The Rise of the Wrym Lord

by Wayne Thomas Batson

  But that didn’t stop them. They came at Antoinette from every direction. And now that Aelic was not at her back, she felt them pelting her from behind. The armor kept them at bay, but then one landed on her collar and went for her neck. But Antoinette whipped her head back, and the creature fell away. This isn’t working! Focus on the objective, Antoinette told herself. She kept both blades churning, but at the same time scanned the area. Through the cloud of black wings, she saw a broad tree just a few yards away. That’s it!

  She suddenly sheathed her sword, grabbed at Aelic’s armor, and pulled with all her might. He was heavy, and the illgrets began to land on them both immediately. Still she managed to drag him a few feet. Then Sir Rogan appeared. He hoisted Aelic over his shoulder, and they ran to the tree. He eased Aelic down to the ground so that he lay against the tree as if napping. He turned to Antoinette.

  “Does he live?!” he barked.

  Antoinette knelt at Aelic’s side and felt for a pulse on his neck. She did not feel anything. “Come on!” she yelled, placing her fin gers in different places. Finally, she found it, a beat, faint but steady. “Yes!” she almost choked. “Yes, he’s alive!”

  Sir Rogan smiled. His eyes flashed blue and narrowed in such a way that even Antoinette was afraid. “Stay low,” he said, and then he unleashed his axe. Antoinette watched with dark fascination as Sir Rogan swept his broadaxe back and forth so quickly it seemed he had two axes—no, three! Swarms of illgrets exploded in midair as the axe carved a wet swatch through the oncoming clouds. Pieces of the dark creatures were scattered everywhere.

  Thok! Antoinette heard a loud impact and ducked reflexively, thinking that Sir Rogan had embedded his axe in the tree behind her. But when she looked up, she saw a Blackwood Arrow stuck in the tree. And impaled on its shaft were seven dead illgrets!

  Thank you, Nock! she thought. Then she saw the illgrets up close for the first time. They were large and birdlike with scaly bodies and clawed limbs. But their eyes were what caused Antoinette to step back and shudder. Their eyes were milky white and slanted as if bent on malice.

  “To me!! Warriors of Alleble!” a voice sang out. Antoinette thought it was Sir Oswyn’s. “Rally to me all who can! Hurry! Follow my voice!”

  “Come!” Sir Rogan said. He again slung Aelic over his shoulder, and they ran through the clawing, scratching clouds to follow Sir Oswyn’s call. They found him and the others in a clearing of sorts, a place where the large trees around them were distant, but their long limbs still formed a kind of wooded roof.

  “At last!” Sir Oswyn yelled. “Kaliam! That is everyone! Now?”

  “Yes, now!” Kaliam answered. “The illgrets are regrouping!”

  Sir Oswyn sheathed his sword and removed one of the long leather tubes that hung at his side. He popped the cap off the tube, grabbed the bottom of it, and slung it up with a snapping motion. A fine white powder shot out of the open end and fell slowly in a mist. Sir Oswyn ran around the outside perimeter of where the knights were huddled, waving the tube up and down until a ghostly cloud surrounded the entire team, including Sir Oswyn.

  Then he took two stones out of a pouch. “You might want to close your eyes!” he said with a mischievous wink. Antoinette covered her eyes with her arms, but she did not close them. She watched Sir Oswyn strike the stones together several times. Finally, there was a spark, and . . .

  WHOOOOSH!!!

  Bright yellow fire leaped into the air, igniting the white powder and wreathing the twelve in a protective wall of flame. The illgrets who had been unlucky enough to be in close range burst into crackling fireballs. And sensing the heat and mistaking it for prey, the illgrets began to dive toward the flames. Wave after wave of illgrets ignited as the fire spread from wingtip to wingtip.

  Flaming illgrets fell from the sky and landed in smoldering heaps, and the air filled with a horrible greasy smell. And suddenly, the unnatural darkness was lifted.

  “What do you think of that?!” Sir Oswyn stood tall and grinned.

  “Great, clever knight!” barked Mallik as he wiped blood off his gouged forearm. “But you could have done that sooner!”

  “And harm the trees?” Sir Oswyn objected. “Do you not know that the Blackwood is the firstborn forest of the entire Realm?”

  “Incredible stuff, that powder!” Sir Gabriel said. “I have never seen a nonliquid substance burn like that.”

  “I made it by grinding up the stalks of a most extraordinary plant that I found growing on the shores of the Mirror Lakes.”

  “What in The Realm made you think of burning it?” asked Tobias.

  Oswyn winked. “I burn everything.”

  “What about reviving our two victims?” Kaliam asked. “Tal and Aelic were bitten. Do you have something to wake them?”

  “Of course,” Sir Oswyn replied, beginning to look through the many pockets on his jerkin. “Just a whiff of the milikynne pod ought to—”

  From somewhere in the distant woods came a mournful howl. A few seconds later there was another, then another, until a chorus filled the woods.

  “Wolvins,” Kaliam whispered. “Nock, how close?”

  Nock’s eyes narrowed. “Not far enough. A quarter league or less.”

  “Have they scented us?”

  “There is your answer,” Nock said. He pointed to the tree line just beyond a pile of burning illgrets. A pair of keen yellow eyes stared out of the shadows.

  “Take your best shot, archer,” said Sir Gabriel.

  Nock drew back his bowstring, released, and his black shaft streaked into the woods. There was a strangled cry, and the shadow dropped to the ground. Suddenly, a ruckus of growls and barks broke out in the woods.

  “The pack draws near!” Nock cried.

  “Mallik, take Tal,” Kaliam commanded. “Rogan, take Aelic. Run south, follow the path as best you can! The rest follow, and I will guard the rear!”

  “I will take the rearguard with you,” Lady Merewen said. “I know something of these beasts, for they are the pets of the enemy!”

  “Good,” Kaliam replied. “Now, knights, fly! It is too late to avoid the Blackwood at night, but we must hope in our King’s provision that we make it through to see the dawn! Fly! The hounds of Paragory are upon us!”

  25

  THE SEPULCHER OF

  THE SEVEN SLEEPERS

  The Alleb Knights hurdled massive bulging roots and fallen branches, but they could not escape the pursuing wolvins. The creatures’ mournful cries haunted every step of the fleeing knights. And worse yet, they had lost the path.

  Sir Rogan, with Aelic slung on his back like a sack of grain, thundered through the darkening woods but had no idea which direction he was headed. “Just as likely to come out where we came in as we might to Yewland,” he mumbled to himself. “If we come out at all.”

  Still, Sir Rogan plunged deeper into the woods. Mallik, with Tal on his broad shoulders, raced after him. Antoinette and the others followed with Kaliam and Lady Merewen guarding the rear.

  “Fly!” Kaliam yelled, his voice strained and urgent. “They are at our heels! Fly or find a place we can defend!!”

  Antoinette’s heart hammered. She could run well on a track, but the weight of her armor and the perilous terrain robbed her of any such speed. “C’mon, legs!” she urged herself. “Go!”

  Suddenly, a huge dark blur crashed out of the trees on the left and slammed into Mallik. Tal flew off Mallik’s shoulders and landed with a flop at the base of a tree. Antoinette saw that Mallik lay still on the ground, but something huge was there beside him.

  The thing was wolflike in shape, covered in dark fur, but much larger. And its upper body was massive. Its barrel chest heaved as it slowly rose up on all fours. It shook its head as if disoriented and then growled at the downed knight. Mallik rolled onto his back and frantically shoved himself backward. He reached for his hammer, but it had landed beyond his grasp. The beast stepped toward Mallik.

  “Don’t you touch him!” Antoinette foun
d herself yelling.

  The wolvin sniffed the air and then turned its head toward Antoinette. Huge black ears lowered and pressed back into its thick collar of dark fur. Its pale yellow eyes stared at her coldly, pupils small and absent of mercy. The wolvin’s muzzle quivered. It bared its large white teeth and snarled with such slow, deep ferocity that Antoinette felt it.

  The blood drained from Antoinette’s face. Her hands went cold. She took a careful step backward, holding her sword out in front. The beast pawed toward her and then rose up on its hind legs like a bear and howled. But the howl was cut short.

  “Time for you to join your friends!” Mallik bellowed. And he swept such a two-fisted hammer stroke into the body of the wolvin that it flew over Antoinette’s head and up into the treetops. At that moment the rest of the team came stumbling to a stop behind them.

  “Why do you halt?” Sir Oswyn asked breathlessly. “They are right behind us!”

  “Where is Sir Rogan?” asked Tobias. “And what happened to Tal?”

  Mallik growled and ran over to the sleeping warrior. “Tal is none the worse for wear, Master Pathfinder. He fares much better than the wolvin that delayed us!”

  Sir Rogan returned to see what was delaying the others. He grunted at them as if to say, “Get moving, you slugs!”

  Snarls came from behind and very close. “It is a pack, maybe two!” shouted Kaliam. “Go now, or we will be overrun!” Again, following Sir Rogan’s lead, the knights of Alleble sprinted through the Blackwood. The wolvins, driven mad by the chase, were steadily gaining on them.

  Even burdened with the full weight of their poisoned comrades, Sir Rogan and Mallik began to pull away from the rest.

  To follow, Antoinette took to watching the movement of the tree branches that swayed from the passing of their leaders.

  Their course through the trees began to rise steadily. Keeping the pace on the hill was grueling, but Antoinette managed. She struggled over a large root, stumbled once, and kept going. Hearing a great echoing yell from one of the other knights up ahead, she pushed herself to a speed she did not know she possessed, surging forward until the ground dropped out from under her, or at least it seemed to. She had run off the edge of a berm and tumbled down a ragged hill. The others who came behind met with the same fate, crashing awkwardly down the slope and landing in a heap at the bottom. Only Nock kept his balance, and that just barely. He raced down the hill and came to an abrupt stop just before he would have rammed into Sir Tobias.

  Antoinette rose awkwardly to one knee and then stood. Her heart jackhammered and her breaths came out in a mist. She shuddered in the sudden cold. Lady Merewen was there beside her, blinking rapidly and absently brushing soil and dead leaves from her cloak. The rest of the team stood, and they found themselves in a large round hollow, ringed by the most immense trees they had yet seen. But these trees did not have the crown of crimson leaves like the others. These were barren and seemed dead. They reached up with twisted arms into the twilight sky. Tendrils of fog began to pour like a ghostly waterfall over the edge of the hill and down into the hollow.

  “What is this place?” Mallik asked. He looked around, a stranglehold on his hammer. No one answered at first. They simply stared as the mist began to curl around their ankles. Kaliam alone seemed to possess the ability to move. He walked as if in a trance to the base of one of the huge black trees and looked down.

  “There is a stone here,” he said. “A rune is upon it, but it is ancient, beyond my knowledge.”

  Sir Gabriel went slowly to the base of another tree. “A marked stone lies beneath this tree as well,” he said, shaking his head. “No scroll of Alleble records it meaning.”

  Antoinette looked from tree to tree, wondering if a stone lay at the base of each one. She noted that there were seven massive trees in the hollow. Seven?

  “Do you not see?” Nock asked. “Seven trees! And beneath them, seven stones! We have come to the place I feared the most. We have come to the Sepulcher of the Seven Sleepers. We would have been better off facing a dozen packs of wolvin. We must leave this place! Sir Gabriel, do you believe now?”

  Sir Gabriel did not answer.

  “I fear you are right in this judgment,” Kaliam said. “There is a foul presence in this hollow—an unknown malice all around us.”

  “But what if it is that place?” Mallik asked. “Do not the roots of the blackwood trees hold the sleepers beneath the ground?”

  “Yes, or so it is told,” Nock said with little certainty. “But look, the trees are dying. Once they were tall and secure. The kings of trees. If now they wither and perish, who can say?”

  “You said they were just wolvins, right?” Antoinette asked. “If they did come up, we could take out seven wolvins, couldn’t we?”

  No one answered. The mist continued to swirl as it rose, grasping at their knees.

  “Well, couldn’t we?”

  “The seven were of the first generation of wolvins,” Nock explained. “They would be larger, swifter, and more powerful than any wolvin that yet lives. And they were endowed with the power to change form—perhaps to the likeness of any living thing. There is no telling what other dark powers the Wyrm Lord gave them!”

  Kaliam nodded and said, “We need to depart from this place with all haste. Sir Oswyn, you possess something in your pouches that would cure our two sleeping warriors?”

  “Verily,” he replied, fishing two brown packets from his jerkin. “The spice I will use to revive them is so pungent it would indeed wake the Seven Sleepers!”

  “Do not say such things!” Kaliam barked. “And make haste. I do not like it here.”

  Sir Oswyn mixed together a series of herbs and managed to wake Aelic and Tal more or less unharmed.

  “My head aches as if Mallik swings his hammer within my very skull,” groaned Tal.

  “I feel the same,” replied Aelic.

  “Be glad you are alive,” Kaliam said. “Aelic, from what Sir Rogan tells me, you owe Lady Antoinette a debt of gratitude for defending you when you fell. Had she not, the illgrets would have picked you clean.”

  Aelic looked at Antoinette with wonder. “I will repay you,” he said.

  “That’s not necessary,” Antoinette said. “You would have done the same for me.”

  Antoinette looked away only to see Lady Merewen staring at her. But before Lady Merewen could speak, a piercing howl came from over the edge of the hollow, and dark shapes began to appear. One after another, until wolvins were all around the rim—jostling and clawing for space. They stared down with pale eyes and snarled.

  Antoinette heard a strange noise, turned, and saw Farix a few yards behind her. He cracked his knuckles again, looked up at her grimly, and said, “Stay close to me, Lady Antoinette. I give you my word. Not one of them will touch you while I breathe. But if we are all to die, then let us die well.”

  Antoinette swallowed, furrowed her brow fiercely, and nodded. “Never alone!” she said. Aelic stood as steadily as he could manage, drew Fury, and nodded.

  Mallik hefted his hammer. “Let them come!” he growled. Tal and Sir Rogan stood beside him. The rest of the team made ready their weapons. They stood in the swirling mist and waited for the wolvins to charge.

  They heard another howl—this one very different in pitch and punctuated by brief pauses. But where the sound had come from, no one would say. They were afraid to entertain the possibility that the howl had come from under the ground beneath their feet.

  Antoinette thought that it must be a signal, that the pack would then pounce, but it was not so. One by one, the creatures began to withdraw from the edge of the hollow. And soon, they were gone.

  “What do you make of that?” Farix asked, turning to Kaliam.

  “I have never heard of a pack of wolvins to abandon easy prey,” Kaliam replied.

  “It would not have been easy,” muttered Sir Rogan.

  “Be that as it may,” Kaliam said, smiling, “we were outnumbered and surrounded with no e
asy escape from this dell. They ought to have attacked.”

  Sir Gabriel sheathed his long knives and looked around. “It is almost as if they were content to leave us here,” he said.

  “Or perhaps they were chasing us here all along,” said Tobias.

  Antoinette looked at the seven trees, tall and dark, brooding over the hollow as if from a long, miserable labor. And down at their massive roots, the mist churned, obscuring the pale stones that lay there like burial markers. She wondered what powers the Seven Sleepers could have that allowed them to live while buried over the long passage of time. And she thought of the hate they must bear toward all things that walk free in The Realm.

  “My dagger is missing!” Sir Rogan grunted. “It broke free when I fell!”

  “And I have lost two scrolls!” Sir Gabriel exclaimed while patting his sides and the pockets of his cloak.

  “Search quickly beneath the mist,” Kaliam said. “If our sacks opened when we fell, we may be missing more than we can afford to lose.” The twelve began to scour the area. Antoinette lost a pouch of gold coins, and two of her waterskins had burst.

  “Knights, you move too slowly!” Kaliam bellowed. “Finish your search, and let us depart from here!”

  “What is your wretched hurry?” Sir Rogan yelled back from the base of one of the closest trees. “I cannot find my dagger in this accursed mist!”

  Antoinette, who had been on her knees looking for her coins, stood up abruptly and stared at Sir Rogan.

  “Serves you right!” Tobias said, and he spat on the ground. “A fine path you led us on. It is your fault we are in this ghastly place!”

  Sir Rogan stood up stiffly and lowered his eyebrows. “I only led the way because you did not offer your pathfinding services at the time.”

  “And a fine job leading you did,” Farix said, his words dripping with sarcasm. “I am quite sure Aelic appreciates your effort as much as the rest of us. Tell us, how many branches did you crack on his skull as you ran heedlessly through the trees?”