Crowlord

by Michael Wallace

  That decided it. They took her swords away, hoisted her onto the goat’s back, and tied her down.

  #

  The first ten or fifteen minutes were easier than Miklos had supposed. The enormous mountain goat stayed calmer than expected. Perhaps it was nothing more than being in motion, or feeling the seriousness of the situation with its master tied down on its back. Or maybe the road, lifting ever higher, reminded the animal of alpine meadows, and gave it hope of cleaner air up top.

  It was enough to make Miklos wonder if he’d been wrong to send away his mare. The animal was hardly safe simply because he’d cut her loose. A horse would fare better than a goat in these parts—at least initially, before someone captured it and rode it into battle—but these were dangerous times for human and animal alike.

  He was soon concentrating too hard on clearing the smoke ahead to give it thought. The fire was to their right, encroaching ever closer to the road.

  And the volcano. A boom split the air, followed by a tremendous hiss of venting gasses. They must be thirty miles yet from Manet Tuzzia, but the volcano sounded like it was right on top of them.

  “Lava flow,” Narina announced. Her voice rose disembodied from the gloom to his rear. “You fools had better take it into account or we’ll be burned alive.”

  “We’ll worry about that when we get to the canyon,” he said. “It’ll be night before we reach it.”

  She gave a bitter laugh. “You think night has any meaning in these parts?”

  It did when trying to pace one’s travel. It may look like midnight and smell like hell, but they couldn’t stop here. They faced a continuous, brutal climb through the foothills, to the mouth of the canyon, and then along the ledge above the river until they were above the danger, and that would be a day and a half, nonstop. No average soldier could have managed that climb, at that pace and in those conditions, and the warbrand and his bladedancer companions would be hard-pressed, even with the aid of their sowen.

  “Anyway, you’re wrong,” Narina added. “Lava has broken through on the north face and is flowing down the hillside above us.”

  Miklos didn’t know what she was going on about. “Manet Tuzzia is well to the south of us—the lava would never come close to here.”

  “I’m not talking about Tuzzia.”

  “There’s no volcano on this side of the canyon.”

  “The whole world is a volcano, you idiot. Can’t you feel it? Can’t any of you? Never mind—the lot of you are too weak to sense it. Even you, warbrand. I killed a firewalker and cut down a crowlord. What have you done? Murdered your cousin without a fight? An old woman, wasn’t she?”

  Miklos felt himself flush with anger, and he bit back a combative response, knowing it was only the demigod curse speaking through her.

  “And you, old man,” Narina continued. “What have you done? Way back when, you could have been champion of the demigods, but you failed. And now you’re weak and broken down. You don’t even have your staff anymore. So try to do something useful and find the lava before it kills us.

  “Master,” Gyorgy said, “perhaps you could rest. It wouldn’t hurt to sleep a little.”

  “Shut up, boy. You are nothing in this, except maybe a way to test the sharpness of my blade. Free my hands, and I’ll show you.”

  The other three stayed quiet after this. No point in engaging her, and they had enough to worry about clearing the smoke to find their way through. At one point, the flames were so close to the road that it would have been hard to hear over the roar anyway. The whole mountainside above them glowed eerily.

  After another two miles or so, Kozmer took hold of Miklos’s arm. “There it is. Lava, to our right.”

  “I don’t feel it,” Miklos confessed, disconcerted that the older man had a greater mastery of the sowen than he did.

  “You will.”

  Miklos needed another five minutes, but then he, too, could sense the intense heat breaking through the earth’s crust from below. The eruption was bigger than he’d expected; in spite of Narina’s words, he’d expected at most tiny fissures opening, forced to the surface by great pressures below. Instead, the eruption was an immense wound tearing open the hillside.

  Within the eruption emerged something else, a chaotic twisting back and forth, like snakes writhing in a pit. A tearing apart of auras, more intense than the flames, more organized than rivulets of lava, yet a vector of chaos at the same time.

  “Fire demons,” he said.

  “I feel them, too,” Kozmer said. “Five, six of them, at least.”

  “There are several more beneath our feet,” Miklos said. “Trying to come up, but not strong enough to melt through the post road.”

  Narina murmured something in a tone too low for him to hear, followed by, “You lot had better hope the road holds, then.”

  “It’s very old, and bound by ancient magic,” Kozmer said. “The bricks will resist longer than the rock and soil surrounding it.”

  “It won’t last forever,” she said.

  She was squirming on the back of the goat where she’d been tied, and Miklos thought at first she was trying to get a hand loose to reach for her blades, which were secured behind her, but it seemed she was only trying to get more comfortable. An impossible task, he thought. Nevertheless, he gave Gyorgy a raised eyebrow when she grunted and seemed to give up, and the boy met it with a nod. He fell back to stay close to his master and kept his gaze on her. Narina’s student may be young, but he was no fool.

  Meanwhile, Kozmer limped next to Miklos with his sowen pushing through the smoke and ash. He’d picked up a new walking stick a few minutes after Narina’s taunt, a branch that was charred on the tip and had the jagged stumps of branches along one edge. He tapped it on the stones whenever he seemed to be deep in thought. It was clattering away now.

  The fiery glow had grown more intense on the hillside, and was pushing back some of the gloom, and Miklos got a close look at the elder’s face, lined with worry. It looked like fear, in fact. His sowen was beginning to fray. So was Miklos’s. The boy was barely holding on.

  “What about those circles?” Kozmer said at last. “If you didn’t draw them on the post road, who did?”

  “I have no idea. You say they called fire demons to the road?”

  “Trying to sever it, I think. There was fire all around, and demons came leaping over the top of the river. Narina redirected the current and washed them out.”

  “Did she now?”

  Miklos doubted he’d have been able to make a river jump its banks, even at his greatest level of concentration, let alone in the middle of a forest fire and volcanic eruption. He cast a glance back at the woman, startled by her mastery of the sowen. These bladedancers were proving stronger than he’d thought. How had he underestimated them so much that day at their temple?

  The smoke had momentarily cleared, and Narina was glaring at him from the back of the goat. She seemed to recognize the question in his eyes. “You wouldn’t understand it, warbrand.”

  “I understand it. I’m just impressed.”

  “You’d have to be acquainted with water, first. Have you ever taken a bath in your life?”

  He couldn’t help but chuckle at the snarling response to his compliment. But the mirth faded quickly as he remembered the seriousness of the situation. It was fascinating to see how the curse had got hold of her, but alarming at the same time. In his case, the curse had turned his natural ambition into a cold, calculating bid for power. In Narina, it seemed to make her flare into rage at the smallest of slights.

  Maybe a quick temper was her natural weakness, something that would have been trained out of her at the temple, cooling her fiery inner nature to rock, as surely as she doused the demons that had crossed the river. Miklos, on the other hand, had always been ambitious. That ambition had been turned against him.

  None of these speculative thoughts answered Kozmer’s question about the circles on the road, and he was about to voice additional gue
sses and doubts on the matter when something shuddered to his right. Hot and violent, it tore apart the auras of their surroundings.

  He reached back for his hilt, bent his shoulder slightly, and drew his falchion. It was a heavy, comforting presence in hand as he pivoted to meet the threat.

  A figure burst out of the smoke, glowing red-hot, the light so bright it left him momentarily blinded. It was a demon, all bony limbs and angular hips. There were several different kinds, and this was one of the hornless ones, with a smooth, skull-like head. Its arms were so long they nearly dragged the ground. Flames burst from its hands, and its fingernails were razor-sharp obsidian blades.

  “Take my right shoulder,” he told Kozmer. “Gyorgy, to my left.”

  The demon’s head whipped in their direction at the sound of Miklos’s voice, and a forked tongue of white flame darted out to taste the air. Miklos’s sword blade gleamed in the monster’s reflected light, and the demon cocked its head, but it had no eyes, only blackened eye sockets. It seemed to be blind, and he regretted having spoken. The demon stood on the edge of the post road, which resisted the fire, and would soon force it back before its limbs hardened to stone. If he hadn’t spoken, it might have done so already.

  He held still, and the others followed his lead. The demon seemed to lose interest and was returning its gaze to the sound of crackling fire and spitting lava at its back when the goat made a moaning, braying sound.

  Once again the demon’s head snapped around. Its tongue darted faster, and it took two quick steps onto the road toward the small company. Miklos dropped his left hand from the hilt, holding the sword in place with only the right, and grabbed a handful of saltpeter from the little pouch at his belt. He hurled the saltpeter at the demon, and as he did, gave it a push with his sowen. It caught fire and engulfed the demon in a ball of flame.

  The idea wasn’t to burn the monster or harm it in any way. It was to deafen it, dull its senses. The demon belched a cloud of black smoke that smelled of rotten eggs and burning pitch, then turned this way and that with its forked tongue lashing at the air. It howled in frustration, a sound like bending metal about to break.

  “Go, move!”

  Gyorgy grabbed for the rope around the goat’s throat and jerked it, while Kozmer clattered ahead with his makeshift staff, and Miklos shielded them with his sword and his sowen. The demon soon dispersed the cloud of flame and smoke—or absorbed it, more like—and returned to the hunt. But the humans and their animal had moved along. They could hear it screeching behind them.

  They’d escaped just in time. Two more fiery figures appeared where the fire met the post road. The lava was surging, too, and only a few feet away from hitting the brick. No telling what would happen then.

  They hurried past the lava and the demons and into a deeper patch of darkness, forced to continue more by feel than sight. The goat was balking, and enough smoke was getting through Kozmer’s sowen to make the animal cough.

  “Why weren’t you at my right shoulder?” Miklos asked the old man.

  “I was.”

  “I meant armed!”

  “I’m not carrying any blades.”

  “You didn’t grab your swords when we entered the smoke?” How had Miklos missed that? “Demons and demigods, why not?”

  He expected Narina to make a sarcastic remark, but she was quiet, and in fact had offered no comment about their confrontation with the demon. Instead, it was Gyorgy’s voice that materialized from the darkness next to the goat.

  “The elder sohn doesn’t carry swords. Most of the time he refuses to fight. He still can, though. He’s capable.”

  “Against a fire demon?” Kozmer said. “I’m not so sure. My sowen is the best weapon I’ve got. You might not have felt me pushing smoke and fire when you pulled your little trick with the saltpeter.” This was to Miklos. “But I did. Or would you have preferred an old man with flabby muscles flailing around with swords?”

  The comment broke the tension, and Miklos allowed himself a private smile. He was warming to Kozmer, which was good, because accursed or not, Narina had worn on him. Again, she was missing her chance to needle the others. With any luck, she was fighting against it, and the effort had exhausted her into silence.

  “Can any of us strike a fire demon?” Gyorgy asked. “Wouldn’t it melt our swords?”

  “These are temple-forged weapons, yours and mine alike,” Miklos said. “No flame will hurt them. Can we do damage is another question. Mine. . .yes, a little. Yours, better, I think.”

  “The boy can do damage with his dragon blade,” Kozmer said. “The demon blade is practically useless against these creatures.”

  “Is that so?” Miklos said.

  “How would I fight with only one sword?” the boy said. “All my training. . .seems I’d be unbalanced.”

  “Nobody says you have to drop the demon blade,” Kozmer said. “Although I suppose you could take Narina’s and fight with two dragons. You’d be unbalanced either way.”

  The woman didn’t answer back there, although it was another opening for sarcasm on her part. Something about her student cutting his leg off with a master sword, perhaps. Instead, she stayed quiet. Silent and sullen was as good as they could get, apparently.

  “Narina?” Kozmer said. “I feel you back there, brooding. Do you need water or anything? To move so you can stretch your muscles? There are more demons on the road, and it’s going to get hotter as we go.”

  Still nothing. Miklos reached back, growing concerned, but felt her there. Her sowen was calmer than it had been, but guarded. As if she were trying to shield it from the two masters on the road ahead.

  He was going to fall back to find her in the darkness and see if he could get a better sense of what she was hiding, but fire billowed across the road ahead of them, whipping in from a copse of burning trees. He and Kozmer pushed back, then found themselves hurrying along to stay ahead of the hot winds, with Gyorgy yanking hard on the goat’s rope, as more demons cavorted on the edge of the road.

  Twice more, he caught sight of the creatures among the fire, but then they enjoyed a respite. They pushed through heavy smoke and fire, concentrating and combining their sowen, and finally reached a point at the mouth of the canyon leading up toward the temples.

  Here, they faced the worst. The heat was suffocating, and choking ash and burning air nearly overwhelmed them. Even Gyorgy had to contribute his efforts to clear the air enough to breathe.

  There were demons, as well—too many to push through—but they seemed to be warring among themselves. Squat, smoldering demons emerged from the south side of the road to fight the long-limbed, scaly demons with snake tongues and smoking horns entering from the north. The taller demons lashed with whip-like tails, while their squatter companions opened their mouths doubly wide and spewed molten lava. When they met, they grappled and rolled about on the road, biting and clawing and lashing.

  Whenever one demon defeated another, it continued to tear at and eat the fallen, and seemed to absorb its enemy. What emerged was some twisted amalgamation of the pair. Wherever there were two or more of these hybrid demons, they joined forces and devoured the earlier, lesser incarnations.

  Once the companions had taken stock of the fighting demons, their choices were stark: retreat the way they’d come, or make a run for it. Nobody wanted to go back; they’d come too far already.

  Miklos led the way into the inferno. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck curled and burned, and it felt as though he were breathing burning ash. He was drenched in sweat and parched with thirst, but didn’t dare stop for a drink from the skins. Demons were all around them, but intent on fighting and devouring their rivals.

  At last, they emerged into a quiet stretch where the sound of the river rushed from somewhere ahead, its roar stronger for the first time than the blasting fury of the fires. The air was a little clearer, and Miklos even caught a glimpse of the stars through a window in the cloud and smoke cover that opened briefly before c
losing over once again. Night had apparently fallen. Even that brief window strengthened his will and gave him hope.

  Brutus bellowed, which was a good sign in and of itself. Perhaps Miklos needn’t have worried about the goat after all; after that initial blunder, it had had the good sense to stay quiet during the fighting demons. That it now felt confident enough to voice its displeasure confirmed the relative safety of their current position.

  Kozmer spoke up from the darkness. His voice was thin and shaky. “Gyorgy, do me a favor and fetch a waterskin, will you? I’m a dried-out husk—don’t think I’m going to make it to the river.”

  Miklos groped ahead with his sowen and was gratified by what he sensed. “It’s clear all the way to the riverbank. Not long now, maybe a half-hour. From there, we can cross the fords and come up along the ledge. That will get us past the worst eruption and the most dangerous of the demons.”

  “Master Kozmer!” Gyorgy cried.

  “Shh, boy. Keep your voice down. What is it?”

  “The ropes are cut. Master Narina is gone!”

  Miklos felt back in alarm, and knew at once that it was true. He could no longer feel the bladedancer’s sowen.

  What was it the boy said? The ropes had been cut? That meant Narina had deliberately freed herself during the chaos of the last two hours. And instead of wielding her swords to defend against demons, or using her sowen to push back against the suffocating, burning air, she’d shielded herself from their notice.

  To escape.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Katalinka remained with the firewalkers after the demigods abandoned their attempt to smother the demons with ice and snow. They retreated up the hillside as day gave way to night to find a safe vantage point to watch the final destruction of the temple. The basin in which the firewalkers had built their shrines and homes was soon submerged in lava, without a trace remaining even of the walls and narrow walkways carved through basalt. Even the spire itself vanished beneath the molten rock. Lava trickled down the path of crushed quartz to the base of the hill on which the survivors waited.