to the ground like winnowed husks, ripped from their core.
Time seemed to stand still. Seconds passed like hours, but in reality, there was barely time to blink an eye before everyone, except Rose, had reacted. Ash transformed himself into a giant snow tiger and leapt towards El-on-ah, with fangs and claws bared.
El-on-ah called out to Puk and reached upwards, a hand stretched out towards the sky. The pukis came from nowhere, skirting the ground like a hurricane, Puk swooped up, soaring above her head. Grabbing him by the tail, El-on-ah was lifted high into the air.
“Revincio!” Auriel cast the binding spell. Golden thongs of energy lashed out from her ring, but her magic was not powerful enough and the bindings fell short of El-on-ah’s quickly rising feet. Before she could cast again, El-on-ah was gone.
Auriel gasped, her cheeks streaked with tears. She ran over to Rose, who was kneeling in the dirt, cradling what remained of Arjan’s robes in her arms, her face expressionless but for two brimful, unblinking eyes. Lee, who had remained by her side, stood over her, gently resting his hands on her shoulders.
“Technically he’s not dead Rose, he merely descended,” Lee said, in an awkward attempt to console her. “He will ascend again in time. It serves no logical purpose for you to grieve for him.”
Auriel frowned at him, sighing and shaking her head in sorrowful acceptance of her friend’s insensitivity. She crouched down beside Rose, taking her hand tenderly in her own.
“I know that it won’t seem like this now, Rose,” she said, “and I can’t believe that I am going to say this... but Lee is right. Arjan did the only thing he could do. He did what any of us would have done. If he had not. Then we would have lost you and then we would all lose. Arjan would want you to be strong Rose, to go on and fulfil your destiny."
"I understand all of that,” said Rose her voice hoarse, “ but Arjan was my friend, I have lost my friend and he died because of me."
A tear forged a glistening path down one ashen cheek. Getting to her feet, Rose unfurled her left hand, in which she had gripped the adder stone so tightly, that it had left a deep impression in the centre of her palm. Its pulsating light had grown even more intense and now it hummed with magical energy, primed for release.
Rose took a long breath. “We have to leave immediately," she said, her voice emotionless. "El-on-ah will provide Ka with our location. We may not have told her where we were going, but she knows we travel with Twocasts and she knows we are in Ferrum. It will not be difficult for them to work out our destination. We have to warn the Twocasts and the resistance right away."
Glancing down at Arjan’s blackened apis pin, she rubbed it between her fingers to remove the soot, and then attached it to her robe, beside her vaulknut.
“I will carry you with me... always,” she said softly, before turning to the others. "Tell Vega what has happened and ask him to make ready to leave. I’ll join you presently."
Lee nodded and started to make his way back along the path, but Ash and Auriel hesitated.
"I have to do this alone." Said Rose, “ I’ll be fine now, she’ll not be back....... Go!"
When finally they left, Rose took the adder stone and held it out in front of her, its green glow revealing her face, in all of its mournful contemplation. Concentrating she spoke the incantation that Lord Dux had taught her only a few days before.
"Incantatio secretum tuum”.... reveal to me your secret incantatio.
The stone burst open like a fiery puffball, expelling hundreds of shimmering silver letters into the air. Like liquid silver, the letters flowed into each other, joining together and forming words and finally a quivering script that danced before her as she read.
‘From knucker holes thou must acquire,
Ice that stays the heat of fyre,
Keep it well in knucker’s spew,
Until again, I heed to you.
This charm begins,
Though there are more,
Three to fashion that...
Which is cast, on four.’
The words quivered and then all at once, they faded into nothing, the magic spent.
Rose placed the adder stone on the ground and stood back, her potens hand outstretched.
“Occillo!” she spoke softly as she cast the destruction spell.
A searing bolt of white light shot from her potens ring, hitting the adder stone with a thunderous crack and fracturing it into thousands of tiny pieces.
Rose kicked at them, scattering the small grains of stone into the dirt. When she finally turned and walked back through the trees, there was nothing left to see, but fallen leaves, sandy soil and a few fragments of fine, green tinged grit.
ALLEGIANCE
No one made a sound when Rose returned to the wagon though all of their eyes were upon her. Seeing her mournful expression as he helped her up into the wagon, Vega greeted her with a brief look of concern. Watching her carefully, he waited for her to take her seat. Then, still troubled, he turned back to the horses, cracked the whip, and urged them back towards the road.
Remarkably, the children were still asleep on the floor of the wagon. There was more room now, with two fewer souls on board. Che and Tu-nek-ta, still bound and gagged, had been seated at the back of the wagon. Che’s fearful, questioning eyes burned into Rose’s face, challenging her for an answer that he was almost too afraid hear. Rose met his gaze, her eyes empty of expression and her face drawn.
“Lady El-on-ah, survives,” she said, her voice flat and her words spoken through teeth clenched tightly with barely controlled fury. “She survives, but at the cost of one of our own.”
Unconsciously she grasped Arjan’s apis pin between her fingers.
“Before today, I’d wanted to try to help win this war for Dux, for the Oratory, for all the people of the Afterlands who seem to expect it from me. Now it’s personal. Now I want it for me.”
Her eyes smarted, pricking with tears. She turned her head, looking out of the wagon and into the darkness.
“I swear that I’ll not relent until Ka, his Ophites and his army of Afreet, are scourged forever from our lands. Until the Kingdom of Erebus is disembowelled, so it can never again provide sanctuary to the evil plague that is the Djinn.”
Che closed his eyes. He let out a long breath; the breath that he had been holding on to for what seemed like an eternity. He was not listening to her now. He had stopped listening after the words ‘lady El-on-ah survives’. El-on-ah was alive and that was all that mattered to him.
“What do we do with them?” Ash asked nodding towards the two Bloods as Rose turned to meet his eyes, blinking away her tears.
“They travel with us, until they can pose us no threat.” She said, “I have no appetite for killing natives. There has been enough killing for one day.”
The wagon rumbled into the entrance to the Ebony Forest just before dawn. Their pace slowed as the track narrowed, becoming more and more overgrown as they travelled deeper into the woods. After about a mile, the state of the road had deteriorated so badly, that it appeared that they would be unable to travel any further in the wagon. The road ahead was strewn with fallen trees and boulders that were far too large to be moved by hand.
Lee watched curiously, as Vega seemed to ignore this fact and continued relentlessly to push the horses on. As each moment passed, Lee expected to be jolted out of his seat by the breaking of a wheel or an axle, and yet it didn’t happen. Baffled he stood up and looked out beyond Vega’s shoulders and through the bobbing heads of the horses.
“Fascinating,” Lee said, with eyes as wide as a loris.
As the horses walked on, the scene in front of them trembled, subtly altering, the way an image reflected in a great lake rippled and changed when you tossed in a pebble. One moment the boulders were there and then a second later they were not. The wagon pushed through them lik
e a boat pushing through water, the image reforming behind them as they passed. Vega chuckled as he watched Lee’s perplexed expression.
“The trees are bewitched,” he said, “’tis the Elder Witch, she cast an enchantment on the road t’ discourage strangers from entering the forest. Most folks turn back when they see their way’s barred. It works well, yes?”
Overhearing their conversation, Ash and Auriel joined Lee at the front. The three of them watched enthralled as the horses effortlessly ploughed through the illusion, each step taking them on to a different scene.
“This is bloody amazing!” said Ash, “Rose, come over here, you’ve got to see this...”
Rose hesitated for a second and then joined them, peering through the front flaps of the wagon just as the scene changed once more. Then, as if a great watery curtain had parted before them, they found themselves in a large dirt clearing, surrounded by small wooden houses fashioned from the hollowed out trunks of ancient ebony trees.
Beside the houses were groups of Twocasts; old and young, male and female, their faces painted with white lines, each pair of eyes unblinkingly following them as they drove past. The Twocasts gravitated towards the wagon, some of them reaching out to touch its side as it rolled past. Then in unison, they seemed to join together in an impromptu procession following the wagon.
Rose, still watching the scene from the front of the cart, appeared to be the subject of much interest. They pointed at her, with expressions of awe and excitement.
From inside the wagon they could hear snatches of
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