“And?”
“My father took out his sword and dared any of them to leave. That pretty much settled it.”
Ryne chuckled. So many years later and Stefan was still the same. Whether it was his soldiers or citizens, he took full responsibility, refusing to risk lives foolishly and willing to sacrifice where necessary. Ryne recalled a time the man was different, when all that mattered was glory. Nerian and the Tribunal had killed that Stefan. They’d given birth to a better man.
“How do they plan to escape?”
“That’s what I’m here to discuss with you,” Ancel said.
“Let me guess … I’m the decoy.”
Lips pursed, Ancel gave a slow nod.
“Tell them I say that after I do this we’ll need to make a detour on our way to Torandil.”
“Are you sure you can manage? When we linked earlier, I could tell how weak you were. I’d rather take our chances, all of us together, than to lose you.”
As touching as Ancel’s sentiments were, Ryne understood the reality of the situation. Their escape route would be out across the Kelvore River where no wall existed. The shade hadn’t covered the area yet, but sooner or later they would. Unless they found something else to chase after first. “Whether I can manage is irrelevant. There’s no other way.”
Ancel kicked at a patch of snow.
“What they asked isn’t all that’s bothering you, is it?”
“No.” Ancel looked up to meet Ryne’s eyes. “Why does Irmina want you dead?”
“Did you ask her?”
“Yes. She said the reason was yours to tell.”
Ryne nodded. “So it is, but this is neither the time nor the place.”
“Two of the most important people to me want to kill each other, and I can’t get a straight answer from either. What’s worse is, both of you are risking your lives for me.”
“Who said I wanted to kill her?”
Ancel looked at him askance. “What if she attacks you?”
“Not even then.”
Tension drained from Ancel’s face. “I’ll go tell them you agreed.”
The vasumbrals released a keening wail, this time higher and longer.
Ryne tilted his head, judging their distance. “Tell them they only have a few minutes.” Snow crunching underfoot, he began to jog toward the northern gate. “The attack is commencing,” he called over his shoulder. When he reached the tower to the right of the gate, he shouted for the basket. A wealth of shaking and creaking later, he stood next to the two Dagodin guards.
Out beyond the barrier, a fountain of dirt and snow shot into the air with a dull rumble. The tower itself shook. A hole at least thirty feet across appeared in the snow.
Before the debris hit the ground, a form snaked up, black against the snowfall and tenuous light of the barrier. Rocks, dirt, and snow struck its ridged surface before falling to the wayside. A screech resonated from the silhouette, the sound crawling across Ryne’s skin. The dark, wormlike form split down the middle from the top to where it disappeared into the hole, revealing an opening to swallow the night itself. It was not just black; it was an absence of light, a devouring of shadow. The vasumbral made the mass of shadelings beyond it appear bright by comparison. Hundreds upon hundreds of feelers reached out from its interior, sampling the air.
Several thousand feet away, the process repeated. Then again, and again, and again, until Ryne counted a dozen. He understood now why the person controlling them waited. Stretching over a hundred feet into the air and at least a quarter of that distance wide, the creatures were still half-grown.
Ryne sensed a spike of power then. Someone Materializing, a portal opening. First one, two, and then so many at once he lost count. Mater surged from the northeast. The Tribunal’s Matii had arrived.
A few of the vasumbrals turned their eyeless forms toward the convergence of elements. The vertebrae joining each section of their bodies glinted where they humped into ridges. Together the beasts screeched, coiled back, and dived down, crashing into the earth with a rumble before their tails pulled out of one hole to disappear into the new ones their heads made. Snow bubbled up into a swell of white waves rolling across the ground in the portals’ direction.
Ryne waited, but only the equivalent of two shadebanes followed. The other vasumbrals continued to eat into the barrier. “Leave now,” he said to the two guards. “Tell Shin Galiana I said to take everyone with her.” He leapt from the tower over the wall.
A cold wind rushed by his face, sweeping snow in stinging swirls as he fell. Without the benefits of moonlight, he drew on the barrier’s luminescence instead and added that to the corresponding element within his Etchings.
He Shimmered.
One moment he was falling, and the next he reappeared at the shield’s edge without crossing it. He stepped directly into the glow, his skin tingling slightly as he did so. Light essences raced up into him, his Etchings gobbling them up greedily. Ryne’s body replicated the barrier’s blue luminance. The prickling sensation increased to a burn. Energy filled him to near busting. He threw his back.
“SAKARI!” he bellowed, using the wind to increase and carry the sound.
Everything stopped as if the entire world had come to a halt. The vasumbrals and shadelings alike turned slowly to him as if of one mind.
A blur of motion announced Sakari’s presence. “You called, master?” The smirk on Sakari’s face was as out of sorts as his appearance in the form of a typical milk-skinned Granadian.
The essences Ryne held brimmed, leaking from him like blood. “You won’t get what you want. Not now. Not ever.”
“And what is to stop me and mine?”
Ryne gave the netherling a ghost of a smile. “Yourself. We pose no threat to you.”
“Smart, but not smart enough,” Sakari said. “I could have sworn a certain someone shot me with an arrow, and another someone stabbed me. Their actions give me the right to breach any contract to defend myself.”
The breath Ryne wanted to suck in remained between his clenched teeth. Sakari had deliberately goaded people close to Ancel into attacking him.
“I see you understand. I do not need to fight you to get what I require.” Sakari’s eyes changed color, going through several hues of blue to gray to black. “As has always happened, you, like the other Eztezians before you, will lose.”
“Why are you doing this? The people of this world have done nothing to you or your kind.”
“Come now, Ryne.” Sakari shrugged. “What drives the world? What drives man? Power. Freedom. Love. A combination of all three or a lack of one or the other. In our case, we simply would love the freedom to use our power.”
“So the Nine will destroy an entire people to have something as meager as that?”
“They will destroy whoever stands in our way. Is that not what you and your brethren have done for millennia?” Sakari cocked his head marginally. “We gave you Eztezians the means to deliver the world to us, and not your so-called gods, but too many of you became smarter than was good.”
“Trading one slave master for another was never an option,” Ryne said.
Sakari chuckled. “You cannot fight the inevitable. We can give you the same choice we gave the others though. Join us. Enough of humanity will survive. We do need them, and people to rule, to keep them providing us with what we require.”
“Never.”
“Then I wish you the best of luck, and may your gods help you.” Sakari’s form Blurred away. “But not even they can save you.”
Netherlings. Forever arrogant. Ryne smiled. As always, the chance to gloat, to declare superiority had proved impossible for the netherling. The weakness gave him exactly what he needed.
Coiled in the air from where Sakari had blurred was a concentration of Mater. Stronger than normal, the essences combined to form primal elements almost as potent as those within an Entosis. Ryne delved into the Shunyata, reaching out to the elements before him as he did so. The voices screa
med promises of power into his head, and he obliged.
He fed the essences Sakari’s Mater.
The glow around his body grew to a blinding incandescence. The heat built to an inferno raging within him. Ryne’s body trembled with the strain of holding the power in. Allowing the Etchings to help stabilize all he held, he drew in more until he had gained the last bit of residue left by Sakari’s own Forging.
Then he released it all at once.
Light and energy shot into the sky in a cylindrical cone a dozen feet wide. If he had not rooted himself to the earth beneath his feet, the explosion would have thrown him back. Instead, it blew away snow, dirt, debris and everything else before him. Unable to bypass the protective barrier, the power expanded in a semicircle with him at the center. The ground steamed. It smelled of char and wet earth after a rainstorm. Tiny fires fluttered on grass once frozen solid.
“No!” Sakari’s voice bellowed in the distance.
But it was too late. The release of that much Mater had already gained the vasumbrals’ attention. They screeched as one. In response to the issued commands, the shadelings howled and wailed. The ground churned toward Ryne.
Body still aglow, he Shimmered toward the location of the opening portals. When he reappeared, he began sprinting. The snowfall had become a squall now, but through the winter white, he made out the rolling earth of the vasumbrals snaking to follow him. They ate up the distance between them within seconds until swaths of earth and snow twenty feet tall swept behind him like an ocean heaving in angry throes.
He whipped his head around. Rank upon rank of Dagodin spread before him, armor crimson like fresh blood. Ashishin and High Ashishin stood behind them, portals opening and closing to allow in more of the Tribunal’s troops.
Someone yelled a command. In a synchronized dance, the army formed into columns. Gleaming lances pointed toward Ryne and the creatures behind him.
Another command bellowed. Lightning split the sky, striking near Ryne, sending earth and snow showering up. Debris peppered him. Undaunted, he pressed on.
Links bloomed between the Ashishin, spanning from one to the next in continual concentration. They grew until the air itself hummed with their power. He imagined what the scene must look like to them. Some terrible wraith glowing in slivery-blue followed by creatures of the purest black that they had never seen and could not begin to fathom. Not to mention the thousands of howling and wailing shadelings charging in their wake. His lips curled into a smile. The timing needed to be perfect.
The release of Mater from the Shin came in an ear-splitting roar. Whatever Forging they unleashed surged toward him in an overheated torrent from straight ahead and above. The air blazed, the clouds in the heavens lit up, and the ground heaved. Snow and rock melted. Despite the miniature shield around him, his hair began to sizzle, the scent of its burning becoming stronger and stronger.
At the precise moment when the Forging would strike him, and the vasumbrals reach him, he Shimmered. He reappeared among the Ashishin, next to a portal, and stepped through.
He stood in a humongous city square with glowing structures all around and streets that crisscrossed between them while rising in the air. The surprised expressions of troops massing to depart greeted him. The Iluminus, he thought as he severed the power he held, his luinance diminishing to nothing.
Chest heaving with exertion, he drew on what reserves he had left before the soldiers reacted. He Materialized and shut the portal behind him so none could follow. The freezing cold that he hardly noticed before sent his body into a spasm of shivers.
Something wasn’t right.
He glanced down at his body. His aura spilled about him. Tiny fissures ran up his arm where it leaked. One of the vasumbrals had touched him and eaten into his Mater.
Sela, his lifeblood, was leaking away.
Chapter 26
Huddled deep within his cloak, head down, Ancel held his reins steady. Snow fell like white rain, before swirling as if it wanted to smother him. The wind’s teeth threatened to penetrate even his furs. From near the middle of what moments before had been the slow rush of the Kelvore River, and was now water frozen to the consistency of solid stone, he glanced back toward the glow of the barrier, picturing Eldanhill’s lights beyond. At present, he couldn’t pick them out; the unnatural winter storm blotted out his home. Under his breath, he muttered a prayer for Ilumni to keep his father, Irmina, and the rest of the council safe. Whatever it took, he promised to see them alive again.
The horse beneath him snorted. To his right, Charra appeared within the swirls as if part of the downfall. Around them, the quickly accumulating precipitation muted the sound of hooves and wagon wheels, and offered better footing than would normally be possible over water frozen by Eldanhill’s Matii. Folded within layers of fur and leather, the remainder of Eldanhill’s folk and army trudged along.
Dagodin, and what was left of the Seifer and Nema clans, guarded the flanks. Sifting through which among them were the enemy had taken some time, but the mountain men had their own torturous ways to discover the truth. Ancel cringed with the memory of rope tied around privates or to arms and legs and attached to horses pulling in opposite directions. Worse than that was watching a few of the prisoners as wolves or daggerpaws savaged them.
Somewhere behind their convoy, Shin Galiana kept an eye on their rear along with Kachien. Loneliness weighed heavy on Ancel. Even with Mirza’s presence next to him, he felt as if he’d lost everything. Mother, Da, Irmina, Ryne. All that was important to him had been torn away. He hunkered deeper into his cloak against the howling wind.
A recollection of Ryne’s voice screaming the name Sakari made him shiver. In the moments since, his link with Ryne had flitted around like a buzzing fly before finally settling somewhere well ahead of them. For a while, he’d sensed Mater in unbelievable amounts surge to Eldanhill’s north. The last time he’d encountered something similar his mother had been taken, and his father lay at death’s brink in Galiana’s hospice.
Did his father survive those injuries only to die now? Had he regained Irmina to lose her once again? Could he really trust her to remain true to her word and find a way to keep the council, and more importantly, his father, alive? She’d been adamant that if she wasn’t there to greet the Tribunal they would simply kill whomever they found and pursue him and the others. Thoughts a gray muddle, he sank further into himself and his furs, inhaling their musty odor.
Time crawled by as they continued their exodus, the storm’s fury constant, keeping them hidden. When they crossed off the frozen river and up the banks, the swirls of snow abruptly ended. The wind still bit as he looked back. The tempest covered the Kelvore River and beyond, but here several miles before the Red Ridge Mountains, all was calm.
“What in Amuni’s name …” Mirza said.
Inclining his head toward the Matii huddled together near the river’s edge, Ancel pulled down the scarf from around his mouth. “The storm was all their doing.”
Dagodin stood guard near them and helped to usher those on foot up onto the open plain past the riverbank. Several folk stopped to stare in awe as one moment they were walking through a near blinding snowstorm, and the next they were standing with only residual flurries touching them in a light spray. A few dropped to their knees in a brief prayer as if the journey was over.
Ancel knew better. Their trek had just begun.
Caked in an icy layer, Galiana appeared last. Kachien followed close behind.
Galiana threw back her hood and unwound a cloth from around her face. “Set it to hold for a few more hours,” she shouted above the wind. “We should be long gone before then.”
A Teacher nodded and passed the instructions to the others. They stood motionless for a while, facing out into the storm, the wind whipping their cloaks. The squall intensified for a moment before settling. More than one of them sagged when they were finished.
“Get those too tired to ride off their mounts and into the wagons,” Galian
a said to a nearby Dagodin. “Use their horses for a few of those on foot.” She rode closer to him. “So far, Ryne’s distraction worked.”
“Good,” Ancel said, trying to sound braver and more confident than he felt. “He’s somewhere ahead of us.”
“We will pick him up on the way and find out what this detour is that he requires. Until then make sure we have not lost anyone. You too, Mirza. Remind them, no lamps until we are past the foothills.”
“Yes, Shin Galiana,” they both said and rode off.
With Charra accompanying him, Ancel split off from Mirza to check one side of the refugee lines while his friend rode along the other. Relying on the twin moons whenever they peeked from behind the clouds was a test in patience on a night that was otherwise drab and gray, but Ancel made sure to ask each Dagodin if they lost any from the groups they supervised. To his relief, the answer every time was no.
An abrupt flash of pain seared across his mind. Immediately, he knew it was Ryne. Weariness, hurt, and shivering cold suffused him. A vision bloomed in his head. Hands freezing, turning blue, a body huddling against icy rocks, then falling down a hill and kicking up snow. The link cut off.
Ancel whirled, gazing up to the left and the looming, dark countenances of the Red Ridge Mountains. Ryne was up there, and he was hurt. He whipped his reins and raced to Shin Galiana. She glanced up from advising a Dagodin and an Ashishin. The thud of other hooves announced Mirza’s arrival.
“You completed your-”
“He’s hurt,” Ancel wheezed. “He’s hurt badly. Probably dying. We need to go to him now.”
“Who?” Galiana asked. “Where?”
Frantically, Ancel pointed up the Red Ridge’s slopes. “It’s Ryne. Up there. I–I can feel him.”
Galiana turned to the two Matii. “Continue on this route. You will meet the Dosteri contingent at Colvar’s Gap. From there head to Calisto, get supplies, then make your way to Torandil. Kachien, stay and help them.” She turned to face Knight Captain Steyn. “See them there safely, Knight Captain.”
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