what appeared to be swirling ice. Within the ice, Etana’s body was stiff, her arms plastered to her sides and her legs twined. Her neck was stretched upward, the eyes open and unseeing. The irises and pupils combined to make one circle of wintry white. She was suspended above a pit of five hundred leaping and whistling Naztwai, penned within ridiculously flimsy picket fences.

  He was sinking; he couldn’t breathe. His eyes filmed over, and he gripped the doorframe, the slow beating of his own heart reverberating in his ears.

  It… couldn’t… be…

  The Naztwai were whistling.

  He froze, his pulse accelerating. They thought there was a chance of food. They would only get excited over fresh meat… fresh…

  It was a slim chance.

  He stepped into clear view on the walk, only vaguely aware of the rows of black tents like shark fins along the Ravine floor, people moving in and out of them. With one shaking hand, he reached out to touch the blue cord.

  Asiel stood by the picket fences. His elongated face was uplifted, the lips curled.

  Rafen’s fingers brushed the cord, and it slid down toward the Naztwai, the cocoon opening from the bottom. Her head thrown upward, Etana slid out, sodden to the skin, water flying off her face and hair as she fell. The Naztwai were a giant, churning pile, blue-black faces opening and shutting…

  Rafen leapt from the walk, a net of orange exploding from his fingertips and sweeping Etana up before she hit the ground. It dropped to the floor of the Ravine of its own accord and formed a fiery shield around her. She was standing – he nearly laughed in his delight -

  He landed in a squat amid the Naztwai, and they surged toward him as one. Rafen whipped his sword out, pointed it at the wall leading into the Ashurite hall, and ejected a torrent of fire. An explosion rent the air. The Naztwai claws were almost on him when he dived into the shield with Etana. He seized her hand and ran with her toward the hole he had created in the wall, the shield moving with them. An unnaturally rapid tread ran through the ground beneath them like a drumroll.

  “Rafen!” she gasped, scarcely intelligible through her sobs. Her skin was still warm, and she seemed completely dry after landing in his kesmal.

  “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” he panted, rushing her through the hall and into a narrow corridor leading deeper into the mountain. They were nearly around the corner when the first blue shaft punctured the shield. The warm atmosphere of his kesmal vanished, and the cold air leapt forward to embrace them.

  Etana whimpered in horror, and Rafen squeezed her hand, even though the Lashki was six steps away and knives of blue ricocheted off the walls around them. Was she thinking of their run together in Tarhia, when they had first met in this life, near both of their cells? Or perhaps she was remembering the very first run they’d had together as spirits – a plunge toward the new world Zion had created, a plunge that had left everyone else behind.

  He swung ahead of her, pressed her hand to his lips with feverish desperation, and then darted behind her. Her brilliant blue eyes wild, she screamed his name. He shot a beam of orange into the roof of the corridor between them, so that rocks showered down and separated them. When he spun around, a spe
ar of blue was coming for his forehead. He evaded it rapidly. The Lashki blocked the corridor ahead of him, his dreadlocks swirling in the unnatural wind around them, his teeth bared.

  I have to get him away from Etana, Rafen thought. Or make sure he can’t run.

  He transformed in a second and flew toward the ghoul. The Lashki saw his intent, and an icy flare sliced the air, intended to catch Rafen’s body as a whole. Rafen flung himself against the wall mid-run and found himself past the Lashki and back in the hall. Something hit him in the side, and he was thrown out of the hall and onto the stone ground of the Naztwai pen.

  Aching, though not seriously hurt, he discovered he was in his normal form, his legs tangled. His sword, which he had absorbed with his transformation, had reappeared, and slipped from his fingertips. He seized it now and leapt to his feet as the first Naztwai pounced, its long thighs snapping upright. Rafen staggered backward and threw his sword arm out, blasting the Naztwai back with kesmal. Several whistles sounded behind while hairy bodies rushed toward him. Rafen whirled around in a circle, sending rays of fire in every direction. Singed Naztwai screeched; a collection of bodies was starting to appear.

  One of the beasts hit him in his front. He kicked its rock-like muscles with his leg, swung his sword up, and stabbed it in the eye before it could get its bloodstained teeth on his throat. It reeled backward, screaming, and three other Naztwai attacked it and began eating it. Heavy feet pounded toward him from behind, and he turned around with a yell, brought his sword down, and sent a shiver of kesmal through the Naztwai’s skull. It collapsed at his feet, and he quickly stabbed its muddied green eyes too.

  Creating a wall that moved before himself and fended off stray Naztwai, Asiel leapt the picket fence and flung himself bodily on Rafen. He shoved Rafen back toward the Ashurite hall. His white-blue eyes crazy, he ripped his nhanya blade from his cloak and sent spiraling emerald kesmal at Rafen. Rafen answered with another beam of fire that shattered Asiel’s wall and forced him to dodge. A purple beam rushed toward Rafen’s head from a different direction. Rafen’s fiery shield sent it rebounding to the short, bald philosopher who had sent it. Talmon calmly raised a pistol from where he stood, flanked by two broad-shouldered foreigners. The bullet was already halfway toward Rafen’s temple before he realized what had happened. He lifted his sword, focusing the kesmal. The thin ray met the bullet, and thunder sounded as the burst of fire flowered on the air, killing five Naztwai. Rafen turned again to Asiel, his sword meeting the nhanya before it could stab him in the torso. Asiel was smiling as if he knew a secret. Something cold and moist covered Rafen’s face. Rafen threw himself sideways, landing on his knees, and dashing the slime from his brow. He raised his blazing sword again, looking around frenziedly. The Lashki was nowhere to be seen.